by Jan Cherubin
What could be sad compared to our situation? Brenda’s perspective was so twisted.
“What?” I said.
“Your daddy just died.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not true.”
“Yes, just a little while ago.”
“No.” People died in bed, in and out of consciousness. They didn’t die asking for the TV Guide.
“Yes,” said Brenda.
She was a liar. It was too soon. He was sitting up. He was talking. He wanted the TV Guide! “NO!” I shouted. The phone dropped onto the carpet. “No!” I went down on my knees and I drew a breath in and then I made a croaking sound because I couldn’t get enough air. She killed him. She gave him an overdose. That had to be what happened. My mother picked up the receiver and spoke to Brenda and hung up and got down on the floor with me and held me by the shoulders and she was crying, and I was gasping for air, and then she slapped me.
“Do you think she killed him?” I said.
“Sweetheart, he was very, very sick. He was going die, there was no way around it.” Tears were streaming down her face.
How could I have been shocked? How could we both have been devastated knowing his disease was terminal? But we were. We got our coats and got into my mother’s car like people feverish and weak. The almost full moon was high in the night sky and lit the road with a ghoulish cast. My mother told me the few details Brenda had given her. It happened at about eight-twenty, they found the right channel and he had been watching Dressed to Kill. She called the hospice nurse.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said.
My mother pulled the car to the side of the road, tires crunching. I got out and stared at the gravel shoulder whitened by moonlight. The pebbles were stones in a bowl of milk. I got back in the car. “I don’t have to,” I said. My mother drove slowly as if we were in a procession. We were keenly aware that something big had happened to us.
“They didn’t take him away already, did they?”
“No. Brenda said the nurse told her to wait until we got there before she called anybody.”
“You mean Sol Levinson.”
“Yeah, Sol Levinson.”
There must have been other Jewish undertakers in Baltimore, but I’d never heard of any. We turned at Northern Parkway and drove past Sinai and the turnoff to my grandmother’s house, and over the railroad tracks and turned right into Cedar Drive. Just as we passed the willow trees that leaned over the creek where the street curved, a cab passed us. It was rare to see a taxi in our neighborhood. It floated by unnaturally, iridescent yellow with black windows, seemingly driverless. I thought when we pulled up under the maple tree I would have to be dragged out of the car, I’d be too afraid to come inside. But the second my mother shifted into park I jumped out and ran across the lawn as fast as I could, through the carport and into the kitchen. I ran so hard I had to be stopped, and strictly for that purpose it seemed, there was a tremendous woman blocking my path whose body took up the entire width of the passageway between the kitchen and living room. I ran into her and she was soft as a pillow.
“Whoa, whoa. There now, sweetheart, take it easy. I’m Sharon, the hospice nurse, and I want to talk to you before you go in.” Her voice was as comforting as hot chocolate. Where have you been? I wanted to say. Where were you all these months when I needed you so badly?
“Is he in the living room?” I said.
“Yes, and he’s sitting in a chair,” Sharon said. She put her arms around me, pressing me into her big bosom.
I used to forget how tiny the house on Cedar Drive was until I walked in after months away, and saw that it was like a house from Disneyland, three-quarters the size of a real house. Now everything in it was unreal, too. “He’s sitting up? He’s in his chair? What happened? How did he die?” The nurse held me in her arms.
Brenda emitted a little snort, a kind of half-laugh, and apologized to Sharon. “She’s like this,” Brenda said. “It’s normal for Joanna.”
“Tell me what happened,” I demanded of Brenda. “Tell me everything.”
Sharon nodded to Brenda to go ahead.
“Well, he said he was having trouble breathing and he asked me to open the window,” said Brenda, enunciating slowly. “But I couldn’t get around the chair so he got up and opened the door.”
“The front door?”
“Yes, the front door. But I didn’t want him to catch pneumonia, so I closed the door and then he started pulling apart his pajama top, so violently his buttons popped off, and then he sat down in the swivel chair, and he was gasping for breath and pulling at his pajama top and then he sort of put his head down. And I called the number we had on the legal pad, the number for the hospice nurse, and I said, ‘I think my husband just passed away.’”
