He shrugged, walked through the living room where Michael, lounging on the couch in his pajamas, said, “It’s easy.”
His father said, “Don’t be a smart aleck,” and then, when he had hung up his coat, “Get to bed.”
Upstairs, in their room, Michael said, matter-of-factly, as if it were the middle of the day, “Battle of Hastings, 1066, Magna Carta, 1215…”
“I’m asleep.” Jacob had his back to him. His voice was muffled.
“I thought Jews were supposed to be smart,” Michael said. In the dim light from the hallway, he couldn’t tell at first what his brother had thrown at him—it missed anyway and hit the floor. But then he saw it was the flashlight Jacob kept at his bedside and the potential pain it might have caused filled him with indignation. They were on each other in seconds, legs and arms and blows struck into ears, into shoulders. The overhead light came on—if they hadn’t expected that it would they would not have begun the battle—and their father barked a single word. He dragged them apart, both of them splotched red in the cheeks and across their shoulders and throats, but whether from blows or their own fury, their father couldn’t have said.
He grabbed them, both of them panting, by their shirts. Their mother was in the doorway with Clare in her arms and Annie was next to her. “Enough,” was what he said.
He shoved them both down on the edge of their beds. “Sit.” They glared at each other, across the short space between their beds, believing, each of them, that there was no greater flaw in all the vast design of the universe than these two made brothers, condemned to this same small room. Only their father between them, saying words, kept them from colliding again.
“Flesh and blood,” were the words their father was saying, standing between them. Michael’s eyes fell on the black flashlight, rolled just under Jacob’s bed, and he pointed to it as if it could bear witness. “He threw the flashlight,” he said, before his father cut him off. “Your own brother,” their father said, raising his voice again. “Who,” he asked with his finger in the air, “who do you think you’ll have on your side when your mother and I are gone? Who do you think you’ll be able to turn to when you’re as old as I am and there’s something you need—a buck or two, or a piece of advice, maybe just someone you can ask, Remember when? Your friends? Your Little League team?” He waved his broad hand. “They’ll be scattered to the four winds. They’ll have forgotten your name.” He paused, as if waiting for them to speak. And then he said, “Your family. Your flesh and blood, that’s who you’ll have. If you’re lucky. Your two sisters. Each other. That’s who you’ll have.”
Michael held out his arm once more. “It could have really hurt,” he said, trying again; the occasions when Jacob struck the first blow were so rare. Their father put his hand in the air. “Enough,” he said again. “Apologize,” he said, suddenly weary. “Then say your prayers and go to sleep.”
He walked past them, past their mother and the two girls, turning off the overhead light as he did. Into the darkness, with Clare in her arms, their mother whispered, “Think of poor Uncle Frank.”
“He threw the flashlight at me,” Michael said, all in a rush.
His mother peered into the shadowed room. His sisters, little Clare and Annie both, stared at him too, duplicating her eyes. “Think what your father would give,” she told him, whispering, “to have his own brother beside him for just another night.” Then she walked away.
Jacob was slipping his pale feet under the covers, awkwardly, as if his feet were much bigger and his legs much longer than he could manage. He threw himself at his pillow like a landed fish, put his back to his brother and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. After only a second or two of silence, he said, “Sorry, Michael.”
Michael said nothing. He remained seated on the edge of his bed, the lumpy whorls of the chenille bedspread just under his palms. He looked into the lighted hallway, heard his mother putting Clare back into her bed, and asking Annie to put her head down. Then he heard them praying, “Ever this night, be at my side…” Next door, Mr. MacLeod was playing his piano again, each note just a slight vibration against their bedroom wall.
Michael had only a vague recollection: Uncle Frank had looked like their father, only ugly. A broader, taller, bizarro-world version of their father with more hair and bigger teeth and a white handkerchief that he would mop his maroon face with, like Louis Armstrong. He drove Cadillacs and always spoke to them in a voice like Donald Duck’s. When he visited, mixed nuts and chips with onion dip were served, and they would hear him downstairs late into the night, telling long, loud stories that involved a multitude of voices—Porky Pig, Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Durante—stories that made his parents scream with laughter. Sometimes, lying in the dark, listening, missing most of it, he and Jacob would laugh, too.
Michael watched his mother cross the hallway to her own room. Heard his parents’ voices. On the floor by his feet, just under the fringe of Jacob’s bedspread was the flashlight he had thrown. Quickly, Michael bent down and picked it up and then slipped into bed with it. He turned it on under the blankets, put his fingers over it to see if he could count the bones. Turned it up to the ceiling. He wrote his name, drew a face. The light went off in the hallway. He moved the beam over Jacob’s back, the bedspread and the blanket, his dark head, his ear.
He moved it down the length of his brother’s body and over the wooden footboard of his bed, past the dresser they shared, out the door. Leaning out over his own mattress, he saw the light catch the doorknob of the linen closet, the door to his sisters’ room. He willed the light to push the door open a bit more. He could then move the beam over Annie’s face, play it across her eyelids.
