If Julian had been beside her, he would have cackled at the irony, ribbing her, for she finally understood that if she’d been a better mother, she would not have let him mistreat her children as horribly as he had. And though she’d made an uneasy and, for the most part, a resigned peace with this some ages ago, she’d never understood his monstrous unwillingness to attach to his children, especially to Jacob. Although Roz understood she wasn’t supposed to have a favorite, it was all too clear that she had preferred her youngest, though this was probably because he was the most vulnerable and most prone to Julian’s ridicule, given his boyhood tendencies to dress up in her nightgowns and stomp around the house in her high heels. Things that made her chuckle but that offended Julian to the core, Julian who took these moments personally—acts of transgression, he called them. They disgusted him—disgusted him so much that at one point, when Jacob was seven, he cornered his terrified son and shouted at him, “You were born a boy. Start acting like one, for God’s sake.”
She might have loved all of her children equally, but she found she had the most in common with Jacob—that he was a homosexual made no difference. In fact, she might have learned a thing or two about men from him, she thought, and a memory came to her, bubbling to the surface as Julian’s last and final breath bubbled to the surface: her very first PFLAG meeting, which she’d attended alone because Julian wouldn’t hear of coming with her.
She had sat among other mothers and fathers in quiet discomfort, thinking that it would have been nice if Julian had at least shown some interest in coming with her, for Jacob’s sake. But Julian wouldn’t dream of it. “It’s not an issue for me, Roz,” he’d said, though of course it was. She’d seen how Julian behaved when Jacob came out to them, how Jacob had felt so terrorized by Julian’s reaction that he’d flown back to L.A. that very day. How cruel Julian had been. Though several years had passed since then, she’d seen how Jacob’s sexuality had become something else Julian could use against him, spurring interactions between them that she was forced to defend.
Granted, it was an odd memory for her to have at that moment, as her husband sank to the bottom of the pool, but in some way her recollection of the utter aloneness she’d felt at that meeting was indicative of her entire marriage and helped further justify her own feelings about killing him, feelings that went beyond trying to save her brood.
Without another thought, remorseful or otherwise, Roz went back into the house, where she rinsed off, changed into a fresh nightgown, then climbed back into bed, waiting for Dietrich to set the next part of their plan into motion. Following the Seder, when everyone was busy returning clothes to hangers and jewelry to boxes, she’d taken him into the downstairs guest room and briefed him.
She lay in the dark, gazing at Julian’s side of the bed, the digital clock on the nightstand reading 3:23. A couple of minutes later, she heard the floor creak as Dietrich made his way downstairs “to go for a swim because he couldn’t sleep.” Dietrich tapped on the door and entered, whispering, “Mrs. Jacobson, it is I.”
He was wearing a pair of swimming trunks, his long, lean body angular and defined, with a ridged stomach and a tiny trail of blond hair that led down into the elastic of his suit. Seeing him in his bathing suit recalled all the family trips they had taken down to the Gulf of Mexico when the kids were small and she wanted to ask him about his own family, if they’d ever taken trips and where, but it would have to wait for another time, for she needed to rise and feign surprise. “Yes,” she said. “Now it’s time to wake the house. Well, only my children.”
“I will get up Jacob. He will do the rest,” he said, and she thought he smiled.
“Thank you, Dietrich,” she said.
She waited, hearing footsteps rushing past her door and whispers, loud and fretful, from Edith. She heard an enormous thud, as if something large and weighty had been dropped, and shushing and more heated whispers, a door being opened and shut. She got up and dressed, waiting for the alarm to go off, which it finally did—4:00 A.M. She shut it off and left the room, dragging her oxygen tank behind her into the den, where she met Jacob, Edith, and Moses, who’d just come in from outside. “You’re all so thoughtful to get up to see us off,” she said. “Is Dad loading the minivan?”
She hated to deceive her kids like this, but deceive them she must, for their own sake and for the sake of her grandsons. “Ma, it looks like…Daddy’s had an accident,” Edith started, glancing at her brothers and looking away. “He’s dead, Ma. Daddy’s dead.”
