by Paul Hond
“He went bad,” Donna said. “Wasn’t that it?”
Mickey shrugged. “I wasn’t too familiar with his personal life. I know he had problems. He got mixed up with some characters. But you”—Mickey heard his voice brighten desperately—“you were just a baby.”
“He used to talk about you,” said Donna. “I remember. Up until the day he died, he talked about that fight.”
“Did he?” Mickey dreaded the topic, but he was curious to know what Thomas Childs had said about him.
Donna brushed the lap of her dress. “He said he nearly killed you in the ring.” She laughed, as if to assure Mickey that she knew this was an exaggeration, the bluster of a deeply troubled man, but Mickey detected a note of pride in her voice. “Said he messed you up so bad, they had to give you a new nose. I always used to look at your face, trying to see where they operated.”
Mickey laughed, but he felt depressed as hell. Poor Tommy Childs. The fight had ruined him. He never fought again, as far as Mickey knew; the life he’d tried so hard to escape through boxing quickly reclaimed him, and in less than ten years he was dead, shot during an argument over money. Mickey’d always felt bad about Tommy, as if he himself were somehow liable for his plight; he often wished he could do something to make up for things, something short of punishing himself, and now, for the first time, he realized why he had stuffed little Donna Childs with éclairs, and why, more recently, he had hired her son—Tommy’s grandson—to drive the Lerner Bakery van.
“I never did tell Nelson about my father,” Donna said. “It was bad enough his own father was no good. Bad men all around. The child never had anyone to look up to.”
Mickey cleared his throat. “I meant to talk to you about our boys,” he said. “Ben and Nelson.”
Donna didn’t seem to hear him. “Been doing everything I can to make sure he doesn’t turn out the same way.”
“About Nelson and Ben,” Mickey said. He paused to make sure he had her attention, then went on. “I know that Benjie’s been spending a lot of time at your house lately, and I just want to make sure he’s not, ya know, overstaying his welcome. Inviting himself over, that sort of thing. Taking advantage.”
“Ben Lerner?” said Donna. “Are you kidding me? He’s welcome anytime. But now, if it’s a problem—”
“Oh no, not at all. No problem. I just want to make sure it’s okay on your end.”
“Are you worried about him being in that area at night?”
Mickey laughed too readily. “Why would I be worried?”
“It’s dangerous, that’s why,” Donna said. “I wouldn’t want my child hanging around that area, night or day. But at this particular moment, I don’t have a choice.”
Mickey felt shamed by her admission; he didn’t know what to say. Already he had bungled the point of the meeting, which was to somehow contrive to keep their children away from each other.
“We’ll move someday,” Donna said. “Right now I’m saving to send Nelson back to college.”
“Right,” Mickey said. “He was taking classes, wasn’t he?”
“Two semesters,” said Donna. “Took the required classes. Math, history. English. Hated every second of it. Said it was a waste of time.”
“Why?”
Donna shrugged. “Too easy. That’s what he said. Disruptive students, too, just like high school.” She wiped something from her eye. “He could’ve gone to a good college on scholarships,” she said, “if he hadn’t got mixed up with the wrong people. I told him all through high school: stay out of trouble. You’re a smart child. But kids, they don’t want to listen. He was nearly killed. I’m not even going to go into that. He’s got a job now, and all I can do is pray he holds on to it.” She sighed. “I just wish there was someone who could talk to him. Someone he’d listen to. Someone he respected.”
