Til the Real Thing Comes Along (47 page)

“Someone named… God, I can’t read this. It looks like S-H-U-L-something-something.”

“Shulke, my uncle,” R.J. said.

“Yeah, well, he called a million times at least. Then someone named Dr. Feld called a lot of times, and then…”

R.J. was cold. Icy-cold in the hot apartment in the hot California day. Why these calls?

“My mother?” she said in a panic. “Were any of the calls from my mother?” She had been so caught up in Palm Springs she hadn’t
once called Rifke. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And here it was Monday morning and…

“Nope, just the ones I told you about, hon.”

“Thank you,” R.J. said, and hung up the phone. Oh, God, what was—

The phone rang almost immediately.

“Hello?”

“Well, my God. I don’t believe it. You’re finally there. Where in the hell have you been? Where could you possibly go for
so many goddamn days? Who do you think you are not to call your family back and let them know where you are and if you’re
safe? Were you off for the weekend with some Hollywood movie star or what?”

“Alvin, my God. I was in Palm Springs with two friends, and I had no idea anyone was trying to reach me. What’s the problem?”

“The problem, Little Miss Hollywood, is that your mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage early Saturday morning and no one’s
been able to reach you. The funeral is tomorrow morning. Why don’t you make some airline reservations and let me know when
you’re coming home.” He didn’t even say goodbye. Just hung up.

R.J. put the receiver down and began to cry out loud. The lonely, plaintive cry of the orphan she now was. Rifke, gone. Mama.
No.
Du bist meyn velt.
My world. Now she was no one’s world. Why had she left Pittsburgh?
Just a nerve pressing.
It had been a warning all along. She lay on the bed, just looking at the ceiling for a long time. Then finally she picked
up the phone and called to make a reservation on a flight to Pittsburgh.

“Yiskadal v’yis Kadosh.”
R.J. sat between Uncle Shulke and Alvin in the front row at the Burton Hirsch Funeral Home, tearing absently at the edges
of the card someone had given her earlier with the transliteration of the mourner’s Kaddish. She didn’t look behind her, but
she could feel that the room where the service was being held was filled with people who had come to say goodbye to Rifke.
Many of them were customers from Uncle Shulke’s store. Over the years she had worked there, Rifke had befriended everyone:
the old orthodox Jews who walked by every Friday evening on their way to services; the black cleaning ladies who waited at
the bus stop outside the store for the bus to
take them home to the Hill District; the neighborhood children who, though they never had quite enough money for a Fudgsicle,
somehow managed to negotiate with Rifke and to leave the grocery store with one anyway.

R.J.’s ride with Alvin from the airport to her mother’s empty apartment the night before had been strained. He had greeted
her at the gate with a perfunctory embrace, waited for her bags without even a word, and then escorted her to what he pointed
out was his brand-new car. A beige Cadillac. It smelled good inside. Leathery and rich. They were almost all the way to Squirrel
Hill when he said, “Both your parents are dead now, Rose. So I guess I’ll be your roots now. Marry me and we’ll be a family.”
It sounded like lines from a bad play, recited by a terrible actor. But the message was one she’d thought about in the few
hours after she got the news of her mother’s death. A family. Now she would never be a part of one until she got married.
Now she was alone in the world. Alvin had said something else, too, last night. Something about R.J. forgetting “that Hollywood
nonsense,” and about how she “belonged in Pittsburgh.” R.J. thought about what it would be like to be Mrs. Alvin Feld. To
live in Pittsburgh and go everywhere in a beige Cadillac.

The tall, thin, bearded rabbi, who was a friend of Uncle Shulke’s and had never once met Rifke, was giving what was obviously
a standard speech about how in life Rifke had been a beloved mother, sister, friend. R.J. knew it was the same thing he said
about every woman who died. And then he began to recite a last prayer. Soon the service would be over. No. That bland speech.
Those over-the-counter words were the last words anyone would say about her mother before they lowered her into the ground,
R.J. thought. And then, almost as a surprise to even herself, she was standing and walking toward the bema, where the rabbi
stood in front of Rifke’s coffin. One foot in front of the other she moved, not even certain what she would do when she got
up there. She could hear the comments from her aunts and uncles.
“Zeynorl Rosenu geyt tsu trim bema.”
Look at Rosie going to the bema.

