A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “What do you remember, Joe?”

  “What do I remember?”

  “When you were a kid,” I said. “What stands out?”

  “Ah, you know — there was so much. Phillies games at Connie Mack, April right through September.” His voice wistful. “Ocean City in the summer. Grilling hamburgers on Sundays. My dad really liked to do that American stuff. The Liberty Bell every Fourth of July, then fireworks.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s those baseball games I miss, I’ll tell you. I should have made the time to go. It’s been at least a decade. I never go to games anymore. I should have taken him to see the Phillies.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself.”

  “Indulge me,” he said. “My father’s dying.”

  I patted his shoulder once, trying to be supportive in as masculine a fashion as I could manage, then turned to gaze out at the highway again. Our fathers. I had just spoken to mine the day before; I’d been calling him every day since Joe found out about his dad, and he was delighted at the attention, although he tried to be gruff about it. We talked about maybe seeing a Nets game together; I told him I’d see about seats.

  When we pulled up to the row house on Rawle Street where Joe had grown up, where Laura had lived as a baby, where Elaine and I had spent so many chaste youthful weekends, I felt unexpectedly relieved to see that the place looked exactly the same. Three stories of dark red brick, white shutters, gleaming black iron railing along the stoop, gingham shades behind the windows.

  “Boys, boys, Peter, I’m so glad you could come. How was the drive? Are you two hungry?” Mrs. Stern bustled to mask her nerves, barked at us, took our coats and sat us down and yelled upstairs at her husband to come down, the kids were here. The house looked great, but Mrs. Stern looked terrible: wan, so skinny her collarbones stood out sharp as files. I remembered her as bright-eyed, jowly, with a full European bosom and thick brown curls. Now her hair was lank and completely gray.

  “Niels, Nissim, the boys have come to see you. Come on down,” she called upstairs again before backing into the kitchen. The pictures of FDR and JFK were on the wall where they’d always been, but they had neighbors: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, innumerable shots of Stern grandchildren in all manner of sports uniforms and Halloween costumes.

  “Nissim! Unten gekommen, come on, let’s go.”

  “Ma, it’s okay. I’ll go upstairs in a minute.”

  “He’s not dead yet, Joseph,” Mrs. Stern said, and she sat down at the table. She was fierce in a way I knew Joe could be, too, tougher than me like steel to cotton. She came to the States with her little brother when she was still just a girl, sponsored by some cousins in Philadelphia, who put her to work immediately in their shoe factory. In Frankfurt, where she was born, she would have learned the classics, French and Latin, would have studied math and science in the private school where her father served as headmaster. In Philadelphia, she pushed grommets into calves’ leather until pebble-hard calluses burned on her hands. Her father and mother both died in the Holocaust.

  “So, how’s the baby?” she asked, putting a plate of dry biscuits on the table. I felt a brisk chill on my neck, touched beyond reason that she’d remembered our five-month-old in the midst of what was happening to her husband.

  “He’s doing great, Mrs. Stern. Thanks for asking.”

  “You have pictures?”

  “Does he have pictures,” Joe snorted, and I dutifully pulled my wallet from my pocket. There was an entire foldout section dedicated to my son, from hospital-tagged newborn to drooling, half-falling-over chubster. Alec asleep on my chest on the couch, Alec and Elaine by the JCC kiddie pool, Alec with a full beard of homemade pea mush, waving a spoon in the air.

  “Gorgeous.” She sighed. “That’s a gorgeous kid. He has your chin, doesn’t he?”

  “To be honest, I can’t find much of a chin yet.”

  “No, I can see,” she said, taking my wallet and holding it close to her face. “There it is, your little tricky chin. And Elaine’s smile.”

  How could she remember Elaine’s smile? It had been years. “You’re right,” I said. “The smile is pure Elaine.”

  “He didn’t come easy, did he?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I was always asking Joe when you were going to have a baby. He told me to mind my own business. And I know no news is bad news as far as babies are concerned. Especially because I could remember you two with our Laura, how good you were. You were meant to be parents, I always thought.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Stern. It feels — it feels good. We’re really enjoying it.” She nodded: of course we were enjoying it. “And you’re right, it wasn’t so easy. But the wait was worth it.”

