“What’s an alderman?” Robert asked.
“Hell if I know,” Tommy said, smiling. “But a lot of cops hang out at his place; safest building in town.”
“How do I get there?” Robert asked.
“Take the Blue Line to the end, to Wonderland. Then you get on a bus.”
“Wonderland?” Robert asked. Why not? Had he not fallen down the rabbit hole?
“Yeah,” Tommy said, smirking, “but there’s nothing wonderful about it.”
AND SO ON THE FIRST of June he moved again, carrying only his duffel, now significantly lighter. All he had from Gwendolyn was the leather jacket she’d given him, and a few affectionate notes she’d left for him on the refrigerator, which he saved in the pages of her Spanish-English dictionary; he was desperate, somehow, to remember her sloppy, sprawling handwriting. Someday, he knew, he would forget the sound of her voice, and so he listened for it in his head every day, to check, as if pressing a wound, then feeling oddly relieved that the pain was still there.
He followed Tommy’s instructions, taking the Blue Line all the way and then transferring to a bus, getting off in a tree-lined neighborhood with a main street of stores: a coffee shop, a small grocery, a Salvation Army, a bar, and a Laundromat. Older women in housedresses walked with their bags and carts, children played on cement as they had where he grew up, only here the lawns were even smaller. The houses and apartment buildings were boxy, close together, made of siding or clapboard with flat roofs. His own building was yellow with tiny windows, high steps, and an iron railing. It was the tallest building for blocks except for the housing project across the street, where just then a buxom blond woman sat outside, braless, wearing a stained orange T-shirt and smoking a cigarette. She waved at him like an old friend.
He now had an unkempt beard, and his hair was longer than usual, hanging in his face so that to anyone who’d known him even three months earlier he was almost unrecognizable. His jeans were falling apart and his shirt, one of Tracey’s shirts, was faded after so many washes, the cuffs fraying; his sandals had so many holes in them that he could feel the hot pavement under his feet. He still had another man’s initials on his pocket, but other than that he fit in well here with the poor, the lost, the angry. The neighborhood of Italians and Irish was giving way reluctantly to incoming Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. People stared at him, trying to place his background. He shouldered the duffel and walked up the steps. Inside, he shook hands with his new landlord, Tommy’s brother, John, a beefy, affable man with a round face, who directed him to the top floor and offered assistance, which he declined.
His room was in the back of the building, and from one of two windows he could see the roofs for several blocks, with their clotheslines and pipes. From the day he arrived, he gave in to his desire to sleep, sleeping through John’s late-night parties and the hum of a loud television downstairs, the occasional scream of fury at a Red Sox game lost, or a poker hand poorly wagered. There were always men crowding into John’s apartment, or sitting out on the stoop. Cops mostly, as Tommy had said. Tommy was the serious one in the family; John was more of a partier. Of the new tenant, John would tell Tommy that he’d never imagined a man could be so quiet. Most of the time, he forgot anyone was up there at all.
Tommy came to visit every few weeks, carrying a pizza and a six-pack of beer. When Robert refused the beer, he drank it all himself, his pale skin blooming into a healthy pink. Usually, after attempting to get Robert to eat some pizza, he’d give up and go down to spend most of the evening with his brother. Robert was invited along but always declined. When Robert commented once that Tommy and John were close, Tommy mentioned a third brother, in the middle between them, no longer living. And Robert wondered if perhaps this was the reason a stranger had grasped so quickly his helplessness and come to his aid. But he did not ask.
Robert wasn’t trying to starve, but he wasn’t ever hungry. He drank water and juice, and sometimes, when Tommy yelled at him enough, he choked down a milk shake with a raw egg in it. But by mid-July Tommy couldn’t take being around Robert so much, and Robert couldn’t blame him. If depression is contagious, he had caught it—the bathroom was filthy, food rotted in the tiny refrigerator, and dust clumps rolled like tumbleweeds across the floor. When Robert thought of cleaning, or leaving the house, he felt so very tired. One minute he was paralyzed by remorse at all the ways he’d failed her, then the next he’d become furious, up all night yelling at her in his head: She had deserted him for whatever foul plans barked at her. She had not loved him enough to stay alive. She would not live for him, and she had left him to this.
