Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

I’d been waiting for the call about my father since he turned seventy. I thought that would be a nice gift from the universe — ten or fifteen healthy years of widowhood for my mother, traveling with friends, taking courses at the Elderhostel, and winding up in her eighties on a hotel veranda sipping a tall, fruity drink with someone who looked like Mr. Rachlin. I hoped Mr. Rachlin was still alive and I hoped that my father wouldn’t dawdle in shuffling off this mortal coil. He’d had a fairly serious car accident when he was sixty-eight, which left him limping a little, and he was a heavy cigar smoker, which seemed promising. I sent him crystal ashtrays and silver cigar cutters for his birthdays, expensive humidors and a subscription to that stupid cigar magazine for Christmas, and when friends went to Cuba, I’d ask them to bring back a box for my father. I was, roughly speaking, watching the clock.

Their next-door neighbor found my name on the tiny phone list my mother kept taped to the kitchen wall. Your father’s too upset, Mrs. Cannon said, so I’m calling. Andy and I met at the airport and rented a car and drove to our house. Mrs. Rachlin greeted us very warmly and Mr. Rachlin waited in the living room, sitting next to my father, who was reading the paper. Mr. Rachlin jumped up to hug us. He jerked his head toward my father. “It hasn’t really sunk in,” he said, and Andy and I nodded. My father said, “Hey, kids.” Mrs. Cannon left a lasagna on the kitchen table. Broadway Delicatessen delivered platters twice, fried chicken from the hospital where my mother volunteered, and right before dinnertime, six pounds of corned beef and pastrami, with a pound each of cole slaw and kosher dills, from my father’s law firm. We let the Rachlins go home and I gave Mr. Rachlin a little kiss for my mother’s sake. My father unwrapped the corned beef and made himself a sandwich.

“You kids want some?”

We said we weren’t hungry. My father ate his sandwich over the sink.

“You slimmed down,” he said to Andy. “The trick is keeping it off. Discipline. Without that, the avoirdupois just piles back on.”

I put all the food in the fridge and, for the same reason that I still recut the flowers in a bouquet before I put them in a vase with an aspirin and always put scented soaps in with my underwear and cedar chips in with my sweaters in May, that is, because I am my mother’s daughter, I made us all sit down in the living room, To Talk.

“Go ahead,” my father said, flirting with a corner of the front page.

“Daddy,” is how I started, and I couldn’t say another word. On the phone I always called him Alvin, as if it were a joke.

Andy picked up the ball and ran with it. Nope, my father said. No sitting shiva; your mother and I didn’t believe in that. And no memorial service; your mother wouldn’t have wanted that. I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t have wanted it but my father was adamant about everything. Cremation, he said; your mother felt very strongly about that — you know she hated cemeteries. And I’ll take care of it.

“We’d like to participate,” I said.

“The fact is,” my father said, “I already had it taken care of.”

“Where’s the urn,” I said.

My father laughed. “What, you don’t believe me?” He pointed to the sideboard, and we saw a black box about the size of a lunch thermos and sealed with gold tape, sitting next to a bottle of Tia Maria, two bottles of sherry, and a bottle of Scotch someone gave my father fourteen years ago. Andy and I got up to look at it.

“And the will,” my brother said. “I’m just asking because—

“She left everything to me,” my father said, “but if you kids want something from her jewelry box, go ahead and take it.”

My father picked up the paper in both hands, and we went into their bedroom, which was as neat as it always had been, except for my father’s underwear on my mother’s bargello bench. Her jewelry box was on their dresser, centered beneath their big Venetian mirror.

“I wish she had something you’d want,” I said.

“She kept Poppa’s watch in the bottom,” he said. “I’ll take that. I don’t think the Erwin Pearl clip-ons are going to work for me.”

Our grandfather’s handsome old Hamilton watch was not in the bottom of her jewelry box. And her good pearls were gone and her diamond watch and the sapphire earrings and matching bracelet she’d bought for herself on her sixtieth birthday, cashing in the bonds her father left her.

“Daddy,” I said. “Mom’s good stuff is missing.”

“Nothing’s missing,” he said coldly, and I thought, Christ, I’m going to have to show him, but he cleared his throat and said, “I put all of her valuables in a safety-deposit box. With people in and out of the house, it seemed smart.”

There was no answer to that. “Oh, good thinking,” I said. I went back to their bedroom with a handful of plastic bags.

“Just take half of it,” I told Andy. “In case you have a daughter or you have a friend with a daughter or you start dressing up. Just take half of every fucking thing that’s in there.”

He picked up a turquoise bracelet and a handful of cheap Indian bangles and I nodded. I put the beautiful Italian shoes she stopped wearing when she got bunions into a garbage bag and I put the beautiful heavy silk French scarves that she wore until she died in my suitcase. When Andy and I had cleaned out her closet and her jewelry box, leaving her track suits and sneakers and her sensible poly-silk blouses for my father to deal with, we went into my room. I pressed the push lock on the door.

“Please sleep in here,” I said.

Andy patted my hand. “We didn’t say good night.”

“Good night,” we both yelled through the closed door.

“Good night, kids,” he yelled back. “I’ll be back for lunch.”

We took a walk in the morning and threw some bad costume jewelry (Boca Bohemian, Oaxaca Farm Girl) into Long Island Sound and cried and talked while the gulls circled and we waited until my father came back. I made three corned-beef-pastrami-and-cole-slaw sandwiches and we each took an A&P diet soda from the case on the kitchen counter.

“So,” Andy said. “No service, no interment, no obit, and no visiting. Is that it?”

“That’s it,” my father said.

“Do you need anything?” I said.

“Like what?” my father said.

“We’ll head to the airport this afternoon, then,” Andy said.

“Sure,” my father said. “You’ve got jobs, don’t you?”

I didn’t stop speaking to my father. I did what my mother would have wanted me to do. (I like to think that her wish was for my father to have slipped painlessly and just hours after Andy was born into a deep crack in the world and never return, but I could never get her to say so. What I wanted was to have come out of her womb armed to my little baby lips and killed him with my superpowers before the cord was cut.) My weekly phone calls had none of my mother’s social flourishes. (It doesn’t hurt to be nice, she said, but that wasn’t true in this case.) I did make sure my father wasn’t dead and that he was not, with his driving, a danger to others or, with some old-man slippage in hygiene or nutrition, a danger to himself. I hired Delphine Jones to keep the house tidy and to look in on him three times a week, and when she couldn’t stand him anymore (“Your father is a very exacting man,” she said, her island lilt just about knocked flat after days and weeks with Alvin Lowald), she would pass him on to a colleague for a week of R & R.

Delphine called me on a Wednesday afternoon in January.

“I see the pipes have burst,” she said. “Your father isn’t sure who to call.”

I called Andy, and he called a plumber, who, for only fourteen hundred dollars up front, would make things right, and I found the Cutler Brothers Catastrophe Company, whose receptionist said, very kindly, that they specialized in “this kind of thing,” and I canceled my appointments and got back on a plane to make sure that things were okay. (“I’ll give you a million dollars if I don’t have to go this time” Andy said. “Seriously. I will give you a weekend at the spa of your choice. I will buy you diamond earrings.”)