Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  I wanted my father to be all the things that an ideal man is supposed to be, a hero. He wasn’t far off the mark, really. He got worse as I got older, but my idea of what a hero was incorporated worse things, too. And it kept things orderly for him to be a hero. He has been a stranger to me since I was about twenty-five, twenty years.

  The telephone will ring, it’ll be the message, this is how it will feel, I can imagine it. I will feel like an animal standing at the margin of a field beside a fence, head high as if catching a new, totally unknown scent, afraid but not terrified, confused but not bewildered, hurts to swallow, feeling all the muscles in my jaw, in my arms, unable to run, not wanting to run, hearing my heartbeat. I will do what I’m supposed to, walk, talk, a suit. I can imagine it.

  Bye Bye Brewster

  For two years or so I had enjoyed thinking of myself as a great friend to Brewster until the day I understood that I was not, a day shortly before he moved out of the apartment complex we both lived in. I had managed to forget that day until yesterday morning when his daughter called—he’d mentioned a daughter somewhere in the east—and told me Brewster had died the day before. I was shaken, it couldn’t be. But of course it was.

  She was in town, from Connecticut, for a few more days. She had been with him when he died. He’d left me some money. I was to take one of his cats, too, she said, he said you’d know which one. Could I come over to the house? Did I know where it was? She gave me the address, and I agreed to drop by later in the day. She said, “I don’t know what to do with the other cats; there’re so many.” I knew which one; we had had a stupid quarrel over it once, but that had gotten straightened out. Still, I didn’t bother going over there, the afternoon passed and I had dinner and watched something on HBO and by that time it seemed awful late. I didn’t need a cat to take care of, anyway.

  I hadn’t seen Brewster since he moved, about five months ago. It was eerie, imagining him speaking—about me—yesterday or the day before and now not speaking anymore. He was twice my age, but a bond had been fashioned out of necessity, because he was old and alone, because my life had turned up all zeroes—all I had was a job and this apartment. It hasn’t gotten any better since he moved. It seems sort of strange, but the time I knew him had become in my memory an oddly contented and happy time, one of those periods of one’s life during which one bitches and complains incessantly which later in retrospect becomes a life sorely missed. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about those months: we had shared a lot of evenings, eaten together, played card games, talked a lot, did some drinking, awaited and then watched favorite TV shows every week, rituals of a friendship. He had lent me money and then forgiven the debts; I had helped him out sometimes. He said his son was in California, maybe Washington state. He never heard from him. I had had a father who was easy to disappoint, and after I disappointed him I took poor care of him, which maybe explains the Brewster thing.

  For the two years we were friends I did everything that Brewster needed done, so much so that I got into the habit of knocking on his door when I got home from work in case there was some errand or muscle work he needed, so I could get it done before I settled in to watch the news and have dinner, so that I wouldn’t be interrupted; it was a practical matter. I would walk up an extra flight of the steel and concrete stairs at the apartments, past mine on the second level, up to his on the third, knock and wait until he came to the door, say Hi, as if I were checking on him.

  Often he didn’t have anything for me to do. But sometimes he’d have some job he’d saved all day until I got home, hold this, drill this, cut this, move these over there and those where these were, do you know where I can find a good this, maybe you could accompany me there. He had been an engineer but his father had done millwork and fine carpentry, worked a lathe, skills Brewster had learned as a boy and used to make tables and shelving, cabinets, and small cases for things, beautifully crafted boxes made from wood and covered in fabric, although now at seventy-something his hands were unsteady and his eyes were shot.

  One month I took him to the eyeglasses place six times on lunch hours and hours out from work, trying to get him a pair of glasses through which he could see. I never knew, still don’t know, whether the glasses were good and he was just crazy or whether the optometrists and opticians were the most incompetent fools God ever made. It was funny, watching them try to deal with him, condescending but forgiving him everything because he was old, him playing that for all it was worth. We’d laugh afterward, but each time he would say, “I really can’t see worth a damn,” no matter how many times they remade the glasses. “They just think I’m a crazy old duck,” he would say.

