Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Jackie was silent a long moment before she grimaced, nodded, and turned with half-humorous appeal to Gernshon.

  Gernshon cleared his throat. “Well, actually, it would probably be better if all four of us came. I’m embarrassed to say that prices are higher in this city than in . . . that is, I’m not able to . . . but if we went somewhere less expensive, the Automat maybe, I’m sure all four of us could eat together.”

  “No, no,” Harry said. “We already ate.” Manny looked at him.

  Jackie began, offended, “I certainly don’t want—just what do you think is going on here, buddy? This is just to please my grandfather. Are you afraid I might try to jump your bones?”

  Harry saw Gernshon’s quick, involuntary glance at Jackie’s tight jeans. He saw, too, that Gernshon fiercely regretted the glance the instant he had made it. He saw that Manny saw, and that Jackie saw, and that Gernshon saw that they saw. Manny made a small noise. Jackie’s face began to turn so black that Harry was astounded when Gernshon cut her off with a dignity no one had expected.

  “No, of course not,” he said quietly. “But I would prefer all of us to have dinner together for quite another reason. My wife is very dear to me, Miss Snyder, and I wouldn’t do anything that might make her feel uncomfortable. That’s probably irrational, but that’s the way it is.”

  Harry stood arrested, his mouth open. Manny started to shake with what Harry thought savagely had better not be laughter. And Jackie, after staring at Gernshon a long while, broke into the most spontaneous smile Harry had seen from her in months.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “That’s nice. That’s really, genuinely, fucking nice.”

  The weather turned abruptly colder. Snow threatened but didn’t fall. Each afternoon Harry and Manny took a quick walk in the park and then went inside, to the chess club or a coffee shop or the bus station or the library, where there was a table deep in the stacks on which they could eat lunch without detection. Harry brought Manny a poor boy with mayo, sixty-three cents, and a pair of imported wool gloves, one dollar on pre-season sale.

  “So where are they today?” Manny asked on Saturday, removing the gloves to peek at the inside of the poor boy. He sniffed appreciatively. “Horseradish. You remembered, Harry.”

  “The museum, I think,” Harry said miserably.

  “What museum?”

  “How should I know? He says, ‘The museum today, Harry,’ and he’s gone by eight o’clock in the morning, no more details than that.”

  Manny stopped chewing. “What museum opens at eight o’clock in the morning?”

  Harry put down his sandwich, pastrami on rye, thirty-nine cents. He had lost weight the past week.

  “Probably,” Manny said hastily, “they just talk. You know, like young people do, just talk . . .”

  Harry eyed him balefully. “You mean like you and Leah did when you were young and left completely alone.”

  “You better talk to him soon, Harry. No, to her.” He seemed to reconsider Jackie.

  “No, to him.”

  “Talk isn’t going to do it,” Harry said. He looked pale and determined. “Gernshon has to be sent back.”

  “Be sent?”

  “He’s married, Manny! I wanted to help Jackie, show her life can hold some sweetness, not be all struggle. What kind of sweetness is she going to find if she falls in love with a married man? You know how that goes! Jackie—” Harry groaned. How had all this happened? He had intended only the best for Jackie. Why didn’t that count more?

  “He has to go back, Manny.”

  “How?” Manny said practically. “You can’t hit him again, Harry. You were just lucky last time that you didn’t hurt him. You don’t want that on your conscience. And if you show him your, uh . . . your—”

  “My closet. Manny, if you’d only come see, for a dollar you could get—”

  “—then he could just come back any time he wants. So how?”

  A sudden noise startled them both. Someone was coming through the stacks.

  “Librarians!” Manny hissed. Both of them frantically swept the sandwiches, beer (fifteen cents), and strudel into shopping bags. Manny, panicking, threw in the wool gloves. Harry swept the table free of crumbs. When the intruder rounded the nearest bookshelf, Harry was bent over Making Paper Flowers and Manny over Porcelain of the Yung Cheng Dynasty. It was Robert Gernshon.

