Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  The episode gave Donald a bad scare and he never struck me again. Years later he hit my little sister, the child of Jean and my mother, who received her first blow in life at the age of eighteen months, but again, despite my mother’s disapproval, he got away with it.

  Violence was uncharacteristic of Donald, though—in fact totally absent from his dealings with anyone besides children. The way he attacked Jean one Christmas Eve was much more his style.

  Donald held the little glass swan in front of his mouth, talking quickly, his eyes shining. “It’s supposed to be a test of lung power. You blow hard to push the water up the swan’s neck.” He blew into the tube, his cheeks swelling. “Nothing happens because I have my finger over this tiny hole in the back here.” He pointed it out. “That’s the trick.”

  My mother came in from the kitchen. “Well, the turkey’s almost done.”

  “Have you got everything, now?” Donald asked me, looking down at the stuff on the table. “The puzzle works by squeezing the white dot on the corner. The others are self-explanatory.”

  “Yes.”

  My mother laughed. “Donald, you’re incredible. Where’d you get it all?”

  “A novelty store on Forty-second Street.” He emphasized the word “novelty,” savoring it as a special, ironically delicious tidbit. It was a mannerism of his to underscore his own words, flattering his listener’s ability to read between the lines.

  She laughed, looking down at the assortment of practical jokes. “You know what’ll happen. Probably this year he’ll make an effort.” Donald’s plan for Christmas Eve was possible only because Jean made it a point to be cynical about holidays, particularly religious holidays. “It’s all a fraud,” he would say about Christmas. “Commercialism. Big Business,” and his voice would fall off. He was suspicious as well of the once-a-year imitation of happy domestic life in which we all participated. When Christmas came around he would just as soon have gone to the movies, leaving the whole pageant in my mother’s hands, but of course he couldn’t. He had to pretend he was father to the children, pretend to be pleased by gifts, pretend that Donald was his friend—all rather difficult as he was bad at pretending. The best he could do was to maintain a good-humored cynicism, to talk like George Bernard Shaw, but at the same time to let everyone know he was conscious of the comic overtones of his chosen role by lapsing every now and then into a delicately mechanical parody of himself. Donald knew that this was the way it would be, that Jean would be too preoccupied and vulnerable to retaliate.

  At dinner Jean caught me looking at him several times, but he said nothing. Inside me a war was going on between excited anticipation and an amphorous sense of something being wrong. Over the turkey and wine Donald kept the conversation moving quickly, playing to my mother as usual. He looked at me occasionally, and once, for the first time I’d ever seen, he winked. I sat stunned. It was so out of character I began to have that worst of all feelings for a child, that more was going on than I could grasp.

  After dinner we moved from the table to the other end of the living room for coffee. I held my breath as Jean dropped a nondissolving sugar lump into his cup, stirring slowly as he talked. But nothing happened. He sipped away without noticing.

  The fake matches were equally unsuccessful. After two or three attempts to get a light he threw them on the table and pulled another book from his breast pocket without so much as a pause in the conversation. Donald, rambling around the room sampling the little bowls of sweets my mother had set out, seemed not to notice.

  In our house it was the custom to open the presents on Christmas Eve, as in Denmark. An hour or two after dinner my mother gave the signal and Donald went to the tree, squatting over the brightly wrapped packages.

  “All right everybody, this year you have to open mine first.” He rummaged around and came up with a green box he tossed to Alison. As the rest of us watched she unwrapped it and held up a tray of scented soap.

  “Thank you, Donald, yours is under ...”

  “No no no. We’ve got to go on. Here Frank!”

  I caught the small package and unwrapped the sliding-letter puzzle Donald had explained to me. There was a card in his cramped writing: “Donald’s Special I.Q. Test.”

  “You’re supposed to make a word. Slide the letters around.”

  I looked down at the puzzle in my palm, the jumbled white letters in their black frame spelling out CGAMI. You were supposed to make AGICM, then press the white dot releasing letter M, slide it over and make MAGIC. I stared at it.

