37. A LEAF AT THE EDGE OF THE SKY

The wind howls, rattling the windows, bullying the last leaves off their branches. He is in his armchair, slippered feet warm and heavy on the carpet. How long has he been sitting here? He doesn’t know. The sky is like an upside-down porcelain bowl, blue-glazed, resting on the tops of buildings and water towers and the bare oak tree across the street. He likes the fading light at the end of the day. He remembers a different chair in a different living room, Holly cooking in the kitchen, the radio on NPR. Or Sarah, a long time ago, him with a scotch and the newspaper, she with a book, a glass of sherry perhaps, the radio playing, or an LP record. A car honks. Steam floats up from the building across the street. The oak tree is resolute—knobbly, arthritic. Here and there, a tenacious leaf clings to the end of a branch at the edge of the dim blue sky. Sometimes Sarah would play the piano—Bach or Schumann—while Janey gave Glenn his bath. They’d lied to her, the doctors, at the end, just as his own doctors were probably lying to him now.

HE STILL walks most days, not to the park, but along Van Brunt and up King Street to the waterfront, a mess of rubble and abandoned stuff—wire hangers, shoes, broken glass, plastic bottles, smashed TVs, hubcaps, charred wood. In the river, plastic bags and mucky branches tangle and bob against the embankment. Beyond the murk, the water flows cleanly, a real river, swift and determined.

A SPLASH of whiskey in his tea in the afternoon. The milk is three days past its expiry date but it smells okay. A nip when the sun goes down, with the television on, a glass of whiskey or cheap red wine mixed with a bit of port. Warms the heart. His eyes are crap. When he peers into the fridge he has to wait for the shapes to settle into things he recognises—milk, can of beans, yoghurt. Driving in a taxi, the world flows and ebbs, things mash and unmash, warble in and out of focus in dizzying colours. Henry, gripping the armrest, presses himself back into the seat like a frightened child as cars, lampposts, and pedestrians swim past.

HE’S BEEN to the house in Annandale. Went there for Thanksgiving and Christmas day. Sometimes goes for Sunday lunch. It’s big and clean and feels half empty. Is Glenn happy? He’s never known when Glenn is happy. After Dunningham left, they were alone together in the Sullivan Street apartment. He bought coloured markers and paint and paper and they covered the walls with pictures of cars, buildings, grids, and swirls of primary colours. He told Glenn he didn’t know when they’d move to a proper house, or when Mommy would arrive.

GLENN NEVER did get his mother back, nor did he get a second mother. Well, there was Melanie, who moved in with them in the first house in Stony Brook. But the thing with Melanie eroded, then ended abruptly. There was Anne, a divorcée, two kids, both a bit younger than Glenn. They’d go to the beach together, have cookouts with the kids at each others’ houses, but they never moved in together. What had happened? She’d moved somewhere. Seattle or California. And Sarah? She had served her time, and the police kept her passport for a while, but after her release they left her alone. She was introduced to Peter Hirsch at a cocktail party. She’d sent photos of little Alison and Brett, her cute blond babies.

SOMETIMES HIS sight goes gauzy. It’s as if a curtain descends across his eyes. The thinnest cotton, but somehow also liquid, leaky. Quick and slippery, it happens without warning. The world wobbles, shapes melt. Sometimes, in dreams, she calls to him. Sarah. She waves, or sits with her hands together as if in prayer, looking up at him. Kom, Henry.

OR HIS father with the tefillin and leather-bound mahzor he’d brought all the way from Lithuania. Baruch Shem Kavod Malchuto L’Olam Vaed. There’s the little synagogue, too, on Hereford Road and also the priest at his school in Port Elizabeth, Father Slayton. He can’t remember what happened yesterday, but he remembers the synagogue, the dark pews, the brass lights, the old school priest. Wherefore have ye beguiled us, saying, We are very far from you; when ye dwell among us? Sometimes Nellie appears, in a wet-grass garden. When he saw her again thirty years had passed. They were both old. She wasn’t loved enough or thanked enough or mourned enough, not by him, anyway. For years after he came to America, he’d made mental notes of things to tell her, share with her. Harlem, Coltrane, Kennedy, Wes Montgomery. She’d been his sanctuary and his saviour, his fugitive love, and he’s never stopped missing her.

