IF ANNA HAD KNOWN EARLIER how badly her sister Gert had taken advantage of Anna’s daughters when she tried to commit suicide, she would have risen up from her bed and murdered Gert herself.
Now that Anna was in limbo, between dead and buried, she found she could slide up and down the pole of history to explore certain secrets about which she’d never quite had the whole story. This was an advantage of daunting latitude—she could go anywhere in time and see what had previously been kept from her.
When she was still alive, but half dead in the nursing home, she’d been very suspicious when she learned of Gert’s suicide attempt and the way her girls had mumbled over the details—(“We think she probably took too many sleeping pills”)—and changed the subject. Anna knew something was amiss there and that her girls had somehow been more involved than they were telling her. If Gert had wanted children to get mixed up in her craziness, she should have had some of her own.
From the very beginning Gert had wanted to steal Anna’s babies. On the first day Anna had brought Janet home from the hospital in Brooklyn, her sister tried to take over, elbow her out of the way, block Anna’s access to the crib (where Gert would sit for hours, staring at the baby’s little curled fists, stroking the thin blonde fuzz on her delicate head). She complained about the way Anna bathed the baby although Anna had professional instructions for this, left in writing by the visiting nurse: “Hold the point of towel under the chin, lift baby from bathinette, hold tight if baby is slippery, fold left side of towel to the right, then right side of towel to the left. Drop the point on baby’s head but do not drop baby.”
Gert thought she knew better about everything. She criticized Anna for waking Janet from a peaceful sleep at six A.M. to give her orange juice, though the doctor advised that a rigorous schedule was important for discipline. Anna let the baby cry for the same reason, but Gert was always rushing to the crib, cooing and rocking and singing and baby talking in a way that made Anna nauseated.
Still, it was Anna’s baby, not Gert’s, and Abram was Anna’s husband, not Gert’s, and all Gert had was her smelly dog Bingo who was forever scraping her rear end along the carpet and making Anna sick. One day when Gert wasn’t home, Anna had no choice but to call the pound and give away the dog. Male dogs were coming to the front yard and peeing all over the baby’s carriage because they smelled Bingo, who seemed to be in heat every other day.
The timing wasn’t kind, but Bingo had to be removed when Gert wasn’t at home or she’d have kicked up a fuss to high heaven. The dog was just a dog. Gert simply couldn’t understand that a baby was more important. When she came home and found Bingo gone, not only gone but dispatched to dog heaven, she told Anna she’d never forgive her. Then she pretended to have something like a nervous breakdown for a few weeks and lost weight and cried in her room.
Anna, in her new freedom as a dead woman and with time to spare, felt called upon to investigate the nervy suicide attempt that had to be Gert’s ultimate ploy to seduce her children. Anna herself never played games about ending her life; she had said she wanted to die, said it up front in the nursing home every day. And when she tried to do it by wedging herself between the piano and the wall in the chapel, she certainly wasn’t asking for attention. It was just her bad luck they got her out.
But Gert: if she could have, she would have done it on national television. On the day she picked, Janet had just cleared the dishes from Danny’s breakfast (she was one of those women who still cooked for their men) and was packing him a lunch when the phone rang.
“Janet…” It was Gert. Janet took a deep breath. Exasperation was on her face; this wasn’t a good time for her to talk, it was too early in the day, she had a hundred things to do in the morning. Did Gert care how often she interrupted the girls’ lives? Sometimes she called Anna’s daughters four times a day—a woman with all the time in the world. Her second husband, Harry, had died four years before, and now she lived in a fancy Beverly Hills retirement home.
“Janet,” she said. “I decided I don’t want to live anymore.”
“I know how you feel. I know it’s hard to be old, Aunt Gert,” Janet said kindly if a little impatiently. “But what can you do about it?”
“I already did it.”
“Did what?”
“I slit my wrists. Don’t call anyone…”
“You slit your wrists? When?”
