Life After Life (31 page)

“Speaking of bad names,” he said.

“Kindness,” Sadie said. “I believe in kindness. Be ye kind one to another,” and everyone got quiet as they usually do when Sadie speaks. The only one to continue was Stanley Stone who asked Rachel if she would like to come to his room for Saki and origami and she had to bite her tongue and sit on her hands so she wouldn’t try to break his neck.

Now Rachel stops by Sadie’s room, but Sadie is napping. Rachel almost wakes her but then changes her mind. For several days now, Sadie has been skipping lunch, taking long naps after a busy morning so that she is able to rally again late in the afternoon. The last time she came to the table, she was wearing her pajamas under a big sweater, which was not like her at all. She has also begun to talk to people who aren’t there, pausing to answer the invisible switchboard off to the side of her bed that she works to plug and unplug saying,
Hello? Hello?
Toby has seen this, too, but neither of them mentioned it for a while. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does, it doesn’t last more than a few minutes. Sadie will shake her head, laugh, and then be back as clear as a bell. Toby said she saw no reason to tell anyone about it, that she herself was very open to all the ways a person might communicate spiritually. “Who am I to say that Sadie doesn’t really have somebody on the line?” Toby asked, and Rachel nodded her agreement. Now she stands and watches Sadie asleep with what looks like an old grocery list in her hand and Harley purring at her feet. He stares at Rachel with big green eyes, ready to bolt if she raises her hand the way most do when they see him so she just eases back out with a whispered promise to come back a little later.

“D
O YOU THINK
anyone here likes potatoes?” Rachel asks when seated, and looks at her little daily menu, picks up the pencil to mark what she wants. “I see potato salad and baked potato and French fries. I see sweet potato pie.”

“Must you always be so critical?” Marge asks. She says that she is offended by the way Rachel criticizes the food and therefore
the whole South and all the southerners in it
and that she bets there are plenty of
Jewish Yankee
foods that they could all make fun of.

“Maybe,” Rachel says. “In fact, I am sure you could. However, here’s the difference. You don’t hear me sitting around and talking about it all the time or plastering it on the front of every local-yokel rag and filling up the menu with one choice. Gefilte fish, gefilte fish. Gefilte fish salad and gefilte fish fried. My my, wouldn’t I sho love me some gefilte fish.” She knows she is being mean even as she does it and yet she can’t help herself. Sadie’s absence almost always affects her this way, taking away her reason and desire to strike a more moderate tone.

“Let’s be prejudiced against unkind people,” Sadie had said when the conversation turned to stereotypes and got Toby so upset. “Let’s be prejudiced against those who act ugly.”

“The gefilte, now there’s a monster of a fish,” Stanley said. “I caught me a gefilte one time. Big-ass fish long as my leg, fought it for hours there on the coast of Israel.”

Even Rachel has to laugh at that and it helps to swallow back the discomfort she has felt since leaving the cemetery. The two of them hold eye contact for a second before he continues with his little rant. It’s not often you encounter such brazen and boisterous stupidity. And of course she has learned that anytime she makes eye contact with him and seems to have a moment of understanding, it flips him out into the most absurd place, like a kid determined to shock and steal the show. The behavior is unacceptable as hell. She watches him, waiting to see what will come next.

“At the state fair,” he tells, “they had fried sweet tea and fried Coca-Cola and fried beer, which required a current ID.”

“In case no one knew you were legal, right?” Toby asks, and the whole table laughs. Toby can almost always make that happen. What a gift. Just yesterday she told how that child from next door said her poor puppy once ate a monopoly piece and her Daddy boiled it clean once it came out the other end. Toby said it had a
get out of tail free
card. “Get it? Do you get it?” Toby asked, and laughed so hard she had to excuse herself to go to the ladies room. It made Rachel think of that movie,
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
which she hadn’t thought of in years, the part where the Danny DeVito character keeps putting a hotel in his mouth. Nineteen seventy-five. That was one of their movies there at a little theater in Arlington.
Godfather, Exorcist, Jaws, Taxi Driver.
Not a very romantic backdrop but lots of moments that made her jump and lean in to hide her face against Joe’s shoulder, his big warm hand on the back of her head pulling her close.

“Hey, cat got your tongue? Dreaming of gefilte fish?” Stanley is tapping his fork against her plate. He stares at her in a way that makes her uncomfortable, like he can read her thoughts. The T-shirt under his rumpled half-unbuttoned dress shirt says
ROYAL RUMBLE
and has a picture of one of those ugly wrestlers.

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you, Stanley,” Toby says. “Did you ever know somebody named Art Silverman?” Toby looks at Rachel and shrugs a
what have you got to lose
look.

“Is he a wrestler on the circuit?”

“No,” Rachel says. “He was my husband.”

“Does he live here?”

“No. He’s dead.” Rachel is sorry Toby brought it all up but is still trying to decide if she’s ready to make the next move, to ask about Joe. Now that C.J. has heard her talking to him, the whole secret is feeling a little off kilter. “But he used to visit here in the summer when he was growing up.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Why would I know him?”

“He was quite the ladies’ man,” Toby says. “And you’re about the same age so I figure he might have competed with you.”

“I have no competition.” He raises his eyebrows. “In anything.” He grins at Rachel and so she looks everywhere except at him. She watches the Barker sisters off in the corner eating sweet potato pie they have decorated with M&Ms, which one of them had in her purse. “However, to the best of my knowledge, in those days there were only three Jewish families in this town.” He slams his fist on the table. “Look at me when I talk to you or I’ll pin you to the mat, sister.” He leans in so close she can feel his breath on her face.

“Fine then.” She turns to face him. “I wouldn’t expect you to know a goddamned thing I’m interested in, but I will listen.”

