by Susan Isaacs
Now, however, my mother’s silence lasted longer than usual. Another time (more in the interest of “Let’s move it along” than out of kindness) I would have offered a hand to pull her out of her emotional hole. Why not? I’d been doing it most of my life, once I decided that, through either the grace of God or recessive genes, I had what they lacked: sense.
I’d grown up being their guide around Normalville. This time, though, all I could do was get angry and think, Can’t you even ask me, “Is there anything I can do?” Aren’t there any limits to your insecurity? You’re my mother, for crissakes! Just then she asked, “Would you like us to come over?” I decided she was hoping I’d say, “No, don’t bother.” Before I could stop myself, I told her it would be great if they could. Maybe I was thinking that someday in the future, I’d be saying, “Listen, my parents are far from perfect, but when the chips were down, they were really there for me!”
There for me? Maybe I was fantasizing my mother calling my father at work and saying “Susie needs us!” then grabbing a cab out to Long Island and him driving eighty-five miles an hour from Queens to comfort me. Maybe—though I knew that despite her fifteen-year flirtation with feminism, she never went anywhere without my father. She’d flunked her driving test forty years earlier and found taxis too filthy and obscenely expensive. Public transportation was, in her view, too public: crowded with male riders who saw buses and subways as prime turf for humiliating women via the rush-hour penis prod.
Anyway, by the time my father left work, drove back to Brooklyn to pick her up, and crept out in rush-hour traffic to the house via the expressway, since side roads could still have ice from January, they arrived after six.
“Maybe he’s at a medical conference,” my father, Stanley Rabinowitz, suggested, “and just forgot to mention it to you.” He was sitting at the kitchen table wearing one of his Mr. Rogers cardigans, this one a weary green covered with decades of pilling. Very little actual sweater remained, yet the tiny pill balls somehow hung together and seemed to have acquired balls of their own. I set a large plate of grilled cheese sandwiches on the kitchen table because naturally, they had shown up at dinnertime expecting to be fed. When I sat, they seemed taken aback that there was no soup or salad. My mother, glancing around at the place mats and finding neither forks nor spoons, reluctantly took a half sandwich.
The boys and Ida and Ingvild were in the den with their cheese sandwiches, apparently charmed by the sophisticated wit of Lenny the Wonder Dog, giving me time to bask in the warmth of my parents’ company. My father always ate sandwiches from the outside in: His grilled cheese sat on his plate with even denture marks all around the perimeter, like a decorative scalloped edge. He picked it up and took another bite.
“He’s not at a medical conference,” I replied calmly. “First of all, Jonah wouldn’t forget to tell me he was going someplace. Even if he did, he would have had to plan for going out of town. There isn’t any sign of planning. He had operations scheduled, appointments at the office. He just disappeared. Didn’t come home, didn’t show up at his office or the hospital. His partners are as mystified as I am.”
My father shrugged to show he was stumped, too. When no one else spoke up, he added, “Maybe foul play?”
“Maybe.” Just those two syllables used up all the energy I had left.
My mother shook her head, a movement that communicated Gee, too bad rather than Catastrophic. When she’d come in, she’d given me her usual awkward hug, where her upper arms performed the actual hugging and everything else, from elbows to fingertips, hung awkwardly in the air behind me. Now, though, she seemed to realize some comforting maternal gesture was in order, so she reached across the big round table to squeeze my hand. However, her arms were short. In order to do my part and get my hand squeezed for comforting, I wound up stretching forward until, from the waist up, I was almost flat on the table.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
She muttered something into her sandwich. It could have been “No problem.”
My mother was short and chunky. Not a stylish combo, but short, chunky women can be tough/adorable or else little dynamos throwing off sparks of energy. Sherry was neither. She was belligerently unattractive, almost as if she’d been created in the late sixties by a male-chauvinist cartoonist as a malicious caricature of a feminist.
