Epilogue

by Anne Roiphe

  Once I took buses and trains down to the Washington Mall to protest the war in Vietnam. I marched with my women friends to support a woman’s right to choose. I wanted to choose another child, but that didn’t matter. I thought that each of us, adding our voices, our votes, our messages on what was then an invisible screen, would bring fate to its knees, force it to do our bidding. I knew but forgot that while the Enlightenment made its mark, the worst happened anyway. The smoke of Auschwitz overcomes Goethe and Beethoven. Progress is a splinter in fate’s eye. A few tears wash it out.

  Of course I don’t want my children to know this. I won’t tell them.

  H. was in the Battle of the Bulge. He didn’t tell me that until we had been married thirty-five years. It slipped out in a conversation I overheard at a picnic. He didn’t want to talk about the war. He had the usual affection for Franklin Delano Roosevelt of a Brooklyn boy born of immigrant parents. When it turned out that his hero had betrayed the Jews, refusing even to bomb the train tracks that would at least slow down the killing machine, he was not surprised. He was a Freudian after all and while Freud had not so much to say about politics he had everything to say about human nature and if the savage heart of man beats ever on in our breasts then the indiscriminate use of machetes lies in our future. That’s what H. believed. He voted. He had opinions on the worth and substance of our political leaders. He listened to Mozart and Bach and was especially fond of sopranos. He forgave Roosevelt. But he knew what he knew. When reports came of serial killers in the Midwest, pederasts kidnapping little boys, Serbs rounding up Bosnians and the other way around and bodies in the ditches, he was not surprised. I was. I knew what he knew but I didn’t want to know it.

  And now that he is gone I know what he would have said about the headlines, about the editorials, about the nightly news. I know whom he would have hated and whom he would have admired. His mind follows mine about. This is what the platitude means about how the dead live on in our memory. They don’t. Our memories contain knowledge of the dead, the smell of them, the sound of them, the touch that was but isn’t anymore—which is good, at least if the dead one is more loved than hated. But this memory is just a memory and does not mean the dead, like a friendly ghost, like a presence that gives you the shivers, live on. H. would find such a conceit ridiculous. He would not consider my thoughts about him equivalents or adequate substitutes for his life itself. If I remember something about him, the Irish cap he wore, the time we drank ice-cold root beer at a road stand in Vermont, that is my memory sending neurons scattering about my brain. It is not his memory, which has disappeared into protein and atom, molecule and dust. Freudians do not believe in life after death, and neither do their spouses.

  Which I admit deprives us of certain easy comforts. No meeting again in some heavenly place, no holding hands on a cloud, no merging of body and soul, not ever again. I see his features, one or two in the children’s faces. I see the shadows that deepened under his eyes in the shadows under a grandchild’s eyes. I see his gifts repeated in their gifts. I do not see him.

  I have lunch with a writer friend whose last books have all been on aging and dying and the disappearance of his self, which he finds intolerable. I understand this grieving for yourself. But I know that H. would shrug. Some people he would say cannot accept their mortality, their unimportance. The blow to their ego shatters them. Anger at the fact of death, that H. would recognize and respect. He had it too; although I can’t remember his expressing it directly, I could feel it in him in the last few years of his life, a kind of darkness that would come across his face, unprovoked by any event in our lives. Anger that we must lose our bodies and our minds, which are not two things but one, is reasonable as long as it doesn’t encroach too badly on the time left. My writer friend will not allow biology to run right over him without a huge complaint.

  It will do him no good. Biology is unimpressed by the human capacity to describe its devastation or rant against its ways.

  I am having a difficult day: an especially difficult day. I am tired. It’s only noon. H. would say I am tired because I’m sad. I don’t feel sad, not directly, not clearly. I feel tired behind the eyes as if I had been working for hours on a manuscript with small type. I feel tired as if I had not slept. But I had. I feel bone-tired as if I had walked five miles. I had not. I do not want to talk to a friend. I do not want to go out to lunch. I do not want to read a book or listen to music. I am a sea of negativity, a languid sea that heaves against the shore, withdraws and heaves again.

  I am worried about money. But then I often worry about money without this exhaustion following. I am concerned about my daughters. Suddenly this peril or that looms large. I have no particular reason to fear for their lives but I am fearing nevertheless. A young husband could die, a desired job be denied, a piece of work be rejected, a granddaughter sicken. I am inventing disasters that have not yet happened. This is the worst waste of time imaginable. It’s a tic that comes and goes and with H.’s death seems to occur more frequently. I am worried about getting sick myself and requiring nursing care, nursing home care. That is a horrible prospect. I wonder how so many people allow themselves to end up strapped to wheelchairs in dingy rooms, waiting for unkind aides to dress them. Is breath so precious that most people accept it on any terms at all?

