“Sal told me you used to be world champion.”
“Coulda beena contendah. Har har har. Yeah, I won some fucking money. Not much money in checkers. They got a computer now that can’t be beat. The human being is obsolete.” He sat back, patted his stomach. It was hard to tell where all the food had gone. All that remained on the table was three fingers of milkshake, which he eyed spitefully. “You want to know something about Victor, buy me dessert.”
I flagged the waitress. Joe asked for coconut cream pie.
“We don’t have it.”
He looked at me. “I want some coconut cream pie.”
“What about strawberry,” I offered.
“Does that sound like an adequate substitute?” he asked.
“Well—”
“How bout some hair pie,” he asked the waitress. She looked at him, looked at me, shook her head, and walked away.
“Whatever happened to service,” Joe shouted at her. He looked at me. “I’ll have a brownie sundae.”
I got up and went after the waitress.
Joe stared sullenly at the tabletop until his dessert came. When it did, he didn’t touch it. He said, “Victor was in the nuthouse, too.”
“With you?”
“No.” He snickered. “You never met him, huh?”
“No.”
“He’s a lot older than me. We didn’t meet until he started coming to the club.”
“And when was that.”
“Right after I started advertising the tourney. So, 83. I used to make fliers and stick em up on telephone poles. He shows up, one of the fliers in his hand, like it was his ticket. I remember that night, there were only three of us, me, Victor, and Raul, who kicked it in a couple of years back. He and I played all the time cause nobody else showed on a regular basis. I knew Victor was decent cause he clobbered Raul.”
“Did he beat you?” I asked.
He began shoveling in the ice cream. “I said he was good.”
I apologized.
“I don’t care. But if you’re trying to get the facts, then that’s the fucking facts.”
“Did he ever mention where he was institutionalized?”
“Someplace upstate.”
“Did he mention the name?”
“That’s privileged information,” he said.
He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished his sundae, scraping his spoon along the inside of the bowl to gather the last threads of chocolate sauce. Then he grunted and took a deep breath and said, “The New York School for Training and Rehabilitation. That’s what it’s called.”
I wrote it down.
“It’s near Albany,” he added.
“Thank you.”
He nodded, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on the floor as the waitress passed. She hissed at him and he blew her a kiss. Then he sighed and said, “Pardon me while I drain the main vein.”
I paid the check and sat waiting for him to return. He never did. He went out the back door, and by the time I figured it out, his footprints were already filling up.
Interlude: 1962.
Bertha lies on the top floor of a private hospital on the east side of Manhattan. Well-wishers have filled her room with bouquets, but as she prefers the dark, the nurses have left the shades drawn and the flowers have all begun to die, producing a cloying stench that gets into one’s clothes. Nevertheless she will not consent to have the vases removed. She is impervious; she has tubes up her nose; and the comfort that the flowers provide means more to her than the momentary comfort of her visitors. Visitors come and go, but she is stuck; and if the room smells like a compost pile, that’s nobody business but hers. Who are these visitors, that they should have an opinion? Not her friends. Not the committees and boards of directors who have sent the flowers. Those people are not allowed in. She does not want to be seen in a state of decay. Only with the greatest of reluctance did she agree to come to the hospital in the first place. She wanted to stay at the house on Fifth. David prevailed upon her: she could not remain at home; she would die if she did not get proper care, in a proper setting. And what, exactly, was wrong with that? Louis had died at home. But David argued that if she went to the hospital she might live longer, and wasn’t that the idea? To stay alive—to clutch at life—to dig fingernails into its greasy surface?
Lying here, she isn’t so sure.
Hospital or no hospital, she’s dying all the same. Her body is a city and the tumors that riddle it little insulting middle-class suburban outposts of disease, springing up overnight in her liver, her lungs, her stomach, her spleen, her spine. They have tried one treatment; they have tried another. Nothing helps. Better to go in a favorite bed, with a favorite view, surrounded by people she has known and trusted. Not these men with clipboards. Not these women with needles and white hats. Not lost in an artificial jungle of sympathy. Where is her son? He brought her here. Where is he, that son of hers? She calls his name.
