They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (15 page)

That night, Molly straightened the medicine bottles. The hospice nurses had lined them up neatly already. Molly reorganized the reorganization. Molly Mixinovitch, Aaron used to call her when she got like this.

“It’s a pick-me-up, isn’t it, Aaron? That Molly energy. And her friend Freddie, what a lovely person.”

Should she have said wife? “Well, wife, then.” She put on her reading glasses and found the ointment for Aaron’s lips. “Wife,” she said softly. “I am your wife, Aaron. Mrs. Aaron Bergman.” She began to say, Till death do us part, but stopped. “Nothing can part us.” Even death could not do that after so many years.

They had been Aaron and Joy for a lifetime. Joy contemplated the word “lifetime.” How sad that a word meaning a full span of experience, meaning a whole life, should carry within it the end of a life.

Marrying Aaron had been a triumph, the goal of her existence, of any girl’s existence in those days. A handsome, well-heeled man, that was part of it. A handsome, well-heeled man who didn’t care about money, that had been another part of it—he was an artist, a singer, contemptuous of the grubby world of commerce. On their first date he had lifted her up and carried her through the park singing. It was like a movie. She was swept away. She did not know the difference between carefree and careless in those days. She learned. There were trials and tribulations along the road. “We’ve had some sickness and health, haven’t we, Aaron? Some richer and poorer.” She dabbed the ointment on his lips. “Never a dull moment.” It didn’t seem possible that Aaron’s lips were so dry and cracked, lips she had kissed when they were practically a boy’s lips, nice well-formed lips, when she and Aaron were both young. Aaron’s young lips had been replaced, magically, by these chapped and papery ones. How proud she had been, proud of being in love, of finding love, as if love were a prize on a treasure hunt. Aaron smiled at her as they stood at the altar fumbling with their rings, a crooked smile he never turned on anyone else, until the grandchildren were born. It was a dangerous smile, full of promise and play. “That’s you, playful and full of promises.” He did not keep his promises, perhaps, but he never stopped making them, and that had been a different kind of honesty and keeping of the faith.

*   *   *

Molly threw the package of chipped beef away. Joy retrieved the package when Molly wasn’t looking. She put it back in the freezer.

*   *   *

Freddie and Molly took the girls to the Museum of Natural History to get them out of the apartment for a little while.

“They look so real,” Cora said. The enormous Alaskan bear loomed over her, a wounded seal at its feet.

“They are real,” said Ruby.

“They’re dead.”

“They’re still real.”

Freddie stepped away from the existential discussion to answer her phone. She backed against the case of the skunks. “Laurel, is anything wrong?”

“Not that we know of,” both sisters said at once. “But we thought we’d come see Dad in June. It’s a slow month for us. It might be the last time we see him. We have to be realistic.”

“He’ll be thrilled.”

“We have a very good package at the Disneyland Hotel for three nights, and then the Beverly Hills Hilton. Doesn’t it sound like fun? A night in Palm Springs, a quick trip to Vegas—we’ve got it all planned out. You let him know we’re coming. We’ll send you our itinerary. And, Freddie, we’re gluten-free. Just so you know.”

“Maybe
you
should call Dad and give him the good news. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

“What if he didn’t know who we were?” Laurel said. “It would be so awkward. But you’ll know how to tell him. After all, Freddie, you see him all the time. We don’t.”

Freddie smiled a little at that. When she found Molly and the girls, they were examining the naked Neanderthals. Molly was distracted, worried about her father. Ruby and Cora were hungry.

“I still say the animals are not real.”

“Are they fantasies?” Ruby said contemptuously.

“Well, they are in a way,” Freddie said. “Nineteenth-century fantasies of everything wild. In their glass cases.”

Molly snorted.

Cora said, “Snort again!”

“If I went inside one of those cases and kicked one of those kudus,” Ruby said, “I’d hurt my foot. A fantasy wouldn’t bang my foot. A real kudu would. A dead, real kudu.”

“You refute Berkeley thus, Dr. Johnson,” said Freddie.

“Death is the only thing that’s real,” Molly said softly. Only Freddie heard her. She took Molly’s hand and they walked silently home across the park. Cora and Ruby skipped and cried out in English accents, “I’m Berkeley and nothing is real; I’m Dr. Johnson and I refute you thus,” kicking stones.

