Fog Music 1981
Alex M. Frankel
Flora Herzberg spent every day in an armchair by the window, her nose hooked up to a ventilator. In the ventilator’s instruction manual, a healthy, fully-dressed man was shown sitting with his legs crossed reading a magazine. Flora did not look anything like that man. She never got out of her nightgown and she never used make-up. Her legs were swollen and one of her eyeballs seemed to be coming loose in its socket.
An Irish nurse took care of her, but Flora’s husband didn’t approve. “She doesn’t need a nurse—she’s not that sick!” Kurt Herzberg was worried about money.
Their son, Michel, came home from Berkeley every Thursday afternoon to spend the weekend with his parents. “What happened to your eye?” he asked his mother when he saw her, while his father, standing by the window, signaled to him to be quiet.
Michel had just driven across the Bay, into the city and the fog. He had seen the cold white ranges dipping into the land from the ocean and had been sorry to leave behind the sunshine and the cafés.
Michel stood before her, tall and tanned, with eyes so blue and hair so fair that as a child his parents’ friends had referred to him as the German General.
“Don’t stand so far away,” said his mother. “Sit by me and talk philosophy and things you write. No one pays attention to me.”
He saw his father shaking his head and looking out the window, as if there had been something new or worthwhile to see out there. Michel did as he was told and sat next to his mother. It was not going to be an easy weekend and her eye was strange today.
“Tell about your progress,” she said, trying to smile, her eyelids drooping, especially the one over the bad eye. Suddenly Michel noticed her body was giving off an odor. All her life she’d been so fussy with appearances and hygiene.
Kurt Herzberg sighed.
Flora had visitors every day. Most of them annoyed her husband. These tended to be German Jews in late middle age, like the Herzbergs, though Flora was so well-liked that people of all kinds came to see her, people like the head waiter at the French restaurant the Herzbergs had been enjoying for twenty years, or Michel’s fifth grade teacher. They would sit in the big recliner that had been moved from Michel’s room especially for guests, and they would talk about the past as the ventilator hummed. If she had more than one guest they would spill over to the hassock or the bed, and this was what Sheila the nurse described as “holding court.” Sometimes, during these sessions, Flora would come out with statements like, “When I lived in Mexico during the war I went to a bullfight every Sunday.” People smiled and nodded politely at this but once downstairs they’d say, “It’s going to her brain already,” or “It’s the morphine.”
One of her most frequent visitors was the rabbi. During the last few years Flora had practically run the synagogue for no pay. “I won’t accept any money for the job,” she would say. “I don’t want to lose my status as a congregant.” This infuriated her husband, who knew she could have been making forty to sixty thousand dollars a year for what she was doing. But now her work was finished. When the rabbi came over, he would sit in Michel’s big chair and try to discuss details of the upcoming Bar Mitzvahs and weddings that she had helped plan. But the rabbi could see that she tired easily and he felt uncomfortable burdening a dying woman with the minutiae of temple life.
During these visits from well-wishers, German was rarely heard in the sickroom or in any other part of the house. Though the Herzbergs (unlike some of their friends) had not gone to the extreme of refusing to speak their first language, it had now been thirty years since their arrival in America and over time their German had dated, faded and slowed, and had been almost completely replaced by English—the heavily accented English of immigrants. And yet they had passed on their Germanic sounds to their son: to most people he seemed as quaint and European as his parents, though he looked nothing like them and had been born and raised right there in the Sunset District. “Where in Europe do you come from?” people would ask him, and he would have to take a deep breath and explain about being the only child of foreigners, about being trained to use knife and fork the German way and to go to school carrying a huge black briefcase.
Sheila left after Michel got home, and he kept his mother company. He was taking a philosophy course, and he let her see one of his books. She spent half an hour on the first page and finally gave up and handed him back the book. “Over my head,” she said. “I admire you for understanding this, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a business class.”
He went on with his reading, and she took out her diary, where she recorded the names of visitors in her old-style fussy German handwriting—it was so beautiful that, back in grammar school, Michel’s teachers had always commented about it when they saw it on notes from her. She’d been keeping this diary since the onset of illness, back in the winter, and she seldom recorded events or thoughts here, unless something momentous happened. In April, after her second operation, when she finally asked the doctor to tell her the truth, she’d written: For the first time, serious news.
It was foggy. The fog had come in June and it wouldn’t burn off now until September. It would stay, and the foghorns would moan; the birds would chirp until dark. A day would not be divided into different colors; the sun didn’t rise or set. There was only black night and gray day and the chirping of the birds and in the distance gunfire from the rifle range on the other side of Lake Merced. It was a predictable, unchanging world enclosed in a white dome, and every day would bring the same thing: cold off the Pacific, the rustling of leaves, the scent of eucalyptus trees, the muffled sounds of traffic and, occasionally, the screeching of brakes from cars that had taken a sharp turn too fast.
The doorbell rang. Kurt, startled out of a doze in his study, went downstairs and opened. It was Frau Kahn, a woman of beyond ninety. Though thirty years older than his wife, she still rode the bus every day. Kurt greeted her coolly, and watched as she nimbly climbed the stairs to see Flora.
“Very handsome—the girls must be crazy for you!” Frau Kahn said to Michel as he got up to let her have the recliner.
He smiled and shook her hand, anxious to be getting out for his run.
It must have been around six o’clock: Kurt (standing at the window) and Michel (starting his jog) both noticed the little old man at the same time. He was very aged and small and he was walking a dachshund. Every day for the past ten years he’d been walking his dog and passing the Herzbergs’ house at exactly the same hour. The tiny man wore a shabby gray hat and walked with a bad limp painful to watch—it was so exaggerated that as a child Michel had often imagined the man was doing it on purpose and, if requested, would be able to perform a normal walk like anyone else. The old man watched as his dog squatted on the Herzbergs’ lawn. Kurt knocked on the window, furious. In answer, the man snarled a few raspy words at him and limped on.
Michel ran and he was free. Night was falling, and the fog was wet on his skin and mixed with the sweat of his body as he circled the lake. In the distance he could sometimes hear the roaring of lions at the zoo. The roars, rumbling like faint thunder cracks, could be heard for miles in the fog. All through his growing-up years he had listened for the lions in the evening or late at night, while he did his homework.
He got back in time for dinner, but even after his run he didn’t have much appetite.
Kurt ate nervously, watching a baseball game with the volume muted. Every few minutes he would jump up and check on his wife, who was eating a bit up in the bedroom. Because of the ventilator they’d hooked her up to, she was confined to that one room. For six weeks now, since her last operation, she had not set foot in any other part of the house.
“I’m changing my name,” said Michel.
Kurt was a bit deaf in one ear and occasionally things needed to be repeated; but he’d heard this. Michel, sitting near his father’s good ear, had taken care to speak clearly. For a moment Kurt couldn’t respond and looked straight ahead. He put down his knife and fork. Then he looked at his son. “You’re not satisfied with your name?”
“It’s only one letter, but it will make a difference: I’ll be Michael from now on.”
Kurt shook his head. “And Michel is such a beautiful name!” He sat back in his chair and stared at baseball. Then his eyes wandered and he thought he saw an ant walking on the other side of the table. He was preoccupied with ants and, fearing an infestation, would routinely crush any small object that looked suspect. He leaned forward now and, with the force of his whole body behind him, demolished a bread crumb with his meaty middle finger. Then he sat back, glancing at the walls. “I’d like to know,” he said, “who gives you all those ideas.”
“I’ve hated my name ever since I can remember.”
Flora was watching Love Boat in the dark room, her face lit by the flickering blue of the television set. She hadn’t touched her food and was thinking about Michel and the way he always judged his parents for watching so much television; he didn’t seem to understand that people who work need to unwind. The trouble was, he didn’t know what it meant to have a job. Flora started to fret and forgot about Love Boat. In a few days he was going to be twenty and he was still so rebellious. All he cared about was his poetry and his philosophy and where would he get with those things? And his room! He lived in Berkeley most of the time now, but his room had gotten worse. She had a plan, though. One day she would free herself of the ventilator and, with Sheila’s help, would go in there and restore order. His closet obsessed her: she knew he had suitcases and boxes in there, things that belonged in the basement. And since he didn’t have a hamper he would toss dirty clothes on the floor and close the door and forget about them. Whenever he wanted to get to his shoes he would have to rummage under a pile of clothes. Flora began mumbling to herself. She longed to tear off the tubes that went into her nose and get to that room. It was intolerable that she should have to spend one more night in the house knowing there was so much chaos just down the hall.
When she heard the shouting coming from downstairs, she turned off the television. “That shrink is taking advantage of you, Michel!” her husband was screaming. “You’re perfectly sane—you don’t need to spend two hundred dollars a week to make conversation!”