“Yes, Mother.”
“I want to go home.”
She cannot see his reaction—he sits slightly behind her, where he knows she cannot turn to see him—but she knows what he’s doing: tugging on his earlobes. His father did the same thing.
“You can’t go home, Mother.”
“I can and I will.”
He says nothing.
“David.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“If the child is a girl I don’t want you to name her for me. That’s morbid.”
“It’s a boy, Mother. We’re going to name him Lawrence. You already know that.”
“I know nothing of the sort. What kind of a name is Lawrence?”
He sighs. “We’ve talked about this already.”
“When.”
“Several times.”
“When.”
“Weeks ago. Several times. In fact, you asked me the day before yesterday.”
“I asked no such thing.”
He says nothing.
“When are the children coming to visit.”
“They were here, Mother.”
“When.”
He says nothing.
“When were they here,” she says, afraid to hear the answer.
“Yesterday,” he says.
“That’s a lie.” She grips the bedsheets, terrified. Why is it that she can remember events and faces and stories and whole conversations from thirty years ago—and yet she cannot remember her grandchildren, yesterday? That shouldn’t be possible. Her memory is impressionistic; the closer she gets, the less she can resolve. Her nose to the canvas and all she gets are dots and smudges. And her mind has worse tricks than that up its sleeve, much worse. Old memories keep springing up where they do not belong; at times she calls David by his father’s name. She overhears David and the doctor discussing the president, and she expresses her opinion about Roosevelt and the two men look at her and David says, “It’s Kennedy, Mother.” The doctor is a young Jew named Waldenberg or Waldenstein or Steinbergwald or Bergswaldstein. He is bald and joyless and she doesn’t trust him. She asks David for Dr. Fetchett and is informed that he has been dead since 1957. That is nonsense; Fetchett has been in the room. He comes in daily to take her temperature. He stands at the foot of her bed, commiserating. Dear Bertha, you look so pale. Would you like a glass of whiskey? A kind of second sight has taken hold of her; before her illness, she never would have been able to see him so clearly. The forehead filigreed with blue veins and the enormous pores and moist nostrils, like a cow’s. Not a handsome man, Dr. Fetchett… And yet she sees the wilting flowers and cannot remember who sent them; demands over and over to know why she cannot go home.
Worse than the loosening of her mind still is her awareness of that loosening. She had expected that one of senility’s few comforts would be its self-negation; she might be confused, but she wouldn’t know she was confused. But she sees how people talk to her. They use soothing tones meant for animals and children. They push food upon her. They ask her to sign documents relinq
uishing her authority. They coax and wheedle and she sends them away. They don’t have her best interests in mind. She won’t deal with them, not as long as they continue to patronize her. Still they come, these lawyers with their pens and notaries and contracts and wills and lawsuits and mortgages. She refers them to David and still they come. They are crafty. They wait for him to leave and then they sneak in. It’s enough to drive a lesser woman up the wall.
Bertha has never been one to succumb to anger; hers has been a life of self-control. She did not become a Muller—remain a Muller—save the Muller name from extinction—by losing her head. She may be sick, but she’s not dead yet, and as long as she can draw breath, she will believe that all problems have solutions; that no turn of events, no matter how bleak, cannot be turned further, bent into an advantage, the barrel twisted back toward the shooter. Her memory has decided to run riot. Fine. Let it. She might not be able to remember the day of the week, but she can bring back her childhood with a thrilling vividness. She will enjoy herself. She opens the album and remembers.
