Saving Grace (43 page)

Voices came at him; faces blurred. Now and then one stood out. Lily’s friend Margo, smart in black, makeup streaked with tears. His loyal secretary Maggie, weeping. “They say God works in mysterious ways, but this is incomprehensible.” That funny little man who’d come to the house several times to visit when she was sick, Lily’s hairdresser, pressed his hand and said, “I loved her, Mr. Fleishman.” All the while Christopher Leeds hovered nearby, a
goyishe
guardian angel. Old allies from various tenant associations came, the staff of the Democratic headquarters, political associates who hadn’t spoken to him in months. Our prayers are with you, they told him. When he looked around the room, part of him took pleasure in the diversity of people who had gathered to see her off. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites, working people, socialites, and politicians: their only common denominator was Lily.

The mayor’s entrance was heralded by a commotion at the door. Trailed by his entourage, he strode up to Jonathan, clasped his hand. “Jonathan, my deepest condolences. Lily was a mensch, as good on the inside as she was lovely on the outside.”

“Thank you for coming,” Jonathan said with all his heart, for it seemed to him that whatever harm his colleagues had done him mattered far less than their goodness in coming now.

The mayor shook his head. “How many times have I sat at her table?”

Certain truancies were also felt. Jonathan understood full well why Michael and Lucas couldn’t and shouldn’t have attended; yet their absence caused phantom pain, like the missing limb of an amputee.

A small elderly man hurried in, wiping rain from his glasses with a large white handkerchief. With a jolt, Jonathan recognized the rabbi who’d presided over the reading of Job. “What are you doing here?” he said, not rudely, but with surprise.

The rabbi stood close to him. “Ever since our talk, I’ve felt guilty. When I heard about your wife, she should rest in peace, I knew I had to come.”

“Why should you feel guilty? You didn’t do anything.”

“That’s why. You came to me at a time of terrible trouble, in agony of the soul, and me, what did I do? Like a dumbkopf, like Job’s
ferkakte
comforters, instead of consoling, I lectured. You asked a question and I pretended to have an answer, when the truth is, I have none. Forgive me, Mr. Fleishman,” the old man said, “for I, too, am bewildered by God’s ways.”

The mourners were ushered into the chapel. When all were seated, the doors opened again for the family. Jonathan led Gracie in on his arm; Paul followed with Clara. Like a wedding procession, Jonathan thought, except that his bride lay in the coffin beneath the ark. Gracie sat on one side of him, Paul on the other, with Clara beside Paul. His son and mother sobbed throughout the service, but Gracie sat dry-eyed. She had not wept since Jonathan broke the news, and her face was like a gathering storm, ponderous and dark with unshed tears.

He heard nothing of the eulogy. Instead the little rabbi’s words played through his head, over and over, until they shed their mantle of customary meaning and were revealed in their nakedness. I too am bewildered. Bewildered: lost in a wilderness, as Gracie had been, as he was now, stranded without moral compass in a world governed only by the inscrutable laws of nature.

When the Lord smote Job, he left him his wife. Jonathan’s wife had been taken. Jonathan no longer asked, “Why me?” Instead he asked, “Why not me?” For him, at this stage of his career, dying would have made perfect sense; for Lily it made none. Her death was not only unjust but also offensively arbitrary, as if whatever god was hurling thunderbolts at Jonathan had struck Lily by mistake.

Now and then portions of the service reached his ears. He tried not to listen. If they spoke of God’s mercy, he would have to rise and bear witness: “Here before you stands a living example of God’s bountiful mercy.”

Nevertheless, when the rabbi recited the Kaddish, Jonathan stood and repeated after him the Hebrew prayer for the dead; and though he could not have said what they meant, the ancient words comforted him the way a man, wandering alone in a desert, is heartened by signs of other men’s passage.

A cold, steady rain accompanied them to the cemetery. Standing by the open grave, Jonathan felt his composure start to crumble. He lowered his umbrella and let the rain sluice down on him. The chill discomfort alleviated a little the pressure within.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Lily lay in her grave. When the rabbi motioned him forward to throw soil on the coffin, Jonathan turned and walked away.

