“Miles!” Cob shouted when he saw me come in the front door. He charged my body like a small bull and wrapped his arms about my waist. Poor vision must’ve run in our family: I also wore glasses, but Cob required Coke bottles so thick, it was a wonder he could see anything at all. The doctors said that if he wore them throughout his youth, he might be able to get on without them as an adult. In the meantime, the glasses were an obstacle to his popularity in school. He had always had a strong affinity for insects, and I sometimes wondered—perhaps insensitively—if it wasn’t in part because of his awkward resemblance to a praying mantis.
“Hey, Cob,” I said, hugging him back. “Tell me something: What day is it tomorrow?”
“Friday.”
“It’s not the weekend yet, then, is it? You done your schoolwork?”
He sighed and shook his head. He was a good kid. Whether he did his homework or not, Cob still maintained the stunningly beautiful quality of never lying about such things.
“How about we do it together?” I said.
He gave his assent in a vigorous nod. “And then after I can show you the new bugs I caught?” he prompted. If there was one thing Cob cared about, it was adding to his insect collection and showing it off to people. He knew the world’s geography in shockingly precise detail, but only in terms of what beetle lived where and which butterflies migrated with the seasons. For birthdays, my mother traditionally gave him socks and footballs, but I had taken to giving him heavy hardbound books on entomology, and while he showed little interest in the socks or the footballs, he never expressed disappointment with the books.
“Go fetch your books and bring them into the living room.” I nudged him into motion and he ran off to find his schoolbag. I moved in the direction of the kitchen to find my mother.
“Ma?” I called, feeling slightly apprehensive.
“In here.”
I found her at the kitchen table peeling carrots.
“I hear you say you gonna help Cob with his schoolwork?” she asked with no further greeting.
“Yes,” I said, relieved by her tone; I knew no malicious gossip had reached her ears.
“Good,” she replied. “I was helpin’ him last night, but Wendell was in one of his moods, so we had to quit.” This, I knew, was getting to be a common occurrence. Whenever my mother paid attention to Cob, Wendell grew blindingly jealous and got into one of his “moods,” as my mother called them. The fact that a grown man should be jealous of a mother paying attention to her seven-year-old son baffled me, and the fact that my mother—a strong-willed woman and breadwinner to boot—should cater to these childish tantrums baffled me even further.
“I remember when I used to do my schoolwork in the living room when I was Cob’s age,” I murmured, half to myself. “Father never got in a mood. He had so much curiosity about what I was studying,” I said, recalling the way I’d sit cross-legged on the floor next to my father’s easy chair. It was a pleasant memory, the way he would lean over my shoulder and watch me solve algebra problems and balance chemical equations as if I were performing one magic trick after another.
My mother chose to ignore my digression.
“Who that old man you runnin’ errands for in the mornings?” she asked. My sense of alarm perked up again. She meant Mister Gus. I’d told her a little bit about the extra money I was earning. “That a lot of money to pay for jus’ bringin’ him the daily paper,” she said now, frowning. “You know, they gots paperboys for that. Why don’t he jus’ subscribe?”
“He says subscriptions make newspapermen lazy,” I said, repeating a line from one of Mister Gus’s tirades. “He doesn’t want any paper thinking they’ve got him on the hook.”
She grunted. “Sounds like you got yo’ hands full with that one.” She twisted from where she sat at the table in order to heap the carrot peels into a small rubbish pail. “Well, just don’t let him take advantage of yo’ time or yo’ kindness. Rich white folks always trying to take advantage.” For a moment I worried she was implying something sinister. I knew some part of my recent employment was a function of Mister Gus’s loneliness, but I had not yet admitted as much to myself outright.
I glanced at my mother, nervous. But then I reminded myself of the time she had worked as a personal nurse to an elderly lady on the Upper East Side. The woman had requested my mother take on more and more work, yet was often forgetful when it came time to pay my mother. Finally, when the old lady passed away, a tally of her outstanding debts was revealed. My mother’s name was not listed among them. Even now, years later, I could see it still galled her to be reminded of how she had worked like a dog and been shorted nearly two months’ pay—two months she could not afford.
“I’ll be mindful,” I said.
“Be mindful all you wants,” my mother said. “Just get yo’ money up front.”
• • •
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the living room with Cob, the two of us crouched over the coffee table, going over parts of speech and then afterwards the finer points of “borrowing” when subtracting two-digit sums.
“Are you going to California to look for Daddy’s journal?” Cob asked while in the middle of working out a math problem.
“Ma told you about that?” I was surprised and faintly annoyed. I was nervous enough about how things would turn out; I didn’t need to be nervous for two. Cob nodded, and my stomach lurched with a sense of responsibility for him.
According to my parents, I’d had another brother, too: an elder brother named Marcus who as a boy of only six had drowned in the East River as a result of accepting a neighborhood dare. He died shortly after I was born, and I’d developed a kind of reverse magical thinking about this fact, as though my coming into the world had accidentally pushed him out. A photograph of him hung on the wall in my bedroom. From this image I was able to extrapolate all sorts of memories, with no true gauge, of course, to measure their accuracy. Every once in a while, I talked aloud to his photograph in a familiar manner, the way children sometimes do when they are confiding secrets to a favorite rag doll or asking favors from an invisible god. I had the details of that photograph memorized. Marcus was a handsome little boy, with a confident smile and his shoulders thrust proudly backwards, and I wondered sometimes whether, if he had lived, he might’ve become the man I know my father was hoping one of us would become.
