Anna in the Afterlife (7 page)

“Who else should I tell?”

“You should tell your doctor, no one else. He's the only one who can do something about it, not your nieces.”

Gert was obviously getting bored. She was looking around for the black man. With all Gert's prim and proper attitudes, Anna suspected her sister was a sex maniac. She once saw a red mark on Anna's neck and accused her of having a “love bite.”

“I think it was the Prozac that made me to do it,” she said. “My doctor told me to take it when he couldn't help my pains, which he thought were all in my head. No one could help me. Doctors, they know nothing.”

Wrong answer again. “Prozac is supposed to
help
you,” the psychiatrist said.

“I read it brings on homicide,” she countered. “I blame Prozac.”

The doctor was out of patience. (When Anna—on the other hand—had been examined by a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, he had dictated a twenty-page paean to her charms, intelligence, and beauty.) Obviously, Gert was not charming this doctor. He was totally disgusted with her and did not conceal it.

“I want to get out of here,” Gert said. “The woman in my room gets up at night, walks over to my bed, and pees on the floor.”

“You'll go home when I discharge you, not before, and you're not ready to go home yet.” Gert looked around as if she might try to escape. At both ends of the hall were locked doors with glass windows in them. No one could go in or out till a series of bells and whistles were heard, and only when a nurse, locked behind glass herself, pushed the button.

“You're not very nice,” Gert accused the doctor. “You're not kind at all to me, after what I've been through.”

“This isn't a place you come to for ‘nice.' You're here because you did a very bad thing. I'm trying to ascertain that you won't try to do it again. Then, and only then, I'll let you out of here. Otherwise you'll stay as long as I think is necessary.”

“Medicare is paying you and you know it,” Gert said. “You think I'm a cash cow, that's why you won't let me out.”

The doctor tucked his papers back in his briefcase, gave Gert a dirty look, signaled the nurse to buzz him out, and left.

To Anna's annoyance, her daughters decided to move Gert out of Beverly Hills and closer to where they lived. Not only closer to them, but in the very next building to Anna's nursing home, a retirement home that was more like a holding pen for dying animals. When they got sick enough, they'd be funneled over to the slaughter house (the place where Anna lived). She could understand the necessity for this—after Gert had ruined the rugs and bed in her room, the Beverly Hills place definitely didn't want her back to give the other residents any ideas, especially with the scars on her wrists and in the crook of her elbow.

First Anna's girls toured the facility. There was the usual: the lounge with a big TV, a crafts room, a dining room, and the individual cells where the prisoners served their time. At least these failing creatures, unlike those in the nursing home, could still walk on their own two feet.

Anna's daughters conferred. They agreed that they wanted to take the room for Gert for the convenience of being able to visit Anna and Gert in the same trip. But they still had to tell the truth about Gert's wrist slashing to the retirement home director. They waited for her in the front office as legions of the ancient creaked and ratcheted by on their walkers and pulled their oxygen machines on wheels after them.

They talked business: the girls inquired about room rates and services. Then they confessed: “Our aunt recently tried to take her own life.”

“Oh, don't worry about it,” the director said. “They all want to do it. One resident here jumped off the second floor balcony of her apartment.”

“So that's not a problem?”

“Not at all. They're all depressed. It's the rule, not the exception. So let me know when we can send our truck for your aunt's things and move them here.”

What troubled Anna the most was that now the girls would only have half as much time to spend with her. With Gert on the other side of the parking lot, they'd be killing both old birds with one stone. Anna was reluctant to concede being the main attraction in this zoo of the old.

Besides, it worried her that the hard work of moving Gert's belongings and furniture would be a hardship on her girls. Carol's health was not good, Janet was no teenager herself. Gert should have had three strapping sons if she intended to slit her wrists and require her relatives to move her household on such short notice.

On moving day, the girls, using their good sense, enlisted the help of Carol's son David and Janet's daughter Bonnie. David, the son of the dead hippie father, had the incredible good looks of the poor man, the only decent thing that came from him (and the boy—in Anna's opinion—the only good thing that came from the marriage). David had the flashing smile, the blue eyes, the muscular build, the outdoorsman look that had seduced Carol from the start. It was only a pity Jewish boys did not come in this model.

