A Life of Her Own, page 4
Max found a real estate agent. They spent weekends tramping through houses that were too big for them, too small for them, too expensive, in need of too much work. Then, when they’d decided they’d give it one more Sunday, and if nothing turned up, they’d sign a contract for an unfinished house on a barren street in a new development, they found it.
The house was in a residential section of a town not far from the city. In less than half an hour, Max could drive through the Holland Tunnel and be at the hospital. There was even an older doctor in the town who wanted a younger man to cover for him evenings and weekends and might want to sell his practice before long. Their lives were falling into place.
They closed on a hot breezeless Friday at the end of July. Fans whirred in the open windows of the bank that was backing the GI mortgage, while the two lawyers slid papers back and forth across the table, and Fanny and Max and the man who was selling the house signed on the proper lines. Their lawyer had asked Max if he was sure he wanted Fanny’s name on the deed, and Max had said he was sure. The process took less than half an hour.
They came out of the hot office into the long rays of the late-afternoon sun. Max was carrying a sign saying THE FABRICANTS in big block letters, which the real estate agent had given them for the front yard and Fanny had no intention of putting anywhere other than the back of a closet. Max slipped out of his seersucker jacket and hung it on the hook in the back seat of the old prewar Chevrolet. She took off her white cotton gloves and put them in her handbag. They climbed into the boiling car and rolled down the windows. She didn’t have to ask where they were headed.
He pulled up in front of the house and came around the car to open her door, and they made their way up the flagstone path shaded by two old oaks. The grass needed cutting. Later Fanny would see the unkempt yard as a sign. Why had they needed the extra worries? But that would be later. When they reached the front door, Max took the key from his pocket.
“Should I carry you over the threshold?”
“Only if you want to spend tomorrow in bed with a bad back.”
“I resent that. I came back from the war an excellent physical specimen.”
“You can say that again.” Standing behind him, she reached around his body to embrace him as he opened the front door.
They went through the rooms, sometimes holding hands, sometimes standing with their arms around each other’s waists, occasionally going single file down a hall or up the stairs.
“We could make that into a breakfast nook,” she said of an alcove in the kitchen.
“We could, except that if we start renovating, we won’t be able to afford breakfast to eat in the so-called nook.”
“I see a breakfront there.” She pointed to one wall of the dining room.
“That’s funny. I see a bare wall until we pay down the mortgage a little.”
“The sofa will go there,” she said in the living room, “and two chairs facing each other in front of the fireplace.” She envisioned them sitting of an evening, reading, his long legs stretched out so that, still keeping her nose in the book, she could slip off her shoe and tease him with her toes.
They climbed the stairs to the second floor.
“This will be your study.”
“Until we need another bedroom.”
They reached the master bedroom, and he let go of her waist and crossed to one of the two windows overlooking the backyard. She followed him. Several streets over, an egg-yolk sun dripped toward the roofs of other houses, none of them replicas of this one. In the near distance, a child’s voice shouted home-free-home. From the other direction came the crack of a bat hitting a ball.
“Tell the truth,” she said. “You hired an army of kids to put on this show.”
He had his arm around her again. “The kids came cheap. The setting sun cost a bundle.” He went on looking at her, and she recognized the expression.
“There’s no bed.”
“Bed? What happened to the girl who thought a chair in a locked med school lab was pure luxury?”
“Her lustful heart still beats, but I don’t see a chair either, and the floor doesn’t look as if it’s been swept anytime recently.”
“Fortunately, I happen to have a blanket in the car.”
“What are you doing with a blanket in the car in the middle of July?” she asked when he returned with it.
“I like to be prepared.”
He spread the blanket on the floor. She reached behind her to unzip her dress. As she tugged at the zipper, it caught.
“Damn,” she said.
He came around the blanket, unzipped the dress, and reached inside it. The last thing she thought before she stopped thinking was that a child conceived their first afternoon in the new house would be a miraculous down payment on the future.
Two months after they moved into the house, Mimi’s younger sister, Barbara, got engaged, and Fanny gave her a shower. She didn’t particularly want to. She didn’t approve of showers. That was Rose’s influence again. It was one thing in the old country, Rose insisted, when everyone was poor and a couple starting out needed all the eiderdowns, cooking utensils, and other household items they could get, but now it was merely a stickup for more presents. Fanny agreed with her, but went ahead with it. No one could expect poor widowed Mimi to take on the task.
There was one fortunate dividend, at least for Chloe. Barbara asked her to be a flower girl in the wedding.
Chapter Four
SHE CLOSED THE DOOR TO THE BEDROOM BEHIND THEM and walked to the windows to pull down the shades. The snow was an impenetrable curtain of white shutting out the world. They’d gotten home just in time. She pictured the other wedding guests who’d stayed even later tripling and quadrupling in the few hotel rooms left, if they were lucky, sleeping on a row of spindly wedding chairs, if they weren’t.
