Tag: memory

Afterthought

Autumn. Leaves just beginning to fall. The seminar room is filled with counselors, faculty, and caregivers. Marcus stood, along with a few others, mostly men, who, like him, had been among the last to arrive. They leaned with their shoulders against the reluctant gray concrete wall opposite the high windows on the other side of the room.

There were slide presentations, personal stories, some gruesome and some not, role play, Q&A, prompts from the leader (“Perhaps it was someone close to you or even yourself,” was the way she put it) to which many raised their hands (some slowly and some quickly) or nodded, or touched their hand to the shoulder of a person next to them. He had not responded in that fashion, nor was he moved to.

As an afterthought, though, later, during the lunch break, he recalled there had been a student of his, Rodrigo, who’d hanged himself over the door closer arm of his dorm  room and was found the next day. And, of course, there was Ralph who’d refused food and water and died a week later in his bed in St Vincents, and then, too, his own lawyer, Friedman, who’d driven his car into a bridge abutment on the Bronx River Parkway and survived but remembered nothing about it. Yes, there were those.

“Shit!” he said, shaking his head. Where had his mind been?

After the evaluation forms and the chit-chat with other faculty in the hallway and in the parking lot, he got into his car,  put down the pamphlets and notes he had taken and, only then, when he retrieved the key from under the seat, holding it cold and firm in his hand, about to insert it into the ignition, he shuddered… and it came so very clearly to him as if it were, in fact, the present …

He is thirteen…

… kicking his shoes through dry brown leaves along the curb, walking home from the school bus. The late bus. Mrs. Gormley, his homeroom teacher, made him stay after to clean the chalkboard erasers.

Walking behind Francis Romeo. Francis always has to take the late bus home, and he always sits in the back, smoking.

The front door had been left unlocked and wide open.

The house quiet. Dim, behind pulled-down shades. He puts his books on the stairs. No TV on. The door to the baby’s room is closed.

“I’m home. Sorry I’m late. Mrs. Grumbly made me stay after. Don’t tell Dad, and don’t tell Angie, but did you know that Francis smokes?”

No answer.

The hall bathroom door is closed.

“Mom?”

She says something.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

In the kitchen, he pours a glass of milk.

“Mom? I got myself some milk. Ok?”

He knocks once on the bathroom door. “Mom?”

“Leave me alone. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Is there anything wrong?”

“No. Go away.”

He knocks again. “Do you need anything?”

“Noo-oo-oo,” in a whimpering wavering tone.

He jiggles the doorknob. It is locked.

“Get away from the door.”

“Mom, please, can you open the door?”

“I can’t. Just go away.” Her angry voice.

“Mommy, I can’t go away. I live here. Are you sick? Can I help?

No answer.

He waits… and waits… and then…

“Mommy, if you don’t open the door I’m going to get Angie.”

“Don’t you dare do that!” she screams.  

At that, doorknob turns, the door clicks open.

With his hand pressing against it, he looks in.

His mother is standing at the sink, facing the mirror, dressed in the yellow housedress she was wearing this morning as he left for the bus. Barefoot. Her hair hanging down on either side of her face.

Her glasses folded at the back of the sink, her eyes red-rimmed and wet. Her nose is dripping onto her upper lip.

She is rocking, slowly, side to side.

“Mom, what are you doing? What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” folding her arms across her chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Mommy, I can see that something is wrong. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Please, Marcus, just go out and leave me alone.” She smoothes her hair back.

Her left hand, the one closest to him, is balled into a fist.

“What’s in your hand?”

“Nothing.”

A bottle of Bayer aspirin lays in the sink. The cap off. The bottle empty.

His knees shake. Heat rises into his head. Tears fill his eyes. He is frightened. So alone.

He reaches forward to take hold of her arms, to turn her toward him. She moves responsively at first and then pulls sharply away.

“Don’t touch me!” she screams. “You can’t stop me. No one can.”

White streaks run from the corners of her mouth.

“Mom, please. ”

He sees how miserable and sad she is. He has never ever seen her like this before.

She swallows hard. Gags.

He backs away.

“Mom,” he pauses, then says no more.

She looks at him.

Then slowly, assuredly, his voice calmer and softer now…

“Ok,” he tells her. “I don’t want to stop you.”

Silence.

“I know I can’t. Believe me. Just let me see how many pills are in your hand.”  

She looks into his eyes.

“Open your hand and let me see how many are there. That way I can tell the police when they get here how many you took.”

She keeps her gaze on him. He takes her closed fist in his hand.

“Please, just open your hand a little to let me see them.”

They watch her fingers uncurl. A cluster of tablets, some moist with her sweat, rests in her palm.

They both look down at them. Counting.

And, holding her hand firmly in his, he suddenly, with his free hand, strikes the bottom of hers with a violent, concussive blow. The pills scatter, hit the mirror, bounce into the sink and into the tub.

She gags and retches, lurching forward grasping for the edge of the sink, losing her grip, she slips back.

Her full weight falls against him, forcing him hard against the wall and the towel bar. He grabs hold her from behind. Together, they slip, drop, and fall as one, hitting the edge of the sink and curling tightly beneath it onto the cold, checkered, green-and-black tile floor.

Jake. Julia. Winter. 1948

In her housedress, Julia opens the kitchen door. She looks out, folds her arms across her chest. It is dark. The wind blows the thin fabric against her legs.

“Get your slippers on,” she tells her son.

“Jake,” she says, speaking to her husband in their bedroom, behind the curtain separating it from the kitchen, “I wish you didn’t have to go in today,”

He pulls aside the curtain wearing his brown suit and a matching wide tie.

“Please leave if it starts to snow.”

He shrugs on his officer’s overcoat, stuffs his pant legs down into his galoshes, snapping shut the metal buckles.

Julia hands him his thermos of coffee. He leans over, kissing her cheek, tousling the boy’s hair. “Be good,” he says.

“Bring me something?” the boy asks. “A pencil?”

“Maybe,” he replies. Holding his hat fast on his head, he steps out into the wind.

“Call me,” Julia says. “Be careful,” then louder, “Jake, don’t you think you really should stay home today?”

He turns his head and waves. The wind flaps his coat around his knees.

The street is empty. He pulls the car away from the curb, trailing exhaust vapor behind, passing a row of garbage cans. One topples, rolls and bangs against the steel side of a neighbor’s hut, colored lights blink in the window.

He turns right onto Bruckner Boulevard. Juia closes and locks the door. The kitchen heats again.

Earlier, at breakfast, she had said, “I just don’t understand why you have to go in on the day after Christmas. Nobody else will be there. And it looks like it might snow. You think Eddie will be there?” 

“We need the money, Julia. We’re not in the army anymore. If I don’t go, I don’t get paid and we don’t eat.” He pushes his bowl toward the middle of the table and gets up.

Julia draws aside the window curtain now, looks out, lets it fall back, and clears the dishes from the table, where the boy sits with a few books, paper, pencils, and a box of crayons.

She mops the floor and folds laundry.

Every few minutes, she stops, looks out the window, sighs and returns to what she had been doing. The boy sighs as she does. He draws RAF P-40s fighters and Messerschmitt 109s in a dog fight shooting a flurry of bullets, popping his lips with each one.

The wind picks up. Snow begins falling after lunch. The phone has not rung all day. Julia picks it up, listening for a dial tone. She dials, waiting, listening, a finger pressed to her lips.

A woman answers, ”Hello. How can I help you?”

“Hello, can I please speak to Jacob?”

“One moment please.”

“Hello?” the woman says. “Jake is in back and cannot come to the phone. May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is his wife. Can you please ask him to call me as soon as he can?”

“I sure will, Julia.”

Julia starts to say something but stops, pressing the receiver against her chest for a moment before putting it down. Standing next to the bed, looking at the phone, thumbing her wedding ring around her finger.

She dials the phone again. This time she says, “Tell him it’s very important.”

In a moment, he picks up. “Why didn’t you call me?” she says. “I’ve been waiting all day. When are you coming home? Don’t you see it is snowing?… It certainly is snowing,” she says. “I can see it. It’s not just flurries. Don’t treat me like I’m crazy. It’s a foot deep. Please, Jake… Wait,” she says. “Don’t hang up… Jake…”

The oven ticks. She sits with boy in her lap, resting her head against him.

“It will be okay,” he tells her.

Snow now blankets the window.

She carefully opens the door an inch or two to look out. Blown by the wind, it swings in against her. Snow tumbles in around her legs, filling the entrance. She pushes back against it, packing the mounded snow tight. It will not close.

Books, papers, crayons, napkins, and cups blow off the table. The bedroom curtain is blown off its rod. The bedside lamp falls. Snow covers the floor, puddling by the oven.

“Where is he?!” she cries.

She  carries the boy into the bedroom, dresses him in a snow suit, boots, and hat. Her hands shake. She pulls her brown cloth coat from the narrow closet. Tears run over her cheeks. Her lips are pressed together, wrinkling her chin. She sinks to the bed, holding the boy, shivering, holding their backs against the wind.

“Why is he doing this to me?” she cries. 

Wind-blown snow whips through, toppling the hot pot on the stove, snuffing out the flames. 

She carries the boy back toward the door through a mat of snow and green peas. Her hand blocks the wind from their faces.

“Where is he?” she pleads. They retreat to the bedroom, but once again she goes to the door. Back and forth, to and from the growling wind and the spitting snow.

In her wet hair and shivering cheeks, they huddle, holding tightly to each other. Waiting.

Waiting.

And then the door pushes further open. He is covered in white. He kicks the packed snow out, bracing his shoulder against the door, slamming it shut. The frigid, racing, air stops. It is silent.

The three stand in the melting snow.

The room smells of gas. He turns the burners off.

 “What are you trying to do? Kill yourself?” he says. His face is red with cold and anger.

“Where have you been?” she says. “”I’ve been sick with worry. Can’t you see what the storm has done?”

“What the storm has done? How did the door open? Didn’t you lock it?”

“We opened it,” the boy says.

He looks at them.

“I opened it,” she says.

“What for? Are you nuts?”

“I wanted to see if you were coming home.”

“I can’t believe this. Look at this place. I told you I was coming home. I Can’t believe you opened the door.”

“I was so afraid you weren’t coming home. I didn’t know what to do.”

He kneels, picking up the pot and peas from out of the slush.

“You didn’t know what to do?” he says, his hands filled with filthy water and shreded napkins. “That’s hot,” he says. “You had nothing else to do but call me five times at the office.”

“I only called twice.”

“Becky said you called a few times.”

“Oh, so now it’s Becky. She treats me like dirt and then lies to you. Is that why you had to go work today? To see her?  Who knows what you were doing there all day.”

“Now I know you’re nuts. She’s Eddie’s daughter. She’s seventeen, for god sake. She answers the damn phone. I have nothing to do with her.”

He stands suddenly. His face clenched hard as a fist. She flinches, falling backwards, grabbing hold of his arm, knocking the boy down, pulling them all down to the puddled floor beside her.

The Song We Would Sing

Our children were quite young. We were living in the walk-up in Brooklyn, near the park, when, Sonja, my older sister who I spoke with sporadically over the past few years, called. We were in the bustle of dressing and feeding them, cleaning the kitchen, and dressing ourselves.