  “An old duck” is what he called himself and any other old man he liked. A man he didn’t like was a “louse.” I liked him, in part, because he talked like no one else I knew, probably only a reflection of his age, vestiges of another time showing in his vocabulary, favorite expressions, a reserve or restraint which prevented him from using vulgar language, though “damn” and “hell” were common coin.

  I still live in the apartment complex. He had been here for years—I never was clear on how many—when I moved in two years ago. I don’t want to go to his place. I don’t want to see it. When he was evicted from the apartments, he asked me to move with him, to split the house he was moving to. I had sort of agreed, at least we had talked about getting a place at one time, so he had reason to expect it, but when it really came up, I couldn’t get over the idea of moving in with a seventy year old man. He was way past caring about how strange such a roommate arrangement might seem. I was also afraid of getting still more tangled up than I already was, of his growing dependency, of making my temporary abandonment of social life with people of my own age and station into a permanent condition.

  Splitting a house with Brewster might not have meant that, but at the time the prospect felt like being pulled under water I had been just sort of pleasantly floating in, expecting sometime sooner or later to return to land. So I guess I wasn’t much of a friend to him, when it came down to it, or at least had misrepresented the friend I was.

  “You know,” Brewster said, “you could move in with me. Take half the house. There’re two kitchens over there. Four bedrooms.” We were standing on the concrete walkway outside the apartment he was leaving. He was serious. “We could split it up any way you want.” His body was short and heavy with a belly and thick forearms, still strong. His big, bald, ruddy face had round areas where the skin looked thin and stretched, broken capillaries, spots, and some kind of ugly black scar or growth on one ear. He was looking at me. I should say something, I thought, but the only thing in my head was what I usually said to Brewster—“Sure”—and I didn’t want to say that. Finally I said, “Well,” and looked down into the courtyard, so obviously with nothing to look at that I almost stumbled into the railing. Brewster shrugged, and the light left his blue eyes. “Well, you can think about it,” he said. “House isn’t going anywhere.” He nodded to the door of his now bare apartment. “Play some cards?” We went in.

  • • •

  They had no reason to throw him out, but they said it was the cats. Brewster had nine cats, and two of them lived in the stove, an ordinary sort of eccentricity, as common as cornflakes, the kind of thing nobody gives a moment’s thought until for some other reason the light of the community shines on you and suddenly there’s a mob of good upstanding citizens all jabbering fiercely to each other. The place smelled, of course, even though the cats were pretty good about it, they would do their business outside under the shrubbery or on the tiny lawn around the apartments. Every night at ten o’clock, the old man’s door would swing open ten inches or so and the cats, or most of them, would step out single file—a big old Siamese, followed by a gray, two black ones, a fluffy calico, another that looked red, others. They’d step along the walk and down the concrete stairway like ducks, and then scatter, and if they didn’t all come back smartly at ten thirty, you would hear the old man whistl
ing for the stragglers.

  I had met Brewster a few weeks after I had taken the apartment on the floor below him. It’s a four-story building with forty or forty-five apartments, a large parking area at one end. One sunny Saturday afternoon I was working on my car in the parking lot, a simple repair, putting new pads in the brakes, and he came out and lent me a hand. Car repair was clearly not considered proper parking lot activity at this complex, which added to Brewster’s pleasure in helping out. We got along well from the first. It wasn’t long before we joked about getting a place together somewhere, about getting away from the old women who more or less ran our building. He was chary of the management company, too, because of the cats.

  He was particularly sweet on the Siamese, whose name was Antibody, but he called it “A. B.,” or more often, “Abe.” It was about sixteen years old, and liked its comforts. The one I liked best was what they call a “snowshoe,” a cat that looked Siamese-y but with bright white paws and nose, like the “points” were reversed. This one, the one we argued about, Brewster called “Killer-T.” It was some kind of weird joke. He spent contented hours reading medical magazines at a branch library.