She remembers: walks in the forest and wonderfully sour Kirschkuchen and the yeastiness of her father and the soapiness of her mother. Baths in a small wooden tub, the stump of a barrel. A wooden soldier that clapped its hands when you pulled a string in its back, a painted top that cut bright orange circles in the air. The housekeeper taught her to sew until she was reprimanded for doing so and thus Bertha never learned more than a simple running stitch. The day her parents told her they were moving to America she ran crying to her best friend Elisabeth’s house, but nobody answered and in her time of greatest misery she felt lonelier than ever. At home she cried in her mother’s arms and her mother promised We will always be together, I will always take care of you. The journey will be long but you will see so many things girls your age never get to see. Bertha was unconsoled.
The port at Hamburg, the ship’s huge fluted mouth belching loud enough to shake her in her shoes. The waiters in long black coats who called her Mademoiselle. In the big dining room she ate snails; they tasted like rubber and butter. She did not get seasick; her mother did. They sun-bathed on their private veranda. Her mother read to her from a book of fairy tales, using different voices for each character. The princes were noble and the princesses gentle and the witches sounded like grinding chains, everyone exactly as they should be. As they sailed into the sunset she thought of her home and she wrote lots of letters to Elisabeth that she intended to deposit in the mailbox as soon as they landed but forgot about when she saw the green lady in the sea.
She remembers her first sight of Central Park, from their hotel window. She was disappointed. She’d hoped it would be bigger. It didn’t compare to the parks and woodlands she knew. It was full of wheelbarrows, trenches, overturned earth. It wasn’t a park; it was a pit. She cried, and to quiet her down, her father gave her a package of peppermints that she ate, one by one, until she was sick.
She remembers school. She remembers being teased. She remembers the tutor. She sells seashells. Who sold those seashells? She never found out.
At Bloomingdale’s, tailors stuck her with pins. She didn’t enjoy the process but then the dress came. Everyone fussed over her, but she didn’t need their confirmation, she could see for herself: she had talent. In yards of green silk, she outshone Lady Liberty herself. Standing before her mother’s three-sided mirror, she decided that it would be terribly ungrateful if she did not use her gifts to become someone important.
She remembers her debut. The eyes all on her, not just the men but the women, too, whether jealous or shamed or in unabashed worship. She remembers descending the stairs on a cloud, her tiara held in place with so many hairpins that she thought her head would break off and roll away. Dancing and champagne and young men’s sweaty hands slipped into hers over and over. Her mother pointing out a certain young man in a narrowly cut jacket. That is Louis Muller, of the Mullers.
And her wedding.
She remembers early summers in Bar Harbor, the gleaming sailboats white, so white, her smocks flawless and dry even in the woolly heat. She changed her outfit four times a day: after breakfast, after lunch, in the afternoon before tea, and then for dinner. So many meals, piled high with those coarse American dishes she would never quite get used to, the Southern-style cornbread that her father-in-law liked but that tasted to Bertha like a block of animal feed. She ate sparingly. While other women talked about the need to reduce, she wore a bathing costume that emphasized her bust. She was the most divine creature on the Eastern Seaboard. So said her father-in-law. Dear Walter. He called her his little Bavarian rose; never mind that her family came from Heidelberg. He was always a little in love with her, openly scornful of his son’s indifference. What a catch Louis had landed, what radiance, what wit, what charm, what skill. She could play the piano. How many girls had a figure like hers? She could count them on one hand. And could any of those girls play the piano? She could count them on one hand, too… if you cut off all her fingers… but then she wouldn’t be able to play the piano. Ha ha ha ha. Walter always implied that, had the vagaries of time not torn them asunder… But she ended up with Louis. Oh Louis. Dear Louis. She wants to be charitable to him. She will choose to think of him fondly.
