After Melanie Read online

  ‘Yes. Yes, she is,’ Judith said.

  She turned away. She had not lied. The small cemetery where Melanie was buried, her grave marked by a simple pink marble gravestone (pink, always pink – in death as in life), was only a few miles north of their home. It would not cost them an arm and leg to visit her. Unlike Mike Andrews and his wife, she and David did not visit their daughter together.

  She knew when David had been to the grave because he left small, smooth pebbles on the pink marble to mark his visitation. She had found one there on the day she planted a small rose bush which the nursery had assured her would bear pink blossoms in high summer. There had been yet another smooth stone there a week later and she had placed a minute splinter of heart-shaped black slag beside it. There was, as yet, no blossom on the rose bush.

  ‘Well, I bet your husband will be glad of the space,’ Mike Andrews went on, indifferent to her silence. He whipped out his metal tape measure. ‘Shelves along this wall. You don’t want them near the window. And how big a cabinet?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask my husband.’

  ‘What kind of wood?’

  ‘Dark. Walnut maybe?’

  ‘I’ll bring you some samples. I guess your husband will want to see them.’

  ‘Yes. Good.’

  They arranged a time when he would return. He stared at the room again before he left. ‘A great space,’ he said approvingly. ‘My daughter’s room was this color – a kind of pink. The wife kept it that way. Reminds her of Edie, she says, and pink is OK for a sewing room. But not for a man’s office. You going to paint the walls or panel them?’

  ‘I haven’t decided,’ she replied tersely.

  She wanted him gone, this pleasant man whose married daughter had moved to Pittsburgh. She wanted him out of the barren room so that she might press her face against the cold pink walls and weep herself into calm.

  He left, but she did not weep. Instead, she hurried to her car, remembered the nightgowns, returned to the house, thrust them into a bag and drove to the thrift shop.

  It was less crowded than on the previous day.

  ‘No pay day. No welfare checks,’ Suzanne explained. ‘It’ll give us a chance to sort through the new donations. They come in heavily at this time of year. Spring cleaning, you know.’

  She led Judith into a storage room where cartons and shopping bags overflowed with clothing and household items. Mountains of books tied together with cord were shoved against a wall. An entire Encyclopedia Britannica formed an uneasy tower, oddly topped by a huge sad-eyed panda, its seams leaking discolored stuffing.

  ‘We toss the toys and give most of the donated books away,’ Suzanne said. ‘No one wants them. There’s no market for used books.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Judith said drily. ‘What about the encyclopedia?’

  ‘They’re obsolete. Everything’s on the internet. You must know that. You’ve got kids …’ Her voice trailed off. Her cheeks blazed. She had remembered too late that Judith no longer had kids. Only a dead daughter and a grown son.

  Judith stared at her. ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know that. Our children loved our encyclopedias. Brian loved the maps in our Britannica. He traced them for school reports and he sometimes studied them even when it wasn’t a school project. Melanie was addicted to “The Book of Stories” in our very old Book of Knowledge. Twenty volumes. My mother bought them with coupons she cut out of the newspaper. The internet can’t replicate that.’

  She marveled that her voice did not tremble, that she could speak of Melanie, in a room cluttered with the detritus of other people’s lives. She turned away from Suzanne and lifted the first volume of the Britannica. The vellum binding was unmarked and soft to her touch, the pages intact.

  ‘It’s in very good condition,’ she said. ‘I think it might sell.’

  ‘All right. If you can find a place for it.’

  Suzanne, recovered from her brief embarrassment, had moved on and stood beside a plastic bin. ‘This is full of Judaica. You’ll be shocked at what people give away.’ She held up a silver Seder plate, a yellowing embroidered challah cloth, a kiddush cup dark with grime which she dropped on to the Seder plate. The metallic clang jarred. Judith thought of the woman who had embroidered the challah cloth, the man who had lifted the kiddush cup each Sabbath eve, of the family who had celebrated the Seder.

  Emily Dickinson’s lines sprang to mind: If I should die, And you should live, And time should gurgle on.

