When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  The prices were ridiculous, ten dollars a dozen for everything. You name it; I bought it: plates, bowls, serving pieces, knives, forks, spoons. Just as I was about to pay, I spotted demitasse cups and saucers and added those. They all said TWA on the bottom. For less than a hundred dollars, I solved one of my problems. I have most of the china still and use it, including the TWA cups. The airline stopped flying in 2001.

  In another piece of luck, I noticed that the telephone company had been laying a lot of cable near where I lived, unrolling it from table-size wooden spools left by the side of the road. Late one night, friends with a pickup truck helped me liberate one of them. We put it on my balcony. If I covered it with some padding and a tablecloth, I thought, no one would get a splinter. I borrowed a few folding chairs and bought a few. One of the guests turned up on Thanksgiving carrying a large platter with a picture of a turkey on it she got at a thrift shop. I still use it, too. The dinner turned out well, and I was quite proud of myself.

  Carol had a better story, a wonderful story. She said that for years she and several friends, including Stephen and his former boyfriend Paul, the Paul who crept into so many of Carol’s and Stephen’s conversations, would splurge and go to the Four Seasons restaurant for Thanksgiving, to wrap themselves in its glamour for an evening.

  The restaurant is gone now, but for more than half a century, just the name conjured up a kind of movie New York, its population sleek and sexy, very grown-up in dinner jackets and gowns, the kind of people who sailed down Park Avenue in limousines, through a canyon of skyscrapers to the Seagram Building, Midtown Manhattan’s modernist masterpiece, where the restaurant beckoned.

  Everything about the Four Seasons restaurant was famous. Its architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Its iconic marble pool in the middle of one of its two rooms, ornamental trees in planters at each corner. As each of the four seasons began, the trees were replaced to reflect the time of year. Famously, a theater curtain painted by Picasso for the Ballets Russes divided the space. Famously and scandalously, the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko was commissioned to create a series of pictures for the restaurant but then refused to allow them to be hung there and gave back the money he was paid because its regular clientele included a who’s who of famous names to be dropped, faces to recognize, the very people Rothko detested.

  Carol smiled and described being offered champagne when she and her friends arrived for Thanksgiving dinner. They drank it by the pool and were then taken to another table for their meal. She talked about dressing up in clothes she had designed, choosing what to wear for the occasion and the place. A work of art herself, I could imagine her delight at being surrounded by objects made for the place, the tables, the chairs, the tableware, all of it custom, each detail considered. She said that every year she saw Helen Gurley Brown. Sometimes she’d be there already with her husband when Carol and her party arrived. Sometimes Brown would slip in just before they left. One way or another, until she died at ninety, the mother of the sexual revolution, the editor of Cosmo, the author of Sex and the Single Girl, would always make her appearance.

  “But the best part, I think,” Carol said, her lips quivering, the oxygen tube at her nose wheezing, “was every year getting a call from the restaurant, from Sophie. ‘Miss Fertig, will you be making your customary reservation for Thanksgiving this year?’ It was great.” I thought, wow, the courtesy of that phone call. To be made to feel important enough, special enough, to be consulted before the reservation book filled up. Carol’s smile crossed her face and touched her eyes as she remembered.

  Soon her eyelids began to flutter and close. She was falling asleep. She asked Ann and me to leave. As I stood to go, I stroked her arm. It was damp and clammy, almost sticky, as it had been the last time I’d been there. I said to her, “This Thanksgiving, in addition to the things I’m always thankful for, I just want you to know, I’m very thankful for Harry and very thankful for knowing you, for this entire experience.” She started to cry and mumbled, “Me, too.”

  As Ann Rittenberg and I reached the elevator, she started sobbing. Seeing Carol so helpless and uncomfortable, she told me, was unbearable. She and Carol had met when Ann moved to 15 Broad Street after her divorce. They’d only known each other for about three years, but Ann wished it had been twenty. “As I do,” I said. We walked together the length of the blue line and then out onto the street before she stopped crying. I learned that she was a book agent, and that she was the person who was buying Carol’s beautiful marble table. When we reached Twenty-third Street, she hailed a cab. I walked to the bus stop. We both had Thanksgiving dinners to attend.

