In a distant room, a record began to play. It was a song called “Innsbruck, I Must Leave Thee.” Lizzy went away to investigate it. She found Miss Colt in the kitchen dribbling whiskey into a glass of iced tea. Without turning around to see who had really come in, Miss Colt said, “Hello, Alice darling,” and sipped the drink. A gush of sigh blew out of her. Her head and shoulders drooped as though deflated. She unrolled her stockings. She said, “My dogs are not hunting anymore.”
“How’s that?” Lizzy asked.
“Elizabeth!” Miss Colt said, turning around. “I thought you were our Alice. Come talk to me while God curses my feet. Make yourself sandwich.”
“No, thank you.”
“Come sit and tell me about your flower today.”
“Where did he come from, Mr. Hausmann in there?”
“Germany, I believe.”
“Was he like a Nazi and killed a lot of Jews?”
“Yes, I believe he did.”
Lizzy said, “B.S.”
“Ask serious question, get serious answer.”
“You’re only trying to teach me a lesson about don’t be flip.”
“Have it in your way then.”
“What do you mean you believe?”
“I regard as true.”
“So you’re guessing.”
“There were millions of Nazis. Where do you think they all went?”
As though Miss Colt had beaten her, Lizzy said, “Today’s flower is a peony.”
“Argentina could not be expected to hold every one of them, could she? I met Nazis in Argentina. Obvious Nazis. And in Uruguay and in Baja Peninsula of California which is in Mexico. Obvious Nazis with accent and foreheads dented from obviously bullets. Nazis now are onions in stew, disintegrated, everywhere.”
“Omar gave the flower to me.”
“Congratulations! It’s enormous. You must be so proud! Do you plan them ahead to match your ensemble?”
“You know Omar, from the newsstand by Firestone Tires? He gives it to me early in the morning, and I go back home and pick the right dress for whatever the flower.”
Trisha appeared, soaked the oatmeal bowl in an adjacent room, and stood in the doorway until Miss Colt said, “Go back in there and talk to him.”
“He’s asleep,” Trisha said.
“You don’t know that.”
Lizzy, using the brave blunt tone that Trisha had long coveted, but that Lizzy had lately forgotten how to use in the company of men and boys, said, “Miss Colt, why are you hiding him?”
“Who says he is hidden?”
“If you aren’t hiding him, why do you keep him in his secret box?”
“You have reached the age of showing off ankles and shoulders and whatever other pretty parts. Later you will reach the age of privacy. To lie alone in the dark will be sweet.”
“Then why shouldn’t we talk about him to other people?” Here was the old Lizzy, daring to ask what Trisha shrank from asking. Trisha knew it was only Miss Colt’s dispute with the Department of Health, which she had not allowed to overrule her compassion for the old man, that necessitated this secrecy but had never told Lizzy. A confidence was a confidence.
“Privacy,” Miss Colt said. “Privacy, that is all.”
“Miss Colt says Mr. Hausmann was a Waffen SS,” Lizzy told Trisha.
“Already the child is embellishing on me,” Miss Colt said with bemused indignation.
“No, he wasn’t,” Trisha said.
“Miss Colt believes he was.”
“Embellishing with the big beautiful penny in her hair.”
“He was not,” Trisha insisted.
“How would you know?” Miss Colt asked. “Enter back in there and talk to him.”
“He told me is how.”
“What did he tell you?” Miss Colt asked derisively.
“Where he came from and like that.”
“Oh yes? Where did he come from?” Miss Colt asked.
Trisha tried to speak plain and strong as Lizzy would. “From Greece.”
“You never told me that,” Lizzy said.
Miss Colt intently turned the ice in her tea, watching Trisha.
“But he was born someplace else,” Trisha said.
Miss Colt said, “He talked with you?”
“Yes, a couple of times. Why, is he not supposed to?”
“How did he talk with you?”
“What do you mean, how? With his mouth is how.”
Miss Colt refreshed her tea straight from the whiskey bottle. She said, “He talked to you with English.”
“No, in Greek. I only understand here and there. He isn’t very good at it, but neither am I. I tried it out and he answered me. What are we supposed to do all afternoon? I finish my homework, and you won’t let me organize or sweep. Is he a prisoner that I can’t talk to him?”
“Why are you with Greek? And I thought you were Poles in your house and you spoke only English.”
“That’s my father’s father, the Polish one. His mother came from Athens. Mommy is from the Dominican. I don’t, like, study Greek. I’m better at French where we take it in school, but I tried French on him and he just lay there dying.”
“Why are you with French?” Miss Colt said, annoyed. “What happened to Latin for schoolgirls?”
“They make us learn a useful language now,” Lizzy said.
“Useful. I thought it was religious school, but in fact it is vocational where you attend,” she sneered. “Then where did he go?”
Lizzy took the pin out of the flower and adjusted it and put the pin back in, all without moving any part of herself except her arms and hands. She was practicing her fornication stare.
