“No, not my little Claire de Lune? My Claire da Loon, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” she said.
“I used to make tea for your father. I used to wake up in the morning and turn to his side of the bed—long after he’d abandoned it, long after his side was empty—and say, my goodness, look, I’ve overslept, I’ll just run down to the kitchen and make us tea for two.” She smacked her lips. They were colorless, cracked. “How are the children?”
“Fine. Thank you for asking.”
“How’s Jim?”
Claire fished in her pocket for Kleenex and found one and dabbed at her neck. “He’s fine.”
“How was the trip?”
And then her mother shut her eyes and truly fell asleep.
So nothing had been accomplished and nothing was resolved. Next morning Claire drove south again, making the flight from Albany and back in Ann Arbor by dark. The girls were at rehearsal for the concert the school orchestra was planning for that Friday, and she ate leftover chicken and a wilted arugula salad and, since Jim had done the dropping-off, collected them at ten. They asked, “How’s Granny? How was your trip?” and she kissed them and sent them to bed.
That night she lay awake. While her husband rumbled beside her, oblivious as always to her night sweats and then sudden chill, she stared at the tasseled canopy fringe and the pattern it cast in the hall light’s dim glow and tried to assess what went wrong. It was—she had known this already—the final time she’d visit Alice alive. She could remember feeling both pleased with herself for having made the gesture (the trouble and expense she’d gone to, the obstacles she’d overcome) and cheated of its consequence; there had been no blessing asked for or received. Claire would always want something her mother refused, always be asking for some sort of attention from someone who failed to provide it. She had wondered, bleakly, vaguely, if in her old age the roles would reverse, if she would shut her daughters out and they would feel the same way. In the feng shui of her own house she is well- positioned, central, but in that other household irrelevant as dust.
When the call arrives she is making the bed, and it is the lawyer, Joseph Beakes. He introduces himself, and she says, yes, I know you, yes, you represent my mother. He says our office has been doing so for forty years, your father too when he was alive, and we regret to inform you that Mrs. Saperstone expired last night; we were notified this morning by the Saratoga Hospice. He says you won’t remember me, but I remember you—your sister and your brother too—when you were learning how to ride and falling off your ponies and getting on again; like yesterday it seems to me, and now you’re all grown up.
When did she die, Claire asks, exactly when, and he assures her the end had been peaceful, your mother did not suffer in her final days. The hospice has been wonderful, continues Mr. Beakes, the management of pain is much much better nowadays and the body has moved—
been
moved—to the funeral home, and are you planning to sit what I think is called shiva and how can I help?
She answers him. Her mother had planned on cremation, the burial service is standard, and they are nonobservant Jews and will not be sitting shiva and her husband is, as Mr. Beakes might be aware, practically in the business because if you run a string of nursing homes you must be prepared for this sort of procedure; she’ll call her sister and locate their brother and fly East in the morning and the others of her family will follow in due time.
“Mrs. Handleman? I hope you’ll let me call you Claire. We’ve been trying to contact your sister and brother—Joanna, David—too. Are they away?” asks Mr. Beakes. “They don’t seem to answer, or use a machine.”
She swallows. He has tried to reach the others first; she is the third of three.
Then Beakes repeats his personal condolences and they schedule an appointment and the line goes dead.
David has been practicing avoidance; he is getting good at it, and better every day. He can avoid, for example, his own eyes in the mirror while shaving; he can avoid the pavement cracks while walking down a sidewalk and all conversation with strangers and the shrill importunities of headlines or the television news. He can say the word
rhinoceros
and then forget it rapidly; he can choose to imagine and then not imagine a gray mud-spattered charging beast, its pig-eyes and its flesh-clad horns and complicated rolling gait and snout.
