by Joan Silber
Rhoda no longer brought Claire with her when she came to visit. The deterioration in her mother’s appearance had been sharp and rapid, the damage sudden. Under her eyes were blackish smudges like thumbprints. Her skin had a bruised look, with splotches of broken capillaries in the cheeks, purplish with false health. She had lost a great deal of weight. The broad outlines of her jaw remained, supporting a damaged copy of her face.
The shock of the change still stung Rhoda to tears: she could keep them back, she learned, only by quelling a sense of protest. She would try to think You can’t look back, or This is just life, and that served to calm her some.
This afternoon Rhoda had brought her mother a photograph of the completed downstairs rooms. Rhoda helped her rise to a more upright position on the pillows so she could see more easily; twice her mother cried out in sudden pain as she shifted her weight. Rhoda brushed her mother’s hair, then held the mirror while her mother applied a light coating of lipstick, high over the cupid’s bows as she had worn it for twenty years.
When she’d put the mirror away, Rhoda found her mother staring at her hands, and she thought, from her expression, that the gnarled, mottled look of them made her sad, or that she was looking down so as not to have to look directly at Rhoda when she was in pain. Instead she surprised Rhoda by asking her if she would give her a manicure the next day she had time. “You can be my beauty parlor. It wouldn’t hurt to bring some lotion, too, if you don’t mind.”
Later in the week Rhoda brought with her a small bag filled with rattling bottles, and took from it the bottle of Revlon Plum Beautiful, with its long white applicator handle like the tail of a very elegant plastic bird. “See, Ma?”
Her mother, who was heavily narcotized under increased dosages now, opened her eyes slowly. “You don’t have a lighter shade?”
Rhoda shook her head. While she dabbed at her mother’s nails, her mother leaned back on the pillows, saying nothing, and held her hands perfectly still, splayed out stiff and patient, on the towel across her lap.
It was getting hard for Rhoda to be with Leonard in the evenings. He seemed unreal to her, and when he tried to be helpful she was often rude and scornful with him for acting as though anything could help. But at times he seemed to say the right thing, and she was sleepy and quiet as she leaned against him, and almost more grateful than she could stand. It was easiest to keep her bearings if she drew herself up and kept busy and took pride in her competence and the continuation of the routine under stress. Lately he had more or less chosen to take her at her word when she told him things should go on “as normal.” She could, of course, only simulate normality; the normal was, for the time being, a paradise she had lapsed out of. She longed for it constantly.
This evening, after giving her mother her manicure, Rhoda arrived home in a state of desperate, slow sadness. Nor was she left for a minute even to the grim peace of her mood; the noise and disorder of the children was intolerable. She was up in Suzanne’s room, yelling at her, when she heard the click of the door downstairs which meant that Leonard had arrived. She continued yelling, in a passion of irritation, which ended in her giving Suzanne a slap. “And more is coming,” Rhoda said. Suzanne was crying loudly.
Leonard began mounting the creaking carpeted steps. Rhoda met him at the landing. “Your dinner’s almost ready,” she said. She turned back and shouted, “Start putting those things away.”
They walked down the stairs together. “A nice greeting,” Leonard said.
Rhoda sat down in the living room. “I’m too tired to talk about it.”
“Well, listen,” he said. “I had fairly good news today. Addie Shulman came by the store—he told me we’re going to be able to rent the big auditorium at the temple for the Beta Omega party in June.”
Beta Omega was Leonard’s fraternity from pharmacy school. He had been president of his local alumni chapter for four years running—elected, Rhoda thought, because he was both well-liked and a cut above the other members. Addie Shulman was bright enough, an avid reader and an opera buff; Fred Meyers had a nervous tinge of leftist politics which, while it made him a volatile dinner companion, also gave him an undeniable air of weary integrity, but they were all, compared to Leonard, a bit coarse and off-base.