“The Cohens lived beside us and old man Berkowitz lived on the way to the beach and the Friedmans who owned that old department store lived on the corner of Seventeenth and Pine. Sadie can tell you. She knew them all very well. Lots of Jewish families now, but back then that was it.”

“None of that helps me,” she says, and then without allowing herself time to think and change her mind, she continues. “Art visited a cousin of his who was not Jewish,” Rachel says. They all look up as if struggling to figure this out. “People do marry out of their faiths, you know.”

“Not people who are saved,” Marge says, and adds more sugar to her tea. “People who are not saved do all kinds of things. Commit horrible atrocious crimes. Steal from their own family members—even their mothers. What was the cousin’s name? If
he
lived here, one of us will know him. My people have been here forever. My people were here way before the Civil War.”

“Well, let’s get it on the
hysterical
register,” Toby says. “Your family is old as dirt.”

Rachel swallows and takes a deep breath before she allows his name to roll from her tongue. “Art’s cousin was named Joe Carlyle.”

“Oh dear Lord,” Marge sits back in her chair. “I sure know who he is. Everybody knows who he is. Even Sadie would tell you what a rounder he was. Cousin, huh? Well, those are
not
good lines I can tell you that. ”

“Might be where Art learned all his moves,” Toby says, and laughs.

“Yes, might be,” Rachel says, and feels them all looking at her. She wishes she were all alone on a busy horn honking street or in Filene’s Basement with women throwing clothes and bumping around or all by herself in a chair in her room. She feels like she might cry, which is something she rarely does and it surprises her.

“He went with anybody who would look at him. And that poor wife.” Marge has put down her knife and fork and has her hands up to her face. “I don’t believe in divorce at all, but I believe that was a case where God would have told Rosemary to go forth and get one. I don’t know if she was kind of simple retarded–like or just crazy from living with him.”

“Art never knew any of that,” Rachel says. “He couldn’t have. He visited when he was just a young man.”

“Well, then he didn’t know him very well.” Marge looks at Stanley for confirmation. “Joe Carlyle was bad news his whole life. And you should have seen his obituary.” Marge looks right at her and Rachel has to stop herself from saying she did see it, that she has a copy in a book right beside her bed.

“He clearly wrote it himself,” Marge continues. “He used words like
matriculate,
which people around here just do not say, and the article said he was intelligent in three different places.”

“Like in the bedroom? In the car? And where?” Stanley asks.

“Three places in the
article.
” Marge raises her voice and then squeezes her lips together, clearly wanting to call Stanley something. “He said he was intelligent three different times and we all know if you have to say it that often, then it must not be true.”

“Intelligent, once, twice, or thrice, who knows, but what I do know is that he was a real son of a bitch,” Stanley says. “Screwed everything in sight and never paid his bills. He always had some kind of moneymaking scheme he was in on and had enough slick charm to get a little ways with it if he were dealing with someone from out of town. People were always trying to take him to court. He was as slippery as that Jell-O they keep trying to make us eat.” Stanley sounds totally sane and clear and intelligent—too sane and clear—and then all of a sudden, after long eye contact with Rachel, shifts his attention back to Marge. “Hey, Marge, did you ever have a BM to improve your mood like that visiting priest advised you to do?”

“What!” She pauses with a forkful of potatoes. “How dare you turn that ugly crazy talk on me!”

“He was right there. Didn’t you see him? Shaved head, pink golf slacks? Didn’t look like a priest at all, said the two of you had a baby together back in the service, an ugly-as-hell baby, too.” Stanley puts his elbows on the table and sticks his tongue out at Marge; it is the kind of thing that on an ordinary day might make Rachel laugh, but right now she is feeling sick.

“You need to go away.” Marge holds her knife up and shakes it. “They need to haul you off somewhere with the other crazy people. There is no priest and I never had a thing to do with Joe Carlyle, though I can tell you it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part!”

“Joe or the priest?”

“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about with a priest. I have nothing to do with the Catholic church and I never have. We were talking about Joe Carlyle and that’s all.”

“Marge,” Toby says. “That language.”

“Art never said anything like this. In fact, he thought a lot of his cousin,” Rachel says. “Are you sure that you’re talking about the right person? He grew up on Chandler Street and went to the Methodist church.”

“That’s him,” Stanley says. “And he was always hanging out at the river, always had several gals on the line at once. He had to marry Rosemary because she was pregnant and her daddy would’ve killed him otherwise. Rosemary was a good kid, quite a bit younger, who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Then she nursed him all those years he was an invalid,” Marge says. “The church practically supported them because he had burned up every cent running here and there to Boston and DC and New York and Chicago. Bunch of worthless big talking hot air. My husband, Judge Henry Walker, who never judged anybody, claimed that there was a place for the likes of Joe Carlyle.”

“Not worth two cents,” Stanley adds. “But his wife stood by him.”

“What choice was there?” Marge asks. “She wasn’t trained to do squat and had children to raise. How humiliating. If he’d been my husband, I’d’ve found a way to get rid of him.”

“Oh yeah?” Toby asks. “What would you have done?”

“Read my scrapbook some time and you’ll see,” she says. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

“Or kill a spouse.” Stanley spears his baked potato and holds it up. “Remember that famous potato that looked just like Richard Nixon? Who does this look like?”

Rachel pushes back from the table and stands. “That’s a sad story,” she says, and turns. “That’s not what Art believed at all and so I am happy he isn’t here to hear all of these stories.” She walks quickly, but she hears Marge continue. “Truths,” Marge says. “It’s all the Lord’s truth. A bad seed.”

Rachel walks as fast as possible, knowing someone is following her. She gets to Sadie’s door and then stands there, hand on the knob. She wants to hear her reaction to Joe’s name. She needs to be near someone kind.