Stern

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  The Negro ran through the other patients, while Stern made himself small in his chair and tried to block out all sound. After the last patient, Stern found himself putting another bill in the Negro's pocket, as though he hadn't realized what he was getting and saw now that he had underpaid.

  A sweet and choirlike glow came over the Negro's face as he showed Stern out of the office and began to push the baggage cart. All the way to the administration building he blurted out secrets of the Home. “Nobody know it, but they get tranquilizer every day,” he said. “Guy gonna die, we shift him to Room 12 so we can whip him out of there when he go and not shake up no one.”

  And after each batch of secrets, Stern compulsively stuffed another bill in the Negro's jacket, wanting him to stop and tell no others, yet paying him for each pair. On the front steps of the administration building, Stern saw his wife's car. The Negro, a little flustered, strained for a climactic one and finally said, “Staff get to eat better than the patients. We get better cuts of meat and all we want.” Stern let Lennie get his bags on the car rack and stuffed a final five into his pocket.

  “You didn't have to tell me any of those,” Stern said, getting behind the wheel and taking his last look at the Grove Rest Home. But then, lest he hurt the Negro attendant's feelings, he said, “But thanks,” and swept out of the driveway.

  “I thought I'd always have it in there, but the parachute is gone,” Stern told his wife as they drove home. “It feels as though I have a hot tablecloth around the front of me now, but it's better than the chute.”

  She sat beside him with one tanned leg folded beneath her, her great eyes glistening, wet with expectancy. She wore a cotton jumper, and when Stern leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her blouse was loose and he could make out the start of her nipples beneath her half bra. It got him nervous, and he said, “Why are you wearing your blouse like that? When you bend over, people can actually see the nipples. That isn't any damned good.”

  “It isn't?” she said, teasing him. “Oh well, don't worry; it's only when you get real close.”

  “None of that's funny,” said Stern. “I just got out of the goddamned place for my stomach. Do you still go to that dance class?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, sitting against the door, her eyes huge. “That's what saved me when you were in there. First we dance like crazy and then we congregate at the overnight diner on Olivetti Street. That's the best part. You should hear one of the girls talk. Dirtier than anything you've ever heard. She's a scream. Then José spins me home, since he lives out our way.”

  “Is there any more of that tongue stuff?” Stern asked.

  “Don't be silly,” she said. “He kisses everybody. It's what they do.”

  She hung back against the door, her skirt above her browned knees, and Stern wondered whether she had gone to bed with the instructor, getting into tangled, modern dance positions with him. How did he know she hadn't spent the entire five weeks of his sickness at endless, exhausting, intricately choreographed lovemaking, flying to the instructor seconds after she had deposited Stern at the Home? She seemed curled up, contented, shimmering with peace, as though someone had finally pressed the right buttons and relieved the dry, chattering hunger Stern had never been able to cope with. Perhaps she had gone to him in a desperate way, knowing that the instructor, however thin of bone and feminine of gesture, would never allow her to be insulted and would attack any offender with Latin fury. In any case, the secret was locked between her warm thighs. He would never know what had gone on, and he felt a drooping, weakened sensation and wondered why there couldn't be a chemical test, a litmus paper you could hold up to women to find out how many times they'd been to bed since last you saw them.

  “We're having a recital and I've got to rehearse practically every night. It saved me while you were away. I'd have gone crazy.”

  “I don't know about any recitals,” Stern said. “I've got to have everything easy on me. I don't want that thing coming back. I never want to go back to any rest homes. If I go back there, I'm really cooked.”

  At the Home, several days before Stern left, Rooney, hanging from an overhead porch beam, had told Stern of a merchant seaman who had gotten over an ulcer and who subsequently was incapable of being riled. “You could stick it into him from morning till midnight and he'd just give you a little smile and off he'd go like a contented cow.” Now, as he drove home, Stern, who had spoken sharply to his wife and had felt the hot brocade tighten against the front of him, began suddenly to follow the procedure of Rooney's man. He held the controls gently in his hands, tapping lightly on the foot pedals and scanning the road ahead easily, as if too vigorous a motion might topple his head from his shoulders. He began to do things in a slow and mincing way, as though he might be able to whisper and tiptoe through life, hushing his way past death itself. At the tollbooth, he smiled meltingly at the uniformed attendant, and when the man took his fifty cents, Stern said, “Thanks a lot.”

  “Why did you thank him?” his wife asked.

  “Why not?” said Stern.

  Later, when they approached the outskirts of Stern's town, they drove past small houses with neatly kept lawns and Stern nodded in a friendly way to the people who stood outside them. He knew they were all gentiles and he wondered what would happen in a pogrom. Which ones, if any, would hide him and his family from the authorities? Probably quite a few, he thought; ones that would surprise him. Probably the people with the most forbidding gentile faces. Ordinarily they'd never have anything to do with Stern, but if it came to a pogrom, with New England crustiness they'd spirit Stern and his family off to attics, saying to one another, “No one's going to tell us what to do with our Jews.”

