“Ginny, what in God’s name are you doing here?”
“It’s the professor’s memorial,” Ginny said. “Am I not allowed?”
“Allowed?” Ginny should have been the one up at the podium, delivering a speech.
They left the mourners to their club soda and iced tea and settled themselves on the steps of Low Library.
“How are you, Ginny? How’s Rafe? You should have brought him with you.”
“If I’d brought him with me, he’d have never gone back.”
“Why? Does he miss New York?”
“He thinks it’s the only place worth living.”
“So he hasn’t adapted?”
“Oh, he’s adapted just fine. Our first week in North Carolina, he climbed a tree and landed in the emergency room. Count on the hemophiliac to court danger. I tried to remind him he’s not a squirrel, or a cat.” He was doing well at school, Ginny said, and he was making friends. But he missed the things everyone missed about New York: the crowds, the midnight pizza, the bodegas open at three a.m. And when Ginny reminded him that he hadn’t been eating pizza at midnight or going to bodegas at three a.m., he said, “At least I knew they were out there. You were the only thing getting in my way.” He blamed Ginny for the accident. Of course he was climbing a tree: what else was there to do in North Carolina? But mostly he was trying to make a point. Ginny had said East New York was dangerous, but there were far more dangerous places than East New York. “The real problem is the people,” Ginny said. “Rafe thinks they’re boring.”
“Are they?”
“Some are boring and some aren’t. Just like here.”
“It takes a while to find your people.”
“I tried to tell him that, but he said, ‘Mom, do you really think there are people like the professor here? Do you really think there are people like Pru?’ ”
“Oh, Ginny, I miss Rafe, too.” A Frisbee sailed past them. A professor walked by, trundling her books. “What about you?” Pru said. “Have you found your people?”
“I already have my people. I have my mother and I have Rafe.”
“And your husband?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“So it hasn’t worked out?”
They were in a holding pattern, Ginny said. She knew all about those: her flight had gotten in an hour late; they’d been perched high above Central Park, waiting for the go-ahead. The view was astonishing—for a minute she could have sworn she saw Pru and Spence’s old apartment—but it also felt like a taunt: New York, here we come, but not quite yet. She’d been so busy with Rafe’s homesickness that she hadn’t realized she was a little homesick herself. “My husband’s still in Kingston. He has some work to wrap up.”
“And then he moves north?”
“We’ll see.” He had come for a few visits and they’d gone well enough, but once he left, Ginny was relieved. She was beginning to think the promise of a relationship—the threat of one—was superior to the real thing. She wasn’t cut out for love, at least not love of the romantic sort. She was better suited for frustrated love, like the lovers in those nineteenth-century novels Rafe was reading at school. She was too busy at work, besides. And with Rafe, and with her mother, who, unfortunately, had fallen again, and so, for now, she was a caregiver for them both. “Rafe wants to come to New York for college.”
“Will you let him?”
“If it’s okay with the admissions office, it’s fine with me. He still talks about having you adopt him.”
“I’ll even include you in the deal.”
Ginny laughed. “I’ll be long settled at that point. There are other things in my life besides Rafe.”
Maybe there were, Pru thought, but Rafe trumped them all, just as now that Spence was gone, Sarah trumped everything. Pru had been serious when she said she might move to L.A.
Ginny looked at her watch. “I have to go, Pru. I have a flight to catch.”
“I’ll come visit you sometime. I’ll fly down to Charlotte if you’ll have me.”
“I’d like that,” Ginny said. “We’ll have a more leisurely get-together.”
Pru stood there for a minute, watching Ginny recede down College Walk, until, at long last, she was gone.
45
Pru was headed down Broadway when she ran into Walter, and all she could manage was a startled Oh. She hadn’t seen him since that night at West Side Market.
He started to hug her, then stepped back. “I’m sorry about Spence.”
“So you heard?”
“I was at the memorial.”
“Oh, Walter. You should have come over and said hello.”
“I thought about it, but the room was stuffed and you were busy. Those speeches, though, they were something else.”
“It’s like they say. Never speak ill of the dead.”
“Actually, I’ve been hoping to run into you.”
But now that he had, he didn’t know what to say, and she didn’t know what to say, either.
Finally, she said, “I was cleaning up the other day and I came across your brother’s running shoes.”
“Why do you have my brother’s running shoes?”
“Don’t you remember?”
It took Walter a minute, but then he did.
“I must have taken them home by accident. I’ll get them back to you.”
“When?”
She made a show of checking her calendar. “Are you around tomorrow afternoon?”
* * *
—
When she got to Walter’s apartment, Albert greeted her, as always. He did a circle around her, then circled back.
She heard an infant cry—a wail, low at first—start to percolate. “Your neighbor’s baby is making noise.”
“That would be news to my neighbor.”
When Walter returned he was holding a baby, and all at once Pru remembered. “Walter! Your grandson!”
“Pru Steiner, meet James Cohen.” Walter lowered the baby onto Albert’s back and led him around like a matador. “James likes to ride Albert.”
“What about Albert?” Pru said. “Does he like it?”
