The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  As usual, the last to arrive was Andrew. Dressed in an elegant black suit, he carried a big bouquet of white lilies and a large golden box of fancy chocolates. Robin, who was standing with the men by the bar and drinking neat (“it’s too good for ice”) scotch with Larry, was the first to spot him. “Hi, Andrew. Making your usual dramatic entrance, hey? Kenny was about to start in on the bourbon without you.”

  Rachel was startled to feel her heart leap at her father’s appearance. Everyone seemed to have the same reaction. The dynamics of the room changed completely, as if its center of gravity had shifted all at once; yet no less striking than the electric effect on her was the inner resistance it aroused. Andrew made straight for the kitchen, hugged her, and asked how she was before turning to kiss Linda. Her heart skipped another beat as she saw her parents’ eyes meet. He kissed Amy and Cora, his ex-sister-and mother-in-law, and gave George a warm handshake; if the presence of his wife’s ex-husband made him feel the least bit uncomfortable, George was careful not to show it. Kenny, who was standing at the bar, shook Andrew’s hand happily, hesitated, and then gave him a big, clumsy bear hug. Larry shook his hand, too. Pots and pans clattered in the kitchen. The white lilies were put in a vase and placed at the center of the table. Where do the chocolates go? Just put them over there, with the desserts, the cookies, and the pumpkin pie.

  Andrew excused himself for a minute and went to look for Alison. Though he had a good idea where she was, he wandered absentmindedly through the house, peering into bedrooms, opening the door of the game room, and leaving the family room for last. Alison was absorbed in a movie. Wrapped in a blanket with her shoes kicked off and her chin propped on a fist, she was such a darling that only his fear of embarrassing her kept him from sweeping her up in his arms with fierce longing. He stood there watching her quietly, this child he felt so close to and knew so well. What an amazing combination of Ethel, Cora, and Linda she was, but with her own wisdom and goodness! He reached out to stroke her hair. “Dad!” Startled by his touch, she jumped up bright-eyed and pressed her cheek to his. “We’re watching a movie. Want to see it with us?” Andrew kissed her on the forehead and playfully rumpled her hair. “I’d love to, but the grown-ups are waiting for me. Another time, okay?”

  15

  It’s odd, Rachel thought, setting forks and knives on the table beside the folded napkins by each plate, how on Thanksgiving the men in our family sit and eat and the women serve. It’s odd because it isn’t usually that way. Dad cooks, and George cooks, and Kenny cooks, and Robin hasn’t cooked a thing in her life, but the deep patriarchal structure surfaces on Thanksgiving even in our liberal, intellectual family. For a single afternoon we live the old fantasy: the men at the table, red-faced and tipsy, and the women bustling in the kitchen, giddy with the excitement of being the housewives they never were. Old-fashioned queens of hearth and home, they parade proudly out with their turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes while the men cheer them on like overgrown children. If Dad would follow Mom in, standing tall behind her and the turkey, it would make a perfect Norman Rockwell painting.

  Rachel finished setting the table and, instead of returning to the kitchen to see what else she could do, went to the bar to pour herself a second bourbon. Though she drank scotch on occasion, savoring the subtle gender-bending statement of ordering it in public, bourbon was a drink she never had learned to like. Its crude, corn-mash odor didn’t appeal to her. Even Andrew drank it only on Thanksgiving, and no one else she knew touched it at all; as far as she was concerned, it was strictly for Republicans and Confederate flag flyers. Downed in one gulp, the rough, faintly honeyed liquor stoked the resentment that had been building up in her all afternoon, an anger, dark and deep, laced with bitter nostalgia and longing that had kept her on the verge of tears. Feeling dizzy and flushed, she banged her empty glass on the table as if she were in a Western and casually poured herself another drink.

  “Mom, Mom! Sean switched channels to a football game in the middle of the movie!” Alison tugged at Linda’s skirt while Linda stood by the open oven with Cora, probing the browned, mouthwatering bird with a thermometer to see if it was done.

  “Not now, Alison sweetie, okay?”

  “But Mom, he grabbed the remote and started switching channels, and now we can’t see the end of the movie.”

  “Why don’t you go play the piano?” Linda suggested with sudden inspiration. “Show Tessa how you play. You play, too, Tessa, don’t you?”

