“That’s for sure,” said Teddy with a little laugh. “Absolute clarity in all things, Oscar. Never wavered, never hesitated.”
“He had balls,” said Abigail.
“He was not a good boy,” added Lila.
Maxine looked around at their three faces. “Please,” she said. “I never got silly about him. I saw him for what he was. Without the haze of sex.”
“Shhh. Ethan,” said Abigail again. “I promise, it’s all right.”
Ethan abruptly went quiet, but his hands moved by his ears and he kept rocking.
“Staking your claim,” said Teddy. “You’re welcome to it.”
“We all saw him, in our own ways,” said Lila.
A silence fell around the table. The four women avoided eye contact, as if suddenly ashamed or shy. Into the breach came the sound of Katerina singing to herself in the far corner of the loft, something in Hungarian in a raspy, slightly off-key voice that somehow managed to be beautiful anyway by virtue of the language she sang in. Her voice sounded to Abigail like a peasant girl’s during wartime as she dug, squatting in a potato patch behind a hut.
Abigail said to no one in particular, “I’ve read too many novels. I haven’t lived enough of life.”
“Oh, me, too,” said Lila, as if she had been thinking along similar lines.
“I wanted to,” said Abigail, “but I could never quite get up my nerve. And then Ethan always needed me.”
“You could have put him in a home,” said Maxine. She looked over at Ethan. His mouth was twisted; he was looking at the tabletop.
“I could do no such thing!”
“Of course you couldn’t,” said Lila.
“Why not?” Teddy asked. “Would he have known the difference?”
Abigail said with horror, “He would have been miserable among strangers!”
“Among his own kind,” said Maxine. “Cared for by trained professionals. And then Oscar might have felt he had your undivided attention, Abigail.”
“Maxine,” said Teddy, “that was not why Oscar—”
“Oh really,” said Maxine.
Teddy and Maxine stared at each other with hatred.
“It wasn’t,” said Abigail. “You’re right, Teddy. He didn’t want my undivided attention. He wanted me distracted.”
“Oscar, Oscar, Oscar,” said Maxine. “Look at us, four smart old bags with plenty to think about, fixated on my putz of a brother, who’s been dead for five years and wasn’t especially nice to any of us.”
“Time for Lila and me to be going,” said Teddy. “You have your tefillin, we’ll all keep our traps shut about Helena, we had a nice little volley of long-overdue spats and tantrums, and now I’m tired and ready for a nap.” She stood up and said to Lila, “Ready?”
“Yes,” said Lila. “But I just want to add one thing. Oscar and Teddy were soul mates. That was true love if I ever saw it. It didn’t diminish or tarnish over all those years. I can’t go home without saying that.”
“Stop romanticizing Oscar and me, Lila,” said Teddy. “I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but really, it was as complicated and messy as any relationship between two people always is.”
“Like I said,” Maxine said, “I have heard enough about Oscar for one lifetime. I don’t care if he and Teddy floated in fairy dust and little red cinnamon hearts together, I’ve had it with my fucking brother and all of you lovelorn girls who fell for his bullshit.”
“Good-bye,” said Teddy, pushing her chair back, standing up, smiling enigmatically. “Thanks very much for all the whiskey.” She walked toward the door with her head held high and disappeared through it.
Lila fluttered around, gathering her pocketbook, hooking it through her arm. At the door, she turned and said, “Abigail, I would love to have lunch with you someday, but of course I understand if that’s impossible. Good-bye, Maxine.”
After the door had closed behind Lila, Maxine made a harrumphing noise that might have been just her clearing the phlegm from her throat.
“That was very tense,” said Abigail.
“You were on their side,” Maxine said.
“I said exactly what I thought,” said Abigail. “I was being honest.”
“I find it very interesting,” said Maxine, “that this seemed to involve agreeing with them most of the time.”
“What about the things you said to me? Calling me a yellowbelly in front of Teddy! What sort of loyalty is that, Maxine?”
Maxine bunched up her mouth, looking away from Abigail and at Ethan. “What do you make of all these crazy old bats, Ethan?” she said loudly.
Ethan clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Abigail said nothing.
“I bet you think we’re all out of our trees,” Maxine told Ethan.
“I’m not out of my tree,” said Abigail.
Maxine looked at her sister-in-law. “Well, sometimes I think I must be completely out of mine,” she said. It was as close to an apology as she had ever come.
“What did Moe Treitler say about Oscar that was so terrible?” Abigail asked, forgiving her grudgingly but completely, as always.
“Oh,” said Maxine. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t. I don’t know whether it’s true, for one thing. I only know what Moe told me.”
“Well, so tell me and I’ll take it with a grain of salt.”
Maxine called out, “Katerina!”
“Yes,” came a faint voice from the other end of the loft.
“Did you put those tefillin in the safe?”
“Yes,” came the stoic answer.
Maxine grimaced at Abigail. “I’m wrung out. That little meeting was goddamned debilitating.”
“Ethan,” said Abigail, wrung out herself, quailing at the thought of getting Ethan downstairs, hailing a taxi, getting him into it, then getting him out of it onto the sidewalk on Riverside Drive and into their building’s front door and elevator and finally their apartment, “it’s time to go home.”
Ethan said, “Unghhh.” His eyes were fixed on the ceiling now. His hands had come to rest on his thighs, still fluttering, like birds landing after a storm.
Nine
The next morning before breakfast, after a night of odd and upsetting dreams (one of which was about playing Scrabble with Ethan and having to pretend “eeokiys” was a word), Abigail got out the Manhattan White Pages, found a “Treitler, M” on Greene Street, and, without stopping to consider whether or not she might be opening a can of worms, dialed the number.
An hour later, her doorbell rang.
“Abigail Feldman,” said an ancient man in a slightly tattered black suit, a tattoo of a spider on his cheek. Shoulder-length greasy gray hair sprouted from his skull-like head. “You look just the same.”
She stared at him while he grinned at her. He was missing a front tooth.
“It’s Morris!” he said puckishly. “Moe Treitler.”
“Moe Treitler,” she said. Moe Treitler had always been on the stout side, stout and pink and somehow juicy.
“Esophageal cancer,” he said. “That’s why I look like this; I’m being eaten up from the inside. All those cigarettes finally bit me in the ass.”
“Moe!” Abigail said, recognizing him now by his breathy voice and hepcat manner, his glinting no-goodnik eyes. “Come in, come in.”
He followed her back to the kitchen, where Ethan sat at the breakfast nook. Morris chucked him under the chin and slid in next to him. “Ethan,” he said. “It’s been a fuckin’ lifetime, but you look just the same, too.”