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Overview
“I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.”
Mona’s perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness—leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality.
This stunning work was a finalist for the National Book Award for First Novel; now, its brilliant, ambitious exploration of an unfinished life is about to be discovered by a new generation of readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480410619 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 308 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Gail Albert is a writer, licensed psychologist, photographer, and certified teacher of Jewish mystical and meditative practice. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. For most of the 1990s, she directed a program in New York City that brought psychiatrists to mentally ill homeless people; currently, she has a private practice in Woodstock, New York. Her first book, Matters of Chance, was a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection and was nominated as the Best First Novel of the Year for the American Book Awards. Her second book is called The Other Side of the Couch. One of its chapters was republished in a book for the general public on psychotherapy (Inside Therapy: Illuminating Writing About Therapists, Patients, and Psychotherapy), which includes chapters by such people as Erich Fromm, Theodore Reik, Janet Malcolm, Mark Epstein, and Irvin Yalom. Her third book, Mending the Heart, Tending the Soul: Directions to the Garden Within, was published in 2012.
Read an Excerpt
Matters of Chance
A Novel
By Gail Albert
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1982 Gail AlbertAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1061-9
CHAPTER 1
HANNAH WAS MY BEST FRIEND until her father killed her mother with the bread knife when we were eight. Hannah found the body lying on the kitchen floor late one October afternoon and ran screaming down the stairs into my aunt's arms. Later my uncle said that Hannah's mother had always nagged too much; and he cried because they'd all known each other since before the war.
Hannah's father was sent to prison in upstate New York, and his spinster sister Irene moved in from Philadelphia. A schoolteacher, misplaced in our part of Brooklyn, she never let any of Hannah's friends inside the apartment. I was the only one of us even allowed on the stoop: I'd passed her test.
I stood on the pavement; she looked down at me from her wooden folding chair at the top of the brownstone steps.
"Tell me," she said, "the names of twenty Presidents of the United States. They don't have to be in order." Her mouth was tight, and I felt her eyes on my gypsy hair and scraped knees.
"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt," I said, "and Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, and Washington and Lincoln, and ..." Counting on my fingers I slowly ticked off thirteen more. "... Did I say Madison?" I asked at last.
"No," she said. "Not yet."
That time Hannah and I played geography and hangman until sunset, while I bit my tongue to keep from spelling m----r for murder or k---e for knife. I loved Hannah and I hated Irene for shutting me out.
I still dream of Hannah twenty-six years later, and wonder what became of her. I see her as unmarried, sometimes living alone and sometimes living with a bent and white-haired Isaac, out of prison at last. I ask if he collects Social Security, unable to remember the rules for convicted murderers.
Indeed, I think that Isaac was actually convicted of manslaughter, although I've never quite seen how stabbing your wife with a bread knife is anything less than murder. The knife had always been there, ready to cut great slabs of the pumpernickel Isaac brought home from work. I can see him using it on Rose instead of on the thick black bread if she pushed him just too far when he already had the knife in hand. And yet I can't, for all the years I've thought about it.
I get angry too; everyone does. With my husband, say, or with my children. When my boys were very little, I'd sometimes slap one of them in a rage, so mad I wanted only to keep on hitting until my child begged me from the floor to stop. But I never gave way to more than those few slaps, no matter what I felt like doing.
Once I even locked myself in the bedroom to protect Daniel from me; he was in the middle of an unending toddler's tantrum and I couldn't make him leave me alone. I locked myself in and covered my head with pillows while Dan screamed and banged and hammered on the door. I was pregnant for the second time; Bob was interning and on duty at the hospital thirty-six hours out of every forty-eight. Huddled on the bed, knowing I'd be alone with Dan for ten more hours, I was afraid I'd kill him if I came out of the room.
Then why did Isaac stab Rose to death? I knew Isaac, I knew Rose, as well as a child knows close neighbors when you're poor together, and sometimes I feel I understand and then again I don't.
We moved from Brownsville to a better part of Brooklyn when I started high school. Hannah moved then too, back to Philadelphia with Irene. We exchanged cards at Rosh Hashanah a few times, but no more than that. We talked so little in the years after Isaac killed Rose; how could we write?
It's Sunday night, almost eleven; Bob and I have been reading in the living room, trying to keep up with this week's journals; the boys are asleep and the room is quiet except for the rumble of buses outside. Remembering that I have to boil an egg for Dan's lunch box, I take the article I'm reading with me to the kitchen, grateful that Adam, at least, eats simple ham sandwiches that need no thought the night before.
Whatever the reason, I picture Hannah as a veterinarian, in white coat, surgical mask perhaps, in her office in some upstate town. Last year it occurred to me that Sing Sing is upstate and that I always see her near her father.
At least the murder must have settled Hannah's life. She is a spinster like Irene. Wanting to marry, perhaps. But unable. I imagine the polite prospective in-laws asking about her absent parents.
"My father killed my mother," she patiently explains. "He's out of Sing Sing now and lives with me. I'm sure you'd like him." But it's too late, they've run out.