Avoidance is a discipline, and it requires work. Avoidance is the hardest task because it seems so easy and you can be tempted to relax your guard. His last lover had complained, “You’ve been avoiding me, I don’t know if you noticed but it’s been a week today, it’s been since Thursday the last time you called.” Then Adrienne had started in with the familiar litany of intimate assertion, the proprietary body language of someone who fears not so much the leaving as being left behind. She had been asking, if not for commitment, for at least a kind of
clarity,
because he simply rang the bell and hadn’t bothered to warn or inform her, and what if she’d been out, or busy maybe, not alone? She had been holding oranges and lemons and steadying a wicker basket on one outthrust hip. She was standing in front of the hot tub and jade plant, the high-breasted willowy arched length of her backlit by sun; David knew that he must dance away or give it up and stay.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Adrienne. “Of course I’m glad to see you. Except you should have called.”
He left. It was a form of avoidance. He left towns and jobs and people often, and like any other habit it was easier to make than break; it had been his MO and his SOP for years. “Standard operating procedure,” he said. “I’m your dance-away lover, remember? That’s me.”
“Oh Christ,” she said. “That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m saying that I
missed
you, babe.”
Adrienne lives near the Rose Garden, on Euclid Street, and on clear days the view is spectacular; on clear days they lie together on the cantilevered deck and watch the clouds and islands and the bridges and the bay. David has been working freelance for an agency that is abandoning print and focusing on web sites, and though he understands why web site design is the art of the future and though he is good at it and makes good money at the job, he misses the hands-on technique. He has been in Berkeley since May. This is par for the course, and time to get gone, and so he drove up to Bolinas and spent the night with Richard and Lucy, eating soft-shelled crab and smoking what his friends assured him was their sweetest home grown smoke and listening to the Pacific down beyond the Mesa; he has been working on a series of pastels about water and the offshore rocks and wondering how best to sketch a visual equivalent of sound. Not sound waves, David told them, not a diagram but evocation, an equivalence, so what you see is what you hear and doubly what you get.
The past, he said to Richard and Lucy, that’s
exactly
how it feels to me: a handheld brush above an empty page. It’s like calligraphy, he said, you practice to make it seem casual, you work to make it effortless and the stroke no work at all. Or like all those years he spent at karate and jujitsu, where the price of a black belt, they say, is ten thousand falls. The thing about pastels, he was saying—Lucy’s head in his lap, her red hair spiked and staticky—is that they take
forever,
so the trick is to make it seem easy though it’s hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
Richard has a trust fund and is into hydroponics and he and Lucy have no children but are planning to adopt. There’s a network, they told David, a pipeline straight to China and you get to go—five couples max—with a pediatrician along on the trip, so he can check out the babies and help with traveling back. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork, the time it takes to check us out and have the documents translated and site visits and the rest, you wouldn’t believe what it costs . . .
“Except it’s worth it,” Lucy declared. “It’ll be worth it, I’m certain.”
“Another mouth to feed,” said Richard, theatrical, grinning. “Another candidate for excess to join the favored few.”
Then David told them how, that afternoon, he’d stopped, on impulse, at Muir Woods and walked the trail an hour (past the sightseers and the instructional signs, the benches with their carved initials and a pair of men in wheelchairs and a group of high school students on a field trip with their teacher) to what he thought of as his sacred grove—well, no more than any other grove except in the way that it mattered to
him,
this particular cluster of redwoods where a year before he’d promised himself that next year would be different, a ring that
counted
on the trunk, a year to mark a growth spurt since he was turning thirty-five and that was Dante’s fateful year, the middle of the journey in the middle of this life.
Che la diritta via era smaritta,
that much he could remember: where the direct way is a muddle and the direction unclear . . .
“Or remember Yogi Berra,” Richard said. “And his immortal saying. ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’”
Lucy laughed. “Well, has it?”
“Has it what?” he asked.
“Been a year that mattered?”
“Not in any good way, no.”
And that was when he understood his mother was going to die. That was when he shut his eyes and pictured his sister Joanna, a continent away and staring at the other sea, and sister Claire uneasy in her starter castle—“Oh
excellent,
” Lucy was saying, “we give you our premium homegrown and tell you we’re going to China and acquiring a baby and you say it doesn’t matter”—and then the three of them mourning together, together again for the first time in years, he and Claire and Joanna grown-ups now or all of them anyhow trying to be,
Nel mezzo del cammin
—in the middle of the road, the middle of the journey—and standing in their adult garb beside their mother’s corpse . . .
