Stern

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  They parted for a year. She stayed in Oregon, and Stern, heavy with guilt as he stole a final bite, flew to New York in search of girls who knew Turgenev. A great singing freedom came over him, but the closest he came to a Turgenev lover in the following weeks was a divorcée's daughter who lived in midtown, tossed her hair, ate exquisitely, and said often, with appealing phoniness, “Perhaps I'll sleep with you. Perhaps I shan't.” Mostly for Stern it was a time of long and lonely calls to Oregon while he tried to see how long he could stay away. One night her phone voice said, “The funniest thing. A Venezuelan wants to marry me. He has two children, but he says he'll leave them. I just thought I'd tell you,” Stern flew with nausea to Oregon in bad weather and saw her at the airport, her great eyes lovelier than before, the Venezuelan at her side. They did an intricate Latin dance for Stern, and she said, “Look what we do together. We're always dancing.” Stern excused himself to vomit in the men's room, but when he emerged he pretended to be confident and the Latin took his leave. In a hotel room, she said, “You're losing your hair,” and Stern said, “I don't understand this Venezuela bit.”

  “I enjoy his company very much,” she said, and Stern, a vomit swiftly coming on, feigned coolness one last time and said, “I'm packing.” She let him fold his T-shirts and then put her head deep into his lap and said, “I've been so lousy bad,” and he knew he was bound to her for a hundred years.

  Now, together with her in this house, it was as though a small, cold jail cell of steel had dropped out of the sky, encircling Stern's heavy body, surrounding his movement. He tried to free himself of it; he bought his son a trampoline. The boy saw it and said, “Daddy, put a rope in the sky so when I jump I'll be able to catch it and stay up there. Maybe God will catch me. God has the biggest muscle in the world.” Weekend afternoons, Stern would watch his son jump sturdily on it, feeling this would build his body and protect him from banister falls. One day, the two of them heard a shot and a long crinkling of glass and saw a boy of about eighteen fly by in the street, as though he had been fired from a gun, and land on the concrete street, his arms stiffly at attention, a soldier still marching. Fingers had broken off him, and his face had swiftly turned black. Riding a motorcycle, the boy had jumped a traffic light on the corner next to Stern's house and collided with a speeding car, which had hit him head on. Stern took his son inside, not offering to be a witness, although he had seen the accident and knew the motorcycle boy was in the wrong. He just held his son tightly and kept him inside the rest of the winter, feeling the more the boy's bones grew sturdy on the trampoline, the greater chance he would be shot out of a cannon onto the concrete.

  At the end of March that year, Stern went to cover his son at night and saw that the boy's head had swelled to twice its size. Stern kissed the dead side while his wife called a doctor, who said, “You've never called me before. I don't come in the middle of nights unless you're a regular patient.” Stern said he would call the man and rehearsed the things he would say to him, that he had no right to call himself a doctor, that he was a peasant son of a bitch, that if he wasn't a doctor he would be selling diseased poultry to housewives. What kind of a man was he who could go to sleep while a child's fever rose and his face grew large and moonlike? He got on the phone and said, “I want to tell you that I know what you said to my wife. You wouldn't say it to a man.” The doctor repeated what he had said, and Stern choked, “It's a shame.”

  They called a second man, Dr. Cavalucci, hesitant because of his home remedies. When Stern's chest had been inflamed or his wife's fingers had curled in shock, Cavalucci, the doctor, a soft, youthful man, wary of pills, had chuckled and begun, “Now I know this is going to sound funny, but you know those shopping bags you get at the supermarket? If you take one of them and breathe deeply into it for half an hour, you'll get to feeling better.” His treatments always involved shopping bags or typewriter ribbons or old shoe polish cans, “the kind you open with a penny, brown, preferably.” And he would always begin his instructions by saying, “This is going to make you feel silly, but …” That night he touched the heavy side of the boy's face and said, “I don't have one for his case. I'm taking him in.” In the ambulance, Stern held the child, but now he kissed the good side of the face, afraid of what was inside the bad one, and ashamed of himself for feeling that way, and finally kissing lightly the bad side, too. He said to the doctor, “Anything I've got. Anything I own. Just make him better.” But he felt as though he were giving a performance and wondered how many other men had said the same thing. The hospital had long corridors and Stern had heard it was good but needed grants. Inside, a cluster of young men gathered round the child, and when Cavalucci said they were all fine specialists, Stern wondered if he should be calling in men from Europe. When Stern was a child, a cousin of his had once fallen in love with a dying girl, and Stern remembered hearing that he had done everything for her, even to the point of “bringing in men from Europe.” The phrase “men from Europe” had stuck with Stern, and he wondered how you went about getting them. It seemed so hopeless, standing in the children's ward now, just to go to the phone and get some of them over, and yet he felt that if he were a real father he would stop at nothing and bring several across. The doctors talked near the child, and when Stern asked what they were doing, Cavalucci said that two of them didn't want to go in and disturb the area and one did. Stern asked which one wanted to disturb it, and Cavalucci pointed him out. He was the surgeon. When the conference broke up, Stern glared at him but was afraid that now the man would push home his view and not only disturb the area but also try risky, tradition-breaking techniques. They waited round the clock while the live part of the face took food, and then Stern and his wife went home awhile and ate veal cutlets. They looked at each other after every bite, and when they had finished, Stern said. “He's lying there, his face as big as a house, and I just ate veal cutlets and kept them down.” And then Stern wondered whether to call Winkel and whether Winkel still took cases and could come, because in his heart he still felt that all other doctors would be wrong except Winkel.

