A Friend of the Family (15 page)

“We’ll just take the bus home,” Laura said. “You don’t have to worry.”

“Sounds great,” Iris said. “C’mon, Pete. They’ll be fine.”

“But —,” I said. “But—okay.” I suppose I knew when I was defeated. I closed the door but powered down the window so I could continue talking at my son. “Listen, do you need some money?” I asked, which was code for, You’re still just a child, you know, don’t get ahead of yourself. Which was code for, Don’t you forget you still live in my house.

“No, dad,” Alec said. “I’m cool.”

“You are? You’re cool?”

But before he could say another word, Iris had jolted us out of the garage and onto Fifty-fifth Street, east toward the FDR, and because there was no traffic, because it was a balmy January Saturday, because there was nothing to keep us in New York City except my son wandering around with a white-bellied baby killer, within fifteen minutes we were on the Palisades.

“Pete, you want to go to the Meadowlands tonight?” Joe asked me, turning around to face me in the backseat. In the very rear of the car, Neal was nuzzling the Red Menace.

“Not really,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“But don’t you want to see LeBron James? We could get some floor seats, that can’t be too hard.”

“Not tonight, Joe.”

“But—”

“I said I don’t want to see the goddamn game,” I said, and I brooded the whole of the Palisades, down Maycrest Avenue, and all the way to our front door.

T
HE BIG YELLOW
house on Pearl Street was always, if we dwelled on it, too big. Victorians were built for Victorians, which is to say people born into an age without either reliable birth control or a postwar infertility epidemic; we had four bedrooms. Each was small except for the master bedroom, which the previous owners had made by merging two of the larger bedrooms; they had also added on, at presumably great expense, a four-piece bath. But the rest were no larger than certain walk-in closets I had seen, and when I got home to an empty house, I peered into each of them, looking for who or what, of course, I had no idea. My son’s bedroom had been stripped
bare before he set off for college, stripped down to the duct tape he’d used to tape up his huge Escher poster and his Kandinsky prints, and now that he’d moved back home, the floor was cluttered with the Bed Bath and Beyond crap we’d bought him before his initial departure: cardboard dressers, toiletry caddies, a gorgeous Samsonite suitcase. His bed, an extralong double that took up three-quarters of the floor space, was sloppy and unmade, sheets crumpled back to reveal the stained white mattress we’d gotten him as a high school freshman, when he’d cracked six foot two. I surveyed the mess, then called Elaine’s cell phone. She didn’t pick up.

It was dimmer than it should have been; one of the lights in the overhead fixture had burned out. I took a step stool from the hall closet. I changed the lightbulb. How many internists does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one on this quiet January night. I screwed in the bulb and put back the step stool. We’d moved into this house from the two-bedroom in Morningside Heights that we’d rented for a song. I was a third-year resident, Elaine was working on her dissertation, and no babies, no babies — but we saw this house and it was too big and too expensive and we were well aware of all that. Yet the thought of all these rooms filled with our future family made us feel safe enough, I think, to try it anyway.

I pulled up the mattress cover, the dark blue sheets on my son’s bed. I pulled back the curtains; 5 p.m. and dark out already like midnight, but the lamplights on Pearl Street were glowing. I wanted to clean up the rest of his room but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where his stuff belonged, and I didn’t want to open his closet and uncover whatever secret things he kept there. Instead, I sat down on his floor.

The Sterns had moved to Round Hill two years after we did, bought themselves a large, fancy house without worrying how they’d
pay for it — Iris had just scored a job at Merrill — or how they’d fill it with children. A sprawling split-level, five bedrooms plus the rec room, and I remembered how Elaine and I oohed and aahed our way through it on our first tour, which Joe and Iris led hand in hand. Then we sat at their new kitchen table, glass and brass, and wolfed down pepperoni pizza.

“Iris isn’t convinced we’ll like it here,” Joe said, perhaps less diplomatic than he should have been considering we were the ones who’d talked them into moving to Round Hill. But Joe was never particularly diplomatic on more than one beer.

“No, that’s not what I said,” Iris said. “I’m just still wondering if we should have bought in the city. Or just thinking about what it would have been like.”

“Did you really want to live in the city?” Elaine asked. This was 1984, after all, when Columbus Avenue was still considered a frightening thoroughfare and only the suicidal strayed north of 125th.

“Well, I always thought it might be nice to have something in the Village. Maybe a little townhouse, I don’t know.”

“Not enough space,” Joe said.

“I didn’t want to live in New York City, anyway,” said Laura, who appeared in the kitchen doorway with a book jammed under her arm. Her red hair was long and stringy, falling in front of her eyes. I guess she was eight then. “It’s dirty there.”

