The View From Penthouse B (30 page)

My comment seemed to delight her. Soon enough I would realize that all questions, all topics, all answers did, too.

“We did! For the schools. Nineteen sixty-something. I’ll show you his room.” I followed her down a short hallway to an unlikely candidate. Its walls were a deep rose and its pale-pink lampshades looked like tutus. “Do you believe what I did? Like a cliché! I turned it into a study two minutes after he left for college. He was the worst slob—clothes everywhere. Didn’t know what a hamper was for! He’d empty his pockets onto the nearest surface—pennies, quarters, Canadian coins, receipts, gum wrappers, golf tees. A pigsty! I rolled up my sleeves—I was just going to clean it up, vacuum, and then I got carried away. Voilà. The desk and adding machine were my father’s. He was a CPA. The sofa converts, of course.” And after only the slightest pause: “Are your parents alive?”

I said, “No, unfortunately. They died within a year of each other.”

“Before your husband or after?” she asked. “No. Why did I ask that? Morbid curiosity. You seem fine. I mean, able to go full-swing into this.” And with that, she tilted her head in the direction of her absent son.

He joined us, managing three monogrammed goblets. “Believe me,” he said. “The walls weren’t pink when I lived here.” Then, in teen-lover-boy fashion, he slipped an arm around my waist and asked, “Wanna listen to some music? Ma, you leave. She’s helping me with my English homework. I’ll keep the door open.”

Myra said, “Very funny. C’mon. I have Gouda and Triscuits.”

I listened hard for hints of buyer’s remorse from our matchmaker, especially for any words suggesting she’d been too hasty in promoting a match with a non-Jew. After we finished an unidentified cold green soup, she told me no, sit, Eli would clear. And while you’re in there, hon, would you take the pot roast out of the oven and slice it up nice on the big oval tray that was on the counter?

“Happy to,” he said. “But be nice. No third degree.”

“Use the oven mitts,” she said. And as soon as he’d left the dining room, she whispered, “It’s written all over his face, isn’t it?”

I didn’t want to be presumptuous, so I said, “Something good, I hope.”

“Good? Better than good. He’s happy,” and with that, her voice broke. She flapped one hand in front of her face, signaling
Don’t mind me.

I said, “I’m happy, too, Mrs. Offenberg.”

“Myra!”

“Myra.”

“You continue to be happy. He’s a wonderful boy. A wonderful man. Much neater now. I’m lucky that I lived to see this,” she said, waving her index finger back and forth between me and the kitchen.

I said, “I don’t want to take anything for granted . . .”

She leaned closer. “I’m a widow, too.”

I said, yes, I knew that—

“I had just turned seventy, maybe seventy-one, when Joe died. And even though it wasn’t the biggest love story ever told, I had no desire to keep company with another man.”

“But you did?”

“My high school reunion, another cliché! My fiftieth. Does that add up right? Maybe it was an odd-year reunion. Nathan Sondheim—no relation, unfortunately. We’d gone to a dance together junior or senior year, not even a prom, a semiformal. Not a word or a photo in fifty-plus years. He walked in alone. I walked in alone. Nathan recognized me immediately. And when I got home that night I dug out my high school yearbook and I saw what he’d written. Believe it or not, it said, ‘Myra Lowenthal, will you marry me?’ Of course, I took it as a joke because he was always something of a wisenheimer.”

“How soon was this after Mr. Offenberg died?”

“Actually, it was before, but a few months later he was gone. Nathan sent a card. We had our first dinner together six, maybe seven months later. When people ask, I say it was a year.”

“Has he since confessed that he meant it—the marriage proposal in the yearbook?”

“No! He has no recollection of it, so I haven’t brought it up.” She smiled. “He took me to his grandson’s bar mitzvah this past April and introduced me to everyone as ‘the woman to whom I’m not married.’ That’s how we like it.”

She whispered that Eli wasn’t up to speed on Nathan. Her doing. Sons can be squeamish about a mother’s love life. She patted my hand as if to say
Watch this.
“Hon? How are you doing in there? Was the knife sharp enough?”

“No, but I’m almost done,” he called back. “Two minutes. Do you have any parsley? Everything’s the same color.”

