Frog (35 page)

Olivia prays. “Dear God, please don't let my father have pain wherever he is. Any pain, in any part of him. From his toes to his head top to out to the tips of his fingers and penis and nose. Whatever part and wherever he is. Dear God, please just do that for me and I'll do anything you say and want for the rest of my life forever, I promise. Please, please, thank you.” She turns over in bed and hugs Talking Bear. If she hears her mother walking or putting away dishes or turning a page, she'll cry she wants her. Wants her for what? It has to be good or she'll get mad. For water, to make peepee, or she's still having trouble sleeping, thinks she's getting a cold. She listens, hears nothing. She listens for Eva in the next room. If Eva cries or talks to herself or taps on her crib bars or wall or bangs her feet against them, she'll call for her mother and say Eva's keeping her up. She hears nothing. Why'd Eva get to get one more story read to her than she tonight? Tomorrow night it's her turn to get more. She had so many other bears she loved more than Talking Bear but right after her father died he became her favorite. Why's that? Talking Bear was brought back from some place her father had been, the only bear he gave her just by himself. She never thought of that but now she knows. When her mother said before “Just rest in bed and think, if you can't fall asleep, but no getting out of it,” would that be something interesting she could tell her mother she thought? She thinks so, but it wouldn't be a good enough reason to get her here to tell her. “The other bears tell me my father isn't somewhere still alive,” she says to Talking Bear. “Is that true? Should I believe them or you?” “Believe me,” Talking Bear says. “It's best for you. I am closest and mostest and I always tell the truth and all I do is think of you. That's my job.” “But the other bears all together, when they're together, say the same thing and know much more than you. They know more than anyone. They know almost everything there is to know when they're all together.” “Then believe them. I won't be hurt. I say ‘If it is good for you, it is good for me.' I say this every night before I go to sleep. Right before the last wink awake, so I haven't said it yet tonight to myself.” “What about if I don't believe any of them when they're all together, or you? If I just find out for myself?” “That could be the best way. If you can find out and if you know before you start looking that you might be able to find out.” “If I don't know whatever it is you said, that last thing, and if I can't find out, what should I do?” “I don't know.” “The other bears all together would know, but I can't get them all together now for them to tell me. I'd have to get out of bed. That wouldn't be hard. I can inch out. I can move quietly. The door's shut. There's a rug on the floor. I could get some of my bears. But for the rest of them I'd have to leave the room. I might even have to go to Eva's room if she took some when she wasn't supposed to, but I don't think I'd have to go downstairs or outside. What I'll do, if I can't find out about my father from here, is believe what makes the most sense.” “That's a good way too. If you can't find out for yourself or you're not able to, believe what makes the most sense.” “Or the best sense.” “Or the best sense. But if I were you I'd believe me. I tell the truth and I also know. I am for you.” “But no matter what, the truth is if he is still somewhere alive but doesn't or can't let me see him anymore, I'll be very sad.” “That's why I'm here. To help you in things like that. You can ask me how if you want.” “How?” “You'll have to give me time to think…. You can throw me up and down and try to catch me. You can kick me and I won't say ouch. You can squeeze me while you sleep or are feeling sad. If you're away in a car someplace and I'm not with you because you forgot me or you couldn't find me, you can know I'm home waiting for you and wanting you to throw me or kick me or squeeze me while you sleep or anytime you're sad. Lots of ways. We can think of many. It's something we can also do.” “How should I start to find out if he's alive or really dead or really alive or near here or what?” “You can look for him. I haven't seen him for a long time, maybe as long as you, but I hear he's around. You can ask me how I hear this.” “How?” “You'll have to give me time to think…. I just hear it, there isn't any reason how. It's something I can do. Or we can look together for him if you want. In basements, outside behind bushes, in backs of bottom drawers. All the places you haven't looked. If we don't find him or we can't, because he's too big to be there, in a drawer, we might find a sign of him. Or you can speak to the bears. If they know everything, they might know where to look. I won't be hurt.” “They said he isn't alive. When I said you said he is and I think he is and I want to find