Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  Sitting there in front of the television, Danny closed his eyes and for a moment saw his mother standing in a room somewhere high in the celestial spheres. Apparently she had wriggled through the machinery of Dr. Thayer’s watch and, upon emerging, found herself in an afterlife not unlike a mental hospital. She wore a white hospital gown, and her arms were held back by angels dressed as psychiatric orderlies, standing on either side of her as she looked down at the doings of the earth. She seemed to want to say she saw it all: She saw April dirtying three pans where one would do; she saw Nat eating jam with a spoon, then leaving the spoon on the counter. She was cursing, pulling to free herself from the tight grip of the angels, but they only smiled. They held fast with infinite patience, infinite sympathy. They had all the time in the world.

  In the laundry room someone had unplugged the vat of wax; its contents was hard as candles. When, later, Danny ran a fingernail over the cloudy surface, lines appeared like those a skater leaves on an iced-over pond.

  ___________

  In the morning Eleanor arrived early to set up for the party. She had put herself together, for once, put on lipstick and had her hair done. With the help of Sid and Joanne she carried into the kitchen six platters of cookies, four elaborately decorated cakes, two roast turkeys, and ten loaves of rye bread. “I thought I told you, Eleanor, nothing fancy,” Nat said when he saw Sid bringing in the last of the food. “Just cookies, coffee cake. For God’s sake, this isn’t a Christmas party.”

  “Oh, pish,” Eleanor said. Putting her crutch aside, she eased herself into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “None of this is that fancy, Nat, and anyway, you’re going to have a lot of mouths to feed. As my dear ma used to say, nothing makes people hungrier than a funeral.”

  Nat looked away. “Why everything in this family has to be food, food, food, I have never understood.”

  “Oh, Natty,” Eleanor said, reaching out her hand toward him, “I’m sorry if I overdid it. But you know me. Everyone does what they can; what I do—”

  “Is cook. I know.”

  “Anyway, think of it this way: You all are not going to be in any mood to make dinner for the next couple of days, and this way you’ll have all the leftovers—if there are any leftovers, that is.”

  “I just didn’t envision it this way,” Nat said. “I wanted something simple.”

  “It will be simple. Don’t worry so much.”

  Across the kitchen Joanne was unloading cookies; in a drill sergeant voice, Eleanor instructed her which of Louise’s platters would be best for which cake, and how to garnish the turkeys. April came in and upon request from Eleanor unveiled the chocolate peanut butter cake, lemon torte, Black Forest cake, tollhouse cookies, and walnut balls she had made the night before. “April, you’re turning into a first-class baker,” Eleanor said. “I’m proud.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it, April?” Nat said. He was skulking in a corner, near the washing machine.

  “What, Dad?”

  “That I said simple. Nothing too fancy. No, you just go right ahead and do what you want.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “Forget it, just forget it. Tell me if you need me to do anything, will you?”

  “Dad!”

  But he had retreated to his bedroom and turned on the television. Soon he was staring at a soap opera in Japanese.

  “Do you know what this show is about?” Danny asked when he passed by later.

  “No,” Nat said.

  “Well, that must be sort of fun,” Danny said. “Guessing everything from intonation. I’ll bet that old lady is the mother of the younger one, and they’re fighting about—maybe her marriage to that other guy?”

  Nat kept his eyes on the television, his hand on the remote control.

  “What do you think?” Danny said. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know, it’s in Japanese,” Nat said. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “I was just asking,” Danny said. He considered saying more, then changed his mind and headed into the kitchen, where Clara, bedecked in black polyester, was unwrapping the same loaf of dense, inedible fruit bread she had given the Coopers every Easter and Christmas since 1966.

  “Isn’t that nice,” Eleanor was saying. “Clara brought something as well. Certainly won’t be any food shortage today, will there?”

  Clara smiled, pulled on rubber gloves, and was about to start hand washing when she noticed Joanne putting an expensive glass bowl in the dishwasher. “Mrs. Cooper says never put that one in the machine,” she cried, grabbing the bowl away from Joanne, who immediately looked to her mother for guidance.

