Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  “He takes his mother out to dinner, drinks too much at her apartment first and then at the bar while they’re waiting, because she wants one, for a window table, and gets sentimental and sad to himself about how old she looks and fragile she is and weak her voice has become, though doesn’t want to reveal what he’s feeling. But for the first time, he believes, he sees her as—”

  “I asked my mother to tell me a thing or two about her mother she remembers the most. She asked me what I meant. I said ‘A memory, some incident, something she did to you or around you or to anyone—anything, a trait, habit or ritual she went through, religious, dress, food, or otherwise. But just something that keeps coming back and back to you—a quirk, even, or some physical gesture or a pretension—and you do or you don’t know why it does come back or why you can’t forget it or even what it means to you or just in itself, but something that possibly, well, you know, exemplifies her, but it doesn’t have to be as sweeping as all that.’ She looked at me as if she still didn’t understand. I shrugged as if saying ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Really, sweetheart, you’re not making yourself very clear, and I don’t think it should be blamed entirely on my hearing.’” Enough, give up.

  19

  _______

  Frog’s Sister

  She was a very pretty child. People thought she’d be the best-looking one in the family, possibly a beauty like his mother. Complexion, nose, eyes, hair, smile, face shape, long neck, fine features. It’s difficult describing looks. There’s a photo. There’s always a photo. In a large plastic bag of photos he keeps in a file cabinet drawer in his office at school. Has no room for it in the house and his mother lives too far away to keep it there. But that’s the one he thinks of when he thinks how pretty she was and beautiful she might have become. A posed photo, as much as a child can pose, by a professional photographer his parents had hired when she was around three. Since it was summer and he knows what year it was and when she was born, she was six to seven months past three. They had rented a bungalow for the summer in a bungalow colony near Peekskill, New York. So his father could drive up weekends. Morning Glory Park, it was called. No significance. Later photos: when she was very ill, dressed in black, couldn’t get around except with a walker or on crutches and not for long on either of them. Thin, gaunt, twenty to thirty pounds lighter than what should have been the normal weight for a woman her age and size. But that’s another thing. She was supposed to become the tallest member of the family: six feet or six-one. Based on the growth chart compiled by her pediatrician. In the top two percentile in height and something close in weight when she was born and then when she was a month old, half-year old, every annual checkup till she was five. That’s when she showed the first sign—cross-eye—of the disease that would kill her twenty years later. First operation when she was six. Another when she was nine or ten. Several in her teens, one in her twenties, all crippling her more but done, doctors said, to stop the disease from spreading. If there was a family motto: “Doctors Like to Cut.” Years later his mother would say “Was any of it necessary? What we put her through so early. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t let them cut into her so soon and maybe not at all. Those operations just replaced big ugly growths on her neck and back with long ugly scars, and I’m sure they metastasized the disease faster.” And a few years ago: “Today, of course, she would have been cured or at least not died from it.” He was with her that morning in the hospital. Where most of this will probably take place. It’s been on his mind. They knew she was dying. Her medical man used an expression when she was brought in. “There aren’t any nails left to bang into her coffin.” Or “nails left in her coffin to bang in.” He said that to them because of the more well-known line about nails and coffin he used the previous time she was brought in. Tubes all over her body and under her bed. But what? Last time she was measured—it was nearly impossible; for years she couldn’t stand or lie down straight—she was four-eleven to five-two. And weight, couple of months before the last time she went into the hospital, was sixty-eight pounds. He was curious. She’d become so light. So he put a scale by her bed, weighed himself on it, picked her up while his mother was changing the bed under her or pulling away the potty, and stepped on the scale with her and told his mother to see what it read. Later his mother said they shouldn’t have done it, what was to be gained by it? and he could have slipped on the scale “and that’s all we need is for her to break her hip.” She’s brought home several days after she was born. He’s waiting at the door with his next oldest brother. A nurse he’s never seen before is carrying her in a blanket. His parents are behind her, all bundled up, laughing, and waving at them. A big to-do in the building’s hallway before they even get in. Someone, while she’s being passed around, asks how he likes her. He says he just met her, so doesn’t know but thinks he likes her fine. How do you know if you don’t know her yet? He’s supposed to have said, one of his remarks often quoted by his father, “For now she’s too small to do anything wrong to me.” She’s on her back kicking the floor and screaming. He doesn’t like her. She looks so ugly. She makes so much noise. She cries and whines too much. She’s no fun to play or be with. She never says anything smart or nice or thinks up new things to do. She’s always cranky and complains. Her face is red and twisted and wet too much. She’s allowed not to eat what he has to eat and doesn’t like. Can’t they see? She’s only screaming for attention. Or she’s trying to get him in trouble by making believe he hurt her or wanting people to think that. Someone get her to stop. Her screaming’s busting his eardrums. Plug up her mouth or he’s going to do it for them or start screaming at the top of his lungs too. His mother says his sister can’t help it. She’s frustrated, she says. He doesn’t know what that means and every definition his mother gives doesn’t help. It’s not being able to deal with her sickness, that’s all, his mother says. So what’s she so sick with? She’s just sick, but something worse than a headache or a cold. An earache? he says. If it’s an earache, he can understand. Then she should be in bed with that heating pad under her bad ear, which for him doesn’t do anything but give him an upset stomach, it’s so sickening and warm, but for everybody else it seems to work. Something much worse than that, she says. He’s too young to understand what. But he has to begin tolerating her tantrums—sympathizing with her, even—helping to calm her down, if he can. In other words, putting up with her the best way he knows how, or at least a lot better than he’s been doing. She’s just faking, he says. He’d grab her up and twist her wrist and start spanking her hard till she stopped crying. She tells him to go to his room and stay there till he can come out and say he understands. He says he can’t understand, he’ll never understand. She’s just a brat and everybody should know it. He’s slapped and pulled to his room by his hand. She’s got a hole in her throat. He learns a new word, tracheotomy. He learns another new word, trachea, but this one he forgets fast. He learns other new words: windpipe and bronchial tubes and larynx, but the last two he quickly forgets what they mean too and how to say them. Bronchee, monkey, long key. It’s an ugly hole in her neck, pink and full of wet flesh like a fingertip gash, with a little dribbling like spit coming out of it sometimes. He doesn’t know when the hole’s uglier, with the tube in or out. She has it in her when she comes home after each operation. It makes his mother sick when she has to clean it or use it to suction the gook out of her neck right past the hole. He can’t wait for the tube to come out for good and the hole to close. It never does all the way but gets smaller and smaller till after a while it’s about as big as a little asshole when it’s closed and he can look at it for a short time without turning away. Sometimes, though, and he doesn’t know why now and not then, he has to excuse himself quick and run to the bathroom because his stomach’s getting sick. He begins feeling sorry for her. No more yelling at her, she wasn’t a brat and he can see it was something else doing it to her. She’s in a hospital bed at home and doesn’t look like the same girl that left. Skin’s yellow and black ma
rks under her eyes, cheeks are deep and lips are chapped and cracked, and something about her hair and eyeballs. Came home on a stretcher carried by two men. Ambulance outside with its roof light turning and a few people on the sidewalk bending down to look past the building’s vestibule all the way back to the apartment’s foyer. “It’s my sister. She had a bad operation at the hospital that almost killed her, but she’ll be getting better at home.” “I’m glad,” someone says. “You be a good brother and take good care of her.” “That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to keep the street quiet for her, because she’s right in that front room. Anyone beeps a horn too much, I’m running over to say something.” He tells his mother how he feels and she says it’s about time. Then she says she’s sorry for saying that and pats his head and says it’s wonderful he feels that way and she hopes he means it deeply because it’s much better for Vera that he does. “If she thought you didn’t want to look at her or hated her the way she is or just didn’t like her, you never know what could happen. She could just give up and die.” Later she says it could never come to what she said it could. It would just mean a lot to Vera and no doubt help her get well faster if he showed her the kind of nice attention they all know he’s capable of. She’s in bed in the hospital after her second operation. That would make him around eleven. Bar above her bed to hold on to or pull herself up with when she gets stronger. Flowers and cards all over the room. Toys, fruits, boxes and tins of candy. Lots of tubes and hanging bottles near her. A new radio she doesn’t want played and dolls and stuffed animals she wants taken home or turned away from her. That same sick face again, arms black and blue, scrawny. She hardly says a word to anyone but his mother and usually so quietly his mother has to put her ear to Vera’s lips. “What? What? Don’t repeat if it’s too hard to.” Her head never leaves the pillow and mostly faces up. Something’s been drilled into the top of her skull. Someone calls it a sinker and he thinks of fish. Another new word, traction, which he almost never understood but could see what it was doing. Each time she moves her head even a little he thinks her scalp’s going to be pulled off. The weight attached to the cable seems heavy enough to give him some trouble lifting. She doesn’t seem to be in pain but he doesn’t see how unless she’s being drugged. He wonders how the sinker will come out without another operation. He asks and someone says don’t worry, it’s like a tooth. He thinks of his own teeth, which fell out while he was eating or came out with a little jiggling, and thinks that might not be it but he’s satisfied with it. He hopes she doesn’t come home with it in and the pulley and weight and his mother says she’s going to be in the hospital that long just so she won’t. A visiting nurse comes for two hours a day at home to relieve his mother and do the harder chores. Vera won’t let anyone do the suctioning but his mother. She says it hurts too much when anyone else does it. His mother pleads with her that she doesn’t do a good job sometimes and maybe just this once it should be done properly, but Vera squinches her eyes and pounds her thighs with her fists and shakes her head violently. He has trouble looking at her in the hospital bed from one side because of the urine bag hanging off it. Sometimes it’s so full and the tube to it is still dripping that he thinks it’s going to burst all over the floor or else go back inside her without bursting and kill her. He sees her body filling up with urine till it leaks out of the neck tube, and he has to shake the thought off. But he’s also drawn to the bag, often checking how high the urine is, and occasionally tells people it’s filled or that the bag’s very dirty and she needs a new one, but they always say it has a little ways to go yet or that the bag can be used a couple of more days. There’s a big party for her sixth birthday. Friends of his parents, cousins and uncles and aunts, kids from the block who don’t even know her and a few who seem too old to be there. The room’s decorated with streamers, flowers and balloons, all the kids have party hats and noisemakers, folding chairs and a special long table have been rented, lights have been set up around the table for a movie a man’s been hired to make of the party. There’s mixed drinks and catered canapés and things for the adults, hamburgers and hotdogs and potato salad and different sodas for the kids, a huge ice cream cake is brought in by two waitresses, three musicians play the kind of music he once heard at a wedding, a clown pulls rings and bracelets and money and a baby rabbit out of Vera’s ears and mouth and gives her the jewelry. She’s very shy through it all and won’t look at the camera whenever she’s asked to. She blows out the candles after several tries and with some help from his parents and everyone cheers and claps and sings “Stand up and show us your beautiful face,” and his father lifts her to his shoulder and walks around the apartment with her and lots of the older people kiss her fingers and knees and shoes. He asks his mother why such a large party for her and she says it was so much fun and everyone had such a good time and it was so wonderful seeing so many of her family and friends together for once that maybe she’ll give them like this for all her children from now on. His mother wants him to read to Vera a half-hour a day. It’ll take her mind off things, she says, and her eyesight’s gone bad and she refuses to be examined for glasses. Whatever he chooses to read she doesn’t like and she can’t think of a book she wants him to read. She doesn’t like any books, she says. There’s nothing in them that ever means anything to her and someone reading one to her would make what’s bad even longer. He says hell read fast, she’ll see, so pick a subject she’s interested in and he’ll go to the library and get a bunch of books on it. If they don’t have it, their mother’s said he can buy any book she wants at a bookstore and as many as two a week. She says “Nothing,” then she says “Pottery.” He says all right, he’ll get them, even if they won’t be very interesting reading for him. What is pottery? she says. She’s heard the word and liked the sound of it. He says at her age she doesn’t know what pottery is? Maybe that’s why she should be reading books more. But she must be kidding him, and she says she is but he can see she’s not. He ends up reading her Robinson Crusoe because he has to read it for a book report at school. Most of the times she falls asleep about ten minutes after he starts reading. Or stares up at the ceiling and when he calls her name and asks if she’s listening, she doesn’t answer or look at him. It’s the drugs, his mother says. Maybe in a few months she won’t have to take them anymore. His reading is making it much easier for her to rest and fall asleep naturally though, which she also needs to do, so look at it that way. His brothers and he always know about her next operation a week or so beforehand. His mother usually announces it to them at the dinner table about an hour after she’s told Vera. “I’m very sad to have to say this, though it is, what I’m about to say, going to take place for a very good purpose…” “I know what you’re going to say,” Vera said once, “and I don’t want to. The doctors hurt me. They come at me with sharp blades and big clubs and cut and beat me to ribbons and I feel most of it when it’s going on but I’m too doped-up to keep them away or say anything. And then it hurts for such a long time after and none of the painkillers do anything to make it stop and I get uglier and smaller and worse each time. I know I’m going to die because of the operation this time, either when they’re doing it or soon after.” “No you’re not. It’s a simple operation, the simplest of any of them. More for correcting a little thing from the last one than doing anything new this time. Probably not even an IV after it or any intensive care. You’ll be up and around maybe an hour or two after you come out of the anesthesia, if they even have to put you out for it.” “That’s what you said before the last one and it was the worst and most painful one I had. This one will be even worse. And the one after it, if I don’t die this time, even worser.” “What are you saying? This one should be the last.” “That’s what you said before the last one. I remember and you do too and everyone else here does also but you’ll all pretend you don’t. You think I’m dumb and have lost my memory because that’s what my sickness is supposed to do to me too. And why does it always have to be me? Why doesn’t someone else h
