“You see,” Harry said, pointing at Byron with desperate satisfaction. A flush of embarrassment was still on his cheeks although he now had Byron for a willing student. He rewarded Byron for his eagerness by tousling his hair. “It’s pretty good history. A hell of a lot more interesting than your teachers can make it,” he commented to Jonah. He added to Max, “Of course they make short shrift of the causes and Shelby Foote’s sentimental anecdotes are both pointless and misleading but I think its treatment of the battles is first-rate. And boys like battles, don’t they? Are you sure you aren’t interested, Jonah?” Harry said, saying his grandson’s name with a hint of displeasure. It was implied anyway since he said Jonah instead of Nonah. Nonah was the affectionate nickname Harry routinely used.
“Okay,” Jonah said, drawling the word. But he took another step back from his grandfather and closer to his mother. “I’ll watch it for a while.”
“If you don’t want to, say no,” Max said.
“I do!” Jonah insisted.
“No you don’t,” Max said.
“Max, for God’s sake give him a break,” Debby said, but mildly, and called toward the kitchen entrance as she walked in that direction: “Ma? You need help?”
“Come on, boys,” Harry said, gratified by his grandson’s agreement, even if it was bullied. He draped an arm around Jonah’s shoulders and pulled him down the hall. “Do you know about the second battle of the Wilderness? They fought two battles in the same woods only a year apart. There were soaking rains in the weeks before the second battle and the dead from the first—they had been buried in shallow graves—rose to the surface.”
“You mean, they came up out of the ground?” Jonah asked.
“Exactly,” his grandfather patted his head as though giving him an A.
“Gross,” Jonah said.
“I know what dead bodies look like!” Byron shrieked proudly.
They had reached the open double-door entrance to the living room. Once there had been sliding oak doors or perhaps they were glass-paneled. When these buildings were designed apartment dwellers still had the romantic desire to imitate the gracious compartments of large homes, each room dedicated to one aspect of living. Modernism had taught New Yorkers to accept that they were creatures of a concrete and metal arbor—apes with elevators living in one-room tree houses. Byron’s parents stood just inside the open doorway, drinks in their hands. They had been listening to Nan with polite expressions. Peter and Diane Hummel were dressed formally, he in a suit, she in a sedate dress that could easily be a suit. Nan was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Underneath the T-shirt she had on a black bra that showed through the white. Her breasts were large, and the effect was more obscene than if she had put on nothing. She waved her arms in the air, talking garrulously as Max, Harry and the boys approached. She looked wild, her usually straight blond hair teased out from her head, her widespread arms showing off her breasts, targeted by the shiny black bra—but even she was stopped by Byron’s remark.
“I do!” Byron repeated in a scream. “I’ve seen lots of dead bodies!”
Peter’s mouth puckered sourly as if he were tasting his son’s words. He said, “Hello,” to Max, trying to smile.
“They look really dead!” Byron screamed at Harry.
Harry’s thick eyebrows lowered as if trying to shade his eyes.
Not so eager for knowledge, are you? Max thought. Nan still held her arms up. Max looked at her black-cupped breasts. Had they always been so big? Why hadn’t he noticed? Some sort of polite blindness for Jeff’s sake?
“But they must have been mostly skeletons,” Jonah said.
“No they weren’t!” Byron continued to shriek.
“Byron,” Peter said softly, although he pronounced the n firmly. “Speak in a lower voice, please.”
“They had their skin!” Byron lowered his tone to the volume of mere shouting. “They were smashed—”
“Byron!” his mother shouted in a panic.
“I don’t mean them!” Jonah also shouted, arms out, frustrated. “I mean in the battle Grandpa was talking about!”
“We’re all going to go deaf,” Peter mumbled.
“I don’t know any black people,” Max announced to all of them. “When I was in school I knew lots of black kids.”
“What are you talking about, Max?” Nan said. She lowered her arms. With them down, although her highlighted breasts were less provocative, they looked even bigger.
