You Are My Heart and Other Stories Page 18
When he apologized for his drinking—“I’m too much of a slob to be associating with classy dudes like you two,” he said—Margaret responded by saying that she trusted we would see one another again soon, and that, in her experience, it was hardly tragic when a celebratory event—our dinner and meeting—became more celebratory than anticipated. The best moments in life, she said, as in good novels—and when she said this, she reached over—a first—and held my hand briefly—are those that are unpredictable.
“That wins for me!” Joey exclaimed, and we all laughed.
At dinner the next evening, Margaret said that she had, of course, been thinking about Joey a good deal, and about my relationship with him. Having met him, and understanding why, as a boy, I would have looked up to him the way I did, had reinforced a wish she had for the two of us.
“I think he was quite shrewd when he said what he did about you doing well when kept under a good wing,” she said.
I shrugged. “So—?”
She stood and walked around the table to me, touched my face gently. “I’ve decided to take you under my wing,” she said, “and I hope you’ll consent.”
Even though, despite the arch way she put it, I understood immediately what she was talking about—I hadn’t been without my own fantasies—I still gasped to hear the words come from her mouth.
“So?” she asked. “What do you say?”
“Thank you?” I replied.
“Thank you?!” she laughed. Then she kissed me. I kissed her back, stood, pressed her to me, and when I started to probe her lips with my tongue, she stepped back.
“Be patient, Marty,” she said. “It’s the main thing. We’ll do much better—we’ll be capable of more unique pleasures, and of the often sublime understandings that accompany pleasure—when we learn to be patient.”
What she told me later that night, when we lay next to each other in her bed, was that the quality that drew her to me was my combination of innocence and enthusiasm. What I clearly lacked, and what she believed she was capable of providing—think William Blake, she said—was experience. I had a rare sensibility for a young man of my background, and what excited her were the ways in which she might nurture it. She had been waiting for a young man like me for many years, felt fortunate to have found me, and hoped she would be able to help me learn about the many good and beautiful things of life: books, of course, and food, and wines, and music, and sex.
I was too happy—enthralled, enchanted—to object strenuously, though I did protest mildly, saying that even though she was somewhat older, and held a higher position at our school, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of us being in a student-teacher relationship.
“That is not the right way to think about it,” she said and, telling me that I was not to move, no matter what impulses arose in me, she began, very slowly, to make love to me again.
In the evenings, and on weekends, she started introducing me to wines—how to taste and evaluate them—and to music I was unfamiliar with (she would, for example, play two recordings of a movement from a Bartok or Dvorak string quartet, and we’d discuss their differences)—and on some evenings we would take turns reading passages from novels to one another, then talking about what it was in what we’d read that seemed especially unusual, remarkable, or wanting.
We never drove to or from school together, and on weekends we did not frequent local restaurants or movie theaters. Instead, we either stayed home, sometimes, except for going downstairs to get food, remaining in bed together for an entire twenty-four hours, or we drove into the city and went to museums, concerts, and the theater. In public, we never touched, and though this frustrated me no end—I wanted, always always, to be touching her, holding her hand, having her fingers touching my arm or neck—she seemed to have no difficulty in keeping a discreet distance, nor was she flattered or amused when I told her how frustrating the situation was for me. Discretion, she declared once, was not only the better part of valor, but central to what Flaubert thought of as a true sentimental education—meaning not an education that was emotionally sentimental, and therefore shallow, but an education in the sentiments themselves.
On a Sunday evening, five weeks after I’d begun living with her, she told me that she had finished reading my novel.
“What I think,” she said—we’d finished dinner, but were still at the dining room table—“is that despite its many merits—you certainly have a good ear and a good heart, and there are some quite vivid, affecting scenes—the publishers have probably done you a favor by not publishing this book.”
I was devastated—felt tears rush to my eyes—but controlled myself and looked straight at her. “And—?” I asked.
“And what?”
“What else?”
“There’s nothing more to say, really,” she said. “Except—”
“Except what ?” I asked.
“I trust you’ll take what I say next as kindness—something I say to you as your friend, though I am sure it may not feel that way to you at first,” she said. “Although you have some gifts, and surely do not lack for fortitude—your Brooklyn roots have given you the ability to compete, to stay the course, and to want, like your cousin, to win at anything you do, I believe your desire to be a writer is—how best to put it, and in language you will understand—?”
“Just say it, for Christ’s sake,” I demanded.
She looked at me with a half-smile but didn’t speak.
“Patience, right?” I said. “Patience. Sure.”
“I think, given what I know about you, that your desire to be a writer, inspired by your cousin during your impressionable years, is a bit like the ambition a young baseball fan might have for becoming a professional player some day,” she said. “It is quite understandable, and, as with many excellent athletes, there are often viable reasons to encourage certain youngsters. Still, in my judgment, which is surely fallible, you were made for other things—better things, things more consonant with—”
“Fuck you,” I said, and left the room.
