Y

by Aaron Tucker

  He looked from the van Gogh to his watch and saw it was five minutes past, realized he hadn’t heard the church bells toll the hour; They forgot to go off, he offered himself, and the apartment was hermetically quiet, as if all the cracks and gaps in the floorboards and walls were secretly solved while he sat by his father’s bed. But then the phone rang and the nurse burst from the room, grabbed the earpiece from its cradle, hushed the voice on the other end. As she spoke in low tones, he sat still and staring and recalled those months following his mother’s death in 1931, months his father spent trailing his own shadows around the apartment, picking up the cutlery and plates and glass from the dining table after habitually setting a seat for her, and Opje would fly across the country to see his father in this New York apartment, unlock and push open the door and find Julius still at the table, in the same hunch as when he left weeks ago, as when Frank left him the week prior, and he would grasp his father under the arm, guide him to the sitting room, position him underneath that painting, and they would listen to the radio together, his physics books and papers dormant in his suitcase, forgotten until after his father fell asleep on the couch, because he couldn’t bear to sleep in her room, and so he took his parents’ old room, bed, spread his calculations over her side of the duvet, slept until he heard his father in the morning, navigating the cupboards and drawers in caustic clatters, struggling to prop open the kitchen window – ‘It just doesn’t smell right,’ his father would reason after he greeted him, and he answered, ‘Maybe you can come visit me in the next few weeks, in Pasadena,’ imagining his father on one of the schooners of his youth, conquering the Pacific horizon, and he would be content to steer when his father grew too tired.

  He told Kitty, the two of them completely engulfed in the darkness of their Bathtub Row home the night before she left, that he and his father lived together for a few of those years but did little sailing; however, they did have lunch together every day, California hardly chilled by the winter, but enough that the tiny garden behind their cottage couldn’t supply; the lettuce and tomatoes, slightly wilting or bruised, of their sandwiches or the vegetables that made the broth of their soup, were rounded up on his father’s trip to the grocery store, and the two would eat their simple lunches, his father’s stomach balking at anything too spicy or foreign, and Opje would clear the table and run through the tasks his father needed to have done; ‘If I knew of anything to do I should do it,’ he told his father between the coughs that kept his father from walking too briskly, between the words that fell from his thoughts in mid-sentence. He remembered his father’s pride, his gifts, the cars, the boats, the paintings, and matched that with a steady forward-moving duty – his own name was Julius, too, even if it was unspoken, and it was his responsibility to keep him from pictures of his dead wife, to bring his father to meet his friends, the weekly Stammtisch, a table circled by heavy dinners and strong bourbons, and sometimes when he spoke in French his father would burst in, clumsy but earnest, and he would tell the story about Nat while the guests listened and laughed along.

  The soldier-chauffeur waves out the driver side as he pulls away, and Peter waves back joyfully as Opje hands Toni to his wife, hugging both close to him. They embrace and his son rushes past him and inside their home. He holds Kitty but reaches back into his memory of telling her about his father’s death and it hitches on the omissions and lies. What he did not tell Kitty that night was about Jean. As he pulls back to look into his wife’s smile, his mind shoots to Jean and Julius shaking hands through the frame of his California home’s front door; he was standing behind her and his father was inside the home and they reached across the threshold before Julius swept his hand as an invitation in, an invitation she deferred to another day.

  He did not tell Kitty that while the nurse whispered into the phone he watched the closed door to his parents’ bedroom and remembered Jean telling him about her mother’s death, only months before, the lymphoma that robbed her body of its muscle and fat, ravaged the skin with rashes, and then, only months later, his own father was dead, too. He knew then what poem he would share with her when he called, once the doctor had come and he had called his brother, thought of Donne, as he often did when he pictured Jean, the last six sonnet lines of ‘Death, be not proud’:

  Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

  And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

  One short sleep past, we wake eternally

  And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

  and he imagined her finishing the last two lines with him, their voices simultaneous despite the continent between them, and in that moment he wanted her there in New York, needed her to help him, to plan, to prop him up, her own mother’s death still fresh and so she could be there in symbiotic sympathy, the two of them equal in grief.

  He thought of his brother Frank, of how young he was when their mother died, not even twenty and himself not even thirty, thought of how Frank sat in the room outside her bedroom, his hands and head hung between his legs, fingers brushing the carpet, his brother only entering when he could follow Opje into the room and, even then, refusing the second chair beside her bed, beside him, instead hovering near the sideboard filled with family pictures, pictures of the two brothers, an infant Frank in Robert’s lap, another photo taken on board Trimethy at Bayshore, both boys waving to the camera, another of Julius and Ella at their wedding, his father’s neat moustache matching the shade of his suit, that suit made from cloth from his store, and their mother’s dark eyebrows framing her eyes, which were looking at something just to the left of the lens, her hair down and past her shoulders. Frank would stay by these photos even when she slipped into unconsciousness, would watch as his father adjusted the dress around her elegant neck, never removing her mechanical right hand but instead pulling the sleeves of her sleepwear up to its edges and then crossing her left overtop it, resting both on her chest. Opje would go in shifts with his father so that at least one of them was with her.

