A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “There was nothing you could have done, Pete,” my mother said as we drove back to the apartment. She was right. But still, another death on my watch.

  AND SO, A year later, February 2006, we left Round Hill for the unveiling before 9 a.m., silently, Alec still half-asleep in the backseat. Elaine drove. Dizinoffs are buried at the Beth David cemetery out along the Queens-Nassau border, right near the Belmont Park racetrack. All four of my grandparents, Aunt Iz and Uncle Nate, my mother’s cousin Louise, who died of diphtheria and whose case was used as a warning to all us kids to button up — they’re all there facing east toward Jerusalem, and we’ve sprung for something called “perpetual care,” which means their graves will never go dusty. We arrived first and tripped our way through other people’s dead families. A crowd of Hasids were shraying near an open pit.

  “You okay, Pete?” my wife asked me.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have to say that if you’re not,” Elaine said, putting a hand on my arm.

  “I’m fine,” I said again, and I shrugged her off.

  “This weather,” she said. “Strange, right?” Then she moved toward someone she used to go to grade school with, who by coincidence was buried right near my family.

  “Is this where we’ll end up, too?” Alec asked after we’d both placed stones on Uncle Nate and Aunt Iz’s graves. “I never really liked Long Island.”

  I shrugged. Actually, Elaine’s parents had given us — as an an niversary present seven years ago — two plots near the ones they’d picked out for themselves down in Florida. Elaine wrote them a florid thank-you note, knowing, since they were her parents and she’d spent a lifetime decoding their bizarre and unwelcome displays of affection, that they really had meant no harm. I was indignant, both at the timing of the event and at the thought of spending eternity at a guano-dusted memorial park near my wife’s parents, but Elaine told me to cool it, we would deal with it later. So far we haven’t.

  Alec was kicking at a few dandelions sprouting near Walt, my second cousin once removed. “Because, no offense, this place is really depressing.” Maybe twenty yards from Cousin Walt’s feet, cars cut one another off as they raced toward the Belt Parkway.

  “Can you imagine a cemetery that isn’t really depressing?”

  “No,” Alec said. “It’s not just the death. It’s the whole idea of rotting, too. Your bones putrefying in a mahogany box.” My son was wearing a pale blue shirt, a tie, and khaki pants just a bit too short for him, so I could see the socks he’d stolen from my drawer. His hair was slicked back with too much gel. Even at twenty, he didn’t have much in the way of a beard, still a bit of crusted-over acne along the jawline where some spirals of beard were valiantly trying to push through, and I remembered him at his bar mitzvah, almost as self-assured back then, and almost as tall.

  In the distance I saw my brother approach in a long black cashmere coat, Hasid-style, holding my mother’s arm as though she were an invalid, helping her slowly navigate the pebbly path. “Alec.”

  “He looks like he’s accompanying the queen,” Alec said out of the side of his mouth. “Look how careful he’s being.”

  “Well,” I said mildly, “your uncle likes to be solicitous.”

  “That’s because he’s a solicitor.” Alec grinned at his little pun. “But I think you’re wrong. I don’t think he really likes it.”

  “Then he’s a good actor,” I said.

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  “He’s always been a good actor,” I said.

  “You either have it or you don’t.”

  “Hey, Pete,” Phil said, meeting us on the pebbly path. My mother looked drawn, trembly. She’d suffered her third ministroke two months before, and this one had left the right side of her face sagging.

  “Phil,” I said, reaching out to give my brother a hug, heartily false on both our ends.

  “Peter,” my mother said. “What a day this is. What a day.” She touched my arm. “Although your father would have liked seeing everyone together.”

  “You doing okay, Mom?”

  “It was good of Phil to pick me up,” she said, and I pressed my lips together not to say anything. Phil lived fifteen minutes from Yonkers, right on the way to the cemetery. There was enough room in his Range Rover for his whole family plus my mother’s cane, should she need it. Elaine approached, touched me gently on the back, and leaned forward.

