IT WAS THE FALL of 1981. I was sixteen. I brought my boom box to the memorial service at Anabel Taylor Hall and set it down within easy reach on the seat next to me. Professor Braff led the service.
“Is he some kind of rabbi?” Grandma Millie asked, speaking too loudly.
“No Grandma,” my sister Melanie whispered for the umpteenth time. “He’s a professor at the university. A neighbor.”
I remember Braff had asked me to speak, but there was no way I was going to get up in front of all those people to “share my thoughts and feelings.” Instead I made a mixtape of all the saddest songs I knew. Ones my mom had loved. The first to be played, “Leaves That Are Green,” by Simon and Garfunkel, had the desired effect. Most of the people in the chapel were fighting back tears. Some wept openly.
My mother had not wanted a traditional funeral. She had asked to be cremated and her memorial service to be held at the non-sectarian chapel on the Cornell University campus. She was an avowed atheist her whole life, even at the end. My father, on the other hand, had not had the luxury of time to plan. He was killed in a car crash in the winter of 1969, a week before my fifth birthday. My family lived in New York City at the time and we were driving home from a wedding out on Long Island. Back then, most cars had only lap belts, with no shoulder harnesses. So when the accident happened, there was nothing to stop his head from slamming into the steering wheel.
“Open the damn windows! I’m falling asleep,” was the last thing I heard my father say. I must have fallen asleep too, because the next thing I knew the car was upside down and I was on top of my mother, with my left leg through the skylight, pinned underneath the weight of the car. At first I didn’t understand why the car had turned upside down. The windshield was broken and both my older brother and younger sister were gone. I can still picture my father. His forehead was against the steering wheel and he wasn’t moving.
At the hospital, I shared a room with my brother Jeremy. Like me, he had sustained only minor injuries. I suffered a broken leg, Jeremy a broken arm. But I was worried about my mother and father, and my little sister, Lucy. Where were they? Were they alright? The last time I had seen my father he wasn’t moving. I asked a nurse.
“Your mommy and daddy are going to be just fine,” the nurse said.
My father hadn’t looked like he was going to be “just fine.”
“My daddy’s okay?” I wanted to believe her.
“That’s right. You wait and see. He’s going to be as good as new. He just needs a little time to rest in the hospital before you can all go home together.”
“But where is he? Where’s my mommy?” The nurse became flustered and was unable to answer my question.
“They’re not here!” my brother cried from the bed next to mine. “They took them to a different hospital.”
“With Lucy?”
“Yes.”
Jeremy and I weren’t roommates for long. My constant crying made it impossible for him to get any rest and my uncle arranged a room change.
The first time I got wind that something was terribly wrong was a couple of days after everybody was back home from the hospital—except for my father. I was in my room playing with blocks and a beloved robot. I heard my brother crying somewhere else in the house, and I knew that something bad had happened. A few minutes later I heard the knock on my door. Stan, a close friend of my father’s, entered. “I have some sad news for you, Doug,” he said. His face was grim, his tone businesslike.
Stan knelt down on the floor and looked me square in the eye. “Daddy died.”
Daddy died. Daddy died. Daddy died. Daddy died.
“But the nurse said he’s going to be as good as new. He just needs a little time to rest in the hospital!”
“I’m sorry, Dougie, but it’s true—Daddy is never going to come home.”
Pins and needles all over my body, a burning sensation on my cheeks.
The next day I threw my toy robot down a flight of stairs, smashing it to pieces. We never saw Stan again. Dad was buried somewhere out on Long Island.
At some point prior to his death, my father had taken out a life insurance policy offering double indemnity in the event of an accident, allowing my mother to receive twice the face value of the policy. With the relative windfall of the insurance money, my mother, a lover of the great outdoors, moved my family from smog-filled Queens to the fresh air of upstate New York.