  “Have you got the word yet?”

  “I see the word.”

  I fooled with the letters until they made AGICM, then hesitated.

  “I’m timing you,” Donald said. “This is a contest. Five-minute limit. You’ve got three left.”

  I pushed the white dot and made the word. “Okay.”

  “Time: two minutes, fifteen seconds. Your turn, Dagmar.” My mother took two and a half minutes and then it was Jean’s turn.

  “Here, I’ll jumble them up.” Donald mixed the letters and smiled.

  “This is just your meat, darling,” Jean said to my mother. “Like your crossword puzzles. Although why an intelligent person wants to waste time on ...”

  “Just try if you think it’s so easy,” Donald said, laughing.

  Jean took the puzzle and bent over it.

  “He didn’t say it was easy. He just said it was a waste of time,” I found myself announcing. Everyone looked at me.

  “Listen to Judge Leibowitz,” Jean laughed.

  Irritated, Donald leaned forward, his watch in his hand. “Keep quiet, Frank. I’m trying to time him.”

  The room was silent as Jean pushed the letters around with his index finger. I looked up at my mother. She watched Jean’s hands without a trace of expression. After a moment she lighted a cigarette, holding it awkwardly, blowing out the smoke uninhaled. In my lifetime I’d only seen her smoke once or twice before. It looked strange.

  Alison busied herself by rewrapping her soap, crackling the shiny paper as she folded and sealed, working to make the package look exactly as it had before she’d opened it. She knew about the puzzle, but she paid no attention. It was as if the events in the room meant nothing to her, as if she was part of another family and was only in the room by accident. Her eyes downcast, she folded and sealed, folded and sealed, absent with neither pride nor shame, absent the way nuns are absent.

  “Four minutes gone,” said Donald.

  “What is this?” said Jean. “I see the word but I can’t get the M in front where it belongs. It won’t go.”

  “You have to try different ways. Everybody else got it.”

  Jean looked up, his eyes moving quickly to each of us in turn, a tenuous, faintly puzzled smile on his lips. “There’s a trick to it.” He put it on the table in a way that made it clear he wasn’t going to pick it up again. “Is there any more coffee?”

  “How about the presents?” I asked my mother. “Isn’t it time yet?”

  “All right,” she said. “But go see if there’s any coffee first.”

  “Yipee!” I jumped up from my chair and ran to the kitchen. The pot was warm under my palm and about a quarter full. I took a cup from the kitchen sink and was about to fill it when Donald came in.

  “Wait a second.” He searched in back of one of the cupboards until he found what he wanted, a large coffee cup I’d never seen before. He put it on the table. “Fill it.”

  I poured the coffee and put the pot back on the stove.

  “All right,” he said. “Take that in to him.”

  I stared at the cup, then at Donald. He started out, but at the door he stopped and looked back, his white face set, his eyes cold behind the glasses. “If you interfere,” he said slowly, “I’ll break your neck.”

  Jean accepted the dribble cup without comment. Throughout the excitement of the present-opening he sipped at it slowly. Every now and then he would raise his bent index finger and wipe the undersid
e of his lower lip. After a while, as my mother distributed gifts, I forgot about him.

  “What’s this?” my mother said, holding up the glass swan from the crumpled paper on her lap.

  “Read the card,” Donald said.

  “Donald’s Special Wind Test. To establish the existence of your third lung,” she read, laughing.

  “Just blow and see how far the water rises in its neck.”

  She found the secret hole and covered it with the tip of her finger, rather obviously, I thought, then turned the swan around, pursed her lips, and blew.

  “Nothing,” said Donald. “You’re not trying.”

  “I am!” She blew hard this time, her cheeks cracking.

  “It moved a little!” Alison said.

  “Let me try,” said Donald.

  We all tried, then my mother gave it to Jean.

