I'll Be There (21 page)

“My husband left me a couple of times. He was even in the pokey more than once, before you were born, when your mother was a kid. For illegal gambling activities. But you want to know what? I got him back every time. And I stashed away plenty of cash during the good years, and had a beautiful house where your grandmother, my sister Rosie, could come and visit, and now this condominium. I got the world on a string, honey.” She puffed away a series of puffs on the

cigarette until there was smoke all around her face.

“What was my grandmother like?”

“A doll. A beauty, just like your mother. A widow at a young age, but she never wanted to remarry.” Neetie shook her head when she told Nina that. “Personally I think that’s what killed her, killed your mother too. The doctors can call it cancer or stroke or whatever you like. I say a woman without a man dries up and dies.” She took a long puff on the cigarette, creating dozens of tiny lines around her mouth as she puckered, then blew out the smoke, and asked, “So what about Cee Cee Bloom? Who’s her latest boyfriend?”

“She doesn’t have one at the moment.”

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“With that face it’s no wonder,” Neetie said and laughed. :“Of course men don’t care so much about the face, do they? Just the neck down.” She laughed at that, then lay back, the cigarette now burning between her two fingers as she drank in the sun’s rays. “Tonight we’ll go to dinner to a cafeteria. Won’t that be fun?” ,i

Nathan held Cee Cee’s arm as he moved haltingly down the hall. H was wearing a paisley bathrobe Cee Cee was sure he’d had when she was a little girl. Earlier she had tried to get him to eat a meal.

“Don’t give me any more of those lousy potatoes without salt.” “You’re not allowed to have salt, Daddy.”

“I’m gonna be dead in a little while, .who’s gonna know if I had salt?”

“Pretend there’s salt on them.” “You pretend I’m eating them.” “You need your energy.”

“Why? I’m not going disco dancing. I’m lying here waiting to die. For that I don’t need energy.”

After that the nurse came in to bathe him, and Cee Cee stood in the hall outside talking to the doctor, who looked just the way Cee Cee pictured him when she spoke to him on the phone from Los Angeles. Small and slim with horn-rimmed glasses and wispy gray hair. “As I told you the other day, he has a negative attitude about intervention of any kind, says he’s too old. The symptoms he has indicate that he has the mechanical problem of a leaking heart valve,

and if it’s replaced he could do well for quite a while.” “Then why is there a doubt?” “He says he’s lived enough.”

That night, after Nathan fell as!eep, Cee Cee checked into the Doral Beach Hotel to a suite that felt as large as an entire floor of the convalescent home, where she took a long bath, got into the big double bed and turned out the light, and couldn’t sleep. For hours she paced the floor of the too-lavish room, wanting to blame her sleeplessness on the fact that she could hear Nightline on the television in the suite next door, but long after the people next door had turned the television off and there was nothing to be heard but silence, she was still wide awake.

She thought about how hateful and selfish she’d been, never being

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available to Nathan, then she worried about the possibility that Nina and Neetie were having a terrible time together, then she worried about the possibility that they were having a great time together. She ordered up a sandwich from the twenty-four-hour room service, and even though she wasn’t hungry she sat eating it and every last potato chip they sent with it, thinking about the fact that it was in a hotel suite in Miami Beach a lot less grand than this one where the breakup of her marriage had happened, a lifetime ago. And how in the lobby of the same hotel from which John had made his exit, after a long, bitter estrangement she and Bertie had been reunited.

And what a reunion. Cee Cee was playing the showroom at the Carillon, and Bertie arrived in Miami Beach to sit by the bedside of her dying mother. It was one of those bizarre twists of fate that Cee Cee was certain was part of a predestined plot written on the day of everyone’s birth, and she remembered how when she first walked into the lobby of the Carillon that day with those dogs she used to have yapping at her heels, and saw Bertie standing there after not seeing her for so long, she thought she was hallucinating.

