A Call From Spooner Street

By Carol Ascher

Three generations of strong-minded Rosens have gone their own ways, keeping a safe distance from each other. When Peter Rosen, the octogenarian émigré professor, takes a bad fall in the snow, his estranged adult daughter Marlene begins flying regularly to Madison. Long days on Spooner Street amidst her ailing father’s beloved German books enable Marlene to let go of old bitterness and rekindle her love for him. When her son, Noah, returns from Africa for a last visit with his grandfather, he instigates a deeper honesty, love and forgiveness among all three Rosens. "[A] superb novel, tender, wise, and beautifully crafted. I found myself reading more slowly as the end of this stunning novel was in sight, not wanting to leave its embrace." - Marnie Muller, author of The Climate of the Country  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634135832

Book preview

Goethe

Chapter One

They talked over Thai carryout in the Riverside Drive apartment they had once shared, and their musings held the cozy ease of a long friendship. When Marlene brought in mugs of steaming tea, Julia was stretched out on the soft couch.

I bought those mugs, didn’t I? she asked, lifting herself slightly to receive her tea.

Marlene tried to remember when the hand-hewn mugs had appeared. Probably in the early seventies, when she had been immersed in that muddle of idealism and mathematics that led to a doctorate in sociology, while Julia diligently mastered corporate, international, and constitutional law. In those days, walking home from Columbia, there’d been a potter on Amsterdam somewhere below 110th Street whose mugs and bowls often caught their eye.

When the telephone rang, Julia yawned lazily. It’s probably Larry, wondering whether I still intend to help Adam with his homework.

It’s too late for homework, isn’t it? Marlene glanced at her watch and went to the phone.

The soft rolling voice in her ear was Dorothy Becker’s, her old Spooner Street neighbor.

Marlene, dear, we’ve had a big snow, which is unusual for Madison so early in November. You see, the light was waning, and I was trying not to slip on my steps. But I was sure I saw a dark winter coat lying on the snow next door.

Marlene closed her eyes and told herself to breathe. Dorothy had probably talked as unhurriedly twenty years earlier when she had courageously called with the news that Liesel was dying of cancer, and Marlene should ignore her father’s banishment and come home with her son.

I’d already noticed that no lights were on in the professor’s house, Dorothy was saying. Your father is so regular in his habits. Then I started picking my way over there, and I saw groceries strewn over the snow.

I don’t understand, Marlene broke in.

Eyes shut, she saw the narrow yard between the two Tudor homes perched high above the hilly street. Peter had given up his car along with his bicycle on his eightieth birthday, but eight years later he still walked everywhere, and with a steady, almost vigorous gait. Even if he had slipped, why wouldn’t he have been able to get up?

Opening her eyes to her own four walls with Julia on the couch, Marlene gave her a worried look.

How long do you think he was lying in the cold? she asked Dorothy.

The first thing I did was try lifting him off the freezing ground. But I couldn’t get him to respond. I can’t say how long the professor was there before I got to him. Luckily my new cell phone was in my purse, although I’m still a real dope about using it. Snow was falling, and my hands were clumsy and cold. Eventually, I got nine-one-one, but I was so nervous I gave them my address instead of his. It was suddenly quite dark. When the EMS truck finally drove up the street, I yelled at them and the medics came running up your father’s steps. They bundled him into a stiff suit to prevent any broken bones from moving, so I realized it was good that I hadn’t been able to sit him up.

Where is he now? Marlene broke in. Is he in the hospital?

I thought they would take him to St. Mary’s, but the driver came right over to the University Hospital. There’s a big new modern building, Marlene. You wouldn’t recognize the place.

Is he conscious?

They’re treating him for hypothermia. I guess that means he must have been out there awhile. His pulse had dropped pretty low. Also, they’ve given him pain meds, so he might just be doped up or asleep.

Julia was watching her, frowning sympathetically.

Why didn’t Peter have his groceries delivered! Marlene wondered in exasperation. Or, for God’s sake, wear a call button like normal old people who lived alone—though the buttons probably didn’t work outside. Even her latest suggestion of someone to shovel snow had been met by her father’s stubborn refusal.

Dorothy was saying something about X-rays and a brain scan once he was stabilized.

It doesn’t sound good, Marlene said.

You know, dear, I’m here to help in any way I can.

Thanks. I’ve been expecting something like this. I need to come out.

She would take an early flight from La Guardia to Milwaukee or Chicago. But, even with a quick air connection to Madison, it would be Friday afternoon, with the regular doctors gone for the weekend, by the time she got to the hospital.

