by John Donovan
“Fred wants you to hug him,” I say.
Mother makes the nutty noises people make to dogs when they guess they are talking to them. It’s not exactly goochy-goo, but close to it. She does bend down to Fred and lets him give her a few big licks. I’m the real stiff in the picture, I conclude. So what if Mother wants whiskey in the morning? It’s none of my business. Fred likes to give her licks regardless of what she drinks. Fred probably has more sense than I have. Right? Who’s to say?
I tell Mother that I’d better take Fred out for a walk. “Didn’t you take him before breakfast?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“He doesn’t have to go out twenty times a day, Davy.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“Then why are you forever running down the stairs with him?”
“I don’t know. He likes it, I think,” I answer. “He likes to go out and sniff around. You know.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know.” She says this with her snotty voice, the one I hate the most.
“It’s that it’s new for him, Mother. He likes to sniff around. That’s all. And I’m not going to be able to take him out so much next week when I’m in school.”
“You always seem to be going out or coming in with Fred, Davy. Aren’t you two ever just going to stay?” Mother’s voice cracks a bit when she says this, so I say sure we’re going to stay. She understands that this is a new place for both of us, right? Maybe it takes us a little time to go out and come in at the right time, but we’ll learn. Is that OK?
She says sure it’s OK, and she’s sorry that she sounds like a nag, and one of the biggest and most important things in her life is that she shouldn’t sound like a nag, and more important that she shouldn’t be a nag, and do I understand the difference?
I say sure I understand the difference. And I hope I didn’t make her feel that I thought she was a nag. If I did, I’m sorry.
“Oh, no!” she says. “Davy, sweetheart, there’s nothing to be sorry about. Oh, sweetheart, Mother wants most of all to have a lovely home for her baby. You understand that, don’t you?”
I tell her sure I do. She gives me another one of her hugs, and I’m sorry, I want to get out of it. My stomach turns over inside, I think, and I pull away from Mother. Does she know it!
“There’s something wrong with you animal lovers,” she says very loud. “You think you’re better than the rest of us. I’ll tell you something, Davy sweetheart, animals are from hunger! Don’t forget it!”
I look at Mother for a minute. She’s nuts, I guess. I want to go back to my real home. I want this to be a short vacation, over on New Year’s Day.
“I’m going to take Fred out,” I say abruptly. “Come on, Fred.” Fred’s ready to go in half a second. I get my coat and go to Mother’s front door.
“Take your damned dog out,” she says. “Have yourself a damned good time. Stay out the whole damned day if you wish. Forget about your damned mother, Davy!”
I open the door and Fred races out into Mother’s hallway. I run after him and the door slams shut. Oh, God, I think to myself.
“Oh, God,” I hear Mother saying on the other side of the door.
ten
Two days later is the day before New Year’s, and it’s been arranged that my father will pick me up in the morning and we’ll spend the day together. The doorbell rings around eleven, and Fred, old symphony orchestra that he is, howls a greeting to my father. My mother works the buzzer to let him in, and as he comes up the stairway Fred is crazier than ever. For the first time, Mother doesn’t go berserk. I can see from the smile on her face that she’s glad Fred is giving hell to my father. I don’t anticipate that this will be a very cheery meeting, so I get out my overcoat, ready to put it on in half a second.
“Happy New Year, David,” Mother says to my father after she has let him in.
Father tells her the same thing and then gives me a sort of kiss, not really a kiss, but he puts his arms around me and puts his face next to mine. I guess I’m awkward and don’t know what to do.
“Hi,” I say.
He says hi too and tells me Happy New Year as well. Fred is screaming at his heels, so he bends down in a second and Fred licks his hand.
“Hi, Fred,” my father says. I’m pleased that he calls Fred by his name and my face shows it. My father says, “Fred and I are old friends, aren’t we, Fred? You remember, Davy, I met Fred at your grandmother’s.”
“Oh, sure,” I say. I remember that was one of the times I left Fred alone with Grandmother for a week, when my father took me on a trip. Grandmother told me that Fred wouldn’t eat for two days after I went away. I don’t think I was very hungry either.
No one says anything, so I say, “Do you want to see my room?”
Sure, he says, so Mother and I take him into my room. Mother is beaming with pleasure that I asked him, I guess, because she puts her arm on my shoulder as though we are buddies.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
“It’s very nice,” he answers.
“Look at the paneling, David,” she says, running her hands up and down over the wall. “It’s supposed to look like it came from an old barn. What do you think of it?”
“It’s nice, very nice,” my father says again.
“It’s not from a real barn of course. It’s synthetic. You could never tell the difference, could you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“What do you mean, suppose? You couldn’t tell the difference in a million years unless you were a farmer. The decorator says it’s actually better to use simulated paneling. Real barn paneling may deteriorate. Especially in the city. Davy likes it,” she says. “Don’t you, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“See, David,” Mother says. “It doesn’t make any difference to Davy if it’s real or synthetic.” Then she sort of laughs. “When the bill comes, you’ll see what a big savings it was to use fake.” Mother opens the drawers where my clothes are. “Look, David,” she says. “These are the drawers.”