  The young man dropped into a chair. His face was ashen. In one hand he clutched a sheaf of paper, the handwriting on the last one trailing off into shaky squiggles.

  After a moment of silence, Manny said diplomatically, “So where are you coming from, Robert?”

  “Where’s Jackie?” Harry demanded.

  “Jackie?” Gernshon said. His voice was thick; Harry realized with a sudden shock that he had been crying. “I haven’t seen her for a few days.”

  “A few days?” Harry said.

  “No. I’ve been . . . I’ve been . . .”

  Manny sat up straighter. He looked intently at Gernshon over Porcelain of the Yung Cheng Dynasty and then put the book down. He moved to the chair next to Gernshon’s and gently took the papers from his hand. Gernshon leaned over the table and buried his head in his arms.

  “I’m so awfully sorry, I’m being such a baby....” His shoulders trembled. Manny separated the papers and spread them out on the library table. Among the hand-copied notes were two slim books, one bound between black covers and the other a pamphlet. A Memoir of Auschwitz. Countdown to Hiroshima.

  For a long moment nobody spoke. Then Harry said, to no one in particular, “I thought he was going to science museums.”

  Manny laid his arm, almost casually, across Gernshon’s shoulders. “So now you’ll know not to be at either place. More people should have only known.” Harry didn’t recognize the expression on his friend’s face, nor the voice with which Manny said to Harry, “You’re right. He has to go back.”

  “But Jackie . . .”

  “Can do without this ‘sweetness,’ ” Manny said harshly. “So what’s so terrible in her life anyway that she needs so much help? Is she dying? Is she poor? Is she ugly? Is anyone knocking on her door in the middle of the night? Let Jackie find her own sweetness. She’ll survive.”

  Harry made a helpless gesture. Manny’s stubborn face, carved wood under the harsh fluorescent light, did not change. “Even him... Manny, the things he knows now—”

  “You should have thought of that earlier.”

  Gernshon looked up. “Don’t, I—I’m sorry. It’s just coming across it, I never thought human beings—”

  “No,” Manny said. “But they can. You been here, every day, at the library, reading it all?”

  “Yes. That and museums. I saw you two come in earlier. I’ve been reading, I wanted to know—”

  “So now you know,” Manny said in that same surprisingly casual, tough voice.

  “You’ll survive, too.”

  Harry said, “Does Jackie know what’s going on? Why you’ve been doing all this . . .

  learning?”

  “No.”

  “And you—what will you do with what you now know?”

  Harry held his breath. What if Gernshon just refused to go back? Gernshon said slowly, “At first, I wanted to not return. At all. How can I watch it, World War II and the camps—I have relatives in Poland. And then later the bomb and Korea and the gulags and Vietnam and Cambodia and the terrorists and AIDS—”

  “Didn’t miss anything,” Harry muttered.

  “—and not be able to do anything, not be able to even hope, knowing that everything to come is already set into history—how could I watch all that without any hope that it isn’t really as bad as it seems to be at the moment?”

  “It all depends what you look at,” Manny said, but Gernshon didn’t seem to hear him.

  “But neither can I stay, there’s Susan and we’re hoping for a baby . . . I need to think.”

  “No, you don’t,” Harry said. “You need to go back. This is all my
mistake. I’m sorry.

  You need to go back, Gernshon.”

  “Lebanon,” Gernshon said. “D.D.T. The Cultural Revolution. Nicaragua.

  Deforestation. Iran—”

  “Penicillin,” Manny said suddenly. His beard quivered. “Civil rights. Mahatma Gandhi. Polio vaccines. Washing machines.” Harry stared at him, shocked. Could Manny once have worked in a hand laundry?

  “Or,” Manny said, more quietly, “Hitler. Auschwitz. Hoovervilles. The Dust Bowl.

  What you look at, Robert.”

  “I don’t know,” Gernshon said. “I need to think. There’s so much . . . and then there’s that girl.”

  Harry stiffened. “Jackie?”

