They May Not Mean To, But They Do(79)
As for her brothers, the best Freddie could do was FaceTime them.
Duncan sat up in his hospital bed when they all assembled. He stretched out one pallid skinny arm, tubes dangling from it.
“‘Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones.’”
Someone, one of the brothers on FaceTime, muttered, “This really cannot be happening.”
“‘Had I your tongues and eyes,’” Duncan continued, his voice low now, “‘I’d use them so that heaven’s vaults should crack.’”
“It’s his last performance,” Pamela whispered. Laurel nodded, eyes wide.
“‘A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!’” Duncan roared.
It was a disjointed piece of theater, he spoke only Lear’s lines, but it was moving nonetheless. Freddie was tempted to fill in the missing dialogue, but stopped herself. She saw that this was her father’s show, and a show it was, Duncan’s voice rising and falling with emotion, his arms flung out, then pulled back to his heaving chest.
“‘No, no, no life!’” he cried, turning first to Pamela, then Laurel, to each son’s face, one on Freddie’s phone screen, one on Molly’s. At last he turned to Freddie herself. “‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?’”
“I’m breathing, Daddy,” she reassured him softly.
But suddenly, it appeared, Daddy was not breathing. He dropped back on his pillows, his mouth agape, his arms hanging from either side of the bed.
There was a hush.
Then Lear opened an eye.
Lauren gasped. “He’s not dead.”
“Rotten trick, Dad,” said Gordon’s FaceTime voice. “You scared the living daylights out of us.”
Duncan, though pale, trembling, and clearly exhausted, smiled through the fatigue, sat up, and bowed from the waist, first to the left side of the room, then the right, then straight ahead.
Freddie began to clap. What else was there to do? It had been a brilliant performance.
58
The great day arrived. Ruby sat nervously waiting to be called to read her Torah portion. It was a portion full of curses cast on the people, but she could not really blame God—the Israelites were always straying. She had recently seen an old black-and-white movie in which Lassie, actually Lassie’s son Bill, a perfect and brilliant collie sheepdog belonging to a young Elizabeth Taylor, accidentally goes off to World War II and comes home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, growling at and biting anyone who comes near him, raiding chicken coops, until at last he is reunited with Elizabeth Taylor and regains his calm and loving nature. Ruby had, in the last few days of frantically practicing her Haftorah, begun to confuse the behavior of God and of Bill, both of them essentially good, both of them driven to violence by the misbehavior of human beings. She sensed this must be sacrilegious, the comparison of a dog, however regal, and the god of the Israelites, but the thought was hard to get out of her head once it had planted itself there.
Her sister had wanted to wear a matching dress. Ruby had not had to throw a fit, though she was prepared to do so. Their mother had pointed Cora to a frilly dress she knew Ruby would never have worn, and Cora had fallen for the bait. Ruby was content in a dress her grandmother called elegant. Her mother had been willing to spend quite a bit of money on it, she was so relieved it was not a bejeweled ice-skating costume. “Sophisticated” was the word Ruby used to describe it, and herself, to herself.
She looked down at her grandmother, in the first row, who was rather violently slapping her legs together, then moving them apart, then slapping them together again, staring meaningfully at Ruby. Maybe Grandma Joy had to go to the bathroom. But it was very distracting.
“Why won’t Ruby put her legs together?” Joy whispered to Danny. She slapped her own closed again, instructively. “She looks like Sharon Stone, for heaven’s sake.”
Ruby could not remember much of the actual ceremony. She was aware of the rabbi, her wonderful rabbi, right beside her, a strong and comforting presence. The cantor was wearing perfume, which made Ruby sneeze once. She had no love for the cantor, a cold, shrill taskmaster in soft feminine sheep’s clothing. The Hebrew letters of the sacred yellowed scroll came in and out of focus, but the words were there, in her head, in her soul, she realized, and she chanted a little louder, her voice firm and high and only occasionally off pitch.
Karl sat on Joy’s other side, murmuring along with the prayers. Danny had insisted Karl sit there, right in front, and that was nice, but Joy’s escort was someone else, someone not there; she felt Aaron’s absence as if it were a physical presence beside her. She wore sunglasses and cried freely. Aaron, she thought, you would be so proud. Aaron had not been religious, not at all; he had not been brought up with any Jewish education and he claimed to think all religion was superstition. He did not in the least mind singing about Jesus Christ when Purcell or Handel wrote about him, he was as comfortable in a church as in a synagogue, but he would have been happiest now, proud of his granddaughter up there, so brave, so learned. Joy pressed the damp Kleenex to her cheek. Danny was grinning and crying, too. Cora was kicking her feet, but they were in the front row, so she wasn’t bothering anyone. Joy wished she believed she would see Aaron again in heaven, but since she did not, she was grateful to think of him here in this place, at this moment, when he would have been so gloriously happy.