All the Time in the World (27 page)

“What are you crying for?” my brother shouted. “You wanted to get rid of things, didn’t you?”

A FEW WEEKS
later my aunt phoned again and said she thought it would be necessary to have another letter from Jack. Grandma had fallen out of her chair and bruised herself and was very depressed.

“How long does this go on?” my mother said.

“It’s not so terrible,” my aunt said, “for the little time left to make things easier for her.”

My mother slammed down the phone. “He can’t even die when he wants to!” she cried. “Even death comes second to Mama! What are they afraid of, the shock will kill her? Nothing can kill her. She’s indestructible! A stake through the heart couldn’t kill her!”

When I sat down in the kitchen to write the letter I found it more difficult than the first one. “Don’t watch me,” I said to my brother. “It’s hard enough.”

“You don’t have to do something just because someone wants you to,” Harold said. He was two years older than me and had started at City College; but when my father became ill he had switched to night school and gotten a job in a record store.

“Dear Mama,” I wrote. “I hope you’re feeling well. We’re all fit as a fiddle. The life here is good and the people are very friendly and informal. Nobody wears suits and ties here. Just a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. Perhaps a sweater in the evening. I have bought into a very successful radio and record business and
I’m doing very well. You remember Jack’s Electric, my old place on Forty-third Street? Well, now it’s Jack’s Arizona Electric and we have a line of television sets as well.”

I sent that letter off to my aunt Frances, and as we all knew she would, she phoned soon after. My brother held his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Frances with her latest review,” he said.

“Jonathan? You’re a very talented young man. I just wanted to tell you what a blessing your letter was. Her whole face lit up when I read the part about Jack’s store. That would be an excellent way to continue.”

“Well, I hope I don’t have to do this anymore, Aunt Frances. It’s not very honest.”

Her tone changed. “Is your mother there? Let me talk to her.”

“She’s not here,” I said.

“Tell her not to worry,” my aunt said. “A poor old lady who has never wished anything but the best for her will soon die.”

I did not repeat this to my mother, for whom it would have been one more in the family anthology of unforgivable remarks. But then I had to suffer it myself for the possible truth it might embody. Each side defended its position with rhetoric, but I, who wanted peace, rationalized the snubs and rebuffs each inflicted on the other, taking no stands, like my father himself.

Years ago his life had fallen into a pattern of business failures and missed opportunities. The great debate between his family on the one side, and my mother Ruth on the other, was this: who was responsible for the fact that he had not lived up to anyone’s expectations?

As to the prophecies, when spring came my mother’s prevailed. Grandma was still alive.

One balmy Sunday my mother and brother and I took the bus to the Beth El cemetery in New Jersey to visit my father’s grave. It
was situated on a slight rise. We stood looking over rolling fields embedded with monuments. Here and there processions of black cars wound their way through the lanes, or clusters of people stood at open graves. My father’s grave was planted with tiny shoots of evergreen but it lacked a headstone. We had chosen one and paid for it and then the stonecutters had gone on strike. Without a headstone my father did not seem to be honorably dead. He didn’t seem to me properly buried.

My mother gazed at the plot beside his, reserved for her coffin. “They were always too fine for other people,” she said. “Even in the old days on Stanton Street. They put on airs. Nobody was ever good enough for them. Finally Jack himself was not good enough for them. Except to get them things wholesale. Then he was good enough for them.”

“Mom, please,” my brother said.

“If I had known. Before I ever met him he was tied to his mama’s apron strings. And Essie’s apron strings were like chains, let me tell you. We had to live where we could be near them for the Sunday visits. Every Sunday, that was my life, a visit to Mamaleh. Whatever she knew I wanted, a better apartment, a stick of furniture, a summer camp for the boys, she spoke against it. You know your father, every decision had to be considered and reconsidered. And nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.”

She began to cry. We sat her down on a nearby bench. My brother walked off and read the names on stones. I looked at my mother, who was crying, and I went off after my brother.

“Mom’s still crying,” I said. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s what she came here for.”

