As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (7 page)

They ate together that Friday at Regina’s, a tiny restaurant, four tables total, in the living room of the home of Regina Scantelli. They might have eaten at Angelina’s, in Angelina Tucci’s living room–turned–restaurant, but Nelson preferred Regina’s. Only one other customer was there, Judge Luigo, of the Middlesex County municipal court. As Nelson took his seat he nodded, and the judge nodded back. “What’ll it be?” Regina then asked Nelson and Howard, and by that she meant either the spaghetti and meat sauce or the chicken parmesan. That was what she’d cooked up that day, so far.

Since there was such a good chance of chicken that night for the Shabbos meal in Woodmont—roast chicken, not chicken parmesan, but chicken all the same—Howard ordered the spaghetti. Besides, the chicken parmesan, combining meat with cheese, wasn’t kosher, even in the relatively loose way his family defined that term. But Nelson, who wouldn’t be coming with them to Woodmont for the weekend, who was single and who had once told Howard that he ate bologna sandwiches for dinner most nights, ordered—without hesitating, and apparently without worrying about the rules of kashruth—the chicken parmesan for lunch.

They didn’t talk while they ate, but over coffee Nelson said, “You can’t see it now, but you made your father happy this morning with that sale and all. He’ll forget about the rest. It was just one minyan out of a million.”

“I didn’t mean to be late,” Howard said, the memory of Mort pulling away from the curb and driving past him revived in his mind.

“No one said you meant it,” Nelson offered. Quietly, he tapped his fork on the edge of the table.

Howard paused, watched his uncle play with his fork, and then glanced at Nelson’s face. “He might as well have meant it. You saw it. The way he drove off.”

Nelson nodded. He lifted his fork then placed it on his empty plate. Glancing toward the kitchen, he looked as if he wanted something else, but then he turned back to Howard. “It can be hard to be a son,” he pronounced at last. “I know what I’m saying.”

A look of deep sadness overcame Nelson. Howard waited for him to say more—being a son was indeed a difficult business, the most difficult of his life—but Nelson wouldn’t. Instead he flagged Regina over to the table. “You got any dessert?” he asked, suddenly agitated. “A little for me, a little for him. We’ll split whatever you’ve got.”

When Regina brought them two bowls of fruit cocktail, Nelson dug right in. Howard, who hadn’t been able to finish his meal, had no appetite for it. He slid his bowl toward Nelson.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” Nelson offered at last, his voice calmer, the two bowls of fruit cocktail eaten clean. “It’s not about your father, it’s about my father,” he added, and that was at least something.

Howard nodded.

At three o’clock that afternoon Mort and Leo grabbed their weekend suitcases, stuck in a corner of the back office at the store, and, along with Howard, headed off, out of Middletown and toward Woodmont. Because Leo was prone to car sickness, he sat in the front seat beside Howard, who drove. Leo was reading a book by Charles Darwin,
The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms.
With a title like that, Howard didn’t even want to begin to ask about the book. Behind Howard, Mort sat compliantly enough in the backseat, though for Howard the sight of Mort in the rearview mirror, serious as ever as he gazed out the window, and even as he nodded off napping, was more than a little daunting.

At four o’clock Howard pulled the Dodge into the parking lot at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven. His father was still napping, but this detour was expected, Howard knew, and so with only Leo’s consent, but not Mort’s, he drove toward that part of the parking area abutting Jimmies hot dog stand. They would each get a hot dog at Jimmies, known for its split dogs, perfectly fried. The stop was a secret from the women at Woodmont. The men knew that the women would scold them for ruining their appetite, but because dinner wouldn’t be served until at least half-past seven, the fortification was indeed helpful, and besides, “there comes a point,” Mort had said the first of the two previous times Howard had joined them, “when a man has to take a little time out from the family.” As they sauntered moments later toward Jimmies, Howard trailing his newly awakened father, he noted to himself how odd a rationale that was, for the men had already taken time out—at the morning service, for example, not to mention during the whole week at the store. But Howard didn’t dare question it: the men, Leo as much as Mort, were religious about their pre-Shabbos hot dogs. Apparently they needed the stop, couldn’t quite make the transition from Middletown to Woodmont without it. And today was not the day to start even a friendly argument with his father.

