“You could get married right here,” I whispered to Meredith and looked up into the trees, the sunlight filtered through the branches as if it were, indeed, coming through stained glass. The crowd had suddenly hushed, just as if they were inside a cathedral. “It’s so pretty. You wouldn’t have to wait until you got back to New York. Think of the effort you’d save.”
You and Meredith smiled at one another and you took her thin hand in yours. I walked off and left you alone, going toward the front of the crowd where the three children stood next to the conductor, listening to his radio announcer voice. It was becoming an impossible visit, but it would soon be over. How could I hate Meredith, someone who was so deathly ill? Besides being so sick, she was also very sweet. And perhaps not as naïve as Elliot had thought. Sometimes when she was looking at me, I was sure that she knew about us, that the secrecy about our weekends in San Francisco had been unnecessary. Her gaze remained friendly, yet it was steady and penetrating, seeming to know all.
You and Meredith did not accept my suggestion to marry in the redwoods, but said your vows soon after you returned to New York, in the garden under that trellis. It was just as Meredith had planned. The leaves were beginning to change color and it must have been beautiful. But within the year, Meredith was gone, buried in the little cemetery in your town along the Hudson. Her death, not so long after your wedding, was a hard death. There had been a lot of pain, you said, and though she grieved at leaving Matthew, she wanted it to be over.
In the weeks after her funeral, you phoned me often from the house near the Hudson River. Once again, I found myself listening to your grief, consoling you through the awful period of aloneness, just as I had after your mother’s death. Although you’d never been a drinker, now I heard the clinking of ice cubes against glass as we spoke.
Without your knowledge, while her mind was still clear, Meredith completed paperwork assuring that her older sister, Renata, would receive primary custody of Matthew. Renata already had two kids, close in age to their cousin Matthew. She and her husband lived farther upstate in New York. Their house was small, but there was land and woods and they could give the boy a family. On their land, they raised goats, and made goat soap and goat cheese which they sold at farmers’ markets. They had a big, sloppy Australian shepherd that Matthew adored. Renata and Meredith had lost their own mother early to the same cancer that killed Meredith, and she was sure that the bad decisions she’d made in her life (namely, the disastrous first marriage to a junkie) occurred because she’d been deprived of her mother during her formative years. She’d had less time to absorb her mother’s sound judgment and guidance. By comparison, her older sister, Renata, was more wise and settled. You and Meredith were alike in that—you’d both lost your mothers young. Meredith hoped that Matthew would have the mothering he needed by growing up in Renata’s home. Although Renata and her husband were poor, at the time just getting by in the goat soap and cheese business, Meredith was sure Renata would be an excellent mother to Matthew, perhaps even better than she herself had been. And, with your generosity, Meredith had set up a trust fund for Matthew. His future would be well taken care of. Of course, Meredith stipulated, Elliot should be free to visit whenever he wanted, every weekend if he liked.
Meredith’s decision to put Matthew in the custody of her sister devastated you. You told me you suspected that Meredith and her sister had been concocting this plan for some time, but you learned of it only after her death.
“Elliot Pine has been the best stepfather a child could want,” Meredith had written, “and his love of Matthew is not in question. However, his demanding work schedule and commute to the city would be incompatible with single fatherhood. My hope is that Elliot will remain active in Matthew’s life, but my sister, Renata, and her husband, Jake, are the most able to assume full-time custody of my son.” (Meredith’s first husband, now in prison for selling cocaine, had terminated his parental rights.)
Losing Matthew so soon after Meredith died made the house even more desolate. You had tried hard to be a good father to the boy. It seemed to you that you’d failed an important test you didn’t even know you were taking and did not understand how Meredith had deemed you unworthy of caring for her precious child. You thought of contesting her will, but when Matthew ran from your car after you brought him to Renata and Jake’s place, excited to see his cousins and the dog and the farm animals, you gave up on that idea. For months after Meredith’s death, you rattled around alone in the house, trying to maintain the garden and making frequent trips up the Hudson to visit Matthew.
