A candy wrapper blew across his path as Tad crossed West End Avenue. When he saw candy wrappers on the sidewalk, or when he saw used condoms floating in the Hudson River, part of Tad invariably reflected that someone had had candy and he hadn’t. Another part of him would then point out he’d been spared excess calories or squalor.
In two short blocks, he went from the thoughtful still life of Riverside Drive to the rattling midway kineticism of Broadway, his second reenactment of birth trauma that morning. As he reached Eighty-sixth and Broadway to enter the subway, and birdsong was succeeded by auto horns and exhaust, Tad glimpsed in the shadows under some construction scaffolding a homeless man asleep on his cartful of unredeemed soda cans—which to Tad, who could bear reality only by dressing it in metaphor, evoked a bargain-basement Norse troll guarding his treasure. Could that be me in six months? he wondered. One of his mother’s uncles had been a bum, the old pejorative for homeless, so Tad knew that genetically, he had it in him. He just hoped he could be homeless indoors.
The subway station’s token booth bulletin board usually featured cheerful daily axioms like “The Chinese words for crisis and opportunity are the same word” or “Honor is bestowed, but pride you give yourself.” However, in recent weeks, the messages had started to take on a disturbing edge, like “Love is as invisible as air” and “When you fall into her arms, you fall into her hands.” This morning, the wobbly Magic-Marker lines were, “It is as important to express anger as it is hate.” He wondered if the employee who posted these slogans were himself having a crisis.
“Um, excuse me,” Tad asked the bored-looking clerk as he bought several tokens. “Who writes those sayings?” He cocked his head to indicate the bulletin board.
The clerk shrugged. “I don’t know, kid. Somebody on the night shift. I’m too busy for that. You just go on along now.”
There were people in line behind Tad, so he took the, as always, patronizing hint and proceeded to drop his token into the turnstile and leave this research project to others. Once again, he’d been mistaken for a child. It was a family curse. All three Leary boys were short, and despite their short father’s eternal invocations of bantam boxers, feisty jockeys, and Saint James of the Bowery—the family name for Jimmy Cagney—everyone secretly knew smallness was a disadvantage.
Les had used Napoléon, Mike Todd, and the many eighties Wall Street midget moguls as his role models. He enacted the fireplug wrestler in high school, won the debating prize, and then became a pit bull in the sales world. Like polio survivors who become champion skaters, he rose in the ranks to CEO, a title that makes an individual sound like a robot you can’t kill, or, worse, a corporation. But even chief executives can’t be made crackproof as part of their perks.
Middle brother Nat had gone into natural science, as if to figure out nature and then take revenge on it. He had specialized in studying social orders in domesticated wild animals like elephants and yaks, to whom his height was immaterial, and in any case outside their sphere of judgment, insofar as livestock have judgment. Conversely, in another study, some poultry had mistaken Nat for their mother, proving that, in nature, human shortness is more relative.
As if to round out the curriculum, tertiary Tad, sequentially the baby, had gravitated to fine arts, forgetting fine can mean “extremely limited” and “narrow.” Literature wasn’t a job, but at least there was no dangerous machinery involved. He had taken refuge from mankind in the humanities. Tad’s affinity for folktales, where the youngest of three sons always wins in the end, led him to immerse himself in it for consolation. Still, smallness, like poverty, is a virtue only in fantasies.
The subway train arrived almost immediately, which Tad interpreted as a wink from God, promising at least trivial relief from his travails. As it headed to Times Square, Tad contemplated the advertisements aimed at its captives:
HAVE YOU BEEN INJURED?
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS.
CURE WARTS WITH LASER SURGERY.
LEARN A TRADE.
DO YOU HAVE LUPUS?
STOP SMOKING COMFORTABLY.
Tad wondered if that last ad offered to teach you how to start smoking uncomfortably. As a litany, the ads reminded Tad that he moved in a different realm than glossy Dean Parish, who’d been his lover only momentarily, like a man-made element that blazes into being for just a fraction of a second. Dean edited a local society magazine full of advertisements for pearl necklaces, co-ops whose monthly maintenance fee could buy a house in Waterville, and financial security packages whose functioning Tad couldn’t even grasp. It was called Vision, but it didn’t seem to see anything that existed west of Fifth Avenue or north of Ninety-sixth, except for an occasional squint southward to Palm Beach. Tad hadn’t even enjoyed Dean’s stolid company, but he had mistaken Dean’s mannequin composure and sheen as an improvement on Angelo’s gauche Italian effusiveness. Tad shivered, a reluctant troglodyte, and noticed another provocatively worded ad overhead, floating like a visitation:
DIVORCE YOURSELF FOR FIFTY DOLLARS.
If only you could get divorced from yourself, he thought. His body was an unwelcome partner to him, the lamp confining his genie, and Tad, in his mad, glad sadness, had never felt so confused.
Across the aisle, he sighted a smooth-faced young beauty, crew-cut and decent in a blue hiker’s parka. That hopeful college boy is my ideal, he mused, only to realize as she turned her head that this ideal was a young woman. It was the third time in less than a month he had made such a mistake, and Tad was bewildered that even his desires were contradictory. He assumed the rest of the world knew its heart’s desire, whether or not they got it, but he didn’t get it in either sense. Women were beautiful and smooth, but complex and hidden, and in the clinch, he was frightened. Men were familiar, but coarse and unavailing, and he didn’t want them so much as he wanted to become them. To Tad, facial hair on others was repulsive; it seemed an evolutionary graffito. Chimpanzees didn’t have facial hair, so why should men? Unexpectedly, he thought of Saint Wilgefortis and the soldier in his Lives of the Medieval Saints who recoiled when the saintly female virgin he was pursuing sprouted a beard after she prayed to God for help in fending him off. Even the milk mustaches on the busty supermodels in magazine ads gave Tad an uneasy feeling.
His few partners, however, except for Angelo, had all been larger and darker than he was, and he’d felt strangely as though he were after their pelts, that he was Dan’l Boone killing their b’ar. He’d clutch and gnaw at them like a jealous cannibal, trying to conquer or acquire their essences, usually picking up only the barbiturate of their personal problems, the draining equivalent of their mad-cow viruses. At this point, though, exhausted by the irrational equation, Tad’s theory was, If there’s no conception possible, why bother? Sex was beautiful in fantasy but risky and ridiculous in practice. Besides—hadn’t he slept with the most beautiful girl at Hale? On the third hand, he contradicted himself, hadn’t he slept with her for the same reason he’d slept with men later, in order to gain some status by proximity? What he didn’t grasp was that it was his own selfishness that kept him lonely.
He certainly was uninterested in others’ satisfaction. His agenda was only his own gratification, the phallic “I.” Angelo had been no competitor, with his dangling, misplaced baby toe, like a putto’s, a comma where an exclamation point is expected, but that relativity, of course, had made Tad king of their household, Zeus, hurler of thunderbolts. To his compartmentalized shame, Tad had never felt in his heart that he loved Angelo, but he’d known Angelo loved him, and that had made him safe and comfortable for five years. Angelo and grad school were to be temporary hiding places. He could bide his time, work on his master’s and then his doctoral thesis while Angelo praised him and did the cooking and cleaning, first in their Waterville basement and then in the Village studio he’d guiltily surrendered in the breakup.
Tad had welcomed being the relatively rugged realist in their partnership. Angelo was so foolishly good, he chased after tourists on the street when he felt his directions to them had been unclear, and he agonized that he couldn’t oblige the telemarketers who darkened the dinner hour. He fretted over ailing potted plants like they were E.T. on the operating table, and tiptoed through any room where a cat or dog was sleeping. He smiled reflexively at anyone whose gaze he met, a mixture of friendliness and fear that Tad had found disarming initially but later came to see as craven, like a chimpanzee’s appeasement grin.
Tad was remorseful now, remembering fellow townie Angelo as the most unreconstructed of old-fashioned wives, all the time singing in his innocently overbearing off-key Boston accent the show tunes Tad found so inane. He admired Angelo’s purity for belting out “Home on the Range” without irony while washing dishes, but he was maddened when Angelo got song lyrics mixed up, like “the clouds are not cloudy at all,” or “Whistling words of wisdom / Let it be.” Still, Angelo, younger and, uniquely, smaller, had worshiped Tad as the seeker who’d risen in the ranks and become a great Hale graduate—or else he stoically pretended to, geisha-style, and avowed his submissive adulation to Tad with the intensity only a man would wish for in his idealized partner. Now, Tad didn’t even know where Angelo was.
In the dank clamor of the Times Square station, where, like Hades, no sense of Sunday could ever permeate, Tad passed a bizarrely robed swarthy man with a handful of leaflets, arguing with a pale bald man who wore earrings in both ears. “It’s not me who hates them!” he heard the leafleteer saying. “It’s God who hates them!” Tad was tempted to fish one of the discarded leaflets out of the trash barrel he saw just yards ahead, but at the last minute he resisted. If it was him God hated, Tad didn’t want to know. He remembered a few years ago, as he stood on a subway platform, a passing lunatic had seen him momentarily appraise the covers of the men’s fashion magazines. In one of those intuitive leaps that lunatics make without hesitation, the stranger had growled, “AIDS gonna get you!” Tad was left shaking, not from the threat of future illness, but the threat of present hatred.
The crosstown shuttle was crowded with people who had tacitly agreed not to acknowledge one another’s existence. Tad sat opposite a tired teenaged mother whose hyperactive toddler daughter was fascinated by the tunnel’s passing lights and who knelt on the jiggling seat to watch them wheel past like ball lightning. “Sit down.” The mother repositioned her brusquely. “How many times I tell you not to be looking at things?”
Tad’s eyes met those of a young black nurse with a Bible, also opposite him. It struck him as odd that a person of science would also carry a virtual grimoire of magic spells, but he then had to admit that people who get up early to work on Sundays with the dying probably need reserves of spiritual strength. She subtly rolled her eyes at Tad, in secret conspiratorial annoyance at this dubious parenting, the same way his mom often would to Tad at wedding receptions when groggy Dad started blowing hard on conversational tangents she was apparently helpless to stop. For a moment, Tad felt connected to mankind, and, furthermore, he wished he could be that girl’s father, and tell her, “Yes, delight in those lights! The world is full of variations of light—sunset and Kugelblitz and will-o’-the-wisp and aurora borealis and the luminescent tiny portholes on those deep-sea fishes! Go ahead and look! As far as I can see, that’s what life is for!” On the other hand, he didn’t have to change her diapers or endure her tantrums, not to mention take her to see Santa, or whatever labor the tired mom was indirectly complaining about.
The escalator ride to street level seemed exceptionally long to Tad, inevitably reminding him of the escalator in cartoons that takes people up to heaven, or abruptly, should the rider think something impious, converts to a slide to hell. Ahead of him were two leering high school boys in hockey caps, and as they neared the top, Tad overheard the end of a joke one was telling the other. “… So the elephant turns around and says to the ant, ‘What are you doing back there?’ and the ant says, ‘Take it all, bitch!’ ” His companion groaned rather than laughed, and they and Tad fell silent in the general noise as they completed their ascent.
He crossed the great hall of Grand Central Station, its sea green vaulted ceiling, salted with constellations, playing sky for a miniature world below. Beneath its false welkin, thousands of horoscopes besides his hurried to their daily opportunities and risks.
