Yet somewhere along the way, Moses had stopped defending them to him, because he thought it was high time they defended themselves. What he hadn’t realized, until a couple of months ago, was just how far-reaching his dad’s disappointment in all of them was and how deeply vindictive he could be. Mo suspected that over the last few weeks his dad had been setting his own plan in motion and that this plan had a three-prong approach—first, to poison their mom against the three of them, second, to render her non compos mentis, and third, to get power of attorney, thereby kinging himself. For it still seemed far too coincidental to Moses that his mother, the wife of a research pulmonologist who specialized in rare forms of progressive and life-threatening lung diseases, should contract one herself, this one as particularly pernicious as it was idiopathic, meaning that no one, not the doctors who treated her or the specialists in the field, had any idea where it came from, although Moses thought he might: his dad. How easy it would have been for his dad to figure out the precipitating factors that could lead to the disease and then introduce them to her environment. A particular aerosol, perhaps, or a cleaning agent that she used on the floor, the fumes of which only she would breathe while he was safely away in his lab miles away. An airborne toxin, maybe, administered while she slept and that irritated and damaged her lungs, and her lungs only, for he’d be certain not to let himself come into contact with it. There were countless ways to kill someone and Moses wondered if his dad hadn’t figured out the best way possible. From a young age, Moses had understood that a vein of greed ran directly through his dad, who had controlled every single aspect of the family’s finances, including his wife’s inheritance, with a ruthlessness that bordered on the fanatical. While his children fell into financial wrack and ruin, his dad sat by and watched it happen with furtive glee.
“I can’t wait for the day when all of you are off my dime,” his dad used to tell them. This coming from the man who’d retired practically the day Grandpa Ernie died and bought a brand-new Mercedes convertible while Edith drowned under a mountain of debt after her divorce. This from the man who’d showed up at the house with a used barbecue, for which Moses had thanked him, but then who’d thrown a tantrum because Moses hadn’t thanked him quite enough.
As he got out of his car and wandered into the house, Moses wanted to tell his siblings that even if they managed to talk their dad into leaving, he wasn’t about to go quietly and certainly not without what he thought he deserved—a chunk of change commensurate with the years he’d spent as a father and a husband, however incompetent he’d been at both. There was no way Moses saw them getting rid of him that easily, no way without involving their mom, whom they’d sworn to keep all of this from. In some odd way, he understood, this was her fault more than anyone else’s, for if she’d only left him when she’d had the chance, they never would have had to discuss such grisly plans. Yet here we are, Moses thought, knocking on the guest room door and entering to find his mom resting on her bed, reading a magazine.
“You’re alive,” he said, delighted to see her free of a bandage or a cast.
“I tripped,” she said, looking up, her face a blend of emotions, seriousness and sorrow among them. “I’ve never fallen in my life,” and she patted the bed. “Come sit with me for a few minutes.”
“Sure, Ma,” he said, taking a seat beside her. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Honestly, I’m still not sure,” she said, rubbing the back of her head. “Dad and I were taking a walk around the cul-de-sac—the doctor said I need to get as much cardiovascular exercise as possible—and we were on our fourth or fifth loop, and I just went down. Well, down and backward. You should have seen your dad, Mo. Absolutely beside himself. He says I must have slipped on a patch of oil.”
Moses studied his mom, the clear plastic tube of oxygen running from the tank to her nose. The sight made his insides run cold. He studied her to see what she wasn’t telling him, or rather what she was telling him without telling him. Yet her face remained impassive and darkly gleaming with whatever secrets she was keeping. Perhaps these secrets are the only things keeping her alive, he thought. “Are you still on your first tank?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, they last me a few weeks,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious,” he said, thinking of the video. Should he show it to her and let her come to her own conclusions, or should he wait for the three of them to confront their dad when the time was right? What if the time was never right and they missed their tiny window of opportunity? His parents were scheduled to leave tomorrow morning to drive back to Texas because she had an appointment with her pulmonologist on Wednesday. The hours were shrinking away from him, and Moses decided then and there that his mom could never comprehend the depths of his dad’s depravity.
“Do me a favor, will you? Do something nice and take your dad fishing. Get him out of the house. He keeps hovering, and it’s driving me nuts,” she said.
“I will if I have time,” he said.
“Good. Now I’m going to rest up before tonight’s big event,” she said. “Pandora told me the network’s sending a gal over to do our hair and makeup!”
“Yes, they always do that,” he said, rising and kissing her on the cheek.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“No reason,” he said. “Because you’re my mom, and I love you.”