ere get sick like me and have to go in for one and I can have a rest from them for once?” “I’m sure if one of us could—” “I won’t go to the hospital for it. I’ll run away first. I’ll kill myself first, even. It’s better than having a lot of doctors with half faces cut me up and hit me with hammers to help me die.” “Believe me, darling, this one should be the very last. I was mistaken the last time. I understood wrong what the doctor told me. This one you’ll be on the operating table a short time and home in a day or two. And you’ll have dinner at the table with us that night if your stomach can take it and you’ll go to sleep in your own bed when you get home. If I’m wrong again—If there are sudden complications while they’re operating, and they don’t expect that to happen. Or something they just discovered because they have you opened up—then it won’t be because I was mistaken or didn’t understand what the doctor told me. These things sometimes happen. But I truly believe and hope and pray and everything like that, my sweet darling—we all do—that it won’t happen this time around with you.” She’s always dressed as if for a party and has her little valise packed with bedclothes and bathroom things and a few of her smaller bubbled-glass and alabaster animals when she goes to the hospital. She’s always at the door with the valise and with her coat and hat on and once holding a child’s umbrella, waiting for her mother to finish her coffee and maybe have another cup and brush her hair and put lipstick on and get her coat and handbag out of the foyer closet and make sure she has all the documents the hospital needs and enough cash in her wallet and her checkbook and a paperback to read and her keys. His father always goes to work about a half-hour before. Vera’s already waiting at the door. Kisses her and says if he’s not too tied up with last-minute patients he’ll see her at the hospital tonight. His mother and she always go alone together. Vera won’t let anyone carry her valise outside or put it in the cab. A couple of times he ran up the block with one of his brothers to get a cab for them, then had to run down the block while his brother rode in the cab to their building. He should have been in school by then but his mother wanted Vera’s brothers there to say goodbye. He kisses her and his mother and waves to them and the cab drives off. His mother always looks through the rear window and then waves back at them till the cab slows down for a red light or is about to turn the corner. Maybe she was holding on to Vera when the cab came to a stop or turned, afraid she might fall forward or hard to the side. Vera never says a word these mornings. Head always faced down and she never looks straight at anyone or responds to any question or remark, even his mother’s. When his father crouched down and hugged her and said something in her ear, she stared at the door. His own last words to her on the sidewalk are always “Good luck,” and then he wishes he hadn’t said them. She might think the operation’s going to be much worse than she’s been told. That she might need luck after all. For why have her brothers stayed home for her, why’s everyone being extra nice to her? Two of these mornings he tells himself, when Vera’s about to get into the cab, not to say good luck as he’s done the last times, but it always comes out. Say “See ya,” he tells himself one of those times, “See ya, Vera” or “I’ll see ya,” which is what he almost always says when he leaves one of his friends or brothers, but something stops it—he forgets while he’s telling himself to say it and instead says “Good luck.” His mother always later says Vera was the same way in the hospital: silent and resigned and acting like a phantom when she was checked in. “I had to do all the answering for her—how old, date of birth and so forth, any cold or sore throat the last few days?” And then when she went upstairs to her room, had lunch and dinner—“I had to check off what I thought she wanted to eat and drink; she wouldn’t give me a clue.” And when she went for some tests or aides and doctors came in to prepare her for the operation if it was to be the next day. His father never gets to the hospital those nights but always leaves the house early the next day to be there in time for her breakfast. If the operation is for the next morning, he skips going there that early and comes after work much later that day. Once he went away for a couple of days when she was being operated on. A patient of his had invited him to a Catskill resort he had a big interest in or owned. His father said he took the man up on it only because the operation would be too much for him—it was to be the most serious she’d had—and he’d be more problem than help if he hung around the city during the operation and went to the hospital right after. But his mother used to say he just didn’t want to pass up a free vacation. Years later Vera told him, when she got into an argument with him about something else, that she still held it against him, but other times she said she’d never given it much thought. “You did right. You wouldn’t have been any help. You only would’ve cried when you saw me with those stupid tubes up my nose and pester the hospital workers with all sorts of questions anybody could answer or nobody could, making it embarrassing and even more painful for me. Because the staff sometimes takes it out on the patient if the visitor makes scenes or insults them or even asks questions that can seem as if he’s criticizing them a little. Only Mommy knew how to handle things there and could help me and only Mommy did.” “Glad she was there then,” his father said, “for I’m too much of a softie when it comes to the sicknesses of my kids. But just remember who insisted on the best doctors and hospital rooms and postoperative care for you and who paid all the bills.” He visits her in the hospital the day before an operation. She’s in her room waiting for him in a wheelchair. He says “What would you like to do?” and she says “I don’t care—anything,” and he says “Mind if I wheel you around and explore the place a little?” and she hunches her shoulders or gives him a face and he wheels her around the halls into the waiting rooms and the solarium and to the little closet that’s a library and then toward the children’s playroom. “Did you have lunch yet?” he says while they wheel and she says “Look at your watch; use your brains.” “Is the food good here—better than at the last hospital?” and she says “That’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard, even from you.” “Is the girl you share the room with nice?” and she says “Your questions are getting so dumb I’m not even going to let you know I’ve heard them anymore.” “What do you want me to ask or say then?” and she stares straight ahead, and he says “Come on, you’re not being fair, I came here to see you, so answer what I asked,” and she says “Don’t ask, don’t say, use the time to think what you’ve been saying for a change—and you’re supposed to be one of the smarter ones in the family?” “Listen, I know what you’re going through and I feel lousy about it, the whole world does, so what am I asking or doing or anything that’s so wrong?” and she says “Now I’m serious about ignoring you, you dumb dope, so you’ll only be talking to yourself from now on.” Lots of things in the room to play with, a volunteer lady who gives out juice and cookies and pieces of fruit to the children who can drink and eat them, another volunteer walking around holding up cups and cookies to several childrens’ lips. Some are completely bald. He’s never seen that except during the ringworm epidemic at school this year when lots of boys and girls came with their heads shaved, but they kept hats and scarves on all day except when someone knocked or pulled them off. He tries not to look at them, doesn’t want to make them feel bad. Same with the ones who sit and groan or who drag the upside down bottles and tubes attached to them on what look like wheeled coat stands. Some are sleeping and a few are so skinny and sick looking they seem dead or close to it, while others you wouldn’t know were sick except for their hospital gowns. His mother told him to be cheerful. “You have a tendency to get depressed over things like this, but for Vera’s sake make believe everything’s hunky-dory. Otherwise, do me the favor and don’t go.” “So this is the playroom,” he says. “Mom told me about it. It’s beautiful, very nice. Like a snack? Any of the games interest you? I’ll gladly play.” “It’s ugly here. The games and toys are for morons, which most of us here are going to become if we’re not already are.” “You said you weren’t going to a
nswer me anymore, but I’m glad you did. It’s nice talking. Better than just staring or standing or sitting still. But tell me, why do you say it’s ugly? Look at the walls. My favorite shade of blue. Bright but not blinding. Peaceful, cheerful, and it seems recently painted. And the pictures hanging up seem interesting and nice. Not just your regular kids’ stuff. What do you think that one’s of? Maybe just a design.” “It’s of nothing. And the blue’s awful on the walls. If vomit was blue that’s what shade it’d be. The whole room’s awful. It stinks from medicine and disinfectant and diaper rash and shit and pee. That’s because most of them can’t control themselves anymore. You must have a nose cold.” “I don’t and I don’t smell anything funny. Maybe only soap.” “Then get the holes in your nose unclogged. But yesterday a boy younger than me, even, died right in this room.” “Oh come on, nobody dies in a playroom. Unless he falls off something and breaks his skull. But they don’t have anything that high here—I’m sure just to prevent that. And probably because we’re in a hospital, and the part of it just for children, the dying from the fall couldn’t happen anyway even if someone climbed to the top of the curtain there and dived off and landed flat on his head. Too many nurses and doctors to help right away.” “He died in his wheelchair fast asleep. I was here but not near him. He was dying anyway. Anyone could see it when they wheeled him in. Mouth open, stuff running out, and more tubes than the usual. But his mother thought his being around not-as-bad-off kids would help him. All of a sudden they shooed us out or wheeled the ones in chairs like me and later we found he died, though the nurses and aides won’t say so. But is he around? Because he was way too sick to be sent home. I know what room he was in and that bed was empty today and the card with his name’s off the door. Sometimes, I heard, they put kids in the very last room down the hall when they’re dying or only have a few days left to live. But that one’s taken by someone else we’ve never seen, since the door’s always closed and the window on it’s got paper over it.” “I don’t believe it. If this boy who you say died was that bad off, then as you said he wouldn’t have been in a regular room like yours for everyone to see.” “You’re wrong. Sometimes they die here all of a sudden. That’s happened in almost all my hospital stays. A nurse even got in big trouble this time because of it. She’s not supposed to listen to what mothers want on things like that. If you’re dying you’re supposed to do it in that last room or your own room if that’s all they have, with the door closed and the curtains around you and no other patients or your family in it. You do some asking around here about it and you’ll find out. But that’s why I don’t like it when the nurses pull the curtains around me.” “No, I didn’t know you didn’t.” “You’ve seen my face when they do. I’m afraid I won’t come out. That they can do something, decide my time is up and the bed’s needed for someone else—I’ve heard that too—and put their hands over my nose and mouth or use a pillow or something or just stick a death dose in my veins and goodbye. But they curtain me all the time when I have to go kaka and pee and can’t get to the bathroom myself, which now is always.” “Let’s try talking about something else, Vera. This has to be disturbing you.” “Like what? There’s nothing else. My operation tomorrow? That I’m feeling ‘oh great I’m going to get sliced up again’? Can you get me out of this thing into a normal chair? I’ve got cramps shooting up my back that are starting to make me scream.” He gets a nurse and aide who lift her into a soft chair. He should try changing the subject again. He’s not doing a good job here. His mother will come and Vera will say he made her feel even worse. He should be taking her mind off things, cheering her up. “By the way, your friend Kitty sends her regards.” “So what?” “She’s your old friend. I’m just saying I bumped into her on the street.” “She’s lost.” “Maybe you’d like her to call you. She could still do it today.” “I don’t want to speak to anyone.” “Almost all our relatives have called and want to see you, but we say you’d rather not till you’re feeling better.” “Till they learn I’m not dead.” “No, till a couple of days after the operation, or whenever you want. We’re doing the right thing by saying that for you and keeping them away, right?” “What are you talking about? When could they come? Today? Yesterday when I’m in tests all day? Tomorrow when I’m operated on? Make sense.” “I meant the day after you came in, for instance.” “What do I care? Have them sleep under my bed here, for all it means to me.” He says maybe she’d like him to read to her. He could get something from that library closet. He thinks he knows what she’d like, unless she wants to be wheeled there to choose one. Or maybe she just wants to read something herself. If she did, he’d sit beside her, read a book he brought with him. It’s OK by him. “What you can do is turn my chair around and pull it up to the window so I can look out. That way I won’t have to see anybody but their reflections. And you’re strong. You lift weights and do millions of pushups a day. So pulling the chair’s what you can use it for, and then let me look in peace.” “You’re saying you want me to go home?” “You want to go home, do it.” “I don’t. I’ll stay as long as you like, and certainly till Mom comes.” “If you change your mind and go before then, make sure you tell someone at the nurses’ station so they know you’re not coming back to wheel me to my room.” “I told you, nobody’s going.” He pulls her chair to the window, takes the bed pillow off the wheelchair seat and fixes it behind her, sits beside her, takes her hand because he thinks maybe that’ll comfort her a little, she looks at their hands together and then stares out the window at the river, boats and barges passing, Long Island or Brooklyn across it, maybe the reflections of people in the room, and falls asleep. He looks out the window a while. He’d like to go to her room and get the book he brought with him, but taking his hand away may wake her. After about a half-hour he signals one of the volunteers to come over and asks if it’s possible for her to go to his sister’s room and look in his left-or rightside coat pocket for a book and bring it to him. “She’s sleeping so peacefully and needs to, I don’t want to disturb her.” The woman says there’s been a number of petty thefts and one major one in the patients’ rooms the last few weeks, night and day, but probably not on the children’s floor, so she’d rather not be seen going through anyone’s pockets. He says if she can get the pen and pad or just the pad out of his right back pants pocket, since he’s sure she has a pencil or pen, he’ll write a note with his left hand giving her permission. She says “I’m really not supposed to leave the children unless for something like going to the ladies’ room or when someone relieves me, but I’ll get a nurse’s aide if you think it’s that important and perhaps he’ll do it.” He says “Don’t bother, she should be up pretty soon.” He stays like that for another hour till his mother comes. He’s slept the night in the visitor’s lounge, washes his face and brushes his teeth with his finger in the men’s room, goes to her room and knocks in case a nurse or doctor’s inside. No answer, so he lets himself in saying “Vera, it’s me, I’m coming in, okay?” She’s in the same position he last saw her in late last night, on her back, tubes for this and that, monitors on, blip-blip sounds from one of them, face sweaty or glazed, one side of her mouth dropped and agape, eyes half open if that. She could be asleep or awake or maybe she’s gone into a coma. He says from the foot of the bed, while moving a few inches from side to side to see if he can catch her eye, “Vera? Hi. Good morning.” Her eyes go to him and he stays still. “How are you? It’s still very early. I slept the night in the lounge. On a chair. Someone was already asleep on the couch when I decided to turn in but not when I woke up, and the other lounge was locked. My back aches,” stretching, “but nothing bad. I should have asked a nurse to open the other lounge—the one at the end of the other hall—but I didn’t think of it. Maybe that’s where a doctor or two sleep, if they’ve been on duty all night, and they wanted it locked. But minor stuff, right, so why am I bothering you with it?” She just looks at him, lids still half-closed. Drugged look, but she seems to be hearing him. Part of one side of
