Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Irv Kornfeld played fullback in the same Austin High School backfield in which Sam Greenspan played halfback. He specializes in wills and estates. Now a fat man with a ridiculous combover, Kornfeld exudes a false intimacy that, Lenny now recalls, put him off on the few previous occasions when he had met him. In his early eighties, he is still going down to the office five days a week. His unctuousness, Lenny discovers, hasn’t slackened over the years.

  “Your father and I go back more than sixty years,” Kornfeld begins by saying. “I could tell you stories about him and me you wouldn’t believe. He was a fine man, a wonderful man, your dad. He gave something on the order of a hundred grand annually to Israel and to Jewish charities, and, as you will presently learn, he planned to continue to do so from beyond the grave.”

  It doesn’t take Lenny long to feel that he has heard enough from this old bullshitter. He wants to hear the details of the will.

  Kornfeld passes out copies of the will and testament and trust of Samuel I. Greenspan. The document runs to some forty pages.

  “I could read through this will with you boys page by page, but maybe I do better to summarize and then take any questions you have after you’ve had a chance to peruse the document at your leisure.” Kornfeld paused. “Either of you care for a cup of coffee or a soft drink before we begin? No. Allow me, then, to proceed.

  “The general arrangements are pretty straightforward,” Kornfeld says. “Gordon, you are to get the business, Greenspan Box, Inc. From the proceeds of your late father’s stock holdings and the sale of his apartment, small trusts have been set up for your two daughters, paying them, roughly, a thousand dollars a month, to begin when each of them turns thirty. Your father left twenty-five thousand dollars to Ruth Greenspan, his brother Henry’s widow in Los Angeles. The rest, a little more than four hundred thousand dollars, will go to the various Jewish charities he denoted on page 29 of the document in your hands to which Dad made pledges before he died. And that, boys, is pretty much it.”

  Lenny wants to hold back, but isn’t able to do so. “What about me?” he asks. “What did my father leave me?”

  “Sorry, son, but you aren’t mentioned in the will, except on page 34, under division of chattels.”

  Lenny feels a stab of rage at this fat man and his preposterous hairdo referring to him as “son” and his father as “Dad.” He knows he has to take control of himself.

  “I was of course with your father when he made his will in this very office. I asked him at the time, ‘Sam, what about your son Leonard?’ ‘Don’t worry about Lenny,’ your father said, ‘Lenny’s already had his inheritance.’ When I asked him what he meant, he chose not to explain.”

  Gordon looked over to Lenny, who looked away. Kornfeld cleared his throat, then added, “You and your brother will share in your father’s chattels, so-called—the furniture in his apartment, his clothes, watch, and other personal effects. The division of these items is something your father left for you boys to work out on your own.”

  The brothers were in the Audi, barely back on the Kennedy Expressway, returning to Highland Park, when Gordon asks Lenny, “What do you suppose Dad meant when he told Kornfeld you already had your inheritance?”

  Lenny hesitates slightly, then says, “Now that he’s dead, you may as well know that Dad had been sending me a monthly check for twenty-five hundred for nearly the past thirty years.”

  “He never said a word about it to me.”

  “He asked me to keep it to myself, told me not to tell you or anyone else.”

  “I’m sure the money came in handy when you were starting out, but do you still need it?”

  “Need it?” Lenny says. “Last year from my combined magazine writing and lecturing and my peasantries, as I call the pathetic royalties from my books, I earned a grand total of $8,745. And I believe that was a slight increase over the year before. So, yes, I still need the money.”

  “Why do you suppose he cut you off? He must have had some sense that you could still use it.”

  “I wish I knew,” Lenny says. “I haven’t yet absorbed it. I’m not angry. I’m disappointed. Mostly I guess I’m shocked.”

  “I could let you have fifty grand or so till you work things out,” Gordon says. “And if you’re interested, you could work for Greenspan Box.”