My mother and father had both fallen in love with Ithaca when they first visited Cornell while college hunting with my older sister Melanie. I can still remember my mother describing to us the town’s idyllic green hills and lake, its spectacular gorges and waterfalls. She was in awe of the Cornell campus, with its ivy-covered stone buildings and lofty elm trees. As far as my mother was concerned, Ithaca embodied the two things she and my father had valued most in this world: nature and higher learning. The fact that Melanie already lived there made it even more appealing.
The Simon and Garfunkel song came to an end. I pushed STOP on the boom box.
“Thank you, Douglas, for that beautiful selection,” Professor Braff said, gazing down at me with soulful eyes. “I know it was a favorite of Susan’s.”
Braff was a short, frail-looking man with salt and pepper hair, kind eyes, and thin, red lips. My mother was fond of him, but less so of his wife. She used to say Jonathan Braff was a mensch, but also a bit of a nebbish. He used to mow our lawn and drive my sister and me to school, along with his own kids. I think he felt sorry for my mother because she was a widow. In warmer weather I used to sit with him and his kids on the front stoop of his house while he read aloud to them. I liked the stories, but couldn’t help feeling cheated and resentful. It made me angry that all the other kids around me had fathers and I didn’t.
“And yes, time does march on,” Braff said. “And yes, green leaves do indeed turn to brown. Fall is inevitably followed by winter. And for many of us in this room, it must feel like winter already. But spring will eventually come again.”
Oh, really? I thought. I wasn’t so sure. I wondered what kind of professor Braff was. I couldn’t remember. In any case, he sounded like an idiot to me. I thought of the character Chauncey Gardiner, played by Peter Sellers in the film Being There. A simpleton who always speaks in gardening metaphors and is taken by everyone to be a prophet. That’s what Braff seemed like to me now—a phony, ridiculous. But what I resented most about him was the way he always poked his nose into my family’s business. Before my mother had been diagnosed, he had told me he thought I should do more around the house to help her. Who the fuck did he think he was?
I never felt responsible for what happened to my father, but I did blame myself for my mother’s illness. After the car accident, I changed overnight from a happy-go-lucky kid to a moody, self-centered, spoiled brat. By the time I reached adolescence, my mom couldn’t handle me anymore and gave up trying. I refused to go to school and flew into a rage if I didn’t get exactly what I wanted whenever I wanted it. I was convinced that the constant worry and grief I caused my mother had given her cancer. I believed it. I was sure of it. And I was so tortured by feelings of guilt that not an hour went by that I didn’t entertain a fantasy of ending my own life.
“Susan was a good neighbor and a dear friend,” Braff said, gesturing to a large framed portrait of my mother. “She was a mom to Melanie, Jeremy, Douglas, and Lucy. And she was also a daughter to Millie. All of us came to know Susan under different circumstances, but whether you had the privilege of knowing her because you volunteered with her, played bridge with her, lived next door to her, or were related to her, she touched your life in a deeply positive way.”
While Professor Braff sung my mother’s praises, I began to tune him out and made a survey of the room to see who had come. I was convinced that everyone there must have thought I was some kind of freak. I certainly felt like one. Who loses both parents before the age of seventeen? I was sure it was somehow a bad reflection on me.
My mother’s mother, Grandma Millie, looked more angry than sad. She had flown up from Florida, where she lived in a predominantly Jewish retirement community. She was a bitter and cantankerous old woman who had worked her whole life in the labor movement. My great Aunt Gabby, one of Millie’s sisters, had also come and brought her middle-aged son Harvey with her.
Looking around the chapel, I couldn’t help notice that more of Lucy’s friends were there than mine. I obviously went to school with a bunch of assholes. But a few of them had come. Seated in the back row were Mike McFadden, Stuart Campbell, Elisabeth Jensen, and Eddie Rubenfeld. Eddie and I had been best friends since my family had first moved up to Ithaca, but I hadn’t seen much of him lately. These days I saw much more of Mike and Stuart. Eddie was determined to get into the right school—any Ivy League college other than Cornell—and spent virtually all his time studying.