He sat on the side of the bed, pulled open his tie, and slipped out of his jacket. “That was one hell of a ride,” he said as he reached around to unhook his cummerbund. “There were a couple of moments when I was sure we were going to end up in a snowdrift and freeze to death before anyone found us.”
“Thanks for not telling me at the time.”
He fiddled with the hooks for a moment, then stood and crossed the room to the dresser where she was taking off her pearls. “Whoever invented these things ought to be taken out and shot.”
“But you look so dashing in it,” she said to his reflection in the mirror.
He grinned, then turned his back so she could undo the hooks.
He sighed. “Now I know how you feel when you take off your girdle.”
“Are you kidding? That thing’s child’s play compared to a Lily of France straitjacket.”
He sat on the side of the bed again, removed the ladybug studs from his shirt, shrugged out of it, stood, and started for the closet, carrying the shirt, cummerbund, and jacket. She knew that tired as he was, he’d hang up the suit and put the shirt in the laundry basket.
She slipped off her earrings and inserted them in the velvet row in the top compartment of the jewelry box, then closed it and stood holding on to the dresser for a moment. She was so tired that she flirted with the idea of not taking off her makeup, but it was only a flirtation.
She heard a thud from the closet. He must have bumped into the shoe rack again. She loved him dearly, but he was a bull in a china shop in that closet. He insisted he hadn’t been until she’d had him put up the second rack.
“What is it about women and shoes?” he’d asked.
“What is it about men and ties?” she’d answered.
Sometimes she varied the reply. “It has to do with my legs,” she’d say.
“What does it have to do with your legs?”
“The way you can’t keep your eyes off them.”
“Guilty as charged.”
She twisted around to reach the zipper on the side of the dress. Side zippers were supposed to be easier than those at the back, but they rarely were. Nonetheless, she was too tired to struggle. She started for the closet.
“Honey, can you—” She stopped. What were the clothes—his suit, several of her dresses and skirts and blouses—doing on the floor? Later she’d realize he must have pulled them down when he’d grabbed the pole to keep from falling. But he had fallen. He was lying on his side, his body twisted, his face as white as the pleated shirt she’d danced against all evening, his eyes terrifyingly blank.
She didn’t remember calling the ambulance, but she must have, because it came, though it took forever to get through the snow. All she remembered was sitting beside him, holding his hand in both of hers, begging him not to leave her.
Chapter Five
SHE KNEW AS SOON AS SHE CAME DOWN THE STAIRS AND stepped into the living room that she never should have let them hold the service here. Not that anyone had asked her permission. They plied her with pills and tiptoed around her, while she moved through them like a sleepwalker. Now the sight of the plain pine box shocked her awake. It radiated menace, like a wild animal that has stumbled into the house and, unable to escape, was poised to strike. But the funeral home would have been worse. She couldn’t leave him with strangers.
Someone—her father? Max’s? The insincerely sympathetic man from the funeral home? She couldn’t bear to lift her eyes to discover who it was—led her through the maze of rented chairs that crowded the room. The extended family was large. Max had a lot of friends. And people were eager to show their indignation. A man in the prime of youth. A man, as his father kept saying, who’d returned from the war safely only to be done in by the peace. This was not the way the world was supposed to work.
She felt their eyes boring into her as she took the seat left open for her. Her knees were almost touching the pine box. She reached for Chloe’s hand. Her daughter grasped hers in return. He couldn’t be in there. It was impossible. She fought the urge to fling open the coffin. You see, she’d scream to the ghoulish mob who didn’t belong in their living room, it’s a mistake. It’s a bad joke. Max is upstairs, waiting for you all to clear out so he can come down and we can be alone.
Another hand at her elbow guided her out of the house down the shoveled path to the long black car waiting at the curb. Later, she had no idea how much later, other hands helped her out of the car at the cemetery and steered her along the path that had been cleared between the banks of snow.
The blizzard had camouflaged the hard truth of the field of death. Only the occasional white-blanketed rise of an overly tall headstone gave away what lay beneath the snow and dirt. They reached a raw gaping hole in the ground. Later, years later, she’d wonder how they’d managed to dig a grave in the frozen earth. Now she merely averted her eyes.
The rabbi’s words were foreign to her, though he spoke in English. She and Max weren’t believers. It was all a meaningless performance going on behind a scrim. A mistake, like the pine box in the living room. She’d wake up from it soon.
The rabbi finished speaking, picked up a shovel, slid it into the pile of soil that had somehow been defrosted, and turned the blade into the open grave. The sound of the earth hitting the coffin shocked her awake again.
The rabbi held the shovel out to her. She stood staring at it. He leaned toward her, urging her to take it. She went on staring at it. He murmured something. She looked from the shovel to the grave and back again. She closed her eyes. The moment seemed to go on for some time. Behind her, someone coughed. She opened her eyes. The rabbi extended the shovel another few inches toward her. She took one more look at it, then turned, walked down the gravel path, and out through the gates of the cemetery. She would not bury Max.
Years later, Chloe would remember three things about her father’s funeral.
