The Family Markowitz Fannie Mae " E sther," Rose calls through her neighbor's closed door, with its blistering paint and the new steel plate around the knob. "Who is it?" Esther's muffled voice floats back. "It's Rose." "Who?" "Rose Markowitz." The door opens, and they fall into each other's arms. "How are you dear?" Rose asks. "I thought I heard you last night on the stairs, but I couldn't leave him. Now the woman from the service is here. What business do you have taking a cab so late?" "Come in, come in," Esther says. "My nephew met me." "Who? Arthur?" "Come in, Rose." "No, I can't stay." "Just for a minute. Let me get you some coffee. I've made it already." "But I really can't stay," Rose says as she walks into Esther's apartment. "I was just going downstairs for the mail." They sit together at the kitchen table and sip coffee from Esther's china teacups. They have lived in the building for twelve years, and their apartments are mirror images of each other. "I'm speaking Hebrew," Esther tells Rose. "Ani midaberet ivrit." "You took those Hadassah classes?" Rose asks. "I went on ulpan," Esther says, as if to say she went on safari. Rose thinks that anyone in the room would notice the contrast between Esther, full of energy after six weeks in Miami, and herself, wan and exhausted from staying here in the city all winter with Maury ill and no one to help. Having to do things when she didn't have the strength. Esther is tall, and big in hip and shoulder, her brown hair puffy, although thinning a little in the middle. Rose, who has always been petite, has lost weight--although she is still not thin. Her hair is short, once black and now iron gray. She no longer has time for herself or the beauty parlor. "And who do you think I met on the first day?" Esther asks. "Dr. Mednik's sister." "He and I," says Rose, "are not on speaking terms." "No, you are not," Esther agrees. "But it was strange to see the sister there. She looks nothing like him--it only came out later." Rose stares at the place where Esther's oven should be, except that the apartment is a mirror image. "And then right after, just a couple of days later, I went to the kids' hotel, where Dougie had his bankers' convention, and I was sitting by the pool and there out of the blue came Beatrice Schwartz with him; he's had surgery--he speaks artificially, you know, with a voice box--but she's still walking around with her fingernails out to here painted white, and the white slacks with the pleats, the knife-edge pleats. They weren't even the only people I saw. I could go on and on. It was just, you know, one small world after another. But I was worried about you, Rose." "Well," says Rose, "he's very ill." "But he's in good spirits?" "Happy as a lark." "I hope I have such a happy disposition at his age," Esther says. Rose's husband, Maury, is eighty-three, ten years older than Rose, fifteen years older than Esther. "Now, on top of everything, today his daughter is coming." "From Israel?" "We haven't seen her in years, and now she decides to come." "I can talk to her in Hebrew," Esther says. "And she's staying with us," Rose tells Esther. "Here in the apartment." "For how long?" "She wouldn't say." Rose lowers her voice to a whisper. "She has an open ticket, and I think that she is determined to stay until, God forbid, the end." Esther shakes her head. "What else could she mean by coming now? She has never ever come before." In the lobby, Rose pries the mail out of her small aluminum mailbox, number 5. There are bills, there are statements from the insurance, and there's a calendar from the Girls' Orphanage in Jerusalem, full of halftone pictures of the girls' laughing faces, their great big eyes and curly hair, their uniforms. She leafs through the calendar as she climbs the stairs. Rose loves the Girls' Orphanage and gives a little to them every year. She had always wanted to have a little girl of her own, but she and her first husband, Ben, had two sons. She would not have traded Henry and Edward, never. But she always wanted a little girl. She would have dressed her up in the summer in crisp white dresses with smocking; in the winter she would have sewn dresses with velvet sashes. There would have been tea parties and doll clothes; she would have trimmed doll hats. She has two granddaughters, it is true, but they are far away, almost too old for dolls, almost wild. Her eyesight is no longer good enough to sew small pieces. The Girls' Orphanage teaches sewing and the arts; the girls, it says on the calendar, "are instructed strictly according to the precepts of the Torah." Rose's small gifts support the schools, the woodworking shop and sewing classes, the dowry fund for brides--"to help them build a Jewish home." When she walks into her own apartment she feels how stuffy it is; the air is so hot and close. On the sofa the woman from the service reads her magazines, and Maury is sleeping in his chair. His large-print library books are stacked at his feet, his plaid blanket spread over his knees as he