by Diana Altman
“No.”
He spoke!
“You mean there isn’t one?” I asked. His “no” was steering me in a direction I didn’t want to go. “Did there used to be? They didn’t used to have some special treatment there in Louisville?”
Dr. Goldfarb said nothing. Just let his silence do its job. “So why’d she go there?” I asked. Flat on my back, I twisted my head to find his face but could only twist far enough to see his shoes and trouser cuffs so I turned back and continued looking at the venetian blinds at half-mast shielding the view of the street and telling me by their closed slats that everything I said was private, for his ears only and in this room only. “She said it was a very delicate operation and Louisville was the only place where the surgeons knew how to do it.”
He said nothing, just let the silence vibrate.
“She looked pregnant.” If a wind storm can be silent, then that’s what his silence was inside of me, trees blown sideways, waves rising, debris from the sidewalk swirling. “You think she was pregnant?” Bracing myself as if outside in a storm I said, “You mean you think she was pregnant but told me she had a tumor? How could someone tell their daughter they have cancer when they don’t? What a mean thing to do!”
Silence. Then silence on top of silence.
“So you think she was pregnant?” Silence. He was making me work this out for myself. “Who from?” So that’s what that time was all about! “Maybe Jerry Applebaum. I came in one time and she was on top of him in her bedroom and she leapt up. It was so disgusting to think about old people even touching each other. They weren’t undressed or anything. I’d just caught her making out. He was a nice guy.” Silence. “I think she would have married him but he never asked. He ended up marrying the nurse who took care of his wife when she was dying. So do you think he knew? You think she told him? No, wait. He was long gone by the time she got that tumor.” Silence. “She wasn’t seeing anybody when that happened.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
He spoke! I understood him to be shoving me, almost as if saying I should grow up already. “Ask her? Are you kidding? I’d never ask her. Oh, my god. I’d never dare ask her.”
“Why not?”
“Ask my mother? Are you kidding? Ask my mother if she was pregnant that time? Are you kidding? I’d never ask her.” Silence. More silence. “You think I should ask her?” Silence. “She’d never tell me the truth. How could she do that? How could she think it was better to tell me she had cancer and make me think she was going to die than tell me she was pregnant? Anyway, why didn’t she get an abortion? They had abortion back then. I know they did. My grandmother was always paying for her maid’s abortions. Or did once. Someone said something about it, used some euphemism like how Grandma “took care” of Willa. Gee. So you think she was pregnant? You think my mother had a baby? I wonder what happened to it?” Silence. “She gave her baby away?” What had been a blur was now clear. “I wonder what it was.” Is that what happened that time? Could that have happened? “You mean you think I have a brother or sister out there some place?” Would the secret linger in the form of a stranger lurking somewhere? “Maybe it died. It probably died.” Silence.
I reviewed that time for my doctor. “She made me lie to everybody. I had to tell her mother she was in the tub, tell her sister she was at a class, had to lie to my grandfather. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone she wasn’t home. She sent all her letters to her dressmaker and the dressmaker forwarded them so they’d have a New Rochelle postmark and not a Louisville postmark. I was hurt she trusted the dressmaker more than me. But also, I thought it was pathetic she had no one to trust except her dressmaker. Not one friend. No one. We had to stay with Ruby. It was horrible. She had a heart attack right in the kitchen. Joan and I didn’t know what to do.” Silence. “What a jerk. Can you imagine telling your daughter you have cancer when you don’t? So mean. She’d rather tell me she was going to die than tell me she’s pregnant.” Silence. “She never said she was going to die. I don’t think she ever said she had cancer. She said she had a tumor and she was going to a hospital in Louisville that specialized in taking tumors out. It was a special kind of tumor. I remember wondering if she was going to die but not really worrying about it. She wasn’t even there when I got my college acceptance letter. No, wait. That was a different time.”