  Mrs. Stern waved her hand in front of her eyes. I remember a whole group at our Pitt graduation; she was the only one of a half-dozen mothers who refused to cry, and now here she was tearing up over my fertility problems.

  “Soon we’ll have six grandchildren, you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “Susie’s two, Annie’s two, and soon Joe’s two. Iris is having a boy.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ll name him for Niels.”

  I looked down at the billfold, my fat, cherubic son. “Maybe Niels will get to meet him — they’ll get to name him for someone else.”

  “Maybe.” Mrs. Stern coughed, pushed the plate of biscuits at me. “Where did Joe go? He just gets here and then he disappears. I think he’s very upset with what’s happening. He’s too sensitive, don’t you think?”

  “Joe?”

  “That’s why he’s an obstetrician. He only likes happy medicine.”

  Who told her obstetrics was happy medicine? “It’s got to be hard for everyone.”

  “Susie’s here every day,” Mrs. Stern said. “She’s been bringing the twins, shows up in the afternoon, lets me take a break. She’s very good at handling all this. I always think she’s the one who should have been a doctor, you know? She’s tougher than Joseph.”

  “Joe’s pretty tough, actually —”

  She shook her head. “Nah, he’s a cotton ball. He’s like a puff of air. Not like his father. Sometimes all I can think of is the pain he’s in, and watching him trying not to let on that he’s in so much pain.”

  I wanted to say something useful. “The medicine,” I fumbled, “should be taking the edge off.”

  “How could medicine help you forget, forgive me for saying, that you’re dying?”

  A grunt, a hacking cough, and next to the table stood Mr. Stern. Haggard, yes, and much too thin, but dressed neatly in a soft cotton button-down and striped trousers. I had expected a bathrobe and a grizzly beard. Joe was holding his arm.

  “Mr. Stern.” I stood up, wasn’t sure what to do, and decided to go for a handshake, but the old man gave me a hug. He wasn’t so old, actually. He just smelled that way—menthol and mothballs — and felt that way through the loose cotton of his shirt.

  “You look good, Pete. Fatherhood becomes you.” Niels Stern had a much softer accent than his wife, even though he was older when he arrived in this country, twelve to her nine. He’d lost four older half brothers himself in the Holocaust, plus a half-dozen nieces and nephews, all four grandparents, a trembling quantity of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and who knows how many friends. His father had been the assistant rabbi in a middle-class suburb of Berlin; he got out of the country even after the immigration quotas started to seize up, owing to some little-known clergy exception. Mr. Stern used to tell the story all the time, how his family headed first to Memphis and then soon enough to San Francisco, Newark, and finally Philly, where they spent the rest of their lives—his father, his sisters, and a mother so homesick that when she died three years after they settled in Tacony, everyone said it was from heartbreak, even though it was probably colon cancer, just like her son’s.

  “You don’t have to look at me that way, Pete,” Mr. Stern said. “Between you and my son, a
man could get a complex. Nettie, you got any soup for these boys?”

  “Who said anything about soup?”

  “I thought you were going to make me some soup.”

  “I made blintzes.”

  “Ma, you didn’t have to do that.” But I could tell Joe was thrilled that she did. Mrs. Stern’s blintzes were heavenly, ethereal things: linen-pale crepes filled with sweet cheese and fried in butter. Joe used to come home from Pitt on spare weekends just to eat his fill.

  “Shush,” his mother said. “I didn’t do it for you. It’s the only thing your father can stand to eat.”

  “I wanted soup.”

  “I’ll make you soup tonight,” Mrs. Stern said to the dying man. “Stop complaining.”

  That afternoon, despite ourselves, Joe and I ate six blintzes apiece, drowning in sour cream, cherry preserves on the side. We ate hard biscuits and drank hot tea in glasses and watched Mr. Stern pretend with all of it, funneling some food in a napkin and then retreating to the couch to lie in pain. He ushered us over to talk to him.

