The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  His father understood. “Places have smells. I remember some myself.” He shrugged. “We’ll drive back, soon as you comb your hair.”

  Anthony washed his face in the strange-smelling cistern water, dried it on the tail of his shirt. He looked for a comb, but found a brush—ebony-backed with long soft bristles—on the bedroom dresser. He picked it up, hesitated, holding it in the bright spring light. Tangled in the bristles was a long blond hair. He looked again. There were shorter snarled ones wound down into the base. He rolled them between his fingers, testing them. … He felt tremendously relieved. He’d known all the time. Of course he had. Women came here with his father. … And now he, Anthony, was here. His father had brought him to this special place, this secret place. … He stood smiling down at the brush, wondering what she’d looked like. … His father called: “Ready, Anthony?” He kept on smiling at the brush; then very slowly, very deliberately, he lifted the brush to his head, mixing his own hair with the blond strands. He felt pleased and proud to be doing it.

  HE SPENT that summer with his mother at Port Bella. His father did not appear at all. Not once. His Aunt Margaret came now and then, and her son Joshua and his nurses spent a few weeks. And of course, his grandfather came every weekend.

  ONE LATE August afternoon when the days were long and dry and dazzling hot, he and his mother played cards in the trellised gazebo overlooking the Gulf. “Father isn’t coming at all this year,” he said.

  She shuffled steadily. “He will when he has time.”

  “Grandfather does.”

  She began dealing. “There we go.”

  Anthony picked up his cards. “Mother, do you ever wonder why Father married you?”

  She answered him levelly, without hesitating. “No.”

  “Did he love you?”

  She went on solemnly. “I loved him, Anthony, and that is nearly the same thing.”

  He nodded. He seemed to understand. Not the words, but the message behind them.

  “Do you think he married you because there was a lot of money?”

  “Your father would have found money with or without me, anywhere in this world.”

  Suddenly he didn’t want to talk about it any more. He was angry with her for not changing the subject. Why was she always so serious with him, why did she always treat him like a grown man? Why was she always so honest? Invincibly honest. … He liked that phrase; he repeated it to himself: invincibly honest.

  “Your hand’s shaking, Anthony.”

  The cards in his left hand were quivering. He slapped them down immediately. His body was always betraying him.

  He flicked his cards into the middle of the table. “I am just sick of being in this house out in the country. I wish school would start.” He stalked down the sun-bleached lawn toward the water. He could feel her brown eyes following him, understanding, sympathetic. He picked up a small beach rock and hurled it with all his strength at a boulder. It splintered into fragments and sprayed away.

  He remembered suddenly that he had never been in a fight, had never punched or been hit, had never really wrestled. Supervision at home and school allowed only a little shoving and pushing. He had never felt his fist hit tissue-covered bone. … He tested it into his palm. It felt nice. He did it again, with more force, repeating until his hands hurt. He wished there was somebody on the beach. Win or lose, he would have fought with him. He would have felt his muscles push against something. Something instead of air.

  The beach was empty, as it always was. Just green water and a small skirt of yellow sand. Not even a shell, not even a sea-wrack line; two yard boys picked it clean after high tide every day. He squatted down and, scooping up a handful of sand, he began to blow the grains from his open palm toward the Gulf. Squinting, he tried to see if they reached it. None ever did. But then, he really couldn’t expect to distinguish a grain of sand falling into the water.

  There would hardly, he told himself, be any splash.

  IN 1942 HIS FATHER went to war. He telephoned Anthony twice a week, until he was ordered to England. Then he sent only an occasional letter; he’d never liked to write.

  That year Anthony grew three inches. His clothes were all too small; his ankles stuck out sharply, his wrists dangled from the cuffs of his shirts.

  “Anthony,” his mother complained, “you look like a scarecrow.”

  “I can’t help growing.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, “we’ll manage. You look pale.”

