THE TAO OF SYLVIE by Miriam Karmel
My mother was laid out contrary to Jewish law in an open casket. “Just like the goyim,” Nana said, dabbing her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief, its pink and blue posies soaked with her grief. “What were they thinking?”
The open casket was a mistake, like the time Nachman’s Bakery piped a bold crucifix on my brother Jonah’s bar mitzvah cake. Mother shrieked when she saw it, then laughed and with a few strokes of a spatula erased the offending cross. She would have gotten a laugh out of the open casket. She had no time for regrets. But Nana, with her starched handkerchiefs, wouldn’t let up. “An open casket,” she sniffed. “For all the world to see. Even the mayor.”
Perhaps fretting over the casket was easier than wondering what Mother had been doing at Michigan and Wacker on a Wednesday at noon? Nobody knew why the lawyer’s wife, as she became known in the papers, was where she was when a city bus ran her down. There were no entries on her calendar for Wednesday, though the surrounding days were so full that the Sun-Times referred to Wednesday as the eye of the storm. The day before she died, she had her teeth cleaned, picked up Father’s suits at the cleaners, and took a voice lesson with Madame Peffli. On the day she was buried, she was scheduled for the hairdresser.
Those are the facts. The rest is speculation. Some people say she was on her way to see a lawyer. Others imagined a lover. I like to think she’d been to a travel agent planning a trip to Paris.
Witnesses reported seeing her dart out as the light was turning red. A few said the light had already changed.
* * *
If a picture says a thousand words, what does a blank canvas say? I stare at it, as if I can will her to appear. I know she’s there, because I was there, too.
It was a hot, fuggy day. My brothers were at camp. Lark and Robin and I were stuck at home, whining about the heat, threatening to kill ourselves. Mother piled us in the car and drove to the air-conditioned mall, where we whined until she handed over a quarter for the picture booth. She lined us up, youngest to oldest, pushed Lark into the booth first, ordered her to smile, and after the flashbulb went off, shouted, Out! Pronto! One by one we posed for a mugshot – Lark, Robin, me, and finally Mother. It felt like forever waiting for the photo strip to emerge, damp and reeking faintly of chemicals. There we were, eight, nine and eleven years old. The Glazer girls. And there was not Mother.
It’s a story that got tossed around a lot in my family. The day Mother disappeared before our eyes.
“Vaguely,” Lark said, when I told her I’d found the picture. “That was what, thirty years ago?”
I reminded her that Mother ran out before the flashbulb popped. “Don’t you remember? Father saw it and said, Sylvie Glazer. Absent from her own existence.
Next thing, Lark was on the radio appropriating my memory. “My mother was a woman absent from her own existence,” she said, in her prim Lark voice.
Lark was everywhere touting her book, Emily and Lavinia Dickinson: A Tale of Two Sisters. “So, your mother was like Emily?” The talk show host sounded more interested in Lark’s particulars than in whether Emily did or did not loathe her sister’s cats.
“Oh, no! Emily did as she pleased.”
“And Vinnie?”
“Vinnie lived to please Emily. She even served as the model for her sister’s dresses.”
“Sounds like you admire Vinnie.”
“I’m simply acknowledging her role in the household. Emily once wrote, ‘I don’t see much of Vinnie – she’s mostly dusting the stairs!’”
“That’s terrible.” The host was relishing this, I could tell.
“Is it? Would you rather be remembered for your poetry or your housework? Dusting. Really.” Lark audibly shuddered.
“Did your mother dust?”
“Not really. Most days the house felt like a blender running with the top off.”
I pictured my sister tossing her head back as she let out a plummy laugh. How like Lark to reduce our life to a pithy little joke.
* * *
“It was a madhouse.” Robin rushed to Lark’s defense. “Don’t you remember the party where Lark, all of what, two years old, set a potholder on the tile floor, lay her head down and fell asleep? I swear, Mother stepped over her on her way to the kitchen for more ice.”
