At the memorial service, Camille carried the baby in a front pack, and she walked through the doors of the church in a blast of sunlight that seemed to cascade around her and then to advance before her as she proceeded up the aisle. Sunlight from the stained-glass windows caught her in momentary droplets and parallelograms of blues and reds. When she reached the first pew, she projected the tender, brave dignity of a woman on whom too many burdens have been placed too quickly.
Afterward, following the eulogies and the hymns, Camille and I stood out on the lawn. Aunt Margaret, with whom I had been sitting, had gone back to her apartment in a hired car. Camille had seemed surprised by me and had given me an astonished look when I approached her, my hand out.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “The cousin. I wondered if you’d come.”
I gave her a hug.
“Sorry,” she said, tearfully grinning. “You startled me. You’re family, and your face is a little like Branty’s. You have the same cheerful scowl, you two.” She lifted baby Robert, who had been crying, out of the front pack, opened her blouse, drew back her bra, and set the baby there to nurse. “Why didn’t you ever come to see us?” she asked me, fixing me with a steady expression of wonderment as she nursed the baby. “He loved you. He said so. He called you Bunny. Just like one of his animals.”
“Yes. I didn’t think … I don’t think that Brantford wanted me to see him,” I said. “And it was always like a zoo, wherever he was.”
“That’s unkind. We had to give the animals away, back to the official rescuers. It was not like a zoo. Zoos are noisy. The inmates don’t want to be there. Brantford’s creatures loved him and kept still if he wanted them to be. Why’d you say that? I’m sure he invited you over whenever you were in town.”
She looked at me with an expression of honesty, solemn and accusing. I said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
“Yes. It’s always a beautiful day. That’s not the subject.”
I had the feeling that I would never have a normal conversation with this woman. “You were so good for him,” I blurted out, and her expression did not change. “But you should have seen through him. He must have wanted to keep you for himself and his birds and cats and dogs. You were his last precious possession. And, no, he really didn’t invite me to meet you. Something happened to him,” I said, a bit manically. “He turned into something he hadn’t been. Maybe that was it. Being poor.”
“Oh,” she said, after turning back toward me and sizing me up, “poor. Well. We liked being poor. It was sort of Buddhist. It was harder for him than for me. We lived as a family, I’ll say that. And I loved him. He was a sweetie, and very devoted to me and Robert and his animals.” She hoisted the baby and burped him. “He had a very old soul. He wasn’t a suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you all right?”
“Why?”
“You look like you’re going to faint.”
“Oh, I’m managing,” I said. In truth, my head felt as if the late-afternoon sunlight were going right through the skull bones with ease, soaking the gray matter with photons. “Listen,” I asked her, “do you want to go for a drink?”
“I can’t drink,” she said. “I’m nursing. And you’re married, and you have children.” How old-fashioned she was! I decided to press forward anyway.
“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s have coffee.”
There is a peculiar lull that takes over New York in early afternoon, around two thirty. In the neighborhood coffee shops, the city’s initial morning energy drains out and a pleasant tedium, a trance, holds sway for a few minutes. In any other civilized urban setting, the people would be taking siestas. Here, voices grow subdued and gestures remain incomplete. You lean back in your chair to watch the vapor trails aimed toward LaGuardia or Newark, and for once no one calls you, there is nothing to do. Radios are tuned to baseball, and conversations stop as you drift off to imagine the runner on second, edging toward third. Camille and I went into a little greasy spoon called Here to Eat and sat down at a table near the front window. The cook stared out at the blurring sidewalk, his eyelids heavy. He seemed massively indifferent to our presence and our general needs. The server barely noticed that we were there. She sat at one of the counter stools working on a crossword. No one even looked up.
Eventually the server brought us two cups of stale, burned coffee.
“At last,” I said. “I thought it’d never come.”
The baby was asleep in the crook of Camille’s right arm. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Camille asked me, “So. Why are you here?”
“Why am I here? I’m here because of Brantford. For his memory. We were always close.”
“You were?” she said.
“I thought so,” I replied.
Her face, I now noticed, had the roundedness that women’s faces acquire after childbirth. Errant bangs fell over her forehead, and she blew a stream of air upward toward them. She gave me a straight look. “He talked about you as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”
“Please. I—”
She wasn’t finished. “You look alike,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that you were close. You could have been his identical twin and you wouldn’t have been any closer to him than you are now. Anyway, what was I asking? Oh, yes. Why are you here? With me? Now.”
“For coffee. To talk. To get to know you.” I straightened my necktie. “After all, he was my cousin.” I thought for a moment. “I loved him. He was better than me. I need to talk about him, and you didn’t plan a reception. Isn’t that unusual?”
“No, it isn’t. You wanted to get to know me?” She leaned back and licked her chapped lips.
“Yes.”
“Kind of belated, isn’t it?” She sipped the hot coffee and then set it down. “The mom. A little chitchat over coffee with the mom.”
“Belated?”
“It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? That desire? Given the circumstances?” She gazed out the window, then lifted the baby to her shoulder again. “For the personal intimacies? For the details?” Her sudden modulation in tone was very pure. So was her irony. She had a kind of emotional Puritanism that despised the parade of shadows on the wall, of which I was the current one.
