Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  The boy is now hefting the slab of mortar, holding it out over the ledge, defying the others. The presence of the girl makes him cocky, more reckless. He swaggers for her benefit, but deep down he does not intend to drop the slab.

  The other youth jeers and taunts him. The girl laughs. She senses that her presence there makes Pumo’s position doubly difficult. She enjoys his dilemma.

  “Hey, Pumo. Drop it man. Gawhead—Drop it. Drop it. Cobarde maricón.”

  Mooney could hear the taunts as clearly as if they were occurring at that moment. “Drop it, man. Drop it. Gawhead.” The voices reverberated across the ghostly vacancy of the roof.

  Leaning far out over the ledge, trying to follow the progress of their downward descent, one by one, Mooney let the pebbles fall from his hand.

  But there was something profoundly unsatisfying about this vision. It was a set piece. It lacked authority or any ring of truth. For one thing, he found no sign that a gang of youths had been up there. Gangs, in Mooney’s experience, tended to leave behind their spoor—beer cans, wine bottles, reefer stubs, condoms. He found no such signs there.

  But why should he persist? The forensic unit had been thorough enough. They had pored over the area. They had not been able to find a single piece of evidence, or lift a single fingerprint from the area where the slab had broken off. And other than three or four similar incidents that had occurred over the past four years, and the somewhat dubious testimony of an eleven-year-old street rat, there was absolutely no compelling reason to believe that last week’s crushed skull was anything more than an accident. No perceivable human cause.

  It was 11:00 P.M. Spica glared in the tail of Virgo; Castor and Pollux, the twins, glittered out of Gemini. Both Venus and Mars were in Pisces. Love and contention within the fish. He had won money that day and known love of a sort. What more was there? Mooney patted the bulge of cash above his breast and turned to go.

  7

  “I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “It’s true. See for yourself.”

  “All I can see is that the boy is faking. He doesn’t want to go to school.”

  “Be sensible, Cyril. How could the boy be faking? Look at the flush on his cheek.”

  “A hundred and two degrees. Very convenient. Sickness invariably occurs on the morning of school examinations.”

  “That’s unfair. Can’t you see he’s sick? I wouldn’t send a dog out in this weather, little less my own child. He’d be back in an hour with pneumonia.”

  “You’re ruining the boy, Mary. Mark my words, you’re bringing him up to be a welcher. Well, Charles, congratulations. You win again.”

  The door slammed and his father was gone, leaving in his wake the odor of leather and cologne. He loathed that odor and would always loathe it. It filled his bathroom. It was in his clothing and his drawers. Sometimes he could even smell it on his mother when she’d been with him.

  Now he’d gone, yet the odor lingered. His mother’s cool hand was on his brow. It rested there ever so lightly, with an air of quiet anticipation. “Charley?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Charley? Are you sleeping, dear?”

  She leaned over him, rested her head on the pillow near his and whispered into his ear. “It’s all right, dear. Your father’s gone now. He doesn’t mean what he says. It’s just that sometimes he’d like to see you up and ever so much more active. Football. Hockey. Boy Scouts. You know. Charley—Charley—do you hear me?”

  He nodded and felt the dammed-up tears start to spring at the corners of his eyes and track down his cheeks.

  “I’ll call Mr. Mortimer at school.” She fussed over him. “We’ll arrange to have you make up your test when you’re feeling better. But, you know, dear, your father is right. I know for a fact that you’ve been neglecting your Latin. Skipping your homework. How could you possibly be prepared for an examination this morning? Now come, we won’t discuss this any further. It’s just between you and me, but we both know that there must be an improvement. Is that understood? Very good. Well then, Doctor says you must have plenty of fluids and rest. Meanwhile, just roll down your pajama trousers and let me take your temperature.”

  After she’d gone he listened to her puttering out in the kitchen. Soon she’d be back with soft eggs and toast. Just the way he liked them. Quickly he switched the thermometer she’d stuck in him for the one he kept wrapped in an old sock beneath the hissing radiator beside his bed.

