Table Six

The Cypress at Encino keeps a fish tank in the lobby and a grand piano that a man named Duane plays on Sundays at four. Above the mailboxes a glass case holds the activities calendar in forty point type. Tuesday, Screen Time, 10:30, Multipurpose Room B. A volunteer from Milken named Talia, seventeen, comes and teaches the residents to work their iPads. She has come every Tuesday for eight months. She smells like grapefruit and the men adore her and she has never once made anyone feel stupid, which is a talent, and she will lose it in college.
She shows them the video on the first Tuesday in April.
She means it as a kindness. Pearl Grossbard’s son the rabbi, on the internet, two million views, and Talia has it queued before the class settles.
It is not the rabbi. Nobody filmed the rabbi, because he said it on Shabbos morning in front of six hundred people who keep Shabbos. It is a sixteen year old boy in his father’s gray sport coat, alone in a bedroom in Beverlywood, doing the rabbi. He has the hands. He has the pauses. Eleven women and four men watch a child put both hands on an imaginary shtender and say that he would not learn a page of Gemara if nobody paid him.
The room goes quiet the way the shul went quiet.
“Play it again,” says Selma Lieb, eighty-eight, who has a grandson at Cedars in interventional cardiology and a daughter who takes her to Palm Springs.
Talia plays it again.
By lunch it has reached the dining room.
Pearl Grossbard has held the head of table six by the window since March of 2019, when Ida Perlman died and the chair came open. The Cypress prints a seating chart and the activities director believes she assigns the seats. Nobody who lives there believes this. Table six seats six and takes the morning light and looks out at the courtyard where the good bougainvillea grows, and the women at table six have between them one federal judge, two orthodontists, a woman who wrote for a soap opera, and Pearl’s son, who has been on television in Israel.
Her son has been the strongest holding in the portfolio for four years. He is bald in the good way. He is quoted. When the Journal ran his photograph in September, Pearl carried the paper down to breakfast folded so the picture faced out and set it beside her grapefruit and did not mention it, and that is how you play the game at the highest level.
She comes in at noon and Selma Lieb looks up at her with an expression of tremendous sympathy.
“Pearl,” Selma says. “We saw.”
Pearl eats her chicken. She does not eat it fast and she does not eat it slow.
By Friday she has been asked twice whether her son is having a breakdown, once whether he lost his faith in the Holocaust, and once, by a man named Herschel Ostrow who has designs on her, whether the shul will let him keep the house. Saturday she takes her lunch in her room. Sunday she takes it in her room. Marilou, who has worked the third floor for nine years and misses nothing, brings the tray and says, “You want I should bring the good pudding,” and Pearl says she doesn’t care about pudding, and Marilou brings it anyway and it comes back untouched, which Marilou reports to nobody, because Marilou is a professional.
Grossbard comes Thursdays. He has come Thursdays for six years, eleven in the morning, and he brings a bag of the sour cherry candies she likes from the Russian market on Santa Monica, and he stays ninety minutes, and there are weeks when this is the only appointment he does not move.
He knocks and comes in. She has the crossword folded into eighths.
“Ma.”
“You’re early.”
“I’m four minutes late.”
“Then you’re late.” She does not look up. “Sit.”
He sits in the chair by the window. Her room has her own furniture in it, the walnut dresser and the chair with the worn arms, which is a status item at the Cypress and cost her twenty-two hundred dollars in delivery and storage, and she would pay it again.
He starts in. He can’t help it. It comes out of him the way a sneeze does.
“I have news. I’m not being paid at the moment. The board suspended me for sixty days. So I want you to understand that this visit is currently pro bono and I’d like it noted somewhere.”
She fills in seven across.
“Ma.”
“You want me to laugh.”
“It would be nice.”
“Talia showed us the video.”
He waits.
“Fifteen people in Multipurpose Room B,” she says. “Twice. She played it twice. Then Selma Lieb played it for her son on speaker in the hall so the whole floor could hear him say oh my God.”
“How’s the cardiologist.”
“He’s a cardiologist,” Pearl says. “That’s the thing about a cardiologist. He stays a cardiologist. He doesn’t wake up Tuesday and announce he only does the valves for money.”
Grossbard laughs. She does not.
“I lost the table,” she says.
“You didn’t lose the table.”
“I’ve eaten in this room for eleven days.”
He stops laughing.
“Eleven days.”
“Eleven days. And it wasn’t even you, Shelly. It was the Malik boy in a sport coat. My son goes down for something a child said in a bedroom.” She takes a breath. “Eleven days, and Herschel Ostrow has been in my chair four times, which he thinks nobody notices, and Selma Lieb has started saying grace before the meal, out loud, at table six, which she never did in her life, and she does it looking at me.” Pearl sets the crossword down. “Do you know what I have here, Shelly? I have a room, I have a dresser, and I have a chair by the window at the good table. That’s the inventory. That’s everything. And you gave it away on the internet for a laugh from a bunch of thirty year olds in sneakers who won’t come to your funeral.”
He looks at the courtyard for a while.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll fix it.”
“You can’t fix it.”
“I can fix it. I’ll come do a program. Sunday. A shiur, whatever they want, I’ll do the whole floor. I’ll say something rabbinical about Pesach. Marilou will put out the good cookies. Selma Lieb will have to sit there while forty people watch your son teach Torah for free, which will be the first time in her life she has had to sit through anything.”
“For free.”
