A year after Davy died Howard began classes at Wesleyan University. And he continued, by choice, working at the store. It was clear to us all that he was willfully exhausting himself. Sometimes I would come into the store at six in the evening and there he’d be, helping his umpteenth customer of the day, bending low as he measured a foot for a shoe size, or reaching for some obscure appliance, or selecting yet another pair of women’s gloves for a fussy customer. He had a kind of walk when he was tired, a kind of shuffle, just like our grandfather Zelik Leibritsky, who’d acquired his signature gait when he was young, peddling still from a cart, and could barely stand up after a long day of sharpening knives, selling pots and pans, and enduring the weather. When I saw Howard like that I could see him the day Davy was hit by Sal’s truck, after Howard had fallen from the Sailfish into the water. Hearing our mother’s screams he chose not to get back on the boat after he had fallen overboard, believing that swimming the eighty yards to shore would be faster. Then he ran another thirty yards up the beach and to us, on the street. When he got to the accident scene he fell to his knees with anguish and fatigue; still, he reached under Sal’s truck to touch our brother’s head. He always felt that if he’d arrived two or three minutes earlier things would have been different. As it was he stayed there, prone, sobbing though he didn’t realize it, all the while straining to comfort Davy, until a policeman dragged him away.
He didn’t date Megan O’Donnell for long. He dropped her as soon as Davy died. Howard and Megan were young, of course, and the duration of their relationship might very well have been circumscribed regardless of the summer’s tragic events. Then again, they might have persevered inasmuch as Howard’s connection to Megan was drawing forth qualities from within him he didn’t know he had: a will of his own, greater sensitivity. As it turned out, though, he saw her only once after Davy’s death, on a day trip to Woodmont from Middletown a week or so after Davy’s funeral, a trip to gather some odds and ends left behind, and he was as cold to her, as rejecting, as Mark Fishbaum, Steve Gutterman, and Jack Epstein had been at Sloppy Joe’s.
“Howard?” she said. “Howard?” She’d come to the cottage and stood on the porch, holding a filled cookie tin, which, because he wouldn’t take it from her hands, she’d finally thrust his way, forcing him to reflexively grab it. The moment before she’d told him how very sorry she was about the loss of his little brother. She’d said the words carefully, as if she’d rehearsed them, but her voice trembled with the gravity of the message nonetheless. She’d bitten her lower lip upon their utterance but otherwise stood there, more or less composed, staring at him with a concerned, compassionate expression. But in the face of his silence—a thick fog of silence that encased him, held him captive—her words became anxious, even frantic. “Howard? Howard, it’s me,” she pleaded at last, the same thing, though she didn’t realize it, that Howard had said to Mark Fishbaum.
If he could have he would have said to her, “That was self-indulgent, wasn’t it?” speaking of their time together, the walks, the talking, the many kisses. “I was a stupid jerk,” he would have said, not meaning to hurt her, but rather to inform her of what had become to him in the last week such an obvious, even glaring truth. But he was too choked up to speak. Cookie tin in hand, he nodded, went back inside.
She wrote him several letters that fall from her home in Cheshire to his in Middletown. Because of the Cheshire return address I knew they were from Megan, though she didn’t write her name on the envelopes. She must have known that our parents would have disapproved of her presence, even by mail, in our home. Howard opened the letters, read them, and stacked them neatly on his bedroom dresser. Once, a silent evening in early October, I spotted him in his room, sitting on his bed, a pad and pencil on his lap, the pile of letters beside him. But he wasn’t writing anything down. He was simply staring ahead at his bedroom wall, his gaze unfocused as if he were dreaming. Then he blinked awake. Upon doing so he ripped free the top page of the pad—apparently he’d begun a letter—crumpled the paper, and hurled it into the wastebasket.
“Take them, Molly,” he called to me, rising. From his doorway he handed me the letters.
“What for?” I asked. I didn’t dare take them; they seemed too personal.
“Hide them from me,” he said.
“You mean throw them out?” I still wouldn’t reach for them.
“No. I mean hide them. But don’t throw them out, okay?” He thrust them at me and reluctantly I took them, placing them in a corner of my closet. When I asked him some months later if he wanted them back he looked at me surprised, as if he’d entirely forgotten them. Megan hadn’t written another one. He hadn’t heard from her in five months.
He sighed. The five months had changed him; he was quieter, more considerate in some ways—he rarely barked at me, for example—but he was also more tense, his forehead almost always furrowed in worry. He was older, it seemed, by a whole five years. “Just throw them out,” he said.
“Shouldn’t you?” I asked.
