Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  Around eight, she walked to her father’s for supper. Tasha was napping; Rachel looked in on the sitting room and found her on the carpet in front of the television, her mouth open, lengthening her face. The television left on, its pixilated talking heads almost as large as her mother’s sleeping one. Beside her, a space heater blew thick vents of air; Tasha chilled easily, and loved the almost human touch of warmth of any kind. Rachel tiptoed to turn it off, conscious, quietly guilty, that she didn’t want to wake her mother for selfish reasons.

  The cloud cover kept the heat of the city, such as it was, in for the evening, low to the ground; one of those cool nights you sweat into your woollens. ‘Your father has something to tell you.’ Yes, Rachel had been uneasy for months; Reuben had been working Saturdays since Christmas, which is why she spent her weekend afternoons with Tasha, shopping. He looked hassled, out of sorts. At seventy-five, seventy-six, it seemed undignified to keep up such a pace. Sometimes her mother was right: never to waste time is sinful, immodest. ‘Who are we we have to do so much? The world will turn. Leave it be.’ For a time, Rachel thought he worked only to keep away from an unhappy home. And, in fact, after he moved out two years before, those first weekends, months, he was very solicitous, dependent on his daughter. Greatly softened; too much almost, she didn’t like to see such sweetness in him, like the juice of an old apple, a sign of rottenness. ‘Come here, let me put my hands to your face. I need a menschliche touch.’ His lips, when they pressed her forehead, wet, uncertain. Later, his manner was more correct; perhaps he had found another woman. This was his announcement; no wonder Tasha’s tears lay so close to the surface. At his stage of life, there seemed something wonderfully ambitious, wilfully blind, in these fresh starts. As if he said, ‘I begin again as often as I want. Don’t tell me there isn’t time to see things through.’ He had been losing hair.

  She crossed the quiet two-way traffic of York Avenue, the corner deli, the laundrette. She had enough to think about: Brian Bobek, standing on the street with Frannie, considering options, sharing a smoke. Rachel sensed their shyness as she ‘left them to it’: her own phrase, quietly repeated, suggestive rather than conclusive. These cigarettes: her father had a morbid horror of them. Occasionally, Tasha bought a pack and smoked it out in the course of a month or two; just for the feel of it in her hand, she said. When she was a girl young men used to fall over themselves to reach her with a match. Another source of argument. As Reuben once declared, ‘One thing I’m thankful for, we’ll never run out of arguments.’

  ‘Me, I don’t want to live for ever,’ was Tasha’s line. ‘I’d use up all of my love and couldn’t bear it. But your father gets along very well without. He can keep going for years.’

  Rachel regretted dragging Frannie along. Saw her stoop to the cigarette in Brian’s lips. Their dirty intimacy demanded a reluctant respectfulness; shared sins were binding. Rachel’s innocence, carefully preserved, left her lonely, but she wasn’t willing to spoil it simply for company’s sake. Recently, around the pair of them, she’d become conscious of her diminishing rights. Brian had always protested his love for Rachel openly and cheerfully, but people’s high opinions of you also made certain claims. The opinions changed if you didn’t satisfy them. Rachel wasn’t sure her inside materials could ever live up to anyone’s expectations; apart from her own, possibly her father’s. Even so, such food for reflection offered a kind of nourishment; she was in no hurry. And the way was familiar, the six-block journey west from Tasha to Reuben: out of the rich quiet neighbourhood by Gracie Mansions, and through the dirtier blocks around Second Avenue, where the Rosenblums lived.

  On the side streets, she passed dingy apartment lobbies, the brown-tinted fronts of cobblers’, tailors’ shops. Repetition of trees at even intervals, black heaps of garbage sacks, thrown-out ovens, yellow fridges. She wore a cream skirt, loosely pleated, printed with a few red roses, each on its cut inch of green stem. A pale green top heavily flounced at the neck, and a long brown woolly cardigan, knit large, with a single button just below her breasts. Slate-grey tights, little blue shoes. Her father always praised her turn-out, and she liked to please him. Tasha used to satisfy his sensibility; he had a fine eye for womanly qualities, and Rachel guessed that in this respect at least she had supplanted her mother. Tasha’s style, in any case, ran to excess as she grew older; she hoped to hide behind vividness. Rachel was conscious of the subtler interior regulations demanded by her attention to appearances; she stepped prettily along the pavement, waited with still feet at the traffic lights. And enjoyed, in spite of her worries, the sense of a well-ordered personality, arranged in the best of taste.

