“I’d like to hear that you’re sorry.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”
“The cycle? Its failure? Doing the wrong thing, or not doing enough of the right one?”
“Putting pepper in a perfectly spiced stew.”
* * *
By the time Henry padded into the kitchen just after nine o’clock, a rare late waking time for him, she had formulated a question, but she waited to ask it until he had his coffee and was sitting with a steaming cup between his hands.
“So what, exactly, is involved in my doing another cycle?”
She watched as his morning grogginess gave way to surprise. “You want to try again? Really?”
“I do.” She added after a beat, “Really.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant to do until she said the words. Once she said them, though, she was sure. Or nearly sure. That was the attraction of language: you could test your feelings against the words. There would always be a chance later on to revise, revisit, or simply retract.
She did not think she would retract. This last month had hardened her resolve.
“Wow,” Henry said, “I didn’t expect this.”
“You don’t sound so happy to hear me say it.”
“I am. It just seems so—”
“Improbable?”
He refrained from saying anything to that.
“You yourself said, Henry, that there were a lot of crazy-making hormones pumping through me. Things feel different now. I feel different now. And there’s your father in the hospital … I guess I’m feeling time, concerned about time. I guess that’s it.”
He nodded. He sighed a long sigh.
She told him about her period, then asked how soon she could start again.
“Well, with your next cycle, I suppose, at the end of March.”
“That’s when my mother plans to visit.”
“Right about then, yes.”
“But I don’t want her to know.”
“Why not?”
“I probably don’t need to tell you that in Italy many people still aren’t as open to fertility treatment as they are here. Some women are still going off to places like Croatia and Spain to try to conceive, and if you’re gay or need a surrogate or a donor egg, forget about it. My mother is in many ways a rational person and a modern woman, but she is also Catholic, and of a certain generation, and I’d just prefer not to talk to her about what we’re doing, that’s all.”
“I’m well aware of the history of that punitive Law Forty, Costanza, and I’m up to date on all of the changes that have been made to it in recent years. I just didn’t realize, after all the time you’ve lived here, that such an attitude would be so—so relevant to you.”
“I’ve lived a long time in America, Henry, but my mother, remember, has not.”
“Okay, I get it.”
She studied Henry for a moment. This was the most easygoing conversation they had had in days.
“If my mother does end up coming, how can I possibly explain to her why I have doctors’ appointments every day at seven in the morning?”
He took out his phone and brought up a calendar. He counted the days several times, then said, “Why don’t you have her come around the twenty-first. If you have to go in before that week, it would most likely be once, if that. We’ll tell her that I have a conference in Toronto if she tries to come any later. There are always conferences in Toronto.”
* * *
Andrew kept reaching for Isaac Schoenfeld’s sweater, even though it was too big on him and not really his style. It had traces of Schoenfeld’s scent on it, something herbal crossed with something vaguely antiseptic. He wore it to school. He wore it when he went to visit Leopold in the hospital. He wore it at home.
Home: which was again where Andrew chose it to be, and when.
Henry, looking in on him one evening while Andrew was working on a paper, noticed the sweater right away. “Is that something your mother bought you?”
Andrew explained that he had lost his sweater at a party and that the father of the guy who was hosting it loaned, or maybe gave, him this one to wear home.
Henry seemed baffled.
“Actually you know him. The father. Isaac Schoenfeld.”
Henry’s eyebrows drew together. “Isaac gave you his sweater? You met Benjy? How?”
Henry knew Benjamin? And was of the “Benjy” school?
“He’s … a friend of Charlotte’s.”
“I didn’t think you were still a friend of Charlotte’s.”
Andrew looked up from his computer screen. “Yes, I am still a friend of Charlotte’s.”
“Where did this meeting take place?”
“At their apartment.”
“On Park Avenue?” Henry was speaking slowly, as though he needed to deconstruct the logic of the conversation.
Andrew noted his father’s confusion. “Yes, at a party at Dr. Schoenfeld’s. On Park Avenue.”
“What was Isaac doing at a party for people your age?”
“He came home at the end.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“Dr. Schoenfeld?”
“Yes, Andrew. Who else?”
“No. Why would he?”
Andrew waited for Henry to answer.
“I’ve told you before. We have history.”
“But why do you care about him after all these years? Your practice is a huge success.”
Henry sighed. “I suppose I’m not someone who lets go of things easily.”
“I’ve noticed, Dad.”
Henry smiled. The atmosphere in the room shifted. “The reason I stopped by was to see if you wanted to go with me to visit your grandfather.”
“I went today after school. I’ve got to finish this history paper now.”
“Tomorrow then.”
* * *
Leopold had been in the hospital for more than ten days. Every time he was about to be discharged, he spiked a new fever, and Henry insisted on further tests, another round of antibiotics. He refused to send him back to Brooklyn until he was sure—of what? That Leopold was himself again. But would Leopold ever again be himself? The hospital had weakened him and diminished him. For the first time he seemed truly, incontrovertibly old.
