The Family Markowitz Read online

“It’s been just a week,” Esther says.

  “I have never been a superstitious person,” Rose tells Esther.

  “No, of course not.”

  “But anyone can see that to come like this, to an elderly man’s bedside, to come when your father is sick, and to keep going over the past. Over and over. It’s terrible. Just terrible. If she would move into a hotel at least. I’ve tried to talk to her, to hint to her—she sits and she sits. She doesn’t notice anything; she makes herself at home. She spreads out all over the study. Do you know what she does? She listens to the news on the radio all day and all night. The traffic reports. Do you know why? She loves catastrophes. This is what she does; she sits and sheds gloom.”

  Esther asks, “And how does he like it?”

  “He? He’s happy as can be.”

  “Then it’s good for him that his daughter is here.”

  “Good for him? She’s exhausting him, wearing him out.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She sits and looks at him; she talks to him. He pretends he can’t hear her. What do you think she’s doing, going through the desk like that?”

  “Rose,” Esther says, “you’re beside yourself. I’m sure it was just innocent curiosity.”

  “She was standing there with her great big hands all over Ben’s dissertation, getting her fingerprints all over it. What do you think she meant by that?”

  “Well, I think maybe she was looking for old pictures or letters Maury wrote when he was young.”

  “His pictures are in the albums in the chifforobe,” Rose says.

  “But she couldn’t know that.”

  “If she wants to see pictures, she should ask for pictures; she shouldn’t go snooping like a—a common thief.”

  “But she’s his daughter,” Esther says again.

  Rose throws up her hands. “And that’s why I don’t say anything. Even if I did say something, where would she go? She has no money for a hotel. She’s come here with no money; she’s come here to sit.”

  “I imagine she’s had a hard life,” Esther says. Rose’s eyes widen. “Because, you know, she was the child of a broken home, and she ran away when she was so young, and had to make her way.”

  “I was seven years old when I came to England, and I was all alone with no one in the world to look after me,” Rose says heatedly. “And she could never never know what I saw and what I lived through.” Esther is not sure Rose is right, but she is too courteous to say so. “My own parents sent me away,” Rose says. “In the name of safety they abandoned me.”

  “Why don’t you come here for dinner with Dorothy and Maury,” Esther says. “You’re wearing yourself out cooking.”

  “No, no.”

  “Because it’s too much for you. Listen to the way you’re talking. I’m worried about you, Rose. Look at this. I’ve got barbecued chicken. Ready to eat.”

  “He won’t eat it.”

  “So I’ll make him something else.”

  Rose must decline the invitation. Esther comes over to Rose’s apartment to try to persuade her, but Rose has to say that he is really too sick. Rose, Esther, and Dorothy stand watching Maury sleep in his chair by the window with the sun coming in. “This is my dear neighbor,” she says, introducing Esther to Dorothy.

  “Shalom. Ma shlomeich?” How are you? Esther asks Dorothy in her new and childlike Hebrew. “Shmi Esther. Eich ohevet New York?” My name is Esther. How do you like New York?

  Dorothy turns up the palm of her hand as if to say she can take it or leave it. “I did not come to see New York,” she says.

  “At garah bimoshav? Osah tapuzim baboker? Ovedet maher?” What she means to say is, It must be terribly difficult to raise tomatoes on a farm and live the life of a farmer, getting up before dawn. What comes out is: Do you live on a farm in the morning? Do you make oranges? Do you work fast? Dorothy grins. “At mivinah kitsat ivrit sheli?” Do you understand my little Hebrew?

  “Yes,” Dorothy says.

  “You know,” Esther tells Rose later, “a year ago I would never have tried to express myself in Hebrew like this.”

  Rose does not answer. She is sick at heart. It seems to her that she is completely alone. Her sons call her on the phone and ask her how she is doing. How can she explain it long-distance? “If you were here, it would be one thing,” she tells Edward when he calls from Washington.

  “We were there two weeks ago, remember? We came for winter break.”

  “But that was before all of this,” she says.

  “All of what?”

