As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (33 page)

Bec, who in ordinary times had many useful things to do, all connected to her sewing and designing, stopped her work, and most of the week she stayed by herself, sitting for hours in the wicker chair in her sunporch and smoking more than usual, or going off in bare feet for long, solitary walks along the water’s edge. At supper Vivie nearly had to force her to eat. “Come on, Bec,” Vivie urged over and over. “We can’t afford another disaster in the form of you starving.”

Nina and Leo were inseparable, sitting side by side on the front porch, his arm over her shoulders, her face often pressed into his chest as she cried yet again. They didn’t read. They simply sat there, looking seaward.

Sometimes I sat with them. Other times I wandered into the kitchen to watch as Vivie or Judy prepared the next meal.

Occasionally one of them would ask me to set the table and I’d rush forward, a little too eager to finally have something clear and useful to do.

Mark Fishbaum, who had also been at the accident scene, came by each day that week, always with a fresh bouquet of flowers. “For your family,” he told me each time he arrived, knocking on our cottage door, and I’d nod and take the bouquet from him. “See you tomorrow,” he’d then say. He didn’t even ask for Howard, who he seemed to know wouldn’t have the heart yet to say hello. I didn’t say anything to him the entire week either, but each afternoon from Wednesday on I found myself peeking out a side window to see if Mark was on his way again.

That was another thing to do.

The first Wednesday following the accident, early in the evening, Howard drove us all in together to see Davy. This was the first time we’d be there en masse. Our parents were already there. Howard knew that later that evening he’d have to take us home in two trips.

“I don’t mind,” Howard said. “Really, I don’t.”

Upon our arrival Ada was sitting by Davy’s bed, holding his hand, rubbing it between hers. Mort was behind Ada, pacing the length of the room.

Davy had tubes stuck into him, and his head, partially wound with white bandages, looked larger than it should have, out of proportion with his small, thin body. His left arm was in a cast, and most of his torso was wound with white bandaging as well. He looked like a mummy, a wrapped-up little mummy with a blanket thrown over his legs and tubes coming out of his nose and wrist.

He was asleep. Ada told us he’d been that way the whole day, which wasn’t surprising. He’d been out nearly nonstop since the accident, and in the few moments when he’d awakened he’d not said a word.

“He needs his rest,” she said, reaching over his body to rub his hand. “He’s hungry, he needs nourishment, but he needs his rest most of all.”

Then she admonished us to whisper because to talk would risk waking Davy and risk the hospital staff finding out, against their rules, that so many of us were there. Our whispers were ridiculous in their banality. “Hi, Davy,” most of us offered, for lack of anything better to say. Bec said more. “Get better. You get better now,” she urged, leaning over his face, kissing his nose, which was one of the only unwrapped pieces of him.

My father stopped pacing and made a point of standing by Bec, looking at her coldly while she spoke to Davy. When Bec finished, she stood off to the side, a step or so away from the rest of us. Though days had passed since the accident and we were no longer hurling blame at each other, Mort was still looking at everyone with a stunned expression, as if only then seeing us for who we were: Ada, Bec, Howard, Nina, Leo, everyone, as he saw it, who’d had a direct role in the unfolding of the events leading to the accident. He was no longer yelling at everyone, just glaring now and again. He was even angry with Vivie, just for being Nina’s mother. And, it seemed, with me too, for my role, innocent as it was, as witness to the whole thing. Then there were other times when he seemed more irate at himself than anyone else for his absence when his family was in need.

“He knows to get better,” Mort said in response to Bec’s words, his tone agitated but controlled.

“Shoosh,” Ada scolded. “Mort,
whisper.
”

We’d fallen into another one of our collective wordless trances, all of us mute as we stared and stared at the sleeping Davy, when footsteps outside the door grew louder and the faint smell of something smoky and familiar—cigars—wafted into the room. I turned and there was Sal, standing meekly in the doorway. He was dressed not in his usual Good Humor whites but in a dark suit and tie, and at first I didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t smoking a cigar, but his clothes reeked nonetheless. In one hand he held his fedora while in the other he carried a large bouquet of late-summer flowers, mums and daisies.

“I hope you don’t mind I’ve come,” Sal said, taking the smallest step toward us. Everyone had turned his way by then. When no one answered, Sal didn’t proceed farther.

