He told her in his blandest voice that he was fine, and as he grabbed a shopping cart inside the automatic doors, she said, “You know, I’m fine, too,” but her face occasionally displayed brief expressions of resignation followed by inappropriate private smiles. Her head nodded, quick flicks. Saul could see that she was carrying on a lengthy inner conversation. She was lying to him; she wasn’t fine at all, of course, but sprightliness had once been in her nature, so she would try to maintain it.
“What?” he asked.
“What ‘what’?” she answered. “Grab some of that romaine lettuce, would you?” He did as he was asked. Music drifted down like plastic icicles from speakers in the ceiling: “Mona Lisa” in a string arrangement. “Do you like green peppers in your salad? Tomatoes? I don’t remember.” Still smiling, she added, “It’s been such a long time. After all, I’m not your mother anymore.” Planted near the produce, she gazed at him, examining him for one second too long. “Sometimes when you stand like that you look like your father.” She made an all-purpose gesture. “Too bad you didn’t inherit his sense of humor.”
“We’re having another child,” he said, trying to forestall any discussion of what he had or had not inherited. “Patsy and I,” he clarified.
“Oh, yes, Patsy told me.” Saul dropped the peppers into the cart, as his mother beamed. “That’s so wonderful. They never arrive when you expect them to, you know—children. By the way, have you talked to your brother lately?” She straightened herself, cleared her throat with a noise like a sheep, and pushed the cart ahead of him, toward the meat counter. She picked up one of the T-bone steaks inside its shrink-wrap and examined it closely, as if, Saul thought, for an infection. “He makes all this money and then he goes out on those extreme sports, or whatever they’re called. Rock climbing and such. So aggressive . At least he’s not moody. When you get into these moods, Saul, I wish you’d go into therapy, or at least get a hobby the way your brother does.”
“In Five Oaks? That’s a good one. You’ve gotten kind of moody yourself, Ma.”
“Me? You still eat meat, don’t you? You haven’t turned into one of these vegetarians?” She dropped two of the steaks into the cart and gazed down the grocery aisle toward the dairy products. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “I’m not sitting up watching television and sitting around all day, Saul. I’m not making trips all over the country.”
“My seeing you doesn’t have a purpose? Seeing my mother? That’s a hell of a thing to say. It’s summertime. Besides, I’m not in your way. You don’t have a job or anything.”
She banged the shopping cart into his hip, as a nudge. “Well, I know you do have a purpose, being here. And I certainly do have a job. I work. You just don’t know what it is that I do. Do you? No, you don’t. I go to an office four times a week, Saul, where I . . .” She nodded to herself. “Oh, never mind. It’s nice, that I have a job, a serious job, and you don’t know what it is. You don’t keep yourself informed. Don’t have a ghost of a clue, do you, honey? You don’t ask.” She turned around to look at him. “What do you mean, I’ve gotten moody?”
“I’m your son,” Saul said. “I can tell.” Shoppers passed them quickly. The two of them, mother and adult son, were becalmed in a sea of shoppers passing by them in waves. “So what’s this job? What’s going on with you, Ma?”
Delia had been looking straight ahead of her, and all at once she flinched. “What’s going on with me? I’m hanging by a thread. Oh, look. Somebody fell.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Up there.” She pointed toward the dairy products and the case for frozen foods. “Somebody fell up there.”
Saul looked in the direction where she was pointing and saw a man on the floor. He was reasonably well dressed, and Saul was quickly ashamed of himself for thinking that people who fell to the floor in public places were always shabby. Anyone could fall to the floor. Saul himself could do so; he was quite capable of it. The man had apparently slipped on some wet linoleum tiles—there was a standing yellow hazard marker just off to the left with a little silhouette figure of a falling person on it—and by the time Saul got there, being careful of his own footing, the man was already on his knees, and then, with Saul’s help, on his feet. “My mistake,” the man said, in apology. Next to where he had fallen there stood, in the center aisle, a pyramid display of canned tomatoes with their brightly dark red labels, and after the man thanked Saul, he brushed himself off and went on his way, carrying a frozen dinner he had picked up from the floor. Saul stayed where he was. He could not take his eyes off the display. The red of the labels was magnetic, visually fixating. Tomato cans! He was unable to look at anything else. People and things passed by him. More bland music of some sort drizzled down from the ceiling speakers—small, drabby, synthetic music—as Saul felt himself sucked wholly into the blood-red colors on the cans.
