Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

What I remember most about being a kid were the fights that would end with my mother in tears and my father in the basement, smoke filtering through the floorboards. When it got bad enough, my inscrutable Hungarian grandparents—the great-grandparents you never met—would come down from the upstairs apartment, looking half-starved, wearing bathrobes like crazy people. “Sha,” they’d say, “the whole neighborhood can hear you,” as though our neighborhood was people in houses as opposed to the butcher shop next door, the dry cleaner next to him.

  When my mother stopped crying they’d go back upstairs, shuffling, to do whatever they did all day, play cards, watch the news. My father said that they were just so happy to have safety, stability, to watch their grandchildren grow up, they really didn’t need anything else in life. “Is that why they never get dressed?” I’d asked, and got smacked on the side of the head for being rude.

  People say that childhood is the happiest time in your life, but I’ve always thought that was ridiculous—children are basically at other people’s mercy at all times, powerless, subject to the tidal waves of circumstances they can’t control. Homework, chores, dinner table discussion where you have nothing to say. Most of the time I hated being a child, living according to the fluctuations of my parents’ moods, depending on whether my mom got a bonus check, my dad got an extra class at Hunter. In contrast, I found being an adult exhilarating: I had my own money and my own bathroom. And you were so quiet, which meant that if I didn’t yell at home, I never had to hear yelling in my home.

  “Do I yell?” I asked you.

  “Not too much,” you said, kicking your swing into the air. “Only when you really mean it.”

  Out in the bay, enormous ships were idling, packed with brightly colored container boxes, headed to China, Russia, God knows where. I remember once, when I was in high school, I asked my grandfather if he’d like to show me Hungary one day. He was born in Budapest, and this was right around when the Iron Curtain was crumbling and Budapest was a place you once again could go. He looked at me like I was crazy. Said I’d rather take you to hell, then died a few weeks later.

  Well, maybe I was too hard on all of them. They did the best they could with what they had. And the truth is, after my grandparents were gone and Allie and I were out of the house, my parents did seem to relax, became much happier around each other. By the time my mother died, they had spent many peaceful years together. Even as my father started fading, my mother got slower, they were still more happy than they’d been when we were young.

  “I think we should call him today,” you said.

  I pretended not to hear you in the wind, the cawing of seagulls. Somewhere out there, I was sure, a trawler was blaring.

  “Mom,” you said. You ran your feet along the ground, stopping your swing. I wasn’t ready to stop yet. I kept kicking and kicking my feet into the air, flying higher and higher, my butt lifting off the seat a little—what a hoot to be so light, so featherlight, so ephemeral that I imagined if I could just kick a little harder I’d jet off into the atmosphere altogether. I could see over the tops of the multicolored shipping containers toward the forested islands beyond.

  “Mom.”

  Below me, I heard you. You sounded half-annoyed, half-scared.

  “Mom!”

  I sighed. This thing about being a mother, about keeping my trajectory close to the ground. “Yes,” I said after I skidded myself to a stop.

  Your eyes were narrow, and you crossed your arms over your narrow chest. “I think we should find him now,” you said.

  “Okay.” I wanted to swing again, but you were already turning to march across the park, back toward the car. “But first,” I said, because I was the mother, and because it was my prerogative to make you do things you didn’t want to do, “first we’re going to visit your grandfather.”

  “Mom!” You collapsed back down on a swing, started kicking your feet again.

  “Don’t whine,” I said. My stomach was cramping. I ate more for breakfast than I’d eaten in a while, plus all the laughing—but still. Stomach cramps could equal anything: fluid, blockages, build up of scar material. They could also equal a recurrence sooner than expected, but they probably didn’t. They usually didn’t. I kicked through the pain; I wanted to be in the air again. And I didn’t want you to know anything was wrong. “We’ve got to see him while we still can.”

