A FAMILY INSTITUTION
By Howard Reiss
Published by Reiss Krance Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Howard R. Reiss
Cover art by Michael Witte
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard word of this author.
Dedication
To the women in my life who have made me who I am: my friend Sherri, my grandmothers Sadie and Edie, my mother-in-law Millie, my mother Rose, my daughters Shira and Erin, my grand-daughter Lucy, and most of all my wife and best friend Ellen. I have been blessed with a life filled with great women.
Table of Contents
Ira's expectations are lower than they once were. He is satisfied with the flimsiest of promises - a train that runs on time, faint praise from a superior, or the passing smile of a pretty woman. When the conversation at parties turns to the old college days or early married life, as compared to middle age in suburbia, as it frequently does, he’s the first to volunteer that it’s better now.
"It's those little certainties in life that really matter," he’d say to the eyebrows raised in response.
Most of them would profess to disagree citing the thrilling discovery of love and the limitless energy of their innocent youth, but not without nodding unconsciously at the same time, as if some deeper, more honest self recognized it was all a delusion. This was the point where Ira would excuse himself to get more wine counting the little certainties in his head as he did so. It was never very difficult. First, there was the warm bed he shared with his wife, Ellen, who was asleep most work nights long before he found the energy to get up from the den couch, turn off the TV and head to bed. She always felt so warm and welcoming when he slid in beside her.
Second, he would add the animated discussions with Jaime and Scott about school, friends, and the latest gadget that they can’t live without, conversations that spring to life like the old pop-up books the moment he walks through the door. Then there are the lazy weekend mornings in bed, breakfasts out, shopping expeditions, Saturday night movies followed by Saturday night embraces, holidays, snowstorms warmed by movie rentals and microwave popcorn, swimming in the town pool, and endless nights of cable filled with action adventures and steamy romances for the late nights. Of course Ira would also have to include their growing savings backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.
He can’t recall when it dawned on him that it was a lot easier moving with a force instead of against it or when he learned that thinking too precisely about things just made them difficult to accept. It was probably after they were married and Jaime was born. It was around that time he realized that he couldn’t satisfy everyone all of the time, not even himself; you just had to put the past behind you and move forward. It was obviously a sign of maturity.
Ira was always quick to give Ellen much of the credit. Disappointment and failure was as common as a cold to a third-grade teacher, especially when you were dealing with 28 kids from all different kinds of families, many as nutty as his.
"If you don't move quickly past the failures and disappointments," Ellen always says, "you’ll just burn out . . . as quickly as a shooting star."
Shooting stars were pretty and dramatic, but a man needs to last longer than that. Lasting itself was a kind of success. Ellen believed that as well. You can’t be disappointed, she said, by a life well lived.
Of course it has all been a little disappointing to his mother, Selma, the high priestess of great expectations, who foretold his name in lights. She expected a Nobel Prize or at least a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"I'd have settled for a doctor or even a lawyer," Selma said when he told her that he intended to make advertising his career, “or a dentist for crying out loud.”
Of course, she didn’t really consider what he did, creating coupon campaigns, to be advertising. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing, she said, that real advertising men did, like producing commercials and writing jingles. Selma considered coupons to be at the bottom of the advertising food chain. She said he was like one of those guys in the street handing out circulars, except he did it in the newspaper.
"He could've been a genius Murray," she liked to say to the ceiling fan in the kitchen, where the spirit of Ira's father had revolved since his death fifteen years earlier.
She loved to remind him about her great Uncle Johann, who supposedly invented the thumbtack, and her father's second cousin, who wrote a sonata for the left-handed piano player.
Ellen told him to ignore his mother when she got like that. She called it Selma's ancestral refrain.
When his mother really wanted to put on the finishing touch, she'll repeat his name slowly; I . . . RA . . . I . . . RA, turning her head each time from side to side with a little sigh like she was letting out some gas at the same time.
She knew how much he hated his name. It didn’t sound intellectual or athletic, and it didn’t slide off the tongue like Charles or Andrew. It was the first-person singular I followed by RA, the ancient Egyptian sun god and the symbol for radium. Unfortunately, he didn't have a heavenly body, and he certainly didn’t glow.
Ira was in charge of couponing at American Family Care Products and the father of the tip-in coupon, lightly glued to the page of a magazine so that the consumer could simply rip it off. It’s far more expensive than the traditional printed-on-a-page coupon - the kind you cut out - but it has a much higher redemption rate. It is especially good for new products. Ira specialized in over-the-counter drugs and his biggest successes to date have come with colds and hemorrhoids.
"My son provides relief from itching at both ends," was the way Selma liked to describe it to her friends.
Ira liked what he did. He liked coupons. They had a single, clear purpose. He liked dealing with things that had expiration dates. You know what to expect and when to expect it. He took great delight in patrolling the refrigerator, tossing out milk, cottage cheese, or anything else on the exact date stamped on the container. Even though Ellen insisted that the stamped date was only the last sale date and that it remained edible for days afterward, he refused to treat them that lightly.
About eight months ago Ira turned forty. He's always been a little chubby, so the few extra pounds he’s put on over the last five years weren’t really that noticeable. Although his once fiery reddish-brown hair has faded like the den curtains and the top of his head had begun to rise to the surface like a wild mushroom.
His father, of course, his mother often pointed out, had a full head of dark hair until the day he died. Not a hint of grey, although his mother wasn’t around to remind him of all his failings. She had died before he even married Selma.
Ira’s eyes were still dark and clear, framed by crow’s feet like his mother, which she never said a word about. His nose bent slightly to the left, as if it had grown up in the face of a stiff breeze, perhaps because he always sat to the left of his mother at the dinner table. He had a mustache left over from college and a large mouth, the kind that needed something to keep it busy like a pipe or gum. It dominated his whole face like Jimmy Carter, but without the toothy smile.