Their hot dogs paid for, the men settled themselves at a nearby picnic table. Off in the distance was the famous Savin Rock roller coaster. Closer by, at their feet, was a veritable sea of littered napkins. The place was seedy, Howard always thought. But the hot dogs sure were good. For a few minutes the men ate in silence. Howard glanced several times Mort’s way, but his father was steadfastly gazing out toward Long Island Sound. Leo’s gaze was similarly seaward. Then Leo spoke.

“Your father frightened us at minyan.” He turned to Howard. “He looked like he might pass out.”

“It was nothing,” Mort said, glancing at Leo then back to the water.

“Maybe a little more than nothing,” Leo insisted. Again he looked Howard’s way. “His face was pale. His heart was pounding.”

“You don’t know that,” Mort told Leo firmly but not unkindly. “My heart was fine the whole time. I just grew weary suddenly. Needed to sit.”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Seems bigger to me. Pull it out of him, Howard.”

But Howard didn’t say anything. Clearly, Mort didn’t want him involved. In fact he was deliberately ignoring him, Howard understood, staring out at the ocean as he was, his back to Howard even when Leo addressed him.

Howard turned toward the ocean, which looked friendly enough, then toward Mort’s icy back. The summer before, a Friday in July, everything had been different, more convivial. Mort had been driving that day. When they’d pulled in to Savin Rock and Howard had asked what was up, Mort began laughing. “Something for us,” he’d finally said. Then they’d risen from the car and as they walked toward Jimmies, the smells of fried foods increasingly wafting their way, Mort had slapped Howard’s back over and over. “Us, us, us,” he’d eagerly repeated. Then he’d added, winking, “Don’t tell.”

Howard had gone with the men to Jimmies again, later that summer. Once more Mort welcomed Howard’s joining them. He was even proud of Howard, who had come back to Middletown for a week to help with the store’s summer inventory. “Eat up,” Mort had told him then, adding a moment later, “What the hell, have two if you like.”

But this day Mort merely said, “Ready?” exclusively to Leo, who nodded.

At five o’clock they arrived at the cottage.

Walking into a spotlessly clean kitchen, then past a dining room table perfectly set with flower-patterned china, wineglasses, and candlesticks, and then into a living room with the sofa bed folded up and no signs at all of two girls spending their nights there, Howard called, “Whoa, what happened
here?
”

Mort stood behind him, and Howard turned in time to see him remove his hat and place it, for one of the women to pick up, on the little telephone table in the dining room.

Mort looked around, nodded his approval.

“At least some people have respect,” he said, finally staring at Howard, but only for the purpose of directing the implied criticism his way. He then turned from Howard and toward the dining table, where he focused his gaze on the unlit candles at the table’s center.

When he spoke next, Mort was still staring at the candles as if mesmerized by a flame they didn’t yet emit.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said.

T
here was something about Davy’s personality—a touch of silliness, a whole lot of energy, an easy likability—that allowed us to see in him what we wanted to. My father saw that part of himself, the boy so very good at being a shortstop, that was never allowed to be. Howard, in contrast, very often saw someone to protect, perhaps against the father to whom he felt at times so vulnerable. In the same breath, however, Davy could be a way for Howard to buffer himself against Mort. That’s why, perhaps, upon arriving at Woodmont that Friday evening, Howard grabbed Davy, threw him over his shoulder, and carried him, kicking and squealing, outside for a quick pre-dinner game of catch. The baseball gloves and ball were lying in a protected corner of the front porch, always ready for such an occasion. Without even stopping to take off his tie and shoes, Howard grabbed the mitts and ball and led Davy to the beach, where we could see them throwing the ball back and forth, and we could hear the distinctive thump of the hardball hitting the mitt’s leather, and we could even hear Howard’s gentle coaching of Davy—
good one, run, get it
—whose favorite part of the game was to chase a fly ball, the highest Howard could throw. Had he lived to play the game beyond his childhood, there’s no doubt in my mind that Davy was destined to be an outfielder and not the shortstop of my father’s projected dreams. But such is the way of family: we are what they tell us we are, and part of life’s great struggle, it’s always seemed to me, is to know oneself despite that imposing collective definition.