The rabbi looked curiously at her at first, but the determined look on her tearstained face made him step aside and leave
room for her at the podium. Though it was the proper
height for the tall rabbi, R.J. had to stand on her toes to make sure she could be seen over it.

“My mother,” she said, but it came out so softly, even with the microphone, that she began again: “My mother, Rifke Kaminsky
Rabinowitz, never had a bad word to say about anyone. She called me her
velt
Her world. And I won’t ever forget the things she taught me. She came—” Just then the P.A. system emitted a piercing high-pitched
sound that filled the whole room, and R.J. bit her lip, trying to hold back the tears. Someone must have adjusted it after
a moment, because the room became still again and R.J. went on.

“She came to a new world that was strange and not a little bit frightening to her, but she worked hard and made a life for
herself and for my father and never complained. In fact she laughed at people who did. If she was here with us now she would
say
’Forvos veynstu? Siz besser tsu lachen.’
Why do you cry when it is better to laugh?
’Ich bin tsuzamen mit meyn Louie in Ganayden.’
Because I’m with my Louie in heaven.’” R.J. took a deep breath to try to gain some control, then spoke again. “I miss her”
was all she could get out this time, knowing if she said one more word she would break down.

Instead, she focused on the faces of the friends and family who looked up at her. They filled the tiny chapel all the way
to the last row. Aunt Chana, Aunt Malke, Uncle Benny, Aunt Sasha, Mr. and Mrs. Heft, Mr. and Mrs. Fishmann, Mr. Katz from
the fish market, Arthur Misner. My God. R.J. couldn’t believe her eyes. It was Arthur. In a coat and tie. In the next-to-the-last
row. He nodded ever so slightly when their eyes met and R.J. nodded back, then she glanced nervously over at Alvin to see
if he had noticed. He hadn’t. He was looking down at a prayer book that he was leafing through with a kind of pout on his
face.

The rabbi said, “Thank you,” then nudged R.J. gently away from the podium and she stood next to him, not knowing what to do
while he advised the congregation to rise and exit toward the back of the chapel, and asked for the pallbearers to come forward
and carry the coffin to the hearse which would transport it to the cemetery. Alvin was a pallbearer, and when he and R.J.
brushed past one another as he moved toward the coffin, and she moved into the crowd, he said nothing about her speech. R.J.
made her
way toward Arthur, who stood waiting at the back of the synagogue.

“Arthur, how did you know?” she asked quietly when she finally stood next to him. A
mensch.
A fine person. A good citizen. Arthur Misner was a
mensch.
That’s what Rifke would have called him. Rifke would have liked him, R.J. found herself thinking. Okay, so he’s not a doctor,
but Ma, a man flies all the way from Los Angeles for a funeral? That’s already a
mensch.

“They told me at the front desk that you rushed off to the airport by taxi last night. So I called your home and spoke to
some uncle of yours who told me about your mother. Dinah drove me to the airport and I took a red-eye to Chicago and an early-morning
flight here. I’m sorry about your mother, R.J.,” he said. “It was very brave of you to be able to get up and say a few words.
Even though I didn’t know your mother, I’m sure she would have been proud.”

A
mensch.
“Thank you, Arthur,” R.J. said. She put her hand on his arm and watched as one of her tears fell, making a darker-navy spot
on his navy linen blazer. She could feel the group of people pushing forward, some of whom probably weren’t coming to the
cemetery and would want to express their condolences to her now.

“R.J.,” Arthur said, “I came all this way to pay my respects to your mother, but mostly what I came to do was to ask you to
please come home with me. To Los Angeles.”

“I’m glad, Arthur,” she said. “Very glad.”

“Oy,
poor little Rosele Jane,” Uncle Shulke said, coming up now and throwing his arms around R.J. “They took my sister—how could
they take my Rifke? She was the best one of all of us and they took her.
Oy,
God. Why?”

As R.J. held and comforted her Uncle Shulke, walking with him to the front of the funeral home and helping him into the first
black limousine behind the hearse, then sliding in beside him, she wondered exactly how she would tell Alvin Feld that she
was going back to Los Angeles with Arthur Misner.

