The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  Rose shakes her head. “I could never live there.”

  “But all your things are going to arrive, you know. We couldn’t fit the secretary in here.”

  Rose looks around the little bedroom, considering the problem. “It could fit,” she says. “But it wouldn’t look very elegant, one thing on top of another.”

  Sarah hardly expected this. She feels a rush of hope. Her house to herself, and Rose at the Helena. Of course, she doesn’t know that in the next three weeks she will be looking for new silk-shantung lampshades and spending hours at House of Foam, out near the airport, as workmen pump new, high-density stuffing into Rose’s sofa. For a moment, she sees free evenings unfolding before her, the empty rooms expanding. What are wistful literary dreams compared to that?

  ONE DOWN

  On a background of blue velvet stand two baby pictures in silver frames. Then letters in silver script scroll up the screen:

  Miriam Elizabeth and Jonathan Daniel

  produced by

  Edward and Sarah Markowitz

  Zaev and Marjorie Schwartz

  supported by

  Ben, Avi, and Yehudit Markowitz

  and Dina Schwartz

  and also starring

  Ilse Schwartz

  Estelle and Sol Kirshenbaum

  and

  Rose Markowitz

  as themselves

  This is the opening Miriam and Jon have chosen for their wedding video. Bill, the videographer, has it all mocked up for Ed and Sarah in his studio. When the monitor darkens again, the two of them sit there in silence. Then Sarah says, “That wasn’t my daughter, by the way.”

  “Oh, I know,” Bill reassures her. “Those baby pictures are just samples. Miriam and Jon are going to bring in their own.”

  “Well, they’d better take care of that—” Ed says.

  “Not to worry,” Bill tells them. “We won’t be putting all of this together until after the wedding. You’ve got plenty of time to think about length, too. I’ve already gone over this with Miriam and Jon. You have the option in addition to the two-hour version of going for”—Bill reaches behind him and deftly swipes a black binder from his desk—“four hours, or the deluxe, which would be six hours. That would cover the whole wedding.”

  “Gavel to gavel,” Ed says.

  “Exactly. From hors d’oeuvres through to the getaway car.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think we need that,” Ed says.

  “It’s pricey. But truthfully, for the money, I think your best choice could very well be the four-hour version.”

  “What’s wrong with two hours?” Sarah asks.

  “That would come with it, of course. The four hours comes with the two-hour cut. And what’s wonderful is you have your options in terms of viewing time. Believe me, I know that right now two hours seems long to you, but when you’re looking at a wedding, you’re looking at some brutal cuts, and inevitably what happens is a lot of memories end up on the cutting-room floor.”

  —

  “I’m going to sit down and get some reading done,” Ed says when they get home to Foggy Bottom. He sits down on the couch where he’s been working on the stack of books he has to review. Just a few of the many new books on the prospects for peace in the Middle East. There they lie on the coffee table in their slick dust jackets, gaudy reproaches to Ed, who has not finished his scholarly book on peace and the changing role of terrorism. He opens the morning’s New York Times.

  Sarah puts her purse on the kitchen table and starts making phone calls. “Hello, this is Sarah Markowitz. I want to add to our order—yes, I’ll hold.”

  “Sarah,” Ed calls from the living room, “listen to this. ‘The Palestinian will hate Israel no matter what Israel does. Give land for peace and you will give up all the security Israel has won in previous wars. A Palestinian state will be a launching pad and a suicide, mandated by America, which I compare to Dr. Kevorkian helping the patient go under to put him out of his misery.’ Sarah, are you listening?”

  “You know those books aren’t very well written,” she says.

  “No, no, this is a letter in the Times. Oh, this is choice: ‘The solution to the problem was simple, but it was not followed in the past. Give the Palestinians a one-way ticket out of Israel. Now that time has passed, and the opportunity is gone. The cold war is over, the Soviet Union is gone. Israel ends up paying the peace dividend in the Middle East.’ ” Ed shakes his head. Then his eye catches the name at the bottom. “Sarah!”

  “Yes,” Sarah says into the phone. “This is for the Markowitz wedding. We need to add another tux, same style, 44 long, yes, the double-breasted.”

