AFTER A WHILE, PEOPLE began to know. Joseph’s mother knew with a terrible look of triumph. Joseph knew with a sudden inability to meet my glance when he spoke to me, awed by my close association with horror.
One Sunday I left the boys with him at a playground near our house and I went to visit my mother and father. We sat in their living room, steam piping up from a chorus of radiators. My mother picked at a doily on the arm of the sofa. She stood up and stared at the row of philodendron plants on top of the television set as if she had never seen them before.
“He was always a gentlemen,” she said. The most tender of epitaphs. “Do you remember when you were only kids? Do you remember his nice manners?”
My father nodded his head and tapped his fingers on the table next to his chair. “Do you remember when he used to come in on a Sunday and I would cut his hair?”
“Hello Mrs. Stein, good-bye Mrs. Stein. Thank you, please, you’re welcome.”
“Such thick hair,” my father murmured. “Such a good head of hair.”
“Tootsie,” my mother said, touching my arm. “Maybe, just maybe with modern science …”
“No, Ma,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Everybody dies,” my father said with a thoughtful sigh.
“What does that have to do with it?” My mother’s eyes were cruel. “What do you know about it?”
Even now, I wondered, she could remember old wrongs and feel new anger. Things that were fresh when I was a child in their house. Words that poured through the wall separating our bedrooms. She had promised never to forgive him and she had kept her word. But I remembered the sounds of them together as well, imagined my mother’s clothing dropping to her feet, the white nylon uniform with her name, Rose, imagined that the name blazed through to her very flesh, that my father saw it there as he fell on her breast.
“Ma,” I said. “Daddy loves Jay.”
“I love him,” my father confirmed. His eyes filled with tears and he blew his nose.
“Are you going to tell Mona?” my mother asked.
“I’ll have to tell her sometime.” I would have to invade Paradise. “Not yet. I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything. I want the whole world to stop.”
“Sandy …”
“Don’t worry, Ma. I talk, talk, talk.”
“You don’t talk so much,” my father observed. “Get it off your chest.”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
“Do you need money?” he asked.
“Not now. We’re okay now.”
“As soon as you need ….”
“Thanks, Daddy. I know.”
“Well,” my mother said. I saw that she was searching her head for a new subject. What could she say that would not be indelicately jovial, or that would not bring us back full circle to Jay? “Well,” she said, wringing her hands. “Is anybody hungry?”