Dinner with Edward (10 page)

And as he approached his family home in Nashville, he braced himself for what he knew would be a final meeting with his father. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to encounter in the hospital room.

“He looked, lying on that bed, like the victims we had seen in Shoah,” recalled Edward. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust had been revealed only a decade earlier. Edward wanted to take his father off life support, to end his suffering, and tried to rally his mother, brothers, and sisters to the cause.

“Fuck the hospital,” he had said to his family; this was no way for any human being to die. “He was all protruding blue veins and tubes and wires,” recalled Edward. “Tubes from plastic bags overhead fed solutions drop by drop into his veins on quivering arms and body. And from his bladder and colon, contents flowed through more tubes into pans beneath the bed. I begged the intern to remove the tubes and allow him to die with dignity, but no one listened.”

That night, as Paula and the children were asleep in his old bedroom, Edward was restless, anxious about his father's suffering. The air was heavy as before a storm, and the city was dark and silent. Edward stared out the second-­floor window of his childhood home, straining to catch the intermittent glow of fireflies.

And then he heard chirping and looked out as a lone mockingbird fluttered up and down on a pole in his backyard. Losing himself in the birdsong, Edward felt something graze his leg.

A mouse? A rat?

“I felt that rats were invading the walls of our home, the way the cancer had invaded my father's veins,” Edward said. The next day, before heading to the hospital, Edward bought traps and set them up inside the house and in the bushes next to the foundation, right under his father's bedroom window. He was standing in the living room when he heard one of the traps snap shut. At the same time, he became vaguely aware of the doorbell ringing. He ignored the doorbell and rushed to dispose of the trapped rodent. But as he approached the trap, Edward recoiled.

“I saw that I had trapped something gray,” said Edward, who began to tear at the memory. “But it wasn't a rat.” By now he was sobbing as he struggled to tell me the rest of the story. Before he even managed to get the words out, I knew what he was going to say.

“I killed the mockingbird,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

He sat on the ground in the garden of his childhood home cradling the dead bird, a symbol of the South, his youth, and perhaps his innocence. He didn't need to hear the news from the hospital messenger who had been incessantly ringing the doorbell. He already knew that his father was dead.

“I buried the bird, trap and all, in the backyard,” said Edward, still crying. “It was the Fourth of July.”

The funeral was two days later, and the day after that Edward and his family got in their Chevy to return to New York. Back on the Skyline Drive, Edward was so tired and distraught that he swerved off the highway, “only stopping by some miracle when I slammed my foot on the brake before we would have catapulted off the side down to our deaths below.”

We were quiet for what seemed to be a long time after Edward finished his story—until Edward rose from the table and busied himself with the Turkish coffee that he made in a makeshift ibrik on the stove. He poured the thick dark liquid from his coffee pot into two espresso cups and added a few drops of Ricard to each cup.

We drank our little cups of coffee quietly, watching as the fine grains made swirling patterns on the sides of the white cups after each sip, and then collected in a muddy sludge at the bottom by the time we'd finished. What could those grounds tell us about where we were going, where we had come from, and how we ended up here in this hushed dining room in New York City?

Finally, Edward turned to me, smiling. “That's a hell­uva way to end an evening,” he said.

13

Linguine with Homemade Pesto

Salad

Assorted Chocolates

Martini, Pinot Grigio

I
told Edward I was through with men.

I stood beside him as he warmed plates in the oven and wondered what we were having for dinner. Edward didn't say anything. He didn't even glance my way; he simply had no reaction to my pronouncement. Instead, he opened the freezer, removed a frosty martini glass and the Pyrex cup that contained his magical icy mixture, and poured it into the cold glass. He poured himself one as well.

In the past, whenever I had let him know that I had met an interesting man, Edward seized on the news.

“Bring him over,” said Edward, after I mentioned the businessman whose Midwest accent and air of studied earnestness reminded me of Nick Carraway in
The Great Gatsby
.

“I want him to know that you are not alone in the world, that you have someone who is watching over you,” he said.