That effort was perhaps my great task that summer, other than trying to hang out as much as possible with Nina, and to do this I found myself that first week in Woodmont drawn at times to the claw-footed tub in the upstairs bathroom, which I’d recently discovered was a good place to think. The tub dry, my clothes still on, I hurdled the high rim and sank down, just as if I were soaking, but in silence rather than water. And something about that silence, along with the confinement of the tub, got me into a particular frame of mind, one in which it became more than evident that this was uncanny—this life, this existence at all—and what I meant by that was that it seemed so very strange to be me, just me, this silent inner self whom only I actually knew. The outer self, whom the family knew quite well, was but a shell, a quaint cover story, and that week I had only just begun to understand that no amount of living with them, cramped cottage and all, would ever change that fact. She didn’t even have a name, this essence of myself, this non-Molly whom I quickly took to, rather liked, and that Friday, after Howard had taken off with Davy, and in the time we still had before we’d begin our Shabbos meal, squirreled away in the upstairs bathroom with the locked door and the womb-like walls of the tub surrounding me, I managed in just a few quiet minutes to do it, to woo her from the cave of my soul.
Hello,
I whispered to my near stranger of a self.
Hello.

Moments before, upon the men’s arrival that evening, after my father had loosened his tie, my mother, already dressed in a proper skirt and blouse for Shabbos, emerged from the kitchen to bring him a glass of water and told him to “Sit, sit,” to which he answered, “I’ve been sitting already, too much sitting,” and then she, as if she hadn’t heard him, walked back into the kitchen, and he, as if he hadn’t heard himself, sat, in the corner chair in the living room. And that’s how my parents behaved toward each other then, courteous but cool, aware of each other but imperturbably so, as if they inhabited separate spheres and saw each other only from a distance. From what I observed it was hard to imagine them ever being passionate toward each other, hard to imagine that time when Ada was eighteen and Mort was twenty-four, and the attraction they felt for each other was so strong that Vivie was thrown, easily enough, by the wayside.

For Vivie the ordeal—something in hindsight she called her slow march toward freedom, toward a self she never knew she had—began like this.

A week after she’d spotted Ada and Mort hand in hand outside her front door, Vivie had to endure the fact that when Mort finally apologized to her, coming to her home just to do so, he didn’t even hint at the possibility of their resuming their old courtship. It was real, then, she knew: the hand-in-hand business wasn’t just an accident as Ada had tried so hard to convince her, describing over and over again the spill she’d taken just seconds before on their front walkway.

“He was pulling me up,” Ada had insisted. “That’s all. That’s it. I was so embarrassed to fall like that—on my tuches!—but he acted like he didn’t even see.”

But with Mort’s apology Vivie came to know better, came to know that her younger sister was capable of making a lie sound not only convincing but even sweet.

Then Vivie had to endure that first time, several weeks later, when she watched from her bedroom window as Mort approached her front door, rang the bell, and asked—albeit timidly—for Ada. Vivie crept from her bedroom to the top of the stairs where she could hear everything but not be seen. She gasped as Mort and Ada laughed upon meeting again. The laughter was quiet, meant not to be heard, but it was laughter—joy—all the same. And that’s when my aunt decided that her survival, her dignity, depended on her moving out.

She knew of an extra room down the street in the Bloomberg home, where she’d babysat Lorna Bloomberg for so many years. The family was more than happy to offer it and to her relief accepted only the most nominal of pay. “We think of you as family,” Mrs. Bloomberg told her, surprisingly enough. She thought of them as simply the Bloombergs, a couple who’d had a pest of a child late in life, people she didn’t really know.

