Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  Resolutely, she knotted a tie around a single trash bag and thrust it aside.

  “Mom, the freezer is crammed with food and the refrigerator, too,” Lisa protested.

  “I know. But I want to make dinner tonight. I don’t think we have to eat sympathy offerings.”

  She was determined. She wanted to cook for her children, to fill the house with the remembered scents of their childhoods, chicken slowly roasting in the oven, a fragrant soup simmering on the stove, the sweetness of cinnamon and brown sugar caramelizing on baking apples. After the week of eating meals prepared by others, served on paper plates, and nodding dutifully, appreciatively, at endless expressions of condolence, she wanted her home restored to normalcy. She wanted to sit at her properly set dining room table with her four children, to set their favorite foods before them, to listen to their talk, their laughter, their privacy as a family restored, Neil’s very absence a presence.

  “All right. Whatever you want,” Lisa said wearily.

  She looked at her sister, at her brothers. They knew that there was no point in arguing with their mother. They understood that they could not counter her energy, her fierce determination.

  “Your mother is not a woman who is easily dissuaded,” their father had said wryly more than once.

  They watched as she drove away and Sarah went into the kitchen and put up a pot of coffee. Denis set out cheese and brown bread and rummaged through the refrigerator in search of kosher cheese for Sarah and the rolls that came from the only bakery in the area certified kosher by the rabbinate. They all sat around the kitchen table, the brothers and sisters together for the first time in years. It was Peter who commented on it.

  “It’s funny for it to be just the four of us,” he said. “No mates, no children.”

  “No significant others,” Denis added. He was thinking of Andrew but he turned to Lisa.

  “You and the guy from Washington still an item?” he asked.

  “David. His name is David. Yes. We’re still together if you can call my living in Philadelphia and his living in Washington real togetherness. Still, we’re okay with it, though. He would have been at the funeral or at least the shiva but he’s in Europe trailing after some senator.”

  She looked at her twin. She knew that Sarah, who would not even shake hands with a man other than her brothers or her husband, who concealed her body beneath shapeless garments and went to the ritual bath each month to insure the purity of her marriage, did not approve of her relationship with David. But that was all right. She, after all, did not approve of Sarah’s life, of the way she covered her bright hair with that stupid wig, to say nothing of having one child after another. Sarah already had four children and was now in the first trimester of her fifth pregnancy. Lisa contained her anger at the way Sarah submitted to the overwhelming pressure of her family’s demands and worked herself into exhaustion at the home-based business she ran so that Moshe could continue to study. Sarah, in turn, in quiet truce, tolerated her relationship with David. And it was only Sarah after all, who knew why Lisa lived as she did. Lisa’s secret was safe with her twin.

  “I’m sure David was sorry not to be with you,” Sarah said, her tone, as always, serene and nonjudgmental.

  Lisa smiled gratefully.

  She poured the coffee into the brightly colored mugs of Elaine’s own design. Their mother had crafted a special mug for each of her children, carefully mixing each glaze and applying it to the clay in different colors and fusions. Peter’s was fire-engine red, Denis’s a deep blue, Sarah’s sunshine yellow and Lisa’s a gentle lime. Their father’s mug, larger than their own, was chocolate brown and it hung beside Elaine’s own smaller coral-colored one on the wrought-iron holder in the breakfast nook.

  What would their mother do with that mug? Denis wondered and he realized that he wanted it. He wanted to carry it back to New Mexico as a gift for Andrew. He even thought of what he would say when he held it out to him.

  “My mother wanted you to have this.”

  It would signify Elaine’s unqualified acceptance of his relationship with Andrew, as opposed to the controlled tolerance, the requisite political correctness, she and his father had always maintained. But Neil’s cup, he knew, would remain in place.

  “What will Mom do now?” Peter gave voice to the question that had nagged at each of them during the long week.

  “I don’t imagine she’ll do anything for a while. Nothing dramatic, that is. She has her work. I’m sure she’ll go on with that. Her work has always been important to her. Her work and Daddy,” Lisa said. “The cornerstones of her life.”