Eddie had also been through a family tragedy, and I think it had changed him. Three winters ago, over the Christmas break, his older sister was hiking and slipped and fell into a gorge. Cornell was notorious for its high suicide rate, and the most popular method amongst its students was throwing oneself into the gorge. But Eddie’s sister’s death was a complete accident. Eddie had always worshiped and idolized his older sister. I think that when she died, an adventurous, warm, fun-loving side of him died too. Sitting next to Eddie was Elisabeth. I had recently developed a bit of thing for her. She was a pretty girl with dark blonde hair and a penchant for dressing in tight fitting turtleneck sweaters. She looked amazing in them—the way they accentuated her large, perfectly round breasts. Sadly, despite my advances, Elisabeth seemed determined to remain friends. She hoped to become a psychotherapist one day. Whenever we were together all she was interested in was hearing about my feelings. Maybe she was practicing for her future profession. I hadn’t had sex yet, and I wondered if I could use my pathetic situation to finally break down her resistance. And that made me feel seriously messed-up, that at my mother’s funeral I was thinking of how I could use her death to get sex.
As various members of the community stood up to share their cherished memories of my mother, I studied the faces of my friends. Mike McFadden looked as though he were attending a lecture on his favorite subject. Eddie Rubenfeld was staring blankly out the window. Stuart Campbell’s eyes were red with tears and he couldn’t stop rubbing them. Halfway through the service, I noticed he got up and left. I didn’t hold it against him—Stuart had always been uncomfortable with displays of emotion.
For some reason, my brother Jeremy was not seated with our immediate family. He sat with his wife Carrie, who was squeezing his limp hand between hers. I liked my brother’s wife and so had my mom. She had believed that Carrie was a good influence on Jeremy and that it was thanks to her he had decided to go to medical school. Carrie fit in well with the women in my family, partly because she was so tiny. But her physical resemblance to them ended there. Carrie was not Jewish and she didn’t look like us. Everyone in the Greenbaum family had dark hair and eyes, and an olive complexion. Carrie had light hair, blue eyes and fair skin. She had a nervous temperament and a myriad of phobias, but she adored my brother and had been kind to my mother as her illness had progressed, teaching her to meditate and making helpful recommendations for her diet.
Jeremy was seven years my senior and although he had never applied himself at school before college, he was a better student than me. Getting straight A’s came naturally to him. While I was plagued with learning disabilities and would be lucky to finish high school, Jeremy sailed through effortlessly and became the second person in my family to get into Cornell. But by then he was introverted and my mom said he was depressed. When he moved into campus housing, there was no indication that he had a single friend. Then one day, without any warning, he brought a girlfriend home for Thanksgiving. He had met Carrie at the Raja Yoga meditation center. The fact that Jeremy was interested in yoga and meditation was news to my family and raised some eyebrows, but everybody, particularly my mom, was pleased he had finally made a friend and seemed happy.
By the spring of 1979, Jeremy and Carrie got engaged. They were married later that summer. My mother welcomed Carrie into the family, but always rolled her eyes at any mention of Raja Yoga or the holy man from India that Carrie called “Baba.” Then Jeremy said something the following Thanksgiving that gave everybody pause: “This year I have been doubly blessed: by the grace of God, I have found my soul mate and my true guru.”
Although I had always looked up to my brother, at the time I was convinced that he had joined a cult. First of all, we were all atheists. No one in my family ever mentioned the word “God” unless they were swearing or joking. Whenever he and Carrie came over to my mother’s house, I mocked him about his new religion. Then one day he had enough of it, and he and Carrie blasted me for my “total lack of respect” for such a “great being like Baba.” I never teased him about his religion again.
“Would anyone else like to share any memories or thoughts about Susan?” Professor Braff asked.
“I would,” Aunt Gabby said.
“Won’t you please stand up and tell us what’s on your mind?” Braff said.
