Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  You’ll steel yourself for the sight of her on my couch, at my table, on my chair, wherever. You’ll tell yourself it’s platonic. You’ll keep using the word “companionship.” But you know your grandfather. How he is. How he’d look at the old ladies at the bar in the front room of Ta-boo on Worth Avenue. “A pickup bar,” and he’d wink.

  You’ll be very polite with her. You’ll make a big show of it. You’ll put her at ease.

  “Miriam, it’s wonderful to see you.” “Wonderful”: one of my words.

  “Miriam, we brought you a turkey sandwich. Do you like turkey?”

  “Miriam, do you have any great-grandchildren?” You’ll tune out during her story and nod along at the pauses.

  You’ll do what I’d do. What my mother would have done. You’ll hug her.

  You’ll feel her bones under her polo shirt. She won’t hold you back, the way I pressed us together with a furious grasp. And you’ll sit at the table with your mother and your grandfather and her. You’ll notice her tenderness toward him. How she hands him a napkin when mustard drips on his chest. She won’t mop it; she’ll let him do it.

  She’ll clear her plate and his, making herself useful. “Does anyone need anything else?”

  Your grandfather will announce to the air: “Miriam and I usually go for a walk after lunch.”

  Your mother and you will exchange a glance. It was our walk, the walk on the dock.

  “It’s windy,” Miriam will say. “I’ll bring us some sweaters.”

  You’ll remember what your mother had said on the way to the house: “She’s a godsend.” What a word.

  At the restaurant later that night, she’ll thank the waitress after your grandfather barks his order. She’ll order exactly the same thing as him and pile her French fries onto his plate. She’ll laugh when he tells his stories about the chair that wobbled and the Mafia man taking his car. She’ll wait as he tries to retrieve a name—as he closes his eyes and shakes out the memory. “It was Roy Bloch!” She’ll exhale and smile. He’ll offer her a bite of ice cream, which she’ll accept, and he’ll smile as she eats it.

  As you and your mother get on the boat to leave, you’ll wave back at both of them, smiling as they see you off. You’ll realize it’s the first time in over a year you’ve been with your grandfather where he hasn’t cried. You’ll watch the two of them turn around, hand in hand, and go back to the car to drive home. To watch the Yankee game, to read the paper, to go to bed and to wake up and to eat and to walk and to remember to bring each other a sweater.

  And as the boat pulls away you’ll say it to your mother: “It’s what she would have wanted.”

  * * *

  · · ·

  You know what I would have wanted? If you’re asking me, I have a few ideas:

  A plate of calamari and a decaf iced coffee.

  A walk arm in arm with your grandfather on the dock in Menemsha on a warm day and I don’t have to stop and catch my breath.

  The end of a decent book at two in the morning and a walk into the kitchen for a piece of chocolate babka.

  A sale at Neiman’s and a new lipstick—a neutral for fall. A mauve.

  An ice cream soda.

  A movie.

  A new hat.

  A new ending.

  To go back to the last day.

  To tell the nurse good night. To lie down in the hospital bed in the living room. To have the heart attack. To hear the emergency workers scramble the stretcher through the apartment, scuffing the marble with black treads. To be loaded on, breathing and not breathing. To ride in the ambulance with your grandfather strapped to a chair. To zoom through the ER, hear the shouting, your grandfather in hysterics; to feel the shock on my chest; to see my mother and your mother and you; and to look into your grandfather’s eyes. To gasp. To hear the beep. Beep. Beep. Steady. To exhale. To laugh. To hear your grandfather wail, “Oh, Bob. Oh, Bob. I thought that was it.”

  For that not to be it.

  To wake up the next morning and choke on the smell of all the flowers. To see you all there—whoever could make it. To see you cry. To hold your hand. My angel, my angel. To tell you to calm down. To not get hysterical. To see you laugh. “If you died, I’d kill you.” To hear the doctor so proud of himself. “You gave us quite the scare, Mrs. Bell.”

  To go home in a taxi the next day. To send home the nurse. To send you back to work—to send you back to Charlie. To kiss you and kiss you and thank you. To make a roast beef sandwich and sit down at the kitchen table and split it with your grandfather. To call you and tell you about it. “What did I tell you?” “You’ll be fine.” “Would I ever lie to you?” “No, Grandma.”

  To put on a suit and my earrings and a brooch and go out to eat, to see the orchestra. To fly to the Vineyard. To check on the rosebushes outside the bedroom. To walk on the dock and to see Miri and Alice and Bob—that’s all who’s left. To hear an author’s lecture at the community center. To mark the date on my calendar when you’d arrive. To wait at the gate at the airport and wave like a maniac as you and Charlie walk down the tarmac. To take you to lunch at the Galley and tell you to take the bread off your veggie burger. To see you shoot Charlie a look and shoot me a look and eat the bread anyway. To take you to the flea market and yell at you about a peasant top—you’ll look like a tent. To sit on the couch with you and read our books. To tell you about my brother and how he insisted I learn how to read. To tell you about your mother and how she and your uncle tried to start a restaurant on the island. How they cut up skate with cookie cutters and sold them as scallops. To see your eyes crinkle when you laugh. To see a little gray in your hair in the light.

