He lifted his hand to wipe the perspiration from his lip, raised and lowered his good leg and then slipped both hands under the thigh of the bad one and slowly raised it until he could feel again the weight pulling against his foot.
And then the pain again, wire thin this time, through his leg and into his gut and reaching up to hook the corners of his mouth.
He turned his head, waiting for it to pass. The fan on the dresser was humming, though it offered no breeze. The Saran-wrapped sandwich and the pile of magazines his wife had left for him on her side of the bed, the damp bedsheets themselves, gave off a nauseating yellow sheen and in his impatience with it, with the pain itself, he pulled at the leg again.
The pain answered in kind.
It was a ridiculous argument. A stupid fight. And yet, he raised his chin defiantly at the speckled boot. There were white dots of paint from the living room, bits of pale green from when he had done the boys’ room, pale pink from the year Clare was born. Other colors, no doubt, were he to examine it more closely, two decades’ worth of housekeeping chores done in these boots, painting and gardening and leaf raking, the very peacetime pursuits the army, in giving them to him, had sought to insure. Pursuits that the pain, on this hot still morning, now easily reduced to foolishness. He had wasted his life with painting and gardening and leaf raking. He had squandered his time.
With his hand under his thigh, he lifted his leg again. The pulley squeaked a little, slowly turning. Foolish man, Michael had said. Ve have other ways. Well, no, not squandered. There were his children, after all.
In the mirror above his wife’s dresser, he could see the reflection of the crucifix that hung over their bed, the tiny gold Christ curled against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the accoutrements of Last Rites. It had been a gift from the priest who married them, a reminder, no doubt, that their marriage bed might also be the bed in which they would breathe their last. It had not been difficult for them, bred-in-the-bone Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at the beginning of their lives together, to imagine the final scene: the candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at his bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving. Certainly, they had said till death do us part, but it wasn’t until they’d opened the priest’s present (he recalled the wrappings of the other gifts spread across the living room of her father’s apartment, her pretty beige going-away suit, the nervous anticipation he had felt, opening a few packages while they waited for the cab that was to take them to the city) that the scene became vivid for them both—the crucifix spread apart, the thin white tapers lit, the dim room where he would breathe his last.
It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street, already gone.
He lowered the leg again, heard the pile of thick books, tied together like a schoolboy’s satchel, hit the floor. Pain such as this had a tendency to reduce everything, every effort, every belief, to brittle plastic, easily shattered. It could shatter the notion of Paradise opened by a single, wracked body hung on a cross. It could shatter any hope you had that you were worth more than the bustling of your ordinary days. It could remind you easily enough that death was no more or less than the choke and sputter of a single muscle, the sudden exposure of gut and bone, your skin turned black in the cold.
If you didn’t argue against it, the idiot pain, the very things you’d based your life on could shatter.
His eyes went from the reflected crucifix to the blank gray face of the television. He could make out his own reflection there, sitting up against the headboard. His chest and shoulders in his pale pajamas, his bald head, his face, which in the reflected shadow and distorted sunlight caught by the blank screen, was suddenly the face of his brother.
It had happened before: one of his sons would be talking in another room and he’d hear, for a moment, Frank’s laughter. His niece once raised a hand, turned her head, and it was Frank’s gesture. He would raise his own chin shaving and there he’d see his brother, briefly, briefly.
Even now his own reflection in the blank gray face of the TV set had become simply his own again, too bald, too gaunt for Frank. But the glimpse, nevertheless, had been well timed, and as if to acknowledge it, small gift that it was, he pulled at the leg again. He held his breath again as the pain flared. No realistic person expected a full-fledged visitation, or even hoped for one—it was, surely, what they meant when they said “laid to rest”—but still there were tricks of the eye or of the mind that could satisfy even someone like himself, who, steeped in superstition as a child, had long ago learned to resist it. Surely there were assurances, even for the most reasonable of believers, that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day. Frank’s face, glimpsed briefly, assuring him, his own heart, his spirits, rising at the mere possibility of once again seeing his brother’s face.
He recalled that all the pain of that rainy day—the endless Mass at Incarnation, the traffic-choked ride to the cemetery—had been for Catherine, Frank’s daughter. All the dignity, resignation, joyful hope of resurrection the rest of them had mustered, as one must, to get through the day, undermined by the poor girl’s tears. She cried a torrent through it all. Thin as a willow in her dark sweater and skirt, bent over in the pew or under her mother’s arm at the cemetery. A scrap of tissue in her hands and the pale red hair falling over her face. Too young to be so wracked by grief. Too pretty, too newly formed to know that particular kind of disappointment. Afterward, back at the house, he had knelt beside her chair and said, “Your father will be with you for the rest of your days,” and she, nineteen at the time, had looked at him with her red eyes and said, “I’ll never stop missing him.”