her head’s shaved, he just notices, but he doesn’t know what for, since there are no plans to operate on her this time. “This will very likely be the last time you’ll be taking her here or to any hospital,” the doctor said. “Why?” They hadn’t asked why but he said it anyway. “Because I don’t see how she can pull through this time, plain and simple. She’s been a lucky girl to have gone home the last two times. So to speak, lucky.” “Vera? Can you hear me? It’s Howard. Your brother. That was some sleep I had. I couldn’t find a place to stretch out, so I had to sleep mostly sitting up. Remember I spoke about it? The other man on the couch? And it was cold. A nurse offered me a blanket but I said no thanks, I’ll use my coat, but it wasn’t enough. I was freezing. What do they do in those lounges after ten o’clock, shut the heat off? Yet it’s plenty warm in here. Just as it was the times late last night I came in to see how you were doing, and you only slept with a single or double sheet. Though good sheets,” rubbing the top one between his fingers, “—thick, but smooth, but not thick enough if the temperature here was the same as in the lounge. To keep you warm, I mean—the sheets. I just thought of something. If I was going to buy cotton sheets, which is the only kind I like—the synthetic kind is so itchy—and which can be very expensive in the department stores, I’d buy them at a hospital linen supply place if they’d sell them to me, right? Because it might be they only sell to hospitals and places like that. Probably a reasonable price, and good quality, because they have to go though so many washings. Every day, and I guess certain high standards that hospitals insist the manufacturer keep. But you feeling OK? Should I come closer so I don’t have to talk too loud—maybe that’s disturbing you, my voice—and where you can still hear?” Her breath will be bad. She can also stink of urine and shit and other things, but that he can take. “I’ll come closer.” Does. Her eyes move with him. “Good. You’re on to me. Your eyes. So you can hear me if you can see me, I’d think. Can you?—Is there anything you want? A nurse? Water? Have they been in to see you yet? This morning, I mean. Want me to mop your brow? Are you hearing me, Vera? I hate to harp on it, and if it’s any effort to answer, please don’t. But can you nod? Can you shake your head? Remember—nodding is to say yes? Shaking your head is for no?—I guess even if you were trying to nod and shake, you couldn’t tell me with a nod or shake. Let me put it simpler. Even I didn’t quite get what I just said. Nah, let’s forget it. I’ll give you a break for once with my trying to explain things. I don’t know why, but I sure can get tongue-tied. And then sometimes, bam, I’m articulate, but very articulate, talking the way I always want to. But how about blinking your eyes? Can you blink them when you want to? Like now, for instance. No? Want to try? Two blinks for yes and one for no—that sort of business? You know, so we can set up some sort of system where you can tell me what you want or need, including the end of my stupid chatter, right? Let me take care of your brow first. I’ll be right back. I’m going to your bathroom to get some wet paper. OK? OK?” He gets paper towels in her bathroom, wets several sheets, dabs her forehead and cheeks with them. “Does this hurt or in any way feel uncomfortable? I hope not. Does it feel better? What about this?” and he pats her lips with the wet paper. “Your lips are getting dry. We don’t want them cracked. Then we’ll have to take care of them, sores, discomfort—you know. It’s this tube with the air in it, I think. And the hair hanging over your head’s wet. From sweat, probably. I’m going to tamp it dry.” Pats her hair and face with a dry paper towel, sits beside her. There’s a smell, doesn’t know what of, but not bad. Doesn’t want to sniff deeper, if she is watching him. “Let’s forget all the questions from now on. It’s getting so where even I can’t stand the sound of my voice anymore.” He smiles. “Can’t get a laugh out of you, right? Well, you’ve always been a serious type. Dad always said that about me, but it was really you. I wish I could be like that. A thinker. Deep,” and he jabs his temple. “It’s good, maybe the best way. You think about things. You just don’t let everything pass, as I tend to do. But mind if I take your hand? If you mind, try tapping my hand with your finger or rubbing it or pull your hand away. I swear, I won’t mind. Even pinch me. I could use some waking up, and not just from sleep.” He takes her hand. It’s cold and the palm’s wet. He dries it with a paper towel, gets up and dries the other palm, her eyes always on his, and sits and bends his head down and shuts his eyes. He’s about to cry. Tries not to, biting the insides of his cheeks, but he cries. He says with his eyes shut and head down “I hope you’re not watching this. I’m sorry, if you are, but you know I don’t like seeing you like this, so that’s why. How I wish you were all better. I’d give anything to help you get well in a flash, and you will get well, though in time.” She pulls her hand away. “Well look at that. You see your hand? You pulled it. That proves you’re getting well. Tugged it right out of mine. Were you able to all this time? And blinking and tapping too, I bet. I’m sure you were, but you were just holding back. Stubborn, aren’t you, or something.” She closes her eyes, her lips move. “No no, don’t try to speak. Not with those tubes in you. The nose.” Her lips continue to move. Spit comes out. “Oh, gee.” He wipes it with a paper towel. “No, too rough, the paper.” Wipes it with his handkerchief. “I swear, no germs. It’s clean, I haven’t even used it. This handkerchief, I’m talking about.” Her eyes open and he dangles the handkerchief in front of her. “Wait. Those lemon-flavored swabs. I just remembered. There’s a drawer full of them.” He pulls out the drawer by her bed. They’re there, a whole box full. “None here. I’ll go to the nurse’s station to get them. For your lips. They’re still too dry. I’ll be right back.” He leaves the room and cries outside. Goes to the station and says “I know there are lip swabs in her drawer, but to get out of the room I told her—” “Who is ‘her?” the nurse says. “My sister, Vera Tetch, 4–26, down this hall.” He gets swabs and goes back. The door’s shut while he’d left it partly open. He knocks. A nurse comes to the door and says “Give me five minutes.” “Is she all right?” “Sure, just cleaning up. Make it ten.” His parents are out. His oldest brother’s in the army, the other’s working as a movie usher. At seven o’clock he says to her “Don’t forget. Mom said for you to be in bed by eight and lights out by eight-thirty and asleep by nine.” She says she doesn’t have to. “You’re not the boss.” “Yes I am, at least for now. You heard them tell me to give you the order if you don’t do it by yourself.” “That still doesn’t make you the boss. I’m staying up for as long as I want to till Mommy comes home.” “That’s what you think.” At eight he yells down the hall to her room “It’s eight, Vera. Start getting into your pajamas and don’t forget to wash up and brush your teeth. I forgot that’s what Mom said for me to see you do too. Your hands and your face. And both sides of your hands and don’t forget your neck.” She doesn’t answer him. At eight-thirty he yells down the hall “I hope you’re in bed and all washed and your teeth brushed and in pajamas because your lights have to go out.” Ten minutes later he yells “Your lights aren’t out yet, Vera. Come on, they have to.” At nine he goes into her room. She’s in regular clothes, sitting on her bed, talking to a doll in each hand. “Would you like to have breakfast?” she says to them. “Yes we would,” one says, and the other says in a different voice “No we wouldn’t,” and they both bow several times. He says “Now I asked you.” She turns to him as if she just noticed him there and screams for him to get out of her room. “It’s private. You’re not supposed to be here if I don’t want you to.” “Listen, I promised Mom and Dad. They’re paying me. They’ll come home and find you playing and think I didn’t do my job. We’ll forget the washing and teeth. Now where are your pajamas? Don’t worry, with your look-Til leave before you start putting them on.” “I’m not telling you. Just get out.” He gets a pair out of the dresser, holds them out to her, one doll says to the other “What’s your favorite dessert for supper?” He grabs that doll and puts the pajamas in Vera’s free hand. She throws them and the other doll at his face. “That�
�s it. You could have taken my eye out with that. The shirt has buttons on it and I even think it scratched my cheek.” “Good.” He unbuckles his belt—just as his oldest brother did, slowly—takes if off and says “If you don’t do what I say I’m going to beat you with this. Now pick up the pajamas and go to the bathroom and put them on.” She suddenly looks scared, he doesn’t know if it’s an act, jumps on her bed, curls up and starts crying. “Then put them on, goddammit, put them on.” She’s now shrieking. He holds the belt over his head. Same thing Jerry used to do with Alex and him. Sometimes beat them with it and sometimes pulling their pants down and beating their behinds with it and sometimes leaving welts, pants down or up. When their dad wasn’t home and their mother complained to him about something they did. They’d be in their room, sent there by then-mother, and they’d hear Jerry in some other part of the apartment yell something like “What! Again!” and then charge to their room in these heavy army boots he always seemed to wear then, and if their door was closed, throw it open so hard it banged against the bookcase behind it and knocked things off the top. Usually by this time they were both huddled together on the bottom bunk of their double-decker bed. And it worked. They did whatever he said, after. Or when he came through the door they’d start pleading they’ll do whatever he wants or never again do whatever it was they’d done and apologize to their mother any number of times he wants them to, but usually it was too late. They could see it in his face. After the beating and they were crying, Jerry would rethread his belt and say something like “Tough shit if it hurts. Just be good and not filthy mouths and I won’t have to do it. Because you think I like to, you two dumb schmucks?” “Now will you, will you?” he shouts and beats the buckle end of the belt on the other side of the bed from her. She’s shrieking. Then he thinks what am I doing? Who do I think I am? I couldn’t hit her with this if I was paid to. “Just go to sleep. Even in your clothes if you want. Or don’t go to sleep or do anything, but I’m out of it. And tell tell tell all you want and what I did, for all I give a crap,” and leaves the room and rethreads his belt. If she told, neither of his parents or anyone else ever said a word to him about it or looked at him in a different way the next few days. They go to the same summer camp together. “Why’s your sister so scarred up?” some kids would ask. One time he overhears a boy say “Last prize is a dance with Vampire Vera at the next social.” He tries to defend her: she’s gone through serious operations; it’s been tough on her since she was a little girl; she’s been tested to have a high IQ but has never had a real chance to use it; the scars are suppose to get smaller and smaller and in a few years almost go away; if they saw pictures of her when she was small they’d know how beautiful she could have been. But he still hears the comments and cracks. Her coordination and eyesight’s bad and she loses her energy fast and she can’t play most of the sports or be part of a lot of the camp activities, or just does them poorly and clumsily. The other kids mostly ignore her. She’s probably made fun of in front of her. Her bunkmates and the girls who swim in the lake with her probably even have trouble looking at her undressed or in a swimsuit or in the shower house and he’s sure she picks this up. He sees some of it in the mess hall. His bunk’s table is on the boys’ side but he sometimes stands up to look over a lot of the other tables to see what she’s doing. Most of the other five or six girls at her table are usually talking excitedly among themselves. She’s usually just eating slowly, or staring at the spoon or fork in her hand or food on her plate or playing with the salt-and-pepper shakers or looking at the roof rafters or the huge wooden scrolls on the support posts with the names of all-around campers and best athletes and such from previous years. She always lags behind her bunkmates when they’re going to this place or that. He’ll often yell “Vera,” and wave and point that he has to go with his bunk and she’ll wave and stop to look at him. In the rec hall during a movie or show, she’s usually at the end of the bench, a foot or so from one of the other girls in her bunk, not talking to anyone, staring at the stage curtains or empty movie screen. A couple of times he sits beside her and says “So how you doing?” and she says “All right,” and he says “Hear from the folks or Alex or anybody recently?” and she says “No, you?” and he says “I’m not allowed to sit on the girls’ side but just thought I’d come over a second,” and she nods and smiles and he says “Well, got to go—why don’t you talk to your bunkmates next to you?” and she says “I do,” and seems sad when he goes and turns around to look back at him now and then before the lights gc out and show begins. “This place isn’t for her,” his counselor says. “Nobody will tell you because the directors don’t want to lose the second month’s fee when there’s no guarantee they’ll get a girl to take her place. But I see it. I’m going in after med school for psychotherapy—the mind, the brain, the whole emotional mishmash—so I can pick up your concerns and anxiousness over it and a lot of what she’s going through too. You should tell your folks. Shell go home at the end of the summer much worse off in the head than she must have been when she came. Why? Because she’s taking a beating. Call them, I’ll pay, and if the camp kicks me out for squealing, OK.” He calls home. “Let her stay,” his father says. “Tell that guy to keep his nose out of it; she’ll make friends soon.” “Listen to what Howard’s saying,” his mother says. “She’s unhappy. It’s doing her worse than good. It was a mistake thinking she’d get along well there. Let’s cut our losses for her sake.” They say they’ll discuss it further together and then with the camp directors and her counselor, and that weekend they drive up to take her home. He helps them carry her luggage to the car. It’s rest period and her bunkmates lie and sit on their beds reading comic books and playing card games and checkers and then look up and say goodbye to her, when Howard says she’s going, as if she were only leaving for a couple of hours. He thinks, walking with her to the car, What’s she thinking? He tries to make it out. She’s glad to see her mother but seems sad to be going. Some kind of defeat’s on her face and in the way her body slumps. All her smiles today have been fake, her voice so low to those girls they could hardly hear her. “What? What? None of us can understand you,” one of them said. He was hoping one or two of them would come over to her, help him with her things, say “We’ll miss you,” and kiss her, even say “Write and I’ll write back.” He thinks he can sense what’s inside her: stomach hurting, chest crying or just feeling full, tears held back. Standing by the car she tells her mother “I tried to do whatever they asked me. Made my bed good; ate when I was asked to, even things I hated; went out for things I could do. I think I was having a good time and was liked. Maybe it’s best going home though. We’ll go to the beach sometimes when it gets too hot, won’t we? That’s what I liked best about camp, the nice nights. You’re lucky,” she says to him. “Listen, none of it was your fault, so don’t think so,” he says. “Some places aren’t right for people. I’ve had delivery-boy jobs for stores when I shouldn’t have, the owners were so mean. And this camp concentrates too much on competition and sports. I’ll be glad to get home also.” “Why? Everybody’s been nice. I had no problems that way.” He wants to make sure not to say the wrong things, so he says nothing else. She’s lying, she knows he knows it, and maybe she knows he is too, but so what? He kisses her goodbye, careful not to press her back where there might be some new lumps there, kisses his folks, and the car drives off. Waves till he can’t see it anymore. Just as it disappears his father honks twice. Walking back to his bunk he thinks maybe if he had defended her more. Made her laugh more, spent more time with her somehow, spoken to her counselor about her, tried to get her bunkmates to include her more, and so on; punched a couple of noses. Later he’s in a way relieved she’s gone but thinks sadly of her a lot and writes her almost every other day. Short letters, but so many in three weeks that he has to borrow a stamp to write his parents for more stamps and envelopes. “Dear Vera,” one letter goes. “It’s muggy and awful here. A real heat spell where even the nights are hot and the lake