  She hears Dorothy padding around and she dares not say anything. “He is weaker,” she tells Ed. “He is far weaker than before. He can’t get up from the chair; I can barely lift him.”

  “Ma, I wish I could get on a plane right now,” Ed tells her. “But now I have to teach. Ma?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just want to hear how you feel.”

  “What is there to say?”

  “What do you mean, what is there to say?”

  She says nothing. It seems to her that there is no point in describing how she feels, when he tells her he can do nothing about it. What is the point on the long-distance telephone? He has his classes to think about, his family. Even her grandchildren are wrapped up in school; they are wrapped up in multiplication and arts and crafts. How she had loved it when they were small and spoke in breathy voices about nothing at all.

  Then her older son, Henry, calls her from Venice, California, and she is thrown from one extreme to another. From the ice into the shvitz bath, he is so wrought up and fraught with anxiety. “Mother! How are you? How are you managing there? Promise me you aren’t taking a single step outside. I heard the ice is terrible.” It has always been that way with her sons. Ed all business, and Henry just overcome, so that she must comfort him whenever he calls—or get off the phone first. He has been in therapy in California, so that he can understand himself. Fine. But now, when he calls, he tries out the therapy on her. He tells her how she feels, and when she tells him about Maury, he says with the utmost empathy, “Mother, you must be so afraid.”

  “Don’t say that,” she tells him. She feels it coming from him just as it emanates from Dorothy, this foreboding like a faint but undeniable smell, mildew in a sponge.

  The one who truly comforts her is Ed’s wife, Sarah, her darling daughter-in-law. Henry has not married, although he is now forty-five. He is living in a world of his own. But Rose does have one daughter-in-law, a beautiful girl. She says to Rose, “I don’t understand why Dorothy is still sleeping on that sofa. It’s ridiculous!”

  “What can I do?” Rose tells her.

  “She must have relatives, cousins.” Over the wire Sarah is thinking of something, coming up with a plan. Rose has always loved Sarah, because she truly thinks about others. Her own sons, for all the brilliance of their minds, do not have that quality. They take after Ben, their father.

  —

  In the dead of night Maury wakes up gasping. He is having trouble breathing. Rose props him up on pillows; she turns on all the lights. Then Dorothy bounds into the room dragging the telephone with her. She is calling an ambulance, shrieking into the phone.

  “No, no,” Maury gasps. “No ambulance. I’m fine.”

  Dorothy pays no attention to him.

  “He doesn’t want it,” Rose says. “He doesn’t need it.” If Dorothy would just leave him alone, if she would just give him a few moments of peace, he would recover, Rose is sure of it. Instead, the medics in white tear through the apartment. They lift Maury out of his own bed and strap him onto the stretcher as if he were a piece of meat.

  They are killing him jolting him through the streets, pounding at his chest. He does not even have a blanket in the bitter cold. The cold is terrible, and the noise! “Stop it! Stop it!” she screams. They are attacking him, beating his frail body. She fights them off and they just push her away roughly against the back window, icy black. The lights streaking through the night. Sh
e is not even wearing a coat. They screech to a halt and open up the doors. Climbing down, she falls to the ground; one of the orderlies saves her, and brings her in. They are racing him into the hospital.

  Dorothy did not fit in the ambulance. They did not take her. She comes later to the hospital, like a shadow, to Maury’s bedside. She stands over his bed shedding doleful tears. “Father,” she says. He lies still and pale.

  Rose cannot bear it. She opens up her purse and gives Dorothy almost all the money she has in it. She puts the bills in Dorothy’s hand. “Please,” she says, “I beg you. Go back.”

  “Go back where?” Dorothy asks.

  “Go back to where you came from. You must go; you must. Can’t you see? You’re causing him to die.”

  “What kind of nonsense?” Dorothy booms out.

  “Yes, I tell you. Are you so thick that you can’t see it? Before you came, he was eating and reading, he was walking downstairs. You’ve sapped his strength; you’ve bled him dry.”

  “And what have I done to sap him like this?” Dorothy demands. “What have I done but come to be with him, spend time and talk to my own father?”

