“But it didn’t make money. Not a living for two people. And if she was sick, and knew she . . .”
“She was fine. She was never sick.”
“Well, no matter,” the man went on, in the voice quite a bit deeper and more confidently soothing than Jake’s. That was why Abby had a hard time remembering being asked any of this by Jake. That and the old woman’s voice and her impossible attitude. Her bragging how she wrapped candy. “No matter. What happened to her?”
There was a long silence. “Oh . . . all right. I’ll tell you. We had a reunion! Years later. Or not so long as all that. When she got out of jail . . . oh, they didn’t keep her but a little while, no, they would have seen how she didn’t belong there . . . It must have been after the war was over.”
“That would have been almost ten years.”
“Oh. Well then, let me see. Well . . . but my land, we went over all our memories. I do believe we sang a couple of songs.”
For a horrible moment Abby thought the old voice was going to sing again. But it just said dreamily, “We would’ve sat there and cried our eyes out. You know. Just thinking about . . . how poor we must have been.”
The picture changed, in one of those maneuvers of the camera lens that let you know something that looks the same is different now.
“But now tell me, why don’t you, what really happened.” You could do it with a voice too. Move in closer.
After a silence the voice whispered, “I saw her that one time. The day they took me over to the jail. She must have been sick. She died in jail. It was that same year, the year I turned twelve. She died. She died.”
It was then the camera began its final sweep around the tree. Not that again, Abby thought, catching hold of the chair arms. This girl was not the one a brother had climbed a tree to wait for. She was not sister and daughter to them, or anyone. Right there you could see what was happening. Right there—she was going to look out for herself, cause some people a lot of trouble, kill the love of her own children. The guitar kept on with the one chord. The little girl stared out. She was not little, though, she was almost grown. She was ready for the life nobody could alter any more by what they did to her, because it was hers.
The Mouse
THE critic Lindenbaum had been a handsome man when young, large-eyed behind his glasses and wearing his dark hair in thick waves. “Dark one,” Sofya Lindenbaum called him in her book of love poems.
Dark one, today my heart is light,
because today you are coming back from the dead.
With his money, Lindenbaum would have been a contented dilettante if he had not become a literary critic. But he gave his heart to the profession. His claim was always that it existed in defense of art. Though he never wrote a political sentence, the poet he married, Sofya, from a Russian émigré family, ranked him with Belinsky—the idealist Belinsky, with his belief in the saintly individual. “But even Belinsky, of the warm heart, the soulful eyes—though blue, not your glamorous color—could wield the knife.”
Ungrounded in a university and lacking theory or any instinct to criticize, Lindenbaum wrote only one book, a thin volume about the Symbolists, begun in his days as a French major and finished in his fifties. The rest of the time he wrote, and gradually published in the newspaper book reviews of the time, approving essays about an assortment of books, most of them novels and biographies. At this work he had a prolonged if minor success.
It was of little consequence to him either that his essays and reviews had loyal readers or that his book did not. He quoted Sainte-Beuve: Being a critic is saying whatever comes into your head. Like many wealthy eccentrics he was an admirer of technology, but he lagged decades behind it, peppering his writings with “transistors,” and “remote control” and “the hydrofoil,” interspersed with “the flesh” and “the soul.” He did not ally himself with any school of thought. He would take off the shelf a writer long and firmly retired by serious critics and end a rambling essay with “but we must wait and see.” “What is this ‘wait and see’?” said Sofya. “What do you wait for, from this man who is beneath your notice? They will put it on your stone. ‘Wait and see.’”