Mickey nodded, aware that he was being marked for some awful favor. He wanted to discourage Donna from trying to enlist his help, but her faith in his fatherly powers was strangely flattering, prompting him toward a rosier account of his own son than the facts allowed. “Yes,” he said. “Fortunately, as far as Ben is concerned—” He stopped; he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t tell a lie. He decided to go with the truth, hoping that a more sober profile of his son might yet sound like a father’s modesty—as if, out of tact, he were quietly downplaying Ben’s prospects. “What I mean,” he said, “is that Benjie’s the same way. I call him an underachiever. We decided it was a good idea to wait a year before he went anywhere. Too many kids jump right into college, they’re not ready.” He paused, then said, “You got an impressionable kid, believe me, college can do more harm than good,” hoping, as he tapped the wheel with his fingers, that this subtle reference to drugs—colleges being notorious hotbeds for every drug you cared to name: cocaine, pep pills, marijuana—would ease them into the topic and allow Mickey to wonder aloud if their boys were perhaps indulging together in the harder stuff—reefers, crack, angel dust, Mickey couldn’t come up with all the names—endemic to many of the poorer areas, such as the one in which Donna happened to live. But Donna didn’t seem to catch his drift. “The way I look at it,” Mickey said, now focusing on his previous point, “a kid shouldn’t be pushed too hard one way or another. Into college, I mean.” He took a breath, satisfied that he’d rung the very bell of fatherly reason.
But Donna seemed agitated. “I don’t know,” she said. In her reluctance to contradict him she betrayed a soft disappointment. “They don’t always know what’s good for them. They need to be pushed.”
Mickey bristled; he hadn’t counted on having to argue his point. “I agree,” he said. “I only meant that they shouldn’t be forced into anything.” This was, Mickey knew, a bit of hypocrisy; for hadn’t he been pushing Ben toward the bakery? Wasn’t Ben behind the counter right this minute, under threat of eviction from his room should he refuse to comply? “What I mean is,” Mickey said, “you have to give a kid direction—” He broke off, disgusted by the sound of his voice, the failure of his argument. He feigned impatience with the traffic, blasted his horn, cursed under his breath at other motorists, wishing all the while that Donna would disappear from his sight. He was shocked, even angered, at how violently he craved her respect, her adulation. He wanted, in light of her experiences with corrupt, dissolute men, to be seen as the perfect husband and father, the very salt of manhood; he wanted to punish her, to crush her with the goodness of his life.
The traffic on the expressway flowed like liquid silver. Mickey tried to make sense of his clash of feelings. At bottom, he supposed, he was in a kind of secret agony over the state of affairs at home (would Emi even remember their date in the garden today?), an agony complicated by Donna’s total innocence of it. Truth be told, he had no goodness with which to crush her; he was impoverished in his own way, and resented Donna for making him feel, by mere virtue of her material want, that he ought to be a better man than he was.
But there was something else as well, some other issue that he couldn’t quite put a finger on; and as he exited the expressway, with Donna gazing out her window, he was overcome with an almost panic-stricken desire to get home to his wife—a desire which, as they passed the Lyric Opera House, the old Alcazar Ballroom and the cobblestones and monuments of Mount Vernon Place, sharpened itself to such a needlelike intensity that minutes later, driving back home, Mickey could hardly recall having stopped in front of Donna’s workplace, or her thanking him and getting out of the car with a clank of jewelry (“Now don’t tell Nelson we talked; he’ll just think I’m getting in his business!”), or his own sense of helplessness in having failed to accomplish a damn thing with regard to Ben; no: all Mickey could see, all he allowed himself to see, was the road home, the route leading to the garden, to Emi, to the life he wanted so desperately to put in order.
By the time Mickey arrived, Emi was already out back, kneeling by one of the flower beds, shears snipping at the hibiscus that Mickey had bought at a nursery on Falls Road. He watched
from the bedroom window as she attacked the stems: Lord and Lady Baltimores, they were called; the Lords were yellow and the Ladies were pink. Mickey’d thought Emi would get a kick out of the idea—an aristocratic couple in bloom. Now he winced as she beheaded them.
He removed his shirt and tie and changed into his work trousers and tennis shoes, wondering if he should tell Emi about his morning. She knew little about Ben’s friendship with Nelson, and even less of the strange, shared destiny that seemed to exist between the two families. Mickey never saw the point of drawing her attention to it.