The cold air on Lexington Avenue was harsh but refreshing, official proof that he had left the Underworld. He headed uptown and east, where skyscrapers shone even in the gray light like phalluses in shiny novelty condoms or extra-large bottles of caffeinated soda. In one of the vast corporate lobbies Tad passed he saw, instead of a Christmas tree, a single house-sized Christmas tree bulb, a joke like the pointlessly world’s largest chair Tad had seen in North Carolina once, promoting the local furniture makers. The huge red bulb, shiny as the skyscraper and the profits it generated, inexplicably irritated Tad. It was like the obese prizewinning pumpkins or monstrous pigs the newspapers featured at harvest time, or the mile-long submarine sandwich unveiled as a photo op—a celebration of bigness as bestness, of The Guinness Book of World Records outweighing the Bible. Godzilla was an accountant’s idea of horror—by the yard—and was less frightening to Tad than a tarantula. He figured, We can all see Godzilla coming, so the suspense is minimal. Even the Macy’s parade had been lost on him as a child. There was clever little Snoopy, only it was an enormous, palpably lifeless version of him. Childe Tad, watching the tiny TV image of the gargantuan crude rubber balloon versions of the small platonically imaginary characters, had wondered, And? What’s the point? What do we learn? To him, humans in Mickey Mouse costumes were all wrong—wrongly fuzzy, wrongly huge, preposterous imposters without even the wit to speak, and, most of all, wrong in their very three-dimensionality. Likewise, the face of God in paintings was never fabulous enough. God with a human face was God wearing a stupid mask.
Far more interesting to him even back then was the notion of miniaturization, and he’d avidly overseen his collection of tiny jungle animals, of tiny knights in combat, of perfect Train Town citizens he could crush. He had been their God then, holding each in the palm of his hand. Besides, miniaturized, they were now comprehensible; immobilized, they had limits. In a child’s bedroom, the universe need not be infinite, and therefore not frightening.
Tad walked to Les and Bonny’s town house on East Fifty-fifth Street. This place alone would have satisfied most pelf-seekers, but it was merely their pied-à-terre, for business trips. They had two other homes, one in a gated community in suburban Whitehaven, the other a beach house down in Apogee, on the Gulf Coast. Tad assumed that since the financial collapse of the nationwide chain of VitaManager stores—where busy executives could buy bottles of vitamins at drive-through windows, and which Les had pioneered and controlled—not to mention the subsequent collapse of Les, some or all of those addresses might be in jeopardy. Tad rang the doorbell.
“Who is it?” Bonny’s voice reverberated like a kazoo through the intercom.
Her remoteness frustrated Tad. “Um … It’s a serial killer. Are there at least two people there? Come on, Bonny! I said I’d arrive at eleven, and it’s eleven! Open the door!”
There was a pause. The cold gripped Tad like an unwanted lover. “Who is it, please?” Bonny had gone security-mad since moving out to their Whitehaven compound. She had always imagined New York as a prime-time TV drama of gunfire and relentless violation, and now, especially since Les’s accident, she had to cling to any security system available. Les had always joked that in the limo after their wedding, she’d locked the doors to keep him from escaping, but Tad theorized that actually she didn’t like the look of the shabby Waterville streets they were riding through.
Tad surrendered. “It’s Tad, Bonny.”
Over the intercom, Tad heard Bonny chastising her rambunctious five-year-old. “No, Hunter! I said no! I think it’s time for a time-out!” The name Hunter had been her idea of classy, even though scientist Nat had teasingly told her she should next have a daughter and name her Gatherer.
“Bonny?” He pressed the doorbell one more time.
“Oh, sorry!” Bonny buzzed him in.
As Tad walked down the hall toward the parlor-floor apartment, he heard the off-puttingly familiar cadences of his already-tipsy father. When Dad drank, he inevitably waxed, or rather, waned sentimental about his childhood poverty. “My dad used to beat the crap out of me when I goofed up!” he was saying. “That got me in line. No time-outs, let me tell you. But I suppose today they’d call that child abuse.”
“Well, yes, of course, they would, certainly!” Nat’s wife Rekha’s barely suppressed impatience with Dad could be felt even through the wood door, even though her musical Indian voice strained to conceal it. Tad tried the doorknob. That door, too, was locked.
“Bonny, is this hall a decontamination chamber or something? Open the door!”
“I wanna get it! I wanna get it!” he heard Hunter shout right on the other side.
“All right, you’ll have to learn to receive people sometime!” Bonny said.
The door opened, and there in the vestibule was tiny milkblond trophy child Hunter, wide-eyed, scared and motionless, the kindergartner with stage fright. He had forgotten that opening the door entailed socializing afterward.
“Hunter! Hey!” Tad greeted him as brightly and unintimidatingly as he could, although he was inwardly frustrated at being forgotten in the few months since he’d last seen the boy.
“Hunter, you recognize your uncle Tad!” Bonny appeared in a red sweater that featured a winking snowman’s head. Her tone was arch, but she then reverted to a normal voice. “He’s like this with the telephone, too. He’s crazy eager to answer it, but then he’s terrified to speak into it!”
In his hand, Hunter held a slice of baloney, which he had folded in half and taken one bite from, so it had a seemingly impossible nibble at its center.
“I like that trick bite in your baloney!” Tad tried to engage him. “You could do two bites and make a sort of baloney mask!”
Hunter complied expressionlessly, and took another bite of the folded lunch meat. He held the makeshift mask to his face, and his eyes now glittered through the openings. Tad saw his own interested, reticent self in those glittering eyes. If Tad and Les shared half the same genetic material, and Hunter had half of Les’s, Tad figured, then Hunter was one quarter the same person as himself.
Hunter tilted his head back so the baloney would remain on his face without his holding it, then paraded back into the living room and out of sight. Dad could be heard telling the one about how his father had never seen a banana until they handed them out to the detained newcomers on Ellis Island.
“Don’t hide in the bedroom forever!” Bonny called after Hunter. “I want you and Little Nat to come and join the grown-ups!” She turned back to Tad and added confidentially, “All the beautiful buffet in there, and that’s all he’ll eat. Come on in. I’ll take your jacket.” She hugged Tad minimally, which made him wonder if she considered his gayness strange, or whether she assumed all others, not just him, were strangers to be approached warily. He remembered that when he’d waltzed with her at her wedding, she’d positioned her body at a right angle to his, rather than face-to-face, to separate their bodies—the choreographic equivalent of twin beds. But then, he pointed out to himself, attempting to be fair, that may have been appropriate for a bride.
Tad followed Bonny into the living room. It was furnished with beautiful leather upholstery and elaborate window treatments, as Bonny would have referred to them. The bankruptcy proceedings were presumably going to affect all this. Tad thought of the tale of “The Fisherman’s Wife”—how Les and Bonny had started out in the upstairs of a drab Waterville duplex, and how Bonny, feral and instinctive like her mate, had gone through half a dozen ever-larger houses as Les rose in the world, decorating each to a fare-thee-well and then saying fare thee well to it. She avidly read magazines like Modern Shelter, Abode Options, and Better Domiciles, which didn’t even offer the happy finality of depicting the best, simply the ever-ascending better, a tantalizing spiral that left its consumer hungrier than before. Tad recalled she once had a room in the Whitehaven house redecorated for a party because her guests had “already seen it.” Now she was sliding backward through the story, into ever-smaller quarters, back to the fisherman’s barrel, and she was struggling with assimilating the rewrites. She and Tad were more similar than either knew at that moment.
In the adjacent dining room, Tad glimpsed the table invitingly laid with a miniature plastic sleigh of fruit salad, a carefully stacked Aztec-style pyramid of doughnuts, a glass-covered platter of scrambled eggs and bacon, steaming like a shoppe window of yesteryear, cold cuts laid out like a shingled roof in a kiddie book, and a velvet-trimmed treasure chest–shaped basket intentionally overspilling with Christmas cookies, including a related tray of gingerbread folk. Bonny still managed and innovated, despite her upheavals, Tad conceded, and he acknowledged, to his own discredit, how in his comparably lesser trials he’d eaten cold gravy from a can and let dirty dishes pile up in Garth’s sink.
The impersonally tasteful Xmas tree Bonny had set up—it was an Xmas tree, not a Christmas tree—had uniform tiny red balls on it, none of the piquant menagerie of accumulated cheap treasure with which most families trim their trees. Tad thought momentarily of the tarnished diversity of the ornaments Dad and Mom had hauled down annually from the Waterville attic. Christmas ornaments are as close as most regular families ever get to an art collection. He recalled the oddities on the family tree—the peekaboo pendant quasi–Easter egg with the Holy Family hunkering inside, the salacious cherries oddly glazed with frost, the seeming miniature disco ball with its mirrored facets like a fly’s eye, the strange elongated glass icicles like uselessly fragile drill bits, the crummy mandala of Popsicle sticks Les had made in kindergarten, the shimmering purple onion-shaped Turkish domes some unaccountably fancy relative must have donated.
Tad braced himself, despite an interior rash of uneasiness, and entered the arena. As with life, he pined for his family but then had the urge to flee in their midst. “Hello, all! God bless us, everyone! This message void where prohibited by law.” Tad tried to make fun of his cute image so it couldn’t be used against him like surprise evidence in court. He reflected that, whatever his humiliations, at least he had escaped playing Tiny Tim onstage. Oliver Twist was a roughneck by comparison.
“Tad! You made it safe!” Mom greeted him plaintively, combining goodwill with a sense of constant danger. She was a tiny sparrow, as short Dad’s pride had required his bride to be, and she saw life as an antechamber where you wait for the X-ray results.
Dad, grizzly, ruddy, smelling of tobacco, glass in hand, greeted Tad with “Well! It’s the elf himself!” Dad was very funny at press conferences, but unfortunately, that’s what he conducted even at home.
“Hey, Dad!” Hey is somehow less commital than hi. Tad knew Dad teased him about his height the way bald men tease one another, from a mixed sense of solidarity and self-consciousness.
“Ah! The homunculus has arrived.” Tad heard Nat’s monotone from elsewhere in the room. “I’d say ‘the dwarf,’ but I have to admit, his limbs are perfectly proportioned.” Nat was only an inch taller than Tad, but just as Tad had dominated five-foot Angelo by a mere inch, so five-two Nat worked his advantage over his little brother. Besides, Nat had had to go to a city college, whereas Tad had luckily been accepted at Hale, and Nat had to assert his superiority somehow, despite that status destabilizer. The old cartoons of an infinite sequence of fish swallowing their inferior, while being swallowed in turn, flashed through Tad’s mind.
Then he saw Nat was in a leather armchair, off in a corner.
“You know, the short joke wears thin after about thirty years,” Tad recited.
“Not if it still bugs you!” his older brother countered.
Nat was gazing deep into a palm-top computer he’d brought with him from the suburbs. It glowed like a cauldron in use, and gave messy-bearded Nat a warlock’s lit-from-beneath face. He stared into his crystal not like Nostradamus or Narcissus, but impassively, his fingers benignly click-clicking on the keyboard as if he were deploying knitting needles. Tad thought of the old war movies, where the submarine ensign concentrates not on the room he’s in, but on the radar screen, intent on some revelation of danger or treasure elsewhere. Nat had grown more and more detached with the years. His occasional beard was grown initially to counteract his shortness (he didn’t use the wildly obvious but nonetheless prevalent cigar ploy the way business honcho Les had, and Les in turn had nixed bearddom as borderline Bolshevik, unacceptable to his Bible Belt customers), but it also recurred because he tired of superfluous niceties like daily shaving. Tad wondered if it was a hedge grown for privacy, to keep the world at a more clinical distance. He wondered if it kept Rekha away as well, but where attraction is concerned, one man’s moot is another man’s passion. It must have taken all autumn to raise that beard, on that research project in shaving-not-required Africa, Tad thought, given the sparsity of the Leary cheek. In a way, Tad felt he’d been the bravest Leary son, at least in this instance, remaining uncompensatingly clean-shaven and cigar-free, even though it meant being mistaken for a child.