He hadn’t seen her cry in ages, not since he’d left home for college, and when the tears started falling from her eyes, it was all he could do not to cry himself. He didn’t blame her, not like Jacob, who he suspected only wanted to off their dad to get back at their mom. Jacob was nothing if not vengeful himself, although Moses knew exactly where his unforgiving spirit came from—those nights his mom visited him, but also from someplace else, a single moment in time when they were still boys and Moses palmed him in the nose and they’d had to stop at IHOP on the way to the airport. It was a memory Jacob had relayed to him only yesterday, one that Jacob said had returned to him years after the fact, when he was already living in Brooklyn and was writing his first play, Possessive Plural, about an incestuous affair between a mother and a son, who, after murdering the boy’s father, sold the family house, bought a new car, and went on a road trip, stopping off in every IHOP along the way to fuck in the bathroom. The memory kept returning, long after he’d finished writing the play and found a theater to produce it. On Friday, while Edith was in Claremont and Dietrich was napping, Moses had taken Jacob for a drive, ending at Calabasas Lake. It was there, in the gazebo at the lake’s edge, where Jacob recalled that morning thirty years ago—the day after Edith’s bat mitzvah—when their mom had piled them into the car and headed for the airport.
“You never apologized for hitting me in the nose,” Jacob began.
“You were being a twerp.” He shrugged. “You had it coming.”
“You were my big brother,” Jacob said. “And, no, I didn’t.”
“You want me to tell you I’m sorry?” Moses asked.
“It’d be a start,” he reasoned. “Considering.”
“Considering?”
“What else happened to me that morning.”
“What else happened to you?”
“You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you,” Jacob said, pausing. “Mom kissed me.”
“Mom kissed you? Mom kissed you how? What are you talking about?”
“She was wiping the blood off my chest and leaned in and kissed me on the lips,” Jacob said. “That’s the truth, Mo.”
“No, it’s not,” he choked. “That did not happen.”
“It happened. I can’t prove it, but I did write an entire play about it. I have no reason to lie. Not anymore.”
They stared silently at each other.
“She…our mother…kissed you?” Moses repeated, his voice full of disgust, though he wasn’t sure if it was directed at Jacob or at the very idea of what he was saying or that he was saying it with such candor, as if it co
uld have actually happened.
“She didn’t just kiss me,” he admitted. “She French-kissed me.”
“She did not French-kiss you, Jacob. Stop making stuff up,” Moses snapped. “You always made stuff up when we were kids. You’re a consummate, pathological liar. Isn’t that what Dad used to say? I never wanted to believe it, but today I just might. You’re talking about a woman who’s dying, Jacob. It’s…so utterly preposterous I really should bash you in the nose again for old time’s sake.”
“I know all that, Mo, but she wasn’t always dying. She packed us into the car and drove away from the house. She was leaving him, Mo, I’m certain of it. Then you punched me in the face and we had to stop because I was bleeding and she took me into that bathroom to clean me up and…she kissed me,” Jacob said helplessly. “I’m not saying that what she did was right or wrong. I’m not ascribing judgment. Well, maybe a little. But it’s something that happened, and I had to tell you. But I’m not going to sit here and take your crap, either. I’m not about to let you or anyone else tell me I can’t trust my own memories, because that’s what our asshole father has tried to do to us our entire lives.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Moses said, beyond stunned. He wanted to ask Jacob if there was a word for that, but he hated his brother too much at that moment to ask him much of anything.
“Then we left the bathroom and joined you guys. We ate our pancakes and drove back to the house,” Jacob said. “Dad never knew we left home. He never even knew she was going to leave with us.”
“He knew,” Moses corrected. “Because I told him. Later.”
“That explains it then,” Jacob said.
“What does it explain?” he asked.
“Why he was nice to us for about a minute,” Jacob replied. “I always wondered about that. I just thought he’d changed. I was wrong.”
“You were always right about him,” Moses conceded. “I’m sorry.”
“For my nose?”
“No, for not listening to you,” Moses said. “And I guess for your nose.”
This exchange rattled around in Moses’s head as he left the guest room and shut the door, running into his dad, who he had assumed had driven Edith to Claremont, for the minivan had not been in the driveway upon his return. The front door opened again, and this time Jacob and Dietrich strolled in, no longer wearing those insulting, despicable getups, but back in jeans and T-shirts.
“The tech guy’s here,” Jacob said, ushering Dietrich up the stairs.
Sure enough, the front door swung open yet again and in walked a tall, skinny kid in a black T-shirt with THE JACOBSONS! in white block letters emblazoned across the front. On the back, the show’s tagline:5 X THE LOVE, 10 X THE VOLUME.
“Hey, Mr. Orenstein-Jacobson. I’d like to start on the room this shindig is happening in,” Chandler said. “Take some measurements. Do the do. Cam it up.”
Moses led him into the dining room, which sat off the kitchen at the far end of the horseshoe and directly opposite Pandora’s office, though unlike Pandora’s office, the dining room was made up of two glass walls—one that looked directly out onto the backyard, the other onto a grassy declivity separating the Jacobson property from their neighbors’, the dreaded, cantankerous Frieda and Milton Rothman, an older, retired Jewish couple who were as prickly as their precious cacti, Pandora liked to say. When they’d first taken possession of the house from Pandora’s own cuckoo of a dad—a gift to them and a tax write-off for him—Pandora had beseeched the couple to have the cacti removed, yet Frieda and Milton had remained adamantly opposed to her request. They had seen the new homeowners as interlopers on what had been a peaceful, quiet block, “until the arrival of your unruly boys and your hotheaded wife,” according to Frieda, the ornerier of the two, who had mentioned this to Moses a few days after what became known as Cactusgate around Edelweiss Estates.