“Albert doesn’t mind.”
Maybe he didn’t, but at the moment Albert was just standing there, with the resigned aspect of a mule.
“Albert is used to having babies around. James is the least of things.”
“You had another grandchild?”
“Albert had puppies.”
“Wait a second,” Pru said. “Albert’s a girl?” She knew Charlies who were girls, and a couple of Georges, but Albert?
“Nope,” Walter said. “Albert’s a boy. He got the neighbor’s dog pregnant.”
“How?”
Walter sighed. “The way anyone does it.” He had a history of being lax, going back to when his sons were in high school and he let their girlfriends sleep over. Two feet on the floor had been the house rule, but dogs could have two feet on the floor and still be up to no good. “Albert’s taking responsibility,” Walter said. Wasn’t that how things worked these days, men standing beside their wives, saying, We’re pregnant? Back when Walter was procreating, men didn’t exaggerate their role in the affair. Albert, inasmuch as he was Walter’s dog, agreed. He would take responsibility for what he’d done, but he wouldn’t pretend to have carried the litter. “People kept telling me to have him neutered, but I didn’t want to deprive him.”
“Deprive him of what?” Pru said. “Sex?”
“Oh, who knows?” Walter sat down on the couch. “Now I have a litter of puppies on my hands. You’re not looking to adopt a puppy, are you?”
Pru laughed. Some things would change now that Spence was gone, but this wasn’t one of them. She handed Walter his brother’s running shoes.
“So you’ve been cleaning hou
se?”
“In my own way.” She’d been emptying the closet of Spence’s blazers and neckties, of his slacks with their creases stiff as oak tag. She’d offered Sarah her father’s clothes—she thought Orson, Sarah’s boyfriend, could wear them—but Orson was taller and broader than Spence; if he put on Spence’s clothes, he’d look shrink-wrapped. “I figure it’s better to clean up now. I won’t have much time once I’m studying.”
“Why would you be studying?”
“I’m applying to law school.”
“You?”
“I know.” She was thirty-five years late to the ball. Back in her twenties, law school had been where people went when they didn’t know what else to do. Camille had gone to law school. Now Camille was marrying Bruce, and Pru was applying to law school: they were switching lives. “I should become a real estate lawyer,” Pru said. “I’ve already had to hire one.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.” A couple of months ago Arlo had visited, and he’d handed her a set of keys. “I changed the locks for security’s sake, but everything else remains the same.”
“What locks?” Pru said. “What remains the same?”
“Your old apartment,” Arlo said. “I bought it from you.”
“What are you talking about?” She’d sold the apartment to an LLC.
“I was the LLC,” Arlo said.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to. What matters is I’m the owner now, and I’m selling the apartment back to you. The price is a dollar. I’ve already had a lawyer draw the contract up.”
“But that apartment would go for over a million dollars.” It had already gone for over a million dollars.
“Then you’re getting a good deal.”
“Arlo, why are you doing this?”
“Because I owe you.” Arlo removed from his bag a yellow legal pad and showed her the numbers he’d written down, all the money his father had spent on him.
“You don’t owe us,” Pru said. “We owe you.”
But Arlo was pressing the keys into her hand.
“You don’t expect me to move back there, do you? It’s where your dad and I used to live.”
“Then rent it out. You could always put it on the market again, but then I’d have to buy it back from you.”
So she was stuck with the apartment—stuck with it forever.
She was, in fact, renting it out. At least, Spence wasn’t around to witness this. She could hear his voice. Good God, Pru, you’ve become a landlord.
“Will you go to Columbia?” Walter said now.
She shook her head. Columbia was Spence’s school. She was hoping NYU would admit her. Or if not NYU, then Cardozo. “What about you?”
“Am I applying to law school? I’m applying to baby-sitting school, is what I’m doing.” Between Albert and James, Walter spent a lot of time with one mammal or another slumped across his lap.
“It sounds like things are going well for you.”
“In some ways.”
“Not in others?”
Walter shrugged. “I’ve been seeing this woman.”
“Oh,” Pru said. “Is that not good?”
Walter hesitated.
“Seriously, Walter, I’m happy for you.” She was, in a way, and she thought saying those words would make her feel them. She hadn’t expected him to wait around for her. Still, she hoped he would keep the details to himself, leave her to her quiet speculation.
“The thing is, it’s not working out.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like her enough. My heart isn’t in it.”
Did she allow her own heart to swell? She looked at Walter across the couch from her. “We should get coffee sometime. Or maybe dinner.”
“We should?”
“Meaning I’d like to.”
A clock beeped in the kitchen. Albert stretched out his paws. Walter said, “Does this mean I’m back on your holiday card list?”
“If only I wrote holiday cards.”
“You could start.”
“Please, Walter, don’t make me write you a holiday card. And while you’re at it, could you get me to stop watching so much TV?”
“You hardly watch any TV at all.”
But that had been when Spence was alive—Spence, who’d been a television teetotaler. Now Pru had been untethered, and though she still didn’t watch much TV, she watched a lot more than she used to.
“Then come over sometime and watch Jon Stewart with me.”