“Your father,” she said, “died this morning.” She may have said, ‘Daddy died,’ but I don’t recall that clearly.

“I’m sorry,” I am sure I said.

A graveside service was planned for the next afternoon. We arranged for a hotel room and a rental car.

Driving across the Brooklyn Bridge that evening. The lights of lower Manhattan. Chinatown, the East River bridges, the medical centers. All of it both so spectacular and so routine. I was sad to leave, if only for a day or two.

At the grave side, beside my mother’s, Sonja brought us around to say hello to family. The resemblance among my relatives was unmistakable. People I had not seen in ten years and more. Some not since I was young. Familiar faces. Names. Familiar smiles. Some, too, I had never seen nor heard of before.

How had so many years had passed. Why?

I know the how of what happened. The why was the real issue. I’d moved away after college. Long before cell phones and email. We’d never shared numbers or addresses. I lost track of family.

All those years, benignly estranged. No arguments. Disputes. Nasty words. Just nothing.

“You remember Aunt Minnie and Uncle Fred?”

“Yes,” I said. “The dentist?”

“Well, this is Janice, their great granddaughter.”

“And you remember Ruthie? Ethel’s, granddaughter?

“Yes.”

“This is Rebecca, her daughter’s youngest child.”

“Hello,” I said. “This is Bess and these are our children.” It was so good to feel a connection there with them.

On it went. New people, children of children of aunts and uncles I knew. Cousins of cousins. Generations of births and birthdays and illnesses and new jobs. Lost. Lost to me. An old novel with chapters that kept being written after I had put it down. I wanted now to read those unread pages, though I knew it was not possible. The gaps were inaccessible to me.

We drove back home the next day. Listening to Waze. The radio. My mind present, and also wandering in the distant past.

I had moved away. Never once thinking of the consequences. Caring for only my need to be away.

The kids were asleep in the back.

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“What?” I said.

“How did you lose track of all those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever think about them? Ask about them?”

“Sonja would tell me things once in a while, but I never thought more about it. For a while all the names had faces but then they became only names.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It does. I feel terrible. I let it happen. Not once thinking about them. As if I left and they disappeared.”

“But, it was you who disappeared. Not them.”

“But my parents never…”

“Never what?”

“Never let me know what was happening.”

“And you never asked them?”

“No.”

“My parents and I didn’t talk much and then they were in nursing homes. And with their dementia it became impossible.”

“That’s not really an excuse, and you know it. There clearly were others.”

“No. Not an excuse really. An explanation. Maybe.”

“Maybe, but let’s never do that to our children, please,” Bess said. “Let’s keep them connected. Show them how important family is. What it is to be part of a family. Making family the most important thing.”

“I didn’t grow up with that.”

“But you did. You remembered your Aunt Minnie, Aunt Ethel. Harold. But then you let them all drop away.”

“I did,” I said. “I only see that now.”

Back home, we returned the car and stopped at the market on Eighth Avenue and 12th Street to pick up milk and bread. Bess put the kids to bed.

I stood by the stove heating water for tea. Mesmerized by the bubbles twisting upward. The larger ones roiling the surface. The warmth on my face. Drifting into another space.

Seeing all those others, how they were with each other. Embracing one another. How easily they embraced me as they did when I was so young.

But feeling, in that mindless space, what I had never said to myself before. I don’t think that my parents loved me. Feeling that so clearly should have wrenched at my heart, but it didn’t. It was, instead, a relief, a validation of, growing up, how lonely I was. Lost. Alone. An observer at some close remove. Awkward. Feeling as though I never had the right or reliable answer to any question. In school. At home. Anywhere. Nothing felt unjudged. Nothing felt safe. Though I can’t ever remember being aware then in those terms. As if the wrong response would be punished by further isolation.

The kettle must have been boiling for a while. Bess came up behind me. She lay her hand on my shoulder, and turned off the burner.

“How are you doing?” She said.

“I’m okay,”

“You sure? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I was watching the water boiling” I told her. “My mind drifting to yesterday. The past. Not happy thoughts though. Thinking about what it was like for me growing up. But then a song came to me, as if from the rhythm of the bubbles. One we used to sing in the car when we drove from our apartment in the Bronx to my father’s relatives in Brooklyn. The windows down, my father smoking a pipe, my mother on the front passenger side. And, she would begin to sing ‘Merrily we roll along’ and I would join in, and we would sing it a few times until we tired of it, and she would start our favorite one. The one I loved. ‘You are my… sunshine’ she would sing, and I would join in, ‘… my only sunshine…,’ and we would sing the whole song, over, and over again, ‘You make me happy when skies are gray,’ until our cheeks hurt from smiling. And then she would nod to me and slow the tempo down and we’d both deepen our voices, for this last time, the last line, ‘Please… don’t… take… my… sunshine… away.’”

Bess listened to me while she made the tea and set the cups down on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” she said.

Slow Dancing

Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.

“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”

It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.

They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.

Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.

The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.

No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.

“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.

“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would  turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.

He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.

That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.

No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.

The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.

The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.

And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.  

The Dreamer from the Dream

Between the end of his first and the approach of his soon-to-be second marriage, Arnold Bregman lived a quiet and peacefully life. Cooking what pleased him. Cleaning his tiny walk-up apartment. Shopping at a corner market after work. Most evenings making a modest meal, reading for a while, going to bed and sleeping well.

In time, though, his pleasant dreams, which had always been vivid, turned dark, leaking out of his sleep into his waking hours. He was terrified by them. In them, he’d been involved in a murder. A brutal murder, the details of which he could not remember. The murder of a man he might have known, whose name he could not recall, and whose disappearance would soon become apparent.

The certainty that this had actually happened, no matter how implausible, would not loosen its grip on him. Following such dreams, he was consumed with crushing guilt. Fear of being found out and of the looming horror of punishment.

Distraught, with no one he felt he could talk to, he consulted a psychiatrist referred by a friend. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist, a man named Ostrove, found no signs of psychosis, no signs of an aggressive, psychopathic, sociopathic, or dangerously disturbed personality. He was, Dr. Ostrove told him, a man living with ominous guilt, but it was not for the crime he believed he had committed.  

But why then, Bregman asked, would I have such horrible thoughts, and why can I not rid them from my mind?

Bregman was not an unintelligent man. He should have anticipated the response, being familiar with how psychiatrists worked, but he was nevertheless surprised when Ostrove said, neatly crossing his legs, his face as straight as the crease in his trousers, “Why do you think that is so?”

I don’t know. Why would I be here if I knew, Bregman replied.

“That’s a good question,” said Ostrove, shifting in his chair.

Bregman increasingly doubted the value of continuing with therapy. Ostrove seemed unconcerned about the depths of his despair, yawning, nodding off at times while Bregman was speaking. Bregman could not bring it up to the psychiatrist, feeling he must be a terrible bore and unworthy of the man’s attention. At two hundred dollars per session, which Bregman could ill afford, he would soon have to stop.

But perhaps, Bregman thought, Ostrove was being quite shrewd. Merely playing at nodding off just to test him. To see if Bregman could be pushed to react to being so badly treated. Goading him to the point that his true, typically male, belligerent nature would erupt.

As he approached Ostrove’s office, he decided to announce that he was going to stop coming. To try to work things out on his own but before he had the chance to speak up, Ostrove suggested that Bregman might agree to hypnosis as a possible and more productive approach to therapy and they agreed that the at next session Bregman would submit to what Ostrove described as light hypnosis.

The night before the hypnosis was to take place, Bregman once again entered the dream as if it were a present reality. He was standing with two men in a dank, cramped, basement.

It was cold and dark. The granite walls were damp and dimly lit. In the center of the dirt floor was a round iron plate beneath which Bregman knew was a narrow pit with the crumpled remains of the murdered man, his bloody clothes still clinging to his body.

They had come to move the body that evening, suspecting that someone, as absurd as that was, had told the police about the crime.

Bregman was stiff with terror. The police would imminently break in, find them and the body. He knew that he and he alone would be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to certain death.

They hurriedly placed the bloodied man’s remains into a leather duffel and dragged it out into a shadowed alley. He was filthy with grime and blood. Gagging on the ferrous odor. He stood with the others in a light drizzle. They looked to Bregman for direction, but he was unable to move.  

The next morning, Bregman was unable to discern the dream from reality. That he might have murdered someone seemed a palpable reality which he had effectively blocked from his consciousness. Surely, he could not allow himself to be hypnotized. He couldn’t go to the appointment, unsure of what was real and what he might say. But then, if he didn’t show up, and he were in fact guilty what might Ostrove do? Break confidentiality and report him? Had Ostrove presented the lure of cure by hypnosis as trap, a clever psychological ruse?

At Ostrove’s office door, he hesitated, tempted to leave, but he did not. He was not truly a murderer. Of course not. He would go in. Ostrove would hypnotize him and reveal a simple, plausible, explanation for his dreams. Some unresolved deep Oedipal feelings they would work on together. In truth, that was all he wanted.

Was it not uncommon, at the very cusp of a therapeutic turning point, for one to resist the prospect of change. Was not the known present better than the unknown future?

As he stood outside of Ostrove’s office, the woman who had the appointment before him emerged from inside. The faint smell of her cologne reminded him of a woman he once knew. Their relationship had ended badly. After they’d split, she haunted him, came to where he  worked, called him at all hours of the day and night. “I loved you and you left me like what remains after the vultures have finished eating,” she told him. He’d killed, she said, every loving cell in her body, and he would have to live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life.

The woman leaving Ostrove’s office smiled, nodded, and went on her way. Though they had never spoken, each time he had seen her over the past several months, he felt increasingly more attracted to her. Each time, smiling, she averted her eyes as she passed him on her way down the stairs. Just as she had now done.

He turned, intending to follow her. But then quickly stopping himself, What am I doing? This is absurd, he thought. Who am I? What a sad demented creature, chasing after a woman I don’t know. What could possibly be the outcome of that?

No, he thought, better for me to go in and tell Ostrove all about this. This may be the breakthrough I’ve been seeking and avoiding. The revelation of reality. The salvation.

Tormented with indecision, he leaned his head back against the wall, slowly sliding his back down the wall until his hands reached the soft edge of the matted green carpet. He closed his eyes, and there he sat, unable to imagine whatever might happen next.

Laying (Some) Matters to Rest

On a clear afternoon in June, Otto Gruber met his two sisters for lunch at Gennaro’s in White Plains. Their father, Otto, Sr. passed at seven that morning in a nursing home in Greenburg. A decision they had made not to resuscitate in his third, recurring, intractable bout of aspirational pneumonia. They had been there with him when died.

They sat in a booth. Elke and Marta, both of whom were much younger than he, sat on one side, Otto on the other. While he waited when they went to wash up, he looked at the family photos of successive Gennaro generations. Each one smiling. All in front of the restaurant just as it is now.

Simple, sincere, faces of old men and women holding babies. Can families really be like that? As a child, he’d never been hungry, never been beaten, or abused. His parents were neither alcoholics nor drug users. There were books to read. Clean clothes. His parents were civil to one another. They never had much money. They were Roosevelt Democrats and voted for Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. Was he happy, though? No, he’d say. He wished he could say differently.

