He lived in a neighborhood of sidewalks and shade trees. Houses were white with black or forest green shutters and window boxes hung from porch rails and first floor windows. Women swept the sidewalks wearing aprons and men in ties with coats slung over their arms picked up the newspaper from the front lawn as they got out of their cars in the late afternoon and went inside to see what was for supper. Children rode bicycles in the street and a busted nose from a bad hop in a stickball game or the anxiety of falling in love for the first time was the height of trouble. He learned from his father not to get too close or too far away from anyone or anything and was treated much like his father treated the family hardware business, with attention and concern to make sure he was functioning correctly.
Work. That was what his father talked about around the dinner table. In between flipping the pages of the sports section. This family has run on work for generations. And you’ll do the same one day. You’ll walk into my office and it will be your office and then it will be your son’s office and so forth and so on. This is a fine business to learn. Runs itself. But you got to know what you’re doing, how to talk to people, how to listen even if you’re not really listening because you’ll hear about it all. Not only how many lug nuts or quarts of oil they need but what a hassle it is to get the frame square or how much the rain has set everybody back or my wife has been nagging me for weeks to get this done. You’ll hear it all and you got to listen.
Then getting a little older and his father offering him coffee. Nick feeling like a bigshot and getting up early for school and beating them down to the kitchen. Taking the white mugs from the counter and setting them on the table next to the sugar bowl. Taking the small bottle of milk from the icebox and setting it next to the sugar and waiting for them to come down. Calling. Come on. I got it ready. His mother and father coming into the kitchen with brushed hair and tied robes and his mother set the coffee to brew and they settled at the table with their son.
During these stretches of contentment he always noticed something in the eyes of his father when his father looked at his mother. Something almost mournful, a tenderness and a happiness but blended with the distance of loss. Sometimes she caught him looking at her and she would smile and maybe even blush but mostly Nick watched his father as he stared at her. His mother unaware as she washed dishes or read in her spot at the end of the sofa or wrote a thank you note to the host of some party or dinner they had attended the weekend before. His father’s watchful and careful eyes settled on the placid nature of his mother and at times Nick sensed the wonder in his father’s stare and other times he sensed desperation.
There was work and school and church. Birthdays and anniversaries. Cooked meals and blue blossoms in the yard and old leaves twirling in the chill wind and smoke from the chimney. The sunlight falling into the bay windows in the early morning and his father walking up the driveway at the same time each evening. The rhythm of being.
But these stretches were interrupted by other things. By a blackness that interrupted the periods of goodness and stayed with them for weeks. Months. Closed doors and the curtains pulled. The docile nature of an evening of conversation replaced by the lull of electric light or the clatter of dishes in the sink. His father downstairs and his mother upstairs in the bedroom. The bedroom door locked. The light off behind the door. Great spaces of solitude in the same house that was sometimes filled with the smiling faces of friends and family but during this blackness the house seemed to grow and the space seemed to stretch in height and spread in width and Nick was left to wonder where the voices had gone.
His mother disappeared during these times and he was left to his own in the afternoons after school. His aunts dropped by to check on him and sometimes took him for ice cream. But she’s here, he wanted to say. You don’t need to check on me. She’s here. But she was only there behind the door and he knew that too. They left casseroles or leftover chicken and mashed potatoes for him and his father to eat for dinner. They left soup to take up to his mother as she would eat little else during this time. His father came home from work in the evening and walked into the silent house and pursed his lips and looked around. Looked past Nick as if he wasn’t there.
Mom is upstairs, Nick would say though he hadn’t been asked.
I know where your mother is. Have you seen her?
No.
Are you hungry?
Yes.
Do you have homework?
I finished it.
Did you call for her when you came home?
Yes.
What did you do?
I went to her door and knocked and asked if she was feeling better. I told her I was home and that if she needed anything to tell me. She said okay.
Did she say anything else?
Nick would shake his head.
At night Nick would go upstairs to his mother’s room to tell her good night and she would let him in. Read with me, she said and Nick sat beside the bed with three or four books to pick from and he read to her as she lay propped on pillows and she held the blanket underneath her chin as if cold or scared. When he finished one book he would ask if he could read another and she would say yes until he had read everything he had brought with him. In the better times he was the one lying under the covers and she was the one at his bedside reading but during the blackness the roles reversed and when he was done reading he kissed her forehead and tucked the covers around her. Asked her if she wanted to say a prayer and she said no but be sure and say yours before you go to sleep. She carried heavy eyes and her color gone and sometimes her hair matted against the side of her head where she had been sleeping all the day long. Nick kissed her and held the books under his arm and then he would go back downstairs to find his father and most nights his father was not in the house but outside.