August came, and though he didn’t read the paper or watch the news, he heard from John, who came up the steps to tell him: the Defense Department had asked for the last of this year’s troops, and the final number called up was 195. He had come within two digits of being drafted, but now he was safe forever. No amendments, nothing to be done. In six months, they’d pick the next year’s victims. His life had been returned to him, only he had no life left and no energy to live it. He thanked John for the news, declining an invitation to come down into the air-conditioning and have a cold beer. Then he got back in bed and went to sleep.
THREE WEEKS LATER, at ten in the morning, a man knocked loudly and repeatedly on Robert’s door, getting him out of bed. Robert put the chain on the door and looked at him through the crack. A tall, sandy-haired cop. “You have the wrong apartment,” Robert said. “You want John Connaghan. He’s downstairs.”
“Vishniak?” he asked. “Robert Vishniak?”
Robert opened the door. “Yeah, I’m him. But I’m number 197. You can’t take me.”
The man looked around at the room and shook his head. “I don’t give a damn what number you are,” he said. “People are looking for you, son. How’d you disappear like that? Call your parents.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Connaghan has one downstairs,” he said. “Hurry up.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Just come with me!” he barked. “They need you at home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Homecoming
Robert did not call. Instead, he packed his bag, left a month’s rent for John, extra money to hire a cleaning service, and a note explaining the situation. Seven hours later, he was coughed up on the shores of his childhood home, clutching his tattered duffel. The train from Boston had deposited him at the 30th Street Station, and he’d taken the SEPTA rail line to Holmesburg Junction, the stop that bordered the Holmesburg Prison, its impenetrable walls visible in the near distance. Then he’d taken the bus that let him off a block from the house, walking as if in a trance, relying on the instincts of a homing pigeon.
A group of teenagers wearing bell-bottoms and macramé headbands walked in twos and fours up the sidewalk, laughing and shouting amused threats to each other. They stopped at the corner, then shuffled up the walk to a mother who held the doors open and asked, loudly, what they wanted to eat. A mailman, shoulders slumped, finished his rounds. A truck with an image of a giant stork painted on the side pulled up across the street, and a man began unloading piles of diapers wrapped in plastic. A neighbor, spotting Robert shuffling up the walk with his bag, called his mother—Stacia, there’s a filthy vagrant outside your house—so that now, as he reached the steps, Stacia stood at the door yelling that she didn’t have any money to spare.
“It’s me, Ma,” he said. “It’s Robert.”
She did not reply, only stared, her expression oddly slack. And then she embraced him, her arms awkwardly around his neck. She was not a hugger or a crier, yet he could feel her terror in that embrace, and her relief.
Entering the living room, he found Vishniak sitting in his usual chair wearing his Sunday uniform of shorts and an undershirt. Only this wasn’t Sunday. Robert stared at his father’s legs. One was its usual ghostly white, but the other was a stump ending just above the knee.
“We called your apartment but the nu
mber was disconnected,” his mother said. “And we wrote, but you never replied, and the letters were returned. Nobody at the university knew anything, nobody at her building either. Then I couldn’t be bothered anymore; your father was in the hospital, and I said, ‘If he wants to be lost, or is lying in a ditch, nothing I can do.’”
“I moved,” Robert said. The stump of his father’s leg was pink with a dark scar across it.
“Your brother left for college last month. When your father got sick, he was a help, surprised us all. His idea to call the police.”
“Nothing you could have done,” his father interrupted, looking up into his face and seeing his expression. “Bad circulation. Gangrene set in.” Then he added, “Eventually they’ll want the left leg too, I bet, and then they’ll take my prick, and soon I’ll be nothing but a head.”
“Will the head know when to shut up?” his mother snapped, moving toward the kitchen.
“I’d have come home,” Robert said softly. “If I’d known.”
“You’re home now, that’s all that matters,” Vishniak said and took Robert’s hand, pressed it to his lips. Robert could hear his mother removing things from the refrigerator.