Periodically, one of my friends would tell me I was too harsh about her; that, okay, she would never win any awards in the mother-love department, but wasn’t that because she thought herself less than lovable? Probably. Her own mother, Ethel, had walked out when she was eight. Little Sherry had been raised by her father, my grandfather, Lenny “the Loser” Blechner. After failing early on to be a nightclub singer, probably because he had a mediocre voice and kept forgetting to smile between songs, he’d become a bookkeeper for Calabro Brothers Flounder in the Fulton Fish Market.
“So,” my father said, “where do you go from here?” An outsider would think he was wracked with emotion because his voice quavered so much, but I knew better. For as long as anyone who knew him could recall, he’d always talked as if the section of floor he was standing on were vibrating. Now and then some less than diplomatic soul would ask, “Hey, uh, what’s with your voice? You got Parkinson’s or something?” He’d reply, “Huh?” He never got it.
“I honestly don’t know where I go next,” I told him. “I want so much to do something. But the police are on it, and a private investigative agency. I wish I could think of something else to do.”
“Terrible, terrible,” he said. His eyes fell to his plate, and I sensed he was trying to come up with a suggestion, but nothing came to mind, so he picked up his sandwich.
Some people would call my father a nebbish. I certainly did. Other than despising my mother, an emotion he projected mostly by flaring his nostrils whenever she spoke, he had few strong opinions. He was bald and colorless. Even if he’d committed some terrible crime, he would never be picked out from a lineup because it was impossible to remember his face. He worked as a salesman in a store called My Aching Back, although he wasn’t particularly successful at it. As a kid, I had sensed his boss kept him on because even though he was only borderline competent, he was very reliable. Stanley was without ambition to be any better off than he was, so he was truly reliable. His commissions were enough for us to live on. Also, his shaky voice made some customers believe he was becoming emotional about their back pain, so he was never fired. I guess he liked his job; the only time I saw my father anywhere close to animated was when he was holding forth on sciatica.
“Maybe you should go on TV,” my mother said. “All those missing women? You always see their parents on the Today show with their home movies of the one who’s missing. The husbands sometimes do it, although ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you know what?”
“What?” I knew what.
“What?” my father asked.
“The husbands turn out to be batterers who finally went over the line and did what all the friends and relatives always knew they would.” In case we weren’t clear on what this was, she added: “Kill the wife. And then the relatives all have the chutzpah to say, right on camera, ‘Oh, I begged her to get out while she still could, but she just wouldn’t listen.’”
“I did give some thought about publicity,” I told her. Her mock turtleneck was covered by some weird little capelet, squares of black and forest green that looked like an afghan someone had abandoned when they realized they hated crocheting. The capelet had captured a lot of sandwich crumbs and three orange teardrops of melted cheese. I went on, “I may have to resort to going public. There are even organizations that help you with PR. But right now it’s only been two days. If something’s happened to Jonah that he or I or his partners wouldn’t want public, going on TV or whatever would put it all out there. Something embarrassing could mean the end of his career.”
“Like what?” my mother asked. “What could he be doing that couldn’t be public? He’s not a drinker, as f
ar as I know.” I shook my head: No, Jonah wasn’t a drinker. “So he wouldn’t be lying in the gutter on the Bowery. Is there something you haven’t told us?” She shrugged. “Drugs? You hear about doctors getting hooked because they have easy access. Homosexuality? Some other . . . whatever.”
“No. To the best of my knowledge, which I truly believe is excellent, Jonah is what he seems to be: honorable and sober. And heterosexual.” Since she looked as if she still didn’t get it, I explained, “It doesn’t have to be a major issue. Sometimes even the best people get into trouble.”
Silence. Maybe someone else’s mother would have clearly disagreed about not seeking publicity and told her daughter that finding Jonah was of paramount importance. “You have to risk bad publicity in order to find him. The more time elapses, the colder the trail gets.”
But my mother had strong opinions only on matters with no direct effect on our lives, like what had been printed on her T-shirt the previous summer: SOCIAL WELFARE REVERSES EVOLUTION, which I’d spent half a barbecue thinking was an anagram I couldn’t figure out.
“Well,” she said, “I guess you know what’s best.”