“Michael,” he heard his mother say from his parents’ room. She was trying to keep her voice low, but not whispering. “Go to sleep,” she said. She sounded not exactly far away but heading there, as if she had stopped in the middle of her leaving. “Do you hear me?” she said. He imagined she was speaking to him from over her shoulder, just as she was stepping out, maybe through one of her bedroom windows, maybe following his father, her hands on the window frame, her foot on the sill, their father already gone before her (when we’re gone, he had said) into the night. “Put out that light,” she said, over her shoulder, as he imagined it. And he did. In the darkness, he felt more certain of their absence. His parents had left the house and if he called out “Mom?” only Jacob and the girls would hear him. If there were a knock at the door tonight, it would be left to him to answer. He would take Jacob’s flashlight. He imagined Pauline, scratching at the glass, wanting to get in. Lying alone in the darkness, he formed the words in his mind, willed them across the room, but did not speak them out loud. “Sorry, Jacob.”
Instead, he whispered, “Mr. MacLeod is tinkling on his piano again.”
And then they were both laughing in the dark.
THEY SHOULD HAVE COME EARLIER in the day, but it was a World’s Fair, after all, and there had been much to distract them. Now the sun was low and orange, radiating heat like a glowing coal. The asphalt that had been wet and clean this morning—hosed down by jumpsuited workers intent, it seemed, on lending the paved-over park a hint of morning dew—was now gummy and pliant underfoot. Now heat waves rose from it, smeared the air and made a mirage of the shoes and the ankles and the pink knees of the passing crowds. The painted benches had grown too hot to sit on. The shrubs and sparse trees were limp. Now the jumpsuited men walked listlessly, clicking their long-handled brooms against the opened and closed mouths of their long-handled dustbins. The passengers in the sleek Glide-a-Rides, erect and smiling earlier in the day as they tested a bit of space-age transportation, now slumped in the molded plastic seats or gazed out from behind their sunglasses, unimpressed even with the future. It was the end of the day.
In another hour, the sun would dip into the Hudson and the humidity would begin to give way. In another hour—by the time they got through the exhibit—the lights in the trees and on the pavilions an
d under the fountain that surrounded the Unisphere would draw the eye up, to the spires and the arches and the silvery searchlights of the fair, to the stars themselves. But not now. Now every head was bent under the day’s accumulated heat, every grimy collar and darkened arm ring exposed, every stranger’s arm or bare shoulder—as they joined the line outside the exhibit—was sticky, unpleasantly cool.
“We should have come earlier,” Mary Keane said, although, she supposed, earlier the line might have been longer still.
Beside her, Annie stood on her toes to glimpse the distance to the entrance and then leaned out to see how many more had joined the line behind them. There was solace in the seven or eight—and now another four—who would have to wait longer still. She stepped back into place. There was a tall, older couple ahead of them, the woman fat, the man slightly stooped. Behind them, a younger couple, but not so young that the woman didn’t look a little foolish, hanging—in this heat—on the man’s hairy arm.
They had already missed the exhibit twice. Once, the first time they had come to the fair, when they had Clare and the two boys, who had balked at waiting an hour and a half to see a statue. Once again when their father was also along. After only ten minutes on the long line, he had shown them his wrist and declared that if they were not all in the car in the next half hour it would be a nightmare on the Grand Central.
(Because he was a man who always knew precisely when they must all be in the car, knew precisely the minute after which the trip would be in vain, impossible, a nightmare. “Look at the time,” turning furiously on his wife as if she were both the single force delaying them and the single reason in all the world that he sought to wage this battle. It made little difference if their arrival or departure was meant to be precise or merely eventual, he held his wrist in the air, his fist clenched as if he would bring it down on their heads if they failed to understand—tapping the face of his watch—that time was against them.)
But now they were just the two—mother and daughter—and while Mary Keane, in deference to her husband’s habit of mind rather than out of any impatience of her own, reprimanded herself for not getting here earlier, she also made calm accommodation for what would clearly be a long wait: a later bus home, was all, she told herself. A phone call to the boys to tell them to fix some spaghetti. Another to Pauline, who had Clare for the day. Nothing else to stop them, really, from finally seeing this through.
“Probably,” she said to her daughter, “it’s best to have left this for last. Probably after you see this you won’t want to see anything else.”
Together, months ago, they had watched on TV as the statue arrived. Or at least they had seen the crate that contained it as it was lowered from a ship. One of the world’s most profound and precious works of art, taken from Rome for the first time in history. The television showed men reaching up to touch the wooden crate as it slowly descended. Carved by the artist in his youth, nearly five hundred years ago.
And the line was moving. Shuffling, really, as if the hot asphalt pulled at their feet, and with so little distance between them all that each step brought the bump or brush of another body, a bare forearm, a soft hip. The touch of a toe against your heel. Among the fair’s sweet, pervasive smell of Belgian waffles, there was a stirring of human odors, perfume and aftershave and sweat and hair warmed by the sun. The odor of breath as they all turned to one another to say, “At least it’s moving.”
