A Friend of the Family (11 page)

“You know how people are when they’re starting to grieve.”

“I told him for years to get a colonoscopy. He wouldn’t. We’d fight, you know? Just getting him to stop smoking a half pack a day …”

“He was a stubborn guy.”

Joe shrugged, checked his rearview mirror. “They’re all stubborn, that’s the thing,” he said. “That’s how they were raised. That’s how they raised us, how they got through the daily business of their lives. They worked like animals. My dad at the store, your dad with the insurance. They wore out their shoes, you know? All that shuffling every day. Worked harder than I ever will in my entire life. But never buckled his seatbelt, never put out the cigarette, never got a goddamn colonoscopy.”

“They invented seatbelts too late.”

“No excuse,” Joe said.

Both our dads had spent the bulk of their best years doing things they didn’t feel like doing: Joe’s dad at the shop, my dad pounding Ninth Avenue, soft leather briefcase in hand. People never stopped needing insurance, he reminded us, and he never stopped trying to sell it to them.

But then again, every so often my dad would take off an entire weekend, and we’d drive deep into Westchester, me in the front seat and Phil in the back. We’d go scout properties in White Plains or even up in Chappaqua, Yorktown. “What do you think, guys?” my dad would ask, slowing down in front of a
FOR SALE
sign, a shiny new ranch with a one-car garage and dogwoods dripping on the front yard. “Good schools, safe neighborhoods, low taxes.” A caress in his voice.

Sometimes my dad would stop across the street—keeping the motor running—and we’d all imagine it, the bicycles in the driveway, the fort in the backyard, our very own bedrooms. We’d seen television; we knew how it was supposed to be. We’d roll down our windows and stare. Board games stacked neatly on the shelves above my desk, Davy Crockett wallpaper, pennants from the local high school team. And then, blinking awake, we’d understand the impossibility of leaving Yonkers for greener pastures. My dad would pull a K-turn. We’d be home in time for supper.

“What do you remember, Joe?”

“What do I remember?”

“When you were a kid,” I said. “What stands out?”

“Ah, you know — there was so much. Phillies games at Connie Mack, April right through September.” His voice wistful. “Ocean City in the summer. Grilling hamburgers on Sundays. My dad really liked to do that American stuff. The Liberty Bell every Fourth of July, then fireworks.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s those baseball games I miss, I’ll tell you. I should have made the time to go. It’s been at least a decade. I never go to games anymore. I should have taken him to see the Phillies.”

“Don’t do that to yourself.”

“Indulge me,” he said. “My father’s dying.”

I patted his shoulder once, trying to be supportive in as masculine a fashion as I could manage, then turned to gaze out at the highway again. Our fathers. I had just spoken to mine the day before; I’d been calling him every day since Joe found out about his dad, and he was delighted at the attention, although he tried to be gruff about it. We talked about maybe seeing a Nets game together; I told him I’d see about seats.

When we pulled up to the row house on Rawle Street where Joe had grown up, where Laura had lived as a baby, where Elaine and I had spent so many chaste youthful weekends, I felt unexpectedly relieved to see that the place looked exactly the same. Three stories of dark red brick, white shutters, gleaming black iron railing along the stoop, gingham shades behind the windows.

“Boys, boys, Peter, I’m so glad you could come. How was the drive? Are you two hungry?” Mrs. Stern bustled to mask her nerves, barked at us, took our coats and sat us down and yelled upstairs at her husband to come down, the kids were here. The house looked great, but Mrs. Stern looked terrible: wan, so skinny her collarbones stood out sharp as files. I remembered her as bright-eyed, jowly, with a full European bosom and thick brown curls. Now her hair was lank and completely gray.

“Niels,
Nissim,
the boys have come to see you. Come on down,” she called upstairs again before backing into the kitchen. The pictures of FDR and JFK were on the wall where they’d always been, but they
had neighbors: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, innumerable shots of Stern grandchildren in all manner of sports uniforms and Halloween costumes.

“Nissim! Unten gekommen,
come on, let’s go.”

“Ma, it’s okay. I’ll go upstairs in a minute.”

