Then, exhausted, Bruno slept, finding strange comfort in a hand half-closed, curled around the porcelain handle of a razor.
In an odd, oblique, unexpected way, Mrs. Evans found out about Angel and his father.
She was nervous, pained, anxious to confirm her plans for the holidays and when he telephoned as he said he’d do every few days (though she was never sure) she made him promise to come by. This was a week before Christmas, and when he appeared, it was with one eye swollen blue, so painfully bruised she winced as she applied a compress of ice after putting him down full-length on the couch in the living room.
Of course, there had been a “street fight,” and she nodded sagely, knowing his father alone was responsible and that it was about time they got to the truth of it. It was a clear case of vicious child-abuse and there were legal and other means to deal with it.
But she wanted to “settle” Christmas first, and got the boy to agree to come by late in the afternoon of the 24th in whatever clothes he had that were Sunday best so they could, if he desired, go to Midnight Mass.
This was a surprise to Angel, since he knew Mrs. Evans wasn’t Catholic. Anyway (though he made quite a sour face at the prospect of Midnight Mass), it was okay with him, ‘cept it always lasted so long, an’ there was all that crazy sitting down and standing up; one never knew what to do when. “That’s why,” he explained, “they sometimes put a couple a’ nuns in the front row so’s people can do what they do; they’re the ones who know.”
Mrs. Evans nodded impatiently, promising to sit behind the nuns, if there were any, so their own behavior, hers and Angel’s, would be impeccable.
But also (he added, objections not quite over) sometimes he got so bored that he fell asleep.
Well . . .
She’d risk it. All boys his age attending Midnight Mass fell asleep. It was one of the immutable laws of the universe.
He didn’t understand this last part, but she never-minded him and went on to tell of her plans, rushing through them, praying, pretending there could be no objection, no possible impediment (and as it turned out, there were none): how Christmas Eve would be spent in New York, he’d sleep over (“so bring your pajamas and a toothbrush”), then about getting up early and the drive to Long Island, the time they’d spend there—maybe several days if they found it fun—all this a bit circumspect, hinting at rather than revealing the many surprises she’d have in store.
He had a ten-day vacation from school, so time was no concern. Would—(holding her breath)—would his father be a problem? —asked so casually it might be about the weather.
Angel frowning, haunted and hard-stared at the mention of Auri’s name, thought not. “Y’see: every year at this time, him and his gang—the construction crew—has this big bash, startin’ Christmas Eve and lastin’—God!—maybe a week, ‘til New Year’s when he drinks himself blind and maybe passes out cold, like dead, f’a couple days after.” So how would his father know where he was, or what he was doing?
He wouldn’t know, Mrs. Evans agreed. No, the man certainly wouldn’t know. Or care.
Then, after various circumlocutions and no urging at all on her part (only a spectacular puff-pastry bursting with tender apples served to him hot under its glaze of shiny vanilla frosting), the boy—obviously with long-considered determination and effort—spoke about “this here friend I have—at school; y’know? This guy, about my age, maybe younger, who is—well, sort of, having trouble with his father.”
“Trouble” to Mrs. Evans at this stage of the confession meant beating up. She affected a lack of interest, thinking to encourage him, and it did. He pushed the matter aggressively, accusing: “You’re not listening!”
“Oh, but I am”—returning the response matter-of-factly, fussing with the tea things. “You have this—here friend, who is having trouble, with his father.” Inquiring lightly: “what kind of trouble is your friend having?”
“Well—”
He winced, touching his cheekbone needlessly, as if requiring and enjoying a moment’s pain. “It’s peculiar . . .”
“Most troubles are.”
“Are what.”
“Peculiar. But go on. Your friend’s trouble is very peculiar?”
“Yes.” Both eyes, good and bad, blinking. A few sporadic tics of the chin. Tongue wetting lips. A visible tightening of muscles all over, then partial relaxation. She could literally see resolution gained, then renounced, determination sought, found, abandoned.
