Bec’s words turned out to be prescient. I could go back, and I did, first to Mark Fishbaum, and then to Woodmont itself.
As it happened, I ran into Mark the next week, in Hartford, where we were both visiting his father in the hospital. Judge Fishbaum, as everyone still called him, had broken his hip, and the news came my way fast, the way it always did, via the busy mouths of several Leibritsky’s customers.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” I told Mark when I stepped into the hospital room. In the twenty years since our divorce we’d seen each other only a few times, the last of which was at Howard’s funeral. I stood with my hand over my heart.
“Sit down, Molly, this could take a while,” Mark said. He lifted War and Peace from his lap. “See what I mean?” he quipped. But instead of reading he rose, and I was so pleased when he rushed over to embrace me.
His father, meanwhile, begged him not to joke; it hurt when he laughed, he complained. Judge Fishbaum—I was never able to call him anything less formal, though he’d wanted me to—reached for my hand. “Dear Molly,” he said. “It’s been too long. Where you been?”
We got our hellos and don’t-you-look-goods out of the way quickly. Mark did look good, insofar as he looked remarkably unchanged, despite the fifteen years that had passed since I’d last seen him. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it, and Mark, I noticed, couldn’t help but stare at me. We smiled, truly happy for the unexpected reunion.
Judge Fishbaum, unlike Mark, had certainly aged. Upon my arrival he struggled to sit up but, too tired, eased back against his stacked pillows. He was a widower now, I knew, just two years beyond the loss. Despite his happy greeting I saw sadness in his face, some lingering grief, and I apologized up front for missing my former mother-in-law’s funeral; I’d been on a buying trip for the store, I explained. He nodded while Mark said for them both, “We loved your card and flowers. We understand, Molly.” Once I settled into a chair, Mark began to read, to both of us this time, an act I found comforting and so much wiser than pushing for an instant conversation between us. Yes, Mark looked the same—and he said as much about me—but in fact we were strangers.
“Going to drop off. Nothing personal, Molly,” Judge Fishbaum, yawning, announced after a time, and indeed he did drop off, closing his eyes a moment later. Mark rose, kissed his father’s forehead, pulled the blanket to his neck.
“Coffee?” he then asked me, his voice a whisper, and though I knew I should get back to the store, I was struck by how caring he’d just been. I remembered, suddenly, how many times during our courtship and short marriage he’d brought me a cup of tea, or a blanket, or simply held me close. I recalled, too, the summer bouquets he carried to our cottage each day following Davy’s accident, the way he’d simply drop them off and know, with a wisdom beyond his years, to leave us be.
That afternoon, back at the store, when I told Bec about the hospital visit and that Mark and I had decided to meet for lunch the next week, she asked, “Filling a hole still, Molly?”
“Maybe I missed something back then,” I answered. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure he’s still married. He wasn’t wearing a ring and I didn’t ask, but I’m pretty sure.”
“How could you not have asked that?”
“We kept to the present: his father’s health, the hospital’s bad coffee, traffic, weather. Simple stuff. It was like we were in a little bubble. Bec, I didn’t want it to burst.”
“I hope for your sake, then, he’s not married. Take it from me, Molly,” she said, “that’ll burst it. Sure will.”
“For old times’ sake” is the rationale I offered Mark for the suggestion that he and I get together the next week at Jimmies of Savin Rock, the old hot dog stand in West Haven, now a full, and fully enclosed, restaurant. Mark lived in a suburb north of New York City and he figured we could meet in the vicinity of New Haven. We settled on the following Thursday, which turned out to be a chilly and windy March day. We were seated in a booth by one of the restaurant’s large ocean-side windows, and because of how I felt—anxious with yearning—I peered out the window rather than at Mark while I offered him a series of banal opening remarks about the ocean’s lively, frothy waves.
“Haven’t seen that in a while,” Mark said, nodding toward the water, then peering at it, and I could see him then on the shore’s edge at Woodmont, a year after Davy died, the year of our coming together, upside down and walking on his hands, trying to make me smile. “Give it a try,” he’d urged of the handstands, but I didn’t. I’d hurled my sorrow into cartwheels instead.
For the next hour I poured out the news from the years of our separation. In the end I said everything I’d hoped to say to Mark except what I’d only just begun to grasp: that as long as I expected him to fill a hole that no one could fill, it wasn’t that I didn’t love him but that I couldn’t love him. Or couldn’t feel my love for him. I was too busy blaming him for not assuaging my grief.
But a confession like that was too much too soon. Instead I listened as he told me his story: the second marriage that was still on, the three children’s ages, looks, and interests. I nodded, and though my heart sank further with each detail he imparted, I managed to smile agreeably throughout. By the time he’d finished we’d eaten most everything. Our waitress brought us coffee, and as we sipped it I began, as I had earlier, to glance anxiously out the window. The sea seemed so suddenly and terribly lonely—but that was just a projection, I knew, of me.
“I was hoping,” I told Mark when I looked back at him. I pointed at him then at myself. “But that would be too easy, right? Like magic. Like a fairy tale.”
