A Complicated Marriage (54 page)

The next day I met her brother and a sister, a nun, whom she had never mentioned. Sister Violet was as short and stout and round-faced as Jennifer was tall and lean, with her fine-boned blondness. I watched Violet put on Jennifer's white Givenchy winter coat with a white fur collar and gracefully scalloped hem. She preened at the mirror, thinking herself very fine. “Perfect for Nebraska,” she said.

I had understood Jennifer's rage, but I was disconcerted by Clem's listless acceptance of what was happening to him. No anger, no highs, no lows. His emotional spirals had flattened out since he had been weaned from the hospital medications. At home he was the Clem he had always been, except more subdued. His even disposition that I had
always treasured now oppressed me. When he would say he wanted “to talk,” he really just wanted my presence. He had reached a plateau in his recovery and evinced no interest in furthering his progress or talking about it. While I, as I tended to his daily care, needed to believe that his condition was improving. I was incapable of joining him on his high road of acceptance. A lonely time of things not said. He never spoke of death. Only once did I ask him whether he thought about it. He said he did, but seldom, and when he did, he “numbed at the thought of it.” I envied him.

On January 16, Sarah and I threw an eighty-fifth birthday party for Clem. Since his seventieth, we had arranged a big celebration every five years, always in friends' lofts, always a dancing party. This year, the gathering would be smaller, and I filled the apartment with close friends and family: his brother Marty, so long estranged, and his wife, Paula Fox; their half-sister, Natalie, whom I had met only once; and Leatrice Rose, his brother Sol's ex-wife. Reconnecting with Clem's family meant more to me than to Clem, who appeared to be unmoved by their presence. The Greenbergs, who cared so little for maintaining family ties, would have been surprised to know that they had become my virtual family after I had been stripped of my own forty years before. Now I felt the lack of family more strongly, and, though I knew they cared little about Clem and certainly not at all about me, I wanted to see them and touch them. The party was a success. I kept everyone moving and talking to people they didn't know, as I had learned to do years before. Clem sat where he sat. After the group winnowed down, we put on the Bee Gees, and when “Stayin' Alive” came on, Clem couldn't resist. With his cane and a steadying hand, he stood and danced.

As if to keep the celebratory mood going, a few nights later, leaving Clem with Sarah, I went to a party at my artist friend Yvonne Thomas's. There I ran into my “starter affair” and felt the flutter of being young and in love. Later, on the Fourteenth Street subway platform, three beautiful African American women were singing in a cappella harmony, “I believe in yesterday . . . ” When, at Columbus Circle, I switched to the C train, it was to the strains of an aging hippie on a sax playing, “Smile though your heart is breaking . . . ” I cracked up. How many nostalgic messages
did I need to tell me that my flirtiness had just been my own half-baked way of “feelin' alive”? And the coda? It told me that my world was Clem, and though we were dancing on thin ice, we were alive. I smiled all the way home.

And then winter closed in. It started off on a frightening note. During the past months there had been occasional alarms with the catheter when the urine had turned cloudy or bloody. Each time I was advised to wait and see, and each time it had cleared. But in late January the flow stopped and Clem was in pain. It was 3:00 AM. I wrapped him up, stowed him in the lobby, scoured the deserted streets for a taxi, and once again took him to the ER. They cleared the blockage, gave him antibiotics, steadied his breathing, and discharged him the next afternoon. Clem, as usual, was unfazed, while I found it an unsettling reminder of how fragile our status quo was.

I scrubbed and vacuumed, emptied closets and drawers, and then began again. My way of numbing. I would sleep heavily, as if it were a burden, only to awaken suddenly when I would hear Clem call. But often they were phantom calls. No matter—I would go and check and then check again, and then be unable to sleep. I had a strong need to talk to friends, but I was unable to listen. I felt that my sadness was contagious and that people were keeping their distance. As Clem suffocated, I suffocated. “Sympathetic dying,” I quipped to my friend Carol. She understood my panic and simply said, “Clem is alive.”

