Herb's Pajamas

by Abigail Thomas

“Let me think a second.”

  “What’s the matter?” asks Roland. “You don’t want to go? I thought that was what you wanted to do.”

  “I know. Okay. It is. Okay.” She stands there straddling the bike.

  “So let’s get this show on the road.” Roland starts off down the driveway toward the street and Bunny follows.

  “Let’s not go too fast,” she says.

  They are on the road now, pedaling along, Roland talking to the dog in his basket and Bunny riding behind. But the ride is so short. In hardly any time they are almost there.

  “Hey,” says Roland. “Steep hill coming up. New Hope in sight practically.”

  Bunny wants to stop for a minute. She had no idea this would be so exciting and so scary. She wants to stop her bike and close her eyes. She wants to see if she can feel if Merle is close.

  “Hey,” says Roland. “We’re there. Don’t stop now.”

  “I just needed to catch my breath,” says Bunny, wishing he would be quiet. How can she concentrate if he is always talking? The sun feels nice on her face.

  “Buster is happy,” says Roland. “I think he can smell the river.”

  The hill is steep and they keep their brakes on all the way down. But she can see they are almost somewhere.

  “Is this New Hope?” she asks but he shakes his head.

  “We’re still in New Jersey. New Hope is the other side of the river. There’s a bridge up there,” says Roland, pulling over and stopping on the sidewalk. “You want to go across and start looking or get some food first? Thirsty?”

  “I was kind of planning on going alone,” says Bunny. It is hard to talk because it is hard to breathe. “But I can meet you later maybe.” The town is pretty and everywhere she looks there are sweet little houses, everything looks so old and nice.

  “Oh, hey. That’s okay. I get it. I’ll hang back. Don’t worry.” Roland nods a lot of times.

  “I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything,” she says.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll hang around here and catch you later. Lots of luck.” He is busy with Buster now, fussing with him and lifting him out of the basket into his arms. “Me and Buster have a river to see,” he says. “Don’t we, boy.”

  “Wait. I have to be wearing this.” She reaches into her knapsack and pulls out the scarf.

  “Little hot for that, isn’t it?” Roland looks puzzled.

  “No, it’s just right.” Bunny smiles, putting it around her neck. Next she unpacks her jacket. The one jacket she embroidered. Merle’s name on one pocket and Bunny’s on the other. She puts it on, her back to Roland. She feels very close to Merle, very warm. Merle is here somewhere, she just knows it. Everything is going to be okay.

  “Hey,” says Roland. “That’s very nice work. Did you do that yourself? Check out those rays.” Roland is looking at the back of the jacket, a sunburst, a rainbow, shooting stars, you name it.

  “Most of it,” she answers. “Some of it. My sister did the back. I did the front.” She turns around to show him her name on one pocket, Merle’s on the other. A vine of flowers going up by the buttons on one side, and by the buttonholes on the other. It is really beautiful.

  “You said your sister’s name was Honey-Lou,” says Roland. “Was your sister’s name Merle?” asks Roland. His face looks so funny. “Merle Cunningham? That wasn’t your sister, was it?” He is standing there with his dog in his arms, his bike leaning against a post.

  Bunny doesn’t feel like answering, and her hand goes up to cover Merle’s name. “I don’t have to answer everything you ask me. I didn’t ask you what your mother’s name was.”

  “Carol.”

  “Carol. I don’t care what her name is. I don’t even know you.”

  “Was your sister Merle Cunningham, Bunny?” Roland’s voice sounds so kind. It really makes her mad.

  “Shut up!” Bunny surprises herself by screaming. There are people walking on the sidewalks but not so many. It is still early in the morning. A few of them stop to look at Bunny. “Just shut up! Why are you so nice! I hate you! And that stupid dog is going to die!” Bunny lets her bike fall right over on the sidewalk.

  Roland’s face turns bright red. He kisses the top of Buster’s head.

  “I know that,” he whispers.

  MOMMA WAS SHAKING and she had a paper sack in her arms.

