Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  On the sidewalk, Roland pointed to the tuxedo, which Sonya carried over her arm. “I’ll never wear that thing again.”

  “Who knows? ‘With proper care you can live another twenty years,’ ” she said, quoting his doctor.

  “Proper care does not include after-dinner speeches in a monkey suit.”

  “Yes, well.” And the coat, the coat …

  “The tuxedo … will do for a shroud.”

  … the coat: she would haunt the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop until the thing appeared. She’d buy it and stash it in the Finnish chest; maybe in that relic the Old World would find repose. And if not, let it writhe. Love, love … “A shroud? Up yours,” snorted Sonya, startling him, making him smile. “I intend to keep you around. Darling, let’s have dinner out.”

  She took his arm and led him to a new Italian place on East Twelfth, one which the courtly old gentleman in the fur-collared coat had never had a chance to patronize.

  MATES

  KEITH AND MITSUKO MAGUIRE drifted into town like hoboes, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fares like everyone else. But they seemed as easy as vagabonds, without even a suitcase between them, and only one hat, a canvas cap. They took turns putting it on. Each wore a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack. Two lime green sneakers hung from Mitsuko’s pack.

  That afternoon they were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks. They looked as if they meant to camp there. But sleeping outside was as illegal twenty-five years ago as it is today; and these newcomers, it turned out, honored the law. In fact they spent their first night in the Godolphin Inn, like ordinary travelers. They spent their second night in the apartment they had just rented at the top of a three-decker on Lewis Street, around the corner from the house I have lived in since I was a girl.

  And there they stayed for a quarter of a century, maintaining cordial relations with the downstairs landlord and with the succession of families who occupied the middle flat.

  Every fall they planted tulips in front. In the spring, Keith mowed the side lawn. Summers they raised vegetables in the back; all three apartments shared the bounty.

  Anyone else in their position would have bought a single-family house or a condo, maybe after the first child, certainly after the second. Keith, a welder, made good money; and Mitsuko, working part-time as a computer programmer, supplemented their income. But the Maguires kept on paying rent as if there were no such thing as equity. They owned no television, and their blender had only three speeds. But although the net curtains at their windows seemed a thing of the moment, like a bridal veil, their plain oak furniture had a responsible thickness. On hooks in the back hall hung the kids’ rain gear and Keith’s hard hat and Mitsuko’s sneakers. The sneakers’ green color darkened with wear; eventually she bought a pair of pink ones.

  I taught all three of the boys. By the time the oldest entered sixth grade he was a passionate soccer player. The second, the bookish one, wore glasses. The third, a cutup, was undersized. In each son the mother’s Eastern eyes looked out of the father’s Celtic face; a simple, comely, repeated visage; a glyph meaning “child.”

  Mitsuko herself was not much bigger than a child. By the time the youngest began high school even he had outstripped his mother. Her little face contained a soft beige mouth, a nose of no consequence, and those mild eyes. Her short hair was clipped every month by Keith. (In return Mitsuko trimmed Keith’s receding curls and rusty beard.) She wore T-shirts and jeans and sneakers except for public occasions; then she wore a plum-colored skirt and a white silk blouse. I think it was always the same skirt and blouse. The school doctor once referred to her as generic, but when I asked him to identify the genus he sighed his fat sigh. “Female parent? All I mean is that she’s stripped down.” I agreed. It was as if nature had given her only the essentials: flat little ears; binocular vision; teeth strong enough for buffalo steak, though they were required to deal with nothing more fibrous than apples and raw celery (Mitsuko’s cuisine was vegetarian). Her breasts swelled to the size of teacups when she was nursing, then receded. The school doctor’s breasts, sometimes visible under his summer shirt, were slightly bigger than Mitsuko’s.

