Shakespeare's Kitchen (17 page)

“Bethy has taken her to play out in the yard, O.K.?”

Ilka kept saying “thanks” to people. “Does anybody want some coffee?” she asked them.

Everybody said, “No thanks.”

Leslie said, “I would very much like some coffee.” Leslie had returned? Ilka was in the kitchen filling a kettle with water, measuring coffee, when Officer Jose came and stood in the kitchen door. He asked Ilka if she minded if he studied his book for this exam a week from Tuesday, to make sergeant. Ilka took him into Jimmy’s study and cleared Jimmy’s papers onto a chair. Ilka walked upstairs. She went into the bedroom. That was Jimmy under the white sheet. Ilka didn’t recognize the sheet—it was not one of her sheets. Would Ilka have turned the sheet back if the very large, embarrassed boy policeman hadn’t stood in the door and asked if she minded if he watched the playoffs, his favorite team? His brother’s best friend was a rookie fullback. Ilka minded
very much, but couldn’t think if that was right or not. She couldn’t figure out why Jimmy’s being dead under the alien sheet should prevent a bored boy from watching his brother’s best friend on his favorite team. She said, “Get yourself a chair out of the baby’s room at the top of the stairs,” but the policeman said, “That’s O.K.” Ilka understood that he wanted to be a minimum of bother. She understood that her presence prevented him from turning the TV on, so she went out of the room. The TV stood on the dresser. It troubled Ilka that the boy would have to sit on the edge of the bed to watch. Would he budge Jimmy’s legs under that sheet to make room? As long as Ilka lived she wondered about not having turned the sheet back to look at Jimmy when he was dead. And she tried imagining a way for the young policeman to have sat on the edge of the bed without having to move Jimmy’s legs.

 

 

It wasn’t till evening that the coroner’s men came with a folded stretcher. Leslie walked outside and closed the door and talked with them and came back in and said, “Ilka, take the baby into the living room.”

“No!” shouted Ilka. “I want to stand here!” Ilka stood at the bottom of the stairs. She shivered and someone put a sweater around her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. The phone rang. Someone handed Ilka the receiver. Ilka’s friend, Carter, was calling. “Just happened to be thinking about you,” he said, “wondering how you’re doing.”

Ilka said, “Jimmy died.”

“We have a bad connection,” said Carter on the other side of the continent. “I don’t understand what you are saying.”

“Yes, you do,” Ilka said, “Jimmy is dead. They’re bringing him down the stairs.”

“Christ!” Carter said. “This is embarrassing.”

“No, it’s not! It’s not embarrassing! Why is being dead embarrassing!” howled Ilka as the two men lifted Jimmy over the banister. They got him angled out the door, carried him down the path and out of the gate. They put him in the back of the coroner’s truck and drove away.

The coroner’s men put James in the back of the truck and drove away, and the Bernstines, once again, urged Ilka to come home with them, at least for the night, or let them take the baby. Again Ilka was earnest in begging to be left right here, wanted the baby to stay here with her. No thank you, really, she did not need—did not want—anybody sleeping over.

The friends and colleagues trooped down the path, the Shakespeares, the Bernstines, the Ayes, the Zees, the Cohns, and the Stones. Outside the gate they stopped, they looked back, but Ilka had taken the baby inside and closed the door. They stood a moment, they talked, not accounting to themselves for the intense charm of the summer hill rising behind Ilka’s house, of standing,
of breathing—of the glamour of being alive. Leslie asked everyone to come over for a drink.

They moved along the sidewalk in groups and pairs. Dr. Alfred Stone walked with his wife. The report of the accident had come in the very the moment the committee was about to vote on Jimmy’s retention. Alpha had called Alfred. It was he who attended at the scene. Dr. Stone was arranging the sentence he ought to have spoken to the widow when he arrived at her house or at some moment in the hours since. Everybody stopped at the corner. Ilka’s door was open. The two policemen who had spent the day trying to be inconspicuous were finally able, now that the body had been removed, to go home. The smaller, Spanish policeman walked out the gate, but the big young policeman turned and waved. Ilka must be standing back in the darkness. The two policemen got into the police car and drove away.

