by Sean Stewart
She shuddered. You know what you call that, don't you? she asked, with a small, frightened laugh. Stopping before her desk, she stared at a doll sitting on it, a dark-eyed doll with human hair. The doll stared back with wide, watchful eyes.
Under its gaze, Jewel's lace gloves began to twitch and flutter, dissolving into a mass of gray crawling bodies. You call that a god.
Dante caught his father in the study after lunch. "Do you have a minute?"
Sitting at his desk, Dr. Ratkay looked around in surprise. "Well, actually—"
"It's important."
Dr. Ratkay squinted, sighed, nodded. Dante came in.
We do look alike, he thought. When did that happen? If I went and looked through Mom's photo albums, what sort of man would I find standing over my cradle?
Slowly Dr. Ratkay swiveled in his chair to face his son. "Well?"
Dante took a deep breath. " 'Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad—' I'm going to die, Dad." He cut off his father's protest. "I'm going to die very soon, and I want you to promise you won't cut me open. No autopsy, no embalming, no . . . tampering."
Dr. Ratkay settled back in his chair, looking carefully at his son. He seemed small; much smaller than Dante remembered him. The heavy chair before his desk was too big for him now. Dr. Ratkay fixed himself a pipe, his fingers much slower and more precise than usual, as if the least mistake could cut an organ or sever an artery.
"I interned as a pathologist," he murmured at last. "You knew that, I suppose. Did I ever tell you why I came back here to be a GP instead?"
Dante shook his head, wondering at it for the first time. Why had Anton Ratkay come back, a sharp young medical man with a brand new degree? Why come back to his parents' house, to the sickly smell of his mother's lingering death? (The fat old woman tugging at Dante's sleeves, her stringy white hair; her soft bed a trap, like quicksand.) He remembered Sally Chen in her nursing home, tearing pictures of herself into tiny pieces, squares of color so small they lost all meaning.
"Pathologists are the most terrible hypochondriacs," Dr. Ratkay said ruminatively. "Everything is fatal, you see. There's no such thing as a cold you get over, a mild case of pneumonia, a benign tumour. Every time you examine a patient, the case was terminal. Pathologists live in fear." He sighed. " 'The fear which troubles the life of man from its deepest depths, suffuses all with the blackness of death, and leaves no delight clean and pure.' "
"Virgil?"
"Lucretius." Dr. Ratkay tamped tobacco into his pipe. His fingers were shaking. The skin no longer fit them quite right. It hung around his knuckles, liver-spotted, yellow with age and smoke. "I didn't want to raise my children in a pathologist's world."
"Well, you did your best," Dante observed. "With the skull on your desk and your other cheery lessons. Your World War Two was practically a catechism, Dad: And poverty begat Hitler and Hitler begat the Blitz and the Blitz begat Dresden and Dresden begat Auschwitz and on and on."
Dr. Ratkay blinked. "Was I really like that?"
"Were you like that!" Dante said, laughing and outraged at once. "It was like living with Mengele!"
Dr. Ratkay drew a match from a wooden box and struck it. His fingers were trembling. "I didn't mean it," he said softly. "I didn't mean it that way. It's just. . ." He sucked fire into the bowl of his pipe. Tiny strips of tobacco flared and fell to ash, like German villages ignited in Lancaster raids. "It is important to know those things."
"And what kind of name is Dante, anyway? Couldn't you just buy me a bus ticket to Hell on my eighteenth birthday?"
"We went to visit your Aunt Gloria, I believe," his father said dryly. "A close approximation, as I recall." Dr. Ratkay settled back in his chair, drawing on his pipe. His face seemed thin, the lines between his brows deeper than Dante remembered. Wearier.
Anton sighed. "I started medical school in the decade after the War. A tremendous amount of what we knew, especially about physiology and the treatment of trauma, came from wartime research. They used to put dogs in little wooden houses and then blow them up to study the effects. Did you know that?"
Dante swallowed.
"Hm. My reaction exactly. But in the next few years, while I interned and started my practice here, an even more horrible question came up: what to do with the data from the death camps.