“After Greece,” Miss Colt said.
“He said, ‘Down below.’”
“Below what?”
“Please don’t say I did something wrong. I didn’t mean to. He’s such a silly coot. We only ever talked a couple of times. I’d rather listen to his crazy mumble than just sit there. He said, ‘I was down below. But I have come up now in the light.’”
* * *
• • •
FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon.
Gurgling and slow, the Impala rolls up the avenue and stops at the court. Sleek and rounded quarter panels, the hood pointed and beaklike, the whole body bright with wax, the chrome aglow. Its ill-tuned engine, however, is like a consumptive trying futilely to stifle his coughs. The rear door swings open. The boy Marlon emerges, loping to the cage of the court. The Impala rolls away, hacking.
Somewhere in the surrounding apartment buildings, a radio is singing angelically about Raisinets.
The boy approaches the cage gate where the bronze statue of a lady saint presides. An offering has been left in the dish at her feet. Two dollars in paper money. The bills staring up at him like a dare with a rock on it. He assesses his surroundings. Nobody observes from the seats on the el or the apartments. Then he sees the Iceman watching him from the court. The boy waves at the gnats swarming him.
The cage gate slams behind him. Suddenly, the gnats are gone. Before he can strip his windbreaker, the ball comes to him from parts he can’t have seen. He catches it and springs it to Fernando, who sends it to Maitland, then to Pickett the barber, Iceman, Julito, Josip, Jerome, back to Marlon, who by then is doing a squat with a jump at the height of the extension, distending his ligaments, getting tall. He catches the ball midjump and shoots it from midcourt.
The ball spins through the breeze tinged with smoke. It comes down on the neck of the rim. It bounces high, climbs, climbs, and dives like a swimmer through the chain-link net.
Shouts and curses. Young and old. Little Maitland asks to touch his shirt. Even the gnats know that in here Marlon is king.
Play continues into the evening. The streetlights come on.
One of the lights stands near enough the court they can go on playing, Marlon untiring, never distracted, a growl when he lays up, using the others as a surface against which to bounce his shoulder. He plays less with the others than among them. The eyes suggest another opponent, a phantom within. He has modest height, a patient shot, a microsecond of pause for thought that serves him at the free throw line but makes him pickable in the key. He’s heavier than the other boys, but the muscles, for all their coordination, are slack. Any of the others could crush him in a fight.
All the cars have their headlights on now. Only men and Marlon remain on the court. Pickett tells Marlon he’s late to go home, though it’s known only Marlon’s older sisters remain in the apartment to impose a curfew on him, and while he doesn’t quite ignore the curfew, he can be spotted at any corner of the neighborhood these days at any hour loitering with the grown people, listening, hanging back among them, half noticed; until some sensible woman happens by, some old person telling him his sisters are burning up the phone wires trying to find him, get on home, does he know what time it is? his sisters worried sick, what’s the matter with him? his sisters with their brains tangled up in worry, doesn’t he understand a boy can get abducted, dismembered, dissolved in vats? get home to your bed, you need to sleep to grow.
The game breaks up. The men sit stuffing their legs into sweatpants, zipping jackets. The money is gone from the dish at the feet of the saint. Marlon closes the latch on the cage gate and follows the men up the street. All his grace evaporates once he leaves the court. He shambles and lurches, aping the men’s gestures, the walk that shows nobody what they think or feel. Information blackout, the way the men can do. The posture that says they know the price of things and give nothing away for free.
Fernando says, “You do nice work on your sister’s chrome, Marlon.”
Julito, the pale Cuban, a machinist for the MTA, says, “Coño, that ride is fine.”
“Tell her to replace her compressor,” the Iceman tells the boy. “Her points and her plugs are shot too. You can’t hear it?”
“Time to go home, Marlon,” Pickett says. “Your sisters need you.”
The boy pretends to ignore him, selectively deaf like the men, snug within lightproof envelopes of self. He knows from these men that he must be indifferent to the demands of all women while living only and ever in the hope of sex with the prettiest ones, but he hasn’t figured out how to do both at once.
“We drink now,” Julito says. “The superstar goes home.”
They walk on pavement where, in the hot tar, dead balloons are stuck, stove-in hamburger boxes, the remnants of a rat flattened by many tires. Ants marshal over smashed fruit.
The bartender is outside his door drawing back the canvas awning with a crank. “Marlon, your sister called,” he says. “Go home.”
The men go inside; the boy stays without.
* * *
• • •
“NOW ASK HIM where is the money,” Miss Colt said.
“What money?” Trisha asked, sitting on her stool by Mr. Hausmann’s bed.
Lizzy stood uselessly in the miniature doorway.
“Ask him where he put his money.”
“To pay for room and board?”
“Ask him if he knows Social Security number and ask him if he has children or interested parties, whether in Greece or other country, who would like to say farewell to him, and ask him if any of them have his money.”
