After a painfully long look at Joanne, he turns and swallows David in a warm, gentle bear hug. When this aching embrace ends he walks over to Carol.
“Hi,” he says gently.
I can see Carol’s body vibrating with internalized sobs when Jeff embraces her.
“Hey,” Jeff says, cupping her head with his hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
His concentration on Carol cancels out the presence of Max, Elaine, Joanne, Mr. Smilow, David, Rosetta, Kate Constant and me. When he releases her, Carol moves back toward Neil and Jeff stands alone in the center of the kitchen, holding the manuscript in his outstretched hands.
“You all probably know this is Sukie’s book,” he says quickly, nodding at the box in front of him. “I’ve been editing it,” he explains, turning toward Mr. Smilow and Rosetta. “I’m Jeff Conroy. I know you must be Sukie’s family.” He moves forward to shake their hands.
Mr. Smilow squinches up his eyes as he studies the casual-looking stranger who seems so at home in his daughter’s house.
Mr. Smilow is not happy.
“Because everyone came in at a different page in this event, nobody knows the whole story.” Jeff continues. “The only important thing is that I reread Sukie’s book again this morning, and it’s really terrific. Also, it’s much closer to being finished than I thought.”
“Just what I thought.” Mr. Smilow nods. “Exactly. My suspicions were correct.”
He flashes an I-knew-it-all-along grimace around the kitchen.
“But you’ve got to hear me out,” Jeff insists. “This is not an easy situation. There’s been a lot going on around this manuscript that you kids, and probably you too, Kate, don’t know about. First off, all your mom’s friends have been trying to get their hands on it.” He flashes a fast I’m-just-teasing smile at Carol and David. “Then your dad came looking for it—over at my place—and then your grandfather”—Jeff pauses to nod politely toward Mr. Smilow—“sent a pretty tough rep over last night to nail it down for himself.”
Jeff looks at Joanne for another longish moment.
I am unable to determine whether I am experiencing a flash or a flush, a rush or a blush, but I am very warm.
“Now wait a minute, sir,” says Mr. Smilow. “Don’t mess with us today. Our family is suffering a terrible tragedy. I am the father of the author. I am the one in this family who can recognize if something has a value. And I want my tochter’s book manuscript. If it has any value, it is part of the estate.”
Jeff’s ignores Mr. Smilow.
“To tell you the truth,” he continues, “I didn’t know what to do. In some ways I thought I was the one who best knew what Sukie meant this book to be and do and say. But I stayed up real late last night trying to figure out the right moves and just this morning I realized what Sukie would’ve wanted.”
“If you think you know what Sukie would have wanted, you’re fooling yourself,” Max interrupts. “Sukie never knew what she wanted, so how could you?”
“What Sukie wanted, you took away from her,” Mr. Smilow howls at Max. “A little bit of security. A little bit of peace and quiet at the end of her life.”
“We don’t have to accept your decision anyway, you know,” Rosetta says prissily.
My heart is hammering.
Jeff takes a few lateral steps and puts the box in Carol’s hands. Then he waits until a slim smile of surprise slides across her face.
“Now wait a minute here,” says Mr. Smilow. “How should a young girl like Carol know what to do about a book of fiction? How should she know?”
“Okay. Let me tell you why I think Carol should have it,” Jeff says simply, turning toward the Smilows. “The reason is that I suddenly remembered, just after dawn this morning, right before the storm broke, something Sukie said to me about a week ago. She said, and I’m repeating her words to the best of my memory, ‘You know, I Wouldn’t be at all surprised if Carol starts writing soon. She always wrote real well and I think the only thing that keeps her from starting is the fact I’m a writer. But now I’m getting a feeling that things are about to change and that she’s ready.’”
I look at Mr. Smilow. With voodoo impertinence, I will him to accept this decision, to understand the psychology of the moment, the human importance of what Jeff has said and its possible redemptive power in reconciling Carol to Sukie.
“She really said that?” Carol asks Jeff with confrontational directness. “She said all of that?”
He nods.
“Actually, I can go along with this decision,” Max says in a generous tone of voice, edging closer to Carol. “I really can.”