That first night at the Bloombergs’, late February of 1926, was the first time in my aunt’s life that she’d spent even a night on her own. The Bloombergs’ extra room was a small one on the third floor, a former nanny’s quarters, furnished, though barely so. When she’d arrived there, a Sunday night, she placed her suitcase down at the doorway then took a few steps inside the room and finally sat on its twin bed. For over an hour she stayed there, her coat still on, her hat in her hands, her mind determined to ignore Lorna Bloomberg, then fourteen, who kept peeking in on her, asking her if she needed this or that. More water? An extra blanket? Something to read? To all this Vivie shook her head, and she continued to sit still, frozen, even as she heard Mrs. Bloomberg scold Lorna, telling her to leave “poor Vivie” alone.

“Poor Vivie.” The words resonated with how she felt about herself, a single woman in a room with a single bed, a single pillow, a single dresser, and a single window to glance out of. There was a small night table beside the bed, and on it was a glass filled with water and a dusty vase containing a single artificial red rose. It, too, was dusty.

She’d arrived at the Bloombergs’ at seven. At nine or so the radiators began to clank loudly. At nine thirty the bulb in the lamp beside the bed flickered. Vivie thought the light would go out but it didn’t. She wouldn’t have minded if it had, blacking out the present scene and brightening the one in her mind of a different room, the one she was to have had as Mrs. Morton Leibritsky, a woman who might just work for a time at the store, she’d long figured, but only until the first child came, and then she’d be caught up in the whirlwind of responsibility that was motherhood. Her bedroom, the one she would share for a lifetime with Mort, was to look, with its full-sized bed, its several dressers, its lovely draped curtains and colorful bedding, nothing like the room she now inhabited. At ten o’clock she reached for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed and threw it over her lap. She was still in her coat but, strangely, she was shivering. By eleven, though, she rose to take off her coat and shoes, then she leaned back, placed her head on the pillow, and eventually wiped her eyes dry, flicked off the unsteady lamp, and fell asleep.

Because she was on her own, just a half block from her family but in this new room feeling miles and miles away, and because she’d never returned to Leibritsky’s Department Store once she’d spotted Ada and Mort together that day, Vivie needed a new job. This she acquired promptly through a suggestion from Mr. Bloomberg. She should visit his doctor, he told her, who was out a secretary, and within the week she began working for Dr. Walter Shapiro, one of Middletown’s two Jewish general practitioners.

The job gave her the money to keep going, to board, and it offered something to do. Often those first weeks on her own she reminded herself that the job was a step up from the sales work—just a whole lot of talking—that she’d been doing before. She’d remind herself of that and then she’d remind herself again, because in fact it was so very quiet in Dr. Shapiro’s somber waiting room, with its windows covered by faded blue drapes, its worn carpeting, the few pictures on the walls of foreign landscapes, and the patients who walked in, typically tired and anxious.

Still, the work gave shape to what otherwise would have been entirely unwieldy days, without purpose, with too much time to think. “Poor Vivie,” Mrs. Bloomberg still called her weeks after she’d moved in, and who knew how many others thought of her in the same way, as forlorn as a patient waiting for Dr. Shapiro, as weakened at the core.

Spinster.
The very idea of it made her shudder.

The job gave her a different title—Secretary, Gal Friday, Dr. Shapiro’s Trusty Viv. Arriving by nine each morning, she’d get through those early hours by greeting patients and making appointments. In the afternoons she’d pull out the billing. But at some point she’d be interrupted by Tillie Hirschfield, Dr. Shapiro’s nurse, who, just weeks into Vivie’s tenure, couldn’t resist the daily urge to drop her bottom right on Vivie’s desktop and talk, not so much to her as at her. In this way Vivie invariably knew what Tillie Hirschfield would have for dinner that night, was thinking of doing over the weekend, and, most interestingly, what she’d gone through when she suffered both of her divorces. That the patients could hear Tillie as easily as Vivie could didn’t seem to affect her oration. It might even have been the point, Vivie soon concluded. At five she’d leave the office and amble back to the Bloombergs’. “Poor Vivie,” Mrs. Bloomberg would be sure to say, without even realizing it, upon seeing her. “How was work?” she’d then ask, sadly. The phone, with her mother, Risel, calling her, might or might not then ring, and if so, another married woman would say “poor Vivie” at least once. This scenario wasn’t much to come home to, and Vivie walked toward it slowly, breathing deeply as she did, at times gulping in the evening air as if whatever winds and fragrances and warmth or coolness that combined to form it were a prescription from Dr. Shapiro, medicinal, healing.