Aunt Gabby frowned and shook her head: “I am standing.” Almost everybody in the chapel burst out laughing. “Susan was such an extraordinary woman. Words cannot describe how wonderful she was.”
“Excuse me!” Grandma Millie interrupted, rising to her feet, “I strongly disagree! Susan was my daughter and I can tell you myself that words can describe how wonderful she was.”
“Oh no, but you’re wrong,” Aunt Gabby said, “Words cannot describe her virtues.”
“Excuse me, but they can!”
“Oh, no—they can’t!”
“Oh, yes they can!”
By this point, half the gathering was watching the argument between my aunt and grandmother unfold with their mouths wide open in disbelief. The other half was in stitches.
“Then tell us!” Aunt Gabby said. “Describe how wonderful she was!”
“I have nothing to prove to you,” Grandma Millie said, folding her arms. Grandma would argue with anybody about anything, anytime, but she was especially fond of contradicting her sister. Millie and Gabby fought with each other at every possible opportunity. It made no difference what the fight was about.
Ordinarily, Cousin Harvey would have been oblivious to the scene Millie and Gabby were making. He was fifty-three years old and had lived his entire life with his mother in her rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Until recently, when Grandma Millie moved to Florida, he had never lived more than a couple of blocks away from his mother’s sister. He was used to their squabbles. But today was different. Harvey had worshiped my mother and was devastated when she died. On any other occasion, he would simply have tuned them out. But today their arguing was making him ill. He kept clutching at his throat, and he was sweating profusely, even though the chapel was cool.
When I was a small boy, Grandma Millie once told me that Harvey had a metal plate in his head. Although she never did explain why he had it or what it was for, I guessed it had something to do with his odd way of speaking, which I later learned was called a “speech impediment.” But stuttering was the least of his problems. My mother told me that Harvey was also “severely myopic.” The impossibly thick-lensed glasses he wore to help him see made his eyes look huge like an owl’s. As if the awkwardness of his speech and the air of perpetual bewilderment caused by his glasses weren’t enough to make Harvey seem like a freak, he also wore his pants pulled up practically to his chest.
Despite his strangeness, I was in constant awe of my cousin. He could recite all fifty states and their capitals in under thirty seconds. He could recite Pi up to at least a hundred decimal places. He had encyclopedic knowledge of the Finger Lakes region where we lived, and of the Native American tribes that once inhabited it. He might have known just as much about a lot of other subjects, but I would never have guessed. Whenever he came Upstate to visit us, Native American culture was all he wanted to talk about.
Even though my cousin was obviously some kind of genius, he had never gone to college. My mother said this was because Harvey was probably autistic—what we call nowadays “on the spectrum.” Despite this disadvantage, he had managed, somehow, to hold down a job as a city clerk and earn a decent living. Why he never left home was a mystery to me.
I liked Cousin Harvey and always looked forward to spending time with him. He was especially fond of Ithaca’s many gorges and enjoyed going on long hikes, for which he was never appropriately attired. Whether he was climbing a gorge trail or attempting to wade across a stream, Harvey never deviated from his standard outfit: polyester slacks, a white button-down shirt, and ten-dollar shoes from Sears.
Although I was not a patient kid by nature, I always managed to find the time to listen to Harvey and to accompany him on his outdoor adventures. I tried not to stand too close to him, however; his breath always reeked of peanut butter, and he tended to spray saliva when he spoke. Interestingly, he didn’t stutter nearly as much when we were alone. Of all the strange things about my cousin, the oddest was that he always addressed me as “sir.”
“Harvey, why do you call me ‘sir?’” I once asked him.
“Because I have the ut—ut—ut—most res-res-spect f-f-f-for you, sir.”
Most of the time I went around feeling like a misfit. But spending time around Harvey helped me to feel more “normal” by comparison. I also tended to like myself more when I was around him. Harvey brought out the best in me; it wasn’t often that I was kind.
