Love Saves the Day

I wasn’t due at Ear Wax until the afternoon. Still, I was up early because Laura was up early, and I sang in the kitchen as I fixed toast and cereal for the both of us. Laura was waiting for Mr. Mandelbaum to return from the cramped, ancient synagogue two doors down from our building. He had gone there to pray every Saturday morning for the past fifty years. Today was different, though. It was Shavuot, the holiday that celebrates God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead, is recited four times a year. One of those times is Shavuot, and Mr. Mandelbaum would be reciting the Yizkor today for Mrs. Mandelbaum, who’d died in her sleep during the past winter.

Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t been the same since. His eyes would roam the room instead of looking at your face when you talked to him. The voice that had once boomed down hallways, audible sometimes even downstairs in our apartment, had faded to a whisper. He would forget to take his medication for days at a time. Even Honey seemed to sense the difference. She had always been close to him, always been “his” cat—his and Laura’s—but now she hovered near him constantly. Whenever we went up to see him, Honey was in his lap or sitting next to him on the arm of his chair. Her soft eyes looked anxious as they followed his every small movement. If Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t remembered to shop for Honey, to buy her food and bring her the little tidbits of turkey she loved from the corner deli, he might not have remembered to shop at all.

Laura and I tried to spend as much time with him as possible. But there were too many hours in the day given to school and to work, too many hours when Mr. Mandelbaum was by himself in that apartment filled with photos of the wife and son he’d lost. Too many hours with only his cat for company. The book Mrs. Mandelbaum had been reading aloud to him the night she died still rested, facedown, on the coffee table where she’d left it before going to bed. Laura had seen him only yesterday, heart torn at Mrs. Mandelbaum’s absence from the kitchen where she’d prepared cheese blintzes every year for Shavuot. Laura’s idea today was to take Mr. Mandelbaum for a walk, maybe to Katz’s for the blintzes they served there. Anything that would keep him from spending the rest of the day alone in his apartment.

But it was pouring outside. Laura fretted at the idea of Mr. Mandelbaum being outside in this weather, fretted also that he might not have remembered to bring an umbrella with him when he’d walked to the synagogue that morning. He was apt to forget such things these days.

It was nine when we heard the knock on our door. Laura, already dressed and hoping it was Mr. Mandelbaum, ran to answer it. I was in my bedroom, just starting to change out of my nightshirt. I heard an unfamiliar man’s voice, the upward tilt of Laura’s voice responding with a question. “Mom?” she called out. “Can you come here?”

My hands fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. “I’m coming,” I called back.

I had missed a button and my shirt was on lopsided. There were two firemen at our door. One of them, the younger one, seemed to notice my shirt but refrained from pointing it out. “Is there anybody else in the apartment, ma’am?” he asked me. Their yellow-and-black raincoats gleamed wetly, and I remember thinking their muddy boots would make a mess in the hall.

“Why?” I wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

“We’re evacuating the building,” the other one said. “Part of the rear façade has been damaged from the rain. There’s a possibility the whole building might collapse.”

I heard his words, but it was information my brain instantly rejected. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“We’re evacuating the building,” the older fireman repeated, patiently. “This building is in danger of imminent collapse, ma’am.”

“Oh my God.” I felt a vein begin to throb in my throat. My mind whirred and skipped, a phonograph needle trying to settle into the right groove. I had a sudden, unbearable image of my daughter crushed beneath a collapsed building, her body broken underneath a pile of bricks and beams. I knew, though, that I couldn’t let panic alone, or the sharp pain of my heart thudding in my chest, determine my actions of the next few minutes. I had to force that image away for a second. I had to stop and think.