As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (34 page)

A month after Bec had revived her dormant Singer we met at a small Greek restaurant in Hartford, close enough to G. Fox’s that I could walk there when I got off that night from work. Lost in talk that night meant that Bec listened and nodded as I complained about the man I was then dating, Bob Neddlestein, who had a job at Aetna Insurance. He was at the top of Aetna’s corporate ladder, had plenty of money, and once we began our relationship he liked to treat me to lavish vacations. I’d never been on lavish vacations before and they were certainly easy to take, even if I sometimes yawned at the dinner table conversation. That night with Bec, Bob and I had just returned from a week at a Swiss spa, where I’d done as much yawning as lying around.

“An entire week of lying around?” Bec looked skeptical.

“Pretty much,” I answered. “The whole point of a spa is to relax. We read. Talked. Ate. Bob took long swims and I took mineral baths. In the afternoons we both couldn’t help it: we napped.” I nodded, recalling the pleasant enough bed I’d so easily dropped off on. “We went to bed early, too,” I added.

“Oh, Molly,” Bec said, clearly disappointed. “You sound like you’re eighty years old. I just don’t believe that two people who love each other, healthy and young enough like you two, rest and nap and go to bed early for an
entire
vacation.”

I was eating a salad, but I stopped. I’d never heard Bec talk about the nuts and bolts of romance, but here she was, doing so with surprising authority.

“You’re not even close to being in love,” she continued. “What are you doing with that man? Is this Mark Fishbaum all over again? Are you just filling a hole? Is that what this is?”

When I dropped my fork, flummoxed, a waiter came rushing over to hand me a new one.

“I think there was something a little more genuine with Mark,” I told Bec after a time. My words, measured, were also sad.

She nodded. “Of course there was.” Her tone was gentler. “All that history. That’s very real stuff, Molly. You can’t say he didn’t know where you were coming from.”

“No. Can’t say that.”

I went silent. Bec ate some of her food but I only stared at my salad.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Bec said after some minutes had passed.

I shrugged but otherwise didn’t answer.

She waited another minute. “Two pennies.”

“I was just remembering how I woke up this morning at seven fifteen,” I told Bec, my voice hesitant. “I sat on the side of the bed and all I could do was look down at my bare feet. When I looked at the clock again it was nine twelve. Bec, I don’t know where the time went.” I paused. “Which is kind of what I’d say about my whole life.”

Bec sighed. “Molly, maybe a change of scenery would be good,” she then suggested. Soon enough she rolled out her plan: she and I would co-own the family store. We’d rename Leibritsky’s Department Store, simply enough, Leibritsky’s. The new place would be just for women’s wear, much of it specially made by her. She wanted it to look like a parlor, with plush upholstered chairs strewn throughout and an openness that would replace the cramped aisles. She also wanted a back room for her sewing machines, the old Singer that she couldn’t part with and the new one she’d just bought. “Eleanor Roosevelt,” she said, speaking of her aged mannequin, “is dusted off and ready to go too.”

I listened, ate some salad, listened some more.

A moment later, when I still hadn’t spoken, she grew even more intent. “I’m throwing you a lifeline. Grab it, Molly. Grab it.”

“I’m not drowning,” I insisted.

“No? Seems to me you’ve been under water since you were twelve years old,” she said.

And with that—a smack of truth—I agreed to become part of Leibritsky’s.

And with that—Bec’s and my co-ownership—Leibritsky’s stopped having anything at all to do with men.

We worked well together, Bec and I, and when I think of those years, which were the years of my late thirties and forties, I can’t help but feel the relief that the change was meant to bring, as big a relief as breaking it off, finally, with Bob Neddlestein. Bec’s and my joint venture worked straightforwardly: as the store’s buyer I sometimes traveled, but more often I was in town, in the store, generally managing things. Bec was pretty much always in the back room, making something. Her reputation spread quickly throughout the Connecticut River Valley.

Though busy, we made time for each other, lunching together at least three times a week. All those years, then, we were lost in talk. And all those words and lunches and dresses and customers added up to something profound. She showed me that, in the end, with the gift of her house.

In 1986, when Bec was seventy-five, she began to consider retiring. Nelson had already died, as had Leo and my father—the deaths of age and illness, which were deeply sad but not shocking, bruising, unacceptable deaths. But Bec seemed to flourish with time rather than wither. How often did I see her, a woman in her seventies, bending over one of her worktables, her forehead wrinkled in concentration, scissors in hand, slicing through a sheet of fabric, only to look up suddenly and break into a wide smile and an effortless wave? How pretty she was, I often thought, waving back, apologizing if I’d interrupted her. Her short hair curled around her face, her glasses hung over her chest, her typical plain turtleneck fit snugly about her upper body, her slacks bagged around her bottom, and her shoes—“old lady” shoes, I used to call them, thick with rubber soles—lifted her nearly an inch from the floor. Though fashion was her work, she was hardly a beacon of style anymore herself. She was simply somebody who made things—dresses, it turned out—and as long as she was concentrating on her craft she was satisfied. That absorption was her beauty, and it was a gift to witness.