  “Charley.” She reappeared, smiling at the door. “Charley, darling. Here are your eggs and there’s some nice hot …”

  “Mr. Watford …” He felt himself gently prodded. “Wake up, Mr. Watford. Dr. Kramer is here.” Watford cracked an eye and looked up into the solemn, doleful features of the young internist.

  “Good morning, Mr. Watford.” The doctor perused his chart. “How are we doing this morning?”

  Watford started up, winced conspicuously, then lay back in bed.

  “That head still bothering you, is it?”

  “It’s awful, Doctor. Like a sledgehammer. And my stomach …”

  “Hurting you?”

  “Something fierce. And the vomiting …”

  “When did that start?”

  The intern, standing above him, arms akimbo, watched him with an air of consternation. “We’d better have a look.” As he drew the covers down from Watford’s chest, Watford raised the gown above his hips while the nurse slowly encircled them in a floor-to-ceiling curtain hung on tracks.

  “Ow.”

  “That hurts, does it?” The doctor probed Watford’s pelvis with a finger. “Is the pain generalized or at a certain spot?”

  “It’s right here, Doctor,” Watford groaned and guided the intern’s hand to an area just above the navel.

  “Ow,” he squealed again and sat bolt upright, suggesting exquisite tenderness.

  The physician pulled Watford’s gown back down over his knees and drew the covers up over him. “There’s a great deal of tenderness there. Your fever is still high and your leukocytic count is way up over two hundred thousand. Could be an abscess or possibly peritonitis. In any case, I think you ought to plan on being here a few more days till we can get to the bottom of this.” The young man turned to the nurse. “Will you have them get Mr. Watford ready for radiology within the hour.” The doctor turned back to Watford, smiling. “See you shortly.”

  As he started out, Watford called feebly to him. “Doctor. My head.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. Demerol, wasn’t it?” The doctor picked up the house phone beside Watford’s bed and dialed the hospital dispensary. “Hello, Dr. Kramer here. Will you send up eighty milligrams meperidine, parenteral dosage. Room 815, please. Thank you.”

  Left suddenly to himself, enclosed in the hushed white sanctity of the privacy curtain, encased in the starched antiseptic dignity of hospital linen, Charles Watford, smiling to himself, quite peacefully awaited the hospital attendants who would shortly come to wheel him to the radiology room.

  Stretching beneath the blankets he experienced the most wonderfully comforting sense of languor and well-being. In this briskly efficient, deeply caring temple of healing, he felt as if nothing again could ever possibly harm him.

  MAY/‘80

  8

  The calliope wheezes sad little tunes into the torrid air. The lion roars and paces its cage. The gorilla with its gray-green human eyes sucks grapes and picks its nose. Monkeys jabber and vault about on trapeze bars. A row of elephants tethered at stakes fork bales of straw into their mouths with swaying trunks.

  The menagerie was particularly good that day. Festive Sunday crowds jammed into the big hall of the Pittsburgh Sports Arena. Squealing, laughing children wolfed frankfurters and cotton candy in a warm haze of sawdust and fresh manure.

  Watford sauntered through the holiday crowds, a look of dreamy abstraction on his boyish face. The little girl beside him clasped his hand and edged closer to his leg. She winced as the shriek of a cockatoo re
nt the air.

  “Shouldn’t we go in and sit down now?” she asked. She held in her hand an untouched paper cone of pinkish cotton candy.

  “Not yet. The show doesn’t start for another twenty minutes. And, besides, we haven’t seen the freaks yet.”

  They entered a large room adjoining the menagerie. It had high ceilings and long galleries down which people slowly ambled. By contrast to the menagerie, this room was quiet. People moved through a wide aisle and tended either to stand silent or to whisper before the exhibits.

  Watford had always loved the freak show. For him it had some special draw, an opportunity to relish a slight dread along with a sense of awe he could not quite articulate. About it all was an air of reverence. He walked like one in a church. There was the curious divinity of freaks. He could see the face of Christ in all the tired deformities. The infinite sadness of the fat man’s eyes. The armless, legless lady, an unappendaged torso propped up on a crate draped with black imitation velvet, a marble bust of immobile torment. The tattooed man, stigmata stenciled over every inch of his pelt. And the self-immolation of the fire-eater staging hourly the bogus miracle of an auto-da-fé.