  The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filligreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired. When their eldest was in my class, each gave a What I Do talk to the sixth grade. At my request they repeated it annually. Wearing a belt stuffed with tools, his mask in his hands, Keith spoke of welding’s origins in the forge. He mentioned weapons, tools, automobiles. He told us of the smartness of the wind, the sway of the scaffolding, the friendly heft of the torch. “An arc flames and then burns blue,” he said. “Steel bar fuses to steel bar.” Mitsuko in her appearances before the class also began with history. She described Babbage’s first calculating machine, whose innards nervously clacked. She recapitulated the invention of the Hollerith code (the punched card she showed the kids seemed as venerable as papyrus), the cathode tube, the microchip. Then she, too, turned personal. “My task is to achieve intimacy with the computer,” she said. “To follow the twists of its thought, to help it become all it can.” When leaving, she turned at the doorway and gave us the hint of a bow.

  Many townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs—shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware. The kids bought magazines and notebooks at Dunton’s Tobacco. Every November Keith and his sons walked smiling into Roberta’s Linens and bought a new Belgian handkerchief for Mitsuko’s birthday. During the following year’s special occasions, its lace would foam from the pocket of the white silk blouse.

  But none of us knew them well. They didn’t become intimates of anyone. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink. One day we heard that the youngest was leaving to become a doctor; the next day, or so it seemed, the parents had decamped.

  I had seen Mitsuko the previous week. She was buying avocados at the greengrocer. She told me that she mixed them with cold milk and chocolate in the blender. “The drink is pale green, like a dragonfly,” she said. “Very refreshing.”

  Yes, the youngest was off to medical school. The middle son was teaching carpentry in Oregon. The oldest, a journalist in Minnesota, was married and the father of twin girls.

  So she had granddaughters. She was close to fifty, but she still could have passed for a teenager. You had to peer closely, under the pretext of examining pineapples together, to see a faint cross-hatching under the eyes. But there was no gray in the cropped hair, and the body in jeans and T-shirt was that of a stripling.

  She chose a final avocado. “I am glad to have run into you,” she said with her usual courtesy. Even later I could not call this remark valedictory. The Maguires were always glad to run into any of us. They were probably glad to see our backs, too.

  “You are a maiden lady,” the school doctor reminded me some months later. We have grown old together; he says what he pleases. “Marriage is a private mystery. I’m told that parents feel vacant when their children have flown.”

  “Most couples just stay here and crumble together.”

  “Who knows?” he said, and shrugged. “I’m a maiden lady myself.”

  The few people who saw Keith and Mitsuko waiting for the trolley that September morning assumed they were going off on a camping trip. Certainly they were properly outfitted, each wearing a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack.

  The most popular theory is that they have settled in some other part of the country. There they work—Keith with steel and flame, Mitsuko with the electronic will-o’-the-wisp; there they drink avocado shakes and read pap
erbacks.

  Some fanciful townspeople whisper a different opinion: that when the Maguires shook our dust from their hiking boots they shed their years, too. They have indeed started again elsewhere, but rejuvenated, restored. Mitsuko’s little breasts are already swelling in preparation for the expected baby.

  I reject both theories. Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference. Keith and Mitsuko took the trolley together, yes. But I think that downtown they enacted an affectionate though rather formal parting in some public place—the bus depot, probably. Keith then strode off.

  Mitsuko waited for her bus. When it came she boarded it deftly despite the aluminum and canvas equipment on her back. The sneakers—bright red, this time, as if they had ripened—swung like cherries from the frame.

  HOW TO FALL

  “FAN MAIL!” brayed Paolo. “Come and get it.”

  Every Monday and Tuesday Paolo lugged a canvas sack from the studio to the rehearsal room at the Hotel Pamona. Until recently Paolo had been Paul. The change in name was going to get Paul/Paolo strictly nowhere, in Joss’s opinion; but teenagers had to transform themselves every month or so—he had read that somewhere. Before dropping off the mail, Paolo picked up lunch for the television brass and brought it back to the studio. He told Joss that he hoped to become a comedian. The letters that came out of the sack smelled of deli. Some envelopes had greasy stains.