  “It’s the drugs, you know. They take it all out of me. But on the other hand it feels nice to finally relax.”

  “They strong enough, Dad? You want me to get you something stronger?”

  “Why stronger? I’m feeling fine.”

  “You don’t have to say that if you’re not,” Joe said.

  “You think I’m lying to you?”

  “You just don’t have to be Superman, Dad. If you want stronger pills, just let me know.”

  “Let me be,” his father said. “My doctors here are doing a fine job. Be my son, not my oncologist, huh? Pass me that blanket over there?”

  Joe tugged the blanket over his father’s bony shoulders. The old man sighed, sank himself into the couch. Joe stood to draw the drapes, then snuck out the double doors into the kitchen. Maybe his mother was right, that Joe was, despite his years of medical training, a cotton ball.

  “So what are you reading these days, Peter?”

  “Good question,” I stalled. The last book I’d finished even a chapter of was What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a copy of which we’d had in our bedroom for four years, tempting us, tempting fate.

  “It’s hard, I suppose, with a new baby on your hands. No time to really dive into a book.”

  “I was thinking of picking up Moby Dick again,” I said, which was true—I’d been thinking about that book ever since Joe told me about his father’s diagnosis. I’d never managed more than seventy pages the first time around, even after Mr. Stern’s endorsement.

  “Ah, Moby Dick.” The old man smiled, and his chapped gray lips turned rosy. “Our old favorite, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  He turned his gaze to the wall, turned to oratory. “All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

  “You’re just showing off now.”

  “That’s right.” Mr. Stern chuckled. “It’s my privilege.”

  We listened, then, to the noises of his disease — intestinal gurgles, the soft whoosh of his labored breath—all alongside the sounds that had accompanied Mr. Stern’s home life for almost forty years, the creaks of gravity buffeting the old row house, his wife’s footsteps and the faucet in the kitchen, his son in the hallway, pacing. Mr. Stern sighed with wistful pleasure. The things we’ll miss aren’t the Caribbean islands we’ll never see, the bosomy blond we’ll never share a shower with, the million dollars we’ll never spend on the shopping spree of our lives. Instead — and maybe everyone else already knew this, but it felt, on that couch, like a revelation to me—what we’ll miss is our wife’s callused hands. The worn porcelain in the upstairs bath. The couch we read five hundred books on late at night, the perchloroethylene stink on our pants, the luxury of our shoulders sinking into these good, soft cushions.

  He turned his head from the wall, and it was possible his face had a little more color. “So when I’m gone, you and Joe will watch out for each other?”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Stern,” I said, sounding more than I would have wished like an abashed teenager.

  “You’ll watch out for each other,” he said. “Like you’ve always done.”

  “We will.”

  “It’s a nice thing to have friends, Peter,” Mr. Stern said. He closed his eyes. “You boys are very lucky.”

  “I know,” I said, and I did.

  Then Mrs. Stern came in, fed him some pills; soon he was asleep on the couch, and he lay there all afternoon as still as night while Joe and I watched college basketball in the kitchen and Mrs. Stern cleaned the clean house. Late in the afternoon, Susie showed up with her girls, and after a half hour of tickling the kids, Joe and I took our leave. Niels roused, barely, smiled at me, tried to shake my hand. He was dead ten weeks later to the day. Iris went into labor during the fourth night of shivah, and her son, like his older sister, spent his first week on earth at his grandparents’ small row house in Philadelphia. He was, as Mrs. Stern had predicted, named for his grandfather.

  ALL THIS FROM a cigarette burning in Laura’s hand, the angle of her chin, the purse of her lips. Then Elaine snapped me out of it. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to go out there,” she said. She had crept up behind me while I was gazing out the window. Mosquitoes were humming and buzzing near the porch lights, but Laura’s cigarette smoke kept them from biting. “I’ll invite them in for dinner. You can set the table.”

  “I’m in my sneakers,” I said. “I should go out.”

