Riggs Park (21 page)

After the waiter cleared our plates, we drank coffee spiked with Kahlúa while she finished her story. I hadn’t eaten so much at one time in a year. By the end of the meal, I felt calmer than I had in a month.

It was a lovely thing to have a grown daughter, especially if she was paying for your dinner. So what if she didn’t tell you about her movie until it was about to go into production. It was a lovely thing simply to know your daughter existed; to know she was walking somewhere in the world.

Even Jon deserved such a thing.

This, I realized, was why Marilyn had not come to North Carolina to watch the tape with me. This was why Steve had rented a jet to bring my daughter to my doorstep.

“Mom?” Robin asked.

I made my eyes focus.

“You okay?”

“Just full.” But I felt suddenly sober. This was what Marilyn had known and I had not: that whether we died before sixty or lived until ninety, at some point we belonged to the generations and not just ourselves. Penny was our history and our duty was to pass it on. If it would be kindness to sugarcoat the story a bit, we had to do that, too. Feeling as I did about Robin, how could I do anything else?

I’d read somewhere that when something was inevitable, you ought to embrace it. But no one said you had to do it gracefully. By the time I got Robin settled into the guest room, I was too tired to do anything but fall into bed and sleep like the aging, snoring, overfed dowager I was.

In the morning, I followed Robin to the airport to drop off her car, then took her to breakfast before her private jet whisked her back to her Pennsylvania film shoot.

“See you in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I’ll be here before you know it.” The wind lifted a tuft of her short hair in a cheerful salute as she marched out to the tarmac, expectant and hopeful.

It was another beautiful morning, the landscape dominated today by the bright Chinese tallow trees, their small triangular leaves an autumnal patchwork of red and gold, purple and orange—a stunning display. And Robin’s life, right now—who knew for how long—seemed filled with exactly such colorful breathlessness.

A small plane lifted into the clouds above me—Robin’s jet, surely.
Fly safe,
I thought. And then, unbidden:
Life will not be as you imagine, child. Enjoy this now.

Then my mood went from Technicolor to black-and-white. I drove straight home, called Jon’s motel and left word for him to come by whenever he got in.

It was full night before he arrived. For half an hour I’d been standing on the chilly deck, watching a shifting path of moonlight arc across the sea. He ran up the stairs. “I didn’t leave Charlotte till two,” he panted. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

“It depends on how you define the word.” I slid the tape into the VCR. “I was just going to drop this off to you,” I said. “Call me a pushover, but I thought it would be too hard to be by yourself when you saw your daughter for the first time, all grown-up.”

He stiffened but didn’t say a word.

We watched the clip. “She’s so much—herself,” he said at last. “Herself and not me. I guess I didn’t expect that.”

“She looks like you a little. Sounds like you a lot. I couldn’t get over it.”

“She sounds pretty sane, doesn’t she? Pretty together,” he said. Try as I would to remain aloof, I couldn’t help returning his grin at the idea that Vera’s sanity would be uppermost in our minds.

“Why do you think Essie sent it? Why not just call and tell us where she was?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Jon. From here on out, I don’t think it concerns me.”

He acted as if he hadn’t heard. “I think it’s because if there’s going to be a meeting, she wants to orchestrate it herself. Old as sin and still wants to run everybody’s life.” He paused. “Maybe I should call her anyway. Thank her for the tape. Sort of—hasten things along.”

“Call her in the morning,” I said. “It’s too late now.”

He arrived the next day at six, but I was already awake. We drank coffee, flipped through the morning news shows, fidgeted until it seemed a decent hour to phone. When Taneka answered, she told Jon that Essie was sleeping.

“At 9:00 a.m.?”

“She gets up at the crack of dawn and takes a nap later,” Taneka explained. “She’s old. Old people need a lot of sleep.”

Jon phoned again at noon. No one answered. “Maybe they went out to lunch.”

“You mean, out to a restaurant? No chance,” I said. “Essie can hardly walk.”

“Maybe she had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to you any more than she wanted to talk to Marilyn. Maybe she wants all of us to be patient. She said she’d let Marilyn know as soon as she set up the meeting.”

“And how long should that take?”

“Look, Jon, I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters. After thirty-six years, what’s another couple of days? But if you want me to call Marcellus, I will.”

I thought he’d have the grace to say no. He didn’t. And Marcellus, unlike Essie, was more than willing to talk.

“Essie don’t want some man Vera never saw drop by one day and say he’s her father. She wants it to happen by plan,” he told me. “That’s why I had my man edit the tape. Pretty good, wasn’t it?”

“Very anonymous,” I said.

“Essie wrote Vera. Said Vera’s mother stayed with her when she was pregnant. Asked Vera to write back if she wanted to know more.”

“And did she?”

“Yeah. They still writing.”

“Just writing? Why not talking on the phone? Why not—?”

