Wreathed (5 page)

Maybe that was a mistake.

I clicked on the link from the Gawker article and read the obituary all the way through, for the first time:

BERKMAN, SHELDON, 67, of Cape May, passed away on Monday, March 12. He was a native of Cherry Hill, the son of the late Aaron Berkman and Hannah Berkman. He retired to Cape May four years ago. He served for twenty years in the United States Air Force, retiring as a technical sergeant. He served at Elmendorf, Dyess, and McGuire Air Force Bases. After retirement from active duty, he worked as a machinist in the engineering division of PF Avionics in Lakehurst. Funeral services will be held at First Presbyterian Church, Cape May, on Friday morning, March 17, at 10:00 a.m. He is survived by a sister, Bernice, and a nephew. He was a resident of the Victorian Cottages active senior residence, which will hold a reception in his honor following the service.

Throughout his life, he expressed his love and devotion for Emily Thornhill, his one true love. Although she left him and married another, he held on to his undying love and respect for her, refusing all other romantic entreaties. He kept a picture of her on his wall, and talked often to his friends and relatives of just how much her love had meant to him. Although his life was lonely and sometimes sad, the memory of his beloved carried him through his many trials.

Sheldon often said that he would love Emily until he died, and it was his one wish that his dear Emily attend his funeral after he passed away. “I know that she doesn’t love me as I love her,” he once said. “That has been a sad and painful part of my life. I only hope that when I pass on from this vale of tears, that she will remember me and want to come to my funeral, to honor the love that we once felt for each other, so long ago.”

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to the American Society for Model Aircraft.

Maybe I should have screamed. Maybe I should have cried. But all I did when I finished reading poor Sheldon’s final message was laugh—a high, desperate cackle that was part relief and part manic ecstasy.
Oh, Sheldon
, I thought. Poor, sad, deluded Sheldon, whose biggest mistake in life, so far as I could tell, was to fall in love with my mother.

Chapter 6

The
Curtains
article wasn’t much more than a recap of the obituary, with a bit of snarky commentary about wanting to give poor sad Sheldon a big hug and a bowl of tomato soup, were it not for the inconvenient fact of his recent demise. The problem was in the comments section. Compared to the deep, swirling pit of semisolid waste that is the comments section of most Internet sites, it wasn’t all that bad. It would have been unobjectionable if it hadn’t been about me.

One person had asked the obvious question about who Emily Thornhill was, and that led to questions about whether she was still around, and if it could be ascertained as to whether she would attend the funeral. Mother had kept her maiden name, and she’d had a long career with the Camden County Democratic apparatus, so it wasn’t that hard to find her basic information on Google. Someone had cross-referenced her name against my name (Gwendolyn Gail Jarrett, “Wendy” unless you want me to hurt you) and had come up with Grandfather Thornhill’s obituary from seven years ago from the
Inquirer
. If the research had ended there, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but someone had posted links to my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles in the comments. That made it easy for whoever-it-was at Gawker to come up with the bright idea of calling me at work and endangering my future employment.

The rest of the comments were a series of cutting and snarky insults about my personal life and romantic prospects. People who waste their lives commenting on websites are about as sharp as a sack of marbles.

I spent the next hour or so wading through my e-mail and Facebook in-boxes, which mostly involved deleting crap from people I didn’t know and telling the people I did know to mind their own business. I got halfway through before I gave it up as a bad job. The one positive I saw was that there didn’t seem to be any inquiries from legitimate media outlets, which—as I devoutly hoped—meant that there likely wouldn’t be any TV cameras at the funeral. The other good news was that it didn’t look as though anyone had thought to contact my brother or my sister about the story. Greg was too busy to care, anyway, and Pacey didn’t use social media for anything except posting pictures of her twins and whatever thing they had destroyed most recently.

I wondered for a moment if any enterprising soul at Gawker Media or one of its competitors had thought to contact Mother directly, and then said a brief prayer on behalf of anyone who would be so foolish as to try.

