Equal Affections (30 page)

“Is he free?” asked Nancy Needham. And leaving Danny for the moment, the two women headed off toward where Nat stood, momentarily free of company. Danny looked around. The crowd had grown enormous and was squeezing out the two doorways of the dining room. So many faces! Young people had grown old, old people (seemingly) had grown young. Oscar Lowell, after a heart attack, had lost seventy pounds and now ran ten miles a day. He was by the fireplace in a red sweat suit. As for Francine Cantor, who was having radiation, she stood gauntly in the corner, a lopsided wig teetering on her hairless head. Her wrists—impossibly thin—were covered with spots; each finger supported a heavy ring; she wore thick bracelets of ivory and cut glass. Danny wondered that her matchstick arms didn't break from the weight of such accoutrements, remembering a time not so many years before when she'd come over to swim in the pool with her then-husband, Bruce, and offered lessons in lifesaving. Francine had been a young, energetic woman then, and had dragged Danny across the pool by the hair. Like many of Louise's acquaintances, she was the ex-wife of one of Nat's colleagues; across the house somewhere, Danny knew, Bruce Cantor stood with his new wife, a blond girl in her twenties whose name no one could remember. Now Francine was old, alone, dying, lighting a cigarette.

He turned away just as she was about to see him, just as she was about to offer an acknowledging, conversation-requiring smile. He was facing Sarah Goldberg, who in elementary school had been fat and asthmatic and had worn octagonal wire-rimmed glasses. She had asked for, and was given, a water bed for her bat mitzvah. Today she stood with her mother, Linda, against the dining room wall. They weren't talking, just standing together, looking out on the crowd, each with a cup of coffee in her hand. Sarah was less fat than Danny remembered her, a big girl neatly dressed in a denim skirt and cream-colored blouse. Her hair was long, luxuriously thick and long. Did she still carry a little can of breathing medicine in her purse? He hadn't seen her for twelve years. And again, just in time to avoid a meeting of eyes, he backed away. There, cutting cake, were the Eadys from across the street and their daughter, Jennifer. And across from them, Millie Bartell—wife of
the dean—eating cookies off a little plate. Some faces had changed, but some, like Millie Bartell's, seemed not to have changed, not even remotely. Had Millie Bartell's life been as unvaried as her face? Danny wondered. Had it been an unending, placid succession of days spent cleaning, shopping, occasionally substitute teaching at the high school? Or were appearances, in this case, deceiving? Not too far from Millie, in the same room, stood Bill and Janet Hartpence, whose daughter Julia had set off a car bomb in 1968 and was just this year becoming eligible for parole. Upheavals of various sorts had ravaged their faces; they looked old and tired. What a far cry from Millie Bartell, for whom things had gone so smoothly, for whom the weather had been so balmy. Cancer, heart attacks, deaths, children in prison—these storms had passed her by. And so she came to funerals, or sealing parties, or whatever one chose to call them, and ate cookies, and kept quiet. How did it feel to be so lucky? Danny wanted to ask her, but then, realizing she was about to see him looking at her, changed his mind, turned around, was confronted with another familiar face, another hand waving, another voice calling, “Hi, Danny!” The party was a pinball machine, and he a steel ball being ricocheted from one unwanted encounter to another. Jennifer Eady this time. He waved to her and moved across the room.

In the kitchen, meanwhile, April had taken out the electric mixer and was making a last-minute icing for one of her cakes. Myra Eber, who had just put her coat away, touched her shoulder, and April screamed.

“Oh, I didn't mean to scare you!” Myra said.

“Mrs. Eber!” April said. “I'm sorry, I guess I'm just jumpy.”

“Don't apologize, dear,” Myra Eber said, smoothing her jacket down with her palms. “So how are you? You all surviving?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you knew, Jack and I, our thoughts are with you, and—”

April turned the mixer on high, and Myra, her mouth still open, stopped in mid-sentence.

“Go on,” April shouted over the high wail of the mixer. “I can hear you. Go on.”

Bewildered, Myra looked behind herself, to see if anyone was listening.
“I just wanted to say,” she shouted above the mixer, “anything we can do to help we'd be happy to—”

April shut the mixer off.

