It’s obvious, in retrospect, what I should have done. I should have gone over to the couch and issued a soft but impatient order: “All right, old man. Tell me what’s the matter.” I ought to have made clear to him that it no longer mattered what happened then. I should have given my one, obvious reason why he should stick around, here, now, healed. Back in the present.
But I had no idea of what the present was. All the headlines agreed that the old place was dead. But what at that moment struggled to replace it was anyone’s guess. I should have forced my father to return to the local urgencies of this place, this year. But I could not tell him how to find his way back to them. I had no more sense of ’78 than he had had of ’42, on the rumor-filled ball fields at sixteen. I was not even sure the trade-off was fair.
Thinking of that evening, I am filled with revisions. I allowed my father to lose me in the dominant tense. I looked at the man lying prostrate on the couch, jaundiced, debilitated, crazy with fever, a sardonic smile holding down the terminal gut-retch welling up in him. But all I could see was the boy of sixteen, the one he had told me of, involved in the enterprise of screening the files for his potential helpmate. I saw him attending school, perfecting his evening waiter’s act, memorizing Miller’s serenades, dabbling at lifting the long ball, wading through the whole mid-teen High Lutheran cycle of devotion, apostasy, and disgust, breezing through algebra on his way to an engineering career, alternately too serious and too irreverent for a boy his age, and, most of all, agonizingly waiting for his eighteenth birthday to enlist, but in the meantime daily wearing, even when it clashed with his civvies or his waiter’s duck-tail suit, a bright blue-and-white pin, obtained three years before at the General Motors Futurama exhibit highlighting the world of 1960, that bore the inscription “I Have Seen the Future.”
5
Eddie Jr. thought it the classic routine. Artie snapped him the pigskin and trotted leisurely, like the geezer pushing thirty that he was, up Second Street. Eddie waved him downfield with the universally recognized quarterback’s hand motion for a big-play bomb: deep, deep, deeper. Then, when the sucker was incredibly, ridiculously deep, and it became obvious even to Artie that nobody in hell could possibly chuck a football that far, Eddie Jr. reversed his hand motion and waved big brother back in. Artie did all that he could do to save face in the situation: he grinned sheepishly, I’ve been had. He yelled “Asshole” into the crisp, bowl-game air, scrambling to reverse his fly pattern as if wise to the joke from the beginning.
“You talkin’ to me?” little Eddie yelled, upfield. “I’m an asshole? What a terrible, terrible thing to call your baby brother. I may be an asshole, but at least I’m not the one doing the scatter pattern.” This small blow was no retaliation for the dozen years of sadism that Arthur and the girls had enjoyed at his expense. Eddie was too nice a fellow to retaliate. Even his anger was benevolent. Nevertheless, the comeback gratified him, and for the next few passes, he took a little something off his return spirals, as apology.
They lobbed the ball to one another with an earnest relaxation, as if this were not the big game but only the warm-up. Artie threw for precision—the ICBM guided all the way from Vladivostock to the neighborhood junior high school, landing after twenty thousand miles in the third aisle of the faculty parking lot. Eddie preferred the wild but flashy hot-dog pass—the flee-flicker, Statue of Liberty, double-reverse, play-action fake. His were heat-seekers, or TOWs, not the most reliable missiles in the world but undeniably novel technology. The brothers shuttled the ball back and forth in the expectant daylight, Artie for accuracy, Eddie imitating the dramatic vees of last month’s departing geese. They did not throw hard. The air was now cold enough, however, that even relaxing one’s spine required work.
A handful of flamboyant goal-line heroics later, Eddie Jr. collapsed to earth, using the pigskin as a pillow. Artie, his yearly autumn anxiety once more welling up in him—you’re wasting time; you’ll die in school as the world unfolds out here—lay next to his brother, uncushioned on the iron ground. “I think,” began Eddie, in confidential burlesque, “I know what’s wrong with your father.”
Artie did not turn his head. “Great. But it’s your father we’re trying to diagnose, buddy.”
