The Sixteenth of June Page 14

  His brother looks away. Wanting to refute him, but also recognizing the truth of these words, so exactly what their grandmother would have said. “So, what? You decided to start visiting her to get revenge?”

  “If I wanted revenge, why would I have kept it a secret?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  It’s so typical, Stephen reflects, so utterly typical of his brother. “Because anything that doesn’t involve you is unacceptable, right?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You hate secrets, Leo. Everyone knows that. Mine’s just the one that came out.”

  Leo opens his mouth to speak, but stops.

  “I liked her, okay? I went out there because I liked her. I didn’t expect to, but I did. And, yes, I even liked being out there. I know it’s weird, and I know how it sounds.” Stephen pauses. Was he really having this conversation? With Leo of all people?

  He regroups. “When her mom got bad at the end, Nora got sucked into a hole. You must have felt it, too, like she suddenly wasn’t there anymore. She was my best friend, and she was gone. Or maybe it’s different with you two. Maybe you’re closer than ever.” A bitter laugh tumbles out of Stephen’s mouth.

  “It wasn’t some big plan on my part. I never thought I’d go as much as I did. I went because I felt bad for her. And then—I don’t know. We became close. She was a good listener. Everyone out there—” How to say it? How to tell Leo? “Everyone out there was kind. There wasn’t this competitive thing of having to prove yourself.”

  It was the opposite of this, he wants to say. It was the opposite of this party, this day, this family. His grandmother didn’t ask if his briefcase was calfskin. She didn’t ask if Stephen’s classmates had already turned in their proposals. She never sized him up, assessing him, comparing him. When Stephen was with her, he didn’t feel Michael’s stick prodding him or June’s carrots luring him in different directions. He felt only her concern, unfaltering and pure.

  “I still don’t get the secrecy. I still don’t get the cover-up.”

  “Because our family is so easy to talk to. They listen so attentively when you talk about your job, for example.”

  “They were looking out for her,” Leo insists. “They didn’t want her falling on the ice or whatever. That’s not a bad thing.”

  “She hated it there. Did you know that?” Stephen stands and crosses the room to look out the bay windows. The second floor is at tree level, and he sees sprays of branches, a tangle of arms.

  He and Nora had gotten high here once, that summer she stayed with them. The two of them had leaned out the windows one night, passing a joint back and forth, the rest of the house asleep. Nearly a decade ago, he realizes. Everything felt possible then, as though nothing between them would ever change.

  “She lost her sense of purpose out there. She’d lie in bed not wanting to get up. All that stuff they had—the classes, the field trips—that wasn’t her.” He is glad his back is to his brother, that he can speak the words to the glass.

  “I used to get her to take a walk with me when the weather was nice. Miriam said it was good for her. And she always put on a smile, acted like she was fine. But I could tell—” Stephen finds that he knows what he is about to say, that he has known it all along. A hint of sunlight filters through the clouds, touches the leaves.

  “I could tell she was sad. When I left, there was nothing for her. I tried to get people to visit her, some of the other residents. I asked if they could check on her.”

  They would agree, touched by his request. But he could tell they were unsure what to say to the withdrawn woman who kept to herself. The woman who ate her meals alone. Who never took pottery classes or attended events. Who never went to museums. He sensed this but ignored it, relieved when they assured him that, yes, of course, they would knock on her door. Even though he knew, he knew, it was not those faces she craved.

  “If Mom and Dad were so concerned about her, why not have her live here? God knows there’s enough space. Mom could’ve hired someone to keep an eye on her. They raved about Pine Grove. But they never asked if it was what she wanted.

  “She was a lot like you, Leo. She loved family. That was the most important thing in the world to her. I think some part of her assumed when they put her out there that she’d see us more. That we’d visit.” Those years in New York were hard, she had admitted. Not because Michael was busy, but because he was unavailable.

  “I don’t think Dad likes to think about where he came from. Maybe you make a giant leap like that and you can’t look back. But she definitely got the message. He wanted to forget about being Jewish, his past.”

  “Maybe he never was so Jewish to begin with,” Leo counters. “Maybe that wasn’t his scene.”

  I did it, too, Stephen reflects. I let her sit on that couch like an outcast. Because I worried what everyone would think. Stephen closes his eyes. His vanity. His stupid sense of vanity had kept him from being kind.

  “Or maybe,” Leo continues, “it was to make Mom feel more comfortable. It’s hard when someone feels left out.”

  Stephen turns, wondering if Leo can hear himself. “The way they make you feel, you mean?” Stephen shakes his head. “Do you remember that time I tried to host Passover? Back in New York?”

  He was in middle school. June had acquiesced, and he’d excitedly called his grandparents in Brookline to invite them to the city. He picked up a copy of the blue-and-white Maxwell House Haggadah from Gristedes. “Maxwell House, as in the coffee?” June asked, bewildered. “Does Zabar’s have something nicer?”

  Stephen set the table, carefully placing pillows on chairs, adjusting their angle. He set out the parsley, the dish of salt water. Tears, he had learned. A bowl of tears to remind us.

