It was never just the four of us, and soon this moment would end—spouses, children, neighbors, friends, our mother, all would come pouring from the other rooms any second. But for now we were together, recounting every positive thing we could think of to say about Lucas Ekker. Remember how much he loved the peppermint ice cream you could only get at Christmas? Remember how he liked to stay up to watch reruns ofM*A*S*H, and how, being lanky and tall himself, he identified powerfully with Alan Alda? While we assembled our list, I kept looking at their faces, thinking of how their mother was our mother—that was the part that always amazed me. Our lives had so little overlap, and yet she had given birth to all of us.
“She can get rid of this place now,” Matthew said, his eyes going up to the double-height ceiling above the stairwell. “She can get herself a fancy condo in town, spend the winters in Florida if she feels like it.”
“Not that we’re thinking about Dad’s death in terms of the real estate potential,” Christopher said. He had a job in tech, something to do with search engines. That’s all I knew.
“She spent her life taking care of him,” Matthew said. “Even before she married him, she was taking care of him.”
His brother agreed. “That’s why he married his publicist. The publicist is always going to take care of you.”
This conversation lasted maybe five minutes, seven at most, and it made the hours we had traveled to Winchester and the hours we would travel to get home worth it. Christopher’s wife, Paula, came in and let out a little howl to see us there, and the howl drew forth their own two sons, ten and twelve, from the den where they had been splayed across the sofa playing videogames. They gave each of us the tentative hug of a young boy. Christopher had picked them up early from school, the same school Leda and I had gone to, the same school Christopher and Matthew had gone to. When does that happen anymore?
Only Lyle was missing. “He never leaves work,” Matthew said.
“Let him hide from us for a minute,” Paula said. “He was here last night until nine o’clock.”
“Teeth take precedence over everything,” Matthew said.
“Where’s Mom?” Leda asked.
“Lying down,” Christopher said. “She’s been on the phone fighting with the mushroom casket people all morning. Apparently Dad’s modest stock purchase does not move him to the top of the wait list. Demand for mushroom caskets has exceeded inventory.”
“He really wanted to be eaten by mushrooms,” said Sean, the older of Christopher and Paula’s boys.
“Well,” Leda said, putting a therapeutic arm around his shoulder, “he won’t know the difference.”
I dropped my bag on the long Shaker bench in the hall and excused myself for a minute. I went down the hall to the kitchen, through the mudroom, and down the stairs to the backyard, going across the patio and into the soft grass where Lucas had died. How long had it been since he and I stood there together while he made his cranky pitch for more Positivity books in the classroom? Lucas had gotten much more time on this earth than my father had. Buddy, whose funeral mass so overflowed the church that people said there must not have been a boat on the Atlantic that day. I stood in front of the lilac beds and thought about them both, Lucas Ekker and Buddy Zabriskie. I was not inclinedtowards magical thinking, but I sent out something like a prayer to the two of them all the same. Let me keep Eddie, I asked them. Not forever, of course, but if you could look out for my third father for a little while, I would be grateful.
A cold spring wind had picked up, and I had left my jacket on the bench in the hall. The moment I had the thought, my mother was there, the jacket in her hand. “You’re going to freeze,” she said, and held it up for me to thread my arms inside. I must have been standing in front of the place where Lucas had fallen. She no doubt thought I was there for a different reason. I put my arm around her and I told her I was sorry, because I was sorry. How awful that she had to find her husband that way.
“Thank you,” she said. “No one seems to feel bad that he’s dead.”
We weren’t looking at one another, which made it easier. “Well,” I said, “it’s hard not to think about all the other ways it could have gone.”
She nodded. “And it’s hard not to wonder if the four of you won’t say the same thing about me when I’m gone. Mom’s dead, check that off the list.”
What Leda had said on the train came back to me, that by going about the business of her own life, she had made us capable. I made a quarter turn and took her in my arms. “You’re a whole other story,” I said to her, thinking it might even be true. “If you ever die, the four of us will cry out a river for you to be carried away on.”
My mother smiled at the thought of that, then she rested her head against my shoulder. We stood there in the cold until Leda came and told us it was time to come inside.
6
Eddie went to the opera and he went to the theater. He saw the plays on Broadway but also saw plays in Brooklyn. He had memberships at the Whitney, MoMA, the Frick, and a twelve-ticket package to the Tribeca Film Festival. He attended lectures at the New-York Historical Society, the Center for Fiction, the 92nd Street Y, as well as occasional dharma talks at the Shambhala Meditation Center. Despite being retired, he continued to go to bookstores to see his former authors. He passed on dance.
I went with him to some things, or Jonathan and I did, and on occasion it was only Jonathan, who was happy to serve as a fourth in a Sunday bridge game that Eddie had been a part of for years. My husband and my stepfather played bridge. Skip played bridge, but he often canceled at the last minute, unable to get away from the responsibilities of Darien. Sometimes Leda and Steve met Eddie for dinner, and I wouldn’t hear about it until after the fact, and twice over the summer he took Steve and Leda’s son, Henry, to the Blue Note because Henry was cultivating an interest in jazz. Eddie was a popular man, and the few members of our family didn’t begin to fill his social calendar. We accepted the invitations that were extended, and we offered invitations in return. But I got to take him to chemo. I was clear about that.
“Okay,” he said. “Time to go.”
It was July again, and so there was nothing I needed to cancel. I picked him up at his apartment, and Jonas, the doorman, hailed us a cab. Eddie had a cane now, not a statement piece but the kind you buy at Duane Reade. There was a bit of a struggle getting it into the taxi, closing the door. “I have become a tri-ped,” he said.
“It is the natural progression of time.”
“Just think,” he said, touching my sleeve, “if you’d left me in that car to freeze all those years ago, none of this would have happened.”
The day was hot and bright, and it seemed almost funny to remember how cold we’d been. How alone. Forty-five years later we were stuck in traffic on the FDR, watching the boats slicing their way up the East River.
The sunny waiting room was crowded. In some cases you didn’t know who was the patient and who was coming along for the ride, but then there were the people who looked like they’d been assembled from a bone kit, translucent and bald in their wheelchairs, their sock hats pulled low against the air conditioner’s chill. We made our way through, found two empty seats.
“Will you tell them we’ve arrived?” Eddie asked me, and lowered himself into his chair. Taxi to the curb, across the sidewalk, into the building, across the lobby, into the elevator, out of the elevator, down the hall, through the door, it had exhausted him. I carried his canvas tote bag—a thick book, a yellow legal pad, potato chips with half the salt. I went to sign him in. When I came back, his head was tipped against the glass behind him.