“Know how he always sort of curls up when it comes on, cringes all of a sudden, like?” Eddie’s speech, whenever he tried to sound serious, grew awkwardly casual, returning by reverse evolution to the embryonic speech of his grandmother, a rich, weird branch of Lower Manhattan, Southern European English. Her inflections slopped back out of the melting pot to claim him. He recalled her telling of how eighty years earlier she had caught a wild turkey in the prairies of what was now only a half hour out of downtown Hoboken. “Flinching,” Eddie continued, a victim of diction. “You’ve seen it: like he’s bracing for something. And then—watch him next time. Always this upwards sweep of the eyes.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Artie, quietly. “So what are you suggesting? The Henny Penny syndrome?”
“In a manner of speaking, my man. À la 1978. Put it together, mofo. What’s on the news these days, almost every night?”
“Basketball scores?”
“Besides that, you overeducated nit. ‘Scientists fire retros, wrestle to stabilize Skylab. Details at ten.’”
Artie tried to imagine Pop obsessed with the idea that an artificial moon, out-of-control, threatening to crash any month now, had his name on it. He imagined Dad, periodically tearing his family out from their established bunker and insisting they remain moving targets, lately growing convinced of a terrible destiny, a celestial downward arc that, no matter how he wound his path across the map, would soon swoop down for the final interception. SPACECRAFT BITES MAN. Despite going a ways toward explaining Pop’s secondary symptoms, his brother’s interpretation was too far on the tabloid side, even for Dad.
“Where’d you get that idea, the supermarket check-out line? I thought I told you to stop reading newspapers that carry alien-invasion stories as their main headlines.” He tried unsuccessfully to pull the football out from under his brother’s stout neck.
“Ha! I suppose you want me to start reading that New York liberal rag of yours, now that I’ve grown up? How can you trust a paper that hasn’t covered sports adequately since sculling went out of fashion? No way, palomino. And I think you ought to quit denying the obvious. Your dad’s bracing himself for falling space stations.”
“But what about the high fever? And the vomiting?” Only after making these objections did Artie realize their ridiculousness. He had once more been utterly duped. Things had gotten so far out of hand that he had forgotten that his brother’s suggestion had been facetious. Dad had, after all, been dosing out since long before Sputnik. Eddie Jr. had tricked him into taking a second downfield hand wave seriously. Artie thought of how he used to run riot over the kid. Once he could have gotten him to believe anything. But something had turned for the worse between the two of them in the last few years. Artie confronted the awful possibility that under the stress of current events, he had somehow become the gullible one.
Eddie enjoyed the advantage. “Yeah. You’re right. What about the vomiting? I mean, if I were about to be hit with NASA’s finest, I’d want it to be on a full stomach.” When his older brother did not reply, Eddie added, contritely and sadly, “Joke, Artie,” too late to unscrape the wound.
Artie stayed in his vacuum of sound, committing himself no further to little bro’s truce than the ambiguous gesture of pinching the bridge of his nose. He conceded that Edski was funny. The kid had a natural punchline, as with so much else. Even when pretending acerbity, Eddie was nicer and kinder than was safe. His little brother would swallow his phlegm sooner than offend anyone by spitting. But certain facts about the littlest Hobson had by now made themselves apparent to Artie. Artie felt that the kid, in coming of age, had reneged on an understanding, had become a questionable quantity. One could not, for instance, send him to the store with a twenty-dollar bill and expe
ct to retrieve full face value on the remaining change. Eddie would come back with coins of varying denominations spread over his person and would spend weeks pulling singles out of hitherto undiscovered pockets, remarking in surprise, “Hey, check this out! I’m loaded.”
Each time Artie headed back to U. of C. Law to knock out another semester, he hoped that upon his next return his brother would at last demonstrate competence. But Eddie Jr. remained the same—cheerfully inept. Coupled with his proven unreliability, linked to it in a way that Artie couldn’t put his finger on, was Eddie’s alarming propensity for making friends, a practice the male Hobsons had scrupulously avoided for centuries. Soon it would be Thanksgiving, and through the startled house would pass sundry craigs and barbaras and kellys and bobs, each of whom Eddie would take pains to introduce to the family, optimistically beginning, “You all remember . . .” knowing full well that nobody did.
