Too Many Men (7 page)

She had practiced what she was going to say for weeks before she told husband number one that she was leaving him. When he said, “You can’t go, I’ll lie down in front of the car,” she had said, “That’s fine. I’ll drive over you.” She had intended this conversation to be about remaining friends forever.

Ruth walked back to her room. She had an hour to shower and get dressed before leaving for the airport to pick up her father.

Chapter Three

E
dek Rothwax emerged from the customs and immigration area. He paused just outside the self-opening doors. He looked around him. A look of bewilderment and anxiety occupied Edek’s face.

Ruth had spotted the short, anxious movements Edek made with his head, the minute he had come through the door. “Dad,” she called out from behind the roped-off area she was standing in. Edek saw her. His face broke into a smile. It was a smile of relief. The sort of smile you saw on small children who thought they had lost their mothers. He ran toward her, clutching a briefcase and an overnight bag.

The sight of Edek made Ruth want to cry. She blinked back her tears.

She had missed him. Most of the time she tried not to let herself know how much she missed Edek. From the other side of the world, she took care of his phone bills, his credit card payments, his health care, and his car insurance. But she knew she wasn’t really looking after him.

If she really was a good daughter, she would be living closer to him. She wouldn’t be separated by ten thousand miles and delivering her love for him, long distance, in the form of a bit of money and some bookkeeping.

She bit her lip. She didn’t want to cry. There were two things she was determined not to do on this trip. She was not going to cry and she was not going to feel angry or annoyed with Edek.

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She looked at Edek. He was trying to overtake a woman in a wheelchair.

He looked well. He didn’t look like a man who had just flown halfway around the world. Ruth was relieved. She had dreaded seeing a decline in Edek. Dreaded the thought that he might look noticeably older. She hadn’t seen him for almost a year. She moved to the front of the crowd to get closer to him. He was still hemmed in by the wheelchair.

Edek looked up at Ruth and shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly, the woman in the wheelchair stopped. Edek saw his opportunity. He lost no time. With one nimble, surefooted movement, he propelled himself past the woman. Ruth ran up to him and hugged him.

“I’m so happy to see you, Ruthie darling,” he said. “Now that I have seen you, I feel much better.”

“What’s wrong, Dad?” Ruth said.

“Ach, the little piece where you put your feet up didn’t go up?” Edek said.

“What little piece, where?” said Ruth.

“The little piece what you put your feet on. That’s why a person flies business class, to get a little piece,” Edek said.

“Oh, you mean a footrest.”

“That’s right. A rest for the feet,” said Edek. “My feet did get no rest on this trip. I had to sit the whole way with my feet just normally on the floor and I paid for my feet to be on this rest.”

“Your seat didn’t have one?” Ruth said.

“Of course the seat had one. All the seats in business class have got such a rest. My one didn’t come up. It was stuck,” Edek said.

“Oh, no, what a drag,” Ruth said.

“That’s not the end,” said Edek. “They put me in the last row and my chair didn’t go back so much. Other people could nearly sleep in their chair. I couldn’t sleep. I did have to read a book the whole time.”

“I’ll call up and complain, tomorrow,” Ruth said.

“No, no, no,” Edek said. “I fixed it. I have to go to the airport manager for the airline, and talk to him.”

“Now?” Ruth said. “What are you going to talk to him about?”

“I’m going to talk to him,” Edek said. “You go pick up my suitcase from the luggage place.”

“Dad, I’ll talk to whoever you want me to talk to tomorrow,” Ruth said.

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“It’s nine o’clock. We should go to the hotel. You need to get some sleep.”

“I know what I need,” Edek said. “I need to talk to this manager. My suitcase is brown.”

“Brown?” Ruth said.

“You will see it,” Edek said. “I did put some yellow tape what they use for packaging on the handle and around the case. That way I can recognize it straightaway.”

“Exactly where will we meet?” said Ruth.

“It’s not such a big airport,” Edek said. “We will meet here where we are standing.”

“It’s a bit crowded here,” Ruth said. “Let’s meet by that brown bench.”

“Okay,” Edek said. “You think I won’t see you if you are not next to this brown bench. I will find you.”