  Lenny looks over at his brother, behind the wheel of his Audi, and his heart fills with gratitude. Would he, he wonders, have made so generous an offer if things had been the other way around? Has he all these years underestimated his brother? “Thanks, Gordie,” he says, “I appreciate it. I have some small savings that will get me by for a bit.”

  That night, turning in bed in the guest room in his brother’s house, Lenny tries to sort out his future now that he is no longer his father’s remittance man. He has sixteen thousand dollars and change in the bank, the end of the money from the last movie option. That won’t last long in New York.

  “A dreamer” his father called him, Gordie told him earlier today. His father was right about his betting everything on his talent being up to his ambition. He bet it all, his whole life, he now sees, and has lost. He never thought he would be a star among American writers, but he had hoped to be a serious and productive one. That dream is now over.

  Lenny realizes he will probably have to leave New York, which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Earlier this year his agent, Claudia Kipnis, told him that a television production company in Los Angeles was looking for someone to help craft scripts for reality television shows—yes, they have writers, she told him, and they design plots, and they feed the non-actors lines. At the time he felt himself above such work. That was while he was still receiving his father’s regular stipend. Now, though, it might be worth looking into. Or he could return to Chicago, possibly even take up Gordie on his offer to work in the family business, though what he could possibly do for Greenspan Box he hasn’t a clue.

  Falling off to sleep, the question playing in Lenny’s mind is not the usual one of how to advance the sterile plot of the novel he is working on at the moment, but how to live out the rest of his life without his father’s net under him. He should be feeling frightened, but is surprised to discover that what he feels instead is relief. He is off his father’s payroll at last. His final thought before sleep overtakes him is that he will have to shell out another $600 or so to have his name changed back from Greene to Greenspan.

  My Five Husbands

  It’s a mistake, somebody or other once said, to have three cats, for if you have three, why not five or six, or more? The same may be true of husbands and wives. If three, why not five or six? I’ve had three cats at various times in my life and, as it turns out, five husbands, so maybe there’s something to it. Five husbands, the number boggles the mind, whatever “boggles” means.

  I also have ovarian cancer, or so I’ve just been told, which makes this as good a time as any to try to explain my life, if only to myself. The theme of my life, as I’ve known for a long while now, has been freedom, or at least the hope of gaining freedom, and just as it looks as if I have it, here comes my death sentence in the form of ovarian cancer.

  I’ve always had a man problem, the problem being how to get away from them, beginning with my father. I grew up in a small town in north-central Arkansas, Batesville by name. A handsome man, my father had a beautiful but nutty sister, my Aunt Velma, and a kindly but retarded younger brother named Roscoe. Velma flounced and fluttered around and Roscoe walked the yard of their small house, with his kindly face behind which who knew what was going on. My father worked as a stone mason, always in business for himself, for he was too independent—“too damn mean,” he would have said—ever to work for anyone else.

  Why my mother married him I haven’t the foggiest notion. My mother was reserved and artistic. She made beautiful quilts and also the uniforms for the cheerleaders and marching band at Batesville High. My fat
her didn’t so much give her a hard time as mostly pretend she wasn’t there. When he wasn’t working, he was out hunting and fishing. He kept a large freezer stuffed with fish he had caught and rabbits and squirrels he had shot. The freezer was near our bathroom. For some reason my father never saw fit to put a door on our one bathroom, which was covered by a sliding drape, making for a terrible absence of privacy. I was ashamed to bring friends home from school, and rarely did.

  Daddy kept his drinking to the weekends, and he was not a happy drunk. He never beat my mother, nor my older sister Dottie and me, but on his rampages he did a pretty good job on our furniture and dishes and glassware. The effect of her marriage on my mother was to make her seem defeated, old before her time, and resigned—above all, stuck with a man who had no sense of what stirred her soul. I’m not sure that I ever openly said it even to myself, but I decided never to be resigned in life, never to settle for a situation like my mother’s.

