Love Saves the Day (35 page)

It was five weeks before I heard from my insurance company, and they informed me that my renter’s policy didn’t cover lawful acts of emergency demolition by the City. By then Laura and I were staying in cheap hotels on the Lower East Side, and my credit was nearly exhausted. I arranged a “fire sale” at Ear Wax, selling everything that could be sold for whatever price I could get for it to the obsessive collectors who had always been my best customers. At the end of it, I turned the keys and the lease over to Noel. I still had hundreds of records left that were scratched or damaged, or that the collectors hadn’t been interested in, and perhaps two dozen that I couldn’t bring myself to part with. They weren’t worth much anyway (although I don’t think Laura, when she saw how many remained unsold, believed that), but now you could probably sell them for something simply because they’re old. All of them, along with my personal effects from the store, went into the same storage unit I’d first rented back when Laura was born. Another phase of my life had been boxed up and put away in a dark room, left there to molder and gather dust.

We were living in an SRO up in Harlem—all I could afford at that point, and more accessible by subway to the Midtown employment agencies I had applied with—when we finally heard from Anise in early August. I brought Laura with me to every typing test and every job interview—because where could I have left her?—and that, along with my lack of a “real” address, wasn’t helping my job hunt. Most of what Anise had to say about her management company—which, as I suspected, hadn’t made much of an effort to pass my messages along—was unrepeatable. She fired them a few
days later, and her ousting them in the middle of an international tour over “creative differences” became a minor news item. The new management company she quickly signed with arranged for Laura and me to stay in one of their corporate apartments. Anise offered to do a lot more than that for us, but I refused to take it from her. I knew I’d never be able to pay her back.

Once I had an address, I was able to find a job as a typist at a small real estate law firm. The hourly rate was good, and I learned that if I was willing to work off-hours—late at night, for example—I could make up to double my hourly rate. I was used to keeping odd hours because of the record store, so that suited me fine.

Having a job meant I could finally fill out the reams of paperwork for a two-bedroom apartment in a Mitchell-Lama building in the East Twenties. Only thirteen blocks from the technical boundary of my old neighborhood, but still a world away. We were more or less settled by the time Laura’s school year started, although it was Christmas before I could afford to buy us any real furniture beyond the two mattresses I’d used up the last of my credit for when we moved in.

Laura was barely speaking to me those days. When I lost Laura’s voice, I lost the music in my head, too. Or it was more like the music in my head
was
my daughter’s voice. Laura was my music. It was like living with my parents all over again, except this time the only person to blame was me. I knew the only way I could make things right would be to find Mr. Mandelbaum, to salvage whatever there was left to salvage of our old lives.

I went back to our old neighborhood every night after work, every morning before I was due at the office. I had the photo of Laura and Mr. Mandelbaum that I’d kept in my wallet, and I showed it to people. All the hookers and squatters and street people I’d come to know over the years. Except that there weren’t as many of them anymore. How had I not noticed? I even went to the beat cops, the ones I knew from my store. Cops who hadn’t been on the other side of the barricades that day. In the end it was Povercide Bob from his usual haunt in front of Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A who—after subjecting me to a twenty-minute diatribe
about how the government and the CIA were conspiring to kill the poor, and how what had happened to our building was proof—directed me to a seedy SRO on the Bowery.

I thought (foolishly, I now realize) that if I went to Mr. Mandelbaum with a plan for getting him out of that place, everything could still be all right. I told myself nothing had happened to any of us that couldn’t be fixed by time and the quiet order of a clean new home. I called City agencies on my lunch breaks, trying to find a place for him to go. I got shuffled around a lot. Eventually I was referred to the Jewish Home for the Aged, who would be able to find Mr. Mandelbaum an apartment only a hundred dollars a month more than the old place had been. Of course, a hundred dollars a month is a fortune to somebody on a fixed income. But I was making more money now, more than I’d made with the record store. My bigger paychecks, our cleaner, bigger apartment, hung in the air between Laura and me like unspoken accusations. I had to do something. I had to make it right.

