As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (26 page)

Marjorie Blumfield was not pretty, though not unattractive either. She was short, slight, and wore a significant amount of jewelry, bracelets that rattled whenever she lifted her arms, delicate pearls around her neck. Her nails were painted the precise shade of red of her lipstick, and her hair was styled into a smooth, brushed-under bob. When asked by Howard what she’d studied at college she answered, giggling, “Oh, everything.” That night she giggled often throughout the meal, particularly so when, later in the evening, as my mother and I cleared dishes, Howard described his plans to return from Boston to set up a pediatric practice. He answered her laughter with a befuddled glance. But I understood. “She thinks she’s won the lottery,” I told my mother, angrily, in the kitchen.

The meal was winding down, our dessert and coffee had been consumed, when Marjorie’s giggles ceased at last. For a moment she looked worried, glancing at her parents, signaling them to do something, and her father began questioning Howard about his more immediate plans, such as those for next week’s Shabbos. “I wonder what’s up?” was how Marjorie’s father put it as he adjusted the knot of his tie.

Howard turned to Marjorie and, to our surprise, asked her if she’d like to join us next week, even though this meant another two-hour drive for him from Boston to Middletown and then back again. Oddly, he didn’t look at her when he spoke but rather stared past her, at our father, who sat silently at the end of the table, nodding at the question, as if Mort were the one Howard had just asked to Shabbos dinner and the answer was a resounding, happy yes.

The last time I saw Howard, two months before his death at forty-one of a heart attack, a loss that left my parents for a second time without a son, it was at a family dinner at my parents’. Howard had seemed so much older than he was—his hair, what was left of it, a solid gray, his back slouched, his stomach protruding in a way that took me by surprise, reminding me of our uncle Nelson. Howard had been married to Marjorie for nearly fourteen years, and they had two girls. Though I didn’t see Howard often—in our adult lives we stayed as separate as in that first year following Davy’s death—I’d heard plenty about his medical practice; he was known for his extraordinary care with children, his gentleness, and the time he gave to both the kids and their parents.

That evening, as we quietly ate our mother’s food, Howard looked worn out, his eyes heavy, his face drawn, and I was worried for him. But then I got busy again with my own life, my bland career at G. Fox & Co., a department store in Hartford, where I was a buyer of women’s clothing. Since my divorce from Mark Fishbaum five years before, the job was like a cave I’d come to live in. Off duty and I’d blink at the brightness of a world I barely knew. By the time I got the call two months later that Howard was dead, I was wholly preoccupied, as I so often was, with the minutiae of hose, bras, and underwear.

At Howard’s burial, staring at my devastated parents and then at Howard’s grave, all I could think of was how he’d been determined since Davy’s death never to make another mistake, never to displease our parents.

“But you never made a mistake,” I once told him. Howard was a senior in college then, still living at home, already committed to medical school though his natural talents lay so much in the business of the store. Almost five years had gone by since Davy’s death. I was seventeen, still stupid about so many things, but this much I understood: “Howard, nothing that happened was your fault.”

“It was all my fault,” he answered, his voice steady, his conviction unshakable, his body, though seated, tense and pumped with adrenaline, as if it were still that day five years ago and he were in the water swimming toward us while Mark Fishbaum—sailing behind him, then beside him, and then ahead of him—brought the Sailfish onto shore.

For years Nina had nightmares about Davy’s death, though she wasn’t actually there at the accident scene. Nevertheless, she woke in the night screaming, seeing the events—the particular stretch of Beach Avenue, the ice cream truck, the blue sky, Davy’s body up and running then down and broken—as if the whole thing had unfolded right before her. That was why she couldn’t imagine coming back to Woodmont the summer following the death when Bec called, asking Vivie, along with Nina, to join me, Bec, and my mother there. “It isn’t possible,” Vivie had said simply enough, speaking for Nina. Vivie had taken to speaking for Nina often that year, as Nina had no words for what ailed her, left her bedridden on many a weekend, left her spacey and languid at school. For the first time her grades weren’t stellar, but they were good enough for her to pass each class.

