“You know, the way you’re standing, you could almost have been your mother for a minute there.”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him come out of the bathroom.
“Sweetie,” he said, coming toward me, “it’s only me.”
I was afraid for a minute he was going to put his arms around me, but instead he took off his shirt.
“Would you mind just looking at my back for me? This—boil, or whatever it is—I…” He trailed off—I could see he didn’t like to ask.
“Oh, Pop, I don’t know anything about boils,” I said, but after all he was alone, while I had Louis to look at any boils of mine, so I sat him down to examine him. His skin was coarse and oily—I remembered all I knew about skin, how it’s the body’s largest organ and full of various glands. How heavy a skin is, like a wetsuit: I pictured his folded over the back of a chair. The sore was a round raw center in a nimbus of pus, and I saw he’d been picking at it, like a child who can’t leave a scab alone.
“Press it and see what’s in it, sweetie,” he said. “I thought something crawled out of it yesterday.”
He looked up at me and some ancient, familiar shadow crossed his face. Was he cut so absolutely free of his moorings, so adrift in fantasy, that his night-terrors were as alive to him as his island dreams? I felt frightened myself, suddenly—he seemed a mire that might any minute pull me in, and I tried to remind myself that he was only a man, a lost, confused man who had no one to care for him but me.
I set my finger to the edge of the inflammation, and the pain pleased him. “It’s doesn’t sting,” he said, “more like a burn…”
“It just needs to be disinfected,” I said. “There’s only a little swelling here, nothing to worry about.” Truly, I thought it might want lancing, but I knew if I suggested that he’d ask me to do it, and dabbing it with a bit of cotton soaked in witch hazel was almost more than I could bear.
“That’s good,” he said with a little shudder. “That’s so good.”
“There,” I said. Blood poison was unlikely, and no one would count me responsible if his blood was poisoned, or neglectful if he died. I probably wouldn’t feel more than the occasional prick of guilt myself—nothing compared to the way I felt for hating him so. “I think it’s going to heal up fine.”
“It’s wonderful to have family, isn’t it sweetie?” he said, standing up, relieved, it seemed, of every fear and sorrow by my little ministration. “So few people understand that, that it’s family, not glamour, or money, or fame, that’s the important thing.”
He turned, glowing with good feeling, to hug me.
I knew it would be insane to scream. I leaned stiffly toward him, patting his back above the sore, concentrating on my breath so as not to panic, doubly gentle because I felt as if my fingers might sprout claws.
“Is there a sheet or something I could tack up over the window?” I asked when he released me.
He looked puzzled. “Nobody can see in here, sweetie,” he said. “We’re on the sixth floor.”
He was right, of course. Still I felt exposed.
“If you’re nervous,” he said, “you can come in and sleep with me.”
His voice was studiedly casual, but his eyes had the angry gleam of a man who has bet everything on a single number and is watching the wheel spin. It was a proposition, and I felt the room swinging around me like a nauseating carnival ride, in the center of which I—my heart, breath, mind, and most of all my eyes, must keep fixed absolutely still.
“I’m okay,” I said. Very lightly, hoping I could somehow back away from him without moving. It was the first such suggestion I had ever declined. Professors were so magnificently arrogant, they’d leave the marks of their grip on my arm, asking me to bed as if they were challenging me to a duel—it would have been cowardice to refuse. And the others, the timid boys who tried a little ruse, like my father—I could never bear to turn them down. Men—you can feel their sadness—but how to assuage it? You have to do it through sex, they can’t take nourishment any other way. And I was always so grateful to be wanted, to feel them drinking their strength from my beauty, drinking and drinking until they seemed powerful as gods.
Pop shrugged. “We used to do it, when you were two years old,” he said.
“So, Columbus tomorrow!” he said when I didn’t answer. “Teaching, you say?”
I nodded.
“What would you teach?” he asked, sounding baffled.
“Comparative literature.”
“You don’t need some kind of certificate for that?”
“No,” I said, knowing he didn’t count the Ph.D.
