We Are Gathered Page 5

  There are hundreds of people at the wedding. We drive past rows and rows of shiny automobiles: Mercedes, BMWs, even one boxy black Rolls-Royce. Josh, my oldest, is a lawyer, and he has done well for himself. I was disappointed when he chose law school over medicine. He was a bright kid, and he could have gone to any professional school he chose, but he was shy and sometimes inarticulate, and I thought he lacked the social skills to prosper in a world where charm is as precious a commodity as intelligence. I tried to steer him away from business; he didn’t seem tough enough. Corporate law seemed to offer the same pitfalls, but he insisted on going that route, and given the results, I suppose I was wrong to discourage him. I do not know what he does that is so valuable, but he is paid well, and his house is large, and his friends are wealthy.

  There is a parade of women in floral dresses and dark-suited men puffing their way up the driveway. They step onto the grass when they see the van coming and look a little disgruntled. At the top of the driveway, Ida stops the van, and Mitchell walks, hunched over, to where I am strapped in and unbuckles me. A crowd gathers around the van, and Ida embraces people I’ve never met. Eddie’s face appears when the door slides open, and he steps up to help Mitchell with my wheelchair. “How ya doing, Pop?” he asks. If I could, I would grimace. Eddie never called me Pop when he was growing up. I was Dad under normal circumstances and Father when he was hurt or angry. When he went off to college—the first attempt—he had a fair-haired, all-American, tennis-playing roommate who called his father Pop. Among other things that Eddie picked up from that boy—drinking gin and tonics, using the word summer as a verb, playing golf—he picked up that name. It sounds false on his lips, and I have been waiting twenty years for him to stop using it. Eddie is wearing cheap cologne, and he smells like Pine-Sol. He swoops over me, and I see that one of the middle buttons on his shirt has come undone. Together, he and Mitchell lower me from the van. Eddie tells Mitchell that he can take care of me, and he calls out, “Mom, I’m going to take Dad somewhere shady.” He parks me in back of the chairs, alone, then leaves me. I hope he is enjoying his revenge.

  There are flowers all around the courtyard of my son’s house, big bursting yellow tulips and roses. White-jacketed caterers slip among the crowd carrying empty silver trays. A semicircle of plastic chairs has been arranged around a lace chuppah. No one is sitting down yet and, thank God, the ugly girl has moved away. I am stuck facing forward, staring at the white columns of the front of my son’s house. Eddie returns and squats down in front of me. He searches my eyes, and I try to convey through them that I am alive and cognizant. This takes a great deal of effort, but I might as well try to push the Empire State Building over with my bare hands. “Elizabeth is getting married today,” Eddie tells me. It is the umpteenth time I have heard this news. “I wonder if you know that,” Eddie says. There is a bit of cotton stuck to his face, and I imagine he nicked himself shaving. When Eddie was a boy, he never emerged from an encounter with a razor with fewer than three wounds. Mornings, we sent him off to high school with flesh-toned Band-Aids pasted all over his cheeks and neck. Eddie scans the crowd behind me. His hand shoots up, and a moment later, Sharon is with us.

  “Hello, Albert,” she says. “That’s a very nice suit.” She turns to Eddie and tells him, “I’m going to sit in the back row with Matt. He’ll never be able to sit through the whole ceremony, and I want to be able to make a discreet getaway.”

  “Okay,” Eddie concedes. He and Sharon almost never touch, and Matthew is the only thing I have ever heard them discuss. Sharon is overdressed in a frilly blue outfit, and I think of the praise that Eddie has heaped on her family and consider that it must be ill deserved. Eddie does not know how to praise. All compliments bestowed on others are really backhanded insults meant for me.