Tad greeted his brother by his high school nickname. “Good ol’ Nat Sci! The mad zookeeper! You brought your computer to brunch?” Its showy standoffishness reminded him of Nat’s teenage rebellion period, when he’d worn his Walkman at the dinner table to bypass family interaction. Mom had said it was like feeding the living dead, and Dad had said at least the living dead didn’t have tuition expenses.
“One of them,” Nat answered, with ostentatious flatness. He had an array of computers, small and large, though Tad never comprehended what one did that another couldn’t.
“Ah!” Tad offered approval, hoping for the same in return. “Your desk away from desk.”
“He says he has work to do,” Mom said tartly. “God forbid we should have a decent conversation.”
“Just answering some E-mail,” Nat said without looking up. “I’m in a news group. We’re discussing how to use the program we’re using to discuss the program we’re using.”
Tad tried to connect with his brother by making a joke. Dad and Les had never paid any attention to him—they were hopeless projects—but Nat, only three years older, at one time had been his partner in ridiculing the larger world. “Sometimes I think you care more about your little noncorporeal on-line friends than you do about me!” He pretended to sob.
“You sound like a certain wife I know,” Nat responded emotionlessly.
Tad didn’t dare look over to wherever Rekha was for her take on this. When she disapproved of something, her voice remained soft, but her eyes darkened like Kali about to cleanse the earth of itself.
“Enough with the typing already!” Dad carped humorously. “Typing is for weekdays and women!” In Dad’s days at the mayor’s office, men didn’t type; they dictated.
Nat finally looked up to meet Tad’s gaze. “Yikes, what happened to you? You look like Snap or Crackle after the rottweiler got to him.”
Tad felt a knot in his stomach. Nat always acted playful, but his tactless gibes sometimes had an edge of redirected frustration. Nat was having job trouble, too, and although he never talked about his marital happiness, his and Rekha’s careers kept them apart for strenuous periods of time.
“I haven’t slept too well lately,” Tad offered tersely.
“Whoa, and what’s that on your chin? Have you been eating barbecue potato chips?”
“I didn’t shave. Sunday simplicity.” Tad tried to change the subject. “I like your natty wardrobe!” Nat was wearing blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, just like Tad. “How was Africa?”
“Corrupt and bankrupt. My project was basically poached out of existence.”
Tad, meanwhile, saw his mother was watching him, waiting to be greeted. Outside their own home, parental protocol and privilege become ambiguous.
“I think you already know the Judge and the Drudge?” Nat feigned the manners of the grand ballroom as he gestured to his parents, who were sitting in perpetually floral armchairs by the room’s bay window.
“Hey, Ma, Hey again, Dad,” Tad said. Nonchalance is confused love’s best opening gambit.
“¡Feliz Navidad!” Dad joked, as if wishing happy holidays in English was too emotional for him.
“Good to see you,” Mom said. “I worry about you!” Tad inwardly flinched. I love you in spite of that. If wedding announcements were worded “John XY will be inserting his engorged penis into the vagina of Mary XX,” he thought, wouldn’t heterosexuality seem scarifying, as well? It’s the visualizing that frightens people.
“When did you all get in?” Tad inquired ritualistically.
“Yesterday afternoon.” Mom said. There was a snag of silence before conscious social improvisation could kick in. Tad noticed the television opposite the couch was on, but with the sound turned off, and its shifting light played on the walls and faces like pale blue firelight.
“And … how’s Les?” As a teacher, Tad was used to inducing conversation.
“He walks and talks and everything,” Dad began, mustering his old spin control. “He even seems—what’s the word? Relaxed. But I don’t see him flying jumbo jets anytime soon.”
Mom added her diagnosis. “He’s asleep. For the moment, I mean. Though in a larger sense, too, I suppose.… When I think of what might have happened, I just thank the Lord he’s still with us.” Her own brother, a longshoreman, had been killed by a falling crate of machine parts. Tad was born after his death, and he could never visualize his unknown uncle’s end without a guilty twinge of cartoon amusement.
“Now, Midge …” Dad’s voice of consolation had an edge of reprimand in it.
Tad tried to keep the proceedings upbeat. “Hi, Rekha! Getting some candid footage of Leary-us americanus?”
Nat’s petite wife was a freelance nature photographer. She’d met Nat in Bombay when he was a graduate assistant on a study of the effects of pollution on elephants in urban workplaces. She sat in a rocker by the couch, but her poise, like a temple idol’s, was such that the rocker didn’t move. “Hey, I like your wardrobe!” Tad joked. Rekha, too, wore blue jeans and a crisp white shirt. “We’re the College Crowd Coffee Bar Singers!” Rekha was thoughtful and slow to speak, so some Leary or other usually interrupted her.
“She’s going from here to spend Christmas on a shoot for National Photogenic—at the North Pole!” Mom announced with awe, since Rekha did things no woman Mom knew in her childhood would have been allowed to do. Mom had wanted to study music, but she was forced into taking shorthand. Tad remembered that he had noticed Rekha’s camera equipment and some luggage piled in the vestibule.
“I hope it pays well!” Dad said.
“Away from your son on Christmas!” Mom seemed to be reciting a headline about a bus plunge. “Science can be so cold!”
“Especially in this case!” Dad leapt in triumphantly, staking his comedy claim before his competitive heirs could.
“Insert Santa’s workshop jokes here, I guess.” Tad smiled at Rekha.
“Don’t even start,” Nat mumbled from his corner. “That kind of corn rolls off Rekha like water off an alpha duck.” Nat had once studied a flock of wild ducks to see how the alpha duck was determined. Somehow, they’d accidentally picked him, and the study had to be abandoned.
“Alpha duck,” Tad mused. “It sounds like a parody of a superhero.”
“It’s a fact of nature,” Nat answered. His adolescent drollness had dried into brittleness. Tad could remember when Nat had energetically enjoyed himself. Nat had been a prankish teen, and at one school talent show, he sang a cowboy spoof with words he wrote himself, surprising for a thirteen-year-old.
Oh my Darwin, Oh my Darwin,
Oh my Darwin, man alive!
I’ll be lost and gone forever
If I’m not fit to survive!
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavation Number Nine—
Found some fossils of a monkey—
Oh m’ God, those bones are mine!
Nat had worn a cowboy hat and a lab coat to perform the skit, and of course had gotten in trouble with the Catholic staff for saying “Oh, m’ God,” never mind the implicit doubts about creationism. To ten-year-old Tad, Nat had seemed the coolest.
Rekha smirked mirthlessly, as if watching something happening blocks away through a telescope, and spoke for the first time. “All males are a parody of a superhero.”
Tad wondered if she was thinking of her childhood, and all the bumbling male-dominated hierarchies of the caste system. Mom had been confused at meeting Rekha, with her fathomless stare and caramel complexion. A black woman might have panicked Mom, but as she’d whispered to Tad at the couple’s wedding reception, “She’s not exactly Oriental even—so I don’t know if this is sideways motion or what.” Hindus had never been part of the social sequence in South Boston, where she grew up. The Irish weren’t as good as the WASPs, but they certainly felt free to look down on blacks. Mom had no malice in her; she was just a rueful spectator of what prevailed. Nat may have aspired to rise to Rekha’s exotic level, and maybe Rekha saw Nat as a connection to a more rational and secure Western lifestyle that would have better-equipped darkrooms. Or else both thought they were doing the other the favor, since Nat had a hard time finding short American girls who’d tolerate him disappearing for months. Like many, theirs was a mutually morganatic alliance.
“How’s Sheep’s Crossing?” Tad returned to Rekha, who remained composed, even as reflected images of football mayhem from the soundless television distorted her face. Nat and his family lived in a small town near the college that was sponsoring his latest studies.
“Small-minded, but we’re leaving.”
“Stop! Rewind! What?”
“Nat took that job at Generalized Foods.”
“The chickens-in-bondage project,” Nat added, a verbal footnote. “Can they live full lives without ever moving?”
“Yes, but after the North Pole, I think I’ll be able to handle it,” Rekha answered.
“I’ll go round up the boys,” Bonny said. “They’re playing computer games. Tad, help yourself. There’s coffee in that silver urn.”
“Thanks, Bonny!” Tad called after her, and then sensed he was standing in the center of the room while everyone else sat. He went to the dining room and poured a cup of coffee for himself. “How’s retirement, Dad? Taking it easy?” he called, noting that the room was silent without his efforts. Tad stirred some cream in his coffee, and the spoon clattered, the galloping hooves of approaching caffeine.
“Well, you know, I think that heart attack was nature’s way of telling me to die.” Dad’s jokes always sounded secondhand somehow, as if he had writers hidden somewhere, just as he himself had written material for Mayor Halloran over the years. “So here’s to nature’s bad advice!” He made a mock toast as Tad returned, and Tad saw that his father’s murky beverage was in a novelty glass that sported a skull and crossbones with What’s Your Poison? lettered on it.
“Doesn’t the genteel retiree wait until noon to hit the hard stuff?” Tad hoped he sounded raffish, but his voice was strained. He remembered liquor as his rival, as the one Dad embraced when he came home late at night from fund-raising dinners or whatever obscure policy sessions Waterville could have demanded. The only time Dad had ever mentioned him with praise was in his heavily miked retirement speech, lumped in with Nat and Les as one of the “three fine sons” he said he considered his greatest accomplishment.
Mom squirmed, an uncomfortable accessory to a crime. “It’s his only pleasure. And you know your father’s never done a thing he didn’t want to do.” Tad thought of Angelo’s chainsmoking mother, who smoked even while praying, and how grief-stricken dutiful Angelo had been at her early death, and how, at the grave site on the first anniversary of her passing, her three gardener sons had all silently lit cigarettes and inserted them filter-down into the earth by her stone, temporary eternal flames. It had struck Tad as garish at first, like so many things the Silvarinis did, but then it seemed a beautiful gesture. After all, how bad could smoking be for the dead?
“Besides, the milk is supposed to make up for the whiskey,” Mom added. Tad was mystified by her acquiescence to Dad’s bad habits, especially after his heart attack. Has she given up? he thought. Does she secretly want him to die? Tad remembered when they used to jump on the beds, and Mom would say, “All right, keep it up, one of you will break your head open!” and Nat did. The ambulance had come to take him away, and Tad briefly respected her ability to see the future.
“He has an ulcer, too,” Mom explained, as if Dad had left the room. In a way, he had.
Dad chortled to indicate he was a lovable rascal. “I don’t have ulcers, I cause ’em!”
Nat played an eerily flat straight man. “Har har, sir,” he answered dutifully, simulating an underclassman at a military academy.
Mom frowned. “Don’t call your father sir,” she chided. “It’s disrespectful.”
“If I have the whiskey mixed with milk, it’s safe for my stomach,” Dad protested.
Tad went back to the dining room for more coffee. “Really? Is that backed up by chemistry?”
