In fact, she liked just about everyone. Position on the ladder did not indicate human worth. She liked Louie. She had liked Paci too, even though he’d left the vegetable trade for a position in an unspecified enterprise. The city had an active Mob.
Louie arrived in the back vestibule every Thursday afternoon around four. Usually his son came with him. His son was in Mindy’s grade, but he was in group two with mostly Italians. He was Louie’s image, but a little shorter. It would have been hard to be much shorter. He had the same large curved nose, and he wore similar secondhand clothing. Louie called the boy Sonny and referred to him as Sonny, though Mindy knew his name was Franklin. Sonny had inherited or adopted Louie’s deferential manner.
“Hangdog,” defined Talia.
“Preoccupied,” Mindy said. She thought that Sonny had things on his mind, even though his mind was not superior…not yet, anyway. Talia knew of a few kids who had started in group two and got shifted to group one and ended up at Harvard. Talia herself was planning to go to Harvard.
“Sonny has green eyes,” Tem said.
Mindy hadn’t noticed. On the following Thursday she did notice. Yes, large eyes the color of blotting paper. They must have come from Mrs. Louie.
Despite the impoverished look of Louie and Sonny, their truck was a royal wonder. Paci’s wares had been arranged hodgepodge, heaps of beets consorting with mountains of potatoes only more or less separate from apples. Bruisable items were slumped in boxes blackened by age and weather. Perhaps Paci’s vehicle had sometimes been swept, but what could be seen of its floor was always covered with dirt and twigs and the squashed remains of things stepped on.
In Louie’s truck, boxes filled with produce were fixed to the sides, large ones below, then middle, then small, in a hierarchy of size. Louie kept his lettuces silvered with moisture—Sonny watered them at various stops in the journey. Sometimes Sonny filled a watering can from the Margolises’ outdoor spigot; Mindy, wandering outside from the breakfast nook where she did her homework, admired his deftness even at this low-value task. He didn’t waste motions, though he would pause briefly to say hello.
“Hello,” she’d say.
He watered the lettuce. Behind him, within the truck, potatoes were dotted with the wholesome dirt they’d been wrested from. Carrots came in mischievous shapes. Summer squash and zucchini lay side by side like gloves in a drawer. There was a makeshift aisle between the wares for the convenience of Louie and Sonny. It narrowed sharply as it approached the rear (really the front, just behind the cab), distorting perspective; the aisle seemed to go on for a mile. In the very back, a treasure within treasures, seasonal flowers stood in buckets. Every so often, after business was done, Louie would go into his truck and return with a bouquet which he presented to Mrs. Margolis, his cap still on his head.
Arcimboldo’s work reminded Mindy of the vegetable man, and the vegetable man’s abundant stock reminded her of Arcimboldo. Sometimes, standing at the rear of the truck, Mindy spotted a butternut squash like a bulbous nose or strawberries that side by side would have made a perfect mouth. You could put those tiny pearl onions between the berries, she said to Talia. Teeth.
“Nature imitates art,” Talia explained. “That’s an apothegm,” she added. Again there were sudden tears behind her glasses. “I wish Daddy would get better.”
On Thursdays Mindy continued to watch Louie or Sonny or both fill several slatted baskets and carry them into the kitchen and leave them there. Next week, emptied, they’d be waiting in the vestibule. Louie’s system was considerate, his truck was pridefully kept in order, and though he couldn’t have made a living in the insurance business, he was an excellent vegetable man.
And Sonny, second group notwithstanding, was an excellent apprentice. After awarding him her one-word greeting, after silently admiring the truck, Mindy always returned to the breakfast nook. She had a good view of the vestibule. Louie stood there having his audience with her mother. Mindy watched the two of them, Louie recommending, her mother thinking, and saying, Yes, two pounds; or Yes, a couple of good ones; or No, not today. Louie wrote the requests in a spiral notebook. Beside him, Sonny did the same, in a notebook of his own. When enough had been ordered for a one-person haul from the truck, Louie nodded at Sonny, and Sonny went outside. The rest of the Margolis order was inscribed in Louie’s notebook alone. Then Louie joined his child; and soon they both entered the kitchen with baskets.
