Making Toast Read online

  Carl’s boys have been made apprehensive by Amy’s death. Seeing that it is possible to lose a mother, they fret when Wendy is out of the house, asking frequently where she is and when she is returning. They watch at the window. They brood about Amy. Three-year-old Ryan told Carl, “I wish I could jump to the sky.” Ryan is big, born at just under ten pounds and growing at a giant’s rate ever since. He sometimes thinks of himself as a superhero with superheroic powers. “Why do you want to jump to the sky?” Carl asked him. “I’d jump up and grab Aunt Amy and bring her back,” he said.

  Neither Wendy nor Amy had sisters, but they found one in each other. It was fun to hear the two of them laugh and conspire. If you were walking behind them, they looked like twins—same height, same build, with their heads tilted toward each other. Wendy favors family over work, as Amy did, and gave up a position as a senior health policy analyst when she had children. She is direct, like Amy, one of those people who answers the question you ask. She also keeps me in line the way Amy did. One summer, she brought me a gift of Trivial Pursuit—the “Know-It-All” edition. Yet the two women were just different enough to make their friendship interesting. In her eulogy, Wendy told a story of Amy’s amused, sardonic reaction to the environmentally pure paper Wendy used in her home. Risa Huber, her sister-in-law, was with them. Risa picked up a sheet of the paper, which disintegrated at the touch. “What’s this?” she asked. “Exactly,” said Amy. When Amy died, Wendy told Carl, “We’re all angry. But no one is angrier than A.”

  There are things I don’t want to know and things Ginny doesn’t want to know. The doctors we consulted after Amy’s death differed just enough in their speculations to leave room for anguish. Ginny wants to pursue the question to get to a more definite answer. I have hesitated. I do not wish to hear how extraordinarily rare Amy’s condition was, and how even rarer it is that someone dies from it. One cardiologist I spoke with early on said flat out that however unlikely it is that someone was born with Amy’s heart structure, the anomaly is almost never lethal. To find out, definitively, that Amy’s death was one in a million or a trillion would only deepen my anger.

  On the other hand, Ginny declined to view the open casket before the funeral. The funeral director had asked if we’d wanted the casket opened, and, having no practice in such choices, Harris and I said we did—for the pre-service “viewing,” but not for the service itself. Harris, Carl, Wendy, John, and I, and Amy’s and Harris’s friends, the Hales, attended the viewing. Ginny would not. She did not want that to be her last image of Amy. She may have been right. The figure in the casket—her hair done like Amy’s, wearing Amy’s new favorite brown dress and a shawl with tones of brown and red—seemed less our daughter than a semblance. One by one we approached to say our goodbyes. Out of habit, I touched her hair.

  Harris buys Sammy a punching bag, an Everlast heavy bag, which hangs on chains from the ceiling in the playroom. When Sammy isn’t using it, I do.

  Ginny and I met in junior high school, and have known each other for more than fifty years. Laughing noisily with my friends, I looked up from my desk and saw the new girl, the first elegant thirteen-year-old since the British monarchs. Yet she has remained something of a mystery to me. She is without vanity. When I ask her about this, she says simply, “I was lucky to be born with a beautiful face.” What might sound outrageous or wishful thinking in someone else seems a factual self-assessment.

  She does have a beautiful face, the kind movie directors of the 1930s and 1940s might have looked for. It is not the siren’s beautiful face, or the ingénue’s; it is the face of intelligent virtue into which you read qualities such as competence, endurance, and acceptance of one’s lot, along with a veiled sexiness—the face of the good wife and mother. Claudette Colbert had such a face, as did Joan Fontaine and Irene Dunne. Ginny is more beautiful than all of them. She acknowledges her looks as a way of dismissing their importance. Vanity is inapplicable to her life.

  She has never had a lift or a tuck or a Botox treatment. “My hair and my nails,” she says. “I’m vain about them”—meaning she has them done when she has the time. The subject of self-indulgence comes up with us these days because it is out of the question. Before Amy died, the big decision of our day was where to have lunch. “Our friends live by choice,” she says. “What choice do I have?” The question is asked with a kind of satisfaction, in spite of the horror that occasioned it.