When his sisters returned, the owner, a woman named Maria-Vita, came out of the kitchen, wiped her hands on a towel. “Give me a few minutes, hon, and I’ll get you folks started. I just made some rollatini di melanzane.”

She set down three glasses of water and handed the menus to Elke.

Otto said, “Well, I guess that’s it. It’s over.”

“Thank God,” said Elke.

I mean,” he said, “when your parents die, you’re really, finally on your own. There’s no more mama and papa. You’re alone. You look back and wonder, ‘Was any of that worth it?’”

“What kind of a way is that to look at it. This is the time to get closer. You’re not alone. You have us. Of course, it all wasn’t so smooth sailing. No family is, but they tried. We all tried. ”

Marta said, “I’m getting some wine. You want some?”

“Get a Barolo and I’ll have some,” said Elke. “Are you having any?”

“No, not for me,” he said.

Maria-Vita returned with the wine and glasses. “You’re the brother,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I love your sister.”

“Yes, I’m the brother.” he said. “Yeah, Elke, she’s great.”

“Look, give me back those menus. I’m bringing you fresh bread from Viglioti’s, a tomato salad, and the rollatini I made. You have enough on your minds.”

“I hope she’s quick, I have to get going.”

“Oh, please, Otto, that’s enough.” Your father died four hours ago, you could at least have a little heart. Take a few minutes and say something nice and kind about him. Not just, move along, the shows over, he’s dead and gone and, guess what, nobody cared, anyway.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” he said. “Let’s each say something nice. You go first, Marta.”

“Do you remember the time, he…,” said Marta.

“He, what?”

“Don’t interrupt her.”

“… he…”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but the happy little family you both lived in was not the one I did,” he said.

Maria-Vita brought the bread, three ample white bowls and a platter of steaming rollatini in red sauce with fresh cheese on top. “Eat,” she said.

They spooned rollatini from the platter into their bowls, broke off pieces of bread and dipped them into the sauce. They ate quietly.

“Look, I’m not complaining,” he said. “I just had a different life than you both did. Not horrible. It just wasn’t all that good. I was a kid. I just wasn’t a happy kid.”

“But they loved you. They must have. Mom did. I know that. She thought you were like a god,” said Elke.

“That may be true. I think she did. She was distracted. Fragile. Like she might do or say something wrong. Worrying about everything. Afraid one night he might not make it home.”

“Well, he did that to her. His parents were like that, too. Stiff. Old school. Not very affectionate. Never smiling. That must have affected him.”

“I know. I see that. But you’re saying treating people badly because of how you grew up is just okay? And I shouldn’t complain. Just forgive and forget. Let go. Put it all behind me.”

“I guess, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Do you remember it being like that?” Elke said to Marta.

“No. I was happy. They got me a dog after you moved out.”

“I heard about the dog, and how did that work out?”

“Not so good,” Marta said.”

“No, not great,” he said. “And why? I’ll tell you why. Because neither of them liked dogs and your mother was terrified of them. He knew that and yet he bought you a dog for which he had to build a cage in the basement, and it barked all day long driving her crazy, right? You had a good time with that?”

“No. That was horrible.”

“It must have been. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you and for the dog and for them. But it wasn’t the dog’s fault. You don’t blame the dog for complaining. Something was wrong but he just didn’t know what.”

“So, you’re saying…what? You were treated like a dog?”

 “No. I’m saying, I don’t know. I never told anyone this but, he never once said, ‘I love you’ to me, never once put his arm around me. For a kid, that’s pretty devastating.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“Me, too.”

“Me too. I’m sorry for myself. But I have to go. Please tell Maria the eggplant was the best! No shit, that’s worth remembering fondly.”

He left, got into his car, put his hands on the steering wheel and sat there. The sky was still clear. The faint white face of the moon. He sat there until a knock on the side window startled him.

“Marta,” he said. Her cheeks were smudged. He lowered the window.

“You’re right,” she said. “You did live in a different family. I’m sorry. I don’t remember it being that bad for you. But when you left, it was like the lights went back on after a thunderstorm at four in the morning. The air was suddenly easier to breathe! Your story isn’t the only story. It’s not. It’s only yours. Don’t try to make it mine or make me feel bad because it wasn’t.”

She turned away and walked back toward the restaurant.

Then she stopped, turned, came back to the car.

“And, one last thing,” Marta said, “it is not lost on me, nor should it be on you, that you are a male, you are older, you make more money than I do and, in general, you have more power than I do. You dominated that whole conversation in there. You intimidated us and, instead of remembering the still-warm body that was, and still is your father, you talked only about you. If you ever want to have a conversation with me about my life, how I feel, how it was all like for me, what I think, let me know. I’ll be there. And while you’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, take a good long look in the mirror.

A Life in the Rearview

David Bellingham nodded to the usher as he passed by and he took a seat in a pew by the open window. It was in the last row on the righthand side as you faced the front of the sanctuary. The back of the pew pressed hard against his spine. He was prone to slouching and straight-backed seats like this one were uncomfortable for him.

He wondered, did people choose seats on one side or another at a funeral as you did at a wedding. More likely as not, one did, he thought. Families and friends being what they were. They were no different at funerals than they were at weddings were they. Maybe, he thought, there was an even greater cause for internecine animus at a funeral.

Nonetheless, he sat where he sat and that was that. Besides, would where he sat make any difference? Make him feel any less like an interloper of sorts? Any more than he was already feeling?

He knew next to no one there, and, of course, that was to be expected. The people he knew or who knew him were dwindling, were they not?

Outside the window, the tops of trees down the hill, across the lake, rustled in the breeze. The sound they might have been making didn’t reach him, though the breeze through the window brushed across his skin. His mind wandered. Drifted.

When they called his name, he touched his hand to his jacket pocket. His notes. An Ativan. A Clif Bar. His water bottle. He got up and walked up the side aisle and negotiated the short flight of stairs to the microphone. He tapped it. God, he thought, must everyone in the world do that?

Hear cleared his throat. “We met,” he began, “in September of ‘57. The year the Dodgers left New York for LA. He was new. It was junior high and everyone that year was new. We all came from different parts of town. But he was from a different town.

“I remember that he looked lost. Maybe not lost, but he had this solitary look about him. The way he looked around. The concavity of his expression. He looked, I think, like I was feeling.

“You have bike?” I asked him. He shook his head. You play basketball? ‘Yeah,’ he said.

“In Phys Ed, we shot baskets at one of the nets on the side of the gym by the bleachers. He would shoot these jump shots from the corner. He’d say, ‘Fall back, baby!’ when he hit one. Those were not high percentage shots but that’s what he liked. We’d go to the outdoor courts after school and shoot around and then we’d play one-on-one.

“And there was this one day. I remember it was cloudy. I don’t know why I remember that but, we were playing, and I thought he was going to take one of those corner jumpers, but he didn’t. He drove straight at me, and I had my hands up, my arms up, my hip into his, and he went to the hoop for a layup. He didn’t stop. Just banged into me and, and I can feel him coming into me at this moment as I stand here, and his shoulder slammed into me, right under my arm, and it snapped his shoulder. He just crumpled. He fell down, and some old guy came over and he yanked on his arm, and I could hear the bone pop back into the socket. I was shaking. Felt sick. He was sweating like crazy, and I thought he was going to faint, but he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ll take the foul.’

“His mother made us good sandwiches and he had a nice sister. One day after school he told me that Miss Bergman, the English teacher, who he thought had a crush on him, told him he was an iconoclast. I didn’t know what that meant.”

“One year, this was the year before we graduated, we went to see a Chiffons concert in the city together, and after the show he said to me that one of them, the one on the left, the really cute one, was looking at him the whole entire show. I told him I thought she was looking at me. ‘You believe what you want to believe,’ he said.’

“Then the next year, after we graduated, it was May or June, he called me on a pay phone from upstate. He said, ‘Can you pick me up at the AmTrak station?’

“Why?”

“I flunked out,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I was sorry, I told him, but I was really glad to have him home. I didn’t say so. So, we went straight to Roberta’s in the Bronx for pizza and a beer.

“We went to Knicks games. Bradley, Frazier, Monroe and Willis Reed. He was my best man, and I was his. We were both crazy young. Too young and too crazy to know we were too young and too crazy.”

“One year, it was ’69, he called me, ‘Come over and we’ll watch the moon landing together. The four of us did. We sat on the floor in his living room and ate tacos. And afterwards he said, ‘You think that whole thing was for real?’

“Yeah, why?”

“’No reason. Just saying, I guess.’” That was exactly the kind of thing he would say.”

“We used to talk about the kids. Vacations. Work. Where the country was heading. Where the world was heading. We still do. Talk about kids and vacations and the country. Not still, I mean, but you know what I mean. It was always grounded in the here and now. The present. Covid shots. Hearing aids. Knee replacements. Shingles.

“A few years ago, he started talking about how old we were getting. It was like, aches and pains and surgeries. And he’d always say how he could see us one day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wearing hats and overcoats and looking out at the water. Sort of like the Simon and Garfunkel song. And he’d always say that we’d be mumbling things indistinctly in one another’s direction and we’d be nodding our heads like we heard and understood.

“But, you know, we never really talked about the rest of it. The ‘what happens after the mumbling stops’ kind of thing. Other than joking about being euphemistically ‘gone.’ I don’t know what he believed. I mean really. I think we had different ideas, but I’m not so sure about that. I never really asked him, in just those same words.”

He paused speaking.

“Oh, yes, and one last thing that he would say to me, ‘You know, David, I’ve been down so long, it is beginning to look like up to me.” I always thought he made that one up. I was sure of it. Anyway, I liked thinking that. Besides maybe Richard Farina was the one who stole it from him. That’s possible.”

He looked out at all the faces of all. There were mostly smiles all around. People he didn’t know or didn’t recognize. You could see he figured that that was as good a time as any to stop.

So, he walked back down the steps. Back to the pew at the end of the aisle, near the open window and he watched the trees across the lake rustling without saying anything and he could feel the breeze brush against his skin.

The Long Orderly Life of Morrison G. Heffermann

Morrison Heffermann awoke to footsteps scuffing on the wooden stairs up to his bedroom.

Morse?

A familiar voice. His father’s voice? His bed is wet. Shivering in the cold. His father will find him once again soaked in his own pee. Wet sheets wrapped tight round his knees and ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse?”

The bedroom door is knocked and rattled and banged and pushed open.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here.

Morse?”

“It must be a hundred.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Syd, open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Syd, can you get him up?”

“Don’t turn it on!”

“We have to. Have you had anything to drink today? Get him some water.”

“It’s me, May, Morse. Can you sit up? Let Syd help you up.”

“May?”

“Go get him some water. I’ll help him up.”

“I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

“Yes… give me my robe, please.”

“Get him his robe. And turn the AC on for God’s sake.”

“Don’t turn it on. It uses up too much electricity. It’s old and won’t last long.”

“But it’s so damn hot in here. You won’t last as long as it will if you don’t let us turn it on.”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Syd will help you. Let Syd help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“Can you get up?”

“Help me. I can’t get my balance. Not under that shoulder.”

