Bec’s house that I’ve inherited is in Middletown. Not New Haven. Nor New York. She lived in the house with my uncle, Nelson Leibritsky, not Tyler McMannus. That is to say, she became Mrs. Nelson Leibritsky—sister-in-law to her sister Ada—and never, even unofficially, Mrs. Tyler McMannus. But with Nelson’s death occurring so many years before Bec’s, I can hardly find a trace of him here.
The few belongings of Nelson’s that Bec kept I found, aptly enough for a basement fan like Nelson, in this home’s basement. Tonight is Halloween, and earlier in the day I decided to come to the house to put the lights on, as if to woo the parade of small costumed souls who will ring the doorbell in hopes of a treat if they see someone is at home. Bec was always well stocked for Halloween and I’d made sure to bring multiple bags of Tootsie Rolls, Nelson’s favorite candy.
But in the basement, looking for holiday decorations, I found nothing beyond the predictable washer and dryer and furnace until I came to some boxes lined up against a wall and marked, plainly enough, Nelson. The contents, I saw, were Nelson’s LPs from yesteryear: Frank Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey band, Ella Fitzgerald singing with Chick Webb’s group, a solo album of Rosemary Clooney and another of Dean Martin. But as I flipped through the stacks I saw that more than those solo artists, Nelson collected recordings of the big bands of his youth. There was Johnny Mercer and Glenn Miller, more Tommy Dorsey, and finally I came to a series of recordings by Benny Goodman.
Everybody knew that “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing)” was Nelson’s all-time favorite—many a time we must have heard the music, or at least its signature drumming, rising from the basement of Leibritsky’s Department Store; Nelson, contrary perhaps to his own view of things, was hardly hiding down there—and finding a recording of it, lifting the old album from the box, felt almost like I was exhuming Nelson from the grave. The impulse to play it was irresistible, and so I climbed the stairs, laid the record on the turntable of the living room’s antiquated music system, and dropped the needle. It began: that inimitable tom-tom beat of the drums, then the roar of trombones, then trumpets, and finally it was Goodman himself, wailing on his clarinet. But always the music returned to the drums, “the drumbeats of God,” Nelson once said in a rare moment of speaking up at a family meal in Middletown. The genius of drummer Gene Krupa was just a contrivance, Nelson urged us to understand, a way for God to tell us all to wake up, to be sure we felt something of our own heart’s beating.
“Who doesn’t feel that?” I remember Davy asking Nelson, surprised, his hand pressed against his chest. And such a memory dates the occasion: a Sabbath meal in Middletown in the weeks before we left for Woodmont in 1948, Nelson then still a bachelor—always the bachelor, everyone assumed—and invited to our home for the evening, and Davy throughout the meal staring at Nelson’s suit jacket as if by so doing he could bring forth the Tootsie Rolls Nelson was sure to be pocketing there.
“Everyone knows their hearts are beating,” Davy insisted. He was smiling as he said the words, his hand still pressed to his chest.
But Nelson didn’t grin back. He said, his face dour, his tone just the tiniest bit angry, “Not everyone, boy. Not everyone.”
Upon saying those words Nelson reached into a suit pocket and, just as Davy had anticipated, he pulled out a Tootsie Roll, then ate the thing even though his plate was still full of my mother’s roast chicken and potato kugel.
Davy watched in disbelief as Nelson unwrapped, chewed, and swallowed the candy. Davy even turned to our father, as if expecting him to scold Nelson just as he would one of us if we were to pop a chocolate into our mouth in the middle of a meal.
But Mort pretended not to see, and following his lead, neither did Ada or Howard. Even I looked away.
“Can I have one?” Davy finally said, turning Nelson’s way.
“When you finish,” my mother answered.
“But—” Davy began.
“No buts,” Mort said.
“But—” Davy tried again.
Ada reached over, pointing her fork at Davy’s plate.
Davy, confused, turned toward Nelson, then toward one parent, then the next. He was clearly dying to finish his sentence, to argue his case further. The inequities of the situation were glaring.
“Tell you what,” Nelson told him. “You listen to ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ sometime with me at the store and I’ll give you two candies. And if it gets your heart going like it does mine, going so that you know for sure it’s going, I’ll give you three.”
But we left for the summer before Davy got his chance at those three candies, his chance to listen to the music with Nelson, who was telling Davy, telling us, what it was to be depressed. You can’t even feel your own heart beating. And that news, at least to my parents who pretended not to hear it, was shameful.
Instead, before he could ever take Nelson up on his offer, Davy’s was the heart, young as it was, that literally stopped beating. And some time after that Nelson’s figurative ticker began to revive, to beat once again such that he could feel it, though he was already middle-aged and had assumed, for so long, that he’d always exist in the numbness of his solitude. The night of that Shabbos meal Bec was in New Haven, living a life that included her secret love for Tyler McMannus. It was only after Davy died that she was present often enough in Middletown for Nelson to get to know her, then to find in her a companionship he deeply longed for, then to marry her and live with her in this house. In Bec’s living room this afternoon my foot tapped to the drums of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and though I knew theirs was a union born of loss and marked by loss, somehow under the music’s spell—the drums of God, yes, yes!—it seemed entirely possible that they did what people do, perfectly ordinary people, people all over the world and for all time: they became better acquainted, grew to like each other, and, redeeming years of loneliness and years of secrets and years of half-lived lives, they fell in love.