He had helped his father build a redbrick firepit in the backyard the summer he was ten and when his mother went behind the door his father had taken to standing in the dark and burning newspapers in the pit. He never kept them when she was part of their lives but when she was held by the blackness he stacked them next to his reading chair. Separated the sections and rolled them before he went to bed and wrapped rubber bands around the ends to give them the form of a baton. He kept the rolls stacked neatly on a shelf in the garage and each night after he and Nick had found something to eat and after they had exchanged what few words his father could muster, he told him to go upstairs and see his mother and then he took the rolls and wandered into the backyard like a messenger, slipping off into the night with news to deliver. His father stood at the edge of the firepit and stared at the stars or clouds or halfmoon or whatever there was to stare at in the sky and then he struck a match and lit the end of the first roll of newspaper.
Nick would come outside after reading with his mother and stand next to his father. The rolls burning methodically and his father never lit another until the one before was done. Bluegold flames twisted from the ends of the rolls and then bit by bit black pieces of the paper peeled away and drifted up and across the backyard, wrinkled and charred with hairlines of orange glowing on the burning edges. The stories and reports and promises of the daily news disintegrating in the night air and Nick would ask if he could light a roll and his father handed him the matchbox and he stood still with his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the firepit as he waited for his son to take his turn to try and burn it away.
In the nights in the backyard or when they were in the house together or maybe taking an evening walk, Nick and his father said little. Nick fought to conjure up a story from the school day or to share some interesting tidbit he’d picked up in science or history and his father answered with polite nods or crossed arms that suggested disbelief or confusion. A man not cruel to a boy. Only unable to see him the way he needed to be seen as his mind was occupied with his own confusion and disbelief.
Nick took to lying awake at night. Listening for steps or movement or anything that told him his mother was still alive in
that room. That she was in the blackness but she was safe and she would come out of it again like she had so many times before. And this time she would stay out of it and there would be a straight line in her life. In his life. In their life. He began to make marks on his headboard, undetected beneath the edge of the mattress, counting the days that she was gone. Knowing the more marks he made the closer it was to being over. Tiny grooves in multiples of five that reached into twentyfive, thirty. Thirtyfive, forty. The highest being fiftytwo before he came downstairs before school to find her sitting there with her makeup on and her hair down and clean and brushed. With eggs in the skillet and toast in the oven and a wink that said it is over for now. I am alive again. What do you want me to pack you for lunch today?
He would lie awake and listen and hear the footsteps in the hallway. Their room on the other end of the hall from the stairway and his father or maybe his mother crossing past the threshold of his bedroom, the creaks in the floor predictable and dependable and he would sit up. Hold his breath. Try and measure by the sound of the stairs the weight of the person going down. Heavy cracks and it was his father and soft squeaks said it was his mother. He then tiptoed across his bedroom and listened at his door. Sometimes there was muffled crying. Other times he waited to see if the back door would open and if it did he moved to his window and watched his father’s silhouette shift back and forth across the yard, a cigarette folded underneath his hand in the same way that he smoked on the sidewalk in front of the store, not wanting to be so obvious. The red tip at his father’s wrist and Nick watching it turn and wander as his father stepped in his slippers across the damp grass of the middle of the night.
If his father was outside Nick would put on socks and then open his door and creep out into the hallway. Go to the bedroom door that his father had left cracked open and he touched his hand to the door gently and pushed it open, just wide enough to slide through. In big quiet steps he moved to the edge of their bed and his mother breathed heavy in her sleep and he stood there and touched his fingertips to her hip and felt the rise and fall in her breathing. The room so black with the shades down and the curtains pulled. So black and he could see nothing but he imagined everything. Her dreams or maybe her nightmares and his father’s eyes wide open as he lay there next to her and the doctor who sometimes came and talked to her for hours and what they might say to one another, their voices only murmurs as he and his father sat downstairs. He imagined creatures in the night slipping out from under her bed and out of the closet and slithering across the floor and up the bedposts, across the blankets and gathering between the sheets and then whispering to her all through the night that she should go deeper and deeper down. You are not there yet. Not quite yet. We can carry you deeper. Nick waved his hand when the creatures felt too real. He imagined everything in that black room where his mother lay buried and sometimes he whispered a prayer of resurrection like he had heard on the lips of the choir. He whispered promises to her that if she would trust him and his father then you will not go deeper but we will help you up and spend a day in the sunshine and that is all you need. One good day. Maybe it will be tomorrow.
Some nights he would slide along the edge of the wall in his sock feet and stand at the top of the stairs. He waited and sometimes a chair in the kitchen would slide and he knew his father was sitting there with his face in his hands or maybe having a drink or maybe both. And then he would go to find out.
On this certain night he made it down the stairs but not without sound and felt it was impossible that his father did not know he was there. But he moved on. At the base of the stairs he waited for the voice to tell him to go back up. You have no business being awake. A boy needs his sleep. But the voice did not come and he crept on like a thief in his own home. Stopping in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. He spied his father in a chair with his back to Nick and no light but that from the moon that came through the window and gave blue shadows.