Inside her foyer Ilka closed the door and leaned her head against it, devastated at everybody’s leaving.

At the Shakespeares’ there was the business of walking into the sitting room, of sitting down, of the drinks. “A lot of ice, Leslie. Thanks.” “Martini, please, and hold the vegetables.”

Joe Bernstine smiled sadly. “I wonder if we retained Jimmy.”

Leslie said, “Alpha will schedule us a new search committee.”

Nobody said, We could hardly do worse than poor Jimmy.

Jenny Bernstine said, “Ilka is being very gallant and terrific.”

Nobody said, She didn’t cry.

Alicia said, “Ilka isn’t one to throw her hands up.”

“Or the towel in,
or
the sponge,” said Eliza. “Joke. Sorry.”

Alicia said, “Ilka is not one to drown in her sorrows.”

“Well I’m going to drown mine,” Eliza held her glass out to Leslie, who refilled it.

Alicia said, “We live on borrowed time.”

Alpha asked her husband, “The policeman said there was fire?” and the friends’ and colleagues’ imaginations went into action to dim or scramble or in some way unthink the flames in which Jimmy—the person they knew—was burning. They wanted not to have an image of which they would never after be able to rid themselves.

Dr. Stone replied that there was fire but Jimmy’s body had been thrown clear. The fall had broken his neck.

The flames were gone. The friends envisaged the unnaturally angled head with Jimmy’s face.

Dr. Alfred Stone took his drink. He sat down. He looked around the room and located his wife sitting beside Eliza Shakespeare. Were they talking about the death? Alfred had, earlier in the day, seen Alpha talking with Ilka and had wondered what words Alpha might be saying to the widow: To refer to the death would be like putting a finger in a wound, but how
not
mention it? And wasn’t it gross to be talking of anything else? Alfred mistakenly believed himself to be singularly lacking in what normal people—the people in this room—were born knowing. He thought all of them knew how to feel and what to say. He watched them walk out and return with drinks. They stood together and talked. Dr. Stone remained sitting.

 

 

At eleven o’clock that first night, as a brutal loneliness knocked the wind out of Ilka, her phone rang. “We thought we’d see how you were doing,” said Leslie. “Did the baby get to sleep?”

“The baby is O.K. I’m O.K. Is it O.K. to be O.K.? I could do with some retroactive lead time. I need to practice taking my stockings off with Jimmy dead. Relearn how to clean my teeth.”

Leslie said, “Wait.” Ilka heard him pass on to Eliza, who must be in the room, who might be lying in the bed beside him, that Ilka was O.K. but needed to relearn how to clean her teeth with
Jimmy dead. His voice returned full strength. “Eliza says we’re coming over in the morning to bring you breakfast.”

“I don’t know how,” said Ilka. Joe Bernstine remembered that when his father died, his mother had turned the faces of the mirrors to the wall. Ilka was struck with the gesture but embarrassed by its drama. “I know I’m supposed to sit on a low stool, but I can’t get any lower.” Ilka was sitting on the floor tickling Maggie, the fat, solemn, comfortable baby. Baby Maggie’s eyes were so large they seemed to go around the corner of the little face with its baroque hanging cheeks.

“A Viennese baby,” Eliza said.

“She’s fun to hold because she collapses her weight in your arms.” Ilka jumped Maggie up and down. “She must have heard me scream when the policemen told me.”

Eliza unpacked the tiny tomatoes from her garden. She had baked two long loaves of white bread. Jenny was arranging the cold cuts that she had brought onto the platters she had also brought. At some point in the morning Joe and Leslie rose to go to the institute. They would be back in an hour. Leslie took Ilka’s hand and brought it to his lips.

Ilka said, “I called my mother and she is coming tomorrow.”

Celie at her desk across from the front entrance fanned herself with an envelope like one trying to avoid fainting. She told Betty, “I talked with him that actual morning! He comes running in, punches the elevator button, doesn’t wait and runs right up those stairs, comes right down. He’s stuffing papers in his briefcase. I
told him, ‘You have a good trip now,’ and he says, ‘Oh shit!’ and he’s going to run back up except the elevator door opens, and he gets in, and goes back up.”