water is like a steambath and the cesspool, which opened up again, stinks everything to heaven. I envy you away where there are fans to blow on you and also to be the only one alone with Mom and Dad this summer. As for me, I’m not having too good a time. Last year my bunkmates were friendly and smart, but this year they are always fighting and acting stupid Like throwing things in the messhall and saying silly things to girls and making fun of the head counselor behind his back and Rabbi Berman and Aunt Lois, who aren’t so bad. I’ll be glad when camp’s over. Not only to get out of here and see my friends on the block, but to see you and Mom and Dad again. Love to all, Howard.” She never writes back but when he calls she thanks him for his letters. “Nice as the weather’s been since I’ve been back, I’d still exchange places with you today if I could.” It’s June and she tells him her room’s much too hot and she doesn’t know how she’s going to stand it this summer. He’s working as a permanent sub in a junior high school and offers to buy her an air conditioner if their parents won’t. His mother says they would have bought her one long ago but they’ve been told the building’s wiring won’t take it. He goes to a discount store to price them, finds one that uses the least amount of power of any of them and which the salesman says will only be priced this low for one more day, and buys it. If it only blows the building’s fuses but not the air conditioner, the store says it’ll take it back. It’s a simple one and to save money he carries it home and installs it himself. He tells his parents if the building’s wiring gets destroyed when he turns the air conditioner on, he’ll pay for an electrician to fix it. “Look at you,” his father says. “Just four months on the job, now no money saved, and soon in debt if the electricity conks out. Nobody knows how to blow money like you.” The air conditioner works fine and in the morning she says it made her room so cold she couldn’t even get out of bed to get blankets. “You have to adjust the dials before you go to bed,” and he shows her how again. He complains to his mother that Vera never even thanked him for it. “That was two weeks’ salary, and if I have to pay taxes this year because I made over the minimum, nearly three.” “She’s thanking you, don’t worry, but in her own way. She told me, but not to tell you, she’s praying for you, though for what particularly she wouldn’t say.” He’s alone in the apartment with her. It’s night, around ten, and he was told by his folks to check to see she has her covers over her before he goes to bed. He goes into her room. It’s lit by a little night table light plugged into the wall. The covers are on the floor and her nightdress is above her waist. She has a little pubic hair around that area. He’s never seen any before. She’s sleeping. He picks up the covers, covers her and leaves the room. He gets halfway down the hall and is excited. He wishes he hadn’t covered her up. He’d go back and from the doorway take another look. Her hair wasn’t the big black bush in the magazine but like a little light brown Hitler mustache, if that’s what color it was. Red, even, and right above the crack and none of it around. He should have got closer and looked some more. Done it on tiptoes, held in his breath. He goes into his room and takes off his clothes to put on his pajamas, turns sideways in front of the dresser mirror to see his hard-on in it and begins playing with himself. It gets bigger and straighter and he puts his pants back on but not the undershorts, tries to press the hard-on down but it won’t go so has to hold it to his stomach while he zips up so it doesn’t get caught. He goes into her room. Knows he shouldn’t. Whispers “Vera, you up?” If she says yes—moans, even; blinks; anything—he’ll say “Sorry, just wanted to make sure; good night.” She doesn’t move, eyes stay shut. “Vera, you up?” he says louder. Again, if she is, good night, and out he goes. But nothing of her moves. That enough? Should he say it once more? Pulls the covers down to her knees slowly. She’s in the same position as before. Flat on her back, arms down her sides, legs a little parted, nightdress way it was. He gets closer to that area and looks at it. “Vera, you asleep?” Watches her eyes and mouth for just the slightest movement. If she wakes, well, he doesn’t know what hell do. He feels around her crack for a hole, finds it and sticks his finger in. After a few seconds he moves it around. It’s what he thought and heard. Wet, soft, deep as his finger goes, which is just a little ways in, not even a joint. He takes it out, pulls the covers up. He goes to his room, unzips his fly, can’t get his hard-on through it it’s so stiff so unbuttons the pants and pulls them down and plays with himself facing the mirror. The door, and he shuts it, turns the key and resumes playing with himself. He’s done it before but nothing’s ever come out. He heard when it does he could almost fall. He does it harder and faster, from one end to the other, and it begins to hurt. He zips up, and holding his penis inside his pants, starts for her room. “That’s enough,” he says to himself, “you’ve seen and done plenty, if anyone finds out you’ll be killed,” takes his hand out of his pants at her door and goes in. She’s in the same position asleep. He hopes asleep. “Vera, are you up?… I’m just checking on you, seeing you’re all right, the covers are on you. Mom and Dad told me to.” She doesn’t move. If she did, said anything, he’d say “Well, everything seems all right, so good night.” He pulls the covers down slowly. Same position, hands cupped up rather than palms down, maybe her legs a bit closer together. He stares at the crack, finds the hole again with his finger, sticks it in, little deeper than before and moves it around. Still wet and soft and some little bumps now. Then he thinks “Enough, shell wake up,” takes his finger out and covers her up. Starts to go, then says “Vera, you awake?” She says nothing, nothing on her face moves, hands and legs stay the same. “If you are up and say anything about this to anyone, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you when nobody’s around. I mean it, I’m serious as I ever was about anything, don’t say a word about what I did, to me or anyone, or I’ll kill you dead.” He watches her face; nothing. Should he say it again? Goes to his room, puts on his pajamas, shuts the light and gets into bed. What have I done? I shouldn’t have gone back after I did it to her the first time. Just should have taken a look, covered her up, and if I had to, gone into the bathroom or my room and tried to jerk off. I’m dead; she’ll tell; nothing will ever be the same again. He squeezes his eyes tight as he can, grinds his teeth, digs his nails into his knuckles, smells his finger. Smells as if he stuck it up his behind when it’s clean. Smells the others on that hand; they don’t smell at all. He goes into the bathroom, washes his hands and with a washrag and soap scrubs that finger where it went in, brushes his teeth and gets back in bed. He lies there a long time, thinking he’ll never get to sleep and in the morning his brother and parents will drag him out of bed and yell and scream at him and do he doesn’t know what. His brother’s asleep in his bed next to his when he wakes up in the morning. He washes, dresses, goes into the kitchen. Vera’s having breakfast, doesn’t smile or say good morning as she usually doesn’t, his mother’s making coffee, smiles at him and says “Good morning, darling, sleep well?” He watches their reactions to him the next few days. No change it seems. Wonders if Vera was awake either of those last two times and if she was, if she told his mother, and if his mother thinks not talking about it to anyone is the best thing to do. He knows if his mother told his father but said don’t let Howard know we know, his father would still let him have it, and maybe even with his hand. But insult him terribly; call him a disgusting pig who from now on has to be watched and maybe should be caged. But no change in anyone. Brother goes about his business; Vera looks and talks to him normally. After a while he feels she was up just the second time he touched her, because nobody could stay asleep so long through it, and he did stick it in deeper and move it around more than the first time. If someone played with his penis when he was asleep, he thinks he’d get awake after a while. And if a finger was stuck inside him, he’d definitely get awake. He knows he’ll never do anything like that again. If he ever sees her sleeping naked, he’ll just turn around and walk away. Not even cover her up. Or maybe just cover her, if it’s cold and it seems the covers had fallen accidentally to th
e floor and not just been kicked off or down the bed, but not look at her crack. He thinks about the incident on and off the next few years. Shudders every time. Sometimes it comes when he’s just looking at her face, and not even when she’s looking back at him. He doesn’t know why, but it comes back to him, putting his finger in, and he has to shut his eyes and shake his head to get rid of it. A few times it’s when she’s got a hospital gown on, at home or in a hospital, and which always seems to fall a little over her left shoulder. Maybe that’s the side she was operated on most and lost more bone than the other and so has less shoulder to support the gown. After a few years he thinks she never told anyone in the family about it but had been awake both times he fingered her. He’d be duping himself or just a fool to think something like a finger in her wouldn’t have wakened her the first time. And if that’s not it—let’s say she went sound asleep immediately—then also because he didn’t know what he was doing then with his finger and so had to be a little rough. He’s also beginning to recall a slight smile on her when he threatened her. Why’s he see it now when he didn’t think he saw it then? Maybe he didn’t recognize it as such then or just didn’t want to. If he’d seen it then it would have meant to him she was awake and he’d then feel for sure he was in the worst trouble he’d ever been in. But that’s the face he’s starting to see whenever he remembers threatening her. More than that: it’s the face he sees, though the face through the rest of it—when he was probing and fingering her and so on—was of one asleep. Years later he tells a woman he’s been going with for months about it and says she’s the first person he’s told. He’s around thirty. She says “What took you so long to tell anyone? It’s common stuff. I hear it all the time from women friends. My own brother did it to me lots of times and much worse. Occasionally he’d wait for my mom to leave and then go straight to my room, tear off my blankets if I was in bed and even asleep and say ‘Pull down your bottoms so I can take a peek.’ He also had me whack him off a few times and one time I had to wipe him clean and then wash his tip over the sink. I drew the line when he once wanted to stick his prick in. Only an inch, he said, and I told him I’d tell the police if he so much as tried, and maybe even say he’s been trying to rape me for years. So what did he say? ‘What about your rear end then? That way you can stay a virgin and not get babies and I heard if it hurts anyone, it’s the guy.’ He was really wild.” “Why’d you let him do anything to you?” “Why’d your sister?” “It was only once, or twice in about ten minutes, and for all I know she actually might have been asleep.” “She was up; don’t go kidding yourself again. Only reason she pretended being asleep was she was curious, or possibly scared. As for me, I thought it’d get him to treat me better. You see, he fancied himself as, and my mother encouraged him to be, the man of the house, what with our dad dead, but he took advantage of it and became a real mean louse. I also never thought she’d believe me if I told her what he was doing. To her, that schmuck was God. But everything turned out OK. We got it all out at a shrink—a family counselor we went to as a family for a year. And now we don’t even think about it or as anything more than sadistic growing-up experimental kid stuff on his part, and on mine, that I should have said ‘Lay off or I’ll call the cops or kick in your nuts’ from the start. And on my mother’s: birdbrain neglect that she was lucky didn’t turn into catastrophic life-changing big brother inseminating little sis.” “I know you said he made you masturbate him and maybe worse, but did he ever stick his finger in you too?” “Finger. Toe. Once a pencil. That’s why I say, he was a sadist then. But he turned out fine and I’ve no fears he won’t be anything but a terrific father to his girls.” “I’m not even sure I can look at the sonofabitch now after what you told me.” “Oh, lay off the guy. He was just a jerk who since then’s done a complete reverse. At least he talked about it openly by the time he was twenty-five. While you, you’ve kept it in and have most likely whipped yourself to death over it several times, even if what you did wasn’t one-fiftieth as bad.” His mother says “What can we get her to amuse herself? She stares at the walls half the day, doesn’t have a clue what to do with herself once her teacher leaves.” They get her paints, pastels, an easel and smock, modeling clay. She tries a few times and then says: “I’m not the artist type. My stuff is so amateurish and hopeless it makes me feel ugly and dumb just to look at it. I think I’m more the type that likes making things people can use.” His mother has him get Vera craft materials at a hobby shop and she makes leather scissor holders and book covers, beaded necklaces and cloth trivets and wraps them and at the dinner table gives them as gifts. “It’s not my birthday or graduation, or not that I know of it,” he says, “but thanks. It’s very pretty and handy.” “I’ll make something else for you then with leather,” and he says “Nah, one’s enough. Not that I don’t really like it, but spread the good work around,” but the next night she gives him another wrapped gift. “Look Mom, Dad,” he says “it’s to hold my keys.” Feels and smells the leather. “Smooth, and very nicely cured. Smells almost like the actual cow’s hide, but nice, though, and now my keys won’t scratch my thighs or cut through my pants pockets and make all my change spill out.” Later he says to his mother “She should be doing something, if it has to be crafts, that I can say ‘That’s fantastic, that truly shows talent.’ Something I can honestly admire if not use—we, all of us—and give her real credit for and which she can get better and better at over the years till she even becomes an artisan at it, why not? and even sells some of it. But work stupid but well-meaning institutions give brain-damaged people to do? It’s humiliating. Or demoralizing. Whatever it is, I hate it for her.” His mother says “She hasn’t a storehouse of talent and imagination and any pushing her to be more artistic will make her feel ugly and dumb again and maybe even make her head hurt. Let her do what she enjoys doing and feel it’s adequate and you continue faking your admiration whenever she gives one to you.” She next gives him a lanyard with a whistle on it and he says thanks, blows it, says “Nice tone, not too tweet-tweet. Maybe I’ll wear it at the next square dance I’ll do-si-do to,” and she says “Where’s that?” and he says “You know, when you call the calls or whatever the caller does,” and she says “When did you ever do one of those?” and he says “At camp, when I used to dance, not call. But I’m really only kidding. But it’s nice, this, though what I can use it for…? Maybe my keys if I’m wearing pants without pockets or something—like athletic shorts for the outside but when I also have no shirt on with pockets in it,” and she says “Really, if you don’t like it, or can’t use it, I know someone who might,” and he says “Well, then you should probably give it to him or her, for it is, to tell you the truth, kind of wasted on me. It’s not quite for the city and I’m always in the city, not that I want to be, and I suppose also I’m just not a lanyard man,” and he gives it to her and she looks hurt and he says “Excuse me, but what did I say? Honestly, Vera, it’s good work. The colors are lovely and so’s the design and it’s just about perfectly constructed—’fabricated,’ is the new word. And if I had to make something like that—if I so much as tried—it’d be all over the joint, a perfect mess. But what if—but maybe I shouldn’t say this, though if I don’t I’m sure I’ll regret it even more, so here goes. What if you started doing something that would thoroughly take you over and make you want to do it every chance you got and which, let’s say in a year or so or just whenever it happens, could eventually become something like art or just great or truly excellent crafts? Because you show talent here with this lanyard—with the bracelets and leather works and that cloth hot pot thing—I always forget the name of it—you truly do. The colors and way you make them and such and the quick way you picked it all up, besides the variety of different crafts you’ve done.” “I’m not interested in making things like that, but thanks for what you said about my work,” and she doesn’t show him any of it after that. A few weeks later he asks his mother what Vera’s been up to with her crafts, “since she hasn’t gi