“Two hours ago. The blood keeps clotting. I had to cut them again. Then I had to get up again and cut my vein in my elbow. I think it’s working now. There’s a lot of blood. I called to say good-bye. And to tell you I’m going to hide my ring somewhere so they don’t steal it. My ring is for whichever of your children was nicest to me. You decide.”
“My God! I have to hang up now and call for help.”
“No, don’t call anyone, this is what I want. But maybe you could get Carol on the line, you still have three-way calling?”
Just then Danny passed in the hall, wearing his underwear, shaving cream still dotting his face.
“Aunt Gert just slit her wrists,” Janet cried out to him. “She said I shouldn’t call anyone.”
“You have to,” he said.
“First she wants to say good-bye to Carol.” Janet was already doing the three-way thing, and then Carol got on the phone, half asleep.
“Aunt Gert wants to talk to you, she’s in the middle of killing herself and wants to say good-bye. She slit her wrists.”
“What?”
Gert’s voice came over the wire, weak and helpless.
“Good-bye, children. Life is too much trouble. Don’t be mad at me for this.”
“I’m hanging up. I’m calling the paramedics.” In Carol’s voice was a certain toughness, even a lack of surprise. Carol’s husband had run her in circles for years, threatening to kill himself if she didn’t do this or that the way he liked. What nerve—for Gert to pull a trick like this when Carol had been through hell already with one suicide in the family.
Why would Gert do this? For attention, of course. Anna wanted to smack Gert hard, give her an Indian burn the way she used to when they were little. She wanted to say “Grow up, will you!”
In the meantime, Janet was still on the phone with Gert.
“Carol is calling the paramedics, Aunt Gert.”
“Well, I don’t want them to steal my ring. Where should I hide it?”
“You know that cup with the pencils? You could drop it in there.”
“The Band-Aid box in the bathroom would be better.”
“You probably don’t have the strength to get to the bathroom.”
“I think I could,” she said, her voice trailing off.
Janet just kept her talking until she heard a hard knocking at her aunt’s door.
“One of the Mexican boys is here,” Gert said. “I hope it’s too late for them to help me.”
“Put him on the phone,” Janet said. She heard her aunt say, “Come in, Julio.”
“Julio? Is my aunt really bleeding?”
“Blood everywhere,” he said. “God save us. Blood is all over.”
Anna’s two daughters rushed to get dressed and drive to Beverly Hills, where Gert, who always made a big thing about living near Jews, now lived among dozens of them she hated and cursed daily.
The girls drove along the freeway in a state of shock. The smog was heavy already, sitting on the hills like a smoke ring, making it hard to breathe. Anna had always hated driving behind diesel trucks; she’d read that the fumes could give you cancer. As it turned out, she had had good luck with cancer, she never had any. She’d had plenty of other things to make up for it: her stroke, her broken hip, her lifelong nausea, her gastritis, her arthritis, her glaucoma, her high blood pressure, her—well, what difference did it make now? She was done with all that.
From the freeway her daughters could see the impressive edifice of the Burning Bush Cemetery where Anna’s husband had been buried in 1965. The girls, whenever they were on this freeway, always called out a greeting to their father, who was buried on the slant of a hill coming down almost to the road. The place looked pretty good to Anna, the grass well kept, the neat rows of bronze plaques in lines almost as far as the eye could see. In a couple of days she would finally be lined up right there with all the dead, dug under, covered over, lying beside Abram. If he could see her, he wouldn’t recognize her—a woman of ninety with wild white hair, a face as sunken as a fallen cake, limbs as shapeless as Jell-O. If he remembered even one thing about her it would doubtless be the gorgeous legs of her youth. And if she could see him, God forbid, she’d see a pile of bones in his favorite blue suit. She had to remind herself they were both somewhere else already, cozy in clouds, far from these holes in the ground that would soon house what was left of their mortal remains.
When the girls arrived in Beverly Hills, Carol said to Janet, “Do you believe we’re really doing this? Coming to see our eightysix-year-old aunt who just slit her wrists? It’s got to be a sick joke.”
