Happy Any Day Now

by Toby Devens

  “They’re taking a long time to buy ice cream.” Mrs. Botansky’s eyes were overbright. “But I’m sure everything is all right. Gracie can hold her own. Can’t you, darling?”

  My mother shook off the old lady’s bejeweled claw and dragged me by two fingers to a corner. “Private here.” She folded her arms and waited.

  I folded mine and tried to keep my voice steady. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Uhm-mah? Something to do with the family? Maybe from long ago? A secret I’m not supposed to know?”

  She looked innocent. A little less so when she backed up two steps. “Like what?”

  The problem was Aunt Phyllis hadn’t given me a clue. Since our conversation, I’d been sifting through all kinds of possibilities. I laid out the one I liked the best. “I was thinking Irwin isn’t my real father.”

  “What!” My mother clapped her thick peasant’s hand against her chest. “Not your father!” She almost lost her balance as she rocked with the hilarity of it. “Of course Irwin your father.” She couldn’t contain her whoops of laughter. “This what you want to be true, different daddy. Ay, so funny. We do paternity test?” That phrase she knew, thanks to Jerry Springer. “Fine. Can prove with paternity test.”

  The response was too spontaneous to be a bluff. And she’d called mine. My last, best hope for a disconnect with that loser had just gone down the tube.

  “Then you’re hiding something else from me,” I said. “What is it?”

  That shut her down as if a plug had been pulled. “What else? Secret about your father? Why you think that?”

  Answering a question with a question. Three, actually. The cross-cultural contamination was getting serious. Also, it was a clever evasive move. She didn’t look at me. Her stare was fixed on her bright red fingernails. Her lips, which had been parted a moment before, pursed as if she’d been sucking a lemon. She made a half turn away. Gave me a cold shoulder. Oh yes, she was hiding something, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

  I had no more to go on. I said, “Okay,” meaning for now, and switched to a more pressing issue. “Marti showed me your check for the party.”

  “You’re welcome,” my mother said. Koreans are not big on sarcasm, but living among the Jews and Italians, she seemed to be picking up the knack.

  “Yes, thank you. However, before the check is handed over to the Belvedere, I really need to know if that money was from you or him.”

  She flared. “First Irwin not your father. Then Irwin-not-father pay for party.” She shook her head in wonderment.

  “Come on, Uhm-mah. If you’d won three thousand dollars at the craps table, you would have been on the phone to me in a heartbeat. But not a peep. You never mentioned it.”

  “You want me call you every time I pee. This so stupid. So stupid and crazy, Judith. I be nice and give money. You be . . . what word?”

  “Ungrateful?”

  “Ungrateful. So stop ungrateful. Enjoy party. No more questions. Chungbun!”

  When my mother said “Enough!” she meant it. At fourteen I’d obeyed. Not so much at forty-nine. “One more, an easy one, and then I’m finished. Is he planning on moving in?”

  “Here? Apartment too small. He don’t know where he live. Free as bird now. Thinking maybe move to near Aunt Phyllis. Great Neck.”

  No subways on Long Island. That might explain the Jaguar, which would be perfect for Great Neck.

  I was finished with my mother, but she wasn’t finished with me. “Why where he live your business? Maybe you move to New York with judge. That my business? No. Don’t insult. So many insult today.”

  • • •

  I was still basking in the Great Neck moment when Irwin walked through the door carrying a Wegmans shopping bag. Sonia Applebaum followed, arms empty, eyes clouded with maybe cataracts, maybe adulation.

  He searched the room for my mother. When he found her, he lit up.

  I looked at her when she found him. Radiant.

  Irwin handed off the ice cream to the activities director and made his way toward us. He walked briskly for an eighty-year-old man. With the entire room now watching, I found myself stuck facing him.

  He shifted his gaze from my mother to me and assumed a salesman’s eager expression, as if he had a pound of the finest kippered herring up his sleeve. With my name on it. Half price. Today only.

