Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, look at you,” Rebecca said.

  “Never gets old,” he said.

  She fumbled for her camera but it was too late. He shook his head. “I’ve tried it,” he said, “but, you know, you take the picture and you look at it and it’s just not the same. It kind of loses something in the translation.”

  “I suppose it depends on the picture,” Rebecca said.

  “No offense,” he said. “Sarah says you take good pictures.” He stuck out his hand again. It was wrapped in a grubby bandage. “You could use some fiberglass insulation in that crawl space before winter comes,” he added. The calculator in Rebecca’s mind began its desperate clicking again: 5800, 1000, 1400, 1900, 1000. The owner of the cottage had not replied when she had asked him to pay for the raccoon removal and the roof repair. “It won’t be much,” he said as though he could hear the sound in the silent forest. “Mainly materials.”

  “I have a photograph of the raccoon you might be interested in.”

  “A dead animal in a picture, now that’s a different thing. I’ll trade you. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said.

  “Back to work,” he said, hoisting himself onto the lowest branch of the maple tree, and she stood and watched him climb, disappearing by inches.

  SHE KNEW IT

  During the month of August:

  Sarah put up the poster of Still Life with Bread Crumbs in Tea for Two. (Like everyone else in town, that’s what Rebecca called it. She ignored Kevin’s parentheses. If there was a Kevin. Rebecca had yet to meet him.) Rebecca had signed two copies of the poster and Sarah had had them framed. One was going to Sarah’s mother for her birthday, and the other had been hung on the long wall of the shop, opposite the door. “I need more art in here,” Sarah said.

  “This is really good,” Jim Bates said when he saw the photograph of the raccoon’s paws, shot so close that it was difficult to tell what they were. He put two layers of insulation in the attic. A spark of sunlight from below struck the side of the ladder laid across the top of his truck. It was something that happened often, the odd ray of light from below.

  “Where’s your flag?” Jim Bates said. Rebecca went to the back door where the white flag was leaning. “It fell off during that thunderstorm,” she said. He put it back up so that it fluttered wildly in a gust off the mountain. Rebecca wondered if it was an advertising vehicle, like those signs along the road that said THIS SUNROOM COURTESY OF BRIGHT DAY ADDITIONS.

  The shards of lights from below disappeared.

  Rebecca found two more crosses. One had a blue ribbon at its base. “First prize” was written on the ribbon, but the cheaply embossed gilt letters were beginning to fade, and parts of the fabric were bleaching to a military gray. The ribbon was limp and sad from rain and sun. Over the course of a week it became limper and sadder, and she kept taking photographs. No one moved it. She thought of asking Sarah whether she knew why someone would be leaving the crosses in the woods, but she thought Sarah would discuss the matter with everyone who lived within a ten-mile radius, and that perhaps the person who had removed the first cross would take the others. She didn’t want that.

  The next cross had a birthday card open beneath it and was surrounded by chicory, its starry blue flowers a frame. “A daughter is a blessing / from heaven above / a gift that’s everlasting / of wonderful love,” the card said in pink script. “Mommy,” said the signature in copperplate penmanship. (“Mother,” her own cards from her mother had always said.) Rebecca wondered what the front of the card looked like. It was still fresh and untouched, although a thin line of red ants was marching across the glittery border of pink roses. Rebecca took photos with the ants and, when they had moved on, without.

  The following day that cross and the card had both disappeared, and she reluctantly decided it was time to go visit her parents.

  FAMILY OF ORIGIN

  Anthropology 101/Mount Holyoke College

  Fall semester

  Family of Origin Field Study Exercise

  Rebecca Grace Winter

  Mother: Beatrice Sophia Freeman, born 1925, New York City. Only child, Morris (born Krakow, Poland) and Bertha (born Warsaw, Poland) Freeman. Educated Fieldston School and Manhattan School of Music.

  Father: Oscar Winter, born 1920, Brooklyn, New York. Son, Jacob and Leah Winter (born New York, NY). Educated Evander Childs High School.