dozes away. He is so sick he gets all the pills he wants. For Rose, Mednik won't prescribe a thing. She has come to him and begged for some relief from her pain. Nothing. The sun through the window warms Maury's upturned face, and he seems to be dreaming he is lounging on the deck of an ocean liner. How she would love to do that. To sail away with him out of Washington Heights over the slush and the ice and out onto the Hudson, and then across the Atlantic, far, far away. If he weren't ill. If they could leave the apartment. She bends over him and says, "Maury, I don't know what to do. Where are we going to put her? On the sofa in the study? Is that where she should sleep?" Rose doesn't even know Maury's daughter, Dorothy. She's only met her once. Maury and his first wife divorced in 1950, when Dorothy was a child, and all she knows is that Dorothy lived here and she lived there and then ran away to Palestine. She simply grew up in greenhouses, raising tomatoes. She just grew and grew until she became a great lump of a woman, big and heavy, with thick, cropped black hair and down on her lip. Rose dreads having her in the house. He has been sick before and she's never come, but now Dorothy is visiting herself upon them. What will she do with her in the house? She will feel eyes on her all the time. She will have to cook for the angel of death. She cannot bear it. If Maury were well, it would be one thing. She would be happy to serve anyone at her table. She and the woman wake him for his pills. They bring him lunch on a tray that clips onto his chair and try to get him to eat it. He pushes the food around on his plate. "Eat a few bites," Rose urges. "I'll tell you what," he tells Rose in a light, dry voice; he weighs almost nothing. "You get this young lady to go down to 160th Street. I want a number 11 on light rye, extra lean, a side order of onion rings, and a cherry Coke." "You aren't going to eat all that." "I was going to share the onion rings with you," he says gallantly. "But you aren't going to finish all that," Rose tells him. They send the young lady down to 160th Street all the time. Rose tells him the food is bad for his digestion, and he makes a face. "What'll be?" he says. "Am I going to die from one corned beef and tongue on rye?" "Don't talk that way," Rose snaps. She hates hearing him talk like that, because he is joking not only about his own condition but about her predicament, too. He seems to be laughing at her, his eyes sparkling, magnified by the lenses of his glasses. "Aw, don't worry, kid," he tells her. Dorothy is forty-five, and she sleeps and sleeps. She snores in the study on Rose's green silk nonconvertible sofa, her face against the bolster and all the antimacassars in a pile on the floor. She wears jogging suits but she never goes jogging, and in the mornings she uses up all the hot water in her shower. Emerging from the bathroom, she just shakes the water out of her cropped hair like a great black bear. Then, day in and day out, she sits and watches her father sleep, waits for him to wake up. The minute he wakes, she pounces, asking him questions. How is his heart, why this medication or that. She wants to know about the doctor. Then she starts asking him about his life. What he did in the union, how he did piecework, cutting the fabric. But it's all a ruse, as Rose can clearly see. As soon as Dorothy starts asking Maury about his life, she starts talking about her own. And then she starts in schrei ing at him. "Father." She says it in deep voice--not just deep but lugubrious, and with an Israeli accent so dark and smoky you would have thought she was a native. "I have come here to be with you." "What did she say?" Maury asks Rose. "Because I am your only child," Dorothy continues, "and so I have come here to be with you, even though I never had the chance to know you. I have wanted to come and talk to you, so that you and I would know each other just once. I have wanted to tell you about my life, what I have done--" "I can't hear you, dear," says Maury. "What I have done," Dorothy tells him loudly. "Yes, what have you done?" Maury asks. "I have asked myself this question: What I have done to deserve this silence from you? You forgetting me, your daughter." "Listen," Maury explains, "this was long ago. Needless to say, your mother and I were not on the best of terms. She threw me out. We had a divorce." "But there was me also." "So you went with her, too. Your mother said I wasn't fit to raise her child. All right, fine. I wasn't going to argue with the woman." He is falling asleep; in his state, talking wears him out. Rose tries to shoo Dorothy away. Big, heavy tears fill Dorothy's eyes. It's horrible, as if, God forbid, Dorothy is starting up a funeral in the apartment. If she had come to bring some good cheer, it would be one thing. If she had come to help. But weeping and complaining is all she does. And she snoops, Rose is sure of it. She has heard her twice in the night, walking around the apartment. She thinks she