“How long has this been here?”
Polished brown wood, four inches tall. A mournful bearded figure, arms spread, eyes closed, wearing nothing but a cloth around his waist, braided twigs on his head, and little nails through his palms.
“Did Jessica put this here?” he asked, pulling it from the wall, and when his mother didn’t answer, added, “The brown girl?”
Why did he trust anyone? He’d given her a job, he’d offered her a dollar more an hour than he’d promised in his ad, he’d said she could take a paid vacation after working for a year. One gesture of good faith after another, and all she’d done was stomp on his generosity. He hopped down from the bed and headed for the trash can in the kitchen. Only when he came close did his mother grab his arm and pull it up so she could see what was in his hand. “Him?” she said. “He doesn’t bother me.” She pried the crucifix from his fingers with surprising strength and set it on the dresser. Then she gestured at the paintings on the walls, or maybe it was the furniture she was pointing to, or the walls themselves, the whole room, the memories it contained. “It can all stay.” She turned and hobbled into the hallway. “Let’s go already.”
The Waterview Terrace was on 81st between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, just a block and a half north of the apartment where Paul had spent the whole of his fourth decade. Along with traffic sounds through the open window came a pleasant breeze, the smell of diesel and fish, the eager cry of a seagull. As he hung his mother’s clothes in her new closet, a wave of nostalgia struck, not for childhood but for days that were once open and waiting to be filled—sometimes lonely, yes, but ripe with potential. The sound of car horns, the restless air stirring the drapes, brought a suggestion of youth and vigor that made Paul wish he could spend the rest of his Saturday roaming the city, breathing in its smells and listening to its cacophonous music without the intrusion of his mother’s groan as she lowered herself into a chair, and of the TV, turned up too loud, as she pressed buttons on the remote control.
“You’re going to like it here,” he said again, more doubtful now than ever as he took in the kitchenette’s aluminum sink, the cheap pressboard cabinets, the institutional paint job, the sad attempt to make the place look homey with ugly lace curtains and doilies under table lamps and coffee maker. The box of his mother’s knick-knacks didn’t help. The china bowl took up too much space on the counter, and the framed photos didn’t all fit on the dresser. The one porcelain doll he’d kept for her he had nowhere to put except on the shelf at the top of the closet, where his mother couldn’t reach it, or even see it. One of its eyelids had stuck shut, its wink less coy than distraught or diseased.
On a side table next to the armchair, he set a snapshot of Joy and Kyle from three years ago, when they’d come home for Passover. “Joy decided to stay out West. Says she’s addicted to sunshine. Cyn and I are planning to visit in November.”
“Regina lived in California,” his mother said.
“I don’t know if you can call it ‘lived,’ ” he said. “She wasn’t even there six months.”
“She went to school.”
“Of a sort, I suppose. The Haight-Asbury School of Mind-Expanding Debauchery.”
“Your father never took me anywhere.”
“So I’ve heard. Good thing he made up for it by being such a kind and easy-going person.”
“I’m the only one of the girls who never went to Paris.”
“And half the girls died of lung cancer because they smoked like French hookers.”
“I was the best dancer out of all of us.”
“I remember,” Paul said. “You did the Charleston at my wedding.”
She clicked off the TV, waved her hand as if to shoo him, and said, “Like a dream.”
He’d planned to stay for lunch, to get her settled, to make sure she wasn’t disoriented by the new surroundings, the new routines. But by the time he shepherded her into the elevator, he was already thinking about leaving. He’d take her as far as the dining room, maybe, or pass her off on one of the aides in the lobby. He’d hurry back out to Queens, finish the packing, and with luck he’d still have an hour to catch dinner before the start of the Mets game. Even this late, there was sure to be space available in the upper deck. Or maybe he’d find a scalper in the parking lot and treat himself to the best seat he could bargain down to under a hundred bucks. He’d call Cynthia and let her know he was coming home late. Reggie could get the dolls another day.
With them in the elevator was an elegant Indian woman in a wheelchair. White hair, red sari, perfect posture. British accent when she said good morning. Paul introduced his mother, who managed to slide behind him, so the woman had to lean back in the chair to see her. “She just moved in,” Paul said. “She’s a little nervous.”