The grandfather clock in the dining room struck eleven. A minute later the cuckoo clock up in Michel’s room tried a brittle parody. Michel always neglected his clocks, so by the seventh cuckoo the clock’s weight had reached the floor and the imitation bird, exposed on the threshold by its open door, fell silent in mid-call.
Michel noticed the plight of the bird but couldn’t be bothered to get off his bed.
It was a dark morning in the Sunset, and the gunfire from the rifle club across the lake sounded louder than usual. Michel lay on his bed fully dressed in case he needed to greet visitors. Rebecca Lipman was in his mother’s room now. Whenever he opened his door, he heard the hum of the ventilator. It was not going to stop as long as his mother lived. It ran all day and all night.
Suddenly he could make out laughter and young people’s voices; it had been a long time since he’d heard sounds like that in his parents’ home in the fog belt. They were coming from the neighbors’ backyard, and he went over to the window. There were ten or twelve children in that family, some of them grown up. Quietly Michel opened his window and tried for a view through the thick branches. What he saw after all this effort was a long-haired boy in white jeans, a blue sweatshirt and sandals. Somebody’s boyfriend. He was smoking and talking with two of the sisters. Michel stared, mesmerized: Mami and Deddy would never have allowed him to wear sandals in this weather, or to smoke in any weather.
An hour later Michel was standing by a windmill in the park.
Kurt broke through the fog in his blue Jaguar, ensconced in the luxury behind the control panel, breathing in the pungent smell of the leather upholstery and listening to a Baroque fanfare, switching over now and again to another station to get the baseball score. As he passed the airport on 280 the fog burned off and the cold was far behind him in the city. A quiet, dry, parched heat pressed down on him as he drove through the suburbs. He took the first Atherton exit and went half a mile. He opened a garage door with his own key and drove in. A German shepherd wagged its tail and sniffed him.
Hildur was watering plants by the pool.
He loosened his tie. The pale blue pool mirrored the cloudless sky, and the trees were heavy with oranges, lemons and pears. Canaries sang in cages and butterflies fluttered in the hot air. The cement under Kurt’s feet felt hot even with his shoes on, and the sweat dripped from his forehead.
“How is she?” Hildur asked, as he moved closer.
People in the park liked Michel’s eyes and his wistful, dreamy look. Michel was tall and blond but not a California type of blond: looking at him, most people took him for an exchange student from Denmark or Austria, and this impression was confirmed when they heard him talk. Mercifully, nobody talked in the park.
Often it took a long time here, and he would have a chance to think. As a Sunday school student he’d written a prayer, and it still hung on the wall of his parents’ bedroom. God, thank you for my parents and my home. Thank you for this world, and thank you for me. Thank you. In the top right-hand corner of the paper he had signed his name: Michael. That first year in Sunday school, at the age of seven, he had tried to shed the name “Michel” tried to become more like the other boys. He had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and had begun to hang around the tougher children. They accepted him as Michael. Then one day a secretary came into the classroom and announced she had a message for Michel Herzberg. Everyone looked puzzled; his experiment—his popularity—was over.
Through the branches Michel made out a tangle of four or five men. It’s too early for that. Veering off on a new path, he remembered his posture and tried to straighten out. The park was the only place he ever thought about his posture.
Lara’s theme from Doctor Zhivago was coming over the speakers by the pool, while the muted Merv Griffin Show played to an empty living room. They lounged by the steps of the shallow end of the pool, eating crackers with guacamole and drinking sangría.
Hildur was German and flew for Pan Am. Kurt had met her on one of his business trips to the Far East, during the long flight between San Francisco and Tokyo.
“I went to church this morning and prayed for her,” she said.
Kurt looked away, uncomfortable with this talk of Christian prayer. He loved it here. He had always wanted to move out of the city, into the sunlight, but Flora had opposed it: she was afraid of the freeways and of being isolated from her friends in San Francisco. He looked around him now and felt he was in paradise and no longer worried, as he had in the beginning, whether anyone at home noticed his tan. He had become a little reckless recently, but he felt he could do as he liked.
“I can make us some more sangría,” he said.
The canaries sang in their cages and the sparrows and bluejays in the trees chirped incessantly and hopped from branch to branch. Half the pool was already in deep shadow, but Kurt could feel his face burning.
“Yesterday at dinner Michel told me a very strange thing,” he said.
The park was busier than usual, but still Michel could not make a connection. Sometimes he thought about the boy he’d seen in the neighbors’ backyard: he wondered, if he’d been able to reach through the sandals, whether the toes would have been warm.
The fog had lifted somewhat and for the first time since the beginning of June a ray of sunlight penetrated the dense cloud cover and shone on the cold city—it lit up a Monterey cypress and a patch of hillock and a stranger with a Walkman who at first looked as if he’d wandered into the park by mistake. Then he smiled at Michel—smiled! I’ll take care of you, that look said.
The grandfather clock struck three.
“Where is everyone?” asked Flora, in her armchair. “Where’s Kurt?”
“He should be getting home from work soon,” said Sheila.
“And Michel?”
“He said he was going to the movies. Don’t worry. You know I won’t leave you until someone comes.”
“Do we have People?”
“Only an old Time.”
Sheila handed her the magazine. The cover featured a picture of the falling Pope in a bloodied robe, with the caption, WHY DID THEY DO IT? “What a stupid question,” said Flora, and Sheila smiled.
Flora tossed the magazine on the hassock and Sheila went back to reading the paper. Then Flora took out her diary and studied it, writing in it lightly with a pencil:
Rebecca Lipman and Frau Doktor Kandell. Rebecca brought information about hospice. Michel is so unhappy. I wish there was something I could do to help. We did our best for him since the day we brought him to our house. Have to stop right now.
Kurt and Hildur were lying on her bed in the room facing the garden. The sun had left the pool and lit only the tops of the trees.
“I’m off to Frankfurt again on Sunday,” she said.
“Promise me you’ll get enough rest. I’m going to leave you a sleeping pill. Take it before you go to bed.”
She sighed and turned to him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I have a present for you,” she said, reaching over to the nightstand. “It’s a lucky box from China.”
“A lucky box?”
When she handed it to him he saw it was small rectangular box with Chinese characters and a grassy woodland scene painted on the lid. He opened it: two mechanical crickets were chirring loudly. “They told me it was solar-powered,” said Hildur. “This is for your nights in the city, when you want to remember this house.”
It was so easy. He took a step towards the youth who had wandered into the park by mistake, and the youth in turn motioned to Michel to follow. They did the ritual hike along narrow trails, through prickly shrubs, uphill and down, until the stranger found a spot where they did not run any risk of being discovered. The person unbuckled his belt; he’d stopped smiling and looked crazy with hunger. What had happened to the promises? He was even younger than Michel, almost not a young man yet, and Michel wondered what it would have felt like to sit with him in a café at Berkeley.
And suddenly he knew he couldn’t go through with the quick attachment and then the parting—not with this stranger, anyway: standing on that hillock, spotlighted by a fleeting beam of sunshine, he’d promised Michel too much and would never be able to deliver; it would be the same wild loss again, the days and days of obsession. “I’m sorry,” Michel said, stepping back.
“Then watch me!”
Michel shook his head. He didn’t walk off but turned away and listened as the pants were pulled up and the belt buckled. When he turned around, the boy had a sullen look about him; it would only be a moment before he vanished.
“I’m sorry,” Michel said again.
It was all right because, of course, the person would find someone else, would be quite busy here for as long as he liked.
“What’s your name?” said Michel.
“Jeff.”
But Jeff would not look him in the eye anymore. Michel watched him put on his headphones and go down the trail and disappear behind the trees.
MICHEL’S BAR MITZVAH, it said on the cover of the oversized photograph album, in big golden Hebrew-like letters. “We liked the pictures so much, we used each and every one of them,” said Flora.
“How old was he?” Sheila was a Catholic, and of course wouldn’t know about these things.
“Thirteen.”
Nineteen-seventy-four. They had all been seven years younger then, and Flora had looked radiant in the burgundy dress made especially for the occasion.
“I wanted to see this one more time,” she said.
There were pictures of the fancy sanctuary of the Reform synagogue and all the congregants in their finery. There were pictures of Michel holding the Torah, chanting from the Haftarah, being blessed by the rabbi, dancing at the Fairmont Hotel, blowing out candles. “He looks so different from you and Mr. Herzberg,” said Sheila.
“Seven years,” said Flora, shutting the album. “And they still today talk about that party.”
Michel walked back to his car. He got into the driver’s seat, pulled down the sun visor and the mirror. Men heading towards the windmill looked back at him but Michel could see only himself. “Michael,” he whispered. Then he had an idea: Mike. I’ll be Mike when I become Michael. It was a beautiful name to him: Mike, Mike, he said. Then he said Jeff. What kind of pizza did Jeff like? Was Jeff a morning person or a night owl? Did he drive a car with a stick shift? Perhaps Michel had made a mistake; perhaps he’d humiliated Jeff. He was confused and shut his eyes and knew he needed to search for Jeff again so that they could find a motel together. There were many motels by the beach. He thought of Jeff’s hands, but he had trouble remembering the face. What would he do if he couldn’t remember the face?