“I forgive you,” Bertie had said to her, and just remembering that haughty look Bert always got on her face when she thought she was so right about something, Cee Cee bristled. “Yeah, well thanks a whole fuckin’ lot, Bert,” she had said, “but I don’t forgive you, and I never will.” Of course that night she’d felt like a total schmuck for walking away from her, so in her usual fashion of overdoing it, she had gone to the hotel kitchen and picked up a bunch of dinners, then schlepped them over to the intensive care unit to feed all the relatives of the sick and the dying. Saint Cee Cee. Yeah, sure. Mother Teresa wasn’t losing any sleep over the competition.

Anyway, Bertie did forgive her and they had gone on. Started sending their letters to one another again. And it was a few weeks later when Bertie sent her a poem in the mail. Cee Cee couldn’t remember now who had written it.

Friendship is the comfort

The inexpressible comfort

Of feeling safe with a person

Having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words But pouring all right out

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just as they are, chaff and grain together, Certain that a friendly faithful hand

Will take and sift them

Keep what is worth keeping

And with a breath of comfirt

Blow the rest away.

The poem had stayed in her mind forever. After all, pouring it all

out was definitely her M.O., and for all their lives Bertie had managed to sift them out. Yeah, she thought now, it’s good that Nina’s visiting Neetie. The frostily airconditioned living room of the suite was getting colder every minute, and she wished she remembered what the bellman told her about how to turn the air off. Even if Cee Cee personally hated that old bitch Neetie, it didn’t matter because it was good for Nina to make a connection with somebody who gave her a sense of her own history, let her know that she had one, that once there was her grandmother Rosie who loved her daughter Bertie and that she was beautiful and fun and called her daughter “Puss” the same way Bertie did with Nina.

And it was good that Cee Cee was here in Miami for the same reason. To connect with her father and the part of herself that had come from him, a man who could make someone laugh by putting a dishtowel on his head and singing the words “Without a pair of pants” had definitely to be related to her by blood. And that was worth a lot. Finally after taking the room service tray out into the deserted hotel corridor, she fell asleep on the sofa in the living room of the suite, dreaming some vague dream about her mother, and eventually she woke with a pounding headache, dressed, and called down to the front desk and asked if the bellman would please get her a taxi, and soon she was back walking down the corridor of the convalescent home.

Nathan was arguing with a nurse about his breakfast.

“Daddy,” Cee Cee said, “you’re going into the hospital. Today. So

put on your paisley robe or whatever you have to put on because I’m taking you over there now.”

“Like hell you are,” Nathan said.

“Doctor Feiffer told me you won’t go to the hospital because you

think you’ve lived enough. Well, you know what? You may have lived

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enough for you, but you haven’t lived enough for me. I made a mistake, I stayed away from you for too long, and now I want you to stick around for a while so I can get to know you. Purely selfish, I’ll admit, but I want to make up for some of those years, so Nina can get to know you, and I want to hear stories about my grandparents and what Leona was like when you were dating, and what you said

the night you asked her to marry you.”

“She asked me.”

“Well, I want to hear about that too. And about what I looked like

the first time you saw me in the hospital nursery.”

“A big mouth just like now.”

She was pulling a little suitcase out of one of the closets, not sure if it was her father’s or Marty Elman’s, and packing toiletries in it and pajamas and a clean seersucker robe.

“I remember there were a lot of stories I used to ignore like about how smart I was and what my first words were, stories nobody else knows about me but you.”

“I can tell you all that stuff in one day and you can go home,” Nathan said, but he was turning on the bed now and putting his feet on the floor.

“I’m not going home until I get a date from you of when you’re coming to Los Angeles to visit.”

Nathan gave her a dismissing wave and a grunt, but he walked across the room to the bathroom unassisted.

Nina had never eaten in a cafeteria and the food looked great. The plates piled with squares of red Jell-O on lettuce, the pineapple rings on beds of cottage cheese, with a little strawberry half on the top. “Live it up,” Neetie told her. “Have the Jell-O and the cottage cheese and a cream puff too. There are cream puffs at the end of the line.”

