His brother comes back, walks through the door, says “So Howie, how are you, how’s it going, what’ve you been up to?” “Alex, what is this? you gotta be kidding,” pinches himself, slaps his face, “Still gotta be a dream,” bites the inside of his cheeks, shuts his eyes for a few seconds, then says “It isn’t, you haven’t gone away, I still don’t believe it but I’m gonna make the most of it,” rushes over to him, hugs him, kisses his shoulders, keeps his arm around him while he yells “Denise, Olivia, Eva, the babysitter, hurry in here, meet someone you’ve never met before, my brudder Alex, lost at sea years ago, thirty years, in ten it would’ve been forty, in twenty it would’ve been fifty, thirty: sixty, and by then I’d be an old man but still I’m sure mourning several nights a year my dear lost brudder, crying some days too—jeez am I glad to see you, meet the family,” and points to the staircase when he hears someone coming down, it’s Eva, says “Babysitter’s gone home, Mommy told me to tell you… who’s this?” and he says “My brudder—brother,” “But I know your brother—Uncle Jerry, and this isn’t him,” “This is my other brother, the one I’ve talked so much about—you know, on a ship, lost at sea, terrific storms in the ocean, the North Atlantic to be specific, ship probably split apart or by some fluke rolled over by the waves, life buoy washed up on the Irish coast, only thing of the ship ever found that they knew belonged to it, we thought him dead, sweetheart, but here the guy is—ask him something, tell him to say where he’s been all these years and how he got here and that he’s your uncle, my and Uncle Jerry’s brother, your grandmother’s middle son—God am I happy, and we got to call her up quick,” and runs to the phone, dials, woman answers, he says “Is this LaDonna or Sojourner?,” “Sojourner,” she says, “Well hi, this is Howard, Pauline’s youngest son, a fabulous practically unbelievable thing’s just happened, get me my mother quick,” and she says “She’s napping—should I wake her?” and Alex’s waving his hand no, and Howard says “One second please” into the phone and covers the mouthpiece and Alex says “I don’t think we should spring it on her like this—the shock of it,” and Howard says to Sojourner “No, tell her I called and will call back later and don’t mention anything about the fantastic or unbelievable part of why I called—how is she, by the way?” and she says “As well as can be expected—you know, we took a walk down and back the block today—it tired her out—and not eating very much but not because she has no appetite—she only wants to stay slim, she says—she’s quite a vain woman—while I tell her good eating shows good health and good looks, and she still won’t listen when I say not to smoke so much—she says she’s not inhaling but I see it—and also not to drink before she retires at night—scotch for sure not, but not even water, for it gets her up to void and if I’m not by her side right away she tries for the potty herself and sometimes falls,” and he says “Thanks, thanks for everything—I’ll call,” and hangs up and says “Oh boy, Mom’s in lousy shape, and of course Vera and Dad died,” “No, I didn’t know but by now expected as much,” “Yeah, you were lucky not being here—both eroded so slowly—and also lucky in a way with Mom, avoiding the quick slide this time, but then there’s all you kissed—missed—but see what he did before, Eva, about my not waking Grandma up?—he was almost all the time right, this brudder of mine, your uncle—Christ, what would I have done not having him around when I was growing up? and Christ, what I would’ve done if he hadn’t disappeared—I was only twenty-four, hardly on my way, and he was my best friend and the serious drinking I fell into—really, why the thirty-year silence, Alex, unless the details are too disquieting for witty-kiddy ears?”—“Do you mean me?” Eva says and he says “No, I meant cats, it’s an expression, ‘Here, kitty-witty, nicht disquiet bischen ears,’ but one that’s probably too far in the past for you to understand, like ‘the bum’s rush’ is for me, which was Dad’s—remember, Alex? and do you know if it meant fast and if fast then fast as you run away from the bum or fast as the bum rushes away after he puts the touch on you? another expression of his—’Don’t put the touch on me in front of people,’ when we wanted a dime for a comic book and saw the best opportunity to get it—a dime then, sweetheart, think of it,” “What’s a dime or a comic book?” and Alex says “Before we talk about my long silence, let me tell you your Eva’s a doll—what I’ve missed and not kissed not being around from the time she was born—if you want, come and give your unc a juicy squeeze, my beautiful niece,” and opens his arms and she shrinks from him, runs behind Howard and holds onto his legs while looking through them at Alex, when Olivia comes down, arms loaded with books, “I heard from upstairs but had to get these first—Alexander, your brother, impossible and you know it, Dada—a person can’t swim up again after thirty years below and say ‘Hi, I’m alive,’ and spit some water out that might be gagging him”—Eva’s laughing—“Oh, they can pump water out of some drowned persons when they haven’t drowned for very long and make them breathe again, and sometimes even after an hour if they’ve been in very cold water, with ice floating on top and snow in the trees, because it lowers the body temperature and heartbeat and I don’t know how but you’re saved—I read that in one of my Nancy Drew books,” and drops the books on the floor and starts looking through them—“I can’t find which one it’s in so you’ll have to trust me—so who is he, Dada, a friend of yours impersonating your brother to trick us for some reason?—maybe it’ll fool Eva but not me,” and she sits on the couch with the books on her lap and starts reading, and he says “Olivia, show some respect—it’s your uncle, my brother, this is a miracle till explained otherwise—even if you don’t fall for it because you think you’re so smart and have better things to do at the moment, please get up and kiss him,” and she slams the book down—“If you make me lose my place!”—and goes over to Alex and puts her cheek out and looks pained, he closes his eyes and kisses her, looks content, says “Ah, another honeypot you got, you apotheosized kid, and with such a smooth cheek too”—“That’s because she hasn’t shaved yet”—Olivia clenches her eyes tight and hands into fists—“Only kidding, my sweetie—for some reason, Alex, she’s never going to shave-only kidding, my sweetie, but by now you know me, though Alex doesn’t—he stopped dead with me at twenty-four: easy with the jokes, not so with the other things,” caresses her face, she looks up at him and pops him a kiss, “Oh this gal’s bright, good, sensitive, imaginative, creative—sounds like a college reference I’m giving but she’s gonna be the artist in the family—compared to her we’re has-beens who never were, unless you’ve done something startling and long-lasting under another name since we last heard from you and it can be converted,” and Alex says “Don’t worry, all the material you’ve probably used about me the past thirty years is still valid and not dated, if it was done well,” and he says “Me?—strictly fiction; only nonfict I’ve writ was called Why I Don’t Write It,’ which proved its point by reading unbeingable and where no magazine asked me for one again, but let’s start unraveling the snarl as to where you’ve been so long and why all this time you didn’t clue us in, but darn, here’s Denise—just when I thought I’d get an answer from you—though wish you’d met her previous to her present condition—she had such lively eyes, like the sea,” and she comes downstairs slowly—“Howard?,” “I’m here, dear, just a few steps farther,” “How many?,” “Seven, not counting the floor”—clutching the rail with both hands, foot edging to the end of each step before going over and dipping to the next one till she nudges it, then, toe poised over a step: “I can’t make it this way—I’m scared I’ll fall,” and he says “Just five more steps not counting the floor—for Alex,” and she starts to cry, Alex says “Go to her,” he says “No no, this’ll help—I want her to learn how to do it or else we’ll have to sell this place at a loss to buy a ranch house,” “You can move her to the first floor,” “I want to be with my wife in our bedroom upstairs—I’m a beast: I need my warmth, her smells, my sex and her breasts,” she gets on her knees and crawls down the steps backwa
rds, holding onto the balusters, stands at the bottom, “Watch when she smiles,” he whispers to Alex, “nobody has one like her—it lights up blown bulbs even when they’re not in the sockets, and if they are, even when the lamp’s unplugged—our whole globe could run for a year on the electricity her smile gives off, our sun is a dark dewdrop in a deep cave at the peak of the Ice Age by comparison, our solar system could spin another min with a single glint of that facial detonation and if she had her old eyes back, for days,” she grabs a cane off the bottom of the banister, “Where are you fellas?,” “Over here,” Howard says, “up two, down three and then weave around another staircase,” and she faces them and says “Alex, what a delight finally to meet you and especially when we thought you’d perished, and what a change your being here will have on Howard and in turn on the children and me—you’re the chief reason he sleeps so feistily at night and acts like a caffeine neurotic during most of the day,” and she pokes the cane in front of her hitting a bunch of things and then getting the tip caught under the rug—“I can’t use this rotten stick,” she shouts, holding it above her as if she’s going to throw it, “it’s for cripples, not blinds,” “Oh oh,” Howard says, “now we’ll never see her smile or not much of one—anyone got a match or flashlight?,” “Go to her,” Alex says, “stop pitching for laughs,” and he says “No no, believe me I’m doing the right thing—she’s got to learn to walk with it or else she’ll stay in her room under the covers all day be it this place or a ranch house, and then why would I disrupt my life to give up this great place at a big loss to buy an overpriced ugly ranch house besides sticking the kids with new playmates and a different school?,” “Because she’s your wife and their mother and you’re supposed to help, support and etcetera her,” “Listen, happy as I am to see you—giddy’s the