I began to unbutton his shirt. “Everyone says the second baby’s easier.” Put my lips to his bared throat—was there any place on a body more lonely and vulnerable? “A girl next time,” I said. “One of the nurses told me to have a girl next time. Someone to take care of me in my old age.” But he was still shaking his head.
“I’m not afraid,” I told him. I wasn’t. I had conceived our first child without any notion of the suffering involved. Now that I knew, desire—which was still there, of course—seemed small enough incentive to conceive again. It was courage now that was delightful to me. I was a bold piece. I had stood at death’s door. I had withstood pain. I knew I could make a stand against it, against time, bold and stubborn, a living child in my arms.
When he ran his fingertips over the scar that split my belly, he paused. I heard him catch his breath. “This is foolish of us,” he whispered.
I said, “I suppose it is.”
THREE
The first strange thing was that Tom brought him in through the front door, which we never used. I had been sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the shadow to cross the lace curtain over the window in the back door, the shadow that meant the car had been pulled into the carport, when I heard instead the rattle and bang and then the odd wheeze of the door at the front of the house. I heard Tom’s voice—loud and buoyant. “Come in, come in,” a jovial innkeeper—and another series of small crashes that was my brother’s suitcase being wrestled into the narrow hall.
Susan was at the sink, making something complicated out of the simple task of brewing iced tea—there was wild mint involved, weeds from the yard, as far as I was concerned, honey, and lemon rind—and the two of us glanced at each other at the sound of the front door opening, the sound of the storm door clutching at the threshold, with the same surprise we might have shown if Tom had led Gabe in through the drier vent. “What in heaven’s name?” I said.
Gabe was standing alone in the middle of the living room. He had his hands at his side. Even as a boy, he had sometimes stretched his smile too wide like this. Conveyed, all inadvertently, the effort he was making to express a pleasure that was, nevertheless, authentic and sincere. It was a shy, dutiful boy’s picture-taking smile, held a beat too long. “Hey there,” he said.
He had lost weight. Something of his natural color had left not only his face and his hair but also the backs of his long hands, his polished dress shoes, the clothes he wore—a white polo shirt buttoned to the neck under a blue Windbreaker, despite the heat, and a pair of gray dress pants. Meticulous as always, yes, his broad long face was clean-shaven, his fair and graying hair carefully combed, but altogether less vivid than he had been, less present, somehow, in the world. I crossed the living room to him, Susan behind me, Helen following. Tom was already halfway up the stairs with the suitcase, and he called to Gabe over the banister. “Look out,” he said, “the gang’s all here,” as if to remind my brother that the women must be humored.
I reached up to put my palms to Gabe’s hollow cheeks. His skin was prickly, glazed with perspiration. He raised both his hands to my elbows. For a moment, we brought our faces together in the modern way, but then we stepped back, into the more comfortable distance we had known growing up. There was the scent of the institution about his clothes: cafeteria food and hospital disinfectant under his aftershave. “How was the traffic?” I said, and Gabe said, “Fine”—even his eyes had lost some vividness—while Tom cried out from the top of the stairs, “Southern State backed up through Hempstead going out. Poor fools won’t hit Jones before sunset.”
I turned to the girls behind me. I hadn’t intended it to, but it felt like a turning away.
“Here’s Susan and Helen,” I said brightly. The two girls had paused just inside the arched doorway of the living room. Each of them raised a hand and wiggled its fingers, Helen ducking her head as she did so, lifting her shoulders shyly—she was a hunchback of shyness in those years—and Susan showing in her smile that she knew she could, if she wished, unmask us all: her jovial father, her cautious mother, her uncle just out of Suffolk—the mental hospital out east that had been the stuff of childhood insults for as long as she could remember:
Where do you go to school, Suffolk?
Hey, Suffolk called, it’s time to go back.
The men in the little white coats want to give you a free ride to Suffolk.
He was, perhaps, the first adult about whom she knew something she was supposed to pretend she didn’t know, and I understood then that this set her well above us all in those first hours of Gabe’s return.