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  He’d been tired for months, and he hurt all over—no specific pain, just a cloud that filtered through his body and ran from place to place, touching, fluttering. It was his dreams, he thought; they were nothing but war and blood and explosions. His father was never there—just Anthony and some other faceless people, and noise and confusion, and falling. Every night, every night. He could sleep only in the afternoons. As if the shapes that haunted him waited for dark. … He’d seen pictures of the brain with its cracks and crevices. Lots of hiding places in there. … After a few months he came to expect those dreams. To look for them, even. Once, when he had a cold, he’d taken a codeine cough syrup, and hadn’t dreamed a single image. He felt irritated and disappointed; he had actually missed them.

  In 1943 his mother closed her house in New Orleans and lived entirely in the big house at Port Bella. Anthony spent weekends with her; during the week he lived with his grandfather. He was there that April afternoon—just come from basketball practice, still sweating so that his pants stuck to his skin and pulled at his legs when he walked. He came up the drive, in the side door—as he always did—and through the hall toward the stairs. He passed the living room, glanced inside. He stopped and looked again, blinking against the duskiness of the drawn curtains. In the middle of the room his grandfather was on hands and knees, crawling slowly toward the door. Very slowly, one arm moved; it dragged across the carpet for a couple of inches, stopped. The other arm began moving in exactly the same way. His head hung down, swinging from side to side, like a hound’s on a scent. His bald head rotated like a searchlight sweeping the ground.

  Where did the shine come from, Anthony found himself thinking. What light fell on that bare skin? …

  His grandfather crept another few inches. His back sagged until his belly touched the floor. His shoulders stayed up; though his arms trembled visibly with the strain, they held firm. After a couple of minutes, he lifted his back and inched forward again.

  For all of that effort, Anthony thought, he had moved about a foot. … He went into the room, calling “Grandfather! Grandfather!” He stopped, right at his side, so close that the tips of his brown oxfords actually touched his left hand. His grandfather was breathing heavily. Each breath came out so slowly, rattled so loudly, that Anthony thought it would never stop. Then, when it did, the strangling gurgling struggle to inhale began. “What’s the matter?” Anthony shouted. “Tell me what to do!” His grandfather’s left hand moved forward again, brushing past the brown oxfords, settled on the rug, stiffened and bore the weight of the body as it crawled another couple of inches toward the door.

  Anthony backed out of the room. He meant to shout, but somehow the shout turned into a scream. And once he had started screaming he couldn’t seem to stop.

  HE STOOD on the column-lined porch, one step away from the big mahogany front doors, while people rushed past him, and cars wheeled down the drive, spattering gravel like water. His Aunt Margaret pushed him aside angrily. “Can’t you even keep out the way, for God’s sake?” Anthony stared through the open door, first at the smooth stretch of parquetry flooring, following the squares over and over again, then eventually allowing his eyes to rise to the broad stairs and the curving dark banister. He reached out to touch the wood of the doorframe. His fingers fell away from it as if it were hot and burning.

  There’s something wrong with me. There must be something wrong with me.

  A couple of blocks away a car horn blew sharply. In the oak
tree a big blue jay rasped, and a mockingbird imitated him. A cloud passed across a corner of sky, hazy and thin as a veil. A yellow cat sauntered across the lawn while mockingbirds twitched bits of fur from its back. Once the cat crouched and spun. And missed.

  Inside the empty house a phone began ringing.

  I should answer it. Hello. This is Anthony. Everybody’s gone to the hospital. I’m the only one here. …

  The phone stopped ringing. He gasped. He’d been holding his breath, and not even aware of it.

  The cat rubbed against his legs, complaining.

  “Shut up.” Anthony kicked. The cat dodged away, yowling. Then slowly, tail high and fluffy, it crossed the porch and went in the front door.

  The cat could answer the phone.

  But the phone had stopped. … Anthony listened carefully. There was no sound at all in the afternoon, except a far-off hum.

  I’m listening to my own skull sing like a sea shell’s echo. The sound from inside my head, full of spongy white and spongy red.

