As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (18 page)

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he’d said. “None of us did. I just went where I was told to go, did what I was told to do. I’m only glad to know it wasn’t all for nothing.” And that’s about as much as he’d ever said about his war experience, culminating in his injury during what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

At the awards ceremony she envisioned him limping slightly as he set forth across the stage, down the steps, and resumed his seat, the one next to hers.

She couldn’t bear it that she was only dreaming, that she wasn’t actually going to be there.

On the day of the ceremony, Veterans Day, for the first time since she’d moved to Middletown she had that claustrophobic feeling again, the one she claimed to have had almost every Friday afternoon in Woodmont for all the years I could remember. Telling Ada she’d be right back, Bec left the house midday and went for a two-hour-long walk, past the Wesleyan campus on High Street, up Route 66, closing in on the diner where she’d last seen Tyler, where they’d shared what they didn’t know would be their last meal together: a messy meatball grinder and a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Later that afternoon she didn’t want to play rummy, though my mother and I were eager to. At school I was studying Asia, its geography, religions, and cultures, and uncharacteristically, Bec didn’t want to hear anything about it. Instead she sat in the chair my mother used to spend her endless hours in, staring out the window, gazing into the distance as if she might find something she once lost, if only she stared hard and long enough.

“Teach me to drive,” she asked Mort when he came home that evening. He hadn’t taken the day off from work but instead held a “Veterans Day Sale” at the store, an idea that even Howard, always one to make a sale, found to be verging on disrespectful.

“Please,” Bec said, lifting Mort’s coat from his shoulders. “Please.”

For the next six weeks Mort took her out regularly in that old Dodge we couldn’t seem to part with. By mid-December she was ready for her driver’s license test. The day, a Wednesday, was a windy one with a possibility of snow, and by the time my father picked Bec up at one o’clock and brought her to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a dimly lit brick building on Route 66, a light showering had begun.

Though Mort urged her not to, insisted he wouldn’t mind coming back the next day or the next, she took the road test anyway, and passed.

In obtaining her driver’s license Bec had a plan. She’d return to New Haven. She’d see Tyler again, repair the damage she’d done in staying away for so long. It didn’t have to be all or nothing: all Ada, nothing for Bec. Her self-imposed sentence, she’d come to realize, especially those last months as Ada was more and more able to take care of herself, was simply too harsh. Bec had inflicted it on herself in the raw days of her mourning, when Davy’s death was a catastrophe no one would ever recover from. But here they were, living on, their days difficult but bearable, and the idea of what she would do with the rest of her life became more and more pressing. She had smashed the old life. Now, could she put it back together again?

The day she chose to see Tyler, a week before Christmas, was cold but stunningly clear. Without any questions Mort had lent her the car, a generosity she considered while heading south on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. She’d never been alone in the Dodge before, and every once in a while she found herself speaking out loud, as if to Mort, who had taught her to drive with a patience she didn’t know he had. All of it had been a kindness. He’d been aware of her all this time, his actions showed. “Thanks, Mort,” she’d told him that morning as he handed her the car key. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done for me.”

She drove to the center of New Haven, past the city’s green, and then to Howe Street, where her apartment had been. She decided she’d rather walk the few blocks from there to the dress shop, to come upon it just as she always had. As she neared the shop, the awning over its entrance caught her eye first, and seeing the familiar green and white stripes, she stopped short. Feeling weak, she veered toward the coffee shop across the street where she sat at a table by the front window.

Strangely, there were lights strung across Tyler’s storefront, for Christmas. He had never bothered with such decorations before, something she hadn’t thought about until right then, when she wondered if he’d held back for her sake. Not that she would have minded. Feeling stronger already, she thought she’d go and tell Tyler that. She didn’t mind a little festivity for the holidays, she’d say. Truly, she didn’t. But upon standing, she felt her heart begin to race, and she dropped back into her seat, ordered coffee, sipped, and stared.

Inside the dress shop everything seemed still. The lights were blazing, however, so she knew they had to be there, Tyler and Irene and that new dressmaker, Mildred Butler. Peering more determinedly, she wondered if she could see Irene that very moment, walking to a dress rack then away from it, but from the distance of the coffee shop she wasn’t sure. A moment later she set down her cup, left some change, and rose.