  “I think my whole life has led up to this moment,” she tells me. “When Carl was born, I felt I was coming into my own, to be a mother. It’s what I love to do. I know who I am.” Her motherly decisions are without premeditation, like an athlete’s. When Bubbies starts school, she will take him every day, and not relegate that duty to Ligaya, because she knows that as able as Ligaya is, Mimi will be as close to a mother as Bubbies, Jessie, and Sammy will have from now on. “I’m comfortable doing this,” she says. “And neither of us would have been able to pull it off if we hadn’t been around a lot before Amy died.”

  There are outlets for her. She writes poems from time to time, and takes photographs. She founded a book club with Meredith Brokaw, consisting of some twenty remarkable women who have kept in constant touch since Amy’s death. At a surprise birthday party for Ginny, their toasts were funny and touching, yet all of a piece—tributes to her selflessness. She maintains such friends because, like Amy, she listens to them. If someone tells her something, good or bad, she never tries to top it with a story of her own in those pointless competitions many people enter into, but rather concentrates on the person who seeks her attention. I had always thought of selflessness as a characteristic one learns and adopts, but in Ginny it seems like part of her genetic information. And now, in sorrow, she is in her element. “I am leading Amy’s life,” she says in despair yet comfort, too. After forty-six years of marriage, due to the most painful of reasons, I am getting to know my wife.

  Back in Quogue, I meet with Kevin Stakey, the contractor Ginny and I hired to turn the garage into a playhouse for the grandchildren. We wanted a place where they could paint, work with clay, race cars, transform Transformers, and fight over card games like Uno and War. The plans were made in the late summer, with Amy, Harris, Carl, Wendy, and John involved. After Amy died, creating the playhouse became therapy for me. I hoped she would approve. It was my way of bringing her back to life. Because I could not understand why she died, I sought to make other things less confusing. I cleaned out junk-closets, gave order to a chaotic shelf of CDs, and cleared an ivy-choked area of the yard.

  Kevin is in his late forties and built like a substantial piece of rope, the kind that ties ships to piers. He has a large head and a mustache and a beard on his chin, thick as a shoe brush. Shorter than I, at about five-foot, nine inches, he is twice as wide. When we shake hands, mine disappears in his. He took the news about Amy as if he had known her. I tell him that, because of our changed circumstances, I will not be around that much. He will have to make many decisions about the playhouse on his own.

  “No problem,” he says.

  “Of course, if you screw up, I’ll make you do it over.”

  “No problem.”

  “And don’t fool around with the Yankees grill cover,” I tell him. It was a Christmas gift from Harris. A Mets fan, Kevin has threatened to loosen the ties so that the wind would carry it away.

  The building of the playhouse proceeded with little help needed from me. Kevin converted the garage by exposing the old beams of the original stable, putting up sheetrock, remaking the old windows, and replacing the dirty, cracked cement floor with gleaming wood. When he finished, I told him the brown of the wood had too much orange in it. “Can you fix it?”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Tell me, Kevin. If I asked you to turn the playhouse upside down, so the kids could enter from the roof, would that be a problem?”

  “No problem,” he said. He sanded the prestained floor down to the wood, and made it the darker color I wanted.

&
nbsp; Harris’s introduction to the family occurred in Quogue shortly before he and Amy became engaged. Amy had had a parade of boyfriends in high school and college, one of whom was “serious”—a genial, laid-back athlete who fitted in with us comfortably. We liked him and his family, and could picture Amy married to him in a seamless extension of their easygoing companionship. But whatever little thought I gave to their future suggested that theirs would not have been a marriage of people who improved each other or teased each other gainfully or made each other alert to the world’s surprises, pleasant, foolish, and tragic. I never went so far as to picture them having children.

  But when Harris entered Amy’s life, and ours, here was a husband, a father, and a man full grown. For Carl, John, and me, he was instantly recognizable as one of the guys, but there was something else he had, like a secret soul. Exceptional people are sometimes freakish. Harris seemed to have planed the edges of his exceptional qualities so as to prevent them from being offensive to others or isolating to himself. I see something similar in Sammy, as he tries to find a middle ground between his private silences and his fun. Harris walked into our house bringing not a perfectly fitting piece of the puzzle, but rather an eccentric enlargement of the whole. Wendy had had the same effect on us a year or so earlier.