“No. But I remember you used to call Mother the Old Woman in the Shoe.”
“Who had so many children,” Robin trilled into the phone. “The point is, Mother neglected us. Though rather benignly. I’ll give you that.”
* * *
Lark was on the radio again not talking about the Dickinson sisters. “We called him Crazy Eddie. He was a manic, wild-eyed kid who lived with us for a while. I remember the night he arrived. He stood in the living room, still in his coat – it was probably cashmere – and suddenly he rushes out into the yard, crying, Nature! Nature! When he burst back inside he explained that at home, home being a hotel on the Gold Coast, he had to ride an elevator with old dowagers in furs who smelled of perfume. You, he stuttered. You just open a door and voilà! Nature!”
“Oh my,” the host cooed.
“I must have read Eloise too many times,” Lark said, “because when I asked if he could get room service whenever he wanted, he said, ‘What do you think? My family owns the hotel.’ But he wasn’t bragging.” She paused. “We couldn’t fathom why he wanted to live with us.”
* * *
Robin phoned to say she remembered the afternoon the Sugarmans came for lunch. “They drove up in a black Cadillac. It looked like a hearse. I can still see Mr. Sugarman step out of the car and go around to open the door for Mrs. S. She kept glancing over her shoulder as she walked toward the house. She had on a white silk blouse and white slacks, dark glasses and a silk scarf the color of wildflowers. I wished Mother had served something fancier than hamburgers and hot dogs.”
I reminded my sister that I used to wish Mother would act like other mothers. Play mahjong or golf. Wear matching outfits. When I confessed this to Aunt Vera, she said, “Sylvie was on her own path.”
“The Tao of Sylvie,” Robin said. I thought I could see her smile.
Suddenly I remembered something that felt important, how I’d overheard Nana tell Mother, You must have made a good impression on the meshugener kid. “Poor little rich boy,” I said to Robin. “No hot dogs at the hotel, so when they’re about to ship him off to the hospital he remembered that afternoon. It was the nuthouse or the Glazers!”
I told Robin that the night Eddie came to stay I was at the library writing a report on J.D. Salinger. “I was in love with the Glass family. I wanted to be part of them. I wanted to be Franny, picking at chicken sandwiches, growing pale and thin. I wanted a sensitive brother like Seymour – never mind what he did later – instead of brothers who played Little League in summer and floor hockey in winter. I didn’t care that they were confused or depressed or out of place in the world. They were interesting. Then along came Eddie, a troubled kid who wanted to live with us. I never wondered, Why us? I only knew that suddenly, we were interesting, too.”
“Interesting?” Robin laughed. “The fact that a crazy kid wanted to live with us made us interesting? Really, Phoebs. We were a fucking freak show. The family with so many kids that one more didn’t make a difference.”
* * *
I can still hear Mother laughing at Robin. “A shoe? You call this joint a shoe?”
There’s a photo of the house on Maple Hill Road. It had to have been summer, because the oaks are in full leaf and the window boxes are packed with geraniums. It’s a solid, meandering house. Red brick. Slate roof. Mullioned windows. Green shutters. French doors that look out on the garden, overgrown with neglect. The doors didn’t latch. Toilets never stopped running. Drawers in the butler’s pantry were full of stuff from the previous owners – dead batteries, keys, wine corks. There was a buzzer beneath the dining room table to summon a maid. The buzzer was broken and there was nobody to summon.
Mother loved that house.
* * *
“Lark didn’t make that up,” Jonah said. “Nature! Nature! I’ll vouch for that. Not that enthusiasm for nature is crazy,” he said, bowing to the wooded trail we were hiking.
I told Jonah I only remember Father picking me up early at the library that night. “On the drive home he said, Eddie Sugarman wants to live with us. What do you think? It sounded as if I had a say, but when we turned into the driveway a cab was pulling away. Nobody takes a cab in Wilmette. It was a fait accompli, Jonah.”