Ira considered his life safe, secure, certain, and relatively satisfying, as predictable and episodic as a television sitcom. Unfortunately, it was about to be preempted by, of all things, a tombstone.
It all started on a Monday, always an unwelcome day.
Ira could barely make his tie in the morning. The knot kept coming out too small, leaving the back way too long, like Jaime always made it for him when she insisted on trying. She had his small hands, which made it difficult, although he knew she’d eventually get it since she had Ellen’s concentration and determination. She stared so intently at her fingers when she tried that it seemed as if her eyes were controlling them instead of her brain. He could look right into them unobserved, which made him feel like a Peeping Tom, but he liked what he saw . . . she enjoyed the challenge and was unafraid of failure, another one of Ellen’s traits. A good teacher needs that.
It took four tries for him to get the knot right, not a good way to start the week, which meant he had to hurry to catch the train. He grabbed his brief case and rushed into Jamie's room. The floor was strewn with outfits and books. Jaime always looked neat, her face washed, her hair combed, her clothes coordinated just like her mother, but everything else around her was always a mess and she always left a mess when she left a room. He liked to call her Pigpen, after the Peanuts character. He bent down to give her a kiss on her forehead. Her lips were slightly parted and fell naturally into a mysterious little grin. She didn’t stir as Ira brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes; she never did. Jamie has always been a good sleeper.
Scott is nine and you could perform open-heart surgery on the floor of his room. He won’t go to sleep if there's a piece of paper on the floor or anything out of place. Every drawer is shut tight, not a single sock or shirt sticking out. His comic books are neatly stacked on the bookcase, and the pictures on the dresser all arranged in neat rows.
There was always a little tension in Scott’s face while he slept, particularly around the eyes. He was troubled by dreams that forced him to make impossible choices between people he loved, choices that always seemed to make the difference between life and death. Ira knew the feeling. His bad dreams didn’t disappear until 5 years after he moved out of his house and away from his mother. They didn’t really stop until he married Ellen.
Scott was a light sleeper, probably because he was always afraid of missing something, so he didn’t get too close. Ira just blew him a kiss and tiptoed out of the room. Even so, Scott lifted his head slightly and looked up at him with a vague sense of recognition before mumbling something about a falling rock. Fortunately, he turned onto his side away from the door and instantly fell back asleep.
Ira went back to their bedroom to say good-bye to Ellen, who looked pale under the bent spotlight thrown by the 75-watt light bulb in the hall. Sleep always deepened the lines in her forehead, making her look more thoughtful. The static lifted a few strands of hair like little hands calling out in school for attention.
Not even sleep could hide that third-grade teacher cuteness. Those big, cheerful eyes filled with kindness when opened and intensely occupied by whatever or whoever was in front of them. A little circular nose and a wide, comfortable mouth that brought her students a great rush of affection with each smile, just as it did with Ira.
Ellen had the petite body of a model from the waist up, but from the waist down it’s been the slow escalation of the Vietnam War. The groves in her thighs have grown more committed and intransigent every year. Sometimes she stared at them in the mirror and wondered out loud whether they were actually turning into Jell-o. Then she slapped them together and laughed because it sounded almost as if they were clapping. Ira has always been jealous of her complete lack of self-consciousness.
He bent down to kiss her good-bye, another one of his rituals, and she reflexively covered her mouth to hide her bad breath. He kissed her forehead instead.
By seven-twenty he had his paper and stood waiting for the seven-twenty-eight train. It was the same time every day, give or take a minute or two, and the platform was crowded as always. Everyone was facing north waiting for that first glimpse of the train as it came around the bend. When it did there would be the usual cacophony of folding newspapers, opening and closing attaché cases, and dropped conversations, as well-dressed feet fluttered like birds to the spots on the platform where they’d be close to the opening doors.
The seven-twenty-eight is one of the new trains with state-of-the-art features like a red emergency stop button instead of a cord. The seats don’t flip like the older cars, half face one way and half the other, so you either watch where you're going or watch where you've been. Since most people pick the former, on days when Ira’s not fast enough he winds up traveling backwards. He doesn’t like watching the past recede quickly like that and it makes him a little nauseous.
Today's ride to Grand Central took the usual forty-two minutes. He read the New York Times, skimmed it really, and near the end of the ride turned to the business section to check his American Family’s stock. It was the only stock he owned, not counting some mutual funds, the contents of which were a mystery to him, and he was glad to see that it was slowly creeping back up after dropping a month ago because of disappointing earnings.
He noticed that the lottery was up to forty million. Ira never played, but he’d been thinking about starting and fantasized about how his life would change if he won. He'd have more time to spend with Jaime and Scott for one thing. He’d be waiting for them when they got home from school with a warm snack. He could meet Ellen for lunch sometimes. Maybe open a small business near home or do absolutely nothing.
He knew that would make his mother proud.
He wasn’t much of a get-rich-quick schemer or dreamer, so he attributed his recent thoughts to the lunacy of turning forty. Decades were like lines in the sand that sometimes you crossed with the promise - or threat - of living the rest of life somehow differently. However, like most promises and threats, it never amounted to much, nothing ever changed.
Ira wondered how he could live the rest of his life somehow differently and all he could come up with was going back to art. He had dreamed about being a cartoonist in high school. It was delusional to think of becoming an artist at his age with household expenses so high and Jaime and Scott not all that many years away from college. He used to work on the sets for the plays in high school and do caricatures for the yearbook. He took some art classes in college, but it was clear that he only had a small talent at best. He was good with landscapes, but terrible with people, just like in real life.
