CHAPTER 50

My mother decided to come home. She said she’d catch the next train and we’d meet at her apartment around seven. At five, I opened the front hall closet and got my coat while taking note of his army uniform on a hanger in the back and an old fedora on the top shelf, the crown still dented from the imprint of his grip. I wasn’t the only one in the family hanging onto the past.

“Where’re you going?” my father said.

“I’m going to stay at Mom’s tonight.”

“Don’t go,” he said.

I kneeled by his chair and rested my cheek against the back of his hand. If only he would get better, we would be close from now on. We’d talk about everything. “I have to,” I said. “I haven’t had a break in days.”

“Stay with me. Please.” His frog’s eye was sealed shut, but his other eye was wide open, imploring.

“It’s only for the night,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll be here before you even wake up.”

“You will?”

I smiled. “Yes, of course. I have to be here early in the morning before Brenda leaves. You know that.” I certainly wouldn’t want Brenda to be late for work, especially not tomorrow. I wanted no obstacles foiling my plan this time.

“When I open my eyes tomorrow, I’ll see you?”

“Yes.” I laughed softly at his childlike question. “I’ll be the first thing you see.”

“You can go, then.”

The weather was mild with a drizzle. Toward the horizon storm clouds parted to show a streak of bronze sunlight and two snow-white clouds outlined in gold. It was a beautiful sight. I drove carefully on the shiny black roads. My mother’s train wouldn’t be in for a couple of hours so I thought I’d cook dinner and stopped at the supermarket. Once at my mother’s apartment, I was a little spooked by the empty rooms. She’d been away three days. I looked behind the shower curtain and bolted the door. Then I unpacked the groceries and put the rice on, and I started to feel more at ease, and set the table in the kitchen, and I called Fred. The wall phone in the kitchen had a long cord, so I could talk and pace with the phone wedged between my chin and shoulder while steaming the vegetables. I was making the simplest dinner I could think of—chicken breasts with paprika, the rice and string beans. A few minutes after I hung up with Fred, the phone rang.

“Oh, hi, Brenda. How is he?”

“He’s fine, but he wants the TV Guide. Do you know what you did with the TV Guide? I saw you walking around with it.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I might have left it on a kitchen chair.”

“No, I don’t see it. That’s a bad habit, not putting things back where they belong.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s there somewhere. I didn’t take it out of the house.”

“He wants to watch Dressed to Kill,” Brenda said.

“He loves that movie,” I said. I was glad he felt good enough to watch something so intense, or even to want to watch it.

“It’s on at eight, but we don’t know the channel. Don’t have a cow over it, though.”

It was a little after seven. My mother would be home any minute. Meanwhile, my father and Brenda had almost an hour to search before the movie started.

“Sorry about the TV Guide. I hope you find it.” I hung up.

My mother arrived winded and red-cheeked. “I see you turned on every light in the place,” she said cheerfully. She was happy to find me waiting for her.

“Oh, man. It’s been brutal,” I said.

“You made dinner! How lovely!”

“The rice is kind of plain,” I called to her as she put her bags in the bedroom. “I added some chicken broth, but that’s all I could think of.”

“Looks good,” my mother said, coming into the kitchen. “Should I turn off the burner under the string beans?”

I ladled out the food, we sat down, and I popped open a Diet Coke. “We’re getting rid of Brenda,” I said.

“Getting rid of her?” My mother laughed. She thought I was kidding.

“We’ve got to do what Uncle Harry says. Change the locks. I’m serious.” I cut into my chicken with enthusiasm.

“Whoa. Slow down. Wait a minute. I’m not so sure about this, Joanna. You’ve taken on a lot already.”

“That’s why I made the calls about nursing. I can’t leave him alone with her. Do you understand how bad it’s

been?”

“Don’t you think you should consult somebody first? Like a lawyer or something.”

“Shep said he’d talk to this friend of his who just went through a divorce and had to do the same thing.”

The phone rang and I stood and answered it, pulling the cord around the corner into the living room. “Hi, Brenda.” They probably still hadn’t found the TV Guide.

“I have some sad news to tell you,” Brenda said.

What could be sad compared to our situation? Brenda’s perspective was so twisted.

“What?” I said.

“Your daddy just died.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true.”

“Yes, just a little while ago.”