“That was ages ago, Phoebs.” Jonah was peering through binoculars, neck craned, gaze steady. “Can you let it go?”
I could tell him the truth: I don’t know what I’m holding onto. Instead, I started walking and as we picked up the pace, Jonah told me that some days Eddie bought a loaf of Rosen’s rye after school. “Sometimes he’d eat the whole loaf, standing in the kitchen, picking seeds off the crust, dropping them on the floor. Once I asked why he didn’t buy a seedless loaf. “I can do that?” he said.
I was thinking Mother must have cleaned up after Eddie, when Jonah, perhaps sensing my anger, said, “But he wasn’t all bad. Remember the night we watched Citizen Kane? He’d gotten hold of the reels and rented a projector. Dad took down the painting over the sofa and we watched the movie on the wall. Mom made popcorn.”
“Citizen Kane? Where was I?” I was beginning to feel like Mother, the cipher, the blank space in the photo booth picture, absent from my own existence. “But I remember Rashomon,” I said, my voice brightening.
“Rashomon?”
“The movie where a murder gets recalled from multiple points of view. When we couldn’t agree on events, Mother always said Rashomon. The truth is in the eye of the beholder. Like me not sharing your memory of Citizen Kane, or you with Rashomon.” I watched him watching some bird. “Are you listening?”
Jonah rested his binoculars against his chest and turned his full attention on me. I told him I’d asked Robin if she remembered Kay, the woman who ironed for us. “Somebody ironed for us?” She sounded astonished. “I remember pulling wrinkled clothes out of a laundry basket and wearing them to school.”
“What’s your point?” Jonah asked.
“Mom was right. The problem is, why don’t I remember popcorn and Citizen Kane, or Eddie wolfing down Rosen’s rye?”
We walked in silence for a while. Then it came to me. “I just want something that we can all agree on.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe all I need is someone to say, Yes, that happened.”
* * *
This I remember. Mother sitting on a kitchen stool, the phone pressed between shoulder and ear as she lit another nail in the coffin. Hah! Hah! I could tell by her tone – prickly, impatient – that she was talking to Nana.
The shrink said he couldn’t live at home. Something about a toxic environment. And since he was too young to live on his own, they were shipping him off to Michael Reese. That’s when he flipped out and begged to stay with us.
I know because Sugarman said he told the kid that was a crazy idea. If you ask me, that’s not the best thing to say to a kid who’s crazy enough to be hospitalized. But nobody asked me.
Solomon? That’s rich! He told, which is par for the course.
Two nights ago,
I called you as soon as I could. Don’t start now, Francine. Please.
Okay. Don’t start now, Mother.
Taxi.
You’re right. It must have cost a fortune.
When he arrived? He kept running outside shouting, ‘Nature! Nature!’ Then he’d run inside and say, ‘I can’t believe you just walk outside without riding an elevator.’
Dangerous? No. I’d say he’s just unhappy.
* * *
My aunt told me what I already knew. “Sylvie turned everything into a joke.” We were sitting on her porch drinking tea, while my mother lay in the ground at Waldheim. It was raining. “People said Sylvie was crazy for taking Eddie in. Of course, she dismissed them with a joke. What’s one more kid, after all?” My aunt hesitated. “Actually, that came later. Early on it was Solomon says it’s the right thing to do. Then she’d sigh. I suppose it is. The What’s one more kid shtick came only after Solomon had told everyone that’s what she’d said.” Vera caught my gaze. “You see, don’t you?” When I shook my head, she narrowed her eyes at me. “Your father had said it so many times she started to believe it.”
Vera stared out the window, as if bits of memory were lurking beneath the flower beds and bushes. I studied her face, hoping to catch a glimmer of my mother, only Mother’s face was broad and soft; Vera’s narrow with high, jutting cheek-bones. Then Vera spoke and a tropical isle, falling in love with some girl he meets on the beach. She also correctly predicted he’d forget about the cat. She never said, I told you so.
