‘What you want is’, Rachel interrupted, ‘I should end up like Tasha.’
‘You could do worse. Your mother has generous sympathies, they give her great pain.’
‘So you walked out on her.’
‘I couldn’t compete,’ he cried, pulling at the silk at his neck. ‘I couldn’t compete, for space, for air!’
Her fish lay in thickening oils. Dark folds of skin among the fine bones at the side of the plate yellowed as they dried. Reuben continued to eat. ‘Even so,’ he said eventually, ‘I understand you.’ Eyes in the head of the fish looked up from the broken neck. Rachel imagined her dead father as he ate in front of her. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she declared, folding her napkin. ‘I don’t believe the doctors.’
‘It’s true she is difficult to live with – we suffer with her. No, you should be free of these restraints. I think, Rachel, you’ve been too caught up in the battle of your parents. You keep fighting it out. You want me to win this time, I know, I’m flattered. Well, come fall you’ll be rid of us both.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Well, listen to me, keep your mouth shut. I understand that this isn’t something you can answer with any real feeling, any grace. Not now, but later, I want you to consider what I’ve said. What I’ve worked for all my life offers you real freedoms; do what you want with them, that’s all I ask. Don’t confine yourself for form’s sake.’
‘Sometimes Tasha is right. The way you talk about money is a real sin. Please, let’s go. I don’t want to be looked at any more.’
He left money on the table, his wallet was thick with bills, he disliked banks. Standing up, he reached out for his daughter. She caught him by the hand and then the elbow; he was very unsteady, also light, easily supported. ‘I’ll tell you what they’re looking at,’ he said loudly. ‘They think I’m an old drunk taking out some piece of skirt.’
‘Hush.’
‘Some old drunk.’
He picked up his umbrella at the door, and let go of her, shifting his weight. Into the cool night air; spring was coming to the city, its concrete and iron. You could hear it in the taxis, the grit in their tyres loosened, the hot hum of the running motors; smell it in the air coming down 82nd Street from Central Park. Rachel remembered the photograph of her at her grandfather’s funeral: such pretty grief, her pricey black dress, worn once. Now she felt ugly and dry. She didn’t know what to look like; she couldn’t feel anything. ‘I’ve said my piece. You have a large inheritance. I want you to live like it.’ Rachel, with her hands over her ears, ‘I don’t want to talk about money. I don’t want to talk about money.’
He couldn’t remember the way home. His anger at this fact was very real, very like his old manner.
Later, Rachel’s tidy habits offered her some consolation. She flossed in front of the bathroom mirror on cold feet. A white mosaic of small hexagonal tiles; she felt the grouting in her toes and dug in. Her face contorted oddly in her hands, as she pulled the waxed string between empurpled fingers; her gums bled lightly. She rinsed, tasting her own salt, and spat. She rinsed and spat again to clear her mouth. Cupped fresh tapwater in her humbled hands and drank; it tasted of pipes and porcelain. She spread her wet palms across her cheeks, rubbed behind her ears, at the back of her neck, vigorously, ungrieving. Before bed, she lifted her recent purchases out of their bags, their tinsel paper, and hung them in the dressing cupboard, her blouse, her dress, and folded her new jeans over a hanger. Tasha, at first, hadn’t thought to buy two pairs, till Rachel prompted her. It must have seemed a waste to her mother at the time; the arrangement wouldn’t last much longer.
II
It seemed to Rachel at first, that her knowing was in fact the cause of his rapid decline. After the announcement at dinner, in the days following, she began to spot the inconsistencies in his manner, his sudden imbalances. Sometimes he seemed his old self, kindly, sharp; and even took a cab to the office. When she got home from school, she found his apartment empty, the sports page stolen from the paper on the coffee table. This is what he liked to read on the way downtown. Tasha told her to move in with him. ‘I won’t have him living alone now, and he doesn’t want me.’ By living, of course, what she meant was the other thing; Reuben had always chastised her for euphemism. But in this instance, Tasha’s generosity surprised Rachel; she had guessed her mother would be jealous of his dying, another one of Reuben’s characteristic retreats into silence. She herself chided her father prettily when he got home, grey in the face, worried-looking. (Rachel, amazed, that such grave concerns still took the shape of worries in his features, his thoughts.) ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘I should watch myself die. No sir, I’d rather make other people watch. This is what money can do at this stage in life.’ Rachel offered to stay home from school, if that is what he wanted.