“Amazing. Hey, you don’t think there might be a something out there for me, do you? I’ve got a real soft spot for the Midwest. Good people, salt of the earth. Nothing keeping me here—you might say I’m footloose and fancy free. We could get a nicer place if there were two of us. I’ve been making money.…”
To invite him would be suicide. To say no was more of a homicide. I settled for silence: cowardice seemed a bloodless crime.
“Well, just something to think about…” he said. “It’s just great to have you here, sweetie.”
He spoke so sincerely that I was afraid he was going to hug me again, but no, he went into his bedroom and closed the door, and a few minutes later I saw the light blink out beneath.
I curled against the far arm of the couch, pulling my knees to my chest, keeping the blanket tight around me, the way I used to sleep as a child. I had a recurring dream then that some awful force had come to suck me out the window, and I’d hold my breath, playing dead until it went away. I was always looking for a charm, something to wrap myself in for safety, the image of Zeus or Louis or whoever—everyone needs something like that, something to grab hold of in the dark. Now I tried to think of Cincinnati—a sleepy river town, sun on the factories, the pleasure of getting to know a new city, any city—but all I could feel was that I didn’t dare leave Louis, I needed him to keep my father at bay. After a long time I fell not asleep but into a kind of purgatorial consciousness, full of specters but still at one remove from that room.
“There’s no one else,” a voice said, so clear it seemed to rouse me, “you’ll have to marry him.”
Then I heard my father’s bedsprings and his feet as they touched the floor. Soon he would pad past me on his way to the bathroom. I held myself tighter, trying to take the deep, slow breaths of a sleeper. He might be only inches away from me, but he wouldn’t guess I’d awakened, and I’d never let him know.
An Early Death
The morning of his ninth birthday Stevie awoke with a sense of great promise and looked out the window toward Brooklyn as if he’d see the ship of his future coming in through the Narrows, guided by one of his father’s tugs. It was May, he could smell the sea, not the oil and salt of the harbor but a brilliant astringency that belonged to the open water beyond, and he heard a ship sounding: one sharp blast, another long lowing, a moan. “I yearn, I must go!” Then the doorbell—already! And it wasn’t even nine. Lottie got it, of course, and came into the parlor bewildered, carrying a bamboo cage with two very large spotted kittens in it. Ocelots, from Señor Villanueva, whose bananas and sugarcane Stevie’s father imported: they grow to about three feet in length, eat raw meat, make faithful pets.
“Sweetie—no—,” his mother said, smiling uncomfortably. He was an impossible child; his every move disarranged things, she’d have to follow him through life with a soapy cloth. Yesterday, while she went over the week’s menus with Lottie, he had disassembled the toaster; now he was poking his fingers into a cage of wild animals. And his father seemed to be living another childhood, all mystery and tenderness, with this younger son—having been so stern and exacting with the other. When she’d sent Big Stephen in to speak to Stevie about the toaster, father and son sat down on the floor and put it back together, emerging proud as if it were their own creation. Who knew why they should be so close? The name, or a coincidence of temperament, or the
fact that the boy, conceived by accident when his brother was nearly grown, had come when the man had established himself and could turn his heart back to his family …
“Oh, Señor Villanueva!” Big Steve said, shaking his head and laughing. “Señor Villanueva, time and again I tell you gifts will not be necessary, and time and again…”
“Sweetie, you’ll really have to speak to him more firmly,” Mama said, “We can’t—”
“Well, we can’t send them back,” Stevie broke in. He was so thin, still in his drop-seat sleeping suit, you could imagine the wind wafting him up like a seed. The cats tussled in the cage, one knocking the other down with a wide, clumsy paw, then commencing to wash it, while the other, the one who’d given in, had a luxurious stretch. “Isn’t that true, Papa? It’s an insult, in the South American cultures, to return a gift.”