His father sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Just the way Nick always imagined him sitting in the dark.
“She has never been the same,” his father mumbled and he sucked in his breath twice as if trying to catch it. Nick like a shadow. So still and listening to his father mumble in the dark.
“She has never been the same,” his father said again and he lifted his face from his hands and let his head fall back. Nick took a step back anticipating his father’s rise but his father stayed in his chair.
She has never been the same since when, the boy wanted to ask. What was she like before whatever it is you’re talking about. Before all this. Why does it come and go and why can’t we stop it?
A short glass of bourbon sat on the table and his father wrapped his fingers around the glass and held it. Didn’t raise it but only held it and he sat up straight in the chair. The wooden chair talking back with the movement of weight and the boy paralyzed and waiting.
A heavy sigh. Both hands around the glass now as if to protect it and then his father raised the glass and tilted it just enough so that the bourbon would meet his lips.
Keep talking, Nick wanted to say. Please keep talking.
His father set the glass down.
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” his father said. “Tell me what to do.”
His father was something different now. In this solitary moment with the night surrounding them and his mother asleep and the world around them quiet and the moon glaring at them through the window his father became another thing. Not the stoic and certain man who taught him about handshakes and looking people in the eye and not the straightforward businessman who only missed a day of work if he was on the edge of his grave and not the man in the black suit who stood with his shoulders back as he sang from the hymnal. His father whispered and asked for mercy and seemed like a helpless thing on the verge of being crushed and Nick took a step back and slid behind the wall of the dining room and he bit his lip until it bled to keep from crying.
“Somebody tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
The glass raised and set again.
Nick moved across the dining room. He heard a match strike and then smelled the cigarette as he reached the first stair. He raised his foot to climb but not high enough and he stubbed his toe. A bump in the dark.
The chair in the kitchen slid and he heard the man stand. He heard the bottle pour into the glass. He waited for the voice. He would have given anything in that moment to have heard the voice and been called into the moment. To be asked to be a part of whatever his father was talking about and whoever he was talking to. Call me and I will come in there and sit with you. He wanted the voice and he wanted to sit in the chair next to his father and watch him in the moonlight and listen to him in the moonlight and be let inside of the things that kept them both awake at night and later he would blame himself for not doing something or saying something in the middle of that night. To try and make them both believe there was the possibility of something good and something closer between them. Between all of them. He waited and wished and only a word could have changed it all to the boy and he heard his father move but it was not toward him. Instead he moved across the kitchen to the door leading to the garage and it opened and closed behind him.
7
He had marveled at their simplicity. Lying together naked underneath the costumes and without reasons attached to what they were doing or why they were doing it. Only that this is what two people wanted. He lost his anxiety and began to discover more about the body of a woman and there was a carefulness in the way he moved and he allowed himself to be guided and to learn.
On the third day she asked him why he kept looking at his watch. You are often looking at the time as if you are waiting to run away and he took it off and stuck it in his coat pocket. Along the river he sold the watch at a used jewelry kiosk and used the few francs he got for it to buy a pack of cigarettes and candy canes and they sat beneath Pont des Arts and alternately smoked and bit off the hard candy
.
In the mornings after they explored one another they walked. They had coffee and bread at the café that looked out to Église de la Sainte-Trinité and the small man moved between the tables with a towel slung over his shoulder and a song on his lips. After coffee they drifted toward the river and stopped at Quai Voltaire. Few skiffs moved up and down the Seine and boys sat along the riverbank with long poles and long lines. She told him the regular boatsmen were all off fighting or dead in the war. Nick then told her that he had never been fishing and she bragged about the giant carp she had caught with her grandfather in the small river that ran through her village. How she baited the hook with brown insects with bent legs that sang in the night. Crickets, he said. Crickets, she repeated. And she went back to the tall tales of catching carp as big as dogs with a single singing cricket and that her grandfather had once fished the Mediterranean until his boat sank because of the weight of his net. He was never allowed to go back because he took too many fish. She then told him of going to New Orleans with her father when she was very small and somewhere there was a photograph of him holding a large fish with one hand and her with the other and they were the same size. Nick shook his head and watched her eyes glow as she told the tall tales and he did not laugh or argue but let her travel as far as she would travel.
After they were done watching the fishing and the boats they would get a cold bottle of white wine and a strip of saucisson sec and walk along Saint-Germain to Jardin du Luxembourg. They sat underneath the trees and drank from the bottle and Nick cut the sausage with a pocketknife. Children chased after pigeons and some pushed sailboats in the fountain with wooden poles and then stood anxiously and waited for the breeze to return the boat so they could push it again. Old men walked with old women across the pebble pathways, arms wrapped together and their steps careful through the children. There was always a spot to lie in the grass or a café with cheap wine and cigarettes. Always a hand for him to hold and as the days passed he reached for it more often in the way that a child grows accustomed to reaching for and expecting help.
Nick Page 4