Authors: Rafael Yglesias
She reached out with thoughtful idleness, right forearm balancing on his shoulder, a delicate hand brushing past his cheek. Her index finger and thumb took hold of his earlobe, and she squeezed lightly, as if they were old lovers with all the questions answered and all the time in the world. In that pose she resumed her account of the disappointment of black radical separatism on campus, releasing him after a few sentences, content with what they had accomplished, sitting back, clear of more kisses, seeming to want nothing more from him than to continue their endless conversation.
F
OR FIVE DAYS
and nights a steady flow of people entered Enrique and Margaret’s home and walked up the stairs that typically only they, their sons, or their cleaning woman climbed. These final visitors passed through the small study where Enrique wrote on weekends and on through a pocket doorway into a bedroom almost as large as Margaret’s old studio apartment, where they first kissed. Their bedroom was filled with light from its sweeping view of southern Manhattan, which used to be dominated by the shimmering, rectangular boxes of the World Trade towers and whose emptiness was scarred these days by the tops of a quartet of cranes. Enrique brought up extra chairs for the larger groups, such as when Margaret’s mother and father, her brothers, and their wives had come for lunch.
The Cohen family’s final meal with Margaret was preceded by
a confrontation that, in one aspect, Enrique had feared all of his marriage. Margaret asked Enrique to tell Dorothy and Leonard that she wanted to have her funeral at the nineteenth-century synagogue on the Lower East Side where the atheistic Enrique had been accompanying her since her diagnosis; that she wanted her service to be presided over by their eccentric Buddhist Rabbi; and that she be buried not in the family plot in New Jersey but in the hillocks of Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, with its view of southern Manhattan, where Margaret had sown her wild oats, tamed Enrique, raised her children, and would die.
Seeing the look of fear in her husband’s eyes at the prospect of confronting her parents without her, Margaret was quick to reassure Enrique, “After you break it to them, I’ll confirm it’s what I want, but I can’t bear to fight with them, so you explain it. That’ll get them used to the idea, and then you send them up to me.” Enrique made no reply. If she’d been healthy, he would have attempted to weasel out of such a request, but how could he now? Anyway, wasn’t this the beginning of a necessary new skill? The Cohens were his sons’ grandparents; he had to learn to deal with them by himself. “You can do it,” she said into his silence. “They’ll fuss, but they’ll do what I want. I just don’t want to listen to their nonsense about it.”
Something was wrong in her construct of the situation, he couldn’t pinpoint what, but he had little time to reflect on it, not even half the morning. Her parents arrived for lunch at ten am. Max, having graduated high school a week before, was presumably sleeping off a worrisome quantity of alcohol. Margaret was still upstairs, occupied by the long process of getting dressed. There was the difficulty of tubes and ports that couldn’t be concealed entirely, the application of makeup with tearing eyes and lack of brows, and her postchemo hair, which was brittle and thin, yet thick enough to make adjusting her wig difficult. Her prepara
tions left Enrique alone with Dorothy and Leonard in the living room, an excellent opportunity for him to inform them of the funeral arrangements.
He had little choice; it was Dorothy’s second question. “Max is still asleep?” she asked immediately after she and Leonard settled on the couch. She almost ran over Enrique’s yes to ask, as was typical of her, not a single question but a paragraph of them, sandwiched between assumptions, advice, and answers to her own questions. “So what about the funeral and everything? What are you going to do? I mean, why should you know anything about all that? About services and burial plots. You’ve never had to do it before. Except for your father, but you didn’t have to arrange that, right? Didn’t his sister take care of things in Florida? We understand you want to have a memorial service in New York for your friends. And Margs likes her Rabbi. We know that. So her Rabbi could do it here in Manhattan, that’s all right. But what about the temple? Is your temple big enough for all the people? A lot of people will want to come. We have a lot of friends. And you have a lot of friends. Isn’t that going to be too many people for that little temple? It’s so small. What about this idea? We could do the funeral service at our temple for everyone and then you could have a memorial in the city for your friends. That would work. Many people have both a funeral and a memorial. But what about the plot? You don’t have a plot, right? You and Margs never did anything about that. Why would you?” She made an embarrassed face and lowered her voice as if they were discussing something pornographic. “And there’s plenty of space in our family plot. When the time comes, which we know won’t be for a long time, but if you could also—I don’t know where you want to go, whether you want to be with your father’s family—but we consider you a part of our family, so—” She shook her head as if all these thoughts were flies buzzing her. She cried out, “It’s terrible,
it’s just terrible…” And the carapace of her face cracked with anxiety at how to control this last social arrangement for her daughter. Although Dorothy felt compelled to organize it, Enrique could see that this event was too painful for her to think through.
