Chava

September 30, 1979

Chava,

Because this was the end, Bernie rented a big house on the lake for one last shindig before the winter would set in, and I would die. The place had a wrap-around veranda in the shadow of a grove of large deciduous trees blowing and dancing and holding space on the edge of the lake, their brilliant leaves obscuring the setting sun, her light refracting through their boughs, reflecting from the lake, alighting here and there upon the drifting piles of autumn leaves littering the low cropped turf, etc.

Bernie placed a cup of hot Lipton’s beside me. The annoying nodules of the oxygen tank itched and tickled and dried my nose. I brushed them irritably aside. ‘How are you Ma? Are you enjoying yourself?’ Bernie asked. ‘Is there anything else I can get for you?

I spent a lot of time in a comfortable wicker rocking chair that weekend, reading Calvino’s new book and jotting notes into the margins. I burned cigarettes like incense. I had grown less afraid of suffocating; one thing about losing the war with lung cancer is that at some point one begins to accept the unnatural reality of suffocation. Calvino’s new book reads like a series of meditations upon meaninglessness and unreality. I felt like he had my life in mind.

Bernie had long known the truth about Irv, but what son, having spent a lifetime venerating his old man, has the courage to confront the reality of the supremely ordinary and weak man who happened to die angry and desperate and in terrible pain? My son’s answer was as blinding as the late autumn light refracted off the big lake. He ignored the evidence and persisted in his program of veneration. Which is his right.

Yet I was confronting death, and I felt that this sort of filial devotion had its limits, and particularly when we were considering a person such as Irv.

I sowed my garden with Lorin-love. Then Irv furrowed Bernie into my inexperienced womb. I was just a girl. Al forced Irv to marry me. He thought he was doing right. Fear, shame, unable to breathe. Marriage extinguished my light. I lost my voice; I could no longer speak. Vacuous and silent night. In silence my garden suffocated. The sickness metastasized. And now I’m dying; unable to breathe.

There was a life - not at all what I had imagined, but a life nonetheless, which involved first Bernie and eventually little Al (after Uncle died) and then my Lorin Kim. I made peace in my body with that brutal stupid man, and my lost Lorin-love. Irv got sick, and I realized he would die, and I finally had a chance to be free of him.

In slavish devotion to his father’s memory, Bernie refused to allow us to grow out of that long, dark shadow. So Joe and I corresponded in the dark, and I think we brought one another a measure of joy, but always in a way that could be hidden from my children’s eyes. When finally I agreed to marry Joe, Bernie behaved as though it were a betrayal of his father, and he refused to attend the wedding, or to acknowledge Joe as anything other than some sort of charlatan, stealing his mother’s love from himself, his brothers and from their apotheosized father.

‘Bernie,’ I said, ‘everything is perfect. You are such a blessing.’

Your despairing friend,

Lucy

*****

April 12, 1976

Chava,

One of the boys’ idiot wives was over. She asked me whether there was anything I would change about my life. I thought you poor, ignorant soul, what a question to ask of me. But I said, ‘Judy, daughter, I only wish I had more time to spend with you’. 

And yet the stupid question has lingered, and this morning it occurred to me that just because the question is obvious, it doesn’t mean it is unworthy.

The obvious answer is that I wouldn’t be dying of cancer. But the more compelling answer is that I would not have wasted so much time deferring to the delusions of small men.

Joe and I would go out West. I’d greet every new locale with a cigarette, and a drink. We’d watch the sun set. For so many years I mistook Joe's quiet confidence and good nature, his gentleness, for weakness, and therefore a part of me had despised him. But as Proust wrote “the strong alone, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have that gentleness that the crowd mistakes for weakness.” 

I have lived my life in the company of assertive men. In a man, assertiveness is the least attractive quality. All the preening and conniving, and you know what is behind most of that? Insecurity, anger, resentment, folly, dissipation.

In a woman weakness is the least attractive quality. I have allowed myself to be dominated by pushy, assertive, insecure men, and now, facing death, I despise myself for it. Irv was so tormented by his failings and insecurities that he constructed a citadel about himself. He constructed battlements to ward off his enemies. He forced himself onto the world, and when the world waved him off, and knocked him down, and ridiculed him, he tormented himself with such bitter recriminations that even I could not have dreamed them up. And this meanness that he built up for himself he used on the people around him. Me, the boys, Joe, probably his other women too.

And even though his passing created a calamity in our lives, and for his children, there has never been a day when I have missed him.

Your fed-up friend,

Lucy

*****

January 5, 1971

Chava,

I do know that none of this is your fault, and yet I can’t help feeling that you somehow ended up with my meaning and my happiness.

I was meant to be with Lorin, you know. Even now, when Joe and I are married, it is Lorin who comes to me in my sleep. He is still my great comfort, my great love.

