by Susan Isaacs
Once Dr. Twersky left (after an inordinate amount of time in the yellow alabaster guest bathroom), I spent the next hour making brown sugar cookies with the boys, for whoever came back to the house after the cemetery. I figured it would be a good way to get the three of them to calm down after their truck races and also let them feel they were participating in the day. Also, I wanted to give Ida and Ingvild a break; based on their kindness over the last few days, they could qualify for sainthood.
I cried so much that day. Not just from grief, because I’d been grieving since they found Jonah, and even before, in anticipation. This time my tears were from being in this packed chapel with almost three hundred people demanding face time to tell me “What a terrible, terrible loss.” Many of them meant it. “Susie, I’m so sorry.” It was like someone else’s car radio you couldn’t turn off; I was stuck with listening to their every word. Yet all I heard of the rabbi’s eulogy was “We have a right to ask, ‘Where is God in all this?’” The rabbi probably offered an answer, though I didn’t catch it.
Apparently, he went on for a while. One of Florabella’s best customers, Caddy Demas, came running over—or whatever it’s called in stiletto heels with anorexic ankles—just as I was getting into the limo to go to the cemetery. Her gloved hand tugged at my coat sleeve. “Susie, I just have to tell you. That rabbi may have gone on for what? twenty minutes? but it was so incredibly moving that nobody cared.” Her gloves were persimmon suede with black satin skirtlike things flaring out at the wrists, a look for the woman whose devotion to fashion was so maniacal she was proud to look like the fourth musketeer.
By that time, I was little more than a robot programmed to respond “Thank you” when spoken to. But Caddy had a standing five-hundred-dollar-a-week order with us, and so was capable of overriding my circuitry. I wound up saying, “Oh, Caddy, thank you so much for sharing that with me,” a sentence I normally would not only refuse to utter but would make me gag. Maybe it wasn’t that she was a valuable customer; maybe it was dawning on me that I needed to be nicer to people.
With three little kids, I was facing the world as a different person. Whatever points a widow inherited from her husband’s status weren’t going to guarantee me a spot on the A-team anymore. “Stabbed to death” might make for interesting conversation, but Jonah’s demise at a call girl’s apartment would be taken to mean that Susie hadn’t been able to satisfy him. Or that someone like me had managed to score a privileged-attractive-charming-gifted-successful Yale doctor only because he was one deeply twisted dude.
Chapter Thirteen
“How has it been, dealing with her?” my brother-in-law asked. Our heads turned toward the living room and his mother.
“Fine,” I said. Theo gave me a look, so I said, “Doable. But she seems to be avoiding eye contact with me. Normally, that would throw me. But I’m too far gone to be thrown.”
“Let me tell you: When a person comes to the end of her rope and she’s sure there are no more terrors life can hold, that’s only because she hasn’t met my mother yet. You’re never too far gone.”
“Your mother can be a challenge, to put it mildly,” I agreed. “But she loved Jonah so much. She and I are going through the same hell now. The last thing I want is for her to withdraw from me. Trust me, Theo: I understand what your parents—and you—are living through now, what you went through from the minute Jonah was missing. This is just as terrible for you as it is for me.”
Theo flipped his stylishly messy hair off his forehead. “No. Look, they lost a child, but he’d had a life: He accomplished, he gave them grandchildren. I lost a brother who was always great to me, even way back, when I was the primo pain in the ass.” Jonah would not have put that completely in the past tense, but I nodded. “For me, a brother like him was a perpetual reminder that you don’t have to be a shit or a bore to get where you want to go. He was such a good man, but he didn’t wear his goodness like, you know, Thomas More in The Tudors. He was fun. But for you: We’re not just talking close relative here. We’re talking father of your children, triplets, for God’s sake. And your lover.”
“My dearest friend, too.” My voice might have trembled a little, but by late afternoon, I was cried out, at least until after everybody left. “He understood me so totally, right from the start. And he loved me a hundred percent. He wasn’t looking to make changes.”
“Sucks,” he murmured.
“And then some.”
