3
Episode Three. Wednesday.
Two Days Before the Wedding.
Oh! The Bible with a bullet in it!” Aunt Carrie lays a hand upon her breast. “Otis, Hugh! Come, you’ve got to see this!”
They’re in the Rundle Junction Natural Historical Museum, no more than a couple of rooms in the basement of the public library. Aunt Carrie positions her boys in front of her where they can see inside the glass case containing artifacts of local history, including this pocket-size Civil War–era Bible butterflied open, the better to display the bullet embedded in its pages.
“I always loved this. Has Pim seen it? He must have.”
“I don’t know,” says Bennie doubtfully. “I’m not sure I ever have.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you have. Didn’t we all have to take a field trip here in fourth grade? And how could you not have brought Pim, with his love of all things military? Pim-Pim, come!”
Carrie and the twins flew in from Cleveland this morning, Walter driving through rush hour to ferry them up from LaGuardia. Carrie had been typically thoughtless about picking a flight that got in at the worst possible time, but it allowed Walter to come across as a hero, not to say martyr, and at the same time to escape the franticness at home, which is to say Bennie’s franticness, since everyone else has been drifting around pretty tranquilly—this fact itself no small contributor to Bennie’s franticness. Carrie’s husband, Graham, is missing the wedding, purportedly because he can’t get away from work. He’s a probate attorney. Bennie, who can never remember what that means (frankly it just makes her think of prostate), considers Graham’s absence no great tragedy, and yet the thought niggles: If Clem were marrying a man, would he have rearranged his schedule? Carrie herself speaks of the wedding in a tone that suggests she doesn’t consider it quite legit. Remember on Friday Clem is getting “married” to her “friend,” Bennie overheard her brightly telling the boys, the aural quotation marks unmistakable.
Of course Carrie’s always ever so slightly overacting, always playing to the peanut gallery with her blandly pretty features. She’s not so much a ham as a perennial overcompensator. Compensating for what, exactly? Graham’s permanent veneer of disdain, no doubt: making it up to the boys, going the extra mile to ensure they’re exposed to the recommended minimum daily allowance of enthusiasm. But it predates Graham, this inflated merriment; it was a role she played, a task she shouldered, in childhood, too. Tall, strapping Carrie with her taffy ponytail, her blue-gumdrop eyes, her bubble-gum lips that always form each word as if for a hard-of-hearing person. She’s been here a whopping three hours and already Bennie could use a break.
Lunch had been a flurry of cheese sandwiches, after which Bennie and Carrie had piled all the younger children—Pim, Otis, Hugh, Mantha, and Ellerby—into the car in order to go “tire them out” (Bennie’s phrase) at the playground on the shore of Ida Pond, where the sisters lounged on a bench for what felt like the merest of moments before they were beset by the children, who came back one by one to heap up beside them, offering their scrapes to be evaluated and clucked over, their thirst to be assuaged (Bennie’d brought a string bag full of juice boxes), their shoes to be dumped free of wood chips. Someone said something about the ice cream truck and they all began whining for treats, even though the mothers maintained they lacked the ability to make the ice cream truck magically appear. “All other rumors of our greatness are accurate,” Bennie hastened to assure them. It was Carrie who suggested, when the kids refused to be cajoled to go back out and play some more on the hot climbing structures, that they see if the museum was open.
The way from the playground to the library took them past the granite monument, and Ellerby paused to read the oxidized copper plaque:
IN MEMORY OF THE 18 CHILDREN
WHO PERISHED BY FIRE
ON THE SHORE OF IDA POND
JUNE 24, 1927
“Oh, that’s a famous story,” began Mantha proprietarily, but Ellerby, who hitherto had uttered so little that various of her cousins had wondered if she had some kind of speech impairment, did not let her cousin elaborate, but read aloud, in the unhurried manner of her father, the names and ages listed below. The boys, trailing grass-stained and sweaty behind them, caught up now with the girls and, without quite knowing why, organized themselves into a formation of solemn attention.
Otis, ridiculously cherubic with his sunlit curls and cheeks like pink hams, stood with his feet apart and clasped his hands behind his back. Hugh, younger than his brother by seven minutes, sallow and slender everywhere Otis was fair and stout, used his middle finger to push his glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose before following suit. Pim, the littlest, stood erect, chest thrust forward, chin held high. As a kind of afterthought, his right hand floated up and covered his heart.
“Maxwell Abbott, seven years old,” Ellerby intoned. “Cecily Cartwright, eleven years old. Clara Cartwright, nine years old . . .”
“Okay, okay, we get the picture.”
“. . . Winifred Dempsey, eight years old. Benjamin Erlend, two years old.”
“So young.” The mothers had strolled up behind them; it was Carrie, of course, who made the sentimental observation.
But, “Erlend!” exclaimed Mantha. “Nobody ever told me we were related to one of the kids who died in the fire!”
The mothers looked at each other.
“It’s a coincidence . . .”
“How’s it spelled?”
They inched forward, leaning over Ellerby’s head to decipher for themselves the letters, partly obscured by lichen and rust.
Ellerby stopped reading and turned to inspect her aunts’ faces. All the kids turned to look at them.
“Huh,” said Carrie. “Huh, huh, huh.”
“Weird neither of us ever noticed it,” murmured Bennie.
“I don’t remember ever reading the names. I mean, we all just knew what the memorial was; I don’t remember anybody actually reading it.”
The sisters mirrored each other’s frowning visages.
“We would know . . . ” Carrie reasoned, sounding patently unconvinced.
That was enough to propel Bennie into certainty. She told the children, “There must have been another Erlend family.”
It was Ellerby who commented: “It’s the same name.”
“Hel-lo-o!” Mantha made three syllables of it. “I said that already five minutes ago.”
But, “The same as you,” said Ellerby, extending the tip of her pointer finger toward Bennie.
Bennie regarded her niece. Their faces, while betraying nothing of their shared blood—the child’s face being smooth and brown, the woman’s harried and blotched with heat—were identical in their expressionlessness. If they shared a genetic trait it was the cool way each masked her thoughts.
Carrie, whom that gene had skipped, exclaimed, “She’s right! That’s crazy . . . Benjamin, Benita—it can’t be a coincidence. Oh my gosh, you guys—we have to ask Aunt Glad!”
Her sons were less swept off their feet by the prospect of sharing a familial tie with one of the ancient dead. “I’m thirsty,” said Otis. But the juice boxes were gone. “I’m thweaty,” said Hugh, and pulled on his mother’s arm: “What are we doing now?”
Bennie sympathized with the itch to change the subject, not because she found it dull, but because it was so freighted with strange implication, and with questions she’d prefer to sift through in private. Was there a family tragedy, long since hidden away? Was she the namesake of an unfortunate ancestor? And why had no one thought to fill her in, if so?
Ellerby lifted her imaginary camera, which evidently went everywhere with her on an invisible strap around her neck, and snapped a photo of Bennie looking pensive next to the plaque.
“Come on then,” said Bennie brusquely. “Let’s go see if the museum’s open.”
So they all trooped over and found that it was.
“How lucky!” chirped Carrie.
Now, inside, they are at least out of the sun. In fact it is blissfully cool in here. The rooms have that soporific smell produced by old wood and varnish, and the fragrance draws both Bennie and Carrie back through the decades—isn’t it the very quintessence of their childhood? An olfactory bridge to selves that no longer exist—and has a complicated effect on the children as well, at once muting their vigor (a contagion of yawning passes among them) and producing a sluggish form of restlessness. A scuffle breaks out between Otis and Hugh as they jockey for position in front of the display case, and Hugh gets pushed into Mantha, who whacks him with her cast. “Ow!” he cries, and Bennie in a voice like distant thunder says, “Mantha, so help me, if you keep this up . . .” and lets the rest of that thought dangle ominously.
“Pim,” declares Carrie, scooping him into her arms (her go-to parenting technique: deflection, redirection), “see that little book with the pellet in it?” By some magic she is able to both lower her voice conspiratorially and project it for the benefit of the other kids, who, scenting something of interest about to begin, abandon their squabbles and draw near. “Well that little book saved a soldier’s life.”
How? she can feel them wondering, how could a little book save anyone’s life?
Fed by their raptness, she imbues her voice with color as she fills in the details, makes her voice climb and dip, tack and clip in a way she has known to intoxicate small children and dogs. She is better at this than Bennie. Bennie may have twice the number of children, Bennie may be more unflappable, run a tighter ship, but Carrie is the enchantress: pliant, enticing, transmitting her own pleasure for the children’s sake. She boosts Pim a little higher on her hip. “It’s a Bible, a tiny, little Bible”—on tiny and little her voice shimmers—“that he always kept right in the pocket of his shirt. And when he got shot on the battlefield”—she bends to read—“‘wounded at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee on November 30, 1864,’ the book actually stopped the bullet, just before it would have entered his heart! See?”—her voice throaty now with sudden emotion—“There it is, you can see it . . . stuck in the pages . . . nothing but that little bundle of paper to shield his heart . . .”
On the other side of the room, perusing fossils, Bennie stifles a yawn. Mucrospirifer brachiopod. The index card gone ochre with age. Early Paleozoic Era. How dull, the items under glass. Elevated by having been placed under glass, but how dull they are, little lumps of pocked gray shale and sandstone. Streptelasmatidae, reads another card, Middle Ordovician–Middle Devonian. Conularia formosa. All the Latin makes her eyelids droop. The cards, typewritten, look fossil-like themselves, browned and brittle, stuck with T pins to black felt. In the neighboring case, artifacts of the Wappinger people, thousands of years old—stone scrapers, bone needles, flint points. Quill and antler tools. Pendants and pipes. Pre-contact, they are labeled, and Bennie thinks, Contact with what? then realizes Oh! With us! Before we came along with our smallpox and guns and changed everything. How different is it, she muses, from what is happening now on this same piece of land, a new group of people moving in, the existing residents up in arms?