“Civil War,” Max said. He passed between the Hummels and entered into the living room proper; he saw that Harry had the liquor out on top of the stereo cabinet. Should I get drunk? he wondered. That would make tonight more dangerous—but also less real. “All those dead,” he continued, considering whether to have Scotch or vodka. “Fought to free the slaves and I live in a supposedly integrated city—our mayor’s black—and I went to public schools and I marched on Washington and I don’t know a single black.”
“I do,” Diane Hummel said. “I have two good friends who are black, I work with—”
“Are there any living in your apartment building?” Nan asked. “Any in your son’s school?” Nan laughed at herself, an apologetic guffaw.
“There are blacks in our…” Diane trailed off, uncertain.
“Only one and she’s there by marriage,” Peter said.
“By marriage?” his wife asked, sloshing her drink a little as she turned toward him abruptly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Anyway,” Peter said, making no response to his wife. “They didn’t fight to free the slaves. They fought for economic dominance.”
“It’s the same thing,” Max said.
“Well,” said Harry. He brushed his eyebrows with the thumb and ring finger of his right hand. “Well,” he said again and thrust out his chest, fingers still scratching the gray and black hairs. “I suppose in the ultimate sense a fight for what kind of economy a nation is going to have was necessarily a fight over slavery in the case of the United States, but Mr. Hummel is referring to whether the motivation was moral or pragmatic—and on that score—”
“I know what he was referring to, Harry,” Max said. “Don’t recapitulate the obvious.”
His father-in-law dropped his fingers from his eyebrows; they parted from his eyes, suddenly nude with surprise. Max decided to have a drink. He took the vodka in one hand, a glass in the other, and moved toward the ice. “The only reason historians make the economic point about the Civil War is so that we don’t feel morally inferior to the people who lived a hundred and thirty years ago. Plenty of them—even if they weren’t the majority—gave their lives for at least the stated goal of ending slavery. I don’t know anyone who would do that today. Anything else people say about the subject is just bullshit. The rest of its lessons are dead and uninteresting except to history nerds. They should be forgotten, not rehashed.” He had his drink made and he took a long swallow.
“That’s the new you, Max,” Nan said. She saluted him with her glass mockingly.
“What’s the new me, Nan?” Max asked.
“Expert on bravery and charity. They should have replaced Father Ritter with you.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Max said. “I don’t believe in God and that means I can’t molest little boys, accept payoffs, or suck up to corrupt politicians.”
“Oh yes…?” Nan smiled; lasciviously, it seemed to Max. She approached him with her arm out like a grappling hook, only it was her drink at the end that threatened to stab and gather him to her. Instead, it went around his shoulder and moistened his shirt. He noticed she had covered her pink cheeks and forehead with lots of makeup. From a foot away he could smell its musty powder. She kissed him on the cheek, wetly, and whispered, “And why can’t you do those bad things?”
“Because there’s no one to forgive me,” Max said and pushed her a little, on her soft right hip, to move her enticing warmth away.
Nan skipped back a step gracefully. With a sweeping gesture, she brought her dri
nk to her lips. “You’ve become a self-righteous asshole,” she said softly in a neutral tone.
A voice, reedy and full of hope, called into the living room from the hall. “Jonah?” it said. “Is Jonah here?” the voice pleaded.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Max heard Jonah answer. “I’m right in front of you.”
The grown-ups parted enough for Max to see the tableau: Jeff’s sons were in the hall. Sam, the older, had spoken. He was trailed by Jake, his four-year-old brother. Jonah left his grandfather’s side to stand almost nose-to-nose with his friend Sam. Jonah’s wide mouth displayed the unevenly sized teeth of a ten-year-old, front teeth as big as an adult’s, incisors small and still coming in; Sam beamed back with a mouth of oddly proportioned teeth. Instead of saying hellos, they laughed with delight at each other. Sam had his portable video game with him; a dirty white blanket with a frayed satin edge trailed behind little Jake.
“I was looking the wrong way into the living room!” Sam said in a nasal whine, his typical tone of voice. “I didn’t see you.”