He felt worse the more he thought about it, not because he couldn’t come up with another viable idea about something different to do, but because he knew there was no chance he’d try even if he had. Maybe he was just overreacting to the widow Selma, who never hid her disappointment.
"Your father," she told him when she handed him his fortieth birthday gift, a book entitled The Ten Best Ways To Stay Motivated, "may he rest in peace, didn't have your advantages. He grew up without a nickel in his pocket, but by the time he was your age he had his own accounting practice. Now that’s motivation.”
“He worked day and night,” he said.
“So I could stay home with you.”
Ira remembered that all too well.
"I hate numbers; I like advertising."
Selma rolled her eyes upward like she expected Murray to smack him on the back of his head on his next pass around the ceiling.
Today, Ira had to begin finalizing the coupon campaign for American Family's newest cold medicine, Sinoral. He had planned hundreds of coupon campaigns, the kind that people rip out of Sunday supplements and had devised some great rebate programs that compelled people to soak labels off jars and cut bar codes from almost indestructible containers. Selling over-the-counter drugs in America was very competitive and coupons were a major weapon in every company's arsenal. The distribution of manufacturer's cents-off coupons exceeded one hundred billion dollars last year. A successful coupon campaign had about a two-percent rate of return. Ira has had a half dozen as high as four percent.
For some reason Selma always found that funny.
She wasn't impressed that the first coupon promotion was in 1880 by C.W. Post of Battle Creek. He gave out one-cent coupons to encourage people to try Grape-Nuts. She didn’t care that the Nielsen people, the same ones who monitored television ratings, accumulated and published annual figures on coupon redemption. Most of all she didn’t care that the last industry-wide innovation, the tip-in coupon, was Ira’s creation.
“Try creating something the world can't live without, "she once said, "like the thumbtack."
Ira was at lunch in the cafeteria with Tom and some of the other guys from marketing. They were talking football but Ira wasn’t paying much attention in part because he was a one-sport fan. If it wasn’t baseball, he wasn’t interested. He was wondering instead about what they'd be having for dinner and whether his favorite show on TV tonight would be a rerun. If it was, he might take Scott to buy that skateboard he wanted. Selma would flip out when she heard, because she thought that they were far too dangerous. She wouldn’t let Ira have a bicycle when he was growing up, because she was sure that he’d kill himself. Ellen called it the only child syndrome.
He did listen when the conversation switched to Tom's new secretary.
“They defy gravity."
“It's like they’re staring up at me.”
"I swear that her nipples stood up and saluted the other day when I walked by."
Heads turned in the cafeteria wondering what was so uproariously funny.
As they were just finishing lunch, the super was letting the police into his grandmother's apartment. His aunt had been calling for over two hours. They found her on the floor in the bathroom still in her nightgown. By the time Ira got back to the office, the police had notified his aunt and the required calls were being made.
Ira was in the middle of proofing the final Sinoral coupon design. There are lots of cardinal rules for coupons. Keep them dollar-bill size since odd shapes create problems for consumers and retailers. Make them simple and clear. Don't use the coupon itself to advertise, but show a picture of the product on the coupon. The face value must be in large type in the top corners. The expiration date must be clearly visible and allow for adequate time, since a short expiration angers consumers and they'll simply rip off the date. Retailers don't care because a manufacturer will accept a coupon until the end of time.
Ira was running through his checklist when he got the call. An acid heart attack, quick and to the point. The funeral was the next morning. His mother didn't believe in wasting time.
"Have Tom finish the Sinoral layout,” he told his secretary. “And don’t forget to tell Paul what happened. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow."
He couldn’t focus on his book on the way home or even think about the coupon layouts he’d brought home with him. He kept thinking about Grandma Sadie. They lived with her until he was five. His father was just getting established and money was tight. He remembered warm milk at night that knocked him out like a sucker punch and bedtime stories about what happened to little boys who wandered away at the grocery store or didn't do as they were told.
She was an old woman as long as he could remember with a proud posture and regal, gray hair. She buried her parents and two brothers in Russia and her husband, Ira's grandfather, at a very early age. Although she had a tough exterior, she was the kindest person he knew, not manipulative, not judgmental, and easily pleased, at least by him. She was the opposite of his mother who must have inherited her demanding gene from some pagan ancestor.
Grandma Sadie had three children. His mother was the youngest. She had Sadie's deep-set eyes, overhung by thick eyebrows as sharp as a rocky ledge, so like Ira’s that it was almost frightening. Obviously not the personality marker one might think.
His Aunt Sarah was the oldest. Ira has always been very close to her. She spent a lot of time at his house while he was growing up, telling Selma to "leave the poor boy alone already." His late Uncle Max, the middle one, lived in the Midwest and looked nothing like his grandmother. He had a small mouth and always wore a salesman's smile. Max had two girls that he hardly knew who grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Ira was always his grandmother's favorite. He always thought it was because he lived closer, but the events that were about to unfold proved to him that there was more to it than that.
Ellen and the kids were upset, of course, but they had a very different relationship with his grandmother. She used to visit three or four times a week when he was growing up in the city, but she didn't travel to the suburbs very often. When she did, the kids didn’t sit still, or if they did it was in front of the television. They didn't have time to listen to her stories.
Ira had this peculiar funny feeling in his mouth that night, a kind of tingling in his gums, as if they were tired of holding on to his teeth, as if they were about to let go, so he kept pushing in on his teeth, as if to prevent them from popping out.
“What’s wrong with your mouth?” Ellen asked him as he climbed into bed.
He ran his tongue along his gums.
“I don’t know. They just feel funny.”
