Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  Sasha nodded. “It was all a long time ago. Maybe now.…” He shrugged.

  Stefan didn’t ask maybe now what; Sasha probably meant everything would work out for all of them. How was that possible? What happened now didn’t erase all the previous years, the divorce, the secrets; you couldn’t make times like that go away by trying to be someone else trying to forget or live differently.

  “It will be a good thing,” Sasha decided. “I’ll make dinner. What did you do today?”

  Stefan followed Sasha to the kitchen and they talked casually about Sasha’s lesson, the friend he’d met for a late lunch. Stefan tasted and chopped and did the few other peripheral things Sasha permitted him to do.

  After dinner Sasha said “I met Jenny’s mother on Broadway. She’s very against the strike. Too much.” Sasha stirred his tea.

  Stefan excused himself. In the bedroom he hunted in the small leather-bound address book for his mother’s number; Sasha hadn’t put it under Borowski or Greenberg (Leo’s name). He turned the pages slowly, reading every entry, found it under Ann, but he only knew because of the address—he’d never thought of his mother as that and even when Leo called her “Annie” or Sasha said “Anya” it sounded very strange to him.

  “Yes?” Good—it was his mother.

  “Can I come tomorrow?”

  “That’s Wednesday.”

  “School’s on strike all week,” he said; she had to let him come tomorrow. He had to get away.

  “Do you remember the directions?” his mother asked after a pause. “Or Leo could pick you up—?”

  “No, I remember how.” Before he hung up he thought perhaps she wanted to say something else besides going over the directions with him, even ask why he was coming so soon, but all she said was “See you, then,” and hung up.

  Sasha was about to sit at the piano when Stefan walked into the living room.

  “I’m going to Bay Ridge tomorrow.”

  “Yes?”

  “For a while.”

  “Ah. The strike is all week?”

  “All week,” Stefan told him, going off to the kitchen, hungry again.

  After breakfast, he wandered around the apartment, wondering at how small it seemed; Sasha slept, so he had to be quiet, couldn’t turn on the radio or play anything, and would have to wait before he could pack.

  Sasha seemed very far-off when he woke, rubbing his arms as if he’d been cold; Sasha hardly spoke to him, but went right to the kitchen for tea.

  Stefan headed for the closet, made some quick choices, collected underwear and then dragged his duffel bag out from behind a box of old music; with it came his old dog. He stopped to give it a good look: the face was worn and rubbed and stuffing had at some time escaped out the back legs.

  “I haven’t seen Scotty in years,” Sasha said from the door. Stefan thrust the dog back into the closet. He heard Sasha go into the bathroom to shower.

  He felt very restless, torn between wanting to rush off to Brooklyn and a desire to just sit somewhere, not here, somewhere he wouldn’t have to think or talk or listen. There probably was no such place, so it didn’t really matter where he was, Stefan thought grimly.

  He drifted to the piano and tried a Chopin nocturne he knew he was really too young and clumsy to play—the most he could do was mimic the music, not enter and join it. This was his problem even with much simpler pieces when they demanded not only facility and expression, but depth, the depth Sasha had sometimes, when there was no line between the player and the playing. Still, he had to sit at the keyboard now and then, and if he wasn’t very good, he wasn’t very bad either. “Your touch is light,” Sasha had told him once; at the time Stefan took it as a compliment, but now he thought different.

  “I’m going to shop,” Sasha said from the foyer.

  “I guess I’ll stay in,” Stefan said, trying not to show he was relieved to have the apartment to himself for a while.

  “You’ll be gone when I return? Then have a good time.” Sasha nodded at him and left.

  “He doesn’t want me to go,” Stefan almost said aloud, but why that should be he had no idea.

  The train ride was noisy in the afternoon, with crowds of school kids appearing at different stops. Stefan wasn’t used to the subway so the metal shriek, the roar into and away from one dirty platform after another seemed like being stuck at a party with someone who knew only one joke.