  The next morning, I got up at five-thirty and began cooking a second Thanksgiving dinner, this one for Stephen and another friend, John. I told both of them to arrive at 6:30 P.M. When I finally sat down for the first time all day, at about six, John showed up early. A little after seven Stephen phoned. I could hear his distress. His dog, Teddy, old and beginning to fail, was sick. Stephen had been out with him three times but was on the way now, he said. He arrived without the mashed potatoes he’d made. Worried about Teddy, he had left the dish on his kitchen counter in his rush to leave. I had baked sweet potato casserole because I like it, so there was no shortage of food. We had sweet potato casserole, turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, a green salad, and pumpkin chiffon pie with whipped cream for dessert.

  Carol knew that Stephen was coming to my place for a belated Thanksgiving. She made me promise to send lots of pictures. I sent one of the turkey just out of the oven, another of the dogs staring up at the turkey, a couple of Stephen engaged in precision carving, me in an apron smiling next to the sideboard (taken by John), and a close-up of my plate. Carol was apparently waiting, phone in hand. Almost immediately, she emailed her pronouncement that the turkey was “gorgeous.” After dinner, I sent a picture of Harry stretched out on the couch, sleeping off his share of the white meat. She replied, “Is football next?” Later I emailed her one last picture of Harry, standing in front of my open refrigerator studying the leftovers. In the subject line I wrote, “Better than football.”

  seventeen

  THE DAY AFTER THAT

  On Saturday, I woke up to the news that Fidel Castro had died overnight, which meant I would have to go to work and make one final update to the obituary I had updated over and over, every time the former Cuban leader was seen in public or was said to be ill. The trick with the obituaries of famous people is that they have to be done well before the individual actually dies. No newspaper or television network would dare wait until the death is announced because it would be practically impossible to assemble all the necessary interviews and pictures fast enough to do a decent job. I was assigned my Castro obit a good five or six years before the fact, prompted by one of the many rumors that Fidel was dead or dying. It took weeks to research, write, and put together. The producer, the video editor, and I joked after every false alarm, after being called in to make changes every time there was a new “Castro’s dead” panic, that it was our doing that the guy was still alive, that we’d given him multiple new leases on life. At the rate we were going, we told ourselves, he would live forever.

  But he didn’t. Our obituary was running on CBS Sunday Morning the following day. Our executive producer would want to screen it again and approve our tweaks, but my shift at Carol’s bedside was from two to six P.M. There was a schedule by then, informal, but the idea was to make sure that some member of her self-appointed family was with her most of the time, except during the overnight hours. Lissa kept track. She had become the gatekeeper. I texted her that I would go early and stay as long as I could.

  Carol was alone when I walked into her room. The lights were off. In the gloom, all I could see were her giant, black glasses on a motionless mound at the far end of the bed, but she was awake. On the blanket beside her was a square plastic basin three times the size of the kidney-shaped stainless steel one it had replaced. For vomiting.

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nbsp; I talked about the dogs. “The city has been doing roadwork on Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh,” I said. “Drilling. They’ve been pumping some sort of mucky slime into a tree pit on our route to Chelsea Piers. It’s like a shiny black slurry. Harry couldn’t resist. Yesterday morning, he walked right into it, all four feet. He sank down almost to his stomach. He was covered in it. His bootie was a mess. I had to use a wire brush to scrub it clean. Fortunately, my hose hasn’t been turned off for the winter yet. You told me he hates hoses. Well, like it or not, he got hosed down yesterday, and the water was cold.” I heard myself and thought, Too many words.

  Carol opened her mouth and seemed to laugh at half speed. “That’s my boy.”

  She told me she was uncomfortable. “Your back?” I asked. “No, my whole being.” I cleared off her tray table, raised her bed, and brought her fresh water and ginger ale. Slowly, she lifted the plastic basin to her chest and waited, but nothing happened. Just as slowly, she lowered it. I poured her some ice water and held it up for her, but she grasped the cup and inched the bendy straw toward her lips. It collided with the oxygen tubes in her nose. For a good thirty seconds, she tried to guide it into her mouth. After a couple of small sips, she moved the cup back to her tray table, her hand shaking, as if it took all the effort in the world.