  “No, no. Someone she and I met a few days ago, at a coffee shop. She just walked in.

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked at her and just went into shock—and maybe she did too, for all I know. The girl looked exactly like me. And she felt like—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. She felt like me. I said hello but I didn’t tell her my name; I didn’t dare.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I think she’s my granddaughter.”

  “Hoo boy,” Manny said.

  Gernshon stood. He made a move to gather up his papers and booklets, stopped, left them there. Harry stood, too, so abruptly that Gernshon shot him a sudden, hard look across the library table. “Going to hit me again, Harry? Going to kill me?”

  “Us?” Manny said. “Us, Robert?” His tone was gentle.

  “In a way, you already have. I’m not who I was, certainly.”

  Manny shrugged. “So be somebody better.”

  “Damn it, I don’t think you understand—”

  “I don’t think you do, Reuven, boychik. This is the way it is. That’s all. Whatever you had back there, you have still. Tell me, in all that reading, did you find anything about yourself, anything personal? Are you in the history books, in the library papers?”

  “The Office of Public Documents takes two weeks to do a search for birth and death certificates,” Gernshon said, a little sulkily.

  “So you lost nothing, because you really know nothing,” Manny said. “Only history.

  History is cheap. Everybody gets some. You can have all the history you want. It’s what you make of it that costs.”

  Gernshon didn’t nod agreement. He looked a long time at Manny, and something moved behind the unhappy hazel eyes, something that made Harry finally let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. It suddenly seemed that Gernshon was the one that was old. And he was—with the fifty-two years he’d gained since last week, he was older than Harry had been in the 1937 of Captains Courageous and wide-brimmed fedoras and clean city parks. But that was the good time, the one that Gernshon was going back to, the one Harry himself would choose, if it weren’t for Jackie and Manny...still, he couldn’t watch as Gernshon walked out of the book stacks, parting the musty air as heavily as if it were water.

  Gernshon paused. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ll go back. Tonight. I will.”

  After he had left, Harry said, “This is my fault.”

  “Yes,” Manny agreed.

  “Will you come to my room when he goes? To . . . to help?”

  “Yes, Harry.”

  Somehow, that only made it worse.

  Gernshon agreed to a blindfold. Harry led him through the closet, the warehouse, the street. Neither of them seemed very good at this; they stumbled into each other, hesitated, tripped over nothing. In the warehouse Gernshon nearly walked into a pile of lumber, and in the sharp jerk Harry gave Gernshon’s arm to deflect him, something twisted and gave way in Harry’s back. He waited, bent over, behind a corner of a building while Gernshon removed his blindfold, blinked in the morning light, and walked slowly away.

  Despite his back, Harry found that he couldn’t return right away. Why not? He just couldn’t. He waited until Gernshon had a large head start and then hobbled towards the park. A carousel turned, playing bright organ music: September 24. Two children he had never noticed before stood just beyond the carousel, watching it with hungry, hopeless eyes. Flowers grew in immaculate flower beds. A black man walked by, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, his head bent. Two small girls jumping rope were watched by a smiling woman in a blue-and-white uniform. On the sidewalk, just beyond the carousel, someone had chalked a swastika. The black man shuffled over it. A Lincoln Zephyr V-12 drove by, $1090. There was no way it would fit through a closet.

  When Harry returned, Manny was curled up on the white chenille bedspread that Harry had bought for $3.28, fast asleep.

  “What did I accomplish, Manny? What?” Harry said bitterly. The day had dawned glorious and warm, unexpected Indian summer. Trees in the park showed bare branches against a bright blue sky. Manny wore an old red sweater, Harry a flannel workshirt.

  Harry shifted gingerly, grimacing, on his bench. Sunday strollers dropped ice cream wrappers, cigarettes, newspapers, Diet Pepsi cans, used tissues, popcorn. Pigeons quarreled and children shrieked.

