We Are Not Ourselves
Page 19
The boys took their seats with palpable pride at being envied from above. Batting practice was still going on, and they got their gloves out. Connell never failed to bring his glove to games and wear it for hours in an uncomfortable vigil, despite having never come close to snagging a ball; they were always in the wrong seats. On the lower level, though, having a glove was good planning.
Ed took their orders and went for refreshments. In the absence of his moderating influence, the boys fired fusillades of obscure terms at each other: hot smash, can of corn, high and tight, round the horn, hot corner, filthy stuff, the hook. As she listened to them speak, a meditative calm came over her. She did some of her best thinking at ball games, or while Ed was listening to them on the radio. She’d always understood the basic mechanics of baseball, and Ed had successfully explained a good deal of the more complex aspects to her, but she’d never cracked the code of the priestly solemnity her husband and son greeted the game with, in which old bats and split-leather gloves were revered like relics, as saints’ fingers and spleens had been in earlier centuries. In truth, she was impressed by the range of her son’s knowledge. It was an arrested form of scholarship he was practicing when he allowed his brain to soak up these facts. It was really history men craved when they fixated on the statistics of retired athletes—men who hadn’t been to war, in a nation still young enough to feel dwarfed by the epochal moments of its onetime rivals. The rhetoric of baseball was redolent of antiquity, the hushed tones, the gravitas, the elevation of the pedestrian into the sublime. Connell and Ed would read write-ups of games they’d watched or listened to on the radio, even ones they’d attended. The narrative that surrounded the game seemed as important as the game itself. Ed raved about the descriptive power of some sportswriters, but she never saw what he was talking about; it seemed like boilerplate stuff, dressed up as the chronicle of an epic clash. She focused on the visceral particulars of the stadium experience instead: the smell of boiled meat, nestled under sauerkraut; the thunder of the scoreboard exhorting them to clap; the feel of her son’s hand as he slapped her five.
Ed had been gone a long time. She panned around for his Members Only jacket. After some restless searching she spotted him a section over, leaning into the railing, staring around with his hand over his eyes like a lookout in a crow’s nest. She had his ticket stub in her pocket, so he couldn’t show it to the ushers, one of whom was trying to move him along. She could see Ed growing agitated as he swatted a second usher’s hand from his shoulder. She hated making a spectacle of herself, but any second now the guards would be called, and that would create an even bigger scene. She stood and shouted his name, waving her arms. He finally saw her and broke free of the ushers, who gave no chase, seeing order restored. He made his way down the aisle encumbered by trays; she distributed the quarry to the boys.
He stood in front of his seat. “Where the hell were you?”
She stole a glance around to see who was listening. “I was right here,” she said, trying to urge him toward calm. No one had cocked an ear yet, but she and Ed were on the border of a full-on commotion.
“I couldn’t find you,” he said sharply.
“I realize that, honey. But you’re here now.”
“I was looking all over for you.”
“Ed,” she said. “I’m here. You’re here. Enjoy the game.”
The boys were too caught up in the food to notice Ed. He still hadn’t taken his seat but was standing looking into the crowd as if the answer to what confounded him were projected on the backs of their heads. Farshid listlessly fingered a waxy-looking pretzel. Connell wolfed down a hot dog in two bites and started in on his own pretzel. When she picked up on annoyance behind her, she tugged on Ed’s sleeve and he fell into the seat and began to smooth out his pants with an insistent repetitiveness, as though trying to warm himself or clear crumbs from his lap. He had bought nothing for the two of them to eat.
“Where’s the food for us?”
“I didn’t get us anything.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “What are we going to eat?”
“You didn’t ask for anything.”
“I have to ask to eat now?” She took a piece of Connell’s pretzel.
“Hang on,” he said. A hot dog salesman had entered their section, and Ed flagged him down.
“I feel like you don’t think anymore,” she said when they were settled in with their dogs. “I need you to get with it, Ed.”
“Let’s just enjoy the game,” he said.
A couple of innings later, a Met lifted a high foul ball toward their section. She could feel it gaining on them. As it approached, time seemed to slow; an awful expectancy built. It shifted in the wind, so that it appeared to be headed elsewhere; then it was upon them. People all around reached for it, but it was headed right for Ed. He stabbed at it clumsily and it bounded out of his hand, snagged by a man behind them in the ensuing scrum.
For a moment, Connell appeared stunned. He had been brushed on the neck by the hand of destiny. His body seemed to shiver with contained nervous energy, and he hopped like a bead of oil in a saucepan.
“Wow!” he said, to her, to his father, to Farshid, to anyone who would listen. “Can you believe it?”
The victorious fan stared into empty space with a determined expression as he received the forceful backslaps of his friends. His studied lack of fanfare had the effect of holding the note of his triumph longer.
Ed was miserable. “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “I tried to get it for you.”
“No problem, Dad.”
“I’m really sorry.” He looked bereft. “I feel terrible.”