  Of course, time would always gurgle on. Lives ended, the treasures of the dead were discarded, once-precious items were sent to charity shops, to be picked up and set down by indifferent browsers. And time, always and ineluctably, gurgled on. She was glad now that the furnishings of Melanie’s room were not lost to an anonymous gurgle but were in the room of silver-haired Nancy’s daughter, Lauren.

  Suzanne’s voice intruded. ‘Customers are coming in. You see to them and I’ll start sorting through this stuff,’ she said as she lifted the challah cloth and tossed it aside. ‘Stained. I wish people wouldn’t give us things that aren’t in good condition. When donations come in, make sure you accept only things that are saleable – you know, gently used. You may have to be firm when you refuse. Tactful but firm.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Judith said, amused by Suzanne’s officiousness.

  A slow but steady parade of donors wandered in throughout the morning. Young women in tennis dresses, carrying shopping bags of clothing, smiled up at her and glanced down at their watches. They were all in a hurry, eager to get to the courts and manage a few sets before their children returned from school. They did not have the time for Judith to examine the contents of their bags and they smiled brightly when she asked the mandatory question. ‘Everything in good condition? Everything gently used?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They explained that they were giving away their children’s outgrown clothing, shirts their husbands no longer wore, clothing they themselves had tired of. One young mother plucked a white tutu, the price tag still dangling, from her overflowing Bloomingdales bag.

  ‘See. Brand new,’ she told Judith. ‘Who knew she would give up ballet before I even removed the price tag?’

  ‘Yes,’ Judith murmured. She thought of Melanie’s pink tutu and her never-worn white tennis dress, that price tag also still in place.

  Who knew she would die before I even removed the price tag? she thought bitterly, even as she smiled at the woman whose daughter had refused ballet.

  ‘Some little girl will be glad to have it,’ she said and turned to the next donor.

  Every donation was gently used and laundered, the scent of detergent wafting out of the shopping bags. Others were shrouded in the clear plastic of dry cleaners. Judith asked the estimated value, wrote out receipts, nodded her thanks.

  There were cartons of crockery, offerings of pots and pans, carried in by middle-aged women whose faces were still masks of grief.

  ‘From my mother’s house. She died a few weeks ago.’

  ‘From my mother-in-law’s kitchen. We had to place her in a home. Dementia. She can’t even remember my husband’s name.’

  ‘Sad.’

  The mother-in-law with dementia had had wonderful taste in ceramics. Judith fingered a set of cream-colored egg cups, a collection of rainbow-colored ramekins, all selected with a discerning eye by a once-sophisticated woman who no longer knew her son’s name. The danger of living too long, Judith thought. The scales of life were unevenly balanced, weighted down by those who lived too long and those who died too young.

  She looked up from writing the receipt, handed it to the woman who had delivered the ceramics, and was relieved to notice that only one donor remained. She smiled at a man who looked very familiar. Her memory jolted into gear and she realized he was Jeffrey Kahn, a former neighbor whom she had not seen for many years. A pleasant man, she recalled, with a pleasant wife, Sylvia, a cultivated woman who spoke English with a charming accent. Jeffrey
was a doctor – an ophthalmologist, she thought.

  She and David, in years long past, had occasionally socialized with the Kahns – a casual situational friendship that had withered when Jeffrey and Sylvia moved to a northern exurb. She noted that he had aged but was not much changed. He was still thin, his features sharp, laugh lines rimming his closely set gray eyes. His thick hair was dark and only lightly tinged with silver.

  ‘Jeffrey, how good to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Good to see you too, Judith,’ he replied. ‘I hadn’t expected to find a familiar face here.’

  ‘How is Sylvia?’ she asked.

  He averted his gaze and was silent for the briefest of moments. He clasped and unclasped his hands over the small carton he had placed on the counter.

  ‘I don’t suppose you heard. Sylvia died two months ago. Cancer. Uterine cancer,’ he added, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

  She stammered, hesitated and wondered what more she might say. She herself had not found words of condolence to be comforting, but she was aware that he was waiting, perhaps paralyzed by her awkward silence, or perhaps by his own awkward sorrow.