And if she and Walter have decided not to fight the change but to accommodate it—even hasten it—is that really weakness? Or is it realism? Knowing one’s place in the world. Knowing the impermanence of one’s place.
Mantha, materializing at her side, rubs her face against Bennie’s shirt.
“Are you wiping your nose on me?”
“No!” She backs off, affronted. But she is in a clingy mood and almost instantly leans in again.
Bennie pulls away. “It’s too hot.”
Ellerby glides over and, with a movement of her index finger and an accompanying click of her tongue, documents the Wappinger tools.
Mantha glares. “Anyone can do that,” she whispers.
Otis’s voice, petulant, from across the room: “Where are the dinosaurs?”
Don’t whine, Bennie would say, but he is not her child.
Carrie soothes, “Fossils, darling—not dinosaurs. Fossils of sea creatures.”
After the fossils come cases of local fauna: taxidermied mammals and birds, a whole series of Odonata specimens impaled on acid-free paper. “Ith the pinth what killed them?” wonders Hugh, and Pim envisions a dragonfly taken down midflight by a pin shot from a tiny bow.
They drift limply through the exhibits, the children’s disappointment palpable. Once again the grown-ups have promised delights that turned out to be paltry in real life. And whatever happened to the ice cream? Didn’t someone say there was going to be an ice cream truck?
“Oh my gosh, kids—it’s Aunt Glad!” sings Carrie from the back room. They flock in her direction. Aunt Glad’s not as good as the ice cream truck, but still it’s a novelty to think of finding her at the museum when they all remember having left her back at the house. How did she get here? And why?
But except for Carrie the tiny back room is unpopulated. Also dank and poorly lit. The entire room is devoted to the events of 1927—the pageant and the tragedy that ended it. The children thread past cases of artifacts that make real, that complicate and lend dimension to, the names of the children Ellerby so recently read off the copper plaque on the granite stone in the center of the Village Green. Among them: an ornately inked booklet (labeled Pageant Program), a cardboard cone (Pageant Ear), a trio of trinkets—paper fan, toy horn, handkerchief-size American flag—(Pageant Souvenirs), a piece of charred wood (Remnant of Grandstand).
The walls are covered with old-fashioned photographs; it’s before one of these that Carrie stands. “Look, kids—recognize anyone?”
“We have that picture!” Mantha is quick to claim. “In the powder room. Only ours is smaller.”
This one has been blown up to nearly life-size.
Carrie points to the winged child sitting in a wagon. “Who’s this girl?” she asks in an intoxicating hush.
“Who ith it?!” Hugh whispers back. He has some of his mother’s theatricality. His eyes are enormous behind his eyeglasses.
Everyone else already knows. They feel bad for him, almost—why, she’s their very flesh and blood! Aunt Glad, they tell him, shaking their heads and giggling behind their hands.
The children pay hardly any attention to the adjacent photograph, a wide-angle shot of the grandstands taken on the morning of the final day of the pageant: little more than a grainy sea of blown-up humanity, faces and bodies all but indistinct, a common blur of black and white. That Lester Vilno—who paid for a ticket like anyone else; who brought from home a frugal lunch of fresh radishes, celery, and two boiled eggs, all wrapped in a checkered cloth; who furthermore brought with him several sheets of paper and a pencil, at the ready in his pocket, that he might sketch any ideas that might come to him as he watched the proceedings, inspirations for new marionettes; and who would later be, if never officially blamed for what happened on the final day, scapegoated as a walking emblem of foreignness, as a vessel of suspicion—that he is among the people captured in this photo was lost on everyone at the time. It would not be verifiable even now, regardless of today’s advanced technology, since no other record of his visage exists. As it happens, the only remaining record of Lester Vilno’s existence is contained within the memory of one Glad Erlend. And that is fading fast.
SOMEONE HAS PAINTED SWASTIKAS on the new development.
“What do you mean ‘on’ the new development?” asks Bennie.
“On it, Ben—on the walls.”
“I thought it was still just being built.”
“That doesn’t alter the fact,” Walter, rarely snappish, snaps.
“No, I just . . . so it has walls already?” She tries to visualize it. Were the marks spray painted on girders? On Tyvek wrap?
“They painted two swastikas on the foundation walls, one on the contractor’s trailer.” His T-shirt shows dark moons at the armpits and collar, dark beehives on the chest and back; he has been mowing the front lawn with the old push mower, whose blades have not been sharpened in years. If they had a power mower he likely wouldn’t have felt the vibration in his pocket until he’d finished the job. As it was he’d paused to read the text, from, of all people, Jeff Greenberg, and was so distressed he left the job unfinished, the lawn mohawked: a single band of high grass splits it now down the middle. Bennie, coming into the kitchen to start dinner, had found him pacing, a bottle of seltzer in hand, trying to decide whether to call Marty.
“Who’s Marty?”
Martin Stein; old college friend; you remember him, Ben, we were at his wedding; works for the Anti-Defamation League. Walter speaks in bullet points while swiping through contacts on his phone. “Maybe I should get more details first.”
“What do you think it means?” asks Bennie.
He looks at her, incredulous.
“No, I mean—in this context. Who do you think is responsible?”
“Gee, Ben, let me think. How about anti-Semites? Whether it’s coming from the Citizens to Preserve Blahblahblah People or not, it’s obviously a hate crime—what?”
For it’s obvious she’s thinking something, the way she’s standing there with narrowed eyes, one arm propped against the door frame, chewing her bottom lip.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Just, it’s a little convenient, no?”
“What are you talking about?”
“To happen at just this moment. When the village finally seems to be mounting some solid opposition, with the whole wetlands thing. Seems like a campaign that might really have an—”
But here a great eddy of children gushes in under her arm, as if the kitchen were a tidal pool and she and Walter, on dry land a second ago, were now inundated with a swirling wave of voices and bodies and paraphernalia: paper, pencils, a shoe box full of glue sticks. They take over the breakfast nook; it’s all the little ones minus Pim (who can be spied at this moment through the many-paned bay window of the breakfast nook, striding about the lawn with a sailor hat and a bandanna knotted loosely around his neck).
“Wait, you guys—what’s going on?” Bennie demands. “This isn’t the art and crafts room.”
“They’re playing post office!” declares Carrie, bringing up the rear with an armload of supplementary materials: stapler, tape dispenser, can of markers, pack of construction paper.
“What are you, their minion?”
“It’s just like we used to play!” she rhapsodizes. “Remember, Lloydie?”
For Lloyd has just appeared, too: he hovers on the threshold, looking almost comically mortified to find himself in the presence of so many people. Poor hapless Lloyd. His hair going every which way, his stubble glinting coarse and whitish (When did he get so old? both sisters think), a red welt on his cheek that would be mystifying if they didn’t know him to be an insomniac who always disappears for long stretches in the middle of the day only to show up bearings the marks of napping.
“What are you looking for, Lloyd?” Bennie asks. “Coffee?”
“Remember?” Carrie continues. “Lloydie would always insist on being postmaster!”
“Lloydie, Lloydie,” chorus the twins.
He gives a shy, pained grin—a grimace, really.
“Lloydie!” All the children take it up.
“Stop that,” she tells them. To him again: “What do you want? Coffee, juice?”
“Uh, just water, thanks.” He accepts the glass she hands him with a sleepy, grateful look. Takes a swig. Apologetically, “Didn’t sleep much last night.”
“You always don’t sleep much,” says Ellerby.
He aims his index finger at her: Right you are.
“So here’s how it works,” proclaims Mantha. “Everyone gets a mailbox—”
“I know this!” says Otis. “We did it in school. For Valentine’s.”
“This is different,” she informs him. “We have real mailboxes.” And points with her scissors (eliciting a swift maternal Don’t point with scissors) toward the wall.
One entire wall of the kitchen, formerly the inner sanctum of the post office, is studded with cubbyholes that correspond to the wall of little brass doors in the living room. Whereas in the latter they constitute a kind of idiosyncratic decorative element, in the former they are strictly utilitarian, housing such items as spices, birthday candles, tea, pot holders, dish towels, matches, a vegetable peeler, a lemon zester, a strawberry huller, a garlic press; also there are bandages, Mercurochrome, aspirin, rubber bands, paper clips, hair grips, playing cards, cootie catchers, and business cards for all varieties of home repair.
“That’s where you put the letters for the customers to take out on the other side,” Mantha explains. “The doors are locked but I know how to pick ’em.”
The cousins beg her to show them how, and Mantha, pretending reluctance, heaves herself up from the breakfast nook and leads the way into the other room.
The grown-ups acclimate themselves to the relative stillness of their wake.
Then Walter picks up the thread of the interrupted conversation. “You were saying?” he prompts Bennie, sliding into the vacated breakfast nook. “About the swastikas, and the convenience?”
“Right.” She sits opposite him. “What I was thinking is, who stands to gain? From the vandalism. Not the Citizens to Preserve Blahblahblah People. Even the perception of anti-Semitism would hurt, not strengthen, their cause. Right? And on the other hand, doesn’t a hate crime automatically generate, if not outright support, then at least sympathy?”
Walter, who sees where this is headed, pretends not to. “Go on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Finish the thought.”
“I did.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I did, Walt. That’s the extent of my thought, at the moment.” She purses her lips. Of course that’s not the extent of her thought. But she won’t be bullied into saying the thing he’ll find most objectionable. “Is there something you would like to add?”
They stare each other down, the air fairly crackling with the obviousness of what neither is willing to voice: Could the Haredim themselves be behind the offensive graffiti? As a way to upstage and derail environmental objections?
“What?” Carrie’s gaze is ping-ponging between them. “What are you guys talking about?”
But neither Walter nor Bennie gives any sign of having heard her. Both are thinking of what only they know, the thing that even in this moment of friction unites them: the fact that after the wedding they’re putting the house on the market. The fact that the timing of their decision (over which they have labored long and hard: after all, why not wait until Tom, who has only two years of high school left, graduates? why not wait until Glad, who cannot be much longer for this earth, passes on?) has everything to do with their own strategic interest and not the good of the community. The reason they are electing to abandon Rundle Junction now, rather than sticking around either to rally behind the wetlands or pave the way for friendly relations with the newcomers, is strictly financial: they’re hoping to get out while the housing market’s good, before demographics shift and property values drop.