him, they said the one thing they don't know anything about is where to look. Missing bears they can help me find. People they can't. It's just something they can't do and now they don't even try.” “Then we are in what your father used to call a spot. But go to sleep. Maybe in the morning you'll have your answer. Maybe I will. Maybe it will just appear. A paper we pick up that has a map showing where he is and how to get there. Something that was once a piece of scrap paper but now isn't. Or something that is and always was a map. Or we might see something written on a wall in this room. A message written in light from the outside or being written while we watch it on the wall.” “I don't know how to read.” “You don't know now but maybe tomorrow you will. Or maybe you'll be able to read just that. You know a few words. The message might just be in those words. ‘Red, blue, dog, gray, go, he, girl, green,' and some others, and we'll figure it out. Or maybe I'll even know how to read by tomorrow. Listen to me though. What I say is true. Maybe in the morning everything you want to know or what you need to know it, like reading, will just happen or appear.” “That's what bears always say. ‘In the morning. Tomorrow.' They're good up to a point. After that point, they're not. It's always that way. And always when they're most sleepy.” “If it's always that way, then it's always that way. Ask anyone. Though that doesn't mean it will always always be that way. And if it is always always that way, then it doesn't mean it will always always always be that way. But go to sleep. It's not because I'm sleepy. Just maybe you'll know in the morning as I say. Or maybe I'll know. Or maybe all the other bears and us together will know, something we never did once. But maybe it will probably not be so. If that's so, what?” “I don't know. What?” “Let me think…. I don't either.”

Eva does a series of paintings called Memories of My Father. One shows her father sleeping behind her mother. Another shows him sitting on a toilet seat folding a newspaper in half. Others: squeezing lemon juice for a pitcher of scotch sours, mailing a bunch of manila envelopes in a post office, pushing the two girls in a shopping cart at a supermarket, paying for takeout food in a Chinese restaurant, haranguing her mother across the dining room table, peeling an avocado seed for planting, fork-feeding the two girls simultaneously, kissing her mother while holding on to her bottom, digging his knuckles into his temples, looking at several photos of his father, helping his mother downstairs, putting a record back into its jacket, filling a pen, cleaning a typewriter key. Eating, exercising, cooking, slicing, typing, reading, driving, raging, sneezing, aimlessly peeing, winding his watch, brushing his teeth, grating a carrot, unpinning her diapers, filling her baby's bottle with milk, in a hospital dying. Brown tweed suit, button-down blue shirt, light gray tie. The family stands above it staring inside, Eva on a box, Olivia on tiptoes, his mother crying. He looks healthier there than in any of the others. The paintings are exhibited and get lots of attention and reviews. The gallery sells the lot. Two are bought by European museums, one by a prominent Japanese art collector. Most of the drawings for the paintings sell too. Newspaper article, long critiques in art publications, two-page spread with reproductions of some of the works in a popular newsweekly, interviews. “I feel awful,” she writes Olivia. “First, that I didn't keep even one for myself. That's because I couldn't make up my mind. ‘Daddy in the Tub'? ‘Daddy Showering'? ‘Daddy Shaving the Back of His Neck After Giving Himself a Haircut'? When I finally chose the tub one, it was just being bought for the most money, even if it was one of the smallest and no better framed than the others. The gallery owner said to me ‘My dear, we must pay expenses and keep peachy relations with this particular buyer, who's already begun to sock away funds for the most expensive work in your next show. Choose another,” but by then admissible bids were being made for the other two, and the few remaining I didn't feel merited keeping. Secondly, that I didn't offer you whichever one you wanted for nothing. Especially the one of you and Daddy holding hands and he with your backpack over his shoulder as he walked you down the hill to school. I got you both from behind. You seem to be looking at a squirrel in a tree running. I think it's a good one. Now I'll probably never see it again, though I've some like slides of it. Also, that I should be on my way, or already made, as one idiot critic put it, and partly because of Daddy. What about all the paintings I did before? The Laughing Mom series. Bombed quietly. One-dimensional, that gallery owner kept being told. They didn't get the joke—'Say “Cheese”', even though I know you can't float a whole show on one pun—or see, as we say, the new