Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  I take Moses’ hand in mine and shake it. His hand is warm and I can almost feel the opal rings pressing into my palm. His hair, which used to be tight black curls, lending him a sinuous invincibility, now is thin and white, and I can see the pinkish brown skin underneath. It occurs to me that he is at least ten years younger than my father, who, with his blue knit golf shirt and arms tan from working in the garden, looks like a picture of youth next to Moses.

  “So what you all doing here?” Moses says. “I guess you all didn’t come by just to see me—or my better half.” We laugh nervously. “It been a while,” Moses says. “I’m used to it.” I try to picture Moses—the double-jointed arms and elbows of his one-legged torso—bent back and stroking his head preciously. It is a frightening yet enthralling image of roving, serpentine arms, like a Hindu god, and has the same power to make me stare dumbly at him as I did years ago.

  “You retired youself, am I right?” Moses says to my father.

  “Ten years now,” my father says. “I was ready to leave.” He spreads his hands out, as if to contemplate a globe while he speaks. “Comes a stage when you have to consider making changes. Life’s too short to spend so much time in one place.”

  “Here today, gone today,” Moses says. “How’s the wife doing?”

  “She’s dead, a year now.”

  “Sorry to hear that. I didn’t know nothing about it.”

  “To be honest, it was a blessing for her. Very sick. Great pain for her.”

  Nobody says anything for a few moments. Then Moses asks, “How about you, Adam? What you doing now?”

  “He’s doing terrific,” my father says before I can answer. “A big reporter out in Arizona.” My father bends over and taps Moses on the shoulder with a stiff finger, speaking in a stage whisper. “He broke that Mafia story on the Nicosi family in Tucson. You read about it, right?”

  Moses shakes his head. “I just keep up with the sports.”

  “We’re going to have a baby,” I say, trying to add something I care about. The Nicosi family turned out to be nothing in the end, dismissed at the grand jury level for lack of evidence. My father forgets to add this, as he does anything that might diminish my greatness in others’ eyes. When I was in law school he liked to tell everyone I had a judicial internship lined up at the Supreme Court. “I only inquired about one,” I told him the summer after I dropped out.

  “Well, congratulations to you, Adam. You gonna make a fine daddy.”

  “Yes?” I say, and wonder about this, why his casual compliment strikes me with such force, and then I realize it’s because my father has never said anything so simple and easy to me. “Thanks,” I say softly.

  “He’s writing a terrific book about her.”

  I wince. Moses looks puzzled.

  “We’re here for someone named Victoria,” I explain.

  “Schmidt,” my father adds. “You know her, Moses?”

  Moses shakes his head. “Can’t say I do.” A bell rings. “Lunch time. You all want to join me?”

  “We should find her, Dad,” I say. “Ask at the desk about her.”

  “Moses,” my father says, “I know where you are now.”

  “You know where I am,” Moses says. “Don’t be no stranger.”

  “You can see the woman she used to be, right? I mean, for the book you could use your imagination, now that you met her.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m driving back. It was obvious once we left the nursing home, with his shortness of breath and hands trembling as he searched himself for his keys, that he’d been too shaken by the experience to drive. Near the Pennsylvania state line, we have traveled almost twenty miles from the Golden Meadows Care Center in uncomfortable silence. But the farther we drive from the nursing home, from the real Victoria, the more I can feel my father regaining his confidence.

  “You should hear her laugh. She wasn’t up to it today. Delightful. Like a little arpeggio.” My father raises an imaginary flute to his mouth and plays fanciful, silly tones that sound as if he’s inhaled helium. “I used to live for that laugh. Once—”

  “Stop it, Dad.”

  I pull off at a rest stop.

  “You have to go? Go ahead. Do your business. I’ll wait here.”

  “Listen to me,” I say. I turn off the engine. He squirms in his seat.

  “All right, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I warned you she might not be in such good shape.”

  “Good shape? She was pitiful.”

  “Tragic, I told you, it’s a tragedy what happened—”

  “It’s not a tragedy, it’s just pitiful. Did you look at her? Did you?”

  My father doesn’t answer. I think of Victoria, sitting on a plastic chair in a corner of the recreation room, her mouth and throat scarred by cancer, her hands clutched at her stomach as if to hold a warm stone there, her complete lack of response to my father’s pleading It’s Newman, Victoria, it’s Newman, his hand on her bony shoulder, the dull green fabric of her robe with its smiley face button that an attendant had pinned to a worn lapel.

  “We’ll go visit her again while you’re here. She may need time to feel comfortable with seeing me again.”

  I shake my head. “Who exactly are we talking about? Victoria?”

  “Sure, Victoria.”

  “And you can’t see how hopeless she is? She didn’t even know you were there!”

  My father gets out of the car. He goes over to a picnic table and sits down with his hands on his knees. There’s a row of newly planted spruce trees behind him, staked down with wires. On a blanket in front of the trees a family sits eating lunch. A toddler industriously picks up paper cups and drops them in a cooler, takes them out and drops them in again. I feel a pang of loneliness for Claire, for our unborn child, my own family. It seems months since I’ve been gone.