“Dead? But, Thistle, that can’t be. He was…we were asleep,” she said.
“Come see for yourself,” said Jacob, his voice strangely devoid of sorrow or cheer, simply uninflected and matter-of-fact, as if he were reporting the weather.
She followed her children into the garage and there he was, propped up in the backseat of Mo’s Expedition, looking like he was waiting to be chauffeured around. “Why is he in there?” she asked, slightly unnerved. This was not part of the plan, which had involved capitalizing on the rampant rise of anti-Semitic attacks and a faceless (fabricated) assailant, whom Dietrich was supposed to have seen fleeing the scene, a bat in his hand. She could not have been any clearer with him that this was how it had to go, that it was the perfect explanation to a perfect crime. Nowhere in this foolproof plan of hers had she accounted for the possibility—the certainty, she now saw—that her children would bungle it all so spectacularly by moving the body. To her utter dismay, Dietrich had not been able to convince them that he’d seen someone about, they weren’t buying his death-by-unknown-anti-Semite explanation, and now she had to deal with the fallout of his failure. “What have you three done?” How inept were her children that they couldn’t even spin a narrative about a dead body served up to them on a silver platter? Had they all just simply panicked and taken leave of their imaginations? She couldn’t blame Edith or Moses for such a response, but Jacob? Her youngest had imagination in spades. Perhaps this had just been too much for him and he had simply short-circuited. Whatever the case, she was horrified by what they’d done and how they’d managed to screw up her inspired work.
“We just wanted to give you some peace,” Moses explained, clearly believing that one of his siblings had killed his father. Well, if this is how it’s going to play itself out, then so be it, she thought. Better that than having them turn on one another. “We can take care of you. You can move out here now. We’ll build you a cottage, and you can be closer to your grandsons. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Ma?”
“I’d like to know which one of you killed him,” she said, deciding the only way to secure their silence was to make them all believe one of them had done it without the others’ approval. They all began to bicker, hurling accusations, until Roz stepped in. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter now, does it? What’s done is done,” hoping this would be the end of it.
“We should have just left him where he was,” Edith said plaintively. “We should have just listened to Dietrich; he saw someone running away. But no, ‘Don’t listen to the German,’ you said, Mo. We shouldn’t have listened to you! What Dietrich said would have worked. It would have made sense to the police. Now we have this, which doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Edith was clearly coming apart, and Roz turned to her and grabbed her hand. “Thistle, enough. You can’t put him back. The only way is forward.”
“Forward?” She sniffled.
Roz knew this day had been coming, though she’d had no idea how or when. She’d hoped for Julian to keel over from one of his heart attacks, like his dad and grandfather. No such luck, for the man was destined—had been destined—to outlive them all. It was just a happy coincidence that Dietrich had told her anything at all about what her children were up to.
“We’re going on a road trip,” she announced, turning to the freezer and opening it. She pulled out a bottle of vodka and handed it to Edith. “Fortify yourself, dear.” Edith took a swig, then passed it to her brothers. “Now,
listen to me. I’m still your mother and I still love you no matter what you’ve done, so Edith, you’re going to take another few sips of vodka while you, Jacob and Moses, are going to move your father into the minivan. And you,” she said to Dietrich, who’d just stepped into the garage, “are going to drive us because we are all going to drink until we get to where we’re going. Pass the vodka back to your sister, Moses.”
“And where’s that, Ma? Where are we going?” Edith asked, taking the bottle and sipping from it as instructed. “Because Jacob has a crematorium on call.”
“Edith,” Jacob shouted.
“Oh, please, like it matters anymore if she knows,” Edith replied. “So I guess you should call Clarence and tell him we’re on our way,” all of her features contorting and turning her face into one giant grimace. “Asses to asses, Daddy…” An old joke Julian used to make at the expense of one dead relative or another.
