“Beth? Sure. Sweet kid. Loves to tap-dance,” Max said.
Samson gave Max’s hand an authoritative squeeze, shepherding him back to the present.
“Beth died, Uncle Max. Remember? About five years ago now.”
Max blinked and pulled his hand away. He seemed hurt by this brash statement of the facts.
“You like chocolate?” Max asked in a lowered voice, changing the subject. “It just so happens that I have some in my room. Not Hershey’s, the other kind. I’m not supposed to eat it. High blood pressure. But I happen to have some I won’t say how.” Then, as if in retaliation, he added, “I’ll tell you who liked chocolate: my sister-in-law’s girl, Beth. She loved chocolate. She had these shoes. What do you call them, Mary Janes. With the little metal taps. You could hear her coming down the hall. She would dance and then I would give her chocolate. Come—you want, I’ll give you. Not Hershey’s.”
There was something pitiful and moving about the offer of the generic chocolate—not the best stuff, not the all-American candy bar, the one they rained down on starving children after the war, airlifted in cartons the kids ripped open with their teeth, not that one but the other kind, as if there were only Hershey’s and the rest, America and the rest. There was something about the meagerness of the offer that made it seem cruel not to accept.
Samson agreed, and taking the handlebars of Max’s wheelchair, turned him toward the door. Max turned stiffly, his face clouding over. “Shhh! Keep your voice down,” he hissed, though Samson had not spoken loudly. “I don’t want any trouble.”
The Max that Samson remembered had had a resistance to authority and made a mockery of it at any cost. Once he had to be bailed out of jail after a small traffic violation because when the police officer had pulled him over he’d handed over the contents of his wallet piece by piece like a Marx Brothers scene—old movie stubs, business cards, his library card—everything except his license. Afterward Max had reenacted the scene to anyone who would listen, laughing uproariously each time. It seemed to Samson now that this pleasure in ridiculing figures of authority was in some way Max’s own muted form of protest against the injustice of fate, against the Nazis who had taken his family and destroyed all traces of his former life. Samson felt a jolt of compassion for Max, the singular, sad beauty of kinship. He squeezed his great-uncle’s shoulder as he piloted him along, palpating it through the robe as if Max were a wrecked boxer about to make a last appearance in the ring.
On the way to Max’s room they passed a glassed-in area where ten or twelve residents stood in front of a cluster of chairs. A plump, animated woman of about sixty, wearing a yellow leotard and tights, stood in front of the room gaily singing “It’s Silver Motion Time! It’s Silver Motion Time!” The class joined in with a strangled chorus like roosters trying to keep tune with a fat canary. “It’s Silver Motion Time! Silver Motion Time!” Out in the hall, the old prizefighter brightened up and clapped along.
“That’s Ruth Westerman,” Max announced, joining in with the others in a robust and still melodious tenor.
“Now move your head up and down, yes, yes, yes,” Ruth sang out, and the bedraggled troupe nodded their heads yes, yes, yes. “Beautiful! Now shake your head from side to side, no, no, no,” and like lemmings they followed her, no, no, no. The champ shook his head as well: No Hershey’s! No trouble! No I don’t remember who you are! “What else can we move?” Ruth sang out, and a host of suggestions came back, conservative at first—“Our eyebrows!” “Our fingers!”—then increasingly bolder—“Our arms!” “Our legs!”—until finally a booming command—“OUR PELVIS!” Ruth Westerman turned to the doorway where the suggestion had come from. Max was still clapping. “Our pelvis!” he repeated. It took a moment for her to absorb the idea. “Our pelvis!” she finally called out, raunchily pumping her hips. After a moment of confusion about the new choreography the seniors also joined in, rocking and swaying in assent.
It occurred to Samson that Ruth Westerman, now swiveling her groin (“Stir it! Stir it! Stir it!”), was about the age his mother would have been if she were still alive. That Ruth Westerman should be leading a geriatric dance team in a charade of scandalous motion while his mother lay still for all eternity in a box was too much. All he wanted was to visit her, to pay his respects, to lay his weary head down on her small plot of earth. After that it didn’t matter. After that Ruth Westerman could march a whole Silver Motion army over them both for all he cared. He jerked Max’s wheelchair around, stripping the class of its second-in-command, who continued to happily thump his thigh as he rolled down the hall.
