Epilogue

by Anne Roiphe

  I have to decide but I can’t decide in the abstract whether or not I really want a new companion, a new mate, a new man in my bed. In theory yes, in reality maybe, maybe not. There are not so many years left in my life that I couldn’t be alone, get used to being alone, even enjoy being alone. I could make my work the center of my life. I could make my children and my grandchildren the center of my life. My friends could amuse me, hold my hand on difficult days. This I think would be dignified, proper, reasonable. I could do this and may have to do this. But then I am having lunch with a friend who tells me that last night she and her husband, who has Parkinson’s disease, who is eighty-two years old, decided they did not want to go out for dinner and so they ordered in Japanese food from a good place and they sat on their couch and watched the movie they had ordered from Netflix. “We had a great evening,” she said. I felt a wrenching stab of jealousy. H. and I had evenings like that all the time. There is nothing great about food and a movie if you are alone in front of the TV. The blue light flickers, the characters do what they do, the camera zooms about, but the couch is not a safe haven and the food tastes of cardboard containers and the hours of the evening do not fly by. Therefore I do want a new companion.

  A friend tells me to be careful. You don’t want to end up taking care of an old man you hardly know, with whom you have shared so little of your life. That is true; however, it seems too calculating and self-protective to think of that. She draws it out for me. “If you have a relationship now it will end very soon at the doctor’s office, with you pushing a wheelchair, filling prescriptions, calling for an ambulance, waiting in hospital waiting rooms. You will end up as a nurse or a social worker filling out forms.” There are of course many worse ways to end up. One could be an old crone the children on the block are afraid of when they see you coming down the street. One could be a madwoman who talks to herself and lives in memories of better times. One could forget how to care for another person. One could be sitting in front of the TV eating takeout food and suffer a final heart attack and days pass before someone misses you. I told H. I would take care of him until I was ninety and then I would run off with the mailman. I didn’t get the chance.

  This leads to two equally valid questions. Would the mailman want to run off with me and can I still run off with anyone?

  I have overpaid on H.’s Capital One credit card. Not by a little but by nearly $1,000. I misread the amount owed and overlooked the minus sign and thought the credit was actually a balance. I paid and paid for months, repeating this error. I did not ask myself how the amount could grow, since H. was dead. I did not actually realize that the card was in his name, not mine. I did not ask myself what it was that I was charging. I just assumed that I owed the amount that was actually owed me. Then I noticed and I called. Of course I didn’t get a person, not for a long time, not until I held the phone to my ear for over thirty minutes. I explained. I explained again to an account supervisor. I gave all my pertinent information twice. I gave H.’s Social Security number and his mother’s maiden name. I waited. They promised a refund check that should arrive after three weeks. It didn’t arrive. I forgot about it. Then they send me a bill on his account with a zero balance and I wonder about my check. Again I call and I wait and I speak to two young women who refer me to a third and at last they promise to send the check out again and not to the address on the card, which was his office, where no one is forwarding his mail anymore, but directly to me. I feel strange. I have closed his account. His mail is no longer coming to me. I no longer receive the psychoanalytic journals I used to read each month or the giveaway professional magazines.

  I wonder about my daughters. Since they are grown people, am I still necessary in their lives? I would hope not. I would hope so. At this point it is my need for them that is the stronger need. I suppress the impulse to call them in the morning, to call them as the day ends. I don’t want them to know that I am a cloud hanging above their days. What kind of a mother would allow that? I know them so well that a shift up or down in voice tells me about their state of mind. I hear fatigue. I can tell when something has gone wrong, perhaps seriously, perhaps not. I know them so well that I know that it is time for me to step back, grow a little deaf, allow them to collide with each other, with their children, with their work. This was easier when H. was here. We could talk together about them. We did talk about them incessantly. H. would reassure me if I was worried. He trusted their ability to swim to any shore. Now my love runs in circles, dances around the telephone, waits for it to ring, hangs above my head, bringing most terrible “what if” thoughts in its wake. In fact my daughters are passionate, emotional, caring, nurturing, decent enough people. What more could a mother want? Maybe that they be spared. Spared what? I could make a list but it would be so long that night would fall before I finished and the gates of hell would open and swallow me live.

  I want to tell one of my daughters a new thought that has occurred to me about my brother. These days I am always thinking about my dead brother. My nephew is not speaking to me because I hinted in a memoir that his father might have been gay. My nephew, nineteen at the time, thought that by writing about his father, even so delicately, I was not protecting him or considering his response to such news. He accused me of lying. He said I was wrong. He had every right to be angry with me. I was likely more concerned about my book than about his response, although I was not blind to that matter. I worried about my nephew. I wasn’t sure what to do. Once I had learned that my brother had a hidden life I could not lie in a published memoir.