I spent the better part of the afternoon wading through social media sludge as best I could until I determined that there wasn’t anything I needed to do but wait for the entire mess to blow over. I took a hot shower, put on comfortable clothes, and tried as best I could to steel myself for the long car ride down to Cape May.

“You did bring a nice dress?” my mother asked.

We were stuck in traffic on a bumpy two-lane highway leading south out of Princeton. I was driving with the top up against the late-March chill. It would be a long ride, and I wasn’t in a big hurry to hear the long and sad story about how my mother had stepped on Sheldon Berkman’s black little heart. I was in even less of a mood to hear her carp about my shortcomings, fashion-related or otherwise.

“I have an adequate wardrobe for funerals,” I said.

“I imagine that you do. Is that what you would call an occupational hazard?”

“Not at all. I want my clients to live long, productive lives, so they can change their wills every other year or so and I can bill them for it.”

“I see,” she said. “Dead clients pay no bills.”

“Ideally, they don’t pay taxes, either.”

“Don’t remind me, dear. All I wanted was to make sure that you didn’t wear that dress you wore to your cousin Alicia’s wedding.”

That had been a black chiffon number with a deep neckline with a bow placed strategically to keep it decent. I will admit that it was form-fitting, but I was dressing to impress my date. Rodrigo was the assistant director of the Argentinian mission to the U.N. and was the heir to a large mining fortune. He had long, flowing black hair, an exquisite accent, and soft, supple hands. He tried to show me the basic steps of the tango, and after the reception, I showed him some moves of my own. It was a very romantic evening, and a very romantic morning after that, and it all would have worked out perfectly if he hadn’t turned out to be a sexist cretin who didn’t think that women should be allowed to practice law.

“I have a very nice, conservative outfit,” I told my mother. “It’s a very dark charcoal suit. Perfect for funerals.”

“Let’s hope we just have one, then.”

“That would not be my preferred way to spend the weekend, no.”

“I never thought about this,” she said, “but you didn’t have any other weekend plans, did you? I do hope I’m not impeding your social schedule.”

This was her way of asking me if I was dating anyone. I figured I would get static from her on this topic during the trip, but I had at least hoped that she would have waited until we were on the other side of Trenton.

“Why do we have to do this?” I asked. “Why can’t we have a conversation like nice, normal people?”

“Several reasons. I want to know certain things about your life that, for some reason, you are determined not to tell me about. Asking questions is a good way of finding this information out.”

The car ahead of me finally made the left turn it had been signaling for the last half mile, and I hit the accelerator. “You could just wait for me to tell you.”

“And die of curiosity? No, thank you,” she said.

“I thought we had this whole discussion just the other day, about how I was a grown-up now and you were going to start treating me like one.”

“Part of being a grown-up is engaging in grown-up activities, which includes romantic relationships. I am just inquiring as to your progress in that area. It’s not a criticism, sweetheart.”

“It is too a criticism,” I said. “You’re not asking me about my career, or my accomplishments, or my goals. You’re asking if I’m seeing anybody, and if I am going to get married anytime soon. And I refuse to be lectured to on the primacy of bourgeois values by the co-chairperson of the Bryn Mawr Social Justice Forum, Class of 1967.”

“The Sixties were
not
a revolt against bourgeois values. Unless you count war, racism, and sexism as bourgeois values.”

“I was thinking more about short hair and personal hygiene.” I couldn’t let Mother push my buttons without pushing some of hers right back, and revisionist Sixties history was a huge issue for her.

“I will not sit here and let you call me a hippie. You weren’t there and you didn’t know and I took showers frequently. Anyway, most of us did end up getting married and settling down, you know, even the hippies.”

“I have a very good job. I am self-supporting. My romantic life”—
or serious lack thereof
, I added silently—“is my own personal business. If and when I get engaged, I will let you know.”

