This prompted an impassioned diatribe about Anthony and James Dolan, with Beth listening in amazement and me nodding in agreement. “You keep saying you can’t remember things, but everything you remember I’ve already forgotten,” I said. That made her laugh.
One thing was clear to me: With Michelle, there was no comparison to the heartbreaking deterioration Beth and I had experienced with her parents—her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her father’s dementia. As Beth’s father had done in the grip of the disease, Michelle occasionally would point an index finger to the side of her head when a certain word eluded her. Unlike my father-in-law, whose short-term memory grew so lacking that he would forget a conversation minutes after it occurred, Michelle’s recall, both distant and recent, was still quite good. Her questions to Beth about her work were specific. She remembered the career paths of our sons, Alex and Charly. By name she identified Beth’s mother’s dearest friend, the woman we had brunched with in Greenwich, despite my having mentioned the name, Sylvia, only in passing when I had called about visiting the previous day.
She also expressed vivid memories of our wedding reception on the front lawn of my in-laws’ home and of a call she had made to Beth’s father during the early eighties to tell him that the young attorney he had just hired happened to be her new daughter-in-law. It was the first of several coincidental intersections of our family’s arcs. The last and most delightful was Charly and one of Michelle’s two grandsons winding up one grade apart at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, a small school made smaller by basketball; Andrew was a varsity player, Charly on the club team. They occasionally ran together in full-court pickup games. It had thrilled Michelle that both her grandsons had played high school ball and that Andrew had gone on to star on the Clark team. We had made a plan at one point to take a drive together to watch one of his games, but the boys’ college years went by in a flash, while Michelle grew less mobile. We never did make the trip.
• • • • •
Before another horrendous Knicks season could mercifully draw to a close, Michelle made one more trek to the Garden. She attended an early April 2018 game with Wynn Plaut—her fourth of the season, one of thousands across forty-five seasons.
There was little worth remembering about it, other than that the Knicks lost once again. With Kristaps Porzingis injured, they would drop twenty-five of their last thirty-one games of the 2017–18 season. Looming was another unceremonious firing of a coach (Jeff Hornacek). The tally of consecutive years missing the playoffs would grow to five for the NBA team with the worst cumulative record of the twenty-first century. Michelle couldn’t help herself, though. She had never been a fair-weather fan, Plaut had been gracious enough to not only offer but to drive her into city—and who knew when, or if, another opportunity would arise?
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next season,” she told the security guard who for years had presided over her section, while giving him a hug. If she never made it back, this would be her proper good-bye. The next day, she told me that schlepping into the city to watch this pitiful team no longer served her in the way it had in the past. Much as she loved her courtside view, the conclusion of recent Knicks seasons had actually become a relief from the blur of meaningless games and being surrounded in her section mostly by strangers.
Absent the Knicks, the playoffs had become Michelle’s time to appreciate the game at its best in her twilight years. She looked forward to two compelling months of authentic NBA drama, night in, night out—without having to get off the couch to enjoy it.
I had suggested Sunday, April 15, for a visit because the Oklahoma City Thunder was scheduled to play Game 1 of a first-round playoff series against the Utah Jazz. Michelle was less a fan of the Thunder than she had been when Kevin Durant was costarring with Russell Westbrook; and when Scott Brooks, her buddy from his brief days of riding the Knicks bench, was coach. She still loved watching Westbrook for his sheer athleticism and unbridled aggression, despite my reminding her that her choice of a favorite NBA player was a bit of a contradiction. Westbrook, during crucial points of a game, could be as much of a spirit-killing ball hog as Carmelo Anthony. She ignored my comparative assessment. Michelle liked what she liked. And I had to admit that Westbrook played with a hunger that Anthony never had.
But as if the Knicks hadn’t tormented her enough, when they finally did trade Anthony, they had sent him to the Thunder to partner with Westbrook and Paul George. Michelle immediately predicted that he would ruin the Thunder the way he ruined the Knicks. Lo and behold, Anthony was the same defensive liability for the Thunder, proved uncomfortable and unproductive without the ball in an offense controlled by Westbrook, and pushed back indignantly against the sensible notion of a reduced, nonstarter’s role.
Back at Michelle’s, we watched the Thunder take Game 1 behind Westbrook and George, but they would go on to lose the series, with Anthony proving every point Michelle had ever made about him in the fourth quarter of Game 5. Oblivious to the Thunder’s tighter defense without him on the floor, he argued on the sideline with an assistant coach, demanding to be put back into a game his team was rallying from a sizable deficit to win and temporarily stave off elimination. “What did I tell you?” Michelle said after the story blew up and I called to give her a chance to gloat.
With the Thunder defeated,
