THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO

Fiction

Joyful in New York

THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO

By Cathleen Schine

290 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Joy Bergman is a New Yorker and never intends to be anything else. She never intends to leave the apartment where she and her husband Aaron have lived so long. No matter what her children think. No matter how difficult it gets.

And it is difficult. She cares for her husband Aaron, who is all but bedridden, sometimes lucid and charming and sometimes demented. She has a PhD, works three days a week as curator of a tiny museum of New York Jewish memorabilia. Her friends, her children all urge her to put Aaron in a nursing home, or at least get help. 

“I know you all think he should probably go to a place,” she said, “but he would be miserable. He needs landmarks, needs familiar things, needs his schedule. 

“What about what you need –” they all asked. “But what she needed was so obvious. She needed Aaron.”

Their son Daniel, wife Cora and two precocious pre-teen granddaughters live nearby. Daniel is assiduous about coming to see his parents weekly. Their daughter Molly, an archaeologist, has divorced her husband and gone to live with another woman, Freddie, in California. Molly comes home regularly to officiously clean up, straighten up, and try to run her parents’ lives.

Aaron had wanted to be a classical singer but had of necessity gone into the family business instead. He bursts into song often. He calls his wife Joyful; he likes to sing, Joyful, joyful we adore thee…

Craving fresh air, Joy insists on taking Aaron out. They pause in a small park. Aaron’s chin immediately drops to his chest.

“Are you asleep?” she said. “Or dead?" 

“Which would you prefer?” he asked, his eyes still closed.

On one of their outings they meet another old man with a caretaker and an identical red walker. Joy is stunned to find Karl is someone she knew in college – yes, an old boyfriend.

After Aaron dies, the clan tries to find solutions for Joy. Her children want her to live with them. Molly and Freddie lure her to California; she isn’t happy. They take her to the beach to watch the sunset. They take her for walks. They get a small dog for her to walk; the dog, Gatto, hates walking and refuses, so she takes it out carrying it. But she feels useless.

Gatto is attacked by a larger dog, and Joy finally has the excuse she needs: “This is a dangerous city. I’m taking Gatto home [to New York] where it’s safe.”

Molly’s grown son, Ben, knocking around bartending, working construction, aimless, turns up now and then and asks to stay with his grandmother for a while. Nothing pleases her more.

Cathleen Schine doesn’t look old enough to know how it feels to be old. She does know, though. Her insights appear ironically in her characters’ thoughts. It’s hard to encapsulate the humor in this book; it grows organically from them. For instance:

Molly and Freddie both dread Christmas with their aging parents. Freddie, the Californian, says she loves New York. “Everything you hate about it,” she said to Molly, “like the crowds, for instance—I love that. I love being a tourist there.”  

“You go to New York and see my father, I’ll stay here and see your father. They won’t know the difference.”

“But Freddie knew that Molly’s Jewish Christmas was somehow their most important holiday. They celebrated Hanukah in a haphazard way, lighting candles on the nights they remembered. But Christmas was a time they all got together…even Molly’s ex-husband and his current wife. ‘And Ben will be there,’ Freddie said. She had said the magic word.”

Joy vacillates between being empathetic and grateful for her children’s efforts and feeling resentful and stubborn about having as much of her old life as she can. She and Karl become daily companions. She invites him to her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. Anxious about the family Passover seder with Aaron gone, she invites Karl, her friend Natalie, and newcomer neighbors who have never been to a seder before. The family is horrified; Joy thinks it would have been too sad to have just the family without Aaron. Almost everybody gets drunk.

Molly and Daniel connive to protect Joy. “Look…Mommy’s got nothing left in her life…No job to go to. No sick husband to take care of… She’s very vulnerable…It’s up to us to protect her.”

Meanwhile, Joy and Karl happily connive to keep the well-meaning children off balance. I won’t say how.

The title is borrowed from a line in a Philip Larkin poem:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

In this case it’s the grown children who do. Schein has produced a smart, witty, wise and knowing novel, clever but not superficial. It may sound like a downer, but don’t be misled. In many ways it’s a happy read.

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.