They May Not Mean To, But They Do

8

“My father is very ill,” Molly said to the woman next to her on the plane.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m going to New York to see him.”

“I’m sure that will do him good.”

Will it? Molly wondered. She thought of Daniel so many years ago, when he was so ill. He was just a kid, eighteen, younger than Ben, her son, was now. Younger than Ben and in the hospital for so long, almost a year. Then in a wheelchair for months. How had he stood it? The way he stood everything, she supposed — by ignoring it. Had it helped Daniel, had it “done him good” when Molly came home from college to sit with him in his hospital room? She had tried to entertain him, telling him amusing stories, family gossip. She’d read the newspaper to him, brought him milkshakes, too. And she’d given him novels, Lucky Jim, A Handful of Dust, which he was too sick to read. Did any of that “do him good”? There he’d been in his hospital bed, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, squinting against the smoke, smiling at her, laughing at her funny stories, but when it came time to leave, she’d see his eyes sink back into their blank gaping stare of pain. Oh, she’d had some good fights with the nurses about his painkillers, such as they were, not that anyone cared what a college girl said. Their mother had been even fiercer, but still the doctors refused to give him sufficient pain medication, insisting it was too addictive for a teenaged boy.

So had her visits done Daniel any good at all? Would this visit to her father do him any good? Would it restore his short-term memory? Would it give him back his strength, his balance, so he could walk? Would it replace the colostomy bag with his own intestine? Would it make him healthy, would it make him whole?

“You’re such an absolutist,” Freddie had once said to her, and she had said, “Yes. That is the goal, at least.”

As soon as she got to New York she would call her parents’ various doctors. She would organize all their medications in little plastic boxes labeled with the days of the week. She would order a lamp with a high-wattage bulb for reading, a telephone with big buttons and an extra-loud ring. She would put all their bank accounts online and arrange for deposits and payments to be made automatically. She would set up Spotify and program it to endlessly play Frank Sinatra.

She said these things to herself to make herself feel better, but she knew what would really happen. Neither her father nor her mother would be able to decide which doctor she should speak to or find their phone numbers. The medications she organized would be the ones they no longer took. There would be no place to plug in the new lamps with their bright lightbulbs, every outlet in the apartment, and there weren’t many, sporting frayed extension cords already overloaded. They would change the appointments she did manage to arrange for them without telling her. Every television in the apartment, and there were too many, would not work. The radio would play only static, loudly. And then there was the computer.

“Why did you even talk to someone who called out of the blue and said he was from Microsoft?” she would ask her mother.

“Because he said he was from Microsoft.”

“Mom, Microsoft doesn’t call people like that to say your computer has a virus. They never call anyone. They don’t even answer calls. It doesn’t work like that.”

“They said it was urgent.”

It wasn’t Joy’s fault that an entirely new paradigm of communication and commerce had developed in her later years. Molly would say, “Okay, Mom. No harm done. As long as you didn’t give them any information.”

“Of course not! Just my name. I think just my name. Oh god, what if I gave them something else? Like my credit card number?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. How can I remember everything like that? He asked me so many questions.”

And her mother, her inspiring, unflappable, competent, hardworking, distinguished mother, would berate herself, berate the modern world, then sigh helplessly. “I don’t know why Microsoft called in the first place,” she would say. “I really don’t.”

Molly sat in the taxi from the airport anticipating Central Park, heavy and loamy and full of autumn. As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK: a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace. She opened the cab’s bleary window and breathed in the lights and the skyscrapers, the sky lit from below, the river.

The taxi driver popped the trunk and pulled her bag out for her. Before she could grab it, the doorman was already rolling it beneath the canopy to the door. When Molly was growing up here, the doormen were such a normal, essential part of her life. She had never really gotten used to living without doormen. They always knew where your parents were, when they’d be home, if the dog had been walked, if your brother had friends with him — an early alert system for family life. If you lost your keys, they let you into the apartment. They handed you packages. They told you the mailman had come when you were waiting for college acceptances and refusals. When she was little she had loved their uniforms with their names stitched on the chest, their smart hats like policemen’s hats, but unlike a policeman, they picked you up and swung you through the air and lent you a quarter if you needed it for candy. She’d known some of them, the older ones, for what seemed like her whole life.

