Assisted Loving (4 page)

I
nformational interlude. Here's something I never knew before. Or let me put it another way. Here's something I never had to think about until now: the Census Bureau estimates that 80 percent of all healthy widowers remarry, and many more end up in live-in relationships soon after a wife dies. There are no figures for senior dating or, as my dad calls it, “keeping company,” but ask boomers these days and they will tell you they have or know of an elderly parent who is reentering the dating game after being widowed. Men like my father have the demographics in their favor. There are three women available for every one of them, a virtual sample sale for those energetic enough to shop; and with longevity what it is today, not to mention pharmaceuticals, many are. To make it even easier for the men, they have
no trouble dating younger women, while the overwhelming majority of widows tend to end up with men older than themselves due to the long-standing societal norms that even Demi Moore can't undo.

One reason for men turning to dating soon after losing their wives? They enjoyed marriage the first time around. Another? They're incompetent. “Babies,” one woman called them in an article I clipped on widowers and dating. In addition to being incapable of going to dinner alone (not necessarily the case with their busy female counterparts), men don't like to come home to an empty house or do housework. They're not just looking for love, they're looking for lunch. Senior women, meanwhile, find it liberating to be free of the responsibilities of marriage and caregiving. They are more likely to be good at maintaining social networks that don't even include men. Men who have lost their wives, on the other hand, are less adept at creating new social lives for themselves after so many years as half of a couple. So rather than spend a lot of time mourning, the way widows do, they get busy. As an old saying suggests, when there's a death, women mourn and men replace. After a few weeks of not terribly expressive grieving, the men can be ready to move on. And that's great, but what are the kids supposed to think the first time they see a freshly widowed parent in a car driving off on what appears to be some kind of date? And, more urgently, what the hell are they supposed to do?

P
.S. 27 is a public elementary school in Red Hook, a housing-project neighborhood in Brooklyn that is not near any subway stop. It's so inconveniently located that I get sent out there in a chauffeur-driven town car when I make my four volunteer visits each winter. The organization that sends me pays for the car, an amenity that may seem counterintuitive to altruism, but works fine for me. It also helps that it's a late-morning gig, so I don't have to get up too early to make my contribution to society. As the author of one out-of-print children's book—about a privileged little Fifth Avenue kitty with serious family issues—I am part of an “authors read aloud” program.

It's a rainy Wednesday in February, six weeks or so after last seeing my father, when I get out of the car. Inside
the school I sign in for a security guard. The fluorescent lights cast a harsh glow. The halls of the school are an institutional mint green. In the stairwells, there's Cyclone fencing. Some children I pass in the corridors recognize me from previous visits and they yell and wave.

For someone so free of responsibility, volunteering in schools provides both real meaning for me and also, let's be honest, something to brag about at dinner parties. My mother was always proud of me for my volunteer work. Oh, she worried about my going into dangerous neighborhoods, but she couldn't help but be encouraging. She was a volunteer for years. She would read to people in a nursing home on Long Island and lead book discussions. I prefer to volunteer with children. I play ukulele, sing silly cat songs, read my book, and talk about writing.

I love an audience. Even second-graders will do.

Today, I'm not feeling so inspired. It's my birthday, forty-five years old, and it does occur to me that, despite my ambition, I may be a little old to get much further ahead in life. There has not been another children's book, let alone a series. My style column in the paper isn't turning into a springboard for world media domination either. The other problem with my birthday, and I try not to let this bother me all that much, is that it falls on the day before Valentine's Day. So it's a double-barreled occasion for self-reflection.

Mrs. Stark's classroom is on the third floor, across from the drinking fountain. It's my second visit this winter. A sign on her door says, W
ELCOME
A
UTHOR
B
OB
M
ORRIS
! I open it and see a classroom full of faces focused on writing in workbooks. There are art and science projects all over the room. Mrs. Stark is a tough-talking young
woman with a chipped tooth and a Brooklyn accent. She has what it takes to keep an overcrowded classroom in control, which seems to be, above all else, laser-sharp purpose and a sense of humor. She makes what I do for a living look like recess.

