Tasha, deliberately childish, playing her daughter’s game, ‘I saw him first. I saw him first.’ Rachel knew when she was being talked down to. But she remembered what Frannie had said: ‘It isn’t only your death.’ Well, it didn’t feel like hers at all any more. Or rather, this was only her first death; she had all the others to come, the people she hadn’t met yet, the lovers, the friends. Also, of course, her mother’s. For Tasha, this was the last one that mattered. She had the better right.
In the morning before school, Rachel liked to look in on her father in bed. Mostly in a rush, a glance in the door; the school bus came at a quarter to eight up Madison. When she put her head in the next day, her father lay on his back with his eyes open; Tasha on her belly still sleepy, heavy in sleep, the covers around her rumpled in human shapes, her plump arm sprawled across Reuben’s chest and holding him by the neck. He didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to wake her up. He lifted his eyes and closed them again, one of those gestures, more intimate than meaningful.
*
She decided to do something about Brian Bobek; in the event, this proved to be relatively easy. They had coffee one night in the diner on First. He smoked a cigarette, the taste of it later strong on her tongue, a little headrush. She told him about her father; consolation quickly turned to something else. With her eyes shut and her face pressed against his, the world seemed close and large; gratefully, she was blind to most of it. They held hands at lunchtime. In the baseball field, in the bright weather, she laid her head on his lap and he tried not to move. Frannie’s name never came up. Rachel, looking up through shut lids, saw red. Sometimes, among the bins in the alley behind the cafeteria, they made out; the sun shone hot on the white concrete, their faces sweated and cooled each other, their hands were restless and full of blood. Once Mr Englander discovered them; she was suddenly heartbroken, and ran after him, feeling an urge to… confess everything. But there was nothing to confess. And she never told Tasha or Frannie or her father.
Reuben didn’t have long left in any case. The nausea got worse. After all this, a lifetime of eating, shitting, pissing, fucking, he couldn’t keep anything down, he was sick to his stomach. He was beginning to reject the world, his body wanted no part of it any more. Not that you saw Tasha cleaning up. Mostly it was still Rachel who brought mop and bucket from the kitchen cupboard, who held his hand and lifted heavily upwards when he got off the pot, who counted the pills out for him in her childish palm. When Rachel mentioned this, Tasha cried, ‘You have no idea what I’ve been doing all day, what I’ve been dealing with. You, you come home after a day of school. Every morning you leave him to me.’ In any case, Rachel was glad enough of the work, of doing her bit to help him die. She couldn’t share his bed at night, this was what she could do. It also occurred to her that these relations were less painful for her than for Tasha; her mother had known him in his more vigorous days. And Tasha, after anger, very weepy, heavy-nosed, yellow-eyed, leaned also on her daughter. ‘What have they done to him?’ she said. ‘My husband, my lover. When I first met him, you should have seen the way he danced, like a man from the movies. Such light, quick feet. Me, I always had heavy limbs, my breasts alone… a woman’s sleepiness. Later he told me how much the lessons cost; he could never refrain from mentioning prices. It gave him real pleasure on its own: the best in town, the most expensive.’ Now, she didn’t say, there were days he couldn’t walk unaided from the bed to the bathroom to be sick.
Also, the headaches; the pressure on his brain was growing. His private doctor, a grizzle-headed German who took peculiar pride in his unstained accent, his American manner, prescribed cortisone pills. These relieved him somewhat. There were worse details. Rachel discovered the terrible power of the specific – of things, as she said to Frannie, you could never imagine, and never imagine going wrong. They had inserted a ‘line’ in his stomach to facilitate the chemotherapy; this became infected, an ugly, bloody mess. Two days in the hospital, a course of antibiotics. Visiting him in his white-tiled room was particularly painful, the journey to his ward alone exposed wide human suffering, the family of suffering, the vast sibling struggle for the parent’s attention, to alleviate pain. Money bought Reuben his own room, a view of warehouses. But in this case at least it couldn’t buy him what mattered.
Reuben, at his best, managed to keep up the joke. ‘Tell me, Doc; how much does a new head cost?’