Just seeing Sal caused a relief I couldn’t explain. I rushed over to him and wrapped my arms around him, and when I felt his arms around me I began to wail as if it were last Friday again and the accident and ordeal to ensue had just begun. I’d been wanting to do that—bury my head in someone’s chest—for the longest time, though I hadn’t known it until that moment.

“Molly, darling,” Sal said quietly as he patted my head and back. “Ah, darling…It’s a terrible thing. I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”

When I recovered some and lifted my head I stayed where I was, beside Sal in the doorway. The rest of the family silently faced us. Nina’s eyes were almost as tearful as mine, and Leo had his arm wrapped tightly around her. She seemed to want to join me and Sal but something kept her from moving. Then Howard took a step Sal’s way, but only a step. Still, Sal moved his hat to the same hand that was holding the bouquet and reached out to Howard, but Howard didn’t come closer.

“Oh, you kids,” Sal said, dropping his hand and looking at each of us. “So terribly sad…”

“Of course they’re sad,” my mother said, still trying to keep her voice to a whisper. “And why do you think they’re sad? Why is that, Sal?”

Instinctively, I froze. Though I let go of Sal, I remained at his side.

Sal was about to speak again, but before he could Vivie spoke on his behalf. “Ada, come on, we’re past that now,” she urged, her voice no louder than my mother’s.

“Careful now,” Howard said, speaking particularly gently, as he did whenever he wanted to win our mother over. “You don’t need to get wound up.”

“Wound up?” Ada said, her voice, against her own advice, rising in volume. “How can I not get wound up when the man who hit my son is here?”

Bec said, “Ada, we all know it’s not his fault. We’ve been through this so many times already.”

Ada was nevertheless adamant. “Get him out of here,” she said, her voice even louder than before. “Get him away from my son.”

But Sal had already stepped backward, just out of the room, when Davy rolled a bit to one side and then, blinking first, opened his eyes.

Our mother had wakened him.

He blinked several times more before focusing his gaze on the doorway, directly in his line of vision.

He lifted a finger as if waving Sal’s way. He even mouthed something, though no sound came forth. Then his eyelids dropped closed again.

“See you later, Davy boy,” Sal whispered. The flowers in his hand shook from his trembling.

He backed fully out of the room, turned, and raced down the hospital hallway. I followed him, calling to him. When he stopped, I caught up and he held me again. It was an accident, I assured him, crying as I told him so. Even if we didn’t act like it, I said, we all knew that.

He hung his head; he nodded.

Two days later Sal had a fruit basket delivered to the hospital. Then, the following Tuesday, he ordered flowers to be delivered to our home in Middletown, a late-afternoon drop-off following Davy’s funeral. He didn’t risk any cards, any identification of himself, but we knew who’d sent the flowers. My mother wanted them thrown in the wastebasket, but Vivie took them. “Something to console Nina,” she said. The third delivery was of money, fifty dollars, as much as Sal could spare that month. Ada wanted to throw that out too, but Mort took the bills from her before she could tear them up. By the next month, when Sal sent another fifty dollars, Ada had calmed down just enough to hand over the envelope to Mort without comment. And so it began: fifty-dollar payments every month, always the first Monday, for the next decade, and always, once received, forwarded promptly to Reuben Leibritsky in Israel, who needed it the most, Mort insisted, even in the years after Reuben’s small department store, opened in Haifa, finally began to thrive.

For weeks after the accident Sal’s Good Humor truck, which he refused to drive, remained parked in front of his house. During this time there were moments when he wondered about the children on his route, and sometimes he approached his truck, leaned his back against it, and rattled off their names—Edna Muldoon, Kevin Amato, Binnie Rosenstein, Amanda Pratt, Tommy Monroe—one after the other until his feet ached and he had to go inside to sit down.

One night nearly a month after the accident, after his own children were asleep in bed, he walked outside, climbed into the truck, and stared at the night sky. He hadn’t dared sit in the driver’s seat since the accident. But having finally returned, he leaned forward to grip the steering wheel as if acknowledging an old friend. Then he pulled at it, attempted to rip it out. When he couldn’t he sat back, exhausted. Through the windshield he observed the full moon, emitting a radiance that obliterated the light of most of the stars. The glowing moon looked like a distant spotlight aimed absolutely and singularly at him. He knew he couldn’t duck the light. He knew that his life, the one he’d lived for so long, had already become a thing of the past.

