As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (25 page)

A
year after Davy died Howard began classes at Wesleyan University. And he continued, by choice, working at the store. It was clear to us all that he was willfully exhausting himself. Sometimes I would come into the store at six in the evening and there he’d be, helping his umpteenth customer of the day, bending low as he measured a foot for a shoe size, or reaching for some obscure appliance, or selecting yet another pair of women’s gloves for a fussy customer. He had a kind of walk when he was tired, a kind of shuffle, just like our grandfather Zelik Leibritsky, who’d acquired his signature gait when he was young, peddling still from a cart, and could barely stand up after a long day of sharpening knives, selling pots and pans, and enduring the weather. When I saw Howard like that I could see him the day Davy was hit by Sal’s truck, after Howard had fallen from the Sailfish into the water. Hearing our mother’s screams he chose not to get back on the boat after he had fallen overboard, believing that swimming the eighty yards to shore would be faster. Then he ran another thirty yards up the beach and to us, on the street. When he got to the accident scene he fell to his knees with anguish and fatigue; still, he reached under Sal’s truck to touch our brother’s head. He always felt that if he’d arrived two or three minutes earlier things would have been different. As it was he stayed there, prone, sobbing though he didn’t realize it, all the while straining to comfort Davy, until a policeman dragged him away.

He didn’t date Megan O’Donnell for long. He dropped her as soon as Davy died. Howard and Megan were young, of course, and the duration of their relationship might very well have been circumscribed regardless of the summer’s tragic events. Then again, they might have persevered inasmuch as Howard’s connection to Megan was drawing forth qualities from within him he didn’t know he had: a will of his own, greater sensitivity. As it turned out, though, he saw her only once after Davy’s death, on a day trip to Woodmont from Middletown a week or so after Davy’s funeral, a trip to gather some odds and ends left behind, and he was as cold to her, as rejecting, as Mark Fishbaum, Steve Gutterman, and Jack Epstein had been at Sloppy Joe’s.

“Howard?” she said. “Howard?” She’d come to the cottage and stood on the porch, holding a filled cookie tin, which, because he wouldn’t take it from her hands, she’d finally thrust his way, forcing him to reflexively grab it. The moment before she’d told him how very sorry she was about the loss of his little brother. She’d said the words carefully, as if she’d rehearsed them, but her voice trembled with the gravity of the message nonetheless. She’d bitten her lower lip upon their utterance but otherwise stood there, more or less composed, staring at him with a concerned, compassionate expression. But in the face of his silence—a thick fog of silence that encased him, held him captive—her words became anxious, even frantic. “Howard? Howard, it’s me,” she pleaded at last, the same thing, though she didn’t realize it, that Howard had said to Mark Fishbaum.

If he could have he would have said to her, “That was self-indulgent, wasn’t it?” speaking of their time together, the walks, the talking, the many kisses. “I was a stupid jerk,” he would have said, not meaning to hurt her, but rather to inform her of what had become to him in the last week such an obvious, even glaring truth. But he was too choked up to speak. Cookie tin in hand, he nodded, went back inside.

She wrote him several letters that fall from her home in Cheshire to his in Middletown. Because of the Cheshire return address I knew they were from Megan, though she didn’t write her name on the envelopes. She must have known that our parents would have disapproved of her presence, even by mail, in our home. Howard opened the letters, read them, and stacked them neatly on his bedroom dresser. Once, a silent evening in early October, I spotted him in his room, sitting on his bed, a pad and pencil on his lap, the pile of letters beside him. But he wasn’t writing anything down. He was simply staring ahead at his bedroom wall, his gaze unfocused as if he were dreaming. Then he blinked awake. Upon doing so he ripped free the top page of the pad—apparently he’d begun a letter—crumpled the paper, and hurled it into the wastebasket.

“Take them, Molly,” he called to me, rising. From his doorway he handed me the letters.

“What for?” I asked. I didn’t dare take them; they seemed too personal.

“Hide them from me,” he said.

“You mean throw them out?” I still wouldn’t reach for them.