“They’re old,” Moses told Pandora. “And they’ve been here a lot longer than we have.”
“They’re evil,” she said. “And it’s just like you to take the side that isn’t mine.”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” he said.
“Exactly!” she said.
So Moses went over to try to convince the Rothmans and again the request was shot down, though this time Frieda asked him to stay for a cup of tea, which he did, because he thought it might help down the line. Though in trying to accommodate and placate both parties, he knew that sooner or later he’d merely just wind up alienating one or the other.
“Having grown up with a combative, litigious dad, the last thing I wanted was to become him, so instead, what did I do?” Moses asked Frieda as he sipped his tea. “I traded him in for Pandora,” he said, joking somewhat. “No, but really, her bark is worse than her bite.”
“Well, I just hope she doesn’t snap at us again,” Frieda said and Moses detected an accent, “because then I will be forced to call the pound,” and she smiled, the first time he’d seen it. “I am sure she’s a nice, reasonable woman. She just wants to protect her children.”
“Yes, that’s true, she does,” he said. “So it sounds like you’re from Germany?”
“Austria. From Innsbruck,” she said and he detected the tiniest of blushes rising in her face.
“My grandparents were Viennese. They took my brother to Innsbruck when he was a kid. He came back with one of those funny green felt hats. He wore it around the house for weeks until our dad made fun of him and told him he looked like a prancing gay leprechaun.”
“Your father said that?” she asked, surprised.
“My dad said many hateful things to us,” he said. “That was tame by comparison.”
“No one should speak to a child like that,” she pronounced firmly. “Milton and I have a son. He was born here, in California. We never see him.” This came as a shock to Moses. “He married a Catholic girl against his father’s wishes. It was terrible. Milton never got over it.”
“Just for marrying a non-Jew? That seems…harsh,” Moses offered tentatively.
“He married outside the faith,” she said. “I was hurt, but not like Milton. What some of our own relatives lived through only to have our boy disavow his own Judaism? It was a betrayal. Unforgivable to some,” and she poured herself another cup of tea. “I speak to him on occasion. Don’t tell Milton.” Moses said he wouldn’t dream of it. “We have three grandchildren who Milton doesn’t even know exist. If I bring Ezra up, Milton just changes the subject. They own a house a few miles from here, in Tarzana. Can you imagine living so close and yet so far?”
Yes, Moses could imagine it, because that’s how he’d felt while growing up in his dad’s house. “I’m sorry you have to go through that,” he said.
“It’s Milton who suffers for it, not me,” she said. “Oh, he’d never admit it, but I know he does. I catch him looking at Ezra’s baby pictures sometimes and know his heart’s still breaking. But sometimes what we believe in is more important than whom we believe in.”
Some two years later, nothing much had changed between the neighbors, except that Milton had taken ill and was housebound and Frieda left him alone for hours at a time to go visit Ezra and her grandchildren. Moses only knew that because he saw her at the Commons once, in the window of Slices of Heaven Bakery, seated at a table with a man, who looked like a younger version of Milton, and three teens, who could have only been her grandchildren. The cacti still remained an unresolved contention, with Moses still caught between Frieda, who would not budge, and Pandora, who regularly slipped notes into the Rothmans’ mailbox with landscaping brochures and estimates.
But now that Edith had arrived, Moses was hoping to be able to put the issue to bed at last. Edith, with her mediation skills and her powers of persuasion, which she’d been honing for years, starting at home by brokering deals between Moses and Jacob when they were deadlocked on whose turn it was to take out the trash or mow the yard. It was Edith, Moses suspected, who’d insinuated herself between her parents a
fter their Point Dume proclamation, and who must have talked their mother into giving their father another chance. He couldn’t be sure of it, yet it seemed completely plausible, more so now that he was having his own marital troubles, and he wondered if he shouldn’t encourage his sister to whisper in Pandora’s ear. Not that Pandora would ever listen to her or take her advice, but this was an arena in which Edith did seem to excel. Yes, he and Pandora were in the middle of it and because of that they had lost their perspectives. Their marriage had become a house in which the power had gone out and everything was shadows and dark corners and sharp edges and broken glass. And he was tired of cutting his feet on Pandora’s disappointment and running into new walls she kept erecting, just as Pandora was tired of talking to the specter of his former self and feeling as if he didn’t care. He didn’t want to lose his wife or his family. That said, he was pretty sure he didn’t want to give his sister any incentive to meddle in his affairs, although that’s what she would do whether asked her to or not. “I was only trying to help,” she’d say—but he knew Pandora wouldn’t take unsolicited advice, good or bad, from anyone, especially not from Edith. No, if Edith really wanted to help, she should keep her nose out of it. Which was not to say that Moses wouldn’t enlist her to smooth out relations with the Rothmans, though this weekend was probably the worst of all possible times to go about it.
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