ven me anything in a while, and come to think of it, even shown me it or spoken about it,” and his mother says “She seems to have lost interest in it and I’m afraid is back twiddling her thumbs most of the day, when she isn’t staring out the window at the sun and burning her eyes,” but gives no hint she knows what took place between Vera and him. His parents buy her a special television set she can control from her bed. She gets to like a couple of the afternoon soap operas and follows them every day. Just to get her talking about something, he asks her “So what is it about these shows that you watch them so much?” He tells himself that whatever she says he’s going to answer “That’s nice, that’s fine, makes sense, very interesting, now I can understand.” She gives the story line of one of the shows for the last two weeks and says “Maybe not to you, but to me it’s kind of fascinating. Also the acting is very good and the whole thing feels like real life but not any that many of us live. All that plus looking forward to it and probably guessing what’s going to happen next has hooked me and a few million other people, like a good novel would to you that takes place over a few centuries. You know, very long and involved and with family after family and lots of living and dying.” “Actually, some of the things you described do make me think it could be good, like a long-term infection that doesn’t make you sick or anything and even makes you feel chipper.” She invites him to watch it with her one day after he gets back from teaching junior high school. He says “Usually I’m too bushed to do anything but nap for an hour before I have to start correcting papers and things, but one day I might.” “You’ll see you could get hooked too. I’ve even read where big-time college professors changed their class schedules when one of the soaps moved to a different time, just so they wouldn’t miss a single minute of it.” “Well, if they can watch and appreciate it, why not I? I could even use a daily rather simple distraction like that, which could be why they do it, to clear the head a bit, or maybe it is that engrossing and good. Tomorrow then, if I don’t fall asleep on my feet second I get home.” He tells himself “Remember, if you don’t like it, which you know you won’t, don’t say so. Just nod and say it’s pretty good and you could see why someone of any kind of intelligence could get hooked on it, but you only wish you had the free time most college professors have, but you have a ton of paperwork and lesson plans to do each weekday if you want to keep your weekends relatively clear.” During the first commercial break she says “What do you think so far?” and he says “Not bad, not bad,” and during the next break she says “Did it get any better for you?” and he says “Why, don’t you think I’m enjoying it?” and she says “You’re obviously not. Fidgeting around; chewing your cuticles; that sourpuss look you always have when you’re bored with something and feel you can’t get out of it—that one goes back to when you were a boy,” and he says “Oh, that’s my stomach acting up which it’s been doing all day—teaching often works on my muscles there in addition to giving me cramps,” and she says “Listen, if the show’s junk, say so. Because what are you holding back for, my feelings?” and he says “Well, they mean something,” and she says “Believe me, whatever you say’s not going to hurt me or change my watching it,” and he says “OK then; all right. To me—mind if I talk while it’s on?” and she presses the remote control and the show goes off. “To me the whole thing feels made by admen for idiots.” “That sounds rehearsed.” “No. If it’s good, then it’s a mistake. And you’re no idiot by a long shot, so I don’t know what you see in it; though maybe those professors are, experts in one line but dumb and young in most everything else. Or maybe today’s segment is an isolated bad case and all the other days are five times as good,” and she says “This one’s fairly typical, in story and the rest.” “Then I don’t know what to say. But when the commercials are more gripping than the story and better acted and directed, then we better watch out.” “What’s wrong with the acting? You saying it’s bad?” ‘Tm saying it’s quacking, not acting. I’m saying any schnook off the street could do better. You hear about casting couches? This one must have had a dormitory hall of them, one side for men and the other for the young beauties.” “What are casting couches?” “You know. Couches where actors are cast on, like in bronze and stone. Forget that; didn’t turn out. And the bad acting’s probably not the actors’ fault either, for what do they have to work with? ‘Goodbye.’ ‘Goodbye?’ ‘That’s right, goodbye.’ ‘You’re really saying goodbye?’ ‘You got it. I’m truly and absolutely saying goodbye.’ ‘You can’t mean it.’ ‘I mean it, my darling, I mean it.’ ‘Then why’d you call me now your darling?’” “OK, I get the point,” she says. “Wait, I’m getting to the heart of it and having fun. ‘Force of habit.’ ‘Force of habit?’ ‘Yes, force of habit. Now goodbye.’ ‘Shall I see you to the door at least?’ ‘See me if you wish but it won’t change my leaving.’ ‘I’ll see you to it then.’ ‘Then see me, for no more protests I hope on either of our sides.’” “What do you mean by that last thing?” “It’s nothing; another flub. Then, after six commercials and several station breaks with minicommercials, back to where we left him seeing her to the door. The camera zooms in on his hand on the doorknob. Maestro, doorknob music. Then closer to the pinky ring she once gave him. “This is painful,” she says. “Painful, but not close?” “Nowhere near. They don’t repeat talking like that. They almost never follow the same couple scene after scene. And how would we know she gave him the ring? Was it yesterday’s show? Was it today’s? You’re being silly.” “He says so at the door. ‘Want the pinky ring back you gave me when I was your darling?’ ‘No.’ ‘No?’ ‘No.’ Actually, what they have there might not be so bad. Modern drama. I’ve always thought someone should write a play or book where the whole two acts or two hundred pages of it takes place between the time the guy gets out of his chair to go to the window a few feet away till he reaches the window and looks out. Or gal. And maybe at the end all he or she does is look out of it a second and raise a hand to wave or say hi or tries to raise the window and gives up after one try. So I’m saying this soap maybe has something going for it that I didn’t know. Maybe all soaps if they’re all as slow. But I’m tired, as I told you I’d be, so my judgment of them could also be very bad. School teaching knocks the living stuffing out of you. The kids today—” “You really didn’t give it a chance. You came in with lousy opinions of it and then did everything you could to back them up.” “I gave it enough, didn’t I? Ten minutes, around—what more’s it need?” “If it was a book how many pages would you give it? Twenty pages, you’d have to. That’d be about thirty minutes for a fast reader, maybe forty for a slow. “If it was a lousy book I could tell in five minutes. Just three pages—the first two and the last and maybe an extra thirty seconds to zip through the middle. Because crap is crap and doesn’t need anymore time than that. Just as that stupid soap was, which you’re too smart not to know. So what am I saying? I’m saying if you have to watch anything on TV when the sun’s still out and we’re not on daylight saving time, maybe an educational program on another station at the same hour?” “What about if I don’t watch anything because I can’t?” and she looks around for something and he says “What do you mean?” and then “What are you looking for?” and she grabs the glass off the night table and throws it at the screen, doesn’t break it but the glass breaks when it hits the floor. “Oh, smart, smart,” he says. “You want to kill us all if the tube explodes and sets fire to the room? Brilliant,” and he leaves. “Hell with you, bastard,” she yells. “And the tube couldn’t have exploded because the television was off,” and he says “Maybe, maybe,” gets to the end of the hall, then back to her room to pick up the glass. “Martyr, back, wonderful, don’t cut your hands I’m supposed to say,” and after he’s got all the glass but the tiniest pieces he leaves the room. They don’t talk to each other at dinner. After, his mother talks to him and he says he would have gone in anyway to apologize and goes into her room where she’s on her bed reading a magazine and says “Look, I’m sorry, the whol
e thing was dumb of me, please accept my apology and I came in not because anyone told me to but on my own.” “I don’t want to talk about it. You’re so freaking stuffed with yourself you stink.” “Fine, good, get it out on me; you should.” “I’m not getting it out. I’ve thought about it and you’re a mess.” “Look, my standards, if that’s what they are, are stupidly and most likely falsely and just all-out-of-proportion high. And to me I have this misguided, don’t ask me where it came from, idea that art-art-art is God, so what can I say? I’m probably a fake.” “Oh, when you get right down to it a lot of what you say’s true, even if the way you say it is horrible. I do watch these dumb shows to stop from being bored to death, when I should be doing something else with my time. Like what, though’s, the problem.” “No no. Watch the good stuff, that’s all, and maybe some of the bad stuff too when you’re totally bored; it’s only human.” “Really, much as I hate admitting it and still think your a swollen-headed mess, you changed my mind. You want the set in your room from now on? Because I don’t.” “No, keep it and never listen to me again on this, or just think some more before giving it away.” “If you don’t want it can you wheel it to Mom and Dad’s room? They said they wouldn’t mind having one like mine they can regulate from bed.” That’s where he puts it. In a closet, which is where his parents want it, and from time to time someone wheels it out for her, but not out of the room, for something she especially wants or thinks she ought to watch. He takes her to the movies. “Take her to a movie; she hasn’t been in years,” his mother said. “You want to go to a movie?” he said. “Sure, I love them,” she said, “but who’s going to take me and how we going to get there? It’ll take me a year to walk to Broadway to get the bus.” She’s begun to smoke so wants to sit in the balcony. He can’t stand tobacco smoke but will take it for her. He asks if they have an elevator here, “you can see my sister can’t take the stairs too well,” and the usher says “No elevator; if it’s that she wants to smoke, she can do it in the ladies’ room, but that’s one flight downstairs.” “If you have to go,” he tells her, “do it now; I don’t think there’s a bathroom upstairs.” “No worry; I always go twice before I leave.” She hands him her metal braces, grabs the stair railing with both hands and climbs the two flights to the balcony. She has a lot more trouble with the steps in the balcony because there are no railings along the aisles. He says “Maybe I should have got the loge seats. They seemed so much more expensive, but what the hell. Want me to run down and quickly change them?” “I’ll just be in people’s way while you’re gone. And by the time you get down and back we can be up there, and who’s to say they’ll have any? C’mon.” The theater’s jammed. It’s a popular movie, won a few Academy Awards in the leading categories the newspaper ad said, and the people around them all seem to be laughing. “If I see a single seat, want me to grab it for you?” “I don’t like sitting alone; nobody to tell what I think about it. Don’t worry, we’re almost there or thereabouts.” When he finally got around to asking her if she wanted to go to a movie and they looked in the paper for one, this one had already begun. But it was the one she wanted to see most and she didn’t want to wait for the next show, she said, as he might lose interest in going by then or say it was getting too late, he has to work tomorrow and so on. So he ran outside, up the avenue and got a cab and picked her up in front of the building. “Only front two rows audience seats or last three rows balcony,” an usher was announcing by the ticket booth and he looked at her and she said “OK with me; I want to see it and might not get another chance till it comes around again in a year. When the movie ends we’ll come down.” She seems to be struggling so he grabs her arm to help her walk up the last few steps and she says ouch. “That hurts; too much pressure on my arm goes straight to my brain or spine or something, but it’s like a bullet shot in me where you touched.” It takes twenty minutes to walk from the lobby to their balcony seats. People around them are still laughing and even howling hysterically. She gets in first and he turns around to look and doesn’t yet see what’s so funny. Jack Lemmon. He can be a funny guy. And something about an apartment key he heard on the way up and some pretty actress he’s never seen before who seems to be overdoing the New York accent. He bought her what she wanted at the candy stand. “Anything?” “Pick it, the kid’s flush.” “What’s ‘flush’? “Cash, on me, more than enough.” Popcorn, soda, ice cream bonbons that seemed pretty expensive for the size of the box. He didn’t say anything, but his look when he got his change back. “Well, since I see my being here as kind of an occasion,” she said, “I might as well treat myself big or let you do it.” “That a way to go.” He carried it all up for her with the braces. Some of the popcorn spills when he quickly turns from the screen to her when she says “C’mon, sit down, you’ll see it better from here,” and he hands her the soda, popcorn and box and starts picking it up. “What’re you doing?… Leave it, we’ve already caused too much fuss.” It’s the last row, nothing behind them but wall, so he can bob around and sit as tall as he wants. He sits, drops under the seat what popcorn he picked up, lays her braces quietly on the floor, helps her off with her coat, she gives him back the bonbons and says “For some reason I can’t open it; the fingers; they feel stuck,” and he rips the plastic off with his teeth and opens the box. “Help yourself,” she says but he says he hasn’t been able to stand any kind of ice cream since he was a soda jerk at a summer resort and saw—, but she shushes him, points to the screen and they watch. She smokes six cigarettes during the forty minutes till the movie ends. At one point she put her head close to his and said “Liking it?” and he said “You know, it isn’t for me to say this but—,” and she said “Please don’t talk about my smoking,” and he said “But your clothes are going to stink from it-mine too—not to say your health,” and she said “Let me have what little fun I can get, will you? and you’re also killing the movie for me,” and sat up straight again. Most of the balcony gets up to leave when the movie’s over and he says “Should we move down?” and she says “Who wants to get trampled in the rush,” and he says “Fine by me, so long as my eyes hold out—yours doing OK?” and she nods, “and nobody behind me to complain of my big head.” When the movie gets to the part where they came in he says “Think we can go now?” and she says “Why, did we see this? Can’t we see it to the end though? I’m having a ball.” He hates seeing a movie he’s just seen. Even as a kid, hated it, for even a few minutes, and doesn’t think he’s ever seen the same movie through twice in his life. He looks at his watch. It’s a dark part of the movie and he can’t see the numbers and hands on the dial, but he says “It’s getting late,” tapping his watch; “I have to be at school tomorrow half past eight at the latest,” but she pretends not to hear him or she really doesn’t, everyone around them laughing so hard. She’s laughing now too, harder than she’s done since they got there, maybe for his benefit, but then she also might understand the story better now. A combination of things perhaps, one contributing to or taking away from the other, but too difficult and not important enough to try to figure out. He shuts his eyes, slumps down till he’s lower than the seat top, tries to sleep, but her laughing and everyone else’s and the loud sound track keep him up. Who can sleep in a theater? he thinks. His father, even at operas. “Only comedies,” she says when they’re putting their coats on and waiting for almost everyone in the balcony to leave. “No serious stuff, which I’m sure you’d like better. That is, if you ever want to take me again. And if it’s the balcony that made you so irritable, next time you can stick me up here and then sit downstairs and come back for me after. I can get used to sitting alone if it’s a picture I can laugh hard enough at. Though this one was both serious and funny, don’t you think? A very tricky plot, with some serious actors in it, and suicide’s nothing to laugh about, if I got what happened right. I know she didn’t kill herself, but they did have to walk her around.” “Irritable? Me? No, it’s just—well, cigarette smoke might make me that way a little, but I’ll g
