Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  “Something I have to tell you, Al,” Larry said. “It’s been on my mind for a while.”

  Between the seventh-inning stretch and this moment Feldman had been composing his forgiveness speech. It all happened a long time ago, it’s history, no harm done really, Larry was not to give it further thought, at this point in their lives it was nothing to worry about . . .

  “Three months ago,” Larry said, “I was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I haven’t told anyone else.”

  “Holy shit,” was all Feldman could say.

  “I’m terrified,” he said. “Take my advice and don’t Google ALS. You won’t sleep that night.”

  “Rotten luck!”

  “I may have to call on you during the months ahead,” Larry said. “I haven’t minded living alone all these years, but now I have to start thinking about caregivers, nursing homes, hospices, the full goddamn catastrophe. With ALS taking away my speech and every goddamn thing else, which it eventually does, I may not be in good enough shape to make some of these decisions, let alone express what I want. I’m going to need help, especially toward the end when, I learn on Google, I won’t even notice that I’m crappin’ in my pants, if I’m wearing pants. I’m going to need you to stand by me, Al. There’s no one else I can call on.”

  Were Larry’s eyes welling up? Feldman couldn’t be sure, because his own were.

  “You can count on me,” was all he could think to say.

  “I knew that,” Larry said.

  In the months ahead, Larry first lost the strength in his arms; then his legs went, forcing him into a wheelchair. This caused Feldman to hire a so-called caregiver for him: a Filipino in his fifties named Felix Phau. He charged $900 a week, and earned it. Felix’s job was to spoon-feed Larry, dress and undress him, carry him to bed at night, bathe him, lift him on and off the toilet and clean him up afterwards.

  Feldman’s power of attorney, which Larry had arranged earlier, kicked in. Feldman wrote the weekly checks for Felix, paid Larry’s utilities and condo assessment and other bills. Larry’s speech grew slurred, and soon the slurry slipped into the unintelligible. His head, which he could no longer keep up, dropped to his chest.

  Feldman came over two or three times a week, and spent much of Sunday with Larry, standing in for Felix whose day off it was. They sat with the television set on, tuned to baseball and football games. Feldman brought in Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald CDs to play for his old friend. Larry would grunt—more like a gurgle—and Feldman would guess from the grunts what he needed: the bathroom, water, his pureed food, the television turned off. Larry was dying the slow death by subtractions that we all fear.

  His speech now entirely gone, Larry’s only communication came through his blinking his eyes. Felix taught Feldman the crude system of communication he and Larry had worked out. Two blinks from Larry meant yes, three blinks no. One Sunday evening, Felix away and not expected back until ten, Feldman wheeled Larry in his chair into the bathroom, and lifted him onto the toilet. After he was done, he placed him back in his chair, and then set him on his back in bed.

  “Larry,” Feldman found himself saying, “Elaine, my first wife, you remember Elaine, Larry did you screw her?” Feldman hadn’t meant to ask it; it just came out.

  Feldman looked down at his friend’s oddly serene face.

  Larry blinked twice. Feldman awaited a third blink but it never arrived.

  “Larry,” Feldman said, “are you sure? Are you saying that you did sleep with Elaine?”

  No answer. Larry’s eyes were closed.

  “Look,” Feldman said, “even if you did, it doesn’t matter. It’s trivial, without consequence, doesn’t matter.”

  Larry’s eyes were closed. Was he asleep? Feldman couldn’t tell for certain. He left the room feeling that he shouldn’t have done what he did.

  The next morning, at seven, Felix called. “Mr. Goodman die,” he said. “Try to wake but no possible. Die in sleep. Quiet death. Good blessing.”

  Feldman thanked Felix for letting him know, and told him that Mr. Goodman wanted him to have an extra month’s pay for all his good service, and that he would be over in an hour or two to relieve him of any further responsibility.

  After hanging up, Feldman walked into the kitchen to make coffee, and thought he had no satisfaction whatsoever from learning that his best friend, decades ago, had slept with his wife. He wished he had never found out. The truth, Feldman felt, doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it just makes you feel lousy.