  They paused for a while amid a sweating, jostling crowd to watch the human torso do tricks. She lit cigarettes and signed autographs by means of a pencil tucked beneath her chin. Illuminated by a single klieg light, her frizzy, carrot-colored hair, her thickly rouged and lipsticked face transformed itself into a ghastly maquillage.

  “How does she go to the bathroom?” someone whispered behind them and there was giggling.

  Wide-eyed and visibly uneasy, not certain whether to laugh or close her eyes, the small child pressed closer to Watford when the red gash of the torso’s mouth cracked into a smile and greeted her in a shrill harpy voice.

  “Can’t we go now?” six-year-old Millicent Rhodes whispered, her eyes still fixed on the grinning torso nodding at her.

  “We’ve got time. We still haven’t seen everything. Don’t you want to see the fire-eater?”

  At last she succeeded in steering him away from the freaks to out under the big top where the overture and promenade were just starting up.

  Tubas, drums, xylophones, glockenspiels, the trombones and the clash of cymbals swelled the tent. Colored floodlights swerved dizzyingly round the triple arenas.

  Up above the silver-threaded guylines and high wires, trapeze bars awaited the aerialists and tightrope cyclists. Clowns and midgets tumbled on the cinder footpath circling the main arenas. Behind them came a man on stilts, followed by the elephants, a dancing bear, and a brace of prancing Lippizaners with bright red feathers in their ears.

  And always the clowns, sad and ludicrous, and the hobos with their baggy pants collapsing round their big, floppy shoes, cakewalking through the promenade.

  Watford observed the small child beside him, twirling the little pencil flashlight he’d bought her outside at one of the concessionaires. As he watched the floodlight reflected in her glowing eyes, he was suffused with such a sense of tenderness that he had to choke back tears.

  They watched the aerialist scramble up the ladder and into the labyrinth of silver wires strung like cobwebs at the peak of the tent. The child watched intently a young girl, no more than seventeen or eighteen, with the face of a quattrocento Madonna, effortlessly ascend a rope, then step outward onto a tiny platform one hundred and fifty feet above the roaring, taunting crowds. Fearless, imperturbable, she spread her arms out sidewards as though they were wings. There was a gasp as she stepped outward into space.

  “You’ve got some hell of a nerve, Charley. Edgar’s furious. Fit to be tied.”

  “It’s only nine-thirty.”

  “Nine-thirty? You’ve been gone the whole day, for God’s sake. Where the hell have you been?”

  “I told you I was going to take her to the circus, didn’t I?”

  “The circus? Are you mad?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I told you—I know I told you.”

  “About three weeks ago you mentioned something about taking her. But, of course, you neglected to tell us what day, or when. We wake up this morning. You’re gone. She’s gone. How the hell are we supposed to put all that together? We called the police.”

  “The police?”

  “We thought she was kidnapped. We thought she ran away. God knows what we thought.”

  “Well, for Chrissake, if that isn’t the dumbest— now don’t—for God’s sake, go and start bawling.”

  Watford made a motion toward his younger sister—a raised hand, a gesture half warning, half placatory—“Now don’t, Renee—Please. There’s no need for that. I can’t stand when you do that.”

  Almost imperceptibly, his hand prodding gently at the small of her back, he nudged the child forward to plead his cause.

  “Don’t cry, Mommy. I’m fine. Uncle Charley and I had so much fun.”

  “Never mind the fun, young lady. Your father is nearly out of his mind with worry. He’s been calling from the office all day.”

  Her taut, tired body was suddenly shaken with sobs. “You go wash up, Millicent. Get ready for bed. I’ve got to call your father.”

  Together, they watched the little girl walk out. “Jesus, Charley. God damn you, anyway.” Watford flung his hand up in despair. “Well, what the hell did I do that was so gosh damned awful anyway? Will you kindly tell me that?”

