Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Twelve years after my non-marriage to Jessica McNeil, I married Susan Levinson, a pediatrician in private practice on the near north side. My brother Howard was my best man, Melissa was one of Susan’s maids of honor; my father wasn’t invited to the wedding. We hadn’t spoken in all this time. I thought about inviting him, felt maybe this was the right occasion to make things up between us, but then I decided it was his, not my, place to make the first move toward a reconciliation, and in all this time he never made such a move. From time to time I asked my brother if my father ever mentioned me. The answer was always negative. I wasn’t upset by this; it let me off the hook. He was too preoccupied to be much of a father anyway.

  I listened to “The Bernie Klepner Show,” not every night, but at odd times: driving home from a movie or play or dinner with friends, in the bathroom while brushing my teeth before going to bed, up at night paying bills. He was as wild as ever, my old man. One night I heard him ask Edward Albee how he had come to hate the American family so much. Another night he asked the president of Northwestern University, a Jew at a school that once had strict anti-Jewish quotas, how it has come about that the Jewish presidents of so many American universities were just as mediocre as their gentile predecessors. He told an advocate of gay marriage that he was for gay marriage because he didn’t see why, as a divorced man himself, gay men and lesbians should be spared the legal complications and nightmares of formal legal divorce. He had an environmentalist on one night I had tuned in, and promptly asked him what the hell the environment ever did for humanity, apart from floods, landslides, earthquakes, tornados, monsoons, droughts, and raging fires. A famous rapper came on and the host asked him when he first realized there was a good buck to be made composing songs hating white people. Wild, like I say.

  My brother Howard, who studied accounting at Illinois, eventually came to work for me. When he told our father he was planning to become an accountant, our father said, “Howard, dope, you don’t become an accountant. You hire an accountant.” Howard kept me up to date on my father’s doings, not the least notable of which was, at age sixty-six, a third marriage, this time to a personal injury lawyer, Teri Rabin was her name, who specialized in spousal abuse cases. She was in her mid-fifties.

  “Her aggressiveness,” Howard reported, “makes Dad look like Peter Pan. Her name’s Rabin but it could more accurately be Rabid. Our dad doesn’t seem to mind. He finds it amusing.”

  “Sounds like a woman dangerous to divorce from,” I said.

  “Maybe we better set up a trust fund for our father,” Howard said, “just in case.”

  The marriage lasted four years, when Teri Rabin acquired early onset Alzheimer’s, and had to be put into a nursing home. I never met her. My brother told me that our father attended to her well past the time when she could no longer remember his name, continuing to visit her in the dementia floor at the Northwest Home on California and Rosemont. She lived on, in a cloud of obliviousness, for nine more years. Give my father his due. He could be rough, verbally brutal, tyrannical, but he wasn’t a skunk.

  Susan and I had two kids together, sons, and on more than one occasion, when still young, they asked me how come they never got to see their Klepner grandfather. I remember as a kid asking my father the same question about not seeing his father. He told me his father was working abroad. When I asked him where “abroad” was, he said “Sudan.” When I asked what he did there, he said he owned and ran a drugstore. I wasn’t as imaginative in lying to my children. I told them that their grandfather was nervous around young children, and would love to see them once they were older. After a while they stopped asking.

  Looking back on it, my father hadn’t had an easy run. He had three marriages, none of which gave him enduring satisfaction. One of his sons turned out to be an accountant, which, by the standards set by the University of Chicago, fell on the prestige scale somewhere between a garbageman and a child molester. His other son, me, with whom he hadn’t spoken in more than thirty years, he had long ago written off as a coarse money man, nothing more. He had, in effect, sat shiva over me, or I over him, I’m not sure which, long ago.