“Look, it’s just better if I don’t see them again,” he said, and I nodded, though secretly I wished he would take them back, as if in doing so he’d return in some small way to the person he’d refused to be since Davy’s death: sarcastic, bossy, but so much more alive. But Howard was resolute, and that night after dinner I pulled the letters from my closet and dropped them into our kitchen garbage, which got taken out each night. I thought it was best that, if this was the way Howard wanted it, the letters go quickly into oblivion rather than linger in some upstairs wastebasket. And in this way I was just a tiny bit complicit in how Howard freed himself of Megan O’Donnell for all time, except, of course, what he managed to carry with him in his memory. Whatever that was, though, he chose never to speak of it.
The first year following Davy’s death there was a long period in which Howard, Nina, and I stayed apart: Nina (when not at school) in her Middletown home five miles from ours, Howard (with his deferral from entering college) at work with my father at the store, and me (when not at school) at home, standing alongside either my mother or Bec in the kitchen, or sitting next to one or both of them in what was mostly in those days a darkened living room.
But something changed that second year when Howard returned to his studies. We three had each stayed so close to our respective parents in the wake of things, had practically attached ourselves to them like we’d been when we were so much younger, only this new attachment, at least Howard’s and mine, was less for our sake than for them. But with the start of college, Howard was the first of us to gain just a little of his own life back.
It was the beginning of his sophomore year in the fall of 1950, which coincided with Nina’s last year of high school, when the three of us began to meet together, about once weekly, on the Wesleyan campus. Nina, who could drive by then and was encouraged to do so by Leo, who gave her access to his car, a more rickety Dodge than ours, would initiate these meetings by driving to my home to get me. From there we’d leave the Dodge behind and leisurely walk the remaining distance toward High Street, past a lineup of houses, to where the open green of the campus began. We’d climb the hill of the green toward a series of imposing brownstone buildings at the heart of the campus, where we’d settle ourselves next to Judd Hall, where science classes were held. “I’d like to go here,” Nina said on more than one of those afternoons, leaning her back against the brownstone wall as she did, but of course that was impossible. The place was for boys only.
Howard would have gotten the message that we’d be coming from me. Nina would have telephoned me the night before, not to talk in a general way, but to set the time and to have the message passed on to Howard the next morning at breakfast that we’d meet him, if he wanted to meet us. The tension between Howard and Nina was still there, an alive thing, and all the more so with its key place in the unfolding of events the day of Davy’s accident, and it was easier if I served as a go-between. But in fact they wanted, even needed, to see each other—to try to mend what had finally broken between them. The whole matter, then, was an attempt at healing, I suppose, all that near-silent sitting we did on the grass beside Judd Hall, or sometimes when it snowed on the worn, iced-over steps of the place. When Nina asked to see him, Howard never said no.
Sometime during the course of that year Howard took up smoking cigarettes. And sometime during that year he began passing his lit cigarette—always a Lucky Strike—to Nina, who would take it, hold it between her fingers, watch the smoke rise from its lit end and curl into the air, and finally take a hasty drag on it before handing it over to Howard. Back and forth the cigarette went between them, and it seemed to me they were communicating with each other through the plumes of smoke they blew from that same burning stick. One day midwinter, shivering from the cold and from our inactivity, I asked if I could please have a smoke too.
“Oh, no, Molly,” they both replied in near unison, their voices carrying the same protective concern for me, the same nearly parental sense of caution. Then, still in an unplanned coordination with each other, they reached for me, Howard to punch me lightly and affectionately on the shoulder, Nina to quickly wrap her arm around me. But it wasn’t me they were protecting, I knew, it was Davy, or the idea of Davy. They both felt entirely responsible for his death.
Weeks passed. Spring was just breaking through, tulips and irises had blossomed, grass was being mowed, when one day, our backs against Judd Hall, Howard mentioned that this semester he’d spent most of his time right there, inside the very building we were leaning against.
“What do you mean?” Nina asked, provoked by the idea that Howard had taken up an interest in the sciences, which were more or less her exclusive terrain.
“Premed,” Howard said, looking straight ahead of him rather than at either Nina or me.
Nina smirked and I knew it was at the thought of Howard actually having academic ambitions. I was surprised, too, as Howard was by far the store’s best salesman. In the year when he was working there full-time, sales had gone up by some measure, and everyone knew this was Howard’s doing, despite his grief. It seemed inevitable that one day he’d run the store.
Howard saw Nina’s skepticism. “What’s it to you, pimple face?” he responded, his voice reverting in an instant to the cutting one from before Davy’s death.
Nina’s complexion was a clear one, skin to be admired, but she raised her hand to hide her face anyway. Then she rose to her feet, crossed her arms over her chest, and loped away from Judd Hall. And, as if out of nowhere, there it was again, the old rivalry between them, the one that had lain dormant, as if snowed over, for so many months.
But Nina stopped, paused, turned slowly around, and a moment later sat down once again on the grass. “Premed,” she said, calmly enough.
When Howard explained that as a doctor he just might save a kid’s life, Nina nodded encouragingly. With an honesty I wasn’t prepared for, Howard added, “Premed. It’s not like I’m good at it or anything”—which was the same thing he’d say in many a letter to Nina in the years that followed.
