by Rick Gekoski
‘Where was the father?’
‘Shhh. He was away at work, so they had to look after themselves. And one day they heard footsteps – CLUMP! CLUMP! – heading their way, and a ferocious loud voice saying, I AM COMING TO GET YOU! And they knew that if they didn’t find someplace to hide, his hands with terrible claws would grab them by the ankles and capture them . . .’
Addie paused, slowly reached across the grass and grabbed Becca’s ankle.
‘Addie! I knew you were going to do that! I heard you! Anyway, I’m not scared of stupid ogres!’
‘You should be. And the reason you’re not is because you know how to escape from one.’
‘I do?’
‘Course you do,’ said Jake.
‘So just as the ogre was coming into view, the family ran into the woods and built a fort! It was the best fort ever because it was camouflaged, covered with brown blankets, with leaves and sticks on top. And they remembered to bring their box of provisions, so they had enough to stay in there for days, till the ogre was gone. They had Cokes, and candy, and cupcakes and a whole salami and bread. And as long as they were totally quiet, that ogre could never find them. And sure enough, in a few days he went away, cursing, and yelled into the air, I WILL GET YOU NEXT TIME!’
‘Did he?’
‘Never! They outsmarted him, didn’t they?’
There was a pause. It was a pretty good story, just scary enough. The children settled down and Addie had a fleeting yearning to tuck them in, kiss them goodnight.
‘Addie,’ said Jake. ‘Are we moving?’
‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘I guess we are.’
‘Do we have to?’
‘We do. I don’t want to either. But we’ll build a bigger and better sort of fort, and you’ll see, it’ll be fine.’
There was a long silence.
‘When?’ Becca said.
‘I don’t know. Maybe later in the summer, maybe not. It’s a bit complicated. But whenever we move I promise it’ll be fine. Maybe we could live near Frankie and the girls, wouldn’t that be neat?’
‘Yeah!’ said Becca.
‘No!’ said the boy.
It must have been – what? Fifteen minutes? A surprisingly long time, suspended in quiet contemplation, hardly aware of where they were, breathing together, Addie thought to herself whimsically, as if they were one organism. She hadn’t felt so close to the children since they were babies, still part of her. Closer, really. They weren’t so needy just this moment with her, not sucking at her. She grimaced.
Poppa’s voice from the porch surprised her.
‘Addie! Jake! Becca! Lunch is ready! Come and get it!’
Lunch would be welcome, they’d had a rest and a respite, were obscurely aware that something unusual had happened between them, welcome, hard to describe, comforting. None of them wanted to get up, they felt safe in their overheated hideaway.
‘Do we have to?’
‘I guess so,’ said Addie. ‘Time to get back to the real world. It’s too bad, we liked it here. Let’s do it again!’
She raised herself up and pulled the blanket open.
‘Hold your horses!’ she shouted. ‘We’ll be right there!’
‘Can we have our dollars now?’ asked Becca.
They crawled out of the fort, brushed themselves down as best they could, picked the grass out of their hair, disassembled their little retreat, folded the blankets, gathered up the provisions, took one of the chairs up to the house, promising to come back for the other one.
When they came into the dining room, no one asked where they’d been, sensing some quiet self-sufficiency that they respected, without knowing, quite, what it was that was being protected. In any case, Ben was already in the driveway, putting his overnight bag and briefcase in the car, getting ready to leave as soon as lunch was finished. If he made good time – and the roads were usually clear on Sunday afternoon, didn’t jam up until later – he’d be home at suppertime.
Not that there would be any dinner, though there was food in the fridge. He was in no mood to cook. He had his specialties – spaghetti and meatballs, coq au vin, goulash – but they were all for the family, not just for himself. He liked cooking with the kids, who joined in with an unexpected enthusiasm, perhaps because their mother would have been uninterested in their abilities as sous chefs. No, he’d stop on the way, get some fuel for self and vehicle, arrive home, maybe put an opera on and go back to his book. He was reading a life of Dickens and deciding that he didn’t like him very much. Not because he was a womaniser, but because he was a hypocrite.