  I didn’t know what to say. I had used up all my words. Finally I asked, “When you’re not overcome by your pain and discomfort, do you think about happy times or adventures? Do you relive parts of your life?” It was a question to fill the silence. I didn’t expect much of an answer, but after a long pause, she mumbled something. “What?” I asked. Her voice came out a faint, high murmur. I heard, “Not really … pedestrian things.” “Like what?” I asked. “The woods,” she whispered, and went quiet. “Any woods in particular?” Pause … “The Adirondacks,” she said, and smiled, just as she had on Thanksgiving talking about the Four Seasons restaurant, but now, two days later, she was much weaker.

  Her story came out in breathy bursts that were hard to understand. Her ex-husband’s family had a small house in the Adirondacks. She fell in love with the area when she went there with him. “There’s a book.” She strained to point toward a chair. I looked and saw a spiral notebook, on its black cardboard cover the words Adirondack Days, spelled out in twigs that had been glued on. One of the Three Graces, Kate or Cecilia, Lissa probably, must have brought it. I opened it and found a welcome letter. “Dear Miss Fertig and Violet.” It was dated August 4, 1996. The letterhead said “LAKE PLACID LODGE. A Classic Adirondack Retreat.” On the page opposite the letter was a picture of Violet, Carol’s first bull terrier, an over-the-shoulder shot taken from behind, a blue ball in her mouth. The image had been cut out and stuck to the lower right-hand corner of the page, arranged with a collage of other photos so that she appeared to be staring at a panoramic view of a building. A covered balcony extended over the porch. The railings were made of tree branches arranged to spell out: LAKE PLACID LODGE. On the next page was a photo of the word PINE mounted on birch bark and framed by twigs, the name of Carol’s cabin, I guessed, because pictures of a stone fireplace and rustic plank walls came next, then lots and lots of Violet posing for the camera in bed, nestled against piles of pillows. The headboard, too, was a tangle of branches. Some folded note cards fell out as I turned more pages, each one printed with the same engraving of a deer next to a lake, Lake Placid probably, and a poem or quotation inside. From Samuel Johnson, for instance: “I would rather see the portrait of a dog I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.” The cards must have been placed at Carol’s bedside every night when the maids turned down the sheets. Several said “Sweet Dreams.” The one with the Samuel Johnson quote was signed “Happy Trails, Violet” in the same handwriting as the welcome letter from the hotel manager.

  And sure enough, there were photos of Violet on a trail in the woods, bounding ahead of the unseen photographer (Carol), in some, looking back, seeming to beckon her, “Hurry up! Follow me!” And one of Violet crouching next to a dock. “She was objecting to my going in the water.” I realized Carol must have been in the water looking back at the shoreline when she took the picture.

  “What was Violet like compared to Harry?” I asked. Long pause. “She was a bitch … out for herself.” That startled me. “They’re very alike in some ways but very different. Harry is nicer.” But clearly, she loved Violet dearly. Paging through the scrapbook, I found a snapshot of Carol on a bench, cradling Violet like a baby. It was the only picture of the two of them together. It wasn’t glued in, so I turned it over and saw that it was taken in 1993, three years before the trip to the Lake Placid Lodge. Selfies didn’t exist then, and there were no pictures of just Carol, which told me that she and Violet had gone there by themselves.

  I understood and recalled the sweet, contemplative melancholy I felt on trips I took alone. Loneliness scared me at first, but the loneliness didn’t last. I found myself wider awake, seeing and smelling and hearing in a heightened way. For a change, I could pay attention to words and thoughts, worries and dreams, as they came and went in my head. Time felt like poetry. I could eavesdrop. I could pretend. I could forget. I could remember. I allowed myself the luxury.