The man at the front desk of the SRO pointed me to a room on the fifth floor. How did Mr. Mandelbaum manage to climb up and down five flights of stairs every day? His room was at the end of a drab corridor, next to a large plastic trash can beneath a naked lightbulb. The floors had probably been tiled at some point, although now they were no more than hard puddles of red, blue, and brown.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s room contained a single cot and an ancient wooden dresser. A plywood divider separated this room from the one next to it. Mr. Mandelbaum lay on the cot, still wearing the brown suit he’d worn to synagogue the day we’d lost our home. On top of the dresser, an ashtray overflowed. The room stank of smoke, unwashed clothing, and trash from the hallway. I had imagined Laura’s joy upon being reunited with Mr. Mandelbaum. It had been the only truly happy prospect I could imagine for any of us these past months. But I knew now as I looked around that I could never bring her to see him here.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said dully. He struggled a bit until he was in a half-sitting position, his eyes refusing to meet
mine. “I wanted to give you something.” His hand fumbled along the top of the dresser pressed flush against his cot. “I bought this for Honey, but I didn’t have a chance to give it to her.” He handed me a crumpled plastic bag. “Someone should have it.”

I accepted the bag and sat down on the bed next to him, trying to think how to begin. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I finally said. I hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but somehow it did. It was the wrong way to begin.

“I don’t.” He seemed confused. “Ida made me quit thirty years ago. She’d kill me if she thought I was smoking again.”

I let it go. “We should talk about what you’re going to do now.” I tried to sound efficient and cheerful.
Everything is fine
, my voice insisted.
It’s all just a question of logistics
. “I’ve found a place for you to live through the Jewish Home for the Aged. It’ll cost a bit more than what you were paying, but I have a good job now. Laura and I can help with the rent. We want to.”

He continued to look at the wall. “I lost one home already,” he said. “I’m not starting over in a new neighborhood. Not at my age.”

“But you can’t stay here in this place.”

“What difference does it make where I die?”

“Mr. Mandelbaum …” I took his hand in mine. “Max,” I said gently. “There are still people who love you and need you. I do. Laura does, too. To her you’re like …”
Like the father she should have had
, I thought. “Like family.”

“Every time Laura looks at me, she’ll think of that day,” Mr. Mandelbaum said. “Better she shouldn’t remember. She’s still young enough to forget.”

Something sharp darted through my chest.
If only she could!
“You’re wrong. Laura needs you more than ever now. You need each other. Doesn’t she matter to you at all?” My voice became more urgent. “The world is the same place it was three months ago. There are still things in it worth living for.”

Finally, he turned to face me. “Oh, Sarah.” There were tears in his eyes, and a look of compassion. As if in this moment it were I and not he who needed understanding. “You know I haven’t wanted to live since Ida died.”

My throat closed in a hard, painful lump. There was nothing I could say.

The hand I held squeezed faintly against mine. I felt how it trembled, cold and papery and crisscrossed with thick veins. The skin slid loosely over the bones of his knuckles, as if there were nothing to connect them.

“As long as I had Honey and my memories, well …” He withdrew his hand to pass it over his eyes. “You and Laura will be fine without me,” he said. “When they buried my cat and everything that reminded me of my wife, they buried me, too.” He turned his face to the wall again. “It’s already like I never existed.”

Laura had always been a good student. But now all she did was study. She had this grim, determined air about her, like a prisoner trying to claw her way through solid earth. Although maybe that’s not as true as I think it is. Maybe Laura gossiped with friends and dated boys and thought about some of the other things pretty teenage girls are supposed to think about. It’s impossible for me to know. I worked a lot of late nights, earning as much as I could so I would have something to put away for Laura’s college. We didn’t see much of each other. We were like roommates, I remember telling Anise once, years later. Like roommates, rather than family. Two people who happened to share a living space because it was convenient and made financial sense for them to do so.

In a way, it was like living with my parents all over again. Our home was silent—no conversations, no music. I knew Laura resented my music, I knew she blamed me for loving it so much that I’d raised her the way I had. She screamed it at me once. It was a month after I’d gone to see Mr. Mandelbaum at the SRO, when I had to tell Laura that he’d died. I had gone to visit him every day after I’d found him, bringing food and soap and whatever comfort I could. I had succeeded so far as getting him to change into the clean clothes that I’d brought. But I couldn’t persuade him to leave that place altogether.