"You mentioned Mengele a moment ago. No doubt you have me to thank for making the name familiar to you. But he did a great deal of, of research on people in the camps. So did the Japanese. They called their subjects 'logs.' " Dr. Ratkay's chair creaked as he leaned forward. " 'The limb of one of the logs was dipped in liquid nitrogen and snapped off, with the following effects. . ."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Anton gestured with his pipe, drawing exclamations of blue smoke on the air. "Because that's what life is, Dante! . . . Along with love and grass and skating in winter and good strong black coffee first thing in the morning." He shook his head. "Nobody told me that." He sucked in a long stream of smoke and did not speak, holding it until it began to trickle from his nostrils. Then with a rush it billowed out, clouding his face. "My parents never talked about the hard things. My brother died of fever and we never mentioned him. Leslie was gunned down in his parachute over Italy, and for us he had ceased to exist before his body touched the ground— It's against the Geneva Convention to shoot a man in a parachute," he added, laughing mirthlessly. "As if we play by the rules. As if we wait for the man to drift down before walking up to shake his hand and lead him to comfortable facilities to wait out the war." He snorted in disgust, and billows rolled through the blue smoke now thick around his head.
"You never talked about Aunt Sophie's baby," Dante said accusingly. "You never talked about Jet."
"Well—no. No, we didn't." Dr. Ratkay coughed, troubled. "And maybe we were wrong about that. Your mother wanted to spare Sophie's feelings, and then there was Jet to consider, after all. Still, maybe that was wrong too. To tell only the happy stories: that isn't life. It isn't true, and you deserve better. You deserve to know."
"A little late now, don't you think?"
Angrily Dr. Ratkay laid his pipe aside. "Oh, that's you all right, always sniping. And yet you come to me, saying you are about to die, and you say, 'Father, Father, you have injured me. You told me that war was evil. You told me death was hard."
Dante colored. "I didn't mean—"
Ratkay coughed, a dry, racking spasm that seemed too violent for his thin chest to contain, his narrow rounded shoulders. When did his hair get so thin? Dante wondered. When had his back begun to curve? When had his eyes begun to cloud with cataracts, and something more? Some careful surgeon's look turned inward at last?
"There is only one antidote for death, Dante. Children. A child, now. . . A child cheats time, you see. A child carries a little bit of You into the future. A little bit of hope, a little bit of memory, a few strands of your DNA." He stared angrily at Dante, his old blue eyes fierce. "Let me hurt you some more, my son. There is no Father in a big white beard to make everything better. When you die you rot, and your life rots with you." He leaned forward to grab Dante by the wrist and pulled him close, so he smelled pipe smoke and lime shaving lotion; so he saw the blue stubble a ghostly shadow on his father's aging skin. "You hurt me!" Dr. Ratkay murmured, trembling. "How dare you tell me you are going to die? What stupid words are these? Because I die too, Dante. You kill me, saying that. Do you understand? I die too."
Fiercely his old fingers gripped Dante's wrist, pulling himself out of the chair, movements slow and brittle, as if he had aged many years since he sat down.
And then, slowly, his fingers softened. "But there: I am an old man," he said softly. "I am tough, and I want to be told the truth." Gently he folded his son into his arms, and Dante stooped, awkwardly tall, smelling his father's neck, his familiar cardigan.
"Well, well," Dr. Ratkay murmured. "Whatever comes, we will look at it together, heh? We will look at it together."
* * *
In this memory he was three years old, walking with his dad. It was winter, and when he jumped off the path he sank in snow over his knees. He struggled to get out, arms and legs packed into his snowsuit like weenies inside so many hot-dog buns. He thrashed through the snow, flippering it aside with his mittened hands and laughing until he toppled over.
—Found himself suddenly cold and spluttering, snow on his eyebrows and sneaking inside the tight hood of the snowsuit as he wiped his nose, sniffling, struggling to gain his feet, flailing about in the treacherous snow.
And then his father leaned over, smiling and enormously strong, and lifted him out of the drift; and he laughed and his father swung him around, the two of them laughing in winter, and their breath steamed up together, his father tireless and the white ground spinning under him. He was so happy he didn't need to breathe, it was better than birthdays it was perfect it was flying and he was safe: he was helpless laughter in his daddy's strong arms.