“I’ll get you something to eat, okay?”

“Close the door, Syd. Just help me get my damn shorts down so I can sit down and get that pad on.”

“May, call 911. He’s fainting.”

“Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I’m not leaving my house.  I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Dammit. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.”

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties at night.

Morse Heffermann was a Navy man, he joined right out of high school. After Pearl Harbor. Air crewman. Pacific coast patrol bombers.

After the war, he met Margret. In two months’ time they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottningholm, and then by bus to Stockholm. They stayed with her parents a week.

In Boston, they both took whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter.

He started a business and kept it for forty years, working the phone out of his home selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was right to do.

Margret died young and the daughter left home. For fifty-five years he kept the old house.

He paid the bills on time, read books on the war and every book by David McCullough, Goodwin, Tuchman, Caro, and Mantel. He remembered each one. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm running. Saved every nickel, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Never spoke ill of another person. Kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit the lights only when he needed one and shut them off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and heated up Swanson’s dinners in the oven. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You keep to yourself, keep your affairs in order, prepare well, make plans, and stick to them. That’s all you need.

He handwrote his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law, Syd. The one who had married Agatha, his daughter. His only daughter. And then she too died, young and fresh like her mother had.

He had files and note cards for everything. “Do not touch” labels in uniform squared blue ink caps taped to light switches, the radio, bookcases, file cabinets, the stove, and cupboards.

He catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, and a hot coffee in front of him.

After Syd and May got him down in the stair chair, he ate an egg, a cup of coffee, and then fell asleep at the table.

He’d told May that he’d had nothing to eat or drink for days. He’d ridden the stair chair up to his room and lay down a few days ago when it got real hot. How many days, he didn’t know. He had asked her to bring him back up there after he finished eating and told her to call no one else and to shut the door and lock it when she left.

When she could not waken him the next morning, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the County hospital. You can’t make me leave my own house! He refused treatment on the gurney. They moved him from the ER to a room. He took no food. No drink. He accepted only pain medication. Nothing more.

“We can’t let him do that, May!”

“We can. What else are we going to do, Syd? Have them tie him down and shove a PEG tube in his gut, stick an IV drip in his arm, and a Foley up his tiny you know what? We have no right to do that. No one does.”

“We’re his only family, May. We can’t let him die like that?”

“We can, Syd. Because we are the only family he has. It’s his life, not yours or mine. We need to let him live the last days he has the way he has lived every other day in his whole life. Let him be who he is. Please, just let him be.”

In the Last Days There Will Come Times of Difficulty (2 Timothy: 1-2)

Morse Sheffield lay alone in his bed in the late heat of August. Shades pulled down against the sun, darkening the room. The air, close and heavy. A thin sheet over him. He is dreaming his unpleasant dreams.

Someone on the stairs. Two of them. His father. Leave the cat alone. Do your homework. His mother. Come take your bath. Morse? Morrison? You hear me? Cold and wet. Dust in the air and in his mouth. Knocking on the door. Go away. I’m not dressed. He’d wet the bed again. His legs would not move. Tangled sheets around his ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse? Are you here?”

A hand pushes against the door.

“He’s in here,” one of them, a young woman, says.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here. Morse? Morse?”

“It must be a hundred in here.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Simon, open that window. Morse?

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Can you get up?”

“It’s Didi, Sigrid’s daughter, Morse. Can you sit up? Do you need help?”

Didi.

“Do you have any water? Simon, go get him some water. Help him up.”

I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

Yes. Can you give me my robe?

“Get him his robe. And turn on the air conditioner.”

“Don’t turn it on. Leave it. I don’t want it on.”

“But it’s so hot in here, you’ll die. Get him some water. Do you want some water?”

I need to go to the bathroom.

“Simon will help you. Morse, Simon will help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“It’s Simon, Morse, can you get up? Morse, lean over this way.”

I can’t. Don’t touch that shoulder.

Simon walks with Morse into the bathroom, helps him turn and eases back him down on the toilet seat.

“Are you okay in there?”

Don’t come in. Just help me get my shorts down.

“Ask him if he wants something to eat. Should I call 911?”

Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I will not go. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Please. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.

For over a week, the heat had been oppressive. Over ninety each day. The nights unbearable.

Sigrid, who came in to clean once a month, is the one who had found him. She knocked on the bedroom door. He told her to leave. To go away. She called the brother. The one with the house by the water. The only family of his she knew. No answer. She called her daughter Didi.

“You have to come to Mr. Sheffield’s house. He’s in his bedroom with the door closed and it’s a hundred and ten up here. He won’t let me go in.

Morse Sheffield had been a Navy man. He joined right out of high school. 1944. An air crewman, flying patrol bombers on the Pacific coast.

He met Margret in college. In ’55 they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the freighter Drottningholm to meet her parents in Stockholm. They married there and, after Oslo, Paris, and London, they made a home back on the east coast, in the town where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had grown up.  

He had no trouble finding work. Enjoyed working, no matter the job. He was gregarious. They liked his attitude.

He and Margret were together. They had a daughter. Life had no end.

Then Margret died and, soon after, Agatha got married and moved away.

He stayed in their small dark house on the corner of a quiet street up the hill from the center of town. His sadness weighed him down.

One winter he’d fallen down the back stairs carrying a bucket of trash out to the garage and he lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw him. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked his neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You have no right to take me anywhere. This is my home. Getting old is not a crime. I want to stay in my home. This is my home, and you have no right to take me from it. Living alone is not a crime.

The officer helped him back up the stairs, made a note in his notepad and said, “Mr. Sheffield, you’d better get someone to put a railing up along the stairs there for you.”

Thirty-five more years he lived there. Went working in an office in a nearby town, keeping house, paying the bills on time, reading books on the war, Lincoln, the depression. All the presidents. He kept his Saab running, saved his money, trusted few people, had fewer friends. Year after year. Solitary. Thoughtful. Kind. Carefully generous. Never speaking ill of another. Keeping things in order. Was he happy? It was not a question anyone would think to ask him.

He started his own business and kept it going for a few years, working out of his home, selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death.

He’d say that keeping your affairs in order, preparing and planning, not being a burden, was what mattered. He wrote a will. Leaving the house to his son-in-law. The one who had married Agatha. His only child. His only daughter, who died young and fresh, just like her mother had.

He turned the lights off when he left a room. Wrote reminder notes to himself and thank-you and birthday cards to others. He cooked when he was able and ate what he made, and then later, when he couldn’t manage the pots and pans, heated up the Swanson’s pot pies and frozen dinners in the microwave. He didn’t renew his tickets to the symphony. He had to stop walking to the beach and the market and the bookstore.

He wrote notes with detailed instructions in uniform capital letters and taped them up on everything. “Unplug when not in use” over light switches. “Do not touch” on bookshelves, file cabinets, the stove, cupboards.

He catalogued boxes of 35 mm prints, names, dates, and places on the back. Made notes of thoughts and quotes and left them folded in the books he’d read. David McCullough. Goodwin. Tuchman. Caro. The Bible.

Didi waited at the bottom of the stairs. Simon had helped Morse fit himself into the stairlift. He rode down holding on to the armrests, in his slippers and his robe.

She had opened the back door and the window above the sink. He ate the eggs and sausage and sipped the tea she prepared for him, eating without speaking, and when he’d had enough, he asked Simon to help him go back upstairs.

You’re both kind, he told them. I don’t want you to call anyone, and please shut the door when you leave.

In the evening, Didi returned with a small dinner she prepared. When she could not waken him, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the local hospital. He refused treatment and was moved to a bed near a window in the nursing home nextdoor. He took no food. He accepted only pain medications he could take with a sip of water.

Morse Sheffield passed away in bed in a quiet room near a window. Neither in the bed of his dreams nor in the one or in the manner of his own choosing.

Easter Dinner at Heidi’s in SoHo

Some time ago, a college friend of Simone’s, Heidi, I recall, a tall, slender woman with near-black hair pinned back, covering just the tops of her ears, invited us to an Easter dinner at the new apartment in SoHo she bought with her partner, a man named Nathan or Natan, whose name I had forgotten and which I didn’t quite clearly hear when Heidi said it as we were coming in the door, and I was reluctant, perhaps out of simple misplaced courtesy, to ask her later to repeat it hoping she would say it again when he came into the living room, where we were seated, or perhaps, she might call his name to remind him that we had arrived, or to tell him to come in to greet us from the kitchen where he was feeding the dog.

We had not seen them since their wedding the previous spring, an affair with well over a hundred guests, at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. At that time, it was the only occasion we had been to there and we both very much enjoyed it. In particular, I recall the setting for the reception in an enclosed tent, with flickering, lambent, afternoon light shifting slowly across the white-clothed tables, as it sifted through the tall surround of oaks and maples which were especially lush that year after seven consecutive weekends of rain in the city, much to the chagrin and concern of the local business owners who depended heavily upon the foreign and domestic tourist trade, already depressed significantly by the  global financial crisis and bank bailout in 2008. It was also the year in which I had been let go from a job I’d had for over fifteen years. The weather was cool. We were seated at a table near the bar with other friends of the couple whom we did not know and with whom we exchanged pleasantries until they got up to dance, after which we never saw them again that afternoon or, in fact, ever again.

Simone said, as we got off the subway at Spring Street, “Maybe we’ll see someone from the wedding there today.”

Heidi, in a phone conversation she had with Simone the week before Easter, said that they were not traveling this year because they had recently acquired a dog, a rescue animal which Nathan, or Natan’s, sister Ailene had adopted from the Bideawee on 38th Street several months prior and for which, sadly, she was looking for a new home as she was leaving the country and could not possibly take the poor-dear dog with her to the Bordeaux University on a Fulbright scholarship, could she? No, of course not, said Natan (let’s just call him that) to her and they’d be thrilled to take care of the dog whose name was Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, though I can’t quite recall which, but I know he was named after one of the French existentialists of the mid twentieth century, who were the subject of Ailene’s doctoral dissertation.

Sartre, I think that was the dog’s name, after finishing its dinner, strained its way into the living room where Simone and I were sitting talking with Heidi. Natan was holding the dog on a very short, taut leash which he immediately let drop and let the dog rush forward toward the couch in which Heidi, Simone, and I had settled ourselves. It stopped abruptly and crouched directly in front of her, and consequently, between Simone and myself, its front paws spread wide apart, its haunches up, looking up at her with its pink-rimmed eyes and naked gums, ready, I thought, to move in any direction.

“He simply adores Heidi. He tolerates me well enough, but he loves Heidi,” Natan said.

The dog was a brindle. An American Staffordshire terrier who Heidi said was terribly affectionate. “Pit bulls are, you know,” she said, “but just saying that name gets such bad rap from most people. But you two are dog people, I think Simone said, so…”

“Simone is the dog person,” I said. “Not so much me but…”

“Oh, well,” Heidi said, “he’s just a baby,” she said, looking down at the dog and pursing her lips as you might in talking to an infant in a stroller. “He’s just getting used to us and his new surroundings, you know, trying to get the lay of the land, you know, figuring out who is the alpha person here and all…”

“… He’s adorable…,” Simone told her.

