Blues in the Night (9 page)

As Saunders talked, images of Lenore violently shaking her crying baby forced themselves on me. I felt ill and couldn’t imagine how he lived with the pain.

“Did you believe her?” I recalled what Lenore had told me. That no one believed her about what had happened to Max. No one except Nina.

“I
wanted
to,” he said with sad earnestness. “Lenore’s doctor said hers was a textbook case. He explained that she’d had a postpartum psychotic episode, and everything he said made sense. The symptoms were all there. And Lenore was obviously severely depressed. The day of Max’s funeral she tried to kill herself in jail. She broke a makeup mirror and used a piece to slash her wrists, and she overdosed on medications she’d somehow hoarded. She tried again a few weeks later. I felt terribly sorry for her, and I blamed myself for not having seen the signs, for not having protected Max.”

I didn’t know a pleasant way of bringing up my next question. “You felt sorry for her, but you divorced her.”

He flinched as though I’d struck him, then nodded. “Maybe another man would have been stronger. I couldn’t get past the fact that she’d killed our son. I hired the best criminal defense attorney we could find. I was there for her during the trial, and after. I just couldn’t stay in a marriage that had died.”

There are violent deaths to a marriage, I thought, and there are petty, sordid ones. “What happened during the trial?”

“The jury found her guilty of manslaughter, and the judge decided against jail time. She was in a psychiatric hospital for six months, and as far as I know, she’s been continuing therapy with Dr. Korwin, and on medication.” Saunders sighed. “But I guess the guilt was too much for her.”

I understood now why Lenore had felt she hadn’t deserved a second chance. Connors, of course, had known all along. That’s why he was so sure she’d killed herself.

“Lenore wouldn’t want all of this to come out again,” Saunders said, his tone urgent. “Her mother certainly doesn’t. One of the reasons I returned to L.A. was to get away from the notoriety. The media coverage was worse than the trial.” He was scowling at me, as if I were personally responsible.

“I’m surprised there hasn’t been more coverage here now that you’re running for office,” I said.

“Me, too.” He grimaced. “I’m waiting for the shoe to drop. So far it hasn’t.” He looked at me pointedly.

I pitied the man. If what he told me was true—and why would he lie?—he’d suffered a horrible tragedy, and I had no interest in forcing him or anyone in his family or Lenore’s to relive it. I understood now why Betty Rowan had been evasive when I’d asked her if she knew what Lenore was doing on Laurel Canyon.

But what about the events of last Sunday morning? According to Andy Connors, neither of Saunders’s vehicles had struck Lenore. Still, I was skeptical about Saunders’s story. I wondered whether he’d pursued Lenore—to protect her, as he claimed, or to harass—and forced her into the street; whether he’d seen her lying there, injured, and had decided not to come to the aid of the ex-wife responsible for the death of his son.

fifteen

The vacuum was groaning when I let myself into my parents’ house. After calling “Hello?” and receiving no answer, I went upstairs to my old bedroom and unpacked. I don’t usually spend Friday night with my parents. They live on Gardner, south of Beverly, over a mile from my apartment, and since I don’t drive on the Sabbath, I have to sleep over. Sometimes I prefer the solitude of my apartment, the uninterrupted introspection; sometimes, as my sister Edie claims, I’m determined to prove my postdivorce self-reliance. The truth is that, as comfortable as my parents try to make me feel, since the divorce it’s been odd returning to the bedroom I left when I got married. Like Hardy’s Tess, I am maiden no more, trying to find my place.

I stepped into the hallway, where my brother Joey was pounding on the bathroom door, yelling at my sister Liora to get out and ignoring Noah, who was demanding to know the whereabouts of a tie Joey had borrowed without asking. I find it comforting that, even though half my siblings are married and out of the house, nothing has essentially changed.

Friday afternoon before Shabbat candle lighting in my parents’ home was always frenzied. Hair dryers droning, music blaring, pots clanging, doors slamming, feet pounding up and down the stairs, an occasional expletive, the ensuing rebuke. My mother assigning last-minute chores that we bounced among us like a volleyball. My dad charging into the house, dangerously late as usual. We kids jockeying to be first in the shower and last to set the table or candles, or make sure the refrigerator lightbulb was unscrewed and the oven and clock timer set. On Friday afternoons we were an orchestra warming up, strings and percussion and winds warring in a crescendo of discordant solos until the conductor raised his hands and cacophony was magically transformed into one pure note that soared and swept you with it.