A bit more than a year after Meredith’s death, I arranged to go to New York, a Thanksgiving trip for me and the twins. For Jewish children, watching the Macy’s parade on television is a non-threatening, non-Christian way to imbibe holiday spirit. No baby Jesus or even Ave Maria. Just marching bands and colorful floats and Santa Claus at the end. Just as I had done as a child in Chicago, the children would get up early on Thanksgiving morning and, while I cooked, watch the parade on television from start to finish. Evan loved the floats and the fantastic balloon characters, while Miriam adored the horses prancing in rhythm. I scheduled the trip so that we could watch the holiday parade in person, and I did my research, thoroughly, as usual, and found a very nice hotel on the west side right along the parade route.
The trip across country with the eleven-year-olds had gone well. What a pleasure it was to travel with them now, each able to carry their own backpack of things they wanted for the plane, me finally no longer responsible for crayons and books and snack crackers. It was bitter cold when we walked out the doors of JFK and the children squealed when they felt the first gust of freezing air, huddling around me as I found a cab to take us into the city. They didn’t complain, though. The cold was part of the adventure.
There was also real pleasure for me in avoiding the holiday back home. If it was Seth’s year for Thanksgiving (holidays and birthdays with the twins had been carefully and equitably distributed in the divorce settlement), I attended someone else’s dinner without the children. However, this meant certain loneliness. I felt their absence acutely. The chatter around the table and the abundance of food felt hollow without Miriam and Evan, my family, at my side.
The years when I did have the children for the holiday weren’t much better. I drove myself mercilessly, feeling that as a single parent I needed to incorporate every tradition that would make the holiday memorable for the twins. Perhaps I needed to do it to excess in order to make up for the fact that no father was at the table to carve the big, golden bird. So, on the days preceding the dinner, I dragged two long folding tables in from the garage. I placed white, freshly ironed cloths on them and set up to twenty-five places, a number that completely filled the narrow living room. It felt important to fill the house to overflowing and to pile the coats on my bed, just as my parents had done in their apartment in Chicago on holidays.
I’d prepare far too many of the recipes I’d encountered on supermarket magazine racks—cranberry biscuits from scratch, green bean casseroles that were not sullied by canned soup filler, fragrant orange and apricot and almond stuffing for the turkey, and perfect x’s carved into the chestnuts before roasting. Afterward, at midnight, when I was alone in the kitchen, and exhaustion filled me as I rinsed glass after glass, I wondered whether the effort had been worth it. Would the children remember, in years to come, that their turkey had been preservative-free? I doubted it. I wished for someone to be at my side as I cleaned up in the now empty and messy house that I’d spent days cleaning. I didn’t want help with the dishes. I just wanted someone there to talk about the evening. Had there been enough side dishes? Was the turkey moist enough? What about the seating arrangement? Did everyone have someone to speak to? Oh, how I wanted to process the evening with a partner. And then, I wanted to fall into bed with that someone and have exhausted, thankful sex. It was done, I’d made another elaborate holiday meal, and now it was time for me—to be stroked and appreciated an
d caressed into sleep.
I am embarrassed to confess how many times I did allow some not very appropriate man, a guest at the dinner, to stay after the Thanksgiving celebration. Ostensibly, it was to help me clean up. But the real reason was to push away the loneliness and exhaustion. These men were not allowed to stay the night, of course. They could not be there when the children awoke. And, I rarely saw them again.
It would be a different Thanksgiving for this year. Honestly, I told myself, it wasn’t to console a lonely Elliot Pine. When Evan had been very small, he’d called the city Une Nork. That was how we always referred to it—even decades later when Evan lived there himself and his sister, Miriam, had children of her own. We’re going to Une Nork, the twins excitedly told their friends and their dad. To see the big parade and, maybe, snow. They were too old to believe in Santa Claus, but there was still a thrill as they thought about Santa at the end of the parade, the elves throwing out candy to the crowds gathered on either side of the street.