word, rapt, ecstatic, beside myself, though I don’t entirely show it—and much as I’ve missed you—agonizingly’s how I’d put it, heartstrickenly, sickenly—you can’t come back after thirty years and second or third thing—Olivia, have you been counting? for she’s the math whiz here,” but she doesn’t look up from her book—“tell me how to ruin my life—run it, I mean, ream it, wreck it, rot it, rue it,” “I can advise you when you’re being a little too cruel where it hurts—you always had that streak in you but I thought by this time you’d have muzzled or domesticated most of it,” “And if I always had that then you’ve always had the ability not to clam up or mind your own bizwax,” “That can’t be constituted an ability, even if I were a clam,” “The know-how, know-too-much, know-it-all-how-do-I-tell-my-schmucky-bro-how-to-conduct-his-life, and knack’s the word I meant, skill, trick, touch—but I have to live with her and have lived with her and in her absence do most of the things for the house and kids-shopping, mopping, slopping—nobody ever thinks of that, rarely, let’s face it, unfairly, so why don’t you just wise up or get lost?,” “You said it, I didn’t,” and Alex goes over to Denise, takes the cane from her and puts it back on the banister, kisses her hands and leads her to the couch and sits her beside Olivia, squeezes in between them, whispers something into her ear, she slaps her thigh and smiles (she never did both at the same time with me, Howard thinks, or one after the other; thinks again: no, never, far as he can think back), the houselights go on when anyone who could have turned them on is in the living room several feet from the nearest light switch, and even if that person could have reached a light switch it wouldn’t have turned on all the lights on the first floor and in the stairwell and on the porch right outside the front door, Alex whispers something to her again and she smiles and slaps her thigh at the same time: air conditioners, radios and television upstairs, washer, dryer, humidifier and probably all the lights downstairs, toaster, dishwasher, food processor, juice squeezer, kitchen radio, stove light and fan, “Stop smiling,” he shouts, “and Alex, stop whispering funny things to her—with so much power on at once we’re bound to blow a fuse,” Eva sits on Alex’s lap and kisses his hand, Olivia kisses his other hand and then puts his arm around her shoulder while she reads, “This is what I was most afraid of if you ever did come back,” Howard says, “not only that you’d outshine me intellectually and perceptively and with general all-around sensibleness but that you’d outdo me as a writer with the work you came back with or were now working on, show me up in front of my kids with your gentleness and equanimity and all the rest of those things, make my wife enjoy herself twice as much in your company than mine—three times, four, five, jack up the utility bill in my house where I couldn’t afford paying it, and start a kissing-hand habit in my family and maybe eventually on our street and in the neighborhood when before my family was doing just fine kissing one another on the cheek and head and lips and as neighbors we were doing fine also with a mere nod or hello-well, go on then, she’s much better off with almost anyone but me, and maybe the kids ditto, and if she stays in the family with you, even better, since I’ll get to see her at functions and such from time to time and also my kids,” and he stamps out of the house, hoping Denise will call him back and the kids will run after him and Alex will say he’s sorry and what does Howard mean and maybe something stupid besides, juvenile, injudicious, senseless, obscene, all the interior and porch lights of the other houses suddenly go on at once when the sun’s straight up or an hour to the side left or right but bright, through the living room window sees his girls, turned around now with their knees probably on the cushions and their elbows on top of the couch’s back—Alex and Denise smiling and talking continuously, one or the other or both at the same time, energetic talk, lots of face gestures, he can’t see it but thinks from the way their arms are positioned that they might even be holding hands—waving at him forlornly, curiously, bewilderedly, for a few seconds Olivia staring him in the face with a look saying you know darn well what you’re doing’s totally wrong and absurd, he waves back and whispers “I’m your daddy, honey, don’t look at me like that, and besides, you know how horrible I feel so don’t make it worse,” says loud enough for them to hear if they can hear him through the closed window and door and with all the appliances in the house going, for he didn’t see anyone get up to turn them off, “I swear I never wanted to leave you two, it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, in the world, the universe, whatever’s more than that, for you mean everything there is to me and leaving you is like a death that’s quick but pain filled and unforeknown and-foretold—I don’t quite know what I meant by the last part of that but it sounded right and may be—that I’ve always loved your mother from the minute I set eyes on her, second, instant, and that instant to maybe a minute after it across a room filled with partygoers, chatter and tobacco smoke—some day if either of you want I’ll tell you about it and exactly or as close as I can get to it and if my memory by then’s still good, how I felt and what I remember her response to me was when I finally did get up the guts to go over to her to introduce myself—it’s true she and I have had our spats and brawls but we seemed till now to have been able to talk them out, I don’t like her illness any more than you do, condition, affliction, hate it, damn it, would kick its ass in if I could, but occasionally it gets to me in other ways, that she can’t do almost anything she used to like helping with the cooking, cleaning and shopping and your homework and getting you kids to your various activities and schools and just seeing the things around the house that need picking up before someone trips over them and breaks a limb, so all the extra work I have to do, and while I’m at it all those tedious to good books with the horrible readers of them on tape she gets I also if I’m in the house have to listen to, I didn’t want to storm out of here looking and acting like such a fool, I don’t like pretending I know where I’m going now and what I’m going to do, I’m in fact trying to find out why I did what I did before by talking about it and related things here with you,” they wave only their fingers this time and turn around, Olivia putting Alex’s arm around her shoulder and holding it there and with her other hand holding her book close to her face, Eva back on Alex�
��s lap and kissing his visible hand, Alex and Denise laughing now and jabbering when the laughing stops, they don’t turn to the window once, he doesn’t understand it, if he were Alex he’d look and see what he’s doing out there and then tell her and then for them both to smile and wave to him that it’s all all right and to come back in, he wishes he knew what they were talking so actively about, vigorously, spiritedly, he’s glad his brother’s back, nobody can hear him but if he said that aloud and someone could hear him he’d want that person to know he’s happy as can be to see his brother after thirty years, happy he’s alive, looking well, intelligent, everything intact, glad he’s able to make Denise laugh, glad she’s laughing, that his kids love their uncle, glad everyone there’s happy and having such a good time, though wishes things could be switched around a bit to a lot—brother back, that unchanged, healthy, intact, etcetera, Denise laughing, smiling, animated, both animated but he seated between them holding their hidden hands and Eva on his lap and Olivia on the other side of Alex or Denise with her arm stretched behind whomever she’s sitting beside so her hand’s on his shoulder or neck, patting it, habit she got from him when he used to pick her up to comfort her before she could even walk or when he’d walk her to sleep, or just resting on or stroking it, goes to the dogwood tree in the front yard, only tree there, centered in the small lawn, doesn’t know why he went to it or what he’s going to do there, stare at it? walk past it and then where? snap a branch off and toss it over or into his hedge and then what? all the streetlights on the street and the cross one go on at once though the sun’s still almost straight up and bright, never liked the tree even when it blossomed pink or gave on a hot day enough shade to sit beneath, which he never did, always preferred sitting in the rocker on the covered porch and close enough to the railing to put his feet up, little table by the chair to put down his newspaper or book and drink, its branches are sharp and have scratched his arms when he’s tried to mow close to it and the top of his head once when he bent down under the low branches to get the mower right up to the trunk, is that it with all dogwoods or just pink-blossoming ones or just his: low branches and sharpness? all or most of the house alarms in the neighborhood go off, four or five of them, loud almost simultaneous hum starts up from what seems like all the air conditioners in the neighborhood, though it can’t be fifty degrees out, fifty-five, he wasn’t serious before about her smile and what it could do concerning electricity and giving off energy and moving solar systems and stuff, it was what literary people, even people with just literary pretensions, and of course some nonliterary people who happen to know the word, like to call, well, like to call, exaggeration for want of the fancier literary word he can’t come up with now but which sounds Greek and has some part that sounds like bell or ball in it but always slips his mind when he wants to use it, bill, bull, boll, but he’ll see: usually two days at the most, three, after he can’t recall it he comes across it in a newspaper article or magazine when he hasn’t seen it in one for months, sees an ant crawling up the tree trunk and immediately drops to his knees under the branches, resights the ant and squashes it with his thumb, then thinks why’d he do that? it wasn’t in the house or heading for it and even if it were heading to it, it was just one, he probably wanted to take something out