“What?”
“Find yourself one that doesn’t eat.”
His father wasn’t thinking of the skeletal girls in multiple layers of sweaters and huge baggy pants who hung out in the dining hall like hostile ghosts, eyeing the food on your tray, one hand cradled around their Styrofoam cup of black coffee. In many ways, William Whyte’s ideas about women were outdated. Girls nowadays, the ones that ate, paid their own way; they sometimes even paid the whole thing, if they were the one who’d asked you out. The rules of the game were a lot slipperier than they’d been in his father’s day, but the ambiguity of the dating process was unimportant to Buddy. To him, those girls were irrelevant, except perhaps as practice for the real thing. Tate. He’d seen her in the cafeteria, eating like a starving boy, eating more than he did, flashing her teeth in laughter, swallowing voluptuously.
He’d contrived to run into her on campus the day before he’d left, and they’d had the usual pre-vacation exchange.
“Where are you heading for break?” she’d asked.
“South,” he said. “I’m going to do a film.”
“How’d that other one go?”
He winced. “Fine. But that was just beginning stuff. This one’s going to be longer.”
“Ten minutes this time?” she teased.
“Regular length,” he said. “A feature.” He was lying; Szilardi expected no more than half an hour.
“Anybody famous in it?” she asked.
“It’s a documentary,” he said.
“Like the news?” she said.
“Sort of,” he said. “Regular movies are fiction, you know, made up, with scripts and actors. Documentary is real stuff, no script or anything.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.” She smiled. “I can’t wait to get out of here. This semester’s been a drag.” She waited. “I’m going South, too,” she said, and he realized that he ought to have asked her where she was going for the break. “Florida.”
“Fort Lauderdale?” He thought of her frolicking, swimsuited and tan, with the golden boys crowding around her, spraying her with beer. He saw her dozing, sun dazed and sand encrusted, on a large towel near the water, while a muscular hand rubbed oil into her back.
“Nothing like that,” she said, frowning. “I hate that kind of fraternity shit. I’m going to Boca, to see my grandparents.”
“Sounds great,” he’d said, feeling lamed by the pallor of the conversation.
“Well, I gotta go,” she’d said, walking backwards, away from him. “Good luck with the movie. See you.”
“See you,” he’d said, automatically, watching her stumble infinitesimally in reverse, then turn and go forward, dwindling to doll size and mingling with the other dolls. When he lost sight of her, he gave an involuntary cry, and two girls walking by had giggled, and looked at each other.
“Geek,” said one.
He ignored them, lurching a few steps after Tate. She thinks I’m an idiot, he thought. A fool who talks about making movies. He heard himself, in playback, lecturing her about the difference between fiction and documentary film, and he cringed. Why hadn’t they had a normal conversation? He was always talking about stupid stuff like that. The trouble was he didn’t know how to have a normal conversation. Why couldn’t he talk like everyone else? He’d seen them from afar, laughing and gesturing, using that secret college slang, the nuances of which escaped him. They never said yes, they said really. And nothing was great or cool, anymore. Now it was intense, heavy duty, radical.
“Radical,” he said to himself. Sure enough, it sounded stupid in his voice. He had to face it—he wasn’t made for small talk. He wanted to communicate bigger, more crucial things than small talk encompassed. Why, then, were his conversations with Tate nothing more than the smallest of small talk?
He began to walk. How could she like him? She didn’t know anything real about him. What was there to tell her—I lived in six different houses before I was five, I sunburn easily, my mother shot herself?
Hard to believe, even now, that she wasn’t somewhere waiting for him. In Connecticut, making a batch of runny brownies, her only concession to motherly behavior. Or anywhere else—the Bahamas, Hawaii. He’d always had the sense somehow that she’d leave someday, just take off somewhere. She gave that impression of impermanence, like she was listening to something far-off. But he’d thought more along the lines of a vacation, not a permanent checkout. He felt the old, the usual spring of hope that came whenever he let himself think like this. It was a few weeks after the funeral when he first realized he was thinking them, thinking them without even knowing it. All day long in his head there ran a little monologue. It’s okay, it’s good that you got away. I bet you’re getting a great tan. I’m not angry but I miss you. Just call me sometimes.