“It’s not dirty, sweetie,” said Iris. “It’s interesting.”

“There’s garbage on the street.”

Iris shot me a look, as though I was supposed to defend her. I rose to the occasion. “It might have been a decent investment. And a fun place for you, Laura.”

“We wouldn’t have had enough bedrooms,” Joe said.

“It would
not
have been fun,” Laura said.

“All right, all right,” Iris said. “We were never going to live in the city, I get it.”

“How many bedrooms does a family really need?” I asked.

“Five?” Joe shrugged. “Six?”

“Six?”

“It’s hard to know,” he said, passing Laura a slice of pizza, “but we might end up needing six.”

My wife and I met each other’s eyes, trying not to seem aghast. Six bedrooms. Five children. Here we were on year four of inexplicable infertility, and the idea of even one child seemed like such a miracle. Iris stood, grabbed two beers from the fridge, cracked them both, and handed one to me. Our fingers brushed against each other’s.

“Well, you guys have a bunch of bedrooms, right?” she asked. “Six may sound like a lot, but, you know … these Round Hill houses are spacious.”

Elaine and I looked at each other. What overkill, what narcissism, what stupid hopes we’d had. “Our bedrooms are small,” I said. Joe and Iris knew we wanted children, but I don’t think they ever realized just how much. This was not the sort of thing one talked about in those days, not even to one’s closest friends. And I didn’t want to embarrass my wife.

We were all quiet then as we watched Laura dissect her pizza, handing the pepperoni to Elaine, who quietly tucked it into a napkin. I remember thinking that Elaine would have such fun with a daughter. A long-haired, bookish daughter.

“You done with your pizza, sweetheart?”

“I’m not really hungry,” Laura said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not even one piece?” Joe asked.

Laura poked at her slice a bit sadly. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

“You don’t have to apologize,” said Elaine, pushing the girl’s stringy red hair softly out of her eyes.

“Thanks,” Laura said, sliding out of her chair, giving Elaine a grateful smile. I watched my inexplicably infertile wife watch Laura leave the kitchen. That night I held her close to me and told her that I was so sorry.

I
T’S ALMOST MIDNIGHT
now and I watch the lights in the house snap off one by one. Kitchen, television, living room, hall. My son’s room, the former master bedroom, where Elaine can no longer bear to sleep — those are the lights that go off last. I sit by the window and inspect the house for a while. It’s time to repaint the siding, really, or even replace it, and even though it’s ugly, we should probably go vinyl, for upkeep’s sake. If Elaine really intends to kick me out, I’ll make arrangements to do this before I leave. It’s not the sort of thing she likes to deal with, hiring contractors, comparing estimates. There’s a guy across the street from my office in Bergentown, he has a siding and trim business, and he’d probably do a decent job for not too much money. I’ll call him Wednesday morning, after I know what’s what. I wonder if they’ll be able to side it this shade of green.

I’m interrupted in my musings by a knock on the door, and my heart flips for a minute. The Craig boy? Has he followed me here? No, even more unexpected: my wife, holding two travel mugs. “Tea,” she says. She’s wearing sweatpants, a denim jacket. In the months I’ve been living in the studio, the months of our marriage’s strange illness, she’s never visited me this late at night before.

“That’s nice. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Like everyone in Round Hill, Elaine’s having a hard time putting aside the accusations against me. I think this hurts her even more than it hurts me.

“I put some honey in it,” she says.

“That’s great,” I say. “Thank you.”

My travel mug is a party favor from Janene Rothman’s kid’s bat mitzvah. Elaine watches me while I drink; she’s still standing there on the rickety wood landing outside my door. “Do you want to come in?”

“Iris says Joe’s trying to reach you.”

“I know.”

“She says you’re not picking up your phone.”

“I’m not.”

“She wants to know why.” Elaine and Iris, former sorority sisters and best of friends, have, of course, suffered a weakened bond in the aftermath of everything that happened, which I find sad. Iris is no longer prone to just stopping by our house during a jog around the neighborhood, as far as I can tell, nor do they go on joint shopping expeditions, nor do they meet at the Garland Chophouse for the occasional postwork drink. But it seems at least they still chat sometimes.

“I don’t feel like talking to him, I guess.”

“Do you know why he’s calling?” She holds the travel mug to her chest, to the space between her breasts.