It was the third night of shiva, the weeklong period of mourning. Theo and I had successfully hidden ourselves in plain sight in the hallway between the guest bathroom and living room. Momentarily, we were safe from the damp kisses and messy condolences from the almost two hundred visitors coming each day.
The seven-day grieving period probably had been a brilliant custom for a sixteenth-century Polish village, where you could spend a whole lifetime meeting fewer than two hundred people. But in the twenty-first century, Babs, Clive, Theo, and I were overwhelmed with visitors from the different universes we inhabited. We had doctors, of course, smooth-browed plastic surgeons and rumpled oncologists. Babs’s crew of cosmetic-industry executives was discernible because they looked like they’d inherited their eyelashes from a mink. The theater and New York movie types from Theo’s casting life reminded me of academics—the only other group I knew who wore their scarves indoors.
From my life, floral types set down flowers that could have been plucked from the Garden of Eden when God’s back was turned. Event planners came bearing excessively inventive sympathy baskets. Someone brought French preserves, a wheel of Reblochon, and baguettes tied around and around with tricouleur ribbon probably left over from a Bastille Day party. Another came with a Limoges plate on which she’d arranged gargantuan dried apricots and pears into a giant rose.
Neighbors came, too, from all the Gersten territories, suburban Long Island, Manhattan, the Hamptons. So did our best friends from high school, college, and the present. Obscure third cousins appeared, insisting on drawing family trees on the backs of business cards. It was all too much.
Every few sentences, Theo or I would glance over at Babs. She sat so far back in the wing chair—Jonah’s chair—that her black lizard Manolo flats weren’t touching the floor. I kept waiting for her to inch forward, as she was in deep dialogue with her blue-eyed rabbi. It seemed like a one-way conversation—she talked, he leaned in to listen. But she sat straight, speaking slowly but intensely, her head pressing against the chair’s high back.
“I’m glad I’m not a fly on that wall,” Theo remarked. “I’m sure she’s saying something that would infuriate me.” He shuddered in a way that made his glossy, longish hair flop charmingly. “Or humiliate me beyond belief.”
“Maybe just embarrass you,” I countered.
“Not that ‘embarrass’ is a natural segue, but are your parents coming tonight?” Even when trying to hide distaste, a lot of people broadcast it through small gestures—nose wrinkling or corner-of-mouth twisting. Theo’s giveaway was always over the top in its lack of subtlety. He would jerk back his head in distaste as if he’d just spotted a conga line of cockroaches. I thought it was hilarious, though Jonah had a theory that Theo’s hostility level was so off the charts that while politeness required everyone else to hide their “What a loser” or “Outrageously cheap wine” comments, Theo had to let it out. His “your parents” and head jerk occurred in the same instant.
“No, they’re not coming,” I told him. “My mother had a sinus attack. From my flowers, she said. She disapproves of flowers inside houses. Right after I dropped out of school and moved to New Haven, she went through an environmental-activist phase. It lasted about three weeks. But that was just when I moved in with Jonah and landed a designer job with the best florist in New Haven. When I told her about it, she did her quiet ‘oh’ first. She just says ‘oh,’ then stops. Gives you enough time for your heart to sink. Then she said, ‘There are some of us who believe nature is a not-for-profit corporation.’ I had
some brilliant response, like ‘Huh?’ She got this really huffy tone: ‘Some of us might ask if the florist business is ethical. You have to admit it does rip off nature.’ So I asked her, ‘What about farmers?’ She couldn’t think of an answer, so she backed down.
“But a couple of months later, she was sitting next to a basket of dahlias and bittersweet I’d done. All of a sudden she started clearing her throat about a million times. Then she said, ‘The doctor thinks I may have developed an allergy to flowers indoors, when there’s no ventilation.’ She still does her allergy act whenever she remembers. Sometimes she rubs where her sinuses hurt. Except Jonah said where she’s rubbing would be for TMJ pain, not sinusitis. Anyway, my father offered to come by himself tonight, but I could hear the relief in his voice when I told him he should stay home, rest up.”
A minute later, we glanced back into the living room. Babs had fallen silent. The rabbi looked like he was trying to recall Pastoral Relations 101, the lecture called “When Communication Is Awkward.” Suddenly, Babs burst into tears. She patted her lap, blindly searching for her handkerchief, unfolded it, and pressed it against her eyes with both palms.
