Chapter 1 Apple Cake #2
“Melanie,” Jeanne whispered.
“What is it?” Melanie asked. Already the tears. Always the tears.
“Half a bagel,” Jeanne said.
That sent them off again, scrambling to Rosenfeld’s. The two couples took Dan’s Volvo to Newton Centre, even as they told each other there was no way. Melanie, the doctor, said, “She’ll never eat a whole half a bagel.”
“Does that matter?” Dan demanded, as he drove.
“No,” Melanie said, “of course not.”
“If my mother wants a half a bagel. She’s getting half a bagel.”
Melanie said, “No poppy. She could aspirate the seeds.”
“Get her an egg bagel,” Steve suggested from the back seat.
Andrea corrected him. “She doesn’t like egg. She likes plain.”
By the time they returned with a dozen bagels, two large containers of whipped cream cheese, a side of lox, and a chocolate babka, Jeanne was sleeping again.
The nurses stopped predicting when Jeanne would drift away. Now they said that only Jeanne would know when it was time. Lorraine suggested that everybody share a moment. Was there unfinished business in the family? Sometimes people had to forgive each other before they could let go.
Tremulous, angelic, Sylvia told Helen, “I forgive you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Helen said. There was nothing to forgive. Simply the great divide between them. Helen told the truth, while Sylvia tried to paper over everything.
“Helen never listens to me,” Sylvia declared in front of the entire family assembled at Jeanne’s bedside. “I’m invisible to her.”
Amazed at this mixed metaphor, Helen said, “Obviously I see you.”
At this point Dan spoke up. “I think we need to focus on the time we have together.”
“Amen,” said Lorraine, and everyone was jealous, because she liked Dan best.
Look at you, thought Jeanne. All vying for attention! Even so, she forgave everybody. Good night, she told her family silently. Farewell. She wished she could send a blanket dispensation. After which she could stay, and they would leave.
In fact, she looked a little better. She drank some juice and tried a bite of toast. She asked for her violin. She couldn’t play it. She couldn’t even open the case, but she kept it on the table next to her bed.
Like a cat, Jeanne slept most of the day, but waking, she seemed a heightened, sharper version of herself. When Pam drove up the second time from Providence, Jeanne asked why she’d never married. When Melanie sniffled, Jeanne snapped, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Obviously, Melanie was sad because she was afraid of her own death. Jeanne could see it in her eyes. Jeanne’s sisters were just as bad. They looked at her and thought only of their own mortality.
But this was cruel! Not only unkind, untrue.
Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves.
Sylvia berated Lew all the way home to Weston.
Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking.
Lemon squares, brownies, sticky pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies.
Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in wax paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers.
Her husband, Charles, told her, “You should get some rest.”
What a thing to say! How could anybody rest?
Helen had not pursued a career like Jeanne, the music teacher, or three successive husbands, like Sylvia.
No, Helen had always been a homemaker. Now her family needed sustenance, so she doubled every recipe and froze half.
After all, there would be a memorial service, and shiva afterward.
Helen could already picture Jeanne’s students descending with their parents.
Sylvia hadn’t baked in years because Lew was diabetic.
As for Melanie and Andrea—what would they throw together?
A box of doughnut holes? No. Helen was the baker of the family.
What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch.
And yet, Jeanne kept on living. Her sisters held vigil; her sons came up on weekends. In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.”
“Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in their own way.”
Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet, and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room.
Sometimes Jeanne asked in a confused voice why everyone had come.
And then there were moments when she remembered and took charge.
She ordered Melanie to drive all the plants and flowers to Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
She told Wendy to put her guitar away. After this she asked to speak to her sons alone.
She lay in bed and watched Dan and Steve approach.
This is it, the two of them were thinking. “We’ll see,” Jeanne said.
Guilty, nervous, Steve asked, “What did you say?”
“These are my wishes,” Jeanne said.
Dan pulled up a chair, but Steve paced up and down.
“Stop that,” Jeanne said.
“What are your wishes?” Dan asked.
“First of all,” Jeanne looked at Steve, “don’t pace.”
“Second of all…”
They waited.
“No funeral.”
“A private burial?” Dan ventured.
“No burial.”
Astonished, Steve said, “You have the plot.” He might as well have added, and it’s paid for.