“Welcome,” the woman said. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.”
“That’s what I told her,” Paul said, with gratitude.
“The people are very kind. And there’s much to keep one occupied.”
“I told her about the exercise classes. And the card room.”
“The Thursday lectures are very informative,” the woman said. “Sometimes my son joins me. He quite enjoys them.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “Isn’t that nice.”
“He works downtown, but he comes all the way up on the subway at least once a week for lunch. He’s very attentive.”
“I wish I had that kind of time,” Paul said.
“He’s coming today, in fact.” Paul smiled but didn’t respond. He hoped if he stopped talking she wouldn’t go on. They still had seven floors left. But it was clear she had plenty more to say. “I’m meeting him in the lobby, and we’re going out to a restaurant. The food here does get tedious after a while. As does the company. It’s really quite essential to have regular visits from family. One could become very depressed otherwise.”
Paul coughed and cleared his throat, hoping to shut her up. But it was his mother who rescued him. “Smells funny in here,” she said. The woman’s smile disappeared. She sat straighter in her chair. They descended the last three floors in silence.
When the elevator doors opened, the woman charged into the lobby with startling speed, head tilted forward, hands pumping rubber wheels. But before Paul had to face the enthusiastic greeting of her attentive son, he and his mother were met not by an aide but by an old man in a blue cardigan, one pair of glasses on his nose, another on a cord around his neck. His body was a big round ball, no distinction between belly and chest, but his legs were surprisingly thin, swimming in baggy trousers, and he had a strange prancing gait, lifting up on his toes with every step. Paul wondered if he worked for the Terrace. Some kind of manager, maybe, here to welcome new residents. Except on his feet he wore leather slippers, deeply creased across the toes and backless, heels bare and yellow. “Mitzi,” he said, and took Paul’s mother by the elbow. “I’ve got a seat for you at my table. Good people there. No yackers.”
No one had called his mother Mitzi since the last of the girls moved to Florida, twenty years ago. To his father she’d always been Mimi or Mother. Among her mahjong partners, whom she wanted to impress and intimidate, she’d gone by Miriam. To her face, shopkeepers had called her Mrs. H., though when she was out of earshot, even if Paul lingered nearby, she was The Mayor of Utica Avenue. “The Mayor wasn’t happy with the grapes today. Had to eat half a pound to be sure they weren’t ripe.”
But the old nickname didn’t surprise her. Or at least she showed no sign of being surprised, though she showed no sign, either, of being pleased by it, or offended, or even having heard the word. She disengaged from Paul and started hobbling away with this stranger prancing beside her. “Excuse me,” Paul said, and only then did the old man turn to him, raising the second pair of glasses and holding them up over the first.
“Sorry, Paulie-pal,” he said. “I’ve only got one seat saved.”
Paulie-pal. Mitzi. Half-formed memories arrived like puffs of smoke, dispersing as he
tried to grasp them. The apartment on Crown Street. The swim club on Utica. His father’s cigar in an ashtray. Ice cubes rattling in a small glass. His mother’s laughter. “Mr. Fatts?”
“Hey, who you calling fat?” The old man slapped his belly. It was the same line he’d used when Paul was a boy, though it had been funnier when he was a hundred and fifty pounds, his belt buckled on its tightest notch. “You’re a big boy now. You can call me Herman.”
“I can’t believe it,” Paul said. “It must be forty-five years.”
“Believe it, boy-o. We all get here eventually. It’ll be you, before you know it.”
“You were in California. I didn’t know you’d come back.”
“History lessons some other time. We’ve got to get in there before all the rolls are gone. Come on, Mitzi.”
His mother didn’t glance back at Paul as she walked away. She transferred her weight from her cane onto the old man’s arm, and her steps seemed to grow stronger, more balanced, as the two of them disappeared into the dining room, from which Paul heard a joyous clinking of plates and silverware, a rumble of excited talk. He should have been pleased to hand his mother off into such spirited company, but astonishment made him lightheaded, and once again he found himself forgetting to breathe. Herman Fatts. How was it possible? Of all the places in the world, how could he be here? He no longer wanted to finish packing his mother’s apartment. He didn’t want to wander the city, either, or watch a Mets game. He just wanted to go home to Cynthia, to a quiet dinner and a TV movie, to a predictable life that didn’t throw him into confusion at every turn.