“I see,” Father says.
“Don’t you think it’s marvelous the way they have been sort of worked in underneath things? Look,” she says, tugging open another drawer, one built in under the bed, “here’s another drawer. Isn’t it marvelous? I more or less designed everything myself. Look at the bed.” She pushes at the top bunk, raising the mattress there and letting it fall back in place. “There’s an extra bed so Davy can invite friends to stay the night. What do you think of that?”
“Very nice,” Father says.
“You don’t sound enthusiastic. Or are you just thinking of the bill?”
“No, no,” Father says. “It’s just that it doesn’t look like a real room.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Only that it doesn’t look like anyone lives in it.”
My mother gets red in the face. “I didn’t design it all by myself. I used a decorator. He has top clients too, David. I just gave him my ideas. I don’t see what you find wrong with that.”
“It looks like an advertisement for a boy’s room,” my father says.
“Davy loves the room!” Mother says. “Don’t you, sweetheart?”
“I think it’s swell,” I lie.
“There!” Mother yells. Then she says, “Honestly …” or something like that under her breath. She almost pushes Father out of the room, which is very easy to do. With three people in the room, if one moves, two others get pushed.
Mother calms down a little bit and asks Father if he doesn’t want some coffee before we go.
“No, thank you, Helen.”
“Or a New Year’s drink perhaps, to fortify you for your day’s adventure?”
“No,” Father says. He helps me put on my overcoat. Fred
is sure he is going out with me, but he isn’t. We leave. Fred is jumping up against the door. I can hear Mother arranging the breakfast utensils in her sink. It’s lucky that manufacturers have developed unbreakable kitchen stuff is all I can say.
“We’ll meet Stephanie at one thirty and have lunch,” my father says when we get to the street. “Is that all right with you?”
“Sure,” I say. Stephanie is my father’s new wife. Not new. They have been married three years. I met her one time before they were married. Father brought her to Boston for the weekend and told me he was going to get married again. I didn’t like it much, but I was only ten at the time. I always hoped that my mother and father would get together again. I thought maybe if they both came to stay at Grandmother’s they’d get back together, but Grandmother wouldn’t ever let me ask them like that.
Now that I think of it, Grandmother looked forward to seeing my father more than my mother. When Father was coming, Grandmother would make a lot of cookies and some custards she said he particularly liked. He never stayed more than one or two nights at a time, but I could tell from the way they talked that they got along OK. They never talked about my mother, at least while I was with them. Grandmother was nice to Stephanie when Father brought her that first time. I must admit I wasn’t nice at all. I said hello and all that, and I answered when anyone asked me anything, and I was polite when I was supposed to be, but any way you cut it I was snotty. Stephanie didn’t mind, and that made me mad. If she had worked harder to win me over, I might have been friendlier.
The next time I saw her was at her wedding, which was in her uncle’s apartment in New York. It wasn’t a real wedding like the ones in churches at home. It was like a party, which takes a long time to get started. There were only two other kids there. They were Stephanie’s nephews. All told, there weren’t more than forty people at the wedding. Everyone had a lousy time.
Since they have been married, I have seen Stephanie several times, though she didn’t come with Father when he took me on vacation trips. When my father came to Boston on business for a few days, he would bring her along, and we’d all have dinner. Grandmother usually came, and before you knew it, Grandmother and Stephanie were kissing each other. I started kissing Stephanie too. And to tell the truth, it wasn’t such a bad thing to do. It was my own idea. When she came over with Father last July and gave Grandmother a big kiss, I said something like What about me? or some other such original thought, and she looked at me for what seemed to be three minutes and then gave me a big hug. She bawled for just a second after. I knew I liked her for sure when she said to my father, “I knew I’d screw this one up. Give me your handkerchief.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose very loud. We laughed. That night we went out for dinner and had a great time looking at fireworks being shot off over Marblehead Harbor from the place where we were eating. I haven’t seen Stephanie since then.
“Is there anything you would like to do before lunch?” my father asks.
“Oh, I don’t know. Just walk around, if that’s OK.”
“Sure,” he says.
And we walk around. Before, when I came to New York, there had always been something planned. I went to Radio City Music Hall so often that I wondered if Mother wanted to be a Rockette. She kept asking me if I liked it. And I kept telling her that it was great. To tell the truth I hated it.
Father doesn’t say anything about going to Radio City. He doesn’t say anything about going anyplace. So we just walk down the street. Several streets. We come to a small grassy plot filled with gravestones.
“This is the third Spanish-Jewish graveyard,” Father says.
“Oh,” I say.
“Spanish Jews were in America long before your ancestors were, and even before all of mine were.”
“Oh,” I say again.
I look in over the wall protecting the graveyard and say that it looks well-kept. He asks me if I want to see the two earlier Spanish-Jewish graveyards, and I don’t say anything.
“They’re both beautiful,” Father says.
“Sure,” I say, “if you want me to see them.”
“I don’t want you to see them, Davy,” Father says. “I thought you might be interested in them.”
“Well, I don’t know. Should I be?” I ask.
“It depends on you, Davy. If you want to see them, I’ll show them to you.”