“Certainly not by mixology,” Nat called from the living room.
Dad played himself. “It’s just a short stagger from a brandy Alexander.” He then lit a cigarette.
“You are kidding me!” Tad came back in and overacted his surprise. After all, Dad had always smoked. “Mom, you allow this? Are the cigarettes soaked in milk, too?”
“I wish you wouldn’t, Packy, around the grandchildren,” Mom murmured, filing her petition with a sense of its futility. She had been raised to stand by her man or risk mortal sin, and besides, she had never driven a car or signed a check, and she defined herself through him. Waterville politics and Waterville Latin had been all about men, and Tad briefly wondered if this was why he prized male approval, not as a misfit, but as a typical member of his community. “I’m glad you don’t smoke, Tad. At least you’re safer there.” Again, at least.
Hunter wandered back in, evidently following orders, but he groped along like he was playing blindman’s buff. He was still leaning backward, still wearing his lunch-meat face. “How do you like my baloney mask?” He approached Nat but wasn’t addressing anyone in particular.
“Sheesh, that is unsettling,” Nat remarked, looking up. “It looks like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. All he needs is the chain saw! Santa, take note!”
“Oh please,” Mom protested. “Don’t tempt the fates! Mrs. Hardaway down the street always joked about her little hoodlum when Liam was just a boy, and you know how he turned out!”
“Oh relax,” Nat answered, his face again lowered to concentrate on his palm-top computer. “Mass murderers are blue-collar. With Hunter’s social standing, he’ll kill two, three people tops.”
“This is a Christmas brunch,” Bonny said simply, reappearing from the bedroom. “I don’t want a serial killer–joke theme, all right?” She took the baloney from Hunter’s face and put it on a paper plate. “Let’s set this aside for later, okay, sweetie? You don’t want that grease on your skin anyway.”
“Look, Tad, I’ve built a house that’s for sale!” Hunter, with the amnesiac ease of children switching activities, announced. He had constructed a little castle with Lego blocks. It looked like a typical house, except for the towers, and he had added clip-on toy machine-gun turrets on the roof. He struggled to use the adult words he had overheard. “It’s a, um, combo minimum! We’re asking one point five, but we’re willing to settle for an even million!” Tad felt rattled at the child’s turning his family’s diminished expectations into a fantasy.
“The gun turrets are a definite selling point,” Tad admitted.
Bonny looked weary. “Monkey see, monkey do. We have to sell the house in Whitehaven and, in all likelihood, the place down at Apogee.… This was supposed to be our pied-à-terre, but now it’s our home, and it’s really not big enough.”
“Well …” Tad struggled to sound solicitous and not intrusive. “What’s going to happen to all the VitaManager outlets?”
“What can we do? They all go in the settlement with the creditors,” Bonny said, carefully keeping her voice balanced. “Those were gone before the accident.” She went on for a while about Les’s reckless overextension of the outlets, the terms of the bankruptcy, and the complexities of insurance, but Tad’s hearing reflexively shut down, like closing the shutters on a windstorm, and he just nodded at her like the dog that sits by the dinner table, understanding nothing but its own name.
“I’m so sorry,” Tad said when she was finished. Bonny had sometimes annoyed him, perhaps because she showed no interest in his folklore studies, but grief made her sympathetic. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and change things.” With Nat within earshot, he instantly wished he’d used a different metaphor. Bonny wordlessly opened her palms in a gesture of either surrender or acceptance.
“Now I remember! Tad, do your thumb!” Hunter demanded, now at ease enough with his uncle to give him orders.
Tad had a double-jointed thumb, which he stretched back almost to touch his wrist. “There you go! Ta daah!”
“Excellent,” Hunter pronounced, and wandered back out of the room. Besides his brevity, Tad’s gymnastic thumb was his claim to sideshow stardom. Children were fascinated by it, but he made a point of concealing it from adults.
Bad luck makes slow conversation. After a dry pause like the break between movements of a symphony, Mom coughed and said cautiously, “We’re going to be selling our house, too.”
Tad, who had always been mortified by his modest background, who’d never invited his Hale friends to visit there, was thunderstruck. He realized he loved the house in Waterville with all his heart. He had played contentedly there, loved its chipped crannies and stained wallpaper, the shelves of torn, doleful old catechisms and fruity picture books from the Depression, and the yellowing coloring books that had already been scribbled in by Les and Nat, so to toddler Tad they looked like peaceful scenes incongruously beset by hordes of orange or green insects. He thought of the dim light that glowed in the upstairs hallway all night, the plump dust balls scudding along the floorboards like toy clouds, the flyspecked mirrors and dark green window shades, whose timeworn holes looked like planetarium constellations when light showed through them. He remembered the perennial smell of tea and greasy potatoes, of old newspaper and human hair, of fresh hot linens and pungent dirty laundry, the tang of dried sweat. He had felt safe there. Only the prospect of losing it made him understand that. When you grow up at one stable address, you have three parents—mother, father, and the house.
“What! But why?”
“Well, your father can’t be expected to climb a lot of stairs now. We have to find some simple one-story place, or even an apartment, maybe out in Whitehaven, I don’t know.” Mom spoke the word apartment with distaste, since she had lived only in big old houses, and like pantsuits for grannies, such modish convenience seemed wrong to her.
“That’s why the Nixons moved to Saddle River, you know,” Dad said proudly, as if his heart attack was an approximation of royalty. “Pat couldn’t do stairs.”
“But …” Tad was about to point out that all his childhood toys and books were still in the attic, but he knew Nat would find that risible. For some reason, he thought again of the family’s wan cardboard carton of Christmas ornaments, intentionally frangible in their old egg cartons, hope stored in Pandora’s box. They’d be impossible to move without breakage. “Who’s going to buy it?”
“Who knows?” Mom said, implying aborigines might squat there at any moment.
“I love that house,” Tad found himself saying, and, of all things, specifically pictured Dad’s forbidden liquor cabinet, and how as a child he had furtively played with the different bottles and glasses, arranging them like a futuristic city. Champagne flutes, martini glasses, wineglasses all doubled as transparent skyscrapers, and Tad had invented a whole race of imaginary mite-sized invisible telepathic beings who lived there in crystalline perfection.
Unexpectedly, Nat and Rekha’s son appeared from the bedroom, where he’d been playing computer games. He was also named Nat. “It indicates the passing on of my DNA,” Nat had explained at the baptism, a ceremony he and Rekha submitted to only when Mom pleaded that this might be her only grandchild, and she didn’t want to die thinking the child would end up in Limbo. Now here was Little Nat, at least presumably, because his head and body were hidden under a Darth Vader headpiece and costume Tad had sent as a Halloween gift.
“He’s been dressed up in that Darth Vader suit since Halloween,” Bigger Nat explained. “He won’t take it off. He loves the power, I guess. Watch this.” He seemed to be narrating stock footage.
Little Nat ignored the company and picked up the remote control. He aimed it at the television as if it were a powerful weapon and pressed the off button. “I kill you all!” he declared as the capering humans on-screen disappeared into black emptiness, with only a receding tiny star remaining.
“I give you life!” he announced, and pressed the on button. Life spontaneously regenerated on-screen. “I kill you all again!” he continued, sounding a little more casual about damnation this time, exterminating once more the broadcast figures made of shadow.
“Tohu v’bohu,” Tad observed, eager to try to engage Nat. “Darkness was on the face of the deep. From nothing, something. Maybe God created the universe with a big remote-control button.”
Nat didn’t smile, but he joked, “So everything’s a big sit com—That Darn Universe!—and God’s the couch potato who turned on the TV just to see what was on?”
Nat junior killed all life again, then grinned unseen at the minuscule central ember where the TV world had been. “I create you! I destroy you! I create you! I destroy you!” The big bang and Armageddon happened several times each.
Nat took away the remote and told Little Nat to stop. From behind his Darth Vader mask, the boy pouted. “Do I have to?”
Nat answered with respectful frankness. “The only thing you have to do in life is die. But please, do it as a favor to me.” He set the remote aside and returned to intently twiddling on his palm-top, a TV in its own right.
Tad was unnerved by Nat making a death joke to a child, but he always hesitated to criticize his brother, for fear of a sharp retort.
“And please, as a favor to me”—Rekha lifted her son tenderly onto her lap—“take off that headpiece before you suffocate.”
When she tactfully removed it, Tad noted how, in the few months since he’d last seen his nephew, the boy’s face had changed, becoming more angular where it had been round, as a puppy’s muzzle slowly lengthens. Still, he was a slight boy, with sad dark eyes, and, if it’s possible, sad dark hair. He was palpably smaller than his younger cousin Hunter, and, again, Tad saw 25 percent of his own genes in this frustrated child.
“I hate being seen,” Little Nat complained. “I hate having people see my face!” Compliant to his mother but resentful to be so, he rejected her by wandering over to examine Hunter’s model Lego home, perhaps with an eye to purchase, leaving only Darth Vader’s head in her care. She put it aside and remarked, “They are so eager to be bigger than somebody.”
“He’s grown up so fast!” Mom said approvingly, but then sighed. “I just pray I live to see him graduate from high school.” Tad remembered Mom making the same sighing statement about himself years ago, backstage after a school play, and how it had scared him, or, anyway, made him shiver with the idea that he’d been sinfully preoccupied with the fun of the moment. Mom always sighed even after she laughed, as if to remind everyone she would be resuming her customary burden now.
Rekha played along. “One day it’s diapers and crying, and before you know it, it’s designer sneakers and slightly deeper-pitched crying.”
“I wish we lived in outer space,” Nat Junior said to his Dad, as if the grown-up might arrange it.
“We do live in outer space,” Nat pointed out without looking up. “Right in the middle of it. The thickness of the atmosphere makes you forget it sometimes, but earth is as far away from Orion as it is from us. In fact, it’s exactly as far.”
The TV had been left alive, or at least on, and a syndicated rerun of a program featuring what were supposed to be America’s funniest home videos was showing endless loops of brides falling in swimming pools, party guests spilling from collapsed platforms, “look at me” children’s tumbles from swings. “Planet of the Oops!” declared a title card that then faded to a commercial. Bloodletting, and death itself, of course, were offlimits here. Dad and Mom watched with resignation, as if they’d surrendered the party to strangers.
“Are your videos ever on television, Rekha?” Tad asked, to cure the silence, remembering she filmed wildlife scenes.
“Not often,” Rekha answered with no sign of resentment. “There’s not much demand for America’s most transcendentally beautiful videos.” Her factual take on the ineffable always impressed Tad. “Speaking of transcending … How is your thesis progressing?” Whereas junior college dropout Bonny and success-minded Les and Dad showed no interest in Tad’s activities, Rekha and Nat had run the academic gauntlet themselves, and she had the educated habit of conversing with company even if she hadn’t chosen it.
“Oh, thanks, Rekha. It’s coming along, slowly but confusingly.”
“And does it have a point yet?” she said just as evenly, so Tad couldn’t decide how much of a joke was intended. “Or is it still a Michelin guidebook to the nonexistent?”
“Well, I think my premise is that no matter how farfetched we think our imaginations are, our fantasies still end up looking pretty much like what we already have. Heaven, Hell, the starship Enterprise, Mount Olympus, Asgard—they all look a lot like royal courts, or city hall.” He cocked his head toward his dozing dad, though he couldn’t tell if Rekha registered the reference. “Angels and devils are all humans. Even monsters are just us on a bad day—Frankenstein, Dracula, Lord Vader. Bilateral symmetry, eyes, shoulders. It’s never strange enough.”
