His father opened the door to him. “’Bout time. She’s got a birthday cake.” Down the years, he and Bunt had disavowed the sentiment of it, two boys together under Maeve’s silly yoke.
As Buddy shunted them down the necessary halls to the dining room, he swung a locker-room arm up and over Bunt’s shoulder. “Don’t want to butt in, you and girls, Bunt. Far from. But at your age, I sure hate to see money have to change hands.”
They had stopped dead anyway. He slipped Buddy’s arm off. Size had never been a sorrow between them. But it was time his father dealt with all six-and-a-half feet of him. “Be a Montefiore, Buddy? Not a Rothschild?”
Sure, he had hit him. Maybe it was time to say anything. Without being depressed.
The dining room, full up now, was a shock. All those faces, hanging over the pink-linen trough the main table had been made into, hobbling at him monkey-eyed, ass-chinned, kitty-smooching, diminishing down the room in one of those longshots cameramen took kneeling, out of some nice A-rated movie that had broken its guarantee not to turn into a dream. The sad fact was, it took youth not to look like some other animal than our brand. They all looked like they knew their own ravages. And were counting on a good boy like him to be the kinder for it. They were still in the saddle—and he had better watch it; they wanted to take him along. Oh, he knew where he was, all right. Maybe the women weren’t decked out like the Brooklyn of those days, but he knew the smell of those salted almonds. The wine in these glasses might be a little better, and technically this wasn’t a hall—but after all, he was older than the usual candidate.
Just then, Doughty pranced in and up to him. A Harlequin Dane wasn’t his style, up to now not the Bronsteins’ either, but a dog is a dog. An animal that is an animal. He fed him a couple of almonds, making the picture they were planned to. “Doughty,” he said to the cocked ear, “bet you never been to a bar mitzvah before.”
He’d been seated at the big table’s far end, his parents at the other. Looking down the line, he saw that Maeve’s “do” hadn’t changed much—the people maybe, but not their categories. Leskel, the man on his left, was the one who had asked to meet Buddy, at his own graduation. The lady on his right, a nice camel with big droopy eyes, said, “We’re in your parents’ box.” The opera. On her right was a big tawny-haired man Leskel introduced as Dr. Somebody. The hair long for these parts. Or for him. On Leskel’s left, the gal who had admired the rug informed him she was from Maeve’s class at the Alliance Française. His parents hadn’t thank God placed him between the two of them. There were no place cards. “Just sprinkle,” was what Maeve would have said, or Buddy. There wasn’t that much time, to know who your friends were.
Maeve was still here. He kept an eye on her.
“The best gilt glasses, Buddy. I see you kept those.” His father was pouring him wine. The glasses were from the last place, and really something. They’d never drunk from them before.
“When it gets to be art, you can keep it on,” his father said. “All the years it took to find that out. Something is gone though. Thought you’d notice right out.”
“Never thought you noticed I noticed … It would’ve looked like fool, with that harpsichord.”
“Would it? Anyway, I saved it. You’ll see. That little Kranich & Bach has integrity.” Buddy winked.
He winked back. Like he knew his father was a tried man. “Okay, saved by a piano.” He put a hand on Buddy’s shoulder, locker-room style. “Okay, we’re still in love.”
Leskel was envying them. His hair still had a round cut; the trim bags under his eyes were impressionist. “You know my boy Johnny? He’s living with a girl.”
That’s Johnny-boy. “Not to worry.” Bunt said. “They all come from very good families.”
“Oh, I know.” Leskel brightened. “The mother and father came to look us over. To plead us to do something. When they saw how we lived—they calmed down. We even had a foursome of bridge. Best partners Dollie and I ever had.”
“Maybe they’ll make it legal someday.”
“Think there’s a chance?”
“The foursome? Oh—the best.” He leaned forward; a glint had caught his eye. But the tawny man had turned his back.
Mrs. Camel was waiting for Bunt’s regard. “I saw the way you looked at us. Can’t blame you. But wait ’til it’s your turn.” She had a smiling competence he recognized, but couldn’t place. Direct, and hopeful-hopeless.