Max’s room was small and cramped. Even with his personal belongings it looked like a hospital room, like the tragically decorated rooms of the terminally ill who’ve given up paying rent outside. On the wall were four framed views of the Italian city as seen from above. The tiny crosshatched streets and the little churches were all rendered with the tender, compulsive passion of a grieving lover. The strangest and most haunting showed the city as a concave curving around the globe, as if the Italian city of Max’s youth was all that remained in the world, its geometry bending to encompass the earth.
Other than the drawings there were mostly books. A set of about ten oversize volumes bound in black leather struck Samson’s eye. It looked like they would be a challenge for Max to drag them off the shelf. Examining their German titles, their unabridged girth and uniform darkness, it did not seem impossible to Samson that they contained a lifetime of wisdom, that somehow everything in Max’s brain had been meticulously copied down there in tiny print, setting him free to roam the pastures of oblivion.
The room overlooked the front lawn. From the window Samson could see his ride vigorously nodding to the music. He wondered how much time was left before the driver got fed up and drove off without him.
“So you want the chocolate, Max?”
“You have chocolate?”
“I thought you did.”
“How did you know?” Max seemed genuinely surprised. “It just so happens I do. Where I put it, that I don’t know. Here you have to hide things. Leave something out in the open and like that, they confiscate it. Gone.” He angrily swiped the air. “Someone, I don’t know who, once sent me cookies. What do you call it, fresh-baked. They let me have a couple and then they took the rest. On account of my high blood pressure. Bastards.”
The remark surprised Samson, delivered in a tone that sounded so distinctly like the Uncle Max he remembered, the wry and contentious man who refused to bend to the petty orders of the traffic police. That he should end up here, ferreting around for a few crumbs of illegal chocolate, seemed a miserable and cruel degradation. Samson let out a sharp sigh. Max turned to him, his eyes keen and focused, and for an instant he seemed to be actually registering his great-nephew’s presence. Then the moment vaporized and his face blurred back to infirmity. “Bastards,” he said again, as if he were repeating something he’d heard someone else say.
Max wanted to take off his robe, and so Samson helped him to his feet and peeled it off. It was spotted with crusty patches like the matted fur of some insufficiently domesticated animal. Underneath Max wore wrinkled pajamas, the bottoms of which ended at his shins.
“Okay.” Max rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go!”
Off they went, Samson gamely moving from shelf to shelf like a child looking for the afikomen—Warm, warm, warmer!—while Max coached from his wheelchair: “Open that little box! That’s a music box. You heard that song before? It’s a waltz. I got that I don’t know where. Maybe Bavaria. Any chocolate in there? No? All right, look behind that book.” Warmer, warmer, COLD! “Not that one! The one on the left, the big book. See if I hid the chocolate behind that. No? Fine. What about the desk? Maybe I put it there.”
Samson sifted through the tumble of empty eyeglass cases, uncapped pens, old checkbooks, and mismatched earrings like an underwater diver in a flooded city. This was the detritus left over at the end of a life. He did not really e
xpect to find the chocolate. It had probably never existed, or if it had, most likely that had been decades ago, a long-lost bar of chocolate that in Max’s mind had become the El Dorado of candy.
“Nope, nope, nope. Next,” Max ordered as Samson opened each drawer and searched through it.
Samson closed the last drawer. The sky had begun to turn dark. It saddened him that he would have to leave Max soon, and for a moment he forgot why he’d come. He picked up a jar of salve off the desk and held it up.
“What’s this?”
“That? Let me see it.” Max brought it close to his face, and when he couldn’t make out the label he busily unscrewed the cap and stuck his nose into it. There was a blast of menthol. He frowned. “Oh, that. They rub it on my chest sometimes, when I have trouble breathing.”
“How about I rub some on for you right now?”
“Naaa!” Max hastily screwed the top back on the jar and tried to shoo Samson away. “I don’t need it! It smells terrible. What do I need it for? I’m breathing fine. Vicks, I think they call it.”