I drove back to my apartment in Ridgefield that night, and stayed away from her house until the next weekend. At school, we passed each other in the hallways the way we always had, with no acknowledgement that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. I brought my lunch with me—sandwiches and fruit—and ate outside, in the gardens near the baseball field, so that I didn’t have to see her in the lunchroom.
By Saturday, though, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I drove out to her house. Her car was in the driveway, but when I knocked on the door she didn’t answer it. I opened the door, walked through the downstairs rooms, then went upstairs.
She was sitting in a chair, looking out a window at the backyard, and did not turn toward me.
I touched her shoulder, bent down to kiss her, but she lowered her head to her chest.
“I missed you,” I said, “and I’m sorry I left the way I did.”
She looked up at me then, and I was shocked: she seemed to have aged twenty years since I’d seen her in school the day before. Her face was ashen, her eyes red and swollen, her voice, when she spoke, without affect.
“I hurt you badly but I couldn’t help myself,” she said, looking down again and playing with a set of keys on her lap.
“Are you okay ?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Can you talk to me—can you say anything?”
“What’s there to say?” she said, but without looking at me, after which, despite my asking her a bunch more questions, she did nothing but stare at her lap.
“Are you sick—should I call a doctor?” I asked after a while.
She shrugged again. “I didn’t want you to see me this way,” she said.
“Which way?”
“It’s an old story, and for the most part we are successful at keeping most of the demons at bay most of the time…”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, and brought a chair over, sat and faced her. “What demons—?�
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“Mine,” she said, without smiling.
“But I love you,” I said. “I want to know what happened—what’s wrong—what’s going on—”
“You’re quite sweet,” she said, “and you have nothing to do with this. Nobody does. I shouldn’t be here, really.”
“Then where should you be?”
“Nowhere.”
I kept at it for a while, trying to get a response from her—any response—but nothing I said made a difference. I was able to get her to walk downstairs with me to the kitchen, but she wouldn’t let me touch her, much less kiss her or hold her, and though she did drink a glass of water I brought for her, she refused all other food and drink.
I stayed for an hour or two, and when I returned the next day, she and her car were gone. At school on Monday, when I stopped by her office after my first class, she greeted me in the brisk, impersonal way she greeted everybody. She looked the way she usually did—beautiful, poised, clear-eyed, with nothing in her appearance or manner that suggested she had ever been the woman I’d been with two mornings before, or during all the weeks that had preceded that morning.
When, three weeks later, on a Thursday evening, I received a call from Herschel telling me that Joey was gone, and that the funeral would take place in Brooklyn the next morning—they’d found him dead in a motel room in the Catskills of an apparent heart attack—and when I telephoned Margaret to say that I would not be in school the next day, and why, she offered me condolences on my loss, said she was glad she had been able to meet a man who had played such a significant role in my life, and that if I needed to stay away from school past the coming Monday, I should let her know and she would arrange matters.
“I really loved him,” I said, and started to cry. “I really did…”
“I know,” she said. “Early, unexpected losses are the most difficult of all, aren’t they?”
It turned out that when Joey died, he wasn’t working as a maitre d’, but had been going from motel to motel in the Catskills, and along the Jersey shore and in the Lakewood area, selling machines that attached to beds and into which you put quarters that made the mattresses vibrate and gave you what were advertised as ‘magic-finger massages.’
Neither Herschel nor Rose ever mentioned Joey’s name again. Rose died ten months later, and Herschel became a recluse, staying in his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment and emerging only to get food, and, once in a while, when I was in town, to go to the fights, either at Madison Square Garden or the old Saint Nick’s Arena on West 66th Street.
I left the prep school at the end of the year, enrolled in the graduate English program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, got a Ph.D. in English with a dissertation on the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, and became a professor of English at Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York, a good small liberal arts school similar to Union College. Helene Maubert, an English teacher in a Clinton high school, in order to to gain credits toward a master’s degree, enrolled in a course I was teaching—‘The Modern Novel’—and we were married nine months later, in Rensselaerville, a small town south of Albany where she’d grown up. We lived in Clinton for the next three decades, raised our daughters there, and it was only after Helene’s death and my retirement from teaching that, at my daughter’s urgings, I moved back to New York City. I never revised my first novel or wrote another one. I became Chair of the Hamilton College English Department though, and contented myself with building an excellent department and, in my teaching—introductory literature courses especially—with trying to impart a love of reading to several generations of students.
