We only went down to the city a couple of times that spring, when the Met put on an opera he was sure wouldn’t be set in a disco or a Las Vegas casino; lately he’d only wanted to see tenors in tight pants and open shirts, sopranos in big dresses, soldiers with helmets and breastplates. Instead of getting us drinks in the lobby—they were overpriced—he brought airplane bottles of Dewar’s, and we downed them on the sly during the intermissions, while looking at the costumes in glass cases. “Some brave soul,” he said, “needs to grab a whip and drive the moneychangers from the temple.” One night, we got stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway, even though it was eleven o’clock, and he said, “I hate the future.” “I don’t think it’s exactly the future anymore,” I told him. “All right, fine,” he said, “I hate the present. Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting to hear?”
I’d broken the news to him about the job only after I’d been hired, and then only after the first drink. “Ah,” he’d said. “The first move in the Great Extrication. I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. For what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed our little idyll. Next thing we know, you’ll be making friends.”
“You have friends,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not about that.”
“I did have friends.” It was true that no one had visited us lately. “No, you’re right, you’re too young for all this.” He swept his hand across the landscape, taking in the river, the mountain, a boat moving downstream, its sail pink in the afternoon light. “It must look like death itself to you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I was just losing my mind trying to be, I don’t know. What I’m obviously not. I feel like I’m disappointing you.”
“Let’s say it’s not what I’d envisioned for you. But I suppose that wasn’t my business, was it?”
“It’s not like you held a gun to my head,” I said. “A normal person would have died for a chance like that.”
“And you’re sure you’re not just going through a rough patch?”
“On the way to what?”
“On the way,” he said. “Oh well. At your age, you have a different view of things. Will they be paying you decently?”
“No,” I said.
“Then it’s not entirely without dignity. Are they giving you insurance at least?” He’d dropped his coverage—not a good idea for a man who’d just turned seventy-three—because the premiums had gone up to six hundred a month. He’d been worried enough to visit a walk-in clinic when we got back from Montana, but he wouldn’t go see the urologist to whom they’d referred him.
“Well, the drugstore next door gives flu shots,” I said. “They have a sign about it.”
“Oh,” he said. “But it’ll pay for your gasoline? And you’ll continue to have a roof over your head. Assuming we’re still…what would one call it?”
“You’re making this into some big catastrophe,” I said. “Nothing’s going to change—I mean, you don’t want it to, do you?”
“As long as you don’t,” he said. “Probably longer.”
—
My mother’s birthday was in May, and although she’d told me that seventy was nothing to celebrate, my husband offered to take her to dinner in the city and have us all stay at the Carlyle.
“I thought we were broke,” I said.
“Bent,” he said. “No worse than a forty-five degree angle. What would you do, put her on a bus back to New Jersey?”
“We could have her here.”
“And stick her in the cellar?”
“It’s a beautiful room,” I said. “I mean, you designed it.”
“For functionality, yes. I suppose we could give her our room. She doesn’t piss the bed, does she? Should you invite your brother, just for form’s sake?”
“He’d never come.”
“How quickly they catch on, these young people. You will have covered your bases. You see, I’m looking out for you.”
But he did come. He couldn’t afford to bring the family, not that I’d asked him to, so the wife—praise Jesus!—stayed home with the baby and the two little ones. “Well,” my mother said when I told her, “that was very thoughtful of you.” She seemed content with what reconnecting she’d already done, and, having seen one grandchild, could handle the disappointment of not seeing more—just my interpretation. I had to work, so my husband drove to LaGuardia to pick him up, then out to Saddle River to get my mother on the way back. When I got home, I found the menfolk out on the deck, my husband with a glass of whiskey, my brother with a can of Diet Coke. My mother was in taking a nap. My brother got up—he was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a black tie—and took my hands to keep me at arms’ length. “This is some house,” he said. “I was just getting the story on it. That somebody’d see a movie and then haul off and build the thing—that blows me away.”
“Maybe it just shows I don’t have much imagination,” my husband said.
“Did you remember to pick up the cake?” I said.
“I did. Mission accomplished. As our president would say.”
My brother sat down and looked out across the river. “So what do they call that mountain over there?”
“You’re right,” my husband said. “We don’t need to get back into that. As I said, you have to excuse an opinionated old man.”
“I better get started on dinner,” I said. “Can I bring you something? There’s cheese, crackers, olives…”
“I don’t want to get filled up,” my brother said.
“I’m fine, thanks,” my husband said. “I might come in and replenish. How are you doing with yours?”
“Still working away,” my brother said.
In the kitchen, I said, “So how badly did you two get into it?”
“We managed to step back from the brink,” he said. “I keep forgetting there really are people like that.”
“This is where we live,” I said. “You should come over to Kingston with me sometime.”
“No,” he said, “this is where we live. Thank God. Maybe our lesbian Unitarian could come and exorcise the place once he’s out of here.”
At dinner, my brother reached out his hands to me and my mother. I took his and reached for my husband’s, but my mother said, “I’m sorry, but it’s bad enough being this old without having to humor you. And your pushiness. Which is all this is.”
My brother turned red. You had to feel sorry for him. A little. “I didn’t mean to—you know, I just don’t see that it hurts anybody to give a word of thanks.”
“Well, why don’t we all join hands and say the Lord’s Prayer backward and see if we can get the Devil here?” She turned to me. “Isn’t that what he thinks we do?”