“So, even in fantasy there is no escape?” Rekha announced, the doctor distilling the data.
“Exactly!” Tad said. He delighted in Rekha and thrilled when he could engage her imagination. “Well, the Blob is a step in the right direction, but really, it’s just lava with a touch of an IQ. And some of the Hopi folklore is so weird, I can’t follow it, but maybe to them it was logical. And your man Brahma, sitting in a lotus that’s growing out of his own navel, that’s pretty freethinking.”
Rekha continued smiling but said nothing, which made Tad feel he’d made a misstep. He had pretended to be crass for comedy’s sake, always a risky posture.
“Well, and the way Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu take turns being one another, how Hindu gods have multiple identities, that’s beyond me, which is good.”
Rekha’s smile tightened. “I assume the Holy Trinity also baffles you?”
She was teasing him, secretly, unlike the over-the-counter abuse Nat always dished out. Here was a woman who could work a veil. “I always assumed they stood for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Starting, going, stopping,” he stammered.
“Well, then, there you are!” she said, closing the case, and turned her attention to her skinny six-year-old, who was now scaling a bookshelf of color-coordinated simulated classics. “Careful, Nathaniel! Don’t climb on that! You’ll break it and/or yourself.”
“Oh, let him climb,” Big Nat countered, but faintly. Fathers want to see their sons climb high, as if the child were their inner child’s kite, but mothers want them to live to adulthood.
Nat closed his palm-top for the moment and now, just as impassively, watched the TV Little Nat had graciously allowed to live. He pressed the channel-advance button rhythmically, every three seconds, less like a man in search of entertainment than a security guard surveying the corridors.
Tad tried again. “You’re surfing those channels like the Ghost of Christmas Present—you know, flying over the rooftops to peek in all the windows.” Past the game shows where someone was winning and someone was losing, past the football games where one team was winning and another was losing, past the ashen old movies where everyone weeping and laughing was now long dead.
“The Ghost of Christmas Present has a better-trimmed beard.”
“And are you going to trim yours? You are going corporate now.” Nat had been fired from a number of academic positions, mostly because he didn’t care to handle the politics at his base-camp colleges, and he always automatically recited the truth to his supervisors without ever positioning it for a soft landing, which they took as insubordination.
“Yeah. From ivory tower to torture chamber.” He sighed and turned off the television with the remote, imitating the electric ping it made, and then Little Nat. “Ftoink! I destroy you!” He continued looking at the darkness on the face of the TV deep. Rekha coughed, but Tad couldn’t tell if it was by choice or not.
“Oh no!” Bonny involuntarily called from the dining room. “The canary’s dead!”
This exciting real-life violence brought Hunter and Little Nat back into the company. No one spoke for a few seconds, but the case seemed clear. Dad’s smoking in the small space had killed the canary. Weirdly, it made Tad briefly consider a coal miner’s life. What sort of job would he have to resort to in order to survive now? Would blue-collar labor be necessary? Mining? He’d worked at a chemical plant for one summer, and the din and sulfurous air was hell to him, only with hillbillies instead of sophisticated demons for company.
“Well … one less mouth to feed,” Bonny said in a strangely detached monotone, and covered the cage. “Should have left it in the country.” After bankruptcy and a bewitched husband, pet loss was just a maraschino cherry on her misfortune. The boys, to Tad’s surprise, didn’t seem to mind.
“It was more Mom’s bird than mine,” Hunter said flatly. “Birds don’t even like you or anything. If it was a dog, I’d cry.”
“I barely knew that bird,” Little Nat pointed out.
“Good thing we’re staying in a hotel,” Nat said.
“Let’s have a cease-fire on the smoking, all right?” Bonny suggested with surprising delicacy. “It can’t be good for the boys. Or just do it out on the steps, okay, Dad?” She carried the cage out of the room.
Dad, without quite acknowledging his culpability, wandered out to use the bathroom, mumbling, “My old man used to smoke all the way through dinner. Back then, it was supposed to be an appetizer.…”
“The heart attack affected him,” Mom said, as if it were classified information.
“I know, and, I mean, I realize it’s usually just you and him,” Tad said to Mom. “But Dad seems completely oblivious of others now!”
“He never struck you, did he?” Mom reminded Tad. It was her stock, lame but valid defense. Her generation had seen spankings galore, not to mention the atom bomb. She had a kind of morbid optimism that consisted of imagining worse scenarios than the one you were in, like watching news footage of a plane crash and saying, “That could have been us!” or pointing out when Nat cracked his head that he could have fractured his skull. When speeding drivers passed their car, Mom always said, “In a hurry to get to the graveyard!”
“You’re right,” Tad agreed limply. His father had never hit Tad because he was never anywhere near him. Still, Tad remembered seeing his dad walk the halls of Waterville City Hall, snappily greeting everyone by nickname, if not king of the hill, then deputy king of the hill. As a very little boy—a social climber even in the sandbox—Tad told his playmates his father was the mayor, and only when he found out that lies are quickly exposed did he accept that his father was a perpetual sidekick. Still, Dad’s corny jokes once seemed glamorously new to his ears, and on the exciting rare occasions when Dad told the bedtime stories, they were full of secret agents and movie stars, and Dad himself was the government official who gave Goldilocks five to ten for breaking and entering. Tad could remember times of seeming blood connection, Dad’s strong hand holding down Tad’s head as he gave him a monthly home haircut in the basement, stabilizing him earthward, like the clutch of a minister at baptism. And when he had found out it was Dad who brought the gifts, not Santa, how thrilled he had been, how much better that was. It made him love his parents more.
“And he gave you life,” Mom added as a clincher. It reminded Tad of a joke Dad had played on him on the morning he was to move into his freshman dorm at Hale. He’d given Tad a letter, which turned out to be a mock bill for $180,000, Dad’s comical calculation of rent, tuition, and board charges Tad had accrued as a child. Everyone laughed it up, especially since Hale had given Tad a generous scholarship, but he had hoped for a letter of paternal confidence like the ones WASP youths reported getting in their autobiographies. Still, Dad gave him life, and Christmas presents, and if he seldom praised, neither did he criticize.
“No, Ma. I love Dad. I just don’t want you to be alone.…” Tad instantly regretted pitching any treatments for nightmares that Mom didn’t yet have in development.
She smiled faintly and changed the subject. “You haven’t eaten a thing, Tad,” she said, acknowledging his slant reference to his love for her with one of her own. “Your appetite’s all right, isn’t it? You’re not sick and not telling us?”
“I’m fine!” Tad said with restraint, though his inner Donald Duck was jabbering curses. “It’s just, I’ll probably be eating all day, and Bonny’s sled o’goodies looks like you should photograph it, rather than eat it.”
“It is pretty! Did you see? She did all of us as cookies!” Sure enough, despite, or perhaps in defiance of, her grief, Bonny had made a platter of gingerbread men that included minimal renderings of the family members. Tad’s likeness had cherry red hair, but otherwise it was identical to the rest, with three buttons in lieu of clothes.
“That’s funny!” Tad was intrigued. “But who’s supposed to eat which one? Do you eat only yourself? There’s an odd voodoo aspect to it.…” Bonny returned from wherever she’d taken the canary cage. Dad could be heard clattering around the bathroom. “Don’t overanalyze it,” she said. “I sprayed them with a fixative, so they’re like ornaments. You don’t eat them, unless you’re, like, starving! See the red ribbon hooks? You can hang them!”
“Like crucifixes!” Tad observed.
“Must everything be perverse to you guys?” Bonny was straightforward at least. Les had always been middle-of-the-road in his joke telling, so meeting Nat and Tad had confused her at first.
“Wait a second!” Nat called from his corner, apparently not missing a trick. “We also eat Jesus, don’t forget! Hang and then eat! Communion includes inherent cannibalism.”
Bonny shook her head. She was tired by the rudderless free association her brothers-in-law brought to brunch. “These are just … souvenirs.”
“I’m sorry, Bonny,” Tad said, remembering she’d had a disastrous few months. “I’m impressed. This is all very imaginative and labor-intensive, and with all the … well, confusion you’ve had!” He touched her hand, surprising himself. She looked surprised back at him.
“I can hardly wait till Jesus brings all the presents!” Hunter said out of the blue. He had wandered past with a cookie, and typically confused Santa with God, and goods with goodness. Both supermen enjoy omniscience and (on Christmas Eve) ubiquity, and Santa’s list and Saint Peter’s are basically identical. Santa’s more fun than Jesus, and Tad always wished Jesus were more like Buddha, who more resembles Santa than skinny-marink mirthless Christ. Santa’s like a rich, careless father, though. If he’s so full of love, why doesn’t he ever spend any quality time with his kids? Showering them with presents, but never being around for the crises. He doesn’t even show up; he just leaves the presents behind. Jesus isn’t exactly a live-in lover, either, Baptist infatuation spirituals—to the effect that Jesus Never Jilts—aside, God and Santa are both supposedly devoted, but both are generally unavailable.
“Let me go check on Les,” Bonny said. “I heard him getting up.”
“She’s a strong woman,” Mom announced when Bonny left.
“Yup,” Tad answered, again confused by conflicting feelings. Bonny was certainly lovely and hardworking, and she sometimes reminded him of his college girlfriend Inger Persson, except Bonny was blond out of determination and Inger was born that way, and Inger was Swedish and hip. Her parents had acted in the sixties art-house psychodramas of Gunnar Sternland, uttering lines like “I feel nothing but contempt for your emptiness!”—which to collegiate Tad had seemed more complicated than parents were capable of being. Inger had routinely seen them nude in saunas and even in their films, whereas Tad’s mom thought looking under automobiles was somehow dirty if you weren’t a licensed mechanic. Tad had been so proud to sleep with this tall, gorgeous, articulate girl whose ultraliberalism inclined her to sleep with the under-dog—in this case, Tad. He’d used her, he knew now, to be the envy of all his dorm mates. He was turned on by her beauty to others. She’d been his trophy as Bonny was Les’s, she was his White House rather than his Blue Lagoon. That had been and was still Tad’s fatal flaw, trying to ascend, trying to be taller, wanting to eat what the big boys eat. Looking at the abundant desserts Bonny had laid out, Tad remembered panicking as a child when he lay in bed and heard Les and Nat breaking open a forbidden bag of cookies in the kitchen below, which meant he wouldn’t get any. He felt trapped by his place in the food chain. All his life, he’d been a guppy trying to ingratiate himself with the dolphins.
Little Nat and Hunter emerged from the bedroom quarreling. “Fraid not!”
“Fraid so!”
“Fraid so!”
“Now what’s this all about?” Mom asked.
Nat theorized, “In either case, it involves being afraid.”
The slightly older Nat junior asserted, “You may be taller than me now, but you’ll never be older than me!”
“I hope I live to see them both married!” Mom said over their heads. She clearly lived to see these kids. Descendant worship.
Les wandered in wearing a bathrobe, with Bonny close behind, a discreet attendant who wanted her patient to walk on his own but stood ready to check any unsteadiness. His hair, which had been shaved off at the hospital before the doctors figured out that his self-surgery was complete, had grown out into a crew-cut like the kind Tad’s Avenue B hipster friends wore in lieu of military service. Stranger was Les’s glassy but benign expression. Nat closed his palm-top, and Mom couldn’t conceal her apprehension.