  “I’ve always been an optimist,” my father says.

  “Listen to me. You can’t just throw this fantasy into the pot and make everyone come out happy.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  A truck pulls into the parking space in front of us, the whoosh of air brakes being released.

  “Mother’s dead. You never mention it. You never admit it. I can’t get around that. I can’t even help you move out until you acknowledge that in your heart—grieve over it for God’s sake! It’s got you completely stuck, and me too, now.”

  We are sitting beside one another like two old men on a park bench, with all the time in the world. Not a word from him.

  “You don’t face things,” I say, driven now to force a reaction. “You won’t even visit her grave with me.”

  He remains mute. When I turn I see that his eyes are moist and my heart seizes. He pats my knee. “We won’t talk about her anymore,” he says, leaving the pronoun eternally ambiguous.

  That night my mother sits with me in a sewing room on the third floor, a floor that doesn’t exist in my parents’ house. A plaid blanket lies over her paralyzed legs, the same blanket my father covers himself with, summer or winter, when he sleeps on the couch.

  Why won’t you come down? I ask her. She has been up here a long time.

  How is the baby? she says. There’s no strain in her voice, none of the tension I remember as a child when she would tell my sister and me to go to our rooms and play because she was sick and needed to lie down.

  I let her know the baby is fine, Claire too. Will you come down now? Please?

  She pulls my father’s blanket tighter around her waist.

  We need you. He needs you.

  My mother lowers her head and parts her hair with her fingers, exposing the white roots. I look closely and discover a tiny gem, like a bindi, the bright red dot Hindu women put on their foreheads, only this jewel is deep blue. I wonder how long it has been there, how it is embedded in the skin.

  Does it hurt? I ask.

  My mother smiles at me. I will be disappointed when I wake up, because she hasn’t looked at me with such pleasure and curiosity in a lo
ng time. No, she says, it doesn’t hurt.

  Does Dad know about this?

  She laughs. All the fathers know, she says.

  A week passes. I’m still in Philadelphia trying to get my father moved.

  “He’s impossible,” I complain to Claire during one of our late-night phone calls. My father is asleep on the couch as usual. It is where he used to sleep when my mother was sick. He has never dropped the habit.

  He has been to see Victoria every day since our first trip. His visits grow longer, stretching out to three, four, and five hours. He tells me he is “making progress,” though I have no idea what this means because I refuse to go with him, staying behind instead to pack, angry at him for leaving me with this task. My editor has reluctantly given me another week’s extension, and Claire has become impatient, listening in cool silence.

  “Maybe you’re part of the problem,” Claire says now.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He can rely on you to take care of everything while he goes off and lives out this fantasy.”

  “What can I do? I have to get him out of here. The realtor is calling every day asking whether we’ll be out by the closing.”

  “Will you?”

  “I don’t know. We’d better. It’s three hundred dollars a day if we don’t.”

  Silence.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “I just miss you, Adam. This was supposed to be our last vacation before the baby.”

  “If I could just get him away from Victoria.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. He’ll find some other way to keep you there. He’s afraid. He doesn’t want to be alone.”

  “How are you doing?” I say, wanting to change the subject. “Still being dropkicked?”

  “Every night right at ten, just as I fall asleep. Apparently baby doesn’t want to be alone, either.”

  “All right,” I say, “I get the message. I’ll try to wrap things up here in a day or two.”

  But the next afternoon my father returns from the nursing home and informs me that he’s bringing Victoria to dinner tomorrow evening. He’d like my help in preparing the meal. I’m stunned.

  “In the car,” he says, explaining how he’ll transport her here. Shouldn’t it be obvious?

  “Dad, are you actually talking with her now?”

  “Of course I talk with her.”

  “Does she talk back?”

  My father looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What do you think—I go around talking to myself?”

  “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe this!” I’ve been staring at the dining room table pads for the past half-hour, wondering which of my three piles they belong in: the apartment pile, the storage pile, the trash pile. Unable to decide, I put the pads in an “undecided” pile, which grows exponentially as we near our deadline. We have three days left before the new owners take possession. I called my sister in Seattle to ask for help, but her vacation starts tomorrow and the whole family is leaving for Hawaii. “Why didn’t you call earlier?” she asked.

  I thought I could do it myself. I wanted to. She had spent so much time here when our mother had a stroke; I felt this was my contribution. “Have a moving company do it,” my sister said last night. “They’ll put everything in boxes and get it on the truck.” But it’s too late for that now and I would feel even more ashamed of my failure. Also I’ve gotten sidetracked by mulling over my own past, high school yearbooks, honor roll certificates, desperate letters to adolescent girlfriends whose faces in memory blur into a composite not unlike the youthful, fiery Victoria laughing in the salted sea air of the boardwalk.

  “You need to help me pack, Dad. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to postpone the dinner.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “It’s our anniversary.”

  “Your anniversary? Of what?”

  “When we first became engaged.”

  “You were engaged now!”