  Sarah looked sharply at her twin. She wondered if Lisa was even aware of the bitterness in her voice.

  “I’m worried about how she’ll cope,” Sarah spoke hesitantly. “Keeping up the house, dealing with the bills, her day-to-day life.” She hesitated and then added, “The loneliness.”

  “She won’t have any financial worries.” Denis was in his attorney mode and Peter added sugar to his coffee that he really did not want.

  Denis was the executor of their father’s will, of course, a choice that had been discussed with Peter. He had agreed with his father that it made sense. Denis, after all, was an attorney who handled wills and estates on a daily basis. He understood the laws, the various shelters available, the changes in inheritance policy from year to year. And he would have the time to deal with anything that might arise while Peter’s family was his priority. Neil had discussed the situation with his usual sensitivity. He had been a careful and responsible man and he did not want his other children to resent his choice of Denis. His arguments had been cogent and neither Peter nor his sisters had raised any objection. Denis, Peter knew, would be fair and honest, competent and knowledgeable and yet he could not deny that he had felt a familiar twinge of resentment. He had felt slighted during his father’s life because he had always sensed that Denis was his favorite, the last-born child, the son who had inherited Neil’s own love of music and athletic grace. He felt that slight anew, in the gathering shadow of his father’s death. He had lost any chance of ever being the chosen one, the favored son.

  “So Mom is in good shape?” Lisa asked.

  “Dad lived carefully, invested wisely. He made separate and equal bequests to each of us, generous bequests, but basically the estate was left to Mom as well as the house and everything else. It’s standard practice and I agreed with it,” Denis replied. “I’ll have my office send each of you the paperwork involved.”

  “That’s all right then,” Sarah said. “I think what we’re all really worried about is how Mom is going to live her life. She’s pretty isolated out here. And she and Dad were so incredibly close, so different from other couples. All they seemed to need these last few years was each other.”

  “All they ever seemed to need was each other. And their work.” Lisa’s tone was edged with a thin anger.

  Denis went to the window. The leaves of the red maple were slowly falling; wind-tossed, they drifted through the air and formed brittle scarlet hillocks on the tall grass of the lawn. He thought of how Andrew’s camera would capture them in midflight and wished himself back in Santa Fe, at a remove from Lisa’s petulance, Peter’s moody silence and Sarah’s piety.

  They sat around the table in silence for a few minutes. Lisa was right, they knew. Their parents had always been locked into a passionate togetherness. Their mother’s face had burst into brightness when their father entered a room. Their father had spoken her name with tenderness; his hand had rested lightly on her shoulder as they walked down their rural road each evening. Often they had returned from those walks, their faces wreathed in smiles, cradling the first flowers of spring or the glorious foliage of early autumn which they placed in low bowls and tall vases to be set on tables and windowsills, on kitchen counters and bedroom bureaus. They spoke softly as they worked and called to each other as they wandered from room to room.

  “Neil.”

  “Elaine.”


  “In the living room.”

  “In the dining room.”

  Behind closed bedroom doors, pens poised over notebooks, their sons and daughters smiled, pleased and embarrassed by their parents’ love.

  Those loving reassurances of proximity resonated anew in their children’s memory, reminding them that now their mother would be alone in this large house on an isolated road, with no one to call to as evening drifted into night.

  “She’ll feel the emptiness. As soon as we leave tomorrow, she’ll feel it,” Sarah said and they knew that she was right.

  “We’ll talk to her. There are things she can do,” Lisa said.

  Her brief anger had melted. The past, that shadowy era of pleasure and pain, was done with. All scores in the blame game had been settled. She had schooled herself to focus on the future, on days and years to come, on what was yet to be. Her mother would do the same. Lisa did not fear for her, not for that strong determined woman who saw beauty everywhere and created it where she could. Breathlessly, she thrust forth her ideas.