heard her try to open the secretary where Rose keeps her Venetian glasses, the acorn tea set, the crystal she bought when she worked at Tiffany. At night she imagines she can hear her opening the glass doors. Then, during the day, she realizes it cannot be so, because Dorothy has no interest in the things in the secretary. Dorothy has probably never even heard of such a place as Tiffany, where Rose once stood behind the long glass counters and brushed with royalty in the form of the Duke of Windsor and his men browsing through the silver and the jewelry. Dorothy would not understand such things. Then, early in the morning, Rose catches her. She walks into the study and finds Dorothy bending over, peering into the drawers of the desk. "That's Ben's desk," Rose exclaims. It is her dear late husband's desk. Maury has never used it. No one touches it. Its surface is clear, except for the R. C. Allen typewriter and the leathertrimmed blotter. Dorothy looks back at Rose, mute. "What are you looking at?" asks Rose. "This," says Dorothy. She has opened a box of typewriter paper and is looking down into it. "The Dissertation," Rose gasps. Quickly she puts the cover onto the box and shuts the drawer. Everyone in the family calls it The Dissertation. It is the thesis her dear husband Ben was writing when he was a doctoral student in Vienna in 1926. Of course, he could not finish it, because of the wars and the family, his immigration to America, and his job teaching high-school French and German. He taught all year, and in the summers he was a ghostwriter for a French textbook. The senior teacher at the school, his department head, was the official author, and Ben was the writer. He never breathed a word about it. He did not want to lose the job. Not in the middle of the Depression. No one in the family has read the dissertation; the children do not read German. Rose reads German well, but when she looks at the blue-black typescript it only makes her cry. And she does not care for works of history and literary criticism. The dissertation is a study of the works of Thomas Mann. Rose is glaring at Dorothy; she does not tell her any of this. Dorothy just looks back at her, confused and baleful but unwilling to back down. "She is driving me to distraction," Rose tells Esther that afternoon on Esther's gold sofa. Esther shakes her head. "She's like a bloodhound. A hound sniffing blood. Did we ever hear from her or see her before? Once, twice. Now, when he's sick, she comes for one week, two weeks--" "It's been just a week," Esther says. "I have never been a superstitious person," Rose tells Esther. "No, of course not." "But anyone can see that to come like this, to an elderly man's bedside, to come when your father is sick, and to keep going over the past. Over and over. It's terrible. Just terrible. If she would move into a hotel at least. I've tried to talk to her, to hint to her--she sits and she sits. She doesn't notice anything; she makes herself at home. She spreads out all over the study. Do you know what she does? She listens to the news on the radio all day and all night. The traffic reports. Do you know why? She loves catastrophes. This is what she does; she sits and sheds gloom." Esther asks, "And how does he like it?" "He? He's happy as can be." "Then it's good for him that his daughter is here." "Good for him? She's exhausting him, wearing him out." "What does she do?" "She sits and looks at him; she talks to him. He pretends he can't hear her. What do you think she's doing, going through the desk like that?" "Rose," Esther says, "you're beside yourself. I'm sure it was just innocent curiosity." "She was standing there with her great big hands all over Ben's dissertation, getting her fingerprints all over it. What do you think she meant by that?" "Well, I think maybe she was looking for old pictures or letters Maury wrote when he was young." "His pictures are in the albums in the chifforobe," Rose says. "But she couldn't know that." "If she wants to see pictures, she should ask for pictures; she shouldn't go snooping like a--a common thief." "But she's his daughter," Esther says again. Rose throws up her hands. "And that's why I don't say anything. Even if I did say something, where would she go? She has no money for a hotel. She's come here with no money; she's come here to sit." "I imagine she's had a hard life," Esther says. Rose's eyes widen. "Because, you know, she was the child of a broken home, and she ran away when she was so young, and had to make her way." "I was seven years old when I came to England, and I was all alone with no one in the world to look after me," Rose says heatedly. "And she could never never know what I saw and what I lived through." Esther is not sure Rose is right, but she is too courteous to say so. "My own parents sent me away," Rose says. "In the name of safety they abandoned me." "Why don't you come here for dinner with Dorothy and Maury," Esther says. "You're wearing yourself out cooking." "No, no." "Because it's too much