In the glorious colors of a cooler autumn, Jules stood at the doorway home from law school, just a subway ride away, Columbia University, and Abe could not have been more proud. Abe, his skin waxy and cold to the touch, lay in their bed. Marie slept on the daybed in the sitting room. She was to give him the morphine in the syringe, a milliliter or a centimeter or something; every morning she drew the liquid to the line as the hospice nurse had shown her. The hospice nurse said every two hours but Marie gave the morphine every half hour and what the hell, she said to herself more than once, what the hell.
Jules has come home! He stands in the doorway, the light behind. He has his laundry, his socks; he wears a new beard.
“Jules!” she says.
“Hi, Mom,” he says.
He walks past and drops his backpack on the Queen Anne chair next to the walnut sideboard, his keys in the cloisonné bowl, the china one with the Chinaman in blue. Do you know why the Huns went west? she can still hear Abe asking Jules as a little boy, the two at the kitchen table over Jules’s history books. The Great Wall. It actually stopped them!
Jules gets into the bed with his father. He is careful not to touch his father’s legs or his knees or his shoulder. He is careful to lie on his side. Where Abe stares is difficult to see. Perhaps Very Grand speaks only the language of the dead, or the near dead, or perhaps he is just in his morphine dream.
“I have a joke, Dad,” Jules says. “Are you ready for a joke?”
He had always been a sensitive boy. There were never many friends. His mother and father were his friends, and then, mostly, his father. His father now lies in the bed, his face sunken, gaunt, his skin pale and stretched across his skull so that he already looks a skeleton.
“You’re going to like this one,” Jules says, touching his father’s hand.
Abe smiles and if his eyes could be bright they would be bright.
“So,” Jules says. He is very close to his father’s ear, though careful. The pain is terrible, he knows. Like breaking bones, the doctor has told Marie and she, unable not to say it to Jules, had said it to Jules and then immediately regretted it—after all these years such a good secret keeper, such a good stoic and this?I
“Ready?” Jules says. And almost imperceptibly but perceptibly Abe nods. He loves his boy. It is as if his body is already a shell he could burst from with the light of his love for his boy.
“Why did Noah not take any apples on the ark?” Jules says.
Do his eyes flicker? Jules wants to know. Is that a flicker?
I can’t tell, Marie says. I think I imagine it sometimes and then I think no, there’s definitely something.
I think that’s a flicker, Jules says.
He leans in to kiss Abe’s hollow cheek and Abe bursts with light.
“Because God said only pairs,” Jules says.
Abe’s smile is the smile he wears for certain voices—his son’s voice and his wife’s voice at times. He was a happy man, Marie thinks, watching her son and her husband lie in the bed, side by side, her son straight with not touching, with carefulness, her son the height and length of his father, as handsome, all Abe except for his eyes: her eyes.
He will not stay for dinner or for wine. He has a class tomorrow and he has promised his roommate something. He will be back in the morning, or maybe the day after tomorrow—his filthy sneakers on the bed and after all that, Abe, after we’ve told him so many times—but Abe will already be gone and so this is it: “because God said only pairs.” A punch line; a joke—last words overrated, Jules said first to his roommate, then his boyfriend, testing how it sounds, how it might sound, though it sounds like shit, Jules said afterward. It sounds like total shit.
I. Not until Remembrance Day, when Jules had the school assignment, did she ever say a word: why speak of such things? Remembrance Day not to her liking, Marie said. This, now, who we are, she said. Onward, she said, Jules baffled by his mother’s sudden anger. It was the neighbors I most despised, she told him: St. Claire’s idiot boys; the widow with the pony and the milk cart. They took my mother’s loom. Jules listened and then drew a picture of a pony pulling a milk cart, a loom, or how his mother described to him a loom, in the milk cart, the perspective skewed, the loom misshapen, curved as an angel’s wing and too large—he had been very young. He had never seen a loom or a milk cart.