“Well pushing in on them isn’t going to help. Call the dentist."
"Tonight?"
"No, tomorrow after the funeral."
Ira nodded but he wasn’t going to call. He’d let it pass and it would go away, funny feelings like that – stress-related probably – generally did. Besides, the Sinoral campaign was going to keep him busy and he couldn’t afford to take off any time for the dentist, certainly not for the next two weeks.
That night Ira dreamt that he was in the dentist's chair.
"So you've finally found your teeth," the dentist said, except it wasn’t his dentist it was his late Uncle Max.
"What does that mean?"
"People become aware of their teeth when they reach middle age."
Ira pushed in on his teeth and he could feel them move.
"Unfortunately," Max said, "once they do that feeling never goes away."
His teeth still felt strange in the morning. He had braces when he was ten to straighten out an overbite that was "barely noticeable" according to the orthodontist, because his mother couldn't live with the imperfection. Now it felt as if they were getting even by pushing back out where nature intended them to be.
They left early and had to wait in the car for the funeral home to open. Ira hated being late, which is probably what comes from living life according to a train schedule and growing up with a mother who considered “Thou Shalt Be On Time” to be the eleventh commandment.
A directory out front listed the recently departed like the menu in a drive-in restaurant. Sadie was on top. His mother wouldn't have had it any other way. Her casket was already at the front of the chapel, sealed tight, his aunt having already made the necessary identification. The room itself was meant to suggest a living room with red drapes on the walls and maroon carpet on the floor. But the line of folding chairs and the heavy chandelier made if feel more like a cheap hotel ballroom.
The service started promptly at nine. There were very few old faces, since Sadie had outlived most of her friends. A rabbi no one knew recited some well-turned phrases, but Ira didn’t listen. Instead, he heard her insisting that he eat more in that soft yet unyielding voice of hers. He also smelled the onions, butter, and chicken that attached to all her housedresses like lint.
There should be a Reader's Digest in there, he thought, opened to “Personal Glimpses.”
The rabbi recited the names of the mourners, which he received moments before from Selma, and called him Ida. He said nothing about the pogroms in Russia, the murder of her two brothers by the White Army, the arranged marriage to her second cousin, Ira’s grandfather, his early death, or her refusal to eat anything until everyone else had seconds. Of course, there was not a word about her bedtime stories.
Ira's mother sat with her military posture, eyes straight ahead, wearing that hard, enduring look he first noticed as a child. He used to think it was anger and determination; now he saw it more as disbelief and disappointment. Aunt Sarah, on the other hand, looked around and smiled at him. At least until the coffin creaked and everyone jumped, even the Rabbi. Ira half-hoped that the lid would make a loud pop like a newly opened vacuum-sealed jar, and Sadie would sit up to say it was all a big mistake.
The Rabbi went back to his sermon and Ira thought back to that winter when he turned eight and forced his grandmother to sleep with him whenever she came for a visit. It was because of the light fixture in his room, the Methuselah of all light fixtures, with three naked bulbs for eyes and a nose and a decorative braided line below that looked like an angry little mouth. Perhaps it was originally designed to hold candles in one of those dark torture chambers in the castles of matinee movies and was murderously angry because some fool had electrified it.
Sometimes at night he swore he could hear it thinking.
Most nights he slept under the covers barely able to breathe, but when Grandma Sadie was over, he felt safe pressed up against her. She was big and warm and impervious to fear. No evil spirit could penetrate that force field of chicken and mothballs. Her slow, heavy breathing completely drowned out the whispers from above.
"Don't baby him," Selma would say.
"It's just for a few minutes until he falls asleep."
It was never just for a few minutes.
It got so bad that Ira was afraid to go into his room even in daylight. The problem disappeared once his grandmother convinced his father, over his mother's objection, to change the fixture. He never figured out how she knew, because he never said a word to anyone.
The rabbi finished the sermon by talking about Sadie's living memory. He went on and on about how she wasn’t really dead, but alive in each of them, seeing the world through the eyes of her children and experiencing the joy of life through her grandchildren.
Seeing the world through the eyes of Selma was not a very comforting thought.
His mother insisted that Ira ride with her and Aunt Sarah in the limousine, which came, Selma pointed out, “as part of the package.”
"It'll be strange without her," Sarah said as they pulled away from the curb.
Selma barely nodded. She just stared straight ahead her mouth snapped shut like her purse and her chin out, as if her jaw had been wired shut.
"She's always been there," Sarah said to Ira. "And I've never been far away."
In fact, Sarah lived with her mother until about 20 years ago, when she finally moved out to a similar apartment two blocks away.
"I spoke to her two or three times a day."
Ira tried touching Aunt Sarah lightly on the arm, the way he’d seen Ellen do a thousand times, but it turned out more like a pat. He didn't know what else to do or say so he stared out the window.
"It's unhealthy to call that often," Selma said.
Sarah sighed.
Ira thought about how death polarizes things. Clear becomes ambiguous and uncertain turns into inevitable. Far away seems so close and near much further away. It’s life through both ends of the binoculars. Fortunately, this state of confusion and doubt doesn’t last very long.
He was second now, he realized, in the natural order of things, right behind his mother. Instead of depressing him, it made him wonder why he bothered spending two and one half hours every day on a train to nowhere. It couldn’t go anywhere because the tracks ended at Grand Central Station. Why spend every waking hour making money for nameless, faceless shareholders?
“It’s good to have family at times like this.”
Sarah took Ira's hand and held it in her lap. All three of them stared at his hand.
“I liked that coupon for the rash cream. What was the name again?"
"Dermacure."
"That's the one. I liked the funny face. Did you draw it?"
"No."
"Like someone tortured by an itch."