  Eddie stands suddenly, and I hear him call, “Thank goodness. Can you stay with him for a while?” I recognize my wife’s perfume, and then her hurried geisha walk. Eddie and Sharon disappear, and Ida sits beside me, a yellow rose corsage sprouting from her wrist, her fingers curled around her pocketbook. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that she is frowning. I want to tell her to go and leave me alone. Ida loves to socialize; she puts people at ease, and by the end of any party, there are at least two women who consider themselves her new best friend. I have watched her across many crowded rooms. She tilts her head when she is listening, and she never laughs but rather smiles inwardly to herself as if she knows the true meaning of whatever joke or story has been told. This leads people to credit her with a degree of understanding that she does not really have.

  Wedding guests begin to shuffle into their seats, and Ida lifts her hand frequently to wave. I see I am not the only poor schlub in a wheelchair; that kid is here, the crippled one we used to always see at the synagogue on High Holy Days with his mother parading him around like she was such a saint. I thought he’d died, but maybe he’s like me, stuck between life and death, staring at the sky. Josh finds us, kisses Ida, says nothing to me. He says, “You’re sitting in the front row.” Behind me, I hear him say, “Let me do it.” He grabs the handles of my wheelchair and pushes me over the grass, jostling me back and forth. People stare at me, my head bobbling, my pants leg caught in the wheel, freed, caught again, freed. “Maybe you should have left him at home,” Josh says.

  When my boys were young, I was just starting out in business for myself. My father had left three grocery stores to my older brother with the understanding that when I finished college I was to enter the business as an equal partner. This never came to pass. My brother and I differed on almost every count, and I spent two frustrating years arguing with him before he finally wrote me a check for a lump sum and told me to leave. I was nervous at first. Josh was four, and Eddie was less than a year, and Ida had expensive taste. I wanted Ida to worry with me, but she blithely assured me that she knew I would succeed at anything I tried, and she continued to eat lunch at the country club and make weekly daylong trips to the beauty parlor. I considered my next move very carefully. I did not have enough money to fail. My brother probably would have taken me back into the business as an employee, not as a partner, but I would rather we starved before that happened. Ultimately, I took a leap of faith. For no reason stronger than a hunch, I used the money I had as a down payment and took out a loan to buy a fleet of twelve Mack trucks and started a produce-shipping business. I paid my drivers well, and they worked hard, but I accepted no excuses. If a shipment was late, I docked their pay 10 percent for every hour overtime. We moved oranges, peaches, tomatoes, and onions all around the Southeast, and the business grew quickly. The more it grew, the more time I had to spend working, the more I worried, the more I yelled. Ida used to tell me that we had enough money. When I would consider a new venture—a canning factory, some retail stores of my own, a fleet of airplanes—she would answer: Why? Don’t we have enough? I could not make her understand that standing still was not an option. In business, you have to be a shark. The minute you stop swimming, you start dying.

  I’ll admit that I enjoyed watching my brother’s house fall into disrepair as we moved up into bigger homes, fancier neighborhoods. It was a sweet moment when my brother finally had to come to me for a loan because the banks had refused him. I wrote him the check, and we did not discuss the terms of repayment because we both knew that was something that was never going to happen. I was magnanimous, and I refrained from pointing out that in all the issues over which we had disagreed I had turned out to be right and he wrong. I gave him the check and did not force him to look me in the eye, and then I never mentioned it again. I know now, and I think I probably knew at the time, that this magnanimity hurt him worse than if I had squeezed him, gloated, and nagged. From a position of need, grace seems almost impossible to attain, though, of course, it comes quite easily when you have power. It was the grace that I wore as carelessly as my own skin that hurt him most.

