(Orpheus/Eurydice)

When it was no longer possible for Leonard and Marjorie to go to their country house without a team of nurses and a lot of equipment, Leonard would often bring Marjorie out for a walk up Madison Avenue on the weekends.

Her mind had left her face by then, but she was still able to walk and Leonard held her hand every step of the way. People would see him bending over to talk to her, pointing out things in the windows that she could no longer name or understand. Still, he talked on and on and people, seeing her vacant eyes and still slight smile, thought what a good man he was. To be thought well of was not why he talked to Marjorie, nor was there any illusion that he might bring her back. He talked to her, crooned almost, because he was trapped in a mad love and had been from the moment he saw her.

By then, many of those friends they ran into on their walks had heard about Marjorie and would talk to them as though nothing was wrong. Leonard’s great power in the city lay over them both like a warm protective cape, a tent almost that no one they knew dared to open.

If anyone talked over Marjorie’s head just to Leonard he would note this and in later days not forgive.

“That jacket would look wonderful on you,” he said to her, pausing at the Givenchy boutique. And later in the afternoon, when she was back resting with the nurses, he would return and buy it for her in the smallest size they had.

There came a time a year later when she could no longer walk and then Leonard, along with one of the nurses, would bring her to Central Park, which was just across the street. Sometimes one of the children, very grown by then, would join them, calling Marjorie “Ma” and talking to her in the way their father did. It was just like talking to the air. Sometimes, in the beginning, their mother was angry, which was so unlike her that it frightened them. After that, the smile came and stayed, even as strangers fed and bathed her and dressed her in her fine old clothes and exquisite nightgowns.

Leonard’s love was even greater then, without impatience or judgment for her as his fury grew at himself and his useless powers. All through the nights he slept with her small body in his arms, holding her tight as he could, often weeping, and, for a while, she remembered enough to wipe the tears from his cheeks. Then she did not, and just lay still or thrashed in dreams without any content but cool swirling mist.

In the park Leonard, now with a nurse on either side of the wheelchair as he stood behind, pointed out dogs and the first daffodils. He considered and rejected the zoo as too disturbing even just visually. The old Marjorie was always with him, the whole long marriage, the travels and houses and children and pets, but mostly he thought of their courtship which was brief because of his impatience and so much fun.

He used to play his guitar and sing to her then the songs of the sixties, their time– He played the Mamas and the Papas “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and sang along with Mama Cass as she laughed and plugged her ears. He sang “What a Wonderful World” and “Try to Remember” from the first show they saw together. And from even before, “I Was the One” by Elvis Presley who she had liked. “You are the only one,” he said to her.

He sent his driver to bring his guitar from the attic of the country house and then remembered it must be in their beach house and went himself to find it there.

Now he sang the songs again, the silly songs of their young love and the nurses stopped to listen in the doorway. There was no expression on Marjorie’s face. He could play and play and not bring her back from that place, still his old fingers plucked at the strings and the older nurse hummed along when he was not looking .

Marjorie had been a sweet and generous woman, one who had done good deeds with all their money, one who had smiled on people who always, always smiled back, one who had met his large bucking and thrusting body with her own rather subdued but constant ladylike passion.

Leonard could not understand why God had punished them and allowed him to see her pulled away into some underworld for three years now, getting further and further from life and him, sliding down into death. Every day had been intense in its own excruciating way. For him there could be no forgetfulness even when he went earlier and earlier to his offices, remembering with bitterness the way she would hold his overcoat for him as he left and stand at the door until the elevator came.

At the end, she slept with her night nurse dozing on a chair and from his bedroom Leonard heard the light footsteps of the other nurses on their rubber soled shoes as they prepared their tea and her medications.

He never played his guitar anymore for her and lulled himself with the figures of his business and making calls overseas.

 

No one outside of the nurses and Marjorie had ever seen Leonard with a guitar or heard him sing. Therefore it was yet another shock when, at the memorial in the great synagogue, one of his sons handed him an old acoustic guitar and, in the middle of his eulogy, he began to strum and sing in a quavery small voice.

 

Stars shining bright above you

Night breezes seem to whisper I love you

Birds singing in the sycamore tree

Dream a little dream of me

 

Say nightie-night and kiss me

Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me…

“Oh God, I didn’t quite know,” one of the female rabbis whispered to her junior colleague.

Now his voice grew strong as though touched by the divine, he sang loud and in key

While I’m alone and blue as can be

Dream a little dream of me

 

Everyone in the vast Moorish expanse of the temple had already been surprised by the giant screens and amplifiers placed on the pillars. They had never seen such a sight in the long history of the space they visited only two days a year. Very few funerals took place there, the immensity of the space suggested a head of state, a king or a queen, had any been Jewish. The man who gave a museum and headed a network had been “celebrated” there long ago but no one since. It was a strange request the chief rabbi thought, and, after calling the rabbi emeritus and others, one he could not refuse. Singing (always), dancing (never), a play with secular dancing in front of the bimah where the holy scrolls were kept (never ever), giant screens posted throughout the Moorish magnificence (never ever) and yet all had come to pass.