  H. and I knew a writer who in his late sixties had a small but meaningful stroke and after that he talked of the end of civilization, the coming of nuclear night, the overthrow of democracy in America, the inevitable destruction of Israel by its Arab neighbors. H. said our writer friend was confusing the end of the world with his own end. It was easier to think about the coming conflagrations of continents than of the slowly blocking arteries of his own heart. I am thinking about the rising seas due to global warming. I am thinking of the children in refugee camps in far corners of Africa. I am thinking they will die before help arrives. In my mind’s eye I see a truck loaded with wheat and oranges headed for the border. I see a mine explode and the truck turn over on its side. I too am confusing my own existence with the roll of history. Also I am lonely.

  How to describe this loneliness without becoming maudlin or unbearable? In the theater last night where I saw a play with two friends, a play about an English prosperous family, set in 1905, a drawing-room comedy where the tragedy broke through, I wanted to reach for H.’s hand in the dark. I did not want anyone else’s hand. I did not want mints at intermission. I did not want the actors in the play to be better performers although that might have helped. I felt as if I had no hands, no place to reach. This is the loneliness that I believe will not be banished as the hours and the days and the years pass. It makes me tired, tired behind the eyes. In the children’s book Goodnight Moon, there is a little old rabbit lady sitting in a rocking chair knitting and she is whispering “Hush” to the little rabbit who is going to sleep. Yes, I am the little old lady but I feel as if someone is whispering “Hush” to me. And I am not ready yet.

  A friend calls and we talk about the Russian revolution, the evils of Stalin, the hopes of several Democratic candidates for president, the possibility that America will become a theocracy, and then we dissect a TV series we both follow with idiotic devotion, and she invites me to a dinner party in a few weeks. The sun is high and large squares and rectangles of light reflect on the walls of my living room, stripes of sunlight fall across my dining table, across the wooden chairs, over the Oriental rug H. and I bought together so many years ago. I go for a walk. I buy a new beautiful yellow scarf. I talk to one of my granddaughters on the phone. I am going to a movie with a friend whose husband is out of town tonight. Ah the sweetness of it.

  I have read about widowhood. The books say that after a while the departed spouse becomes a comforting memory. In other eras widows consulted with psychics in an attempt to reach the beloved in a space between here and there as if the dead were suspended between heaven and earth and could migrate from one to another the way a monarch butterfly transverses the continent. I
have always had pity for those at the séance table. Their need is great and so is their folly. The medium has a child appear in a cloud of light and pretend to relay messages from the other side or doors slam and cold air is blasted through the room or mechanically the table rises and falls. The medium is a con artist. The bereaved is desperate to believe. I have no desire to communicate with H. We had our chance. We did as well as we could. I do not feel his presence comforting my days. I feel his absence. There is my cold blast of air.

  I have gone to the doctor. He has offered me Paxil. Paxil will help me through. Paxil will make it easier for me to move along. I take the Paxil. A few days into the drug I feel calmer, steadier, better. But I stop taking it. I intend to take it but I keep forgetting and then I decide to quit. Is this rational or is this puritanism without a point? I am not sure. But I know that what I was experiencing before I took the Paxil was neither unusual nor truly unbearable. I would immediately take morphine for cancer pain. I do take Advil for headaches. I cannot count the number of times antibiotics must have saved my life. I do have a glass of wine with dinner. I am afraid, however, that with Paxil racing through my bloodstream I will lose my edge, my observant eye will close, my wit will melt. I can reverse this decision at any moment. I am not bound by it and have signed no contract to be drug-free for the rest of my life. That said, I am off the Paxil.

  I drop my gym membership. I just don’t get there. Lazy perhaps, uninterested in my heartbeat, certainly. The rows of cycles, the televisions blinking, flashing, mouths on multiple screens opening with words only for those with attachments in their ears, wires plugged into machines, a curious silence in the long rectangular room, do not warm me, not right now. The rows of lockers, the women in various stages of undress, the towels thrown in a bin, it is not like a walk in the park, or a swim in the ocean, or meeting a friend for lunch. I avoid the mirrors in the gym. Ultimately I avoid the gym.

  We have our first Seder without H. We have it at the Brooklyn home of my daughter, whose husband will lead. In other years H. sat at the head of the table and directed the reading of the Haggadah, using his deepest, most serious voice. He also cooked the food, poured the soup and carved the meat and filled the plates with vegetables. He was proud of his recipes. He told us how his father would make wine in their cellar in Brooklyn for the Seder each year. This was only until the family was evicted during the Depression from their home, a fact which H. did not say aloud, because he wished to forget, because he was ashamed, because he had traveled to a different America even if his daughters were back in Brooklyn now. My son-in-law has invited two colleagues from his office. The furniture in their small living room has been pushed aside and the couch is sitting on their terrace. The tablecloth is ice-white. Wedding presents are used for the first time, bowls and spoons and candlesticks display themselves proudly. Crystal glasses catch the light and shine. Everyone has arrived, everyone who is coming that is. My stepdaughter and her husband and three children, my other daughter with her husband and her child, and me.

