The Family Markowitz

  “How did you feel about that?” Alma asks.

  “I just told you.”

  “I mean, beyond the bare facts. Emotionally. How did that make you feel? Didn’t you feel violated when the soldiers came in? Do you still dream about it?”

  Rose shakes her head. “This was many years ago.”

  “Yet you remember it so clearly!”

  “No, actually,” says Rose, “it’s gotten very fuzzy in my mind.”

  “You’re trying to forget it?”

  “No, I just can’t remember it that well. Alma, I haven’t thought about this for years and years.”

  Alma glares at the needlepoint bird framed on the wall. “You’re sublimating this.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re purposely forgetting. Pushing it out of sight.”

  “Alma,” Rose says gently, “when you forget something you don’t try, you just—forget what happened.”

  “But can’t you remember the feelings? Weren’t you frightened?”

  “I suppose we were.”

  “Couldn’t you have gotten killed?” Alma bursts out. “I mean, really murdered. Raped, then murdered.”

  “Oh, definitely.” Rose’s voice quavers. “Sometimes when I think of the wars I could just cry.”

  Alma leans over taut with expectation, urgency, and sympathy.

  “But I don’t think about them very much.”

  What does she think about, Alma wonders, staring at Rose’s shadowed eyes. In fact, Rose is thinking about her slipcovers. She regrets that she gave them up. For forty years they covered the sofa where Alma sits. Rose brought them with her from New York when she moved into the residence, but the same day, Gladys came to introduce herself and examine Rose’s things (she was sharp as a whip to the last day, and mean), and she picked up the cover on the sofa and said: “Rose, what are you waiting for?” She embarrassed Rose into it. She wanted them for the flea market, Rose found out later. Gladys used to visit all the residents, spying for the flea markets. They gave her awards. Now Rose has to keep the jalousies closed so the cushions won’t fade.

  Alma bends over her tape recorder. “Let’s move on to the family you lived with in England during the war.”

  “She was a monster and became senile,” Rose declares. “When they lost their money, she went mad because they couldn’t afford plates.”

  “Plates?” Alma asks.

  “China, porcelain. She broke something every day. She threw plates across the dining room. But he was an angel. The only one who understood me. There was also the most cherubic little boy, Eli. With golden hair. I went back to see him in 1954. He was a great big hairy man. Horrible! I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

  Upper-middle-class industrialists, Alma writes in her notebook.

  “They were very observant, that I know. We went to services every week. Alma”—Rose picks up the tape recorder—“I insist you turn off the machine and take some cheese cake. Listen. In my day we were taught to eat. I was a size eighteen at your age.” She sees Alma writing and amends, “Well, maybe sixteen. Come. Sit, dear. Just let me get the cake out of the Frigidaire. You know, I’ve always thought Alma was a lovely name.”

  “Really?” Alma looks up startled. “I hate it.”

  “Why?”

  “Rose,” says Alma, “are you trying to sidetrack me?”

  “No, I’m really interested.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She rattles her notes. “It sounds so—spinsterish,” she finishes carefully. “And on top of that, Almas are never famous in their own right. They’re always married to famous males.”

  “Now that’s not true.” Rose emerges from the kitchenette. “I’ve heard of many famous Almas. Let me think. What about Alma Mahler?” She presents the piece of cake. “Let me tell you about this cheese cake. I got the recipe from Esther Feurbaum. F-e-u-r-b-a-u-m, my dear neighbor in New York. This woman was a legend in her time in the New York Hadassah. I’m telling you so her name won’t be forgotten. If there were any justice in this world, she from all of us would be alive today recording her life for your book. Such a tragedy.”

  “What happened to her?” Alma asks. “What kind of tragedy?”

  “Very great,” says Rose. “If you won’t taste, take a look at her recipe. You’ll see what I mean.”