  You’d known my father only as a silent widower, ravaged by early onset Alzheimer’s. He might even have seemed frightening to you, since he stared so long and so intently at things nobody else could see. But he was more than that once. (I was more than this once.) When you were a baby, my father was still in okay shape, even managing to teach one last class. And I remember, the night you were born—he and my mom came to the hospital and oh! How they marveled at you. “He’s just so beautiful,” my father said, cradling you in his thin arms. “He’s the most beautiful thing I have ever, ever seen.”

  “You think?” I asked, eager to hear you praised.

  “The most beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” he crooned. “Have you finally decided on a name?”

  “Jacob,” I said. I’d been keeping it secret till you were born. “After Janos, you know.”

  “Janos,” whispered my father, holding you close to him. Janos was his father’s name, the man who’d survived the Nazis by hiding in the Gemenc forest eating squirrels, the man who spent his final years in a bathrobe in Rockville Centre. “Oh, I’ve never seen anything like him, this Jacob, oh . . .” My father was crying, which at some other moment might have embarrassed me but didn’t then since I was crying too.

  “Gil, you’ll get germs on him,” said my mother, who was sitting on the bed next to me, holding my hand. My mother was bony and brittle, she was like that all her life—birdlike, said my father—but her hands . . . I’ll never forget, how warm and encompassing they felt, holding mine. How safe. “Gil, don’t hold him so close to your face.”

  “Jacob, Jacob—” My father had turned it into a song and was waltzing, carefully, about that dumb little chamber on 168th Street where you would spend your first night on earth. I’d sprung for a private room, and since I was a single mom the nurses were a little bit lax about visiting hours, and though lights were dim in the ward, our room was lit like a holiday.

  “Beautiful boy,” my father said, twirling slowly with you. My dad was good at backgammon and great at chess, spoke some Hungarian, passable French. By the time you knew him, he was sitting in a chair eighteen hours a day in a high-end nursing home in Bellevue, facing a sea he thought was the Baltic.

  I wondered if you’d like some of his clothing—for when you were older. Maybe you’d want something of the grandfather you never really knew. Those Homburgs, they were quality, and expensive. Maybe hats would be back in fashion by the time you read this. I had, in my bedroom, a big box of things from your grandparents that I wanted you to keep, not just the hats but all your grandfather’s history books, and their photographs, and whatever meaning was packed into their lives.

  My stomach cramped again, maybe just because I was anxious. I still had so much stuff to go through. So much stuff in the world. In my line of sight, all those shipping containers.

  “I don’t want to go!” you said, starting to swing again, since you’d rather have done anything else besides visit the home, even if it meant swinging next to your mother all day in this crappy little park. “I hate that place.”

  “I know,” I said. “I hate it too.”

  “You do? I thought you liked it there.”

  “I like Grandpa,” I said, “not the home,” which I hated for all the reasons a normal person hates a nursing home: the disinfectant smell, the residents gumming their food, the dying droolers parked in wheelchairs in the hall. But I also hated it for all the other reasons you’d expect: I couldn’t believe that this was who my father had become. When my mother dropped dead of an aneurysm last year, right on the floor next to him, he didn’t even hear her fall.

  “
So can we not go?”

  “We have to,” I said, and it felt responsible to say it, but it felt just as good to swing through the crisp dewy air, so I kept going. Across from me, the Puget Sound, glittery whitecaps, gulls, mountains, shipping containers, this earth that went on forever.

  “How about we go to the bookstore instead?”

  You were such a conniver. You knew how much I loved the bookstore in Capitol Hill. I didn’t answer you, just kept swinging. You kept swinging too.

  After a while, you looked at me, grinned cunningly. “Mom,” you said, “we’re flying.”

  “I know,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”

  “But what about—” And then you shut up. Good. I wouldn’t make you go to see your grandfather if you didn’t make me find your father. Just for today. Tomorrow I would feel stronger. Tomorrow we’d visit him. Tomorrow I could do whatever you needed me to do. I could face it.

  Tomorrow, I swore, I’d call the doctors.