What they alone understand: any opinion either of them has about the unfolding drama involving swastikas and lawn signs is inevitably tainted by self-interest, the desire to get a good price. And they sit there now, regarding each other across the old scratched table in the breakfast nook, united by guilt. And even though Walter is defensively, tribalistically angry at Bennie’s unspoken insinuation and Bennie is angry at Walter’s resistance to even considering the common sense of what she has so far tactfully refrained from explicitly suggesting, they are bound by their shared sense of guilt; it lends the air between them a frisson of intimacy, which Carrie senses, so that when she asks again, “What? What’s going on?” there’s a note of jealousy in her voice, a hint of the old kid sister don’t-leave-me-out petulance.
Bennie sighs. “Someone put swastikas on the new housing development.”
Says Lloyd, “When?”
His sisters’ heads swivel toward him in tandem: Can this really be Lloyd? Expressing interest in a local matter?
“Last night,” Walter replies.
“What time?”
“I don’t know, what do you care?”
“I don’t.”
Not for an instant do his sisters believe him.
But he is saved from further scrutiny by the entrance of Aunt Glad, who pushes the screen door open and comes in with her glass, nothing but melted ice and a wilted sprig of mint left in it. The sight of her reminds Carrie to ask about the name on the plaque.
“Hey, we have a question for—” she begins, only to stop herself when she sees her sister shooting her a look.
Not now, Bennie mouths.
It’s true: Aunt Glad is looking rather frail, a bit pallid, actually, at the moment—never mind that she still moves as nimbly as ever, dainty as a damselfly even as she nears the century mark.
Walter has already risen and gently removed the glass from her hand. Cupping her elbow he conducts her past the litter of construction-paper scraps on the floor. Carrie and Bennie murmur solicitous inquiries: Can we fix you something to eat, Aunt Glad? Would you like to lie down? Lloyd just crinkles his eyes in his sweetest smile as he bows out of her path.
“Thank you, dears, no—I just thought if the young people are playing post office”—they exchange marveling glances: What outstanding hearing she still has!—“they ought to know how it’s done. I want to show them how Mother and Daddy did the mail, how they weighed it and franked it, I mean.” She pats Walter’s arm, releasing him from assisting her, and continues independently on her way, adding, “We had some of that in our day, too.”
“Some of what, Aunt Glad?” They exchange mystified glances.
“Feeling against the Jewish people,” she calls back; already she’s crossed into the next room. “It’s nothing new.”
“Hey,” says Lloyd, “should the little guy be up there?”
They follow his gaze out the bay window. Pim is mounting the big aluminum ladder left out on the lawn by Clem and the Ch/Hannahs. They watch as he climbs. Up he goes in his white seaman’s cap. Hand over hand he ascends, somehow managing to carry, tucked under his armpit, a spyglass (the cardboard core of a paper towel roll) as well as a wooden sword. Higher and higher—surely he must be nearing the point labeled Do Not Stand Above This Step. Surely he must have passed it. A collective gasp in the kitchen as his mother, father, aunt, and uncle see the ladder wobble.
PIM, SAILING THE HIGH SEAS, knows how to ride the swells. Reaching the crow’s nest, he finds his balance and proceeds to look out for the foreign elephant. The man said to. This morning on the radio while his father was shaving and Pim was sitting on the hamper. Almost every morning they do this: Pim and his father get up early while the rest of the house is still asleep, and Walter shaves and Pim sits on the hamper and together they listen to the news. Walter concentrating on his reflection in the mirror while Pim concentrates on his face in the flesh as it reemerges, stripe by pink stripe, from beneath the white foam. Pim loves the news. The gravity of the voices, the sense that elsewhere in the world people are in charge, grown-up men and women tending to things, managing things, discussing things in a language he can’t fully follow, a gray wash of gobbledygook. Every now and then, a phrase emerges, glistening clear and pink, for him to seize. That happened this morning when the man had said, How concerned are you about the foreign elephant? And the other man had said, Well obviously without taking our eyes off the threat of domestic terrorism, I think we need to pay close attention to the foreign elephant. Ever since, Pim has been on the lookout. Paying close attention. He expects it to look something like the elephant on the Parcheesi box, garbed in tasseled robes of pink and blue.
Reaching the crow’s nest, he raises his spyglass and scans the roiling ocean. Nothing but waves as far as the eye can see. But wait—what’s this? Glinting off to starboard, can it be? Something large and gray? Something tasseled and tusked? “Ahoy!” he cries. He feels the tossing of the waves. From behind him come startling shouts: “Pim!” he hears, and swivels. The sea swells. The ship lists. “Pim!” the beast trumpets.
And he falls . . .
immensity of earth
immensity of sky
. . . lands on his back, cupped between the two.
I’m okay, he means to say but cannot, he’s caged, his lungs are caged, trapped behind iron bars, he cannot move, he’s squashed flat. Then all at once air swooshes in, the cage melts, and a sob flutters free.
He scrambles to his feet. His sailor hat’s come off; his neckerchief’s askew. There on the ground: the spyglass, crushed.
A shadow stretches over him. It’s his father, wearing the complicated look of a large man who’s been running hard and now, having brought himself up short, labors to appear calm. “You okay, bud?”
Pim nods scornfully, only to burst into tears.
The gathering up. He does nothing. Needs not ask or reach or even see; he is simply lofted and held in his father’s arms, his father’s massive and massively strong arms, stronger than any ship, stronger than any ocean, and he is burying his face in his father’s neck, being tickled by the coarse hairs that sprout everywhere on his father’s body, which Pim both loves and reviles. Every night when he wakes and pads down the hall to burrow in with his parents, he takes his place in a landscape at once familiar and peculiar. Perfumed with skin and hair and breath and secretions not his own, a landscape formed of elbows and bottoms, stomachs and shins, warmly shifting bulks punctuated by the audible breaths his father emits, the damp plosive sound of each exhale as it blows open the valve of his lips, and the softer purrs his mother makes at intervals deep in her throat. The parental bed, his homeland, the cradle of his civilization, grows day by day more strange to him as he becomes more adept at noting its particularities and his own.
But now as he is carried across the just-mown lawn Pim relinquishes all such noting and sorting. His separate selfhood is of no interest to him at this moment; he savors instead his passivity even as he savors the taste of his father’s neck, salty and slippery with his own tears. It is not a smooth ride—he is not cushioned from jolts as he would be if his mother were carrying him (she has a way of fitting him into the curve of her hip, and a more graceful gait besides, although of late he has not been able to get comfortable in her arms)—but his father’s tread is full of power, of solidity. Sturdiness. His mother calls him Stalwart. She says it means steady and firm, lasting. His father sings in a sturdy voice while he bakes bread. He sings, by his own assessment, fortissimo!—and the way he says it, pinching his fingers together with his thumbs and shaking them in the air, always makes Pim laugh. He sings We shall not, we shall not be moved and also Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham and his voice fills the house and Pim doesn’t know who Abraham is but he understands bosom must be an old-fashioned word for arms, and he knows his father’s arms, his father’s bosom, is wider and stronger than anyone else’s in the world.
“NOW WHAT?” says Bennie in dismay. She’s looking through the breakfast nook window, tracking Walter and Pim’s progress as they make their way toward the house—Walter giving a thumbs-up so they know Pim is fine—but her attention’s diverted by the car chugging up the drive behind them.
Rattletrap station wagon plastered with stickers, a mound of bundles bungeed to the roof. Stopping near the house, it discharges its load of three—no, four people, none of them recognizable except in the generic sense. In the generic sense they are members of the Clem and Ch/Hannah coterie. A bare-chested boy with hair as pale and curlicued as ramen noodles. A person of indeterminate gender with a buzz cut and overalls. Another with cornrows to her waist. And a bearded fellow wearing—what is that?—a baby carrier on his chest. Complete with baby. Not four people, then: five.
“It’s like a clown car,” says Carrie as a sixth body emerges, this one shaggy and four-legged.
“Oh Clementine,” sighs Bennie.
They converge in the yard, Bennie and her siblings, Walter and Pim, the newcomers, and, a bit tardily but making up for it by the frolicking way they dash across the lawn from the direction of their orange tent (wherein, to judge by a whiff, marijuana has recently been partaken of), the trio of bride and bridesmaids. Squeals of joy from the young people; a flurry of introductions—the names bandied about seem to be Dave-Dave, Val, Maya, Banjo, Richard, and Harriett, but by the time all the hugs and handshakes have been exchanged, it’s anyone’s guess which name is attached to which body. The obvious is confirmed: these are college friends, here for the wedding.
“They do know that’s two days away, right?” Bennie mutters at Clem.
“Mom! They’re here to help set up.”
“And who is this?” asks Bennie, bending toward the little one whose anemone hand now closes around her proffered finger.
“Harriett,” somebody says.
Harriett regards her with that brazen baby clarity, so tranquil as to border on impudence. Her eyes like wet stones.
It’s all perfectly ordinary—the palmar grasp reflex, the unwavering infant stare—yet Bennie, like most highly defended people, is total mush beneath the carapace. Babies are her underbelly. Perhaps now, with the voltaic secret of new life forming inside her, she is especially susceptible. For a prolonged moment she feels a quickening, a glimmer of some profundity she’d once known, now beyond her recall.
The baby, still holding fast to Bennie’s index finger, opens her mouth, or rather lets her mouth fall open slightly. A bubble of saliva blossoms between her lips.
Pim lunges from his perch in Walter’s arms toward his mother—his mother!—and makes a whimpering sound. “Don’t whine,” murmurs Bennie, even as she pries her finger free from Harriett’s grasp and, without looking, receives her boy, fits him neat as a jigsaw piece upon her hip.