“You can’t see from here,” Theo said. “But I bet you anything her Gigi de Lavallade waterproof mascara is still working.”
I stopped the smile before it got to my face and said, “Theo, stop!” My brother-in-law had the bad-boy appeal of a precocious kid. People were forever shaking their heads at his scandalous remarks while being charmed at his wicked assessments. With him around, I was the nice one, but we’d always enjoyed verbal tennis, volleying remarks back and forth. So in this brief, bright time-out from the darkness of Jonah’s murder, I was on the verge of responding that Babs could use the mascara’s reliability for a first-person “My Tragedy, My Mascara” ad campaign. Theo would like that one, but I couldn’t take the risk. He could easily become a loose cannon, and my remark was great ammunition the next time he decided to zing Babs: “I know your mother is in terrible pain.”
Theo leaned back, tilting one of the antique prints of ferns hanging in the hallway. Though he obviously heard the scrape of frame against wall, he didn’t say anything like “Oh, sorry,” the way most people would have. He just shifted and spoke, his voice relaxed yet somehow flat, as if he were chatting about an actress not quite talented enough to play the mother in a movie he was casting. “She’s probably in pain because my father wants to go straight back to work and not take a post-shiva week in Saint Barth to console her, which means she’s feeling pressure to go back to work before she’s ready.”
“So you’re telling me not to go gently with her?” I asked. “I mean, if she’s feeling pressured.”
“No. Be however you want to be. Say whatever needs saying. Well, easy for me to say. I am her son, which I guess entitles me to special treatment from her. The Best of Babs: Good, Bad, Ugly. You know, I had an internship at a rep company out in L.A. the summer between my junior and senior years at Wesleyan. Okay, I’d been to camp and on teen tours, but that was the first time I was really away from my parents’ world. Not that summer theater is the place to go if you’re big on genuineness, but I felt so right there. What’s really strange, though, is even driving out there, I went through Terre Haute, Indiana, and I thought how much easier my life would have been if I’d grown up there. I’d never realized before how—I don’t know—complex, difficult, it had been living in my parents’ world.”
I could almost feel Jonah beside me, whispering in my ear, “See? You asked a question about you, and what did it become? All about Theo.” He’d be smiling, less with pleasure than with satisfaction that he had his brother’s MO down pat.
I had to get back into the living room. Heads were starting to swivel. Visitors were searching for me so they could say, “This must be such a nightmare for you!” and still have enough time to get home for American Idol. But my bro-in-law didn’t want to let me go.
“I call it my parents’ world,” Theo continued, “but my mother rules.”
I’d told Jonah once that Theo reminded me of those sprites or whatever in a Shakespearean comedy. Not gay, I’d added. He was definitely a hetero sprite, but he was unusually graceful and was always making delightfully wicked comments. Jonah replied that the problem was his brother often didn’t see the difference between being wickedly witty and being a mean little shit.
I waved to Andrea at the far end of the living room, but she missed the urgency of my Come get me! signal and just waved back. I hoped a few seconds of silence would discourage him, but Theo wasn’t going anywhere. I finally said, “You’d think with your father being an oncologist, he’d be more . . . not aggressive. Assertive. He’d know what’s important in life.”
Theo took over. “He knows cancer is important. But cancer isn’t all there is in the world. The only other thing he ever knew was that being the son of a podiatrist with a plantar’s-wart specialty wasn’t a ticket to the A-list. More than anything, my father wanted to be a someone. He was like the Little Match Boy, staring in on people living—whatever—elegantly. He so wanted in, but he didn’t have a key to the door. That’s where my mother came in. ‘This is the biography to read, the film to see, the primary candidate we should support. Wear a white dinner jacket for formal occasions between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Stop ordering risotto because risotto is so 2001.’ It’s all about surfaces with her. Look what she does for a living: marketing director for a cosmetics company. Can you get more superficial than that?”