To put distance between herself and the nightmares, she chose to attend the University of California at Berkeley. For a time she was content, her engagement with academics bringing her back to life. Her second semester there she had a romance, too, her first, with a boy from Santa Monica named Rick. But Connecticut and the summer of 1948 were always there in her mind, and before long she broke it off with him. Happiness, Nina felt, was not hers to have.

But then she met Estelle Casey. Nina had just begun a Ph.D. program to focus on biological anthropology (which according to Leo was like putting the minds of her two long-held heroes Charles Darwin and Margaret Mead into a Waring blender and pushing “go”). Estelle Casey was one of Nina’s professors and Nina was Estelle’s prodigy, her best student, the one with pressing questions for Estelle after class, the one who quickly became her research assistant. Throughout the autumn of 1954, shocked by her attraction, Nina wished it wasn’t so. Her sexual inclination, the true one that, since she was fifteen and just gaining an awareness of, she’d barely allowed herself to feel, shamed her. She tried to hold her feelings at bay, but in Estelle’s presence, staring at her bright eyes and intelligent face, she could hold them back no better than a sky filled with ever-darkening clouds could hold back the inevitability of rain. For some months Nina found a twisted reconciliation with her feelings by calling Estelle “Eddie,” at least in her mind. Once she even mentioned “Eddie” in a call home to Vivie, who she knew so desperately wanted her to feel loved. “I love Eddie,” she told her mother. “But the thing is, I don’t know if Eddie loves me.”

She knew the neighborhood in which Estelle lived, and on weekends during those first months of working for her she began to go there, stopping at a bakery for some bread she didn’t need, drinking cup after cup of coffee at a small café. But in over a dozen such trips she never bumped into Estelle, and it occurred to Nina upon her return from each journey that if she actually met Estelle by chance, as she dreamed of, she’d not live through the encounter. The mere sight of Estelle Casey—her tall frame, her colorful fringed scarves draping over her shoulders, her nearly pitch-black hair—would surely knock Nina dead.

It would be a feat, therefore, to survive an entire dinner with Estelle, but upon Estelle’s insisting that she and Nina eat together to celebrate the publication of Estelle’s first book, Nina did just that. Nina had contributed to the last year of work on that book, one for which Estelle held out hopes of becoming notable in the field. In it she’d synthesized the latest research, including her own, on the physiological changes in primates once they became bipedal. The foot, for example, had gone from a grasping agent, more like a hand, to something that supported a body’s weight. “Enjoy every walk,” Estelle often told Nina over the long months of editing and fact-checking, of hours spent side by side in Estelle’s office, and she said it again, almost giddily, that night at dinner as they talked in Estelle’s kitchen, a small room with an oak table pushed against one of its walls and a single lit candle at the table’s center. Estelle sat at one end of the table and Nina catty-corner to her. They’d touched knees already, though only by accident. Still, Nina couldn’t lift her glass of wine for fear of its trembling in her hands. “Enjoy every walk,” Estelle breezily said, to which Nina nodded and replied, the follow-up by then rote, “because it was long in the making.”

Everything in human evolution was long in the making—the opposable thumb, the human brain, the dual curvature of the human spine. Dinner with Estelle Casey, too, was long in the making, Nina thought to herself as she sat, watching Estelle butter a second slice of bread, hoping she wouldn’t notice that Nina couldn’t manage more than a few bites of food.

But Estelle did notice. “Not so hungry?” she asked.

Nina had been in love with Estelle for eight months. Before that she’d been purposefully alone, avoiding happiness, for close to five years. “Starved,” Nina answered.

They touched knees again, this time on purpose, this time Estelle tapping Nina in a way that signaled she knew what she meant. They held hands. They gazed at each other, a protracted look, and Estelle smiled gently, kindly, when Nina began to blink back tears.

“It’s okay,” Estelle said. “Really, it is.” She leaned toward Nina and kissed her cheek. Then Estelle stroked Nina’s face: her chin, hair, lips. She kissed her again, more intimately. After several minutes, Nina dared to kiss back.

Estelle pulled away and took a sip of wine. “Ready?” she said, looking at Nina.

“For what?” Nina asked, her hand pressed to her mouth where her lips felt new to her.

“A walk,” Estelle told her, gently, whispering the words, “to bed. Upstairs.”