  THAT NIGHT, IN the guesthouse, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I used my frantic energy to research Ace’s opponent, Beverly “Bev” Hernandez: 57 years old, the VP in charge of planned giving at Roosevelt, and generally speaking, a likable figure. Put herself through college while raising three kids, went on for her master’s, graduated with highest honors. Spent her Sunday mornings praying upstairs at St. Boniface and afternoons dishing out meals in the soup kitchen in the basement. Bev didn’t have an official campaign website yet, but she’d filed papers, and I wondered if she had any idea what she was doing with this campaign. I mean, not even a website! Jake, can you imagine a time when that was even possible?

  Still, the election was five months away and if there was anything most New Yorkers were too busy to care about in June, it was electoral politics. So unless Ace really screwed it up—which is to say, unless the Post found out about some Haley or another—this was pretty much in the bag.

  I texted Amani, Ace’s longtime assistant, to schedule a conference call with a few donors as soon as he was back in town. Then I turned my attention back to Bev. There was the biographical information on the Roosevelt website, a few pictures of her at various social functions, and a wide-open Facebook profile, full of family pictures, chubby grandkids in christening gear, someone’s quinceañera, someone else’s wedding.

  Also sprinkled throughout the Facebook page were various pink ribbons and Race for the Cure banners and buttons and updates on Bev’s health. I clicked on a recent photo of her and could see them clearly, the marks of remission: the slightly off skin tone, the crispy hair. She was smiling, though—she had a great smile—warm brown eyes, a nice full mouth, good makeup. And she was wearing a better-than-average hospital administrator outfit, a suit I thought I recognized from Banana Republic. I wondered, after she was diagnosed, if she went to the same websites I did, the ones that urged you to “pamper yourself,” schedule “spa days,” get “makeovers,” and here were the places that would do it for free since you’ve got cancer. After my diagnosis I was too busy with you for spa days or makeovers, but once I dropped twenty pounds I did go shopping—Allie was in town—and bought a tight green jacket at Prada that I just loved and that I’d bequeath to Camilla unless Allie wanted it.

  Behind me, I heard you sigh heavily. You’d fallen asleep in my bed. We were talking about the video chat with Julisa and whether or not you thought Kelly the hamster looked lonely (Do you remember this, Jake-of-the-future? How sometimes you would get chatty before bed, expansive almost, and start talking about school projects or video game levels you were trying to beat? Do you remember that you wore footie pajamas well after you turned six?) and then you fell asleep just like that, the way you always had, so sudden and heavy I used to be afraid you were dead. I watched you sleep for a while and then I turned to my computer, and when I turned around again to look, you had established yourself in the sleep position you’d had since you were a baby, on your back, both hands thrown up over your head in surrender.

  I lay down next to you for a while, hoping your breathing would hypnotize me to a calmer place. It used to, before all this.

  But tonight, too much on my mind—Ace; Bev; my dad, who was napping when we finally hauled our asses over there, Allie and Dustin in tow, so instead of spending time with him we went over to Cupcake Royale, where you and I did a fairly decent impersonation of Batman and his lunatic father. And I must have laughed too hard today or thought too hard because my stomach hurt, my brain hurt, I was too tired to sleep.

  Bev, Bev. Facebook status updates: “Blood tests looking right!” “Back at work! Office never felt so good.” “Hickman cath successfully removed! I feel so free!”

  I scrolled down through political rallies and pictures of kittens to find a picture of her kissing her husband on a Hawaiian holiday: “So blessed and grateful on one-year anniversary of kicking cancer’s butt in Wikiki!” And they looked so happy and radiant that I couldn’t hate her for being healthy, for being happily married, for being Ace’s opponent, for misspelling Waikiki. I clicked on the picture to enlarge it. Once upon a time I might have used Bev’s dicey health history to raise a few doubts about her fitness for office, but that sort of nastiness didn’t seem necessary this campaign. Nor did it seem sporting.

  It was two in the morning, almost sunrise in Manhattan. I needed to sleep. I’d never sleep.

  The computer had been going so long it felt hot.

  If I tried to curl up next to you you’d kick me at some point, you couldn’t help it, you were a sleep kicker. I could have gone next door to your bed, but I knew it would be pointless; I’d never fall asleep in a twin. So instead I turned back to the sizzling computer.