Eventually he got out of the truck, stepped onto the tar of his driveway, and, as if he were suddenly on the moon, he watched himself walk away.

He interviewed weeks later for the position of janitor at the hospital in Milford and told his boss-to-be that he knew a lot about cleaning up messes. He used to be a plumber, after all, he explained, but the family business had recently closed, his father had gotten old, and neither he nor his brothers had the heart to carry the business on into the future.

This was the truth—though not nearly the whole, nor central, truth.

When he was asked his name he spoke it in full for the first time in a long time. It didn’t even sound like his. “Salvatore Giuseppe Luccino,” he said.

T
here was a long-held rumor in the family: Bec didn’t ever sleep with her husband, Nelson, not even once. Three years after Davy’s death she married him, all right, but no one was convinced that she’d done so with even a modicum of passion for Nelson. Add to that how odd they looked together, she such an attractive, stylish woman and he such a sluggish, squat man, and it was hard to see them as a couple. Or at least a couple with any physical life.

And yet the marriage lasted.

Yesterday when I visited Bec’s house I was consumed by those dual mysteries, the way the marriage held and the question of any shared sexual passion between them. Once they’d built their Middletown home in 1953, two years into the marriage, Bec never allowed anyone upstairs. This boundary was similar to the one they’d had from the get-go: they’d never had anyone over to the apartment they shared before that. They were hiding something, we all felt, and what could be more obvious to hide, we figured, than their highly suspected roommate status. Bec reinforced this idea in the way she described the upstairs rooms: a study, a guest bedroom (though they never had guests who stayed over), and “the bedroom.” Not once did she say “our bedroom,” or even “his” or “my” bedroom.

Last night—New Year’s Eve—I climbed the stairs with trepidation, as if finally entering that private realm would bring to it, or myself, some kind of bad luck. Yet how could I make this place my home if half of it was closed off to me? I argued, climbing farther.

Earlier in the day I’d e-mailed Nina the weekly note I sent her. We’d begun exchanging updates after that first visit I made to Berkeley following Howard’s death. I sent mine even before hers arrived. There was so much talk of doom this particular New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t taking chances.
Happy New Millennium,
I wrote.
Fingers crossed,
I added,
We’re good to go in the a.m.
And because it was Friday I closed the usual way:
Shabbat Shalom, dearest Nina.

Hours later I went upstairs. What I saw there was a bedroom, attractive enough and comfortable. A double bed covered with a gray bedspread. A matching gray carpet with a complementary border design of dusty-mauve-colored roses. Straightforward enough furnishings that said nothing of how Bec and Nelson had lived their lives. The guest bedroom offered no clues either. So this is it, I told myself, realizing I wasn’t ever going to know any more than I already did, that all the mysteries of the inheritance were coming along with it.

Yet it always seemed that Bec lived here well, or well enough. She did the best she could. After Davy’s accident she became what we all became, a survivor of one sort or another, though her guilt—those open arms she held out to Davy—was overwhelming. She had as much reason to blame herself as everyone else involved, and for a long while, she did just that.

But then she took a turn the others didn’t take. On the long, tortuous road away from herself, she somehow reversed the process, came back.

Her marriage to Nelson was a first step, though at the time she wouldn’t have thought of it that way. Back then the bond between the two was all about their shared grief and shared guilt. Nelson was the first to confess his culpability. He knew about Megan O’Donnell before anyone else did, he told Bec. He could have discouraged Howard, told him he was nuts. And if he had…He shook his head. He stared not at Bec, who sat across from him at Regina’s restaurant, where they were out for lunch. Early April of 1951, and they’d been coming there for lunch every Saturday for over a year, yet for the first time ever Bec gave Nelson what felt to him like her whole attention. Then she told him her part of it.

“I don’t feel so alone,” she said once she’d finished, turning to Nelson as they rose to fetch their coats at the meal’s end. “Thank you for that. I don’t feel good. Just not so alone.”

“Me too,” Nelson had said.

Once she married Nelson, some five months later, she had more reason than before to stop in every so often at Leibritsky’s Department Store, and the work there—which gradually became central to Bec’s life—was another step bringing her closer to her lost self, the person she was the moment before she opened her arms to Davy from the other side of Beach Avenue.