“But, I should tell you that you must not look him in the eye. He doesn’t handle that well. And so, I mean it’s no big deal, nothing horrible has ever happened, but just don’t look him in the eye. Just don’t.”

“Shouldn’t he be on the leash? I mean with one of you holding it?” I suggested.

“Well, no,” said Natan, “he’s better off leash, I mean, that’s pretty much what we’ve heard, that dogs on leashes get more aggressive. Right?”

And then he stood up. “I’ll make us up some plates and bring them in and we can eat and relax and talk in here. We kind of made a mistake by putting his food bowl by the table in the kitchen and now he doesn’t like it if anyone else eats in there.”

“They’re pretty territorial, I think,” said Simone, nodding her head, looking over at me.

Natan came back in with four dinner plates on a tray which he set down on a sideboard. Generous slices of spiral honey ham, mounded mashed sweet potatoes, and rows of roasted asparagus.

“Simone said you were vegetarians, I think, but this is Easter, right, and this ham is fabulous. Have you ever had it? Be vegetarian on Monday, right?”

He placed a plate on each of our laps and he took a seat in a softly upholstered chair opposite the couch and, just as quickly as he sat, he got up and carried his plate down the hall into their bedroom.

“He’ll be right back. He doesn’t feel comfortable eating, you know, meat, in front of the dog, but he’ll be back after he finishes,” said Heidi.

Turning first to Simone on her right and then to me close by on her left, she said, “I’m so glad to see you both. So much to talk about. Eat, eat. Before it gets cold.”

The Surest Thing

We heard that my father’s friend, Mel Metfessel, was buying Palestri’s market on the corner of Yonkers Avenue, across from the racetrack and next door to my grandfather’s hardware store, where my father worked as the assistant manager.

My grandfather owned the business and he said that made him the manager. From opening the store at nine until he locked the door at five, he sat beside the counter while my father stood behind it all day running the cash register.

Customers would walk all the way back to the counter, passing the washing machines, lawn mowers, hammers, screw drivers, nail barrels, and paint to talk to my grandfather, who they called Benny, sitting in the wooden fold-up chair with one leg crossed over the other, and ask him for what they wanted to buy.

“So, Benny, I’m looking for a fah.”

“What kind of fah?” my grandfather would say.

“A metal fah,” the man would say.

“Rasp or double cut?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whadaya mean you don’t know? Whadah you need it for?” my grandfather would ask him.

My grandfather would sit looking off at the wall on the opposite side of the store. He always did that when he was working. He never looked at the customers when he was talking to them, just at where the fahs or hammers might be, but not right at them.

“I gotta fah down the end of the spindle where it fits into the hole in the sta in Millie’s rocking chair,” said the man.

“Nahhhhh, you don’t need it!,” my grandfather would inevitably respond.

“Whadaya mean, I don’t need it. The spindle won’t fit the hole the way it is.”

“You don’t need a file for that,” my grandfather would tell him and then he’d turn to Dave, my father, and say, “Give him two sheets of thirty-six and two of the eighty sandpaper and charge him forty-nine cents, no tax, and put them in a bag.”

Benny never looked at my father either when he talked to him. Only after he’d say something and then only for a quick second and then he’d look away at something else again.

Metfessel, tall and beefy looking, missing one tooth, used to work for my grandfather. He made deliveries, unloaded inventory into the storeroom, and swept up before closing. He always covered his mouth with the back of his hand when he talked to you.

One day, Metfessel didn’t come to work. My grandfather said he’d got another job. “He don’t work here no more,” he said. That was all he said. That’s when we found out that Metfessel was going to work in Palestri’s grocery.

Palestri did a good business in dry goods, kitchen utensils, and grocery items. There was a Coca-Cola cooler across from the counter filled with ice. He taped a “No leaning” sign on the side by the crate for empties. Candy bars and cigarettes were on the shelves behind the counter. You had to ask Palestri for whatever you wanted, and he would reach behind him for it without taking his eyes off you and slap it down on the counter with a pack of matches on top, if you were buying cigarettes.

Every afternoon my mother sent me down for Chesterfields and told me to tell Palestri they were for her, not to forget the two cents change or matches and I could keep the two cents.

My father had gotten Metfessel a job working for Palestri as a stock clerk. He was working there for about two years when Palestri decided to sell the store to him and move to Florida. Metfessel told my father that he’d set Palestri up with a friend in Miami who’d get him a stake in the Dania jai alai fronton and maybe he might work his way into a piece of the greyhound action in Palm Beach. My father says that Metfessel knows all the right people.

My mother told my father, he shouldn’t get involved with Metfessel. “He’s a slick one,” she said.

“Slick?” my father said. He was smoking in the TV room.

“Turn the TV down,” my mother told him. “I can’t hear you.”

“Slick, I said.”

“No, Dave, you said, ‘slick?’ to me like a question. As if all of a sudden you didn’t know what slick means. And where does Metfessel get the kind money to buy a store in the first place?”

“What kind money?”

“What do you mean, Dave, ‘what kind of money?’ The kind of money you need to buy a store on the hottest real estate corner in the whole city.”

“Hottest?”

“Dave. Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“That.”

“What’s that?”

“Dave, cut it out. I know what you’re doing.”

“What’s he doing, ma?” I said.

“Yeah, Shirl, what’s he doing?”

“Go to bed, Ruthie.”

“Why do I have to go to bed?”

“It’s late. There’s school tomorrow.”

“School?” I said.

“Dave, tell her to go to bed.”

“Go to bed, Ruthie, and say goodnight to your mother.”

“Goodnight, mom.”

I lived upstairs, then. We all lived in apartments above the hardware store. My parents lived on the second floor. I lived with my grandparents and older brother up on the third floor. 

“David, did you have anything to do with this?”

“Which ‘this’?”

“Answer me, are you involved with Metfessel in this deal? Did you give Metfessel any money again? Did you ask my father for money? And don’t answer me with another question.”

“It’s a sure thing, Shirl. We could make an easy ten percent of the profits he makes over and above what he would owe us.”

“There is no sure thing, Dave. Here or anywhere. The hardware store was supposed to be a sure thing. The property in Florida was a sure thing. Look at us. We have nothing. Less than nothing. We live with my parents. I’m forty-seven years old. You’re fifty-six. We share a phone line with them. You work for my father. If he loses anything we lose everything, it’s over for us. All of us.

“Shirl.”

“Don’t ‘Shirl’ me. Did you ask my father for money? The truth. The absolute truthy, truthy, truth.”

“The truthy truth… no, not yet.

“Honest?”

“Honest truth. I swear to you on my mother’s soul, wherever she is.”

“Please don’t ask him. He hates Metfessel for selling Ralphie and Ernestine that pool for the roof over their garage. Dave, look at me. We have a kid in college. We own nothing. You know Metfessel would sell Ruthie and her dog for gas money if we ever took our eyes off them.”

“Ruthie, honey,” my mother called up to me, “I know you’re listening, I didn’t mean to say that about anyone selling you and Sinclair. I was kidding.”

“Shirl, baby.”

“Stop laughing and stop calling me Shirl baby, Dave. I hate that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother calls you ‘The Prince.’ She reveres you. We eat Chinese at their dinner table every Sunday night. She’d cut up your vegetables and spoon your soup into your open mouth if you’d let her. And all that matters to my father is that you married his only daughter.

“I know.”


“David. What kind of store is Metfessel planning to open? … David?”

“What kind of store?”

“Christ, Dave, you do the right thing! Stay out of this. Metfessel is trouble in a tee shirt. We don’t need his kind of trouble. We have plenty of other kinds.

“He has a head for business.”

“Yes, he has a head for business, and he has contacts and friends, and one day he’ll end up either in Sing Sing or in the river. Guaranteed. I need you, Dave. Please stay out of this.”

Metfessel got the store. But not with our money. Nobody ever heard from Palestri again. My grandparents moved to a condo in Lake Worth and gave both the store and the business to my mother. She told my father he should be the manager and she would do the bookkeeping. They changed the name to Dave’s Hardware and hired Ralphie to run the cash register.

The First Fruit Fly of July

“Will,” she says to him, “I see your July sadness taking hold.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Lin,” he says.

Will is standing by the lone window in the kitchen. One of the windows they’ve decided to have replaced. All of the windows need replacing. The cold air comes through them in the winter, and the heat in summer. The humidity in any season finds its way in. He is almost as old as the house is. He feels like his own heat is escaping. A coldness seeping in.

Linda is standing beside him.

“Do you remember that small two-bedroom we lived in, next to the big Congregational church in Brooklyn on Carroll Street that one winter?” he asks her.

“Of course. With the broken tile in the bathroom and the kitchen faucets that dripped, and wood floors that buckled and sloped toward the center, and how my mother came to stay with us to help with the twins.”

“And the windows that were cracked and broken and let the snow in?”

“And all five of us slept in the same bedroom at night to keep warm? Is it the windows that you’re worried about?”

“A little. I don’t know how we can pay for them. But, no, it’s not the windows. Not really.”

“Then what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything as in everything? Me everything?”

“Not you, Lin. The world. The country. So much is going on. All at once. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. But you haven’t shaved since Friday. You’re looking forlorn. Lost, in lonely the way you get. I knew this was coming.”

“You’re acting as if it’s my problem, all of my own doing.”

“It is, though, isn’t it?”

“How can you say that.? Roe v Wade, the EPA, open carry, the separation of…”

“I know. I know. The world is too much with you. You need to take some of it off of your shoulders.”

“Us. Isn’t it ‘too much with us’?”

“Yes, us, you’re right. But I mean you and me. Not everyone worries like you.”

“My sister.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

“Yes, your sister does. And Wordsworth did.”

“And Sinclair Lewis.”

“Yes, Sinclair Lewis.”

“And you, too,” he tells her.

“Yes, me too. But I am more concerned about you, Will. When I see you get like this, I know what’s coming. It’s like when I see the first fruit fly in July. It comes in the door or hidden in a bunch of grapes, and then they’re all over everything. The bananas, the peaches, the lemons. And when, I see that the look in your eyes, the far away, sad, searching look, as is if you alone need to figure it all out, or the world will crash, I know what’s coming. You start to lose patience with people. What they say. How they say it. Question their meaning. Not always. Only when you get this way.”

“What do I or we do?”

“About which, she asked.”

“The fruit flies. Me.”

“The same for both. Clean up. Scrutinize and wash everything that comes in the house, put the bruised fruit in the refrigerator, eat or compost the rest. Maybe even buy only what you can use or read in a day. And, absolutely, stop reading It Can’t Happen Here. Now. Today.”

“But, I’m almost finished. I have only eighty-three pages to go.”

“No more pages. Fini. You don’t have to finish it. Listen, either he liberates everyone from the concentration camps and prisons and saves his family and the whole country in the end, or he doesn’t. Right?”

“I just want to see how it turns out.”

“How it turns out? Will, does that matter? It’s a book. It’s not your horoscope. Look at me. The ‘It’ in the book is happening right here. Right now, today. I see it. You see it. I know that. You know that. Anyone paying even the slightest sliver of attention knows it. But you seem to feed on it. Or it feeds on you. You read about it, talk about it, write about it, resent others for not talking about it. You drink it in. You can’t get enough of it. You need to stop.”