  Townhouses began to appear between Second and Third and then the apartment blocks grew taller, grander, after Lexington. She glanced down the long central section of Park Avenue towards the heart of midtown where her father worked. The lines of planted daffodils, in the mild February weather, had just begun to lift their heads, suggesting both method and profusion. Yellow cabs rivalled the flowers, clustering at the lights. A stately, humourless avenue, sans shopfronts and pavement stalls. The doorman, a wide-hipped Italian, stepped on his cigarette under the awning, and offered to take her shopping up in the lift. Mr Toretti. One of the buttons above his belt had come undone; he shyly occupied a corner in the elevator, leaving room for her, conscious of grossness. She smelt the grey smell of his Marlboros, his lived-in uniform. Two years ago, he might have pushed along a conversation with Miss Kranz. But she had grown in that time and begun to occupy her surrounding spaces, in which men fell silent. She felt the static uneasy pleasure produced by her presence, and looked at her shoes. Thinking of Mr Englander. Once she saw him with a hand in his pocket, adjusting.

  The lift opened into her father’s sitting room, and the doorman left her there, among her bags. ‘Daddy,’ she called out, ‘Daddy’; she always called her mother Tasha. Her father had done little to furnish his apartment since moving in; its high ceilings, wide halls, still echoed slightly, offered clear perspectives. Tall windows looked over the Avenue and the rows of daffodils, taxis. There was a long deep couch in the sitting room, bright red, with square arm rests and a low back. A coffee table constructed of glass and steel. On the mantle, above the fireplace, a picture of Rachel at her grandfather’s funeral, in a short black dress of wispy chiffon. Her colouring pink, eager, concentrated, her eyes wet with dutiful tears – producing a vivid effect not unlike joy. A woven rug, of braided blues and reds, hung against one wall. Other than that, only a poster under clear glass broke the white expanses: an architectural design of the Pont Neuf from an exhibition at the Met. Pencilled elms along the pavement had been wrapped in heavy white cloth and bound tightly: a picture in which the muffling also suggested flame, brought out the torch-like quality in the procession of still trees. One of Christo’s jokes. In a high-backed wooden armchair her father sat, reading the newspaper; only he had fallen asleep, and a corner of newsprint lay dipped in the cup of cold coffee at his feet. Rachel had a sudden image of her mother, the television murmuring to her dreams, her open mouth. She stood quietly a minute, pitying herself for her ageing parents, before she removed cup and paper and set them on the coffee table; touched his elbow, and woke him by a kiss on the cheek.

  Reuben Kranz was a delicate-boned man with a handsome narrow face; his countenance sharp, small-eyed, brown, finely wrinkled. It suggested the prolonged action of vinegar upon it, sour humour, cleanliness, preservation. He wore thin corduroy, a grey wool jumper, open at the neck, a tweed jacket; silver cufflinks in the shape of golfballs, a lonely eccentricity. The clothes bulked larger than the man as he got older, but he needed to keep warm. His hair was usually cut short, a grizzled grey; but as he lost it he let it grow. Thin strands waved in the air like weeds under water, and upset Rachel: she remembered him always as carefully groomed. Tasha was taller than he; they had made an odd couple at the best of times. Rachel recalled a photo from one of the shoeboxes in the storage room. The pair of them posed on the blac
k and white squares of the tiled parlour: Tasha glittering in sepia, her low-necked dress and the slant each way of her breasts suggesting an open heart, recklessness; Reuben, elegant in evening wear, his hand at her full hip, steadying her. About to go out to a party. He widened his eyes at his daughter, very grey. ‘Oh god Rachel you shouldn’t have waked me. I didn’t sleep well in the night.’ Then he composed himself. ‘I’m glad you’re here: I have something to tell you. Let’s get a bite to eat.’ His mild displeasure, chastening habits were seductive. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, consoling herself with the thought that his authority remained intact.