on something, let off steam, thinks of slapping his hand against the trunk for the same reason, beating it, then maybe both hands and then maybe his head, to take it in his hands, which would have to hurt by then, and slam it against the trunk till he gets too dizzy or tired to or collapses or his head splits open, but that would make no sense either unless he wanted Alex or Denise to come out to help his head, which he doesn’t think he does, and though a gash wouldn’t bother him much or the blood—his head got knocked around plenty when he was a kid, though never self-inflicted, with scars dotted along the sides and his continuing baldness revealing a few forgotten creases on top—he wouldn’t stick himself with the pain that goes with those slams, flicks the ant off his thumb, sees several more crawling up the trunk, “You you-yous,” holding his fist over them, crawls out from under the tree and goes into the house, doesn’t know why, maybe to sit between Alex and Denise, put Eva on his lap, Olivia’s hand on his shoulder or back and even patting it for her in case she doesn’t, for one thing to finally find out where he’s been for thirty years and how’d he get here, for another—well, lots of anothers but one’s just to apologize to them all for his behavior before—nobody’s there, shuts off all the appliances and lights, looks out the living room window to the lane of grass between his house and the shrubs that belong to the next, out the kitchen door to the backyard and swing set, shouts for them and then goes upstairs, shuts off Denise’s typewriter and all the appliances and lights, she could be showing Alex his studio and the guest bed in the basement, even making up the bed for him if he’s bushed, for he might have come a long way in a few days, not had much sleep—runs the two flights downstairs, front door knocks, shuts off all the appliances and lights there and the sump pump which continued pumping when there was no water left to dump, upstairs, front door ding-dongs and knocks though doesn’t remember shutting it, looks through the small door window to see if it’s Alex or Denise—window’s too high to see if it’s the kids if they’re standing close to the door—a woman, shuts the porch light, opens the door, strangely familiar, not strangely but queerly, familiarly, family, it’s—she’s—he’s sure what his sister would look like if she’d lived another twenty-four—five—four years, “Hello,” she says, “How do you do, but I’m sorry, if this is for my wife, for she doesn’t seem to be here though she was a few minutes ago,” “No, I’m not here for her but would love meeting her and the children eventually,” “Then if it’s for anything like some organization or charity—a donation, something to sign, a petition, and then a donation for the costs of printing and distributing the petition and keeping the organization going—we don’t do that here—it’s my, not my wife’s, repudiation or reaction against or whatever you want to call it of all door-to-door solicitations and canvassings, no matter how—not ‘important,’ not ‘good’ in the sense of the right thing, moral, virtuous, not ‘upright,’ not ‘upstanding,’ but a certain word I’m looking for—,” “‘Well-intentioned, well-meaning, high-principled’?,” “That’s right—any of those, but we don’t, much as we might approve of what you’re pushing—supporting—canvassing for and want us to join, give to, support or sign, anyway, along those lines, and you should see me—hear me—when I get them over the phone—I’m rapidly—rabidly—against the private home phone being used for solicitations and ads of any kind and the recorded ones—you know, or maybe you don’t, but the ‘Hi, I’m Chuck Computer and are you sure you have enough cemetery plots?’—the worst, though I wouldn’t go so far as to start or give to or canvass for a campaign against them,” same long straight dark hair combed the same way though now streaked a bit gray, hollow cheeks like hers the last few years but more like a model’s high cheekbones so less out of illness—“Vera?—I mean, it can’t be but who else could it but it can’t, so excuse me,” “Howard,” she says, “even if I knew this was your home, for a while I was undecided it was you,” “But it’s impossible, I take back what I said, or if Vera, then you just happen to have the same name as my dead sister, quite a coincidence I’d say, seeing how you look a lot like I’d imagine her to at your age,” “But I am your sister Vera,” and he says “But I was in the room with you—her—when she died,” “You went out of it for ten minutes at the end when I supposedly croaked,” “That’s true, how’d you know? but she was so close to death when I left her—her looks were of someone dying, the darkness and paleness, the depletion and stress, and they’d asked me to leave or else I left to go to the toilet or because I needed a break from seeing her in that condition all night and early morning or just for a coffee to revitalize me after a sleepless night and maybe a bun because I was starved, and when I came back minutes later the door was closed and a nurse behind it wouldn’t let me in—I
’m almost sure that’s how it happened, at least one of those or a combo with the coffee and bun and definitely the nurse not letting me back in and from what I saw through the door crack before she shut it on me there were lots of people in white working busily around her and calling out for things,” “A nurse came in when you were sitting beside me, took one look at me, felt my pulse and told you to leave and then called in what I like to call the goon squad—the emergency team of medical people and machines who are there to revive you but also there when all your chances with them are up and they’re pulling out the plugs and cleaning you up,” “Was that what happened with her, you’re saying?,” “Sure, they pulled them out of me but I was alive and hale after, though my urethra and arms sore from the catheter and IVs, just as I was hale when all the tubes, needles and plugs were in,” “That’s ridiculous-she was in and out of a coma the whole night before and morning she died—I know because I stayed with her, swabbed her lips, mopped her brow—dabbed it and her lips and with water on a rag dabbed her tongue tip—she looked so sad, her eyes so weak and breathing so bad, hair so wet—I dabbed that too—all over her was this cold sweat—oh, the poor thing, why does someone so young have to go through so much woe and pain—anyone, old or young, but with her it was from when she was a little kid and went on and got worse and worse for twenty years—she even asked me—one of the last things I could make out because of her weak voice coupled with her trouble in getting her thoughts together and expressed—maybe an hour before she died when she all of a sudden jumped out of it and had unusually lucid speech for her at the time—why it had to be she who was sick for so long and had lived so abnormally and was now dying,” “I never said that about dying,” “That’s true, she didn’t, but what she said was, if my memory serves me right which it does rarely—variably, and locking me with her eyes while saying it—anyway, ‘How come me, Howie?’ or the old ‘Why me, why me?’ for she was, to illustrate how sick she’d become and what she looked like then, down to around sixty-five pounds from her usual hundred ten—’usual’ meaning eight or nine years before, because her weight loss started long before the end, and sixty-five was just the doctor’s educated guess—she could have been sixty, fifty-five, since there was no reason to weigh her and if they had wanted to she was too weak and frail to be moved—the gist of it is that from the moment she was put on the hospital’s bed everyone knew it was going to be her last living place,” “It was all an elaborate ruse, that last night and day—my decline at home, phoning the doctor what to do, ambulancing me to the hospital and so on,” “A ruse, the weight loss and dying eyes?—I went to her burial—the funeral first and then the burial and a year later to whatever they call that ceremony where they put the monument up and say some prayers over it,” “That’s what I’m saying—it was all an elaborate ruse,” “Look-it, for argument’s sake let’s say you are her, but she—Vera—you would never have pulled it on Mom—for years she worked like three nurses and suffered so much then and for lots of years before and after—we all suffered but those two were very close and she was her mother so she much more,” “Mom was in on it—everyone was but you,” “But why, just for argument’s sake?,” “To get me away from you,” “Oh come on, if you’re going to concoct some cock-and-bull story at least have it make a little sense,” “You stuck your finger in me once and moved it around inside for a while and kept it on my clitoris when you thought you finally found it and pushed down hard on it till I felt I would scream and right after you took your finger out—my eyes were shut, I was pretending to be asleep, I was too young to know what to do, too frightened and confused to stop you—you threatened to kill me if I told anyone—you said even if it took ten years from the time after I told anyone you’d kill me when I wasn’t looking or prepared for it with whatever means you had—a gun—you said you could get one—with a knife, a bat, a brick, an ice pick—with the belt you were wearing then by wrapping it around my neck and you took it off and held it tight by its ends and snapped it—by this time you must have known I was awake though I was still pretending not to be, looking at you through the thinnest eye slits, though you also must have been unsure if I was awake when you did it with your finger to me, because you said ‘You’ve heard me warn you and speak about this for the one and only time and if you’re really as asleep as you look, then OK, and if you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, even better for you,’ so that’s why it was all an elaborate ruse, nobody wanted me killed or for you to go through what they knew you would—remorse, prison, that you were an excitable guy so might be killed there or end up killing yourself—everybody believed your threats, even though they were made more than a dozen years before I told anyone what you did, and realized the consequences if you killed me, they said you had it in you to or to yourself or both because you could never take the shame of anyone knowing what you did to me with your finger and threat and then killing