“Just while I went to the garden for the dill and rosemary. Other than that, it was in the fridge.” Miriam started down the basement steps, headed for the only other bathroom in the house. She knew she should have picked the place with three proper bathrooms. But David had, of course, wanted the one with the biggest outdoor space.
Her husband followed her. “You picked the herbs?” he said.
They swung open the bathroom door. Miriam knelt over the toilet, and David scooted her to the side and knelt down next to her. In synchronicity, the couple heaved over the bowl.
After the first round was over, both sat back against the cinder-block wall and leaned their heads against the cold cement. Miriam wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“The dill,” David said. “I told you I’d get everything from the garden. Where did you get it?”
“Well, you weren’t available,” Miriam said. She had screamed for him to pick the herbs right away, but the noise of the vacuum had won out. Now she wanted to wring her husband’s neck. But the dill had been the most beautiful she had ever seen. “It was amazing,” Miriam said, her body moving against the nausea that was coming over her again. “The dill was as large as ferns almost. And so very green.” She felt now that she was in a sort of dream state. She imagined she was in a field of dill, a setting for a beautiful herbal fairy tale. She pictured herself with long blond hair, like Betsy Randolph’s, flying out behind her as she ran across the field of giant dill. Toward whom? Then she moved to the toilet, and, placing both hands on the edges of the bowl, she vomited again.
David reached over and held Miriam’s hair back with one hand. It was a gesture that, even in the middle of throwing up, made her smile and remember those times when as a child she was sick and her mother sat on the edge of her bed and took care of her. Miriam thought of Esther now in the bathroom off her bedroom, pitched over the toilet that had not been recently cleaned, and she burst into tears.
Things were not going at all as she’d planned.
“Miriam.” David let go of her hair and knocked his head against the wall a couple of times until he felt a dull, numbing pain. “You took the wrong dill.”
Her head rose from the toilet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and turned to face her husband.
“Yes, Miriam. The wrong dill. The one doused in Essoil. You poisoned the whole family.”
Like a cat readying to pounce, Miriam rose slowly from her crouched position. “I poisoned the whole family,” she said.
David ran over to the bowl. “It sure seems like it,” he said, his head still over the toilet.
“Me,” she said. For a fleeting moment she thought of her ruined meal, each slaved-over dish, that blasted turkey she had worried about for days, the twice-baked potatoes, the salad dressing, all tainted by David’s herbs, by her father’s cleanser. “I poisoned us. You had nothing to do with it.”
David could see where this was going. “Well, we’re poisoned in any case,” he said. “Whoever did it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Miriam said, becoming even more furious at her husband. But instead of pausing to articulate this further, she ran upstairs to check on the rest of the house. On the first floor, she heard Frances breathing heavily in the bathroom and continued up to her bedroom.
“Mommy?” The room was strewn with the books she’d thrown from the bed earlier. She ran into the bathroom. “Are you okay?”
Esther lay in a fetal position on the tiled floor. Miriam bent down beside her and took her hand. For a brief moment she imagined that Esther was her baby and that she had to lift her up and make her feel better as Esther had once done for her. She thought of that time in school a million years before, when the class had been learning about the concept of reincarnation. The teacher had asked what each would like to come back as. Miriam, not pausing a moment, had screamed out that she would like to come back as Esther’s mother.
She put Esther’s head on her lap. “Are you okay, Mommy?” she asked, stroking her mother’s hair, stiff with hair spray.
For a moment, mother and daughter stayed this way, peaceful but for the sounds of the running water from the last time Esther had flushed the toilet. Esther rose slowly from her daughter’s grip and looked into her eyes. She reached out and touched Miriam’s damp cheek. “You are a terrible cook, Miriam.” She laughed. “My Lord, sweetheart, when will you ever learn?”
David dragged himself up from the basement to find out what had become of everyone else and was drawn outside, where Vladimir, Joseph, and Seymour were curved over the balcony as if they were on stage taking bows. Seeing his father bent over that way, David had a strange and fleeting urge to spank him, to hold him over the balcony and just smack him until his ass was as red as his face looked right now. Then the urge was gone, and, were anyone to ask David had he ever had such a violent and perverse thought, he would have denied it and believed wholeheartedly in his denial.
The three turned to look at David, who had pulled up a chair and sat down behind them. He paused a moment, shocked by who these men were in history; the history of the country would be different without them. And now here they were before him, three aging men who had just spent the past half hour throwing up into his calla lilies.
“It was the dill,” David said. “My dill. I had been doing some experiments with pesticides and, actually, with your Essoil, Joseph. Turns out, Essoil is a terrific but clearly inedible pesticide. Basically”—he rubbed his forehead—“we’ve been poisoned by the Essoil.” Feeling slightly sadistic, he wondered if he could manage to make his father-in-law culpable.
Joseph looked utterly stunned. “My Cod,” he said. “Surely you know that zhis is not for the foods?” he said.