  He looked at it for a moment, turning it over carefully in his long hands. Watching him, I felt my body tightening, gathering itself the way it had in the woods in Florida as I ran toward the high-jump bar. He raised the swan to his mouth. For one literally breathless moment I thought he was going to put it down again, but he was only catching the rhythm of his breathing. He reached the top, bore down, and blew. The water rushed up the neck of the swan and streamed onto his face, a thin jet striking him on the bridge of his nose, running into his eyes, down his cheeks, and onto his shirt.

  For a fraction of a second there was silence, and in that small full instant I changed, I aged. I understood hate for the first time. No movement, no sound, no distractions at that moment when the water hung from his face like ice. Hate was in the room, the air heavy with it, Donald’s hatred for Jean, and my own instantaneously blind and bottomless hatred for Donald.

  We all laughed. Empty, short laughter as if someone were poking our bellies. Laughter from shock.

  Jean wiped the water out of his eyes, his head bent over. He wanted to know if there were any other surprises waiting for him and Donald said no, there weren’t, it was all over.

  It seemed logical to ask why my mother put up with him, but the full answer is beyond me. I know only that Jean became bored with singing very early on and they were left together with their music, practicing in the afternoons, giving an occasional recital for the experience, gradually improving their repertoire if nothing else. My mother had quickly reached the plateau of her ability. A height, it seems safe to say, few people would get dizzy contemplating.

  Aside from the music they had nothing in common. Even in his function as court jester Donald was removed from her. She missed half his jokes, getting only the tone of malice which was her signal to laugh. He was a noise in the background to which in the end she paid little attention, either musically or humanly. He was her accompanist, a kind of slave. And yet for years they supported each other. He would say of her, “Dagmar? Dagmar’s marvelous,” and she of him, laughingly, unconsciously imitating him, “Well, Donald is just Donald.”

  In fifteen years I don’t think either of them said anything that surprised the other. They had learned everything they wanted to know in the first few months. If there was a surprise it must have come later. Not in a word, or an opening of the heart, or any form of love, but in the knowledge that they gave each other nothing, for all the time they had. Can they have understood, as each approached a lonely old age, that they had denied each other’s reality? Puppets holding puppet strings, each puppet a puppet-master, in deliberate ignorance, as if life were no more than a cycle of their separate fantasies, as if there were all the time in the world.

  It’s a big stage, empty except for the Steinway grand. Around me the noise is beginning to subside. I want another seat and turn to look up the long sloping orchestra for an empty place, but the auditorium is filled. As the house lights go down people begin to hush their neighbors. I feel my upper lip twitching at the corner of my mouth and cover it with my fist. Beside me an old man is asleep, his chin almost touching his protruding collar bone, his rumpled tweed jacket open to reveal a food-stained T-shirt.

  Mr. Miller, the director, climbs onto the stage and speaks into the microphone. “And now boys and girls, a special treat. Mrs. Fouchet, whom we all know—at least most of us know her, don’t we girls?” A mattering of applause from the girls’ side. “Mrs. Fouchet is going to sings a few songs for us.” More applause as Mr. Miller climbs awkwardly down to the orchestra and takes his seat in the front row. Silence.

  Donald walks quickly from the wings and takes his place at the piano without looking at the audience. His hanging tails almost touch the floor. He bows his head, waiting.

  I hear the faint swish of her gown. She is onstage! A rush of light and color, sequins, her heels clicking against the polished wood, her body moving in a blur of swirling clothes and incandescent air. A muted gasp from the inmates at the splendid sight of her, then silence. She stands next to the Steinway, one hand touching the wood. After a moment she looks at Donald, and then back at the audience.

  Beside me the old man is awake, leaning forward to watch her, his jaw slack and his eyes blinking slowly. He lifts a long, veined hand from his knee and holds it motionless in the air. Up front a cretin in a wheelchair moans and burbles sleepily.

