“Here I am, Grandma.” He moved toward her.
“Come here, child.” Steadying her hand with his, she fumblingly placed in his palm a few tawny sugared slices of ginger. Under her waiting gaze, he placed a slice in his mouth and chewed. There was a small, acrid explosion in his throat; his eyes pinkened, but he swallowed obediently, knowing that she thought she was giving him a confection of which he was fond.
“Thank you, Grandma,” he said thickly, his mouth on fire.
“All right, now.” It was time for the other part of the ceremony. Slowly she leaned on his arm and he guided her steps across the room to the wicker armchair, into which she tottered, bearing down heavily on his shoulder and sending the cane in a rasping slide to the floor. Feeling in a pocket at one side of the chair, she brought up her glasses, polished the lenses with a bright-pink cloth, and put them on. Opening a folded afternoon paper, she began to read the headlines with the aid of a handled magnifying glass the size of a small saucer. The ritual was over. After supper, Kinny’s father would read her the articles she asked for, or, in his absence, Kinny would declaim them with careful dignity.
Dangling his legs from the dark old couch, he tried to place just what pulled at him so strongly in Grandma’s rooms. Here in the sitting room, there were only a few steel engravings of Biblical scenes and a big, dark cloisonné pot stuffed with some brackish moss that never seemed to grow or die. Everything was still, but if he sat long enough, he felt the dim waves of history lapping at him, a moving, continuous stream that culminated in him.
He went restlessly toward the window and mooned out at the river. Maybe he could call for Bert, and they could go out and get some isinglass from the rocks that stuck out all over the ground across Riverside Drive. Bert maintained that if you could peel a whole clear sheet of it, it could be sold, like tinfoil.
“Call Hattie,” said his grandmother fretfully. “Ask her if that optician man is coming.” He had never heard her speak of the steady contraction of her sight, or of any other physical drawback, but Mr. Goldwasser came once a month and carefully did something — a plucking or trimming of the short, stiff eyelashes that tended to mat in the corners — which she thought beneficial.
“Mother said to tell you he’s coming.”
In the kitchen, his mother was discarding her apron.
“Here they come,” she said. “Kinny, get away from that table.” She brushed past him. Under Josie’s reproachful, bovine stare, he took another prune pocket and stood at the head of the hall, watching.
Kinny’s father, Aunt Flora and Aunt Amy, and his father’s cousin Selena, old as the aunts, came in from the foyer. He thought that they looked furtive, as if they’d been doing something they shouldn’t and were glad that it was over. Amy’s face, wry and puckered now under her great bird’s nest of iron-gray hair, was tiny and aquiline, with a short arc of mouth, and was supposed to be very like that of her mother as a young woman, but she had none of her mother’s cameo neatness, and was always leaving untidy packages and having to come back for them, so that “something Amy left” had become a byword in the house.
“I think I dropped my gloves at the —” she said tremulously, and stopped. Nobody said the usual “Oh, A-amy!” His father groaned and walked heavily to the sideboard. Rooting in one of the compartments, he brought out the decanter.
“Now, Joe, do you think you’d better?” said his mother. “Come on, everybody. It’ll do you good to eat something.”
“Oh, leave him alone, Hattie,” said Aunt Flora testily, jerking back the white pompadour that reared high over her rouged beak of face. Her inimical glance seemed to concentrate the momentary feeling of the others. Hattie hadn’t just been through what they had.
Flora was the first to sit down at the table. Food, poker, and having the last word were her passions, in that order. “Come on, Amy, Selena,” she said.
Usually, Selena wore puce or mustard or reseda green, but today she wore muddy brown, underlining the mud tints in her equine face.
Kinny’s father sat at the head of the table kneading his gray curls while the others ate, in silence. Kinny stole into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Vichy. Tiptoeing into the dining room, he placed the green bottle at his father’s elbow. He heard the doorbell ring and Josie ushering somebody into the parlor. She came to the dining-room door.