Lindenbaum had fallen into his profession after leisurely years of study in two or three universities. His time was his own. He didn’t have to teach, or champion his own book, or sustain the competitive spirit or the straining after novelty or even the fastidious labor expected of the academic critic. He could take his time, raise his dogs, tend his difficult wife, a poet originally admired by only a small group of readers who with their devotion to poetry lived worlds away from any poet, let alone one with the bitter nature of Sofya Lindenbaum. He could make his undercover attempts—“I beg you to consider what she has gone through!”—to pacify Sofya’s literary enemies, as well as people she had insulted or sued, driven out of her house or reported to the police. There is no hint that he ever longed for a more agreeable companion. A man ambling along the lakeshore in Chicago, following his beagle, one beagle after another, dogs whose inbred hearts gave out and broke his own, Lindenbaum could dream the afternoons away.
Some said he could afford, literally, to be kind. At any rate he was soon old. He had reached the age of struggling to rise from the armchair where he napped at the bay window. “Come now, stand up, my Ivanov!” Sofya would say, pinching his thigh muscle. Ivanov was a Russian strongman who had believed in ice-cold baths and loving his fellow man.
“Unless we consider being a sweet guy a profession,” said one of Lindenbaum’s eulogists, “we will have to concede that our dear Lindenbaum was lazy. Yet driven, in a lazy way. Driven to defend those whom few extol or even remember . . .”
“That awful woman.” This was heard in more than one row at Lindenbaum’s memorial, as Sofya was taken out on the arms of two of his friends, like a bride with two grooms though with a shout of grief, a theatrical stagger, a savage backward look. To meet her requirements the memorial had been postponed and postponed until finally at his friends’ insistence it took place almost a year after his death.
Lindenbaum was the only child of a pair of philanthropists who had made a fortune in business. The material good fortune kept on with his own marriage to Sofya, from a family similarly well placed if not as openhanded. He owned buildings, including the one he and Sofya lived in overlooking Lake Michigan, where he forgot to raise the rents and allowed the tenants pets. They feared she did not cook, and brought him cake. His own door opened on a household of pets, birds as well as dogs, and even white mice for a number of years until the short life span of the mouse began to wear on him.
He was twenty-some years older than his Sofya. Some vague scandal was attached to their union, but there was no call to remember it except among a few old people, Russians clustered in New York. Sofya’s poems were devoted to the period before that, to her own wrathful self and to the parents born for some destiny that had been left behind in Russia and was not parenthood. The parents had agreed with each other’s impulses; they were united in starving their maids and in thinking a violent and uncontrollable child would mend her ways if she stayed long and often enough in a closet, deprived of water so she would not have to go to the bathroom.
In this closet, where she could do nothing but think, her first poems came to her. The door was cut high for a sill that had been removed to allow air to pass, and she would lie among the shoes with her cheek on the floor, waiting for the sun to reach a line of red diamond-shapes in the border of the Persian rug visible under the door.
One day, she saw a mouse. It didn’t approach the closet, though the bread she kept there for her captivity might have drawn it to the bedroom. But the vast old apartments with their glass doorknobs and loose floors had harbored generations of mice, so the sight of one—even in the daytime, when in a house they are night-going creatures—was not the shock it might have been to another child.
On this day, at the same time the sun arrived, and out of the same silence, a mouse appeared on the red woo
l and sat up to stroke its whiskers, not briskly as a mouse normally does but feebly and dreamily. She felt a rush of pity for it. But was it more than pity? Was this love? The feeling swelled past the mouse—past the fur on its chest made pink by the sun on the rug, the flimsy hands curved, even without a thumb, in the ballet position arrondi, as she knew from forced months at the barre—and on, to things a mouse must know, must live for, passageways, smells, and its own kind, and from there to things unknown to it because it had to be a mouse, a world of things going on somewhere, everywhere, with nothing to rule them.
No one would know of such a moment. It was hers. When the key turned in the door, the daze with the world in it was gone, and she managed to twist her mother’s arm and be slapped for it until her ears rang.
Eventually her parents packed her up and sent her to stay with a great-aunt, from whom she could easily run away and who lost track of her altogether when she was fifteen. Few who did remember that girl’s elopement a few years later with the middle-aged critic Lindenbaum would have opened her privately published little book, the first one, in all its hardness of heart.
