As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (17 page)

She’d left her Singer, her mannequin, and her sewing basket in her New Haven apartment. With the intention to do nothing for the time being but take care of her sister, and of us, she’d packed only her clothes. But my mother had a sewing basket too, and in no time Bec was roaming the house, looking for seams to adjust, buttons to tighten, or hems to let down. Not that she didn’t have plenty to do; there was my mother, who, throughout that fall, as the leaves turned and fell from the trees, was still barely functioning. After nearly sleepless nights she would finally fall into a slumber in the early morning, which put her waking time at about noon. Bec, then, was the one to rise early, make breakfast, see us off. Howard had planned to start college that fall at Wesleyan in Middletown, but he’d taken a year’s deferment, and he joined my father each morning at minyan and then spent the day with him at the store. I was off to eighth grade. When I’d return from school in the late afternoon it was Bec, not my mother, who greeted me, held me, and made me cups of hot, sweet tea. I would often find my mother sitting by herself in the living room, staring mindlessly out a window. Bec brought her cups of tea as well, and crackers. And she’d sit with her, as the late-afternoon light waned, and talk to her, though of nothing important. Finally Bec would rise and begin dinner preparations. When my father and Howard walked into the house each evening they were welcomed by the smells of roasting meats, and the tunes sounding from the kitchen radio, popular music Bec liked, and that I, her helper, was growing fond of too. Except for the woman sitting in the dark in the living room it was, at least on the surface, a nearly normal scene.

So Bec was busy, but she was restless, too, and the mending was one way to keep her hands active at her beloved trade, her mind occupied, her heart beating when so many times she must have felt like it was soon to give out.

And there were meetings with Tyler. In the mornings she could practically have had him over to the house, what with all of us gone and my mother sleeping, but she never even considered that, disrespectful as she thought it to be. Instead, she met him at a nearby corner of Hubbard Street, and they’d go from there to a diner on Route 66 on the outskirts of Middletown. The first time there they sat on the same side of a cozy booth, his arm never leaving her shoulders. She wasn’t crying anymore but she still wasn’t saying much. How could she put into words everything that had changed? She mentioned the cups of tea, the nibbles of crackers, the late-afternoon light fading in the living room. She listed the meals she’d made: meatloaf, pot roast, baked chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed cabbage, broiled steak, and on Sundays, always, because she was tired, because it was easy, and because Mort liked it that way, franks and beans.

“Mrs. Coventry came by to tell us about the party,” Tyler reported. “It was a nice party,” he said, squeezing Bec’s shoulders and kissing her head. “That’s what she told us. Her husband was very happy.”

“Very, very,” Bec replied, her voice but a whisper. “That’s how she would have put it.”

“Yes,” Tyler said, his tone gentle but eager. “Exactly, Bec. That’s just what she said.”

They resumed their silence. He ordered egg salad for them both. When they’d finished their meal, she said, “Ada needs me,” and though they hadn’t had coffee yet, he promptly paid and took her home.

For the next month they saw each other every week for a meal at the same diner, where they sat until Bec declared, “Ada needs me.” By mid-November, though, the pace of their meetings slackened and he began to drive to Middletown every other week, then every third week. During January of 1949 he hired another dressmaker, a woman named Mildred Butler, but he assured Bec that this was only until she was ready to return.

“I understand. You have to,” she said, knowing the truth of it.

By February he stopped asking her when she was coming back. Why would he? she figured. Her answer, after all, was always the same: “Ada needs me.” True as that was, there was another reason she kept away, one she couldn’t tell him: that she didn’t deserve him, that she didn’t deserve happiness, that given what had happened she didn’t deserve anything good at all.

In the last weeks of winter Ada began to rise earlier and to help make breakfast for the family. Soon she was doing some cleaning: a little washing, a little ironing. Once or twice as the earliest days of spring emerged she spontaneously sang along to a tune from the radio Bec played as she cooked. Ada especially liked Doris Day’s “It’s Magic” and Mel Tormé’s “Blue Moon,” just out. During those long sits she still took in the living room she began to flip on the light. “Thank you,” she once said to Bec on a rainy evening, the third week of April. The two were seated on the living room couch, staring into an unlit fireplace. “I think you’ve saved my life.” Bec shook her head, continued her staring. When Ada grabbed her hand to give it a squeeze, Bec didn’t squeeze back.

