Either Side of Winter (22 page)

‘She said you had something to tell me. Are you getting married?’

He gave her a sharp look, a close-lipped smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To Marilyn Monroe.’

‘Marilyn Monroe is dead.’

‘Exactly.’ As they stepped out into the marbled lobby, he said to her, between the knocks of his umbrella at his heel, ‘When I said I wanted to talk to you, I didn’t mean I wanted to listen.’ But this was always his manner with Rachel; that he suffered her grudgingly, that he didn’t adore her.

They walked a block west to Gertrude’s; Rachel held her pace back. Reuben liked to look in windows; he had never outgrown the habit from his first visit to the city, when he was only a working man’s son, a Jewish bumpkin with high ambitions. He liked to imagine himself in the lives of the rich. Sometimes he said, ‘You can’t get rich in a generation; the best you can hope for is to see your kids well off, to the manor born.’ Rachel understood well what was expected of her; and she had graceful inclinations, she liked to please in all movements, without calling undue attention. But always, the word ‘kids’ struck her as odd. They saw a man at his desk behind the French doors of a first-floor balcony; he read with one shoe off and his bare foot on the desk. The newspaper twice doubled over in his fist so it opened like a book. Then the phone rang. ‘Yes,’ he said, through the opened doors. ‘Yes, I see.’ At the corner of Madison her father hesitated. ‘I never remember which way.’ She led him left after crossing the street.

At dinner, waiting for the food to come, he put his hand to
the back of his head, as if to stretch his neck; this had become a characteristic gesture. ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said. ‘A couple months ago I was playing squash with Bert Conway over at the Yale Club. Build-up to Christmas, midtown very busy. I was in a sweat just walking down from 57th Street. A close match; he’s no slouch. At one point, after a tough rally, I notice I can’t find the ball. Then I’m looking round for Bert Conway. So he puts his head in the door, already wet from the shower. He says, OK, I give, you win. If it gets you off the court. You coming or not? I lie to him, I say I’m stretching out.’

A waiter, Slavic, with honey hair, arrives in a sidelong flourish, holding a tray high with upright elbow. Wherever they eat, her father orders steak and fries and a bottle of house red. ‘You eat like a fat man,’ Tasha used to say. ‘A poor man having a night on the town.’ He was proud of his appetites, his spare figure. ‘Do you remember the little mole on my nose they cut out a year ago?’ He cuts into the meat which bleeds richly on to the potatoes. Rachel has fish; she lifts the delicate skeleton between knife and fork. Her father’s manner with food is still rough; he talks through a full mouth. It pleases her to see this forceful appetite. ‘Very unpleasant, a real eyesore. After the operation, you met me; I had to lean on your shoulder. We walked to the movies against a few flakes of snow. Coming out, we saw all the heavy work had been done; such a bright afternoon.’ He paused to consider it and drank, still swallowing his beef. ‘Last week I forgot to get out of bed. When I remembered, I couldn’t. I called the only number I could think of, yours, but you were at school. Tasha had to bring me in.’

Rachel laid her knife and fork side by side on her plate. Weeping, she drank from her glass of iced water, appreciating the cold. ‘What are you saying? What’s wrong?’ A piece of ice was thick in her throat.

‘I suppose we’re all dying. Me, I’m only in a little more hurry.’ His stuffed clothes seemed a necessary prop; they
held him up. ‘Come, come, my dear. I’ve always appreciated your quick sympathies; but it hurts me too. I don’t want you to feel so much for me.’ She remembered her mother’s easy tears: Tasha knew. ‘How long could I keep away from his bedside? If he called to me. A minute? Fifteen seconds before I broke down the doors?’ Perhaps it meant they would make another go of their marriage, if only to see it out till the end. Rachel couldn’t tell, in such conditions, if this was desirable to her or not; she prepared her heart against jealousy. ‘I have been diagnosed with a secondary metastasis. Multiple lesions in both cerebral hemispheres and in the cerebellum.’ Such specific language offered him some consolation; he always enjoyed technical detail. In the weeks to come, however, he would lose his grasp on precision. ‘I have seen X-rays; my brain looks like mouldy bread. There’s no point in operating. They don’t like to say
how long
, and then they say, set your affairs in order, take a holiday. (Me? A holiday?) What they mean is two months. One two three months.’