‘You ready to go, Bubby?’ asked Addie, taking his arm. She only called him this fondly, and he was startled by how relieved he felt, had feared a confrontation before leaving, something strident and ugly. But she was curiously, mysteriously, pacified.
He gave her a hug.
‘I’ll miss you, you know!’
‘You won’t,’ she said.
They walked to the car, soup finished, matzo balls dispatched – Perle made them large and heavy, the way her daughter liked them, you could cut them into pieces with your spoon, slurp them down with some rice. Perle insisted on making a couple of sandwiches for Ben’s trip home and put them into wax paper, added a couple of the rediscovered warm pickles, wrapped them in a paper bag.
‘Take these,’ she said. ‘You’ll want a little nosh.’
Ben reached for the kids, who were standing by their mother. He pushed his arms out for an enveloping hug, which they entered with an unexpected reluctance. Not hostile, exactly, but not connected in the usual way. Usually they loved sentimental goodbyes, would shed a tear, make a bit of a fuss. He loved that. And all of a sudden they weren’t, quite, there. Not there. It wasn’t at all clear to him where they’d gone.
‘I’ll miss you, my darlings,’ he said, surprised by the emotion in his voice. ‘I’ll write you some lovely letters, and then I’ll come back in a few weeks. I can’t wait for that!’
They joined him in his hug, one under each arm, aware they’d let him down, though unsure how, or why.
They waved as he backed down the driveway, and his arm resting on the door flapped in response. At the bottom the car turned and he was gone.
They stood there for a moment, as fixed as a family photograph, Perle and Maurice like statues at the rear, formal and unsmiling, Addie with the children, arms round their shoulders. They all looked as if something was momentously finished, as people do after a funeral or a bris. Satisfied rather than happy: That’s done now, thank God for that. It went all right, didn’t it?
Addie leant over and whispered to the children.
‘You two go and play for a while, I’m going to have a nap.’
They understood the code: go outdoors, make no noise! Addie often slept in the afternoon, fitfully, anxious for the enveloping unconsciousness, but rarely finding it. Always sensitive to noise, any sound might wake her, and she would rise furiously to shout, ‘Will you be quiet! Don’t you know I’m sleeping? Can’t you have a little consideration!’
The children were scalded by the venom in her tone, simultaneously guilty that they had caused such offence, but also aware that the reaction hardly fitted the crime.
‘See you later,’ she said, giving both a hug, before re- entering the bungalow and heading for the medicine chest to pop a Miltown. Dr Greaves had warned her against occasional use, wanted her to take two a day regularly, but she found them more helpful in ones. Perhaps her underlying depression didn’t ease as she (and the doctor) had wished, but she was used to it. But when she was as anxious as she was now, this afternoon, this hour, it gave some relief. She washed the pill down with a full glass of water and lay on the children’s bed, and though her mind kept turning over drowsily, she was asleep within a few minutes.
The children had already split up, in tacit recognition of the fact that they were less likely to make noise if they were on their own. Poppa had gone back to the garage, Granny to read on the porch, un
der the shade of the umbrella. The bungalow baked in the blue shimmering July heat, still and timeless, as if at peace.
Jake tiptoed into the living room to pick up his book, tiptoed out again, and headed for the fence at the rear of the house, which had one slat missing (fancy that!), providing a space on which he could put his foot and lever himself up onto the roof. Avoiding the right-hand side of the house, which went over the kids’ bedroom, he made his way to the pitched roof, lay down, took off his T-shirt and rolled it up, put his head on it. But it was too hot, the tar shingles almost melting in the heat – they felt sticky – and though he liked to lie in the afternoon sun, this was intolerable. He made his way back, considered and rejected a visit to Poppa, who was sawing away in the garage, put his book in the front porch, decided to go for a walk down the lane to see if David was in. Usually he’d be at the beach in the afternoons, maybe Jake might walk there by himself? He’d never done so, but neither could he recall that it was forbidden. He set off, feeling decidedly more cheerful.