  “And look where he is now,” Rose says. “You’ve done enough.”

  “It is not for you to decide when I come and when I go.”

  “You’ve outstayed your visa,” Rose declares, giddy with exhaustion and anger. “And if you don’t take this money and take your things and get yourself out of my apartment, I’ll—I’ll call the authorities on you.”

  “I’m a U.S. citizen,” Dorothy answers stolidly.

  Rose picks up her purse again and takes out her checkbook. She writes out a check with a trembling hand. It seems to her a matter of life and death. Maury’s life hangs in the balance. It is a check for five hundred dollars. She puts it on the broad hospital windowsill. Neither she nor Dorothy looks at it.

  For three days Maury breathes in and out, drifting in and out of consciousness. Dorothy speaks to him, but for the most part he does not reply. On the fourth day Dorothy takes the check. “Goodbye, father,” she says to Maury.

  “Goodbye, dear,” he says in his light, dry voice. Dorothy looks at Rose, triumphant.

  In the night, Rose sits by his bedside. She does not sleep for days; she cannot count how many days and nights she has gone without sleep. “Taking a little nap?” the nurses ask her. Rose opens her eyes and glares at them. She does not sleep at all. If only she could sleep. Instead, she watches Maury breathing in and out. “Oh, Mother,” Henry says to her on the phone, “how horrible to feel yourself standing on the threshold of such—such—”

  “Such what?” she asks him.

  “I—I suppose, just—it’s the unknown,” he stammers.

  She simply puts the phone down. This is no fear of the unknown, as she sits by his bedside. Henry cannot even remember that she has been through all this before, with his own father. She watches Maury, and she is stricken tenfold, because she remembers it all. Ben had lain for two weeks in his bed, and she had watched over him every minute. She had fallen sick; she had been hospitalized for days. Of course, this was many years ago, but it has never left her.

  Ben and Maury could not have been more different. Ben was serious and had no patience. He was always gloomy, always shutting himself up with his books. Sometimes he wouldn’t talk to her for days. Maury was another story altogether, always full of jokes. Even their first meeting had been something of a lark. Rose’s dear friend Millie persuaded Rose to let her put an advertisement in the Jewish papers: “Charming English widow…” That was how she met Maury. That was the truth of it.

  Were they happy together? They traveled here and they traveled there. Unlike Ben, Maury loved to see new places—even later, when his health did not permit it. He would laugh it off when he found himself in emergency rooms. They were always busy; they went to shows, went out to eat. He was careless about everything from A to Z. Drank, smoked cigars, walked outside after dark, and money just slipped through his fingers on bets, restaurants, and disreputable stocks. He would say to Rose, “Don’t worry, kid, I’ve got a little cash squirreled away.” But that wasn’t in his nature. He was a grasshopper, never thinking about a cold winter day. His one economy was that he didn’t pay taxes, and he did that because of his political convictions, as he was a staunch Socialist, very near the point of Communism. Rose could say this about her dear husband Ben: he had been an ant. She and Maury squabbled constantly.

  “Maury,” she says to him as he lies there on the white sheets, “the time you were locked out. I’ll never forgive myself.” Just a few years ago, they’d had a fight, a horrible fight about the drinking, and he stormed out without even a coat. Then, when he got outside, he saw it was too cold to take a walk, so of course he came back. But he’d walked out without his key, and he was locked out. He was standing downstairs in the outer vestibule of the lobby just pressing the buzzer when two great men came and mugged him. They dragged him out on the sidewalk. She saw it all from the window, but she could do nothing about it. She was up on the eighth floor. She screamed, she called the police, but by the time they came it was too late, the men were gone and her poor husband was left battered. It was lucky the muggers hadn’t taken knives to him, or worse. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she tells him now.

  “Forget about it,” he says. It frightens her to hear his voice. The white bed has swallowed up the rest of him.

  Those are his last words. He dies that night when the polished hospital is empty and not a single person has come to check on him for hours. No one knows he has passed away except for Rose. No one even notices. It is she who must ring the bells and rush through the corridors. “Are you determined to assume complete and utter negligence?” she bursts out to the night nurse.

