< Apart From Love: Chapter 28 >

Bei Mir Bistu Shein

The last thing I want to see is his face, when he comes home to realize that—poof!—the grand piano is gone. Vanished! My father is known to have an eccentric attachment to things, especially to that old, massive, ornately decorated, polished white beast. Why, you may ask? I have wondered about it, too, and can offer only this: It brings back to him a certain presence, the presence of mom, playing. So perhaps for him, it is a remnant of love: Namely, guilt.

By the time I turned sixteen, mom had developed an unexplained fear, a fear of getting lost, which was quite pronounced, even as she headed out for a short walk, such as to the grocery store on Wilshire Boulevard, not more than a couple of blocks away. She seemed to rely, with an increasing sense of anxiety, on the familiar, and would become ferociously shaken if a chair was accidentally moved out of position. We all knew that the instrument—which was only hers, because I had stopped playing by then—was sacred. It was not to be touched.

And so, too, was she.

Which explained, of course, his restlessness. And later, his affairs. Yet in spite of them, my father had a lingering sense of obligation to her. To this day, he would not dream of letting go of that piano of hers. But—holy cow—it’s already too late! I suspect that tonight, he would be not only surprised—but enraged, too, because the place looks so vacant, so foreign without it, as if it were not ours, but the next door neighbor’s apartment. There is, suddenly, so much air.

I imagine him coming back home, later this evening, and taking a step back, away from the mat, to make certain he has unlocked the right door. He would call, “Anyone home?” and an echo, a crisp echo would rattle the air, as if to announce an unusual depth, an emptiness. He would then raise the key to his eyes, staring incredulously at it. It must be the right one, or else the lock would have jammed—but even so, the old man would check it again carefully, as if some bend, some scuff on the metal might, perhaps, explain the wrong turn of things.

He would rub his eyes, amazed to discover Beethoven's bust planted down there, in the dust, on the floor, its eyes frozen in dumb confusion. Discarded. No longer perched on top, it seems to have shrunk—or else the space has, somehow, ballooned around it.

The marble head is cropped by a beam of light on one side, and a pile of music notebooks on the other. The sculpted shoulders lean against streaks of peeling wallpaper, blackened streaks that have previously gone unnoticed, crumbling away in the shadows, behind the bulk of the piano, which is now missing.

I cannot begin to guess what my father would say, if he would say anything at all, I mean, before he starts shouting. I suppose he would blame this on his new wife, and—by association—on me as well. So I make up my mind to avoid trouble, or more precisely, to avoid him, which is something I have been getting better at doing over the last few days.

Chased by the sound of the dolly rumbling heavily across the floor, then down the stairs, and by the shouts of the movers yelling occasional warnings to Anita and me and to each other, I am relieved, finally, to see the moving van, loaded with piano and bench, lurching into the street. Which is when I figure I should go somewhere, anywhere but here, perhaps to that hell hole called Sunrise, which is where the van is headed.

I recall the pale, gaunt faces, the bent figures I have seen there, some attached by tubes to life-support machines, developing bed sores, others staggering around in slippers, slit open to accommodate bunions. I would have to take in the odor, the unmistakable odor of decay and antiseptic, which is so nasty, so repugnant that the best hope you have is to be driven quickly out of your senses. But then, this I know: While there, I would be with mom. And what is even better, I would not have to talk if I do not feel like it, because as far as I know, she is silent now. Utterly silent.

Soon, her piano will arrive. Watching it, her heart would skip a beat. Imagine that, I tell myself, because imagine I must. There must be some trick—perhaps as simple as reciting a few notes—some trick by which I can stir something, some memory in her mind. Mom cannot possibly be lost to me. She is merely asleep, waiting for a nudge. Her fingers can still tap, I think I have seen it on my last visit. They must remember a multitude of patterns of stroking the keys. They must remember music.

I keep telling myself: She must be rescued. I imagine she can still wake up, and open herself to the present. I just need to believe it bad enough.

*

Assuming my father is still at work, Sunrise Assisted Living is the last place I would have expected to find him; which, as luck would have it, turns out to be a complete miscalculation on my part.

There he is, in the large dining hall, pacing impatiently to and fro, then around the long Formica table, some distance away from the elderly figures hunched there, some over their walking frames, others in wheelchairs. He has me caught in his sight as I get in, and a minute later I feel his grip on my arm.

“What are you doing here? Oh,” he mutters, “never mind. Do not say a word.”

Which leaves me no choice but to rebel against him, and so I ask, “And why not?”

“Oh, stop it,” he says, looking over his shoulder, clearly in anticipation of my mother. “You ask too many questions.”

And I stress, “Why?”

And he says, in a hushed tone of voice, “Just go. Go away, before she gets here.”

So I cry, “What?”

“Your mom,” he says, “she used to tell me repeatedly that she will not want any visits from you.”