GLENN VISITS every two or three weeks. Sometimes they meet at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station or the delicatessen one level down—pastrami sandwiches or beef hot dogs with all the trimmings. When he tells his son he isn’t feeling a hundred percent or when Glenn goes to see a client in Brooklyn, he takes a taxi to Red Hook, brings sandwiches or soggy hotdogs and unpacks the bag of groceries that Holly has sent. Saul lives in the East Village now. He’s working for an Internet startup, thinking about law school, thinking about travelling. His girlfriend’s name is Sabrina; her parents were born in Vietnam. Uitlanders. Fremder mensch. Saul brings her to visit occasionally and they walk to The Good Fork on Van Brunt. Mostly he comes alone, though, once a fortnight or so. It’d be nice to see the boy more often. Joe Borgese lives in Florida now. They have lunch or dinner when he comes to visit his daughter. Good old Joe.

SAUL COMES to Red Hook the most, sometimes just for a few minutes, a cup of tea, a game of backgammon. It was Saul who found him shivering and weak, took one look at him and bundled him into a car. By then he was malnourished and dehydrated, seeing things that weren’t there—a horse on Flatbush Avenue, soldiers in the hospital elevator. Five hours later, he had surgery. A kidney abscess. Jamaican nurses in floral scrubs called him handsome. Such a gentleman, they said. Names and numbers swirled on a dry erase board across from the foot of the bed. He shared a room with a man who was going to have a gangrenous leg amputated. The first days in the hospital his mind played tricks. Acute dementia, they called it. Couldn’t remember the name of the president, or who had just left the room. Then they said it was delirium, caused by the anaesthesia and the dehydration that had preceded it, and it would pass. Delirium moon. Baboon. But his health returned and his mind got itself back to normal. New normal. Glenn came down, settled him at home, set up an emergency contact, a private nurse he could phone night or day. Holly came the following week. Sometimes he puts salt in his coffee. He eats tinned beans, pasta, and tomato sauce, not Chef Boy-Ar-Dee anymore. Once in a while he forgets to buy groceries, or eat. But most days he’s fine.

THE MONEY’S drying up. Glenn took everything they got from the house. That’s okay, there’s still the rent from the downstairs tenant, his retirement checks, and modest dividends, but he has to pay the mortgage, doctors, cleaning lady. He lies to Glenn. Tells him he has enough, tells him not to worry. It’s all right. Not broke yet. A little something to leave Glenn and Holly and Saul and Nellie’s family in his will. Not as much as he’d have liked, but it probably never is. Something better than nothing. Love better than death. Sometimes he rides the bus to Seventh Avenue and walks in Prospect Park. Careful as he crosses the stream of people on bicycles, skateboards, Rollerblades. He hates Rollerblades. Can’t abide boom boxes either, or drumming circles. He takes the train to Stony Brook occasionally, for law school parties or dinner at a colleague’s house. He travelled to London for Rusty’s funeral. Hilda moved back to South Africa, to Sea Point, to live near her son. That’s where she died, three years ago—or was it longer? We have the whole world to be free in.

HE LOVES the pale, breathless sky as the light fades, the steely smell of night. Sometimes he thinks he’s back in the house in Observatory, under an African sky. He remembers the flat on Cliff Street. Port Elizabeth was unimaginably bright and empty. Light in the alleys and on the streets, sun on the water, bouncing off the dark shiny backs of automobiles, sun in the trees and on the grass that grew everywhere, even in the middle of the city. Herschel Rabinowitz drove a Hudson. He likes this armchair, this apartment, the expansive sky. The rug that doesn’t fit lies rolled up in the study like a big log. He doesn’t want to move to a retirement home. No, sir. Fuck that shit. He likes the noble oak tree across the road, its boughs taller than the streetlights and telephone wires. What’s for supper, Janey? The window mullions are painted white, and it is through these frames that he beholds the world—the big oak tree, the sky that comforts him. Sunset paints the walls pink, the awnings and windows across the road, frayed clouds, white stars at night. Wayse shtern.

SOMETIMES HE forgets, and thinks he is in Africa. His eyes play tricks and he sees the land, arid and beautiful. Leaves and branches bending in the breeze, thorn tree shadows on the veld. He loves the trees and sky. And he is glad that he lived there.

IT’S SNOWING again. A fine white powder settling on the rooftops, clinging to the branches. Better not to walk today. The streets may be icy. Sometimes there are kids at the end of the block. They watch him like wolves. What do they see? A funny old man? Possible prey? Better to stay home. A splash of whiskey in his rooibos, doesn’t need milk tonight, see what’s on television. Better to stay put.