The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  But Nana, my grandmother, spoke only of my hands. She met me in my crib, awakening at noon from an hour’s nap, content to babble and coo at the waves of the ceiling while my hunger crested. She came in with Mother. She watched Mother scoop me up and begin a diaper change. I watched her watch my hands as they scrabbled my round belly while my bum was raised and lowered, washed and dusted, diapered and done.

  “Jess, I would like you to meet your grandmother,” Mother said, wrapping my lower half in a blanket and handing me off. Nana held me in the crook of her left arm. Her right hand clasped my wrist and held it still. My grasp reflex was triggered and all eight fingers clutched for purchase. My right hand found only the smooth knuckle of Nana’s restraining thumb, while my left caught the starched end of her shirt cuff.

  “Can she hold a bottle with them?” Nana asked.

  “Ma, she’s only six weeks. We haven’t even tried yet.”

  “Does it hurt to touch where the thumb’s not at?”

  “No, Ma, nothing hurts anywhere in her body. Except her insides when she’s hungry. Let me take her and get her going.”

  Nana watched my fingers caress her knuckle, wave after wave of tiny fingers on her slippery bony ridge. “Looks like a big old spider taking a stroll,” she remarked. She shifted her attention to my face, and I stared back. Her features were plain and unadorned as a child’s crayon scribble. Her eyes were gray dots and her eyebrows gray lines and her hair a gray cloud. The pink tip of her tongue slipped out of her mouth when I scratched her. “You need to cut her nails, Kate, before she scratches us all up. At least it won’t take long to do,” she said handing me back to Mother. “And she’ll never need an orthodontist, either,” she added confidently. We went downstairs to the living room where Mother fed me on the couch. Nana watched.

  My grandfather emerged from his rounds of the basement as my feeding ended.

  “Everything seems shipshape,” he allowed when he entered the living room. “Furnace is holding up. Hot water heater, too. No problems. No problems the rest of this winter. I might decalcify the humidifier pad. It’s gotten a mite crusty.” He sniffed the air to check the house’s humidity. “Not working bad, though. Probably like forty percent.”

  Mother had me in her lap for a burping. “Dad, this is Jessica Mary. Jessica, your granddad.”

  He came to his knees and studied my hands for a second. He took my right hand in his big, calloused paw and shook it till my head bobbed and he became a blur with a beard. “Call me Ned, young lady. Ned will do perfectly well.” He finally stopped his pumping and encased my hand between his two palms. He looked like a priest at prayer, with his hands held together and his red Irish face bowed and his copper hair slicked back and smelling of pomade. He was staring at my feet, which were covered by pink booties, gifts from Mother’s coworkers at the preschool she used to staff. He raised his head in a snapping motion. He asked excitedly, “Kate, she have big toes?”

  “I wouldn’t say big, Dad. Normal size toes. For a baby.”

  “I meant ‘big toes,’ you know, the two big ones.” He uncovered my hand and moved his thumb to the digit-denied side of my palm. He pressed in once, twice, a third time. I caught his thumb with my fingers before he could raise it again and held on tight. He looked surprised and said, “Well, now!”

  “Yeah, sure she does. And all the other toes, too,” Mother said with a hint of exasperation in her voice.

  “Maybe somebody could do a switch. Put her toes where the thumbs should be. Who needs all those toes down there anyway? Thumbs are what make us human.” He slipped his own human thumb from under my fingertips, and held it wide in the plane of his palm. “See, this is how she is without thumbs. Like a little critter or a bird. Her fingers are near useless. And this is what they could change her to.” His thumb moved out of the plane of the palm and did a little dance with his other digits. “See?”

  “I’ll mention your idea to the doctors, Dad. See what they think.”

  “Well, let’s all just call you Doctor Ned O’Brien from now on. You who spent forty years operating a bulldozer and a crane on the roads of Maryland. Girl’s got no thumbs, Ned. Never’ll have thumbs. Your tinkering around life is not going to change that.” Nana rose from the couch and stood over her kneeling husband. “I’ll go start the lunch. I could use a good hot cup of tea.”