“Of course I do.” She winked at me and said, “Chop it fine. And arrange the carrots and potatoes around the meat, okay?”

He called back, “Sure, I’ll stall.”

Myra’s reply was “Don’t be silly.” And then to me, “Would you marry again?”

I said, “I never
thought
I would . . .”

“But?” Myra was breaking her roll into increasingly smaller pieces, to no obvious end.

“What are you hoping I’ll say?” I asked her.

She took her time before answering. “Maybe something like ‘But then Eli came along.’”

I took a roll and passed her the butter dish.

“Then Eli came along,” I said.

Nobody was home when I got back to West Tenth Street, the first time in recent memory that penthouse B had been deserted on a weeknight. I checked the messages on my silenced phone. The first was Margot’s. “We’re out” was followed by a muffled side conversation with Charles. “Quiet. Sorry! We’re debating sushi versus Thai, and a late movie if we can agree on which one. How was the mom? Call me.” And a text from Anthony, nothing more than
Out w Wm. Won’t be home. Thank U! How was dinner? How was Myra?

I texted back the same to each:
Myra is great.
So am I. Have fun. xoxo
.

A bleep told me I had a text message from Eli. It was short but perfect.

I still have it.

39

Acknowledgments

F
IRST, I WANT
to thank Margot for everything. In our year of cooperative living, I learned how to have fun, to give and take, and to count blessings that weren’t visible to the leaky eye. I thank her for being the person who can turn vegetables from the scrap heap into full-course meals, and hot dogs and beans into a party on a roof. Is penthouse B a classroom where one learns how to charm salesmen, doormen, waiters, and strangers on the street? I might be living proof of that.

I am extremely grateful to Anthony, a perfect roommate, wise friend, and safety net. Has anyone ever treated two women, old enough to be his big sisters, as equals and social guinea pigs in the nicest, most inclusive manner? He taught us how to download music, upload photos, find decent dates and biological children online; how to squeeze frosting out of a pastry bag—all without one word of complaint about his claustrophobic, windowless back room.

Despite our urgings, he did not find his calling in cupcakes. He continues to bake, to impress, to indulge and woo with his original and delicious confections. But what I learned from our well-meaning optimism and misguided career counseling is that something done on a small, amateur scale doesn’t necessarily mean employment on a larger one. We are guilty of pushing him rather than appreciating his gifts, and have apologized for ignoring his frequent reality check: A bakery needs venture capital to get off the ground, something none of our cheerleading could provide.

He is a multitalented, unflappable multitasker. Who else knows where to find a kosher caterer, a florist, a judge, Japanese lanterns, and a chuppah?
If anyone reading this has a job for Anthony Sarno, our letters of reference would bedazzle your Human Resources department.

I must also thank my sister Betsy. On the whole, I recognize that bossiness is just another name for leadership, and without question, she cocaptained the team that pushed me out of the house wearing better outfits than those in my closet. And most important, it was her suggestion that put her two older sisters, who were lost at sea for different reasons, in one boat. “Win-win,” she is often heard bragging about the impulse and the results.

Next I want to thank Charles. We had our issues, but here is the lesson of Dr. Pierrepont: If a person is dogged enough in his repentance, eventually forgiveness can’t be denied. He refused to turn Margot’s postdivorce, postincarceration hatred of him into a shoot-out; instead, he showed up, dedicated to the task and persistent, the very traits that got him through medical school, internship, residency, and prison. Hat in hand, he returned and fought, even when some of us clung to the notion of him as untrustworthy and obnoxious. If he had a family crest, its slogan would be “Love conquers all,” which he would, no doubt, correct to “
Omnia vincit amor.
”

I had hoped to report that we are all gainfully employed, but that is not the case. Charles was the first to slip back into the working world, once his license was restored. A prison gynecologist is not the most prestigious or lucrative appointment for a physician, but he finds it rewarding. Never one to chase down job leads, Margot has rather smoothly transitioned back into the role of doctor’s wife.

