As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (16 page)

In West Haven they found a little Italian restaurant neither had been to before. Using the restaurant phone, she called the cottage to tell the family she’d be late, but they already knew that. She’d interrupted their meal. With an unsteady hand, she hung up the phone. How easy it was, she realized, as she stumbled back to Tyler, to be left behind. She and Tyler had been seated by a window. Their table was small, intimate, and covered by a white tablecloth. Already the sky outside was growing dark and a waiter came over even before they’d ordered their food to light a candle at the table’s center. As Bec stared into the flame she felt a growing impulse to raise her arms and circle her hands over it just as she was sure her sister Ada had done over the two Sabbath candles at the center of the dining table in Woodmont. Soon their waiter brought them glasses of red wine and a basket of bread. They could have their own Shabbos, she realized. She explained to Tyler about the candles, the wine, and the bread. In the next moment he lifted both a chunk of bread and his glass of wine.

“Good Shabbos, Bec,” he said, so sincerely that for a moment her eyes welled up.

Then she laughed. And he laughed. They clinked glasses, sipped wine, chewed the soft bread. Before long the waiter brought them two plates heaping with summer greens, carrots, and tomatoes. She was hungrier than she’d realized. Tyler kept talking throughout the meal, about the week that he’d spent at the dress shop without her. She nodded as she ate, cheese ravioli that were more delicious than any she’d ever had.

By the time they finished their meal the sky had completely darkened. Only two other couples had come in for dinner, and they sat at tables some distance from hers and Tyler’s. She glanced out the window. There was water out there somewhere, the Long Island Sound, connecting this place with that other place, that cottage at Bagel Beach, but in the dark she couldn’t see it. She turned back to Tyler, who sat with a look of contentment on his face. His gray eyes reflected the glow of the candle’s flame. He was quieter now, having gotten the this-and-that of the week out of his system, but he wasn’t quite ready to go yet, he said, and she agreed, quickly, that neither was she.

They kept sitting like that, serenely, not speaking but enjoying a kind of coupled solitude that made Bec feel as if this little restaurant were there solely to serve them. In the darkness outside the rest of the world had disappeared. Their waiter came by, asking them if they’d like coffee or dessert, and Bec was taken by the mellifluousness of his voice. He too seemed to be there solely for them. Whatever they wanted, he said. That was what was for dessert. Then he added, joking, but better to order tiramisu, or maybe, a little lighter, some sherbet.

They sat, they smiled, they sipped coffee, and for the first time in a public place, they reached for each other’s hands. When had Shabbos ever been this lovely? Bec began to wonder.

When had she ever felt this much at the center of it, this loved, this well fed?

When had she, single and childless, ever been anything but a stranger, really—a guest, an extra—at the family Shabbos meal? And how strange not to have felt the weight of it, her years and years of Sabbath loneliness.

But she didn’t even realize Shabbos
was
lonely until just then, when it suddenly wasn’t anymore.

She began to shake her head, a measure of her bewilderment, then to nod over and over until Tyler understood from the insistent repetition the depth of what she was saying to him, that she would go to New York, begin that new life, and as he straightened in his chair and cleared his throat as if to speak, it soon became obvious he couldn’t speak, could only do as she was doing: the nodding, the silent
yes,
over and over again.

B
ec’s house that I’ve inherited is in Middletown. Not New Haven. Nor New York. She lived in the house with my uncle, Nelson Leibritsky, not Tyler McMannus. That is to say, she became Mrs. Nelson Leibritsky—sister-in-law to her sister Ada—and never, even unofficially, Mrs. Tyler McMannus. But with Nelson’s death occurring so many years before Bec’s, I can hardly find a trace of him here.

The few belongings of Nelson’s that Bec kept I found, aptly enough for a basement fan like Nelson, in this home’s basement. Tonight is Halloween, and earlier in the day I decided to come to the house to put the lights on, as if to woo the parade of small costumed souls who will ring the doorbell in hopes of a treat if they see someone is at home. Bec was always well stocked for Halloween and I’d made sure to bring multiple bags of Tootsie Rolls, Nelson’s favorite candy.

