If you asked Herbie about his health, he’d answer with one word: “Perfect.” If you asked about his blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, he’d say, “Low,” “Good,” “Fine.” None of which was true. The fact is, Herbie Cohen is man as preexisting condition.
By the time he sold the Glencoe house in 1996, he was either treating or keeping an eye on a dozen maladies, including type 2 diabetes, chronic migraine, bad back. He was accident-prone. He was reckless behind the wheel. He took dumb chances. He dozed off and hit a tree, sliced his finger while cutting a bagel, fell off a chairlift while telling a story. He responded to each injury the way he believed a man is supposed to respond. He ignored it. Quoting Groucho Marx, he’d say, “Never complain, never explain.” He valued one quality above all others: the ability to work while hurt. He bragged about his pain threshold. Here was a man who fell asleep in the dentist’s chair during a root canal. If asked while lying in a ditch shot full of holes how he was doing, he’d say, “Fine, and you?” No matter what ailed him, he denied it. He’d never tell you what the doctor really said. According to him, every bill of health was a clean bill of health, every test negative. When I told him I was worried about him—no one could behave the way he behaved and last—he said what he always said: “Nothing can kill me.”
When he did have a close call—this happened with frequency—he’d focus not on the risk he’d taken but on the miracle of his survival. “If that didn’t kill me,” he’d say, after retaking control of the car, regaining consciousness in the hospital, or wrapping a tourniquet around his knee, “nothing will.”
He was a firm believer in ignoring symptoms, whether they be chest pains, a mysteriously swollen ankle, a lump on his neck. “If you ignore these things,” he said, “they tend to go away.” When it came to medical care, he had a paramount rule: avoid unnecessary surgery. “The hospital is the most dangerous place in the world,” he explained. “That’s where they kill you.”
It’s an ideology that nearly ended his life in 1992. At age fifty-nine, his heart began sending up flares. It started as dizziness. He felt shaky walking up hills. It did not even have to be a steep hill or a long hill. Any hill. Even the kind you’re not 100 percent sure is a hill. The world reeled when he reached the top. Little things looked big. Close things looked distant. There was sweat above his lip. He put his hands on his knees and stared at the ground, breathing hard, waiting for the landscape to settle.
Ellen: “What is it?”
Herbie: “Nothing.”
Ellen: “What are you going to do about it?”
Herbie: “Nothing.”
Herbie and Ellen were spending part of the year in Miami Beach, not in old Jewish North Miami Beach, but in booming Art Deco South Beach, where they’d bought an apartment. The sidewalk climbed as it went from the front door to Herbie’s favorite coffee shop, and it was in the course of that climb, as he went for his skim cappuccino and New York Times, that he was overcome by the light-headedness that got worse by the day. Though he always answered Ellen’s worried questions in the same dismissive way—“It’s nothing. I’m fine”—he must’ve known.
He had to sit down on the curb to catch his breath one morning. On another, as he was sitting down to catch his breath, his eyes rolled back and he slumped on the green spiky grass. Ellen was dialing 911 when he opened his eyes and closed her phone, saying, “Don’t. I’m fine.”
Ellen: “You’re not fine!”
Herbie: “I am fine. I promise.”
He believed the source of his trouble was not his heart but his weight. If he lost twenty-five pounds, he said, he’d be good. “Give me two months to get in shape,” he told Ellen. “That’s all I ask. After that, if I don’t have this fixed, I’ll go see a doctor.”
Ellen agreed on one condition: he could run on a treadmill at the gym, ride a stationary bike, use Nautilus machines, but he was not to put one foot on a StairMaster, which, as a result of a segment on CBS Sunday Morning, she thought of as “the widow maker.” As in a dream, she could see him slumped on its steps, sweat covered, dead. Herbie assented. No StairMaster.
His symptoms worsened even as the weight came off. On more than one occasion, he was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. Each time, when he regained his senses, he’d check himself out and return to his routine. His behavior was always backed by reason. He said he checked himself out of Mount Sinai Medical Center on Alton Road because “the doctors looked like bums.” He said he checked himself out of Coral Gables Hospital because his admission was based on a misunderstanding. “I wasn’t unconscious when you called the paramedics,” he told Ellen. “I was resting.” He said he checked himself out of Miami General because it was Christmas Day and the nurse rolled a ham into the cardiac unit and was serving slices to patients, and “What kind of hospital serves ham to heart patients?”
He went back on the road for work in the spring, which greatly expanded his range of hospital admission. By May, he’d been in and out of emergency rooms across the country. Later, when we learned of this—as per Herbie’s insistence, Ellen wasn’t talking—I suggested he write a Zagat guide to emergency rooms, an idea he did not appreciate. Meanwhile, he’d dropped fifty pounds via fasting and spartan workout. Though he believed he was making himself healthy, he was in fact summoning the very emergency he was working so hard to avoid. Irony. He was down to 165 pounds by July. He called it his “fighting weight”; it was more like his “dying weight.”