As spring set in the crocuses bloomed, as did tulips and irises, all growing wild in a scattering around our Middletown home. My mother had never cultivated a garden but a former owner apparently had, the intrepid remains of which popped up, blooming that year with a conspicuous audacity, or so it seemed, given our heavy hearts. Howard was still living at home and working at the store. There was talk of us all going back to Woodmont for the summer, just like always. One day in late May I heard Bec on the phone with Vivie, discussing it.

“You have to come,” she implored Vivie.

When I asked Bec what Vivie had said, she only shook her head. “Can’t. That’s what she said.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We do what your mother wants,” Bec answered. “It’s her decision.”

What Ada wanted turned out to be a return to the cottage. “Yes, I think so,” she said feebly one dinnertime in early June.

“I can’t be there, you know,” Mort told her, sounding almost indifferent to what she did or didn’t do.

“It never mattered before,” Ada answered with the same indifference. “Why should it matter now?”

“Of course it mattered before,” Mort snapped. He couldn’t hide his contempt as he looked her way.

“Stop blaming her!” Bec urged, leaning toward Mort, almost grabbing at him. “It’s not her fault. For God’s sake, you have to stop with that.” She turned to me. “Molly, don’t listen,” she ordered, as if such a thing were possible.

My father’s head dropped to his chest. A long moment of silence passed. “Like I said. I can’t be there.” He seemed less angry than matter-of-fact. In the same detached tone he added, “Ada, I’m not blaming you.”

But he’d thought it for so long that his words that night did little to melt the block of ice, solid and ever-widening, that lay between my parents. And two weeks later, when Mort drove us back to Woodmont, he said his good-byes only minutes after he’d dropped us off.

Howard hadn’t come. He’d feel better, he said the night before, looking more toward Mort than anyone else, if he stayed in Middletown and kept working. And so it was only my mother, Bec, and I who moved into the cottage that summer of 1949. That year for the first time ever Bec was the one to open the door and step inside first, though her steps were timid, tentative ones, not the impatient, joyful strides of my mother in years past. Bec flicked on a light or two then went to her sunporch, where she cranked open the windows. She lifted the sheet from the dining room table and carried it out to the front porch to shake the dust free. My mother remained on the porch, letting the dust fall around her, holding her breath, seemingly afraid to go inside until Bec linked arms with her, tugged, and said gently, “It’s no worse here than in Middletown. Ada, come on now. I’m here. Molly’s here. It’ll be all right.”

That summer there was no more Friday claustrophobia for Bec, no more meetings, secret or otherwise, with Tyler McMannus. They hadn’t seen each other since late February. Nor were there the weekend meetings of Ada and Mort Leibritsky. My father stayed away all summer, which meant we never had to get the house especially clean on Fridays, never had to prepare a big Shabbos meal. On Friday evenings we three still lit the candles, each of us circling our hands in unison close to the flames, each of us quietly murmuring the old prayers. We still took a piece of challah and chewed it, still drank a sip of wine. But then we’d take our plates—some reheated food from the week’s cooking—out to the front porch of the cottage, where we’d sit in the painted metal chairs and eat off our laps. It was better out there, my mother thought, because of the possibility of a nice evening breeze.

That summer the dunking was the only thing that didn’t change dramatically from summers past, other than the fact that it was me rather than Vivie who stood at the shore’s edge with my mother, watching as Bec dove in first. Once my mother and I managed to get wet, we three would spend a moment floating on our backs, then we’d sink down again under the salty water before we’d rise from it, not so much refreshed as chilled, alert, aware that what faced us was yet another difficult but passable day.

