7.

The sky is slate. The cold descended out of Canada last night and whips trees around light posts, harassing office windows. Though I’m feeling in no particular hurry, I inform the cab driver, I will not pay for a tour of the city. In a heavy Jamaican accent, he says, “I’m not in love widjou eithar, boss. The protestars. Can’t get no place out of downtown.” The next right brings us face-to-face with more policemen in orange vests. A block behind their backs, the intersection is dammed with bodies.

The past fourteen hours have not been the happiest. Elaine helped me to Maggie Kraipolous’ front door while screaming at Stuart. Amid this confusion my only focussed sense was of her concern, and my shoes shuffling into view across the hardwood.

At home I lay down on the couch with a glass of scotch, and slept. I woke at 7:35A.M. to the rattle of wind, still stiff with pain and convinced my liver had been bruised.

I was dialing a cab for the hospital when the doorbell sounded. Hobbling down the steps I was convinced Will had come and that I would fall into my brother’s strong embrace. I was thus the less prepared for the trio on my doorstep: Angus Nelson, Phil Kluge, and Gordon Grindemann. Gordon snarled. Phil smiled. Angus appeared desperate.

The four of us spoke at once. I finally understood that Gordon had found out I’d counseled Greta. A night student had complained of Angus giving female students consistently low grades and an investigation had been launched to discover any pattern. Their converging on my doorstep was mere unhappy chance. Why Phil was there I never did gather.

“You, asshole,” Gordon repeated. “You son of a bitch.”

“Brothers,” Phil called, his hands out. “Brothers let’s not argue. Let’s powwow.” (Phil belongs to a men’s group, a clan of computer programmers who spend weekends chasing groundhogs with sharpened sticks and taking their shirts off in the rain.)

“You talked to Greta,” Gordon said, still chewing on it.

Angus whimpered, “Joe,” pushing between them. “Joe—Hey, you okay, Joe?”

Phil: “You all right, bro’?”

“He’s fine,” Gordon said.

I decided none of them was coming inside.

Angus pleaded, “Joe, I’m in trouble. I could lose my job.”

“We’re with you, bro’,” Phil assured him.

“You are,” Gordon corrected. “I’m in nothing”—a heavy finger lanced toward my face—“with this son of a bitch.” Then he pushed inside, nearly knocking me down. “I want some answers.”

At the foot of the dark stairs, in his black leather jacket and unwashed hair, Gordon seemed the modern neanderthal—something unthawed, dressed up, and handed a Columbia Ph.D. I closed my eyes, trying not to vomit.

“Joe needs help,” Phil told Gordon. “You can hang on a minute.”

“Yeah,” Angus said, “Joe’s hurt.”

Gordon stormed, but no one was afraid and he had to settle for brooding while Phil ran upstairs for my coat. Soon we were all packed into Angus’ ’78 Bonneville, headed for the ER. I rode up front. Gordon and Phil jockeyed for sitting room amid the junk-food trash and overdue library books in back. Gordon poked my shoulder—“You think there’s some allegiance in the world, you know? You make assumptions.” Angus ground his teeth. Phil tried to talk Gordon out of feelings he clearly had no intention of giving up.

At the hospital, a plump intern poked me some more and ordered x-rays. Stuart had merely bruised a rib and I was given a prescription of extra-strength codeine. Gordon had grown sullen while waiting. Inside the Bonneville, from sheer frustration, he shoved Phil, then slammed his open palm against the window.

I had brought yet more pain and confusion into Maggie Kraipolous’ house. And despite the consequences, after the experiences with Felice, I was developing a taste for speaking in my own voice.

I steadied myself with one hand on the armrest, turned and looked calmly into Gordon’s primal eyes. “Greta left you, Gordon, because she is bone tired of your delayed adolescence.” His jaw sank, then snapped tight. “I did talk to her, and what she told me was that she thinks you’ve become preoccupied with your real estate dealings because writing intellectual history—no matter how pugnaciously left-wing—wasn’t macho enough. A reputation (and here I’m making inferences so you needn’t blame Greta), a reputation as a two-fisted theoretical Marxist who can ruffle old schoolmen’s notions about the real influence of Aquinas simply wasn’t sufficient prosthesis. I see now that you reacted so badly to Greta’s unadvertised abortion because getting her publicly pregnant would prove to everyone that your penis, whatever its size in your own unconscious—or reality for that matter, but I refuse to speculate, and Greta is too discreet a woman to say—had yet done the job. I advised her badly because I’d never really suspected any of this; except of course that you wear much too much leather at your age not to leave a few questions in any thinking person’s mind.” I straightened forward and noticed a block-long train of chartered busses with out-of-state plates. I could hear Gordon wheezing. “She left you because she wants to be involved with a man. With an adult male—in which search she has all my sympathies.”

“That’s pretty cold stuff,” Phil said from the back.

I watched an old man carrying a sign that read,

THE SON

OF MAN

WAS ONCE

A FETUS

The glass in Gordon’s eyes had shattered. He was staring at his knees. He had surely heard as much from Greta already. But now it had been spoken by a man, before men.

I glanced at Angus, then back at Phil. They looked like characters in a Restoration comedy: Mr. Noguts and Mr. Goodwill. There didn’t seem much point in stopping.

“As for you Angus, I’d say the chickens have come home to roost, as they are occasionally wont to do.”

Leaves continued to rush in mad fans across the road. For a short while, despite the painful silence, and the aching in my ribs, I felt wonderful. Twice in sixteen hours I had sutured text and margins into a single, whole life. I chewed three bitter tablets of codeine as Angus pulled to the curb.

We were beside a construction site of stacked lumber and bricks. The sidewalk was an even gray where powdered cement had silted beneath chain-link.

Angus said flatly, “I think I’ll drop you here.”