“Essie got to do it her own way,” Marcellus said. “You know how she is. When she’s got it all worked out, she’ll get in touch.”

The next day, Jon moved back into the house. We didn’t discuss it, but both of us felt there was a momentous task ahead of us that made this all right. Tactfully, he put his clothes in the guest room. We avoided physical contact with the zeal of recent converts to celibacy. I was sure if I let him touch me, he’d be thinking not of me but of Penny, of her pale skin and fiery hair; of the supple body—not mine—with whom he had created a life. All the same, I felt every moment that we’d soon end up in each other’s arms.

Three more days passed. I spoke to Marilyn every day, but she seemed to have lost interest, or at least passed on the responsibility for the meeting to me and Jon. She cut our conversations short. If I’d been paying more attention, I would have said she sounded weary, or even sick.

We spent most of our time in the house, trying to work but actually waiting, waiting, waiting for the critical call. If there were errands to run, only one of us went out. Our nerves were thoroughly jangled. “This is ludicrous,” Jon finally said the third day after we’d cobbled together a lunch from the meager scraps left in the refrigerator. We decided to go out, as we used to do, to stock up on groceries.

Less than an hour later, we pulled back into the driveway, and Jon, three plastic bags in hand, bounded up the stairs to check the answering machine.

“You’re supposed to call Marilyn’s,” he called down.

I hefted my own bags higher in my arms and took the stairs two at a time. “I talked to her just a couple of hours ago, so this must mean she’s finally heard something about the party! She promised she’d call the minute she heard from Essie.”

“It was Bernie on the tape. Not Marilyn. Maybe it’s something else.”

“Bernie?” Alarm rang in my ears, the food in my stomach coalesced into a lump. I had thought we would be driving to D.C. for a party. Bernie’s calling couldn’t be good news. But even then, as panic began to bubble in my blood, it didn’t occur to me that we would be going for a funeral instead.

W
e stood in the cemetery just outside the tent top that had been raised over the newly dug grave. Jon started to guide me toward the folding chairs set up beneath the tent, but I shook my head and stayed where I was while his hand rested on my elbow, its pressure welcome through my jacket. I didn’t want to get any closer to the rent-a-rabbi droning on at graveside, a short young man with a beard that looked like an affectation and a high-pitched, irritating voice. I resented his ease at eulogizing someone he didn’t know, had never seen. My whole body tensed as I waited for him to segue out of his sermon into the final prayers.

An overnight rain had left the ground soggy and the air bitingly wet, with the kind of poisonous damp that seeps through the clothes and under the skin, that plants pneumonia deep into the lungs. After the stuffy funeral home, I thought being outside would be a relief. But it was worse.

Earlier in the day, Jon and I had sat in the Waxmans’ kitchen still in shock, bleary from the early morning flight that had gotten us to D.C. in time for the traditional Jewish funeral, within twenty-four hours of the death. Steve’s plane landed just before ours did, so Bernie collected all three of us at the airport and brought us to his house to change clothes. Sitting in the kitchen, I cupped a mug of coffee in both hands for a long time, trying to get warm. “When I saw her she seemed so healthy,” I heard myself say over and over. “Or at least relatively healthy. Despite all her problems, I honestly thought she was okay.”

Steve reached over and put his hand on top of mine. “I did, too. I never thought she’d die on us.”

Jon had said almost nothing since we arrived. He lifted his coffee, cold by now, and swished it around in its cup.

Bernie cleared his throat. “She wasn’t healthy, no matter how she seemed. We should have known that. It isn’t unusual for people to have a stroke.”

For a long beat, no one responded.

“When somebody’s old or sick and it’s not a gunshot wound or a traffic accident, nobody should be surprised,” Jon put in, his voice dragging like a heavy weight pulled from his chest. “But so much was going on, I guess we weren’t prepared.”

“With all this talk of a party—” I stopped. Jon stared at the table.

“Everyone was distracted, of course we were,” Steve said. “We thought things were moving along.”

Sipping a cup of tea, silent as fog, Marilyn had listened to the conversation for half an hour without saying a word. But I had seen her flinch at Bernie’s assertion that “she wasn’t healthy, no matter how she seemed.” The remark might have applied to Marilyn herself. Her post-surgery swelling was gone, her jawline smooth, her skin unwrinkled. The only real indication of illness beneath the freshly refurbished face was the dark smudges under her eyes, not quite hidden by her makeup. Yet for all that, she seemed exhausted.

I hardly dared look openly at her after Bernie’s “not really healthy” remark, no matter how much I wanted to. How often, these past few weeks, had I pretended not to hear the fatigue that laced her voice? How often had I pretended she was “coming along” because I couldn’t concentrate on anything but myself? She sat straighter in her chair, leaned in my direction, and whispered conspiratorially, “Thought it would be me, not Essie, didn’t you?”

