They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (5 page)

*   *   *

“I’m sorry you walked in on such a drama,” Joy said. They were squeezed in at the table in the kitchen drinking the house specialty, decaffeinated tea, weak, lukewarm.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mommy.”

“Gregor is a nice young man. He and his wife just had a baby.”

“Do you think maybe you should lock the door? At night? Then, if Daddy gets up—”

“What if there’s a fire?” her mother said, appalled. “You’re not thinking, Molly.”

Molly stirred her tea. The sound of the spoon against the teacup was musical, like bells.

“I hate being such an old ruin,” Joy said softly.

“You’re not an old ruin. You’re still working, for heaven’s sake. You take care of Dad all by yourself. I don’t know how you manage, honestly. And you look beautiful, too. Old ruin. That’s a joke.”

“Well”—Joy was obviously mollified—“I
am
old.”

No one at work knew her real age. Eighty-six. That would give them a jolt, all those potbellied men planning their retirements at sixty-five. Of course, she couldn’t afford to retire even now. She’d cut back to part-time since Aaron got so sick, which was hard enough on the finances.

“I only work three days a week,” she added.

“That’s plenty.”

“Plenty of
tsuris
.”

The room that had once been Molly’s was now her mother’s office and her father’s study. Those were the terms used by them both, and if an office is a place where you store cardboard boxes of unopened mail and a study is where you sit between spires of those boxes on a convertible sofa and listen to your transistor radio, then those terms were accurate.

Molly transferred the piles of boxes from the sofa to the floor, leaving a little path to the door, and began removing the sofa’s newly visible pillows before she realized that other towers of boxes on the floor would prevent the mattress from unfolding.

“Oh well,” Joy said. “Storage is a problem in New York City. Sleep in Danny’s room.”

Daniel’s room had originally been a maid’s room, a remnant from the days when the building had been built, the days when families had maids. The room was so narrow that the only bed that would fit there was a special narrow maid’s-room bed sold, once upon a time, in some of the better New York department stores. This one was very old, perhaps forty years old, lumpy and somehow inviting. Daniel had always loved his room, fixing it up like a cabin on a boat. In fact, he had made it so cozy and inviting that Molly had tried to get him to switch with her, but he had contemptuously refused. Aaron called it the Nookery, a Dickens reference, he said, and that had clinched it for both children: Daniel had the best room in the house. It even had its own bathroom, the size of a phone booth, with a toilet and a skinny shower. The sink was in the bedroom, which Daniel one day announced was very European, enraging Molly, who was stuck in her conventional American bedroom with its big closet and large windows facing the tree-lined street. The small window at the head of Daniel’s maid’s-room cot faced another building, but he had managed to make a friend across the air shaft and they rigged up a pulley system and paper cup telephone, so even that turned out to be an advantage.

Molly pulled the old cotton quilt around her. She felt far away, missing Freddie, and she felt comfortably at home. Outside, an ambulance went screeching along somewhere in the distance.

She heard her mother padding around in the kitchen, the pop of the toaster, the refrigerator door opening, closing. She would have to check the refrigerator tomorrow, search for the squalid, liquefying slices of tomato, the curled, desiccated turkey slices she knew would be tucked up somewhere in there. She had to make sure her parents were eating properly. There were boxes of Vienna Fingers and saltines on the counter. Minute Rice. Rice Krispies. Cream of Wheat. If it was an empty calorie, her parents were sure to stock it. But she had also seen a banana and a few oranges in a bowl. A good sign. She had tried once to arrange a regular delivery of decent produce through an organic food website. It had not been a success. Her mother did not like the dirt on the vegetables. Her father did not like the irregular shapes. Neither of them liked rutabagas.

*   *   *

Molly had come a week earlier than either Freddie or Ben, neither of whom could get to New York until Thanksgiving Day, and Joy was glad. It gave her a little time to be alone with her daughter. From the kitchen table, she watched with pleasure as Molly grabbed parcels from the refrigerator and threw them into a large garbage bag.

“Mom, this is disgusting.”