One day when I returned from school, Jay was running around the house crying for the cat and Mother telling him to stop blubbering. I’m sure it’s hiding under one of the beds.
I know she lied because I heard her on the phone with Chubby Levine. I knew it was Chubby because Mother always laughed when they talked. It was a lighthearted laugh from deep inside her, a place she never shared with us.
I dropped Solomon off at the station and when he got out, the cat leaped after him and hopped into the car behind ours.
I stepped on the gas!
I know. It was a terrible thing to do. But I felt so giddy, so free.
I’d just see where the car took me.
Home. That’s where. I’d left a pot of eggs on the stove. Besides, I was still in my nightgown.
She grew quiet then, and lit another cigarette.
* * *
“She’s in the sunroom,” Maydell said, nodding toward the back of the house. The builder would have called it a den, but Nana had a knack for the mot juste. Even on gray days the room was welcoming and bright. Today was no exception.
“So, you’ve come for the dirt,” Nana said, as she laid out a game of patience on the parquet table. She had on black slacks and a soft yellow sweater. Pearls.
I hadn’t said why I was coming. Mother called Nana a witch. A good witch. She just knows things that others don’t. “Vera says you sent Bertha. Without telling Mother,” I blurted. “She says Bertha showed up one day, like Mary Poppins. Only not.” Bertha was a slatternly woman, with plum-colored hair and painted eyebrows that gave her a look of perpetual surprise.
“Bertha was definitely not Mary Poppins,” Nana agreed.
“And yet you sent her.”
“Oh, Phoebe, Phoebe.” Nana worked her way through the cards. “Your mother had her hands full with five kids. You with your bird names. Even Jonah. It’s Hebrew for dove. I can hear her now.” She looked up at me. “Tell me, who names a Jewish kid for a bird? But your mother had her own ideas. Or perhaps it was him.”
She couldn’t say Father’s name, or even your father. Though once upon a time, he was golden. I knew the litany by heart. Young lawyer from the North Shore. His father had a seat on the Board of Trade. Grandmother, a sophisticated German Jew, who ate candy during the High Holiday services.
Nana drummed the table with bejeweled fingers and frowned at the cards. “She took in that meshugener boy anyway. When I warned her he could be dangerous, she said he’s just unhappy.”
“He wasn’t dangerous,” I insisted. Yet, how do I know? I was, what, fifteen, sixteen? I wanted to tell Nana about the way he’d sneak up on us with a handheld camera, then cry out, Cinema vérité! He was making a documentary for school. Life Inside a Real Family. The memory stirred something in me. Not a longing so much as a feeling that I am back there, in that moment, turning away from the camera, hiding my face in my hands, hearing his pleas. No! No! Keep doing what you were doing. He wasn’t dangerous.
“Mother was right,” I said, catching Nana’s gaze.
“Listen to me, Phoebe. Let’s say the kid was unhappy. Is that any reason to take him in? Sylvie needed another kid like she needed a hole in her head. His family had money. And I mean, money money. The kind that makes the world go round. They could have set him up at The Ritz. But the point isn’t even that. You can write this down: Nobody’s happy.” She slapped down a card then launched into a tale about a time Mother ran away and ended up at the Clark.
“That joint was no place for a woman with a family. It attracted seedy men in trench coats and a few film buffs, not that your mother had time for the movies.” She looked down at the cards, as if they might tell her what came next. “Sylvie was in the lobby when I arrived. She started to cry. I told her to pull herself together. She had a house to run, children who needed her. She blubbered about wanting to do something that she wanted to do. But I can’t even decide what movie to see. I don’t know if I’ve ever decided anything.”
I thought of Mother wanting to run off like the cat, only she’d left eggs on the stove.
“So, I sent Bertha. Sue me. Sylvie needed help. He was no help. Went to the office every morning on the 8:03. Couldn’t even walk to the station like other men. And Bunny was waiting on the other end. Your mother used to wiggle her nose and say, Solomon’s got Bunny, taking down his every word and handing it back to him in black on white. At night, he went down to the basement to play with his trains. On the weekends, it was tennis. Yet he insisted on taking in that kid. It’s the right thing to do, Sylvie. Right for him. Eddie’s father was the head of the firm.”