“Is here the eye doctor, Mrs. Elkin,” she said.
“Take him on back to Grandma, Josie,” said his mother.
His father stirred and groaned again. “What in God’s name am I going to tell Maw? I haven’t the heart. I haven’t the heart, so soon after Nat.”
“Never thought she should have been told about Nat,” said Flora, brushing the crumbs from her black, bugled front.
“What? Maw?” said Amy heatedly. “She seemed to catch on almost as soon as it happened. She sits there half blind and part deaf, and she hasn’t been outdoors in ten years, but try and fool her about anything in the family!”
Selena leaned forward with a faint flush. “You’ve been fooling her about Aaron’s letters, haven’t you?” she asked. “Hasn’t Joe been writing them and mailing them ever since Aaron went into a coma?” She looked around the table avidly.
“Aaron and I write — wrote — a lot alike,” his father said. “I just wanted to keep her from worrying at not seeing him. I told her he might have to go out West.” He turned down his mouth wryly.
Selena leaned forward again, triumphantly. “Well, why don’t you just go on writing them?”
“It’s a ghoulish thing to do.” He rose and moved to the window. Pulling up the awning, he wound the cord hard around the hooked prong in the casement and stood looking out. It was as if someone had suddenly thrown yards of blue soft stuff into all the corners of the room and veils had settled on the furniture. The white cloth gleamed. Across the wide avenue, the people in the building opposite had already turned on their yellow squares of light.
“She asked me four or five times yesterday,” said his mother gently. “The last letter you had mailed from the farm is here, but I didn’t know what to do.”
The optician’s man came to the door and peered at them obsequiously. “Er-hmm. I’m finished now.” He held a little black bag in one hand and a round black bowler at his chest.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Goldwasser.” His father turned from the window, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. “I’ll see you to the door.”
“Just a minute, Joe!” said Flora. She pushed back the dish in front of her and swiveled around in her chair. “Mr. Goldwasser.”
“Yes?” He blinked at her politely.
“Can you tell us — how much can my mother see?”
“See?” he paused. “Why, she hasn’t had an eye test in years, Mrs. Harris. It’s hard to say. The lenses she has are the strongest made, and she’s had them a good, long time.” He shrugged. “She’s lucky not to have a cataract, at her years. She sees enough to eat, does she not, and get around a little? What I do for her only makes her more comfortable, you know.”
“Could she read, do you think?” Amy faltered, one of her bone hairpins sliding into her lap, where she worked at it nervously.
“Read!” He seemed surprised. “I can hardly think — maybe a block letter or two. You mean she still tries?” He shook his head admiringly. “A wonderful woman. Well!” He bowed and left them, followed by Kinny’s father.
“They never will come right out with anything. Doctors!” Flora snapped.
“He’s not a doctor, Flora,” said Kinny’s father wearily, returning to the room. He slumped into a chair. “I’m all worn out.”
His mother was at the secrétaire. She held an envelope in her hand. “Better to get it over with, Joe, or she’ll surely catch on. She complained about Amy and Flora not stopping in today.”
Amy looked up vaguely and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “I just can’t face her without showing something. I know I can’t.”
“Oh, Amy, be practical,” said Flo
ra. “How do you think we all feel? She’s too old to suffer another shock like that. We’ll have to warn everyone who comes in to see her. Go on, Joe.
“I’m no good at that sort of thing,” he said, choking. “Not today, of all days.”
“You’ve always been the one to read to her,” said Kinny’s mother. “She’d think it strange if any of us —”
Kinny found his voice, with a croak. “I — I read to her sometimes.” He looked hastily around the table and then down at his shoes. Selena switched around in her chair and raised her brows at him.
“Why, Kinny!” said his mother in a slow, pleased way.
“I won’t embroil the child in this!” said his father angrily.
“Little pitchers have big ears,” said Selena with a caustic smile.
