HARRY MEYERSON, CPA, age forty-two whose wife Sarah has been buried three days—seventy-four hours, nine minutes, and (Harry looked at his watch) twelve seconds to be exact, tied his poodle “Yippity” to a park bench and led his small round daughter Rosalie to the playground swings.
“Where’s Mummy?”
The voice seemed to have the regularity of a metronome; he must have heard the question a thousand times, always in the same bright rhetorical tone that contained no trace of interest or concern, quite as if the inquiry were being made about a missing button from a coat.
Harry was so numb, so grieved, so tired, so thoroughly shocked and puzzled by the immense, astonishing intrusion of death into his life, that his mind, he had to admit it, had become silly and perverse—perhaps to preserve itself. When the child asked the question, he always answered it, not aloud, since no answer was required, but in his head.
“Where’s Mummy?”
“Where’s Mummy—? Well, sweetheart— If you really want to know— Mummy is dead—just like Yippity’s two little puppies—do you remember what happened to them—” he lifted his daughter into a swing “—when Daddy’s automobile ran them over?—all their stomachs squashed out on the sidewalk? Well, that’s what happened to Mummy—almost the same thing— oh, not by a car, but by five, no seven nice doctors —all handsome and young. . . .”
“Where’s Mummy?”
“Where’s Mummy—? Well, dear— If you really want to know . . .” He pulled the swing back and let it fly. “Mummy caught a strange disease—not on the outside—it wasn’t like measles (do you remember when you had those funny spots on your face?) but more like a thousand hungry worms all sewn up inside her. Well, love— The doctors didn’t know what to do. So they sawed open her skull and snipped out a tiny thing called the pituitary; that’s what makes everything in you grow, or not grow. You see, they thought if they took it out, all the little worms would have to stop eating Mummy. Only they were wrong. Because the worms ate Mummy all up. . . .”
Suddenly the man had to sit, or fall in a faint. He collapsed next to Yippity, and while the dog licked his fingers, he stared at the rosy-cheeked, well-fed being that was his dauthter, with no other image than that she and the swing were a giant pendulum coming to rest.
“Push, Daddy; push!”
“Daddy is tired.” Did he speak it or think it? It’s impossible to tell, because at last, at last he’s beginning to cry, at least his eyes are flooding and the stone he’d been saving in his heart with which to kill God if they met, is melting with the tears.
Yes, the world is silver-blurred and swimming, overflowing majestically like dream banks on the Nile. If only it would wash away that one last image of his wife’s shaved head, all the crisscross, blue-stained stitches above those bewildered, haunted eyes—laced into her upper forehead like a spider-built railroad track, twenty bloody games of tick-tack-toe. . . .
By the playground fountain, a stout, red-haired woman is allowing her Doberman to drink, paws up on the basin, its long red tongue slurping noisily.
A governess with a baby in her arms and a thirsty, chocolate-mouthed little girl at her side, is aghast at the sight.
“You allow a filthy, germ-ridden animal to drink at a fountain where children. . . .”
So the fight begins, to become quite loud and animated, attracting a small crowd and a police officer who can quiet but never settle the issue because there are so many fountains and dogs and thirsty, chocolate-mouthed children. . . .
Across from the fountain, a young man of erotic intent dressed in the uniform of his persuasion: tight Levi’s and a body shirt, is cruising for someone of his own sex to relieve his anxiety. For this purpose it is good to sit not too far, not too close to the men’s room, thereby exposing oneself well and clearly intentioned, but not indiscreetly so, to the in-and-out trade.
A priest passes—certainly someone with a turned-around collar—who glances back at the young man twice. Once can be an accident, twice is a signal. The man of God hurries toward the door marked MEN but whether from a full bladder or with something more stimulating in mind is impossible to say. However, when he doesn’t come out, the young man rises, glancing about so supercasually that one is sure he is wondering whether to buy strawberry or vanilla ice cream from the nearby vendor, before he saunters to the lavatory, deciding that as long as he’s passing he might as well pee, even though he doesn’t have to, very much. . . .
There is a spray fountain in the center of the playground, and a cluster of children dancing in and out of it with the pulse of a sea anemone, or the human girl-flowers in an ancient “Gold Diggers” movie. Beyond the reach of the water, on a scatter of benches, the mothers, fathers, baby-sitters, and sundry guardians of children sit, reading Time but also making absolutely sure with minimal glances up, that the innocents in their charge are not lured into the trees by sinister figures to be murdered or raped, either of which is indeed quite possible in a city where with some regularity children are thrown off roofs, blasted with guns, drowned in bathtubs, doused with gasoline and set afire, or otherwise beaten, starved, mutilated, or persuaded, somehow, to participate in or succumb to a variety of sexual attack. . . .
Over the chain-link fence of the playground are the hills and valleys of a wilder section of the park; beyond this, one of the larger of the lakes and a complex of buildings that take care of a number of human needs: places to fill one’s stomach, to empty one’s bowels or bladder, to rent boats, buy balloons, play tennis, or simply lie on the grass and read a book or make discreet, inoffensive love. Since it is Sunday, the place teems like the day of the winged Swarming of the Ants; indeed, if you could get away, say rise a half a mile or so up into the air and look down, you’d see a thousand tiny specks moving in and out, aimlessly to and from. . . .
Not far away a dozen small sweaty boys play baseball on a dusty diamond and unless you shut out the sound to concentrate on your Shakespeare, or the Daily News, or Strange Sexual Rites Involving Human Sacrifice, you’ll hear the music of that particular kind of love: “Foul . . . ! Strike . . . ! Who’s up . . . ? Don’t fuck me . . . ! Shit, man, who made up them rules . . . ? !”
In short, it is perhaps any day in any park on a lazy Sunday afternoon in August.
Except for this: “the small, cool secret cave Angel had found high up in a remote, mountainous part of the park where a shaft of immense rock jutted out over a stream.”
The sun splatters a leafy brightness at the entrance, but deep inside the shadows multiply, and there on a bed of leaves and wilted grass, five children sleep. Or are they children?—naked, curled one into the other in tangled, selfless intimacy, breathing with a single soft breath.
One body jerks in a spasmed shudder. The animal dreams, its strange eyes opening and closing in slanted mirrors of green and gold.