“We were going to open presents after breakfast,” Papa said. “But as we will have to call the zoo about these fine fellows, perhaps…”
And he led Stevie out through the garden and threw open the toolshed door. It had been transformed into a laboratory, whitewashed, with a new sink and a Bunsen burner, a rack of test tubes, clamp stands and beakers, a microscope and a shelf of chemistry books. It was 1945, the war was won, all things seemed possible. The basic elements were for sale at the pharmacy. Papa filled a flask with silver nitrate, and gave Stevie a length of copper wire.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Drop it in; it won’t explode.” Stevie did, jumping back in spite of the reassurance, and saw silver quills whoosh down the length of the wire.
“Papa!” So, there was such a thing as magic! It went by the name of science, that was all.
“There’s one rule,” his father said. “You must never come in here unless I’m with you. Do you understand?” Big Steve’s rules were more like promises: Stevie would do as he was told, and his father would stay beside him. Stevie nodded, meeting and holding his father’s gaze, seeing in it the proud authority that would one day be his.
His other gift was a guide to the North American butterflies, Papa having planted butterfly bushes along the garden walk. “We had them in the backyard, when I was little,” Big Steve said. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” His voice caught in his throat, and Stevie thought that if butterfly bushes could so move his father they must be the most beautiful things in the world.
“You don’t often find them in the U.S.” Big Stephen said. His spade sliced sharply into the soil, and he rubbed his shoulder: “This bursitis, it’s the cold fog. Hot damp is good for the joints.”
In fact it was cancer, of the stomach—the pain thrown from its source so for months they thought bursitis, then arthritis, then—an ulcer, maybe? By the time they knew what it was, there was nothing to be done. On Stevie’s next birthday Papa lay wasting in his bed. From which he’d have seen the butterfly bushes, if only they had bloomed. Papa squeezed Stevie’s hand: sometimes, he said, things come in late the first year. It might only be a few weeks before the bushes flowered—they might be cloaked in monarchs by July. Even now he was an optimist—it was Ellis Island confidence, the sense that, having come anonymous and empty-handed, learned a new language at night by reading two editions of War and Peace side-by-side, begun as a messenger and built a fleet of messengers, then trucks, ships, and now planes, the sense that, having done all this, you might be able to do anything. This confidence gave onto courage, and patience. One had been surprised many, many times. Plants may not bloom by the book, illness may go dormant and pass into memory.…
“Another few weeks may well make the difference,” he said.
But there were no buds, which Stevie couldn’t bear to tell him. How fitting, that spring should come without flowers that year, when all plans were given up and all hopes revealed to be foolish, impossible.
The rules fell by the wayside, too. Dinner, once served on the dot of six, was often forgotten entirely on Lottie’s days off. Stevie had believed his father had some kind of infrared vision and always knew what his sons were doing, could guess their transgressions by looking into their eyes. Now he skipped school; spent a whole day in the movies. It was a kind of test, and Big Steve failed it—smiling painfully from his sickbed, pretending to listen to his son’s fabrications. The pact was broken, and the next day Stevie walked boldly into the laboratory and repeated the copper and silver nitrate experiment unsupervised—there was no explosion, no thunderbolt, the sky remained cloudless overhead.
He was set on a new course: which, of all the laws he’d been taught to live by, had meaning? One by one he began to flout them. At dinner he pushed his smelts and lima beans through the hot air register under his chair. They were either consumed in the furnace or dried in the duct—whichever, they didn’t stink and no one was the wiser. He skipped school again, and this time walked home from the movies along the waterfront, where the bums, as his father called them, drank from bottles wrapped in paper bags—they looked dirty and rough but nothing like the menace he’d been warned of, and the only one who spoke to him said kindly, “Hello, son.”
That afternoon he took the yellow phosphorus out of the freezer. It ignites at room temperature, Big Steve had said; they’d wait to use it until he could learn more about it himself. Stevie set a small lump out in an ashtray and after an hour of warming, it burst obligingly, quite safely, into flame.