The doctor was unamused. A conscientious man, also honest: he had little real interest in the pain he could do little to cure. And his sympathies were less tender than his professional curiosity. Still, he was an excellent physician, at the top of his field. His time was in large demand and humour wasted it. Everywhere, everywhere, Rachel thought, we are one among many. (Her language for such reflections had grown richer, subtler; yes, this did in fact soften the blows of reflection, cushion them slightly. She was reading passionately.)
Such a relief after all that to have him home again. It was almost happiness in itself, or very like it, to nurse him in his own bed. To arrange the daffodils on his window sill, and in the pleasure of this arranging, imagine his own.
The German increased his dose of morphine. Reuben swallowed the dry tablet dropped on his tongue in the morning, in the evening. Between times, when the pain grew inhuman, he drank morphine from a coffee mug. Rachel looked up the word in her dictionary: he was drinking not sleep but dreams. His manner was beginning to suffer from this necessary blurring. Rachel knew she was losing him – a loss of focus, a fade not to black but to the colour of ordinary life. When he died, ordinary life could begin again; they could wash the sheets of his bed, open the window, drive his smells from the room. They could go to the movies. Reuben drifted in and out of consciousness; like a man on an airplane, uncomfortable, dreaming of arrival.
Meanwhile, summer came to Manhattan. When she missed the school bus – she was rising later, unhurried – Rachel had to walk across the Park to catch the subway on the West Side. The grass in the Great Lawn blistering thick, thick as fingers. Lines of chalk had been drawn around the softball diamonds; in the early dew, the chalk trails caked and darkened. Pats of dogshit dried in the sun; when the mowers cut, the smells were pungent, humid. Baked earth. After school, she took the subway downtown again and walked back the same way. She didn’t want to share a bus with kids; their lives differed so widely from her own, she was losing touch. Also, she took comfort in this extra hour before home. Tasha now had the nursing of him.
Those early summer afternoons. Hot smells rising from the streets. Even at five, sunshine caught the high-rise windows and burned their edges. Boys played ball again on the public courts; fat young men, glad to be out of the office early, took over the softball fields. Air-conditioning units dripped off the sides of apartment blocks. Walking across town, she felt the dirty cool flecks against her cheek, as many, perhaps, as a wet hand shakes loose after washing. The cherry trees on 82nd Street scattered bloom; confetti aftermaths. Petals wrinkled in the heat, then turned grey with pavement dirt. The days grew longer, stretched on loose elastic that had lost its snap. The rich packed up to leave Manhattan to the poor.
Towards the end, his eyesight began to go. The universe was being taken away from him in black spots; these Rachel imagined being given to the survivors, little gifts of unused light. She considered the world from his point of view; it was going out. Her own sight seemed astonishingly rich and clear by contrast. His headaches became unbearable; he stopped bearing them. A morphine drip was plugged into his opened forearm. He had nothing left to tell her. He had nothing left to tell her. Tasha and Rachel discussed only necessary things; they had lost any appetite for the unnecessary. (Later, after his death, these habits were reversed.) Tasha bought a television for the bedroom; less for his sake than for hers. When Rachel came home, she found her mother in bed watching soaps, her hand on Reuben’s head, idly tender. Rachel left them to it, she had taken a step back.
Tasha was getting fat on takeaway food; she hardly dressed i
n the morning after washing. Rachel, for her part, remained meticulous: she spent at least a half-hour making up in the bathroom mirror before facing the day. Her worries about dress were particular, and therefore consoling. The summer brought with it flowers and summer dresses. Rachel wore her short red frock, patterned with hearts and black lines (bought the same day Reuben told her his news); high-heeled shoes. Some days she didn’t bother going to school; the silence in her head was almost unbreakable. And then, a day short of her eighteenth birthday, real high weather, the skies blue all the way up to the stars, he died. Rachel came home at lunchtime, and Tasha said, ‘It’s over. What are you doing home?’ Tasha wrapped her dressing-gown tight round; her eyes were black with yesterday’s mascara. She was eating toast; the crumbs had fallen in flakes across the silk. Her mother was terribly hungry, her hands like ice.