I was deeply touched that Edward had become my protector. But it was also clear that he didn't think much of my ability to take care of myself or make sound judgments—not when it came to men, anyway. Although he claimed that it wasn't me he was worried about. “It's just that I know men, I know how they think, and that's why I worry,” he said.

Why was he worried? I never found out. Was it a fatherly concern that any man I met was simply going to use me, and then dump me? Would I become pregnant, and abandoned, like one of his sisters, whose ill-­fated affair with her university professor left her a struggling single mother in the 1930s?

The night I announced that I was through with men, I was a bit disappointed that Edward didn't even look up from his stove but continued with the final preparations for our dinner. By now I knew that he was inured to my dramatic declarations, but this silence was still uncomfortable. I was glad when we sat down to our steaming plates of linguine with Edward's pesto.

Maybe Edward was right to be concerned, because when I moved off Roosevelt Island and started to date, I did everything wrong. For one thing, I became determined to find a younger version of Edward, and though I saw glimpses of him in the handful of the men I met, in some dark recess of my brain I must have known this was a recipe for disaster, that I was setting up unrealistic expectations, but I did it anyway.

There was the carpenter who had Edward's soft blue eyes. Like Edward, he had made all of his own furniture; he wrote poetry and he cooked. He'd kissed my hand after he'd walked me home along an icy stretch of road.

There was the SoHo chef with the wild, white hair, the leather jacket, and the moped, who wanted to whisk me to the far reaches of New Jersey for steamed clams and roasted corn on the cob.

I thought I was making a wise choice in the financier. We weren't officially dating. Between his international business trips we'd meet at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. He spoke passionately about global problems, political corruption, ending human trafficking. He was handsome in an intellectual and absentminded kind of way. He subscribed to the
New York Review of Books.

My illusions came crashing down when I walked in on him and a woman at a tony Upper East Side restaurant. I later found out she was his wife. I was standing at the espresso bar, hopelessly underdressed in worn Birkenstocks and shorts, as he walked by on his way out. In a linen suit and wraparound sunglasses, his phone plastered to his ear, he looked very different from the smart do-­gooder I knew.

“What's wrong with you?” asked my friend, the fashion editor, dressed in black. We had walked into the Madison Avenue eatery so that she could buy a tuna sandwich. “Are you sick? You just went totally pale.”

“Don't move,” I said. “He's here. With a
woman.”

The fashion editor's face lit up.

“Where?”

I gestured feebly and turned quickly to face the espresso bar, just as he walked behind me, accompanied by a lithe blond wearing tight white jeans and her own aviator sunglasses. I couldn't see much more with my hand holding up my forehead, my elbows on the bar, my gaze fixed on the espresso machine in front of me

He didn't see me. How could he see anything through those wraparound glasses and the aura of self-­importance that was as finely tailored as the expensive suit he wore? Strange that I had never noticed it before. But in the split second that I caught him making his way through the crowded restaurant with the leggy woman and a studied nonchalance, he suddenly seemed like a cliché.

The fashion editor craned her neck to have a good look, and then suggested we do the polite and proper thing, which was to say hello. He was out on the sidewalk.

“C'mon, let's go bust him now,” she said with obvious glee. “His reaction will tell us everything.”

I grabbed her arm.

“I've never seen you this frightened,” she said. “Stop it. Let's just go say hello.”

“No, we're not leaving the restaurant,” I whispered, terror-­stricken. “We're standing here and having an espresso.”

She gave me a look that combined pity and incomprehension. I tried to explain it in a way that she could best relate to—I pointed to my shorts and yellow Birkenstocks.

“But you look cute,” she said.

“I don't want to look cute!”

If you are going to confront the object of your desire who is with another woman, you had better look glamorous and sexy to show him what he is missing.

“OK, I get it, but calm yourself down,” said my friend, craning her neck to get a better look at the financier who was still outside the restaurant, still talking on his phone.

The barista made me a perfect espresso in a white and peach porcelain cup. I downed it in one gulp. It was worth $5.