nuances in them, among other delusions. No reviews, one sale, and I think that one to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Iris, who still haven't unpacked it because they want me to believe someone I didn't know—possibly a hotshot influential art collector—bought it. It wasn't you, I hope, since half the sale went to the gallery, another ten percent to the gallery for announcements, hangings and cheap opening-night crackers and wine in paper dentist cups, and the rest she's still promising me. Besides, I'd have given you any two Moms you wanted. Best thing about that gallery is that it dropped me flat. That's what I need most to get into and go on with the next series. As it is, I'll probably have to start debasing my present success and maybe give away half my earnings to old age homes for artists to start anything new. But what'll more likely happen is that the Moms will now sell. They had some good things in them, but everyone seems to think the Father ones were more lived than the Moms, though technically as virtuous. But all the scenes in the Mom paintings I experienced and all the ones in Father I made up. I had nothing to paint from because I had no memories of him. Just photos of different sorts and groupings, and I wasn't going to reproduce blown-up versions of those. They'd be so cold, except perhaps my reaction to them, and it's also been done to death before. You should have painted the Father series. You showed lots of talent once. It's all I can remember of you for years. Drawing, painting, tracing, coloring, cutting out and pasting things together to play with and for collages and mobiles, designing and illustrating your own books. Or we could have done Father together. You giving me your head snaps and telling me if I'm getting them on the canvas right. And dabbing here and there and even splashing all over the place if you wanted, for I'm sure you're a better artist dormant than I am active and that it'd all come back to you in a flash and with an intelligence and feeling my works lack. And then with paintings, if it's really bad or there's a serious mistake, there's little you can't cover over and change. Now it's too late. They're done, bought, hung, insured, guarded by guards and alarms and maybe even attack dogs in some places. And many probably can't be located and, if I wanted to, destroyed, since some collectors think announcing they've a collection is like asking for a major break-in. And somehow I don't see myself doing alone Olivia's Memories of Our Father. Though who knows? Since after I do a series on you and a shorter one on Grandma and an even shorter one called Other Relatives, a Bad Marriage, a Number of Lovers and Some Friends, I won't have any place to go. Maybe sculpture. That'd get me doing something new. Though suddenly I see myself sculpting bigger-than-life-size bas-reliefs of all of us, starting with Mom just giving birth to you, and Daddy, in this same scene, in hospital gown and mask and holding you in his arms and weeping voluminously, a moment, Mom's said Daddy called, the happiest in his life.”

Olivia's in the city to give a paper. Her husband and two children come with her to see some sights, go to a few art museums and a recital and play. On the last day of the conference she says “I'm going to skip the rest of it. How many seminars can you go to? I've learned all I'm about to learn before what I've learned starts depercolating. And I've made enough new contacts and seen more than enough old colleagues and friends, and I need to relax and enjoy myself a little before we head home. This might seem an odd way of doing that, but I'd like to drive out to the cemetery to pay respects to my folks and Grandma and Uncle Jerry, as I haven't been there for years.” She doesn't know exactly where it is or even the name of it. “It's in Suffolk County, I know that. I remember we'd drive through Nassau County on the expressway and then see an entering-Suffolk-County sign. Or maybe it's the other way around, but we'll know which counties we're leaving and entering when we see that sign. And that the cemetery's about ten exits past that sign and called something like Brookside or Breitenbrush or Baron Birch or Beth something—but I'm sure it starts with a B. If we drive out on the Long Island Expressway—the road you get from the Midtown Tunnel, or off Vandam Street, I think it is, after you cross the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—Tm sure I'll recognize the exit sign for the road or route number to the cemetery in whatever county it is that had that you-are-entering sign, or it could even have been a you-are-leaving. One thing I remember distinctly is that there was a service road alongside the expressway going east just before the turnoff and then a couple of sod farms along the two-lane road to the cemetery and a number of cemeteries down that road, though I'm sure the farms are gone now. Anyway,” she