Tom came tapping down the stairs again, his hand hovering over the banister. “You wanted to tell the poor P.R.s,” he said, loud and jovial, perspiring as well, his broad face and bald dome flushed pink, “to take their coolers and their transistor radios and head back to the Bronx.”
Now he was at the foot of the stairs, in the small foyer where the front door—the door we never used—was still open. He pushed it closed, and a measure of sunlight fell away from the foyer, from that end of the living room as well. We all stood there for a moment in the dimmer light, sealed in together by the shut door.
Although the house was small enough, we didn’t use the living room much either: we opened Christmas presents here, and took Easter photos, and when we entertained, we sat in here with cocktails and bowls of salted peanuts. There was only one double window, dressed with white, crisscrossed sheers and venetian blinds that were closed now against the morning’s heat. There was the sturdy upright under the stairs, the gold brocade sectional along the far corner, a coffee table, a pair of Waterford lamps. At the beginning of every summer, I rolled up the good wool rug strewn with roses that had been my mother’s, sent it off to storage, and left the wood floors bare until September. My voice echoed faintly, then, as if on a stage, when I said, “Come on in, Gabe. Make yourself at home.”
I led him back through the dining room and into the kitchen. It was a pass-through kitchen, aqua and pink, a narrow, impractical space, catty-cornered between the dining room and the hallway that led to the two downstairs bedrooms. There was only a small table with two chairs, and Helen darted in and took the farthest one, sitting on one folded knee as she liked to do, as if folding in on herself and yet ready to spring. Susan went back to the counter where she’d been assembling her iced tea. I followed and then turned to my brother. Gabe stood in the doorway, reluctant and uncertain—a good foot taller than Tom, who was behind him, still talking about the drive, the beach traffic this morning going out, the relative ease with which they’d gotten home. “Please,” I said, indicating the chair, “have some tea.” I blushed at my own awkwardness. “Or do you want to wash up?”
Gabe said, “I might do that.” And I showed him to the small powder room, as politely as if he had been a stranger.
In the kitchen, Tom slapped his pockets and asked loudly what he had done with his car keys, and then—“Here they are”—held them up between his thumb and forefinger, laughing as if he had conjured them. He said he really should go right out and move the car out of that hot driveway and up under the carport so the seats won’t melt and the paint won’t fade in this heat. He’d been telling Gabe, in fact, he said, telling him on the drive back, how well the old Belvedere was holding up and how cautious he was about keeping it in good repair.
He jingled the car keys, and they caught Susan’s attention as they had done when she was an infant. This was the summer she learned to drive.
“Shall we?” he said, but Susan shook her head. “You go ahead. I’m still making the tea.” Tom shrugged. I recognized the brief struggle he made to convince himself of the unreasonableness of his hurt feelings. She had never before turned down the opportunity to get behind the wheel with him: she was, understandably, curious about this mad uncle of hers, newly arrived.
When Tom was gone, out through the side door, as was usual, Susan turned to me and said, “Why didn’t he just pull in to begin with? Why’d he come in through
the front?” I offered something about getting Uncle Gabe’s suitcase up the stairs, although I understood by then that Tom hadn’t wanted Gabe to feel he had become a back-door guest.
“Weird,” Susan said, and then looked over my shoulder, to Gabe coming back into the room. She suddenly grew busy with her lemons and her mint.
“Sit down,” I said, turning to him. “You must be parched. Susan’s putting together quite a concoction.”
Gabe moved through the small kitchen. I noticed his weight loss once more. It was not a healthy loss. He took the other seat at the little café table, across from Helen, who was studying him unabashedly.
“It was awfully nice of Tom to pick me up,” he said as I served him the tea. Nothing had been added to, or subtracted from, the short smile he wore. “Coming out all that way.” His voice, too, had lost some of its luster. It had always been quiet and even-toned, but now it had a scarred quality to it, as if he had weathered, and recovered from, a disease of the lungs or the throat. “More often than not,” he said, “people leave Suffolk in cabs.”