“Hello … every … body,” Les said carefully, puzzling over the last word as if just realizing how strange it is to greet others’ bodies. His eyes, usually bright with plans, focused on a far horizon like a savant at Shangri-la, or else like the accident survivors found wandering away from auto wrecks. “Here you are!” he added with unexpected vigor, as if he’d looked under the bed and in the closet for them earlier. “I thought there would be floating, you know, strings of things.” He looked toward the ceiling. “Things on strings.”
“What?” Tad asked cautiously, but he assumed Les was referring to Bonny’s customary intricate decorations. Hunter and Little Nat looked unsure of what to do, but they looked at the ceiling, as well.
“He looks good with the crew cut,” Dad piped in, trying to spin damage control on brain damage. Dad had always idealized his army days, vocally regretting that none of his sons had opted for armed service, despite the fact that postwar Hawaii had not given Dad much opportunity for heroics.
“Yes!” Les seemed pleased to understand anything he heard. “The crew! Part of the crew!” A hush fell, like a crisp bedsheet over a fresh corpse. Les giggled, though, and went over to the fireplace. He indicated the many greeting cards on the mantel. “Nat, this is funny!” He had a bond with adjacent brother Nat that hadn’t extended through and down to Tad. “Some are for my shooting me and some are for Christmas!” Among the aggressive red holiday cards were diffident pastel Cheer cards, distinct from Get Well cards, because getting well isn’t always an option.
“Yeah, incongruous!” Nat answered, unwilling to talk down even to the handicapped. “Poig-nant, even.” He vocalized the g as if to mock anyone who would actually find it so.
“We’re going Christmas shopping later,” Les announced with pleasure.
“Yes!” Bonny replied, encouraging him.
“There’re lots of nice things at Poverty Barn,” Les added.
“Oh, we’ll definitely go to Poverty Barn,” Bonny answered tautly, and turned to Mom and Dad. “It’s a sort of aphasia. The doctor says it may pass with time.”
“It may pass with time,” Les repeated supportively but with no obvious understanding, like a husband aye-ayeing his wife while reading the newspaper at the breakfast table. “Hello!” He smiled at the boys and at Tad, though it wasn’t clear if he knew who they were.
“You want to eat something, or not?” Bonny used the slightly arch voice she applied to Hunter.
Les grinned. “Mm! Want to!” He didn’t seem much like a corporate dynamo as he and Bonny went to find suitably soft food on the buffet table. Rekha took this moment to lead the boys back to their play station in the bedroom.
Nat eyed Tad with brotherly shorthand and muttered, “Imagine my surprise to encounter a frictionless surface.” Tad had put Vaseline on Nat’s bedroom doorknob one April Fools’ Day, and, waiting for his curse words, had only heard an intentionally loud musing from the other side of the door: “Imagine my surprise to encounter a frictionless surface.” Ever since then, the family had used the phrase whenever a mystifying inconvenience presented itself.
“Shades of Frank the Crank,” Dad whispered, alluding to his own impressively impoverished childhood, which was full of colorful sufferers. Frank the Crank was the retarded middle-aged son Dad’s next-door neighbors kept at home, who wandered through Waterville mildly reciting obscenities and discarded shiny objects as his consolation prizes for surviving the Depression.
“At least Les isn’t hyperventilating like he used to.…” Tad felt like he was pulling the family on a sled on a long, snowless sidewalk.
“Life’s not all butter and birthday cake,” Mom declared, then, inevitably, sighed. She’d always said this at challenging moments, which had maddened Tad as a child because it made the listener imagine butter applied to birthday cake. That went beyond fun into nauseating. “You know, the morning of his accident, I was looking out the window—you know, up in Waterville,” she began to recite. Tad had heard her tell this story several times already, by phone, but she seemed to need to tell it, like a rosary. “And what should I see in the bird feeder but a big black crow! A crow, in Waterville! It gave me a bad feeling.”
Tad had heard of similar omens from his grandmother, whose fear of the supernatural made Mom seem as rational as Rekha, and as he contemplated his mother’s ever-whiter hair, he was moved by how much like his grandmother she now was. It was because of Mom’s mother that Tad had first fallen in love with the strata of imaginary beings. She had taught him to distinguish the trooping fairies from the solitary ones, those lovelies that were cast out of heaven and those lowlies simply belched up by creation, those that changed shape and those that were simply invisible. Softly, patiently, presenting simple facts, she told him of their lairs and throne rooms. When schoolboy Tad asked her pointedly if she truly believed in all these species of goblin, pixie, and pookah, she said, “I don’t, personally, but I can’t help it if they’re there.”
“Oh, sure!” said disbeliever Nat. “So the banshee’s doing mere injuries now? I guess what with vaccines and the lower speed limits, death is down, he’s gotta moonlight.”
Tad felt Mom needed some support. “Well … I remember Gramma saying she saw the image of Grampa the same day they got the, uh, telegram.” His grandmother had always said of her late husband, “He wasn’t the man I married,” but she meant it literally, that “the Good Folk” had replaced him with an evil look-alike, a gray-haired changeling who then left her and died, while her real, faithful husband languished but lived in a bejeweled cavern in Avalon. She called them the Good Folk instead of the Bad Folk they were because if they were invisibly nearby and heard you, you’d be cursed. The fairies in that sense were like Communist Russia.
“Oh, dear …” Mom trembled, restraining herself from crying. “I mustn’t …” Tad remembered his grandmother telling him that the tears the living shed for the dead are poured into heavy oaken buckets, and the dead must carry them around, so it’s best not to weep for them. He’d later learned that belief went back to the famine, a draconian therapy for the grief-stricken. In his grandmother’s girlhood Ireland, even fantasy couldn’t keep misery out of the picture. So Mom had been taught to conceal her emotions out of fear of ectoplasmic reprisals.
“Now, wait a second. I think Les seems happier now than he ever has,” Nat pointed out, making the good news sound brutal somehow. “He’s peaceful, which he never was before.”
“He may be in a darlin’ mood, but he’s unemployable,” Dad responded. Dad was clearly pained at the sight of the one son whose accomplishments excited him, the one nonegg-head, gone gutless. Conquer, conquer, conquer, Tad reflected. That’s what men respect, and that’s why some of them assess homosexuality as a failure. They imagine it’s surrender instead of conquest. If Dad only knew, Tad mused, how he, too, was trying to scale the Alps or quell truculent natives. The few men he’d bedded, he was trying to control, to appropriate them, as if their muscles became his property for the duration. His blinkered sexuality was just as aggressive in its way as any old oil well, skyscraper, replicating chain of stores, spermlike spiraling football or atom bomb disseminating itself, fertilizing the earth with death.
“Maybe he could walk dogs for the busy,” Nat said with the straight face that he knew irked Dad.
“Here we are!” Bonny sounded like she was guiding a child down a precarious balance beam as she led Les to a seat by the television, then handed him a plastic mug of orange juice.
Dad changed the TV channel to a football game and chattered to the blank Les about which teams were where in the standings, compulsive small talk, as uttered in hospital rooms. As a child, Tad had wondered why his father gloated when a Boston team won anything. After all, Dad didn’t deserve any credit for what the little men on the TV accomplished.
“They all want that one thing,” Les mused, presumably meaning the football. “Why don’t they just get two? Each side will have one. All settled!”
Tad was intrigued by Les’s newfound pacifism. There was a time when Les and Dad had cared a great deal about standings—batting averages, yards gained, who were the power brokers, who was the quarterback, the honcho, the mayor, the senator. Dad had always been eager to be near the power, while being secretly stung by lacking it himself. Tad remembered how Dad always trailed after Mayor Halloran like the mad doctor’s dwarf assistant, or, anyway, like the jester beside the king. Were Tad’s desires as inherited as his height?
Tad wondered what would happen to Les. Cheer without Getting Well? And Bonny would have a hard time with her in-laws on her hands for another week. For a moment, his own problems were not on his mind. He also noticed that Les, despite his disorientation, was nonetheless still glisteningly clean-shaven. At the height of his empire, Les had been his own TV spokesman for the VitaManager stores, always presenting himself by saying, “I’m not only the owner—I’m my best customer!” His smooth Wonder Boy face always seemed headed for the camera like an approaching meteor or polished limousine, and in close-up, no one knew he was only five foot three.
“Les, you’re clean-shaven!” Tad tried direct address, but Les seemed absorbed in a TV commercial about a drumbeating toy rabbit using batteries that never run out.
“Stop! Rabbit!” he joked, presumably aware the TV couldn’t hear him, and turned to Dad. “Too much drums!”
“Yes indeed!” Bonny said, tapping his mug to remind him to drink.
“That’s what’s wrong with the world! Too much drums.” Tad joked. “Does he shave himself?” He now reverted to case study.
“Not yet. I shave him,” Bonny said. “Don’t I, Les?”
He nodded. “I used to drive there myself.”
“Every day?” Tad asked her.
“Every day. This way, I see the man I know. And my mother says if you keep groomed, you’ll make it through.” She stroked Les’s head, and he smiled.
“That’s nice,” he said. “I want to be a dog.”
Tad was confusingly impressed. What he had taken to be Bonny’s hardness now had a kindlier connotation—steadfastness. She had always insisted on mown lawns and pictures hung at matching heights, but Tad supposed it was her way of staving off meaninglessness. A square does make more sense than a squiggle.
“Oh, Tad!” Bonny said. “This is as good a time as any for the cake. Can I have the birthday candles?”
Tad felt the shock he’d had whenever a teacher announced a spot quiz. “Bonny, I—forgot!” To his surprise, Bonny, whom he’d imagined as relentless as a bullet train, began to cry. She had survived the tornado, only to be pierced by a straw. Les looked confused but remained in his seat. Rekha came in from the bedroom.
“Goodness, Bonny, are you all right?” She went to Bonny and held her, a surprising gesture for two differently aloof women.
Bonny composed herself quickly. “I’m just tired. Thanks.”
“You’ve been working too hard!” Rekha seemed to offer praise and criticism at once. They stood apart again, self-consciously, with Mom and Dad looking on.
“Oh my God, I’ve been distracted. I forgot!” Tad repeated. “I’ll go get some candles right now!”
“You don’t have to,” Bonny said. “I wasn’t crying about the candles.”
“I know, but I want to go! I bet Les will actually enjoy them!”
“Well, that’s true. All right, then!” Bonny went to the bathroom to splash some water on her face.
“I’ll go with you,” Nat said, to Tad’s surprise, and stood.
Rekha’s eyes widened subtly. “Well now, what shall we do in your possibly protracted absence?” She did a playful imitation of a colonial British accent, but Tad could tell she was asking not to be left to tend to drunken Dad and sunken Les.
Nat shrugged typically. “Hand out the presents. That’ll make for some busy work.”
Mom trotted out her crestfallen face. “Don’t you want to be here to see everyone’s expressions when they open their gifts?”
Nat joined Tad at the door. “Naah, I’ll just study the results. Anyhow, Tad will need help carrying the birthday candles.”
Tad tried to feel insulted, but in this case he actually enjoyed picturing Tom Thumb, struggling to fend off a mouse with a lit birthday candle. Colossal Planet.
At the door, he playfully grasped the doorknob and reenacted their fraternal punch line, hoping again to reattach some connection to Nat. “Imagine my surprise to encounter a frictionless surface!”
“Skip the shtick. See you all shortly!”
“Be careful!” Mom called.
