The Year That Follows (18 page)

“I know,” she says.

“I’d known enough men by then to know when one wasn’t good enough for my daughter.”

“So, Dad, you never answered me: are you in love with Phyllis?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Can’t live without her. I care more about her happiness than my own. I don’t like being apart from her.”

“So why don’t you two live together?” Cat asks.

“We’ve talked about it.”

“Will she have you?”

He smiles. “She says she might.”

“Then you better take her up on it, Dad.” She is excited for him. A romance, at this time in his life. She should be so lucky.

“When can I see the little boy?” he asks again.

“As soon as I get him. I don’t want to pressure them.”

“I’m feeling the pressure of time,” he says.

“Phyllis made me think maybe you’re sick.”

“I’m eighty,” he tells her. “Eighty is a sickness unto itself. I’ve been lucky beyond any reason, and I’d like to see that little boy. Just lay eyes on him. Pushing my luck, I know, but I’ve never found any reason not to.”

H
e should tell her, right now, in the wee hours, but he can’t bring himself to do it. It is so awkward. Besides, he is her father, the man who raised her and supported her and taught her what it is to be a serious person in this world. This, he thinks, is the problem with the modern world: not enough serious people. When he was a young man, a man like George Marshall meant something. His was a life that
inspired. John Foster Dulles was a bit thick and a blowhard, but they named an airport after him. Today Brad Pitt would more likely get an airport than would a secretary of state. Sam thinks of George Kennan. What ever happened to his kind? Now, there was a man, purely American, Midwestern (the same thing, really), sophisticated yet resolute, generous yet austere, fierce and implacable. The country no longer seems to produce his kind.

Cat should have been a diplomat. She has the brains and the advantage of being an attractive woman, which is totally disarming. And she is tough, as fierce as any man. He wonders whatever happened to her plans. He’d believed once that she would go to law school. Mortgages? It’s not a serious thing. Still, she has to make a buck. She has Connor, and now, it appears, Kyle’s son.
Kyle’s son
. The phrase rings in his head, its meaning almost unknowable, but something close to the completion of his life, that final brick put into place. It’s almost enough to make him believe in a higher power. Almost.

“Dad?”

He turns to her.

“You’re smiling,” she says. “If you’ve got a good joke, please share it.”

“Do you smoke?” he asks.

“No.”

“Ever?”

“Never,” she says. “You taught me that.”

“I’m going to have a cigarette.”

“Dad, you don’t smoke.”

“Now I do.”

She is incredulous.

“I like it,” he says, “and at my age it’s hardly a vice. It’s not as if it will kill me. I didn’t smoke for fifty-seven years. That was deprivation enough. Abstinence at my age is just silly.”

“But you don’t want me to smoke.”

“I’d kill you,” he says.

“Hypocritical?”

“Not at all. Contradictions are the one constant in life.”

“You used to make guests smoke outside the house, even in winter.”

“Still would. Step outside with me. Grab a sweatshirt; it’ll be cold.”

“Connor—”

“Won’t wake up. It’s four in the morning.”

Outside he can hear the surf rustle at the shore. There’s a small stone wall along part of the walkway that leads to the ocean, and here they sit, he with his cigarette, she with her cup of coffee. It’s too early for birds, or even cars. There’s only the sound of the water and his breathing. Another morning, he thinks. I get another morning.

“Tell me again about this ceremony?” she asks.

“The ceremony celebrates the start of the Sabbath. Toward the end they read the names of the dead, those who died this week and have loved ones in the congregation. It’s a way of remembering.”

“It’s not as though you’d forget Kyle.”

“No, but it’s to honor him, too. And as the years go on, it’s a reminder to remember. A prayer is recited, the Kaddish, to honor the dead. Ancient rituals.”

“We never did this when I was growing up.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to,” he tells her, remembering how when he was younger it was easier to let things go.

“And now?”

“Now I’m an old man, and I feel the need to do it. And I want to teach you, so that someday, if you need it, then you’ll have it. I hope you never need it for a child, but if you said Kaddish for me one day, I would appreciate that.”

“I thought you don’t believe.”