The two woman at the desk in the retirement home looked at them with pity. “They already took your aunt away in the ambulance. We had no idea she was thinking such terrible thoughts. In fact, when the paramedics carried her out on the gurney, she was wearing a red lace nightgown. She looked a little pale, but not so bad.”
“We’d better go up to her apartment,” Janet said.
“The police were already up there. They told us they took away her suicide note.”
In the elevator Janet and Carol clasped one another’s hands and squeezed hard. Anna was filled with a wild fury. She had never given her children this much trouble! Nothing she had ever done had equaled these shenanigans.
Blood was everywhere in the apartment. Soaking the bed, in a trail of drops across the rug and to the bathroom, on the sink, in the basin, on the bar of soap. A double-edged razor blade lay on the edge of the sink, red over the steely gray.
“She mined the mattress, the rug, the whole place! We’ll have to pay them a fortune for this.”
“We should call the hospital and find out where she is, find out if we can see her,” Janet said, but when she reached for the phone, her hand stopped in midair. The phone was covered with blood.
“My God,” Carol said. “She did this because she was mad at us! Like Bard. He always felt no one was doing enough to make him happy. And it’s clear no one was doing enough to make her happy.”
“Here’s her ring,” Janet said, “right where I told her to hide it, in the cup with the pencils. That’s the thing she was most worried about—that no one should steal it from her.”
“I’ll tell you what that reminds me of,” Carol said. “The day Bard killed himself, you remember this? He left his insurance policy in the house, on the floor, just inside the front door—a little message to me that I wanted the money more than I wanted him.”
“You think Aunt Gert was telling us the same thing? We wanted her ring more than we wanted her?”
“Who knows what people are thinking when they try to end their lives, Janet. They’re crazy, aren’t they? They decided to kill themselves. Is that sane?”
“It could be, under some circumstances. Like Mom wanting to die.”
“Well, that’s a different story. Wouldn’t you want to get out of it if you were chained to your bed for so many years?”
Anna was gratified to know they saw her point. But she was a little put out, all the same, that her girls had kept the truth from her about Gert, had mentioned in passing that she might have been “a little depressed,” that she had taken a few too many sleeping pills. This blood bath was extravagant and gaudy—leave it to Gert to gussy up everything, to wear a red lace nightgown to do the deed. To call to say good-bye!
It turned out, and it served her right, that after Gert was sewed up in the ER, she was admitted to the psychiatric lock-up ward where they put all the nut cases. Janet and Carol found her in the ER at the hospital just before they wheeled her away; her arms were wrapped in gauze like a mummy. When she saw her nieces looking into the cubicle, she said “Don’t worry about me anymore, I’m not worth it.” On the floor, just to the side of her bed, was her red lace nightgown in shreds. Gert saw them looking: “They cut it off me. It’s a pity, my best nightgown. I had to have seventeen stitches. I don’t know how I had the nerve to do it, a chicken like me. It took a lot of courage, don’t you think? Like they say, old age isn’t for sissies.”
The girls were speechless. Gert had plenty more to say. “Did you get my note? I left you a good-bye note.”
“We didn’t see the note,” Janet said. “The police took it.”
Gert looked surprised and pleased. “Maybe they have to investigate that I wasn’t murdered.”
“What did you say in the note?” Janet asked.
“I said to forgive me. That I was tired of living, that I was doing this so you’d have some use of my money.”
“You killed yourself for us?” Carol asked her. “So we could have your money?”
“Why should it be wasted on an old lady like me? You two have much more use for it. You could have some fun with it.”
“This is really a lot of fun, Aunt Gert,” Janet said. “Seeing you like this.”
The lock-up ward of the hospital was a little like a college dorm: two to a room, a snack machine in the lounge where a TV played all day, a ready supply of free tea and coffee, and one pay phone hanging in a hallway, which, unless you had proper change, you could not use. Nor could you receive any calls on it.