Now the ramen noodle fellow extracts a French horn from the backseat and blows into it, producing the first four notes of the “Wedding March.” Here comes the bride. The person in overalls gives him a poke and the last note ends in a squawk. “What?” protests the musician. “It’s festive!”
Chana hoists herself onto him piggyback. “It is festive!” she concurs. “Give me a ride, Dave-Dave!” and he obliges, setting the instrument on the ground and galloping her across the lawn where they collapse at the foot of the black walnut tree. The dog, with a loose-hipped, shambling gait, goes over to sniff them for damage.
Over everyone’s heads, Walter is beaming a look at Bennie. What gives? it’s asking. Are they planning to stay here? She telegraphs back, I know. She telegraphs, You’re telling me. And for a moment they are in it together, mutually put-upon, and she envisions them joining forces to announce, with benevolent regret, that their house is stuffed to the gills and can’t possibly accommodate more guests.
But in the next moment—oh, she could throttle him, or throttle herself for being so dumb because after all he is Stalwart, ever the emcee, she should have seen it coming—he is inviting everyone inside, inquiring about the length of their drive and whether they’re thirsty, whether they need anything to eat.
So it falls to Bennie to say to Clem, “Could you hold back a minute?”
She sets Pim down and waits until he’s caught up with the others before turning to her eldest in order to enumerate her rapidly growing list of concerns. Where to begin? Perhaps she won’t have to, perhaps Clem is about to tender an apology, a sheepish or even tearful admission that they are in over their heads, a plea for help with the wedding, or a confession—is this what Bennie hopes?—that it’s not really a wedding, but only a game, a frolic, a farce. An elaborate piece of performance art.
What Clem tenders instead is the Last Straw. With a bland smile she inquires, “What’s up?”
“‘What’s up?’” Bennie echoes. The world tilts. The very horizon comes loose at its seams.
Here they are: late afternoon, late June, two days before the wedding. Here they stand on the lawn fragrant with fresh mowings, enveloped by a breeze as lilting as a song. Bennie imagines the scene as it should be. As one of the pageant photos, a tableau titled “Mother and Daughter on the Eve of the Daughter’s Nuptials, an Idyll of Great Poignancy Attended by Love, Fear, and Hope” (these represented by three children in gauzy frocks posed accordingly about the two main characters). She sees it unfold in mawkish pantomime: Mother and Daughter both, with stylized, synchronized gestures, brushing tears from their eyes, swanning into fond embrace.
“What do you think is up?”
Clem blinks. The blink is an act, a faux innocence, an aggressive innocence. Just beneath is a steely shell; Bennie feels it and is enraged and wounded by it and cannot fathom its provenance. Resentment is steaming off her daughter like vapor off dry ice, but what on earth does Clem have to feel resentful about?
“First of all,” Bennie says, hating how high and breathy her voice sounds but being powerless to amend it, “who are these people just showing up at our house? And when were you going to inform us about them? Or excuse me—stupid question: clearly you weren’t. Clearly you didn’t feel the need to tell us. Let alone ask. How could it not occur to you to ask if it would be okay to have more people over before they just show up? Before they just waltz into the kitchen where, incidentally, I guess I’m now about to start preparing supper for”—she does a quick calculation— “nineteen.” On and on she hears herself go, cringing at the merry-go-round inevitability of her tirade even as she is helpless to rein it in. “. . . and don’t think it’s not obvious you’ve been getting high in the tent, after I told you I don’t want anyone doing drugs on our property, especially so close to McElroy’s, but even more now with all these kids around—”
“I haven’t been, Mom, honestly. Hannah smoked a bowl but that’s it, it’s gone now, that’s all she brought with her. I wouldn’t even know who to buy it from up here.”
“That isn’t the point, it’s your selfishness, Clem, your obtuseness, your utter disregard—I mean it’s mind-boggling! Yet again a decision you make, apparently without a qualm, to go expressly against what Dad and I said. And where are they even planning to stay, your friends? In Rundle Junction? Has anyone bothered to check whether the Garrison still has vacancies? Because I very much doubt—”
But this Clem interrupts with an airy wave, gesturing toward the station wagon with its pyramid of bundles strapped to the roof. “Relax,” she says. “There’s plenty of room to pitch their tents next to ours. They’ll be self-sufficient.”
“Clem!” It hits her like a two-by-four, less the news than Clem’s blasé delivery. “Do you have any concept of what self-sufficient means? You told them they could camp here? Tents, plural?”
“What do you care if it’s one tent or two?”
“That’s not the—they’re going to be using our bathrooms, our towels, our kitchen, wanting showers, wanting, wanting—I don’t know—coffee.” Pronouncing coffee as if a kidney. “Just for starters. For heaven’s sake, there’s a baby! What about”—she is spluttering now—“what about diapers? What about spit-up? Do you have, I mean remotely, any idea how much laundry a baby makes?”
“Mom.” Clem winces. “No offense. You should hear how bourgeois you sound.”
Bourgeois! she wants to say. I fell in love with your father when he was living in a tent fighting apartheid. He hadn’t showered in days. Our first apartment didn’t even have a table, we ate our meals on a door taken off its hinges and laid on milk crates. Bennie’s queasy with the injustice. The basic misapprehension of who she really is.
But, “Really,” her daughter is saying, sounding not just unruffled but—and this is the real Last Straw, the real insult to injury—compassionate. Yes: gently now, Clem breaks the news: “If you could hear yourself you’d be embarrassed.”
Bennie breaks. Just breaks. Tears crowd in tight behind her eyes until she submits to them, gives up trying to master herself. She brings her hands to her face and weeps. Bent, racked, before her placid eldest, her pretty, lissome, straight-backed, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth eldest, she lets her mouth crumple and her eyes and nose flow.
There, there, she used to say when Clem was little and the disaster was a skinned knee, a popped balloon, a dropped ice cream cone. There, there, meaningless syllables but with a softness to them, and Bennie would cradle her girl in her lap and pat her curved little back and murmur there, there, more a cadence than anything, low in her throat like a mourning dove cooing, and of course there, there, had really meant here, here, as in Here I am and Here you are and what could be amiss in such an equation? It had been enough. Had been plenty. The crying, the cooing, and the little curved back: always her cup had runneth, then, for what joy it is to have the ability to comfort your own.
Perhaps it’s for the loss of this ability that Bennie weeps now. She feels a hand placed, rather too lightly, on her shoulder. One cupped palm of lukewarm consolation. Two little pats. And now gulping, now using her shirt to wipe her face, she thinks, So this is how it happens. The rift. This is how your children separate themselves from you at last: with the cruelty of indifference.
“ANY FOURS?”
“G’fish.”
“Any jacks?”
“G’fish.”
“How ’bout sevens?”
It’s a kind of music, the slip-slap of cards being laid on the rug, gathered up, fitted into fans in children’s hands.
Glad sits on the gold settee, her small bony feet up on the footstool Tom so thoughtfully brought her. Tom that gallant boy. They are gathered in the living room, the whole ever-expanding lot of them; she has all but given up keeping track of which ones are her blood and which ones strangers. Bennie (she of course is blood, not only blood but the very heart that pumps it, the very keeper of the hearth) sits at the other end of the settee, her face clouded, though when Glad inquires if anything’s the matter she replies she’s just a touch tired. Walter in the Morris chair, bottle of beer on his knee, also looks tired. Carrie and Lloyd and Tom have claimed the sofa, and Clem and her clan are either on folding chairs brought in from the barn or sprawled on the rug, all except the bearded fellow, rocking the baby in the rocking chair. The tall boy is strumming a miniature guitar. It has its own name, she used to know it. A lute, maybe? No. A yule? Not that either. There’s a dog, too, queer-looking creature—like one of those flip-book chimeras, part bear, part sheep, part camel, or like a piece of licorice allsorts (they sell these from a big glass jar next to the cash register, five cents for a little paper bagful).
“We used to gather in just this way.” Glad addresses the room in her clear, oratorical kindergarten teacher’s voice. “Back when it was the post office. And Erlend’s Store.”
From the way they turn to her, nodding and smiling, she has the impression she must have said this before, perhaps just minutes ago, and she blushes, less from embarrassment than chagrin. To be caught out, discovered in a memory lapse, is no great shame in itself. It’s the loss of currency she minds, the understanding that each time such a lapse registers on the others, she is placed in their minds a little farther apart, sent floating down the current of irrelevance, set adrift . . .
The little ones don’t notice her gaffe, so deeply immersed in their game of cards on the carpet. Really it’s a pretty sight, the circle of them sitting crisscross-applesauce there under the stained-glass lamp. (In her day you said “Indian-style,” but that’s frowned upon now.) Though I don’t know why, she says aloud. Daddy played an Indian in the pageant, she reasons, and the big boy sitting nearest her offers a smile without (she can see) understanding what she’s talking about. (At least it might be a boy; to be honest she isn’t sure. The hair’s worn short as a new recruit’s but under the bib of the overalls—is that a bosom?) A Wappinger Indian, she goes on. Mother sewed his costume herself—she put a row of fringe on each leg of his trousers. And made him a tunic out of a burlap sack embroidered with beads from the store—we used to sell them here, you know, beads and buttons and you should’ve seen her working at the table late into the night, bent over with her poor eyesight and the floor lamp drawn up close. She hears herself . . . surely she’s speaking aloud . . . but no one is paying any attention. Then she realizes—it’s a peculiar feeling, not nice at all: she hasn’t been moving her lips.