“No. I mean hide them. But don’t throw them out, okay?” He thrust them at me and reluctantly I took them, placing them in a corner of my closet. When I asked him some months later if he wanted them back he looked at me surprised, as if he’d entirely forgotten them. Megan hadn’t written another one. He hadn’t heard from her in five months.

He sighed. The five months had changed him; he was quieter, more considerate in some ways—he rarely barked at me, for example—but he was also more tense, his forehead almost always furrowed in worry. He was older, it seemed, by a whole five years. “Just throw them out,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you?” I asked.

“Look, it’s just better if I don’t see them again,” he said, and I nodded, though secretly I wished he would take them back, as if in doing so he’d return in some small way to the person he’d refused to be since Davy’s death: sarcastic, bossy, but so much more alive. But Howard was resolute, and that night after dinner I pulled the letters from my closet and dropped them into our kitchen garbage, which got taken out each night. I thought it was best that, if this was the way Howard wanted it, the letters go quickly into oblivion rather than linger in some upstairs wastebasket. And in this way I was just a tiny bit complicit in how Howard freed himself of Megan O’Donnell for all time, except, of course, what he managed to carry with him in his memory. Whatever that was, though, he chose never to speak of it.

The first year following Davy’s death there was a long period in which Howard, Nina, and I stayed apart: Nina (when not at school) in her Middletown home five miles from ours, Howard (with his deferral from entering college) at work with my father at the store, and me (when not at school) at home, standing alongside either my mother or Bec in the kitchen, or sitting next to one or both of them in what was mostly in those days a darkened living room.

But something changed that second year when Howard returned to his studies. We three had each stayed so close to our respective parents in the wake of things, had practically attached ourselves to them like we’d been when we were so much younger, only this new attachment, at least Howard’s and mine, was less for our sake than for them. But with the start of college, Howard was the first of us to gain just a little of his own life back.

It was the beginning of his sophomore year in the fall of 1950, which coincided with Nina’s last year of high school, when the three of us began to meet together, about once weekly, on the Wesleyan campus. Nina, who could drive by then and was encouraged to do so by Leo, who gave her access to his car, a more rickety Dodge than ours, would initiate these meetings by driving to my home to get me. From there we’d leave the Dodge behind and leisurely walk the remaining distance toward High Street, past a lineup of houses, to where the open green of the campus began. We’d climb the hill of the green toward a series of imposing brownstone buildings at the heart of the campus, where we’d settle ourselves next to Judd Hall, where science classes were held. “I’d like to go here,” Nina said on more than one of those afternoons, leaning her back against the brownstone wall as she did, but of course that was impossible. The place was for boys only.

Howard would have gotten the message that we’d be coming from me. Nina would have telephoned me the night before, not to talk in a general way, but to set the time and to have the message passed on to Howard the next morning at breakfast that we’d meet him, if he wanted to meet us. The tension between Howard and Nina was still there, an alive thing, and all the more so with its key place in the unfolding of events the day of Davy’s accident, and it was easier if I served as a go-between. But in fact they wanted, even needed, to see each other—to try to mend what had finally broken between them. The whole matter, then, was an attempt at healing, I suppose, all that near-silent sitting we did on the grass beside Judd Hall, or sometimes when it snowed on the worn, iced-over steps of the place. When Nina asked to see him, Howard never said no.

Sometime during the course of that year Howard took up smoking cigarettes. And sometime during that year he began passing his lit cigarette—always a Lucky Strike—to Nina, who would take it, hold it between her fingers, watch the smoke rise from its lit end and curl into the air, and finally take a hasty drag on it before handing it over to Howard. Back and forth the cigarette went between them, and it seemed to me they were communicating with each other through the plumes of smoke they blew from that same burning stick. One day midwinter, shivering from the cold and from our inactivity, I asked if I could please have a smoke too.

“Oh, no, Molly,” they both replied in near unison, their voices carrying the same protective concern for me, the same nearly parental sense of caution. Then, still in an unplanned coordination with each other, they reached for me, Howard to punch me lightly and affectionately on the shoulder, Nina to quickly wrap her arm around me. But it wasn’t me they were protecting, I knew, it was Davy, or the idea of Davy. They both felt entirely responsible for his death.