Phil protested. I did not. Nor would I allow Phil to get out with me. Gordon, in the far corner, was still staring at his knees. I stood in the wind and cold watching them pull away. I waited long enough to witness a worm expire in the lime-poisoned gutter before a cab swooped to my rescue.

Spread across the black vinyl seat of Garret James’ cab, feeling rather fine on prescription-strength codeine, I sense now a subtle liberation, a giddy fullness of self. I begin telling Garret my grand ideas on financing national day care. I talk myself into such a lather that I actually imagine turning activist. Thus am I tagged by nostalgia, by a memory of awaiting my mother from the sidelines of riots and marches. I rise on one arm despite the distant ache, to catch a last glimpse of the gathering crowds.

“Crazy, self-righteous basta’ds. Live and let live, I say.”

Consciously, I notice only the sign.

ABORTION

IS

MURDER

And I am just starting to turn away, suddenly exhausted by so much rabid conviction, when I catch sight of the ski jacket, the knock-knees, the freshly shaved scalp. By the time Garret has stopped and I have run back over the slithering sidewalk (directing my body through the codeine is like steering an unkeeled boat), she has disappeared into the back of the crowd.

I dig after her. Pressed by shoulders and coats and hot breath, eventually I discover the center of the commotion: a nondescript brick building tucked between a men’s clothing store and a vacuum cleaner salesroom. Its glass doors, blinded with plywood, are protected by a crowd of counter-demonstrators. A barrier of bodies ten feet deep spans the sidewalk and spills over the curb; sitting arm in arm, a virtual quilt of down jackets, stocking caps, and pinked flesh has aproned the building. Only a narrow corridor is kept open from doors to street where a cab now stops and is met by two young women in green vests. The girl inside the cab appears petrified.

I rise on my toes, searching for Felice among women and men, working families, grandmothers and grandfathers, priests, ministers, a few awkward fellows in parkas and stocking caps, old folks in bright nylon, children tagging at the sides of mothers … and all injected with a kind of triumphant mournfulness.

Placards and banners carry the same few messages in uniform block print. At a father’s cue, two little boys scream like tortured furies—“I’m your baby! Don’t kill me!”—their lips blue and teeth chattering with October’s chill. The tide of bodies is quickly pressing back toward the bluff of store windows. I move along the walk, to try and catch sight of Felice.

Five schoolgirls hold hands and begin to sing. Over their sweaters, each wears a T-shirt printed with a dismembered fetus in a stainless-steel bowl.

“You with the mission?”

A giant man in orange hard hat, safety glasses and army parka stands in my way. Suddenly I feel the ache and cold, cutting to the blood through coat, sweater, and codeine. I shiver, but I do not answer. Beyond his shoulder, I see Gordon and Phil searching through the crowd. I hold my coat shut tight and realize, I forgot to pay Garret.

“You’re not with the mission.”

“Fuck you.” Though shivering to my soul, I experience a light-headed delight. For sheer pleasure, I repeat, “Fuck you.”

He grips me by the shoulders. The crowd surges and my face is pressed against the window of a sporting goods store. A masked goalie and football player, the color of impossibly human flesh, seem ready to grab me. The hard hat drags me to the next corner. He aims me down the street, and pushes. I stumble, twist, and land on my back. For a moment I am aware without being entirely conscious.

The pain in my ribs and skull defies codeine and cold, and the sky above—a narrow river of clouds between building tops—pulses mauve. I try to regain my breath. Feeling the earth draw me to its concrete bosom, I listen to the wilderness: the caw of police radios, the circle of girls singing hymns, the hydraulic hiss and squeal of a trash truck in a nearby alley … Bodies hurry past like rags washed down amid the current of clouds. An old woman, wearing a Green Bay Packers cap, leans into the middle of the sky and asks if I am all right.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’m fine.”

She smiles, then hurries on.

I don’t know where my renewed feeling of peace comes from. Perhaps it is an appreciation of my own relative sanity. Perhaps it’s a feeling of wholeness; after speaking out to Gordon and Angus, and Felice, a sense of being, very simply, who I am.

Maybe it’s the codeine.

My eyes shut. I am considering these possibilities when I sense someone leaning above my face; a black silhouette, a dense storm front expanding as it drops from the top of the sky. Giant hands scoop under my arms and lift my weight from the ground. I am ready to apologize for being an obstruction when a glove strokes the back of my head.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

I smile—“Hi.” There is a moment of pure, scintillating joy in meeting Will so unexpectedly.

His shirttail wags from beneath his blue nylon jacket. A broom handle juts up from under his right arm, attached to a sign he keeps behind his back. Nervous and defensive, he demands again, “What are you doing here?”

“What are you …”

Though the block letters are upside down, I read,

SAVE

GOD’S BABIES

Gently: “You should go home, Joe.”

“You’re with them?” I ask.

But of course he is, and this realization is like a second chemical in my blood.

Where else on earth could he be; the son of Angelica da Vincini. Where else but in the fray defending the most defenseless of all?

The world blooms matte—tactile with truths I have never suspected. I recall the countless late nights, the last-minute arrivals to dinner. I see now, his God-given outrage has had its avenues all along. And I am happy for him. I nearly giggle.

“Will. Will, I’m sorry. I should have known.”

He toes a crack in the sidewalk. “I didn’t think …”—didn’t think I would approve. In an agony of discomfort, his fists flex, then open, then flex again. He will not meet my eyes but says simply, “Maybe you oughta go home, Joe.”

“I didn’t come looking for you,” I assure him.

“That’s okay.” His face comes up pleading. I wish that we might slip into a cafe for some breakfast. We could drink coffee over emptied grape jelly packets as we debate personal liberty and the sanctities of life. He grips my shoulder. “It’s not your place. Maybe you oughta just go home.”