“Was he the one who wanted the TV Guide?” I said. “Or was it you?”
“Oh, Joanna, don’t be ridiculous. He wasn’t angry with you about the TV Guide.”
“I know he wasn’t angry with me. That’s not what I meant.”
“She wants to know if he asked for the TV Guide because she wants to know if he was lucid just before he died,” said Sharon.
“That’s right, exactly,” I said. I looked into Sharon’s kind eyes, studied her wide face, her flat bottom lip. How was it this woman I had never met before understood me?
“Yes,” Brenda said wearily, as if I were trying her patience. “Clyde was the one who wanted the TV Guide.”
“Are you ready to go in now?” Sharon asked.
“I think so,” I said. I inched my hand along the wall as if I were on a ledge thirty stories high. I’d never seen a dead body, not up close. When the wall ended at the opening to the living room I took one more step and stopped. My father was sitting in the swivel chair in his pajamas and tartan bathrobe from Susan. I hadn’t noticed before how Christmasy the bathrobe was. How cheerful. His head was bent and resting on his shoulder as if he had nodded off, and his lips were fat in a pout. He had his green hat on, of course. His hair was the same, his mustache as bushy as ever. He didn’t move. I dropped to my knees at the threshold and sobbed my heart out. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I cried. “I’m so sorry.”
My mother stood behind me waiting to slap me if I needed it. When I calmed down I saw that Brenda was carrying a dining room chair and she put it next to him, and sat down in it and kept a frozen smile on her face, as if waiting for her portrait to be taken with her dead husband. It was weird. I didn’t know what she was doing there. “It wasn’t your fault,” Brenda said, still smiling. They were on a stage and my mother and Sharon and I were in the audience. Brenda was glowing, calm and serene. No muttering, no curses. She was much more relaxed with him dead. “Do you think it’s your fault?” Brenda said.
I didn’t know how to explain, but Sharon, my interpreter, filled in. “Joanna only means she’s sorry that he died,” Sharon said over a great chasm, speaking across the River Styx to Brenda in the land of the dead. “She’s sorry she lost her father.”
“Poor Joanna,” said Brenda. “This sort of thing is hard for you.” She stroked my father’s hand.
“You can come closer,” Sharon said to me. “You can touch him if you want to.”
I came closer and Sharon must have said something to Brenda because Brenda got up and carried her chair with her, and left my mother and me alone with my father. He seemed oddly healthier, his face fleshier, his lips fuller, his belly round. I put my finger on the bare skin peeking out between the buttons that were left on his pajamas and he was warm.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to be afraid,” said Brenda from the hall.
My mother came closer and kissed his cheek. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve always loved you.”
I stared at her. Had she told him yesterday, last week, twenty years ago?
“He looks exactly the way he used to when he was playing with you and Susan,” my mother said. “He would play cowboys and Indians with you, and you girls would shoot him and
he’d pretend to be dead.”
“We did? He did?”
“Yes, and he would put his chin down on his chest and stick his bottom lip out and pretend. Just like this.”
There was a knock at the front door and Brenda opened it. Three tall men entered with faces as white as wall paint and greasy strands of black hair glued to their heads. Sharon whispered to us to go into the back of the house, although I was sure Brenda would have been fine watching the morticians unfold my father’s arms and legs and zip him into a body bag.
“Phew!” said Brenda. “I don’t envy them that cleanup job.”
How could two human beings react so differently to the same circumstances? To me, day by day, my father had become sexless, smooth, soulful, and clean. But to Brenda, he was prosaically dirty, a bum who could use a bath.