Six months later, when he gave her his arm on the day she was married, he felt himself a poor substitute, although she had whispered her gratitude, leaving the scent of her lipstick on his cheek and his ear. She had married a kid from Greenwich, a wealthy boy who had a seat on the Stock Exchange now. They lived in Garden City and had refused so many invitations, to Clare’s christening party, to her first Holy Communion, to confirmations and graduations, even to a few odd Sunday suppers, that he and Mary had simply stopped asking. “She moves in different circles now,” Ellen, Frank’s wife, had said, with more pride than disappointment, although many of her invitations were also refused.
Last he saw her, just last year, he was waiting for his wife and the girls outside A&S when Catherine, in a beige Cadillac, pulled into the parking space beside him. It took him a moment to recognize her, and she was out of her car by the time he waved at her through his own passenger window. Then he opened his door to get out and greet her. But she was already walking away, her head down. There was another woman with her and she was the one who glanced over her shoulder when he called. But neither one of them paused.
He looked again at his reflection in the TV set. You’ll be pleased to know that she drives a Cadillac. That she’s doing quite well, her own daughter growing, Ellen tells me. A big house in Garden City. I can’t say that it didn’t cut me like a knife, Frank, standing in that parking lot. I can’t say that I didn’t see some of it in you, while you were here, with your own Cadillacs every other year, your Chivas Regal and your fancy beer, a certain fascination, when we were kids, with the society page.
He lifted the leg again. The pain, he realized, was constant, there was only the illusion of ebb and flow.
His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old
scores with our relatives.
Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.
He pulled at the leg again—it was only stubbornness that made him continue to believe that what he was doing was therapeutic.
AT NOON MARY CALLED from the city. They had met Pauline at Penn Station and now they were having lunch at Schrafft’s before the show. It was hotter than heck. They were looking forward to getting into the cool theater.
And then, with (he would have said) much hemming and hawing, she asked him cautiously (she was building up to something) how he was feeling, if he’d gotten any sleep, if he could eat—and, finally, if his contraption was doing him any good.
He said, Yes it was, believe it or not, and he knew immediately that the lie had taken the wind out of her sails.
Still, she said, “Pauline says it’s a slipped disk.”
“Pauline’s the expert, then,” he said.
Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience, recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry—the kind of concoction only a long marriage can brew. Rising behind it was the faint clatter of dishes, the hum of restaurant conversation.
“No,” she said finally. “But a gal from the office had a brother-in-law with the same problem. Just woke up one morning with a terrible pain. Down his leg. A slipped disk.”
His wife would replace the natural laws with anecdotes. No gravity until someone’s sister’s cousin’s husband had fallen down the stairs. Night and day mere rumor until a girl she used to know in high school was stricken with insomnia, or burned to a crisp by the sun.
“Is that so?” he said placidly. “Same exact thing?”
“Yeah,” she said, with some hesitation. “More or less. You know, his leg.”
The line clicked to say their three minutes were up and instead of getting off, she said, “Hold on,” and dropped another dime into the phone.
“Right or left?” he asked when the coin had been swallowed.
“What?” she said.
And he repeated more emphatically, “Was it the right leg or the left leg? Of this fellow just like me?”
She paused and then said, “Very funny,” to show that it wasn’t. “Pauline read an article about it,” she said. “It happens to a lot of men. It’s evolution. It’s the price men pay for standing upright.”
Pauline, he thought, would be happy to learn that there is a price men pay for standing upright.
“Tomorrow I’m calling the doctor,” she went on, the very reason she had dropped the second dime into the machine. He could see her do her little “so there” nod. There, I said it.
“What are you going to call him?” he asked her.
When she hung up the phone he could hear her say “Stubborn” before the receiver hit the cradle. He could not be sure if she was speaking to herself or to Pauline, or perhaps to the two girls, who would also nod. Maybe only to a waiter, clattering dishes.
An hour later, Jacob returned, banging into the house as he tended to do, always sounding like a drunk on a stage set. He moved around the kitchen a bit, clink of glass and clatter of silverware and slam and then slam again of the refrigerator door. When he poked his head around the doorway of the bedroom, he had half a sandwich in his cheek, the other half, dripping mustard and pickle relish, cupped like a small creature in his hands.
“How are you doing, Dad?” he asked, stretching his throat to get the food swallowed as he spoke. John Keane could not help but wonder how many years would have to go by before it would occur to his son that maybe he should have come up and asked after his father before he made the sandwich.
“Better,” he said.
And then Jacob began nodding, that long, low, exaggerated nod that he and his friends so often substituted for speech. “The thing’s working, then,” he said.
His father shrugged. “Seems to be.”
“Good enough,” Jacob said, still nodding. He was not quite meeting his father’s eye. “You want me to put the TV on for you?”
Although it was within easy reach and the last thing he wanted, he said, “Sure. That’d be great.”