23

This is a general picture
, the pamphlet said. Then it said that the skin turns a gray or green or bluish hue. Her father’s skin was gray and green and bluish. He is off-color, Molly thought, like a joke.
As you hold his hand you may notice that it feels cold
. Her father’s hand was as cold as ice, as death.

He was dead.

Joy came into the room.

“Oh, Mommy.” Molly pressed her face against her mother’s shoulder and cried in ugly dry heaving sobs.

“Molly, Molly.” Joy patted her back, kissed her cheek. “There, there, Molly. You must be so tired.” She turned to Aaron, lying still on his hospital bed. “That terrible jet lag,” she said to him.

“But Daddy … Daddy’s…”

“Come,” Joy said gently. “Aaron, we’re going to get some tea. Back in a minute!”

In the hall, she closed the door to the bedroom and said, “Now, what is it, sweetheart? I don’t want to have any sad discussion in front of Daddy.”

“But…”

“The booklet said you must always act as if he can hear you. Hearing is one of the last senses to go. We have to be careful not to scare him. He can hear what we’re saying even if he doesn’t seem to.”

“But, Mom—”

“The booklet said so,” Joy said fiercely. “It’s disrespectful to talk about dying in front of him. Do you understand?”

“Mom, his fingers are blue.”

“He’s chilly.”

“Do we get a mirror or something?”

“This is not television, Molly. Go wait in the living room. I want to chat with your father. Just the two of us.”

Molly found Daniel and Freddie in the kitchen. “I think Daddy died,” she said through her sobs. “But Mommy doesn’t want him to know.”

She slid down the wall and sat on the floor. She wished she could breathe. She watched Daniel make his slow careful way toward their parents’ bedroom. Maybe her father would be alive again by the time he got there. Maybe her mother would have talked him back to life.

“She thinks he’s still alive and she’s talking to him,” Molly whispered.

Freddie slid down and sat beside her. “Is he? Maybe he is.”

“But he’s green. And waxen.”

When he came back a few minutes later, Daniel said, “She’s holding his hand. They’re having a quiet conversation, she said.”

“So he’s alive?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know.” Daniel started to cry.

Freddie and Coco, the in-laws, went in to take a look as more neutral observers.

“He’s awfully stiff-looking,” Coco said. She emitted a tiny, nervous laugh, then shook her head.

“Is he still green?” Molly asked.

“Bluish green,” Freddie said.

“Is he moving?”

“Of course he’s not moving. If he were moving they would know he wasn’t dead,” her brother snapped.

By the time the hospice nurse came for her afternoon visit, rigor mortis had set in.
Rigor mortis
, she said in her rolling Jamaican accent.
Rigor mortis
.

But still Joy could not be sure. Death? How could anyone be sure of something as unlikely as death? Death made no sense. Where was Aaron if not there? Who was that if not Aaron? Why were the children filing in to say goodbyes as if he were about to take a journey on an ocean liner? She sat on the edge of the bed where she and Aaron had slept and looked at the silent, still man in the hospital bed. Who would take care of him now that he was dead? Who would get him his tea and see him sneak three spoons of sugar into it and pretend not to notice? Who would make him wear his hearing aids? Who would buy him warm sweaters? He would be so helpless and so alone now that he was dead and she could no longer look after him.

She supposed she was crying. Her sinuses were swollen and painful. Her face was wet with tears. She heard uneven sounds, hoots of sorrow, and suspected they came from her. She heard sirens and turned toward the window. It had stopped snowing. She stood up and gazed at Aaron on his hospital bed, his arms now crossed over his chest. Perhaps the nurse had done that, because Aaron, she had to admit, certainly had not.

24

There was chaos and urgency in the Bergman apartment. Daniel said,
We have to call a funeral home, don’t we?
Molly said,
Well, they aren’t going to call us.
Daniel said,
I’ll call the one on the West Side.
Joy, with furious conviction, said,
The one on Madison
is so convenient
. Molly said,
It’s not your health club, it’s not the subway stop, you don’t have to carry him there yourself
, and she must have been screaming, because Freddie took her hand and squeezed it with what was surely excessive force and, in her annoying Yoga voice, told her to breathe.

“I’m a widow,” Joy said. “Show some respect.”

“Okay, I’ll call the one on the East Side, then.” Daniel reached for the phone.