We were, as they say, ladies of a certain age, both of whom had been married and not, both of whom had had careers that were unexpected and unexpectedly long, both of whom had never had children and therefore wouldn’t have grandchildren, both of whom had extra time during the evenings which were often spent alone. Late winter of 1986, though Bec could certainly justify retiring, she still wasn’t sure. She had her health. She was a little stiff, maybe, but otherwise, she said, she couldn’t complain. What would she do with her days? We talked about this one evening. She had a dress in one hand at the time, a bat mitzvah dress, a green velvet mini, and the steamer in the other, giving it the final touch. Once it was done, she held it up for me to see.

“Wasn’t so long ago when a girl wouldn’t even dream of having a bat mitzvah, much less having one in a minidress,” she said.

She nodded thoughtfully. But after a minute it seemed to me her mind was less on the dress than on some private memory. She smiled to herself.

I mentioned how lovely I thought the dress was and she refocused, hanging it on a nearby rack. Then she sat. For a time, while I fussed with paperwork, she was quiet.

I’m not sure how much time passed, but eventually I turned her way. “So?” I said.

“So?”

“So what do we do now?” I closed the accounts book I had opened and scooped up my paperwork.

Bec laughed, and when I turned her way she said, “Molly, you sound just like you did as a child. ‘What do we do now?’ How many times did I hear that? The three of you never seemed to know quite how to fill a day. But Nina could. She was in the driver’s seat, even then. Am I right?”

“Nina didn’t always know,” I suggested, but without much conviction. “She had her moments too.”

Again we were silent, and as Bec reached for some peanuts her quiet munching was the only sound that filled the room. “I can hear myself asking that question,” she said after a time. “We were little girls once, me and Ada and Vivie, and we asked it over and over. Our father would get exasperated sometimes. He’d turn to our mother and say, ‘What are you waiting for? Tell them what to do!’ ‘Be good,’ she’d say to us. ‘Be
good
girls.’ ” Bec laughed. “But that wasn’t anything to
do.
”

Bec walked over to the dress and tugged at it, though it didn’t need adjusting.

“I was supposed to marry Milton Goldberg,” she continued. I knew as much. I nodded. “And when he broke it off, I had to ask myself, ‘What do I do now?’ I was sewing at the time, so it seemed a pretty good idea, to keep on sewing.”

“But would you have been happy as Mrs. Goldberg?” I asked. I was thinking less of the past than of the present, of our contented time running the store. Nothing about marrying Milton Goldberg would have gotten her to this place, I suspected, and told her as much.

“Maybe. But there would have been children,” she said. “That part of it, at least, I know I would have liked.”

She turned to me, and recognizing that it was loss, too, that had clouded my life during my childbearing years, she pulled me close. “We’re a pair,” she whispered. “You and me, Molly.”

“A pair of Leibritskys,” I said, and for some reason that made us laugh.

When we ate lunch together the next day Bec told me the story of her and Tyler McMannus. Our talk the night before—its “what ifs”—had clearly stirred her up. That she’d withheld such a tale amazed me. I thought I knew her completely. “Not such a pair of Leibritskys,” I suggested at one point.

“Why didn’t you go back?” I asked some minutes later, after she told me about that doomed trip to New Haven in those months after Davy’s death. “Why’d you marry Nelson?”

“I made Tyler wait too long,” she said. “In fact, for a while I actually gave up on him. He knew it better than me.”

She stared into her teacup for several minutes. When she looked up, her smile was deliberate. “Well, as it turned out I wasn’t alone. I had Nelson. And what we shared between us, about Davy, was quite a bond, really. And then we grew to know each other. Nelson, you know, was a pretty dear fellow. He told me over and over again that he’d never hold me back.”

I’d heard Nelson say that very thing.

“But he wasn’t Tyler,” I remarked.

“God, no,” was all she said to that.

We finally paid the bill, then walked arm in arm up Main Street. Bare dogwoods, still decorated with holiday lights, lined the street. “Did you ever speak to Tyler after that?” I asked. By
that
I meant the day she saw Tyler with his newborn and his wife. We’d gotten that far in her recollections.

“No, never.”

“You didn’t try to get in touch even once?”

