Alternate Side(65)
“I don’t know that I’ll ever make my peace with the idea that I was downstairs in the living room reading for all that time, and he was either dying or dead,” Sherry said the next morning while Brutus pulled mulishly at his leash, his black eyes glittering as Homer sat patiently next to Nora.
Everyone on the block had salved themselves with the idea of Jack’s as a good death, falling asleep in his recliner chair, without months of chemo or a long hospitalization or, what none of them said, the perpetual disgrace of being the guy who’d done that terrible thing to the poor handyman. But Sherry was not part of that hallelujah chorus. She had not seen her husband for hours, perhaps because it had become second nature to avoid him, and she tortured herself with the notion that he might have called for help and she not heard him, a classical station playing loudly while she read a British mystery novel down below. Her eyes darted up and down the block when she talked to Nora, ever suspicious that one of the tabloids might be casing her home. GOLF CLUB EXEC BEATEN BY BUM HEART. It hadn’t happened. Jack might have once again become a page-five story, but the mayor’s wife had recently left him for a woman—“who I know personally, and, believe me, she is a million times nicer and smarter than he is,” Jenny had told Nora on the phone—and a photogenic twenty-five-year-old divinity student had been assaulted while she biked to class. Bebe had once told Nora that that was the best you could hope for when there was bad publicity—that something worse would come along. And she had been right.
Sherry had even decided against a memorial service. The memorial service had become the new funeral in New York City. No coffin, no body. The deceased was already long gone to the crematorium by the time some public venue hosted what was called a “remembrance” or a “celebration of life.” Nora and Charlie knew the drill by now: slightly more than an hour of anecdotes, favorite readings, a little poetry, perhaps one of the more literary psalms. Slideshows were considered tacky, but classical music was de rigueur even if the person had hated the Philharmonic, WQXR, and Mozart. Sometimes Gershwin or very modern jazz was acceptable, and several people they knew had had “New York, New York” as the recessional. Occasionally a memorial would run close to two hours, and then you would see people sliding into the aisles and out the door early, grumbling in the sunlight about how important it was to be respectful of the time commitments of the living.
Afterward there was usually a light lunch.
The Fisk family—son, mother, son, brother whom no one knew—gathered on either side of the fireplace in the living room, food laid out in the dining room. Alma Fenstermacher had proffered her caterer, and Nora felt vaguely embarrassed by the passing thought that the food was very good. She looked around for George. This was exactly the sort of event he would enjoy, gladhanding his way through the mourners, telling the ones he’d never met before how close he and Jack had been, talking to the ones who lived on the block about how worried he’d been about Jack’s health in the last couple of months, how ashen and haggard he’d been looking. Lowering his voice to a stage whisper to talk about “what happened—you know what I mean.”
But he wasn’t there. Instead, at the Danish-modern table she ran into Betsy, who was eating salad greens with her fingers, dipping each leaf delicately into a small pool of balsamic vinaigrette on the plate.
“It’s nice that you could get away,” Nora said.
“I had to be here. When George said he couldn’t do it, just couldn’t face it, I told him I would come and offer condolences.”
“He’s having a hard time?”
“Terrible. And he says he doesn’t know what he’d do without Charlie. He says Charlie’s friendship has been a godsend.”
“Really,” said Nora. Even to her it sounded like “Really???”
“He’s been a rock for George.” Betsy put down her plate and took a phone from the pocket of her black cardigan. Then she took another from the pocket on the other side. “Excuse me, Nora,” she said.
Nora had to admit to herself afterward that she went looking for Charlie then only to be snide, to say, Wait until you hear this one. You’re a rock. A godsend. In the den a clutch of men who looked like Jack’s partners were watching a Mets game on the flat screen. It must be that they didn’t know that that was the room in which Jack had died. One of them was even sitting in Jack’s recliner, which Nora was pretty sure was precisely where it had happened. From inside the closed door of the master bedroom Nora heard voices, and she knocked softly. Alma and Sherry were sitting side by side on the love seat under the window, a box of tissues between them. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Nora said.
“No, come in,” Sherry said. “I just had to get away for a few minutes. I feel as though I’ve been on a treadmill. I never appreciated how exhausting constant concern could be.”
“Exhausting,” said Alma, putting her hand over Sherry’s.
“Some reporter finally knocked at the door this morning,” Sherry said. “It must be a slow news day. I was so afraid Andrew would hit him. Think of how that story would have sounded.”
“That’s terrible,” Nora said, putting her hand over the one of Sherry’s that Alma wasn’t holding. Sherry started to cry. Alma patted one hand, so Nora patted the other.
“Some young resident came out in the ER and told me he’d expired,” Sherry sobbed. “Who uses that word? It made him sound as though he were a carton of milk past his sell-by date. Expired. Who says expired?” Her nose was running onto her upper lip.