But the cruelest irony of all is that the man who forced his way into my life, and so pushed Lorin into yours, the man who gave me three boys and then died a horrible, drunk and abusive death - who died, Chava, as he had lived - that man has taken Lorin’s rightful place in the minds of my three sons - ‘memory believes before knowing remembers’ - and in that amnesiac world Irv is a tragic figure - a genius brought low by cruel Nature - and I am an innocent and a victim - poor and benighted and left to the depravity and idiocy of Joe Tzel, whom they despise.

Your despairing friend,

Lucy

*****

October 11, 1967

Chava,

I don’t know how to reach you now, and yet you and Lorin are often on my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about you both, lately - about the path forward that you seem to have found, even in the face of such abject and senseless cruelty - and I find myself wishing I had at some point identified some meaning in my life.

Perhaps if things had turned out differently - perhaps if Irv had not forced his way into my life - maybe I would not feel so angry.

Or maybe I would have to travel further back in time than that - maybe if Kittie hadn’t died, maybe if Mother hadn’t descended into the valley and the shadow, never to return, maybe, maybe, maybe.

But all these things did happen, and you and Lorin ended up together, and you have (apparently) built a beautiful life, and (apparently) it is suffused with meaning, and if I am green with envy, my heart is also leavened by gladness for your happiness.

Your friend,

Lucy

*****

December 15, 1956

Chava,

When Uncle Al died, leaving Rachel drifting into depravity, the last bit of my forebears’ lambency blinked out with him. Rachel was like a big sister, at least before she started to spiral. Rachel’s descent into her own darkness preceded Uncle Al’s passing by several years. As such things tend to unfold, by the time I needed Rachel most, she had already begun to deteriorate, a reality which I only pieced together over time. 

I went to see Rachel after it happened. That was 20 years ago now.

‘Do you remember how we used to race around Grandma’s place, laughing and shouting and playing hide and seek? Remember Grandma cursing after us in her circus of languages?’ I laughed, and Rachel appeared to laugh, although her back was turned as she fixed a cup of tea on the stove top.

‘Lucy-doll, Minnie was a laugh-riot,’ Rachel said over her shoulder. ‘One lump or two?’ ‘Just one.’ I took the table cream from the fridge.

‘Alright if I smoke?’

‘Yes, I’d love one. Just crack the window.’

We sat at the blonde kitchen table, one leaf let down so that it sat flush against the wall below the windowsill, the other extended into a half-moon. Our smoke wafted through the blinds, and for the first time since it happened, I felt like I could breathe.

‘Lucy-doll.’

‘Rachel.’

She gazed at me through the double helix of our burning cigarettes, the haze allowing me, for a moment, to look into her eyes. I thought I saw my confusion reflected to me. Her lips parted as though she were trying to appreciate the flavor of my distress.

‘Yes, love.’

The electric buzz of her new refrigerator. The sound of traffic rising from Milton Branch. I peered through the blinds to the graves down below. A corner of the Neponset River just visible beyond.

‘I went out with Irv last night.’ A resigned half smile on Rachel’s handsome face. ‘You two have been drawing close.’

‘Something happened.’ 

With my mouth slightly open, I tasted again the seminal moment of revulsion, fury, futility. The sticky dirty stain he left pathetically dribbling onto my step-in silk slip. Absurdly weeping, promising a new start. Hoisting his trousers. Smacking staccato stomping as each dirty shiny shoe struck 11 stairs. The twist and thrust as he banged open my door. The slap and slam as the door whacked shut. I lay on my divan, amazed by what happened, his scent still on me, my slip still torn sticky wet. His slime still clinging to the fine hairs of my thigh. I closed my eyes, and I asked g-d - please undo this - please make it not so!

‘He forced himself on me, Rachel.’ I allowed the tears to come, gazing at her through the smoke. Rachel still looked out the window.

‘Say something, please.’ I whispered. The smoke whisped toward Rachel on my breath. The acrid taste of Irv hung in the hazy atmosphere above Cedar Grove.

That bitch blamed me for the encounter. ‘It is time you set aside childish things, Lucy,’ Rachel said at last. ‘I hope you will take more care in the future.’ She turned her piercing gaze to me now, her face set into a stoic posture of disapprobation, and she handed me her handkerchief.

I dabbed my eyes and breathed the smoke in deeply. I stayed long enough to finish my cigarette, and the next time I saw Rachel it was at our shotgun wedding.

That it fell to me in ‘54 to inter Rachel at Medfield State Hospital, where she died within the year, was satisfying revenge.

Your avenging friend,

Lucy

*****

July 7, 1942

Chava,

Kittie passed in ’27. She was 7 when she wouldn’t stir from bed. She was flushed and feverish. She whispered, ‘everything hurts. I’m so thirsty’ without opening her eyes.