Though a gentle man, he is no less determined than the oaf who shoved me. He is one of them. And I am not. As he glances toward the backs of the mob, I see that even Will’s patience has a limit, and it occurs to me that I really don’t know him. All these years he too has kept a part of himself hidden. I want to touch his hand but fear he might misunderstand.

“You had your breakfast?” I ask. “I know a place.”

A new chant starts, a prayer as wide as a city block. A police bullhorn warns people to stand back. But the words only put a restless snap in the air.

“I have to go.” He touches my chest with two fingers, to bless and to distance. I grab his wrist. He tries to pull away. “You go home, okay?” He nods and smiles, as though coaxing a child.

“I love you, Will.”

“I love you too, Joe.”

“I love your family. This doesn’t matter.”

He glances over his shoulder—“Uh-huh”—and I catch a glimpse of the unknown man. Still the team player, the protective lineman, but determined to win. I release him and he grips his sign. He says, “I’ll be home later.”

I hear my mother’s voice, a hundred times in my youth. My heart sweetens as I assure him, “I’ll be waiting.”

We each back away a few steps. Finally Will turns, and is consumed by the crowd.

Stragglers rush by and the sky lightens without breaking. I’d thought I might merge my lives into a whole, but now I touch my aching abdomen and sense a hairline fissure. Even the echo of chant and counterchant suggests this is not an age for compromise, and that I must break with one side or the other, or perhaps both, or else be split in half. But then I hear her in the distance, a voice from across a rough sea.

Desperate and plaintive, Elaine is calling to Felice and I am digging back into the crowd, through shoulders and scarves.

At the edge of the curb, bodies ahead and behind, I spot Elaine perhaps twenty yards away. She has moved into the crowd in the street. Her arm is in the air. It appears at first that she has seen Felice and is waving. But her hand just hangs there like living driftwood, shaken by each surge, tagged at its tip by the white gauze bandage. I am ready to go to her when something cold thuds my neck.

“God save the babies!” A young clergyman bobbles a six-inch fetus in the air. The dead skin is a translucent blue, as though a mild bruise pervades the flesh. The hands are tucked into its neck, the eyes shut serenely—an alien space traveler in hypersleep. The jostling upset the man’s grip, the thing has bounced from my neck and I push blindly away until I break into another clearing afraid for the first time, as though all these grandmothers and shut-ins are preparing for mayhem, for some cannibal feast. Still trying to protect my ribs I scramble awkwardly atop a newspaper box chained to a street light. I grip the pole, and search for Felice. Quickly, I begin to recognize faces: the boy who stocks shelves at the market, the dental assistant, the woman who reads TV Guide at the bus stop … But now it is precisely their averageness, their ability to take up places in a mass that has become spectacular. And it strikes me: they are the very pieces in the mosaic my mother and father theorized for a glorious revolution, the very people to blow politics from impassioned theory and into the streets.

The cab has gone. The frightened girl has entered the building. Now men in parkas and women in stretch slacks, young girls, children, old men in golf caps … they are on their hands and knees, crossing the street, as inexorable as some migrant species setting out on its seasonal march. The bullhorn squawks. The crowd takes up a hymn. As the first heads pass beneath the yellow police ribbon, these ineptly evolved quadrupeds are dragged away on their backs or carried by the hips and armpits into vans.

“Fe-lice!”

Elaine has forced her way to the front lines. A few feet to her right, Felice is crawling, but she has run into a jam of heels and rumps. I can do nothing. I am a frightened Buster Keaton clinging to safety while history roars all around.

Elaine calls out again. Felice raises her hand and points a single middle finger.

“Get her out! Get her out!”

Dawn is standing among the counterdemonstrators. The others shout at her to sit down. Denise is kneeling beside her. Dawn sits but both she and Denise whip their hands in the air, signaling Elaine to drag her daughter out before she is arrested.

Elaine leapfrogs two bodies. A man rises and jeers as she grips her daughter around the waist. The girl struggles, flailing elbows and feet. There are shouts but no one dares cut in on the intimacy of their dance. In a final burst of frustration Elaine lifts her child’s full weight clear of the ground and carries her backwards, the girl’s shoes kicking backs and hats and glasses. Those around the clinic cheer. A path opens, until the hard hat steps in their way.

Arms crossed, he just stands there. Felice’s cries have turned to grunts of frustration in her mother’s iron grip. The man smiles.

With the practiced speed of a tennis pro—the other arm still holding Felice off the ground—Elaine gathers a fist and backhands the man across the face. The orange hat tumbles to the ground. His glasses catch sparkles of red and blue police lights as frames and one popped lens spin through the air. He keels forward, clutching his mouth, and spits a long thread of blood. From shock or exhaustion, Felice becomes a rag doll as Elaine pushes forward. The crowd washes in behind them, traceless as the Red Sea.

“Sing with us, friend. Won’t you sing?”

One of the schoolgirls has hold of my leg. I scramble from the newsbox and force a passage through the crowd. I only want to get away. I want to go home.

From the north edge of the crowd I can see the crawlers being swept away by men and women in uniform. I am backing away and ready to flee when I spot his shirttail. Warned by his size, one of the officers calls to another and they wait for Will to cross the line.

Then I am bounding over the backs of crawlers as I once bounded over stumps and weeds in search of Dain. My vision is so narrowed that I watch from the back of my own dark skull through two rounded peep holes. Bodies pass beneath me, and then my brother’s shoe soles, his perma-press trouser legs, his gray socks and wing tips.

My hand comes into the picture from below, grabbing onto his belt. I cannot move him. I lift my eyes and see three police officers: a woman, an older man, and a fair-skinned boy. Will’s head rises into view. Superimposed upon the old policeman’s shoulder, Will’s mouth moves but I cannot hear him. And then the sound track kicks in.

“Watch him too,” the female officer says, nodding toward me.

After his initial shock, Will’s blue eyes cloud. “Just go, Joe. Go away!”