Think of the delight he took in buying her things, how he loved to adorn her. In the cushions of her house, she has lost diamonds worth a king’s ransom. Think of how he took her everywhere. After David was born she felt sad. It came from nowhere and gummed up her mind. Nights she could not sleep; dragging herself from bed in the morning became torture. To cheer her, Louis bought a villa in Portofino. Every summer after that they would spend a month, the baby tucked away with a nurse and Louis promising not to work at all. They would eat rich meals and drink luscious wines and travel the coast, down to Rome or round the bend to Monaco, where the Prince himself would escort them through the casino. They played with chips made of real gold. Servants brought deep saucers sloshing with champagne and wet towels to cool their necks. And then during the War, when travel became impossible, Louis bought another house for her, a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch in the middle of Montana. She tired of it quickly. He sold it at a loss. He bought her a home in Deal. He did whatever she wanted. He was a good husband. She cannot think of him now without tearing up; oh, how maudlin. He was a decent man, after all. She was glad that he went without suffering. His heart stopped a few months before the birth of David’s first child. What is the girl’s name. Amelia. For a moment she almost forgot, but she triumphed through sheer willpower. Amelia, yes. And her baby brother, Edgar. The year after Edgar was born, her old friend Elisabeth died. Elisabeth’s husband had been an officer in the SS and after the War they got to him; the stress killed him and then her. What luck. What timing. Every time David has a baby someone dies. A lesser woman might have ordered him to stop having children. He had a son and a daughter; enough already, stop killing off the rest of us. If anyone is to go next it will be her. But she was glad when Yvette got pregnant, regardless of the outcome. Bertha will sacrifice herself for the cause, because Yvette will be a good mother, far better than David’s first wife, who Bertha never liked and never approved of, even though she and Louis played along for appearance’s sake. They even footed more than their share of the bill at the wedding. David argued that they should foot the entire bill; it wasn’t as though they had a shortage of funds. Everyone argued. David was twenty-five then and his bachelorhood had begun to worry her; he might turn out to have his father’s tendencies. Where she had never doubted her own ability to manage Louis, how could she ensure that a prospective daughter-in-law would have the same strength and conviction? Women could not be relied on. Nobody could be relied on. You had to do everything yourself these days. Thankfully, David did get married. A relief to her, on the one hand; and on the other hand, she did not trust the girl he chose, the daughter of a man who owned clothing stores in the Middle West. She called New York ugly. Who was she to be so stuck-up, she came from Cleveland. Whatever Ber
tha’s opinions of the changes that have taken place in the city since her arrival so many years ago, she firmly believes that nobody has the right to make comments when they’ve been in residence for less than a month. That wicked girl. Bertha can remember her name all right but chooses not to. Picking fights with David over everything, making scenes everywhere, icy dinners where nobody spoke: Bertha thinks about them and suddenly two sets of memories collide: silence and silver on china and crystal on linen… and silences, and— and—and notes delivered by hand, notes from Dr. Fetchett. No, that is not right. That did not happen then. She is mixing up the chronology and she does not want to think about certain things. With tremendous strain she turns the page and finds another one, a page full of good memories, another night, a happy occasion… back to her wedding. Think about her wedding. Think about the liveried footmen and the mighty brass instruments and the dancing legions spinning in her honor; think about her wedding cake, that magnificent tower of buttercream in the shape of a pyramid, the biggest cake anyone had ever seen; they printed a picture of it in the newspaper, and her picture, too. The wedding of Mr. L. I. Muller and Miss Bertha Steinholtz proved undoubtedly the most spectacular event of the season. The bride wore a taffeta gown of surpassing elegance, and the groom his traditional black. The ceremony was performed at the Trinity Church by the Most Reverend J. A. Moffett, and festivities continued.… They called it a fairy tale, and for once they got it right. Her life has been magical.
And now she is old and in a bed and it is 1962. There are things that remain hidden. They should not bother her now, not after so much time. Water under the bridge. But memory, nasty beast, returns again and again.
Not the girl. She can think about the girl without flinching. She has never doubted her decisions and she does not doubt them now. There was too much at stake. Louis could never see that. He told her once that she had no heart but that just showed how deeply he misunderstood the world, how deeply he misunderstood her. She did what she did not because she lacked a heart but because she knew, all too well, how merciless people could be. She remembered being mocked, nightly sobbing, pillows soaked, years of struggle before she came into her own and they could not deny her any longer. Because she was beautiful, and beauty cannot be denied.
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