The Anatomy Lesson (6 page)

In her other pocket, something soft and gauzy. Withdrawing the unseen thing gave him a bad moment, it wasn
’
t exactly like his mother to be carrying her underwear in her pocket like a drunk. Had the tumor impaired her thinking in pitiful little ways none of them had even known? But it wasn
’
t a bra or her underpants, only a stocking-colored chiffon hood, something to wear home from the beauty parlor. Newly set hair, hers, or so he was ready to believe, holding the hood up to his nose and searching for some fragrance he remembered. The sharp smells. the decisive noises, the American ideals, the Zionist zeal, the Jewish indignation, all that to a boy was vivid and inspiring, almost superhuman, had belonged to his father; the mother who
’
d
been so enormous to him for the First ten years of his life was as diaphanous in recollection as the chiffon hood. A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him,
“
Be careful.
”
Then a long gap when there is nothing of her to remember, just the invisible somebody, anxious to please, reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey. Then the Florida retirement and the blond hair. Neatly dressed for the tropics in pink cotton slacks and a monogrammed white blouse (wearing the pearl pin he
’
d bought years before in Orly Airport and brought home for her from his first summer in France), a little brown-skinned blond-haired woman waiting down at the end of the corridor when he gets off the elevator with his bag: the unconstrained grin, the encompassing dark eyes, the sad clinging embrace, instantly followed by the gratitude. Such gratitude! It was as though the President of the United States had arrived at the condominium to call upon some lucky citizen whose name and address had been drawn from a hat.

The last thing he found in her pocket was an item scissored out of
The New York Times.
Must have been sent to her by someone back home. She
’
d slipped it out of the envelope down by the mailbox, then put it into her pocket on the way to the beauty parlor or to Sylvia
’
s in Boca Raton. The headaches and the dizziness still incorrectly diagnosed, she
’
d driven off with a friend on a rainy afternoon to look at a dress. When it got to be 4 p.m., the two widows would have decided on a restaurant for the early-bird dinner. Looking down the menu, she would have thought:
“
This is what Victor would order. This is what Nathan would order. This is what Henry would order.
”
Only then would she choose for herself.
“
My husband.
”
she would tell the waitress,
“
loved ocean scallops. If they
’
re fresh, and the nice big ones, I
’
ll have the ocean scallops, please.
”

One short paragraph in the
Times
clipping had been squared off with rough pencil markings. Not by her. Any frame she drew would have been finely made with a freshly sharpened point. The paragraph was from an article in the
“
New Jersey Section
”
dated Sunday, December 6, 1970. She died fifteen days later.

Similarly. Newark has produced many famous people, ranging from Nathan Zuckerman, the author, to Jerry Lewis, the comedian. Elizabeth
’
s most famous offspring are military men: General Winfield Scott, a 19th-century Army man, and Adm. William
“
Bull
”
Halsey, a World War
II
hero.

In a kitchen cabinet he found a yellow plastic watering can decorated with white daisies and held it under the tap. He went into the living room to sprinkle her wilting plants. So sick and lost and forgetful that last week, she
’
d not even tended her garden. Zuckerman turned on the FM station she
’
d had the dial tuned to and, listening to her favorite music—famous show tunes smothered in strings—proceeded with the watering can along the windowsill. He believed he recognized plants from New Jersey and his high-school days. Could that be? So many years as her companions? He raised the blind. Out past the new condominium that had gone up next door, he saw a wide slice of the bay. So long as her husband was alive, they used to look at the bay ritually from the bedroom balcony every evening after dinner and the TV news.
“
Oh, Nathan, you should have seen the colors last night at sunset—only you would have the words to describe it.
”
But after Dr. Zuckerman
’
s death, she couldn
’
t face all that ineffable beauty alone and just kept watching television, no matter what was on.