“Maybe if you’d had a glove,” Connell said sweetly, extending his own. Ed turned and asked if the boy could see the ball, which the man handed over more warily than Eileen thought appropriate. Connell held it covetously. She worried that he might ask to keep it, but after a few moments in which he seemed to communicate wordlessly with it, he gave it back, and the man secreted it into his jacket pocket. Something about these talismanic objects, spoils of an ersatz war, reduced men to primal feelings. Connell pounded his glove every time a foul ball was hit in their general direction, no matter how far away it was, and she could think of nothing to say to stop him.
20
She sat beside Connell on the top step, wondering about all the fuss people made over the constellations. The webs of light poorly described the forms they were meant to evoke, and even if she’d known what those forms were, she doubted she could have suspended her disbelief enough to see them characterized there.
On an average night the stars glimmered weakly, if they were visible at all, but that night they were unusually prominent. This was another reason to move—maybe in the suburbs he could see the stars well all the time.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“A lot of stars,” he said. “What about you?”
“There’s the Big Dipper,” she said.
“And the Little Dipper.”
“Yes.”
“And the North Star.”
“Yup.”
They had come to the limit of their knowledge. She was relieved to have a son who didn’t spew forth a stream of facts about the sky when he looked up at it. One fear in marrying a scientist had been that her children would be ill-equipped to live in the world of ordinary men.
“I like to imagine people thousands of years ago looking at the same stars,” he said.
She smiled at his philosophical tone.
“And people in the future long after we’re dead,” he said.
A shudder came over her. She was the one who was supposed to put it into perspective for him, not the other way around. She had lived through the loss of two parents and witnessed death nearly every day at work, and yet she was spooked to hear him invoke their inevitable finality.
“Come inside,” she said. “It’s late.”
“I want to see if the stars get brighter the later it gets.”
She stood in the hallway watching him trudge to his room. Then she found herself stepping back onto the stoop and looking again to the night sky, trying to divine what ancient people might have seen in it—animals, hunters, maybe kings. Nothing came into focus, except when she thought she saw a dog with a long leash around its neck. When she looked up again it was gone.
That night, when she couldn’t sleep, she concentrated on the steadiness of the stars, their transcendence of human sorrow and confusion, the reassurance offered by the unfathomable scale of geologic time.
21
On Sundays, they went to one o’clock Mass. Ed was never the driving force in their church attendance. When Connell was a baby, Ed had loved to usher him out the back of the church at the first hint of a meltdown.
For someone whose responsibility it was to get everyone to Mass, she didn’t feel confident of her own belief in God anymore. It had been years since she’d thought of the world as the product of a divine plan. Maybe working as a nurse was too much for belief to fight against. She’d seen people expire on the table in every way—noisily, quietly, thrashingly, completely still. Death had come to seem no more than the breaking down of an organism: the last exhalations of the lungs, the final pumpings of the heart, the brain deprived of blood.
That didn’t mean she was going to stop going to Mass. She liked the moral lessons for the boy, and the good works the Church did were the most important reason to attend—God or no God. When alone with her thoughts she couldn’t help detecting some frequency she was tuning into, and she prayed to that frequency after communion when she knelt alongside her pew mates, though most of the time she felt like she was talking to herself.
The previous Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, at the end of the last Mass he would celebrate at the parish, Father Finnegan, who had been there thirty years, had introduced his replacement, Father Choudhary. Everyone registered the new, dark figure up there preparing the gifts as a harbinger of the future. Over the last decade, the priests had gone from being mostly Irish to mostly Hispanic; now, apparently, they were coming from India too.
Every year, there were more Indians around her at church. A few months ago, an Indian family had bought the Wohls’ house up the block, and because she’d assumed they were Hindu, she’d been surprised to see them at Mass the following week. She’d lingered a bit so she wouldn’t have to walk down the block with them, something she hadn’t been proud of when she lay in bed thinking of it that night. The next Sunday, she made sure to catch them on the way out and walk with them. It had felt good to make amends for a slight no one knew she’d committed, and thereafter she felt comfortable letting them walk home alone.
Ed was more open-minded about other cultures. When they walked through Greenwich Village, he marveled appreciatively at the stratospheric Mohawk haircuts of the punk rockers, while she felt only disgust. So when they found themselves at Father Choudhary’s first Mass, she wasn’t surprised that Ed seemed extra attentive. To her, Father Choudhary looked spooky under his stark-white vestments, with the effigy of Jesus behind him on the altar. He spoke in a trilling accent. Even the Hispanics looked around as if to say, This guy isn’t one of us. Ed just sat with his arms folded in amusement, or tapping the church bulletin against his thigh.
During the reading, Ed was usually good for a flip to another section of the liturgy—he was more into the literature of the Bible than the sacred text aspect—but with Father Choudhary at the pulpit, he held the book open to the reading. At least she could understand Father Choudhary better than Father Ortiz, who she wished would give in and speak Spanish with an interpreter beside him.
