Suddenly, he saw an image of Jack Gilbert smiling back at him from the TV. He blinked a few times, certain that he was hallucinating, but the smiling face didn’t go away. ‘Hey, that’s Jack. Turn it up.’
Lily snatched the remote from the table and turned the TV off.
‘Come on, Lily!’ He grabbed the remote, flipped the TV back on, and watched in amusement as the commercial cycled through a montage of touching scenes: Jack at a car accident, helping the victim, Jack at a construction site, talking to workers, Jack at a hospital bed, looking earnest and caring. A narrator’s voice spoke over the final shot of a dynamic, charismatic Jack in court: ‘You need a lawyer who cares about you. Call Jack Gilbert at 1-800-555-5225. That’s 1-800-555-J-A-C-K, Jack. Don’t let them jack you around.’
‘What a schlock,’ Lily muttered.
‘I don’t know. I thought it was pretty good.’
She grunted.
‘You never used to think he was a schlock. You used to be proud of him.’
‘He used to be my son,’ she said sharply.
Marty sighed. He had made the decision to put his own non-life on hold out of respect for Morey, and to do what he could to help Lily. Hannah would have wanted that. But he wasn’t going to do it forever, which meant this family feud nonsense had to end. Jack should be taking care of his own mother, goddamnit. ‘Jesus, Lily, you’re the most stubborn woman on the planet.’
‘Why do you do that? Why do you swear? You know I hate that.’
‘Oh, come on, we’re Jewish. Saying “Jesus” doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It means something to someone. You could show a little respect.’
Marty took a breath. ‘Fine. I’ll stop swearing, you stop changing the subject. We’re running out of Gilberts here, Lily. It’s just you and Jack now, and it’s about time you buried the hatchet. So he married out of the faith – why is that such a big deal? You and Morey never even went to temple. Why should you care if he married a Lutheran?’
Lily gave him an incredulous look. ‘You think
that’s
what this is about?’
‘Well, isn’t it?’
‘Pffft. Your head is filled with things you don’t know. Things you didn’t bother to find out because you’re such a busy retired person.’
Marty gritted his teeth until he could trust himself to speak. ‘Don’t even try the guilt thing with this one, Lily. We hadn’t seen Jack in a while, he kept blowing Hannah off when she called, so I asked Morey what was going on. He said Jack had married a Lutheran, and we weren’t going to talk about it. Period. A week or so after that Hannah was killed, and you can just goddamn excuse me for not following through.’
He took a breath and eyed the bottle of Balvenie. Ten bucks a shot, the way he figured it. Seemed a shame to waste that kind of money on the rapid journey into oblivion he was hoping for.
‘Go ahead, drink it,’ Lily said. ‘Better you should die from a diseased liver than holes in your stomach from that drain cleaner you drink.’
If she thought she was going to have to tell him twice, she was crazy. He snatched the bottle and filled his glass and dreamed of blackness.
Lily watched him take a long drink. ‘So you want to know about this thing with Jack or not?’
‘Sure. Why not.’
She nodded, then leaned against the back of the couch. Her feet didn’t touch the floor when she did that, and she looked like an old little girl with her legs sticking straight out.
‘Every day Jack would come for lunch, remember? This was before the schlocky ad, when I could still tell people my son was a lawyer and not worry about them seeing the clown on TV. And then one day, poof. He drops off the face of the earth. No lunching, no calling, no nothing. I call his office, I talk to a machine; I call his house, I talk to another machine. Morey said they argued.’
‘About what?’
‘Who knows? Fathers and sons argue. This happens. So they stay away from each other long enough to forget the stupid things they said when they were mad, and then it’s over. Except this time it wasn’t. This time Jack sent us a picture in the mail, and there in the picture are little girls in white dresses and little boys in suits and right in the middle is the big schlock himself, and they’re all kneeling in front of a cross with that poor, dead Jew hanging on it.’
Marty blinked at her, wondering if the last drink had finally fried his brain, because he was definitely missing something. ‘What are you talking about? What picture?’
Lily ignored his question. ‘And on the bottom of the picture it says: Jack Gilbert, First Communion, some Lutheran church.’
‘
What?
Jack
converted
?’
She sipped from her glass and said nothing.
‘That doesn’t make any sense at all. Jack never even believed in God.’
