by Joan Silber
“Gone with the wind,” Rhoda said, casting her eyes up melodramatically. Still it troubled her faintly to think of Nat’s aisles of cabinets stripped, gutted, and reconstructed. “What about the tradition of the folksy smalltown druggist? It means nothing to you, you moderne thing, you.”
“It means superstition, that’s what. Stupidity and stubbornness.” He had these odd streaks of hardness in him. At Friday night discussions after services at the temple he was beginning to insist on the notion that you could be a Jew without believing in a revealed God. (The rabbi thanked him for raising the level of disputation.)
Now he threw himself into the project of remodeling the pharmacy. From the library he brought home books on the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. Once she caught him looking at photographs of Gaudí’s apartment house in Spain. “I trust that’s not what you have in mind,” she said. “Of course, it might help business by making people feel sick.” He chuckled.
In the end he did less refurbishing than she expected. He settled for a larger display window, glass shelves and counters, fluorescent lights, and a floor of beige linoleum squares marbled with white. She called it his “ice palace”—half-alarmed that it might seem cold and unwelcoming—but once the goods were on the shelves, it looked very simply like what it was: a well-stocked store.
“It looks quite human,” she said, by way of applause.
“Aha,” Leonard answered. “You can see it’s really true what they say—there’s a very high human pleasure in the perception of order.” She couldn’t believe he was talking about a drugstore. He was not.
“My, my,” she murmured. She was actually moved in some distant way by what he’d said. The rows of bottles, arranged in degrees of size, became interesting; her eye began to form patterns of the labels’ colors. She settled for predicting, “I know it’ll be a big hit.”
There was, in fact, no way to tell whether it was a big hit or not. The same customers frequented the store, providing approximately the same amount of business. Leonard was not sure what he’d expected, but he felt a vague disappointment, so that eventually even the most rapturous compliments on the store’s new look galled him. For perhaps not the first time in his life he became falsely modest as a symptom of faint bitterness. “I like it,” he would say, shrugging.
Rhoda was so used to his working late hours that when she came home from shopping in the late afternoon and walked upstairs to change her shoes, she almost tripped on the threshold when she heard his voice saying, “Is that you?” He was lying in bed reading a newspaper. Her first thought was that something had gone wrong at the store so that he’d had to close early. The fluorescent lights—she’d always thought the electrician had been too offhand when he explained about the wiring. “I just got so tired all of a sudden,” Leonard said.
“That’s awfully sensible of you to come home when you’re not feeling well,” she said, sitting on the bed. “Not like you at all.”
He seemed better later in the evening; he ate lightly, then he went back to the bedroom, although he kept the light on. There was nothing apparently wrong with him and she wondered if he were simply in low spirits now that the store was done, a post-holiday letdown. But it wasn’t like him to choose to be sick.
The only person in the family who actually liked staying still was her father. “Not that my father wasn’t an intelligent man in his day,” Rhoda said, later in the night, as she straightened the pillow on her own bed and readied herself for sleep. She was lying under the covers while Leonard got up to close the window. She had been reading; a bestseller lay with its face down on the night table.
“You’ll break the binding that way,” Leonard said, coming over to the bedside and shutting the book properly. “But your father’s not so old. How old is he? Sixty-five?”
“Sixty-eight. Look at the way he walks. He’s been an old man probably since he first came to this country. Nothing was the way he’d imagined. What did they know when they came? None of them knew anything. My mother came a year after to join him and she found him sleeping on a park bench.” This did not sound true as Rhoda said it—perhaps her father, who could fall asleep anywhere, had just been dozing over his paper—she had never thought about it before. “I think he never recovered from the humiliation. They were very well-off, his family. Very formal people, you should see them in the pictures, all sitting up straight like stuffed owls. He wasn’t raised to take bad luck gracefully, if you know what I mean.”
“You weren’t even alive then.”
“I know,” Rhoda admitted. She had absorbed her mother’s stories so totally that it surprised her that she hadn’t been there. “But he looks very pompous and handsome in the old pictures. Completely different, very self-assured. But maybe he just had a good photographer and he was always the same.”