He was ashamed. He was not so lost to the world but that he wanted to behave with dignity; yet how could he do it to her? Only yesterday she had died, and already they were burying her. It seemed hasty to him. What if Lily relented, what if she decided to come back?

Gracie came after him, took his arm, and led him back to the graveside. She pressed a fistful of wet earth into his hand and said softly, so only he could hear, “It’s over, Daddy. Say good-bye.”

After the burial, everyone hurried to get out of the rain. Jonathan noticed a man standing some distance away, his head averted, as if he were visiting another grave. A rain hat concealed his face, but Jonathan would have known that rangy, overlong body anywhere. He said he wanted time alone. When his family had gone, he walked over to the man and said, “Lucas.”

Lucas Rayburn lifted his head. “Didn’t mean to intrude. Just wanted to pay my respects.”

“You could have come through the front door.”

“I didn’t think you’d appreciate that.”

“You didn’t think it would be politic.”

“It wasn’t
politic
to come at all,” Lucas said with a shrug. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

Jonathan nodded. Rain dripped down his face into his coat collar. Presently he said, “Michael didn’t.”

“Would you have wanted him to?” When Jonathan did not reply, Lucas continued: “I’m sorry about Lily. I know she must have hated my guts at the end. But I never stopped caring for her.”

“I know.”

“I always said marrying Lily was the smartest move you ever made, my friend.”

The words slipped out—my friend. Jonathan heard them but knew they meant nothing.

“Twenty-five years with a woman like her,” Lucas said, “even ending the way it did, I figure you’re still ahead of the game.”

“I guess,” said Jonathan. He stood like a lost soul, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.
 

Lucas looked at him with pity. “You’d better get back. They’ll be waiting on you.”

Jonathan nodded but lingered. “Decent of you to come,” he said gruffly.

“Will you give me your hand?” Lucas asked, extending his.

“Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.”

Lucas grimaced, reached out, and pulled Jonathan to him. He spoke in Jonathan’s ear. “I don’t want to see you rot in jail. Take the deal, old friend.”

* * *

The many rituals attached to death had seemed from the outside sterile and insignificant to Jonathan; but now he found them comforting. Expressions of an interior bereftness, they served to align the outer world with the inner.

The lapel of his jacket was torn, signifying mourning. Jonathan and Paul let their beards grow. Mirrors were covered, and the family sat on benches or stools instead of chairs. Just as narcotics after surgery knock out the body while it recovers from the insult, shiva acts upon the traumatized mind. Who can think with a houseful of visitors yammering away? People have needs they carry with them, as the more self-sufficient snail transports its house. They must be fed, listened to, comforted. His mother was beside herself with grief. She tried to hide it from the children, but when she was with Jonathan, she couldn’t stop crying. “Why Lily?” she asked a thousand times. “Why Lily?”

For Jonathan, the hardest part of each day came after the visitors departed and what remained of the family was left to its own devices. Then Lily was always almost there, just missing. At supper their conversations were spaced for her; the resultant silences were like an empty chair. The house felt much too large, but if he sought refuge in Lily’s neglected garden he was sure to sense her lingering presence, just out of sight. She was in his mother’s sighs, his children’s forlorn looks.

He was conscious of his children’s misery but sensed that it excluded him. Grace continued to behave with ominous propriety. At the house as at the funeral, she greeted their visitors with calm dignity, courteous even to those former friends who had put aside expediency just long enough to call. With Jonathan she was solicitous, but quiet and thoughtful. She did not speak of her mother.

Tamar phoned frequently. In the absence of the hospital’s medical director, she could not leave the country; she apologized to Jonathan for missing the funeral with such heartfelt regret that he grew aware for the first time of his own callous behavior when her husband died. Several times, she had long talks with Gracie, who closed herself in her room and emerged afterward with reddened eyes. But Jonathan never saw her cry.

Paul avoided his father, spending most of his time alone in his room. Thus Jonathan saw that his children, too, were slipping away.