She felt barred from the significance of what she heard; her weeping answered only the first and simplest understanding of this news. It was like eating without appetite, merely for taste. Shut in a dry light skull, almost soundless, she considered his death; if she ever managed to break out of her own head she would scream. But inside, the weight of it could not reach her. The garlic in her fish seemed distasteful, much too rich in flavour; she would have preferred simply lemon, perhaps a little butter, nothing heavy. The oil made its way straight to the skin of her face; she was sensible of a faint mottling. Her complexion was generally clear, it is true; but now if she touched her hands to her cheeks a residue of her meal thickened her sweat; she rubbed together the tips of her fingers.

She said, ‘I don’t want you to die. I’d rather Tasha had to die.’

‘She’s a young woman still, don’t worry. You won’t be left alone.’

‘Please don’t leave me alone with her. You don’t remember
what it’s like. You couldn’t bear it.’

His head seemed too small against the tall back of the chair. He was always fine featured, long necked. He wore a silk crimson shawl wrapped round and tucked into the front of his open shirt. Well bundled, he looked filled out with straw. Even so, much of the meal, he’d complained of the cold. ‘I’ve given this a great deal of thought,’ he said. ‘You’ll be provided for; you won’t depend on anybody.’

‘I don’t want your money. I want you. I won’t touch your money. Give it to Tasha. Let her spend it.’

The waiter, a heavy-lipped young man with smooth wide cheeks, refreshed her glass with cold water from a sweating copper jug. She said, ‘Thank you’, soft-voiced over her shoulder. (Manners were bred deep into her pedigree; sometimes she thought her truest voice was polite confusion.) When he reached towards the bottle of red wine on the table, Reuben gestured toward it with his hand. ‘I can pour my own drink,’ he said, knocking the bottle over. ‘Oh, look. Such mess.’ His distaste, heavily expressed in the raised corners of his lips, squeezed eyes, was real, impatient; unaffected, it seemed to Rachel, by age or circumstance. The wine left a widening track along the white table cloth, which soaked up very little – ‘A cheap material,’ Reuben later remarked – and ran over the edge of the table on to the floor. Rachel blushed; she was painfully embarrassed. ‘I’m not a drunk,’ Reuben said, ‘I’m not a drunk.’ For the first time, his daughter noticed a certain thickening in his speech. ‘We’re trying to talk. He won’t leave us alone.’ Two other waiters appeared. The wine, half finished, had spent itself; Rachel always remembered the way its red flow died out at the level of the bottleneck. The broad flourish of the stain, poised at its own edges like a filled cup, seemed to express the larger disaster: blood was being spilt, nothing could clean it. With quiet grace, they removed plates, glasses, cutlery, candle and replaced the cloth. Only the purple darkening wetness at her feet remained. Reuben had lifted his elegant hands open-palmed in the air as if to say feh to this, feh to all this.

‘I’ve given it a great deal of thought,’ he repeated. ‘The money is yours; do as you please with it. This is what I can give you, what I’ve worked for. Now you don’t understand the difference it makes, but you will. My life has been too narrow; I confined myself to very specific ambitions.’

‘What you want is’, Rachel interrupted, ‘I should end up like Tasha.’

‘You could do worse. Your mother has generous sympathies, they give her great pain.’

‘So you walked out on her.’

‘I couldn’t compete,’ he cried, pulling at the silk at his neck. ‘I couldn’t compete, for space, for air!’