When he finally came to his senses, his mother was beside him. “A mitzvah,” she said. “Good for you. What’s with those cans, Saul?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They look like . . . never mind. Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, at the checkout line, his mother turned toward him and smiled again. “Oh, I know it’s hard doing this with me. It’s no fun, is it, all grown up and still going to the grocery store with your mother. I just thought it would give us something to do.”
Saul unloaded the grocery cart, lost in thought, watching his mother take out her checkbook. She did it with a restrained bossiness. Down through the years, she had carried on her life without altering it very much for Saul’s, or Howie’s, benefit. Her feminism was personal and private and therefore eccentric, and she had formed the habit of resenting men as a class because her husband had died and left her alone with two sons. Solitude had made her flirty at first, and then impersonal. Getting anything personal out of her was like trying to open a tuna fish can with your thumbs. Saul and Howie had their worlds, she had hers. And the boys shared a guilt with their father, because, one by one, they would grow up and abandon her, which was what males did. Either they died or they took off. In Delia’s version of things, male adulthood was disloyalty by its very nature. Even providing her with another grandchild wouldn’t close that wound.
No wonder a sweet and devoted teenaged lover had knocked the stuffing out of her.
Watching her pay for her groceries, Saul thought of his mother’s dutifulness. She had been good about taking Saul, and then Howie, to Little League practice after Saul’s father had died, but her heart wasn’t in it, in any of those male activities, those sports. Howie’s sickliness had given her a cause to preoccupy her, but her sons didn’t have anything to give her in return. But now, some shift had taken place in her. Her heart had been stripped bare. Sympathies had opened up. Suddenly she was out of character. In midlife she had become someone else. And she deserved everything she got, all the rewards of feeling, Saul thought, especially if she had lost her heart to this kid.
Carrying the groceries out to the car, feeling brave, Saul said, “How’s your love life, Ma? Any prospects?”
“Why? Did Patsy say something to you?”
“No, in fact, she didn’t.”
Saul was putting the grocery bags in the trunk, but he could tell that his mother was checking his face for deceit. She had an internal psycho-galvanometer with Saul and could detect his polite lies a continent away. Her right eyebrow went up, like that of a food critic, and she ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes, there is somebody,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
She waited at the passenger-side door for Saul to unlock and open it for her, which he did, practicing his manners. Back behind the wheel, he asked her why not.
“Because some things you can’t talk about,” Delia said. She was getting grumpy. She harumphed and squirmed in the seat. “All your generation does is talk about sex all the time. Some things should be left to themselves.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” Saul said.
“Listen to you! You quit your job, you come here, you drive me to the Giant and stare at a display of tomato cans, and you tell me that you can talk about anything. Saul, you and I can’t talk about the important things in life, because they’re all secrets. Everything important is a secret. No one ever talks about anything. Deny it. I dare you. That student of yours died, and his death was his secret, and you don’t have the words for it. Who would?”
“It’s not that I wouldn’t, but that I can’t. It’s beyond me. In your case, you can, but you won’t.”
“Well, as for ‘can’t,’ I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Delia said. Saul turned the key to the ignition, and the car, in its puny way, roared to life. “All right. I’ll tell you something. He’s very . . . young. He’s a very young man.”
“What’s his name?” Saul asked, driving out of the parking lot and pretending nonchalance.
“Jimmy,” Delia told him, and when she said the word, Saul accidentally hit the brake, throwing both himself and his mother against their seatbelts. A car behind them screeched to a stop and the driver honked at them.