Rhoda didn’t want to hear about their party, now of all times, and she was disgusted with him for bringing it up; there was no stopping him with chilly replies. Leonard’s enthusiasm for his fraternity was unqualified; the pathetic antics of the most puerile member evinced from him only a sheepish amusement. He was never freer, more expansive, more tickled with himself than at the annual Beta Omega parties. Rhoda went along in tow, enjoying herself well enough—it was easy for her to be hearty—but she had learned not to try to get more than his sporadic attention at these events.
“I thought you’d want to know it’s going to be held on the synagogue premises,” Leonard said, “in case you were planning to wear that risqué dress of yours with the see-through lace around the midriff.” He was joking.
“It’s not see-through,” Rhoda said. “It has flesh-colored taffeta underneath.”
“I don’t know—I’ll have to ask the rabbi about this. Of course, you see a lot of cleavage at Friday night services.”
“Do you have to look?”
“I’m not so old,” Leonard said, “that the cantor looks better to me.” He was in high spirits.
Rhoda was sorry that she always told people what good care he took of her, how sensitive he was: they should see him now. She turned away to walk into the kitchen. Leonard followed.
He asked then, “How was your mother this afternoon?”
“Every day worse. She looks so old now.”
“They’re sure a hospital wouldn’t be better for her?”
“She has the nurse at night,” Rhoda said. “They give her that stuff for the pain and she sleeps. Pop’s no help—he’s not exactly cheerful for her to be around—why should he be any different now than he’s ever been? When he comes into her room, he doesn’t even talk, he just sits there and droops. I kick him out when I’m there.”
“The only thing they can do now is cut down the pain,” Leonard said. He made a tucking sound with his lips, the sound of resignation.
“Why can’t they do anything else?” Rhoda said. “Why can’t they?”
Leonard winced, he raised his eyebrows in a pleading, sad look, and then he turned away from her.
Rhoda stood at the stove. “Dinner,” she said, forking pieces of chicken onto the plates.
“We have to eat fast. The men are coming for pinochle at eight. Did you forget?”
“Sort of,” Rhoda said.
“But you wanted them to come. You told me to invite them; it was your idea.”
“I know,” she said. “Don’t tell me. I made cookies. I know.”
The girls helped slide the bridge table out of the closet, unfold its legs, and set it upright. It was an old table, lacquered maroon to look like mahogany, and its padded oilcloth top looked as if it had yellowed with use, although in fact it had always been that parchment color. The table was too rickety to stand firmly—Suzanne kicked at one leg to make it stop bending inward. “You’ll ruin it,” Rhoda scolded. “That was a very expensive table once.” This was not true, but she expected objects to be permanent, so that all her possessions, upgraded by adoption, were treated like keepsakes.
The men arrived close together—first Addie Shulman, then Hinda’s Stanley and Richard Fern. The children were excited; Claire, who had been allowed to stay up late, leaped at the men and squealed their names. “Calm down,” Rhoda said lightly, mock-stern. “My goodness.” When the men sat down to play cards, Rhoda busied Suzanne with passing a plate of cookies and bringing in glasses of rye on the rocks; Leonard alone preferred Scotch. “A sophisticate,” Addie teased. “Bidding is open. Put your money where your mouth is.”
Claire, who would not leave the room where the men were, sat on a couch, coloring designs on paper napkins. Su
zanne, who was awkward at any precise handiwork like drawing, admired them. This praise from her sister was so unusual that Claire decorated six or seven napkins, until Suzanne noticed from the uniformity of the results that Claire was copying the embossed floral pictures on the napkins. “But I thought you knew,” Claire wailed. “Copying doesn’t count,” Suzanne snorted.
Rhoda had just finished settling the girls in bed when she heard the phone ring. “I’ll get it,” she yelled down. In her haste to get to the phone Rhoda switched off the light in Suzanne’s room without thinking, so that she had to run back to turn it on again so Suzanne could read in bed. When she got to the phone, she was annoyed and flustered. Suzanne was still calling out that she didn’t have the book she wanted. “Wait, I can’t hear you,” Rhoda complained into the phone, and then she called back to Suzanne, “Well, just get up and get it.” Rhoda turned toward the wall so she could hear better; the men downstairs were making a great deal of noise. Suzanne had come into the hallway in her pajamas. She stared at Rhoda, who kept nodding gravely at the wall and wouldn’t look at her. Suzanne went back to her room. Rhoda hung up and called down, “Leonard, come here. It’s important.”