At first, once Nina left for college, she and Howard communicated rarely—a birthday card perfunctorily sent every other year or so. But fifteen years later, in May of 1966, Howard attended a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which that year was being held in San Francisco, a stone’s throw from Berkeley, where Nina then lived. Howard had, after much struggling, become a doctor.
“I was a fool. You don’t know how many letters I’ve written over the years wanting to apologize for how I treated you,” he told Nina. Earlier in the evening they’d eaten dinner at the conference hotel and then decided to drive to the nearest beach. They were standing beside Nina’s car, looking at the Pacific. It would be another hour, at least, before dark.
“That sounds like a dying man’s confession, Howard,” Nina responded.
“Not dying. I’ve matured. That’s all.” He leaned her way and for the first time ever put an arm over her shoulders, a gesture that made them both, at first, quietly laugh. After that visit they corresponded at an unfailing rate of a letter a week.
At Wesleyan that day, after Nina had rejoined us, she turned to Howard and reached for the Lucky Strike. Howard inhaled one more time, with deliberate slowness, forcing her to wait, but soon enough passed it on, and with that gesture—a kind of offering—the competition between them ended.
By the time he entered medical school in Boston, Howard looked like a different man: slightly overweight, tired, his dark hair already threaded with gray. But our parents were proud of the fact that he was making something of himself, something surprisingly grand, as they saw it.
Marjorie Blumfield was the girl they picked for him. Consumed with the studies that remained so difficult for him, Howard hadn’t dated seriously, or even much at all, during college or medical school, and finally his last year there my mother put her foot down. “We don’t want a son who’s a lousy monk,” she said, by way of introducing the subject of his getting married.
Marjorie was the daughter of a friend of a friend, someone my father had heard about at morning minyan. She was a senior at Wellesley College, Jewish, and very much wanting to settle down just as soon as she graduated. “By all accounts she’s a good girl,” my father told Howard, who nodded and then agreed to the Shabbos dinner my parents suggested as a means of bringing the two together.
The night of her arrival, in early April of 1957, I helped my mother prepare the meal. I then washed my hair before dinner and quickly set it, as if I too had something at stake in meeting Marjorie Blumfield. There was a feeling of desperation about this meal, as if it were a make-or-break moment; I had gotten that sense from my mother, who called Vivie several times during the week prior to it to get ideas for more elegant food to prepare than she’d normally make. Like my mother, I didn’t want to provide any reason to put Marjorie off, or her parents. It occurred to me that Howard, who was clearly punishing himself with his ill-suited studies and his unnatural social austerity, had suffered enough; I wished him well.
Marjorie Blumfield was not pretty, though not unattractive either. She was short, slight, and wore a significant amount of jewelry, bracelets that rattled whenever she lifted her arms, delicate pearls around her neck. Her nails were painted the precise shade of red of her lipstick, and her hair was styled into a smooth, brushed-under bob. When asked by Howard what she’d studied at college she answered, giggling, “Oh, everything.” That night she giggled often throughout the meal, particularly so when, later in the evening, as my mother and I cleared dishes, Howard described his plans to return from Boston to set up a pediatric practice. He answered her laughter with a befuddled glance. But I understood. “She thinks she’s won the lottery,” I told my mother, angrily, in the kitchen.
The meal was winding down, our dessert and coffee had been consumed, when Marjorie’s giggles ceased at last. For a moment she looked worried, glancing at her parents, signaling them to do something, and her father began questioning Howard about his more immediate plans, such as those for next week’s Shabbos. “I wonder what’s up?” was how Marjorie’s father put it as he adjusted the knot of his tie.
Howard turned to Marjorie and, to our surprise, asked her if she’d like to join us next week, even though this meant another two-hour drive for him from Boston to Middletown and then back again. Oddly, he didn’t look at her when he spoke but rather stared past her, at our father, who sat silently at the end of the table, nodding at the question, as if Mort were the one Howard had just asked to Shabbos dinner and the answer was a resounding, happy yes.
The last time I saw Howard, two months before his death at forty-one of a heart attack, a loss that left my parents for a second time without a son, it was at a family dinner at my parents’. Howard had seemed so much older than he was—his hair, what was left of it, a solid gray, his back slouched, his stomach protruding in a way that took me by surprise, reminding me of our uncle Nelson. Howard had been married to Marjorie for nearly fourteen years, and they had two girls. Though I didn’t see Howard often—in our adult lives we stayed as separate as in that first year following Davy’s death—I’d heard plenty about his medical practice; he was known for his extraordinary care with children, his gentleness, and the time he gave to both the kids and their parents.