Lily looked at him like he was an idiot. ‘What are you thinking? This had nothing to do with God. This was Jack slapping our faces and turning his back on his family and who he was because he’d had some stupid fight with his father. And then a couple of weeks later we get a wedding picture. Same place, same cross, a bigger girl in a bigger white dress. Another slap, and the coward did it with pictures.’
Marty raked his fingers through his hair, as if that might stimulate some dormant brain cell that could help him make sense of what he’d just been told. Jack had his fair share of shortcomings, but he’d never struck him as the kind of guy who’d hurt anybody intentionally, least of all his parents. Besides, it made no sense at all for Jack to punish Lily for a fight he’d had with Morey. ‘I can’t figure this out.’
‘Big surprise. I’ve been trying for over a year, and I can’t figure it out either.’
‘You should have asked Jack.’
‘I told you, Jack wouldn’t talk to me. Morey wouldn’t talk to me. You men, you do these stupid things, and the women suffer and never know why.’
Marty watched her drink from her glass, foolish enough, even after all these years, to look for a flicker of emotion on the old woman’s face. He knew without a doubt that it was in there, but he also knew he would never see it. Probably if Lily Gilbert ever started crying, she’d never be able to stop.
‘Well, I’ll talk to the little bastard,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘And I’m sorry he hurt you.’
Lily gave him a smug look. ‘And all this time,
I’m
the bad person. By the way, Sol called tonight while you were closing up the greenhouse. You’re a pallbearer, you know.’
‘I know.’
She smiled a little. ‘Morey picked out his casket years ago. He used to go to the funeral home and play poker with Sol, and one day, he comes home and says, “Lily, I picked out my casket today. It’s bronze and it’s heavy, and the pallbearers are going to pull out their backs carrying me. This will help out Harvey, the chiropractor, whose business has been bad.” ’
Marty smiled, thinking that sounded just like Morey. ‘I didn’t know he played poker.’
‘He only played with Sol because he could beat him. And sometimes that Ben person.’
‘Who’s Ben?’
‘A nobody.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘He’s a putz. A stinker.’
‘And Morey liked him?’
Lily shrugged. ‘You know Morey. He was hopeless. He liked everybody, whether they deserved it or not. Besides, they went way back.’
‘Funny I never met him.’
‘They weren’t that close. Mostly they went fishing. Couple, three times a year, maybe some poker sometimes.’
Marty turned his head very slowly to look at her. ‘Morey went
fishing
?’
‘Of course he did . . . oh, turn on the sound. Quick.’ She squiggled forward to put her feet on the floor and propped her elbows on her knees, eyes fixed on the TV. ‘Look, it’s extra innings.’
Marty looked at her in amazement. ‘You like baseball?’
She snatched the remote and turned on the sound herself. ‘Of course I like baseball. These are gentlemen. They hardly ever knock each other down, and they smile a lot when they do something good.’
He watched, bemused, as she got caught up in the game, thinking how little he had learned about Lily in all the years he’d loved her daughter. He’d spent most of his time with Morey, practicing that age-old gender division that happens when families get together. Lily was the mystery in the kitchen; but Morey was the man, the friend, the substitute father he had come to love and know so well.
Except he’d never known about the fishing, and that troubled him. Maybe he hadn’t known Morey as well as he thought.
He let his mind travel back to a day well over a year ago, not long before his life had fallen apart. He and Morey had driven Hannah and Lily fifty miles north of the city to an antique shop that charged twice as much as any closer to home. On the way back, they’d stopped at a rural gas station/convenience store for ice cream and drinks.
‘
Marty, get over here. Look at this.’ Morey was standing at an upright cooler that held milk, cheese, and other perishables, looking into an adjacent water tank with a noisy bubbler, shaking his head.
Marty peered into the tank and grimaced at a writhing black mass of leeches. On top of the tank all manner of worms squirmed in cups of sawdust and dirt. ‘This is disgusting. What’s wrong with these worms? How come the white ones are in sawdust?’
‘I should know this?’ Morey gestured a young clerk over to the tank. ‘This isn’t against the health code?’
‘Uh . . . are you an inspector or something?’
‘No, no, I’m not an inspector, but it’s common sense. There are leeches next to the milk.’
‘And worms,’ Marty added.
‘That’s just the live bait,’ the clerk replied. ‘That tank there’s the live well, and that’s the dry bait on top.’