He walked up the steps and met her in the hallway. “That was my brother Frank on the phone,” she said.
“So why are you whispering?” Leonard wanted to know. Rhoda’s mouth was set and hard, and at first he seemed to think she had been quarreling with her brother, but her eyes weren’t angry, they were soft and wet. “Your mother,” he said.
Rhoda was trying to think whether to say dead or passed away, and she was also clinging to the idea that if she said neither, if she kept everything to herself, the fact would perish on its own, become untrue. Too soon; she wasn’t ready: she was trying to remember the terminology to explain to Leonard that her mother had succumbed to some secondary failure, some swelling complication, saving her, the doctor said, from the last agonized stages. She was thinking wildly I don’t have anything any more and she was making herself dizzy with reckoning—she had Leonard, had Suzanne, had Claire—she was counting up all the ways she had and didn’t have them. Leonard was dialing the phone, calling her brother to find out whether they should go to her father’s house tonight or tomorrow.
Rhoda felt a seeping rage against her father, who was probably sitting in his chair right at this moment, staring dully ahead; he was as ready as he had ever been for a sudden shock. Rhoda had not thought to ask if the night nurse, coming upon her in bed, had heard her say anything. Rhoda did not much like the idea of last words; it seemed unfair to hold them against the witnessable totality of a person’s life. Even Goethe’s famous “More light”—hadn’t they wondered whether he was hearkening to something celestial, or only asking that a lamp be brought or a window opened? The image of this made her think of her mother’s room, with its windows always wide open, and a second painful shock came over her, a wave of homesickness for that room; in the worst of her mother’s illness, it had never had the still atmosphere of a sickroom—it was too airy; any paper you put down in it was always getting stirred by the breeze. The blinds shaking, and the dresser scarves lifting at the ends—it had been almost too cold for Rhoda; she had always worn sweaters to visit.
Leonard was telling her that he was going downstairs to let the men know. She heard them murmuring and getting their coats out of the closet. Their voices were low, tender in a business-like way. They were very decent men; all the same she was annoyed that the news had overtaken Leonard in the midst of a pinochle game.
At her parents’ house the next day, there was a din of voices, like the sounds of a party. To Rhoda, because she was the last of his offspring to arrive and the only daughter, was left the task of consoling her father. She tried distracting him. “Look, Pop,” she said, “all these people have come to visit you.”
“Talk, talk,” he said. He turned his back and walked, with his shuffling gait, toward the bedroom.
Mrs. Leshko came out of the crowd to squeeze Rhoda’s hand. “She was a wonderful woman, your mother. Bright, alert. Everything. They don’t make them like that any more.”
Across the room Rhoda’s brother Andy, who had taken it hard, was being coaxed into a chair by his wife. His wife went to bring him a plate of food. On the way back from the buffet table, she made a detour to ask Rhoda, “Do you want anything?” As one of those directly bereaved, Rhoda was something of a guest of honor. She felt the attention of these people as something gratifying, and yet when she looked out at all of them she had a spiteful notion of their combined worthlessness. “She had more sense in her little finger,” she started to say to Mrs. Leshko, but she was afraid the old lady was going to begin weeping.
“Hinda,” she called out. “Look who’s here.” Hinda, a conversation away, turned around at once. “My friend Hinda,” Rhoda explained, beginning to believe it as she said it, “always asks about you, Mrs. Leshko.”
Hinda was among them, reaching out to grab Mrs. Leshko’s freckled upper arm in a shortened embrace. “I hear your grandchild’s a regular Einstein.”
“You heard right,” Mrs. Leshko wheezed.