  I hope I’m not giving the impression that I hated my father. I didn’t. He could be humorous, even affectionate. But I knew I wanted to get away from him. Dottie must have felt the same, for she left home at sixteen, to marry a man who sold potato chips and other snack foods on his truck route through the Ozarks. I made it until seventeen, when I left home four months pregnant with the first of my five children.

  Van Willis was a high-school football star. The Willises were more middle class, which I guess is to say more respectable, than our family. At least they had a door on their bathroom. Ernie Willis sold insurance; he was in Kiwanis. They were members of the second Baptist Church. They lived in a modest but well-maintained white house in a better part of town than we did. Ernie and Edna Willis were disappointed to learn that I was pregnant with Van’s child. They wanted something better for him and made no secret of it. Van, as they say, did the right thing, and we married while still in high school.

  I should say here that I am not knock-out beautiful, but I must be sexy. I don’t think of myself as flirtatious, but I guess I suggest, in some mysterious way, availability. At least I have never had trouble attracting men. My third, my Jewish, husband used to call me zaftig, which he defined as having lots of curves and all in the right places.

  I didn’t plan my pregnancy with Van. We made love on the backseat of his 1948 Plymouth and, with one exception, always used condoms. The exception, of course, proved the rule, or maybe I should say the fool.

  A fool is certainly what I felt walking the halls of Batesville High my last semester there pregnant. A fool and ashamed. After we married, Van and I found an apartment in town. Not long after graduation, and six weeks before our baby is to be born, he comes home to report that he has enlisted in the Navy. I could have—I really should have—killed him.

  My mother stood by me through the birth of my first son—I seem only able to produce boys—moving into my small apartment for the first month after Donald was born. My father, less than pleased by the embarrassment having a knocked-up daughter caused him among his pals, pretended the whole thing never happened, and was a no-show until his grandson was three months old. Around that time Van had finished boot camp, and was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, from where he called to say that he had found an apartment for us, and would send money for Donald and me to meet him there in a month or so.

  I took my little son on a Greyhound bus trip up to Norfolk, Virginia, to meet his father. Van was an awkward father at best. When I put Donald in his arms the expression on his face seemed to say, “Where did this come from?” I realized right then that even with the best will in the world it wasn’t going to work out. I was on my own. A girl of eighteen, with an infant child, and no job training of any kind. Meanwhile, Van informs me two weeks later that he is shipping out, to just where he isn’t certain.

  Van is not gone two weeks and I wake at four in the morning, needing to throw up. Morning sickness. Pregnant again. I suppose I could have arranged an abortion, though in those days it would have meant a back-alley kitchen-table nightmare. So my second son, Allen, was born. He looked like his father, whom I suppose I was by now looking for some excuse to ditch. Van gave it to me by allowing me to discover that he was seeing another woman—a girl, actually—in Norfolk, the daughter of his chief petty officer.

  So there I was, with two small kids, no work, and a husband—soon-to-be ex-husband—on enlisted man’s Navy pay. My only choice was to return home to Batesville, which I did. But life there soon became impossible. I left the children with my mother and returned to Norfolk, hoping to find work. The work I found was bartending. The bar was a large place called Jimmy’s that used women bartenders to attract sailors. The pay wasn’t great, but the tips from drunken customers helped a lot: tips from the tipsy, I used to call them.

  One of the rules at Jimmy’s was the help was not allowed to go out with the customers. But I broke it one night when a sailor named Mitchell Hendrix, a regular, finally prevailed on me to let him take me out to dinner. He was tall, slender, with a wide mouth and lips that had a slightly collagen look, long before anyone had ever heard of collagen. He had a mischievous sense of humor, Mitch did.

  Mitch was from Bozeman, Montana, where, he told me, his father had been a state senator. His family had a ranch there and lots of land. Mitch was in the Navy because, at the age of twenty, after being caught stealing a car and holding up a garage, a judge in Bozeman gave him the choice of three years in jail or three years in the Navy. “Not much of a choice, really,” is the way he explained it to me that first night at dinner.