“I know, but it is all so horrible, so planned, so evil, so depressing.”

“Go get the book, Will. The book and the country are two different things. Similar, yes. But one you have some control over and the other, you don’t.”

He retrieves the book from his bedside table.

“Give it to me. I’ll put it in the refrigerator for you. It will be safe in there, and here, read this one.”

“The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing?”

“Yes. You’ll love it. You’ll laugh for a change. You’ll smile. You’ll nod your head. You’ll give yourself a break from the angst. Wordsworth is gone. Sinclair Lewis is gone. Rousseau is gone. Huxley and Orwell. Gone. We are here. Right now, and we will endure. I know others will not, and that saddens me. But we will endure.”

“Endure?”

Yes, is that not what we are together for? To be together here and now? To share the load? We need to have the windows replaced because we are too cold in the winter and spend too much to heat the house… we can’t expand the supreme court, or eliminate the filibuster, or save the eel grass and the Amazon rainforests all by ourselves. We can only do those things if we feel empowered, not downtrodden, defeated. Let’s give ourselves a break before we both feel like a broken, leaky, window letting in the heat and fruit flies. Can you do that with me?”

A Walk in the Park

Between the end of his first and the beginning of his second marriage, Arnold Bregman lived alone and he soon came to believe that he had been involved in a murder. He became certain that he had plotted, planned, and killed a man. A man he did not know. A man with whom he had no relationship. A man whose disappearance would never be attributed to Bregman. A murder with no motive, no means, no opportunity.

This certainty, no matter how implausible, would not loosen its grip on his mind. It came and went, but while in its hold, he had no reason to disbelieve it.

Distraught, and with no one he felt he could talk to, he consulted a psychiatrist referred by a friend. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist said Bregman showed no signs of psychosis and exhibited none of the signs of an aggressive, psychopathic, sociopathic, or dangerously disturbed personality.

But why then, Bregman asked, would I have such thoughts in the first place, and why can I not get these thoughts out of my mind?

Bregman was not an unintelligent man. He should have been prepared for the response, being familiar with what was said about psychiatrists and how they worked, but he was nevertheless surprised when the psychiatrist said, with his legs neatly crossed, and with a face as straight as the crease in his trousers, something like, “so tell me, why do you think that is so?”

Bregman replied that he did not know and that he had hoped that the psychiatrist who had an array of framed, embossed, and signed diplomas from what appeared to be distinguished universities on the wall behind his desk, would be able to tell him.

“I see,” said the psychiatrist, which is another tactic Bregman should have expected from a Park Avenue psychiatrist, who, in his grey blazer and opened collared shirt, shifted in his seat on the chair opposite to Bregman, recrossed his legs in such a way as to align one leg over the other at the knee with no space whatsoever between his two legs and with the heel of his well-polished black oxford on his left foot only inches above the shoe on his right foot, and he looked at Bregman.

Bregman, following these appointments, often found himself attempting to replicate the same move while seated on the subway downtown but was never able to and he wondered if there was something unusual about the bones and ligaments of the man’s leg, or the width of the man’s hips, or if, perhaps, he was using this move to distract him enough from his troubles that he would begin to get to the bottom of things.

Nevertheless, over several weeks, Bregman increasingly doubted the value of continuing with therapy. He’d seen the psychiatrist, whose name was Ostrove, nodding off frequently during possibly pertinent parts of their consultations, which annoyed him to no end, though he had never been able to bring it up to the psychiatrist. This left Bregman feeling somehow unworthy of the man’s attention and that he must be a terribly boring person, despite the fact that this was the man’s job and he was being paid a great deal of money, which Bregman could ill afford.

Bregman recalled that his father had a low regard for psychiatry or psychotherapy of any kind. People, he said, should not wash their laundry in someone else’s sink. The only time he ever said that was after Bregman’s mother’s failed attempt at suicide.

Sometimes, Bregman thought that the psychiatrist was actually quite shrewd. He was merely playing at nodding off just to test Bregman. To see how far he could push Bregman to react to being treated so badly. To see if Bregman would not tolerate being so blatantly disrespected and that then his true, basic, typical male, belligerent self would emerge explosively, and his true violent and aggressive nature would be revealed. As if it lay silently deep inside him like a cat, crouched, taut, and ready to strike.

Ostrove’s office was in an expensive apartment building in the upper East Side of New York, near the park and a small French patisserie and bookstore that sold high-end travel books. Bregman was browsing there, having arrived early for his appointment, and the thought came to him that maybe Ostrove was just not as good as he had been told. But, rather than confront him about his dissatisfaction, Bregman decided that he would stop seeing this man and stop therapy altogether.

Bregman never considered himself a violent person. He avoided conflict. Neither of his parents were violent in any way, though Bregman’s mother always seemed to act as if his father had the sensitivity of a spring-loaded mousetrap. This was Bregman’s feeling, not necessarily hers.

Bregman planned to tell Ostrove that he was going to stop coming to therapy because he felt they were getting nowhere but, before he got up the courage to speak up, Ostrove suggested that Bregman might agree to hypnosis as a possible and more productive approach to therapy and they agreed that the at next session Bregman would submit to what Ostrove described as light hypnosis.

The night before the hypnosis was to take place, Bregman lay in bed and saw himself as clear as day with three men in the basement of someone’s home. It was not Bregman’s home, but it might have been.

The room was dark and cold. The brown walls appeared a deep ferrous red in the light cast by a lamp in the hallway. The room had a dirt floor and below the only window was a cast iron manhole cover from a city street which Bregman knew covered the hole which held the remains of a man still clothed but cut up into pieces and packed tightly into the cramped wet space whose sides were rough with protruding stones which glistened with what Bregman knew was the blood of the man having seeped out of his cut and mangled flesh and brutally broken bones.

The men had met because they had gotten word that an informant had told the police they would find a body at that address. They planned to move the body.

Bregman had no doubt that it was a setup, and police were coming and were at that very moment at the front door and would soon find him and the body, and he knew that he would be arrested and tried and convicted of murder, facing certain death himself.

The one way out of the basement other than the stairs was down a narrow hall with several turns, twisting one way and then another, that Bregman had never been down but of which he had detailed knowledge. They made their way out into an alley down the street. They were filthy with grime from the basement. Blood on their hands. They stood in the light rain that was falling. Bregman felt no relief. There was no doubt that he would be caught. They traded schemes of escape, or to blame someone else, or to kill one of their own and make a getaway.

Bregman was unable to dispel the reality of the experience. He got out of bed, still living in its solid grip. He could not allow himself to be hypnotized by this Ostrove character. He would not go to the appointment. If he did, he feared he would reveal his true nature. He no longer knew what had actually happened or what was a fiction. Ostrove would turn him in. But then, what if he didn’t show up for the appointment, what would Ostrove do? Track Bregman down? Report him to the police? Was the lure of hypnosis merely a trap?

Bregman stood outside of Ostrove’s office. He was tempted to leave and find a seat in the French café next door. He did not. He was innocent, was he not? Of course, he would go to the appointment. Ostrove would hypnotize him, and it would all be cleared up. There would be a plausible, credible explanation. Some unresolved Oedipal feelings they would work on together. He would be freed of this terrible belief of being a horrible murderer.

Bregman reasoned that he, like others at the very cusp of making such a momentous revelation, and uncovering the singular, life-changing solution, which would loosen the grip of his anxiety, was simply resistant to discovering the truth.

As he stood outside of the office, the woman who regularly had the appointment before Bregman, came out of the door. She nodded at Bregman and went on her way. The faint smell of her cologne, though, reminded him of a woman he once knew, and of the relationship they had, which ended unhappily. She had called him after they split and told him he had treated her badly and that she loved him and he did not love her back and that he, by his insensitivity, like all the other men she had ever known, and perhaps all men, had killed a part of her and she told him he would have to live with that thought for the rest of his life.

He followed the woman down the stairs, but she was not on the street.

He stopped himself. What was he doing? This is absurd, he said. What am I doing here? I am standing on a New York City street. The street is clean. The sun is shining. I am well-clothed. I have enough to eat and clean water to drink. I am safe here. I want for nothing. I have bad dreams. Who doesn’t? I am one of the very few fortunate people in the entire world. You want some advice, he said, do what matters most. Don’t dwell on the unchangeable. Stop at the used book stalls along the park. Find a good book. And by the way, did you ever check Ostrove’s repair record? Look, do you think if you ever really killed anyone you’d be standing here on Park Avenue, worrying about it?

Bregman walked downtown along the low stone wall of the park, crossed through the Sheep Meadow to the west side at 65th Street, and caught the Broadway local train at 59th Street and Columbus Avenue. He stopped for a pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese at Murray’s in Chelsea and sat by the window, watching the people walking by, carrying their backpacks, their worries, and the few evening’s groceries with which they would make dinner.

Breaking the Judy Blues Eyes Rule

Nathan M. flew from Logan to West Palm Beach. He had taken a few days off from work. His son, the oldest one, picked him up at the airport, and they talked, mostly about the weather in Boston, their jobs, and the Mets on the car ride up to St. Lucie. It was spring training season and it felt like late July in the Back Bay.

 Nathan asked his son if he could turn up the car radio. Billy Joel. Piano Man.

His son always had Billy Joel on whenever Nathan got in his truck. He wondered whether his son really liked Billy Joel or if he only played it because they used to listen to him, volume turned high, when the two of them lived together. That was in the years after his mother and Nathan had split and his son moved back home after college. Either way, it made him happy. He could feel his shoulders relax.

“He says, ‘Son can you play me a memory?

I’m not really sure how it goes

But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete

When I wore a younger man’s clothes.’”

His son had started calling Nathan pretty regularly after his mother had been diagnosed with ALS. This was after he’d finished grad school, gotten married to a young woman from Mississippi, and they moved to Florida to be near to his mother.

Nathan and Helen, the boy’s mother, had three children and all three had moved to Florida to be near her.

Nathan now had two young children with his new wife. They lived in Boston, close to where her family lived.

He’d flown down when his son called to say that Helen was dying, asking if he wanted to come see her for the last time.

Each of his children and their partners were there. They were all in her spare bedroom with the hospital bed and medical equipment. No one spoke when he walked in. They looked at him and smiled. He and Helen had had a troubled past.

Each of them took turns sitting briefly in a chair by Helen’s bed. The IV drip had been unplugged, though the line with the morphine pump was still clicking on and off. Nathan sat by the bed once, maybe twice, for a few minutes each time, hoping and not hoping she would open her eyes and see him there. A thin blanket covered her body. Her face was sharp and gaunt.

He and Helen had married in August of sixty-six. It was hot and he’d worn a suit he’d rented.

Nathan had kept one picture of her. The first one he’d ever taken of her. On one of the first days they’d spent together. The only one he had of her by herself—not with friends or in a crowd of tourists wearing plaid and untucked shirts in front of some famous monument or around a table with smiling people with raised glasses leaning in towards one another though they’d only just met one another.

In this photo she’s standing beside his car. In three-quarter profile, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Her hand shading the sun from her eyes. In a light-colored summer dress. The photo was from September ’65. A little less than a year before they were married.