It wasn’t that Laura blamed me for his death exactly, but that
she blamed me for everything—for our having lived in that building in that neighborhood in the first place. “Because of your
music
!” she’d yelled. “Because your music was more important to you than
I
was. You could have gotten a job, you could have asked your mother for help, you could have done
anything
when I was born that would have gotten me out of that place. But you didn’t!”

And what could I say? I
had
given up music for her. I’d stopped trying to be a DJ or a performer and went into the business side of it. It was only now, now when everything had ended, that I could see my mistakes. I wanted to say,
I was only nineteen! Only four years older than you are now! Music was the only thing I knew anything about back then
. I wanted to say,
I didn’t want to be one of those single mothers who spends all day in an office and never sees her children. I wanted to spend every second I could with you. I didn’t just want us to
live,
I wanted us to have a
life.
I did the best I could, the very best I could at the time …

I wanted to say those things, but I couldn’t. The hardest thing in the world is to admit obvious past mistakes. Not because the admission of guilt is hard (I would have confessed to, would have apologized for, anything at all to win back Laura’s love). But because, in light of how stupid you turned out to have been, your defenses end up sounding like nothing more than excuses. Lame excuses, at that.

For years I thought I resented Laura for the guilt she made me carry. (As if I wasn’t carrying enough already.) Guilt for things that were beyond my control, for decisions I’d made so long ago (and for such good reasons!) that it didn’t seem fair to punish me for them now. For the first time in my life, I craved the silence I’d grown up with. I came to understand my mother better, how a woman could decide that she didn’t want to talk to her own child. There were times when I’d catch a look on Laura’s face, as if she were about to say something of more substance than
Going to the library. I’ll be back later
. Perhaps if I’d encouraged her … but I don’t know. I never did encourage her. I didn’t want to hear her repeat the accusations I made against myself daily. Sometimes I thought there was nothing left inside me but tears, and that if
Laura said the wrong thing I’d put my head down and cry all those tears out until there was nothing left of me at all.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Laura needed to be angry at someone. Who could she be angry at if not at me? The City? The developers greedy for more land they could overprice? Those were anonymous entities, nothing more than a thousand worst-case scenarios Laura blamed me for not having thought enough about. And then one day the anger and silence become a habit. One day it’s been so long since you’ve talked to someone that it’s impossible to say the things you should have said years ago.

Maybe that’s why I blather so relentlessly at Laura when she comes to visit me now. Too late I realized how insidious silence is. I think sometimes that maybe—by sheer accident—I’ll find the one right thing to say, the one thing that will make Laura look at me again the way she used to.

After Laura graduated from college and moved away, she was no longer my legal dependent, and I had to move out of the Mitchell-Lama building. Not that it mattered much to me. That apartment had never felt like a real home, anyway.

I moved back to the Lower East Side. I had to go all the way out to Avenue B—once an unthinkable place to live, certainly for a woman alone—to find an apartment I could afford. It wasn’t exactly the same when I moved back (you can never go home again, as they say)—not even remotely the same, really. But it was the only place where I could find traces of what had been, and what might have been if not for one rainy day and a few fallen bricks.

I still couldn’t bring myself to listen to my music. But I could no longer stand the silence, either. I started watching a lot of TV. And I went out for long, roaming walks. I felt like a ghost haunting the neighborhood. It was odd to see how much things had changed in eight years. The building where Anise and I used to live was now a luxury high-rise where a one-bedroom apartment started at four thousand dollars a month for only five hundred square feet. A
tall silver box divided into dozens of smaller silver boxes, none with any more personality than the other. Lofts the size of the one Anise and I shared now sold for three million dollars, which struck me as something beyond madness. The SRO where Mr. Mandelbaum died was now a high-end boutique hotel. Its lobby bar was thronged at night with young girls who were beautiful and looked very expensive.