After Melanie

by Gloria Goldreich

  He handed her a tartan cape unclaimed by the cape-wearing daughters. They had bought it on a trip to Scotland. It had been their first holiday in Europe, a cruise which Sylvia had resisted because she did not want to cross the Atlantic and she had worried about leaving their daughters.

  ‘But we had a wonderful time,’ he said. ‘In the end, she was glad that I had persuaded her.’

  Judith could understand her reluctance to leave her daughters, but why her resistance to crossing the ocean? Most women would have enthused over the idea of a trans-Atlantic voyage, a European vacation. Another question that remained unasked. She folded the cape and noted that it had been lined with red satin, now faded to a dusty rose.

  Each garment had a tale, and she understood that when he shared those discrete histories, he recreated the world that had been lost to him when Sylvia died. The telling, selective as it was, offered him comfort of a kind.

  He told her that a cousin, long dead, had fashioned the rainbow-colored stole which he held out to her. A long skirt of navy-blue velvet had been his mother’s first gift to his bride. It was faded now but the nap was preserved. Judith folded it carefully, knowing that it would be snatched up by the young women who haunted the thrift shop in search of vintage clothing.

  ‘Sylvia valued everything,’ he said and his voice broke.

  He held up an orange poncho. ‘My sister made this for Sylvia when she was pregnant with Amy.’

  ‘Don’t give that away,’ Judith advised. ‘Your daughters may want it.’

  He nodded and set it aside.

  She added the velvet skirt to the overflowing carton and suggested that they had done enough for one day, although she knew that they had barely made a dent.

  ‘Coffee?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed gratefully.

  She followed him downstairs to the large kitchen, its wooden table scrubbed clean, the windows curtained in red-and-white gingham, copper pots polished to a high gleam dangling above a double oven. A social kitchen, surely, the one-time heart of a household, where a family had gathered and inhaled the scents of simmering stews and slowly rising breads. The bright red linoleum that covered the floor was scarred, the spice containers in the wooden rack above the counter were half empty, the oven mitts were unstained but singed. No Cuisinart, no multi-speed blenders, no Lucite container for takeout menus. Sylvia Kahn had not relied on modern appliances and she had surely never ordered in.

  Judith sat in the breakfast nook and looked through the window at a huge oak tree. A bird feeder hung on a low branch, and as she watched, two plump robins flew in and pecked away at the grain, their red breasts swollen with pleasure.

  Jeffrey glanced at them. ‘The feeder is almost empty. I’ll have to refill it,’ he murmured.

  He placed a bowl of carefully arranged fruit on the table, set small dishes in the shape of strawberries beside it. He passed her a mug of coffee, placed milk, sugar and a plate of anisette cookies on the center of the table and then brought his own mug over and sat opposite her. He was at home in this pleasant room, at ease with its crockery and cutlery. She imagined that he and Sylvia had cooked together, something she and David had never done. Her fault, she knew.

  She had always discouraged David’s presence in the kitchen. It was a room that she thought of as a bastion against the remembered chaos of her childhood home. She had been fearful that he would disturb her uncluttered counters and orderly drawers and cabinets, her carefully stocked pantry and refrigerator. It occurred to her that, given their new circumstance, it might be good for them to cultivate new habits. She wondered if David would be startled if she suddenly asked him to help chop vegetables or stir a simmering soup. And would she regret losing hegemony in her impeccably organized culinary fortress? Not, she thought, if it presented a new path to intimacy, an intimacy they sorely needed. The idea comforted her.

  Jeffrey passed her the plate of cookies.

  ‘I must apologize,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t know about your daughter’s death when I went to the thrift shop. I was told about it later. I want to express my condolences now.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She did not look at him but stared into the cup as though the dark and fragrant brew might contain an anodyne to the too familiar pain that pierced her heart. Melanie had been dead for months. All condolences had been acknowledged and then, blessedly, they had ceased. Jeffrey’s words, belated and unanticipated, but expressed with such gentleness, such awkward and hesitant sadness, moved her deeply.