  “Sarah!”

  She stretches the telephone cord so that she can stick her head out the kitchen door and glare at Ed. She waves her hand at him. “Could you hold the line a second?” She claps her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and hisses, “Ed, stop bellowing at me. I am trying to place an order—for your brother—”

  “Sarah, look who wrote this thing.”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

  He thrusts the paper in her face. “Just look at this. What does this say? Zaev Schwartz, Scarsdale, New York!”

  “I’m very happy for him. Could you add the deposit for that onto our bill? Did I say that the neck is seventeen? Inseam? I don’t know the inseam. Damn, I can’t find his measurements. Look, I’m going to have to send him in. Would tomorrow be all right? He’s flying in from England tonight.” She sighs. “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  “Zaev Schwartz!” Ed exclaims and coughs as if the name were a frog in his throat. “As in—our groom-to-be—his father!”

  “It could be a different Schwartz.”

  “How many Zaev Schwartzes in Scarsdale do you think there are?”

  “Could be two or three,” Sarah says.

  “And spelled that way? I’m telling you, this is the one. Of all the people in the entire country, he’s the one who wrote this crap. Can you believe it?”

  “You said it was choice.”

  Ed closes his eyes. “Sarah, this is going to be part of our family! Zaev Schwartz and I are going to be—uh—”

  “You’re going to be nothing,” Sarah says. “You’re going to be in-laws.”

  “Co-grandparents.” Ed looks again at the newspaper. He feels depressed. “Doesn’t he know my work? Doesn’t he have the slightest consideration for my position?”

  “How could he know your work?”

  “He could read! He could have talked to me about it!”

  “You’ve met the man twice. And, Ed, people don’t just pick up scholarly journals and browse through them.”

  “Scholarly! He could have read me in the Post.”

  “Well, I guess he doesn’t get the Washington Post in Scarsdale. Look, I’ve got too much to do right now. I have to call the florist, the band—”

  “Sarah, he’s a reactionary, a maniac,” Ed says helplessly.

  “You knew that before.” Sarah is brisk. “You’ve spoken to the man.”

  “I didn’t know he goes around publishing this garbage! You know, there are people who make a whole career out of letters to the paper. This is a hobby for people, getting their prejudices published. This is what they do with their time—”

  “Well, Ed, they have a right to express their opinions.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, enough. You don’t have to deal with the man on a professional basis. You’re overreacting.”

  “See, your father and I, for example. We’ve had our differences,” Ed says, “but not philosophical differences. Your father and I have always been completely harmonious.”

  “Right, and you and your brother—”

  “Henry and I have always been in complete agreement about the Middle East.”

  —

  “Do you think we should tell Miriam you’re getting cold feet?” Sarah asks Ed as they stand at the gate waiting for their daughter’s plane to start unloading.

  �
�I’ve got cold feet? Am I the one getting married?”

  “That was going to be my point,” says Sarah. She looks through the plate-glass wall out into the night, where the long covered jetway extends and clamps onto Miriam’s plane. When Miriam was little, she used to call the process biting the apple. “Let’s not mention all this to Miriam, okay?”

  “I had no intention of mentioning it.” Ed feels put upon. Isn’t it his right as a father to mention it? But Sarah insists he take the high moral ground. Then the passengers start trickling out, a few aggressive business types surging forward in the crowd, the servicemen, the kids with backpacks, the families brushing off crumbs, and in the midst of them their daughter, the medical student, sinking under all her bags.

  “Ooh, a poodle kopf!” Sarah pulls Miriam’s hair out of her face. “You need a haircut! We’ve got the tuxes and the flowers under control, but Uncle Henry needs to go in to try his on. They’ll never fit him if he doesn’t.”

  Ed says nothing. A whole conversation is whirling through his head as he imagines Sarah poohpoohing him:

  —What does it matter? Why do you have to dramatize this?

  —Oh, nothing’s the matter. It’s just that I have devoted my whole professional life to studying this issue and trying to get people to appreciate its complexity.

  —Now, Ed, did he do this just to insult you?

  —Look, I don’t care why he did it.

