A week later, my mother had a stroke and went into a coma. She never recovered and I never could fathom why my daughter had had such a startling premonition. Perhaps my mother was the one who had had the premonition and that call, made while she was still full of life, was her way of saying goodbye to both of us.
In many ways, Edward reminded me of my mother. They both faced life with a cheerful equanimity. It took a lot to dispel their even tempers, although I saw them both get angry when they felt I was being threatened or taken advantage of. Edward and my mother were alike in other regards, too. They proved extremely well organized about cooking and death.
My mother pressed jars of her homemade vegetable soup on my brother and me when we were living on our own. She organized family feasts at Christmas and on our birthdays. She froze stock and the almond biscotti and lemon pound cakes she made from scratch. And, like Paula, she quilted pillows and bedspreads from the fabric remnants of old clothes.
I am ashamed to admit that I often balked at the soup jars and the packages of parchment-wrapped frozen cake (“You can have it later,” she would say), seeing them as parental interference when I was trying so hard to be independent. And I had little patience when later in her life she insisted on telling me about the plans for her own death. A devoted Catholic, she did not fear death. “I’ve lived a very good life,” she said, when she turned eighty. Two months later she was gone.
A few years before my mother died, she and my father bought a plot under an oak tree in a park-like cemetery in central Toronto. On one of my visits home, she took me on a tour of where she would be laid to rest. The funeral mass would be at St. Mary’s, the church she first attended with my father when they arrived from Portugal in the 1950s, she told me. It made her happy knowing that my brother and I would never have to worry about arranging a funeral.
When I told Edward the story of my mother’s end-of-life preparations, he completely understood and related to me his own plans, even though he was now fulfilling his final promise to Paula and was no longer in a hurry to die.
Edward had divided Paula’s ashes into three vases. He gave two of them to his daughters. He keeps his share of the ashes in an elegant Tiffany vase in his bedroom. He has told me that when he dies, he doesn’t want a funeral. He wants to be cremated, his ashes mixed with Paula’s in a Bloomingdale’s brown shopping bag, and sprinkled throughout Central Park, which was their favorite place in the world. It’s against the law to spread human remains in New York City parks, but Edward is sure he has that technicality covered. That’s where the Bloomingdale’s bag comes in. Who would ever suspect what the brown bag actually contained? Edward is an atheist, but he had no problem believing that he would be reunited with Paula and revisiting their favorite haunts—their ashes flying across the Great Lawn, up the turrets of Belvedere Castle and over the Reservoir and the manicured gardens of the East Side.
While he was not shy about broadcasting his own plans for death, he swore me to secrecy about his poetry. He also wanted to make sure that I hadn’t told anyone about our shopping trip to Saks. It was only months later, when Valerie saw me applying a coat of particularly red lipstick on one of her trips to New York, that I really understood Edward’s furtiveness.
“I’m going to wash that right off,” said Valerie. I’m not sure she would like it if I told her I might be turning into something of a femme fatale—and at the direction of her father. She thought her father’s views on women were anachronistic, mired in a 1950s suburban utopia that saw women as stay-at-home moms.
“He can be rather controlling,” she had said about Edward. I had no idea what she meant. But of course we all view our parents through our own particular lenses. I can remember being incredibly surprised when my friends told me that I had progressive parents. It’s never how I would have described them. I saw them as conservative and strict with my brother and me.
Edward controlling? I felt Valerie’s father was one of the most remarkable and evolved men I knew.
And Valerie was one of the most accomplished women I knew. She was brilliant and practical and extremely determined. She launched her career in publishing, after graduating from college in the late 1960s, by knocking on just about every publisher’s door in Manhattan and boldly asking for a job. When I met her, she was already well established in her own firm. She gave me my first job when I was barely out of high school.