Nana fixed sad blue eyes on me. “That’s the story, Morning Glory. Now give me a kiss and then go ask Maydell to fix you a little something to eat.”
* * *
We all love the story about the time Mother said yes to a second egg salad sandwich and Father fell in love.
Sylvie said ‘yes’ the moment I proposed. But not as fast as she did to that second sandwich.
“Solly played it for laughs,” my aunt said. “But he knew. He had to know.” We were sitting at her kitchen table, an old photo album between us.
“Know what?” I asked.
“Oh, Phoebe.” She hesitated. “Sylvie wasn’t in love with him. Not really. Not fireworks, over the moon love. There’d been someone else. I thought you knew.”
“She was having an affair?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She looked through the photos, stopping at one of Mother with a young man, his arm draped over her shoulder, grinning like the cat with the canary, though he didn’t appear smug, just happy. Mother’s smile looked pasted on, a say cheese! rictus for the photographer. Love? Hard to tell. It was always hard to tell. The still water who runs deep, Nana called her. “Poochie,” my aunt is pointing to the grinning man. “This was before she met your father.”
“Then why . . . .”
“Poochie worked for his father. They made women’s coats. He was a terrific guy. We all liked him. Ask Chubby, if you don’t believe me. Or Mitzi. But your nana. She went around muttering under her breath. Women’s coats. Then along came Solomon. A good catch.”
“So Mother settled.”
“Your father had his fine points, don’t forget. He was funny and smart. He had a bright future. And he was crazy about Sylvie. Over time, though, he retreated, leaving her to manage their life. He became another kid for Sylvie to look after.”
“And she stayed,” I said bitterly.
“Where would she go? Nobody gets divorced in our family. Nana said divorce was for Hollywood stars and chanteuses who sang at the Palmer House.” Vera grazed a finger over Mother’s image, then touched it to her lips as if kissing a mezuzah. “Sylvie was a quicksilver girl with a generous smile. It was hard to watch all the fizz go out of her. I once told her that Buddy’s sabbatical in Africa was our before and after. All the events of our life line up on one side or the other of that year. Sylvie got quiet. Finally, she said, I wonder if I have a before and after? Then she let out a sharp laugh and said, I suppose it could be the day I said ‘yes’ to another sandwich.”
* * *
Bertha recognized me right away. “Phoebe!” Her face lit up, before collapsing. “Poor Sylvie. Such a mistake. It should not happen.”
I followed her to the break room where she handed me a bottle of water and launched into her tale. “I was at health club. Different club from now. But same. I’m folding towels in locker room when this woman, your grandmother, she says to me, do I clean houses? I wanted to say, I do not come to America to clean. But maybe she will say to me that I am cleaning locker room, so what’s the difference?”
Bertha grew animated as she spoke, her face softening, verging on pretty, in a slatternly, sloe-eyed way. “My boyfriend, Turk, he found job for me at club where I met your grandmother, but he did not say anything about cleaning. It was bad job. Womens throw towels anywhere. They leave hair on shower floor.” She grimaced. “So, when this woman, your grandmother, asks do I clean houses, I think maybe is better job than to pick up towels or hair, and toilet paper what is not in toilet. Then your grandmother, she tells me cleaning is for daughter who has so many childrens, like an old woman in a shoe. When I say, ‘Your daughter, she lives in shoe?’ she laughs and says that’s just story. When I tell her, ‘I don’t clean shoes,’ your grandmother, she laughs again.