for you. Listen to the way you're talking. I'm worried about you, Rose. Look at this. I've got barbecued chicken. Ready to eat." "He won't eat it." "So I'll make him something else." Rose must decline the invitation. Esther comes over to Rose's apartment to try to persuade her, but Rose has to say that he is really too sick. Rose, Esther, and Dorothy stand watching Maury sleep in his chair by the window with the sun coming in. "This is my dear neighbor," she says, introducing Esther to Dorothy. "Shalom. Ma shlomeich?" How are you? Esther asks Dorothy in her new and childlike Hebrew. " Shmi Esther. Eich ohevet New York?" My name is Esther. How do you like New York? Dorothy turns up the palm of her hand as if to say she can take it or leave it. "I did not come to see New York," she says. "At garah bimoshav? Osah tapuzim baboker? Ovedet maher?" What she means to say is, It must be terribly difficult to raise tomatoes on a farm and live the life of a farmer, getting up before dawn. What comes out is: Do you live on a farm in the morning? Do you make oranges? Do you work fast? Dorothy grins. " At mivinah kitsat ivrit sheli?" Do you understand my little Hebrew? "Yes," Dorothy says. "You know," Esther tells Rose later, "a year ago I would never have tried to express myself in Hebrew like this." Rose does not answer. She is sick at heart. It seems to her that she is completely alone. Her sons call her on the phone and ask her how she is doing. How can she explain it long-distance? "If you were here, it would be one thing," she tells Edward when he calls from Washington. "We were there two weeks ago, remember? We came for winter break." "But that was before all of this," she says. "All of what?" She hears Dorothy padding around and she dares not say anything. "He is weaker," she tells Ed. "He is far weaker than before. He can't get up from the chair; I can barely lift him." "Ma, I wish I could get on a plane right now," Ed tells her. "But now I have to teach. Ma?" "Yes." "I just want to hear how you feel." "What is there to say?" "What do you mean, what is there to say?" She says nothing. It seems to her that there is no point in describing how she feels, when he tells her he can do nothing about it. What is the point on the long-distance telephone? He has his classes to think about, his family. Even her grandchildren are wrapped up in school; they are wrapped up in multiplication and arts and crafts. How she had loved it when they were small and spoke in breathy voices about nothing at all. Then her older son, Henry, calls her from Venice, California, and she is thrown from one extreme to another. From the ice into the shvitz bath, he is so wrought up and fraught with anxiety. "Mother! How are you? How are you managing there? Promise me you aren't taking a single step outside. I heard the ice is terrible." It has always been that way with her sons. Ed all business, and Henry just overcome, so that she must comfort him whenever he calls--or get off the phone first. He has been in therapy in California, so that he can understand himself. Fine. But now, when he calls, he tries out the therapy on her. He tells her how she feels, and when she tells him about Maury, he says with the utmost empathy, "Mother, you must be so afraid." "Don't say that," she tells him. She feels it coming from him just as it emanates from Dorothy, this foreboding like a faint but undeniable smell, mildew in a sponge. The one who truly comforts her is Ed's wife, Sarah, her darling daughter-in-law. Henry has not married, although he is now forty-five. He is living in a world of his own. But Rose does have one daughter-in-law, a beautiful girl. She says to Rose, "I don't understand why Dorothy is still sleeping on that sofa. It's ridiculous!" "What can I do?" Rose tells her. "She must have relatives, cousins." Over the wire Sarah is thinking of something, coming up with a plan. Rose has always loved Sarah, because she truly thinks about others. Her own sons, for all the brilliance of their minds, do not have that quality. They take after Ben, their father. In the dead of night Maury wakes up gasping. He is having trouble breathing. Rose props him up on pillows; she turns on all the lights. Then Dorothy bounds into the room dragging the telephone with her. She is calling an ambulance, shrieking into the phone. "No, no," Maury gasps. "No ambulance. I'm fine." Dorothy pays no attention to him. "He doesn't want it," Rose says. "He doesn't need it." If Dorothy would just leave him alone, if she would just give him a few moments of peace, he would recover, Rose is sure of it. Instead, the medics in white tear through the apartment. They lift Maury out of his own bed and strap him onto the stretcher as if he were a piece of meat. They are killing him jolting him through the streets, pounding at his chest. He does not even have a blanket in the bitter cold. The cold is terrible, and the noise! "Stop it! Stop it!" she screams. They are attacking him, beating his frail body. She fights them off and they