She would recall sitting beside her mother in the living room trying to keep her Mary Janes, the same shoes she’d worn to be a flower girl three nights earlier, from touching the big wooden box that they said her father was lying inside. She didn’t believe that. Not for a minute.
She’d remember Belle asking to see her flag.
“What flag?” Chloe answered.
“When my daddy died, I got a flag.”
Chloe didn’t particularly want a flag. It certainly didn’t seem much of a trade for a daddy. But it didn’t seem fair that Belle had gotten one and she hadn’t.
And she’d remember the slap. That came a few days after they took the wooden box out of the living room, but the funeral still shrouded the house. It would for a long time, maybe forever.
Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a cup and saucer in front of her, but she wasn’t drinking from it. She was just sitting there, with her eyes wide and staring, like one of Chloe’s dolls. When you laid the doll down, her eyes blinked shut, but her mother’s didn’t close even when she lay down. Chloe knew because the night before she’d gone into MommyandDaddy’s room that was only Mommy’s now and asked if she could get in bed with her mother. Her mother didn’t say anything. She just lifted the covers and moved over to make room for Chloe. And until Chloe fell asleep, every time she looked at her mother, her eyes were still wide and staring.
Now her mother was at the kitchen table staring, Aunt Mimi was telling her mother she had to eat something, Belle was pulling on Chloe to go out and play in the snow, and Aunt Rose was leaning against the counter watching. Chloe wished they’d all go away, all except Mommy. And that her eyes would stop staring.
“Come on.” Belle tugged on her arm again, and before Chloe knew it, her hand flew up and pushed Belle, Belle fell back onto the floor and started to cry, and another hand flew out and smacked Chloe’s cheek. Then people were shouting, and Aunt Mimi was picking up Belle and carrying her out of the kitchen, and Mommy was hugging Chloe tight, so tight she could barely breathe, and saying I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, forgive me, I didn’t mean it.
Aunt Rose pried her and Mommy apart, took her into the dining room, sat, and pulled her onto her lap. “Mommy’s not herself,” she said quietly, as if it was a secret between them. “She didn’t mean to slap you. She never would have if she were herself.”
Later, when the slap faded and she stopped hating her mommy, because now that Daddy was gone Mommy was all she had, she realized what Aunt Rose said was true. Mommy wasn’t herself. A new mommy had taken her place. She even had a new name. Poor Fanny. The words hummed through the house on the day of the funeral and for the days after it when people came to visit bringing baskets of fruit, platters of cake and cookies, and dishes of food that other people ate, because her mommy turned away from them. Poor Fanny.
For the next several weeks, Fanny avoided the living room. If she had to cross it, she hugged the walls, like a cat slinking around the perimeter in stealth. The only consolation was that she wouldn’t have to avoid it for long. The house was already on the market.
The family had expected her to go to pieces at the realization that she’d have to sell it. She didn’t. A strong woman, some said. Still numb, others observed. No one suspected the truth. She was glad. She hated the house.
The house was the enticement that had duped them. It was the booby-trapped stuffed animal the enemy leaves behind in retreat to seduce a homesick soldier to pick it up and blow himself sky-high. Before the house, they’d been happy. Before the house, he hadn’t had to worry about clogged gutters or aging furnaces or a tree that hung dangerously over the porch roof. Why had they needed trees in the first place when the city was full of parks? Then there was that damn shoe rack she’d insisted on. All it had done was clutter the closet. He hadn’t been able to turn around without bumping into something. It was one more inconvenience, no, injustice, she’d visited upon him. Before the house, he hadn’t had to wear himself out driving back and forth to the city. He could saunter the block to the hospital. He could even come home for lunch, which admittedly he’d never done, but he could have, or she could take Chloe and sandwiches to meet him for a picnic, which she had now and then. The sirens had been a comfort rather than a hardship. The noise had signaled help was on the way. If an ambulance had been able to race to him on city streets that were already being plowed rather than slog through miles of snowed-in roads, the hospital might have been able to save him.
She was at the stove scrambling an egg for Chloe. She didn’t bother cooking for herself. Chloe sat at the table watching her, though when Fanny glanced over, she could tell from her daughter’s expression that she was thinking of something else.
“If Daddy—” she began, then stopped abruptly and put her hand over her mouth.
Fanny slid the egg onto a plate, turned off the burner, carried the plate to the table, and sat across from Chloe. She tried not to look at the empty place at the end of the table.
“You can talk about Daddy. You’re supposed to talk about him. That’s the way we keep him alive.”
It was a nice statement, perfectly crafted for a child, but Fanny hated the lie. Nothing could keep Max alive. They could talk about him till they were blue in the face, and he’d still be dead. Even Chloe knew that.
Fanny had listed the house with the same real estate agent from whom they’d bought it. She didn’t know any others, and Max had trusted him. It sold for several thousand dollars more than they’d paid for it. Between that and Max’s insurance, she could live for a while, but, as everyone in the family was quick to point out, only a while. She had a cushion, not a sinecure. The family telephone wires vibrated with possible solutions to the problem.
Her father invited her to move in with him and his wife.