  “Daddy?” Miriam asks him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Ed says with great precision.

  “You look kind of—disgruntled.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’m not feeling very gruntled at the moment.”

  “We still have to finalize with the band,” Sarah tells Miriam in the car on the way home.

  “I thought we did that already,” Miriam replies from the backseat.

  “No, we still have to finalize the songs for the first dance.”

  “What first dance?” Miriam asks, alarmed. “Mommy, we aren’t having mixed dancing at the wedding.”

  “What are we, Puritans?” Ed mutters. Miriam and Jon in their young-blood traditionalism are having an Orthodox wedding with glatt kosher food, a very young and baleful Orthodox rabbi, and separate dancing circles for men and women.

  “You mean you and Jon aren’t going to have a first dance?” Sarah asks.

  “Nope. There is going to be no mixed dancing, remember? We had that big discussion and everything—”

  “Well, yeah,” Ed says. “But there’s gotta be a first dance. First you and Jon dance together and then you dance with me, and Jon dances with his mother—and that’s how it’s gotta be. Gotta be.”

  “Daddy, do we have to have another fight about this?” The voice is plaintive from the backseat.

  Ed ignores this. “Look, Miriam, I’m not going to say another word about it.”

  “Good,” says Miriam.

  “Except for this. I’m paying that band, and when the time comes, they will play the first dance and we will dance it. That’s all there is to it. End of discussion. This is a wedding, not a wake.”

  “Sweetie,” Sarah ventures to Miriam as they pull up to the house, “if there isn’t any social dancing, Grandma and Grandpa won’t understand.”

  Ed tries to put his arm around Miriam as they walk in, but she shakes him off and runs in.

  “Hey, don’t be mean.” Ed is hurt. He slides her duffel bag off his shoulder and glides unencumbered into the kitchen. Religion hasn’t come to his daughter gracefully; it’s made her fierce and punctilious. She has burst out of their household with its pleasant suburban Judaism and become a little refusenik. She refuses to eat in restaurants unless they have rabbinic supervision, refuses to drive anywhere on the Sabbath, refuses to attend services at her family’s own synagogue because it has mixed seating and the rabbi uses a microphone. Jonathan is just like her, but more nonchalant. He wears a yarmulke wherever he is. She and Jon have printed up a long explanation of the arcane rituals they have chosen for their nuptials—this to be distributed by the ushers for all relatives and guests who are confused or curious.

  The answering machine is blinking. Ed pushes the play button. “Edward? Hello? Am I on the air, as it were? This is your brother, Henry. We just got in. Our room was double-booked, and they’ve given us the most extraordinary suite. We had hoped to come by tonight, but the thing is, we’re completely exhausted—I don’t suppose Sarah had the time to see about my morning coat? If she hasn’t, please, please tell her not to worry. Susan and I are going to rummage something up by ourselves. Believe me, I have a very good idea the sort of bewildering haze that must be descending. Do you—” The message cuts off with a series of beeps, although Henry seems to have continued talking in happy ignorance.

  —

  Sarah wakes early the next morning, and her first thought as she lies in bed is Henry’s morning coat. He has to be stopped. All the ushers are wearing tuxedos! She and Ed tried to call the hotel last night, but it seemed that Henry and Susan had disconnected their phone. She left several messages for Henry, and particularly for Susan. If she can only reach Susan, her gray-haired English sister-in-law, fearlessly sane. She feels instinctively that Susan will understand. In the meantime, there is the rib-eye roast to worry about—and, of course, the kids are coming in, and the Schwartzes. She is having them all for Friday-night dinner. Except for Jonathan and his sister, who won’t drive on Shabbes from the hotel. She looks over at Ed, deep in sleep, face crushed into his pillow. Then she jumps out of bed.

  Several hours later Ed opens his eyes. He has slept long, but he is exhausted. He struggles into his robe and hunts downstairs for the paper. An eerie quiet has descended over the house. Sarah has not left him a note. Now the question is how to use the time. Which is worse, to give up on the day, or to start something and feel that every minute some new crisis will break? He knows that the phone is going to ring. It will be one of his colleagues calling to tell him he saw the letter by Zaev Schwartz. Who is really going to make that connection? Ed likes to torture himself; he realizes that. But the knowledge does not cheer him up. It only adds an edge of self-loathing to his worrying. Then the phone does ring, and Ed nearly jumps out of his skin.

