Gabe smiled a warmer smile. There was as well the grace of a shared past. “The consoling angel,” he said. He tapped the crushed pack against his palm, extracted a single, filtered cigarette and then the matchbook inside the cellophane. I took an ashtray from the windowsill and crossed the room to put it on the table. Again, I touched a fingertip to his knee. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I did get five new dresses out of the deal.”
And I saw my daughters glance warily at each other: they knew this story, too.
Gabe bent his head as he struck the match and then waved it in the air when the cigarette was lit. He blew the first smoke toward the ceiling. “We were all great fans of the afternoon movie out there in the insane asylum,” he said.
The side door burst open and Tom bustled in once more, talking. He was saying how earlier that summer he had hung two tennis balls from the rafters of the carport, a parking guide for Susan, to keep her, he said, walking into the tiny kitchen, swinging his keys, from knocking us all off our chairs in the middle of dinner when she put the front end through the dining-room wall—as women drivers, no doubt, were apt to do. In fact, just yesterday, he said—and look at all this lovely mint, will you, Gabe, grows wild in our own yard, we should make mint juleps—just yesterday, he went on, he saw a woman take out a hedge on the corner of her own lot as she backed down her driveway at what must have been forty miles an hour, her husband standing on their front steps with his hands in the air.
He demonstrated, throwing his hands straight up and then letting them fall back in despair to his own bald head.
He turned to Susan, who was leaning against the kitchen counter, tolerating him, but fondly, fondly. There were times through my daughter’s adolescence that I would have been grateful to have some of that fondness. “I’ll probably get an extra year or two in purgatory,” Tom said, “for adding another woman driver to the world.”
He poured himself a glass of iced tea and loaded it with sugar, even though Susan told him there was honey in it already. “So here’s the thing,” he went on, addressing Gabe. “I put those g.d. tennis balls up there myself, and yet every single time I pull into the carport, they hit the window and I jump about a mile. They about give me a heart attack every time.”
The girls started laughing. He about had a heart attack, they repeated, laughing, every single time. Jumps a mile and cries, Jesus H. Christ.
“Sometimes worse,” Helen added.
“Sometimes he says, “ ‘Holy shit,’ “ Susan said, and I cried out, stamped my foot, as if to crush the scuttling word. Susan said, “I’m just quoting.”
“I don’t know why I can’t remember they’re there,” Tom was saying. “They get me every time.”
This, was, of course, a lie. They had startled him once, but never again. The rest was an act, a comic set piece he had honed over the past few weeks. I knew this. The girls knew it, too. The sudden start, the cursing, the hand to his startled heart, were all part of the joke. One of his jokes on himself, meant to get us laughing at him, meant to get his daughters’ impulse to mock him seem only a weak afterthought to the way he mocked himself. I knew this. The girls knew it.
Gabe was smiling at us all through the smoke from his cigarette.
“He thinks it’s the roof caving in,” Susan said. “Or meteorites.”
“Yellow flying squirrels,” Helen added, giggling. She looked at her father. “Well, that’s what you said yesterday. You said, Goddamn yellow flying squirrels.”
Tom turned his straight face to Gabe. “You see what I put up with here?” he said calmly. “With the boys away, I’m the only man in the house, and this is what I have to put up with. Thank God you’re here.”
The smoke poured out from Gabe’s small smile, it rose up from the cigarette in his hand. His legs remained crossed, his arms crossed over his lap; the wrist of the hand that held the cigarette, bare now, was long and blue-veined and covered in pale hair. The distance between the boy he had been, my brother, and this stranger sitting here now behind a veil of smoke seemed vast. I felt a sudden vertigo, looking across it, and leaned against my daughter’s bare, damp arm as Tom began to tell Gabe a story about some flying squirrels that had once invaded the crawl space behind the upstairs room (“Where you’re staying now, Gabe, but don’t worry”) and the comical pair of exterminators—“Mutt and Jeff”—who had captured the things and taken them home for pets. One of them, the little one, coming to the door some days later wearing the baby squirrel on his shoulder like some kind of mountain-man pirate—“I kid you not.”
He was a man who loved to talk.
