A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “So it’s their fault?”

  “That’s not what I said. It’s just that they expect certain things from all four of them. And pregnancy certainly isn’t one of those things.”

  “I can’t believe you’re blaming Joe and Iris for this.”

  “I’m not blaming Joe and Iris!”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “Pete, why are you so angry about this?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Pete,” she said, and nothing else. Which is where we ended it. Elaine made salad dressing. I set out the plates, still at a loss. How many years had it been since we’d suffered this sort of philosophical difference? And over something like this. A dead baby in a Dumpster.

  But soon enough it was easy to focus on other things: We had dinner on the table. Alec got dropped off from soccer and sprawled himself across the wooden bench that served as our fourth, fifth, and sixth seats and wolfed down half his spaghetti in the time it took Elaine and me to finish our salads, but we were happy enough to have him home that we didn’t pick on him about anything. He was not yet allowed to watch television unsupervised, just to give you a sense of the innocence we tried to impose on the kid.

  But later, after sliced-up pineapple in front of the second half of The Adventures of Milo and Otis and a shower and homework check and a lazy round of dishes in the stillness of the late-night kitchen, I washed my face and brushed my teeth and climbed into bed next to Elaine, who I thought was sleeping. I touched her shiny hair, then pulled the quilt over my shoulder; when we were newlyweds, I used to coerce her, every night, to cuddle against me and sleep with her head on my shoulder and her hand on my chest, but that was years ago. Sometimes I used to sandwich her between my legs, and if she tried to move in the night, I’d wake up, grab her, pull her to me, squeeze her like an anaconda.

  “Peter?” Her voice, scratchy in the dark.

  “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “I was.”

  In the winter, she slept in long flannel gowns; in June, she slept in my old T-shirts. I reached down to touch her leg.

  “Do you believe in heaven, Pete?”

  “What?” I kept my hand on her solid thigh.

  “I’m just curious,” she said. “I really don’t know what you’ll say. We never talk about these things.”

  In our dark bedroom, I thought of a million things at once: A thirty-year-old patient dead last week of septicemia; Alec running into the kitchen, shin guards smudged with dirt and grass; Elaine’s shoulders moving to the tiniest rhythm as she chopped carrots. Her soft blond hair. Joe’s face flashing, that spidery tear down his cheek.

  “Sometimes heaven,” I said. “Sometimes hell.”

  “I believe in heaven,” Elaine said, and maybe that was why I pulled her close to me. I held her tight. “And I believe in the untarnished soul,” she murmured into my chest. “That we all have one, no matter what we’ve done in our lives. I’ve been thinking a lot about it these days, ever since what happened. And that’s what I believe.”

  But the untarnished soul, as far as I knew, did not apply to Jews.

  “Look, the baby probably wasn’t viable,” I said, my mouth near her hair. “If that’s what you’re thinking about, you shouldn’t worry. It doesn’t matter what Laura did to the baby. It was doomed when it was born. It would have been brain-damaged and blind.”

  Elaine was quiet for a while, but I knew she wasn’t falling asleep. “I’ve known Laura Stern her entire life, since she was just a baby herself. Don’t you remember? What a beautiful baby she was? She did what she did for a reason. She deserves our sympathy, too.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d give in tonight.

  “She deserves our love, just like any human being. If there’s a heaven, let’s not deny it to her.”

  I didn’t ask Elaine what her reckoning was, why our local baby-skull smasher belonged in heaven. I only kissed her head and wondered at the way she saw the world, and at the largeness of her mercy.

  THAT PATIENT WHO died of septicemia, by the way, was one of the very few patients I lost that year. To be fair, I was an internist, so most of the really sick ones I sent on to specialists; my deaths were almost always the hypertensives and the diabetics with early expiration dates in their charts. But the septic was a different story altogether, and an awful one. Louis Sherman was an associate at Goldman Sachs, himself the father of a newborn, and the ten-month owner of a gorgeously restored Victorian not too far from our own. A wife as blond and lovely and gentile as they come, and this Louis, five seven in thick soles, frizzy hair circling a bald spot, grease on his tie, a triple-jointed nose—who could blame him for selecting as a life partner the slightly insubstantial but beyond charming Christina Sherman, née Connell? The kid knew luck when he stumbled on it. He’d been my patient since he was a teenager and, both a mensch and a generous spirit, apologized for not inviting me to the wedding, but because of his parents’ objections to the match, the two had decided to elope.