Her fish lay in thickening oils. Dark folds of skin among the fine bones at the side of the plate yellowed as they dried. Reuben continued to eat. ‘Even so,’ he said eventually, ‘I understand you.’ Eyes in the head of the fish looked up from the broken neck. Rachel imagined her dead father as he ate in front of her. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she declared, folding her napkin. ‘I don’t believe the doctors.’

‘It’s true she is difficult to live with – we suffer with her. No, you should be free of these restraints. I think, Rachel, you’ve been too caught up in the battle of your parents. You keep fighting it out. You want me to win this time, I know, I’m flattered. Well, come fall you’ll be rid of us both.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Well, listen to me, keep your mouth shut. I understand that this isn’t something you can answer with any real feeling, any grace. Not now, but later, I want you to consider what I’ve said. What I’ve worked for all my life offers you real freedoms; do what you want with them, that’s all I ask. Don’t confine yourself for form’s sake.’

‘Sometimes Tasha is right. The way you talk about money is a real sin. Please, let’s go. I don’t want to be looked at any more.’

He left money on the table, his wallet was thick with bills, he disliked banks. Standing up, he reached out for his daughter. She caught him by the hand and then the elbow; he was
very unsteady, also light, easily supported. ‘I’ll tell you what they’re looking at,’ he said loudly. ‘They think I’m an old drunk taking out some piece of skirt.’

‘Hush.’

‘Some old drunk.’

He picked up his umbrella at the door, and let go of her, shifting his weight. Into the cool night air; spring was coming to the city, its concrete and iron. You could hear it in the taxis, the grit in their tyres loosened, the hot hum of the running motors; smell it in the air coming down 82nd Street from Central Park. Rachel remembered the photograph of her at her grandfather’s funeral: such pretty grief, her pricey black dress, worn once. Now she felt ugly and dry. She didn’t know what to look like; she couldn’t feel anything. ‘I’ve said my piece. You have a large inheritance. I want you to live like it.’ Rachel, with her hands over her ears, ‘I don’t want to talk about money. I don’t want to talk about money.’

He couldn’t remember the way home. His anger at this fact was very real, very like his old manner.

Later, Rachel’s tidy habits offered her some consolation. She flossed in front of the bathroom mirror on cold feet. A white mosaic of small hexagonal tiles; she felt the grouting in her toes and dug in. Her face contorted oddly in her hands, as she pulled the waxed string between empurpled fingers; her gums bled lightly. She rinsed, tasting her own salt, and spat. She rinsed and spat again to clear her mouth. Cupped fresh tapwater in her humbled hands and drank; it tasted of pipes and porcelain. She spread her wet palms across her cheeks, rubbed behind her ears, at the back of her neck, vigorously, ungrieving. Before bed, she lifted her recent purchases out of their bags, their tinsel paper, and hung them in the dressing cupboard, her blouse, her dress, and folded her new jeans over a hanger. Tasha, at first, hadn’t thought to buy two pairs, till Rachel prompted her. It must have seemed a waste to her mother at the time; the arrangement wouldn’t last much longer.

It seemed to Rachel at first, that her knowing was in fact the cause of his rapid decline. After the announcement at dinner, in the days following, she began to spot the inconsistencies in his manner, his sudden imbalances. Sometimes he seemed his old self, kindly, sharp; and even took a cab to the office. When she got home from school, she found his apartment empty, the sports page stolen from the paper on the coffee table. This is what he liked to read on the way downtown. Tasha told her to move in with him. ‘I won’t have him living alone now, and he doesn’t want me.’ By living, of course, what she meant was the other thing; Reuben had always chastised her for euphemism. But in this instance, Tasha’s generosity surprised Rachel; she had guessed her mother would be jealous of his dying, another one of Reuben’s characteristic retreats into silence. She herself chided her father prettily when he got home, grey in the face, worried-looking. (Rachel, amazed, that such grave concerns still took the shape of worries in his features, his thoughts.) ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘I should watch myself die. No sir, I’d rather make other people watch. This is what money can do at this stage in life.’ Rachel offered to stay home from school, if that is what he wanted.