“Please, Will. Come back. Please don’t do this.”

The young policeman steps closer. The woman touches his wrist. Bodies shove and push by my calves.

Will grips my hand. “Go home, Joe. You don’t belong here. This hasn’t got anything to do with you.”

“But it does. It does really.” The crawlers continue around us like the living dead in some B-rate horror film. And that is the desperation I feel for my brother. If he crosses over, if he makes this sacrifice there will be nothing left of the Will I know. He will be like them. Won by his father’s blood—a zombie of political conviction.

“Please, Will. Please let’s go home.” He tries to push me back but I lean so close my breath rebounds from his face: “You remember after he was dead. You remember.”

“Just go away!”

“You thought it was an accident. But remember I came. I went into the basement after Angelica saw him.” I smile as though this will clear up everything. “I fixed it.”

He is confused. He was six years old and Angelica had locked him outside even before she telephoned me. By the time I came back upstairs, Will had been standing for over an hour on the porch swing, pounding the kitchen window. He had watched in horror as his mother coddled me.

“He killed himself. Don’t you see? Our father—and I fixed it. Don’t you see, that’s what this leads to?” Fighting his grip I try to indicate the crowd. “That’s where this ends.”

His eyes become clear, and sparkling, and intimately wounded.

For a moment we are lost in each other’s gaze. The remainder of the world vanishes. That our father’s suicide cuts so deep is a sign of what William Senior must have meant to him. He must have told Will all the old stories. The stories of his bold life before Dain, his face-off with congress, the run for governor, with no one to contradict him, making himself a boy’s hero once again.

I am tempted to tell him the whole truth. But Will’s gaze is already blank and beseeching, waiting for existence to be reconfigured. Then the world leaps in.

The young policeman, nervous, anxious to prove himself, suddenly takes comfort in action. The sound of club on skull is that of an obtuse foul ball. A cry is torn from girls and women and men. Before his partners can stop him, the smooth-skinned boy, even more frightened by the reaction, swings again. And again. Hitting a single. A double.

A home run.

Yet Will never makes a sound. His eyes remain in mine, the blows merely a primitive drumbeat to what I have told him, clueless as Jesus why he must be so served. He lets go of my wrist and touches the back of his head. His fingers run scarlet and the crowd wails, for in him they have all been hit, these lambs to injustice.

He grips my hand and rises. We walk among the parting crowd, through a gauntlet of caresses while a dozen cameras and a video crew close in on the blood worming under his collar. Before we are free I hear Phil Kluge cry out. I spot him struggling with Gordon near the corner of a liquor store and it dawns on me, Gordon must have come looking for Greta. They fall down, wrestling like stumble bums, fists flying in and out of the tangle of limbs.

Across Franklin, up streets so quiet it seems we are under water, we walk beneath turning trees, past neatly kept houses. A small boy and girl fight giggling over a football and crash into a pile of amber leaves. We have been walking for twenty minutes when, only a block from my house, Will stops.

His blood has dried into a rat tail. He pulls me into a bus shelter where two teenage boys lounge against the plexiglass walls. He sits us down. There is nothing in his eyes. The sun breaks and touches our faces, igniting the scuffed transparency of the walls like a dull bulb.

He presses me close. My elbows pinned, my nose is crushed into his collar. I hear the boys snigger and I close my eyes. He hugs and hugs, rocking gently, forcing the air from my lungs.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he keeps saying, and then squeezes again. “It wasn’t your place, Joe.”

Even the boys become silent. And while maple leaves tumble, I feel like a tiny rabbit, about to be petted to death.

“This isn’t your place. Qui non c’é posto per te. You just never should have come.”

Janitors wheel buffing machines across spotless white tile. Nurses, tired at the end of shift, talk and part. A businessman’s fever soaks through his shirt while a boy leans over the basketball in his lap to poke a tender ankle.

I find myself remarkably calm in the Emergency Waiting Room, leafing through House and Garden. Felice is surely home with her mother by now. And I am confident that behind the distant swinging doors, Will’s skull will prove sound. Indeed, my role here is so familiar, I half expect my mother to appear in fresh bandages.

I do not attend to this feeling too strenuously. I rather let it hover like a mantra across the surface of more troubling thoughts. I am here now. Will is family. This is where I belong.

I turn to an article on the revival of chintz, ready to go forward with my life, tailored head to toe in my own person. Less loved perhaps by others, perhaps less willing always to dress the required part, but more content for these very reasons.

In this state of detachment I watch an ambulance whine to a halt outside. Medics bail out front and back, along with a civilian. Two young men roll the gurney. Across a bloodied face and knees strapped beneath a blanket, I am looking into Felice Kraipolous’ teary eyes.

She is as unable to register my presence as I to feel hers. Elaine has been hurt badly. We are looking at one another across the rolling landscape of her body when Elaine’s hand rises. The medic presses it to her side but she strains to sit up and lets out a nightmarish, gurgling cry. Her fingers claw the air in my direction as I rise.

“Osh-Joe.” Her teeth are broken, an eye swollen shut. “I’m shorry.”

“What happened?”

“Let’s go!” Felice screams at the men. “What are you doing—go!”

“There be time to talk later,” the attendant insists.

“You ochkay?” Elaine asks.

“Me? Yes, I’m fine.”

Her nails cut pale crescents into my wrist. “We c-gan talk. Joe, wek can talk.”

Felice screams, “Just go! Fuck him! She’s dying!”

Then she is swept away. The doors at the end of the hall swing open, ingesting medics and patient, leaving Felice behind. A gray-haired aid, a solid stock of Buffalo granny-hood wearing glasses on a blue pop-bead chain, tries to coax Felice into a chair. Staring at the closed doors, Felice shakes her off with a curse. It is as though the girl can see and disapproves of everything being done to her mother. When she finally turns and glares across the room, all the world that is conspiring to take her from her mother condenses in my face.