me, but they didn’t want to ask you to go away to live somewhere else because they thought you’d come back on the sly to kill me or, away from them watching you, kill yourself, so they sent me away, Jerry knew where I was, Dad, they all saw me from time to time, I went to live with relatives of one of Mom’s friends in Wisconsin, they weren’t well off and could use the money for my room and board, the doctors and nurses all knew of the elaborate ruse, even the ambulance men who drove me that last time were in on it, the hospital orderlies and dietician on my floor who I only secretly got to use when you were away from the room,” “Wait, let’s say for argument’s sake again in this cock-and-bull story that’s at least a bit better than before—all the names and most of the facts right and things, so more believable but still with a few holes—I’d already been out of the house working for a number of years, and didn’t they ever think of therapy to help me get over it?,” “Everybody knew your views on it—you’d said plenty of times you had nothing against it for anyone but yourself,” “I’m not saying I would have changed my mind but it’s possible I might have,” “As Dad used to say about you, you were always too much of a hard nut,” “He said that to whom?,” “To you, to me, and as for your out-of-the-house stuff, the folks got you to move back for a few years soon after I told them, didn’t they?,” “I came back from my Washington job with little money—no, that was after Alex died, which he isn’t by the way-dead, but I’ll tell you more about that later, or I won’t, for who are you to tell it to? and California’s where I came back from a month before she died and had no money and my father was sick so I stayed to have a place to live and to help my mother with him for what turned out to be a few years, but anyway, for argument’s sake for the last time, and to me this is the clincher who you’re not, let’s say you weren’t as sick as you looked in the hospital the day you didn’t die, what happened to your illness? for you were diagnosed chronic progressive or some term by the time you were twelve, and after you didn’t die but to me you did—and believe me I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if you really were Vera, I’d be all over her in happiness if she were alive and miserable talking seriously to someone about her death—your doctors tried consoling us by saying you lived longer than they ever expected, though credited it mostly to Mom’s meticulous unsparing nursing of you,” “All part of the elaborate ruse, and the good country living might have had something to do with my complete recovery, and maybe just being away from the threat of you, or else I’d been misdiagnosed from the time I was five, repeatedly operated on when I never should have been, or some spectacular unaccountable remission that plenty of terminal people get and which eventually wiped away all my illness’s signs except the surgery scars, but I’d been slowly getting better or not worse for years, you never saw it because of all your living here and there and only coming back for days or weeks and then paying little attention to me because maybe you thought I was so ugly and deformed or you worried I might allude to the finger incident,” “Not true; the scars did scare me sometimes, especially when they were fresh and that tracheotomy one when it was still almost
a hole, but I used to take you to dinner and movies—not many but some and especially when I lived in New York with Janine—your first Indian food at a place called the Bombay, those Shanghai somethings or another at 103rd and the other at 125th under the el—you defiantly ate with a fork and called Janine and me phonies with our chopsticks, which I loved you for doing and saying what you wanted,” “So you did it occasionally, or irregularly, or biannually, but as for me then, I wasn’t off crutches yet but no new flareups of the disease for years, so when I did have that last setback it was all part of the elaborate ruse, our aunts, uncles and cousins knew of it, most of my church pals and all our folks’ good friends, we had a makeup artist come to the house when you were out for an hour that last day to make me look suddenly worse, and then the next days at the hospital to make me look comatose and then dead, she was dressed like an orderly and then like one of the nurses who rushed into the room to supposedly pull out the plugs, we even hired an out-of-work director to stage the whole thing, of course the rabbi at the funeral was in on it, I wanted a minister but Dad said ‘Born a Jew, and since we’re surviving you, die a Jew—if you outlive us you can have it the way you want,’ the funeral home people knew of it—I was already on the plane to Wisconsin so couldn’t see, much as I wanted to, your reaction and how everybody else acted, the body in the casket was around my weight in two fifty-pound sandbags, which is why Mom ordered the casket to stay closed, not because she thought people would be put off by my last looks, the cemetery owners, even the gravediggers there and all the guests, except the ones who only learned about it through the obit, at the funeral, burial and unveiling,” “Unveiling, that’s the word I wanted,” “In the end it benefited you as much as me, as you didn’t go to jail or anything like that and I didn’t live around you with the threat of your killing me hanging over my head and you possibly even trying to diddle me again,” “I never would have done either, ever, I was just a kid saying and doing kid things, I passed her room, or went to it intentionally to speak to her or catch her nude, her nightlight was on, saw her sleeping on her back or thought she was sleeping, but then probably woke her with what I did, nightdress above her waist or a few inches below it or right on it, anyway, her legs pretty much open and pubic area exposed, everybody was out, I was getting a quarter an hour to act as the sitter, I got excited at what I saw as I think would any kid my age, the line of hair above her crack like a short pencil-thin mustache standing up, the crack itself for the first time, I’d never seen one even on a baby at a beach, maybe mothers and nannies suspected me even at an early age and immediately covered their girls, once my mother nude from my room into theirs when they thought I was asleep if they thought about it but I was too young to understand what it was to get excited and she was all hair there and prancing around fast, so not good for an extended look, I felt horrible for years about what I did to Vera, for a few seconds at the funeral I was glad she was dead so the secret would go with her, since neither she nor anyone else ever gave me a sign she’d told or they knew, in fact on that last hospital day I whispered to her almost up against her ear how sorry I’d always been about it and said what it was explicitly, something like ‘Your vagina that time some fifteen years back when I put my finger in, it was the most despicable thing I ever did in my life and I apologize a thousand times for it,” “No you didn’t, I was conscious every second you were there, except the night when I slept, but you say it was the last day, and I’m telling you you never said anything about it, if you had I would have stopped the elaborate ruse right then or soon after, somehow made a miraculous recovery, got the makeup artist in once more, been discharged, gone home, gotten much better under Mom’s care and lived a normal life there with the family and you, all things forgiven, for it would have saved us all a lot of time and trouble and the folks a tremendous expense: fake hospital care, for no matter how hard Dad tried finagling it he couldn’t get Blue Cross or Cancer Care to pay, the funeral, burial and unveiling ceremonies and gravestone, and my airfare to Wisconsin and living costs out there till I was able to get a job, and so on, even the regular postman knew, Mrs. G. at her bakery down the block, Morris the candy store man, most of the butchers at Gristede’s, I became a dental hygienist thanks to Dad who heartbroken when none of his boys became dentists settled on the next best thing for me, married a vet who specializes in farm animal teeth and gums and help him run his practice, because of all the different treatments and operations I had when I was a girl I couldn’t have any children that weren’t stillborn, I’m a doting aunt to several of Ted’s nieces and nephews and less so, since I never saw them as much, to Jerry’s kids and now even their kids, do you finally believe me or do you want to phone Jerry or Mom for proof?—you once complained that my painting by numbers was for morons and bought me a real paint set and canvases I felt too unequal to to ever use, you once took me to Janine’s Christian Science practitioner because you thought as long as nothing else was working maybe that would, you once, because of the red-and-black plaid flannel shirt I took from your drawer and wore—,” “What made you come see me now?” “Why put it off longer? why not have done it sooner? one time I was all set to fly in to tell you when I got a bad flu and then changed my mind, what you don’t know will hurt you? what you do know might kill you? why bring up old bilge or why not work it out before you’re dead? for you might get hit by a falling brick tomorrow like I heard happens in the city or one in some punk’s hand and then I’d always be sorry we didn’t talk of it, or I could find I’ve had another kind of cancer for years and go in three days flat, so who knows? reasons for doing can be just as good for not, Ted said do and don’t, Jerry said don’t and do, Mom said ‘What’s best for you, what’s best for you both,’ Dad said to clam it since knowing you’d been duped for so long might give you even more reason for doing me in, Alex never said since he was drowned or his ship blew up or something before I told anyone, but now you say he’s kicking, good, I want to reunion with him too, for one thing to explain why I stole his ship fare from his drawer which stopped his round-the-world trip for half a year which I guess ended up with him getting on a different one coming home that now never went down or did but without him—I liked having him around, didn’t want to see him go or me be the last child at home, but mind if I use your bathroom?