Chapter 7 - The Cold Storage of Verona
The radiator in Marilyn’s hallway didn't hiss; it clanked like a dying blacksmith.
It was an old three-story brick garden apartment complex on the border where Verona slides down into Bloomfield—the kind of place built in the early fifties for widows of the war and retired telephone linemen who wanted a small patch of grass they didn't have to mow themselves. The air in the stairwell smelled permanently of floor wax, cabbage, and the faint, sweet chemical residue of moth crystals that had spent forty years dissolving in hallway closets.
I walked up the two flights carrying a flat wooden crate lined with greaseproof butcher paper. Inside were six pints of the rich chicken stock Nadia had clarified with egg whites until it looked like dark amber, three loaves of the sourdough rye, and a quart of the stewed prunes with cinnamon that my mother had eaten every morning since her gallbladder came out in ninety-two.
Caleb was two steps behind me, his small hand sliding along the dark mahogany banister that had been rubbed shiny by eighty years of old women’s palms.
"Dad?" he whispered, his voice small against the hollow echo of the linoleum. "Does Grandma have the little candies with the leaves on them?"
"In the glass dish on the television," I said. "Don't eat the red ones. They’ve been there since you were three."
"I know," he said. "They taste like the drawer."
I knocked on Apartment 2B.
There was a long pause, then the scrape of the brass deadbolt, followed by the secondary rattle of the safety chain. My mother didn't open the door wide; she cracked it three inches, her eye appearing in the dark gap above the chain, framed by that halo of stiff, bluish-gray hair that she had set every Thursday at nine-thirty by a woman named Theresa who still used pink plastic rollers.
"Wesley?" she asked. She looked past me, down the empty stairwell, as if she expected a process server or a photographer from the local gazette to be lurking behind the fire extinguisher. "Is somebody with you?"
"Just Caleb, Mom. We brought the stock."
She hesitated for a full three seconds—that terrible, agonizing three seconds where a mother calculates whether the presence of her own son constitutes an administrative breach of her older boy's injunctions. Then the chain dropped with a dull *clink*, and she stepped back into the shadows of the foyer.
The apartment was eighty degrees. Marilyn kept the thermostat glued to seventy-eight because her ankles swelled if she sat in a draft, and she had two electric space heaters humming on their low settings in the corners of the living room, their orange elements glowing through wire grates like small, angry mouths.
On the drop-leaf mahogany table beside the television—the same table that had stood in our kitchen on Myrtle Avenue when Dad was still walking—sat Susette’s Christmas invitation. It wasn't lying flat. It was propped against a crystal bowl of plastic fruit, stood upright like an icon on an altar, the heavy cream-colored cardstock bordered in gold leaf, flanked by two small silver candles that hadn't been lit.
Caleb didn't go to the candies. He stopped three feet into the room, his snow boots squeaking on the runner rug, looking at the card. Even at seven, he recognized the calligraphy. He had seen that ink on fourteen envelopes every December since he had learned what his name looked like in print.
"Take your boots off, Caleb," Marilyn said, her voice high and thin, like dry tissue paper being torn. She didn't bend down to kiss him. She held out her hand, touched his shoulder with two fingers, then withdrew them as if his woolen jacket might leave damp salt on her cardigan. "Your uncle Garrett was here this morning."
"I know," I said, setting the heavy crate on the kitchen counter. Her kitchen was spotless, clean in the sterile, terrifying way of people who have stopped cooking for anyone they love. There was no grease on the backsplash, no smell of onions in the wood, only the faint vinegar tang of Windex and two tea bags drying on a saucer by the sink so they could be used a second time.
"He brought me the program from the church," she said, following me into the kitchen, her small scuff-slippers dragging across the linoleum with a steady *shuff-shuff*. "Susette has arranged for the choir from St. Luke’s to sing on the lawn before the soup. She’s having five courses, Wesley. She rented the gold chargers from the company in Newark."
"The chargers are plastic, Mom," I said, taking the lids off the jars to show her the fat cap on the stock. "They’re forty-five cents each to rent, and if you drop one on the hearth, it splits like a poker chip."
"They're gold-toned," she said, her lower lip trembling with that sudden, fierce petulance that had grown in her since Dad died. "They look nice on the linen. She’s got the four kinds of crystal. Garrett said she stayed up until three in the morning ironing the napkins with lavender water."
"Did he tell you where Caleb was sitting?" I asked.
I didn't turn around. I kept my back to her, adjusting the jars on her wire refrigerator shelves, moving aside a tub of margarine and an unopened jar of sweet pickles.
The kitchen went dead quiet, save for the hum of the Frigidaire compressor.
Behind me, in the living room, the small sound of a single piano key being pressed down on a toy keyboard Caleb had found under the sofa—*ping*—then silence.