  The house walls moved, exactly one inch, one inch closer to him. Carefully, stalking him. It was the cat inside.

  How stupid, he told himself. But he backed away. When he felt gravel under his shoes, he turned and ran. After a while he stopped running, and only walked very fast, and after that he just walked.

  He saw a streetcar coming, swaying on its narrow track. He fumbled in his pocket, came up with a quarter and a couple of pennies, and trotted over to the car stop. He only needed seven cents. … After half an hour’s ride, the slow steady rocking of the car made him feel much better.

  HIS PARENTS’ house was closed and locked. He climbed the fence, broke a window on the back porch, let himself in. He remembered it was dinnertime and found a can of vegetable soup and ate it, unheated. He went to his own room, and lay on his bed, a book in his hands. Tom Sawyer; he’d read it a dozen times, until his mother objected: “Aren’t you ever going to read anything else?”

  His mother … she would be at Port Bella, combing the grass in her gardens. Had anyone told her? The phone didn’t always work. …

  He read the familiar words of Tom Sawyer until he fell asleep.

  HIS AUNT Margaret was shaking him. “Wake up.”

  He scrubbed at his eyes until he was able to see her. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I figured we should look here before we called the police.”

  Her curly hair was uncombed; it stood up all around her face in little ragged stabs and wisps. She kept smoothing it down, but as soon as her coaxing fingers passed, the curls rose up jagged again.

  “I assume you’re all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He rubbed his leg where he had a bruise from last week’s basketball. He winced.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “A bruise.”

  “You get a lot of bruises. You ought to be more careful.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She patted his sock-covered foot. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Anthony, I forget you’re still a kid. But you were being damn stupid. … You going to ask how your grandfather is?”

  And he told her the absolute truth. “I thought he’d be dead.”

  “You get that directness from your mother. He’s still with us.”

  “Is he going to live?”

  “Well,” she stood up, “I don’t know, Anthony, he just blew out one whole side of his heart, or something like that. But he’s not dead yet, and somehow I don’t really think this is the time.”

  TWO MONTHS later—another summer vacation— Anthony and his grandfather were at Port Bella. His Aunt Margaret drove over with them in their slow-moving convoy of ambulance and four cars, stayed the weekend, and hurried back to New Orleans. (“With Robert in England and Papa flat on his back, there’s nobody but me to keep things going.”) The road dust settled over the flurry of her tires, and the weight and length of the summer remained. Like all the summers, Anthony thought. With a few changes because of the war. Most of the gardeners had been drafted; only Philip, the redbone, and his young sons still worked the gardens, hiding their daily supply of whiskey under the thick trunk of the wisteria vine. But evenings, Anthony decided, evenings were the worst. The house sweltered airlessly behind its heavy drawn curtains. (All coast houses were blacked out with the first rumor of German submarines offshore.) The hot light-proofed rooms did not seem to bother his mother or his grandfather, but Anthony found them unbearable. After dinner, while they listened to the radio and plotted the progress of both war theaters on the huge wall maps in the living room, Anthony slipped outside to sit on the porch, to let his eyes run around in the night. There were clouds of mosquitoes; he could see them thick as hair on his bare arm. He could imagine their mouths buried in his skin, sucking his blood. It was still better than being inside.

  ONE AFTERNOON when a rain had left the air cooler and fresher with the sharp smell of lightning-produced ozone, Anthony sat with his grandfather on the damp pillows of the ornate gazebo. “What are you writing?” Anthony asked.

  His grandfather put the notebook away. “Things to do, when I go back to town next week.”

  “Oh.” Anthony looked out at the rain-spotted Gulf.

  His grandfather grinned. “I know what your mother will say. But I’ve spent over two months on my heart attack and that’s enough.”

  A small green lizard ran across the window sill and watched them, fluttering his red air bladder nervously.

  “People used to think those things were poison,” his grandfather said.