The house rumbled as the garage door opened; then it closed again and reopened. Sheila and Flora looked at each other, and Sheila went over to the window and drew aside the curtains. Michel and Kurt, from two different directions, had returned, and each in his own car had reached for the opener at the same time. Sheila saw Kurt get out of his Jaguar and shout at Michel, his arms waving in the air and his finger pointing.
Then father and son—one in a suit, the other in a t-shirt, both tanned—were standing in the sickroom looking down at the patient. Kurt sat down on the hassock and took Flora’s white hand in his. Her face had changed, even since morning. Her eye had come loose some more, and her nose had grown; it was as if someone had decided to make a replica of Flora and had made a bad one.
“Mrs. Herzberg ate a whole drumstick at lunchtime,” Sheila reported.
“You’re getting better!” Kurt said to his wife.
“We’re lucky to have Sheila,” said Flora.
Michel, sitting over on the bed, noticed a foul smell in the room.
“And did you see your Chinese customers in Atherton?” Flora asked her husband.
“Business is good,” said Kurt.
“And you?” She looked over at Michel. “What movie did you decide on?”
“Brubaker,” he answered. “With Redford. It was set in a prison.” He hoped they wouldn’t ask him about the plot.
“You’re seeing a lot of movies this summer,” she said, and Michel looked away. “But why are you wearing someone else’s clothes?” she asked him.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t steal others’ clothes,” she said, and closed her eyes, and let her head fall back.
“Flora,” said Kurt, putting her hand in his warm hands. “You will get better.”
Her eyes still closed, she shook her head.
Abruptly Sheila announced that it was time for her to go.
“Look on the dresser,” Flora said, as if in her sleep. “Rebecca Lipman came over today with some brochures from the hospice. I think that’s what they call it. They take care of terminal cases like me, and they don’t try to artificially keep you alive.”
“Oh,” said Kurt. He got up and shuffled the papers on the dresser. “Well, maybe I need to have a talk with Rebecca.”
Flora opened her eyes. “Where did you get those clothes, Michel? I never bought you those things. And it’s wrong to steal, it’s wrong.”
Sheila blew in with final instructions and advice, then hurried out again, and they heard her car start. Kurt went to the window and saw her drive off in a black Cadillac. “Rebecca picked a time she knew I wouldn’t be home,” he said, looking out the window. “Hospice. Now I’ve heard everything.”
Kurt was watching the eleven o’clock news downstairs, and Michel was sitting with his mother. She’d been reading out loud from The Chronicle, but now she was dozing. He lay back his head, and soon he was sleeping along with her. He dreamed about Venice. He was sitting in a hotel lobby while a Polish family checked in. Michel couldn’t help noticing the son, who yawned and sat down on one of the suitcases, leaning his head against a marble pillar. He was wearing a sailor’s outfit and he whistled nonchalantly--
“‘Good feeding is essential for the health of the young puppy,’” Flora was reading, and he woke up. “‘Until the age of six months it’s a good idea to divide his daily ration into three helpings: one in the morning, one at lunchtime, and one. . . A bowl of broth with cereal and honey in the morning. . . half a pound of ground meat and vegetables for lunch.’ Hmm!” And she dropped off to sleep again.
The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July, and for the first time Flora didn’t get out of bed. She didn’t even wake up, and Sheila sent Michel to the hospital for a catheter.
Kurt skipped his Chinese customers that day.
The phone rang continually. Sheila or Michel or Kurt answered, and each time they told the callers that Flora was too sick to come to the phone. Michel sat in the armchair that she had used. The extra chair was not needed anymore and they had already hauled it back into Michel’s room. Once Sheila came in and said, “Don’t say ‘coma’ when you talk on the phone: hearing’s the last sense to go.”
That afternoon, as the firecrackers went off outside, Flora would turn her head or sometimes move her entire body and even half sit up. And once Michel watched in amazement as she nearly sat up all the way and shouted words in German that he would ponder the rest of his life: “Clear the closets—it must all go, all of it!” His parents hadn’t taught him German, but he’d been curious, as children will be, and had taken three years of it in high school. Since he already had a German accent in English, it had been an easy language to pick up.
Michel sat down beside her and felt her hand. “Do you hear me?” Perhaps she did acknowledge him distantly; he couldn’t be sure. Her hand was still warm. Then he went back to the armchair. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Once, he picked up the receiver and heard his father’s voice
“I’m very disappointed,” Kurt was saying. “No, no, maybe disappointed is not the word. I don’t think I ever expected much from you, Rebecca. So, I think that’s all.”
“If you’d let me—” The woman cried “Kurt!” one more time, but he’d hung up. She must have sensed that someone else was still on the line, though, because she became hopeful again. “Hello? Kurt?” Then Michel hung up, too.
Soon the neighborhood turned into violent with whistling rockets and fiery colors—the first bright colors seen in the fog belt for weeks. The festivities lasted until late. Michel, sitting in his mother’s chair or pacing the room, wondered how she could rest through the uproar.
He slept badly that night, and towards morning dreamed of merry-go-rounds, and a boy riding up and down, smiling at his tired parents who smiled back, taking pictures. No one else rode with him, and he began to feel sad. Then his father was standing alone, but the music box melody tinkled on.
Michel woke up. Kurt stood over him holding the musical cake plate that played a tinny “Happy Birthday.” The white disc turned round and round and Michel rubbed his eyes to see a single piece of cheese cake revolving on it, and a single pink candle burning. His parents had used this device to celebrate Michel’s birthdays since he was one year-old. And then, after playing several times, the tune slowed, and Kurt cut the music and put the cake plate down on Michel’s nightstand.
“You like it?” he asked his son.
“I love cheesecake,” said Michel, after he’d blown out the candle, reaching for the card that lay next to the cake. It was a message for a much younger son, and showed bears, kittens, pandas and giraffes in jolly human poses proclaiming this a special day. The card held a thousand dollars in cash.
“I never know what to get you,” his father explained.
“This is a beautiful card.”
His father sat down on the bed. “Sheila stayed all night. The doctor was here and said Sheila will probably not need to spend another night. You know what that means, Michel?” Kurt took his son’s hand. “What are we going to do without Mami? What. . . ?” He suddenly broke down but pulled himself together quickly, taking out a handkerchief and blowing his nose. Kurt was wearing the same brown cardigan sweater, polyester pants and wallabees that he’d worn all through Michel’s youth. But he was much grayer and more tanned nowadays. He pointed to the card. “Keep the money in a safe place, all right?” He got up. “Put on something warm today.”
Around noon the rabbi came and sat with Flora. She’d stopped talking and moving around and was deep in her coma. Finally, shaking his head, he got up and walked towards the door. Michel noticed that he stopped one more time and looked back. The rabbi scratched his head as if he wanted this last look to go undetected, as if he wanted it to come across as an afterthought. And then, turning to the door again and walking down the stairs to the entrance hall, Michel saw the rabbi take off his glasses and cover his eyes; but a second later he had composed himself and was offering a few soft words to Kurt.
The fog was less thick than usual, but there was no trace of sunshine or blue sky. Standing in the sickroom, Michel looked out the window at joggers and old couples in parkas and gloves walking their dogs, and noticed that blackbirds swooped down from the power lines and the trees, brushing against people’s heads. The sound of nearby firecrackers left over from the day before mingled with the usual gunfire in the distance.
When Michel got tired of waiting in his parents’ bedroom he went back to his own room, sat down at his desk and studied an old picture of Flora and Kurt taken on a cruise. “My mother,” he said, and then picked up a mirror and stared at himself. “Twenty!” And he shook his head. He looked at his reflection and compared it with the picture of his parents.
His father came in and sat down on the bed, and together they listened to Tchaikovsky for a long time without talking.
Kurt had an idea. “Maybe next weekend, if you feel like it, come down to the Peninsula, to Atherton. There’s a house I always go to. It’s a house in the sun—you’ll love the sun! I’ve mentioned that house before, remember? It’s Jack’s place. Jack the supplier.”
“We’ll see.”
“When Jack’s out of town, he always lets me use it.”
Michel did not understand why his father went to Atherton so often, and he didn’t think there was such a person as “Jack the supplier.” Most of his father’s life was mysterious to him. Michel half-realized who probably lived on the Peninsula but never asked.
He picked up the picture from the cruise again. His mother’s smile in the picture looked forced.
“She never held me when I was a baby, did she?” he asked his father.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was wondering.”
His father shook his head and stared at the floor.
“Looking at this picture,” said Michel, “there’s a question I will always have about the three of us.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Michel,” said Kurt. “What are you trying to say?”