  ‘She was so lovely, such a charming woman,’ she offered now, aware of the uselessness of her words. She remembered the futile sentences spoken by visitors who had paid condolence calls during Melanie’s shiva.

  Melanie was such a pretty girl. So bright. So lively.

  She was such a smart child.

  So outgoing.

  Such sentiments, meant to comfort, had pierced her heart, compounded her sorrow. She had repeated them to Evelyn, clutching the therapist’s box of Kleenex. ‘Does it matter if she was pretty, bright, lively? Why do they say that? Dead is dead.’

  She would not blame Jeffrey Kahn if he railed against the words she had chosen. Lovely. Charming. Accurate adjectives. Sylvia had been lovely and she had been charming, but that was of no importance. Dead is dead. Sylvia’s charm and loveliness were no longer.

  But Jeffrey nodded and smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, she was,’ he said. ‘Charming and lovely. Thank you for saying that, for remembering her that way.’

  She was moved by the graciousness of his response. She should have said as much to those visitors when they spoke to her of Melanie. She should have thanked them for remembering her daughter as they did. Melanie, in their memories, would forever be pretty, bright, lively, just as Sylvia Kahn was remembered as a lovely and charming woman.

  ‘Actually, it’s because of Sylvia that I’m here,’ he said. ‘Because of her things.’ He pointed to the small carton. ‘You probably don’t remember, but she had a passion for jewelry. Some of it is quite nice and the girls and I thought you might want to sell it here.’

  ‘The girls?’

  ‘Yes. Beth and Amy. Our daughters. You remember them?’

  ‘Of course. They were small girls when I last saw them. It’s been years.’

  ‘No longer small girls. Busy young women. They both live in California now – Amy’s married with a baby, and Beth is in her last year of med school. They stayed on after the funeral and the shiva and tried to help me get organized. They wanted to go through Sylvia’s things. They did what they could but they hardly made a dent. There is so much in her closets, her drawers. Sylvia took care of her things, never discarded anything. At least I’ve sorted through some of the jewelry. That’s what I have here.’

  He flipped open the lid of the small carton and Judith stared down at a tangle of intertwined beads, glittering rhinestone pins, tarnished silver bracelets and chains. She reached in and lifted a green enamel brooch in the shape of a butterfly.

  ‘Pretty,’ she murmured, and placed it on the counter.

  Intrigued, she rummaged through the carton, plucked out a ring rimmed with blood-red gemstones, a trio of silver bracelets, a mother-of-pearl cameo.

  ‘Some of this may be valuable,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. The girls didn’t want them. I don’t want them. At least if you sell them here, the money will help the synagogue.’

  ‘Yes. That’s true.’

  She toyed with a malachite necklace, wound it about her wrist and set it down. ‘Jeffrey, do you mind if I don’t give you a receipt today? I have no idea what all this is worth. I’d want someone with a little more experience to estimate it.’

  Suzanne Brody – cool, calculating Suzanne – would know what to do. She would judge each piece, perhaps bring them to a jeweler for appraisal.

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. But I wonder if I could ask a favor of you. Sylvia’s clothes.’

  ‘Sylvia’s clothes?’ she repeated and looked at him in puzzlement.

  ‘Her clothes. I hoped that someone from the thrift shop could help me sort through them. She had a huge dressing room, built-in closets full of suits, coats, dresses. Shoes. Boxes and boxes of shoes, some of them barely worn. Handbags. Drawers and drawers of stuff. Too much for me to cart down here. It would be so helpful if you or someone else could go through her things, pick out what you think you can sell and arrange to get everything over here. It’s just an idea, but I don’t know what else to do. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but I’d be grateful for the assistance and it could bring the shop some revenue. Actually, lots of revenue. Sylvia only bought the best and, as I said, she took wonderful care of everything. If you could help …’ His voice trailed off and he averted his eyes as though embarrassed by his request. He was not a man at ease with asking favors.

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘And I’d be glad to do it. It’s just that I’m a little overextended right now.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Your teaching schedule. I should have realized.’ He stepped back as though retreating from his request.