  As a child, being sick had not been altogether a bad time for Stern. He would lie in his mother's bed and listen to radio shows all day, and then at night, when his fever rose, he would pull up the covers and wait to hear his father's whistle down the street, meaning he was back from work. A minute or so after the whistle, his small, round-shouldered father would stand at the bedroom door and say, “Jesus Christ … hmmph … oh, Jesus Christ,” and shake his head sympathetically. Then, the first night of the sickness, Winkel would come, his hulking body supported by reedlike legs, and thump gravely at Stern's chest and back with thin, businesslike fingers. He liked cherry sodas, and Stern's mother would always have one ready for him after he finished up and washed his hands. She was a tall, voluptuous woman with dyed blond hair who wore bathrobes whenever Stern was sick. “Do you know what I would do for that man?” Stern's mother would say after Winkel had left. “I owe him my life. He's some guy.” Stern's mother would then send Winkel a pair of tickets for the opera. When Stern got older, he would say, “But you paid him for coming,” and his mother would answer, “You can't really pay a man like that, can you? You've got a lot of growing up to do.” Winkel was always grave and unsmiling with Stern, and once when Stern had a stubborn pimple above his eye, Winkel squeezed it with what seemed to Stern like hatred and said, “Love sweets, don't you?” Though Winkel later specialized in gynecology, he continued to treat Stern in his teens, and Stern's mother said, “I thank my lucky stars ten times a day I have a man like that. You have a man like that, you don't need anyone else.” Nine out of ten of Stern's boyhood friends were planning to become doctors, and there was a time when Stern considered the idea too. His mother told Winkel and the doctor said, “Why doesn't he ever come up and talk to me? All the other boys come up and we have long talks.” Stern did not like the sound of those long talks and never went up. He knew a little about chromosomes and Ehrlemeyer flasks, but he could not i
magine ever filling up a long talk with Winkel. Later, when Stern went to college, he heard that Winkel had gone on to great eminence, giving talks on television. “I can still get him, though,” his mother would say. “I'm the only one he'll still come to.” Winkel had been married to a woman whose frugality supposedly made him insane. Driving from Newark to the opera one night, Winkel and his wife, so the story went, had gone off the road and into a tree, the windshield shattering and glass getting into Winkel's head. With half an hour remaining to curtain time, his wife left him in the car, forehead red, hands locked about the wheel in shock, and went to redeem the tickets. Weeks later, he ran amok while performing an appendectomy and cut two deep crosses in his kneecaps with a scalpel. Now he sat in a room, his practice gone, coming into the street only for occasional cherry sodas. Stern knew what his mother would say if Stern suggested that Winkel come look at his son. “Even with half a mind he knows more than anyone else. Do you know how big that man was? And I can still get him, too. He'll come to me in two seconds if I want him, no matter how crazy he is.”

  The swelling disappeared mysteriously one morning, and in a few days Stern, with a leaping heart, was able to carry his son into his car and back to the house. He kept his nose deep in his son's neck and marveled that some good had come out of the sickness. He had finally been among people in this bleak town, nurses and doctors and visitors in the halls. A day later, he spotted a blossom on the cancer side of the wild cherry tree—and there were other things, too, that happened quickly. A new stop sign on Stern's corner, one that would prevent motorcycle boys being shot out of cannons; a shortcut across the estate; a plan to kill his boiler; and a new attitude on the part of the dogs.

  And then, of course, a week afterward, the man had said kike and looked between his wife's legs.

  There were only three other occasions on which Stern and his wife discussed the kike man. One occurred the very next night when Stern, still in his topcoat, caught her wrists around the oven and said, “I just want to see how it happened.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I want to get a picture in my mind of what it was all about. Get on the floor and show me exactly how you were. How your legs were when you were down there. It's important.”

  “I won't do that,” she said, breaking through to clean the oven.