Gert who had never been away from home one day in her life, who had believed that “if a man is going to find me, he’ll find me taking out the garbage,” now appeared to be having the lost excitement of her youth. A black man, another nutcase, took a fancy to her, and tried to waltz with her every time she sashayed down the hall. He sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” as he twirled her around the floor. He wore pointy brown shoes with white wing tips.
Twice a day the inmates had therapy sessions. Gert had a Jewish psychiatrist who liked to shove his face into hers and say, “Are you going to do what you did ever again? Ever again?“
“I wish it had worked the first time,” Gert told him.
He scowled. Wrong answer. His face was even more fierce.
“You’re going to put your family through that again? Do you know what it did to them? I met your nieces, they’re nice girls. One is a widow, she told me, of a suicide.”
“I did it for them,” Gert told him. “I thought they could use a little extra money.”
Wrong answer. His face was even meaner.
“Okay, so it didn’t work, and now I’ll be a terrible trouble to them.”
“You don’t think you’ve already been a terrible trouble to them? Your older niece said all you do is call her up ten times a day and tell her how many pains you have.”
“Who else should I tell?”
“You should tell your doctor, no one else. He’s the only one who can do something about it, not your nieces.”
Gert was obviously getting bored. She was looking around for the black man. With all Gert’s prim and proper attitudes, Anna suspected her sister was a sex maniac. She once saw a red mark on Anna’s neck and accused her of having a “love bite.”
“I think it was the Prozac that made me to do it,” she said. “My doctor told me to take it when he couldn’t help my pains, which he thought were all in my head. No one could help me. Doctors, they know nothing.”
Wrong answer again. “Prozac is supposed to help you,” the psychiatrist said.
“I read it brings on homicide,” she countered. “I blame Prozac.”
The doctor was out of patience. (When Anna—on the other hand—had been examined by a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, he had dictated a twenty-page paean to her charms, intelligence, and beauty.) Obviously, Gert was not charming this doctor. He was totally disgusted with her and did not conceal it.
“I want to get out of here,” Gert said. “The woman in my room gets up at night, walks over to my bed, and pees on the floor.”
“You’ll go home when I discharge you, not before, and you’re not ready to go home yet.” Gert looked around as if she might try to escape. At both ends of the hall were locked doors with glass windows in them. No one could go in or out till a series of bells and whistles were heard, and only when a nurse, locked behind glass herself, pushed the button.
“You’re not very nice,” Gert accused the doctor. “You’re not kind at all to me, after what I’ve been through.”
“This isn’t a place you come to for ‘nice.’ You’re here because you did a very bad thing. I’m trying to ascertain that you won’t try to do it again. Then, and only then, I’ll let you out of here. Otherwise you’ll stay as long as I think is necessary.”
“Medicare is paying you and you know it,” Gert said. “You think I’m a cash cow, that’s why you won’t let me out.”
The doctor tucked his papers back in his briefcase, gave Gert a dirty look, signaled the nurse to buzz him out, and left.
To Anna’s annoyance, her daughters decided to move Gert out of Beverly Hills and closer to where they lived. Not only closer to them, but in the very next building to Anna’s nursing home, a retirement home that was more like a holding pen for dying animals. When they got sick enough, they’d be funneled over to the slaughter house (the place where Anna lived). She could understand the necessity for this—after Gert had ruined the rugs and bed in her room, the Beverly Hills place definitely didn’t want her back to give the other residents any ideas, especially with the scars on her wrists and in the crook of her elbow.
First Anna’s girls toured the facility. There was the usual: the lounge with a big TV, a crafts room, a dining room, and the individual cells where the prisoners served their time. At least these failing creatures, unlike those in the nursing home, could still walk on their own two feet.
Anna’s daughters conferred. They agreed that they wanted to take the room for Gert for the convenience of being able to visit Anna and Gert in the same trip. But they still had to tell the truth about Gert’s wrist slashing to the retirement home director. They waited for her in the front office as legions of the ancient creaked and ratcheted by on their walkers and pulled their oxygen machines on wheels after them.