  —

  Ron watches Alma from the bed. Brushing out her wet hair, she stands with a towel draped over her cotton shirt. Plain and expensive, her clothes seem young for her. Not incongruous, but unforgiving. She buys jeans and dresses cut for her younger self, the waist she must have had in college, hips and breasts not yet thickened with extra weight. It makes him a little sad. Not because he didn’t know her when she was younger; he believes her when she says she was a little bitch. It’s just that it saddens him to think she dresses as she remembers herself. Still, she does it more out of habit than vanity. Her money is like that, too. A habit outgrown, but not outworn. It was something of a joke at his department when they first started going out. “She only wears jeans and old T-shirts!” everyone said. “But have you noticed, they’re never the same jeans and T-shirts?”

  Alma’s cousin Liz is showing her pen-and-ink animals at the Royce Gallery, so they are going to the opening. They both hate gallery openings. Ron hates the people and Alma hates the art. It’s one of her inherited pretensions; her mother is a collector.

  “Tell me again why we’re going to this thing,” says Ron.

  “Because it’s her first show in three years!” Alma says. “This is a very stressful point in her life. She really is marrying Tom this time, and she needs reinforcement or she’ll run back to Yosemite, and you know she doesn’t take care of herself out there—we’ve been through this before.”

  “Yes,” he says, “but it’s so funny.”

  She misses this last in the roar of her blow-dryer.

  —

  From the Royce Gallery Ron can see two other artists. One sells handpainted silk scarves and holds classes Mondays. The other offers handcrafted wood furniture—that is, if working out back with a Sears router counts as handwork. Besides the galleries, there are boutiques with their starched Indian rags and ice-cream stores, bright and blank—room for standing customers only. Galleries are like that, too; nowhere to sit. Ron thinks of Venice’s old attractions. He used to take his day campers to Muscle Beach for snow cones—strawberry, orange, grape, no gourmet flavors—and then for a tour of the Hyperion Treatment Plant. “How old are you?” his seven-year-olds asked him, and he told them he was ninety-nine. They believed him, too. Later on he went to the endangered-programs beach parties. Ethnic Studies would challenge Women’s Studies for volleyball, and afterward everyone sat on the sand and stuffed themselves with homemade food. Then a few people would stay and get stoned quietly under the stars.

  In the chatter by the drinks table a long-legged woman leans toward him companionably. “I miss Venice,” he tells her.

  “This is Venice,” she says.

  He cups his hands and whispers in her ear, “I mean old Venice.”

  She clutches her drink. “What, Venice, Italy?”

  Across the room, Alma squeezes her cousin’s hand. “Hey,” she says. “How do you feel?”

  Liz stands with her arms at her sides watching the crowd. “I’m okay,” she says. “What are you doing nowadays?”

  “Oral histories of women in Venice.”

  “Oh, wow,” says Liz. “That must be a lot of work—”

  “It is,” Alma cuts in, “but it’s worth it. There’s so much great material out there.” She smiles quickly at Liz’s fiancé and moves on to avoid his frozen black eyes.

  The drawings crowd the walls in distressed wood frames. “Such fine draftsmanship,” muses a salesman. Alma nods, but the fine detail disturbs her. The lines seem unnaturally concentrated, like leaf veins under a magnifying glass. Every quill on Liz’s hedgehog is equally important, every hair on a mouse is equally focused. She draws with a hawk’s vision, Alma think
s, but there must be a way to draw with human sight. There has to be a rule for finding significant details, a method of selective focus. Moving to the open door for air, she finds herself staring at a small bronze of the Indian maiden Sacajawea. The stern figure stands slit-eyed against the elements. So powerful. So angry. Her hair thrown back in the wind. Her baby lodged like a stone against her heart. Her lips mute.

  —

  The living room is stifling when they get home, because whenever they leave the house they have to close and lock the windows for security. “I’m getting central air-conditioning,” Alma announces.

  Ron looks at her aghast. “That’s ridiculous! Alma, this is just a brief heat wave!”

  “This happens every summer,” she says. “It’s just beginning.” She flips on the answering machine.

  “Alma, it’s Mom,” enunciates Nan Renquist from the tape. “No message except I look forward to seeing you Saturday.”

  Ron scowls at the machine. “I’m not supervising any air-conditioning while you’re gone,” he tells Alma.

  “No one asked you to.” She watches the machine cycle through two hang-ups. Suddenly it crackles.