  “Oh, I’ve washed many a bowl in my day, Clara,” Eleanor said. “Believe me, it can go in.”

  Clara looked distraught. “Mrs. Cooper always said no.”

  “But, Clara, I’m a professional cook, and I’m sure that bowl can go in the dishwasher.”

  Clara shrugged then, and Eleanor shrugged, in a way that made Danny suspect both of them of having, for a long time, nurtured dreams of control in this kitchen.

  “Well, if you insist,” Eleanor said. “I don’t care really, just wash it by hand.”

  “No, no,” Clara said, “I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Friedman. The dishwasher it is. Mrs. Cooper always was peculiar about things.”

  They smiled at each other, and Joanne put the bowl in the dishwasher.

  ___________

  People started to arrive around eleven: colleagues of Nat’s, women from the Mothers Against the Draft, nurses who had remained close to Louise after her various hospital stays. Danny remembered his mother saying, once, that she had no friends, that they were all really Nat’s friends, but he saw today that it wasn’t true: People had loved her. He greeted half-remembered wives of half-remembered retired physics professors, and couples whose children had been in his class in high school, and elderly women who approached him, open-armed, crying, “Danny, little Danny, how you’ve grown!” in hoarse voices. Soft, spotted hands touched him, arms draped in dark silks. “I remember you, darling, but I’m sure you don’t remember me!”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Ah, the young people! You don’t remember your old friend Goldie Silvers, who made you that pudding cake you liked so much when you were a little boy!”

  “Ah, of course! Mrs. Silvers! But your hair’s shorter.”

  “Twenty years under the hair dryer next to your mama, you can bet it’s shorter! It all fell out! Why, I remember you when you were just a baby, it was yesterday, and now look at you. What do you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer! I knew it before, I just forgot. Your mama was so proud of you, she talked all the time!” Then, in a lower, more somber tone: “Danny, it’s a terrible thing, her being gone, but you know she had a lot of suffering, and there was only more suffering in store. So maybe it’s not the worst tragedy, is it?” Nodding.

  “No,” Danny said. “Maybe not. No.” Nodding together.

  “You’re a good boy,” Goldie Silvers said. “A real special one. And I still make that pudding cake, if you ever want one!”

  “Thanks,” Danny said. They parted. The doorbell rang and rang. Nat, as always, answered it, greeting now a woman named Dixie Watkins, who, like Goldie, had for years sat next to Louise at the hairdresser’s. She worked at the House of Humor, selling whoopee cushions and glasses with pictures of women who undressed as you drank. Her husband, Benny, had caused a scandal years before by arriving at a New Year’s Eve party in a Nixon mask; Oscar Lowell, the provost of the time, had walked out in a huff. Now Benny shook Nat’s hand somberly while Dixie looked on, dabbing a purplish smear from under her eye. Altogether Louise’s most unsuitable, most tacky friends, but among the ones Danny liked best. Dressed in tiger stripes, her eyeliner running, Dixie kissed Danny on the cheek and in her brassy Texas accent asked, “Is there anything I can do for you, honey?” almost like a generous-hearted madam.

  “Thanks, Dixie, bu
t no,” Danny said. “We’re okay.”

  Over her shoulder he saw another familiar-looking woman approaching him, one whose name he couldn’t recall, a woman with white hair and a powdered, teacherly face. “Danny,” the woman said, “hello, dear,” and shook his hand.

  “Hello,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine, never mind about me. How are you all doing?”

  “We’re okay, thanks.” He remembered a trick of his mother’s for correcting just such a social embarrassment. “Ah, this is my mother’s friend Dixie Watkins.”

  “I’m Nancy Needham,” said the powder-faced woman, shaking Dixie’s hand. “I was this boy’s librarian in elementary school, though I’ll bet he doesn’t remember.”

  “Doesn’t remember!” Danny said. “Mrs. Needham, of course I remember!” And laughed perhaps too loudly. Her husband had once been a colleague of Nat’s.