The few good-hearted thoughts I had about my mother were like: Okay, she’s embarrassing, grabbing on to causes, letting the slogans on her T-shirts substitute for snappy conversation and a philosophy of life. Amazing. There is absolutely nothing she can do well or even competently—cook, clean, talk about a TV show, buy shoes, show affection (much less love). To be fair, she’s like someone who had a terrible accident as a kid and can’t walk. Her own mother abandoning her when she was eight was exactly like that—a terrible accident. It left my mother permanently crippled. She can’t do all the simple, normal things in life that other people take for granted.
That abandonment was obviously the central fact in my mother’s life, and maybe in mine. If Ethel had left Lenny the Loser but kept little Sherry with her, my mother might have been different. Okay, maybe she wouldn’t have been fun or kind or had a sense of style. But she could have been emotionally savvy enough not to need MapQuest to find her way across a room to hug her grandsons.
My mother had very little to say on the subject of her own mother other than “I hardly remember her.” The times I pushed for more information, all I got was “I have almost no memory of her.” No memory? The only memory she ever dug up for me was: “One time we heard her screaming at the top of her lungs. My father and I went running into the bedroom. She was holding a stocking in her hand, and she screamed at us, ‘My last pair of stockings, and I got this huge run!’ Then she went right back to screaming.”
Eventually, I stopped asking my mother, but that was when I was ten or eleven, old enough to take aside some cousins nearer to my mother’s age and ask them about the woman I thought of (with bizarre familiarity) as Grandma Ethel. Cousin Marcia told me she’d heard that someone had seen Ethel in a nightclub in Miami Beach wearing serious jewelry in the company of an Italian-looking guy. However, further inquiry by Cousin Danny led to finding out the man was Ethel’s husband, Sidney Nachman, of Nachman & Company, distributors of wine and spirits. Cousin Naomi made a few calls to Florida and learned the Nachmans had no children. About ten years later, Cousin Marcia told me that her best friend from high school, who’d moved to Coral Gables, had sent her a clipping of Sidney Nachman’s obituary from the Miami Herald: Nachman is survived by his wife, Ethel, and a sister, Rita Umelitz of Creve Coeur, Missouri.
And that was—almost—that. Although my mother never told me, I heard from assorted cousins that she knew Ethel was alive and well and wearing serious jewelry. However, she made no attempt to contact her mother. Maybe she was waiting for Ethel to make the first move. That never happened.
Just before my twentieth birthday, a half year after Jonah and I were married, we were on a flight to Miami for the wedding of one of his camp friends. I’d had a couple of vodka tonics to dull the sound of the engine (it was only the third or fourth plane ride of my life, and I was still terrified). In a what-the-hell mood, I said, “Hey, we’ll be in Miami. Maybe I’ll try to find my grandmother.” I waited for Jonah to say, “Are you crazy?” When he didn’t, I asked, “Do you think I’m crazy?” He said no, not at all, but I should be prepared for someone who was a total bitch and who would refuse to see me—and don’t forget I’d made a hairdresser appointment at the hotel at four-thirty on Saturday.
Finding her wasn’t as easy as it would be today; we were in the pre-Google era. But after an hour at the Miami Beach public library that Saturday morning, Jonah and I discovered Ethel Nachman had married Roy O’Shea, a man who owned several Honda dealerships in South Florida. The O’Sheas definitely had an active social life. As we sat looking into the microfilm viewer at newspaper photos of parties and benefits, Jonah kept saying, “I can’t believe how much she looks like you!” I kept saying, “Oh my God!” I also said, “Do you think my mother remembered what she looked like and saw the resemblance and that’s why she always held back with me emotionally?” Jonah said, “Everything doesn’t need a psychological explanation.” We went back to the microfilm and discovered that in the mid-eighties, “gregarious and charming socialite Ethel O’Shea” was high on a list to take over as the new host of a local late-
morning TV show, Talk of Miami. Ethel got the job. Ethel was a hit. Within a year, Roy O’Shea was history.