  ‘Actually, I’m on sabbatical but … well, there are other things.’

  She thought to tell him about Melanie, to trade a death for a death, but she remained silent. The Kahns had moved before Melanie was born. He had probably not known of her birth. What, then, would be the point of telling him of her death?

  ‘Look, let me talk to someone here and I’ll figure out my own schedule. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you and see what I can arrange,’ she said.

  ‘Great.’

  He handed her his card. She had not been wrong. He was an ophthalmologist.

  ‘You’re still practicing?’ she asked.

  ‘Three days a week. Since.’

  ‘Since,’ she repeated, strangely gratified to note that he too spoke in the abbreviated cryptography of the newly bereaved. Since. Before. After. He scrawled his home phone number on another card.

  ‘We’ll talk,’ he said. ‘Regards to David. And to Brian. He was in Beth’s class, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  She watched him leave the shop, glancing at his watch as he stood in the doorway, wondering perhaps how to fill the empty hours, reluctant to return to a silent house shrouded in cobwebs of memory. Even as she stared at him, a soft voice interrupted her thoughts.

  ‘Lady, please, lady. You said to come back today.’

  Emily, the young mother with skin the color of buttercups, smiled shyly at her. She wore a simple white blouse and a dark skirt. Her baby, wrapped in a makeshift gingham sling, rested against her breast. A wreath of woven white flowers crowned the infant’s shining black hair.

  ‘Perhaps you did not remember,’ she said. ‘The nightgowns.’

  ‘But of course I remembered,’ Judith assured her. She reached under the counter and handed the bag of flimsy garments to her.

  ‘Oh, this is so very good of you. I thank you.’

  She opened her purse but Judith brushed the bills she held out away. ‘My gift to you,’ she said. ‘No money.’

  Emily smiled. Her dark, almond shaped eyes glinted with gratitude. ‘How good of you. How kind of you,’ she said softly.

  ‘My pleasure,’ Judith replied and realized that she spoke the truth. She was pleased. ‘My name
is Judith,’ she added. ‘I hope you’ll come again. We get some very lovely things for babies. Beautiful babies like your Jane.’

  Emily bowed her head. A blush brushed her cheeks, turning them rose-gold. ‘Yes. Thank you, Mrs Judith. I will see you again. Soon.’

  ‘Soon,’ Judith replied.

  She remembered seeing a beautiful little smocked dress with matching tights amid the infant clothing and she hurried across the store to retrieve it. It was, she thought, perfect for a child who wore a garland woven of white flowers on her jet-colored silken hair.

  Suzanne Brody took over the counter and busily made an entry in an account book.

  ‘How did you manage with Doctor Kahn?’ she asked, barely looking at Judith. ‘I saw him come in. Poor man. I suppose he’s going through Sylvia’s things now.’

  ‘He left these pieces. I think some of them might be valuable.’

  She showed Suzanne Brody the carton of jewelry.

  Suzanne fingered a brooch, held a string of beads up to the light. ‘You’re right. Some of it could be worth something. We’ll get it all appraised,’ she said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He wants someone to go to the house – there are all his wife’s clothes, shoes, handbags, scarves, he said. Probably designer scarves.’

  ‘We’ve had requests like that before. We’ve done it. Sometimes it was worthwhile. Sometimes it turns out to be tons of shmattes.’ Suzanne frowned.

  ‘Sylvia Kahn’s things will not be shmattes,’ Judith replied.

  ‘Could you find the time to do it? Maybe one of the other volunteers could help you.’

  ‘I’ll think about it and let you know.’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’

  Suzanne emptied the register and opened her ledger. She did not look up when Judith left.

  Judith drove home suffused with an earned fatigue. She had always enjoyed the deserved exhaustion that followed a satisfying day of work. How strange that the thrift shop, at such a remove from her reference books and computer, her colleagues and her students, was affording her that familiar satisfaction. She would shower before David got home and she would prepare the dinner she had planned for the previous evening. A veal roast. The small red potatoes roasted with rosemary and thyme.