His father first, and then, suddenly, his mother. His father had been dying for years, had been dying for as long as Epstein could remember, but his mother had been scheduled to live forever, for how else would she have the last word? Epstein had buried his father, had arranged everything—the relatives, however distant, wanted a copy of his eulogy, so moving had it been. But there was nothing he could give them, he had spoken extemporaneously. Jonah and his cousins shouldered the pine casket. “Stand on the boards!” the gravedigger had shouted. “On the boards!” He’d laid two thin wooden planks lengthwise across the grave, on which they were to perch to lower the coffin on ropes. But they were struggling under the weight, slipping in the loose soil in their dress shoes, and could not see where they were putting their feet. That night, after everyone had left the shiva, Epstein wept alone, thinking of how his father had looked down at his naked, bruised legs in the hospital bed, and asked, “How did I get so banged up?”
But he could still operate the heavy machinery of grief, and steered his mind away from the places that would cause the most destruction. He had arranged for the religious relatives to fly in from Cleveland and California, had arranged for someone to say the daily kaddish, had already paid the mason for the headstone a year in advance, but in all of this arranging he had failed to arrange his mother, who had always made her own arrangements, who did not want his help, who had never wanted anyone’s help, who had been offended at its mere offer, and who one morning, not even three months after his father died, riding down alone in the Sunny Isles elevator, had had a massive heart attack and died. Passed away in the back of the ambulance, in the presence of no one but the paramedic.
Then Epstein had had to do it all over again. He went through the motions, as if in a fog. People spoke to him, but he barely heard, and wandered off in the middle of their condolences; all was excused, he was in shock. Three weeks later, he flew back to Miami alone. His sister Joanie wanted no part in dealing with their parents’ things. As with everything, she left it to her accomplished brother. Sorting through their belongings, he knew himself to be searching for something, a form of evidence for what he had always known but had never been told, because to utter even a word about his father’s past had been against the laws of their world. Even now, as he looked with trembling hands through his father’s drawers, he could not speak to himself about the wife and small son his father had lost in the war. He couldn’t say how he knew. The origins of his knowledge—no, it was not knowledge, it was innate sense—were inaccessible to him. But for as long as his memory went back, he had been in possession of this sense. It had informed everything. Without touching it, his consciousness had nevertheless grown around this vacuum of his father’s original son.
In the end, he’d turned up nothing except for a shoebox of old photographs of his mother that he’d never seen, belly round with him, hair whipped by wind, face browned by the Middle Eastern sun, the lines of her features deep and strong. Already operating according to her own system. She was not disorganized but did things her own way. Her internal order was hidden to others, and this gave the impression that she was impenetrable. Even after a lifetime with her, standing knee-high in boxes in her closet or going through her papers, Epstein could not crack the code. Conchita was no help either. He made his own instant coffee while she moped in the bedroom and called Lima on the house phone. In the cupboard, behind the boxes of unopened tea, Epstein had noticed a tin from Ladurée—a gift from him, bought on one of his trips to Paris. Opening it, he discovered what appeared to be a few serrated gray beads at the bottom, but when he poured them into his palm, he saw with surprise that they were baby teeth. His own teeth, which his mother, whom he’d never known to possess a grain of sentimentality, had kept for sixty years. He was deeply touched, tears sprang to his eyes; he had the desire to show them to someone, and was about to call Conchita into the room. But his phone rang just then, and he’d slipped them distractedly into his pocket and only remembered them too late, after he had sent the pants to the dry cleaner’s. Wincing, he thought now of the tiny teeth washing down through the drainpipes with the wastewater.
The rabbi drew his sermon to a close, and the blessing was made over the challah. Klausner tore hunks from the braided loaves, stabbed them into a dish of salt, stuffed one into his mouth, and tossed the rest around the table. It was a form of crudeness Epstein had been known to praise: the crudeness of passion that refuses to dull itself with manners. What good had etiquette ever done anyone? So began the little speech he liked to give to Lianne on the long rides back from visiting her parents, the dense old growth of Connecticut unfurling outside the windows. A wrong turn had been taken in the human evolution, the result of the slow drain of necessity from life. Once survival was ensured, time had opened for frivolity and daft embellishment, and this led to the absurd contortions of propriety. So much useless energy spent meeting the standards of social manners, which in the end accomplish nothing but constriction and misunderstanding. Lianne’s family and their priggish formalities were the inspiration for his lecture, but once he’d gotten started, there was no stopping him until they’d pulled into the parking garage in Manhattan: humanity could have gone another way, leaving its inner self exposed!
Lianne, being unable to turn the tide of evolution, silently removed an issue of the New Yorker from her bag and began to leaf through its pages. It had always been that way with her. Epstein could never get through. Perhaps it was desire that had kept him there for so long: he had tried and tried to throw himself against that wall, too, to break through to her secret inner court. After a while, he lost his energy for the argument. His world was making him weary. Those were the months leading up to his announcement to Lianne that he could no longer remain married. When they were dining at the Four Seasons for her niece’s sixteenth birthday, a white-coated waiter had lifted his dropped napkin from the floor and returned it to his lap, and as he did, Epstein had felt an urge to jump to his feet and cry something out. But what? He’d imagined the diners turning to him in bewildered silence, the faces of the waitstaff tightening, the rippling curtains falling finally still, and so instead excused himself, and on the way to the men’s room instructed the ma?tre d’ to bring his niece the spun sugar dessert with a sparkler for a candle.