“That would be nice,” I say because I don’t have anything else to say.
Father is quiet now. He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. We walk along the street and turn from one block to the other. We stop in front of Theodore Roosevelt’s house, and Father asks me if I want to go in. I say No, and he says we’ll go in another time. Will Father and I be going into historic houses until I grow up? I ask myself. Yes, I answer.
“Stephanie is Jewish, Davy,” Father says. “Did you know that?”
I say No, and he asks me if I know any Jews. I tell him sure I do, and then I tell him the names of a lot of kids I know who are Jewish.
Father says let’s go to Central Park, and I say OK. He says this as though he wants me to see a lot of Jewish people in Central Park. We get into a taxi and go to Central Park. Father tells me in the taxi about Stephanie’s father, how he came from Poland, where it wasn’t certain if a Jew was Polish or Russian or German, and how Stephanie’s father, and her mother too, and all of her aunts, and everyone else in the family came from Poland. Now they are living on Riverside Drive in New York, and a few of them live in New York suburbs like Scarsdale, and they are proud of being Jewish and so should we be proud of Jews. I say that I guess I am proud of Jews.
“Of course you are, Davy,” Father says. He puts his arm on my shoulder. I am pleased he does that. I move toward him in the taxicab. He holds me closer to him, and I don’t know what gets into me. I kiss my father. It is the first time I’ve done that since I knew what I was doing and had some control over what I did. He has kissed me before, like this morning when he came to get me at Mother’s. But he has never really kissed me as though he wanted to. Not that I remember. He holds me for a minute, and then I guess we decide that men don’t get gushy over each other like this, and he lets me go. We don’t say anything else until we get to Central Park.
As soon as I get into the park I know that it was a mistake not to bring Fred. There’s grass. And wide spaces where people can run for hundreds of yards and not bump into other people. In half a second I can tell that most of the dogs prancing around are dogs like Fred—they live in apartments and houses like Mother’s. I feel guilty. Fred wants a place he can feel free. He wants to dig in the sand again and own streets in the same way he owned the street we lived on at home. Maybe Central Park is a place Fred can feel as he should. I decide right away that I will bring him here as soon as I have some extra money for a taxi.
Father and I walk around looking at all the people. It’s not cold for the last day of the year. It’s almost like spring in fact, and some people are sitting on the grass.
“Is it OK to sit down?” I ask my father.
“Sure.”
I sit on the grass. The earth is hard from the winter weather, not comfortable. The grass is not green, but it isn’t brown either.
“The grass is kind of gray, isn’t it?” I say, looking up at my father.
He looks around for a few seconds. “Yes, it is,” he says. “Do you enjoy sitting on the grass?”
What a dumb question! I don’t say anything. In half a minute I stand up.
“It’s all right to sit if you want to,” my father says. “Go ahead.”
“No, that’s all right,” I answer. If you’re going to sit on the grass, you should be alone or the person you are with should sit with you. I decide that I don’t know why I kissed my father in the taxicab. Anyone who will make such a big production about sitting on the grass doesn’t get kisses from me
. Fred, doggie, come sit with me in the park!
We come to this restaurant in the park, and Stephanie is waiting for us. She gives me a big smooch and says she hopes I will have a Happy New Year. I say the same thing to her. She starts asking about how I like New York now that I live here, and I tell her that it’s fine, but I’ll let her know more about it when I start school in a few days and begin to find my way around the city. We have a good lunch, and Stephanie chatters away all through it. She keeps smiling at my father and touching me when she talks to me about all the places I will enjoy learning about. She says that her favorite place when she was thirteen was the Museum of Natural History and would I like to go there after lunch? I say sure I would. And I mean it. Animals and all that stuff. I like zoos better because those animals are alive, but Stephanie says she doesn’t like zoos so much because the animals are in cages and they don’t have a chance to be themselves. People are always looking at them and feeding them Cracker Jacks and a whole lot of junk, and the animals aren’t free and natural as they were intended to be. My father says that this is the only way city people can get to know anything about live animals, so he doesn’t think it’s so bad. Stephanie asks him how he would like to be put on display so that people could learn his habits. We get a laugh out of that one, except that I don’t really know any of my father’s habits, so I don’t get as big a laugh as they do.
We go to the Museum of Natural History, which isn’t far from the restaurant. I like it a lot. It has some dinosaur bones hooked together with wire and stretching for hundreds of feet. There are a lot of pictures showing how the dinosaurs looked when they had skin on them, and I notice that the bone structure in the heads of the tiny dinosaurs looks a little bit like what I guess Fred’s bone structure would look like if I could see it. The thought makes me shudder though, so I wander out of the dinosaur section. There’s a lot of stuff about American Indians which is pretty interesting, and so are the stuffed American wild animals. Stephanie says she hates this part the most, and she won’t look at stuffed animals. She decides to wait for us while we look at them. They are all fixed up so that they seem to be in places where they would be found naturally. In addition to all the bears, there are a lot of wolves and animals like that, including a friendly looking coyote. The descriptive card next to him says that coyotes become very tame and make attractive pets if they are caught young.