While Uncle Herb stayed home, “the two girls,” as Neetie called them, had gone to the movies to see Hannah and Her Sisters and then for an early dinner, and they got dressed up to do it. Neetie wore a white-and-yellow-flowered dress that made her dark skin look even darker, and Nina, whose hours in the sun had brought out every freckle on her face, wore a dress Cee Cee bought her, which was a pale yellow pinafore.

Cee Cee had called her from the hospital. She sounded nervous,

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and she told Nina that it was good that they were in Florida to be with their respective families and that even though she may not have acted like it sometimes, she thought people should be good to their families and try to take those relationships to their hearts. The things she said were really corny like from a greeting card, and probably she was feeling sentimental because she was calling from a hospital where she told Nina her father was going to have surgery immediately, which meant she and Nina might have to stay a day or two longer.

Nina said that was okay with her, and it was. She was getting used to the burp burp of Uncle Herbie, who was kind and smiled at her a lot and knew how to play twenty-one and gin rummy too. She had been relieved to find out that his surgery had removed his larynx, where he spoke, not his esophagus, where he ate, so no food fell out of the little hole. He also explained to her that though some others who had the same surgery sometimes used an amplifying device, he had chosen to learn, from another man who had the surgery years earlier, how to speak with his breath. Nina admired that.

The only tiresome part of her stay was Neetie’s endless tirade against everyone in the world, but that was actually starting to be funny. Nina made a game out of trying to see if Neetie could get through any fifteen-minute period without either talking badly about somebody else or complaining about her own life.

“I never even got a cent out of the deal,” she was saying now, as Nina held a red Jell-O square in her mouth, loving the way it dribbled down her throat as it melted, “because when my sister Rose died she left everything to your mother. Not that she had a fortune or anything as far as I know, but she didn’t leave me so much as an earring. Remember that emerald ring she used to wear? I would have liked that. No, she gave it all to your moter, so then your mother dies and what happens? She leaves everything to you, naturally, and again I’m out in the cold, which is a figure of speech, since I’m living in Miami Beach,” she said and laughed at what she was sure was her own wit. A busboy poured more coffee in her cup when she gestured for him with a snapping finger.

“You mean this emerald ring?” Nina asked and reached under the pinafore where the emerald ring, which she only wore when she got very dressed up, was hanging from the chain around her neck, and she held it out toward Neetie.

I’LL BE THERE

Neetie leaned forward, raising an eyebrow, then reached across and fingered the dangling ring hungrily.

“My sister Rosie’s ring,” she said, her eyes full of longing. ‘I’ll never forget how much she loved it. I can picture it on her hand. God, I miss her. u know, she didn’t leave me so much as a bobby pin because she was always so worried about your mother. Of course at the time I was hurt, but now in my old age I got smart. I mean there’s no telling why people do things. Right? But that ring.” She was still gazing at it and touching it, and Nina politely leaned forward to make it easier for her. “I remember when our mother gave it to her,” Neetie said, and then her eyes fogged up as if that thought was an upsetting one. Finally she let go of the ring and dug her fork into the turkey pot pie she had chosen from the hot foods section, as Nina slid another cold square of red Jell-O onto her fork.

“Want to try it on?” she asked, hoping Aunt Neetie would say no but think what a nice girl she was for offering, except she’d barely finished the question when Neetie was standing behind her unclasping the chain, which she pulled away from the ring and placed on the table, and then she slid the ring onto her bony brown hand, and held her arm out stiff in front of her with her hand flexed as she gazed at the gleaming green stone.

“My sister’s ring,” she said, and then she wiped her eyes with her paper napkin.

As Cee Cee sat in the hospital watching Nathan’s condition improve by the hour, measured by the number and volume of his complaints, she realized that the last time she’d been in a hospital was when Nina was born, and while Nathan was asleep she found a pay telephone in

the hall and called Neetie’s number.

“Hello?”