  Ned sat next to Mother and watched Nana walk off. “Mom will be okay after a while,” he said. “You know how hard it is for her. Give her time, Kate, and she’ll come around.” They sat silently for a minute while Mother blotted an eye with her sleeve. “Can I hold her?” he asked. Mother nodded. “Well, Jessy, you sure seem to be taking all this in. Someday we’ll tell you all about your early months.” He settled me in his arm, just the way Cassidy had done. He felt the same, Ned did, like his arm was some solid shell around me, but he lacked the earthy odors that came away from Cassidy’s torso. Ned used deodorant and men’s cologne and smelled like a florist shop in the summer.

  “Dad, how old was he when he died? Billy? Do you even know much about him?”

  “She showed me pictures once just before we got married. I think she wanted me to know what I might be getting into. He was, I’d say, maybe three or four in the picture. Remember, now Kate, this was fifty, sixty years ago. There was nothing for children with birth defects back then, and he had this really bad heart condition as well as those other defects. But I do remember he was smiling in the picture, at some zoo or park where there were cages of animals. His face was . . . was sort of puffy and bloated, but he was at this place enjoying himself, it seemed.”

  “And Mom, how old was she?”

  “Just a young girl. Ten, twelve maybe, when he died. But you know back then, the family carried it all on their shoulders. The home care, the financial burden, the . . .” He paused to rub my head with his big palm.

  “The shame,” Mother added quietly.

  Ned sighed and moved his hand from my head to Mother’s. “Kate, sixty years is a real long time. People had different ways of looking at things like this, back then. Mom will work it out in time. I’ll help her. All we have to do is give her time and let little Jess blossom.” He leaned down to stroke the top of my head with his scratchy beard and to kiss its crown. I squealed.

  “Were there thumbs in the picture of Billy, Dad? Did he have thumbs?”

  “No, Kate, Billy did not.” Ned looked at Mother with a face set for the hard work ahead.

  I squealed and kicked.

  Nana and Ned stayed for two weeks. The weather turned unseasonably warm. Mother pushed me in my carriage for hours each day. Often Ned was busy with a project—an oil change for the car, a new coat of paint for the two bathrooms, an overhaul of the central air conditioner. Nana always came with us, though. I could see her from where I lay on my back. For such a stern-looking woman, her stride seemed young and free. She moved her hands and arms in such wide arcs with each step, she looked like a jockey whipping her mount as it came furiously down the stretch. The outdoors made her smile, too, especially if we were passing a spot that evoked a memory of her own life as a young mother. We lived in what had been their house through all those years of raising a family. Mother and Father, newlyweds, had purchased it from them eight years ago, as Nana and Ned went off to Florida with a pension from the state of Maryland. Even so, Nana would always consider the neighborhood her own, though the house no longer belonged to her.

  On the first day, I watched them talk of the things mothers and daughters always discuss. Their husbands— “Your father is getting on in years, I’m afraid. Some mornings it’s all I can do to get him out of bed by seven.” And “Ford’s up for a promotion at the post office. They’re thinking of making him branch manager.” Their roles as wives and mothers—“Ned couldn’t wash clothes if his underwear got brown as a nut. It makes me so mad!” And “I miss my girlfriends at the preschool. When Jess is asleep, sometimes I go a little stir-crazy, listening to the creaks in the staircase, the hum of the refr
igerator.” Their relatives— “Your Uncle Emmett has diabetes.” “Eric, cousin Eric, shot three deer this season. He wanted to send us the third’s antlers as a gift for Jess! He’s so weird!” Their friends— “Millie Casserton had triple bypass.” And “Sara Scott has had her closets professionally organized. Just because of her shoe collection. Can you imagine?”

  “Tell me about Billy, Ma,” Mother said on the morning of the third walk. We were barely two houses away from home when she spoke. The look on her face was set so tight her eyes could have belonged in a church’s stone angel. Her request put Nana’s arms to rest and parted her mouth an inch. “You can start by telling me how he and Jess compare.” Mother stared straight ahead. Nana’s arms resumed their arcing. She closed her mouth and swallowed hard enough to wiggle her ears.

  “Billy was a mess,” she began. Her eyes searched the sidewalk at her feet.

  “His heart was full of leaks.

  “He wasn’t allowed any salt.