  “I've got to see it,” said Stern, grabbing her again. “Just for a second.”

  “I'm not going to do anything like that. I told you to forget it.”

  “I'm not fooling around,” he said, and, taking her around the waist, he threw her to the kitchen floor, her jumper flying back above her knees.

  “You crazy bastard.” she said, flicking a strip of skin from his nose in a quick swipe and getting to her feet.

  “All right, then—me,” said Stern, getting on the floor. “My topcoat's your dress. Tell me when I'm right.” He drew the coat slightly above his knees and said, “This way?”

  “I'm not doing this,” his wife said. “I don't know what you want me to do.”

  “Were you this way?” he asked. “Just tell me that.”

  “No,” she said.

  He drew the coat up higher. “This?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said.

  He flung the overcoat back over his hips, his legs sprawling, and said, “This way?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Stern said, “Jesus,” and ran upstairs to sink in agony upon the bed. But he felt excited, too.

  On the weekend, several days later, as Stern unloaded cans of chow mein from the supermarket, his wife said, “He has big arms.”

  “Who?” Stern asked, knowing full well who she meant.

  “The man,” she said. “The man who said that thing.”

  “Oh,” Stern said. “What do arms mean?”

  The third and final time was when they sat one day beneath a birch tree while their son dug a hole in the dirt to China. The kike man drove by in his car and Stern's wife said, “I hate that man.”

  “You're silly,” Stern said.

  The man's house lay at a point equidistant between Stern's and the estate. Since Stern did not want to pass the man's house on foot anymore, he took to driving his car back and forth to the estate each day, leaving it at the estate edge each morning and picking it up at night. Once he was in his car at night, he had a choice of either driving directly past the man's house or taking a more roundabout route that avoided the man's house altogether. Each night, as he boarded the train, he would begin a struggle within himself as to which road to take. The roundabout road presented the more attractive view and Stern told himself there was no earthly reason why he should have to pass up the nicer scenery along this road. The houses were much handsomer and made Stern feel he lived in a more expensive neighborhood. Stern would start off along the finer road, but when he had gone fifty yards, he would throw his car into reverse, back up, and go down the road that led past the man's house. It was much shorter this way, of course, and Stern told himself now that distance should be the only consideration, that if he took the roundabout road, he was only doing it to avoid having to look at the man's house and was being a coward, afraid that the man would pull him out of the car and break his stomach. On the few occasions when he did follow the roundabout road all the way home, he would walk past his wife and son and lie in bed, sinking his teeth into his top lip. On most occasions, however, he drove right past the man's house, going very slowly to show he knew no fear. His license said, “Driver must wear glasses,” and Stern could not drive well without them, but when he went past the man's house he slipped them off to present a picture of strength, squinting for sight so he could stay on the road. Past the house, he would duck down and slip them on again, shoulders hunched in such a way that if the man was looking after Stern, he would not see the glasses.

  One night Stern drove by and saw the man's son, who would have been his own son's friend, digging in the dirt beside the curb. From that night on, Stern drove very close to the curb, imagining that he would suddenly speed up, catch the boy on his bumpers, and then go the remaining mile in seconds, disappearing undetected into his garage. And then he pictured a car fight in which the man would get Stern's boy, following him onto the lawn and pinning him against the drainpipe, while Stern, waiting upstairs, held his hands over his ears, blocking out the noise. The man would then, somehow, pick off Stern's wife in her kitchen and then drive upstairs and finish off Stern himself, cringing in his bedroom. Another night, Stern forced himself to examine the name on the man's mailbox. De Luccio. He looked it up in the telephone book that night and saw that there were eighteen others in the town. Even if he were to defeat the man, an army of relatives stood by to take his place. He wondered who he could pit against them and came up only with his married sister who lived in narrow circumstances above a store in San Diego. Once she had helped him in a snowball fight, and back to back they had done well together, until the action speeded up and ice balls began to get her in the breasts. “Stop it; she's a girl,” Stern hollered, but a heavy ball split her brow and down she went, making a yowling, nasal sound. But she'd been game, standing firmly in the snow, puffing, blowing the hair out of her face, panting like a puppy. He imagined her now, back to back with him against the eighteen heavy-armed De Luccios, standing game as a puppy, until they all began to beat her breasts and easily knock her to the ground. Who else might have stood off the De Luccios? When alive, perhaps his Uncle Henny, the shoulder pad tycoon, a man of iron grip who'd been gassed in WW I. Once he had disarmed an aged knife wielder on a moving city bus. Uncle Henny would know how to handle the man. Stern could not see a picture of it in his mind, but he was sure that Uncle Henny would have been able to use his gassed lungs and steel grip to fend off the De Luccios.