  More commiserations were exchanged. Dixie Watkins asked what Danny was doing with himself lately and nodded favorably when he told her. Then Nancy Needham asked if he might have any advice for her son Nicky, who was applying to law school. “Tell him he’s going to have to absorb so much useless information he’ll think his head’s going to fall off,” Danny said, and she laughed. “That’s not so different from being a librarian, is it?”

  “Honey, I couldn’t do it, my mind’s a sieve,” Dixie said. “In one ear, out the other with me. I can barely pass the driving test. Oh, gee, I’m just going to say a word to Nat over there.”

  “Is he free?” asked Nancy Needham. And leaving Danny for the moment, the two women headed off toward where Nat stood, momentarily free of company. Danny looked around. The crowd had grown enormous and was squeezing out the two doorways of the dining room. So many faces! Young people had grown old, old people (seemingly) had grown young. Oscar Lowell, after a heart attack, had lost seventy pounds and now ran ten miles a day. He was by the fireplace in a red sweat suit. As for Francine Cantor, who was having radiation, she stood gauntly in the corner, a lopsided wig teetering on her hairless head. Her wrists—impossibly thin—were covered with spots; each finger supported a heavy ring; she wore thick bracelets of ivory and cut glass. Danny wondered that her matchstick arms didn’t break from the weight of such accoutrements, remembering a time not so many years before when she’d come over to swim in the pool with her then-husband, Bruce, and offered lessons in lifesaving. Francine had been a young, energetic woman then, and had dragged Danny across the pool by the hair. Like many of Louise’s acquaintances, she was the ex-wife of one of Nat’s colleagues; across the house somewhere, Danny knew, Bruce Cantor stood with his new wife, a blond girl in her twenties whose name no one could remember. Now Francine was old, alone, dying, lighting a cigarette.

  He turned away just as she was about to see him, just as she was about to offer an acknowledging, conversation-requiring smile. He was facing Sarah Goldberg, who in elementary school had been fat and asthmatic and had worn octagonal wire-rimmed glasses. She had asked for, and was given, a water bed for her bat mitzvah. Today she stood with her mother, Linda, against the dining room wall. They weren’t talking, just standing together, looking out on the crowd, each with a cup of coffee in her hand. Sarah was less fat than Danny remembered her, a big girl neatly dressed in a denim skirt and cream-colored blouse. Her hair was long, luxuriously thick and long. Did she still carry a little can of breathing medicine in her purse? He hadn’t seen her for twelve years. And again, just in time to avoid a meeting of eyes, he backed away. There, cutting cake, were the Eadys from across the street and their daughter, Jennifer. And across from them, Millie Bartell—wife of the dean—eating cookies off a little plate. Some faces had changed, but some, like Millie Bartell’s, seemed not to have changed, not even remotely. Had Millie Bartell’s life been as unvaried as her face? Danny wondered. Had it been an unending, placid succession of days spent cleaning, shopping, occasionally substitute teaching at the high school? Or were appearances, in this case, deceiving? Not too far from Millie, in the same room, stood Bill and Janet Hartpence, whose daughter Julia had set off a car bomb in 1968 and was just this year becoming eligible for parole. Upheavals of various sorts had ravaged their faces; they looked old and tired. What a far cry from Millie Bartell, for whom things had gone so smoothly, for whom the weather had been so balmy. Cancer, heart attacks, deaths, children in prison—these storms had passed her by. And so she came to funerals, or sealing parties, or whatever one chose to call them, and ate cookies, and kept quiet. How did it feel to be so lucky? Danny wanted to ask her, but then, realizing she was about to see him looking at her, changed his mind, turned around, was confronted with another familiar face, another hand waving, another voice calling, “Hi, Danny!” The party was a pinball machine, and he a steel ball being ricocheted from one unwanted encounter to another. Jennifer Eady this time. He waved to her and moved across the room.

  In the kitchen, meanwhile, April had taken out the electric mixer and was making a last-minute icing for one of her cakes. Myra Eber, who had just put her coat away, touched her shoulder, and April screamed.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you!” Myra said.

  “Mrs. Eber!” April said. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m just jumpy.”

