They spent most summer Thursdays picnicking on the river or watching swan boats in the public garden. If it rained they sat at a sidewalk café under an umbrella. Their vacations happened to coincide—temporally, not geographically; the Raffertys went camping in Wyoming, the Winokaurs exchanged houses with a family in Hampstead. September found them both back in town. It was almost a year since they’d first met.
The Thursday after vacation, they took a noontime cruise on the harbor. The boat was crowded and noisy. The ladies’ room was out of order. Hugh spilled coffee on Marlene’s skirt. He apologized, but his annoyance seemed directed at her.
“Sorry to be in your way,” she said stiffly.
“Hey!”
And the boat returned so late that they had to take a cab across town. She huddled in the backseat corner and watched his profile. Many a college romance had not survived the summer vacation. As if you could call this romance! How did we get here? she echoed herself. Where are we going? Suppose Paul found out?
Suppose Paul found out what? She and Hugh had never kissed. They had never held hands. Once his knuckles had burned hers as he handed a menu across the table. Once, on the riverbank, he had flipped over onto his stomach beside her and she had placed her hand briefly on his blue-and-white striped back. He’d shuddered and turned his face away …
“Would you like to visit a hotel together?” he was saying now.
Her skirt was still soaked with coffee. “Are you inviting me or the cab driver?”
So he had to look at her. He was unsmiling, and his face flamed like a boy’s.
“Yes,” she said. “I would. I would.”
They knew where to go. Twice they had lunched in the lobby café at the Orlando, a lively salesman’s hotel, and they watched couples without luggage—handsome, well-dressed couples—checking in.
“Next Thursday, then,” Hugh said.
“Next Thursday,” Marlene agreed.
She had never stopped loving Paul. During the week that followed she loved him tenderly, gratefully—loved his short, muscular body, his preoccupied manner, his kindness to their children. One love had nothing to do with the other. Paul was the man she would contentedly grow old with. But though she and Hugh were both past forty, theirs was the brief happy fling of youth. Everything proved it: their indifference to the future, their bright, news-of-the-week conversation. He was her boyfriend. She was his girl.
She wore a new dress—silk, with a dropped waist. It was the color of Hugh’s eyes. She looked beautiful, she hoped … even though her cheeks were a little too round and her slate-colored eyes disappeared when she laughed. Her headful of curls was in fashion. At a distance she could pass for a femme fatale.
And it was at a distance that they saw each other, that next Thursday. She was standing at the rear of the lobby when he came through the revolving door. The lobby café separated them. He made his way among the tables, lumbering a bit, bigger than most men, handsomer than all. The smile curved. It curved, it curved … but falsely; she could tell that at once. “You don’t have to,” she said, under her breath. Then his face was close to hers, so close that she could have kissed him, and who would have thought anything of that?—two old friends kissing, people did it all the time, Paul was always complaining that women he hardly knew embraced him at parties like tango dancers. She said it again. “You don’t have to. Dear.”
“I cannot,” he told her.
She probably could have talked him into it. “I’ve put on my diaphragm,” she could have said, and he would have understood that by that act she had already betrayed her marriage. Or she could have allowed her eyes to fill with chagrined tears. Or her enthusiasm, her delight, might have carried him along. But she didn’t use those wiles.
“You don’t have to,” she said for the third time. “Although,” she couldn’t help adding, “everybody else does.”
He took her arm and led her toward a table. “We’re not everybody else,” he said.
No, they were not everybody else, she thought while pretending to eat her salad. Everybody else—in Boston, in Paris, in Tel Aviv; Protestants, Catholics, Jews; black and white, young and old and rich and poor—everybody else played by today’s rules. Young O’Riordan would turn up in this hotel within a decade. And Marlene’s children, when the time came; and Hugh’s children … Everybody else was up-to-date. But she and Hugh were throwbacks. They were bound to the code of their youth—self-denial and honor and fidelity—an inconvenient code that would keep them, she realized with a pang, forever chaste, and forever in love.
BINOCULAR VISION
FOR HIS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY my father was given a pair of binoculars. His medical colleagues teamed up on the present. He was neither a bird-watcher nor a sports fan, so the glasses just lay on his dresser like a trophy.
