The Middlesteins(57)

In a year Marie was dead from a cancer so rare there weren’t even any experimental drugs to use, not that Kenneth would have wanted her to try them anyway. It was enough that she was going through chemotherapy. Marie had been born and raised in America. She believed in Western medicine because that was what she had always known. He thought otherwise, but he could not talk her out of it, so instead he tried to heal her with food. He cooked every meal for her day and night, using the herbs he had been raised to believe could heal her. Turmeric and red clover and ginger. When she no longer had an appetite, he brewed her tea with barbed skullcap. Anna took a semester off from art school and came to Kentucky to watch her mother die. They sat on either side of Marie and held her hands when she passed away. They were silent, and then they were sobbing. There was nothing left of Marie but a faded white shell of flesh.

Anna went back to art school, and Kenneth started moving again, but every restaurant he opened failed within months. Everything tasted funny to him. His father-in-law sent him a check and told him to retire. Kenneth moved to Chicago, where he found a basement apartment ten blocks from Anna in Wicker Park, with a small backyard. Stray cats used it as a thoroughfare, and he sat outside most days and watched them casually scuttle through fences and ivy. Even during the winter months, he sat there on a small stool he found in a scrap heap behind a Lutheran church down the block. Bundled up but secretly praying he might freeze to death. This is where I will live and die, he thought. The cats rarely acknowledged him. He often smoked long, thin foreign cigarettes. The tips of his fingers were cracked and yellow. He aged ten years in two. Gray hair, suddenly. Drawn cheeks, suddenly. Creaking bones in the morning, and no one there to moan to about it all.

At night he read poetry. That was how he had learned English years before: he had memorized American poems, so by the time he arrived from Xi’an to his uncle’s home in Baltimore at the age of sixteen, he could speak the language and was both enamored and wary of his new homeland. He liked the Beats the best, the spunky revolutionaries, those who roamed their country in search of adventure. Ginsberg’s “America” cracked him up.

He had recited the poem to Marie soon after they first met. His uncle was working for her father, an ambitious man who had immigrated from their same province as a teenager, and had built up his restaurant business with brutal efficiency. Kenneth was to work for him also; he came from a well-respected family of chefs. Marie was already working in the office after school. She was the one to hand him cash under the table. He asked her out for New Year’s Eve, and they drank the terrible local beer, National Bohemian, at a party thrown by her cousin who was in nursing school. He whispered the poem in her ear, laughing when he said the line When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. They were young, but she was not na?ve, even if he was. Her slim hand resting on his arm, her eyes concerned, her lips amused. Or was it the other way around? America this is quite serious.

But thirty years later, in the basement in Chicago, he was memorizing poems for no one but himself. “America” suddenly felt dangerous to him. Your machinery is too much for me. He switched his attention to Robert Frost, wholesome and rural. But even he had a layer of darkness underneath his simple charms. He read a poem about an ant dying. No one stands round to stare. It is nobody else’s affair. Lonely years sprawled out before Kenneth. He could have gone either way then. He could have died.

But Anna would not let him. Anna was watching over him, and she missed his cooking. Anna, who would not be denied a thing by her grandfather who could produce a truckload of cash in an instant, or at least enough to start up a new restaurant in a strip mall in the suburbs of Chicago. There was a bunch of paperwork, and in her eagerness to launch her father from his basement and out into the world, Anna might not have read everything she signed. The lawyer they hired was inexperienced, a friend of a friend who had just graduated from some law school Kenneth had never heard of in Indiana. They opened the restaurant, but the business side was a mess. Then it was just the two of them, father and daughter, sitting at a corner table with a stack of file folders in front of them at the end of a slow Tuesday dinner service, wondering what they had gotten themselves into.

The last customer of the night, a woman, a lush, vibrant, large woman, still remained, consuming the meal Kenneth had prepared for her with a fierce pleasure. She sucked on her fork and spoon and chopsticks, sipped in the flavors, his flavors, until all the food was gone. She had been there every night for the last two weeks. Kenneth liked her eyes; they were dark, and welling with anger. Her anger didn’t scare him. He got it. He was pissed off too. His wife was dead. It had been a long time since it had happened, but the fact remained: His wife was dead. What was she pissed off about? Anna said something to him, demanding he return his attention to her. Her voice was husky, and her eyes were red, and while she had not cried yet, he feared her collapse. She was not to be blamed; she’d gone to art school, not business school. Marie had always handled the paperwork; she had grown up working the books for her father. What did either of them know? How could Marie have left them behind like that?

And then the woman rose from her table, the last customer, this late-night goddess, heaving, licking the last of his food from her fingertips, and came to their side. She said, “Maybe I can help.” She had been a lawyer once, a long time ago, but not so long that she had forgotten what she knew. “I was very good at what I did,” said Edie Middlestein. She said it like it was a promise.