They took him away. We called my sister and heard Susan yell to Larry to close the bedroom door so her little girls wouldn’t hear her sobbing. Brenda said she was fine, declining my mother’s invitation to spend the night with us. When we got back to Charles Street, all the lights in the apartment were still on. Everything there was unreal, too. I was reminded of a dream I had when Fred and I lived in New York. I was awakened by the sound of a party, animated voices, glasses clinking. I got out of bed and went to the top of a sweeping staircase, and down below I saw a replica of myself and Fred eating dinner at a cafe table. This other Fred and I were laughing too loudly with rubbery grins, and the food was too bright. It was a terrifying image.
The dinner we left in my mother’s blazing kitchen looked like the dinner in the dream—chicken breasts day-glo orange from the paprika, one perfect bite cut out of each one, mounds of undisturbed yellow rice, neon green beans, a fork balanced on the edge of each plate, chairs pulled out. A garish tableau. What happened here, an archeologist might have asked. Why was this meal interrupted?
CHAPTER 51
Brenda leaned over the funeral candle in the tall blue jar decorated with a Star of David and lit her cigarette off the flame. When the smoke cleared, she glanced back at the mourners and smiled wryly. I flew to California with Fred the next day. I’d go through the house and pack up my things some other time. Brenda said fine, whatever, just let her know when I was coming.
My father died in bleak February and I didn’t come back to Baltimore to get my stuff until June. It was odd that I stalled since I had been so curious about the treasures buried in his books and papers. I expected to relish the searching, sorting, and curating, but I developed a powerful aversion to the task. Something about dealing with the boxes and jam-packed drawers seemed impossible. It seemed like a test of some kind that I wasn’t up to, a sorcerer’s apprentice job—endless and confounding, full of riddles and trapdoors. I stalled until Brenda phoned and said you better get back here before I throw your junk in the garbage.
And that was how I ended up dodging the seventeen-year locusts dive-bombing the carport and spending the night with Brenda in the steamy early June of 1987. I ate her cold chicken, and listened to her talk about the guy she was dating, and I tried to bring the ladder inside to go up into the attic, and then I put the ladder back like she asked, and I waited until she was asleep to search the den, and found the suitcase with the yellow handle, brought it to my makeshift bed on the sofa, and began to read the story my father called Tuckahoe. In the morning, on my way to loading some things into the trunk of the rental car, Brenda threw her menacing weight between me and the door.
I’d been getting the feeling something serious was up, so I had hastily gathered the framed picture of little Clyde in his sailor suit, put it into the daypack slung on my shoulder, grabbed the suitcase with the yellow handle in one hand, and held aloft the three-legged Indian table in the palm of my other hand like a waiter carrying a tray.
“You’re not taking that table,” Brenda said.
“Why not?” I said. I put the suitcase on the floor between my legs and clutched the table with both hands. “You don’t want it. You told me last night it’s a cheap piece of tourist junk.” She grabbed one of the elephant-trunk legs. What was she planning to do? Break it off like a breadstick? I tightened my arms around the table, but she was not letting go. We both knew she would win this battle, at least for the moment. It was the judgment of Solomon—she didn’t care if the cheap piece of junk broke and I did. I let go, and Brenda pressed the ivory inlay Taj Mahal to her chest, pointing the table legs at me like a lion tamer. Then a corner of the framed photograph in my daypack must have caught her eye, because she dropped the table thoughtlessly, like letting go of a gum wrapper. It hit the floor and rocked on its round top while she lunged for the picture. “Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s a picture of my father.” I grabbed onto one end of the boxy frame, and she held fast to the other end. “My father.” We were only inches apart. Beads of perspiration glistened on her upper lip. “Susan doesn’t want it,” I said. “I’m taking it.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Brenda said through her teeth. “You’re not getting the table and you’re not getting the picture.”
“But you don’t want any of it. You said so.”
“Nevertheless,” said Brenda. “My late husband willed the house and its contents to me.”
Her late husband. I almost laughed. She used the jargony phrase with such ease, more comfortable as a widow than a wife. “He asked if I wanted his books and papers and I told him yes,” I said. I kept possession of the suitcase squeezed between my calves.