  Saddest of all was his daughter Melissa—Mel as we used to call her when she was a kid—who never really got over our mother’s death. Mel was sixteen when our mother died, which as everyone knows can be a tough time for girls; I know it was for her. (The only tenderness I saw my father expend when I was growing up was to Mel, his beautiful but clearly fragile daughter.) She went into therapy soon after our mother’s death and never really emerged from it. She had two kids from her first marriage, to a man she had to chase for child support after their divorce. After having a child with a second husband, she was, in her early thirties, diagnosed as bipolar. She drank when depressed, and hung around with all the wrong people when manic. Her second husband, a decent guy, left her, remarking that not many marriages with one person being bipolar make it to their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He agreed to raise all three of her children, whom he promptly took off to live in Oregon. My father felt he had no choice but to take Mel in to live with him, which couldn’t have been all that easy for either of them.

  Through all this sadness and chaos, “The Bernie Klepner Show” kept going, five nights a week. So he plugged away, night after night, talking with experts on climate change, authors of books on reducing crime, politicians on the make, with women who wrote about the child abuse they had undergone, with poets, pacifists, people who wanted to legalize pot, end gun control, save the planet, leaders of one liberation movement or another, with anyone looking for a bit of free publicity. How he kept it up, I have no notion, except that he needed his show, he needed a forum, a place to perform. “The Bernie Klepner Show” was the one inviolate part of his life.

  Then the people at his station decided that my father’s show was to be cut down from two to a single hour. “They’re dumbing down the whole damn station,” he told my brother, “goddamn goyim.”

  Then our sister died in a motorcycle accident, killed on the Eisenhower Expressway, when the motorcycle of the guy she was riding behind jumped the median and ran head on into a truck headed east. If you’re wondering what a Jewish woman of forty-four was doing riding on a motorcycle driven by a guy named Steve Woszjewhawski, I would send you to consult the Wikipedia entry on Bipolarity, with special attention to the manic phase.

  The funeral for Melissa was at Weinstein-Piser on Skokie Boulevard and Church Street. I sat with Howard and his family and my wife and our two sons and my father in the front row. Melissa’s coffin was closed. My father decided it made no sense to have Mel’s children flown in for this horrendously sad occasion. This was the first time I had seen my father in roughly thirty-two years. He still had all his hair, but it had turned white; he wore glasses; his stockiness was gone; he walked with a slight limp. He was near eighty.

  “Not the prodigal but, I’m told, the plutocrat returns,” he said at greeting me.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Apart from being broken-hearted,” he said, “I’m going along. I loved that poor girl. I hope you know that.”

  “Of course I do. It was good of you to take her in after her divorce.”

  “And now she’s gone, and I’m a member of that saddest of all fraternities, parents who have buried a child. I don’t like it, not a damn bit.”

  Somehow we got through the funeral: the platitudes of the rabbi about the early death of a woman who had been plagued by mental illnesses from a man who never knew her, the long ride out to Westlawn Cemetery, the sad lowering of my sister’s casket into the grave that was next to our mother’s. As the rabbi recited the kaddish, I looked across the grave to see if my father was crying. He wasn’t. But he seemed a bent old man, and for the first time I could remember, vulnerable.

  As my father and Howard and his wife and daughter got into the limousine to return to town, my father rolled down the window.

 
“Next time you come out here will be to bury me,” he said. “Try to remember to be respectful.”

  Before I could answer, the window closed and the limousine pulled away.

  The next piece of bad news visited upon my father was the cancellation of “The Bernie Klepner Show.” The station replaced him with a sports talk show, which somehow made it seem all the more degrading to him.

  “Chewing up stale items about preposterous athletic salaries and trades and last night’s game,” he said. “If that’s what the morons want, fuck ‘em, let ‘em have it.”

  He attempted to shop “The Bernie Klepner Show” to other stations around town, but there was no interest. Without a show to go to every night, my father, it was obvious, felt lost. Now that we were back in touch, I offered to take him to lunch. Our first lunch together, at the old Tavern Club, at 333 N. Michigan, where I was on the board, was awkward. At first he hadn’t much to say. He did remark, though, he thought it interesting that he had fallen out with his father just as I had fallen out with him.

  “Maybe we have more in common than either of us thought,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” he replied. “Your brother tells me you’re a wealthy man.”

  “I suppose I am,” I said.

  “I gather you sit around all day conjuring up deals. I’ll bet you drift off to sleep thinking up how you can make still more money?”

