A Private Sorcery (30 page)

For the next year, Rose could not sleep and Lil could not eat. My mother ran herself to distraction trying to engineer things so Rose might sleep: dinner early, but not too early; plenty of exercise but not overexertion.
For Lil, schmaltz drizzled on her potatoes and cream mixed into her milk. I tried to stay out of the way, feeling that it was not my right to grieve as openly as my sisters. They'd been
the girls
. Three of them in the span of three years. I was the son, born four years later. They belonged to each other whereas I belonged to Lil alone, who, when I was a baby, would stick out her arms if Eunice or Rose would approach me and yell,
no, he's mine
. She'd taught me to walk, taught me my letters, my numbers, how to hit a baseball, tie a tie, kiss a girl, write a love letter.

On the first anniversary of Eunice's death, we traveled to the cemetery for the unveiling of her headstone. It was the same design my mother had selected for my father, only smaller. Afterwards, my mother caused a scandal among the aunts and uncles and cousins by not inviting anyone to the house. Poor Uncle Jack had probably spent the trip out to Queens consoling himself with thoughts of the creamed herring and nova to come. “I need to talk with my children,” my mother announced.

Back in the apartment, my mother called us into the living room. Holding her back straight, she assumed her position on the sofa. Only the tips of her shoes reached the floor. She patted the worn mustard cushion at her side, motioning for me to sit beside her. Rose sat in the green wing chair. With her permed hair and bloodred lipstick and fake beauty mark, she looked more like the matriarch than our diminutive mother. Lil lowered herself onto the rug, her long legs curled under her emaciated frame. It was July, and a fan whirred on the table where my father's picture was displayed. My mother held my hand. “The one blessing in all of this,” she said, “is that your father died first. Every day I thank God that he did not have to endure the loss of a child.” Her eyes pooled and her voice grew hoarse, and for the first time since Eunice's death I feared she might break into inconsolable sobs. But she did not. Instead, she opened the top button on her navy crepe dress. There was a lace-edged collar and pearl buttons that rose up from a cloth-covered belt. “Now, children,” she said, “it is time for us to move on. I do not want to see any more long faces. No more tears. We cannot all six of us die.”

By the end of the year, Lil was married to Moishe, a gawky thirty-year-old who would in the next few years make a fortune by convincing his father to convert their drapery factory to the wartime production of parachutes. She was so thin that no matter how many times my mother took in her wedding gown, she looked like a kid playing dress-up. Desperate to flee the constant talk in our household about what was happening in Poland and Germany, Rose took a job, room and board provided, at a girls' day school in Connecticut, and only my mother and I were left in the apartment.

For ten years, my mother and I lived, just the two of us, in that apartment: three years I spent at the Bronx High School of Science, three years I raced through City College, four years of medical school. Although when Jack had promised to pay my tuition for medical school, he'd never said it was contingent on my living at home, my living at home allowed his daily visits to remain safely sanctioned under the guise of a brother-in-law who'd assumed responsibility for a widowed sister-in-law's family. Countless nights, I pecked my mother's cheek as she headed off on Jack's arm, my Aunt Mindyl, by then so fat and diabetic she rarely left the house, happy to have her younger sister accompany her still healthy husband to the opera and theater and symphony.

(“It is your fear of discovering your identification with your Uncle Jack that is leading you to quit your analysis,” Merckin later proclaimed. “The way that you both triumphed over your father when his death left you the men of the household.” As for my claim that without my job, which I quit following Maria's suicide attempt, I could no longer afford Merckin's fee at five times per week, he swatted it away like a pesky fly. Furious, I refused to admit that he was in his clumsy way close to the mark, that I felt with Maria like Jack putting on his thin show of propriety.)

My sisters came home for holidays and birthdays and occasional Saturday afternoons, but there was a cautiousness between us. Lil's husband was taciturn. Rose's goyim boyfriends before she married your Uncle Syd were all boys who'd ended up as teachers at her school by
default, too dissolute or dull to manage in the worlds of commerce and law where their brothers and college classmates now worked, saved from the war by flat feet or myopic eyes. And, jumping ahead, neither of my sisters ever liked your mother. How could they, the way she talked incessantly about the way
she'd
grown up,
unlike Leonard
, she'd say right to their faces as though that didn't mean unlike them too.