The fact was, Jon Stewart was one of the few shows she liked—Jon Stewart and PBS, her regular dips into Masterpiece Theatre. In college, she’d subsisted on a steady diet of Upstairs Downstairs, an exotic, costumed world for an Ohio girl. She missed the days when there were only ten channels and half of them were shot through with fuzz. Now TV gave her choice fatigue. One time, she asked Sarah to sign her up for a cable package that provided only PBS and Jon Stewart.
“PBS isn’t a cable channel,” Sarah said. “And have you ever considered streaming Jon Stewart?”
She hadn’t, not least because she didn’t know what streaming was. Spence would have had something to say about streaming, all those perfectly good nouns turned into perfectly bad verbs. Oh, how he’d hated what had happened to the word impact. Ginny used to talk about toileting Spence, and Pru, under Ginny’s influence, had once used the word herself. Afterward, she thought the only redeeming thing about Spence’s disease was that he could no longer be pained by how people spoke. It was bad enough to have to be toileted, but to hear his own wife use that word?
Walter had one hand on James’s head, the other hand on Albert’s. He looked as if he were blessing them, the way Pru’s father used to bless her on Friday nights, one hand on her head, the other hand on Hank’s.
“Look at these two,” Walter said, staring down at his sleeping dog beside his sleeping grandson. “King James and Prince Albert.” And Walter himself was just a serf. Which was how it should be. Grandparents were meant to serve others. Pru would find this out soon enough.
“Hopefully not too soon.” She was thinking of Sarah’s words. Slow down, Mom, slow down. “I’m too young to be a grandparent.”
“That’s what everyone says until they become one.” Walter stood up. “Here,” he said, “I’ll take you downstairs.”
On Riverside Drive, Pru held James while Walter removed an orange from his pocket. “Do you mind if I eat this? I feel the low blood sugar coming on.” Walter started to peel the orange, but Pru stopped him. “Just watch,” she said, and she handed James back to Walter. When she was small, Sarah would demand that she peel the orange in one piece, then reassemble it without the fruit inside. Pru’s family had its strange ways with fruit in general. She was thinking of her father eating those apple pits, leaving nothing but the stem.
“Come visit me again,” Walter said. If Pru didn’t find him at home, she’d find him in the playground at Hippo Playground: James loved to sit on that hippo. “It must be in the blood,” Walter said. When his sons were small, they’d loved that hippo, too.
As had Sarah. She used to barnacle herself to that hippo, on the days when she tired of Central Park and she convinced Pru to trek over to the Hudson.
Walter sniffed his fingers. “I should go upstairs and wash my hands. I can’t walk around smelling like citrus.”
Pru sniffed her own hands, which smelled like citrus, too. As she turned to leave she thought of Spence, who wouldn’t have been in her predicament. All his life, he’d resisted eating on the street. He’d maintained his decorum until the end, believing certain things were private.
46
The moon dilated and the moon diminished and you could count on Spence every other Sunday visiting Enid in the nursing home. But a few years ago he stopped visiting, emb
arrassed by what he had become.
“Enid,” Pru said. “It’s me, Pru.” They were sitting in the cafeteria, and a querulous look came over Enid’s face; something bobbed in her throat.
“I’m Pru,” she repeated. “Spence’s wife.”
“My baby brother,” Enid said. “He doesn’t come here anymore.”
“Spence can’t come here anymore. He died, Enid. He’s no longer with us.”
Enid’s eyes glazed over; Pru thought she was going to cry. Then Pru started to cry herself. “I’m so sorry, Enid.” She was sorry about everything, but mostly she was sorry for having brought the news, because all it had done was upset Enid.
Pru removed Spence’s eyeglasses from her purse. “These were Spence’s,” she said. “I want you to have them.”
Enid took off her own glasses and put Spence’s on. Spence and Enid didn’t look alike, but now, wearing Spence’s glasses, she looked as if someone had combined brother and sister, like that television show where they put one person’s head on another person’s body, combined the left side of someone’s face with someone else’s right. Trick photography, they’d called it, back before all photography had become trickery.
“I brought you something else,” Pru said. She handed an envelope to Enid. It was a letter Spence had written Enid in Yiddish when he’d first gotten sick. Pru didn’t know why he’d never sent it.
,טײַער שוועסטער
איך טראַכט אַ סך וועגן דיר, און וועגן דער טאַטע און די מאַמע אויך. איך געדענק ווי דער טאַטע פֿלעגט אהיימקומען פֿון דער אַרבעט מיטן ריח פֿון די לעדערנע שיך. פֿון צײַט צו צײַט פֿלעג איך גיין אין געוועלב נאָר ווײַל איך האָב געוואָלט זײַן נאָענט צו זײַן ריח און צו די מאַמע בײַ דער קאַסע. איך טראַכט וועגן די קינדער וואָס האָבן זיך געשפילט אין האַנטבאַל אויף אָרדזשערד סטריט. איך געדענק ווי דו האָסט מיך געטראָגן אויף דײַן פלייצע אין דעם אַלטן געגענט.
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