just push her away roughly against the back window, icy black. The lights streaking through the night. She is not even wearing a coat. They screech to a halt and open up the doors. Climbing down, she falls to the ground; one of the orderlies saves her, and brings her in. They are racing him into the hospital. Dorothy did not fit in the ambulance. They did not take her. She comes later to the hospital, like a shadow, to Maury's bedside. She stands over his bed shedding doleful tears. "Father," she says. He lies still and pale. Rose cannot bear it. She opens up her purse and gives Dorothy almost all the money she has in it. She puts the bills in Dorothy's hand. "Please," she says, "I beg you. Go back." "Go back where?" Dorothy asks. "Go back to where you came from. You must go; you must. Can't you see? You're causing him to die." "What kind of nonsense?" Dorothy booms out. "Yes, I tell you. Are you so thick that you can't see it? Before you came, he was eating and reading, he was walking downstairs. You've sapped his strength; you've bled him dry." "And what have I done to sap him like this?" Dorothy demands. "What have I done but come to be with him, spend time and talk to my own father?" "And look where he is now," Rose says. "You've done enough." "It is not for you to decide when I come and when I go." "You've outstayed your visa," Rose declares, giddy with exhaustion and anger. "And if you don't take this money and take your things and get yourself out of my apartment, I'll--I'll call the authorities on you." "I'm a U.S. citizen," Dorothy answers stolidly. Rose picks up her purse again and takes out her checkbook. She writes out a check with a trembling hand. It seems to her a matter of life and death. Maury's life hangs in the balance. It is a check for five hundred dollars. She puts it on the broad hospital windowsill. Neither she nor Dorothy looks at it. For three days Maury breathes in and out, drifting in and out of consciousness. Dorothy speaks to him, but for the most part he does not reply. On the fourth day Dorothy takes the check. "Goodbye, father," she says to Maury. "Goodbye, dear," he says in his light, dry voice. Dorothy looks at Rose, triumphant. In the night, Rose sits by his bedside. She does not sleep for days; she cannot count how many days and nights she has gone without sleep. "Taking a little nap?" the nurses ask her. Rose opens her eyes and glares at them. She does not sleep at all. If only she could sleep. Instead, she watches Maury breathing in and out. "Oh, Mother," Henry says to her on the phone, "how horrible to feel yourself standing on the threshold of such--such--" "Such what?" she asks him. "I--I suppose, just--it's the unknown," he stammers. She simply puts the phone down. This is no fear of the unknown, as she sits by his bedside. Henry cannot even remember that she has been through all this before, with his own father. She watches Maury, and she is stricken tenfold, because she remembers it all. Ben had lain for two weeks in his bed, and she had watched over him every minute. She had fallen sick; she had been hospitalized for days. Of course, this was many years ago, but it has never left her. Ben and Maury could not have been more different. Ben was serious and had no patience. He was always gloomy, always shutting himself up with his books. Sometimes he wouldn't talk to her for days. Maury was another story altogether, always full of jokes. Even their first meeting had been something of a lark. Rose's dear friend Millie persuaded Rose to let her put an advertisement in the Jewish papers: "Charming English widow ..." That was how she met Maury. That was the truth of it. Were they happy together? They traveled here and they traveled there. Unlike Ben, Maury loved to see new places--even later, when his health did not permit it. He would laugh it off when he found himself in emergency rooms. They were always busy; they went to shows, went out to eat. He was careless about everything from A to Z. Drank, smoked cigars, walked outside after dark, and money just slipped through his fingers on bets, restaurants, and disreputable stocks. He would say to Rose, "Don't worry, kid, I've got a little cash squirreled away." But that wasn't in his nature. He was a grasshopper, never thinking about a cold winter day. His one economy was that he didn't pay taxes, and he did that because of his political convictions, as he was a staunch Socialist, very near the point of Communism. Rose could say this about her dear husband Ben: he had been an ant. She and Maury squabbled constantly. "Maury," she says to him as he lies there on the white sheets, "the time you were locked out. I'll never forgive myself." Just a few years ago, they'd had a fight, a horrible fight about the drinking, and he stormed out without even a coat. Then, when he got outside, he saw it was too cold to take a walk, so of course he came back. But he'd walked out without his key, and he was locked out. He was standing downstairs in the outer vestibule of the lobby just