There was no one out sailing yet. It wasn
’
t even seven. But two stories below, in the parking lot between the two buildings, a very old man in bright green slacks and a bright green cap and a canary-yellow sweater was taking his constitutional, walking uncertainly back and forth between the rows of shining cars. Stopping to lean on the hood of a new two-toned Cadillac, his own perhaps, he looked up to where Zuckerman was standing in his pajamas at the picture window. He waved, Zuckerman waved back and for some reason showed him the watering can. The man called out but too weakly to be heard above the radio. On her FM station they were playing an uninterrupted medley of the tunes from
Finian
’
s Rainbow.
“
How are things in Glocca Morra, this fine day…?
”
A spasm of emotion went through him: this fine day in Glocca Morra, where was she? Next they
’
d play
“
All the Things You Are
”
and break him down completely. That was the record to which she
’
d taught him the box step so that he could dance at his bar mitzvah reception. After he
’
d finished all his homework they would practice on the rugless floor between the dining- and living-room Orientals, while Henry, with an imaginary clarinet between his fingers, pretended to be Artie Shaw. Henry would mouth the words as Helen Forrest sang—anything to get into the act, even half asleep in his pajamas and slippers. At the evening reception, catered in a Bergen Street hal
l several rungs down from the Schary Manor, everybody
in the family applauded (and all his young friends mockingly cheered) as Nathan and Mrs. Zuckerman stepped out under the rainbow lighting and began to fox-trot. When the boy bandleader lowered his sax and started to croon the lyrics—
“
You are
/
The promised kiss of springtime
”
—she looked proudly into the eyes of her thirteen-year-old partner—his hand placed inches away from where he imagined that even inadvertently he might touch the strap of her brassiere—and softly confided into his ear,
“
You
are
,
darling.
”

The apartment, purchased ten years earlier by his father, had been decorated with the help of daughter-in-law Carol. On the longest wall hung two large reproductions framed in faded wormwood. a white Paris street by Utrillo and the hills of a lilac-colored island by Gauguin. The bright linen chosen by the women for the cushions of the bamboo living-room set showed branches of trees bearing lemons and limes. Tropical Eden, that was the idea, even as the strokes hammered her husband down into his grave. She
’
d done her best, but the organic opposition did better, and she
’
d lost.

There was nothing to do for her sadness. If ever there had been, the chance was gone.

While he was still watching the old man down in the parking lot totter from one row of cars back to the other, a key turned in the door: Despite the unequivocal g
leam
off the bay—that dancing of light in which the living exult, proclaiming,
“
Sunny existence knows nothing of death!
”
—the likelihood of her reappearance seemed suddenly as strong as it had while he lay on the bed dazed from the hours of dreaming on her pillow. Maybe he was still dazed up on his feet.

There was nothing to fear from her ghost. She
’
d return only to get a look at him, to see that he hadn
’
t lost weight in the three months since his last visit, she
’
d return only to sit with him at the table and listen to him talk. He remembered when he
’
d first come home from college, the Wednesday evening of his first Thanksgiving vacation—how, with a great unforeseen gush of feeling, he
’
d told her about the books he was absorbed in at school. This was after they
’
d cleaned up the dinner dishes; his brother had left even before dessert for the AZA basketball game down ai the Y. and his father was back in the office, dealing with the last of the day
’
s paperwork. Zuckerman remembered her apron, her
h
ousedress, the dark graying hair, remembered the old Newark sofa re-cover
ed—the year he went off to Chi
cago—in a sober, utilitarian, stain-resistant
“
Scotch plaid.
”
She was stretched out on the living-room sofa, smiling faintly at all he was explaining to her, and imperceptibly falling asleep. He put her right out discussing Hobbes and the social contract. But how she loved that he knew it all. What a sedative that was, the most powerful she
’
d ever dared to take until, after her husband
’
s death, they got her on phenobarbital.

All this sentiment. He wondered if it was only to compensate for the damage that he was reputed to have done her with the portrait of the mother in
Carnovsky,
if that was the origin of these tender memories softening him up while he watered her plants. He wondered if watering the plants wasn
’
t itself willed, artificial, a bit of heart-pleasing Broadway business as contrived as his crying over her favorite kitsch show tune. Is this what writing has done? All that self-conscious self-mining—and now I can
’
t even be allowed to take purely the shock of my own mother
’
s death. Not even when I
’
m in tears am I sure what gives.

He had to smile when he saw who came in: no, it wasn
’
t the specter of his mother returned from the dead with a key to the door so as to hear from him now about Locke and Rousseau but a small, bottom-heavy, earthbound stranger, the color of bittersweet chocolate. She was dressed in a roomy turquoise slacks suit and wore a wig of shiny black curls. This would be Olivia, the eighty-three-year-old cleaning woman. Who he was, this man in pajamas humming to Mrs. Zuckerman
’
s music and watering her plants with her flowered can, she was not so quick to figure out.

“
Who you!
”
she shouted and, stamping her foot, showed him the way out.

