by Dick Cluster
The balding man followed the finger and the eyes. He smiled sadly at Alex, shrugged as if to say “Regulations!” He glanced out the window, took a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, and began to write. The secretary who had left the bundles of letters passed between him and Alex. She looked over her shoulder and gave Sal a quick wave. She said, “We’ll see you, Sal.” The other clerk said to Alex, “Can I help you, sir?”
“Oh, um, yeah, this is airmail. To England. Nothing special, just airmail.” As he dropped his letter on the counter, Alex found that he was still unsure he really wanted to send it. “Um, just weigh it and give me the stamp, okay?”
“That’s what we always do,” the clerk said shortly. End of the day, Alex thought. A black public official in a white town had to stand on his authority— especially if it was limited. Suddenly the man in the brown suit pushed in beside Alex. His superior smile was gone, and a beseeching grimace twisted his pale lips. His eyes danced crazy little steps, and more moisture stood out on the back of his bare, pallid head. He dropped the box on the counter, covering the edge of Alex’s letter, as if to say in a children’s pushing match, Hey, I was here first. His fingers pressed into a half-completed form and a twenty-dollar bill. “It’s all written on the package,” he said. “Please take it, I have to leave.”
“Soon as I’m done with this customer,” the clerk told him. “Just finish the form, please.” He plucked Alex’s letter from beneath the package and dropped it on the scale. Though Alex hadn’t had much to say, it had taken him an ounce of pages to say it. “That will be eighty-eight cents,” the clerk declared.
The balding man looked at Alex, that quick flash of appreciation suddenly showing as his eyes, for a moment, stilled. “You’ll do it,” he said. “You will. Here. Keep the change.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgment. As he brushed past, he wiped his brow quickly with pale, spotted fingers.
Alex stared at the clerk, who placed his own fingertips flat on the counter and said nothing at all. Alex said, “Just a minute,” and left his letter to Meredith sitting on the scale. He crossed to the counter by the window and watched the man in the suit walk away down the sidewalk, toward the square, between two other men. These men also wore suits, but their suits were plaid and much shinier. They seemed to keep the balding man between them, matching their steps to his. Or so Alex thought, if he wasn’t imagining things. Alex quickly completed the form: a local return address, a destination in Berlin. The paper was damp with perspiration, and Alex touched it with a mixture of sympathy and distaste. He waited what seemed a geologic age for the clerk to weigh the package, total the price, attach and stamp the necessary papers, and hand back the change from the twenty plus the carbon-copy receipt. In the meantime, Alex stuffed his own transatlantic letter into his back pocket. He wanted to know whether he was imagining things or not. He had a curious, romantic feeling that fate had just beckoned in his direction. If so, for the moment anyway, the way fate beckoned was the way he was going to go.
3. Mortality
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts respects certain traditions. The baseball team plays on real grass. No bottled or canned alcohol can be sold in a store on the Sabbath. The representatives to the Electoral College are the only ones never to have voted for a President who subsequently resigned. Any place where more than two streets come together, in any town in the Commonwealth, memorializes someone. Such an intersection, whatever its shape, is referred to as a square.
In Davis Square, Somerville, six streets and the ghost of a railroad track came together in the pattern of a deformed asterisk. The steel rails had been driven underground, to become part of the latest extension of the metropolitan Boston subway system. In Alex Glauberman’s youth, this system had been made famous by the Kingston Trio. Only four stops away, in fact, lay the very Kendall Square Station where poor old Charlie had, in all innocence, handed in his last dime to ride on the MTA.
Times change, however. Scollay Square— where Charlie’s wife brought the daily sandwich to the man who never returned— had long since been renamed Government Center. Just now, a minor battle raged over the authorities’ move to change the name and image of Kendall Square Station to Cambridge Center/MIT— a semantic skirmish in a larger struggle between residential neighborhoods and the wizards of high-tech. In any event, the subway had come to Davis, and in place of the old railroad track it had brought a quaint, bricked-over park in the off-center hub of the asterisk.