  ‘It hasn’t been easy,’ she added. ‘But I guess you know that.’

  He nodded. ‘I do. Not easy at all. I didn’t think it would be this hard for me to accept Sylvia’s death. She was ill for a long time. Every treatment had been exhausted. I’m a doctor. I knew she was dying. I was prepared. Or so I thought. But no one is ever prepared for the reality of death. I’ve seen it so many times, but it remains incomprehensible to me, beyond my acceptance, beyond my understanding. Even now, I can’t believe that she is gone.’

  His head averted, he stared out of the window at the bird feeder where a solitary sparrow pecked away. Perhaps he was weeping, Judith thought, and he did not want her to see his tears. He turned back to her, and she was relieved to see that his eyes were dry, although his chiseled features seemed sharper, as though honed by unremitting pain.

  ‘Melanie’s death was very different,’ she said quietly. ‘Sudden. It came from nowhere. We had no preparation. She wasn’t ill. She was a healthy, happy child. She was thirteen years old, alive and laughing in the morning and dead by the afternoon. An aneurysm, they said, an explosion in her heart. We still – David and I – we can’t believe that it happened. It is as though our own lives exploded. I can’t wrap my head around it. Sometimes I think it was all a dream – her life, a dream. Her death, a nightmare.’

  She sat very still, ambushed by her own words. She had never before spoken that way of Melanie’s death. She had never twinned David’s grief with her own. She marveled at the calm of her tone, the ease with which she had revealed the strange and secret fantasy that her daughter’s brief life had been balanced on what Emily Dickinson called ‘the ledge of dream’. Strange, she thought, that the economic verses of virginal Emily Dickinson should define her maternal grief.

  He nodded. ‘That is how I sometimes think of Sylvia. Our life together seems like a dream. And now the dream has ended and I am alone,’ he said, each word slowly uttered and laden with sadness.

  She lowered her head. His grief collided with her own, but their losses were so very different. They could not be weighed on the same scales. Sylvia had had a life; she had been a wife, a mother, a reader of books, a lover of beauty. Melanie had been granted only a childhood, her future cruelly denied. She could not say as much to Jeffrey Kahn, who leaned forward to refill her cup in this kitchen where he ate all his meals alone.

  ‘It must be a blessing for you to have Brian and David,’ he added.

  She sighed and hoped that her voice would not break when she answered him. ‘Yes. It is, but David escapes into his work and keeps very late hours. Brian no longer lives at home. He was a good brother and he is a good son, but he has his life. He’s in law school and engaged to be married. He’s building his own future. I don’t want him to feel that we – David and I – are dependent on him, that it’s his job to soothe our grief,’ she said.

  Jeffrey nodded. ‘I understand. I feel the same way about my daughters. I don’t want to burden them with my sadness, my loneliness. That is why I encouraged them to go back to their lives in California. Of course, they worry. They call. They want me to sell the house and move to the west coast but that’s not a step I’m ready to take.’

  ‘I’ve been told that no decisions should be made until at least a year after the death of a’ – she hesitated – ‘a loved one.’

  ‘It’s a relief for me to be able to talk so openly to you. Thank you for listening. How strange that we should meet at such a time aft
er so many years,’ he said.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. Her hand rested on the table beside the cup newly filled with coffee which she did not want. He covered it with his own and she sat very still, grateful for the warmth of his touch.

  ‘I should be going,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He carried the heavy carton out to her car. ‘Will you be able to come again?’ he asked. ‘There is still so much to do.’

  ‘Of course. I imagine that it will take us several weeks to deal with everything, but I think I’ll be able to arrange it.’

  She took out her diary and they settled on a tentative schedule. Two afternoons a week, perhaps three, depending on his obligations and her own.

  ‘It’s very good of you,’ he said.

  ‘My pleasure.’

  She recoiled against the falsity of her own words. It was not her pleasure. It was her duty. It was her need. It was yet another way to elude the solitude of her grief. Perhaps yet another avoidance. Damn Evelyn.

