The Two-Family House: A Novel (14 page)

When they arrived at the hospital, Mort pulled up to the emergency room entrance. Helen carried Teddy through the double doors to check in while Mort parked the car. Inside, it looked like every other hospital Helen had seen. The walls were a forgettable shade of pale green and the shiny floors were speckled white linoleum. The smell was familiar—mint and medicine mixed with the faint smell of sickness. Teddy started crying again as soon as they walked through the entrance.

“Shh, don’t be afraid.” While Teddy sniffled, Helen explained the situation to the nurse at the reception desk and took the necessary forms. She held Teddy to her chest while he closed his eyes. The poor thing was exhausted. Still carrying him, Helen walked over to the most comfortable looking of the four couches in the waiting area and arranged him so that he was lying down with his head in her lap, the same way they had been sitting in the car. He seemed to like that position best. The hard gray leather of the couch was cold against her bare legs, and Helen wished she had a blanket.

Helen’s right hand was free so she flipped through the forms. Should she fill them out or wait for Mort? She knew her brother-in-law would want her to be as efficient as possible, but she hesitated. Rose might not like it if she filled out Teddy’s forms.
But Rose isn’t here.

After ten minutes passed, Helen decided to start. She wrote down Teddy’s birthday and his blood type, his height and his weight, the things he was allergic to (dust and cherries) and the results of his latest vision and hearing tests. She wrote down when he’d had the chicken pox and when he’d had bronchitis. Then she signed the form and brought it back to the desk. “Miss, you forgot something,” the attendant called to her as she was walking away.

“Sorry, I thought I was finished,” Helen apologized. She walked back to the desk. “Only one more thing!” the nurse chirped. “Just write ‘mother’ on this line.”

“Excuse me?”

“Right here, where it says ‘Relationship to Patient,’ you forgot to write ‘mother.’”

“Oh, but I’m not—you see, I’m just…” Helen couldn’t get the words out. She cleared her throat. “I’m his aunt.”

“Oops! My mistake! Okay then, just put ‘aunt’ right on that line there.” The nurse was unfazed.

Helen wrote in the word. Her hand was shaking. “Am I done now?”

“Yes, you’re all set. One of the doctors will call you in a few minutes. It’s pretty slow here today, so it shouldn’t be a long wait.”

“Thank you.”

Helen had just settled Teddy on her lap again when Mort finally returned. “What took you so long?”

“I parked across the street, so I had to walk a little bit.”

“Why didn’t you just park in the hospital lot?”

“They’re charging a dollar to park there, that’s why! They have you over a barrel, so they try to rob you blind,” Mort harrumphed and sat down next to her on the couch. He had just opened a magazine when a nurse called Teddy’s name. Dr. Schlatner was waiting for them. He examined Teddy and asked a long list of questions. Had Teddy lost consciousness? Where did the ball hit him? Any vomiting? Blurry vision?

When the doctor finished, he told them Teddy’s eye was unharmed and he didn’t appear to have a concussion. “I want you to be very careful with him for the next few days” the doctor cautioned. “No running or physical activity for twenty-four hours. If he vomits or complains of blurry vision or headaches, I want you to see your pediatrician immediately.” Dr. Schlatner winked at Teddy and rumpled the little boy’s hair. “Keep your eyes open, slugger, and don’t walk into any more line drives.” He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a lollipop. For the first time all day, Teddy smiled.

The nurse led them back downstairs to fill out Teddy’s discharge papers. Helen spotted Rose and Abe standing by the main desk. Rose was screaming at one of the attendants. “How many times do I have to spell his name for you? How many two-and-a-half-year-old boys could you possibly have admitted in the last hour?”

As soon as Rose saw Teddy she gasped. “Oh my God! Look at his face! What did the doctor say?” She turned from Mort to Helen, demanding answers.

For the first time since the accident, Helen felt a wave of exhaustion overtake her. She was too tired to answer Rose’s questions or pretend to be pleasant. She gave Mort the discharge papers and handed him the ice pack the nurse had given her. “Mort can explain everything,” she said. “Abe and I have to get back and pick up the kids.”