Next, I’d like to acknowledge my step-nephew, Chaz. He most generously and affectionately relies on the circumference of Margot’s head to guide his constructions because so many of his projects, even the mistakes, end up in her possession. She is now officially a hat person; women often stop her on the street to ask her where these marvelous creations come from. His mother, he says, would also proudly wear his creations, but the new husband, a three-sport coach, doesn’t like her being a billboard for his stepson’s sissy talents. What Margot exhibits is something close to maternal pride, possibly even to motherhood, and when they’re together and I’m lucky enough to be present, I see that in her eyes.

I thank Myra Offenberg deeply for subscribing to the
New York Review of Books,
and, especially, for keeping her old issues lying around, as well as for the nerve it took to e-mail me without her son’s knowledge or permission. I also thank her for her huge heart and open door, welcoming a person of a different religion into her family. And I might as well thank the teenager in her building who advised her in the purchase of a computer, gave her lessons, and signed her up for Wi-Fi. So thank you, Seth Levi-Aronson. I hope we meet someday.

No less deserving of gratitude: Alison and Maddy Offenberg, Eli’s daughters. Could two motherless girls have been any less possessive of their father, more interested in his love life, or any more encouraging to me? And how wise they were, pushing him out the door the night of our first date, calling after him, “It’s only dinner, Dad. It’s one meal. It doesn’t mean you have to be buried together.”

My thanks go to the Batavia’s co-op board for overlooking what in less recessionary times might be considered illegal residencies, times two, and sometimes three.

I might even thank my support group. I imagine that visit, a final meeting, perhaps the one closest to Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve. I’d be something of a guest speaker, a success story, and they could call it closure. I’d tell them about my weepy widowhood and my reluctance to give it up. I’d say to the newcomers, “Do you hate coming here? I did, too.”

And then I would quote Emily Dickinson. I’d say, “I should’ve paid better attention to that poem, the one the English teacher quoted almost the very week before she dropped out of the group. ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ Remember? She said it like punctuation, like a blessing. That line means more to me now, so if anyone’s in touch with her, please send her my regards.”

Eli. I saved him for last.

This is hard to write, knowing my sister will want to improve it. I have to begin with an earlier truth, unseasoned by my newfound self-esteem. I am realistic. I have my moments and some might say my charms, but still, not so many men have taken a luminous and steadfast shine to Gwen-Laura Considine Schmidt.

I’d already had what most people ask from life: a husband, a marriage with music, an apartment with a view of the Hudson River. I ask myself, in secret, guiltily, “Was it possible that my feelings for Eli bumped Edwin down a rung? And what if the marriage I’d commemorated as a storybook romance had been more down to earth and comfortable than I previously understood?” When I confessed this to Margot, she asked, “So? Would that be so terrible? Love comes in different temperatures.”

So this is what I’m getting to: Bad things happen to everyone. No one is exempt, even high above West Tenth Street, in mostly leafy, mostly beautiful Greenwich Village. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. All I am saying is, I am most appreciative. Some people think a higher power orchestrates these things, but I am satisfied with “fate” or “timing” or “luck.”

Eli says, when I voice such sentiments, “But I’m the lucky one.”

Imagine if my father could hear those words on the occasion of a suitor asking for my hand? I picture Daddy’s face, and at that moment I believe I really could have been the rose between two thorns.

Orphan that I am now, Eli did something close to that, in a more traditional manner than I expected. He asked Margot, the family elder, to join us for lunch.

What would you guess my older sister would do and say in a public space, at the elegant restaurant chosen just for the occasion? Scream? Dance? Leap out of her chair and throw her arms around Eli, then me, and probably the closest waiter?

“I’d like your blessing—” he began.

“Is this
it?
” she whispered, clutching my hand.

“Hold on,” I said.

She just stared down at her plate, long enough to worry Eli and make him regret this unnecessary chivalry.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “We thought this would be welcome news.”

“Eli,” she began. “Gwen . . . you two . . .”

“What?” I said. “Just say it.”

Have two sisters ever been closer? Did this moment need to make perfect sense? She was crying now, and not quietly. Within seconds the maître d’ glided to our table and asked if everything was all right.

“All right?” Margot echoed. “More than all right!” She asked if he could bring us something bubbly and sparkling that didn’t cost a fortune. That Spanish champagne? Or Californian? Dry but not too dry? Three glasses, s’il vous plaît. Because this man across the table, this lovely man, her host, her treasured friend, had just made her the happiest sister on earth.