Rhoda, who now took her father on occasional outings in an effort to maintain his interest in life, had brought him that morning to see Leonard’s remodeled store. “Very beautiful. Clean,” he had said. “Finish your business here. I’ll wait outside in the car.” Waiting outside in the car was a device he had developed years before, when his wife’s visits had extended to hours of talk-talk-talk. He would wait, stiffly sitting behind the wheel of the old Hudson, sometimes leaning on the horn when he grew impatient. Now that Rhoda was his caretaker, he seemed to find comfort in the habit of waiting for her; today she had found him slumped asleep in the front seat.
“He gets on my nerves,” she said. “And yet in his own way he likes company.”
“I think,” Leonard said, shutting off the lamp and getting into bed, “he’s gotten worse in the past year, since your mother passed away. But he deserves respect. He’s a dignified person.”
Rhoda said, rolling to the edge of her bed that was nearest to Leonard’s, “He has terrible table manners.”
When Rhoda awoke, there was the sound of a mosquito in the room. She had been reading a historical novel about an heiress on a clove plantation in the West Indies and in her half-stirred waking she wanted to make some joke to Leonard about how they needed mosquito netting. He was the lighter sleeper; there was a good chance he’d been bothered by the noises. But, no, the sound was his snoring—short, whistling wheezes. Something was wrong: he was gasping for breath. He must be dreaming, as the dog did, that he was being chased. “Wake up,” she called, nudging him. “It’s just a bad dream, it’s all right.”
A terrible choking hiss issued from his lips and his chest heaved as though thrust upward by some rudely brutal push. Again she nudged him: he would not wake up. She switched on the lamp. His face was contorted with the effort to breathe and the sounds of his rattling gasps became louder—frightening: they were nothing like Leonard; they were the animal noises of extremity. With one guttural push there appeared on his mouth a foam of blood-tinged sputum; it dripped down the corners of his lips onto his face; like a drunk or a baby, he did not feel the mess of it. “Oh, my God,” Rhoda called out, shaking him. (Was it all right to shake him?)
She struggled with his jackknifing torso to prop him upright with the idea that this might help his breathing. I don’t know what to do, she was moaning to herself. I don’t know what this is. She went to the hall to phone for an ambulance, hearing, all the while she spoke, the whoops of his unearthly efforts for air.
Her voice was high and hoarse as she gave her address. “Tell them to send,” she tried to say slowly, “whatever they send for a heart attack. I don’t know what it is.”
Having called for help, she gave up thinking what to do—leaving it to doctors, to hospitals—and surrendered to participation in the mounting horror. All the while she waited for the ambulance she called his name, a vain effort to share in the peril of his struggle, primitively to beat a drum for his heart. (It could not be his heart. He was forty-two years old.) She wanted to drown out the sound of his hideous gasping. She did not know when the sound stopped and she continued to call his name. (Now it’s over, she thought. He can rest, he can recover.) He was
livid and moist: pity poured from her like a flooding pool, which made her think of the children. I’m the only one awake, she thought wildly; it was newly terrifying. Leonard. She shook him once more.
She would not leave him until the doorbell downstairs sounded four times; before she ran to unlock the door for the emergency squad, she stood for a moment; then she touched the corners of his mouth with her knuckles to wipe from them the still-wet smear of spittle, tinged with blood.
The red light on the top of the ambulance was whirling—she could see it through the low-hanging branches of the chestnut tree in the front of the house. A policeman and two men in white jackets with emblems on the pockets were standing in the doorway. “He’s in the bedroom straight at the top of the stairs,” she said.
“Mrs. Taber,” the policeman said. “If you’ll tell me where your coat is.” She was still in her nightgown.
“I’ll get it,” she said. “I’m all right.”
She went to the hall closet.
“Are there children?” the policeman asked. “How old is the oldest?”
“Nine.”