  Bunny put her fingers in her ears. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you.” She didn’t raise her voice at all. She spoke calmly. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

  “Believe it,” screamed Momma, emptying a sack of what Bunny at first thought was trash on the table. “Believe it.” Bunny picked up Merle’s sewing things, many twists of colored thread, her tiny manicure scissors. Her jacket. Unfinished. “They found this. It was hers. Here. You take it.” Momma pushed everything into Bunny’s arms. “What do I want this shit for!”

  BUNNY IS STILL crying. She’s on the bridge now. She stands there where she had planned to stand, wearing the jacket. She stands in the middle of the green bridge under the blue sky, above the blue water of the Delaware River. She imagines the little ballpoint X up in the sky over her head. Cars pass and make that humming sound on the metal grid. The bridge is like a big musical instrument. It tickles to stand here, it makes your feet tickle like crazy. Bunny leans her arms on the rail and she looks into the water, which is beautiful. A whole bunch of kids are climbing around on the grassy banks with fishing poles. There is a fat lady with cherries on her hat standing next to a tall man. Bunny is making those hiccuping sounds that come from so much crying. She looks to her right, toward New Hope, but she doesn’t see anyone. She looks up in the sky, which is also beautiful. Just like Merle said. She looks back at Roland. He is waving and waving.

  HERB’S PAJAMAS

  RUDY CERVANTES DIED by my back door and although I am sorry for his death there is nothing I could have done to save him. Not even if I denied him the little bit of pleasure we’d both grown used to. Still, it’s the worst that happened so far. Rudy was a good soul but he smoked. I tried that once, choked, and let my body tell me something, but Rudy liked his cigarette after the act of love and since I forbade smoking in the bedroom, he’d generally light up in the kitchen and sit in the back hall, by the service elevator. You could hear the wind whistle down the shaft sometimes, and this made him feel peaceful enough to go home. One time he said he wished he could stay all the way through to breakfast and after. But we knew that wasn’t in the cards. We never wanted to worry May. We never meant for her to have to let on that she knew, if she did know. If she woke up and missed him sometimes she never said so.

  But he died. It was such a surprise.

  We had had a fine time as always and he’d said he was coming back for another half hour after he had his Winston. I waited and fell asleep, draping the sheet over my thigh the way that makes me look most delicious due to the path the moon takes on my bed, and when I woke it was three-thirty. I turned to look at the clock, and no Rudy. It wasn’t like him not to say good-bye and besides there were his trousers neatly folded on the back of the chair, and in that moment I knew something had happened to the sweetest of men. I put on my bathrobe and slippers and I even combed my hair, knowing what I would find, and I wanted to be dressed respectfully because there was no reason for Rudy not to be either in my bed or his own except that death had claimed him. Then I drew a deep breath and walked the narrow hall to the kitchen. And outside my door there was Rudy, sitting on the floor, the cigarette still in his fingers holding a tremendously long ash. He must have died instantly and slid down the wall like an ice-cream cone melting. He looked so natural there. But he didn’t look lifelike; I knew he was dead. The real Rudy would have looked up from being aware of my perfume, but this Rudy didn’t stir. It made tears spring to my eyes to see him like that, my heart nearly stopped on its own. “Oh Rudy,” I whispered, “already I am missing you,” and as if in answer I heard the wind start to kick up in the elevator shaft
. Poor Rudy, I felt of him then and his hands and face were cold but he wasn’t stiff anywhere, if you get my drift, really I just wanted to say good-bye to every part of him, Rudy would have understood that I think. He was wearing Herb’s pajama top, which I always made him do. “Do you want to catch your death of cold,” I would say to him. So he would compromise with the top half. It didn’t catch fire from his cigarette either; Herb was a nut for inflammable. I sat with him for a while, I don’t know how long, staring at the gray doors of the service elevator, listening to the pipes clank. I took the cigarette from between his poor fingers and put it in my pocket. Oh Rudy, I wondered, was it the smoking that got you? If he was ill he kept it from me. If his heart pounded unevenly, if his hands tingled, if his head ached or his bowels ran red, he never spoke of it. Rudy was not a man to complain. I touched my lips to his cool forehead.