Rachel had to look. She stepped into his bedroom, the windows now wide open. Even at the tenth floor you could smell summer. Reuben had complained steadily of the cold; it was the last thing he talked about, not money or memory, only how cold it was. No matter how high they turned the heating. Honestly, she found it hard to tell he was dead. They waited a day and a night to call the doctor; they wanted to see if he moved. Tasha had nowhere to sleep and so the two of them, tightly huddled, lay in Rachel’s bed together. All night they wondered what he was doing; he had left them alone again, just the two of them, mother and daughter.
The next night, however, after the fuss with doctors and ambulances, Tasha slept at home. Rachel said she had schoolwork to collect from her father’s apartment; in the end she spent the night in his bed, in his unclean sheets. Tasha rang of course all morning, worried and needy. ‘What should I do?’ she complained. ‘I give up everything to nurse him. Now what do I do? Come home.’ Rachel, sober and responsible, explained she was busy at school, there was a great deal of work to make up. In fact, she dressed in the morning, and went out to walk the streets. Composing thoughts. When she was a young girl, her teacher asked the class to write a poem about their summer holidays. It would begin: The summer I turned seven. The rest was up to them. Her thoughts began: The summer I turned eighteen. She dried off a patch of bench with paper napkins from the hotdog stand, and sat watching softball. The summer I turned eighteen I kissed a boy. My parents fell in love. (The form of words itself suggested this thought, its childishness. She shook her head.) My father died. The summer I turned eighteen.
*
On Friday Mrs Fuentes came late morning, and Rachel, embarrassed to be caught at home, decided to make her way to school. It was after lunch before she got in. She wanted to talk to Mr Englander, and waited for him in the little office overlooking the baseball field. Her essay was overdue, she had a few notes, she needed to explain. In a white blouse, very summery; she didn’t want to make a show of mourning yet. The odour of her armpits, the stink of heavy emotions amid humid blustery weather, rose in her nostrils. She knew she looked perhaps a trifle overheated against the white cotton – discoloured, the blood in her face hectic, uneven. The lights were off and she couldn’t bear to switch them on. The weather had turned since the clear heat of her father’s death; wind and wet followed the high pressure. In the grey light, the summer skies outside had a sepia tint. She imagined the storage cupboard; here there was only the one door coming in; she couldn’t back out.
She heard him enter and didn’t turn round, her heart beat like a penny on piano strings; he was at the desk before he saw her. A heavy-shouldered walk, much burdened, even worse: properly unhappy. So he had his own private affairs. ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about this?’ he said, almost angrily. He clearly hadn’t been told of her situation, an awful word. The way this loose talk crept into your own thoughts. ‘I give up on you. I give up.’
‘Don’t say that, Mr Englander.’
‘I don’t have a choice. I’ve given you every chance, every encouragement. It isn’t up to me; there are rules I can’t bend. This isn’t the kind of behaviour I can let pass.’
‘I tried to write. You have no idea. I’ve given up on everything else. But I wanted to write for you.’
Don’t cry, she thought, whatever you do, don’t cry, but she cried anyway, she hadn’t cried since her father’s death. Almost as if the animal in her had tears and tensions to release; it was her conscious duty to give them vent. He came quickly to her side and sat down. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ he said, and then her name, ‘Rachel’, as she had always imagined it, a word with intimate meanings. A word like Tasha in her father’s mouth: with vintage. A heavy man, unlike Reuben, his body and side gave off dissatisfied heats, unhealthy odours. When he stretched his arm across her neck and palmed her shoulder, she smelt him vividly. Still, there were solid comforts there, even warmth, whatever the source of it, bloody nourishment and health. Her father’s hand had felt like a glass of cold water.
She stopped crying; her father was dead. It was time Rachel realized she wasn’t a girl any more – to acknowledge this fact and behave accordingly. Her body offered certain promises to men, she saw the way they looked at her, what they expected. ‘Mr Englander, please,’ she said, ‘Mr Englander, please.’ She had pressed her face against his ribs, with her hand on his leg. Now he held her against his shirt and she couldn’t breathe without smelling him. Once she’d caught him looking through her purse after class, fingering a tampon; the shame of it. Later she told him someone was following him round after school. Even to the pharmacy, she said; Frannie had put her up to it, but she was by no means an innocent. ‘Two can play that game.’ It seemed only silly at the time, a girls’ joke: girls were always imagining things, vague threats, especially Frannie. Frannie would say, look at the way that man looked at you, it’s disgusting; and what she really meant was, why didn’t he look at me. Rachel chastised herself for such egotism; but it didn’t mean she didn’t think it was true. ‘Mr Englander, please.’
