Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Las Vegas is, as someone I met at Caesar’s once told me, a mecca for losers. They come from all over. Everyone seemed to have a story of nearly hitting it rich, nearly scoring big, coming this close to a swell life. But you didn’t have to look too closely to see that they were all sad cases, flops, suckers. Everyone was running away from something or other. I suppose I was too, though I couldn’t have told you exactly what it was.

  Lloyd Blakely was a member of the hotel workers’ union—a handyman of sorts. He did twenty years in the Air Force as an enlisted man, where he worked with flight simulators. He had been retired for the past ten years. He was black. Do you suppose that black men know when white women have been with black men? Since my relationship with Ziggy, I sensed black men coming on to me more than in the past. Not that Lloyd did. He was a large gentle man—one of nature’s teddy bears. But whenever he was in the buffet area of Caesar’s, he would stop to talk with me, until one day he asked me if I would care to have dinner with him.

  At dinner I learned that Lloyd, who was in his early fifties, had never married. He had family in Houston, three sisters and a brother, a mother and father still living. He was devoted to them. He owned a small house just outside Las Vegas. He liked to cook. He wasn’t church-going, but the church was important to him in his upbringing, he said. He was a square, but a sweet one. I found my heart going out to him.

  How is it that some very attractive, even very smart women can’t seem to close on marriage? However appealing they may seem, men don’t finally ask them to marry them. Others of us attract not just men but husbands. Men want to marry us. To protect us? To save us? To have exclusive rights to us? Who knows? Getting men to want to marry somehow wasn’t my problem, though maybe, now that I think of it, it was.

  All I know is that, roughly a month after our first dinner together, I became Mrs. Lloyd Blakely. Life with Lloyd was calm. Calm seemed just fine. Lloyd made a decent living. I kept my job at Caesar’s Palace. When we visited his family in Houston, I asked him to withhold all the information about my previous marriages. The Blakelys seemed to like me well enough. (I don’t think the same could have been said if I had brought Lloyd back to Batesville to meet my father, which I never did.) My only complaint about my new husband was that, as a fix-it man, he was a pack rat, and would bring home lengths of cable, canisters, wiring, lumber, and other things that were no longer useful at the casinos at which he worked.

  Lloyd never said so openly, but he wanted a child—really wanted one. I hadn’t exactly proved the model mother, but maybe now, settled at last, with no pressure on me things would be different. I was forty-three, late for child bearing, yet all my pregnancies—after the initial morning sickness—and births had gone smoothly. So I became pregnant. Lloyd was hoping for a boy, and I told him not to worry—boys were all I was able to produce.

  And we did have a boy, Matthew, who turned out to be badly brain-damaged. We had him at a nearby military hospital, and all I can remember is the OB-Gyno man yelling at one of the nurses and leaving the operating room. I later heard that my child’s umbilical cord wound around his neck, choking off his oxygen. You apparently can’t sue the US government for malpractice. What the government did offer was care for my poor baby.

  The extent of the damage to Matthew, who turned out to be beautiful, as so many biracial children I’ve noticed are, was pretty complete. He lost just about all powers of locomotion. He was never able to speak. We couldn’t even be sure if he had sight or not. The decision arose about whether to institutionalize Matthew, or care for him at home. Lloyd wouldn’t hear about institutions, where the child’s life was certain to be shortened. Matthew lived to be twenty-nine, and died less than a year after Lloyd died of his third heart attack.

  Much of the responsibility for taking care of our child fell to Lloyd. He wanted it that way. He rigged up special contraptions for the child to sit comfortably in. He bathed him. He cleaned him. He moved his own bed into Matthew’s room, so that he could help him if he was uncomfortable during the night. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t do anything—I fed Matthew, I washed and changed his clothes—but Lloyd was the main guy.