Mark was kind, as usual. He reached for my hands and I extended them, perhaps too eagerly, his way. “I’ve got this family now. But I’ve never stopped loving you. He paused, then said gently, “Linda Bagel.”
My eyes welled up at the sound of the old puppet’s name. What didn’t Mark know about me?
He continued, “But I love my family, too.”
“Of course.”
“It’s just bad timing. That’s all it is.”
We both turned to the window again.
When we got outside we stood for a time leaning against the hood of his car. The gusts had calmed, enough to allow me to feel the sun on my face more than the wind. Mark’s eyes gleamed in the brightness.
“Guess we won’t be doing this again anytime soon.” I squinted up at him.
“No, guess not,” he said.
We’d pulled apart and were about to get going, in our separate cars, when Mark suggested we take a drive to Woodmont together. He checked his watch; it was going on four o’clock. But he’d recently gotten a call from Arthur Weinstein, the pugnacious one of the twins, who’d become a major developer in the area. Arthur thought he might have something for Mark and his family.
“The brat’s persuasive,” Mark told me, his eyebrows raised, as were mine. “And get this, Molly. He’s stinking rich. Why do the goods always go to the undeserving?”
I shook my head. “My uncle Leo used to ask that same thing,” I said.
We drove first to Woodmont’s west end, where the cottages of Bagel Beach used to be. But even before we’d parked we knew that the homes there were long gone to more developers than just Arthur Weinstein. After all, it had been a while since Jews needed to huddle so close together. In the decades since our childhood the tight ethnic worlds inside Milford had gradually opened their borders. A newer wave of immigrants were now telling their tales from whatever pockets of America they inhabited about huddling and separating and assimilating and holding on. Our story, in that sense, was over. And our cottage, too, was gone, had been sold long ago, ten years after the accident, when everyone finally realized they just didn’t want to go back anymore. But rising from Mark’s car, staring wide-eyed at the extensive condominium complex before me and seeing right through its concrete walls to the old mishmash of wooden cottages that used to be there, I felt the call of memory, which is a different kind of story, born of a separate need.
And remember we did. We stood on the sands of a beach no longer known as Bagel Beach and suddenly there was a younger Mark, sitting on a bright orange life preserver beside Howard and then rising to drag the Sailfish’s shiny hull to the water’s edge. And there I was, cross-legged on the porch steps of the cottage, dissatisfied with Linda Bagel on my hand, hoping that Nina, her head in a book, sitting right behind me, would finally take notice of me. Minutes later, Mark and I passed the synagogue, still known as Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont, but more than the building I saw my father, with Leo, Howard, and Davy in tow, walking briskly and confidently on their way to join the minyan.
Beyond the synagogue Mark and I soon passed Sloppy Joe’s, now called Sloppy José’s, and the Villa Rosa, and I felt some relief to see these businesses still intact, though empty and boarded up for the off season. Finally we came to Anchor Beach, where we dropped onto a bench. Yards away was another bench, the one Davy and I had sat on, or so it seemed, eating our chocolate-and-vanilla-frosted cookies only hours before his accident. I was sure that was the very bench, I told Mark, but when we rose and walked to it, I could see it was in fact relatively new.
From there we made our way to the corner of Clinton Street and Beach Avenue, where the accident took place. We stood for a time, our backs to the road, staring at the ocean before us, a vast and empty thing, no boats in sight. The intrepid March winds still stirred the waters, and the waves, tumbling forward, were as loud as any in my memory. Hello, hello, they seemed intent on calling. Or perhaps their song was more in the way of good-bye, good-bye. Across Beach Avenue, Mrs. Rankoff’s modest cottage had gone to demolition, replaced by a towering new summer home, plain in the modern way. For a long time, while Mark waited at some distance, I stared into the road at the spot where Davy landed. In the end, I did what people do: grabbed a stone and marked the spot as one would a Jewish grave. Then Mark said gently, “We’d better get going,” and so we returned to the car, then left Woodmont and drove off, first toward Jimmies, where I’d left my car, and then, separately, toward what turned out to be our vastly different lives, knowing they’d not intersect like this again.
Only you can go back, Bec had said, but this was years ago already, before she passed away, the last of the sisters to go, leaving her home to me. Now that I’ve moved in, there are days when I wander around in it and can hear her pumping the treadle of her Singer, expertly running a seam. Other days I sit at that cozy booth, staring out at a wondrous Japanese maple tree, its burgundy foliage—just out—so unlike the green of the other trees. It’s not lost on me that what I’ve become—an experienced businesswoman, unmarried, with no children, the final inheritor of the family business—is nothing I’d ever thought I’d be, and perhaps because of that, an oddness I often feel, a deep solitariness, I’ve come to identify with the singularity of that maple. I consider it a friend. Sometimes—because why not?—I even talk to it, tell it that I’m no more an Esther Bagel than a Linda Bagel, in that my less than conventional attributes have come my way only by default. This particular brand of turmoil is what Bec and I shared most deeply, perhaps, a constant need to figure it out—what do I do now?—when the plan, that predictable life we’d always imagined for ourselves, my mother’s “right track,” slipped, like a loose ring, off our fingers and out of our reach. We arrived at the unmarked territory of our adult female lives not as pioneers but, like our cousin Reuben and all the Jews pouring into Israel after the war—or like the rest of my family, forever unmoored by the events of 1948—as displaced persons, as refugees.
