Stern

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  There was no one to complain to. No one who could help Stern with that kind of problem. His only neighbor at the new house was an ancient man with a thin chest who was always being placed and arranged in different positions. He would be placed in the sun and then shifted to the shade when the heat got too intense for him. Then he would be moved inside and placed before the television set, great care being taken not to jostle him. In the wintertime he would be shifted to a train going to Virginia, where he owned a small farm. Stern later heard that once he touched down in the South, he would leap spryly out of his wheelchair and rarely be seen in daylight without two plump-chested young girls at his side.

  One bright day, the man sat vegetablelike in a folding chair, having recently been placed there by his wife. Stern, in a shining burst of weekend hope, had run out of doors with a two-pronged shovel and was loosening the earth around one of his half shrubs, hoping that the sun's warmth would get through to it and make the cancerous side blossom and start to flourish. Across a low fence, he saw his thin-chested neighbor and told him about the dogs. “They wait for me each night,” he explained. With frail wrists, the man drew from his wallet a commissioner's badge and said, “I was very powerful when I had my health. I was able to get stop signs put up. Forget the dogs. I'll take care of them. Do you want to get me around a little to the east … “Stern shifted his neighbor around, hardly able to suppress his joy; he was thrilled to have commissioner-type power on his side and wanted to hug his neighbor's thin chest with delight. Actually he was a little afraid of him now, convinced that as a onetime commissioner he had weapons nearby and probably knew judo holds, ones you could deliver despite a thinness at the wrists. Stern looked forward to swift action, but the dogs continued to slip through the night to Stern's side until he decided the man had done nothing after all. To get any action out of him, Stern imagined his neighbor would have to be carried to the police station and placed before the chief.

  The man's wife was of little help. A short woman who wore loose-flowing Alpine dirndls, she had a garbage problem and was always carrying a bagful out to a wire basket in front of her house to burn it. “I don't know where it all comes from,” she would say to Stern as she made her endless pilgrimage to the basket. Often, on her way back for another load, she would see Stern across the fence, working silently to bring life back into his halves, and say, “I can remember when your house was really beautiful.” Once she invited Stern and his wife into her own home. She took them into the kitchen and said, with arm extended, “This is my kitchen.” Then she took them into the living room and said, “This is my living room,” and so on through the house. She pointed to her husband, who had been placed in front of a fishbowl, and said, “This is my husband.” Then she bid them goodbye, saying, “There was a time when your house was so lovely.” She never asked them in again.

  Since the summer had been cruel to him, Stern looked forward to cold weather, when he would at least not have to bother with neighbors and to face the half shrubs each day. In the winter your shrubs were not supposed to be beautiful, and Stern watched with delight as the grass faded and the leaves dropped and his half shrubs fell in with the bleakness as though their black cancer shapes were the fault of the cold and not a caterpillar miscalculation. The snow came on fast that first winter. One night it built up to eight-inch drifts and was still dropping heavily when Stern, in low-cut Italian rubbers, left the train. The dogs did not clear the fence, hanging back instead to make cold choking sounds at him in the night—as though aware that the snow would make them clumsy, unable to terrorize Stern. He was halfway across the estate when the snow piled up knee-deep and stung its way into his eyes. He bent his great back, lowered his head, and shuffled into the wind; when he had walked far enough to get to his house and still could see no lights, he knew that he had lost his way. A great pain pounded through his nose, and he could not feel his face or catch his breath. With no knowledge of the stars, he saw himself making an endless circle in the snow and then falling silently asleep in a drift, to die of frostbite yards from his new home. The wind and snow flew at him with bitterness and his face seemed to belong to a stranger. He was unable to go further and stopped, defeated by the wind, not after a forty-day trek from Point Barrow, but twenty minutes from his commuter train. Feeling ridiculous, he sat down in the snow, but then he quickly became frightened and shouted “Get me!” into the night. He napped that way for a moment, and when he awakened things were not too much better. He urinated in the snow, feeling giddy and dangerous in this white place more private than a thousand bathrooms. When the wind hit him in his open fly, he imagined himself freezing up swiftly, breaking off with a quick snap like winter wood, and he withdrew quickly with drops remaining. Then, pulling his collar together and making a serious face, he bent to the snow again, as though, by being very businesslike about it and pretending he knew exactly where he was going, the fates would somehow carry him to his door. Later, he came out of the estate, not opposite his house, but in a new part of town. He had to walk three steep hills to his house, but then, turning a corner, with everything wet upon him, he saw it suddenly, as though through a curtain drawn open quickly. It was bathed in frosty light and all its diseased half trees and shrubs were cloaked with mounds of jeweled snow. It was an enchanted candy house, the loveliest in all the world, and Stern, standing wide-hipped and breathless as though beneath a spell, enjoyed what was to be his finest moment of the winter.