  Now Goldman Sachs types are usually a lot more slick than Louis was, but the kid was a Harvard-certified genius, the kind of Renaissance whiz who beat an old Russian at chess in the park at dawn, made a client ten million by lunch, took a fifteen-minute break to make all the right picks in a rotisserie baseball league, and relaxed after dinner by fiddling a Haydn number on his cello. He was a big donor to Israel, the Fresh Air Fund, the Museum of Modern Art. He spent his Sundays with his baby at his mother’s house to give Christina time to catch up with her girlfriends (the baby, by the way, made everything okay again with his parents, as it usually does—she was a twinkling little girl they named Ashley). In short, he was beloved, and on his chart the only oddity was the absence of a spleen, removed after a brutal hockey injury when he was nine.

  Christina called me at home on a Sunday night, a privilege I reserved for favored patients. “Louis has a fever, bad pain on the right side of his belly. He’s nauseous. Appendicitis, right?”

  She really wasn’t as dumb as her in-laws made her out. “Sounds like a reasonable assumption. Take him to the ER. I’ll meet you there.”

  The inflamed appendix was removed laparoscopically by a surgeon I liked a lot, and I saw the whole family during rounds the next day. I’d taken care of each of them: Steve Sherman, a math teacher who looked just like his son, down to the thick, owlish glasses; Shelly, a yenta of the first order; and Louis’s brother, Joel, a poet, the indulged family gadabout. The lovely Christina; the lovelier Ashley, now perched on her daddy’s tender lap. “That was a close one, huh, Doc?”

  “Not particularly,” I said. “Your wife knew what she was doing.” The chart proved we’d taken the right precautions for a guy without a spleen; he’d been vaccinated against pneumococcus and other nasty bugs, and we were going to keep an even closer eye on his temperature than we usually did for postsurgical patients. But his spirits were good, his color was fine, the appendix hadn’t ruptured—Christina had convinced him to go to the hospital even though he was certain it was indigestion, and had saved him a world of trouble—and I expected nothing but the most positive outcome. I shot the shit with the family for a little while, some good-natured teasing about the Knicks’ terrible fortunes (the Shermans were all devoted fans who knew I pledged allegiance to the grungier Nets), and Joel announced, shyly, that he’d just placed a poem in the Paris Review. I told him I’d subscribe. I held the baby.

  Louis left the hospital the next morning and returned, comatose and dying of septic shock, the evening of the following day. A nicked bowel. Peritonitis.

  “It was just so fast,” Christina said, as pale and cold as frost. “He said he felt a little hot, and the next thing I knew—it was just so fast.”

  Louis died three mornings later, six months shy of his daughter’s first birthday and his own thirty-first. I was there when he passed, in the back corner of the hospital room, the family standing around the bedside, murmuring their wrenched, dreadful good-byes. His daughter even at six months was q
uiet and still, as if she understood the lifelong enormity of losing her father. She gripped his finger the way babies do as he slipped away.

  What can be done for a case like this? What can I say to the family? What can I do for these breaking hearts? I am as powerless as a child. I can prescribe Xanax for anyone who wants it. I can listen. But I cannot explain why this would happen, beyond hideous fortune and gruesome bacteria, and of course, I cannot bring back the dead.

  The shivah, at Louis and Christina’s house, was hell. I stood in one of the darkened guest bedrooms and held Steve’s hands for a good twenty minutes. We were standing by the window, looking out on a beautiful April evening. The magnolia in the yard was cloaked in blossoms, and the rabbits that lived under the purple hydrangeas were foraging in the fading daylight. The air in the room smelled heavy with food and sweat and burning wax and Lysol and clean linen. Steve didn’t cry, didn’t speak, just held both my hands in his own. His grief was stark and monstrous behind his thick, gentle glasses. The room was silent.