“So, I go and work for Sylvie. May she rest in peace.” Bertha quickly crossed herself. “I remember, I ring bell. She comes to door in blue jeans and sweat shirt. She is holding rag. I look at rag. She sees I look. ‘Oh! I was just washing the floor. Sorry,’ she says, and puts rag behind back. Why she apologizes, I do not know. I tell her I’m here to clean. She looks at me like she does not know what am I saying. So, I tell her, ‘Your mother, she sent me. She did not tell to you that Bertha will clean?’ Then she opens door wide. I could be burglar, or strangler like what’s from Boston, but Sylvie, she lets me to come inside and I think Bertha will have easy time here. I look around, see big glass light on ceiling. Very fancy. I point and say, ‘I do not clean such things.’ She says, ‘Oh, the chandelier? That’s okay.’ ”
She paused. “Your mother, she was good woman, but she lets things to happen what shouldn’t be. You childrens, whatever you wanted, you could do. When I see this, I know I could do also what I want. This is true story,” she said, her voice turning soft with regret.
* * *
“I don’t know what I can tell you.” But it turned out Bunny Kohlberg knew plenty.
How could I tell her that I didn’t know what I wanted? I shrugged. “I mean, you worked for Father and Mr. Sugarman.” I regretted bringing up Father, afraid she’d tell me to talk to him. What do you think, Phoebs? I don’t want his version of the truth.
I’d always thought of Bunny as old, but she must have been forty-something, about my age now, when we’d all descend on the office, draining the water cooler, spinning on swivel chairs in the library, bickering over the key to the restroom down the hall.
Mother laughed at Bunny’s old lady shoes, but this afternoon she had on aqua runners with silver streaks. There was a plate of Salerno butter cookies on the coffee table, and a pot of tea, which she poured into thick white mugs with an air of calm authority as she proceeded to fill in the blanks.
“You know that Eddie’s grandfather was shot dead just outside a South Side rib joint? Goldie, his wife, was at his side.” I shook my head. “Well, you couldn’t open a paper without reading about Jake Greenbaum, brainy front man for the Mob.” I wanted to protest that I was three years old at the time, but she rushed on. “Victim of gangland killing, the papers called him. But the family said botched robbery. It’s all there. In black and white. How he died with $173 and a Mexican peso in his pocket. How the Mob put a brewery in his name. And a hotel. The Pontiac. Back then it was mostly residential. Rich dowagers lived there. A few mobsters.” I wanted to tell her I knew they owned the hotel, but I was afraid she’d stop talking.
“So after Jake died, everything – the brewery, the hotel – went to Pearl, to Mrs. Sugarman, Greenbaum’s daughter.”
“Eddie’s mother,” I said.
She pushed the cookies toward me. “They say, money can’t buy happiness. They got that right. She was always looking over her shoulder, and in time she stopped leaving the hotel, and she wouldn’t let Eddie out, except for school, and even then, a driver took him. Poor lamb. Sometimes Mr. Sugarman sent me to the hotel with a package from Fields, or something for her to sign. She’d be sitting in the dimly lit living room, dressed in a suit and pumps, as if waiting for her flight to be called.”
I didn’t know where Bunny was going with all this, and what, if anything, it had to do with whatever it was I wanted to know. Perhaps she sensed my uncertainty because she stopped talking and brusquely asked, “Why are you digging all this up?”
I reached for a cookie, stuck my finger in the hole in the middle, like a child, nibbling in a circle until it was gone. I needed to know what happened. No. That’s wrong. I needed to know how it happened. Robin said our family attracted madness. But why? Mother could have told me, but she’s dead, and I don’t even know why she died on a Wednesday, the day after a voice lesson and one day before the hairdresser. Who am I kidding? If Sylvie Glazer were alive, she wouldn’t tell me. Still water.
I fixed my gaze on Bunny. “Did they know?” I hesitated. “Did they know all that when Eddie came to stay? Did my parents know?”
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Everybody knew, Toots. Everybody.”
* * *
If you believe everything you read, here are the facts, in black and white. Jacob Arthur Greenbaum was 5’7”, 150 pounds. He had coal black hair and piercing green eyes. He attended “business” meetings in a back room at Fratelli’s Custom Tailors, 620 N. Michigan Avenue. He was 65 years old when he died in front of the Hickory Pit Restaurant.
