by Tobias Wolff
“But there’s more.”
“I know, I can see it coming. The guy kills his kid, right? I have to tell you, Frank, that’s a crummy story. What’re we supposed to get from a story like that—we should kill our own kid to save some stranger?”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Okay, then, make it a trainload of strangers, make it ten trainloads of strangers. I should do this because the so-called Father of All did it? Is that the point? How do people think up stuff like this, anyway? It’s an awful story.”
“It’s true.”
“True? Franky. Please, you’re not a moron.”
“Dr. Violet knows a man who was on that train.”
“I’ll just bet he does. Let me guess.” Frances screwed her eyes shut, then popped them open. “The drug addict! Yes, and he reformed afterward and worked with street kids in Brazil and showed everybody that Mike’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Is that how it goes?”
“You’re missing the point, Frances. It isn’t about that. Let me finish.”
“No. It’s a terrible story, Frank. People don’t act like that. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”
“You haven’t been asked. He doesn’t ask us to do what we can’t do.”
“I don’t care what he asks. Where’d you learn to talk like that, anyway? You don’t even sound like yourself.”
“I had to change. I had to change the way I thought about things. Maybe I sound a little different too.”
“Yeah, well you sounded better when you were drunk.”
Frank seemed about to say something, but didn’t. He backed up a step and lowered himself into a hideous plaid La-Z-Boy left behind by the previous tenant. It was stuck in the upright position.
“I don’t care if the Almighty poked a gun in my ear, I would never do that,” Frances said. “Not in a million years. Neither would you. Honest, now, little brother, if I was the one down in the mill, would you grind me up? Would you push the Francesburger button?”
“It isn’t a choice I have to make.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But say you did.”
“I don’t. He doesn’t hold guns to our heads.”
“Oh, really? What about hell, huh? What do you call that? But so what. Screw hell, I don’t care about that. Do I get crunched or not?”
“Don’t put me to the test, Frances. It’s not your place.”
“I’m down in the mill, Frank. I’m stuck in the gears and here comes the train with Mother Teresa and five hundred sinners on board, whoo-whoo, whoo-whoo. Who, Frank? Who’s it going to be?”
Frances wanted to laugh. Glumly erect in the chair, hands gripping the armrests, Frank looked like he was about to take off into a hurricane. She kept that little reflection to herself. Frank was thinking, and she had to let him. She knew what his answer would be—in the end there could be no other answer—but he couldn’t just say she’s my sister and let it go at that. No, he’d have to noodle up some righteous, high-sounding reasons for choosing her. And maybe he wouldn’t, at first, maybe he’d chicken out and come up with the Bible-school answer. Frances was ready for that; she could bring him around. Frances didn’t mind a fight, and she especially didn’t mind fighting for her brother. For her brother she’d fought neighborhood punks, snotty teachers and unappreciative coaches, loan sharks, landlords, bouncers. From the time she was a scabby-kneed girl she’d taken on her own father, and if push came to shove she’d take on the Father of All, that incomprehensible bully. She was ready. It would be like old times, the two of them waiting in her room upstairs while Frank Senior worked himself into a rage below, muttering, slamming doors, stinking up the house with the cigars he puffed when he was on a tear. She remembered it all—the tremor in her legs, the hammering pulse in her neck as the smell of smoke grew stronger. She could still taste that smoke and hear her father’s steps on the stairs, Frank panting beside her, moving closer, his voice whispering her name and her own voice answering, as fear gave way to ferocity and unaccountable joy, It’s okay, Franky. I’m here.
Firelight
My mother swore we’d never live in a boardinghouse again, but circumstances did not allow her to keep this promise. She decided to change cities; we had to sleep somewhere. This boardinghouse was worse than the last, unfriendly, funereal, heavy with the smells that disheartened people allow themselves to cultivate. On the floor below ours a retired merchant seaman was coughing his lungs out. He was a friendly old guy, always ready with a compliment for my mother as we climbed past the dim room where he sat smoking on the edge of his bed. During the day we felt sorry for him, but at night, as we lay in wait for the next racking seizure, feeling the silence swell with it, we hated him. I did, anyway.