Joy nodded. Molly’s movements, so abrupt and assured, charmed her. It was as if Molly were a little girl, a busy, officious little girl, as she had sometimes been, bossing her brother around, arranging the spices in the kitchen alphabetically as soon as she learned the alphabet.

“It’s wonderful to have you here,” Joy said.

Molly looked up from the garbage bag. She smiled.

“I miss you terribly,” Joy said.

The smile faded. “That makes me feel kind of guilty, Mom.”

“Would you prefer that I didn’t miss you?”

Molly pondered that. “I don’t know. Maybe. No.”

“Good. Because I do, whether you like it or not.”

She watched Molly spray the kitchen table with Fantastik and scrub it vigorously with a sponge, her elbows almost banging into Joy’s face.

“Should I move?”

“You’re okay.”

Joy did not offer to help. Molly did not like help. Joy watched her with growing satisfaction. The chemicals in the spray made her eyes sting, but she said nothing. The sticky circles left by teacups and jam jars disappeared. Molly gave her a quick kiss on the head as she put back the saltshaker, the sugar bowl with one of its handles broken off, the portable radio, then quickly took them off again and scrubbed them, too. She scrubbed the blackened windowsill.

“That will never come off,” Joy said.

“I miss you, too, you know,” Molly said.

“I should hope so.”

Joy listened to the water run as Molly took a shower in Danny’s minuscule bathroom. There was life in the apartment, echoes of her old life, echoes of life before she was old.

“Aaron,” she said that night as she tucked him in, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face against the back of his head, “I love you.”

He said, “I love you, too, my darling.”

The words echoed in the apartment full of echoes.

*   *   *

Joy left for work at 9:30. She never knew what she would come home to, but Aaron tended to sleep during the day and never went near the stove, so she told herself. She was a conservation consultant for a small museum on the Lower East Side that specialized in Jewish artifacts. It was, she had once observed, years ago, not unlike Hitler’s Museum of an Extinct Race, but with less stuff. Aaron was shocked when she said this. They were in Prague at the time, entering a museum beside the old synagogue, a museum that was piled with candlesticks and spoons and silver spice boxes stolen from Jews by the Nazis and stockpiled in anticipation of Hitler’s museum.

“Joyful, darling, a little perspective,” Aaron said.

A museum like hers was a record of the past, not a trophy of genocide, certainly that was true. But Time was so cruel and so thorough. It made her sad sometimes as she examined her own museum’s jumble of dented tin
pushkes
, Sabbath candlesticks brought from the Old Country, telegrams, newspapers, photographs, the wheel of a pushcart, a deck chair from the Catskills. Where did they belong now? Nowhere. It was an extinct world that passed through her hands and into the Lower East Side Museum. Joy would examine each item donated to the museum or acquired, each fragment of this lost world, to determine if it deserved to be found or to be lost again, to be tossed back quite literally onto the dust heap of history. This choosing which item lived and which died, so to speak—that was the part of her job she did not relish, separating the wheat from the chaff.

“Who am I to judge?” she said to Aaron. “If the pope said that about his flock, is it any wonder I feel that way about my flock of artifacts?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, my love, but you are not the pope.”

Joy wanted to save everything, every scrap, as if it were a soul. A museum was not a warehouse, however, and a conservator was not a hoarder. Collections had priorities, strengths. Every Houdini flyer did not need to be preserved. One Houdini flyer was quite enough. Yet she had been trained to save, not to choose.

A mother of small children with a bachelor’s degree in Art History, she had volunteered at the museum two days a week as soon as Daniel started nursery school. It wasn’t until that first bankruptcy that she’d gone to work there full-time as a secretary, assisting the conservator. Both he and the director of the museum encouraged her to go back to school. She couldn’t give up her job to go full-time, but she managed, working during the morning, going to school in the afternoon, so she could be home to make dinner and put the children to bed. She worked long and hard for that Ph.D. The museum hired her as a conservator even before she finished. She loved the battered pots and pans, the sewing machines, the Yiddish-to-English primers, liked to handle them. She knew others would like to handle them, too, and so she protected them from the loving caresses that would, as in a myth or a fairy tale, eventually destroy them.