From his throne, the chief rabbi looked out at the crowd and saw every seat filled just like one or two of the Days of Awe.

He had gone to Leonard right after the death and looked carefully around at the art and the furniture. He had gone prepared to discuss Sheol, the place to which one goes down following this life or Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come. He would talk about Jewish afterlife–Reform ideas of the afterlife, that is, for there was no mention of such in the Torah. He was going to discuss the memorial arrangements and the mausoleum at Salem Fields where Leonard’s relatives filled the walls and floors.

“How can I get her back?” Leonard said immediately.

“Leonard…,” the rabbi said savoring his first name, used for the first time.

The rabbi pulled at his fingers as though he might retrieve from them the proper platitude.

“She is with you now in spirit…You must not look back. If you do you will lose her forever.”

Without another word, Leonard had risen and left the room and one of the daughters-in-law had come in to speak to him.

He heard her speaking now…After Leonard and the children told their chosen anecdotes of death, the screens lit up with slides of Marjorie throughout her life. She was there on video helping people, warmly loving her family, planting gardens, opening summer camps for sick children. Leonard was there too and no one missed the fact that his arm was always around her, his hand was always in hers, his eyes turned to her, and that over the many years they had come to look quite a bit like each other.

Never before had the congregation and the friends seen such flowers, for the family had emptied its gardens and greenhouses and flown in every flower she liked—the lilies of the valley, the white orchids, the ruffly tulips and narcissus filled the niches and the bronze urns flanking the podium with the abundance of true despair.

For Leonard the absence of an already absent one gave no relief, for this was the permanent absence. Death meant her form, however unresponsive, was gone—the smell, the hair to stroke on the pillow, the eyes on him that did not see him. The ugly clanking equipment was wheeled away, all the nurses except for the one he called Fat Tilda to himself were gone.

The dancers, all black and Hispanic children, now were reenacting the story of their courtship and twirling and leaping through scenes from their life.

The crowd of prominent New Yorkers looked up to the stained glass windows and the glimmering gold mosaics over the vaulted ceiling so they would not look around at each other. With long practice at subterfuge, they controlled any nervous amusement on their faces. Up, up they looked eight stories high above the ark as the organ played and the choirmaster conducted the choir of gentiles.

In the front row Leonard wept and one of the grandchildren clapped her hands to the highly inappropriate music as the dancers pantomimed.

Marjorie lived for that time in the temple then. In that hour, she lived for him as she had been years before. Then with a song and a prayer the service was over. A lone image of her stayed frozen on the screens along with her dates.

Leonard was to lead the procession up the center aisle towards the patriarch-filled stained glass window on Fifth Avenue glowing red and blue, yellow and violet and green in the morning sun.

Trailed by his family and assorted front-row relatives, all the nurses and staff, the friends who considered themselves the closest, those to whom he was the chief benefactor, those whose large salaries he paid, he went slowly up the aisle.

If I can only get to the Fifth Avenue entrance, walking past them all without looking back at the ark, I will have her forever, Leonard (who was very superstitious and always setting himself such challenges) told himself.

There was the mayor, a row of his executives and wives and husbands, there was the man who had decorated all his houses who rose shakily to reach for him, the television star…every step the hands reached out for him, the mouths open, “So sorry, so sorry” “Our sympathy…” “So sad…” Many were beholden in various ways to Leonard. He had known all of them for years, they were so much older now, pale with age, silvery and smaller, with difficulty shrugging on their coats. He saw them all as shades, dim and dimmer. Soon enough they would all be with her.

Marjorie’s image, the one he had chosen so carefully from hundreds and hundreds of pictures, was frozen on the screen. In color, backed by flowers, his Marjorie, a quiet woman and then a silent woman.

One of her friends, on one of the aisles with a screen, plucked at his sleeve as he went by. Annoyed, he turned to brush off her hand. As he did, he looked back, he looked up at the screen.

Don’t look back, let it be as it was.

Her eyes caught his.

At that very moment, in the room where the rabbis robed to enter the bimah a man from the production company, hearing the farewell music, pulled the plug on the screens. Slowly the image of Marjorie among the flowers began to fade. She grew paler and paler, the flowers whitened to ash, the sky’s blue covered with gauze.

And, as Leonard looked up and back, the screen finally went blank.

 

Orpheus, musician and singer, went to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, his dead wife. He beguiled the gods and was allowed to bring her out if he did not turn to look at her but…

 

“…set free / His half-regained Eurydice”

—Milton, L’Allegro

 

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