We Never Told

by Diana Altman

  This was the first time I felt how work concerns fall away when personal concerns take over. The daycare center that filled my thoughts morning, noon, and night suddenly meant nothing to me. It would have to get along as best it could. I knew my boss would fill in for me.

  Joan was at the wheel of our father’s car outside of the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. As she pulled into traffic, she said, “Daddy said he’d be able to walk better if he had new slippers. So I bought him some new slippers. When he opened the box, he screamed that they were the wrong kind and he threw them at me.”

  “He threw them at you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How awful!”

  “I know. Right in front of the guy in the next bed. Some guy all hooked up to tubes. He pretended he didn’t see.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. Took them back to the store. He’s really skinny.”

  “Skinnier than when I saw him last?”

  “Much.” She flicked her brights a few times. “Look at that! Dim your lights you moron!” she yelled into her closed window. “Oh, want to hear the most embarrassing thing in the world?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, these executives from Schumacher came into the studio and asked me to go out for lunch with them because they’re featuring one of my designs in their ad campaign, and they want me—”

  “Wow! Congrats!”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing. They don’t pay me a penny more. Anyway, we go down Seventh Avenue to that expensive place on the corner and guess who the hostess is.”

  “Who?”

  “Guess.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Annabelle.”

  “Annabelle?”

  “Yes. Annabelle. She’s working as a hostess at Three Penny!”

  “No.”

  “It was horrible.”

  “Did she say hello?”

  “No. We pretended we didn’t know each other.”

  “Oh, my god. How’d she look?”

  “The same.”

  “They hired a fat hostess? Isn’t that unusual?”

  “But she’s glamorous.”

  “So she just showed you to the table and handed you a menu like nothing?”

  “Sort of. I hung back and let the reps take the lead so she was next to them most of the time.”

  “But when she handed you a menu?”

  “She was really good at being invisible.”

  The house was black at all the windows when we pulled into the driveway. I still expected our cat Rinso to run into the kitchen and Yow! at us, but he died of old age and now the house was entirely without life. It was depressing to think of my father living in all those rooms by himself, ghosts of his former life in all the corners. All traces of Annabelle were gone except for the pink roses she painted on the furniture, ridiculous at first, now annoying like stains.

  Joan and I had breakfast at Schrafft’s in downtown New Rochelle then drove to the hospital where Seymour was in a room with one other patient. My stomach dropped when I saw a flesh-covered skeleton, his rosy New England complexion now the color of putty. His head was a skull, his forehead oddly prominent. He turned his head to see who had come in and smiled weakly. “Hi, Daddy,” I said and felt tears well up. Limp in a loose hospital gown, he took my hand in his for the first time since I was a child. I’d always admired his hands because they were athletic from all his shuffling, cutting, and palming cards. Now his hands were bony and the blue veins stuck out too far. Crying in front of a sick person was supposed to increase their feeling of depression, so I’d heard. A cheerful demeanor was appropriate to the bedside so I said, “How are you?” His answer was a squeeze of my hand. “It snowed last night,” I said. “Did you see? It was so beautiful. Now it’s mostly slush.” He turned his gaze to his feet sticking up under the blankets.

  “Daddy,” Joan said in a forced voice louder than her usual, “do you want anything from the store? Want me to get you more licorice?”

  Wires were attached to the man in the next bed and transparent liquid was dripping into tubes. His back was toward us. He was unaware that his smock had parted and his ass was showing. Would this be me one day? Was loss of dignity inevitable? A nurse came in and pulled the curtain around the man and said something to him in an exasperated voice.

  A young doctor in a white lab coat wearing a stethoscope necklace came in, nodded to Joan and me, said to my father, “Good morning, Mr. Adler. I see your granddaughters are visiting.” He unhooked a chart from the end of the bed, scanned it, then replaced it, and went out. I followed him to the corridor where food carts were clattering down the hall and someone in one of the rooms yelled for attention and the smell was that hospital smell that exists nowhere else, thank goodness. “What’s the matter with him?” I whispered.