At first her trips to the store were only occasional, and mostly to get away from Ada, whom Bec still cared for. By the fall of 1951 my mother was functioning well enough, but she’d turned her loss of Davy into many unappealing things: a reason to hate the largely Italian community of Middletown, a reason to hate especially clear and sunny days, a reason to hate her present life in favor of an ever more nostalgically perfected past.

Bec, like the rest of us, didn’t have the patience she’d once had for Ada, despite her lingering anguish. And so Bec occasionally gave herself a day off, spending the morning quietly at home, sipping coffee at the table, staring out the window, then flipping on the radio and listening to whatever program she happened upon. But sometimes she spent those rare mornings cooking something up for Nelson for lunch. “Hot lunch,” she’d then announce, marching into Leibritsky’s Department Store, the paper bag in her arms filled with containers of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and boiled peas.

Early April of 1952 Bec had done just that, brought Nelson a hot lunch, when she made her first foray into business, suggesting before she even set down the bag of food a minor rearrangement of the sales floor. Some women’s hats had come in, perfect for Easter. “Perhaps if you put that hat rack where more women see it,” Bec said, turning to Mort, “more would sell.” She smiled, as glad to stretch some old, unused muscle in her mind as she was to be away from Ada. Though her sister had shed her initial anger at Nina for fibbing about Howard, for setting her in motion that day out the door and on the chase, she continued to hold on to her blame of Sal Luccino. If Ada had been ugly with her prejudice before the accident, after it she was worse, more hateful, more irrationally so. But it was easier for Ada to blame Sal, Bec knew, than herself. And the strategy, however unfair, may very well have been the only way her sister could survive. The ugliness was choking, though, and on that day Bec had fled, leaving Ada with her bitterness.

At Leibritsky’s, Bec glanced from Mort to the hat rack, motioning that the rack should be moved from the rear of the store, where the women’s apparel was, to the entrance.

Mort thought not. “I think we know what we’re doing by now,” he told her.

Bec opened her mouth to disagree, but the way Mort looked, the tightness in his neck and jaw, the slight rise of his chest, suggested to her that she had best be quiet. “Just a thought,” she managed at long last to mutter.

A month later, once Bec and Nelson finished lunch—salami grinders which they ate in the basement while listening to a new Sinatra album—Bec attempted again to make a change in the way the store did business.

She and Nelson had just emerged from below when a female customer walked in. She looked around then turned to Leo, and then to Nelson.

“I’m looking for a dress for my daughter’s graduation,” the woman explained. “I’ve been to two other places but the folks there were so pushy. And they just don’t seem to have what I want.”

“Leibritsky’s never pushes,” Bec said, scooting past Leo and Nelson, then taking the woman’s gloved hand in her own. And even though Bec did push, urging the woman, by way of compliments, to purchase both an afternoon and an evening dress, the woman said at the end, speaking to Mort, who rang up the purchase, “She was right. She knew exactly what I wanted.”

Only Howard, now at Wesleyan, had been so slick at sales. Once the woman left, Leo pointed that out to Mort. But Mort said nothing, just looked stone-faced as he held the door open for Bec even before she was gloved, buttoned, and ready to go.

That night Bec asked Nelson if she’d gone too far. “I really do think I see what the store could use,” she told him, recalling the hat rack they should have moved. “I’ve got an itch to participate. But maybe the thing to do is to set up my own dressmaking shop,” she said.

“Mort’s a bully,” Nelson remarked, surprising Bec. “The more you fade away with each punch, the stronger Mort gets.”

Emboldened by Nelson’s words, the next time Bec went to Leibritsky’s she insisted the hat rack be moved. As a matter of fact, she added, she had ideas about rearranging the departments, changing their locations so that “one thing, naturally enough, leads to the next.” First in that process, she declared, was women’s clothes and accessories, which should be moved from the back to the front, where the men’s clothes were now. “Let’s face it.
Far
more of your customers are women,” she told Mort, who with his bristling was clinging, she saw, to what little control he had left in the world. “But everything she’s said makes sense,” Leo pointed out as Mort stood, arms crossed, his chin tucked in, slowly shaking his head.

Despite Mort’s resistance, Leo’s comment pushed the debate in Bec’s direction. After a stretch of silence, Mort relented. “We’ll try it for a month,” he said before turning from them and shutting himself in his office for the rest of the afternoon.