“No.” People died in bed, in and out of consciousness. They didn’t die asking for the TV Guide.

“Yes,” said Brenda.

She was a liar. It was too soon. He was sitting up. He was talking. He wanted the TV Guide! “NO!” I shouted. The phone dropped onto the carpet. “No!” I went down on my knees and I drew a breath in and then I made a croaking sound because I couldn’t get enough air. She killed him. She gave him an overdose. That had to be what happened. My mother picked up the receiver and spoke to Brenda and hung up and got down on the floor with me and held me by the shoulders and she was crying, and I was gasping for air, and then she slapped me.

“Do you think she killed him?” I said.

“Sweetheart, he was very, very sick. He was going die, there was no way around it.” Tears were streaming down her face.

How could I have been shocked? How could we both have been devastated knowing his disease was terminal? But we were. We got our coats and got into my mother’s car like people feverish and weak. The almost full moon was high in the night sky and lit the road with a ghoulish cast. My mother told me the few details Brenda had given her. It happened at about eight-twenty, they found the right channel and he had been watching Dressed to Kill. She called the hospice nurse.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said.

My mother pulled the car to the side of the road, tires crunching. I got out and stared at the gravel shoulder whitened by moonlight. The pebbles were stones in a bowl of milk. I got back in the car. “I don’t have to,” I said. My mother drove slowly as if we were in a procession. We were keenly aware that something big had happened to us.

“They didn’t take him away already, did they?”

“No. Brenda said the nurse told her to wait until we got there before she called anybody.”

“You mean Sol Levinson.”

“Yeah, Sol Levinson.”

There must have been other Jewish undertakers in Baltimore, but I’d never heard of any. We turned at Northern Parkway and drove past Sinai and the turnoff to my grandmother’s house, and over the railroad tracks and turned right into Cedar Drive. Just as we passed the willow trees that leaned over the creek where the street curved, a cab passed us. It was rare to see a taxi in our neighborhood. It floated by unnaturally, iridescent yellow with black windows, seemingly driverless. I thought when we pulled up under the maple tree I would have to be dragged out of the car, I’d be too afraid to come inside. But the second my mother shifted into park I jumped out and ran across the lawn as fast as I could, through the carport and into the kitchen. I ran so hard I had to be stopped, and strictly for that purpose it seemed, there was a tremendous woman blocking my path whose body took up the entire width of the passageway between the kitchen and living room. I ran into her and she was soft as a pillow.

“Whoa, whoa. There now, sweetheart, take it easy. I’m Sharon, the hospice nurse, and I want to talk to you before you go in.” Her voice was as comforting as hot chocolate. Where have you been? I wanted to say. Where were you all these months when I needed you so badly?

“Is he in the living room?” I said.

“Yes, and he’s sitting in a chair,” Sharon said. She put her arms around me, pressing me into her big bosom.

I used to forget how tiny the house on Cedar Drive was until I walked in after months away, and saw that it was like a house from Disneyland, three-quarters the size of a real house. Now everything in it was unreal, too. “He’s sitting up? He’s in his chair? What happened? How did he die?” The nurse held me in her arms.

Brenda emitted a little snort, a kind of half-laugh, and apologized to Sharon. “She’s like this,” Brenda said. “It’s normal for Joanna.”

“Tell me what happened,” I demanded of Brenda. “Tell me everything.”

Sharon nodded to Brenda to go ahead.

“Well, he said he was having trouble breathing and he asked me to open the window,” said Brenda, enunciating slowly. “But I couldn’t get around the chair so he got up and opened the door.”

“The front door?”

“Yes, the front door. But I didn’t want him to catch pneumonia, so I closed the door and then he started pulling apart his pajama top, so violently his buttons popped off, and then he sat down in the swivel chair, and he was gasping for breath and pulling at his pajama top and then he sort of put his head down. And I called the number we had on the legal pad, the number for the hospice nurse, and I said, ‘I think my husband just passed away.’”

“Was he the one who wanted the TV Guide?” I said. “Or was it you?”

“Oh, Joanna, don’t be ridiculous. He wasn’t angry with you about the TV Guide.”

“I know he wasn’t angry with me. That’s not what I meant.”

“She wants to know if he asked for the TV Guide because she wants to know if he was lucid just before he died,” said Sharon.