says to the children, “you'll see some of Long Island for the first time, and of course where your closest relatives on my side are buried, if we get there. And we can stop for lunch at a fish place on the Island and maybe even go to the ocean later. I don't think you've seen the Atlantic, except from a plane, have you?” They start out, half an hour later pass the entering-Suffolk-County sign—she says it looks like the same one from years ago and seems to be in the exact same place—but for the next fifteen exits, no service road or familiar landmark or road name or route number on an exit sign that she'd follow to the cemetery. “Is it possible they've done away with the service road? It was about a mile long. I remember there was a famous-make—I can't think of the name now—cosmetics corporate headquarters on it, or maybe only the plant, but that seems to be gone from around here too. I thought the route to the cemetery would all come back. That I'd just go from A to B to C, once we left the city, but there's nothing left out here to bring it back, or else I've completely forgotten everything but the entering sign in ten years, or however long it's been. I should just look it up.” They stop for lunch at a diner off the expressway, she looks in the phone directory under Cemeteries but doesn't recognize any name, and after several calls to different places she locates Eva. Eva can't remember the name of the cemetery or what exit it's off of or the town it's in or even if the name begins with a B. “To tell you the truth, I think D. David something. Or Dav, Duv, Darien—no, that's a town in Connecticut. One of Uncle Jerry's children might know. If only the other uncle and aunt hadn't died so young. There'd be a bigger pool of cousins to draw information like that from. But I'm terrible. Most times I can't even remember either of our grandfathers' names.” Olivia calls one of Uncle Jerry's children and he doesn't know the name or where the cemetery is, except for it being on Long Island and somewhere off an expressway—“I remember you went right for a long ways once you left the off-ramp of the expressway”—and says he's ashamed to admit that he hasn't been out to it since his mother died. “I doubt my sisters would know either. They're even less interested.” “Who keeps it up, if it is kept up?” and he says “Our grandfather bought the plot long ago for practically nothing, I remember my dad saying. Then he sold off a few parcels of it, it was so big, making back twice what he put out for the entire thing, and paid the cemetery enough money to keep the plot mowed and clean for about seventy-five years. Dad told me I'd only be called—or one of us, meaning you and Eva too—if one of the monuments fell over or the plot was vandalized in some way or the town wanted to move the graves to some other place in the cemetery to make room for more town road or something. Maybe one of those things already happened and the cemetery has changed hands and the new owners don't bother with that kind of notification anymore. Or the old owners don't or they tried to reach us but we've all moved around so much that they're now waiting for us to notify them where we are. But with vandals and such is the only time we'd have to pay something, till after the seventy-five years when we're supposed to take over the maintenance costs. But by then, which of us will care, right? We'll all probably be buried elsewhere—I know I'm going to, and not just because there'll probably be no room at the family gravesite—so I'm sure our kids won't be interested in it either.” “As for caring about it,” she says, “I suppose that depends when those seventy-five years are coming up. And as for my kids' interest, maybe that's one of the things I'm trying to stimulate today by coming out here with them, though I think I just thought of that. But you sort of hope, no matter where you'll be buried or they'll be living, that they and even their children take care of this site so it doesn't become a little forest, don't you? Because some places in very old cemeteries, and I'm talking mostly about European ones now, just look so sad and ugly.” “I've seen them on my trips there but never felt anything bad about it. They even looked kind of interesting, all packed in very tight and overgrown. Listen, if that's the outcome, because of whatever it is, historical or indifference, you face it.” She goes back to the table. “Maybe we passed the cemetery exit, she says. “Anyone mind if we drive back to that entering-Suffolk sign and then come back this way again till we reach, say, the turnoff to the Fire Island state park? Deal is, if we don't see any roads to the cemetery, we'll go right to the ocean.” She asks her husband to drive this time so she can watch the exit signs and service roads more carefully and anything else that might help them get to the cemetery. They drive back, turn around, about five miles past the Suffolk sign she