"Exactly."
Ira looked over at his mother who was staring out the window now. She looked smaller when she wasn't speaking.
Wouldn’t everyone be surprised if he quit and enrolled in art school.
He closed his eyes and took back his hand. He knew better than to make a decision at a time like this, when death has stirred up all the sediment. He wondered what Ellen, Jaime, and Scott were talking about in the car behind. He hoped it wasn't about death. Of course, Ellen didn't believe in avoiding awkward subjects.
"She had a hard life," Sarah said.
"Who doesn't?" Selma said turning her head away from the window.
"Not like hers."
"It's not a contest. You don't measure life by who you bury and how young."
"Or how sorry you feel about yourself," Sarah said.
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
At the graveside, Sarah and his mother stood apart, arms intertwined like promenading partners at a square dance. Aunt Sarah couldn't remain angry for very long, nor would Selma have let her. The two of them stood there whispering one-syllable words that Ira couldn't quite make out, shaking their heads, and occasionally looking in his direction.
Of course, looking back now, he wondered how he could have missed all the signs over the years. Quiet conversations that stopped the moment he entered the room, eyes scrutinizing him behind his back, hands always fixing his collar, brushing down his hair, and picking lint off his sweater, as though looking for that loose thread that might unravel everything.
The wind was cold and Ira huddled with Ellen and the kids. He could smell Ellen's hair. It had a sandy, ocean smell. The same way it smelled when they first met.
The rabbi droned on and on in a language that no one understood, but which sounded familiar. All eyes were on the frozen hole in the ground.
"From dust to dust, we commend her to your care . . ."
The cemetery also reminded him of the beach. Maybe it was the absence of a skyline or the sea of stones under a gray, rolling horizon. Maybe it was the missing noises of commerce and daily life.
". . . to everlasting happiness and repose . . ."
The cold amplified the breathing of the mourners, almost like the sound of the surf through a seashell.
". . .to eternal fulfillment and reward . . ."
His mother moved perilously close to the edge of the grave, the dirt lapping up against her feet like the tide. She was like that, often standing right in your face during a conversation. No one said a word, but everyone thought the worst. What if she fell in? Of course things like that only happened in the movies.
It was overcast and the gray clouds were scalloped like brain matter. They rumbled softly, as if from a distant storm, or perhaps the reflected sound of some truck from a highway in the distance.
". . .and let us say AMEN."
"Amen," everyone said in unison.
The rabbi closed the book, picked up some dirt, and recited a prayer. Three large men leaning on shovels tried to appear solemn, but only succeeded in looking cold and impatient. They shifted their weight back and forth from foot to foot and kicked at their shovels as if to keep them in line.
There must be a dozen other souls waiting to take up residence today on Paradise Lane and Restful Way.
The rabbi dropped his handful of dirt on the coffin and disappeared. Selma was next. She took a fistful and practically threw it at the coffin. It sounded like the crack of a bat against the ball.
Aunt Sarah went next, followed by Ellen, and then the kids. Everyone took a turn throwing dirt on the coffin before returning to the cars.
Ira waited until the end. The gravediggers coiled their hands around their shovels and cleared their throats, but he ignored them. His handful of dirt barely landed on the coffin before they started shoveling. Furiously, almost frantically, as if too much longer and she might climb back out of the grave.
Their dirt hit the coffin like a gunshot at first until the layers reduced the sound to a dull thud. He wanted to wait until she was completely buried, like a spring bulb and backed up past her stone, which was blank on one side and engraved on the other for his grandfather, Issac Portnoy. He died over forty years earlier and gave Ira the “I” for his name.
There were about fifty graves in this small, walled-in area dedicated to members of the Mozur Lodge. Mozur was a small town in Russia that emptied out after the revolution. There didn’t appear to be many vacancies.
He drifted farther back until he stood on a patch of grass that must have been meant for Aunt Sarah. His mother waved him to the car, but he pretended not to see her. She raised her arms higher, but he looked away. Perhaps it was bad luck to stand on an empty grave. His mother knew every superstition and honored them all. He moved over to the next grave and looked down at the stone.
"Eva Portnoy, beloved daughter of Issac and Sadie, born December 12, 1918-died December 12, 1968."
His first thought was that the poor woman died on her fiftieth birthday. The he read the stone again. Something was very odd, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He couldn’t focus at first. Perhaps it was the gust of frigid air or the sounds of the gravediggers as they filled the hole where she’d spent the rest of eternity. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Selma whispering to Scott, who started running toward him.
It seemed as if he were in a movie with the camera retreating so that Scott never seemed to get any closer.
He looked down again at Eva’s stone and another gust of wind blew some fine particles of dirt into his eyes. It came right off his grandmother's grave, as if she didn't want him to look again, but it was too late, he’d already figured it out.
How could Eva have been his aunt? Sarah was the oldest, born in 1916. Max, dead ten years, was born four years later. His mother was the last, born in 1923. If Eva came between Aunt Sarah and Max, Ira realized, which meant that he was twenty when she died, how is it that he never heard her name? How is it that no one casually mentioned her during those long Sunday afternoons around the kitchen table when Sarah and his mother tried to describe what it was like growing up in the Bronx? How is that possible that she wasn’t in a single photograph?
Scott tugged on his jacket.
"Come on Dad it's getting cold. Grandma wants to go. We're blocking cars. Dad?"
He looked down at Scott. He loved the color of his hair, a shade of brown somewhere between sand and earth. Could he hide him? Erase him from human memory?
He gave him a hug and Scott looked up with tears in his eyes.
“I’m cold,” he said.
"Let's go."
Ira put his arm around his shoulder and walked him to the car. He didn’t look back once.
