Still Life with Bread Crumbs (21 page)

Was it everything, all together, that made her say in a tough cold voice not unlike TG’s own, “And your point is?”

“My point? My point? You are devaluing the franchise. A Rebecca Winter photograph has a certain price point. A Rebecca Winter photograph comes with a certain cachet. A Rebecca Winter photograph is handled by this office.”

“When is the last time you sold something of mine other than that photograph the Greifers took that you didn’t especially care for?”

“That’s a problem with the product, not the salesperson.”

Rebecca’s hair was filled with feathers, and as she tried to speak she realized that one was stuck to her tongue. She picked it off, coughed, and said loudly, “You’re fired.”

The other email showed up on her computer after she had gotten home, trailing feathers into the house while the dog followed with his nose to the floor, sneezing. She took off the jacket in the kitchen, crammed it into a garbage bag, wandered around cleaning up after herself. No money, no work, no agent, but at least the parka had made it through most of the winter, hadn’t failed her in December. Her standards had shifted. She looked down at the dog. “Dog pictures,” she said, and he looked attentive. He loved having his picture taken. There was always something to eat afterward.

Rebecca turned on her computer and looked through the photographs she had taken of the dog. She would print a new set, and perhaps some other New Yorker would come through, stop for coffee, and buy them. “I think they would make the cutest
greeting cards,” Sarah had said, as though this would be the zenith of Rebecca’s achievement, the way her novelist acquaintances always complained that the public did not take them seriously unless a movie had been made of one of their books.

She had only one email, from an address that looked for a moment both familiar and strange, and then she realized it was from Sonya. When she opened it, it said, “Papa gone.”

From the obituary column of
The New York Times:

“No shivah?” said the man in the gray suit.

“My father left very explicit instructions,” Rebecca said.

“Understood,” he said. “His preplanning was a model of the form. For your mother, too. He chose Green-Wood Cemetery because Leonard Bernstein is buried there, which he assumed would please her. But sometimes the family is not in agreement on the decedent’s plans and decides to modify somewhat.”

He leaned in close and touched Rebecca’s arm. “By the by, I love your work.”

“No shivah,” said Ben.

Sonya looked away. She had no stake in the discussion, being, it turned out, Lutheran. All these years Rebecca had assumed Sonya, too, was Jewish, in the unspoken way in which the Winter family had been, and it turned out that, like her employers’
affinity for strawberry jam (not jelly) and shirts with light starch, she had simply absorbed it and used it where appropriate without adopting it at all.

“Family Feud,”
she’d said to Rebecca the night before at the apartment, pointing to the television, a solitary standing lamp giving an air of dolor to the place and casting the Mary Cassatt in the foyer in deep shadow. “He say, ‘Sonya, how come no cherry pie these days?’ I say, ‘Bakery on the boulevard on vacation, two weeks.’ He say, ‘No way to run a business, that.’ Then he cough, then he fall, then I call nine-one-one.”

“I’m sure you did everything necessary,” Rebecca had said.

Rebecca looked around the room at the funeral chapel, a living room for the dead or, more accurately, for the friends of the dead. She couldn’t count how many times she had been here, although they did redecorate with some regularity. It was currently blue and cream. It had been gold and tan when her grandmother’s funeral had been handled by the people here. Shivah had been at their apartment, just a few blocks away.

“Shivah, now there’s a racket!” her father liked to say. “Some of them bring food, but what is it? Some little casserole, feeds maybe four people who eat like birds, and meanwhile you’ve got a houseful. You know what shivah means? Hungry! Shivah means more lox than you can shake a stick at!”

As if he could read her thoughts Ben leaned toward her and said, “You know how many bagels you need for shivah?”

“Hundreds,” Rebecca murmured as her son put his arm around her shoulder.