  But when his grandparents arrived, Michael and June stood back like they were strangers. It was Stephen who had rushed forward to take their hands, eager to show them the dining table. “Perfect!” Grandma Portman declared. “Everything is perfect, bubeleh.”

  June winced at the term of endearment. She frowned at the strange rituals of the seder. The dirty Jews, he felt her thinking. He had imagined a warm reunion, wisdom and tradition encircling them at the table. But when he looked at the salt water, he felt his own loss.

  “Mom was awful to them. Dad didn’t really join in. He pretended not to know about the seder, like it was all new to him.” Normally expansive Michael was reluctant to speak that day, like a boy with a stutter.

  The Haggadah was supposed to be an act of telling. “Tell your son,” it said. But how could that happen if his father refused to speak? If he went silent at any mention of the past?

  They never attempted it again. Stephen didn’t have the heart to subject his grandparents to the humiliation. Passover became a modernized meal with matzah and merlot, cleansed of religion. “Persecution,” Stephen says. “All the history of the world is full of it. You just don’t expect it to happen in your own home.”

  “Please. You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Leo, who fits in? When it comes to our family, who actually fits? You? Grandma Portman? Nora? Mom and Dad set the rules. The trouble is that they come at everyone else’s expense.”

  “You!” Leo suddenly bellows.

  Stephen takes a step back, startled.

  “You’re the one who fits in! It’s you! Don’t try to play the victim. You’re—” Leo casts about for words. “You’re the golden boy!”

  Stephen regards him for a minute and then bursts out laughing. “Me? Me? You can’t be serious. I’m the one who took refuge in a nursing home.”

  “You’re the smart one, the artsy one. You’re tall—” Leo pauses. “You know what I mean.”

  “Listen, do you know how hard I fought them to go to Hebrew school? Do you know how much they hated having me convert?”

  “Oh, please. T
hat’s just a religious thing.”

  Just a religious thing, Stephen thinks. Because God is no big deal. “You know the other place I go once a week that we don’t talk about? The synagogue. Why do you think we have brunch on Sunday? They know I go there, and they gloss right over it. It never dawned on me to tell them about visiting Grandma Portman because they’ve made it abundantly clear they don’t want to know.”

  Leo shifts uncomfortably.

  “When you think about what you want, your future home, your family, is this what you picture?” Stephen gestures around the room. The crystal gleams, silent.

  “Don’t you picture a family that’s close? A family that actually talks about stuff ?”

  “But you’re blaming them! You’re blaming them for your secret.”

  “No. I’m blaming them for not wanting to hear it. They never made space for her in this family, even after Grandpa died. If they were so concerned for her, why not have her be a part of our lives?”

  Leo does not answer.

  “I think—I think for a long time she saw the choices they were making and went along with them. Wanting to be supportive, not wanting to meddle.” No Haggadah, she would have thought sadly. Okay. Okay. “But when they put her out there, she saw how they felt about her. She saw that they wanted to live their lives without her.”

  “But she had a say in the matter!” Leo interjects. “She could have refused.”

  Stephen looks across the room at the folder on the desk. She was depressed, he wants to tell him. I didn’t want to see it, but she so obviously was. She was probably on antidepressants to rouse her and sedatives to help her sleep, a circle of drugs to bring her up and down. “Let’s try the meds,” Michael would have said briskly, the folder spread before him. “Maybe she’ll perk up.”

  She didn’t feel as if she had a choice. Because what was she supposed to do? Refuse their help? Turn them down when they were all she had left? And so she made the best of it, figuring she might as well.

  Stephen turns. “Let’s get this up,” he says, indicating the banner.

  “What? She did speak up and they ignored it?”

  “We probably don’t have much time.”

  “Why are you changing the subject?”

  “I’m not.” Stephen turns and is surprised by how close Leo is. A foot away, right before him. Leo’s brown eyes are hurt, confused.

  “She was no doormat, Grandma Portman,” Leo says.

  “I know.”

  “She could have left that place, if it was so awful. No one forced her into anything.”

  Stephen hesitates. “It’s complicated.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “People don’t always do what makes them happy. Sometimes people go along with things because they think they should. They go along because they don’t think they have a choice. They go along because happiness feels impossible.”

  “Oh, Christ. Christ, Stephen. Is this about Nora?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Stephen looks down at the banner.

  “You’re seriously linking this to Nora?”

  “You’re the one who brought her up.”

  Leo shakes his head. “Right. I brought it up. But you think it, right?”

  Stephen eyes him, unsure of what to say.

  Leo laughs into the silence, and this time it’s his laugh that sounds bitter. “You’ve never approved. I get that, okay? But let’s not go there. You had your shot with her.”

  Stephen’s heart sinks. “No, Leo. It’s nothing like that. I was never . . .”

  “No?” Leo says harshly. “Then what is it? You think I make her unhappy? You think I’m like the nursing home, trapping her?”

  Yes I said yes, the banner’s bright ink cries.