There were detriments to the bipedal physiological structure as well as benefits. Arthritis, for example, was a sorry cost, one that, depending on the weather, affected Estelle Casey, caused her back and hips to throb, though she was only thirty-two. “I try to take the long view when it comes to my aches and pains,” she explained to Nina one morning, three months into their love affair. Just the week before, Nina had moved in with Estelle. “I try to take the long view—we’ve been upright for only what, four million years? But then a day like this rolls around,” Estelle said, glancing out a window. A rainstorm had begun overnight and the day was determinedly gray. “My damn back,” she groaned at last, giving in to it.

They spent that day, a Sunday, in bed, not making love as they’d done the evening before, but simply lying next to each other, Nina rubbing Estelle’s back from time to time. They read. Eventually they napped. By midday they were restless, though, and, finally dressed, they grabbed a pair of umbrellas and hit the sidewalks of Berkeley. They walked miles, barely talking, but Nina understood that this silence, comfortable between them, was not to be feared. Because of the rain, the university campus, which they eventually arrived at, was less populated than usual. Over several minutes only a few students entered the library’s door. Something about the emptiness touched Nina. “The whole place looks beautiful today. Like a beautiful world,” she said, taking Estelle’s hand, briefly, as they paused to look around. A moment later Estelle pulled her hand back out of a sense of caution that Nina knew wasn’t personal. “Beautiful, yes. But even here, almost a home, not our world,” Estelle said.

From Vivie Nina had learned a thing or two about cooking, and that night Nina made minestrone and Vivie’s beloved cinnamon muffins. Estelle and Nina ate in the living room, where Nina kept a small but steady fire going. If Estelle’s back still ached she didn’t complain. Nor did she complain over the following weeks and months as the two settled into a routine of living together. In one of her weekly calls home Nina told Vivie, “Eddie loves your food.” Responding to Vivie’s question about the state of Nina’s happiness, she answered, simply enough, “Very.”

She was so very happy, in fact, that when she first met the pair of brothers who delivered the morning paper—one eight and the other ten, they’d told her—she didn’t make any connection between them and Davy. They were just two determined little boys and she took to tipping them generously, twenty-five percent, when they came by on Tuesday afternoons to collect payment for the week’s papers. But two weeks after describing her joy to her mother, Nina answered the doorbell to find that it was just the one brother, suddenly, collecting the week’s payment. She asked about the missing one, the older brother, and was told he was sick. “What’s your name?” she asked the eight-year-old. “Teddie,” he said, and then he thanked her when she tipped him, this time thirty percent. The next week and the week after Teddie came collecting by himself. “How’s your brother?” she asked the third Tuesday that Teddie appeared solo. Her tip this time was fifty percent. The boy only looked at his feet.

For some weeks after that no one came to collect money for the newspaper, though the paper itself was delivered on time each morning. During those weeks Nina began to worry about Teddie and his ill brother, and she’d spend late Tuesday afternoons at the living room window looking for the boy, longing for him and planning, should he arrive, to tip him sixty percent. By then her dreams of Woodmont had resurfaced. When Vivie called and asked if she was as happy as always, Nina answered, “I shouldn’t be. I know I shouldn’t be.”

She thought that way even after the doorbell rang the following Tuesday and there was Teddie along with Alfred, his older brother. Apart from being paler than before, Alfred looked well. Teddie made sure to introduce him. “She likes us,” Teddie told Alfred while smiling at Nina. “You have no idea how much you mean to me,” Nina almost responded. But she didn’t. She simply sent them off after tipping them one hundred percent.

That night Estelle complained that she was having one of her bad days. At dinner she spun her spaghetti rather than ate it, and moaned as she shifted in her chair, searching for comfort. “I need to lie down,” she finally said, offering Nina an apology by way of a weak smile. Before she left the kitchen she paused to kiss Nina, her long scarf unraveling onto Nina as she did. Holding the ends of the scarf, Nina kept Estelle close for a moment beyond the kiss. Then, Estelle gone, Nina began slamming pots and pans, an imitation of anger. She’d seen her mother do this on more than one occasion as a way to get her father’s attention when his head was too long in a book. But Nina saw too that Vivie would quickly regret doing so and stop.