But that’s not how it went. Rather, three years after Davy died Bec indeed married Nelson. It was enough love for Nelson—transforming love, in fact—but for Bec it was not love at all.
She loved, with all her heart, Tyler McMannus. But in the aftermath of the accident that would ultimately take Davy’s life, while he was still alive and in the Milford hospital, while there was still reason for hope, she’d made a bargain with God: if Davy lived, she wouldn’t see Tyler that upcoming Friday as they’d secretly planned. And it worked. Davy did live, at least for the next week. So at the week’s end she made another deal: if he continued to live, she wouldn’t see Tyler again. She’d give him up entirely if that’s what it took to keep Davy alive. She would, she implored God; really she would.
But Davy died at the start of the second week following the accident, on an otherwise fine Saturday morning. Bec’s desperate prayers had done nothing to change that.
The funeral was set for Tuesday, and she was to go with the family that Saturday evening back to Middletown, where she would help Ada with the arrangements and with everything else. My mother could barely stand. “Everything else” was just that: rising, sitting, using the toilet, getting dressed, eating, walking, combing her hair. Bec would attend the funeral, of course, and though she wasn’t required like us to sit shiva, she’d nevertheless stay for the formal mourning period of seven days.
“You understand, right?” she asked Tyler from the phone in our Middletown hallway.
“Take all the time you need,” he said.
Two days after the funeral they decided Tyler would drive to Middletown and they’d meet on the Wesleyan University campus, which was within walking distance from our home. There they sat on the steps of an old and towering brownstone building. Before them the campus lawn sloped downhill in a shimmering sheet of newly mowed green. Though it was September already, the semester had yet to start and no one was out. She leaned her head on Tyler’s shoulder as he wrapped his arm around her. They hadn’t seen each other for three weeks, a fact that would normally have been cause for a relieved sense of reunion. But in the wake of the disaster they had almost nothing to say. She cried for the most part, quietly, lifting an embroidered hanky to her eyes every so often. After a while she closed her eyes as she continued to lean on his shoulder.
“I should be going,” she said after a half hour or so had passed. She rose and faced the direction from which she had come. “Ada needs me.”
After she’d begun to walk away from him, she turned back. Tyler was going in the other direction, his fedora in one hand, his limp more noticeable than she’d remembered.
“Careful!” she called. But he didn’t hear her and continued on, almost staggering at times, it seemed to Bec, who hadn’t budged, was still watching, and did so until he’d turned a corner and was no longer within her sight.
After the week of shiva, Bec returned to the cottage for a day and a night, with Ada and Mort this time. They were there to pack and close the place for the season. When they finished, Bec would be dropped off in New Haven to resume her life and my parents would go back to Middletown to resume theirs.
Though she’d come to Woodmont to work, Ada sat for the most part, in one of the chairs that surrounded the kitchen table. She stared dumbly before her, at the walls, the sink, the washing machine. Bec was the one to empty the cabinets and the refrigerator, and it was she who covered the dining table and chairs with one of the old sheets we’d tucked away at the summer’s start. Upstairs, Bec pulled any remaining clothes from the boys’ room, stripped the beds, and smoothed the matching navy bedcovers. In the bathroom she scrubbed the bathtub with the clawed feet, along with the sink and toilet. She left Vivie and Leo’s room alone, as Vivie had said they’d drive out, despite Leo’s aversion to driving distances, and take care of that themselves. She left Ada and Mort’s bedroom alone, too, as they would sleep there that night, and it didn’t seem right to her, going through their things while they were in the cottage with her.
While Bec worked, Mort took care of the outside of the place, sweeping the front porch and stacking the painted metal chairs. He folded and stored the umbrella clothesline. Inside again, he closed and locked the windows throughout the house, except for those of Bec’s sunporch, which she’d crank shut in the morning, and a window in the master bedroom so he and Ada would have air while they slept.
But no one slept that night. Bec tossed and turned on her cot, and throughout the night she heard footsteps upstairs, someone pacing the hallway. When she rose in the morning she was surprised to see that Mort had not been upstairs but had bunked on the sofa bed in the living room.
When Bec reached Ada she winced to see her sister’s eyes circled with dark bags and her thick hair, which she’d forgotten to braid the night before, in a tangle. It took Bec a long time to comb it through and pin it up. It took even more time to get Ada properly bathed and dressed. While the dressing ensued, Mort was downstairs, pacing from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and back again. By the time the sisters were ready to go he was angry with them, impatient, worn out from the extra care his wife needed, which he, in fact, hadn’t provided. Bec had done it all. And she could see from the coolness between them, an almost complete absence of communication, that should she stay on with them she’d continue to do it all, because Davy’s death had caused something terrible to happen between Mort and Ada. He had grown angrier and angrier with her. That morning, as the three sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, he was barely able to look at her.
