Lore Segal reads.
RUTH
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on. They were going to die. It was now several years since Lotte had died in an assisted-living facility. Then, when Covid worried their children, Ruth had undertaken to Zoom ladies’ lunch. She suggested that anyone who had something to say should show a hand.
Farah put up her hand. She said, “I don’t find it difficult to think about . . . ,” then paused in surprise at not being able to say “dying,” “about choosing not to live if I’m going blind.”
Bessie, Zooming from Old Rockingham, said, “That would be Colin’s choice when he hurts and he hurts all the time.”
Bridget raised her hand. “I think that the reason I think I won’t mind being dead is that I can’t imagine it, and I don’t think we know how to believe what we aren’t able to imagine.”
“You want to repeat that?” Ruth asked her.
“No,” Bridget said and laughed. “I’m not sure that I could.”
•
Then Colin died and Bessie allowed herself to collapse. Her daughter Eve called Ruth to tell her that Bessie was in a Connecticut hospital. Ruth called her there and reported to the group: “Bessie says the room is bright and pleasant enough. I lamely asked her how she was feeling, and she said, ‘Sad. Sad and ill.’ ”
When Farah called her, Bessie said, “Eve wants me to temporarily move into our minuscule Ninety-fourth Street pied-à-terre, which I had made over to her.”
“That’s a good plan, is it, temporarily?”
“Temporarily. Colin and I agreed that Old Rockingham must go to his children. It was never my world. There’s a line I remember, from I forget which school poem, to ‘dance an hour beneath the beeches.’ That’s what my Connecticut years have been. It’s New York that’s for real.”
•
Hope said, “Ruth has been hosting our Zooms all this time and we’ve never done her agenda.”
Ruth asked, “What’s my agenda? I forget.”
“You said you wanted us to discuss our take on wokeness?”
“Which is not a word in the Oxford English Dictionary,” said Ilka, and Bridget said, “Use ‘wokeness’ in a sentence.”
“Just vote it in the next election,” Ruth said.
Farah took out her phone and read: “ ‘Wokeness. The quality of being alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination.’ ”
“What we used to call being a liberal,” said Ilka.
“With the gloves off,” said Ruth.
“I’m trying to remember who described liberals as not having enough sense to argue in favor of their own opinions,” Ilka said.
“That’s nice. I like that,” said Bridget, brightening. “I’m going to write a story about two liberals fighting a duel. On the count of ten, they turn and each shoots himself in the foot.”
“Herself in the foot,” Ruth said.
“Themself,” said Ilka.
•
Ruth called Farah and said, “I’ve been feeling stupid and woozy. The doctor is doing tests.”
Farah said, “Can I come and visit you? How is Monday?”
“Monday is good,” Ruth said.
Ruth’s elegant daughter opened the door. “It’s Helena, isn’t it?” Farah said, remembering her from a long-ago mother-and-daughter ladies’ lunch.
Helena said, “Mom is expecting you. Mom, it’s Farah.”
Ruth in a severely buttoned dress and slippers was sitting in an ample wing chair in the familiar living room. Her son, Ben, introduced himself and asked if it was too early for a glass of wine. Ruth said, “The doctor says it will do no harm.”
“Then yes, please,” Farah said, and Ben left the room.
Ruth said, “I have a tumor.”
“Do we know what that means?” asked Farah.
Ruth said, “I find I’m grateful for that conversation,” and Farah understood her to mean the conversation about dying and said, “I’ve been trying to think that I’ve had the use of my eyes for upward of ninety years and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be expected to give them up.” She paused and said, “One looks for a way to think about it.”
Ruth said, “They may try radiation, but the doctor says it will do no good.”
The son returned with two small glasses of wine. There were the minutes occupied by the business of clearing two surfaces where the two glasses could stand within easy reach. Ben left the room. Farah was aware of searching for something to talk about. She talked about Bessie temporarily sharing the Ninety-fourth Street pied-à-terre with her daughter Eve.
Ruth said, “Temporarily?”
“Colin has left Old Rockingham to his children.”
Farah told Ruth about Ilka’s latest argument with her cousin Frieda; she talked about Trump, about Bibi and Jerusalem. She said, “Is next Monday good to come and see you? Bridget wants to come.”