After Nathan had been there for a while, the hospice nurse had said, “Sometimes, right near the end, you see, one or the other of you might consider leaving the room, to ease the passing.”

She’d said it to all of them, but he was the only one who then left.

He went out for a walk. Passing pastel condos like hers. Neat lawns. Palm trees. Swept driveways. Clean white cars with Michigan and new Sunshine State plates. Nobody to be seen in the yards. No sounds other than those of yelping poodles behind drawn curtains and trucks on the interstate.

He was not in the room when she died.

In the ten months before he and Helen were married, they had taken short, uncomplicated trips. Sampling large pizzas with garlic and onion in places they’d never been before, sharing a Coke with no ice. Eating the whole pie right there in the booth, wiping the grease off their chins and fingers, laughing, giving half-serious points for crust, chew, sauce, cheese, and its New York-style foldability, compared with the others they’d eaten. Tony and Tina’s on Arthur Avenue, Joe’s on Carmine Street, Pasty’s on 56th Street. The Famous and not so Famous Original Rays.

Driving around with the windows open playing the Zombies and Stones tapes. Cramming for organic chemistry exams together: The sequence of steps in the hydrohalogenation reaction of an asymmetric alkene. The Bischler-Napieralski reaction. He wanted badly to go to medical school. She wasn’t interested in any more school and wanted to get a job.

So, instead, they got married.

 Before that, in June or July, Nathan told his older brother that he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go through with it. No way. He was twenty-one. Scared. Rushed. Not at all what he wanted. His brother said if that was a legit reason for not getting married, nobody would do it. “You need a better excuse than that,” he said. If that was his only reason, it wasn’t good enough.

It was during that part of the sixties that still wore the clothes of the fifties. Pre-Woodstock. Pre-sexual freedom. Pre-EST. Pre-consciousness-raising. The pre-let’s-think-about-this-and-see-the-world-for-a-while-before-we-just-rush-into-something-stupid part of the sixties.

His brother said their mother would throw a shit fit if he backed out. And so, he didn’t. They moved into an apartment together. Bought an Ethan Allen couch and a rocking chair. They nailed pictures up on the walls and kept their socks and underwear in separate dressers.

Neither of them knew anything about marriage, at least not good ones. They followed a hand-me-down script they were given, with nothing more than that to go on. Nothing that might help them avert twenty years of quiet unhappiness, depression, anxiety, resentment, isolation, loose and muddled affairs, and weariness. No real, deep, understanding of love to guide them.

Both wanting, expecting, to love and to be loved. And when they didn’t know how to make that happen and didn’t see a way out, they both kept stepping deeper into a muddy river which only got wider the further they got in.

They were little more than adolescents made up to look like adults, with three children and the old thin-at-the-elbows neuroses their parents had given to them. They were no good together, and each was too afraid to say it.

They split. They found they were so much better apart. Happier. It just took so long for that to happen.

She died that afternoon while he was out walking.

Then, as she lay, so recently alive, so recently herself, all of that past came welling up in him.

And so, he cried. For her. And for himself. For their shared and separate sadness before they split. For the joy they had missed when they were together.

On the flight back up to Logan, looking down at the blue, blue ocean, he listened to the circling lyrics of songs he once knew by heart and only now remembered as fragments on repeat in his brain. Words and melodies worn deeply into the grooves of his synapses.

Only then, belatedly, did he see that he had broken the Judy Blue Eye’s Rule.

He had stood by her bed. Taken his turn in the chair beside her. And, even then, at that moment, when she had so little time left, he had not seen her as who she was. Only who she had been … and only in relation to himself. As he had done in the past, seeing her only through his too-young-to-see-clearly eyes.

Even then as she was near to breathing her last human breath, his vision of her was still clouded by the remnants of who she had seemed to be in the past. Not the woman she was. The one who she always had been, and he could not see. CSN. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

“Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now

I am not dreaming

I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are…”

With All Due Respects

Myrtle Molloy arrived the Riverside Memorial Chapel in Mount Vernon. She’d taken the bus up from Washington Heights. She was careful to be on time and to be dressed appropriately.

The chapel rests beside an overpass above the Cross County Parkway. The ample parking lot had only a few cars. Likely as not, she figured, the others had taken the bus as she had.

Not so. The funeral service for the late Sol Nussbaum was meagerly attended. There were no flowers. No organ music. No candles. No golden light streaming in through high stained-glass windows. Jews, she thought, just don’t know how to do funerals. Maybe a few candles would help.

She took a seat in the back row. Up front, the rabbi was speaking with Nussbaum’s two sons. His fingers were laced across chest. She thought he looked like an expectant sparrow waiting for a few crumbs. He nodded and the two men sat down beside their respective spouses at either end of one of the front pews. Winter coats filled the space between them.

A smattering of others, none of whom had she ever seen before, sat further back, along with the four pall bearers, and the Memingers, Nussbaum’s neighbors from across the hall. Mrs. Molloy took a tissue from her purse and began dabbing at the corners of her eyes.

Some of the others leaned toward one another, whispering, no doubt, about what little was known about the man’s passing. All speculations, however, because Myrtle had told none of them about how she’d found the man.  

Sol had lived alone. Since his wife died.

Needles and syringes he’d boiled and used to inject his wife with insulin littered their bedroom dresser. Pills, ointments, bandages, alcohol swabs. Blood-spotted bits of gauze still lay on the floor beside their bed. What a mess, she thought. How could the man live with all of that around him and not clean it up?

They’d removed the wife’s leg below the knee. He visited her three times a week. Taking the bus up the west side to Mother Cabrini Hospital. Sol said that he sat by the window watching the boats on the river, holding Dora’s hand, and listening to her breathe.

Mrs. Molloy felt sure that Dora’s ghost lived in the apartment because her belongings were still hanging in the closet and folded at the foot of the bed.

In their wedding picture, Dora was a young, slender girl with a rounded face, a narrow, pinched nose, and a thin smile. Sol said she was born in Vienna. She spoke little English. She never talked to Myrtle. She was probably a socialist, Myrtle thought. They owned the tailor shop on the ground floor of the building. Dora mended suits and dresses in the front window facing Broadway, sitting at her Singer, behind rows of colored bobbins.

When Dora’s eyesight failed, Sol hired a neighborhood girl who stole from the till, and he let her go. Myrtle had told Sol not to hire the girl because she was a Catholic and not one of them could be trusted.

When someone scrawled Jew across the front of the shop door, Sol found a buyer who paid him in cash, which he kept in an envelope at the bottom of the salt tub beside the stove, but no one was supposed to know about it and Myrtle never let on she knew it was there.

The Nussbaums never went out. Never caused a problem. They were quiet. They had two sons who grew up, joined the army, found women, and moved away. That was it.

They never owned a car. He walked to the markets and the park. He had no one he would call a friend. He kept cottage cheese, scallions, sour cream, rye bread, pickled herring, and celery in the refrigerator. Otherwise, she knew his cupboards were mostly bare. He drank tea from a glass and read the Herald Tribune in the afternoon. As far as she knew, he owed not a penny to another soul and paid his rent on time.

He was hard of hearing and listened to the ballgames with the Tribune on his lap, and always had a lit Herbert Tareyton filter-tip hanging moist from his lips.

After Dora died, he spent a short time at his older son’s home. He said they talked about him at night. The wife didn’t like his smoking or how loud he played the TV, how he left his dishes in the sink, and how she said he roamed the house at night. His son never defended him. And then Sol asked to be taken back home.

It was Mrs. Molloy who found him. She lived downstairs. She had the key because she worked for the landlord and collected the rent each month.

When the last month’s rent was five days late, she knocked on the old man’s door and when no one answered she opened it. She had to hold her apron to her face against the odor. It was the worst odor she ever smelled.

She saw the poor man’s remains in the tub. The body was claimed by the younger son who lived in a high-rise condo in Tampa.

None of the relatives could bring themselves to go through his things. She cleaned the apartment from top to bottom. Sold off the furniture and sent the older son an envelope with birth certificates and other papers she found. A framed picture of the two boys hanging in the second bedroom. One of Sol, long faced, in a dark suit, a homburg, and rimless glasses, standing beside his seated wife in a modest black dress and cloche hat, his hand resting on her shoulder.

She said she had found nothing else of any real value and asked could they please send her the last month’s rent to cover the cost of cleanup.

When the rabbi asked if anyone had a few words to say about Mr. Nussbaum, only a fleshy, middle-aged, man wearing a postman’s jacket rose to speak.

“Uncle Sol” he said, “was a good man. He took me to the movies, and we talked baseball. He never made no trouble for anyone. He worked hard. He lived to be 89. What more could you ask for,” he said with a smile, fingering a piece of paper he’d taken out of his pocket. “He loved his boys, but he kept stuff inside.”

He looked at the two brothers, sitting apart, in the front pew. “Maybe he just didn’t know how to show you,” he said to them.

“Once when I was really little, around seven I think, because it was before the Dodgers moved away, we came out of a movie and were getting on the subway at Dyckman Street, it was really crowded, and he was holding my hand and he pushed into the car, pulling on my arm to get me in through the doors behind him when they started to close, he kept pulling on my arm trying to get me in and I thought I wouldn’t get in and the train would leave me behind and I started crying and saying ‘help, help’ and then a man started to push the doors open wider but then more people started pushing and another man was elbowing me even though I was crying and then uncle Sol…”

“Harold, stop. Just stop.” The younger son stood. His face reddening. What are you saying? That’s a lie,” he said. It was me. It was me he took to the movies and me who got caught in the subway door. Not you. You’re making this up. Shut up. He was my father, not yours.”

“Then why didn’t you tell the story? Tell me that. All’s I’m saying is he was a good man, and someone needed to say that.”

“No, you sit down and be quiet, both of you, all of you for that matter.” Myrtle was standing with her hands balled into fists on her hips.

She looked around the room.

“You people make me so angry I could spit. You’re all so cheap and ungrateful. A man died and what’s left of him is up there in a box. You couldn’t even spring for a decent coffin? And arguing now about what? You should be grateful he took any of you to the movies. What did any of you ever do for him, anyway? Where have you been all these years? Somebody should teach you all some respect. Some respect for the dead at least.”

She picked up her coat, strode past the pall bearers and the Memingers, and out through the doors and down the steps into the street. It was not until she got on the bus at the corner that she remembered she’d forgotten to ask for the money for Nussbaum’s last month’s rent. “Shit,” she said to herself, “you can just kiss that money goodbye, Sweety. And after everything you’ve done for them.”

Alice in Chains

Alice Gompert and Harran Schlamm had once dated. In high school. When they both shared the crystalline innocence of a pair of snowflakes falling toward the windshield of a slow-moving Class A Vista Winnebago heading north on I-290.

He turned to her now, at age twenty-four, with his still-undiminished snowflake eyes, sitting in ‘their’ booth, the one they once sat in back in the old days at Marvin’s Merry Melodies, an ice cream and candy shop in Evanston, IL. The shop, formerly a record and tape store owned by Fred Gompert, Alice’s father, who presciently, on the cusp of the digital music revolution sold off all of the stock, gutted the place, and with advice from Bob Bigelow, his brother-in-law, a self-made, wealthy entrepreneur, who said that the future of retail was in ice cream, and who set Fred up using his controlling interest in Kelley Country Creamery, the foremost ice cream maker in the state of Wisconsin, where “they know their ice cream,” and he signed a ten-year exclusive Evanston sole-distributor contract with KCC, and installed vintage booths, counters, freezers, and lighting, and never found the need to change the name on the store marque.