“It’s a rumor that went around when I was little, the same year I wrote the prayer that’s hanging in your room, the same year I first wanted to change my name.”
“What rumor? What are you talking about?” his father said, and Michel could see he was afraid.
“It’s what the children said when they saw me and the two of you together and when they saw your age. Should I bring you this mirror?”
“Michel, speak English!”
“You don’t want to understand, and now Mami is sleeping there and cannot tell the truth.”
Kurt was amazed. “We have lied to you about something? We have lied to you?”
“Michel!” It was Sheila’s voice, calling from the sickroom; then she appeared in his doorway. “Your mother has no blood pressure.”
But when he sat down on her bed he noticed she was slowly trying to open her eyes. “She’s going to be all right!”
“No,” said Sheila.
Kurt sprawled across his side of the bed and put his face in his wife’s hand. “I want Mami,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
Michel shook his head: it was obvious that his mother would wake up.
Flora’s breathing was loud and labored, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. “Cheyne-Stokes breathing,” Sheila explained, and this sounded like a very strange term to Michel, like something from a dream. Sometimes the pause between breaths became so long that Kurt would lift his head from his wife’s hand and would say “Huh?” It was the only time in his life, to Michel’s knowledge, that he’d ever used that expression. But then she’d go on breathing.
The grandfather clock downstairs struck five and Sheila said—always addressing herself only to Michel—“Are you holding her hand? Don’t look at her face.”
Kurt—a kind of patient now too—was lying next to his wife with his head still in one of her hands, and Michel held on tight to the other one. It was his mother’s hand, Mami’s hand, with her smell. “Mami,” he said. The macabre interest he’d had, a few times earlier that day, in witnessing this moment had passed, and he lost control and was alone. He pressed his lips tight against her hand.
“Be a man!” said Sheila.
He didn’t look up. His eyes were closed and he took in her smell and heard the sound of his mother struggling. He thought he could hear her cry out. When he looked up her face was ravaged, and he heard Sheila say, “There’ll be one more breath.” She was right: after a long moment his mother’s body exhaled, mechanically, one more time, and after that there were no more breaths. And then Michel saw something that shocked and reassured him: the Irish nurse reached over and made the sign of the cross over Flora Herzberg’s head.
Sheila was efficient. She pronounced the patient dead, brushed the hair and prepared the body for the undertakers. Kurt and Michel sat in the living room looking out the picture window at the sidewalk, the trees across the street and the joggers. The fog had thickened and the Sunset District was very dark, though several hours of daylight remained. Blackbirds chattered around the house.
It must have been around six o’clock: the old man limped into view with his dachshund. Both man and dog looked feisty and determined. The man’s limp was as elaborate as ever, and the dog wobbled and sniffed along.
“We were so lucky to have Sheila,” said Kurt.
“Yeah,” said Michel. “We were really lucky.”
Sheila came downstairs, finished with her work, and Michel asked, “Would it be all right if I went to see her, for a moment?”
“Of course!” Sheila and Kurt said at the same time, as if both—in spite of the vast difference in their backgrounds—were surprised that he needed to ask permission for something as basic as a last viewing of his mother.
Michel went upstairs and shut the door. He had never seen a dead body before. Flora looked exhausted. The mouth, partly open and with dentures gone, showed there had been a massive struggle. She’d fought; he’d never realized how hard, until now. What troubled him was the coldness of her hands, her arms, her face—he hadn’t expected this. But her features, distorted in her last days by the final onslaught of the cancer, had returned, just in the last hour, to the way he had always known them. “I’m twenty today,” he said to her. “Mami.” He looked at his own large hand and tanned fingers, the almost perfect nails. “I did my best to please you and to be everything the two of you wanted. I wanted to be your son for you. And to be good, the way you were good.” He stopped talking, realizing he hadn’t said anything meaningful or said what he meant. It always came out the wrong way. What he imagined and what he dreamed never came out properly in words. And then he realized for the first time that something in the room was missing. The ventilator had been turned off and its hum would be silent from now on, and Flora Herzberg was not going to wake up. “And we never said good-bye!” He took her dead hand in both his warm hands. “When people leave on a trip they say a few words. And this is the longest trip and nothing! And Deddy couldn’t make you well, not with all his doctors and money. He didn’t have the power, and he used to arrange everything, every surprise.” Michel rested his head on her arm. It still smelled like her. “I wasn’t good.”
The hearse pulled up, and he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
They came up the stairs quietly, with a peculiar reserve. They stayed a short time and then slowly brought her down on a stretcher and moved her out the front door. A young woman with a stroller happened to be walking by at that moment. She stopped and, with her baby, watched as the men put Flora away in the hearse and shut the doors. Then the young woman moved on, and the hearse drove away.
“I’m not going to forget this one,” said Sheila.
Kurt was glad to have something to do and warmed up a beef stroganoff for the three of them. He and his son hardly touched their food, but Sheila ate a lot. When she complimented Kurt on the meal he said, “This was one of the last things Flora made before she went into the hospital the last time. We have still a week’s supply of dinners in the freezer.”
And soon after that, Sheila left. Now Michel realized that something was wrong. At the front door she hugged both of them and Kurt thanked her for the good work she’d done. Michel didn’t think it was right that she was going and kept wanting to ask her to stay for him and his father.
It was dark and the birds were at rest and there was light traffic. The telephone never rang.
Michel went into his room and closed the door, and his father watched Archie Bunker’s Place and The Jeffersons, sitting in the same armchair that no one but his wife had used during the months of her illness. Once, shortly before the eleven o’clock news came on, the two of them met by chance in the hall and Kurt said, “I’ll give you something to help you sleep, all right? It’s very strong so I’ll only give you half a tablet.”
Michel waited in the hall for his father to get the tablet from the secret place where he stored all his medicine.
“I hope you get to sleep,” Kurt said, putting the half-tablet in his son’s hand.
“Thank you.”
“If you have trouble, though, I can always give you the other half later. Wake me up if you need to.”
Michel nodded.
“Have a snack before you go to bed. There’s cheese cake, strawberries, herring salad, you name it.”
Michel nodded.
The Pope was gradually recovering from his wounds, the Mediterranean fruit fly continued its rampage through California. . .and the world waited excitedly as wedding preparations went on in London—none of this held Kurt’s attention, and after the first commercial break he switched to a TV movie about the romantic escapades of a group of fraternity brothers on a posh New England campus.
Michel woke up in the middle of his room, covered in bedding. “Her voice!” he said. “We don’t even have a recording of her voice!” He turned on the light and made his bed again, knowing he wouldn’t sleep any time soon. Maybe if she’d been a star, he thought, her image and her movements would have been preserved on film for him to see whenever he wanted. It would have been easy to tape her, just one conversation with her, and now it was too late. Why hadn’t this occurred to anyone?
Down the hall, behind the door of what he’d have to learn to call his father’s room, came the boisterous sounds of television blending with his father’s voice. For a moment Michel listened at the door. Kurt was speaking German and sounded happy. Jack the supplier maybe.
As soon as his fingers touched the keys he entered a kind of trance. Michel had never mastered the piano, even when he was fourteen and taking lessons, and all he could do was improvise for hours, constructing huge tone poems for the keyboard—primitive, harsh—nothing that anyone else would want to listen to. And he loved to use the right pedal: sometimes his foot wouldn’t rise from it for an entire session and all eighty-eight keys would sing together, an echoing cavern of pseudo-impressionism. He hated what he played—only loving the potential for what was there—and every composition would leave him exhausted, the same way long sessions with his Etch A Sketch had left him sleepy and demoralized when he was nine. And now he played in his most “advanced” style, without worrying about beat or tonality—he just played and played, and the notes piled up, high notes and low notes, with a lot of pedal and a lot of confusion. He shut his eyes. “I’m not going to forget this one!” he heard Sheila say, and he saw the old man with the dachshund come limping by in front of the picture window and the young woman with the stroller who’d paused to watch the undertakers’ deferential work. Kurt came out of his room and stood on the stairs, barely able to see his son’s back in the dark but hearing every note the old upright was forced to produce. A brief passage in the rambling music could have passed for a pale, atonal version of “Happy Birthday” and Michel remembered that it was already past midnight and “his” day was over. He played on, slowly shaking his head, with his eyes open to view the possibilities of his long fingers as they stumbled over the keys. It was like the fog, it was always like the fog, with no beginning to it and no end—it was a vague, ruminating force. But the music did get quieter after a time, and what had started out slow became very slow, like the cake plate winding down without anyone to wind it up again. “Michel,” said Kurt, but too softly—“Michel.” And playing on, the young man wondered what it would have been like to hear a whole orchestra of non-musicians accompanying him in his improvisation—what rapturous music a mistreated violin or kettledrum or saxophone might create! And his playing became very quiet: now he could even hear, mingled with the foghorns and the late traffic, the roaring of lions in the zoo. It was time to reach for the lowest and the highest octaves and press the keys down with such a gentle touch that no more notes were heard. His foot stayed on the pedal, though, and the gathered echoes of his nocturne stayed in the air long after he released his hands from the keyboard.