“What you can do is your business,” says Mr. Smilow. “Give me the box, Carol.”
The room becomes quiet.
David is watching his sister with pale concentration.
“Grandpa, I’m going to be in charge of Mom’s book,” Carol says.
That’s all. But it is with a kind of authority few women, and even fewer young women, could take with the patriarchal head of their family. Carol watches her grandfather absorb the meaning of her comment. Then, and only then, does she turn toward Neil and break into rough uneven sobs.
I hear Neil expel a soft whistle of relief as he watches Carol finally crack. Clearly, he had been apprehensive about her inhibited response to Sukie’s death, so it is with unrestrained joy that he embraces her.
“Just cry, Carol,” Neil says again and again. “Go on, cry.”
“I didn’t even know …” Carol is fighting hiccups that quarrel with her words, “… I didn’t even know she thought I was a good writer.”
“Hey,” Jeff cajoles her. “Sukie always thought you were a great writer.”
Glowing now with gratitude at her mother’s posthumous confidence, Carol rests against Neil’s chest.
“How is it?” she asks Jeff in an attempt at a businesslike voice.
“You’ll have to read it and see what you think,” Jeff answers seriously. “You do whatever you think is right. That’s an order. Okay, come on now. You and David walk me to the door.”
“Aren’t you coming to the funeral?” Carol whispers over a spray of new sobs.
“No. I’m going to take a pass on that,” Jeff says.
Then he nods to everyone in the kitchen, links one arm around David and the other around Carol, and leads them out into the hallway.
A moment later Joanne slips away to follow them.
The rest of us shuffle about until Rosetta orders everyone to sit down at the table so she can serve the first loaves of kamishbrot that she’s taken from the oven. Their sweet aroma stains the air, mixing with the smell of fresh coffee. I follow Rosetta’s instructions and take my usual place. Mr. Smilow sits in the chair beside mine, subdued and thoughtful.
“I’m sorry,” he says to me. “Yesterday I couldn’t think clear.” Wearily he bites into an oval-shaped slice of kamishbrot. “But now I want to hear the plans. Who’s the rabbi for our Sukie? Someone who knows how to do it right, how to do it up brown?”
“Mr. Smilow,” Elaine begins matter-of-factly, “we finally found a Reform rabbi who agreed to conduct a service in a nondenominational chapel. That wasn’t easy. But we decided to follow him up with something a little unusual, which is allowing anyone who wants to speak about Sukie to come forward and do so. That’s the way the Friends do it.”
“What friends?” Mr. Smilow trumpets. “What’s all this?”
“I meant the Quakers, Mr. Smilow. But actually, in this case, I do mean Sukie’s friends.”
“What are you talking?”
“It’s a new … custom, Manny,” Max intervenes. “The manager at the funeral home said lots of Jews are doing it nowadays. It sounded nice to me.”
Mr. Smilow ignores him.
The discussion about Sukie’s friends carrying her coffin is more dramatic, although actually much shorter.
“I never heard of such a thing,” Rosetta gasps. “It’s heresy, God forbid.”
M
r. Smilow is too dumbfounded to speak.
Max remains politically silent.
Elaine again becomes the whip on this one. “We expect that a lot of Sukie’s Washington friends will come by the house here this morning before the funeral, so we’re sure to find one or two more women who will do it with us.”
“This is insanity,” Mr. Smilow moans.
“I don’t like the open-forum idea either,” Kate says, frowning.
Her facial expressions are so dynamic that Mr. Smilow is half hypnotized by her skittish eyelids, her rambunctious eyebrows and the Popsicle-pink tongue that peeks out occasionally to lick her heavy lips. He watches her surreptitiously, uncertain whether or not it is legal to study a black woman’s face so intently.
“No. It’s got to be better organized than that,” Kate insists, setting down her coffee mug emphatically on the table. “We can’t just have anyolebuddy getting up there and starting to ramble. We’ve got to decide who we want to say what and when we want them to say it. I mean, this is important.”
“Well, maybe Diana could talk about our generation,” Elaine suggests. “Along the lines of the piece she had in the Times.”
