The Ides of March

Starsky and Hutch go to New York for a funeral.

She died in March, a sudden but quiet death. In her sleep, so very different than the way her husband had passed many years earlier. One of her best friends, expecting to see Ruth for Shabbat service, went by and found her lying in bed, cold as the grave.

Naomi called Nicky, who called Starsky.

Clearly grieving, Starsky made plans to fly out that night. Hutch came with him. There was no way Hutch was going to let Starsky — who had nearly died less than a year before — deal with this alone.

There was a Shiva. Naomi marshaled Ruth’s friends from the synagogue to sit with the deceased, leaving Nick, Starsky and Hutch struggling to pin on their yarmulkes and write eulogies. The women patted Nick and David’s hands, feeding them brisket and beef tongue while bustling about finding Ruth’s best dress and a good wig. Her burial was swift — the Jewish tradition requires that the body be in the ground three days after death.

Nicky fled immediately after the service, claiming his wife and new job needed him. Naomi, with her crew of ladies, tidied up the kitchen. They clucked sympathetically, departing almost as quickly as Nick, leaving Starsky and Hutch alone.

Used to the drawn out services of his grandfather’s religion, with a wake, a viewing, a long service in the church and then a gravesite gathering before the burial, Hutch was stunned at how quickly things had happened.

Ruth’s second floor apartment felt too quiet, empty despite thirty-five years of accumulated stuff. Hutch sat beside Starsky on the floral print couch, wanting to give support in some definable way.

Starsky seemed conflicted — by turns numb and then angry. He’d practically seethed all the way through the service at Temple Beth Shalom.

“Starsky?” Hutch started hesitantly, no longer sure what would help his friend. This wasn’t a shootout or a crime scene; it was the memories of his childhood. “Should we…?”

“What?” Starsky growled.

“Start packing up her things? Get some mementos to take back with you to California?” Hutch suggested. “Give something to Nick and…” He’d forgotten the name of Nick’s wife. She hadn’t attended the funeral anyway, which seemed distinctly odd to him. Maybe he should have remembered to ask, but he’d been too wrapped up in Starsky’s pain.

“I don’t want…” Starsky clenched his jaw, pushing a pile of magazines and sympathy cards off the coffee table with a violent sweep of his hand. “She–” He blinked, tears coming to his eyes for the first time since the whole ordeal started.

“Talk to me,” Hutch said softly into his ear, pulling Starsky into a hug. “You’ve barely spoken and that’s not like you.”

“I don’t know where to start,” Starsky whispered, his lips white with the strain. “I don’t know how to feel anymore.”

“She was your mother, you loved her,” Hutch answered, smoothing Starsky’s jumbled curls off his forehead. The yarmulke he’d worn since the service fell onto the couch cushions. “You have a right to be sad.”

“That’s the problem.” Starsky jumped up, all restless energy. “I’m so fucking angry I don’t know — there were years when I hated her. Hated everything about both my parents. My dad died and immediately, mom goes to work for that shit — ”

“Durniak,” Hutch said softly. He’d known much of that story but never heard it told with such disdain.

Starsky nodded, his face twisted with fury. “Nobody at home after school, no pop, no mom… I’d make Nick a plate of sandwiches and get out of the house so fast. Run until I was out of breath and then run faster…” He clenched both fists, pacing wildly. Eventually, his pacing brought him into the kitchen.

Hutch followed without saying a word, patient to let Starsky get out what he needed to say. All the casserole dishes had been washed and carried away by the ladies from the temple and the counters were spotless. He’d been so worried about Starsky that he hadn’t eaten much at the reception, but now his belly rumbled under his black tie.

“So what does she do?” Starsky stood stark in the middle of his mother’s kitchen, surrounded with the knickknacks of his childhood.

He’d pointed out many to Hutch in the last few days: a mug his father used to drink from. A small tin filled with pennies. A cookie jar shaped like a clown. A five-year-old’s tiny handprint in hard clay with David carved crookedly on the bottom.