  He was fun to be around. He liked to be in action, to have scams going. By this time my divorce from Van had come through. Mitch did not exactly move in with me, but he kept some civvies in my apartment and we were, outside of Jimmy’s, a couple. One of his games was to pretend to be my pimp. He would get young sailors to give him twenty dollars for a meeting with me, and then, after I didn’t show up, explain to them what an impossible bitch I was and somehow arrange to keep the money.

  Mitch was also sexually adventurous. He taught me a trick or two—actually five or six—that I hadn’t known. I was myself never squeamish about sex; I enjoyed it. I suppose here I was a little ahead of my time. Anyhow it was after a marathon night of sex that he asked me to marry him and I, foolishly, agreed. I say foolishly because it should have been clear that Mitchell Hendrix, at twenty-two, was incapable of the least loyalty to anyone.

  Not long after my marriage to Mitch I learned, from a long-distance telephone call from my mother, that Van Willis and his parents had taken my two little sons from her, and were going to court for permanent custody of them. I was twenty-three years old, with no money, working as a bartender, and six hundred miles away from Batesville. Mitch was no help. Neither was my father. I wanted to blame my mother for giving up the boys, but she was what she was, a weak woman, and it was probably my mistake for leaving them in her care in the first place.

  Van and his parents won their custody case uncontested. I was given no visitation rights, nothing. While Van was still in the Navy—he turned out to be a thirty-year career man—Donald and Allen lived with the Willises. My marriage to Mitch lasted all of eleven months, broken up by mutual consent when his three-year hitch was up, and he wanted to return to Montana without the extra baggage of a wife. I decided to return to Arkansas, not Batesville, which would have been too sad, and where I wasn’t likely to find work, but to Little Rock, ninety miles away. I was hoping that Van’s parents would allow me to spend some time with my kids.

  I moved in with my sister Dottie and her husband Chester. I arrived at a time when Dottie was in the middle of a love affair with a married man named Lester Hoopston, who owned a laundromat in Little Rock. All my possessions were in a single suitcase, and I slept on Dottie’s couch in her living room. I was able to get a job as a waitress at a restaurant and lounge in the basement of the Hotel Marion in downtown Little Rock called the Garhole—called that because a garfish swam in a t
ank behind the bar.

  Van’s parents did not make it easy to see my children. I took a bus up to Batesville every week to be with them, but the Willises would only allow me to see them in their presence, usually out in their large back yard, and then for no more than an hour or two. When it was time to leave, the children would ask me why I couldn’t take them with me. I had no explanation, except to promise them that someday they would live with me, a promise I had no real hope of making good on. I never left my boys without tears in my eyes.

  I worked three hours during lunch and then returned to the Garhole to work from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Guests of the hotel came down for drinks, and so did the men who worked at the nearby Arkansas Gazette. Politicians hung out there. Occasionally soldiers who worked at the recruiting office at 3rd and Main dropped in after work.

  My style as a waitress was cheerful, and with men even slightly flirtatious, though I made it a policy not to go out with customers after work. This was a policy I broke when one day, at a table of soldiers—enlisted men—I found myself teasing a guy with the nametag Goldstein on his uniform about his drinking coffee when everyone else at the table was ordering beers. He had fine features, soft brown eyes and, I noticed, delicate hands. “With you nearby, what I do need alcohol for?” he said. I fluttered my eyelashes and went into my best obviously phony plantation southerner act: “I declare, sir, you do say the kindest things.”

  After this Goldstein left with his Army buddies. Half an hour later he returned alone, and asked if he might take me out to dinner one night. I told him that I worked nights, and didn’t get off till eleven. He asked if he could meet me after work that night, and I found myself saying, “Sure, OK, why not?”