  I must have seen Rudy a thousand times before I noticed him.

  “Well, I noticed you, Belle,” he told me. “I noticed you the first time you bought in those low-slung silver slippers with the back strap.”

  “Oh those,” I replied, laughing, thinking we had forever. “I was young then.”

  “You’re young now,” said Rudy, moving my hand to show me where I was young.

  Well, it doesn’t do to think of these things anymore.

  So Rudy’s time had come and if it was to be I was glad enough it was after a night of love instead of the third floor while May snored away and he stared at patterns of car lights on the ceiling. Still, it was a predicament. I never made a secret of my life but neither did I broadcast it, and we never meant to harm May in any way or rub her nose in it, as it were. But the truth is, May had never cared for the act of love; her favorite was a box of jelly doughnuts whereas I, as they say, could not seem to tire of it. Even at my age, which was sixty. Rudy had shown up at my front door one midnight and that was the start of it. “I saw your light,” he said. I keep a lamp burning in my front window. “You know what I like about you, Belle?” Rudy used to say to me. “What, Rudy,” I’d answer. “You’re old, like me,” he’d say and we’d laugh, although these lines were not original with Rudy; I had read them somewhere myself in the pages of a magazine. But you can’t put a padlock on humor. And while I’m old I know a few things and my form is just as nice as ever it was, not having been weighed down by childbearing and always being supported by the best foundation garments money can buy. May is a lot younger but, as I said, not much interested in things of the flesh to do with Rudy.

  Anyway, here was my dilemma. There was a dead husband outside the apartment and he wasn’t mine. I had to return him to his own door. This presented a problem since I am barely five feet four and Rudy himself was not a big man but there is some truth to the term dead weight. Rudy alive I think I could have carried up to the roof joyfully if he had asked me to, such is the power of love, but Rudy dead was another matter. There was no breath in him, nothing to buoy him up. The fact is, I could not move Rudy one inch myself. On top of that I knew that bodies began to freeze in their positions and I wasn’t sure how much time I had.

  There was no one for me to turn to except Edith, and I didn’t want to scare her with a ringing phone this hour of the night, seeing as how her apartment is so big around her, but dawn was fast approaching and Rudy needed to be on the third floor in less than an hour. When she picked up the phone I didn’t tell her exactly what was wrong, but I said, “Edith, it’s me, Belle. I need you to come here on the double-quick. It’s a matter of life and death. No time for questions. Don’t make a sound.” Edith has such a good heart that she was here in no time, with her hair in those pink rubber curlers and wearing a huge white nightgown with tiny roses on it. Edith is a big woman. I was waiting at the door and said right off, “Sit down, Edith. Rudy’s dead in the back hall. He died here tonight smoking a cigarette.” Edith patted her curlers.

  “What?” she said.

  “You heard me. It’s true. And we’ve got to get him out of here before the whole world wakes up,” I said, pointing meaningfully downward as if to indicate the third floor. Edith did not move. I pulled her into my kitchen and sat her down at the table. I brought her the apricot brandy, which is helpful at moments like this, and Edith took two swallows. “I am suffering from toothache,” she said. “My teeth don’t meet and I can’t even bite bread.” She had lost the thread of our conversation.

  “Rudy is dead,” I reminded her. “I asked you to come.”

  “Oh no.” She began to cry.

  “We’re running out of time,” I said. I have known Edith since she moved here, in 1953. I knew her mother. I pointed out that May would hate to find her husband had died in another woman’s apartment and that woman me. I know Edith could never approve of the way I lived my life. She would not want to be a party to my affairs. But I was not asking for approval here, I was asking for help. “Come with me,” I said. “We have to get him out of here.”

  At first Edith was nervous as a kitten since she had probably never set eyes on a naked man, let alone a dead one. But I reminded her Rudy wasn’t naked. He was wearing Herb’s pajamas. So we opened the back door holding hands and we looked at the poor man together. I didn’t feel like saying anything. He looked different already in the five minutes I’d been gone. His fingers were blue and his poor eyes looked sunken. “I’ve brought Edith to help,” I said, as if he could still hear, and Edith began to tremble. “It’s all right, “ I said, and touched her large shoulder. “I’m talking to myself.”