  Mother’s occupation: housewife

  Father’s occupation: business owner

  Brothers: none

  Sisters: none

  FAMILY OF ORIGIN

  Like most nursing homes, the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm was situated in an unattractive area of a pretty neighborhood, a busy street where no one would want to raise children. The residents of the home never noticed, and their families, when they visited, pretended not to. Behind it were twisty streets with old trees stretching overhead and large Tudor houses neck-laced with climbing roses. From the nursing home roof the river was visible, moving sluggishly toward New York Harbor and a chance to kiss the feet of the Statue of Liberty. It was a nice view, but no one ever saw it except two guys working in the kitchen who went up there to smoke during their breaks. State regulations made it unlawful to bring patients onto the roof, even if any of them could have climbed the metal stairs. They made it unlawful for staff to use it as well, but the two kitchen workers were making close to minimum wage, so they said to hell with it.

  The home itself, on a commercial boulevard, had no scenery except a back court that was more or less a biggish air shaft with some pots of dusty ivy at the corners and a few outdoor chairs. The chairs were for the visitors, usually; the residents used wheelchairs or, if they were especially lucky or relatively new, walkers.

  In a sunroom with a view of a white brick high-rise a tiny woman with thin white hair sat bent over a card table. It took everything Rebecca had to approach her, although it was unlikely the woman would look up. If she did, it was unthinkable that she would recognize her only child. Not that the flat, slightly suspicious look in her blue-gray eyes would be much different from the way she had looked at Rebecca when she was a girl, or a young woman. “Some women, they shouldn’t have children,” her grandmother had once muttered, and for a long time Rebecca had agreed. But over the years she realized it was more complicated than that. In her mother’s generation it had been assumed that a girl would get married, and a married woman would become a mother, and all of the girls with whom Bebe had grown up and later played cards had. In some cases they had warmed to the task, and in other cases they had not. It was difficult to predict: Bebe’s old friend Ruth Wetzel, for instance, had been a mean-spirited wife whose great love affair had been with her eldest child, her son, for whom enough was never enough. (As for her second child, her daughter, that was another story.)

  For Rebecca’s contemporaries, it had been different: some of them had purposefully avoided having children, even some of the ones who seemed likely to be good parents, and some of them had reluctantly and fearfully conceived, and then been surprised to discover that they were filled to the brim by motherhood. Sometimes Rebecca thought she fell somewhere in the middle. She was not sure that she could say she loved being a mother, that three or four children would have enriched her life. But she had loved Benjamin Freeman Symington, funny little Ben, from almost the first time she had placed his bald misshapen head at her breast, had perhaps come to love him even more when she realized that he would grow up with one and a half parents, given the vagaries of his father’s peripatetic personal life, and that she was the one. Or maybe she had just relaxed into him over time.

  Bebe Winter had never relaxed into anything, especially motherhood. She was as definite, as unyielding, as dark as the ungainly statue of Artemis that she had placed on the table in their old apartment’s foyer. There had been no Jekyll and Hyde, no Dorian Gray, no sweet and sour mother depending on the day or the mood, just what Rebecca’s former husband, Peter, called the Tao of Bebe, dismissive, grand, agg
rieved. How she had loved the fact that Rebecca had married an Englishman. Sometimes it seemed she even picked up Peter’s accent when he was around, although on Bebe it sounded a bit as though her back teeth were stuck together with toffee. She loved toffee, and brandy Alexanders, and chocolate mousse, and the honey ice cream at Gigi’s, the “perfectly fine” French restaurant two blocks from the apartment at which Bebe was a regular. “That chicken I had the last time, Franco,” she would say airily as she let her jacket drop from her narrow shoulders onto the back of the chair, and somehow the poor man would remember what chicken she had had last time, or at least both of them would pretend he had as he presented and she picked.

  Her mother would be appalled at the pale blue acrylic sweater the aides at the home had dressed her in today, never mind the fact that she was living in a place with the word Jewish in its name.

