The Unwitting (20 page)

“… husband,” he said.

The axis of fear shifted, not because of the balance of love, but
because a built-in seismogram told me that a doctor would not call from an emergency room for a minor injury to a grown man.

“What happened?” Now I was whispering.

“I think you ought to come in, Mrs. Benjamin.”

Whatever had happened was so bad that he could not tell me on the telephone.

I grabbed my coat and handbag. In the hall, the elevator refused to arrive. I leaned on the buzzer. There was no sound of gears grinding. I ran down the stairs. The doorman asked if I wanted a taxi. I raced past him onto Central Park West and flagged one down.

Red lights refused to turn green. Pedestrians shuffled across the street as if they had all the time in the world. While I pleaded with the driver to go faster, a cruel film kept looping around in my head. Charlie and I were standing at the front door of the apartment. He leaned down to kiss me goodbye; I turned my face away, again and again and again.

The emergency room was chaos. A woman moaned. Another shouted she needed help. A man sat on a chair bleeding onto the floor. The nurse, when I finally got through to her, directed me to a different area. At least they had gotten him out of that bedlam and into a room of his own.

I sprinted out of the emergency room, up flights of stairs, down halls. Another nurse asked me which Dr. Schwartz I was looking for. There were two. I told her I wanted the Dr. Schwartz who had called about my husband, Charles Benjamin.

She picked up a clipboard and began going through papers. It was the drawling doctor and the cab ride all over again. Finally she told me to wait there and started down the hall. She wasn’t hurrying, but at least she wasn’t strolling. She came back a few moments later with a man in a white coat and owlish glasses. He introduced himself as Dr. Schwartz, took me into a small office, and gestured to a chair. I went on standing. He asked me to sit down. I told him I
wanted to see my husband. That was when he said it. He said he was sorry. Charlie was dead. This time I heard the words so fast they knocked me over.

Then I came up swinging. I told him there must be some mistake. He had the wrong man. The Charlie who had left the apartment a few hours earlier, my Charlie, could not be dead.

Again he said he was sorry. Then he added that someone had to identify the body.

I stood rooted in place.

I’m sorry, he said a third time and put his hand on my shoulder. “It will only take a minute,” he added as if I were worried about the time. He began inching me to the door. I let him lead me down the hall. The sooner I pointed out their mistake, that this was not my Charlie, the better.

They had laid him out on a metal table. All I could think of was how cold that metal must be.

The rest is a blur. They took me to another office. A policeman came in. At first, I could not understand him. His words were thick and distant, like a foghorn echoing over water. Mugging. Gun. Close range. Instant. He said he wanted to ask me some questions, and I suppose I answered them, but all the time I was sitting there, another film loop was running in my head. In this one, I did not quarrel with Charlie. I did not turn my face away. And I did not let him walk through the park because it was such a beautiful day. I told him the park was dangerous and insisted he take a taxi or the subway. And he was still alive.

AT TWO O
’
CLOCK
that afternoon, while Sonia was making her way to school to pick up Abby; Elliot was talking to two more policemen; my in-laws were sitting in the living room, dumb with the shock that this could happen even in America; and I was sleeping a deep unrestful sleep, thanks to the sedative the doctor had given me, another
doctor pronounced another young man dead before his time by violent means. Now the whole country—the whole world—was in mourning.

I STARTED TO
say the hardest part was telling Abby, but that wasn’t true. Every word I spoke in those days hurt, every breath was painful. But her face, twisted with misery and confusion and fear, sharpened the sting.

She began asking me about heaven. I equivocated. Finally she came out with it. “Does this mean I’ll never see Daddy again?” I had never wanted to believe in an afterlife so much.

I SHOULD HAVE
found solace in the national grieving, but a population that stood on street corners crying, and sat glued to their flickering television screens watching the same images again and again, and had the nerve to mourn the loss of a total stranger gave me no comfort. They did not know what suffering was. They did not feel the emptiness left behind, the black nausea-inducing hole that suddenly opens up in a life. They were miming sorrow they had no right to, playacting at pain that left me stripped as raw as if my skin had been peeled away.

I became an expert in comparative bereavement. The world grieved when a newspaper ran a photo of rocking chairs being carried out of the White House. No one except me noticed the impression of Charlie’s body in the empty black leather of the living room Eames chair. Men and women wept when a small blond girl in a sky blue coat laid her cheek against a flag-draped coffin. Nobody except me noticed that my adventurous daughter, who had pleaded to go to school without me, had developed a sudden inability to sleep in her own bed, and night after night crept into mine to curl up against me like a wounded kitten. The new President, who did not seem like a President at all, proclaimed a day of national mourning, and a line three miles long, four abreast, snaked through the streets of the capital
to pay last respects, while the rest of the nation watched the spectacle on television, and long-distance calls reached a historic peak. No one wanted to be alone at this terrible time.

I was not alone. Abby stood beside me at her father’s grave, her narrow shoulders hunched into the curve of my arm, her body slumped against mine, the wind whipping her coat around her bare legs. Charlie’s parents stood on my other side. The crowd at the cemetery did not stretch for three miles, but it was heartening, if that kind of thing heartens you, especially in view of the fact that an hour earlier, on national television, a man had shot the man arrested for shooting the President. Elliot was there, and Sonia; writers, editors, colleagues, and friends; people I knew well, people I hadn’t seen in years, and people I didn’t know at all. The crowd did not make me feel any less alone.