  He had shared all this with Jean after her mother died and she had nodded and cried quietly against his bare chest, in his bed, after she politely refused his offer to run her a bath, ‘No, I just want to lie here and listen,’ and so he told her about the daily letters he wrote in the stilted external language he was forced to use during his mother’s coma, to Ernest Lawrence at his cyclotron, and sometimes to his high school teacher Herbert Smith, letters written just to push the thoughts through his fingers, and, in an effort at a melancholy balance, included a small picture of the secret shack his brother had built at Lake Katherine, a precursor to Perro Caliente, hidden back away from the National Forest’s rangers, and promised himself, as he closed the envelope, that he would wait the winter out, through his mother’s death, and then spend as much time there as possible in the lean air far above sea level, mapping the valleys and dried riverbeds in units of horse lengths and cigarettes. He described to Jean how when his mother embraced him, even as he grew much taller than her and her bones began to hollow, she always grabbed him tighter just as she felt him begin to pull away, and he told her about the home haircuts and the lurking germs, about the French they shared once his piano lessons disintegrated, and how she pointed to one specific brush stroke at a time when admiring a painting, separating each by pulling her face incredibly close to the canvas and frame, always preferring to have her nose in a painting rather than step back the customary half-dozen steps, the strokes like his memories, all a product of accumulation. She died two days after the beginning of her coma, ‘And the last thing she said,’ he told Jean, ‘was Yes – California,’ and that phrase simultaneously rippled through the family’s apartment in New York in 1937 and his embrace with Kitty in front of their Los Alamos home in 1945, overlapped and synced for the smallest measure of time before his memory is back in Pasadena with Jean, and she replie
d, ‘Your mother must have loved you very much,’ and he answered her, ‘Yes, I know. Maybe she loved me too much.’ He shut his eyes, she shut her eyes, and they woke in the morning to the crawl of light through the thick curtains, neither of them having shifted at all in the night.

  He did not tell Kitty about the doctor who came to see his father’s corpse, how the man rested his hand on his shoulder briefly before he followed the nurse into the bedroom, and Opje soothed himself with the assertion that it was best to imagine his father and mother in a cycle of constantly advancing momentum, each moment one in an ecosystem of time and bodies in which both are dead momentarily, though they are both alive in other future and past states.

  The night before Kitty left, they had let his retelling of his mother’s and father’s deaths fade to an end and moved toward their bedroom, past his daughter’s closed bedroom door and instead entered Peter’s room first, and he caught himself leaning over his son’s bed and telling him, ‘This will all be over soon,’ whispering the phrase out loud as his silhouette snaked up the wall above, Am I really that thin now? he thought in reaction to the shadow’s wrists and torso, before bowing over his son and pulling the blanket up to his shoulder, and the boy breathed a tiny lungful out and he left him that way, went to his own room. Kitty was propped up in the bed, a lit cigarette balanced in the ashtray, smoke and embers, on the bedside table. ‘He’s fine,’ he told her when she looked up, ‘I think he was just having a nightmare. He was quiet once I came in,’ and Kitty pulled the last half-inch of the cigarette into her and then stubbed it out, slid down in the bed, and turned off her light. He climbed in beside her, ‘I love you,’ and waited for Kitty’s exhales to settle into a steady rhythm, and in that waiting tried to recall the first time he saw Peter, three years ago: the nurse had come out of the birthing room to tell him that it was a boy, that he was fine, but because he was premature, they had to take him to a different part of the hospital and he followed her, her flat shoes slapping briskly, until he reached the window. ‘He’s the one in the front, on the far right,’ and he was tiny and writhing, but quiet, and he imagined that Peter was adjusting to his new world, to the constant light – how strange it must be to know only a world of darkness and warmth and then to leave it for this incredibly bright shock. ‘Hello,’ he greeted the boy, and watched him for a few minutes more before returning to Kitty.

  He lay in bed while all of Los Alamos was mercifully silent and his mind was his own for those few moments, and he slipped back to his and Kitty’s conversation with the Chevaliers, two months after Peter’s birth: ‘I’m just so tired,’ Kitty explained. ‘Would you take him for us?’ Once they agreed, he and Kitty left for Perro Caliente and its warm, swallowing air, and they cantered the fields of tall grass, sitting lazily back on the cantle of the saddle, and they were browned by summer, lay in bed past noon some days, reading or talking, and by the time they saw Peter again, as he turned four months old, he had spent half his life away from them. Opje was near sleep when he remembered having come back from New Mexico and, as they gathered their son and his things, that he retold how he was nearly trampled: he was rounding the horse for Bethe and had managed to flush it into a corner of the fenced pen before it bolted straight at him, over him – ‘It’s the only time a horse has done that to me,’ he said, and explained that he thought he could feel the startled hooves on his legs, his chest, ‘It’s the only time a horse has done that to me,’ and he lay in the dust as the horse bucked onto its back legs, threatening to bring its full weight down, before he rolled away, and it was during his X-rays in Santa Fe that he thought of Peter, and that he made the decision to return.