Jacob’s sneakers were grass stained and there were grass stains like brushstrokes on his skinny calves and his khaki shorts. Not just slower and shyer than his brother, but shorter, too: you could see in his legs, in the way he walked, that at nineteen there was no more growth in him, that the sudden, surprising adolescent transformation his father had imagined for him all through his childhood was not going to occur. It surprised him. The men in his family were all of a good size. He thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that his son should take after no one so much as his long-ago namesake, the other Jacob.
John Keane watched the boy as he carefully edged himself between the bed and the TV on its rickety stand, turned it on, fiddled with the antenna, leaning a little, his back to his father. He smelled like mown grass, sun, and air. There was some sinewy strength in his tanned arms and in his hands. A young man’s strength, a young man’s compact body under the loose, sweat-limp T-shirt. It was another kind of pain—a sweet, heart-dropping pain—what he felt for his son, what he felt for the boy’s young body, his awkwardness, his earnestness, his life ahead. And he suddenly found himself pulling against it, deliberately, with an opposite and equal weight, meant, like the contraption that bound his foot, to provide equilibrium. There were his failings as well. There was the question, after a less than successful first year, of whether he’d go back to St. John’s in the fall. (“Good money after bad,” he had told the boy, after Jacob’s last set of grades. He’d said, “I’ve got four of you to put through college, you know.”) There was the draft. There was the chance that the military would be the making of him. There was the chance of Vietnam.
Jacob stepped back for a moment, watching the TV—two soap-opera characters, a man and a woman, arguing intently, another woman shown wide-eyed, elaborately eavesdropping from behind a closed door. Jacob watched them all with utter absorption as he finished his sandwich. His father could see the small crop of sparse beard along his son’s jawline, under the fair, sun-touched skin. He needed a haircut, but these days they all did.
When a commercial began, Jacob turned to his father as if he’d just come to. (It was the heart of the boy’s trouble, John Keane would have said; he was too easily absorbed.) “You want to see this?” he asked and his father waved a hand. “Christ, no,” he said. “Turn it off. Get your shower.”
And then he reached out to touch his son, to playfully slap him on the back, but he missed and paid the price for the awkwardness of the movement with another neon-bright rush of pain. He pulled some air through his teeth, he couldn’t help it, and Jacob paused, looking down on him from beside the bed, and then, gently, put a hand to his father’s shoulder. His face was white under his tan and his dark hair fell into his eyes. “Dad,” he said with some alarm, and then paused. And then, in another tone altogether, he said evenly, “What can I do for you?”
There was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance. He had said to that other Jacob, in a prayer, What can I do for you?—and now here was his own boy, that other’s impulsive namesake, saying the same. Some pattern in the coincidence, the connectedness, some thread of assurance that was woven through the passing years—but he was in too much pain now to discern it, if it was there at all. He put his fingertips to his son’s arm. “Get your shower,” he said. “I’m fine.”
When Michael returned, he leaned into the bedroom and said, “How you doing, Dad?” and “The Met game’s on” in the same breath. He turned on the television, sat on the edge of the bed. He, too, had the smell of the outdoors on him. The smell of the golf course. The smell of the wider world. At the first commercial break, Michael looked over his shoulder at the boot and the rope and the pulley and the wood, at his father’s suspended leg. He tested the rope a bit. “Maybe we should patent this thing,” he sai
d. “We can write to the army and buy up their old boots.” He laughed. His father glimpsed the face Michael would wear as a grown man, the blue eyes and good teeth. It was handsome now, in its youth, but it would be no more than pleasant, perhaps, in middle age. “If they don’t all have jungle rot by now,” he added.
Jacob had joined them to watch the extra innings. He was in the chair beside his father’s bed. He was showered and dressed, a short-sleeved shirt and cutoff blue jeans. There was a girl who took up his evenings this summer, although it was Michael who, his father noticed, had a pink bruise on his neck, the shape of a small bite.
“Tony Persichetti,” Michael was saying, “said in his letter that the skin comes off with his socks.”
Downstairs, their mother and the girls were just coming in. Clare was the first to climb the stairs. She hesitated for a moment at the door of the bedroom before her father called her in, and then she leaped easily up onto the bed, rattling the mattress and the magazines, the plate with the untouched sandwich and every plate, it seemed, in her father’s fragile spine. He put a hand out. “Go easy,” he said. Michael turned from the game to say, “Watch it, nimrod.” Only slightly subdued, she perched herself on the pillow beside her father, patted his bald head. “We had fun,” she said.
Then Mary was in the doorway, in her skirt and blouse and stocking feet. Her hands on her hips. “Are you ready to get out of that thing?” she asked.
John Keane saw both boys bow their heads.
“No,” he said simply. “It’s helping.”
She looked to the boys, as if they would corroborate her skepticism. But they were having none of it. She looked especially at Michael, who might have been her surest ally, given all the times in the past he’d stood against his father, over politics, over hairstyles, over mandatory Sunday Mass. “Honestly,” she said, moving into the room, gathering the clutter from her side of the bed. “I hardly think this is the solution.”
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