I had a job in Manhattan that summer. I got the message from my sister when I returned from lunch. It was marked “Urgent.” I’d never seen that box checked before.
Sharon was calm when I got her on the phone, but I could hear my mother crying in the background. Herbie had collapsed at the Watergate gym in Washington, D.C., where my parents lived part of the year. A trainer, having seen him go down, called an ambulance. He’d been admitted to George Washington University Hospital. “It’s bad,” Sharon told me. “Someone needs to be there, and you’re closest.” My mother and sister had been spending the week in Florida. My brother, Steven, who, like my sister, was an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, was in court.
I got off the phone, went to the street, and caught a taxi. Until that day, nothing very dramatic had happened in my life. It was my first emergency, and I had no intention of blowing it. I went straight to the airport and used my new credit card to buy a ticket I could not afford, then sat at the gate reading the opening pages of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.
This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can mean only one thing: she wants to have one of her serious talks. It will be extremely grave, either a piece of bad news about her stepdaughter Kate or else a serious talk about me, about the future and what I ought to do. It is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, yet I confess I do not find the prospect altogether unpleasant.
I was surprised by my calm. My heart did not race; my mind did not reel. I felt nothing. Why aren’t I panicking? I asked myself. Do I love my father? Do I love anyone? Am I some kind of psychopath?
I expected to find Herbie alone in a hospital room, fighting for his life, but he was surrounded by people when I got there, doctors and nurses who were laughing as Herbie and Larry, who’d beat me to the hospital, were telling the Moppo story. Herbie was connected to machines, and was wearing one of those smocks, but he had lost all that weight and was tan and looked better than he had in years. “Good, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, when I came in. “Tell these people, would you, that there really is a Who Ha and that there really is an Inky. They don’t believe us.”
Larry, having experienced multiple heart attacks and multiple surgeries before the age of fifty—he’d even written a book called “Mr. King, You’re Having a Heart Attack”—was what Grandma Esther would call “a real expert.” Sitting on the edge of the bed after the staff had cleared out, he told Herbie exactly what to expect. “Your aortic valve is failing, but you’ll soon have a new one. Maybe a pig valve, maybe titanium, though if it’s pig you’re probably going to want to get clearance from a rabbi, right? They’ll start by putting you so deeply under anesthesia it’ll be like you’re gone. Then they’ll cut you open, crack your rib cage, pop it like the hood of a car. They’ll stop your heart by covering it in ice and put you on a heart-lung machine. It’ll keep the blood flowing, the oxygen moving. The surgeon will take your heart out of your chest. Amazing, right? That guy who was just in here will be holding your heart in his hand! He’ll cut out the old valve and replace it with a new one, put your heart back in your chest, then get it restarted with a jolt of electricity, just like when you jump the Caddy.”
Herbie’s mood changed as Larry spoke, though Larry didn’t seem to notice. By the time my mother and sister arrived, he was gloomy and fighting with the doctors. It was Tuesday. They wanted to operate Thursday morning; it would take that long to assemble the best team. But Herbie had decided he did not want to be operated on in D.C. at all, but would instead fly to LaGuardia and get a cab to Cornell hospital, where my cousin David worked, because whatever is being done is being done better in New York.
The GW cardiologist at first refused to sign a release, then seemed to change his mind, saying, “Okay. I’ll sign it and even come with you to the airport.”
“Why?”
“Because someone will have to sign the death certificate.”
Ellen sobbed when the doctor said this, saying, “Oh, Herbie, you’re such a schmuck.”
Herbie fell back and sighed.
“Fine,” he said, staring at the wall. “Thursday morning.”
I left to check in at a hotel and take a shower. When I got back at 10:00 p.m., Herbie’s room was empty, his stuff was gone, and the bed was made. I was confused. Was I in the wrong room? Just then, Sharon came in holding a shredded T-shirt.
“What’s that?”
She stared at the shirt for a time, then said, “It’s Dad’s,” then burst into tears.
His valve had failed shortly after I left. He’d been rushed into emergency surgery.
“What about assembling the best team?” I asked.
“He was going to die,” said Sharon.
They’d taken him at 9:00 p.m. They were still operating when the sun came up in the morning. At 5:00 a.m., my sister and brother took my mom down to the cafeteria. I was alone when the nurse came in.
She said, “The surgeons can’t get your father off the heart-lung machine.”
“What does that mean?”
“They can’t get his heart beating.”
The door opened. It was my brother, sister, and mother. My sister looked at me and knew something was wrong. But before I could say anything, a second nurse stuck her head in and shouted, “It’s okay. He’s off the machine. He’s out of surgery.”
They wheeled him past on the way to the ICU. He looked lifeless, inanimate, cold, and blue. My weird detachment evaporated in an instant. I fell through the floor and back into reality. I nearly burned on reentry. Bile rose in my throat. I reeled, turned, ran—down the hall, down the stairs, through the lobby, and into the dirty light of morning, where I found a hedge and puked into it.