  Not that any of that stood in the way of the men of the house from turning Harris’s introduction into a hazing. We swept him into our sloppy-yet-brutal game of two-on-two basketball, in which he held his own in terms of both sloppiness and brutality. Then came the essay question. Carl was a rabid fan of Patrick Ewing, the New York Knicks center. He named his yellow lab Ewing. I liked the dog but judged the human Ewing—who only passed the ball to his teammates out of desperation or forgetfulness—to be the main reason the Knicks never won a championship during his tenure. Without stating our antipodal positions on the matter, we asked Harris what he thought of Patrick Ewing. He looked from one of us to the other and said, “Terrible” to me. To Carl he said, “Superstar.”

  One evening in the summer of 2007, Harris arrived at the Quogue house with Sammy and Jessie. Amy was slower coming in from the car with Bubs. The two older kids rushed in and Ginny and I greeted them on our knees with hugs and hollers. Belatedly, I realized that Harris was standing there too. I looked up. He said, “None taken.”

  Harris maintains control of his emotions, his household, his job, and his children, because he must. But occasionally the effort shows. One day a drinking glass shattered on the kitchen floor. I started to pick up the bigger pieces to make it easier to vacuum the smaller ones. He shouted at me to get out of the kitchen so that he could vacuum the floor by himself. He never shouts. It may be that the hand surgeon was concerned that I would cut myself, but, in that small crisis, it felt more that he was asserting his authority—not because of a lack of self-confidence, but rather as a way of holding his life together.

  Yet the presence of another man in his house who, like him, is accustomed to doing things his own way, cannot help but challenge his authority, even if I never actively challenge it. I do not wish to constitute one more source of pressure on him. And even if I felt the urge to put in my two cents, there would be little need, since he is capable of dealing with most mishaps. Only during the first week after Amy died did he rely on me to take the lead in managing the funeral and the burial. After that, one could almost see him physically steel himself and haul himself into shape. Always heavy though not fat, he must have lost twenty pounds in the past couple of months. He has cut down on coffee in the morning. To my regret, he has stopped eating toast.

  As with us all, sorrow frames his every activity, and Harris’s way of showing his feelings is to grow very quiet, as if closing a hatch. I tell him that if he ever wants to talk I am happy to do it. He appreciates the opening, but answers, “What is there to say?” Which is true, yet not entirely true. Catherine Andrews, the children’s psychotherapist, also sees adults in grief. My guess is that Harris will consult her sooner or later, probably later.

  I, too, may consult Catherine, since anger and emptiness remain my principal states of mind, especially when I am away from Ginny and the children, and alone in our house in Quogue. What keeps me from seeking Catherine’s help is that unlike other psychological problems, what happened to Amy, and to all of us, is real. The monster is real. And while there may be strategies that help Ginny and me feel a little better rather than a little worse, we will never feel right again. No analysis or therapy will change that. I think Harris knows this, too. He is used to being on his own, but he never could have anticipated the depths of his current loneliness. It hurts and confounds him. He may appear enigmatic because he now sees that the course of his life—not unlike Ginny’s—has prepared him to live without a main source of happiness, making him an enigma to himself.

  In a rare tranquil moment on a March afternoon, I sit on the green couch in the lower-level play area, rereading Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. It is around four-thirty, and the light has gone from the day. Jessie comes downstairs and asks why I am so quiet. “I’m reading,” I tell her. She takes one of her own books from the coffee table and sits beside me, extending her long legs over the front of the couch. We sit in silence, reading, five feet from where Amy collapsed and died. I look up from time to time, then return to my book.

  Sammy hurtles downstairs and demands to know where his knight outfit is. Amazingly, I spot the outfit, which consists of silver pants, a shirt of mail, a shield, a sword, and a helmet with a visor. Sammy puts it on at once, lowers the visor over his face, and parades back and forth before the couch.

  Jessie drops her book and plays a song from High School Musical 2 at full blast on the stereo. She dances in front of the couch as Sir Sammy marches. Bubbies climbs down the stairs, Ligaya trailing behind him. He dances, too.