“Okay. Why do you think I’m here?” I asked her, taken aback by her behavior. The inside of my mouth had turned to cotton; rudeness does that to me.
“You’re here to exercise your compassion,” she said quickly. “And to serve up some awful belated charity. And, finally, to patronize me.” She smiled at me. “La belle pauvre. How’s that? Think that sounds about right?”
“You’re a tough one,” I said. “I wasn’t going to patronize you at all.”
She squirmed in the booth as if her physical discomfort could be shed from her skin and dropped on the floor. “Well, you probably weren’t planning on it, I’ll give you credit for that.” She poured more cream into her coffee. My heart was thumping away in my chest. “Look at you,” she said. “God damn it, you have a crush on me. I can tell. I can always tell about things like that.” She started humming “In a Sentimental Mood.” After a moment, she said, “You men. You’re really something, you guys.” She bit at a fingernail. “At least Branty had his animals. They’ll escort him into heaven.”
“I don’t know why you’re talking this way to me,” I said. “You’re being unnecessarily cruel.”
“It’s my generation,” she said. “We get to the point. But I went a bit too far. It’s been a hard day. I was crying all morning. I can’t think straight. My apologies.”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t get you at all.” This wasn’t quite true.
“Good. At last.”
We sat there for a while.
“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. She stirred her coffee. Her spoon clicked against the cup.
“Big firm?”
“Yes.” Outside the diner, traffic passed on Lexington. The moon was visible in th
e sky. I could see it.
“Well, do me a favor, all right? Don’t ask me about Brantford’s debts.” She settled back in the booth, while the server came and poured more burned coffee into her cup. “I don’t need any professional advice just now.”
I stared at her.
“Actually,” she said, “I could use some money. To tide me over, et cetera. Your aunt Margaret said that you would generously donate something for the cause.” She gave me a vague look. “ ‘Benjamin will come to your aid,’ she said. And, yes, I can see that you will.” She smiled. “Think of me as a wounded bird.”
“How much do you need?” I asked.
“You really love this, don’t you?” She gave me another careless smile. “You’re in your element.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had a conversation like this before.”
“Well, you’ve had it now. Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you what. You have my address. Send me a check. You’ll enjoy sending the check, and then more checks after that. So that’s your assignment. You’re one of those guys who loves to exercise his pity, his empathy. You’re one of those rare, sensitive men with a big bank account. Just send that check.”
“And in return?”
“In return,” she said, “I’ll like you. I’ll have a nice meal with you whenever you’re in town. I’ll give you a grateful little kiss on the cheek.” She began to cry and then, abruptly, stopped. She pulled out a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose.
“No, you won’t. Why on earth do you say that?”
“You’re absolutely right, I won’t. I wanted to see how you’d react. I thought I’d rattle your cage. I’m grief-stricken. And I’m giddy.” She laughed merrily, and the baby startled and lifted his little hands. “Poor guy, you’ll never figure out any of this.”
“Exactly right,” I said. “You think I’m oblivious to things, don’t you?”
“I have no idea, but if I do think so,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ll let you know. I didn’t fifteen minutes ago.”
“It seems,” I said, “that you want to keep me in a posture of perpetual contrition.” I was suddenly proud of that phrase. It summed everything up.
“Ha. ‘Perpetual contrition.’ Well, that’d be a start. You really don’t know what Brantford thought of you, do you? Look: call your wife. Tell her about me. It’d be good for you, good for you both. Because you’re …”
I reached out and took her hand before she could pronounce the condemning adjective or the noun she had picked out. It was a preemptive move. “That’s quite enough,” I said. I held on to her hand for dear life. The skin was warm and damp, and she didn’t pull it away. For five minutes we sat there holding hands in silence. Then I dropped some money on the table for the coffee. Her baby began to cry. I identified with that sound. As I stood up, she said, “You shouldn’t have been afraid.”
She was capable of therapeutic misrepresentation. I knew I would indeed start sending her those checks before very long—thousands of dollars every year. It would go on and on. I would be paying this particular bill forever. I owed them that.
“I’m a storm at sea,” she said. “A basket case. Who knows? We might become friends after all.” She laughed again, inappropriately (I thought), and I saw on her arm a tattoo of a chickadee, and on the other arm, a tattoo of a smiling dog.
Back in the hotel, I called Giulietta, and I told her everything that Camille had ordered me to say.
That night, I walked down a few blocks to a small neighborhood market, where I stole a Gala apple—I put it into my jacket pocket—and a bunch of flowers, which I carried out onto the street, holding them ostentatiously in front of me. If you have the right expression on your face, you can shoplift anything. I had learned that from my acting classes. More than enough money resided in my wallet for purchases, but shoplifting apparently was called for. It was an emotional necessity. I packed the apple in my suitcase and took the flowers into the hotel bathroom and put them into the sink before filling the sink with water. But I realized belatedly that there was no way I would be able to get them back home before they wilted.
So after I had arrived in the Minneapolis airport the next day, I bought another spray of flowers from one of those airport florists. Out on the street, I found a cab.