Just as she opened the door of the coffee shop, the dress shop’s door opened too, a surprise that caused Bec to jump back, scurry to the table she’d just left, resume sipping the remainder of her coffee. When she looked over again Bec saw Irene, her signature blond curls lifting in the wind as she held the shop door open, waiting for someone.

The woman who finally walked through the door was typical of the clientele Bec remembered: stylish, seemingly moneyed. Taking stock of her nicely tailored woolen suit and jacket, Bec wondered if the new dressmaker, Mildred Butler, had cooked that one up. The suit fit the woman well, Bec had to concede, though it was a conventional look. Surely, Bec noted, she would have done something a little more interesting with the collar, perhaps have added a belt. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, and once she maneuvered it through the door, a man followed her, a person with nearly black hair and a tall, slender frame, a pleasant-looking man like Tyler, Bec thought, studying him, then lifting her hand to cover her mouth, for it
was
Tyler, this man who was now leaning out the shop’s door and kissing the woman in the tailored suit on the cheek, perfunctorily, a way of saying good-bye.

In the next moment, though, he wasn’t saying good-bye but was on the sidewalk, lifting the baby from the carriage and kissing that small person, too. These kisses were hardly perfunctory but joyful, plentiful. Instead of laying the baby back down in the carriage, he continued holding the child as he said a few words to Irene. Then, baby in one arm, other arm linked with the woman’s, he began to stroll down the street with them. When the woman momentarily unlinked her arm and turned, glancing back to call out something to Irene, Bec suddenly recognized her—Tyler’s wife, a woman she hadn’t seen in at least ten years.

Once they’d rounded a corner and were out of sight, Bec managed to cross the street and spent a moment inside the shop speaking to Irene, who was dumbfounded to see her.

“He was out of his mind without you,” Irene explained. “I don’t think he knew what he was doing. Truly, I don’t. He thought you’d left him. But the baby is what’s saved him.” She paused, shaking her head. “Do you want to meet Mildred?” she then asked. “Mildred Butler? She’s just in the back, sewing. She’s not you, but she’s very good.”

“No. No time,” Bec said. She glanced at the dresses neatly arranged on the racks and was dismayed to see everything in such good order.

“Shall I tell Tyler you were here?” Irene asked.

“No point in that. Please don’t.” Bec continued to take stock of the place, the cherished chairs at the back of the store, the pale blue walls, a color she’d chosen.

“I know what was between you two,” Irene said. She shook her head and for a moment held a hand over her mouth. “How could I not know?”

Bec lowered her head and stared at the planks of the shop’s wooden floor. “Not to worry,” she told Irene at last. “I didn’t come for anything.”

Back in the car she did the math. March. It would have been sometime in March when the baby, now just a few weeks old, was conceived. She and Tyler weren’t talking in March. They’d last talked and seen each other, briefly, toward the end of February. “Take your time,” he’d said then about her eventual though clearly questionable return. “Bec, I’m here. I’m waiting.”

That peculiar hell: waiting. He’d lost faith.

And, of course, she hadn’t helped matters with her all too typical response: “Ada needs me.”

She didn’t want to see it then, how that last time they were together at the diner he’d seemed wounded at the words, had winced, and then he’d raised his eyes and given her a look she’d never seen before. He was nodding, confident of some assessment in his mind. “Yes,” he’d told her. “Ada sure does.”

She believed then what she’d said: Ada needed her, and she’d thought she was doing the right thing, the good thing. How easy it was, she realized in hindsight, to have convinced herself of her goodness. But now she could see it, that that the willingness with which she’d abandoned Tyler was cruel.

She left New Haven. As she approached the Wilbur Cross Parkway she thought for a moment she’d head farther south, past New Haven toward Milford, where she’d visit the Woodmont cottage. It was still only morning and Mort had lent her the Dodge for the entire day. But within moments she changed her mind. “Ada needs me,” she told herself numbly, unable to think of anything else to say as she steered the car back where she’d come from, toward Middletown.