You don’t have a spare key to his house? Marlene asked, taking her first sip of the still steaming tea.

We did when your mother was alive. But Professor Rosen asked for it back around the time his Swiss lady friend started visiting.

Another flash of exasperation: Peter usually mentioned Renate as if she were merely a colleague, but Marlene had long ago realized they were spending vacations together. Yet why barricade yourself against a neighbor who respected your privacy and only wanted to look out for you!

Dorothy was suggesting she stay at her house. With her son’s and daughter’s bedrooms empty, she’d be glad for the company.

Thanks. I’m sure you’ll see more of me than you want to. But I’ll probably be better off in my own bedroom.

I just keep telling myself how lucky I am that I saw him there, Dorothy said. It’s fifteen degrees outside.

He’s the lucky one! Marlene heard her edge. Actually, we’re all lucky.

Hanging up, her hand trembled around the warm mug.

Your father’s in the hospital. Sitting up, Julia swung her legs onto the floor. Did he have a heart attack or a stroke?

I think just a bad fall, Marlene said, and sighed. Anyway, Peter won’t want me there, and I dread going out.

Back on the couch, she leaned into her friend’s outstretched arm.

I just wish I wanted to go.

Well, part of you probably does. You always hope for change.

I mean, Peter has never needed anyone, except to listen to his lectures, and he’ll make my time with him a misery.

She found her father in a windowless cubicle filled with beeping sounds. A white cotton blanket covered all but his swollen purple face. A plastic tube ran into his nose, while another tube sent a solution from a drip bag into his wrist. Both hands were tied to the metal rails, as if he had tried to pull free of the tubes.

It’s me, Marlene, she said, her voice breaking.

Even her father’s unshaved cheeks were an awful yellow-green and his fleshy lips, which both she and Noah had inherited, gasped for breath despite the oxygen flowing into his nose. Was this old man the rigid and pompous father who had once severed all bonds with her? Yet after her mother’s death, she had diligently taken Noah to Madison twice a year, loyally keeping up her side of the relationship, while giving grandson and grandfather to each other.

She pulled up a leatherette chair and shook off her thick brown coat; but, surprised by the chill of the intensive care unit, she kept on her heavy pullover. Such refrigeration couldn’t be good for an aging body in physical distress! And the blanket they had wrapped around her father—again she noted that it was thin cotton, probably flannel. His large wrinkled hands with their long knobby fingers—she touched the hand where the tubes were attached and found it cold and ash-dry.

As a surge of wild protectiveness surprised her with rising confusion, she stood up to view the grizzled man in the next cubicle: wasn’t the ICU unit much too cold, wasn’t he freezing? But his thin body beneath the meager flannel blanket had also been reduced to the elemental task of breathing.

She remained standing, thinking to complain to an orderly, the head nurse, even a doctor, if one were still available this late on a Friday. What’s the temperature in the ICU supposed to be? She knew enough not to place hardworking hospital staff on the defensive. Then a nurse appeared at the other end of the unit, and she called out irritably:

Why is it freezing in here?—and heard, too late, how she had ignored her own warning.

It may be a little cool when you’re sitting still, said the nurse, coming toward her. Myself, I keep so busy I don’t feel it.

What about the patients? They’re not moving around. The only thing covering my father is a flimsy blanket.

A patient, professional smile for the worried and jumpy relative, and Marlene prepared herself to accept defeat. But the nurse said:

I can bring your father a couple of warm blankets.

The cotton blankets turned out to be warmed, not warm, which meant they had long gone cold, when a slim boyish resident with heavy black eyebrows appeared at Peter’s bedside. P. Chat-ri-wala—she sounded out the Indian name on his pocket. Although he assured her that he had spoken to Peter’s regular internist, Dr. Martin, he was exasperatingly cautious about divulging any diagnoses or plans. True, he gently raised the flannel blanket to show her the frostbitten foot, though what she saw was only a swell of thick bandage. He also informed her that Peter had cracked two ribs, and that they had already reset his right arm, on which he had fallen. With a gentleman her father’s age, all that would take time to heal.

What’s the beeping about? she asked. Is he in a coma?

From under his thick brows, the young doctor studied her with soft black eyes. The readings are for heart rate, blood pressure, pulse. . . . They’re all strong for a man in his late eighties. He has good genes.

I know, she glared.

You have to remember, it’s been barely twenty-four hours since his fall. Sometimes the body closes down to repair itself.