She watched him too closely; this is what he complained of. Indeed, Rachel felt complicitous; the least stumble in his manner she attributed to dark causes. As if she herself had come to collect death’s debts. In fact, she didn’t believe he was dying; a lack of faith that also made her miserable, since she had already spent so much mourning on him. As if, in spite of her disbelief, she wanted the grand event. Often she wondered how she might greet sudden good news. It’s all off, an improbable mistake. Clearly, relief would take some of the wind out of her sails; she was conscious of living richly, in high weather. (Her mother’s great flaw, as it happens; Tasha’s passion for dramatic occasions.) And, for once, she had her father to herself, idle, dependent; she had the nursing of him, these were tender relations, unequalled. And soon enough, his condition took away her doubts – he was deeply wounded, fast fading – and left her the peace of mind to concentrate on the task at hand. She came home from school, sweating lightly in her armpits, her shoulders, along the line of her bra straps, her backpack, in the dirt of the subway and growing heats of spring; after washing her hands and face, she found Reuben in bed, fully dressed, unsleeping, slowly going mad.
The things he said to her! He had an itch in his head, under his hair, which was both growing longer and falling out in patches. (The doctors tried what they could with chemotherapy; these were difficult questions in arithmetic, equations of life and pain.) Rachel scratched his dry scalp with her manicured fingers. She found the build-up of his skin under her nails very distressing, and at night, before bed, washed herself thoroughly in the heavy shower, applying a bristle brush to her fingers’ ends till they grew pink and raw. Even so, his suffering was much deeper, on the brain. He was convinced he could feel the lesioning. She couldn’t touch him there, or unpersuade him. All his life, in spite of his careful and conservative habits, Reuben had wide curiosities and an unchecked tongue. Tasha often hushed him embarrassed – the things he said! Now he indulged it freely.
He said, ‘I read today that in certain creatures, the anus and mouth are indistinguishable in gestation.’ The papers lay on his bed, a happy mess in other circumstances, say a long Saturday morning. Rachel had come home from school, sat beside him with her hands open on her lap. He kept the heating on and the windows shut; she sweated lightly, her palms were plump and red. ‘One of Annie Rosenblum’s pieces, your friend’s mother. A highly suggestive fact. I thought, all our itches are very deep, internal. We get at them anyway we can, through the body’s holes: mouth, anus, even the ears, the eyes, the navel. The penis, naturally. It doesn’t matter which; everything inside desires a human touch. Of course, for the most part, out of our reach. For this reason, perhaps, women take greater pleasure in sex. I must say I’ve always found the homosexual act abhorrent, but this fact gives me certain sympathies. If, as she writes, the mouth and anus are interchangeable.’
Rachel didn’t know what to answer. ‘Oh, look at you,’ he said. ‘So prim. At your age. Believe me, I know what your thoughts are like.’
She blushed brightly and moved to open a window.
Often, however, he addressed more personal memories. The first time he met Tasha, at a party in
Grace Kupchak’s sitting room. Her high windows framed by little palm trees, hot-smelling as summer grass, the views overlooking Fifth Avenue and the Park: what luxury, the limousines sleekly moving among the one-way traffic. God, what a young man he was still, at fifty! A partner in his firm, Reuben had spent less of his life unworking than those pretty kids. Such appetites they had for company, for making talk; these, he noted, often required secondary passions to serve as points of contact. Fashion, of course, and gossip, but even higher matters were entertained simply as food for conversation: art galleries, films, politics. He preferred to spend his enthusiasm on what concerned him personally. Not that the news was unimportant, far from it, but he disliked the airs of the younger generation, the way they couldn’t so much as kiss without the sanction of some higher cause. Any sense of what was private and mattered privately, and what wasn’t and didn’t, had gone out the window.