Still, it’s true. Mother stitched his costume, working by the very same lamp that is right now shining on the hair of the boys and the girls (the boys’ hair longer than it used to be when she was their teacher; the girls’ messier, untamed by ribbons and pigtails). Earlier this afternoon she’d given them a lesson on the postal system and how it used to work. She’d directed the wiry little girl—whose is that child, by the way? is she kin? the others call her cousin but she looks nothing like an Erlend, not with her hair black as serge and her skin brown as toast; she is what Mother would have described as “a foreigner,” or in a gentler mood, “from away”—to climb up on a chair in the office and feel around on the uppermost shelf of the storage closet, where, sure enough, the Pitney Bowes was parked, just as it has always been. The children had all seemed surprised when it turned out really to be there where Glad directed, especially the girl with the blue cast on her arm. She lives here year-round in the very room Glad and Joy used to share, with the walls papered in apples and pears, and her eyes had gone wide and she’d puffed out her cheeks, saying, Why didn’t I ever know this was here? as if she were in charge of everything in this house, and then she’d tried, as the dark little girl (she looks like an Indian, come to think of it) lowered it carefully, still standing on the chair, to take it from her, but Glad had said in her schoolteacher voice, Let one of the boys do it, dear, and then quickly, lest she be accused of favoring boys, It needs two good arms.
One of the boys, the one with the cheeks, set it on the desk and they’d all gathered around while Glad explained what franking was and how it worked, and everyone got a chance to run an envelope through the meter, which had no ink but still made its satisfying chunkety chunk, and when Carrie came in to see where the children had disappeared to she, too, had been amazed (I remember that old thing! Who knew it still existed . . . ) and demanded a turn putting an envelope through herself and the children all talked over one another, practically fighting to be the one to repeat what their great-grandaunt had told them, that the machine had been approved by the U.S. Post Office Department in 1920, the very year of Glad’s birth.
Without any detectable form of communication—perhaps they signaled to one another in the pheromonic manner of bees, thought Glad, drawing upon some hidden store of rudimentary entomological knowledge—they had transferred their mail-making materials into her room then, arranging themselves at the desk and on the floor, and one of Carrie’s little boys (the one with the glasses and the lisp) climbed right up on the foot of the neatly made cot and made that his work space, while Glad herself reclined at the head, her legs stretched out (Oh how good that felt) beside the child, her bare toes curling and flexing in the June breeze—flattered by the children’s having gravitated to her, flattered but not entirely surprised, for was she not a much-beloved teacher?—and nominally oversaw their operations. Said operations consisting mostly of cutting and folding and taping and pasting, a little bit of scribbling, too, although the lexical content of these missives was plainly ancillary to the crafting of letters as objects—objets, Glad’s memory supplied. Objets de vertu. She scanned the children bent over their paper constructions. The smallest great-grandnephew, the little warrior, squatted on the floor with his scissors and paper, breathing as if he were climbing a mountain, flushed with effort. The Indian-looking girl stood at the desk, creasing her paper into an envelope, on one foot only: the other was hooked around the back of her knee, like a crane. Again Glad tried to remember who she was, how she fit in with the others. Lloyd’s adopted daughter? The imperious child, the one who lives here, the one with the blue cast on her arm, was filling a sheet of lined paper with writing and singing softly under her breath. (Debout! Les damnés de la terre! Debout! Les forçats de la faim!) One of her father’s songs, no doubt; Walter was always belting something out.
Allowing her head to rest back against the pillow, Glad had closed her eyes for a moment. Sounds of snipping and scrawling, breathing and sighing, sniffing and swallowing—one of the twins had a cold or perhaps hay fever; she ought to tell him to use a tissue but was too peaceful to fuss, too peaceful even to open her eyes—sounds, too, of the breeze rustling the venetian blinds, the sound of the slats fluttering, tumbling, a new list of trains on the departure board, and now the sound of a fly buzzing, bumping fruitlessly against a pane; she imagined it trapped between the screen and the glass, she ought to open the screen and close the glass so as to help guide the poor thing out into freedom, but again found herself too peaceful to translate intention into action.
Excuse me, a little hand patting her, little finger pecking like a chick at its shell, about to be born: Excuse me, please, Aunt Glad, do you have an eraser?
Shh, she’s sleeping; can’t you see her eyes are closed?
But I’m awake, she wanted to tell them, I hear everything you say; only she was too far away to open her mouth, too far away to open her eyes; aware of yet detached from her body on the cot in the warmth of the June afternoon. She was far away but not alone. She felt herself accompanied. It was Joy beside her, Joy composing a letter in her new fancy style (It’s called cursive) that Glad couldn’t read. Who are you writing? she asked. I can’t tell you, said Joy. It’s private. So Glad took her own sheet of paper, her own pencil, began her own letter. Who are you writing? Joy asked; when Glad said hers was private, too, Joy peered over her shoulder. That’s not even writing.
Is so—it’s in code.
No it’s not. You’re just making scribblescrabbles.
Am not.
Are so.
Am not.
Are so.
The very fact of Joy’s continuing to bicker instead of withdrawing from the argument was a victory and should have contented Glad, but she was not disposed toward contentment. She couldn’t help it—Joy had a special talent for riling her—really, she was practically forced to jab her older sister with the pencil, whose point, breaking off in Joy’s wrist, would leave a blue-black remnant there, a crumb of graphite lodged deep in the derma. The blemish, which for the rest of Joy’s life people would take for a birthmark, was a source of queer satisfaction to Glad, herself so egregiously blemished compared with her pretty older sister. Joy never told on her, so only the sisters knew it for what it was, a battle scar, and although Glad supposed it ought to have made her feel guilty, it did not. She couldn’t help that either.
Glad opens her eyes (How long have they been shut?) to find herself not in the office on her cot but in the living room on the settee, and the children are playing not post office but go fish. The floor lamp at whose base they have arranged themselves is the one Mother so prizes—Won’t she be pleased to learn it still survives! It had been a mail-order purchase, one of the rare parcels delivered to their house not to be sorted and held for a customer, but to stay. The filigreed cast-iron base came in one box and the stained-glass shade arrived separately, a week later, packed inside a crate with loads of cotton batting that Mother unwound with tremulous care. It looks like an upside-down bowl of fruit. Crimson clumps of cherries, amethyst bunches of grapes. Glad and Joy invent a game called picnic that consists of their slowly circling the lamp and laying claim to its goodies one by one.
I think I’ll have that plum now.
Fine, I get the fig.
They point but do not touch. Touching is forbidden. Part of the game is how close they can hover their fingers near the brilliant glass shapes without making contact. They take turns choosing, miming the act of plucking and popping the fruits into their mouths. They show off their voraciousness by making bestial devouring sounds.
Once they squabble over the banana. One sister shoves the other out of the way, and the lamp is set rocking on its stem. Daddy, reading the Rundle Junction Gazette on the settee, shoots out an arm and steadies it without even looking, but Mother will not let them hear the end of it. Selfish, selfish children! Have you no sense of the value of beauty . . . ?
It was your fault, Joy says that night as they lie side by side under the eaves. You’re the one who bumped into the lamp.
It’s true. Gladdy is the irresponsible one. Gladdy is the one who breaks things, loses things, leaves things out in the rain or the snow or the woods. She is the one who trips, gets sick, talks back, won’t behave. She is the one who makes Mother cry. As if a command had been issued at birth: You shall be the little one, the reckless one, the sulk. You shall weep easily, lose your temper, accustom yourself to not getting your way.
You shall have the smaller part, wear the bent wings, take the blame, come to harm, be rescued, be ridiculed, be lonely, be free. You shall be regarded as quirky, regarded as brave, called “an original,” afforded a measure of respect, a place in the community, real affection. You shall be cared for, laughed at kindly, doted upon in your dotage. Little shall be asked of you, little expected. What ripples you make will be scant and modest. Except in duration. Except in time. For you will remain on earth many years, fourscore and counting; you will outlive all those who came before you and a great many of those who came after.
But why? Glad thinks, knowing this has always been the mystery, the core riddle of her life, perhaps of all lives, the question of usefulness: Whatever is this long life for?
And suddenly—oh! an answer suggests itself, at once obvious and strange: For pleasure’s sake. Could that really be the crux of it, the point? The receipt of pleasure. And of pain. In the end, is that all that ever was wanted of her? To receive? Surely anyway this much is apparent: more and more, every day, every hour, pleasure and pain unveil themselves to her, unveil their dark, luminous secret, which is that they are not only not separable, they are not even separate. The border dividing each from each is illusory. More and more she is attuned to them in their bounteous and various forms. More and more she perceives the myth of their contrariety, is able to recognize both the abundance of their diverse blooms and their one joined root.
“LOOK.” With his chin Tom indicates Aunt Glad, who is emitting the daintiest of snores. She projects the ageless sagacity of an infant in sleep. Thanks to a small, felicitous accident of symmetry, she is in fact mirrored by an actual sleeping infant: the baby Harriett in her father’s arms. She, too, transported elsewhere. Her eyelids, the palest lavender tissue, astir with dreams. The one a recent arrival, the other soon to depart. They might be dreaming of the same distant land. They might be passing each other in the station.
Now Harriett’s little features scrunch in her sleep. She looks for all the world as though she’s wrestling a very great challenge, a point of Solomonic jurisprudence . . . a way around the second law of thermodynamics . . . the solution to Fermat’s last theorem . . . an angel . . . She twists, reddens, emits a series of splurts from her nether regions, and relaxes, beatific once more.
“Impressive,” says Tom.
Her father accepts the acclaim with a modest smile.
Earlier, out on the porch where everyone wound up having supper (as it happened, the new guests insisted on providing for all—a couple of massive salads and a stack of pizzas picked up from Mangiello’s in town), Bennie had addressed him as Richard, as in, “Richard, can I bring you anything?” He’d been administering a slice of eggplant pizza to himself with one hand and a bottle to Harriett, nestled in her car seat, with the other. “Richard?” she repeated when he failed to respond. Instead the slovenly-shaggy dog, who’d been gazing adoringly at Pim’s slice of pizza, had turned and thumped his tail.
“Who are you talking to, Mom?” whispered Clem. “That’s Banjo.”
“What?” Bennie whispered back.
“Harriett’s dad? Is Banjo. Richard’s the dog.”
“Oh.” Because she was embarrassed, Bennie added more acerbically than she intended, “I should have known.”
“The pot calling the kettle black,” Clem pronounced coldly.
