A Week as Andrea Benstock
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: Arbor House
- ISBN: 978-0-87795-100-1
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «A Week as Andrea Benstock». Краткое содержание книги:
They could still hear the phone as they got into Andrea’s car. But it wouldn’t be Mark, she told herself. There was no reason to think it was Mark.
Mother and daughter kept up an effortless conversation on the drive to the cemetery. When the main gates came into view they fell silent. As Andrea turned the car into the cemetery she said, “You’ll have to tell me where to go. I’d be completely lost.”
“They gave me a map when I was here before. A little man offered to show me the route but I told him I would find it myself. I remember he had something wrong with one of his eyes. I have the map somewhere in my bag but I think I can remember. Keep bearing left until I tell you different.”
They drove slowly, and in silence. The spring weather had brought other visitors to the cemetery. They were mostly women, and most of them had come alone. Signs of spring, Andrea thought. The trees begin to leaf out, the spring bulbs push up out of the soil, the birds come north again. And the widows emerge from their dark houses and swim upstream to graveyards.
“The next fork to the right. And there it is, on the left just beyond those trees.”
The grave was situated in one of several Jewish sections of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The double plot of which he now occupied the southern portion had been purchased by David Kleinman in 1961. He had never mentioned this fact to his wife or daughter; they learned about the plot when they opened the strongbox in which he kept his insurance policies and a copy of his will. (The will was unremarkable — after token bequests to his office staff, everything was left outright to his widow.) Sylvia Kleinman was not surprised that a burial site had been purchased. Her husband had been meticulous about putting his affairs in order since that first heart attack. What did surprise her was that he had made this purchase so long ago. But it was not an enormous surprise, and certainly not out of character. It was very much the sort of thing David Kleinman might do on his own initiative, and, having done it, the sort of thing he would never dream of discussing. The grave was as yet unmarked. In some months a stone would be put in place. More orthodox Jews waited a specified number of months before raising the stone, and did so at an unveiling ceremony accompanied by a brief memorial service. But there would be no ceremonial unveiling for David Kleinman. When the stone was ready it would be installed without a fuss.
Andrea knew what the stone would look like. She had been consulted when the stonecutter had been commissioned to prepare it. It was to be a very plain rectangular block of granite. The name Kleinman would be engraved across the top; below it her father’s name would be on one side, along with the year of his birth and the year of his death. The other half of the stone’s face would be blank. For the time being.
Andrea parked the car a few dozen yards from the grave site. She walked around to open the door for her mother and took her mother’s arm when she emerged. She could read very little expression in her mother’s face. The features were masked, withdrawn, remote. They walked together across the asphalt roadway and over the grass.
She found herself walking very carefully, setting her feet down gently, as if she were walking not on the dead but on the living. At the last interment she’d attended before her father’s, it had struck her that there ought to be walkways between the graves. When hours later she’d mentioned the thought to Mark he’d called her inconsistent. “You were just saying what a waste of space cemeteries are. How everybody should be cremated and the ashes scattered. Now you want aisles between the graves.” And of course she had been inconsistent, and of course burial was stupid, and of course embalming was stupid, and the disgusting cosmetology of undertakers was stupid. But if you were going to bury someone, and then walk so matter-of-factly over their bones—
So now she walked lightly, as if the dead might groan beneath her weight.
She did not know how long they stood together, heads bowed, at the side of the grave. It seemed to her that she ought to order her thoughts somehow. There were prayers to be said at gravesides, but she did not know any and would not have said one if she had.
Was there anything that she could say to her father? If there were important things they should have told each other, it was past the time for that now. And so she just let her thoughts find their own paths. It was a beautiful spring day, certainly. Many of the graves were planted with flowers and flowering shrubs. They would do the same, but not until the stone was up.
She closed her eyes and heard birdsong not far off. When she was in high school a boy in one of her classes had been an enthusiastic bird watcher. He used to go to the cemetery early in the morning before dawn to look at birds through binoculars. He had told her this once, and she had shown polite interest while thinking privately that anybody who would get up in the middle of the night to chase sparrows had to be out of his tree himself. Then one day, painfully shy but resolute, he had invited her to accompany him on his next birding expedition. She couldn’t now remember what excuse she had offered. She’d stammered out something. What she did remember was the look on his face. She had evidently figured prominently in his fantasy life, while he had scarcely existed for her, and she had consequently managed to be unintentionally cruel.
Funny. She hadn’t thought of him in years. And, considered in retrospect, the prospect of walking through the still cemetery at dawn was attractive, even romantic. At the time she’d thought it creepy and ridiculous.
“Andrea, wait for me in the car, please. I want to be alone for a few minutes.”
She hesitated for just a moment, then turned and walked back to the car. A cloud had slipped across the sun and she felt a chill. She got into the car, sat behind the wheel with her arms folded over her breasts. Through the windshield she watched her mother, a still figure on a painted landscape.
Her mother stood beside the man at whose side she had spent two-thirds of her entire life. And she stood where she would someday lie. Andrea felt something very chilling in the idea of standing upon a spot and knowing you would one day be buried there. And when the tombstone was in place, with one side left blank for her mother’s name — oh, it was chilling, of course it was, and yet in a strange way there was something almost comforting about it.
In a month she and Mark would celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. At any rate they would mark the occasion. A celebration might not be entirely in order.
In thirty-two years she and Mark would be married as long as her parents would have been married today. If they were alive.
If they were still married.
She shuddered, more at the second thought than the first, and fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes. Was it proper to smoke in the cemetery? But she was in her car, for God’s sake. It shouldn’t matter, should it?
She lit a cigarette, glanced at her mother, who did not seem to have changed position at all. The woman lived each day with grief for company, but for all that Andrea felt sorry for her, today she envied her. She had lost something infinitely precious, to be sure, but for thirty-nine years she had had something precious.
While Andrea, for the first time in seven years, was forced to consider the possibility that her marriage might fail.
And that of course was why she found Mark’s infidelity so impossible to cope with. She could not reasonably be upset at the fact that he might find someone else attractive. If she could only have believed Eileen’s argument — that men committed adultery in a casual and meaningless manner — then she could probably have accepted it readily enough, could have overlooked it as Eileen had advised her to do.