by Chris Adrian
When she woke, Dr. Fie was sitting on the steps, weeping into his hands. Mr. Whitman had opened his eyes, and was moving his lips, but not making any sound. Maci raised herself on her arms and looked up toward the house, where a figure stood just outside the flaming door, looking indecisive and confused. “Down here!” she called to it, thinking it was Gob. “Come down!” The figure turned at the sound of her voice, and did start down the steps, too slow for a person fleeing a fire.
“Stop your crying, he’s alive!” Maci said to Dr. Fie, but he only wept harder, and as the figure came nearer, she saw that it was not her husband, or even little Pickie. It was a boy older than him, one who wore Gob’s face. Entirely naked, he stepped close and peered at her, trying, she could tell, to recognize her, and then he flinched away, as if he had never seen a lady scream or weep before. “Let me go!” he pleaded. But she held him fast.
“THOMAS,” HIS WIFE CALLED OUT FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF their bed, “it’s past your rising time.”
“I know it,” Tomo said. “I’m on my way.” But he lay in bed awhile longer. His knees and his elbows and his shoulders were so stiff these mornings that he liked to loosen them up some in bed before he tried to rise. He was old for his age, and his joints seemed to be the oldest part of his body.
“Don’t be late,” she said, because she thought he had an appointment across the river, a weekly obligation to teach a class at the medical college. She went back to sleep. Tomo felt blindly for his cane, and when he found it, slowly moved his legs off the side of the bed, and rose with all the speed of a growing plant. He’d slept in a hunch, and now his back did not wish to unbend itself. He walked a little around the room, leaning on furniture as he passed it, and paused by the window to look out at the bridge. Half the windows in the house had a view of it—it was the reason he’d purchased the place. He’d put out his clothes by the window so he could dress there, so he could see the bridge and think how he would soon be on it. It was a weekly ritual with him. Every Saturday he’d take a walk over to Manhattan.
Tomo was one of the first to cross over, when the bridge opened at midnight on May 25, 1883. He was twenty-one years old, still a student and still living with Will, who had taken him in even before his mother and Tennie went away to England in ’76. “Aren’t you coming, Will?” he’d asked, but Will wouldn’t go out of the house that night. “Eventually,” Will said, but Tomo was sure that he never even looked out his window at the incredible display of fireworks.
“I sent my mama a telegram,” he said the next day. “Datelined ‘Brooklyn Bridge.’”
“She’ll be glad of it,” Will said. “You ought to have sent one to Walt.”
“I’ll send one to him, too,” Tomo said, though he did not intend to do that. When he was still a boy, Will would take him to Camden to visit the old poet, a man who pinched Tomo every time he saw him, and demanded kisses like a bearded, bad-breathed aunt. Will went down to see him every year in January, on the anniversary of the stroke that had made an invalid of Mr. Whitman, half-paralyzing him.
They had their breakfast—steak for Tomo, apples and toast for Will—and Tomo talked excitedly of how the bridge was magnificent, of how he had jumped up and down in the middle, expecting it to bounce under him.
“Of course it did not,” Tomo said, and then continued to eat in silence. Moody Will was crying again, and it was best to let him alone when he got this way. When Tomo had returned earlier that morning, Will was sitting in a battered chair and looking down at the crowds walking home underneath the paper lanterns on Fulton Street. “No one remembers,” he said as soon as Tomo came into the room. “Not even you. I think that is the worst thing about it. Walt’ll kick off soon, and then it will be just Maci and I. He never forgot you, did he? He remained inside, when he might have come back out into the world. Why don’t you remember? Shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten him? And shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten what he did?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Will,” Tomo said. “Are you talking about Sam? Are you talking about Gob?”
“You should remember,” Will said sadly.