I averted my eyes from the raw red wound in the earth and the plain pine box suspended above it, and forced myself to listen to the few words the rabbi spoke. It could not hurt, said Charlie’s father, the former atheist who had found his foxhole in his son’s death, and I agreed that it could not hurt. Nothing could hurt as much as this.

The rabbi stopped speaking. The machinery started to whir. The plain pine box began inching its way toward the hole in the earth. That was when the realization hit me. Charlie was inside the box. I heard the sob before I knew it came from me.

The coffin settled with a thud. I stood for a moment, stunned by the finality of the sound. Charlie’s father stepped forward, picked up a shovel, dug it into the pile of earth beside the hole, and dumped the soil into the grave. The sound, as it struck the coffin, was like a spattering of heavy rain.

He held the shovel out to me. I took it, stepped forward to the grave, and stood looking down at the dirt-splashed box. I could not do it. I could not bury Charlie. I dropped the shovel and turned away.

Fourteen

I
WAS STUPID WITH
loss. The hole was too huge, the deficiency too cosmic to comprehend, but little things brought it home. As I sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper each morning, trying to make sense of events I no longer cared about, I felt Charlie’s presence across from me and looked up to find an empty chair. A dozen times a day I thought I must tell Charlie this, what will Charlie make of that. Then I remembered. I would never tell Charlie anything again. I would never hear his voice or his laugh or even those long-suffering silences that had driven me crazy. Asleep, I reached out for him. My hand found cold sheets. I kept fighting the truth, but little by little, it won. Charlie was gone. I did not know what to do with the knowledge.

To make matters worse, as if anything could make matters worse, Christmas was upon us, and Abby was ten. I had to go through the motions of giving her a semblance of a holiday.

At her school pageant, I sat alone and averted my eyes when husbands and wives reached for each other’s hands as a small angel or shepherd stumbled onstage. When Abby, decked out in my pinned-up silk bathrobe, appeared as a wise man, I sensed, despite my skepticism, Charlie looking down on her. Afterward, we went to Rumplemeyer’s for hot chocolate and sat across the table admiring each other’s whipped cream mustaches.

“Daddy used to make—” She stopped abruptly.

“… the best whipped cream mustaches,” I finished for her.

“I didn’t want to make you sad.”

“You don’t make me sad, sweetie. I miss Daddy. We both do. That’s why we shouldn’t stop talking about him. Talking about him is a way of keeping him alive.”

Abby was as close as I could come to solace. The rest of the world was an affront. The peace-on-earth-goodwill-toward-men bonhomie of the holiday crowds seemed to be jeering at me. When people on the street apologized for bumping into me or sideswiping me with their shopping bags, I did not smile and say it was all right. I scowled to keep from crying and elbowed my way on. Once, on Broadway, a woman shouted, “Scrooge,” after me. “Fuck you,” I threw back, then berated myself all the way home.

The fragrant walls of pines, firs, and spruces set out for sale on the streets made me as sick to my stomach as the stench of rotting garbage. The decorative red lights turned the world bloody. The thought of blood took me back to Charlie’s last moments.

I hurried past sidewalk Santas with a snarl on my face, until I caught one with tobacco-stained whiskers and bleary eyes taking a nip from a bottle. A soul mate. I stuffed a dollar into his cardboard chimney.

I wanted no part of this foul celebration of life, hope, and prosperity, but I had to take Abby to the Park Avenue tree lighting. She had gone to her first tree-lighting ceremony in Charlie’s arms, then on his shoulders, and finally, in the past few years, swinging between the two of us. We went every year, because the ritual had begun as a memorial to the men and women who had died in the war, and Charlie and I could list plenty of people we’d known in that group; and because it signaled the beginning of the holiday season; and because it had become our family tradition.

Abby and I bundled up in warm coats, scarves, hats, and gloves and headed across the park. The streets and sidewalks around the
Brick Church were already cordoned off to accommodate the crowd, and we had to get out of the taxi a few blocks away. All around us, people were flowing out of apartment buildings and townhouses: women in fur coats, men in Santa hats, and one in a full Santa suit. Toddlers rode their fathers’ shoulders as Abby once had. Teenagers tried, unsuccessfully, to feign boredom. Here and there, dogs strained at leashes. They were families, complete, without a gaping hole at the center. Abby sensed it too. She slipped her mittened hand into my gloved one.

We kept burrowing through the crowd toward the church. Strangers wished us Merry Christmas. A man with a pitcher of eggnog in one hand and a stack of plastic cups in the other offered me a drink. These people laughing, drinking, and celebrating were the same ones who had stood on street corners crying, sat glued to their televisions watching hour after odious hour of public mourning, and claimed the world would never be the same.

Somehow Elliot found us in the crowd. His apartment overlooked the Brick Church, and he always had people up for supper after the lighting. On especially cold nights, some of his guests watched the ceremony from his windows, but we never had. Charlie was a purist. He insisted that watching the ceremony from indoors was unsporting, like shooting a lion from a Jeep.

On the church porch, the minister stepped forward. Adults fell quiet, and children and teenagers stopped horsing around. He announced a carol. A couple of thousand mouths opened to sing about a midnight clear. I looked down and saw Abby watching me. I began to squeeze out the words, like a miser paying a debt.