“Sorry,” Saul said. “I’m not used to this car.” He was blushing.
Delia stared straight ahead at the traffic. Saul could see that his mother’s eyes were watering. “Patsy told you, didn’t she? Patsy told you about Jimmy.”
Saul nodded. “And it’s not that he’s married, right?”
“Well,” she said, “no. Just that he’s very young. Anyway, anyway. You keep driving. Drive home and I’ll make you dinner, and then you can go back to your friends. Maybe I’ll say something about him and maybe I won’t. But first let me say this, honey. I’m really glad you came. And of course I do know why,” she said, looking radiantly pleased all of a sudden. She tapped his right knee, like a chum.
“Why?”
“Don’t be coy, Saul.”
“I’m not being coy.”
“Of course you are. It’s so nice, your doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Coming to see me. Today.”
“What about today?” Saul asked.
“Are you waiting for the right moment?” his mother asked. “Any moment is the right moment.”
“To do what?”
“To wish me a happy birthday!” She smiled at him and put her hand on his leg.
Great Leaping Jesus. Jesus on His Throne in Ohio. He gasped for a breath. Saul calculated the date and realized that—yes—it was indeed his mother’s birthday today. Maybe he really did need a therapist, one to accompany him everywhere he went from here to the grave, and possibly beyond. Another prank played by the unconscious, one of the many. Imagine the planning, the care, the indecency, the deceit . Where was dignity? Nowhere on this Earth. Perhaps in Israel. Maybe he would move there; his mother would never follow him—she had a thing about Palestinians—and his unconscious would band together with the other unconsciouses running amuck in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. Looking in the rearview mirror, as if he were being swallowed by what was behind him, Saul was horrified, as ever, by the terrible ironies of which life was so fond. But he was driving, and in Maryland traffic, so he could not express his horror safely and honorably. He would have to bottle it up and put it with all the other demented preserves in the basement and then wait for it to explode. He kept his hands on the wheel. The FBI would be here any minute now.
“Well, yes, exactly,” he said with pretended calm. “Happy birthday, Mom!”
“Thank you. Don’t pretend you forgot.” She smiled and touched her hand to her hair. “Don’t you dare pretend that your visit here was accidental. I’m so touched that you made the trip to see me on my birthday. Especially at this time in your life.”
“Actually,” Saul said, “I want to stop at a flower shop. Or somewhere. Right now.”
“Oh, you don’t have to get me anything, cupcake. It’s enough that you were so thoughtful to come see me.”
“Please don’t call me that cupcake thing, Ma. No, I want to.”
He turned the car into another strip mall with a flower shop. He quickly bought some cut roses and came running out to the car with them.
“Happy birthday,” he said, shoving the flowers in her direction through the passenger-side window. She smiled, sat up, and put them into her lap.
“You’re so thoughtful,” his mother said, with sweet, dignified, middle-aged irony. “I’ll be lucky if Howie even remembers to phone.”
When they returned to the house, Saul spied a pickup truck two houses away, and, out in front, a scrawny young man mowing the lawn, an ordinary guy, Saul thought, wearing a T-shirt and a cap with the visor turned backward. When he glanced at his mother, she gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Saul thought that if this guy had appeared in one of his classes, he wouldn’t have given him a second look.
After a quiet dinner with his mother, and his return to his friends the next morning, Saul took the train up to New York. The cheapest hotel he could find was close to Gramercy Park, and for his first day he walked around Manhattan. The wonderful ruined glorious old city. He particularly enjoyed getting lost in Chinatown and Little Italy, the tangle of ethnicity and streets in the lower part of Manhattan, where every place you turned from midmorning to the middle of the night you smelled food cooking, scalding cooking oil mixed with the overripe background odor of garbage, and he enjoyed the heat that rose from the pavement, the way it went through your body like an X-ray, the flesh porously absorbing it, how there was no stopping it and no cooling off. Everyone became hot, everyone became the heat. Particularly around West Broadway, the city streets felt abandoned by serious persons in the summer, nothing but human castoffs and scruffy kids filling up the sidewalk space and yelling all day and night. He felt right at home. In the East Village he sat on a park bench soiled with dried pigeon dung and ate an ice cream cone. He watched everyone pass by, and he was perfectly happy.