  “Hiya, Jude. Long time no see. You look good. I hope you’re staying for the party because I just bought this gang some Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. You ever tried that? The best. It’s bananas and nuts and these big hunks of chocolate. I know how you love chocolate. I remember once, when you were a kid around two, I brought you Hanukkah gelt. You know what that is? The gold-wrapped chocolate money.” His mouth never stopped working. “What a thing you had for chocolate. Didn’t she, Gracie? You went through that chocolate money like Grant took Richmond.”

  From the doting-father routine, you’d think he’d never left.

  It was too much. My mother must have known I was ready to tell that old bastard where to shove his Chunky Monkey, because she slung a restraining arm around my waist and drew me close.

  “Go away, Irwin. Now. Help serve ice cream. Not for me. Tea for me. No sugar.”

  “I know no sugar, Grace. For fifty years I’ve known no sugar.”

  “Go.” She shooed him off with her free hand.

  And the amazing thing was, he actually listened to her. “Sure,” he said, “glad to be of assistance.” To me he said, “We’re at table four. I’ll put an extra chair out for you,” and took off.

  She loosened her grip on my waist. “I’m boss now. Big difference. Feel good.”

  I had only a few foggy memories of the time before he left, but even I knew that back then the balance of power had weighed heavily on his side. He ran the show. Big difference.

  We both watched him strut to the front table, where Sonia Applebaum was waiting with the scoop.

  “Ha. Look at how she push herself on him. Such slut. Shibal nyon.”

  “Mother . . .” Shocked, I laughed at the language. “But what if she and he—?”

  “What if, what if, you always what if. No matter what if, I be fine. You think so hard, Judith. Not healthy. Bad for more aneurysm. Go home, take hot bath. Drink ginseng tea. Kok-tchong ma-se-yo—don’t worry. Everything be okey-dokey, you see.”

  Everything wasn’t okey. It didn’t even approach dokey. I called Marti on my drive home. “Listen, I want you to cancel the contract. Get in touch with the Belvedere. Back us out.”

  “Calm down, sugarpuss, you’re going to burst another blood vessel.”

  “Fine, I’m calm. Very calm. I’ll say this slowly and distinctly: the money is from a tainted source. Probably from the dead chippie via Irwin. Now cancel the damn party.”

  There was a brief pause before Marti said, “No can do. Sorry, honeychile. I signed a contract. I pull out now and we lose everything. Including the down payment, which was my contribution.”

  “You made the down payment?”

  “A thousand bucks. My gift to you. And don’t give me any shit about it. The party’s a go. You think your father’s the moneyman? Well, hurrah to that. I say it’s time he paid up. Dance on his dime, have a ball.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t deal with the—”

  “Sure you can. You can deal with anything you decide to deal with. Problem is, you need an attitude adjustment. Judith, I have to tell you, your mental state lately has been worrisome. You’re way overdue for a tune-up with what’s her name, Gottlieb, your therapist.”

  “I don’t need therapy. I need Irwin Raphael to vacate the premises and slink back to the other slimy, belly-crawling sidewinders in Arizona.”

  “Oh boy. Hang up now and call Gottlieb. Do not pass go. And have her send the bill to Irwin.” Marti gave a throaty laugh. “Now wouldn’t
that be a nice touch.”

  • • •

  At home there was a message waiting. Geoff had called me before I got to him with my apology for snapping at him at rehearsal.

  In our history, I’d heard him angry only a few times, furious once or twice, which churned his voice into a thunderous rumble. But I’d never heard this flat chill, like a glacial plain, as he informed me he wasn’t going to be able to make our Monday morning practice session; something had come up. Yeah, his hackles over my treatment of him. So I figured unless I did something fast, that was pretty much the end of our friendship, which had lasted about two weeks after I called time on the sex part of it.

  Oh God, everything was coming apart on nearly every front. But there was a Korean proverb I kept in mind: “Even when the sky is falling, there’s a sunny hole to climb through.”

  On Monday, only six days away, with Chloe at her sleepover in the Georgetown dorm, Charlie and I would have an extended evening together. Alone. No Kiki doing her diversionary routines, no Jiminy Cricket conscience on my shoulder. I’d called Charlie Pruitt many names in my lifetime, but never a “sunny hole.” I guess there’s a first for everything.