Lindenbaum’s friends were holding a dinner in New York for his seventy-eighth birthday. Sofya, who rarely left their building in Chicago where she wrote her poems and accusing letters at a high window overlooking the lake, hated being shut in an airplane, and theirs had landed in a snowstorm. She was calling down curses on the taxis absent from the front of their hotel, a small, choice building on which it was snowing so heavily the mansard roof was like a grave filling up between the brick walls of its taller neighbors. The sidewalk wore a deepening slush of ice and sand. “How I hate this terrible city!” Sofya shouted into his good ear.
Another poet would have seen curtains of snow waving in front of Christmas lights, a hotel’s potted trees sheathed in sparkling ice. Lindenbaum was soothing her with a line from Shakespeare, “Travelers must be content,” when the muggers struck.
“Oh no no no.” Lindenbaum refused to produce his wallet.
“Do it!” Sofya hissed at him, never taking her eyes off the face of the one who had not said anything but had made the mistake of looking for a moment into her black foreign stare.
Lindenbaum’s refusal was contrary to everything he had taught her about getting along among people far more desperate than herself when he had first known her in her youthful desperation. His memory was beginning to go, and with it his judgment. He was restless with schemes; he had just made over a portion of their stock to a dog-rescue organization. As she hooked his cummerbund, she had been lecturing him about his weakness for any and every solicitation that came in the mail. “Be a man, my darling fool! They all expect you to save them. Why must you? Stand up to them!”
So was this mad refusal to hand over his money her doing? Then to her horror she saw exactly what it was: not a refusal, but a wish to have a talk with the robbers.
“Listen to me,” Lindenbaum said, attempting to grasp the hand of the one who had him by the lapel of his overcoat. The other hand was in a pocket with something pointed at him. An angry shove in the chest toppled him onto the sidewalk, whereupon in the cold, in the confusion of falling snow, the boy began to kick him.
“What are you doing, you demon?” shrieked Sofya.
Like a schoolboy, the other one actually answered her. “No, we—” Even knowing the pocket pointed at Lindenbaum held no gun but only a phone, he did not run away, as Sofya dropped to her knees and fastened herself to the leg the kicker was standing on. That one kicked as if the man on the sidewalk might be a lifelong enemy, until under Sofya’s weight he too slipped in the snow and fell. At that moment the doorman, a huge man said in the next day’s papers to have once been a tackle, slammed his bulk into the hesitating one, rolled onto the kicker and pinned him with his knee. He pointed with nothing but a whistle at the one who had missed his chance to escape, who instead of scrambling up lay with both hands in the air as if to pull the snow over himself.
“Kids,” said the cop, when the EMT was getting Sofya back on her feet. She had begun a violent CPR, although her husband was breathing. “Right in the lobby almost. Morons.”
In the emergency room they stabilized Lindenbaum and on the first night he did well. In the morning, when Sofya got out from under the shawl one of his friends had draped around her—for no friend of her own, if any remained to her in this city or anywhere, had appeared or called—the resident came to tell her the blows had bruised the kidney and lacerated the spleen, and that her husband’s body had taken the rare response to such injuries of beginning to break down its own muscles. On the second hospital day he was worse; by the third he had sunk into a coma. That was Sofya’s word; the doctors’ calmer term was lethargy. “This is not coma,” they said. “Lethargy!” she screamed to his friends in snowy scarves in the waiting room, as if it were a curse laid by the doctors.
That afternoon Lindenbaum woke up. As she bent to hear him, he opened his eyes a crack. “Sofi, Sofi, you should go home, let Kiki out.” Kiki was their bird, set free in the afternoons to fly around the kitchen. So Lindenbaum seemed for the moment at least to have some sense of how long Sofya had been muttering and groaning and making her demands in the chair beside his bed with the shawl pulled up to her chin. Then his eyes flew open all the way, his voice rose. “But the dogs? What about the dogs? Who, who—”
“We’re not at home, my fool, we’re in New York for your birthday! Bette has Kiki and the dogs.” Bette was their maid, older than Lindenbaum himself, rescued by him from the household of the cruel parents of Sofya.