At night the house was silent but for the hum of its systems. Jonathan wandered like an unquiet ghost from his bedroom to his study to the library. His ears rang with Lily’s stubborn, baffling silence; was she angry with him?

The library was cold. He built a fire. Without thinking what he was doing, he brought out their wedding album, sat on the rug before the fire, and opened to a picture of his bride. Lily stood beneath a flower-draped chupah in the garden of the Cloisters, wearing a white off-the-shoulder peasant dress. A garland of lilies crowned her hair, which flowed like a golden waterfall about her bare shoulders. She was barely older than their daughter.

On the facing page was a shot of himself flanked by Michael and Lucas. At first he laughed aloud at his youthful self, all hair and beard and dark, hungry eyes. What a contrast to the lovely Lily. He’d wondered then, and still did, why she’d chosen him to love. But when his eyes fell upon his two best friends, dressed for the occasion in rented tuxedo jackets and jeans, mugging for the camera, his laughter gave way to a tidal desolation.

He shut the album and, staring at the fire, fell into a kind of waking dream in which a myriad of flickering images from the past appeared and disappeared. These did not reach back to his earliest years, for Jonathan had been one of those impatient souls who spent their childhood preparing to leave it behind, but rather began with his emergence into manhood, the dawning politicization that was inextricable from his friendship with Michael and Lucas. In the wash of memory, their lives were a medieval tapestry and Lily a golden thread woven through the cloth. She was his lover but their collective lady, their anima, their revolutionary muse. All for one and one for all; they played at war amidst the ivied towers of the university, and their victories, which had seemed so permanent but proved so ephemeral, they laid at Lily’s sandaled feet.

Time rushed by, stuttering now and then, freezing for an instant, then eliding whole decades. Images: Lily naked in his sleeping bag in the back of Rosinante. Martin Luther King’s face close to his; the whisper of his breath, the extraordinary energy of his presence. Paul’s birth, and Gracie’s: a tiny fist thrust out of the womb. Lily in her first garden, a patch of ground behind their Martindale house, laughing up at him with mud on her cheek. Moving vans; a picture rescued from the garbage. The three Musketeers together again, side by side on a dais—this time, their tuxedos had matching pants. The images turned discordant. Three stooges standing admidst urinals, fumbling an envelope from hand to hand. Lily in her rocking chair, staring up at him. Yellow roses upended in a trashcan. Michael in the locker room, tearing the leech from his chest, crushing it underfoot. Lucas’ presence in the graveyard; Michael’s absence. How had they come to this? There was no pivotal point, no sudden turn. One thing led to another, and options closed behind. Do the right thing, Lily had said, enigmatic as the sphinx. There had been a time when he knew what the right thing was.

The door opened. Gracie came in and settled cross-legged on the rug. As if they were becalmed in the night, Jonathan looked at his daughter and perceived with muted wonder that she had become a woman, with a woman’s listening face. The kind of woman men would tell their secrets to; and she would hear what they said and what they didn’t, and weigh these things on her secret scales; and they would never know what she thought unless she chose to tell them. Such a strange, knowing look on a face still soft with childhood filled Jonathan with a sense of mournful wonder. Her precocity was a reproach to him. He had tried to build a wall around his children, but it collapsed about their heads. A smaller wall would have kept them safer.... But what good is wisdom when it always comes too late?

Somewhere, a clock struck three. Jonathan said, as if continuing a conversation, “I used to think you were making a mountain out of a molehill, but lately I’ve realized it’s the molehills that count. You were right, Gracie. I never should have sold that house.”

32

“ARROGANCE,” BUSCAGLIO SAID, “GREED AND SELF-DECEPTION. It began with arrogance, with a man who held himself above the law because he believed that he alone knew what was right for the people of this city, and he alone could accomplish it, by hook or crook or whatever means it took. Benign extortion, tit for tat: a favorable lease in exchange for a day-care center, a city contract in return for a commitment to minority hiring. It worked. And this powerful man, Jonathan Fleishman, saw that it worked; he saw how much people were willing to pay for the favors he could dispense, until there came a time—I don’t pretend to know precisely when, but I suspect it came gradually, little by little—when the nature of his demands changed.