Cathleen Schine - They May Not Mean To, But They Do

“We should take him. Maybe his luck will hold out. We’ll win some money.”

Daniel took Ruby and Cora to the Museum of the City of New York. He thought they would like the Victorian dollhouse, but they preferred an exhibit on graffiti. Then they walked down Fifth Avenue, past the hospital, toward his parents’ apartment, and the girls insisted on getting ice cream from a vendor although it was windy and cold.

“Let’s sit in Grandpa’s park,” Ruby said. “Maybe we’ll see the rat.”

They sat on the cold bench and watched pigeons fluff themselves against the wind. There was no one else there. Daniel wondered if his father would ever see the park again, if he would ever leave the apartment again. For all he knew, his father was slipping into a new stage of dementia, leaving the park, the apartment, the entire world. Leaving Daniel forever.

The world without Aaron Bergman was unimaginable to Daniel. Even this pocket park, where he sat on a bench in a swirl of dead leaves with his daughters, was confusing without Aaron. Why was the park here if not for Aaron? Why were any of them in the park if not for its association with Daniel’s father?

“It’s weird without Grandpa here, isn’t it?” he said.

“Do you think raccoons come here?” Ruby asked.

“Or the coyote?”

His father was the embodiment of the word “entitled,” Daniel understood that. It was a kind of strength, he understood that, too — Aaron’s sense that whatever the world had to offer, it was certainly on offer to him, and deservedly so. Daniel envied him that confidence. Perhaps it arose from being born into a well-to-do family. But it had stayed with Aaron even when he lost his fortune. A small fortune, but Aaron had lost it, lost a profitable, solvent, well-run family business.

My daddy was a gambler , Aaron used to sing, and Daniel would joyously sing along. They listened to Woody Guthrie records while Aaron’s business swelled up into a big balloon of impossible debt and then, one day, just like that, popped and shriveled and disappeared. Daniel had been quite young, so young he didn’t really remember being well-off. What he remembered were the years afterward, one surefire scheme after another, his mother getting a job, taking any freelance work she could rustle up even as she went back to school. He remembered the need, not for the family to live — there was always, miraculously just enough for that — but the need inside his father, the need for money, and for money to make money, and for that money to make more money, and for the lost money to reappear as borrowed money and the whole thing to start over again.

“ I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, I thought you know’d ,” Daniel sang in a nasal country-Western voice.

“Daddy,” Ruby said. She tugged at his arm. Things about him had started to embarrass her.

“ Hard travelin’, hard ramblin’ …”

“ Hard gamblin’ ,” Cora joined in.

“You both make me sick,” Ruby said. But she joined in eventually, too. There was no one to hear them. Just an old man with the same red walker Aaron had, and by the time he reached the bench, the song was over.

Freddie could not decide whether or not to go to New York for Christmas. She loved going East for the holidays, it was still a novelty for her, it always would be — the snow, the cold, the lights on Fifth Avenue.

“Everything you hate about it,” she said to Molly, “like the crowds, for instance — I love that. I love being a tourist there.”

“You go to New York and see my father, I’ll stay here and see your father. They won’t know the difference.”

As soon as she said it, Molly wished she hadn’t. “I’m sorry. It’s so easy to dine out on them. Cheap joke. Why don’t we both stay here this year?”

But Freddie knew that Molly’s family Jewish Christmas was somehow their most important holiday. They celebrated Hanukkah in a haphazard way, lighting candles on the nights they remembered. But Christmas was a time they all got together, all of them, even Molly’s ex-husband and his current wife.

“And Ben will be there,” Freddie said. She had said the magic word, the defining word, the name of the son. She watched Molly’s face grow almost beatific.

“Ben,” Freddie said again, just to see the effect, to see the benignity intensify.

Then Molly caught her at it. “Oh shut up,” she said.

Freddie started to laugh. “The idea of you staying here for the holidays — it’s pretty funny, Molly. Go see your cockamamie family and I’ll stay here and look after my cockamamie father. We will long for each other across the wide continent.”

In her parents’ bedroom, it was dim and cluttered with medical apparatus. Her father sat in his leather recliner, a blanket spread neatly over his knees. He grabbed Molly’s hand and motioned for her to lean down, then put his lips close to her ear.

“There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered, obviously alarmed.

“That’s Walter, Mom’s nurse’s-from-when-she-broke-her-ankle-ten-years-ago’s son-in-law’s cousin’s mother’s friend from church. Or some such thing. He’s from Ghana.” He was a very gentle man with a beautiful smile and a staccato, musical accent. He knew how to change a colostomy bag. He was strong. He was kind.

“What’s he doing here? There’s a black man in the apartment, I tell you,” he whispered again, sputtering now. He pulled on her arm.

“Walter. From Ghana,” she said, louder.

“No one from Ghana is named Walter,” he whispered. “He’s a fraud. Get him out.”

She straightened up and looked down at her father. His beard was trimmed. His hair was combed. Even the hairs in his ears had been trimmed. His nails were clean. His shirt was unstained and buttoned properly. And that blanket on his lap — he could have been a gentleman taking in the salt air on an ocean liner.

“Daddy, he’s here to help you.”

“I don’t need help. What are you talking about? Help? I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help.”

“Well, Mom needs help. You don’t want her back in the hospital, do you?”

“Hospital? Nobody tells me anything. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s resting. Do you want her to drop dead from exhaustion? Then who would take care of you?”

He looked pointedly at her.

“ Me? ” she said. “I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

“Honey?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

He motioned her to lean down again. “There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered.

* * *

“I knew he was a Republican,” she said later to Freddie on the phone. “But he never struck me as any more racist than anyone else his age. The uncomfortable kind of racism, not the suspicious kind.”

“He’s not himself, though.”

“I hope not.” That didn’t come out right. “Anyway, he’s incredibly difficult one minute, then he just switches over to sweetness. When I left the room, he and Walter were sitting side by side eating vanilla ice cream, watching NY1.”

“That’s the real Aaron, the vanilla ice cream one.”

Freddie was a gracious person. It was one of the things Molly loved about her.

“Thank you for being a gracious person, Freddie,” she said. “Even in the face of ghastly in-laws.”

Freddie laughed. How lovely that laugh was. How close Freddie seemed.

“They could have stopped with the telephone…” Molly said.

“Who?”

“… No television, no cars or planes, no computers. Just telephones, the invention that allows me to hear you from so far away, the magical telephone. It would have been enough.”