  “Actually I don’t,” I said. “But I sometimes wake up with terrific ideas about how to do so.

  “Fact is,” I continued, “I do spend a lot of time thinking about money—about how to make it, about how to keep it safe, about how to make more out of what I already have. You find that objectionable?”

  “No,” he said, “I find it unimaginable. I can’t concentrate on money long enough to balance my checkbook, let alone read financial reports.”

  “Are you saying your mind is on higher things?”

  “Yep,” he said, “that’s what I’m saying.”

  “I’m pleased you are able to feel so good about yourself.”

  “We can’t all be luftmenschen, I understand that. I might envy you your dough, but I don’t admire you.”

  “I on the other hand might admire you your freedom, but I don’t envy you at all, so I guess we’re even, or pretty close to it.” I felt as if I were a guest trapped on “The Bernie Klepner Show.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you look,” he said with a smile. “Maybe you’re a Klepner after all.”

  At other lunches—we met every six weeks or so—we talked about the great world. Or rather he talked about it, and I listened. He felt everything good in life was slipping away, all politicians were crooks, academics hopeless, current novelists unreadable, poets non-existent, plays not worth paying the outlandish sums asked to see them, social scientists mostly full of crap, journalists whores. These were rants, pure rants, but fairly impressive ones, I thought.

  “You’ve probably never heard of a writer named Umberto Eco,” he said at our last lunch together. “Eco somewhere writes that as a sapient man grows older he gradually develops contempt for whole segments of contemporary society: physicians, lawyers, professors, businessmen, civil servants, diplomats, and so on, until there is no one left for whom he doesn’t feel contempt but himself. Soon after he dies. I think I’m about there.”

  As we were leaving the Tavern Club, on the elevator down from the 25th floor, my father said: “I apologize. I regret the years we missed out on.”

  “I’m equally to blame,” I said. “No apology needed.”

  Had we been different men, we might have hugged. Instead we both kept our eyes on the floor until the elevator arrived at the lobby. Out on Michigan Avenue, before departing, we shook hands.

  “There’s an old Arab proverb,” he said, “I wish it were a Jewish proverb but I guess you can’t have everything, an Arab proverb that goes, ‘When your son becomes a man, make him your brother.’ I think maybe it’s time I did that for you.”

  “Sounds good to me, Dad,” I said. “I would like that a lot.”

  Three weeks later my father had a stroke.

  I visited him at Rush Medical Center. His left side was completely paralyzed. His face seemed frozen, his speech greatly slurred. I approached his bed, grasped his hand.

  “I,” he said, very slowly, with long pauses between the words. “Loved. Your. Mother.”

  My father died that night. There was a brief obituary in The New York Times. His death made the front page, below the fold, of the Chicago Tribune. “Iconoclast Bernard Klepner Dead at 83” read the headline.

  “The Bernie Klepner Show” was over.

  The Viagra Triangle

  Bill Dolan’s the name, and I’ve been doorman here at The Condorcet Condominiums at 146 E. Cedar for twenty-six years, it’ll be twenty-seven in August. Before this I was a fireman. I played football at Lane Tech High School. I was a linebacker, third team all-city in 1972, to which I owe the fact that my knees gave out at the age of thirty-six and I had to retire on disability from the Chicago Fire Department. With my small pension from the city and my salary from The Condorcet, I make out all right. My wife Marlene and I live in a bungalow in Jefferson Park on the northwest side, and our two kids are grown and long gone.

  I sit behind my reception desk at The Condorcet much of the day, receiving packages, making sure no one gets in who isn’t supposed to, meeting a few requests to run errands for our wealthy owners, watching, you might say, how the other half lives. The Condorcet is located between Rush Street and Lake Shore Drive, with Oak Street beach just to the east. The neighborhood is what used to be known as the Gold Coast, but Cedar, along with Bellevue and Elm Streets, are what lots of people have begun to call The Viagra Triangle, so named because there’s lots of older, financially well-off men with wives or in some cases girlfriends thirty and more years younger than themselves.