et accustomed to it. Hold my nose through most of the show, or something. And twice a month if you want, but from now on let’s try to get here from the beginning.” “I don’t know. Sort of makes it easier for me getting here when everyone else is already in. And coming in the middle of the picture and trying to make out what’s happening is sort of a challenge.” He takes her to a movie a few weeks later and then a couple more times in the next few years. He dreams about her recovering, for several years before she died and lots of times after. In one he says “Good morning,” and she says “Good morning to you, sir,” and gets off her crutches, throws them behind her, he jumps at her to stop her from falling but she steps back, shows how she can walk without crutches and says “I can even fly now,” and puts out her arms, closes her eyes and starts humming, rises about ten feet, flies in a circle around him and then into the clouds. “Come back,” he shouts. “Don’t get carried away. There are planes up there. Spacecraft, lunar junk, wild birds, no air.” In another he’s hurrying to junior high school to teach when a car pulls up, she’s at the wheel and leans across the front seat and says “Hi, like a lift?” “Sure, but since when do you drive?” “Oh, I’ve been practicing in my hospital bed and wheelchair, and stick shift too.” He gets in beside her and says “What is it, some special handicapped car?” and she says “Oh no, I’m all better now, I’ve just come from the hospital,” and lifts her legs above the seat and shakes them. “Watch out for the cars,” he yells and though her car hasn’t moved, her feet go back and forth on about eight floor pedals, so fast he can hardly see them. “I can walk too but why walk when you have a car?” “And your crutches?” “First thing I did when I got out was put them under the tires and run over them.” “You should have given them to the hospital or Goodwill,” and she says “Symbolism over reality any day. You never went through what I did, so how could you know?” Another one she’s in a wheelchair, slumped over asleep and held in by a waist strap, tubes in her nose and coming out from under the blanket on her lap, when she suddenly crows, rips the strap off and tubes out of her, stands and kicks the chair back so hard it bangs against the wall and falls over, and starts walking around in circles, sniffing the air like a dog. “Look at you, you’re walking,” he says. “Mom, Dad, look at Vera. It’s a miracle.” “That’s right,” she says, “and this is the way I’m gonna be from now on. I can’t stand the position I was put in,” and walks out of the apartment, building, down the block, walking so fast he can’t catch up with her even though he’s sprinting. “The world’s fastest walker,” he thinks. “I’ll enter her in the Olympics if they have such a race. She’ll win medals and fame for the family and write a book about it and make millions and not have to worry about anything again in her life.” He stops when he’s out of breath; she turns south on Columbus and next thing he knows she’s just a dot at the tip of Manhattan and then he can’t see her. His father hands him binoculars and he looks through them and sees her walking as fast over a huge suspension bridge. Cars are speeding toward her but she zips around them. “Vera,” he yells, “Vera,” and then loses her. In another she’s in a hospital sitting against the side of her bed. Frail, gaunt, hair a mess, skin yellow, sores on her legs, feet twisted in. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “—do I smell bad?” “No, you don’t smell bad,” he says. “Well I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to live another minute and you have to help me do it.” “Do what, live?” “No not live.” “No, do, live. You smell good. Maybe there’ll be a cure for you some day. Sure there will. I’ve read articles, people have sent you them.” “You think so?” “I’d almost stake my life on it.” Suddenly she’s four or five, same ugly hospital clothes on though, and then quickly becomes around fifteen and her body starts blossoming, little bumps, then big breasts, hips develop, legs lengthen, thighs harden, and she’s wearing a thin summer dress and Greek sandals, they used to call them, with the straps wrapped halfway up her calves, hole in her neck and shoulder slump gone, bed becomes a chaise longue on a patio somewhere, flowering trees behind her and behind them a lake. “I told you,” he says. “You did, didn’t you, Mr. Knows-it-all and always so good to me, so prophetically correct and sweet, does anyone in the world deserve more than you?” and she gets up, comes over, puts his arms around her and her hands in his side pants pockets and kisses him on the mouth. “Oh boy, she’s a hot number,” he thinks. “What am I going to do with her now?” In another she’s stepping off a train onto an empty outdoor platform. Tall, meticulously dressed, hair done up, no sign of her illness. And must have been a long journey, he thinks, what with all the luggage that’s now beside her. She seems to be looking around for someone as the train pulls away. He says “Hey, I’m here, over here,” and keeps shouting and waving as he approaches her, but she doesn’t turn to him or seem to hear him. “Vera,” he says, standing next to her, “the trip’s done wonders for you. What was it, some kind of tour of various spas?” She keeps looking around but never at him. Then she shakes her head, is disgusted, picks up two valises and what looks like a makeup case and walks to the small train station. He lifts her one trunk onto his back, almost collapses from it, holds it by an end strap with his hands over his shoulders, and follows her. “Right behind you,” he says, “if this thing doesn’t kill me first. And hold the door, please, hold that door,” but she lets it swing back into his head. In another she’s sitting at a table in the staff cafeteria of a junior high school he taught at for years, arguing with another teacher about a book they’ve all read. “The author portrays her as a whore. She’s no whore. No woman’s a whore. The whore’s the author who portrays women as whores so every man and lez can stick his finger in while he reads. Because when she sticks her finger in it’s for her pleasure, pure and simple, and perhaps as a mnemonic device, but not for whores who think all women are whores, lezies and fingers.” “You make no sense and are also downright offensive in your references to lesbians,” the teacher says. “And what do you make, you big bag of haggard figs? Fart on me, fart on me, why don’t you?” and she stands up—“Your crutches, watch out, you’ll fall,” Howard says—and she says “Hell with my crutches, who needs them?” and grabs them off the floor and breaks them over her thigh, says to the teacher, who’s never stopped eating, “You’re lucky I didn’t wrap them around your little onanist’s neck,” and slaps the sandwich out of his mouth and stomps out of the room. “Crude, rude and wasteful, is the way I’d characterize your sister,” he says, “and you’re fired.” In another he’s sleeping in bed in his old room, little light from the streetlights coming in through the Venetian blind slits, when the covers are slowly pulled off him, he starts shivering and says “Please, whoever it is, I’m cold,” and looks up and sees she’s naked and has the body and body hair of his wife. She says “Mind if I come in—I’m frightened,” and he says “I’m not allowed to—I promised the folks,” and she says “Why, because I’m supposed to be sick and sad person? Well, you don’t see me crying or on crutches or canes or in a wheelchair or anything, so I must’ve recovered or else always been well,” and she slips in beside him—“Please, it’s a narrow single bed, go back to your own”—kisses him on the chest, tickles his nipples, grabs his penis and jerks it till it’s hard—“That’s reflex, not feeling; it’s even happened when I’ve sat with a plain empty box on my lap”—gets on top of him; he tries to buck her off and she says “Don’t be a rotten bastard; I might, like everyone else in life, be frightfully to moribundly sick tomorrow or even later tonight, so let me have my kicks while I can”—sticks his penis in, arches back to sort of lock it in and bounces up and down on him, while he’s looking at the door, waiting for his parents to burst in and thinking of an excuse to give them—“I couldn’t help it; she forced me to; she’s become so strong and big that she simply overpowered me; I also thought that for all the permanent harm it’ll do me, maybe it’ll do some short-term good for her in some particular way, and I also didn’t want to wake the two of you up…” His mother, Vera and he are at the airport
; he’s leaving for a year on a fellowship at a California school. Vera says “Wait, nobody go away,” and on crutches goes into a shop, comes out and waves her hands no and goes down a passageway and disappears, comes back just around the time they’re thinking of looking for her, with a newsweekly and cheap paperback copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems. “I thought you’d like them for the plane. I won’t pretend I’ve read the poems or even know how to say her name, but it was the only poetry book they had and from what it says on the back cover it seems very good.” He kisses her cheek, she lowers her head and blushes, he wants to tell her that if she has another operation he’ll fly home immediately and stay as long as she likes. That he can’t thank her enough for the book, which he’ll start reading right away on the plane, even before the magazine, which he also thanks her for. That right now she seems balanced on the outstretched crutches like some winged statue of victory on top of an institutional dome. That he’ll come home for Christmas for a month and maybe Thanksgiving if the fare isn’t too steep and they’ll go to restaurants and movies and just spend lots of time talking at home. That he’d trade places with her if he could. He’s had twenty-eight good healthy years, so he’d be willing to take her place from now on if she could be healthy again. That if she ever needs some of his skin for grafting, which the doctors said she might need, and of course any amount of his blood, whose type they share, she can definitely count on him. That she should think about coming to California with Mom to see him for a week or two, but when the weather’s nice so they can see the pretty hills and big smelly trees and exotic flowers and flowering citrus trees, with eventually real fruit on them, he hears the area’s known for. That he’s going to buy a used car there and they’ll drive all the way to Santa Barbara or the Hearst Castle if she wants, even if it turns out to be farther than Santa Barbara, and back along the ocean route through Big Sur where they can even camp out for the night. That he’ll try to write her almost every day but certainly a couple of times a week and of course call. That he loves her very very much and she’s in his thoughts daily and she’ll be in them even more a day when he gets out there and he’ll miss her she can’t know how much and he really thinks, though he doesn’t know why he feels so sure about this—maybe it’s the way she’s been looking and acting lately—but that she’s going to get much better the next year, off the crutches, no more of those urinary and eye problems to add to it and headaches and such, gaining weight and maybe even height and walking and doing just about everything normally again. And that there’s always the chance he’ll get the disease too, as the doctors said, and that she’s set the standard how to deal with it year after year. The departure’s announced, he kisses his mother and her goodbye, thanks her for the book and magazine and tells her to take care and he’ll call them soon after he gets there, the plane goes, he sits in his seat crying for a while, reads the magazine cover to cover, opens the book when lunch comes but the pages start falling out while he’s turning them. One of the first things he’s going to do after he finds an apartment and gets set up in California is stick the loose pages and rest of the book into a postal bag and send it to the publisher with a note complaining of the lousy binding and asking for a new copy plus reimbursement for the cost of the bag and mailing the book to them. He and the woman he’s living with like going to a different restaurant every other week. They take Vera with them every third or fourth time. One time she says the Indian food’s too hot. “If you take me again, please not too spicy a place?” She doesn’t like the Mexican food. “Too heavy and any food that has chocolate in its main course has to be in deep trouble to come up with something original.” Philippine food’s too peanutty, Chinese food too gooey, Japanese food’s pretty but has no taste and the small portions make you feel gypped, German food seems as if it’s been left on the stove for days by mistake, Cuban and Ukrainian food seem unclean. “I appreciate being invited—it’s nice just to get out—but I wish I liked tasting different foreign foods or saw the point to it as much as you. Have you ever eaten French?—I’m sure you have,” and they tell her if it’s any good it has to be too expensive for them, and American food, which she wouldn’t mind having—“Since summer camp I’ve loved things like succotash and chicken à la king”—they feel they’ve had too much of it at home and they also like drinking different foreign wines and beers. The woman’s very attentive to her, holds her arm when they walk, makes sure she gets the best taxi and restaurant seat, provides her with magazine articles she thinks she might be interested in, always compliments her clothes, often comments about her soft sultry voice and long straight well-groomed hair, that she has a perfect little model’s nose and beautiful small fingers and ears and how smart she is not to use rouge and nail polish and hair spray and how well she takes care of her cuticles and nails. Once when he goes to the men’s room she says “I wish I could be like you. Beautiful, a natural height, breasts, hips that don’t look like a six-year-old’s, your posture, educated, engaged to an all-right guy, the chance to drive a car and go to work and have kids. I hate my life but don’t tell my brother any of this. Say I’m satisfied, to a degree, if he asks what we talked about and you say ‘life.’ But sometimes I wish I could suddenly die and nothing really helps that feeling. Religion sometimes, psychiatrists no time, I never took to booze or food as a release. And because my insides are so bad in various places after so many operations and the wear and tear on them from the disease, I’m not supposed to smoke, but screw that I say, since it’s my only peace except sleep.” The woman tells him all this later and he says “Why doesn’t she have more incentive to do something with her life? Sure, death, that’s a good one to scare the shit out of you and which she’s talked a lot about and years ago actually tried, because she hasn’t the fucking imagination or spunk to do anything harder, like possibly doing something. For she has the use of her hands, her brains have the potential, she gets around on those crutches OK or can always take taxis, and she certainly has the time. She doesn’t have to go out and hack it, everything’s given her, the libraries are stacked with the best anyone could read, the state and federal government will pay for any education she wants for as long as she likes right up to a Ph.D., and Social Security or some other big agency guarantees her a decent income for life and even more—if the rest of the family dies—should she suddenly fall flat on her face or can only meet things halfway,” and the woman says “Why do you take her out and spend the time with her you do and talk and say you think about her so much if after all of it you still can’t put yourself in her place?” “Wait a minute—what did I say? Maybe you’re right. I can be a little too hard on people. Let me go to sleep on it, but Christ I’m being straight-out honest when I say I wish she was a more interesting and better-read person and had some intelligent things and few other experiences than her repetitive nonevent bland ones to talk about when we go out,” and next morning, mostly so the woman wouldn’t think him a bastard, he says “You were right on the mark about Vera last night. Maybe I’d had too much to drink or something at dinner and it got me mean and angry, but I was being totally insensitive and unfair.” She tries killing herself with aspirins when she’s around ten. His mother sees her acting giddy, thinks she drank some liquor from the liquor cabinet, sees the empty aspirin bottle, throws her down, sticks her fingers down her mouth till she throws some of it up, gets her in a cab to a hospital to have her stomach pumped. Later Vera tells her she’s never going to try anything like that again. For a day or so she felt sick of her condition and didn’t think anyone liked her but her mother and that her father even hated her and that’s why she did it. “But getting that tube down my neck was worse than any killing myself could be. They must’ve thought I wasn’t awake, but I never felt anything so painful and disgusting in my life.” A couple of years later she cuts her wrist with a razor blade she got out of her father’s razor. Howard’s in his room when he hears his mother scream. His brother and father run through the apartment to the upstairs bathroom. He runs t