  To send you off. To hug you until our bones crunch together. To wave at the gate in the parking lot as your plane takes off.

  To get the call from you on February 13, 2019, when you find out you’re pregnant with a healthy boy. A boy! To tell you that you caught a lucky break. To wait every day for any news. To show all my friends the pictures of the ultrasound. “He has his mother’s old nose.” To call about strollers and how the cheaper ones break and the child could fall and split his head wide open on the pavement. To hear you sigh. To insist it’s true. To hear you laugh. To talk about schools and Los Angeles and how the air is terrible. To tell you to give away the cat. To tell you to find a nanny you trust, to name him something normal, to practice breathing. To tell you my mother gave birth on the dining room table. To laugh when you tell me there’s no dining room table at Cedars-Sinai. To wait for the call. To fly out. To sit there in the waiting room with your mother. To hold the baby. To kiss you on your damp forehead and tell you how wonderful your life is about to become. To watch him grow. To say “I told you so” when you’re back in New York in six months. To watch him walk and talk, and on his birthday—I’d be ninety-five—to walk with the two of you to school. “This is my grandma,” you’d say. “She brought me to my first day and she’s bringing my son.”

  To call you. To hear the phone ring and it’s you. To tell you I love you. To tell you goodbye. To hear you say it back. “I have to die.” “I know.” “Is it okay, Bessie?” “Of course.”

  Oh, Bessie. My sweet Bessie. That’s your fantasy. That’s what you would have wanted. That’s you at the center of it. It’s only part of it.

  You don’t have any clue what I would have wanted.

  You don’t know how terrible it was at the end. How it hurt. How the strokes were happening and there was one doctor after another. How the indignity of old age defined me to everyone else but you. To myself. The face in the mirror with hollow eyes, so tired from the insomnia, then the naps, then the blood vessels bursting from the coughing. The erasure of all my beauty, like someone took a sponge to it. “Who is this old woman?” I didn’t know. I could hardly hold my lipstick.

  What would I
have done with another minute of it, Bessie? Another day? Another two days? More doctors treating more conditions. More nurses with their impatient questions, their bored looks, thinking about their lunch break. More collapse, more parts of myself to go: my eyes, my hearing, my bowels, my mind. More panic in your grandfather’s chest as he watched me struggle for breath at all hours of the night. More of the desperate thwarting of the inevitable decline. More alienation from a world I loved so fiercely, where I couldn’t participate at all.

  More of the same meals at the same places. More books on my chest as I fell asleep, none of them as good as they used to be, harder to read with their fine print. More names in my phone book crossed out, erased. Sitting there with the receiver in my hand, hearing the dial tone, no one to call. More voice mails to leave. More papers to read. More worrying about your mother and you. More minutes, more hours, more days that grew more labored. A stay of execution. A stopped clock.

  What I would have wanted?

  I thought about it the week your mother visited, when I handed her my jewelry to give to you. When I knew I wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was the abdication.

  You know what I would have wanted? I got it at the very end.

  I wanted to fall into a very deep sleep.

  She’s crashing.

  To wake up in silk pajamas in a big bed at a grand Parisian hotel. To light up a cigarette and breathe it all the way in.

  Bobby! Bob! Oh god, oh god.

  To sit on the bow of a sailboat, your grandfather at the tiller, cawing back at the gulls.

  Oh god. Oh my god.

  To twirl in a yellow skirt on a dance floor at a sorority mixer. To fall into your grandfather’s arms. “Watch your step, Carmen Miranda!”

  To step out of our gold Jaguar as the valet takes my hand. To walk through the doors of the country club for the first time, breathing in the clean marble and the smell of the lilies bursting from the flower arrangement on the lobby table. “Right this way, Mrs. Bell.”

  Do it.

  To open my bathroom door to find your mother flushing my cigarettes, tears in her eyes: “Mom…” To watch you smile at me in the dressing room mirror, dressed in blue: “I love it, Grandma.”

  To feel Georgie walk across the room in the attic in Brooklyn. To hear him crouch over me and whisper, “My pet.” To feel him kiss my little forehead and to feel my fever break, a cool mist lifting from my skin into my nightgown.

  Charging!

  To shout “L’Chaim!” at the chuppah as your mother kissed her husband, and her husband, and as you kissed yours. To watch your grandfather lifting the veil over my head, whispering, “How lucky am I.”

  Clear!

  To be a little girl, floating on a tire attached to the dock, so sure I’d never drift away.

  Clear!

  To see my mother’s face, flushed and wet, her hair matted to her forehead, looking at me with a love I’d never seen.

  To die with every memory alive.

  Every memory in you.

  Every story to tell.

  My story.

  And my mother’s story.

  And your mother’s story.

  And your story. And your child’s.

  And for you to live so much and then for you to die.

  And to leave the stories behind, to scatter them in the wind. The myths and the legends and the truth and the heart.

  And they’ll live on and so will I.