“Yes,” I said, and then a sob escaped from my throat. “But I feel like crying too.”

My brother Harold put his arm around me. “Look at this old
black stone here,” he said. “The way it’s carved. You can see the changing fashion in monuments—just like everything else.”

SOMEWHERE IN THIS TIME
I began dreaming of my father. Not the robust father of my childhood, the handsome man with healthy pink skin and brown eyes and a mustache and the thinning hair parted in the middle. My dead father. We were taking him home from the hospital. It was understood that he had come back from death. This was amazing and joyous. On the other hand, he was terribly mysteriously damaged, or, more accurately, spoiled and unclean. He was very yellowed and debilitated by his death, and there were no guarantees that he wouldn’t soon die again. He seemed aware of this and his entire personality was changed. He was angry and impatient with all of us. We were trying to help him in some way, struggling to get him home, but something prevented us, something we had to fix, a tattered suitcase that had sprung open, some mechanical thing: he had a car but it wouldn’t start; or the car was made of wood; or his clothes, which had become too large for him, had caught in the door. In one version he was all bandaged and as we tried to lift him from his wheelchair into a taxi the bandage began to unroll and catch in the spokes of the wheelchair. This seemed to be some unreasonableness on his part. My mother looked on sadly and tried to get him to cooperate.

That was the dream. I shared it with no one. Once when I woke, crying out, my brother turned on the light. He wanted to know what I’d been dreaming but I pretended I didn’t remember. The dream made me feel guilty. I felt guilty
in
the dream too because my enraged father knew we didn’t want to live with him. The dream represented us taking him home, or trying to, but it
was nevertheless understood by all of us that he was to live alone. He was this derelict back from death, but what we were doing was taking him to some place where he would live by himself without help from anyone until he died again.

At one point I became so fearful of this dream that I tried not to go to sleep. I tried to think of good things about my father and to remember him before his illness. He used to call me “matey.” “Hello, matey,” he would say when he came home from work. He always wanted us to go someplace—to the store, to the park, to a ball game. He loved to walk. When I went walking with him he would say: “Hold your shoulders back, don’t slump. Hold your head up and look at the world. Walk as if you meant it!” As he strode down the street his shoulders moved from side to side, as if he was hearing some kind of cakewalk. He moved with a bounce. He was always eager to see what was around the corner.

THE NEXT REQUEST
for a letter coincided with a special occasion in the house: my brother Harold had met a girl he liked and had gone out with her several times. Now she was coming to our house for dinner.

We had prepared for this for days, cleaning everything in sight, giving the house a going-over, washing the dust of disuse from the glasses and good dishes. My mother came home early from work to get the dinner going. We opened the gateleg table in the living room and brought in the kitchen chairs. My mother spread the table with a laundered white cloth and put out her silver. It was the first family occasion since my father’s illness.

I liked my brother’s girlfriend a lot. She was a thin girl with very straight hair and she had a terrific smile. Her presence seemed to excite the air. It was amazing to have a living breathing
girl in our house. She looked around and what she said was: “Oh, I’ve never seen so many books!” While she and my brother sat at the table my mother was in the kitchen putting the food into serving bowls and I was going from the kitchen to the living room, kidding around like a waiter, with a white cloth over my arm and a high style of service, placing the serving dish of green beans on the table with a flourish. In the kitchen my mother’s eyes were sparkling. She looked at me and nodded and mimed the words: “She’s adorable!”

My brother suffered himself to be waited on. He was wary of what we might say. He kept glancing at the girl—her name was Susan—to see if we met with her approval. She worked in an insurance office and was taking courses in accounting at City College. Harold was under a terrible strain but he was excited and happy too. He had bought a bottle of Concord-grape wine to go with the roast chicken. He held up his glass and proposed a toast. My mother said: “To good health and happiness,” and we all drank, even I. At that moment the phone rang and I went into the bedroom to get it.