  Onto a Good Thing

  “Ron?” he asked. “Ronnie Rosenberg?” Rosenberg hadn’t a clue who was asking, and the man who had must have sensed this, for he quickly added, “Nathan, Nathan Klein.” Rosenberg still didn’t remember. “Camp Ojibwa,” the man said. “Eagle River, Wisconsin, 1956.”

  Natey Klein, of course. Skinny kid, talked with a lisp, wet his bed, the cabin goat. Everyone in the cabin was ten years old. Ojibwa was a sports camp, all Jewish, with a bit of arts and crafts added: lanyard-making, wood-carving, that sort of thing. But athletics was at the center of things—softball, basketball, tennis, boxing, ping pong, canoeing, swimming—and Natey had been a lousy athlete, uncoordinated, a slow runner, couldn’t catch, terrified of the water, really awful.

  With nothing to do but play games all day, eat good food, and learn about the world from the older campers and junior counselors, Rosenberg had been in heaven. Natey Klein had gotten nowhere near so much out of Ojibwa. Small, scrawny, pale, his curly-kinky hair always unruly, he had sometimes sobbed at night in his bed, Rosenberg recalled. Every so often the junior counselors had to hang out his wet sheets in the morning. Natey’s parents, Rosenberg had heard, were wealthy. His father was something called a liquor distributor, which, Rosenberg later came to understand, probably meant that he or his family had been bootleggers during Prohibition. Natey was an only child and had to have been a disappointment to his old man, Morrie Klein, who in the 1960s made the Chicago papers because of his connection with the Boys, as they called the Mafia in those days. Mr. Klein must have sent Natey to Ojibwa in the hope of toughening him up. It hadn’t worked.

  “Of course I remember you,” Rosenberg said. “You look nothing like you did when you were a kid.” Natey was still short, but now portly, wore rectangular black-framed glasses, had a comb-over hairdo, with hair of a suspicious darkness, resembling a little the tint of oxblood shoe polish. When Rosenberg asked him what he did for a living, Natey replied that for much of his working life he had been a stockbroker but in recent years had been running a hedge fund. He looked prosperous.

  They were at the bar mitzvah party for Lou Roth’s grandson, Tyler, at a hotel called The Public that used to be the Ambassador East. Lou had gone into the family business, Roth Textiles, supplying linen to Chicago hotels and restaurants. Rosenberg and his wife, Arlene, Natie and his wife, Rochelle (very high maintenance, from the look of her), and two other couples were at the same table. Lou Roth and Rosenberg had played basketball together at Senn High School. Natey Klein mentioned that he had been Lou’s stockbroker and, as he added with a confident smile, had done well for him.

  For the party Lou and Sheila Roth had hired a disc jockey. “Six grand, he charges just to plug in CDs,” Lou told Rosenberg, “and his schedule’s so crowded we were lucky to get the son-of-a-bitch at all.” The four-piece band Rosenberg’s parents had hired for his bar mitzvah party had been led by a man named Phil Lind. Held at the Ridgeview, a residential hotel in Evanston, Rosenberg’s bar-mitzvah dinner had been catered by a heavyset middle-aged woman calling herself the Duchess, who also served as mistress of ceremonies. The Ridgeview is today a halfway house for the mentally ill, but in those days, under the direction of the Duchess, it might to a stranger from another country have seemed a full-out madhouse. The Duchess led the room in singing “The Old Gray Mare” and forced everyone out of his and her seats to do the
Mexican Hat Dance. Everyone, that is, but Rosenberg’s very formal grandfather, who spoke very little English and was a leading figure in Hebrew education in Montreal.

  Still, it had been a party for adults. Not this one. All the music played by the DJ at Tyler Roth’s party was for kids, and noisy and obtrusive it was. No real chance for dancing, not to the music the six-grand DJ was playing, not for grown-ups, that is. Not much chance for talking either, at least not in a normal voice.

  “So what’ve you been doing for a living, Ron?” Natey asked.

  “I went into my father’s business,” Rosenberg said. “Office furniture. We’re on Lake Street, near Wabash.”