  Over the years I’ve seen guys with funny, hobbling walks, or even on walkers accompanied by knock-out young women who are definitely not their caregivers, unless you put a very loose interpretation on the word “care.” On Oak Street, site of Jimmy Choo, Prada, Barney’s of New York, retired guys in Ralph Lauren suits hit on older girls from Walter Payton High School in the hope, who knows, of getting lucky. In The Condorcet there is a man named Lou Pearlman, must be in his mid-eighties, been in a wheelchair for some years, who is never seen without his wife Candace, who once gave the weather on the local NBC station under the name Candy Phillips, better known in those days for her rack than for the accuracy of her forecasts, and who must be forty years younger than he.

  On the twenty-sixth floor, in one of the building’s two duplexes—they go for over three million—lives Sheldon Fishman with what I believe is his twenty-five years younger mistress. Three weeks ago, a very high maintenance blond, she’s maybe thirty-five, approaches the reception desk, and asks for the floor of Mr. Fishman’s apartment. I ask her name, and she tells me Brittany Connors. Fishman asks to have her put on the phone. She calls him Shelly, and laughs loudly at something he’s told her. Before hanging up, she says into the phone, winking at me, “I’ll be right up. Don’t start without me.” When a few hours later the two of them passed my desk on their way out, Fishman, smiling, in a low voice, says to me, “Chemistry is our most important product.” I’m not sure what the right attitude is to take to a man who cheats on his mistress.

  The Condorcet has more than its share of widows and widowers, people in their seventies and early eighties. I’m sixty-two myself, a kid to most of them. I’ve been around the building long enough to watch some of the owners grow into old age. The stages are sadly familiar. Often it begins with the funny walk. Next comes the walker. This is usually followed by the wheelchair and the Filipino caregiver. The fall and the broken hip spells the beginning of the end.

  The widows do better. Some, in their early eighties, continue dressing pr
ovocatively, in designer jeans, dyed hair, heavy makeup, still on the attack, I guess you might say. Many are still looking for new husbands, though they tend to be very critical. Over by the mailboxes, which are near the reception desk, this past Tuesday I overheard Mrs. Faye Schwartz, on the ninth floor, say to Elaine Spivak, 12B, “He’s looking for a nurse with a purse. Count me out.”

  The widowers do less well. Three or four months after their wives die, most of them start to look kind of rumpled: clothes not pressed, spots on their shirts and jackets, letting hair grow out of their noses and ears. Maybe they go a couple days without a shave. Who’s noticing, they must figure. What’s clear is that it was their wives who kept them in respectable order, and with them no longer on the scene things start to cave in pretty fast.

  Sometimes, though, there will be a startling change back to orderliness, or even more than orderliness. Mr. Arthur Handler, from the seventh floor, fell into this kind of widower’s scruffiness in a fairly extreme way a month or two after his wife Sarah died from liver cancer. Then one day he shows up in the lobby in a double-breasted suit, an expensive-looking tie, black tassel loafers with a high shine. Later that evening, just before I go off duty, he returns to The Condorcet with a woman, a redhead, maybe thirty or so years younger than him, which explains everything.

  I was pleased to see this didn’t happen to Philip Sherman, who owns the other penthouse duplex at The Condorcet. I don’t befriend the owners in the building, or maybe it’s more exact to say that they don’t befriend me, but I can’t help liking some more than others. Philip Sherman and his wife Anne were a couple I liked a lot. They seemed to be not just man and wife, but also each other’s best friend. I like to think the same is true of Marlene and me. Without any attempt at fake intimacy or anything like that, they always treated me graciously, as if I were something more than hired help. They were very dignified people, and they acted under the assumption that everyone else had dignity, too. Every Christmas I would get a handwritten note from Anne Sherman wishing me happy holidays and thanking me for my help during the past year, with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill enclosed. When Anne Sherman was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, her husband wouldn’t let her be sent off to a nursing home, but hired a full-time nurse to watch over her. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the two of them walking through the lobby, her holding tightly onto his arm, a look of frightening emptiness in her eyes. For two years she staggered on, until, I’m told, she didn’t remember her husband’s name. She died not long after.