My parents were disappointed when they learned that I was going to take the children across country on a plane, but not bring them to Chicago for the holiday. I suppose it was a little selfish of me. There was no question that they were getting old—my mother’s Russian accent seeming to reassert itself more than I remembered and my father spending increasing hours reading at his spot on the couch, paying less attention to both his wife and the world around him. I would visit them with the twins soon, I promised them and myself. But not this Thanksgiving.
We spent the day in front of our hotel. The music of the flutes, the sunshine reflecting off the tubas—everything was laid out before us almost close enough to touch. When we got cold, we’d run inside and ride the elevator up to our room on the eleventh floor. We’d warm ourselves a bit, watching the parade from our window so we didn’t miss anything, then go back down again to the street. We had cups of delicious cocoa all day, followed by bags of warm chestnuts and peanuts. For dinner, instead of turkey, we had chicken noodle soup and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches from the hotel coffee shop. It was perfect, a memorable day, just as I’d hoped. The kids would not forget it.
Later that night, when they had well and truly fallen asleep, I studied their eleven-year-old faces in the stream of moonlight coming through the hotel room window. Serious Miriam, her need to organize and direct was as powerful as my own. She had thick brown braids and a splash of freckles across her nose. She looked like a child of the American prairie, just like one of the characters in the Little House series she adored. Tomorrow, we’d go skating at Rockefeller Center. But first, I promised her we’d look at the horses at the Central Park stables. Miriam was a sensible and efficient girl, never shirking a chore or a responsibility. She always drove herself hard, my daughter did. I was glad that there was this one thing, her passion for horses, that made her so euphorically happy. Within ten feet of a horse, she softened and visibly released her tense shoulders. The worry wrinkle between her brows relaxed.
Evan, on the other hand, was all nerves and feelings. He was disorganized and unfocused. Week after week, I found unfinished homework at the bottom of his backpack, some problems penciled in, but never removed from its hiding place. Evan was clearly bright, but because his work was often missing, he brought home low Cs or even Ds. The parade had been exciting for Evan, but the homeless people outside our hotel and the beggars who leaped out at red lights when we’d come by taxi from JFK had affected my sensitive boy. Occasionally, he got upset stomachs from tension, and I hoped this would not be a night when he woke with one. In the moonlight, I pulled the blanket over his sleeping frame, watching as his fingers and legs twitched, the nerve endings still firing and reacting to the day’s excitement. He was five inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than Miriam. Were there ever twins less similar?
When I organized the trip, I hadn’t wanted to appear pushy. Was it too soon after everything you’d been through? Meredith’s prolonged illness and excruciating death? Then losing Matthew as well. But I needn’t have worried. When I called to tell you of my plans to bring the children east over Thanksgiving—okay, perhaps harboring just a few thoughts of cooking for you and rescuing you from a lonely holiday—you told me you were thrilled. What a wonderful idea, you said. Maybe there’d be snow. There was sometimes snow in New York in November. Had Evan and Miriam ever seen snow? Then, after a brief hesitation, you told me you had news. You’d met someone. You were at the beginning of a new relationship with a woman. “Now you two can meet,” you said. “You’re going to love her. She’s fantastic.”
Lillian ran a gallery on the main street of Beacon. One Saturday, still carrying a cup of coffee you’d picked up down the street, you wandered into the gallery for no particular reason. While you were staring at the art, not really seeing any of it, she came up behind you and took the paper cup out of your hands.
“No eating or drinking in the gallery, please,” she’d said in her precise diction. “Everyone thinks they won’t spill, but you would be surprised how many accidents do happen. I’ll keep your cup up front for you.” And she walked away holding the still-steaming cup.
You turned and stared after her as she walked off with your coffee. You told me you had never seen anyone so extraordinary looking. She had long, almost black hair that cascaded in unruly curls down her back, and she was wearing a short, puffy skirt, like a ballerina’s tutu, with purple tights under it. From the back, with her tiny frame, you might have thought she was a very young girl. But her face was not that of a young girl. She was beautiful, but obviously not young. You walked to the front of the gallery, following the trail of steaming coffee. Later, you said that you’d always associate the smell of strong coffee with Lillian. It was a fortuitous association, as one of your great obsessions, much more than wine or hard liquor, is coffee. You could talk blends and roasts until I wanted to take you by the neck and throttle you.