The girls were watching him silently. I had been prepared not to mention his time at Suffolk at all.
“Which I would have been happy enough to do,” he added.
“Nonsense,” I said.
He had his legs crossed, his arms crossed over his lap. He still wore his Windbreaker, although it was warm in the house in those pre-air-conditioning days. I offered to take it from him, but he raised his hand to say he was fine. His shoes were brand-new wingtips. “It is a lonely sort of way to go,” he said. And laughed a bit. “To leave, I mean,” he said. The skin of his throat had grown corded, the chin loose, although it was clear that he had carefully shaved. “I’ve seen some of the poor loonies walk out to the cab looking for all the world like they’d rather stay.”
The word—“loonies”—startled and pained me. I could feel both my daughters straining against their instructions to remain mute. Helen, of course, was too shy to say a word, but Susan already had the questions on her tongue: Was it awful? Were there strait jackets? Were you in a padded cell?—the same questions she had asked us when we called her and Helen, quietly, into our bedroom the night before and explained to them both in serious, whispered phrases that Uncle Gabe was coming to stay for a while. Not a sick man, Tom had said—he had been visiting the hospital regularly and knew well the psychiatrists, the experts, he called them—only, he said, for a while there, a man overwhelmed. “Swamped” was the word he used. “Like by a big wave,” he told the two girls. “Like at Jones Beach.”
In fact, nearly a year ago, Gabe had walked naked out of the apartment at dawn. He had walked all the way to Prospect Park—weeping—the police report said, which was probably why he wasn’t charged with indecent exposure, only sent to the hospital, and then, after our own family doctor intervened, to Suffolk.
The scene had been described for us in the admitting room of the hospital on the evening of the day Gabe was picked up by the police. There had been a small crowd, apparently, kids mostly, following behind him as he stumbled along. Some of them had thrown mud. There were traces of it on his shoulder blades and buttocks. Others had thrown thin branches torn from trees, or bits of garbage, newspaper, or lunch wrappers, from the street. He was naked and crying. His feet were bare, one was bleeding. Someone in one of the apartment buildings had called the police. The officers approached him warily. They called him “Buddy.” They asked him where he lived, if he had any family, but he was crying and could not speak. They had nothing in their patrol car to wrap him in, and they would have put him in the car as he was, when an old woman from one of the apartments appeared, breathlessly speaking in Italian or Yiddish, the officers couldn’t agree on which it was. She had a blanket in her hands. She didn’t know him. She couldn’t give them any information, but she had, apparently, been following him for quite a few blocks, the blanket held before her.
It was a hot autumn day. They were at the dusty edge of the park, which was much neglected then. There was the clamor of the children’s taunts and the foreign woman’s words and the cars going by, some slowing, some emitting their own jeers. The sunlight itself was clamorous. Exposed to it, my brother’s fair skin would have been mottled and pale. The officers were perspiring in their uniforms, the guns in their black holsters absorbing the heat. One of them, not the one who was speaking kindly, calling him Buddy, but the other—Officers Fernandez and O’Toole, I had no way of knowing which was which—had a nightstick in his hand. My brother stood naked among them, pale and thin, his own hands at his side. He was weeping, unable to speak. They cuffed his hands behind his back. They wrapped him in the blanket the old woman had brought. He let himself be led away.
Tom and I, together in a small room somewhere inside the hospital, had listened, had flinched, had lowered our eyes even as the doctor described the scene, read off the names of the officers, said “weeping” and “crying” interchangeably. Walking out together down those awful corridors to see Gabe, I let out a single breath and shook my head. Tom took my hand. “Did you see that toupee?” he whispered.
“Every time I saw a cab pull up,” Gabe was saying, “I thought of that scene from Harvey. The one when the cab driver comes in to get paid but the sister can’t find her wallet. And while they’re waiting, he tells them how the nutty people are all friendly and happy going out to the sanatorium, but then all angry and impatient when he drives them back, after they’re cured.”