So what does all this tell me, except that stories are embedded in other stories like Russian nesting dolls? It tells me how little I know. Everybody knew, Toots. Maybe. I only know that we can dig up facts and never get to the truth.
* * *
Bertha took up residence in the carriage house, which sounds grander than the efficiency apartment above the garage that it was. I don’t have bus to worry about. And you don’t worry, Will Bertha be late? was all it took for Mother to cede our playhouse to Bertha.
One morning – and I can tell you this happened because I was there – Bertha showed up sleepy-eyed, rumpled, and late. After pushing aside the dirty breakfast dishes, she settled down at the table with coffee and the newspaper. When Mother returned from dropping Father at the train station, she asked Bertha if she’d seen a list on the table.
“This?” Bertha picked up a slip of paper as if holding a dead mouse by the tail.
“I thought it would be easier to make a list of things that need doing. Around the house.”
“Easier for who?”
“Actually, Solomon thought it would be easier. He said it would clear the channels of communication.”
“I don’t know about these channels what you say.” Bertha set down the list and continued clucking over the news. “Listen to this,” she said, as Mother cleared the dishes. “Man lives in cave for one hundred days. Wants to know what happens after being alone for such long time. I can tell you, man must be smelling.”
“Please read the list when you have time,” Mother said, her voice tight and restrained
“It says here lizards fall out of trees in Florida. They fall on peoples’ heads.” Bertha ran a hand through her plum-colored hair and shuddered.
“We can discuss the list once you’ve read it.”
“We discuss, I think, that Turk will move in. Help fix things.”
Turk, Bertha’s boyfriend, worked as a bouncer at a bar on Pulaski Avenue. He was a thickset, moon-faced man with a thin, unsmiling mouth. When Mother said that Turk already had a job, Bertha replied, “Is at night. During day Turk can help around house. This house has so many things what is broken.”
Mother said she’d think about it and Bertha nodded. “It says here, the President, he lifts beagle dog by ears. People, now, is mad.”
* * *
“Then it all came to a head,” Aunt Vera said. “One afternoon, your mother returned with the groceries and found Bertha and Eddie dancing around the kitchen, hip bumping, laughing, Bertha waving a wooden spoon in the air. Sylvie shouted over the music and asked why Eddie wasn’t in school. ‘Leave boy alone. He’s good boy,’ Bertha called out.” My aunt paused. “And what did Sylvie do? She thanked Bertha for cooking dinner. Then Bertha said she was cooking for Turk.”
Vera rushed on. “Not long after, Sylvie walked into Jonah’s room with folded laundry and found Bertha sitting on the bed watching TV. ‘Some persons knock,’ Bertha told her. Sylvie, of course, apologized. Sorry, I thought you were downstairs vacuuming. To which Bertha said, ‘Do you hear vacuum?’ ”
“Poor Mother,” was all I could say.
Vera held up her hand. “I’m not finished. A few days later, Sylvie overhead Bertha telling Turk, ‘That woman is cuckoo bird. She ask I should check flower vases. I tell her, I do not know anything if flowers are dead. What can you expect from a Jewish?’ ”
I smiled at my aunt’s mean imitation of Bertha, but as she went on I felt an annoyance that quickened to anger. “Stop!” I cried. I’d heard too many stories of my mother’s humiliation. Now, I can never not know that my mother crept away. I can never not know that she couldn’t say ‘no’ to taking in Eddie. I can never not know that she didn’t really love my father, or that she wanted to run away, but couldn’t succeed.
“Stop!” I repeated. My aunt looked stricken. I wanted to say, Bertha’s face lit up when she saw me. She crossed herself when she said Mother’s name. Instead, I apologized for my outburst, but she shushed me and reached across the table to take my hand. Something stopped me from flinching. I needed my aunt. I loved her. And hadn’t I asked her to tell me what she knew? I’d come for the dirt.