I haven’t told anyone, not even her. But back when I was taking care of Roseanne Craig, I said to Joe, I have a patient who seems a little depressed, and ignoring medical ethics entirely, I even told him her name. Joe was my best friend, and sometimes we talked like that. We used to talk about everything. Joe said, You should check for several things besides depression. You shouldn’t take it for granted that
she’s depressed. I ignored him. I had other things on my mind. And now there’s the malpractice case, and all Joe has to say to her family’s lawyer is, I told him so. I told him what to check for. If he’d listened to me, the outcome would have been fine. And then the judge would find me guilty, and I would have to pay up, big-time. I would have to pay for all these wrongs I’ve done to the Craigs, but also, and maybe more importantly, to Joe.

“What is it?” Elaine asks. “Maybe he’s reaching out in friendship?” It amazes me still, her tendency toward optimism.

“I doubt that.”

“Well, Iris wanted me to let you know,” she says. “Maybe you should change your mind and pick up the phone.” Her tone is gentle, but she has an unsure look on her face. She’s going to see the lawyer in two days. What will Alec think when I’m homeless, wifeless, jobless? Will he feel sorry for me then?

“Do you want to come in?” I ask again.

She shakes her head no, pushes a stray piece of blondish hair behind her ear, and retreats back down the steps. I watch her to make sure she gets back in safely, and then I sit down on the steps to consider re-siding the house and drink my tea.

M
Y FATHER DIED
on a cloudy, windless Monday, Valentine’s Day, 2005. His passing was more unexpected than Joe’s father’s, and less melodramatic — exactly how I’d like to go out sometime in the blurry future. He’d taken my mother for a romantic two-for-one lobster lunch at Geno’s on the Hudson (damn the kashrut on a holiday named for a saint), come home, sat down in his old cracked chair in the foyer. When my mother came to bring him his ritual glass of ginger ale before the
Dr. Phil
show, she found him cold and pale, nose tipped up as if he was sleeping. If he hadn’t been so cold, she said, she might not have known at first. Myocardial infarction.

My father was eighty-one years old, healthy as far as eighty-one-year-olds went, a cautious man, a gentleman. He was the person who taught me right from wrong, who took the jigsaw puzzle of the world and made it into a simple picture: work hard, stay safe, do better than your own dad. When the cold war ended and the Soviet Union finally fell, my father celebrated his vindication with a small glass of vodka, the only irony I’d ever known him to perform. My mother called me on my cell phone and said, “I think something’s wrong with your father,” not because she didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but because she didn’t want to upset me. I drove to Yonkers more slowly than I should have. Phil was already there when I arrived.

“He died forty minutes ago,” my brother said at the door, his face maybe a bit more pale than usual, but calm. He was dressed in the callously expensive way of a partner at a Manhattan law firm: wide-wale corduroys, French-cuffed shirt, pale blue cashmere sweater. There was a trickle of something whitish, sputum, near his neat ivory collar. Phil had tried to give my father mouth-to-mouth. “Mom’s with him at Montefiore.”

“Excuse me?”

“A heart attack,” Phil said. “The EMTs took him to Montefiore.”

“And you think he’s dead?” I said, because it was just like that for my brother to announce that our father was dead, and just like that for me to fight with him about what should have been indisputable fact. Because I was one year older, and I was the doctor, and I was the one who would have known whether my father was dead. Not Phil.

“As soon as he got to the hospital,” my brother said. “They tried to revive him—they had defibrillators, but I guess it was too late. I was waiting for you to get here.” He eyed me. “What took you so long, anyway? Was there traffic?”

“What do you mean, he’s dead?” I was the doctor, but this made as much sense to me as it would have to a child. My father wasn’t dead. In the past five years we’d gotten his LDL down to 130, his HDL elevated, his triglycerides stable. He had done a CT scan less than a year ago, showed a promising lack of calcium in the arteries, and had no C-reactive protein. He was on Sectral, a beta-blocker, and a low dosage of Lasix, a diuretic, so we’d managed to get his blood pressure down to 140/90, which wasn’t too terrible, all things considered. And I was on him about his diet. I’d gotten him to cut out the occasional cigar. And therefore he was still alive.

“Right there,” my brother said, pointing to the worn leather armchair, the television, muted but still turned on. Phil drew himself up to his full six foot three. “Let’s get to the hospital.”

“I don’t—”

“He’s dead, Pete,” Phil said. “The EMTs couldn’t resuscitate him. So let’s get out of here, okay? I don’t want to leave Mom by herself.” He looked down at his sweater, caught sight of the sputum, wiped at it disgustedly with his sleeve.

My phone rang and it was Elaine. I told her what had happened, and she let out a yelp of surprise or anguish and burst into tears. She said she’d meet us at Montefiore, but for some reason I could not imagine making it to Montefiore. I sat down in my father’s chair.

“So you’re not gonna go?”

“Just give me a second, Phil, okay?”