But in the basement, looking for holiday decorations, I found nothing beyond the predictable washer and dryer and furnace until I came to some boxes lined up against a wall and marked, plainly enough,
Nelson.
The contents, I saw, were Nelson’s LPs from yesteryear: Frank Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey band, Ella Fitzgerald singing with Chick Webb’s group, a solo album of Rosemary Clooney and another of Dean Martin. But as I flipped through the stacks I saw that more than those solo artists, Nelson collected recordings of the big bands of his youth. There was Johnny Mercer and Glenn Miller, more Tommy Dorsey, and finally I came to a series of recordings by Benny Goodman.

Everybody knew that “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing)” was Nelson’s all-time favorite—many a time we must have heard the music, or at least its signature drumming, rising from the basement of Leibritsky’s Department Store; Nelson, contrary perhaps to his own view of things, was hardly hiding down there—and finding a recording of it, lifting the old album from the box, felt almost like I was exhuming Nelson from the grave. The impulse to play it was irresistible, and so I climbed the stairs, laid the record on the turntable of the living room’s antiquated music system, and dropped the needle. It began: that inimitable tom-tom beat of the drums, then the roar of trombones, then trumpets, and finally it was Goodman himself, wailing on his clarinet. But always the music returned to the drums, “the drumbeats of God,” Nelson once said in a rare moment of speaking up at a family meal in Middletown. The genius of drummer Gene Krupa was just a contrivance, Nelson urged us to understand, a way for God to tell us all to wake up, to be sure we felt something of our own heart’s beating.

“Who doesn’t feel
that?
” I remember Davy asking Nelson, surprised, his hand pressed against his chest. And such a memory dates the occasion: a Sabbath meal in Middletown in the weeks before we left for Woodmont in 1948, Nelson then still a bachelor—always the bachelor, everyone assumed—and invited to our home for the evening, and Davy throughout the meal staring at Nelson’s suit jacket as if by so doing he could bring forth the Tootsie Rolls Nelson was sure to be pocketing there.

“Everyone knows their hearts are beating,” Davy insisted. He was smiling as he said the words, his hand still pressed to his chest.

But Nelson didn’t grin back. He said, his face dour, his tone just the tiniest bit angry, “Not everyone, boy. Not everyone.”

Upon saying those words Nelson reached into a suit pocket and, just as Davy had anticipated, he pulled out a Tootsie Roll, then ate the thing even though his plate was still full of my mother’s roast chicken and potato kugel.

Davy watched in disbelief as Nelson unwrapped, chewed, and swallowed the candy. Davy even turned to our father, as if expecting him to scold Nelson just as he would one of us if we were to pop a chocolate into our mouth in the middle of a meal.

But Mort pretended not to see, and following his lead, neither did Ada or Howard. Even I looked away.

“Can I have one?” Davy finally said, turning Nelson’s way.

“When you finish,” my mother answered.

“But—” Davy began.

“No buts,” Mort said.

“But—” Davy tried again.

Ada reached over, pointing her fork at Davy’s plate.

Davy, confused, turned toward Nelson, then toward one parent, then the next. He was clearly dying to finish his sentence, to argue his case further. The inequities of the situation were glaring.

“Tell you what,” Nelson told him. “You listen to ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ sometime with me at the store and I’ll give you two candies. And if it gets your heart going like it does mine, going so that you know for sure it’s going, I’ll give you three.”

But we left for the summer before Davy got his chance at those three candies, his chance to listen to the music with Nelson, who was telling Davy, telling us, what it was to be depressed. You can’t even feel your own heart beating. And that news, at least to my parents who pretended not to hear it, was shameful.