For almost an hour the revelation of what really happened had been swirling around the office almost like clothes in a dryer, some clunking against the side, all of them in motion. “You mean my mother had a baby?”
Later, back in my apartment, thinking about the session, I decided that Dr. Goldfarb could not possibly know every clinic that was ever in Louisville. Maybe there did used to be one that specialized in taking out tumors. Just because it wasn’t there now and just because he never heard of it in medical school or during his years in practice, didn’t mean there wasn’t such a place. How would he know what’s in Kentucky? His accent was New York. He graduated from Harvard and did his residency at Columbia, so how could such an East Coast person know anything about the South?
I phoned Joan at the apartment she rented after her divorce from Raf. “Joan. Do you think our mother was pregnant that time?”
“What time?”
“The tumor time.”
“Pregnant? Why would you think that?”
“Because don’t you think it’s weird a person would go to Kentucky instead of to Sloane Kettering?”
“No. She explained that. There was only one doctor who knew how to do it. Wait a minute.” She put her palm over the phone as she shouted at her four-year-old daughter who was again bullying her two-year-old son. “Jenny! If you do that to him one more time … Stop it! Just stop hitting him. Give that back to him. Give it back! I’m going to count … One … two … ” She took her palm off the receiver. “I’m going bonkers. Guess how much child support Raf owes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars. I have to go to court again. Stupid moron. Always dragging me into court. Oh you should have seen him the last time. The girlfriend dresses him in leisure suits. Looked like he just came from a game of pinochle at the golf club.”
“So do you think she might have had a baby that time?”
“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“But why would she go to Kentucky?”
“She told us. There was only one surgeon who could remove that kind of tumor.”
“What kind of tumor?”
“The kind she had,” Joan said.
“She never told us the kind she had.”
“She told me. She told me it had to be removed vaginally.”
“What? She never told me that.”
“She told me.”
“What kind of tumor comes out of your twat?”
“I don’t know. Her kind, I guess.”
“Joan. She had a baby. Our mother had a baby.”
Silence. Then, “What’d she do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Poor Mother.”
“Poor us.”
“Poor everybody in the whole fucking world. Jenny, put that down. I told you not to play with that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Unlike his father, Uncle Alan’s goal was not to grow Greenstone Enterprises. It was just the right size, from his point of view. He admired no one more than his own father but understood himself to be a different kind of soul. While Max Greenstone loved taking risks, Alan Greenstone preferred safety. He was a domestic man, liked walking the dog on suburban streets at night with no flashlight, going on cruises with another couple, eating breakfast with his wife on the patio in warm weather. His father traveled on luxurious ocean liners, combined business with pleasure when he went to inspect his manufacturing plants in Greece, France, England, India, and Japan. But times had changed and travel was a chore. Alan waited in lines at crowded airports, hurried down endless corridors,
and waited for suitcases in foreign hubs where baggage claim was slip shod. Was it necessary for Greenstones to be international? The domestic branch alone would keep Alan and his family secure.
Grandpa Greenstone, tired of going into the office and enduring freezing winters, moved with his wife to Miami. He wanted Jordan to move with him but Jordan wouldn’t. The chauffeur said he would never live in Miami, the place was too racist. Willa was not invited because Grandma had fired her. She said Willa was a thief. “What did she steal?” I asked Grandma on the phone. “Never mind. That is not important. She cannot be trusted.”
Grandpa let it be known that he no longer wished to be consulted. He was done. He was happiest wearing his pajamas and watching Perry Mason on TV. If his son Alan thought selling the foreign companies was the right thing to do, then it was.
In order to attract buyers, Alan had to purge excess from the books. His accountants eliminated the salary paid each year to a Customer Liaison Agent. “He can’t do that!” My mother yelled to her mother on the phone. “That’s not what Dad wanted. Who does Alan think he is? What does he expect me to live on?” Grandma did not come to her defense. “She so much as called me a parasite,” Mother told me.
