You were the sword in the stone
The Pulitzer Prize.
“Oh Jesus,” Luke said to himself. Then, to George, “Hit the siren. Let them know we have to get through.”
George activated the ambulance’s flashing red light and the hoarse, pitifully weak siren, which seemed at first to come from beneath the chassis, or from out of the seats. The strobe light, the imploring wail—none of it did any good. The drivers that surrounded us might have been too high on their own excitement to even notice. Maybe they didn’t believe there was anyone injured in our ambulance, or maybe there was nothing to do about it even if they did believe. There was no shoulder for them to pull onto, because the shoulders had long before become traffic lanes.
Your daddy a doctor
Your maw just a maw
How they hated the kid from old Wichita
His hair was unruly
His manners were rough
However I loved you it wasn’t enough.
Esther, oh Esther
The things that you told me still haunt my life
Esther, oh Esther
You were my mother, my sister, my wife.
“Billy?” Grandpa said. “Your mother says don’t be afraid.” “Tell her I’m all right,” I said.
I loved you for your beauty
And your wisdom and such
I loved you most of all for your sweet healing touch
To be with such an angel
It hardly seemed real
And it hurt me so badly when your heart turned to steel
Esther, oh Esther
Mystical daylight
Breaks in your eyes
Esther, oh Esther
I worship your soul, so eternal, so wise.
“Are you okay, Luke?” Grandpa asked. “She wants to know if you’re okay.” If Irv objected to carrying messages between his beloved, broken daughter and Luke, he betrayed nothing of the sort. His voice was soft, affectionate, as if he wanted to convey the feelings behind Mother’s words.
“I’m okay,” said Luke.
“She wants you to tell Billy you’re his father.”
Did she really? Or was Irv putting this in for his own reasons?
“Tell her …” Luke went silent. Then: “Tell her I already did.”
I didn’t dare look at him.
I’ve held the world
In the palm of one hand
I’ve sung for the king, I’ve played with the band
I’ve bought twenty yachts
Then I sunk the fleet
And I still miss the cafe on Sullivan Street
Esther, oh Esther
Try to stop time from slipping away
Esther, my Esther
Where will you be on Judgment Day?
Remember Hotel Paris
Room Nine Thirty Three
Remember the words you whispered to me
Remember the sheets
Croissants in the bed
Rue de Jacob is still stuck in my head
Esther, oh Esther
You squeezed my fingers as the plane took off
Esther, oh Esther
You finally let go when we were safely aloft.
Now the tents are all folded
The circus shrinks in the rain
The kid’s disappeared on a southbound train
Where is the anger
Gone is the lust
My scheme for breaking even has turned into dust
Esther, oh Esther
Like Lucifer I’ve fallen from heaven above
Esther, oh Esther
Take this cursed gift I give you, this goddamned love.
“Hurry,” said Grandpa.
“What? What does she mean, Irv?”
“No, no, she’s sleeping,” said Grandpa. “It’s me telling you to hurry.”
“Esther” was finished and another song started in. Luke glanced at me, lifted his chin, and I switched the radio off.
I prayed for my mother. I did not think it would mean anything, but there was nothing else for me. I had not been on the docket pleading my case before God since I was a very young boy, begging for my father to come into my life and rescue me from my loneliness and isolation and otherness and fear with his rough and gentle love, love that I had once imagined to be as firm and as fair as a handshake, and it seemed to me now that if I prayed and the prayer was unanswered then I would forever live outside of God, all faith, all solace: denied.
We drove the middle lane, our revolving emergency lights strobing red, our siren like the dying howl of a wounded animal. On one side of us was a rusted-out Subaru station wagon driven by some guy who looked as if he were on the lam for operating a home distillery. He was one of those country people who look to be sixty and turn out to be nineteen. He had a starving horse face, skinny bare arms, milk-white chest, and a leather vest. On the other side of us cruised a black Saab, driven by a fleshy middle-aged guy with rosy puckered lips and loads of black-and-silver curls, the sort of lovable schlemiel whose every gesture carries the message: I mean you no harm. Next to him was a gaunt, ponytailed woman, pie-eyed with wonder as she stared at Luke. In the back seat were a sleeping baby in a carseat and a hyperventilating yellow Lab.