  Donald begins to play and my mother sings “Hills of Home.” I am not sad, not happy, not anything. My eyes fill with irrelevant tears.

  6

  Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away

  WE RETURNED to Florida early in the summer. My sister Alison stayed behind. She was only sixteen, but seemed to be very well organized and my mother felt sure she could look after herself. I was eager to go. When the old Ford finally pulled away from the curb I’d already been in the back seat for hours, examining road maps and drawing up time charts.

  Once again we drove nonstop, to save money. When Jean asked me I’d rub the back of his neck or squeeze his shoulder muscles to get the stiffness out. If I was sitting in front while Mother slept he’d take the chance to give his foot a rest. Straddling the gear shift, I’d sneak the speed up to fifty-five, curling my toes against the accelerator, edging it down millimeter by millimeter so he wouldn’t notice.

  We kept a small bottle of smelling salts in the glove compartment, an old-fashioned brand with a border of twisted rose vines on the stained label. I made the mistake of taking a good sniff once, as if it were perfume, and felt my head explode with white fire. Jean used it when he felt himself getting sleepy.

  At a small station in Delaware insects swirled around a naked bulb on a pole and a screen door creaked in the wash of traffic. The heavy trucks went by like ships, gleaming with lights, their flat exhausts splitting the air. Rumbling, long-distance monsters, they shook the earth, each one followed by a dancing kite tail of roadside trash.

  At the apex of the immense blue dome a shapeless white sun streamed down through the air, locking the world into absolute stillness and silence. Heat. Wave after radiant wave passing through trees, palmettos, and deserted barracks as if they didn’t exist, as if they were only images trembling on the air between sun and sand. Standing on the slightly pitched roof, my hand shielding my eyes, I could see three miles in every direction. My vision skimmed over the neatly spaced buildings, then higher, over the tops of the pine trees in a slow circle. Nothing moved. Far away, the sea. At the horizon a motionless black spiral of smoke hung slanting against the sky. The ship had been visible earlier in the day. Now it was gone.

  Climbing back to the peak of the roof through the still air, I felt the film of sweat on my naked chest and shoulders evaporate in an instant of coolness. The Stanley hammer I’d bought with my own money hung rakishly from a loop on the side of my blue jeans and a carpenter’s apron half full of drawn nails bumped against my thighs with a pleasant weight. Way down at the other end of the roof Jean knelt at his work, bent over, his slender brown back gleaming with sweat. Pulling at the tongs with his long arms, he’d draw a nail, wincing at the sharp, incredibly loud screech of sound.

  We had paid th
e federal government a small fee for the right to scavenge lumber from an abandoned Army base near Boca Raton. “Good, tough, seasoned boards,” Jean had said. “No shrinkage!” He held his hands in the air and smiled at the simplicity of it, as if shrinkage was the one great obstacle mankind had failed to overcome, the key problem holding everyone back from the realization of his dreams. Filled with awe at the power of ideas, as drunk as any scientist or philosopher, he hardly noticed it was almost as much work to dismantle a building as to construct one, or that we had to buy a truck to move the lumber. He was happy, eager to work every day, even letting me join him in the interesting jobs instead of standing on the sidelines.

  The boards on the roof were one by twelves, about ten feet long. Nails were drawn with a special tool, after which one could simply lift the board from the supporting studs and slide it down to the edge of the roof. Like a seesaw one end would drop out of sight while the other rose gracefully into the air, pivoting away as the board fell with a satisfying clatter onto the others below.

  “Frank!”

  I dropped on my stomach and let my head hang down into the black hole where I’d removed some boards. Holding the edge of the plank to keep from slipping, I must have looked, from the inside, like Kilroy against the sky —curled fingers, head, curled fingers. “What?” On days when I did a man’s work, removing half as many boards as Jean and occasionally more than my mother, I allowed a certain grown-up tone to emerge in my voice. “What is it?” “Lunch,” my mother said.