Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (15 page)

Listen, Grandpa,
Ruth said, not quite impulsively. You don’t have to go back to that place. You
could come home with me.

He didn’t seem to
be listening. He was humming tunelessly under his breath, eyes on the spoon
with which he was stirring his coffee, making little clinking sounds.

I don’t have much
space, but you could sleep in my bed until I find someplace with two bedrooms.
With your Social Security we could afford it.

That’s very sweet
of you, darling, he said at last, looking up and nodding. She felt guilty
relief, understanding his refusal.

She has to take
you, then, she burst out, as if they’d been discussing M the whole time. She
doesn’t know what that place is like, she can’t. She has the money, she must.
If she won’t bring you home she can at least afford to put you somewhere nicer,
with a private room for God’s sake.

That’s not going to
happen, darling.

Why not?

Your mother, Istvan
said, and began to cough, a prolonged, hacking, convulsive series of coughs
that turned his face bright purple. It seemed to go on and on: people at the
other tables were
looking,
an old woman frowned and
put her hand over her mug of tea, as though to protect it from germs. The
waitress, who stood at the end of the short counter jawboning with the cook,
looked over at them but didn’t move. Istvan coughed some more. Ruth slid out of
her side of the booth and bent over him, touching his back hesitantly, feeling
the slight hunch there. He waved her off, so she just stood there tableside and
watched him cough and cough into a handkerchief on which the monogrammed
letters OF were just visible. Finally the coughing subsided enough for him to
drink some of the water Ruth pushed at him. He sunk and sighed.

Grandpa....

Sweetness, he said
loudly, addressing the waitress. She shuffled over.

You want some
water?

The check please,
sweetness, but don’t rush, Istvan told her. Do you want more coffee, darling?

No, Grandpa.

The waitress smiled
sourly, took the check out of her apron, scribbled something on the back (Ruth
discovered a moment later it said “Have a nice day!” and “Marie” with a heart
to dot
the i
), and put it on the table. Istvan took
out his wallet: a thick, worn, patched leather monument to the man her
grandfather had been, a man with a place in the world though not one of
consequence, bulging with business cards and shoppers’ club cards and folded
papers, very few of them green.

Let me get this.

A man doesn’t let a
woman buy him dinner, her grandfather said hoarsely. He carefully extracted a pair
wrinkled twenties and smoothed them on top of the bill.

She swept up the
bills and went to the register to pay, glancing back to see if he was watching
her, but he was staring at the cable again. She handed her credit card to the
slack-jawed sallow-faced man who served as cashier, trying to think of how she
could slip the money back to him somehow. For a moment she thought her card had
been declined, but then the cashier handed her a receipt to sign with a
gravelly and distant thank you.

When she returned
to the table her grandfather looked up at her as if startled and then smiled:
it was not a sad smile, she thought either, certainly not a happy smile. It was
a
patient
smile.

Your mother, Istvan
said, and again, more softly, your mother, looking into Ruth’s eyes so she
could see his own, brown and rheumy. She wants to help. She tried to help. She
sent me a check, even. You want to see it? Before she could answer he’d taken a
folded slip of paper from his wallet. He handed it to her and she unfolded it just
enough to make out her mother’s signature and some zeroes and the date. She
looked at him.

This is six months
old. You haven’t deposited it?

No, darling. I have
nothing, do you understand? Her only inheritance will be what I don’t take from
her. I want her to spend it on herself.
Or on you.
Look at this.

He’d extracted
another piece of paper from the wallet: it was a Polaroid, folded and curled at
the edges. He held it in his hands and slowly opened it like someone drawing
open a curtain, to reveal a picture of Ruth as a baby toddling with her hand
tucked in Istvan’s. They were walking away from the camera toward the waves—it
was a beach shot, and her grandfather looked tanned and strong in a pair of
Bermuda shorts and an unbuttoned shirt.
The setting sun
heliographed in her hair, which had been a reddish blonde until a little after
her third birthday.
She tried and failed to remember what it must have
been like to be that little girl, tiny smooth hand in his large rough one (but
his hands strike her now with their mottled smallness, their delicacy), sand
burning the soles of her feet, and who had been the photographer? She tried to
picture Papa with the camera and dismissed the image immediately: he would have
been under an umbrella somewhere with one of the thick volumes of military
history that he used to devour on vacations. It must have been M, young and
beautiful, in that two-piece suit that tied at the neck she used to wear, fully
made up with lipstick and mascara even though it was only a daytrip to the
Jersey Shore. There were books and books in the apartment filled with the
pictures she’d taken of little Elsa, mostly Polaroids—they suited her brusque
impatience in the long-ago age before digital photography, and Ruth could
easily picture her standing there waving the undeveloped photo back and forth
as though fanning herself.

Did she take that?
she
asked her grandfather.

Istvan seemed
surprised by the question: he took the photo back and looked at it. I thought
Louisa took it. She liked to take pictures. This is Jones Beach, summer of
nineteen seventy-three. I remember because it was the day your mother told me
she
and your father had gone and gotten married that day.

Ruth remembered
this story: they had lived together in common-law fashion for several years
before and after her birth. It was only when she was three or so that they had
decided to make it official with a trip to City Hall. There was another photo
somewhere of the two of them in a picture eerily similar to the one she
remembered of Istvan and Klara’s picture, except that this one was in color and
standing very small between the happy couple was Elsa Ruth, the only one in a
white dress—M had worn a shade of blue that the passing of the years had
rendered a muddy turquoise.