“Shut up about coffee,” I once screamed during one of your endless lectures on the stuff. “Enough. Coffee is coffee and the only thing that makes it tolerable is two cubes of sugar and a healthy dose of cream.” I, myself, have always been a tea person, but of course, Lillian loves coffee and brought her own Gaggia Classic espresso maker to the relationship. (You reported this to me with reverence. “A Gaggia,” you repeated, as if talking about shares in a gold mine.)
I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. Too late to phone you. I’d wait until the morning. Tonight I would enjoy the stillness of our room and listen to the soft breathing of my children as I looked out at the street below, quiet except for street sweepers still clearing away the debris from the crowded parade route. I tried to imagine your home in the Hudson Valley, a longish train ride from the city. I still thought of you as a city person, and couldn’t picture you anywhere else. I almost couldn’t picture you at all. We hadn’t been alone since the day after the verdict was announced in Circuit Court, decided in favor of your client. At our celebratory dinner in San Francisco, at the old place on the water, you were jubilant about your victory, but there had also been regretful looks. You said you’d always wonder what might have happened between us if things with Meredith had been different.
“No different, Elliot,” I’d answered.
“Don’t say that, Judith,” you said. “How can you know what might have happened?”
“I think I do, Elliot.” I put one hand over yours and with the other picked up my cup and finished the last drops of coffee. I had a long drive across the Bay Bridge back to Berkeley. On the way home, it occurred to me that I was an addict. An Elliot addict. I told myself that if I ever hoped to kick my habit, I would have to stop re-addicting myself with these visits. I knew then that I was a junkie and was appropriately disgusted with myself. I also knew enough about addiction to realize that I would have to be ever-vigilant if I did not want to face a relapse. Relapse happens more often than not, I’d learned in graduate social work school.
Now, a year after Meredith’s death, had anythin
g changed? You were in a house somewhere up the Hudson with yet another woman. I should not have been surprised. Elliot Pine would not be alone long—I must have known that. Lillian was five years older than you. Five years! Back then, at forty, a woman being five years older than a man sounded like a huge gap. My goodness, that made her well into her forties. She was middle-aged, probably couldn’t even have children anymore. You sang her praises in conversation after conversation. Lillian was independent and accomplished. She had turned a little frame shop into one of the most successful art galleries on the Hudson. She hadn’t much formal education past high school, but she was practical, efficient. It drove me crazy. Obviously, the woman had bewitched you.
In the morning, when I finally phoned your house, your new girlfriend answered on the first ring. I tried for a breezy, natural tone, but I heard myself sounding stiff and awkward.
“Hello,” I said. “Uh, you must be Lillian.”
“This is Lilly. May I help you?” Not Lillian, as you had written. Lilly. And she had an accent. Was it French? You also had not mentioned this.
“Ah, Lilly. Sorry, I thought it was Lillian.” I spoke softly into the telephone on the nightstand, stretching the cord as far as it would go, almost to the bathroom, hoping not to wake the kids quite yet. “This is Judith. Elliot’s school friend from Chicago. Did he mention I’d be in town?” I asked. “With my twins?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly he did,” she said, warmer now. “Of course he spoke about you, Judith. I’m so pleased you’ve called. And Elliot will be, too. I’ll get him for you now. You two can make plans. I look forward to meeting you and the children very soon.”
She was efficient and confident. And with a sexy French accent.
You picked up the phone. “Rocket! You’re here.”
I caught my breath. As soon as I heard it, your deep, resonant voice always made me tremble. When I planned this trip, I’d imagined it quite differently. I thought we would spend time together, have fun taking the kids around the city. I hadn’t expected that you would be with a woman. Already. Perhaps I’d opened a small window of hope that with you widowed and me divorced, there could be something between us. Silly me. Silly addicted me. Nothing. Was. Different. You’d met someone new, and I again was your confidant.
Love Is a Rebellious Bird Page 16