“Oh, I tried,” she said. “You’ve no idea how I tried.” She almost stumbled and I grabbed her arm. When she turned to thank me her expression was strained.

“Too late to try again?” I asked, gently, as we moved forward once more.

“Much too late. He’s dead. Gone six years now.”

We’d approached the store but she didn’t seem in a hurry to get back to work. As we lingered outside, I asked, “Did you go to his funeral?”

“No. I would have, but I found out too late. He was buried by the time I knew. But I’ve taken a drive, visited his grave from time to time. I like to bring him flowers. Him and Sal Luccino. Found his grave, too, not far from Tyler’s. Wasn’t looking for it. Just found it. Amidst a whole crowd of Luccinos.”

She nodded while I took a moment to take in the news of Sal.

“Maybe you and Tyler can be buried side by side,” I finally offered, thinking—nonsensically—they’d at least have that.

“I’d rather be able to really talk to him, but I appreciate the thought. Anyway, it’s a Catholic cemetery. I can visit, Molly, but I can’t stay, not for the long haul. Besides,” she added, “at this point I want to be buried near my sisters.”

She opened the door of the store and I followed her to the back room, where we hung up our coats.

“Molly,” she called as I left for the sales floor. Her tone had a touch of urgency. “It’s
you
who can still go back,” she said.

B
ec’s words turned out to be prescient. I could go back, and I did, first to Mark Fishbaum, and then to Woodmont itself.

As it happened, I ran into Mark the next week, in Hartford, where we were both visiting his father in the hospital. Judge Fishbaum, as everyone still called him, had broken his hip, and the news came my way fast, the way it always did, via the busy mouths of several Leibritsky’s customers.

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” I told Mark when I stepped into the hospital room. In the twenty years since our divorce we’d seen each other only a few times, the last of which was at Howard’s funeral. I stood with my hand over my heart.

“Sit down, Molly, this could take a while,” Mark said. He lifted
War and Peace
from his lap. “See what I mean?” he quipped. But instead of reading he rose, and I was so pleased when he rushed over to embrace me.

His father, meanwhile, begged him not to joke; it hurt when he laughed, he complained. Judge Fishbaum—I was never able to call him anything less formal, though he’d wanted me to—reached for my hand. “Dear Molly,” he said. “It’s been too long. Where you been?”

We got our hellos and don’t-you-look-goods out of the way quickly. Mark did look good, insofar as he looked remarkably unchanged, despite the fifteen years that had passed since I’d last seen him. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it, and Mark, I noticed, couldn’t help but stare at me. We smiled, truly happy for the unexpected reunion.

Judge Fishbaum, unlike Mark, had certainly aged. Upon my arrival he struggled to sit up but, too tired, eased back against his stacked pillows. He was a widower now, I knew, just two years beyond the loss. Despite his happy greeting I saw sadness in his face, some lingering grief, and I apologized up front for missing my former mother-in-law’s funeral; I’d been on a buying trip for the store, I explained. He nodded while Mark said for them both, “We loved your card and flowers. We understand, Molly.” Once I settled into a chair, Mark began to read, to both of us this time, an act I found comforting and so much wiser than pushing for an instant conversation between us. Yes, Mark looked the same—and he said as much about me—but in fact we were strangers.

“Going to drop off. Nothing personal, Molly,” Judge Fishbaum, yawning, announced after a time, and indeed he did drop off, closing his eyes a moment later. Mark rose, kissed his father’s forehead, pulled the blanket to his neck.

“Coffee?” he then asked me, his voice a whisper, and though I knew I should get back to the store, I was struck by how caring he’d just been. I remembered, suddenly, how many times during our courtship and short marriage he’d brought me a cup of tea, or a blanket, or simply held me close. I recalled, too, the summer bouquets he carried to our cottage each day following Davy’s accident, the way he’d simply drop them off and know, with a wisdom beyond his years, to leave us be.

That afternoon, back at the store, when I told Bec about the hospital visit and that Mark and I had decided to meet for lunch the next week, she asked, “Filling a hole still, Molly?”

“Maybe I missed something back then,” I answered. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure he’s still married. He wasn’t wearing a ring and I didn’t ask, but I’m pretty sure.”

“How could you not have asked
that?
”

“We kept to the present: his father’s health, the hospital’s bad coffee, traffic, weather. Simple stuff. It was like we were in a little bubble. Bec, I didn’t want it to burst.”

“I hope for your sake, then, he’s not married. Take it from me, Molly,” she said, “that’ll burst it. Sure will.”