  His mother’s bay-windowed corner house was a solid brick square with a curved flagstone path and a wall of thick even hedge; it looked more placed, fully-built, than constructed. There were no big trees so it faced its two streets with wide casement windows, severe and plain-lined.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg” the black letterbox read, not “The Greenbergs” or “Greenberg.” This bothered him. He rang and looked around, hardly taking in what he saw—it was one of those pleasant tree-lined simple streets you passed through and forgot.

  “You’re early,” his mother beamed, waving him inside as if she’d been waiting quite a while.

  “I brought wine.” He fumbled inside his bag. “Sasha picked it out.”

  “You didn’t have to.” She took the bottle. “This is fine. I can hardly tell them apart. I know which ones I’m supposed to like, Leo makes sure of that. Come put your bag away.” She led him past the living room to the small brown guest room. “You seem very tall to me. Come sit in the kitchen while I put in the lamb.”

  He lingered, glancing around the warm room hung with family pictures. Near the window was one of him; he moved closer, curious, hesitant. In it he stood, very little, four years old perhaps, in shorts and T-shirt, staring down at his shoes, looking like he wanted to cry. It was taken on the porch of Mrs. Mannion’s house in Rockaway.

  “Stefan?” his mother called.

  He trailed to the large pale kitchen where his mother fussed at the stove.

  “Smells good,” he said, sitting on one of the bar stools.

  “I haven’t done anything, wait.” She closed the oven and set its timer.

  “Now, what would you like? Seven and seven? Let me see.” She fussed some more and then stepped across to him with a glass. He was pleased that they all let him drink wine and alcohol, that it wasn’t something to argue about, even though he was underage. “We’d rather have you drinking at home, where you’re safe,” Sasha had said. But Sasha had to admit that Stefan going to Dooley’s, only two blocks away, wasn’t too bad either.

  When he took the drink from his mother now he wondered if her hand wasn’t shaking. “Perhaps I’ll have one myself.” She made another and joined him at the counter. He felt very adult suddenly, and worried for her, and this was strange. She fiddled with the edge of her apron. “I’m glad you’re away from all that demonstrating,” she brought out at length, looking him full in the face.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Still.…”

  He nodded.

  “Leo doesn’t really understand,” she said, and it was as if Leo were someone neither of them knew well, he was that far away.

  Stefan nodded again.

  “He thinks we’re all free to believe what we want,” she smiled, sipped her drink, set it down on the counter very carefully. “All of us.”

  “Can I help with anything?”

  “Later. Tell me about school, and next year. Where will you go?”

  Because his grades were so high, and his SAT’s were 1400 combined, he’d been accepted at every college in New York he’d applied to, but didn’t want to go to any of them.

  “I don’t know.”

  “The money doesn’t matter, remember; we both want you to pick the school you like.”

  He didn’t know if the “we” meant his mother and father, his mother and Leo or even her and Sasha. Stefan’s grasp of his financial situation was as vague as he could keep it; there was money for what he wanted, which had never seemed to be too much.

  “There’s Leo,” she said brightly, as a car door slammed. “He’s early too.
”

  Stefan went to wash up.

  Four blocks away was Shore Road and then just across a footbridge he could be close to the water, lean on the plain black railing while traffic off behind him almost covered the lap, lap of littered water below; tiny sailboats flitted off near the rising mounds of Staten Island which bristled with as many buildings as trees. At least from where he stood it seemed that way. He ignored the sky-slashing curves of the Verrazano off to his left, and also the columned base of the Manhattan in the other direction. He stared at the green-gray-blue water, at the large slow dirty-looking ships, at nothing special, just stared. His mother had gone to shop and Stefan remembered having shared this view once with Sasha years ago, so he had come to the water. Sasha seemed very distant now.