“Well, I’m here, dummy,” Jonah said and touched the back of his friend’s head gently. “And you have Gameboy with you. Big surprise.”
“Boxxil is really tough!” Sam said. He had switched on the game. His head was down; his thumb flickered speedily from button to button. A tinny electronic song could be heard.
“Did you die yet, Sam?” his little brother Jake asked and sniffled. A dark streak under his nose, a mix of dirt and smeared snot, gave him a fake Hitlerian mustache.
“My beautiful sons,” Nan said and cleared her throat.
Peter Hummel laughed, but briefly. It wasn’t clear if Nan was kidding.
Jonah knew instinctively they had become a spectacle for the grown-ups. He pulled on Sam’s elbow, but gently, respectful of the game in progress. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“On pause,” Sam said, pressing a button on the portable video game. The tinny music was stopped in mid-melody. “Change screens,” Sam said and ran out of sight. Jonah followed, laughing.
“Wait for me, guys!” little Jake yelled and lumbered after them, his blanket swishing on the floor.
“I thought we were going to watch the Civil War,” Harry called to his grandson.
“Don’t want to!” Jonah shouted back.
Harry slumped, exaggerating his disappointment comically, but it wasn’t funny. There was too much real disenchantment in his eyes. “Well,” he gestured to Byron. “How about you? Do you care to learn anything about the most significant period of your country’s history?”
For an answer Byron turned to Max. “You said you were going to watch with me.”
“Byron,” his father said in a soft voice. “That’s not polite.”
“Oh, you can’t expect Max to keep his promises,” Nan said. She had finished her drink; she put the glass down on Harry’s bookshelves with a bang. The shelves lined one entire wall of the living room and were filled with old hardcovers missing their jackets. Max thought they had a pompous and depressing look, dusty sentinels of useless knowledge. “Max has been reborn so he doesn’t have to keep his promises.”
“Why don’t you play with the other boys?” Diane Hummel said to her son.
“I don’t like video games,” Byron said.
“Then ask them if they want to do something else.” She ran a hand over her smooth black hair, pulled flush to the scalp, fingers combing all the way back to the bump of her demure bun. Finding it in place, she patted it.
“A boy who doesn’t like video games!” Nan said in disbelief.
“I have a weird son,” Peter Hummel answered in the same tone of pride he used when telling Max that it was odd of Byron to enjoy drawing.
“I’m not good at them so I don’t like playing them,” Byron said blandly. “I don’t think that’s weird, Dad. What I think is weird is a dad who says his son is weird for not wanting to play video games. That’s what’s weird.”
“Your father’s weird, there’s no doubt about that,” Diane said.
Peter listened to his wife’s and son’s comments thoughtfully and then nodded in agreement.
“What promise haven’t I kept?” Max asked Nan.
“You said you’d help Brillstein and you’re not,” she said, her onstage tone turned down, the sexiness gone. She was serious. Serious, she looked older.
“I’m helping him as much as I can,” Max said, sighing.
“Bullshit,” Nan said. She turned away and announced, “I’d better see if the womenfolk need any help.” She marched out, the heels of her loafers clattering on the bare hallway floors.
They watched her go. Harry raised his bushy eyebrows and opened his arms. “What is she talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. He was tired. Nan always made him feel tired. He backed into the wing chair that Harry liked to read in. Flora complained it was too big for the room. Max agreed but then most comfortable things didn’t fit anymore. Max let himself drop into it. “Every week she finds some new thing to add to the lawsuit. This week it’s negligence on the kind of seats they had in the plane, even though Jeff’s seat didn’t come loose, that’s not what killed him. And she wants me to exaggerate how hysterical and terrified Jeff was at the end.” He remembered Jeff crapping in his pants. He had never mentioned this to Brillstein or Nan or anyone. What an excellent proof of his partner’s fright. It was so faint in his memory that he wondered if it had really happened or if he had just invented it for the sake of the lawsuit.