oo but they tell him to go back to his room and stay there. The cut isn’t much and his mother bandages it up. A few weeks later, though his mother told him not to mention any of it around the house and never to Vera, he says to her “Please don’t let the folks know I’m talking about this, and if the question bothers you don’t answer it, but what did it feel like when you did it to your wrist and what in hell made you do it?” “First of all,” she says, “don’t curse. Second of all, doing it hurt very much. When the blood started shooting out I suddenly got scared and couldn’t go any deeper. I didn’t want to live, that’s all the reason was, because I’m sick of the ugly way I look and my body all crooked and that I know it’s all only going to get much worse. But all I got from it was a lot of gushy attention I didn’t want and a big bawling-out from Dad. I felt so dumb. I’ll never try anything like that again. Mom’s also said if I kill myself she’ll kill herself right after and then haunt me in heaven forever or just crack up in real life and never again be the same.” She’s fourteen when she goes to the roof of their building and sits on the edge of it looking down to the street. A man in a window across the street yells “Hey miss, hey miss, what are you doing up there, get down,” and when she turns away from him and just stays there, he calls the police. A policeman comes to the roof and says “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get too near you, but what are your parents’ names and where do they live?” and she says “They’re away for the weekend, my only brother at home’s at work, and the woman who’s supposed to look in on me went shopping downtown and won’t be back till much later today.” He moves nearer and says “Good, that’s a nice clear sensible answer, you sound great. Now come on off of there, kid, really, it’s no good for you and I don’t want to work hours past my duty,” and she says “Step a step closer and I’m sliding myself off. I don’t want to live but I don’t want to jump right away.” “Why don’t you want to live?—go on, tell me, I’ll listen,” and she says “Not to you.” “I can understand that; I’ve got a uniform; you’re afraid of it maybe. But will you speak to a minister or rabbi or someone from the clergy like that?” and she says “A priest. I like them best out of all those because they have time only for regular people and give everything they earn extra to the church and poor.” The street’s now blocked, lots of police cars and vans and fire trucks down there, lots of people looking up. Occasionally she hears her name called and a couple of times she thinks she recognizes the voices, but she stops looking down or at the windows across the street, almost all of them with people in them looking at her, and only looks at her hands or the people on her roof or a plane passing or just the plain sky. A priest from a local church comes to the roof and tries urging her down. “You have everything to live for. No matter what our state of mind or physical health, we all do. Think of your dear mother. Your brothers and father I’ve heard. There is never a good reason to take your own life.” She says “There’s no way I’m getting off here except head first to the street, so thanks but no thanks. It’s a long climb and you seem to have trouble with your legs like me, so I’m sorry for making you come up.” “Would you instead show your appreciation for what I did and your respect for my age and weak legs by accompanying me to my church where we can talk without being surrounded by all of this?” “No, but if you want to talk, do, so long as it’s from safe distance away,” and he says “Fine, I for one don’t like heights so if I have to be up here I’m happy where I am,” sits on a parapet separating adjoining roofs, takes a beret out of his jacket pocket and puts it on, “To protect me from the sun; I’m fair-skinned, so subject to its strokes,” and says “Now tell me, my dear, what brought all this on? And take your time and speak loudly, my ears from this far away aren’t good and I want to hear every word,” and she talks about her illness and childhood and operations and scars and that she has no friends, only people who feel sorry for her or are paid to do things or be with her, and some people the last two years have almost gagged at their first sight of her and nobody but nobody but her mother truly loves her, but that’s all right, why should they? she loves nobody but her in return, and don’t tell her God loves her too because she’s heard all that, she’s visited a priest to speak, maybe from his own church—is his the one a few blocks down between Columbus and Broadway?—and he says no, that’s a cathedral, his is farther uptown but he knows the one she means and its very fine head priest—and she says anyway, if he says something about how everyone isn’t perfect in life but is in the eyes of the Lord and so on, shell say everyone but her it seems to be like, and she forgot to say she of course doesn’t want to hurt her mother but she more than that doesn’t want to go on anymore like this which is worse than hurting ten mothers if they were all like hers, and she only wishes, so she could be sure to die and not just get a broken neck or leg, that this building was fifteen stories high instead of five or whatever it is when you count that open areaway her mother calls it you go four steps down into from the street. He listens, tries to reason with her at several points, finally says what looks beyond bearing today can suddenly be thought thoroughly bearable tomorrow and even a gift of sorts because it forced her to reconsider her existence which in the end will give her the essential spiritual subsistence to live, and then they are always devising new cures for everything, medicine is like that these days, the good news about her cure might even be in the mail now to her mother or doctor or being printed this moment on sheets at the newspaper plant so they can all read it later today, so he’s sure if she comes downstairs with him she’ll look upon this as one of the more capricious events of her junior years but not one to be ashamed of one bit, for she is only questioning deeply and acting fervently and being profoundly human and all that’s to be respected and even revered by all well-meaning intelligent men, death is tied to life as she must now see, she has made the connection that most people never make in their entire lives so why rush things, does she understand what he means? gives up after an hour, says it’s become too hot for him and he’d feel ridiculous sitting here under an umbrella when there’s no rain and besides that he’s not well himself, he doesn’t want to say with what but part of it is something very personal that most older folk get which now forces him to go downstairs, but if she wants to talk to him some more to have the police phone him, he’ll be by his phone the next few hours and will immediately cab over, and if she only wants to talk about other things on this or any other day, simply phone him and he’ll come directly to her home just as she is always invited to his. Her brother Alex comes, tells her he called the resort their folks are at but they’ve gone sightseeing for the day and can’t be reached. She doesn’t look at him, watches two pigeons nestled under a roof eave across the street, follows the path of a contrail and then stares at it till it disintegrates, every now and then stands on crutches and stretches, ignoring the oohs, ohhs and noes from below. During one of these stretches, when she’s watching an enormous orange sun set into the river, a policeman swings to her on a sling hooked up from the next roof behind her, grabs her around the waist and swings back with her to his roof. She cries and kicks, is given an injection, is unconcious by the time she’s put into the ambulance, Alex all this time never letting go of her hand. Howard doesn’t know how the sling worked. It would have had to be somewhat large and complicated, for safety reasons and because the police knew they only had one shot at it and there couldn’t be any mistakes. Wouldn’t she have seen it being set up and been wary of it? Maybe she wanted to be saved that way, risky as it was, rather than just giving in and going downstairs on her own. He never asked her. In fact nothing about it was ever mentioned between them. People from the street yelled “yay” and applauded, some shouted “Tarzan and Jane.” He was working as a guest waiter in a summer camp upstate. There was a front-page photograph of her sitting on the roof, legs hanging off it, in both morning tabloids. He learned of the incident when Alex sent him a letter a week later talking about lots of other things but which included about ten lines typed out with x’s and n’s
and m’s and then scratched out with a pen. It took him a while to decipher it; held it up to the light; held a lit match behind it; tried erasing and then dissolving the ink. “She’s okay now, out of the hospital first on some stupefying and now a tranquilizing drug. Roof door’s been padlocked, violating all F. D. laws. Just hope she doesn’t incinerate the place to kill herself next time and the ground floor exit’s blocked. I know what your impulse is but don’t waste your hard-earned dough and scant day-off time coming in to see her. We’ve been told to put the whole thing away for good. Poor kid. Who could blame her? Newspaper articles and photos enclosed. They don’t even come close. Don’t let on I wrote.” He calls home, Alex answers and says—Vera or the folks must have been near—“Hi, everything’s jim-dandy here, the folks fine, Vera’s just great, you’re lucky to be away. City’s been sticky with humidity and temperatures in the upper nineties for a week, so even with the fans blasting at high we can’t sleep.” By the time he gets home at the end of August all the newspapers about it have been thrown out. He tries talking about it once but Alex says “Shh, shut your trap, someone might hear; anyway, it’s old news.” There’s a brownstone on the block for Christian missionaries passing through on their way to Africa or on their way back to wherever they live in the States. She becomes friendly with the woman who runs it, is invited in for chats, then prayer meetings, Bible classes, dinners in the refectory, Sunday teas. She makes friends with the young violinist son of a couple who work there. They stayed in New York rather than go back to Africa or wherever they came from in the States because their son got a full scholarship at Juilliard when he was fifteen. Howard finds this out only years later at a chamber music concert near the summer cottage he and his wife rent, when his mother’s up visiting. “That man playing,” she whispers, “—the one sweating so. I’m sure he’s the same violinist Clintwell Vera was friends with at the Heatherwhite House.” “Come on,” he says, and she says “Seriously. He’s heavier and older, but the same sweet soulful face, and he used to sweat a lot then too.” After the first piece he says “I never knew about him. I mean, he’s a fantastic violinist and all that. I even have a couple of his recordings—one a Bartok violin-piano duo and the other a Bach partita, I think, with a sonata or another partita on the other side-but with Vera?” “You were away. California. Should we speak to him after, though he probably won’t want to know she didn’t survive.” “It was so long ago; he won’t remember her.” “Of course he will. They were close friends. She used to bring him home for lunch, play checkers and cards with him in her room, do all sorts of things together: sit out in the backyard and tell funny stories and laugh. For a while I even thought if there was anyone who’d marry her, it’d be he. Simply because he’d overlook her illness, being so involved with his violin, or out of some Christian act, do it because of that. They weren’t in love, I don’t think, and she was a few years older; but he was very religious and withdrawn and shy and had no other real friends, she said, so I don’t think there was any young person closer to him at the time. Then he graduated and moved away.” They see him talking to a couple on the veranda during intermission. He’s holding his violin and bow, though he didn’t play in the second piece, and is mopping his hair with a hand towel. Probably he was in a studio in back practicing, for it isn’t that hot. “I have to know—you coming with me?” and she goes over, excuses and introduces herself, says how much she enjoyed his performance even if she isn’t the greatest connoisseur of classical music—she likes it, though, make no mistake about it—but she wonders, mainly because her son thinks she’s imagining it—she points to Howard who shakes his hand, says “Howard Tetch, her son; enjoyed your playing very much, very very much”—if he could be the same Clintwell who lived with his parents in the Heatherwhite House in New York City many years ago and knew her daughter Vera. “Sure, Vera; Vera Tetch. She helped me,” and turns to the couple and says “Her daughter helped me with my writing and math when I was a young man or I would have flunked,” and asks her and doesn’t seem surprised to hear Vera died twenty years ago. “I’m sorry. Thank you for stopping by,” and resumes talking to the couple, something about an excellent inn nearby with an unbeatable breakfast. After about two years of being around the mission house, borrowing their pamphlets and books, going with some of them to a religious retreat for a week, she announces at dinner “I hope this won’t be taken badly by any of you, but I plan to convert.” “Over my dead body,” his father says. “If she really wants to,” his mother says, “and she feels it will help her in ways, there’s nothing we can do.” “You’re going to tell me? Over my dead body.” Vera says “I’ll do what I have to; I’m old enough; there’s no law to stop me,” and leaves the table. “You’re old enough to be confused,” his father shouts after her. “There might be no law but I’ll stop you by locking you in your room. By burning down that Christian house. By getting the police after them and running them out of town.” A few months later she says “I’ve an announcement to make. I don’t know if any of you will like it, but I’m now a Christian. I didn’t go through any ceremony, but I feel I am and for now that’s enough for me. So from now on, please don’t consider me a Jew.” “You didn’t go through a ceremony, you’re no Christian,” his father says. “And even if you did go through one, I wouldn’t accept it. You were born a Jew, your mother and father are Jews, your whole family is, from your brothers on down, so you’re stuck with it. It’s the best religion, so feel good it’s still yours. But tell the world you’re a Christian and I’ll tell them right back you’re crazy.” She says nothing, leaves the table crying. The next day she leaves a note by the phone saying “Please keep this here till everyone has read it. Dear family, don’t include me in any of your Jewish religious observances from now on, except if you only want to invite me as an outsider. Thank you. I love you all always and I will pray for you all always too, no matter what you might think of that. Vera.” That’s the last she brings it up at home. She talks about it privately with his mother, his father never mentions it again to her. She goes to church with some mission people on Sundays and religious holidays, spends lots of time in the mission house setting up tables for dinner, cleaning up rooms as best she can, doing little chores. She says she does all this because she wants to and that they’ve offered her money for her work but she’s refused. When she dies several mission house people come to the chapel that night to pay their respects. Vera’s in a closed casket in the room, the funeral’s the next day. The woman who runs the mission house kisses his mother’s cheek, shakes everyone else’s hand, asks if she can speak to the family outside the room. His father says “I know what you’re about to say and it’s no.” The woman says “Perhaps you do know but my conscience compels me to tell you, to find out. May I speak?” “Speak, speak.” “Vera told me a few months ago, long before she went into the hospital, that if she died—” “That she wants to be buried a Gentile with a Gentile ceremony and so forth. I know; I told you I did.” “But she wouldn’t mind what kind of cemetery she was buried in, Jewish or Christian, but would prefer, if it was the former, to be near her parents.” “She wants to be this; she wants to have that; she can’t have both and everything. I hope you told her that. Because where we have our plots is a place for Jewish burials and monuments only. Maybe on one side of us and along the road to it are other cemeteries for Gentiles, but that’s nothing to talk about since she’s going in the ground tomorrow.” “I told her there was a problem and also to tell everything she told me to her parents. She said she tried, but wouldn’t explain further. I said if what she wants does happen, and that I don’t think it’ll happen at a time when I can be of any help—I meant by that to try to tell her I was much older than she and so would die long before her—I’d do what I could. But that she should still try to work it out with her family.” “Did Vera ever say anything about it to you?” his father says to his mother. “She said she was undecided about everything,” she says, “but leaned to being a Christian.” “There, c