  “She might want to rent a small apartment in the city, a kind of pied-à-terre. Near the museums and galleries. And there are all sorts of trips. She and Dad could never really travel because of his patient schedule, but she’ll be able to do that now. You know I’m planning to adopt a child from Russia and I’ll have to go there. She could come with me.”

  “And of course she could plan to visit us,” Sarah added. “She hasn’t been to Israel for a long time. It would be wonderful if she came to us for Pesach.”

  She did not add that by Passover, her pregnancy, now in its very first weeks, would be advanced. She had not told her mother or her brothers about the new baby. Of course, Lisa, ever the observant physician, watching her twin undress in their girlhood bedroom had scrutinized the barely perceptible thickness of her waist, the dark aureoles of her nipples and had known at once.

  “Sandy—Sarah, how wonderful,” she had said, but Sarah knew that her sister, so carefully groomed, her body so determinedly toned and slender, did not think it wonderful at all. Pregnancy, with good reason, frightened Lisa although neither of them ever spoke of what had ignited that fear all those years ago. She was unsurprised then, that Lisa chose that moment to tell her that she planned to adopt a child, that she had already begun the process, choosing an agency with Russian connections.

  “And David, what does he say about the adoption?” she had asked quietly.

  Lisa’s long-term, long-distance relationship with David mystified Sarah. David, a power broker, a partner in a public relations agency that could make or break political candidates, had once visited their Jerusalem home during a pre-election junket. Long divorced, the father of two children, the handsome, graying man, his craggy face softened by an unfamiliar wistfulness, had observed Sarah and Moshe’s life, shared a noisy dinner and laughed at their children’s antics. Later he had walked alone with Moshe and told him how fortunate he was in his marriage. Lisa, he had said, staring out into the Judean hills, was so different from Sarah, so proud of her independence, her career.

  “He would want things to be different for them,” Moshe had told her later. “But he doesn’t want to pressure her.”

  Sarah had not doubted her husband’s insight nor his wisdom. She had not doubted Moshe from the moment of their first meeting. He would welcome her mother if she came to Jerusalem and it might well be that Lisa and her David would visit as well. The idea comforted her and she folded her hands across the gentle rise of her abdomen.

  “Mom’s never spent more than two or three days with us.” Peter kept his tone casual. He did not want to echo Lisa’s resentment. “If she stayed in Encino for a while she’d get to know my kids, get to understand my life.”

  He did not add that his life had grown uncomfortably complicated. He had, for weeks, thought of talking to his father about those complications. Stupidly, mired in cowardice, he had waited, and now there would be no one to guide him through the emotional maze in which he found himself lost. He was angry with his father for dying, angry with his mother for her long absence from his life and he was angry at himself for the irrationality of that anger.

  “They came to Santa Fe together exactly once,” Denis said moodily. “Just after Andrew and I built the house. One visit in all those years and it wasn’t exactly comfortable. It was easier when Dad came alone, which he did a couple of times, although I’m sure he wasn’t too happy about my life.”

  They looked away. They understood the discomfort, the unease of that lone parental visit, Denis sleeping with Andrew, their mother and father in the neighboring guest room, all of them striving to pretend that the situation was acceptable, normal because, after all, Neil and Elaine were modern, enlightened people. Always they had prided themselves on their nonjudgmental acceptance of their children’s lifestyles. Sarah’s embrace of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle, Lisa’s determination to remain single, Peter’s move to California and his early marriage had all been met with the same carefully muted reaction. If that’s what you really want, if you’ve really thought it through. The parental mantra that rang hollow, that denied disappointment and attendant sadness.

  Denis’s situation must have presented greater difficulty, they knew. But neither Peter nor his sisters had discussed their brother’s homosexuality with their parents and their own conversations about it had been oblique and evasive.

  As long as he’s happy, Lisa and Peter had each said guardedly. They were part of contemporary culture, sensitive to changing mores, to political correctness. They had gay friends, gay colleagues. Their brother was part of a large and recognized community.

