A Private Sorcery (24 page)

9
Leonard

I plan to call her on Thanksgiving Day. My mother always called me on Thanksgiving Day. My Uncle Jack, who devoted himself to Americanisms, who took the turkeys and firecrackers and little red, white and blue flags as seriously as his father had the unfurling and furling of the Torah each Yom Kippur, always called my mother on Thanksgiving. The bigger the turkey, the more American. Jack pronounced
big
the way you and Marc did as toddlers:
bee-ig.
One year he claimed that my Aunt Mindyl had roasted a thirty-three-pound bird. My mother laughed and laughed: “The butcher, knowing Jack, stuffed the neck with stones.”

After Marc moved to Atlanta and you missed two Thanksgivings due to being on call, I gave up on preparing a holiday meal. If I'm willing to participate in your mother's dance about not feeling well enough, she is perfectly happy to go to the Ramada Inn where they do the entire spread, pumpkin soup to pumpkin pie. No matter the weather, she wears her full-length mink, the last present from her father. Thinking about it now, I don't know why you and Rena have never joined us. Did we ask and you declined or did I assume it would be too bizarre a grouping, the four of us seated in the windowless mirrored dining room of a motel whose main attraction is its proximity to the parkway?

Thanksgiving morning, I rise as always at five. Making coffee, I watch the birds pecking for seeds. Never, it occurs to me, have we had a bird feeder. All these years watching them scavenge for food, and never once have I taken the hour to go to the garden supply store and buy a feeder. Shtetl mentality. Jews from the Bronx don't go to garden nurseries. It's Italian men who plant yellow rosebushes and blue hydrangeas, who keep basement workshops where they probably make their own bird feeders.

I take a box of bread crumbs from the cabinet and open the kitchen
door. In my slippers and pajamas, I step into the cold morning air. It takes a moment for the dampness to seep through the flannel. I sprinkle the patch of grass just beyond the patio. Back inside, I watch a flock of sparrows descend. They peck for the crumbs, their beaks tiny jackhammers.

I wonder if you are still sleeping. Rather, I wonder if you have slept at all. This last month, you have reassured me that Rena's announcement that she wants a divorce has been a strange relief. At first, I wondered if this was just more of your masochism. Like when you were first arrested and Morton told us you wanted to plead guilty. That in your perverse logic, it is a good thing for you to suffer so therefore you feel less depressed. When I asked you about this, you looked perplexed and then amused: “It's nowhere near that elegant. Once I got over the self-pity about Rena leaving me and the anxiety about living alone after I get out of here, I had to admit how impossible marriage is for me now. About as likely as someone who's just had open-heart surgery going mountain climbing.”

The question I want to ask you but cannot is:
Was it sex? Was sex the problem?
I feel certain that the answer is yes but that you would not be able to say so. Not out of prudery but rather out of ignorance. Perhaps this is my arrogance to think of you as a sexual innocent. Still, I imagine you and Rena as twin flamingos, your spindly legs planted in watery marshland, your delicate necks caressed by the balmy breezes. Your fussy sleep. Your non-appetites. No alchemy, no fire in two such similar creatures. I believe this. I do. That we are built to desire the dissimilar. That we cannot rely on morality alone to ward off incest but need to have lust itself most inflamed by what is different.

Seeing you without the cloak of lethargy, I actually felt alarmed. Were they giving you an experimental mood elevator? Something that would burn out your serotonin circuits? I was relieved when you said your sleep remained poor—that whatever shift taking place in you was at least in this way proceeding gradually. Ever since you could get out of your crib on your own, I recall your episodes of sleeplessness. At two, when you still slept in pajamas with feet, I would hear you padding out of your bedroom, your eyes bloodshot with fatigue, dragging
your blanket, tearful that you couldn't fall asleep. Your mother had no patience for this. She'd grown up in a household where there were clear and abundant rules for children. “Never would I dare get out of my bed without my parents' permission. It was the same with food. I never even opened the icebox until my thirteenth birthday.” No wonder, I thought, she'd been so intemperate once given the opportunity. Hell, if they'd let her get her own juice, maybe she wouldn't have gotten drunk and gone to bed with me and maybe we wouldn't be so miserably here.

