Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  All at once, she realized something: what if, come September, Ginny was no longer available? What if she found another job?

  “I’ll pay you not to work,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll pay you in New York as if you’re working here.”

  “But I’m not working here.”

  “Technically.”

  “I’m not going to be paid to do nothing.”

  All Pru could do was hope—hope that Ginny would find temporary work so she could come back to her job.

  38

  Over the next couple of weeks, Spence declined. He was back to how he’d been before the drug trial; he might have even been worse. Pru blamed Ginny for his decline, then blamed herself for blaming Ginny.

  She was alone with Spence in this city she didn’t know, the gawkers gawking at the White House and the Supreme Court. She could have enlisted Arlo’s help, but Arlo wasn’t cut out for the kind of help she needed, and he’d already done more than she’d asked.

  She thought of going back to shul, but she couldn’t pick and choose her worship times.

  But she did go back, taking Spence with her because she couldn’t leave him alone. He grew agitated during the service, and she grew agitated, too, sitting across the mechitza from him. She hated Orthodox Judaism, where you couldn’t even sit with your own sick husband.

  When the Torah reading started, Spence began to moan, and she crossed over to the men’s side to collect him. She thought of waiting until the Blessing for the Sick, but that wasn’t for another twenty minutes. She didn’t want to bless him while he was standing right there, arrayed before the congregants, on display. What was the point, besides? If the drug hadn’t worked, then praying wouldn’t work either. It didn’t matter that she now knew his mother’s name.

  * * *

  —

  One evening, Spence began to cough. He sounded like the city buses, their pneumatic doors wheezing closed. It was three in the morning, and Pru took the stethoscope Sarah had left her and pressed it to his chest.

  “I hear a crackle,” she told Sarah over the phone.

  “It sounds like pneumonia,” Sarah said. “You should take him to the ER.”

  But Pru didn’t want to take him to the ER. She’d signed a DNR order; she refused to have him intubated.

  In the morning, though, his breathing was worse; he was making gasping sounds, like a fish on a dock.

  This time Sarah insisted. “Pneumonia’s not…”

  What? Pru thought. A good way to die? She hadn’t encountered one of those yet.

  At the hospital, it was confirmed: Spence had pneumonia. He was given antibiotics and put on a ventilator.

  Sarah flew in. Arlo came to the hospital, too.

  In the waiting room, they sat in front of the TV, taking breaks to check on Spence, buying Popsicle after Popsicle from the cafeteria, letting the sticks pile high.

  “This could be it,” Pru said.

  “Have faith,” Sarah said. “Dad’s stronger than you think.”

  They went outside, where Pru leaned against a car and drank a cranberry juice, watching the city conduct its affairs.

  Back in the waiting room, Judge Judy was yelling on TV.

  Sarah was right: by the end of the day Spence had rallied, and when Arlo showed up, he rallied even more.

  The next morning, he was off the ventilator. The morning after that, his breathing was back to normal. Two days later, he was allowed to go home.

  As they left the hospital, Sarah said, “Dad needs to rest.” Moving forward, they would have to treat him with greater caution.

  But Pru was thinking something else. In the coming months—in however much time he had left—she would let him do whatever he wished. He’d always wanted to go to Nepal. Spence, who had forded snowdrifts to get to class, who just might have tried to climb Mount Everest if she’d let him—Spence, who probably didn’t know what Nepal was anymore and certainly couldn’t have located it on a map: Spence probably still wanted to go to Nepal, and she would allow him to do it. She made a proposal to the sleeping Spence. “Let’s go to Nepal, darling. We’ll leave the rest of the world behind us.”

  * * *

  —

  Sarah was about to fly back to L.A. when she got a call from Arlo. “There are problems with the drug trial.”

  “What problems?”

  “Other patients have gotten pneumonia, too.”

  Two days later, the news broke in the Times and the Post. A statistically significant elevation in heart attacks and strokes among the patients on the Zenithican compared to the patients on placebo, and an even bigger jump in pneumonia. The trial was being suspended.

  “That drug almost killed him,” Sarah told her mother.

  But Pru refused to blame the drug.

  “I was an idiot,” Arlo said.

  “You weren’t,” Pru said. She had gone to his office, leaving Spence in Sarah’s care.

  Arlo handed her the newspaper article. She knew what it said, but she hadn’t been able to look at it. Even in the last two weeks, as Spence had gotten worse, she’d been holding out hope.

  She handed Arlo back the article.

  “It’s my fault,” he said.

  “It’s not.” She was the one who had brought Spence down. What difference did it make, besides? Spence was falling like a meteor, he was diminishing like a candle, but that had been true before he’d gotten the drug, and so the only thing dashed were her hopes, and they’d been unreasonable hopes, anyway.

  “I’m so sorry,” Arlo said.

  Pru was, too.

  Arlo hired movers to pack their bags. Then he called a car to drive them home to New York.

