In the unquiet of his shoe-box study, amid the noises of his house, Walt tries to read. Walt Kaplan. Furniture salesman, daydreamer, reader. It’s 1947, a year no one will much remember. After the war, but before anybody really got used to the war being over. He gives up. How could anybody read in this asylum? The peck of the clock nicks away his flesh. No matter how much I eat, he thinks, it makes no difference. I’m a fat husk. A funny thing. Sarah’s downstairs on the phone: the phone. Such fathomless yappery. Why, why must she shout? Is everyone who rings this house in need of orders? And there is the thump of Miriam’s battering up and down the stairs. Eleven years old and the kid sounds like a platoon. And he aches for her. He always has. So that somehow hearing her is the same as not hearing her is the same as her gone. What? Kid this loud? Possible? Gone? Such cacophony. I am a morbid man, a morbid, lazy sloucher. He shouts, “Knock it off, Orangutan! You got a father in here thinking.” The kid doesn’t answer. So he talks to Sarah without talking to Sarah, which is one of the great advantages of being married so long. Cuts down on the need for superfluous conversation. He talks to the idea of her. She talks on the phone.
I’m talking fundamentals, Sarah, follow me? You make something in this world, take, yes, a child, and then? Then?
Don’t be daft. We got bills to pay and cocktails at the Dolinskys’ at eight.
Dolinskys? What could we possibly have to say to them that hasn’t been said?
We can’t be late. Doris made reservations at the Lobster Pot for quarter to nine. They’ll give our table away.
So much for mine wife’s wise counsel. Not that I don’t enjoy a good cocktail as much as the next man. Glenlivet for me, thanks. Nobody can say Walt Kaplan doesn’t have a certain amount of class. But listen: What I’m getting at is silence and what it means in a world where there’s not any, at least we think there’s not any, but we got a whole lot coming, you know? I tell the kid, Knock it off, Orangutan, you got a father in here thinking… and if the kid heard, which even if she did, she didn’t, she might have stopped at my door and spoken through the keyhole and said, Thinking about what, Daddy? And I might have said, I’m remembering things, which is hard work. You think remembering things is a peanut, Peanut?
Remembering what?
Lot of things. For instance the hurricane of ’38, when I, your father—
That story!
You think a story dies?
(Her little mouth breathing through the keyhole.) Five hundred times I’ve heard that same story.
Five hundred and one, five hundred and two, five hundred and three. Your mother is home here in Fall River, and you and I, Orangutan, are out on the Cape at Horace’s place in Dennis. A little father and daughter vacation from the dragon, and the dragon calling up and squawking, Didn’t you hear the weather? Get out of there! Evacuate! You’ll get swept to—
China, the kid would say through the keyhole. We’re always getting swept to China in this family.
Precisely! And Walt Kaplan knows who’s boss. The man takes good orders, and he blankets you up. You were two years old and your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs. I ever tell you that? That your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs? Every time you tell anything, you have to add something new. And your father, great and fearless father, carries his daughter to the mainland in his Chrysler Imperial steed. Last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the hurricane of ’38 sent half the Cape into the Atlantic. They called it the Long Island Express. New Yorkers got to have their nose in everything. They even take our disasters. Rhode Island blew away, too, but nobody noticed. What’s half of Rhode Island anyway? Is your mother never wrong? No—she hasn’t got the time. She’s got Louise Greenbaum on the line. Paging Sarah Kaplan. Sarah Kaplan. Louise Greenbaum on the line. So, yes, hail the Sultana! But salute the infantryman, too. Walt Kaplan, hero of the Sagamore Bridge. Write him down as a footnote in the annals, hearty scribes!
And so Walt sits in the unstillness of his shoe-box study and thinks about fundamentals.
You make a kid, and the wind comes and tries to air mail it to Asia. Insurance got Horace a new house. The claim: Act of God. Act of God? State Farm’s going to send me a new kid? That only happens in the Book of Job. Last car, Walt Kaplan, dodges the terrible wrath of wraths, but how many more to come? How many acts has God got left? What on earth compares with the shame of not being able to protect your daughter, your only only? Let a father weep in peace, Orangutan. That fuckin’ thumping. Hellion child. The devil’s spawn. Sarah, my yappery-yapperer. Not the clock that dooms us, but the us of us. We’re walking, talking Acts of God. Don’t you get it? The thumping will not echo. It only booms in the brain, in the silence which is nowhere. A grave has more hold than the noise of this house. Miriam’s feet tromp up and down the stairs. You say I don’t get out enough, that I waste my life’s blood cooped up here being morbid, being stupid. Sarah? Sarah? You hearing me?
The kid’s gonna die, Walt. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. Tell me something else, you genius.
Don’t laugh at me, woman.
You want me to start weeping now? This minute? We got cocktails at Dolinskys’ at—
That’s it. I’m asking you, I’m really asking you—how is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?
I ironed you a shirt. It’s on the bathroom knob.
Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.