As Professor Braff brought the service to a close, I heard the rain start up again, drops pattering against the windows of the chapel. “Let us conclude with another musical selection from Douglas.”
I pressed a button on the boom box and “Who by Fire” by Leonard Cohen began to play. My mother had been particularly fond of this song, and I couldn’t stop listening to it after she died. She once told me that its lyrics had been inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement:
Who by fire and who by water,
Who by the sword and who by wild beasts,
Who by hunger and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangling and who by stoning?
The song, like the prayer, lists all the ways someone can die. But at the end of the song, Cohen asks, “Who shall I say is calling?” I didn’t believe in God, but I couldn’t stop wondering who or what had called my parents away.
The song came to an end. While it was playing, the drizzle had turned into a downpour. In the reception area, a cold buffet of Jewish delicacies had been laid out. I found Grandma Millie still arguing with Aunt Gabby. Absorbed in her debate with my aunt, she was oblivious as Melanie, Jeremy, Lucy, and I formed a receiving line.
My father’s brother and his wife were among the first to offer their condolences: “You come down and visit us soon, Dougie,” my aunt said crushing me in her arms and kissing me on the cheek. When she pulled away I could see that she was crying. I tasted her salty tears on my lips. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my suit jacket and nodded. My uncle looked like he had just been run over by a truck. He took me in his arms and kissed the top of my head. When he released me I waited for him to say something, but he was speechless.
Next it was Eddie Rubenfeld’s turn. He weakly shook my hand and made fleeting eye contact. Then he nodded and headed out the door of the chapel and into the pouring rain. As I greeted some other friends from school, Mike McFadden darted past the receiving line on his way to the exit, snapping closed his raincoat. I caught his eye and he turned red. I thanked him for coming with a silent nod of my head. He smiled self-consciously and gave me a shy wave goodbye. Then he escaped out the door as fast as his feet could take him. I couldn’t bear another second of this excruciating awkwardness. I was uncomfortable in my dress clothes and my tie was strangling me. I couldn’t wait for the reception to be over so I could get home to the safety of my room.
“Hey, Greenbaum, it sucks that your mom is dead,” Elisabeth Jensen said. She gently placed a hand on my shoulder. When she hugged me, I felt her large firm breasts push against my chest, and I started to get a stiffy.
“Call you later?” she asked.
I nodded, my eyes following her ass as she walked away. God, what was wrong with me?
After the reception at the chapel, Jeremy and Carrie headed home to Boston instead of coming back to the house with us. My brother was in his last year of medical school at Tufts. My aunt and uncle also returned to Long Island. Much to Melanie’s chagrin, however, Grandma Millie would be spending another week with us. We were also stuck with Aunt Gabby and Cousin Harvey for the rest of the afternoon, since their bus didn’t leave for the City until evening. It would be a long day.
*
THE RAIN HAD FALLEN in sheets the day before the memorial service and the streets of Ithaca were littered with soggy masses of brightly colored leaves. The sky, as it was on most days I can remember from my adolescence, was overcast and gray. My mother’s home was a five-bedroom, 1950s-style split-level, located in the quiet residential neighborhood of Belle Sherman, on Ithaca’s East Hill. Lucy and I each had our own room, but when my mom got sick and Melanie and her young daughters moved into the house, I claimed the large finished basement as my lair.
When we got home, Melanie and Lucy busied themselves in the kitchen, putting away the prepared food that friends and well-wishers had dropped off for us. Grandma Millie and Aunt Gabby continued to torture Cousin Harvey in the living room, resuming the argument they had begun in the chapel.
I was on my way downstairs from my room to grab a snack in the kitchen when Aunt Gabby called out to me: “Douglas, darling, please join us.” She was seated on the sofa between my grandmother and Harvey. I glanced at my cousin—his forehead was beaded with sweat and the color had drained from his face
“Excuse—cuse—cuse—me—me—me, S-s-s-ir,” Cousin Harvey said, beseeching me with his eyes.
