“The letter? No.”
“How about Aaron?”
“Yes.”
Bernie took the letter. He shook his head at me, smiling wanly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was none of your business.”
Bernie grunted, amused. He put the letter on the pile of documents. “You helped him, right? That’s how he got treatment.”
“I gave him a phone number. That’s all. He did it, Uncle. Don’t turn it into that.”
“So you want me to do what he asks?”
“Isaac’s a bright boy. He should be able to go to college and not have to worry about tuition and living expenses and so on.”
“What’s he want to be? Aaron doesn’t say.”
“Musician. Plays the trumpet. Wants to go to Oberlin. He has a lot of talent.”
“Another artist.” Bernie gingerly lifted his glass of water to his lips and sipped. He smacked them afterwards, just a little, yet there was something infantile about it. “What a creative family I have. I’m so lucky.”
“You are lucky.”
“Oh? I spent my whole life, every fucking minute, doing things for my family. They’re ungrateful and they’re a mess. Can you explain that to me?”
I didn’t answer.
“I bet you can. I bet you can explain so my hair would stand on end.”
“You’re angry at me?”
“You should have told me. Not telling me means you think I’m a child. Or a bully. Is Aaron my fault? Was that my fault, his blowing his mind on drugs, was that my fault?”
“I’m a head shrinker, Uncle. Not a rabbi. I’m not an expert in blame.”
“A lot you know. Rabbis are experts at fund-raising. No.” Uncle pushed Aaron’s letter away. It fell off the pile on its end, like a car that had been pushed off a cliff. “Nobody’s to blame for anything,” he said bitterly.
“Why are you angry at me, Uncle?”
“You should be my doctor,” he said casually. He looked at Manhattan. The sun was going down, casting a slanting light on the glass towers of Midtown. “I told you I wanted you to cure cancer.” He smiled slyly. “I knew this day would come.”
“I’m …” I was about to say, I’m sorry, but that was foolish and untrue. I had what many might feel is a harsh point of view toward this situation. Uncle was over eighty years old. The belief that facing death in old age should be to struggle wildly is too immature and unrealistic for me to accept. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is a failure to understand nature. Bernie was used to controlling events, but that had also done great harm to his relationships. I had hoped he would face his end with more grace. That was childish of me, as well. But, for better or worse, he had become my father and I wished he would set a better example for me. The last gift a parent can give is the lesson of how to die.
Bernie waited for me to elaborate. When I kept silent, he continued, “You didn’t say on the phone what you think of this treatment.”
“Treatment?”
“Yes, treatment. What is it, if it isn’t a treatment?”
“There are other options. Options that would be less painful, less—”
“But I’d die. No question, they tell me.”
I said nothing.
“I’m going to die anyway, that’s what you think.”
“You’re forty years older than the other test cases. The only reason they approved you for this is because of your money.”
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?”
“You might live for up to a year, relatively comfortably, with normal treatment.”
“Relatively comfortably,” he repeated and shook his head.
“There would be time to see Aaron, to meet your grandson, to say your goodbyes to everyone who’s important to you.”
“The people who are important to me are here.”
“But no one says goodbye, right? That would be unsupportive.”
Bernie smiled at me. He slapped my knee. “Only you. You’re the only one who has the balls to tell me I can’t make it.”
“Maybe you can make it. But maybe it isn’t worth it.”
“To live another five, ten years?” He stared at me. I nodded. “That isn’t worth it?” he asked, incredulous.
“Maybe not.”
“You’re crazy.’
“You don’t know what crazy is, Uncle,” I said.
We both laughed. Uncle took another sip of water. When he replaced the glass, he raised Aaron’s letter from its wrecked position and restored it to the top of the pile. “Is this grandson of mine, this paragon Isaac, is he white?”
I was surprised. I thought for a moment. “You’ve checked up on him.”
“That black wife of his—”
“Ex-wife.”
Uncle waved his hand. “She the one who got him on drugs?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. She’s the one who kicked him out. Made him face the addiction.”
“Bernie Rabinowitz’s one real grandson has rhythm,” he said in a mocking tone; but it sounded hollow. His daughter, Helen, had never been able to conceive. Her two children were adopted.
“Look at your nephew,” I said, pointing to me. “The Rabinowitzes are a regular United Nations.”
Bernie smacked his lips. “I’m dry all the time. Get me some water, please. There’s fancy water in that refrigerator.”
The refrigerator was only one of a number of conveniences added to the room. Besides the table covered with papers, there was a stereo system, a Xerox machine, tape recorders for dictation and a huge device that I didn’t know was a first-generation fax.
Pat looked in while I brought him a glass of Evian. “Helen and the kids are here.”
“And the genius?”
“Helen said Jerry’s still at the office. He’ll be here soon.”
“We’ll be a little longer,” Bernie said imperiously, his usual tone with Pat.
She rolled her eyes, but disappeared compliantly.
“She’s the only one who takes and doesn’t whine.”
“How about me?”
“You criticize. That’s worse than whining.”
“Does Jerry whine?” I asked, referring to Helen’s husband, now the president of Uncle’s company.
“Jerry loses my money and blames everything and everyone but his stupid management.” This was an old complaint. In the early seventies Uncle had retired from the day-to-day management of his company, turning it over to his son-in-law. To Bernie’s amazement, Jerry sold off Home World, the discount electronics and appliance chain Bernie had bought and expanded in the sixties. With profits from the sale, Jerry invested heavily in Manhattan real estate. Not the low- to middle-income housing that had made Bernie rich in the forties and fifties, but elaborate office buildings and luxury apartment complexes. At first, Wall Street loved his maneuvers. In 1972, various improprieties came to light — four city inspectors eventually went to jail — and then the 1973 recession hit New York hard. By 74, the value of Uncle’s company’s stock dropped from twenty-three dollars a share to seventy-five cents, demolishing Bernie’s and Jerry’s paper worth from six hundred million dollars to less than thirty million. Uncle came out of retirement. In a series of dazzling moves, he rescued the situation. He called on his old friends, made sweetheart deals with banks, billed and cooed with the state and city government, and managed not only to keep Jerry out of prison, but out of the papers too. By 1980 Bernie had restored the stock to ten dollars a share. In an act of generosity and loyalty — it seemed to me — Bernie stepped aside for Jerry again. This second succession was going better. By 1988, the stock was up to twenty-five and Bernie had returned to the Forbes list of the one hundred richest Americans.