  The first time I saw one of the cats wander into the kitchen and jump onto the open door of the oven and walk into it, I stopped what we were doing—we were playing gin—and pointed and stuttered, “The cat, the cat,” but he just smiled and nodded and told me they lived in there, the twin black ones. All the cats except for the one he called Red had names out of the P.D.R.—the Physicians Desk Reference, which I soon discovered was probably Brewster’s favorite book—christened after disease fighters, cells and medicines—Leukocyte and Lymphocat, Amoxicillin and Streptomycin, and so on. The old man was a hypochondriac as well as a cat lover, and although it was an ironic hypochondria, he wasn’t joking. He didn’t like doctors much, but when I took him to see them, he repeated what they said as if it were the revealed word of God. His refrigerator was crowded with carrots and brussels sprouts and broccoli, wheat germ, tofu and tuna fish, DHEA, glucosamine and other pills, as well as jars of olive oil, which looked like green lard.

  We spent a lot of time playing games. I work for the city in the Clerk Assessor’s office, I’m twice divorced, and my mother and sister live over a thousand miles from here in Arizona, so I guess I needed Brewster as much as he needed me. I spent a lot of evenings up there playing gin, blackjack, whist, even Hold ’em, as well as Scrabble and checkers and chess. For a month or so once we played a basketball game we made up, best of ten shots, using a plastic bucket and a ball he’d bought at the supermarket. We even went to a bar one time and shot pool for a couple of hours, but he didn’t care for the atmosphere. It depressed him—“too much smoke and too many young women with too little clothes on,” he said. I think he just didn’t like losing.

  The cats were outlaws. Our leases prohibited pets, but lots of people kept them, and no one ever hassled any of us about it. It’s benign neglect. Once a week or so now, whenever I get in the service elevator to go down to the washers and dryers in the basement, there’s some ditzy guy with a couple of big fluffy spaniels or whatever they are, heading out for their walk.

  I had taken to letting Snowshoe into my apartment, but it was when she started spending the night at my place that Brewster got upset and threatened getting me evicted. I told him that “Killer” was a stupid name for a cat that was as sweet and lamblike as it could be. He made fun of me for saying “lamblike” and said I didn’t know what I was talking about. He said he was going to call the damn police on me if I ever did it again. Astonished, I told him the cat never wanted to leave, and I wasn’t going to force the cat out the door if it didn’t want to go. He said just remember what he’d told me. I’d be looking for a new apartment in the time it took to say “Jack Robinson.” “Jack Robinson,” I said. We were behaving like children.

  That was in August, when everyone was in a foul mood because of the heat. We had window unit air-conditioners which were old and noisy and expensive to run, so you either stayed in the cool part of the apartment all the time or you went out. Brewster was smart; he spent the hot afternoons at the library, where they had the AC cranked up to flurries. The cat, Snowshoe, as soon as Brewster let them out in the morning, came down to sit outside my front window. Brewster’s other cats hung around together and when any of the neighbors’ cats got aggressive, two or three of Brewster’s would start showing shoulders and snarling, and if that weren’t enough they’d cut the other one up. Sometimes there were complaints, but mostly it was only noise and mostly he got them inside by ten-thirty, so it was never a big problem.

  By late in August Brewster and I had sort of patched things up—I gave in, is how that went. I liked playing cards, especially when my only likely alternative was an evening flipping through my forty-eight channels on the remote control and then going to bed tired but not sleepy.

  I wasn’t dating then, hadn’t been since I got my second divorce, which wasn’t an actual divorce because Michelle and I had just been keeping company, we weren’t married. Afterward, there weren’t a lot of possibilities. After a certain age and in certain jobs, you never meet anybody. There was supposed to be a new woman at the tax office in June, but she turned out to be a he—they hired a man.

