They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (10 page)

“Dad’s doing fine,” Daniel said. “He’s out of the hospital, how about that? He’s home.”

“But who’s looking after him? What is he eating? How is he—”

“It’s all taken care of, Mom,” Molly said. “You’ll see.”

13

The apartment was full of voices, all timbres, tones, and accents. It was like an orchestra. The cushions of the sofa cradled her aching body. She listened to the voices: a deep, male, harsh African musicality; the free-for-all vowels of Portuguese English; the loops of female Polish. And Aaron, his intermittent wailing reaching back to Middle Eastern chanting in its cadences, as if all his ancestors were crying out at once.

Joy opened her eyes. A man the color of ebony smiled at her as he walked past the door toward the kitchen. He stopped to confer with a boxy woman in wide capri pants. And there was Elvira, too, the Bergmans’ housekeeper, tall and thin as a daddy long-legs, behind the boxy lady, nodding. It was such a lively group, the three of them speaking together, one more incomprehensible than the next, incomprehensible to Joy, presumably to one another as well.

Joy closed her eyes again and listened to the languages she could not comprehend. It was as though she could comprehend nothing at all, drifting comfortably on the soft outskirts of comprehension. Eventually Danny introduced the compact, quiet black man. His name was Walter. Danny said that Walter came at night. Joy smiled at Walter. How kind of him to come at night to care for Aaron. To care for her. Lovely, she said when Danny introduced her to Wanda, the woman shaped like a UPS package. Wanda emitted a gurgling laugh. Thank you, Joy said. Wanda emitted the gurgling laugh again. She spoke only Polish. Joy said, How kind of you.

“Wanda and Walter are trained in changing the colostomy bag,” Danny said. “And they taught Elvira.”

“Lovely.”

“You absolutely cannot do it anymore. The doctor said you can’t even touch it. That might be how you got C. diff.”

“C. diff is very, very dangerous.” She remembered now, she had heard about C. diff on
The Joan Hamburg Show
on the radio. “Treacherous.”

“So you really have to take it easy, Mom. Will you be able to do that? Just rest and let your strength come back?”

“Danny, you’re so good to me. You and your sister are so good to me.”

“Molly will be back in a few weeks.”

“She’s a good daughter. I am so lucky.”

Daniel smiled. She reminded him of his daughters when they had a low-grade fever. How sweet they became.

“You’re okay with not touching the pouch? Molly and I were a little worried. We know you like to take care of everything, especially about Dad, which is admirable, completely understandable. But this is really important. No pouch.”

“Lovely,” Joy said, closing her eyes. “Lovely.”

She could remember, in a soft, foggy way, the motions of taking care of Aaron, gathering his pills, counting them, explaining what each one was, then explaining again, helping him out of his wet pajamas, squatting down to get each of his enormous feet into his pant legs … And then the pouch, removing it, emptying it, washing Aaron, drying the hole, affixing the new pouch …

*   *   *

Each night Walter helped her to the bathroom. He brought her things to eat and helped her move the spoon from the bowl to her mouth. What a kind, kind man. When he appeared in the room carrying a tray or a basin of water, she was always pleasantly surprised. There was that kind man again.

When it was not night, there were the other kind people. Elvira, wiry and fast as a greyhound, whisking into the room and whisking out again. She had worked for Aaron and Joy for many years, coming every other week for a few hours. But now, Danny explained, she was coming in three mornings a week. She had insisted, he said. She didn’t trust the others. Joy smiled when he said this. She smiled when he said anything. She really did not care what he said or what anyone else said as long as she did not have to move, as long as she could lie on the couch and rest. Never had fatigue been this heavy, never had it been this welcome. Lovely, she said when someone spoke to her. Thank you, she said. How kind of you.

“So kind,” she said. “Everyone is so kind.”

14

Could Molly have ever convinced Freddie to move to New York? Of course she could have. Even though Freddie had a tenured position teaching English at UCLA while Molly had been an adjunct at a community college in New York. Even though Molly had a better position here and was paid more, too. Even though her new Catalina Island investigations, unlike the work she’d been doing in Syria, were not likely to get her kidnapped or beheaded. But she did not want to convince Freddie to move to New York.