Henry observed his father for a moment from the doorway. Leopold was upright, with the Times in his lap open to the crossword. Upright—but not right. Not quite dozing, but drifting. His gaze was distant, silvery. Elsewhere.
Henry would never be ready for the end of Leopold. He could not see any way of “preparing.” His father was bone, tree trunk, rock. Leopold was his duelist, his life opponent, his life giver, his frame—and his framework. He had survived, phoenixlike, the fires of Hitler’s hell. Such a man could not allow a case of pneumonia to bring him down. No.
“Father, how are you feeling this evening?”
Leopold looked up at Henry and, clearly, maybe because he wasn’t expecting him, did not at first know who he was. The moment went on for no more than a few seconds, but they were excruciating. Then: “Ah, Henry. I was just thinking about you.”
“Oh, yes?” Henry lowered himself into the chair by Leopold’s bed.
“I was thinking about the day those test scores came in the mail and you decided to apply to medical school. Your mother and I knew what the envelope was, but we didn’t open it. We put it out on the kitchen table for you to see. We leaned it up against the saltshaker. Do you remember?”
“Of course.”
“And they were very high, those scores. And that was when we knew you could do it.”
“We.”
“You say that as though there were something wrong with that.”
Henry paused. It was a judicious pause. “Not at all. You, you and Mother, were most—supportive—yes—at a time when I probably needed it.”
“Not probably. Definitely.”
Henry’s face hardened. “All
my life, Father, you pushed me. To take science classes. To go to medical school. To specialize in assisted reproduction. To start my own practice … and stick with it.”
“Was all that so mistaken?”
“I don’t really know anymore.”
“I prefer to think of it as encouraged. I knew you were a smart boy, a gifted boy. Also, yes, I wanted revenge—through you. I didn’t expect it to work so brilliantly. You took the encouragement and went from there. It has been the greatest gratification of my life, after I saw so much death, and lost so many people I loved, to see you make so much life. So much of it, I will also say, Jewish. But even so, you have made life for many people who would not have had life, period. That is an accomplishment beyond all else, to me. And it has made me a very proud father. The proudest.”
Henry softened. “Well, thank you, Father. For saying that.”
“But there is one thing, one area, of which I am not so proud, not so pleased.” Leopold went on, uninvited, “I think you should tell the boys.”
“Please, not that. Not now.”
Leopold clasped his hands. “‘The truth will out.’”
Henry produced a formidable sigh. “Papa, you’re layering on Shakespeare?”
“You haven’t called me that in years. Since you were small.”
“Papa…,” Henry repeated, as though he were trying the word out again, curious to see what memories, what feelings, it might bring back.
“‘It is a wise father that knows his own son.’”
Henry was perplexed.
“Also from Merchant. Do you remember how I used to learn all that Shakespeare by heart? After work, after all that deadening time in the shop. I came alive at night, with my reading.”
“I don’t know how you got up the next morning, you stayed up so late.”
“I loved the smell of those books. I can smell them now. The old paper. It had a special mustiness, like tea leaves. Tea leaves closed up in an old tin. How I loved to stretch out on the sofa, the one with the striped linen. Belgian linen, quality cloth. With you asleep and your mother asleep, or knitting quietly in her chair. All the work of the day completed, set aside. A good meal in me. Your mother always made sure of that. A glass of schnapps after. A bright light over my shoulder. It was in that room, on that sofa, that I felt it most acutely: I had come out on the other side of something that, at one point in my life, I never thought…” Leopold paused. “And then … and then you add Shakespeare on top of that. And Dostoyevsky. And Hardy. Schiller. Proust. Mein Gott.”
Henry could almost hear the sound of pages turning; of Leopold, a younger, more vigorous Leopold, lifting and separating them between his thumb and index finger, one after another after another, passing this too on to his son: a love of reading, an appetite for knowledge, both unbridled.
“I have no idea if I tell them what might unravel.”
“What does Costanza say?”
Henry looked into his lap.
Leopold scanned the whole of his son’s face. “You trust her with your seed—but not your life?”
Henry took this in. He took Leopold in. Old, faded Leopold, still fierce, penetrating, and regal. His was a small kingdom, but he still asserted his power over it.
“I believe it is the right thing to do. I believe you know it is the right thing to do.”
Henry sat back in his chair. “This is beginning to sound awfully like a deathbed conversation.”
“Well, that I can’t know. But it’s one I’ve been wanting us to have for a while.” Leopold directed his gray eyes at Henry. “I won’t ask you to promise. That is a deathbed conversation. But I will ask you to think. In the middle of the night. Or some morning. Somewhere undistracted and quiet. I know you have so much on your mind. So many people depending on you, so many patients. It’s a more open world now, Henry. Open yourself up with it.”
“What if they use this as a reason to—” Henry stopped there.
“To what?”
“Give up on me.”
“Give up on you—or give you up?”
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Give me up.”
“They could have done that with the divorce, no? Gone to live with Judith only. They elected not to. Both of them, independently. And in court. Remember?”
Leopold and his piercing, clarifying logic. Leopold and his pushing. Leopold and his authority.
Leopold.