No. 42
I got a few hours of sleep at the hotel, then returned. It was early afternoon, though it’s always midnight in the cardiac ward. We were allowed to visit Herbie in twos. My mother and sister went first. I could see them through the windows of the heavy ICU doors. Ellen was bent over, touching Herbie as she spoke. Sharon had one hand on Ellen and another on the railing of the bed. They came out holding each other, crying.
Steven and I went in. Herbie was in a super-complicated hospital bed. There were wires and monitors. The machines had him. He looked the same as he had that morning: all death, no life; all body, no soul. He opened his eyes and gazed at us in confusion. He did not know who we were. He tried to talk, but was intubated. He’d repeatedly tried to pull out the tube, which is why his wrists had been tied to the bed.
“He doesn’t know what’s good for him,” a nurse explained.
Tall with long gray hair, this nurse became the focus of Herbie’s anger.
A sheet was thrown over his body, but it shifted and we could see the jagged scar. They’d given him a titanium valve and bypassed four of his arteries. Looking at him, I felt the way I’d felt the last time. Beds, walls, floor—it all began to spin. Steven grabbed my arm. I pulled away, turned, ran—past my sister and mother, through the hall, down the stairs, through the lobby, and back to the hedge.
Steven was waiting in the lobby when I returned.
We went into the coffee shop.
“You’ve got to control yourself,” he said.
“How do you do it?”
“Did you see the big tube going down his throat?”
“Yes.”
“I tell myself that Dad is Jacques Cousteau, and that the tube is connected to his oxygen tank, and that his eyes are wild because he’s swimming around a beautiful reef.”
Steven made swimming motions, then said, “Picture him that way, with bubbles coming up.”
From then on, whenever the room started to spin, I’d look at Steven and he’d make the swimming motion and I’d be okay.
Despite the ventilator, Herbie found ways to communicate. Using just his eyes, he persuaded Ellen to pour a bucket of water over his head. As Ellen started to do this, the gray-haired nurse rushed over and scolded her. As she went away in a huff, Herbie, though his arms were still tied to the bed, gave the nurse the finger with both hands, the so-called double bird, which is when I knew he’d recover.
He was taken off the ventilator and moved to a regular room. Once he was settled, Ellen went to the Watergate gym to retrieve the clothes and wallet he’d left behind. She was in a good mood when she left and in a fury when she got back. The gym manager told her he was the one who’d called the ambulance. Ellen asked where Herbie passed out. The manager said a trainer found him “slumped on the StairMaster.”
“You promised,” she screamed. “I told you, and you promised.”
Herbie swore he’d never used the StairMaster.
“Then why’d they find you there?”
Herbie was quiet for a moment, thinking.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was on the treadmill when I got dizzy. I pressed the emergency stop and got off. I must’ve stumbled up onto the StairMaster as I passed out.”
He said that he’d fainted while running on the treadmill several times that summer and was often hurled across the room. If you’d been working out at the Watergate on one of those days, there was a good chance you would have seen the world’s greatest negotiator in flight.
The week that followed surgery was tough. Herbie was an emotional whirligig, up and down, bright and bleak, warm and cold, sometimes elated to be alive, sometimes terrified not merely by how close he’d come but by how it made life seem arbitrary and meaningless. I could die now, or I could die in ten years. What’s the difference?
I sat by his bed for hours, reading him the newspaper or watching TV.
“You have to be more careful,” I said. “What would we do without you?”
I expected him to laugh when I said this or chuck me on the arm, but he wept instead. I’d never seen him cry like that. He said he could not stop thinking about how short he’d fallen from the goals he’d once set for himself. I scoffed at this, then told him what he had told his own father in the hospital: “You’ve done great.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “All I’ve ever done is what I think my father would have done.”
But maybe that’s all anyone has ever done.
No. 43
Herbie was prescribed sleeping pills the night before his release: Halcion, a Benzoid later taken off the market because it can cause temporary psychosis. Halcion is what made Philip Roth and George H. W. Bush go temporarily nuts. Such a narcotic does not change a person’s character, but brings out what’s normally been hidden, sublimated. It reveals a person’s true nature. President Bush made a mockery of himself on Halcion, falling and vomiting into the lap of the Japanese prime minister. Philip Roth was overcome by paranoia on Halcion, a mental state depicted in his novel Operation Shylock.
Herbie took his Halcion at 10:00 p.m., was asleep by 11:00 p.m., and was more fully awake than he’d ever been at 3:00 a.m. He got out of bed and walked through the hospital, and as he walked those endless Kubrickian halls, he was tormented by the unfairness of the world. How is it right, he asked himself, holding his smock closed and creeping so as not to arouse attention, that some patients have many flowers, while others have none? He spent the rest of that long night correcting the injustice, stealing daffodils and tulips from the flower-rich and leaving them at the bedsides of the flower-poor. Exhausted when he got under the covers at dawn, he slept the sleep of the righteous, believing that he’d finally achieved the important work of his life.
No. 44
His gloom returned as soon as the novelty of being back home faded. It fell on him like a cloud. Food lost its flavor, as did everything. The color drained from life, and what remained was a black-and-white simulation. It was as if he’d died on the table and woken in a different world altogether.