Still, I was devastated when Lil and her husband moved to San Diego shortly before Marc was born. Moishe, who had by then inherited his father's business, had the wherewithal not to talk about it in front of us, but it was clear that the move was a way to avoid the unions. In San Diego, there was cheap Mexican labor and, Lil wrote, gorgeous light. She took up painting, set up a studio in what had been the guest cottage of the La Jolla property they bought. A year later, Moishe died. She was thirty-five and he left everything to her. Before this, your mother had been able to think of Lil as the poor wife of a rich man, but once the money was Lil's alone your mother grew green with envy. Shamelessly, she courted Lil, to whom she'd barely spoken before. Every few weeks, she would make a trip to the post office to send off a missive: cards and books and toffees. A nightgown purchased at the local lingerie store. An invitation to join us for the holidays. Lil never responded due, I was certain, to her distaste for the evident falseness. For my part, I was mortified that she might think I was somehow involved.

My mother began spending the winters in San Diego with Lil. Through her, I learned that Lil's hair had gone gray early and that she'd taken to wearing beautiful trousers that suited her slender form. She took a course in set design, went to work for one of the studios that was still using painted backdrops in its films, and moved to Venice, the artists' enclave in Los Angeles, where she could run her dachshund on the beach. In her forties, she sold Moishe's business and opened a production company that made documentary films.

One of Lil's first films was about Japanese families, laborers living since the turn of the century in the San Joaquin valley. Perhaps you remember the afternoon we took the copy she'd sent us to the public library,
where we watched it on a projector set up in a room in the basement. What I remember is sitting in the dark, trying to untangle how your entire lifetime had passed with Lil and I having hardly anything to do with each other. Yes, there was your mother's condition, but why had I not taken you boys there over the summers? The best I'd been able to come up with was an odd resentment that had developed between Lil and me such that it was unclear who had abandoned whom. The silences had become our communication: a ringing accusation. On my part, too, there was an illusion, as if time did not exist, as though all of this were happening in some interlude outside of real life. Lil and I, who had loved each other as children, who had shared a cot when we'd lived in Jack and Mindyl's dining room, were not
really
estranged. Our lives were not
really
passing with nothing to do with one another.

After this, I wrote her, telling her how much I'd admired the film and how badly I felt that we had drifted so far apart. She wrote back thanking me for my kind words and indicating a reciprocity of sentiments. But neither of us had possessed the wisdom to see that extra effort would be needed. Again, foolishly, we acted as if it were only practicalities that kept us from talking with each other—time differences that interfered with phone calls. At my mother's funeral, Lil and Rose and I hugged and vowed to stay in closer touch now. Afterwards, we all went to Rose's house in White Plains. Even though we lived less than fifty miles away, you and Marc had been there on only a couple of occasions. You'd forgotten the feline decor. Cat wallpaper in the bathroom. Coffee served out of mugs painted with pictures of cats. A cabinet filled with porcelain cats. Sitting with my plate of food, I watched the relatives studying Lil with begrudging admiration: her black pantsuit and expensive flats. Her gray hair cut in a way that made the face below appear unexpectedly young. Later, scrutinizing Lil in the photographs taken that day, your mother declared, “She's a lesbian, you can tell, from the way she holds her cigarette. And why is there no man? A woman as good-looking as that?”

I get out of bed and go downstairs to my study. I look up Lil's number. Outside, I can see the outlines of the Japanese maple, just starting
to bud. I push the buttons.

It's the voice of an old woman on the other end of the line.

“Lil?”

There's a pause. Not more than a few seconds, but the sign of a lifetime passed since each other's voice and smell were as familiar to us as our own. “Lenny?” A space just long enough to allow this to serve as a question. “Lenny, is everything all right?”