“Did you see that toupee?” he had said as we left the room in the ancient Brooklyn hospital where Gabe’s nightmare had been described for us. He shook his head and let out a single sigh as we headed down that bleak corridor.
He said, “You’d think a guy like that could afford a better rug.”
He said softly, leaning to speak softly into my ear, “A psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake.” He held my hand. “Wearing a rug like that.” He chuckled. “Talk about a cry for help”—the very words the doctor had said about Gabe—“terrible-looking thing. You wonder his wife doesn’t tell him. Must itch like hell.” Sailing us both down that bleak hallway until we’d reached the door of the ward where Gabe was lying, sedated, his back to us, his face to the wall.
Helen said, “May I be excused?” when her father came to a pause, never an end, to his flying-squirrel story. It was five of four.
“The movie,” Susan said, all wisdom and forbearance.
Tom did a theatrical stagger. “Tell me you’re going to watch a movie … on a nice summer day?”
“It’s hot,” Helen said, and Susan cried, “Dad, she does this every day!”
I added that she had been swimming in the Graysons’ pool all morning.
But, of course, in those days Tom was never home from work at this hour to know this was his daughter’s summer routine. He’d only taken the day off to drive out to Suffolk to fetch Gabe.
“And where is Lucy Grayson?” Tom asked, looking under his elbows. He explained to Gabe, “The neighbor kid, Helen’s best friend. Her shadow. They’re usually joined at the hip, those two.”
“Her Gerty Hanson,” I told Gabe, bringing him in.
“She’s home,” Helen said quickly. And before I could catch his eye, Tom asked, “What? Did you have a spat?”
Helen lowered her chin and Gabe leaned forward again, over his crossed knee and his crossed arms.
“I hope she hasn’t stayed away,” he said, “because of me.” And then, in the sudden awkwardness that followed, he turned toward the table to put out his cigarette, as if to give us all time to rearrange our faces. I had indeed asked Helen not to bring Lucy over until we had Uncle Gabe well settled in.
“Believe me, Uncle Gabe,” Susan said kindly, “you’re not missing anything. This girl has the most annoying voice you’ve ever heard. Like Minnie Mouse if Minnie Mouse smoked a carton a day. Right?” she asked Tom. She was quoting him.
Tom laughed and said, “Right. A twelve-year-old with a voice like a consumptive hooker.” And I cried out another objection.
“Can I go?” Helen whispered, her eyes to the clock just over the kitchen doorway. “It’s starting.”
Gabe leaned to return his cigarettes and his matches to his pocket. “I’ll watch it with you,” he said. “If I may.”
There followed a sudden bustle in the crowded little room. Helen rushed to the basement stairs to get the TV turned on—it was an old set and needed a few minutes to warm up. The rest of us followed. The basement was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. It smelled heavily of damp earth and heating oil. Helen already had the set on and had taken her usual place in the worn chair closest to the TV. I directed Gabe to the old couch. Susan, saying she would watch only for a minute and then go wash her hair, took the rocking chair beside them. Tom didn’t have the patience to watch television in the middle of the afternoon—and c
ould never watch any movie silently, anyway—but stayed long enough to see everyone settled. He had some errands to run, he said, and showed me a prescription from Suffolk cupped in the palm of his hand. “Enjoy the show,” he said, and then climbed the basement stairs, his step light, his hand held lightly over the banister.
I went back to the laundry room to empty the drier and start another load. I finished my ironing, carried the fresh clothes to the bedrooms upstairs, and put them away, then went down again to put the new load into the drier. Susan was still watching the movie with Helen and Gabe—there was forties movie music and the voice of a young actress. Only Gabe noticed me as I came down the stairs, and he raised one hand from his thigh.
When I went upstairs again to start dinner, I found Tom reading the paper on the screened porch in back. I peeled the potatoes and set them to boil. Then I poured a beer into a pilsner glass from the freezer and brought it out to him. He said, “Thank you, dear,” and offered me the first sip. This was our routine. First and best, he sometimes said. I tasted the foam, the icy beer underneath, and then handed it back to him. “Should we offer one to Brother Gabe?” he asked.
I shrugged. “What do you think?”