  The three stores that bore our last name gradually crumbled, so by the time my brother f
inally gave up and sold the property, they looked as if they had survived a war. Before the last store was torn down, I walked through it with my brother. It happened to be the first store my father had built, and I remembered running up and down the aisles chasing my brother among stacks of cheeky apples and navel oranges that seemed to stretch higher than the Tower of Babel. My father played classical music in the store, and the shoppers, wheeling their gleaming silver carts over the snow-white polished floor, all seemed to be participating in some kind of ballet that my brother and I interrupted with the shriek of our rubber-soled shoes. By the time my brother conceded defeat, the floors had faded to a putty gray, flat and streaked with black skid marks. The shelves were empty except for a few random bags of potato chips and boxes of cereal gnawed open by mice and spilling their innards. The store smelled sweet and rotten, and in the cases that used to hold generous slices of fresh meat, there were bloodstains that seemed malevolent and foreboding, as if something vicious had happened there. The stated purpose of that final walk was to make sure that we had made the right decision; that the building was not worth saving, but by then, the decision was irreversible. The property had been sold. My brother asked me to walk through the store to prove that he could muster grace when necessary. Before we locked the front doors, the glass of which had long since been shattered and then covered with strips of graffiti-marred plywood, my brother told me, “I guess you were right all along.”

  There were times, as my empire grew, that I feared I would lose it all and that Ida and the boys and I would be reduced to poverty. I had money saved, but I also had debts. Everything was liquid, and it was a cruel game, where the winner is not announced until the very end. So there were these factors driving me: vengeance, righteousness, fear; but when I put those all together, they do not amount to anything like the momentum I had in business. It was something greater than money that drove me; it was creative, artful. I realize this now, and I hate to admit it, for I have always been indifferent to art, and I considered this indifference an advantage, one that would ensure my survival over those lesser creatures who stop to dawdle and dream and do not see the pouncing lion until it is too late. Were it not for indulgent husbands and fathers, I am sure the art lover would have long since been bred out of existence. Art inspires us to foolish things, and it was the artist in me, not the businessman, who let my company grow and distend until it became as unwieldy as the Hindenburg. It was the artist who would not admit that there was no heir apparent and that I was becoming too old to steer the ship. When the stroke came, there was not a single other person who knew the extent of my business; there was no way to carry on in my absence. Ida has tried to hide from me the fact that, bit by bit, she has sold off my empire, what part of it that did not actually dissolve in her hands, for far less than it was worth.

  Ida does not think I can understand her, and she generally behaves as if I am not in the room. Since the stroke, I have belatedly discovered the true nature of the woman I married: she is sloppy and sensual and even brave, all qualities she never before revealed to me. I have discovered this only through her absent-minded behavior; she is more natural in front of me, in my supposed stupor, than she ever was when I was conscious. But she must feel that if there is any part of me left with cognition it would be the part of me that ran the business. Thus, while she walks in front of me in her bra and panties and distractedly touches her own breasts, she is fastidious about ushering people away when the subject turns to the business. Nonetheless, I have overheard my share of phone conversations; and others, especially Eddie, are not as careful. I know what is happening, but I am amazed that I do not care. Maybe the stroke destroyed my emotions or tilted the balance. In my frozen state, I find myself affected by little things, most of which I probably would not have even noticed before, and completely unmoved by the few issues that I was passionate about. My business is crumbling; it will not survive me. I used to dream of stores bearing my name far into the future, when men traveled highways in the air and Mars was a vacation spot. It is clear that this is not going to happen, but then, most of the things that we predict for the future do not come to pass. What does it matter? I am going to die soon. My granddaughter is marrying a Christian boy, and no one seems disturbed, not even Ida, who still lights the candles on Friday nights and prays with her fists tucked into her eyes; not for my benefit, I now know, because she has continued the ritual as I sit immobile in my wheelchair, fascinated by the dripping of the wax. I told my sons I would disown them if they married outside of the faith. They obeyed me, even Eddie, every time. Perhaps I should have told them it was okay to fuck outside of the faith. Maybe that would have allowed them happier lives. In any event, they have probably figured that out.

  Eddie wasn’t quite right from the moment he was born. It was obvious to me, and I said as much to Ida, but she denied it. “Every baby is different,” she said, as if she knew. Women often speak with unearned authority on the subject of child-rearing. He cried furiously all the time, soiled his diapers in rapid succession, and refused to accept a bottle from anyone but his mother well into his twelfth month of life. He walked late, and then clumsily, falling often and wailing each time.