  “Interesting,” Klein said, though he didn’t look in the least interested.

  As the evening progressed, Natey revealed he was a member of Bryn Mawr Country Club, had a winter home in Palm Springs, drove a Bentley, had a son who had gone to the Wharton School of Business and was running a software company in Silicon Valley, and had a daughter who had married a cardiologist and was living in Los Angeles. He and his wife had sold their house in Glencoe five years ago and moved into a co-op at 219 E. Lake Shore Drive, a very expensive address.

  “You golf, Ronnie?” Natey asked.

  “No,” Rosenberg said. “I assume you do from your mention earlier of Bryn Mawr.” Never having taken up golf, Rosenberg felt, was one of the few completely sound decisions he had made in his life.

  “Love the game,” Natey said. “Not that I’m so hot at it. Rochelle, in fact, frequently beats me.” Here he patted the back of his wife’s bejeweled hand. “We’re thinking of buying a condo on a golf course in Scottsdale.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Arlene, Rosenberg’s wife, said, looking at her watch.

  “Shame you don’t golf, Ron,” Natey said. “I’d like to have taken you out for a round at Bryn Mawr.”

  “Maybe we can meet one day for lunch,” Rosenberg said. Why did he say that, he thought, for the fact was that Rosenberg had heard all the bragging about his wealth from Natey Klein he needed.

  Before they left, Natey and Rosenberg exchanged business cards, and Natey promised to call sometime the following week.

  “What a dreary, boring little man!” Arlene said on the drive back to Wilmette.

  As promised, Natey Klein called to invite Rosenberg to join him for lunch at the Standard Club the following Friday. Rosenberg said yes, sure, glad to, looked forward to it, then wondered what the hell they would find to talk about.

  When Rosenberg was a kid, the Standard Club might as well have been the Union League Club in New York, or White’s in England, or the Jockey Club in Paris, so remote had it been from him and his family and most of the people he grew up with. In those days the Standard Club’s membership was purely German-Jewish, and the Rosenbergs and almost everyone else who lived in West Rogers Park were Jews from Eastern Europe. In Chicago, the Jews of Rosenberg’s caste had had the Covenant Club, which his father, Sam, joined in the early 1960s when his business became more profitable. In a small room off one of the dining rooms, Sid Luckman, the legendary Bears quarterback, long retired from football and by that point in the cardboard-box business, used to play high-stakes gin rummy. Later in the evening you could hear Luckman swearing in his strong New York accent.

  Most unlikely that you would ever hear anyone swear at the Standard Club. Rosenberg had been there once for a fund-raising event for Soviet Jews and was impressed with the general feel of the place, its vast rooms, solid furniture, heavy draperies. He imagined its regular membership as dark-suited, solemn, solidly wealthy, humorless, not likely to be impressed by the accomplishments of Sid Luckman.

  But when Rosenberg entered the Standard Club on Friday and told the young woman at the reception desk that he was a guest of Mr. Nathan Klein, he was struck by the view in the lobby of the large number of men in sport shirts, sweaters, chino pants, and even jeans. Several members were wearing those five-day growths of beard called, Rosenberg recently learned, double-stubble or perma-stubble.

  When Natey entered the club lobby on the Plymouth Court side, ten minutes late, he was wearing a dark blue suit, a gray silken necktie, and highly polished black shoes with a single line across the toes. He gave off a strong whiff of men’s cologne.

  “Ron, good to see you,” he said. “You know this joint.”

  “I know only that fifty years ago neither of us would have been able to meet here for lunch.”

  “Yeah,” Natey said. “The old joke was that the only Jewish event ever celebrated at this club was Kristallnacht. The place always had a great kitchen, though. Still does.”

  When they were seated, Rosenberg asked Natey where he had gone to high school.

  “Same place you did: Senn,” he said. “I was a semester behind you, but you obviously never noticed me. You were at the center of things—on the basketball team, in the best clubs, and all that—and I was out on the periphery, a nebbish. I didn’t have very happy high school years, or for that matter a very good adolescence.”