“For old times’ sake” is the rationale I offered Mark for the suggestion that he and I get together the next week at Jimmies of Savin Rock, the old hot dog stand in West Haven, now a full, and fully enclosed, restaurant. Mark lived in a suburb north of New York City and he figured we could meet in the vicinity of New Haven. We settled on the following Thursday, which turned out to be a chilly and windy March day. We were seated in a booth by one of the restaurant’s large ocean-side windows, and because of how I felt—anxious with yearning—I peered out the window rather than at Mark while I offered him a series of banal opening remarks about the ocean’s lively, frothy waves.

“Haven’t seen that in a while,” Mark said, nodding toward the water, then peering at it, and I could see him then on the shore’s edge at Woodmont, a year after Davy died, the year of our coming together, upside down and walking on his hands, trying to make me smile. “Give it a try,” he’d urged of the handstands, but I didn’t. I’d hurled my sorrow into cartwheels instead.

For the next hour I poured out the news from the years of our separation. In the end I said everything I’d hoped to say to Mark except what I’d only just begun to grasp: that as long as I expected him to fill a hole that no one could fill, it wasn’t that I didn’t love him but that I couldn’t love him. Or couldn’t feel my love for him. I was too busy blaming him for not assuaging my grief.

But a confession like that was too much too soon. Instead I listened as he told me his story: the second marriage that was still on, the three children’s ages, looks, and interests. I nodded, and though my heart sank further with each detail he imparted, I managed to smile agreeably throughout. By the time he’d finished we’d eaten most everything. Our waitress brought us coffee, and as we sipped it I began, as I had earlier, to glance anxiously out the window. The sea seemed so suddenly and terribly lonely—but that was just a projection, I knew, of me.

“I was hoping,” I told Mark when I looked back at him. I pointed at him then at myself. “But that would be too easy, right? Like magic. Like a fairy tale.”

Mark was kind, as usual. He reached for my hands and I extended them, perhaps too eagerly, his way. “I’ve got this family now. But I’ve never stopped loving you. He paused, then said gently, “Linda Bagel.”

My eyes welled up at the sound of the old puppet’s name. What didn’t Mark know about me?

He continued, “But I love my family, too.”

“Of course.”

“It’s just bad timing. That’s all it is.”

We both turned to the window again.

When we got outside we stood for a time leaning against the hood of his car. The gusts had calmed, enough to allow me to feel the sun on my face more than the wind. Mark’s eyes gleamed in the brightness.

“Guess we won’t be doing this again anytime soon.” I squinted up at him.

“No, guess not,” he said.

We’d pulled apart and were about to get going, in our separate cars, when Mark suggested we take a drive to Woodmont together. He checked his watch; it was going on four o’clock. But he’d recently gotten a call from Arthur Weinstein, the pugnacious one of the twins, who’d become a major developer in the area. Arthur thought he might have something for Mark and his family.

“The brat’s persuasive,” Mark told me, his eyebrows raised, as were mine. “And get this, Molly. He’s stinking rich. Why do the goods always go to the undeserving?”

I shook my head. “My uncle Leo used to ask that same thing,” I said.

We drove first to Woodmont’s west end, where the cottages of Bagel Beach used to be. But even before we’d parked we knew that the homes there were long gone to more developers than just Arthur Weinstein. After all, it had been a while since Jews needed to huddle so close together. In the decades since our childhood the tight ethnic worlds inside Milford had gradually opened their borders. A newer wave of immigrants were now telling their tales from whatever pockets of America they inhabited about huddling and separating and assimilating and holding on. Our story, in that sense, was over. And our cottage, too, was gone, had been sold long ago, ten years after the accident, when everyone finally realized they just didn’t want to go back anymore. But rising from Mark’s car, staring wide-eyed at the extensive condominium complex before me and seeing right through its concrete walls to the old mishmash of wooden cottages that used to be there, I felt the call of memory, which is a different kind of story, born of a separate need.

And remember we did. We stood on the sands of a beach no longer known as Bagel Beach and suddenly there was a younger Mark, sitting on a bright orange life preserver beside Howard and then rising to drag the Sailfish’s shiny hull to the water’s edge. And there I was, cross-legged on the porch steps of the cottage, dissatisfied with Linda Bagel on my hand, hoping that Nina, her head in a book, sitting right behind me, would finally take notice of me. Minutes later, Mark and I passed the synagogue, still known as Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont, but more than the building I saw my father, with Leo, Howard, and Davy in tow, walking briskly and confidently on their way to join the minyan.