“That’s right, exactly,” I said. I looked into Sharon’s kind eyes, studied her wide face, her flat bottom lip. How was it this woman I had never met before understood me?

“Yes,” Brenda said wearily, as if I were trying her patience. “Clyde was the one who wanted the TV Guide.”

“Are you ready to go in now?” Sharon asked.

“I think so,” I said. I inched my hand along the wall as if I were on a ledge thirty stories high. I’d never seen a dead body, not up close. When the wall ended at the opening to the living room I took one more step and stopped. My father was sitting in the swivel chair in his pajamas and tartan bathrobe from Susan. I hadn’t noticed before how Christmasy the bathrobe was. How cheerful. His head was bent and resting on his shoulder as if he had nodded off, and his lips were fat in a pout. He had his green hat on, of course. His hair was the same, his mustache as bushy as ever. He didn’t move. I dropped to my knees at the threshold and sobbed my heart out. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I cried. “I’m so sorry.”

My mother stood behind me waiting to slap me if I needed it. When I calmed down I saw that Brenda was carrying a dining room chair and she put it next to him, and sat down in it and kept a frozen smile on her face, as if waiting for her portrait to be taken with her dead husband. It was weird. I didn’t know what she was doing there. “It wasn’t your fault,” Brenda said, still smiling. They were on a stage and my mother and Sharon and I were in the audience. Brenda was glowing, calm and serene. No muttering, no curses. She was much more relaxed with him dead. “Do you think it’s your fault?” Brenda said.

I didn’t know how to explain, but Sharon, my interpreter, filled in. “Joanna only means she’s sorry that he died,” Sharon said over a great chasm, speaking across the River Styx to Brenda in the land of the dead. “She’s sorry she lost her father.”

“Poor Joanna,” said Brenda. “This sort of thing is hard for you.” She stroked my father’s hand.

“You can come closer,” Sharon said to me. “You can touch him if you want to.”

I came closer and Sharon must have said something to Brenda because Brenda got up and carried her chair with her, and left my mother and me alone with my father. He seemed oddly healthier, his face fleshier, his lips fuller, his belly round. I put my finger on the bare skin peeking out between the buttons that were left on his pajamas and he was warm.

“It’s all right. You don’t have to be afraid,” said Brenda from the hall.

My mother came closer and kissed his cheek. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve always loved you.”

I stared at her. Had she told him yesterday, last week, twenty years ago?

“He looks exactly the way he used to when he was playing with you and Susan,” my mother said. “He would play cowboys and Indians with you, and you girls would shoot him and he’d pretend to be dead.”

“We did? He did?”

“Yes, and he would put his chin down on his chest and stick his bottom lip out and pretend. Just like this.”

There was a knock at the front door and Brenda opened it. Three tall men entered with faces as white as wall paint and greasy strands of black hair glued to their heads. Sharon whispered to us to go into the back of the house, although I was sure Brenda would have been fine watching the morticians unfold my father’s arms and legs and zip him into a body bag.

“Phew!” said Brenda. “I don’t envy them that cleanup job.”

How could two human beings react so differently to the same circumstances? To me, day by day, my father had become sexless, smooth, soulful, and clean. But to Brenda, he was prosaically dirty, a bum who could use a bath.

They took him away. We called my sister and heard Susan yell to Larry to close the bedroom door so her little girls wouldn’t hear her sobbing. Brenda said she was fine, declining my mother’s invitation to spend the night with us. When we got back to Charles Street, all the lights in the apartment were still on. Everything there was unreal, too. I was reminded of a dream I had when Fred and I lived in New York. I was awakened by the sound of a party, animated voices, glasses clinking. I got out of bed and went to the top of a sweeping staircase, and down below I saw a replica of myself and Fred eating dinner at a cafe table. This other Fred and I were laughing too loudly with rubbery grins, and the food was too bright. It was a terrifying image.

The dinner we left in my mother’s blazing kitchen looked like the dinner in the dream—chicken breasts day-glo orange from the paprika, one perfect bite cut out of each one, mounds of undisturbed yellow rice, neon green beans, a fork balanced on the edge of each plate, chairs pulled out. A garish tableau. What happened here, an archeologist might have asked. Why was this meal interrupted?