  As they drove past the man's house, Stern held his breath and closed his eyes for a second, as though there were a chance it might not be there. He had been away five weeks, and perhaps part of his cure was that the man's house would be swept away or that it would disappear as though it had never been there, much like his vanished ulcer. But the house stood in the same place, and Stern, as he drove by, inclined his head gently toward it, as though he would face whatever horrors lay inside with softness and gentle ways, melting them with his niceness. As he neared his own house, he wondered fleetingly what he, the man down the street, would do in the event of a pogrom. Would he startle Stern by spiriting his despised Jewish neighbors away in his cellar, hating pogroms as even more un-American than Stern?

  In his house, Stern sat down in the easy chair of his sparsely furnished living room and said to his wife, “Softly and easily. That's how it's going to have to be. No noise. No upsets.”

  His son came out with a bandage on his elbow and said, “What's it like to die?”

  Stern said, “I'm not doing any dying for a while. But there'll be no rough playing any more. Everything with Daddy is soft and easy. Where did you get the cut? That's the kind of thing I don't want to get involved in, but where did you get it?”

  “I found it on me in the morning,” said the boy, beginning to suck a blanket.

  Stern's wife, who had been boiling eggs for him in the kitchen, hollered in, “There's one last thing you're going to get a kick out of doing. The kind of thing you'll enjoy. I'll tell you about it later.”

  Stern started to eat the eggs, but they stuck in his throat and he said, “What's the thing? I don't want to get into anything two minutes after I'm back from a rest home.”

  “I wouldn't tell it to you, except it's the kind of thing you'll enjoy taking care of. Some kids came by on a bike, older than him, and one of them cut his elbow with a mirror and called him ‘Matzoh.' I've been furious, but I saved it for you because I know it's the kind of thing you'll want to settle.”

  “He doesn't live around here, that bad boy,” said Stern's son. “He's just visiting someone here. I wish you'd make the boy die.”

  “Daddies don't make small boys die,” said Stern. The brocade that lay across the front of him began to heat up, and he pressed his fist deep int
o his stomach and held it there, on guard lest another ulcer begin to sprout forth and fill his ribs.

  “Nobody seems to have heard what I've been saying,” he said to his wife, but then he clasped his son's head and said, “You're right; it is the kind of thing I'd like to take care of.” He took the boy to his car, squeezing his hand, and for a second it seemed that the child was really holding his hand, leading Stern and protecting him. He drove the car in a wide arc, as far as possible from the kike man's house, and the child said, “You're going too far. The bad boy won't be around here.”

  “You point him out to me,” said Stern, the front of him on fire, crouched over as though to give the flames less area to ruin. They came to a cluster of seven boys who'd gotten off their bikes to rest, and Stern stopped the car, gripping his son's hand for courage. He went among them and said, “Someone said something to my son and cut him. They said a dirty thing to him, and it had better not happen again.”

  “Don't make them dead,” his son said. “They're not the bad boys.”

  Stern grabbed the collar of one of them, twisted him close, and said, “I can really get sore, and when I do I can really start swinging. That better not happen again.”

  The boy looked at him evenly, without fear, and Stern released him. He must have been around twelve, and Stern wondered whether he would remember and two years later, at fourteen, with his body shaping into athletic hardness, come after Stern and pummel him to the ground.

  Stern got back into the car with his son and, continuing in the arc, he drove slowly through the streets and stopped alongside a small boy with glasses and large feet who was walking next to the curb, carrying books.

  “Someone said something lousy to my son and cut him,” Stern said from the car. “I don't like the particular kind of thing they said.”

  “I'm not a little boy,” said the book carrier. “I'm seventeen and finishing high school. I'm small and everyone thinks I'm a kid.”

  “Don't make him dead, Daddy,” said Stern's son. Stern felt very sorry for the small high-school student with his big feet, and yet he was thrilled to find someone in the neighborhood who read books and wasn't fierce. He wanted to invite him to his house and give him books, maybe take him to New York to see Broadway plays.

  “Come over if you're near my place,” said Stern, and drove off.

  “I think the bad boy is visiting over there,” said Stern's child, pointing in the direction of the house that darkened Stern's every waking moment. Nonetheless, he knitted his eyebrows, bared his teeth, and gunned the motor, as though, by going through the motions of outrage, he would somehow become outraged and the momentum would carry him right up to the man's front door before he had time to change his mind. He raced toward the man's house, and yet, when he reached it, the fraud of his facemaking became apparent to him and he continued on, realizing that he had never intended for a second confronting the man.

  In his own home, Stern's wife asked, “Did you find him?” And Stern said, “I don't want to do any finding. Don't you realize I just came home from a Home a few hours ago?”

  For one blissful second then, Stern's vision blurred and it seemed that he had gotten it all wrong, that he had not been away at all, and that he was to leave that very evening for a place where everything would be made better for him. But then he caught the edge of a chair, his eyes cleared, and he realized that he really had been away. The thought that he had come back to find his situation unchanged was maddening. It was as though he had been guaranteed that the treatment would heal his neighborhood as well as his ulcer—and that the guarantee had turned out to have secret clauses, rendering it worthless. The man was still there. The hospital had not had him removed. His wife had not somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His father had not gone down the street to thrust his scarred nose up in the man's face. No hand had reached down from the heavens and declared that the man had never existed. He was still right there in his house, not even seriously sick.