Even after he’d confronted it, the madness had persisted, stretching itself out and winding into things, becoming more devious. When the first quarter grades had come out, he’d been excited by his A from Szilardi, and had found himself dialling the old number. He hadn’t understood what he was doing until the jangling off-key notes came into his ear, shocking him into sanity. “The number you have dialled,” the taped voice had said, and he’d put the phone down, not waiting for the rest, knowing what it would be.
He heard it now, breathing the dusty air of spring in Naples, and it seemed to fit with everything. He heard it in the operator’s voice, in his mother’s voice, in his own. It made a rhythm with his walking, like a sergeant calling out to his troops. Not. Not in order. Not.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The World of Men
JOAN WAS CRACKING, I could see it. The way she’d looked the other day when we met in town—like a ghost, flickering on the pavement in front of the drugstore. She hadn’t been so bad for years, not since the day I found her sitting in the backyard and knew I had to take charge of things. Even at the worst of times she’d managed to keep up outward appearances. It was hard to believe, but sometimes it seemed like she’d forgotten it all; with the advent of Buddy, it was moving back toward her, a gigantic shadow pulsing its awful message of memory.
Thank God for the house. Within it, we were safe. It was Joan’s safe haven, and now she nestled into it like a wounded animal settling in for mending. Time alone there was all we’d ever needed to put things right again. She didn’t mind entertaining there—small bridge parties and larger fêtes, stringing lanterns in the yard and twining streamers through the branches of the apple tree. Joan planned these events herself, and afterward was exhausted. She went to sleep while I crept around and tidied. Pulling the decorations down, emptying the ashtrays. Dismantling the evidence of interlopers, so that the next day when she awoke, the house would be clean again, and ours.
One April evening in 1953, my father called me into his darkened room. By then, he was sleeping in the old front room, ostensibly because it was cooler there, but really because he could no longer cope with the long flight of stairs to the bedroom he had shared with my mother. An odd effect of his illness was an intolerance to light, and to spare him discomfort the house was kept perpetually dark, the curtains drawn even at night, so that no stray beams from a passing headlamp could spill in at the windows.
I had been in the army for four and a half years now, visiting Naples when I could, staying in the house on Worth Street. I hadn’t been back since Jack’s wedding two months before; in my absence, Joan checked in on my father, who had been largely confined to bed for the past half year. She had tried to warn me on the telephone, but nothing could have prepared me for the decline that had taken place in that short interval. He was there alone when I arrived, and I muddled my way toward his voice, passing through rooms that hadn’t been so dark during the war, when we’d used the blackout. I found him in bed, coughing; the nature of his cough was light and dry sounding, not the kind one expects from lung disease. Occasionally, however, there came a deep, rasping cough, seeming to start at the bottoms of his feet, and from which he never quite caught his br
eath.
I had intended to see much of Joan during this visit; my next planned leave was set for the day before our wedding. Instead I stationed myself at the house, to look after my father. The woman who came in during the day was friendly enough, and seemed impervious to gloom, but the long hours told on her, and she agreed readily when I offered to take over for a week. Joan, occupied with wedding details, was understanding. “You wouldn’t want to fuss with this stuff anyway,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t notice half of it.”
Jack and his wife, Paula, lived in a small house a little over a mile away. I’d gotten an overnight pass, and made it just in time for their wedding, dashing into the church moments before the ceremony began. Fidgeting, still anxious from the split-second timing of my journey, I let my mind detach, inspecting the groomsmen, construing from their nauseated expressions that the bachelor party had gone well. Allowing my gaze to drift to the altar, and over the bridesmaids, and only briefly over my brother’s profile, all the while figuring return routes after the reception was over.