“Jonathan? This is your aunt Frances. How is everyone?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“I want to ask one last favor of you. I need a letter from Jack. Your grandma’s very ill. Do you think you can?”

“Who is it?” my mother called from the living room.

“Okay, Aunt Frances,” I said quickly. “I have to go now, we’re eating dinner.” And I hung up the phone.

“It was my friend Louie,” I said, sitting back down. “He didn’t know the math pages to review.”

The dinner was very fine. Harold and Susan washed the dishes and by the time they were done my mother and I had folded up the gateleg table and put it back against the wall and I had swept the
crumbs up with the carpet sweeper. We all sat and talked and listened to records for a while and then my brother took Susan home. The evening had gone very well.

ONCE WHEN MY MOTHER
wasn’t home my brother had pointed out something: the letters from Jack weren’t really necessary. “What is this ritual?” he said, holding his palms up. “Grandma is almost totally blind, she’s half deaf and crippled. Does the situation really call for a literary composition? Does it need verisimilitude? Would the old lady know the difference if she was read the phone book?”

“Then why did Aunt Frances ask me?”

“That is the question, Jonathan. Why did she? After all, she could write the letter herself—what difference would it make? And if not Frances, why not Frances’ sons, the Amherst students? They should have learned by now to write.”

“But they’re not Jack’s sons,” I said.

“That’s exactly the point,” my brother said. “The idea is
service
. Dad used to bust his balls getting them things wholesale, getting them deals on things. Frances of Westchester really needed things at cost. And Aunt Molly. And Aunt Molly’s husband, and Aunt Molly’s ex-husband. Grandma, if she needed an errand done. He was always on the hook for something. They never thought his time was important. They never thought every favor he got was one he had to pay back. Appliances, records, watches, china, opera tickets, any goddamn thing. Call Jack.”

“It was a matter of pride to him to be able to do things for them,” I said. “To have connections.”

“Yeah, I wonder why,” my brother said. He looked out the window.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that I was being implicated.

“You should use your head more,” my brother said.

YET I HAD AGREED
once again to write a letter from the desert and so I did. I mailed it off to Aunt Frances. A few days later, when I came home from school, I thought I saw her sitting in her car in front of our house. She drove a black Buick Roadmaster, a very large clean car with whitewall tires. It was Aunt Frances all right. She blew the horn when she saw me. I went over and leaned in at the window.

“Hello, Jonathan,” she said. “I haven’t long. Can you get in the car?”

“Mom’s not home,” I said. “She’s working.”

“I know that. I came to talk to you.”

“Would you like to come upstairs?”

“I can’t, I have to get back to Larchmont. Can you get in for a moment, please?”

I got in the car. My aunt Frances was a very pretty white-haired woman, very elegant, and she wore tasteful clothes. I had always liked her and from the time I was a child she had enjoyed pointing out to everyone that I looked more like her son than Jack’s. She wore white gloves and held the steering wheel and looked straight ahead as she talked, as if the car was in traffic and not sitting at the curb.

“Jonathan,” she said, “there is your letter on the seat. Needless to say I didn’t read it to Grandma. I’m giving it back to you and I won’t ever say a word to anyone. This is just between us. I never expected cruelty from you. I never thought you were capable of doing something so deliberately cruel and perverse.”

I said nothing.

“Your mother has very bitter feelings and now I see she has poisoned
you with them. She has always resented the family. She is a very strong-willed, selfish person.”

“No she isn’t,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to agree. She drove poor Jack crazy with her demands. She always had the highest aspirations and he could never fulfill them to her satisfaction. When he still had his store he kept your mother’s brother, who drank, on salary. After the war when he began to make a little money he had to buy Ruth a mink jacket because she was so desperate to have one. He had debts to pay but she wanted a mink. He was a very special person, my brother, he should have accomplished something special, but he loved your mother and devoted his life to her. And all she ever thought about was keeping up with the Joneses.”

I watched the traffic going up the Grand Concourse. A bunch of kids were waiting at the bus stop at the corner. They had put their books on the ground and were horsing around.