Who, Bec wondered, was going to nourish Ada in the days to come, provide a shoulder for her to lean on, get her up and dressed, help her make the family’s meals? Certainly we children couldn’t, and shouldn’t, Bec knew. And in the wake of Davy’s death Vivie had taken a step back from the extended family, into her own home, where she was busy consoling an almost inconsolable Nina.
By the time they arrived at Tyler’s dress shop, Bec had made up her mind. She told Mort she’d be only a minute. Inside the shop she waved at Irene, then grabbed Tyler’s arm and pulled him into his office.
“I have to go back to Middletown. Ada needs me. I’m the only one she has.” She leaned toward him, straightened his tie, then held on to it.
He was nodding, quickly, insistently, just as he was that evening—not so long ago—at the little Italian restaurant in West Haven.
“Okay?” she asked. Then she added, “It’s just until she gets on her feet again. Just a little while more.”
Though still nodding, he said, “No, not okay at all.”
They embraced and she told him, “You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Go on,” he said, releasing her from his arms. “I’ll be here, waiting.”
She offered a small smile of gratitude though she knew what she was doing to him, knew from those years of her long-ago engagement what a peculiar hell it was: waiting.
“Just until she’s on her feet,” she said again, and then she kissed his mouth, straightened his tie once more, turned, and left.
Thus in mid-September of 1948 Bec moved in with us, sleeping, though she refused to at first, in Davy’s room, but capitulating to that arrangement, however awkward, after a week or so since it was the only vacant bedroom and she needed among the rooms of our Middletown home just a little space to herself. Nobody minded that she cleared out Davy’s things; nobody minded because nobody knew what to do. Emptying the room of the things that signaled a life that was no longer in it seemed as good a way as any for us to start this new life, a kind of afterlife. She removed his clothes from the drawers of his dresser, his collection of baseball pennants—Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers—his old stuffed teddy. The only thing she left was the picture, almost finished, that Davy and Lucinda Rossetti had drawn together over the summer. She had brought that back with her, in the envelope addressed to Davy at Woodmont. The envelope stayed in Davy’s room, on top of his old dresser.
She’d left her Singer, her mannequin, and her sewing basket in her New Haven apartment. With the intention to do nothing for the time being but take care of her sister, and of us, she’d packed only her clothes. But my mother had a sewing basket too, and in no time Bec was roaming the house, looking for seams to adjust, buttons to tighten, or hems to let down. Not that she didn’t have plenty to do; there was my mother, who, throughout that fall, as the leaves turned and fell from the trees, was still barely functioning. After nearly sleepless nights she would finally fall into a slumber in the early morning, which put her waking time at about noon. Bec, then, was the one to rise early, make breakfast, see us off. Howard had planned to start college that fall at Wesleyan in Middletown, but he’d taken a year’s deferment, and he joined my father each morning at minyan and then spent the day with him at the store. I was off to eighth grade. When I’d return from school in the late afternoon it was Bec, not my mother, who greeted me, held me, and made me cups of hot, sweet tea. I would often find my mother sitting by herself in the living room, staring mindlessly out a window. Bec brought her cups of tea as well, and crackers. And she’d sit with her, as the late-afternoon light waned, and talk to her, though of nothing important. Finally Bec would rise and begin dinner preparations. When my father and Howard walked into the house each evening they were welcomed by the smells of roasting meats, and the tunes sounding from the kitchen radio, popular music Bec liked, and that I, her helper, was growing fond of too. Except for the woman sitting in the dark in the living room it was, at least on the surface, a nearly normal scene.
So Bec was busy, but she was restless, too, and the mending was one way to keep her hands active at her beloved trade, her mind occupied, her heart beating when so many times she must have felt like it was soon to give out.
And there were meetings with Tyler. In the mornings she could practically have had him over to the house, what with all of us gone and my mother sleeping, but she never even considered that, disrespectful as she thought it to be. Instead, she met him at a nearby corner of Hubbard Street, and they’d go from there to a diner on Route 66 on the outskirts of Middletown. The first time there they sat on the same side of a cozy booth, his arm never leaving her shoulders. She wasn’t crying anymore but she still wasn’t saying much. How could she put into words everything that had changed? She mentioned the cups of tea, the nibbles of crackers, the late-afternoon light fading in the living room. She listed the meals she’d made: meatloaf, pot roast, baked chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed cabbage, broiled steak, and on Sundays, always, because she was tired, because it was easy, and because Mort liked it that way, franks and beans.
“Mrs. Coventry came by to tell us about the party,” Tyler reported. “It was a nice party,” he said, squeezing Bec’s shoulders and kissing her head. “That’s what she told us. Her husband was very happy.”
“Very, very,” Bec replied, her voice but a whisper. “That’s how she would have put it.”
“Yes,” Tyler said, his tone gentle but eager. “Exactly, Bec. That’s just what she said.”
They resumed their silence. He ordered egg salad for them both. When they’d finished their meal, she said, “Ada needs me,” and though they hadn’t had coffee yet, he promptly paid and took her home.