Jacob moved toward the door, but Roz interjected: “Darling, don’t make that call just yet,” as she had other plans for disposing of the body. “I’m pretty sure there are legal channels to go through before a cremation can happen.”
“But, Clarence…,” Jacob stuttered.
“I think it would look quite suspicious if Clarence lit up the cemetery, let alone an oven, at this time of night, don’t you? Does he still hate you, Jacob? Are you willing to find out? He might have alerted the cops already, and they might be waiting to pounce the moment you drive up with a body. You did kill his peacock, after all. Why would you think you could trust him?” It amazed her again how it was she’d raised such smart children only to have them not think any of this through or even understand that everything would have to be explained in what was becoming a very complicated lie.
Better to do it my way, she thought, sending her sons off on their appointed task, while she lingered in the garage with Edith, who leaned against the wall, eyes shut, and took an occasional sip from the bottle. Roz herself gazed at the tools—the hoe, the shears, the trowel—suspended on the wall, each of them corresponding to the ones Julian had back in Dallas, the very same arrangement. She smiled when she pictured the garage sale she was going to have. Or she might just keep it all, not for any sentimental reason but out of respect for Julian and his memory, for Julian loved his garden. Maybe she would keep pulling the weeds up for him; it was the least she could do.
After the boys got their father into the back of the minivan, Dietrich came around and helped her into the passenger seat. And then they were ready, Dietrich behind the wheel—he was worried about not having a license and having only just learned to drive, but Roz reassured him that it would be okay, saying that she trusted him to drive more than her own children in their shocked states. The three others got into the backseat. She turned the dial on her oxygen tank up one notch, from two to three, as they climbed into the hills of Malibu Canyon, the sky dark, the moon overhead dangling like a bare bulb, which she wanted to reach up and shatter.
Roz glanced in the rearview mirror every so often to catch sight of her three dumbfounded children. Edith sat between her brothers, her unfocused eyes opening and closing. Mo had his arms crossed on his chest, his long, shaggy black hair peppered with gray, although his beard, to her constant wonder and surprise, remained as black as the day he’d appeared with it onscreen two decades ago. Jacob told her it came out of a bottle. She’d laughed at his willingness to tattle on his brother even then and at Mo’s ongoing vanity, which he had yet to outgrow. Jacob, too, was turning gray at the temples, and this made him look even more handsome, as distinguished as Julian had been at his age. All of them bore a profound resemblance to their father, who was strapped into the seat in the far back of the minivan, looking as if he were sound asleep, his head lolling forward every so often, then rolling back on his spongy neck. She half expected him to open his eyes and holler at her, but then the dead had but one directive—to stay dead.
Dietrich followed the directions of the state-of-the-art navigation system and drove with German precision, his hands gripping the wheel at twenty-two and fourteen, as Jacob had prescribed. He used the turn signal religiously and obeyed the rules of the road as if he’d been driving his entire life. It didn’t surprise her that he’d been willing to carry out this task for them. For Jacob, she thought, correcting herself, and turned to Dietrich, who, she hoped, might still one day become her son-in-law.
“Thank you for…cooperating,” she whispered.
“That’s my pleasure,” he said.
She imagined Jacob, intractable grammar Nazi that he was, scolding him for the mismanagement of the English language. He definitely has some of his father in him, she thought, an untamed, untrammeled part that he still needed to watch. It made her sad to think that Jacob—that any of her kids—had it in them to speak as roughly to their loved ones as Julian had spoken to them.
“My husband said some egregious things to you,” she said. “I’m not sure he meant half of them.”
“It’s okay,” Dietrich said, holding his eyes firmly on the tortuous, narrow road. “I am German. I think probably I am somewhat to blame. Jacob tells me I should be less of a Besserwisser—a know-it-all. I think probably I should not have come to Los Angeles but stayed behind in Berlin. It would have been easier on all of you if I were not present.”