“There's a chair for you there, Mr. Morris,” Mrs. Stark says.

I sit in an old tattered reading chair by the window.

“Okay now, class, stop writing,” Mrs. Stark says. “One, two, three!”

And just like that, they come to attention at their little desks.

“Look who's here,” she says. “What do we say to our guest?”

“Good morning, Mr. Morris!” they call out in unison.

The enthusiasm is heartening. I must have done something right on my first visit.

“Now, class, I want you to take your things and find a seat—quietly—on the rug. No pushing. And leave Mr. Morris some room. Can you do that, please?”

With a minimal amount of fuss, they scramble to sit cross-legged all around me, vying for the spaces right under my feet. They stare at my ukulele. They work to sit up as straight as they can. They aren't rich, but they are richly accessorized, with light-up sneakers, vivid Sponge Bob and Simpsons sweatshirts, and all kinds of plastic jewelry and geegaws in their hair. The new maximalists. They settle on the floor into a squirming, expectant mass, and Mrs. Stark calls them to attention again from her desk.

“Mr. Morris, before you begin, we have something we'd like to say to you.”

“What's that?” I ask.

“Class? What do we have to say? One, two, three!”

There is a beat, about the length of time between lightning and thunder. Then, in perfect unison, they scream: “Happy birthday, Mr. Morris!”

Their delivery is kind of primal. And my response is, too. Tears fill my eyes.

“Now, class, starting with Juan,” Mrs. Stark says, “bring your things up to Mr. Morris.” One at a time, they shyly step up to me with handmade birthday cards.

I shake each hand and make a fuss over each card. When they are finished, Mrs. Stark leads them in the birthday song. When it comes time for me to sing my own songs back to them, they are watching me so attentively, so happy to have me here, that I lose control of my voice for a moment.

I leave the school glowing, thoroughly pleased with myself. In the town car back to Manhattan, instead of checking my phone messages, I read each birthday card again, feeling a little like my parents must have felt when I made them cards for every birthday and anniversary. “You're funny, Bob Morris,” says one from a boy named Angel. “You are my favorite author,” says one from a girl named Janelle. This is what I call a haul. A good birthday.

I haven't had many meaningful birthdays. My fortieth was pretty good. But that's because I was in love. I flew into L.A. to be with a new beau, named Jack. He picked me up at the airport, ruddy and rugged in corduroy shorts and rain boots. We drove to the organic market, then to his apartment, where he made an organic dinner. We had not been dating long. It was my first time in his dark and cramped home. I wish I hadn't studied his bookshelves
so carefully. They were full of self-help authors and New Age tomes.

At midnight, he presented me with a small box. I opened it to find a ring.

It was a silver heart surrounded by entwined hands.

“An Irish friendship ring,” he said.

I like the Irish. Jack was gorgeously, redheadedly Irish. I was turning forty, and I was thinking that my luck with men was finally shifting. But the ring—although it wasn't cheap—looked inelegant to me.

I held my tongue and slipped it on, eyed it in the light.

“It's very nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Do you really like it?” he asked.

“Is it returnable?” I replied.

The next night was my party at the Chateau Marmont. Jack and some friends of mine were in charge. We invited a hundred guests, and filled the room with enough people to make it work pretty well. But by the end of the week I had grown weary of him—his morning chanting, his yoga, the elaborate washing of his face each night with organic oils and customized ointments. I called it his ritual ablutions. I thought he was a New Age narcissist, totally obsessed with his body. He thought I was unable to love, too judgmental, and crippled by my own cynicism. It broke my heart when he left me.

Since there's nobody else to step in and orchestrate my forty-fifth birthday tonight (my brother's away with his family), my friend Marisa has taken charge. I'm glad. We are in the town car she has ordered (my second today, thank you) and are headed up to a runway show at the Four Seasons. When we walk up the marble steps (she in
very high-heeled Gucci boots and white leather jacket; me in a blue velvet suit that hangs a little funny), we are surprised to find that the show has already started. Fashion shows always start late. “What is going on here?” she says. “We're not that late!”