“We’ll meet next to the bench,” she said. “Dad,” she said, “can you believe we’re in Poland, together?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I got to go to the manager’s office.”

“I love you, Dad,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said as he rushed off.

Ruth heard him ask a guard for directions, in Polish. The two men ges-ticulated for two minutes. The guard pointed to the right, then to the left, and then waved his arm in a motion that indicated distance. Edek thanked him with several short bows. Ruth watched Edek running across the airport. He took the quick little steps she was so familiar with. One small, swift step after another.

He always ran like this. As though everything was an emergency. He ran to the corner store, if he ran out of milk. He ran to answer the phone. But there was an enthusiasm as well as desperation in his urgency. He looked happy when he was running. If Ruth needed anything bought or picked up and shipped to her, in New York, from Australia, she called Edek. Edek bought, packed, and shipped Australian face creams and body lotion, Australian raincoats and Australian boots, for Ruth. He did administrative tasks and chores such as renewing her Australian driver’s license, and making sure that her name was still on the electoral rolls.

She called him for small things and big things. Things that had to be done were irresistible to Edek. Ruth knew that her request would be executed with ruthless efficiency. The boots or the creams or the documents

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would arrive in New York in record time. She knew that her father would drop everything to run an errand.

He used to run errands for Henia, endlessly. Henia was a New York woman Edek had known in Lódz before the war. “We should be together,”

she said to him on one of his visits to Ruth. “I knew your Rooshka and you knew my Josl. If we get together, I can talk about my Josl and you can talk about your Rooshka.”

Ruth had encouraged her father in this liaison. Edek had been so depressed since her mother died. And Henia seemed to have a liveliness and sparkle to her. “It wouldn’t be like with Mum,” Edek had said to Ruth when he finally agreed to leave Australia and move in with Henia.

“Of course it wouldn’t be the same as your marriage to Mum,” Ruth had said.

In order for Edek to stay in the United States, he needed a green card.

Edek and Henia had had to get married. Josl had left Henia a wealthy woman. Her two grown sons were not about to let the wealth be diluted.

They didn’t want this marriage. But Henia wanted Edek, and she overrode their objections. The sons prepared a thirty-page prenuptial agreement for Edek to sign. “I find that very objectionable,” Ruth had said to Edek. “I wouldn’t sign it.” “What’s the big deal?” he said, and signed the documents. The marriage lasted four years.

Henia’s seduction of Edek lost some of its gloss after the wedding.

When Henia was in full pursuit of Edek, she smiled at him and laughed at everything he said. She patted him on the hands and on the head. She blew him kisses in the street. She didn’t play her cards as well once they were married. She criticized Ruth, endlessly. “She is not married. She doesn’t have any children. What sort of life is this?” she said to Edek every time Ruth rang. Edek never answered her.

Edek and Henia had dinner regularly with her sons and their wives and children. They ate at the older son’s house every Wednesday and Sunday, and with the younger son on Tuesdays. If Ruth invited them out, Henia developed a toothache or a stomachache or a headache. “I make her ache,”

Ruth said once to Edek. “It is not so funny,” he said. He looked miserable.

“Look at her,” Henia had said to Edek, the only time she had ever invited Ruth to lunch. “She doesn’t eat.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like your food?” Edek said.

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“That’s impossible. My boys love my food,” Henia said. “Anyway, it is not your fault she is like this. Let’s forget about it.”

“My daughter is fine,” Edek had said.

“Something is not right with her,” Henia had answered. “She moves her leg under the table. The whole table claps and bumps.”

“Maybe you don’t make her so comfortable?” Edek said.

“She is a snob,” said Henia. “And always in black. Like a widow.”

“An expensive widow,” Edek said. “You know how much she does pay for those black things?” As soon as Edek had said this, he had regretted it.

He knew he had unwittingly given Henia another round of ammunition to fire at Ruth.

Henia’s sons came around together one Friday afternoon. They had another series of documents for Edek to sign. More papers to safeguard Henia’s property.

“We’ve noticed that our mother’s phone bills are a hundred dollars a month more than they used to be before you arrived,” the elder son said.

“And we feel you should pay for this.”

“I feel that I should, too,” Edek said, “which is why I do. I do pay all the phone bill and all the electricity and all the food bills straight into your mother’s account.”