  Stern thought that in the cold weather he would turn his thoughts inside to family and home, creating a handsome interior that would make up for the cancer garden. He would then lead visitors swiftly through the mottled shrubs, entertain them in interior splendor, and rush them out under cover of darkness. The paint-store owner delivered gallons of paint one Saturday morning, and then, when Stern raised his brush to deliver the first dab, the owner hollered, “Don't paint.” Stern lowered the brush and the man continued to shout: “Never paint. Lay your brushes aside and, for Christ's sake, don't paint. You paint and you're a fool. Uh-uh. No painting, don't paint, never paint.” And then he lowered his voice to a whisper and added, “Until you're ready to paint.” He then imposed a long list of conditions which would have to be met before it would be all right for Stern to paint. “Scrape your walls, scrape your floors, paper your halls, drape your dainty pieces, test your tones, check your temp, dress properly. But, for Christ's sake, don't paint. That is, until you're ready to paint.”

  Stern and his wife set all the paint in the corner of the room and waited until the ideal day came along, but it never did, and they gradually lost interest in painting. It was decided they would get rolling by laying tile, and Stern's father sent Crib, an ageless Negro with great strength in his wrists, to help them lay it, his services a moving-in gift. Stern's father, a small, round-shouldered man who always wore slipovers, had worked most of his life in a shoulder pad concern for his brother, Uncle Henny, expecting to be made a partner or to take over when Henny, a coronary patient, passed on. When Henny did expire, however, the business went instead to a distant nephew who had always worked in civil service positions, and Stern's father had to continue in a subordinate position, his life more or less gone up in smoke. Crib, a sweeper and handyman, had supported Stern's father for head of the business, almost as though it had been an election, and now, years later, remained a faithful supporter of his.

  “He a fair man,” Crib once said to Stern. “And nobody cut a pad like him. No waste.” And Stern's dad, in turn, spoke with admiration of Crib's great strength. “He must be about ninety, but he's some strong guy. You ought to see what he can lift.”

  Crib appeared early one morning, wide nose parched with cold, slapping himself as though he had come all forty miles on foot, and Stern, who had a special feeling for all Negroes, hugged him in a show of brotherhood. He raced upstairs to rouse his wife and bring her downstairs, long-nosed and cranky, so she could fix some bacon and eggs for the Negro. To make Crib feel at home, Stern howled with laugh
ter as his father's friend made such remarks as “It too cold for ole Crib out here.”

  When Crib had cleaned his plate of eggs, Stern asked if he wanted some milk to wash them down and Crib, with a wink, said, “That ain't what I want.” Catching on, Stern filled up a tumbler with rye and Crib drained it, smacking his lips. “That what I want,” said Crib slyly, and Stern howled with laughter once again. “Now ole Crib fix you up,” said the Negro, rising and going to the tile. He rolled his sleeves back over his great wrists, and Stern felt that even though tremendous power would not be needed to lay the tiles, it was comforting to have it on tap anyway. Crib spent the morning on his knees, measuring and arranging and muttering, “Ole Crib forgot his tile cutter.” Stern silently placed a variety of sandwiches and another tumblerful of rye on a loose tile near Crib, and in the evening, when the job was finished, Stern's wife had a roast ready. Later, Crib went back to inspect his work, shaking his head and saying, “Crib wish he bring his tile cutter.” Stern gave him twenty-five dollars, hugged him tightly, and saw him off, thinking for a moment how wonderful it would be if he could have Crib out there with him, using his great wrists to fight Stern's enemies, police in rimless glasses and short, powerful-legged firemen. “You made too much of a fuss over him,” said Stern's wife, and Stern replied, “He's a saint. We were lucky to get him.” A day later, the tiles buckled, and Stern had to put books, A Treasury of the World's Great Classics, about the room to hold them down. When the Treasury was removed, great crevasses remained between the tiles and Stern's wife said, “We really needed him.”