That day after Sal visited Davy at the hospital, after my mother’s rant, after Davy’s miraculous near wave of one of his fingers and the way he opened his mouth, seemingly to speak to Sal, Howard drove the family back to the cottage in two shifts. I was taken in the second shift along with my silent parents, my father in the front beside Howard, my mother in the back with me, a seating arrangement we were used to except for the absence of Davy, who always took the hump between me and my mother. Except for Howard, who had to keep his eye on the road, each of us kept turning to that spot, as if seeing Davy there.
Once inside the cottage we walked directly to the dining table, where we’d been gathering each night of the ordeal. The fighting, at least for now, was over. For days we’d simply sat there in the evenings, eaten a bit, and sat some more. Even when my father had taken it upon himself the night before to address Howard’s relationship with Megan O’Donnell, there wasn’t the yelling we’d expected. He’d said, calmly enough, “You have responsibilities as a Jew. You can’t just drop them. You can’t just go out into the wide world of America and pick anybody. For you it’s different.” Howard nodded but then asked, “What about love?” My father laughed wearily. “Love is putting up with a whole lot. Putting up with it and feeling good about it. Howard, my son,” he said, gripping his shoulder, “that’s love.”
Our refrigerator was filled with gifts of casseroles, and by the time our shift arrived at the cottage Bec and Vivie had already heated one and had made a salad to go with it. Nina had set the table and she’d placed one of the many flower bouquets from Mark Fishbaum in the center. And so we began almost instantly and in silence to eat the evening’s meal. “Things are looking up,” someone, at long last, said. Another added, “Did you see how he wanted to speak to Sal? Did you see Davy recognize him and wave?” Yes, we’d seen, and with all eyes on Ada each one of us assured her that Davy was progressing nicely, that in fact he’d be fine. There was an upside to Sal’s visit, Howard gently suggested, for it had gotten Davy to focus, just a bit, at long last. To our surprise, even my mother agreed that the visit was useful in this singular way. “He’s improving, isn’t he?” she asked, and a chorus of us rushed to answer, “Sure is. Sure is.”
A bubble of hope floated invisibly in the air over our heads, and with it a sense of normalcy—the old life—momentarily returned. Several of us took second helpings. A little boy was injured but he’d soon enough heal. And our lives, too, weren’t so deeply changed. There’d be time, still, to pick up where we’d left off. And so sometime during that meal Howard’s thoughts drifted, quite helplessly, and despite my father’s warnings, to Megan O’Donnell. And Bec spent a moment envisioning the new life that she and Tyler McMannus would soon share. Just before the table was cleared Ada gave a proprietary glance around the dining room, and there it was, just for a second, her old satisfaction with the place—her place—rising once again to the surface. And between Vivie and Nina those worries that had arisen in the last week, worries about something, unnameable as yet—a something that was wrong with Nina—were now but a fleeting thing. After dinner Leo could finally get back to his reading, to that article about universal chaos and motion. And Mort could tune in to a baseball game, catch up on the Yankees, whom, like God, he hadn’t had any contact with in the last week and sorely missed.
As for myself, I could believe, as I had many times that summer while in the upstairs bathtub, that I was separate from them, wholly different from them. When I said me, I sensed anew, I didn’t mean them.
But then my mother began sobbing and in response we snapped back to attention, dropped our dreams.
The table was almost cleared when the doorbell rang. That would be another neighbor delivering another casserole, some of us must have thought. Though that night Bec was the one to open the door, and to our surprise there was Nelson, making his first visit to Woodmont, asking in a worried voice if there was any news, lately in my dreams when I return to this moment it’s me, rushing forward, beating out the others, opening the door, and hoping against hope that with my doing so a faint but unending scream—which is mine, my mother’s, and even my grandfather Maks’s—will finally cease.
But when I do no one is there, no one is ever there, and each time this empty space is as much a shock as the last.
“I thought I should come,” Nelson said next, his tone hesitant. He then thanked Bec, who he told us had phoned him the day before.
As Bec rose to make Nelson a plate of food, she handed me his hat, which I placed beside my father’s on the little table in the dining room with the telephone on it. Earlier the day’s mail had arrived and had been placed there too. That’s when I saw that Lucinda Rossetti had sent Davy yet another installment of their picture. As Howard carried in an extra chair from the kitchen, and as Nelson sat himself in it, catty-corner between my father and Howard, and as everyone shifted a little, to the left, to the right, and as my father patted Nelson’s back, saying, “Good of you to come, brother,” I opened the envelope and unfolded its contents. What was remarkable was how clear and perfectly ordinary the scene had become: the original red panel at the bottom was now a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, the three vases on it were rounded and shaded, and the bouquets arising from each vase were fleshed out, one with daisies, one with tulips, and the third left blank for Davy to fill.