Turning from them, Rhoda faced another older gentleman—the room seemed to be full of them, vaguely remembered—remote relatives, one-time trade unionists, kibitzers from the old neighborhood altered into seriousness for the occasion. The man was round-faced and heavy-jowled, wearing spectacles with black plastic frames—the doctor. He nodded at her and extended his hand; shaking his hand and saying his name, Rhoda felt herself smiling the stiff smile of a loser in a very long, grueling sports event. At least it’s over, she was thinking (as though it had been something temporary), there’s nothing left to happen.
5
AS LEONARD’S PHARMACY prospered in the post-war boom, he began to work shorter hours. Two extras were hired to work behind the counter—a somewhat silly older man and a housewife who wore noisy costume jewelry—while Leonard devoted himself to filling prescriptions and ordering the pharmaceutical stock, keeping abreast of advances by reading the medical journals.
As a schoolboy, Leonard had felt the desire to become a doctor. He was the middle child of three—his father had been a cobbler, a harsh, honorable man who beat his children with a strap when they were disobedient; his mother had been sweeter, mild and ineffectual (they were both dead now). Leonard had been a great student, the one groomed to be a professional. There was an older brother, small-boned and soft-spoken like himself (but not so quick), who had always been kind to Leonard. His younger sister Eppie had never been quite right in the head. She was dull and dispirited, she seemed to care for nothing; when you brought her things to play with, she let them fall from her hands. She was all right in school; she learned to read and write with her class, but she would never play. At recess she sat by herself, unbuttoning and buttoning her shoes or pulling up grass. Once she climbed up a tree and would not come down. Before she entered high school, Mrs. Taber took her to a store to buy a gym suit, but Eppie would not try it on; she crossed her arms in front of her chest and wrapped them about her sides, rocking up and down; when they pleaded with her, she beat her elbows against the counter. At home she took to lying in bed and feigning illness; one morning she was found hiding crouched under the bed.
In her teens Eppie was put in a state institution. The family went to visit her twice a month. Eppie never complained, despite the horror of the place. Her father tipped the orderly to make sure that she was kept clean, and she was, she said. Leonard was the most loyal in his visits: for years he never forgot her birthday. Once, to Leonard alone, his mother confessed a lingering suspicion about Eppie’s birth and delivery. The doctor, she said, had wrenched so hard with the forceps that he had left, beneath the ordinary scabs, visible dents in the infant’s skull. “He meant well, I suppose,” Leonard’s mother said. “Who knows?”
Thereafter the whole notion of being a doctor sank in Leonard’s estimation, in the deep figurative sense of something falling, slipping away: a si
nking sensation. He had no fascination with the dreadful; the responsibility had become abhorrent to him.
He still loved the intricacies of medicines; at a time when the influx of new drugs developed since the war was overwhelming, the quality and extent of his stock was unparalleled in the neighborhood. He was known for being able to explain, when asked, just what good a particular substance was going to do for you. Physicians themselves often phoned him with questions.
His partner Nat still handled the books; he was twenty years Leonard’s senior, and he was now talking about selling his interest and retiring to Florida. Leonard was not ready to buy out the business: he was conservative in his ways of accruing money and he distrusted credit. Still, his stocks had done well, and he began to tease his partner about the luxuries of Miami sunshine.
In his expanded spare time, Leonard was active in volunteer work for the town’s Community Chest. He was a regular at monthly meetings, and in the autumn he canvassed door-to-door collecting donations. His photograph appeared in the local paper for having pledged a continuing supply of medicines and bandages to the Ambulance Fund. Leonard watched the total of donations increase with the excitement with which he watched a baseball scoreboard; it was his hobby now.
This year he and Rhoda were invited to the annual kick-off fund-raising party at the home of a surgeon named McPhearson. To Leonard it was simply a meeting in evening dress; Rhoda was both excited and dubious. The McPhearsons’ place was farther out in the suburbs, in swooping hilly country where the houses had manorial lawns and the streets had no sidewalks. “It’s that one,” Leonard said, “the one that looks like a castle.” “Tudor,” Rhoda said.