The park was furnished with old-fashioned wooden benches and decorated with life-size statues in out-of-date dress, all of which gave it a certain spooky charm. On one of the benches Alex spotted the man whose package he had mailed. He sat wedged between the two men, younger men, who had surrounded him on the sidewalk. They sat straight up, but the balding man was doubled over, his head dangling limply toward the ground.
Though the square was full, no one except Alex appeared to notice this particular tableau. Alex edged closer, stopping by one of the statues. It was a boy with bat and glove, walking home forever from a summer game. On the other side of the bench, an elderly couple stood frozen for posterity with shopping bags in their arms. Alex latched on to the baseball bat with one hand. He held the receipt from the overseas package crumpled in the other.
The two men’s dark plaid suit jackets were buttoned over dark shirts and light ties. If the man in the brown suit might be a professor, or an executive, then these might be contractors, or aldermen. They might own bars, or be lucky playing the dogs or horses. But Alex could not mistake the way the balding man slowly straightened up, from the waist but not the neck, his head still hanging in either pain or shame. He had to be recovering from a rabbit punch, a chop with the edge of a hand, a quick needle in the thigh.
When his head did come up, finally, he stared at Alex. He fixed Alex with his sad, watery eyes, betraying neither recognition nor surprise. All Alex could think of to do was to let the man know that at least his package had gotten off. Alex flashed the receipt, and then it occurred to him that he could also leave it in a post office box, so to speak. The balding man could collect it later if that was the way things worked out. So, as the man watched, Alex stuffed the flimsy paper into the opening where the statue-boy’s mitt hung from his bat. The balding man blinked, and then one of the younger men rose, holding him solicitously by the arm. The younger man led him slowly past Alex to the curb where a taxi sat idling. Alex noted the company— Green Cab.
The pair disappeared inside, and the third man climbed into the front seat. The cab jerked its way into the clogged traffic. It drifted past the beauty salon and then the sandwich shop, and then the angle of the buildings caused it to vanish from Alex’s view. Alex watched it disappear with a feeling that a curtain was dropping, slowly but inexorably, in front of a play that had hardly begun. He was not going to run after the taxi, nor was he going to sit in the little park breathing exhaust and hoping for one man, and not three, to come back. He did, though, remove the receipt from its hiding place and recopy the addresses onto the back of the envelope holding his letter to Meredith. He thought a moment and then added a short message to the bottom of the receipt: “Petros’s Coffee Shop, Central Square. Till seven tonight.” Then he wadded the receipt up once more and stuck it back into the crevice between glove and bat.
A note in a bottle, that was what he had just sent. Crossing from the park to the subway station, Alex could not guess whether his note would be read. He could not even be certain that he hadn’t, wishfully, read exotic significance into a perfectly ordinary incident. In any case, he was not really sure where in the incident he stood. He still thought of the frightened, balding man with ambivalence. This might well be the sort of odd, lonely creature, the person on the next stool at the bar or beside you on the bus, best left to his or her own devices, to his or her own extrication or demise.
But all these questions were beside the point, because what Alex had just witnessed spoke to him in a voice that he could not deny. The voice said that
fate, once he or she beckoned, did not fuck around. The note was for this voice, more than it was for that man.
* * *
The new subway sometimes pushed Alex to think about mortality. This was because, as Meredith had pointed out to him, four men had died in cave-ins and crane accidents to bring better access and higher property values along its extended route. Unlike Alex, Meredith followed such news unflinchingly. That was a quick death— a sudden squashing out of life under a careening crane. Quick and shocking. “I’m sorry, your husband/father/son/brother won’t be coming home from work today.” Not like a cancer. With a cancer, there could be a long time between the shock and the death.
Alex told himself to knock it off. Anyone could die, anytime. Besides, relatively speaking, Alex was one of the lucky ones. Statistics said this. So did the personal grapevine that had materialized like magic when he’d received his diagnosis— so-and-so’s Aunt Helen, so-and-so’s friend Larry, so-and-so’s ex-boss. With proper care, and a good attitude, his number was not likely to come up very soon.