I didn’t get up the courage to call her—not that I had her unlisted number. But while I was at the hairdresser, Jonah called the TV station, said he was Jonah Gersten from the Yale School of Medicine and that Ethel O’Shea had asked him to mail something to her at her home address. Sadly, he’d lost it. Who would have believed a story like that? Anybody. I’d always told him I trusted everything he told me. Whenever I said that, he’d smile and say, “Why wouldn’t you?” But most other people had that reaction to him, too. So at nine the next morning, four hours before we had to leave Miami to get back to New Haven, the two of us rang Grandma Ethel’s bell.
“I’m . . .” I began to say to the woman at the door. She was me plus forty-something years—assuming a good dermatologist and a great colorist and plastic surgeon. Her jaw dropped. She barely looked at Jonah before turning back to me. Even without makeup, her eyes were her most beautiful feature: pale green jade. Her smooth skin was an almost completely unwrinkled pearly pink, and her hair an incredibly believable blond. She was built like me, too, tall and long-legged. Even though we didn’t have any money yet, I already knew enough about fashion to realize the satin robe she had on was a Donna Karan.
“You’re mine?” Grandma Ethel asked at last. She knew the answer. Before I could say a single word, she took my arm and brought me inside.
But my blocking out the reality of my parents’ alternating grilled cheese and diet-ginger-ale burps with the memory of my grandparent ceased when my father boomed, “Excuse me!” It so startled me that I twitched, dropping my last bite of sandwich, a near-perfect circle, onto the floor. “I know this is a bad time for you,” he said.
He does have empathy, I thought. “Thank—” I started, but never got out the “you” because he cut me off: “Maybe you haven’t gone shopping, but do you happen to have a piece of fruit?”
One navel orange and two decafs later, they left. Four hours after that, the police rang my doorbell.
Chapter Nine
On either side of the front door, there were tall, slender panes of glass, so even before I opened it, I could see Detective Sergeant Timothy Coleman looking down at the doormat. He stared with an intensity born of a desire to face anything but the person who would open the door. Beside him stood an African-American guy in his forties—the ex-jock type who looked like he’d discovered doughnuts, though only recently. He had on a gray overcoat and a long black knit scarf, the kind male models wrap around their necks a hundred times. It ended at his knees in a hysterical eruption of fringe. He studied me through the narrow window. It was nearly midnight, but he appeared more weary than physically tired, probably bec
ause he knew too well what the next hour would bring.
As if to live up to his expectations, I began to cry as I tried to turn the stiff, heavy lock. I clutched the brass knob, and it felt like forever before I was able to turn it.
“Mrs. Gersten,” Coleman said, “this is Lieutenant Gary McCorkle Paston from the NYPD.”
“Corky Paston,” the other cop said.
It wasn’t until the gusting icy wind made me shiver that I realized my hand was still gripping the knob and the two men were outside. “Sorry. Please come in.” I led them into the living room, though all I wanted was to stand right there in my bare feet on the cold marble floor of the hall and shout at them, “For God’s sake, just say it! Get it over with!” I was still crying as we passed through the hall, yet when we got to the living room and I turned, a small part of me expected to see Paston smiling and giving the thumbs-up to signal, Hey, no reason to cry. I’m here with good news. Your husband’s fine: just a little worse for wear.
“I’m sorry, but I have bad news,” he said.
“Is Jonah dead?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t wail. I stared at his scarf and thought it looked hand-knit.
“We found him just a few hours ago.”
“What happened?” My voice emerged as an awful croak. I got so busy clearing my throat again and again that I didn’t notice Paston had guided me over to a chair until I felt the frame and seat cushion against my leg. But it was the wing chair, Jonah’s chair, and sitting in it would have been indecent, like flag-burning or even idol worship. I stepped away quickly and moved to the deep corner formed by the arm of the couch. I motioned for them to sit. Neither went near the wing chair. Coleman took the chair he’d had the last time, and Paston sat on the middle cushion of the couch.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you: Your husband was murdered,” Lieutenant Paston said.