The four of them—Gert's unwilling servants—entered the apartment like archeologists entering the tomb of Tutankhamen. What eerie artifacts they would find, they didn't know. The blood had been wiped from the surfaces, but traces of it still darkened the carpet. The mattress was gone, thrown out, but the phone was still there, its buttons cemented by dried blood.

David made several trips up from the car with cartons he had collected. Anna's daughters and granddaughter began opening Gert's drawers and dumping their contents into the boxes.

Suddenly, on Gert's dresser Anna saw the most astonishing sight. Her own husband Abram was featured in a silver-framed photo, half naked, his mouth opened wide…and biting Gert's thigh! The photo had been taken at Coney Island in 1932, when a bunch of boys and girls were at the beach on a blanket. A smaller copy of this snapshot had been in Gert's photo album. Anna remembered dimly that she had been at the beach when someone thought it would be funny for the gang to entwine all their limbs and take a picture of it. Abram, always up for a joke, pretended to bite the leg closest to his mouth. Anna, however, had thought it beneath her dignity to roll around on the sand with a bunch of hoodlums and removed herself from the blanket. Now here was that moment captured in time, not only captured but blown up to the size of an oil painting! And cropped to show only Gert's delighted smile, and Abram's big open mouth poised over her lily-white thigh. There was no end to the treachery of this sister!

What caught Anna's eye next was a small photograph, tucked into a corner of Gert's mirror. In it was a picture of the antique samovar that Gert had promised to Janet.

What Gert had done with that samovar was an injustice that would burn in Janet's heart forever. The samovar had belonged to the mother of Gert's second husband who had brought it with her from Russia. Pure silver, filigreed handles, a place for a teacup on top, a creation fit for royalty (there was a photo of Gert's father-in-law having tea with Chaim Weizman beside it). Gert had kept it in the place of honor on a table in the corner of her dining room in all the apartments in which she had lived. It was the cherished heirloom, the family's singular piece of history. And she had promised it,
pledged it
, for years, to Janet. “This will be yours when I kick off,” was the delicate way she had phrased it.

Janet was grateful and said so to Gert many times. Maybe Janet had suffered because Anna had never given her anything valuable from the antique shop—she was a stern mother that way. “What will I sell if I give you everything here you like?” she used to tell her daughters. “The children will break it, the cat will knock it over, someone might steal it.” Anna had a flash of regret about her tightfistedness. Now it seemed it might not have been the best philosophy in the world. But she, too, had always counted on Janet's having the samovar. (In secret she had done some research on the current prices of antique samovars. Gert's was in the class of those valued at—at least—$20,000! What a nice bit of security it would be for Janet, whose husband, Danny, as good and reliable a son-in-law as he was, was still only a college teacher.)

Even now, when Anna remembered Gert's treachery, this act of revenge (on who? on her? retribution for giving away Bingo?), this betrayal of Janet, of Janet's trust, she wanted to commit mayhem. The very manner in which Janet found out about the betrayal was a low and underhanded trick. She had gone, one day, with Danny and the children to visit Gert and Harry and discovered the samovar gone from its place. When she inquired about its absence, Gert said, with no apology, “I gave it to my step-grandson. I know his wife will polish it every week. I knew you wouldn't.”

The kiss of Judas. That's what Gert gave Janet.

Still—loyal and good niece that she was—Janet was standing knee-deep in the debris of Gert's botched attempt to pass on to greener pastures.

“Get rid of all the razor blades, all the scissors, any knives you find, throw them right into the trash,” Janet instructed her daughter and nephew. “She isn't going to have one sharp item in that new place.”

Carol was opening the china cabinet, beginning to wrap the knickknacks in newspaper. Such valuable things Gert had—all of them from Goldman's Antiques, things she had finagled Abram into giving her. The silver candlesticks, the amphora, the bisque statue—if those were also going to be inherited one day soon by the step-grandson, Anna was going to whirl like a dervish among them and smash them to pieces right now.