  Edith patted her curlers again. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said, which sounded old-fashioned, but Edith is old-fashioned. Her favorite actor is Fred Astaire. Then Edith said, “He isn’t dressed, Belle.”

  I said, “Well, not in his street clothes, Edith.”

  “Does he have anything on under that shirt?” she asked, and I had to say I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t. I couldn’t remember. “Well, I can’t touch him then, Belle, you know I have never even seen that thing.” She wouldn’t go nearer until I’d assured her he was wearing his underpants. I prayed the Lord that he was and I was right. Poor Rudy. He wore red checked boxer shorts that May bought for him by the dozen from her sister-in-law, who got them cheap. But Rudy never minded. He was a saint among men. All during this time I was moaning, which was not like me at all, and wiping away the tears. Then Edith said, “Oh, Belle, I can’t touch him. He’s dead.”

  And I said, “Well, of course he’s dead, Edith. That’s why I called you here.”

  “We have to call the police,” she said, starting to tremble again.

  “What is May going to say when she wakes up and can’t find her Rudy, and it turns out he’s here outside my door, and I’m your oldest friend in the building? Do you think you’ll be on the Chrysanthemum Committee?” Well, I hated to hurt her where she lived but I had no choice. We were running out of time. May is the head of the gardening club, although she never lifts a trowel.

  “Maybe if I get under his arms,” said Edith then, and somehow with a scooping motion she did and we managed to get him over her shoulder, his poor thin legs hanging down. He was stiffening up a bit, and she kept imagining his manhood against the small of her back but I said it was just the buttons on Herb’s pajamas, although I was not positive myself. Rudy was a fine man for one so short. It was awkward getting down the stairs, but the weight was no problem for Edith, who is nearly six feet nothing and weighs one hundred and ninety pounds. She cried the whole way, in tiny little mews.

  “Shhh,” I kept saying.

  “I can’t shhh,” she said. “I am carrying a dead person. I am carrying a dead man.” Mew mew. I wanted to point out it wasn’t just any dead man, it was Rudy Cervantes, who had repaired our shoes for thirty years, but I was feeling too bad myself to bring this up.

  “Don’t trip on your nightgown,” I said.

  And Edith managed beautifully. Down the flight of stairs, across the tiles to 3C, while I tiptoed behind her, praying no dog would start barking, and that the paper
s would not be delivered early. Edith is strong. She could chop her own wood if she had to. She could haul her own water. And she carried Rudy Cervantes to his own front door, and let him slide down her back to a sitting position on the floor. Then the trouble was he was still wearing Herb’s pajamas. I couldn’t think of anything to do but take them off. That left Rudy in his boxers but it couldn’t be helped. I gave him a kiss on top of his cold head. “I hope I don’t burn in hell for my part in this,” Edith said and then she went home. And so did I. Thank God the early risers in the building were miraculously asleep and so were the Mexicans who sing all night. But I have given love freely and sometimes God cuts me a little slack.

  THANKS TO ALL THE USUAL SUSPECTS: my brilliant editor, Shannon Ravenel; Chuck Verrill and Liz Darhansoff (whom I live to please); my daughters Sarah, Jennifer, Catherine; my son, Ralph; my sisters Judy and Eliza. My husband Rich. My mother. Special thanks to Quin Luttinger, old friend, whose wonderful story gave Walter meaning and purpose. And last but not least, thanks to the Tuesday Night Babes, who have enriched my life in more ways than could ever have been reasonably expected.

  ALSO BY ABIGAIL THOMAS

  Getting over Tom: Stories

  An Actual Life: A Novel

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  ©1998 by Abigail Thomas.

  All rights reserved.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the magazines and periodicals that originally published several of these short stories, some in a slightly different form: East Hampton Star (“Negligee”), Ms. (“Shoes,” published as “Here”), and Glimmer Train (“Herb’s Pajamas”).

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No references to any real person is intended or should be inferred.