“Oh, I won’t mind so much getting old. If I can get my life right. But I’ll hate it for the girls I know.”
“Oh, they’ll manage.” When she laughed, the eyes lifted. The red hair looked real as his own. “You just stop being a girl.”
He saw Maeve slip out again.
“You look a little like a girl I knew.” Monica’s eyes went that way, already. “But with her anything can happen. She’s a speed freak.”
“Oh, so are mine. All six of them. The situation around our house is terrible. Eight cars of course. But then, four Hondas and a hovercraft. Plus the two planes.”
Some mothers—that’s what he’d recognized. Where there were a lot of kids, like once. She could hang on, or let go; whether or not she knew the score, she was the center of it. At graduation there had been some like her. “You married? I mean—” He blushed.
She exploded.
So did he. “I mean you’re not a widow or anything.”
“My husband flew us in. I expect he’s in Honduras by now.”
“Airline pilot?”
She smiled a no.
“Revolutionary?”
“You are a romantic, aren’t you.”
“No, a wit. I mean, who else would have six kids. Except maybe the Kennedys.”
“He owns the airline.”
“Oh, that’s right. Silly of me.” The opera box. They were rich enough to have six kids, not poor enough to. And Maeve’s pick-up’s husbands so often had business elsewhere.
“You Catholic?” he said. It was on his mind, that he might give in.
“My husband is. And the children, of course.”
“You women. You can do anything.”
“You women. Where did you pick that up?”
He looked her over. Yes, she looks like Paulina, like—like any of them, when you get down to it. Like all of them, at that certain moment when. If he said—Let’s go somewhere, you and me; let’s get out of here; see here, I have this awful hangnail I need help about; or even, you’re pretty vulnerable, you need to talk; or any of the one-hundred-ninety-seven unconsecrated versions of it—more variations than his knife had, and more reliable—she’d give in. Maybe she didn’t know that yet; maybe she thought he didn’t. Asking is the flattery. More than anything. He wouldn’t though. No one over thirty, so far. So far, no one over twenty-six, which is what Jasmin is. Keep the bloodlines clear.
“I’m scared I’ll be too adjustable, that’s all. It’s the one thing scares me blue.”
“Your principles, you mean?” She was already over the romantic hump, examining her rings with a tycooness cool that made him think less of her. You could commit hara-kiri on anyone of them. But she had asked.
“I’m only romantic about what I want. Or I will be. Not over the rest of it.”
She closed her eyes and said something to herself.
Jesus, he thought it was. Appropriate, for a convert.
On her right, the big fellow Leskel had introduced as Doctor, leaned forward. “I hear you say you want to live right?”
“Listen, I was only trying to say anything. Anything I really thought. It was an experiment.”
“How’d it work out?”
Bunty looked him over closer. In profile, the man’s hedge of hair really vibrated up, like an electric shoe-brusher with a kind forehead. Or a man on the hotseat, smiling all the same.
“Too easy, if you want to know. When a place is not your style, anyway. And it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“You don’t like it here?” she interrupted. “The s
on of the house?” South American curves on top she had, and under the table what he’d bet would be long country-club stems. He had a suspicion that, closer to forty, which she must be, the attraction was that the parts didn’t match. But what he wanted to see was that doctor’s ear.
“Everybody has his own way of dwarfing the world,” he said, low. “This just isn’t mine.”
“Where do you want to go?” The doctor’s voice.
Back to where it hurts, is Jasmin’s idea. She said she intends to spend the rest of her life there.
He raised his eyes. “You our new family doctor?”
“Partly.” He had a way of listening in profile, eyes cocked sideways. Like a teaching nun. Or a monk. Or one of the children at their skirts.
Right on. “You’re Buddy’s shrink.”
He winced. And there it was, the thin gold wire in the bush of his sideburn. Like one more gold hair, thickened with listening. There couldn’t be two of them with that in an ear.
Should he ask, or leave it be. Choose.