  The doctor shook his head. “His vital signs are good. Heart rate, blood pressure. Blood work doesn’t show anything.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So what’s the matter with him?”

  He looked at me with too much sympathy and I didn’t like that. It scared me. “We’ve scheduled him for another test tomorrow and that might show us something.” He walked away from me and into another room.

  Joan and I, alone in the house, sat next to each other on one of the love seats in the living room and watched television. The house felt hollow around us. We went to bed at last, she in her room, me in mine. The phone jangled me awake at three in the morning. I was still telling myself to get up and answer it when Joan came into my room and said in a trembling voice, “Daddy’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Daddy’s dead. We have to go to the hospital.”

  “Daddy’s dead?”

  I could only see her vaguely in the darkness, well enough to see her face collapse and that was enough to make me cry too. We dressed and went out to the garage, our breath puffs of cloud. Snow sprinkled down on the withered gardens at the edge of the driveway, gardens once full of roses and daffodils and tulips and my mother in her overalls digging in the dirt with her hair tied back in a bandana.

  We hurried down the long entrance path to the hospital and went inside that terrifying structure that contained disease, death, worry, and misery. We were the only ones in the elevator at that time of night. The corridor was empty as we hurried to his room, and there he was in his bed covered with a sheet. The bed next to his was no longer in use, the mattress rolled up. We stood there looking down at our father’s outline under the sheet. I had never seen a dead person before and was afraid but only seeing his outline didn’t seem enough. “Should we look?” I pulled the sheet down off his face and there was our father, a weird yellow color, his eyelids closed and purple, his blue lips pulled back in a sort of grin, his top teeth showing. Someone had crossed his hands over his chest. He was still wearing a hospital gown and his arms were flesh-covered bones. “Put it back! Put it back!” Joan said so I pulled the sheet over his face. When she started crying, I said, “I’ll call Uncle Norman,” and hurried out of the room down the empty corridor to the pay phone. I went into the booth, closed the door, dropped a quarter into the phone, dialed the operator, and reversed the charges. Would I start crying when I said it? Why wasn’t I crying now? What was the matter with me? Woken from sleep, Aunt Maggie croaked, “Hullo?”

  “Aunt Maggie? It’s Sonya. I have some bad news. My father died.” Silence on the other end. Why didn’t she say anything? “Well I just wanted to tell you,” I said after what seemed centuries.

  At last she said, “Hold on. Here’s Norm.” I heard her say to him in her raspy cigarette ruined voice, “Seymour’s dead. It’s Sonya.” Uncle Norman said, “Sonya, dear? Are you there? When did it happen?” I told him about the telephone call then didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted to get off the phone and go back to Joan. “So will you tell everyone else?” He didn’t answer. “Okay,” I said at last. “Okay?” He said nothing. “Okay
, Uncle Norman?” At last he said, “Yes, dear.” I hurried down the empty corridor, all the patients’ rooms dark on either side.

  Joan was standing next to the bed making an odd mixture of sob sounds and groans. “What are we supposed to do now?” I said.

  She sniffled hard, stopped crying, and said, “I don’t know.”

  I felt steely. I would not cry. There were things to be done. “Should we go home?” I said.

  “You mean just leave him like this?” She started sobbing again. “Leave him here?”

  Now we heard footsteps in the corridor and the young doctor of that afternoon came in wearing his stethoscope necklace. He suggested we go with him to his office. His attitude was solicitous, and I wished he wouldn’t be like that. No need to act so kindly. We just needed to know what to do next. The doctor sat behind his desk. Joan and I sat in the two chairs on the other side. “Why didn’t you cure him?” I said. “You should have given him something that would make him better. But you didn’t. You didn’t do anything.” He received these slaps, thought to reply then didn’t, just sat there watching me with a look in his eyes that lumped me in with suffering mankind.

  “I suggest,” he said, “that we do an autopsy to discover just why your dad died. We need your permission. Please sign here, and we’ll send the results to you. I’m sure you both want to know what happened.” We signed.