Or perhaps not. Her father had been ninety-one years old. Except for his daughter and his grandson, his family was gone, unless you counted Sonya and, of course, his wife. So were nearly all of his friends, and all of the people he’d overseen at Freeman Foundations until they’d closed the showroom and the factory. Cheap white utilitarian bras, or brassieres as they had always called them at the company. Girdles so snug “you can go
down a dress size,” according to the slogan her grandfather had coined. For decades it had been a dependable living, a fortune even. And then women had stopped wearing girdles, and started wearing bras that were lacy, flimsy, turquoise and black. The women who wore Freeman Foundations got old, and died, and the sewing machines went still and were sold. “I don’t know what else I expected,” her mother had said dismissively.

The chairs in the funeral parlor were empty except for a frail couple who had lived in their old apartment building, the administrator of the nursing home where her mother lived, an aide from the home, and Rebecca’s mother herself, who seemed to be asleep in the wheelchair, her chin on her sunken chest, her fingers only faintly twitching. The black dress she wore had been supplied the night before by Sonya and was several sizes too large, the darts jutting aggressively because there was nothing inside them. At eighty-six Bebe Winter had the body of a ten-year-old girl. She had had a lifetime stockpile of Freeman Foundations herself, the higher-end Belle line, but none of it fit her anymore.

When her mother had first arrived Rebecca had pushed her chair to the casket, and she had stared at it with a glare so ferocious that Rebecca was instantly in mind of the bald eagle whose picture she had taken several months before. “Those eyes are frightening,” she had said and Jim Bates shook his head and replied, “Everybody says that. I don’t think he looks scary. I think he looks like he sees everything.”

A woman in a dark suit hurried in, breathless. “Sorry,” she mouthed, sitting down. She lived in the apartment across the hall from Rebecca’s. Ben identified a man in a parka as the unit producer of the movie Ben had just finished. “Quite a crowd,” Ben said. Such were the rites for those who had outlived their own lives: a smattering of mourners tangentially related to the dearly beloved, the sorts of people who wouldn’t feel the need to make the drive to the cemetery.

“The rabbi would like to start in a few minutes,” said the funeral director quietly, and Rebecca nodded.

She knew exactly the kind of remarks the rabbi would make, and as she sat beside Ben in the first row, her mother on her other side in the wheelchair, he made them: Oscar Winter was a good man. (True.) He had been a very successful businessman. (No. Not even dimly.) But the most important thing in the world to him was his family. (True.) He rejoiced in the love of his wife, Beatrice, to whom he had been married for more than sixty years. (The number of years was correct. Rebecca’s mother did not even raise her head at the sound of her own name. Rebecca looked at her mother’s hands. She was playing the
Moonlight
Sonata. It was one of the only pieces Rebecca herself knew how to play and she recognized the fingering immediately. She had always thought of it as a funeral piece and she wondered whether her mother had, too. “That piece is for amateurs,” Bebe Winter had always said when someone requested it.)

Only Rebecca and Ben rode in the black limousine to Brooklyn for the burial. Sonya had refused, sliding into the passenger seat of a compact car driven by a nephew. The nursing home had provided an ambulette for her mother and the aide, and Rebecca was ashamed that her first thought was that she would have to pay extra for that. Ben was wearing black jeans with a black sport coat. She didn’t mind, but she could imagine what her mother would have said had she been in her right mind. Even a very fine sport coat, navy cashmere, with very fine gray wool slacks—slacks, she called them, not pants—Bebe considered a kind of shoddy substitute for a suit.

“He was a good dude,” said Ben, folding his hand over hers.

“He was that.”

“Benjie! Take a look!
The Bridge on the River Kwai!
Greatest movie ever made! Not like that moony stuff you go to see!”

Rebecca smiled. “You do an excellent imitation of your grandfather. He would be proud.”

“I’m gonna try it on Nana and see if she reacts.”

“Don’t wake her, or interrupt her if she’s playing.”

They drove past a series of bodegas and body shops. She felt a little lost. The driver must be taking a back way. Rebecca could see the hearse in front of them.

“Is Leonard Bernstein really buried there, or did he just tell her that to keep her happy?” Ben said.

“He is. And Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

“Wow. That’s random. Is there room for you?”

“I have no idea. Nor do I have any interest.”

“Still life with urn?”

“Have I told you that you are a terrible smart aleck?”

“Do you know that now they can press your ashes into fireworks and set you off?”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow.