“We'd be happy to do,” Myra said, more softly.

“That's nice of you,” April said.

___________

In her heavenly prison it seemed Louise had finally stopped fighting the archangel orderlies, though for good measure they still held her arms. Even so, their grip was not so tight. With their other hands they stroked her back in sympathy, having once been alive too. One of the stories she used to torment Danny with was about how, on the morning of her ninth birthday, she had put a spider down Aunt Eleanor's skirt, and in punishment her mother had locked her in her bedroom for the duration of her own birthday party. She had lain on her neatly made child's bed then, determined not to cry, plotting unimaginable vengeances and rebellions, while downstairs children laughed and danced and ate, their voices booming up through the floorboards even when she covered her ears, even when she buried her head in the pillow. What about the presents? “She saved them for me to open later,” Louise sometimes said, but other times she claimed her mother had given them all to Eleanor, “to make up for the spider.” In both versions of the story, after the party a piece of the cake was brought back up to her, with a rose, and part of her name, LOUI, in icing, and grim-faced in the silent aftermath, her eyes red from crying, she would not touch, would not even look at it.

___________

Danny was standing near the fireplace in the living room when Walter found him.

“Hi,” Walter said.

“Hi. Where were you?”

“Talking to Margy McLaughlin. We were in April's room. Are you okay?”

“Sure. It's nearly two. People are starting to leave, so the torture will be over soon anyway.”

Nat cruised through the living room, waved at them. “Isn't someone going to say something?” Walter asked.

“What do you mean, say something?”

“You know. Just a few words of remembrance. Or maybe April could sing.”

“You heard my father in the car. My mother would hate that, people getting up all teary-eyed to talk about how wonderful she was. She'd be embarrassed.”

“I think your father's the one who'd be embarrassed,” Walter said. “Forgive me if it's none of my business, but it seems to me he's using this whole supposed dislike of ceremony on your mother's part to justify his own dislike of ceremony, his own embarrassment.”

“It's out of my hands,” Danny said. “And anyway, what right do I have to tell him how to bury his wife—or not bury her, as the case may be?”

Walter was about to say more when a low, gruff voice called out, “Danny boy!” from the horde of well-wishers. Two elderly, fat men in nearly identical beige suits were waving in greeting from the door. “Hi!” Danny called, waving back. “That's Sy and Herb,” he added in a low voice, to Walter. “They were my grandfather's oldest and youngest brothers. The other two died in the war. What were the names? Herbert, Sydney, Milton, Seymour. You know, all the time I was growing up I thought those were the most ordinary Jewish first names, until someone pointed out to me that they were British last names. I guess to my great-grandparents those names must have sounded so modern, so sophisticated, so—non-Eastern European. And now they're just Uncle Miltie, Uncle Sy, Uncle Herb. Do other people have Uncle Donne and Uncle Wordsworth?”

“Probably somewhere,” Walter said. In truth, it was hard to connect those poets and gentry with their namesakes, Danny's cigar-smoking uncles, slouching up to him now from the door. They were in their middle seventies, fat, with hair in their nostrils, and for thirty-two years they had not spoken to each other. Herb still owned the family's struggling seltzer business, while Sy—cut out of the company forty
years before by his brother—had had his vengeance at last, making millions in the bottling trade. They lived in Southern California, only a few miles apart, in similarly locked and sentineled retirement communities, and had flown up on the same plane, in different rows. Thirty-two years of mutually inflicted noncommunication between brothers sounded terrible to those who didn't know them, but in fact Sy and Herb had spent so much of their lives not speaking that when they stood together at family functions, there was no edge left to their silence; it was just habit. They talked around each other, through other people. They almost seemed like friends.

“Danny, you're looking good,” Sy said now. “How's the legal profession going?”

“Fine, Uncle Sy.”

“And you still like living in that, excuse me, stinking hellhole New York?” Herb asked. “No, sorry, New York, New York, it's a wonderful town. Excuse me, Danny. I love New York.”

“Uncle Herb, we've been living out in Jersey the past couple of years. Didn't Mom tell you?”