  I promised myself I would never do this, but then you asked.

  His name was Dave Kersey, and when I met him he was forty-two years old.

  He was a partner at Wales, Heinrich, a firm with offices in Florida, Philadelphia, Englewood Cliffs. Not particularly white-shoe, that is to say. He attended law school in Maryland. He did personal injury and made a small fortune, but it wasn’t like he advertised on billboards or anything; he really did try to take on legitimate clients with legitimate complaints. He really did try to do the right thing. That’s what his line was, anyway.

  I’d met him at a fund-raising dinner for Griffith back in 2006, just after Griffith declared. Your father was tall, balding, gentle, with the kind of greenish hazel eyes I’ve always melted for. We sat next to each other and I told him about how, earlier that day, I had called my dad and it took him way too long to recognize my voice. I made the story funny. He laughed along. At the end of the evening he asked if I’d like to have dinner some time. I told him I was going to be all over Maryland the next few weeks. He told me he’d wait.

  Dave Kersey, Dave Kersey. His name used to be a lullaby to me. I would sing myself to sleep, pregnant, whalish and sweating at the tail end of my third trimester, singing to myself and to you your father’s name, unable to help myself. David Michael Kersey. A nice Irish Catholic boy, originally from Baltimore. David Michael Kersey, who told me he loved me but lied.

  Google said that he still lived in Hudson Towers, that sprawling monstrosity along the Palisades. His apartment up there was so stupidly bachelor pad, I couldn’t get over it: black leather couches and a fifty-two-inch television and a glass coffee table and just about nothing else. A six-pack in the fridge, some moldy bread. I asked him if he felt like a cliché and he sighed and said sometimes. He’d been a bachelor all his life, minus a ten-month marriage in his twenties. He drove a BMW, which he was (naturally) fastidious about. He’d been five years older than me. He was I supposed.

  There, said Google, that was him on a panel at a trial lawyer’s conference. There he was speaking against tort reform at a law school in Alabama. There he was, on Facebook, his arm around a woman who was possibly his wife. He looked the same as always, maybe a little more bald. The woman was pretty and blonde and younger than me. I clicked to find out more, but unlike Bev Hernandez, your father had
the good sense to keep his Facebook page private.

  Should I tell you that the sight of Dave Kersey with his arm around this beautiful woman was enough to send me to the bathroom to weep like a teenager? That it made me retch into the toilet with the violent emotion of the lovelorn, the spurned? Part of me wanted to keen like Batman or scream like Batman’s father, but I couldn’t, I would never wake you, and anyway, I was a grown-up. And anyway, it had been seven years. And anyway, I probably shouldn’t have told you this. This wasn’t how I wanted you to remember me, even though it was also the truth.

  I had sat next to him at that dinner party for Griffith, where I was supposed to be schmoozing big donors, and we had talked and laughed and kept talking. I felt like we’d never run out of things to talk about. The brief interregnum where Griffith thanked everyone for coming, spoke a little bit about his boyhood in Baltimore County, summers in Ocean City, American values, last six years of Bush-Cheney, time to bring real change—he was using all my lines, my best lines, and usually when he used my material I’d feel a bit gloaty, but sitting next to your dad I felt nothing but bubbles. I barely heard whatever was coming out of Griffith’s mouth. I was just cartwheeling inside, I was so happy that fate had sat me next to this man.

  I almost never drank but that night I had two glasses of champagne.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked, and I told him, and I let him drive me to my hotel on some weird man-made pond in Bethesda. I was back in New York two weeks later and he was in Englewood Cliffs and the first time we went out it was Friday night and we didn’t leave each other’s sight till Monday morning.

  Should I have told you this? But you’re an adult now, right? And even though we’re always kids when it comes to our parents’ love lives—I suppose I should tell you that, regardless of what happened then—of what happens next—once upon a time your father really was a gentleman.

  You breathed deeply, kicked the covers off. I was glad I wasn’t next to you. One time you kicked me in my abdomen, right in the burning scar.