OK, he was a lonely old man, and didn’t mind the way these young women touched him by the elbow and displayed the hand’s breadth of fine skin between their breasts and throat. But he couldn’t talk to them as a man; and they seemed to take his silence for disinterest. It cost them nothing to hover around Grace’s dry-witted, overdressed lawyer, making nice. Grace always said, ‘Oh Reuben, we’ll find you something; it’s just a question of seeing what fits for a rich man.’ Grace was no great beauty herself any more, fat in the hips and cheeks, with thinning hair; her bright clothes did no justice to these features. Still, her ugliness had its sexual undertones, the pucker of her lips like squashed cigars. And young men she had no shortage of; though Reuben suspected their real interests lay elsewhere. Perhaps Grace herself longed for quieter company. In any case, all her girls thought he was harmless; it shamed him.
But this kid from Port Jervis was a different matter, her vivid high spirits, easy to tease, admire. She offered plentiful material for conversation. Her accent, for one thing; a little sour-mouthed in the vowels and sharp in the endings, her clipped ‘t’s exposed just the tip of tongue-flesh on the edge of her teeth. It seemed to him an affectation, very charming; and then they talked about neighbourhoods, families. These subjects he was comfortable with; they involved natural sincerity. Also, Tasha herself wasn’t so young any more, twenty-six, twenty-seven. Already she had an eye for the value of kindness and courtesy; qualities she could rely on when her looks went off. Reuben’s attentions were flattering. He took her out to an opera at the Met. His uncle had served as cantor for the synagogue in Port Jervis. The Kranzes all had rich voices. Large unhappy music moved them easily to tears, their tongues, their lungs twitched in sympathy, the back of their throats ached, they wanted to sing. When he moved to Manhattan, Reuben decided to become expert in this one field. Among other things, he took pleasure in growing knowledgeable about something high class, difficult, expensive. Reuben, in bed, wrapped in his summer overcoat from Barney’s, propped on pillows, sang Qu’ai-je vu? O ciel, quel trouble! to his daughter, who tried to quieten him with tea.
In fact, Tasha was already in some difficulties. A month after the opera she met him for shabbas dinner red-faced with tears. She carried herself haughtily; when she had unpleasant news, she grew angry in the telling, especially when she was herself to blame. A characteristic fault; later, this always enraged Reuben. As he said to Rachel now, ‘This way I suffered coming and going. I couldn’t win.’ That night he took the seat in the window at Vespa’s, a Kosher Italian on Second. He himself liked looking at the traffic stopping and moving on, but this way, no one but the waiter could see what a state Tasha was in. He ordered a bottle of house white, which Tasha preferred, and meatball spaghetti for two; something humourous in the eating he hoped might cheer her up. As it happened, she barely touched her food; only from time to time dipping her bread in the tomato sauce. Reuben complained of all the food left over. Well, your trouble is you never listen, she said; I told you to get what you liked I wasn’t hungry.
‘You said no such thing.’ Even after all this time, Reuben was insistent. ‘So she says with me you have to read between the lines.’ Drinking heavily from her glass of wine she confesses: I’ve been heaving my guts up all day. I’m pregnant.
‘Well,’ Reuben said, his handsome head active, the lines on his face shifting, persuading, in spite of the still body tucked in like a lump beneath his sheets, ‘you could tell she had worked herself up into a real fury. Of course, the kid wasn’t mine.’ He wriggled his hands out to gesture more widely; he took Rachel’s wrist in his fingers, they were sweatless, cold. ‘Belonged to some fellow she’d been going with before, a photographer. The reason, I suppose, she wasn’t having supper with him, he had no money. And she was tired of living off other people’s lifestyle. She was too old. Besides you couldn’t do it with a baby.’ He didn’t want Rachel to turn away; this was part of her inheritance.
Rachel briefly imagined he wasn’t her father; she could shrug off the grief of his death. The suffering she had in front of her involved something else, a change in perspective, new relations. Reuben let go of her. ‘I couldn’t abandon her, this Jervis girl. You should have seen her high colour: flaming. Boy could she fight for her rights. Drank half a bottle that night and dared me to say a word. Looking back, I see she played her cards right; I couldn’t let go a chance for correcting her. For stepping in. Of course, I insisted on an abortion. At the time, she was grateful for these arrangements, for my practical talents.’ (Rachel remembered her mother’s words. ‘He thinks he can pay his way out of anything; but I told him, you have to take real human interest in life or everything goes to pot.’) ‘I had the pleasure of comforting a big beautiful girl. Walking home, she leaned her head on my shoulder, her hair fell down my back. By great efforts and careful words, I could put to sleep her conscience. I’m sure she guessed how tempting I found these tasks. But afterwards, she suffered real horrors; the way she moaned in her dreams, when she slept in my bed, was terrible. I almost imagined the blood on my hands, between her legs. There was nothing I could do. I was lost in admiration for her, deeply in love. Such high passions she had, what a talent for suffering. I tell you it put me to shame. In fifty years I had hardly suffered at all; but boy did it start when I took up with your mother. These were thrilling times, very miserable. So I sat up in bed and watched with my palm on her hair. If I woke her she reproached me bitterly, but I couldn’t bear for long to hear her sleep-whimpering. Like someone in her dreams was beating her with a stick.’