  Leo crosses his arms across his chest and Stephen looks at the familiar pose. Leo, five, dejected he can’t play Little League. Leo, eight, waiting up late in his Phil Simms jersey for their dad to get home. Leo, fifteen, watching Stephen fill out college-application forms.

  “I don’t think any of those things. I just think—” Stephen knows that whatever he says, things will never be the same between them. “I just think that I’ve known her for a long time. I was friends with her before you two started dating.”

  “I get it! You were BFFs.”

  “Let me finish, okay? I don’t think you’re bad for her. You’re my brother. And I was never interested in her that way. It’s just—I know her. And I’m not saying I know her better than you or anything like that,” Stephen adds hastily, seeing that Leo is about to interrupt. “But I knew her before her mom got sick. I knew her before everything got crazy. And she’s changed.” Stephen looks at his brother, who is grudging, guarded.

  “Our grandmother—I think she felt like everything was out of her hands. She felt like it was all decided, like she had no choice. She faded out there. I saw it but didn’t want to see it.” The institution of marriage, he thinks. To you, it’s camp. “I just think—when someone is suffering, when someone is ill—and Nora is ill, Leo, she saw her shrink this morning—then it’s not the right time to be making decisions about the future.”

  “This morning?” Leo repeats.

  They hear a noise behind them and turn. Nora is in the doorway, clutching two floral arrangements, a strange sound having escaped her.

  “Nora,” Leo says, starting toward her.

  But Nora takes a step back. She gestures with the arrangements, each one moving in her hand, as if to say, No, please, continue.

  Stephen watches the vases nervously. “I’m sorry—”

  “We weren’t—” Leo starts.

  “Talking about me?” she says, finally finding her voice. “But you were.”

  The three of them stand looking at each other.

  “We were,” Stephen finally acknowledges. “I don’t know how much you heard. But you’re right, we were. Only because we care.”

  “Because I’m ill? I heard plenty.”

  Leo draws a breath and takes a step toward her. His movements are so cautious that Nora laughs. “What do you think I’m going to do?” she asks shrilly. She looks down at the vases in her hands, her grip on them too tight. “You think I’m going to throw these? You think I’m going to—?” Then Leo is there, relieving her of them. He takes them from her and places them on the empty table.

  “Are there more of those?” he asks quietly.

  Nora is silent for a moment, looking at her empty hands. “Downstairs,” she says finally. “A whole bunch. June asked me to bring them up.”

  “I’ll get them,” Leo offers. “You take a load off, okay?”

  As if he could fix everything, Stephen reflects. As if her world were broken in some way he could repair. “I should go,” he says. “I need to get ready for the party.”

  He brushes past their convergence at the door. Nora has changed into an ivory dress with green embroidery, and he wonders if Leo knows, if he had even noticed her black dress earlier. It was the same dress she had worn to her mother’s funeral. Nora had sat on the couch that day staring at the box of ashes, the empty rocking chair a few feet away.

  Stephen pauses on the landing and watches Leo jog down the stairs. Nowhere to go but up, he thinks, and begins the climb.

  Thirteen

  The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Dusk, that magic hour, the day bleeding into its own end. Nora catches sight of the setting sun through the small laundry-room window. The air in the room smells of starch and ironing. Carol’s housekeeping supplies line the shelves, scouring powder and cleaning agents in canvas bins. An ironing board is next to a more elaborate machine, where, seated, Carol can feed linens through a press, her foot operating a pedal. Nora rests her chin on her knees and leans back against the washing machine.

  Strands of hair litter the groun
d beside her. Just one, she had told herself. Her hairpins lay scattered across the sink, an explosion of metallic lines like fireworks across the porcelain. She had placed them so carefully earlier, thinking, this way I won’t, this way I won’t. She was pleased with her reflection at the loft, enjoying a boost of confidence before leaving the apartment. But how long had that lasted? An hour?

  “Darling, do me a favor and bring these up,” June had said, pressing two vases into her hands. There was no question in her voice. It was an order, as though Nora were one of the staff. The arrangements were green and white, a broad leaf encircling the vase’s interior to conceal the water and the stems. “The boys will do the rest,” June added. Only while Nora was ascending the stairs, hearing Stephen’s and Leo’s voices, did it dawn on her that June was referring to her sons.

  Nora had stopped in her tracks when she heard them arguing. They talked about her as if she were a child. “And she is ill, Leo,” Stephen said. As if he were an expert! As if he knew anything at all.

  She hadn’t heard much before that—only a few words about their grandmother. Leo must have confronted Stephen about the visits.

  “You shouldn’t presume to know what’s best for me,” she should have interrupted in a dignified voice. Instead, a squawk came out, a sound before the words could form. They turned, startled. Stephen’s face showed concern. Leo’s face crumpled.

  After they left, Nora gazed around the room. She could feel their argument linger in the air. She felt Stephen’s discomfort, his sadness. She felt Leo’s determination to pretend everything was fine.

  “There,” Leo said, returning with the last of the flowers. He set the vases down and hopped up the ladder to hang the banner. Watching him work, she wondered if the scene had really happened. Leo seemed so calm and unfazed. “What?” he asked, when he caught her staring, and she shook her head.