“
You
’
re Olivia. Take it easy. Olivia. I
’
m Mrs. Zuckerman
’
s son. I
’
m Nathan. From New York.
I
slept here last night. You can close the door and come in.
”
He extended his hand.
“
I
’
m Nathan Zuckerman.
”

“
My God, you like t
’
scared me to death. My heart just flutterin
”
. You say you Nathan?
”

“
Yes.
”

“
What you do for a livin
’
?
”

“
I
’
m the writer.
”

She walked straight up to shake his hand.
“
Well, you a good-lookin
’
man, ain
’
t you?
”

“
You
’
re a good-looking woman. How do you do?
”

“
Where
’
s your mamma?
”

He told her and she dropped backwards onto the sofa.
“
My Miz Zuckerman? My Miz Z
uckerman? My beautiful Miz Zuck
erman? That cain
’
t be! I seen her last Thursday. All dressed up
—
goin
’
out. Wearin
’
that white coat with the big collar. I say to her,
‘
Oh, Miz Zuckerman, how beautiful you looks.
’
She
cain
’t
be dead, not my Miz Zuckerman!
”

He sat beside her on the sofa, holding and stroking her hand until finally she was able to be consoled.

“
You wants me to clean up anyway?
”
Olivia asked.

“
If you feel you can, why not?
”

“
You wants me to fix you a egg?
”

“
No, I
’
m all right, thanks. You always come this early?
”

“
Most usually I gets here six-thirty sharp. Me and Miz Zuckerman, we likes a early start. Oh, I cain
’
t believe that woman is dead. People always dy
i
n
’
, but you never gets used to it. The nicest woman in the world.
”

“
She went quickly, Olivia. Without any pain.
”

“
I say to Miz Zuckerman,
‘
Miz Zuckerman, your place so clean it hard for me to
make
it clean.
’”

“
I understand.
”

“
I tells her all the time.
‘
You wastin
’
your money on me. Everything so spark
l
in
’
here, I just rubs around to make it more sparklin
’
but I cain
’
t.
”
I never comes in here we don
’
t hug and kiss soon as we sees each other. That woman she kind to everybody. They comes in here, the other ladies, and she sit in her chair, that one, and they start peskerin
’
her to give
‘
em some advice. The widow mens, they
’
s no different. She go downstairs with them and she stand there and she show them how to fold up their laundry out of the dryin
’
machine. They wants to marry her practically the day your father pass. The man upstairs want to take her on a fancy cruise, and some other ones down in the lobby, they
’
s linin
’
up like little boys to takes her Sunday afternoon to the movie. But she love your daddy too much for any monkey business. Not her. She don
’
t play that. She always sayin
’
to me, after Dr. Zuckerman pass,
‘
I was lucky all my life, Olivia. I had the three best mens in the world.
’
She tell me all the tales from when you and the dentist was little boys. What you write them books about?
”

“
Good question,
”
he said.

“
Okay, you can go right back to what you was doin
’
. I gon
’
get myself along now.
”
And as though she
’
d just stopped by to chew the fat, she got up and went off
to the bathroom with her
shopping bag. She came out wearing a red cotton beret and, over her slacks, a long red apron.
“
Wants me to spray the shoe closet?
”

“
Whatever you usually do.
”

“
Most usually I sprays. Keep the shoes good.
”

“
Then do it.
”

Henry
’
s eulogy lasted nearly an hour. Nathan kept count as Henry slipped each page beneath the last. Seventeen—some five thousand words. It would have taken him a week to write five thousand words, but Henry had done it overnight, and in a hotel suite with three young children and a wife. Zuckerman couldn
’
t write if there was a cat in the room. That was one of the differences between them.

A hundred mourners were gathered in the mortuary chapel, mostly lonely widowed Jewish women in their sixties and seventies who
’
d been transplanted South after a lifetime in New York and New Jersey. By the time Henry had finished, they all wished they
’
d had such a son, and not only because of his height. posture, profile, and lucrative practice: it was the depth of the filial devotion. Zuckerman thought, If sons were like that, I
’
d have had one myself. Not that Henry was out to put something over on them; it was by no means a ludicrously idealized portrait—the virtues were all hers. Yet they were virtues of the kind that made life happy for a little boy. Chekhov, drawing on material resembling Henry
’
s, had written a story one-third that length called
“
The Darling.
”
However. Chekhov wasn
’
t undoing the damage of
Carnovsky.

