“I myself am in the midst of a divorce,” he said, as if to fortify her.
“Oh, no. I’m sorry.”
“It’s best,” he said, bending his head and examining his hands. His broad ribcage expanded in the black coat. When he looked up it seemed that one of his eyes had filled with tears but the other had not.
“I’m really sorry. God. My horse, my life . . . stop me, somebody.”
“Stop with the horse, the life,” he said.
She laughed. She looked at the sky. She saw a vision of the parting of Tara and her shy, stern medical student, with shouts and tears. You could never say that, even if, like Jane, you were getting reckless in what you did say. Never say a sliver of ice from the future blew into you in the middle of these ceremonies so that you knew beyond a doubt that the end was coming and sometimes not even from afar, not even decently loitering while the marriage got on its feet.
He was thinking. Now both eyes had filled, and reflected the low sunlight. She had better leave him alone. She had better leave everybody alone. Over there her poor brother was fingering his boutonniere and wiping his eyes with a napkin.
“Could I ask you something?”
“Ask me.”
“Didn’t you have to instruct them? Prepare them? I know you know her story but do you know her at all? She’s reckless. She’s driven. She doesn’t think. Did you caution that boy? Do you know him?”
“He’s from Connecticut. We don’t all know each other.”
“That’s not—”
“He’ll do his best. So will she. It’s a genuine enough conversion. She’s way out in front of him with the Judaism, by the way. She went into the mikvah, she purified herself. And the parents, you notice they’re not that worried? That’s half the battle.”
She didn’t say, Elaine is a romantic and with Dewey and Maggie it’s relief. She said, “You got to know them, the parents.”
“What is it you’re asking?”
“I don’t know.”
“This could help her. The girl has a burden.”
“Tell me what you really think.”
“Betrothed in righteousness,” he said, and winked at her.
SHE TALKED TO Mayhew, where he sat between the flower boxes. She talked about the heat, the steers grazing in the fencerow. She counted them and told him the number. She said she hoped he wouldn’t mind sitting right where he was, on the terrace with the red geraniums, for one or two short sessions while it was still summer. But with field and sky behind him. In that blue shirt.
There was a certain peace in not having your smile returned. You could go ahead and drop the subject and the smile. When had he begun the unpleasant skewing of his head to stare at her? He was going through an awful simulation of a tourist trying to follow in a phrase book. The head went still, a stare took the sag out of the features. Something like horror passed over them. Horror at her? Something he saw.
Then he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Someone came and propped the doors open. The women in hats helped each other up out of the chairs. Fana came out to say it was his nap time. “But first I will smoke one cigarette on my break, and then I will come back,” she said. Before Jane could stand up and say, “Don’t go, I’m just leaving, let me leave,” Fana had drifted down the steps past the OXYGEN IN USE, NO SMOKING sign, crossed the lawn to the buggy, and lightly mounted the iron step, where she waved out her match and faced the little field, or perhaps her own country, where women did not smoke and those too old to be useful might be left sitting in their own yards, with children around them instead of dogs.
Mayhew had begun to struggle against the mesh belt. He kept swiping at his neck and chest with his claw hand. Was something running down his throat? He seemed to be after the bib, but the Velcro at the back of the neck wouldn’t give. Finally he got the hand to his eye, rubbed viciously. Then the other hand wavered out and she felt it dab at her slacks.
She moved her leg, the hand came on. She had to touch it and finally lift it in her fingers. The palm was slick with sweat. The blue shirt stuck to him under the arms. His eyes had undergone a change. “Tara,” he whispered.
She kept the hand in hers, holding it loosely to let it dry, but she didn’t answer him.
“Tara.”
“No!” Jane shook her head. “No. No.”
“Tara.”
She leaned away from him.
“Tara . . . are we old?”
She dropped the hand. She stood up, steadying the backs of her legs on the planter. The red eyes kept up their demand. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yes, Avery, we are, now. We’re old.”
Tearing now from being rubbed, the eyes undertook an examination of her face and body. With care, she sat down again, folding herself away from view. “But . . . but listen to me. We’ve had a good life.” The stare dropped to her breasts, rose to her face. She clenched her teeth. “I know you don’t remember.” Stop that. God help you if there’s a mirror in there, if you think I’m old. Do you think I want to come here? I don’t know why I come. I come because I can’t see the end of this. Is that it?
She made herself look at him. She let her stare grow as bold and sickened as his. Nevertheless she kept looking. Somewhere behind what she was seeing was the face from the yearbook, the face Tara trusted her to comfort. The beloved.
“Avery,” she said finally, as if in the long habit of coaxing explanation, wifely forbearance, “everyone gets older.”
From the buggy, Fana called to the women at the far end of the porch, “Time now, time to get ready for your meal.” They had their dinner at 4:30. Fana didn’t come right away; she let them pretend not to hear. “Are you ready, Mr. Mayhew?” she called.
“The important thing is”—Jane came out of the chair, sank to her knees on the flagstones and crushed his hands in hers—“I’m here. You see? I’m here.”
“Tara.” He leaned down as far as the harness would let him, and sighed with a groan that stirred her hair.