There were times, too, when I imagined the day of the tragedy. On late summer afternoons when there was nothing to do and the heat of the day was trapped in the apartment, I would lie around my bedroom, watching dust motes falling idly through the air, and allow my eyes to slide shut despite the fact I was hardly sleepy and not in need of a nap. My waking dream was always the same. I envisioned Marcus picking over the steep boulders of the urban shore as other boys jeered at him and egged him on, his small, tough little body easing into the filthy waters and then pushing off into the current. The way I pictured it, he must’ve been a brave kid, the kind of kid who would not have been able to turn back defeated. The challenge was to swim clear to the opposite shore and back again. Of course no child in our neighborhood had any business being in the water, let alone a six-year-old. The sum total of a Harlem kid’s swimming experience was generally limited to a handful of summer days spent splashing chlorinated water into one another’s faces in a rec pool packed with hundreds of other children, the pool shallow enough to stand on the bottom and so packed with bodies you couldn’t reach out an arm without touching someone else. But heroic leader that I imagined Marcus to be, I theorized he’d been completely lacking in fear. In my most morbid musings, I wondered if he’d been surprised, in those final moments, to feel his head dipping under the water for longer and longer periods, until he had been swept all the way downstream, past the tip of Randall’s Island, and he finally failed to come up altogether. I used to lie in bed and stare at that photograph, searching Marcus’s face for some kind of
sign, as though somewhere in the gleam that shone within his eyes was a hint of premonition, a signal that he understood his fate was already sealed. I considered whether, if he were in my place, Marcus would make the trip out to California now.
“Are you going to go?” Cob repeated his question. I considered how to reply. I thought some more about how different things were when I used to do my schoolwork with my father leaning over my shoulder and smiling in proud amazement every time I wrote a sentence or solved an equation. There was a particular sensation that went along with it—a sensation I wouldn’t trade for the world—and I wished Cob could somehow know it, too. But he never would.
“Maybe,” I said finally. This was honest. “If I can manage it.”
“Ma says you’re going to bring back Pa’s journal,” Cob said. Then he gave a shy smile and peered back into the open pages of his schoolbook, shrugging. I could see he wanted something; he always got shy when he wanted something. “And maybe . . . if you go . . . you could bring back some bugs, too,” he suggested. “I’ve never been able to catch a monarch. Lots of monarchs migrate through California.”
“Do they?” I asked. He nodded enthusiastically. “Well, I, for one, would like to know more about that,” I said, and sat back, listening to my kid brother explain to me all about the beauty of love and death within the insect world.
21
I was more than a little shocked one morning when I arrived at Mister Gus’s townhouse to drop off the usual stack of newspapers, only to find him downstairs in the kitchen fumbling with a coffee grinder over a pot of boiling water. I froze where I stood, the key to the servants’ entrance still in my hand and the bundle of newspapers under my arm. An involuntary gasp escaped my lips. I had never so much as seen him out of his bed, much less standing and roaming about. He cut an eerie figure. Upon hearing my gasp, Mister Gus whirled about, his eyes flashing.
“Well?” he demanded.
Well, what? I thought to myself. I was where I had promised to be; he was the one breaking with expectation. He attempted to work the grinder but his hands trembled and he fumbled it. “Do you need any help, sir?” I asked. He looked even frailer out of bed than in, if that was possible. His pin-striped pajamas drowned him; he was thinner than I’d thought, and I could see he was suffering from a slight hunchback.
“I’m trying to make some coffee,” he said in an impatient huff. “Some decent coffee, for a change! Greta’s gone.”
Greta was the woman who brought Mister Gus his breakfast and cleared it away, changed his sheets, did his laundry. The manner in which he had pronounced those words, Greta’s gone, made me think she was not coming back and that I ought not ask questions. If she was on an errand, he usually said: Greta’s out. I had no idea what had happened, but I knew enough to intuit it had to do with Mister Gus’s irritable tirades and her diminishing success in avoiding all contact with the man.
“Here,” I said, moving to help him. I took the coffee grinder out of his hands, and after a moment of hesitation he relented and sat down to watch me. I ground up several tablespoons of coffee, then dumped them into the boiling water and immediately switched the burner off. “Do you have . . . ?” I asked, but before I could finish my sentence I’d found a lid. I rummaged around some more as the coffee brewed and found a ladle. “And . . . here you are,” I said, ladling fresh coffee into a baroque-looking china teacup.
“Hmph,” Mister Gus said, glaring at me and reaching for the teacup. He continued to glare at me as he let the coffee cool down. After what seemed an eternity, he brought the cup to his lips and took a sip. “Hmph,” he repeated, but this time there was a slightly different tone in it. He sipped, then sipped again. “Hmph. Not bad. Not outstanding. But not bad.”