  This was all the more difficult to bear since Josh had been an easy child, slow to cry, adept and quick to learn. He spoke early, and then almost immediately in complete sentences. He learned to walk, and before we knew it, he was propelling himself around the room, holding on to coffee tables and bookshelves. He was eager to please us, and when I brought out the old movie cameras, he turned toward me gleefully and clapped his hands and waved. He was three when Eddie was born, and he treated the baby as if he were a toy. He referred to Eddie as “my baby,” and he came to fetch his mother whenever he cried. “My baby is hungry,” he would say. Or “My baby needs a new diaper.” Josh was protective of Eddie, probably because Ida used him as if he were a third nanny. Ida had plenty of help. Her mother was over at our house constantly, and we had a full-time maid, Jessica, Mitchell’s mother. Jessica loved babies, and both my children, I must admit, seemed happiest in her arms. She would sing and waltz them around the kitchen, holding them one-handed while she polished the counters with Comet. But when Jessica left at the end of the day, Ida would frequently dispatch Josh to care for the baby. This practice did not please me. Often, when I returned from the office tired and wound up, I was greeted by Josh and the baby in the playpen and Ida on the telephone. After dinner, when all I wanted was some peace and quiet, Josh entertained the baby with hide-and-go-seek punctuated by shouts of “Boo!” and “Surprise!” I tolerated it as long as I could, but eventually I would have to put a stop to it, and whenever I did, the baby began to cry. Ida rushed in from the kitchen, and Josh sat crestfallen in the center of the room, his whole face sliding into his lap.

  As Eddie grew, his problems worsened. He was temperamental and disobedient. He refused to put away his toys or share or clear his plate after dinner. Any attempts at discipline resulted in a tantrum. When he was six years old, he began to run away, and one night I had to call the police to search for him. They found him in the woods behind our house, and I do not think I was being excessive when I spanked him hard that night. He cried, but then he cried if I looked at him the wrong way, so there was no way for me to really judge the pain he was in. In any event, he survived, but he did not learn, and there were spankings that followed that one, some with a belt. I’m not sure they accomplished anything, but I do not regret them. If Eddie had been changed by those punishments, transformed into the boy I wanted, he would be happier and more prosperous today.

  People are taking their seats. Women whose faces I remember but whose names I have forgotten stop by to tell Ida how pretty she looks. I may have slept with some of them, but they don’t even glance my way. Maybe they want to remember me the way I was; maybe, like Mitchell, they’re in on the joke. A rabbi and a minister are conferring at the altar. If I was still a presence, they would not have dared to affront me in this way. In fact,
if it was up to me, I would not be here at all. I have made a policy of rejecting interfaith marriage, and I do not intend to change that policy. It’s not so much that I believe in God, but people need rules. If we start to compromise our principles, our lives are meaningless. Elizabeth is a sweet girl. She is pretty and compliant. In fact, aside from her dark hair, she resembles her grandmother more than her mother. Not that my daughter-in-law is unattractive, but compared to Ida, most women come up short. I would like my granddaughter to be happy, and it is for this reason that had I the wherewithal I would have protested this union. I have indulged her. She needs rules. Ida used to say it was because I had no daughters of my own. Elizabeth would sit in my lap when she was little and read quietly while I balanced the books. Later, her friends would come and swim at the pool. Some of them were disrespectful, loud, and abrasive, but never Elizabeth. She cleaned up after herself and her friends, put the lawn chairs in order, always remembered to thank Ida and me. Who do you think paid for summer camp in Maine? When the children were little and before Josh made partner, I offered before he had to ask. Riding lessons, even her own horse at the barn until she discovered boys. Extra money in college that summer when she wanted to go to Los Angeles to see her friend and suddenly needed a thousand dollars. That was me. But not without conditions. Good grades and the right aspirations, marriage, a family, no traipsing around Africa or finding yourself in India, no teaching the poor inner-city kids—as if that’s what they need.