  I can easily imagine anyone reading this thinking that Matthew was my just deserts for being not much of a mother to my other children. The truth is that Donald, now living in Oregon, no longer wished to speak with me or any of his brothers. Allen had two marriages, and his second wife wanted nothing to do with me because I had married a black man. Richard turned out to be like his father, David, a good student type. He’d gone to college, and afterwards made a lot of money working for some stock-market company in San Francisco. He stayed in touch with me, and would occasionally help me out with a few thousand dollars, but I know he felt I had made a mess of my life. Joel, my fourth child, who had been wild as a teenager, died in a car accident in his late twenties in Chicago. I wasn’t able to attend the funeral.

  I’ve tried to be as candid as I know how here, and so I had better go on to say that, after Matthew was born, I began to drink in a way I hadn’t done before. I was always what Mitchell, my second husband, called a short hitter, by which he meant that it didn’t take more than two or three drinks to get me flying. But now I looked forward to the haze curtain that alcohol drew across the sadness of my life with my broken, feelingless last child.

  Lloyd understood, or at least he pretended to, when I would go off for two or three days alone and get quietly snockered. I don’t say that he liked it, but he put up with it. What was he going to do about it, anyhow? I had put on weight—maybe 50 or 60 lbs—and men no longer hit on me the way they once did, so at least he didn’t have to be jealous. I was as little interested in men as they now were in me. Things had got beyond the stage of guilt and repentance in Lloyd’s and my marriage. I would come home from one of my little benders and pick up the old routine as if nothing had happened. After a while Lloyd stopped asking where I had been.

  I watched Lloyd die. He was lifting a steel beam from the back of his pickup, when he stopped, the beam dropped to the street, he clutched his heart and fell forward. I ran out to the street, but he was already gone. He was the husband I was married longest to, and he also treated me best. Ours was hardly an ideal marriage, if such a thing exists. We’d long ago stopped making love or having long conversations. What held us together was our poor sad child.

  After Lloyd’s death, I had to put Matthew into an institution. I visited him there, at first every day, then once a week, then less than that. When I would arrive, he made a gurgling sound. I’d put my index finger in his hand, and he grasped it tightly. There was no way that, without Lloyd’s help, I could have brought Matthew home. He died three weeks before his thirtieth birthday, roughly five months after his father.

  I put our house on the market and moved into a studio apartment closer to the main drag. I was, finally, free to live as I wished—for the first time since I was seventeen and had become pregnant with Donald. I luxuriated in it. I stayed up late, drinking and watching old movies on television. I woke when I pleased. I took walks, played a little blackjack, ate what I wanted when I wanted. I thought about my life, where I had been and what I had done. I’d planned on living this way—quietly, freely—for another ten years or so. Then I started noting a bloating and loss of appetite and having to go to the bathroom all the time. I’m not one for rushing off to doctors at the least jigeroo in my health. When I started bleeding vaginally, I knew something was up. What it was, as I’ve already told you, was ovarian cancer.

  I’m told that I can buy some extra time if I’m willing to put myself through chemotherapy. I’ve decided against it. With Matthew gone, no one is dependent on me. I don’t really have all that much to look forward to. I’ll be seventy-three next month, and I don’t figure to grow more beautiful or much smarter.

  Was it freedom I longed for? Or was I only running away from responsibility? Maybe I had responsibility thrown on me too early in life:
a stupid father, a meek mother, a baby to worry about at seventeen. When I think of having had five husbands even I am a bit amazed. Maybe I should have dug in and made the best of one of them. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t settle. Was I wrong? I honestly don’t know. Now, with time running out, I’m pretty sure I’m never going to know.

  Irwin Isaac Meiselman

  Never trust a writer on the size of his audience or the sum of his royalty checks, and so when I say that I estimate the crowd attending my lecture on Willa Cather at Roosevelt University at seventy-five, I suppose it was probably closer to forty. Whether the lecture went over or not, I am the last person to say, for all my energies went into the delivery of it, with not much left over for judging its reception. During the question-and-answer session afterwards, no one had any questions to offer, probably not a good sign, but that was fine with me. The $2,500 fee was decent, and my love for Willa Cather’s fiction—my subject—genuine, and so, all in all, I thought it wasn’t a bad evening’s work.