“But I do,” Tomo said. “What sort of person wouldn’t remember his own brother?” He pulled a chair closer to Will’s and put his hand on Will’s knee, thinking of their respective brothers, both dead in the war. He cried a little, too, thinking of Gob’s abbreviated life, but he could not keep up with Will, a champion mourner, and Will’s snuffling sobs turned to voices in Tomo’s head as he drifted to sleep in his chair, thinking again of the illuminations over the bridge.
He had stood under the millions of flashing stars, listening to every ship in the harbor blow its horn, and thought how Will must be standing with his face to a wall, so as not to see even the glimmer in neighboring windows. Next to Tomo, a little boy in a black suit and a porkpie hat was clapping his hands and laughing at the display, at the fountains of gold and silver stars roaring off the towers, and the hundreds of Japanese shells bursting in rapid succession into blue, red, white, and emerald sparks that fell, still incandescent, into the river. “Isn’t it sad?” the boy asked Tomo. “Isn’t it so terribly sad?”
Tomo was always very slow going up the stairs to the promenade. Sometimes he’d stop and lean casually against the rail, unfold the paper that he carried under his arm, and pretend to read. In a little while he’d be able to go on again, up to the top of the stairs, where he always found himself thinking of the people who’d died on the bridge during the big stampede. Every May he’d bring a little wreath over and lay it down to get trampled, too.
It was his custom to stop in the middle of the bridge and look down the river. It was pretty rare, these days, to see anybody jump, or even to read about it in the papers. But Tomo had been there when Odlum made his leap in 1885, and he still remembered very well how he jumped, with one arm raised up over his head, and how his fall was so easy to follow because of the startling red shirt he wore. Tomo had missed Steve Brodie’s supposed midnight jump, which had probably not ever really happened, anyhow, but he had been there in ’87, when a man named Hollow had leaped off wearing a pair of giant canvas wings. Tomo watched as the man glided down to land gently on the surface of the river, just in front of a friendly-looking tug. It plowed over him, crushing his wings, but he lived through that abuse.
“He’s dead!” the little boy had said, next to Tomo. He’d hauled himself up on the railing, and was looking down the river, his face all twisted up in dismay.
“No, child,” Tomo told him. “See there, he’s swimming away in the wake. It’s only his wings that have been injured.”
“He’s dead!” the boy wailed. “He has died, and nothing can bring him back!” Tomo reached out to console him, but the boy dropped off the rail and ran away.
“What do you remember of your youth?” Maci would ask him. It was a question she reserved for her rare solemn moods. A friend also to Tomo’s wife (she’d introduced them to each other), she was often a visitor at their house. She’d been visiting Tomo all his life, with such frequency, when he was younger, that she had been nearly a constant presence. Now her visits were more rare. Five or six times a year she’d take time off from her career of political agitation and come to Brooklyn.
“Not very much,” Tomo told her again at her last visit, the same answer he always gave her. “When we were small, Gob and I used to play in a clearing in the orchard behind the house in Homer. He liked to play games called Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville—we had scarecrows dressed up as Confederate soldiers at whom we would shoot with toy muskets made from apple boughs.”
“Yes,” Maci said, and was silent a moment. “My friend,” she said, “I don’t think memory is to be trusted. I used to think that madness was the chief enemy of joy, and then I thought it must be hypocrisy, and then it seemed very clear that it was mortality. But in my late days I think it is memory that keeps us all ever from being happy.”
“My dear lady,” Tomo said. “L
earn from me. I am very happy.” It was the truth. Her visits made him happy. From the next room his wife threw off happiness like heat from her person. And yet, thinking of the orchard in Homer, he suddenly remembered how he had hurt his brother, how he had been a coward and refused to go along when Gob ran off to the war. Tomo closed his eyes and inhabited that moment, with Alanis Bell’s warbling ringing in his ears. Over and over he sent his brother off to die without him.
“Why are you crying?” Tomo asked the boy. He was three-fourths of the way across the bridge, and about one-fourth of the way to his destination, when he saw the boy, leaning against the railing and sobbing. Every other passerby seemed completely unmoved by the boy’s display. He was about seven years old, with long, shining brown hair that fell past his shoulders and down his back. He wore a neat, old-fashioned black suit. In that moment, he was not at all familiar to Tomo.
