INSPIRATION

He and Father Tom went their separate ways, Ives watching the priest get into a taxi. Nicely invigorated by the chilly air, he stood looking into a travel-agency window near Rockefeller Center. Up on the walls were placards about places he had never seen and probably would never see in his life, from Singapore to Lima, Peru. He thought about the family trip to Italy back when they had returned in a celebratory frame of mind and how he and Annie had once talked about spending their retirement traveling. Some places he still wanted to visit: Egypt and Israel, for the old ruins and for the Holy Land; he had even found out about Catholic group tours to the latter, sent away for their brochures, but, as much as he had wanted to go, he was afraid of going to Jerusalem or to the Church of the Nativity and being disappointed. When he shut his eyes, having just looked at the image of the bright Egyptian sun, he remembered back to when he was a child and would look through books about Egypt, with their endless pages of sarcophagi and temples, and depictions of bright orange Egyptian suns, and he would think that Egypt was a land of God and eternal things. He had once thought he would go there, to see the pyramids, that he would then travel to the Holy Land and rest his eyes on the Sea of Galilee one day—and now?

During their lunch, Father Tom had asked Ives if he and Annie had ever planned on going back to Europe, and Ives had related how they “just never got around to it.” But if they hadn’t gone anywhere, it was no one’s fault but his own.

Many times over the years he had received invitations to visit Latin America from executives he had gotten to know. A Señor Miguel Alvarado, a certain Señor Barrancas, Señor Oliver. Friendly men who had simply extended a bit of hospitality, which Ives had declined again and again, until the invitations stopped coming. There had been an invitation to give lectures on the advertising business in Japan. He and Annie were going to combine that trip with a cruise of the South Pacific on the old Holland-America line, one of his agency’s clients, but Ives, in a fit of depression, canceled that. Every year, too, his wife had suggested the British Isles, as he told Father Tom, and every year he had been held back by his own doubts, making untruthful excuses about one job or the other. His anxiety about flying, which he had never liked, his tendency in his advancing years to become more and more staid, was closer to the truth.

He thought about the last time she had come home with one of her pep talks in mind, clutching a New York Times: “Just look at this, Ed. Look here,” and she showed him a page. A sleek jetliner was pictured flying over the skyline of London, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace prominent, the advertisement declaring: “It’s Never Been Easier. Or Cheaper!” And he looked it over and handed it back to her.

“Well, what about it?” he’d asked.

“Don’t you think it would be nice for us to go?”

“Yes, yes…”

Then, slapping a book down on the table, a chronic weariness of mind and body hit him.

“Yes, we’ll go. I’ll pay for it, and then you tell me who’ll pay the bills a year from now if something should happen to me.”

“But Ed, we’re not badly off.”

“That’s not the point. You don’t understand, do you?” and he went down the hall into the bathroom, slamming the door. Then he stood before the mirror, pouring cold water over his face, already regretting his outburst. Later, when he came out, he found a note. She had gone off to the movies with a friend.

AS HE STARTED WALKING WEST, HE PROMISED HIMSELF THAT HE WOULD go through with the trip this time, overcome the paralysis that sometimes seized him. Headed toward the subway, he decided to be more upbeat about things. Annie was in her early sixties, and even though he looked about fifteen years older than she, with the exception of his troubled skin they were both in good health. God willing, they’d have another ten or fifteen years together, and even though it would become progressively harder to get around, maybe they’d even make that trip to see the pyramids. They’d go on tours of the Greek Isles, maybe return to Italy, maybe rent a car in Portugal and drive into the Algarve, and then hop a ferry for Spain. Or simply remain in North America, drive out west and perhaps head down to Mexico and search for the Plumed Serpent. He felt exhilarated by the whole notion, and yet by the time he had gone down into the crowded subway, smothered and pushed aside, and asked for money a half-dozen times between the Fiftieth Street and Ninety-sixth Street stops, by the time he had gone into a D’Agostino’s to buy some groceries, and waited in the interminable line, finally getting home, he was so exhausted that he could not keep his eyes open for the six-thirty news; and by that time, feeling the wine and his age, all these other trips had become fantasies, and he’d decided that it would be enough for them to go to London.