  “Don’t apologize, dear,” Myra Eber said, smoothing her jacket down with her palms. “So how are you? You all surviving?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure you knew, Jack and I, our thoughts are with you, and—”

  April turned the mixer on high, and Myra, her mouth still open, stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Go on,” April shouted over the high wail of the mixer. “I can hear you. Go on.”

  Bewildered, Myra looked behind herself, to see if anyone was listening. “I just wanted to say,” she shouted above the mixer, “anything we can do to help we’d be happy to—”

  April shut the mixer off.

  “We’d be happy to do,” Myra said, more softly.

  “That’s nice of you,” April said.

  ___________

  In her heavenly prison it seemed Louise had finally stopped fighting the archangel orderlies, though for good measure they still held her arms. Even so, their grip was not so tight. With their other hands they stroked her back in sympathy, having once been alive too. One of the stories she used to torment Danny with was about how, on the morning of her ninth birthday, she had put a spider down Aunt Eleanor’s skirt, and in punishment her mother had locked her in her bedroom for the duration of her own birthday party. She had lain on her neatly made child’s bed then, determined not to cry, plotting unimaginable vengeances and rebellions, while downstairs children laughed and danced and ate, their voices booming up through the floorboards even when she covered her ears, even when she buried her head in the pillow. What about the presents? “She saved them for me to open later,” Louise sometimes said, but other times she claimed her mother had given them all to Eleanor, “to make up for the spider.” In both versions of the story, after the party a piece of the cake was brought back up to her, with a rose, and part of her name, LOUI, in icing, and grim-faced in the silent aftermath, her eyes red from crying, she would not touch, would not even look at it.

  ___________

  Danny was standing near the fireplace in the living room when Walter found him.

  “Hi,” Walter said.

  “Hi. Where were you?”

  “Talking to Margy McLaughlin. We were in April’s room. Are you okay?”

  “Sure. It’s nearly two. People are starting to leave, so the torture will be over soon anyway.”

  Nat cruised through the living room, waved at them. “Isn’t someone going to say something?” Walter asked.

  “What do you mean, say something?”

  “You know. Just a few words of remembrance. Or maybe April could sing.”

  “You heard my father in the car. My mother would hate that, people getting up all teary-eyed to talk about how wonderful she wa
s. She’d be embarrassed.”

  “I think your father’s the one who’d be embarrassed,” Walter said. “Forgive me if it’s none of my business, but it seems to me he’s using this whole supposed dislike of ceremony on your mother’s part to justify his own dislike of ceremony, his own embarrassment.”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Danny said. “And anyway, what right do I have to tell him how to bury his wife—or not bury her, as the case may be?”

  Walter was about to say more when a low, gruff voice called out, “Danny boy!” from the horde of well-wishers. Two elderly, fat men in nearly identical beige suits were waving in greeting from the door. “Hi!” Danny called, waving back. “That’s Sy and Herb,” he added in a low voice, to Walter. “They were my grandfather’s oldest and youngest brothers. The other two died in the war. What were the names? Herbert, Sydney, Milton, Seymour. You know, all the time I was growing up I thought those were the most ordinary Jewish first names, until someone pointed out to me that they were British last names. I guess to my great-grandparents those names must have sounded so modern, so sophisticated, so—non-Eastern European. And now they’re just Uncle Miltie, Uncle Sy, Uncle Herb. Do other people have Uncle Donne and Uncle Wordsworth?”

  “Probably somewhere,” Walter said. In truth, it was hard to connect those poets and gentry with their namesakes, Danny’s cigar-smoking uncles, slouching up to him now from the door. They were in their middle seventies, fat, with hair in their nostrils, and for thirty-two years they had not spoken to each other. Herb still owned the family’s struggling seltzer business, while Sy—cut out of the company forty years before by his brother—had had his vengeance at last, making millions in the bottling trade. They lived in Southern California, only a few miles apart, in similarly locked and sentineled retirement communities, and had flown up on the same plane, in different rows. Thirty-two years of mutually inflicted noncommunication between brothers sounded terrible to those who didn’t know them, but in fact Sy and Herb had spent so much of their lives not speaking that when they stood together at family functions, there was no edge left to their silence; it was just habit. They talked around each other, through other people. They almost seemed like friends.