I looked at Luke to see how he was taking it, and to my surprise he seemed not only worried, but embarrassed, as if this mob of followers proved there was something cheap and unworthy in him, something too accessible, and that he was for all his airs a kind of junk food. Was he seeing himself through Irv’s eyes for the moment? Was the configuration of Esther and Irv pushing Dad back through time and awakening those feelings of awe and intellectual inferiority he experienced when Stuart Kramer first came to New York, raw from the Midwest? It was hard for me to hold on to the thought, because he was the source of so much of my own sense of banishment, but maybe all Luke ever wanted was a home. Maybe it was as simple as that; maybe that’s all it ever turns out to be. Irv and Mom had gotten it wrong. Luke wasn’t sitting at their Brooklyn dinner table pawing through their ideas like a shopper looking for bargains; he was memorizing the words they said and the books they had learned them in and adopting their opinions as a kind of plea for their acceptance, believing with his orphan’s abject and storm-tossed heart that the right analysis, the right opinions, the right political line might lead him to the safe harbor of their steady regard. Like any homeless boy, and like a criminal, too, he wanted to be admired.
“It never ends, does it,” I said to Luke. He squeezed his hands, again and again.
“I’m frightened,” he said.
I looked at the speedometer. We were going twenty-eight miles an hour. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Our distance from the bumper before us was shrinking, the margin for safety disappearing. And the cars behind us were also squeezing close. What was supposed to have been a two-hour trip was going to take us four or five—if matters didn’t get worse.
The sun slipped away and darkness rolled like a carpet over the fields. The evening light was doing something to all of us, I could feel it happening. It was making us a little more afraid, and in some way I don’t know how to explain it was making the moment feel holy.
Yet it was not the holiness of life everlasting, or of resurrection, or of answered prayers; I felt something immense holding all of us in its implacable neutrality.
“Daddy?” It was my mother’s voice, coming from the back.
“I’m here, baby, I’m right here,” said Irv.
We turned to see her. Grandpa loomed over her, his hands humbly folded, and then he leaned back, and we knew she had fallen back to sleep.
Color flooded Luke’s face. His eyes shined as if he’d been slapped. Just then a sign appeared announcing that a service area was coming up on our right. There was really no way for us to move over the two lanes and make the turn.
“Go into the right lane,” Luke said to George.
“No room,” he said. George’s body temperature was by now so high I wondered if it was he whom De
ath pursued.
“Just turn,” said Luke.
“I can’t do that,” said George.
“You want that woman back there to the because we’re stuck in this?”
“No.”
“Then do what I fucking tell you.” Luke turned in his seat. “Hold on to her tight, Irv,” he called out.
And a moment later, our front bumper collided with the rusted-out Subaru. Like most of us, I had been witness to thousands of car crashes, in the movies and on TV In those, the aggressor car can plow through cars like a bowling ball scattering tenpins; but here, our first contact, with a car clearly our inferior, resulted in an animal-screeching howl of twisted metal and a hysterical pounding noise from beneath our hood. And George, seized by the idea that he was no longer responsible for anything that was happening, maybe even feeling a kind of madness, continued to steer us toward the service area. We bumped into someone else. Someone else and someone else and then someone else slid into us. I looked back at Grandpa. He and David steadied Esther’s stretcher; they didn’t seem overly disturbed by our having suddenly been plunged into this demolition derby. They knew better than the rest of us how little time we had to waste. As we made our way onto the access road to the rest area, the other cars began following us in.
“What good can this possibly do?” I asked.
“I’m going to talk to them,” said Luke. Then, calling back to Grandpa: “Is she okay?”