Instead, before he could ever take Nelson up on his offer, Davy’s was the heart, young as it was, that literally stopped beating. And some time after that Nelson’s figurative ticker began to revive, to beat once again such that he could feel it, though he was already middle-aged and had assumed, for so long, that he’d always exist in the numbness of his solitude. The night of that Shabbos meal Bec was in New Haven, living a life that included her secret love for Tyler McMannus. It was only after Davy died that she was present often enough in Middletown for Nelson to get to know her, then to find in her a companionship he deeply longed for, then to marry her and live with her in this house. In Bec’s living room this afternoon my foot tapped to the drums of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and though I knew theirs was a union born of loss and marked by loss, somehow under the music’s spell—the drums of God, yes, yes!—it seemed entirely possible that they did what people do, perfectly ordinary people, people all over the world and for all time: they became better acquainted, grew to like each other, and, redeeming years of loneliness and years of secrets and years of half-lived lives, they fell in love.

But that’s not how it went. Rather, three years after Davy died Bec indeed married Nelson. It was enough love for Nelson—transforming love, in fact—but for Bec it was not love at all.

She loved, with all her heart, Tyler McMannus. But in the aftermath of the accident that would ultimately take Davy’s life, while he was still alive and in the Milford hospital, while there was still reason for hope, she’d made a bargain with God: if Davy lived, she wouldn’t see Tyler that upcoming Friday as they’d secretly planned. And it worked. Davy did live, at least for the next week. So at the week’s end she made another deal: if he continued to live, she wouldn’t see Tyler again. She’d give him up entirely if that’s what it took to keep Davy alive. She would, she implored God; really she would.

But Davy died at the start of the second week following the accident, on an otherwise fine Saturday morning. Bec’s desperate prayers had done nothing to change that.

The funeral was set for Tuesday, and she was to go with the family that Saturday evening back to Middletown, where she would help Ada with the arrangements and with everything else. My mother could barely stand. “Everything else” was just that: rising, sitting, using the toilet, getting dressed, eating, walking, combing her hair. Bec would attend the funeral, of course, and though she wasn’t required like us to sit shiva, she’d nevertheless stay for the formal mourning period of seven days.

“You understand, right?” she asked Tyler from the phone in our Middletown hallway.

“Take all the time you need,” he said.

Two days after the funeral they decided Tyler would drive to Middletown and they’d meet on the Wesleyan University campus, which was within walking distance from our home. There they sat on the steps of an old and towering brownstone building. Before them the campus lawn sloped downhill in a shimmering sheet of newly mowed green. Though it was September already, the semester had yet to start and no one was out. She leaned her head on Tyler’s shoulder as he wrapped his arm around her. They hadn’t seen each other for three weeks, a fact that would normally have been cause for a relieved sense of reunion. But in the wake of the disaster they had almost nothing to say. She cried for the most part, quietly, lifting an embroidered hanky to her eyes every so often. After a while she closed her eyes as she continued to lean on his shoulder.

“I should be going,” she said after a half hour or so had passed. She rose and faced the direction from which she had come. “Ada needs me.”

After she’d begun to walk away from him, she turned back. Tyler was going in the other direction, his fedora in one hand, his limp more noticeable than she’d remembered.

“Careful!” she called. But he didn’t hear her and continued on, almost staggering at times, it seemed to Bec, who hadn’t budged, was still watching, and did so until he’d turned a corner and was no longer within her sight.

After the week of shiva, Bec returned to the cottage for a day and a night, with Ada and Mort this time. They were there to pack and close the place for the season. When they finished, Bec would be dropped off in New Haven to resume her life and my parents would go back to Middletown to resume theirs.