“Yes, I know,” David said. “I never intended for us to eat the food with the Essoil. It was an experiment gone wrong,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He looked down and debated telling them that it had been Miriam who had picked the wrong herbs. That it is Miriam who simply never listens, never, always has to do things when and where she wants them, so impatient. But David kept these thoughts to himself for now.
That was when they heard the giggling below.
Slowly the men turned to look at where the laughter was coming from.
Sarah.
David got up and leaned out toward the girlish sound coming from his mother, a sound he had not before heard from her. How could she be laughing? He realized then that she had been spared the salmon as she sat sulking in the dining room.
Below, Sarah was completely naked but for the light blue scarf that had been looped around her neck but was now tied around her wrist. Her clothes made a little path behind her, and she waved the scarf, reciting Shakespeare:
Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Sarah danced over the lily bulbs David had just planted and crashed into the new shrubs and chrysanthemums he’d cut down the previous weekend.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Joseph said.
Seymour looked over at him, for a moment stunned more by his knowledge of the reference than by the image of his wife dancing naked below.
David turned away from the sight of his mother’s nakedness.
“Come down, boys,” Sarah said. “It’s so lovely in the garden.” She waved her arms wildly above her head, and the scarf trailed behind gracefully.
“Sarah,” Seymour called down to his wife. “Please, dear, put your clothes on, you’ll catch cold!”
Vladimir cleared his throat.
Sarah laughed at him from below. “I’m free!” she screamed.
“Mom,” David whispered.
Seymour put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “She’s been getting worse,” he said.
Oh, really, David thought, shrugging his father’s hand away. He watched Seymour head down the stairs and into the g
arden, an outstretched hand reaching toward his wife.
Chapter 19
Sundowning:
Sarah Bloom, 1960
PERHAPS, MANY DOCTORS SAID, Sarah Bloom had killed off too many of her brain cells with that terrible drinking and for this reason was confused about the difference between a potted plant and a teacup. Or perhaps she suffered from Alzheimer’s, a disease nearly impossible to diagnose while the patient is still living, Seymour was told when he demanded an accurate assessment of why his wife was losing her memory at a terrifyingly rapid pace.
Either way, all that dancing in the basement had certainly taken a toll. Whatever the cause, Sarah’s state worsened before Seymour’s eyes. In a matter of months he watched her go from forgetting the teakettle on the stove, a small and forgivable infraction, to stacking his cleaned shirts on the top shelf of the refrigerator, to the horrible scene when she had shrieked naked through their son’s garden on Thanksgiving.
Something had to change. Five months later, inside the Upper East Side brownstone, Seymour taped yellow slips of torn paper to most of the household objects. The one on the stove said “stove,” the one on the bureau said “bureau.” Their living room opened onto a deck, and when the lightest breeze blew off the East River, the bits of paper fluttered like insect wings in flight. The doctor had said that this labeling would help Sarah. Trigger, said the doctor, the same one who had looked Sarah square in the eye and, as if she were not even there, told Seymour that his wife’s state could be her own fault. Labeling will trigger her memory, the doctor had told them. This term had led Seymour to think not of a series of recollections, accumulated images his wife must somewhere still hold, but of a gun, always a gun, the barrel of it switching in his mind’s eye from his wife’s temple to his own and back to hers again.
By the time the crowds gathered to watch the ball drop in Times Square, ringing in 1960, Sarah had stopped doing almost everything but watching television. The Price Is Right, I’ve Got a Secret, What’s My Line? The hum was always present, and Sarah sat before it silently. At first Seymour could not understand why she watched game shows, vapid programs she would not have tolerated for a moment only the previous year. But listening to the ding of a contestant getting an answer correct, the abrasive sound of clapping from the audience, he realized that these programs contained no narrative—there was nothing about them to remember. And though the viewer was held briefly in suspense—What would the secret be? Would he get three in a row?—it was a fleeting emptiness. In seconds, the answer would be presented, and what Seymour came to realize was that Sarah’s anxiety would be momentarily alleviated, until the next question was posed.
Seymour often thought if he could just press his memory down deep inside him—into his stomach, his intestines—his recollections, like his wife’s, would simply not exist. Was her forgetting willful? Had their life together been so horrible? Seymour could not help but be reminded how on any number of nights they had been forced to leave a party early and he would say to her, as her martini glass tipped sideways, Sarah, can’t we have fun tonight?
Her face had mocked him. Fun? She’d laughed at him. How many times had she laughed at him? Still he saw her mouth opening as if to swallow him up.
At the end of the night Seymour would have to help Sarah into the car so that she would not fall or catch her dress, and he saw the way the other partygoers, in their tuxedos and long, sparkling gowns, would look out at them with pity. This never ceased to make Seymour think about the long days before he’d met Solomon, how he’d dragged those heavy encyclopedias all over the five boroughs and beyond. One day, he’d known even then, that burden would be lifted.