He was safe he was safe and it was forever.
* * *
Later that Monday evening, just after dinner, Dr. Ratkay put down his glass of dry French wine and rose from the table. He had intended to put something on the turntable, a recording of one of Beethoven's late quartets by a Czech ensemble he very much admired.
Instead he wavered, as if his entire attention had been suddenly directed deep, deep within himself. Scarlet bubbles foamed abruptly on his lips, followed by a gush of bright arterial blood. He collapsed.
Under pressure from a malignant tumor, an artery in his lungs had given way. They quickly filled with blood. He never regained consciousness.
THIS IS THE BITTEREST PAIN AMONG MEN, TO HAVE KNOWLEDGE BUT NO POWER. —HERODOTUS
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The day after Anton Ratkay died, Laura and Aunt Sophie stood side by side at the kitchen counter in the Ratkay house, making lunch. Laura was dutifully chopping up an enormous red cabbage. Now here is something Chinese and Hungarians share, she reflected: a perverse attraction to cabbage. Idly she wondered if the Mongols had been responsible for that.
Aunt Sophie was making schnitzel. She was also smoking a cigarette, talking around it or holding it between two fingers while she dipped each piece of veal into her special batter. Laura couldn't help watching for the moment that a plume of ash would break from Aunt Sophie's cigarette and sprinkle like pepper into the schnitzel batter.
Laura hadn't exactly meant it to work out like this. She had come for Dante's sake, taking off from work as soon as Jet phoned with the news that Dr. Ratkay had died the night before. She had even brought charm paper and ink and brushes, in case Dante wanted to burn an offering for his father. But the Dante she found when she arrived was disturbingly different; polite and drawn and terribly distant. It was as if everything warm and human in him had turned wooden and ropy at his father's death.
"Just came to help out," she had said briskly, thinking, This is what they mean when they say someone aged overnight. This sudden hollowness, like an empty house. And she remembered her father in the weeks after his first stroke: that clever laughing man, grim-faced and gaunt, struggling to sign his name, or tie his shoes.
So, instead of comforting Dante, she had somehow ended up in the kitchen, listening to Aunt Sophie talk about her little brother's wedding.
"Gwen's father was calm as anything at the rehearsal, but when it came to actually giving away his daughter. . . ! You could see him leaning on her arm all the way up the aisle. Gwen's mother, though: she was something different. She was an old-fashioned schoolmarm with the soul of a pruning hook. I had her for three grades and she scared the spit out of me." The flesh on the underside of Aunt Sophie's big arms jiggled as she lowered her piece of schnitzel judiciously into the skillet. Boiling lard sizzled and spat. "I was shocked to see her cry all the way through the ceremony. . . Well, I had quite a bit of wine, you see, and caught the bouquet at the reception." Aunt Sophie snorted. "It made me reckless. So: I got my guts together, marched up and said, 'Why were you crying, Mrs. Jones? My brother will be a perfect husband for your little girl!"
Aunt Sophie paused, glancing sharply at Laura. Laura had never noticed before how curious a color her eyes were, a dull gleaming gray, like old pewter. She had what Laura's father had called "a heavy look"; Laura felt the weight of it, the long years of fierce laughter and grief and finally patience learned at great cost. "You know what Mrs. Jones said? She said, 'Mothers don't cry at weddings because they're sentimental'—all the time she's looking at Anton and Gwen, dancing together in the middle of the room, happy as bluebirds—'Mothers cry because they know how hard it's going to be.' "
Aunt Sophie looked away. "Mothers cry because they know how hard it's going to be."
Schnitzel sizzled in the skillet. Gwen's voice murmured from her husband's study; she was using the phone in there to arrange the funeral and reception, calling relatives and friends and patients all over the country. In the parlor Grandfather Clock ticked calmly, inexorably on.
There was something about the death of Dante's father that was making time do funny tricks in Laura's head. Earlier she had been struck by the old man that had come like a spirit to live behind Dante's eyes. Now, watching Aunt Sophie take a long drag on her cigarette, she could also see the brassy cocktail waitress Sophie must have been, trading shots with her customers, or laughing and drunk at her little brother's wedding. She would have been the sort of woman who drank Scotch, not gin; who stepped up to the booth at the carnival and won her own damn kewpie doll while her date stood back and grinned.