Which stung the more for being unfair—after all Pim was the traditional Dutch nickname for William! And Mantha had been a perfectly ordinary Sam until six months ago; Bennie could hardly help it if her most willful child suddenly insisted on going by the latter syllables of her given name. But this was hardly the time or place to mount such a defense. Mother and daughter, reduced to furious silence, simply glared.
And so much congealed in that moment: Bennie’s estimation of the newcomers; Clem’s estimation of Bennie; the bitterness between the two; the injury in which each felt wholly and solely justified.
(Bennie’s annoyance would only grow when, after supper, the newcomers pitched their tents, two of them, each sprouting from its peaked roof a pennant: one scarlet emblazoned with a golden apple, the other azure emblazoned with a silver swan. What about these flags—they were after all innocently jovial and evidently hand-stitched—did she find irksome? Was it the affectation? Or the territorial presumption? Her antipathy only ratcheted up when they proceeded to unload their car and carry into the barn—the barn! as if it weren’t liable to collapse any minute now—a unicycle, a pogo stick, something that looked like homemade crutches, and what appeared to be painted flats of the sort a traveling theater might use. “What are those?” she asked Clem, who only trained upon her a Giocondian smile and said, “You’ll see on Friday,” so that Bennie was left again to wonder whether this wedding was sincere or a kind of trompe l’oeil, a piece of performance art that would make all the guests feel like dupes.)
Banjo, then: everyone turns to look at Banjo, the long-lashed man who sits rocking the infant, the look on his bearded face as he gazes down at his daughter matching her own. The mother is apparently rehearsing a play at some pop-up performance space in the city and won’t get here until Friday. Which news Bennie registered with a click of gratifying disapproval: these selfish children playing at adulthood had no business bringing babies into the world and would plainly make a mess of it, to the detriment not only of their own offspring but of society as a whole.
And yet, she has to admit, there is no fault to be found in this moment, in this father-daughter portrait. It radiates only sweetness. Is fairly encrusted with sweetness, glinting with the crystalized syrup of parental love, and as such stands in painful relief against the mother-daughter portrait from just a few hours ago: Bennie and Clem on the lawn, the very emblem of connection gone awry.
Dave-Dave, who has been picking out “Summertime” on the uke, prompts, “Sing, Val,” and now the person with the buzz cut begins to hum—Clem has informed Bennie that Val is gender-fluid and should be referred to as “they”—producing a low satiny ribbon of sound. Clem is sitting in a half lotus on the floor behind Maya, who surrenders drowsily to the kneading of her vertebrae. The Ch/Hannahs have both flopped onto their backs, their limbs intermingled with a kind of carelessness, a kind of ease. They’re like a couple of alley cats who, at the end of the day, without quite saying it was all a charade, shed their adversarial stances and concede to groom each other.
INTO THIS TRANQUILLITY comes a vivid pulse.
“Cops,” observes Dave-Dave, so laid-back no one pays any attention.
Only when the lights strobe the room a second time, a carnival sweep of red and blue, and Dave-Dave stops strumming and repeats the word, do the others take notice. The Ch/Hannahs sit up. The little kids stop playing go fish. Richard the dog lifts his head from his paws. Sound of a car engine cutting out. The lights, close-up now, saturate the room in rhythmic rounds of hue. Walter sets down his beer and goes to the window, peers out for a moment, then strides into the kitchen. They hear the smack of the screen door, the rumble of voices on the porch. Then the door swings open and shut again, and there are footsteps, and Walter reappears.
“Tom?”
All heads swivel Tomward.
“Could you come out here, please?”
“Sure.”
The exchange could not be more innocuous, nor, in its very minimalism, more foreboding. Walter’s please occasions a flutter in Bennie’s breast, but it’s the way Tom responds—with such lightness of tone, as if Walter had just said Could you give me a hand unloading the car?—that ratifies her sense of dread. Dread of what, she could not say, but this much is clear: it’s not nothing.
And there he goes. Tom follows Walter. Who did not bother to catch her eye. Neither to offer a look of reassurance, nor to brace her. He kept her in the dark like everyone else in the room. And whether he did this wittingly or no—but of course, of course it was witting! his failure to acknowledge her status and their link, their jointly held role as Tom’s makers and protectors—there can be no question whether it was inadvertent. Walter! she would like to yell after him, Walter, hey Walter—what happened to our foot? But this she cannot do, being trapped onstage—for that’s what the living room has become, with all these spectators. How often in life does the law come asking you to produce your child? How often in life does such a scenario turn out to be benign? A wave of protest swells in her, a wave of resentment at having her home wrested from her control and designated a public arena.
THIRD NOCTURNE
THE MOON
His own sobbing wakes him. He used often to wake sobbing when he was little, so little he doesn’t remember, not as worded memory, anyway, not preserved in the aspic of language, but still there lurks, beneath this crushing liquid terror, a residue of something he has known before. Does that make the terror even more terrible? Yes. It senses him, knows him. He is caught inside the curling tongue of a massive wave; it tosses him mockingly, pricks of sand sting his skin, pricks of salt swarm his eyes and he cannot see, everywhere it’s dark, he can’t tell up from down and then something is reaching for him, a great suckered tentacle, and he wails and sidles away, his own scuttling motion appalling him. Nothing is stable, nothing as it seems, not even—most terrifying of all—himself.
Then he is grasped and hoisted from the queer dark airless rustle of the waves; limp with fright, he succumbs; he passes through fright into something numb. To resist somehow more horrific than to give in.
Give up,
give in,
wake up, Pim!
“Wake up. Pim. You’re having a dream.”
Walter draws to his chest the sweaty collection of limbs that is Pim. On the other side of the bed, Bennie does not stir. Normally a light sleeper, she has been succumbing more fully these past several weeks to the depths of first trimester slumber. The moon silvers the damp slick of hair at Pim’s temple, and although his eyes are open they have a wild, remote look: he is still lost inside his dream. Or not dream, nightmare. Or not nightmare, night terror. Pavor nocturnus the doctor had called them when they sought help a few years earlier, back when Pim was having them several times a week. The worst thing they could do, Walter and Bennie had learned, was explicitly try to comfort. Overt eye contact, direct address, flagrantly consolatory touch: all of these only increased Pim’s panicked confusion, made him skitter deeper into the crevices of his frightening unreality. They had learned instead to pay him only the most oblique attention. There were techniques. Hold him in one arm and casually say, as if to yourself, I’m a little thirsty. Think I’ll get a glass of water, and then wander with him over to the sink. If you kept your tone light and your manner offhand, bit by bit then his breathing would return to normal and he might sip from the cup you abstractedly offered him, peer through the curtains alongside you, or rest his head on your shoulder and become a tired, ordinary boy once more.
Walter, yawning, lifts Pim and carries him first to the window (Hello, moon, he greets the aspirin-white tablet so far away), then across the hall to the bathroom where, without turning on the light, he lifts the seat and pees. Pim, his distress having passed, wriggles out of Walter’s arms and, replicating in miniature his father’s exact stance, adds his own tinkling cadence to the bowl.
THE MOUSE
High in the wall behind the eaves, under the attic and above the bathroom, in a nest soft as the lambskin upon which the Blumenthal children all lay when they were babies—in fact in a nest that is part lambskin, for the mother mouse while fashioning it had helped herself to liberal mouthfuls of the woolly thing that Bennie, after Pim outgrew it, had washed and packed carefully away in the attic for some future child; six months from now when she goes to retrieve it (not for a grandchild, as she had more or less supposed at the time, but for her own next soon-to-be-born child) she will find it depilated in patches, with signs of nibbling along one edge—five babies lie in a heap.
The babies are six days old. Hair just barely beginning to cover their pink nakedness. Snow-white peach fuzz. In the past twenty-four hours their ears have begun to perk up but they won’t open their eyes yet for another week, won’t stop nursing for another three. In the womb they’d had a sixth sibling but their mother ate it, the littlest, immediately upon giving birth.
These newborns share a lineage similar to that of the Blumenthal children whose lambskin they also share. Not genetically but geographically similar, all of them having descended from inhabitants of this house since its erection in 1891. The humans moved in upon completion in May of that year. By June there was a mouse family on the premises as well. For a hundred and twenty-three years the clans have coexisted, with varying degrees of oblivion and cognizance, under varying conditions of tolerance and pitched battle, fear and complacency. There have been acts of aggression on both sides: plunder and murder, soiling and eviction. There have been instances of communally endured hardship, countless blizzards and heat waves, sudden frosts and torrential downpours, that have proved challenging for all residents of this house. There have been, too, congruent experiences of well-being—good health and healthy births, full bellies, days of warmth and freshness, nights of good company—as well as corresponding burdens: disease, discomfort, discord, death. Loneliness.
Tonight, while just a few feet below them Walter and Pim pee side by side into the toilet, while more than two hundred thousand miles away the moon rolls across the sky like a lost pill, the baby mice are growing. Veering toward their respective fates. Their mother lies crosswise to them in the shape of a sickle moon.
She is a cousin, this attic mouse, of the downstairs mouse who two nights earlier was munching the beetle in the wall behind Aunt Glad’s cot. She has cousins who live in the cellar as well, and cousins who live in the barn. She has cousins she’s never laid eyes on, both here in these environs and farther afield, meadow cousins and woods cousins and those who live in other houses and other barns, and if we were to trace the clans back far enough in time, we’d see how she is in fact connected by blood to innumerable distant relations spread across the land today, relations who make their homes in habitats as diverse as libraries and train stations, synagogues and ice cream stands, old bowling alleys and new buildings under construction. Places beyond the imagination of this attic mouse.
Her progeny, just beginning to make sense of their newest sense, attune the delicate cups of their infinitesimal ears to the lullaby of her body. Lullaby of the nest. Synesthesia of sound and smell and touch and taste. Squirming, nursing, they are growing fat on the ancient hymn of milk and urine, feces and fur, mammalian warmth and sweet wood rot.