But when he tried to leave, a small crowd blocked the revolving door out of the lobby. There was the dignified Indian woman in her wheelchair, and in front of her two aides in forest green uniforms, with the Terrace’s logo—a river passing under a bridge—embroidered on their chests. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Randawaha,” said one of the aides, heavy, black, hair dyed orange and straightened stiff to her shoulders. “We’d like you to stay inside.”
“But I’ve told you. My son’s expecting me.”
“If he comes, he can meet you in here,” the aide said.
“He isn’t planning to park,” Mrs. Randawaha said. “He’ll be alarmed when he pulls up and doesn’t see me.”
“I thought you said he was coming by subway,” the aide said.
“Excuse me,” Paul said, and when no one moved out of his way, asked, “Can I help here?”
The other aide, a skinny young man with pitted cheeks and wet-looking hair, gave an extravagant sigh. “We go through this every day.”
“What’s the problem?”
“We can’t let her out.”
“This isn’t a prison,” Paul said, short of breath. “She’s not an inmate.”
“Last time we got a call from the cops. They found her in the middle of Columbus Circle, blocking two lanes.”
“Your son wants you to stay inside,” the first aide said, bending down close to Mrs. Randawaha’s face. “He doesn’t want you to get lost again.”
“I spoke to him this morning,” Mrs. Randawaha said. Her posture was no longer quite erect. In fact, it looked as if she were in the midst of collapsing, the upper portion of her body tilting to one side. Her voice, too, had lost its force and now came out as hardly more than a whisper. “He told me to be outside. Promptly at noon. He’s taking me to, to…”
“Well, I talked to him just half an hour ago,” the aide said. “And he told me he might get held up at work. He said you should stay inside, and if he doesn’t show up by twelve-thirty, you should go on and have lunch here without him.”
“Why didn’t he call to let me know?”
“He tried, but you must have already left your room.”
The other aide said to Paul, without bothering to lower his voice, “He hasn’t been here in two years.”
“Excuse me,” Paul said again, and this time he edged around the wheelchair and ducked between the two aides until he could reach the nearest wing of the revolving door. But before he could push it, a hand snatched his wrist. Brown, bony, with deeply grooved nails. “Please,” Mrs. Randawaha said. “Please, get me out of here. I can’t eat another meal…”
It took both aides to extract his wrist, and when they did, a red mark appeared all the way around. Unlike his mother, Mrs. Randawaha kept her eyes on him until he turned away, swinging through the door and hurrying as fast as he could out of sight.
“Herman Fatts,” he said, setting the box of porcelain dolls in front of Reggie, who lay back in a recliner, eyes closed, fingertips pressed to both temples. “After all these years. Can you believe it?”
“On a day like this,” Reggie said, moving only her feet, “I believe anything.” She wore leather slippers not much different from Herman Fatts’s, only hers were brand new, with a fluffy wool lining, and her heels were pristine, skin pale and smooth, no calluses or corns, though she was on her feet all day. “You could tell me John Lennon was there, holding hands with Janis Joplin, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
Reggie was only two years younger than Paul, but the more time passed, the more they seemed to separate in age. She was slim and fashionable, with hair dyed so carefully you could mistake it for natural, and people often guessed she was in her early forties. Unlike Cynthia, born a month earlier, she hadn’t yet gone soft in the backside and thighs, didn’t have burst capillaries under her eyes or wrinkles around her mouth. When she was younger, Paul had attributed her looks to lack of stress, and her weight to cigarettes. But she’d quit smoking more than fifteen years ago, and if you believed her, stress was the only thing she experienced from the moment she woke up until she went back to sleep.