And yet, all these years later, here she was, in the kitchen making dinner, grieving and going on. With a quick flash of anger Laura thought, Isn't that the story of all human tragedy? The men mooning and wordless and withdrawn in the face of anything they couldn't control, leaving it to the women in the kitchen to make the next meal, and feed the baby, and cry: leaving them to do all the hard living in life. Even Laura's father had given up. He had eased himself into Heaven after only two weeks of struggling against his first stroke, leaving his wife alone to face the years that ate away at her like cancer.
Eyes stinging, Laura stood by Aunt Sophie, shoulder to shoulder, slicing her cabbage into ribbons.
Aunt Sophie coughed violently, then spat into the kitchen sink. "That reminds me. Decided if you're going to marry Dante yet?"
"What?" Laura yelped. "Marry him! Of course not! He hasn't even asked!"
"Not yet, eh?" Aunt Sophie shook her head and snorted.
"Why? Did he say he was going to ask?" Laura's mind went racing back to the previous Sunday when Dante had told her that he loved her.
Aunt Sophie took a long drag on her cigarette. "Didn't say that, exactly."
"Well, what did he say?"
Laura could have sworn there was a glint of amusement in Aunt Sophie's eye. The older woman coughed and waved her hand, pulling a ribbon of smoke through the air: "Oh, nothing. Not, to me, anyway."
Laufa glared at her.
" 'Course, a woman like you must get plenty of offers," Aunt Sophie continued mildly. "Good job. Nice hair. And if you want a family, you'll be wanting to start soon." Aunt Sophie appeared not to notice the way Laura's almond eyes narrowed. "I mean, you're already older than Gwen was when she had Sarah, and was that a handful! Some people say to wait, you need the money, but myself, I think the energy's more important." Sophie scooped the last pair of schnitzels out of the pan and onto the serving plate.
Laura gritted her teeth. The worst part about this outrageous turn the conversation had taken was that Sophie was saying just the sort of thing Laura had been secretly saying to herself for the last few months.
And to tell the truth, Dante's declaration hadn't been entirely without effect. Oh, it still made her seethe to think of it, but somehow seeing Dante charging about rescuing Jet and torn up over his father's death had made Laura face up to her own loneliness. Visiting the nursing home with him, she had seen her mother as if through a
stranger's eyes. She had realized just how much she didn't want to grow old alone.
And Dante did have his strong points, of course. His wit, his charm. There was nothing wrong with his mind, if he ever chose to use it on something. If he could just develop some kind of, of . . .structural integrity. A husband good enough for her would have to be capable of bearing more pressure than Dante could right now. He was too loose, too flimsy an aggregation of parts.
Although the materials were very promising. . . After all, he loved her, didn't he? And for that matter, as she had wryly admitted to herself, he was very good-looking—which a potential mate should try to be, if at all possible.
Chop, chop, chop: vengefully Laura hacked up the bits of her already mutilated cabbage. "In case he hasn't told you," (chop) "Dante is quite convinced he's about to" (chop!) "die," she snapped. "I imagine that would put a hitch in any wedding plans."
Aunt Sophie absorbed this information. "Oh. So that's what he thinks, is it?" She nodded slowly to herself. Keeping her cigarette in her mouth, she rinsed her hands and then turned to bring a cake out of the refrigerator. "Lemon," she said, setting it on the scarred kitchen table to warm up. "Gwen's favorite. I made it yesterday."
"Yesterday . . . ?" Once again Laura felt the weight of Aunt Sophie's old gray eyes. "You knew," she said slowly. "You knew what was going to happen to Dante's dad."
Aunt Sophie shrugged. "I guessed." She returned to the stove and flipped her schnitzel over.
"Your coins," Laura said, remembering the stories Dante had told about his fortune-telling Hungarian aunt.
Wait— Had the coins shown Aunt Sophie something about Dante? About Dante and herself getting married, for instance? "I remember I was here last New Year's Eve and you were telling fortunes with them"—Laura frowned—"but you said everything was going to be great. You said it would be a wonderful year."