Chapter 1 Apple Cake #4
“She said bury me. She told the rabbi.”
“She didn’t believe in rabbis!”
“Does that mean he never existed?” Helen shot back. “Does that mean the conversation never happened?”
“Stop,” Dan begged, but they ignored him.
“As far as you’re concerned,” said Sylvia, “the only conversations that happen are the ones happening to you.”
Now Helen lost her temper. “I asked her to make plans, and you accused me of having no feelings! I talked about instructions because I knew this was going to happen!”
“She stated her wishes a thousand times.” Sylvia spoke with resolve. “She said she wanted to be scattered.”
“That is what she said,” Dan admitted.
“She never wavered,” Sylvia told Helen.
“She changed her mind!” Helen cried out, but nobody believed her.
Once Helen had been the sane one. Now they treated her as though she were delusional.
Sylvia had begun the insurrection. She’d waged this war for weeks.
Helen’s voice broke, even as she appealed to them all, “Jeanne talked to the rabbi and she talked to me and she said bury me, and that’s the truth! ”
Sylvia fixed her eyes on Helen. “Don’t get hysterical.”
But, of course, it wasn’t up to them. Dan and Steve were in charge, and they decided. There would be no burial, just a celebration of Jeanne’s life.
Privately, their wives spoke to Sylvia and Helen. They said the reception after the service would be catered, and for the sake of the family, they requested no homemade desserts. They asked Jeanne’s sisters to promise. No cookies, no pecan bars. Absolutely no cake.
“I will do whatever you decide,” Helen declared.
“And so will I,” said Sylvia.
Helen added, “I would never use an occasion like this to call attention to myself.”
—
No rabbis spoke at the celebration of Jeanne’s life.
Jeanne’s student Emily played Bach, and Dan spoke about how Jeanne’s music filled the house.
Steve talked about what he had learned from his mother.
“Don’t quit. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.
Don’t just stand there.” These were the lessons he remembered, although Jeanne’s actual words had been don’t pace.
In the front row of the funeral chapel, Sylvia wore tinted glasses. She didn’t think that she could speak. However, when the time came, she walked up to the lectern and the words began to come. She had written them on college-ruled paper.
“All my friends were jealous when she was born,” Sylvia said.
“But I didn’t even let them touch her. She was a perfect baby and an angel.
From the time she was born, she was my special charge.
I used to dress her and play with her. I was her teacher when we played school on the porch.
And this is why…this is why it’s so difficult… impossible to…”
Sylvia broke down, and her son rushed to the lectern to comfort her, which made her cry even more. How could he keep smoking after all this? How could Richard’s wife, his first love, leave him?
Lew was standing. He helped Sylvia to her chair, and she sat between the two of them, her husband and her son. The tears kept coming—until Helen began to speak.
“It is perhaps appropriate that I speak last, because I knew Jeanne longest,” Helen said.
“And yet I have no monopoly on my sister. Like every human, she belonged to many people, not just one. She had parents.” Helen stood at the lectern and stared straight at Sylvia.
“She had two older sisters. She was a beloved member of our family. Daughter, sister, mother, aunt, grandmother, friend. She was a musician. She was a teacher who spent countless hours instructing children. She was not sentimental, but she was giving.”
Now Sylvia took off her glasses. Now she wiped the last tears from her eyes.
“She did not love tradition,” Helen said, “but in her final days she spoke of God.”
“Not true!” Sylvia whispered to Lew, who took her hand.
“She talked about belief.”
Louder, Sylvia whispered to her husband, “That’s just not true!”
As Helen spoke, Sylvia rattled her notes, her own words left unsaid.
She longed to stand and finish her eulogy.
To deliver her bright version of Jeanne’s life, the true picture, unvarnished with religiosity, but she’d missed her chance.
Already Helen was speaking about eternity. Already she was reciting kaddish.
Sylvia wanted to jump up from her chair and drown out the prayer.
She whispered loud enough for those around her to hear, “This was not Jeanne’s wish!
” She turned to the mourners behind her and said, “This is exactly what Jeanne wanted to avoid!” Apart from that, she suffered in silence.
She would not ruin the memorial. She would never make a scene.
To close the service, Jeanne’s twelve-year-old student George played the meditation on a theme from Tha?s. He didn’t rush until the last cascading phrases at the end. Horse knows the way, Jeanne would have said.
After the celebration, the family convened at Jeanne’s house to sit shiva for one day, because no one could take off another week.
Silent, staring, Helen watched caterers set out quiche and crudités and sweet noodle kugel in a silver chafing dish.
Fresh fruit platters stood in for dessert, along with factory-made cookies and weak coffee.
In the living room, Melanie and Andrea tried to comfort friends shaken by Jeanne’s passing. Several confided that Jeanne’s death had prompted them to enjoy life while they could. Jeanne’s neighbors, the Auerbachs, were planning a cruise to the Galápagos Islands to see the tortoises.
In Jeanne’s studio, Dan and Steve and their cousins Pam, Wendy, and Richard talked about how they used to play wiffle ball together in the backyard. Someone asked Helen to look for the photo albums, but she did not respond. As for Sylvia, she was nowhere to be seen.
Only as the guests began to leave did Sylvia slip into the house. Sober, Lew followed, carrying a Bundt pan.
“Lew?” Andrea said in a warning voice. “What is that?”
Lew kept moving. He knew this was the nuclear option, and he felt culpable, but he loved his wife.
In the dining room, Sylvia turned out and sliced her fresh-baked apple cake. The caterers were packing up. Their chafing dishes were hardly cold when the house filled with the cake’s fragrance. Jeanne’s grandsons ran straight to the table. Chris appeared with Phoebe right behind him.
The scent of apples woke Helen from her trance. She marched into the dining room and saw the family eating; she knew what Sylvia had done. Eyes bright, mouth set, she turned and walked out again.
That was the end.
Melanie tried. Everybody tried. Nobody could reconcile Jeanne’s sisters.
This was all a misunderstanding, their children said.
Don’t be stubborn, their children pleaded.
Andrea said they only had each other now, but they refused to listen.
Dan said life was short. They didn’t care.
In fact, they knew it wasn’t true. Their lives were long.
Lorraine was right. Everybody mourned in their own way.
Phoebe wrote a poem, and Melanie did, in fact, start taking antidepressants.
Richard began dating a woman he’d met at a bar.
Pam adopted an Irish setter. As for Jeanne’s sisters, they would not forgive each other for her death.
Helen and Sylvia would not reconcile, even when the whole family gathered at Singing Beach in the spring to scatter Jeanne’s ashes in the ocean.
Wendy stood on the sand and asked the sisters, in Jeanne’s memory, to open their hearts and to embrace each other so that they might begin to heal, but no, not even then.