  “I sometimes think I peaked back then,” Rosenberg said, “and it has been pretty much downhill since I was eighteen.”

  “You were all-city in basketball, no?”

  “Actually, all-north section. I had a ride to play at Bradley, but decided I had got all I could out of basketball. I went to Illinois. What about you?”

  “Michigan. Started out as pre-med. My old man’s idea, my becoming a doctor. But he died my sophomore year, heart attack, so I switched to economics before organic chemistry, and boredom completely crushed me.”

  “Looks like it was the right move.”

  “I’ve had my share of good luck. How about you, on the money front, I mean?”

  “I guess I do all right,” Rosenberg said. “My daughter has an autistic child and a husband who deserted her, so I’m pretty much supporting two households, which wasn’t in what is nowadays called ‘retirement planning.’”

  Rosenberg rarely told anyone, even friends, about the condition of his grandson, Zachary, or about his daughter Sarah’s loathsome ex-husband. Why was he telling all this to Natey Klein, whom he scarcely knew?

  “Sorry to hear it,” Natey said. “If there’s any way I can help out, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  Rosenberg thought to say that, since you asked Natey, how about letting me have half a million or so. “Nice of you to ask,” he said instead.

  “I wasn’t trying to be nice,” Natey said. “I have something in mind. Let me ask, Ron: How liquid are you?”

  “By liquid you mean . . . ?” Rosenberg was one of those men who, even though he ran a small business, could never bring himself to think for long about money outside the confines of the office-furniture business. Debentures, leveraging, buying on margin, selling short, capital appreciation—it was all Hungarian to him. Not that he thought he was too good for it. On the contrary. When Rosenberg saw some of the dopes he grew up with having made fortunes in the stock market, or through investing in real-estate development, putting them safely out of the financial wars, he felt woefully inadequate.

  “I mean how much money do you have that’s not otherwise tied up in long-term investments?”

  “If I scrape a few things together, maybe a hundred grand or so,” Rosenberg said. “Why?”

  “Because I think I can put you onto a good thing. I can turn it into a lot more than that for you, and fairly quickly. That is, if you’re interested.”

  “Really?” Rosenberg said. “Let me think about it and get back to you, Nathan.”

  “Natey, please, like in the old days, Natey, will do fine.”

  “Onto a good thing.” Rosenberg remembered some years ago asking his friend Norm Brodsky about the sudden wealth of a guy they had known in the Sammy house at Illinois named Earle Pollock. He was no genius, Pollock. In fact, he flunked out his freshman year; couldn’t do accounting. Norm told him that so
meone Pollock knew who worked in the commodities market had put him “onto a few good things,” which made him a rich man.

  What did Natey Klein have in mind by his “good thing”? He assumed a killing on some fast rising stock. How much of a killing? How quick a turnover was involved? When Rosenberg said that he could scrape together a hundred thousand, he was lying. The only way just now that he could get together a hundred grand was to borrow on his 401(k). And why trust Natey Klein, with his bragging and his oxblood comb-over, with the money?

  Rosenberg decided not to talk it over with Arlene. She was even more cautious about money than he. Besides, he knew what she would say. “Put a hundred thousand dollars in the hands of that drip! You must be crazy!” is what she would say. So often the little decisions in life get lots of attention, and the big ones are made on impulse and instinct. It was purely on instinct that Rosenberg decided to trust Natey with his money.

  When Rosenberg called Klein at his office the following Monday, Natey said that a certified check, either sent by FedEx or delivered in person, would be best. Rosenberg decided to bring the money himself, just to make sure that Natey wasn’t operating out of a boiler room.

  The Hawthorne Fund, Natey’s firm was called, and his office at 110 N. LaSalle was impressive. The layout was similar to that of a successful law firm: comfortable reception room, long corridor, expensive-looking art all along it. In an office with large windows on three sides sat Natey, behind a large uncluttered desk, on which was a laptop and two pictures of his family in silver frames. On a credenza behind him, three large computers were flickering with lit-up numbers. His suit jacket off, his rounded shoulders, the softness of his chest and pot belly evident, Natey seemed even less impressive.