“You’re Janacek, aren’t you? The child psychologist?”
He bowed. “And you are Bunt.”
Who floats in Buddy’s mind, like a hovercraft? “How’d you come to know—us?”
Leskel spoke. “Through us.”
He was stunned at the way it could work out. And encouraged. Chance can happen. Good or bad, you have to cherish it. “Aren’t you a child psychiatrist?”
Another bow. “Sometimes the children are—grown. You know my work?”
“I—knew one of them.”
Janacek smiled, but didn’t ask who. Probably gets it all the time; there are so many of them. Besides the one he’s married to.
It didn’t take a minute, to dovetail her story with this bowing man’s. And feel for both of them. “A dirty story he had nothing to do with,” she said. “Ten years old at Buchenwald, Bunt—Long Island is full of them. And Washington Heights.” But his mother had been a camp guard. And was still alive. Until recently. He wore the wire, Jasmin said, for kids to focus on. And it’s true, Bunt—you look at it, in that hair, and you’re back in fairyland where the grass has eyes, and there’s a gold ring in the pond. “He has very strong lines of force,” she said, “but he doesn’t hurt enough, anymore.”
He was exerting them. “Like to talk to you, Bronstein. About your parents. And you of course.”
K-k-k, Bronstein. The story attracts you.
“S-sorry. Thanks though.”
“Why not?”
Up at the head of the table, Buddy tapped a fork against a glass. It rang true, of course.
“There’s my majority coming up. Let’s leave it at that.”
“You could help so.”
“I plan to.”
“Why not let me help you to?”
“Hold it, Kid Bronstein,” Buddy had seen Maeve was gone. “A slight delay. Practice your speech.”
He saluted. “Coming, Father!” Buddy and Ike’s favorite comic, the early days. A comic son.
“You’re a very interesting young man. You could help me.”
He puts his empathy right in your hand, Jasmin says. He has to have you have it. That’s why she left; that’s why she goes back. It’s the secret of his success with the kids, she said. He’s non-rejectable.
He could try. “Thanks. But I don’t think you’re the teddy bear I always wanted.”
He looks puzzled. Human flesh shows no prints. At least, mine doesn’t yet. And maybe she never went back to him. But the echoes of people in one another last on and on.
As is my hope.
“We—have met?” Echoes were the man’s trade, after all.
He could pass it up. Chance strolled by him, a gainly dog; he gave it his hand to bite. “Yes, we have, Dr. Jannie. In a launderette. You came by with Jasmin’s check.”
Janacek knew her habits, she said, and couldn’t give the habit up. In bed after, in the room paid for by the check perhaps, he’d felt uneasy, but she’d said not to; she didn’t need the money, really. Let Jannie think he was protecting her. She let him come back sometimes—yes, into bed even—because she was the only one with whom he could be a child. They’d agreed not to have them because of his work. And her views. “It’s a rotten sell for kids these days. I shan’t have one.” She’d agreed to have Jannie though, not knowing. “You can’t desert a child,” she said, laughing, and tugged at his own red hair. “Kangaroo-oo.”
To his right, Mrs. Camel, mother of six, was now talking seriously with Leskel, who had moved around to her. They look so grown, most of them, no matter what’s inside. Opposite him, Janacek’s earring glinted, joining him to childhood. Perhaps one day, Bronstein himself would find himself wanting one.
Janacek was staring at him. “Yes, she spoke of you. Many times. Ah, yes.”
“How is Jasmin these days? I should call her up.”
Sorry—I’m always rude when I have to wear a tie.
“How long have you been away, Bronstein?”
“Nine months. Wrote her from Paris.” After Monica? No, before. “But she never wrote back.”
“Poor boy.” Janacek grasped him by the jacket. “Sit down.”
His father was chiming at his glass again. The table straightened and took up the chime, old dinosaurs chocking their bow ties sideways at the guest of honor—a dowager iguana, a donkey with the usual whimsical specs.
Cows were harder to come by. In a pinch might two priests do? One black, one white.