Though she’d come to Woodmont to work, Ada sat for the most part, in one of the chairs that surrounded the kitchen table. She stared dumbly before her, at the walls, the sink, the washing machine. Bec was the one to empty the cabinets and the refrigerator, and it was she who covered the dining table and chairs with one of the old sheets we’d tucked away at the summer’s start. Upstairs, Bec pulled any remaining clothes from the boys’ room, stripped the beds, and smoothed the matching navy bedcovers. In the bathroom she scrubbed the bathtub with the clawed feet, along with the sink and toilet. She left Vivie and Leo’s room alone, as Vivie had said they’d drive out, despite Leo’s aversion to driving distances, and take care of that themselves. She left Ada and Mort’s bedroom alone, too, as they would sleep there that night, and it didn’t seem right to her, going through their things while they were in the cottage with her.

While Bec worked, Mort took care of the outside of the place, sweeping the front porch and stacking the painted metal chairs. He folded and stored the umbrella clothesline. Inside again, he closed and locked the windows throughout the house, except for those of Bec’s sunporch, which she’d crank shut in the morning, and a window in the master bedroom so he and Ada would have air while they slept.

But no one slept that night. Bec tossed and turned on her cot, and throughout the night she heard footsteps upstairs, someone pacing the hallway. When she rose in the morning she was surprised to see that Mort had not been upstairs but had bunked on the sofa bed in the living room.

When Bec reached Ada she winced to see her sister’s eyes circled with dark bags and her thick hair, which she’d forgotten to braid the night before, in a tangle. It took Bec a long time to comb it through and pin it up. It took even more time to get Ada properly bathed and dressed. While the dressing ensued, Mort was downstairs, pacing from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and back again. By the time the sisters were ready to go he was angry with them, impatient, worn out from the extra care his wife needed, which he, in fact, hadn’t provided. Bec had done it all. And she could see from the coolness between them, an almost complete absence of communication, that should she stay on with them she’d continue to do it all, because Davy’s death had caused something terrible to happen between Mort and Ada. He had grown angrier and angrier with her. That morning, as the three sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, he was barely able to look at her.

Who, Bec wondered, was going to nourish Ada in the days to come, provide a shoulder for her to lean on, get her up and dressed, help her make the family’s meals? Certainly we children couldn’t, and shouldn’t, Bec knew. And in the wake of Davy’s death Vivie had taken a step back from the extended family, into her own home, where she was busy consoling an almost inconsolable Nina.

By the time they arrived at Tyler’s dress shop, Bec had made up her mind. She told Mort she’d be only a minute. Inside the shop she waved at Irene, then grabbed Tyler’s arm and pulled him into his office.

“I have to go back to Middletown. Ada needs me. I’m the only one she has.” She leaned toward him, straightened his tie, then held on to it.

He was nodding, quickly, insistently, just as he was that evening—not so long ago—at the little Italian restaurant in West Haven.

“Okay?” she asked. Then she added, “It’s just until she gets on her feet again. Just a little while more.”

Though still nodding, he said, “No, not okay at all.”

They embraced and she told him, “You have no idea what this means to me.”

“Go on,” he said, releasing her from his arms. “I’ll be here, waiting.”

She offered a small smile of gratitude though she knew what she was doing to him, knew from those years of her long-ago engagement what a peculiar hell it was: waiting.

“Just until she’s on her feet,” she said again, and then she kissed his mouth, straightened his tie once more, turned, and left.

Thus in mid-September of 1948 Bec moved in with us, sleeping, though she refused to at first, in Davy’s room, but capitulating to that arrangement, however awkward, after a week or so since it was the only vacant bedroom and she needed among the rooms of our Middletown home just a little space to herself. Nobody minded that she cleared out Davy’s things; nobody minded because nobody knew what to do. Emptying the room of the things that signaled a life that was no longer in it seemed as good a way as any for us to start this new life, a kind of afterlife. She removed his clothes from the drawers of his dresser, his collection of baseball pennants—Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers—his old stuffed teddy. The only thing she left was the picture, almost finished, that Davy and Lucinda Rossetti had drawn together over the summer. She had brought that back with her, in the envelope addressed to Davy at Woodmont. The envelope stayed in Davy’s room, on top of his old dresser.