  The breeze played with his hair but hardly offered any glimpse of an answer as he eyed the ceaseless cutting little waves. Nothing seemed any clearer here—all that happened was that he’d changed places, nothing deeper, nothing more. No, that wasn’t true; his mother was glad he’d come and Leo was heartier, more man-to-man. After dinner last night, while his mother was upstairs, Leo, from the deep shelter of a champagne-colored wing chair, had remarked warmly:

  “Your mother’s been through a lot,” and shook his fine dramatic head in admiration. It was at once a very private statement and yet public too and Stefan didn’t know how to take it up, or if he even wanted to. He didn’t want to resent Leo—or not completely—but how could he stop feeling a bit repulsed by his mother’s husband? Leo liked him, yet the gap between them could only narrow, not close. And Stefan was jealous, because Leo must know exactly what had happened to her, his father, Sasha, and Eva, Stefan’s aunt. Leo didn’t have to live with lies.

  Leo seemed determined not to notice any awkwardness. “Shall we go?” His mother had appeared all quickened, smiling, and they went to see a very silly movie, took a drive afterward.

  Stefan was too tired this morning to think of what he’d left in Manhattan; he hadn’t slept well because the room practically gloated at him—so many pictures of his mother and Leo, so many poses and grins; the walls were clamorous and disturbing, forcing him to face what had been a fact now for years. The walls were worse than the way his mother touched Leo’s shoulder to get his attention, worse than the silences in which he felt something pass between Leo and his mother that was so intimate it stifled him.

  “I don’t want to go back,” Stefan muttered, and then glanced round to make sure he was alone. Not back home, and not to that perfectly appointed house in which everything looked made of silk.

  Once some friends of Jenny’s at a party had discussed suicide, alternately boisterous and hushed; Stefan listened, not tempted, not outraged—the idea didn’t touch him, somehow, was foreign and incomprehensible.

  “If you were really low.…” he remembered Jenny having said thoughtfully. Was he really low now? How did people decide such big questions?

  “You just do it,” one of Jenny’s friends had assured the room, and Martina knew because a cousin of hers had sealed his head in a large plastic bag.

  He didn’t want to go back anywhere, wanted not to take up his life again. Graduation was coming, and then a strange summer, he was sure—he dreaded this one. And he had to choose a college soon. Faster than soon.

  And Jenny.

  He broke away and stalked back to the house his mother lived in. “Would you like some lunch?” She already seemed less tense with him, asked questions more slowly. He leaned in the kitchen doorway.

  “Maybe I’ll read something.”

  “Most of the books are up in the study.”

  But he didn’t go there; instead he drifted to the Steinway grand in the living room which glistened in the sun. Stefan played everything he could remember, not once stopping to see what music was in the bench.

  “I wish I still played,” his mother smiled, coming in to sit on the sofa near him.

  “Does Leo?”

  “No. It’s really Sasha’s piano, whenever he’s here. Leo thought of it.”

  He nodded, thinking he should say something about how nice that was of Leo.

  The silence in the room wasn’t strained, but dead somehow, as if alone, the gulf between them became obvious, immeasurable. He didn’t know what to do except play more, but that wasn’t really for his mother, or even for himself.

  “You’re good. You should practice more—”

  “To be a tenth-rate pianist?” he flashed.

  She blinked, said nothing but “I’ll start dinner.”

  He did go up to the book-crammed study, which, with its brown-gold couch and armchairs and ceiling-high shelves, looked like a club room—anonymous in a way, with nothing more personal than the names inside the books: Leo Greenberg, Fania Greenberg, Ann Borowski. Many just said “For Ann” with a date; he guessed those were from Leo.

  Stefan settled into one of the chairs, stacking books on the arm, but he didn’t begin to read. There was no noise out in the street, no cars, no bicycle bells, and certainly no voices. What did his mother do all day? He knew she’d finally earned a Ph.D. four years back—why wasn’t she teaching, or something?

  Was it simply that Leo was enough, a life with him enough? Stefan suddenly felt for the first time the urge to ask her; he could go downstairs and sit her down and say “Now tell me why you married him, what makes him better than Dad? And how could you lie to me all those years?” It could all begin there.

  He flushed with the vision, but it was no more than that. He’d never said anything half so real to her, now wasn’t the time to start.

  He took the top book and began reading to drown out the rising clamor; he didn’t dare unravel his past, their past. He would ask nothing.