Alone again with Peter, Marlene’s edginess dissolved in sorrow. She had waited too long for his repentance, or withheld her forgiveness for too many years. Probably both. The trouble was, you couldn’t be on guard for years on end, and then turn on easy affection, just because your father had managed to do a lot of damage to his old body. Had he ever apologized for her long three years of exile—or for any other of his brutal tricks? Even now it was unclear whether Peter would ever have reached out, if Dorothy hadn’t called to say that Liesel’s cancer had moved to the last stage. Could he—would he—have really let her mother die without letting them see each other again? Yet there he lay stretched before her, her father, and the awful sight of his green and purple face gasping for air turned her resentful yearnings peevish. Of course he had a strong heart! But what if he died without waking? What if he never talked to her again?

The evening shift had come on, new drip bags had been installed and monitor readings checked, when Dorothy appeared, pink-cheeked and plump in a hand-knit sweater under her down parka.

I’m so glad to see you! Marlene hugged her neighbor.

He looks a lot better than he did this morning, Dorothy said.

I don’t think he even knows I’ve been sitting here all afternoon.

People in a coma do sense things. Anyway, I’m here to ask you over for lentil soup. You’ve done enough for a day.

A few minutes later, Marlene was following Dorothy’s car back to Spooner Street. While the stucco exterior of the Beckers’ Tudor home had been repainted every few years in experimental hues—it was now lavender and gray—the Rosens’ house had remained the traditional Tudor tan that highlighted the dark cross beams. Inside, too, Dorothy’s rooms were a haphazard mix of colorful furnishings, some with a Mexican flair, while two decades after her mother’s death her father’s interior remained a deteriorated version of Liesel’s formal décor. Pushing aside the clutter of publishers’ catalogues in her neighbor’s kitchen nook, Marlene listened quietly to Dorothy’s retelling of discovering Peter spread-eagled and inert in the snow.

I was feeling so sad this afternoon, Marlene said. I’m sick of being stiff-necked and resentful when I’m the only family he’s got.

You have a lot of troubled history between the two of you.

A rush of angry despair, as she saw her father posed before his bookcase. His dark waves and heavy brows, along with the horn-rimmed glasses held in his hand, proclaimed him a serious scholar, dignified and sure of his ground. The photograph had adorned the dust jackets of his books long after his hair had turned white.

Do you forgive Nathan for leaving you for that silly student?

Dorothy stared out the dark window. Mostly I don’t think about Nathan anymore. The last time I ran into him in the library, he seemed creepy and self-important. How could a grown-up man want to marry a student almost as young as his own daughter? What I can’t understand is why I was so eager to have a family with him. I was almost thirty when we met. I should have known better.

He was a good father to Jonah and Lizzy, wasn’t he?

He still is.

It was after ten when Marlene picked her way across their snowy yards with the aid of Dorothy’s porch light. Opening the front door, she flipped the hall switch. The central stairs were illuminated, but behind the glass doors on both sides the dining room and living room remained in darkness. The house felt drafty and neglected, and she turned up the thermostat. Upstairs, worn but clean sheets lay folded in the hall closet, and she made her childhood bed. Only the bird feeder outside her window, a few girls’ mysteries and horse stories she had thought unworthy of her son, as well as a framed photo of herself and Noah as a mischievous two-year-old, identified the room as hers.

It was her third day in the claustrophobic pale blue room he had been moved into. Though it would have been a perfectly nice single, the hospital was temporarily overcrowded with patients, and she sat squeezed between her father’s bedside and the jacquard blue privacy curtain that closed off the bed near the window. In three long days, neither Peter nor his curtained roommate had received a meal tray—patients didn’t eat in this netherworld—and the bathroom door had been opened only by hospital staff. Even she avoided the little windowless room, preferring the excuse for a walk down the hall.

Peter’s closed eyelids were islands amidst bruises and swelling from his hairline to his sagging jowls, and his dark mouth still sucked hard for each breath, despite the tube sending oxygen into his nose. The ominous monster father who had once appeared in her nightmares had been defeated, and his long white hair lay matted and dank against the hospital pillow. She imagined him rising from the hospital bed like a deep-sea giant to tear at the tubes that bound him; tall and burly with a barrel chest, he would loom over her before turning away to stride out of the hospital. But a moment later, she recognized how the monster fantasies blocked her sympathy and sorrow for the helpless old man, artificially hydrated and wrapped in sheets. And that awful sucking and the jagged rise of his chest—how they constricted her throat, making her long for the relief of tears.