—tiny bladders run in our family—remember Mom dashing in from the street and leaving a pee line on the floor?” and he points the way, says “What am I saying, I mean doing, for it’s not as if I see you every day?—oh Jesus, Vera, this is more than I can say, both of you back the same day,” kisses her hands, says “I feel so bad what I put you though starting from that time in your room, I also want you to meet Denise and our girls, they’re going to love having a blood sister-in-law and aunt from me—Denise is an only child and all of what would have been her relatives right down to the last second cousin were murdered or worked or frozen or starved to death during World War II, and also please, whatever you do, don’t tell my kids what I did to you—no threats but I will feel rotten if they find out,” and puts his arms around her and kisses her head, she says “You still retract like you used to because of the ugly scar down my back—for my sake try to get used to it if you’re going to hug me,” and he says “I always thought I did it in a way where you didn’t notice, I’m sorry, and go to the bathroom, you’re jumping around as if you have to,” and she goes in, shuts the door, turns the faucet on, “Just like Mom,” he says, “with the water going, so nobody will hear,” “You say something?,” “The faucet—Mom—I don’t think I spoke about this with anyone in the family—used to even turn it on to teach us how to pee in the bowl—she thought the sound of it, which still gives me the urge to go if I’m in the john or at the kitchen sink and the water’s on,” phone rings, “It’s Dad,” he says, “has to be, the triumveral—which lots of people must have already coined—return, or march,” and picks up the phone and says hello, “Will you accept a collect call from Simon Tetch?” a woman says, “Sure, put him on, I won’t even
ask how he’s there, since I saw him right before my eyes die—no going-out-of-the-room-at-the-last-moment on my part—and then a day later get buried, and his body I saw at the funeral,” “Howard,” a voice like his father’s says, “how’s my boy, and good to hear you, and how I got back I’ll level with you straight off—I wasn’t dead or faking, just some look-and feelalike coma that even had the doctors and morticians fooled, and then I pushed and crawled out of the box and above ground like I’ve pushed and crawled out of every spot I’ve been in, whole and better and a lot smarter and tougher from it and ending up standing on two feet but this time in need of a little cleaning,” “And this was when—yesterday or the day before after almost twenty years—how was the food down there?,” “It was some time ago—you figure it out, you’re the one who was always making with the plots and angles and complications, and you probably still are, if I know you, only because you couldn’t turn up anything better to do—but I’m here and that should be enough,” “You know, reasons have to satisfy me logically, plausibly—,” “Oh plausibly, with your flossy words, well I got them too: abomination, ridicule,” “All I’m saying is your explanation doesn’t quite make it, but I’m glad you called,” “Good, since my life’s much easier when you’re not being a wise guy, and listen, I’m sorry for the reverse charges, which shouldn’t stand you much as I’ll be brief, but I’m at a booth and had no change on me,” “No problem, glad it didn’t stop you from calling, and let’s face it, Dad—do you think I can say this?—you were never one much for making calls from pay phones if you first couldn’t tell the operator you lost your coin in the slot or got the wrong number, or even from the one at home, so maybe it is you on the phone,” “Why you being so sarcastic? and it was you who was always the big sport with our phone—calling pals in California—that homely stringbean and her kid you once lived with out there—but you never picked up the tab for it, never even asked to see the phone bill,” “I used to leave a couple bucks by the phone if I made a long-distance call and with a note saying for my California call at such and such a time, and I called from home because I was living there then, helping Mom take care of you, which was a promise I made her and OK, I wanted to do it too, and if I went out to call it would have cost me twice as much because of I don’t know what implausible justifications the phone company gave—operator assistance for a while, but when I could dial direct from a pay phone if I put in the right change after a recorded voice told me how much?,” “You never understood even with the local calls that it’s extra charges after the first three minutes, and that piled up into big phone bills, but did you put money down for those?,” “So the phone bill was a few extra bucks a month because of me, so what?—you knew you were never going to see your last buck and you had a free nurse’s aide in me minus my room and board,” “I wasn’t made of money is what I’m saying,” “And I’m saying you had enough dough stashed away to take care of the little extra a month on the phone bills, and I’ll pay you back everything you still think I owe you for those calls, with interest and interest on the interest, for I’ve money, a regular job, not a tremendous salary but enough to get you back every last red cent of it,” “Forget it, it’s over and done with and I don’t want to be petty, but you used to make me mad with that business and other things—my liquor, for instance, swilling it like a dozen drunken Irishmen at a wake but did you once bring a bottle home?,” “Sure I did, probably more than I drank, booze for Mom, booze for me, wine, cordials, beer, soda when I was drinking brandy and soda,” “When, if you didn’t keep it in your room?—you never brought and you drank too much and the best stuff I had too, the scotch and my one bottle of rare Crown Royal I was saving for special occasions, and then you watered the bottles, don’t tell me, ruining the liquor for me when I was finally able to have my one shot a month,” “While you’re at it why not bring up the refrigerator—,” “Just tell me first, did you water my Crown Royal?,” “Yeah, I don’t know, I might have watered a bottle or two of something—it was late and I was probably exhausted but couldn’t sleep or just keyed up from having taken care of you and needed a drink—one of your big fecal spills, for instance, which I’m not blaming you for—and I’d run out of my own booze and Mom’s was empty too and I thought you might be checking the bottle level the next day, but if I took an inch of it it was a lot,” “Three or four inches, if I remember, and not because I measured and checked it but because of its taste, but what about the refrigerator you started mentioning before—how you used to stand in front of the open door all day?,” “That too, but I was thinking about your complaints of how much I ate,” “You nearly ate us out of house and home, but you were fidgety from taking care of me maybe, which led to all your overeating, so like you I shouldn’t blame you there, but with the open door you acted as if we had lots of stock in Con Ed—you also acted as if the refrigerator bulb and the food spoiling inside were replaceable for free,” “Then you should have got a see-through refrigerator door, for how else could I have seen what was inside?,” “You could have come to it the way I did, with an idea what you wanted to eat and what was inside,” “Mom was constantly buying different foods, so I didn’t know what was inside,” “And you were constantly eating but I don’t think buying it,” “You wanted me to set aside a special little section of the refrigerator for myself with just the food I bought?,” “I wanted you, since you weren’t shelling out for your own upkeep outside, to contribute something to the house—food, alcohol or money—for no matter how little you earned with your sub work at school you always still could have given in a small cut,” “What about how much you were saving on nursing care with me and Mom?,” “Listen, with my own mother—my father I couldn’t do it for because he just keeled over one day and died—but with her when she was sick I paid for round-the-clock nurses in the hospital and then a live-in one for her at home till she died,” “You were such a good son—that’s what you liked to stress—and what lousy sons we were, or just me,” “Not lousy, you just always thought you knew better than me so never did anything I asked, and you also never chipped in a dime to the house,” “You became a dentist early and made much more than I,” “I was paying half my parents’ living costs when I was working two jobs while going to dental school, but it could be I had more incentive than you kids, coming from a background where we had almost nothing,” “You went into everything else, why not my Gentile girlfriends next?,” “I’ll go into them—which ones?—you had so many, one uglier and skinnier than the next, and you lived with some, you brought them to the house for dinner so we had to entertain them no less, one Kraut you even had stay a week and don’t let’s forget again that especially ugly stringbean one and her kid you lived with at the house for a few months,” “A couple of weeks—we were supposed to for a few months, while she went to some accelerated interior design school, but it was obviously upsetting you and in turn Mom and us, so we moved out, and I did ask your permission first—you forget that or just don’t want to remember—I called from California and wrote and in both the call and your letter back you said though you don’t entirely approve of the arrangement, you gave your permission,” “I never gave anything, your mother must have even though I told her not to,” “And that Kraut for a week was a Dane I met there whose parents put me up for a while, and she was a friend, that’s all—we had similar interests in art and literature and looking at cathedrals and so on—and we slept in different rooms in her home and ours,” “Oh, you were shtupping her, don’t tell me—you thought you had a shlong ten feet long that had to be used every night or it would become standard size—well then you should have used it in your own home—I hated all your Gentile girlfriends, there was never anything to them, no looks or brains, with probably tight anti-Semites for parents if they had any money—you were throwing yourself away on them just to get laid,” “You liked them well enough when they were around, and they were always pleasant to you, much more than you rated, seeing what you thought of them—Janine, for example—she m