She watched him too closely; this is what he complained of. Indeed, Rachel felt complicitous; the least stumble in his manner she attributed to dark causes. As if she herself had come to collect death’s debts. In fact, she didn’t believe he was dying; a lack of faith that also made her miserable, since she had already spent so much mourning on him. As if, in spite of her disbelief, she wanted the grand event. Often she wondered how she might greet sudden good news. It’s all off, an improbable mistake. Clearly, relief would take some of the
wind out of her sails; she was conscious of living richly, in high weather. (Her mother’s great flaw, as it happens; Tasha’s passion for dramatic occasions.) And, for once, she had her father to herself, idle, dependent; she had the nursing of him, these were tender relations, unequalled. And soon enough, his condition took away her doubts – he was deeply wounded, fast fading – and left her the peace of mind to concentrate on the task at hand. She came home from school, sweating lightly in her armpits, her shoulders, along the line of her bra straps, her backpack, in the dirt of the subway and growing heats of spring; after washing her hands and face, she found Reuben in bed, fully dressed, unsleeping, slowly going mad.

The things he said to her! He had an itch in his head, under his hair, which was both growing longer and falling out in patches. (The doctors tried what they could with chemotherapy; these were difficult questions in arithmetic, equations of life and pain.) Rachel scratched his dry scalp with her manicured fingers. She found the build-up of his skin under her nails very distressing, and at night, before bed, washed herself thoroughly in the heavy shower, applying a bristle brush to her fingers’ ends till they grew pink and raw. Even so, his suffering was much deeper, on the brain. He was convinced he could feel the lesioning. She couldn’t touch him there, or unpersuade him. All his life, in spite of his careful and conservative habits, Reuben had wide curiosities and an unchecked tongue. Tasha often hushed him embarrassed – the things he said! Now he indulged it freely.

He said, ‘I read today that in certain creatures, the anus and mouth are indistinguishable in gestation.’ The papers lay on his bed, a happy mess in other circumstances, say a long Saturday morning. Rachel had come home from school, sat beside him with her hands open on her lap. He kept the heating on and the windows shut; she sweated lightly, her palms were plump and red. ‘One of Annie Rosenblum’s pieces, your friend’s mother. A highly suggestive fact. I thought, all our
itches are very deep, internal. We get at them anyway we can, through the body’s holes: mouth, anus, even the ears, the eyes, the navel. The penis, naturally. It doesn’t matter which; everything inside desires a human touch. Of course, for the most part, out of our reach. For this reason, perhaps, women take greater pleasure in sex. I must say I’ve always found the homosexual act abhorrent, but this fact gives me certain sympathies. If, as she writes, the mouth and anus are interchangeable.’

Rachel didn’t know what to answer. ‘Oh, look at you,’ he said. ‘So prim. At your age. Believe me, I know what your thoughts are like.’

She blushed brightly and moved to open a window.

Often, however, he addressed more personal memories. The first time he met Tasha, at a party in Grace Kupchak’s sitting room. Her high windows framed by little palm trees, hot-smelling as summer grass, the views overlooking Fifth Avenue and the Park: what luxury, the limousines sleekly moving among the one-way traffic. God, what a young man he was still, at fifty! A partner in his firm, Reuben had spent less of his life unworking than those pretty kids. Such appetites they had for company, for making talk; these, he noted, often required secondary passions to serve as points of contact. Fashion, of course, and gossip, but even higher matters were entertained simply as food for conversation: art galleries, films, politics. He preferred to spend his enthusiasm on what concerned him personally. Not that the news was unimportant, far from it, but he disliked the airs of the younger generation, the way they couldn’t so much as kiss without the sanction of some higher cause. Any sense of what was private and mattered privately, and what wasn’t and didn’t, had gone out the window.