  “This is Rose Markowitz. I am feeling very ill, my dear, and I would like to cancel the interview for Monday. Simone passed away yesterday…”

  “Shit!” Alma throws herself down on the rug.

  “I haven’t slept all night,” Rose continues, “which is not unusual for me except that I had a terrifying dream which I hardly ever do. She was standing above me dressed in her terrible blue gown. An evening gown which she wore to the senior citizens’ dinners.”

  “Jesus!” Alma moans. “Simone was fine last week. I’ve got five weeks of tapes on her! What happened?” She flicks off the machine.

  “Hey, I was listening to that.” Ron flips the button.

  The voice stretches on. “I told her at the time I thought the dress was inappropriate; it was foolish to wear a thing like that and threadbare, too. It looked shoddy, to tell the truth, and it was inappropriate to wear on this so-called bingo night. They all wear them of course…” Her voice fades for a second. “When I saw her there, she looked at me and looked and she wouldn’t say anything, and I kept calling her but she wouldn’t answer me, and I felt sure I was growing mad. There is a gentleman here they just took away with Alzheimer’s mad as a hatter; he couldn’t remember his own wife they said—she died two years ago…”

  “Would you turn that thing off?” Alma goes into the other room, but Ron bends over the tape.

  “So she wouldn’t answer me. She just stood above my bed like a ghost until morning, and now I feel terribly ill. She used to dream like this, you know, and now I’m dreaming the way she did. She used to smile and smile; she loved to sleep more and more, she said, and just before she passed away she dreamt she met her sweetheart, looking just as he used to look—she saw him at Marina del Rey in her dream—and he told her, ‘Je me souviens. Je me souviens, Simone. Je me souviens.’ And I asked her, Who is it who remembered you? She would just smile and smile. ‘It was one of them,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure which.’ ” The tape cuts off.

  Ron finds Alma curled up on the bed. “They’ll all be dead by the time I finish,” she says. “And I’ll never get this done anyway, because they don’t understand what I’m doing at all! I talked to Rose’s doctor, you know. She takes tranquilizers. Half the time she’s blowing her mind on some form of Percodan. You heard her just now.”

  “She was great,” says Ron. “I think she’s fascinating. You should copy the tape from the machine.”

  “You don’t understand,” she cries. “You think it’s funny, but don’t you see, all I have is tapes like that. Hours and hours of trivial reminiscences, insignificant data.”

  “Alma—” He puts his hand on her shoulder but she shakes him off.

  “Can’t you see,” she says. “They’re incoherent. They can’t tell past and present apart. Half the time they don’t know when they’re awake or sleeping. I can’t get facts or dates from them. Only these muddled stories. What kind of vehicle do I have here? What can I do with this shit?”

  “Calm down,” says Ron. “It’s not worth getting upset about.”

  “Yes, it is worth it! I’d like to see you just once get upset about an idea!”

  “Well”—Ron smiles—“I don’t have a religion like you. The thing is, though, you have to work with what you’ve got. I’ll help you, but I’m not Robert Coles—what can I say?”

  She laughs a little at this and turns over. “Oh God, Ron, I’m such a fool. Could you tell me in a nonpatronizing way that you’ll take care of me?”

  “Give me a minute,” he says, but she’s up and washing her face.

  “At least I won’t have Rose on Monday,” she says. “I’ll have a respite this weekend.”

  “Now that’s dangerous. She’ll convince you to give up. Your mother will talk you out of the whole thing.”

  “Thanks a lot! She’s not talking me out of anything.”

  “We’ll see,” says Ron.

  —

  Ron doesn’t know Alma’s mother at all. When she calls, she asks for Alma without identifying herself. And she never leaves messages with him. Only on the answering machine. He pictures Nan as Alma describes her—someone who smoothes away and subdues all opposition. He has his own private image of her, too, more place than person: windless rooms and vapid water. He imagines her house surrounded by still blue swimming pools.

  He senses Nan’s presence while Alma is away. He feels the way she pulls invisibly from her house outside the city so that Alma changes her plans and comes when she calls. Alma, otherwise strong-willed, indignant, earnest. Those were the qualities he first liked in her, and, above all, her energy. Not her arguments, he realizes now, but the way she argues, the way she jumps out of her chair, the way she laughs when cornered, as if she could sweep away objections with her hands.