When I got home Mother sat upon the bed beside Kittie, who lay flushed and feverish, her hair clinging to her skull. She didn’t look up as I entered, applying a washcloth to Kittie’s forehead. Kittie’s eyes were closed. Her lips, dry and thin, were parted. Her arms, uncovered, lay stiffly unmoving.

‘Go get Grandma,’ she urgently said, never looking from Kittie.

I came across old Senhor Coelho in the stairwell. He missed a step, catching himself on the baluster. He gave me a bewildered smile, and I wondered what he was doing out alone.

When I got up to Grandma’s, the Coelho’s door was open, Senhora’s pungent bacalao emerging into the hallway. I explained my errand to Grandma. She rushed back into the hall, yelling at Grandpa over her shoulder.

She roused Dr. Marks by pressing the bell again and again. He was already in his hat when he emerged. As we rushed back down the stairwell we came again across Senhor Coelho, now crumpled on the stair, the bewildered smile still curling his lip. Dr. Marks tried to stop but Grandma insisted that he proceed, sending me instead back up the stairs to warn Senhora.

The aromas of dry fish, sauteed onions and sweet boiling potatoes filled her clean and spare apartment. The kitchen window was propped open with a book, allowing a cool breeze to circulate. Senhora was humming to herself before the stove. I explained that Senhor had fallen and she cried past me.

I had never seen a dead person before. His eyes and his mouth were gaping, his cheeks drawn in. His thin lips were stretched wide, revealing unmoving tongue, toothless gums. To me, he looked surprised. Senhora began to wail. Not knowing what to do I ran back down to our apartment.

It was growing crowded. Dr. Marks had gone into our bedroom and closed the door behind him. 

Grandpa had carried Grandma’s stockpot down to our apartment with him. And Grandma finished the soup on our stove. The sweet smell of lentils in chicken broth, sauteed onion, earthy kasha, filled the apartment. We set the table and served the food. But no one had an appetite, and Grandma’s cooking sat uneaten, cooling to stillness. It seemed we sat there a long time in the stillness.

Eventually Dr. Marks led Father and Mother out of our bedroom. Father had Kittie in his arms. She seemed so small. We followed Father down to the curb, where twin ambulances stood; strobes flashing, sirens mournfully announcing twin tragedies.

Mother disappeared behind Kittie into an ambulance. Then Senhora appeared following Senhor beneath a white shroud, which orderlies rolled to the second conveyance.

I barely saw Mother after that. For the most part she communicated with me in short, cryptic notes. I started to feel that in some way she blamed me for Kittie’s illness.

I spent a lot of time across the hall with the Sterns. This is when Lorin and I started to draw close. Lorin’s hard blue eyes, his brilliant hair falling before his glasses. The way he would sit in straight back concentration before the Bartok or Boulez or whomever his father had him studying. I see him still when I fall asleep at night.

Sometime near the end Father took me out of class. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was taking me to say goodbye to Kittie. Mother didn’t seem to notice me. Her face was swollen red and purple. She had eyes only for Kittie.

Father pushed me forward to give Kittie a kiss. I was horrified at her face near in, drawn and pale, save for a red splotch on her cheekbone. Her lips were blue, black beneath her eyes. Afraid, barely believing this was Kittie. Turning away and forcing myself from Father’s grasp, I threw my arms around Mother. She patted me distractedly, but she didn’t return my embrace.

Sometime after Kittie died I dreamed that a lion was stalking me in the tall grass. The lion caught my scent and attacked me. I woke before the lion struck. The apartment was dark and deserted. The little bed I shared with Kittie was empty. I had never felt so alone.

Your mournful friend,

Lucy

*****

September 1941

Chava,

I want you to know that I do not blame you for making a life with Lorin. Our love was only still born because it was prematurely conceived. After that night there could be no future for us. Suddenly I was with child, and the fact that it had happened in so unnatural a manner could not change the reality of the situation.

The moldering scent of spoiled youth, the halitosis I could not wash from my hair, signaled the untimely demise of our garden. Now it lay in washed out ruins on the cold pink tiles lining the base of my shower. Raising myself whimpering and goose-pimpled into the cold dawn light now filtering through the frosted shower window, wrapping last night’s damp towel, slightly mildewed, around me, I had found this little bit of clarity at least - I had to find a new way to exist, given what I had now become.

Our garden was a ruin, yet Irv had planted a new life in my inexperienced womb. And my hatred for Irv could not entirely choke the flowering of this new life. Little Bernie is an angel. He is happy, and smart and in love with his daddy. I have even found small ways to get on with Irv. He is old, and boring, but not without his charms.

It is not really in my nature, any longer, to bless. My own life is a curse which I refuse to spread. I will try not to say another word regarding your relationship with Lorin.

I wish you every happiness.

Your unhappy friend,

Lucy