An Irish nurse took care of her, but Flora’s husband didn’t approve. “She doesn’t need a nurse—she’s not that sick!” Kurt Herzberg was worried about money.
Their son, Michel, came home from Berkeley every Thursday afternoon to spend the weekend with his parents. “What happened to your eye?” he asked his mother when he saw her, while his father, standing by the window, signaled to him to be quiet.
Michel had just driven across the Bay, into the city and the fog. He had seen the cold white ranges dipping into the land from the ocean and had been sorry to leave behind the sunshine and the cafés.
Michel stood before her, tall and tanned, with eyes so blue and hair so fair that as a child his parents’ friends had referred to him as the German General.
“Don’t stand so far away,” said his mother. “Sit by me and talk philosophy and things you write. No one pays attention to me.”
He saw his father shaking his head and looking out the window, as if there had been something new or worthwhile to see out there. Michel did as he was told and sat next to his mother. It was not going to be an easy weekend and her eye was strange today.
“Tell about your progress,” she said, trying to smile, her eyelids drooping, especially the one over the bad eye. Suddenly Michel noticed her body was giving off an odor. All her life she’d been so fussy with appearances and hygiene.
Kurt Herzberg sighed.
Flora had visitors every day. Most of them annoyed her husband. These tended to be German Jews in late middle age, like the Herzbergs, though Flora was so well-liked that people of all kinds came to see her, people like the head waiter at the French restaurant the Herzbergs had been enjoying for twenty years, or Michel’s fifth grade teacher. They would sit in the big recliner that had been moved from Michel’s room especially for guests, and they would talk about the past as the ventilator hummed. If she had more than one guest they would spill over to the hassock or the bed, and this was what Sheila the nurse described as “holding court.” Sometimes, during these sessions, Flora would come out with statements like, “When I lived in Mexico during the war I went to a bullfight every Sunday.” People smiled and nodded politely at this but once downstairs they’d say, “It’s going to her brain already,” or “It’s the morphine.”
One of her most frequent visitors was the rabbi. During the last few years Flora had practically run the synagogue for no pay. “I won’t accept any money for the job,” she would say. “I don’t want to lose my status as a congregant.” This infuriated her husband, who knew she could have been making forty to sixty thousand dollars a year for what she was doing. But now her work was finished. When the rabbi came over, he would sit in Michel’s big chair and try to discuss details of the upcoming Bar Mitzvahs and weddings that she had helped plan. But the rabbi could see that she tired easily and he felt uncomfortable burdening a dying woman with the minutiae of temple life.
During these visits from well-wishers, German was rarely heard in the sickroom or in any other part of the house. Though the Herzbergs (unlike some of their friends) had not gone to the extreme of refusing to speak their first language, it had now been thirty years since their arrival in America and over time their German had dated, faded and slowed, and had been almost completely replaced by English—the heavily accented English of immigrants. And yet they had passed on their Germanic sounds to their son: to most people he seemed as quaint and European as his parents, though he looked nothing like them and had been born and raised right there in the Sunset District. “Where in Europe do you come from?” people would ask him, and he would have to take a deep breath and explain about being the only child of foreigners, about being trained to use knife and fork the German way and to go to school carrying a huge black briefcase.
Sheila left after Michel got home, and he kept his mother company. He was taking a philosophy course, and he let her see one of his books. She spent half an hour on the first page and finally gave up and handed him back the book. “Over my head,” she said. “I admire you for understanding this, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a business class.”
He went on with his reading, and she took out her diary, where she recorded the names of visitors in her old-style fussy German handwriting—it was so beautiful that, back in grammar school, Michel’s teachers had always commented about it when they saw it on notes from her. She’d been keeping this diary since the onset of illness, back in the winter, and she seldom recorded events or thoughts here, unless something momentous happened. In April, after her second operation, when she finally asked the doctor to tell her the truth, she’d written: For the first time, serious news.
It was foggy. The fog had come in June and it wouldn’t burn off now until September. It would stay, and the foghorns would moan; the birds would chirp until dark. A day would not be divided into different colors; the sun didn’t rise or set. There was only black night and gray day and the chirping of the birds and in the distance gunfire from the rifle range on the other side of Lake Merced. It was a predictable, unchanging world enclosed in a white dome, and every day would bring the same thing: cold off the Pacific, the rustling of leaves, the scent of eucalyptus trees, the muffled sounds of traffic and, occasionally, the screeching of brakes from cars that had taken a sharp turn too fast.
The doorbell rang. Kurt, startled out of a doze in his study, went downstairs and opened. It was Frau Kahn, a woman of beyond ninety. Though thirty years older than his wife, she still rode the bus every day. Kurt greeted her coolly, and watched as she nimbly climbed the stairs to see Flora.
“Very handsome—the girls must be crazy for you!” Frau Kahn said to Michel as he got up to let her have the recliner.
He smiled and shook her hand, anxious to be getting out for his run.
It must have been around six o’clock: Kurt (standing at the window) and Michel (starting his jog) both noticed the little old man at the same time. He was very aged and small and he was walking a dachshund. Every day for the past ten years he’d been walking his dog and passing the Herzbergs’ house at exactly the same hour. The tiny man wore a shabby gray hat and walked with a bad limp painful to watch—it was so exaggerated that as a child Michel had often imagined the man was doing it on purpose and, if requested, would be able to perform a normal walk like anyone else. The old man watched as his dog squatted on the Herzbergs’ lawn. Kurt knocked on the window, furious. In answer, the man snarled a few raspy words at him and limped on.
Michel ran and he was free. Night was falling, and the fog was wet on his skin and mixed with the sweat of his body as he circled the lake. In the distance he could sometimes hear the roaring of lions at the zoo. The roars, rumbling like faint thunder cracks, could be heard for miles in the fog. All through his growing-up years he had listened for the lions in the evening or late at night, while he did his homework.
He got back in time for dinner, but even after his run he didn’t have much appetite.
Kurt ate nervously, watching a baseball game with the volume muted. Every few minutes he would jump up and check on his wife, who was eating a bit up in the bedroom. Because of the ventilator they’d hooked her up to, she was confined to that one room. For six weeks now, since her last operation, she had not set foot in any other part of the house.
“I’m changing my name,” said Michel.
Kurt was a bit deaf in one ear and occasionally things needed to be repeated; but he’d heard this. Michel, sitting near his father’s good ear, had taken care to speak clearly. For a moment Kurt couldn’t respond and looked straight ahead. He put down his knife and fork. Then he looked at his son. “You’re not satisfied with your name?”
“It’s only one letter, but it will make a difference: I’ll be Michael from now on.”
Kurt shook his head. “And Michel is such a beautiful name!” He sat back in his chair and stared at baseball. Then his eyes wandered and he thought he saw an ant walking on the other side of the table. He was preoccupied with ants and, fearing an infestation, would routinely crush any small object that looked suspect. He leaned forward now and, with the force of his whole body behind him, demolished a bread crumb with his meaty middle finger. Then he sat back, glancing at the walls. “I’d like to know,” he said, “who gives you all those ideas.”
“I’ve hated my name ever since I can remember.”
Flora was watching Love Boat in the dark room, her face lit by the flickering blue of the television set. She hadn’t touched her food and was thinking about Michel and the way he always judged his parents for watching so much television; he didn’t seem to understand that people who work need to unwind. The trouble was, he didn’t know what it meant to have a job. Flora started to fret and forgot about Love Boat. In a few days he was going to be twenty and he was still so rebellious. All he cared about was his poetry and his philosophy and where would he get with those things? And his room! He lived in Berkeley most of the time now, but his room had gotten worse. She had a plan, though. One day she would free herself of the ventilator and, with Sheila’s help, would go in there and restore order. His closet obsessed her: she knew he had suitcases and boxes in there, things that belonged in the basement. And since he didn’t have a hamper he would toss dirty clothes on the floor and close the door and forget about them. Whenever he wanted to get to his shoes he would have to rummage under a pile of clothes. Flora began mumbling to herself. She longed to tear off the tubes that went into her nose and get to that room. It was intolerable that she should have to spend one more night in the house knowing there was so much chaos just down the hall.
When she heard the shouting coming from downstairs, she turned off the television. “That shrink is taking advantage of you, Michel!” her husband was screaming. “You’re perfectly sane—you don’t need to spend two hundred dollars a week to make conversation!”
The grandfather clock in the dining room struck eleven. A minute later the cuckoo clock up in Michel’s room tried a brittle parody. Michel always neglected his clocks, so by the seventh cuckoo the clock’s weight had reached the floor and the imitation bird, exposed on the threshold by its open door, fell silent in mid-call.