  Bebe was playing the piano, of course. Bebe always played the piano. Rebecca watched her shoulders, arms, and back. There was something deliberate, even aggressive about the way her mother’s bony winglike shoulders shifted beneath the ugly sweater, how her fingers moved along the fake wood surface of the table. Bach. With Bach or Beethoven she usually moved forward and back, as though Bebe Freeman was davening as her conveniently forgotten male ancestors had done. Rebecca had agonized over that anthro assignment in college. Should she write that her mother’s parents had once been Friedmans? If her mother discovered Rebecca had come out as what, when she had had several brandy Alexanders, she would call a Jewess, even if only to an adjunct professor at Mount Holyoke, she would be very angry. Bebe Freeman—Freeman!—was a practiced expert at the casual anti-Semitism of the wealthy assimilated New York Jew.

  Bach, Rebecca thought again, as certain as though there were actually notes and chords and movements instead of the muted sound of her mother’s reddened fingertips hitting the table surface. When it was Chopin or Mozart her mother’s body rocked from side to side, softer, gentler. And she had always preferred Bach to Beethoven. When Beethoven’s name would come up, her mother would say flatly, “deaf,” as though it was a character defect and the mark of a lesser talent. Bach’s hearing had remained intact. It was hard to tell if this was true of Bebe, since her capacity to ignore the comments of others had been fully formed even when she was quite young.

  One of the aides entered the room pushing another woman, slumped over in a high-backed wheeled chair, her bony head held aloft by some bracelike assemblage. In the nursing home it was typical that the patients were fragile reeds while the aides were brawny women with large arms and legs. The aides were weight lifters, the patients the weights. The social workers and nurses tended to be smaller, usually Indian. The aides were black women from the Caribbean. They were realistic, a little blunt. “She’s having a bad week,” they might say, or even, “I’ve had it with her today.” The Indian women had melodic voices and were cheery, optimistic. “Someday she will look up and say, ah, there is my daughter,” one had said during her last visit. It was all Rebecca could do not to reply, “She didn’t do that when I was eight. Why would she do it now?”

  As these places went, it was a good place. All of the money left over from the sale of the family’s old apartment, after the many hungry creditors of the business had been satisfied, went to pay for it. But that had been a decade ago, before selling an apartment like the one Rebecca had grown up in had been like winning a lottery. The income from the investments was not enough, the principal had been breached, the cash was running like sand through the hourglass of Bebe’s days, and every month Rebecca wrote a check to supplement it and prayed that the market would spike and the nursing home fees remain flat.

  The aide nodded toward Rebecca’s mother. “Don’t you interrupt her,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rebecca said. She sat for almost an hour and her mother never stopped playing, her fingers moving ceaselessly. “I wish I could have heard her in the old days,” the aide said. “You ever hear her?”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said, looking at her little gold watch. Even with her mother as insensible as she was, she had not dared to wear the practical plastic digital watch. She told herself that it was because that belonged to one life, the gold watch to another, but she had heard in her head, as clear as a Chopin étude, the sound of her mother saying, “What on earth is that on your wrist?” Those high-pitched intonations, silent now for years, still unmistakable. Rebecca’s own syntax was stiff and old-fashioned because, when she was growing up, her mother had made slang, even contractions, seem like obscenities. “Honey, dangle a participle every once in a while,” Dorothea had said to her one night in college, and Rebecca had flushed, embarrassed.

  Her mother stopped moving, perhaps at the end of a piece, then began again. Childhood, girlhood, school vacations, visits: don’t interrupt your mother while she is playing. The grand piano was in a corner of the living room, but you could feel the vibration in the glossy parquet of the foyer. Sometimes Rebecca just put down her bag full of books and went directly to the kitchen in the back, with the dim windows overlooking the air shaft, and the big table with the mottled vinyl surface and the matching chairs, to get a cookie, or a lemonade, or a cup of tea from Sonya, the housekeeper.