“I don’t.”

“So, if you don’t believe …”

He thinks about this. The old rituals matter; he knows they do.

“If I don’t believe, why do I do it? I may be wrong,” he tells her. “And if I’m not, I still don’t want to forgotten.”

“You won’t be,” she promises.

He decides he will tell her. He will tell her about her biological father after the service. He’ll wait till that’s out of the way.

“Someday we are all forgotten,” he says. “But till then, we should recite the prayers for the dead.”

“You’ll need to teach me that prayer,” she says.

C
onnor plays with the planes he got from United, little toy
767
s circling the living room to his swishing sound effects. He moves the planes around the little city he’s built in the corner of the living room, most of it made from the large Lego pieces given to him by Phyllis, who does seem to know something about boys. It’s only nine in the morning. Cat thinks she will take Connor to the water when it warms up a bit more. The water here is freezing, and Connor can barely swim, so maybe they will build sand castles and thus pass the time till tonight, when they have the ceremony for Kyle and then can fly home to their regular lives.

Cat heads to the kitchen for more coffee, where she finds her father looking out the window. Never a big man, he looks smaller now, more hunched. Really, he’s just tipped forward—his back can’t bend—with his bony shoulder blades sticking out. “Dad,” she says. “Can you stand up straighter?”

“Aren’t I straight?”

“Not so much.”

Cat stares at her father’s back, at the shoulder blades almost dorsal, the old man tipping, slowly, she realizes, toward the grave.

“There, how’s that?” her father asks.

The same.

“Better,” she says. “You feel okay?”

“I guess. Getting old sucks. Isn’t that what the kids say?”

“I’m no kid, Dad.”

“To me, you are.”

She lets a moment pass. “I think you’ve given Connor a whole new view of the Japanese.” Earlier, she’d heard him talk about shooting at them. Japs, he’d called them.

“Maybe someday he’ll remember this morning. It will be something that he knew a World War Two vet. Like meeting a Civil War vet, when I was a kid.”

“Did you ever meet one?”

“I knew someone who did.”

It has only been lately that she’s really felt the passage of time, and she’s feeling it now, learning that her father is old enough to have known a veteran of the Civil War. Not her great-grandfather or even her grandfather.
Her father
. She is no longer young. She thinks of the black dress she will wear tonight, simple and elegant, the hem just at the knee. How much longer, she wonders, will I be able to wear that dress? How much longer will I want to? How much longer till I’m hunched over, halfway to the floor, unaware of how everything has tilted?

“Hey, Mom!” Connor calls from the other room. “Come quick!”

Cat runs into the living room, wondering what disaster she might discover, only to find Connor standing
by his Lego building. In the building’s upper reaches he’s wedged one of the United planes, nose in, just the tail section sticking out. Connor, his eyes wide with delight, stands proudly beside his creation, a tiny hand on the building to hold it steady.

T
hey stand in Sam’s living room, Cat and Connor, Phyllis and Sam, match at the ready. Symbols, Sam thinks, this is all about symbols, the candle, the flame, the burning out of the light. There is no way to deal with death, less even to deal with the death of a child, and so we have symbols. He strikes the match, hears the tearing sound of it, then the silence as he lights the wick. Sam looks at Connor, who seems transfixed by the flame. He’s wearing a dark suit with a tie, a little man next to his mother. Connor, with his fair hair, looks as Kyle did at that age, though Sam is the only person left alive who remembers it.

Sam says, “We do this to remember Kyle, as we will every year, to remember the dead. In this way, his memory lives on, in us.” He takes a breath.

“Amen,” says Phyllis.