  Jews love life. Doctors love life. It is entrusted to us to preserve it, to do whatever must be done to preserve it; I had failed as a doctor and a Jew, although the Shermans would not think to blame me.

  As the room darkened, Shelly knocked on the door and then came in. I let go of Steve’s soft hands, he took his wife in his arms, and together they rocked back and forth, her head buried in his neck, a slow, pathetic, inconsolable waltz.

  This is what parents who lose their children should look like. Twenty-five weeks or thirty years. Doesn’t matter to me. This horrible waltz is what it looks like to be the parents of the dead.

  I sat in the Shermans’ lovely kitchen that evening and watched the yahrzeit burn. I was the last person to leave.

  LAURA STERN’S TRIAL loomed. Alec would soon turn nine. One steamy July night, walking to Carvel to pick up his Fudgie the Whale birthday cake, I saw Laura Stern, by herself, slowly picking at a bowl of chocolate soft-serve on a bench outside. They let her out by herself? Should she be left alone like that? She was wearing an enormous blue T-shirt, smudged glasses, dirty sandals. She took the smallest possible bites of ice cream, mouse bites, a defiant breath before she opened her mouth. Her hair was greasy. Her fingers were small. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I hurried Alec into the shop, my hands on his shoulders, awkwardly guarding my son’s eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EVENING IN THE garden of good and suburban, I find myself reading a dusty copy of a book by an author I’ve never heard of before, which I found wedged between the futon and the studio wall. I’ve enjoyed digging up the detritus Alec has left in this room, not that there’s been too much of it, and not that any of it has been particularly informative. Acne gel: so my son worries about zits. Hair gel: he worries, too, about his hair. The books, the Colgate toothpaste, the minifridge full of soy milk and Kashi, the iPod shuffle someone gave him for his high school graduation, not knowing he already had the iPod with the video capabilities. In the bottom drawer of his drawing table, a short stack of Heavy Metal magazines, which turn out to be not about music at all but rather an odd hybrid of sci-fi and tits. And this book I’m currently skipping through, moody and poorly written short stories about men who reject society to live in the woods. Gauguin’s Brotherhood. Inscribed to Alec from someone named Haley, whom I’ve never heard of, urging him to be well and live according to his strengths.

  It occurs to me that if Alec were a wilier kid, he’d have realized that I would try to excavate him from the ruins he’d left behind, and maybe have left a few messages among his garbage to throw me off. A couple of unsent letters — although who sends letters anymore? — or a journal half-full of entries. He was so intent on letting me know I was a total bastard, but it was easier than I wanted it to be to drown out his indictments with the hum of my own guilt. I don’t need Alec to tell me I was a bastard when I know it so well myself and when I believe, in my heart, that I never acted without his best interests in mind.

  My son looks just like me, physically speaking. Have I mentioned that? He always has. Were it not for the obvious difference in the period in which they were taken, his baby photos would have been indistinguishable from mine. After he was born, Elaine took great pleasure in showing off the baby pictures of me and Alec that she kept side by side in her wallet and having friends bubble about the uncanny resemblance. We were both chubby, Buddha-bellied kids; now we’re both tall and lanky, although there’s every reason to suspect that he, too, will soften in the gut sometime around fifty, that his hair will thin in the middle of his scalp, and that his eyes will become increasingly nearsighted (although right now he’s irritatingly well built, with a thick head of sandy hair and perfect vision).

  Throughout his boyhood, Alec was curious about other people, polite, diligent about schoolwork, compliant about chores. He was reflexively kind to strangers. On myriad trips to New York City, God forbid you pass a homeless person and not flip him a quarter — Alec wouldn’t speak to you for an hour. I cannot number how many times I’ve looked at him and been almost knock-kneed with pride and thought, Yes, yes, that’s my son. This, I’ve been told, is a condition peculiar to baby boomer parents, but it doesn’t bother me.