“No memory here,” Sy said. “It's going, going, gone. Still, always nice to have a place to get away. Minna and I, we were in Brookline forty-two years, and there wasn't a day I wasn't glad for a little green to come back to, instead of some cramped apartment. We're really a country family, you know, back in Europe. According to my grandfather, it was a hundred miles to the nearest train.”

Aunt Eleanor, coming over on her crutch, joined her uncles to form a circle around Danny and Walter. “Uncle Herb and Uncle Sy want to take the family out for Chinese food,” she said. “After the party. And Nat says it's okay with him if it's okay with you and April, and April says it's okay with her if it's okay with you. So it's up to you.”

“It's okay with me,” Danny said.

“Good. Then I'll make a reservation at Ming's.”

She moved away, and Danny and Walter, excusing themselves, pushed their way back through the crowd of hungry mourners into the kitchen. For the moment April was alone in there, by the oven, struggling with the baby bootie on its needles.

“Quiet!” Danny said. “What a relief.”

“Teaching yourself to knit?” Walter asked.

“Trying,” April said.

“Shouldn't you use a book or something? What you're doing, it looks a little catch-as-catch-can.”

“Well, I've almost got the hang of it,” April said. “It's not that hard to figure out. I just followed the path of the yarn, you know, through the stitches Mom had already done, and now I'm trying to copy it.”

The buzzer on the oven went off, and April screamed. “Sorry,” she said, resting a hand over her heart, and switched it off. She opened the oven door, where another golden cake bubbled in its pan, and, with potholder mitts on her hands, drew it out.

A girl with stringy brown hair, a burlap satchel on her shoulder, and a guitar case peered in through the kitchen door. She knocked. Again April jumped.

“April?” she said.

“Yes?” April said, turning around.

“Hi. I'm Sally Degner,” the girl said, creeping into the kitchen. “My sister Jenny was in your class in high school?”

“Oh, sure, I remember,” April said. “How is Jenny?”

“Oh, she's fine. She's living up in Oregon! now. She said to say hi to you. We met a couple of times back then, you probably don't remember, I was just a little kid. I came today with my mom—she was in the Mothers Against the Draft with your mom—and I just wanted to say, I'm really sorry about your mom, it's really terrible.”

“Thanks,” April said. “Uh, this is my brother, Danny, and his friend Walter.”

“Hi,” the girl said, not looking at them, then turned once again toward April. “I just wanted to tell you, I think you're really great, you're my very favorite singer, and all my friends in school like you as well. We listen to your albums all the time.”

“That's nice to hear,” April said. “Where do you go to school?”

“Oberlin,” Sally said. “I'm a sophomore. Right now I'm out on spring break. I'm actually kind of a singer myself, and I write songs too.”

“That's nice,” April said.

“Thanks. Anyway, I know it's presumptuous, but—how would you feel about listening to some of them? I mean, I know things must be sort of hectic and all, but I thought if you had any free time—”

April closed her eyes. “Things are a little crazy around here,” she said.

“Oh, I understand,” Sally answered. “God, it must be terrible. I
mean, I'd heard your mom had been sick a long time, but—oh, God, if I lost my mother, I just—I don't know, I can't imagine it. I'm really sorry.”

April smiled tightly and nodded. “It's okay,” she said.

“Well, maybe instead—well, maybe I could leave some of them with you—you know, just to look over and stuff—and tomorrow maybe I could call, and if you liked them, maybe we could get together later. Would that be okay?”

April smiled tightly again. “Sure.”

“Oh, great,” the girl said. She opened her satchel and pulled out a thick booklet of sheet music. “I can't tell you how much I appreciate this,” she said, handing April the booklet. “You know, you're my very favorite singer.”

“Thanks,” April said.

“So I'll call tomorrow,” the girl said.

“Yes.”

“Okay, great. And thanks again in advance for looking at my songs.”

“Thank you,” April said. “I mean—you're welcome.”

The girl slipped back out of the kitchen, once again leaving April alone with Danny and Walter.

“I cannot believe this just happened,” Walter said. “I absolutely cannot believe someone would be so insensitive, so completely self-serving as to—”