“Hi! Hi! It’s so good to be here!” she said, then realized she did not actually know this particular doorman and had greeted him too warmly. He did look familiar, perhaps because of a strong resemblance to Mussolini. Squat head, square jaw, wide frown. He was probably too young to know who Mussolini was. The name stitched on his uniform was Gregor.

“The Bergmans,” she said. “I’m their daughter. I have a key. They’re expecting me.”

A novel by James Patterson was spread-eagled on the console. He glanced at it longingly as they went to the elevator, saying, “Your mother will be glad to see you.” He spoke in a heavy, clouded voice, just as she would have expected a Mussolini look-alike to speak, though the accent was wrong, Eastern European. “She’s had a rough night.”

“Is she okay? Did something happen?”

“Oh,” said Gregor, and he cleared his throat. “She’s fine, but…”

“My father? Oh god. What happened?”

The elevator doors opened.

“They’re both home, safe and sound,” Gregor said as the doors closed.

Home? Of course they were home. Where else would they be at midnight?

Molly burst through the door, unlocked as always. “Mom! Mom! What’s going on?”

Her mother was lying on the couch in the living room, though Molly had trouble locating her at first, she was so swaddled in down. A down comforter, a down robe beneath it, down booties, and, which was new to Molly, a down hood. “I’m here,” the little face said. “I’m fine, darling.”

“But Daddy?”

“I’m trying to warm up. What a night. Your father is okay now, back in bed where he belongs.” She took a sip of water from a paper cup on the side table. Why did she use paper cups? Molly wondered. To make the apartment seem more like a hospital?

“I was reading, I guess I fell asleep—”

“Mom?”

“A really deep sleep, which I have not had in weeks, believe me. I checked on your father at ten, before I went to bed. I made sure he went to the bathroom to pee, I checked the colostomy pouch…”

Oh, please spare me those particular details, Molly thought guiltily, knowing her mother could not spare herself those details.

“And he was comfortable and quiet. So I came back here to my nest.”

It did not look like a nest, that undulating pile of pillows and comforters, more like an avalanche from which long-lost hikers might at any moment emerge, shaking themselves off, wondering how they ended up in this Manhattan living room. “And?” Molly said, rather sharply, moving her hands in circles as if to speed things up.

Perhaps, Joy thought, Molly’s authoritarian nature came along with the work she did, a professional hazard, like Marie Curie being exposed to radiation. Molly was exposed to so many pottery shards. They were not radioactive, but there were so many and they were minuscule and each one might turn out to be the important one, but who could tell, they were so small and filthy, and so you had to gather them up as if they were diamonds, then separate them, then put them back together again. Well, you would have to be officious, wouldn’t you, with all those shards depending on you? Joy had been so proud when Molly decided to study archaeology, when she got her Ph.D., when she went off to Turkey to dig up ancient pots. It was like an Agatha Christie novel. It was like Agatha Christie’s life with her archaeologist husband, minus a husband, of course, but that was another story. You had to clean the dug-up bits and pieces with a soft toothbrush like the ones for people with diseased gums. This thought always made Joy shudder, as if the pottery shards were in fact old decayed teeth. Then the discoveries, such as they were, would have to be labeled on bits of paper like the slips in a Chinese fortune cookie. Then they would end up buried again, in drawers in a university or museum, never to see daylight for another thousand years or so. No wonder Molly was always trying to organize Joy. She even tried to organize her own body, stretching this muscle, strengthening that one. If Molly could number the hairs on her head, Joy was sure she would, she was so busy trying to order the world. She had been the same as a child, not particularly obsessive or compulsive, although she did refold her clothes when Joy brought them up from the laundry room, come to think of it. But it was more a show of strength, this insistence on order, her own order, a demand rather than a need.

That would keep anybody busy, never mind her job. Look at her, poor dear, so antsy-pantsy. She was looking good, though. Fit. Always fit. An obsession. There were worse obsessions. She resembled her father with that long face. Sculptural, Joy liked to think, though others might call it craggy. The face was frowning ferociously now. Of course! Joy hadn’t told her about Aaron yet. No wonder! “Where was I? Oh, I came here into the living room and I read a little and then I must have fallen asleep—”

“Mom!” Molly snapped. “Could you just tell me what actually happened, for god’s sake?”