  Part VIII

  39

  “And this is the dining room,” Pru said, “and this is the kitchen and this is the hallway, and this is the bedroom where you’ll sleep.” Spence had already slept there—four weeks and counting—but every day she had to start over. The new building was handicap-accessible, and as if to acknowledge this, Spence had started to use a wheelchair. This heartened Pru—she no longer had the strength to do battle—but it depressed her, too, seeing his resolve flee like a thief.

  She’d had to sell their apartment. She wasn’t working anymore; already these last months they’d been living off savings. Spence, if he’d understood, would have been relieved; he’d hated being a property owner.

  As soon as she put the apartment up for sale, she started to look for rentals. Maybe their old place on Claremont Avenue would be available; being back where they’d started might jog something in Spence. But the apartment was being rented by a young sociologist and his wife who weren’t planning to have children. And the man, Pru reasoned darkly—he was in his early thirties—was twenty-five years away from even early Alzheimer’s, so they weren’t getting their apartment back.

  She could have rented in one of the big condos, with a gym and a party room, where the elevator rocketed you straight to your door and the doorman ran out to greet you. But she didn’t want to be accosted as she entered the building, forced to surrender her groceries when she was capable of carrying them herself. So she settled on a three-bedroom on 112th and Riverside, where the doorman got on at four and off at eleven, and the rest of the time you were left alone.

  The apartment was big enough to hold their grand piano. She had played it growing up, and for a time she’d hoped Sarah would play it, too, but except for some sporadic banging on the keys, it had spent the last twenty-five years unmolested. The beached whale, Spence had called it, though he liked to sit on the piano bench, listening to Mozart on the old Victrola, like those fans at Wimbledon in their tennis shorts.

  Pru was lucky: Ginny had taken a temporary job, so she was able to come back and take care of Spence. And Elaine was available to cover nightti
me.

  When Pru closed on the apartment, she raised their pay to twenty-two dollars an hour, and she paid off Sarah’s medical school loans.

  “We’re back in our old neighborhood,” she told Spence, but even as she wheeled him past College Walk he seemed not to realize it. He was lost now, a puppet cut loose from his strings.

  * * *

  —

  Watching him sleep, Pru told herself he wasn’t in pain, and maybe this receding even brought him pleasure. She recalled fevers as a girl, lying in front of the TV with her hot-water bottle and ginger ale, that feeling of being locked in her own body. Now, again, she was so rooted in herself she would lose track of where she was. What month was it? What year? Whole parts of her life were lost to her.

  The first time Spence wet his pants and, months later, the first time he soiled them, the stink was such a humiliation she went mute. But as the months passed it happened more and more until it became a matter of course. It was better not to be ashamed of what couldn’t be avoided, but there came with this accommodation its own kind of loss. When they were around, Ginny and Elaine cleaned him up, but on weekends the job fell to her, and she went about the task with grim efficiency.

  Early on, when he was sufficiently himself that she almost wouldn’t have known anything was wrong, the bad moments were made worse because she had his old self to compare him to. That was when she would rage at him, when she would tell him to try harder, to concentrate. Afterward she would rebuke herself and think maybe her impatience was the problem because nobody liked to have the pressure put on. Now, though, he was so far gone that to rage at him would have been like raging at a stone. What a year ago had been a bad day would now have been so good it was unimaginable. A good day was when he could string a few sentences together, when he could respond directly, if tersely, to How are you? Finally, she was able to be kind to him in a way she hadn’t been before.

  Looking at him as he slept, she told herself she wouldn’t forget him. But in a way she’d already forgotten him, forgotten what he’d been like before he got sick, even as it was all she could think about. She wondered whether this was what she would remember, these last years of diminishment. She persuaded herself that when he was gone the end would fade and the man she’d first known would remain, accompanying her through the lonely days, through the years of solitude that lay ahead of her.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, she helped him to the toilet and stood outside the door. Even now, when there was little dignity left, she wanted to give him some privacy. When he was done, she came inside and squeezed the toothpaste onto his toothbrush.

  He was brushing too hard, jabbing himself in the gums. “Go easy on yourself, darling.”

  He kept brushing too hard.

  He’d left the water on, and she said, “Rinse up, rinse up, there’s a water shortage here,” though she’d gone running last week and the reservoir looked full to overflowing. There was probably enough water for them to brush their teeth from now until they both shall live.

  She laid his slippers on the floor and watched him struggle to put them on. “The brain controls everything, doesn’t it?”

  He stared silently at her, and she wished she hadn’t said that. But she needed to talk to someone; there was only so much talking she could do to herself.

  The soap kept sliding out of his hands. She could get him liquid soap, but that probably wouldn’t be any easier. He had only the hot water on, and she recoiled at the touch. “Jesus, darling, you’re going to burn yourself.”

  But he was already drying off his hands, his palms as red as rib eyes. Perhaps this, too, was part of the disease and he was losing his sensitivity to heat.

  She had started to shave him, and it brought her back to childhood, watching her father shave. She placed the shaving cream on his face, a patch on one side, a patch on the other, as if he had muttonchops.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  So he could still feel pain. And she hadn’t even begun to shave him yet. It was the cold he felt—that was what he was most sensitive to—and he shivered at her touch.