“We should really get going to the temple,” says Sam, and soon they’re on their way, the four of them in Sam’s Lincoln. Phyllis drives, Sam is in the front. Cat and Connor sit in the back, total silence in the car, nothing but
the sound of the tires on the pavement, the faint grind of the engine. Here’s what I wanted, Sam thinks, all I wanted. It strikes him how simple it is, how modest are his desires. Perhaps this is aging. When he was a young man he’d wanted so much. First, to survive the war; then to walk again; then wealth and, if not fame or reputation, to be a man who mattered, someone who was noticed. None of that matters now. How could it after the death of a child? When his children were young the fear of losing them was like a low-grade ache, a minor pain always there. So many horrible things happened to children. When they got older, he often found himself believing that fate might treat them well. Certainly he’d taught them to fend for themselves. But Kyle’s death, this could not be foreseen. Even when he’d learned about the planes he hadn’t worried. He knew Kyle worked across the street; Sam had been there once, to that cavernous floor, the rows and rows of desks and computers, the men—they were mostly men—fit into it as were the men in the Rivera factory murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This was where Kyle was, Sam knew, and when Kyle could, he’d call to say he was all right. But the call the next day came from the firm, from a man who called himself a managing director, whatever that was, an odd name descriptive of nothing, and the news was not good. From that moment on, Sam wanted his children with him, together, and with each other. That it was no longer possible made him still want Cat, especially on this day, which, it turns out, isn’t really even the right day. He was supposed to use the
Hebrew calendar, but the plane reservations were set and Rabbi Gauss made an exception, saying wearily that this was yet one more alteration that the Reform movement could stomach for this one day, for this one family, for this one year, even if it meant giving in to the Romans and their calendar. Did you see the irony of it? Gauss asked, even if the Romans had made a calendar more logical and thus easier for counting time. The issue here wasn’t logic, said the rabbi. It was mourning the dead, the tradition of it, and in this realm logic held little truck. But yes, bring your daughter and grandson, and I will read the name of your son, and you, as part of the deal, will attend services on the High Holy Days.

And so they arrive at the temple, Sam and the three people closest to him, none of the three related to him by blood, really, or even Jews. He feels something tug in his chest and he pauses a moment, while Phyllis cuts the engine, to see what it is. Nothing, apparently. He shifts to look at Phyllis. He can’t turn enough to see Cat and Connor. “Ready?” he asks.

Inside they take seats with the other congregants. Sam has the same feeling he always gets in a temple, a surprise, the thought being, Wow, look at all these Jews. Most are old, though perhaps not as old as he. Here then, is what you might do on a Friday night, if you have nowhere to go. He would feel silly coming here for companionship, but at the same time he wishes he could belong. After the navy he never felt he belonged to anything, except maybe to the country and its endless economic struggles.

The service drones on, the rabbi motioning for them to stand and sit, the reasons behind why some prayers require standing and others don’t a mystery, the whole service a bit puzzling to him. This is his tribe, but he doesn’t really know its customs. He watches Connor, the boy’s earnestness, his mimicking of his mother, who has told the boy about his uncle. Connor is to listen for Kyle’s name. Sam has engineered all this and feels glad for it, though he can’t say exactly why.

Finally, the Kaddish is announced, the congregation rises, and the Aramaic prayer is recited. The words come to Sam; he finds that after all these years he still knows them.
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash, sh’mei rabah …
Sam remembers when his own father took him to temple to say Kaddish for Sam’s grandfather, who had died in what was then Russia and was now something else, Ukraine, or perhaps Belarus, and there, too, they likely still said the prayer for the dead, which in truth said nothing about the dead but only of the all-powerfulness of God, this in a place that had all but been wiped clean of Jews by the Nazis.

The names are read, a dozen or so, with Kyle’s in the middle.

“There it is!” shouts Connor, so loud that everyone turns, or so it seems to Sam. He turns to Phyllis and she is looking at him, something close to a smile on the edge of her lips. She grabs his hand. Cat is standing with her arm around Connor, patting his shoulder. Nothing, he knows, will bring Kyle back, but this, it would seem, is as good as it will get.

C
at listens to Connor sleep in the bed next to her, the boy’s breathing languorous yet strong, insistent. They’ve done it. They’ve come to California and said the prayer for Kyle, visited with Cat’s father, met his girlfriend—had Cat not come, would she have known her father had one?—and now they will wake and spend the morning by the water, then fly home, where life will go on, without her brother.

And so now her father is going to live with a woman, the first time since Cat’s mother. Is this mortality finally raising its head in the old man, her father acknowledging that he doesn’t want to die alone?