Everyone returned to his mother's house, which was filled with fruit baskets, jars of nuts, boxes of cookies, and platters of cold cuts. There was a big bouquet of flowers from his office.
“You’re supposed to send food to the house and flowers to the funeral home,” Selma said when she read the card.
“They’re nice flowers,” he said.
“Inappropriate,” Selma said turning and walking to the door to greet some recent arrivals.
People sat around eating and discussing Florida vacation spots, inexpensive restaurants, World War II battles, and a host of other subjects, like they were trying out for Jeopardy. There was almost a party atmosphere.
His mother played the hostess better than the grieving daughter.
"What's the point," she said. "It won't change anything."
The present always came first for her, followed by the future. The past was a distant third.
He sat quietly in the corner of the living room briefly conversing with the mourners as they left the kitchen plates piled high with roast beef and potato salad. It was the perfect spot - not enough room for anyone to sit comfortably beside him and no lengthy conversations possible with so much food close at hand.
"Sorry about your grandmother."
"Thank you."
"We should all make it to eighty-two."
Ira nodded. That was the most popular line.
Then they raised their plates in benediction and promised to find him later.
He wasn't being sociable, but he's never been good at parties. He’s uncomfortable with small talk. He has to think about it too much. He never knows how to fill the silences, whether it’s a time of celebration, illness, or death. He can handle the nodding and looking interested part well enough, smiling or frowning depending on what's appropriate, but he normally relies on Ellen to carry the conversation forward. She was, however, busy helping in the kitchen.
That's what attracted him to Ellen the very first time they met. He didn’t have to think about what to say next. It was as if she were writing the dialogue and all he had to do was read it, like it was hanging up there in a comic strip balloon. Every response felt spontaneous and sounded right. For a lot of people, that's as good a reason as any to fall in love.
Ira was never sure what Ellen saw in him that day at the coffee shop, but he bet it was the home in the suburbs and the two kids. A life without surprises, although she said it was the look in his eyes, like a little kid hoping that the present was for him.
Ira was startled by Aunt Sarah, who squeezed in beside him.
“You’re not eating.”
“I had something before.”
It was a lie, but safer than saying he wasn’t hungry. You didn’t skip meals in his family, because it could only be an early sign of illness.
“There’s cake.”
“Maybe later.”
Selma insisted that Sarah was very beautiful when she was young, although it’s hard to tell from the few black-and-white pictures that remain and impossible to imagine from the way she looked now. Her eyes, which still looked kindly as they fell on him, carried two big bags around with them these days like they were homeless, and they didn’t open that wide anymore, swollen as they were by two cataract operations. Sometimes they filled with tears in the normal course of a conversation, as if they had worries and troubles of their own. Her good-natured mouth has also begun to sag as well. Her entire face seemed to be losing its shape, the years erasing the child-like symmetry that had once defined her features. Selma said it was because she retained too much water.
"She turned down a lot of perfectly good marriage proposals,” Selma said, “because she waited too long for Mr. Perfect."
Still, Aunt Sarah didn’t complain, didn’t criticize, and always kept busy. She worked up until a few years ago in the administrative offices of the garment workers union and the day after retiring she joined the senior citizen's center. Unlike his mother, who filled her days thinking about all the things that could go wrong, Sarah attended Broadway shows, traveled to Atlantic City, and did arts and crafts. Ira's house was full of her clay bowls and potholders.
"She was a good mother and grandmother," Sarah said brushing the hair from the front of Ira's face.
"The best," he said.
"Everyone liked her.”
Effortlessly, he thought, just like Ellen.
“Did I ever tell you about this Italian woman who worked with her in the garment center?" Sarah said.
"About a thousand times."
"Sadie helped her find a place to live and she named her first daughter after her. Can you imagine, somewhere in the city there's an Italian girl named Sadie."
They both smiled and stared straight ahead at Selma, who moved constantly, keeping to the edge of everyone's conversation like a moth circling the light.
"Aunt Sarah."
"Yes darling?"
"Who was Eva?"
Sarah's whole body contracted in an instant, like it was a single muscle. Her breathing stopped and then resumed with a start, like a car thrown too quickly into gear.
"She was your sister," he said. "I saw her headstone at the cemetery."
Aunt Sarah watched Selma work the room, heading slowly in their direction.
"Eva was two years younger than me. Grandma had to put her in an institution.”
“How old was she?”
“Eighteen. She stayed there for the rest of her life."
"What was wrong with her?"
"Behavioral problems."
"They don't put people away for life for behavioral problems."
"Things were different back then."
"What institution?"
"What's the difference?"
"I'm curious. I suddenly discover at the age of forty that my mother had a sister who died when I was twenty who I didn't even know existed. Don't you think that's a little strange?"
"The world didn't have to know everybody's business back then, not like today."
"Well, this is today and I’d like to know."
"You know all you need to know," Sarah said.
"You sound like my mother.”
Sarah shuddered.
“I’m sorry,” Ira said.
"Just don't ask her about Eva."
"Why?"
"Because your mother was the youngest and Max and I were in school. My mother had to work, so Eva wound up taking care of her. She took care of your mother until the day they took her away."
"How old was she?"
"Who?"
"My mother . . . when they took Eva away?"
"Eleven. She never saw her again."
"She didn’t visit?"
"No."
"Why not?"
“It was hard for her.”
“Did you visit?”
“In the beginning.”
“It was hard for you.”
“I was much older.”
Selma was getting closer.
"What's the name of the institution?"
"Your mother is coming."
"Tell me . . . or I'll ask her."
Aunt Sarah swayed back and forth as if the upper part of her body were balancing on a spring.
"I want to know."