The director had a bit of a crush on her, though he had never bothered her after that one time, and even then she had been able to fend him off with a pretense of utter ignorance and innocence, one of her favorite strategies, no hurt feelings or embarrassment. It had been a long time since she’d had to act as though she had no idea what a man meant when he spoke in a husky voice and happened to rest his hand on her knee. That was one piece of the past she’d been only too happy to consign to the garbage.

The conservator who had encouraged her had died years ago. The director had retired. The field of conservation relied more and more on computers and software and technology, or so she read, she could not possibly employ all the new techniques, it was hard enough for her writing emails. The museum was changing with the times, too, growing bigger and more professional, and Joy had begun to identify with her artifacts, out of date, obsolete, left behind.

*   *   *

Joy had already gotten Aaron dressed. All Molly had to do was bring her father his breakfast and his lunch, and make sure he didn’t wander or fall.

“For once I can relax at the office,” Joy said. “Goodbye, Aaron. Goodbye, Molly. Don’t drive each other crazy. I’m off to the salt mines.”

Aaron poked at the lump in his sweatshirt and asked what it was doing there. Molly explained about the colostomy bag at great length, as if a longer explanation would stay in his head longer, but at a certain point he just waved his hand at her, a dismissal, and she left him in his chair and washed his dishes. By the time she was done, he was calling for her mother.

“She went to work, Daddy,” she said from the doorway.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

He called for Joy ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, until Molly decided to stay in the bedroom with him.

“No wonder Mom is going nuts,” she said to him.

“
Who can from Joy refrain,
” he sang, “
this gay, this pleasing, shining, wond’rous day?
”

By two o’clock, the apartment was driving Molly insane, the banging radiators and stifling steam heat, the television’s endless loop of NY1 weather and politics and interviews of off-Broadway dancers. She had to get out.

“You have to get out,” she said to her father. She bundled him in his jacket and herded him and his walker to the door. “Come on. It’s so hot in here. With the TV grinding on and on. I can’t stand it.”

“Well, I can.”

“You need fresh air.”

“You sound like your mother. Where is your mother? Joy! Joy!”

“She went to work.”

“Oh, she did, did she?”

He often took on this joshing tone when he was confused. Molly hustled him into the elevator.

“Well, where’s your mother, anyway?” His voice had gone from joshing to desperation. “Joy? Joy! Where are you? Where’s your mother?”

They made it to the park, and Aaron stared at the evergreen bushes.

Molly sat on a bench beside him. The air was cold and wet. “So,” she said. Before the dementia, he had been a kind of genius at small talk, always able to chat and charm. That gift had been lost, gradually, but even so he had continued to enjoy a good attack on the mayor. She mentioned the mayor now, and he said, “All a bunch of crooks,” but did not elaborate. Molly moved on to the grandchildren. He liked to hear anything at all about them, laughing and calling them spitfires or
wisenheimers
.

“So Cora and Ruby go to public schools,” she said.

“Imagine that.”

“I hope they’re really good ones.”

Her father nodded. “Yes, indeed,” he said.

“I thought Ruby would go to private school for seventh grade for sure. Not that anyone asked my opinion. Of course no one can afford the tuition anymore. Except Russian oligarchs.”

“Well, now.”

“
Are
there any good public middle schools?” she soldiered on. “There weren’t when Daniel and I were that age, that’s for sure.”

“Is that so?”

Molly tried a couple of other topics, but none of them, not the state of the CIA or health care or water quality, sparked more than a nod, an all-purpose phrase: You don’t say; imagine that.

Oh, Daddy, Molly thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was a useless, selfish daughter, dragging her father out into the cold against his will so that she could get some fresh air, so that she could breathe, so that she could escape when she knew he could never escape what was happening to him, not if she made him stumble behind his red walker as far as the North Pole. And to top it all off, in these precious moments at what was surely the beginning of the end of his conscious life, she couldn’t even think of anything to say to him. To her own father.