  If Alec would listen to me now, I would tell him that I’ve always had his best interests at heart. But I would say it more convincingly than that; I’d try to get around the clichés. Other fathers, I know, they get over their sons — they experience some profound moment of disappointment, catch the kid whacking off in a bathroom, realize he’s a shit to his mother, or just slowly lose the romance they once had with him, let it curdle the way all romances can. But that had never happened to me. Sure, I’d had plenty of opportunities to fall out of love with my son: he’d dropped out of school, he’d run away a few times, he or some of his friends had stolen two of Elaine’s opal brooches for reasons that he never quite made clear. His senior year in high school, he got busted at a high school kegger with five ecstasy tablets on his person, and another time loitering by the town elementary school in the vicinity of two known marijuana dealers, Dan Herkel and Shmuley Gold, whom I remembered carpooling home from Hebrew school ten years earlier. Drug-free school zone, kids! Pay attention to the signs! Dan and Shmuley both got probation, but my lawyer brother, Phil, did some maneuvering for us, and Alec got released with a (skin-tingling) slap on the wrist. He went to Hampshire scared straight.

  And then, three semesters later, he dropped out.

  Yet is it too ludicrous to say that of all the people in my life—mother, father, brother, even my wife—is it too ludicrous to admit that Alec is my one and only? Others have been better to me, and others have tried harder, but there’s nobody I’ve ever loved more.

  He has said to Elaine quite seriously that as long as I’m here, he won’t even look in the studio’s direction. He has said to her that he doesn’t know how she still lives in the same square acreage as me. She told me she feels as if she has to defend herself against him, defend herself for taking so long to make up her mind. I tell her she shouldn’t take that from him, that she is, after all, his mother, but she just shrugs. She says maybe he’s right.

  Across the darkened lawn, I see the lights in the master bedroom flicker on. We’ve always had these flimsy shades in there, always cocooned in this idea that nobody would want to bother looking in. But it’s so easy to look in. The Craig boy could do it. Anyone could do it. Alec—I see him in profile — is standing by the window, talking on his cell phone. I have no idea who he talks to anymore. I hope maybe he’s dating someone, although I doubt it. There haven’t been any strange cars in our drive, and his car’s been parked here too many nights. He gesticulates, shakes his head, snaps off the phone. Leaves the room.

  A fight? I’ll never know.

  True to his word, he doesn’t once look in the studio’s direction.

  LAST YEAR, OBVIOUSLY, it was different.

  January 1, 2006, marked the eleventh annua
l Stern New Year’s brunch open house, a tradition ever since Joe finished building an elevated deck with only the help of a rented circular saw and the Time-Life Complete Home Improvement and Renovation Manual. Seven hundred dollars’ worth of oak four-by-fours and a nail in his thumb that required an early morning trip to the emergency room. I happened to be in the ER when they brought him in, teased him while a resident put in the stitches. “All this, Joe, just to prove a Jew can do manual labor?”

  “You goddamn Yid,” Joe said, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain. “I’ll show you manual labor right in the face just as soon as I can move my hand again.”

  The deck turned out to be a beauty: Iris stained it dark walnut and the Stern family took to eating every weekend meal out there from March through October under a big pink umbrella on the cheap patio furniture Joe bought from Sears. Sometimes Elaine and I would stop by during walks around the neighborhood and dig into Stern leftovers or drink scotch and maybe share a cigar with Joe and Iris, the four of us passing it around like a joint. The kids — Neal, Adam, Pauline—would scramble to the rec room to play video games; if Alec was around, he’d join them. Suburbs, man. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s the only civilized way to live.

  The New Year’s brunch ritual mandated that cocktails be served on the beloved deck, no matter how frigid the temperature. Joe liked it that way, but Iris kept a Dutch oven full of hot cocoa bubbling in the kitchen for those too sane to brave the weather. Usually the men would stand out on the deck, blowing on their hands and talking about football, and the women would huddle around the hot chocolate, nibbling guiltily on doughnuts and bitching about their husbands.

  January 1, 2006, Elaine woke up first—a rarity — and put on a yoga tape in the den. Alec woke up next, dry-mouthed from too much partying the previous night, tiptoed into our bedroom, and plugged through our drawers of drug samples until he found a hidden stash of naproxen. His jostling and slamming woke me up.