There was a bloodstain on the fur of his slipper. Through her hair she saw the bones of his foot move in the thin white sock. The beloved. She raised her head. “It’s all right, stop it,” she whispered harshly, intimately, to the shut eyes. “Oh, it’s all right, Avery. I’m here.”
Behind her Fana said, “We will go in now.”
He kept his eyes shut. Jane got to her feet. Fana took hold of the handlebars, bent to the back of his head. “Today, Mr. Mayhew, is the day you will see your friend.”
“His friend?”
“His friend the dog.” Fana made a face. “For this friend, he is waiting.”
THE RABBI WAS in the parking lot, standing beside his car. Neither of them showed any surprise. “Hello there,” she said.
“So, how did it go?” he said.
“Well, I have a question for you. What was that about ‘great mercy’?”
“‘You have dealt with us according to your great mercy.’”
“‘You have dealt with us.’ That’s it. That’s the part that applies.”
Across the hot concrete from them the sun had turned the sweet-bay trees along the fence a tropical green. Phthalo green yellow, it might be. You could put in a red sky, filling up most of the space, keeping the strip of field a blue green inch at the bottom of the canvas. If you did it small, and got the red right—red could combine torment and calm—and put in no human figure, you would have a tiny painting of still, intense memory. Farm.
“Mercy,” she said, combing her fingers through her hair and shaking it as if the groan might have lodged there. “I don’t think so.”
“Who are you to say?”
“Who are you to say?”
“I’m the rabbi.”
“I see.”
“I came because I thought we might want to walk down to the creek.”
“There’s no creek there any more,” she said bitterly. “Oh, a trickle.”
“Clean, though. They cleaned it up. The fish have come back, I’m told
.”
“Fish,” she said in despair. “I couldn’t read that fish story of yours. I looked in an old Bible I have and it’s not in there.”
“I will read it to you,” he said.
Behind the house, Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed nodded through the rails of the fence at the mown grass with its sprinklers. If he knew about the creek he must have walked here before. By himself. Thinking of his wife, who was divorcing him. Jane felt sure it was that way around. He was not a man who would cast somebody off. He already had his foot on the fence rail and she had to show him there was a gate farther down, at the corner of the yard where the fence met another coming up from the barn. She showed him the thin path made by cows, leading downhill to the barn.
“When?” she said, opening the gate for him as he tried to figure out the looped wire on a stick of wood.
“When what?”
“When will you read it to me?”
“Today,” he said. “You’ll come to the house. The apartment. My wife has the house.”
“I’m sure she does,” Jane said.
“So. You like him maybe a little. Mayhew. This guy who gives up everything. And for what does he do this? For a woman.”
“A woman!” she said. But she didn’t argue. There was more to it than an explanation, however long, could cover. Often it seemed to her the explanation of anything that came to pass would have no beginning and no end. If you painted a thing, that was the shortened explanation of it.
When they sat down beside the creek, almost invisible but gurgling under the vines, she held up her foot. “I wore the wrong shoes.” He studied her sandals, her toe ring. He had been panting as he walked and he was still breathing hard. About that, she would talk to him on another day.
Luck
HIS DOCTOR PUT him on the plane and he flew home to
Seattle alone. It was September, and he was well.
Your mind can rush you like a tackle. His mind had been warning him, and his mother, for long enough that on the day she came in from work and called his name twice from the door, she knew.
He had been shooting baskets with Chris. Then he was walking home from Chris’s house, but walking on and on and not getting there, not getting home. By the time he got to the porch he had a shrunken, sickish feeling, light-headed and hot. His memory of it was from describing it. At the door of his room he had braced himself against the onrush of something, a kind of furious speech, close to his ears yet too faint and tinny to make out, that he had been staving off all day. He got down on the floor and covered his ears. The next thing he knew his mother’s hands were loosening his fingers and he could find no answer to the normal words she appeared to be saying.
Quickly, somebody had been found who knew the best place to take him. Even though the place was in Chicago, his mother had taken him. She was so pregnant she had had to lie to get on the flight.
All he remembered of the trip was her getting up to go to the bathroom five or six times, and taking his hands back into her own cold, washed, half-dried ones every time she sat down, and saying, because he was whispering on and on, he couldn’t shut up, “Shh, shh. You don’t have to worry, it’s all right.”
She thought flipping out had made him afraid, but that wasn’t it. He liked planes. It was said that as a baby in a stroller he had shouted and pointed them out in the sky, and he could remember himself in a certain grassless spot in the playground near the slide, in what must have been kindergarten because his father was already dead, staggering backward to look at a plane going over.
It wouldn’t have been all that crazy for a little kid to get the idea that catching sight of a plane in the sky brought him luck. And then he had had the ability to dispense the luck. That was his game, to bring them luck, to offer safety to passengers who could not be seen, who were so far off and miniaturized they were turning into nothing. But if he saw their plane in time, they returned to existence.