“For free.”
“So the video was a lie.”
“The video was a theory.”
“It was a lie.”
“Ma.”
“You’ll come Sunday and do the cookies and every one of them will go back to their room and pull up the video again, because that’s what people do, they keep the version they liked.” She picks the crossword back up. “You can’t fix it with a program. You could fix it by shutting up and you’re not going to shut up, so let’s not sit here and pretend.”
The nurse’s cart goes by in the hall. Somebody two doors down has the Dodgers on at a volume you could hear from the parking structure.
“Why do you do it,” she says.
“It’s true.”
“It’s true,” she says. “Sure. And a hundred things are true and you say the one that gets you on television.”
“I say the one nobody else will say.”
“You say the one that keeps you safe.”
He turns his head.
“You heard me,” Pearl says.
“Say it plainer.”
“Your father learned for free.”
There it is. It has been in the room for six years of Thursdays.
“Nine to eleven at night at the shtiebel on Detroit Street,” she says. “Every night. Sundays from seven in the morning. Thirty nine years with Yudel Faktor, may he rest, and Yudel’s wife and I used to look at each other at simchas like two women who’d been in the same car accident. Your father sold refrigerators at Bernstein’s on Pico. He was the number two man in the store for eleven years and he never once asked Sol Bernstein for the floor manager job because the floor manager works Sunday morning.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know the numbers. I know the numbers. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars when he died and a leased Buick with fourteen months on it, and I went back to work at fifty four doing intake for a periodontist in Sherman Oaks, and I did that for nine years, and that’s how I’m sitting in this room instead of at your house in a room with your wife’s mother’s furniture in it.” She says all of this in the voice she used on the phone with insurance companies. “So don’t tell me about paid and unpaid. I priced it. I priced it before you were born and I’ve never gotten a different number.”
He does not say anything for a while.
“He never raised his voice to me,” she says. “Not once in thirty nine years. I’d have preferred it.”
Grossbard gets up and pours her water from the pitcher and puts it where she can reach it, which she notices and does not thank him for.
“What was it for,” she says. “Answer me like I’m not your mother. What is it for. Forty years of nine to eleven. What does it do.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be clever.”
“I’m not being clever, Ma. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make a man good. I know men who learn twelve hours a day and I wouldn’t leave them alone with the tzedakah account. It doesn’t hold a marriage together. It didn’t hold yours. It doesn’t keep the grandchildren Jewish, I’ve watched it fail at that in a hundred houses. It won’t get you a better death. There’s a whole industry out there selling it as therapy, as continuity, as parenting, as a wellness practice, and every one of those people is lying, and they’re lying because they’re scared to say the true thing.”
“Which is.”
“That it’s good for nothing and it’s the best thing there is.”
Pearl looks at him.
“You can’t have both,” she says.
“That’s the only place it’s ever been,” he says. “Both.”
The Dodgers get louder down the hall. Somebody laughs at the nurses’ station.
“So he was right,” she says.
“He was right and it cost you everything and both of those are true and I will not sit here and choose, and I have never once in my life told a woman that her husband’s learning was worth what it took out of her, and I’m not going to start with you.”
“You tell everybody the price.”
“I tell everybody the price.”
“You got that from me,” Pearl says.
He does not answer.
“You didn’t get it from a book. You got it from a woman doing intake in Sherman Oaks at fifty four years old.” She takes a sour cherry candy out of the bag and works the wrapper with her thumbnail because her fingers don’t do the twist anymore. “You’ve been giving my testimony for thirty years and taking the credit.”
Grossbard reaches over and takes the candy and unwraps it and hands it back.
Then he takes the small Mishnayos out of his jacket pocket, the one with the cracked spine that was Manny’s, and he opens it on his knee and starts to learn out loud in the singsong, quiet, the way his father did it in the yellow chair after the store closed, and he does this for eighteen minutes while his mother sits with the candy in her cheek and the crossword in her lap.
“You look like him when you do that,” she says.
“I’m being compensated.”
“I know,” Pearl says.
He comes Sunday and does the program. Marilou puts out the good cookies. Forty one residents come, which is a record for a Sunday that isn’t a birthday, and he speaks for thirty five minutes on the four sons and he is extremely funny and he does not say one outrageous thing, and afterward Herschel Ostrow tells him he should have his own show, and Talia films the last four minutes on her phone and posts it and it does eleven hundred.
Monday, Pearl comes down to lunch at noon.
Grossbard has driven back out to bring her the eyeglass repair she asked for, and he stops in the doorway of the dining room because he can see her from there and she cannot see him.
She is at the head of table six. Selma Lieb sits at her left with her hands folded.
“He came Sunday for the cookies,” Pearl is saying. “You understand what I’m telling you. There’s a contract. A hundred and ninety thousand a year plus the house, and community programming is in section two, and if he skips it they dock him. He told me himself. That’s my son. He doesn’t do one thing for free.”
The women at table six make a sound.
“Pearl,” Selma says. “That’s terrible.”
“That’s what I’ve got,” Pearl says, and reaches for the salt.
Grossbard stands in the doorway another moment. Then he leaves the eyeglass repair at the front desk with Marilou and walks out past the fish tank and the piano and the glass case with the calendar in it, and he gets on the 101 at Balboa at 12:20 on a Monday, which is the only hour of the week that road moves, and he makes it back to Pico in twenty six minutes, which he tells everyone about for a month.