But there's nobody at the door out front to let us in. We stand outside a wall of tinted windows in an icy drizzle, peering in as models sashay past people we know. Marisa pounds on the glass, only to be ignored by a minxlike minion near the door.

How dare she keep us out?

“You know what,” I say. “Why don't we go to the Grill Room and get drunk?”

“What time is it?” Marisa asks.

“Almost nine.”

“Maybe just one. Silvano is expecting me for dinner.”

“Really? Tonight?”

“I always join him at the restaurant at ten o'clock. You know that.”

“Right. So you're ditching me?”

“You're welcome to come, Bob. Why don't you? I'm sure it'll be fine.”

I thank her for trying to make my birthday work and apologize for making fun of her. But no, I don't want to intrude on her private dinner with her man. I kiss her good-bye, then go up to have a drink by myself in the bar upstairs, one of the most beautiful rooms in New York, dimly lit and hushed as a mausoleum.

“Expecting anybody?” the bartender asks.

I tell him no, order a Scotch, and sip it slowly. Then I tell myself that I'm fine.

And also a little too old for a midlife crisis.

N
ot long after my birthday, my brother and I realize Dad's eightieth is coming up in late March. And it occurs to us that even though it's only six months after Mom's death, the old man will want us to plan him a big party in Florida.

“I'd love it,” he tells me over the phone. He thinks it would be fun and the perfect way to reciprocate to all his friends. “So many of them were so hospitable over the years to your mother and me,” he says.

Jewish tradition says no singing or dancing for a year after a wife dies, and my mom was pretty devout. But Dad's not. He lost any faith he had in God when Mom got sick. Or maybe he just got tired of standing up and sitting down at services. The kosher rules she liked to observe got to be a drag, too. Bye-bye, latkes. Hello, lobster.

His is a God of fun, not discipline.

My mother's older sister, Aunt Phyllis, although fond of Dad, says she will not attend the party. “I just couldn't,” she says. “It's too close. You understand.” Mom's younger sister, Bev, who lives nearby in Palm Beach Gardens, eschews the event, too. “I just hope you aren't planning on having any dancing or singing,” she says.

Actually, we are. For a sing-along. Because it just wouldn't be Dad if there weren't. I hire a pianist named Wes and book a room at the Hilton on the beach.

“We know it's what will make him happy, right?” I tell my brother.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I just keep thinking about what Mom would say.”

I do, and I don't. I know she didn't want to be a burden, she wanted us to enjoy ourselves. Nothing made her happier than to see all three of us happy. I guess that's why I took off for Scotland the week before she died in August 2002. I had been invited on a Scotch tasting tour, and, after a rough summer of one emergency after the next (alternating shifts with my brother and spelling for Dad, who could be counted on for only so much help with her medications and doctor's appointments), I felt ready for a break. I'm not sure why I didn't call home every day to see how she was doing in the hospital while I was away. She had fallen out of bed and injured her head. But when I left New York, it didn't seem all that serious, and my father and brother told me they wanted me to take my trip. In Scotland, we had a packed itinerary of distillery tastings and formal dinners, and with the time difference and lack of Internet service, it was hard to keep in touch with home. When I got to a phone a few days into my trip (a pay phone on a road beside hilly fields dotted
with barley and sheep), Mom's voice was unrecognizable. She was babbling like a toddler. And I was so far away that I couldn't even touch her forehead or hold her hand. “I love you, Mom,” I said into the receiver. “I'll be home soon. Get well, okay?” I hung up the phone and went back to my Scotch tour with a group of bickering New Yorkers. Like the Scotch we were tasting, there was a slightly bitter quality to the week, but it didn't occur to me to end it early. If anything, all the Scotch kept me oblivious.

One night toward the end of the tour, I was standing under a starry sky outside our hotel on Islay, a remote island known for its peaty Scotch. The northern lights—or something like them, anyway—were glowing on the horizon. Suddenly I was remembering the time as an adolescent I had woken my mother up in a motel room in Pennsylvania to take her outside to see the aurora borealis. While my brother and father slept, Mom and I stood together in our pajamas in a lonely parking lot, looking up at the shifting, spectral marvel. “You're the one in this family who sees the beauty in things, Bobby,” she told me. And she was the one I could show the beauty to. Even at the end of her life, when she could barely walk, I could get her out of the house to walk down our street to enjoy a blazing sunset over the Great South Bay. She was willing to be inspired. And there was always so much I wanted her to see, so much I could show her. My father was too self-absorbed to listen, too busy with his own fun to be open to taking in the joy of anything I loved and wanted to share. But Mom, in her innocence, cared.