Depression is not uncommon in the aftermath of heart surgery. No one knows exactly why. Some believe it’s the lingering effect of the anesthesia, traces of which can remain in a person’s system for months. Some believe that the trauma of the surgery changes the chemical balance in the brain, that it can take up to a year to restore stasis. Some believe it’s simply the patient’s dawning realization of the human predicament revealed by the near-death encounter. Everyone knows they’re going to die, but a person who’s been through that knows it in a different way. In other words, there is knowing, and then there is knowing; there is understanding, and then there is accepting; it’s the difference between the what and the how.
Being a productive person means believing you might live forever, that there is a point to all this work and suffering, that some of the achievements might survive, but for those who have leaned over and looked down, such belief becomes exceedingly difficult. To continue on as before, they have to forget what they’ve learned, which seems to take about a year.
Herbie returned to the road, but without joy. He was going through the motions. Whereas he’d always seemed to move effortlessly through the world, you could now see him counting steps, making himself do it because there was nothing else to be done. Then, one day, he seemed better, lighter, happier. And the next day, he seemed happier still. About fifteen months after he’d collapsed, he took me for lunch at Duke Zeibert’s in Washington, D.C. Though he’d been told to avoid red meat and fat, he ordered a filet with a side of creamed spinach.
Me: “Are you crazy? That stuff will kill you.”
Him: “You’ve seen what I’ve been through. If that didn’t kill me, nothing will.”
No. 45
Herbie had soon reverted in every arena of life: diet, work, confrontation. He was back at full steam, giving hundreds of speeches a year, traveling all night to partake in negotiations. He’d given up cigars after he left the hospital, then, without explanation, began smoking again. When asked why, he’d say, “You’re crazy. I never quit cigars.” When we insisted, he said, “If I did quit like you say, I don’t remember it, which is the same as if I didn’t.”
Then he did quit, only, once again, he didn’t. I spotted him coming out of Nat Sherman’s cigar shop at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, carrying a box of Montecristos that he swore was a gift for a friend but he couldn’t remember which friend. He’d always been terrible at lying. He left evidence of secret cigar smoking everywhere. Ashes on his sweater, butts in his car. In Miami Beach, he listened to a radio show called Smoke This!? When saying goodbye to a guest or caller, the host of the show would wish that person “long ashes.”
He dissembled even when caught red-handed. You’d come upon him at a coffee shop on Lincoln Road, a cigar smoldering on a ledge nearby.
You’d say, “I thought you quit.”
He’d say, “I did quit.”
You’d point to the cigar on the ledge and say, “Then what’s that?”
He’d look at the cigar, do a double take, then say, “That’s not mine.”
Turning into Columbo, you’d say, “So, you’re telling me a man walked by here, placed a half-smoked cigar on a ledge behind you, then walked away, and you didn’t even notice?”
“Or woman.”
“What?”
“It could have been a woman.”
If seriously confronted—“You’re going to kill yourself!! Do you want to die?”—he’d respond in the way of Aesop, with a fable: “My father’s brother was named Itzhik. He was my favorite uncle. And Itzhik was sick all the time. Diabetes, heart disease, cholesterol. He was like the Danny Kaye sandwich at the Carnegie Deli, an old man with everything. Then he got throat cancer! Poor guy. They took out his voice box. He had to hold this metal device to his throat when he wanted to talk. It made him sound like an electric razor. We went to see him after the surgery. He was sitting up in bed when we got there, eating a corned beef sandwich. My father’s other brother, Nathan, snuck it past the nurses. Itzhik was on a strict diet. My father was furious and yelled at both brothers. Itzhik, who’d been enjoying this sandwich, put the metal device to his throat and said, ‘If you can’t have a good corned beef, then what’s the point of living?’”
No. 46
Meanwhile.
Grandpa Ben, looking to secure his legacy, had become a philanthropist in his old age, focusing most of his attention on Maimonides, a midsize hospital in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He gave millions to Maimonides, and even served as president. He was determined to turn the hospital into a world-class heart center. He financed a new building and named it for Abraham Gellman, Betty’s brother who’d been killed in the Philippines during World War II. There is a bust of Uncle Abe in the lobby, along with his Purple Heart, Silver Star, and citation signed by President Truman. There’s an Eisenstadt building, too, with a portrait of Ben the patriarch in the front office.
When a rich man gives millions to a conveniently located hospital, it’s partly to help the community and partly so the doctors will save him when the Malamoufitz knocks. That’s what makes Ben’s story such a black comedy. In the fall of 1996, he began experiencing the same sorts of symptoms that had troubled Herbie. He went directly to Maimonides, where he was diagnosed with valve failure and scheduled for replacement surgery. In preparation, he was given a megadose of penicillin, which triggered an allergic reaction that nearly killed him. He was released after a week in intensive care, told he was now too weak and old to survive surgery, and sent home. Restless in Midwood, he began doctor shopping, looking for a second, third, fourth opinion, for anyone who would agree to replace his valve. “I’d rather die on the table,” he said, “than sit in that house waiting.”