  H. and I argued. My brother’s secret, which he had kept from his son and which I only found out about after his death of AIDS some thirteen years ago, should or should not be told to my nephew. H. thought he was entitled to know. H. thought my nephew should not spend his life without understanding the great family secret that had surrounded his childhood. I wasn’t so sure. What if he hated me later? What if he was shaken off his own life course by this information? I suspect there was no good answer. He should know. He shouldn’t know. Did he already know? H. and I consulted with two psychoanalysts. They both were very clear that my nephew should have all the information that I had. But psychoanalysts spend their lives uncovering secrets. They are by profession the archenemy of the secret. I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t my obligation to tell my nephew, but if I didn’t who would? I settled on a compromise. I hinted at how my brother contracted AIDS in a few sentences in the last pages of a memoir. Either my nephew would notice or he would not.

  He noticed. His mother emphatically denied the fact. Either she was lying or she didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. My nephew did hate me. He did not speak to me or his cousins after the publication of that memoir. Now ten years later he speaks to one of my daughters. After H.’s death his mother suddenly told him the truth. Yes, his father was gay and had affairs with men from the time my nephew was two years old. Yes, she had always known. What mysterious compromises people make. I understand nothing.

  I tell myself that many men have wives and children and frequent gay bars, have male lovers and live double lives. My brother knew a million jokes, spoke four languages fluently, was a hematologist who worked in a lab, was a pianist of considerable quality. He hated football and baseball and psychoanalysis and fresh air. He had asthma and was allergic to dogs and cats and flowers and trees and exercise. He loved Proust and Thomas Mann. I visited him often in the last year of his life. I hoped he was happy to see me but I was never sure. After he died I was going to write a book about a hero scientist who cut himself in his laboratory and got AIDS and died. I went to Montefiore Hospital intending to pick up his published papers on sickle cell anemia and to talk to the head of the lab. The man told me that my brother could not possibly have contracted AIDS in the lab and that he had been seen leaving a gay strip bar in New Orleans on one of their convention trips, and that he had heard from an old lover of my brother’s that he was homosexual and he had several other confirmations of his actual sexual prefer
ence.

  At that time I considered that this chief hematologist might be protecting his lab from possible lawsuit. I wasn’t sure if what he was telling me was or was not true. He also told me that my brother had never liked me. That I did believe.

  I could not write the book about a hero scientist if he had not caught the disease in the lab. I couldn’t stop thinking it over, his secret, mulling it back and forth. H. would tell me to let it go. I would for a while and then my brother and his life would return again to haunt me. That’s when I decided to turn the book that was intended to be about a hero scientist into a memoir about the childhood my brother and I shared.

  Family secrets are toxic. That is not in doubt. But revealing them may also release poisons. Guilt, guilt at revealing secrets, exposing others, is a common ailment among certain kinds of writers. I am among them. However, for some of us, guilt is more bearable than silence. If I had stayed silent I would have assented to the shame that in places still follows homosexual identity about, building closets where spacious rooms with grand views should have been. In silence we assent to the cover-up of actual human experience.

  Would I write that memoir again, the way I wrote it? Would I risk my nephew’s fury and our lasting connection for it? Was publishing that memoir worth never meeting my great-niece who bears the female version of my brother’s name, and must be two by now? There are no second chances in real life. Even so I suspect I would do it again, just the same way, because many people worship at the feet of one false god or another and the least I can do is be faithful to mine. Guilt is mine ever after.

  But now that H. is dead I feel the loss of my only nephew more strongly. Stubbornly, in the face of the facts, I have always wanted more family, not less. Siblings fight and lose each other over the years. Sometimes they just move away to different coasts of the country. Lonely fathers and mothers are despised and forgotten and left to rot in nursing homes. Sometimes they are despised long before their old age. Perhaps we live too long, outlast our connections to our children, place too high a burden on public finance.

  I am obsessed now with my brother. It is not that I am thinking new thoughts. It is that I am thinking the same thoughts over and over again. I am overwhelmed by a compulsion to tell everyone I meet about my brother, about his AIDS, about how I should have known before I knew. I speak to an old friend who lives in another city and I tell her the entire story. I am like the Ancient Mariner grasping at the lapels of the wedding guests. I see in people’s eyes, as they listen to me, a certain embarrassment, a certain withdrawal; she is quite mad, they think. They are also interested in my tale.

  I think about my brother’s wife and how she kept his secret and why she kept his secret. I walk along Broadway thinking about him. I sit in my chair in front of the evening news and I think about him. I go over the details of his death in my mind again and again. I know enough to become suspicious of my own tenacious thoughts. Why can’t I let him go? Why am I rubbing this sore until it bleeds again and again? When my daughter speaks of my brother’s son, my nephew (she’s seen him at this party, she had dinner with him here or there, he is doing this or that), I feel guilt like slivers of glass in my spine. I betrayed my brother. I hurt his child. When I imagine how much he would have hated me for that, I grow afraid as if his hate could reach out from the grave and pull me in.

  Is it easier to think of my brother, guilt and all, than about H., who should never have left me alone?