“I’m not a child.” He hung his head and looked at his father sidewise. “She’s used to me. I can do it.” His voice trailed off weakly.
“After all, I was the one who had to go in and tell her about Nat,” said his mother bitterly. “All of you avoid anything unpleasant.”
“Maybe the child could do it,” said Flora hurriedly.
His mother came around the table and thrust the envelope into his hand. “That’s a good idea, Kinny. Just read to her, like you always do.”
“All right. All right, all of you,” muttered his father, not looking at him. “Just be careful, Kinny.”
Now that their collective eyes, raw and ashamed, seemed to be pushing him out of the room, he felt uneasy. Carefully, he straightened the silver on his plate. There were several large crumbs on the floor next to his chair. With a prim show of industry, he picked them up, one by one, and put them on the cloth. Grinding his shoulder blades together, he left the room.
In the hall, he pressed his face against the cold, stippled wall. There were too many dark-angled halls in this apartment. He wished that the family would leave soon for the summer place, and thought with relief of the house, where you could dash straight through from back to front, out into the sunshine, slamming the door behind you. Stacked at a corner of the hall, rolled-up carpets wrapped in tar paper waited to be stored, giving out a drugged, attic smell. He flicked each one as he went by, rattling the paper in drum time.
Outside his grandmother’s sitting-room door, there were several pictures that had been taken down and swathed in cheesecloth. He spent some time peering at these, trying to make out which was the one of the old bookshop and which the red-coated dragoon and his bride. Through the half-shut door he could see his grandmother in the unlit room. She was snoring softly, head back.
“Grandma,” he said, his voice cutting the cobwebs. “It’s me, Kinny.” He went up and touched her lightly on the arm.
“Ah — oh. Yes?” The folded newspaper slid off her lap and she blinked up at him. Turning on the lamp beside the old cloisonné bowl, he laid the letter in her hand.
“A letter for you. Shall I read it?” It seemed to him that she hunched into herself like an old bird, listening.
“Where’s your father? Where’s Amy and Flora?”
“In the — in the dining room.” He rocked back and forth on his ankle. “Can I use your paper cutter?”
She nodded, drawing her shawl around her, although the dank heat in the room made his lip bead. He got out the paper cutter, rubbing his thumb against the ivory hair of the girl on the handle, and slit the envelope. In the uninflected drone taught in the grade schools, he began to read his father’s high, knotted script.
“My dear Mother: Trust this finds you well and in good spirits. Everything is fine here. The meals are good and the rooms are nice and clean. I miss seeing you and my dear family, but the doctor says that everything is going as well as can be expected, though he still would like to see me go out West this fall. Please God, we will all see each other before then. Keep well and do not worry if I write seldom, as there is very little news here. Your affectionate son, Aaron.”
Rubbing the ball of one thumb ceaselessly in the palm of the other hand, his grandmother looked straight through him. He’d never noticed before how her head shook a little, as if blown by a slight, steady current from behind. “Read it again, Kinny,” she whispered.
He read it again, more quickly, thinking that its phrases sounded a lot like the letters his father sent home from his travels — “please God” and “trust you are well,” and signed always “Yrs. aff., Joe.”
“Let me have the letter.” Searching shakily in the side pocket of the chair, she brought out the thick, beveled magnifying glass. Holding it almost under her nose, she inched it slowly along the letter, then the envelope, then back to the letter again. She sat for a long time with the letter in her lap; then a sharp movement of her arm sent the magnifying glass across the room, where it hit the couch and spun to the floor with the dull, rubbling sound of a top but did not break. He pressed his knees together, listening to the echo.
He saw that she was feeling for the cane. Frightened, he thrust it under her hand, but was reassured by the familiar heavy way she rested on him and pulled herself up in three marionette jerks. The two of them made their way to the sideboard. As she bent over the drawer, he saw the moisture from her eyes run six ways down the channels in her cheeks and fall into the drawer. Turning, she let her sticks of fingers brush his face in a dry gesture.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You were good to try.” Thrusting the box into his hand, but not releasing it finally, she held her hands cupped around his, and for a moment, they rocked back and forth together, in a movement of complicity and love.
