The Immortalists(59)

‘So go easy on me.’

‘Why do you think I didn’t wake you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Daniel, walking downstairs. ‘Maybe because I’m no longer a child?’

‘Wrong.’ Gertie sneaks out from behind him and takes the lead, sweeping magisterially into the kitchen. ‘Because I go easy on you. No one goes easier on you than me. Now sit down if you want me to make you coffee.’

Gertie moved to Kingston three years ago, in the fall of 2003. Until then, she insisted on remaining at Clinton Street. Usually, Daniel visited monthly, but that year, he had skipped March and April: work was chaotic due to the Iraq invasion, and Gertie assured him that she would spend Passover with a friend.

When he arrived on the first of May, she was in bed, wearing her bathrobe and reading Kafka’s The Trial. The windows were covered in brown packing paper. Where the wooden-framed mirror above her dresser once hung, there was now a lone nail. She had pried the bathroom mirror, which doubled as the door of the medicine cabinet, off by its hinges, exposing a cluttered pharmacy of prescription pill bottles.

‘Ma,’ said Daniel. His throat was dry. ‘Who’s been prescribing this stuff?’

Gertie walked into the bathroom. Her eyes had a stubborn Who, me? quality.

‘Doctors.’

‘Which doctors? How many doctors?’

‘Well, I’m not sure I can say. I see a man for my gut problems and a man for my bones. There’s the primary physician, the eye doctor, the dentist, the allergy doctor, although I haven’t seen her in months, the women’s doctor, the physical therapist who thinks I have scoliosis, which nobody once diagnosed even though all my life I’ve had back pain; there’s a little bone in my rib cage that I swear to you pops out when I do what Dr. Kurtzburg calls “heavy twisting”’ – she held up a palm as Daniel began to protest – ‘and you should be glad I’m being treated, cared for, looked after, an old woman alone, needing what care she can get in this world, and getting it. You,’ she repeats, keeping her palm aloft, ‘should be glad.’

‘You don’t have scoliosis.’

‘You’re not my doctor.’

‘I’m better than that. I’m your son.’

‘I just remembered the dermatologist. She’s keeping an eye on my moles. People think they’re just beauty marks, but beauty can kill you. Did you ever consider whether Marilyn Monroe died of a mole? That one on her face she was famous for?’

‘Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. She took a bunch of barbiturates.’

‘Maybe,’ said Gertie, conspiratorially.

‘Why did you take down the mirrors?’

‘That’s for your brother and your sister and your father,’ Gertie said. Daniel walked into the kitchen. A tall glass of wine, rimmed by fruit flies, sat on the counter. ‘And that’s for Elijah. Don’t touch it.’

When Daniel poured the reeking Manischewitz down the drain, a haze of flies rose and dispersed. Gertie huffed. On the other side of the sink was an aluminum tray of store-bought kugel, left uncovered: the noodles were shiny and hard as plastic. Here, as in the bedroom, the windows were covered with paper.

‘Why did you black out the windows?’

‘There’s reflections in there, too,’ Gertie said, her pupils dilating, and Daniel knew something had to be done.

Initially, Gertie refused, but she was flattered to think Daniel wanted her close and relieved by the end of her solitude. They moved her out of Manhattan in August. Varya had relocated to California to take a job at the Drake Institute for Research on Aging, but she flew east to assist. By evening, the apartment was so denuded that Daniel felt sorrow at having done it. Once they carried out Saul’s pea-green velvet chair, a hideous piece of furniture that the entire family adored, the only remaining task was to dismantle the bunk beds.

‘I won’t watch,’ said Gertie – half-threatening, half-despondent. The bunk beds had been purchased at Sears forty years earlier, but even after Klara and Simon were gone, she wouldn’t take them down. At first she claimed that everyone would need a place to sleep, should Daniel and Mira and Varya all visit at once, but when Daniel suggested that at least one of the pairs could be taken apart, Gertie became so agitated that he knew not to raise the issue again. Before Mira ushered her down to the car, Gertie insisted on having her picture taken with the bunks. She stood holding her pocketbook and smiling gaily, like a tourist in front of the Taj Mahal, before she trundled quickly out of the bedroom, turning her face toward the wall so that they could not see it.

Daniel closed the front door behind her and returned to the bedroom. At first, he didn’t see Varya. But snuffling noises came from her old top bunk, and when Daniel peered upward, he saw her right foot listing over the edge. Tears rolled sideways out of each eye, creating two wet circles on the mattress.

‘Oh, V,’ he said. He began to reach for her, then thought better of it: he knew she didn’t like to be touched. For years, he was hurt by her habit of ducking hugs, and by her general distance. They were the only two left, and sometimes it took weeks for her to return his calls. But what could he do? It was too late for either of them to change very much.

‘I was just thinking about,’ Varya said, and inhaled. ‘When I used to sleep here.’

‘What, when we were kids?’