The organist stopped fiddling around at the front of the church and slammed his fingers down. The organ blast; it said: Here comes the bride. I turned along with everyone else to see Paula head to toe in sheer white, floating down the aisle. I was surprised at the upwelling of emotion I felt, seeing her draw closer, kiss her father, and then take her place beside Jack. The day was cloudy, but when the minister said the final words, a ray of light came through the stained-glass panel overhead, throwing the couple at the altar into a profusion of color. Jack kissed the bride; and then it was done.
I suppose I had too much to drink at the reception; or perhaps it was the proximity of my own wedding day. Whatever the reason, I quickly lost all sense of balance and wandered around being maudlin, congratulating everyone I recognized, pumping hands and slapping shoulders in a highly emotional fashion. I told sentimental stories to the minister, and risqué stories to Stan the organist; only I got them confused, although I’d known both of them all of my life. I sniffled, watching Jack and Paula dance together, the only couple on the floor, Jack barely moving, looking down at Paula who smiled up at him with her veil lifted away from her face and her train trailing from one arm. They say that in the hush I burst into song—what song it was no one could tell—and that when Joan tried to hush me, I began quoting the Bible. I set thee as a seal upon my heart. When the couple drove away, I tossed rice with the best of them, hurling the hard little grains toward the bride so viciously that she shielded her face with her purse.
“I was drunk,” I said in the train station, a few hours later.
“You didn’t have that much to drink,” said Joan.
“I must have,” I said.
“I’ve seen you drink five times that,” she said. “Is it so terrible to admit that you got emotional at a wedding? He’s your brother, after all.”
“We’re not that close,” I objected. “We don’t even like each other.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Joan.
“You’ve never had a brother,” I told her, shortly.
“I wish I did,” she said. “I’ve always wanted one.”
I let the matter lie there; but I knew it was not feeling for Jack which had moved me so, but rather the whisky on top of the anxiety.
That had been the last visit. Now I rattled around the big house all day, seeing no one, pulling dusty volumes from my old bookshelves, taking them to the window seat in my parents’ old room, dropping them there when I was finished. For hours I was plunged into adventure stories, revisiting the literature of my boyhood, reading by the light of the only open window in the house, listening the while for my father’s bell.
He rarely rang for me; and he seemed annoyed when I checked on him spontaneously; often I read on undisturbed until evening, when the failing light reminded me of where I was, and why. I roused myself and laid my book aside, descending the stairs to see to supper. Four days went by this way, and then one night, I heard the bell.
“You get the house,” he said, without preamble. He paused, breathing harshly, putting up a hand to indicate that I should be quiet. “You—were—never my favorite,” he said, at last. “You knew?”
I nodded. He nodded, too, neither pleased nor displeased, as though the statement had been merely punctuation.
“Jack—my favorite. Ellen—your mother’s. You knew that, too.” This time he didn’t look to me for confirmation but just paused, catching his breath. “Figure we owe you something,” he finished.
I could barely see my father across the lightless room; he was breathing harder now, and coughing. I hesitated; was it not now the moment for a tender exchange, some batch of conversation which could stand in my memory as a testament to the misunderstood depths of our relationship? Shouldn’t I say something to connect us, father and son, in these final hours? Could I really let the moment go by?
I could. After a few wordless minutes, I stood up.
“Um, thanks,” I said.
He opened his mouth to speak, but instead began another battle with the atmosphere, trying to draw his fair portion of it into his lungs. I waited by the bed.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, finally.
Light from the kitchen was filtering down the hall as I closed my father’s door behind me. I went toward the light; but once in the kitchen I felt aimless. I went to stand on the back porch in the twilight.