“Fuck off. Just fuck off.”

Faces turn. I assure her, “I’m waiting for my brother. I didn’t—I’ll be here.” I open to a column on the vitamin needs of shaded plants, and make some show of actually reading. She sits in a chair twenty feet away. This charade of indifference continues for half an hour. Every few minutes Felice demands to see her mother and is gently rebuffed. Then she goes to the pay phone near the front doors, dials, and waits. She repeats this process three more times, leaving messages.

Now she looks toward the nurses’ station. She picks up a copy of Cosmopolitan. But it sits in her lap only a moment before she stands and marches toward me.

“I don’t have any money. I can’t get anybody on the phone.” I wait to be instructed. She gives an impatient stomp. “They want to know about insurance. We don’t have any and they’re just going to let her die.”

“Wait.”

I find the nurse on duty and explain the situation. She too is tired, but professional, and accepts with a nod my offer to cover all costs. They have already tried to contact relatives.

“Is she that bad? Surely there’s no risk …” But the idea knots in my throat—the idea that Felice might somehow be left to me. She promises to bring out the doctor as soon as possible.

Felice waits in front of my chair. As I approach, I assure her, “It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” Beneath her jacket, her slumped shoulders appear as fragile as balsa. “It’ll be some time before you can see her.”

She looks suspiciously toward the nurse. I ask what happened. She kicks at the tile. “He jumped us. This butthead she slugged at the demonstration. We were getting into the car and this dickface …” She must fight back angry tears. “He slammed her into the roof of the car.” She breathes through her teeth, staring at the floor as though watching the scene again. Her voice squeaks: “He just kept kicking her.”

How many times has she been forced to stand by and witness her mother being beaten? Her arms cinch tighter around her body. “I hate all those people. I hate them. I was so fucking stupid.” She slugs her own upper arm a cruel blow, like every snot-nosed Smike ready to offer the abuse she could never spare her mother. “I just did it to bug her.”

“You’re all right?”

She peers down the room. The aid brings us a Dr. McCormick, a gaunt young woman with a fraying ponytail.

Her handshake is cool and firm. She blinks slowly, as though taking short naps. “Your mother’s going to be fine,” she tells Felice. I nod, “Thank goodness.” “We just have to run a few tests, and then we’ll want to keep her a day for observation. Long-term we’re talking about bruised bones and some backache.”

“Thank goodness,” I repeat, suddenly reminded of the pain inside my own shirt.

She tells Felice, “Your mother’s a very strong woman.”

“I know. You don’t have to tell me.” Overwhelmed, the child crosses her arms and turns away.

“Thank you. Thank you,” I tell McCormick, shaking her hand too hard. (I see Dain perched in a full lotus on the nurse’s desk. One eyebrow rises skeptically.)

I ask Felice if she likes waffles. She kicks the floor.

We are riding up Main street, pressed to opposite doors of the cab, when I realize I’ve forgotten Will.

“I thought we were going to breakfast. There are places all along here. Look.”

She points ahead, then over my shoulder at a speeding Grandma’s Pancake House.

“I know a better place. So tell me exactly what happened.”

She turns on me. “What were you doing there?”

I watch to be sure the driver, Boris Stanyzov, takes the shortest route to my house. “I told you, my brother was hurt.”

“How come you just left with me then?”

“They said I couldn’t see him.”

“Then why were you waiting?”

She peers skeptically at my profile. Finally she gives it up and faces forward.

“Did you know the man who hit her?”

“She was really upset, you know.”

“It was a dangerous situation.”

“Not that. About you.” (We are back in Maggie K’s dining room.) “After you left, she and Dawn got into it.” She glares. “Dawn says you shouldn’t even be around me.”

I stare at the back of Boris’ head. “What did your mother say?”

“Nothing.” I suspect this means nothing against me, but she will not give it up. We stop at a light. Commuters smoke cigarettes and stomp out the cold awaiting the bus. “I just went down there ’cause Dawn was going, just to watch. Then I saw my mom and this guy hands me a sign.”

“That’s perfectly understandable.”

“God—I might be on TV.” She covers her face with her thin hands. “I don’t even believe in that shit, I’ll just die.”

“Maybe they didn’t get you. The cameras.”

Fists upturned in her lap: “God, I hope not. I hope hope hope not.”

The light changes. We turn left from Main onto West Ferry.

“Are we going to your house or something?”

“I have an errand later. I want to get my car.”

“We have to go back to the hospital in time.”

“We will. We will, don’t worry.”

She crosses her arms and glares at me. “Dawn asked if you ever did anything to me.” (Boris glances at me in the mirror. The aching in my ribs begins burning.) “I didn’t say anything.”

I exhale and steal another breath. “I’m sorry about what happened in my house. I was just very surprised.”

“I was stoned.”

“I think we misunderstood each other’s intentions.” She keeps her eyes on the blur of parked cars and a high school football team butting each other around a field. A black stubble has already sprouted between the stripes of her hair. “I never expected—”

“Just forget it, okay? It’s my fault and it didn’t happen, okay?”

But it did, and what we expressed in that moment—her need, my love and trepidation—has not diminished. Her body exudes that slightly rancid scent of adolescent worry. With an effort, I tell her calmly, “I know where we can get the best waffles in western New York if that interests you.” (And in fact I recall a place Gordon and Greta talked about, before things went bad.) She says nothing. I ignore Dain, peeking like Kilroy from the front seat.

In the front yard of a small white house, a man throws his child into the air. The baby knows and likes the game and spreads its limbs wide, as though it would keep flying into the heavens, as though it would become a tiny, blue-knit star.

Inside my Camry, we say nothing headed east up Highland, then north onto Delaware, toward Niagara Falls. Traffic is light for a Saturday. Between the stone-pocked hills of Forest Lawn and the man-made lake, I tell her, “I’m glad we have a chance to talk.”