But there was more. “Of course, Sylvie couldn’t get rid of those two grifters. It was your nana who sent them packing. They were gone within a day, along with a whistling teakettle, the bed linens, Turkish towels, and what had been Nana’s everyday dishes, which she’d given to Sylvie after replacing them with something new.”
* * *
“I like to think she was heading to a travel agent to plan a trip to Paris,” I told Jonah.
“Paris?”
We were sitting in the back of the funeral parlor, as far as possible from Nana, dabbing her eyes as all the world, even the mayor viewed Mother in the open casket.
I shared a story Vera had told me about Mother tracking down a chocolate shop on rue de Sévigné, only to find it had been replaced by a stationery store. “Mother wandered inside and picked up a notebook. The cover was handmade paper with a ribbon binding. It was so pretty she forgot her disappointment over the chocolates. But when she opened the book all the pages were blank. She panicked. She’d just graduated from college and had no idea what came next. I had nothing to say, she told Vera. “It became a joke for a while,” Vera told me. “If your mother’s hopes were dashed, she’d say, You want hot chocolate and you get blank pages instead, or simply rue de Sévigné.” I paused. “I think she wanted to go back and get it right, Jonah. She’d buy a notebook and fill it with stories.”
Jonah had his own theory. “What if she was meeting Chubby or Mitzi for lunch, and they haven’t said so, because they feel somehow to blame for her death?”
I considered this, then shook my head. “Let’s just say neither of us knows why she was where she was that afternoon.”
We fell silent. I scanned the room. It was full of people I didn’t recognize. Rubberneckers. Curiosity seekers. Strangers with long faces and misty eyes. I turned to Jonah. “You want to bet if the mayor shows up?”
He laughed and said he’d never bet against Nana.
“Then how about Eddie?” I thought he’d show up, though we’d lost touch years ago. He departed as suddenly as he’d arrived. I asked Jonah if he remembered Mother telling us Eddie had gone back to the hotel? Or perhaps he went to the psych ward after all. “Facts were never important to her,” I said.
“But she wasn’t a liar. She was more of a fabulist. A storyteller.” He paused. “You know, I saw him in Grant Park.”
“Who?”
“Eddie,” he said impatiently. “I thought we were talking about Eddie.”
I nodded.
“It was some time last winter. I still can’t believe I recognized him. His hair was clipped short on one side; the other side was long and matted. His trench coat was soiled, his boots scuffed.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t think he saw me. He was on a park bench tossing breadcrumbs to the pigeons.”
“Rosen’s?” I said, like Mother, turning a moment of quiet revelation into a joke.
Jonah didn’t laugh. “They went out of business years ago. Didn’t you know?”
I wanted to say, recuerdo, the Spanish for souvenir, from recordar, memory. I need a souvenir, un recuerdo, a memory to hold onto. I want it to be the same memory as yours. I want us to break bread together, eat from the same loaf. Please don’t tell me it was seedless and sliced, because I remember it otherwise.
“There are so many things I don’t know,” I finally said. I glanced across the room to the casket. This was the moment I knew she was dead.
I offered Jonah one more story from Vera. “Mother told her she’d wait for the phone to ring. She thought she could will it to ring. She wanted someone to call. Anyone. Someone, something serendipity.”
Suddenly, I felt overcome with grief. Mother waiting for something to happen, and like the punchline to a very bad joke she was hit by a bus. Then it came to me. She was always on the phone. I measured her calls in cigarettes, the ashes piling up in the old clam shell we’d brought home from the beach. A two-cigarette call was the norm. And yet she waited for it to ring.
Glancing at the casket again, I thought that if this were a fairy tale, I’d walk up and kiss my mother’s cheek. Her eyes would flutter open. Phoebe. She’d smile and then she’d start at the beginning.
Miriam Karmel is the author of the novel Being Esther (Milkweed Editions, 2013), and a short story collection, Subtle Variations and Other Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Bellevue Literary Review, Water~Stone Review, and Passages North.