All that year, while my mother did indeed need Bec, at first in the most basic ways, and then as a supportive friend, my father needed Nelson. He needed Nelson to pick him up each morning to get to services on time, for though it was a duty to say Kaddish every day for Davy, and though he wouldn’t think of not observing this sacred task, the truth was my father was having trouble getting himself together each morning and out the door on time. Howard was no help in these matters, for he was having the same trouble. Later, Mort struggled while opening the car door, then again while walking the short route on Broad Street from the car to the synagogue. He needed Nelson there in our driveway honking his horn again and again, and once the car was parked near the synagogue, he needed Nelson to take his arm as he shambled timidly toward the service. Nelson was a help, too, when, mid-service, holding his prayer book, Mort invariably lost his place, couldn’t connect with even one Hebrew word. For my father, every day had become Yom Kippur and every prayer a litany of sins for which he desperately tried to atone. There was the sin of not praying well enough, of constantly losing his place; and the sin of enjoying his time—those crucial last months of Davy’s life—without the family; there was the sin of not instilling in Howard a strong enough commitment to Judaism; and the sin, worse than it sounded, of stopping for hot dogs on Fridays as he made his way to Woodmont. Finally, there was the sin of not knowing his role in life anymore. “What am I?” he asked God in his prayers each day at the morning service, but he never heard an answer. “Come on,” Nelson would say when the service ended. “Let’s get a bite before work.” And Mort came to rely on those quiet breakfasts—a bowl of oatmeal for him, a pile of eggs and toast for his ever-hungry brother and for his son—as at least some means of nourishment, sustenance that neither prayer nor work nor being home with the family was able to bring anymore.

There were moments when Bec and Nelson crossed paths, nodded at each other, occasionally said hello.

Gradually their conversations grew longer. They talked sometimes of Ada and of Mort, giving each other brief reports. They talked, like everybody, about the weather. They talked about business at Leibritsky’s, its ups and downs. Once Nelson mentioned something personal to Bec: that he enjoyed music. Big bands, he said, were the best.

One evening in December of 1949—almost fifteen months after the death and two weeks before her drive to New Haven—they had their first conversation about their mutual roles as caretakers. Nelson had driven Mort home from work rather late and had walked him inside.

“He’s spent,” Nelson explained to Bec, who held the door open for the men. Once Mort had disappeared, after handing Bec his hat and coat and then going straight upstairs to bed, Bec turned to Nelson, who had stood the whole time in the doorway.

“I know how much Mort leans on you,” Bec told Nelson. “You’re a good brother.”

“And you’re a good sister,” he answered.

They stood for a moment without speaking. After a while Nelson said, his eyes cast to the kitchen floor, “You know, we should treat ourselves, take a break. It’s been a long haul.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Bec said, sighing. “Maybe I’ll take a bath. You know, a long soaking bath.”

Nelson nodded. Then he said, “Regina’s has a nice lunch. Very nice.”

“Lunch?”

“If you’d like. You know, for a break.”

She said okay, and the two went to lunch together that Saturday when Nelson was through with Shabbos services. And they went to lunch together again, the first Saturday of the following month, just a week after her journey to New Haven, a time when she could barely touch her food, when she sat there, across from Nelson, sipping tea and nodding as he rattled on, best he could, just to keep the meal a pleasant one. They lunched again the first Saturday of the next month. By March of 1950 they were going to Regina’s two Saturdays a month, and were beginning to talk more, Nelson about the store’s history, or even more about Mort, or sometimes about the records he collected, and Bec about childhood with Ada and Vivie, and about her parents, Maks and Risel. She never mentioned the years of her adult life, her dresses, the time in New Haven. She hoped she seemed grateful enough for each meal. By May of that year they were lunching at Regina’s every Saturday. The meal finished, the bill paid, Regina would lean over the table, tell them, “Listen, I’ll make something special for you two next week. Veal cutlets and spaghetti. Chicken cacciatore. Something like that. See you then, right?” The two would nod, and the next week’s engagement would be agreed upon without Nelson, who was awkward at such matters, having to ask Bec, and without Bec, who still loved Tyler, having to respond to an invitation from Nelson.