  “Missives!” He swung the sack onto the round table in the corner, loosened its neck, and allowed some of the letters to spill out—fussy business, too many little motions; but Joss kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t in the coaching game. Besides, silence was what he got paid for.

  Happy Bloom had been rehearsing his opening monologue—the one he delivered in a tuxedo, the one with the snappiest jokes—in front of the wide mirror between the windows. But when he saw Paolo he whirled, stamped, and called a recess. He loved his fans. He got quantities of letters, all favorable. He was “the New Medium’s New Luminary”—Time magazine itself had said so when it ran his picture on the cover the previous December. Churchill had been on the cover the week before, Stalin the week afterward, you’d think Happy had conferred with those guys at Yalta. But Happy was bigger than a statesman; he was an honorary member of every American family. On Thursday nights at five minutes to eight the entire nation sat down to watch The Happy Bloom Hour … And on Friday nights, as maybe only Joss knew, Heschel Bloomberg, wearing a gray suit and horn-rims—without greasepaint, without toupee, unrecognized—welcomed the Sabbath with the other congregants in a Brooklyn synagogue.

  Joss admired the funnyman’s faith. Himself, he hadn’t been inside a church in eighteen years, not since the morning his daughter was baptized. But he had graduated from a Jesuit high school; he had believed in things then … “I like the routine in the shul, no improvising,” Happy told him. “The cantor’s a baritone, not bad if you like phlegm.”

  The Heschel Bloomberg placidly worshipping on Friday night reverted to Happy Bloom on Saturday morning. Writing and rehearsals started at nine; he usually threw his first tantrum by ten. But today was Tuesday—the show already shapely, the skits established. There’d be only a couple of outbursts.

  Now Happy settled himself at the table to devour his mail. Joss strolled over to one of the windows and breathed New York’s October air. Happy might snuggle with the country; he, Joss, belonged to this stony metropolis which kept forgetting his name—oh well.

  “There’s a fan letter for you, Mr. Hoyle,” Paolo said, and did a Groucho with his eyebrows. He extracted a pale green square from the heap and walked it over to Joss, heel-toe, heel-toe, poor sap.

  No return address on the envelope. Joss opened it. Slanted words lay on a page the color of mist. He brought the letter up to his nose. No scent.

  Dear Mr. Jocelyn Hoyle,

  I’m a big reader (though small in physique). Television leaves me absolutely frigid. I don’t ever watch hardly. Those wrestlers—shouldn’t they sign up at a fat farm? Happy Bloom smiles too much. Much too much too much.

  But I admire your face. Your long mouth makes thrilling twitches. Your dark eyes shift, millimeterarily. Those eyes know hope. Those eyes know hope deferred. Those eyes know hope denied. Oh!

  The Lady in Green

  Joss looked up. “This is a fan?” he inquired of the city. He sniffed the paper again.

  THE SECOND LETTER ARRIVED the next week, on show day, at the studio—they rehearsed there Wednesdays and Thursdays. Happy was screaming at the orchestra; at the properties-and-scripts woman, who held the whole enterprise together (she had a name but he called her “the Brigadier”); at the writers; at the cameramen; at Joss. Paolo came around, the sack of mail on his shoulder. Joss took the letter from Paolo and put it into his pocket, unopened.

  The show went all right. They had a fading tenor for the next-to-last number leading into Happy’s windup monologue, the sentimental one. Joss stood listening to the tenor in what passed for the wings. The studio had some nerve calling this a stage, wires and cables all over the joint. He’d worked Broadway, rep, vaudeville; the worst house he’d ever played in had kept itself in better shape than the New Medium. The two circuses he’d traveled with were tight as battleships; well, circuses couldn’t afford bad habits … Nessun dorma, sang the has-been. He was at the point in his decline that Joss liked best: ambition flown; to hell with the high notes; emotion at last replacing resonance. He wore a tux and makeup but he might as well have been naked. Joss could sense the paunch under the corset, could imagine the truss, too—oh, the eternal sadness of fat men.