The Scotch tour continued. Why didn't I drop out and rush home to her? At the beginning of the last weekend I called in to my voice mail from a Glasgow hotel room.

A message. “This is your brother, Jeff. Remember me?
We haven't heard from you all week. I just thought you should know that Mom is in very bad shape in the hospital, and she may not be alive when you get back. I'm not sure why you haven't been in touch. Maybe you didn't want anything intruding on your holiday. All I know is that if you don't get your ass back here right away to show you're taking this seriously, then you will have so much to be sorry for that I imagine you'll be in therapy dealing with the guilt for the rest of your life.” The click after his final words was as loud as a door slamming. I hung up the phone. My hands were shaking. Jeff could never do enough for Mom. He employed her once a week in his educational media business in Manhattan, giving her the sense of purpose she had lost when she retired from the library. He lavished her with gifts, monitored every doctor's visit, researched every new medication, hoping to find a way to fix things or at least make them better for her. Holiday dinners were always in one of his beautiful homes with his family. The devotion he could show my mother put me to shame. It never occurred to him to be anything but absolutely attentive. No matter what I would do for her, he'd do me one better. The result was that he raised the level of my own attentiveness, a very good thing. But now, here I was, so unhelpfully far away, and I couldn't reach him to explain my pointed absence.

I reached my father instead. He sounded circumspect. He told me not to worry, but that we had to pull together as a family. It was important my brother and I not fight. And it was important for Mom that we all love each other. I told him that I'd be home Sunday, and that if she slipped away without me, I had already said good-bye before I left. On a hot August Tuesday, after Scrabble, I had lifted
her into her bed, gone into the living room, and played her piano, singing “Tumbalaika,” an old Yiddish lullaby. And as I played, I heard her, straining to sing along in a ruined voice that was so different from the sweet one I knew from childhood. I finished the song, let the last chord fade, then went to her bed and kissed her good night, knowing I might not see her again.

“I already said my good-bye, Dad,” I told him. “Jeff should know that.”

Even over the phone thousands of miles away, I could sense his confusion. Like me, he wasn't one to be inconvenienced and had his own way of shrugging off heavy obligations. We were just so alike in that way, so starkly different from my brother.

“It's up to you if you want to come home, Bobby,” my father said. “We all know Scotland is a long way away. And I can't make any promises, but I think she'll still be around on Sunday when you get back.” I did leave Scotland early to be with her before she died. But only after spending another day there first, in Edinburgh, a city I had always wanted to see. I bought her a scarf, Merino wool in the pale blue color of her eyes.

She died a few days later, but was not coherent enough to say good-bye. Jeff told me it was the worst day of his life. For me, it was more complicated. Watching her take hours to expire in the hospital brought up feelings of both sadness and impatience. Her breath slowed as she lay without many tubes left to keep her going. But she was fighting to the end in a way that exhausted all of us. Finally, when the moment came and the life passed from her face, leaving it frozen, with mouth and eyes open, I felt horrified, then, callous as this sounds, liberated.

And now that she's gone, all I want is for Dad to stay healthy and happy, and not to be a worry. Six months have passed, and all those years of concern for her are behind us. She's gone. Dad is well, free to run around his beloved Palm Beach paradise unencumbered by responsibility. And even Jeff—who says he feels lost without Mom, and finds himself wanting to call her to tell her things when he knows full well that she isn't around anymore for him to phone—doesn't have the heart to sober him up.

So we decide to make a big celebration for the big eight-oh.

“Look, it's a hard call,” Jeff says. “But it's what Dad wants, so let's do it.”

I'm glad he's willing to err on the side of happiness. And I feel incredibly lucky not to be an only child.