“Does he?” The elder son asked his mother.

“Yes,” said Henia.

“Don’t they notice how much better off Henia is with you?” Ruth asked Edek when he told her about the incident. “You do everything for her. You shop, you wash the dishes. Henia’s got a very cushy life.”

“I call them the waiters,” Edek said to Ruth. “They are waiting for their mother to die.”

When the boys came back for a third series of documents to be signed, Edek patiently signed each page. Henia never said anything during these signing sessions. As the older son was leaving, he leaned over to Edek.

“You’re not giving your daughter any of our money are you?” he said. Edek was stunned. He looked at Henia. Henia remained silent. Edek decided he had had enough. He left. He went back to Australia.

He felt bad about leaving Henia. As though he had abandoned her.

“She was a cow,” Ruth said. “She abandoned you when she didn’t speak up for you.” Ruth tried to persuade Edek to stay in New York. But he didn’t

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want to stay in New York. He didn’t want to bump into Henia or her friends. “You can live in New York and never come across Henia or any of her friends,” Ruth said. “It’s a very big city. Anyway, they all live in Queens.

You can just never go to Queens.” But Edek was adamant. He had to go.

He booked his ticket to Australia and left.

Edek had been unhappy and out of sorts for most of his first year back in Australia. But slowly he had stopped blaming himself for the breakdown of the marriage. And slowly he started playing cards again, and eating chocolate, and running errands.

Edek didn’t look eighty-one. His silver hair was thick and vigorous; his face was hardly lined. Ruth felt lucky to have a father in such good shape.

She didn’t want to lose him. She had reeled for too long after the death of her mother. When she flew anywhere, she still found herself looking out of the window of the plane, wondering if at thirty-three thousand feet up in the air she was any closer to her mother. Wondering if there could possibly be a heaven, and if there was, was this where her mother now lived. She knew it was a stupid thought. There was no heaven. And there was no life after death. There was nothing after death. “Mum’s spirit still lives on in me,” she had once said to Edek. “I think about her all the time. I cook the food that she used to cook. I use the face creams she used. I even lie in the sun like she used to, and understand why she loved it so much.”

“There is no spirit,” he said. “Mum is dead. Nothing has changed.”

The baggage collection area was crowded. The luggage from Edek’s flight was already arriving. Ruth saw Edek’s suitcase straightaway. Six inches of bright yellow masking tape was wound around the middle of the case. She lifted the suitcase off the carousel. It was very light. She hoped Edek had packed enough clothes.

She had noticed that he was wearing the navy knit top she had bought him. Her mother used to choose all of her father’s clothes. Rooshka had good taste. She bought finely woven 100 percent cotton shirts and simple well-cut trousers for Edek. Rooshka made sure that he always had one good-quality suit for everyday occasions, and one suit with a bit more panache for going out at night.

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clothing until they disintegrated. He never noticed what he was wearing.

When Rooshka went on her annual two-week winter vacation to Surfers Paradise, Edek mixed and matched his clothes with an abandon that disturbed Ruth and drove her mother mad. “You can’t wear sandals with socks here in Australia,” was the first thing Rooshka said to him when he picked her up at the airport, after her very last vacation in the sun. “It is not Poland,” she said. “It is comfortable for my feet,” Edek said. But the minute they got home, he had changed his shoes.

As soon as there was a stain or a smudge on anything Edek was wearing, Rooshka would whip the garment off Edek and put it in the laundry. There, it would soak in bleach or salt or whatever Rooshka thought would best remove the offending mark. Edek was resigned to this. He would take off the socks Rooshka thought he had worn for too long, or the trousers with the cuff that contained a spot of mud. He understood that Rooshka had had too many smudges and stains in her life. Edek would change whatever he had on, as many times a day as Rooshka wanted him to, if it made Rooshka happy. He loved her dearly. He saw her, until the day she died, as the beautiful young girl he had pursued, and won, in Lódz. Ruth walked back to where she had arranged to meet Edek. A couple with two teenage children were sitting on the bench. Ruth put down the suitcase and stood next to them. The son, a sallow-skinned, sullen-looking youth, stared fixedly out into the distance, as though by removing his gaze he had removed himself from this family picture. The girl looked down at her lap.