I endured all the caretaker clichés: I had no appetite, cried at odd times, couldn't concentrate on a book, was struck suddenly by physical pains that then disappeared. Even as I recognized these things as clichés, they were no less real for that. On the emptiest of days I watched myself watch television. Shadows of Bank Street in my twenties: I watched myself losing my self. I slipped into a monotone. More shadows remembering when, after our baby's death, my analyst Sy had said I was choking on inexpressible emotions: rage and guilt and fear. I felt them all. I was submerged in a tank of water, navigating by fear, dodging electric currents. Rage itched under my skin to get out. And it leached out, mainly at Clem over the trivial frustrations of caretaking. My anger had always been part of me, but never before had I met it head-on and been forced
to acknowledge it and admit my helplessness in the face of it. Then, suffused with guilt, I would beg forgiveness, even as I knew I didn't deserve it. And the price of a good hour, a good day, a party? More guilt, piggybacking on my anger about having to pay a toll for feeling good. Oh, the long tentacles of guilt.

These feelings had been cumulative, and eventually I had the sense to know that I needed help. Marge Iseman, Helen Frankenthaler's sister and always a cornucopia of advice, recommended the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. There, at a cost adjusted to what one could afford, I was folded into a therapy group that met one evening a week under the guidance of Ruth Kreitzman, a skilled and compassionate therapist. I found, in the occasional confrontations and bickering of the group, a chance to vent some of my emotional steam in a safe place. It provided a good counterbalance to the gentleness of Al-Anon's dynamic. I hadn't known I needed both until I experienced them.

As winter drew to a close, so did the one-year anniversary of the day we had heard of the embezzlement. My fellow VIPs were indifferent to my reminder, and I felt let down. Not that I wanted to celebrate or have a weep-fest, but I wanted a simple affirmation: “Yes, a terrible thing happened to us.” And: “Yes, we remember.” I was sure no one had forgotten, but the hand-holding days had passed.

The IRS had certainly not forgotten. As tax time approached, we faced a final reckoning regarding the taxes that Powers had never filed. The liens had been lifted, but the amount the IRS had deducted for unpaid taxes, plus interest, left us with much less available cash than I had expected. The IRS was holding out for penalties as well, which the accountant hoped to negotiate. Two weeks later, we received the final IRS sign-off letter, so important in case credit problems cropped up down the line. We were no longer criminals in the government's eyes.

Fortuitously, that very week, on April 28, as if to show that what goes out can also come in, there was an opening at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford of a group show honoring the work of Noland, Olitski, and Caro, a show that also honored Clem. The three artists, family to us for so many years, attended the opening and dinner that followed, as did Sarah, who represented her father. She called late that night to tell us
of their extraordinary generosity: The artists had gifted their honoraria to Clem.

The final convocation of the VIPs was on April 29, for the sentencing of James Powers. Two weeks earlier he had pleaded out, as Valerie Arvin had predicted when Sarah and I had first met her. It seemed that years had passed since then. I awoke, stomach clenched, fearful yet eager for my day in court. Sarah was still in Hartford, but our friend Annie Walsh offered to come with me. The group congregated, swelled by family and friends. I could feel the uneasiness in the air.

Grim and guarded, we were impatient for the proceedings to begin. Powers was finally brought in. He looked pasty, diminished, his demeanor sullen and listless; he looked like the loser felon he was and had always been, although he had concealed it well. Only five of us took the stand to speak. The crime was the same, but each spoke from the depths of his or her experience and the gist of each differed. From trust and betrayal to “His life in jail will be more assured than my own” to “He should pay” to the invasion of our lives to “I cooked food for him.” This speaker was the only one who, when she finished, approached Powers, pinned him eye to eye, and said, “Shame on you.” I felt a chill. She might as well have put a bullet in his head.

I told our story, Clem's, Sarah's, and mine. From the initial shock and my retrieval of $21.47 from the Chase account—“the only return on our investments I would ever hold in my hand”—through all the ensuing shocks of destitution, taxes, liens, and Clem's health. My gist: “The numbers and facts are known, but I will never be able to calculate the damage Powers did to our family. This was a crime of violence.” Inwardly the emotions of a year flooded through me, and when I mentioned Clem, I cried but the flow of my words never faltered. Strasberg might have finally said, “Well done.” And I was proud; I had said what I had to say. One of our group leaned over and said, “You were earth and fire, Joan of Arc.” Annie held my hand.

