Liebestod in Rego Park

By R.Z. Sheppard

ENDING

by HILMA WOLITZER 223 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

The wedding of love and death has given literature some of its best-- and most of its worst--moments. Consider, for example, the timeless tragic passions of Tristan and Iseult and the disposable bathos of Love Story. In Ending, Hilma Wolitzer's first novel, there is neither an emerald love cave nor an ivy-covered campus to enhance the relationship of love and death. The setting is Rego Park, Queens, a part of New York City where thousands pursue their lives in middle-income high-rises not far from one of the largest and dreariest cemetery complexes in the world. The story is about a young mother named Sandy Kaufman who must confront the irreversible truth that her 32-year-old husband is dying from multiple cancer of the marrow.

Jay Kaufman is a television cameraman, lanky, easygoing, well liked. Focusing on the hard legs of show girls and the putty faces of comedians is only his job. His life is with Sandy, their two small sons, and with New York City itself. As an amateur still-photographer, Jay loves to roam the city and poke his lenses into the varied faces of his fellow New Yorkers. Sometimes, when startled out of their reveries, they poke back. At home he arranges his photos on the bed and casually plans to publish them in a book.

Jay is ripe with innocence. He is old enough to have savored love and father hood but still too young for the restlessness and self-recrimination that often accompany the onset of middle age. It is difficult to think of rebellious cells fanning out through his body, turning his blood to water. For Sandy, whose life suddenly becomes a ritual of babysitting arrangements and hospital visits, death infiltrates past the eggshell phrases of doctors, through false hopes, the increasingly embarrassed concern of neighbors, and even such things as her sudden piercing awareness that there is less laundry.

Death skins her eyes, allowing her to prepare for loss by making her more vulnerable and open to experience. And there is still plenty of that. Her best friend, who also lost a husband when he ran off with another woman, drags Sandy to a group-grope therapy session. It is not her thing, though in her own graceful way she learns to take risks with strangers. Riding a bus to Atlantic City during a brief stand-down from her deathwatch, she holds the hand of a grossly fat woman who has spilled out her troubles. She suspends the usual fear and suspicion when a middle-aged man keeps intercepting her in the hospital parking lot to make pathetic and harmless advances.

Under the trying circumstances, nothing Sandy does seems inappropriate. The secret of her appeal and depth is that she is a ministering angel who also ministers to herself. She has an artist's sense of what is real and what is merely tactful. When her husband's doctor cops out and leaves her to tell Jay that his illness is incurable, Sandy's instincts are superb: "I wanted to do it while he was still able to walk. It seemed immoral somehow to tell a dying man the miserable and imminent truth when he was helpless, lying down in the very path of the words."

Ending could easily have been a dreadful book. Instead, it is an extraordinarily good one. Each of its 40 short chapters contains a quiet surprise or nuance that is all the more effective be cause it springs from the most familiar sources. Author Wolitzer, a Long Island housewife and mother of two, practices realism at its best. Her novel is not a direct imprint of close personal experience. It is an imaginative act that contemplates the world without the lachrymose bitterness that made an anxious Hemingway demean life by calling death an old whore.

qed R.Z. Sheppard

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