I was so shocked I found no words to defend myself. Marilyn chuckled. “Close your mouth, Barbara. Bugs are going to fly in.” And then she said, more softly, “I forgive you.”

Abruptly, Bernie stood up and said, “We better get going or we’ll be late.” We all rose at once as if jolted by electricity.

At the funeral home, Marcellus and Taneka were sitting in the private wing reserved for family, where we greeted them before the service started.

“Thank you for coming,” Marcellus said after Jon and I offered our condolences. “Thank you both.” I heard warmth in his voice I hadn’t expected. “We’ll talk more later. To clear up—everything.” He turned to Jon. “I’m sorry this is how we had to meet, man.”

“Me, too,” Jon said.

Then someone else came up, and after the haste with which Marcellus turned away, I didn’t think we’d really talk.

The funeral service itself was more like a PBS documentary than a religious event, the young rabbi alternately mumbling in Hebrew and explaining in English the various parts of a Jewish service. This approach continued when we got to the cemetery.

By the time the final prayers were recited and the casket lowered and the traditional handful of soil thrown on top, I realized I’d been clenching my jaw so tightly that it hurt to open my mouth.

Marilyn and Bernie and Steve emerged from under the tent and caught up with us as the crowd dispersed. “Know any of these people?” Marilyn gestured at the retreating backs of the few white mourners headed to their cars: a middle-aged couple walking arm in arm; a youngish man opening a car door for a much older one; a hugely pregnant woman, nearly hidden by the folds of a hooded cape that must have been the only garment that still fit her, leaning on the arm of a man who guided her protectively toward the road.

“Nobody I’ve ever seen before.” Essie’s circle of friends was an enigma, just as Essie herself had always been, a repository of intrigues and secrets—including those about Vera she had apparently taken to her grave.

“I’m sorry, Jon,” Marilyn told him. “I really thought there’d be a meeting.”

“I guess not,” Jon said in a tone that closed the case.

After sidestepping a puddle gilded by weak sun, I turned one last time toward the tent where workers were already removing the folding chairs. “Bye, Essie,” I mouthed silently. For a moment, my mind reeled back to other funerals, sadder ones—Barry Levin’s, Penny’s—and then to a time before any funerals at all, when Marilyn and I had viewed death as an exotic, impossible concept.

We were headed—as if the funeral thus far hadn’t been bizarre enough—to what had been described as “Marcellus’s church,” where food and strained fellowship would be waiting.

From behind us, Marcellus’s voice startled me. “Barbara and Jon, how about riding back with me.” It was an order, not a request.

I climbed into the back seat of the chauffeured car between the two men. Even before the driver turned on the ignition, Marcellus began to speak, so rapidly that I wasn’t sure whether he was anxious to unburden himself or simply wanted it over with.

“Number one, Vera sent Essie that videotape over a year ago. I just had it edited so you couldn’t trace her. Number two, it wasn’t Essie’s first stroke that killed her. It was the second.” He turned to me. “She had the first one a few days after your visit. She knew she was dying. She knew it wouldn’t be long.”

I gasped. Jon said nothing.

“I know we weren’t straight with you, but it was what she wanted,” Marcellus said. “She never stayed in the hospital but two days. She was home. The reason she wouldn’t talk to anybody was, she couldn’t talk.”

“So she was never planning a party,” Jon said woodenly.

“Nobody ever said a
party.
She said a
meeting.
Listen, man, she was a proud woman. She didn’t want you to think she was—” His face glistened with a thin veneer of perspiration. “Nobody likes people to know they can’t talk. That they’re all crumpled up.” His voice nearly broke. “She couldn’t talk but she could write. She’d been in touch with Vera a long time. She wrote her about the meeting and told her what to do. It took all her energy.” Again his voice grew throaty with emotion. “When you have a stroke, it wears you out. Essie knew she was dying, you know what I’m saying?”

I had no idea.

“Me and Taneka, we got that tape to you. And when Essie passed, we did what she asked.” Marcellus leaned back in his seat.

“So there’s still—” Jon cleared his throat. “There’s still a possibility of a meeting?”

Marcellus turned toward us again, miraculously recovered. “
This
is the meeting, man. Essie told Vera to come to her funeral. That pregnant woman at the cemetery? You already seen her, man. You already seen her, and you’re about to see her again.”

But Vera was not at the church, where a buffet had been set up in the social hall. We filled our plates, nibbled nervously, watched the door.

“It’s sick, planning a meeting like this at a funeral,” I said to Steve, who stuck close to me while Jon paced.

“It’s quintessential Essie.” He bit into a pastry. “She probably figured it was the closest she could come to being here herself. Not to mention an occasion none of us will be likely to forget.”