That evening, as we quietly ate our mother’s food, Howard looked worn out, his eyes heavy, his face drawn, and I was worried for him. But then I got busy again with my own life, my bland career at G. Fox & Co., a department store in Hartford, where I was a buyer of women’s clothing. Since my divorce from Mark Fishbaum five years before, the job was like a cave I’d come to live in. Off duty and I’d blink at the brightness of a world I barely knew. By the time I got the call two months later that Howard was dead, I was wholly preoccupied, as I so often was, with the minutiae of hose, bras, and underwear.
At Howard’s burial, staring at my devastated parents and then at Howard’s grave, all I could think of was how he’d been determined since Davy’s death never to make another mistake, never to displease our parents.
“But you never made a mistake,” I once told him. Howard was a senior in college then, still living at home, already committed to medical school though his natural talents lay so much in the business of the store. Almost five years had gone by since Davy’s death. I was seventeen, still stupid about so many things, but this much I understood: “Howard, nothing that happened was your fault.”
“It was all my fault,” he answered, his voice steady, his conviction unshakable, his body, though seated, tense and pumped with adrenaline, as if it were still that day five years ago and he were in the water swimming toward us while Mark Fishbaum—sailing behind him, then beside him, and then ahead of him—brought the Sailfish onto shore.
* * *
For years Nina had nightmares about Davy’s death, though she wasn’t actually there at the accident scene. Nevertheless, she woke in the night screaming, seeing the events—the particular stretch of Beach Avenue, the ice cream truck, the blue sky, Davy’s body up and running then down and broken—as if the whole thing had unfolded right before her. That was why she couldn’t imagine coming back to Woodmont the summer following the death when Bec called, asking Vivie, along with Nina, to join me, Bec, and my mother there. “It isn’t possible,” Vivie had said simply enough, speaking for Nina. Vivie had taken to speaking for Nina often that year, as Nina had no words for what ailed her, left her bedridden on many a weekend, left her spacey and languid at school. For the first time her grades weren’t stellar, but they were good enough for her to pass each class.
To put distance between herself and the nightmares, she chose to attend the University of California at Berkeley. For a time she was content, her engagement with academics bringing her back to life. Her second semester there she had a romance, too, her first, with a boy from Santa Monica named Rick. But Connecticut and the summer of 1948 were always there in her mind, and before long she broke it off with him. Happiness, Nina felt, was not hers to have.
But then she met Estelle Casey. Nina had just begun a Ph.D. program to focus on biological anthropology (which according to Leo was like putting the minds of her two long-held heroes Charles Darwin and Margaret Mead into a Waring blender and pushing “go”). Estelle Casey was one of Nina’s professors and Nina was Estelle’s prodigy, her best student, the one with pressing questions for Estelle after class, the one who quickly became her research assistant. Throughout the autumn of 1954, shocked by her attraction, Nina wished it wasn’t so. Her sexual inclination, the true one that, since she was fifteen and just gaining an awareness of, she’d barely allowed herself to feel, shamed her. She tried to hold her feelings at bay, but in Estelle’s presence, staring at her bright eyes and intelligent face, she could hold them back no better than a sky filled with ever-darkening clouds could hold back the inevitability of rain. For some months Nina found a twisted reconciliation with her feelings by calling Estelle “Eddie,” at least in her mind. Once she even mentioned “Eddie” in a call home to Vivie, who she knew so desperately wanted her to feel loved. “I love Eddie,” she told her mother. “But the thing is, I don’t know if Eddie loves me.”
She knew the neighborhood in which Estelle lived, and on weekends during those first months of working for her she began to go there, stopping at a bakery for some bread she didn’t need, drinking cup after cup of coffee at a small café. But in over a dozen such trips she never bumped into Estelle, and it occurred to Nina upon her return from each journey that if she actually met Estelle by chance, as she dreamed of, she’d not live through the encounter. The mere sight of Estelle Casey—her tall frame, her colorful fringed scarves draping over her shoulders, her nearly pitch-black hair—would surely knock Nina dead.
It would be a feat, therefore, to survive an entire dinner with Estelle, but upon Estelle’s insisting that she and Nina eat together to celebrate the publication of Estelle’s first book, Nina did just that. Nina had contributed to the last year of work on that book, one for which Estelle held out hopes of becoming notable in the field. In it she’d synthesized the latest research, including her own, on the physiological changes in primates once they became bipedal. The foot, for example, had gone from a grasping agent, more like a hand, to something that supported a body’s weight. “Enjoy every walk,” Estelle often told Nina over the long months of editing and fact-checking, of hours spent side by side in Estelle’s office, and she said it again, almost giddily, that night at dinner as they talked in Estelle’s kitchen, a small room with an oak table pushed against one of its walls and a single lit candle at the table’s center. Estelle sat at one end of the table and Nina catty-corner to her. They’d touched knees already, though only by accident. Still, Nina couldn’t lift her glass of wine for fear of its trembling in her hands. “Enjoy every walk,” Estelle breezily said, to which Nina nodded and replied, the follow-up by then rote, “because it was long in the making.”