Artie lay perfectly still, feeling each breath, staving off hypothermia through sheer will. He thought back to the last time he had felt any urge to bring an acquaintance over to the house. It couldn’t have been later than third grade. He had discovered early on the effect of his father’s erratic illness on his friends. Easier not to bring outsiders by, easier to stay just outside the arms’ length of intimacy. But his little brother had somehow achieved membership in that envious class that Artie had long since banished himself from. His own flesh and blood had become a joiner—the very class that had persecuted Artie throughout school for having to base his image on intellect rather than social confidence. Little Eddie had arrived in the islands of the well liked, a place as mysterious to Artie as his father’s mythic town. His brother and he had inexplicably ended up in opposing camps.
Aside from last night’s glimmer of a calamined summer on the Pacific, Artie’s memory of his own childhood was far less powerful than his recall of encyclopedia facts. His first vivid recollection of being driven out of the safe haven of simplicity was of one winter day when his father explained a joke that precocious Artie had read in a book that lay beyond his six years: “A: There’s a man at the door with a package marked C.O.D. B: Sounds fishy to me.” Typically, Pop explained the punchline recursively, saying the joke itself sounded fishy to him. Only after little Artie wailed in protest did Dad explain the play on words and the obsolete cultural practice of cash on delivery.
Artie recalled Dad proceeding to free-associate on fish names, telling his son, with the utmost urgency and solemnity, what he claimed was the world’s longest palindrome: “Doc, note, I dissent; a fast never prevents a fatness: I diet on cod.” And closing his eyes on the frozen-over front-yard football field, Artie could still summon the precise look of mysterious intensity filling the man’s face as he turned to his firstborn and said, “What’ll you give me if I say it backward?” From that moment, the boy’s relations with the outside world carried the complication of two directions.
Artie suspected the trauma that scattered his early memories beyond regrouping and the trauma that instructed him with childlike sensitivity not to bring friends over to the house were the same. Making this connection, Artie understood that his folks, who in their Jersey heyday had been the epicenter for the Mid-Atlantic Charter of the Drop-in-for-Cocktails-Unannounced League, must have been compelled by the same decorum to make their steady decline out of sight. They became once-a-monthers at the Other Guys’ place. At last they achieved their current status, quarantined in Fortress Second Street, One-Oh-Three. Society itself had not outgrown the spontaneous visit, as Artie had for some time vaguely concluded. The Hobsons alone had something solicitors shunned and arbiters avoided.
Yet somehow Eddie Jr. had escaped, immune. With his easy grace—a trait lurking recessive in the Hobson genotype for generations—he made friends broadly and indiscriminately. Peers of both sexes genuinely liked him and, most remarkable to Artie, found nothing unusual in him or his old man. No doubt little Eddie (this particularly filled Arthur with horror) even joked away his dad’s pathology with these perfect strangers as he had just tried to do with his brother. Artie would have winced thinking about it; but not wanting to give Eddie any cause to think that he too had the first stages of Skylab sickness, he froze his face into a slate of pleasantry.
Granted the girls had had their friends as well. Lily had even taken the extreme, although temporary, step of marrying outside the family. But none of those developments alarmed Artie so much as Eddie Jr.’s defection. His sisters were different, in a way that Artie would not dare to articulate to anyone of his own stratum. They were not true Hobsons, but had the name only on extended loan. He kept this distinction to himself, knowing he could never explain his sexist medievalism to the enlightened organic fascists of his law-school class. Nor could he hope to convince his contemporaries that such a lack was not a failing but a freedom. Hobson’s Choice was one asset he would have gladly come out from under.
Eddie, oblivious to all his brother mulled over, kept at the wisecracks. Adopting a falsetto, he said, “The Skylab is falling, the Skylab is falling.” When Artie looked over and smiled sweetly, Little Brother, understanding that he had transgressed worse by trying to appease, shifted back down ottava. He asked, “Well what do you think it is, really?” The boys—those saddled with the liability of a lasting last name—began hashing out the fine points of what had until then been a politely avoided division of opinion.