  For Brewster, the old woman he had sometimes spent time with, a sarcastic British lady named Mrs. Sims who also lived in the building, had died in the spring, so he was as alone as I was. After she died, he had broken into her apartment—the lock wasn’t much—and taken a weird collection of stuff. He had photographs of her and him, a square jar full of sand, a slab of polished green and white malachite stone, and her hair dryer, a big old one with the bonnet in a round carrier, all on the shelves in his living room with books and magazines and a Civil War pistol that didn’t shoot.

  So I was up there playing cards one afternoon when there came this pounding on the door. The place shook. He got up and opened it and there stood Mrs. Eller, screaming, pointing down into the courtyard, a fenced space behind the building with a small swimming pool rimmed by stones set in concrete and stocked with white iron lawn furniture.

  We were three floors up. We stepped out onto the walkway and looked down into the swimming pool where she was pointing. When we got downstairs we found the woman’s orange striped cat in the pool. She said that old Abe and a couple of the others had chased it in there and drowned it, that it was terrified of the water. There was blood in the pool, too, a stain holding together, apparently from the head or ear. I got the skimmer and pushed it in under the cat and lifted him out, swung him over onto the stone. When I looked around Brewster stood behind me with his arms dull at his sides, his rugged hands quivering at the cuffs of his gray shirt. He was looking over my shoulder at the dead cat, inconsolable.

  I have seen grown men cry, but Brewster was past seventy, and I had never seen an old man cry. It was a terrible thing. I put my arms around him. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.” I had this sick feeling in my stomach. I knew I should take care of Mrs. Eller, too, but I couldn’t do both of them. I looked around, hoping one of the other old women would show up. Mrs. Eller was dull-eyed, opaque. “Sorry,” I said.

  It just got worse. A few days later, the Siamese, old Abe, disappeared, so I took off work and we spent all day and most of the night out looking. I was afraid of finding Abe dead on the road that ran in front of the apartments, though the cats didn’t go out there much. A couple of days passed. Brewster was certain that Mrs. Eller had done it. He claimed that he had heard Abe calling—every Siamese has a distinctive voice, he said—from somewhere on the first floor. I laughed, and he looked at me. “It just seems … unlikely,” I said. A week after that Brewster got a letter from the management company’s lawyers which informed him that as he had violated the terms of his lease by keeping animals on the premises and as those animals had become a nuisance to the other tenants, etc. etc. etc. They gave him two weeks.

  Someone told him about an old house, acros
s town, near a park, and I helped him pack, boxing and taping. He never would have gotten it done, didn’t seem to care. There wasn’t much to it. He lived a pretty spartan existence except for the cats and his wood work and what seemed to be every issue of Prevention magazine ever published. He had three drawers full of medicines, salves and pills and drops, not for him but for the cats. Brown prescription bottles with “Antibody Brewster” and “Abe” and “Moxy” and sometimes “cat” for the patient’s name. He had a lot of clothes he never wore, books, some odds and ends. The apartment did smell, and packing it up seemed to make it worse. As we threw windows open to air it, I said, “I don’t know why you care.”

  “They’ll think they were right,” he said. “They’ll congratulate themselves.”

  All through the last few days of the packing I wanted to say something—some new and better way of phrasing “no”—but after that one time he never asked me again about moving in with him.

  The day before he left he was still swearing that Mrs. Eller had stolen his cat. We had everything ready to go, in cartons by the door, and the manager had arranged a truck for his furniture. We played a half dozen games of whist, dealing cards out on top of the cardboard boxes, and then I got up to go home.

  I looked around the bare living area. The remaining cats were all there in the front room, and it occurred to me that they were there because they were afraid of being left behind. “Hey, Brewster,” I said, “I’m thinking about just staying here. I mean …” I shook my head, tried to get myself to look at him. “I’ll think about it, but I’ll probably just stay.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” he said. He was standing up, waiting. It felt like he was pushing me out the door. “Listen, I want you to keep Killer. You know, the little one.”

  “I couldn’t take her,” I said.

  “Oh sure you could.”

  “I’ll see her over at your place,” I said, and then a strange look flashed across his face for a second, and he abandoned the idea.