She decided to affect irritation, annoyance,
“Well, tell me about your friend and his problem. Goodness! All this preamble!”
But there appeared to be a strong, almost psychoanalytic transference between them: he the terrified patient about to reveal the rankest, darkest, most secretly sexual of secret sexual secrets of his life (which indeed to him it was) and she the cool, voiceless, most wooden-faced of impersonal speak-to-the wall analysts (but ready instantly, the moment he spoke the evil words, to wrap him up in yesterday’s newspaper, like the garbage he was, and throw him out).
“Is it,” she inquired, since the silence might go on forever, “is it that your friend’s father did something to him, or rather does something to him, maybe like, well, hurting or beating him?”
The answer was quick, certain, completely believable. “Oh no. It’s nothing like that.”
So. She’d been wrong.
But Angel had the toe of one foot in the door, enabling him to say tremulously, “He . . . he does something else. He . . . He . . . He . . . ”
There may have been as many as seven “he’s” separated by long or short pauses—until she placed a demanding hand on his shoulder because, still full length on the couch, he had turned his “he-saying” face to the pillows.
“Angel. There‘s nothing you can say, about your friend, that I haven’t heard before, or seen, or read about, many times. And there isn’t a word in the English language that you know that I don’t, or that I haven’t said myself at one time or another. So, whatever it is, about your friend, just say it—just say it right out.”
He managed quickly before he lost courage: “This here friend of mine, his father, made a pass at him—if you know what I mean.”
Pass.
She in no way expected this though it evoked no visible surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had many passes made at me during my life. Many, many men, and a few women besides, if that helps any . . . with your friend.”
“Women!?” As if it was the first time he’d ever heard of it, faking transparent surprise.
“Yes yes. Now get on with it. About your friend. What’s his name by the way?—just so we don’t have to go on calling him ‘your friend.’
“His name?”
“He does have one. Better: make one up; that way we’ll conceal and protect his identity.”
“Well—it’s Joey.”
“Fine. Very good. An excellent choice.” And, catching his eye, she knew that he knew that she knew who Joey was. “Now then. So Joey’s father once made a pass at him . . .” (she could see she was off the mark) “. . . keeps making passes at him . . .” (that was closer). “The man’s queer—right? Or is that too old-fashioned a word? But you know what I mean. He has some of that in him.”
The idea, perhaps the word, implying effeminacy, seemed to startle the boy. “No. It can’t be that. I mean—He’s—Joey’s father is big and strong, a real man; he drives a gigantic truck with a crane maybe five hundred feet high.”
The driver of a crane truck, indeed! Mrs. Evans thought of the great Alexander lying against silken pillows in his battlefield tent with his perfumed boy after the day’s killing, surrounded by miles of the slaughtered dead, who would be buried, if they were lucky, in the morning.
“Well, you must be right,” she said, after thinking about it and deciding what would be good to say. “It must be, simply, that he—Joey’s father, loves his son a great, great deal—so much, and in s
uch a funny deep way, that he can’t quite help . . . wanting to touch him . . . make love to him once in a while.” (Pause.) “Would you say that that’s a fair way of putting it?”
Silence. Deep, prolonged, followed by a slight, then a violent nodding of the head.
She’d been tempted to ask “what kind of love” (crane drivers made) but caught herself in time, thinking, how silly, how cruel to make him shape it into words. How many kinds of love can there be between a boy and a man? His father, whatever his relations with women, was also a pederast; this sometimes happening to drivers of cranes and Alexanders the Great.
“Pass” had done nicely, and would continue to do. The important thing was that he’d told her. That much—so very much—had been gained.
But why was the boy still so tense, with little visible sign of relief. Unburdened, confessed, his fearsome secret known at last, she expected to see tight muscles relax, the body loosen, the mist of sweat on his forehead dry.
Then she realized that the greatest, darkest secret of all hadn’t been exposed. The most important question, the only important question hadn’t been asked—no less answered—that question being: What about Joey? Does he love the kind of love his father loves . . . ?