Still, Alex felt different from other people. What made him different was not his knowing that he was going to die. Everyone knew that. It was knowing more fully what was likely to kill him. He not only knew it but, unconsciously massaging the back of his neck, he could feel it.
It was Meredith who had discovered the knot there, during the third night they spent together. She had insisted he get it checked out, and that was how he’d learned he had swollen lymph nodes all over his body. Then it had become her task, as well as his, to wait out the winter and the spring until his tumors got to the point where they required treatment. She’d stayed with him, an anxious onlooker, for his first week of medications and the weeks while his body and his blood supply recovered to the point where they would tolerate going through the cycle of medications again. Then she’d left, at his insistence, to fulfill the half-semester teaching fellowship in London that she’d accepted long before. It was an important academic opportunity and, for her, a free visit home. She would be back to Boston by Thanksgiving. And by turkey time, more or less, Alex should be cooked. By Thanksgiving, he should be as normal as he was ever going to get.
* * *
Alex pulled the envelope from his back pocket and smoothed it gently on his knee. Normal, but cheated of the time the beginning of their relationship should have been. They had enjoyed one surprising dinner, the pair of them thrown together by Kim’s machinations, warm and soaking up together the glow of hot food and wine after trudging like awkward storks through the icy Cambridge streets. The surprising dinner had continued on into a surprising night and then a bright, sunny day out skiing across the clean, powdery snow on a frozen river not many miles from town. They had shared some talk about books read, places been, past lives followed or abandoned, and (wrinkling noses) marriages walked away from.
Meredith possessed a self-assured, no-nonsense, things-in-their-places outlook that Alex found powerfully attractive, though he had not thought he was in the market. And Alex, Meredith said, was older than she without being terminally stuffy. On the clean, frozen river she had held him by the beard and examined him again. She had declared him to be a rather cockeyed, unexpected sort of a man.
Yes, it had been a nice start, a lovely, no-questions-about-the-future, opening-up couple of weeks. Then she’d come to Alex’s apartment, through wet, chilly slush, the evening after his diagnosis. She’d listened as Alex explained just what the pathologist had found on the slide, the wrong kind of cells on a thin but representative slice of Alex’s tissue. She’d asked a few technical questions, and hurled a glass ashtray to bits on his new kitchen floor. Much later that night she had asked whether the chemotherapy made men sterile.
“Somewhat,” Alex had told her. “The doc pointed out the option of opening an account in a sperm bank for a few hundred bucks, as a precaution. But the effect is generally just temporary.” He’d stroked her hair and run his hand all the way down her spine, and up again. He’d rolled away from her, and then snuggled back, and finally said, “Meredith…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got one kid already, and I won’t take bets about getting to her high school graduation. I don’t know who’s going to pay for her college, but it’s not likely to be me. Also, I’m only just beginning to know who you are. But that was— is— a very nice thought.”
“I didn’t mean it to be nice,” Meredith had said. “I’m just trying to understand what’s changed.”
Now Alex looked over the words and numbers he had copied from package to postal form, and from postal form to his letter to her. The balding man’s writing had been fine and precise. Alex’s was more like a monkey’s scrawl. “Sender: G. Meyer, 91 Old Mill Circle, Melrose, MA 02176. Recipient: C. Meyer, Gasthaus Mockernstrasse. 58 Mockernstrasse, West Berlin 61.” Wife, brother, daughter, son? He wondered what Meredith would have to say about this man G. Meyer. Would she have invited him to sit over Greek coffee in small, hand-painted cups to explain what had frightened him, and why? She might have, but only if she could say it to his face. Leaving a note in a bottle, dropping bread crumbs like Hansel and Gretel along the path— these would not have been her parson’s-daughter ways. She might have laughed, and Alex liked making her laugh, but Alex did not want to be laughed at just now.