  Bubbies warms to me. Among the adults of the household I stand a distant fourth in his affections to Harris, Ginny, and Ligaya, and he continues to regard me accurately, as an amateur entertainer. Yet little by little he has detected that I have certain practical uses, in addition to toast-making, and as long as I keep my place, and perform the few duties of which I am capable, everything is okay.

  I love his voice. He speaks the way I imagine Paul Newman sounded as a baby—with a slight husky rasp—and every statement is authoritative. His questions are authoritative. He also has a good ear, and pronounces all the syllables of longer words, such as “chocolate.” Often he sounds like a southern European learning English: “cho-co-laht,” emphasizing all syllables equally. He calls his sister “Jess-see-kah.” I will say, “Jessica is sharing her water with you. What do you say, Bubs?” He says, “Thank you, Jess-see-kah.”

  Ginny frowns upon my roughhousing with him, but I did it with Carl, Amy, and John. We perform the “upside-down baby boy,” which is what it sounds like. I hold him upside down over the bed, and swing him around by his ankles. I also perform the “flying baby boy,” when I lie on my back on the bed with my legs raised and balance him on the bottoms of my feet. And I give him the “squeak,” my word for a quick tickle. These assaults are welcomed gladly, except when he is intent on some matter of business—climbing up on the couch in order to jump off, or “cleaning” the floors with a length of hose from the vacuum cleaner. If, during any of those missions, I grab him to give him a squeak, he will protest—“No, Boppo!”—as if to remind me that he is not a toy. If I behave myself, and if there is no one better around, he will climb onto my lap, and take my face in his hands.

  Here’s a book for Bubs. Margaret Wise Brown’s Little Fur Family. Garth Williams’s drawings are fuzzy, in dusty, muted colors. Their spareness gives them life: the tree home of the fur family, and its curtained windows and green shutters and red door with its own little green roof; the nearby stream and its serene fish; and the members of the family, who look like bears with a strain of hedgehog in them. Bubbies studies the pictures as I read the passage in which the little fur boy sneezes and wakes up his grandfather, wh
o lives in a hollow stump. The grandfather appears disheveled, his eyes are dazed, and his unkempt fur is gray. Bubbies studies the drawing, then me.

  The grandfather emerges from his hollow stump and says, “Bless you, my little grandson, every time you sneeze…Kerchoo!” The little fur child says, “Bless you,” and walks on “through the dark and sunny woods.” Bubbies likes the way the book begins: “There was a little fur family, warm as toast.”

  The Word for the Morning is “consider.” It has been selected because Jessie and Sammy have been at each other too much lately. They cannot stand it if one interrupts the other. When an adult arbitrates, deciding in favor of one of them, the other will shout, “It’s not fair!” I want them to make the connection between “consider” and “considerate.” I connect the two words on the Post-it at breakfast. “If ‘consider’ means to think about, what does ‘considerate’ mean?” I ask them. They do not answer. I persist. “Well, ‘consider’ means to think about, so who would you think about if you were being considerate?” I ask. Nothing. “If you consider something, you think about an idea or a problem. But if you are considerate, you think about…?” Sammy asks, “Boppo? May we be excused?”

  Ginny and I attempt to make a dent in the stack of letters we have received—over 800 so far. Harris, Carl, Wendy, and John have received another 400, not counting emails. The letters continue to arrive from our friends, from my present and former students, from Amy’s high school and college friends, from Amy’s and Harris’s friends, colleagues, and patients. Kate and Jim Lehrer, lifelong friends who had given their home for the funeral reception, and who have remained attentive to us since, recommended a place that prints cards of acknowledgment. I worked for Jim at the NewsHour for twenty-three years, and I have watched the Lehrers gracefully help others all their lives. In our free moments Ginny and I jot notes on the cards. The exercise feels like greeting a convention of all the people we have ever known, looking back on a history of friendship. Peter and Judy Weissman, our oldest friends, spent four or five weekends with us. Peter, an endocrinologist, coached Amy through organic chemistry when she was preparing for her MCATs. Other friends of ours visited on weekends as well, as did the Hales whose boys, Dylan and Ryan, are close to Jessie and Sammy. On the day Amy died, Liz and James flew down from New York and had arrived at the house before we did, even before Carl and Wendy.