Her mother glared at her and snapped back: “Your father got out of bed and pulled his urine-soaked pajama pants and adult diaper down around his ankles and went out, like that, with his urine-soaked pajamas and adult diaper around his ankles, into the elevator to the lobby, okay? The doorman brought him back.”

“Jesus.”

“Gregor—Jesus retired last year. All right? Okay? Direct enough for you, Molly? Delivered quickly enough? Sorry I was not as concise as you would have liked. I’m sorry I didn’t describe your father’s humiliation with the clarity and alacrity you demand…”

Molly sank onto the downy couch beside her mother. “Oh, Mom,” she said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

They sat like that for a while, quiet, together, and she snuggled against her mother, then went into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin. He had aged since she last saw him, not that long ago despite her mother’s admonitions, two months. But Aaron, breathing noisily, his face otherwise so still, looked old, like an old, old man. Molly kissed his forehead.

* * *

“I’m sorry you walked in on such a drama,” Joy said. They were squeezed in at the table in the kitchen drinking the house specialty, decaffeinated tea, weak, lukewarm.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mommy.”

“Gregor is a nice young man. He and his wife just had a baby.”

“Do you think maybe you should lock the door? At night? Then, if Daddy gets up—”

“What if there’s a fire?” her mother said, appalled. “You’re not thinking, Molly.”

Molly stirred her tea. The sound of the spoon against the teacup was musical, like bells.

“I hate being such an old ruin,” Joy said softly.

“You’re not an old ruin. You’re still working, for heaven’s sake. You take care of Dad all by yourself. I don’t know how you manage, honestly. And you look beautiful, too. Old ruin. That’s a joke.”

“Well”—Joy was obviously mollified—“I am old.”

No one at work knew her real age. Eighty-six. That would give them a jolt, all those potbellied men planning their retirements at sixty-five. Of course, she couldn’t afford to retire even now. She’d cut back to part-time since Aaron got so sick, which was hard enough on the finances.

“I only work three days a week,” she added.

“That’s plenty.”

“Plenty of tsuris.”

The room that had once been Molly’s was now her mother’s office and her father’s study. Those were the terms used by them both, and if an office is a place where you store cardboard boxes of unopened mail and a study is where you sit between spires of those boxes on a convertible sofa and listen to your transistor radio, then those terms were accurate.

Molly transferred the piles of boxes from the sofa to the floor, leaving a little path to the door, and began removing the sofa’s newly visible pillows before she realized that other towers of boxes on the floor would prevent the mattress from unfolding.

“Oh well,” Joy said. “Storage is a problem in New York City. Sleep in Danny’s room.”

Daniel’s room had originally been a maid’s room, a remnant from the days when the building had been built, the days when families had maids. The room was so narrow that the only bed that would fit there was a special narrow maid’s-room bed sold, once upon a time, in some of the better New York department stores. This one was very old, perhaps forty years old, lumpy and somehow inviting. Daniel had always loved his room, fixing it up like a cabin on a boat. In fact, he had made it so cozy and inviting that Molly had tried to get him to switch with her, but he had contemptuously refused. Aaron called it the Nookery, a Dickens reference, he said, and that had clinched it for both children: Daniel had the best room in the house. It even had its own bathroom, the size of a phone booth, with a toilet and a skinny shower. The sink was in the bedroom, which Daniel one day announced was very European, enraging Molly, who was stuck in her conventional American bedroom with its big closet and large windows facing the tree-lined street. The small window at the head of Daniel’s maid’s-room cot faced another building, but he had managed to make a friend across the air shaft and they rigged up a pulley system and paper cup telephone, so even that turned out to be an advantage.

Molly pulled the old cotton quilt around her. She felt far away, missing Freddie, and she felt comfortably at home. Outside, an ambulance went screeching along somewhere in the distance.