After having been turned down by a dozen specialists, Ben called Ellen. Herbie’s nephew David, the cardiologist, agreed to examine Ben, then agreed to assemble a team and perform the surgery. At this point, I feel like jumping into the computer, grabbing Ellen by the shoulders, and screaming, “Why? What good can come of it? If he lives, they’ll never forgive you for being the person he turned to. And if he dies, they’ll say you killed him.”
The operation was performed at New York Hospital on York Avenue in Manhattan when Ben was eighty-nine years old. It went perfectly. Ben was back at home three days after surgery. He joked and told stories when we visited him, behaving unlike the man I had known my entire life. He hugged me and said he was sorry—he did not say for what—then hugged me again. Ellen basked in the glow, for once at ease in her childhood home. Betty was affectionate. Gladys said nothing. It was just a moment, but it was a good moment.
Ben went back to the hospital for a checkup a week later. What started as a routine exam turned into a disaster when the doctors discovered an infection in his chest. In most cases, the patient would’ve been treated with antibiotics. Ben’s allergic reaction at Maimonides ruled this out. They reopened his incision and cleaned out the infection by hand, then left him in a medically induced coma in case they had to go back in. Betty stayed in the ICU for weeks, talking to Ben, calling him home. She’d say, “He’s Odysseus. He’s making his way back to me.”
Ben never regained consciousness. When he died in April 1996, The New York Times headlined the obituary “Benjamin Eisenstadt, 89, a Sweetener of Lives.”
Betty got into bed in Midwood after the funeral and basically stayed there the rest of her life. Neither Prozac nor lithium could touch her. Her bed was moved downstairs to be closer to Gladys. Meant to salve her loneliness, this only made things worse. According to documents filed after Betty’s death, Gladys abused Betty mentally and physically in those months, withheld medication and food, threw dishes, and even hit her. That’s when Gladys persuaded or forced Betty to change her will, disinheriting Ellen and her family, changing the crucial clause to read, “to Ellen and her issue I leave nothing.”
The reason?
According to Aunt Gladys, it was because “Your mother killed Ben.”
Herbie wanted to contest the will, as did my brother. They hired attorneys. The process began. Steven, who led the legal team, actually deposed Aunt Gladys in her room. It’s a Jungian fantasy. Neither my sister nor I was told about this. It was kept from us out of fear that, being weak and sentimental, we would argue against going forward. And, when the secret slipped out, we did. We begged and then commanded Herbie to drop the lawsuit. We worried that the experience would extend the awful moment of disinheritance indefinitely, destroying our mother. You never find what you really need in court, anyway; no matter the outcome, the trial becomes the punishment.
No. 47
Gladys sat in the front row at Betty’s funeral. It was her first trip out of the house in years. She had to see that her mother had in fact been buried, had to know, with the evidence of her own eyes, that the all-powerful little woman was truly dead.
Gladys walked with two canes. She was shrunken, but her curly black hair still had the old spring. Her cheeks were as red as candied apples. When I went over and held out my hand, she looked at it and me with hatred, then said, “I have no idea who you are.”
She had come to show Ellen and her issue that she, Gladys, had been the winner. She’d gotten the money, and the house, and the furniture, and the jewelry, all of which she would in turn leave to her friend Sherry, Sherry’s son, and a cat possibly named Toots.
When I explained the lawsuit to Uncle Marvin, saying, “My mother wanted acceptance and love,” he said, “Yeah, well, that’s not what you ask for in court; in court you ask for money.” He was right about that, but he was wrong, too, because in this world, where symbols stand for reality, the most powerful symbol is money.
Herbie understood this in a way the rest of us, having been raised in relative comfort, never did. “Success in life is about creating options and keeping those options open and available as long as possible, and money does that,” he explained. “What’s more, it’s never really about the money, not even when it came to my lawsuit or Betty’s will. That is to say, it’s not about the money. It’s about the money.”
No. 48
There is a hole in this book. Something is missing. I’ve noticed it every time I’ve reread these pages. It’s my mother, Ellen Marilyn Eisenstadt, her hopes, dreams, and disappointments. She was the happiest and unhappiest person I’ve ever known.
When I close my eyes, I see her life all at once, at every age, in every way she could be—as she was in her childhood in Brooklyn, as she was at the soda fountain and in Midwood High School, as she was at the NYU cafeteria where she met Herbie, who’d made up a story to talk to her, as she was as a daughter, sister, and young wife, mother and grandmother. She is young in my memory and she is old, too, arguing with airport security who wants her to skip the normal procedures because of her age.
“Just how old do you think I am?”