Helen bent down to hug Teddy goodbye, but Rose grabbed her arm and pulled. “You’re not going
anywhere
until you tell me what happened.”

Helen’s reaction was visceral; she yanked her arm free and glared.

“You have no right to speak to me that way!” she shouted. “Where were
you
when Teddy got hurt? Where were
you
when I was comforting him on the way to the hospital, filling out forms and talking to his doctors? You were gone! You were nowhere! You were hiding from your family and feeling sorry for yourself!”

People were staring and the nurses at the reception desk were silent. “Lower your voice, Helen, please—” Mort began, but Helen waved him aside and took a step closer to Rose. “I’m not taking the blame for it anymore, Rose! Not this time! Do you hear me? You can go ahead and pretend you had no part in this, but we both know the truth. For years you’ve pretended to be the weak one so I would get stuck with the dirty work. You fall apart and I’m the one who has to pick up the pieces. Well, pretend all you want, but you made this happen.
You did this!
” Helen was shouting so loudly that Teddy started to cry. He was frightened and scurried to grab on to Rose’s leg.

Rose opened her mouth to respond but closed it without saying a word. For an instant, Helen thought she saw a flicker of remorse pass over her sister-in-law’s face, but Rose made no apologies. On the car ride home, Helen decided it was probably just the hospital’s fluorescent lighting that made her look that way. Rose wasn’t sorry at all.

Chapter 27

JUDITH

(April 1952)

The black-and-white clock on the library wall was oversized and easy to read. She would wait twenty minutes more, until the hands pointed to a few minutes past five. Then she would pack up her books and walk carefully down the pitted stone staircase to the side exit. If she walked at her usual pace, she would reach the front door of her house around 5:25. She had to be home by five-thirty or her mother would start to worry.

That’s what Judith told people. “If I’m not home by five-thirty, my mother will start to worry.” But “worry” was a euphemism. An entirely truthful girl would have said this: “If I am not home at exactly five-thirty, my mother will start panicking. At five-thirty-one, she will call my father at work. At five-thirty-two, she will call the police, and at five-thirty-three, she will call the local hospitals. At five-thirty-five, she will sit at the table and start crying. She will tell my sisters and little brother that I am most likely dead, hit by a car or kidnapped by a child molester, and that will make
them
start to cry. And then, when I walk in at five-thirty-six or five-thirty-eight, she will scream at me and wring her hands. She will call me irresponsible and selfish. I will apologize and promise never to be late again. She will go into her room, slam the door and refuse to come out. I will hug my sisters and tell them everything is fine. I will rock my little brother on my lap until he isn’t scared anymore. I will finish making dinner if my mother has started it, feed my siblings and get them ready for bed. My father, after getting the five-thirty-one warning call, will work late that night and come home between nine and nine-thirty. I will leave a plate for him wrapped in tinfoil on top of the stove. He will eat it alone at the kitchen table, knock on my door before he goes to sleep and call out ‘good night.’ And in the morning, we will all pretend it never happened.”

The first time Rose behaved that way, Judith thought her mother must have been upset about something else. But then it happened a second time and a third. So Judith tried her best never to be late, not from the library or anywhere else. The trouble was, she could never predict when her mother might “worry.” On school days, it was settled that she had to be home by five-thirty from the library. But what if she took Teddy to the park? Or walked to the drugstore for a candy bar on a Saturday afternoon? How many times had she come home to find her mother agitated and hysterical, sometimes when she had only been gone for fifteen minutes? She had lost count.

Judith tried to get her mother’s attention whenever she left the house, to set a return time so they both knew when she was expected. But half the time her mother forgot the time they had agreed upon and ended up “worrying” anyway. Judith tried leaving notes, detailed and clearly printed with her return time circled in red pen. But her mother claimed she never saw them. “How am I supposed to know that I should look for a letter when my child is dead in a ditch somewhere?”

“But I’m not dead in a ditch.”

“How could I have known that? You were twenty minutes late!”

“Mother, please. I’m not late. If you had just read my note—”

“Stop talking to me about notes! I won’t be tormented like this!”