“He told me he doesn’t have any children or any relatives. Poor coot. The other day he said.”
“Is there annuity or pension fund.”
“Miss Colt, I don’t know those kinds of words in Greek.”
“Are there perhaps stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit under other names in other countries. And ask him what are the names and what are the countries and what are the names of the banks.”
“I can conjugate, ‘Where are the good plates I gave your mother for Christmas?’ and like that.”
“Is there term life insurance, and what is the term.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to describe what that is with the words I know.”
“Go on. Insurance policies. Or perhaps IOUs. Debts owed to him by interested parties, and who are the parties.”
“Mr. Hausmann?” Trisha said. “It’s no use. He’s sleeping.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“When he can talk—it’s hard to explain—one side of his face scrunches and the other shivers, and that means it’s a day when he can talk. And he isn’t doing that now, so I think it’s the wrong time. He’s just, what, sleeping and innocent.”
“Go ahead and feel bad for him. Then feel bad for me also. And ask him if there are funds in secret somewhere,” the woman said and leaned over his body and nudged Trisha out of the way, as if politely. And she turned the yellow-pinkish globe of his head, the inscrutable world of his head, and the long lusterless wisps trailing off it onto the pillow, and the face scrivened with wrinkles. And she swung behind her then briskly forward and smacked his skull, high over the ear where no hair grew, and exclaimed at him in Polish, and carried the arm straight through like they tell you to swing through the ball when batting; her arm, coming across her and reaching its extension, now swung back and cuffed the other side of the head with the knuckle-studded back of her hand.
Mr. Hausmann’s eyes came open like two yellow chicks cracking out of their eggs.
Trisha should have said, Why are you doing this to him? Or, Stop it, Miss Colt, he’s an invalid. But something prevented her. What was that thing? Call it by its name. The name was cowardice. And it took the form of a backward step toward where Lizzy stood in the dark entrance full of old woolly dresses that guarded the way into his living crypt.
Mr. Hausmann said something. Trisha could not hear it through Miss Colt’s incomprehensible Polish imprecating.
Miss Colt asked, “What he said?”
“Say again Greek please, more loud?” Trisha said.
He turned toward approximately where she stood in the mothball haze of old clothes and the fullness of a hundred other smells wafting from within the crowded home. In Greek he said, “You’re the girl.”
“Yes. Right.”
The gray and white untamed bristly eyebrows lifted, opening the old eyes wide in childlike curiosity. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“It’s Miss—it’s the woman doing it to you.” This was cowardly also: she had stood by and was letting it happen.
“Is she trying to help me die?”
“No, she wants to know where your money is.”
“I’m so tired,” he said.
“Ask him where,” Miss Colt said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stop her,” Trisha said.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stop her from”—Trisha could remember only the word her father sometimes used—“spanking you.”
He raised a soft hand in pardon or feeble defense, and the woman swung harder and struck it, and the hand flew away from the rest of him and fell over the edge of the bed.
“Why is the woman striking me?”
Trisha made a note of the word. “He asks why are you striking him?” She took another backward cowardly step crouching through the low doorway reaching behind her and flapping her hand so that Lizzy would take it and hold it. But it only slapped the raw wood jamb. Lizzy had forsaken her there.
8
Vollie knew how to lie now. It came to him as the knack of tying a hog had come: first in a flurry of ill-timed swipes and snatches aimed at getting all the limbs of the crazed thing under his control; then with a mastery so sudden and natural he forgot whatever had confounded him about it before; finally with pity for the angry hogs, the facts he had hobbled.
He did not tell stretchers or evade or hedge th
e truth, he told downright lies in plain speech. He marked them with details distinct from their functions the better to remember them. He told not many lies but the same ones faithfully. The bookkeeper at the ice cream warehouse asked if he had brothers or sisters. Thinking it wise to distinguish new life from old, he borrowed Heflin’s first name and gave himself a brother Bobby. In the next breath, he killed this Bobby in childhood lest news or visits be expected of him in the future. Every lie was a new fact forever to which subsequent lies must conform. He avoided new lies only for the nuisance of keeping them in agreement. So long as he spoke of present matters the need for a lie seldom arose. When he had to speak of past times he delivered the lies so squarely as to make them true—except the one that came with trouble every time, the name, to which he would never learn to answer without a moment’s calculation, the name, the source lie and the one that mattered and the one that didn’t work: he was still there.
The mechanism of erasing who he was had a bug in it that had less to do with becoming the new man than with leaving the old man behind. Nobody in the warehouse or on his route or in the neighborhood doubted he was Tilly, so nothing they said or did refuted the existence of anyone called Vollie Frade. It insulted his independence that he should want a witness, but unless someone from before could corroborate what he was trying to accomplish, he’d never believe in it himself. Yet if someone from before knew what he was doing, the old life would continue; the new one would never overtake it and become true.
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