Morey snorted. ‘Of course it’s live. It’s moving. This is disgusting.’
‘Uh . . . we get a lot of fishermen in here.’
‘Fishing. Bah. And they call themselves sportsmen. What kind of a sport is it that you impale helpless creatures on a wire hook so you can throw it in the water and impale bigger helpless creatures?
‘Well, they’re just worms and leeches and stuff.’
‘To you, maybe. Tell me. Did you see that Spielberg movie?’
‘Oh, hey, yeah, man, I’ve seen them all.’
‘Really. I’m impressed. You saw
Schindler’s List
?’
‘Uh . . . you sure Spielberg did it?’
‘Never mind. The one I’m talking about had dinosaurs.’
‘Oh, yeah,
Jurassic Park,
sure. I saw that one four times. The sequels kind of sucked, but the first one really rocked.’
‘Then you’ll remember where they tied up the goat so the big dinosaur would come?’
‘Oh yeah, that was gross.’
‘And did you feel sorry for the little goat?’
‘Well, sure, sort of. I mean it was scared, crying and stuff.’
‘Live bait. Like these worms.’
The clerk gave Morey a blank look.
Morey shook his finger at him. ‘There’s an important lesson here. Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you. One man’s worm is another man’s goat. Remember that.’
She’s wrong, Marty thought as he drifted back from his reverie. No matter what Lily said, no matter what anybody said, Morey Gilbert was no fisherman.
The unseasonable heat continued on the morning of Morey Gilbert’s funeral, and meteorologists predicted yet another day of sunny skies and temperatures in the eighties. Old-timers in the state sat on sun-drenched porches, paging through their well-thumbed
Farmer’s Almanac
s as if they were the writings of Nostradamus, searching history for a similar Minnesota April heat wave, and finding none. But fifteen hundred miles north, deep into the Canadian territories, the belly of an enormous cold front began to sag toward the American Midwest. A change was coming.
The Uptown Precinct had called for five extra patrols to manage the traffic converging on the synagogue where Morey Gilbert’s service was held. By ten in the morning there was standing room only inside; by eleven, when the service began, the crowd had spilled out onto the lawn, the sidewalk, and ultimately the street itself. The numbers were in the hundreds, and there was no hope of moving them, and simply no place to move them to, so the street had finally been closed for three blocks in either direction. Not one resident or motorist complained. Even the cops, initially irritated to be diverted to traffic management, were eventually moved by the size and reverent demeanor of the crowd, and became caught up in the sense that they were more honor guard than enforcers, there to witness the passage of a great man. None of them understood it, and later could only say, ‘You had to be there.’
Three hours later Magozzi and Gino sat in the unmarked outside Lily Gilbert’s house behind the nursery, watching a small army of black-clad mourners funnel through the front door.
‘You know, I think half the city showed up at the cemetery. I don’t know how the hell she’s going to squeeze them all into that cracker box,’ Gino commented.
‘It’s a private reception. Family and friends only. These are the people who knew him best; the ones we want to listen to.’
Gino sighed and started to loosen the knot in his tie. ‘You ever seen press coverage that heavy at a funeral before?’
‘Not for anybody who wasn’t in politics or a rock band.’
‘And isn’t that a sad comment on the state of the world? But I’ve been thinking, you listen to all those people who stood up and told their stories about how Morey helped them out? Christ, it was like taking a stroll through a maximum-security cell block. You had your drug dealers, gangbangers . . . hell, pick a felony, they were all there.’
‘
Ex
-drug dealers,
ex
-gangbangers.’
Gino snorted. ‘So they say. But what if one of them went bad again, came back to good old Morey for a little more monetary support and got pissed when he unhitched him from the gravy train?’
Magozzi looked at him. ‘You know, I just figured it out. You’re really respectful, almost genteel, until you loosen the knot in your tie, then everything goes to hell.’
‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’
Magozzi sighed and draped his wrists over the steering wheel. ‘That one of the people he helped came back on him? I suppose, but if that’s the case, we’re going to have a hell of a time picking him out. There must have been over a thousand people there today. Besides, that punches a hole in the same killer hitting Rose Kleber, and I’m kind of stuck on that.’ He leaned forward and squinted out the windshield. ‘Who’s that guy in the navy suit hugging Jack Gilbert?’