The desperation in his voice must have surprised her. It certainly surprised him. He wouldn't have asked his mother - not yet anyway - and certainly not now . . . maybe never, he’d have discussed it with Ellen first.
Selma stopped about ten feet away and rested her hand on the shoulder of one of her cousins. She said something to him, but looked right at Sarah and Ira.
"The name?"
"Pilgrim State Hospital."
"Where is that?"
"Not now."
"Where?"
"Long Island."
"So what are you two whispering about?" Selma said.
"You," Sarah said.
"What about me?"
"How well you handle these things."
"I've had practice."
"You don't get better with practice at things like this."
"You two were whispering like a couple of criminals planning a robbery. What else have you been talking about?"
"This new course I'm taking at the center," Sarah said.
"What about?"
"Knitting."
"Sweaters?"
"Afghans."
"Sweaters would be more useful," Selma said. She had an opinion about everything.
"I've made enough sweaters to last a lifetime," Sarah said.
"No one ever has enough sweaters."
Sarah didn't argue. She knew better.
"And that's the big conspiracy?"
Sarah nodded.
"I don't believe you for a minute.”
Sarah laughed.
"But I don’t have time to stand here and find out,” his mother said. “Ira, there's so much food in the kitchen, I want you to take some home."
"We don't need anything."
"I've already made up a platter for you. It’s in the refrigerator."
"Fine."
"When are you going to learn to make a tie?" Selma said, bending down to straighten the knot. "Go get some dessert in the kitchen. I want to talk to Aunt Sarah."
Ira jumped up.
"And don’t forget to tuck the tie into your shirt while you're eating," she said. “The way your father always did. He saved a fortune on dry-cleaning.”
Ira ate a big piece of chocolate cake in the kitchen, letting his tie swing dangerously close to the frosting. He was almost elated to learn that his mother's family wasn't perfect and that they weren’t an unbroken string of well-adjusted, success stories. There was a big failure carefully hidden away by his mother, lest she become a yardstick to measure his own accomplishments.
They didn’t get home until after ten. They were all exhausted. Ellen and the kids went right to bed, but Ira couldn’t sleep. He had this urge to do something domestic, so he sat at the kitchen table balancing the checkbook.
He tried not to think about Eva. It was hard enough comparing the amount on each check with the scribble in the checkbook. He also needed to spend a few minutes looking over the budget for the Sinoral campaign. He’d lost a day already and it had to be finalized by Friday. The big question, as always, was how many consecutive Sundays to run it and how far up front in the supplement.
Ellen didn't know about Eva. There hadn't been a quiet moment to tell her since the cemetery. Besides, he wasn’t ready to talk. The whole thing still seemed too bizarre and personal. He needed to think about it awhile and work some answers out in his head in terms of what he wanted to do before talking it over with Ellen, especially since he knew what she was likely to say. She’ll try to convince him to respect Aunt Sarah's wishes. Every family has a black sheep, she'll say, some skeleton hidden in the closet. What was your grandmother supposed to do, advertise the fact that her daughter had been committed to a mental institution?
Ellen respects the past. She believes in leaving well enough alone. He’s always loved that about her. He usually felt the same way, except not tonight, tonight he felt as if Eva needed to be rescued from obscurity. He felt the passion begin to burn and everyone needed a burning passion from time to time. Lord knows, it’s been so long since he’s had one.
For a long time it used to be his art. In high school, it was the caricatures of the teachers that he drew senior year for the yearbook. In college, it was the sketching courses, fruits, landscapes and nudes. There were some really talented students, both real and representational, and it quickly became clear that he wasn't one of them. He had the technique, but not the vision. He was pretty good with trees and rocks. Once or twice he caught the light just right surprising even himself. His mother has one of those landscapes in her den. He was a passable artist, but not nearly as good as Selma believes. She didn't see all the failures.
"He could've been another Rockwell, drawing pictures instead of coupons," she occasionally told the kitchen fan, when he was near enough to overhear it.
She couldn't possibly understand that a small talent can be a curse, in some ways worse than no talent at all.
Ira finally climbed into bed about three in the morning. He dreamt that he was at some kind of resort that looked more like a college campus. He had to leave, he was late for something, but he couldn't find his way out. He walked in the same direction for hours, however, the campus never ended. He finally stopped to ask someone for help, an attractive girl in her early twenties with long, curly hair and crystal-clear blue eyes, so blue that it was like looking into the reflection of a mountain lake. She had one flaw, a large mouth, which made her smile look a little silly.
"Don’t you know where you are?" she said her voice very soft and sweet, almost melodic.
"On vacation? In college?”
He was sure it was one or the other.
"No Ira, you're in a mental institution."
When he looked down he saw that he was in a straight jacket.
"How do you know my name?"
She looked disappointed and kissed him on the forehead.
Then he woke up.
He couldn’t get past the headlines on the front page of the newspaper on the train ride to work the next morning. There were too many questions floating around inside his head. What were the circumstances of Eva's institutionalization? He couldn’t imagine his grandmother putting away her own daughter unless she had no choice. She had to have done something horrible. And what kind of behavioral problem could have kept her there for the next thirty years? There must have been rules and rights even back then. Maybe she was profoundly retarded and Sarah just didn't want to admit it. But then how could Eva have been trusted to take care of his mother when she was a little girl? And why the universal conspiracy of silence? What if it was all a mistake, Ira wondered? What if Eva was one of those people you read about who waste away in a mental institution before anyone realizes that it was just a hearing problem or dyslexia?