Mindy guessed she’d feel sorry when she had to stop watching this routine. But next year she hoped to play her viola in the school orchestra, which had afternoon rehearsals. Or she might go out for basketball. And sometime in the future there might be embarrassment between her and Sonny. She was destined to become desirable—all three sisters were. Their mother, like a good witch, had promised them loveliness one Saturday after an afternoon of unproductive shopping. Talia sniffed, as if she knew that tall skinny bespectacled girls rarely underwent transformation. “Can’t I be a lovely boy?” Tem wondered. But Mindy trusted the prediction—she already resembled her desirable mother. She was destined to become the prettiest daughter of an acclaimed doctor—of a late acclaimed doctor, if the worst happened. Sonny was destined to remain a vegetable man’s son. If he loved beyond his station, loved Mindy or some other elevated girl, that love was doomed. But this predictable disappointment seemed as far away as the receding back of the truck; now, on this year’s Thursdays, Mindy still sat in the breakfast nook taking silent part in the domestic performance.
One Thursday Sonny didn’t show up.
“Sick,” Louie said to the inevitable question.
Also the following Thursday and the one after that, and he seemed to be absent from school. Mindy was used to seeing Sonny with the other group-two students as they trooped through the halls. She didn’t see him now.
Sonny’s absence coincided with Dr. Margolis’s reappearance. One Saturday morning he came downstairs in his robe. Tem like a four-year-old hurled herself at his shins. Talia stood still, her mouth working. Mindy slid her arm under his and laid her head against his heart. The following day he came downstairs wearing slacks and a sweater, carrying Legends. A few days later he joined them for dinner; afterward he helped Aunt Cecile with a crossword puzzle. Retransformation at last…Soon he would go back to his office.
Louie was still working unassisted.
But one week, like their father, Sonny stopped being sick. He was in school on Monday, and on Thursday he came with his own father to the Margolis back vestibule. It was raining. Louis and the boy wore yellow slickers, Mindy observed from her nook—did they think they were fishermen? Her mother completed the first half of the order. Sonny went out to the truck.
“I’m glad he’s gotten better,” Mindy’s mother said.
Silence. Louie raised his head. Then he said in a dull voice: “He hasn’t. He hasn’t gotten better. He’s not going to get better.”
That was all. Her mother did not say What or I’m sorry or Doctors can be wrong or even Oh, Louie. She remained standing in the vestibule looking down at the vegetable man and he remained looking up at her, and the space between their dissimilar profiles formed a misshapen vase. Then her mother turned away. Louie went out. The vase disappeared.
The girl went outside too. The rain had stopped. Around their backyard hung a mist. Sonny’s slicker was folded neatly on the grass. She watched as within the illusive length of the bright truck the condemned boy, soon joined by his father, silently filled baskets with squash, apples, melons—noses, cheeks, chins—the two working with their rare efficiency, as they would continue to do while they could, until they couldn’t.
Her throat ached. Sonny, intent on his task, was losing a future, his future, maybe stunted and loveless and second groupish, but his.
Friday night, Mindy and Talia sat side by side on Talia’s bed, their legs dangling as if from a raft into a lake. Side by side but not hip to hip; they were separated by an expanse of tufted bedspread. And so they managed to face each oth
er by twisting their slender torsos. The profiles did not match: Talia’s nose was long and commanding, Mindy’s straight and agreeable. Mindy’s non-Jewish features might serve to move her even higher on her mother’s imaginary ladder, might even allow her to swing over to the Yankee ladder, onto a Yankee rung, next to a Yankee boy. Her parents would wring their hands but they would not declare her dead. “Sonny has a lethal disease,” Mindy said.
“Fatal,” Talia corrected. “Sonny…? Oh, yes, the vegetable boy. Which disease?”
“I don’t know.” Mindy repeated the conversation she’d overheard.
“That’s too bad,” Talia said.
“It’s terrible.”
“Terrible, then.”
“I mean…suppose it was us.”