Were you surprised?

Her grandfather had
taken the cigar out of his pocket and was clenching it between the second and
third fingers of his right hand. Nothing your mother does
surprises
me, darling. She was always her own girl. You’re the same.

I’m not the same,
Ruth heard herself say, but her grandfather doesn’t respond, for the waitress
was bearing down on them. You can’t smoke in here, she declared. The
grandfather looked up at her with an air of injured pride.

I can’t smoke
anywhere, sweetness. I’m dying in the lungs. Probably be dead before I haul
this out the door. He gestured with the cigar at the oxygen tank crouching at
his feet like a surly pet. The waitress’ mouth opened and then closed. She
looked at Ruth as if for help, but for once in her life Ruth didn’t apologize
for anything, she just gave her a level look. The waitress retreated without
saying anything.

They’re trying to
kill me, he said to Ruth. Let’s get out of here. It’s time to go home.

Some home.

Ruth took her grandfather’s
arm and slowly, painfully, bumping the tank wheels down the short flight of
steps from the dirty glass door, they stepped out together into the humidly
teeming July evening. Step by step they made their way to the end of the block
and around the corner to where the Hopeview dankly loomed.

We have to get you
out of this place.

I’ve been in worse
places.

Yes, I know. I wish
you’d tell me more about your experiences.

There’s nothing
more to tell.

What if I came back
with a tape recorder, Grandpa? Would you tell me then? It’s history. People
ought to know.

It’s enough,
darling. It’s another life.

You don’t remember?

That’s right. He
stuck the cigar in his mouth, as though to plug it.

It was summer in
the city, sticky, infernal. She squeezed his skinny hand in her own. By autumn
she’d be sitting shiva for him in the old over-airconditioned house in New
Jersey, where polite conversation was fueled through the night by endless cups
of coffee until Ruth was nauseous in her belly and sick in her soul. He’s
buried now and I never heard his story, she thought. I never really touched
him. But she remembered then returning him to his room; he’d wanted to say
goodbye in the lobby but she had insisted on accompanying him up the antiseptic
peeling elevator to the room he shared with a frail snoring black man with
tubes in his nose, only a plastic curtain between their beds. At least she’d
turned down the roommate’s television and sat there for a while with him, and
he’d taken out a bottle of some sort of medication.

It’s for my eyes
darling,
perhaps you could help me with it. I have to sit in
the chair.

He sat in the chair
and took off his glasses and leaned back. She studied the thin gray skin of his
face, bunched at the ears and neck, the turkey neck folding loosely above the
white hairs sticking out from the top of his undershirt. His eyes were open,
looking up at the ceiling, not registering her, little tremulous orbs. What
these eyes have seen. She positioned the dropper over first one eye and the
other, just a couple of inches. He blinked tears and she touched, for a moment,
the sparse oily hair of his head and felt the warmth of his scalp.

Thank you darling.

Gently replacing his glasses on his face.
Holding for one more moment that papery hand.
I would see for you, Grandfather, if I could. Still dressed, he lay down with
difficulty in the bed, stretched out with a sigh, rested his hands on his
sternum and smiled his goodbye. At the door she looked back, saw the light from
the TV reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. His eyes were open or they were
closed. She shut the door.

The past is a succession of Russian dolls,
each smaller than the last, with finer features, fainter colors, receding into
something, many somethings, that’s too small to hold, cascading through open
fingers like water or sand.
Lucy on the swing, riding gently
back and forth, singing the words mommy and daddy to a tune of her own
invention.
The lake heaves and simmers in the autumn breeze to Ruth’s
right. To her left the other mothers are clustered by benches and strollers,
exchanging gossip and childrearing advice: they look absurdly young to Ruth,
none of them a day over thirty. Ruth’s eye is drawn to the only other woman
here standing apart: quite tall, of Slavic appearance, with reddish blonde hair
and tight designer jeans, silently assisting her silent toddler son up onto a
metal horse mounted on a spring and then, with an open-hipped and masculine
gesture, rocking him on the horse with her foot. She’s the youngest woman there
but seems somehow older than the rest: something clings to her, a preoccupation
that isn’t distraction, there’s a special slowness to her, like royalty must
have,
a
woman used to being looked at, with enviably
unlined skin that Ruth guesses is not the result of Botox. The woman notices
Ruth and simply looks back at her for a moment without changing her expression;
Ruth drops her gaze. Up, up, Lucy demands, so Ruth picks her up and perches her
on the slide, a bit nearer to the woman in jeans. She hears herself addressed
finally.

How old is yours?
says
the woman. The accent is Russian, maybe Ukrainian.

Almost two, Ruth
says, suddenly relieved to speak to someone, hoping against hope that the
subject won’t be cloth versus disposable. She remembers, with difficulty, to
ask about the woman’s son.

Two and a half, the
woman says, giving her son’s blond curly head a kind of pat that Ruth’s
familiar with, a touch that doesn’t communicate affection so much as presence.
His name is Boris. His father’s name is also Boris.

Ruth doesn’t quite
know how to respond to that. That’s Lucy, she says at last.

A very beautiful girl.
Like her mother.

Ruth feels the heat
in her cheeks. Um, thanks. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.