I knew I had won a small but sure victory.
I was still smiling when my eyes fell upon an automatic coffeemaker. It looked brand-new and state-of-the-art. It also was unplugged and coated in a fine layer of dust.
“But why . . .” I began. “Sir . . . why wouldn’t you simply use this?” I moved to stand near the machine, pointing in disbelief as though I had just found a unicorn roaming the kitchen.
“Tsk!” Mister Gus hissed scornfully. “You sound like Greta! My niece in California sent that contraption to me. Don’t know why I didn’t put it straight into the bin, infernal thing! Why on earth would I use that? I said I wanted a decent cup of coffee!”
“Have you ever tried it?” I ventured.
“I don’t need to,” he snapped.
“But if you use the machine, all you have to do is add the coffee and push a button.”
Mister Gus shot me a look that silenced me.
I sighed. “Would you like me to carry this upstairs on a tray for you?” I asked, meaning the coffee and the newspapers. He replied with a grumpy nod, and off I went, with Mister Gus trailing very slowly behind me, his feet shuffling softly over the rugs.
By the time I set the tray on his bed and arranged the papers the way he liked them, he still had not caught up, and I realized he was likely having trouble on the stairs. Nervous, I went to go check on his progress. I walked to the top of the sweeping half-circle staircase and looked down.
There he was, doggedly climbing one stair at a time and pausing, trying to conceal his heavy breathing. I knew if I offered to help him he would refuse. I padded down the stairs with a quiet, businesslike demeanor and slipped an arm under his armpit. To my surprise, he did not resist or chide me or even—as I’d worried he might—protest my touching him. Together, we worked our way up the stairs at a fairly efficient, steady pace.
“Thank you,” he said in a hoarse voice once we’d reached the top. It was the last thing I’d expected him to say; I thought, for a brief moment, that I was hearing things. I nodded and allowed him to shuffle the rest of the way into his room on his own, following him for fear he might yet fall.
“You know,” he said, once he had settled himself back into his immense pile of pillows and blankets like some kind of bird roosting in a nest, “you could come round more often and do things like that—the coffee, I mean. I’ve got a girl coming to drop off my meals, but I haven’t found a full replacement for Greta yet.” I looked at him, taken off guard by him for the second time that morning. “I’d pay you,” he said.
I cocked my head, considering. I would have to cut back on the hours I worked as a messenger, but this only made practical sense, for my messenger work paid less than half as much. Mister Gus, for all his bluster and prickly edges, was beginning to grow on me.
“Fine. Never mind!” Mister Gus snapped, assuming my hesitation was leading to a declination.
“No,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’d like that.”
He looked at me, his eyes opened wide and watering with tears. He gave a small, tight, grateful nod. Then he looked away.
22
As I soon learned, the list of neglected items that needed fixing in Mister Gus’s house was endless. Over the years, he had become something of a recluse, and his interest in seeing to it that things were properly maintained had waned in equal proportion to his interest in welcoming strangers into his home.
“Sir . . . when you go downstairs, why don’t you use the elevator?” I asked. Two days prior, I’d opened a Gothic wooden door at the far end of one hallway that led to what I thought was a closet and discovered a beautiful brass birdcage-like piece of machinery.
“It’s broken,” Mister Gus snapped.
“I can call to have it repaired,” I offered.
“I’m sure whatever is the matter with it is quite complicated. And besides, I don’t want some greasy fix-it man traipsing in here while I’m trying to read or nap,” he said. There was a note of anger in his voice, but the more closely I listened, the more I realized the anger was only a mask; beneath it was fear. Mister Gus, perhaps reasonably, was afraid he might be taken advantage of. He was extremely leery of new acquain
tances, and before Greta left, she had gossiped to me about an unfortunate incident involving a man who had visited the house on the pretext of representing the fund-raising committee for the Metropolitan Opera but who turned out to have no affiliation with the Met and ten sticky fingers. It wasn’t until hours after he left that Greta noticed a pair of silver candlesticks and cut-crystal ashtrays from Tiffany’s had gone missing. Greta was sure there were other things missing, too, but as she went through an itemization of objects she couldn’t locate or account for, Mister Gus wouldn’t directly acknowledge any of it. He was embarrassed, she reckoned. Fund-raising, indeed . . . was all he’d muttered under his breath.
“I can make sure the repairman only comes during a time I’m here, and I can monitor him if you like,” I said. Mister Gus regarded me warily from out of the corner of one eye.
“Fine,” he said, jutting out his chin and rolling his lips into a fine line. “If you’re going to be stubborn about it.”
I telephoned several elevator repair companies—an act that represented a significant victory in and of itself, if only because Greta and her predecessors had all been barred from getting half as far—and hired the one that struck me as most reputable. In the meantime, I tinkered with other broken items in the house, replacing lightbulbs, ratcheting up a bit of leaky plumbing, and oiling hinges. Mister Gus treated all this work as though it were invisible. My main duties—according to Mister Gus—involved making coffee, bringing and clearing trays of food, fluffing the seemingly infinite number of pillows on his bed, and drawing his bath.
Three-Martini Lunch Page 14