The tall old man in front of them wore a yellow plaid shirt, short-sleeved. Although his arms were tanned, his puckered elbows were chalky. He had missed a belt loop in back. Beside him, his wife was fanning herself with a map of the fair. Despite the heat, there was a white pillbox hat pinned to the back of her head. She wore a floral shirtwaist dress and the flesh beneath her arm moved like a pink hammock filled with something heavy. She turned to the mother and daughter to say that the lines had been terrible all day long. They’d waited forty-five minutes to see It’s a Small World. More than an hour and a half at the Bell Pavilion. There was an orange plastic dolphin on her dress, a gift from the Florida exhibit. She said they’d brought their son along, who was on leave, but he’d already gone back to the hotel to cool off. He told them he did enough standing in line in the army.
For Annie, the lines, the crowds, the restricted view while she waited, were all part of the fair’s adventure, like being led, blindfolded. At the end of every wait—it had been happening all day—wonders were revealed.
(She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of tomorrow. They had sat—after the hour wait—in a moving theater as a mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and the 1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They’d watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended above the ordinary Queens skyline. They’d walked quietly through the spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of snow. They’d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental highway while a voice like God’s told them, whispering softly into their ears, that the present was just an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.)
The line shuffled forward three more steps. Constricted by the space between them, Mary Keane reached back carefully and pulled her blouse away from her spine. She felt a bead of perspiration roll down her back. And then another. Cascading, she thought. “I’m melting,” she said. Behind them, the man with the woman on his arm was reading from a guidebook. Annie felt the edge of the paper against the back of her head.
“They shouldn’t have moved something so old,” he said. “Something could have happened to it.” And the woman on his arm made a sympathetic noise and then seemed to readjust herself, as if she were turning in bed.
“God, it’s hot,” she said and Mary Keane turned to nod at her, “Isn’t it, though?” Farther behind them there was a family, parents and two teenagers, limp shouldered and unhappy. Then what might have been a church group of pastel men and women, all with name tags and crosses on their breasts, fanning themselves with identical paper fans printed loudly with the name of an Atlanta funeral home.
Above the rooftops of the Belgian Village, the sun had gone from orange to red—so fiery now it might have been lifted from some creation tableau itself. Might more appropriately have been shining down on tar pits or boiling mud. As Annie leaned out to look back (the line was longer still) and then forward (no shorter ahead), the red sun struck the gold dome of the pavilion and sent her ducking back into her place. Now a vertiginous edge of purple outlined everything she saw. She saw heads turned away from the sun. Shoulders moving slowly forward. The man’s speckled hand that had missed a belt loop this morning reaching up to wipe perspiration from his sunburned neck. His wife was turned around again to say to her mother they had one son in the army and one in the Marines and another one married and back near home. And Mary Keane replied four, two boys and two girls.
Something prehistoric, too, in the scaly flesh of the woman’s throat as she turned to speak to them, chin and neck indistinguishable. Her voice was worn.
She said she should have gone for four and had a girl, too. Daughters will wait with you to see something like this. Not boys. “Although my boys are good to me,” she said. “They’re good boys.”
The woman turned to Annie, taking her in with small eyes, perhaps assessing what she’d missed. Suddenly, she asked, “Did you see the Carousel of Progress, honey?”
And her mother answered, “Yes we did.”
“The Magic Skyway? Futurama? The Moon Dome? Did you talk on the picturephones?”
“Oh, yeah,” Annie said, knowing her mother wanted her to say yes, not yeah.
“What I want to know,” the woman said, raising her voice, nearly shouting, “is what i
f you just got out of the shower, and your picturephone is ringing? Do you answer it?” She laughed, her open mouth full of silver and gold. She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eyes. “That’s your future, honey,” she said to Annie. “Not mine or your mom’s.” She leaned back, her wide arm touching Mary Keane’s damp shoulder. “We’ll be well out of it, don’t you think?”
The man in the plaid shirt, as husbands will do, was staring straight ahead, ignoring the conversation, as if both women were strangers to him. Even in this heat, Mary Keane was aware of a certain pleasure in being relieved of the burden of a husband.
“We sure will,” she said, agreeably.
But then the woman suddenly raised her arm, the pale skin swinging, and gestured toward the fantastic rooflines and white towers, the sky lifts and the monorails.
“The only thing I hate to think about,” she said, “is how all this will be knocked down when the fair is over.”
Other than the slow shuffling forward and the fanning of maps and brochures, there was the rise and fall of cigarettes to mouths, the tossing of them onto the asphalt. A couple up ahead occasionally left the line to chase a toddler. The man behind them was saying “Michael-angelo,” and the woman on his arm was saying, “Meekel, Meekel-angelo.”
They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered elbows, freckles, birthmarks. The variety of head shapes and hair colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his arms, the woman’s weight against him.
The fat woman, mopping her thick neck with a small tissue, turned again to say that the long wait would be worth it. “It’ll be like a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.”
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