My mother said this was only temporary. We were definitely getting out of there. To show me and maybe herself that she meant business, she went through the paper during breakfast every Saturday morning and circled the advertisements for furnished apartments that sounded, as she put it, “right for our needs.” I liked that expression. It made me feel as if our needs had some weight in the world, and would have to be reckoned with. Then, putting on her shrewd face, my mother compared the rents and culled out the most expensive apartments and also the very cheapest. We knew the story on those, the dinky fridge and weeping walls, the tub sinking through the bathroom floor, the wife beater upstairs. We’d been that route. When my mother had five or six possibilities, she called to make sure they were still open, and then we spent the day going from one to another.
We couldn’t actually take a place yet. The landlords wanted first and last months’ rent, plus a cleaning deposit, and it was going to be a while before my mother could put all that together. I understood this, but every Saturday my mother repeated it again so I wouldn’t get carried away. We were just looking. Getting a feel for the market.
There is pleasure to be found in the purchase of goods and services. I enjoy it myself now, playing the part of a man who knows what he wants and can take it home with him. But in those days I was mostly happy just to look at things. And that was lucky for me, because we did a power of looking and no buying.
My mother wasn’t one of those comparison shoppers who head straight for the price tag, shaking their faces and beefing about the markup to everyone in sight. She had no great concern with price. She had no money either, but it went deeper than that. She liked to shop because she felt at home in stores and was interested in the merchandise. Salesclerks waited on her without impatience, seeing there was nothing mean or trivial in her curiosity, this curiosity that kept her so young and drove her so hard. She just had to see what was out there.
We’d always shopped, but that first fall in Seattle, when we were more broke than we’d ever been, we really hit our stride. We looked at leather luggage. We looked at televisions in large Mediterranean consoles. We looked at antiques and Oriental rugs. Looking at Oriental rugs isn’t something you do lightly, because the men who sell them work like dogs, dragging them down from these tall piles and then humping them over to you, sweating and gasping, staggering under the weight, their faces woolly with lint. They tend to be small men. You can’t be squeamish. You have to be free of shame, absolutely sure of your right to look at what you cannot buy. And so we were.
When the new fashions came in, my mother tried them on while I watched. She had once been a model and knew how to strike attitudes before the mirror, how to walk casually away and then stop, cocking one hip and glancing over her shoulder as if someone had just called her name. When she turned to me I expressed my judgments with a smile, a shrug, a sour little shake of the head. I thought she was beautiful in everything but I felt obliged to discriminate. She didn’t like too much admiration. It suffocated her.
We looked at copper cookware. We looked at lawn furniture and pecan dining-room sets. We spent one whole day at a marina, studying the inventory of a bankrupt Chris-Craft dealership. The Big Giveaway, they called it. It was the only sale we ever made a point of going to.
My mother wore a
smart gray suit when we went house hunting. I wore my little gentleman’s outfit, a V-neck sweater with a bow tie. The sweater had the words FRATERNITY ROW woven across the front. We looked respectable, as, on the whole, we were. We also looked solvent.
On this particular day we were touring apartments in the university district. The first three we looked at were decent enough, but the fourth was a wreck—the last tenant, a woman, must have lived there like an animal in a cave. Someone had tried to clean it up, but even with the windows open and the cold air blowing through, the place smelled like rotten meat. The landlord said that the woman had been depressed over the breakup of her marriage. Though he talked about a paint job and new carpets, he seemed discouraged and soon fell silent. The three of us walked through the rooms, then back outside. The landlord could tell we weren’t biting. He didn’t even offer us a card.