The thing was, Berlin fit. Berlin was redolent of decadence, iniquity, intrigue. It made some sense of G. Meyer’s half-concealed desperation, his need to get rid of that package right away. Berlin meant hard-edged syllables, postcard images of the new neon jungle and the old Brandenburg Gate. Shadowy, trench-coated figures crept though back streets and lurked, waiting, beneath a looming Wall.
Alex’s ancestors were Russian Jews, not German ones. To his parents, Berlin meant the headquarters of the Holocaust, nothing more or less. But Alex had a curiosity about the Berlin of Bertolt Brecht as well as the one of Adolf Hider. He indulged a fantasy of himself and Meredith, a tall, bearded Semitic Holmes and a red-haired, not-at-all comic, female Watson. Strolling down a cobbled street, peering and trading guesses as they passed Number 58 Mockernstrasse, wherever that might be.
4. Family Pictures
At Central Square, Cambridge, Alex climbed into the sunlight. He had to end up here anyway if he was meeting Kim, who lived nearby. Petros’s, two blocks down the street from where he stood, was simply the place— a place some distance from the scene of the crime— that had popped into his mind to suggest to the man he now thought of as G. Meyer.
It was Friday afternoon, five-thirty. Alex stepped down Mass Ave through a jumble of nurses’ whites, students’ chinos, assorted T-shirts and jeans, suits male and female, denim vests, colorful tank tops. The staccato of jackhammers punctuated speech in English, Spanish, Creole, and further tongues. At Petros’s, about half the dozen tables were filled. Regulars argued in Greek over papers from home, spread out between them. Young, rising professionals networked busily over coffee or tea. Alex claimed the sole no-smoking table— an unhealthy contradiction in terms— and waited for the man who most likely would not come.
Alex was good at waiting. He figured that he’d inherited his mother’s mouth and his father’s patience. The mouth came in handy very often, but he valued the patience more. Possibly that was because his mother drank too much, while his father did not. On the other hand, Meredith told him it was because boys worked at being like their fathers, while they took after their mothers without knowing it. He asked the waitress behind the counter for tea and spinach pie.
They served excellent coffee at Petros’s, but coffee of any sort was not something his insides could tolerate this week. That was the cyclophosphamide; it chewed up his stomach lining because it couldn’t tell one kind of rapidly dividing cell from another. It chewed up the nascent blood cells of the bone marrow for the same reason.
When his food was served, Alex took the teabag out of the pot right away. He chewed and swallowed his pie, but as the dope wore off, the food did not sit very well. The wheeze
of the ineffective air conditioner irritated him, and the circling of the ceiling fans did not help. He nursed his cup of weak tea and waited longer. He opened and reread his letter to Meredith, less sure about it now. If he really wasn’t going, he ought to call and cancel his reservation, which he had not yet done. He ought to call Kim, anyway, and tell her he had gotten himself tied up till seven. But Alex did not step out to make either of these calls. He waited, in a kind of suspended animation, as if he were playing a game of poker and had called the bluff of a teasing opponent fate. Now she would show her hand, and he would see whether there was anything in it or not. Many questions he wanted to ask of fate could not be answered. This one could.
It was getting close to six-thirty when his man walked in. The jacket of the brown suit was gone, and so was the tie. In shirtsleeves, Meyer looked poorer and sadder— like a washed-up accountant, or a pawnshop manager who’d seen too many sad cases in his time. He walked haltingly, as if something hurt at every step. He didn’t display broken thumbs or a mouth relieved of teeth, but there was dried blood on his lip and a blotchy red mark on his temple. Yet, when he slumped into the chair opposite Alex, his look of fear or desperation, or whatever it had been, was gone. He pulled back his membranous lips into one of those superior half-smiles, and said, “Good to see you again, young man.”
“Good to see you too, Mr. Meyer,” Alex replied. The voice speaking was his own, and he was in control of it, but he felt as if he were acting in a different realm. He felt very lucid, and at peace. As if he had stopped time, had willed the yo-yo to hold still at the top of the string. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”