Weeks passed. Spring was just breaking through, tulips and irises had blossomed, grass was being mowed, when one day, our backs against Judd Hall, Howard mentioned that this semester he’d spent most of his time right there, inside the very building we were leaning against.

“What do you mean?” Nina asked, provoked by the idea that Howard had taken up an interest in the sciences, which were more or less her exclusive terrain.

“Premed,” Howard said, looking straight ahead of him rather than at either Nina or me.

Nina smirked and I knew it was at the thought of Howard actually having academic ambitions. I was surprised, too, as Howard was by far the store’s best salesman. In the year when he was working there full-time, sales had gone up by some measure, and everyone knew this was Howard’s doing, despite his grief. It seemed inevitable that one day he’d run the store.

Howard saw Nina’s skepticism. “What’s it to you, pimple face?” he responded, his voice reverting in an instant to the cutting one from before Davy’s death.

Nina’s complexion was a clear one, skin to be admired, but she raised her hand to hide her face anyway. Then she rose to her feet, crossed her arms over her chest, and loped away from Judd Hall. And, as if out of nowhere, there it was again, the old rivalry between them, the one that had lain dormant, as if snowed over, for so many months.

But Nina stopped, paused, turned slowly around, and a moment later sat down once again on the grass. “Premed,” she said, calmly enough.

When Howard explained that as a doctor he just might save a kid’s life, Nina nodded encouragingly. With an honesty I wasn’t prepared for, Howard added, “Premed. It’s not like I’m good at it or anything”—which was the same thing he’d say in many a letter to Nina in the years that followed.

At first, once Nina left for college, she and Howard communicated rarely—a birthday card perfunctorily sent every other year or so. But fifteen years later, in May of 1966, Howard attended a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which that year was being held in San Francisco, a stone’s throw from Berkeley, where Nina then lived. Howard had, after much struggling, become a doctor.

“I was a fool. You don’t know how many letters I’ve written over the years wanting to apologize for how I treated you,” he told Nina. Earlier in the evening they’d eaten dinner at the conference hotel and then decided to drive to the nearest beach. They were standing beside Nina’s car, looking at the Pacific. It would be another hour, at least, before dark.

“That sounds like a dying man’s confession, Howard,” Nina responded.

“Not dying. I’ve matured. That’s all.” He leaned her way and for the first time ever put an arm over her shoulders, a gesture that made them both, at first, quietly laugh. After that visit they corresponded at an unfailing rate of a letter a week.

At Wesleyan that day, after Nina had rejoined us, she turned to Howard and reached for the Lucky Strike. Howard inhaled one more time, with deliberate slowness, forcing her to wait, but soon enough passed it on, and with that gesture—a kind of offering—the competition between them ended.

By the time he entered medical school in Boston, Howard looked like a different man: slightly overweight, tired, his dark hair already threaded with gray. But our parents were proud of the fact that he was making something of himself, something surprisingly grand, as they saw it.

Marjorie Blumfield was the girl they picked for him. Consumed with the studies that remained so difficult for him, Howard hadn’t dated seriously, or even much at all, during college or medical school, and finally his last year there my mother put her foot down. “We don’t want a son who’s a lousy monk,” she said, by way of introducing the subject of his getting married.

Marjorie was the daughter of a friend of a friend, someone my father had heard about at morning minyan. She was a senior at Wellesley College, Jewish, and very much wanting to settle down just as soon as she graduated. “By all accounts she’s a good girl,” my father told Howard, who nodded and then agreed to the Shabbos dinner my parents suggested as a means of bringing the two together.

The night of her arrival, in early April of 1957, I helped my mother prepare the meal. I then washed my hair before dinner and quickly set it, as if I too had something at stake in meeting Marjorie Blumfield. There was a feeling of desperation about this meal, as if it were a make-or-break moment; I had gotten that sense from my mother, who called Vivie several times during the week prior to it to get ideas for more elegant food to prepare than she’d normally make. Like my mother, I didn’t want to provide any reason to put Marjorie off, or her parents. It occurred to me that Howard, who was clearly punishing himself with his ill-suited studies and his unnatural social austerity, had suffered enough; I wished him well.