  “Jackie’s going to be just as hard as ever—and why not?” Harry continued. “She finally meets a nice fellow, he never calls her again. Me, I leave a young man miserable on a sidewalk. Before I leave him, I ruin his life. While I leave him, I ruin my back.

  After I leave him, I sit here guilty. There’s no answer, Manny.”

  Manny didn’t answer. He squinted down the curving path.

  “I don’t know, Manny. I just don’t know.”

  Manny said suddenly, “Here comes Jackie.”

  Harry looked up. He squinted, blinked, tried to jump up. His back made sharp protest.

  He stayed where he was, and his eyes grew wide. “Popsy!” Jackie cried. “I’ve been looking for you!”

  She looked radiant. All the lines were gone from around her eyes, all the sharpness from her face. Her very collar bones, Harry thought dazedly, looked softer. Happiness haloed her like light. She held the hand of a slim, red-haired woman with strong features and direct hazel eyes.

  “This is Ann,” Jackie said. “I’ve been looking for you, Popsy, because . . . well, because I need to tell you something.” She slid onto the bench next to Harry, on the other side from Manny, and put one arm around Harry’s shoulders. The other hand kept a close grip on Ann, who smiled encouragement. Manny stared at Ann as at a ghost.

  “You see, Popsy, for a while now I’ve been struggling with something, something really important. I know I’ve been snappy and difficult, but it hasn’t been—everybody needs somebody to love, you’ve often told me that, and I know how happy you and Grammy were all those years. And I thought there would never be anything like that for me, and certain people were making everything all so hard. But now . . . well, now there’s Ann. And I wanted you to know that.”

  Jackie’s arm tightened. Her eyes pleaded. Ann watched Harry closely. He felt as if he were drowning.

  “I know this must come as a shock to you,” Jackie went on, “but I also know you’ve always wanted me to be happy. So I hope you’ll come to love her the way I do.”

  Harry stared at the red-haired woman. He knew what was being asked of him, but he didn’t believe in it, it wasn’t real, in the same way weather going on in other countries wasn’t really real. Hurricanes. Drought. Sunshine. When what you were looking at was a cold drizzle.

  “I think that of all the people I’ve ever known, Ann is the most together. The most compassionate. And the most moral.”

  “Ummm,” Harry said.

  “Popsy?”

  Jackie was looking right at him. The longer he was silent, the more her smile faded. It occurred to him that the smile had showed her teeth. They were very white, very even.

  Also very sharp.

  “I . . . I . . . hello, Ann.”

  “Hello,” Ann said.

  “See, I told you he’d be great!” Jackie said to Ann. She let go of Harry and jumped up from the bench, all energy and lightness. “You’re wonderful, Popsy! You, too, Manny!

  Oh, Ann, this is Popsy’s
best friend, Manny Feldman. Manny, Ann Davies.”

  “Happy to meet you,” Ann said. She had a low, rough voice and a sweet smile. Harry felt hurricanes, drought, sunshine.

  Jackie said, “I know this is probably a little unexpected—”

  Unexpected. “Well—” Harry said, and could say no more.

  “It’s just that it was time for me to come out of the closet.”

  Harry made a small noise. Manny managed to say, “So you live here, Ann?”

  “Oh, yes. All my life. And my family, too, since forever.”

  “Has Jackie . . . has Jackie met any of them yet?”

  “Not yet,” Jackie said. “It might be a little . . . tricky, in the case of her parents.” She smiled at Ann. “But we’ll manage.”

  “I wish,” Ann said to her, “that you could have met my grandfather. He would have been just as great as your Popsy here. He always was.”

  “Was?” Harry said faintly.

  “He died a year ago. But he was just a wonderful man. Compassionate and intelligent.”

  “What . . . what did he do?”

  “He taught history at the university. He was also active in lots of organizations—

  Amnesty International, the ACLU, things like that. During World War II he worked for the Jewish rescue leagues, getting people out of Germany.”

  Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.

  “We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”

  Manny’s eyes gleamed.

  Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.

  Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”

  “He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”

  After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”