“Why not put some on before you have trouble breathing? Come on, off with the pajama top.”
Max struggled but Samson grasped him by the shoulders and worked him out of the top. Defeated, shirtless, the champ obediently shuffled over to the bed. Spurred by the medicinal vapors of the Vicks, perhaps Max could produce the name of the cemetery. Samson scooped out a gob of the ointment and began to work it into his uncle’s leathery chest. Max seemed unmoved by this sudden act of intimacy. Either he was used to being handled by strangers or he was no longer capable of astonishment. His eyes turned glassy as Samson massaged his wrinkled breasts, the once powerful frame still sinewy.
“How does it feel?”
“Fine. All right. I didn’t need it but it feels all right.” “I need to ask you something, Max. Can you answer something for me?”
“Sure. Okay, I can try.”
“Remember Beth?”
“Sure. Sweet kid. Takes tap lessons—”
“She’s dead, Max!” Samson exploded. “She grew up, she stopped tap-dancing, and she died!”
Max stiffened, and right away Samson felt guilty for having lost his temper. Exhaustion, the pressure of the waiting taxi, and the sadness of not being recognized by Max had made him edgy. Struggling to regain his composure, he worked the Vicks into his great-uncle’s shoulders, kneading the atrophied muscles. Through his fingertips he felt the faint heat of Max’s skin.
“There’s a lot I’d like to tell you if I had the time and you could understand,” he began. The only sign that Max could hear him at all was a slight relaxation of the shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe the things that happened to me. I’m so tired I could sleep for days. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself—I don’t. I’d even like to think that one day I might laugh about all this. Sitting in a room, in a house far away from everything. Just sitting by the window watching the leaves outside and suddenly I’d begin to laugh. Because it will all feel so long ago, in another lifetime, like it happened to someone else.”
He was settling into the monologue now, content just to be heard if not understood, like talking over the radio, not knowing if one’s voice would reach anyone, but knowing that it was out there nonetheless, traveling the waves.
“I mean, how many someone elses can one claim to be in a lifetime? It’s not very long a life, is it, Max? You’re a kid, it’s summer, you blink your eyes and years—years—have passed. And you realize that you’ve become someone else, but that your heart is still caught in that lost kid. That what you’re left with beating in your chest is a diminished thing, a shadow of what it was when you were a boy and running under the night sky you felt it was filled to bursting.”
Samson sighed and dropped his hands into his lap. Max sat with his head bent, leaning forward as if in prayer.
“You’re lucky, Max, that you remember your wife. Maybe you even remember mine. Her name is Anna, a very beautiful woman. Whenever I think about her now, I’m struck by her beauty. She’s the sort of woman who—how can I explain it?—you never know what she’s thinking. Or maybe it was only me who didn’t know.” He wondered whether Max heard the desperation in his voice. Quickly he got to the point. “I shouldn’t be going on like this, I’m sorry. Look, I just need to know where my mother is buried.”
Max was silent and Samson lifted his hands to his face and pressed his eyelids, forgetting that they were coated in Vicks. The sting was terrible. He rushed to the sink and pushed his face under the tap. When he straightened up, his eyes were bloodshot in the mirror. Over his shoulder he saw a blurred Max struggling to his feet.
“Sit down!” he cried as he stumbled toward the unsteady figure of his great-uncle. He regretted raising his voice as Max collapsed back onto the bed like a puppet and sat with his head hung, blinking. Gently, enunciating each syllable, struggling against forces far greater than himself and Max, than the small room at the end of a life, Samson forged on. “Is she buried with the others? Next to Aunt Clara, maybe? Where is the cemetery, Max?”
A long silence and then, miraculously, Max answered.
“She’s not there,” he muttered.
HOT! You’re boiling! Eyes still streaming from the Vicks, Samson began to pump Max’s shoulders again, increasing the blood flow to his brain, closing in on the dim glow of recognition.
“Not there? Where? At the cemetery with the rest? Why isn’t she there?”
“Not there. Nope.”
Max lunged for the jar of Vicks as if to put a halt to any further interrogation. Nope, nope, nope. Next. The lid fell and rolled across the floor. Indignantly he said, “They don’t rub it into my back.”