ase closed. A Jew’s buried a Jew, otherwise he can never be at rest. His soul. I think that’s Jewish law. If it isn’t, it’s still what I want for her.” “I only wanted to get it off my chest,” the woman says. “As far as I know she was never baptized. Even if she was, and I don’t see how I couldn’t have known of it, you’ve gone through too much with her these last few years and we’d never think to interfere.” “Can’t we make some sort of compromise?” Howard says to his parents. “Mind your business,” his father says. “It’s too late for anyone to stick his nose in.” When she’s in the hospital the last time, Howard says to her “Want me to read anything to you? Or tell you a story, or reminisce?” She shakes her head. “I’ve brought an anthology of poems. The Oxford, look at it; enormous. It could be from any century you want.” Shakes her head. “From the Bible then?” There’s one on the side table, with several ribbons and envelopes sticking out of it as bookmarks. “No,” she says, “nothing feels right. For a while I liked it. Maybe the next day.” “I could start at the beginning. It’ll give me something to do, so for me. And I’ve never read any of it except in Hebrew school when I had to for my bar mitzvah, so it’d be a good chance for me to get in to it again. I’ll skip all the lists, just concentrate on the beautiful parts and good stories.” Shakes her head, seems to lose consciousness. “People call her the mayor of the block,” his mother says in a letter. “Almost everyone who lives on it, or at least gets out onto it, knows her, and same with lots of people from other blocks who walk through ours to get to the subway or bus and back or who work around here. She sits against the railing out front and people stop to talk to her. Every now and then one of them asks if she wants to go to the store with them or a museum or have lunch at the luncheonette down the street or one of the restaurants around. I think for the first time since she was five she’s really happy. She’s opened up. She wishes strollers, some of whom she doesn’t even know, a ‘good day’ or expressions like that. She watches over babies in carriages sometimes in front of a building, if someone asks her to, or a doubleparked car if the driver’s not going to be too long. And of course the people at Heatherwhite House have been a godsend. Not only welcoming her in but twice rushing up the block soon as I phoned them, when Dad and Vera fell at the same time in different rooms and I couldn’t pick either up. And when the weather’s not so nice, she goes there, sometimes for all day, or friends she knows from the neighborhood come to see her here. She’s reading; she’s busy; she’s taken an interest in ancient choral music and stained glass, all from going to church. She never seems to have enough time to do everything she wants to, which is terrific. She’s deteriorating physically, though. Her face looks wonderful—bright and cheerful, that gorgeous smile—but her body has more of those café au lait spots than ever and a couple of new spongy fibromas on it. The neurologist wants to see her, but I don’t see how we can put her through more surgery if he asks for it. Suppose she says no—that she doesn’t even want to be examined by him—what am I to do? I think I can convince her, but do I want to? Everything will change for her—her mood, on and off the street, so no more big smiles and spontaneous yoo-hoos—and there isn’t a fresh place on her neck or back to cut through anymore and I don’t want them going through old scars…” His brother Alex saves money for a trip around the world. Bus to San Francisco, tramp steamer to Japan, teaching English there for several months to earn some more money, then Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and so on. Two days before he’s to leave she takes the bus ticket and several hundred in cash from his drawer, flushes the ticket down the toilet, spends all the money on gifts for relatives, anonymous donations by mail to charities, a lavish lunch at an expensive restaurant for friends and acquaintances, a hundred dollar bill to a scavenger going through garbage cans on the street. That’s what she tells his mother. Alex postpones the trip. Doesn’t want to take money from his folks or borrow it from anyone. “I want to go free and clear,” he writes Howard. “I also don’t want to speak to Vera yet why she did it. She’s not ready, it might hurt her too much, she’s got her own problems, and I already know why. She’s jealous of my being able to clear out when I want for as long as I like, and we’ve gotten tight since I moved back home, so she also doesn’t want me to go. By staying a few more months I can earn back the bus ticket and what she stole and also do what I can to get her used to my going more and to what she did to me….” He rents an apartment on the East Side, borrows his brother Jerry’s convertible to move his books and typewriter and some furniture and boxes of different things. It takes several trips. She drives with him, holds onto the mattress handle to keep it from falling out while they go across town, stays in the front seat while he carries his things to the top floor. Every time he comes downstairs she smiles and waves at him. One time she has her straw sun hat off and is brushing her hair. Another time her head’s back and she’s smoking without removing the cigarette from her mouth and her arms are stretched out on top of the seats. Another time she’s singing along with the radio. Another time she starts up the car—he left her the key to show a policeman in case one says the car’s illegally parked and has to move—and honks, pats the passenger seat next to her and says “Hop in.” Another time her sweater’s off and the sleeves are tied around her neck and she’s behind the steering wheel and pretending to drive. “I’m doing something useful for you by coming along, aren’t I?” she says once. “Without you I couldn’t leave my stuff here or go upstairs. It would have all had to be done by professional movers I can’t afford.” He goes up, comes down. She’s put two lamps and a box of clothes on the sidewalk. “I feel as though I’m your girlfriend, doing good things for you. Not helping you carry your stuff up because it’s too many flights and too heavy things for a girl to climb up that far with them who’s even in the best shape.” “I wish you could see the place, help me arrange the furniture and suggest what colors I should paint it—both rooms. Just give me advice; the woman’s touch.” “I’ll fly. Or carry me. I’m pretty light.” He laughs and she says “I mean it. On your back, not in your arms, and once I’m up, I’ll get down the stairs myself.” He thinks it’ll be memorable for her, exciting, she’ll talk about it a lot, think he took one of her suggestions seriously, and later he’ll tell her he’s going to take every bit of advice she gave him upstairs. He parks the car in a good spot, bends down, she gets on him piggyback, and he starts upstairs. The flights are long and steep and he’s exhausted by the time they reach the fourth floor. He puts her down, says “I don’t think I can make it. All that moving before did me in. Maybe another time when I’m not so wiped out.” “No, now. We won’t think of it another time. Either of us won’t be in the mood. Or you’ll feel silly doing it or you’ll know your neighbors by then so you won’t want to be seen with me on your back, and by that time you’ll have painted the rooms and settled on where all the furniture should go. If you feel too weak carrying me, sit me anywhere till you feel strong again.” He does it that way next flight: stops every five or six steps and sits her down. His shirt’s so soaked that her skirt and blouse get wet. She says “No problem. When we get home I’ll put them in the laundry bag and take a bath.” She does half the next flight by sitting on the bottom step and pushing herself up step at a time. Then she says she hasn’t the energy to do it that way anymore and he says he doesn’t see how he can carry her up any farther. A door opens one floor below, no head sticks out and she says “New neighbors, don’t worry; heavy luggage, just moving in.” “Hi,” he says, “how do you do; Howard Tetch. I’ll be in 6D.” Door closes and he gets her on his back and lugs her to the top, sets her down, gives her her crutches and they go into the apartment. She looks around, checks into everything including the shower stall and oven and broiling compartment and refrigerator’s vegetable bin and butter chamber and little freezer and every drawer in the dresser left behind, suggests paint colors and furniture arrangement and where all the pictures should go on the walls and that he should get shades and a new toilet seat, cleans the inside of
his windows and the bathroom mirror, takes some hangers out of a box and hangs them in the bedroom closet, puts a cake of soap in the soap dish above the bathroom sink, gets out two mugs and a pot and a box of teabags his mother gave him before they left and makes them tea. “One real piece of advice, though it’ll cost you,” she says. “Get window grates in the living room or they’ll be climbing down the fire escape into your apartment every other week. When I was waiting for you downstairs some very suspicious-looking characters were looking at me on the street. If I hadn’t been sitting in the car I’m almost sure they would have stolen it or at least felt around inside for dope and change.” His mother asks him to come along with them to Washington. “We’ll train down, you’ll have your own hotel room, we’ll try to be in an adjoining double. She always wanted to see the Capital. You worked there, it’s nothing new for you, but if she gets sick or falls down and I have to pick her up on the street, I’m going to need someone and you can also show us things ordinary tourists never see. That little subway in the Congress building you spoke about. We’d both be interested, and maybe we’ll go visit our congressman and stand in that place under the dome there where you said someone can hear you whispering from the other end of the room. And her operation’s in less than a month, so I said I’d take her anywhere she wants that’s within a few hours by train from New York, and no expense spared for either of you. It could be her last trip anyplace, for who knows what condition she’ll be in when they discharge her or, God forbid, if she’ll even survive it sufficiently to ever get out of bed.” “The White House,” he says. “The Capitol, the Smithsonian, or the Phillips Gallery—you can’t believe the little masterpieces they have there,” and Vera says “Suddenly none of those places seems very interesting.” “The zoo. It’s outside, where we should be on such a beautiful day, and if it’s too tough walking around we’ll borrow a wheelchair if they have them. Smokey the Bear’s there, or one of his descendants with his name, and she says “That’s stupid, that dumb bear in trousers.” When they finally get her to leave the hotel she only wants to sit on the Mall writing picture postcards to relatives and friends and snacking on hot dogs and sodas from vendors. She also wants to be photographed with whatever famous building or monument that can be seen behind her while she sits on one of the benches or pool walls on the Mall, bangs combed down to her eyes, hands folded on her lap, serious face, shirt buttoned to the top and pulled up to cover half her neck, crutches always out of camera range. He goes into the National Gallery while they stay outside, hurries through a few of what were his favorite rooms, from a pay phone there calls some old girlfriends in Washington. One’s married with two kids, two aren’t listed anymore, one agrees to meet him at the hotel bar around nine the next night. At dinner in the hotel his mother says to her “If you’re not enjoying yourself here or are disappointed in anything, say so and we’ll do whatever you want,” and she says “There’s too much to see that needs walking or bumping along in some dumb tour bus. And I don’t want to be shoved around in a wheelchair and be stared at, and besides that I miss my own room,” and they go home right after breakfast the next day. On the train he says to them “Damn, should’ve mentioned the Washington Cathedral and the Arab mosque,” and she says “That would have been nice. I thought of it, saw them on the map, but didn’t think you’d want to go.” Large group photo he has of all twenty children or so and the owner and two counselors at the summer camp they went to for two months. Most of the campers standing or sitting on the dock, feet in the water or dangling above it. Few, like him—the older boys—standing in front of the dock in water up around their waists and chests. It’s obvious he’s freezing, teeth chattering, so probably the professional photographer had them stand in the water too long. Or maybe they’d been swimming awhile, photographer came down and told them to stay in the water longer till he took the photos. She’s standing on the dock, only in her underpants, hands, which she’s squeezing together, hiding most of her face. Little part of her face he sees is smiling sweetly. Her body looks healthy: legs straight, solid lean torso. She’s the prettiest girl there her age, even if her hair’s been clipped badly by the camp owner. He thinks she used a bowl to do it, or maybe that’s what his parents said when they saw the photo or when he and Vera got home, and he took them literally. His mother thought she should spend the summer in the country, being with other kids and him, good air, cool nights, eating food straight from the farms and lots of activities, before she was operated on for the first time that fall. Years later she told him the doctors had said there was a fifty-fifty chance Vera would survive the operation and that when she was wheeled into the intensive care unit they never thought she’d pull through. “My one regret is that I let them go ahead with it.” “What could you have done? Tiger in one door, lion in the other, both mean and hungry.” “There might have been other ways. Diet, for instance, but nothing I explored. The surgeon was very prominent and convincing and quite striking looking and also a former classmate of our pediatrician, so I needed more will power than I had and your father said to do what I thought best, he was staying out of it. But if she had died unscathed and with only a little pain in three years, which is all they gave her without the operation, wouldn’t it have been better than living horribly for twenty?” He’s in her hospital room and she’s pointing to her mouth with her arm that’s attached to the IV. She can’t speak because of the tube in her throat. “You’re thirsty?” She nods. “I can’t give you anything with that thing in you,” pointing to her throat. “I’ll have to ask the nurse.” He’s in her hospital room and she’s sleeping. Tubes in her, but she looks calm, sleeping without making a sound. He sits beside her, takes her hand in his and kisses it. She opens one eye and looks at him. He says “I’m sorry, did I disturb you? I’m sorry,” and kisses her hand and puts it back on the bed. Her eye closes and she seems to be sleeping again.