“Next Monday is good,” Ruth said.
•
It is the nurse who brings Farah and Bridget into the empty living room, goes out and returns with Ruth in a wheelchair. The nurse goes out. Ruth looks like Ruth but her voice is so low that they have to ask her to repeat what she is saying: “My right side has shut down. I don’t have the use of my hand.” The nurse comes back with three small glasses of wine, for which she arranges three convenient surfaces. The nurse goes out.
Ruth watches Farah and Bridget talk.
•
When, the following Monday, Ilka and Hope ring the doorbell, Helena opens the door and says, “Mom is unresponsive, but come in.” Ruth is sitting in the wheelchair. They sit down. No wine, thank you. Helena remains in the room. The fingers of Ruth’s left hand play a nonexistent keyboard on her lap. She looks into the room before her but does not speak.
Afterward, Ilka and Hope talk over a cup of coffee in the corner Starbucks. Hope says, “One yearns to be comfortable for her, but one just sits there.”
Ilka says, “I looked up ‘tumor’ and it’s too much information. What does it mean that ‘the body shuts down’?”
Hope says, “What is the Ruth in the wheelchair thinking? What do we know? Is she in pain?”
•
Bessie comes to see Ruth and takes her hand and presses it to her cheek, weeps and says, “Colin is dead.”
Ruth frowns—is it in an attempt to focus? She says, “Who?”
•
And another Monday. Helena says, “There’s a theory that hearing is the last faculty to go. We asked Mom whether she wanted music, and she said, ‘Conversation.’ ”
Helena, Farah, Bridget, and Ilka make conversation. Ruth, in a blue bathrobe and the slippers, lies on the sofa. Her head is turned away from the room and the people in it. The open window behind her gives onto a magnificent view of the Hudson River. The fingers of Ruth’s left hand move on her lap. She coughs—is it to clear an obstruction in her throat?
FARAH
The season after Ruth died and Covid was over as much as it was ever going to be, the friends talked about reviving ladies’ lunches in person. “At my place, please, if you don’t mind,” Farah said. “My new walker gets me around the apartment, but I no longer feel secure on the street.”
Bessie, about to close up the Connecticut house, did not feel like a trip to town, so Farah set up the computer on the lunch table and Bessie Zoomed in to what turned out to be “a bit of a downer,” as Hope put it. What was wrong with each of them could not be contained within the twenty minutes allotted to complaining: Since Colin’s death, Bessie suffered from debilitating headaches; Hope was scheduled for a pacemaker; Bridget might need meniscus surgery; and Lucinella’s “Book of Late Verses” had not been reviewed by the Times. Ilka detailed the dental repair she accused herself of neglecting.
“And I,” Farah said, “can no longer see to read the pages of instructions my ophthalmologist sends home with me.”
“But you’re a doctor,” Hope said. “Doesn’t that give you insights?”
Farah said, “I always liked the bit in ‘Washington Square’ where the father of—what’s the girl’s name?—gets ill. He’s a doctor and he instructs the household what to do and when. What I understand is that there are a lot of different things going wrong with my eyes.”
“Like what?” Bridget asked her.
“There is an interestingly patterned white lace across my field of vision, sometimes a field of white or purple daisies with yellow centers, in gentle, continual right-to-left motion, without moving.”
“What is motion without moving? Sounds like T. S. Eliot,” Lucinella said.
Farah said, “I hold up my hand and watch the lace or the daisies—I’m just describing what I see—moving without ever disappearing in the direction in which they are moving. What do I know? I ask the doctor and he says many people report that the loss of vision finds compensation in visual hallucinations. Which explains exactly nothing.”
“How many fingers?” Ilka asked her.
“That’s not the problem,” said Farah. “Let me give you the plastic-baggie test. I carry one with me in my pocket for the purpose. Look through this and count my fingers.”
“Four fingers,” Ilka said. “I see your four fingers. I see you. I see the room but everything is behind a dark, a dirty mist.”
Farah said, “And I ask the doctor how thick and how much darker will the mist get? How dark? Will there be an absence of light, a black darkness? How black is black? Is it too cold for ice cream?” she asked the friends around the table. “Berries and ice cream, everybody? Anybody?”
