What pains me most of all was that I’d been careful around those reporters. Those newspaper people, they could be smart. So clever with their sneaking around. Calling me up and asking leading questions as if I was born yesterday and wouldn’t see right through what they were doing. ‘Mrs Katz,’ they’d say, ‘isn’t it true that Bobby is acting a little strange?’ ‘You can keep your acting strange,’ I’d tell them. ‘Does it hurt to be so stupid?’
If it wasn’t for Bobby, I don’t know if Lily would have found the strength to go on after Lori died. Lori was a nice girl, arty sure, but she was a good daughter. Me, I don’t know if I would have been able to go on after a stab in the heart like that. And that Bobby! What a lovely child! It was never a burden taking him off Lily’s hands. He’d come into my kitchen and help me make cookies, used to let himself in as if he was one of the family. Sometimes we’d sit down and watch Jeopardy together. He was good company, a good boy, always happy, always with a smile on his face. I worried that he wasn’t spending enough time with other children–what kid wants to spend all his free time with old ladies?–but it didn’t seem to worry him. I’d told Lily many times that Rabbi Toba’s family ran a good yeshiva in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but she wouldn’t hear of it. But could I blame her for wanting to keep him so close? I was never blessed with children, but when my husband Ben fell to cancer ten years ago this September, I felt the loss like a knife in my heart. Lily had lost too much already. First Reuben, then her daughter.
I knew that Lily was trying to hide something from me, but not in my whole life could I have guessed what it was. Lily wasn’t a good liar, she was an open book. I didn’t nag her to tell me. I figured that eventually she would come to me and tell me herself.
I was cleaning my kitchen when I heard Lily shouting that day. My first thought was that something must have happened to Reuben. I ran straight to her apartment. When I saw those two strange men in their suits, and their fanatical eyes, I called the cops right away. I knew what they were. Me? I could spot one of those fanatics a mile off after they started crawling around the neighbourhood. Even when they thought they were being so clever by dressing up like business people. They were smart, ran out of there before the cops arrived. While Lily made a statement, I went into the apartment to watch Bobby and Reuben.
‘Hello, Betsy,’ Bobby said. ‘Po Po and I are watching From Here to Eternity. It’s an old movie where everyone is coloured black and white.’
And then Reuben said, clear as day. ‘The oldies are the goodies.’
And how do you think I reacted? I almost jumped out of my skin. ‘What you say, Reuben?’
‘I said, they don’t make films like they used to. Are you having trouble with your hearing, Betsy?’
I had to sit down. I’d been helping Lily care for Reuben since Bobby came out of hospital, and I hadn’t heard him speak a word that made any sense in all that time.
Lily came back in and she saw right off that I knew. We went into the kitchen and she poured us both a brandy. She explained it all to me. How he’d started talking out of nowhere one evening.
‘It’s a miracle,’ I said.
When I got back to my place, I couldn’t settle down to anything. I had to talk to someone. I tried calling Rabbi Toba, but he wasn’t in and I needed to get it off my chest. So I called my sister-in-law. Her best friend’s nephew Eliott, a good boy–or so I thought then–was a doctor and she told me I should talk to him. I was just trying to help. I thought maybe I could get a second opinion for Lily.
Saying it now, it sounds like I was a real fool, I know this.
I don’t know if they paid him, or what they did, but I know it was him who talked to those reporters. The next day, when I left the house to go to the store–just to buy myself some bread as I was having soup that evening–I saw all the reporters hanging around the apartment, but that wasn’t new. They tried to talk to me but I gave them the brush-off.
I saw the headline on a placard outside the bakery: ‘It’s a miracle! Bobby’s Senile Grandfather Starts to Speak.’ I almost threw up right there. May God forgive me, but it did cross my mind that I could blame it on those religious putzes who had conned their way into the apartment. But the article made it clear that the news had come from a ‘source close to Lillian Small’.
I was so worried. I knew what this could mean for Lily. All those crazies, led by that real dangerous one, I knew they would jump on this like flies on a turd.
I ran back home and I said to Lily, ‘I never meant to let it out.’
She turned white, and could I blame her? ‘Not again,’ she said. ‘Why won’t they leave us alone?’
Lily never forgave me. She didn’t cut me out of her life, but there was a watchfulness when she was around me after that.
I wonder, I really do, if this wasn’t part of what caused everything else afterwards. May God forgive me.