It wasn't like I hadn't been warned. Melissa and I had done our own research in the newsroom, finding a woman's cell phone registered to his name and address. At the
Post
, whenever anyone—mostly one of the twenty-­something women reporters—was interested in a man, we would immediately plug his name into every public records database we could access. An e-­Courts or Scroll New York search would reveal if he were going through a divorce in the state of New York; a Nexis search would show if he lived with anyone or had any judgments against him; New York's department of finance would let us know if he had any tax liens against him. We could also look up any homes or mortgages, weapons' permits, and criminal records.

In my case, a simple Google image search revealed dozens of photos of the financier and the lithe, blond young woman in back issues of the
New York Social Diary
, the society newsletter for the boldface crowd. I rationalized. Perhaps they had already broken up? Why else would he be texting me, making plans to meet? I was too embarrassed to tell Edward the whole sorry tale. Yes, Edward had cause to worry. I harbored some pretty naïve views about men and love. In a fit of wounded vanity, after the disappointment of the businessman, I decided it was best to give up.

After we had finished our salads and moved on to the box of expensive chocolates that had been given to Edward by one of his neighbors, I told Edward again that I was through with falling in love, that I couldn't imagine at middle age finding the man of my dreams. This time he answered.

“How about a woman?” said Edward, looking up at me, a mixture of incredulity and compassion in his gaze.

14

Crab Cakes with Homemade Tartar Sauce

Tomato Salad with Homemade Pesto Dressing

Prune Tart

Pinot Grigio

W
e never made it to dessert the night Edward collapsed.

Of course, there was a dessert—there was always dessert chez Edward. On this particular evening it was a prune tart that I glimpsed on the kitchen counter, still steaming from the oven, the prunes oozing their dark syrup onto the golden French pastry. We had just finished our salads, after the crab cakes, and an­ticipating our next course, Edward began to explain how he had prepared the tart. The secret, he said, was soaking the prunes in Earl Grey tea for at least an hour before baking.

“That's how you get that thick, sweet black syrup,” he explained. “Just soak them for an hour before you—”

But he began to tremble and his words came out in a slur before he could take me through the rest of the recipe. And then Edward lurched forward in his straight-­back chair. I rushed to help him, and he seemed to will himself back to an upright position. Closing his eyes, with great effort, he steadied himself and slowly rose from his chair, leaning on his cane, which he always kept nearby. He headed to the bathroom, leaving me in his empty living room, wondering if he was ever going to be all right again.

It seemed like a long time that he was gone. I called to him, to ask if he was OK, and he said he would be back momentarily.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw when he limped back into the kitchen, where I was now filling the sink with soapy water. He stood, leaning on his cane, in bare feet, wearing a threadbare nightshirt. A cluster of blue veins balled at his elbows, below a thin layer of almost translucent skin, dotted by liver spots.

Where was
my
Edward, the proud, jovial, and smartly dressed gentleman who had made me an almond cake for my birthday and taken me to Saks Fifth Avenue? Could he really be this frail, elderly man who stood helplessly, his age so harshly revealed under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen? I wanted to look away, suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of embarrassment. I was never supposed to see him like this.

“Don't tell Valerie,” he said in what seemed to me a desperate whisper. “And don't tell Laura.”

It was the only time I ever betrayed him. It did cross my mind that he might never speak to me again when he found out that I had told his daughters about his near fainting episode. That night, as I walked toward the tram, I called Laura, who rushed over from her apartment across the street to make sure her father was all right. And then I called Valerie.

For months after that, I spoke to Edward only briefly, even after he actually did faint some weeks later. He hurt himself so badly when he fell on the tile floor of his bathroom that he couldn't get out of bed for weeks. He developed bedsores and began fighting with his daughters.

No, he would not go to the hospital. No, he didn't want to see his doctor; Edward already knew what was ailing him, and he claimed he knew better how to heal himself. Clearly, he was afraid. Did his mind race back to the summer of 1955, when his father lay dying in a Nashville hospital ward “coiled in a fetal position, knees drawn up to his chest, little left but skin, covering protruding bones”?