“About what?”

“About your mother and me.”

“What about you? You did it. Okay, so congratulations.”

“Your mother cares for you enormously, Felice. You’re the center of her life.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

I wait until we stop at a light. I lower my voice. “The two things simply can’t be separated. I think you know that.”

She watches a kid pump gas into a Buick. It strikes me this is Will’s place, to care for a scared child. The light changes.

“I know some things,” she says cryptically. On this note we remain sealed up in our own thoughts, beyond the city line, through Kenmore, Tonowanda, North Tonowanda, past the hardware stores, wholesale houses and lumberyards. Then we turn east, into countryside broken only by an occasional intersection and gas station. Between fields of corn crew-cut a foot from the earth, there remain stands of old trees and acres reclaimed by stubborn weeds … an ailing barn, boarded cafes, and body repair shops. It was on such a day that Dain and I argued about what our father and mother might have been like if they hadn’t gone into politics. It was early November and we were climbing the apple trees. Beyond the river, someone was burning brush—the sweetly acrid smell like an offering to call back spring.

Felice demands, “Where are we going?”

“I told you, I know a place.”

“They said I could see her by noon.” Her wristwatch is the face of some rock star with bulbous lips. Guitar necks point eleven-twenty. “I don’t want to be late.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get back.” My hand ventures out, but only hovers in a disembodied patting motion. “We’ll call the hospital as soon as we stop.”

She stares at a patch of rhubarb tended by leprous plaster deer. She chews the inside of her lip. “Are you going to ask my mother to marry you?” (She will not look at me.) “Are you?”

I settle my hands at ten and two o’clock on the wheel. “Would that be so bad?”

She pushes with two fingers to give her teeth purchase on the lining of her cheek. If Elaine were here she would tell her to stop. We glide over a short bridge, from one bank of hedgerows to another.

“I don’t believe you would. I don’t believe you.”

I glance at her again. But she will not give me her eyes. And I am too surprised to answer. It is as though I have turned and found a stranger seated beside me.

The hurt in her voice was as eloquent as any confession. Despite her suspicions and jealousy, and the terrible misunderstanding in my house, despite even the fiasco at her grandmother’s table, it is clear. She wants me for her mother as badly as Elaine wants me for her. Even after last evening, in her eyes, I am the tease.

“I don’t mean you wouldn’t ask. But you wouldn’t really. You don’t think she’s good enough.”

“You’re wrong,” I tell her sincerely. “You don’t know me.”

Now that the possibility has been offered, it all becomes as evident as the V of geese emerging over the horizon: I might never love Elaine Kraipolous, not in any real intimacy of soul. But we share respect and could learn affection. Indeed, for a moment, watching the birds grow larger and larger, I see it again: Will and Cindi helping Maggie up her own front steps while the rest of us prepare to sit down with beer and pretzels. And there would be Felice herself, to supplement what bonds we could not manage to build ourselves.

It could happen. I truly believe that it could.

“Look,” I say, on the verge of a titter. “Look, we’re here.”

To our right, from behind a wall of trees, emerges Mother’s Kitchen and The Shiny Brite Motel. The motel is perhaps ten rooms behind sagging eaves and rusting metal trellis. Mother’s is crowded, sealed up in glass and fake brick.

I pull into the gravel drive of the motel and stop near room eight, opposite Mother’s. A maid’s trolley sits outside number two. A bone-thin woman comes out. Wearing denim shorts and an orange T-shirt, a cigarette hangs from her lips as she wipes her hands on a towel. She looks at us indifferently, grabs a roll of toilet paper and a bucket and goes back inside.

“We getting out?”

I rub my right temple—a mild codeine hangover. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

We have to wait for a table. Time enough for Felice to call the hospital and the sensation caused by her haircut to settle into the occasional glance. A waitress seats us in a booth between the end of the lunch counter and a picture window opening upon trees and the road north. We order and Felice stares through the glass.

She will not say what the phone call revealed. I tell her, “I like your mother, it’s true. She’s a very good person. She cares deeply about you.”

“Why do you keep telling me that? Don’t you think I know?”

“You don’t act as if you do.”

After a long pause, her eyes struggling and damp, she says to the trees, “She doesn’t really like you that much. I heard her on the telephone with her friend Cerise.”

I realign my fork and spoon on the napkin. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”

“It’s true. Even before last night.” Her face pinches, drawing the gate down over her heart. “She said she thought there was something wrong. She said …”—she looks at her crossed arms on the table. In black ink, someone has written “smiKe” on the back of her wrist. The K is drawn to resemble a battle axe. As she speaks she claws at the letters. “She said—she said she doesn’t know if you’d be reliable. She said there’s things she can’t explain exactly.”

Beyond the row of ball caps at the lunch counter, through the steam of hot coffee, the woman in the orange T-shirt comes out again for towels. I wonder if, while they were still happy—if Gordon and Greta didn’t work up an appetite making love in that very room, if perhaps the child that would sabotage their marriage wasn’t conceived in a coupling as familiar as a lazy Sunday morning.

And it occurs to me, like a wash of brightness, as though the sky had faded from gray to mild blue: If one is in fact to acquit oneself decently, one must enjoy an inborn principle of acceptable action. Something that cannot be gained through dogma or discipline; a kind of water table of the moral soul which in all cases, among all people, without conscious effort, will discover its proper level. It is what I want to believe I possess, but cannot seem to feel through the fear of how my actions might be perceived. This is the thing that, unlike Dain, I failed to inherit, the thing whose absence subdivided my life: the strength of a healthy indifference to the opinions of others. The woman flicks her cigarette onto the gravel and goes back inside.

“I’m not making it up.” She sounds frightened now, as though she knows she is getting deeper into trouble.

“It doesn’t matter if you are,” I assure her, for I want to speak nothing but the truth.