  “We got him for nothing,” said Stern. “It's not a bad job. Nobody gets tile exactly right.”

  But the crevasses made them suddenly lose interest in fixing up the house. They left the paint cans in the corner of the living room. The floors remained bare of carpeting, the windows without drapes. They took to ducking down when passing open windows in the nude, to avoid being spotted by cars. Upstairs, in Stern's bedroom, the color scheme remained Mr. Spenser's winter-green selection, and inferior artwork whipped up by the golden Spenser children still hung about the walls.

  At this point, all of the sweetness seemed to drain out of Stern, a man who had once played a thousand inventive games with his son, Donald. There were no young children in the neighborhood for the boy to play with, and often, with the air clear and sun out full, the boy would sit alone on the front stoop, stroking a blanket, shaking quietly and trying to rock himself to sleep at the height of day. “Why do you need a blanket?” Stern would ask, and his son would answer, “I don't know.” And Stern, in early morning, jittery and uncertain, an endless pilgrimage in front of him, would kneel at his wife's bed and say, “For Christ's sake, see that he has activities.”

  “What am I going to do out here?” she would answer, and at night, when Stern had gotten past the dogs, he would find his son standing in the middle of the lawn, holding his blanket as though he had been there all day, waiting for Stern to come back. So Stern, his stomach bursting with guilt, had made up games. A favorite had been “Butterfly Hand,” in which Stern's quiet, fat hand would suddenly begin to flutter and wiggle. “It's turned into a butterfly,” Stern would say to his son as it flew about the room. “There'll be no controlling it now.” The hand would then go still and Stern would lift his son above his head, the boy's arms extended, for a bout of “Airplane,” carrying him with droning sounds about the room and then bringing him in for tabletop landings in “San Diego.” Top game of all was “Billy One-Foot,” in which the boy would fight an all-out battle with Stern's leg, “Billy One-Foot, the toughest of all fighters.”

  They had endless thumb fights, too, but now Stern could no longer muster spirit to play the games. He would sit cold and heavy in an empty room, and when the boy said, “Let's play Billy One-Foot,” Stern would pat him on the head and say, “Billy One-Foot is sick now.” Occasionally, he would swing his boy round the room in a circle, clamping his own eyes shut in an effort to black out a vision of himself heaving the boy headfirst against a stone wall, forever ending thoughts of God and blankets and other children.

  He had always found it amusing that his wife was lax about managing things. “You think you can get away with carelessness because your behind is beautiful,” he would say, and clasp her surging buttocks. But a banister was loose that winter in their bare and windy house. It fell into no special category of repair—neither carpentry nor stairway work—and when his wife was slow to have it attended to, Stern took to shocking her with vivid accounts of what would happen because of her inaction: “Your son will fall, and perhaps when you see him at the bottom of the stairs with his head open, you'll realize the importance of having it fixed” or “A slight push on top and he'll be at the bottom dead.” And Stern imagined such a scene, his son with cleaved skull and Stern unable to cry convincingly. Once, a childhood friend named Ruggie had gone to climb a fire escape and given Stern his dog's leash to hold. Stern purposely let go the leash, and the dachshund ran a mile before it went beneath a speeding car. Ruggie then came back carrying the dog in a dumb march, the dachshund's body staining his sleeves, to put him some place, while Stern watched, frozen to the ground. Now Stern imagined himself with his son's smashed body in his arms, going dumbly outside to put him someplace, too. He imagined a scene in which he was putting all the dead boy's toys in a box but continually finding new ones as years rolled by.

  Stern's wife, too, became sullen, mostly about having no friends. For a while, a distant cousin of Stern's named Barbie visited and served as a companion to her. But she centered everything, the food in the middle of plates, flower vases in the center of tables. She even put Stern's son in the exact center of the couch as he watched television. Stern's wife finally wearied of her because of having to listen to her constant teen-age questions. Though she was far out of her twenties, she would ask Stern's wife, “Do you think it's sinful to allow petting on a first date?” and “Will I lose Phil if I don't let him go as far as he wants?” When she left, Stern's wife had no one, and when he asked her about this, she said, “I don't need anyone,” and this infuriated Stern. “You've got to have friends,” he screamed at her, and then he had a picture of all three of them, his wife, his son, himself, sitting on the lawn, sucking blankets, shaking and trying to rock themselves to sleep.