  “In the summers he’d try to lick my skin just for the taste of salt.

  “His arms and legs—especially his legs—all puffed out so they split open at the ankles and wrists. They were like slits in pie crust.

  “They wept pink ooze till they were sticky as a used sucker.” She looked up from the pavement to Mother. “Then I had to wash him in his wheelchair, run the damp cloth over his hands and feet and legs while he tried to get his tongue to my neck or face.” She shook her head. “He was a mess.” We crossed Buchanan.

  “And he was my brother, Kate. My brother with no thumbs.” She sighed at the flash of memory.

  “He liked to lick his fingers after he’d held some food to his mouth. It turned my stomach when he did that. Finger after finger going in and out of his mouth with loud sucking sounds.

  “I had to push his wheelchair around when we were out. At the end he couldn’t walk at all. He just sat in his chair and turned his head and smiled at me when someone we knew passed, or a dog or a cat.

  “A mess.”

  Mother waited for a few seconds. “Could he hear? Did he speak?”

  Nana shook her head at the sidewalk. “Not a word. But he had sounds, noises, he’d made up for some things. A different grunt for me, one for our father and mother, one for the neighbor’s German shepherd. His own language.”

  They both looked at me then as they trudged on. “You were ashamed of him,” Mother finally said. There was no tone of accusation in her voice, simply a soft acknowledgment.

  “I was eleven years old when all this was happening, Kate. The kids teased me at school about his claw hands, his elephant legs always crusted with ooze. I could never have my friends to the house. Even my teachers at school seemed to treat me . . . differently than the other girls. I didn’t cry when he died. I remember that. I didn’t cry a single tear.”

  We crossed a street. I felt the front wheels bump down and then the rear. The sensation made me laugh.

  “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to Jess,” Mother said. “But it won’t. Her heart has a murmur but it will either mend itself or get fixed by surgery when she’s seven. The cardiologist did all the tests and told us so.” Nana’s face registered surprise, and she stumbled a little coming off the curb.

  “How do they know that?” she asked.

  “They have all these tests—EKGs and echocardiograms and X-rays. Her heart’s not going to be a problem for her. It’s going to be her hearing and her learning to speak, to communicate. She’s going to have an operation on her ears in six weeks. We’ll work with the speech pathologists. Then we’re all going to learn sign language. We’re going to do it, Ma. Her geneticist is convinced Jess is smart. Real smart. And we believe him.”

  Nana’s eyes drilled into mine. “Well, she looks smart, if you don’t notice her hands. Not like Billy, I’ll give you that.”

  “Ma, Ford and I have talked. We’ll take whatever it is we got with Jess. We hope you and Dad do, too.”

  Nana looked at me again where I lay under a pink blanket. “I thanked God when every one of the four of you were born normal. Fingers, ears, toes, hearts, all normal. I thought I’d gotten free of the shame and the memory of Billy. But now . . . Now Kate, I know I didn’t. It’s in our genes like a spoiled spot on an apple. It’s in our genes, whatever condition this is, and it’s skipped a generation.”

  Mother took hold of Nana’s arm. “Dr. Garraway, Jess’s geneticist, told us it’s a lot more complicated than that, Ma. And he told us that Jess isn’t the syndrome she has. She’s a baby girl. Jess is a baby girl, Ma, just like any other baby. What’s more, she’s my baby.”

  Nana wouldn’t take her eyes from mine. “Yes, she is, Kate,” she finally said. “She’s yours.” They walked a silent route down Macomb, through the community gardens stitched straight with the bright spring green of new-sprouted onion, radish, and lettuce, and back home along Quince. Now* I listen and hear what they heard—the brittle traffic noises, the faint squeak of the carriage chassis, the birds’ daysong in the branches, footfall too heavy for the spring.

  As we came through the gate, Mother said, “I’d like it if you’d come to the doctor’s with me for her checkup. It might help you see her differently.”

  “I’ll go. But I don’t see what it could change.” Mother took me up out of the carriage and carried me up the stairs. “Ned should come, too,” Nana said to her back.