The judge had been moved by us all. He passed a sentence of eight years, the maximum under the plea agreement. He spoke of the magnitude of the crime and recommended that the defendant serve his full term. I liked to think he would have been happy to sentence Powers to
fifty years. Valerie told us it was highly unusual for a judge to put such a recommendation on the record.

The group adjourned for lunch nearby. Our spirits were light, our mood softened. Oh, there were a few grumblings about the length of the sentence. After all, eight years added up to less than a year per victim, a short term for a crime that had altered the course of our lives. And it would take almost that long for our credit ratings to be cleared of liens. But at least the bastard was in jail. We bantered, drank, and toasted the future. We had come a long way since our first meeting, when the air had been filled with panic, fear, anger, and so many questions with no answers. We still didn't know all the answers, and never would, but we had all found strength, perspective, and purpose within the group. We were bonded, although I realized how little I knew of their personal lives. On the street when we parted, I knew that we would probably not see each other again. None of us would need or want to be reminded of the past year. And then it was over, and I headed for the subway.

Over the next two days, Clem's breathing became more labored. He used the nebulizer more frequently and he was back on prednisone. This time, however, it soon became clear that the miracle drug had lost its healing powers. On Monday, May 2, in the late afternoon, Clem's breathing worsened and he complained of pain in his left leg. I called 911. The drill was the same, but this time, as we waited for the ambulance, Clem broke out in a cold sweat and started shivering. For once, the paramedics didn't waste time with the usual arguments against going to the East Side, and in record time we were in the Lenox Hill ER. Clem was started on an IV, they eased his breathing, tests were under way. It was still unclear whether he would be admitted. Sarah joined me for the long vigil in that disheartening waiting room we knew all too well. Late that night, he was admitted.

The next morning Clem was much improved, downright chipper. He even shaved himself. Doctor Kutnick said that his lungs were clearing, and although there was a blood clot in his thigh, it should respond to medication. If all went well, he could be released as early as Thursday. I had brought books and we settled in to Room 434.

After lunch, Clem mentioned the morning we had gone to get married.
“We were sitting in the back of that taxi, and I knew that marrying you was too good to be true.” I understood what had stirred the memory—the next day was our anniversary. It was a day we never forgot to mark; nothing fancy, just a word to say,
I remember
. But that he should refer to the taxi made me laugh. I told him how vividly I, too, remembered, except that I had been worried about my golf dress and if it was spiffy enough and wishing I had a corsage to make me look more like a bride. “Do you remember stopping the cab and running into a florist for an orchid? It was as if you had read my mind.” He shrugged. “Maybe I did.” But I knew he didn't remember the flower.

When I told him it was thirty-eight years—we never did subtract for the “divorce”—he said, as he did every year, “That long? You don't look old enough.” Good to hear, especially since I had recently turned sixty. A little later, drowsy, eyes heavy, he said, “I never gave you enough. I'm sorry.” His words came from a place seldom unlocked. I knew he wasn't referring to flowers and “stuff,” he meant enough of
himself
. I told him that his words surprised me, that I had always thought of myself as being the withholding one. He simply said, “No, not you.” But I was sure it had taken two. I thought of the many things that lay between us, said and mostly unsaid, as we had protected each other or, more often and more likely, protected ourselves.

There was a gentleness in the room that day. It was reflected in his thoughts and his voice. I had noticed that in recent weeks his intonation had become softer, the hard edges of consonants more cushioned. It was as if his boyhood Southernness had reasserted itself.

Late that night he was possessed once again by the drug demons. He called me. He was locked up in a hotel. They refused to give him a wake-up call . . . My helplessness, the doubts, my anxiety kicked in. He had been so fine all day. What if he fell again? I should have taken him home. They were just making him worse.