Now I know that your sleeplessness was our fault, your mother's and mine. You couldn't sleep because we never helped you learn how. Even when we lived in Jack's dining room, my mother always made bedtime a thing so sweet it is painful to recollect. We would lie on our cots while she read to us in her hushed alto voice: first picture books for Lil and me, then a chapter from a girl's adventure story for Rose and Eunice. She'd close the book and come to each of us, one at a time—Rose, then Eunice, then Lil, then me—kissing our cheek, stroking our hair, whispering,
I love you, I love you, my child
. Solemnly, my father would follow behind, awed by this piece of beauty my mother created in our cramped quarters.

In my study, I close the scrapbook left open on my desk and turn on the computer. I stare at the screen and the words stare back, white and inert. My lids are heavy. Already, at six in the morning, it seems too late.

I lay my head on the desk, close my eyes, slip into sleep as quickly as a stone dropped into a cold clear quarry. Twenty minutes later, I wake and immediately begin:

On March 18, the day after the baby was found drowned, Carmelita woke to the sound of banging. The village women had come to exorcise the devil from her. With Carmelita still on her mat, they dismantled the hut piece by piece. She lay motionless on the dirt floor during the hour it took them to tear the straw from the wood frame and then hack the frame to bits. When they were finished, they poured goat urine over her garments,
rubbed chicken blood in her hair and left her lying bare to the elements in the midst of the rubble.

A
T ELEVEN, I STOP
to prepare your mother's breakfast. I make a fresh pot of coffee and scramble eggs with salami, a dish she wrinkled her nose at the first time I cooked it for her but devoured after tasting it and then began to request. Although I'm the one who comes from the peasant stock (you cannot imagine how intimidated we immigrant Ukrainians were of the second-generation German Jews with their heritage of professorships at the university in Frankfurt and diamond stores in Berlin, how often your mother in the first years of our marriage would remind me of these differences between my family and the Jewish colleagues her father had known), your mother is the one who possesses the peasant's appetite and body, too: the broad hips, the round belly, the square face, all exaggerated now by a quarter-century on the horizontal.

Your mother is unusually cheerful. She slathers the eggs and salami with strawberry jam, makes a tiny belch when she's done. “Excuse me,” she giggles, putting her hand over her mouth, her gestures more girlish now at fifty-nine than they were at twenty. After these rare warm moments, I tell myself that I was right to stay with her all these years, that love flourishes in the caring for others. It's not a sentiment I am able to sustain—either that familiarity breeds affection breeds love or that anything so elevated as love has motivated me with your mother in any way.

While she bathes, I change the sheets on her bed and bring her the
tiny piece of cookie
and the television guide she has requested. Dressed in her peach bed jacket, she sits in the armchair and flips through the pages. “Leonard,” she says, looking up at me with alarm, “you didn't tell me today is Thanksgiving.”

“Yes, dear,” I say, surprised because she usually tracks the calendar like a hawk.

She slumps in the chair. “My sinuses. They've been awful.”

We go on about her sinuses and the headaches they cause. The outing
to the Ramada Inn, I cajole, will do her good. I help her back into bed.

“Maybe if I rest awhile.”

I adjust the shades, switch off the light, turn to leave. “My mink …”

I
CALL
M
ARC FIRST
. The conversation is defined by his not asking about you. He talks about his law practice, his golf game, Susan's job teaching sign language. It was you who first pointed out the peculiar nature of these conversations. At the time, you were upset and railing a bit: “These phone calls, they're not about trying to communicate anything. They're rituals. Incantations employed to reassure himself that what seems empty makes sense:
I know it's ridiculous hours. Half the time, I think I should sell the house and we should move to Wyoming and I'll work digging ditches. But, look, I guess you have to make these sacrifices at this time of life. No one who bills under twenty-five hundred hours in a year is going to make partner.
” You sighed with exasperation. “It's false consciousness,” you concluded, the harshest condemnation you can level.