  “It was nice with you out here all the time.”

  “Thank you, Anthony,” his grandfather said formally.

  Anthony flicked the lizard away. “When you had your heart attack,” he asked, “were you afraid?”

  His grandfather scowled into the vine-covered lattice walls. “You know, Anthony, I remember sitting down in that chair, not feeling too good, and then the next thing I knew I was on the floor feeling like a hole had been blown through me by a shotgun.”

  “But”—Anthony studied his own browned hands, their nails edged with dirt—“were you ever scared?”

  “Of dying?” He smiled wryly. “With all the people staring at you, well, you get a little self-conscious and you start watching what they’re watching.”

  “But you weren’t scared?”

  “No.”

  “Well”—Anthony pulled a moonflower and tossed it away—“why do you suppose that is?”

  “I suppose,” his grandfather said, “when you’re that close to dying, you see it for what it is; it doesn’t look that bad.”

  HIS GRANDFATHER left for New Orleans. Because the trip was tiring, he did not come every weekend any more. His Aunt Margaret did not come either—she had married suddenly, and three weeks later started divorce proceedings. Her husband waited in the big azalea hedge, shot at her, missed, turned the gun on himself, missed again, shooting off a piece of his ear lobe. By the time the police came, he was in tears.

  Anthony heard all these things from a great distance. Nothing happened in the house at Port Bella. He sat in the corner of the porch and watched his mother in the garden; when the glare was not too strong, he watched the empty blue-gray stretch of water. At times he felt that it took all his energy to breathe. I used to play basketball, he thought, and I used to be on the baseball team, but now if I bump into a chair I have a black-and-blue mark. And if I punch my thigh I have a bruise. …

  Day after day he sat on the shaded porch. “You can’t just sit still all day,” his mother said, “you should move a little.”

  “I’m not just sitting, Mother,” he said, “I’m reading.” To prove it, he brought a different book each day, and flipped its pages. That wasn’t too bad.

  What was bad was the sudden pain in his wrists. One morning it was not there, the next it was. His wrists hurt so badly that he could no longer carry the book to the porch; he could not even manage to pick it up. Each morning he forced himself to dre
ss; the pain was so intense that tears ran down his cheeks. He could leave his shirt unbuttoned, saying he wanted to be cool, but he had to fasten his pants. And that was almost more than he could do. He could not even rest his hands on a table. The pain was only bearable when his arms hung straight down from his shoulders, unmoving.

  It took his mother two days to notice. He was surprised; he’d thought she watched him more closely.

  “Anthony, we will have to see about that.”

  They went first to the doctor in Collinsville, a red-haired old man, who’d practiced there since finishing school in Georgia forty-five years before. He was exaggeratedly polite, and his courteous drawl lengthened so that Anthony had trouble understanding him.

  “Madam, I am dumfounded. I have delivered women by the hundreds, I have stitched cuts by the mile, I have set bones, I have pronounced the dead. But not this. I could hunt through my books, but I wouldn’t be sure.”

  Anthony’s mother said impatiently, “I suppose we’ll go back to New Orleans.”

  “There is a young man in Pensacola—a diabetic, so the army did not take him—he would be closer and just as competent.”

  “Fine,” his mother said. “Call him and we’ll go there right now.”

  Anthony caught one glance from the pale blue eyes. Quick, sharp in the round freckled face. Why that, he wondered; why that?

  They stayed two days at Pensacola, at a tourist court in a grove of mulberry trees. At night Anthony listened to the ripe berries falling on the tin roof, and the boards of the porch were stained red by their juice. Shiny green-and-blue flies swarmed on the rotting fruit, and thick-bodied jays followed the flies. In the early morning he watched them from his window, until his mother’s alarm clock rang and she woke up too.

  He didn’t remember too much about the days, except that again the doctor was red-haired. The second afternoon he fell asleep on the examining table. He woke feeling much better, sat up, and collapsed whimpering with the sudden pain in his wrist.