“Were we. You’re always thinking of yourself.”
Mindy only guessed that Suppose it was us, though brief and ungrammatical, was a necessary first step toward putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, for you had only to reverse subject and complement to say Suppose we were Sonny. Suppose we faced pain and then darkness; pain, what is it like for Sonny; darkness, how will it be? But she was sure that Talia, not far from her on the bed, was insulting her and that what might have been a moment of closeness between the girls had turned into a kind of spat. “I’m sorry,” Talia muttered, but too late—Mindy stood up and left her hard-hearted sister.
Hard-hearted? Talia would have said other-minded. Though she thought of Sonny as a kind of vegetable, she knew he was a human being, and therefore worth saving, like all those human beings she would be called upon to save when she finished medical school. Perhaps one day she would invent a cure for his disease. But today what Sonny needed was a remedy from the mythical past. Some functionary in the kingdom of the sick had moved her father to the kingdom of the well and replaced him with Sonny. There must be a new magic, perhaps a heavenly one. Maybe the changeable, demanding God of the Legends would let Sonny live if Louie bought him a robe edged with embroidered pomegranates. Or perhaps her mother would redeem the boy by sacrificing one of her daughters, the way Hannah devotedly sacrificed Samuel to Eli, the way Beauty’s father unwittingly sacrificed his girl to the beast. The selected daughter—Mindy?—would marry Sonny, and on their wedding night he’d be transformed from a turnip into a prince; Mindy would become a princess. Talia would be rid of her.
On Saturday afternoon Mindy and Tem were playing gin rummy. Their father had been kibitzing but he had gone upstairs for a nap. Mindy revealed the latest news.
“Children don’t die,” Tem countered. “Sometimes they drown, that’s all.”
How innocent a twelve-year-old could be. “They die of diseases too.”
“In books. Not here. Stop talking. Gin.”
The bested Mindy exited through the archway to the dining room just as their father descended the stairs into the hall. Tem was treated to the back view of her sister, all grace and angora, and to the front view of her parent—what a tiny nap he’d taken, how could it have been restful. Her hand itched for a pencil; she’d use the side of the graphite for those grooves on the cheeks, crosshatches for the area under the pursed lips. Dr. Margolis, Restored to Health? No: Dr. Margolis, Pretending Not to Hurt. His restoration had been so brief. She felt cruelly teased. But she smiled at him, and he managed to smile at her. He sat down on the recliner. Tem was wearing work overalls that Aunt Cecile had bought for her at a secondhand store, and she knew she resembled a construction worker, and she was sorry for that, for her father was an old-fashioned man who preferred women to look like women. “I’ll be right back, Daddy,” she said, and ran upstairs and put on one of those pleated skirts that hung in her closet and a white blouse that her mother had ironed. Now she was in costume—in drag, Talia had explained: she was a boy impersonating a girl. She ran back down and dropped onto the floor beside his shins and put her hand on his knee, and he took it. She placed his palm next to her cheek. Tomorrow, back in overalls, she would make him a present—an Arcimboldo-like portrait, created not out of vegetables but out of articles from his kit bag: bandages for hair, a swab for a nose, Mercurochrome-soaked cotton for a mustache, and, for eyes, cod-liver oil capsules.
The funeral took place in an unfamiliar, dimly lit shul, the plaster walls shredding. This congregation occupied a low rung on the ladder. Mrs. Louie was undiscoverable within a knot of her family. Louie was shrunken and wrinkled like a forgotten cucumber. A red-bearded rabbi tried in vain to talk sense. Roz remembered the funeral of Cassie Mae, who had worked for the Margolises. The congregation there stood up and wailed and shook its hundreds of black arms. Why couldn’t this bunch of underprivileged Jews let themselves go, become unseemly fools; what a relief that would be. They could storm up to the bimah and kill the robed representative of an incompetent God.