They didn’t tempt me at first. I had already been disappointed by his ophthalmoscope, which didn’t magnify a thing. (I also didn’t like the coin-operated telescope on our Connecticut city’s twenty-four-story building, the tallest in New England; as soon as I managed to focus on something through the telescope, my nickel ran out.) But one December afternoon, wandering in an aimless, childish way around my parents’ bedroom, I picked up the binoculars, took them to a window that looked out on the street, and directed them toward a leafless tree. I saw a brown blur, so I fiddled with the wheels on the instrument. Now the tree was hyper-clear, making my eyes ache. Finally, after more fiddling, I saw the tree plain and even vaguely menacing, like my great-uncle at the last family party who had leaned so close to me that his tie swayed in front of my eyes. But when I thoughtlessly reached out to touch the tree’s bark, I touched instead the windowpane.
The side window in my parents’ room, like the windows of the other bedrooms in our end-of-the-row house, looked out at the second-floor apartment next door, also brick, where the Simons lived.
With the aid of the binoculars, I projected myself into the Simons’ living room. Their fireplace was as dark as a cave. On the mantel crouched a humpbacked clock. In one of the two chairs flanking the hearth sat Mrs. Simon herself, her gray head bent. She was crocheting. I could not see the pattern of the work, nor the pattern on her dress, but I could see that her green chair wore a lace antimacassar and that a flared lamp on a table cast its glow on a pile of magazines. There was no television, of course—only rich show-offs had televisions then.
I went into my own bedroom. From there I inspected the Simons’ dining room. An empty silver bowl occupied pride of place on the table. Perhaps Mr. Simon’s colleagues had given it to him when he turned forty. I went into my sister’s bedroom. From her window I peered at the Simons’ little kitchen. Two cups and two saucers lay on the drainboard. A calendar hung on the wall, but no matter how much I fiddled with the wheels of the binoculars I could not make out the Simons’ appointments.
From our last bedroom, reserved for guests, I got a dark glimpse of the Simons’ big bedroom. I knew there was a small bedroom, too, for my friend Elaine lived in an identical apartment down the street. The small bedroom faced the backyard, a skimpy strip of grass and six little garages, one each for the six apartments. I would never get to see that bedroom. The room I did see had a double bed with an afghan at its foot, folded into a perfect right triangle. This application of geometry to daily life gratified my critical ten-year-old self.
DURING THAT MONTH, which included a school vacation, I discovered that Mrs. Simon was a great tidier. Often I would find her in the living room, readjusting an antimacassar or rearranging candy in a dish or polishing the glass door of the bookcase. Serious cleaning was done once a week by a regal mulatto woman, but sometimes Mrs. Simon would stand at the kitchen sink, her stubborn profile lowered, fiercely scrubbing something. Occasionally she lay down in the bedroom. And often she disappeared. Perhaps she was talking on the telephone in the hall, a windowless place my binoculars could not penetrate. Or perhaps she was walking a few blocks to Elm Street, as most of the women in our neighborhood did
most days, in order to pick up some fish and vegetables, or a library book. Once in a while I ran into Mrs. Simon on just such an errand. We were the same height—I was a tall child and she a small and somewhat bent woman—and her expression was as steely as her curls. Our eyes met, with no mediating binoculars. “Hello,” I’d whisper, suddenly shy. She never answered.
In the late afternoons, Mrs. Simon got busy. She stirred pots on the stove. She set the table in the dining room. She folded the evening paper several times, this way and that, and finally laid it on the arm of Mr. Simon’s chair. Again she adjusted the antimacassars and arranged the candies.
Darkness came at 4:30. From the window of our spare bedroom, reading by flashlight, I kept track of the cars returning to the six garages. A floodlight illuminated the area. When Mr. Simon’s car appeared, I would close my book, switch off my flashlight, and raise my binoculars.
Mr. Simon, a tall man, would unfold from his automobile. He’d pass a hand over his gray hair, raise the door of the garage, get back into the car, and drive it into the garage. He usually sat there for a while, giving me a chance to inspect his license plate, which had three numbers and two letters. I have forgotten them all. My eyes caressed the curve of his car trunk. I noticed the branch caught on the fender. Where had he been driving, to collect such a trophy? Was he a salesman? What did he do while Mrs. Simon and I were watching the clock for him?