  She’s wonderful at protestations, manifestos. An orator at picnics, flushed with sun and wine. He’s heard the stories about her riding lessons, Mount Holyoke, her wedding afterward. They’re in Egypt on their honeymoon and she’s riding this stinking camel when these Bedouin women start following them. They’re watching her, talking among themselves, and finally the old one comes up to her guide and starts pointing. The guide says, “They want to know how much your husband paid for you.” So here she is, with this camel shitting underneath her, giving them the big speech about how in America you marry out of love; the man doesn’t pay for you. The guide translates, and the Bedouins start up again, talking among themselves. Finally, one points to her engagement ring. The guide says, “They want to know how much he paid for that.” And seriously, she knew right there she was going to leave her husband. She’s not going to get bought again.

  He’s laughed at this, and he’s waited straight-faced not to give it away and then watched the rest laugh. And now the story and the laughter afterward cycle together in his mind like dust and a record needle. It scratches him, it hurts him to remember how she tells this standing next to him, arms folded, eyes for her audience. Each time she loses something in the telling. Her tapes are like that, too. It shocks him how cheap she sounds. Everything fresh about her stripped to an insistent, alien voice. It’s strange how delicate the old women sound in contrast. They speak without an end, and it’s a kind of music, the long, slow ramble of their voices.

  “Now did Rose tell you about the ferns?” Eileen asks from tape E.M. 3. “Well, I came in to water; the two of them looked just pitiful to see. So I boiled some water because I’d read years ago tea was the fertilizer for ferns. I watered them with tea, cooled off, of course, and when I came in next morning they’d just perked right up—looked so much better, and all in one night! I kept house for my daddy in West Virginia: I dug up two ferns from somewhere and planted them one on each side of the porch. I used tea, pots of it; kept it in the fridge and heated it a little to take the chill off, of course, and pretty soon those ferns
were big like this. They used to stop on the road to take pictures of them. It was a cream farm. We sold cream once a week. The milk was for the pigs and the calves in spring. May to July, or was it August? I forget when the calves got milk. We raised most everything. Sold what was left over—we made certain there was plenty left to sell. That was the advantage for us children. If we raised tomatoes we got the cash. Yes, we took them to the produce market; the prices came from Pittsburgh—you could read them in the paper, and when radios came along you could hear them. When Dad died I didn’t want to go back…”

  “But why? Why didn’t you?” That was Alma.

  “Oh, you know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me why!”

  —

  Alma has trouble sleeping at her mother’s house. She unbinds herself from the tight sheets and slips downstairs. She wants to take a walk but can’t remember how to turn off the new alarm system. It’s as cluttered as Rose’s place, she thinks as she paces around. Mom’s clutter is older, though. Hopi pottery and shards of ancient blue glass, Roman coins, hand puppets and bas-reliefs bought together in Indonesia. Mayan wood carvings. Most of the things are broken, and usually in a set there is one thing missing. Dad would point this out when Mom returned from her excursions. He would line up a set of graduated gold-wire circlets and ask, “Now where are number two and five? Your mother buys seconds,” he told Alma.

  Even before Dad died, Mom traveled alone. In the summers she took Alma with her—mostly to excavations. They went to Ashkelon once, and after high-school graduation, Pompeii and Herculaneum. Albums of pictures crowd the bookcases. It’s frightening the way she keeps them among the artifacts. The photos themselves are such a mixture of dead and living things. Nan and Alma Renquist grinning in Pompeii among the corpses preserved where they went about their business. As Alma flips the album pages, it seems to her the ashen bodies on the streets look more alive—clutching themselves, doubled over—than the tourists frozen upright in the photos. What, after all, has Alma to do with the girl in white shorts? And what relation has her mother to this younger woman holding out something invisible and now forgotten in her hand? Rose and the others with old photo albums talk about themselves as girls, but they are speaking really of other people. She forces the albums back on the shelves. They’d planned an early start to go riding the next day, but Alma sleeps through her alarm and Nan doesn’t wake her.