“Drink’s never been his trouble,” Tom said. And paused. “Although there was some discussion, out there, about your father being a drinker. Sins of the father, you know. All that Froodian stuff.” He widened his eyes, mocking himself and the doctors simultaneously.
I looked into my hands. It was Tom who had driven out to Suffolk every Thursday night to sit in on the therapy sessions in the men’s ward. When we visited together, we drove out on Sunday afternoons. We brought Gabe cigarettes and candy and sat outside when we could. We talked about meaningless things and saved our pity for the other patients, whose trouble was evident in their puzzled faces or the defeated slump of their shoulders.
I told Tom once that there was something of Gabe’s old seminary about the place. He had laughed and said there was also something of the stalag.
Tom said now, “It’s just their way of trying to find someone to blame for his trouble.”
Through the screened wall behind him I could see the early-evening sun casting long shadows across the back lawn, the small patio and the flower beds and the ocean blue sides of the pool. I could hear the gurgle of the filter and the metallic pock and shallow calls of the kids in the next yard, playing ball.
It was a homely room. The floor was painted concrete and the screens stained here and there with rust. Even then, the cushions on the wrought-iron garden chairs were yellowing beneath their painted vines, splitting along the seams. There was a sickly looking Wandering Jew and a spindly spider plant in the corner, a basket of old pool toys no longer used. Beside it, Tom’s easel and paints and a nearly finished painting of the bed of impatiens in the front of the house. Both inexpert and pretty.
“Will we ever know,” I asked him now, “Gabe’s trouble?”
Tom placed his beer on the glass-topped garden table. Were I to dream again, I would dream myself into this room, at this hour. I would take the fading cushion beside him.
“We only know what the doctors tell us,” Tom said. “Depression.” In those first weeks, he had come back from his visits to Suffolk and joked that this was the first time he had ever heard the word used without the “the.”
“Which pretty much tells us nothing,” he added.
“What’s the prescription for?” I asked him, and he said gently, “Only to help him sleep.”
I said, “He never was an easy sleeper. Even as a kid.”
And then Susan appeared in the doorway to say, “Well, that was ironic.”
I looked at her over my shoulder. “What?”
“The movie,” Susan said, moving into the room. She had stayed to watch it all. “Do you know what it’s about? It’s about Uncle Charlie. He comes to visit his sister”—she bobbed forward a little as she said it—“his sister and his niece, his sister’s daughter.” She bobbed again. “The niece thinks Uncle Charlie’s the most charming guy in the world, just worships him, until she finds out he’s a murderer. That he murders old women and steals their money. And their jewelry. So of course, he tries to murder the niece, too. He even looked a little like Uncle Gabe.”
I said, “Susan,” because Helen was already behind her. Gabe following. They both seemed a little subdued.
“How was the movie?” I asked brightly, and Helen said, “Good.”
Gabe said, “Not very fair to the bachelor uncles of the world.”
I glanced at Susan, who was blushing beneath her freckles, her eyes cast down. “So I hear,” I said.
“I’ll be forever suspect, I’m afraid,” he said. And smiled that short smile. He still wore his Windbreaker. There was a gleam of perspiration along his lip.
I offered Gabe a beer and then went into the kitchen to pour it. I suggested he take off his jacket and sit outside with Tom, to catch whatever breeze there was through the screens. While the girls set the table and I finished making dinner, I listened to the voices of the two men as they shared the paper and talked about the news.
I served mostly cold meals in the heat of those summers: sliced ham and coleslaw from the deli, cucumbers in vinegar, potato salad, and bakery rolls. Gabe sat at our older son’s place. His manners, as always, were meticulous and elegant. They had been meant, after all, to belong to a bishop. Watching him at my table, I briefly entertained the notion that the lace-curtain pretensions my parents had taught us might well have been meant as a way (frail at best, but a way nonetheless) of cosseting, corralling, patting down, and holding in, whatever it was that had undone him last summer.
I made note to mention this to the girls when they slumped (Helen) or licked the back of a spoon (Susan), that good manners, gracious conversation, might well be all we have, finally, to cosset and confine confusion.
