Bambi, who had been in a fog all day, glanced distractedly at the middle-aged woman who had asked the question. Brown hair, dressed in a knit two-piece, which Bambi’s expert eye identified as high end, perhaps even St. John’s, a few seasons ago, although that was always fine in Baltimore. But the woman was a stranger to her. Why would someone unknown to Bambi be at Aunt Harriet’s shivah?
“Thank you-Naomi.” The name came to her in the nick of time. Naomi had been Linda’s classmate at Park. Bambi kept forgetting that her daughter, forty-one this month, was a middle-aged woman, too.
She walked Naomi’s platter back to the Gelmans’ kitchen, which had been redone a year ago and now had one of those enormous French-door Vikings, wide and deep enough to hold multiple platters from Seven Mile Market, the kosher deli, not that anyone in this crowd kept kosher. Not even Linda had gone that overboard. Bambi hoped Bert and Lorraine, who had been generous to host this shivah, would also allow her to leave much of the food behind. Oh, she would raid the platters for the cold cuts, maybe some of the cheese and fruit, but now that she was alone in the Sudbrook Park house, she had no use for all the cookies and cakes and pies. Neither did Bert nor Lorraine, with Sydney in New York and the twins at law school in Chicago, but they would find it less shameful to toss out the uneaten food. Rich people were allowed to waste things.
Returning to the living room, Bambi still couldn’t get over how many people were here. Her mother had been right, after all, to insist that they needed something bigger than her little apartment in Windsor Towers. Bambi had thought no one would come. Harriet had no spouse, no children, and she had outlived the few friends she hadn’t alienated. Yet the Gelmans’ first floor teemed with people. Bambi’s friends, Ida’s friends, even the girls’ friends had been coming and going all afternoon. Perhaps, Bambi thought, people were simply desperate to gather. But what was the point of being with other people when the conversation immediately turned back to all the horrible topics-the Towers, anthrax, Cipro, the stories of near misses, the personal connections to those who had died. No one in Bambi’s circle really knew anyone who had been affected, although Joshua, Rachel’s husband, had a college friend who had been on the upper floors of the second tower and gotten out in time.
“The body was found”-Bambi started at that bit of overheard conversation, but surely they were talking about the attacks? She continued to move through the crowd, checking on people. They would have to say a prayer at some point. Thank God they had Linda’s oldest to get them through it. Like most of her generation, Bambi read Hebrew only in transliteration and didn’t know any prayers by heart. Her family had been conservative when to be conservative was to be rather lax.
But Felix knew Hebrew. She remembered her surprise, early in their marriage, when she realized that Felix had been raised in a relatively devout home. Synagogue was not just a social network for Felix. He relaxed there, took solace in High Holiday services. It was more than a way to burnish his social standing, although he always pretended otherwise.
After he had gone, Bambi sometimes looked at the new bimah, the Chagall-inspired stained glass behind it, and felt as if she could count the Brewer dollars that had gone into it-and wished she could have every one of them back.
“I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” a woman said, clasping Bambi’s hands. Corky Mercer, the absentee owner of the Pikesville boutique where Bambi had worked for twenty years now, all the while pretending it was a lark, something to do after the older girls left home. The job had kept them all in clothes they otherwise never could have afforded.
“She?”
“Your aunt.”
Of course. Her aunt, Harriet. They were here for Harriet. “She hadn’t been well for two years, but, no, in the end, she didn’t suffer,” she said, extricating her hands. Corky meant well, but Bambi didn’t appreciate any touch that held her in place. She wondered if Corky would have done the same to a lifelong customer, as opposed to a customer who had ended up being a lifelong employee.
Aunt Harriet had died in her sleep at age ninety-five. It had been at once slow and sudden, the end of a gradual decline that began with a fall at age eighty-three. It was only a broken wrist, but it was the beginning. That was when they started hiring the aides-and when Harriet’s eccentricities became more pronounced.
Or was it simply that someone was finally there, paying attention? At any rate, the calls began twelve years ago. Even after Bambi’s mother moved into Windsor Towers, just down the hall from her older sister, Bambi still got the calls. Sometimes from Harriet, sometimes from the front desk, but mostly from the nursing aides who were subjected to Harriet’s verbal abuse. Bambi wouldn’t call her aunt racist-
I would, said the Felix who lived in Bambi’s head. Still. Still.
But Harriet was misanthropic and suspicious of almost everyone, regardless of race. She also had a bad tendency to cite people’s appearance in her tirades. So, yes, when she yelled frizzy-haired slut at the Jamaican aide, or big-mouthed idiot at the next woman, it probably seemed racist. “If you knew the things she says to my mother, her own baby sister,” Bambi said when she tried to appease the women. “I’m the only person she likes.”
They were not appeased.
Bambi really was, according to Harriet, the only person she liked. When Bambi was a child, Aunt Harriet had said: “You are my favorite niece.”
Bambi, just ten, had said: “But I’m your only niece.”
“Exactly,” Harriet said with a scary loud laugh, slapping her thigh. “So you’re my least favorite, too. When I write you out of the will, it’s so I can put you in the will.”
But as Bambi emerged as a belle, Harriet’s teasing evolved into sardonic adulation. Harriet, never married-by choice, she said-took vicarious pleasure in Bambi’s social successes. She always wanted to know if the boys were from good families, by which she meant only one thing: Were they rich? She resented Felix at first. “He nipped you in the bud,” she said. “He knew a good thing when he saw it.”
Yet Linda, Rachel, Michelle-they were of no interest to her. Even as Michelle began to resemble Bambi more and more, Harriet ignored her nieces. “You’re my only heir,” she said to Bambi time and again.
“What about Mother?”
“She has a husband.”
Bambi’s father had died less than a year after Felix disappeared, so it seemed to Bambi that she and her mother were in similar situations, even if her mother did have Social Security, life insurance, and savings to draw on. Still, in Harriet’s mind, it was different, a disappeared husband apparently being much worse than a dead one. Even as her animosity toward her sister lessened, softened by Ida’s decision to follow her to the Windsor Towers, Harriet insisted that Bambi, and Bambi alone, deserved her money.
How much was there? Enough to make a difference? She hated herself for thinking about it-yet it had been her only thought for forty-eight hours, since the last call about Aunt Harriet came, and she wished it could be her only thought now, that it could force other things from her mind.
She caught Lorraine looking at her, eyes full of pity, and she knew it was not for Aunt Harriet. Bambi wouldn’t be pitied. She checked her posture, smoothed her hair, and searched the crowd for her daughters. Here was her fortune, achieved against enormous odds. Linda, the family breadwinner and a good mother, with four terrific kids. Rachel, still trying to be a mother, while now enjoying success doing some computer work that Bambi didn’t quite understand, but it had grown out of a silly thing she had done, creating a computer program that sent out a poem every day. And Rachel had helped Michelle find a job at a start-up, although its main appeal to Michelle seemed to be the glamorous offices, created out of an old factory in the heart of Canton.