They talked business: the girls inquired about room rates and services. Then they confessed: “Our aunt recently tried to take her own life.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the director said. “They all want to do it. One resident here jumped off the second floor balcony of her apartment.”
“So that’s not a problem?”
“Not at all. They’re all depressed. It’s the rule, not the exception. So let me know when we can send our truck for your aunt’s things and move them here.”
What troubled Anna the most was that now the girls would only have half as much time to spend with her. With Gert on the other side of the parking lot, they’d be killing both old birds with one stone. Anna was reluctant to concede being the main attraction in this zoo of the old.
Besides, it worried her that the hard work of moving Gert’s belongings and furniture would be a hardship on her girls. Carol’s health was not good, Janet was no teenager herself. Gert should have had three strapping sons if she intended to slit her wrists and require her relatives to move her household on such short notice.
On moving day, the girls, using their good sense, enlisted the help of Carol’s son David and Janet’s daughter Bonnie. David, the son of the dead hippie father, had the incredible good looks of the poor man, the only decent thing that came from him (and the boy—in Anna’s opinion—the only good thing that came from the marriage). David had the flashing smile, the blue eyes, the muscular build, the outdoorsman look that had seduced Carol from the start. It was only a pity Jewish boys did not come in this model.
The four of them—Gert’s unwilling servants—entered the apartment like archeologists entering the tomb of Tutankhamen. What eerie artifacts they would find, they didn’t know. The blood had been wiped from the surfaces, but traces of it still darkened the carpet. The mattress was gone, thrown out, but the phone was still there, its buttons cemented by dried blood.
David made several trips up from the car with cartons he had collected. Anna’s daughters and granddaughter began opening Gert’s drawers and dumping their contents into the boxes.
Suddenly, on Gert’s dresser Anna saw the most astonishing sight. Her own husband Abram was featured in a silver-framed photo, half naked, his mouth opened wide…and biting Gert’s thigh! The photo had been taken at Coney Island in 1932, when a bunch of boys and girls were at the beach on a blanket. A smaller copy of this snapshot had been in Gert’s photo album. Anna remembered dimly that she had been at the beach when someone thought it would be funny for the gang to entwine all their limbs and take a picture of it. Abram, always up for a joke, pretended to bite the leg closest to his mouth. Anna, however, had thought it beneath her dignity to roll around on the sand with a bunch of hoodlums and removed herself from the blanket. Now here was that moment captured in time, not only captured but blown up to the size of an oil painting! And cropped to show only Gert’s delighted smile, and Abram’s big open mouth poised over her lily-white thigh. There was no end to the treachery of this sister!
What caught Anna’s eye next was a small photograph, tucked into a corner of Gert’s mirror. In it was a picture of the antique samovar that Gert had promised to Janet.
What Gert had done with that samovar was an injustice that would burn in Janet’s heart forever. The samovar had belonged to the mother of Gert’s second husband who had brought it with her from Russia. Pure silver, filigreed handles, a place for a teacup on top, a creation fit for royalty (there was a photo of Gert’s father-in-law having tea with Chaim Weizman beside it). Gert had kept it in the place of honor on a table in the corner of her dining room in all the apartments in which she had lived. It was the cherished heirloom, the family’s singular piece of history. And she had promised it, pledged it, for years, to Janet. “This will be yours when I kick off,” was the delicate way she had phrased it.
Janet was grateful and said so to Gert many times. Maybe Janet had suffered because Anna had never given her anything valuable from the antique shop—she was a stern mother that way. “What will I sell if I give you everything here you like?” she used to tell her daughters. “The children will break it, the cat will knock it over, someone might steal it.” Anna had a flash of regret about her tightfistedness. Now it seemed it might not have been the best philosophy in the world. But she, too, had always counted on Janet’s having the samovar. (In secret she had done some research on the current prices of antique samovars. Gert’s was in the class of those valued at—at least—$20,000! What a nice bit of security it would be for Janet, whose husband, Danny, as good and reliable a son-in-law as he was, was still only a college teacher.)