  The thermometer registered 180 degrees. “All right, darling,” said Cora to her daughter, “you can tell everyone to come to the table.”

  “I can’t believe you made this!” Robin called across the table to Cora. “We’ve been eating the same Thanksgiving turkey for fifteen years, year after year, and I still can’t get over how tender and juicy it always is.”

  “That’s right, Mom,” said Kenny, his mouth full of food. “The turkey’s fabulous.”

  “And the stuffing!” Larry had to shout to make himself heard above the animated conversation, the scrape of silverware on china, the unmelodious chimes of the piano, and the roars of the crowd from the television in the family room. “It’s great!”

  Cora smiled broadly. “Butter. The secret is butter. I squirt tons of it under the skin. Just don’t tell my doctor, he’ll kill me. Or the rabbi at my synagogue.”

  Everyone laughed. Linda came from the kitchen with a large tray of steaming sweet potatoes baked in their skins. “Girls!” she called to the living room. “Girls, can we have a little quiet? Alison, sweetie, why don’t you play the piano later?”

  “I’d like to propose a toast,” Larry shouted, ringing his fork on his wineglass to the chorus of assent that sounded like a musical accompaniment. “Here’s to our host Linda! And to George, of course! And to the four-star chef Aunt Cora! And to this whole wonderful family!”

  The toast was greeted with a cheerful clink of glasses. “So what’s new, Andy?” asked Kenny, filling Andrew’s extended glass with more bourbon. They were standing at the bar, slightly apart from the other guests, who had retired to the couches at the other end of the living room to drink coffee and listen to Alison and Tessa’s “holiday concert,” a stumbling, four-handed duet that convulsed the two girls in giggles while earning them a merry ovation. The bourbon ritual, by now a family joke, had started years ago when Kenny, Linda’s younger brother—a would-be poet who had settled for an assistant professorship at Bard College teaching English and writing a bit of verse on the side—had declared that nothing but bourbon should be drunk on Thanksgiving because it was “the very soul of America.” Andrew tipsily took him up on it, and ever since then, in the mysterious way that passing incidents have of becoming time-honored traditions, their bourbon brotherhood was part of the day. Each year Linda made sure to buy a squat bottle of Maker’s Mark with its red plastic top that resembled a wax seal and indeed sealed a pact of quiet affection between the two men, who never saw each other from one Thanksgiving to the next.

  “The situation in our department is intolerable,” Kenny said without waiting for an answer. “There’s been a rash of promotions and everyone is now entrenched in a tenured position. We’ve had to turn down a ton of job applications, some from men and women with lists of publications almost as impressive as yours . . .”

  They exchanged smiles. Kenny’s gibe was aimed more at himself than at Andrew. He had never made his peace with his academic career, which he had continued to rebel against passively even after getting tenure himself. Andrew nodded in agreement. He liked Kenny’s company. Despite the differences between them, they shared an unspoken bond, as unspoken as the strange illusion, re-created each Thanksgiving, that Andrew and Linda were together again with George as an older, harmless, likable uncle.

  Without waiting for Andrew to empty his glass, Kenny reached for the half-finished bottle and refilled it. He’s nervous, Andrew thought. There’s something he wants to tell me and doesn’t know how. Andrew supposed he knew, or at le
ast could guess, what it was. “You know,” Kenny said, refilling his own glass almost to the rim, “Robin and I have been having problems lately.” Andrew nodded sympathetically, every bit the discreet friend. He was used to it. Since his divorce, quite a few men had tried making him their confessional priest, assuming that having “been through it” himself, he would understand them and have some advice for them, a magic formula to rid them of their guilt and let them have it both ways. “I don’t know if Linda told you, but I moved out for a couple of weeks and went to live in the apartment of some friends who were abroad.” Andrew kept nodding, waiting for the confession to come. “I had this really brilliant doctoral student, a young woman who was writing a dissertation on intertextuality as a reflection of . . .” Here we go, thought Andrew, feeling suddenly bored and drunk. “They called her Lolita . . .” But although Kenny went on confiding in a tone no less proud than distressed, Andrew was no longer listening. Something he couldn’t put a finger on was nagging him. “Now Robin and I are back together again, and it’s wonderful. Wonderful! She’s a fantastic woman. She took me back and hasn’t nursed a grudge. You know something? Paradoxically, it’s even better than before. It’s like there’s an electricity between us that we haven’t had in years. As if it had all been part of a plan . . .”