“Hey! Don’t get me wrong,” Kate says in her usual energetic style to me. “That was a good article. But it was a real downer and I don’t want to get written off so soon—the way you wrote off ‘your’ generation. I mean, maybe the ladies you’re talking about went down with the plane, but I certainly didn’t. I wasn’t on that passenger manifest. So don’t write me off yet. I’m just getting started.”
“How old are you, Kate? Thirty-seven? Thirty-eight?” I ask.
“I’m forty-three.” Kate whips off a triumphant smile. “I was born in 1942, but I’m still one of your Depression Babies. A couple years either side of the 1930s don’t matter. Believe me. Nothing’s so neat. In fact, I think you should include all the War Babies in your DEBs generation, because we had almost exactly the same set of experiences.
“See, Sukie and I talked about your article for a long, long time. Really. But I just couldn’t buy all your conclusions. And I don’t think Sukie did either, even though she might not have mentioned that to you. See, both of us thought that if you fight long enough, you don’t know how to stop fighting. You get hooked on surviving—seeing how to get out of the next fix, what the next catastrophe will be. Who’ll come out of the woodwork to help you, like Sukie helped me last year. You survive this long, it’s hard to quit trying.
“Kate,” I say, “I don’t want you to quit trying.”
“Anyway, there’s too damn much left to do. And we’ll do it. We’ll do it with husbands or without them. With boyfriends or without them. We’ll do it with jobs or without jobs, with money or without money. We’ll do it after all the kids we’ve grown dependent on leave us home alone again. We’ve done it before and we’ll keep doing it. All we ever needed was a little help from our friends and that’s what friends are for, right?”
“Just what is it we’re going to do?” Elaine asks with a touch of desperation. “What is it we’ve saved ourselves to do now?”
“Well, first off, one of the first things I suggest you do is make peace with the enemy, if you know what I mean. I think that’d do you a world of good.”
“Uh-huh.” Flat, noncommittal. “And what else?”
“Hey. I don’t know. Whatever needs doing. We’ll do sit-ups and volunteer tutoring and different political actions and our hair and some dope once in a while and our nails and our jobs and careers and our families and our men. We’ll just do what we always do. But maybe we’ll do it better. Maybe that’s what we’ll do. We’ll do good and we’ll do it better. We’re going to do some good works. Godworks. We’re going to think about other folks a little bit more. Help out a little more.
“Who knows? Maybe we’ll run for Congress or join the Peace Corps or invite a man over for dinner or take care of our kids’ kids or write a book about the forties or the fifties or the sixties—our herstories. They’ve got to get written. Hey, don’t look so hopeless. Don’t try to scare my horses. I lost my voice, okay? And my voice was my career and my identity and my union card and my meal ticket and my sex appeal and my line of credit. My voice was my everything. Maybe losing a leg is worse, but I didn’t think so.
“We’re just feeling our oats now. We’re just learning how to run a campaign and get elected to office, how to run a business and make some bread, how to write and sell our work. And just look at everything women our age are doing all around the country. So we’re going to do this funeral right for Sukie, too. Here’s the deal, see? We’re going to write a eulogy that will really honor her. We’re going to write a herstory of what’s going on these days. This generation isn’t wiped out. Hell. We’re just getting freed up now to start the rest of our lives. So let’s all go sit down at Sukie’s desk and bang out this eulogy right now.”
And moments later, Sukie’s other friends begin arriving. They appear individually or in pairs, some with men at their sides, a few with teenaged children. They greet whoever admits them and then walk immediately back into the kitchen. There they introduce themselves to Rosetta and Manny, take a cup of coffee and a piece of cake from the continental-style buffet on the table, and then move out into the living room, where they talk among themselves in frightened whispers. Most of them are dressed in dark cottons and are wearing end-of-the-summer scuffed sandals and sunglasses which they leave on while inside the house.
The first wave of arrivals are Sukie’s Cleveland Park neighbors—white Ward Three liberals, as she described them. They are well-intentioned, well-educated women married to more-than-moderately successful men, and the mothers of high-achieving children. Sukie frequently felt threatened by her neighbors’ stability, but they adored Sukie for her chaotic passions and forgave most, if not all, her sins.