“Think they’ll be all right until we call someone from the hospital?” Rhoda nodded. The two men were bringing Leonard down on a stretcher. She watched them slide him into the back of the ambulance; waiting in cold readiness was an array of tubes, machines, a mask—they would not let her look. They made her sit in the front seat, separated by white metal doors, as the ambulance shrieked its way to the hospital.
She waited in the corridor, her nightgown flapping foolishly about her ankles. The policeman, who had followed in his patrol car, waited with her. He paced outside the phone booth, looking in to check on her, as she called Sally Finch to come stay with the children. An accident, she was saying; it was the only word she could think of. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. We hope so too. They were heavy sleepers, the girls, you could move Claire from one room to another and she would sleep right through. She thought of them, innocent and oblivious in their beds.
The policeman gestured for her to sit in a chair while a clerk asked her questions for the forms. The harsh, curative smell of antiseptic was making Rhoda feel sick. The odor would be familiar to Leonard when he came to. She was embarrassed before the policeman because her voice wavered. She was explaining that she didn’t have her Blue Cross card with her when a doctor tapped her on the shoulder from behind.
He led her to a small square office which had been painted a bright, shocking, senseless yellow. He’s going to ask me to sign a release for an operation, she thought; how fat he is, so young too, you’d think a doctor would know better; but he was saying, cardiac arrest, dead on arrival, know how you must feel. She was sobbing quietly, all the while thinking that she had lived for years under a misunderstanding about life, always missing the point that the core of it was tyrannically physical. “He was so intelligent,” she heard herself whispering. She was going to say other things, truisms, to manufacture a eulogy on the spot, to make conversation with this man. The sound of her own voice jolted her.
She was sorry that at the moment the doctor had given her the news she’d been thinking of other things. She was trying to memorize what he’d said. She wanted to ask him to tell her again. “I have to go home,” she said.
Afterwards Rhoda was to have no clear recollection of how the news was disseminated. The first days of mourning were confused and besmudged with social activity; masses of people swarmed the house. Someone else told Suzanne—she never knew who, her brother Andy perhaps—and she could vaguely remember telling Claire in her low, lecturing voice, something crazy about how people’s hearts worked.
Rhoda preserved in herself a faint sense that she had perhaps heard wrong. A mistake: it was against all logic as well as against all decency. All around her in her own house she heard the voices of lesser people, still spitefully breathing, full-blooded, and distasteful in their familiarity. They were all more likely cases for fatal effects. Hinda’s Stanley was six years older and had an ulcer. Her father, shuffling and stooping, inexplicably continued in the same middling health he had “enjoyed” for years. The fury she felt contemplating possibilities, permutations of disaster unrealized, made her want to jump out of her skin, to rend her clothes and tear her hair: the ancient mode, after all.
The children had no such sense of protest. Claire, in particular, was so little that the shock met no resistance in her; she was accustomed to being behindhand in understanding the way things were. It disturbed Rhoda when people inquired too closely after the children. The children were fine; currently Claire was at the Finches’, Suzanne was staying with Andy; they were so fine that she could not be unwell, she had a sense of reserving herself for them, of resisting sleep so that she might be awake when they returned and continued in their relentless needs to be fed, provided for, talked to. They were blocking her from the luxury of mourning.
These things she thought when she could distinguish particular sentiments in her own will. At other moments she was at the mercy of something more simple and blurred. The fabled numbness of new widows had not set in. She felt instead a constant abstract panic, as though a room just behind her was on fire, and she had somehow to act as though it did not concern her, to pour coffee for guests amidst the roar and the flickering, to set her mouth in conversation: it was all for the good of some normal continuance she could barely remember; meanwhile bodies turned, screamed, and burned. People took her hand to soothe her.
Of the actual, specific, wrenching pain that Leonard was gone she could not think. She would think of it later; she had put it aside to save herself. It was all she could do now to speak in sentences; a syllable was constantly rising in her gorge—something wordless like the vague horror of flames outside her vision—she fought to keep it down, as one fights nausea. It was the natural translation of an anguish so acute that it ran rampant through the body. She felt as though she had been dragged through streets, not allowed to rest. All this served to distract her with a sense of unjust bodily discomfort, and dwelling on this, she bore it fretfully like a patient.
