Authors: Rafael Yglesias
Enrique had spent most of his life anticipating what was to come: the past something to outpace, the present needing improvement as quickly as possible. Margaret’s illness had proved to him what a wasteful state of mind that had been. But he knew Dorothy and Leonard would never learn that lesson—they were anxious creatures who continued to cling to the belief, despite evidence to the contrary, that thorough planning and prudence could prevent any calamity.
Out in the hall, Leonard held on to Enrique’s arm for balance. “Listen,” he said solemnly. “Now that she’s decided to let go—and we accept it—I accept it—listening to her I understand—but now that it’s going to happen soon, we have some very difficult things to discuss. But now is the time to discuss them. And about one of them, I’m going to push you. Hard.” Hearing this vaguely
threatening statement and fearful of his future without his wife, with grown sons both away from home, Enrique assumed that Leonard wanted him to buy the apartment or move out.
Enrique interrupted. “Listen, I know, Leonard. I have to decide about the apartment. I don’t want to move out until Max has graduated from college. It’s the only home he’s known, and I don’t want him to lose both his mother and it all at once.” He was encouraged to go on by the fact that, although Leonard’s thick, wavy eyebrows contracted in confusion, he did nod slowly in what appeared to be comprehension. “I can buy the apartment, but it would mean putting everything I have into it, and that scares me. If I could rent it until Max graduates, then I’ll move—”
He didn’t continue because Leonard grabbed his arm and shook it with impatience. “What are you talking about? You’re not moving. We’re not selling the apartment. You’re our son. What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?”
For a moment Enrique was too surprised to speak. He had himself, only a moment before, felt a similar intimacy with Leonard, but it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be reciprocated. They were different in so many ways, and Leonard was utterly unlike Enrique’s father; it seemed impossible that Leonard could feel so close to Enrique that he would override his natural caution and pragmatism. So Enrique stumbled ahead on the same mischosen path: “Well, it is your apartment—and I just can’t go on living there—”
“Stop it!” Leonard looked toward the hospital room, as if Dorothy might help him quell Enrique. “I was talking about the funeral. Margaret’s funeral,” he said, his voice low, conspiratorial, and ashamed, as if he were discussing a sexual taboo. “I wanted to say that we would arrange everything. There’s room in our family plot and, unless you object, we wanted to use our temple and Rabbi. He’s pretty good at these things, and he does know Mar
garet—” He stopped abruptly, looking up at Enrique with his daughter’s eyes, overwhelmed with confusion. “Why would you think that about the apartment? Are you crazy? I don’t understand you,” he said and did something so unexpected that Enrique would never have invented such a gesture for a man as discreet with his emotions as Leonard. He tugged on Enrique’s arm to bring his face lower, and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re our son,” he said, and then, having trouble finishing the next sentence, “Don’t talk about that nonsense anymore.”
Enrique was mortified. He thought he had anticipated Dorothy’s and Leonard’s understandable financial conservatism and fashioned a compassionate solution for all concerned. Instead he had insulted this wounded old man, his sad eyes drowning in the immense tide of his only daughter’s death; a man who remained so foreign to Enrique’s sensibilities that the subjects of his concerns—who would preside over his daughter’s funeral? where she would be buried?—had never occurred to Enrique as things to deal with at all.
The Sabas and Cohen families couldn’t have been more different in that respect. Ritual—religious or otherwise—had never been important to the Sabases. Occasionally, in a spasm of sentimentality, his parents overreached and attempted a mass gathering that invariably ended in quarrels and resentments. So bereft of family tradition were the Sabases that Margaret had arranged his father’s funeral. She was a natural for that task. Such events were not only the center but the totality of her family’s family life. It was for the calendar-enforced intimacies of Passover, birthdays, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving that the Cohens assembled—and at no other time. Whereas the handful of truly happy gatherings of the Sabas family were happenstance (accidents of people being in the same city on the same night and having nothing better to do for dinner), a nonholiday gathering
of the Cohens had never occurred in Enrique’s twenty-nine years with Margaret. In spite of the proximity of her parents living in Great Neck, an easy half hour away, six months of the year, they had dinner with them twice a year and always with at least a month’s notice. Enrique spoke to his father every day once he had children, and his mother at least a few times a week; Margaret could go a month without talking to her mother, and far longer without speaking to Leonard. And those contacts were carefully managed. She released information to her parents in the manner that the White House discloses its intentions to the American people, omitting troubling details and the possibility of failure.