Now it's the afternoon of the celebration, a sunny Saturday in March, when the weather in Palm Beach is its absolute best. Jeff is staying with his wife and kids at the Ritz-Carlton up the road. Under my tyrannical tutelage, Maddy and Ian, my niece and nephew, have worked up a number to perform, a parody of “Singin' in the Rain.” I'm staying with Dad in his apartment, pasting photographs of him as a handsome young man with jet black hair and a gorgeous wife onto poster boards for a big display. My hands are sticky with rubber cement. I feel like a kid again, decorating the house to surprise him on a birthday. I still have to do the seating. But I also have to teach him the parody I wrote (the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree) for him to sing with me in front of his guests. His cell phone keeps ringing. CNN is broadcasting shrill, nonstop coverage of Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. I'm wildly opposed to it. Dad's all for it. His Republican poli
tics annoy me. He's a disgrace to the Jews, a red state person in a blue state community. But, in a rare occurrence of self-mastery, I hold my tongue. It's the old man's eightieth birthday. And, really, what nicer way for him to celebrate than by singing in Palm Beach while there's bombing in Baghdad? I take my ukulele to the balcony, lure Dad outside.

“Okay, Dad, turn the cell phone off,” I tell him. “We have to learn this song. Here's what I have. What do you think? It's to the tune of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.'”

I strum and sing:

Dad is shaking his head as if he's just tasted something very unpleasant. Now he's getting up to walk away. I know I'm teasing him a little with the lyrics, but I can't help myself. I gently nudge him down. “Hey, where are you going, buster? We have to focus on this right now, or it'll be a mess at your party.”

“I don't think so, Bobby,” he says.

“What? What's the matter, Dad?”

“I don't want to sing that to my friends.”

I don't blame him. It's all so confusing. Why are we both so lighthearted in the wake of Mom's death?

“Dad, I worked hard on these lyrics. Give it a chance.”

“Don't you have anything else on offer?”

His cell phone rings again. He grabs it. I stand up over him. I want to grab it out of his hands, but I don't. Why am I so nervous? Is it because, despite all the lip service,
this party is a bad idea, and I'm trying to make it his fault instead of mine? Or is it just that I like the opportunity to be in control of him? I don't want to embarrass myself singing unprepared in front of an audience, even if it's just family and friends.

“Can you turn your phone off until we learn this and you're showered and dressed, Dad?” He nods. I reach out and tousle his soft hair. “Please?”

I can't believe I am writing songs the way he did when he was in the army sixty years ago. And I can't believe how important it is
not
to bomb in Palm Beach tonight. It's absurd. After so many years of striving and failing to make my mark as some kind of professional performer, I'm giving my old man a hard time about the audience at his birthday party? And yet, I also know that, if we can just get a good song together as a father-and-son team, it'll make him proud and make his party very special.

“Bobby, maybe this isn't such a good idea. It's not worth the aggravation.”

“But I wrote this song for you. I know how you love an audience.”

“True, but don't you get a big kick out of doing this, too?”

“Me? Please! I am doing this in your honor, Dad! This is all for you!”

“If you say so.”

I stare out at the intercoastal waterway, searching for composure. There are some pelicans gliding over the dock. They've always reminded me of my father, with their silvery heads and prominent straight noses, kind of clumsy looking, especially when they hobble, yet they glide so easily in the air, cruising along looking for noth
ing but some fish, a breeze, and a good time. Out there by the pool, an old man Dad knows is on a chaise lounge, tanning happily, so relaxed, without a care, it seems, without anybody nagging him to put on sunblock.
Wife is gone, rest in peace, move south, start over.

“You know, if you really want to honor me, Bobby,” Dad finally says, “you have to write something funny that my friends can relate to.”

I take a deep breath. I let it out. Then I think of something.

“Okay, Dad. I have another verse. Try this, okay?”

I strum so hard it hurts my thumb.

“Okay, now this one has legs,” he says.

“So sing with me, Dad, come on! The words are right here on this paper. I wrote them big for you.” And much to my delight, he does, and in his finest croon.

“It's unpleasant but very true,” he says, “I have to admit.”

“Just sing, Dad, sing!”