Read Parachutes and Kisses for Free Online

ago,” my sister said. “Her name was Malke-Mary in English.”
    â€œAnd his age?”
    â€œNinety-seven,” they all said in unison.
    â€œAh—a very long-lived man.”
    From the way he said “long-lived” (he added two syllables above the usual number like a rabbi out of Philip Roth), Isadora knew with foreboding and horror that they could all look forward to an oration upon the theme of Methuselah and the blessings of a long life. She had been to enough Jewish funerals to foretell this with horrid certainty.
    Before leaving Connecticut that morning, Isadora had crammed into her handbag the scrawled remembrance of her grandfather’s death and dying which she had written at a white heat, her pen propelled by the winds of his passing. While he lay expiring in a grim nursing home in Spring Valley, she was scribbling about him, as if by her scribbling she could make him stay. Now she was trembling with desire and fear—desire to read this memoir to the assembled relatives and friends, and fear that it would horribly offend them, for it was hardly a conventional eulogy. She had told her father and mother about it on the phone, and her father, as usual, sensing a good media event, wanted her to read it, while her mother wasn’t sure.
    â€œRabbi,” said her father, “this is Mr. Stoloff’s granddaughter, my daughter, Isadora Wing.” He waited for the aha of recognition. It never came.
    â€œShe is the well-known author,” said Isadora’s father, ever the promoter, ever the tummler. Isadora squirmed with embarrassment. Apparently her reputation had not penetrated the shuls of mid-Manhattan.
    â€œYou probably know her Vaginal Flowers, or perhaps her most recent best seller, Tintoretto’s Daughter,” her father went on.
    â€œDad,” she squirmed. Isadora actually blushed. The word vaginal never sounded dirtier than it did there in that Rabbi-roomlet.
    Her father charged blithely ahead. “Well, not many people know that she is a poet as well as a novelist, and it is the wish of the entire family ...” (her mother and aunt did not seem so sure) “that she read her memoir and an elegy to Mr. Stoloff in lieu of a eulogy.”
    â€œCertainly, certainly,” said the rabbi, looking a little disappointed not to be able to do his Methuselah number. “Surely a member of the family who knew and loved him is preferable to a total stranger ...” One could not help feeling the rabbi was annoyed to be preempted.
    â€œBut we do want all the proper prayers in Hebrew, before and after,” Isadora’s mother said—her mother, who had probably never in her life heard Hebrew prayers except at funerals and bar mitzvahs. “He would have wanted that,” she added.
    â€œAnd what about the Kaddish? Who will say the Kaddish?” the rabbi asked. “I can arrange for some yeshiva bucher to say Kaddish.”
    Yes! Yes! Isadora thought. Do it right. Speed his passing. But her mother said no. Isadora was crestfallen.
    â€œMy daughter will read her memoir and a poem,” Jude said resolutely, “and then you will close with a prayer.”
    â€œAnd The Rubáiyát,” said Isadora, “his favorite poem. I will read part of that.”
    â€œOf course, Miss Wing,” said the rabbi, deferential to the idea of Fame, even if he’d never heard of the person. “Of course.”
    So it was that Isadora came to read her blasphemous memoir to an audience consisting of her sister, her mother, her father, her aunt, her cousins, her husband, two ex-husbands (one a psychiatrist, the other a psychotic), assorted friends and acquaintances-and one horrified rabbi.
    â€œAs I begin writing this, my grandfather is dying in a hospital in Spring Valley, New York, dying alone, with paid nurses to attend him, dying thousands of miles from the town in Russia where he was born ninety-seven years ago—a town I do not