Only Robert and I knew that it was his eleventh birthday. He’d always liked the story, of how the pains came but the baby didn’t, of how they’d taken us into an operating theater and put up a screen at my breastbone to shield Bobby and me from what was happening below, of how Bobby stood up to straighten out the crease in his pants legs and caught a glimpse of the incision like a big red mouth and the blood around the edges of the drape, of how he sat down hard on the metal stool at my head. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Bobby? Are you going to be all right?” The OB nurse, who’d been a class ahead of me at nursing school, gave him a big clean whiff of oxygen. Robert laughed, to think of his father so helpless. He liked that story. Loved it. I’d told it a hundred times. Bobby couldn’t handle the sight of blood. What a laugh.
Robert’s birthday was July 4 now, or at least Robert Crenshaw’s was. But on April 9 we invited Bennie and three other boys from the basketball team for a sleepover in the living room. They came carrying sleeping bags and video games. Chelsea was on a sleep over that same night, her first, with a little girl named Melissa Erickson whose room, Cindy said, was entirely pink. She had been an in vitro baby, and her parents acted as though anything, from a playground spill to a B plus to a mosquito rattling around the stall shower in her pink bathroom was what my mother used to call “a federal case.” It was a good beginning for Chelsea, who seemed less fearful now since the carnival, since she’d seen the worst with her own eyes. Melissa Erickson’s parents were as fearful of life as Chelsea was. Maybe more.
It was Robert’s first sleepover, too, unless you counted the nights he’d spent with Grace and his grandmother, Ann Benedetto bringing him back to the house with new sneakers, a new shirt, a toy, a book, a pocketful of candy and change. He’d spent the night at the Castros’ a couple of times, but he’d never had a friend to his house overnight. Bobby had thought that that was fine. He didn’t like strangers in the house. “I don’t get all of this sleepover stuff,” he’d said. “I never had anybody sleeping over at my house when I was a kid.” And I’d never had anyone except Gracie, breathing in the next bed, her freckled legs tangled in the brown blanket. Robert always said that he didn’t want any kids to stay over at his house anyway. Maybe he was afraid of what they would hear, of what they would say: Robert, what’s the matter with your dad? Why’s he yelling like that? What’s that noise? Maybe he was afraid to let them into his nighttime life, those kids who hadn’t learned when you needed to be deaf and blind. Maybe it was the dim memory of that night, when he was three, when he came downstairs, his face soft and pink, his eyes squinted shut against the light, and said, “Why you crabby, Daddy?” It was the first time he’d ever come downstairs when we were fighting. It was the last time he ever had. “Get back in bed, Robert,” Bobby had said, his supple voice hard, not loud but mean, mean. “Don’t you ever get out of your bed or come out of your room unless I say so.”
“How come?” Robert had said.
“Get … up … stairs.”
I stayed upstairs reading during the sleep over, listened to the murmur of the boys’ voices from the living room, read and dozed and read some more. When I came down to make more popcorn they were halfway through the second Star Wars movie. “The guy who is Luke in the movie had a car accident and they had to, like, put his face back together,” said a boy named Andrew Kovacs as the five of them lay on the floor, comic books and video cartridges around them.
“You can tell,” Bennie said. “His face looks different after a while. Like his eyes are different sizes.”
“I never had peanut-butter popcorn,” said An Li Thong, a Vietnamese kid who was the goalie and whose school name had, naturally, become Goalie.
“His mom is a really good cook,” said Bennie, as though I wasn’t even there.
So normal, the long black velvet evening, the stars bright over central Florida, a moon almost full rising outside the bedroom window. It was hot during the days already, but at night it was only warm, a soft warm that felt good when I stepped outside before bed to look at the sky.