She heard her mother padding around in the kitchen, the pop of the toaster, the refrigerator door opening, closing. She would have to check the refrigerator tomorrow, search for the squalid, liquefying slices of tomato, the curled, desiccated turkey slices she knew would be tucked up somewhere in there. She had to make sure her parents were eating properly. There were boxes of Vienna Fingers and saltines on the counter. Minute Rice. Rice Krispies. Cream of Wheat. If it was an empty calorie, her parents were sure to stock it. But she had also seen a banana and a few oranges in a bowl. A good sign. She had tried once to arrange a regular delivery of decent produce through an organic food website. It had not been a success. Her mother did not like the dirt on the vegetables. Her father did not like the irregular shapes. Neither of them liked rutabagas.

* * *

Molly had come a week earlier than either Freddie or Ben, neither of whom could get to New York until Thanksgiving Day, and Joy was glad. It gave her a little time to be alone with her daughter. From the kitchen table, she watched with pleasure as Molly grabbed parcels from the refrigerator and threw them into a large garbage bag.

“Mom, this is disgusting.”

Joy nodded. Molly’s movements, so abrupt and assured, charmed her. It was as if Molly were a little girl, a busy, officious little girl, as she had sometimes been, bossing her brother around, arranging the spices in the kitchen alphabetically as soon as she learned the alphabet.

“It’s wonderful to have you here,” Joy said.

Molly looked up from the garbage bag. She smiled.

“I miss you terribly,” Joy said.

The smile faded. “That makes me feel kind of guilty, Mom.”

“Would you prefer that I didn’t miss you?”

Molly pondered that. “I don’t know. Maybe. No.”

“Good. Because I do, whether you like it or not.”

She watched Molly spray the kitchen table with Fantastik and scrub it vigorously with a sponge, her elbows almost banging into Joy’s face.

“Should I move?”

“You’re okay.”

Joy did not offer to help. Molly did not like help. Joy watched her with growing satisfaction. The chemicals in the spray made her eyes sting, but she said nothing. The sticky circles left by teacups and jam jars disappeared. Molly gave her a quick kiss on the head as she put back the saltshaker, the sugar bowl with one of its handles broken off, the portable radio, then quickly took them off again and scrubbed them, too. She scrubbed the blackened windowsill.

“That will never come off,” Joy said.

“I miss you, too, you know,” Molly said.

“I should hope so.”

Joy listened to the water run as Molly took a shower in Danny’s minuscule bathroom. There was life in the apartment, echoes of her old life, echoes of life before she was old.

“Aaron,” she said that night as she tucked him in, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face against the back of his head, “I love you.”

He said, “I love you, too, my darling.”

The words echoed in the apartment full of echoes.

* * *

Joy left for work at 9:30. She never knew what she would come home to, but Aaron tended to sleep during the day and never went near the stove, so she told herself. She was a conservation consultant for a small museum on the Lower East Side that specialized in Jewish artifacts. It was, she had once observed, years ago, not unlike Hitler’s Museum of an Extinct Race, but with less stuff. Aaron was shocked when she said this. They were in Prague at the time, entering a museum beside the old synagogue, a museum that was piled with candlesticks and spoons and silver spice boxes stolen from Jews by the Nazis and stockpiled in anticipation of Hitler’s museum.

“Joyful, darling, a little perspective,” Aaron said.

A museum like hers was a record of the past, not a trophy of genocide, certainly that was true. But Time was so cruel and so thorough. It made her sad sometimes as she examined her own museum’s jumble of dented tin pushkes, Sabbath candlesticks brought from the Old Country, telegrams, newspapers, photographs, the wheel of a pushcart, a deck chair from the Catskills. Where did they belong now? Nowhere. It was an extinct world that passed through her hands and into the Lower East Side Museum. Joy would examine each item donated to the museum or acquired, each fragment of this lost world, to determine if it deserved to be found or to be lost again, to be tossed back quite literally onto the dust heap of history. This choosing which item lived and which died, so to speak — that was the part of her job she did not relish, separating the wheat from the chaff.

“Who am I to judge?” she said to Aaron. “If the pope said that about his flock, is it any wonder I feel that way about my flock of artifacts?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, my love, but you are not the pope.”