Outside, the two brothers felt the easier confidentiality siblings share when their parents aren’t around. Even the frigid air was a bond.
“In a way, Les seems to be having a nice vacation,” Tad offered.
“Mm. The permanent vacation as described by the old girl groups. I hope his insurance is intact. I’d offer to look into it, but I assume Bonny knows what she’s doing.”
A young couple passed them, hand in hand and walking a golden retriever. Tad assumed it was a new relationship. “It’s Dad I’m worried about,” he said. “It was fine when he was fifty, but he’s seventy now.”
“The old man’s just lost it,” Nat announced simply. “He wants out of consciousness, I’d guess. Barely noon and the snake is out.” He was referring to the vein that bulged from Dad’s temple when he drank. “Luckily, the kids don’t seem to care. They don’t mind Les all that much, either. Kids just adjust and proceed.” Tad remembered being oddly tearless after his grandmother’s death, even though he’d loved her, and the odd sensation of how fun it was playing impromptu touch football with a rolled-up coat in the funeral parlor basement with the other children who were bored by the wake upstairs.
“So … Little Nat does like that Darth Vader costume I sent him.”
“Yeah yeah, Thanks, in quotes. The fact is, he hides in it. I think he’s just getting to the point where he’s self-conscious about how he looks.”
“What, that he’s small for his age?”
“Well, yeah, and that he’s of mixed race. The kids in his class are really aware of that stuff all of a sudden, and he doesn’t like being unique.”
“But it’ll be so cool eventually. He’ll be so beautiful—” Tad realized as he spoke this was not vocabulary Nat wanted to hear about his son. “Er, or handsome. You know what I mean. Anyway, the world he’ll be an adult in will be more enlightened than Dad’s and Mom’s was.”
“We hope. You can’t tell a kid to wait ten years to be hip.”
“And also, he’ll have the advantage—what is it called in biology? Heterosis. Hybrid vigor.” Tad tried to show off any science skills he could summon with Nat. It was his version of keeping up with the Joneses.
The cold now put a wedge between them. “So, what did you get Rekha?” Tad continued.
“Nothing. We don’t exchange gifts. It’s a waste of resources. And it’s our way of showing we trust each other.” Nat had once argued against cemeteries as a waste of resources in Debating Club at Waterville Latin, to the censure of the priest moderating. Twelve-year-old Tad had thought that was extremely hip, as if Nat were the Lucifer of logic.
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. But it’s a gesture, isn’t it, a love refresher, a necessary ritual?”
“Ritual is just delusion made legal,” Nat stated, as if recounting the major export of a foreign country. Tad thought of the typed postcard he’d received in the mail ten years before, announcing Nat and Rekha’s marriage like a change of address. When Nat and Rekha got serious, they didn’t get romantic. They got serious. As a couple, they seemed to have a hermetically private relationship, a secret society like the Masons, or the Thuggees, or the Serpent Club at Hale. “By the way,” Nat added, “what’s with the tight leather and no hat? You’re not a delinquent teenager. You’re entering middle age.” Nat wore an Arctic explorer-style bulky parka with a fur-lined hood. He had no problem with fur—if you can kill it, he figured, as a Darwinian, it had it coming.
Tad tentatively stood his ground. “It’s not that tight.”
“I just don’t want you to embarrass yourself.”
Tad tensed up again. What Nat meant was that he didn’t want Tad to embarrass him. “Are you annoyed with me about something?”
Nat didn’t answer at once. “Only that you ask annoying questions like whether I’m annoyed with you,” he said sharply, but then took a reactive breath. “Hey, Les’s body-snatcher routine is weirding me out, and pretending to be up, up, up for this job interview wore me out, and Dad is Dad, and if I can’t take it out on my little brother, who can I?”
Somehow this seemed a friendly concession from Nat. “Well, I know …” Tad felt like this was a bargaining table with two tiny nations. “But what about Rekha—can’t you be mad at, or with, her?”
Nat exhaled a one-note whistle. “Oh no. It doesn’t work that way.”
Tad knew Nat knew about Angelo, but it had never been acknowledged in words. “Are you annoyed with me for being gay?” he ventured. Both Nat and Tad had been schooled in the Waterville Latin assumption that gayness was a choice one made to get attention, though why anyone wanted the kind of attention it garnered was never fully explained.
“No, no,” Nat answered hotly. “That’s perfectly natural. Rekha and I knew some gay elephants in Bombay. They showed them heterosexual pachyderm porn, but it didn’t change anything. There are alcoholic elephants, too. They seek out fermented fruit.”
Tad didn’t like the equation of gayness and alcoholism, but he curbed his objection because he longed for peace with his brother, and at the moment, he needed friendly counsel rather than a debate. “For some reason, lately, I’m not even sure I actually am gay.”
Nat stopped in his tracks, the performer in him overplaying the gesture. He spread his arms wide. “Whoa! What am I holding here?”
Tad flinched, recognizing a private childhood joke, deployed to express disbelief. “World’s largest invisible coffee cup,” he murmured.
Nat now drum-rolled his lips like a fidgety horse. “And what is this I’m doing?” he recited.
Tad sighed. “World’s largest spit take.”
“Exactly. Taxonomy check! Eight legs makes an arachnid! If you’re not gay, what about those five years you spent playing house with Pinocchio?” Despite his doctorate, Nat prided himself on his Waterville street-life frankness.
“Well, exactly, I think we were just playing house. I was the husband, I felt safe with him. But most men are disgusting, and self-absorbed! I admire women, but somehow I’m not ready.”
Nat had to decide if he was going to walk through this mental mud puddle or not. “Well … laddie, you are more confused than an anal-retentive anarchist. You’re thirty-four and think maybe you’re still just afraid of girls?”
“Well, we are Irish. And … I mean, women are a better species. I like the way they’ve got this war and murder thing beat, for the most part.”
“I like Isaac Newton, but that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with him.”
“Well, and, at least with men being with women, it’s clear who’s on top and who’s on the bottom.”
Nat stopped again, spreading his arms even wider this time. “What am I holding?” he repeated.
“Oh come on,” Tad protested, but he played along to prevent a quarrel. “World’s largest invisible coffee cup.…”
“No!” Nat said intensely. “Largest invisible coffee cup in the universe. Boyo, if you think the way men and women relate is as simple as that, you really are even more childish than I ever suspected.”
This grieved Tad, the knowledge that however much fun they could share, however allied to provide color commentary on the world’s widescreen burlesque, in his heart Nat saw Tad as junior varsity, second string, a noncompetitor in the arena. Nat’s unspoken theory was that gay men could handle the solitary stuff—the weight lifting, the diving, the one-night stands—but straight men still excelled at boxing and marriage.
They walked in silence for a minute. “I just meant, you know, traditionally.… The way sky and earth are male and female in Greek mythology, because the sky is on top.…” Tad looked to Nat, but the session was over.
Somewhere, church bells rang, girlishly and gravely, and Tad remembered it was Sunday, and none of the Learys had even mentioned considering going to Mass. He’d stopped going his freshman week at Hale, but he thought Mom still went, as if to get credit from her own long-dead mother for taking her castor oil.
The corner deli was overheated and crowded with late-rising brunch shoppers, but still a relief from the gray cold outside. A hand-lettered cardboard sign on the cash register declared: “BEST” COFFEE IN TOWN. Tad liked the quotation marks around the word best, as if their coffee wasn’t really the best, or else the whole idea of best was somehow debatable.
“Tony? I have a void!” A pretty teenaged Hispanic woman behind the counter was calling to the stockroom. Her large liquidy eyes made Tad think of Angelo. “I have a void! Can you help me fix that?” An impatient-looking old Caucasian codger stood by, drumming his fingers on his purple down jacket. The closeness of the shelves, the milling customers, oxenlike in their winter wear, and the excess heat felt to Tad—who compulsively converted here to elsewhere in his mind—as if he were in a tiny stable, a manger, whatever a manger is.
Over the counter hung a breakfast menu labeled BARNYARD SUGGESTIONS, which struck Tad as slang for talking dirty. As decoration, a cartoon pig and chicken merrily offered the viewer a plate of bacon and eggs. Tad nudged Nat, hoping, as always, that the right joke would win his brother’s respect.
“Look at that!” He pretended to gasp. “Do those animals have any idea what they’re doing?”
Nat played along automatically. “I think therapy has taught them to embrace their destinies.”
“Mm,” Tad continued. “Deli Be My Destiny.”
“It’s like Dad serving up his liver on a platter,” Nat went on. Before Tad could gasp, this time sincerely, Nat had calmly refocused his attention to the pretty salesclerk. “Do you carry birthday candles, like for cake?” he asked, carefully specific.
“Are the candles for Baby Jesus’ birthday?” she asked playfully, her brown eyes like inviting ponds boys play hooky to swim in. Tad liked that. Her soft neck. The moment was jarred by the appearance of Tony, a large, dented version of handsome, who pressed a button, resolved her void, and valiantly retreated to the stockroom. Which one did Tad want?
Nat never flirted. “No, for a human,” he said over the register’s clicking.
The girl produced a tiny box of candles from somewhere behind the counter, and Nat quickly paid for them.
Tad was surprised. “Nat! It was my mistake. I should pay for them.”
“Forget it,” Nat said. “I’m pulling a mini-Jesus.”
The young cashier smiled but knew not to intrude on New Yorkers’ private conversations. She put the candles in a bag that read WE LOVE OUR CUSTOMERS. Instead of the word love was the happy, symmetrical symbol for the heart, so unlike the squishy, unbalanced actual organ. The girl looked radiantly at Tad as she gave Nat his change and said, “Happy birthday!”
“Yes, same to you!” Tad answered nonsensically, aroused but aware it was only his ego that was. Then it dawned on him that she had used that goo-goo inflection on him that is reserved for children. His possible love object thought he was younger than she was.
Suddenly, the edgy man in the down jacket started barking in agitation, something about how a customer who’d just left must have stolen his wallet. “I’ll bet it’s a racket, and you people are in on it!” he shouted to the frightened young woman. Tad considered chasing the suspect to impress Nat, but Tony, the cashier’s void-fixer, had already sprinted out after someone he hadn’t even seen, leaving the crowded store in silent confusion.
After a few seconds, the panicky man discovered his wallet in his jacket pocket. “Oh, wait—no, here it is!” He had to be loud to stop the tension ball he’d gotten rolling, but he clearly also tried to underplay it as an event. Tony returned out of breath and empty-handed, since there was no one to capture. Tad and Nat stared uncomfortably, and the accusing man observed, “I used to live in New York, but it’s stuff like this that made me leave.” His illogic reminded Tad of Justin’s mother. So much unnecessary trouble. The old man had probably provoked that void, too, Tad concluded.
The odd experience made the return walk feel slightly out of kilter. “So—you said you’ve been distracted?” Nat began. “What’s distracting you?”
“Well …” Tad decided to confide in Nat, especially since Nat had asked. “Do not tell Mom or Dad this, with all they have to deal with.… My friend Garth is returning to New York next week and I have to find a new place to live.” He left out the more distracting getting fired part, knowing Nat might somehow suspect Tad of being guilty as charged.
“Don’t they have spare cots at that school you teach at?” Nat asked. “I slept at my lab for a while, years ago.”
Tad ad-libbed. “Well, the Health Board doesn’t allow anyone to live there.…”
“I see.… Well, Sheep’s Crossing can be your hideout for a … an hour or two.…” Nat smiled, his generosity couched in the mockery that made him able to offer it. “We don’t move until the Epiphany.”