  “Charley Watford—you are a thoughtless, stupid—”

  “I take a kid to the gosh damned circus—big deal—”

  “It’s not that you took her. It’s how you took her. You stole her. You sneaked out of here at six a.m. like a thief, while everyone was still asleep. Not so much as a call all day, or a by-your-leave, to let us know where you are. What are we supposed to think? It never crosses your stupid mind that we’d be worried sick …”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” Watford whined pathetically. “Not only for her but for you, too. I thought I was doing you a big favor, taking her off your hands for the day. Giving you a vacation. I thought you and Edgar would be delighted. I thought you’d find it funny. A big joke. Ha, ha.”

  “Oh, God,” she blanched and covered her mouth with her hands. “I still haven’t called Edgar.”

  She bolted from the room, and in the next moment, he could hear the hasty, clicking sound of the dial, and her low, husky voice speaking rapidly into the phone. When she came back she looked ashen. “Look, Charley—”

  “Renee—Don’t …”

  “Please don’t interrupt me, Charley. Just let me get this off my chest. Edgar’s about ready to wring your neck. He’s furious. He has been for months. How long has it been now? Eight months? Nine months?”

  “Sissy, look. Just …”

  “No Sissy stuff, Charley. Not now. Please.” She backed away as he slowly approached her, that look of puzzlement and hurt on his face. “I didn’t mind taking you in after the hospital. You were recuperating. You were still weak. Also, I didn’t want to see you go back to the house all by yourself.”

  “Listen, Renee. I wasn’t going to say anything until it was certain. I think I’ve got a job lined up …” She paused, hooked in midsentence, her head cocked to one side. “How long?”

  “A couple of days. A week at the most.” He watched her closely, dangling more bait before her wary eyes. “It’s a traveling job. Sales. Hardware. Machinery. That sort of thing. This guy, the manager … he’s just got to clear it with home office.” Sensing her growing skepticism, Watford’s speech quickened and grew slightly frantic.

  She wavered a moment, indecisively, torn between loyalty to both brother and husband. At last she shook her head back and forth, first slowly, then with gathering momentum. “No. No—Charley. Not this time. We’ve been down this road before. The last time …”

  “I couldn’t help that, Sissy.”

  “No Sissy stuff, I told you.”

  “Irene— You know yourself I couldn’t help that. The guy promised me. It just fell through. I can’t
help that.”

  “I can’t help it either, Charley. Not anymore. You’ve got to go now. It’s not only your welfare that’s at question. It’s now a question of my family, my marriage, my life. Edgar simply won’t stand for another day of this. We’re all stretched to the …”

  “Well, for gosh sakes,” Watford laughed bitterly. “I take my niece to the circus, and for that I get tossed out into the cold.”

  “It’s not cold, Charley. It’s May. Spring. The lilacs are blooming outside in the yard.” Her voice suddenly went soft and she spoke very slowly as though she were cajoling a child. “You can stay here tonight, but that’s it. Tomorrow, out. Go home. Go back to the house. It ought to be lovely up that way now.”

  His fingers fumbled with a jacket button and he started to speak. But before he could she waved him to silence. “Don’t, for God’s sake, say another word, Charley. Don’t try to play on my feelings ‘cause I’m just about ready to bust.” Her eyes were red and glistening.

  “But I don’t have …”

  “Don’t worry about that,” her hands fluttered at him again. “I’ve got a few hundred stashed away. You can have it all. But you’ve got to go.”

  She watched him slump down into a chair. “Don’t think I enjoy kicking my only brother out. I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry about Mom and Dad. I’m sorry about you. You’ve had nothing but rotten luck. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. But I can’t help it. I’m trying to make some kind of life for myself out here, and I’m afraid it just doesn’t … can’t possibly include you.”

  She blew her nose into her apron, then cocked an ear at a sound coming from the direction of her daughter’s bedroom. “Coming, honey. Mommy’ll be right up to tuck you in.”