“No! Not yet! Not yet!”

“Rigor mortis,” said the nurse.

“Mr. Aaron, Mr. Aaron,” Wanda cried.

“Grandpa,” the little girls were wailing. “Grandpa!”

Molly marched into Daniel’s old room and called the East Side funeral home on her cell phone. She told the man who answered that they would want a Jewish ceremony, as soon as possible, did they have an opening, as if she were calling to have her hair colored. Like the hair salon, the soonest appointment the funeral home had was in two days. But two days was Saturday and you could not have a Jewish funeral on Saturday.

“Of course,” said the man. “Well, we do have a spot on Sunday afternoon.”

Aaron was zipped up in a black bag and placed on a wheeled stretcher, then steered out by two silent men, the discrepancy in their heights comical, their clothing almost theatrically grim: shabby black suits, white gloves like footmen. One wore a fur cap; the other, the little one, a yellowed straw fedora with a grimy brim and stained brown hat band. Ernie, the doorman on duty, had come up to say goodbye; the grumpy super, too. He was a fine man, said the super. A gentleman, said the doorman. They stood with bowed heads while the family wailed in anarchic waves of hysteria and grief that emanated from every side of the room, then bounced back from the walls, rolling, echoing, as the little girls clutched their mother’s waist and Coco said shrilly, desperately, “Who wants cake, I brought cake.”

That was how Molly remembered it. Joy didn’t remember it at all.

Wanda and the hospice nurse stripped the hospital bed. They pushed it against the wall. Joy refused to go into the room. The room did not exist without Aaron.

She went into the hall bathroom, which Aaron had used as his own. Wipes and pads and pouches in boxes. Creams and lotions and powders. Tubes and rubber gloves. Where would she put them? Aaron was in a refrigerator on Madison Avenue, but what about all of Aaron’s supplies? They would not be buried with him, he was not King Tut and they were not treasures. They were garbage. Expensive garbage. How sad that she had all these costly medical supplies and no one to use them. Most of the boxes had not even been opened.

“Daniel, quick! Look on your phone. Where can I donate? I have colostomy pouches. Perfectly good! Someone needs them! Hurry! I have to donate!”

That was what Joy remembered.

She rushed to the phone and said, “Operator! Dial the hospital. I have urgent equipment to donate.” Daniel took the phone from her hand gently. “The operators aren’t there anymore, Mom. No more operators, remember?”

“She’s in shock,” Molly said.

“Should I slap her?” Cora asked.

“That will not be necessary,” her father said.

Ben came in the unlocked front door and saw immediately that he was too late.

“He’s gone,” Molly said. “Oh, Ben, he’s gone.”

He put his arms around her and they both cried.

Joy called her friends to let them know. Natalie first. She always called Natalie when something happened, good or bad. Sixty-five years of good and bad, and now this, which was very bad. She called Natalie to tell her, just as she had called Natalie when she was married to a man who was alive instead of to this man who was dead. She told Natalie Aaron died. She listened as Natalie said such nice things about Aaron. She stopped listening and took comfort in the voice, the same voice, hoarse with cigarettes, that had been bossing her around since college, that had bossed her around during all those days and weeks and months of Daniel’s illness, through the depths of Aaron’s financial ruin, through chemo appointments, the voice that inevitably called to cancel lunch dates and dinner dates and any date that involved the pleasant, the unnecessary, the routine encounters of a social life, but never failed her when things got tough.

“Oh, them,” Natalie said when Joy mentioned the funeral home where Aaron now lay. “They’re crooks. They’re all crooks. I plan to be cremated and set in a tin box on my own mantelpiece next to my mother and father and dog and two cats in their tin boxes. Now, let me think. I read something. A nonprofit funeral home on the West Side. Community-based and nonprofit…”

Joy imagined a community center, a rec room with Ping-Pong tables and battered metal folding chairs. “That sounds horrible. Like they hand out cheese sandwiches. Oh, I don’t care anyway. He’s gone. What does it matter?”

As soon as she said it, Joy knew it did matter, that it was all that mattered, there was nothing else. The funeral was Aaron’s funeral, the last thing she could do for him. She had to do it properly. Not just properly, but perfectly, in just exactly the way she suddenly and clearly visualized it: “There will be a violinist. The violinist will play klezmer as people file in.”