Blindly they suckle at this warm, white, silken, milky moon. Knead it with their paws. Whenever one gets pushed off the teat by a brother’s foot or a sister’s tail, it adds to the song a chirping sound of its own before scrambling back to latch on once more.
THE TRAITOR
Bennie draws back the covers and makes a crescent of her body for Pim, who’s asleep again almost the instant he nestles back against her warmth. Before Walter can climb in, too, she whispers, “How’s Tom?” which he understands to mean, Go check on Tom. Which he understands further to mean, Since you were so keen to unilaterally assume control of the situation earlier. Accepting the fiat as penance, he kisses her shoulder. Shuffles dutifully down the hall.
Tom’s bed’s empty.
Passing Mantha’s room he receives a summons. “Dad, c’mere.”
Treading carefully around Ellerby, fast asleep on the trundle bed, he goes to the head of Mantha’s bed. She lies on her stomach with one arm, the broken one, by her side, the other flung radically above her head. Face turned to the side like a swimmer taking a breath. He smooths her hair, slightly damp in the warmth of the summer night.
“No, Dad, my feet.” She hates it when her pajamas bunch up around her shins. Walter goes to the end of the bed, lifts the covers, smooths her cuffs down by her ankles, and gives her foot a double squeeze: sweet—dreams.
Walter continues on his mission. How biddable he is. The banister, polished by generations of hands, is soft as a pelt. In the darkness the house seems to expand around him; always in the middle of the night it feels more vast, more voluminously blue. Full of shadows, of shades, their inaudible histories stirring in the air, soughing in corners, shifting the hem of a curtain.
He finds his boy on the porch, occupying Aunt Glad’s cane chair, the smell of cigarette smoke so obvious it seems pointless to mention it. Yet impossible not to. Stifling a yawn: “I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Tom.”
“I know, Dad.”
“It’s just a stupid thing to do.”
“I know.”
Walter sits. So why do it, he wants to ask. So why don’t you use your head? and hears in the question so precisely the cadence of his own father that he almost laughs.
Myron. Myron Blumenthal. Deli boy, deli worker, deli manager, eventually deli owner, although even then, when he’d earned the right legally as well as spiritually, he never changed the name of the place. Fiebush’s Deli it had begun and Fiebush’s Deli it would remain until its demise, never mind that Myron had lived and breathed the place since the age of fifteen and given more than four decades of his labor to it by the time the establishment became his. Establishment. Fancy schmancy moniker for a shoe box of a shop down on Avenue C, with its fat and smelly cheeses, its braids of garlic depending like bellpulls from the ceiling, its slabs of lox and tongue gleaming pinkly in their glass cases, its oak barrels swimming with pickles, its soup of the day, whatever it was—mushroom barley, matzoh ball, kasha vegetable, borscht—steaming up the small window behind the counter.
For years the deli had closed early every Friday and stayed shut through Saturday, not because Fiebush himself observed the Sabbath but in deference to the bulk of his clientele, bearded men in black hats and vests with tzitzit, the fringes, hanging below the hem, women in long skirts and long sleeves no matter the weather, always with bundles of children in tow. Walter’s mother had died (Of a sepsis, said one aunt; Of meningitis, said another; It was her blood, said his uncle, while his father always maintained It was her heart, no good) when he was not quite three, and as an only, motherless child, he’d spent most of his childhood afternoons and Sundays at the deli. Schoolboy memories of sitting on a stool behind the counter, his cheek bulging with a wad of Bazooka or a Mary Jane, looking up from his comic book or homework to make solemn eye contact with these other children who came in bunches, their neatly staggered heights a sign of their parents’ faithfulness to the first mitzvah: be fruitful and multiply. The size of their families as exotic to young Walter as anything else about them.
His gaze would most often be drawn to one of the boys near his own age, a doppelgänger in yarmulke and peyos, intractably foreign to him, just as he was to them; that this foreignness existed on both sides was precisely clear, even in the absence of a single word spoken. Myron always referred to these customers as “the Hasids” in a tone that puzzled, seeming as it did to braid antipathy and respect. Over the years, as the deli became frequented by a more heterogeneous clientele—punk rockers and grad students, activists and artists, yuppies and drag queens, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Trinidadians and Taiwanese—the number of Orthodox customers dwindled and eventually, at Myron’s urging, Fiebush’s began staying open seven days a week.
Myron, who had always taken pride in the place—from his days as a pimply kid wielding a broom to his days as a young man wielding the meat slicer to his days as a balding widower wielding an adding machine in the tiny, airless back room—took that much more when old Fiebush at last, after years of demurrals, consented to be bought out. Fiebush, by then eighty-eight, liver-spotted as an overripe banana and prone to grinning in an unsettling way (his large, tawny false teeth always seemed to be on the verge of leaping free of his mouth); Fiebush, all at once Las Vegas–bound with his new wife, Essie (whom he proudly proclaimed to be, at seventy-six, a spring chicken); Fiebush had been by then only too delighted to sign the papers. Over Dixie cups of Manischewitz. Walter and Essie had been present for the auspicious occasion, like witnesses at a wedding following upon a decades-long courtship, each one standing just a little behind the key parties under a chuppah of braided garlic and flypaper. When the deal was done, the l’chaims and mazel tovs pronounced, and the drams of sweet wine downed, Myron had even teared up with the astonished gratitude of one who’d long ago resigned himself to his love remaining unrequited. But for all his deep attachment to the place, he’d forbidden Walter ever to work there.
“You don’t know from the deli,” Myron would scoff whenever Walter professed his desire.
“What are you talking about? I’ve probably clocked more hours of my life at the deli than in the apartment.”
“Sure, eating jujubes and picking your nose.”
“But I love the place,” Walter would protest. He made his most ardent—and final—pitch just after dawn on the day after his father finally purchased the business. This was just months before his own graduation from college.
“Bullshit,” Myron proclaimed. They were—where else?—in the deli, Myron getting ready to open, Walter hanging around before heading off to his actual summer job, working with at-risk youth in a program run by Hunter College. Myron ambled back from the refrigerator case with the day’s first can of Cel-Ray—he ritually drank four a day, a practice to which he credited his excellent bowel function—and paused to ease himself onto the leather-upholstered swivel stool that had over the course of forty-two years molded itself perfectly to his ass. “Use your head, you should do me the favor, for one second, please. You got no feel how to run this place. How could you? Not one drop of sweat did you ever put into it.”
“Because you never let me, Pop!”
“Why do you think?” Myron glared. His caterpillar eyebrows fairly vibrated. “Use your head. And by the way”—he took a long swig of the soda, then waited for the belch before continuing— “forget about inheriting. It’ll never be yours.”
Two weeks later, at age fifty-seven, Myron had a massive coronary and died the next day without regaining consciousness. Fiebush, already ensconced by then in his new Las Vegas high-rise with Essie-the-Spring-Chicken, outlived him by another decade. True to his word, Myron had written into his will a stipulation that the deli be sold to any qualified buyer not related to him by blood, with the profits to go to Walter. The qualified buyer not related by blood bit struck Walter as a kind of vaudeville gimmick, an exaggerated wink from beyond the grave, since Myron’s only sibling, a brother, had died of polio in childhood and the extended Blumenthal family, cousins and such, had either perished in the Holocaust or moved to Israel.
At any rate, it came to pass that a buyer without genetic overlap with the Tribe of Blumenthal was found, and Fiebush’s Delicatessen, Est. 1934, sold for what was deemed by the lawyers a fair price and what Walter, at his tender age, considered quite a bundle. Shortly thereafter the buyer, having managed to acquire not only the street-level business but the entire building, hired wreckers who put a two-ton ball of forged steel through the brick facade of the three-story tenement. He eventually constructed on its footprint a ten-story luxury condominium complex, anticipating the gentrification of the Lower East Side by a healthy and highly profitable margin. Walter used the money for a graduate program in Mass Communication, a field of study he chose because it sounded at once relatively easy and highly transferrable. That is, he figured he wouldn’t have to think very hard to pass, and a degree in Mass Comm seemed like it might get him in the door for an interview at a wide range of jobs. This appealed to him because: (a) he couldn’t imagine his grief ever dissipating enough to allow him to think sharply again, and (b) he couldn’t conceive of any particular job he might want to do. A third reason for his gravitating toward this particular graduate program didn’t occur to him until a few years later—until he met Bennie, in fact, that chilly autumn morning when he’d sat brewing coffee on the tiny camp stove. Only after he met Bennie, only after they’d struck up an intimacy he’d never before experienced, did the thought rise from his subconscious that the very name “Mass Communication” seemed to hold within it the prospect of bountiful connection, of linking together on a massive scale, and he had been at that moment in his life, in that newly orphaned moment, terrified of spending the rest of it alone.
Now here’s Tom, occupying with princely ease the chair on the porch of the house in the village he has lived in his whole life, entirely innocent of his imminent ouster. For a moment, in the cricket-laced calm of the night, Walter contemplates spilling the beans.
Instead he says, “Anything else you want to tell me about the graffiti?”
“No.”
Of course this was what the police had wanted to speak with Tom about—the vandalism at the new housing development. Security cameras had caught someone arriving on a bicycle and scaling the hurricane fence the previous night. Between 12:37 and 12:43, they said. Precisely. The beauty of time stamps. One of the officers down at the station had apparently coached the JV boys’ soccer team last fall and thought he recognized Tom as the kid in the footage; the investigating officers were following up on his lead.
Walter had been surprised that they offered up the details so freely, even before dispatching him back into the house to get Tom. The officer who’d coached the soccer team—Walter had no memory of him. What did he look like? Had he been the head coach or an assistant? Did he himself have a kid on the team? Probably. He was probably one of those dads who had the time to attend every practice—a thought that produced in Walter a kind of defensive resentment. Who were they, anyway, these dads you always saw helping carry the equipment onto the field, knowing all the kids not only by name and position but by playing style, by stats? Many of them had probably grown up in Rundle Junction, had parents who’d grown up in Rundle Junction. They worked locally, for public services. Or as contractors. Small business owners who set their own hours, shift workers who got off at four. Walter might work at a socially conscious nonprofit in the city, Walter might write checks to the PTO and be an active participant in village meetings, but in Rundle Junction the fathers with real cachet are those who somehow know the exact moment to order the pizzas so they get delivered to the field just as the game is ending.