“Gentlemen,” I said as I handed them a second bowl of popcorn, “here’s the deal. I don’t care how late you stay up”—Goalie cheered softly—“but if you wake me up, you’re all going home. Hear me?” “Yes, Mrs. Crenshaw.” “Thanks, Mrs. Crenshaw.” “We’ll be quiet.” “We understand.” The heavenly host, boy voices hovering between soprano and tenor, their words slurred by the popcorn in their mouths. Upstairs in the dark I could still hear them talking, hear the sound from the television, but it was muted, as though someone had thrown a blanket over them all, the way sound came through the walls when the couple who lived next door to my parents’ apartment—the fourth one, I think, or maybe the fifth—would play the stereo late in the evening and fight with each other next to the bedroom where Grace and I slept. Gracie held a glass to the wall the first couple of times, to hear what they were saying, but it was dull. “She says who does he think she is, his mother?” Grace whispered to me. After a week or two we learned to sleep right through it.
In the pale blue light from the window I could make out the furniture in my room, the big scarred bureau, the landscape over it that I’d gotten from Cindy’s basement, the rocking chair, the darker shadow of the closet door. And I realized, as one of the boys belched loudly downstairs and the others laughed, then chastised one another in loud whispers, that it had become my room. I knew its contours in the dark. To know the streets nearby, where Royalton met Poinsettia, where Miramar met the highway—that was one thing. To know a bedroom in the dark was something else, something final, something fine.
Even when I heard the sound of someone below, at the living-room window, I knew enough to feel only tired, tired and happy. I could tell by the whispers, a little louder than the whispers of the occasional tropical winds around the building, that the group of girls who were staying at the Castros’, Bennie’s sisters and their friends, had come to hassle the boys. One giggled, another squealed. The boys heard them, too. The movie was shut off, there were mutters from below, and the sound of the door opening. The crowbar beneath my bed seemed ridiculous, like a prop left over from another movie on this same set.
I opened the window and looked down on the five girls gathered in a little knot. I remembered doing this with Dee Stemple and some other girls once, when a group of the boys from Holy Cross were camping out in Mr. Dolan’s chop shop, sleeping on the linoleum floors in the office. Two of the girls below were carefully holding something in their hands, like gifts. I coughed, and one of them dropped hers, and water arced up, little sparkles in the air.
“If anyone throws a water balloon into this house, you are in big trouble,” I whispered, and they screamed and scattered.
Just after three I went downstairs to turn off the lights. All five boys were sleeping with their mouths open, their hair askew. Andrew had his thumb in his mouth. Goalie’s little video game was still on; football players running at one another constantly, falling down, getting up, sending the ball in a spiral across the screen. I had met his parents at soccer games; they alternated, one staying at the restaurant while the other stood, silent, on the sidelines. I turned off the little game, turned off the lights, pulled the cool sheets over myself. This is the life I always wanted to have: five boys asleep on the floor, with nothing to wake them except the giggles of little girls. It felt so ordinary.
“God, you look chipper, considering,” Andrew’s mother said as the boys spilled out of the kitchen and toward the front door, climbing into her van to head out to a day-long basketball clinic at the middle school.
“In this case, looks are deceiving. I’m going back to bed.”
But I never made it. I was stacking the cereal bowls in the sink when the phone rang. Again there was no answer, only breathing on the other end of the phone. All the ordinariness of the night before, the sense of being settled and secure, of my boy being an ordinary boy—all of it just slipped away.
“Bobby,” I whispered, defeated,
and then there was a cough, a gasp, a sob. “Mrs. Nurse?” came a small voice, and I leaned back against the counter.
On my way to the Levitts’, I stopped and bought an extra-value meal from McDonald’s, large fries and a Big Mac. Mrs. Levitt was sitting in the dark of an apartment in which the blinds had been neither raised nor opened. She smelled of perspiration and sleep and dirty clothes, and she did not speak as I opened the door with the key she’d given me and moved past her to the bed, stopping only to lay a hand lightly on her shoulder. It was the first time I had ever been in the apartment when there had been no sound, the television still, Irving’s stertorous breathing silenced. Even the big Seth Thomas clock had wound down. Irving’s body was a little cool and beginning to stiffen. Mrs. Levitt had pulled the sheet down to his ankles, as though one last time she wanted to look at what, for so long, had been the scarcely noticed landscape of her life, even more than her own body, which required a mirror to see.