  “Ruth, hello.”

  “Hello, dear,” my mother said, and she let Elaine reach up and press a cheek to hers. Then they stood back and examined each other for a moment the way they always did. Elaine, short and soft and appropriate in a loose, dark coat; my mother, tall and stiff and adamant in the stained, puffy hip-length jacket she’d worn without change or apology three seasons out of four since my father died. “What do I have to get dressed up for?” she’d ask, not looking for an answer.

  Phil’s wife and daughters soon appeared by the grave, followed by a small collection of surviving cousins and friends, balding women behind walkers, men stooped and deaf, each grabbing my mother and rocking back and forth, hugging me, hugging Phil. Then the Sterns approached with Laura, not a surprise. She had shown up again and again since our afternoon at MOMA, rarely going inside the house but sitting on the porch with Alec for hours, chatting about who knows what, me spying, a stooge, in the light of the lamps Elaine and I had found on that long-ago trip to Bedford. Elaine would bring me coffee as I sat stiffly on the couch by the window, holding the same copy of JAMA, my vigil stupidly disguised. They never touched, Laura and Alec—I should know, I was hawklike in my observations — and sometimes lapsed into long silences, and Laura always left before midnight. And I suppose I was starting to relax. Sometimes I managed to actually read an article. Sometimes I managed to finish it.

  “Uncle Pete.” Phil’s younger daughter, Lindsey, whom I’d always liked the best of that whole bunch, came up to give me a hug. She’d inherited her father’s bony height and her mother’s dramatic French features, beaky nose, and blue black hair, which maybe had she grown up in Paris she could have pulled off, but which in Scarsdale ensured she’d go without a prom date. She was nineteen, studying modern dance at NYU, and Phil wondered openly and cruelly how she’d ever find a husband.

  “A whole year without Grandpa,” she said.

  “I know, Linds. It’s hard to imagine.” My father had been so wholly charmed by both his granddaughters, but especially this one. I suppose he sensed she needed the greater part of his admiration. I remember, a few years ago, he treated Lindsey to a date at the Rainbow Room, the fanciest place he could think of, the night the rest of her class was jigging at the prom. They listened to Michael Feinstein croon standards and he let her drink as many champagne cocktails as she wanted at fifteen dollars a pop and then took her for a spin on the dance floor because that’s the kind of guy he was.

  “I want to call him all the time,” she said. “I keep thinking he could come down to visit, we could go to the Second Avenue Deli or something, we could go to the movies. And then I remember he’s gone.”

  “He would have loved that,” I said. “He was an enormous fan of yours.”

  “He was an enormous fan of yours, too,” she said. “He really was.”

  “Well,” I said, and we reached for anything else to talk about, but of course there was nothing, and soon she, too, was engulfed by the small crowd of aunts, cousins, family friends who wanted to comfort themselves by reaching up to pinch her cheek. Near RIVKA DIZINOFF (1915 – 1989), Elaine and the Sterns were talking, and Laura had meandered to the gate by the roadside to try to light a cigarette. In the distance I could see Phil’s diminutive rabbi making his way through the headstones, and I felt myself take several steps backward to distance myself from all of it. In the past year, I’d felt close to my father dozens of times: staring out the window of an Amtrak train, anticipating the first juicy bite of a hamburger, the lousy second half of a Nets game, a dr
ive up the Saw Mill — but right now he was nowhere to me. Another step backward, and I bumped into my son, who was removing himself the same way.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” Alec said, his voice tentative. He was still kicking at the nearest flowers. Ten yards away, Laura was staring past the gate, sucking down a Marlboro under a smoky halo.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it’s weird, but … but do you think Grandpa’s already disintegrated?” he asked. “I was wondering, how long does it take for a human body to decompose? Is he still actually there? Or are we holding this ceremony for a bunch of bones?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looked guilty, but I knew he wasn’t being flip — he’d always had a taste for biology—and he stopped kicking at the dandelions and shrugged his hands deep into his pockets. The truth is this was something I, too, had reflected on throughout the year, and it would come to me at odd hours: falling asleep to Elaine’s heavy breathing, waking up to find her already out of bed, that first draining piss of the day, catching my saggy jowls in the mirror over the sink. Age, age, death, and we’re gone.