He said gently, putting as much affection as he could into the word, “Dorothy…”
But at the sound of his comforting tone, she revved herself away from sorrow, lines smoothing under the weight of makeup, voice returning to the shrill noise of planning: “It’s terrible, but we have to think about these things. What about parking, for example? Is there parking for your temple? And your Rabbi. We would have to meet him. He doesn’t know us.” She stopped abruptly, her barrage ceasing without a tapering off. Enrique’s mind reeled as to how to untangle the thicket of erroneous facts and gross presumptions. Dorothy sat ramrod straight on the couch, panic radiating from her pale blue eyes, while Leonard slumped, his mournful violet eyes swimming in despair.
Enrique cleared his throat of the twenty-nine-year clog of swallowed objections, of resentment that Dorothy’s way of doing things always took precedence, and the constricting fear that he would be unable to get Margaret what she wanted without also hurting her mother. And then it struck him, staring at her parents in their confusion and their pain. The difficulty for him in this situation was that to negotiate between Margaret and her mother required extraordinary diplomacy, and Enrique wasn’t a diplomat at all. The Cohen children were masters of indirection with their mother, of expressing desires without explicit statements, of refusing demands without saying no, of agreement without harmony, of fighting without blows. Enrique was loud and direct, shouting nos and singing yeses, a creature who loved clear skies but also required the inevitable churning seas, black clouds, and howling winds of a yearly hurricane to create in the atmosphere of affection
a deeper blue than before. He had never loosed a Sabas storm on Dorothy, and to do it now, of all the times he had been tempted, would be a catastrophe that no amount of volunteers or charitable aid could repair.
And yet without creating hurricane-force winds, how could he be sure that Dorothy’s knotted oak of worry and control would bend to the breeze of Margaret’s wishes? How else could he overwhelm Dorothy’s powerful need for familiarity? She wanted to sit in the same bland building she’d gone to for thirty-five years, secure that there was ample parking. She wanted to be surrounded by lifelong friends while she sat on the same wood bench where yearly she had atoned for sins that would make an angel laugh, and listen to an old friend of a Rabbi who would repeat platitudes that were comforting precisely because they no longer had meaning. She wanted to drive on the same road that she had taken again and again to honor the graves of her mother and her father, and her husband’s mother and father; to feel safe in this heartbreaking new context by saying the same words and staring into the same upturned earth.
How could Enrique explain that, although Margaret would be dead at her funeral, in order for her to go in peace she needed to picture herself departing from the people she loved in places that she loved? To say good-bye in the evocative wood-and-stone temple fashioned by European craftsmen in the squalor of Lower East Side streets that had no parking because they were too crowded by striving immigrants. To picture herself mourned in a symbol of Jewish ancestry that Margaret preferred to think of as hers, rather than her anonymous childhood home in Queens or the Long Island lawns and malls of her parents’ later prosperity. To have spoken over her lifeless body confused comfort from a Buddhist Rabbi trying to reconcile the Old Testament’s frank tribalism and rage with modern longings for acceptance and harmony. For her
last gesture as a woman obliged to leave her husband and children this early to be that she would lie forever as close as possible to where she had nurtured them, and in as elegant and as welcoming a place as she could find; that even in death Margaret longed to seduce, rather than demand; that the life lesson she had learned from her mother was that she wanted ardor, not obedience from her family.
The obstacle, Enrique realized, in his twenty-nine-year history with these two mitochondrial creators of his sons, was that in order for him to win with either Dorothy or Margaret, if he had ever really had won any battle with these women, he had had to insist without discussion, to disobey without debate. Whenever he engaged in negotiation, he lost. After the tumultuous early years of their marriage, he’d made a shouting demand of Margaret only a few times, and never of Dorothy. Not directly, anyway. Once or twice he had done so through Margaret to Dorothy, but on those occasions Margaret was on his side anyway—she used him as the offstage bully. But those contradictions of Dorothy’s desires were about trivia such as whether they would spend their family school vacation at the Cohens’ home in Florida. This sad circumstance could not be decided by fiat. He needed the irreconcilable to be reconciled.