She couldn’t ask. No one could. Not even Joey of himself. Even if Joey knew, Angel surely didn’t.
On the evening of the 23rd, just as Mrs. Evans and Martin emerged from Sardi’s after a small supper that followed the theater—a fine production of The Chairs—a light snow began to fall.
By the time they reached Washington Square, the flakes were large, the fall windless and heavy, and the temperature sufficiently below 32 degrees not to have it all melt on the pavements.
In their twenty-odd minute ride from mid-town, the city had turned a glorious blue-shadowed white.
Mrs. Evans stopped Dori before the arch of the Square beginning at Fifth Avenue, telling him to take the car home, she and Martin would walk the rest of the way.
“Didn’t you love it?” Martin asked, about the play. “Wasn’t it marvelous? They were simply great, both of them, and that make-up! Didn’t you believe she was ninety years old—a girl barely twenty? Wasn’t it funny—and terrifying? Such an incredible play! How I would love to do it one day! That old, old man . . . tottering about with his cane . . .”
But Mrs. Evans scarcely heard a word; she was too taken by the snow, breathing its clean wet fragrance, turning up a smiling face to let the icy crystals kiss her cheeks and mouth and forehead. They clung, unmelting for a moment, so thickly to her eyelashes, she laughed and had to blink them away, else not see at all.
To Martin’s dismay, she began to whirl and dance her way into the small park. He caught her in time, pulling her back.
“Don’t go in there,” he warned; “do you want us both murdered? Good Lord! you’ve lived long enough in the Village to know!”
Half in his arms, she continued to dance.
“No one is murdered on such a beautiful night.”
“Everyone is,” he returned. “Precisely because nobody thinks so.”
Mrs. Evans looked at him with an expression that was suspiciously euphoric, and he wondered if, when at Sardi’s he’d gone into the men’s room just before they left, she might have taken a pill—or several. But it was always difficult to tell: her moods were so varied and many. It may have been, simply, of all things, the snow!
It was. The fall of it immense.
She removed her cloche hat, silk scarf, opened her coat, letting the flakes feather her hair, drift coldly against her throat.
“How wealthy God is!” she said.
The snow, reflecting the street lights, made everything quite bright, so it was easy to see the bag of garbage or bundle of laundry—whatever it was—that someone had left next to the stairs that led to the Evans home.
Mrs. Evans was annoyed. People were so disgusting, discarding their refuse wherever they pleased.
“Oh do get rid of it, Martin,” she said; “put it on the curb.” But when he touched it, it moved!—shaking itself of snow, and stupor or sleep.
When it stood up, Martin was dumbstruck. “It’s a child!. . . why it’s a little . . .” Then he saw exactly what it was and murmured, “Good Lord!”
Mrs. Evans moved closer, equally astonished.
“Why it’s Bruno!” And all three stood in a momentary tableau, until her unsteady, dazed Little Crocodile took a glassy-eyed, bewildered step from the half-shadows into the light and she saw the tiny icicles that had formed around the brim of his hat.
“The poor boy is frozen! Good heavens! Bruno! Whatever are you doing here, crouched in the snow? We thought—”
“You know him!” Martin asked, illuminated, his scalp beginning to crawl. “He’s one of your—boys?”
What kind of question was that at this time? “What?” she asked.
“Your boys!” he snapped. “He answered your ad? You’ve been seeing him?”
Why was he so angry, his face so pale?
“Well . . .” What could she say? “Yes.”
“This . . . creature!”
How shocking, how unkind! How could he use such a word. And worse.
“God knows,” he continued, “I knew you enjoyed talking down to people, but really, Carma—” with a gesture toward Bruno “—that’s pretty low. Maybe you have a stepladder handy when he visits. No? A pair of stilts? Or does he just manage to fly—with that broken wing on his back?!”
She was incapable of reply, her mouth working to find words, her body moving between the two of them so Martin would stop feasting his eyes.