Michel noticed the plight of the bird but couldn’t be bothered to get off his bed.
It was a dark morning in the Sunset, and the gunfire from the rifle club across the lake sounded louder than usual. Michel lay on his bed fully dressed in case he needed to greet visitors. Rebecca Lipman was in his mother’s room now. Whenever he opened his door, he heard the hum of the ventilator. It was not going to stop as long as his mother lived. It ran all day and all night.
Suddenly he could make out laughter and young people’s voices; it had been a long time since he’d heard sounds like that in his parents’ home in the fog belt. They were coming from the neighbors’ backyard, and he went over to the window. There were ten or twelve children in that family, some of them grown up. Quietly Michel opened his window and tried for a view through the thick branches. What he saw after all this effort was a long-haired boy in white jeans, a blue sweatshirt and sandals. Somebody’s boyfriend. He was smoking and talking with two of the sisters. Michel stared, mesmerized: Mami and Deddy would never have allowed him to wear sandals in this weather, or to smoke in any weather.
An hour later Michel was standing by a windmill in the park.
Kurt broke through the fog in his blue Jaguar, ensconced in the luxury behind the control panel, breathing in the pungent smell of the leather upholstery and listening to a Baroque fanfare, switching over now and again to another station to get the baseball score. As he passed the airport on 280 the fog burned off and the cold was far behind him in the city. A quiet, dry, parched heat pressed down on him as he drove through the suburbs. He took the first Atherton exit and went half a mile. He opened a garage door with his own key and drove in. A German shepherd wagged its tail and sniffed him.
Hildur was watering plants by the pool.
He loosened his tie. The pale blue pool mirrored the cloudless sky, and the trees were heavy with oranges, lemons and pears. Canaries sang in cages and butterflies fluttered in the hot air. The cement under Kurt’s feet felt hot even with his shoes on, and the sweat dripped from his forehead.
“How is she?” Hildur asked, as he moved closer.
People in the park liked Michel’s eyes and his wistful, dreamy look. Michel was tall and blond but not a California type of blond: looking at him, most people took him for an exchange student from Denmark or Austria, and this impression was confirmed when they heard him talk. Mercifully, nobody talked in the park.
Often it took a long time here, and he would have a chance to think. As a Sunday school student he’d written a prayer, and it still hung on the wall of his parents’ bedroom. God, thank you for my parents and my home. Thank you for this world, and thank you for me. Thank you. In the top right-hand corner of the paper he had signed his name: Michael. That first year in Sunday school, at the age of seven, he had tried to shed the name “Michel” tried to become more like the other boys. He had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and had begun to hang around the tougher children. They accepted him as Michael. Then one day a secretary came into the classroom and announced she had a message for Michel Herzberg. Everyone looked puzzled; his experiment—his popularity—was over.
Through the branches Michel made out a tangle of four or five men. It’s too early for that. Veering off on a new path, he remembered his posture and tried to straighten out. The park was the only place he ever thought about his posture.
Lara’s theme from Doctor Zhivago was coming over the speakers by the pool, while the muted Merv Griffin Show played to an empty living room. They lounged by the steps of the shallow end of the pool, eating crackers with guacamole and drinking sangría.
Hildur was German and flew for Pan Am. Kurt had met her on one of his business trips to the Far East, during the long flight between San Francisco and Tokyo.
“I went to church this morning and prayed for her,” she said.
Kurt looked away, uncomfortable with this talk of Christian prayer. He loved it here. He had always wanted to move out of the city, into the sunlight, but Flora had opposed it: she was afraid of the freeways and of being isolated from her friends in San Francisco. He looked around him now and felt he was in paradise and no longer worried, as he had in the beginning, whether anyone at home noticed his tan. He had become a little reckless recently, but he felt he could do as he liked.
“I can make us some more sangría,” he said.
The canaries sang in their cages and the sparrows and bluejays in the trees chirped incessantly and hopped from branch to branch. Half the pool was already in deep shadow, but Kurt could feel his face burning.
“Yesterday at dinner Michel told me a very strange thing,” he said.
The park was busier than usual, but still Michel could not make a connection. Sometimes he thought about the boy he’d seen in the neighbors’ backyard: he wondered, if he’d been able to reach through the sandals, whether the toes would have been warm.
The fog had lifted somewhat and for the first time since the beginning of June a ray of sunlight penetrated the dense cloud cover and shone on the cold city—it lit up a Monterey cypress and a patch of hillock and a stranger with a Walkman who at first looked as if he’d wandered into the park by mistake. Then he smiled at Michel—smiled! I’ll take care of you, that look said.
The grandfather clock struck three.
“Where is everyone?” asked Flora, in her armchair. “Where’s Kurt?”
“He should be getting home from work soon,” said Sheila.
“And Michel?”
“He said he was going to the movies. Don’t worry. You know I won’t leave you until someone comes.”
“Do we have People?”
“Only an old Time.”
Sheila handed her the magazine. The cover featured a picture of the falling Pope in a bloodied robe, with the caption, WHY DID THEY DO IT? “What a stupid question,” said Flora, and Sheila smiled.
Flora tossed the magazine on the hassock and Sheila went back to reading the paper. Then Flora took out her diary and studied it, writing in it lightly with a pencil:
Rebecca Lipman and Frau Doktor Kandell. Rebecca brought information about hospice. Michel is so unhappy. I wish there was something I could do to help. We did our best for him since the day we brought him to our house. Have to stop right now.
Kurt and Hildur were lying on her bed in the room facing the garden. The sun had left the pool and lit only the tops of the trees.
“I’m off to Frankfurt again on Sunday,” she said.
“Promise me you’ll get enough rest. I’m going to leave you a sleeping pill. Take it before you go to bed.”
She sighed and turned to him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I have a present for you,” she said, reaching over to the nightstand. “It’s a lucky box from China.”
“A lucky box?”
When she handed it to him he saw it was small rectangular box with Chinese characters and a grassy woodland scene painted on the lid. He opened it: two mechanical crickets were chirring loudly. “They told me it was solar-powered,” said Hildur. “This is for your nights in the city, when you want to remember this house.”
It was so easy. He took a step towards the youth who had wandered into the park by mistake, and the youth in turn motioned to Michel to follow. They did the ritual hike along narrow trails, through prickly shrubs, uphill and down, until the stranger found a spot where they did not run any risk of being discovered. The person unbuckled his belt; he’d stopped smiling and looked crazy with hunger. What had happened to the promises? He was even younger than Michel, almost not a young man yet, and Michel wondered what it would have felt like to sit with him in a café at Berkeley.
And suddenly he knew he couldn’t go through with the quick attachment and then the parting—not with this stranger, anyway: standing on that hillock, spotlighted by a fleeting beam of sunshine, he’d promised Michel too much and would never be able to deliver; it would be the same wild loss again, the days and days of obsession. “I’m sorry,” Michel said, stepping back.
“Then watch me!”
Michel shook his head. He didn’t walk off but turned away and listened as the pants were pulled up and the belt buckled. When he turned around, the boy had a sullen look about him; it would only be a moment before he vanished.
“I’m sorry,” Michel said again.
It was all right because, of course, the person would find someone else, would be quite busy here for as long as he liked.
“What’s your name?” said Michel.
“Jeff.”
But Jeff would not look him in the eye anymore. Michel watched him put on his headphones and go down the trail and disappear behind the trees.
MICHEL’S BAR MITZVAH, it said on the cover of the oversized photograph album, in big golden Hebrew-like letters. “We liked the pictures so much, we used each and every one of them,” said Flora.
“How old was he?” Sheila was a Catholic, and of course wouldn’t know about these things.
“Thirteen.”
Nineteen-seventy-four. They had all been seven years younger then, and Flora had looked radiant in the burgundy dress made especially for the occasion.
“I wanted to see this one more time,” she said.
There were pictures of the fancy sanctuary of the Reform synagogue and all the congregants in their finery. There were pictures of Michel holding the Torah, chanting from the Haftarah, being blessed by the rabbi, dancing at the Fairmont Hotel, blowing out candles. “He looks so different from you and Mr. Herzberg,” said Sheila.
“Seven years,” said Flora, shutting the album. “And they still today talk about that party.”
Michel walked back to his car. He got into the driver’s seat, pulled down the sun visor and the mirror. Men heading towards the windmill looked back at him but Michel could see only himself. “Michael,” he whispered. Then he had an idea: Mike. I’ll be Mike when I become Michael. It was a beautiful name to him: Mike, Mike, he said. Then he said Jeff. What kind of pizza did Jeff like? Was Jeff a morning person or a night owl? Did he drive a car with a stick shift? Perhaps Michel had made a mistake; perhaps he’d humiliated Jeff. He was confused and shut his eyes and knew he needed to search for Jeff again so that they could find a motel together. There were many motels by the beach. He thought of Jeff’s hands, but he had trouble remembering the face. What would he do if he couldn’t remember the face?