For the next month they saw each other every week for a meal at the same diner, where they sat until Bec declared, “Ada needs me.” By mid-November, though, the pace of their meetings slackened and he began to drive to Middletown every other week, then every third week. During January of 1949 he hired another dressmaker, a woman named Mildred Butler, but he assured Bec that this was only until she was ready to return.
“I understand. You have to,” she said, knowing the truth of it.
By February he stopped asking her when she was coming back. Why would he? she figured. Her answer, after all, was always the same: “Ada needs me.” True as that was, there was another reason she kept away, one she couldn’t tell him: that she didn’t deserve him, that she didn’t deserve happiness, that given what had happened she didn’t deserve anything good at all.
In the last weeks of winter Ada began to rise earlier and to help make breakfast for the family. Soon she was doing some cleaning: a little washing, a little ironing. Once or twice as the earliest days of spring emerged she spontaneously sang along to a tune from the radio Bec played as she cooked. Ada especially liked Doris Day’s “It’s Magic” and Mel Tormé’s “Blue Moon,” just out. During those long sits she still took in the living room she began to flip on the light. “Thank you,” she once said to Bec on a rainy evening, the third week of April. The two were seated on the living room couch, staring into an unlit fireplace. “I think you’ve saved my life.” Bec shook her head, continued her staring. When Ada grabbed her hand to give it a squeeze, Bec didn’t squeeze back.
As spring set in the crocuses bloomed, as did tulips and irises, all growing wild in a scattering around our Middletown home. My mother had never cultivated a garden but a former owner apparently had, the intrepid remains of which popped up, blooming that year with a conspicuous audacity, or so it seemed, given our heavy hearts. Howard was still living at home and working at the store. There was talk of us all going back to Woodmont for the summer, just like always. One day in late May I heard Bec on the phone with Vivie, discussing it.
“You have to come,” she implored Vivie.
When I asked Bec what Vivie had said, she only shook her head. “Can’t. That’s what she said.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We do what your mother wants,” Bec answered. “It’s her decision.”
What Ada wanted turned out to be a return to the cottage. “Yes, I think so,” she said feebly one dinnertime in early June.
“I can’t be there, you know,” Mort told her, sounding almost indifferent to what she did or didn’t do.
“It never mattered before,” Ada answered with the same indifference. “Why should it matter now?”
“Of course it mattered before,” Mort snapped. He couldn’t hide his contempt as he looked her way.
“Stop blaming her!” Bec urged, leaning toward Mort, almost grabbing at him. “It’s not her fault. For God’s sake, you have to stop with that.” She turned to me. “Molly, don’t listen,” she ordered, as if such a thing were possible.
My father’s head dropped to his chest. A long moment of silence passed. “Like I said. I can’t be there.” He seemed less angry than matter-of-fact. In the same detached tone he added, “Ada, I’m not blaming you.”
But he’d thought it for so long that his words that night did little to melt the block of ice, solid and ever-widening, that lay between my parents. And two weeks later, when Mort drove us back to Woodmont, he said his good-byes only minutes after he’d dropped us off.
Howard hadn’t come. He’d feel better, he said the night before, looking more toward Mort than anyone else, if he stayed in Middletown and kept working. And so it was only my mother, Bec, and I who moved into the cottage that summer of 1949. That year for the first time ever Bec was the one to open the door and step inside first, though her steps were timid, tentative ones, not the impatient, joyful strides of my mother in years past. Bec flicked on a light or two then went to her sunporch, where she cranked open the windows. She lifted the sheet from the dining room table and carried it out to the front porch to shake the dust free. My mother remained on the porch, letting the dust fall around her, holding her breath, seemingly afraid to go inside until Bec linked arms with her, tugged, and said gently, “It’s no worse here than in Middletown. Ada, come on now. I’m here. Molly’s here. It’ll be all right.”
That summer there was no more Friday claustrophobia for Bec, no more meetings, secret or otherwise, with Tyler McMannus. They hadn’t seen each other since late February. Nor were there the weekend meetings of Ada and Mort Leibritsky. My father stayed away all summer, which meant we never had to get the house especially clean on Fridays, never had to prepare a big Shabbos meal. On Friday evenings we three still lit the candles, each of us circling our hands in unison close to the flames, each of us quietly murmuring the old prayers. We still took a piece of challah and chewed it, still drank a sip of wine. But then we’d take our plates—some reheated food from the week’s cooking—out to the front porch of the cottage, where we’d sit in the painted metal chairs and eat off our laps. It was better out there, my mother thought, because of the possibility of a nice evening breeze.
That summer the dunking was the only thing that didn’t change dramatically from summers past, other than the fact that it was me rather than Vivie who stood at the shore’s edge with my mother, watching as Bec dove in first. Once my mother and I managed to get wet, we three would spend a moment floating on our backs, then we’d sink down again under the salty water before we’d rise from it, not so much refreshed as chilled, alert, aware that what faced us was yet another difficult but passable day.