“You waited for me,” I said, taking her hand. She nodded. “That’s good,” I said. “Can I call now for someone to take care of things, or do you want to wait awhile?”
“A minute or two,” she said, and shuffled into the kitchen in her house slippers. I could hear her open the bag I’d brought, then the sandwich wrapper.
“What time was it?” I called.
She carried her lunch to the card table on a cookie sheet. “Nothing for yourself?” she said.
I shook my head. There was a box of matzo on the card table, and I remembered that it was Passover. “I hope I didn’t bring the wrong lunch,” I said, looking at the box.
Mrs. Levitt saw me looking, and shrugged. “You think God’s gonna be upset that I ate a hamburger?” she said, handing me the ketchup package to open.
She was silent, eating, and finally she patted her lips with a napkin. “I was watching the cable news around midnight, maybe,” she said, “and I fell asleep on the couch, and then I woke up around six. Some kind of report on geese, they had, and the sound they made woke me right up, and I said to Irving, they’d wake the dead, those birds.” Her shoulders rose high and fell, just one dry, strangled sob. “I was changing the channel to the one on NBC with that young girl I like, the one that just had the baby. Then I couldn’t hear nothing from the bed.” She said something else, one more sentence, but it was in German, Yiddish, or Hebrew. I couldn’t tell the difference.
“I got to go to the bathroom, sweetheart,” she said vaguely, and shuffled out of the room.
She looked better when she came back, more alive. She crossed to the hospital bed. “Take that thing out, sweetheart,” she said, and I went over and removed the catheter tube. Then Mrs. Levitt pulled the sheet up over Irving, up to his bony chin, that stuck up now like the prow of his body, proud and hard. Then she leaned close to his ear and whispered something, then patted his shoulder.
“I was hungry,” she said, sitting down and looking at the debris of her lunch.
We called the Jewish funeral home in Middle Lake, and an hour later two men came, black suits, soft voices, a collapsible gurney that came up and went down on the freight elevator. The hospital bed stood empty by the window, and as I opened the blinds, finally, the sun fell full upon the white sheets that Mrs. Levitt and I had changed only two days before.
“I can have this stripped and out of here in an hour or two,” I said. “Or I can leave it just as it is. Whichever will make you feel a little bit better.”
She sighed. “Leave it, sweetheart,” she said.
“Is there someone I should call?”
She shook her head. “Irving had two older sisters,” she said. “They treated him like a prince. His mother, too, like a king. They’re all gone now.”
“For you, I meant.”
“I had two brothers and a sister. They’re all gone a long time ago.” She sipped at her soda, going warm and watery. “Almost fifty years we were married. It’s a long time.”
“It is a long time.”
“Forty-eight years last month.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“Ach, everyone wants to hear the story. He liberated me,” she said, and I smiled and rubbed the thin skin of her hands, cross-hatched, age-spotted.
“The fifth of May, they told us after. We didn’t keep track of time. One girl who slept on the shelf above me, she made marks with a piece of stone on the wall. She died of something, coughing, coughing, you know, and then sometimes we didn’t know what month it was, not even what year after a while.
“You could smell from a long way those little white flowers, so sweet. There were none of them so you could see, but you could smell. When we woke up all the guards were gone, and one lady who helped them, she was going down the road, looking back like she was afraid we would come after her. There was nothing to eat. There wasn’t anything to eat for maybe a week or two. Two of the girls were dead, but we waited for someone to take them. They died all the time. You’d wake up in the morning and see that someone wasn’t moving from their bunk and then you’d know, so that after a while it was nothing, like seeing a rat or the sun or anything else. Just someone dead again. A lot of them died with their eyes open. That’s not so nice.” She looked over at the hospital bed. “Otherwise it looks more like you’re sleeping.