“Jacob’s father is—was—a wisenheimer, too,” she said. “My kids gravitate toward people with that quality as well. Better that than the alternative, someone like me. I’m not exactly the smartest person in the world. You heard my husband. If I’d seen a doctor sooner—”
“Mrs. Jacobson, please,” he interrupted, “now is not the time to beat up yourself. It’s possible your condition will improve, that it will go away on its own. Many medical distresses come and then go without fuss. They caught it, and you are dealing with it.”
No, she thought, you’re wrong. Now is the perfect time to beat myself up because I know it’s not improving. I know it’s only getting worse. “Please drop the formalities and call me Roz. Before I became Roz Jacobson, director of membership at the JCC and a damn good housewife to boot,” she told him, “I was Rosalyn Overland, originally Oberlander, daughter of Ernie and Trudy, of Little Neck, Long Island. My parents were immigrants. Viennese. In 1938. The Anschluss. I don’t know if Jacob ever mentioned that.”
“Yes, he did. As I’m sure he told you, we traveled by train to Wien for his birthday last year. It was an eye-soaping experience.”
She laughed, coughing and grappling for breath, and reached down to increase the flow of oxygen. “Eye-opening,” she corrected at last, because she simply could not help herself. Jacob might have inherited his temper and impatience from Julian, but he’d inherited a love of language and books from her. He was the best and worst of them.
“Yes, this is what I meant,” Dietrich said, taking his eyes off the road to smile at her. “You are a warm, kind woman, very unlike my own mother. It is impossible for us Germans to disavow our mothers, although sometimes they should be disavowed.”
“Dietrich, do you think you and Jacob will make it?” she asked, blurting out the words before she could stop herself. In the bathroom mirror at Mo’s and Pandora’s, she’d rehearsed the question, and now that she had asked it, she wished she could call it back. Contrary to what her husband claimed, she didn’t like to pry.
Before he could respond, however, the navigation system announced, too loudly, “Exit 32 onto Las Virgenes Road,” which Dietrich took. Edith poked her head into the front seat.
“Are we there yet?” she asked, transporting Roz to a different time, when the five of them—the kids not yet teenagers, she and Julian in their thirties—had made this same journey. They’d followed the Pacific Coast Highway, pausing along the way in Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Solvang, Santa Barbara, then in Malibu. Julian refused to let Roz drive, which was fine by her, she remembered, gazing out the window at the still-shadowed Malibu Canyon. It felt odd to remember that trip now. She and Julian had stood at the
edge of one of the cliffs at Point Dume, the sea spreading out like a pool of liquid silver under the smelting heat of the sun. The kids were down the road, using the bathroom and most likely squabbling over the array of snacks in the vending machine, while she was up there with this husband she loved, discussing if they shouldn’t separate permanently.
Edith asked again and Roz said, “Not yet, Thistle,” remembering the origin of her nickname and how looking upon her blossoming daughter had once unnerved Roz. She’d had a hard time not superimposing onto Edith her ideas of what Julian had been like as an unassuming, bespectacled boy. She didn’t want to see this boy reflected in her daughter’s face, reminding her of her own girlhood and all those thousands of delicate and indelicate steps that had led her to become Dr. Julian Jacobson’s wife. Against nearly everyone’s wishes—her mother, her friends, everyone except her father, who liked Julian as much as Roz did—she’d renounced her baptism, converted to Judaism (well, technically, back to Judaism), and married him.
Everyone but her father had been right, of course, but she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing it. It was impossible to keep it from her kids, however, because they’d witnessed his brutal ferocity up close. Because Mo arrived first, he bore the worst of it, along with Roz herself. Her little Moses, who tried to act as her protector, her pint-sized, pigeon-toed son with his stutter and lazy eye, all thankfully corrected in time, though not before Julian had committed these weaknesses to memory and used them against him. How had she allowed it all to happen? History made fools out of them all, though mostly out of Roz, who had only recently begun to take stock of her circumstances. Better late than never, she supposed. A few months, the doctors told her, but that was a few months ago, so what did they know?
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