Lindenbaum closed his eyes. In twenty-four hours he had reached a stage the residents called obtundation. There was groaning in the room, of the soul trying to stay in the body. A day later, interrupting an open-eyed vigil coma, they called it, that had seemed to Sofya to promise a wakening, the body, cruel landlord, evicted the soul into the cold room of monitors, where Sofya was screaming and trying to cram it back in.
From his room, where her shouts echoed down the elevator shafts and disturbed other floors, Sofya had to be escorted to a cab, accompanied to her hotel, and helped through every arrangement.
The names of these stages, each downward step of Lindenbaum’s course in the hospital, appear in a cycle of love poems. Because of these poems, the center of her fourth book The Stages, Sofya won not only an important prize but a general acclaim. A book of love poems had not come along in some time. As such her book outsold the other poetry of its decade, and she acquired more of a reputation than Lindenbaum had ever enjoyed. He had been a minor figure at best; what kept his name circulating as long as it did among those familiar with his essays, as well as among the writers who had caught his benign and extenuating notice, was Sofya’s crusade. For Sofya spent years engaged in a very nearly fanatical attempt to save the boy who had not kicked Lindenbaum.
The one who had kicked him was seventeen, not eligible, at the time, for an adult sentence. That one, after testifying to his brutality, she left to his fate. But the other boy, the one who had looked away, who had mumbled an answer when she screamed, was twenty. As an of-age accomplice he was eligible for any charge that could be applied to the acts of either one of them. Though he had not touched Lindenbaum, he was convicted of murder.
For years, Sofya worked on his appeal. When the appeal failed, she attended his parole hearings as they came and went. Finally in prison he was one of those chosen to take part in one of the dog-training programs being introduced in the correctional system. When he was at last paroled, not as a result of Sofya’s efforts but for distinguishing himself in the program, with her help he got into the state university where she had gone to teach Russian after Lindenbaum’s death.
By this time she had retired from teaching. Though she was a celebrity in the world of poets, it was less as a poet than as a significant donor to the university that she was one of those invited to say a few words at his graduation. She was old, though not as old as she looked, being one of those who put
up no resistance to age. She had to be helped to the lectern. Her hawk’s face had softened into swags; her black eyes were quite gone, submerged in their lids. Before she was handed her sheaf of flowers and escorted back to her chair, she rambled on for some time about the work of her late husband, the critic Lindenbaum. Few attending the graduation of this giant university had ever heard of the famous poet Sofya, let alone of the critic Lindenbaum.
“We must wait and see,” she said. She paused with a knobbed hand on her neck. When the audience did not break into applause, she sought to bring her speech to a close. “One of those who will graduate today is someone . . .” Here she paused again to fumble for the water they had poured for her. She turned around to glare at the speakers seated behind her, but no help came. “He is someone my dear husband and I knew in his youth.”
There was no one to say that was not so. No one to say she was confused: no one else in the hall had any idea what or who she had been talking about from the beginning, or who he might be, a heavyset middle-aged man of mixed race walking up to receive his diploma, the oldest of the graduates.
He was heading for the stairs at the end of the stage where she was seated when she rose to her feet and tottered after him with her sprung hands dropping from the wrist. He turned, bent, and took her in his arms. This the audience applauded at length. Some even stood up. The robed speakers nearest to the two clapped loudest, as at some tender fact known to them. They didn’t know this graduate any more than Sofya did, or than he knew her, or than anyone in the world had known her, except her readers and Lindenbaum.
Guatemala
HIS son’s girlfriend stuck one leg out of the car and followed it with an aluminum crutch. She sank the crutch into the sandy earth and took hold hand over hand as if she meant to vault on it, but she only hoisted herself and then lay back to reach a second crutch in the back seat. This was rapid, practiced.
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