ade you laugh, held your hand when she talked to you sometimes, treated you with plenty of respect, and if you thought she was ugly and skinny then you have less of an eye for beauty than I ever thought, for weren’t you always boasting you married one? or maybe you only started keeping your glasses filthy when I met her,” “I forget this Janine, most of them looked like the next one, maybe there was an exception some place, but rich, beautiful and Jewish is what I’m saying I wanted for you and you should have too and could have got, for if they have everything a Gentile girl does but also’s Jewish, what’s so wrong with it?—fewer problems, for one thing, because you’re mostly from the same background so understand each other from the beginning, and Jewish girls are as sexy as any—more so most times—maybe it’s in the religion or what’s not in it or what they learn at home—to give a man who gives them a good life everything he wants—and you had the looks, height and brains to get one but you never took advantage of it—then you lost your hair like me—I told you you would—but not like me you didn’t have any money to make up for it, and you were drinking too much and not taking care of yourself in other ways—clothes, even though I said if you were interested in a Jewish girl I’d buy you an entire wardrobe to date her—your beard sometimes, other times a mustache—nobody even knew who you were because of these quick-change acts with your face—and your old sneakers, no socks with them sometimes, you were getting to look like a street rummy with all of this, so then why would they want you?,” “I still had a youthful face—it’s genetic, from Mom’s side—and I didn’t shrink or lose as much hair as you at a comparable age or my brains, but I didn’t happen to meet a Jewish girl I liked then, maybe just circumstance,” “You didn’t meet them because you didn’t want to have anything to do with them—they were Jewish, so not as good as far as you were concerned—no small features, stick legs, no invisible nose or breasts—Jewish was trafe for some smart-aleck reason—you only wanted Gentile because they were different from what the rest of our families had and you could shove them into my face because you knew I hated it—consider yourself lucky one didn’t foul you up for good by getting a baby from you and making you pay through the nose for it,” “How do you know one didn’t?,” “First of all you had no money for payments to her if she did,” “I’m only talking about the baby part,” “That’s just what they’d do—out of marriage, even when living with their own husbands but from someone else, and right after she screwed with you she’d screw with him and then with both of them smoking a cigarette after she’d tell him she’s pregnant by you and he’d come with a gun after your head, but don’t even insinuate to me you and one woman did, I don’t want to hear it not even as a joke, because if it’s true then you’re finished in my eyes and because of your cavalier attitude to it, in the world’s,” “No, I’m sorry, it never happened, probably I was lucky, and now I’m married and have two wonderful girls and my wife couldn’t be nicer, and she’s Jewish, what do you know? though it had nothing to do with it—I just, well, met her, and she turned out to be that—in fact when I first saw her I thought she wasn’t,” “And it made you more attracted to her,” “No, I was just attracted to her, Jewish or not—the smile, the face and hair, from across the room without her even saying or even looking at me, and her body,” “A full body, what I’ve been talking about, one you can grab and that fills out a dress,” “Some women I knew had full bodies,” “You’ve had them all, I know—big, skinny, one with all legs, another with all neck, you said like a swan’s, I said like a beer bottle—long hair another one had down to the floor and what a mess, one with hair like a marine recruit,” “That’s because it was burned in a fire and had to be cut short,” “Blacks, whites, mostly WASP but a few Chinese thrown in,” “She was Philippine,” “Short and squat, like a baseball catcher, not to mention that greasy thick hair, though if I had my choice I’d take them over the blacks—you made me sick with what you did, but you at least showed the common sense for once not to bring the black to our house,” “I didn’t want to humiliate her,” “And us?,” “I didn’t want to tamper with your sensibilities either, though I doubt Mom would have minded—the woman was a very well respected modern dancer, had advanced degrees in other fields and came from a fine professional home,” “So why didn’t you marry her if she was that good?,” “She was too rigid sometimes, maybe we were both too self-conscious about our being together and the remarks and stares we got, I found her dull a lot and didn’t love her though she said she did me, so that was why we broke up—I don’t know for sure but I’m glad we did because of what I eventually got,” “A sick woman,” “When I married her she wasn’t, but you’d leave her because she got a disease?—that’s not what Mom did with you,” “We were already thirty-five years married—with yours I would have found out better before I married that she was sick,” “There weren’t any signs,” “Did you look hard enough, did you notice?—you just saw the great body and face and pretty blond hair and wanted to stick what you thought was your big prick in and she’d be impressed, and then you got hooked like all schnooks do with simply having a chunk of pussy always around for them and said ‘May I?’ or ‘Would she?’ and of course she does for by then she’s over thirty and maybe knows she’s got a little illness and getting worse and will probably need lots of taking care of later and her folks can’t live forever and besides all that you finally landed a decent job and dressing better and so forth,” “I was dressing just as badly, maybe better footwear because I discovered sneakers made my feet ache when I walked in them a lot and also now underpants and socks—I could afford them,” “Anyone could afford them, you were just too much of a slob to wear them—pissing the last few drops into your trousers, you didn’t notice but I did, the stains—anyway, I’m saying she was no dope, she knew that no matter how sick she was to become you were the kind of guy—you probably even bragged about it—to stick with her for life, which is all to the good but bad for you,” “How so if I’m helping her? and let me tell you that sometimes I’m not such a nice guy about it too,” “Maybe because you sensed something wasn’t to Hoyle, because to throw away the rest of your life on someone who might have fooled you into thinking she was well when you met her or popped the question?,” “That’s not it at all, but you left out dentistry—just want to remind you,” “What about it—I loved the field, yanking out stubborn teeth, fixing the ones that stayed, measuring and then finishing off the plates to perfection and people walking around with them in and complimenting me on how good they fit, besides all the money and the kibitzers who were always dropping in,” “I’m referring to my not going into it,” “You’re proud of it, so you bring it up, but you broke my heart when you stopped taking the sciences in college—you had the personality like me for dentistry—outgoing, unassuming, a boy from the boys—you could have shared my office half time and done what you wanted the other half—write, painted, taken the piano—or we could have had two offices between us and once I retired and you bought me out you would have owned them both—one in the Chrysler building which I always wanted—imagine, that tall a place and so important in architecture, which you must have liked, and up till the last time I checked not a single dentist in it,” “I was terrible in the sciences,” “You could have ignored that you knew I wanted it so much and tried harder and passed and then forgotten them when you got into dental school because you don’t need them there, once in it’s all practical stuff—in fact you can still go back to college, get all the predental subjects out of the way in a year and then go to dental school, people have done it this late in their lives—that famous peaceful man who studied medicine in his forties, then went to Africa with his degree and I think his organ but unlike that guy, since he only wanted to be away from the world, you could make lots of money, take that tiny house of yours and triple it in size, or buy a new one, a ranch house so your wife doesn’t have to walk up the steps and fall down them like in the one now, or a city and country one both, two cars instead of one, garages in the house for when
it snows and to keep them from being swiped off the street, drive to your office and garage your car there too, and your girls could have their own ponies, not just dolls of ones, and go to the best of private schools, and you want to go on vacation you get another dentist to cover your practice, like you do for him, and off you go for a month with your wife and a special nurse for her if you want and a nanny to stay with the kids at home, and round-the-clock nurses all the time for her at home if it ever gets that bad, for who else is going to do it and now you haven’t the means,” “Me, I will, I teach college so I’ve time, also because I don’t want nurses around and no nannies for the kids, I want us to bring them up ourselves, I don’t even like a housekeeper in the house for more than a few hours a week—just to clean up in a way I can’t, spots or clumps of dust I never see—I like my quietness, nobody around but the family or at least for extended stays, and if we have to move to a ranch house, which is what, the one-floor family house? then we’ll do it since I make enough to live OK, but I don’t want my girls spoiled with too many things they don’t need, trunks stuffed with dolls, closets with party dresses and dressers with sweaters and hose, certainly not private schools at so early an age unless there are killers or idiot teachers in the public ones they’re assigned to, and nothing to do with ponies or any of the horsey-set pets, just what I need are pony turds all over my yard and the cult of the equine inside, and as a teacher I get longer vacations than a month, we like going to Maine all summer to a simple rented cottage overlooking the ocean and doing our nonschool work there,” “You can buy that ocean cottage and a piece of the ocean, then add a couple of out-of-the-house studios with