“Too soon?” said Ben, and Rebecca laughed.

The paths wound round and round the lawns and monuments, beautiful lawns, beautiful monuments. Rebecca had taken photographs here once, but somehow they had never come to life. “Do you know a young agent who would like to represent an old photographer?” she asked Ben, staring out the window.

“Are you serious?”

She nodded. “I fired TG. Or maybe she fired me. I took some pictures of my dog and let Sarah hang them in her coffee shop and TG was offended. She kept saying ‘dog pictures.’ ”

“I bet they’re great dog pictures.”

“They’re good dog pictures. It’s a good dog. I’m certain you’ll like him. But now I need an agent. I’d prefer someone younger. And nicer.”

“Mom, this is a complete no-brainer. You’re Rebecca Winter.”

“I was Rebecca Winter,” and her voice caught and trembled, not because of money, or dog pictures, or TG, or her career, or the lasagna that had never ever arrived, but because she remembered
how her father would sometimes introduce her: “My daughter, Rebecca Winter. And yes indeedy, she’s that Rebecca Winter.”

The car stopped and Ben stepped out and gave her his hand and said, “You will always be Rebecca Winter,” and she started to cry.

She wiped her eyes as she saw the pile of ocher soil only a few steps from the road, a garish pocket square of artificial grass beside it. She turned as the funeral director’s men, in their shiny dark suits and black topcoats, carried the wooden box to the metal stand atop the not-very-well-disguised opening in the earth.

Ben had his arm around her and it was not until she was standing right at the graveside that she saw Sarah and Tad standing on the other side. Sarah was wearing a gray coat with a fake fur collar that was far too snug, and Rebecca wondered if she had borrowed it for the occasion. The rabbi spoke again, vaguely. He read from the Book of Wisdom and then handed Rebecca a shovel. She knew she was supposed to shovel in just a bit, just for show, but she shoveled and shoveled until her arms began to burn and Ben came behind her and whispered, “Hey, lady, give a guy a chance.” Ben shoveled for a long time until he handed the shovel to Sonya, who shook her head and handed it to Tad. He was a good shoveler. Then Ben put the shovel into Bebe Winter’s hands and pretended that she had helped him put a shovelful of earth into the grave.

“Benjamin Symington, the grandson of Oscar Winter, will recite the burial Kaddish,” the rabbi said, and Rebecca listened as her son, who had not been bar mitzvahed, whom she had had to fight to have circumcised—“barbaric,” Peter said, but for some reason she would not let it go, it was one of the few things on which she had stood her ground—recited Kaddish in Hebrew. She realized he must have learned it some time before, to know it so soon after his grandfather’s death. All those years
of being brought up in a Jewish household that never acknowledged being Jewish, and she could remember only one thing about Kaddish, that it included “lovingkindness” as a single word. And that fact she had learned in a world religions class at Holyoke.

(“Pop Pop, teach me Kaddish,” Ben said one evening after the Final
Jeopardy!
question.

And he did. “Now you can say Kaddish for me when I’m gone,” Oscar Winter said. “You want ice cream? Ben and Jerry’s! The good stuff!”)

When Ben was done he bowed his head, and two things happened at the same instant: Tad began to sing and Rebecca’s mother began to—what? Keen? Wail? Or was that singing, too, of a sort, the counterpoint to Tad, who was singing a Kaddish himself? Whatever it was, it rose in the air like smoke and lingered there after the last notes had been sung. It sounded exactly like sorrow.

“We’re going to take her back if it’s okay with you all,” said the aide. “You can’t tell how much of this she’s getting, you know? It can be upsetting.” But Bebe Winter’s head had fallen forward again and her eyes were closed, as though she had said what she had come to say and fallen immediately into a deep sleep. “We’re taking you home, Mrs. Winter,” the aide said, very loudly, pointing to the ambulette, red and white against the greens and grays of the cemetery.

“That was a very odd service,” the man who had lived in their old building said to his wife as they shuffled to their car.

“My most heartfelt apologies for being late,” said Tad.

“Good job, man. You can really sing,” Ben said to Tad, shaking his hand.