  “For a day. Then she called it off. She’d gone back to her home in Darby, run away from the composer. She called me, crying. She said he was all wrong for her—no respect, no security, no future. Later I learned he’d taken up with somebody else and that’s what she was so upset about, but at the time all I heard was she wanted to marry me. She begged me. I had all the stability the composer couldn’t give her, a pretty good business over on Samson Street. It was right after the war and I was selling diamonds like postage stamps. I couldn’t keep enough in stock—”

  “Wait a second. After the war—you were already with Mom, weren’t you?”

  My father stands at the refrigerator, eating what’s left of the rice pudding. He keeps his back to me. “We were engaged, too.”

  “Too! You were engaged to Mom and Victoria at the same time?”

  “Yes. That same day Victoria called me I gave her a ring.”

  “Mother knew about this?”

  My father nods. He puts the lid back on the rice pudding and pushes it far back onto the shelf filled with the leftover takeout food we’ve been eating every night. He refuses to look at me, won’t move from behind the refrigerator door.

  “In other words, you broke off the engagement with Mom.”

  “It was a bad thing. Very serious.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “She shouldn’t have taken me back.”

  “Mom?”

  “She shouldn’t have taken me back. Or she should have forgiven me. To be married all those years and never forgiven. She’s also to blame.” He closes the refrigerator. Rice pudding has stuck to his chin. I reflexively touch my own face, so much the image of his, reversed only in that it shows shock, where his shows resignation. “You look back and you say, I should have done things differently. But you look back hard enough and you know you wouldn’t.” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t. It’s a whole new life you need. I’m going to nap.”

  “Dad—”

  His eyes close on the couch. In seconds, he’s asleep.

  “More wine?” my father says to Victoria.

  We are sitting at the dining room table, surrounded by boxes stacked up to the ceiling.

  Victoria raises one finger. My father smiles and fills her glass to the rim with the wine, a white Bordeaux.

  She wears a blue dress with a silver satin collar, a small white bow fastened with a cloth button the size of a kitten’s nose to each short sleeve, the elastic of which fails to grip her upper arm. A hairdresser who visits the nursing home every Thursday has coifed Victoria’s white hair, swept back and folded behind her head with what seems a generous amount of hair spray. At her throat rests a pearl choker—my father’s gift to her for their “anniversary.” We have gone through appetizers (bruschetta with prosciutto, ricotta, and arugula from Mateo’s), and veal (from the Chalet), and now on to dessert, a Black Forest cake (from Engleton’s). My father spent the entire day gathering food from the best restaurants in town. He unpacked a set of dishes and some silverware from one of the boxes I had sealed. He pretended to be making all the food himself in the kitchen. As far as I know, Victoria believed him.

  “Adam, would you do the honors?”

  My father sets the cake in front of me with a knife. “Excuse me,” he says. Victoria leans over to say something to him. She cannot raise her voice above a whisper, the throat cancer. “Victoria says none for her.” She whispers again. “She wants to know why you didn’t eat your veal.”

  “It’s inhumane,” I say.

  “I slaved for hours,” he says.

  I smile weakly at him, then glance at Victoria, her eyes glassy from the wine, her thoughts only half here as she stares off toward the ceiling while my father takes her hand and helps her up from the table. She has moved in and out of being with us during dinner, speaking only twice, with great pain, once to say the food was excellent, the other time to inform us that at eleven she would be picked up by her mother (who died twenty years ago). The staff at the nursing home made a big production about her going out. “She had four a
ttendants dressing her!” my father announced over dinner, his arm paw-like, hanging like a large gourd over her tiny shoulder, squeezing wide-eyed looks from her as she sat mute and dazed in all her aged smallness. “It could have been her first dance! You should have seen everybody standing on the steps waving goodbye. Do you know she hasn’t left the grounds there for fifteen years? It’s a miracle she’s here.”

  Earlier we had stood in the kitchen “preparing” the meal, a hush-hush operation while Victoria sat in another room waiting for the end of an imaginary toast, her arm extended for the few minutes we’d been gone, a courteous if strained smile on her face. Meanwhile my father and I had had a tug of war over the dinner plates, with him insisting he would wash and repack them and me demanding he use paper ones.

  Now my father sits with Victoria in the living room while I clean up. I hear him talking to her although I cannot make out what he is saying. It sounds as if they are having an actual conversation, punctuated by laughter and teasing. I dump all the Styrofoam containers and paper cups into the trash, then wash the silverware and repack it. The movers will be here tomorrow and I am finally ready for them, having marked every box with the appropriate apartment room. The sense of accomplishment I feel from all this is ridiculously great.

  When I enter the living room, I see my father sitting at the feet of Victoria, who, between the wings of a floral chair, has only her legs visible to me in their navy hose. I picture Victoria’s face, imagine her pale yellow eyes staring vacantly at my father, a dimly lit warmth retrieved from near hopeless depths.

  “Victoria will be staying for breakfast,” he says.

  She leans forward. Her expression conveys shyness and mild flirtation. The bows on her sleeves dance with mischief, her pearl choker a high marble wall to be surmounted for the pleasure of her throat, her exhausted body all things to all men. I do not see the hollow flesh, the dead cells, the bones so fragile they break like tiny glass tubes, the laying her out sacrificially on my mother’s bed.