“Can’t now. What’s up?”
Janacek sat down. Slowly.
It came to him then. What it must be. Of course. Underneath the din, he said it aloud. “She’s pregnant. That it? And it’s mine.”
FOR FIVE SECONDS, HILARITY had me. Report that as my reaction to fatherhood. Not everybody can find that out beforehand. At his own bar mitzvah. And as a candidate for the Catholic Church.
In retrospect it seems a long time. Farce would have been so lovely. Of God.
JANACEK BENT FORWARD ACROSS the table, pulling me toward him. Five seconds more were awarded me. In which I called Jasmin up. His earring brushed me then. I recoiled. His eye had passed me on the way, an old red searchlight.
“She fell in Bryant Park, an anti-war day crowd. The autopsy showed a very light skull.”
The glasses went on chiming true.
“To our son on his twenty-first,” my father said. Maeve had come back. He raised his glass to me. The first time I’d seen him so, he’d been in his first custom-made tux, toasting himself in a mirror as the best dressed goddam penguin he ever saw—and I’d bawled with an eight-year-old’s rage because it was so true-not-true. “To my son. Not a prodigal. But returned.”
Buddy is a graceful man.
Grace, past or present, breaks me up.
Program me in now, Betts.
Betts?
There was a disappointed murmur at the conclusion of my speech, a one-liner I remembered from what a boy says on that day. Murmur more approving as the word went round that I had achieved tears. Buddy saluted me. Maeve put out a hand like a ghost feeling. I sat down.
“Maybe you’ll come talk to me now?” Dr. Jannie said. The children called him that; sometimes she did. She talked about him more after I’d seen him; that was natural. Still, there are these people you never expect to have to deal with personally. Even if you know their sadness perfectly, maybe even seeing their story, seeing around it, just a little different from the person telling you it. Even so—he had been only a character in my friend’s life.
But just now, I had had my first real death. And I noticed something about it that people never tell you. Not even the poets, who are supposed to have the high sign on it. From now on, Jasmin was going to be only a character in living peoples lives. She was only going to be something that had happened to us. Oh, we could tell each other stories. About what had happened between her and us. We could explore it forever. But nothing could ever change for her. On her own. She had no more chance.
“M-maybe I will.” I didn’t know whether I could bear to help the process along.
But that was for later. I knew what had happened to me, too.
I looked down the table. Oh yes oh yes, I was pretty young for what had happened to me; for a long while yet, it mightn’t show. But I had joined the animals. A voice was telling me so. A character in my life. “Kangaroo,” it said to me. Kangeroo-oo.
Maeve was looking down the long, buzzing table, at Jannie and me. No, at him. At least lift a glass to me, Maeve, throw me a kiss, even a department-store kiss. After all, it’s my twenty-first. Her glass stood primly unused; I hadn’t watched. At the time of the toast, I was elsewhere in time. Only a few minutes ago. But I remembered a time for Maeve and me when she couldn’t take her eyes off me. From about my eighth to eleventh year, it was the worst. Or when I got conscious of it. I’d raise my eyes from my oatmeal or math book; or even while I was talking; I’d bump into hers. “Stop looking at me.” She’d shake her head, shake her glance away, and only smile. Ten minutes later, I’d catch her back at it. “I love the shape of your head, that’s all,” she said once. “I just like to look at it.” And reached out and smoothed my hair. When I got too tall for her to do that without stretching, she stopped. About the time of Paulina, my first girl, of course. But I couldn’t buy that, much. Or that when it came due to toast me, Maeve felt vibes from Jasmin.
It was the other way round. Jasmin was making me feel Maeve’s. Of all the girls since Paulina, all those who hung in my mind like upside-down pretty torsos not bloody at all, white as candy, tan as sand, all swaying in the wind like a gentle town on wasyday that I whizz by on my motorbike—Jasmin is now the one who’s right-side up, a speaking girl. She has a good head on her shoulders now. Thinskulled as it is, it can talk to me. She’s permanent.
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