He paused, bent forward from the waist, politely, as if to see if we had heard and understood him. As if to gauge whether he had too suddenly said too much, or had spoken at all. I remembered the look, the slight, questioning, polite leaning forward from his boyhood. His hairline was receding and the light in the kitchen caught the curve of his skull in two places.
Helen said, “I love that movie.” She was sitting opposite Gabe at the small Formica table. She was not sitting up straight, she never did sit up straight. She was hunched over her glass, her pointed little chin nearly touching the rim. There was so much weedy mint in her tea it looked like an amber-lit terrarium. “Harvey made the wallet disappear,” she said.
“The pooka,” Gabe said softly, nodding. He turned toward her politely, but with some surprise, as if he had not expected her to speak.
“So Elwood wouldn’t get the shot,” she said.
He nodded again. “Elwood P. Dowd,” he said. It was the gracious wariness of an adult unused to conversing with children. “Right you are.” The cuff of his Windbreaker had ridden up a bit, exposing the pale skin. There was a hospital bracelet on his bony wrist. He looked at me. “Someone stays up to watch The Late Show,” he said, and Helen’s chin dipped farther, touched the rim of her tall glass.
Susan laughed. “And The Late Late Show,” she said. There was both big-sister mockery in her voice and, perhaps because of Gabe’s presence here, a new forbearance. There was a way her body had, in those days, of bobbing and weaving as she spoke: as if a more assertive, adult Susan—the lawyer she would become—was elbowing past the shy child she, too, had once been. Although she’d once been as skinny as Helen was now, she’d recently begun putting on weight. I was aware of the cool heft of her fleshy forearm. She was standing against the sink, her palms hooked behind her, but her body bobbing forward. I nudged her aside a bit as I opened the utensil drawer and took out the kitchen shears.
“She even tries to stay home sick when there’s a good movie on in the morning,” Susan was saying. “She plans her whole life around the TV schedule.”
“I do not,” Helen said into her glass. “I never do.”
“Are you kidding?” Susan cried, goading her. Showing off, too. “Who circles all the old movies in the TV Guide every week? And puts those reminders on the bathroom mirror, like National Velvet, Tuesday?”
Helen dropped her chin yet again, drew her raised shoulders nearly up to her ears. “No, I don’t,” she said softly, while her sister said, “Of course you do, don’t lie,” and
laughed.
I crossed the narrow room and took my brother’s hand from his knee without a word. Without a word, he gave it to me. “I’m of the same mind,” he said to the girls. “A good old movie on TV can make my whole day.” His flesh was cold and there were graying, golden hairs on the backs of his pale fingers. I slipped the kitchen shears between the plastic cuff and the blue underside of his narrow wrist. I neatly cut the thing in half, then touched his knee before I carried the bracelet to the trash.
“Guess I won’t need that anymore,” he said, and I tried to sound lighthearted. “We know who you are,” I said.
Gabe turned to Helen, “What’s the movie today?”
Helen raised her eyes to the clock on the wall. She had a narrow face and small dark eyes, black-lashed and lovely. She had perfect vision, both girls did. A blessing from their father. “A Hitchcock,” she said. “Shadow of a Doubt.”
“Joseph Cotten,” he said. “Another good one.”
Helen said, “I don’t know who that is.”
Something authentic entered my brother’s smile. “Joseph Cotten,” he said. He shifted in his chair, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. He looked at me. “Whatever happened to Joseph Cotten?”
I shrugged, aware of, grateful for, the grace of this ordinary conversation. “Who knows?” I said airily. “All those old actors. Probably making commercials.”
“Probably dead,” Susan said.
“It’s from nineteen forty something,” Helen added. “The movie, nineteen forty-one or nineteen forty-two.”
“Ancient history,” Gabe said. “Your mother was still a babe in arms.”
I laughed. The air in the warm room had grown a bit lighter. “Hardly,” I said. “I was working at Fagin’s by then.”
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