  “You can’t set the table in your sneakers? Come on,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  But I wouldn’t be deterred, wouldn’t wimp out. I jogged out to the porch, dodging mosquitoes, fake-jaunty, and smiled at the pair of them.

  “So you still up for a game, you two? Let an old man kick your collective butt?”

  “I thought you’d abandoned us,” Laura said with a leisurely shake of her head. She let smoke stream through her nostrils. “Nice shorts.”

  I looked down at my baggy, stained self; in that split second I’d forgotten what I was wearing.

  “Actually, we were thinking of going into the city, right?” Alec said, flicking his eyes from me to Laura. “Maybe something’s playing at the Angelika?”

  Laura shook her head. “You know what, I think I should probably head back. I don’t want to offend Neal by missing his girlfriend’s hospitality. This might be my last, best hope of getting on his good side.”

  “Steamed eggplant,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Laura said.

  “Well, what about the MOMA exhibit?” Alec said, doing his best not to sound crestfallen. “This weekend?”

  “Now that,” Laura said, “is a definite. We’ll take the bus? Meet at my parents’ house on Saturday?”

  “You’re going to MOMA?” I asked, as though this had not just been established.

  “Yep.” Laura grinned. “I haven’t been there since the renovation, and Alec says there’s a David Smith installation I’ve got to see. Plus the building itself is supposed to be a masterpiece, yeah? And there’s a really great restaurant downstairs. Maybe we’ll make reservations if we’re feeling fancy.”

  My son, as a rule, rejected fancy restaurants as both boring and capitalist. “That sounds great.”

  “You know, I haven’t been there either,” I blurted. “To MOMA, I mean. Or the restaurant.”

  “Then you should come along.”

  Alec gave me a look of death, which I pretended not to see. “You sure I wouldn’t be cramping your style?”

  “Oh, no,” Laura said. “It would be fun.”

  “Maybe your dad would like to join, too. It could be a family outing. A little Stern-Dizinoff togetherness, like the old days. Remember when we used to go to Delaware in the summer? Rehoboth Beach?”

  “My dad’s not much for art museums, Dr. Pete.”

  “Well, ask him. Ask you
r mother, too.”

  “You really want to go?” Laura said while Alec glared holes into the porch. “A field trip?”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything cultural,” I said. “I’ve got to keep this old brain from rotting.”

  “It’s not such an old brain, Dr. Pete,” Laura said, standing up. She grabbed her purse, tousled Alec’s hair. “So I’ll see you Saturday, kid?”

  Kid. Thank God.

  “You want me to walk you home?”

  “Your mom has dinner ready, Alec,” I said. If he hated me already, I saw no reason not to push it.

  “I’m okay,” Laura said. “I’ll catch up with you on Saturday.”

  “Sure,” Alec said, and the two of us watched as she tossed her hips down the front path, pausing by the forsythia bush to light another cigarette.

  “She smokes too much,” I observed as soon as she ducked around the corner.

  “You are such an asshole.”

  “An asshole? Isn’t that a bit much? Want to shoot some hoops?” Ordinarily I took more umbrage to name-calling, but I was inexplicably giddy. She called him kid. She invited me along on their date. She wasn’t out to seduce my son and loosen his already-tenuous hold on grown-up life.

  “I was going to go out with Laura alone and you turned it into a fucking family reunion.”

  “Oh, relax, Alec. You’ll get to spend lots of time with Laura, I’m sure.”

  “But what the fuck was that? Why would you do that?”

  “Watch your language,” I said, heading over to the driveway, where a couple of basketballs were piled against the garage. “If you’re that mad at me, let’s get it out on the court.”

  “Why?” He was whimpering like a toddler. “You know I want to spend time with her, and you just totally inserted yourself where you don’t belong.”

  “Stop whining,” I said. “You’re either playing or you’re not.”

  He stared at me for a minute, then shook his head with more disgust than the situation could possibly have warranted. He stomped inside and slammed the door in case I hadn’t gotten the point.