She still likes to tell the story of our initial meeting. She and her business partner gave me a typing test as part of my interview for an internship in her office, which was located above an ice-cream parlor on a downtown street in Toronto. They escorted me over creaking floorboards to a back room, where there was a desk, chair, and an IBM Selectric typewriter. According to Valerie, I sat in the room for forty-five minutes before walking out, my footsteps loud on the old hardwood floors of the office. Valerie and her business partner looked up at me from the page proofs they were poring over.
“Um, how do you turn on the typewriter?” I asked.
I have only a vague, embarrassed recollection of the event, but Valerie says it was a decisive moment. “You’re hired!” she says she said on the spot, although I think she must have given me the news in a phone call a few days later.
I spent my summer proofreading and was thrilled when I caught a mistake that the much more experienced copy editors had missed. “Desiccated has two cs!” I wrote triumphantly on a Post-it note one afternoon. I also read the piles of fat, unsolicited manuscripts that arrived in manila envelopes and were relegated to the slush pile. I went through each submission carefully and at first felt horrible about sending them back in the self-addressed stamped envelopes. But I soon grew adept at writing the perfect rejection letter, striking just the right balance between firmness and only slight encouragement on future endeavors. “Thank you very much for your submission . . . Unfortunately, your manuscript does not fit with our publishing program . . . Best of luck with your book . . .”
I worked two summers for Valerie. During that second summer she mentioned that her parents were visiting from New York City. She was marveling that her father was bringing her his Scotch broth. As a nineteen-year-old, I must have found the gesture both charming and bold because, decades later, I still remember it as something special. What kind of person does this? I thought. He brought soup? How did he transport it from New York to Toronto? In a thermos? It would be another twenty-five years before I would meet this somewhat peculiar and definitely wonderful man who transported soup over international borders.
Valerie, like her father, was a tremendous cook. When she retired from publishing, she bought a home in the country and grew her own vegetables and herbs. She cooked with edible flowers, made her own sorbet, experimenting with lavender, rosemary, and rose essence long before it was fashionable to do so. Years later, when I told her I was growing my own Swiss chard but didn’t know how to cook it, she immediately suggested steaming it and then covering it in heavy cream, mixed with a teaspoon of Dijon and grated pecorino, before baking it in a hot oven. She suggested serving it over polenta, which I do now pretty much every time I have Swiss chard.
But while they shared many attributes, Valerie and Edward had many diametrically opposing views, especially when it came to women. Valerie had her mother’s chestnut hair and confidence, her father’s height and artistry. She wore elegant Armani suits, but she would not have reacted well to Edward’s position on “feminine enhancement.” After all, she seemed appalled by my Dior lipstick.
I wasn’t about to tell Valerie about the shopping trip to Saks, nor about Edward’s poetry submissions. In return, I believed we had an unspoken agreement: Edward was supposed to keep everything that was happening to me after I moved to Roosevelt Island to himself.
These were promises neither of us would be able to keep.
7
Bourbon
No ice
No tonic
No lime
Just neat
&
nbsp; One Sunday afternoon, I showed up at Edward’s apartment with a pound of raw squid from my favorite fish market in Newark. We both knew it was a pretext to visit him, and the tears started soon after I crossed the threshold.
He didn’t seem at all surprised. “I wish there was something I could do to help you, darling,” he said. “But if I interfere, it will just be worse for you.”
“Friction, competition, confrontation, impatience, and distraction.” It was the first sentence of my horoscope for that weekend. The rest: “For the next few days you will have a shock. You are very sensitive in your relationships and everything will result in irritation. For this reason, it would be good to avoid complicated negotiations.”
It was a Sunday morning, my husband and I were fighting, and in order to avoid “complicated negotiations” I had taken New Jersey Transit to the Ironbound section of Newark, the Portuguese neighborhood where I went regularly to buy salted cod and olive oil—the foods from childhood that made me feel grounded. I often took my daughter to a seedy barbecue joint on Ferry Street, the kind of place frequented by muscled cops and construction workers, that grilled chicken and ribs on charcoal. We would leave with our clothes infused with the smell of barbecue but satisfied with our meal of tender chicken, mounds of french fries, and a vinegary salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and bold slices of raw onion.