  Once, when I lived in England, I brought my first bull terrier, Piggy, with me on a long weekend. We took the train southwest from London to Dartmouth, a picturesque village in Devon tucked just upriver from the English Channel. Carol took a picture of Violet sitting in the front seat of a car as they drove to the Lake Placid Lodge. I took a picture of Piggy sitting across from me on British Rail, FIRST CLASS embroidered on the linen cloth velcroed to the seat behind his head. We stayed in a nice small inn. Piggy padded up several flights of stairs and, once we got to our top-floor room, picked out a red armchair as his. Instead of a walk in the woods, he and I took a public footpath that led us across a farmer’s field full of sheep. Piggy had never seen sheep before. Sheep were among the great discoveries of his life, right up there with horses. He raced after them, straining at the end of his retractable leash, dragging me running along behind, holding on as best I could. The sheep had his number. They stood in twos and threes, staring at him as he approached. Whenever he got in lunging distance from any of them, they’d calmly trot a few feet to one side or another safely out of reach. Do sheep laugh? I had my camera with me. As I pitched and staggered, I managed a couple of one-handed shots of my crazy dog lurching out of control, truly at the end of his tether. In one, all four of his feet are off the ground. Suddenly, I saw that the field was about to come to an end. The horizon appeared just in front of us. It dawned on me almost too late that we were about to go over a cliff. I hauled Piggy back with all my strength and managed to reel him in a couple of yards from the edge. I looked down. The sea crashed over rocks hundreds of feet below us. When I saw how far we could have fallen, surely to our deaths, I felt faint.

  The picture of Piggy in first class is in a frame next to my bed. I have no idea where the photos of our near-death experience in the farmer’s field are now, in an envelope somewhere, stashed in a drawer probably. Why hadn’t I ever made a scrapbook? Admiring Adirondack Days, I thought about how Carol told stories, and how I did. So different, the artist and the writer.

  Carol struggled to breathe, gasping occasionally. She tried to reposition the little oxygen hoses in her nose. Finally, she asked me to get the nurse to increase the flow and to give her more of her nausea medicine.

  Lissa arrived and gleefully announced she had gossip from their mah-jongg group. Cecilia’s teenage son had been caught with his “fast” girlfriend attempting to undress her in his bed. When Cecilia discovered them, the girl ran to the bathroom half-naked. A serious discussion then took place between the parents. The Three Graces may have been goddesses, but they apparently hadn’t given birth to angels. I saw a glimmer of devilment cross Carol’s face. I stroked her arm, said goodbye, and went to work.

  eighteen

  CONVE
RSATIONS ACROSS A DEATHBED

  Carol’s visitors were supposed to spell one another, but often they didn’t leave when the next person showed up. They gathered around her bed talking to each other. When Carol was able, she listened and tried to talk a little, but usually drifted in and out of sleep. The conversations continued with and without her. At times, her friends forgot to be sad. Once, I walked in and found Stephen holding a phone to Carol’s ear. It was playing Barbra Streisand songs. “She loves Barbra Streisand,” he told me. Something about Carol reminded me of Streisand.

  I was visiting her practically every weeknight and, on weekends, in the afternoons. Fortunately, I wasn’t traveling much for work. I was writing stories that had already been shot. The 2016 presidential election was dominating the news cycle. Donald Trump seemed to be on every TV screen, all the time, the noise of the coverage a jangling constant. Except in Carol’s room. Through the summer and into the fall, she had talked nonstop about politics, especially with Stephen, who, like her, was a news junkie. And with me, because I work in news. Now her TV was off. Her room was quiet. Going there was like entering perpetual twilight.

  It was not unusual to arrive and find people I’d never met. Paul, Stephen’s ex-boyfriend, the one who’d made up with Carol after they’d fallen out over a business deal. Michael, then editor of Elle Decor magazine, and his husband, Robert, a media relations consultant. Carol’s friends Chuck, a pediatric endocrinologist at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and his partner, Jeffrey, a landscape designer, who’d known her since the 1970s. There were many more I didn’t meet. Lee, the fashion writer, and Tony, her photographer husband, who came all the way from Australia. Carol’s friend Charlotte from Portland, Oregon. Denise, the real estate heiress. Others, one after another, plus the regulars. Carol knew amazing people, a lot of them. Her gift for friendship.