He went downstairs and out the kitchen door. The temperature was above seventy: Indian summer. Mickey grabbed his clippers from the closet-size shed attached to the back of the house and joined his wife in the dirt. “Some day, huh?” he said. He crouched down: his joints crackled like wood.
“Too hot,” said Emi. She wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt. She was panting softly.
“It’ll be cold soon enough,” said Mickey. “We should get the parsnips in before the first frost—they’ll be sweeter that way, growing in the frozen ground all winter.” In the daylight he noticed that her hair, like her body, had thinned over the past few months. She was working too hard, worrying too much.
She said, “Where were you?”
“This morning?” Mickey’s voice barely modulated. “I took the car down to Gordy’s. There’s been this noise when I start it up.” He poked the soil with his forefinger. “A choking sound.” It was a small, merciful evasion, a means of sparing them a heated argument over Ben (“What’s wrong with his being friendly with a black boy?” she would say accusingly, missing the point); but Mickey felt he had crossed a dangerous line, had committed the first of a new kind of deception. He said, “Gordy told me to bring the car in next week,” and made a mental note to see Gordy later in the day.
Emi nodded; she didn’t seem the least bit suspicious. Mickey felt a vague disappointment.
“So,” said Emi, and Mickey knew from her tone that she was choosing her words: “Where’s Ben today?”
Mickey took a breath. “He’s at the bakery,” he said, defiantly, because he knew how she felt about it. “He’s helping me out so we can spend the day together.”
“I see.”
She’d wanted to push Ben to go to school in the fall—he’d been accepted to a local community college—and Mickey had said why not let him wait a year, let him think about what he wants to do. Benjie, meanwhile, didn’t seem to have an opinion either way.
Emi said, “He’s been helping out a lot lately.”
“How would you know?” Mickey said. She wanted a fight, he’d give her war. “You’ve barely seen him.”
There was a silence. Mickey was surprised: normally Emi defended her spates of absence by equating them with the kid’s braces, his basketball camp, his computer, his investments; but now she looked abstracted, troubled, as if realizing for the first time that her son had grown up without her.
Mickey saw her anguish and relented. “Anyhow,” he said, “I don’t see the harm in it. The bakery is a good experience. Teaches him some responsibility.” Still, he knew what Emi meant. She was afraid the kid would end up working there permanently, just like his father, and Mickey was forced to behave as though her fears were unwarranted. There were several levels of degradation to this, Mickey perceived.
“I just don’t think you should push him into anything,” Emi said.
“I’m not pushing. But if he wasn’t at the bakery, he’d be out playing ball, or else sitting in his room all day with the damned computer.”
“Maybe he’s learning something on the computer.”
“He plays games.”
“And what’s he doing now? Standing behind a counter? Bagging bread?”
Mickey drove the clippers into the ground. “Okay,” he said. “It’s my fault. You happy? It’s my fault he’s not a genius.” He gripped the wooden handles. “Maybe if you’d been around—” He stopped himself: to blame her for not being there to nurture Benjie would be to open himself to charges of genetic failure. What would it matter if I was around? she could say. He’s naturally limited.
Of course she would never actually say it. But she wouldn’t have to.
She was quiet again, began snipping the lilies with fierce little bites. She was surrounded by lopped-off heads, stems, the wilt and wither of old, strewn bouquets.
Mickey suddenly felt penitent. Their garden time was too precious to be spoiled by arguments, and in any case he couldn’t afford to drive her to the edge of her anger. What would he do if she ever left him?
He lifted his hand and placed it gently on the back of her neck. She barely quaked in his palm, and touched his hand with her own. She hadn’t the strength to fight.
She said, “We should add the compost.”
“Another week,” said Mickey. “We’ll have to pick up that gypsum, too. I figure six bushels of compost.”
He smiled. When he first met her, she hardly knew mulch from mud; everything she knew, he’d taught her. The garden was the one place he felt in command, and sometimes he was moved to draw comparisons between their fields of expertise, not so much to raise himself in her estimation, he thought, as to try to mingle their fortunes.