On this day I felt better after eating chicken at the Formica table of Ferry Street Barbecue and wandering the aisles of the nearby Portuguese supermarket, sampling olives, goat cheeses, and buying chorizo, but I knew I couldn’t stay away forever. When I returned home the fighting started again. That’s when I escaped to Edward’s with my pound of squid.
Edward took the mollusks and stashed them in his refrigerator. Then he offered me a seat on his sofa, walked over to the hutch in his living room and divided the last of his Kentucky bourbon evenly between two glasses. He didn’t bother with ice, or tonic or pastis, or even a squeeze of lime. He limped over to the sofa, shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and handed me my glass.
“How about a bourbon?”
He needn’t have asked. I inhaled the soothing liquid heat and soon after that everything came pouring out of me. I told Edward about the horrible arguments, dishes crashing on the floor, a family dinner that became so bitter and nasty, my daughter left the table in tears and hid herself in her room.
“I’ll never forget this dinner as long as I live,” she cried. Nor, I thought, would I. But now on Edward’s sofa I could no longer recall what had been so terrible that it resulted in platters laden with food being hurled across the dining room table and red wine splashed violently against a white wall, an appropriate abstract rendering of my marital discord that I hadn’t bothered to clean up.
Perhaps it was a sign that our dysfunction was now alarmingly visible. The “melancholia,” to borrow a nineteenth-century phrase the New York Times used to describe the maladies of patients shuttered in the asylum where we now lived, had been let loose within the confines of those walls. It was now sure to spill over to the outside world. Maybe friends had already noticed the sharp tones we used to address each other. At work, Melissa probably suspected. Why else was she so respectfully silent during my very uncomfortable phone calls home—conversations (could I even call them that?) that involved screaming on the other end and me trying unsuccessfully—in the middle of the newsroom—to calm the drama du jour in strained sotto voce.
In some ways, I identified with Nellie Bly, the investigative reporter who went undercover at my madhouse in 1887 and wrote a series of exposés for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. After ten days at the psychiatric hospital, she documented forced meals of spoiled food and ice-cold baths where prisoners were required to stand in long lines and wash themselves in the dirty water left by their fellow inmates.
Bly wrote about how prisoners from the nearby penitentiary even doubled as orderlies, keeping inmates in check through savage beatings. Among Bly’s observations, recorded in her book Ten Days in a Mad-House, which I had recently read, “From the moment I entered the insane ward on the island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.”
Well, maybe things weren’t as bad as all that but, like Bly, I was an investigative reporter who had also entered The Octagon undercover—when we moved in I was pretending that everything was all right with my life. But as soon as I began to get a grip on reality and reclaim myself, “the crazier I was thought to be.” When I brought up divorce with my husband, I was taken aback by his response. Was I mentally ill, menopausal? Had I had my thyroid checked lately? Perhaps I needed a psychiatrist, antidepressants? What about yoga? Bly’s statement ricocheted through my brain.
I’m not sure I did a good job explaining any of this to Edward. On that fateful Sunday afternoon I spent a lot of time crying my way through the bourbon, sounding incoherent even to myself. Edward listened and, at one point, rose to refill our glasses, having forgotten that we had already consumed the last of the bottle. I looked out his living room windows at the lights in the buildings across the water. It was already dark and I knew it was time to go home. Even in my leave-taking, though, there was something comforting. I guess I knew that after the drama, Edward would always be there. As he escorted me to the elevator, holding the door open with his outstretched cane, he said, “Let’s have dinner soon, OK?”
A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Valerie. Edward had told her everything about my crisis. She told me he was distraught, mostly because he felt there was nothing he could do to help me. As I listened, I became upset with myself for having put Edward under so much stress. “He’s very worried about you,” said Valerie.