  She dropped her bags in the bedroom; undecorated, aside from a white pot of lilies in the fireplace, blooming against the bricks – the housekeeper’s kindness, Mrs Fuentes’s – and a gilt mirror over the mantle. Rachel looked steadily at her reflection: she wanted to see if she was happy. Stray hairs along her temples, very fine, suggested worry, disorder. Perhaps he intended to talk to her about sex; nobody could believe that she hadn’t changed. An old argument she was growing tired of hashing out in her thoughts, so she gave up on it. The way his clothes bulked around his shoulders, his neck, dismayed her; Brian, in his youth, enlarged himself, acquired mass, but her father was shrinking. Her window looked over a courtyard, a fountain among low trees, stuffed garbage bins lined up against a wall. When she laid her cheek against Brian’s shoulder on the subway downtown, she felt him stiffen and begin to regulate his breathing. A little nervous, but perfectly controlled. Afterwards, combing out her hair before bed, she smelt his cigarettes.

  Reuben waited for her in the hall, umbrella in hand. She said it wasn’t raining, it’s the kind of low cloud that never rains. He shook his head, a peevish gesture, and called up the elevator. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Asleep when I left. She took me shopping.’

  ‘So I see.’ They stepped into the lift, brightly lit; the mirrors, however, had been covered with brown pads.

  ‘She thinks you’re having an affair with Mrs Fuentes.’

  ‘No she doesn’t,’ he answered very final, sure. He propped himself with two hands on the umbrella; a whimsical posture, Rachel imagined him breaking into dance, he must be light on his feet, so thin, his puffed-out clothes seemed to hold him in the air.

  ‘She said you had something to tell me. Are you getting married?’

  He gave her a sharp look, a close-lipped smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To Marilyn Monroe.’

  ‘Marilyn Monroe is dead.’

  ‘Exactly.’ As they stepped out into the marbled lobby, he said to her, between the knocks of his umbrella at his heel, ‘When I said I wanted to talk to you, I didn’t mean I wanted to listen.’ But this was always his manner with Rachel; that he suffered her grudgingly, that he didn’t adore her.

  They walked a block west to Gertrude’s; Rachel held her pace back. Reuben liked to look in windows; he had never outgrown the habit from his first visit to the city, when he was only a working man’s son, a Jewish bumpkin with high ambitions. He liked to imagine himself in the lives of the rich. Sometimes he said, ‘You can’t get rich in a generation; the best you can hope for is to see your kids well off, to the manor born.’ Rachel understood well what was expected of her; and she had graceful inclinations, she liked to please in all movements, without calling undue attention. But always, the word ‘kids’ struck her as odd. They saw a man at his desk behind the French doors of a first-floor balcony; he read with one shoe off and his bare foot on the desk. The newspaper twice doubled over in his fist so it opened like a book. Then the phone rang. ‘Yes,’ he said, through the opened doors. ‘Yes, I see.’ At the corner of Madison her father hesitated. ‘I never remember which way.’ She led him left after crossing the street.

  At dinner, waiting for the food to come, he put his hand to the back of his head, as if to stretch his neck; this had become a characteristic gesture. ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said. ‘A couple months ago I was playing squash with Bert Conway over at the Yale Club. Build-up to Christmas, midtown very busy. I was in a sweat just walking down from 57th Street. A close match; he’s no slouch. At one point, after a tough rally, I notice I can’t find the ball. Then I’m looking round for Bert Conway. So he puts his head in the door, already wet from the shower. He says, OK, I give, you win. If it gets you off the court. You coming or not? I lie to him, I say I’m stretching out.’

  A waiter, Slavic, with honey hair, arrives in a sidelong flourish, holding a tray high with upright elbow. Wherever they eat, her father orders steak and fries and a bottle of house red. ‘You eat like a fat man,’ Tasha used to say. ‘A poor man having a night on the town.’ He was proud of his appetites, his spare figure. ‘Do you remember the little mole on my nose they cut out a year ago?’ He cuts into the meat which bleeds richly on to the potatoes. Rachel has fish; she lifts the delicate skeleton between knife and fork. Her father’s manner with food is still rough; he talks through a full mouth. It pleases her to see this forceful appetite. ‘Very unpleasant, a real eyesore. After the operation, you met me; I had to lean on your shoulder. We walked to the movies against a few flakes of snow. Coming out, we saw all the heavy work had been done; such a bright afternoon.’ He paused to consider it and drank, still swallowing his beef. ‘Last week I forgot to get out of bed. When I remembered, I couldn’t. I called the only number I could think of, yours, but you were at school. Tasha had to bring me in.’