Our two boys, Tommy and Jimmy, our Irish twins eleven months apart, were working in Hampton Bays that summer. Having a fine old time, Tom explained to Gabe over dinner, bringing him in. Attracting girls like flies at their age, he said. Two college boys, he said. Two Mr. Party Guys. Both brown as a berry, last time we saw them, what with lying out in the sun all day. Jumping into the ocean to cure their hangovers, no doubt, and then working in the restaurant at night. Not a care in the world, Tom said. “Not like you and I were, Gabe, at that age.”
“I worry about them,” I added. “What with all that’s going on. Drugs and whatnot. And the way the girls are these days.”
I knew Susan was rolling her eyes.
Tom waved his hand, dismissing my words. “They’re just sowing some wild oats,” he said. It was an ongoing argument between us. “Enjoying themselves while they’re young.”
“Oh sure,” I said. I did not like to be dismissed.
Gabe looked at me and smiled. He had taken off his Windbreaker, and in his white polo shirt he seemed both younger and frailer than he had when he arrived. Maybe more like himself as a boy. Or maybe more like our father, although Gabe was now older than our father had lived to be.
“Do you know the prayer of St. Augustine,” he asked me, “the one he said when he was their age?” Gabe pronounced the saint’s name with a soft ending, in what I thought of as the priestly way, which may be why I felt there was suddenly something reverent in our attentiveness. Even the girls grew serious, or perhaps wary. Despite our best efforts, they were no more pious than I had been at their age, little pagans.
“No,” I said.
There was a warmth in my brother’s brown eyes. “ ‘Grant me chastity and self-control,’ “ he said, quoting the saint, “ ‘but please, God, not yet.’”
We all laughed—the girls with some relief, perhaps, to discover that he was not a solemn man, Tom with all the old affection and admiration for this intelligent brother of mine.
“He’s your guy, isn’t he?” Tom said, “St. Augustine,” and he pronounced the name with a layman’s hard ending—like the city in Florida. He
did so, I knew, more out of humility than ignorance. In his mouth, Gabe’s finer pronunciation would have been a pose. “You’ve mentioned him before.”
“I’m an admirer,” Gabe admitted. “The man struggled mightily.”
I stood to clear the table. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I only know I sleep better when the boys are at home.”
Over ice cream, Susan dissected the four o’clock movie. She outlined its flaws in logic and probability, budding lawyer even at seventeen. How could it be that no one knew, she said, and really people weren’t that naïve, and surely that was way too much of a coincidence.
“What’s the point of watching a movie,” shy Helen asked her sharply, “if you’re going to spend the whole time looking for reasons not to believe it?”
“It is called Shadow of a Doubt,” Susan answered.
“Well, I’d put my faith in Alfred Hitchcock,” Tom said.
Gabe said, “At my first parish,” and nodded to Tom, who would remember, “there was a widow with three children, the youngest twins, who was at ten o’clock Mass every Sunday. I asked our pastor about her when I first got there, thinking we should do something for her, for her kids, at least, and he says to me, ‘There’s a hard case. She’s a drinker.’”
Susan and Helen both laughed a bit, and Gabe glanced at them and smiled.
“No, seriously,” he said. “That’s what he told me. It was well known to everyone in the parish, he told me. She had a drinking problem, three kids and all. She was as neat as a pin in church on Sunday, so were the kids, and the couple of times I’d said hello to her she seemed fine to me, but the pastor told me I was wet behind the ears if I couldn’t see it. She was a real alcoholic, he said. I couldn’t get over it. I started to look for her. She always looked cold sober to me. The kids were quiet in church. They always had money for the plate and never came late or left early. I asked the pastor again how he knew, what the evidence was, had he seen her stumbling or weaving or whatnot, and he called me a puppy, said I was naïve. Said once more that it was well known. I couldn’t figure it out. There was no one else to talk to. I didn’t want to fan any rumors by asking around. But then I noticed that every Sunday morning, as she and the kids were walking to church, she ducked into the candy store just down the block from the rectory. The three kids would wait outside, she’d duck in and out in no time. Maybe, I thought, she was taking a nip then. Maybe that’s what she did.”
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