  We begin to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea and the flight from slavery toward the promised land and we read what this rabbi or that had to say about this detail or that. The little girls get up from the table and the ten-year-old plays with them. We ignore the distraction. But I am distracted. My face is serene. But I have become hollow, as if I am not there at all but a pretender sits in my place. I think nothing. I refuse to think about H.’s absence. I have taken flight. This is the trick of bored schoolchildren, airline passengers waiting out a storm, people in doctors’ offices, on subway trains. I turn the pages at the right moment. I read aloud what I am asked to read but I hear nothing.

  The mournful rhythm of the Hebrew words, Eliahu Rachamim, Elijah the Merciful, float up around me. A little child goes to the door to open it for Elijah and everyone sings the prayer as the invisible visitor joins our table, takes a sip of the wine set aside in a large goblet just for him, leaves again. The child closes the door and returns to the table. In other years I have felt a shiver of awe as the door opens, a lump in my throat as I pledge myself to the generations that have gone before, opening and closing the door, and I am aware that those in line to the crematorium sang this song, and I know that all over in other homes at almost the same moment, Elijah enters and retreats. Of course Elijah’s visits are merely metaphors of rescue. His magic way of being everywhere at once is no more than a plea for comfort in a non-comforting universe. This year I am not appeased. Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, Elijah, it’s all the same, a fairy tale to enchant the children, to allow the adults to return to their childhood when anything was possible. In other years I have listened with great care, thought about the wise son and the wicked son, and I have sung the songs with full voice, the same songs we sing each year, the songs of praise, of hope. This year someone who seems to be me mouths the words along with the others, helps clear the table, places the dishes in the dishwasher, watches the small children climb into their mothers’ laps, tired now, enough of it all.

  But then in the light of the candles now burned down halfway I see the flush of my daughters’ faces, wine of course but also the relief of having served the meal with all its dishes, with having said the words once more. I see the Haggadahs on the table covered now with crumbs and several with wine stains. The matzoh balls were soft, the brisket was sweet, a cat in the garden below calls out for a mate. I see my sons-in-law, large men, different one from another. I see my smallest granddaughter holding her doll in her arms and pressing matzoh into her never opening mouth. The room is warm and crowded. My stepdaughter is explaining why she hated a recently seen movie to her half-sister, who loved the movie. They both raise their voices. This is a friendly discussion and a not-so-friendly discussion. I join them. I divert them.

  There had to be a first Seder that H. couldn’t make. This is not a surprise. Someone had to take over his place at the head of the table.

  A few blocks away the lights on the Brooklyn Bridge blur in the soft rain that is beginning to fall. There are no stars out that we can see from the small terrace but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, gas and rock, meteor and planet. Soon bunches of lilacs will rise on their long branches out of black plastic buckets at the greengrocers’.

  Later on the way home I return to myself. I am half-asleep and at peace. Maybe the wine finally had its effect, the sweet wine that no one likes but me, that I could drink by the bucketful. It was a beautiful Seder, a promising Seder, one that will go on without me one day, and that is how it should be. Between my thumb and forefinger I rub the pearls that I am wearing. These are the pearls that H. had given me. Actually I gave one of the double strands to my stepdaughter when she was married. H. replaced it, not without complaint and he made me wait about ten years and my strands don’t match. These are not magic pearls. They do not summon up H. from the depths of the underworld. One day I will give them to a granddaughter but not yet.

  One death reminds you of others. Rather one death like a magnet picks up other deaths, making a pile. I don’t think too often about my mother’s death. She was fifty-two and I was twenty-seven. She died of a melanoma that began with a neglected mole and ended with a brain tumor. This was in the days when chemotherapy was almost unknown. Six months later my father would marry his mistress with whom he had a twelve-year-old child. I would be divorced from my husband within two months. My mother lost her life before she had a chance to brave the world and produce a play. She wanted to be a producer. My mother died before she had a chance to run a business. She had a head for the stock market and she remembered every card played and was unbeatable at canasta and gin and backgammon. She died before she understood that she didn’t have to be neglected, rejected, and weepy every night. As I watched her die I was in shock. I had not before believed that such a thing could happen, happen to someone I knew so well, could shake the ground on which I stood. It could be argued I stood too close to her. It could be said
that we talked on the phone too often. It could be said that I had not learned to stand on my own two feet. It could be said that although I rejected the life she had wanted me to lead—a lady of much leisure, married well to a man of a certain position and a membership in a golf club—I was still my mother’s child. Every day for two months I visited her bedside, with my young daughter from what would soon be my first marriage playing with a jewelry box on the carpet below. I saw the gray hair on her head begin to grow, an inch and inch and a half, as if death itself were pushing forward, insisting on its rights. She soon lost her speech and I could see the terror in her eyes. My father ordered a speech therapist to teach her to speak, to learn the letters of the alphabet again. This was done so that she wouldn’t know she was dying. But she was not fooled. I could see it in the way she turned her head away from the therapist, the way she used her good hand to sweep off the bed the crayons and the paper the lady had brought.