Harran, with tentative, downcast eyes and his damp hand gently resting on Alice’s elbow, said, “Can I ask you a question?”

She glanced at the hand on her elbow. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “like what?”

They had dated for all of four, non-consecutive, weeks. They’d been sweethearts. Or, I should say, Harran considered them as such, while from Alice’s point of view, they were just friends, thoroughly devoid of any possible deeper feelings and any attendant benefits. He’d taken her to three Alice in Chains concerts, one per year, when the band played up in Kenosha. It was not the actual Alice in Chains they saw. The band was called Alice’s Chains, an AIC cover band which Harran said were way better than AIC anyway. But that didn’t matter, because it was only the name of the band that was the way cool thing since it included Alice’s name.

Alice’s parents, Fred and Lillian, had driven them, waited in the parking lot, and brought them back for ice cream at the store, opened especially just for them. Three evenings. Each of which Harran counted as a full week of dating. Then there was the senior prom to which Harran invited her the day after the night of the junior prom to which Alice had gone with George Blechta, a twitchy dweeb who danced like Elaine Benes doing a version of the Stroll. And she, of course, said yes, but ended up not going because she had a tonsillectomy the day before the prom and then spent the next six days recovering from surgery. He brought her the corsage he had purchased and counted that as week four.

He looked at her there, once again sitting together in their booth, and said, “Alice, would you…”

“Harran, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t ask me what I think you’re going to ask me.”

“What do you think I…”

“Harran. I’m sorry. This is just not such a good time for me, okay?”

“Okay… Would you…,” he said then, “… would you ever think of going back to New York?”

She sighed, “I don’t know,” and shifted in her seat so that his hand dropped away from the warm bend of her elbow.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I went there because I couldn’t live here anymore. This store. Opening at ten and closing at six every day, every day, and dinners at home with parsley, a starch, and a protein on every plate. This little place with its little routines and its niceties that feel like crustless white bread triangles with low fat cream cheese spread and seedless cucumber slices.”

Harran looked at her as though he was listening to her.

“I went to New York to get away and I loved it. Loved every minute of it. People from all over the world in one place. Working and reading actual books. Staying up after nine o’clock and going to Czechoslovakian movies. Eating dinner at ten. People on the subways. I once sat across from Sarah Jessica Parker on the F train and it was like “oh, okay,” and bumped into John Turturro in Bruno’s deli in Park Slope. And when I heard Sinatra singing ‘If you can make it here you can make it anywhere’ on New Year’s and I cried each year because it’s true. True, true, true!”

“So, you’re going back, then?”

“And then it all came down. It all came down around me. The buildings. The thundering, shaking noise that has never stopped in my ears. And the horrible, horrible clouds of oily, burning, grey-black smoke, choking your lungs and burning your eyes, and filling your body with such enormous fear like someone was holding onto you and who won’t let you go, and you panic and plead, and they still won’t let you go.

“I couldn’t stay there. I tried. I tried to be normal. To feel normal. I tried. And walking in Penn Station each day with soldiers in camo, desert camo in Penn station, with machine guns pointed to the floor, their fingers so, so near the triggers. Everywhere. Street corners. And you want to cry out to make it all stop and to go back to the way it was before. But it never will. People just stopping on the street. Just stopping and putting their heads down and covering their eyes and crying. Crying so softly, hiding their faces from you. And you, you just walk by and then you start crying yourself. You knew. You knew that all those faces, the flyers taped to the walls and the fences and lightposts. They were never coming back. They were dead. You knew it because it was a nightmare in a clear blue sky. And it was the realest thing you will ever see, and never forget.

“I am covered with it all. The incinerated flesh and plastic and metal. The incinerated lives. And that morning, that same Tuesday morning. On the C train. At seven fifty-five. People I was sitting with, looking at their phones, holding onto the railings. At the station under the buildings, got off and took the elevators up to work in those buildings.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Harran, I am not who I was before. I don’t know who I am now. It’s not just that the buildings fell. It’s how and why it happened. The senselessness of it. How people planned this murder. And others knew about it and said, ‘yes, go do it.’ And governments knew, had to have known, and were complicit. For what? To make us feel attacked and attackable. Vulnerable. Ultimately, personally, vulnerable. Not theoretically. Not philosophically. But materially, demonstrably, vulnerable.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. And I know you cannot know what I‘m feeling. The feeling that you matter less than nothing. And that nothing matters. Realizing that everything matters. That everything matters so little and yet that everything matters so much. That breathing and trees matter. The sky, the person sitting next to you, the woman in the library or working the fryolator in McDonald’s. They all matter. That everything matters and nothing matters.

“And then what? Instead of sadness, healing, and introspection, Hillary Fucking Clinton and Chuck Fucking Schumer voted, voted in the Senate, to knowingly, calculatingly, bomb and burn and incinerate thousands more people? To plan it. Execute it. Calling it ‘shock and awe’ like a Call of Duty video game. I knew better. They knew better. And still they voted to say go ahead to George Fucking W Bush and his fucking father who was once the director of the CI fucking A. He knew about the Saudis. They all knew about it. They could have stopped it all and they just went ahead did it with smiles on their faces.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Say what?”

“Fucking.”

“Oh my God, Harran. Me saying ‘fucking’? That’s what bothers you? I shouldn’t say fucking in my father’s fucking candy store, in Evanston fucking Illinois? Because it may disturb some people? They should be fucking disturbed. Take a look around, Harran, has anyone one died because they heard me say ‘’fucking?’”

“Alice.” 

“Don’t tell me Alice. I’m not Alice. I don’t know who this person is anymore. I’m going.”

“Don’t go. Where are you going?”

“I don’t fucking know, Harran. You know that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night because you feel like you’re falling? That’s the feeling I have every night. But I wake up in the morning and they don’t. Can you imagine the feeling of falling, to be falling, to have the room falling with you, the ceiling crushing down on you, as the last feeling you will ever have in life? I pray you don’t ever know what that feels like. I have to go.”

“Why did you even come back?”

“What?”

“Why did you come back?”

“Don’t ask me that. I don’t know. I think I was hoping things would be different here. But they’re not.”

“Could you let me out?” he said.

“What?”

“Let me out. Please, I have to go.”

Malachi and His Mother: The Aftermath of the Altshul Incident

“Mel Rothstein called me this morning. He had such tight anger in his voice. Like he was trying to stuff it back down. Showing me how in-control he was.”

Malachi was sitting across from his mother at the kitchen table. She had spilled some sugar as she was adding more of it to her coffee. She pushed the crystals around on the slick tablecloth with her finger as she spoke.

“What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘How could you?’ He said I had fomented an insurrection. An armed insurrection. At the temple. The ‘temple’ he called it. He said I had ruined the reputation of the whole congregation that he had worked so hard to make and that tweets or posts or whatever they call them had been posted across the internet. Pictures of me. Rage on my face. Leading a mob of radical Jews against the police. Calling them Nazis. Threatening them.”

“I saw the pictures.”

“He said that he expected more from me, which I know is a lie because he has never expected anything from me or any other woman beyond dull, mute, subservience and a look of thankful awe.”

She presses her finger into the mound of sugar she had created and picks up what has stuck to the finger into her mouth. Her lips curl, her chin wrinkling. She begins to cry. Malachi reaches across the table to toward her.

“I feel so terrible,” she says “I’m glad your father wasn’t there. I don’t know what he would have done.”

“Ma, I feel so bad for you. I know you meant well. In the most genuine, human sense, you saw a danger and you wanted to save everyone. You weren’t crying wolf, or ‘fire’ in a theater. You thought those cops were terrorists intent on shooting everyone in the room. The whole congregation was sitting like obedient sheep waiting for the doors to open and the shooting to start.”

“That’s what Rothstein called me. A terrorist. Worse than a terrorist, he said. He said I should be ashamed of myself for risking everyone’s lives for my own neurotic mishegas. He said I needed to get help.”

“Rothstein, ran out himself. He ran out without looking back, without offering to help anyone. He burst through the side door. He knocked down the officer there. He ran out of the building the second he heard you scream ‘get out!’ It’s only now that he feels embarrassed. He shouldn’t feel embarrassed. He did the right thing. You did the right thing. They had guns. They were acting like real active shooters. They meant to scare the shit out of you. Out of everyone. And, I may be wrong, but I think they got some sort of charge out of scaring the shit out a bunch of cornered Jews.’’

“Rothstein. I never liked him. But that is totally separate, Malachi. For the first time in my life, I feared for my own mortality. Not in the philosophical sense. Not just in conversation over cocktails. Not in that casual, intellectual, sense of ‘let’s all talk about death’ in some abstract, manageable, way. But in the real gripping fear of death in that very moment. Certain that you’d be shot and killed. Ripped through with bullets, and that my body, me, my mind, my thoughts, my very self, would be lost. Gone. Lost to consciousness. Lost to all reality, to all eternity. It is a fear unlike any other human feeling. That instant awareness of imminent death.”

“I can only begin to imagine how you felt, ma. When I was twelve or thirteen, at night, in bed, if I would think of the vastness of the universe or infinity. The blankness. The unending black void. I could feel my body exploding with fear. The fear of nothingness.”

“I don’t remember that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to. I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night like I needed to escape my thoughts as though they were a physical being. As if death and nothingness were physical beings. Even though the total lack of physicality of them are really what is the most incomprehensible and frightening of all. I needed to get out. Just like you did. I left my room and I went to your bedroom door. It was closed and I didn’t want to knock. I didn’t.”

“You should have, Malachi, that’s what parents are for.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to wake you. It’s that I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“Frighten me?”

“I thought talking to you about death with you older, closer to death, that it would bring up those morbid fears for you. So, I just sat there until I went back to bed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s when I started saying a prayer at night.”

“What kind of prayer? I never taught you prayers.”

“The one with, ‘Our father who art in heaven.’ The one with ‘give us our daily bread’ and ‘the valley of death’. ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ I didn’t know if it was a real prayer. It just made me feel better to say those things. And I’d say bless my mother and father and list of all the people who I wanted to protect, and say them in exactly the right order or I’d have to start all over again to say it right, no matter how many times. And then there was one night, when I was going to bed and I’d always say ‘good night’ and ‘see you in the morgen’ like ‘guten morgen’, but instead I said see you in the morgue.’ And my god, I apologized a hundred times and then I cried and cried and all I could think of was that what I said would really happen and that you’d die because I said that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, ma. And don’t be sorry for doing what you thought was right and good, no matter how it turned out. And forget about Rothstein. He’s not thinking of you, only himself.”

They look at one another. Eye to eye.

“My coffee is cold and I spilled sugar all over the table. Sit, I’ll make us fresh. And let’s talk about something else.”

“Critical Race Theory?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. You should hear what your aunt Frieda has to say about that. Like she might know what it means.”