“Well,” Diane said, running her hand over her head and touching the bun in back again. Her sharp chin bobbed forward, like a bird pecking. “I hate to say it, but it’s good strategy. At this stage the lawsuit is largely a game of bluff. You’re pushing for a settlement really and you want the other side to know that you’ve got so many shots on goal to make with a jury that you’re sure to score at least one. And one is all it takes.”
“I thought you’re a public service lawyer,” Max said, annoyed by her tone of absolute knowledge.
“She used to work for the pigs,” her husband Peter explained, flashing a polite smile that Max imagined he might have used on a fellow member of the Century Club. Who were these people? So rich they could give their son a computer system Max wouldn’t indulge in himself, so uptight he had never seen them hug their damaged son, and yet agreeing to come to 103rd Street to have Thanksgiving with a gaggle of crazy Jews. Who were any of them? Why was Nan dressed up like Madonna? Why was Byron standing there listening to the adults rather than going after the other boys? Was Byron special, like Max, a creature of the unafraid living, a true son of his spirit, while Jonah, obsessed by the fakery of computer life and death, was forever lost to him?
Nan wants me to sleep with her, it occurred to Max abruptly. He was stunned by the clarity of this revelation. That’s why she’s angry. She’s lost a mate and she wants me to replace him. But it isn’t me, she doesn’t want me, she wants any replacement—I’m just the nearest to her dead husband. For a moment he felt he understood her but then he wasn’t sure. If she didn’t want to sleep with him, the real Max, and it was merely a desire for a generic male, then why did she persist no matter how often he was cool to her? None of her actions, her wildness and sensuality, fit the person Jeff had lived with. Jeff had talked to Max about Nan daily, had told countless stories, whined and analyzed her at length, and yet not one of Jeff’s judgments was helpful. They didn’t seem to have anything to do with the widow Max had to deal with every day.
“Max,” Byron said. He had come to the wing chair and leaned against Max’s knees. “Come and watch with me.”
“Leave Max alone,” Diane said. “Go and play with the other boys.”
“We’ll be eating soon,” Harry said to no one in particular.
“Max,” Byron said, his elbows digging into Max’s legs.
“I can’t help you, Byron,” Max said in a low voice. He felt near to tears and yet he was angry.
“I j
ust want you to watch TV with me,” Byron said in a shy voice.
“Go on, Byron,” his mother said. “Go play with the other boys.”
“All right!” Byron shrugged his shoulders and walked out miserably.
“Should I put on the—?” Harry began and then despaired. “I guess they’re not really interested. I loved the Civil War at that age,” he wondered aloud with unembarrassed self-admiration.
“That’s why you became an historian,” Peter said.
The doorbell rang.
“My mother,” Max said in a voice of doom.
“I’m not a historian,” Harry said. “In fact, I can appreciate your old-fashioned and quite correct usage of ‘an’ historian. I teach American literature,” Harry said in a modest mumble, as though mentioning something so secret and precious that he had to be careful not to be overheard by the wrong party.
The doorbell rang again.
“Harry, can you get that!” Flora’s voice called from the kitchen.
“Don’t my daughter’s legs work?” Harry asked rhetorically; he had already begun a shuffle down the hall.
Max looked up at Peter and Diane Hummel. Both stood in formal poses holding empty drink glasses. He was alone with two strangers.
“You know I decided to ask around about your lawyer,” Diane said. Peter shifted from one foot to another. For him that was almost feverish behavior.
“And you found out he’s a shyster,” Max said.
Diane’s dark eyebrows lifted. “No. Do you think he’s a shyster?”
“I don’t think he’s honest.”
“In other words, he’s a lawyer,” Peter said and laughed gutturally in his wife’s direction.
She winced and her nostrils tightened, as if she had smelled something foul. “No, but…he’s, well, he’s second-rate. And he has no experience in aviation liability.”
“I know that. I gave him the job because he’s second-rate.”
“Do you always do self-destructive things or are you planning to sue him for legal malpractice?” Peter Hummel grinned at Max, pleased by his own wit.
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