She’s dressed in the flower-covered shifts of the 1970s, the pantsuits of the 1980s, and the skirts of the 1990s and beyond, a blushing bride, a protective mother, an infuriated daughter, a wounded wife, and a doting grandma, a woman of handbags and perfumes and gifts, drunk and happy from a single glass of wine, a woman who, having quit smoking years before, still says, “I can feel my lungs getting pinker every day.” Which I suppose is my way of saying it’s not my mom as she was at a particular moment I remember, but her essence, the immortal quality that outlives each change in body, circumstance, and fashion, that survives every infirmity and is still and always alive to be talked to and comforted and communed with. Despite her great emotional tides, the ebb and flood, she was essentially a happy person with a philosophy so simple it was religious.
She did not want parties, did not want wealth or fame. She just wanted to be left in peace to enjoy her family. She wanted to stay at the hotel and order from room service. She wanted to take a hot shower—with good pressure—have a glass of wine, and watch the tribute to Broadway on PBS. She wanted to spend the evening alone with her husband. This made her happy even when she was frustrated with his quests, even when he refused to settle the lawsuit, even when she was fighting with her parents and worried about money.
When they were clicking, Herbie and Ellen fell into a comedic patter. They were George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. She believed in immortality, but did not believe in God. She played sick on major Jewish holidays. She’d call down as we waited in the front hall, dressed for synagogue, to say she had a stomachache or migraine and couldn’t go.
Herbie would plead with her, saying, “Please, it’s just a few hours.”
“Oh, Herbie,” she’d say. “I don’t believe in any of that.”
I knew my mother didn’t believe in God. She thought the whole thing was a fairy tale and that if you live on it’s in the memories of those who love you, which was never good enough for me.
Herbie, as if to balance the example, expressed a strong and certain belief in God. When I pointed out contradictions in the Bible, he’d shrug me off, saying, “It’s confusing because it’s not our fate to know with certainty. It’s mysterious and opaque for a reason. As the Book says, we can know what it is given to us to know, but the rest belongs to God. In other words, it’s none of your business. Your business is to do what you’re supposed to do and be good to other people.”
To him, Judaism is as much about tradition as theology. Each generation, while living out its own life, was a kind of bridge, carrying the faith over the abyss, handing it off, as it had been handed over for hundreds of generations. No matter what else he did with his life he was determined to make that handoff, which is why he wanted my mother to go through the motions. Even if it doesn’t seem important to you now, hang on to it, save it—leave the option open—because you never know how it’ll look to you or what it might mean later. All it takes is one bad generation, one group of people who don’t understand, for the signal to be lost, the thread snapped.
Ellen did not believe in that kind of tradition. To her, if it is not working, if it does not speak to you, it should be exchanged for something that does. When Herbie spoke of ancestors and descendants, she shook her head. She believed no one, no matter what they said, could truly care about more than five generations. “Your grandparents and parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren—beyond that, life is a path that emerges from darkness and returns to darkness.”
Family is what made her happy, here and now, time in a bottle. She needed to love and be loved. She was like a hothouse flower, an orchid that requires a lot of attention. If you missed a day, she’d suffer. She was terrified of abandonment. But given proper care, she bloomed.
I made a list of things she liked and things she didn’t like.
First the dislikes: the sound of children fighting; the way her mother talked on the phone; driving in the snow; driving at night; Larry King and his many wives; the raccoons in the attic; our dog Lazlo; baths, “because, in a bath, you’re basically sitting in your own filth.”
Now the likes: chocolate egg creams made with Fox’s U-Bet syrup; musicals; Hitchcock movies; Charles Aznavour; Rome and Paris; jewelry; Herbie; four-star hotels; room service; wine in the afternoon; lemon vodka; her children.
Being a grandmother was best of all. It was all frosting and no cake—no getting up at 2:00 a.m., no punishing, withholding, driving to hockey, or preparing for the future. She loved J. D. Salinger and seemed to share his view about adulthood: that it crushes the wonder in us and sublimates natural joy and curiosity into something complicated and dark. Children are pure goodness and all love, and their presence reminds you that in the end only one thing matters.
She was a young grandmother, just fifty-three when my sister Sharon’s first child was born. My brother and his wife, Lisa, soon followed. Ellen had seven grandchildren before she turned sixty-five. It changed her. She relaxed, filled out, began wearing blowsy clothes and flat shoes. She spent entire afternoons at FAO Schwarz.
This is where Herbie and Ellen parted for a time. He loved his grandkids, but did not like being a grandparent. Not at first, anyway. He did not want to be called Grandpa, only Herbie. Or the nickname he fashioned for his new role, Mr. Strong Man. Sharon’s and Steven’s children would speak of visits from “Grandma Ellen and Herbie.”
Becoming a grandparent seemed to shock and upset him. Though still in his fifties when his first grandchild was born, it registered as a portent of mortality. It was the grim reaper waiting with his coat at the door. It was a turn of the wheel. It was the change you feel when the sun passes its zenith.
He began skipping events, taking a last-minute powder. He went to the West Coast just to hang out with Larry and the Brooklyn boys.
He seemed edgy when he was with us, even a little angry.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked after dinner one night in D.C.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been mean lately,” I said.
“You’re crazy.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with him,” said Steven. “He’s realizing that he won’t be around forever and that he’s not going to reach a lot of the goals he set for himself and that he’s much closer to the end than to the beginning.”