Beyond the synagogue Mark and I soon passed Sloppy Joe’s, now called Sloppy José’s, and the Villa Rosa, and I felt some relief to see these businesses still intact, though empty and boarded up for the off season. Finally we came to Anchor Beach, where we dropped onto a bench. Yards away was another bench, the one Davy and I had sat on, or so it seemed, eating our chocolate-and-vanilla-frosted cookies only hours before his accident. I was sure that was the very bench, I told Mark, but when we rose and walked to it, I could see it was in fact relatively new.

From there we made our way to the corner of Clinton Street and Beach Avenue, where the accident took place. We stood for a time, our backs to the road, staring at the ocean before us, a vast and empty thing, no boats in sight. The intrepid March winds still stirred the waters, and the waves, tumbling forward, were as loud as any in my memory.
Hello, hello,
they seemed intent on calling. Or perhaps their song was more in the way of
good-bye, good-bye.
Across Beach Avenue, Mrs. Rankoff’s modest cottage had gone to demolition, replaced by a towering new summer home, plain in the modern way. For a long time, while Mark waited at some distance, I stared into the road at the spot where Davy landed. In the end, I did what people do: grabbed a stone and marked the spot as one would a Jewish grave. Then Mark said gently, “We’d better get going,” and so we returned to the car, then left Woodmont and drove off, first toward Jimmies, where I’d left my car, and then, separately, toward what turned out to be our vastly different lives, knowing they’d not intersect like this again.

Only you can go back,
Bec had said, but this was years ago already, before she passed away, the last of the sisters to go, leaving her home to me. Now that I’ve moved in, there are days when I wander around in it and can hear her pumping the treadle of her Singer, expertly running a seam. Other days I sit at that cozy booth, staring out at a wondrous Japanese maple tree, its burgundy foliage—just out—so unlike the green of the other trees. It’s not lost on me that what I’ve become—an experienced businesswoman, unmarried, with no children, the final inheritor of the family business—is nothing I’d ever thought I’d be, and perhaps because of that, an oddness I often feel, a deep solitariness, I’ve come to identify with the singularity of that maple. I consider it a friend. Sometimes—because why not?—I even talk to it, tell it that I’m no more an Esther Bagel than a Linda Bagel, in that my less than conventional attributes have come my way only by default. This particular brand of turmoil is what Bec and I shared most deeply, perhaps, a constant need to figure it out—
what do I do now?
—when the plan, that predictable life we’d always imagined for ourselves, my mother’s “right track,” slipped, like a loose ring, off our fingers and out of our reach. We arrived at the unmarked territory of our adult female lives not as pioneers but, like our cousin Reuben and all the Jews pouring into Israel after the war—or like the rest of my family, forever unmoored by the events of 1948—as displaced persons, as refugees.

That day after Sal visited Davy at the hospital, after my mother’s rant, after Davy’s miraculous near wave of one of his fingers and the way he opened his mouth, seemingly to speak to Sal, Howard drove the family back to the cottage in two shifts. I was taken in the second shift along with my silent parents, my father in the front beside Howard, my mother in the back with me, a seating arrangement we were used to except for the absence of Davy, who always took the hump between me and my mother. Except for Howard, who had to keep his eye on the road, each of us kept turning to that spot, as if seeing Davy there.

Once inside the cottage we walked directly to the dining table, where we’d been gathering each night of the ordeal. The fighting, at least for now, was over. For days we’d simply sat there in the evenings, eaten a bit, and sat some more. Even when my father had taken it upon himself the night before to address Howard’s relationship with Megan O’Donnell, there wasn’t the yelling we’d expected. He’d said, calmly enough, “You have responsibilities as a Jew. You can’t just drop them. You can’t just go out into the wide world of America and pick anybody. For you it’s different.” Howard nodded but then asked, “What about love?” My father laughed wearily. “Love is putting up with a whole lot. Putting up with it and feeling good about it. Howard, my son,” he said, gripping his shoulder, “that’s love.”

Our refrigerator was filled with gifts of casseroles, and by the time our shift arrived at the cottage Bec and Vivie had already heated one and had made a salad to go with it. Nina had set the table and she’d placed one of the many flower bouquets from Mark Fishbaum in the center. And so we began almost instantly and in silence to eat the evening’s meal. “Things are looking up,” someone, at long last, said. Another added, “Did you see how he wanted to speak to Sal? Did you see Davy recognize him and wave?” Yes, we’d seen, and with all eyes on Ada each one of us assured her that Davy was progressing nicely, that in fact he’d be fine. There was an upside to Sal’s visit, Howard gently suggested, for it had gotten Davy to focus, just a bit, at long last. To our surprise, even my mother agreed that the visit was useful in this singular way. “He’s improving, isn’t he?” she asked, and a chorus of us rushed to answer, “Sure is. Sure is.”