Over the summer weeks, Mark Fishbaum became my friend. It was so odd, so very lonely, to be at the beach without Davy, and without Nina, Howard, Vivie, Leo, and my father. I didn’t like sleeping in the double bed of what should have been Vivie and Leo’s room. But sleeping on the sofa bed without Nina would have been worse, and to even think of sleeping in Howard and Davy’s room was out of the question. During the days, besides following my mother and Bec about, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, and in the evenings, when the kids my age gathered at the beach or near Sloppy Joe’s, I felt lost without Nina beside me. And so when Mark Fishbaum wandered over, looking for Howard and not finding him with us, but lingering at our cottage nonetheless, I began to linger with him. We were two lost souls, it seemed, but in each other’s company just a little less so. I sighed often that summer, offering up to the winds of Long Island Sound any number of melancholy exhalations, and Mark Fishbaum responded to these inadvertent but steady bursts with the kindest nods and pats on the shoulder. “Is he your boyfriend?” Ada, come August, wanted to know. But that summer, with the nearly six years between us a veritable chasm, and with Mark’s identity still as Howard’s friend and mine only by default, there was no romance between us. But that he was increasingly important to me was clear enough. As the summer progressed the most common answer to my mother’s invariable question “Molly, where you going?” was “Going to find Mark.” And when I did find him, or when he found me, I felt a rush of relief. In an effort to make me smile he performed handstands in the sand, even walking at times with his long feet wriggling in the air. Soon I began to accompany him upside down, spinning cartwheels around him, transfixed as I did with the sight of the world turned topsy-turvy: a moving, shimmering silver sky and an earth, seemingly so fragile, of cerulean blue.
In this way, with help from Mark, the summer passed, and in late August we returned to Middletown. Only then did I understand how calming the summer had been for my mother, how, over its warm months, days spent sitting on the front porch and by the shore’s edge, or walking the few streets from Bagel Beach to Anchor Beach and back again, a kind of useful resignation had set in for Ada that Davy was gone, that that was just the way it was. She’d returned with this resignation, which took the form of an inner stillness she hadn’t shown since the first weeks of the summer before. She wasn’t happy; that would have been too easy. But she was living again, rising early, taking an interest in managing her home, sometimes smiling sadly at my father, and occasionally—I saw this every once in a while—she’d take a moment to herself for something long ago and almost forgotten: a deep breath.
Bec was still living with us—as much because she had no place to go as because my mother still needed her help, functioned so much better with her sister around. That September, with my father’s and Howard’s assistance, Bec emptied her New Haven apartment, bringing her Singer and mannequin to her room in our house. What furniture she had in New Haven she stored in our basement. With Bec now settled in our home, and my mother on her feet again, a kind of routine set in. That fall, in the late afternoons before dinner, Bec and Ada took to playing cards, rounds of rummy that I sometimes joined in on as well. They’d play at the kitchen table with the radio close by so that as they arranged their cards and strategized their next move, they often did so humming quietly in unison.
Bec and Ada were each other’s constant companions, and in her new role—this unwanted afterlife we’d all been thrust into—suddenly, oddly, Bec wasn’t itching to get back to sewing. Though she had her Singer with her again, it sat idle beside the dresser in what we now thought of as her room as much as Davy’s. The mannequin beside it, Eleanor Roosevelt, as Tyler had once in happier times christened her, remained relentlessly bare.
In November, as Veterans Day approached, Bec was surprised to read in the afternoon newspaper that Tyler McMannus, newly elected to the New Haven Board of Alders, was soon to receive an honorary service medal from the city. The award was part of the city’s efforts to raise the profile of its aldermen. Bec read the article three times. She clipped it, finally, and stuck it inside the top drawer of Davy’s old dresser, beside her stockings and brassieres. After that Tyler was on her mind again, though these were dangerous thoughts, she knew, stabbing her heart as they did. Unwittingly, she imagined herself sitting in the audience at the awards ceremony in New Haven, clapping loudly despite her properly gloved hands as they pinned a medal on his uniformed chest or handed him an officially sealed document or did whatever they were going to do to honor him. She imagined him standing on a stage, looking down, unwilling to take credit for anything that happened during that “pitiless project,” as he’d always put it, of war.
“You were defending my people,” she once told him, when, postwar, the news fully emerged of the death camps, with their starvation and gas.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he’d said. “None of us did. I just went where I was told to go, did what I was told to do. I’m only glad to know it wasn’t all for nothing.” And that’s about as much as he’d ever said about his war experience, culminating in his injury during what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.
At the awards ceremony she envisioned him limping slightly as he set forth across the stage, down the steps, and resumed his seat, the one next to hers.
She couldn’t bear it that she was only dreaming, that she wasn’t actually going to be there.