Roz saw tears slide from beneath Talia’s glasses. Mindy sobbed. Tem was stony, as if reserving her grief. Dr. Margolis had stayed home. Cecile had come; school was closed for vacation. She sat at the end of their row wearing her suit for occasions—brown, ill-fitting, with a dreadful blouse in a different brown. She looked dowdy and enviable both. She would never have to bury a child. A child’s death was the one unsupportable grief; Talia had said so, Aristotle had said it to her—as if anybody had to bother to say it, as if every parent didn’t already know. That insupportable grief might be destined for Roz herself, who could tell.
But for her daughters? With lips pressed together and eyes fixed on the comfortless ark, Roz prayed for them. She asked not for lives free of sorrow—what deity would heed that request? No; she made a sensible plea: she prayed that all three would turn out to be barren.
The Descent of Happiness
I was eight—old enough to be taken along on a house call as long as I stayed out of the bedroom or whatever room was to be used for the examination. Little children were sometimes examined on the kitchen table spread with a quilt. In those cases I hid behind an open door or maybe squatted outside the house beneath a window so I could hear the conversation, all sentence fragments as my teacher would have pointed out, that got batted like a shuttlecock between my father and the child’s parents. But this morning my father was visiting an adult, Mr. Workman, patient and friend. Mr. Workman had a bad heart, not as bad as he thought it was, my father had told me, but bad enough to be listened to whenever he phoned.
“Can you hear that syncopation on your receiver?” he’d shouted.
“No. Sam. Sam! Take the phone away from your chest…” Pause while Mr. Workman presumably obeyed. “Put it back up to your ear and listen to me. I’m on my way with my stethoscope.”
“Good,” Mr. Workman said. “And after you listen to my heart with that thing I’ll use it to call my aunt Mary.”
So he probably wasn’t in too much discomfort.
My father was what you might call a country doctor if by that you meant something sociological: a doctor who practiced in both a small town and the rural area surrounding it. Or you might mean something more artistic, more Norman Rockwell–ish—a doctor who drove a car so old that his patients were likely to outlive it, a doctor whose stubby fingers, smelling of cigar overlaid with soap, seemed Velcroed to an old black bag, except this was seventy years ago and Velcro had just been invented and none of us had heard of it. In the trunk of his rattly car he kept a case of medicines, a few of which he always transferred to the house icebox whenever he entered a home and never forgot to remove on departure. Sometimes I thought he never forgot anything. But I have discovered through the years that anyone who restricts his conversational responses to what he knows—what he knows he knows—will always seem to have an extraordinary, well-stocked mind. My father did know a lot but not everything. He knew midcentury medicine and American history and some botany. He knew some chemistry and a lot of anatomy. He didn’t know the world of animals or the world of stories—two worlds I considered one, since the only books I read were about horses. He knew my mother. He knew me. He knew Mr. Workman and all his other patients
too.
We got into the moribund car that October Saturday and drove over back roads to Mr. Workman’s house in the woods. The fall had been relentlessly wet, but the rain had stopped the day before. In the moist clearing where my father parked, yellow leaves seemed pasted to the birches, and brownish leaves fallen from the maples made the path from the clearing slick as oilcloth. An occasional wind shook drops from the branches as if new rain were welcoming us.
We could see glimpses of Mr. Workman’s elfish house. I loved that house, with its peaked small windows that resembled its owner’s small eyes and the roof over the front door that extended widely like an upper lip. A carpenter’s bench stood at one side of the front door and a handmade table on the other. You’d think that Mr. Workman was a Wood Workman, and in fact making furniture was his hobby, but he was a lawyer by profession. He practiced in a one-room office near the courthouse. He was a bachelor, and lived with a dog I did not like—a large noisy hybrid named John Marshall. John Marshall had a pointed snout and black gums. To me he looked like a wolf—no, he looked like a dog who had reverted to wolfdom and then reverted farther back to whatever lupine species had preceded wolves. I knew nothing of Darwin then except what my father had revealed to me: that once nothing on earth was as it is now, that everything we see descended from something else—sycamores from ferns, sparrows from flying dinosaurs, Mr. Workman from a chimpanzee (but Dad didn’t say that last). There was something called evolution and something else called natural selection.
Honeydew Page 22