He began, as he imagined a diplomat would, by moving beside Dorothy on the couch, as close as a lover. He spoke in a calm voice. “Margaret and I have discussed all this. Margaret’s very clear about what she wants. I don’t know if you remember that we stopped going to the little temple, the Village temple over here where Max and Gregory were Bar Mitzvahed? Instead we go down to a big old synagogue on the Lower East Side.” Dorothy began to interrupt. Enrique talked over her. “It’s a partially restored nineteenth-century synagogue. In fact, it’s the oldest surviving temple in New York—”
“Margaret was telling me about this,” Leonard said, sitting up straighter, his natural curiosity about Jewish history rousing him from his sorrow. “It’s not functioning now, right?”
“Our congregation rents it every other Friday and on the high holidays. Our Rabbi, who is a Buddhist—”
“He’s Buddhist?” Dorothy said, her face widening in what might have been either surprise or horror. In any case, the fact didn’t inspire her confidence.
“He claims to be a Buddhist, but he was a traditional Rabbi for many years, and we’ve been going to his services for almost two years, every other Friday night and on the high holidays. Margaret loves him. He’s the first Rabbi, she says, that she likes.” Dorothy and Leonard both started to speak, to remind him that they had heard all this, but Enrique knew they had somehow slipped back into thinking that he was proposing to have Margaret’s funeral at the small temple on Twelfth Street where Margaret used to take the boys on her own, when she was healthy and Enrique could defy her with the pride of his atheism. He talked over their comments. “It’s been deliberately kept to look like a nineteenth-century temple which hasn’t been that well-maintained. A kind of hip, sort of ruined look. But the building is completely sound, it’s clean, it has plenty of room for all your friends and ours. I don’t know about parking. I’m sure there’s a lot nearby. But that’s where Margaret wants her funeral service. And there’s something else she wants. She doesn’t want to be buried in New Jersey. She wants to be closer to New York. There’s a cemetery in Brooklyn, it’s a national landmark, but they allow a few new graves and I’ve arranged to—”
That was too much for Dorothy. “She doesn’t want to be buried with us!” she exclaimed, dropping a bomb of hysteria and guilt into Enrique’s calm oration. She had converted Margaret’s longing to be in a place she admired into a rejection of her mother. For much of his married life, Enrique had wanted to yell at
Dorothy for this blind spot, that she had no idea how much her daughter honored her wishes. He wanted to shout that Dorothy must try to see the world through her daughter’s eyes now. He listened passively for his anger to explode, as if he were a bystander. He was sure that he wouldn’t be able to restrain his frustration for his wife’s sake, given that his fatigue was so heavy and his need to release so urgent. He waited for the old Enrique, the wild, confused young man whom Margaret had rescued, to throw a temper tantrum and make a forlorn situation even more desolate.
But he had no storm in his heart. He took hold of Dorothy’s hands, something he had never done. She was startled and tried to pull them back, but he didn’t let go. Her stiff fingers and rigid palms relaxed. He said, “Dorothy,” in the gentle tone he imagined he would use with a heartbroken daughter. He squeezed her hands, and she squeezed back, her startled, anxious eyes fastened on him. “Dorothy, Margaret loves you. She wants to be buried in Green-Wood
not
because she doesn’t want to be with you but because she loves it in Green-Wood. A friend from her cancer group was buried there, and it made her feel okay about losing her. It’s not about anything else. She’s letting go of us. It’s very hard to let go of us. She needs to know that everything about her death is going to be the way she would like it. She needs that in order to accept what’s happening. It’s all she asks of us. Green-Wood is nearby, much closer than New Jersey. You can visit her there.”
Dorothy’s pale eyes flickered into darker hues of blue, as if she were raising a shade to allow him to look deeper into her. It felt to Enrique—he wondered if it felt that way to her as well—as if they were gazing into each other’s eyes for the very first time. What he saw was not the demanding matriarch he resented, not the bourgeois who would never view him as a success, not the nagging mother who didn’t praise her daughter enough. He saw a lonely little girl who longed for her parents’ approval. “Dorothy,”
he pleaded as gently as he could. “Let’s do this for her. It’s very hard on us. Very, very hard on you, maybe harder on you than on any of us, but let’s make this as easy as we can on Margaret. For her, okay?”