  Standing at the lectern, putting my lecture notes back in my briefcase, I note a pudgy guy with a round face, rimless glasses, bald, alone, who had not left his seat in the second row.

  “Excuse me, Ed, but do you have a moment?” he asks.

  Ed? Do I know him? “Of course,” I reply. “What can I do for you?”

  He gets to his feet and comes up to the lectern. He is short, looks to be in his middle fifties, is wearing jeans and gym shoes, and a heavy blue crew-neck sweater. He, too, has a briefcase.

  “Irwin Isaac Meiselman,” he says, extending his hand. He says the name with authority, as if he had expected me to know it.

  “I’m writing a book about immigration to America,” he says, “which is why I attended your lecture on Willa Cather this evening. She is, as you mentioned in your talk, one of the great chroniclers of immigration, and she figures heavily in the chapter of my book on the Scandinavian migration. My chapter’s still in draft form, but I thought you might like to read it.”

  Were this a world in which candor was allowed, I should have said, “Of course I don’t want to read your chapter. Why the hell would I want to do that? “ Instead I hear myself saying, “Sounds interesting. I’d very much like to read it.”

  He has already fished out of his briefcase what looks like a manuscript of fifty or so pages. I glimpse at it only long enough to note that it is typed single-spaced.

  I have been sandbagged by experts in this line. People write me flattering emails. My answer occasions further flattering emails, which eventually lead to a request that I read a seven-hundred-page historical novel my correspondent has written, set in fifth-century AD Byzantium. “This correspondence,” as the old Times Literary Supplement used to note of exchanges in its letters columns that had gone on too long, “is hereby ended.”

  I thought my radar for such supplicants was by now fairly well developed, but I have never been confronted so directly as by this man Meiselman. After I put his somewhat smudgy manuscript in my own briefcase, he presents me with his business card. “Irwin Isaac Meiselman, Independent Scholar,” it reads, and lists his address, 6327 N. Bell Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60645, in the lower left-hand corner and his phone number, 773-262-3444, in the lower right-hand corner.

  “I’ll be eager to know what you think about it,” he says.

  “I’ll get back to you,” I say, eager only to slip this Meiselman’s company and get home.

  “Take your time,” he says. “If I don’t hear from you in three or four days, I’ll call you.” He extends a small padded hand, more like a paw, for me to shake as he takes his leave.

  When I returned to my apartment, I removed the manuscript from my briefcase, and placed it in the bottom of my already overcrowded inbox. So much, I thought, for Stanley Melvin Mitzenmacher, or whatever the hell his name is.

  Five days later, a Wednesday, mid-morning, my best working hours, my phone rings.

  “Hi, Ed, Irwin Isaac Meiselman here.”

  My name is Edward Kastell, the name under which I both write and live. When I was a kid, friends called me Eddy, but no one, now or then, has ever called me Ed. My wife doesn’t call me Ed. I have never for a moment thought of myself as Ed. Why, suddenly, am I cut down to Ed and this Meiselman, a stranger, gets three full slightly preposterous names? Beware, I tell myself, three-named Jews.

  “Hello,” I say, trying to put as much formality in my voice as possible, “this is Edward Kastell. What can I do for you, Mr. Meiselman? “

  “I was just wondering, Ed, what you thought of my Scandinavian chapter.”

  “Haven’t quite finished it, but I’ve found what I’ve read thus far full of interest.” I hadn’t of course read a word of it.

  “Any chance for lunch today to give me your ideas about it?”

  “Afraid I’m booked for today, and the next few weeks are crowded ones for me,” I say.

  “OK,” he says, “how’s Tuesday, February 11? I can come to Evanston.”