1973

T
here was a student at the Wharton School named Farley Coburn, who was as ill-behaved as his father was rich, and judging
by the net worth of this particular father, it would have left no one surprised to find Farley behind bars before his forthcoming
graduation from business school. The windshield wiper of Farley’s turquoise Dino Ferrari always had a parking ticket stuffed
in it; he was currently being sued by a young lady he swore he’d never met, for the paternity of an impending heir; the owner
of a nightclub in downtown Philadelphia was looking for him in connection with something related to drugs. And David Malcolm,
who was his roommate, thought that Farley was one of the greatest guys he’d ever met.

“A classic,” David said when Farley told him he’d just given the Ferrari, pink slip and all, to a poor black family he’d chosen
at random in the Philadelphia ghetto. Farley was lying on the sofa in their Walnut Street apartment that morning when he confessed
the story of his generosity to David, who was sitting in a nearby chair, the fingers of his two hands touching to make a steeple,
his head shaking in disbelief.

“Do you honest-to-God think it’s a classic?” Farley asked. For the two years during which their friendship had flourished,
Farley had always put a lot of stock in David’s approval.

“A classic,” David said again, “because you’re a fruit
cake. You’re trying to pretend you don’t care about your old man or anything he stands for, or anything he gives you, so you’re
pissing it away, and that’s a crock.”

“I’m not pretending,” Farley said, and he rolled over on his stomach, buried his face in the sofa pillow, and remained in
that position for a while. Then he picked up his face and looked at David and said, “He’s an ostentatious nouveau riche prick,
and I wish he’d stop understanding me so well and forgiving me all the time so I could have a reason never to talk to him
again, because I hate him.”

“A classic,” David said. “Pars, you’re a cliché. Next thing you’ll be telling him that inherited wealth corrupts and you want
to be out of the will.”

“I did that already,” Farley said, sitting up and rubbing his hand again and again over his scruffy face, which he hadn’t
shaved in days.
“You
met him, Malcolm.
You
tell
me.
What
did you
think of him?” Farley yawned. He’d had a big night the night before, trying to decide to which black family exactly he should
give his Ferrari. Philanthropy could sometimes be exhausting.

David had met Farley’s father many times on the man’s numerous visits to Philadelphia to rescue his son from one crisis or
another. Once, Bill Coburn and David had talked a drunken Farley down from jumping off the balcony over the quad, where Farley
had gone when he’d learned his father was on his way through Philadelphia for a meeting with Walter Annenberg and wanted to
stop by the apartment to say hello while he was in town. Many times David had been left with a frustrated Bill Coburn across
a dinner table at a restaurant, after Farley had stormed out because of something his father said to him that Farley had described
as “cutting my balls off.”

“I think,” David said to Farley, “that he’s rich, and that he loves you, and that you can stand on a corner wearing a propeller
hat and reading
The Communist Manifesto
aloud, or poison his tankful of tropical fish, and you know what? It ain’t gonna change.”

“He embarrasses me,” Farley said.

“Then you’re a jackass,” David told him.

“Fuck you,” Farley said.

“Fuck him. Fuck everybody,” he said again as they sat aboard the Coburns’ private 727, which Farley’s father had sent to bring
him home to Dallas for a weekend a few
weeks before graduation. David was invited to be a house-guest.

“Want to puke?” Farley asked David. Farley’s fondest wish was that just once, someone would mistake him for coming from the
Lower East Side of New York, and he spent as much time as he possibly could trying to behave and sound as if it were true.

David, certain that Farley’s was a rhetorical question, watched amazed while a waiter dressed in white tie served him an artichoke
stuffed with chicken salad. Amazed, because if someone had read his mind only minutes before, he would have known that that
was exactly what David was longing to have for lunch. When Farley, the man of the people, was served a rare cheeseburger,
he sent it back because it needed “a little more fire.”

“I mean, this’ll really make you puke,” Farley said. “He’s buying a fucking movie studio.”

“Who is?” David asked. He was waiting to begin his salad until Farley’s burger returned, but he could already tell, merely
by looking at the chopped chicken peeking out of the artichoke, that it contained too much mayonnaise.