Prayers for the Dying (Pam of Babylon Book Four) (2 page)

.

2

A
cross town, Bernice Smith was trying her best to pull it together. Her beloved son, Jack, was due to arrive any minute, coming to the family mansion on Columbus Avenue from his Midtown apartment to begin planning the engagement party, rehearsal dinner, and wedding reception for his nuptials to Pam Fabian.

Bernice was a closet drunk. Only her devoted staff and family knew the truth, although it was suspected among a few acquaintances. Her future daughter-in-law thought she was what she appeared to be: a pillar of proper New York society. Jack would never betray her secret. She tried to present herself to her children as the motivated, dynamic mother they pretended her to be. Her dressing table mirror couldn’t hide the pain of the previous night; not yet fifty years old, she looked seventy. Ice to the eyes helped some of the swelling; makeup would do the rest. She worked quickly and expertly, years of practice helping her to wipe away all traces of a weekend of binging and physical abuse.

There was a knock on her door; Mildred, her housekeeper, announcing the arrival of the wedding planner and Mr. Jack. Bernice got up delicately and, standing as straight as she could, walked to the door of her room. She turned around as she reached for the light switch; a slight smell of whisky lingering in the room just strong enough to give her away. Hoping Mildred didn’t notice, she dug in her skirt pocket for another breath mint.

Voices coming from the den revealed where the meeting would be. Of course, Jack would want it there, where the action always took place in the house. A more appropriate room may have been the parlor; if Harold came home from his golf game, he wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion into his sacred space. Bernice plastered a smile on her face as she entered.

“Hello!” she announced. Jack went to her and kissed her cheek. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with us on Sunday, Robert. This is my son, Jack,” she said to the wedding planner. “The groom!” she added with a giggle.

Jack looked at her, concerned. He held his hand out and shook the other man’s, and then looked around the room. “Where’s Mrs. Fabian?” Jack asked. “Come to think of it, where’s Pam?”

Bernice looked confused for just a second. “Why, I imagine they’re home, silly boy. This is just a preliminary meeting, just a chance to meet Robert and see if we all want to work together.”
Whew
! Bernice thought.
That was close.
She didn’t like Pam; thought she was silly and ignorant, and her mother was worse—about as interesting as a turnip. But she had forgotten that they might insist on being consulted about the wedding plans.

“Oh! I rather thought we would be making real plans today. I booked you for two hours, Mrs. Smith,” Robert said, thinking,
she
will
pay for it whether or not anything gets accomplished, that’s for sure.

Bernice thought fast, which was not easy so early in the afternoon. “Well, we can certainly plan the engagement party and get Pam’s approval later, can we not?” She failed to see what the big deal was. “Besides, I think it may have been a wee bit presumptuous of you to assume you would come here and plan for two hours when we haven’t seen your portfolio or references!” Bernice was sliding into her role as haughty matron. It had the right effect on Robert, but Jack was looking at her, horrified.

“Yes, of course, let me get my albums out for you to look at.” The young man began to dig through several satchels and pulled out thick folders of photographs. Bernice pointed to the table.

“Sit down, sit down,” she commanded. She had saved herself from a clumsy exposure yet again. That Robert Winegarten was the most sought-after wedding planner in Manhattan, booked two years in advance, had been forgotten. Bernice Stein Smith was in charge.

The week before, beautiful Pamela Fabian, twenty-two and just out of college, was sitting at a local luncheon counter in Bensonhurst with her four sisters, sharing a huge order of French fries and listening to Sharon talk about school. Of the four girls, Pam, the oldest, was the prettiest. Four years after Pam, Sharon had come along. Born with a mild degree of spina bifida, after surgeries and rehabilitation she barely had a limp. Sharon was in her first year of college up in Hartford, but she missed her family and tried to get home every weekend.

Susan, a year younger than Sharon, was a senior in high school. She was the smartest of the four children, but the quietest and easily forgotten. Marie was the baby. She stood next to Pam with her head on her shoulder. Pam absentmindedly rubbed her younger sister’s back while they talked. The three girls were close to Pam, but not so much to each other. She was the mother figure of the family, the nurturer and listener. Their mother, Nelda, held down the fort as the provider of meals and clean clothes, but because of her own issues, which included alcoholism and mental illness, she was unavailable to her daughters emotionally.

Jack Smith was going to ask Pam’s dad for her hand in marriage that evening. He was coming into Brooklyn to be by her side when they broke the news to the family. Although the visit was supposedly for dinner, Pam’s mother could smell an engagement announcement. It was God appearing in the flesh; Nelda Fabian was like a crazy person trying to get the house ready. While scurrying around cleaning, she took the time to put a sandwich down in front of her husband for lunch.

“We should have made arrangements to meet at a diner,” she said, looking around the kitchen. “This place needed painting ten years ago.”

“Oh, relax, will you? He’s coming here to see Pam, not the house.” Frank Fabian worked for the city of New York and knew all about the Smiths of Columbus Avenue. All he could think about was that if Pam left to marry, he would have one less mouth to feed. And one daughter marrying into a rich household might benefit the others. He bit into his sandwich; pork from last night’s pork and sauerkraut.

“What are you making for dinner tonight?” His wife was Polish and he was Italian but they never ate macaroni. When Frank requested it, Nelda’s response was that it was too fattening and they had a house full of girls to keep thin and marriageable. Secretly, she hated Italian food. If he wanted it, he could go upstairs and let his mother cook it for him.

“Roast beef,” she replied.