pressing the buzzer when two great men came and mugged him. They dragged him out on the sidewalk. She saw it all from the window, but she could do nothing about it. She was up on the eighth floor. She screamed, she called the police, but by the time they came it was too late, the men were gone and her poor husband was left battered. It was lucky the muggers hadn't taken knives to him, or worse. "I'll never forgive myself," she tells him now. "Forget about it," he says. It frightens her to hear his voice. The white bed has swallowed up the rest of him. Those are his last words. He dies that night when the polished hospital is empty and not a single person has come to check on him for hours. No one knows he has passed away except for Rose. No one even notices. It is she who must ring the bells and rush through the corridors. "Are you determined to assume complete and utter negligence?" she bursts out to the night nurse. The children come. Ed with dear Sarah, and Henry from California with sunglasses folded in his pocket. Ed paces around the apartment and issues orders; they must contact a rabbi, they must have a plan. Rose feels faint. He is like a general, short and compact, with iron-gray eyes, small hands and feet. He does everything impatiently--even the way he opens doors, jerking the doorknobs with a flick of the wrist. And then there is Henry, tall, heavy, and rueful, simply lingering in corners and examining the pictures on the walls, leaning in doorways, stammering, as he always does at the most inconvenient moments, tearful all the time. She can hardly bear it. "He did not want a rabbi," Rose tells Ed. "He did not believe in them." "Look, Ma, he was Jewish, and I think--" "He told me a hundred times, he wanted to be cremated and scattered," Rose says. "Please, I don't have the strength to argue. Please, do as he asked." "Mother," Henry says, "we will." "Thank you," she tells him. "But where did he want to be sc-sc-scattered?" That question is all she can take. "I don't know that, why are you asking me that? I tell you, I don't know. Why are you interrogating me like this? I haven't slept at all for ten days. I haven't eaten anything, not a bite. Why do you come here to drill me with questions?" Sarah gets her a tissue. She says, "Mother, can I make you some fresh coffee?" Rose nods, mutely. The coffee is wonderful. No one can make coffee like Sarah, they all agree. "But, Ma," Ed starts in, as soon as she feels the slightest warmth, "you have got to start thinking about the future." The future? The question is absurd. She has been to the future and back, to the hospital gates and beyond. She has seen the future. The white hospital bed, the silvery intravenous tubes. She's seen the end. Now, he says, she should begin to think about it? "You must invest your money," Henry tells her. "I can't think about that now," she wails. "You're going to have to think about it," Ed informs her, quick as always with the ultimatums. "You've got enough money to live comfortably, very comfortably, even after you pay the back taxes and the penalties." "I don't want it," she tells them all. "But, Mother"--Henry leans down over her--"you can leave the city." "Give up the apartment?" she gasps. All her treasures swim before her eyes--the framed needlepoint birds above the sofa, the secretary, and the black-and-white pictures of Ed and Henry in their adorable sailor suits. "You can have a better apartment," Ed says. "And where am I going to get seven rooms for two hundred eighty dollars a month?" she asks. "Maybe not rent-controlled, but in a good neighbor-hood," he pleads with her. "Where you can walk outside. Where you aren't going to get robbed if you leave the building. If you do some, um, financial planning, you could live a safer, happier life." She is disgusted that he would speak in such a way just two days after Maury's death. To talk about finances and about happiness, and to speak of them together. She stands up and clutches the back of her chair. "I don't want a happier life," she says with great conviction. She won't go to the bank, and she won't go to Shearson. The only one she will see is Dick Gorham, because he was Maury's dear friend. Dick was the lawyer for the union when Maury was the accountant. It was in the days when the union could not afford a C.P.A., and so they hired Maury, because he was not certified. Dick is almost eighty, but he is a lawyer and has not retired. He still keeps up his office on Eighth Avenue, a one-room walkup full of files and stacks of papers. There are yellowing newspapers, some Yiddish, and paperback books; there are plaques from the union. The walls are covered with photographs of the testimonial dinners. Dick comes from behind his desk and embraces her. He asks her how she is, but already Ed, Sarah, and Henry are crowding in behind her. There are not enough chairs. They all begin talking at once. She should get C.D.s, she should get tax-free municipal bonds. Ed is for the C.D.s and Henry for the bonds. Sarah tells her these