“Fuck the hospital,” he had said then about his father.

Or was he remembering when Paula got sick? One day, Paula took the Roosevelt Island tram into Manhattan and came home more exhausted than usual. It was the last time she would go into the city on her own. “She told me that she was no longer the gal she used to be,” said Edward. He paused, thinking about the day that signaled the beginning of the end. “For me, she was always the same,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “She hadn't changed.”

But when they went to visit their doctor, there was sobering news. Paula would have to have her leg amputated. The doctor's speech made sense; he even sounded encouraging. “The prosthetics today are phenomenal. She will learn to walk again. She could live another four or five years,” he said with enthusiasm.

“No way,” Edward had told the doctor, when they were alone.

If we don't amputate, the doctor warned him, gangrene could develop: “She'll have to go to a hospice where they will zonk her out with morphine until the end. However long that might take. Maybe weeks. Not a happy ending.”

But Edward was unmoved. He knew that Paula's “Appointment in Samarra” was imminent. It was his favorite tale from the Arabian Nights, adapted by Somerset Maugham. He had often told me the story about the Baghdad servant who was sent out to the market to buy provisions for his master, a wealthy merchant. The servant bumped into Death at the market. Frightened, he borrowed his master's horse and galloped to Samarra to escape his fate. Later, the merchant went to the market to confront Death himself. “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” he asked.

Death looked amused. “That was not a threatening gesture,” said Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Edward had told the story about the impossibility of escaping death to another doctor years earlier, when he'd had a brush with cancer. “After an operation, I was advised of a procedure that I was reluctant to take. Chemotherapy is poison. Not vitamins or orange juice,” he had written in a fictionalized version of the episode he called “Providence.”

Edward recited the Arabian tale to the oncologist who would be administering the therapy, asking “if in relation to that slave seeking escape from Death's beckoning, was I, too, by taking chemo, rushing to my death and Samarra?” The oncologist told him he didn't know. Which is when Edward decided not to proceed. Ten years later, the cancer had still not returned.

But the folktale seemed lost on most medical professionals. “She's a vibrant woman,” insisted Paula's doctor in his Upper East Side office. “Why would you want to deny yourselves all the life she has left? You talk it over. She may surprise you. Tell me what you decide.”

Paula, though, agreed with Edward. It was a quiet afternoon in August—that time in Manhattan when only sweating tourists clutching maps seem to walk the streets. Edward said little to his wife in the taxi back home. He held her frail hand in his as the cab rattled through sun-­baked streets en route to the Queensboro Bridge. Then, desperate, he proposed that they commit suicide together; Paula squeezed his hand, and said that he was being ridiculous; she would have none of it.

Edward took Paula home, where she died two months later, surrounded by their scrapbooks, the rugs she had hooked, the dining room table he had fashioned from scraps of wood that he had found at one of his job sites, the walnut coffee table, the straight-­back chairs that he had woven from fine strands of wood, the pillows she had quilted from the remnants of old skirts, fraying cotton sheets, and tartan work shirts that were all testament of their sixty-­nine years together.

And now, after his fall, Edward told his daughters, if it was indeed time for his own appointment with death, he was determined to do it surrounded by the things he loved. How would he ever feel better in an anonymous hospital room? He needed to stay where he could glance out the windows and watch the tugboats streaming across the East River during the day and the lights of the million-­dollar apartment buildings on the Upper East Side that twinkled at nightfall. What had Paula said about those places when they first moved to their apartment? “They paid millions for their places with their river views, and they are really just looking at us. We paid a fraction of the price, and we have the million-­dollar view of Manhattan! How about that?”

Although he had never articulated it until now, he was adamant that, like Paula, he would die at home, without any special care. And so, he resisted his well-­meaning daughters at every turn.

Fuck the hospital.

