The Other Side of the World (25 page)

“So let's go home again, Charlie—what would you think of
that
?” she said when, well past Hartford, we were approaching New Haven.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“And as long as we'll be in the old neighborhood,” she said, “I've decided we should visit my mother and my sisters. I haven't seen my mother for nearly three years. My sisters say she's not quite what she used to be—that she's in the early stages of Irish Alzheimer's.”

“
Irish
Alzheimer's?”

“That's where you forget everything but the grudge.”

“Sounds about right,” I laughed.

“And once we get there,” she said, “I've decided I'll ask my sisters to invite my father. Or I'll do it myself, and surprise the
bastard. My parents never divorced, but they've lived apart for most of my adult life. I told you that before, didn't I?”

“Yes.”

“And who knows
what
marvelous things might happen once we're all together again,” she laughed. “My father was an old song-and-dance man, you know, though I only got to see him perform once or twice, and that was when I was very young—when they were trying to revive vaudeville. But I was remembering one of his gags, about how a newspaper account of an Irish social event begins.”

“So tell me, Seana,” I said. “How does a newspaper account of an Irish social event begin?”

“‘Among the injured were…'”

I asked if she'd called any of her sisters to let them know we'd be coming, and she said she was taking a page from my book—from the way I'd waited until we were nearby, in Maine, before calling Nick's parents. As in all wars, she said, an element of surprise could carry the day.

“Surprises are good sometimes,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “In stories and in life. Like us.”

“Like us.”

“That was one of your father's mantras, in our writing workshop. ‘Chances are,' he'd say, and he was quoting from Flannery O'Connor, ‘that if what you're writing doesn't surprise you, it won't surprise anyone else either.'”

I think we both saw returning to the old neighborhood as a kind of pilgrimage, and I was about to say so—to say that it pleased me to be memorializing Max by making his last wish come true, but as soon as the thought was there, I remembered that his last wish had not been about us returning to Brooklyn, but about what he'd said when he'd phoned us at Trish's: that we shouldn't forget to be kind to one another.

Seana and I had been living together in the Northampton house for the seven weeks since Max's death, and what had
surprised us was how easy—how natural—it seemed to be doing so. It surprised me too when, snuggled close to me one night before sleep, she whispered that she had a confession to make: that although she'd known a fair number of men in her time, this was a first.

“A first?”

“I've never lived with a man before,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I'd said. “Because you're really good at it…”

What had also surprised was that Max had left instructions for me and for our rabbi, stating that he wanted a traditional Jewish funeral, and spelling out specifics: services for him at the synagogue, where, though he never attended services after I was Bar Mitzvahed, he had remained a dues-paying member until his death; burial in the synagogue's cemetery; observance of a full week of mourning—
shiva
—in our home, with a
minyan
of ten men and/or women, so I could say
Kaddish
for him three times a day; the wish that I observe other rituals—saying
Kaddish
for him from time to time on the Sabbath, and on major holidays such as
Rosh Hashanah
and
Yom Kippur
; that for thirty days I obey the injunction not to shave or marry; that during the week of mourning I keep all mirrors in the house covered, and not wear leather shoes; that, as an outward sign of grief, I have the rabbi cut the collar of one of my good jackets with a razor, and not merely pin on a strip of black cloth as was, generally, the contemporary practice; that I keep a memorial candle lit for him for a full week, and light a 24-hour candle for him each year on the anniversary of his death, on which day he hoped I would visit his grave, attend synagogue, and recite
Kaddish
in his memory.

As to the prohibition against engaging in festivities for a full year, he believed this was contrary to the prevailing rabbinic view, which was that it was forbidden to overdo mourning (thus, he noted, one mourned for only a single hour on the seventh day of the seven days of mourning), and he wrote that I should consider myself excused from this obligation.

The last time I'd been to his old neighborhood had been when I was teaching in New York, I said to Seana, and Max's apartment house had still been there. In fact, I'd been surprised at how little things had changed in thirty years. The houses on his block were the same ones that had been there the first time I'd come to Brooklyn with him, and though there were a few more locked gates across building entrances and alleyways, and though ethnicities had shifted—the people who lived on his block were mostly West Indian, not Jewish, Irish, and Italian the way they'd been when he was growing up—everything else had seemed pretty much the same. On Flatbush Avenue, the Dutch Reformed Church and its cemetery, where he'd hung out with his friends when they cut classes, had seemed in good shape, and a few blocks away, the building that had housed his synagogue was still there, though it had become home to a Pentecostal church. Most of the old movie theaters along Flatbush Avenue—the great picture palaces of the twenties and thirties—had survived, though none showed movies anymore, many were boarded up, and those that weren't boarded up had become vast indoor flea markets where West Indians bought and sold everything from incense, dresses, and mouse traps to canned goods, lawn chairs, and auto parts.

“But what do you think
has
changed, Charlie?” Seana asked.

“Is this a trick question?”

“Tell me what you think has changed,” she said. “Please.”

“Max is gone.”

“What else?”

“We're going there together.”