Handling a person's private belongings was like committing a forbidden act. Anna could tell her girls were uneasy, sifting through Gert's underpants, her bras (and her collection of foam rubber falsies), her letters, her checkbook stubs, her photographs. At one point Janet opened Gert's wedding album (the first husband), and there Anna saw herself and Abram in the full bloom of youth. Over Janet's shoulder, Anna studied her own face, her good bone structure (her sealed mouth—she never smiled after her teeth were pulled and dentures were installed). Her migraine headaches were supposed to have disappeared after her teeth were pulled, or so the dentist had said, but the headaches were even worse after that. Anna was hardly ever able to eat again without wanting to throw up after every meal.

But Abram, who was holding the pole of the
chuppa
, looked magnificent, clear-eyed, wonderful. Six feet tall and strong as a mountain, but sweetness and goodness pouring out of him toward the world. (Too good, maybe; he had been a soft touch, and never knew how to be a good businessman.) Janet was in one of the wedding photos, too—about eleven years old, a skinny
marink
. Anna's mother, stolid and simple Sophie, dressed in a dark blue dress, so proud to have her old-maid daughter find a husband.

To think: the lives that people traveled through in a lifetime. Why was it everyone felt that life was too short when, looking back, it was vast, endless, comprised of dozens of little lives so that, by the end, everyone had lived a thousand times? Anna could pick a moment, any moment—her first day in public school, her first migraine headache, her first taste of chocolate—and write a book about each subject. She could talk about chocolate for a week, about her headaches for a year, what each did to her life, how she first felt about it, how she grew to feel about it, how she felt about it now. Her hands—whether she liked them or not—her fingernails, how she shaped them, her hips, the way she perceived them. And then there were all the people, all the events, all the trips, all the grudges, all the jobs, all the flus and colds—such a wild and magnificent collection of thoughts and experiences. So much misery and worry. And fear—enough of that to choke a person, especially when the children might be in danger.

This business with Gert's suicide was a tiny drop in the bucket, a miniscule mosquito bite of an event. Gert's smallness, pettiness, false sweetness (Abram used to call her “the cat with the velvet claws”), all this hullabaloo about one old lady running the edge of a blade across her veins: where did it figure in the history of the world? It was of no consequence, it didn't require Anna's attention anymore. She had other fish to fry and not much time in which to do it.

In her opinion, Gert, alive or dead, was a closed book. Anna was going to move on to the next subject, whichever appealed to her most, whichever was worth the time she had left. Who knew if, after she was buried, she could take these grand trips across history? For now, she had better be moving along.

ANNA HAD BEEN WORRIED for some time that she was a bigot, maybe even a racist. No one ever spoke those words in Brooklyn in 1945 where it was expected that when a colored woman came to clean someone's house, she would be given her lunch in a special glass plate that was kept separate from the family's dishes.

Anna's cleaning girl, Bessie, got a special place in the bathroom where she hung her good dress on a hook and left her street shoes in a carton below. She worked in a loose faded housedress and shoes without backs. (The pink skin of her heels looked to Anna like the pink underside of Gert's dog.)

Bessie was a woman who never said much. She smiled and nodded a great deal and ate silently with her special utensils, never making a sound, not even clinking her fork against her plate. She made the same brief comment to Anna every week: that she was afraid to leave the house after work because her husband had a habit of hiding in the bushes with a knife, waiting for her to come out so he could cut her up.

Anna actually feared there would be a killing in her alley. She was afraid that when Abram insisted on walking Bessie after work to the trolley stop, Bessie's husband would kill Abram and leave Anna a penniless widow with two children. Then, like Bessie, she'd have to go to work cleaning other people's houses.

Which is why—years later—Anna wanted her grown daughters to live in a good neighborhood far from where colored men waited in the bushes with knives. Even when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, even when everyone began calling colored people “black” and then stretched it out to “African-American,” Anna could not forget the scars Bessie-from-Brooklyn had on her face, on her back, and on her arms. If violence was Bessie's fate, Anna wanted to see to it that it was never the fate of her daughters. (How could she have known that Carol would marry a crazy white man who was far more dangerous than Bessie's husband?)