Experience taught Judith a few things. She stopped defending herself. She stopped responding to the accusations. She learned that if she apologized right away, the recovery time was faster. So she apologized, over and over, until apologizing felt just the same as having an ordinary conversation. She grew accustomed to it.

In the old days, Judith might have talked to her aunt Helen about the situation. But she felt uncomfortable doing that now. Ever since Teddy’s accident two years ago, Judith’s mother and her aunt barely spoke to each other. Things had been bad before then, but after Sol’s party, they had gotten worse. For years Judith had been trying to figure out the source of the tension between them. She paid close attention whenever the two of them were together. But no matter how attentive she was, she couldn’t uncover the source of the hostility. All she knew was that she no longer felt right talking to her aunt about anything having to do with her mother. She talked to Aunt Helen about school, her sisters and even her father. But discussing her mother felt like a betrayal. The topic wasn’t difficult to avoid—Aunt Helen never asked about her mother anyway.

Rose started “worrying” about Judith a few months after the accident. She worried about the other children too, but since Teddy was home with her all day and Mimi and Dinah still went to the school across the street, Judith was the primary object of her mother’s distress.

Judith knew that if she went directly home after school each day, she might be able to prevent some of her mother’s outbursts. But, as much as she wanted to avoid causing her mother additional anxiety, she knew that if she gave up her outings and changed her routine to pacify Rose, her own obedient nature would take over, and slowly the few freedoms she had managed to retain would be lost. There were so many days that she longed to go home—she wanted to play with Teddy and her sisters, or she wanted to have a piece of the apple cake she knew was left over from dinner the night before. But even on those days she forced herself to walk to the library. If she didn’t have any homework, she would pick out a book to read or look through the college brochures she borrowed from the school counselor. Eventually she stopped looking for books. The brochures became her escape.

Judith would open the college booklets and imagine herself in the photographs, walking on the campuses and chatting with the students. She would live in a dormitory with other girls her age, and no one would cry if she was five minutes late returning from a class. Her mother wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore—there would be dorm monitors to keep track of her.

Judith was just a junior in high school, but one of the counselors had spoken to her in the fall about the possibility of graduating early, in the same class as her cousin Harry. “I really think you should consider accelerating your program here,” Mrs. Morhardt suggested. “You’ve already taken most of the classes we have to offer, and you’ll have more than enough credits to graduate at the end of this year. Why waste time reviewing what you already know when you could be expanding your knowledge?” Mrs. Morhardt made it sound so simple. When she asked Judith if her parents had given their permission, Judith told her yes even though she hadn’t dared to mention it to them. The few friends Judith had at school didn’t know about her plan. In truth, she didn’t consider it a plan at all because she hardly gave it any thought. She had gotten some forms from Mrs. Morhardt and applied to a few colleges back in December, but she was convinced that none of her applications would be accepted. Judith couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually take the time to reply to her letters. It was already April, and there had been no news. Judith would tell Mrs. Morhardt that she would stay in high school and graduate with her proper class. She was resigned to another year of afternoons at the library.

Judith looked at the clock again: 4:48. She got up to stretch her legs and ran her finger over the top of one of the bookcases. It was caked with dust and turned her finger black. What an uninviting place this was. Three round tables had been thrown between the bookcases, with mismatched wooden chairs surrounding them. The only light source was a dim fluorescent fixture that flickered and hummed every few minutes. The clock ticked. Soon it would be time to leave.

The dull thud of footsteps on the stone stairs startled her. No one ever walked up to the reading area at this hour. Then she heard a familiar voice calling her name. “Judith? Are you here?” It was Harry. Had her mother been so hysterical that she sent him over to the library to find her? The thought of it nauseated her and she wanted to hide behind the bookcases. Instead, she sank back into her chair and covered her face with her hands.

“Are you okay?” Harry asked. He was watching her from the top of the steps. Judith moved her hands away from her face and stood up. “I’m leaving
right now
,” she barked. “It’s not even five o’clock! My mother knows I don’t get home until five-thirty on school days! I can’t believe she sent you here to get me!”