  • • •

  My plan was to get to Berenson Hall early, ambush Geoff before rehearsal, and make a short, dignified apology for my unseemly behavior the day before. Unfortunately, he was otherwise occupied with Deena Marquis, the stunning blond harpist with turquoise eyes only for him.

  There didn’t seem to be any hanky-panky or what Aunt Phyllis called mufky-pufky going on between them, but Deena, who’d been literally waiting in the wings through our relationship, was now center stage.

  Her fingers cruised Geoff’s sleeve between his elbow and wrist. His profile was handsome, stoic. I moved in close enough to cast a shadow and maybe the scent of my Chanel because I thought I saw him flinch. But there was no follow-up with eye contact, so I backed off.

  We didn’t connect onstage or at the break, but after rehearsal, when I came out of the locker room, there was Geoff packing up his trumpet. I waited until he turned to say, “Geoff, hi.”

  “Hello, Judith.” Formal. The smile was flatlined.

  I barreled full steam ahead. “About yesterday. I have no excuse for my bad behavior, but I do have an explanation.”

  It was obvious from the speculative angle of his head that whatever I had better be good.

  “This situation with my pseudo-father is exploding all around me and you just happened to walk into the fallout.” Not quite the way it had happened—I was playing with the sequence of events—but a little revisionist history seemed in order.

  “It wasn’t enough that Irwin screwed up my life by leaving it; now he has to screw it up again by coming back. The man is bad news in forward and reverse. And I’m picking up signs he might stay for good. With my mother. Which is driving me crazy. Unfortunately, you got in the way of that crazy. So, my apologies.”

  Geoff ran his hand through his Redford hair. Finally he said, “Apology accepted. Consider the matter closed.” He slung his backpack over a shoulder. “Gotta go.”

  He went. But then, one foot on the stairs to the exit, he stopped and executed a half spin. “This thing for Monday morning is important. I can’t pass it up, but you could use some polishing on the Mendelssohn, so if you’re free in the afternoon . . .”

  “Afternoon works for me. Two?”

  “I’m driving back on I-95. I don’t know what kind of traffic I’ll hit. Three?”

  I calculated a couple hours of cello with Geoff. That would give me more than enough time to shower and dress for dinner with Charlie. As long as everyone knew his place, I’d be fine. As long as I knew everyone’s place, I’d be fine.

  “Sold,” I said.

  Chapter 21

  I never saw it coming. I should have, of course; there’d been signs all week—four a.m. wake-ups, loss of appetite. To be honest, there’d been signs all my life.

  For example, my childhood aversion to peaches and plums. It had kicked in a few months after my father moved out. The fruit had “strings” that made me gag.

  “Strings represent attachments. What you had was a symbolic transference,” my intermittent shrink, Theodora Gottlieb, MD, had diagnosed in retrospect. “You couldn’t swallow your father’s abandonment, ergo the classic anxiety response.” My mother, who’d never heard of symbolic transference, had simply switched me to bananas. Case closed.

  Reopened, perhaps, when I went through a spell of binge eating in college that ceased abruptly the night Charlie told me he loved me. I wiped chocolate syrup from my mouth, whispered on Hershey breath that I loved him and never looked back on the jumbo bags of M&M’s, the cans of Pringles, the boxes of Mallomars stashed in the back of my closet.

  In adulthood, I adopted full-blown phobias. I dreaded driving through tunnels. Clowns gave me the creeps, even Ronald McDonald, despite his good work with the sick children. And the mishegoss related to my mother were magnificent in their variety and originality. They waxed and waned. The worst was after I’d left for Boston and she lived alone in the Brooklyn flat. Three hundred miles away I obsessed over her. Pilot lights, boiling water, scatter rugs, flip-flops, open windows, closed windows, electrical cords and outlets—all had their individual niches, like the relics of medieval saints, only these didn’t promise salvation; they promised death and destruction.

  Stable I wasn’t. Over the years, I’d dipped into Dr. Gottlieb to help me cope. We managed to get most of my fears under control, though the clowns and the tunnels hung tough. But this new phenomenon, in all its nauseating, heart-galloping glory, this exquisite mind-bender of a neurosis that threatened to destroy my livelihood, it just blindsided me.