On the day of the ceremony, Veterans Day, for the first time since she’d moved to Middletown she had that claustrophobic feeling again, the one she claimed to have had almost every Friday afternoon in Woodmont for all the years I could remember. Telling Ada she’d be right back, Bec left the house midday and went for a two-hour-long walk, past the Wesleyan campus on High Street, up Route 66, closing in on the diner where she’d last seen Tyler, where they’d shared what they didn’t know would be their last meal together: a messy meatball grinder and a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Later that afternoon she didn’t want to play rummy, though my mother and I were eager to. At school I was studying Asia, its geography, religions, and cultures, and uncharacteristically, Bec didn’t want to hear anything about it. Instead she sat in the chair my mother used to spend her endless hours in, staring out the window, gazing into the distance as if she might find something she once lost, if only she stared hard and long enough.
“Teach me to drive,” she asked Mort when he came home that evening. He hadn’t taken the day off from work but instead held a “Veterans Day Sale” at the store, an idea that even Howard, always one to make a sale, found to be verging on disrespectful.
“Please,” Bec said, lifting Mort’s coat from his shoulders. “Please.”
For the next six weeks Mort took her out regularly in that old Dodge we couldn’t seem to part with. By mid-December she was ready for her driver’s license test. The day, a Wednesday, was a windy one with a possibility of snow, and by the time my father picked Bec up at one o’clock and brought her to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a dimly lit brick building on Route 66, a light showering had begun.
Though Mort urged her not to, insisted he wouldn’t mind coming back the next day or the next, she took the road test anyway, and passed.
In obtaining her driver’s license Bec had a plan. She’d return to New Haven. She’d see Tyler again, repair the damage she’d done in staying away for so long. It didn’t have to be all or nothing: all Ada, nothing for Bec. Her self-imposed sentence, she’d come to realize, especially those last months as Ada was more and more able to take care of herself, was simply too harsh. Bec had inflicted it on herself in the raw days of her mourning, when Davy’s death was a catastrophe no one would ever recover from. But here they were, living on, their days difficult but bearable, and the idea of what she would do with the rest of her life became more and more pressing. She had smashed the old life. Now, could she put it back together again?
The day she chose to see Tyler, a week before Christmas, was cold but stunningly clear. Without any questions Mort had lent her the car, a generosity she considered while heading south on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. She’d never been alone in the Dodge before, and every once in a while she found herself speaking out loud, as if to Mort, who had taught her to drive with a patience she didn’t know he had. All of it had been a kindness. He’d been aware of her all this time, his actions showed. “Thanks, Mort,” she’d told him that morning as he handed her the car key. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done for me.”
She drove to the center of New Haven, past the city’s green, and then to Howe Street, where her apartment had been. She decided she’d rather walk the few blocks from there to the dress shop, to come upon it just as she always had. As she neared the shop, the awning over its entrance caught her eye first, and seeing the familiar green and white stripes, she stopped short. Feeling weak, she veered toward the coffee shop across the street where she sat at a table by the front window.
Strangely, there were lights strung across Tyler’s storefront, for Christmas. He had never bothered with such decorations before, something she hadn’t thought about until right then, when she wondered if he’d held back for her sake. Not that she would have minded. Feeling stronger already, she thought she’d go and tell Tyler that. She didn’t mind a little festivity for the holidays, she’d say. Truly, she didn’t. But upon standing, she felt her heart begin to race, and she dropped back into her seat, ordered coffee, sipped, and stared.
Inside the dress shop everything seemed still. The lights were blazing, however, so she knew they had to be there, Tyler and Irene and that new dressmaker, Mildred Butler. Peering more determinedly, she wondered if she could see Irene that very moment, walking to a dress rack then away from it, but from the distance of the coffee shop she wasn’t sure. A moment later she set down her cup, left some change, and rose.
Just as she opened the door of the coffee shop, the dress shop’s door opened too, a surprise that caused Bec to jump back, scurry to the table she’d just left, resume sipping the remainder of her coffee. When she looked over again Bec saw Irene, her signature blond curls lifting in the wind as she held the shop door open, waiting for someone.
The woman who finally walked through the door was typical of the clientele Bec remembered: stylish, seemingly moneyed. Taking stock of her nicely tailored woolen suit and jacket, Bec wondered if the new dressmaker, Mildred Butler, had cooked that one up. The suit fit the woman well, Bec had to concede, though it was a conventional look. Surely, Bec noted, she would have done something a little more interesting with the collar, perhaps have added a belt. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, and once she maneuvered it through the door, a man followed her, a person with nearly black hair and a tall, slender frame, a pleasant-looking man like Tyler, Bec thought, studying him, then lifting her hand to cover her mouth, for it was Tyler, this man who was now leaning out the shop’s door and kissing the woman in the tailored suit on the cheek, perfunctorily, a way of saying good-bye.
In the next moment, though, he wasn’t saying good-bye but was on the sidewalk, lifting the baby from the carriage and kissing that small person, too. These kisses were hardly perfunctory but joyful, plentiful. Instead of laying the baby back down in the carriage, he continued holding the child as he said a few words to Irene. Then, baby in one arm, other arm linked with the woman’s, he began to stroll down the street with them. When the woman momentarily unlinked her arm and turned, glancing back to call out something to Irene, Bec suddenly recognized her—Tyler’s wife, a woman she hadn’t seen in at least ten years.