  They all had a quick one afterward—Joss and the producer and the Brigadier drinking whisky, the tenor brandy, Happy his usual ginger ale. Then Joss ran down into the subway. Searching his pocket for a token, he found the letter.

  Dear Mr. Hoyle,

  Ho! I’ve found you! Id est, I looked you up in Who’s Who in American Entertainment. Also in newspapers in the New York Public Library.

  You were born in 1903, in Buffalo. You’ve been an acrobat. So have I—in my dreams. You served in the armed forces during the War. You have a wife and a daughter.

  Such calm lids, such haunted eyes. Your expression is holy.

  I wonder where you went to college after that Jesuit high school. Who’s Who doesn’t say.

  The Lady in Green

  He’d been a poor boy, but they were all poor boys at the school. He liked every subject, history best. Father Tom’s breathless oratory made history alive. Father Tom’s eyes were green and moist, like blotting paper. The way the fathers lived, there behind the school … a quiet, chuckling sort of house, with Brother Jim their beloved fool. Joss, too, would teach someday, he thought then—history maybe. The fathers mentioned a scholarship to the state university. But he came to see that it was not Father Tom’s subject he loved, not even the teaching of it—it was the delivery. He loved jesting, too: not jokes like Brother Jim’s, not words at all, but glancing and byplay and pratfalls. He had joined a troupe right after graduation, disappointing his mentors and breaking his mother’s heart. Now this letter-writing individual wanted him to relive those times … In the late-night uncrowded subway car he stood up, briefly enraged, and shook himself, twitching in the black glass of the window like a marionette. The window threw back his face: the same face the lady had called holy. A man slid uneasily along the bench away from him.

  When Joss got home he put the second letter on top of the first, in the bottom drawer of the dresser, underneath his sweaters. He could have stuck it between the salt and pepper cellars on the kitchen table for all his wife cared.

  Mary was asleep, lying on her back, her thin hands side by side on the coverlet. She would have watched the program in the darkened living room, bourbon at her elbow, already wearing nightgown and wrapper. Already? There were days she never got dressed at all. Tomorrow, on their walk to the train, she would tell him about his performance in a flat voi
ce. How the camera had cut him in half not once but several times. How it had dropped him entirely during the production number. How Happy held the audience in the palm of his hand. How Joss had outlived his usefulness … but she wouldn’t say that.

  The specialists he’d brought Mary to always first acknowledged the tragedy of their daughter’s condition, then suggested that Mary’s attachment and grief were excessive. You could have a second child, these specialists said … You should have a second child. You are only in your twenties, Mrs. Hoyle … Later: You are in your thirties… You are not yet forty.

  Hospitals had been tried; baths; insulin. Nothing made a difference. She had been a darling little thing with soft lashes when they met, but the small down-turned smile on her pointed face might have warned him of her fragility … A second child? He had too many children as it was. He had his sad-sack kid brothers, he had his damaged wife, he had Happy. And he had Theodora, Teddie, his one issue. Every Friday they went to visit her. It was Friday now, wasn’t it—he glanced at the clock as he wearily undressed: 1:00 a.m. In a few hours he and Mary would walk to Grand Central and take the train and get off the train and take a bus and get off the bus and walk two blocks. They’d come to the iron gate. The guard would nod: he knew them.

  Teddie knew them. She made that hideous moan, or she covered her eyes with huge hands. Sometimes obesity seemed the worst thing about her. She wore cotton dresses made by Mary, all from the same childish pattern—short-sleeved, smocked, white collared. The fabrics were printed with chickens or flowers or Bambis. Sometimes Joss felt shamed by Happy Bloom’s drag—lipsticked face and fright wigs and bare masculine shoulders emerging from an oversize tutu, or yellow braids flopping onto a pinafore—but why should Joss feel shamed? Happy was the one who should feel shamed, big famous comedian aping big retarded girl. Aping? Happy had never seen Teddie. “How’s your daughter?” Happy would ask maybe once a year, his gaze elsewhere. “The same,” Joss always said.