Joy wanted to save everything, every scrap, as if it were a soul. A museum was not a warehouse, however, and a conservator was not a hoarder. Collections had priorities, strengths. Every Houdini flyer did not need to be preserved. One Houdini flyer was quite enough. Yet she had been trained to save, not to choose.

A mother of small children with a bachelor’s degree in Art History, she had volunteered at the museum two days a week as soon as Daniel started nursery school. It wasn’t until that first bankruptcy that she’d gone to work there full-time as a secretary, assisting the conservator. Both he and the director of the museum encouraged her to go back to school. She couldn’t give up her job to go full-time, but she managed, working during the morning, going to school in the afternoon, so she could be home to make dinner and put the children to bed. She worked long and hard for that Ph.D. The museum hired her as a conservator even before she finished. She loved the battered pots and pans, the sewing machines, the Yiddish-to-English primers, liked to handle them. She knew others would like to handle them, too, and so she protected them from the loving caresses that would, as in a myth or a fairy tale, eventually destroy them.

The director had a bit of a crush on her, though he had never bothered her after that one time, and even then she had been able to fend him off with a pretense of utter ignorance and innocence, one of her favorite strategies, no hurt feelings or embarrassment. It had been a long time since she’d had to act as though she had no idea what a man meant when he spoke in a husky voice and happened to rest his hand on her knee. That was one piece of the past she’d been only too happy to consign to the garbage.

The conservator who had encouraged her had died years ago. The director had retired. The field of conservation relied more and more on computers and software and technology, or so she read, she could not possibly employ all the new techniques, it was hard enough for her writing emails. The museum was changing with the times, too, growing bigger and more professional, and Joy had begun to identify with her artifacts, out of date, obsolete, left behind.

* * *

Joy had already gotten Aaron dressed. All Molly had to do was bring her father his breakfast and his lunch, and make sure he didn’t wander or fall.

“For once I can relax at the office,” Joy said. “Goodbye, Aaron. Goodbye, Molly. Don’t drive each other crazy. I’m off to the salt mines.”

Aaron poked at the lump in his sweatshirt and asked what it was doing there. Molly explained about the colostomy bag at great length, as if a longer explanation would stay in his head longer, but at a certain point he just waved his hand at her, a dismissal, and she left him in his chair and washed his dishes. By the time she was done, he was calling for her mother.

“She went to work, Daddy,” she said from the doorway.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

He called for Joy ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, until Molly decided to stay in the bedroom with him.

“No wonder Mom is going nuts,” she said to him.

“Who can from Joy refrain,” he sang, “this gay, this pleasing, shining, wond’rous day?”

By two o’clock, the apartment was driving Molly insane, the banging radiators and stifling steam heat, the television’s endless loop of NY1 weather and politics and interviews of off-Broadway dancers. She had to get out.

“You have to get out,” she said to her father. She bundled him in his jacket and herded him and his walker to the door. “Come on. It’s so hot in here. With the TV grinding on and on. I can’t stand it.”

“Well, I can.”

“You need fresh air.”

“You sound like your mother. Where is your mother? Joy! Joy!”

“She went to work.”

“Oh, she did, did she?”

He often took on this joshing tone when he was confused. Molly hustled him into the elevator.

“Well, where’s your mother, anyway?” His voice had gone from joshing to desperation. “Joy? Joy! Where are you? Where’s your mother?”

They made it to the park, and Aaron stared at the evergreen bushes.

Molly sat on a bench beside him. The air was cold and wet. “So,” she said. Before the dementia, he had been a kind of genius at small talk, always able to chat and charm. That gift had been lost, gradually, but even so he had continued to enjoy a good attack on the mayor. She mentioned the mayor now, and he said, “All a bunch of crooks,” but did not elaborate. Molly moved on to the grandchildren. He liked to hear anything at all about them, laughing and calling them spitfires or wisenheimers.

“So Cora and Ruby go to public schools,” she said.

“Imagine that.”

“I hope they’re really good ones.”

Her father nodded. “Yes, indeed,” he said.

“I thought Ruby would go to private school for seventh grade for sure. Not that anyone asked my opinion. Of course no one can afford the tuition anymore. Except Russian oligarchs.”

“Well, now.”