“Resting.”
The service stop was a dozen gas pumps and a large iron- and-glass box of a building where they sold the usual—Burger King, Roy Rogers, Dunkin’ Donuts, etc. Surrounding the restaurant complex was a vast parking area, where enormous trucks, wheeled behemoths, seemed to be standing in some state of abandonment. Parked among the trucks were four or five vans, small, battered, with Yiddish letters hand-painted onto their doors. And near the vans were thirty or so Orthodox Jewish men, pale, bearded, dressed in black overcoats, fedoras, yarmulkes. Several of them held prayer books in their hands. They were making the run from their jobs in the city to their hardscrabble bungalow communities in the western Catskills, little mountain villages where the shop signs were in Yiddish, and the way of life was as close as they could make it to the life of the religious Jews in the Eastern European eighteenth century, lives of prayer and disputations of doctrine, rituals, songs, births and marriages. It was the beginning of the Sabbath. At home, their wives were preparing the Sabbath dinner and lighting the candles, and a multitude of children looked up from their books and begged to turn on the TV because as soon as the sun went down and the Sabbath began nothing mechanical or electrical could be touched, not a blender, not a vacuum cleaner, not a car, let alone a TV. But the men, husbands all, even the youngest of them, hadn’t made it home in time, and so they were chanting their Friday sunset prayers right here.
A long streak of red, thick as a paint brush, ran along the horizon.
As we drove into the rest area, Luke watched the Jews pray. They swayed back and forth. Luke was staring at them so intently it was as if he could hear and understand their devotions. He was perfectly still, frozen; and then he said to George, “Stop here.” He started to leave the ambulance.
“Don—t,” I called after him. “They’re going to mob you.”
“They already have,” he said. He slid gracefully out, closed the door behind him.
“Be careful,” I said.
“Come with me,” he called back.
“Shhh … shhh,” Grandpa was saying, patting his daughter with one hand and adjusting something on the IV with the other.
As soon as Luke was out, his fans began pouring out of their cars and rushing toward him. Luke jumped onto the hood of the ambulance. His priest shoes, with their slippery soles, lost contact for a moment and he stumbled forward, falling toward the windshield and stopping himself with outstretched hands. He left his handprints on the glass as he righted himself. A moment later, he scrambled onto the ambulance roof. I got out to keep an eye on him. He stood there, with one foot resting on the top-light and his arms stretched high over his head, pointing straight up, so he looked like a capital I, and then from side to side, so he looked like a T, up and down, back and forth, in an impromptu semaphore language that for some reason stopped his fans from engulfing him.
The minion of commuting Jews turned their faces toward him. Did they think Luke was a priest who’d gone completely mad? Did any of them recognize him?
“Listen to me, everyone, listen,” Luke shouted. “Come on in close, I wanna tell you all something.”
With surprising orderliness, the crowd surrounded him. For the first time, I could see they were really not quite a mob. They seemed calm. They were smiling, genuinely pleased to be in Luke’s presence.
“I got a badly hurt woman in here,” Luke said. He was speaking in his most public voice, a kind of Appalachian twang, his heart-of-America voice, the one that conjured Daniel Boone, Pretty Boy Floyd, Will Rogers, Joe Hill, banjos, steel guitars, fishing boats, houses of the rising sun, men on strike for a decent wage, boys in overalls and girls in gingham, and the stoic, decent heart of the common people. In front of his public, he channeled this great strain of Americana; Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, and ten thousand nameless troubadours lived within him, and they would continue to live as long as Luke drew breath. “We’re takin’ her to this hospital where we think the folks’ll be able to help her out.”
“Who’s in there?” a man called out.
Luke turned toward the sound of the voice, though the crowd was so tightly packed it was impossible to know who had said it.
“Who’s in there?” Luke repeated the question. He took his foot off the top-light and paced the small platform of the ambulance roof. He was full of angularity, exhaustion, and power; he looked down at his followers like Lenin at the Finland Station. “You want to know who it is? Okay. I’ll tell you. It’s Esther.”