6
IN THE DAYS after the funeral, after the children had returned and masses of people still thronged the lower floors of the house, all her visitors arrived with boxes of candy in their hands. Chocolates mostly: dark ’n’ light assortments, cherries with cordial centers, butter creams. A peculiar custom: she was too old to be pacified by sweets; for years (since her gall bladder operation, before her marriage) she’d been unable to swallow a piece of chocolate without feeling sickish—a fact known to most of her friends—and yet they arrived blindly bearing pound-packages. “People,” she explained to Claire, who had been pointedly announcing her mother’s dietary restrictions to guests, “don’t think. They don’t know what else to do. Stop opening another one. We’re saving them—in the china closet drawer, that’s right.”
Sylvia Shepp was pinching Claire’s cheek. “A face like a little doll.” “That hurts,” Claire complained. Sylvia crooned, “Oh, it does not, you big baby.”
“She’s not used to that,” Rhoda said. She herself was expending a certain concentration in shrinking from the continual prod of visitors who kept patting her gingerly, as though testing her figure for stability.
No one seemed to know how to behave. They were simpering and childish; they cast their eyes up balefully to hers, seizing upon her look of glazed hurt as an invitation for sympathetic contact. She grew vague in conversation and apt to mumble, a symptom taken as fatigue, which was in fact an impotent sign of outrage at their presumption.
“Listen,” Sylvia Shepp said, looking up from Claire, “if you want this one to stay with us, it’s fine. There’s Rita for her to play with.”
“The young ones bounce back quickly,” Philip Marantz was saying. “And you too. You’re a tough cookie, I know it.” He had his hand on Rhoda’s shoulder.
“Later she can be a tough cookie,” Annie Marantz said. “Now she should rest and sit down. Why aren’t you sitting down?�
� Mr. Dinger, the plumber, stood up sharply to give his chair to Rhoda.
“Oh, Mr. Dinger,” Bev Davis cooed. “I’ve never seen you in a suit before.”
“Doesn’t he look handsome?” Hinda said.
“Where’s my Suzy?” Mr. Dinger asked.
“He loves children,” Evvie Fern told her husband.
Liz and Herb Hofferberg were pressed into a corner, talking only to each other. Maisie, the maid, was the sole visitor dressed in all black; her eyes shone yellow and glassy under a pillbox hat with a veil. Leonard’s brother broke away and began moving toward Rhoda; he looked awful—Rhoda had a great horror of hearing his soft voice.
“Why don’t you go upstairs for a while?” Annie said. “You’re allowed to be tired, you know.” Rhoda moved toward the staircase, noticing as she did that the cube-shaped woman near the couch was Molly Gotham, her principal years ago when she’d taught at Rock Street (Rockbottom, they’d called it) Junior High. “Isn’t that nice of you to come?” Hinda was saying, as the woman accounted for herself.
Upstairs, with the pillows tucked into the chenille spreads, were the twin beds, with the night table between them. The one farthest from the wall was still hers. She lay flat on her back to avoid wrinkling her dress, and then, miraculously—as though her body were oblivious not just to pain and catastrophe but to day and night—she slept.
When she awoke the room was darkened; faint light showed around the edges of the window shades. She made her way downstairs where the living room, hushed and dimly lit with one lamp, was emptied of guests. Food remained, piled on the dining room and cocktail tables—a catered turkey half picked over, platters of cold cuts, and an untouched steamship basket of fruit in cellophane. Alone by the buffet was a tall, stoop-shouldered shape in a hideous shiny black suit. He nodded over his paper plate; he had waited for her: her father. “You’re up now. Eat,” he said. After all, he was a man who loved waiting. “Good,” he said, pointing toward the turkey. He could not chew without smacking his lips. He was speaking again, reassuring her. He was going to stay overnight. Andy’s wife had made up a bed for him in the sun parlor. Not to worry. Very comfortable.