“What’s that mean.”

“It means I want you to say whatever you feel the need to say. Even if it’s not true.”

She sighs and shakes her head. She finally sloughs her jacket. Our waitress, an exhausted fifty-something with a saucy smile, fills my coffee cup and gives Felice tomato juice. I breathe deep. Exhale. “I want to ask you a question.”

“They said I could see her at one. It’s almost twelve now.”

“I want to ask about your father.”

Her mouth opens. A thread of saliva connects an incisor to her lower lip. Then it snaps shut and she breathes hard, staring out the window.

“I know he hurt you.”

“She doesn’t know everything about me. No matter what she said.”

“That’s what I mean,” I tell her because I can see already that my suspicions are correct. So I am temporarily speechless before a vision of the great stone pyramid of hurt that has been turned on its head and balanced upon the point of this girl’s heart. Her mouth opens again, but no sound emerges.

“Was it constant?”

She tries to speak. She scratches her arm again and tells the raw lines, “You don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s why I’m trying to find out.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to help you.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you were hurt.”

“So what? What’s it to you?”

A man at the lunch counter looks over. I lower my voice. “Because I care for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve had a hard time.”

“You don’t know shit.” Then louder, “You don’t know shit about me.”

Faces turn, turn away, and murmur.

She says as a hiss, “I could say something, you know.”

“Just tell me. Did he hurt you.”

“I could tell people what we did. They’ll believe what I say, no matter what. They always believe the kid. Always.”

I close my eyes briefly, trying to slow things down. “Felice, please. It’s all right.”

She grabs her fork in a fist. “Fuck you. What the fuck do you know?”

I try to touch her hand but it flies from the table. The fork is dashed to the floor. I pick it up. “Felice, I just want to help.” I place the fork back in front of her.

Her mouth twists to a beak: “I bet you do. I can just bet how you’d like to help.”

“Please—”

“Bullshit.” She struggles with whatever comes next, searching the table, crumpling her napkin. Suddenly she glares. “I have to make a phone call.” When I say nothing her fist strikes the table. “I have to.”

“All right.”

“I need money.”

I give it to her. She leaves her jacket in the booth and ignores the gauntlet of stares and whispers. I look through the window, to the north.

I begin at the bottom: I ask myself if the thought of Felice performing sexual favors for her father carries with it any titillation—if this is why I press—and I am overwhelmed with disgust.

I take several breaths, my eyes pinned to the horizon of trees: red and amber maples, green conifers, their tops cutting a ragged hem of sky that refuses to give up any sign of afternoon or morning. It was the first time I ever watched through the night, after we had become exhausted from chasing each other up trees in that orchard gone wild with weeds and rabbit holes. He was sitting on a leafless limb, the apples like fat yellow ornaments, gnawing at a core in the morning air. I confessed that I thought Angelica beautiful. He spit seeds in long arches over me, sprawled on the ground, staring at the blank sky. For no reason I could determine, Dain said, “The way mother and father love people isn’t any good unless they respect you too.” I asked, “What does that mean?” He said, “You know. Or you will.”

I still cannot say why I became so angry. I leapt and grabbed his leg and pulled him to the ground. We wrestled in our bulky jackets, hands and nails clawing wool and skin and nylon until I had him face down and sat on the backs of his shoulders, facing his feet. I can still recall the warmth of his body beneath my legs and buttocks as I pounded his lower back with my fists. He cried out and his organs thudded like a bass drum, answering the scent of burning leaves.

He was not a boy who cried easily, yet all through the night his moans penetrated my blankets and pillow and the wall to my parents’ room. Before sunrise they called Angelica to stay with me. Feeling at once heavy and hollow from not sleeping, I watched the pickup’s taillights shrink down the road. But by the afternoon of the next day he was all right. He was allowed to stay home from school for three days reading his favorite Russian novels, and then we were standing as always at the end of the drive waiting for the school bus, our breath crystalline on the morning air, making faces at George and Allen, who made faces back.

But through the mild winter and wet spring, so slowly at first that only I noticed, he was growing weaker. Until summer, when he fell in the field behind me, running after Sal Minnatore’s drive.

While his cries came through the walls, I saw for myself that the world is not remade each morning, that sunrise is always over the same earth—that there is no true rest.

“But you didn’t kill me. You weren’t that smart.” (He is seated in Felice’s place, smaller than she and three shades more pale in his pajamas.)

“I don’t want sex with her.”

He grins wickedly: “Say it then. Just say it. I dare you.”

I announce out loud, “I don’t want sex with her.” (The tables nearby become silent.) “I want to help her. It’s as simple as that—and just as hopelessly complicated.”

“They’re looking.”

“I don’t care.” (The entire room has grown still.) “You may not understand, but I’m sure of it now. I also don’t give a damn what you think now because she’s better than you. She’s better than all of us, or at least more deserving. Brains and integrity aren’t everything. There’s also justice.”

“So which will it be, amigo? Which side wins?”

“Maybe neither. Maybe …” And the truth of it fills me from head to foot: “Maybe that was never the question.”

Then, like the Cheshire Cat, he disappears but for his wicked smile, and then it too vanishes. And the moment I am left staring at red vinyl padding I know I have stumbled upon the magic code. He will not appear again. Dead for a quarter-century, my brother will never come back.

“You still want these?”

There is a silence as deathly as Dain’s absence. Every eye in the room is on me. The waitress holds two plates of waffles. This woman who has seen it all, even she hangs back, beyond my reach. “She took off,” she says, uncertain I should be told. “Lit out like a scared little rabbit.”

The man at the counter grunts, and leans over his eggs.

Felice’s jacket swings from my hand as I slide to a stop on the gravel. The road north narrows to a tip. To the south, blacktop twists into the trees.