“Yes, Harvey.”
My cousin mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “I was wo—wo—wondering if-f-f-f w-w-w-we could stay the night and catch the b-b-bus for Man—Man—Man—hattan in the mo—mo—morning?”
“Did you ask Melanie?”
Harvey began to answer, but was having an even more difficult time than usual getting his words out. His eyes had a glazed quality, as if he were about to pass out. “I-I-I…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll talk to her,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
I found Melanie alone in the kitchen with her boyfriend, Herb. She was slumped forward in her chair, resting her forehead against her hand, the way she always did when she was about to get one of her migraines. Herb was sitting next to her, massaging the back of her neck.
Herb was a well-known professor of psychology at Cornell. At least ten years older than Melanie, he was a short, bearded, teddy bear of a man with kind eyes that shined when he smiled. He was good to Melanie, and had been a big support to her when my mother got sick. But for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I didn’t like Herb. As far as I was concerned, Herb was around much too often, and he got on my nerves. For one thing, he was a know-it-all; whenever I said anything in his presence, which was rare, he would look me in the eye and smile wisely, as if he knew what I were really thinking. When he wasn’t analyzing me, he was aggressively trying to win me over. I hated when he said, “I’m here for you, sport, if you ever want to talk.” Even more insufferable were his offers to play catch or to throw the football around the yard with me. With all his training as a psychologist, wasn’t he perceptive enough to realize that he was the last person I wanted to talk to? Or at least that I hated sports?
“It’s you or them,” Herb was telling Melanie when I entered the kitchen.
“Harvey wants to know if they can spend the night,” I said, interrupting them.
“I know,” my sister muttered.
“We’re discussing it, Doug,” Herb said, glancing up at me and then directing his attention back to my sister. “You’re stuck with your grandmother, but having all three of them here together right now is going to do you in. You have to think about yourself for a change.”
My sister shook her head: “I can’t just send them away.”
“They’ll be fine,” Herb said.
Just then we heard loud cries coming from the living room.
“Harvey! My Harvey! Somebody, do something! My Harvey! Help!!!”
Melanie and Herb leapt to their feet and I raced after them into the living room, where we found Cousin Harvey unconscious on the floor. Aunt Gabby was practically on top of him, shaking and slapping him: “Harvey, wake up this instant!”
Herb took one look at Harvey and ran back to the kitchen to call an ambulance. Melanie and Lucy struggled to pull Aunt Gabby off her son. Paralyzed, I stood by my grandmother. Apart from the fact that he was turning blue, I noticed something strange about Harvey’s face. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I realized what it was: He wasn’t wearing his glasses. I had never seen him without them before.
Within a few minutes, the paramedics arrived on the scene and tried to resuscitate my cousin. But they were too late. By the time they got there, Harvey was already gone.
“My Harvey! My Harvey! My Harvey!” Aunt Gabby wailed as Melanie and Herb barricaded her behind the sofa. “Let me go! Let me go! I need to save him!”
As they lifted Harvey’s lifeless body onto the stretcher, Aunt Gabby began hitting herself in the face. “My Harvey!” Smack! “My Harvey!” Smack! “How can I live without my Harvey!” My aunt was in her mid-eighties and couldn’t have weighed more than seventy-five pounds. But Herb and Melanie couldn’t hold her down by themselves and they asked for my help. Meanwhile, Lucy ran to the bathroom in search of a Valium.
“My Harvey!’ Smack! “My Harvey!” Smack! “My Harvey!”
“Gabby, you need to stop hitting yourself,” Herb said.
“Aunt Gabby please!” Melanie begged. “Dougie, hold her arms!” I grabbed onto my aunt’s wrists, but we were unable to subdue her. She fought us off with the strength of an angry bear.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
“Gabby, you need to calm down,” Herb said.
“A Harvey!” she cried again, even louder than before. “How can I live without a Harvey?”