bathrooms and little kitchens in them so you both can work to your hearts’ content, but probably not in Maine since you want it to be a spot you can go weekends to summers when you have to be at the office and for skiing and short drives up all year,” “If I make enough doing what I’m doing maybe I will buy a cottage on a Maine beach, two bedrooms, where we can each work in one, maybe a little room for a guest, but nothing big where we have to do a lot of furnishing and cleaning up, but look, you got to believe I once really wanted to become a dentist, not to make a great living, or so I sold myself the idea then, but to go to very poor areas here and abroad and work on rotting teeth, but after a few predent courses I knew it wasn’t for me—truthfully, you loved working on mouths, which I admired you for a lot—I love people to have healthy and pain-and stink-free teeth—while I couldn’t even cut up an earthworm in bio—I had to have this bright premed seated at the same lab table do it for me on the q.t. and I still only got a D,” “You can get used to everything, I found—I nearly fainted when they made me dissect a cadaver’s head in my first year at dental school, but I wanted to become a dentist so much that I didn’t let it stop me, and you don’t have to be the kind of dentist I was—you like kids so much you can specialize in their teeth and hand out stickers and cheap toy trinkets after, or only work on gums, implants, adult braces—those guys make more than anyone alive except one kind or another drug or Wall Street thief,” “Fine for you, which I also admired, pushing through with what you couldn’t stomach, but I’ve no interest in making a bundle and since teaching only takes about thirty hours a week max I have some time to do what I really like to too,” “And where’s it all get you?—you have to check your checkbook every time you fill your tank with gas,” “Not anymore, but what else you want to say to me while we’re at it?,” “What else could there be?—we just about covered it all,” “Alex, what’s got to be your thirty-year gripe against me but never expressed,” “You’re the one with the full head of guilt so you get rid of it—me, I don’t let it bother me day to day,” “But we’re on the line, talking instead of yelling about things for once, so let’s use the opportunity,” “Forget it, arguments when you’re desperate never get you anywhere, also because I don’t want you paying too big a bill for this call,” “What’s the difference, it’s my money, and what the hell’s it for?,” “The difference is you don’t want to piss it all away on AT&T,” “That’s you again—chip chip chip, cutting back on the X rays when you took care of my teeth, so later with other dentists costing me three root canals,” “I was no good with my kids’ teeth—it took me a while to realize that—I didn’t want to hurt them so knew I wasn’t going to drill too deep,” “Then what about winding through streets you didn’t know rather than directly over the bridge to save on the toll, probably costing you another gallon of gas besides?,” “That was before the higher prices—seventeen, eighteen cents a gallon so who cared? and you saw streets you never saw before and who says we always got to go the way they tell us or because it’s straight and new? and I’m not talking here about anything but the actual gas, streets, bridges and such so don’t make another meaning of it,” “But if it’s an important phone talk—like if you’re ruining your kids’ teeth with your sensitivity or wasting your passengers’ time with your meandering route—I’m saying when something might just possibly come out of it to clear things up once and for all or smooth them out?,” “Who could know what you’re talking about from that? and I can’t help it but we’re running up a phone bill that’s beginning to make me sick,” “Look, give me your number if you can and I’ll call right back—trick I should have thought of before to make you feel easier with how much this is costing me and which I picked up from you whenever you were going overtime on a pay phone—that and banging the side of the box same time you dropped the nickel into the slot which somehow recorded it as a quarter,” “I didn’t do those only to save—I got a kick putting one over on the system, something you should try more of to make yourself not so rigid, but OK, I can see you’ll never let up, and somebody declared it truth day today and your pockets are burning and got to be put out, so Alex and that last call of his from England, right? and what you said in it, especially after I pleaded with you beforehand, knowing your fast mouth and mind of your own, to keep your trap shut,” “I thought he’d want to be here if Vera died and not days after she was buried,” “But she didn’t die, which I knew she wouldn’t—she’d taken a turn for the worse, something she’d done before after one or two of her operations and lived, so I told you if he called, which we expected since he knew she was going in and he was that kind of brother, and asked how she was to say ‘Not bad, in fact pretty good,’ for I knew he’d fly straight home if he knew the real shape she was in, but what does the big brain say?—he says ‘Dad’s not giving you the complete lowdown, the operation was a flop and it’s possible she might die,’ and I yell on the extension ‘Don’t listen to that jerk—he’s just jealous you’re away playing and he’s working—she’s fine, a little set back but she’ll be OK, stay where you are, you paid through the nose for your trip so have fun while you can, get your traveling bug out of your system and then come back and be serious again with your life, just keep us posted with your address if we think, which I don’t expect us to, you should come back suddenly and we need to telegram,’ but he says you wouldn’t lie to him on this, he thanks us both, me for trying to spare him so he could continue traveling and you for telling him the score and he’s taking the next flight home, and then something must have lit up in you—misgivings or some serious thinking over that you were changing matters when they shouldn’t for otherwise you never would have given in, but you compromised with me for once by telling him he doesn’t have to run home so fast, that he could enjoy himself some more by taking a ship back, which were cheaper than planes then—maybe even a freighter which you said could be an interesting finishing experience for him, and I remember him saying ‘You mean it about Vera?’ and you saying ‘Indubitably for sure,’ which was a code saying between you two when you both totally went along with something, and that you had perhaps overdone her sickness to him somewhat and that he has that much more time—oh, I could have slugged you because if I was him you certainly weren’t convincing me—but he fell for it—for a very bright guy he had a sudden dumb moment—and did what you suggested, found a
cheap freighter in a couple of days and sent us a telegram that he was on his way and when in Boston it would get there, and then two weeks went by, we got worried, three—,” “I don’t know if you know or if this is the appropriate time to bring it up but I saw him just before—I forgot to mention it—Vera too, not together, one after the—,” “Good, I’d like to see them too, but think of all those years your mother and I went through when you didn’t see him—nobody did and all because you wouldn’t listen to me—you thought you knew better—you wanted him back because you were gloomy over some floozy who dumped you that week he called so you wanted your best pal to talk about it with plus to take over some of the hospital-sitting chores you did in Vera’s room then too,” “Maybe that was part of it—a small part, the girl, who if I recall was nice, and my wanting his company—but I really did think Vera was that sick and would die,” “Why, where was the evidence?,” “Something about the way the doctor spoke and looked at me earlier that day told me she was even worse off than he said,” “Come on, he was just another arrogant Mt. Sinai doctor—they all look as if they’re about to spit on you,” “No, it was something else,” “What, his eyes? you didn’t like his tie? the way his Adam’s apple jumped up and down when he said ‘no, yes, goddamnit’? because I was there too—right outside her room, right? and outside through the little window down the hall it was just getting dark—you asked if you should contact your brother overseas to get him home and he said he didn’t think her condition was as grave as that right now,” “If he used the word grave, maybe that was it,” “He used the word serious, bad, urgent,” “I still felt he was holding back—this business that a positive attitude on our part—and of course it’s better if we actually believe what we convey and can get the patient to laugh about his condition—will make her feel good and possibly give her that little extra she needs to pull through,” “So it’s what did it, so why knock the guy?,” “My attitude to her and often Mom’s and her sisters’ was usually dejection and pity, and you and Jerry only came to the hospital for a half-hour after work,” “I had to make money for the medical bills and Jerry had his own family to support,” “I wasn’t complaining, just saying, though I will admit—not boast—that I took two weeks from work—future vacation time—to be there and help, and she was mostly in and out of sleep all the time so she hardly noticed us till she suddenly popped out of it one morning—we weren’t even there, an aide was—and quickly got better,” “So, good hospital care and the doctor urging us to a happy attitude with her helped her survive,” “She survived because she was still young and relatively strong and probably had it in her not to give up so quick and the week’s sleep and IV gave her the rest and extra strength she needed,” “No, she survived mainly because she wanted to see Alex-she loved him like she did nobody but your mother—and the longer we kept him away from the hospital the better, for if he had flown back as fast as you first wanted she would have taken one look, smiled, given up now that she saw him, and died,” “Ah, I could never win an argument with you or even make much sense to you in a discussion and I shouldn’t have even started trying,” “That’s because I’m talking what you hate to hear most: reasonableness and speaking the truth,” “The truth according to Dada—no, I’m Dada to my kids, and Daddy and Papa, while you were just Dad, which was all right, while