Of course, I vowed Friday afternoons in my own home would be different, calmer. Of course, they weren’t. I suppose there’s a Jewish equivalent of Murphy’s law: No matter how early or late Shabbat begins, you’re always racing to be ready. And maybe that’s the point. The activity bordering on the manic helps me appreciate the serene silence and peace ushered in by the lighting of the candles.

There was a time when I didn’t appreciate Shabbat at all, when I wore the rules and readiness like a straitjacket I longed to throw off, and did, for a while. But that was years ago, when I was hurt and angry and bewildered, looking to blame everyone, especially my parents and God.

My mother was crouching in front of the open oven door, basting something that smelled wonderfully of lemon and garlic and tarragon. I called her name, and she stood up, her face flushed from the oven’s heat, a few dark brown tendrils moist against her forehead.

In a short denim skirt and a white T-shirt, sandals on her tanned legs, she looked closer to forty than her fifty-five years. She has slipped gracefully into middle age and her skin is relatively unwrinkled, although she grumbles that menopause has thickened her body into a size ten, and she frowns, between tints, at the gray that has invaded the shoulder-length, chestnut brown hair she tucks under a hat or a wig whenever she goes out or when we have company.

She beamed at me, her dark brown eyes crinkling in pleasure. “Molly. I didn’t hear you come in.”

With the baster in one hand, she drew me close with her other hand, transformed by an oven mitt into a bear’s paw, and kissed my cheek. I’m twenty-nine years old, but when my mother kisses me, I’m a little girl again, safe in the comfort of her arms.

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“Everything’s under control, which is a miracle, but thanks. I’m just going to fill the urn.” She dropped the mitt on the counter and checked her watch. “
Shabbos
is at seven forty-five. I have ten minutes to shower and put on makeup, assuming your father’s done.”

“Go ahead. I’ll fill it.” We don’t cook on Shabbat, so we boil water beforehand for tea or instant coffee. My family uses an electric hot pot, plugged in until Shabbat is over. You can also use a kettle and leave it on a
blech
, a heavy sheet of metal, placed over a stovetop and a burner set to a medium flame.

She studied me. “Are you okay? You seem preoccupied.”

“I’m fine. Just thinking about stuff. A woman I read about in a police report,” I added when I saw my mother’s concerned look. Since leaving Saunders, I hadn’t been able to clear my mind of Lenore and Max, both violently dead.

She nodded. “How was your date? I didn’t even ask.”

“It was okay.”

“Just okay?” she said, careful not to sound disappointed.

“I like him,” I admitted. “I liked him twelve years ago, too. I don’t know if I can trust him.”

“We’ll talk while Daddy and the boys are in shul.” She smiled and patted my arm.

A few minutes later the hot pot was burbling. I went to the backyard, cluttered again with outdoor toys and a wading pool for the grandchildren, and snipped an assortment of roses—whites, citrus-scented yellows, and my favorites, Double Delight, with their heady, intoxicating perfume. The roses reminded me of the sunflowers Darren Porter had brought Lenore. I’d forgotten all about him and made a mental note to check him out on Sunday, maybe before my talk with Nina.

I’d already checked out Saunders’s story. After our meeting, I’d gone home and accessed the online Santa Barbara newspaper archives and printed out numerous articles about Max’s death and Lenore’s trial.

The jury, though sympathetic, had found her guilty of manslaughter. The judge had suspended sentencing and granted probation on the condition that Lenore would enter a psychiatric hospital for a six- to nine-month stay and serve one year in a residential treatment program that would provide progress reports every three months.

Saunders hadn’t exaggerated the media attention and ensuing notoriety. At the funeral, hecklers had forced their way past security guards, carrying signs that were seen throughout the trial and after:
KILL BABY KILLERS
!
JUSTICE FOR INFANTS
!
NEVER MORE
,
LENORE
! After the verdict and sentencing, a fracas broke out between Lenore’s defenders, who felt she should never have been tried, and her bitter attackers, who suggested that the judge had been swayed by Saunders’s wealth and status. A few even hinted that he’d been bought. No wonder Saunders hadn’t stayed in Santa Barbara.