  “Do you throw Dad away after that?” I asked. It was meant as a slap, but also I was curious. I really didn’t know what happened to bodies that had been cut up.

  “No! He’ll either be cremated or buried. That’s up to you.”

  “How will he be buried?” I said. “The cemetery is in Worcester.”

  “We can have the body transported. You need to find out the name of a funeral parlor, let me know and I’ll make the arrangements.” Now I saw a tired young man doing what his job required, new at it but struggling to do it as best he could.

  “Do you always have to stay up so late?” I asked by way of apologizing for blaming him.

  “Often,” he said.

  “So you’re used to it?”

  “No,” he said. “You never get used to it.”

  Our house, with its charming clapboards and ample yard, the gnarled apple tree near the front path, seemed changed when we went inside. Now it was just a three-floor container of stuff Joan and I had to get rid of. Your father’s dead, I kept telling myself. Why don’t you cry? Your father is dead. You are now a girl with a dead father. We went into the living room and sat across from each other on the love seats that still wore the quilted upholstery my mother once defended as necessary when my father screamed at her about the price.

  We climbed the stairs to our bedrooms. I expected to stay awake until morning, but I fell asleep immediately. I woke up and didn’t remember, and then I did and felt as if now nothing was the same. This was a new me waking up, a me who had no father. Did it matter? We spoke only when I phoned him and it was unpleasant. I wasn’t sure he even knew what I was doing to support myself. It wasn’t as if I lost a friend. I never confided in him nor him in me. So what did it mean for me to have a dead father? All I knew was that something momentous had happened and it would keep on happening in various forms for a long, long time, spreading like ripples when a stone is tossed in the lake.

  The doorbell was ringing. The sound didn’t wake Joan. I could hear her snores. I grabbed my bathrobe and ran downstairs. There was a man on the front porch. Dressed in a hat speckled with snow and an overcoat, he stamped his feet to keep warm. When I opened the door, a raw winter chill rushed in as the man thrust his right hand toward me depositing a business card in my palm while announcing his name. As he put his glove back on and tried to peer around me into the house, he told me he heard the house was for sale and he was sure he could get us a good price. “What?”

  “Is it four bedrooms or five?”

  “What?”

  “This is a destination neighborhood,” the man said, “and the house seems in good condition.”

  “What? How did you—”

  “I won’t take up any more of your time,” he said. “We’ve been in the real estate business in New Rochelle for forty years. Guaranteed to get you the best price possible.” Then he turned and stepped carefully down the icy front path that no one had shoveled, got into his car, and drove away. I closed the door and stood there stunned. How did he know?

  Joan came to her door rubbing her eyes. “Did someone come over?” I showed her the card. We were speechless for a while. Then Joan said, “They must check the hospitals. See who died.” I tore the man’s card to pieces. Joan lit a cigarette, something she would never do if our father was there.

  When we finished eating corn flakes in the kitchen and were sitting in the living room looking at all the stuff we were now responsible for, Joan pointed to the wall near the breakfront and said, “The only thing I want is that painting.” It was a landscape of New York City in the snow, pedestrians on the sidewalk ducking their heads, the buildings blurred by white flakes, a painting that my father owned before he was married, a painting that was so him and so full of the all the fights that happened in that house I never wanted to see it again.

  “You can have it,” I said.

  “Is there anything you want?”

  “Yes. The car. I need a car.”

  “Okay. What are we going to do with all this furniture?”

  “Do you think Mommy would want any of it?”

  “Mommy? Why would she want any of it?”

  “I don’t know. She picked it out.”

  We went through the books. I selected an old book titled Masterpieces of American Literature, Washington Irving, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with biographical sketches and a portrait of each author. It was the property of Woodbridge High School. My father must have taken it when he graduated. I packed up Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Horatio Alger’s Helping Himself, a biography of General Ulysses S. Grant called Our Standard Bearer, Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and The Power of Positive Thinking. I took Modern Magic by Professor Hoffman, Thurston the Great Magician, Fun with Magic, and The Art of Conjuring.