  “Dad?”

  I took a breath, and the cool air felt welcome. “I suppose that most of the flesh has disintegrated,” I said. “But the bones are still there. The clothes. Some hair. We put him in an ebonized coffin, which means that it will take longer for his body to decay.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I believe it’s what your grandmother wanted.”

  “Does it bother you to think of him under there?”

  “No,” I said, surprised. He rarely asked me about my feelings. “Does it bother you?”

  “All the time,” Alec said. “It really does,” he said, “all the time.” And then he wandered off toward the gate, to Laura.

  A few feet away, near the crowd — I could see it, though I wasn’t yet ready to visit — my father’s headstone squatted fresh and shiny under its protective cheesecloth covering. I couldn’t bear to look. My father, the same exact height as my mother, and as time passed, it shrank them in exactly the same way, and sometimes they would walk leaning on each other, their heads almost touching at the temple. I couldn’t look at his grave. Bones, clothes, hair.

  And then the tiny red-faced rabbi called us to order, and I no longer had a choice.

  AFTER THE BRIEF, rote memorial service of Hebrew prayers, generic words of remembrance, my mother’s dignified tears, removal of cheesecloth, mournful gazes, my brother holding tight to my mother, more Hebrew, we lunched at an Italian buffet across from the racetrack, in a private room bedecked with horseshoe-shaped bouquets of mums.

  “This was the best they could find?” I heard Iris murmur to Elaine as we trooped in.

  “Nobody wanted to shlep.”

  I sat near my mother, Elaine sat near the Sterns, and various cousins filled the spaces in between. Laura and Alec were wedged together in the middle of the table, across from Lindsey and Phil, and the four of them were gripped by conversation; they didn’t pay attention to any of the rest of us and took forever to rise for the buffet. From the look on Phil’s face I could see that he was delighted to have, after all these years, some close-up interaction with Laura, the baby killer in the flesh, and when Cousin Marvin’s grandkid got passed Laura’s way and she held it for a moment with a practiced gootchy-goo, my brother couldn’t tear his eyes away.

  “So how’s medicine these days?” My cousin Norman, Aunt Iz’s third and least obstreperous son, sat quietly to my right. Norm had taken up music composition and still lived, as far as I knew, in a Yonkers studio right down the street from where he grew up. Aunt Iz referred to him as the durchfall, the failure, right until the day she died, which was mean-spirited, I know. But there was something about short, runny-nosed Norm that begged for derision, even from his own mother.

  “Medicine?” I said. “Not bad, thank God.” A single morning with my family, and I had adopted the rhythms of their speech.

  “You do heart surgery, right?” he asked in his dreamy way.

  “No, just internal medicine.”

  “But some surgery?” He sounded hopeful. “Every once in a while?”

  I shrugged, let him think what he wanted, took a sip of my pasta e fagioli. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother poke at her soup, and I wanted to go talk to her, check in.

  “Hey, do you know any single ladies?” Norm asked after watching me take a big swallow.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Norm raised and then sank his shoulders dramatically. “I’m looking for a nice lady to take out, Peter. I’m turning fifty soon. I need a nice woman to take care of me, I’ve decided.”

  I blinked. I’d always just assumed Norm was gay, not that I’d considered the matter more than a handful of times in my life. “Jeez, Norm,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Nobody?” He looked at me, dejected, with those round, rheumy eyes. “But you’re a doctor, Peter. You meet new people all the time.”

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly work that way when patients come into the office. I’m not really meeting them in a social way.”

  “But surely you know some nurses?”

  “Norm, I don’t —”

  “What about her, over there?” Norman motioned past my shoulder with his spoon. “Who’s that girl?”