* * *
The evening following Henry’s visit, Lorna tried to cheer Leopold up by bringing in a picnic, French in theme. Two cheeses, a baguette, pears, for Lorna half a bottle of Sancerre. Afterward there was pastry, which they never got to. Leopold ate in birdlike portions. He told Lorna that he did not feel unwell, but he did not feel quite right either—in his body. In his heart, he told her, he felt a sense of relief. He used those very words but did not explain. He fell asleep holding her hand.
At three that morning she heard him call out. A word, several words, that she could not understand. “Nina” might have been one of them, but then again it might as well have been “need” or “knee.” He reached out for a glass of water and knocked over the plastic pitcher on the overbed table.
When she was sopping up the water, Lorna touched Leopold on the arm. She knew at once that he had a fever. A high fever, it turned out, after she called the nurse. Over 103 degrees again.
The nurse gave him extra Tylenol. She called the physician on duty, and he said that, as Leopold was already receiving a cycle of antibiotics, all there was to do at that hour was monitor the fever and check his oxygen levels. In the morning, the doctor said, he would order a new set of X-rays.
Later—it was still dark—Leopold called out again. This time what he said didn’t seem to be in English. It was in Yiddish maybe, or maybe even French. Lorna had no idea. She heard him babble, but as she was in a deep sleep herself, she wasn’t sure. The language sounded as though it came from a faraway time and place in Leopold’s brain, and life.
As the sun rose, he woke her with the gurgling sound, a wet, raspy, choking sound that wasn’t coming from his throat so much as deep down from inside his lungs. Lorna called Henry, and he hurried over to the hospital. He met with the attending physician, who ordered yet another round of X-rays and blood tests. A picture fairly quickly took shape: Leopold’s pneumonia had developed into congestive heart failure. His right lung, scarred and weakened from years of cigarette smoking and a touch of emphysema, was in danger of shutting down. They suctioned his lungs, put him on diuretics, changed and amped up his antibiotics. Rendered effectively mute, or at least noncommunicative, by his oxygen mask, or his fever, or his exhaustion, Leopold seemed significantly further away, and further gone, than he had just a day before.
Henry didn’t see the point of calling Justin back from school. There was no way to predict how long this would go on or where it was going.
Andrew and Henry alternated sitting by Leopold’s bed, holding his hand, sitting him up, then laying him down again. He used the last of his severely diminished energies to try to hock, spit, spew, cough, and growl his way back to breath and to life. On the third day, the hideous sounds disappeared. Leopold’s silence was far more ominous than his fight had been, and it meant exactly what it appeared to mean: while Andrew was at swim practice and Henry had stepped out of Leopold’s room to check in with Wanda at the office, Leopold turned his head toward the window and quietly died.
* * *
Leopold’s life ended late on a Tuesday afternoon. Justin came home from school on Wednesday evening, and Leopold was underground by Thursday before lunch. Henry invited only family to the burial; afterward he opened up his house to any of Leopold’s friends who wished to pay their respects. Henry refused to use the word, let alone sit, shivah. No mirrors were draped nor cloth rent, though Leopold might have liked both. Henry organized the rabbi, the service, the food and drink. So it happened that deli was served at Leopold’s funeral and not his wedding, after all.
Costanza, observing H
enry in action—hyperaction, almost—wondered what had happened to him. His control over every detail, everything, including his feelings, was magisterial—at least in the moment. In the days and weeks that followed, she watched him turn inward. A blankness crept into his eyes. He sat for hours in silence, his back rounded. He showed no interest in food. He didn’t touch her.
Early one evening, just as she was beginning to cook, he walked slowly through the door, a weary bear—bear hide—of a man. He asked her when she thought they would sit down to eat, then he went to take a bath. Henry never took baths. He disappeared for an hour; longer. The water must have turned ice-cold. She did not hear him refilling it from the tap, as she would have. Eventually she knocked on the door and asked if he was all right.
“All right?” he said, as if trying to figure out what such words could possibly mean.
She opened the door and stepped inside. “Is it Leopold? Is that where you’ve gone, Henry?”
“Gone?”
“You seem so absent. I don’t mean just tonight. Since your father died. If it’s grief—that I can understand. Of course I can understand.”
“You’re asking if I’ve disappeared into my grief.”
“Yes, that’s what I am asking.”
His skin, under the waterline, had acquired a greenish tinge. “No.”
“Is it about the cycle?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she continued, “Because if you’ve changed your mind, you must tell me, and soon, before I gear up again mentally. Once I start with the drugs, and the ultrasounds, if I hear there are a number of eggs, I know, even after last time, that my mind is going to go very far, very fast.”
“All that is typical. And, no, I’ve not changed my mind. Not in the least.” He made sure that she saw his face, and his eyes, when he said this last part.
“Well, what is it then?”
“It’s nothing.”
* * *
That Sunday, Henry went out to Brooklyn to his father’s apartment. Costanza asked if she might come to help, but Henry said he preferred to go on his own. He had grown up in the apartment and fled from it when he went to college. Everything in it felt confining to him and was saturated with memories he preferred not to dwell on. He intended to be in and out fast.
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