“Thought hit me the other day,” he said, “how the garden is like a symphony. A concert. The colors, the plotting; but especially the timing. Planning it so that when one group of flowers fades, the other is coming up. New combinations, new moods. The string section, the brass, the woodwinds.” He picked up a stem and pointed at the various plots of shorn flowers, like a conductor. “It really is like a symphony,” he said, but then stopped himself upon hearing something too passionate in his voice.
Emi laughed. “And now we have the requiem.” She scooped up a bunch of dead flowers and brought them to her nose, so that her entire face was covered. For some reason, Mickey thought she might be crying.
“Are you okay?” he said.
She tossed away the flowers. She wasn’t crying, but there was distance in her eyes. “Just tired.”
“If you ate some food,” Mickey said, “I think we’d both feel a lot better. How about we get showered and dressed and I’ll take you out. Anywhere you want, you name it, we’ll—”
“I can’t,” she said, in a tone imploring him to understand, to see. “Not until—after these concerts.”
Mickey sighed. “Then how about some salad? I’ve got a whole salad in the refrigerator.” He uprooted his clippers, flexed them to clean the blades. “You’d starve to death if it wasn’t for me,” he said, with a note of righteous accusation aimed at others, the musicians who took so much of her time. “You work so hard you forget to eat.”
“I eat plenty.”
“Then maybe,” Mickey said, “you’ve got some kind of bug.”
“How did you guess?”
“You do?”
“Yes.” She blew a strand of hair from her lips. “David Shaw.”
Mickey’s skin tingled at the sound of the great pianist’s name. Emi rarely shared the details of her professional life (she thought it too boring), and though Mickey often imagined that the grandeur of her world might somehow be tarnished by his access to it, he was always grateful for any small crumbs. “What do you mean?” he said.
“He’s driving me crazy,” she said. “His quirks, his ego. He resents the fact that I’ve been getting more attention.”
“So let him resent it.”
“But he’s the pianist. He’s my safety net.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“He’s been erratic at rehearsals. Memory lapses.” Emi shook her head. “I think after this I’m going to take a long break.”
“You? A break?” Mickey laughed. There’d been a time when he would have encouraged her to keep on, a time when it was just as well for her to be away, when he feared what might happen if she spent too much time with him. Now he’d happily risk boring her: it was becoming more and m
ore difficult to be alone.
Emi shrugged one shoulder. “Sometimes I feel like I’m missing something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Everything.” She closed her eyes. “God, what’s happened to me?”
Mickey scratched his ear. He didn’t want to hear this. He’d always thought her lucky to have a passion, hell, he’d give anything to find one for himself. How could she complain, now, so late in the game? Mickey had always invested a certain amount of his own longings in her love for what she did—it helped him get through her absences—and it shook him to think that it was all a heap of regrets.
“Come on now,” he said.
Emi put her hands over her face.
Mickey looked around nervously at the neighbors’ yards. It wasn’t like her to get like this.
“It’ll be fine,” Mickey said. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was something else bothering her. He kissed her head and rubbed her back; her entire skeleton seemed available to his fingers. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.” She winced, as though his touch were painful.
Mickey tried to think of a way to amuse her, to bring her around. “Here,” he said, remembering an old trick that used to make her giggle. “Look.” He took up a spade and unearthed one of the tulip bulbs they’d planted two or three years ago. Clods of dirt fell from the tangled roots. He carefully brushed the dirt from the white globe, and pointed out the small cloves that adhered to the roundness like sucklings. “See?” he said. “Baby bulbs.”
Emi smiled, but it was more for the past, for the times when they’d give the babies silly names. She pulled away from him and stood up, brushed the dirt from her jeans. “We need some bags for this,” she said, waving a hand at the cuttings. A red maple leaf from the Finkles’ tree floated down and landed near her feet.
“Great,” said Mickey, looking up at the tree. He stood, wobbled, picked up the leaf and dropped it over the fence.