So it is no surprise to him when the lawyer calls. Beakes’s voice is fluting, sibilant; David tries to remember the way that he looked.
“Mr. Saperstone? You don’t mind if I call you David? It’s like yesterday, it seems to me, when you were still in grade school here and we came to the
Nutcracker Suite.
”
Bald, flat-nosed, wearing glasses, that much he can remember, but not if Beakes is short or tall; he has the impression of wideness, a bow tie, a blue shirt . . .
“And I remember how your mother loved to watch you dancing, how she absolutely loved it when you came out on stage. You remember I played piano?”
“No.”
There is static on the line. It crackles. The lawyer offers his condolences, and then the rest of it, the request he join his sisters and the prepaid ticket east. “Your mother left instructions. She was very precise about this, Alice was.” Beakes coughs. “A trust, you understand, comes with conditions; the provider can establish terms—and that’s precisely what your mother did. She wants all three of you to come to Saratoga Springs. It’s a proviso of the will.”
“All three of us?”
“Of her children, I mean. The grandchildren are welcome too, but it’s you three she stipulates.”
“Stipulated,” David says.
“This proviso that you come to town? It’s an interesting codicil.”
“Concerning?”
“I have no desire to be secretive. It’s not a secret, David, and I’ll be happy to disclose the asset as soon as you children assemble together. It’s what your mother wanted, it’s precisely what she stipulated and therefore what we, before probate, must do.”
He agrees. He deploys the techniques of avoidance—formality, politeness—till lawyer Beakes is mollified and says, that’s fine then, we’ll expect you in the office, see you soon.
David cradles the phone and stares at the window and tries to deal with what he’s heard, the size and shape of it, the sudden summons back to what he thought he’d left. Outside a homeless man is picking through recycling bins, gathering bottles and cans. A car siren announces itself down the street and before it shuts back off he listens to the blaring notes, the caterwauling repeated complaint. An ambulance rattles down Ashby, or maybe a police car, and he asks himself in what way an ambulance siren differs from a police cruiser’s and how to assess its direction and if you could, listening, tell.
He does his breathing exercise, inhaling for the count of eight and holding for the count of eight and releasing for sixteen. Upstairs, there is gospel music and the muffled roaring of a vacuum cleaner, and a door slams in the entrance hall: two times. He lies on his tatami mat and tries a series of positions and these too fail to calm him; therefore he ceases willed evasion and tries to remember and does:
David is six, maybe seven years old. He’s standing with his father at the entrance to the racetrack, so it must have been August in Saratoga, and what he wants is ice cream but his father insists on a Coke. “A Coke won’t melt,” his father says; “you wouldn’t want ice cream all over your shirt.” There are horses and trainers and horses and jockeys and he can distinguish between them—the jockeys and the exercise riders—because exercise riders can wear what they want, and he’s holding his paper cup carefully, carefully so the soda won’t spill when a woman approaches them, smiling, saying, “George?”
His father doffs his hat. He does so with a flourish, bending at the waist and nodding and smiling the way that he does, and sweeping his Panama down past his knees. “May I present my son,” he says. Then she says—actually using these words so that David will remember them, because young as he is he can distinguish sincerity from falsity, can recognize when someone means the thing they’re saying or is lying through their perfect teeth—“Why, fancy meeting you two here. My, my, what a pleasant surprise!”
It isn’t a surprise, of course, it happens every Saturday—a well-dressed woman gliding past and then the soft proprietary touch on his father’s arm or shoulder, and then the introduction and the woman’s keen, assessing gaze. “He’s just like you,” she says to his father. “He’ll be a heartbreaker, won’t he; this apple won’t fall very far from the tree.”
“I believe the expression is ‘acorn,’” says George, and then the three of them stand at the rail and cheer the horses on.