“He’s gone!” the boy said. “Gone forever!”
“Who?” Tomo asked. “Did somebody jump?”
“Who?” the boy asked him back, looking up at him with black eyes that had more anger than sadness in them. “Who do you think? They’re all gone. All of them, never to return, and before them all my brother is gone, gone for always.”
“There now,” Tomo said, reaching out to touch the boy on his head. “My brother, he died, too.” He leaned down slowly, sure he heard himself creaking, to better comfort the little fellow. “It is a difficult thing, the death of a brother,” he said. The boy smiled, then, and darted forward like a snake. He kissed instead of biting, a dry little peck, but it burned horribly where he planted it on Tomo’s cheek.
“It’s a difficult thing,” the boy said, and Tomo felt dizzy. He had a falling sensation, and he was certain he had managed somehow to tumble off the bridge. He raised his arm up over his head in the attitude of Odlum, and prepared to meet the water.
“Goodbye, my love,” he said, speaking to his wife. He heard a noise like the ocean, or the breathing of a giant, and he was overcome with desire—he opened his eyes and wanted the whole far shore of Manhattan and all the tall buildings on it; he wanted the bodies of every person passing him where he stood with his arm up over his head, still feeling as if he were falling through endless spaces of air, he wanted to put his hands under their dresses and shirts, to grab at their flesh with his dry old hands.
“Excuse me,” said a lady walking by, because her dog had nipped at Tomo’s shoe as they passed. He took down his arm and looked around. There was the boy, standing a few feet off. Tomo could not remember what they had been discussing. He tossed the little man a coin, because he knew every child likes a nickel to buy a bag of candy with, and every child liked how Tomo could make a coin spin in the air. The boy caught the coin in his mouth and seemed to swallow it.
“I only wanted to see you, Uncle,” the boy said, and then he ran off towards Brooklyn, ducking between pedestrians. Tomo turned and walked on, thinking, just for a moment, that the boy was very familiar, after all, because he suddenly knew how the boy had been haunting him all his life—Tomo had seen him all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, far away in London and Paris, in Cuba, Hong Kong, Portugal, and Morocco. There was no place where he was not. Tomo kept walking, thinking that very soon he would remember why the boy was so sad, and why he never got any older, but as Tomo got closer to Manhattan he began to forget about him. Walking up to the terminal he stepped over the shadow of a streetlamp and paused to read a sign far ahead—though his joints were ruined, though his heart was weak and his bladder was nervous, his eyes were quite sharp. “If the baby is cutting its teeth,” it advised, “use Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.”
“What baby?” Tomo asked aloud, and then he walked on.
“Would you like to go faster?” his mama asked him. They were driving in a speedy Talbot-Darracq, her latest automobile. She kept a chauffeur, but always put him in the passenger seat, insisting on driving herself at high speeds all over her estate at Bredon’s Norton in England.
“No,” Tomo said, knowing she would go faster anyway. His wife didn’t like automobiles. She had remained at the house to eat strawberries and doze in the sun while Tomo and his mother went out for a drive. She thought there was something obscene about automobiles. Tomo thought they were intriguing, though he would not ever drive one.
“It’s a shame they don’t make them any faster,” his mama said. She drove every day for an hour because she insisted that in doing so she was putting a little more distance between herself and death. Since her third husband, the banker Mr. Martin, had died, she’d become obsessed with her own mortality. “Not too close,” she’d say, if a person tried to kiss her, because she feared the pollution of touch.
“You quick widow!” Tomo called out to her, but she was half deaf, and could not hear him above the engine.