Rachel had never felt so cold towards him, this at the height of her grief. But she guessed something of what he meant: ‘These were thrilling times, very miserable.’ She had inherited such sympathies: an appetite for great emotions, no patience with small ones. Father and daughter both relied on other people to supply them with the usual human furniture, anger, love. A woman like Tasha made deep appeals to Reuben. As he used to say of her in happier times, ‘She has plenty of weather, your mother.’ By contrast, their climates were dry, steady. Yes, in some ways, her parents were perfectly matched. Reuben had worn himself out and asked for something to drink. She filled his glass in the bathroom and watched his Adam’s apple make space for the water going down. He finished it with wet lips and asked for another, which he drank half of, and set the remainder on his bedside table. He said, ‘So we married. Most people rush into these things when the lady gets knocked up. We had the opposite problem. Having got rid of the brat, we felt like we had to get hitched. Only decent; otherwise, what was the whole thing for? I thought at the time it’s bad luck to get started on a shared sin. And it was years before she consented to have another child. You were a difficult birth. There had been complications. And after you, nothing.’
She ordered in Chinese and he made a great show of getting up to eat, washing his face, his hands. They sat in the kitchen and ate with their forks from the boxes bending in the heat of the food. Later in life, these scenes were often replayed in her thoughts. One thing that struck her as significant: that he took positive pleasure in explanation, in s
pite of everything.
*
At school, she wondered whom to tell. The pressure of this secret was great; also, as her father said, thrilling. Her private concerns for once were utterly absorbing; she needn’t envy the busy lives outside her. Still, she felt called on to explain herself, she wanted to give some kind of account. It occurred to her that the news might pull Brian towards her again. Tragedy bestowed a kind of weight, gravitational force; it drew some people to its centre, very attractive. For this reason, she kept quiet. She suspected that he and Frannie had been making out, after school, on weekends, without telling her, sharing cigarettes and kissing, till their throats, lips felt rough, sore. It seemed undignified, for many reasons, to stoop to confessions in order to win back his attention.
They were reading Hamlet in her Shakespeare class. The school had invested in cherry-wood seminar tables and high-backed chairs. No expense spared. The chairs alone ran each to several thousand dollars. Their effect was elegant, wasteful. Even modest lines and a matt finish can intimate money thrown around. Rachel could almost feel the fresh wood dust fine as chalk in the palm of her hand. Mr Englander opened the windows. Someone complained of the cold draft, already pregnant with spring suggestions of growth. Full gusts shifted papers, open books rattled like fan belts. So he shut the windows again, one by one, looking unhappy. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘to be stuck inside. On days like this. At your age. The fact that you don’t seem to mind makes it almost worse.’
‘Oh, we mind,’ someone said. Laughter. Mr Englander wore a red bow-tie, knotted at a slant, and a knitted cardigan to hide the spread of his belly. His healthy colouring was a little uneven, as if he’d pressed his fingers to his face, leaving bloodless spots. His hair, steel grey and black, ran back from his forehead in flat lines, suggesting a wet comb. His head had sharply defined edges; you could sketch them with a single stroke of a pencil. Rachel found him a comfortable presence, large, unhurried. An air as if much of the sadness in the world was owing to simple grammatical and correctable errors. ‘I want to talk about Claudius today,’ he began, still looking out a window down the hill. ‘That much maligned old man. Rachel,’ he said, turning round and looking at her with his unevenly shaped brown eyes, ‘will you read?’ Instantly, her hands began to sweat, leaving their marks on the cherry-wood grain. He leaned over her shoulder to point out the passage; she smelt the must of wet wool.
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