Betty was able to one-up Celie with her spatial proximity to the dead man, though at a greater temporal remove. The day
before
James drove to Washington he tried to open the door into the conference room with papers under his arm, carrying a cup of coffee, saying, “Anybody got a spare hand?” Betty had held the door for him. He had said “Oh! Thanks!”

Could a person for whom one held a door, who said “Oh shit!” and “Oh! Thanks!” be dead?

Nancy Cohn and Maria Zee talked on the telephone and one-upped each other in respect to which of them was the more upset. “I got to my office,” said Maria, “and just sat.”

“I,” Nancy said, “never made it to the office because I’d kept waking up every hour
on
the hour.”

“I never got to sleep! I kept waking poor Zack to check if he was alive. He was furious.”

“Have you called her?”

“I thought I would write.”

“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll write her,” said Nancy.

“It’s good of you to come,” Ilka said to the visitors. The institute staff, Celie, Betty, Wendy, and Barbara dropped over together, after office hours. They sat round the table in Ilka’s kitchen. The fellows sat in the living room. Ilka’s mother held the baby on her lap. Ilka let out a sudden laugh. “What’ll I do when the party is
over!” She rose and took the baby and carried her out of the room past Dr. Stone hiding in the foyer.

Dr. Stone believed that by the time Ilka returned he would be ready with the right sentence, but when she came down Alfred was glad that the baby’s head intervened between his face and Ilka’s face so that it was not possible to say anything to her and the front-door bell was ringing again. Martin Moses walked in, took Ilka and her baby into a big hug, and said, “Christ, Ilka!” Ilka said, “Don’t I know it.”

“Give her to me,” Ilka’s mother said and took the child out of Ilka’s arms.

Alpha came out of the living room saying, “Hello, Martin. Ilka, listen, take it easy. You take a couple of days—as long as you like, you know that! Alfred, we have to go.” And the Ayes and the Zees had to go home. Celie and the rest left. Martin left. The Shakespeares said they would be back. Ilka thought everyone had gone when she heard the gentle clatter in the kitchen. Jenny Bernstine was washing dishes.

People trickled over in the evening—a smaller crowd that left sooner. Jenny washed more dishes. When Joe came to pick her up, she looked anxiously at Ilka, who said, “I’m O.K.”

Nancy Cohn went to look for Nat. He was on the living-room couch watching TV.

Nancy said, “I’m embarrassed not to know what to write to Ilka. It’s embarrassing worrying about being embarrassed for Chrissake!”

“Calamity is a foreign country. We don’t know how to talk to the people who live there.”

Nancy said, “
You
write her. You’re the writer in the family.”

“I’m not feeling well,” said Nat.

“She’s
your
colleague!” said Nancy.

And so neither of them wrote to Ilka.

 

 

Maria called Alicia and asked her, “I mean, we went
over
there. Do we still have to write?”

Alicia said, “Alvin says we’ll have her over next time we have people in.”

Celie cooked a casserole and told Art, her thirteen-year-old, to take it over to Mrs. Carl’s house.

“The woman that her husband burned up in his car? No way!”

Linda, who was fifteen, said, “For your information, he did
not
even burn up. He broke his neck.” She advised her brother to check his facts.

Art said, “Linda will go and take it over to her.”

Well, Linda wasn’t going over there, not by herself, so Celie made them both go.

Nobody answered the front bell.

Art said, “I never knew a dead person before.”

Linda said, “You mean you never knew a person, and afterwards they died and you didn’t as a
fact
even know this person at all.”

Art said, “But I know mom, and mom knew him. Ring it again.”

They found a couple of bricks, piled one on top of the other and took turns standing on them to look in the window. Those were the stairs the dead man must have walked up and down on. There was a little table with a telephone on it and a chair. Had the dead man sat on that exact chair and lifted that phone to his ear?

Yvette, who had not called on Ilka, drove over, rang the bell, saw the casserole by the front door, thought, She’s out, skipped down the steps, got in her car, and drove away.

 

 

“Ilka was out, with the baby,” Dr. Alfred Stone reported to his wife, “and I practically fell over the stroller, corner of Euclid.”