In the midst of my musings, Mr. Simon would reappear, briefcase in hand, and roll down his garage door. That handkerchief, hanging from his overcoat pocket—might it slip out? Would the drop of the handkerchief be marked only by me, whose presence was as undetectable as God’s? And if I alone saw cloth meet asphalt, could the handkerchief really be said to have fallen, or would it be like the tree I’d learned about in class, the tree that cracks unheard in the forest and thus provides a philosophical question for the ages? Surely Mrs. Simon, who sorted her laundry with as much finickiness as a forty-niner panning for gold, would notice a missing item. But the handkerchief clung to his pocket as Mr. Simon walked slowly across the backyard and toward the rear door of the apartment building.
I glided into my parents’ dark bedroom. My mother was duplicating Mrs. Simon’s activities in our kitchen downstairs, my father was saving people’s vision in his office. I turned my magic glasses onto the Simons’ bright living room, only a few yards away.
How I yearned to witness Mr. Simon’s return. Alas, it always took place in that inner hall. It must be like my father’s homecoming: the woman hurrying to the door; the man bringing in a gust of weather and excitement; the hug, affectionate and sometimes annoyingly long; and finally the separation, so that two little girls rushing downstairs could be caught in those overcoated arms. But at the Simons’ there were no children. Perhaps the pair exchanged a dignified kiss.
Our dinner coincided with theirs. And then I had to help my mother with the dishes. It wasn’t until evening that I saw the Simons again.
This was my favorite scene. The couple by the fireplace and the invisible guest. I could see how motionless Mr. Simon’s long face was as he read the paper, page by slow page, and how stiffly he held his shoulders under the jacket he never took off. I could almost hear the tick of the mantelpiece clock.
I shifted my attention to Mrs. Simon. Cross and cross again went the needles. And up and down, up and down went the active lips, the unstoppable mouth, the mouth that never produced a word for me but spoke so easily and swiftly and continually when the beloved was home. Talking. Laughing. Talking again.
AFTER VACATION I visited the Simons less often. By the end of January I was dropping in only occasionally—for a moment at the end of an afternoon, say, to make sure that something was cooking on the stove.
Then, during breakfast one February morning, two policemen appeared at our back door. “Doctor, can you …?” My father did not pause even to put on his suit jacket; he just followed the sturdy officers into the yard, looking like their servant in his silk-backed waistcoat and his white shirtsleeves. They walked across the crusted snow and into the backyard of the apartment building next door. My mother stood at the kitchen window, her hand on her heart.
My father returned before we left for school. “It’s Al Simon,” he said to my mother. “He died during the night.”
My sister continued to buckle her boots.
“Was he murdered?” I said.
“No,” my father said. “What makes you ask?”
“The policemen.”
My father sighed. Then, after a thoughtful pause, “Mr. Simon committed suicide,” he told me. “In his car.”
“Did he drive it off a cliff?”
My parents exchanged frowns and shrugs. Such a child, their looks said, all curiosity and no sympathy—and this the teachers call gifted? Then, still in a patient voice, my father explained that Mr. Simon had driven into his garage, closed the door from inside, stuffed the cracks with newspapers, reentered his car, and turned on the motor.
The next day in the obituary section I could find no hint of suicide, unless suddenly was the code word. But the final sentence was a shocker. “Mr. Simon, a bachelor, is survived by his mother.”
I raced to my own mother. “I thought she was his wife!”
“So did she,” my mother said, admitting me abruptly into the complicated world of adults, making me understand what I had until then only seen.
NEW STORIES
GRANSKI
“TWO FACES, ONE NOSE,” Toby said. “A physiognomic curiosity. Which ancestor did we get it from?”
“Isaac Abravanel,” Angelica replied, though the family’s connection to that prominent Portuguese merchant had never been firmly established.
The nose, whatever its origin, was a long thin wavy proboscis, rather comely. Except for this similar feature, the cousins looked nothing alike. Angelica had topaz eyes. Various dark colors shifted in her hair. Toby’s narrow eyes were gray, his hair a steady brown.