He packed some in ice with a strip of caps from his cap pistol, took it to the Saturday matinee and left it under the back row of seats. The ice had melted by the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle—there was a hissing sound, then the caps shot off and smoke filled the mezzanine. “Get out, fire!” a man shouted. People began to file out of their rows, orderly at first, but fear hardened their faces; when a woman with a little girl pushed at the man in front of her saying, “I have a baby,” he put up his shoulder to block her. Now a terror shot through Stevie, too, seeing the adults confused and afraid. It was the awful underlayer of life that he’d glimpsed in his father’s face as Big Steve folded the newspaper and set it high out of his reach, the chill that crept over the grownups when they spoke of the war. There was something he hadn’t known about life; his father had shielded him. Now he was going to be alone with it.
He ran home. He had to confess and be punished, get free. Just to push open the heavy front door with its leaded window, see the afternoon sun spilling into the dining room, was to know that the safety and order of his father’s kingdom was still in place. It was Sunday, so a chicken was roasting; the smell rose reassuringly from the kitchen. His father would banish Stevie’s terrors back to the world of nightmare, put the laboratory off limits, draw a lesson from his son’s misbehavior, set everything right. Stevie ran up the stairs, cupping his palm over the head of the marble elephant on the landing, a habit that had become a superstition so that if he forgot, he’d turn back to correct the oversight lest he accidentally set off some disaster. At the bedroom door he hesitated for a second, but took himself in hand, ready to admit his transgressions and face the consequences, and tapped. The shades were drawn, the room smelled of illness and medicaments, and his father was gone to the hospital, where no children were allowed.
Steve saw his father next at his wake. Big Steve lay emaciated on his bier, his skin fallen in webs, cheeks rouged like a music hall dancer’s over the gray cast beneath. It was the first anniversary of Hiroshima. For the rest of Stevie’s life he’d recall the day suddenly at moments of happiness or pride, and feel his joy sour as he thought of what lay in store. A weakness his father would have despised: he fought it with all his strength, keeping up an indomitable good cheer, an absolute outward refusal of despair. He would be happy, in memory of his father. His brother followed the more conventional path, studying medicine, then oncology.
Next summer the butterfly bushes bloomed in profusion, making up for the lost year. Swallowtails floated over the lavender arches whose beauty seemed a rebuke, as if Big Steve’s longing to see the flowers of his childhood again had been a weaknes
s that led to his death. How vital he had been, taking the helm of a tugboat some days so his men could know and trust him! How carefully he’d packed the roots of the butterfly bushes with sopping peat, to nourish them for a long life. The life he should have had. But nothing is just. Steve never crossed the laboratory threshold again—he had promised never to go there without his father. He began to avoid the flowery path, too, and his studies, and almost everything.
He’d also promised to “take care” of his mother, though it was hard to know what this could mean. Edith was less grief-stricken than bewildered. Her parents had chosen Stephen as her husband and so, of course, she’d married him. She counted love among childish fancies, with magic potions and royal toads. When, on their wedding night, Stephen had explained to her what was expected of a wife, she’d been appalled. He said it was natural; she said that if it was natural she would surely have heard of it before. But as she didn’t have the courage, let alone the language, to speak of it to anyone else, she allowed him into her bed at night and did her best to forget in the morning. She was “a new soul,” on her first visit to earth—this fact had been divined by a carnival palm reader, who had then folded Edith’s sister Lucy’s hand silently back into itself and bowed her head. Lucy’s dress caught fire at a dance that winter and she lived only a few days more. So Edith took her own ignorance as fate, and a lucky fate at that. She obeyed her parents, then her husband … now …
It was frightening to see her, to realize all she didn’t know. She deeded the household management over to Lottie and sat down once a week with Big Steve’s office manager to sign the checks. She played bridge. When she didn’t have a task she became agitated, but as long as she was counting stitches or pennies her fears let her alone. It became Stevie’s duty to protect her from the world’s confusions. He ate his dinner, smelts and all, never took things apart anymore, kept his room neat and his grades reasonable, and checked every night to be sure all the windows were locked, the way his father had used to banish the monsters from his closet when he was six years old.
Darling? Page 15