Mom, now that I think of it, is still Mommy, Momma, Ma, but anyway it’s just winning the argument, your truth, or drubbing your fellow discussant, while mine, which isn’t a truth but conduct, is not,” “You’re way over my head there, sonny, and maybe even over yours, but where you like to be, alone, looking down, sarcastic,” “But before you said I was a boy from the boys,” “You once were but something happened and now you’re not, but listen, this call’s gone way past the point where I can tolerate it costing so much so I’m hanging up,” “But I have the dough I told you and am willing to spend it for this so stop worrying,” “I’m sorry but I just can’t stand AT&T taking you for a sucker,” and hangs up, “I also forgot to mention that if Alex hadn’t taken that freighter he might have got the plane he was supposed to return on a couple of months later and it might have gone down, but you would have said ‘Did one go down that we know of?’ and I would have said ‘We didn’t check then but one could have and we wouldn’t have known,’ and you would have said ‘The planes when they go down you hear about and I would have made the connection then no matter how much and how long after I was mourning him,’ and I would have said ‘You see, I can’t win an argument with you or even hold even in a discussion,’ and you would have said something that made me lose the argument or disgusted with the discussion even more such as ‘Because your arguments aren’t logical, you’ve drunk too much and maybe in the past took too much dope which has made your brains unsensible, you don’t connect things intelligently the way intelligent people are supposed to so maybe you’re not as intelligent as I thought and some people have said,’ and I would have said ‘Since when have you thought that, and what people, because nobody’s told me?’ and you would have said ‘ There you go again, trying to squirm out of it by putting yourself down—when insults and intelligence aren’t working, try a little humility and self-hatred, right?’ and I would have said ‘Oh boy, you sure got me there, Charlie,’ and you would have said ‘Oh boy is right—you got yourself long ago, strung yourself up’s more like it, and don’t you by now know your father’s name?’ and I would have said ‘I was just parroting one of your expressions, but your name, your name, your name—no, I don’t want to say it, it’s not nice,’ and you would have said ‘Go on, say what the hell you like, we’re family,’ and I would have said ‘I suppose once in my life isn’t too bad—your name, dear Dad, is gelt,’ and you would have said ‘What’s with the “dear Dad”—to make me feel better? but if that is my name, then you have none, which makes you and my relation to you what?’ and I would have said ‘Geltless?’ and you would have said ‘No, it makes you more but what, I hate to say,’ and I would have said ‘But you’ll say it,’ and you would have said and I would have and you and I and on and on like that till maybe I hung up before you did,” and hangs up, knows it’s useless but knocks on the bathroom door, no answer, says “Anyone in, for if anyone is, say so, or I’m coming in,” nothing, goes in, empty, seat’s up the way he left it last time he peed even though he told himself then to put it down after, puts it down, goes outside the house and runs to the back, side and front yards looking for Vera, Denise, Alex, his girls, sits on the rocker on the front porch, tells himself to wait, if he sits long enough one of them will come, never likes not to know where his girls are, hopes they’re safe, prays without praying they are, should he make himself a drink and bring it out here with a book or newspaper? it’s past five so time, no, just stay seated and wait, how many moments of quiet does he get like this? no mowers going in neighbors’ yards or cars zipping past, shuts his eyes, cups his hands over them to keep out as much light as he can and to make it easier for him to think if he wants to think, thinks one thing missing: Alex got away but how?—Vera and Dad were explained OK or as well as possible for now but Alex?—he got away as the ship was sinking but how?—the ship was sinking or had sunk and he swam to a lifeboat or climbed down to one from the ship, if he swam he had to swim fast and hard because the water was so cold that one minute in it he’d die of shock before he drowned, nobody else in the lifeboat or someone or several other people in it but they all died, and it ended up on a remote Irish beach in a week and he decided—he had lots of time to think in the boat what he’d do if he survived—to fake his identity for a year to be away from all his past obligations and ties—he knew how much it would hurt his family but he wanted to have more time to think about life and just do what he wanted to like write—something might have happened in the lifeboat, too much sun, rain, being alone for so long, the cold, always being wet, no food or anything to drink, almost no chance he’d survive, patterns of the stars, he might have hallucinated a lot, had a religious experience of some kind,
some deep change when he saw all those men on the ship and in the lifeboat die—he’ll work it out thoroughly when he has more time—or Alex lost his memory when the ship crashed or the shock of the cold water or in the lifeboat and the sun and cold and he wound up on an Irish beach and wandered around for a while till he was found, or it could have been drugs on the ship days before the accident, some fall when the ship was hit or going down, a fight one of those nights or he was breaking up one and someone slammed his head with a bottle or club and his memory going that way and thirty years later suddenly returning after he struck his head against something or another fight or breaking up one or he simply came out of it or through drugs or was in a coma for almost thirty years and only recently came to, or his lifeboat ghosted to shore, he walked to a village, faked an English or Scottish accent and convinced the Irish authorities he was a drifter or hiker, found a job, room, cottage, bought a typewriter or just used pencil and pen and lived alone under a fake name and wrote for what he thought would be a year but it stretched to two, three, ten, thirty, or he was picked up in the lifeboat by a passing ship, sort of a slave one which he only escaped from this year, or one from a Communist country he defected to if it’d keep it a secret for a year, when he planned to leave, but it stretched to thirty and somehow the authorities forgot, there could have been an Irishman or Norwegian in the lifeboat and Alex told him he wanted to escape his old life for a year and the man helped him get false papers, place to live and a job in his country, or the two had talked it over on the ship days before and happened to wind up in the same lifeboat alone or with others but the others died, or just with the man, no talk about escaping his old life, the man died and they looked alike and he took his papers, dumped him overboard and when the lifeboat landed or was picked up he passed himself off as that man, planned to do it a year but did it for thirty, married, children, grandchildren, wrote a number of books under the fake name or a pen name if he took someone else’s name and always refused to be interviewed or photographed, especially for book jackets and publicity shots, till he had an experience—drug, religious, someone close dying, through another head injury or something he read in a newspaper or magazine or saw in a movie—and decided to see his family in the States and explain everything and ask their forgiveness, or he only did it a few months—maybe all he’d planned to—when he tripped and hit his head or got into a fight or was breaking up one when someone clubbed or punched him and he banged his head against the bar or floor and lost his memory and only came out of it this year, few weeks ago, days, their car pulls up, girls waving to him from the back seat and shouting “Daddy, Dada, hiya, hi,” wife smiling from the driver’s seat and saying “Hello, sweetheart, can you help me with some packages?,” “Oh, you bought some more goodies again, huh?” and she says “Groceries, things we needed, and paint and brushes and stuff at the hardware store,” and he says “Oh, you got some heavy work cut out for me again, huh?” and she says “In a way, but nothing you didn’t say you wouldn’t do,” and he says “Wait a minute, wait—I didn’t say? I wouldn’t do?—does that mean I said I’d do it?,” “Eva’s room—we agreed on it, it needed a paint job years before we moved in here, and I’m not suggesting you have to start today—even this week if you don’t want,” and he says “Just kidding, and it’ll look nice—that room needs some cheering up,” and goes to the car while she’s positioning herself to get out of it, kisses her through the window, “How are you?,” “Fine thanks,” she says, “and you?,” “Fine also—some work done, a little thinking, a little rest, a gorgeous day,” “Girls,” she shouts and he turns around alarmed and sees they’re at the curb, goes over, says “You weren’t going to cross without one of us, right?” and Olivia says “No, we were waiting here like we’re supposed to,” and takes Eva’s hand and he says “Good, my beautiful smart girls, but while we’re here let’s practice it—look both ways before you cross,” “We already did,” Olivia says, “You have to do it just before you’re going to cross—also the side street in case a car’s coming out of it or stopped—if one’s there let it go where it’s going to or park before you cross,” “We know,” Olivia says, “you’ve told us,” “And of course, Eva, never cross the street alone or just with Olivia,” “I know,” she says, “can we cross?,” “OK, coast’s clear,” he says, waving them across, takes his wife’s walker out of the passenger front seat, brings it around, opens it, asks where she’s been, “Out, shopping, you can see,” pointing to the back of the car where the packages and paints must be, “But why didn’t you tell me?—I assumed everything was OK, but next time,” holding her arm so she can step out of the car and grab the walker, “no matter how steeped in my work you think I might be, whenever you’re going out for more than a half-hour or so without my first knowing it, knock on my door or leave a note or later call me,” and then stands in the street looking both ways while she crosses it.
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