sees a little sign on a road off the expressway that says “Wellingham National Cemetery” and has an arrow on it. “That could be it,” she says. “Not the national cemetery but the road with maybe a few other cemeteries on it, including ours.” They exit, drive along that road—“No service road near it, sod farms on it, but it could still be the right road—just widened threefold because of the increased traffic on it or just crooked politics well say”—and see a cemetery. “It doesn't look familiar, nor start with a B. But it's the right religion, not a national cemetery, and on the same side of the road ours was and the approximate distance I figured the road to it would be from the expressway exit and the expressway would be from the Suffolk County sign.” They drive in, her husband goes into the office, comes out shaking his head. “Nothing even close to a Tetch here,” he says. “But there are two more nonnational cemeteries on this road, and three or four exits farther on the expressway is a Meldana Boulevard with about five cemeteries on it and two that start with a B, one of which is called Beth-El. Does it sound familiar—cemetery or boulevard?” “The Beth part of it does, but let's try the two on this road first.” Both are the wrong religion. They go to Meldana Boulevard, pass the first cemetery—“Starts with a B, all right, but the wrong religion, so why even bother with it?” The second cemetery's an annex to the national one before. The third cemetery's on the other side of the road than the one she remembers was on. “Let's check it anyway. Right religion, no B, but my memory could be wrong on that account and also which side of the road it was on. And they could have changed where the main gate was, making the back part of the cemetery the front part now, simply to make it easier entering or they wanted it off a much wider and even grander road like this one.” They drive in, no Tetches here, though there is a Titch, the office worker says. He looks up the name in a book: Randolph and Evelyn, parents; Carolyn and baby Arthur, children. They drive past the next cemetery to Beth-El. “I'm almost positive this is it. Right side of the road, religion, the Beth—even the ‘El' is coming back to me now, I don't know why—and the main gate looks familiar and it's not that farther away from the Suffolk sign than where I thought the cemetery would be. Let me see if I can find the plot on my own. I'd prefer that, just coming on it, and even just to see how good my once-great memory still is, rather than going to the office and given directions to road L, lane six, row double-A, plot 117, and so on.” She directs her husband to where she thinks the plot is. They get out. No Tetch tombstones or benches there. “I think it's over there, actually,” pointing to a place several rows away. “To the left of that tall pointy stone…. The breeze,” as they're walking to the plot, “is just about what I remember it was like from the times I used to come here with my mother and Eva and a couple of times with my first husband. He didn't want to but knew how important it was to me for him to come. Also how shaky I'd be driving back alone. It must be the flatness of the place and the openness that creates it, this breeze all the time. Really, almost everything looks the same, but with a lot more graves around—all that over there was just empty grass. And that grove of trees along the boulevard there was a lot shorter.” They reach where she thinks the plot is. No Tetch there. “Let's go to the office,” her husband says. “Even if the gravesite's somewhere around here, we can look and look like this for hours and I don't think we'd ever find it.” “I have to go to the ladies' room anyway,” she says, “and I'm sure the kids do too.” She doesn't recognize the office but doesn't think she was ever in it. The office worker looks up the name Tetch in a book and says it isn't there. “Titch, Tutch, any name like that?” Olivia says. “What I'm suggesting is that in the last few years or so—if this book was entirely reorganized, for instance, which I think it would have had to have been, at least worked on a little—there might have been a typographical mistake.” The woman looks. “No name even near it. ‘Tisch,' in fact, is as close as it gets.” “Could you give me their first names please?” The woman later tells them that seven exits farther on the expressway, “almost to where the island forks, or perhaps a bit after it, is Cranberry Road. Just count off the expressway exits from the Meldana entrance. I don't know the exact expressway exit number, but at seven get off, go right on the overpass and then straight for half a mile or a mile—I wish I could remember what route number it is—and you'll hit Cranberry. If you get lost, ask around for Cemetery Road. That's what it's more commonly called, though not officially on the maps, it has so many cemeteries on it. Eight, maybe nine. After that, the cemeteries are mostly