But Edward never conveyed his worries to me. He never dwelt on my situation, rarely offered any specific marriage advice, never interfered. On occasion, he would sigh and shake his head. “It’s a bloody shame,” he would say, knowing that I was the only one who could solve my problems.
8
Beef with Sauce Bordelaise
Pan-Fried Potatoes with Gruyère
Salad of Mixed Greens with Homemade Vinaigrette
Apple and Pear Galette
Malbec
Edward was cutting beef into very thin slices with the precision of a surgeon when I showed up for dinner with a bottle of Argentine Malbec. He glanced quickly at the bottle and, surprisingly, decided that the wine would be excellent with his beef. He had already made the bordelaise sauce before I arrived, mixing a few spoonfuls of his demi-glace with wine, shallots, and butter. Now he piled the thin slices of meat on plates and spooned the sauce on top, finishing with slices of pan-fried potatoes coated in melted Gruyère.
We took our seats at the table, and Edward opened the Malbec. There was silence as he poured the wine. I knew that he wanted to ask me how things were going at home. It had been weeks since our sad cocktail hour, and I had put Edward off whenever he called to invite me for dinner. I was afraid to cause him any more concern than I already had.
But tonight, I had relatively good news to impart—my husband had finally agreed to a separation. Now the problem was that we couldn’t get out of our lease without severe financial penalties. Neither of us could afford to leave The Octagon right away.
In the following weeks we began to stake out territory in the apartment, and carve out separate kingdoms. I barricaded myself in a bedroom or took over a spot on the sofa in the living room while he stockpiled an arsenal of once-shared belongings in his home office. He had laid claim to a mountain of books, dishes and our imported French pots, the plasma TV, and even cans and boxes of non-perishable food. At first, I considered myself above such pettiness, but I eventually worked up the nerve to seize the coffeemaker and the toaster only after Melissa urged me to snag what I wanted.
We cooked separate meals and were never in the kitchen together. We somehow managed to w
ork out a schedule for spending time with our daughter. When he left to visit relatives in Canada, I breathed a sigh of relief and dismounted from the tightrope that had become my marriage, as if an enormous weight had been lifted off my back.
During this period of domestic détente, I also became an outcast among our neighbors. I joked to Edward that I had become the Hester Prynne of Roosevelt Island, or at least among the community of mostly Serbian émigrés we had befriended.
Before the decision to separate and get a divorce, I was affectionately known as “the foreigner” at neighborhood soirees. These were stilted social affairs at which men sat separately from women, drinking Scotch and rakija and singing lugubrious songs about exile from their homeland. Many had arrived in New York as refugees during the conflicts that had splintered the former Yugoslavia. They went on to work at the United Nations or build small businesses in Manhattan and Queens. Moving into government-subsidized apartments, they formed a community of some two hundred families. At first they welcomed us to their parties and barbecues because my husband was of Serbian origin and I had covered the Balkans as a foreign correspondent before we moved to New York.
After my husband informed them of our separation, I might as well have had a huge scarlet “D” for divorcée affixed to my back. I no longer received invitations to parties and some of the men of the community even refused to acknowledge me when I bumped into them on Main Street. The coup de grâce came when one of the mothers—a fifty-something homemaker fond of track suits—refused to allow her nine-year-old to have a play date with my daughter at our apartment.
It might not have been seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, but I had been formally expelled from the Serbian ghetto. Roosevelt Island became even more of a prison for me.
BACK IN THE 1980S, for Edward and Paula, Roosevelt Island represented freedom, a ticket out of a different prison. Well into their seventies, they found themselves alone in a neat suburban bungalow on Long Island. Their daughters had moved out years before and they missed old friends and the places they loved in Manhattan. Paula did not drive and the prospect of living out their retirement in a far-flung bedroom community didn’t appeal to either of them.
Dinner with Edward Page 5