Everything in human evolution was long in the making—the opposable thumb, the human brain, the dual curvature of the human spine. Dinner with Estelle Casey, too, was long in the making, Nina thought to herself as she sat, watching Estelle butter a second slice of bread, hoping she wouldn’t notice that Nina couldn’t manage more than a few bites of food.
But Estelle did notice. “Not so hungry?” she asked.
Nina had been in love with Estelle for eight months. Before that she’d been purposefully alone, avoiding happiness, for close to five years. “Starved,” Nina answered.
They touched knees again, this time on purpose, this time Estelle tapping Nina in a way that signaled she knew what she meant. They held hands. They gazed at each other, a protracted look, and Estelle smiled gently, kindly, when Nina began to blink back tears.
“It’s okay,” Estelle said. “Really, it is.” She leaned toward Nina and kissed her cheek. Then Estelle stroked Nina’s face: her chin, hair, lips. She kissed her again, more intimately. After several minutes, Nina dared to kiss back.
Estelle pulled away and took a sip of wine. “Ready?” she said, looking at Nina.
“For what?” Nina asked, her hand pressed to her mouth where her lips felt new to her.
“A walk,” Estelle told her, gently, whispering the words, “to bed. Upstairs.”
There were detriments to the bipedal physiological structure as well as benefits. Arthritis, for example, was a sorry cost, one that, depending on the weather, affected Estelle Casey, caused her back and hips to throb, though she was only thirty-two. “I try to take the long view when it comes to my aches and pains,” she explained to Nina one morning, three months into their love affair. Just the week before, Nina had moved in with Estelle. “I try to take the long view—we’ve been upright for only what, four million years? But then a day like this rolls around,” Estelle said, glancing out a window. A rainstorm had begun overnight and the day was determinedly gray. “My damn back,” she groaned at last, giving in to it.
They spent that day, a Sunday, in bed, not making love as they’d done the evening before, but simply lying next to each other, Nina rubbing Estelle’s back from time to time. They read. Eventually they napped. By midday they were restless, though, and, finally dressed, they grabbed a pair of umbrellas and hit the sidewalks of Berkeley. They walked miles, barely talking, but Nina understood that this silence, comfortable between them, was not to be feared. Because of the rain, the university campus, which they eventually arrived at, was less populated than usual. Over several minutes only a few students entered the library’s door. Something about the emptiness touched Nina. “The whole place looks beautiful today. Like a beautiful world,” she said, taking Estelle’s hand, briefly, as they paused to look around. A moment later Estelle pulled her hand back out of a sense of caution that Nina knew wasn’t personal. “Beautiful, yes. But even here, almost a home, not our world,” Estelle said.
From Vivie Nina had learned a thing or two about cooking, and that night Nina made minestrone and Vivie’s beloved cinnamon muffins. Estelle and Nina ate in the living room, where Nina kept a small but steady fire going. If Estelle’s back still ached she didn’t complain. Nor did she complain over the following weeks and months as the two settled into a routine of living together. In one of her weekly calls home Nina told Vivie, “Eddie loves your food.” Responding to Vivie’s question about the state of Nina’s happiness, she answered, simply enough, “Very.”
She was so very happy, in fact, that when she first met the pair of brothers who delivered the morning paper—one eight and the other ten, they’d told her—she didn’t make any connection between them and Davy. They were just two determined little boys and she took to tipping them generously, twenty-five percent, when they came by on Tuesday afternoons to collect payment for the week’s papers. But two weeks after describing her joy to her mother, Nina answered the doorbell to find that it was just the one brother, suddenly, collecting the week’s payment. She asked about the missing one, the older brother, and was told he was sick. “What’s your name?” she asked the eight-year-old. “Teddie,” he said, and then he thanked her when she tipped him, this time thirty percent. The next week and the week after Teddie came collecting by himself. “How’s your brother?” she asked the third Tuesday that Teddie appeared solo. Her tip this time was fifty percent. The boy only looked at his feet.
For some weeks after that no one came to collect money for the newspaper, though the paper itself was delivered on time each morning. During those weeks Nina began to worry about Teddie and his ill brother, and she’d spend late Tuesday afternoons at the living room window looking for the boy, longing for him and planning, should he arrive, to tip him sixty percent. By then her dreams of Woodmont had resurfaced. When Vivie called and asked if she was as happy as always, Nina answered, “I shouldn’t be. I know I shouldn’t be.”
She thought that way even after the doorbell rang the following Tuesday and there was Teddie along with Alfred, his older brother. Apart from being paler than before, Alfred looked well. Teddie made sure to introduce him. “She likes us,” Teddie told Alfred while smiling at Nina. “You have no idea how much you mean to me,” Nina almost responded. But she didn’t. She simply sent them off after tipping them one hundred percent.