  In their Los Alamos bedroom, it was as if he were alone, his wife’s breathing imperceptible, and the complete night of the room drove him further inward, one-pointed, to nearly a year past those X-rays. Frank was visiting, and he recalled his brother mentioning how strange it was that Kitty stayed in the living room while he brought him to Peter’s crib. ‘She gets tired easily,’ he answered before adding, ‘I think he looks more like me,’ then corrected himself, ‘Actually, more like Julius,’ and from there he leapt to the memory of his father’s apartment as he sat at the dining table listening to the doctor explain what was going to happen to the body and encouraging him to ask whatever questions he might have. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and the doctor left with the nurse behind him, and then he was alone with his father’s body, and the afternoon brightness swarmed the kitchen, the sitting room, even as he closed his eyes, and he hunched in that same position, forgetting his body in the radio static that coated his brain, waiting until the medical examiner knocked. The night before Kitty left, before he told her about his father’s death, he remembers her angry across their kitchen table: ‘I’m alone all the time. You’re never here. And your children never see you. They’re my only job up here. There’s nothing else to do,’ she said. ‘We’re trapped here.’ He panned across the empty wine bottles in the kitchen, and he thought of waiting at that table in Julius’s apartment for the examiner then, the empty apartment and his father’s body, then how true Kitty’s words were: he saw Peter only when he was already asleep, never saw him play with the small gifts he brought him back when he travelled to New York or Chicago, those trips growing ever more intermittent as the Gadget solidified into tangibility, and the babysitter was becoming more frequent, Kitty’s trips to Santa Fe, Albuquerque, longer and more common, and the meetings of women in their living room now a daily occurrence, and then he thought of Ella pulling his and Frank’s coats around them, asking, ‘Are you warm enough?’ and thought of Julius and then again about Peter.

  ‘But he will know that his father is a famous scientist, that I helped end the war.’ He watched his wife for her reply. ‘That justifies the sacrifices I’ve made.’

  That memory dissolves and he is holding his wife and his daughter and none of the trio dares to move, clinging. He sees the infant Toni and remembers her birth, the snow already thick in early December, the seventh, 1944, the Pajarito Plateau covered in tiny star-specks of undisturbed white, when Kitty gave birth and the whole compound came by the barrack’s hospital to admire the girl underneath the stencilled ‘Oppenheimer’ sign. While Peter ran between legs and Kitty rested upstairs, he mixed drinks and accepted the congratulations and for a month the family spun in tight synchronicity, the four of them bundled into gloves and thick jackets, his son holding his hand as they all walked to the sledding hill. After that month, however, he began stumbling into conversations, surprising the young scientists, but not before he heard them talking about how their wives had seen Kitty yelling at Peter as he skulked down in his chair, how she stopped changing her clothes, how she was back to drinking and giving the children to the maid for the day.

  The night before Kitty left, just as he was about to fall asleep, she confessed to him, ‘I wish I could be a better mother.’

  ‘I wish I could be a better father.’

  ‘I can’t be here anymore. I have to go home. To my parents.’

  She left with Peter for Pittsburgh and he was alone in the house on Bathtub Row with Toni, he at the dining table filling himself with the military’s forms, the formal letters, the lab reports, and he caught himself during those late nights not having eaten since breakfast, and Henry Barnett, the pediatrician at the barrack hospital, approached him. ‘Perhaps it would be best if Katherine stayed with Pat Sherr and her husband. She just lost a child herself and I think it might help her,’ and he agreed, saw Toni twice a week – he had work to do, action, duty, the wheel thus set in motion.

  Kitty squeezes him as if to signal he should let her and their daughter go, that they should head inside, but he cannot hold back the memory of one month before: he went to see his daughter one afternoon, sat in the Sherr living room, and offered, ‘You seem to have grown to love Tyke very much.’

  ‘Well, I love children, and when you take care of a baby, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, it becomes a part of your life.’
Pat absently put down her teacup.

  ‘Would you like to adopt her?’

  ‘Of course not. She has two perfectly good parents. Why would you ask me such a thing?’

  ‘Because I can’t love her.’

  ‘Have you talked with Kitty about this?’

  ‘No, no, no. She’s been gone for two months now.’

  But Pat said no and Kitty returned a month later with Peter and he never told his wife; instead, he carries Toni down the small path leading into their Los Alamos home. As they enter, he eyes the photograph on the entryway table, the image of his mother and father holding him as a child, the three of them, and his mother is in a long-sleeved lacy blouse, her neck adorned with a gold chain, and she’s looking down at him; he’s in a white outfit that matches his mother’s, and his father is holding him in his lap, he’s turning toward his father’s chest, Julius smiling as he rests his chin on his son’s head.