As his joke indicated, Eddie came down squarely in the Your-Father-Is-Ill-of-His-Own-Accord camp. What ailed Eddie Sr., as far as his namesake made out, was part and parcel of the fellow himself. “Tell you what, Artie. I’ll grant the man is clearly in the middle of a medical catastrophe. But when hasn’t he been? Sick for as long as we’ve known him, anyway. He makes sure the fits get a little more devastating every year. It’s a tradition. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Pop. Can you imagine him completely well?” He spun the football on end in the palm of his hand, adopting the tone of a play-by-play. “Pop wants to be on this road. Nobody’s put him on it. Hell, Pop built the road himself. Pop is the road, no?” It wasn’t clear whom he was convincing. “Maybe Granny toilet-trained him with glaring lights and loud noises. That’s it. And now he’s gotta have it undone by analysis, has to cure himself by one of them . . . what’s it called, Artie?”
“Catharsis?” Artie suggested, unpersuaded.
“Yeah, one of them catheters,” Eddie smiled. First, he’d cure his brother. Then they could talk about Dad. The whole unintelligible complex of symptoms seemed to Eddie easier to parody as an absurd infant trauma than to assault medically. Parody, at least, kept them uninfected. To Eddie, the art of the wince and blackout didn’t hinge on anything; it was simply the only way Dad could absorb the massive accidents that the Big Picture dealt the Little. And to Eddie Jr., nothing could be crazier or less called for. He himself saw the everyday more as a reprieve than a punishment. Even the words to state his case against Dad lay half a step beyond his active vocabulary. “Pop won’t let Pop alone. Passing out is just his way of dealing with himself. Oh, I don’t know . . . you know? Know what I mean, bean?” He asked the question as a way of peacemaking, pretending the issues were still open. He knew without Artie’s ever having spoken a word to that effect that they came from as far across opposing sides of the tracks as imaginable. But he wanted badly to agree.
Artie responded in litigant’s form, watered down so that Little Eddie wouldn’t take to travesty. “Disagree. The way I see it, Pop’s disorder must be somatic. Lumps in the neck and armpits, for instance, are not your typical hysterical symptoms. We have to assume the disorder is real until it’s proven invented.” And suddenly, he remembered a night last summer, passing the bathroom door, hearing the man lurching his soft bowel up into the toilet. He felt a sympathetic cloud of nausea that made all negotiation for recovery pointless and repellent. At the remembered sound of his father’s pulpy, mulched insides hitting water, the sickness became real.
He sat up. “What we need to do, since the fool is afraid o
f a walk-in clinic, is to get a copy of a Merck Manual or a Stedman’s dictionary and work up a differential diagnosis as systematically as possible. Otherwise, we’re reduced to guesswork. And the man wants to keep us guessing.” He did not look at his brother. He put his hands out in front of him to receive the football, and Eddie, without looking, lobbed it to him.
“So what do you want us to do? Traipse up to the librarian at De Kalb Public? ‘We think our Pop’s buying the farm. Got any helpful printed matter?’” Eddie giggled, then sobered quickly. “Artie, if it were something real, the guy would have been dead years ago.” Eddie Jr. declined to follow up his point. For most of his eighteen years, he had lived for his brother’s occasional, affectionate nod. But now, when it mattered, he could not bring himself to concede to Big Brother’s plan. “You make it sound like we have to stop him this week or never. Christ, Artie, what’s waiting another month or two to see what happens?” Eddie himself rejected this even as he said it. “We probably missed our last chance to help him five years back.”
Artie did not admit that he’d been waiting for Eddie to turn eighteen so that it could at last be the two of them against one. Here, on their backs, on the hard ground, Artie saw that it would never be two against one. It would always remain mixed singles.
To assure himself that he had not yet conceded the issue, Artie suggested an assortment of possible pathologies. Meantime, Eddie tossed the football straight up in the air, difficult from a prone position, snaring it one-handed. Artie would say, “Parasitic infection,” the ball would go whoosh, and Eddie would do his Raymond Berry. Then Artie would say, “No, stool’s normal, as far as anybody can tell.” He’d say, “Brain lesions,” the ball would go whoosh, and so it went. By the time Artie proposed leukemia, Eddie had accumulated an amazing four hundred–plus yards on shoestring catches, enough for the record books.
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