It was a reading from the book of Proverbs, on how the wisdom of God was born before the earth was made:
When he established the heavens I was there,
when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep;
When he made firm the skies above,
when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth;
When he set for the sea its limit;
so that the waters should not transgress his command;
Then I was beside him as his craftsman,
and I was his delight day by day,
Playing before him all the while,
playing on the surface of his earth;
and I found delight in the sons of men.
When Father Choudhary closed the book to begin his homily, Ed settled in to listen. Father Choudhary began preaching about matters wholly unrelated to the reading: the idea that if we are all made of dust, then the same dust, cosmic dust, he called it, could be found throughout the universe; that this cosmic dust might have been created by the Big Bang; that somehow our sharing in this dust called us to responsibility to each other. Ed looked positively enthralled. Father Choudhary spoke of the smallness of man in relation to the vastness of the universe, and how that smallness was instructive, how it reminded us that part of our humanity was a sense of humility. He exhorted everyone gathered to allow themselves to feel wonder and awe in the face of all creation, big and small. Then he quoted from a French Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin: “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.” She had never seen Ed more enthused at church. He slapped his hand on the back of the pew in front of him, and for a moment, as she watched him shift in his seat in restless indecision, she thought she would have to reach over and keep him from standing and applauding.
After Mass, a crowd gathered outside the church. Eileen worked her way to the curb, but when she turned, only Connell was behind her. Ed was on the steps, waiting in the receiving line to greet the priest like a well-wisher at a wedding. This was too much.
She reached him just as he was extending his hand for a shake.
“Great speech,” he said absurdly, as though congratulating a politician. “Where are you from?” She was mortified, but Father Choudhary seemed delighted as he pumped Ed’s hand. They talked at length, the receiving line at a standstill.
She waited until they had gotten far enough away.
“What was all that about?”
“All what?”
Connell had produced a tennis ball from his pocket and was bouncing it to himself.
“Since when are you so interested in the lives of priests?”
“He did a good job,” Ed said.
Connell lost the ball and Ed fetched it from the street, flipping it in his hand as he walked, infuriating her. In her anger she twisted the bulletin into a baton that she smacked into her open palm like a nightstick.
“You really needed to ask where he’s from? He’s from India.”
“He’s from Bangladesh.”
“You needed to know that?”
“I like to learn new things. If we don’t learn, we die.” Ed threw the ball to Connell. “Isn’t that right, buddy?”
When they arrived home, Ed stood rooted to a spot on the sidewalk in front of the house. She waved Connell inside, and the boy hesitated, then went in. Ed didn’t budge. She began to climb the stairs, hoping Ed would follow.
Ed bounced Connell’s ball on the ground and caught it. “I saw the paper,” he said. “The houses you circled.”
She tucked up her skirt and sat on the top step. She felt as if she’d been caught canoodling with a boyfriend. The ball went thwunk as it hit the sidewalk; Ed cradled it back into his cupped palm.
“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “We have a perfectly nice house. We know the neighborhood. Doesn’t that count for anything? Plus, we have this new priest.”
“He’s Indian,” she blurted out incredulously before she could catch herself. “Look around you. Look at what’s happening to this neighborhood. What’s already happened.”
; “It’s home,” he said.
“How about that?” she asked, pointing to some graffiti at the base of the big apartment building across the street.
“That too,” he said.
“How about when you walked in covered in eggs on Halloween?”
“Kids horse around everywhere.”
“How about when Lena got mugged?”
“You can’t live in a bubble,” he said.
“How about what happened to Mrs. Cooney? You want that to happen to me?”
“Of course not. But that was an accident.”
“I’d say it was closer to murder.”
She paused, feeling herself shift from anger to resolution. She didn’t need to argue with him. She could do this without him if she had to.
“I want us to look,” she said. “Just to know what’s out there.”
He shook his head. A tiny patch of bald was forming, but she could only see it from this angle. He stopped bouncing the ball and put his hand on her foot and gave it a squeeze. The touch electrified her, as if he had channeled all his energy into his hands.
“I can’t explain why I can’t give you more in this,” he said. “I just really don’t want to go anywhere. Have you ever felt like life was getting away from you, and people were lapping you and you couldn’t catch up? And if you could just stop the world and take it all in, and nobody would go anywhere for a little while, you’d have enough time to understand it? I wish I could do that. I don’t want anybody or anything to move an inch.”
“People move,” she said. “That’s life.”
“I’m lodging my protest,” he said, and he put the ball in his pocket and rose to go inside, leaving her alone on the stoop.
22
The first house she saw cost nine hundred thousand, at least twice what they could afford. She had to see it, though, to have a basis for comparison.
She wore a nice gray suit, a ruffled blouse, and heels. She drove up a long driveway that turned into a circle in front of the house, along whose perimeter a few cars were parked: a BMW, a VW, an Audi. She was embarrassed to be driving a Chevy Corsica. She was glad that Ed’s torpor hadn’t led to an attenuation of his car-washing habit; at least she had neatness on her side.