My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (32 page)

facility. He’s not here, they report. He’s been transferred to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Roosevelt, on 114th Street and Amsterdam.

When I find him, he has only the oxygen mask over his nose. I tell him

I watched
Rear Window
earlier in the evening. He smiles and says something that I can’t make out. Those are his last words. I sit with

him as his breathing gets slower, slower. I time the space between ex-

halations, from ten seconds to eleven seconds, to twelve . . . to twenty, thirty. . . . Five hours later, he dies.

It’s Wednesday, June 20, 2012. On my cell phone, I call Ellen. She

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Looking Backward and Moving Forward

wants to come up. I tell her not to, as I delusionally think I’ll make arrangements for Andrew’s cremation and then get back to work. For

now I have people looking after me, and want to save Ellen for later,

when the whole thing hits home. That’s when I’ll need some consola-

tion. But twenty- four hours later I realize (or my friends make me realize) I need to have people over, and by then it’s too late for her to come.

On that brilliantly sunny Sunday, as people arrive bearing flowers

and food, warmth and support, I realize the need for ritual as an ex-

pression of common bereavement. I regret Ellen not being here. I want

her to meet more of my friends.

Never mind— she’ll come up for the memorial service in the fall.

It’s now October, seven years to the month from the last time I saw

Chevey as my brother, the visit on which he broke the news. The me-

morial service I’m planning will be an elaborate affair— film clips

from the movies Andrew loved, interspersed with friends and col-

leagues speaking about him. It’ll take place at the Walter Reade The-

ater at Lincoln Center, with a reception afterward in the adjacent

gallery. It’s taken weeks of planning with my young cinephile film-

making team. I’m anxious about it all, of course, but glad Ellen will be coming, and especially glad the two ex- wives will come as well. Beth

will come up several days ahead, and take us all out for dinner the

night before the service. Eleanor will stay with Jeanne and be on call.

Ellen knows enough people to be comfortable— still, there are many

who are aware of the situation but haven’t seen her yet. Will they ogle?

Will she stand out in the crowd? Will all attention be focused on her?

Will I care?

One night I dream that she’s come to town and I’ve gone to meet

her at the hotel where she’s staying. (In real life she will stay with me.) I’m in the lobby waiting when she appears . . . but as Chevey! In coat

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My Brother
My Sister

and tie, smiling sheepishly. I understand she’s left Ellen behind for a few days, and come up as my brother. My sense in the dream is that it

hurts her, that it’s a sacrifice, and I feel terrible. But when I wake up, I forgive myself. In our unconscious, past and present meet, fantasy co-habits with reality, and wanting my brother doesn’t mean that I want

my sister less.

The memorial service goes off beautifully, as does the reception, or

at least as far as I can see. Ellen hasn’t brought a warm jacket so I’ve lent her one of mine— black wool, designer resale— and she looks terrific. My cousin Preston meets her for the first time, but another relative can’t bring herself to approach. People tell me she’s beautiful.

“Elegant” is a word I hear. And that she looks like me. I remind myself of my friend Ethel’s warning as to what they
really
think, but find that I’m long past worrying, at least on my own behalf.

Afterward friends call. My agents, husband and wife, both think

she’s lovely. “She’s charming,” Georges says, “but like a woman, not

a man.”

A friend reports that another “good” friend, tipsy no doubt, kept

going up to people, giggling and saying “Tee- hee, have you seen Mol-

ly’s ‘sister’?”

My own opinion is that she carried the whole thing off with great

poise. There were, however, a few glitches. Eleanor and Ellen are at

my apartment the next day to console and help me. We are reviewing

the previous evening and Eleanor has a bone to pick.

“Ellen, you introduced me to someone as your ex- wife. You can’t

do that. They’ll think we’re lesbians.”

“Oh,” says Ellen, to whom the thought hadn’t occurred. “Next

time I’ll introduce you as my friend.” That seems to satisfy Eleanor,

but of course it’s not right either. Once again we’ve landed awkwardly

in a linguistic no- man’s- land.

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Looking Backward and Moving Forward

During the day, Ellen fixes things in the apartment— the tele-

phone, a light— and answers some business questions. She and Elea-

nor open jars and pill bottles. I’m more helpless than usual, as my

arm’s in a cast from a fractured wrist— overexcitement on a quick trip

to Paris before the memorial service. I’d thought I was walking on air

rather than the cobblestones alongside the café Les Deux Magots.

Looking everywhere but down, trying to swallow the whole city in one

gulp after a long absence, I tripped over one of those heavy chains

draped across the sidewalk to keep cars in their place.

Ellen and Eleanor want to help me organize my life, so we begin

with the coat closet. Some of the coats, hats, and gloves are Andrew’s; most are mine. We start a box for the Salvation Army and implement

a filing system: long coats on the left, short ones on the right; sum-

mer hats on the unreachable shelf, winter ones nestled into each

other like Russian dolls; gloves, scarves, in perfect order. How long

will it stay this way? Will the red rain hat and the neon- green and

blue scarf, now in the box, find their way back into my closet after

they’re gone?

Ellen is about to start on a systematic rearrangement of my kitchen

drawers when Eleanor says to her, “Just because you’ve thought and

thought about these things, and have found the most efficient way to

do everything, doesn’t mean it’s the right way for everybody.” Ellen

closes the drawer.

At dinner, as we make our way through several bottles of wine, we

toast Andrew, and reminisce. We are like three people at a train sta-

tion, on our way somewhere, but with no signposts, no clear idea

where we are going, and no grand arches overhead like those of Broad

Street Station, where Mother, Chevey, and I once said our good- byes.

It’s just a whistle- stop platform in the middle of nowhere under miles of open sky. I’m now a widow; my brother is my sister; and Eleanor is

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My Brother
My Sister

an ex- wife, trying to move forward while stuck in a melancholy that

won’t let go. But if the intense happiness of being together on this

night is inflected with ambiguity, full of uncertainty, and edged with

sadness and loss, we are not forlorn. We don’t feel abandoned, nor do

we wish to turn away from each other. We are together on our separate

journeys.

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Acknowledgments

[to come- - 2 pp]

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Acknowledgments

[to come- - 2 pp]

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