are good because she can spend the interest and keep the capital. Rose opens her mouth, but she cannot speak; they are all talking at once. She feels she might suffocate. "C.D.s are good, conservative investments," Ed says. "But the pen-pen-penalties," Henry interrupts. "What penalties? They're negligible; she won't incur any--" "What about some combination? Or a fund--" Sarah suggests. "I don't like those funds, and I'll tell you why," Ed declares. "Anything they call a product is something that's packaged to be of the utmost convenience to them , and anything they call a--" "Out! Out! All of you," Rose bursts out. "I can't bear it." "Do you want to do this another day?" Sarah asks sympathetically. "No!" Ed says. "I don't have another day." "I want to speak to Dick. Alone," Rose tells them. "Out, please. I beg you." They hesitate. Sarah motions for them to go. "And where are we supposed to wait? On the street?" Ed grumbles. She and Dick are alone. He comes around to her side of the desk. "Rose," he says. He takes her hand. He offers her a butterscotch candy from his big glass candy dish. She unwraps the yellow cellophane and puts the candy into her mouth. When she tastes the butterscotch on her tongue, she starts to cry because it tastes so good. She had forgotten. "I don't want the money," she says. "I know," Dick tells her. He has earnest blue eyes and a high dome of a forehead, pink and slightly freckled. "But he left it to you, you know." "We left all our money to each other," Rose says. "Isn't that true?" "That's right. That's how we wrote it up in the will." "How was I to know he had any?" Rose folds and refolds the butterscotch wrapper. "How could anybody know?" "And then where does it go?" she asks suddenly, remembering something. "The money? The way you've got it down, after you it goes to the children." "The children?" "That's right. Of course, you can do whatever you want." "I don't want to do anything," she says miserably. The butterscotch is melting away on her tongue. The dent on the top is wearing down into a hole, sweeter and sweeter. "I would like to see Jerusalem; I would like to go there once. I would like to see Paris again." "You could travel, sure." "But I don't have the strength for it." "But in time--" "If I went on a boat." The idea or wish returns to her, the thought of sailing away over the ice and into the Atlantic. She would take one cabin, and Esther would take the mirror image next door. "I could sail on ships," she says. "Well, of course, you'd be spending capital." Dick pushes around the papers on his desk. "But you only live once. The way I see it, you want to stay liquid, you want to dip in if you feel like it." "But I can't," Rose says. "Why not? It's your money; you can do anything you want." "Even--write a new will?" "Sure you can. You can write a will anytime you want." "I said C.D.s, Henry said bonds," Ed explodes in the cab. "We wanted you to spend the int-int-interest," Henry says. "And preserve your capital so you will have something left," Ed says. "What do you do? You invest in Fannie Mae, so you can spend the interest and the capital and have nothing left." "Ed," Sarah chides from the front seat. Rose is sitting in back, wedged between her sons. They are frightening her to death, waving this and that prospectus in her face. "Don't you see, Ma," Ed tells her. "With bonds you get your interest and then when the bond comes due you get your original investment back. You put your money into the fund that buys mortgages, you understand? You'll get your money back as all these people pay off their mortgages, but then at the end you don't get any lump sum--you don't get anything. All the money is paid back as you go along. And if you spend that money that's being paid, you won't have any more for later. That's it--it's finished." She is clutching her purse in her lap in the lurching cab; she is closing her eyes. Strange flashes of dreams fill her mind. There she is, strapped into the ambulance in the night, and her two husbands on either side of her, one lecturing her, terribly stern, the other whining and kvetching. She opens her eyes and sees spots; she sees her sons and her two husbands. "Stop it. Stop it, all of you!" she shouts. In silence they help her out of the cab. Silently they take her up the stairs. Sarah carries the purse into the bedroom for Rose. "Why don't you take off your girdle?" she says to Rose. "Why don't you lie down?" The sheets are smooth against her skin. There is no one else in the apartment. Dorothy and her jogging suits are gone; the children are gone until tomorrow. In the night she gets up and puts on her robe and slippers. She walks through the empty apartment, turns on the lights. She begins to look at her things, to look at each one as if for the last time. She adjusts her pictures of the boys in their sailor suits. She examines her needlework, all the tiny stitches in her needlepoint birds. She holds up her photograph of Ben to the light, a picture in which he looks very stern and