There were background articles about Lenore, too. She was born in Twentynine Palms, about forty miles east of Palm Springs, an only child raised by a divorced mother. After two years of community college she moved to Los Angeles and met Saunders two years later while working as a receptionist in one of his companies. A year after that they were married. Their son, Max, was born the following year.

Everything I read corroborated what Saunders had told me. Still, I wanted to talk to Andy Connors, but he hadn’t returned my calls. He was probably avoiding me. I would try him again on Monday, but I was impatient to compare what Saunders had told us separately, and I wanted to verify something that had been niggling at me for the past hour.

How long had Connors known about Lenore’s past? Talking with Saunders at the restaurant, I’d assumed that Connors had known all about it from the start—that Betty Rowan had told him. But driving home I remembered Connors telling me that the mother hadn’t known why Lenore was depressed.

Either Betty had been less than candid with Connors, or Connors had lied to me. “Because it’s none of your damn business, Molly,” I could hear him drawling, and I could accept that, even if I didn’t like it. But if he hadn’t known about Lenore’s past at that point, what had he been withholding from me? Maybe—
probably
—nothing important, but it bothered me.

Back inside the house, I arranged the roses in a round glass vase that I set in the middle of the dining room table, now covered with a white lace cloth. I counted seven place settings. My parents often invite company for Shabbat, but tonight it was just family.

Still thinking about Saunders, I phoned my apartment from my mother’s kitchen and listened to my answering machine’s outgoing message (I hate my taped voice), followed by one beep. I hoped it was Connors, but it was Marie O’Day.

I blanked for a moment, then remembered: She was the manager of the apartment house where Lenore had lived.

“I would have called you sooner, but I misplaced the card you gave me,” Marie said a minute later when she answered the phone.

“Was there something you remembered about Lenore, Mrs. O’Day?” I’d excised a tiny cube of steaming hot kugel sitting on the counter. Now I plopped it into my mouth, savoring the potato and onion pudding, and cut another cube.

“Well, no. I’m sorry. But the detective was here not long after you left, to check her apartment. The most terrible thing! Someone broke Lenore’s front-door lock and vandalized the whole place! I thought you’d want to know.”

My stomach muscles tightened. “When?”

“Tom says it must have been sometime Thursday night or early Friday. Whoever did it made a real mess.”

Murder, not suicide. I didn’t care what Connors said—I was as sure as if I’d witnessed the act. My mind was reeling, and I wished I hadn’t called before Shabbat, which is supposed to be a day of repose and tranquillity.

“Miss Blume? Are you there?”

“I’m sorry. Would it be okay if I came by Sunday morning?”

Marie hesitated. “I guess so. The police should be done by then, and there’s not much to protect.” She sighed. “Poor Lenore. I’m glad she didn’t see this. She was very particular about her things.”

So, apparently, was someone else.

sixteen

Bubbie G was in the guest room, rocking in her chair while reciting
tehilim
, psalms, which she does with the aid of a special magnifying lens and memory, now that macular degeneration has stolen most of her central vision and some of the spirit that helped her survive the internment camps during the war and life’s dark surprises. She looked up at the sound of the door opening, smiled with a nod at my greeting, and motioned to me to wait.

Bubbie is a study in contrasts. She is feisty and independent, insisting on living in her own apartment despite her failing vision, yet she is tender and sentimental. She will haggle with a store owner over a nickel, but is generous to charities and delights in giving her grandchildren gifts for no particular reason. She loves off-color jokes, but you’ll rarely see her without a prayer book or psalm book in her hand. My father, who became closer to Bubbie after both his parents died when I was so young that my few memories of them need prompting by faded photos and repeated anecdotes, says Bubbie’s piety and constant prayers have protected our family time and time again. Years ago I asked my father why Bubbie’s prayers hadn’t saved Zeidie Irving, whom I had loved fiercely. Why hadn’t God heard her prayer?

“God always listens,” my father said. “Sometimes He says no.”

At the time I hadn’t been able to share my father’s faith, and though I have come to accept what I don’t understand, I still find myself struggling.

A minute or so later Bubbie shut her psalms book and touched her lips to the brown leather cover. I leaned over and kissed her lined cheek, inhaling the scent of baby powder.

“You look nice, Molly,” she said. “A new blouse?”

“Ann Taylor.” I’m always surprised by how much Bubbie can see with only her peripheral vision. “I like your dress, Bubbie.”