Brenda stopped yanking the frame, and I thought she was reconsidering. She looked me gamely in the eye. “I want my money,” she said. She pulled harder.
I hung on. “What?” I was sweating now. The sweat was dripping down my back.
“That money was supposed to go to me,” said Brenda.
“What money?”
“Don’t be coy.”
So she knew about the check that landed in my mother’s mailbox from the credit union.
“The money my mother got?” I said. “I have nothing to do with that.” It dawned on me too late—Brenda planned this tug of war. But I doubted she expected the fury she unleashed in me. This was my childhood house! How could she do this? How could HE have let this happen? I was furious, finally. What was supposed to happen next? Hair pulling? Nails raking bloody tracks? Punching and kicking? She knew she was stronger than I was, I could tell by the smug look on her face. She’d crush me. I didn’t want her slimy skin touching me anyway, so once again I let go. She took possession of the picture, then ducked and swiped the suitcase from between my legs. His manuscript, Ye Olde Picture Booke. “You get nothing,” she said. “Now get the hell out of my house.”
I was shaking, red in the face, crunching cicada shells under my feet as I stormed the driveway to the car. Shells the nymphs shed after living underground for seventeen years. I started the car, threw it into reverse and lurched backward down the driveway clanking into the street. “You won’t get away with this!” I yelled through my tears. I slammed the car into drive and called out some other things, too, like “you fucking bitch!” because I was pissed off finally. Now that it was too late, I was shaking with rage at my father, or at least the vile part of him, the part he excised. Not his balls—it turned out his balls weren’t the vile part of him. The vile part was Brenda, the part of him that thought he was disposable, not even a mother would keep him, the throwaway part of him that thought he belonged in the garbage.
CHAPTER 52
“So tell me, what shape was the house in?” my mother said. She handed me a Kleenex.
I wiped my tears. “The garden’s a mess, overgrown, weeds everywhere,” I said.
“Did she rearrange the furniture?” she said.
“Inside it’s the same.”
I heard a snap, my mother’s ankle as she shifted her weight, and the familiar sound was a comfort. She folded her arms and sighed. “We should have realized Brenda knew about the check,” she said.
“She’s going to throw out al
l our stuff,” I said. I stood in front of the air conditioner with my arms out and let the frigid air cool my hot head and sweaty armpits. “His books and papers, everything.” I shivered and went and flopped onto the sofa and my mother came and sat next to me.
“Unless I give her the money,” my mother said.
“Yeah. Shit! Ma. The letters! I didn’t get to go into the attic.” My eyes filled with tears again.
“Don’t cry, Joanna. Really. It’s OK.”
“You took some letters, didn’t you? He doesn’t, I mean, she doesn’t have all of them.”
“I still have some in a shoebox.” She got up and went to her bedroom, came back and dumped a pile on the coffee table.
Somewhere in England
29 April 1945
Dear Evie,
I haven’t had a letter from you in weeks. You are not doing right by your boy. Just when victory is in sight you begin slacking off. From Stalingrad to Kiev to Warsaw, from St. Lo to Cologne to Liepzig you were OK, but now when the boys are in the Berlin subway and Himmler thinks he can decide to whom to surrender, you down tools and go on strike.
Yours,
Clyde
“Were you having second thoughts at this point? Is that why you weren’t writing to him?”
“I was scared about him coming home. And I was writing, just not as much as he wanted.”
“You really don’t have any of your letters to him?” I said.
“I told you, he lost them.”
“Asshole.”
“Oh, so you’re finally down on your father?”
“I blame him for this catastrophe. I blame both of you,” I said.
“Me? You blame me?”
I couldn’t stop crying. The fight with Brenda unleashed a torrent. “Where’s the letter that says ‘if the greatest catastrophe to befall mankind couldn’t keep us apart nothing else could?’”
“I don’t know. It’s in there somewhere.”
“Well, he was wrong,” I said. “He forgot about the catastrophe of regular life.”