"She has an aesthetic, Wesley," Marilyn whispered. She was right behind my shoulder now. I could smell the menthol lozenges she sucked for her throat and the dry lavender water she used to cover the scent of age. "You don't understand how hard that girl works to make things nice. Her family came from Bernardsville. They have standards about these things. When you bring the little ones... Lily spills. Last year she got gravy on the silk runner that Garrett bought her in Florence."
"Lily was three, Mom," I said, turning slowly. I stood over her; she was five-foot-one now, her spine beginning to take that slow, downward curve that my grandmother’s had taken before she went into the home in Wayne. "She dropped a piece of roasted carrot because her hands were too cold to hold the fork in the sunroom. You were twenty feet away behind a set of double French doors. You saw her shivering."
"I did not!" she snapped, her eyes watering instantly, red-rimmed and angry. "Garrett had the space heater on!"
"The space heater was blowing on Susette’s ficus tree so the leaves wouldn't drop," I said. "My children were sitting in their parkas."
"You always were jealous of him," she hissed, her fingers curling into the wool of her sweater. "From the day he made Law Review. You with your greasy aprons and your pots. Garrett has a position. People look up to him in the county. When Susette hosts, the town council members come by for cider. The mayor came two years ago!"
"And Caleb stood in the middle of her dining room holding a plate," I said, my voice dropping lower as hers rose. "And she told him he didn't belong there. In front of you. In front of Pete. In front of the woman who changed Garrett's sheets when he had the mumps."
Marilyn looked down at her slippers. The *shuff-shuff* sound stopped.
"She was stressed," she muttered to the linoleum. "The beef was getting cold."
"He asked me in the car on the way home if he was an accident," I said.
The silence that followed that was different from the others. It was the silence of a house after an old clock finally winds down and stops ticking—that sudden, hollow vacuum where you realize how much noise you were tolerating just to keep from being alone in the dark.
Marilyn’s chin wobbled. She looked toward the living room where Caleb was sitting cross-legged on her braided rug, looking through an old Sears catalog from nineteen-ninety-four that she kept in the magazine rack.
"Garrett said... Garrett said if I go to your house, he won't manage the trust from your father’s insurance," she said, her voice so thin I could barely hear it over the radiator’s hiss. "He said the probate isn't finished. It’s been six years, Wesley, and he still hasn't filed the final accounting with the surrogate in Hackensack. He says every time he has to do work on it, it costs him three hundred dollars an hour, and if I make a scene, he’ll just resign as executor and let the court take forty percent."
I looked at my mother—really looked at her.
She wasn't a matriarch holding a family together through iron will and traditional authority. She was an old woman in a three-room apartment on Bloomfield Avenue who had traded her grandson’s dignity for the promise that her eldest son would keep paying the maintenance fees on her Frigidaire out of an account she wasn't allowed to see.
"The probate was settled four years ago, Mom," I said quietly.
She jerked her head up. "What?"
"I went to the clerk’s office in Hackensack in July," I said. "I paid twelve dollars for the microfilm copies. The surrogate signed off on the distribution in twenty-twenty. Garrett’s been holding the check in an escrow sub-account at his firm because you never signed the final release. He told you it was pending so you’d keep asking him for permission to buy a winter coat."
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open, the yellowed tips of her lower teeth showing against her lip. "He wouldn't... he's an attorney."
"He's an associate who needs forty thousand dollars to make partner this January," I said. "And Susette just spent twelve grand on imported limestone pavers for the terrace so she could host the spring garden tour."
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a blue legal folder, folded once, and laid it on the clean linoleum counter next to the jars of chicken stock.
"That's the discharge from the court," I said. "You take that to the bank on Valley Road on Monday morning. The teller will give you your father's money. All of it. Ninety-two thousand dollars. You don't have to ask Garrett if you can buy the fancy tea, and you don't have to eat cold squab in a room where your grandchildren aren't allowed to sit down."
I walked to the kitchen door and called into the front room.
"Caleb. Boots on."
The boy stood up immediately, setting the heavy catalog back into the rack with both hands, making sure the edges lined up with the brass bars. He had his mother's neatness—that careful, working-class instinct never to leave a mess where someone might use it as an excuse to throw you out.
Marilyn didn't move from the counter. She stood there with one hand resting on the blue folder, her breath coming in short, rattling gasps that sounded like grease spattering on an iron lid.
"Wesley," she said as I opened the door to the drafty stairwell.
I paused with my hand on the brass knob.
"Does... does Nadia put the cloves in the ham?" she asked. Her voice wasn't defensive anymore; it was the voice she used when she was sixty-two and my father was coughing up black phlegm in the hospital bed in the den, asking who was going to shovel the curb if the blizzard hit before Tuesday. "Susette doesn't use cloves. She says they’re common."
"She uses thirty-two cloves, Mom," I said. "And she scores the fat with the diamond pattern. The way you showed her when we were living on Myrtle."
May you like
I took Caleb’s hand and pulled the door shut behind us. We were halfway down the first flight before the deadbolt clicked into place, but this time, the safety chain didn't rattle.
***