“I don’t want it.”
Steve protested, “But it’s next to Dad.”
“Yes, I am aware of that.”
Dan’s glasses were fogging up. He took them off and wiped them with the edge of his sweater. “You shared your life with Dad for twenty-five years.”
Jeanne looked at him sharply. “I certainly did.”
If Jeanne had another plan, she did not reveal it to her sons. If she had a good word to say about their father, she did not say it. Fiercely, she insisted there would be no burial. No memorial. Privately, she decided not to die.
Jeanne’s voice grew stronger as she kept living. Outside, the leaves were turning. AAA Sparkling Windows and Gutter Cleaning arrived with ladders. Still, she endured.
Uneasily, the family dispersed. Jeanne’s grandsons returned to school.
Jeanne’s sons and their wives went back to work.
Even Melanie stopped crying. Her mother-in-law was a medical miracle.
She was going to outlast them all. Only the nurses kept the faith.
Lorraine said that sometimes older people held on for an occasion.
They willed themselves to stay alive for one final milestone. A wedding. A grandchild’s graduation.
No one could think of a milestone, apart from Richard’s divorce. Nobody was marrying or graduating. Everyone had shared a moment. Nieces and nephews and grandchildren and…Wait! They had forgotten Phoebe, writing poetry in Michigan, refusing to fly.
Melanie and Dan spoke to Phoebe on the phone. They called her from Jeanne’s house, and then Melanie called again from the car as Dan drove home. She talked to Phoebe about respect and compassion—thinking about others, not just the earth.
Meanwhile, Helen and Sylvia kept coming every day, baleful, fearful, sorry for their lot. Helen wanted to bring her rabbi to the house.
“No rabbis,” Jeanne said. “No members of the clergy.”
“Well, what would you suggest?” Helen demanded.
Sylvia cried, “How dare you scream at her?”
“Only one of us is screaming,” Helen said.
Sylvia left the room, and then she left the house.
Maybe she raised her voice at times. Maybe she felt overwhelmed.
The situation was overwhelming. Jeanne’s death unimaginable, and now—even worse—postponed.
There was nothing to be done, and yet Helen managed to do it.
As usual, she took over everything. Sylvia was up all night; she was so upset.
“It’s all about Helen,” Sylvia told her husband, Lew.
“Her plan, her rabbi, her stale old pecan bars.”
That weekend the family reconvened. They sat with Jeanne and paced the hall while she was sleeping. The house was desolate, the air stale until Sylvia and Lew arrived with fresh-baked apple cake, warm from the oven, fragrant in its pan.
Heads up, suddenly alert, Jeanne’s huge grandsons sniffed the air. Can I have a piece? Can I have some?
Sylvia turned the cake out on a plate in the kitchen and sliced big wedges for the boys.
Then Dan and Melanie had pieces, as did Steve and Andrea.
In the dining room, Helen’s defrosted brownies, pecan bars, and almond cookies remained untouched.
Helen’s husband, Charles, took a brownie out of loyalty, but he slipped into the kitchen for Sylvia’s cake.
“I smell baked apples,” Jeanne whispered in the studio. The bed seemed to swallow her up, and yet she spoke. She scented Sylvia’s cake.
“It’s my recipe,” said Helen. “I gave that recipe to Sylvia twenty years ago.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Jeanne. “She bakes a very good apple cake.”
“I bake the same one! I brought you apple cake last week!”
“I know, but I like hers better.” Jeanne said.
Helen marched into the kitchen and gazed at the last crumbs of Sylvia’s cake. Zach and Nate were eating standing up. Melanie and Dan, Steve and Andrea, Sylvia and Lew were eating at the table. Then Helen caught her own husband throwing away a paper plate.
“Et tu, Charles,” Lew said.
“You used my recipe,” Helen told Sylvia.
“Yes, I did,” Sylvia replied with such an air that even Zach and Nate knew she meant What’s it to you?
The next day, Sylvia brought homemade jelly rolls, soft sponges rolled with tangy apricot, dusted on top with coconut flakes.
She had not baked jelly rolls in fifteen years, and the whole family fell upon them.
Even Lew, who had to be careful, took a tiny piece.
Only Helen and Jeanne abstained. Helen would not, and Jeanne could not partake.