“Sent you to your Aunt Rose for safekeeping,” Hutch finished when Starsky wound down abruptly.

“Got rid of me,” Starsky said through his teeth. “So she could work and have the neighbors watch Nick after school.” He spat like a superstitious old woman, pointing up at a picture on the wall. A familiar face. Joe Durniak with his arm around a youthful looking Ruth Starsky. “So she could date him.”

How did he untangle this knot of anger? Hutch knew Starsky had loved his mother, knew how much he’d enjoyed talking to her on the phone. She called most Fridays — despite the whole thing about not using electricity on the Sabbath, something Hutch never quite understood in the first place. She’d been a brave calm in the middle of the storm after Starsky’s shooting, sitting by his bed knitting what they’d taken to calling the Doctor Who scarf as it grew longer and longer.

“I thought…” Hutch opened the refrigerator to pull out some leftovers, giving Starsky a moment of undemanding quiet. “You made peace with her?”

“I thought so, too.” Starsky sounded exhausted. He sat down on the red plastic, fifties style chair.

Starsky had obviously inherited his mother’s color sense– the whole kitchen was bright with red and chrome, cherries on the wall paper and red and white tiles on the floor. Hutch leaned against the old fashioned Westinghouse fridge door, the air cold on his arms, holding a bottle of milk in one hand. “So what changed?”

“I don’t know. Because she left me again?” Starsky asked bleakly. He crossed his arms over his chest defensively. “When I came back from ‘Nam, I visited her a few months later. Hadn’t lived in New York since I was 13, right after my bar mitzvah, and now I was 21. I didn’t know her at all.”

He waved a hand at the kitchen as if trying to materialize Ruth. “She made me foods I hadn’t eaten in eight years, talked about the family, the…” The tears that had been threatening for five minutes streamed down both cheeks. “Apologized,” he gasped. “For not being able to deal with me back then. For losing her way — ”

Hutch took a few more things from the refrigerator; poured milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer water into a glass and set it in front of Starsky. “Giving you a chance to find yours?”

“I am who I am because of her.” Starsky gathered himself together and took a long drink. “An egg cream!” he said in a shaky voice. “How’d you know?”

“Your mom told me,” Hutch said simply. “A long time ago. I don’t know, maybe after Bellamy and Jennings drugged you?”

“She — ” Starsky shrugged, as if unable to fathom his life going forward without her. “We talked, for a couple weeks, after ‘Nam. You remember, I was — lost. I walked around feeling like I was made of sharp slivers of glass.”

“Yep.” Hutch took a drink from the egg cream. Not his favorite, but it was Starsky’s and that made it special. They’d first met then in a bar in Venice, right before the trip to NY, when Starsky was still so shell shocked he’d spook at a car backfiring. “She must have helped because you were alive after the visit. Convinced me to quit law school and join the academy with you.”

Starsky took back the glass and drained it dry, chocolate smearing his upper lip. “She brought me into life, then pushed me out into it before I was ready, then pulled me back into the womb when I needed it most. So how could she fucking die?”

Hutch kissed him then, having no answer at all. “Because death is part of life, but it doesn’t have to be the end,” he said finally, licking the chocolate off his own lips. He could taste the salty flavor of Starsky’s tears. “Memory keeps them alive.” It sounded too Hallmark card to his ears. He was making things worse.

“Don’t die, Hutch, I couldn’t stand it.” Starsky held tight to his wrists, anguish in his eyes.

“I can’t promise that,” Hutch said, grief settling into his heart in a way he’d felt once before — on a day in mid May nearly a year before. “I can only promise to love you as much as your mother did. More, because I chose you.”

“Hey,” Starsky countered with a watery grin. “I chose you. Saw you in that damned bar. Found love,” he paused to inhale slowly, tranquility replacing the grief, “and hope in a skinny blond.”

FIN