“That's part of it.”

“And the part I don't get?”

“
Me
,” Seana said. “What's changed is
me
. Although I may look and sound like the Seana you've known—same Jeanne d'Arc hair-do, same apostrophic chipped tooth, same haunting eyes,
same brilliant chip-on-the shoulder wit—I'm essentially a new woman.”

“Really?”

“You can't tell?”

“No.”

“But you
are
curious, yes?”

“No.”

“Come on, Charlie—be a sport,” she said. “Ask me how I've changed. And it's not just our being together, or my deciding to see my family again, though they're part of it. But be my straight man and ask me how I've changed.”

“Okay,” I said. “So listen, Seana, I was thinking about what might have changed in the neighborhood where you and Max grew up, and it occurred to me to wonder about how maybe
you
'
ve
changed.”

“Thank you,” she said. “As I was saying, I've been thinking that what's changed most of all is me.” She drew in a deep breath. Then: “I want children, Charlie.”

“You have me,” I said. “I'm a child.”

“I'm
serious
. I've decided I want to have children.”

“Oh.”

“That's all you have to say—‘Oh'—? Did you
hear
what I said? Can you understand what I'm saying?”

“But…”

“‘But aren't you too old,' the man asks,” she said quickly, then answered her own question: “Probably. Still, we're blessed—or cursed—you choose—with remarkable genes in my family. Caitlin—my oldest sister—had
all
her children, four of them, in her late thirties and early forties. My cousin Maggie had her first child at forty-three, her second and third at forty-four and forty-five. My mother had
me
—the family's pre-eminent ‘Oops!' baby—when she was forty-two.”

“But you're forty-three or forty-four, and…”

“I'm almost forty-five, thank you very much, and I'm
certainly not going to mess with all the fertility crap they put young women through these days, but I really would…”

She stopped, unable to go on. I started to reach over to take her hand, but decided, and not just for safety's sake—we were at New Haven, and were turning off the highway—to keep both hands on the steering wheel.

“Are you okay?” I asked when we came to a stop at the bottom of the exit ramp.

“I'm fine,” she said. “So I guess what I've been trying to say in my lame way is that I think I made a mistake once upon a time—took a wrong turn somewhere—and that it's probably not the kind of mistake that's correctable.”

“Like me with Nick?” I said.

“Something like that,” she said. “Although he
did
get his wish—you see that, don't you?”

“See what?”

“That he's living nowhere now,” Seana said, “which according to him—to what you wrote that he said—is the place to be these days. Then too, it's good to remember what Max used to say.”

“What did Max used to say?”

“That death is not an event in life.”

“That's not Max. That's Wittgenstein,” I said. “Max never took credit for other people's words.”

“Still—Nick, or Max, or Wittgenstein—it remains true that I do wish I'd had children—that I still might
have
children, even though I know it probably can't be.”

“I believe you.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” she said. “But it doesn't matter because what I'm doing, you see, is expressing a feeling in a Seana O'Sullivan way—in triads: me, you, a child. A Catholic triad, come to think of it, because if I can't have a child, that makes the child a ghost.”

“A
holy
ghost?”

“Don't get too smart with me,” she said, “because I'm riled
now, and even though you may not be able to see them, flames are shooting out of both my ears at the moment. I'm expressing a
regret
, Charlie—a big, fat, fucking regret, which is something I've worked diligently to avoid—and I've chosen you as the lucky bastard with whom to share the news. Can you understand
that
?”

“I think you're angry with me because of a mistake
you
made.”

“You bet. And I'm also remembering our conversation with Trish—that you feel the same way I do about having children.”

“Maybe we're twins,” I said.

“And have been engaging in incest?”

“An ancient tradition,” I said.

She looked away. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “And also, while we're on the subject, let me assure you I wasn't proposing that
we
have a child together.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Well I was and I wasn't.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” I said, “but it's hard to have kids without having sex.”

“You're probably right,” she said.

“
Probably?
”

“Well,” she said, “since Max died—the last week or two anyway—we
have
become like an old married couple, you and me.”

“I hadn't thought of it that way,” I said.

I drove into the station's parking garage, where we'd leave the car the way Max and I had done when we'd go to New York together, and take a Metro-North train into the city. I found an open space, parked, turned off the engine. Seana unfastened her seatbelt, slid sideways, leaned against my shoulder.

“But
I
have,” she said. “Truth be told, my dear young friend, it's been a comfort to me, the way it was with your father—to live with a man I find attractive
and
with whom I feel safe, and part of feeling safe, despite all my words, published and unpublished, seems to lie in
not
having sex.”

Bright winter sun—the light almost white—poured in through the large windows under the New Haven train station's roof, and I said something about loving times like this—times when I thought of myself as being suspended between here and there.

“It has been a gift,” Seana said, “the way we've been with each other since your dad died.”

“For me too.”

“I didn't mean to lay my decisions on you, Charlie.”

“What decisions?” I asked.

“Right,” she said. Then: “I care about you deeply. You know that, don't you?”