“They don’t do that? Why not? It’s good to get the lungs from behind.” Samson pulled over the desk chair and planted himself in front of Max. “Why isn’t she at the cemetery, Max?”
A pained look flashed across Max’s face. He patted his leg as if tapping out a distress signal. Samson took him firmly by the shoulders.
“Please, I’m begging you. Where is she if she’s not at the cemetery?”
Max looked up, his eyes bright and feverish, gripped with sudden lucidity. Without warning, like an illegal blow to the groin, he answered, “Cremated.”
The old man turned to look out the window. Outside, the light was thin and blue. Stooped, half-naked, embalmed in Vicks, he seemed already of the otherworld.
Samson hadn’t slept in about forty-eight hours, not since the day before he’d left Vegas. Had it really only been today that he boarded the bus at dawn? He felt dizzy and weak in the knees. He struggled for air, his breath coming in short gasps. He tried to pry open the window but it was locked shut. It was all a joke, an absurd dream. In his nightly wanderings he had drifted too far. He had been held up, arrested in a stalled moment above the rooftops but soon he would wake again in his own bed, in a world of natural laws and common tasks. He would drowsily grope along the hallway to his mother’s bedroom and pushing open the door he would find her asleep, her body under the steady sway of her breath, her red dress crumpled on the chair.
He pressed his forehead against the glass, trying to steady himself. Max might as well have told him that she had been buried in space, launched in a shuttle and set loose, her regulation hospital nightgown floating around her weightless body.
Cremated?
That’s what I said.
You’re saying they put her in a combustible box with her clothes folded at her feet and slid her into an oven? That I let them pulverize her remains and then accepted a container of what was left, a few handfuls of sooty matter?
Samson turned, but his great-uncle’s head was bowed. He seemed terribly still, as if he were listening, and Samson realized that he hadn’t spoken at all, that the voice he’d just heard, clear as day, was inside his head.
He tried to compose himself. Cremated? She might as well have been hacked to bits on a mountaintop in the Himalayas and left to be eaten by a horde of ready vultu
res, this news was so horrifically exotic, so unexpected. She must have wanted it, written it down someplace, because it was impossible to believe that even in the most florid gesture of grief he had taken matters into his own hands and decided to set alight his mother’s body. What had he known then of grief?
It was as if some possibility had been foreclosed. Twilight had settled over the room, casting Max’s face in shadow. The conversation continued in Samson’s head.
And the ashes? What did I do with them? Scattered them in some panoramic spot?
The ashes?
Yes.
You don’t remember?
Can’t say I do.
At the house.
Our old house? Where other people are living now, total strangers—I left her there?
Nah! You buried her. In the backyard. You put her under that tree, what do you call it.
The magnolia?
Right. The magnolia. You buried her under there.
Where we buried the dog? I buried her ashes in the backyard with the dog?
Yeah, with the dog.
This was my idea?
What do I know?
You think this is a joke?
No I don’t. Nope. Next.
Do you remember me, Max?
You?
Max was inert, his head resting on his chest. He had fallen asleep. The whole ordeal had exhausted him and he’d simply tucked his head under and checked out.
Samson ran a finger along the spines of the books, trying to steady himself. He thought about what Ray was doing at this very moment, if he was forging on with his project, already picking up a new Output at the airport, driving the man home in his sleek white convertible. Going through the whole act, the house and the thistle tea. Because the truth was that Ray believed in the goodness of his work. He would see the man as a worthy sacrifice for a greater cause; he would make the man feel his worth. For a brief moment Samson considered calling someone—the police, the newspapers—and leading them to the lab in the desert to save the man from harm and expose the whole thing for what it was, not progress at all but a sad and dangerous thing. But who would listen to him? He was half-convinced that if he returned to Clearwater he would find that it had vanished without a trace, dismantled and boxed up overnight so that not even a scrap was left. Where it once stood only the faint hiss of the desert. Maybe one day, a day sometime in the future when his anger had disappeared and he could speak—backed by memory and wisdom—with an eloquence as convincing as Ray’s, he would find the doctor and tell him how impossibly wrong he had been.
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