She harrumphed. “This
shmatte
,” she said, using the Yiddish for
rag
, but I could see the pleasure in her once bright blue eyes.

Bubbie G takes great care with her appearance. She points with pride to the fashionably dressed girl she was in the photos she managed to save before the war—tall and slim with long, wavy dark hair and a cupid-bow’s mouth—and reminisces fondly about the young men who pleaded with the
shadchan
in Sosnowice, the Polish town where she was born and grew up, to petition her parents on their behalf. Old age has shortened and thinned Bubbie’s frame, turning shapely calves into a bird’s twiggy legs. It has hollowed her cheeks and the craters that house her eyes and has silvered her short, thick hair, but it hasn’t dimmed her style.
“Kleider machen Leute,”
she always says, using the German she learned when she lived in Munich after the war. Clothing makes the person.

My sisters have followed in her sartorial footsteps, but I suspect that Bubbie’s patience has been tried by my mother, who lacks the shopping gene and doesn’t always remember to put on makeup. And though I know Bubbie’s unhappy about the brevity of my sleeves and hems and the pants I wear, she has never said a disapproving word.

Which doesn’t mean she hesitates to speak her mind.
“Chapp nisht,”
she advised when I was dating Ron (the “ch” as in “Bach” is a guttural sound best achieved by clearing the throat).
“Du kenst gefinen bessereh schoyreh.”
Don’t grab. You can find better merchandise. Well, I had
“chapped
.
”

“You like my lipstick?” she asked now. “Estée Lauder. Your mother got it free and was going to throw it out, it’s not her color. But I said, give it to me. Why waste?”

“It looks great on you, Bubbie.” She’d applied the cotton-candy pink unevenly on her thin lips, refusing to ask for help because that would allow her failing eyesight a victory.

Pushing herself off her rocking chair, Bubbie found her cane and, ignoring my offered arm, marched, with me at her heels, down the hall to the dining room sideboard where my mother, a lace mantilla on her head, was about to light the candles in the nine-arm silver candelabra my siblings and I bought for my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She had lit two candles as a bride, another when each of us was born.

My father hurried into the room, one hand adjusting the brim of his black hat over his mostly gray hair, the other checking his watch.

He smiled when he saw me. “Hi, sweetheart.” Then he turned his head toward the hall and bellowed, “Noah, Joey, I’m leaving!” and without catching his breath, “Liora, Mommy’s lighting, turn off the hair dryer!”

He gave me a bear hug and planted a kiss on my forehead, another on Bubbie’s cheek. His lips lingered on my mother’s. “Good
Shabbos
.”

“Wait for the boys, Steven,” my mother said, fixing his tie, the top of her head resting just below his square chin.

“Shul won’t wait. Tell them to catch up.” And he was gone.

My mother lit her nine candles, and I lit my two, neither bride nor maiden, reciting the blessing and the accompanying prayers of gratitude and requests. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Bubbie G, anger pinching her pink-stained lips, held a thin, lit candle in a silver tube that served as a match and, admitting temporary defeat, allowed my mother to guide her hand to the
Shabbos
candles she couldn’t see.

That night, for the first time in months, I dreamed about Aggie. She was wearing the long-sleeved navy cotton sweater and ankle-length khaki skirt I’d last seen her in when she stopped at my apartment that Wednesday evening five years ago in July, at the beginning of the Three Weeks, on the way to a community-wide recitation of psalms for a young mother just diagnosed with cancer. Come with me, she urged, but I was too lazy to change out of my shorts, and I didn’t think my prayers would help. So I stayed in my apartment, and Aggie drove to the gathering, and somewhere between the side street where she parked her Corolla and the hall where hundreds of women were beseeching God, Aggie disappeared. They found her body a day later in a Dumpster behind a restaurant several miles away. For a long time after that, I couldn’t pray at all. Because if Aggie wasn’t protected, what chance did I have?

“Come with me,” she called now.

I reached for her slender hand, but she vanished up a steep, darkened street. I raced after her, my chest soon pounding with exertion, my breath labored, as I turned one corner after another on winding streets that seemed so familiar to me. For a second I caught a glimpse of her, angel-like in a long, silky white lace nightgown, and then she disappeared, and though I ran and ran, calling her name over and over, I never saw her again.