  He had met his wife at college after being rejected by a young girl with musical voice and tangles of blond hair who acted in Arthur Wing Pinero plays, doing deep, curtsying walk-ons that made Stern weak in his middle. He had scrupulously avoided taking the blond girl to bed, preferring to think of her as “not the kind of girl you do that with” until, disgustedly, she refused to see him, telling him, “Someday you'll understand.” A week later, he met his wife, a girl with great eyes and shining black hair and no music in her voice, and, after an anecdote or two to establish his charm, he went with her to a blackened golf course and, with clenched teeth and sourness, drove his fat hand through her summer-smelling petticoats and, as she moaned “God no,” kissed her and tried not to think of curtsies. Later that first night, he went into her a little, and they both froze and clung to each other. Stern at that time boarded off campus with a trembling old ex-bass fiddle player who sat each night wearing truss-like old-man belts and gadgets and twanged his instrument in the basement. The old man was not particularly nice to Stern. He feigned munificence by asking Stern to have glasses of milk but actually used him as a sourness tester. At night, while the old man sat in his bands and trusses, Stern would spirit the petticoated girl into his room, undressing her swiftly and then tasting and biting her, going at her with anger and closed eyes to drive away all traces of Victorian curtsies. She was the only daughter of a man who had missed great opportunities as a baseball executive and now lived with silver tongue and failing eyesight in an Oregon apartment. Her mother was Hungarian, had lost three children in infancy, and spent her time crocheting bitterly, dreaming of three dead sons. Lean of funds, they had sent the girl, with heavy trunk-loads
of petticoats, for a single year of college and then no more. She dated constantly, afternoons and evenings, an endless succession of boys. Stern asked her what she did on these dates and she said she'd kissed most and allowed some to “kiss her on top.”

  “You're the only one from New York I've known, and you're different,” she said to him. “You care for different things. The others just care about being a good dresser.”

  Psychology interested her, but she mispronounced words, and it bothered Stern, a man who waded without joy through classics, that she had never tried Turgenev. She had total recall of her childhood and, her voice filled with pain, she told Stern tales that failed to move him. “I had twelve birds, and each time I got to love one, my parents would get rid of it. I'd come home and see it not there and look all over and then I'd realize that they'd given it away. They'd just give me enough time to love it, and then it would get out of the cage and make on the floor and my father would say, ‘It's a filthy animal,' and give it to a girl friend.” She was aware of her long-nosed beauty and would say to Stern, “You should have seen me at eight. I tapered off a little up through ten, but at eleven my face would have killed you. I don't even want to talk about my face at thirteen. I was really beautiful then, really something.” She complained much of her childhood ordeals, telling Stern, “My mother never gave me sandwiches, even though she knew I would have loved them. She'd give me what was inside, and even the bread, but not sandwiches.” Most of the time she would listen to Stern, though, sitting with great and shimmering eyes as he told of New York; and when he was finished, she would say, “You really are different. You're not interested in shoes or dancing. You're the most different person I know.” Their talks were only bridges, and when it seemed to Stern they had put in enough time at it so that he could feel they legitimately interested one another, he would begin to kiss her and bite her and stroke her and undress her and examine her while she stood or sat calmly, great eyes shining, and let him explore her body. When he touched her a certain way they would fly at each other and she would do a private, nervous, whimpering thing beneath him. They clung to each other all over the campus, and sometimes she came to his room with nothing beneath her summer dress. She would wheel about him, nude and happy, while Stern feigned calmness and watched her with held breath as though it were a scholarly exercise. Then his loins would go weak and he would sail at her and bite her thighs too hard. He did crazy, tangled things to her, thinking he would break her frail body, but when he had finished she would come to him with great eyes wide, scrape his neck with her nails, and ask him to “be a man again.” One night, after finding the very middle of her in a new way, he called her later, trembling, and said, “I shouldn't have done that to you. Let's not do it again.” But they did it again the next night in his room and the fiddler opened the door, his elasticized old-man gadgets dangling, and caught them at it. Stern, in an action he could not explain, carried her, without a word to the old man, out the window and to the garden below, and they never did that thing again.