“I’m not hungry,” he called. She would make him sit down anyway and try. And he would leave the table gagging from food he had loved all his life.
VERY QUICKLY, THEY DIDN’T know what to do with him. Each morning he got up to help his father out of bed and down the stairs, then went back to his room, dozing all day until it was time to get Vishniak back to the second floor. Several afternoons a week a short young man named Igor, with bulging muscles and a heavy accent, came to help his father do exercises to strengthen his upper body and arms, paid for by the Postal Service health plan. For once, Stacia was happy about the help, and relieved that the postal workers finally had insurance. Igor had worked with Vishniak during his stay at rehab, and after Robert heard about him for a few days, he crept down the stairs, curious, only to observe his sixty-year-old father crawling along the floor like an infant. He retreated quickly back to his room. Sleep, he plunged into sleep, resting there as if on the bottom of a vast ocean, wanting only the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness.
Meanwhile Stacia cooked everything she could think of to tempt him, and Aunt Lolly and his grandmother contributed, too. A child who wouldn’t eat was a child in crisis, Cece proclaimed, though she added that she couldn’t really see what he looked like, not with her bad eyes and all that hair covering his face. The cakes piled up in the kitchen and dining room, each more tempting than the next, though none more so than Aunt Lolly’s coconut-raisin-cinnamon-carrot cake with chocolate bits and cream cheese frosting, which he’d never been able to refuse before, but stared at now as if it were a piece of art.
One morning in late October, his mother stood at the foot of his bed. “When are you going to—?” The words were on the tip of her tongue—get a job, make money, pay us rent—but she looked at his face and stopped herself. They had asked him about Gwendolyn once, and he shook his head, as if to say Do not enter, and they obeyed, afraid to ask more.
And then there were the nightmares. He hadn’t had them in Chelsea; there, he’d slept like a dead man, but here, in his childhood home, his subconscious roamed free. In one dream, he was back in Boston, coming home from work, knowing what Gwendolyn was going to do, only the elevator was broken and he had to take the steps, but his legs got so heavy, as if his pants were filled with cement, and Tommy would be there at the top of the steps shouting at him, Faster, faster, man! and he’d try and try, panicked, hysterical. In another, he made it into the apartment and there she was, standing in front of him, asking for one good reason why she shouldn’t do it. He’d rush at her, but no words would come out of his mouth, and then he’d realize that it wasn’t her at all, but an impostor, and she was already in the bathroom, dead.
He woke up from these dreams coughing so hard that he could not catch his breath, and then the wheezing began. When it got bad enough, he ran to the bathroom, throwing up what little was in his stomach. That saved him, and then he could gasp and cough and get enough breath back to feel that the crisis had passed. By then it would be almost morning and, too frightened to go back to sleep, he would lie in his too-small bed in the dark, curled up like a child.
He tried to be helpful with his father, but could not seem to hit the right note, sensed that Vishniak just wanted to be left alone with his own pain, as Robert himself did. Only for the physical therapist did Vishniak perk up, as the two talked about the Eagles’ losing season, and the exploits of the team’s high-living owner, Leonard Tose, and his hapless coach, Jerry Williams.
He missed Barry. Barry had always been closer to their father, the two of them so alike, their conversations effortless — Barry would know how to act around Vishniak, how to kid him and make him laugh. Robert was closer to his mother, though he didn’t like to admit it. She watched him now in a way that she never did when he was a child, hovering, asking if he wanted something to eat, and straightening up his room as he yelled at her to leave. She was stuck between the two of them, father and son, each wanting to be left alone yet still needing her for their most basic survival. After she left for work they’d stare at each other, not knowing what to do with themselves. Eventually, doing all her usual routine week after week while they lay around the house, and having failed to get Robert to eat or Vishniak to cut back on his eating, Stacia fell into her own black mood, snapping and barking, threatening that Robert had to start thinking about a job. At least this version of his mother was comforting, familiar.