“Whoa, thanks, Nat. I just don’t know what’s happening yet.”
“There’s your epitaph,” said Nat. “TAD LEARY—I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING YET.” To Tad’s amazement, Nat put his parka’d arm around his brother’s leathered shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “That’s human consciousness for ya!”
Back at Les’s, which now seemed overheated from food and running children, or only by comparison with the cold outside, Les sat on the couch as Bonny fed him a soft-boiled egg, spoonful by spoonful. Tad remembered with grief and pleasure how Mom used to spoon-feed soft-boiled eggs to him long after he could do it for himself. Tad had sensed she enjoyed doing it, and he’d felt guilty as a gigolo when Dad had groused that spoiling the boy that way would turn him into a sissy. Mom turned her gaze from Les to Tad mournfully.
Tad tried to comfort her. He owed her for the eggs gone by. “He is okay, Mom. And he will get better. Remember when Angelo’s sister was in that car crash and got amnesia? She thought her brothers were spies trying to kill her. She eventually got her memory back.”
“I hope so,” Mom said, though her inflection was hopeless. Across the room, Hunter and Nat junior had finished assembling the Visible Horse, an instructional medical model with a skeleton and pastel-colored viscera held inside a transparent horse’s body.
“We didn’t open any presents but the children’s,” Rekha explained. “I won’t be here, but still, we don’t want Christmas itself to be anticlimactic.”
“Les and Bonny gave me the Visible Horse!” Nat junior called, and without thanking him, he addressed Les. “Is it a boy horse or a girl horse?” Tad couldn’t tell if little Nat understood Les’s condition or just was unimpressed by it.
“Doesn’t it say?” Nat asked. Nat junior, already an avid reader, scrutinized the box the toy came in, the way he always examined the inner lids of board games for the more obscure rules. Tad noticed it was made by a company called the Nature Factory.
Mom tried to get back to old-fashioned sexlessness. “It isn’t either one. It’s a ghost, after all.” Tad found her Gramma-like comment bemusing, but he reflected that in most pictorial representations, ghosts did tend to fizzle out at the waist, and trailed off like smoke or a kite tail. Presumably, the dead can’t have kids.
“It’s not dead—it’s just visible,” junior scientist Nat maintained. “They just didn’t include genitals!”
Mom gave a strangled hiccup of surprise.
“Come on, let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ maybe a few carols!” Tad resorted to a Yule duty he didn’t like himself, but Mom played piano, and this could put her in a pleasant, diversionary spotlight for a few minutes. “Bonny, is that piano in tune?”
“I don’t know. I just got it because Modern Shelter said it gave a room grace and purpose.”
“Carol call! All wassail on deck!” Tad called to the boys, but they had gone into the bedroom, from which unearthly explosions and screams began to emanate. They were now immersed in installing Hunter’s gift games, DinoZombie and Space Stalker, and refused to come out. The Visible Horse was apparently already forgotten and outdated, the eohippus at the auto show.
“Carols is just a code word for dumb old songs!” Hunter RSVP’d finally.
“Okay, you don’t know what you’re missing!” Tad found himself saying. Adulthood has a magic and sense of play that children in their seriousness know nothing about.
The adults first sang “Happy Birthday,” with Mom accompanying in her plodding but reassuring way, like a burro ride. Les good-naturedly sang along, although he seemed to think the words were “Half a birthday to you, half a birthday to you,” and when they got to his name, he just hummed, the way playful diners in restaurants do when they sing along for the benefit of a stranger’s arriving cake at a nearby table.
Then Mom tried Christmas carols. As she played, sweet, childlike, perplexed concentration in her eyes as she summoned up chords from her rusty repertoire on the cozily out-of-tune piano, Tad remembered the happier times they’d had singing songs. She’d helped him learn the scores for school musicals, and it was one of the few times she seemed to relax and delight in being herself. Now she seemed disappointed that her onetime alter ego had become a problematic adult, and was, technically, hell-bound. She could never approve of him as wholeheartedly as she had when he’d gotten a standing ovation as Peter Pan, although even then, to public-conscious Les and private-minded Nat, Tad’s acting had seemed an uneasy combination of exhibitionism and embarrassment. Tad again recalled he hadn’t done his gift shopping, and he decided he’d give Mom a framed photo of himself onstage as Puck, glamorously sinking in half-light, almost as a plea for her to take him back on the terms that preceded his coming out. Dad didn’t see drama as a varsity sport, or at least was unimpressed by Puck, but Mom might yet be his friend again.
Nat suggested they sing the parody lyrics he and Tad always devised for the duller carols. “King Kong Marilyn Monroe, Tintin and Bella Abzug!” he called, more energized than he had been all day.
It was his revenge on “Ding dong merrily on high in heav’n the bells are ringing.” He hated its starchy version of joy, the odious onomatopoeia of ding dong, and the fact that heav’n was supposed to be sung, arduously, as one syllable.
“King Kong Marilyn Monroe! Tintin and Bella Abzug! King Kong Sara Lee and I have all been sent to Sing Sing!”
To Tad’s delight, Les sat up and sang all the parody words exactly right, and then grinned with satisfaction. The group fell silent, except Mom, who barreled on. She was concentrating on hitting the right notes.
“Les! Good for you!” Bonny said.
“Songs are easier than talking,” Les explained. “They’re already there.”
“He remembers the words! That’s great, isn’t it?” Tad blurted. He had always assumed Les disdained the indoor comedy antics Nat and Tad resorted to for a social life. “He’s in there all right! Try another one!”
Mom, who didn’t approve of parody, lumbered on into “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” its lugubriousness the musical equivalent of one of her sighs. Tad and Nat sang a few lines obligingly, but confusion arose about the lyrics.
“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.
Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day,
To save us all from Satan’s power—”
“No!” Mom stopped playing. “ ‘Woe and sin.’ It’s ‘To save us all from woe and sin.’ ”
“Hmm. Alternate versions.” Tad remembered hearing both at different times.
“Oh, so ‘Satan’s power’ is too scary for Christmas carols,” Nat suggested. “ ‘Woe and sin’ is tiring, but, relatively, it’s blander.”
“I don’t want to be singing Christmas carols with Satan right in them!” Mom sounded dazed. She did have some of her mother’s apprehensions.
“Like you don’t expect the Alien during Holiday Inn,” Nat offered.
“Where’s Les?” Rekha asked.
Les had wandered away, having turned his attention to the gingerbread men. He was walking one of them across the buffet table as if shopping in a town square. “Doughnuts?” he seemed to speak on its behalf. “Oh no! Cake doesn’t eat other cake!”
The moment for singing had clearly passed. After a pause, from the bedroom there arose such a clatter, Nat and Rekha went to see what was the matter. The boys were arguing about the rules of who kills whom in DinoZombie, since the competing monsters were technically already dead. Tad had been bombarded all summer with media and children alike reciting the slogan of the hit movie the CD-ROM was tied into: “They’re dead, but they’re not extinct!”
Despite the noise, Dad was dozing again at this point, which made him seem eerily helpless, extinct but not dead. Tad shuddered at his father’s stillness, as if Dad were rehearsing something more. In the dining room, Bonny whispered gently to Les. Tad suggested in this time-out that he might leave soon, to get to his matinee.
“I know your friends have invited you for Christmas Eve,” Mom said. Tad had resorted to imaginary friends to give himself an out if he found the prospect of Christmas with the family too much in his confused condition. “You go ahead. We understand.”
“Well … it’s a big reception,” he said. “So it doesn’t matter to them if I’m there or not, so maybe I will join you all again.”
“Good. I mean, well, if you can. We really didn’t get much chance to catch up.”
“No, Mom, I know, what with Dad and Les …”
“And Nat moving to Iowa!” She considered moving away as partial credit toward tragedy.
“Well, Illinois, yes.”
“I hope God takes time off my stay in purgatory for all this,” Mom said tremulously. Nat could be heard click-clicking on his palm-top in the other room, even above the electrically evoked dinosaur caws.
“Oh, Mom.” Tad hugged her. “I think we’re already in purgatory.”
Mom didn’t address this possible heresy. “Anyway … Like I said … If you want to be with your friends, we’ll understand.”
“Thanks, Mom. We’ll see. I’ll try.” It dawned on Tad with a mixture of guilt and happiness that he was Mom’s extramarital affair that had never happened. He had been her devoted consolation in Dad’s decline, and he had disappointed her. Then he thought of the New Year’s Eves of his childhood, in the house that was now about to be sold, when the Learys would go out on the back porch at midnight and bang pots and pans together and yell. It was the only time he’d ever heard his mother raise her voice.
“I’m sorry about giving up the house,” he added.
“Well, it’s not like it burned down,” Mom observed, ever prorating loss. “We had forty years in that house.” Fast away the old year passes.
Bonny walked Tad out, and gave him a “let’s talk” look in the hallway. For a heated moment, Tad feared she was about to ask him not to touch Hunter, but she said, “Tad … Nat just told me.… You have to leave your sublet.”
“I didn’t want to worry anyone, what with everything else.…”
“I understand. I just want you to know, if you really need someplace to stay, come stay on the couch here.”
“Bonny, you’re crowded here as it is! Mom and Dad must be driving you—” Tad felt dizzy, to find himself confiding in Bonny about his parents’ failings.
“You could help me get through this. And Hunter’s crazy about you, he is. He doesn’t forget you, he just gets shy when he’s not around you for a while.”
Tad hadn’t expected her goodness, and he shuddered at the depth he now saw existed where he’d only seen shallows. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean he’d look forward to living on her couch and in her crisis.
“Oh, Bonny, that’s so generous. But with all you’ve got to deal with …”
“Well, the doctors say Les might recover, not completely, but enough so he’d be like, well, nonexecutives.…” Tad wondered if she’d add “like you.” What she said was, “Gardening, one doctor suggested.”
Tad thought of Angelo’s family, the Silvarinis, and their typically grating but ultimately truly named High-Class Gardeners business. “Plants don’t talk,” Mr. Silvarini had once told Tad, as one reason he liked his work. He seemed happy enough—after all, he leapt up at dawn at age seventy. Les might yet find a hitherto-unacceptable happiness.
“Yes, you said he might recover.” Tad hurried back into the moment. “I hope so.” He liked this lackadaisical Les more than the tightly wound self-whipping charioteer, leaping from phone to fax as if every minute were the final minute of a free shopping spree. “Anyway, let me see what happens. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Your mother really wants you to come back for Christmas Eve.”
“I know.” Tad squirmed. “I have plans, but … I probably will.”
“It sounds like I shouldn’t count on you to play Santa.”
“I’m just confused, Bonny. Um … do you really need someone to play Santa?”
She laughed, to his surprise. “Oh, looking for a good role! No, the kids are too sophisticated for that. I just mean, it sounds like you don’t want to come.”
“I do, Bonny, I … You know, Les seems healthy, in a way.”
“Yes. But children—and this child has a child of his own … can’t survive without … sponsorship?” She squinted, as if she barely understood herself.
“Yes, I have no answer, or cure, for that. Well … Thanks so much, Bonny. I’ll call you … tomorrow!” Tad said. He had found a friend in an unexpected relative.
“Your folks have only so many more times to see you!” Bonny reminded him as he walked away.
Tad was unnerved. Bonny, the supposed trophy, had made exactly the right point.