From the story When Murray Met Helen

Helen stared briefly at the faded ivory-colored cover of the album wondering if she should even open it. This was a man and a family now gone, she realized, and who knew what threads of what stories were preserved within the pages.  

Can you measure a life by what’s left behind? She was curious about the answer, but she also felt oddly protective, not of anything she could hold in her hand, but of what she held in her memory of her friend and neighbor. Part of her didn’t want to know anything that would cast Murray in a different light, or begin to displace or shift her dearest impressions of the man she’d known, if not perfectly, certainly well enough to enrich her life.

On the first page of the album was a handsome black & white wedding photo of Murray’s parents taken in the doorway of a church. His mom, with her tightly curled dark hair, had a smile that brought to mind Amelia Earhart. She was a good six inches shorter than Murray’s father, who was well-appointed in a tuxedo; thinning hair, terse smile, solid chin.

Helen turned the page to find the two of them standing together, still a young couple, in a garden, with Murray’s mother playfully holding a butternut squash in one hand and an ear of corn in the other. Murray’s father, his face now tanned and with a smile so wide you could see most of his teeth, had one arm around his wife and one arm wrapped around a long shovel, with the blade nearly touching his cheek.

Then there was an article and pictures about the Minocqua fire of 1912, a small disaster made worse by a hare-brained and panicked attempt to blow the fire out with dynamite.

On page 6 was the yellowed birth announcement of their son, Murray, from January 1924. And then on the next page, the birth announcement, from 1926, of a daughter, named Claire Louise.

Murray never mentioned he’d had a sister.

Three pages later was the photograph that knocked Helen back on her heels. It was of Murray and Claire together, sitting arm and arm, their legs dangling over a dock on Butternut Lake. It would be hard to picture two happier children. Although they were separated by a half century in age, it was also clear from the photo that Claire Louise, at eight years old, could easily have been mistaken for an eight-year-old Helen. And vice-versa.

From the story When Murray Met Helen

For Helen, the highlight of Monday was that neither Renard nor Harry Michaels were badly injured hauling Murray’s six crates down to her basement. They were obviously struggling with the heavier pieces and still persisted even when she implored them to stop so that she and Rick could at least finish the job.

“What is it about the greatest generation that it refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer?” she asked.

“Chivalry,” Renard replied curtly, as he wrestled to keep crate number four on the dolly.

“Men,” Helen thought to herself, assigning the word its seventh meaning, as in ‘hopeless.’

When they were finished she mercifully served them cocoa before they departed in the now ten below zero weather. Then she hurried to get dressed and catch a bus for what turned out to be her fruitless job interview with the securities lawyer.

Tuesday she woke up with a cold and called to cancel her only appointment. Given the numbing cold it was as good a day as any not to go outside. She built a fire from the logs Rick had brought in Sunday night, made a pot of lemon tea, and sat by the fireplace reading a small stack of New Yorkers. She couldn’t quite solve the question in the back of her mind about whether Rick was being too thin-skinned or whether she had provoked him by denouncing Shakespeare in Love. Part of her still wanted to ice him to see how he handled it, and the other part of her wanted to console him with a hug or at least a phone call. Her mother had a saying. “Just because you take a shine to a guy, it doesn’t mean that you still don’t have to break him in.”

But, really, who the hell knows about love and courtship? she figured. And how could something so silly as an impetuous quarrel over a movie become so complicated?

It was at times like these that she missed a game that she and Murray would play across his backyard picnic table on long summer evenings. It was a fast-paced exchange of confessions, of things they would binge on, but then grow tired of and not revisit for months, or years even.

“Smoked almonds,” he’d start.
“Ice cold tomato juice,” she’d reply.
“French onion soup,” said he.
“Tuna casserole with sweet peas and French fried onions on top,” said Helen.
“Kilbasa,” said Murray.
“Toll house cookies,” she said.
“Snickerdoodles,” said he.
“Clam chowder.”
“Sun dried tomatoes.”
“Pillsbury crescent rolls.”
“Baked potatoes with real butter, sour cream and bacon bits.”
“Fleetwood Mac,” she chimed in.
“Mac ’n cheese,” he volleyed back.
“Dutch apple pie,” said Helen.
“Lionel Hampton,” said Murray.
“Eggnog,” said Helen.
“Crab cakes,” said Murray.
“Peanut M&Ms.”
“Gorgonzola.”
“Ham loaf.”
“Ham loaf?” Murray asked, “what the hell is ham loaf?”