  “Well, look who’s here!” The loud, hoarse voice came from nearby them. Kenny fell silent at once. Neither of them had seen Rachel approach. “If it isn’t Dad, Uncle Kenny, and Tennessee Williams!” Rachel pointed a sardonic chin at the almost empty bottle of bourbon. Andrew looked at her in shock. She was drunk. There was a coarseness about her, a defiant vulgarity, that he had never seen in her before. A vulnerability, too, which only made it worse, as if he were seeing his grown daughter without her clothes on. He felt almost compelled to avert his eyes from her. “Wouldn’t you know it!” Rachel took the bottle from the bar and held its diminishing contents up to the light. “Pretending to have a man-to-man talk so as to polish off the bourbon!” She poured herself a brimming glass and self-assuredly, almost coquettishly, two more for the men, enjoying their discomfort at her provocative reversal of the gender roles. “It’s my turn to make a toast.” Her loud voice drew stares from the far end of the living room, stilling its conversation. She raised her glass, the bottle in her other hand. “To the great Native American genocide that we’re here to celebrate! To the hypocrisy of liberal America and to the self-absorbed radical intellectuals who sold their souls to . . .”

  You could hear a pin drop. No one said a word. The last notes of the piano hung in the air. So did the end of Rachel’s sentence, which froze on her tongue and refused to be spoken. Her fingers gripped the glass as if to break it. Although the tense silence lasted only a few seconds, time seemed to have stopped, leaving her suspended and looking down from above, from an angle of forty-five degrees. All at once, like a river whose dam has broken, she made a retching sound, put down her drink, murmured “Excuse me” as if to herself, and hurried from the room while struggling to keep her balance. Tom, who had been sitting on the couch with Kim and Larry, excused himself and quickly followed her into the hallway.

  “Isn’t Rachel sweet!” laughed Cora, defusing the tension and restarting the flow of conversation as if nothing had happened. “I remember the first time Linda came home drunk. She was fourteen. She tried sneaking off to her room without being seen, but she smelled like a distillery. The whole neighborhood could smell it.”

  “God, that was awful! I barely made it to the stairs,” Linda said.

  “I have to tell you a story,” chuckled Larry. “Would you like to know what my father said to me the first time I came home drunk in tenth grade? He . . .”

  Linda didn’t stay to listen. Leaving the living room, she headed for the bathroom in the hall. Tom, his lanky frame crouched by the shut door, was listening to the gagging, sobbing sounds coming from its other side. Linda knocked. “It’s me, sweetheart. Can I come in?”

  There was no answer. Linda waited. After a minute, the door opened a crack and Rachel’s pale, tearstained face appeared. With an apologetic look at Tom, who remained standing in the hall, Linda slipped inside and shut the door behind her. “Come, darling,” she whispered, hugging Rachel, in a voice reminiscent of other, distant times. “Come, I’ll make you some coffee. Everything’s all right. Everything’s all right now.”

  “Do you get what I’m saying?” Kenny was saying at that moment to Andrew in the living room, speaking too quickly, almost defensively, as if called upon to justify his bourgeois existence. “Intellectual maturity, if you ask me, is the ability to live simultaneously on different levels of consciousness. When you’re young, you think that only a hypocrite who’s sold out gives up critiquing the social construct and accepts it as reality.” He lectured as if to soothe the inner wound caused by Rachel’s words, which he was sure were meant for him. She must have known that at her age he had published an underground edition of poems, written in the narrative voice of the Native American, calling upon America to face up to its genocide of the Indians and make Thanksgiving a national day of reckoning.