Once they’d rounded a corner and were out of sight, Bec managed to cross the street and spent a moment inside the shop speaking to Irene, who was dumbfounded to see her.
“He was out of his mind without you,” Irene explained. “I don’t think he knew what he was doing. Truly, I don’t. He thought you’d left him. But the baby is what’s saved him.” She paused, shaking her head. “Do you want to meet Mildred?” she then asked. “Mildred Butler? She’s just in the back, sewing. She’s not you, but she’s very good.”
“No. No time,” Bec said. She glanced at the dresses neatly arranged on the racks and was dismayed to see everything in such good order.
“Shall I tell Tyler you were here?” Irene asked.
“No point in that. Please don’t.” Bec continued to take stock of the place, the cherished chairs at the back of the store, the pale blue walls, a color she’d chosen.
“I know what was between you two,” Irene said. She shook her head and for a moment held a hand over her mouth. “How could I not know?”
Bec lowered her head and stared at the planks of the shop’s wooden floor. “Not to worry,” she told Irene at last. “I didn’t come for anything.”
Back in the car she did the math. March. It would have been sometime in March when the baby, now just a few weeks old, was conceived. She and Tyler weren’t talking in March. They’d last talked and seen each other, briefly, toward the end of February. “Take your time,” he’d said then about her eventual though clearly questionable return. “Bec, I’m here. I’m waiting.”
That peculiar hell: waiting. He’d lost faith.
And, of course, she hadn’t helped matters with her all too typical response: “Ada needs me.”
She didn’t want to see it then, how that last time they were together at the diner he’d seemed wounded at the words, had winced, and then he’d raised his eyes and given her a look she’d never seen before. He was nodding, confident of some assessment in his mind. “Yes,” he’d told her. “Ada sure does.”
She believed then what she’d said: Ada needed her, and she’d thought she was doing the right thing, the good thing. How easy it was, she realized in hindsight, to have convinced herself of her goodness. But now she could see it, that that the willingness with which she’d abandoned Tyler was cruel.
She left New Haven. As she approached the Wilbur Cross Parkway she thought for a moment she’d head farther south, past New Haven toward Milford, where she’d visit the Woodmont cottage. It was still only morning and Mort had lent her the Dodge for the entire day. But within moments she changed her mind. “Ada needs me,” she told herself numbly, unable to think of anything else to say as she steered the car back where she’d come from, toward Middletown.
All that year, while my mother did indeed need Bec, at first in the most basic ways, and then as a supportive friend, my father needed Nelson. He needed Nelson to pick him up each morning to get to services on time, for though it was a duty to say Kaddish every day for Davy, and though he wouldn’t think of not observing this sacred task, the truth was my father was having trouble getting himself together each morning and out the door on time. Howard was no help in these matters, for he was having the same trouble. Later, Mort struggled while opening the car door, then again while walking the short route on Broad Street from the car to the synagogue. He needed Nelson there in our driveway honking his horn again and again, and once the car was parked near the synagogue, he needed Nelson to take his arm as he shambled timidly toward the service. Nelson was a help, too, when, mid-service, holding his prayer book, Mort invariably lost his place, couldn’t connect with even one Hebrew word. For my father, every day had become Yom Kippur and every prayer a litany of sins for which he desperately tried to atone. There was the sin of not praying well enough, of constantly losing his place; and the sin of enjoying his time—those crucial last months of Davy’s life—without the family; there was the sin of not instilling in Howard a strong enough commitment to Judaism; and the sin, worse than it sounded, of stopping for hot dogs on Fridays as he made his way to Woodmont. Finally, there was the sin of not knowing his role in life anymore. “What am I?” he asked God in his prayers each day at the morning service, but he never heard an answer. “Come on,” Nelson would say when the service ended. “Let’s get a bite before work.” And Mort came to rely on those quiet breakfasts—a bowl of oatmeal for him, a pile of eggs and toast for his ever-hungry brother and for his son—as at least some means of nourishment, sustenance that neither prayer nor work nor being home with the family was able to bring anymore.
There were moments when Bec and Nelson crossed paths, nodded at each other, occasionally said hello.
Gradually their conversations grew longer. They talked sometimes of Ada and of Mort, giving each other brief reports. They talked, like everybody, about the weather. They talked about business at Leibritsky’s, its ups and downs. Once Nelson mentioned something personal to Bec: that he enjoyed music. Big bands, he said, were the best.
One evening in December of 1949—almost fifteen months after the death and two weeks before her drive to New Haven—they had their first conversation about their mutual roles as caretakers. Nelson had driven Mort home from work rather late and had walked him inside.
“He’s spent,” Nelson explained to Bec, who held the door open for the men. Once Mort had disappeared, after handing Bec his hat and coat and then going straight upstairs to bed, Bec turned to Nelson, who had stood the whole time in the doorway.
“I know how much Mort leans on you,” Bec told Nelson. “You’re a good brother.”
“And you’re a good sister,” he answered.
They stood for a moment without speaking. After a while Nelson said, his eyes cast to the kitchen floor, “You know, we should treat ourselves, take a break. It’s been a long haul.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Bec said, sighing. “Maybe I’ll take a bath. You know, a long soaking bath.”