OK, he was a lonely old man, and didn’t mind the way these young women touched him by the elbow and displayed the hand’s breadth of fine skin between their breasts and throat. But he couldn’t talk to them as a man; and they
seemed to take his silence for disinterest. It cost them nothing to hover around Grace’s dry-witted, overdressed lawyer, making nice. Grace always said, ‘Oh Reuben, we’ll find you something; it’s just a question of seeing what fits for a rich man.’ Grace was no great beauty herself any more, fat in the hips and cheeks, with thinning hair; her bright clothes did no justice to these features. Still, her ugliness had its sexual undertones, the pucker of her lips like squashed cigars. And young men she had no shortage of; though Reuben suspected their real interests lay elsewhere. Perhaps Grace herself longed for quieter company. In any case, all her girls thought he was harmless; it shamed him.

But this kid from Port Jervis was a different matter, her vivid high spirits, easy to tease, admire. She offered plentiful material for conversation. Her accent, for one thing; a little sour-mouthed in the vowels and sharp in the endings, her clipped ‘t’s exposed just the tip of tongue-flesh on the edge of her teeth. It seemed to him an affectation, very charming; and then they talked about neighbourhoods, families. These subjects he was comfortable with; they involved natural sincerity. Also, Tasha herself wasn’t so young any more, twenty-six, twenty-seven. Already she had an eye for the value of kindness and courtesy; qualities she could rely on when her looks went off. Reuben’s attentions were flattering. He took her out to an opera at the Met. His uncle had served as cantor for the synagogue in Port Jervis. The Kranzes all had rich voices. Large unhappy music moved them easily to tears, their tongues, their lungs twitched in sympathy, the back of their throats ached, they wanted to sing. When he moved to Manhattan, Reuben decided to become expert in this one field. Among other things, he took pleasure in growing knowledgeable about something high class, difficult, expensive. Reuben, in bed, wrapped in his summer overcoat from Barney’s, propped on pillows, sang
Qu’ai
-
je vu? O ciel, quel
trouble!
to his daughter, who tried to quieten him with tea.

In fact, Tasha was already in some difficulties. A month
after the opera she met him for shabbas dinner red-faced with tears. She carried herself haughtily; when she had unpleasant news, she grew angry in the telling, especially when she was herself to blame. A characteristic fault; later, this always enraged Reuben. As he said to Rachel now, ‘This way I suffered coming and going. I couldn’t win.’ That night he took the seat in the window at Vespa’s, a Kosher Italian on Second. He himself liked looking at the traffic stopping and moving on, but this way, no one but the waiter could see what a state Tasha was in. He ordered a bottle of house white, which Tasha preferred, and meatball spaghetti for two; something humourous in the eating he hoped might cheer her up. As it happened, she barely touched her food; only from time to time dipping her bread in the tomato sauce. Reuben complained of all the food left over. Well, your trouble is you never listen, she said; I told you to get what you liked I wasn’t hungry.

‘You said no such thing.’ Even after all this time, Reuben was insistent. ‘So she says
with me you have to read between the
lines.’
Drinking heavily from her glass of wine she confesses: I’ve been heaving my guts up all day. I’m pregnant.

‘Well,’ Reuben said, his handsome head active, the lines on his face shifting, persuading, in spite of the still body tucked in like a lump beneath his sheets, ‘you could tell she had worked herself up into a real fury. Of course, the kid wasn’t mine.’ He wriggled his hands out to gesture more widely; he took Rachel’s wrist in his fingers, they were sweatless, cold. ‘Belonged to some fellow she’d been going with before, a photographer. The reason, I suppose, she wasn’t having supper with him, he had no money. And she was tired of living off other people’s lifestyle. She was too old. Besides you couldn’t do it with a baby.’ He didn’t want Rachel to turn away; this was part of her inheritance.