That night Estelle complained that she was having one of her bad days. At dinner she spun her spaghetti rather than ate it, and moaned as she shifted in her chair, searching for comfort. “I need to lie down,” she finally said, offering Nina an apology by way of a weak smile. Before she left the kitchen she paused to kiss Nina, her long scarf unraveling onto Nina as she did. Holding the ends of the scarf, Nina kept Estelle close for a moment beyond the kiss. Then, Estelle gone, Nina began slamming pots and pans, an imitation of anger. She’d seen her mother do this on more than one occasion as a way to get her father’s attention when his head was too long in a book. But Nina saw too that Vivie would quickly regret doing so and stop.
“What’s the matter?” Estelle asked, having risen from bed and returned downstairs.
“You think it’s fun living with a goddamned invalid?” Nina almost asked Estelle. Goddamned invalid. Her uncle Mort had called her father that the very day of Davy’s accident. But Nina knew that even though the words, ones she’d practiced, would do the trick—smash the love she didn’t deserve—she couldn’t bring herself to use them. Instead she said, “This isn’t working.”
“Really?” Estelle asked, startled. She took a step toward Nina, who, backing away, knocked over a chair.
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” she told Estelle, her tone of voice deliberately piqued and hostile. That she was good at this level of deception amazed her. She glanced dramatically at the ceiling as if seeing through it to the bedroom. “Why don’t you?” she repeated.
But Estelle was too stunned to move. She finally righted the chair that Nina had knocked over and dropped into it. Eventually Nina sat down too. They were silent, elbows on the table, for nearly an hour.
“Really?” Estelle said at last, her eyes hurt, her upper body slumped over the table.
“Really,” Nina answered, though this time she said the word quietly, even gently, her body aching and slumped, exactly like Estelle’s.
Three months after her breakup with Estelle, Nina went back to Connecticut. Her father was ill. Her mother had been trying to hide it from her but Nina had finally overheard him in the background of one of her weekly calls home. “Tell her I’m fine,” Leo had said to Vivie. “I’m coming home,” Nina responded into the phone.
It was during the second week of her stay in Middletown, when her father, recovered, was back at work, that Nina went to the Jewish cemetery to visit Davy’s grave. Early August, and three days of rain had given way at last to bouts of sunshine. Nina wore sunglasses and a silk scarf that Estelle had given her.
For a time she knelt by the grave, staring not so much at it as at the patch of grass at its base. Finally she reached for a stone and placed it on top of the grave, where several stones already lay. “I remember you,” she said as she released the stone.
She rose and walked several paces, but before she’d reached her car she stopped and returned to the grave, dropping again to her knees and staring again at the ground, then finally reaching for another stone to place atop the grave.
Four times Nina rose and returned, knelt, and found a stone, until finally she managed to leave the graveyard.
Five months later, her life in Berkeley busy but lonely, Nina forced herself to marry. The man’s name was Ed, which meant she didn’t have to explain to her mother anything about her change of circumstances during any of her weekly calls leading up to her marriage. The ceremony was a simple one before a local justice of the peace. Her parents, who had taken their first plane ride to be there, were better dressed than Nina and Ed. Vivie wore a blue suit that Bec had made for the occasion and a new pair of white gloves. Around Leo’s thin neck was a tie he’d acquired for the wedding, something just in at Leibritsky’s. But she and Ed just wore trousers and sweaters. “Is that what you’re wearing?” her mother asked, questioning her attire minutes before they left their apartment for the court. Nina nodded. “Good enough,” she said. This was January of 1957, a sunny weekday afternoon, but unusually cold.
She finished her dissertation the first year of her marriage, and by the next year she was an assistant professor at Berkeley. Estelle Casey had left to take a position in New York. Nina’s husband, Ed Glass, a mathematician, was also hired at Berkeley that same year. And so the two were busy—too busy, to Nina’s mind, to get bogged down in anything like the absence of true happiness, something she couldn’t feel with Ed, though he was a good man, just a little remote and as confounding to her as his theoretical work, which, despite the range of her learning and curiosity, she couldn’t bring herself to understand.
In the next years she and Ed had two children, Max and Russell, the first named in honor of her maternal grandfather, the second for her maternal grandmother, though naming a boy after a woman, she knew, was, in a traditional family like hers, risky stuff. Motherhood, though, was risky business altogether, a whole life suddenly and literally in her hands, and it was something Nina had never imagined until the babies were right there, one after the other, two chubby lumps of love who burped and spat and slept on her shoulder.
“It isn’t fair,” she once told Ed. They were standing in the doorway of their children’s bedroom, watching the boys sleep. Ed, whose life before Nina had been a bubble of pure mathematics, seemed as amazed as she was to have become a parent. He hadn’t so much pursued Nina as merely stood there while she’d hurled herself at him.
“What’s not fair?” he asked.
“This much luck,” she said, shaking her head.