She thought guiltily of her mother and father trapped in their apartment. Freddie’s father, Duncan, was old, too, as Freddie sometimes had to remind her, but that had not entered into Molly’s decision. He did not weigh on Molly’s mind as he should have, meaning she often forgot he existed.

But he did exist, he was old, and now he had fallen.

Freddie spoke to the paramedics, who said they’d thought at first that Duncan’s hip was broken, but he was standing on it, so it couldn’t possibly be broken. “The pain would be unbearable,” they said. “Take him to the doctor, though, just to make sure there are no sprains.”

The assisted-living facility where Duncan lived was called Green Garden, so Freddie and Molly naturally called it Grey Gardens. When they arrived, Molly waited in the car while Freddie went upstairs and got her father into a wheelchair.

“We going to the track?” Duncan said.

“No. We’re going to the doctor. Because you fell.”

“I’d rather go to the track.”

It turned out you could stand up with a broken hip, after all. Duncan Hughes could, anyway. After the doctor saw his X-rays, Duncan was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Freddie and Molly followed in the car. Freddie was too shocked to say much. A broken hip for a man in his late eighties. That was pretty much it for her father. Pneumonia would come next, and he would die. That’s what always happened.

“He’s not like other people,” Molly said, as if she’d read Freddie’s thoughts. “He’ll walk out of there, Freddie. You’ll see.”

Freddie called her brothers and sisters. One brother lived in Melbourne, one in Hong Kong. Both sisters lived in Rio. They ran a boutique together.

“They all said the exact same thing,” Freddie told Molly. “‘Keep me informed.’”

“They came for his eighty-fifth birthday. I guess they think that’s enough.”

“So then they’ll end up coming for his funeral, and it won’t make any difference because he’ll be dead. People should have pre-funerals.”

But Molly turned out to be right: Duncan was not like other people, there was no funeral, and he returned to his room at Green Garden.

“He seems happy to be back. Although he thought the name was Green Goddess. And he still wants to go to the track.”

“We should take him. Maybe his luck will hold out. We’ll win some money.”

15

Daniel took Ruby and Cora to the Museum of the City of New York. He thought they would like the Victorian dollhouse, but they preferred an exhibit on graffiti. Then they walked down Fifth Avenue, past the hospital, toward his parents’ apartment, and the girls insisted on getting ice cream from a vendor although it was windy and cold.

“Let’s sit in Grandpa’s park,” Ruby said. “Maybe we’ll see the rat.”

They sat on the cold bench and watched pigeons fluff themselves against the wind. There was no one else there. Daniel wondered if his father would ever see the park again, if he would ever leave the apartment again. For all he knew, his father was slipping into a new stage of dementia, leaving the park, the apartment, the entire world. Leaving Daniel forever.

The world without Aaron Bergman was unimaginable to Daniel. Even this pocket park, where he sat on a bench in a swirl of dead leaves with his daughters, was confusing without Aaron. Why was the park here if not for Aaron? Why were any of them in the park if not for its association with Daniel’s father?

“It’s weird without Grandpa here, isn’t it?” he said.

“Do you think raccoons come here?” Ruby asked.

“Or the coyote?”

His father was the embodiment of the word “entitled,” Daniel understood that. It was a kind of strength, he understood that, too—Aaron’s sense that whatever the world had to offer, it was certainly on offer to him, and deservedly so. Daniel envied him that confidence. Perhaps it arose from being born into a well-to-do family. But it had stayed with Aaron even when he lost his fortune. A small fortune, but Aaron had lost it, lost a profitable, solvent, well-run family business.

My daddy was a gambler
, Aaron used to sing, and Daniel would joyously sing along. They listened to Woody Guthrie records while Aaron’s business swelled up into a big balloon of impossible debt and then, one day, just like that, popped and shriveled and disappeared. Daniel had been quite young, so young he didn’t really remember being well-off. What he remembered were the years afterward, one surefire scheme after another, his mother getting a job, taking any freelance work she could rustle up even as she went back to school. He remembered the need, not for the family to live—there was always, miraculously just enough for that—but the need inside his father, the need for money, and for money to make money, and for that money to make more money, and for the lost money to reappear as borrowed money and the whole thing to start over again.