From the cemetery they went back to their cousin Essie
’
s apartment, across the hall from their mother
’
s, to receive and feed the mourners. Some of the women asked Henry if they might have his eulogy. He promised to oblige as soon as he got back to his office, where his receptionist would make photocopies and mail them off.
“
He
’
s the dentist,
”
Zuckerman overheard one of the widows saying,
“
and he writes better than the writer.
”
Zuckerman learned from several of her friends how his mother taught the widowers to fold their laundry when they took it out of the dryer. A vigorous-looking man with a white fringe of hair and a tanned face came over to shake his hand.
“
Maltz is my name—sorry about your mother.
”
“
Thank you.
”
“
You left New York when?
”
“
Yesterday morning.
”
“
How was the weather? Very cold?
”
“
Not too bad.
”
“
I should never have come here,
”
Maltz said. TB stay till the lease runs out. Two more years. If
I live, I
’
ll be eighty-five. Then
I
go home. I have fourteen grandchildren in north Jersey. Somebody
’
1
I
lake me in.
”
While Mr. Maltz spoke, a woman wearing dark glasses stood to the side and listened. Zuckerman wasn
’
t sure if she could see, though she appeared to be by herself. He said,
“
I
’
m Nathan, how do you do?
”
“
Oh, I know who you are. Your mother talked about you all the time.
”
“
Did she?
”
“
I told her,
‘
Next time he comes, Selma, bring him around—
I
could give him plenty of stories to write.
’
My brother owns a nursing home in Lake wood, New Jersey, and the things he sees you could make a book out of. If somebody wrote it, it might do the world some good.
”
“
What does he see?
”
Zuckerman asked.
“
What doesn
’
t he see. An old lady there sits by the door, by the entrance to the home, all day long. When he asks her what she
’
s doing, she says,
‘
I
’
m waiting for my son.
’
Next time the son visits, my brother says to him,
‘
Your mother sits by the door waiting for you every day. Why don
’
t you come to visit her a little more often?
’
And you know what he says? I don
’
t even have to tell you what he says. He says,
‘
Do you know what the traffic is like getting over to Jersey from Brooklyn?
’”

They stayed for hours. They talked to him, to Henry, to each other, and though nobody asked for a drink, they ate up most of the food, and Zuckerman thought, No, it can
’
t be easy on these people down here when somebody in the building dies
—
everybody wonders if he
’
s going to be next. And somebody is.

Henry flew back with the children to New Jersey and his patients, leaving Carol behind with Nathan to go through the apartment and decide what to give away to the Jewish charities
—
Carol, so that there
’
d be no fights. She never fought with anyone
—
“
the sweetest disposition in the world,
”
by the in-laws
’
reports. She was a peppy, youthful thirty-four, a girlishly pretty woman who cut her hair short and fancied woolen knee socks and about whom Zuckerman could say very little more, though she
’
d been his brother
’
s wife for almost fifteen years. She always pretended when he was around to know nothing, to have read nothing, to have no thoughts on any subject; if he was in the same room, she wouldn
’
t even dare to recount an anecdote, though Zuckerman often heard from his mother how
“
thoroughly delightful
”
she could be when she and Henry entertained the family. But Carol herself, in order to reveal nothing he could criticize or ridicule, revealed to him nothing at all. All he knew for sure about Carol was that she didn
’
t want to wind up in a book.

They emptied the two shallow drawers at the top of his mother
’
s dresser and spread her little boxes between them on the dining table. They opened them one at a time. Carol offered Nathan a ring bearing a tag that read
“
Grandma Shechner
’
s wedding band.
”
He remembered from childhood how it had astounded him to hear of her taking it from her mother
’
s finger moments after she had died: his mother had touched a corpse and then come home and made their dinner.
“
You keep it,
”
said Nathan—
”
the jewelry should go to the girls someday. Or to Leslie
’
s wife.
”
Carol smiled—Leslie, her son, was ten.
“
But you must have something of hers,
”
she pleaded.
“
It isn
’
t right. our taking it all.
”
She didn
’
t know what he had already—the white piece of paper with the word
“
Holocaust
”
on it.
“
I
didn
’
t want to throw it away,
”
the neurologist had said to him;
“
not until you
’
d seen it.
”
Nathan had thanked him and put it in his wallet; now
he
couldn
’
t throw it away.