On the second afternoon, a Thursday, following a trip uptown, he had disembarked from the Lexington Avenue local at Grand Central and was headed down the underground tunnel in the direction of the shuttle to Times Square. He had an out-of-towner’s pride in his mastery of the New York City subway system and never consulted a map. And he loved the subway itself: the noise, the electric-iron smell, the occasional glimpses of rats, the whackos riding the trains, the sweat of flushed bodies in proximity to one another, the ads in Spanish advocating safe sex. For him the subway was an urban ideal. On the subway, Saul felt very tall, and very blond, and very handsome, at least in comparison to everyone else. The most intricate stations—Times Square, Grand Central— were monuments of human ingenuity and engineering. Saul was more impressed by the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal than he had been by man’s journey to the moon, and he suspected that the entire New York subway system was now beyond what human beings were capable of. Not the technology, but the willpower, the ideal of the public good.
Halfway through the tunnel he heard music. On the other side, close to where the shuttle trains were, stood a band, a typical subway assemblage of musicians, in this case of Peruvian Indians playing music from the Andes. The music reverberated through the narrow subterranean passage; he had heard the music before he had seen the five men performing on their charangos and mandolins and guitars and sikus. It sounded like high-altitude mountain music, harmonies and rhythms and chord changes conceived in the upper atmospheres and brought down to the metal and concrete below ground level. He approached the band. They had CDs for sale; the label said that their name was Ch’uwa Yacu. He even loved the sound of that, without having any idea of how to pronounce it. Saul felt himself drawn up into the music, absorbed by it, as he had been by the heat off the sidewalks. He tossed a five-dollar bill into the musicians’ open guitar case.
When he looked up, on the other side of the small crowd, wedged in near the back, he saw Gordy Himmelman behind what seemed to be a slight curtain of gauze, his eyes wide open and staring. Gordy, a hayseed
ghost out of his element, was looking first at the musicians and then back at Saul, full in the face, and his mouth was gaping dark with distracted amazement. But of course it wasn’t Gordy. It was just anybody’s boy.
He was offering himself to me for adoption, Saul thought. He was a stray dog. That’s why he stood out there on the lawn. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t take him.
Saul waited for a moment, and then it came: what he had been anticipating, the breaking-open, and, very quietly, so as not to disturb the other listeners, he unobtrusively boarded the shuttle to Times Square, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t know how long he sat there, once he got on, though he did remember to put on his dark glasses. Tears streamed quietly from under the lenses down his cheeks and onto his shirt. The shuttle took him to its destination, and then took him back to Grand Central, and then returned to Times Square. Everyone ignored him. They came and left, came and left. He simply lost track of the time as he was ferried from one place to the other.
Part Three
Thirteen
A squirrel squatted in the birdbath. Another squirrel was hanging by its claws onto the birdfeeder. The girl, looking out her bedroom window at the backyard, cleaned her fingernails halfheartedly with the nail file and thought of the end of the world, and then she wondered why, if there was a word “ruthless” that was often applied to enemies of the U.S.A., then what happened to its opposite, its lost positive, “ruth,” which would have to mean “kindness” but didn’t mean anything because no one used it? We had ruthless enemies but no ruthful friends.
If some people were “unruly,” then who was “ruly”? Nobody. When her room was messy, her mother said it was “unkempt,” but when it was clean, it was never “kempt” because the word didn’t exist. Disgruntled postal workers were everywhere. Where were the gruntled ones? Everybody had a word for the wrong thing, but silence prevailed for the right.
Saul and Patsy Page 21