  On the fifth day of strolling, Nana mentioned Joe Cassidy. She had been close friends with Carina, his mother, had watched her raise him alone after her husband had run off. Nana had attended Cassidy’s First Communion, his confirmation, his high school graduation, his leaving by train for a stint in the army, his marriage to Rose Mary, the baptism of their son Joey, and, sadly, the wakes and funerals of mother and baby. And in the years following that terrible event, she had gone with Ned and Carina to retrieve Cassidy from police stations, saloons, alleys, emergency departments, and, once at midnight, in the midst of a blizzard, the deserted St. Anthony Church where, drunk again, he had taken a baseball bat to the stands of votive candles flanking the sanctuary. The three of them, Nana, Ned, and Carina, had used all their connections with the county police to keep Joe Cassidy out of court so he could keep his job in the post office. Then, five years into it, Carina died of stroke, and he lost his taste for violent behavior but not for his drinks. To the world, he became a happy drunk, backslapping and singing and pawing his way through crowds at bars and parties and family gatherings. But to Nana, he was a heartbroken man who never missed a day of work, or a night of loss.

  “How’s Joe Cassidy getting along?” she asked Mother as they strolled home along Macomb. None of the trees had leafed out yet, giving the streets a sun-washed look that she always associated with the light at the beach.

  “If you mean is he still drinking, the answer would be yes. If you mean do we love him dearly, also yes. But he overdid it at Jess’s christening party. Ford had to drive him home. Joe had him pull over twice on the way.”

  “Cassidy, alright,” Nana said with sad eyes. “All that drink in his system but he’ll not vomit in your car.” They walked in silence, regarding the tulips for a block.

  “Would you like him over to supper, Ma?” Mother finally asked. She already knew the answer.

  “I could make my beef stew,” Nana replied. “It’s not too hot for that quite yet. And a nice bread pudding for dessert.”

  “I’ll call him, then, at the post office.” Her sides were beginning to itch from the rub of her plumpness—her nursing girdle, the OB called it—against her blouse. The last thing she needed was stew and bread pudding. But Cassidy was like an older brother to her, so often had he been at the house while she was growing up. Two drinks, she thought, I’ll limit him to just two drinks.

  Two days later on Saturday night Cassidy arrived out of the rain, carrying flowers in one hand and his guitar, wrapped in a green plastic garbage bag, in the other. He didn’t bother to ring the bell. He just opened the front door and
walked right to the kitchen, where Nana and Mother were trying to find five unchipped dessert plates from the stack on the counter and Ned was holding me.

  Nana hugged and kissed him and held him by his wet shoulders for a few moments to study his face. “I see your mother in your eyes, Joseph,” she said. “You still carry her kind eye.”

  He handed her the flowers and cleared his throat. “I know the one who’s kind, Mrs. O’B.” He faced Kate. “Kate, lovely as the sun on the cliffs, as usual.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Thanks for coming, with the rain and all,” Mother answered. She took the flowers from Nana and started searching for a vase.

  “Joe,” said Ned, shaking Cassidy’s hand and nodding to the sink.

  “Mr. Ned, a pleasure,” Cassidy replied, reaching to lay the dripping wrapped guitar on the white porcelain.

  When Father entered, Cassidy added, “Ah, Kate, your grandfather with the leprosy. A pleasure ta see you again, sir.”

  “I’ll mail you the part you’re missing if mine ever drops off out there on Molokai,” Father said in reply.

  “Boys, we got ladies here present,” Ned said.

  Cassidy and Father both laughed, but they bowed to Nana and nodded to Mother. “May I?” Cassidy asked, proffering his hand toward Ned and me. “May I take her?”

  “If there is no more of that wild talk, you may,” Ned said with a smile. He passed me to Cassidy and began to untie the knot that sealed Cassidy’s guitar. Gone were the smells of licorice and wet wool and cigar from the crease of Cassidy’s arm. In their place, nothing but the sharp brace of Old Spice. My nose worked the fabric of his jacket for more of him, but there was nothing but his aftershave to catch. What he didn’t do for my baptism—shower and shave and freshen—he did for his visit with Nana.

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed as he hefted me. “What a load you’re becoming, little miss. A regular double-stuffed, I’d say. Kate, what ya feedin’ this one with? Must be getting half her daddy’s lunch pail every morning before he goes. The density of her, Kate. Good job!”