Steven was speaking as if analyzing a character in a story. I think he started out joking but the logic carried him away. He’d meant to be funny but wound up cutting too close to the bone.
“Is that true?” I asked my father.
“It’s bullshit,” said Herbie, more to himself than to us.
This is the context for what followed, the part of Herbie’s life that remains a puzzle for me. It violated the rules he’d set for us over the years.
No. 49
I met her before my father. It was on a trip to Los Angeles in the 1990s. She was ten years older than me, around forty, a short-haired brunette who worked in the movie business. She was dating my father’s friend Sid, a part of the Brooklyn contingent that went west after high school. The age difference struck me as odd. Sid was old enough to be her father. I met her, then forgot her. Let’s say her name was Penny. She was like one of those characters that take center stage at the end of a play, though they’ve been lurking in the background from the start.
Larry had married his ninth wife, Shawn, then, at her insistence, moved his CNN show to Los Angeles. Herbie began going out there to see Larry. He invited my mother, but she refused to go. Penny, who broke up with Sid, pulled Herbie aside during one of those visits. She said she knew about his work as a negotiator and needed help. She said she was being pushed out of her job and didn’t know where to turn. That’s really why it started: because he could never refuse a person being shafted by the machine.
At some point early in the twenty-first century, the relationship became physical. I don’t know the details, and don’t want to know. As far as I’m aware, Herbie, until then, had been with only one woman, my mother. For all his travels, he was, in some ways, inexperienced, naive. Maybe it was becoming a grandparent that did it. Maybe he wanted to know more of life before it was too late.
If there were good times, they did not last long. Within a few months, Penny was pressuring Herbie. She wanted money, gifts, to be taken on vacation. When Herbie refused, she threatened to tell Ellen and the children everything. After he’d depleted his savings to placate her, she called my mother and told anyway.
How did we find out?
At Ellen’s insistence, Herbie called each of his children and confessed what he’d done. He started by saying, “This is your father. I love you. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Ellen made him do this not by way of punishment, or not entirely, but out of fear that this woman in Los Angeles would call each of us to tell on my father, as she had threatened and as she in fact did. That call from Penny wasn’t the absolute worst call I’ve ever received.
What had Herbie been thinking?
What did he believe would happen after he’d run out of money and fixes? Instead of answering this question, I will share one of his favorite jokes, a joke that, as far as he is concerned, expresses an ancient philosophy made necessary by the vicissitudes of Jewish history: “The czar of Russia summoned the Minsk rabbi to the Kremlin, where he handed him a cage with a parrot and said, ‘You have one year to teach this parrot to speak Latin.’ The rabbi, accepting the challenge, returned home, where his wife, hearing the story, became hysterical. ‘But you don’t even know Latin,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’
“‘A year is a very long time,’ said the rabbi. ‘A lot can happen in a year. First of all, the czar could die. Second, I could die. Or third, the parrot could die.’”
No. 50
The ensuing weeks stand as a distinct epoch, like the Little Ice Age or the age of disco, consisting of my mother crying, my father apologizing and repenting and calling himself a schmuck.
I was disappointed by Herbie, but sympathetic, too. His brush with death, his fear of oblivion, the darkness ahead, his desire to live, his hunger for more life, which, to him, must have meant novelty, new experience, even danger, had pushed him to folly. The fact that he’d botched it so badly tells me he’d never done this kind of thing before; he was so awful at it. The subterfuge, the juggling, the phone calls and excuses—it blew up in his face almost as soon as he’d opened the package.
I was angry at myself, too. I should have known what was going on, and at a subliminal level maybe I did. I knew Herbie had been going to L.A. for no good reason. In other words, it was right in front of me, but I decided not to notice.
Worst of all, I’d actually had dinner with Herbie and Penny in L.A., where I’d gone for work, making me complicit. We went to Matsuhisa, the sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills where my friend Mark was maître d’. I was supposed to meet my father alone, but he showed up with Penny. He said he had bumped into her in the lobby of his hotel and, on a whim, had invited her along. They sat on one side of the table. I sat on the other. He seemed anxious to eat his meal, pay the check, and leave. It was so strange. Mark called me a few days later and asked if my father was dating the woman he’d brought to dinner. After I’d cursed out Mark for merely suggesting such a thing, he said, “In that case, do you mind if I ask her out?”
If I had any doubts, they were dispelled that fall, when we spent Thanksgiving weekend at my sister’s house. I was working on a draft of my book Lake Effect, which was about my childhood on Chicago’s North Shore. I’d given Herbie the manuscript a few weeks earlier, as I’d done with all my writing. This gets into Herbie’s role as my shadow editor, which goes back to grade school. Sometimes he revised my papers. Sometimes he rewrote them, which explains the frequent mention of Bensonhurst and the Brooklyn Dodgers in my schoolwork.
There was good and bad in this.