He shook his head, paced around the small living room, breathing out his nose forcefully, like an animal. I pretended not to notice. I felt the smooth leather of the chair under my arms, imagined I could still feel the warmth of my father’s body pressing down on the chair’s coils and springs.

“You were stuck in traffic, Pete?”

“Phil, you’re not blaming me for this.”

“Let’s just not make it any worse than it already is,” he said. He wouldn’t stop pacing around the room. He was leaving a trail in the deep burgundy pile. “Let’s get to Mom.”

He was blaming me for this. I guess I understood; I was blaming myself. I closed my eyes. I could not imagine making it to the hospital. I could not imagine leaving this chair, this carpet, this apartment where I’d grown up. It smelled like a million meals, pot roast, Sabbath candles, my childhood, defibrillators, EMTs.

“We’ve got to go, Pete,” Phil said. “Or I’ll just go without you, if you can’t handle it.”

At the hospital I held my mother and looked at my father’s body, stroked his hand, saw the gray in his skin and his eyes, but it was only after I talked to the doctors in the ER—plaque rupture, arrhythmia,
nothing anyone could prevent, just like half a million deaths a year in the United States — it was only after I’d absolved myself that I truly believed my dad was gone.

“There was nothing you could have done, Pete,” my mother said as we drove back to the apartment. She was right. But still, another death on my watch.

A
ND SO, A
year later, February 2006, we left Round Hill for the unveiling before 9 a.m., silently, Alec still half-asleep in the backseat. Elaine drove. Dizinoffs are buried at the Beth David cemetery out along the Queens-Nassau border, right near the Belmont Park racetrack. All four of my grandparents, Aunt Iz and Uncle Nate, my mother’s cousin Louise, who died of diphtheria and whose case was used as a warning to all us kids to button up — they’re all there facing east toward Jerusalem, and we’ve sprung for something called “perpetual care,” which means their graves will never go dusty. We arrived first and tripped our way through other people’s dead families. A crowd of Hasids were shraying near an open pit.

“You okay, Pete?” my wife asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to say that if you’re not,” Elaine said, putting a hand on my arm.

“I’m fine,” I said again, and I shrugged her off.

“This weather,” she said. “Strange, right?” Then she moved toward someone she used to go to grade school with, who by coincidence was buried right near my family.

“Is this where we’ll end up, too?” Alec asked after we’d both placed stones on Uncle Nate and Aunt Iz’s graves. “I never really liked Long Island.”

I shrugged. Actually, Elaine’s parents had given us — as an an
niversary present seven years ago — two plots near the ones they’d picked out for themselves down in Florida. Elaine wrote them a florid thank-you note, knowing, since they were
her
parents and she’d spent a lifetime decoding their bizarre and unwelcome displays of affection, that they really had meant no harm. I was indignant, both at the timing of the event and at the thought of spending eternity at a guano-dusted memorial park near my wife’s parents, but Elaine told me to cool it, we would deal with it later. So far we haven’t.

Alec was kicking at a few dandelions sprouting near Walt, my second cousin once removed. “Because, no offense, this place is really depressing.” Maybe twenty yards from Cousin Walt’s feet, cars cut one another off as they raced toward the Belt Parkway.

“Can you imagine a cemetery that
isn’t
really depressing?”

“No,” Alec said. “It’s not just the death. It’s the whole idea of rotting, too. Your bones putrefying in a mahogany box.” My son was wearing a pale blue shirt, a tie, and khaki pants just a bit too short for him, so I could see the socks he’d stolen from my drawer. His hair was slicked back with too much gel. Even at twenty, he didn’t have much in the way of a beard, still a bit of crusted-over acne along the jawline where some spirals of beard were valiantly trying to push through, and I remembered him at his bar mitzvah, almost as self-assured back then, and almost as tall.

In the distance I saw my brother approach in a long black cashmere coat, Hasid-style, holding my mother’s arm as though she were an invalid, helping her slowly navigate the pebbly path. “Alec.”

“He looks like he’s accompanying the queen,” Alec said out of the side of his mouth. “Look how careful he’s being.”

“Well,” I said mildly, “your uncle likes to be solicitous.”

“That’s because he’s a solicitor.” Alec grinned at his little pun. “But I think you’re wrong. I don’t think he really likes it.”

“Then he’s a good actor,” I said.

“That’s what I think, too.”

“He’s always been a good actor,” I said.

“You either have it or you don’t.”

“Hey, Pete,” Phil said, meeting us on the pebbly path. My mother looked drawn, trembly. She’d suffered her third ministroke two months before, and this one had left the right side of her face sagging.

“Phil,” I said, reaching out to give my brother a hug, heartily false on both our ends.