Looking over at his wife, who stared blankly at the television, Seymour felt a pang of sadness that nearly split him open. What, he wondered, would spill out? He imagined images from his past replacing blood and water and electrolytes, and, in a kind of leaching, he fantasized that he too would be emptied of the past, nothing left behind him. No guilt. No memory of Sarah before she turned into a bitter woman. For this he would forgo the memories of becoming: the feeling of walking down Forty-second Street on his way to a show. My show, he’d think, not so much with an inflated ego but with the feeling that what he and the audience were about to experience—the glorious escape of the theater—was something he was helping them to feel. No, he could not help his wife, or even his children, but he could bring theater and music to people who would be changed by it. As he was.
Sarah was his charge now. Only Seymour held the memory of how they had skated on the Duck Pond before the war, before the children. Would they have done it again, knowing what was to come? Sometimes Seymour imagined their lives together as two hopelessly misfired synapses. And sometimes he allowed himself to feel envious that Sarah had always been able to escape everything, jealous that she was allowed to forget what great disappointments they had been to each other and their children.
The straw that broke it came in April 1960, when Sarah tried to crawl into the oven, set at 450 degrees.
“What are you doing?” Seymour asked as he watched her shove herself in.
“Trying to get warm.” Her voice was an echo inside the stove.
He ran over to turn it off and pull her out. What if he had not been there?
“She’s become a danger to herself and to this household,” Seymour told his son. He had phoned him at home so no one at work would hear him speak of it.
David could not bear to think of his mother like this.
“Hmm-hm,” he said. But was this his father’s fault? Had his father ever tried to stop her drinking? David couldn’t think of a time he had.
“Really, son, she is going to hurt herself.”
David wanted to bash the telephone against the wall over and over again. He wanted to rail against his father, but instead he said, “I see,” between clenched teeth.
“We’re going to have to find a home,” Seymour said. “She needs help.”
David let out a laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Now she needs help. And all those years his mother had wasted her life, what had she needed then? Now that Seymour was left alone with her, he wanted to send her away.
At that moment Seymour was exhausted. He could hear the tone in David’s voice, and he was too tired for it. Sometimes his son’s attitude completely eluded him—Seymour had worked hard in this life to give his son what he himself had never had. This was not the time for David and his rebellion. What a selfish, useless boy, Seymour thought. He works four days a week at a job I handed to him on a fucking silver platter. He hates me so much, why doesn’t he go try his hand on Wall Street then? Why doesn’t he go to law school? When would David become a man? Seymour had been forced to be a man when he was twelve years old and had to look after his little brother while Inez worked. His mother. Still he could not bear to see his own mother in Sarah’s condition. Inez was old now, but no crazier than she had been when he was growing up. It would have been horrible for him to have to see what David and Dulcy were witnessing in their mother. And yet, it was not easy for him either. When, Seymour wondered silently, would his son reach over and place a firm hand on his shoulder, offer him the support he needed as well? “You can either help or not,” he snapped. “You decide,” he said and hung up the phone.
At David’s suggestion, Seymour had tried to get a nurse, but the doctor told him that, at least for a while, Sarah would need to be closely monitored where hospital facilities were available.
“Where there is no alcohol,” the doctor said pointedly.
When he said this, Seymour flinched. It had been selfish, he knew now, to have alcohol shipped especially for her. Back then, he’d had no idea what would happen. Seymour had simply thought he was saving them both some trouble: Sarah from the covert way she sneaked around the house stealing Mob liquor, and he, well, from the prospect of being killed for the indiscreet way she watered the whiskey down. Now Seymour saw he had taken the easy route when it came to his wife, and now, now, he sa
w that he was paying the price.
“There is no liquor in our house,” Seymour said.
The doctor cocked his head at him. “It’s for the best,” he said.
“Of course,” Seymour told the doctor. “Thank you,” he said, on the verge of weeping.
Sarah Bloom, barely sixty years old, watched television in the den as David helped Seymour get some of her things together.
“She’s not dead,” Seymour said to his son coldly, as David aggressively ripped through his mother’s closet. “She’ll be coming back soon.”
But would she want to come back as she had been? David thought. He remembered that day they had first seen Frances Gold on television, the day Sarah had been thrown into an inconsolable rage. In what David now recalled as a brief moment of lucidity, his mother had stilled him with her gaze and asked him never to let her lose her mind.
David grunted and threw clothes for all seasons onto the bed. Not dead, he thought, merely hovering. Haunting. As he heard the clapping of game show contestants, he couldn’t help but wonder silently if the war between him and his mother—a war that had everything to do with how much he had already loved and lost her—was finished. He would give almost anything to have his mother’s hands shaking over the paper as she read “Dear Maggie,” making one vicious comment after another. Who is this Maggie telling me that an unhappy wife’s dignity demands she never show her disapproval of her husband? Clearly, she was never married to your father, Sarah would say, laughing to her son.
Who had won? David opened the upright desk in the bedroom, where he had seen his mother write on so many dreary afternoons. He’d watch her from the hallway as she wept and threw balls of paper behind her. Sometimes when he came in, his mother’s head was propped on her elbows as she stared blankly at the bottles of ink and paper, the letter opener gleaming from its leather case. I hate your father, she’d tell her son from this pose. Hate him.
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