Becca had already ensconced herself in the sub-cellar, which was cooler than anywhere else in or about the house, though smelly and damp. She’d been frightened the first time she went down there with Jake, but his efforts to make it seem scary and haunted had the opposite effect. She rather liked being brave, it was a new sensation. She had left a blanket and cushion down there, and occasionally popped in for a little, not nap exactly, she was way too old for naps, just for a little rest, to close her eyes, like she did at the fort. Maybe think some more about spending her newly earned riches?
It was great having a fort, safe from the monster, safe with Addie. She snuggled down. All of a sudden she felt small, not small like a baby, more like she wasn’t there at all, small like nothing, something like that. It was pleasant, a safe sort of feeling. If anyone looked into the cellar they wouldn’t spot her, she wouldn’t be there at all.
The afternoon drifted by. Jake wished he’d remembered to put on his swimsuit before leaving, but David’s mom had an extra one in the car that he could use.
‘Does your mom know you’re here on your own?’ she asked, as he changed clumsily behind a towel, the way he’d seen girls do sometimes.
‘Sure. My dad just left in the car. He’s going home, so I walked here.’
‘Well, that’s just peachy. We’re going to have another swim, we already had lunch.’
He dropped the towel and emerged in the slightly damp swimsuit. It was an ugly rusty colour, like the edge of Poppa’s saw. He’d never seen David in it. It didn’t matter.
‘Thanks, Mrs D,’ he said, as he got into the back seat next to his friend.
It was Perle, as ever, who first felt the emptiness, the absences. Addie was still sleeping, you could hear her characteristic noise, somewhere between a snore and a bit of heavy breathing with a whistle attached. Morrie was in the garage. Ben had left hours ago. She walked round the side of the house to avoid making noise, scanning the yard in all directions. No sign of the kids on the swing, or in the hammock. Jake wasn’t on the roof: he thought he was hiding up there, but you could spot his feet if you stood in the right spot below him.
She was fond of a cup of tea in the afternoon, perhaps with a cookie, or two, if no one was looking. Who cared, really? She claimed that she was watching her weight, but what she mostly watched was her stomach filling up and out. She did the requisite alterations, if necessary made new clothes, occasionally bought something pretty in the city, but at her age no one looked at her that way any more, or any way really. Might as well be invisible, and fat. Stout. Full-figured. Last year she’d taken down the full-length mirror from the wall beside her dressing table and put it on the side wall of the bathroom, saw herself less that way, and in the antiseptic fluorescent light, hardly her at all. Maurice never noticed the change, or perhaps, divining its cause, had been tactfully silent about it, though that didn’t sound much like him. She’d damn near twisted her shoulder moving the mirror. It was surprising how heavy it was and how hard to lift onto the new hooks.
She went quietly into the kitchen and put the kettle on the gas hob. It would make a noise that Addie could hear in the bedroom – the wall between kitchen and bedroom ended two feet from the ceiling, for some reason no one could fathom. Maurice kept promising to fix it, to add the missing section, but never got round to it. Anyway, it was a way of checking on the children when they went to bed, to make sure they weren’t fighting or just talking too much instead of sleeping.
Anyway, if Addie was woken by the steaming kettle, too bad. The kids might have been scared of her, Ben too was intimidated, but her mother certainly was not! Addie had kvetched her life away, from child to grown woman, demanding, self-referring, petulant. So she’d wake up? Too bad. The house doesn’t have to stop because you want a nap, does it?
She was thinking these ungenerous thoughts – May God forgive me, she whispered, my very own daughter – because she was worried. It was too quiet, there was an emptiness in the air, not the sort that Ben left, he never filled it in the first place. No, something was wrong.