Each of the women who arrives has a totally different way of dealing with her sorrow, but most of them cry at some time or other during the endlessly long wait for the funeral to begin. One thing they have in common is a physical restlessness, and they all keep moving around the house, touching Sukie’s possessions with heartbreaking gentleness and loving familiarity. They seem to achieve a certain dialogue with her through the statement of a small wooden table, an old-fashioned lamp, or the needlepoint footstool that used to belong to her mother. The majority keep returning to the kitchen again and again.
Oh, how many times have we used the excuse of “helping a hostess” to slip out of a public space back into the kitchen, to be reabsorbed into our basic clan where we feel most comfortable, where we don’t have to look beautiful, where we can communicate without words, deliver complaints without disclaimers and make accusations without explanations. Together we can laugh at the character of an individual man, without having to present a bill of particulars, or at the nature of all men, whose traits are now as familiar as an old joke that no longer requires a punchline. Women, like longtime married couples, seldom have to complete a sentence or thought. Our tribe is rich in resources and resonances.
Kate Constant has quite naturally assumed seniority among the Washington women by virtue of her personal charisma, minority status, and enormous love for Sukie. Eventually she moves into the study to work on the eulogy with input from different women who drift in and out. Elaine takes me aside to say that Kate and Mary Murphy have already volunteered to join our coffin brigade, and each of them is recruiting other pallbearers.
A while later I see Marlene Bennett, whom I met at Sukie’s during various visits because she went to many peace demonstrations with us. Silently she wraps her arms around me in a hug of shared, shocked loss.
“This is not fair,” she moans.
She is a thin, trim woman in her mid-forties, whose grief, though different from mine, is as intense.
“Aileen and Sandy Ratner and I are going to … carry the casket with you,” Marlene says.
All morning long, the front doorbell rings and after a while Neil takes charge of admitti
ng and welcoming the guests. Old friends Sukie thought she’d alienated arrive early; to them Sukie was still without question part of their intimate circle. Around noon, a warm blond woman arrives to spend a long time talking mostly to Carol, and later I learn from Aileen that the woman was Annie Austen, Sukie’s savior/doctor.
Norman Naylor arrives. Max and I happen to be standing near the front door, so I introduce them. For a brief moment, Norman seems enormously interested in Max, but, when he sees Elaine flashing some high cleavage in her low-cut cotton sundress, he turns away to make his moves on her. Against all odds, Norman seems to have decided that a connection with Elaine has some value, if only to assure himself of a bed-and-breakfast stop in New York.
At first, Elaine seems flustered by Norman’s high profile approach, but then she calms herself. I see the involuntary flutter of her hand, rising like a phoenix to plump out the side of her hair with hopeful fingers, and the innocence of her pleasure brings tears to my eyes.
“I’ve got my car here,” I hear Norman say. “So you can ride over with me.”
Now I see Elaine flush and nod, flattered despite herself.
Max is still standing nearby, watching me watching them, which irritates me enormously.
“I’m going upstairs to get ready,” I say.
He looks into my face, but he is actually posing the question of himself to me. He is challenging me as young children challenge parents—presenting themselves and demanding that their presence precipitate a response. Indeed, Max is flashing his self at me.
“Well?” I ask, meaning what does he want from me.
He shrugs.
I am completely impatient. I am feeling the kind of impatience that precedes a hot flash. Any moment now I will feel the heat start to scramble up my neck toward my face.
“Well,” I shrug again, in a more conclusive way. Then I turn my back on him and run up the stairs.
From my suitcase in Sukie’s room, I retrieve the slim black linen sheath I had for some reason—premonition?—taken out to the Hamptons and, even more surprisingly, remembered to throw in the car Friday when I rushed back to LaGuardia. In the bathroom I turn on the hot water and hang my dress over the shower-curtain rod to steam it out. Stripped to pants and bra, I station myself at the mirror, which has begun to steam up, and wash my face before reapplying my makeup for the second time in two hours.
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