  Stern went upstairs, and as he sat on the edge of his bed he felt a small spring inside him stretch and finally break, leaving his body in a great tremble. He lay back on the bed, as though mere contact with a bed could cure anything, but he could not quiet himself, and so he dialed Fabiola.

  “A brand new thing has happened,” Stern told him. “There's a tremble in me and I can't control it. The thing is, I've just come back from the damned rest home. Can you just come back from a place like that and have something like this happen?”

  “Yes,” said Fabiola. “You'd better avoid tension or you're going to wind up back there again. Remember that and call me if you get into more trouble.”

  Stern got on his knees now, as though in prayer, clutching fistfuls of sheet and trying to squeeze out the tremble. The bedroom windows were darkening with night when his wife appeared, flinging off her shorts, combing her hair, and saying, “I've got to go to rehearsals.”

  “Look,” Stern said, “I'm going to ask you something, and I really have to. I've got a new thing and I have to have you here. I'm not talking about any ulcer but something really new and lousy.”

  “You mean you want me to give up the dancing? It's the only thing I have out here.”

  “You don't know what this new deal is,” said Stern. As though to demonstrate, he began to take short, gasping breaths. It started as a plea for sympathy, but when he tried to stop he found he couldn't and he began to cry. “Let's get out of here. Oh, let's sell this house. We don't belong here. You'll have to handle all the details. Oh, I'm really in trouble now.”

  IT WAS a jangled, careening period that followed, and later he could remember it only as a black piece torn from his life rather than a number of days or weeks. He knew that it began trembling on the edge of a bed at midnight and he remembered how it ended, but he could pick out only single frenzied moments in between, as though it were all down on a giant mural he was examining in darkness with an unreliable flashlight. There was no good part of the day for him during this period, but it was the mornings that seemed the worst because there were always a giddy few minutes when it seemed he was going to be all right. But a dry, shriveling tremble would soon come over him, and it was then that he had to hold on to things, as though to keep himself on the ground. He held on to chairs and desks and he held on to himself, always keeping one fist buried deeply in his side, as though to nail himself down and join together the pieces of human spring that had snapped within him. Going to work was a stifled, desperate time, and there was at least one ride when, sealed up in the train, holding the bottom of his seat with all his might, he thought he was not going to be able to make it and said to the man next to him, “I'm in a lot of trouble. You may have to grab me in a second.” He remembered that the man, who smoked a pipe and wore his hat down low, had hardly looked surprised and said, “I'll keep an eye on you,” and then gone back to his Times.

  He was certain, on these rides to the city, that he would lose his breath and begin to bite things so that heavyset men, who'd been college athletes, would have to sit on him in mid-aisle, pressing his face to the floor, while conductors signaled on ahead to alert authorities. Each time the train pulled in, Stern would race gratefully to the street, sucking in hot blasts of summer air, stunned that he had made it.

  In his office, on these mornings, a motor, powered by rocket fuels, ran at a dementedly high idle somewhere between his shoulder blades. He could not sit and he could not stand, and he remembered his narrow business room as a place to crouch and sweat and hope for time to pass. A film seemed to seal him off from the others around him. Unable to think, his mind an endless white lake, he touched papers and opened drawers and felt pencils, as though by physically going through remembered motions the work would get done. He did these things in short, frenzied bursts, holding on to a table with one hand; it seemed that someone was pulling him into the ground. At noon, his fist socked deep into his stomach, as though to seal it like a cork, he would run to a nearby park, where he would fling off his jacket
, lie on his back, and stick his face in the sun, praying that he might sleep or disappear into the grass. Once he slept a long while in his office clothes, his face burning up in the heat. He awakened at a crazy, magical time of day, cool and grateful, the trembling stilled, and for a moment he thought it might be over. But then the motor turned over quietly and began to hum.

  There was, too, during that period, a numb and choking fear of his boss, Belavista, that formed suddenly and oppressed Stern. He crouched within his office and gripped his desk and waited for the Brazilian to call. The man's confident morning steps in the hall sent Stern looking for a'place to hide. The phone ring became a knife, and once, when it was late and Belavista summoned him, he flew first to the bathroom and locked the toilet stall. He could remember that later, in the front office, Belavista had stood for a long time without talking, his charred millionaire's face staring out of the skylight, while Stern died in his tracks. Turning finally, he had said, “How are things going in there?” And Stern, his tongue shriveling in his mouth, had said, “I just can't,” and had run to put his face up to the park sun, grunting and squeezing his fists blood red, as though he could force and fight his way into a sleep.

  His house, once he had screamed “Let's sell,” became a dirty and infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, “I saw your ad about the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don t want it to be all my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I can't tell you how important that part is.” And Stern had moaned back, “Oh, I know; I really know,” joining the man in tears.