But in fact the luck was tempered by many dreams of Estelle Casey and the less frequent but so much more violent Woodmont nightmare. For a time, then, she accepted it, this luck: motherhood, her fascinating growing boys, cooking and grocery shopping and cleaning for four, teaching and researching while all the rest was happening, Ed’s occasional suggestion that she lie on top of him, rather than the other way around, in an attempt at more satisfying sex—all that and the private anguish that caught up to her in her sleep.
The boys were four and six when, on a walk to their favorite park one June day, Nina saw the tall, slender figure of a woman approaching, one who, with her dark hair and colorful scarf, looked so very much like Estelle Casey. Nina gripped each boy’s hand and signaled to them to stop. She needed a rest, she explained, straining her eyes to better see the woman. It had been almost ten years since Nina had smashed her life with Estelle, and there were many times during those years that she considered attending one of the professional conferences at which she knew Estelle had become a favorite speaker. There, sitting anonymously in a crowded auditorium, she could look at her. That’s all she wanted to do, she told herself: look and look and look.
Max tugged at her arm. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” he asked.
“Mommy’s seeing ghosts,” she answered, still scanning the distance. Then she bent toward Max’s questioning face. “Just kidding,” she said. She loosened her tight grip and the three commenced walking.
She sat on a park bench while the boys took to the swings. Nervously, she nibbled a cookie from the bag she’d brought for the boys’ treat. The woman was sitting not so far away on another park bench. Still, Nina couldn’t be sure if it was Estelle or not. It certainly looked like her, but did she really know what Estelle looked like anymore? she wondered. She wanted to approach, but she was afraid. “Really?” Estelle might say to Nina, her voice as shocked and pain-ridden as it had been that day when Nina broke up with her out of the blue.
The boys had joined some other children and a group of five was now running together in jagged spurts, like a school of fish. Only when one fell did the group stop, waiting until the child had successfully risen. Her younger boy, Russell, was the pack’s slowest.
What she would do, she decided, was make a slow circle around the park’s perimeter. At the closest corner this would bring her toward Estelle—if in fact it was Estelle—but not so close as to force an interaction. She could safely check the woman out.
It only took several steps to see that, yes, the woman was indeed Estelle Casey. Nina could identify her, despite the eyeglasses that Estelle had not worn before. She was reading. The children’s squeals, increasingly rambunctious, didn’t disturb her. Nina froze. Then she turned and began to retreat back to her bench. Then she froze again, torn between directions, the one toward Estelle and the one away from her, both of which she wanted to traverse at a run. In the middle of the playground Russell began to cry. And so it was in his direction that she finally rushed.
Nina was holding Russell in her arms, carrying him to the bench where she’d left the bag of cookies, when another woman approached Estelle. Nina watched as Estelle rose, opened her arms, and the two embraced. They did so just long enough and in such a way that Nina knew in an instant that this person was a lover, not a friend. Instinctively, Nina scanned the park, wondering if the other adults had noticed, but no one seemed to. Sensing that indifference, Nina shook her head. Never had she and Estelle dared to be as affectionate in public. Ten years, Nina told herself, and the world had changed in ways she had never dreamed of.
Oddly, she’d never imagined Estelle loving again. Instead she preferred to think she’d gone on to live a purely professional existence, as if in leaving her Nina had stolen Estelle’s very capacity for love.
Stupid, she saw now. And self-serving. For they go on, the betrayed do. She was witnessing it right then as the women pulled apart, laughed, kicked their legs out like kids, laughed some more.
They go on to better people.
Just the sight of Estelle Casey, all those years later, marked Nina. In the weeks that followed something came to the surface, a repressed feeling, the dread of not loving the best she could, of not being who she really was. She loved her children with all her heart, but she loved her partner in life, Ed Glass, like she would anything that familiar, a couch, a favorite movie, a vista she would be happy enough to see though she wouldn’t go out of her way to visit it.
I could die, Nina told herself at last. Then she concluded, just as Bec had so many years before: No, no. Am already dead.
* * *
That revelation came in July 1965, and in April of 1971 I saw Nina for the first time in fifteen years at Howard’s funeral. Not since her trip to Davy’s grave had she come back home. Nor had I, unlike Howard, ventured west. At thirty-eight she was still so pretty, but she looked pale and was ravaged with sorrow over Howard’s death. I was too. That he and I weren’t close in the last years didn’t make any difference. The grief was as raw and overwhelming as when Davy had died, and in a way the pain seemed to be about Davy all over again, as much as about Howard. When I told Nina that she nodded. “I see a connection between their deaths too,” she said. Then she took my hands in hers. “Come visit me, won’t you, Molly?” she asked.
A month later I traveled to Berkeley. There Nina lived in a small stucco house with her two boys, scientists in the making. By this time she’d been divorced for five years and she had a new lover, a woman named Sandra Pierce.