The Watchers
THROUGH THE AQUEOUS summer night, the shop lights along the avenue shone confusedly, like confetti raining through fog. From bench to bench in the narrow strip of park down the center, voices bumbled softly against one another, as from undersea diver to diver, through the fuzzy, dark medium of the evening.
Over toward the river, groups of girls and boys in their teens foraged for mischief and experience in the anonymous blur of the shadows, but Hester, bound to her mother, sat between her and her father’s elderly cousins on a bench that they kept to themselves, repairing somewhat, by this separation, the déclassé gesture of sitting in the park. Across from them, in the big gray apartment house, Hester could see the long, lit string of their own windows — at one end the great, full swags of the Belgian-lace curtains of the living room, and around the corner the faint glow of her grandmother’s night light.
Outwardly, it was because of her grandmother that their home swirled continuously with family company, but actually the visitors spent no more than a token time with the old lady, whom longevity had made remarkable but unapproachable other than as a household god. In reality, according to Hester’s mother’s exasperated comments, the visiting was a holdover from the bland, taken-for-granted gregariousness of the Southerner, whereby, in a rhythmic series of “droppings-in,” in corner tête-à-têtes of intramural gossip, they all reaffirmed the identity of the family and of themselves.
Now, after the Sunday-night supper of cold cuts and cheese and pastry, most of the company had eddied away, and only three were left here with Hester and her mother — Rose and Martha, who lived in Newark and came only on Sunday, and Selena, who lived Hester did not quite know where but came most often of them all. Under the incomplete dark of the New York sky, their faces bobbled, uncertain and white, above their sombre, middle-aged dresses, and from time to time they pushed up sporadic remarks through the stifling heat.
“When does Joe get back?” asked Martha.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Hester’s mother. “This is his last trip for the year.”
“Then you go to the country?” said Rose, with her plaintive whine, in which there was a hint of accusation.
“Yes, to White Plains. The same house as last year,” said her mother, as if she regretted the disclosure. She would deplore their visits in conversation, behind their backs, but they would all come anyway, sending her into grudging paroxysms of hospital
ity.
“Not a breath stirring,” said Martha, twitching her lip with a movement Hester could not really see but knew was there. Martha was a steady little person, dumpy-legged, with a face as creased and limited as her conversation. A milliner, working at home, she specialized in such oddly assembled trivia that Hester wondered often who bought them. She never went hatless and often appeared in rearrangements of the same materials, so that the lilies of the valley of last week, detached now from their wreath of green leaves, turned up limp but enduring on the orange velvet toque of the week before. Martha’s rooms, which Hester had once seen, had the same scattered look, as if her whole life were composed of bits of trimming and selvage that she endlessly, faithfully, turned and made do. On the speckled, polka-dotted, or mustily striped bosoms of her dresses, anchoring her together, there was always the gold brooch lettered “True Sisters,” symbol of a Jewish ladies’ organization that was her extracurricular glory. To Hester, it seemed that this must have some esoteric significance, about which she never dared inquire, since, in so doing, she would be delving impolitely into the personal springs that must lie under the trivia of Martha, would be asking of that cramped, undreaming little body, “Cousin Martha, to what is it you are True?” Another thing that lifted Martha from the ordinary was her tic, which consisted of a wetting of the lips and a side twitch of the mouth that occurred at regular intervals, whether or not she happened to be talking. At first repelled by it, then fascinated by the way Martha and those around her ignored it, Hester had finally come to watch for it and dwell upon it, for it seemed to her a sign that obscure, eternal forces nudged even at the commonplace Martha, twitching at her, saying, “Even under your polka-dotted bosom, under your bits and stuff, we are working, we are here.”
In the Absence of Angels Page 13