They were sixteen. During the school year, at home—she in Paris, he in Connecticut—each kept au courant with songs, the proper placement of studs, movies; of course they carried cell phones and knew where to buy weed. But here in Maine they could be their true selves. Their true selves were variously described by the family. Snooty agoutis, according to their younger siblings and cousins. Good sports, according to Gramp, a good sport himself. Too damned clever, said their mothers, who were sisters. The third sister, aunt to Toby and Angelica, complained that they breathed air rarefied even for this family, and we are already the most hyper-indulged characters on the face of the … Her statement dwindled as always. As for Gran—tall, crop-haired, pale-eyed Gran—whatever she thought of these particular grandchildren she didn’t bother to say.
They were enjoying exceptional educations, Angelica in her école, Toby in his boarding school. His French was almost as good as her English. Here in Maine they played tennis, hiked, swam. Gramp taught them to drive, then told them not to use the car. “Self-restraint is strength,” he explained. “Also you can be arrested for driving without a license.”
“Self-restraint is fear,” Toby said one afternoon as they walked to the little boathouse. “We are a terrified clan. Since Antwerp.”
Seventy years earlier the family had fled Antwerp for Haifa. The details of the disembarkation had been repeated again and again. Angelica could have drawn the scene. The youngest child, a little girl, ran down the gangplank, a fortune in diamonds sewn into her coat. Her two brothers followed—the older would become Gramp. Great-grandmother came next, face tragic above a fur-collared coat. She had left the graves of two other sons in the Shomre Hadas Cemetery. Great-grandfather brought up the rear. He had managed the departure from Belgium, he had swept his family to safety, his children now twice owed their lives to him. His portrait hung over Gramp’s desk in the Manhattan brownstone.
“Great-grandfather was a type,” Toby now remarked. “Cultivated European.”
“Prescient,” Angelica reminded him.
“Without Great-grandfather you and I would never have been born.”
“We were fated to be born.”
“No, no, it was hap.” Yesterday she had won bonus points for hap in bilingual Scrabble. “Hap and heroism.”
Their heroic great-grandparents had settled in Jerusalem, thrived, worriedly saw the birth of Israel. Their grandfather, though, had remained only long enough to conceive a dislike for the coarse country. The end of the war found him on another ship, this one bound for Hoboken. (Two years later his younger brother emigrated to Cape Town.) The family had retained its banking connections: useful to both sons. In New York, Gramp made money from money. He was a dandy, he was musical, he married a renegade Yankee then working as a veterinarian’s assistant. Grace Larcom—Gran, now—was an only child, born late in the life of her parents. She insisted on converting, or at least declaring herself converted, though Gramp said it was unnecessary. This big summerhouse in Maine was all Gran’s straitened father and mother had to give her, and they gave it gladly. “They were relieved that I was chosen by a human being,” she’d said to Angelica in her dry voice. “They were braced for an interspecies liaison.” And decades afterward, summer after summer, Gramp and Gran’s three far-flung daughters returned with their husbands and their growing families—Angelica’s beautiful mother from Paris; Toby’s artistic one from Washington; the third sister, the one who rarely finished a sentence, from Buenos Aires.
Angelica was a month older than Toby. That made her the oldest of the nine grandchildren. This accident of rank brought little privilege—everyone had chores to do—though she did get her own room on the third floor. The third floor was reached only by a set of shabby back stairs, but rising from the spacious front hall toward the balustraded second floor was a handsome central staircase. It separated into two staircases halfway up, an enormous Y. “Fit only for an opera house,” Gran complained; still, she kept the carved posts in good repair. Except for this spectacular feature, the house was asymmetrical, and also disorderly. Parlor opened off parlor, and the pantry cupboards were decorated with stained glass stained more deeply by time, and a piano was covered with brocade edged in dusty fringe, and the whole place was strewn with heirlooms of little value if you didn’t count the occasional signed piece of silver. “Impedimenta,” Gran said. Dense pines protected the house from the prying sun. But here and there light unexpectedly winked—reflected from a copper shovel, from a chandelier long ago cut down from the ceiling and left unmourned on its side, from a decanter holding a cloudy amethyst liquid.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 26