Ira had to review the proofs for the Sinoral coupon first thing in the morning and confirm the print schedule. In four days a coupon would be appearing in Sunday supplements and magazines in every big city and small town in America. There'd be a rush of redemptions, because Americans love to try new things particularly at a discount. Then there'll be another round 60 days later. This time fewer will be clipped and most of those will get stuck in drawers.
At 11 o'clock he took a fifteen-minute break and called Pilgrim State Hospital. The switchboard connected him to the Records Department.
"I'd like to verify the presence of someone at your institution."
"Try admissions.”
“She’s not currently a patient. It's a woman who was there twenty years ago."
"Ask her."
He didn’t like the sound of that.
"She's dead."
"Then the information is confidential."
The voice belonged to an older woman with the practiced and measured tone of a hardened civil servant.
He tapped his pencil slowly against his teeth. It was better than pushing them in with his finger.
"She was my aunt. I need the information for . . . genetic reasons. It has to do with my wife's pregnancy."
"Congratulations, but all files are confidential."
"If you'll just verify the years that she was there it would be a big help."
"Can’t do it, it’s against the rules."
It was the bureaucratic kiss of death. He could see her finger moving toward the disconnect button.
"How can I get permission?"
"Try the Attorney General's office in Albany."
With that the connection went dead.
Ira called Albany and reached Lisa Hancock, an attorney in the Health and Hospital Administration assigned to the state mental institutions. She was sympathetic, clearly not a professional bureaucrat, but a young lawyer passing through on her way to a more lucrative job in private practice.
"I wish I could help, I really do, but you need the consent in writing of her nearest living relative, in this case your mother or your aunt. You also need a physician to establish medical need. If the Commissioner agrees, the file can be reviewed, but only by the doctor."
"It's my aunt for God's sake. I just want to see the file, not publish it."
"It's not up to me. If it were, I'd be happy to give it to you."
"What about a letter from a genetic counselor?"
Ellen knew a genetic counselor.
"It has to be an MD and only with the consent of one of her sisters."
"What if I can't get their consent?"
"You can always petition the court. The court can order files released regardless of consent where a physician shows compelling need."
"Can I at least confirm the dates of her stay?"
"Not with me, I don't know them."
Any attempt by a government employee to make a joke should be punishable by a fine and imprisonment.
The Sinoral layouts were screaming to be double-checked and the placements needed to be confirmed. American Family had at least one hundred million dollars riding on Sinoral, much more if you factored in all the research. There were hundreds of jobs hanging in the balance. This weekend the eyes of the company would be on Ira as he fired the first shot.
Of course, the world desperately needed another cold capsule, Ira thought with a chuckle, as he punched in Sarah’s telephone number. He asked if she would give her consent. He knew that would be harder than finding a doctor to write a letter.
"Of course not."
"I won't say a word."
"Some things are best left forgotten."
“That sounds like something you read in Ann Landers.”
“And what if it is, I think she knows one or two things about families and life.”
"You’re going to force me to ask my mother."
"Go ahead."
`"What choice do I have?"
"Go ahead you’ll get the same answer . . . that is if you don’t kill her first."
He couldn’t imagine an emotion ever getting the better part of Selma.
"Talking about her doesn't seem to be killing you."
"Eva didn’t raise me the way she raised your mother."
He could hear Sarah tapping her knitting needle on the table by the chair.
"What did Eva look like?"
"I really don't want to talk about it."
"Does anyone have a picture?"
Sarah didn’t respond.
"Did you visit her in the hospital? Do you remember the name of her doctor?"
"What difference would it make to anyone if I answered your questions?"
"It would make a difference to me.”
Sarah sighed into the telephone.
“I'm not giving up so easily," Ira said.
"This is so unlike you. I’ve never known you to be so indifferent to the wishes . . . and feelings of others."
"But it’s a lot like my mother, isn’t it?"
"Selma doesn’t disturb the past.”
"Because she can’t argue with it or change it."
"Maybe we made a mistake not mentioning Eva, but what's done is done."
He hated that phrase. His mother used it all the time. She made it sound like it was one of the laws of nature, as immutable as gravity.
"What's done can be undone, particularly when it’s a secret, that's how you learn from your mistakes."
Aunt Sarah excused herself. She said that she had to go to the laundry room to move her clothes to the dryer before someone dumped them onto the table, but Ira didn’t believe her for a minute. Sarah was not the type to leave her laundry alone, which is why she always had a book to read with her.
He tried to push Eva out of his mind and do some work. Half the world had a relative or two hidden in the closet. One crazy aunt was no big deal. Still, he couldn’t focus. Everything he tried to do seemed so trivial. Did it really matter that the S in Sinoral had to be larger in the center of the coupon and smaller at the corners? Or that AFC would get a better rate if it didn’t insist on an odd page or top placement?
He picked up one of the slick ads that would be gracing the Sunday papers all around the country. It had a giant picture of Sinoral's snot green box, and underneath it read, WATCH OUT SNIFFLES, GRIPPES AND FLU – SINORAL WILL GET THE BEST OF YOU.
He can’t imagine what the agency charged for that little ditty.
Below that in smaller letters it called Sinoral the most important discovery since chicken soup.
One-half hour later he gave up and took an early train back home. He left as soon as he felt the urge to highlight the "Sin" in Sinoral to see if anyone noticed.
The woman beside him was reading “The Post.” Twins separated at birth had been reunited after fifty years. They grew up in the Midwest one hundred miles apart. They looked alike, their wives looked alike, and they were both mailmen.
It was a sign. He had to reunite with his Aunt Eva. He had to drive out to Pilgrim State in the morning. He'd tell work that he had to do something for his grandmother's estate. He'd be back after lunch and no one would be the wiser. He wouldn't even tell Ellen until afterward, otherwise there'd be too much discussion and she’d probably talk him out of it.