Even now, when Anna remembered Gert’s treachery, this act of revenge (on who? on her? retribution for giving away Bingo?), this betrayal of Janet, of Janet’s trust, she wanted to commit mayhem. The very manner in which Janet found out about the betrayal was a low and underhanded trick. She had gone, one day, with Danny and the children to visit Gert and Harry and discovered the samovar gone from its place. When she inquired about its absence, Gert said, with no apology, “I gave it to my step-grandson. I know his wife will polish it every week. I knew you wouldn’t.”
The kiss of Judas. That’s what Gert gave Janet.
Still—loyal and good niece that she was—Janet was standing knee-deep in the debris of Gert’s botched attempt to pass on to greener pastures.
“Get rid of all the razor blades, all the scissors, any knives you find, throw them right into the trash,” Janet instructed her daughter and nephew. “She isn’t going to have one sharp item in that new place.”
Carol was opening the china cabinet, beginning to wrap the knickknacks in newspaper. Such valuable things Gert had—all of them from Goldman’s Antiques, things she had finagled Abram into giving her. The silver candlesticks, the amphora, the bisque statue—if those were also going to be inherited one day soon by the step-grandson, Anna was going to whirl like a dervish among them and smash them to pieces right now.
Handling a person’s private belongings was like committing a forbidden act. Anna could tell her girls were uneasy, sifting through Gert’s underpants, her bras (and her collection of foam rubber falsies), her letters, her checkbook stubs, her photographs. At one point Janet opened Gert’s wedding album (the first husband), and there Anna saw herself and Abram in the full bloom of youth. Over Janet’s shoulder, Anna studied her own face, her good bone structure (her sealed mouth—she never smiled after her teeth were pulled and dentures were installed). Her migraine headaches were supposed to have disappeared after her teeth were pulled, or so the dentist had said, but the headaches were even worse after that. Anna was hardly ever able to eat again without wanting to throw up after every meal.
But Abram, who was holding the pole of the chuppa, looked magnificent, clear-eyed, wonderful. Six feet tall and strong as a mountain, but sweetness and goodness pouring out of him toward the world. (Too good, maybe; he had been a soft touch, and never knew how to be a good businessman.) Janet was in one of the wedding photos, too—about eleven years old, a skinny marink. Anna’s mother, stolid and simple Sophie, dressed in a dark blue dress, so proud to have her old-maid daughter find a husband.
To think: the lives that people traveled through in a lifetime. Why was it everyone felt that life was too short when, looking back, it was vast, endless, comprised of dozens of little lives so that, by the end, everyone had lived a thousand times? Anna could pick a moment, any moment—her first day in public school, her first migraine headache, her first taste of chocolate—and write a book about each subject. She could talk about chocolate for a week, about her headaches for a year, what each did to her life, how she first felt about it, how she grew to feel about it, how she felt about it now. Her hands—whether she liked them or not—her fingernails, how she shaped them, her hips, the way she perceived them. And then there were all the people, all the events, all the trips, all the grudges, all the jobs, all the flus and colds—such a wild and magnificent collection of thoughts and experiences. So much misery and worry. And fear—enough of that to choke a person, especially when the children might be in danger.
This business with Gert’s suicide was a tiny drop in the bucket, a miniscule mosquito bite of an event. Gert’s smallness, pettiness, false sweetness (Abram used to call her “the cat with the velvet claws”), all this hullabaloo about one old lady running the edge of a blade across her veins: where did it figure in the history of the world? It was of no consequence, it didn’t require Anna’s attention anymore. She had other fish to fry and not much time in which to do it.
In her opinion, Gert, alive or dead, was a closed book. Anna was going to move on to the next subject, whichever appealed to her most, whichever was worth the time she had left. Who knew if, after she was buried, she could take these grand trips across history? For now, she had better be moving along.