We had one more apartment to look at, but my mother said she’d seen enough. She asked if I wanted to go down to the wharf, or home, or what. Her mouth was set, her face drawn. She tried to sound agreeable but she was in a black mood. I didn’t like the idea of going back to the house, back to the room, so I asked if we could walk up to the university and take a look around.
She squinted up the street. I thought she was going to say no. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? As long as we’re here.”
We started walking. There were big maples along the sidewalk. Fallen leaves scraped and eddied around our legs as the breeze gusted.
“You don’t ever let yourself go like that,” my mother said, hugging herself and looking down. “There’s no excuse for it.”
She sounded mortally offended. I knew I hadn’t done anything, so I kept quiet. She said, “I don’t care what happens, there is no excuse to give up like that. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A group of Chinese came up behind us, ten or twelve of them, all young men, talking excitedly. They parted around us, still talking, and rejoined like water flowing around a stone. We followed them up the street and across the road to the university, where we wandered among the buildings as the light began to fail and the wind turned raw. This was the first really cold day since we’d moved here and I wasn’t dressed for it. But I said nothing, because I still didn’t want to go home. I’d never set foot on a campus before and was greedily measuring it against my idea of what it should look like. It had everything. Old-looking buildings with stone archways and high, arched windows. Rich greenswards. Ivy. High on the west-facing walls, in what was left of the sunshine, the red leaves of the ivy glittered as the wind stirred them. Every so often a great roar went up from Husky Stadium, where a game was in progress. Each time I heard it I felt a thrill of complicity and belonging. I believed that I was in place here, and that the students we passed on the brick walkways would look at me and see one of themselves—Fraternity Row—if it weren’t for the woman beside me, her hand on my shoulder. I began to feel the weight of that hand.
My mother didn’t notice. She was in good spirits again, flushed with the cold and with memories of days like this at Yale and Trinity, when she used to get free tickets to football games from a girlfriend who dated a player. She had dated one of the players herself, an All-American quarterback from Yale named Dutch Diefenbacker. He’d wanted to marry her, she added carelessly.
“You mean he actually asked you?”
“He gave me a ring. My father sold it to him. He’d bought it for this woman he had a crush on, but she wouldn’t accept it. What she actually said was, ‘Why, I wouldn’t marry an old man like you!’” My mother laughed.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You had a chance to marry an All-American from Yale?”
“Sure.”
“So why didn’t you?”
We stopped beside a fountain clotted with leaves. My mother stared into the water. “I don’t know. I was pretty young then, and Dutch wasn’t what you’d call a scintillating guy. He was nice…just dull. Very dull.” She drew a deep breath and said, with some violence, “God, he was boring!”
“I would’ve married him,” I said. I’d never heard about this before. That my mother, out of schoolgirl snobbery, had deprived me of an All-American father from Yale was outrageous. I would be rich now, and have a collie. Everything would be different.
We circled the fountain and headed back the way we’d come. When we reached the road my mother asked me if I wanted to look at the apartment we’d skipped. “Oh, what the heck,” she said, seeing me hesitate. “It’s around here somewhere. We might as well make a clean sweep.”
I was cold, but because I hadn’t said anything so far I thought it would sound false if I complained now, false and babyish. She stopped two girls wearing letter sweaters—Coeds, I thought, finding a cheap, keen excitement in the word—and while they gave her directions I studied the display in a bookstore window, as if I just happened to be standing beside this person who didn’t know her way around.
The evening was clear and brief. At a certain moment the light flared weakly, and then it was gone. We walked several blocks, into a neighborhood of Victorian houses whose windows, seen from the empty street, glowed with rich, exclusive light. The wind blew at our backs. I was starting to shake. I still didn’t tell my mother. I knew I should’ve said something earlier, that I’d been stupid not to, and now I fastened all my will on the effort to conceal this stupidity by maintaining it.
We stopped in front of a house with a turret. The upper story was dark. “We’re late,” I said.
“Not that late,” my mother said. “Besides, the apartment’s on the ground floor.”