Rachel briefly imagined he wasn’t her father; she could shrug off the grief of his death. The suffering she had in front of her involved something else, a change in perspective, new
relations. Reuben let go of her. ‘I couldn’t abandon her, this Jervis girl. You should have seen her high colour: flaming. Boy could she fight for her rights. Drank half a bottle that night and dared me to say a word. Looking back, I see she played her cards right; I couldn’t let go a chance for correcting her. For stepping in. Of course, I insisted on an abortion. At the time, she was grateful for these arrangements, for my practical talents.’ (Rachel remembered her mother’s words. ‘He thinks he can pay his way out of anything; but I told him, you have to take real human interest in life or everything goes to pot.’) ‘I had the pleasure of comforting a big beautiful girl. Walking home, she leaned her head on my shoulder, her hair fell down my back. By great efforts and careful words, I could put to sleep her conscience. I’m sure she guessed how tempting I found these tasks. But afterwards, she suffered real horrors; the way she moaned in her dreams, when she slept in my bed, was terrible. I almost imagined the blood on my hands, between her legs. There was nothing I could do. I was lost in admiration for her, deeply in love. Such high passions she had, what a talent for suffering. I tell you it put me to shame. In fifty years I had hardly suffered at all; but boy did it start when I took up with your mother. These were thrilling times, very miserable. So I sat up in bed and watched with my palm on her hair. If I woke her she reproached me bitterly, but I couldn’t bear for long to hear her sleep-whimpering. Like someone in her dreams was beating her with a stick.’

Rachel had never felt so cold towards him, this at the height of her grief. But she guessed something of what he meant: ‘These were thrilling times, very miserable.’ She had inherited such sympathies: an appetite for great emotions, no patience with small ones. Father and daughter both relied on other people to supply them with the usual human furniture, anger, love. A woman like Tasha made deep appeals to Reuben. As he used to say of her in happier times, ‘She has plenty of weather, your mother.’ By contrast, their climates were dry, steady. Yes, in some ways, her parents were perfectly
matched. Reuben had worn himself out and asked for something to drink. She filled his glass in the bathroom and watched his Adam’s apple make space for the water going down. He finished it with wet lips and asked for another, which he drank half of, and set the remainder on his bedside table. He said, ‘So we married. Most people rush into these things when the lady gets knocked up. We had the opposite problem. Having got rid of the brat, we felt like we had to get hitched. Only decent; otherwise, what was the whole thing for? I thought at the time it’s bad luck to get started on a shared sin. And it was years before she consented to have another child. You were a difficult birth. There had been complications. And after you, nothing.’

She ordered in Chinese and he made a great show of getting up to eat, washing his face, his hands. They sat in the kitchen and ate with their forks from the boxes bending in the heat of the food. Later in life, these scenes were often replayed in her thoughts. One thing that struck her as significant: that he took positive pleasure in explanation, in spite of everything.

At school, she wondered whom to tell. The pressure of this secret was great; also, as her father said, thrilling. Her private concerns for once were utterly absorbing; she needn’t envy the busy lives outside her. Still, she felt called on to explain herself, she wanted to give some kind of account. It occurred to her that the news might pull Brian towards her again. Tragedy bestowed a kind of weight, gravitational force; it drew some people to its centre, very attractive. For this reason, she kept quiet. She suspected that he and Frannie had been making out, after school, on weekends, without telling her, sharing cigarettes and kissing, till their throats, lips felt rough, sore. It seemed undignified, for many reasons, to stoop to confessions in order to win back his attention.

They were reading
Hamlet
in her Shakespeare class. The school had invested in cherry-wood seminar tables and high-backed
chairs. No expense spared. The chairs alone ran each to several thousand dollars. Their effect was elegant, wasteful. Even modest lines and a matt finish can intimate money thrown around. Rachel could almost feel the fresh wood dust fine as chalk in the palm of her hand. Mr Englander opened the windows. Someone complained of the cold draft, already pregnant with spring suggestions of growth. Full gusts shifted papers, open books rattled like fan belts. So he shut the windows again, one by one, looking unhappy. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘to be stuck inside. On days like this. At your age. The fact that you don’t seem to mind makes it almost worse.’