Here’s (some of) the good:
He always supported me, even after he’d stopped rewriting me. When my brother laughed at my dream of being published in The New Yorker, Herbie scolded him, saying, “What’s funny? Richard’s stuff is good enough for that magazine right now.” Later, if he liked a story of mine that had been rejected, he’d say, “Forget it. It’s a good story. Believe me: I know better than that editor. I’ve read more and lived more and I’m telling you it’s good.” When my first book was published, he did more than the publisher to sell it. He made clandestine trips to all the big bookstores, requested and extolled my book in a booming voice, bought three copies, then, when he thought no one was looking, moved the rest to the front of the display. He drummed up crowds for my events. He seeded the room with shills, Warriors like Inky and Who Ha, who raised their hands as soon as I’d finished talking, then asked questions written by Herbie, such as “How is it someone so young has written such a brilliant book?” Or: “Can you explain why I couldn’t put this book down?”
Here’s (some of) the bad:
In trying to help, he usually took control, pushing me out of my own process. He was like the friendly mobster who, after helping fix your problem, decides to stick around. He’d stand up at events and start explicating, delivering stem-winding testimony as if we were strangers, though most of the people in the audience knew exactly who he was—his picture was in the book! He’d pull me aside after each reading to share his “thoughts,” which could be brutal. After softening me with a few compliments, he’d criticize my voice, pronunciation, choices, and demeanor. “You read too goddamn fast. And need a shave! And a better shirt!” He gave me notes on the early drafts of my work; most of his suggestions were meant to either clarify, soften the hard edges—“because why piss people off? These are your readers”—or clean up the language.
“Who taught you to use these disgusting words?”
“You did?”
“Well, if I did, I didn’t mean to.”
But the notes he gave on Lake Effect were different.
While sitting at my sister’s dining room table, he went through the manuscript. It was dog-eared, diner stained, riddled with paper clips and rubber bands, as well as two distinct kinds of handwriting—one familiar, one strange. He suggested the sorts of additions and changes you hear nowhere but in pitch sessions and the writing rooms of the movie industry. He spoke of plot points and conflicts and takeaways. He spoke of backstories and B stories and reveals. He said, “Maybe it turns out Jamie is gay. Or maybe you are gay. Or maybe you’re both gay. Maybe you’ve just come back from the army. Maybe, though you don’t know it until the third act, you and Jamie have the same father.”
In other words, I chose not to know what I knew. Herbie says, “Believing is seeing.” If true, then the opposite must also be true: “Not believing is not seeing.”
There was tremendous fallout from the affair. Abandonment had always been Ellen’s primal fear—being cast aside, left behind, forgotten. Herbie’s infidelity was Ellen’s biggest fear realized. There was some talk of divorce, but none of us took it seriously. Herbie and Ellen had been married for more than forty years. They’d grown together like old trees, roots entangled, leaves forming a single awesome canopy. Ellen instead chose to erase all evidence of the affair from her life and her mind.
Because Penny had possibly visited these places, the apartments in Washington, D.C., and Miami Beach were sold. Before a month was out, Herbie and Ellen had moved from South Beach to a ranch house beside a golf course in a country club in Delray Beach, the exact sort of nondescript place my father hated. Asked the average age of residents at the Boca Delray, he’d say, “Comatose.” They closed the deal after a single quick walk-through—bought it fast, everything included, even furniture, even sheets, and even tchotchkes. “I’ve always wanted tchotchkes,” said Ellen when she showed me the house. When I pointed out that these were not her tchotchkes, she said, “Oh, Richard, tchotchkes are tchotchkes.”
I sometimes wondered if Herbie strayed less to satisfy himself than to release his children. His example was so strong it could be suffocating. It was impossible to live up to. Maybe he did what he did to set us free. Of course, I know that this is not what he intended. The man simply faltered. He simply gave in to restlessness. He simply behaved like a human being. It was a perfect example of the old man teaching by counterexample, of his kids taking away a lesson but not the lesson he had intended. There was the what (Herbie instructing his children not to “sacrifice a mature design to gratify a momentary passion”) and the how (Herbie, Penny, and me splitting a dragon roll at Matsuhisa). The what was the ideal—the way a person should behave. The how was what life is like in the real world, where even our heroes falter.
Being in the new house—a place without associations—did not fix Ellen right away. That took years. But she did forgive him, and once she did, it was as if it never happened. And then came the great gift of her later years. One afternoon, after Betty and Ben and Gladys had all died, Ellen’s brother Marvin called and cried on the phone and said he had been wrong and she had been right and everything they had told her was in her head was in fact true: she had been treated unfairly, frozen out of the family, given over to placate Gladys, who was angry in a way none of the others could face or understand. “We were scared of her, and the way we dealt with it was awful and wrong,” he said.
When Herbie heard this, he said, “He must be seeing a new therapist. Let’s see if he ponies up the do-re-mi.” He did. But this was better than money. Everyone in this world believes they got a raw deal, were mistreated, could have made much more of themselves if they’d gotten a fair shake. But almost no one gets what Ellen got—a call telling them they are not crazy but had in fact been right all along. With that, the cloud that had followed my mother since childhood lifted.