The Souvenir Read Online Free PDF Page A

was sincerely baffled.
    He offered more than once to pay for law school. “If you change your mind,” he would begin any conversation about my “career,” inevitably infuriating me.
    My mother, on the other hand, was always eager to be invited on an escapade. She slept on a box spring with me in a New York City walk-up, shared my unheated room in wintry Wales, a double-seatedouthouse on an Oregon commune. I inherited her impulsive nature, a trait both endearing and frustrating to our respective husbands. Her vigor was such a contrast to my father’s somber, more plodding tempo. Her bursts of enthusiasm and childlike delight always a contrast to his taciturn, dry wit.
    From my perspective, Norman Steinman—who’d worked thirty-five years in his pharmacy—had excised both risk and introspection from his life. He left the house every morning for his store, filled prescriptions all day, returned at night to the dinner table, his columns of numbers, his bed. The unbuilt world did not call out to him—not the Sierras, not the Mojave, not the California coast. Sleeping in a tent was out of the question. His experiences in the war, whatever those had been, were all the adventure in the Great Outdoors he needed for a lifetime.
    â€œDo you ever think about divorce?” I asked my mother during a spell when it seemed like every word she said irritated him. She looked at me in astonishment. “No,
never
,” she said emphatically. Her devotion to my grouchy father was a mystery.
    M ONTHS PASSED AND my father refused to cooperate. He would not appear in a single dream. His obstinate absence struck me as unfair.
    Others arrived and departed without invitation: childhood friends I hadn’t thought about in decades; a tap-dancing uncle; Ruth’s old boyfriend; neighbors; the janitor from work; the cashier at the neighborhood coffee shop. But my father, for some reason, stayed away.
    He paid a dream visit to my mother in the very first week after his death. “He wore a dark suit,” she told me, her huge gray-blue eyes wide with astonishment, “and he was holding a hat in his hand. He had a nicely pressed handkerchief in his pocket.”
    I tried to will him into appearing. I meditated on his image atnight before falling asleep, hoping to summon him, but he would not come. I gave up trying, and there were other unforeseen events to deal with. Just weeks after his death, my mother’s cancer returned. Three years earlier, she’d had a rare and successful surgery to excise the tumor from her pancreas. Now, nine months after my father’s death, my mother was gone. She was seventy-one. At first, I felt a semblance of relief—her physical suffering had been enormous. But she loved being alive. She did not want to die.
    â€œIt’s a blessing Dad went first,” Ruth said grimly. He wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing Mother in that kind of pain.
    Again the four Steinman siblings and the extended family assembled in the same vault in the same mausoleum in the same cemetery in Hollywood for my mother’s funeral. Once again, the relatives convened afterward in the condo. Once again, we ordered platters from the deli. Once again, the upstairs neighbor appeared with the boiled chickens and the pot of broth. Once again, rarely seen cousins told family stories. Why hadn’t my father ever told me the names of his ten Russian uncles and aunts? It didn’t matter that I was nearly forty years old: I still felt orphaned.
    After my mother’s death, the bulk of the disagreeable task of dismantling the condominium fell to Lloyd and me. The condo was in a development with the misleading name Fox Hills. After their four children had grown up and moved out of the house on Harter Avenue, my parents had been ready for a change. For years, my mother had dreamed of moving near the ocean. My father thought the new development, near a shopping center and the