“Thank you for seating us here.” She spoke very softly so no one else might hear. “The Falkeses, Eleanor and Rupert, are the most charming people. I asked them their connection to the bride and groom. I didn’t recognize either of them. Eleanor said laughingly she was an old girlfriend of yours, ‘five small boys ago.’ I don’t know why you let her get away. Lucky for Anne. And the rest of us.”
For months after the wedding, Jim found himself thinking too often of Eleanor. He would buy flowers for his studio in the brilliant hues he knew she liked. For her twentieth birthday, he had taken her to a flower shop on Madison Avenue to buy her a dozen roses. He had pointed to some pale yellow ones. “No, no,” she said, laughing. “Those are flowers for good girls. I’m a wild anemone girl.”
When she called him, more than a year after his wedding, he found himself getting agitated. She wanted the name of a cardiologist. Her mother had had a silent heart attack and wasn’t doing anything about it. “She said she’d trust your recommendation,” Eleanor said. Jim gave her a name and said he’d call him for her.
“I can’t thank you enough,” she said.
“How about a movie?” he asked.
Eleanor paused. “I only go to movies in the afternoon,” she said.
“I can do that,” he said.
They made a date to see The Story of Adele H. the following Tuesday. They would meet at the theater.
Jim was early. When he wasn’t in surgery that week, he had thought of nothing else. “Do you ever think of the old days,” he asked her as they settled into their seats. “Who has time?” she said. “I’m up to my eyebrows in boys. Tell me about your work.” Jim shrugged. “Heart repair.”
After the movie was over, Jim suggested a quick supper. “Not possible,” she said. “Dinner is a command performance, for everyone, including Rupert.” She gave a half smile. “The boys sometimes compare me to their grandmother.”
“Let’s do this again sometime,” Jim said.
“Yes,” Eleanor said. She turned and walked away.
Six months later, Jim called to find out how Mrs. Phipps was doing. Did she like the cardiologist he had recommended? Eleanor apologized. “She died a month ago. Suddenly. She saw your colleague, Dr. Schwinn. He said she had a congenital defect. She could go anytime. I should have let you know. I’m sorry.” Jim didn’t invite her to another movie. He stopped buying flowers for his studio. Eleanor made a donation in Jim’s name to the Cardiac Center at Presbyterian Hospital.
—
Nathan Isaac Lehman Cardozo was born on Thanksgiving Day 1977. He had Jim’s dark hair and eyes and Anne’s sturdy build. Nate excited feelings in Jim he didn’t know he had; life took on meaning outside the operating room. He would die for him; he would live for him. Nate laughed whenever he saw his father, his whole body crinkling with happiness. Holding Nate to his chest, Jim would feel his heart miss a beat. Until Nate, he had disliked the overworked “heartfelt” metaphors his patients bandied about in the examining room, playing down their panic. Their “hearts in their mouths,” they spoke jokingly of themselves as “brokenhearted,” “heavyhearted,” “fainthearted,” “lighthearted,” “halfhearted.” Jim would nod and half smile, thinking, The heart is a muscle; if you want love, look to the brain. Nate upended his scientific literalism; he had stolen Jim’s heart.
For Nate’s first birthday, the Lehmans threw an afternoon party for all his aunts and uncles and cousins. They invited Jim’s parents. Mrs. Lehman insisted. “It’s practical good manners. If we include them, as we should, you may not have to see them again for two months.” Many small children cry at their birthday parties. Nathan, holding on to his mother’s hand, wobbled about the room, beaming and chirping, happily accepting coos and kisses from relatives. All the Lehmans agreed: Nate was the most charming baby they’d ever seen. Jim wondered if he too might have been that way had he been raised with different parents. He looked at his wife, beaming as brightly as her baby. He needed to thank her.
“It’s too bad Nathan isn’t blond and blue-eyed like his mother,” Mrs. Cardozo said to Mrs. Lehman as they watched their small grandson on parade. “He should have had Anne’s coloring and Jim’s body type. He’s so plump, don’t you think? And a bit plain.” Mrs. Lehman stiffened. It was a family rule: all babies were beautiful, all grandmothers doting. “?‘Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’ David Hume,” she said. Her tone was brisk but not openly hostile. “Also Shakespeare: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’?” She smiled, showing her teeth. Mrs. Cardozo fumbled with her hanky, coloring with anger at her hostess’s correction. She always felt at a disadvantage in the presence of the Lehmans, her Sephardic pedigree no match for their German pile. Blowing her nose, she massaged her grievance against the Lehmans. Arrivistes, thinking money was the same thing as class. She signaled to her husband it was time to leave. They missed the cake and candles.
The Lehman and Lewisohn grandchildren called their grandparents Oma and Opa, in the German fashion. It was an old family custom, going back to 1843, when their forefathers landed in the New World, “on die Maiblume,” Anne told Jim, only half joking. The only exception was one of Mr. Lehman’s great-aunts, who insisted on being called Grossmutter. “She was a Seligman,” he’d say, no other explanation being needed. Like all the old German Jewish banking families, the Lehmans and Lewisohns had married so determinedly among themselves, they’d become unhealthily inbred. By the fourth generation, first cousins who didn’t marry first cousins were the outliers, teased for marrying auslanders and diluting the bloodline. Anne’s parents had been second cousins; her grandmother’s had been first cousins. “My mother is also my second cousin once removed,” she explained to Jim. “That is true of my father as well.” She laughed. “My sisters and brother are also my third cousins.” When her sisters married Hungarian and Czech Jews, Mrs. Lehman was relieved. “Thank goodness,” she said to her husband. “I was expecting the next baby to be born with hemophilia or the Hapsburg lip.” Anne’s marriage to a Sephardic Jew was also regarded as a chromosomal boon, though not so groundbreaking. One of her father’s sisters had married a Mendes. Mr. and Mrs. Lehman weren’t ready yet for a Russian Jew but they knew one was coming. Marriages to gentiles would inevitably follow.
Money aside, not always possible, Jim’s parents took the position that he had married down. Certainly in the looks department, there was no comparison. “He looks like a Spanish prince, doesn’t he?” his mother would say when anyone told her how handsome he was. “Breeding will out.” In safe company, she’d add, with an air of triumph, “Anne and all the Lehmans are squat.” She asked Jim to have Nathan call her and her husband Grandmamà and Grandpapà, the accent landing on the last syllable, as an English child might say it. Jim agreed, Nathan couldn’t. Try as he might, the best he could manage, accents in place, was Ga-mà and Ga-pà. Jim was delighted. Nathan’s Ga-pà sounded like his marble-mouthed “good-bye.” “That’s my boy,” Jim said to Anne. “He announces he’s leaving as soon as he says hello.”