Naturally, I didn’t say “How about the last movie you cast?” Call 666-SATAN was not only superficial but supremely lousy. Also, as Jonah pointed out, totally miscast. Then again, Theo wasn’t exactly coming home to voice mail from Martin Scorsese. He worked for deeply minor theater companies and film directors whose common goal seemed to be making bad imitations of successful horror, soft-core porn, and hacked-up teenager movies. So I said, “I don’t know about superficial, but your mother is capable of love. You—” Theo shook his head: No. She doesn’t love me. Arguing with him would have taken too much time, so I kept going. “She loved Jonah.”
“Absolutely.”
“She loves the boys. I know she sees them as individuals, not just the triplets.”
“That’s true. She—the two of them—are the quintessential doting grandparents. Granted, it’s baby-boomer chic, being crazy about your grandchildren. But they are completely besotted. Well, she told my father he was completely besotted, so that’s what he is. And that will be great for you.”
I didn’t get what he meant. Normally, to avoid the Gersten I-Must-Be-Patient-with-Your-Stupidity deep breath, I would have said sure, but I’d waited too long. As Theo inhaled, I was forced to ask, “What do you mean, great for me?”
“I mean she’s not going to do anything to alienate you. Don’t you see why? She’s smart enough to know that, ultimately, alienating you would also mean alienating the grandchildren. You are the doorkeeper.”
“What?”
“You control access to the boys. Also, if my parents didn’t do right by you and word got out, they’d look bad. It’s not comme il faut to fuck over your late son’s widow.”
Just as I was wondering if he meant his parents could deal with their son’s murder but not with looking bad, Fat Boy came into the hall, double-timing it from the living room on his way to the bathroom. I noticed a macadamia nut drop from the huge fistful he was trying to hide by stuffing his hand into a too-tight side pocket. Since I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable about having to squeeze by the two of us, I parted from Theo with “Later.”
“Later” took quite a while, because I made the mistake of saying “Why don’t we sit down?” to Gilbert John Noakes and his wife, Coral. She was a long-limbed Englishwoman. Though her looks made you think, Oh, more graceful than a gazelle, Coral lurched through life like a bad actor imitating a drunk, which I guessed she was. It was hard to tell, because all she ever drank in public was sparkling water, yet she showed the signs: Most
of her sentences made you wonder whether you’d misheard—they were Britishly enunciated and probably grammatical, but they didn’t make sense. Also, she was dangerous in any space containing antique vases and other people’s feet—such as my living room.
Once we were seated, though, I was hardly able to speak to the Noakeses. People kept crowding around me like I was a Nancy Gonzalez sale table at Bergdorf’s. I got that phobic feeling of Oh my God, not enough air, so I stood. That left the two of them gazing up at me, but at least I didn’t feel like the oxygen was being sucked out of my lungs.
I sensed Coral and Gilbert John would understand my getting up, or pretend to, or not notice, and they wouldn’t disappear from my life. I could look forward, unfortunately, to still being asked to their dinner parties. Gilbert John would invite a mix of doctors, potential patients, and what he called “interesting young people,” which meant anyone under thirty who wore retro eyeglasses. Coral used a caterer who always served what Jonah had called “elderly chicken” with halves of grapes and a curdled white sauce. But maybe I’d be too tainted by the scandal of Jonah’s murder to be asked to dine chez Noakes. They might take me to a restaurant every six months. Without the comfort of knowing I could at least laugh about them on the ride home, how could I bear it? Gilbert John would rake a fork tine on a tablecloth to show me the pattern of his newest mosaic, thereby competing with Coral’s convoluted conversation about English gardens of her youth, though she could never remember the names of flowers: “The purplish ones with . . .” She’d fluff a couple of fingers outward, waiting expectantly, so I’d wind up guessing iris, anemone, cosmos. No to each. “Passionflower, echinacea?” Again a no.
At very long last, they stood to say goodbye. Gilbert John’s chapped lips felt like an emery board against my cheek. “We’ll speak soon,” he said. Coral put her cheek to mine. As I kissed the air, she said, “If there’s anything . . .” She must have thought she’d completed a sentence, because she turned and walked away. Gilbert John hurried to catch up and grab her elbow. He steered her across the rest of the living room so if she did trip over any feet, they would be her own.