Often, by the time he’d reached the other side of the bridge, Tomo would have had enough of walking, so he’d take a cab to the church, struggling with his paper to pick out the address to give to the driver. It was a different church every time, and he was sure that by now he must have visited every one on the island. On that day in 1927 he went to a Catholic church on East Twenty-fifth Street, to a funeral, one that was especially dolorous and grim—that was how he liked them.
It was a sin, he knew, to lie to his wife, and probably also a sin to masquerade as a mourner. And yet wasn’t he sad for this person, this man who had died of a bleeding stomach, who was survived by a wife, seven children, and a full score of grandchildren? Tomo might go to the hospital tomorrow or the next day and fail to save a person like this man, a balding Irishman whose skin was too big for him to fit into anymore. He might go to that funeral, too, because he was drawn to them, because he had always been drawn to them.
Tomo sat in the back, and watched quietly, not crying until the end, when he approached the casket and looked in to see the face of the man. He put a hand over his mouth and wept, sure that all around people were wondering who he was, this well-dressed, hobbling old man who grieved so dramatically. A pair of girls led him back to his seat. They were sisters, he could tell. “Are you twins?” he asked them loudly, and they both told him to hush. One of them stayed with him, standing while he sat, her hand placed gently on the back of his neck.
“Listen,” he said to her. “Do you know how you are undying? Do you know how Heaven waits for the faithful? It’s the good news, that a person is such a piece of work that there can be no end to her.”
“Hush,” she said.
“Do you doubt it?” he asked. “Do you?” He held her wrist, finding her pulse and reading her perfect health in it. “You do doubt it, don’t you? You callow, doubting girl! You are afraid to die!”
“Stopper it up, Gramps,” she said, placing a soft hand over his mouth, but Tomo pushed it away. He stood up and left the church, not caring how his slow, heavy tread rang out in the air and marred the lovely, sad music.
“Was it a good day?” his wife asked him. It was the question she asked every night as they got into bed together.
“Good enough,” Tomo said. He’d spent the afternoon in Central Park, eaten ice cream on Madison Avenue, and bought an armful of daisies for his wife, enjoying, for a while, how they drew the stares of everyone who passed him.
“My feet are aching,” his wife said, after they had been lying side by side for a while in the quiet dark. They had been dancing, that evening. They were neither of them very good at it, so they did it in the privacy of their home, in the empty bedroom that had once sheltered their second daughter.
“I’ll heal them,” Tomo said, sitting up and peeling back the covers so he could get at his wife’s big feet. They were very pale, and as he massaged them they seemed brighter than any other thing in the room.
“Shall I reach under the bed?” she asked him, after he had been rubbing on her for a while, and after his hands had started to wander up her body.
“I think you had better,” he said. Even as he worked her with his hands, she re
ached down under the bed and brought up a little porcelain bowl. It was too dark for Tomo to see it clearly, but he knew how it was painted in blue with birds, tall herons and egrets. It made a grating, ringing noise as his wife removed the top. Age required her to augment her natural charms with petrolatum.
With his creaking joints and his crooked back, his cloudy brain and his obstipated bowels, it always seemed to Tomo that physical love should be beyond him, but it was not yet, and sometimes, as on this night, it took a supreme effort of will to keep from spending himself like a naive boy. He did surgeries in his mind as he kissed his wife and whispered her own name into her face. It made him think of hernias, what they were doing, of organs invading cavities that were not their usual homes, and so to keep himself in order he went through the Bassini repair, sewing, in his mind, the conjoined tendon and the iliopubic tract into a forbidding wall that said to the protruding viscus, Stay where you belong.
When his time came, he imagined the futile sutures bursting, the tendons ripping and breaking to release a tumbling mass of bright confetti that ignited in his brain, becoming the millions of stars that had fallen around the bridge on that distant past night. He called out his wife’s name, “Phoebe!” It was a distinct and equal pleasure, to shout it as loud as he could, in a house emptied by time, where no one could hear the name but him and its owner. His wife, a singer, answered him with a perfect C in an octave that told him he was doing well for her this evening.