The house rumbled as the garage door opened; then it closed again and reopened. Sheila and Flora looked at each other, and Sheila went over to the window and drew aside the curtains. Michel and Kurt, from two different directions, had returned, and each in his own car had reached for the opener at the same time. Sheila saw Kurt get out of his Jaguar and shout at Michel, his arms waving in the air and his finger pointing.
Then father and son—one in a suit, the other in a t-shirt, both tanned—were standing in the sickroom looking down at the patient. Kurt sat down on the hassock and took Flora’s white hand in his. Her face had changed, even since morning. Her eye had come loose some more, and her nose had grown; it was as if someone had decided to make a replica of Flora and had made a bad one.
“Mrs. Herzberg ate a whole drumstick at lunchtime,” Sheila reported.
“You’re getting better!” Kurt said to his wife.
“We’re lucky to have Sheila,” said Flora.
Michel, sitting over on the bed, noticed a foul smell in the room.
“And did you see your Chinese customers in Atherton?” Flora asked her husband.
“Business is good,” said Kurt.
“And you?” She looked over at Michel. “What movie did you decide on?”
“Brubaker,” he answered. “With Redford. It was set in a prison.” He hoped they wouldn’t ask him about the plot.
“You’re seeing a lot of movies this summer,” she said, and Michel looked away. “But why are you wearing someone else’s clothes?” she asked him.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t steal others’ clothes,” she said, and closed her eyes, and let her head fall back.
“Flora,” said Kurt, putting her hand in his warm hands. “You will get better.”
Her eyes still closed, she shook her head.
Abruptly Sheila announced that it was time for her to go.
“Look on the dresser,” Flora said, as if in her sleep. “Rebecca Lipman came over today with some brochures from the hospice. I think that’s what they call it. They take care of terminal cases like me, and they don’t try to artificially keep you alive.”
“Oh,” said Kurt. He got up and shuffled the papers on the dresser. “Well, maybe I need to have a talk with Rebecca.”
Flora opened her eyes. “Where did you get those clothes, Michel? I never bought you those things. And it’s wrong to steal, it’s wrong.”
Sheila blew in with final instructions and advice, then hurried out again, and they heard her car start. Kurt went to the window and saw her drive off in a black Cadillac. “Rebecca picked a time she knew I wouldn’t be home,” he said, looking out the window. “Hospice. Now I’ve heard everything.”
Kurt was watching the eleven o’clock news downstairs, and Michel was sitting with his mother. She’d been reading out loud from The Chronicle, but now she was dozing. He lay back his head, and soon he was sleeping along with her. He dreamed about Venice. He was sitting in a hotel lobby while a Polish family checked in. Michel couldn’t help noticing the son, who yawned and sat down on one of the suitcases, leaning his head against a marble pillar. He was wearing a sailor’s outfit and he whistled nonchalantly--
“‘Good feeding is essential for the health of the young puppy,’” Flora was reading, and he woke up. “‘Until the age of six months it’s a good idea to divide his daily ration into three helpings: one in the morning, one at lunchtime, and one. . . A bowl of broth with cereal and honey in the morning. . . half a pound of ground meat and vegetables for lunch.’ Hmm!” And she dropped off to sleep again.
The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July, and for the first time Flora didn’t get out of bed. She didn’t even wake up, and Sheila sent Michel to the hospital for a catheter.
Kurt skipped his Chinese customers that day.
The phone rang continually. Sheila or Michel or Kurt answered, and each time they told the callers that Flora was too sick to come to the phone. Michel sat in the armchair that she had used. The extra chair was not needed anymore and they had already hauled it back into Michel’s room. Once Sheila came in and said, “Don’t say ‘coma’ when you talk on the phone: hearing’s the last sense to go.”
That afternoon, as the firecrackers went off outside, Flora would turn her head or sometimes move her entire body and even half sit up. And once Michel watched in amazement as she nearly sat up all the way and shouted words in German that he would ponder the rest of his life: “Clear the closets—it must all go, all of it!” His parents hadn’t taught him German, but he’d been curious, as children will be, and had taken three years of it in high school. Since he already had a German accent in English, it had been an easy language to pick up.
Michel sat down beside her and felt her hand. “Do you hear me?” Perhaps she did acknowledge him distantly; he couldn’t be sure. Her hand was still warm. Then he went back to the armchair. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Once, he picked up the receiver and heard his father’s voice
“I’m very disappointed,” Kurt was saying. “No, no, maybe disappointed is not the word. I don’t think I ever expected much from you, Rebecca. So, I think that’s all.”
“If you’d let me—” The woman cried “Kurt!” one more time, but he’d hung up. She must have sensed that someone else was still on the line, though, because she became hopeful again. “Hello? Kurt?” Then Michel hung up, too.
Soon the neighborhood turned into violent with whistling rockets and fiery colors—the first bright colors seen in the fog belt for weeks. The festivities lasted until late. Michel, sitting in his mother’s chair or pacing the room, wondered how she could rest through the uproar.
He slept badly that night, and towards morning dreamed of merry-go-rounds, and a boy riding up and down, smiling at his tired parents who smiled back, taking pictures. No one else rode with him, and he began to feel sad. Then his father was standing alone, but the music box melody tinkled on.
Michel woke up. Kurt stood over him holding the musical cake plate that played a tinny “Happy Birthday.” The white disc turned round and round and Michel rubbed his eyes to see a single piece of cheese cake revolving on it, and a single pink candle burning. His parents had used this device to celebrate Michel’s birthdays since he was one year-old. And then, after playing several times, the tune slowed, and Kurt cut the music and put the cake plate down on Michel’s nightstand.
“You like it?” he asked his son.
“I love cheesecake,” said Michel, after he’d blown out the candle, reaching for the card that lay next to the cake. It was a message for a much younger son, and showed bears, kittens, pandas and giraffes in jolly human poses proclaiming this a special day. The card held a thousand dollars in cash.
“I never know what to get you,” his father explained.
“This is a beautiful card.”
His father sat down on the bed. “Sheila stayed all night. The doctor was here and said Sheila will probably not need to spend another night. You know what that means, Michel?” Kurt took his son’s hand. “What are we going to do without Mami? What. . . ?” He suddenly broke down but pulled himself together quickly, taking out a handkerchief and blowing his nose. Kurt was wearing the same brown cardigan sweater, polyester pants and wallabees that he’d worn all through Michel’s youth. But he was much grayer and more tanned nowadays. He pointed to the card. “Keep the money in a safe place, all right?” He got up. “Put on something warm today.”
Around noon the rabbi came and sat with Flora. She’d stopped talking and moving around and was deep in her coma. Finally, shaking his head, he got up and walked towards the door. Michel noticed that he stopped one more time and looked back. The rabbi scratched his head as if he wanted this last look to go undetected, as if he wanted it to come across as an afterthought. And then, turning to the door again and walking down the stairs to the entrance hall, Michel saw the rabbi take off his glasses and cover his eyes; but a second later he had composed himself and was offering a few soft words to Kurt.
The fog was less thick than usual, but there was no trace of sunshine or blue sky. Standing in the sickroom, Michel looked out the window at joggers and old couples in parkas and gloves walking their dogs, and noticed that blackbirds swooped down from the power lines and the trees, brushing against people’s heads. The sound of nearby firecrackers left over from the day before mingled with the usual gunfire in the distance.
When Michel got tired of waiting in his parents’ bedroom he went back to his own room, sat down at his desk and studied an old picture of Flora and Kurt taken on a cruise. “My mother,” he said, and then picked up a mirror and stared at himself. “Twenty!” And he shook his head. He looked at his reflection and compared it with the picture of his parents.
His father came in and sat down on the bed, and together they listened to Tchaikovsky for a long time without talking.
Kurt had an idea. “Maybe next weekend, if you feel like it, come down to the Peninsula, to Atherton. There’s a house I always go to. It’s a house in the sun—you’ll love the sun! I’ve mentioned that house before, remember? It’s Jack’s place. Jack the supplier.”
“We’ll see.”
“When Jack’s out of town, he always lets me use it.”
Michel did not understand why his father went to Atherton so often, and he didn’t think there was such a person as “Jack the supplier.” Most of his father’s life was mysterious to him. Michel half-realized who probably lived on the Peninsula but never asked.
He picked up the picture from the cruise again. His mother’s smile in the picture looked forced.
“She never held me when I was a baby, did she?” he asked his father.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was wondering.”
His father shook his head and stared at the floor.
“Looking at this picture,” said Michel, “there’s a question I will always have about the three of us.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Michel,” said Kurt. “What are you trying to say?”
“It’s a rumor that went around when I was little, the same year I wrote the prayer that’s hanging in your room, the same year I first wanted to change my name.”
“What rumor? What are you talking about?” his father said, and Michel could see he was afraid.