I would have said more, but a stream of people began approaching Steve and introducing themselves, saying how much they liked his songs, sometimes asking for an autograph. Marilyn and I ended up sandwiched between a wall and the coffee urn, musing at how funeral receptions often turned cheerful, unless the deceased was young or the circumstances tragic. “Like Penny’s funeral,” Marilyn said.

“It was awful.” Penny’s funeral had provided me with my first glimpse of Jon after our breakup, and my last for another thirty years. Jon and I had made a point of staying far enough away from each other in the crowd that we wouldn’t have to talk. It had been one of the most difficult days of my life.

An old lady with hearing aids in each ear pulled on my sleeve and began a monologue about having been Essie’s neighbor. “Only white woman I was ever friends with,” she declared. She fixed her gaze on me and then on Marilyn, as if awaiting a challenge.

“Mrs. Brown, Keisha’s looking for you!” Taneka rushed toward us in a black sheath that showed off her ample curves. “Keisha thought you wandered off outside.”

“That girl!” the woman said, and hastened off.

“Tough couple of weeks, huh?” Marilyn asked Taneka. “Barbara says you took real good care of Essie.”

“Thanks. I tried.”

“I hear you’re at the University of Maryland. Have you been able to keep up with your classes through all this?”

Taneka nodded. “When Essie couldn’t talk she wrote me a note. She said no matter what happens, I damn well better stay in school.”

We all smiled at the image of Essie doing that. “What about the house?” Marilyn asked. “Will you stay there?”

“Probably for a while.”

“I guess Essie will leave it to you, anyway,” I said. “Or to your dad.”

“Oh, the house isn’t Essie’s. It’s Dad’s. Has been for a long time.”

“You mean she gave it to him?” Marilyn asked.

Taneka’s vivacious tone grew measured and cool. “No, of course not. He bought it.”

“Bought it?”

Taneka examined the skirt of her dress as if looking for a stain, then took a breath and looked up. “He bought it because Essie ran out of money. I don’t know all the details. He bought it so she’d have some place to live.”

“Oh.” Trying to suppress my surprise, I spoke more to myself than to Taneka. “I guess she paid him rent.”

“She did,” Taneka replied shortly. “In case you’re curious, her rent was a dollar a month.”

“I didn’t mean—” I felt the hot blush spread over my face.

“I guess he’ll sell it now. Sooner or later. Too many memories. Sometimes it’s better to start fresh.” With less than tactful deliberateness, the girl excused herself and caught the attention of a woman pouring coffee.

Across the room, Jon was pacing back and forth in front of the entry door, a plate of uneaten food in his hand.
I should go to him,
I thought, but didn’t move. His tense, preoccupied expression made it clear he didn’t need me.

“You know what? I think I better sit down,” Marilyn said, her face draining of color.

I guided her to one of the chairs lined up at the edges of the room. “I’ll get you a drink.” I bolted to the buffet table, grabbed a glass of water, thrust it at her. Her pallor was alarming.

“This is how it always happens. Okay one minute and zonked the next,” she muttered.

“I thought you were going to start treatment.”

“I was. I am. Most of the time I feel all right, just tired the way you always are after surgery.”

Bernie had spotted us, was coming over.

“Listen,” Marilyn said, “these little spells are nothing. It’s been a long day. Don’t tell him.”

“Let him take you home, then. Jon and I can go with Steve.”

“Are you kidding? You think I’m leaving without getting a glimpse of Vera?”

As if on cue, the door opened and inside the doorway, recognizable for the first time as she slipped off the hooded cape that had hidden her face, there she was. Jon stood an arm’s length away from her, staring. In person, she looked more like Penny than she had on the tape—not her features so much as her questioning, unsure expression as she scanned the room for the face that belonged to her father. Following Marilyn’s gesture that I should go, I made myself move toward Jon.

But in the end it was Marcellus who took Vera’s hand and brought the young couple over to where Jon and I stood, immobilized, and made the courtly, formal introduction. “This is Vera Silverman and her husband, Ed,” he told us. Then, to Vera, he said, “Vera, I want you to meet your father.”

The four of us stood in the center of the room after Marcellus walked away, staring at each other like tongue-tied adolescents.

“I hardly believe this,” Vera said finally.

Jon coughed, cleared his throat. “Me, either.”

“We wondered when you were going to get here,” I said, resorting to small talk to defuse the charged air of emotion.

“We were late because we don’t know the area. It’s so easy to get lost,” Vera said.

Ed nodded. “We were lost and Vera was so hungry we had to stop for a snack.”

“I feel like I’m eating for three or four instead of just two.” Vera’s face flushed, as Penny’s used to do, and I noticed the pale sprinkle of powdered-over freckles on her nose.

“Twins?”

“Oh, no. Just one.”

“You came from out of town?” Jon asked. “I guess you know Essie sent us a tape, edited so we couldn’t figure out where you were from.”

“Cumberland,” Ed told them. “No secret.” It was in western Maryland, less than three hours away.