We were in her kitchen, painted the same pale green as the outside of her house. At the kitchen table we sipped coffee as Nina cautiously laid out the truth of her life for me. Staring more at the tabletop than at me, she blushed almost scarlet as she determinedly revealed herself, telling me first about Estelle, then Ed, and finally Sandra. She seemed compelled to do this telling, however uncomfortable it made her, or me. Other ways, other possibilities—I hadn’t really thought about that in terms of Nina’s sexuality, but there it was, made plain at last.
For a variety of reasons—maintaining custody of the kids being primary—she and Sandra didn’t live together, Nina explained. Besides, she added, that would be too much happiness. “Can’t have that,” she said. “Makes me crazy.”
“Too much happiness?” I asked, referring to the distance she purposefully kept from her lover, who lived only blocks away. “Would Davy really want you to be deprived?”
“You’re not telling me anything my analyst hasn’t told me for the last six years, Molly,” she said.
My marriage to Mark Fishbaum had gone south just when Nina’s had with Ed, and we talked about that, too. My situation was easy enough to explain. I hadn’t really loved Mark, I told Nina. Over time I realized that he’d just filled a hole in my life, the one created not only by Davy’s death but also by everyone scattering in its aftermath. I wanted more from a relationship than just that. Being an only child, Mark had always wanted children, but I kept delaying, and in our fifth year I lied to him, telling him that I didn’t want children and had never wanted children, thinking he might take that and leave. “Bingo,” I said, and sighed.
Nina placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Molly,” she said.
That was how our visit began—the catching up, the confessions of our confused adult lives—but we got busy soon enough. Each day Nina had a class to prepare for and teach, and meetings with students beyond that. Max and Russell, then eleven and nine, needed to be taken care of too. She was glad, she told me, for the extra help, and the third day of my visit, while I made toast and eggs for breakfast, there was a moment when Nina and I looked at each other, recognized our mothers in ourselves, and suddenly whooped with a kind of laughter reminiscent of theirs.
“I get it,” Nina said, speaking of my mother’s mood, which invariably lifted each summer in the company of her sisters.
“I get it too,” I told Nina, speaking of Vivie, spatula held high, delighting, as I was just then, in feeding a whole clan. And a moment later, when Russell hopped onto my lap, I got it even more, though this time it was Bec’s journey I’d segued into, the piece of it about not becoming a mother, and of how lovely it was—a holy moment—sitting there and holding a child.
Because of Nina’s unyielding schedule I had toured the Bay Area largely on my own for the first days of my weeklong visit, but on Thursday I went with Nina to the Berkeley campus. The class she taught that day wowed her students. If the entire evolution of life—Big Bang to now—was likened to a single year, she explained to a packed auditorium, then mankind’s appearance comes at about one thirty p.m. on December 31. At 11:59:59, the Renaissance begins. And with less than a second to go, everything else—the Enlightenment, modernity, life as we actually know it. “Feeling insignificant yet?” Nina quipped, and the class howled. I got the shivers.
When we left the auditorium a group of five students followed us, each one pushing past the next, seeking an appointment with Nina. She had no openings that week, she explained, but then she met with two of them on the spot anyway. I waited over an hour in the hallway.
“Dr. Cohen?” yet another student asked just as we were about to leave. This student was a young woman, clearly distraught, her eyes dark with fatigue.
“Give me a few minutes, Molly, okay?” Nina asked, and back I went to the worn chair outside her office door, where I overheard Nina gently tell the student, “You’ll survive this. You really will.”
That evening after the boys were in bed, the house was silent. Nina was in her study, grading papers or preparing yet another class; I couldn’t be sure. As I’d done before, I wandered through the house, looking at photos. Just outside Nina’s study was a shot of her and Howard that day when they met for dinner after Howard’s meeting with the Academy of Pediatrics. As they’d stood together, Howard’s arm over Nina’s shoulder for the first time, Nina had said, “Howard, I always felt that if I hadn’t lied the day of the accident Davy would be alive. I can’t shake it. The feeling’s at the core of my being.”
“Nina, that’s just not true,” Howard urged.
“You’re not telling me anything my analyst hasn’t told me for the last year,” Nina said, and then they stood there, not talking further, for another five minutes.
Nina spotted me staring at the photo and called me in. Her study was crammed with books and papers. On one wall she’d hung up her various diplomas and I took to gawking at them—there were so many. But when I peered closer at an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I was confused to read that it was made out to Leo Cohen rather than to Nina.
“Oh, it’s mine,” Nina said. “But I thought he deserved it more than me so I had his name put on it. When I gave it to him he said he hadn’t earned it and wouldn’t take it.” She paused to wipe a smudge from its glass frame. “It’s pretty much what I’m most proud of, Molly.”
She got back to work and I went to bed. At three in the morning I woke and rose to get some water. The light in Nina’s study was on and she was talking on the phone. I’d been in Berkeley just shy of a week by then and I wasn’t surprised to see that Nina was still up, still working, counseling someone—“You’ll survive,” I heard her say—giving of herself though it was late and the day had been long and there couldn’t have been anything left to give.