  —

  The children come. Ed with dear Sarah, and Henry from California with sunglasses folded in his pocket. Ed paces around the apartment and issues orders; they must contact a rabbi, they must have a plan. Rose feels faint. He is like a general, short and compact, with iron-gray eyes, small hands and feet. He does everything impatiently—even the way he opens doors, jerking the doorknobs with a flick of the wrist. And then there is Henry, tall, heavy, and rueful, simply lingering in corners and examining the pictures on the walls, leaning in doorways, stammering, as he always does at the most inconvenient moments, tearful all the time. She can hardly bear it.

  “He did not want a rabbi,” Rose tells Ed. “He did not believe in them.”

  “Look, Ma, he was Jewish, and I think—”

  “He told me a hundred times, he wanted to be cremated and scattered,” Rose says. “Please, I don’t have the strength to argue. Please, do as he asked.”

  “Mother,” Henry says, “we will.”

  “Thank you,” she tells him.

  “But where did he want to be sc-sc-scattered?”

  That question is all she can take. “I don’t know that, why are you asking me that? I tell you, I don’t know. Why are you interrogating me like this? I haven’t slept at all for ten days. I haven’t eaten anything, not a bite. Why do you come here to drill me with questions?”

  Sarah gets her a tissue. She says, “Mother, can I make you some fresh coffee?” Rose nods, mutely.

  The coffee is wonderful. No one can make coffee like Sarah, they all agree. “But, Ma,” Ed starts in, as soon as she feels the slightest warmth, “you have got to start thinking about the future.” The future? The question is absurd. She has been to the future and back, to the hospital gates and beyond. She has seen the future. The white hospital bed, the silvery intravenous tubes. She’s seen the end. Now, he says, she should begin to think about it?

  “You must invest your money,” Henry tells her.

  “I can’t think about that now,” she wails.

  “You’re going to have to think about it,” Ed informs her, quick as always with the ultimatums. “You’ve got enough money to live comfortably, very comfortably, even after you pay the back taxes and the penalt
ies.”

  “I don’t want it,” she tells them all.

  “But, Mother”—Henry leans down over her—“you can leave the city.”

  “Give up the apartment?” she gasps. All her treasures swim before her eyes—the framed needlepoint birds above the sofa, the secretary, and the black-and-white pictures of Ed and Henry in their adorable sailor suits.

  “You can have a better apartment,” Ed says.

  “And where am I going to get seven rooms for two hundred eighty dollars a month?” she asks.

  “Maybe not rent-controlled, but in a good neighborhood,” he pleads with her. “Where you can walk outside. Where you aren’t going to get robbed if you leave the building. If you do some, um, financial planning, you could live a safer, happier life.”

  She is disgusted that he would speak in such a way just two days after Maury’s death. To talk about finances and about happiness, and to speak of them together. She stands up and clutches the back of her chair. “I don’t want a happier life,” she says with great conviction.

  —

  She won’t go to the bank, and she won’t go to Shearson. The only one she will see is Dick Gorham, because he was Maury’s dear friend. Dick was the lawyer for the union when Maury was the accountant. It was in the days when the union could not afford a C.P.A., and so they hired Maury, because he was not certified. Dick is almost eighty, but he is a lawyer and has not retired. He still keeps up his office on Eighth Avenue, a one-room walkup full of files and stacks of papers. There are yellowing newspapers, some Yiddish, and paperback books; there are plaques from the union. The walls are covered with photographs of the testimonial dinners. Dick comes from behind his desk and embraces her. He asks her how she is, but already Ed, Sarah, and Henry are crowding in behind her. There are not enough chairs. They all begin talking at once. She should get C.D.s, she should get tax-free municipal bonds. Ed is for the C.D.s and Henry for the bonds. Sarah tells her these are good because she can spend the interest and keep the capital. Rose opens her mouth, but she cannot speak; they are all talking at once. She feels she might suffocate.

  “C.D.s are good, conservative investments,” Ed says.