  Eight p.m. Eric, tired and already slightly hungover, had left with his girlfriend, a long ride ahead of them. Larry, far from sober himself, was having a second coffee while saying, “It’s better to get home late than get into an accident, isn’t it?” Tessa was sleeping in Robin’s lap, and Alison, too, had fallen asleep on the couch, her head propped on Andrew’s thigh. Linda sat dreamily at the piano, her wineglass beside some sheet music, amateurishly picking out an old, familiar duet. What was it? Of course, Gershwin, Porgy and Bess. Did you know he, too, lived on West 110th Street? That’s where he composed his Rhapsody in Blue, on a small upright piano, in a little apartment looking out on the backyard. Cora, peering over her glasses to read the music, was singing the female voice in a husky contralto while Kenny crooned the male part in an off-tune tenor. Where was George—in the kitchen? He could never sit still when there were dirty dishes in the sink, he always had to sneak into the kitchen and do them. What a lovely evening. Too bad it would soon be time to say good night. Outside, in their parked car, Rachel is weeping, her head burrowed deep in Tom’s lap, staining his brown leather jacket with hot tears of shame and self-pity.

  16

  Eleven p.m. The kitchen is squeaky clean, the dishes are washed, and the house is back in perfect order. The turkey leftovers, wrapped neatly in tinfoil, are already in the refrigerator, ready for the next day’s sandwiches. George and Linda lie reading in bed, in their pleasantly lit bedroom, surrounded by colorful pillows, magazines, and stray parts of the weekend paper. “God, George,” says Linda suddenly, as if picking up the thread of a dropped conversation, “could you believe Andrew, with his black suit and white flowers?”

  George looked up from his magazine with a smile. “Yes. He’s been prolonging his twenties longer than anyone I know.”

  Linda giggled and poked him in the side. “Don’t be mean!” She sighed. “Rachel worries me, though. I don’t think she’s happy with Tom. There’s something missing there, don’t you think?”

  George put down the magazine. “I don’t think it’s about Tom. It’s much deeper than that. She’s harboring a lot of rage toward her father; she is very conflicted and has all kinds of mixed feelings about their relationship. She doesn’t dare attack him directly because she’s afraid to endanger his love, so she took it out on Kenny. The poor guy is an easy target with all his frustrations and guilt.”

  Linda put down her book, too. “Do you really think it’s all about Andrew?”

  “Of course,” George said. “Transference, a classic case.”

  17

  Nighttime. A night of unleashed fury, of dark dread, of the shadow of death. Demons are conjured, ghosts come to you in your dreams. The Harpies raise their bloodcurdling cries and the horrible howls of Cerberus reverberate to the dark horizon. There is a river, called the Sambation, which could smash an iron mountain; six days a week it roars with san
d and stones, and on the eve of the seventh, as darkness descends, cloud covers it and it is hidden from men until the Sabbath departs. Angels’ wings beat to the hoarse cry of the phoenix, revived again and again from its ashes. Stray souls migrate endlessly, flying in all directions like the slivers of a shattered pot, ricocheting, changing course, colliding again. The migrations quicken; hence, the ancients lived longer than we do. Adam. The generation of the Flood. The generation of Babel. The soul of Abel, of Cain, of our Father Abraham, of Moses, may he rest in peace, of Aaron the priest, of Nadab and Abihu, of Phineas, son of Eleazar, pure and zealous for the Unutterable Name, of the prophet Elijah of blessed memory. Souls big and small, black and white, unclean and holy; rebirth without end; flashes of light in the darkness of oblivion; entire lives, transmigrations, go by; lives many years long flicker for a moment and go out, their burning, speeding brilliance tracing a thin arc of fire that curves through space and is gone like a meteor shower; infinite motion. A man, a priest, walks between the drops, his head wrapped in a linen turban, a gold fire pan in one hand.

  18

  November 24, 2000

  The 26th of Heshvan, 5761

  Three a.m. Andrew was awakened from a troubled sleep by a splitting headache and a sour feeling of nausea. Jerkily, as if beamed by an old movie projector, the image of someone in a wheelchair danced before his half-opened eyes, a figure from a dream whose fragments squirmed like maggots: Walter Cohen, Andrew’s father. A venerable, old man, he shivered feebly from cold beneath the layers of clothing piled on him by Maria, the devoted housekeeper at his assisted living unit in Miami.

  Walter’s low blood pressure made him feel cold all the time, and Maria, touchingly maternal, kept straightening out his brown wool sweater that had expanded shapelessly with Walter’s body until, tattered and threadbare, it hung on him like a second, elderly skin. Walter hated Florida and refused to get used to its manicured, artificial, ever-air-conditioned world. Absurdly, he found it colder than the Westchester he had lived in and would have liked to die in, and where, so his will laid down with unchallengeable precision, he wished to be buried.