  February 11 turns out to be one of those Muscovite-like Chicago days, the temperature around 10 above zero, a sleety schmutz blowing in the wind. At Meiselman’s suggestion we meet at a Greek restaurant called the Golden Olympic, upon whose awning is written, you’ll have to believe me on this, “A Family Restaurant with Just a Touch of Greece.”

  Meiselman is awaiting me, sitting at a table toward the back of the restaurant, papers spread out before him. In preparation for this lunch, I had dragged my eyes across his manuscript. Not exactly what people nowadays call an easy read. The writing is serious but with an air of hopelessness about it; or maybe it is hopeless with an air of seriousness about it. I’m not sure which. When I say hopeless what I mean is that it is beyond question unpublishable. Meiselman’s prose is clotted, filled with academic locutions (lots of “as it weres” and “if you wills”), its author stopping several times in his narrative to put down earlier scholars on the subject. Having said this, I have to add that it showed a great deal of hard work. Some of the footnotes reference books in Scandinavian languages, which made me wonder if its author had taught himself Swedish and Norwegian for this book.

  Meiselman waves but does not get up.

  “How goes it, Ed?” he says, extending his childlike hand. His fingernails are dirty. Hair grows out of his ears.

  “OK,” I say. “Colder, though, than a politician’s kiss out there.”

  “Chicago, what do you expect? I’m just getting ready another draft chapter for you. It’s on the Jews, our people,” he says, with an odd, slightly contemptuous, chuckle.

  “I’d have thought that subject maybe has been done to death.”

  “Not at all,” Meiselman says. “Besides, I think I have a new angle on it.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s that in emigrating from Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, the more adventurous Jews went inland and down south. The tamer Jews, exhausted by their trip, stayed in New York, which offered less in the way of opportunity. So it turns out that in New York you had lots of proletarian Jews—factory workers, house painters, milk men—but not so many in other American cities, where Jews tended to open shops, sell goods, take more risks, be more entrepreneurial.”

  “Interesting,” I say, and mean it. Have I underrated Irwin Isaac Meiselman?

  Meiselman orders a bowl of chicken noodle soup, a turkey-bacon club sandwich, and a Coke. I have just the soup, hoping to make a fairly quick escape from this lunch.

  When I ask if he is married, Meiselman tells me that he isn’t, though he had come close once. “It’s a long story,” he says. I ask him where he works (in connection with his manuscript the old line, “Don’t give up your day job” comes to mind), and he says that he doesn’t have to. His mother died when he was seventeen, and father, with whom he continued to live, died nine years ago, and left him, an only child, with enough money to be able to devote the rest of hi
s life to study.

  “My father was a hustler,” Meiselman says. “He came out of World War II and drove a cab. He bought a second cab. He went from there to acquire a hot dog joint on the old West Side, near the Sears mail-order center. Then he bought a second hot dog stand on Western Avenue, a joint called Beefy 19, you may remember it, near Foster. He never ran any of these places himself. He always had partners doing the actual work. He finally sold everything and acquired an appliance-parts business, which allowed him a minor monopoly on appliance parts for the whole northern and northwestern suburban sections of Chicago.”

  “Impressive,” I say. “My own father was an accountant. Unlike yours, he was a cautious type.”

  “My old man,” Meiselman continues, “once said to me that he thought that if he were away from his business for six months his employees could only cheat him out of eight percent of the profits. A funny thing to tell me, when you think about it, since I was one of his employees.”

  Meiselman slurps up the last of his soup and starts on his club sandwich. He pours lots of ketchup on his fries.

  “I believe my father was dyslexic,” Meiselman says. “I never saw him read anything. Whenever I’d give him anything to read, he’d say, ‘You read it to me’.”

  “How come you didn’t take over his business?” I ask.

  “Because I wasn’t any good at it. My father thought about business, money, the angles, full-time. My mind was always elsewhere.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Illinois here in Chicago,” he says. “I was a lousy student. I daydreamed. I wasn’t a conventional person and couldn’t be expected to learn in the regular way, though I didn’t know it at the time. A lot of geniuses didn’t do well in school. You probably know that.”