No longer able to afford Manhattan, my mother moved to an apartment in Mount Vernon. She noticed cigarette butts pushed into the dirt of the potted plants in the lobby and cigarette holes in the rubber plant leaves. But she didn’t take those tiny brutalities as a sign that she might not like her neighbors. She never factored in neighbors. She never had anything to do with neighbors, not in New Rochelle, Scarsdale, Chicago, or the Upper East Side. In Mount Vernon, the neighbors forced her to pay attention. From behind locked doors, dogs cried piteously all day until their owners returned from work. Rock music blasted out into the halls. She could hear other people’s televisions through the walls, and the tenants above her were always scraping furniture across floors with no carpet.
She had no interest in men even as occasional escorts. She had no interest in women either, never mentioned wanting to make friends. She was devoting herself to the study of Zen, which she understood to be a philosophy that justified a desire to be alone. She was letting go. Having no interaction with other people was not a fault but a virtue. One had to detach from all worldly things. Almost every time I phoned she was meditating. She responded to what I said in a distracted way as if she couldn’t wait to hang up.
The creative energy that had been focused on sculpture now turned to other pursuits. She bought calligraphy brushes and practiced forming Chinese characters. She knit coats with patterns that required the interweaving of six or seven colors. She joined the Paranormal Society where people took seriously visitations from the dead and having a college degree meant nothing, as if it was the least important ingredient to knowledge. But all her activities, including her practice of meditation, could not erase the humiliation of being a poor relation. Her sister Dovey Lee in Rome frequented the famous designer who dressed Audrey Hepburn, sat on a comfortable loveseat while models paraded for her alone. Her brother installed a swimming pool in his backyard, the water always welcoming. Neither of them got off an elevator and stepped over a dog pee stain on the hall carpet.
Grandpa Greenstone was dead for three days before I heard about it. Joan told me. She wondered what time I was getting to Miami. “How could you not tell me Grandpa died?” I spoke to Mother as if shaking a child who played with matches.
“Why? There was nothing you could do about it.”
“But it was Grandpa! He was my grandfather! You could have told me. Now Grandma thinks I don’t care about her because I didn’t call her.”
“Whatever you say.”
“What time are you getting into Miami?”
“I’m not going to Miami.”
“What do you mean? You’re not going to your father’s funeral?”
“No. All that mumbo jumbo. Means nothing.”
“But won’t your mother be hurt?”
“My mother? What’s she got to do with it?”
“He was her husband!”
“I know he was her husband, Sonya. You’re always so superior all the time.”
Joan didn’t go either. “He says he can’t take the kids so I can go to Grandpa’s funeral, because that’s the weekend he’s going to Cancun with his girlfriend. I said, ‘You think going to Cancun with whore brain is as important as me going to Grandpa’s funeral?’ He says that I never liked Grandpa anyway so why go to his funeral and pretend I’m bereaved.”
Wiley met me at the airport with the top down in his rented convertible. He grabbed me and hugged me and carried my suitcase out to the car. We pulled out into traffic and sped off onto the highway lined with palm trees. Wiley’s attractiveness never failed to enchant me. “So how are you?” I shouted. He shouted back, “I’m leaving Price Waterhouse. Going to Fidelity.”
“Why?”
“They wouldn’t let me keep my parrot in the office.”
“Your parrot? What parrot?”
“Conchita.”
“You brought your parrot to work?”
“My clients didn’t care. They liked her. She can say stock market and Dow Jones.”
“But people don’t bring their pets to work, Wiley.”
“I do.”
“Is Fidelity letting you bring your bird to work?”
“I told them if they want me, they get Conchita too.”
“You must have some pretty good clients, Wiley.”
“Yeah, I do. All the old ladies love me.”
“Can’t you just leave your bird at home?”
“No. I can’t. She gets lonely. She needs someone to talk to.”