  It makes me sad, Sarah had confided. She did not speak of the constraints of her religious belief, of Torahitic restrictions. She spoke only of what she saw as the emotional deficit in her youngest brother’s life. No children to carry on the tradition of their people, no younger generation to inherit Denis’s keen mind, his lean visage, the heavy dark brows and thick curling hair so like their mother’s. No one to say Kaddish for him. She felt similarly about Lisa but perhaps Lisa would eventually marry and if she did not at least there would be the child she was adopting, a child who would be brought up as a Jew. Lisa had assured her of that much. But for Denis, her baby brother, there were no such possibilities.

  “We’ll talk to Mom tonight, after dinner,” Lisa said. She spoke with the authority and certainty she brought to her work, the authority and certainty that had brought venture capital into the radiology labs she had established throughout Philadelphia and that attracted and retained the small army of doctors, nurses and technicians who worked for her.

  They nodded. Lisa would find the persuasive words, the firm approach.

  Elaine returned and they helped her unload the car. The brown paper sacks overflowed with produce from the farmer’s market—huge apples, slender stalks of asparagus which Denis had always favored, full-flowered broccoli for Lisa and Sarah who, as girls, ate the vegetable raw, jicama which Peter had proudly introduced them to. All their favorite foods, they realized, as their mother placed plump Cornish hens and packets of phyllo dough, wild rice and lentils on the kitchen table.

  “Now get out of here and let me cook,” she said in that impatient tone they remembered from their childhood.

  It was Lisa who had observed that Elaine concentrated on her cooking in much the same way that she concentrated on her ceramics, completely absorbed, handling each utensil with respect and skill, regulating the heat of the oven with as much concern as she regulated the heat of her kiln. She focused on each task. Surely, she would focus on reconstructing her life. Her strength invigorated them. The purposefulness and grace of her movements as she reached for cutting board and knives, as she filled a large pot with water, her face flushed, her eyes bright, diluted their fears.

  And so they scattered, Lisa and Sarah up the stairs to their bedroom to pack, Peter and Denis out to the backyard where Peter found their old basketball in the garage and they played
one-on-one, leaping wildly to drop the ball into the basket that their father had affixed to a tall sheltering oak and which he had never dismantled. Neil had taught his sons to dribble, to shoot with grace and accuracy, skills he himself had acquired late in life. His immigrant father, stooped and weak-eyed from long hours of piecework, had never touched a basketball, in all likelihood had never even seen one.

  The brothers played in silence and with great seriousness, each well-aimed shot a tribute of a kind to their father. Just so he had taught them to run, to stretch, to reach. Exhausted at last, they sank into the Adirondack chairs, not yet stored for the winter because Neil and Elaine had often sat outside, even in late autumn, to watch a flock of Canada geese scissor their way through the slowly darkening sky.

  “Sarah’s right,” Denis said. “The next couple of months are going to be really tough on Mom.”

  “Yup. Loren’s dad, Herb, you remember him—he’s been in a real depression since Lauren’s mom died and it’s been almost five years.” Peter bent to pluck up a fallen branch. His mother would have to get a couple of maintenance guys in to take care of the property that his father had patrolled with such pride.

  “I think women are more resilient than men,” Denis replied.

  “And how would you know?” Peter asked and immediately regretted his words.

  “Oh, guys like me know quite a lot about women,” Denis replied easily. “Women trust us more than they do other women, and much more than they trust straight men.”

  The brothers laughed then and went upstairs to do their packing.

  In their girlhood bedroom, Lisa and Sarah sprawled across the twin beds still covered with the spreads in the bright blue Druze design which Sarah had brought back from her first trip to Israel.

  “Did I ever tell you that I hated those spreads?” Lisa asked teasingly.

  “No. And did I ever tell you that I couldn’t stand that Bob Dylan poster you hung over the desk?” Sarah retorted, pointing to the singer’s picture, faded within its lucite frame.