isolated. An eighteenth-century cemetery here, an old slave cemetery there, one for Chinese fieldhands someplace from a long time ago, one even just for artists, and lots of modern ones of every religion and denomination, but all by themselves.” “Tell me, is there a directory for all the cemeteries on the island of the people buried in them?” Olivia says. “No such thing.” “For the county then or a directory only by religion?” “Nothing like that.” “Cranberry Road doesn't sound familiar,” Olivia says in the car. “But let's try it. If it is near where the island forks, then we'll be fairly close to Fire Island State Park, I think, or even the Hamptons. Or Montauk, which can't be an hour's drive from that exit. If you're going to see the Atlantic for the first time, that's the place to see it from. Giant cliffs, hidden inlets, all very dramatic and, if they haven't done their best to ruin it, quite beautiful. Heck, I could even be tempted to stay over. Off-season rates now, so it shouldn't set us back too much. Even if it does, what do we care?—we're sort of vacationing.” “Stay over how?” her husband says. “Our luggage is in the hotel. We've paid dear for that suite.” “So we'll buy a few toothbrushes and clothes. Things we've needed and can use after today. And if we don't, it'll be like camping in. But it's one night I'm talking about, and it's just lousy money.” “Listen, Cranberry Road can't be the one your cemetery is on. It's got to be a good twenty to thirty miles past where you thought it was. It's impossible, it's unrealistic, it's lots of things.” “OK, no Montauk overnight. But what more do we have to lose—half an hour at the most—by driving down Cranberry Road? If no cemetery looks right—we don't even have to get out of the car—I'll quit.” They get on the expressway, count off the exits, follow the woman's directions, can't find Cranberry Road. They stop at a service station. “I never heard of it,” the attendant says. “And you live in the
area, or know for sure there's no Cranberry Road nearby?” her husband says. “I've been here almost all my life.” “Cemetery Road's what it's also known as, we were told,” Olivia says. “I never heard of that one either. There's a cemetery on Deepdell and another on Indian Fort and that's it for miles around here, except for some backyard family grounds and under-the-tree things and a pet cemetery that costs more, I heard, than for a person.” “I give up then,” she says to her husband. “This never would have happened, you realize, if my grandfather hadn't been such a perfectionist in seeing to the maintenance costs so long beforehand. We should appreciate what he did, I guess—saving us the time and expense—but what did he think, that my father and Uncle Jerry wouldn't have taken care of it? And his two other children, if he did all this before they died? From what I know, all of them were every bit as conscientious and meticulous about things as he, but maybe not as wily with the buck. Maybe that's it. It was too good a financial arrangement to pass up then. Or the maintenance contract also covered the plots he apparently sold off because his own was so large, giving them even added value, but I'm being unfair to the man. I'll find the cemetery though. Not today, of course. Information about it should be among my mother's papers, though I don't even know where most of those are now. Or my cousins might turn up something, or Eva, but I doubt it. She's always made sure I kept the important documents—that she'd lose them. But something has to be around somewhere—on the burial certificates for my parents, if there are such things. There have to be and officially recorded; you can't just put a body into the ground. Or the rabbis for their funerals, if they're still alive and I can remember their names or where we got them from. Dad's I'll never remember. Too far back. Mother's I got from a friend of mine—Liselotte—who married her, so shell know or have it on her marriage license. Or Uncle Jerry's kids could give me the names of the minister and rabbi who did the services for their parents' funerals. Then I'll fly back alone—make a special trip for it and rent a car at the airport and drive straight out here and leave stones, enough for all of us since we've all in a way been out to see them, and on all their graves, aunts and uncles also. I think I owe them that. I don't owe them anything—I simply want to do it. I also want to see how the plot's been kept up after so long. And if it's deteriorating in any way or not kept up in the way I think it should be, to give the cemetery additional money to maintain it better.” They drive to the ocean, park, take off their shoes, roll up their pants and hike up their skirts and wade in the water and sit in the sand. Then it gets too cold for them and they return to the car and drive back to the city. As they're approaching the Midtown Tunnel Olivia shouts “Mount Zion—it just came to me; but the next time.”