  Rachel laid her knife and fork side by side on her plate. Weeping, she drank from her glass of iced water, appreciating the cold. ‘What are you saying? What’s wrong?’ A piece of ice was thick in her throat.

  ‘I suppose we’re all dying. Me, I’m only in a little more hurry.’ His stuffed clothes seemed a necessary prop; they held him up. ‘Come, come, my dear. I’ve always appreciated your quick sympathies; but it hurts me too. I don’t want you to feel so much for me.’ She remembered her mother’s easy tears: Tasha knew. ‘How long could I keep away from his bedside? If he called to me. A minute? Fifteen seconds before I broke down the doors?’ Perhaps it meant they would make another go of their marriage, if only to see it out till the end. Rachel couldn’t tell, in such conditions, if this was desirable to her or not; she prepared her heart against jealousy. ‘I have been diagnosed with a secondary metastasis. Multiple lesions in both cerebral hemispheres and in the cerebellum.’ Such specific language offered him some consolation; he always enjoyed technical detail. In the weeks to come, however, he would lose his grasp on precision. ‘I have seen X-rays; my brain looks like mouldy bread. There’s no point in operating. They don’t like to say how long, and then they say, set your affairs in order, take a holiday. (Me? A holiday?) What they mean is two months. One two three months.’

  She felt barred from the significance of what she heard; her weeping answered only the first and simplest understanding of this news. It was like eating without appetite, merely for taste. Shut in a dry light skull, almost soundless, she considered his death; if she ever managed to break out of her own head she would scream. But inside, the weight of it could not reach her. The garlic in her fish seemed distasteful, much too rich in flavour; she would have preferred simply lemon, perhaps a little butter, nothing heavy. The oil made its way straight to the skin of her face; she was sensible of a faint mottling. Her complexion was generally clear, it is true; but now if she touched her hands to her cheeks a residue of her meal thickened her sweat; she rubbed together the tips of her fingers.

  She said, ‘I don’t want you to die. I’d rather Tasha had to die.’

  ‘She’s a young woman still, don’t worry. You won’t be left alone.’

  ‘Please don’t leave me alone with her. You don’t remember what it’s like. You couldn’t bear it.’

  His head seemed too small against the tall back of the chair. He was always fine featured, long necked. He wore a silk crimson shawl wrapped round and tucked into the front of his open shirt. Well bundled, he looked filled out with straw. Even so, much of the meal,
he’d complained of the cold. ‘I’ve given this a great deal of thought,’ he said. ‘You’ll be provided for; you won’t depend on anybody.’

  ‘I don’t want your money. I want you. I won’t touch your money. Give it to Tasha. Let her spend it.’

  The waiter, a heavy-lipped young man with smooth wide cheeks, refreshed her glass with cold water from a sweating copper jug. She said, ‘Thank you’, soft-voiced over her shoulder. (Manners were bred deep into her pedigree; sometimes she thought her truest voice was polite confusion.) When he reached towards the bottle of red wine on the table, Reuben gestured toward it with his hand. ‘I can pour my own drink,’ he said, knocking the bottle over. ‘Oh, look. Such mess.’ His distaste, heavily expressed in the raised corners of his lips, squeezed eyes, was real, impatient; unaffected, it seemed to Rachel, by age or circumstance. The wine left a widening track along the white table cloth, which soaked up very little – ‘A cheap material,’ Reuben later remarked – and ran over the edge of the table on to the floor. Rachel blushed; she was painfully embarrassed. ‘I’m not a drunk,’ Reuben said, ‘I’m not a drunk.’ For the first time, his daughter noticed a certain thickening in his speech. ‘We’re trying to talk. He won’t leave us alone.’ Two other waiters appeared. The wine, half finished, had spent itself; Rachel always remembered the way its red flow died out at the level of the bottleneck. The broad flourish of the stain, poised at its own edges like a filled cup, seemed to express the larger disaster: blood was being spilt, nothing could clean it. With quiet grace, they removed plates, glasses, cutlery, candle and replaced the cloth. Only the purple darkening wetness at her feet remained. Reuben had lifted his elegant hands open-palmed in the air as if to say feh to this, feh to all this.

  ‘I’ve given it a great deal of thought,’ he repeated. ‘The money is yours; do as you please with it. This is what I can give you, what I’ve worked for. Now you don’t understand the difference it makes, but you will. My life has been too narrow; I confined myself to very specific ambitions.’