That month was a good one for profits, and another boom month led to the next until finally, come the new year, even Mort agreed the change should be permanent. Bec’s next idea came readily enough and included that the very items Leibritsky’s Department Store sold were problematic. “You’re out of date,” she told the men on a cloudy afternoon in February 1953. She straightened Nelson’s ten-year-old tie. She brushed the dusty shoulders of Mort’s ancient suit jacket. For Leo, drowning in his oversized pants and jacket, she offered only a sad smile. “Just look at you,” she said to the three, shaking her head. “Not even a whiff of fashion sense.”

The next morning my father woke from a troubling dream. He and his father were standing on the Leibritsky’s Department Store sales floor, though the place, oddly, was clean of any merchandise. Zelik Leibritsky, facing him, wore a business suit, stylishly double-breasted. On his feet were gleaming wing tips, which was also strange. Mort wanted to ask his father, “What happened to you?” but before he did his father asked him that very question.

“What do you mean?” Mort’s forehead was beaded with sweat.

“I started this store in nineteen nineteen,” his father told him. “Back then Jews weren’t always welcome in the stores of goyim, or in the doctors’ offices of goyim, or in the universities of goyim, or even in their towns. But it’s a different day now.”

Zelik was already leaving. As he opened the front door and a gust of cold February air blew in, he asked, “How’s Mrs. Leibritsky?”

“What’s Ada got to do with this?” Mort was chilled by the air and confused by the question.

“That’s just it,” Zelik said. “My son, times have changed. There’s more than one Mrs. Leibritsky now.”

As Zelik left, walking down Main Street, he became smaller, then smaller still, until finally the man looked to be the size of a boy, someone eight years old, say, and then he was nothing, just the palpable absence of someone disappeared.

Mort shot up, awake, and reviewed the sequence of events that had led to Davy’s accident. He could see Nina polishing the candlestick just as she was telling Ada about the Irish girl. And he could see Ada running out of the house, and even hear her sandals clomp as she rushed out onto Beach Avenue. He could see Howard tumble from the Sailfish and shoot forward, swimming to shore.
And if he had not indulged himself in a hot dog.
He could see Bec across Beach Avenue, surprised and delighted at the sight of Ada and the children. And he could see Sal Luccino in his driver’s seat, leaning out the side window of his truck.
And if he had not been late.

My father pushed himself to his feet, attempting to rise from his bed. But he couldn’t.

He fell back. He fainted.

In 1972 I began to work at Leibritsky’s Department Store. Bec was fully in charge of the store by then. My father, who ever since that dream had come to the store not five days a week but three days, or sometimes two, had finally fully retired. Leo retired as well. Nelson, at sixty-six years old, still hung about the place, but mainly in the mornings. For so many years already Nelson’s role was mainly as Bec’s helping hand, a function for which he was so much better suited than that of the store’s so-called business executive. He had ample time, then, in the afternoons to sit at the booth in his kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, planning what to make Bec that night. She didn’t love him, she merely liked him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t love her. In his married life Nelson gave himself that much freedom and in doing so he became, to everyone’s astonishment, an accomplished chef.

The year I came to Leibritsky’s, Bec would begin the third and final step in her largely accidental process of self-reclamation: she would start to sew again, make dresses to order. One quiet Saturday night in May she had Nelson help her lug her old Singer up from the basement and move it to a corner of the living room. Carefully, she greased the treadle. Minutes later, her foot pumping, she revved the ancient thing back to life.

By the end of that evening she knew she’d buy an electric; of course she would. No one would take her seriously with that primitive clunker. Swiping her brow, she knew she wouldn’t have to work as hard either. But she grew unnerved by the thought that she’d lose the physical give and take between herself and the machine if it were powered by some foreign, outside source. Electricity would take her body out of it, the body that was the conduit for the language she and the Singer had come to speak, were speaking again.

“How’s it going?” Nelson asked as he looked in on her later that night.

“Lost in talk,” Bec answered, nodding. “Lost in talk.”

Lost in talk was how I often felt with Bec, who by then had become one of my closest friends as well as a kind of second mother. Since my divorce in 1966 we’d met every other week or so for dinner out, just us two. “I don’t like that you’re so alone, Molly,” Bec had told me when we’d begun sharing meals.