“Are there any good public middle schools?” she soldiered on. “There weren’t when Daniel and I were that age, that’s for sure.”

“Is that so?”

Molly tried a couple of other topics, but none of them, not the state of the CIA or health care or water quality, sparked more than a nod, an all-purpose phrase: You don’t say; imagine that.

Oh, Daddy, Molly thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was a useless, selfish daughter, dragging her father out into the cold against his will so that she could get some fresh air, so that she could breathe, so that she could escape when she knew he could never escape what was happening to him, not if she made him stumble behind his red walker as far as the North Pole. And to top it all off, in these precious moments at what was surely the beginning of the end of his conscious life, she couldn’t even think of anything to say to him. To her own father.

She tried reminiscing. Older people loved to reminisce. “Remember when you had to drive up to Vermont to take me home from camp?”

“You don’t say?”

“Yup. Twice, actually. Because when you got there the first time, I had already changed my mind and wanted to stay. But by the time you got home again, I had changed it again and wanted to leave. I was so bossy. Why did anyone listen to me? I was eleven, for god’s sake.”

But her reminiscences were apparently not his reminiscences. He smiled and patted her gloved hand with his gloved hand, his expression blank.

“Now, look, Daddy,” she said, “you drove all day. I know you remember. You have to. You were so annoyed, but then you just laughed. That got me really upset — that you laughed at me, that my situation was comical and I was just one of a million little girls who did this, just an ordinary, predictable child. You have to remember all that. I got mad when you laughed, and you somehow understood and stopped laughing and pretended to take me very seriously, and then I was happy.”

“Imagine that, imagine that.”

Then another old man with an identical red walker appeared, and Aaron seemed to come alive. He stood up, with great effort, and offered the man his hand. “How do you do?” he said.

The slow determination of his movements, the difficulty and awkwardness of them, lent them a seriousness, almost dignity. Why don’t we revere the elderly? Molly wondered briefly. She knew why. They were difficult and inconvenient. But how brave her father was just by standing up, by insisting on the code of conduct he’d been brought up with, by being, simply, polite. He still tried to open doors for Molly, his hand shaking. At first she told him not to, afraid he’d topple over. But then she saw it mattered. It was what a man did, a man brought up when he was brought up.

Aaron put out his hand to shake the newcomer’s and with some formality introduced first Molly, then himself. There was a cookie crumb in his beard. Molly saw it and thought, for a flash, how foolish he looked, then recanted. The cookie crumb was not foolish at all, it was a battle scar from a battle to exist in a world that insisted on changing if he so much as blinked.

The other man introduced himself as Karl. “And this,” he said, gesturing toward his plump, red-cheeked caretaker, “is Marta. She is kind, though strict.”

“I go coffee,” she said in a heavy accent, Polish, Molly guessed.

“Would you like coffee, too?” Karl asked. “Marta, can you get this nice young lady and her delightful father a cup of coffee?”

Molly pulled her wallet out, but Karl put up his hand and said, “My treat.”

He was a good-looking old man, silky gray hair nicely cut, beautifully dressed. Molly shot a glance at her father. The cookie crumb had been dislodged. His beard could use a trim, but it wasn’t too bad. Her mother took very good care of him. Better than she took of herself, but there are only so many hours in the day, as Joy said when Molly pointed this out to her.

Marta returned with four cups of coffee, and they sat there drinking the scalding coffee in the cold November air.

“Chilly for two old geezers like us,” Karl said to Aaron.

“Not like the war,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

“I don’t know why people call them flying rats,” Karl responded. “Listen to them. They coo like doves.”

Neither Aaron nor Karl seemed to mind the gaps, the non sequiturs, in their conversation.

“We had cold showers in the jungle, but boy oh boy, we sure didn’t mind.”

“Just listen to them cooing. Like lovebirds. They’re pretty, too. Don’t you think?”

“Oh that I had wings like a dove!” Aaron said. “For then would I fly away and be at rest.”

“Dad? That’s beautiful. Is that a poem?”

But her father had no answer for her. He smiled and turned his face up to the golden autumn sun. Molly looked on, a little envious, as the two men sat in a companionable silence, side by side, while the pigeons cooed like doves.