“It’s what the children said when they saw me and the two of you together and when they saw your age. Should I bring you this mirror?”
“Michel, speak English!”
“You don’t want to understand, and now Mami is sleeping there and cannot tell the truth.”
Kurt was amazed. “We have lied to you about something? We have lied to you?”
“Michel!” It was Sheila’s voice, calling from the sickroom; then she appeared in his doorway. “Your mother has no blood pressure.”
But when he sat down on her bed he noticed she was slowly trying to open her eyes. “She’s going to be all right!”
“No,” said Sheila.
Kurt sprawled across his side of the bed and put his face in his wife’s hand. “I want Mami,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
Michel shook his head: it was obvious that his mother would wake up.
Flora’s breathing was loud and labored, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. “Cheyne-Stokes breathing,” Sheila explained, and this sounded like a very strange term to Michel, like something from a dream. Sometimes the pause between breaths became so long that Kurt would lift his head from his wife’s hand and would say “Huh?” It was the only time in his life, to Michel’s knowledge, that he’d ever used that expression. But then she’d go on breathing.
The grandfather clock downstairs struck five and Sheila said—always addressing herself only to Michel—“Are you holding her hand? Don’t look at her face.”
Kurt—a kind of patient now too—was lying next to his wife with his head still in one of her hands, and Michel held on tight to the other one. It was his mother’s hand, Mami’s hand, with her smell. “Mami,” he said. The macabre interest he’d had, a few times earlier that day, in witnessing this moment had passed, and he lost control and was alone. He pressed his lips tight against her hand.
“Be a man!” said Sheila.
He didn’t look up. His eyes were closed and he took in her smell and heard the sound of his mother struggling. He thought he could hear her cry out. When he looked up her face was ravaged, and he heard Sheila say, “There’ll be one more breath.” She was right: after a long moment his mother’s body exhaled, mechanically, one more time, and after that there were no more breaths. And then Michel saw something that shocked and reassured him: the Irish nurse reached over and made the sign of the cross over Flora Herzberg’s head.
Sheila was efficient. She pronounced the patient dead, brushed the hair and prepared the body for the undertakers. Kurt and Michel sat in the living room looking out the picture window at the sidewalk, the trees across the street and the joggers. The fog had thickened and the Sunset District was very dark, though several hours of daylight remained. Blackbirds chattered around the house.
It must have been around six o’clock: the old man limped into view with his dachshund. Both man and dog looked feisty and determined. The man’s limp was as elaborate as ever, and the dog wobbled and sniffed along.
“We were so lucky to have Sheila,” said Kurt.
“Yeah,” said Michel. “We were really lucky.”
Sheila came downstairs, finished with her work, and Michel asked, “Would it be all right if I went to see her, for a moment?”
“Of course!” Sheila and Kurt said at the same time, as if both—in spite of the vast difference in their backgrounds—were surprised that he needed to ask permission for something as basic as a last viewing of his mother.
Michel went upstairs and shut the door. He had never seen a dead body before. Flora looked exhausted. The mouth, partly open and with dentures gone, showed there had been a massive struggle. She’d fought; he’d never realized how hard, until now. What troubled him was the coldness of her hands, her arms, her face—he hadn’t expected this. But her features, distorted in her last days by the final onslaught of the cancer, had returned, just in the last hour, to the way he had always known them. “I’m twenty today,” he said to her. “Mami.” He looked at his own large hand and tanned fingers, the almost perfect nails. “I did my best to please you and to be everything the two of you wanted. I wanted to be your son for you. And to be good, the way you were good.” He stopped talking, realizing he hadn’t said anything meaningful or said what he meant. It always came out the wrong way. What he imagined and what he dreamed never came out properly in words. And then he realized for the first time that something in the room was missing. The ventilator had been turned off and its hum would be silent from now on, and Flora Herzberg was not going to wake up. “And we never said good-bye!” He took her dead hand in both his warm hands. “When people leave on a trip they say a few words. And this is the longest trip and nothing! And Deddy couldn’t make you well, not with all his doctors and money. He didn’t have the power, and he used to arrange everything, every surprise.” Michel rested his head on her arm. It still smelled like her. “I wasn’t good.”
The hearse pulled up, and he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
They came up the stairs quietly, with a peculiar reserve. They stayed a short time and then slowly brought her down on a stretcher and moved her out the front door. A young woman with a stroller happened to be walking by at that moment. She stopped and, with her baby, watched as the men put Flora away in the hearse and shut the doors. Then the young woman moved on, and the hearse drove away.
“I’m not going to forget this one,” said Sheila.
Kurt was glad to have something to do and warmed up a beef stroganoff for the three of them. He and his son hardly touched their food, but Sheila ate a lot. When she complimented Kurt on the meal he said, “This was one of the last things Flora made before she went into the hospital the last time. We have still a week’s supply of dinners in the freezer.”
And soon after that, Sheila left. Now Michel realized that something was wrong. At the front door she hugged both of them and Kurt thanked her for the good work she’d done. Michel didn’t think it was right that she was going and kept wanting to ask her to stay for him and his father.
It was dark and the birds were at rest and there was light traffic. The telephone never rang.
Michel went into his room and closed the door, and his father watched Archie Bunker’s Place and The Jeffersons, sitting in the same armchair that no one but his wife had used during the months of her illness. Once, shortly before the eleven o’clock news came on, the two of them met by chance in the hall and Kurt said, “I’ll give you something to help you sleep, all right? It’s very strong so I’ll only give you half a tablet.”
Michel waited in the hall for his father to get the tablet from the secret place where he stored all his medicine.
“I hope you get to sleep,” Kurt said, putting the half-tablet in his son’s hand.
“Thank you.”
“If you have trouble, though, I can always give you the other half later. Wake me up if you need to.”
Michel nodded.
“Have a snack before you go to bed. There’s cheese cake, strawberries, herring salad, you name it.”
Michel nodded.
The Pope was gradually recovering from his wounds, the Mediterranean fruit fly continued its rampage through California. . .and the world waited excitedly as wedding preparations went on in London—none of this held Kurt’s attention, and after the first commercial break he switched to a TV movie about the romantic escapades of a group of fraternity brothers on a posh New England campus.
Michel woke up in the middle of his room, covered in bedding. “Her voice!” he said. “We don’t even have a recording of her voice!” He turned on the light and made his bed again, knowing he wouldn’t sleep any time soon. Maybe if she’d been a star, he thought, her image and her movements would have been preserved on film for him to see whenever he wanted. It would have been easy to tape her, just one conversation with her, and now it was too late. Why hadn’t this occurred to anyone?
Down the hall, behind the door of what he’d have to learn to call his father’s room, came the boisterous sounds of television blending with his father’s voice. For a moment Michel listened at the door. Kurt was speaking German and sounded happy. Jack the supplier maybe.
As soon as his fingers touched the keys he entered a kind of trance. Michel had never mastered the piano, even when he was fourteen and taking lessons, and all he could do was improvise for hours, constructing huge tone poems for the keyboard—primitive, harsh—nothing that anyone else would want to listen to. And he loved to use the right pedal: sometimes his foot wouldn’t rise from it for an entire session and all eighty-eight keys would sing together, an echoing cavern of pseudo-impressionism. He hated what he played—only loving the potential for what was there—and every composition would leave him exhausted, the same way long sessions with his Etch A Sketch had left him sleepy and demoralized when he was nine. And now he played in his most “advanced” style, without worrying about beat or tonality—he just played and played, and the notes piled up, high notes and low notes, with a lot of pedal and a lot of confusion. He shut his eyes. “I’m not going to forget this one!” he heard Sheila say, and he saw the old man with the dachshund come limping by in front of the picture window and the young woman with the stroller who’d paused to watch the undertakers’ deferential work. Kurt came out of his room and stood on the stairs, barely able to see his son’s back in the dark but hearing every note the old upright was forced to produce. A brief passage in the rambling music could have passed for a pale, atonal version of “Happy Birthday” and Michel remembered that it was already past midnight and “his” day was over. He played on, slowly shaking his head, with his eyes open to view the possibilities of his long fingers as they stumbled over the keys. It was like the fog, it was always like the fog, with no beginning to it and no end—it was a vague, ruminating force. But the music did get quieter after a time, and what had started out slow became very slow, like the cake plate winding down without anyone to wind it up again. “Michel,” said Kurt, but too softly—“Michel.” And playing on, the young man wondered what it would have been like to hear a whole orchestra of non-musicians accompanying him in his improvisation—what rapturous music a mistreated violin or kettledrum or saxophone might create! And his playing became very quiet: now he could even hear, mingled with the foghorns and the late traffic, the roaring of lions in the zoo. It was time to reach for the lowest and the highest octaves and press the keys down with such a gentle touch that no more notes were heard. His foot stayed on the pedal, though, and the gathered echoes of his nocturne stayed in the air long after he released his hands from the keyboard.
