All of Great-grandfather’s descendants stayed the week, and then returned home, if that’s what they called it. “Good-bye, beloved mother of my mother,” Angelica whispered to the thick indifference of the Air France window. “Good-bye, Tobski,” she added, an afterthought.
THE LITTLE WIFE
THEY FLEW FROM BOSTON to Bangor on a mild February morning. Gail pretended to read a dumb novel selected by her group. Max brought some scientific tome. But he kept the volume closed on his knees, and on top of it he had opened the Beethoven score, opus 66, which he was practicing on his wide thighs. Gail playfully inserted a manicured nail between two of his busy fingers, and with uncharacteristic irritation he flicked her hand away.
They were in their late sixties, both retired. They were going to Maine to see their friend Fox, probably for the last time. Gail, fond of Fox, nevertheless looked forward to this finale with as much curiosity as dread. Every death foretold your own — there would be something to learn. She had been a schoolteacher; discovery was a lifetime habit.
I.
THERE IS AN ANECDOTE ATTRIBUTED, though not traceable, to Beethoven: In Vienna, seeing a passing woman, he remarked to his friend Janitschek, “What a magnificent behind, like the beloved pigs of my youth.”
Long ago, when they were in college, Fox had instructed Max not to believe this tale. Fox had said that if anybody made the remark it wasn’t Beethoven and not Janitschek, either, but Janácek, the Czech composer who lived almost a century later and who so loved the folk that he probably loved their livestock, too. Beethoven was a city boy, argued Fox; he knew pigs only as sausage. “But a pig’s behind is indeed a thing of beauty,” Fox went on to say. Fox’s uncle had been a gentleman farmer in Vermont, and during a few summers spent with him Fox had come to appreciate the plump joyousness of swine.
Max was acquainted with pigs mostly from the warnings in Leviticus. He did remember carcasses behind the window of the Italian butchery on Avenue J, which he had passed every day on his way to grade school. They hung there for all to see, upside down like Mussolini. “Dead and cured,” Max told Fox.
“A pig deceased bears little resemblance to a pig alive,” Fox informed him.
“HOW DID YOU and your roommate find each other?” Gail asked Max a decade after college. They had just met. Seated next to each other at a bat mitzvah luncheon, they were asking each other question after question, rudely ignoring the other singles at their table.
“Fox and I? We were married by the university shadchan.”
Gail understood; the housing office had placed them together as freshmen. “Not an obvious pairing,” she ventured.
“We, too, wondered about it.” In those days freshmen were assigned to room with fellows who resembled them in backgrounds, religious and athletic preferences, secondary educations. In none of those particulars — except, perhaps, that neither played a sport — did there seem to be a match between Foxcroft Whitelaw and Max Chernoff. One of Fox’s grandfathers had been governor of Maine and the other a president of a small New England college; further in the past a Protestant divine had cast a wrathful glance over his own and succeeding generations. Max’s ancestors, keepers of small unprofitable stores, receded namelessly into the shadowy shtetlach his grandfathers had abandoned. In their turn his Brooklyn parents abandoned most observances, though they did keep kosher to please the old folks. During the first years of their marriage, Max and Gail did the same in honor of those ancient grandparents, who sometimes took a meal with them. When the last grandparent died, the young Chernoffs gave up the practice, and soon they were boiling lobsters in their own kitchen.
Max hadn’t always been Max. But entering college had given him the opportunity to discard the affected “Maurice” his parents had saddled him with. Later, though, when he’d become established as a historian of medicine, he was grateful for the dignity of “Maurice Leopold Chernoff ” decorating both his books. Shortly after the publication of the first book a gift came in the maiclass="underline" a recording of Maurice Abravanel conducting Maurice André and the Utah Symphony Orchestra in trumpet works by Ravel. Foxcroft, said the enclosed card. Max turned the record over and over in his hands. “Neither of us plays the trumpet, neither of us likes Ravel …,” he wondered aloud.
Such a learned man; such a sometime dope. “He thought this had your name on it,” Gail explained.
Music connected the roommates — perhaps the college housing office had been shrewder than it seemed. As a little boy, Max had been taught scales and finger exercises and “Für Elise” by a monstrously unmusical great-aunt. (“It’s a wonder you can even hum,” Gail remarked after meeting this redoubtable, still alive when they married.) Then he studied with a real teacher on Twenty-third Street. During the first semester of freshman year he sometimes played after dinner in the dormitory’s common room — jazz, mostly, but also Bach and Chopin. He was an adept amateur. Fox, thoughtfully listening, mentioned that he himself had tried various members of the string family. Then, the day after Christmas vacation, while Max was memorizing formulas in their shared bedroom, he heard Fox returning to their shared living room, making more than the usual amount of noise. Small wonder: he was carrying a battered cello case and had to kick his second suitcase. From the cello case he withdrew a magnificent instrument. “I just thought,” he said. Max hoped the thing was insured.
Fox turned out to be accomplished and dedicated. He was soon practicing an hour a day, and he joined a student quartet and played duets with Max in the common room on afternoons when neither had a lab and no one else was around. They both enjoyed these sessions, though the disparity between their instruments — Max’s the dormitory’s upright, Fox’s the invaluable cello — and between their abilities reminded Max of the other disparities that sometimes grieved him. Flatbush boys, Gail thought when Max told her of this old distress; is there any species so easily stung?
Fox went to medical school in Chicago, Max in New York. Fox married before graduating. “A surprise to me, that early marriage,” Max said to Gail at the fateful bat mitzvah. “He was wary of girls in college. Well, so was I …” Sophia Whitelaw was a bony, unadorned young woman who had flouted her aristocratic background, skipped college altogether, tramped around Europe like a hobo. At the wedding she danced with all the men and also with her sister, Hebe, an undersized ten-year-old in love with her horse.
“Foxcroft’s sister-in-law is named — what?” Gail inquired. They were still only an hour into their lifetime companionship; each had just been issued half a chicken. “Hebe? As in heebie-jeebies?”
“As in the Greek goddess of youth.”
Max was then working on his second graduate degree, in the history of medicine this time. “I find I prefer the library to the bedside,” he told her. Gail was teaching fourth grade. (She would later take time off after the birth of their only child, a son, then return to the classroom for another thirty years.) Her hair was curly, her nose fixed. She read a lot and collected art deco jewelry. She had her choice of suitors, including a rich one who had loved her before the nose job, when she still wore an owl’s profile, but she felt elevated by being chosen by a doctor, even if he was not planning to hang out a shingle. (For her part Sophia seemed to consider medical practice on a social level with window washing.)
Fox joined an endocrinology group in Maine. Max taught in Boston. The families sometimes spent weekends in each other’s homes. The men listened to music and played duets; the children — the Whitelaws had a daughter, Thea — played checkers and, in later years, chess; the women went to the museum if they were in Boston and to crafts fairs if in Maine. Once Sophia drove Gail and Hebe (the Goddess of Youth visited her sister frequently) all the way to Lewiston to see some notable antique farming tools. The crone who collected and sold the stuff also dealt in jewelry, mostly worthless. But there, tossed onto a table, was a circle of diamonds banded in silver banded in black enamel. Gail put the bracelet on. What a transformation — she felt like a queen, or at least like a commoner with a royal wrist.