“No, I mean yes. No, there's not a problem. Yes, everything is all right.” Idiot. How could I have not realized that it would scare her to have me call at this hour?

“You frightened me. I thought …”

“Someone had croaked.”

She laughs. “Well, if you have to put it that way. Still, we are getting to that age.”

“I just wanted to talk with you.”

“It must be two in the morning your time.”

“I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about all of us, when we lived with Jack and Mindyl.”

There's a moment's silence during which I fear that I've offended her by assuming too intimate a tone or hurt her by pressing against something she'd rather not touch.

“You know what I remember the most about that room?” she says. “The way there were four layers of molding. I used to lie awake studying the design. I can still remember the sequence.”

“How's everything? How are you?”

“Oh, I'm getting old. It's been a winter of the flesh giving out on me. Arthritis in my hands. Cataracts in my eyes. Now they say my hip is going.” She laughs again. It's eerie. The same laugh as our mother. The refusal to take oneself too seriously. “I figure we don't have longevity in our genes. Papa died when he was forty-three. Mama made it to seventy-six. I think I'm hitting that obsolete stage.”

“It was the times. Today they would have resuscitated him, done a bypass and put him on medication.”

“How's Rose?”

“I haven't talked with her in a while. She calls Klara every month or so, but I only hear about it afterwards.”

Lil sighs. “Who would have ever thunk?”

“Yeah, who would have ever thunk.” My breathing feels labored, as if the lost decades have lodged in the bottom of my lungs. I long to put my arms around Lil, for us to hold each other the way we did when we were kids. “Lil, how has this happened? That we've grown so apart?”

“I don't know. Sometimes I blame myself for having moved out here.”

“It's no more your fault than mine.”

“Rose … well, you know Rose. I wouldn't see her other than holidays even if I'd stayed back east. Those cats, that kitsch, kitsch, kitsch. But us, do you think we would be close?”

I can imagine Lil living in an apartment in the Village, going out for early dinners with her. Maybe having a Philharmonic subscription together.

“I worry about you. The situation with Klara. How hard that must be.”

“I worry about you.”

“Why?”

“Living alone. Out there in wild Califor-nee.”

“People always think there's something hard about living alone. But it's so much easier than living with someone. I just read a proposal for a documentary on these highly developed monkeys from an island near Bali. They go back and forth between living in multigenerational groups where the babies are raised and being what the filmmaker calls free agents. Existing independently on the periphery of these groups. That's what I am. A free agent.”

Another pause. “So tell me, how are the boys?”

I stare at the photograph of the pyramids at Giza that hangs over my desk. Clearly, I knew when I telephoned her that she would ask this question and I see now that this is why I have called her: to tell her about you.

So I tell her. It might as well be the first telling, since other than your
mother and brother I have not told anyone. And she's wonderful. She grasps immediately what I can only call the sweep of it all. The tragic quality—a good boy gone wrong without ever going bad.

“He's like you, Lenny. One of those sweet souls who attract bees like honey. Your thing was Klara, getting tangled up with her.”

“And now there's something else. Rena has got herself involved in a situation with an old professor of Saul's, a blind guy whose son disappeared fifteen years ago in Guatemala. The old guy died, and now they've found the son's body and she wants to bring it back and bury it.”

“You're not talking about Santiago Domengo?”

“You knew him?”

“I knew the son's girlfriend—well, it wasn't even clear that she'd been his girlfriend, only that she'd been in love with him. She wanted to make a film about what happened. About the father and his relationship with Castro and whether the CIA was involved. It was fascinating. She wanted to include these tapes the son had made of the indigenous music in the area he'd been studying. Letters he'd sent her. Reports from the private detectives the parents had hired to try and find out what happened. Only she was so addled about the whole thing, there was no way to figure out what was fact and what was fantasy. This was maybe ten years ago. More. My lawyer said it was a landmine for lawsuits. She showed me a videotaped interview she did with the parents. The father had just gone blind and the mother, if I remember correctly, was an opera singer.”