•
Before the next lunch, Farah e-mails UWSLadiesLunch. Subject line: “Black Is Black.”
ILKA
“Today,” Ilka said, “my Maggie is finally getting her Austrian citizenship.”
“Congratulations!” “Great!” “That’s wonderful!” said the Zoom gallery of friends. They were back on their computers.
“I guess,” Ilka said. “It seemed to take years of consultations with consulates, documentations. Her birth certificate had to be certified, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of et ceteras.”
“You didn’t apply for citizenship for yourself?”
Ilka said, “I did not. I was remembering my parents’ desperation assembling the papers that were required for our emigration—the morning post that didn’t bring the essential documents before the expiration of two other essential documents.
“Austria had annulled our citizenship. It bemused me to have been not only stateless but unnatural until I became a naturalized American.”
“But that’s not what the word means,” Bridget said. “It means a plant growing naturally where it’s not indigenous.”
Ilka said, “Maggie has bought her ticket to Vienna, where I was indigenous.”
“And you’re not going?”
Ilka said, “You remember how we said no more trains, no more planes?”
“But you’ve been back?”
“I used to go.”
“And how was that?”
“Intensely exciting—the child-in-the-candy-store kind of exciting. I would deposit my bags in the hotel and shoot back out the door in search of a certain palace I remembered on the other side of the street, or a tower glimpsed in the other direction, but I’d get waylaid by an archway and stop to look into a shadowy courtyard with an old water cistern. I remember looking through one open door at a monumental Baroque male supporting the central staircase on his bare back.
“The Viennese dialect of my childhood sounded helplessly dear. The taxi-driver from the airport told me I was lucky that I had got away before the Russians came. My hosts were kind and eager, the children, or grandchildren, surely, of erstwhile anti-Nazis, but by the third day I wanted to be out of there and was glad to find my seat on the plane taking me back to my adoptive New York.”
“That had naturalized you,” Bridget said.
•
Ilka said, “You’ve all seen our family portrait. Let me go get it and I’ll show you. Maggie spent the weekend with me.”
She held it up in front of the monitor. “You see how the photographer has staged the fifteen children—fourteen, actually, because Karl, the youngest, was not born yet—around the father standing behind the seated mother. The three oldest girls are Great Aunt Berta’s, this is the one I call Mali, and Rosa. I’ve told you about the Sunday afternoons we used to spend in Tante Mali’s apartment with my mother’s cousins.”
Farah said, “The aunt who had a stereopticon?”
“Who let you mess with the beads on her curtains,” remembered Bessie.
Ilka said, “The little Onkel Löwy would open the front door into the foyer and show us into the room where Tante Mali with the lovely face, immensely overweight, always sat in the same chair at the big table watching us. You see, in the picture, she is the one with the sweet look. She and Onkel Löwy ended up in Mauthausen.
“Sitting on her left, that’s my grandmother Rosa, around fifteen, maybe. She and the four-year-old Poldi on the low stool would make it out and get to New York. They and the brother who went to Canada before the First World War, and a brother who died of lung disease, were the four ‘survivors’ of my grandmother’s generation.
“All the boys in the picture—what age would you say, between seven and seventeen?—have had their heads shaved for the photograph and wear big bow ties. No way for me to tell Maggie which one grew up to be Gigerl, who got away to Canada, or Miklosz, who had the bookshop, or Szandor, married to Tante Mali, who had twins, one of whom, Willi, lives in Israel. Which and what was the name of the uncle who had a photo shop with a Bauhaus-style interior?”
•
“Maggie is in Vienna, in Wien,” Ilka told her friends on their next Zoom. “She has taken the best I can do in the way of a family tree—the old, broken leather address book—and seems to know how to do the research I didn’t do. Was it Rotenturm or Sterngasse where my parents lived after I left? My grandparents moved in with them after the Nazis Aryanized Grandfather’s house and shop.
