They were all sitting in the living room, just back from synagogue, when Adam walked in. He was wearing a tie and a beautifully cut dark blue Brioni suit, a custom-made white shirt, and perfectly polished shoes. Any other mother would have melted when she saw him. He was well built and good looking, in an exotic, ethnic way. On rare good days, when he was younger, she had said he looked like a young Israeli freedom fighter, and had occasionally been willing to let on that she was proud of him. These days all she ever said was that he had sold his soul to live in Sodom and Gomorrah, and his life was a disgrace. She disapproved of everything he did, from the women she knew he went out with, to the clients he represented, the trips he took to Las Vegas on business, either to see title fights for his boxers, or to see his rappers do concert tours. She even disapproved of Charlie and Gray, and said they were a couple of losers who had never been married and never would be, and hung out with a bunch of loose women. And every time she saw pictures of Adam in the tabloids with one of the women he was dating, standing behind Vana or one of his other clients, she called him to tell him that he was a complete disgrace. He was sure tonight wasn't going to be much better.
Missing services on Yom Kippur was about as bad as it got, as far as she was concerned. He hadn't come home for Rosh Hashanah either. He'd been in Atlantic City cleaning up a contract dispute that had erupted when one of his biggest musical artists had shown up drunk, and passed out onstage. High Jewish holidays meant nothing to his clients, but they meant a lot to his mother. Her face looked like granite when he let himself into the house and walked into the living room. He was so stressed and anxious, he was pale. Coming home always made him feel like a kid again, which was not a happy memory for him. He had been made to feel like an intruder and a disappointment to them since birth.
“Hi, Mom, I'm sorry I'm so late,” he said as he walked toward her, bent to kiss her, and she turned her face away. His father was sitting on the couch staring at his feet. Although he had heard Adam come in, he never looked up to see him. He never did. Adam kissed the top of his mother's head, and moved away. “I'm sorry, everybody, I couldn't help it. I had a crisis with a client. His kid's selling drugs, and his wife was about to go to jail.” His excuse meant nothing to her, it was just more cannon fodder for her.
“Lovely people you work for,” she said, with an edge to her voice that could have sliced through a side of beef. “You must be very proud.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice, as Adam saw his sister glance at her husband, and his brother frowned and turned away. He could tell it was going to be one of those great evenings that left his stomach aching for days.
“It feeds my kids,” Adam said, trying to sound lighthearted, as he went to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. A stiff one. Straight vodka over ice.
“You can't even wait to sit down before you have a drink? You can't go to synagogue on Yom Kippur, or say a decent hello to your family, and you're already drinking? One of these days, Adam, you're going to wind up at AA.” There was little he could say. He would have made a joke of it with Charlie and Gray, but nothing that happened in his family was ever a joke. They looked like they were sitting shivah, as they waited for the maid to tell them that dinner was served. She was the same African American woman who had worked for them for thirty years, though Adam could never figure out why she did. His mother still referred to her as “the
“How was synagogue?” he asked politely, trying to strike up conversation while his sister Sharon spoke in hushed tones to their sister-in-law Barbara, and his brother Ben talked golf to their brother-in-law, whose name was Gideon, but no one liked him, so they pretended he had no name. In his family, if you didn't make the cut, everyone pretended you had no name. Ben was a doctor, and Gideon only sold insurance. The fact that Adam had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School was canceled out by the fact that he was divorced because his wife had left him, a fact for which, in his mother's opinion, he was almost certainly to blame. If he were a decent guy, why would a girl like Rachel leave him? And look what he'd been dating ever since. The mantras were endless, and he knew them all by then. It was a game you could never win. He still tried, but never knew why he did.