In one of the boxes Carol came upon the round gold pin his mother had received for being president of the PTA back when he and Henry were in grade school: on the face, the name of their school engraved above a flowering tree; on the reverse side the inscription
“
Selma Zuckerman, 1944-45.
”
I
’
d be better off, he thought, carrying that around in my wallet. He told Carol to take it for Henry, however. In his eulogy, Henry had gone on for nearly a page about her PTA presidency and what a proud child that had made him.

Opening a tortoiseshell box Zuckerman found a stack of knitting instructions. The handwriting was hers, so were the precision and the practical thinking,
“
1 ROW SC ALL AROUND, HELD IN TO KEEP FLAT… FRONT SAME AS BACK UP TO ARMHOLE… SLEEVE 46 STS K 2 P 2 FOR 2 ½ / ADD 1 ST EACH END EVERY 5 ROWS…
”
Each sheet of instructions was folded in half and bore on the outside the name of the grandchild, the niece, the nephew, the daughter-in-law for whom she was preparing her gift. He read the names of each of his wives in his mother
’
s writing.
“
Vest for Betsy.
”
“
Raglan cardigan—Virginia.
”
“
Laura
’
s navy sweater.
”
“
Suppose I take this,
”
Zuckerman said. He tied the bundle with a five-inch snippet of pinkish-white yarn that he found at the bottom of the tortoiseshell box—a sample, he thought, to be matched up at the yarn shop for some project being planned only the day before yesterday. There was a snapshot at the bottom of the box, a picture of himself. Severe unsmiling face, dark low hairline, clean polo shirt, khaki Bermudas, white sweat socks, suitably
dirtied white tennis sneakers, and clutched in his hand, a Modem Library Giant. His tall skinny frame looked to him tense with impatience for the whole enormously unknown future. On the back of the snapshot his mother had written,
“
N., Labor Day 1949. On his way to college.
”
It had been taken on the rear lawn of the Newark house by his father. He remembered the brand-new Brownie box camera and how his father was absolutely certain that the sun was supposed to shine into the camera. He remembered the Modern Library Giant:
Das Kapital.

He waited for Carol to say it:
“
And this is the woman the world will remember as Mrs. Carnovsky, this woman who adored you.
”
But having seen how his mother had identified the picture, she made no accusations. All she did was put one hand over her eyes as though the radiance off the bay was momentarily too much. She
’
d been up all night too, Nathan realized, helping Henry compose his seventeen pages. Perhaps she
’
d written them. She was supposed to have written wonderfully exhaustive letters to her in-laws, itemizing all she and Henry had seen and eaten when they were off on their vacation trips. She read prodigiously too, and not the books he might have imagined from the mask of innocuous niceness that she invariably showed him. Once, while using the upstairs phone in South Orange, Zuckerman had gone through the pile of books on the table at her side of the bed: a note-covered pad thrust into the second volume of a history of the Crusades, a heavily u
nderlined paperback copy of Hui
zinga on the Middle Ages, and at least six books on Charlemagne borrowed from the Seton Hall University library, historical works written in French. Back in 1964, when Henry drove to Manhattan and stayed up all night in Nathan
’
s apartment trying to decide whether he had the right to leave Carol and the children for the patient with whom he was then having an affair, he had positively rhapsodized over her
“
brilliance,
”
calling her, in an exceptional outburst of lyricism,
“
my brain, my eyes, my understanding.
”
When they were traveling abroad on Henry
’
s vacation, her fluent French enabled them to see everything, go everywhere, to have a really wonderful time; when he
’
d made his First small investments, Carol had read up on stocks and bonds and given him more good practical advice than the guy at Merrill Lynch; her backyard full of flowers, a spectacular success written up and photographed for the local weekly, had been planted only after a winter of patient planning on graph paper and studying landscape gardening books. Henry
spoke movingly of the strength
she
’
d given her parents when her twin brother died of meningitis in his second year of law school.
“
If only she
’
d gone on for her Ph.D.
”
He said this mournfully a dozen times.
“
She was
made
for a Ph.D.
”
—as though, had the wife as well as her husband (had the wife
Instead
of the husband) proceeded after their early student marriage to do three years of post-graduate work, Henry would somehow be free to disregard the claims of loyalty, habit, duty, and conscience—and his forebodings of social censure and eternal doom—and run away with the mistress whose brilliance seemed to reside largely in her sexual allure.