“We went outside because of the smell. You’d think after all that time we wouldn’t notice. They soil themselves, see. Well, you know that, with the nursing and all. So we went outside. Sada, the girl I sat with, she was from a farm somewhere. She talked and talked always, at night, in the morning. She was a big fat girl when she came but she was skinny then like the rest of us, with no hair on her lower place, no bubbies either, either of us. We were modest when we came, like young girls, you know, but not after a while.
“We saw dust coming and she said it was the guards coming back. I thought maybe she was right because I saw the trucks and the uniforms. But then they got close and we could see that they were different from the guards. Then we saw the flags on one of the trucks, and we knew. One of them, young, with brown eyes and a little mustache, he came and stood by me, and he said something in English. But I didn’t know it was English, I didn’t know English. I said in German that I couldn’t understand, that I couldn’t speak English. Then in German he said, it will be all right now. He looked like he was crying a little bit. I said to him, we are Jewish, sir. You should know that I am Jewish. And he said, ‘Yes, miss, so am I.’”
She waited a moment, as though always here in the story the audience had had something to say. But I was speechless.
“Sergeant Levitt. I never heard of such a thing, a Jewish soldier. And they had food. Sada stuffed herself and then was sick, right on the ground, like a dog. They took us to a special tent and gave us something for the bugs. The clothes were not so good.” Her eyes shone suddenly, and she smiled. “But I was a pretty girl, even in ugly clothes.”
“I learned the word later. Liberated. He liberated me. Everybody like the story. One soldier, he put it in a special soldier’s newspaper they had. Sergeant Levitt liberated me, and he brought me home and married me. His mother and sisters, they weren’t so happy. There was a girl around the corner they liked better for him. Sophie, her name was. But he married me.”
She pushed back the sleeve of one of her cardigans and there was the identification number. “You see?” she said.
“I see,” I said, and nodded. I was crying, and Mrs. Levitt smiled and shrugged and patted my hand.
“Everybody likes that story,” she said. “But, you know, after that, then we were married. Everybody thinks because of the story, it’s like a fairy story. That’s what one of Irving’s nieces said once. Like a fairy story. I don’t know. You got to live in the time you’re living in. The past is the past, right, Irving?”
“It’s an amazing story,” I said.
“It’s just a story,” she said. “It’s a long time ago, now.”
“Are you going to bury him in the veterans’ cemetery? Or Arlington, in
Washington?”
Mrs. Levitt shook her head. “I already talked to the people at Perlman’s. They’ll cremate him. Then I can take him wherever I go.” She looked over at the hospital bed. “You know what would have been the best thing for Irving? If he’d just gone home and married Sophie. She never married, that girl. She taught fourth grade in the public schools until they made her retire. Irving would have married her and thought about me, and I would have married somebody else, or maybe not, and thought about Irving, how he saved me.” She sighed. “Ach, well. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself now. Maybe I’ll move down to Miami. Two of my friends from home live in Miami. Both widows. Ruth and Esther, if you can believe it. I used to feel sorry for myself, tell people all my family was dead, they took them all away, my mama, my papa, my sister Rachel, my brothers. Now everyone I knew is dead. They got old. They got sick. Whatever.” She lifted her hands to the sky. “Ah, what are you going to do?”
At the door I hugged her. “You look tired,” she said.
“My son had four of his buddies spend the night last night. They stayed up, you know? They were good, but you still don’t sleep. You could have called me earlier.”
Mrs. Levitt smiled. “My sister and I, we did that. Rachel. She was the pretty one. I was smarter. Both of us in one big bed, the sheet over our heads, talking about the boys. You know, this and that. Our mama would yell at us, go to sleep. Go to sleep.” She was smiling, Mrs. Levitt, but her eyes were full of tears. “Maybe your boy will want to take up golf,” she finally said.
“Maybe,” I said.
Just so you’ll be ready, I need to warn you that Mrs. Bernsen makes them all do family trees in fifth grade.”