“It’s something my mom used to make, like meatloaf, you know, only with ham and pork shoulder.”

“Like Spam?”

“No, much better than Spam and, by the way, you lose,” she declared in a sing-song voice.

“Okay,” he’d said, “double or nothing. Zucchini bread.”

“Pickled asparagus,” she answered.

And so on, into the evening, sometimes sharing beer, sometimes lemonade, sometimes peppermint schnapps, and always long past the hour in which stars would become visible above them.

A little after three in the afternoon Helen went downstairs to the basement and grabbed a claw hammer. She sneezed twice while she pried open the first box, and even with her cold she could detect its epochal smell, musty with odors of white pine, wool, and old papers and the glue from book bindings. On top were a couple hundred-year-old saws for cutting ice. Beneath an old leather jacket with a fleece lining she found an album. On the cover, someone had written: “Butternut Lake/Minocqua 1933-’34.”

From the story When Murray Met Helen

January 16th was one of those days when the arctic cold that had descended upon Milwaukee took a bite out of any one who stepped outside. As she got off the bus and walked briskly to her job interview, Helen noticed that people coming out of coffee shops, or ducking out doors for a smoke, were wincing at the sky as if God were reverting to the Old Testament.

The interview hadn’t gone that well. It wasn’t that Helen didn’t want to go back to work. She did. She’d had good experiences as a paralegal, but she was also wary about going to work for just another misogynistic trophy hunter. It was a standard part of her interviews to gently lay out how she expected to be treated in exchange for her loyalty. But today it had come off to the interviewer–a somewhat anxious, balding, and sniffling securities lawyer in his mid-forties–as though she should be giving him more of the benefit of her doubts.

“That’s very forthright and candid of you Ms. Morris,” he’d replied. “There are times when I deeply appreciate that in a colleague.”

From which she could subtract, through his tone, that this was not one of those times.

It hadn’t helped matters that she and Rick had quarreled the night before. Things had started well enough when he showed up with a jaunty smile, a bottle of Kahlua, and a DVD. Shakespeare in Love, he figured, was just one of those films you’d rather enjoy with your lover than with the guys at the firehouse. So it surprised him when Helen pronounced it dreadful, worse even than The English Patient.

In ways that indicated that he either felt too strongly about the film, or that he’d had too much Kahlua, Rick began to lay out his thesis for why Shakespeare in Love was among the best movies of the ’90s, and how Judi Dench’s performance, alone, could be received with pleasure comparable to sexual satisfaction.

“Oh, now I get it,” Helen said, “you’re just all excited that Gwenyth Paltrow got undressed.”

Rick was so flustered he could only stammer.

“Aha! I’m right!” she said, piling it on. “I know how men think. I’ve broken the code.”

It was a silly argument, but the upshot was that he was so tongue-tied that he grabbed what was left of the Kahlua and left, depriving both of them of the warmth they would have otherwise enjoyed that night against the January chill.

Helen awoke the next morning to the sound of a muffled banging on her door. Once she realized where the noise was coming from and what it was about, she hoped and expected to open the door and find Rick.

Instead, she opened the door to find Renard and Harry Michaels, with grim smiles, cold feet, and a dolly loaded with the first two of Murray’s crates

From the story When Murray Met Helen

Helen’s memorable luncheon at the Wisconsin Club with Renard and Harry Michaels had not quite gone according to plan. Oh, the table was perfect and the airlifted lobster had been sublime, as had the warm-from-the-oven, cracked red wheat dinner rolls and the lush tomato salad. But the casually rehearsed presentation of Murray’s wishes for Helen, on account of the awkward nature of the request, had been put off to the dessert course. Continue reading Unthinkable →