  Marti might have inadvertently played a part in setting it off when she stopped by to tell me she’d found Brenda Himmelstein.

  As soon as I saw Marti’s face, I knew. “Damn,” I muttered. “She’s dead, right?”

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

  “What did she die of?” All the diseases of aging spooked me. Cancer, the big sneak. Heart attack. Stroke. Oh, please God, don’t let it have been an aneurysm.

  “She fell off a mountain. A climbing accident. She and her husband were on some peak in Albania, I think he said. Last August. She lost her footing.”

  Given the alternatives, it was a happy ending. Quick, no chemo, no tubes.

  “We spoke on the phone yesterday. He’s also a high-end lawyer, but he sounded like an okay guy. I don’t think he pushed her.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “He overnighted some photos.”

  She pulled a file from her briefcase and shoved across the dining room table the picture of a well-preserved middle-aged woman. Big smile, tanned and wrinkled face framed by a cloud of red hair. I wouldn’t have known her if I’d bumped into her; it had been nearly forty years. But she looked nice. Brenda’s essential goodness still shone through, the nature that had made her the perfect playmate for the needy little girl who’d followed her around like a puppy.

  I sighed. “So I missed her by less than a year. That is so cruel.”

  “Yeah, life is cruel. Just when you think you’ve got your feet on the ground, it pulls the rug out from under you.” Slippery rugs, one of my phobias. “She tried to find you, by the way. When her Googling Judith Gabriel turned up nothing, she figured you got married and changed your name.”

  “Gabriel?”

  “Gabriel, Raphael—she knew it was some angel at least. But her husband said she talked about her best friend Judith from grade school. And she saved this.”

  Up and out of her seat, Marti moved around and gently placed another photo in front of me. She laid a hand on top of my head, as if she needed to baptize me into pain. “Turn it over. See what she wrote on the back? ‘J and B in front of Rube’s Candy Store. Eight yrs. old.’” />
  That night, getting ready for bed after an exhilarating concert, I propped the photo on the side table. My last waking image was of Brenda and me, two innocents holding hands on a summer afternoon. When I startled up on sweaty sheets at three a.m., the night-light was spilling just enough glow to catch Brenda’s haunting green eyes. Adorable at eight. Dead at forty-eight. Happiness, life, everything can go just like that, I thought, and for a split second I got slammed by the astonishment, the dizziness, the weightlessness Brenda must have felt flying off that Albanian mountain with nothing beneath her except air and oblivion. Funny, though, I felt no fear. That came later.

  • • •

  The weekend program at the Berenson was an odd combination of the sublime, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, and the sublimely ridiculous, a new work by the brilliantly erratic Baltimore-born composer John Briscom. His Bi-Polar Suite had been written during his latest stay at Sheppard Pratt, a local private psychiatric facility. The piece’s cello solo bounded from a depressive threnody to manic passages that jumped pitch, position, and strings with breathtaking speed. You really had to concentrate not to slip up.

  Premieres are always challenging and this one had a few dings, but the audience loved it. They were on their feet at the final note, and when Angela flourished me up for a solo bow, a chorus of bravas flew at me.

  The second half, the Brahms, was old hat—beautiful, elegant old hat. One of my favorites, and as Geoff might have said, I could have played it with my toes.

  The following evening, we nailed the Bi-Polar. We got a standing, though no bravas for me this time. I told myself some crowds were just more demonstrative than others.

  At intermission, Angela clapped me on the shoulder as she walked past. So the boss was pleased at least. Still, I remembered the shouts of the night before and wondered whether I’d missed something. Messed something.

  Everything was spot-on for the first movement of the Brahms. But the second movement, a scherzo, has moments of tumultuous energy, and tonight as the storm whipped up, something in me suddenly went frantic. Without warning, my pulse took off, thrumming wildly, my mouth went dry, and my right leg began to twitch. What nonsense! This was good old Brahms, for God’s sake. Sure, I’d been nervous in our earliest encounters, but we’d been married for years, Johannes and I, and the fires had long since banked. What was my problem?