"People are peculiar," I announce to Bob when I sit down again in the living room. He looks up, startled, with no context for my observation. Then he grins, the skin around his gray eyes crinkling, and asks what set me off this time.
I am an associate professor of neurobiology at a well-known university. My husband is a doctor, a cardiologist, a Jewish blond from California, with the dazzling smile of a Los Angeles lifeguard hoping to catch the eye of a Hollywood film maker. My marriage is happy, my children normal, and my department voted me tenure a year ago.
At school I teach my students everything I know about the brain, and in the afternoon, after classes, I record nerve impulses from the brains of rats to study precisely how each bit of nerve tissue controls their memory. And the more I study, the more sure I am that I'm not even asking the right questions. I don't know if I've ever asked the right questions.
Why did Isaac murder Rose? Did Isaac know he was going to murder her? Did he even mean to kill her when he did?
It's April 1977, two weeks before my thirty-fifth birthday. Isaac killed his wife over a quarter-century ago. As my father killed my own mother—and himself—in a head-on collision with a truck in the Utah desert four summers ago. My father, who never scratched a fender in thirty-six years of driving on New York City streets, in that empty countryside smashed into a trailer truck on the wrong side of the road. They'd never left New York before; I sent them on that trip, and they died in a gully by the roadside.
Bob has just gone downstairs to walk our dog, McCrae, in Central Park. The cherry trees are blooming; from our windows, the Park looks soft and romantic, its tree-lined winding paths a nineteenth-century vision of an English garden.
We live on the fifteenth floor of a co-op in Manhattan, high above the Central Park Reservoir. Our bedroom overlooks the Park but I see none of it now. With Bob outside, I've gone to bed; retreating to the warm, king-size, soothing waterbed; ignoring the city and the Park to look up at space and sky, floating in space while the bed makes warm waves beneath me.
On the walls of the room are photographs of the Utah desert; of Canyonlands, Arches, and Cedar Breaks; of rocks red with iron, green with uranium. I float in space on a warm sea, looking at the desert pictures and the sky outside. I've attained the American Dream and it's come near to killing me.
I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville, and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.
CHAPTER 2IN BROWNSVILLE, the woman who lived above us was a witch. My mother warned me always to be polite to her, to carry her groceries, and to open the door for her. To keep her from giving me the evil eye.
When I was two and my father was in basic training in the infantry, my mother had a second child, a son. In an argument with my mother three months before the birth, Mrs. Goldstein cursed him. My mother was five months pregnant; Mrs. Goldstein had caught her foot in the fire escape upstairs while washing windows. She called down for help, but my mother was afraid to climb the open stairs.
"I was dizzy all the time; I couldn't help her," my mother told me. "She killed your brother because I didn't come."
"Let him choke the way I choke here now," she'd cursed. And when he was born, six weeks early, he turned blue and choked and died. He tried to live, lying in an incubator for ten days of gasping struggle, but in the end the curse was too strong. Or so my mother said.
We lived in an apartment building four stories high, two brick wings around a pink concrete courtyard. The lobby was all marble, floor and walls, and a marble fireplace stood opposite two marble window seats that looked out upon a second weed-filled courtyard in the back. My parents said there had been armchairs in the lobby and a red velvet canopy out front when the building was new in 1923, long before they lived there. The skeleton of the canopy was still standing so I believed them. Now my friends and I roller-skated in the empty lobby on rainy days.
It was still the nicest building on the block; the others had neither courtyards nor lobbies. The block itself was not the best, but it was second best, with three trees and a number of small brownstones across the street; and down the block, a dentist lived in the brownstone that had a white rosebush in front.
We had a two-bedroom apartment one floor up and overlooking the street. My parents slept in one bedroom; I slept in the other with my grandfather.
Isaac and Rose lived just across the street, in the same brownstone as my aunt and uncle, and Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein lived above us. On warm days, I might clamber out my parents' bedroom window to the fire escape, to lie reading on a blanket in the sun; and sometimes I'd climb up the iron staircase one landing to Mrs. Goldstein's window. Careful not to be seen, I could watch her husband put his arms around her, or pinch her as he walked by. At night I heard their bed creak through the ceiling.
Mrs. Goldstein didn't like to bring her garbage to the dumbwaiter for collection every night; often she threw it out the window instead, into the back courtyard, bits of it dropping onto the laundry my mother hung out to dry. My mother said it was people like Mrs. Goldstein who were making the building go downhill. But her own three daughters finished high school and married well, moving out of Brownsville to fairy-tale Long Island suburbs. She had pictures of them on all the flat surfaces of her furniture, posed in front of their suburban homes.
When Isaac killed Rose, many of the neighbors said they understood: Rose nagged too much. But Mrs. Goldstein could never forgive a Jewish man for killing his wife. "In her own kitchen," she raged. "With her daughter to find her dead on the linoleum."
On the other hand, she was glad when Irene moved in, glad to have a schoolteacher across the street, and she took to stopping at Irene's with gifts of homemade noodle puddings and honey cakes. Irene invited her in when she asked in no one else, and visited with her in turn.