Over the summer weeks, Mark Fishbaum became my friend. It was so odd, so very lonely, to be at the beach without Davy, and without Nina, Howard, Vivie, Leo, and my father. I didn’t like sleeping in the double bed of what should have been Vivie and Leo’s room. But sleeping on the sofa bed without Nina would have been worse, and to even think of sleeping in Howard and Davy’s room was out of the question. During the days, besides following my mother and Bec about, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, and in the evenings, when the kids my age gathered at the beach or near Sloppy Joe’s, I felt lost without Nina beside me. And so when Mark Fishbaum wandered over, looking for Howard and not finding him with us, but lingering at our cottage nonetheless, I began to linger with him. We were two lost souls, it seemed, but in each other’s company just a little less so. I sighed often that summer, offering up to the winds of Long Island Sound any number of melancholy exhalations, and Mark Fishbaum responded to these inadvertent but steady bursts with the kindest nods and pats on the shoulder. “Is he your boyfriend?” Ada, come August, wanted to know. But that summer, with the nearly six years between us a veritable chasm, and with Mark’s identity still as Howard’s friend and mine only by default, there was no romance between us. But that he was increasingly important to me was clear enough. As the summer progressed the most common answer to my mother’s invariable question “Molly, where you going?” was “Going to find Mark.” And when I did find him, or when he found me, I felt a rush of relief. In an effort to make me smile he performed handstands in the sand, even walking at times with his long feet wriggling in the air. Soon I began to accompany him upside down, spinning cartwheels around him, transfixed as I did with the sight of the world turned topsy-turvy: a moving, shimmering silver sky and an earth, seemingly so fragile, of cerulean blue.

In this way, with help from Mark, the summer passed, and in late August we returned to Middletown. Only then did I understand how calming the summer had been for my mother, how, over its warm months, days spent sitting on the front porch and by the shore’s edge, or walking the few streets from Bagel Beach to Anchor Beach and back again, a kind of useful resignation had set in for Ada that Davy was gone, that that was just the way it was. She’d returned with this resignation, which took the form of an inner stillness she hadn’t shown since the first weeks of the summer before. She wasn’t happy; that would have been too easy. But she was living again, rising early, taking an interest in managing her home, sometimes smiling sadly at my father, and occasionally—I saw this every once in a while—she’d take a moment to herself for something long ago and almost forgotten: a deep breath.

Bec was still living with us—as much because she had no place to go as because my mother still needed her help, functioned so much better with her sister around. That September, with my father’s and Howard’s assistance, Bec emptied her New Haven apartment, bringing her Singer and mannequin to her room in our house. What furniture she had in New Haven she stored in our basement. With Bec now settled in our home, and my mother on her feet again, a kind of routine set in. That fall, in the late afternoons before dinner, Bec and Ada took to playing cards, rounds of rummy that I sometimes joined in on as well. They’d play at the kitchen table with the radio close by so that as they arranged their cards and strategized their next move, they often did so humming quietly in unison.

Bec and Ada were each other’s constant companions, and in her new role—this unwanted afterlife we’d all been thrust into—suddenly, oddly, Bec wasn’t itching to get back to sewing. Though she had her Singer with her again, it sat idle beside the dresser in what we now thought of as her room as much as Davy’s. The mannequin beside it, Eleanor Roosevelt, as Tyler had once in happier times christened her, remained relentlessly bare.

In November, as Veterans Day approached, Bec was surprised to read in the afternoon newspaper that Tyler McMannus, newly elected to the New Haven Board of Alders, was soon to receive an honorary service medal from the city. The award was part of the city’s efforts to raise the profile of its aldermen. Bec read the article three times. She clipped it, finally, and stuck it inside the top drawer of Davy’s old dresser, beside her stockings and brassieres. After that Tyler was on her mind again, though these were dangerous thoughts, she knew, stabbing her heart as they did. Unwittingly, she imagined herself sitting in the audience at the awards ceremony in New Haven, clapping loudly despite her properly gloved hands as they pinned a medal on his uniformed chest or handed him an officially sealed document or did whatever they were going to do to honor him. She imagined him standing on a stage, looking down, unwilling to take credit for anything that happened during that “pitiless project,” as he’d always put it, of war.

“You were defending my people,” she once told him, when, postwar, the news fully emerged of the death camps, with their starvation and gas.