“Peter,” my mother said. “What a day this is. What a day.” She touched my arm. “Although your father would have liked seeing everyone together.”

“You doing okay, Mom?”

“It was good of Phil to pick me up,” she said, and I pressed my lips together not to say anything. Phil lived fifteen minutes from Yonkers, right on the way to the cemetery. There was enough room in his Range Rover for his whole family plus my mother’s cane, should she need it. Elaine approached, touched me gently on the back, and leaned forward.

“Ruth, hello.”

“Hello, dear,” my mother said, and she let Elaine reach up and press a cheek to hers. Then they stood back and examined each other for a moment the way they always did. Elaine, short and soft and appropriate in a loose, dark coat; my mother, tall and stiff and adamant in the stained, puffy hip-length jacket she’d worn without change or apology three seasons out of four since my father died. “What do I have to get dressed up for?” she’d ask, not looking for an answer.

Phil’s wife and daughters soon appeared by the grave, followed by a small collection of surviving cousins and friends, balding women behind walkers, men stooped and deaf, each grabbing my mother and
rocking back and forth, hugging me, hugging Phil. Then the Sterns approached with Laura, not a surprise. She had shown up again and again since our afternoon at MOMA, rarely going inside the house but sitting on the porch with Alec for hours, chatting about who knows what, me spying, a stooge, in the light of the lamps Elaine and I had found on that long-ago trip to Bedford. Elaine would bring me coffee as I sat stiffly on the couch by the window, holding the same copy of
JAMA,
my vigil stupidly disguised. They never touched, Laura and Alec—I should know, I was hawklike in my observations — and sometimes lapsed into long silences, and Laura always left before midnight. And I suppose I was starting to relax. Sometimes I managed to actually read an article. Sometimes I managed to finish it.

“Uncle Pete.” Phil’s younger daughter, Lindsey, whom I’d always liked the best of that whole bunch, came up to give me a hug. She’d inherited her father’s bony height and her mother’s dramatic French features, beaky nose, and blue black hair, which maybe had she grown up in Paris she could have pulled off, but which in Scarsdale ensured she’d go without a prom date. She was nineteen, studying modern dance at NYU, and Phil wondered openly and cruelly how she’d ever find a husband.

“A whole year without Grandpa,” she said.

“I know, Linds. It’s hard to imagine.” My father had been so wholly charmed by both his granddaughters, but especially this one. I suppose he sensed she needed the greater part of his admiration. I remember, a few years ago, he treated Lindsey to a date at the Rainbow Room, the fanciest place he could think of, the night the rest of her class was jigging at the prom. They listened to Michael Feinstein croon standards and he let her drink as many champagne cocktails as she wanted at fifteen dollars a pop and then took her for a spin on the dance floor because that’s the kind of guy he was.

“I want to call him all the time,” she said. “I keep thinking he could come down to visit, we could go to the Second Avenue Deli or something, we could go to the movies. And then I remember he’s gone.”

“He would have loved that,” I said. “He was an enormous fan of yours.”

“He was an enormous fan of yours, too,” she said. “He really was.”

“Well,” I said, and we reached for anything else to talk about, but of course there was nothing, and soon she, too, was engulfed by the small crowd of aunts, cousins, family friends who wanted to comfort themselves by reaching up to pinch her cheek. Near
RIVKA DIZINOFF
(1915 – 1989), Elaine and the Sterns were talking, and Laura had meandered to the gate by the roadside to try to light a cigarette. In the distance I could see Phil’s diminutive rabbi making his way through the headstones, and I felt myself take several steps backward to distance myself from all of it. In the past year, I’d felt close to my father dozens of times: staring out the window of an Amtrak train, anticipating the first juicy bite of a hamburger, the lousy second half of a Nets game, a drive up the Saw Mill — but right now he was nowhere to me. Another step backward, and I bumped into my son, who was removing himself the same way.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Alec said, his voice tentative. He was still kicking at the nearest flowers. Ten yards away, Laura was staring past the gate, sucking down a Marlboro under a smoky halo.

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s weird, but … but do you think Grandpa’s already disintegrated?” he asked. “I was wondering, how long does it take for a human body to decompose? Is he still actually there? Or are we holding this ceremony for a bunch of bones?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” he said, looked guilty, but I knew he wasn’t being flip — he’d always had a taste for biology—and he stopped kicking at the dandelions and shrugged his hands deep into his pockets. The truth is this was something I, too, had reflected on throughout the year, and it would come to me at odd hours: falling asleep to Elaine’s heavy breathing, waking up to find her already out of bed, that first draining piss of the day, catching my saggy jowls in the mirror over the sink. Age, age, death, and we’re gone.