  Oh, give me a break. “Well, Norm, I think she’s a little young for you, don’t you?”

  “But who is she?” he asked. “She’s so pretty.”

  “Her name is Laura Stern. She’s an old family friend. Remember my college buddy Joe? She’s his daughter.”

  “Is she single?”

  “Norm, she’s not—”

  “Do you think maybe you could introduce me to her?”

  “I just don’t think that would be appropriate, Norm. This isn’t the right occasion for that sort of thing.”

  “But you said she’s an old family friend.”

  “Norm, I know, it’s—” And then so quickly we both could have missed it, Laura and Alec pressed their lips to one other’s and then in an instant removed them. They did it right in front of Phil and Lindsey, right in front of all of us, and then, not two seconds later, they did it again. I felt my extremities turn to ice. They were kissing. My son and Joe’s criminal daughter. And these were not the passionate kisses of people just falling in love with each other—worse, much worse, they were the kisses of familiars. Of people who had been kissing for ages already. How could I have missed this? How could they have escaped me?

  “Well, Christ, Peter, she’s Alec’s girlfriend?” Norm said. “Why didn’t you say she was his girlfriend?” And if the whole of my family hadn’t been in the room, I would have quietly forced his face into my soup bowl and held it there until he drowned.

  “Peter, if she’s Alec’s girlfriend you could have told me. It’s not like I’m going to say anything weird, I just thought she’s sort of hot—”

  “She’s not his girlfriend,” I hissed. Then I pushed out of the way, making sure to give Norm’s seat a nice jostle, and headed for the buffet.

  “But Pete!” he called from his chair, aggrieved. “Why didn’t you—”

  Manicotti, rigatoni, chicken parmigiana—chicken parmigiana? My parents kept a kosher home for fifty-nine years!—and I squeezed my fists hard enough to hurt. I turned my head, accidentally caught Laura smoothing Alec’s hair with her small fingers, her pearl ring, squeezed my hands harder in front of a tray of hardening garlic knots.

  “You okay, honey?” Elaine, my soft, appropriate wife, with her arm around me.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “You want to go home? I think we can just leave if you want.” She kept her arm around me. “Nobody will mind.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure, you can.”

  “Elaine—”

  “If you want to go, we’ll go.”

  And look like a shmuck. And giv
e Phil a golden opportunity at filial one-upmanship. And leave Alec in the suckery tentacles of his thirty-year-old paramour. And leave my paralytic mother to her un-kosher meal.

  “I want to go home,” I said to my wife.

  “So then,” my wife said, “let’s go.”

  Explaining to everyone that she wasn’t feeling quite so well, a little tired, Elaine and I got into the Audi, and she took the wheel.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked as we eased out of the parking lot, but I was too disgusted to answer. We were quiet past the racetrack, the four-lane slog of diners and gas stations on the bumpy road toward the Belt Parkway. In the distance, the Manhattan skyline shimmered like an oasis, but I kept my gaze on my hands knotted together, my fingernails chewed down to the pink, veins lumping near my knuckles. Elaine turned on the radio, the classical station. I shot her a look. I wanted her to know I wanted quiet without having to say anything. But her eyes were on the road where they should have been, and so we listened to Ravel the rest of the way across Queens.

  “Did you know Alec was seeing her?” I asked, two stoplights from the Triborough Bridge. I could hear the accusatory note in my voice, but Elaine missed it.

  “Of course,” she said. “They’re together all the time.”

  “And you knew it was romantic?”

  “I assumed,” she said. “Why? Didn’t you?”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “What should I have said?” She looked at me sideways. “I knew it would upset you.”

  “Of course it would upset me! She’s endangering him! She’s putting him in danger, Elaine. Of course it would upset me.”

  “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic,” she said. “She’s not putting him in danger. This is just a little flirtation before he goes back to school.”

  “He’s not going back,” I said. “He’s totally derailed. I can sense it. The more time he’s with her, the more derailed he’s going to be.”