Perogies were the staple for Sunday dinner, but they were too smelly to serve someone from Columbus Avenue. Nelda was a classic snob. She was also a Jew-hater but she did not yet know Jack’s heritage. Frank loved his wife and daughters but he knew his place in their Brooklyn household. His job was to bring in the money and they would spend it as fast as they could. Life went smoother if he kept his mouth shut. Money was tight with the girls in college, although his mother, bless her heart, paid living expenses for the household. Pam was finished and Sharon was in her first year. That one-year overlap was murder. Sharon had wanted to be a physical therapist since she was a youngster, which meant more college. Susan was right behind her and dental school was in her future if they could find the money. Hopefully, Marie would be satisfied working at Macy’s or serving hot dogs at Devil Dogs because he didn’t think he would live long enough to get her through college. Now, with Jack Smith in the picture, that might change.

“What time is he supposed to be here?” Frank asked, gazing longingly at his recliner.

But Nelda wasn’t having it. “Don’t even think about it,” she snapped. “You’ve got to run the vacuum for me and get a shower.” She looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall. “Better hurry up. Those girls will be back from the store soon and they have to get washed up, too.” Raising four girls with one bathroom was easy as long as she kept them to a strict schedule. She wondered what was taking them so long. “If they stopped to eat anything, I swear to God I will whip all four of them.” She swept the kitchen floor in a frenzy, beating the broom bristles against the wood.

Putting the last of his sandwich in his mouth, Frank got up from the table, resigned that the rest of his Sunday would be spent in domestication. Secretly, he was fine with it. And although he longed for the day when all four girls were independent, he was afraid of being alone with Nelda again. “I’m going out for a smoke and then I’ll get started,” he told Nelda, determined to waste as much time as he could before he got down to real work. He grabbed his cigarette pack and lighter and went out the back door, which led from the landing to the basement and outdoors. Nelda had made a place for him to smoke, providing an old coffee can filled with sand for the butts.

The houses on their street lined up evenly across the back and the men of the households sat outside on their fire-escape landings to smoke and catch up with the latest neighborhood gossip. Nelda counted on Frank to fill her in on the divorces, affairs, births, and deaths of Benson-hurst. Today, the talk centered on Jack Smith of Columbus Avenue.

“We got the stoop swept off just for yer’ company today, Pizon. My wife drivin’ me crazy. ‘Get up off yer’ lazy backside and do something about the trash!’ she holler at me. Thanks a lot,” Fredo complained from his stoop next door.

“Which of your girls is he comin’ for?” Mario asked from the other side of the house. “It gotta be Pamela.” The other men whistled or sighed in agreement.

“None of your business,” Frank yelled. “You’re all a bunch of perverts.” Outside of the relief he could get financially, Frank didn’t allow himself to dwell on the aftermath of what a marriage would mean to one of them. He wasn’t raising them to be any man’s sexual partner; the thought was disgusting, sickening, maddening.

Nelda told him he was being ridiculous. “You can’t have it both ways, Frank. If you want another man to pay for your daughter, she has got to sleep with him.”

“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Shut up! What are you trying to do to me! Jesus!” he yelled, holding his hands over his ears as she went on and on about what was wrong with him, did he think his children were above sex? “It’s not something I want to think about, if it’s alright with you.” Having the neighbor men droning on about which of his girls were bait for the rich Smiths angered him because they had hit a nerve. He threw his cigarette down onto the grass and stormed back in the house, leaving the men to laugh at him. “He thinks his kid is going to stay a virgin forever! What a putz!”

Going to the kitchen sink to wash his hands, Frank stared out the window over the sink. He’d go upstairs and see his mother before he started vacuuming, further delaying the inevitable. Nelda walked in as he turned from the sink.

“I think I’ll go up and see Mom first,” he said. “Do you want me to take anything up to her?” His mother had moved to the third floor of the house when Susan was born nineteen years ago. The family had needed more room and the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor was too small for a family with three children. Being upstairs would give everyone more privacy. But Nelda didn’t see it that way. She thought Genoa was fleeing from the children. Her help with them had made motherhood tolerable for Nelda.

“What kind of grandmother doesn’t want to be around her grandchildren?” she’d challenged when Frank told her about the move. “I have never heard of such a thing.” Her own mother lived in Hamtramck and wouldn’t leave Michigan to visit them. Nelda didn’t have the money to go there either, so the children had never met their maternal grandmother. Nelda had separate and severe standards for her in-laws that didn’t apply to her own family.

“She does want to,” he’d said. “She really wanted us to have more room is all.”

But Nelda was used to it now, after all these years. She was fond of her mother-in-law, and grateful for the home she provided and all the help she’d given when the girls were younger. Nelda wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for Frank’s mother.

“Can you take her mail up?” Nelda asked. She turned her back to fish through a pile of papers and envelopes. “Ask her to have dinner with us too, okay? Pam said Jack will be here at six sharp.”

Frank took the handful of mail from his wife. He climbed two flights of stairs to reach his mother; she rarely ventured down these days. The time may have come for her to revisit the lower floor of the house. Pam would be moving out soon; she could have her room. Frank knocked on the door.

“Mom, it’s me!” He could hear her giggling to herself; his salutation always made her laugh.
Who else would it be?

“Pam’s boyfriend will be here for dinner. Can you come down at six?” He put her mail on a small table by the door and went into her sitting room where windows looked out on Bay Parkway. In front of the windows were two comfortable chairs on either side of a small, round pedestle table. He’d sat there over the years, having meals with his mother, listening to her tell stories of the family. Occasionally, one of the girls would accompany him. Pam liked visiting with her grandmother more than the others did because she could remember the days when her grandfather was alive and they lived on the first floor while Frank and Nelda lived upstairs with their growing family.

“Who’s the boyfriend? Not the kid from Columbus Avenue?” Grandma Fabian asked, suddenly speaking with a Brooklyn accent. She shook her head no. “I don’t like his mother; she’s a lush, not that it matters much anymore.” She thought of her own daughter-in-law.