old. He would not approve of putting money in Fannie Mae. He would call it frivolous. She folds up Maury's plaid lap blanket and touches his large-print library books in their clear plastic library jackets. He used to say, "What's money for but to enjoy?" All the time he was saving a hundred here, a thousand there, in all those little bank accounts. Ben spent on the big things, the old Brooklyn house, the car, furniture, college for Ed and Henry. Maury never bought big-ticket items. As for Rose, she hates the thought of money. She has never had a head for mathematics or money. She loves beauty, and that is all. Then she remembers something. There is something she must do. She goes to the secretary stocked with stationery. She still has her stationery and her old address labels: "Mr. and Mrs. B. Markowitz." She never changed her name, even after she married Maury. She had been Rose Markowitz for too long to change--and besides, Maury's last name was Rosenberg, and Rose Rosenberg was a name she could not bear. She couldn't bear it. She takes out her note paper, cream-colored, with a single coral rose at the top. She begins to write on it, covering the paper lightly in ballpoint. Her letters are round and large, with a great deal of space above and below. She leaves her a' s and o' s open at the top, as if they were bowls to be filled up later. Will , she writes at the top of the page. Thank God I am still in sound mind, although my body is weak, still grieving for the loss of my dear husband still in shock from the way he was torn from me when they were claiming to be reviving him. The whole of my estate if there is any left from Fannie Mae, I leave not to my children or to Maury's daughter, Dorothy, not out of spite, but because I choose to give where there is most need. My son Edward is a renowned professor of the Middle East and although a good man is deeply absorbed in his own career and foreign affairs with little time for other matters. Within him lies a good heart, although self absorbed. With many successes and articles, he is standing on his own two feet. My son Henry is now in the art business in California. He has given up teaching for business however he has still not married. Although he breaks my heart being a bachelor, he does not do anything about it. He is living for himself only, and what way to live is that? If however, my son Henry does marry within five years I will give his wife all my jewelry with the exception of my garnet ring which I leave to my dear neighbor Esther Rabinowitz. If he does not marry, then to my darling daughter in law Sarah will go all the jewelry. As for Dorothy, I bear no malice toward her but I cannot forgive her for coming to push her own father into the grave. All the money and goods will go to The Girls' Orphanage in Israel, to the fund for brides to prepare them for their weddings and their Jewish homes. I too was an orphan like them and I too know what it was like to be sent away to a foreign land. The only exception is my diary, which I leave to my dear Sarah, because she is a writer. Although it is unfinished, she will know what to do with it. Rose has covered six small pages of her cream stationery. She is exhausted. She gets up and walks back to the bedroom. But as she gets into bed she realizes she has forgotten something. What is it? She agonizes, imagining what it can be, but she can think of nothing. Then, in the early morning, before dawn, she wakes up and glimpses the stern picture of her husband Ben staring down at her from the wall. He seems to be following her with his eyes. She hurries back to the desk. Codicil , she writes. I cannot forget also about Dad's dissertation which has never received recognition. I leave this also to Sarah to translate and to publish as she sees fit because she can appreciate its scholarship. When he passed away I planned to translate it in his memory but the difficulties I encountered in my life were too great before I met Maury and afterward Maury insisted I spend my time on other things for he believed that it was better to enjoy life while living than to spend time with the dead. However, I still hoped to translate it while I had the strength, but in recent years when he became ill I found I did not. It is not Maury who is to blame for this it was simply his disposition. Despite his many other qualities he was not a scholar. She reads the will and codicil over to herself and sighs with relief. It is not that she feels better, but that it comforts her to write this down. Maury didn't write down much. He never wrote letters, or even postcards. But Rose feels she must leave some description of her feelings and ideas to her children. She cannot bear the thought that she will not be remembered. As for whether they'll approve of her will, she cannot worry about that now; it is hers to write, and they won't know about it for years and years. She won't say a word. Copyright (c) 1996 by Allegro Goodman Excerpted from The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