“Now that,” I say, “is a lie! It just has to be!”

But my father insists, “Ben, you do not understand. She would never have wanted you to see her like that.”

And to my question, “So then, why are you here?” he replies, briskly at first, “Just because.”

But then he explains, “With me, she had little choice. I have been the one watching over her, the one who has seen the change. But you, you are still blind to it. Go away! Trust me, Ben: She would tell you so herself, if she could, because see, you are the one she cherished.”

And I say, “Huh!” to which I add, bitterly, “What an odd way to show love.”

“Yes,” he says. “I grant you that. But consider this, Ben: She wants you to remember her the old way, the way she was. Bright. Talented. Most of all, healthy.”

For a while, neither one of us speaks. The old man looks remarkably tired, his jaw less defined than usual, perhaps because of the gray stubble on it, which takes the edge off the features of his face. He must have skipped his morning ritual, by which I mean, his shave.

So I soften a bit, just enough to ask him, “And you, dad? You miss her? I mean, the way she used to be?”

For a minute he holds his breath, and I see him glancing at a dark silhouette passing across the far windows of the dining hall.

Then he says, “She still walks on both feet, still looks the same, more or less. To someone who does not know her, Natasha still looks as if nothing at all is wrong with her. The shell, so to speak, is intact. You may laugh at what I say, but to me she is beautiful, still. Pure. Same as the first day I laid eyes on her. But on each visit I see the changes. Each time, her mind disappears a little bit more.”

“Dad, you still didn’t give me an answer.”

“Do I miss her? No,” he says, and takes a long, painful pause. “Not all the time.”

“Was it difficult for you, bringing her here?”

“For several weeks, I had dreaded what she would say. That morning I got up from bed, and found her talking to the mirror. I said, This is a special day, Natasha! Let’s go out for breakfast. And pointing straight ahead, at the glass, she said, OK, and what about her, is she coming, too? And I said, No, not today. Just you and me. Oh, she said, OK. And to her reflection she said, Goodbye. And so we came here.”

“Again, dad: You still didn’t give me an answer.”

“Was it difficult to bring her? No,” he says. “The difficult part was to leave her behind, and go home, and find myself lonely, lonely and empty and, at long last, free. I stood there, on the threshold, without her, not knowing what to do with my hands.”

“And mom, what about her? Having clung, so hard and so long, to that which was still familiar around her, did she resist being left here, in a strange place, suddenly alone? I mean, was she furious? Did she cry?”

“All along,” he says, “she was uneasy about making plans for herself. She insisted on going back home, staying there until, she said, The good Lord would show pity, and take her. But that morning, when at last we got here, to Sunrise home, I found a new way to respond, which I admit, I am not proud of. I told her that the apartment was about to be fumigated for termites.”

“You what—”

“So she agreed to stay here, temporarily. I knew she was unable to keep track of time. In fact, I counted on it. I told her the work would take one more day, and the next day I said, one more, and the day after that, one more, and so on, and on, which seemed to convince her, somehow—until, to my relief, she stopped asking.”

“Listen to me,” I say angrily, finding myself forced, yet again, to repeat. “Was she furious? Did she cry?”

“No,” he says, and his voice turns stubborn. “If she did, I did not see it.”

“And she stopped asking? Stopped talking, even?”

“Yes,” he says. “That is correct.”

“No wonder,” I say, resisting a sudden urge to spit in his face. “You lied to her!”

My father glances at me, contempt flashing from his eyes. “Who the hell are you to judge me. Much do you care! You were not even here. To this day, you have no idea what happened, what I had to go through, over the years, with her,” he grumbles. “So just spare me the—”

This is when his eyes widen, and a few things happen at such a fast pace, that the details threaten to escape me. So at the risk of confusion, here goes:

There is a distant sound of rumbling, it draws closer, grinds to a stop, the figures, the misshapen figures at the table, they turn around, highly agitated, some of them scream, at high pitch, at the movers, who have just arrived, talking to someone, some woman in a nurse uniform, no, it’s the care giver, forgot her name, Martha. Some papers change hands, mark Donation here, please, and a signature there, now hold the door, wider. The dolly is rolled in, first here, then there. It’s too far, careful now, stop! Now it’s too close to the windows, and the table, someone says, might be in the way, that’s a safety hazard. So on go the wheels, turning, squeaking until the thing is lined, properly now, against the wall, and the blankets, a few layers of them, are being untied, unwrapped already from one leg, then another. They look OK, no scratches, and the dark figure, the silhouette out there, she raises a hand, as if moved around by some strings, and it claps to her mouth.