  Leo called to say he’d be late and Stefan wondered if he shouldn’t leave tomorrow—wasn’t he out of place here?

  Leo was very chatty at dinner, asking at one point: “When do we get our tickets?”

  “Tickets?”

  “For graduation.” His mother smiled.

  Stefan looked at their waiting faces.

  “I’m not going,” he said vaguely, because he hadn’t known until then.

  “As a protest?” Leo asked, interested, serious.

  “If there’s demonstrating—” his mother began anxiously.

  “No, not as a protest. I’m just not going.”

  “It’s not important to you?”

  Stefan pictured the robes and aisles and hats and little kids and the pop-pop of cameras, the singing.…

  “I don’t want to go.” He shrugged.

  “When I was a kid in Flatbush,” Leo remembered, picking up his wine glass, “high school was a big thing.” Leo smiled at Stefan’s mother. “Here’s to college, though,” he toasted. “College is a big thing.”

  Stefan then announced which college he’d chosen: Fordham at Lincoln Center. “Because it’s small,” he explained in answer to his mother’s glance.

  “That’s a Catholic school,” Leo observed.

  “So?”

  Leo shrugged. “Just commenting.”

  Stefan didn’t say that he had chosen it precisely for that reason. Columbia and NYU had too many Jews.

  They spent the rest of the evening talking about a school Stefan had only chosen to make himself seem more positive and decisive.

  But the fog closed in on him again when Leo and his mother went upstairs to bed, leaving him alone in the brightly-lit cool living room. He stretched out on the sofa, lost to anything more specific than the yellow-beige ceiling he stared at, and a vague train of melodies that blurred and twisted each other to make just noise in his head.

  “You didn’t stay the weekend?” Sasha wondered at the door, taking his bag from him.

  “I guess not.”

  “Something happened?”

  “No, nothing.” Stefan went to the fridge, pulled it open, let it shut.

  “There are letters for you.”

  “What?”

  Sasha had put the
bag in the bedroom and now held out two white envelopes. “From your father. From Jenny.”

  Sasha still had the letters.

  “You read his,” Stefan brought out, beginning to feel dizzy.

  “Are you sure?”

  Stefan didn’t move as Sasha ripped one of the envelopes.

  “It’s about the marriage,” Stefan said dully, “When, and who she is, and where they’ll live.”

  Sasha nodded as he scanned the single sheet.

  “That’s all, right?”

  “No.” Sasha set the letter down on the table. “There’s more.”

  “He wants me to come for the wedding?”

  “No—that’s next year. He wants you to come for the summer. It says they have a house up in northern Michigan, a big one, that belonged to her family.” Sasha met his incredulous stare. “Read it.”

  But Stefan wouldn’t look; how could he go back to Michigan when just two days in Bay Ridge were so awful?

  He held out his hand for Jenny’s thick letter. He didn’t read that one either, not even later when Sasha went to bed and he sat up, turning the unopened envelope over and over in one hand. Sasha said Jenny had called but didn’t want the number in Brooklyn. The thick wrinkled letter seemed ominous to Stefan; he was afraid to open it, afraid to set it down or put it away.

  Too much made him afraid, Stefan thought, but that wasn’t enough to get him to tear open Jenny’s envelope.

  “Whatever she has to say she can tell me,” he thought sullenly, but that was a lie: he didn’t want her to tell him anything, he wanted to forget.

  There was always something new to forget, something he couldn’t bear to think about, at least lately, like when he was a kid, and then after, after the breakup, and coming to live with Sasha and finding out who he really was; forget the time he’d screamed at Leo and thrown a full ashtray at him, missing but covering his own hand and head in ashes, screaming “Get out! Get out!” at the stranger who his mother liked better than anyone; forget how ugly his mother and father had looked at each other the last time he saw them together before his father went away to leave them; forget how he’d hated them all and wanted to rip Scotty apart—poor old Scotty who’d never bothered anyone; forget the time he’d imagined creeping towards the piano with a scissors when Sasha wasn’t looking to hurt what was most beautiful to him, to hurt something.