What I want to ask your brother but don't is how he's feeling now that he and Susan are no longer trying to have a baby. Six years of ovulation kits, hormone injections, egg extractions yielding three conceptions and three miscarriages. The last at eighteen weeks, after the sonogram, after seeing the baby curled knees to chest in the amniotic balloon. Susan, grief-struck, too afraid to try again. At the time, I'd wanted to call her, to comfort her by reminding her that one out of four conceptions miscarry, Nature's way of weeding its garden; my grandmother, your great-grandmother, had six miscarriages and sixteen live births, only ten of which lived beyond childhood. But I hadn't called. Marc said she didn't want to talk about it. Instead, as always, it was you and I who discussed it: how these extraordinary efforts to boost fertility leave no room for the early losses, the medical interventions making each conception too precious, the loss of the fetus (for my grandmother, as expected as not) a devastation.

With you, it takes over an hour to get through the busy signal. I keep hitting redial until I'm lucky and get a free line in the split second between someone hanging up and someone else dropping their quarters in the slot. “Shit,” I hear someone say. “Fifteen minutes, I'm standing here for this phone and that motherfuck Dubinsky gets a call. Dubinsky,” he yells. “It's your boyfriend. Get your whiteboy ass over here.”

I wait three, maybe four minutes. “Fuck 'em, fuck 'em,” someone mutters before the line goes dead.

Rena is my last call. She answers slightly out of breath.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say.

“Oh, Leonard, it's good to hear your voice. I just walked in the door.”

I hold while she takes off her coat, a jealous interlude during which I'm convinced that she's coming in from the night.

She's good enough to puncture my fantasies. “I walked up to Riverside Church. I've never seen it so bright inside. It must be the angle of the sun.” This information is meant, I can see, as a hand reaching out to pat my arm. This place you and I have passed countless times on our walks to Grant's Tomb.

I do something impulsive. It's because, I tell myself, I cannot reach you. “Are you free Saturday? For coffee, dinner?”

She pauses. I am flooded with anxiety. Anxiety that she will say no. Anxiety that she will say yes.

“That would be really nice. It's sweet of you to ask me.”

I am surprised that she seems touched. I always think of her as inaccessible, surrounded by the flurry of her glamorous job, well, her old glamorous job, her lesbian friends, her idiosyncratic beauty. She suggests the Alice in Wonderland statue in the park, near the model boat basin, half past four, sufficient light for a brisk stroll before an early dinner, and it is not until I am at the sink washing your mother's breakfast dishes that it occurs to me I have not asked her what she is doing today, with whom she will spend her Thanksgiving.

I
ARRIVE TWENTY MINUTES
early and sit at Alice's feet, watching the pigeons skirt the steps that lead down to the basin. The sky is all whites and fading blues, a cold light that erases the yellow and red undertones that lift an ordinary spirit. There are no children, the promise of chill and dark too close, only two men, both mustached, both wearing brimmed caps. They stare at their toy boats, maneuvering them with remote controls, adult men frozen in eternal boyhood.

She arrives exactly on time. Approaching from a distance, her hair covered by the hood of her parka, she could be you, twenty years ago, loping up the hill in front of the house. She kisses me on the cheek, her hood falling back over her shoulders, her hair ringleted from the damp, a haze around her pale, angled face. Ivory soap, lemon from her shampoo.

“You look well, Leonard.” She smiles, a mouth of perfect gapless teeth.

“It's been a long time. Since the end of June when you moved.” Immediately, I regret saying this, afraid of sounding like one of the guilt vampires, those old people whom you've hardly greeted before they ask when they'll see you again.

She takes my arm, something I can't recall her having ever done before, and we descend the steps to the terrace around the boat basin, the café closed for the winter. “This is one of my favorite places,” she says. “I come here in the summer to eat ice cream and watch the children with their boats.” She points at the boarded-up building. “Strawberry ice cream in a paper cup.”

“I used to take Saul here.”

“He told me. Your New York afternoons. The Forty-Second Street library, dim sum in Chinatown. He said you told him this was like a little piece of Paris in New York, how there's a place like this in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

“You've been there?”