The chasm between the way these families functioned was familiar and well-defined for Enrique. He immediately adjusted, obeying his standing orders from Margaret to hide behind her, since she never approved of him dealing directly with her parents. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry I misunderstood.” Enrique shut his eyes and, for a moment, his legs swayed and he felt that his feet were sinking through the carpet. He opened his eyes to catch himself from falling and saw Leonard regarding him with a new expression: a childlike wonder and a worrying about the mouth. “Uh, sorry,” Enrique said, breathing hard. “I don’t know about the funeral. I haven’t—” He was about to say “discussed it with Margaret,” a caveat which seemed, now that it had come into his head, both natural and appalling.
Leonard took hold of his wrist and again shook his entire arm. “We don’t have to talk about this now. Forget it. We’ll talk about it later.”
Telling Margaret was automatic. That was the rule of law of their marriage. Moments after Dorothy and Leonard left, while he and Margaret waited for the hospice social worker, who would discuss the logistics of her dying at home, she asked, “What did my father talk to you about?” Her tone was soft and sweet, but it
retained the assured command of a general expecting a full report from her chief of staff.
Dutifully, he told her of Leonard’s suggestion that they use Great Neck Temple and its Rabbi and the family plot in Jersey. But for the first time in their marriage, he deliberately omitted a detail of a conversation with her parents—his gaffe about the apartment. He believed that to reveal that he was thinking about his future without Margaret would hurt her feelings. He had read the opposite in an article about how to talk to a dying loved one, written by a woman of Margaret’s age who was dying of breast cancer and insisted that she wanted the comfort of knowing what would happen with her children and spouse and friends after she was gone. She felt in that way she could celebrate and encourage their future achievements. Or perhaps, she speculated, she wanted the comfort of knowing that she would not be harming them by dying. Enrique did not believe his wife would enjoy a discussion of the future she was going to miss. Margaret was a middle child, jealous of the fun activities of others. And she needed control, especially of Enrique and her sons. To oblige Margaret to imagine her babies loose, without her present to stop them from making mistakes, would torment her.
As much as possible Enrique tried to give Margaret the comfort of feeling that her job as a mother was complete and a success. The Cohen tradition of ceasing emotional surveillance of their children when they left for college was a help. Leonard and Dorothy expected that, other than paying for school and hearing reports of triumphs, nothing short of an emergency would require parental involvement once a child was in university. Greg, their older son, was well past the age at which the Cohens had kicked their young out of the nest of feeling, and Max, a high school senior, was nearly there. Although Margaret’s intimacy with her children was of an entirely different order, she resorted to her family’s
tradition of emotional distance toward her older son once she became ill, and more so after her first recurrence. “It hurts too much,” she gasped at Enrique one night. “I can’t help him, I don’t have the energy,” she confessed, ashamed that she needed to hand the phone to her husband, so that he could listen to Greg complain about his dissatisfaction with college in general and his vibrant pain at his girlfriend’s mistreatments. Margaret’s impatience with young Max’s indifference to working hard in high school classes that bored him spiked to unbearable frustration once she knew that soon she wouldn’t even be able to fail at whipping him into shape. Enrique selected what she would learn of her sons’ troubles; he focused on how well they were progressing to maturity.
Enrique was glad of that censorship when he observed Margaret’s annoyance at learning that her parents were persisting in the very behavior that had pushed her away from being closer to them. Margaret disliked planning. Enrique had presumed that her distaste was a rebellion against the forward planning Dorothy and Leonard insisted on. He was convinced that Dorothy’s ceaseless nagging of Margaret—“What is Greg doing for the summer? Is he getting a job?” asked in November; or “I want you to come down to Florida Christmas week,” demanded, not asked, in March—had forced her daughter into an equally extreme counter-behavior. If Enrique wondered in November what they were doing for Christmas break, or suggested something they might do, Margaret would snap, “Don’t ask me now,” as if his timing were outrageously premature.