Finally she managed: “Will you stop it! Martin, stop! Can’t you see he’s ill, and all but frozen? Help me get him into the house.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Martin replied with a strangled half-laugh. “What am I? Part of the menagerie, the freak show you’ve got going? Carma—” (barking it out, bubbles of foam at the corners of his mouth) “you’ve got a decision to make, and make it fast! Either you tell this—little. . . monster to fuck off, get lost quick—or it’s the last you’ll see of me.” Whereupon, the outrageous inhuman man took the $500 Brooks Brothers Gift Certificate she had that very evening given him as a Christmas present, tore it in half, and threw it in her face.
So it was he, not she, who had already made the decision.
“Goodbye, Mr. Dzierlatka!”—the words edged out between closed bared teeth. She watched him turn instantly and walk away. But, as very serious moments in life sometimes provide, his raging departure was punctuated with a touch of comedy. One foot slipped on the snowy curb, make him dance like a wounded bear and go down—so ungracefully!—on one knee before he picked himself up and, behind the heavy fall of snow—a curtain on a stage—disappear.
So she was left with her Little Crocodile, whose eyes were as glazed as the small icicles that hung from his hat. He was muttering something she couldn’t make out, and, as little as she cared to see him now, she couldn’t let him go like this, and pushed him before her, steering his staggering little body into the house.
Since everything was dark except for the hall and the window on the left, which was Dori’s, she used her key to let herself in.
Once inside, she turned to look clearly at Bruno—un-shaven for days, eyes pink with blood, sunken in blue shadows—with both surprise and the first touch of fear. The left side of his face seemed to hang, as if he’d been stricken with Bell’s Palsy, the mouth turned-down, shiny with a dribble of spit.
He hadn’t the sense to take off his hat, so she did it for him, and looked at hair that was dirty, matted, sticking wetly to his head, and a forehead, despite the outside cold, dripping with sweat.
Had he a fever, a raging fever? She put out a hand to see, then drew it back sharply, untouching, her fear mounting.
“Bruno—Bruno—” like a frightened mother to a child sleeping too long, refusing to wake.
And then it started, perfectly memorized, precise: the priest’s love-mad sp
eech from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the voice sonorous, rolling out the words like muted thunder:
“Take pity on me! Thou deemest thyself miserable. Alas! Thou knowest not what misery is!”—dropping to his little knees, one of them creaking. “It is to love a woman—to love with all the energies of your soul—to feel that you would give for the least of her smiles your blood, your life, your character”—following on his knees as she, her hands crossed below her throat, backed slowly away, down the hall toward Dori’s room, under whose door was a crack of light”—your salvation, immortality and eternity, this world and the next—to regret that you are not a king, an emperor, an archangel, that you might throw a greater slave at her feet . . .”
Now he reached for and caught the hem of her skirt, pressing it to his wet fallen mouth, continuing between sobs: “. . . To clasp her night and day in your sleeping and your waking dreams, and to have nothing to offer her but an object of fear and disgust. . .”
It went on and on, she stepping closer and closer to Dori’s door. Was the man asleep, couldn’t he hear?—while this fantastic, mad little boy all but threw himself upon her.
“. . . Your arteries boil” she heard, “your heart is bursting, your head splitting, your teeth tear your own flesh . . . inexorable tormentors: love, jealousy, despair! . . .”
Her hand touched the doorknob and she threw it open, a corner of one eye in a backward glance seeing Dori, who, fully dressed, must have fallen asleep with the light on, rising, startled, from his bed.
And this groveling little man, reading his fate, shrieking into the room at her: “Mercy! . . . Have pity!. . . Repulse me not!. . . Oh say thou wilt not have me?” And now, the voice trembling and soft, the head cocked, the color of his eyes all but hidden in his head: “. . . I should have thought that the day when a woman could reject such a love, the mountains would dissolve . . . and fall into the sea . . .”
Bereavements Page 16