  A seventy-six-year-old man on Match.com sends me his profile. He lives in a suburb of Albany. He is a big man with a mustache and he has a dog on his lap. He says he likes cooking and politics and animals. He says he is conservative, but I am not so opinionated as I used to be. I e-mail him back. I tell him the miles that lie between our cities may prevent any good coming from this meeting. He e-mails me back, “Don’t worry about the geography, let’s just see what happens.” And so I begin. It is absurd to be hopeful from a photo and an e-mail. But I am. He tells me he is a lapsed Catholic. He went to a military Catholic high school and then to a liberal arts college in the West, known for producing hippies and bakers of their own bread. He was divorced twice. He sends me a long piece he has written about his dogs, a poodle mix named Tina and a kind of beagle named Cashew. Tina has died, and he tells me about her death and the way the dog pressed against his thigh in her last hours. He describes disciplining the animals and I see that he is firm but gentle. He lets the neighborhood children play with his dogs. He says that he is interested in spiritual growth. He has had some Jungian therapy. He has also benefited from est. This is not my school of therapy. The sixties rolled off the back of my psychoanalyst medical school husband, and while he was not a conformist Freudian he held no brief for all the shortcuts and the primal screams and soaking in hot tubs and crawling through tunnels to be reborn, which prevailed across the country in wave after wave of self-improvement efforts. I am a very non–New Age person. Put more correctly, I am a very old-age person. But this could be interesting, I tell myself. After all there are many ways to skin a cat and I have respect for anyone who wants to make themselves more conscious, more aware, more capable of surviving in this harsh world.

  He sends me a recipe for the black bean soup he is making for dinner. I will not use it, because I’m still calling the local Chinese takeout for dinner, but I print it out anyway and slip it into the worn and tattered, binder split cookbook that H. used most often.

  I take the subway out to Brooklyn. I remember the Ezra Pound poem: Faces in the subway like petals on a branch. But the faces are not like petals, they are more like bicycle pedals, worn, dark, shadowed, concealing their histories behind a veneer of dust and soot. My face too must look like an old rubber boot left at the bottom of the closet many winters ago. The subway stops running because of a power outage. We wait in the tunnel a long time. We finally pull into a station and everyone is asked to exit. I walk to the surface and find a taxi that crosses the Brooklyn Bridge, oh brilliant blue water, masts of sailboats that are now docked at a museum’s edge, and in the distance a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, her garish green color, like a lady dressed in another century’s fashion, catches the sun’s rays. The cables and the beams of the bridge form a web in the sky. A police car waits at the entrance of the bridge to catch a terrorist but how can the policeman now drinking his coffee prevent the pushing of a button, the blowing up of a minivan? How would anyone know a moment before what will follow? There is the watchtower of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The route goes by the federal prison and the courthouse. I arrive at the home of one daughter only a short while after I was expected.

  And then there is my granddaughter. Here love rises, irrational love, reasonless love. It turns me pink and makes me wish that H. were there to see the child do only what all children do but bring me wonder without end. The child uses a marker on a paper, moves it in almost a circle, a doll is dropped from the back of a chair, a tower of blocks grows by my feet. I would sweep the child into my arms and hold her in my lap. But the child is a moving child, not a lap child, at least not at this moment. I watch.

  When I come home, the subways running again, I slide into my chair and open my e-mail. My correspondent has sent me a very long article about peace in the Middle East. It is about the eternal treachery of Arabs and the vile premises of the Muslim religion. I do not agree. I do not like this view. But I assume that because this man knows I am Jewish he is bending over, perhaps too far, to protect my interests as he perceives them. I take the article as an offering of friendship. I am far more moderate in my views and hopeful of reconciliations that may not come but must still be hoped for, if sanity is to be maintained.

  The question arises again: am I capable of a new love? Or is it gone, that willingness to open my mind to another, even more alarming, to let the hand of another go between my thighs or rest lightly on my breasts? I lie down on my couch and listen to Ray Charles. I am old but he was blind and that didn’t stop him. He would understand my moment of unrea
sonable, unsubstantiated optimism.

  The form comes from the monument makers. There is a sketch of the stone with H.’s name on it. Under his name and his date of birth and his date of death I have told them to put the words HUSBAND, FATHER, GRANDFATHER AND PHYSICIAN. The words are there on the design, on the right side of the tablet. On the left there is a blank space, for my name and any additional words my children will choose. The ground under my side of the stone is still undisturbed. Perhaps I will take a course at the Museum of Natural History and find out the names of the strata of earth, the mineral and rock that lie beneath. I am supposed to approve the sketch and sign the bottom of the page. Also I am to include a very substantial check. I stare at the blank space. I am cowering like Scrooge on the visitation of Christmas Future. Only no behavior change, no reform of my bad character, no effort to improve my mortal soul can affect the sentence. I consider telling the children what words I want carved onto my side of the stone. But they would be angry at my morbid thought. I’ll let them make up their own words; after all I won’t know or care. Being dead grants someone else the final word.

  So I sign the form and place it in the envelope provided and put the stamp on the corner. One of these days I will even mail it.