Besides, he hadn’t always been a monster, merely a charismatic egotist with a bad temper who had yelled whenever his precious world was threatened. He had been unprepared for a daughter calling to say she was going to have a child alone in New York. Not that she had wanted him to do more than acknowledge her foolhardy step, and one day be a grandfather to the child she was carrying. But his notions of femininity had never gone beyond such nineteenth-century German heroines as Effie Briest, who paid dearly for every attempt at freedom. Still, he had uncomplainingly taken up the slack through years of her mother’s crippling depressions, and he had always been generous to students and colleagues, who remembered him fondly, even if they joked about his intemperate reaction when they failed to meet his impossible European standards of excellence.

Crowded between his bed and the privacy curtain, she understood that their conflicts had accelerated year by year, giving her banishment a kind of inevitability. Hadn’t Liesel rightly called them a folie à deux? Yet, if Peter had continued to be a critical and disparaging father, he had been a devoted grandfather. With Noah, an easy love had made him flexible and forgiving, even bringing a tender smile to his full lips when his rambunctious grandson teased him or resisted his wishes.

It was late Tuesday morning when her father’s eyes briefly opened; but, instead of recognition, his dark pupils showed startle and pain, and his papery lids were surrounded by yellowish bruising.

When his lids opened again around noon, his eyes were a watery blue. He seemed to acknowledge her. Perhaps he was comforted by having her at his side. Even in peaceful moments, she had never felt confident of his thoughts.

It’s me, Marlene, she said, tentatively, and gently touched the white hairs on the arm into which the IV flowed.

He gave the slightest nod, but his large chest relaxed with a long out-breath.

By carrying her office laptop to the hospital every day, she had pretty much kept up with her supervisory responsibilities. Now she flipped open the data program and found the eighth grade test scores her staff had emailed. But the numbers bled into each other as she remembered a report she’d brought to Madison just last summer. It had been an evaluation of New York City’s high school students. Is there supposed to be a story here? he’d asked with apparent innocence. There actually is, if you take the time to read the report. Well, it’s not readable, he’d responded, with a disgusted glance at the charts. What she hadn’t managed to convey to him was how the charts, graphs, and correlations he found so unliterary were increasingly demanded of any educational analysis. It was her knowledge and creativity in designing data sets and creating the illustrations of her analyses that made her invaluable to the Division of Accountability. The trouble was, she herself increasingly questioned the one-dimensional truths the data implied.

She had become a workaholic like her father. How else could she have risen to head of the Division while raising a son? Of course, Julia had stayed in the apartment for the first couple of years, and she had continued to act as a loving auntie. Combined with Inez’s daycare around the corner, Marlene had gotten through a number of nearly impossible years. Her heart could still race at the memory of Noah’s kindergarten teacher on the line, because Inez hadn’t shown up to take him home, or, later, the school secretary calling, because he had fallen on the playground and was at St. Luke’s Hospital getting stitches. How many times had she grabbed her coat, telling her staff to Keep discussing this without me, or, unable to get away, called Julia, Please can you go for me? I’ll talk to you in an hour.

The heartbreaking moments had come later when, sitting across from her at dinner, Noah had pointedly reported that the father of so-and-so played catch in the park and was teaching the boy to swim. This had evolved into, You’re too picky, Ma! when he was in high school, and had begun to sense that something elusive attracted adults to each other—or didn’t. Unlike his best friend, Kevin, Noah himself had generally been uninterested in romance. And then, in a program to increase its black student enrollment, Dartmouth had wooed her son. Noah had even been awarded a nice financial package, though there’d still been a substantial sum left that Peter had paid. When it came to Noah’s welfare, he was as steady and generous as any middle-class American grandfather.

She was finding errors in the analysis of a staff member who tended to be careless, when her father smacked his cracked lips. She set down her laptop and stood to look for water. But, with all the tubes, she was afraid to give him anything to drink. Rushing into the hall, she called out to the Korean nursing assistant who had been in and out of the room over the last days. Returning with her, Joo-wan cranked up the head of the bed. Then he showed her how to sponge her father’s lips, which let liquid seep into the dark rubbery inside of his mouth.

Peter’s pale watery eyes had actually opened to watch the man bend over him.

He was resting comfortably again when she picked up her laptop, but this time she saw her mother immobile and silent inside the shaded rooms of Spooner Street. Marlene was a child when Liesel had begun to sit for months at a time with the shades drawn, her delicate hands tensely folded. Her mother would tell her to pick up chicken or milk, or to give her father the tiny cramped grocery list. Though Liesel had