  She’d aged well, Sonya. She had one of those strong Slavic faces that was much the same at seventy as it had been at seventeen. That was how old she had been when she came to work for the Winter family, when Rebecca was just seven. Even then she had kept her fair hair scraped back so tight that it was the equivalent of a face-lift. Not a crease or a wrinkle.

  “Good you are here,” Sonya said when she opened the door of the apartment she shared with Rebecca’s father, up one of those leafy roads behind the nursing home, its proximity to Rebecca’s mother a reflection of an assumption the world made about the relationship between Bebe and Oscar Winter as well as Rebecca’s desire to make visiting her parents as simple and easy as possible. Sonya’s slightly fractured English had not changed, either, even after all these years of shopping at the Safeway and screaming at the dry cleaner on the telephone.

  “Aha!” her father said from the recliner chair, a glass of tea on the table next to him. “Come sit!” It was what had always made Rebecca feel loved when she was a child, the tone of excitement in her father’s nasal voice. When she had entered the dining room in the morning for breakfast his greeting suggested a visiting dignitary: “My beauty! Have some toast! Sonya! Marmalade for my princess!” Then she went to the office with him for the first time when she was eight and discovered that he spoke to everyone that way. “Irving! Good to see you!” he said to an acquaintance in the bank. “Ramona, my love!” he called to the waitress at the kosher deli, ordering corned beef as though he had just invented it and wanted to introduce it to the entire room. It made everyone like him, but it had disappointed Rebecca, to know she was not special in that way.

  “How is your mother?” he asked. “Good?” He always assumed Rebecca had gone to the nursing home first, made it clear that this seemed to him absolutely correct. “A good daughter,” he always told people, always had, always would. Sonya put a glass of tea next to Rebecca, and two Pepperidge Farm cookies still in their cup of white fluted paper.

  (“Vulgar,” Bebe said in Rebecca’s head. “Sonya? Take this back into the kitchen and put it on a proper plate.”)

  Rebecca shrugged. “Bach today,” she said.

  “I never cared for Bach,” her father said. “Maybe the Goldberg Variations, but not the rest. It was too, too—what’s the word I’m looking for, Sonya, my love?”

  “German,” Sonya said, disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Hates the Germans,” Oscar Winter whispered.

  “I know, Papa,” Rebecca said.

  “I hear that bagel shop in your neighborhood is closing!” her father said. “Sonya saw it in the paper. That’s a shame! Those people made a good bagel. Not too soft. A bagel shouldn’t be too soft.”

  Her father believed she was still living i
n her city apartment. It was better that way, with no explanations. Her father doesn’t like to talk on the phone, never did, never had. It flattens his affect. Sonya sends her emails on the small computer, handed down from one of her nephews, that she uses to play online poker. She is as she has always been, a woman of few words. “Papa defib,” the last message said. The paddles and a stent had done the trick. “The old ticker!” her father had said the next time she saw him, thumping on his chest with his palm. “Almost a century old!” Her father is actually nearly a decade shy of a century, but this is what he’s always done, rounded up high. It explains what happened to the family business.

  “You look good, Papa,” Rebecca said. Compared to her mother, he does. Compared to her mother, everyone does.

  “What can you do?” he said. That was another thing Rebecca remembered from her childhood. What can you do? Your wife doesn’t care for you much, certainly not as much as she does lunching with friends and playing the piano. The family business her father passed on to you, that seemed to just run on custom and inertia, that once spit out cash like the U.S. Mint, begins to falter and then fail. The big apartment facing the park gets run-down. The wife starts to lose her moorings, until instead of playing the baby grand she plays the fraying satin counterpane in the mornings, the dining table in the evening. Your daughter finds a place for her mother, finds a buyer for the apartment. The daughter helps as much as she can, but what can you say, children aren’t meant to take care of their parents, you’ve always insisted on that ever since you got saddled with your own. But you’re in luck! The housekeeper takes an apartment three blocks from the home where the wife lives! Sonya! You’re a saint, a godsend, a port in a storm!