  She looked through the rearview mirror as she drove away and watched him walk very slowly into his silent house. She imagined him refilling the bird feeder at an hour when the darkening sky was streaked with the melancholy pastel rays of twilight. His sadness, at that treacherous hour when day drifted into evening, was, she knew, twin to her own.

  She turned away and concentrated on the road ahead of her, driving too fast because she was eager, suddenly, to be home, to begin cooking dinner so that the house would be redolent with the scent of a simmering sauce when David turned his key in the door. Perhaps this very night she would ask him to stir the sauce, to hand her a spatula, and they would work together at the stove, their faces bright with the rising heat. And then she remembered that David would not be home for dinner. She would be alone, yet again, staring into Melanie’s mirror and chasing the memory of laughter silenced and words unspoken.

  TEN

  ‘Helping Jeffrey Kahn sort through Sylvia’s things is an enormous job, but I agreed to help him. I’ll probably be spending two days a week doing that for a while,’ Judith told David the next morning.

  He nodded.

  ‘It shouldn’t interfere with our schedules,’ she added and wondered what schedules she was talking about. There were no social engagements on their calendar. Invitations, kind and hesitant, had been offered after Melanie’s death, all politely refused.

  ‘We understand,’ their friends said in the soft voices usually reserved for convalescing invalids. Then, after a while, a very short while, there had been fewer solicitous phone calls and, finally, no invitations at all.

  ‘If you’re sure it won’t be a strain,’ he said. ‘Actually, I was just assigned a major arbitration, so there’ll be a lot of late nights at the office. You won’t have to worry about dinners.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ she said drily.

  So much for the fantasy of kitchen intimacy, David chopping vegetables and stirring stews. The thought was tinged with anger. No, not anger. Disappointment, she acknowledged. Like Jeffrey Kahn, she would be eating many meals alone. She shrugged and did not reply in kind to his desultory wave as he hurried to his car, eager to catch his commuter train.

  At the thrift shop, she and Suzanne sorted through the carton of Sylvia Kahn’s clothing, Suzanne marveling at the quality of the garments.

  ‘This is only the beginning,’ Judith told her. ‘There’s tons of stuff there. I’ll be helping Jeffrey Kahn go through it for the next several weeks. Probably on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.’

  ‘Fine,’ Suzanne said. ‘I’ll note that on the thrift shop roster.’ She fingered a gray cashmere dress. ‘What do you think about sending things of this quality to a consignment shop?’

  ‘Let’s see what else I bring in,’ Judith said, although she knew that anything Sylvia Kahn had bought would be of similar quality.

  She managed her new routine with ease. Each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, she left the thrift shop and drove to Jeffrey’s home. They worked methodically, filling one carton after another, which she delivered to the thrift shop the next day. Suzanne gave Sylvia’s clothing pride of place. She dressed a mannequin, plundered from a bankrupt boutique, in the long blue velvet skirt and an elegant white satin shirt. Both items were snapped up by a stylish young woman who frequented the shop in search of vintage clothing.

  A sweet-faced young girl, pale and sad-eyed, her shapeless blue cotton dress wrinkled and belted with a fraying rope, bought one of Sylvia’s capes. She put it on at once, although the day was warm.

  ‘I’m cold. I’m always cold. It’s the medicines. The medicines make me cold. But I have to take them. Otherwise, I’ll be sick again. I want to be well. When I’m well, I’ll have my own apartment. That will be nice.’

  She smiled at Judith, a child’s tentative smile in search of support and reassurance.

  ‘Very nice,’ Judith agreed and watched her leave, huddled in the cape, its hem trailing in the dust.

  ‘She’s from the halfway house up the hill,’ Lois confided. ‘A lot of them shop here. Mental patients in recovery. Addicts in rehab. Kids, most of them. They need a break.’

  Judith told Jeffrey that the cape had been sold. ‘To a young girl. A very poor young girl who really needed it.’