I put her jacket into the car. The door to room eight is open. Gnarled sheets, cardboard and cellophane from a new dress shirt … a telephone. I should call someone: Will or Elaine, or my mother. The woman emerges from number four wearing pink rubber gloves to her elbows. “You want somethin’?”

The restaurant windows fog with gawking breath.

I look again into number eight, into its terrible stillness.

“Hey! Hey you get outta there! Hey—Lloyd!”

I look at the avocado-colored phone. I can’t say who I would call, or why. I pull the sheets and blankets across the bed. After I had arranged my father’s body so that Angelica could bury and visit him with the blessing of her church, I walked back up into the kitchen and she embraced me. My face rested in scents of lilac powder and perspiration, listening to Will. He was screaming his lungs raw, pounding on the glass though he could not know our father was dead. And I understood, staring without sensation over Angelica’s shoulder, I understood from the tragic red mask of his face that he believed I had come back to take my old place, and that she had locked him out for good though she cried out to him, “Bambino mio, innamorato mio—il povero orfano!”

It was a moment, in the confusion of Will’s cries and hers, amid my own sickness, it was a moment before I felt myself straining at her so insistently I could detect with it the line where her underwear creased her thigh. But I could not push away. I pressed closer until she felt it too and her sobs became choked, struggling with my shoulders as Will thundered the window and I held her tighter and tighter in horror and unceasing love hoping she would remember her first touch, and touch me again, so that the moment—standing above my father’s corpse—might be blessed.

I pick up the shirt wrappings from the floor and place them in the trash can. The room smells of old carpet and new caulking. On the bureau there is a pack of matches from the Dare Devil museum of Niagara Falls. I slip it into my pocket before picking up the phone. The woman in pink rubber gloves, dragging her husband, looks in.

He is a stocky man with belly hair poking beneath his white shirt. They are people who do not feel cold.

“What’s goin’ on?”—more confused than threatened. A man old enough to know anger can’t help.

His wife demands, “Ain’t you gonna do somethin’?”

“Chrissake, Doll. Cool out.”

“Whatchya gonna do, Lloyd? He coulda called anywhere. You gonna let him just walk?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I take the Dare Devil matches from my pocket and hand them to Lloyd. “It was an emergency. I didn’t call anyone. I’m very sorry.”

I look back only once, from behind my steering wheel. His wife’s pink-rubber hands go up and down. The waitress in Mother’s dials a telephone. And Lloyd reads the inside of the match book, perhaps considering a new career driving long-distance freight.

She is at first a distant spot, then a stick figure walking south along the edge of a shallow ditch, beside an overgrown field. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she huffs. She glances back and nearly stumbles. Fifty feet behind her, I park but do not get out. She searches all around before jumping the ditch.

The field is cut squarely out of the forest, perhaps a quarter mile deep. It has been overtaken by rich green grass, purplish thistles, and a few spindly pines among shoots of wilding corn. I step out. The grass reaches so high she must lift her arms, batting as she runs.

She will get back to Elaine somehow. Yet I call to her softly, “Felice, please. I am sorry.”

The saturated earth oozes around my black soles. The codeine vanished, each step jars my ribs up through my teeth. “Felice!”

Suddenly she stops. I can see only the stripes of her scalp. Until she turns, and the darkness in her eyes marks us hunter and prey. Then she heads south, toward the forest—toward home.

My knees hit the earth. I breathe in dampness and rot, trying with all my soul not to vomit. Muddy water soaks to my skin, and then I go over forward, onto my hands. I retch into the weeds. Burning my throat. Scorching sinuses.

I make myself stand. I can move faster than she because I am heavier and clear the path more easily until I am only a few wheezing steps behind as she flails at the cutting weeds. “Felice … please. I just want to … take you home,” but she continues to run through currents of green, she will not wait and listen and I lift my feet faster, beyond my breath crashing over corn stocks and thistles while her knees keep coming up. We are nearly to the edge of the field, to the open ground beneath the trees where she will surely outrun me, when she disappears.

I keep moving though I am ready to believe she has evaporated into the sky, or back into my own imagination when the grass opens and—still in motion—I am looking down at her inside the earth and on her back she is facing me in horror as my heel, trying to stop, slides in the mud, then catches on the edge of this sunken watering trough or trunk the size of a small coffin and my momentum pitches me forward down miles and miles, down on top of her.

“No. No please you don’t understand.” “God get off oh, God, God please! Oh please God don’t, don’t!”—weeping for her mommy her fingers in my face and eyes in agony beneath my hips sobbing for her mother, the sound sucked back like someone buried alive as I try to push myself up and my legs straddle her—“Please God I want my mommy, God please don’t!”—but when I try to push out she flails again and my hands are on her shoulders, on her breasts, my fingers all through her body trying to escape until her mouth is a screaming red slash in her hair caught in the vines pulling her down into the earth clutching or tearing at my arms on top of her in the narrow grave her body so delicate every move will crush or maim her flesh oozing between my fingers wishing my touch would bless her but these thoughts are only in my fingers, in my hands and arms on her breasts behind the wall of her screams the noise driving a glass wedge between vision and hearing.

Screaming to God. To her mother. And I want to say to her, I am here.

Then the world stops.

Her knee juts up. My bruised ribs are impaled, and the soft knot of our bodies is miraculously untied inside a purple fog.

I slide to the side of the pit. She kicks wildly, clawing at the ledge of earth before she steps on my back and springs free.

Clutching my abdomen, breathing moldy funk under the low and gloating sky, I hear her legs scissoring toward the protective forest. As my breath returns, and I hear the distant wail of a siren, the sound of her running grows fainter and fainter until—kneeling, brow to earth—I can only imagine her bounding away through the underbrush. Slowly, my breath grows soft again. As soft as the ooze beneath me while sirens rise and die and radios squawk. As soft as the thought of her fleeing, into the remainder of her rich life.