Nelson nodded. Then he said, “Regina’s has a nice lunch. Very nice.”
“Lunch?”
“If you’d like. You know, for a break.”
She said okay, and the two went to lunch together that Saturday when Nelson was through with Shabbos services. And they went to lunch together again, the first Saturday of the following month, just a week after her journey to New Haven, a time when she could barely touch her food, when she sat there, across from Nelson, sipping tea and nodding as he rattled on, best he could, just to keep the meal a pleasant one. They lunched again the first Saturday of the next month. By March of 1950 they were going to Regina’s two Saturdays a month, and were beginning to talk more, Nelson about the store’s history, or even more about Mort, or sometimes about the records he collected, and Bec about childhood with Ada and Vivie, and about her parents, Maks and Risel. She never mentioned the years of her adult life, her dresses, the time in New Haven. She hoped she seemed grateful enough for each meal. By May of that year they were lunching at Regina’s every Saturday. The meal finished, the bill paid, Regina would lean over the table, tell them, “Listen, I’ll make something special for you two next week. Veal cutlets and spaghetti. Chicken cacciatore. Something like that. See you then, right?” The two would nod, and the next week’s engagement would be agreed upon without Nelson, who was awkward at such matters, having to ask Bec, and without Bec, who still loved Tyler, having to respond to an invitation from Nelson.
Late in May, almost five months since Bec had seen Tyler and his wife and baby, Bec decided to drive to New Haven once again but ended up driving to Woodmont, visiting the cottage there for the last time in her life.
She didn’t know that would be the case when she set out. She intended to make her way to Tyler. Unlike her last attempt at seeing him, this time she knew that she couldn’t change the past or repair the damage she’d done. But she could at least tell Tyler she loved him, had never intended to part ways with him forever, had gotten mixed up, confused, more than a little lost. And then she could say, her dignity intact, a proper good-bye.
But for all her bold intentions, when she got to New Haven she didn’t exit from the highway but kept driving south.
When she arrived at Woodmont it was still morning, overcast, the sun behind the clouds pushing its way through every so often in brief flashes of light. She would have liked to stop for a cup of coffee but Sloppy Joe’s and the Villa Rosa hadn’t yet opened for the season. The entire village, it seemed, was closed. She drove past the synagogue, the words Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont as distinct as ever over its entranceway but its windows nailed tight with winter shutters and its front doors sealed with a large lock. Minutes later, from the cottage’s front porch, she glanced at the many other cottages in the cluster along the Bagel Beach shore. A wave of sadness struck her as she took in their emptiness: windows shut, doors locked, porches cleared of the summer clutter of outdoor furniture and towels and rafts and rubber tubes.
Inside the cottage silence settled around her like dust. She stood for a moment in the thick of it: the hush, the emptiness. Then, slowly, she took stock of the place, just as she and her sisters always had, roaming from room to room, unable to keep from touching the old family furnishings. Everything was still the same: the sofa bed, the corner chairs, the covered dining table, her cot and wicker chair. Upstairs, the claw-footed tub looked as freshly scrubbed as it had when she’d cleaned it the last day of the summer before.
In the back bedroom, the one Vivie and Leo had shared, Bec opened the closet only to find hanging there a lone remnant of the past, the strapless dress and matching jacket she’d made, with such hope in her heart, for Nina two summers ago. She pulled it from the closet, then sat on the bed holding the dress in her lap, her arms circling it, her body rocking back and forth. In its folds there wasn’t even a hint of that hopefulness left—for Nina, for her, for anyone else. She could feel that as she sat there, clinging helplessly.
Minutes passed. Finally she rose, re-hung the dress, shut the closet door with a final click, and made her way downstairs. Standing once again on the porch, she turned to lock the front door.
Outside she felt different, surer. There was nothing here for her anymore, she knew. And in the salty shoreline breezes she could almost smell the new life, a landlocked one filled with, come a given Saturday afternoon, veal cutlets and spaghetti or chicken cacciatore or maybe, sometimes, just meatballs.
The door locked, she reached for the mezuzah. She touched it then brought her hand to her lips. The gesture was the same one her father had made on his last day at the cottage in early September of 1939 when he was closing the place up, leaving for the season. The mezuzah was still new then. By the following January, Maks was dead from a heart attack that had overtaken him in his sleep.
Risel’s last day at the cottage, a week before her death, came at the start of the next summer. Standing in for Maks, Bec had watched her mother touch the mezuzah before entering the cottage. But once inside the place, she was overwhelmed by the memories. “Where is he?” Risel kept asking of Maks. She walked through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen, and back out again. Slowly, she made her way to the water’s edge. “Where is he?” she called to the Sound, as if during the months of Maks’s absence he’d not been underground in the Jewish cemetery in Middletown but there in Woodmont, dunking, waiting for her to join him. “I’m tired,” she finally said at day’s end. But rather than go to bed she handed Mort the car keys. She begged him to take her away. “Done,” she said, simply enough. Then, “Away.”