The driver smiled at the flowers I was carrying. “Very nice. You are surely a gentleman,” he said, with a clear, clipped accent. I asked him where he was from, and he said he was Ethiopian. I told him that at first I had thought that perhaps he was a Somali, since so many cabdrivers in Minneapolis were from there.
He made an odd guttural noise. “Oh, no, not Somali,” he said. “Extremely not. I am Ethiopian … very different,” he said. “We do not look the same, either,” he said crossly.
I complimented him on his excellent English. “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, wanting to get back to the subject of Ethiopians and Somalis. “We Ethiopians went into their country, you know. Americans do not always realize this. The Somalis should have been grateful to us, but they were not. They never are. We made an effort to stop their civil war. But they like war, the Somalis. And they do not respect the law, so it is all war, to them. A Somali does not respect the law. He does not have it in him.”
I said that I didn’t know that.
“For who are those flowers?” he asked. “Your wife?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“They are pretty except for the lilies.” He drove onto the entry ramp on the freeway. The turn signal in the cab sounded like a heart monitor. “Myself, I do not care for lilies. Do you know what we say about Somalis, what we Ethiopians say? We say, ‘The Somali has nine hearts.’ This means: a Somali will not reveal his heart to you. He will reveal a false heart, not his true one. But you get past that, in time, and you get to the second heart. This heart is also and once again false. In repetition you will be shown and told the thing which is not. You will never get to the ninth heart, which is the true one, the door to the soul. The Somali keeps that heart to himself.”
“The thing which is not?” I asked him. Outside, the sun had set.
“You do not understand this?” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “This very important matter?”
“Well, maybe I do,” I said. “You know, my wife works with Somali children.”
The cabdriver did not say anything, but he tugged at his ear.
“Somali children in Minneapolis have a very high rate of autism,” I said. “It’s strange. No one seems to knows why. Some say it’s the diet, some say that they don’t get enough sunlight. Anyway, my wife works with Somali children.”
“Trying to make them normal?” the cabdriver asked. “Oh, well. You are a good man, to give her flowers.” He gazed out at the night. “Look at this dark air,” he said. “It will snow soon.”
With my suitcase, my apple, and my flowers, I stood waiting on the front porch of our house. Instead of unlocking the door as I normally would have, I thought I would ring the bell just as a stranger might, someone hoping to be welcomed and taken in. I always enjoyed surprising Giulietta and the boys whenever I returned from trips, and with that male pride in homecoming from a battle, large or small, I was eager to tell them tales about where I had been and what I had done and whom I had defeated and the trophies with which I had returned. Standing on the welcome mat, I looked inside through the windows into the entryway and beyond into the living room, and I saw my son Jacob lying on the floor reading from his history textbook. His class had been studying the American Revolution. He ran his hand through his hair. He needed a haircut. He had a sweet, studious look on his face, and I felt proud of him beyond measure. I rang the bell. They would all rush to greet me.
The bell apparently wasn’t working, and Jacob didn’t move from his settled position. I would have to fix that bell. Again I rang and again no one answered. If it had made a noise, I couldn’t hear it. So I went around to the back, brushing past the hateful peonies, stepping over a broken sidewalk
stone, and I took up a spot in the grassy yard, still carrying my spray of flowers. Behind me, I could smell a skunk, and I heard a car alarm in the distance. If I had been Brantford, all the yard animals would have approached me. But if I had been Brantford, I wouldn’t be living in this house. I wouldn’t be here.
Giulietta sat in the back den. I could see her through the windows. She was home-tutoring a little Somali girl along a floor balance beam, and when that task was finished, they began to toss a beanbag back and forth to each other, practicing midline exercises. Her parents sat on two chairs by the wall, watching her, the mother dressed in a flowing robe.
I felt the presence of my cousin next to me out there in the yard, and in that contagious silence I was reminded of my beautiful wife and children who were stubbornly not coming to the door in response to my little joke with the doorbell. So I rapped on the window, expecting to startle Giulietta, but when she looked up, I could not see through her dark glasses to where she was looking, nor could I tell whether she saw me.
I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.
The Winner
IN THE HILLS BORDERING Lake Superior’s northern shore, Krumholtz was lost. Behind the wheel, searching for a landmark, he had not seen a road sign or any other indication of a human presence for miles. The surface on which he had been driving had altered from asphalt pavement to rutted dirt, and the route appeared to be undecided about its direction. It had been headed north, but after a sharp curve, it had angled south again. The rotting telephone poles, without wires, had been listing down toward the ground and now had disappeared entirely, swallowed up by forest-matter.
Having advanced for the last half hour feeling that he had moved back into an era of primeval undergrowth, Krumholtz found himself in a thick wooded area of spruce and maple trees. They were edging closer to the road as one mile followed another. He had lost sight of the lake and was getting anxious about the time. He pulled his rental car over—there was no shoulder, just a patch of weedy grass—to consult his directions, which appeared to be contradictory. The rental car’s GPS system wasn’t working. Having little idea of where he was, exactly, he turned off the engine and got out of the car.
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