  EPILOGUE

  GRANDDAUGHTER: Grandma, tell me about your mother.

  GRANDMOTHER: You tell me.

  I can’t.

  You’re the one writing this.

  You are.

  Of course I’m not. I’m in a box in the ground. You’re putting words in my mouth. In a dead woman’s mouth.

  Are you angry?

  It’s fine. Do you have a publisher?

  I don’t know. Some people emailed me about it after the New Yorker article.

  The article that was only on the internet.

  That’s right.

  Not in the magazine.

  Nope.

  Did you get a lawyer?

  I got a lawyer.

  A good lawyer.

  I think so. I certainly hope so!

  That’s how they get you in publishing. You must have a good lawyer look over the contract.

  Grandma. Please. It’s fine.

  Bessie, do you know how much I love you?

  Loved me.

  Is it gone?

  You’re gone.

  So what’s the point?

  I don’t know.

  Well. Do you know what my zayde used to tell me?

  Yes.

  When the earth is cracking behind your feet and it feels like the whole world is going to swallow you up, you put one foot in front of the other and you keep going. You go forward. And do you know what happens if you don’t?

  No.

  Ha! Neither do I, angel. Neither do I.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this book is nonfiction, oral history is by nature an imprecise exercise. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is not an objective account of my grandmother’s story, but rather a representation of a life, an echo, an impression, shaped and blurred through two generations and many retellings. Some names and identifying details have been changed. The major events described in this book happened and were verified through interviews with my mother and grandfather. I have brought as many tools as I could to this story, including the documentation, voice-mail recordings, and memorabilia on these pages. But this is neither my grandmother’s memoir nor her definitive biography. She had three children and seven grandchildren, whom she loved fiercely. This story accounts for only two of those people. It’s a matrilineal love story, drawn from her life, and dedicated to her memory.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without my mother. Though she insists she’ll never read it, it should be known by those who do that the book would not be here without her support and generosity. I am grateful for the hours she spent recounting stories from her childhood and young adulthood while I wrote. Thank you, Mom, for your unwavering (I think?) belief in me.

  My dad was the book’s first reader. Though he is a minor character in this text, it’s his opinion that matters the most to me about most things. Thank you, Dad, for your help with this, and all things. You are a most excellent faja.

  I also thank my grandfather Hank Bell for his support of this project on every level, and in particular for allowing me to record interviews with him about his career. Nobody’s life was more profoundly shattered by Bobby’s passing than his. My hope is this book is a comfort to him in a small way after the heartache he has endured every moment of every day since March 2017.

  Thank you to Jeannie Otis, for her recollections of George, Leo, Rose, and Sam.

  The book was brought into being by Robin Desser at Knopf. Robin’s insight, judicious cuts and notes, faith, and encouragement transformed the book from its first draft into its current incarnation. I thank Robin for being my champion throughout this process. This book simply would not exist without her. Thank you, Robin.

  Thank you to Erin Malone at WME for encouraging me to submit the proposal, and believing there was a book in my grandmother’s stories and voice. It is due to her that the book ever saw the light of day.

  Thanks to the brilliant Annie Bishai at Knopf for her excellent editorial notes and feedback on the manuscript, and for working so assiduously on behalf of the book. Annie, the book is better for your involvement in it.

  Thank you to Katy Nishimoto for your sharp and formative notes on the very first draft.

  Thank you to Victoire Bourgois, Lucas Wittmann, Kelly Dreher, Br
idger Winegar, Jeff Loveness, Whitney Graham, and Katie Okamoto for your comments on early drafts of the book.

  Thank you to Jimmy Kimmel for showing me how to work hard and do everything at once.

  Thank you to Zoe Komarin for your reassurance through this process, with your wisdom, generosity, and pita. I love you.

  Thank you, Will Kalb. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, including leave you out of this book entirely.

  Thank you to my son for allowing me to finish this book while pregnant with you. A lesser baby would have made that impossible.

  Thank you to Charlie for getting me here. The boy and I are so glad to be loved and tolerated by you. You are the reason for all of it. How lucky am I.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1Bobby in graduation robe

  2Rose

  3Bobby as a child with bow in her hair

  4Bobby fixing Bess’s makeup at Bess’s rehearsal dinner

  51930 census forms

  6Bobby and Hank on their wedding day

  7Rose and her four sons

  8Bobby as a teenager

  9Bobby holding Bess as a baby

  10Bobby and Bess at a family wedding

  11Bobby and Bess having lunch in Palm Beach

  12Rose as a young girl, photo marked “Hurwitz’s, 49 Canal St”

  13Bobby with her parents at her college graduation

  14Hank and Bobby on their honeymoon in Florida

  15Bobby and Hank’s wedding reception menu

  16Thank-you card from Bobby and Hank’s wedding

  17Bobby and Hank on a boat

  18Bobby and Estelle

  19Robin as a young girl

  20Bobby and Hank in formal clothes

  21An email from Bobby to Bess

  22Four photos from Hank and Bobby’s travels in the 1960s and 1970s

  23Bobby at Robin’s first wedding

  24Robin and Bess after Bess’s birth