“He’s not dead yet, Joseph,” Mrs. Stern said, and she sat down at the table. She was fierce in a way I knew Joe could be, too, tougher than me like steel to cotton. She came to the States with her little brother when she was still just a girl, sponsored by some cousins in Philadelphia, who put her to work immediately in their shoe factory. In Frankfurt, where she was born, she would have learned the classics, French and Latin, would have studied math and science in the private school where her father served as headmaster. In Philadelphia, she pushed grommets into calves’ leather until pebble-hard calluses burned on her hands. Her father and mother both died in the Holocaust.

“So, how’s the baby?” she asked, putting a plate of dry biscuits on the table. I felt a brisk chill on my neck, touched beyond reason that she’d remembered our five-month-old in the midst of what was happening to her husband.

“He’s doing great, Mrs. Stern. Thanks for asking.”

“You have pictures?”

“Does he have pictures,” Joe snorted, and I dutifully pulled my wallet from my pocket. There was an entire foldout section dedicated to my son, from hospital-tagged newborn to drooling, half-falling-over chubster. Alec asleep on my chest on the couch, Alec and Elaine by the JCC kiddie pool, Alec with a full beard of homemade pea mush, waving a spoon in the air.

“Gorgeous.” She sighed. “That’s a gorgeous kid. He has your chin, doesn’t he?”

“To be honest, I can’t find much of a chin yet.”

“No, I can see,” she said, taking my wallet and holding it close to her face. “There it is, your little tricky chin. And Elaine’s smile.”

How could she remember Elaine’s smile? It had been years. “You’re right,” I said. “The smile is pure Elaine.”

“He didn’t come easy, did he?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was always asking Joe when you were going to have a baby. He told me to mind my own business. And I know no news is bad news as far as babies are concerned. Especially because I could remember you two with our Laura, how good you were. You were meant to be parents, I always thought.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Stern. It feels — it feels good. We’re really enjoying it.” She nodded: of course we were enjoying it. “And you’re right, it wasn’t so easy. But the wait was worth it.”

Mrs. Stern waved her hand in front of her eyes. I remember a whole group at our Pitt graduation; she was the only one of a half-dozen mothers who refused to cry, and now here she was tearing up over my fertility problems.

“Soon we’ll have six grandchildren, you know that?”

“I know.”

“Susie’s two, Annie’s two, and soon Joe’s two. Iris is having a boy.”

“I know.”

“They’ll name him for Niels.”

I looked down at the billfold, my fat, cherubic son. “Maybe Niels will get to meet him — they’ll get to name him for someone else.”

“Maybe.” Mrs. Stern coughed, pushed the plate of biscuits at me. “Where did Joe go? He just gets here and then he disappears. I think he’s very upset with what’s happening. He’s too sensitive, don’t you think?”

“Joe?”

“That’s why he’s an obstetrician. He only likes happy medicine.”

Who told her obstetrics was happy medicine? “It’s got to be hard for everyone.”

“Susie’s here every day,” Mrs. Stern said. “She’s been bringing the twins, shows up in the afternoon, lets me take a break. She’s very good at handling all this. I always think she’s the one who should have been a doctor, you know? She’s tougher than Joseph.”

“Joe’s pretty tough, actually —”

She shook her head. “Nah, he’s a cotton ball. He’s like a puff of air. Not like his father. Sometimes all I can think of is the pain he’s in, and watching him trying not to let on that he’s in so much pain.”

I wanted to say something useful. “The medicine,” I fumbled, “should be taking the edge off.”

“How could medicine help you forget, forgive me for saying, that you’re dying?”

A grunt, a hacking cough, and next to the table stood Mr. Stern. Haggard, yes, and much too thin, but dressed neatly in a soft cotton button-down and striped trousers. I had expected a bathrobe and a grizzly beard. Joe was holding his arm.

“Mr. Stern.” I stood up, wasn’t sure what to do, and decided to go for a handshake, but the old man gave me a hug. He wasn’t so old, actually. He just smelled that way—menthol and mothballs — and felt that way through the loose cotton of his shirt.