Was anyone looking up at the plane he was in now, coming home by himself? He shook out his shoulders, rocked his head. Relax yourself. Relax your body. Relax your mind. If you could relax “your” body and “your” mind, where and what was “you?” You, you were not there. You were not on the plane. But of course he was there, in the seatbelt. What had etched the glass of the window in just that way, thousands of silver hairs trapped on it? Every once in a while his gaze went through the glass, like a finger breaking the surface of water, to the banks of cloud just below the wing. As the plane veered downward into them they streamed sideways, bathed the windows, and pulled apart suddenly into dark, wooded land, where you could see roads, huge lots full of tiny cars, even horses in fields.
The noise snapped into a higher register, the wing fiercely dropped its angle, and quite suddenly they were down. Until he had the floor of the gangway under his feet, he didn’t think of being home. He didn’t think of his mother or the baby until he saw them.
His mother did not hold the baby up to display him. She had him in a corduroy contraption on her chest. She put her arms around Gabe with the baby between them and said just his name; she didn’t say how he looked—his skin had broken out—and he didn’t say how she looked, which wasn’t very good, with gray hair in her bangs and her eyes set among creases.
She kept her arms around him, resting him. He was tired, but in a normal way, without the tinny commentary. His drug had gotten rid of it, the quiet racket too fast and just too far away to be unscrambled. “So, is this Lars we have here?” he said.
“That’s him,” she said. “Sixteen pounds of lead, when he’s asleep.”
A baby. And she its mother. But in fact she had left it once to come and see him, and barely spoken of it, the result being that Gabe could not say he had firmly understood its existence. He studied the wad of cheek against the sling, the large ear, bigger than his own. He said, “He’s pretty cute.”
“You can’t really get the full picture. You’ll see him at home. And we’ll see you. Oh, Gabe. I’m so happy, I’m so happy you’re home.”
“This is all my stuff,” he said. “I didn’t bring anybody a present.”
“A present!” She stopped walking and he thought she might hug him again but she didn’t. Roughly she pulled down her jacket under the sling and set off again, walking fast, as she always did. Nothing woke the big, jouncing baby. Gabe said, “How’s everything at school?”
“All right.”
“All settled down?”
“Oh, they’ll get used to anything. They haven’t but they will. I can’t go into my office because it’s locked. The district is worried I’ll sue. They’ve got me in the back transferring test scores, won’t let me see my kids.” She glanced at him. “I mean particular ones, who need me. They have to come in and lurk at the counter and get sent away and leave notes on my car to ask me if they should report their uncle for raping them.”
A lot of people knew it was Mr. Lofgren’s baby. The principal knew. Still, his mother had been written up in the newspaper for her work as a counselor in the school—it was his own school—and she had gone to Washington, D.C., to get an award, and in that way she was more important than the principal. And Mr. Lofgren was important, of course, because of basketball.
In the parking garage the wet tire tracks were like attempts to draw something very large on the floor. “Well, so. Did he move in?”
“No, no. No, he’s still at his place.”
“I bet he still has his job.”
She chewed her lip sadly, unlocking the car. “He . . . yeah.”
He helped her disentangle the baby’s legs from the carrier. He was surprised at the baby’s weight. Once she had it in the car seat in the back he got a look at the lolling face. Evidently it had a cold; the big cheeks were chapped and smeared and the pouting lips had a crayon red outline. Huge ears, flimsy looking.
Soft ears. Familiar. He had just read in a magazine, while he waited for his haircut before coming home, about a study showing that criminals were likely to have larg
e, extra-soft ears. Certain kinds of criminals. Serial killers.
“Lars,” he said. “Isn’t that sort of a weird name?”
“It was Carl’s brother’s name. He died in Vietnam.”
“Uh-oh. But old Carl was a hippie, like you.”
“He was in Vietnam too.”
“So how old were they?”
“Eighteen and twenty. Carl was eighteen.”
“Ha. I could join the army.”
“You’re fifteen. And don’t pretend you want to join the army at any age.”
“I couldn’t get in the army. I’m crazy.”
“That’s good, if it will keep you out of the army.” She wrenched the car into the freeway traffic. This was the way she drove; he’d be better at it. He’d be a little behind when he got his license but he would have it by ’93. She said, “I got mad while they had you. Mad at the clinic. They had you and I didn’t. I missed you so much.”
“Anyway the whole thing now is what drug you’re on,” he offered. “That’s all they do. I could get admitted any place for that. Did they tell you that?”
“Yes, they were pleasantly modest about themselves, they told me that.”
“When?”
“Towards the beginning. But that was the best place.”
On their block, a hand went down the middle of the street. Though it was only a leaf, it moved so formally, as if along a keyboard, that he stared after it. He felt a sudden energy of longing. “You know what I always liked? When I was like three? See that?”
“What, the Toyota?”
“The window. See how the tree branches like slide off? In the back window? Every once in a while a plane goes across. I used to think the plane was there in the window, in the glass. I had to make sure it got across. Man I used to watch for those little guys.”
In a voice almost of tears she said, “You always looked at things.” That made him seem to have been gone longer than he had been. She went on dreamily, “You must have been five. That’s when I let you in the front seat with me. Now they say not to. They probably did then. I was so out of it that year, who knows what else I did.”
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