His heavy face turned towards her, he looked unhappy. As if happiness and good humour were only a carefully constructed expression, and when you saw a face up close, a few inches away, like a painting, it revealed more basic components. How near and large he seemed; this intimacy in itself was very persuasive. Her hand on his thigh also sensed other urgent pressures. Her eyes narrowed, she was terrified. But for the first time in months she felt the excitement of what next? She thought, for a second, implausibly: he could easily fit me inside his shirt, and hold me there. The way Reuben used to when she was a small girl, her face pressed to his undershirt. She reached up an arm; he let her hold on by his tie. One hand under her bottom for support. She breathed only him, wonderful comfort and heat. But then Mr Englander stood up, moving unsteadily towards the door. His manner, when he spoke, correct and formal. ‘It’s better,’ he said, ‘for various reasons, we leave that open. Some of them legal, I’m afraid; such are the times we live in. Our powers of comforting are greatly circumscribed. Tell me what’s wrong.’
Perhaps she’d misread him. He was nothing like her father; she hardly knew him. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ You have to make your own way with grief, nobody can help. There are no replacements, what’s lost is lost. When she came home she found Mrs. Fuentes had changed the sheets in her father’s room, the smell of him gone. Folded they lay at the foot of the unmade bed, perfectly white and clean.
*
What was left were two ceremonies, his funeral, her graduation. Later, she remembered, perhaps, more of those weeks than she noticed at the time, living through it the first go round. The course of her thoughts was strong, smooth; undisturbed, it left no mark, but offered clear reflections.
The funeral was a grand affair at the synagogue on 79th Street. Rachel realized, by the time a man gets to the funeral, his family have put on public mourning. Tasha in particular looked pink-faced, radiant, in her costly black dress, specially bought. Men in dark suits, young and old, crowded the service; she didn’t know their names. All these people she didn’t know were coming to bury her father.
(Only, th
ey didn’t bury him there, thank God, on the spot. This was only for city people. At the weekend, Tasha and Rachel went up to Port Jervis for a second funeral, a quieter affair. Tasha took it much harder. Whenever she dressed badly, Rachel knew, her mother was unhappy: what Tasha called ‘ugly unhappy’. She wore grey slacks, a heavy pullover, rollneck, in spite of the heat; sunglasses. The pressures of nostalgia and grief, so different in nature, combined powerfully; winded her. She was confused. Rachel at one point had to ask for directions. Her mother’s shame was awful; Tasha stood ten paces behind, hid her face. Muttering inaudibly, ‘I can find it, Rachel. Leave me alone. We’ll get there.’)
Rachel remembered later seeing Miss Bostick at the service on 79th Street. Her Biology teacher, on the arm of one of the Conways. Miss Bostick was a nervy unripe woman, long-legged, less well liked by the girls than boys. She was wearing a soft grey dress, lined tight around her figure, buttoned up the front; exposing the flat wide pressure of her breasts, very sexual. Her healthy colour, pink, wind-blown; a woman in bloom. Charles Conway, the son of her father’s partner, hadn’t shaved. The mineral stubble of his cheeks, sandy, silicon-grey, flared in the sunshine coming through the high bank of coloured glass at the top of the hall. At the reception afterwards, among the cups and plates set down, the hum of business talk, he made a point of approaching Rachel. Miss Bostick never once let go his arm. ‘I didn’t know him well, he was my father’s friend. We played golf sometimes; he played short and straight, never three-putted. Usually took my money. I’d like to kiss you.’ Stooping slightly to touch her cheek. She felt the rich abrasion of his beard, smelt his cologne – the breath of scented skin thick in her nose.
‘Yes, that’s my father,’ she said. ‘Hello, Miss Bostick.’
Charles continued. ‘It’s like kissing the bride. At a wedding every man should kiss the bride. Very special.’
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