“You look good, Pete. Fatherhood becomes you.” Niels Stern had a much softer accent than his wife, even though he was older when he arrived in this country, twelve to her nine. He’d lost four older half brothers himself in the Holocaust, plus a half-dozen nieces and nephews, all four grandparents, a trembling quantity of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and who knows how many friends. His father had been the assistant rabbi in a middle-class suburb of Berlin; he got out of
the country even after the immigration quotas started to seize up, owing to some little-known clergy exception. Mr. Stern used to tell the story all the time, how his family headed first to Memphis and then soon enough to San Francisco, Newark, and finally Philly, where they spent the rest of their lives—his father, his sisters, and a mother so homesick that when she died three years after they settled in Tacony, everyone said it was from heartbreak, even though it was probably colon cancer, just like her son’s.

“You don’t have to look at me that way, Pete,” Mr. Stern said. “Between you and my son, a man could get a complex. Nettie, you got any soup for these boys?”

“Who said anything about soup?”

“I thought you were going to make me some soup.”

“I made blintzes.”

“Ma, you didn’t have to do that.” But I could tell Joe was thrilled that she did. Mrs. Stern’s blintzes were heavenly, ethereal things: linen-pale crepes filled with sweet cheese and fried in butter. Joe used to come home from Pitt on spare weekends just to eat his fill.

“Shush,” his mother said. “I didn’t do it for you. It’s the only thing your father can stand to eat.”

“I wanted soup.”

“I’ll make you soup tonight,” Mrs. Stern said to the dying man. “Stop complaining.”

That afternoon, despite ourselves, Joe and I ate six blintzes apiece, drowning in sour cream, cherry preserves on the side. We ate hard biscuits and drank hot tea in glasses and watched Mr. Stern pretend with all of it, funneling some food in a napkin and then retreating to the couch to lie in pain. He ushered us over to talk to him.

“It’s the drugs, you know. They take it all out of me. But on the other hand it feels nice to finally relax.”

“They strong enough, Dad? You want me to get you something stronger?”

“Why stronger? I’m feeling fine.”

“You don’t have to say that if you’re not,” Joe said.

“You think I’m lying to you?”

“You just don’t have to be Superman, Dad. If you want stronger pills, just let me know.”

“Let me be,” his father said. “My doctors here are doing a fine job. Be my son, not my oncologist, huh? Pass me that blanket over there?”

Joe tugged the blanket over his father’s bony shoulders. The old man sighed, sank himself into the couch. Joe stood to draw the drapes, then snuck out the double doors into the kitchen. Maybe his mother was right, that Joe was, despite his years of medical training, a cotton ball.

“So what are you reading these days, Peter?”

“Good question,” I stalled. The last book I’d finished even a chapter of was
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
a copy of which we’d had in our bedroom for four years, tempting us, tempting fate.

“It’s hard, I suppose, with a new baby on your hands. No time to really dive into a book.”

“I was thinking of picking up
Moby Dick
again,” I said, which was true—I’d been thinking about that book ever since Joe told me about his father’s diagnosis. I’d never managed more than seventy pages the first time around, even after Mr. Stern’s endorsement.

“Ah,
Moby Dick.”
The old man smiled, and his chapped gray lips turned rosy. “Our old favorite, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

He turned his gaze to the wall, turned to oratory. “All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift,
sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

“You’re just showing off now.”

“That’s right.” Mr. Stern chuckled. “It’s my privilege.”

We listened, then, to the noises of his disease — intestinal gurgles, the soft whoosh of his labored breath—all alongside the sounds that had accompanied Mr. Stern’s home life for almost forty years, the creaks of gravity buffeting the old row house, his wife’s footsteps and the faucet in the kitchen, his son in the hallway, pacing. Mr. Stern sighed with wistful pleasure. The things we’ll miss aren’t the Caribbean islands we’ll never see, the bosomy blond we’ll never share a shower with, the million dollars we’ll never spend on the shopping spree of our lives. Instead — and maybe everyone else already knew this, but it felt, on that couch, like a revelation to me—what we’ll miss is our wife’s callused hands. The worn porcelain in the upstairs bath. The couch we read five hundred books on late at night, the perchloroethylene stink on our pants, the luxury of our shoulders sinking into these good, soft cushions.

He turned his head from the wall, and it was possible his face had a little more color. “So when I’m gone, you and Joe will watch out for each other?”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Stern,” I said, sounding more than I would have wished like an abashed teenager.

“You’ll watch out for each other,” he said. “Like you’ve always done.”

“We will.”

“It’s a nice thing to have friends, Peter,” Mr. Stern said. He closed his eyes. “You boys are very lucky.”