She walked up to the porch while I waited on the sidewalk. I heard the muted chime of bells and watched the windows for movement.
“Nuts…I should’ve called,” my mother said. She’d just turned away when one of the two doors swung open and a man leaned out, a big man silhouetted in the bright doorway. “Yes?” he said. He sounded impatient, though when my mother turned to face him he added, more gently, “What can I do for you?” His voice was so deep I could almost feel it, like coal rumbling down a chute.
She told him we were here about the apartment. “I guess we’re a little late,” she said.
“An hour late,” he said.
My mother exclaimed surprise, said we’d been walking around the university and completely lost track of the time. She was very apologetic but made no move to go, and it must have been clear to him that she had no intention of leaving until she’d seen the apartment. It was clear enough to me. I went down the walkway and up the porch steps.
He was big in every direction—tall and rotund with a massive head, a trophy head. He had the kind of size that provokes, almost inevitably, the nickname Tiny, though I’m sure nobody ever called him that. He was too grave, preoccupied, like a buffalo in the broadness and solemnity of his face. He looked down at us through black-framed glasses. “Well, you’re here,” he said, not unkindly, and we followed him inside.
The first thing I saw was the fire. I was aware of other things, the furniture, the churchlike expanse of the room, but my eyes went straight to the flames. They burned with a hissing sound in a fireplace I could have walked into without stooping, or just about. A girl lay on her stomach in front of the fire, one bare foot raised and slowly twisting, her chin propped in her hand. She was reading a book. She went on reading for a few moments after we came in, then sat up and said, very precisely, “Good evening.” She had boobs. I could see them pushing at the front of her blouse. But she wasn’t pretty. She was owlish and large and wore the same kind of glasses as the man, whom she closely and unfortunately resembled. She blinked constantly. I felt immediately at ease with her. I smiled and said hi, instead of assuming the indifference, even hostility, with which I treated pretty girls.
Something was in the oven, something chocolate. I went over to the fire and stood with my back to it, flexing my hands behind me.
“Oh yes, it’s quite comfortable,” the man said in answer t
o a comment of my mother’s. He peered around curiously as if surprised to find himself here. The room was big, the biggest I’d ever seen in an apartment. We could never afford to live here, but I was already losing my grip on that fact.
“I’ll go get my wife,” the man said, then stayed where he was, watching my mother.
She turned, nodding pensively to herself. “All this room,” she said. “It makes you feel so free. How can you bear to give it up?”
At first he didn’t answer. The girl started picking at something on the rug. Then he said, “We’re ready for a bit of a change. Aren’t we, Sister?”
She nodded without looking up.
A woman came in from the next room, carrying a plate of brownies. She was tall and thin. Deep furrows ran down her cheeks, framing her mouth like parentheses. Her gray hair was pulled into a ponytail. She moved toward us with slow, measured steps, as if bearing gifts to an altar, and set the plate on the coffee table. “You’re just in time to have some of Dr. Avery’s brownies,” she said.
I thought she was referring to a recipe. Then the man hurried over and scooped up a handful, and I understood. I understood not only that he was Dr. Avery, but also that the brownies belonged to him; his descent on the plate bore all the signs of jealous ownership. I was nervous about taking one, but Sister did it and survived, and even went back for another. I had a couple myself. As we ate, the woman slipped her arm behind Dr. Avery’s back and leaned against him. The little I’d seen of marriage had disposed me to view public affection between husbands and wives as pure stagecraft—Look, this is a home where people hug each other—though she was so plainly happy to be where she was that I couldn’t help feeling happy with her.
My mother prowled the room restlessly. “Do you mind if I look around?” she said.
Mrs. Avery asked Sister to show us the rest of the apartment.
More big rooms. Two of them had fireplaces. Above the mantel in the master bedroom hung a large photograph of a man with dark, thoughtful eyes. When I asked Sister who it was, she said, a shade importantly, “Gurdjieff.”