My father cuts off mid-sentence, shocked at the sight, at the white piano, his face turns red, dark red with blood, just as I thought, as I was afraid it would, he rushes ahead, hugs her, walks her over, step by step, to the far corner, tells her to breathe. Breathe deeply, he says, which is when I come to attention, because this is the instant when I recognize, of course, who she is. Mom. With barely a thud, she slips out of his hold and, in a snap, collapses to the floor. By the time she comes to, moments later, the movers are already gone, and Martha has gotten everything and everybody firmly under control. She adjusts the resealable tape of a diaper over the hip of one senior, wipes the dribble from the chin of another, guides mom into a comfortable, upholstered chair, and slides it next to a window, which dad, now turned deathly pale, throws open.

Then she brings in an assortment of simple musical implements, such as bongos, tambourines, bells, egg shakers and xylophones. Martha hands one of them—a metallic triangle—to mom, and the rest to the other seniors to play, as if they were children, young children about to put together an impromptu live show.

One of them, a decrepit, toothless hag cruises up to the front in her wheelchair to get a better look at the piano. Frail like a wooden puppet, she drags her bony, crooked body over to the bench, slides open the cover, and bangs at the keys.

The melody is familiar, but played haltingly, and with an awkward touch, which makes me wish mom would stand up, walk over there right now and show them, show all of them just how it is done, and what fine music ought to sound like, performed with inspired virtuosity by the hand of a renowned pianist, trained from early in life in a variety of memorization techniques.

But no: There she sits, her long fingers idle, her eyes nearly shut, as if trying to block out all distractions, perhaps to divine a particular sequence of music, or to recall the fierce, blind stare coming from an imaginary bust, the bust of Beethoven, or else just to drift off.

The other seniors crowd around the toothless amateur, and they start shaking their wrinkled fingers in the air, in pantomime of her gestures, and humming, La-la, la-la-la! La-la, la-la-la! One of them is so swept by the rhythm, as to warble in a thin, cracked voice, somewhat out of tune,

For some reason the singing grates, quite harshly, on my nerves. I am surprised to find myself so upset. For a time I do not even realize I have water in my eyes. The entire space starts swimming in front of me, and I am glad that my father does not seem to notice it, or else he may think I am weeping—can you imagine that?—out of some weakness or something.

The reason I am so lucky as to be ignored is that his face hangs there, away from me, over his chest, and is held in that position, nearly masked by the palms of his hands. I get the feeling that under that cover, his mind has been carried away elsewhere. Perhaps he is thinking about the first time he saw mom. From reading his stories I know it happened quite by chance, when he accompanied a friend to some concert, and sat there, raising his eyes from the second row, and there she was, up on stage, aglow in a sphere of light.

His heart started fluttering inside. It pounded so hard that he thought he would pass out, which was fine by him, because he considered himself, at that moment, kissed by luck. One could not wish any better than to die a happy man.

In his eyes, she was the most beautiful girl in the world—not only because of the hazy limelight, through which he saw her rosy blush, the long, slender arms, and the glitzy black dress, but because of the heavenly, harmonious music, which she made reverberate in the air, all around her.

For the longest time, the old man sits there, utterly motionless in the midst of bells  being shaken and bongos being beaten. Only the top of his head, gripped tightly in his fingers, is visible to me between this sagged shoulder and that, in the back of the audience. And it is not until the end of the song—when everyone sitting in the divide between him and me has joined in an intoxicated, disorderly chorus, singing loudly, I've tried to explain, bei mir bist du schoen—that the next line makes his hands fall, suddenly, into his lap.

It is then that I see him wincing painfully. Having sensed, somehow, the weight of my gaze, his jaw clenches. My father turns his head abruptly, to pull himself back from view—but not before I realize, to my complete shock, that he is in tears.

There are claps and numerous shouts—Bravo, bravo!—but no one dares give a standing ovation, because for many of them, standing up is a dangerous proposition, risking broken hips and bones. After a while, as if guided away by an invisible hand, they scatter around. The show is over.

Looking at the door on the other side of the space I see it turning on its hinges, and closing, ever so slowly, behind my father, and I think he is fortunate, so fortunate to have left just before having to witness what is happening next: Stirring out of the chair, my mother opens her eyes. In awe I take a step back. At first I want to cheer her on, to cry, Come on, bring them to their knees, now! Show them who you are, what you are made of! Play, mom, play for me!

And it is then that she drops her chin, as if she were a broken marionette, into an unbearably silly, open mouthed grin, which is babyish at best, and lacks any hint of comprehension.

Then she lifts a tremulous hand—on which a steel triangle is hooked—and jerking a little metal wand, strikes it once. The thing gives a high pitched, flat tone. It is a dead sound, meaningless, perhaps because it occurs entirely out of context, chiming noisily when no one even expects it, when no one but me is left there to listen—let alone imagine how she could play.

I dream, as I must, of her fingers darting, soaring in a dazzling blur—long after the cover has been pulled over the keys of her white piano.