  She ran the razor down his right cheek, moving along the slope of his jaw. “Lift your chin, darling.”

  But he lifted his whole body instead of his chin, when what she wanted was for him to tilt his head back so she could get at the sensitive skin along his throat.

  The bristles on his neck were as fine as a baby’s brush.

  She pointed at the two of them in the mirror. “That’s you and me, darling.” Eventually he would stop recognizing her; there would come a time when he wouldn’t know who she was. She didn’t want to be there for that, but she would be there for that, as she would be there for everything. For now, though, she had the opposite problem: she would go into the kitchen and he’d be calling out to her, forgetting she’d just been in the room.

  “Should we finish up? Call it a shave?” She ran the razor under the water, and now she was going over the last patches of skin, mopping up the final clumps of shaving cream like a Zamboni. As she moved the razor in that sensitive trough between his nose and upper lip, he flinched. She had cut him: a drop of blood rose to the surface like a pomegranate seed. “Darling, I’m so sorry.” Hazard of the job, he would have said, but it was she who had nicked him, and as she wiped the blood away, she said, “You almost got through unscathed,” the lightheartedness like a screen to cover her true feelings, which were melancholy and self-reproach.

  * * *

  —

  For years, he’d asked her to bake kichel for him, but she’d always refused. Kichel! It was peasant’s food! Now, though, she finally agreed.

  She followed the recipe devoutly, refusing to improvise, as if to wash her hands of the affair. Six eggs, half a cup of oil, half a cup of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, two cups of flour. She poured the ingredients into a mixing bowl, like bath salts into a tub.

  More and more, he would refer to people she’d never heard of, friends from childhood, the Lower East Side. Often he talked in Yiddish, but the only Yiddish she knew was the Yiddish everyone knew. She knew chutzpah and putz and kibitz and macher and schmooze and shtick and pisher and tush. She knew boychik and traif. She knew nebbish and nosh and shpilkes and punim and schlep. She knew yenta and zaftig and kvell and klutz and kishkes and naches and bupkis and farklempt. Watching Spence eat his kichel, she tried to put the words into sentences. Okay, boychik, sit down and eat your kichel. That takes chutzpah, you big macher, not thanking me when I schlepped all the way home just to bake these for you. Let me wipe your face, you klutz; you’ve left kichel dust all over your punim.

  But there was no point: it made her farklempt just to try. She grew teary, and she took the napkin and dabbed her eyes, leaving kichel crumbs across her face.

  40

  “It’s Ginny’s birthday,” Spence said one morning.

  How like Ginny, Pru thought, not to mention her birthday, to be embarrassed she even had one.

  “Ginny’s birthday is next year,” Spence said.

  “Well, yes,” Pru said. Ginny’s birthday was this year and next year and the year after that. It was an annual occurrence.

  When Ginny came into the living room Pru said, “What’s this I hear about a birthday?”

  “Oh, that,” Ginny said, seeming to regret she’d let word slip out.

  “When is it?”

  “Next week.”

  “When exactly?”

  Ginny sighed, the force of which lowered her onto the couch. “My birthday’s next Saturday, if you must know.”

  “And what would you like?”

  “I’d like you to stop talking about my birthday.”

  “I’ll stop talking about your birthday when you tell me what you’d like.”

  “I’d like to go to the Botanic Garden,” Ginny said. “I’ve lived in Brookl
yn for thirteen years, and I’ve never been there.”

  “It’s November,” Pru reminded her. “Wouldn’t it be better to go in the summer?”

  But Ginny didn’t care what month it was. She wanted to go to the Botanic Garden, and she wanted Pru and Spence to come along. Rafe could come, too, if he wanted. They could spend her birthday, all four of them.

  * * *

  —

  They moved slowly down the hill at the Botanic Garden, Spence silent in his wheelchair.

  “He’s not having a good day,” Pru said.

  “Just give him a little time,” Ginny said. “He’ll rally.”

  But Pru knew, and Ginny knew, and Pru knew that Ginny knew, that if Spence wasn’t doing well in the morning, he’d be doing even worse in the afternoon, because the passing hours marked a depletion, like gas leaking out of a tank.

  Rafe stood across from them in his jeans jacket. Ginny had tried to get him to dress for the weather, but to no avail. “You see?” Pru said when Ginny lifted Rafe’s collar to protect him from the cold. “You’re a Jewish mother, after all.”

  A tour was gathering on Cherry Walk. The topic was deciduous trees of winter: how organisms responded to the changing seasons and how to use sunlight to keep the blues at bay. Seasonal affective disorder, Pru thought—or, as Spence had once called it, seasonal effective disorder, effective as it was at selling sunlamps. But then all diseases, Spence believed, were effective at selling things; it was why they’d been invented in the first place. “How about it?” Pru said. “Should we take the tour?”

  Spence, glancing at the crowd clustered at the visitor center, said, tersely, “No, thank you.”

  “It’s a Madurodam of trees,” Pru said. They were wandering among the Bonsai now, and Pru was recalling a family visit to the actual Madurodam when Sarah was a girl.