In New York, I bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, a few blocks from where Carolyn and her family were living, and not far from Herschel, and was able, until his death seven months ago, to get him to leave his apartment and have breakfast with me on a regular basis, Tuesdays and Thursday mornings, at a local diner, where we would read through the sports pages together, and I’d tell him about my children and grandchildren. On occasion, I’d try to get him to talk about Joey by remarking on the golden olden days and how things had changed—how, for example—my most pointed attempt to draw him out—in earlier times people looking to adopt children wanted only healthy, white babies, but how, with some parallels to the changing ethnicities of boxing champions, which reflected changing patterns of immigration, people had come to accept the adopting of black, Hispanic, and Asian children as normal. Nothing I said could get him to talk about Joey, however, or about what life was like for us before Joey died.
I suspected, of course, that the story of Joey’s motel heart attack was a cover-up, but there was no way to find out the truth without pressing Herschel, and hurting him, and what difference would it make if I found out that Joey had done himself in? All that mattered was that he was gone, and much too soon. The same went for Margaret. I received regular alumni magazines and newsletters from our school, and knew that, three years after I left, she had resigned her position there. For a few years after that, I’d ask some of the teachers I kept in touch with if they knew anything about what she was doing, and after Helene died I even ‘Googled’ her name several times to see if I could find out about her, and, perhaps, I thought, be in touch. But my searches all led to dead ends, as, too literally, did other matters.
Three months after Herschel’s death, I received a call from Carolyn, asking me to please hurry and meet her at Roosevelt Hospital, in the Intensive Care Unit. Something had happened to Amos.
What had happened was that he had developed what seemed at first an ordinary rash—red spots accompanied by dark dots, and by several mysterious marks that looked like bruises even though there were no apparent causes for any bruising. By the time I arrived at the hospital, he had slipped into a coma, and though the doctors were doing all they could, they were not optimistic.
Amos died that night of what was diagnosed as a form of toxic meningitis—meningococcemia was the technical term for a bacterial infection that could take the lives of children, when they contracted it, within twenty-four hours. The doctors had given Amos massive doses of antibiotics, but by the time treatment began, it was already too late. There was an effective vaccine against the disease, I later learned, but the vaccine, except in rare instances, was given only to adolescents.
Amos was, it occurred to me when, at the cemetery, we lowered his casket into the ground, about the age I was when Joey had come home from the war. We sat shiva for Amos in the traditional way we’d sat shiva for Joey (and for Rose, and for my parents, and for all my parents’ brothers and sisters), and during the seven days of mourning I found myself staying close to my granddaughter Deborah, Amos’s sister, as if believing my presence could in some way be protective, even though I knew it couldn’t—that in this life there was mostly pain and loss and worry, with now and then a whiff of hope or pleasure, and that if you thought you heard the flutter of wings, as I recalled Joey telling me once—something he brought back from his time overseas—chances were even-money you’d been cold-cocked and that the best thing to do was to pray the flutter you heard was coming from one of your guardian angels and not the angel of death.
When we were together that week, I found myself thinking about Joey more than I had in many years, and when I thought about him, I thought mostly about the day he showed me the house in which he thought he might have been born, and of the easy way he and Joe Louis had with each other, and of the fact that Louis, our greatest heavyweight champion—one hundred forty consecutive months of taking on and defeating all comers—had not, according to those who knew him, spoken a word until he was about six, the age Amos had been. Like his mother, who’d died in a lunatic asylum, Louis also spent time—this was near the end of his life when he was broke and addicted to drugs—in a psychiatric hospital, and when he passed away in 1981, at sixty-six, and I’d told Herschel I was pleased to hear that Schmeling had helped pay for Louis’s funeral, Herschel laughed at me. Given that Louis was buried at Arlington
National Cemetery, he said, it was our taxes that paid for his funeral.
And Schmeling? Schmeling—a man who would wind up dying seven months short of his one hundredth birthday, outliving not only Louis and Herschel, but virtually everyone who’d ever known him—Schmeling had probably come to believe he’d paid for Louis’s funeral since he’d come to believe pretty much every other distortion and lie written about him. This was a gift of character Louis lacked, Herschel said, and he added that looking back he’d come to see that Schmeling was nothing more than an out-and-out opportunist, a man who’d devoted his life to staying fit, and to pleasing anyone and everyone, including the Nazis. But when we were together the week of Amos’s death, which had followed so soon after Herschel’s, and in visits afterward, I didn’t talk about this, or say the obvious to Carolyn or Carl, or to Michelle and her husband Phil—that, beyond the age of childbearing, Carolyn and Carl were now out of spares.
Copyright © 2011 by Jay Neugeboren
All rights reserved.
eISBN : 978-0-983-24716-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925178
Stories in this collection were originally published, some in slightly different form, as follows: “You Are My Heart” in Notre Dame Review; “The Debt” in The Gettysburg Review; “State of Israel” (as “The Patient Will See You Now”) in Hadassah Magazine; “The Turetzky Trio” in TriQuarterly; “Comfort” in Black Clock; “Make-A-Wish” in Ploughshares; “Here or There” in Columbia; “Overseas” in Michigan Quarterly Review.
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