On summer days they sat on wooden chairs around a tiny table on Irene's stoop, sipping iced tea from special thin-walled glasses. One of Mrs. Goldstein's daughters had moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, and Irene would talk about the city while Hannah and I played our endless games of checkers and geography and hangman. I think Mrs. Goldstein approved of me, polite and bookish as I was, and I loved to listen to them talk; but I was afraid of her. She was a witch.
"I don't like you playing over there," my mother said each week. "Not when Hannah's aunt won't even let you inside. And with Mrs. Goldstein over there all the time ... "
"She doesn't talk to me, she talks to Irene," I answered. But to myself I admitted that she worried me.
"You should get married," Mrs. Goldstein said to Irene when she knew her well enough. Hannah and I must have been ten by then. She smoothed the paper napkin on her lap and waited.
"I'm better off alone," Irene said. "Men are good-for-nothings anyway. And here, who could I meet here? In Philadelphia, there were men with futures. But here? The men who live here are pigs."
She sipped her tea, delicately holding out her pinkie finger. "I met a man at school last week who wasn't bad. We had lunch together in the candy store. But who wants to marry a woman with someone else's child?"
She broke a slice of honey cake in half and swallowed it without dropping a crumb, then wiped her mouth with a napkin. "At least Hannah takes after Isaac instead of her mother."
She paused before beginning the familiar litany, her eyes on the cake still left. "I told Isaac he never should have married her. He was too good for her. You know, he had two years of college. He laughed at me when I told him. When I visit him now, I always remind him how he laughed at his big sister."
Mrs. Goldstein spilled a bit of tea. "Still, a woman needs a man. You're young; my middle daughter is as old as you and she just had another baby."
They looked at us then, aware that Hannah and I had stopped our game to listen. Actually, I thought Hannah looked just like her mother, at least as I remembered her, and not at all like Isaac. She didn't much like school either, for all of Irene's pushing her and making her do homework. Not that she was dumb. But I knew that Hannah liked boys.
"Can we walk around the block?" Hannah asked. "It's still early." When Irene hesitated, Mrs. Goldstein intervened. "They need a little exercise. They shouldn't sit here listening all day."
Hannah grabbed my hand and pulled me off the steps. "We'll be back in half an hour," she said. "And don't call the cops if I'm a minute late."
She half ran down the block, pulling me along, slowing only as we reached the corner. "You hear that Mr. Goldstein is carrying on with Mrs. Sachs?"
I grinned. "I hear Mrs. Goldstein screaming at him through the ceiling. If he's not careful, she'll put a curse on him."
"My aunt says she's used to his carryings on. She just likes to yell."
"Well, I wouldn't get her mad if I was him." I thought then of my parents and of the coldness so often still between them. "Sometimes I don't know why people get married. My mother says it's a curse that women fall in love." I blinked and changed the subject. "Do you like my new skirt? It's tight."
But that too was a delicate subject. My mother let me pick my own clothes, and she didn't mind them flashy. I was even wearing stockings and sling-back shoes to school, the only girl in the smartest track to wear sling-backs. I had a giant blister on my heel where my left shoe rubbed. I looked at Hannah's saddle shoes and socks. Irene insisted that she dress respectably.
When we turned the corner, Hannah unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse. At ten, she was just beginning to get breasts; I could see the nipples through her undershirt and blouse. It was safe enough around the corner: a different neighborhood, where only a few people knew our families. Irene didn't speak to any of them anyway.
"Mr. Goldstein had some beer last week, and he pinched me when my aunt wasn't looking."
I thought of my Uncle Jake and grimaced; he pinched too and he always stank of whiskey. "What did you do?"
"I told him I stuck to boys my own age. It made him laugh."
We stopped then while I bent to fix the Kleenex in my shoe; my blister was getting larger. A few months before I'd had to wear slippers without backs for two weeks to give my feet a chance to heal. But I loved my shoes.
We crossed the street just behind a big red truck, its horn bleating to scatter the crowd of skaters. When I was six, and learning how to skate, I'd turned too fast and fallen in front of a truck that large. I lay in the gutter forever, trying to crawl out of the way, watching the truck bear down on me, everything in slow-motion. It stopped just a few inches from my legs, and the driver jumped out, shouting at me as soon as he saw he hadn't run me over and shaking me by the shoulders when he stood me up; I still couldn't get my legs to move. I'd never told my parents.
I knew that Hannah was looking for some boys to flirt with; I was along for camouflage. To Irene, I was safe company for Hannah in spite of my sling-backs; she'd never gotten over my naming twenty Presidents of the United States. And maybe she even knew I was afraid of boys in spite of how I dressed.
"There's Stanley on his bicycle," I said, hoping to placate Hannah.
"He's a creep."
I knew he was; for me that was the central point. He had a crush on me, and I spent an hour or two each week listening to his baseball talk in return for borrowing his bicycle to go around the block. I'd never owned a bike and I was willing to use him cold-heartedly for the privilege. It might have been easier to let him kiss me, but he wasn't interested, or maybe he was even shyer than I was.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Matters of Chance by Gail Albert. Copyright © 1982 Gail Albert. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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