  “Hello, Ed?” It is his mother, Rose, calling from the Helena, with her Vienna Waltzes CD on in the background. When he visits her, his ears ache with the music and its incessant carousel gaiety.

  “Hi, Ma. How are you?”

  “Have they arrived?”

  “Who? Miriam is here. I guess she went out with Sarah. And Henry and Susan got in last night.”

  “Oh, I knew that. They called me. I meant the Schwartzes. When are they coming in?”

  “Sometime this afternoon, I think.”

  “And you’re going to meet them?”

  “No, they’re renting a car.”

  “You’re not going to meet them?” She is shocked.

  “No, Ma—”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is a very complex day!” He feels awkward with this defense, because apparently he has been somewhat left out of the complexity. Somewhere Sarah has left him behind.

  “And how is she going to walk all the way through Dulles?” Rose asks, referring to the grandmother, Ilse Schwartz. Rose uses pronouns instead of names and expects everyone to understand her completely. This is not a function of her eighty-seven years. She has always done this.

  “I’m sure they’ll have a wheelchair for her at the airport,” Ed says.

  “Yes, I’ve been in those chairs, and, I can tell you, they don’t clean them.”

  “Ma, what do you want from me? If I were there, would the chairs be cleaner? They will take care of it, okay? They don’t need me there with one more car. And, in fact, I don’t think I even have a car here.”

  “They went to the beauty parlor?”

  “Look! Sarah didn’t leave me a note. She could be at the hotel for all I know.”

  “Well, it’s not very gracious,�
� Rose says.

  —

  Ed is just sitting down to eat a sandwich of herring in cream sauce when Sarah bursts into the kitchen with Miriam, who looks much smaller after her haircut. His brother, Henry, follows, a taller, heavier man than Ed, and Henry’s wife, Susan, brings up the rear, bearing a black garment bag from Mr. Tux.

  “Oh, Edward!” Henry exclaims and takes his hand. “It is hot, hot, hot out there. Merciless.” He mops his forehead with his handkerchief. “And that tuxedo franchise. Good heavens. The boy there pinched me!”

  “Inadvertently,” Susan says. “Don’t exaggerate, darling. Where should I put this?”

  “I was standing in front of the mirror—”

  “He was checking the fit in the seat of the pants,” Sarah explains.

  “—his trousers,” says Susan.

  Henry cuts them off with a wave of his hand. “Basta! I don’t think we need to recreate the experience here. Suffice it to say, everything was not as it should be.” He turns to Ed. “I hope you’re wearing your own.

  “It was extraordinary,” Henry confides once he is seated at the table with his tall glass before him. “The shirt felt exactly like a hotel sheet; the fabric was absolutely impregnated with chemicals. And do you know, the pockets had Velcro in them!” He turns around and sees that Miriam has gone upstairs with Sarah. “Far be it from me to question the bride,” he whispers to Ed. “But where did she get these ideas about the wedding?”

  “It’s all part of the Orthodox shtick,” Ed says gloomily.

  “Really! I had no idea this was a religious ritual—tuxedos for eleven a.m. Sunday morning! I could have brought my tuxedo. I only suggested renting because Moss Bros. wouldn’t let their morning coats out of the country. But tuxedos? Is the dark color significant? Does it have some connection to the frock coat?”

  “No, no, it’s not a religious ritual, Henry. It’s just what people do. I’m talking about—wait a second.” Ed interrupts himself and snatches yesterday’s Times from the recycling bin. “Did you see this?”

  Henry puts on his glasses and reads. He sits stock-still for a moment and then folds his glasses up again. He gasps. “Edward! Can this be?” Ed feels a sudden affection for his brother, a real warmth. Henry, with all his scholar-in-exile Anglophiliac affectations, can truly respond to the letter, really understand what it means to Ed. “Good God!” Henry cries. “Tell me this isn’t the father of the groom.”