My own father had said much the same when my mother lay in a coma in a hospital room in Toronto. A diabetic, she had suffered a stroke days earlier. Like Edward and Paula, my parents had been married a long time, nearly sixty years. Unlike Edward and Paula, they were extremely reserved. They rarely kissed, almost never exchanged gifts. There were never any vocal declarations of undying love between them, no cards or letters painstakingly collected in a scrapbook. As a kid and then as a young adult, I railed against what I saw as their lack of affection. Hadn't I told each of my husbands how much I loved him?

Now I realize how immature I had been about my parents. I came to understand how much they had loved each other: In the year before my mother died, my father, a gruff and curmudgeonly seventy-­nine-year-old, became her most devoted nurse, administering her insulin five times a day, pricking her finger to draw the drop of blood, placing it on a plastic test strip, which he attached to the glucose meter to measure her blood sugar level. He meticulously recorded each alteration, however slight, in his precise handwriting on a graph that he had designed himself. My father was a carpenter, a construction foreman who had barely managed to complete high school and who had immigrated to Canada with little more than his bag of tools in the early 1950s. But the graph that he showed to my mother's doctors was so detailed that they couldn't believe that it hadn't been put together by a trained medical professional.

My father cried when my mother died. I know this because it was reported to me by someone who saw him do it, discreetly, in her hospital room as an orderly took her body away. I have never seen my father cry. After her funeral, he visited my mother's grave every day in the grand park-­like cemetery, which is also the final resting place of Canada's heads of government and captains of industry. My mom's grave is across the way from the crypt belonging to the Massey family, one of the country's most important and wealthiest dynasties, and down the street from William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's longest serving prime minister.

It had long been my father's ambition that they should be buried together in this beautiful cemetery—two Portuguese immigrants who felt they had made their own important contributions to their new land, even though they had held no elected office or important titles. Their greatness, according to my father, was that they had embraced their adopted country, worked hard, and loved their two children and four grandchildren. My mother's name, dates of birth and death, are engraved on her black granite headstone, and my father's name and date of birth is carved underneath hers, followed by a hyphen, standing sentinel, awaiting the date of my father's “Appointment in Samarra.”

My father rarely misses a day at the cemetery. When we talk to him on the phone, he often tells my brother and me that he is off to visit our mother at “the park.” Every time I'm in Canada, we head there together. He knows all the groundskeepers by name, as well as the lonely woman who visits the grave of her husband, which lies down the lane from my mom's grave. He brings takeout coffee and a newspaper to read, dozing off in his car parked next to the headstone on summer afternoons. He pulls out weeds around her grave in the spring, shovels the snow around the headstone in winter.

One early morning, I accompanied him to the cemetery and saw him put a handful of raw peanuts on my mother's headstone. He noticed my quizzical look and held an index finger to his lips.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed, pointing to the stone.

I didn't understand at first, and then I saw them. A cardinal and then a blue jay and then sparrows fluttered above the scattered peanuts, finally alighting on the black headstone, come to keep my mother company. Later, I gathered the pinecones that had fallen from the trees near the grave and brought them back to New York in my suitcase. I keep them in a basket in my bedroom.

In one of our few conversations during the long months of Edward's illness, I called Edward to tell him the story of my father. It made him happy, but he didn't have the energy to say much. I longed to help him, but there seemed so little I could do. And then one night, when I was having trouble remembering one of his recipes, I called him again.

“Remind me how you made that Grand Marnier soufflé?” I hoped that talking about food might heal him. I started calling more regularly. When he was sleeping, I would leave messages on his answering machine—questions about some culinary dilemma that only he could resolve.

“Edward, I forgot the trick you taught me with the french fries. Could you call me back?”

“What's the name of that restaurant in Chinatown where you get your duck?”

I like to think my culinary quandaries improved his mood at least.

“Your phone call today about my recovery's progress is much appreciated,” he wrote to me when he was starting to feel better, “even though its status quo was not what I should have enjoyed relating to you. But at my age there are no quick fixes to equal the speed in which calamity can leave one disabled. But you allowed me, in your excitement about rendezvousing with soufflés soon, to forget if all too briefly my pain.”