My mother’s name dropped like a net over the crowd. They seemed not only stunned, but captured by the fact that Luke was here with his legendary lover. In the deep, dying blue light of evening, I saw something very much like wonder in their faces. There were even cheers, though none of them seemed to realize that just by being there, and being in the way, they were destroying the reunion they wished to celebrate.
“So you guys just clear a path and let us through,” Luke said. “We can’t make this trip goin’ no twenty miles per hour.”
The cheering only got louder. But for what did they make all this wild and hungry noise? For the love he had once given so freely, with the winged, boundless passion of youth, a love that reminded them of their own dreams of happiness? They were in awe of Luke, in awe of his life, and they thought that if only they could know him they could know themselves. They were like me. Luke was our tiny, holy kernel of hunger for heaven, sealed in a package with a hundred layers of gaudy paper. He was wrapped in money, and he was wrapped in fame, in sex, drugs, politics, nostalgia, privilege; but when all of that was torn away, what was left? A soul, just a soul, a tiny, frail human soul, racing blindly and in terror through the dark woods.
Yet to see him there, and to hear his voice trying to reason with the zealots, brought blood to my face. I had been chasing after him for so long, I had somehow neglected to listen to him, I had never heard him, never heard him try to tell the truth, find what was decent in himself, and what was decent in America, never heard the love or the confusion, never quite believed the pain: all those songs. I had been so consumed by the certainty that if those who worshiped him knew how badly he had treated my mother and me, then they would turn on him, they would realize they loved a mirage. I had managed to overlook what everyone else seemed to know: there was magic in him, he made something happen in the air, he changed you, he made you, for a moment at least, willing to risk everything for speed, or music, or love.
“One song!!” a woman’s voice shouted out from the back. “Oh, pleeeeease.”
“Folks,
” Luke said, “we need you to make a way for us. You gotta hang back and let us through.” He looked out at them and shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.
Luke looked down and saw a familiar face, or what was left of it. Eliot Shore had fought his way to the front. He had gone to fat, but extravagantly so: he had reached and passed the point of no return. He bulged out of his overalls. He had sliced open the sides of his sneakers to accommodate his poor swollen feet. His face was spread out like an anvil, his stringy black hair hung limply down to his shoulders. He looked like a gangster’s slow-witted brother, the one who gets to work as a bouncer in a mobbed-up dance club. But Luke seemed happy to see him. Eliot sucked in a bit of his gut and stood straight up, as if at attention, his eyes doglike with love and uncertainty, his face streaked with tears, and Luke saluted him, as if they had once flown together in the RAF.
“Eliot,” Luke said.
“Hey, man,” said Eliot. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Get us out of here.”
“You got it. No one’s gonna get in your way.”
Luke jumped from the roof to the hood of the ambulance. I was at the bumper, with my hand outstretched to help him down, I wasn’t sure why, he probably didn’t need it, but there I was, feeling servile and awed.
“Are those your mother’s clothes?” he asked, rejecting my aid and leaping to the ground.
The crowd kept their distance.
However, one of the Jews—a wraith with a wispy beard, and delicate fingers that nervously worried the buttons of his once white shirt—called out to Luke.
“Luke, don’t forget who you are. You go running around like a chicken with its head cut off looking for what we could have given you all along.”
Luke turned toward the young man and then answered him in Yiddish. I had no idea what he was saying, but all the Jews were nodding, and all but the graybeards were smiling. Then Luke unbuttoned his shirt. His chest was white and slack and in the deep hollow between his breasts grew a dozen or so gray wiry hairs. Resting in this meager nest was a mezuzah, and he pulled it off over his head and handed it to the young man, who held it for a moment in his cupped hands, as if it were a flame or a tiny creature, and then lifted it to his lips to kiss it, and then handed it back to Luke, who said “Thank you” in English and bowed his head deeply.
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