He grew bitter and resentful about Dorothy’s effect on his wife until the middle years of their marriage, when he realized that she didn’t want to avoid planning simply out of rebellion against her mother—she was genuinely made happiest by felicities of accident, novelty, and improvisation. On those occasions when they
got “lost” while driving, she was gleeful; when a last-minute reservation at some exciting place became available, and with little notice they went, she expressed no smugness that her late planning had worked out; rather she was delighted that everything was unexpected. She was glad that the destination was not drained of surprise by research, the pleasures anticlimactic because they were anticipated. Dorothy the planner and Margaret the improviser had been tethered by blood into an endless tug-of-war. Dorothy, being the mother, won almost all their battles. But the price of her victories was intimacy with her daughter.
In a less painful context, Enrique would have appreciated the irony that Margaret’s parents, shortly after accepting her decision to die, wanted to make arrangements for her funeral and use their Rabbi, their Great Neck temple, and their family plot. It was the perfect final battle between her adventurous and artistic nature and her parents’ need for order and security. And he too stuck to his role as an obedient soldier in Margaret’s campaign of passive resistance to her parents’ colonialism, by telling her of their plans instead of dealing with them himself. As soon as he did, he regretted relying on her. But the sad truth was that he didn’t know how to arrange Margaret’s funeral without her help. She lay dying, but he remained her acolyte and counted on her to be the Mahatma Gandhi who could peacefully liberate them from the oppression of two eighty-year-old Jews from Great Neck.
When he reported her father’s suggestions for the arrangements, she winced. He felt like a fool. “Oh no,” she moaned in heartfelt despair. He felt cruel as well as stupid. “Forget it!” He tried to erase the conversation. “We’ll figure it out—”
“No, no!” she cried out. “I want to talk about it. I don’t want to have that silly man do my funeral. I want to use Rabbi Jeff.” She had come to trust an eccentric Buddhist-Reform Rabbi who presided at a temple built in 1885 on the Lower East Side on the
Sabbath and high holidays, while on unholy days he offered Eastern meditation for chemotherapy patients—a solace Margaret had found as soothing as his prayers.
Enrique had guessed that much. But when he asked where the service and burial should be, she said with a frown, “I don’t know. I have to think about that. I don’t want to be buried way out somewhere in the wilds of Jersey, where you and the boys will never come. But I need to think about where. Okay? I need to think.”
Of course she did. It was her careful consideration of any choice, whether it be a style of shoe, if the night was pleasant enough to eat in a garden restaurant, if a dumb American movie would be more satisfying than an alienated French film, if Enrique should wear the blue blazer or a gray cashmere sweater, whether they ought to see the new exhibit at the Met or nap and then shop at Costco. These sorts of agonizing decisions often left them doing nothing at all but reading a book or gossiping. Happily so for Enrique. Their times alone together gave him the most pleasure, Margaret being the party invitation that he was always unambiguously glad to accept. His wife didn’t so much hate to plan as she hated to make up her mind. Contemplating alternatives was what she enjoyed. She could gladly postpone all decisions to an ever-receding point on the calendar.
But her funeral wasn’t much of a future event. She had asked for time to think and so he let some of the precious days left pass. There had been fourteen days to go after they had met with Dr. Ko and decided on how she would die. Thirteen days after he had begun the intravenous steroids to give her energy for a last week of farewells. Twelve days after he had finishing making all the appointments for her friends and family. Only twelve days, give or take a couple, and still she had not answered the question that he knew her parents would quietly, but insistently, ask again tomorrow. Dorothy and Leonard were scheduled to arrive with
Margaret’s two brothers and their wives to say their good-byes, the first mass gathering of the Cohens not on a national or religious holiday. Her mother had twice asked him by phone if they had decided what they were doing about the funeral. He had stalled and then Dorothy had wondered aloud, as if she were talking to a third person, how Enrique could know what to do, he had never had to arrange one—implying that he needed their intervention. Margaret and Enrique were surrounded. In twenty-four hours their position would be untenable, and still she had not told her lieutenant what alternative plan he could present to Dorothy and Leonard.