After some months she began to feel a bit better. It was April then and she trekked toward the Bloombergs’ more slowly than ever, though not because she dreaded being there but because the evening air had become like a friend: fragrant, comfortable, comforting. Once she was midway to the Bloombergs’ when, lost to the wonders of the spring air, she nearly bumped into a young couple, a man with his arm draped over the shoulder of a woman, who in turn had her arm wrapped around the man’s back.

“Excuse me,” the man said.

“Oh,” Vivie muttered, not because of the near collision but because it pained her instantly to see these lovers. Rather than their faces, she focused on their shoes, his and hers. Then, because even that was too much, she focused on something else, the empty porch of the house they were in front of, its mailbox, nailed beside the front door, overflowing.

“Yes, I’m sorry too,” she said, her face still turned from them. Then she dashed away, suddenly racing toward the Bloomberg home, which had never before seemed so much like a haven. After dinner she spent the evening in her room, lying on her back, soothing herself with heavy sighs. She had promised Lorna Bloomberg she’d play cards with her, but when Lorna knocked on her closed door Vivie told her she wasn’t well, she had a stomachache, that tomorrow she’d play with her any game she wanted: rummy, hearts, Old Maid.

Tillie Hirschfield’s remarkable two divorces didn’t mean she was done with men. On the contrary, she was on the prowl, as she put it, searching for Mr. Right. “Two Mr. Wrongs don’t make a Mr. Right,” she quipped one afternoon. Then she added, “After what I’ve been through I deserve my Mr. Right.” This time she was sitting beside Vivie’s desk, not on it, and her voice was lowered, demonstrating a need for discretion that surprised Vivie. It was late spring and the flowery scent of Tillie’s perfume reminded Vivie of the lilacs in bloom along her walk to and from the office.

“Maybe you and me could go out some night,” Tillie proposed to Vivie. “You know, we’d be two ladies having dinner, maybe even having a drink or two.” When Tillie winked, Vivie noticed the beginnings of lines around her eyes. “You never know what might happen. We just might run into a pair of handsome men.”

Tillie nodded and smiled cajolingly.

“I spend my weekends with my sisters,” Vivie lied. “It’s my only time with them.” In fact she spent some of each weekend at home, visiting her parents and one of her sisters, but the other one, who dated Mort Leibritsky, she still couldn’t be around.

“Well, just think about it. You’re not getting any younger.” Tillie rose and broke into a yawn. “God, I’m bushed,” she muttered, as she retreated to the examination area.

Such talk about men and age and, implicitly, about failure—those two divorces that kept Tillie Hirschfield on the prowl—unsettled Vivie. Sadly, she sighed and then scanned the waiting room. Two people were there, a mother, a young woman about Vivie’s age, and her small son, who was pale and couldn’t sit still. The mother struggled to keep the boy seated. She talked to him, read to him, patted his back to calm him. She scolded once or twice. She looked exhausted. Watching them, and still thinking about Tillie, who was soon to turn thirty-five, she’d recently confessed to Vivie in a voice that sounded frightened and grave, a tone, Vivie understood, connected to her increasingly improbable search for Mr. Right, Vivie felt the stirrings of a new insight, something about the hardships of adult life, its awful loneliness, which hit you whether you were married or not; something about marriage itself not being the haven or even the prize she’d always thought. She rose and handed the boy a pad and pencil. “Want to draw a picture?” she asked, kneeling on the floor before him. When he grabbed the items, she patted his head. His mother said to him, “What do you say?” But before the child could thank Vivie she told the mother, “It’s nothing. The least I could do. Doctor should see you in a minute.”