And then one night, hearing first the endless coughing and then a loud thud, Stacia came into the hall and found Robert sprawled on the pale pink shag of the bathroom floor, passed out, having hit his head on the toilet bowl on the way down. She helped him up, brought him ice for his head and ginger ale for his stomach. For the first time in weeks, he fell back to sleep, only to be roused from bed by Stacia at seven. She gave him a cup of tea and some crackers and told him to get dressed. When he refused, she began to strip off his T-shirt as if he were a child, so that he agreed to do as she asked just to get rid of her. But she stood outside his room, waiting. Seeing him emerge, in an old pair of trousers, a shirt, and a sweater from high school that now fit him again, the only decent clothes he had left, she took him by the arm and marched him out of the house and up the street, as she had when he was nine and had lifted a pack of gum from Rapoport Pharmacy. She stopped on the corner, at the house with an office where just a year and a half ago Robert had been turned away by the ancient Dr. Oppenheim.
The office had been redone, painted bright colors with royal blue carpeting and hip plastic furniture. He had no appointment, but the young receptionist welcomed them as if she were a hostess in a restaurant—they were the only patients in the room. She told his mother to wait, and only when he saw his mother sit down and pick up a copy of Good Housekeeping did it occur to him—he was in a doctor’s office with Stacia. She was just that worried. Either that or Vishniak’s situation had improved her opinion of the profession.
The doctor was only six years older than Robert. His name was Schwartzman, and he’d grown up in the neighborhood and come back. He examined Robert so thoroughly that it took hours—was he bored?—then gave him a B12 shot and sent him to Nazareth Hospital, on the other side of the Boulevard, to get a chest X-ray and see a specialist.
A week later, in late November, he wandered the quiet hallways of the hospital, clutching a folder. When he finally found the waiting room, it was crowded with coughing, gray-looking adults and skinny children who breathed like old men. He took his place among them and waited until he was ushered in to see a nurse, who administered a scratch test on his naked back. An hour later, he met Dr. Kryzchek, a middle-aged man with an officious manner who rattled off a long list of irritants that he was allergic to and suggested shots, which Robert still had no intention of taking. Then the doctor made him breathe into a machine and looked at his c
hest X-ray. “You have asthma,” he said. “It’s severe enough to get you out of the draft, if that’s an issue.”
Dr. Kryzchek prescribed a medication that was to be inhaled three times a day, and another one that he was to use only in absolute emergencies, if the other wasn’t helping. “You’re very lucky. There’ve been big breakthroughs. We can control it now.”
“Oh, I’m lucky, all right,” Robert replied.
“This is serious,” the doctor said, not appreciative of Robert’s tone. “If you don’t treat this, you could die. People have died from asthma attacks.”
Robert thought of his grandfather, how his breathing problems made his life a daily battle for decades, aggravated by a windowless factory where he worked with chemicals all day. Leukemia had finally killed him; the workers tanned leather without gloves back then, the dyes seeping into their skin. Vishniak would be the next to go. A severe diabetic should never have worked two jobs in the first place.
“Are you all right, son?” the doctor asked, putting his hand on Robert’s shoulder.
“Would you mind telling me how two different doctors found me perfectly fit?”
“The condition can change over time,” he said, writing the prescriptions on a pad. “Especially if you’ve been exposed to extreme temperatures, poor diet, stress.” He looked up, frowned. “Have you been under a lot of stress?”
Robert could hear his father in his head—They all stick together, Robert. You think he’s going to point a finger at one of his own?
“It wouldn’t hurt you to gain some weight,” Kryzchek said. “There’s information downstairs on a food bank the hospital runs, if that’s needed.”
“I got food, Doctor,” Robert replied, taking the prescription slips in his hand. “I got enough food to run my own food bank.”
On the way out, he passed a mirrored wall in the waiting room, and for the first time since coming home he looked at himself. His beard had taken over the lower half of his face; his hair, parted on the side, hung to his shoulders and fell partially in his eyes, which were bloodshot with dark shadows under them. On his forehead were smudges of purple bruise from when he’d fallen and hit his head. No wonder the doctor thought he couldn’t afford food.
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