“Wiley, you are a weird person. You know that, right?” He glanced at me to see if I’d said that in a mean way, saw I said it fondly, and patted my hand. “I wish I’d visited Grandpa. I didn’t know it was so bad. I should have come down here the first time he went to the hospital.”
Word had it that Grandpa’s stomach cancer was caused by all the aspirins he took.
Grandma Greenstone’s apartment had a wide view of the Atlantic and was the same height off the ground as pelicans fly. Standing on her terrace, they were at eye level as they glided out over the waves and dive bombed into the water. Grandma was shrunken, as if her substance was sucked out. I’d seen other widows and knew she’d inflate again after some time. Now she was as fragile as a spider web. No one hugged her. No one kissed her. No one put an arm around her shoulder. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She seemed surrounded by a force field that repelled others. At first, I thought she was particularly rejecting of me. I said, “Grandma, I didn’t know Grandpa died. My mother didn’t even tell me.” She did not reply, just turned her head and endured the next person who stood before her and said some words. Uncle Alan was there and Aunt Dolly and their now grown children, but Aunt Dovey Lee and Uncle Jack were not there. They had never forgiven Grandpa for choosing Alan above Jack to run Greenstones. I wished I could have consoled Grandma about this, said something like it must have been difficult to not have either daughter at the funeral but it was impossible to console her. She was aloof.
When I saw the coffin at the chapel, I started crying but quickly hid my face because no one else was crying. It seemed bad manners. We were supposed to just sit there in the pews, stony, while the rabbi said words about a man he’d never met. I knew the body inside was not the grandfather I remembered, because Wiley had seen him before he died and told me Grandpa weighed about ninety pounds. I was glad the coffin was closed. I was sorry I’d never taken time off from work to visit him in the hospital. I should have learned from my father’s death but I didn’t, was still amazed when someone actually died.
We gathered at Grandma’s apartment where it was disturbing to see Grandpa’s recliner orphaned in front of the TV. Sandwiches, potato salad, coleslaw and various breads, cookies and cakes, had been set out on the counter in the kitchen by Lester the chauffeur meant to replace Jordan. L
ester thought he was too good for the job and had every right to use Grandma’s Cadillac whenever he felt like it. Sometimes she called down to the garage and the car was gone. Lester was afraid of Grandpa but had nothing but contempt for Grandma. He wasn’t going to let some old white lady tell him what to do. Grandpa was the one who hired the chauffeurs so in a way Grandma never had a chauffeur, which is perhaps why she didn’t understand the boundaries of the job. She wanted Lester to mop the kitchen floor and clean the bathrooms and go to the grocery store. She was trying to turn him into Willa.
Cousin Wiley and I escaped the reception and took a walk on the boardwalk. The people enjoying the beach were an odd combination of men in thongs, orthodox Jews covered head to toe, and elderly women walking in pairs on the wet part of the sand near the waves. “Poor little Grandma,” I said. “I wish she had Willa. At least that would be some continuity with the past. Wow! Did you see that? A dive-bomber! How does it see the fish so clearly from up in the sky?”
“Polarized vision. To pelicans the ocean is clear glass. They don’t see the sparkles on the waves.”
“So I don’t need to admire?”
“Go head. Admire.” We paused to watch a cruise ship make its slow progress near the horizon. “Don’t mention Willa.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t, Sonya. Never mention her to me again. And don’t ask me why.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can too.”
We sat down on a bench. I had stopped smoking but Wiley still did, lit his cigarette with his Playboy lighter, exhaled smoke, and said, “But you swear upon the children you’ll have when you get married that you’ll never tell?”
“Yes.” We watched the waves that came in one after the other perpetually forever. I wondered if they could suddenly swell and turn tidal with no warning. I didn’t trust the ocean. Nor did I like sitting in the sun. There was a spot on top of my head that received sunrays as if they were daggers. It actually hurt to be in the sun. But Wiley was loving it. He was basking with his face turned up.