  Joan wanted the art books, Degas, Cezanne, Fra Angelico. Mother bought those and was pleased when Joan and I sat cross-legged on the floor or sprawled on her wide canopy bed thumbing through the pages in Michelangelo. She encouraged us to look at those pictures and perhaps knew the reason we never opened Cezanne or Degas. We didn’t want to look at ballerinas or vases of flowers. We wanted to see Adam’s uncircumcised penis laying on his thigh so unselfconsciously on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David with its prominent penis that had the hair surrounding it lovingly chiseled. The naked women in Michelangelo were not interesting because they didn’t look like women. Their breasts were little hard mounds too close to their armpits.

  In a small leather-bound edition of Dante’s Inferno, a photograph fell out. “Hey! Look at this!” It was a sepia-toned wallet-sized snapshot of my mother naked from the waist up. She must have been about twenty-two, proud of her well-formed breasts. “Do you think Daddy took that?” I asked. “Sure,” Joan said. “Probably so he could look at her whenever he wanted.” I thought it touching that he wanted a picture of his wife when there were probably dozens of young women willing to take off their blouses right in his office.

  That afternoon, we phoned Clement Monroe. When I saw him standing in his snow sprinkled coat at the front door, tears welled up so I swallowed hard and kept them down. He knew just how to look at me without too much sympathy or too much dramatic sorrow. I wondered if it was possible to learn to navigate the world as he did or if diplomatic skill was innate. He came in and greeted us both by name, something few dared to do because most people couldn’t tell us apart. Sitting with us in the living room, he said that the will had to be probated but that
our father, except for small gifts to his nieces and nephew, left everything to us. He said that probating the will would take several months. I thought now the truth will be revealed. Was he a miser as Mother claimed or did he, in fact, have to pinch pennies? “Do you know where he’s to be buried?”

  “Worcester. His family’s buried in Worcester.”

  “His brother, Norman, can take care of that for you. He’ll know the name of the place. Tell your uncle to have the funeral director phone me and I’ll make arrangements with the hospital to have the body transferred.” He stayed with us for a long time, talking only of practical matters, how to find a furniture dealer, how to find a real estate agent, what to do with the clothes. When there was a pause in the conversation, he looked at us with a rueful and pensive expression that told me that I was too young to lose a father. Since I had yet to be any age older than the one I was right then, I didn’t know what consequences he was thinking of.

  “He’s so nice,” Joan said after he drove away in his black Oldsmobile.

  “Do you think we should try to phone Mommy?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does that countess person have a telephone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Contessa.”

  There was a lot of medical jargon in the autopsy report, but basically it said no one could see any reason that the patient died. The doctor wrote that the patient lost his appetite and complained of feeling numb. Then the doctor revealed his poetic nature by adding, “And so he languished.” He should have asked me. My father lost his wife and his job and died of a broken heart.

  Joan and I drove four hours to Worcester to meet up with the Adlers. I didn’t want hugs and sad faces. I wanted to remain steely. They were all waiting outside the funeral home, Uncle Norman, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Hattie, Uncle Donald, my cousin Claire with her faded, ghostly presence, Avery now grown into a tough teenager, and Eddy, a grown man in an Army uniform but still with that loose lower lip and a sly expression. Grandma Adler was in a nursing home and everyone thought it best not to tell her that her firstborn died. The aunts and uncles greeted Joan and me with intense solemnity. We went into the funeral home, a white colonial house that edged a busy highway. I had never been to a funeral parlor before, so I expected a more commercial structure, something less personal than a renovated house. I did not want to go inside that place but had no choice. Inside it lost its residential charm. The atmosphere was hushed, weighty, and dark. A guest book lay open on a pedestal in the foyer where there were photos of men in prayer shawls on the walls, Jewish stars on framed certificates, a stack of yarmulkes for anyone who might have forgotten to bring one. The men who worked there wore dark suits and black ties and were impeccably correct as they ushered us into a small auditorium with wooden pews all facing a coffin draped in black cloth. My stomach turned over. Was my father inside that box? Had they sewn him back together or had they left him a pile of feet and arms and ropes of intestines?