“Maggie e-mails that it was Rotenstern Strasse. She e-mails me the street names of my childhood—Albert Gasse, where I went to school. The bookshop was in the Wollzeile. She has sent a picture of a block of flats. Do I recognize No. 8 Holland Strasse, Tante Mali’s address? I don’t. I remember the stereopticon, the tall blue tile stove in the corner, the drapes with the wooden beads, the smiling Tante Mali who sat and watched us.”
•
“A note from Maggie,” says Ilka. “Maggie has visited the Wiesenthal Institute, which keeps the records. Not Mauthausen, as I said. ‘On September 24, 1942, Amalie and Maximilian Löwy were deported to Theresienstadt. Deported to Auschwitz, May 16, 1944, where they perished.’
“Where they perished,” Ilka says and is silent.
She imagines the days, the week expecting the knock, the banging on the front door. Two uniforms stand outside, walk through the door, they are inside the foyer—the men Hannah Arendt means, doing a job? They transport the old couple to where men will sport with them before they kill them. Ilka tries not to imagine Tante Mali, who needs help getting up from her chair, forced to run to the right, turn and run left. To imagine the men? Not Dante, not Milton, not Shakespeare has anatomized their human hearts, and about what she cannot imagine she cannot think and I cannot write.
BESSIE
“ ‘If not now, when?’ ” quoted Bridget, when the friends met at Farah’s apartment once again. “I would give up a lifetime’s writing to have got that thought into those four words.”
“No, you wouldn’t,’’ Ilka said. “You wouldn’t give up writing.”
“And that’s true, too,” Bridget said. “I don’t know what to do with myself between my morning coffee and lunch at noon if I’m not writing something, and I wish one of you would have a complaint or a disaster for me to write about.”
“Have some sushi,” said Farah.
Bessie said, “Write about our neighbor Bains buying Old Rockingham, going to change the locks a week from Monday. Eve and Jenny drove me up and we had the week to get rid of the things there’s no room for in Eve’s studio. And what if my next move might be to assisted living?”
Bessie’s friends were silent and looked at her. “My clothes and my own stuff were not the problem,” Bessie continued. “Eve had packed me up when I was in hospital. It’s this endless accumulation of what our kids are supposed to deal with after we’re dead.”
The friends around the table looked at Bessie.
She said, “The local antique dealer came. He took the Bennington ware, some silver, some books and things, and left us to get rid of just so much stuff. There was Colin’s mother’s unfinished patchwork—”
“You’re not going to throw out old patchwork!” they all said.
“And the ancient kitchen scales,” Bessie said. “The cookware, cookbooks, more cookbooks, three inkwells, a box of fountain pens. Jenny made a pile of the useless things for garbage pickup and Eve went out and brought back what she thought was well designed or beautiful.”
“I know, oh, I know!” Hope said. “I’m a lifelong collector of postcards and clippings from magazines.”
“Clippings? Clippings of what?”
“Anything I thought beautiful. Art. What interested, excited, irritated, puzzled me. There’s a suitcase of my favorites under the bed, and the box of favorite favorites in the foyer. In more than a decade, there has been no moment when I have taken them out and looked at them. There’s a drawer full of these snippets in the closet that I am going to have to empty for Miranda. My granddaughter is moving in with me.”
“Moving in! Goodness! I mean, is that good?” Farah asked her.
“Delightful,” Hope said, “except that carving out room for Miranda is a complication; I have stopped sleeping. Yesterday, I got the wastepaper basket, put that drawer on the table, and picked out one snippet after another snippet after another and put one after another back in the drawer and put the drawer back in the closet.”
“You didn’t throw any of them away!” Ilka said.
“Two,” Hope said. “Write, Bridget, about the things we don’t need, don’t know what to do with but cannot throw away. It feels like a physical inability to let things go.”
“Like the key,” Bessie said, “from when we were leaving Old Rockingham. We’d done the upstairs and cased the downstairs for anything we’d forgotten. Jenny was already in the driver’s seat, Eve put the last bag into the trunk, and I closed the door of the house. Jenny said, ‘Mom, just leave the key. Bains is coming over to change the lock.’ I said, ‘I know, but I’d better hold on to it.’ Eve said, ‘Mom! What on earth for?’
“I said, ‘Just in case.’
“ ‘In case of what?’ they asked me.
“I said I didn’t know.” ♦