Very wrong. She knew it. It was the same emptiness they’d all felt when she was a child, living in the city, when cousin Moshe disappeared. The boy had a habit – he must have been about ten at the time, Jake’s age, they even looked alike – of going for walks round the neighbourhood; kids did that in the city all the time. He would come to the apartment with the Brody girls after school, and be looked after until Simon and Molly came to pick him up at six-fifteen. They had a small accountancy business in an equally small office on the Lower East Side. Simon and Molly Cohen, the gilt letters on the office door proclaimed, though she modestly insisted that it was he who was the accountant and asked for her name to be removed. He wouldn’t hear of it. They were a team!
He had qualified as an accountant at night school, and Molly already had basic secretarial skills; they’d met at the Adult Education Institute, started seeing each other. ‘And here we are,’ Simon would say with pleasure. ‘I take care of the numbers and she takes care of the letters!’ They weren’t going to get rich, but were honest, reliable, and above all inexpensive; they did the tax returns for a host of immigrant families. ‘Ve make a living,’ Simon would say, shrugging his shoulders, mocking a Yiddish accent.
And they had their boy, their only child, their pride and joy. Molly had been thirty-eight when he was born, a difficult if exalted entry into the world, and the process left her unable to have another. It didn’t matter, they exclaimed, Moshe was enough to fill an entire family. He wasn’t the apple of their eyes, he was their eyes themselves, through him they looked at the world and rejoiced that it was good.
One afternoon, having his glass of milk and three cookies, Moshe announced he was going to go out, perhaps to the park to play on the swings. Did anyone want to come? But the girls were already busying themselves, preparing dinner, and so the boy put on his jacket, it was getting cool in the early autumn evenings, and stepped out the door. He knew to be back by six, at the latest. Better, by five-thirty. But he frequently went out, the apartment was too small and noisy with the sounds of too many women. Shrieking and giggling, arguing and declaiming, the air full of laughter and discord.
The locals all knew Moshe. Nice kid, real friendly, beaming, kind of hopped when he walked, always in a hurry. None of them had seen him. They asked, then they asked again, then the police asked and asked again.
Perle was only six at the time. She adored Moshe, who was uncommonly kind to her, would even play with dolls, sometimes take her hand and go out for an ice cream. Though Perle was not allowed to go out on her own – God forbid! – he was encouraged to take her, he was an entirely trustworthy boy: kept her hand in his, looked both ways, and then again as they crossed the street, made sure that she was warmly dressed and that her hat was pulled tight and her mittens didn’t fall off. But on this day – on that day – she didn’t feel like going out, didn’t even answer when he invited her. Didn’t even answer.
> Perle spent the rest of her life, or so it seemed to her, trying to forget what happened in the next days, the panicky anxiety that escalated to terror by the moment, the comings and goings of police, volunteers, the rabbi and members of the shul, teachers from the school. The doorbell rang and rang, and eventually they stopped answering, the police in the apartment could do that, send the well-wishers away, accept the cakes and proffered casseroles, as the family huddled in the bedrooms, paralysed with fear.
On the third morning he still hadn’t come home.
On the third evening they found his body in the river.
What came next even she couldn’t forget. Though the details faded, the sight of Moshe’s poor body in the open coffin, his parents – her parents, everyone – crushed by grief, diminished to the point of non-being, unable to do anything except wail – became ineradicably part of her internal world. Moshe’s dead white face, his body dressed in a blue suit purchased for his last occasion: it was more a part of her inner world than the beaming baby Frankie, or the beautiful needy face of toddler Addie. Gorgeous children, so alive and so fragile.
She’d buried it, really she had. Did not dwell on it, did not think of it. Really, she didn’t. Had never even spoken of it to Maurice, though she was certain he knew. He was kind enough never to broach the subject. Moshe Cohen. Everyone knew, it was such a small and inward-looking community, and in some dread way it thrived on tragedy, had endured so much that loss was its lifeblood, its animating principle, something to share and to suffer together.
You could say many things about the world, good things that warmed the heart, remember the births, the Seders, the family growing up, going on holidays, these times at the bungalow, remember them all and kvell. You could thank God and immerse yourself in his world, but you could never trust it. Or him.
