She smiled. “Okay. Thanks.” She patted her stomach. “I worked hard, believe me. It’s against the law to have a tummy in L.A.” Without a break, her face crumpled into the worry I had seen from the car. “Mom’s upset. She’s really bad. Worse than even for Daddy.” I nodded. Julie searched her black purse and came out with a cigarette.
“I thought you gave them up.”
“Just while pregos. I don’t smoke around the kids or Richard.” That was her husband. “He’d kill me.”
“You smoke secretly from your husband?”
“He knows. I just don’t smoke in front of him. Are they all crazy?” she asked without a transition. “Was it the money? They—” she nodded at the temple. The lot was full. The service was due to begin in five minutes. I had arrived late. Traffic was worse than I expected — every route I tried was under construction. “They act like God has died.”
“Maybe He has, for them. Remember, he pulled them out of poverty and he saved them again fifteen years ago.”
“He’s also fucked them up permanently.” Julie blew out some smoke and then covered her mouth with her free hand. “I’m horrible.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just stronger than they are.”
Julie came to a rest. Her nervous movements were frozen, cigarette dangling, eyes on me. “What do you mean?”
“You refused to be dependent on him. And you made it. You made it on your own.”
“How about you? You—”
“You know I never would have made it without Uncle’s help.”
“He also hurt you. Hurt you horribly.”
“Yes. But he meant to do the opposite. And when it came right down to it, he did help me.”
Julie let go of her cigarette, stamping it into the gravel. “Let’s go in before I piss you off too.”
It turned out she had had a fight with her mother. Ceil was angry that Julie had left her kids and husband behind in California. Julie was right. The surviving Rabinowitzes did seem to be a tribe who had lost not merely their chief, but their god. In particular, Aunts Ceil and Sadie were devastated. Uncle’s daughter, Helen, was also stricken, although grief seemed to improve her character. Back at the house, she didn’t drink at all, a remarkable difference, given that she was, in my judgment, an alcoholic. Helen tended to her aunts with grim concentration and told poignant stories about her father that surprised me; anecdotes of Bernie teaching her to ride a bike, dancing with her on her thirteenth birthday, all from before I lived with them, when, apparently, he spent more time with her and Aaron. Even Helen’s husband, Jerry, who must have felt some relief to be finally rid of his boss, was quiet, modest, a little frightened. Aaron did not come, although I had tried to coax him. My cousins, Daniel and the others I had raced against for the Afikomen, were there, with spouses and children, some content, some a mess. All were awed, convinced a great man had died. Julie did not fit in with them, either intellectually or emotionally.
When the visitors thinned out, leaving the immediate family, Julie’s quarrel with her mother started up again. Ceil complained that Julie coming alone to the funeral was disrespectful. I stepped between mother and daughter and took Julie outside, onto the sloping lawn. We walked toward the tennis court where I had had so many lessons, sweating to impress Bernie.
“Will you tell me what this is about?” Julie said. “My kids are three and seven months. I can’t bring them to a funeral. And how is it disrespectful? To Bernie? To this bimbo wife of his? Mom hates her.”
“Your mother wants her grandchildren here. She wants to feel life, that’s all. To know that it goes on.”
“That’s why I want her to come back to L.A. with me and stay for a couple of months. I know she’s lonely—”
“She wants you to honor the life she’s led. That life is here. Here in gracious, sensitive, cultured Great Neck.” Julie laughed at my mocking tone. “You don’t have to. It’s not your obligation to shore up her fantasy.”
“You do. You play along. They were mean to you, they were so fucking mean to you, and they still don’t appreciate you. They think you’re some sort of failure. Jerry talks to you like you’re a family retainer. But you take it all so patiently. You give and give and give to them and they don’t notice. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“I do?” I had learned long ago that a degree in psychology doesn’t confer perfect self-knowledge — or perfect anything for that matter. We had reached the court. I found the switch for the lights and flipped it, curious if they were working. A white glow, not harsh, but brilliant nevertheless, flooded the area. Swarms of bugs appeared, gathering at the large rectangular bulbs. I wondered if the painted asphalt of the tennis court had been maintained. From outside, it was hidden by green bunting to camouflage the fence’s interruption of the lawn. I opened the gate, to check on the condition of the surface. When Bernie bought the house from his first wife, Charlotte — she left the U.S. to marry a businessman who worked in South America — I assumed he intended to resume the old family gatherings, the huge Seders and birthdays. But there had been no family parties. Uncle used to resurface the court every five years. The — gate creaked loudly, a bad omen. But the surface was smooth, the lines bright, the net tape shiny. It was a ghost to me, an apparition from my childhood.
Was Julie right? Did these people think I was a failure after all? Had they taken the fantasies of my childhood to heart and continued to think of me as Bernie’s failed prodigy? And was I concealing something from them, accepting scorn while feeling superior? “I play along?” I asked Julie again. “I’m not aware of being phony. I feel sorry for most of them. For Aaron, certainly. And for Sadie. She’s always been very close to her family. I think she took my mother’s suicide harder than any of them and she loved Bernie, really loved him.”
“Jesus.” Julie slumped down onto the grass outside the gate. She reached for a cigarette. “You’re making me feel like a shit.”
I kept my eyes on the glowing, pristine court. “I’m in love with you,” I said, too cowardly and too ashamed of giving in to this feeling to look at her. “It’s been seven years. Supposed to go away. But I think of you every day and I realize today that I want you more than ever. I made a mistake. I should have taken you on any terms.”
I didn’t hear anything from her. I thought, in the distance, someone shouted joyfully from the house. That didn’t make sense, a whoop of happiness from people in mourning.
Finally, I heard her lips make a noise as she took another puff. But she didn’t speak.
“Maybe that’s why I keep bringing up family obligations,” I continued. “Just a sneaky way of complaining that you didn’t …” I couldn’t go on. I felt alone. I leaned against the fence and remembered a perfect shot I had once hit against someone, I wasn’t sure who, a down-the-line backhand on the full run, a typical stroke for a professional, but the only one I ever hit, a taste of greatness. Pointless in my life, yet I could still see the ball spinning over the net for a winner as if it were yesterday, as if it were full of meaning. “I’m sorry,” I said and turned to Julie.
She was huddled beside the open gate, head down. I knelt beside her. She looked up, face wet. She spoke passionately, but clearly. “That isn’t fair. You ended it. I said we should just go on—”
“In secret? For our whole lives?” I argued, passionately, as if no time had passed.
She straightened and pushed me with one hand, like an annoyed kid. “You have no right to keep it alive now. I love Richard and I love my children. Don’t make me feel guilty about that.”
I took hold of her shoulders and moved her toward me intending to kiss her. “I wanted to force you to—” I stopped.