For years she hadn’t worked at all, instead living on an inheritance from a childless uncle, which paid for her apartment, her clothes, her series of vaguely artistic and penniless boyfriends, her one brief and disastrous marriage. Paul had received the same inheritance, and along with fifteen percent of each month’s paycheck and half his yearly bonus, it had gone into mutual funds whose dividends he immediately reinvested. According to his financial advisor, if he didn’t start spending more money, he’d have enough to retire for three hundred years. “Take a trip,” he said whenever Paul called to ask if he should move more funds from securities to bonds. “Buy yourself a boat or something.” Paul was thinking about replacing the Imperial.
Reggie’s investments hadn’t been so prudent. To celebrate her fiftieth birthday, she’d opened a designer boutique in SoHo with a friend she’d known for less than three weeks. “It’s always been my dream,” she’d told Paul at the time, though that was the first he’d known of it; before that he’d thought her dream had been to live in Japan, which she’d never visited because she didn’t eat fish, or care for its smell. For a year the store had done wonderfully, with a write-up in the style section of a neighborhood paper Paul had never heard of, with two customers who’d played small roles in independent films, with account books running only mildly in the red. And then things got rocky, when Reggie turned out to be a lousy bookkeeper, when the friend turned out to be a thief, when designers asked to be paid. Within three years, the remainder of the uncle’s money was gone, and the store closed.
Afterward, following a long period of depression and recovery during which Paul covered her rent and sent a check for food and necessities, Reggie took a job—her first since high school, as far as Paul knew—at Macy’s. For a while she stood behind the watch counter, and now she was in intimates. “Do you know how mortifying it is to look at women in their underwear all day?” she said, finally opening her eyes and noticing the box of dolls at her feet. She leaned forward, picked one up, turned it over a couple of times, raised and lowered its arms. “The really fat ones I can handle. It’s the ones who think they’re smaller than they are. Today, my god, you wouldn’t believe it. I had this one, easily a 42D, who insists I put her in a 38C. She can’t close the clasp of course, so I’ve got to yank it all out of shape to
get it around her. And then she stands there admiring herself in the mirror, bulging out everywhere, the lace is about to rip, I don’t even know how she can breathe, and you know what she says? Let’s try a size smaller.”
Paul had stopped paying her rent, but he still sent a check once a month to supplement her wages. He’d go on doing so until she retired, he suspected, and then he’d have to triple the amount. If she was going to thank him, it would probably be after he dropped dead.
“I wouldn’t have recognized him in a million years,” he said. What he couldn’t explain was how uneasy he was made by the sight of the tubby old man with two pairs of glasses, and even more by the weird suspicion that he wasn’t really Herman Fatts, or rather that Herman Fatts had transformed into someone entirely different, not over forty-five years but overnight. To distract himself he examined a few snapshots propped on a bookshelf, none of them in frames, all of them showing Reggie in stylish clothing, set off against natural scenery: waves on a beach, a waterfall surrounded by ferns, a field of young corn. Implied was the eye of the photographer—sappy, deluded, doomed. Paul hadn’t met the new boyfriend yet, or even heard about him, but he had enough money, it seemed, to own at least a camera and a car. Paul gave him six months at most. “If I saw him on the street, I would have passed right by. Isn’t that strange? Someone who was such a big part of our lives?”
“He wasn’t a big part of my life,” Reggie said. She was sitting up now, pulling each of the dolls out of the box in turn, examining it carefully from several angles, tipping it forward to make sure its eyes closed properly. “I hardly remember him.”
“He was in our house every Friday night for at least five years. We saw him at the swim club every day in summer. We went to that hotel in the Catskills to watch him perform.”
“He never paid any attention to me,” Reggie said. “You were the one he always wanted to talk to. And mom, of course.”
What Paul remembered was this: a thin, handsome neighbor, not much younger than his parents but unmarried, living with his widowed mother in an apartment building at the corner of Crown and Troy. No one seemed to know how he entered their lives. Maybe he’d filled a prescription for his mother or bought a fountain drink at Paul’s father’s drugstore. Maybe he’d joined Uncle Al’s card game at the swim club. Maybe Paul’s mother had heard him singing to himself in the vegetable market and invited him to dinner. However it happened, by the time Paul was seven or eight years old, Herman Fatts was a fixture at their table, in their living room, around their chairs beside the pool.
Between You and Me Page 17