The sounds of nighttime were starting: the crickets and the gentle echoes of other people’s porch conversations, which crossed great distances when there was no wind. There was a smell of rain to come, and in the profusion which had once been my mother’s vegetable patch there was a rustling, as though some night creature, in the habit of pillaging, had come hoping for new growth, some tasty product of human industry. Far away, at the foot of the land, hidden, lay my father’s windowless workshop.
I ambled off the porch and through the weeds. I hadn’t been this way for years; it was a blind journey I was making, by feel and by memory; and when at last I stood in the tall grass outside the shed, it was with a kind of surprise.
My memories of the workshop were of a silent, male place, a region golden with sawdust and filled with curious instruments which I was forbidden to touch. At four, banished to the steps just inside the door, I watched eight-year-old Jack constructing a wavery bookshelf. Across the room, my father bent his head over something much more complicated—a set of filigree boxes for my mother’s birthday, or a fancy bird feeder to replace the weather-rotted store-bought one hanging outside the kitchen window.
At seven, Jack had been allowed off the steps, into an informal apprenticeship, handing Dad tools. He did this proudly, hour after hour, scrabbling nails out of their boxes and holding them at the ready. Our father never indicated what he wanted but just stretched his hand out silently and handed back each tool he didn’t want until Jack got him the right one. Jack learned this way; soon he was selecting the tools before my father requested them, eager as an OR nurse slapping instruments into the palm of the surgeon. When he was eight, having lasted out a year at our father’s elbow, a workbench was cleared for him, and he was given his own hammer and a small supply of nails and glue and scrap wood.
They worked in silence, my father offering only the most meager of instruction. When Jack drove a chisel into the ball of his thumb, Dad lay down his own tools without speaking and went over to inspect the damage. If it was bad enough, he doctored it out of the first-aid kit kept on the middle shelf, against the wall. When Jack, hammering, missed a nail head, my father’s head lifted, as though he had heard someone calling to him. Later, he might pass by Jack’s workbench, and reach out to finger the place with a grim small smile; Jack would flush and squirm.
Jack learned from watching our father, standing near him for an hour while he used a tool, then later going over and lifting the same tool down from its place. By twelve, he was expert with all but the very dangerous equipment, and it was time for my own apprentice
ship.
I lasted the year, happy to be so near my father, who seemed a different person in the workshop. We were all different there: my father was knowable, and Jack and I were brothers, with an unspoken truce. I received my own hammer, and set about my own clumsy bookshelf. It was clear right away that I didn’t have Jack’s natural gifts or patience. He had learned merely by observation, and had rarely made mistakes; even with his instruction, I was hopeless.
“You’re choking up too much,” he would say, taking the hammer from me. “Like this,” swinging it gracefully, bringing it to tap against the nail head. He gave the hammer back, stood back and watched me, shaking his head. “No,” he said, taking my hand and refolding around the hammer. “It has to feel like the nail is waiting for it,” he said. “Confidence.” We swung together. Tap.
“I can do it,” I said, pulling away, swinging, thwacking the nail a little distance into the wood. Stubborn as I was, I could see that there was a difference between my technique and Jack’s.
“It takes practice,” he said. “You’ll get it.”
But I never did; and before too long I gave up and relinquished the workshop to its rightful owners. The tools which scorned me, twisting and leaping in my hands, I gave back to their masters, with whom they were obedient and meek. I never even graduated to the power tools; at ten years old, I took to the steps again. I began taking my schoolbooks out to the workshop in the evenings, seating myself on the steps and reading while the others worked.
“How can you hear yourself think?” my mother asked me.
“It’s quiet there,” I told her, genuinely surprised. Apart from the hum of the power tools, the occasional screech of a dull sawblade, the workshop was the quietest place I knew. And even though I was not a carpenter, I loved it: it was a kingdom unto itself, of sawdust and varnish, settled into the overgrowth like a pearl dropped into a forest. It was the realm of peace; there I had a father and a brother. It was my window, tiny and smeared though it might be, onto the world of men. I could not totally abandon it.
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