To feel forever inadequate: Is this simply the universal condition of being a father? Walter thinks about how few of Tom’s games he actually got to last fall. How those times he had managed to attend he invariably reached the field late, so it had been approaching evening by the time he strode across the parking lot toward the field, the air already taking on that granular quality it gets on late-autumn afternoons, redolent with bonfires and the soft brown fragrance of apples beginning to ferment. By the time he reached the sidelines where the die-hard parents had been since the game began, well-established in their butterfly chairs with the built-in cup holders, their laps and legs snugly wrapped in the fleece blankets they kept in the cargo areas of their SUVs, the game would be in its final quarter. “Anyone know the score?” he’d ask, feeling guilty of a discourtesy he didn’t quite understand. Perhaps the discourtesy consisted of his inability to understand, consisted of the fact that despite having lived here close to thirty years, marrying into one of the village’s oldest families, sending four kids through the public schools and residing in the historic former post office, he would always be in some sense a trespasser.
Yet when the cops had come inquiring about an actual instance of trespass, for some reason he hadn’t worried. Their willingness to divulge the manner in which they’d obtained Tom’s name, coupled with Walter’s own comfortable certainty about his kid’s innocence, made him suppose the visit was a formality, a matter of protocol and due diligence, understood by all to be a required but ultimately pointless bit of police business.
“Tom, could you come out here, please?” he’d said, standing on the threshold between kitchen and living room, and it was what happened next, the way Tom had risen all too readily, as if he’d been anticipating the summons, that gave Walter his first unpleasant turn.
Once out on the porch—where one of the officers, tall and rangy, remained silent, and the other, a squat man with the face of an action-film star, questioned Tom with a kind of low-key charisma, sounding so casually friendly that Walter couldn’t help but feel the cops must be on Tom’s side—the second shock came. Without hesitation, without a blush, Tom acknowledged that yes: he had gone out the previous night a little past midnight, had ridden his bike over to the site of the new development, had scaled the fence.
“You’re aware, Tom,” said the compact one—he gave his name as Officer Vincente, but Walter couldn’t help thinking of him as Vin Diesel—“that’s considered criminal trespass?” Only now the disarming cadence, along with the repeated use of Tom’s name, struck Walter as less reassuring than calculating.
“No, I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Come on, Tom. You’re a smart guy. You’re telling me you didn’t realize you were trespassing on private property?”
“Well it’s obvious they don’t want people going on the site,” said Tom. “Or why put up a fence?” and Walter thought, Careful, careful, don’t be flippant, don’t piss them off.
“So you knew what you were doing was wrong.”
“I don’t know. Was it wrong?”
“You tell me, Tom.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. You’re a smart guy.”
“I think it depends.”
“Yeah? What does it depend on?”
“Whether you believe in the morality of private ownership.”
Walter could feel actual beads of cold sweat slide from his armpits to his wrists.
But the Vin Diesel guy didn’t get riled. If anything, his composure seemed to deepen, grow expansive. “I don’t know about you, Tom,” he said. “Me, I happen to believe in obeying the law of the land.”
“Really?” asked Tom, his own insouciance a near match for the cop’s; Walter’s innards churned with a pileup of panic and pride. “In all situations? I mean, what about in the time of Jim Crow? Or the fact that we stole this land from the Native Americans in the first place? What about the idea that property is theft?”
Proudhon. Shit. Walter clenched his teeth. He was the one who introduced that idea to Tom in the first place. Not six months ago, at supper. Clem had been home on winter break, holding forth passionately about the ills of capitalism and the glories of socialism, and Walter had stepped in with a few innocent questions about human nature and ineradicable difference and freedom—To revolt is a natural tendency of life, he’d quoted Bakunin, and that had launched them into a discussion about anarchism and federalism and the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat.
The cop switched gears smoothly. You had to admire his equilibrium. “Look, Tom. We’re not here to debate beliefs. You know the difference between right and wrong. You want to tell me your intentions in sneaking onto the property?”
“My intentions,” repeated Tom, drawing out the word.
“What you were planning to do?”
“Yeah, no, I understand the question. I’m just thinking about the answer. I guess I’d have to say my intentions were to satisfy my curiosity.” There was no one thing you could point to and say he was being disrespectful. Element by element—his face, his voice, his body language—all added up to a portrait of an earnest, cooperative boy.
“Well,” said the cop, “you know what they say about curiosity, Tom.”
“What?”
“How it killed the cat.”
“It—what? I don’t understand. What cat?”
Bile surged through Walter’s gut. “Tom,” he said.
“Tom, look. We all want to help you out here. Your father, Officer Gutierrez, and myself. We’re not going to be able to help you out, though, unless you’re straight with us. We need to know what you took onto the building site. You bring any supplies with you?”
“What kind of supplies?” Tom asked.
Too coolly, Walter thought, his heart racing as he pictured aerosol paint cans, then tried furiously to erase the image, as though the cops could detect his thoughts.
And the realization struck him physically—it was like a big stone plunging through his gullet—at some point he’d begun entertaining the real possibility that his son was in fact the culprit. Or one of the culprits. The officer continued to question Tom in a mild yet persistent manner, asking questions that suggested there might have been more than one graffitist. Who had he gone with, or planned to go with; who had he met there or expected to meet? Vin Diesel asked versions of the same questions over and over. Each time Tom responded that he’d gone by himself, had simply been curious to see the site, that he’d brought nothing with him, had only walked around. As the questioning went on (the dull repetitiveness oddly chilling), Walter found himself switching gears: rather than willing Tom to convey humility and show more cooperation, he found himself rooting for Tom to be no more than consistent and minimalist in his responses.
In fact, this is more or less precisely what Tom had done. The cops in the end had thanked him and Walter in a manner that would have elicited no complaint from Emily Post, had said they had “what they needed for now,” and had taken off, putting their squad car in reverse and maneuvering down the driveway with intimidating speed and dexterity.
Now on the porch, Tom says, “I didn’t do it, Dad.”
“Do what?”
“The vandalism.”
“Okay, Tom.” And it is. What could be more okay than Tom’s word? “You know who did?”
A beat. “I might.”
Wind tosses the shagbark hickory above their heads, ruffles the leaves of the azalea bushes.
“I don’t think I should say anything, though,” Tom continues, “if I don’t know for sure.”
Tom’s phrasing makes Walter think he wants to be persuaded otherwise. Wants to be coaxed to share his theory. Gingerly he ventures, “Kids?”
But after a long moment Tom only repeats, “I don’t think I should say.”
“Why’d you go?”
“Honestly? It’s what I told the cops. Curiosity.”
Walter rubs his chin, makes a skritching sound. An assertion of paternal authority. He doesn’t do it consciously, but as soon as he hears the sound he recalls the way his father would do the same, scratch his stubble at key moments in a conversation. How eloquent, how economical the gesture. And how it used to madden Walter, especially when he was Tom’s age and lacked the equipment to respond in kind.
“But not just curiosity—responsibility, too,” says Tom. “I mean, don’t we all have a responsibility to know what’s going on? To make ourselves know. In general, in the world, isn’t it our job to find out for ourselves. Figure out what we think.” He’s warming to his subject, speaking with a kind of passion—a kind of vulnerability, that is, self-exposure—he rarely permits himself these days. These days of cool witticism and urbane quip. It makes him seem at once more childlike and more grown-up. “I think we have a duty not to believe things just because it’s how we were raised. I might actually—in the end, Dad, I might wind up thinking a lot of the same things as you. But if that happens . . . well I hope it takes a long time. You know?”
In the darkness, Walter nods. He does know. He does. And for some reason, in his mind he’s sitting behind the counter of Fiebush’s, watching an unbroken stream of souls processing down the aisle, a kind of surreal cavalcade encompassing several decades’ worth of the neighborhood’s ever-evolving populace: first the ultra-Orthodox, men in long beards and black hats, followed by a succession of others in Mao and Nehru jackets, then kurtas and saris, then guayaberas and halter tops, then biker vests and miniskirts, and finally hipsters—men in long beards and black hats.
He remembers asking his father once, Why does one group move out and another take its place?
Myron’s reply, punctuated with a little troika of shrugs: ’S the way of life. How it is. Things change.
“Listen, Tom,” says Walter. “You challenge me and I love you. But don’t say they’re racist.”
“What?”
“The Haredim. The thing you brought up the other night. About the effigy in New Ash—”
“But Dad, it was! It had dreadlocks and ev—”
“Yes—it was racist. The person, the member of that community who put it there, was racist. But what you said was ‘they’re’ racist.” He gives it a minute to sink in. “See what I mean?”
Leaves stir, changing the pattern of moon-coins scattered around the porch.
“Yeah,” says Tom. “I see.”
MEMORY
A train is coming. The slats on the departure board rustle and clatter. The wind is spinning them over and over very fast. She cannot read what they say. Their endless revolutions make her dizzy until she turns away.
And sees there white steam billowing into the station. A moving pillar of white, then a flurry of flapping as all the pigeons in unison rise—their violent ascension making her cover her head with her arms the way she did in the wagon, with the fairy wings on her back, having her picture taken on the way to the pageant, on the way to be a Little Fairy Attendant Upon the Hours—all beating their wings in concert as they congregate, circling toward the roof of curved metal and glass, impossibly high.
From far away down the tracks: sound of a whistle, sound of a horn. Horn of silver paper curved like a sickle moon. The moon worn on a ribbon worn round the neck of a bare-chested boy. He’s blowing out a warning: Be responsible! Stay together!
She can feel him hidden within that billowing column of white, can feel him driving that train. The naked boy is drawing nearer. Baring his teeth. Here he comes with angel cake on his mind.