  He nodded. ‘That would have pleased Sylvia,’ he said. ‘She knew what it was to be in need.’

  Again, she refrained from asking questions, although she wondered when and why Sylvia had been in need. She would not ask. There had been no repetition of the intimacies revealed on that first day. She and Jeffrey Kahn were careful to observe boundaries. Their losses were not mentioned. She never spoke of Melanie. His references to Sylvia were infrequent. They worked in companionable silence, their efforts synchronized.

  He plucked dresses and jackets from the closet and handed them to her. She shook them loose, went through the pockets, now and again finding coins or loose buttons, supermarket coupons and once, a shopping list, Sylvia’s handwriting, small and elegant. Turmeric. Dill. Squid ink pasta. It did not surprise her that Sylvia had been a gourmet cook. The long-expired supermarket coupons had been neatly clipped. Sylvia, despite her vast wardrobe, had been a frugal woman.

  After two weeks they congratulated themselves on having made significant progress. They celebrated by drinking glasses of wine outside as a flock of Canada geese flew very low.

  ‘Summer visitors, Sylvia called them,’ he said.

  She nodded, recognizing that his words were a gift of a kind.

  One afternoon, she set aside a high-necked dress of sea-green polished cotton, thinking that it would suit Emily, given her dark hair and the apricot-toned sheen of her skin. She felt a great fondness for the very shy, very polite young mother and mentioned her to Jeffrey.

  ‘Asian? Is she Japanese or Korean?’ he asked.

  She admitted that she did not know, but she was grateful to him for asking, for expressing an interest.

  Sharing coffee at the end of the afternoon became a pleasant ritual. Now and again Judith brought pastries purchased at a French patisserie in town. More often Jeffrey set out croissants and wedges of cheese. They sat in the breakfast nook as evening shadows darkened the sky. The bird feeder was deserted, and although the room grew dim, Jeffrey did not turn on the light. They spoke softly, aware of the fragility of their words. When he mentioned Sylvia, his tone was tentative. Their self-set boundaries disappeared and there was a new ease in their exchange.

  He offered fragmented memories, crumbs of information. One afternoon they watched a blue jay descend on the bird feeder and he stared at it and turned away.

  ‘Her favorite bird,’ he said.

  He cut the cheese with an onyx-handled knife.

  ‘Sylvia loved antique cutlery. She bought this at a flea market, I think. We loved going to flea markets.’ His long fingers caressed the smooth stone.

  Judith, in turn, offered him carefully selected anecdotes from her own past, telli
ng him one afternoon how she and David had met.

  ‘We were both feeling miserable and lonely, registering for classes at this huge university where we knew no one, and I asked if I could borrow his pen. I never gave it back. I didn’t have to. We were together from that moment on. We always marveled at how lucky we were to find each other,’ she said.

  And they had been lucky, she knew, she and David, so lost and alone, tumbling into love. Luck and love had sustained them as the years rushed past, lost now and again in gossamer webs of disappointment, small clouds of fear, but always returning. As it would again, she assured herself. She listened as Jeffrey spoke in lilting tones of his own first meeting with Sylvia.

  She had come to the clinic in a poor section of Baltimore where he volunteered during his first year of practice, concerned that the trachoma she had experienced as a child might have damaged her eyes. He had examined her and reassured her that her eyes were healthy, noting that they were also very beautiful.

  ‘Trachoma?’ Judith asked. ‘Trachoma in America?’

  ‘Extremely rare,’ he agreed. ‘But Sylvia wasn’t born in America.’

  She waited but he said nothing more.

  Some days later, going through the pockets of a tweed jacket, Judith found a letter, its faded script in a language she didn’t recognize. She handed it to Jeffrey, who glanced at it and nodded.

  ‘It’s written in Polish,’ he said. ‘From a cousin of Sylvia’s. Luba. She lives in Israel now. She and Sylvia were close as children. In Reidenberg.’

  ‘Reidenberg?’

  He smoothed the letter out and put it in his pocket. Their work for the day was done. She followed him downstairs.