“
I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, I thought you know’d
,” Daniel sang in a nasal country-Western voice.

“Daddy,” Ruby said. She tugged at his arm. Things about him had started to embarrass her.

“
Hard travelin’, hard ramblin’
…”

“
Hard gamblin’
,” Cora joined in.

“You both make me sick,” Ruby said. But she joined in eventually, too. There was no one to hear them. Just an old man with the same red walker Aaron had, and by the time he reached the bench, the song was over.

16

Freddie could not decide whether or not to go to New York for Christmas. She loved going East for the holidays, it was still a novelty for her, it always would be—the snow, the cold, the lights on Fifth Avenue.

“Everything you hate about it,” she said to Molly, “like the crowds, for instance—I love that. I love being a tourist there.”

“You go to New York and see my father, I’ll stay here and see your father. They won’t know the difference.”

As soon as she said it, Molly wished she hadn’t. “I’m sorry. It’s so easy to dine out on them. Cheap joke. Why don’t we both stay here this year?”

But Freddie knew that Molly’s family Jewish Christmas was somehow their most important holiday. They celebrated Hanukkah in a haphazard way, lighting candles on the nights they remembered. But Christmas was a time they all got together, all of them, even Molly’s ex-husband and his current wife.

“And Ben will be there,” Freddie said. She had said the magic word, the defining word, the name of the son. She watched Molly’s face grow almost beatific.

“Ben,” Freddie said again, just to see the effect, to see the benignity intensify.

Then Molly caught her at it. “Oh shut up,” she said.

Freddie started to laugh. “The idea of you staying here for the holidays—it’s pretty funny, Molly. Go see your cockamamie family and I’ll stay here and look after my cockamamie father. We will long for each other across the wide continent.”

17

In her parents’ bedroom, it was dim and cluttered with medical apparatus. Her father sat in his leather recliner, a blanket spread neatly over his knees. He grabbed Molly’s hand and motioned for her to lean down, then put his lips close to her ear.

“There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered, obviously alarmed.

“That’s Walter, Mom’s nurse’s-from-when-she-broke-her-ankle-ten-years-ago’s son-in-law’s cousin’s mother’s friend from church. Or some such thing. He’s from Ghana.” He was a very gentle man with a beautiful smile and a staccato, musical accent. He knew how to change a colostomy bag. He was strong. He was kind.

“What’s he doing here? There’s a black man in the apartment, I tell you,” he whispered again, sputtering now. He pulled on her arm.

“Walter. From Ghana,” she said, louder.

“No one from Ghana is named Walter,” he whispered. “He’s a fraud. Get him out.”

She straightened up and looked down at her father. His beard was trimmed. His hair was combed. Even the hairs in his ears had been trimmed. His nails were clean. His shirt was unstained and buttoned properly. And that blanket on his lap—he could have been a gentleman taking in the salt air on an ocean liner.

“Daddy, he’s here to help you.”

“I don’t need help. What are you talking about? Help? I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help.”

“Well, Mom needs help. You don’t want her back in the hospital, do you?”

“Hospital? Nobody tells me anything. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s resting. Do you want her to drop dead from exhaustion? Then who would take care of you?”

He looked pointedly at her.

“
Me?
” she said. “I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

“Honey?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

He motioned her to lean down again. “There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered.

*   *   *

“I knew he was a Republican,” she said later to Freddie on the phone. “But he never struck me as any more racist than anyone else his age. The uncomfortable kind of racism, not the suspicious kind.”

“He’s not himself, though.”

“I hope not.” That didn’t come out right. “Anyway, he’s incredibly difficult one minute, then he just switches over to sweetness. When I left the room, he and Walter were sitting side by side eating vanilla ice cream, watching NY1.”

“That’s the real Aaron, the vanilla ice cream one.”

Freddie was a gracious person. It was one of the things Molly loved about her.

“Thank you for being a gracious person, Freddie,” she said. “Even in the face of ghastly in-laws.”