“A very feminist outlook,” she said. “I congratulate you. I just would appreciate the occasional update, you know, as an interested party.”

“There’s not much to say.”

The last guy I had anything to do with was named Clyde Witherspoon. I had met him in a bar on New Year’s Eve, and neither of us had anyone to kiss. Clyde was an accountant who worked on the south side of the courthouse square in Morristown. He was pleasant enough, and lonely enough to be nice to me. He spent the night at my place after one too many vodka tonics on a snowy Saturday night in late January. We were supposed to go to a cabin in the Poconos over Valentine’s Day weekend. But right before, he snuck off to what he said was a Super Bowl party over in Wayne but turned out to be a drunken romp with a naked Hooters girl.

So Clyde dumped me,
right before Valentine’s Day,
and took the Hooters girl (whose name was Hyllton, hand to God) to the adorable little cabin in the Poconos that we’d picked out together. He not only had the gall to take a picture of them together, standing on the balcony of said adorable little cabin, but the complete lack of common sense to post said picture on Facebook without paying any attention to the privacy settings.

I was proud of my reaction. I didn’t complain. I didn’t drown myself in alcohol, or at least not any more than usual. I didn’t draft up a fake insurance claim form showing that Clyde had received medical treatment for an STD and e-mail it to Hyllton the Hooters slut. I just waited until he made an appearance at the Starbucks that we both frequented. Then I ordered a venti iced vanilla latte and poured it down his back. Slowly. Then I walked two blocks to the Dunkin’ Donuts, got a large box of Munchkins, and took them back to my office and ate them all, one by one.

That was not, shall we say, a typical dating episode for me, but it wasn’t something I cared to chat about with my mother on a leisurely drive to a funeral.

“I could help you, you know,” she said. “Maybe not so much in Morristown. If you’d at least consider moving back to Cherry Hill, it would be much easier.”

“I am not moving back to South Jersey. That’s non-negotiable,” I said.

“What about Washington? I still know a lot of people on the Hill. It wouldn’t be that hard for you to find a good job somewhere. There might be a pay cut, of course.”

“Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.” It was bad enough that my mother wanted to run my romantic life without her running my career as well.

“I am trying to be helpful, dear. But I don’t know what it is that you
want.
”

“I want a husband, Mom. Don’t get me wrong about that. But I want the relationship to happen... I don’t know what the word is. Organically, if that makes sense. I want it to be something that happens because it was supposed to happen, not because it was something that you or anyone else made happen. I’m looking for something natural, something spontaneous. A relationship that happens because it’s meant to happen, not because somebody did something to make it happen.”

“Darling,” she said, “I love you dearly, but that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

“I’m really not interested in your opinion on my dating strategy.”

“Strategy is the key word. Or lack thereof, in your case. If you just latch on to the first man you come across, you might find yourself making a serious mistake.”

We’d come to the end of the rural highway, and I pulled the car onto I-295 for the long haul south. “Do tell,” I said.

“I was wondering when you were going to ask. It was the fall of 1962, and I was a junior in prep school.”

Chapter 7

The first time I saw Sheldon Berkman was at a swim meet at Cherry Hill High, in the fall of 1962. He and your Uncle Frank were both seniors; they were on the swim team together. I was a junior, but I wasn’t enrolled in Cherry Hill High that year. Mother caught me smoking a Lucky Strike under the bleachers of the football stadium, and she had me transferred to a girls’ prep school in Philadelphia. The express intent was to give me a better education, but it ended up putting me in the company of some very wicked young ladies with depraved thoughts, at least by the standards of the times. Not that any of us got to act on most of those depraved thoughts, which was quite frustrating.

I didn’t want to go to this swim meet, but Mother was determined to have a nice family outing, so I went. There I was, stuck in this loud, wet building that stank of chlorine, watching doughy, pasty boys going back and forth in the pool, and not one of them worth thinking any depraved thoughts about. Frank was on the relay team, which was the last event of the meet, so I had to stay through the bitter end.