HIS GREATEST HAPPINESS

Another Christmas was approaching, and although the holiday did not mean as much to Ives as it once did, Ives took a deep joy in his grandchildren. And he was happy to see that despite some rough times his daughter and Paul had a good marriage. They lived in the old neighborhood, in a rent-controlled apartment that Paul had found years before. Their domestic happiness was something he could not have predicted, because, way back when, Ives, deep down inside, never thought Paul would make it, so many different things pulling on him at the same time.

They were a nice enough couple as teenagers. Then came those years when Caroline went off to college and he had remained in the city, suffering from afar over their separation, the poor kid hitching out to see her every so often. He remembered that when she had first gone off to Antioch she had been a well-behaved, if somewhat exacting, individual, a self-confident young woman (thank God), who played her Liszt and Mozart on the piano and was a good student, starved for the world. Even though Paul, it seemed to Ives, had gone off the deep end, possibly to irritate his Cuban father, she had remained fairly level-headed. And yet slowly she started to change. Around her junior year she broke up with Paul, started dating a Danish exchange student. Nothing came of that, but it left Paul so unhappy that he dropped out of college and hit the road with a rock ’n’ roll band and made a couple of well-received, but modestly selling record albums—his great “moment” an extended tour through the mid and far west, during the last lingering days of the hippy phenomenon. He was considerate enough to write the occasional letter to Ives and his wife, from Boulder, Colorado Springs, Tucson, or Santa Fe. Every one of his notes ended with some sad summation involving Caroline: “When you talk to her, tell her I miss her very much.” “Would you ask her why she hasn’t written me?” “Do me a favor, please use that ten dollars to buy her some flowers, next time she’s home.” And, sometimes: “As for your daughter, I wish it had worked out.”

Ives could not imagine what went wrong—he and Ramirez were counting on becoming in-laws. On this matter, Ramirez would say to Ives, “The one good thing my son had going was with your daughter, and he fucked that up.” He had made this kind of statement without realizing, as Ives later found out, that Caroline had broken up with Paul because of the way he dealt with his father. She couldn’t bear to be with someone who would take so much abuse. Their fights and loud arguments were legendary in the neighborhood. Once at two in the morning, when Paul had come in stoned with a Christmas tree, which he’d set up in the living room, the half silence of the noisy city, even at that time of the night, was split open by the crash of shattering glass. Noticing his son’s glazed eyes, pinched like Spanish olives, Luis had it out with him, shouting things in Spanish like, “¡Yo soy el dueño de la casa, y lo que quiero hacer, lo hago!”—“I am the master of this house and what I want to do, I do!” and Pablo answering him in English, because Spanish sounded to him like the language of terror, “Would you… would you please leave me alone!” “What have I done to you?” And: “No! Don’t, Poppy!” all of that resounding in the courtyards, and so loudly, that people, like Caroline, awake and sitting up in bed, could hear his shouts and sobs.

So that night they fought—that is, his son who would not hurt a fly, covered up, took his blows with belt and fist, in the name of “love and peace,” which was how Pablo greeted his friends on the street—and it got to a point where Luis took the Christmas tree and tossed it, stand and all, out through one of their front windows. When the cops came, Ramirez told them to arrest his son for drugs, but Paul had climbed down the fire escape, spent the night riding the subway trains. Through it all, Carmen had stood in a corner of the living room, pleading and praying that they stop.

There were other incidents: his father found everything about his Americanized son exasperating. Politics particularly killed him, because Paul, even knowing about the experiences of his cousins who’d left Cuba, reluctantly, dejectedly, angrily, had a strong sympathy for the leftist Cubans. It was not even an issue of whether his father might have been correct in his beliefs, but that he didn’t leave any room for discussion. Reading all kinds of books, and having studied political science in school, Paul could say with some authority that, no matter what one’s feelings were, revolutions happened for real reasons—and in Cuba, before Castro, there had been a widespread underclass that suffered great privation. That was all he wanted his father to admit, but even that was too much. Why he felt so compelled to put his own son down no one knew. But there were occasions when even Ives was taken aback as Ramirez had told him about fathers having to set their sons straight sometimes or else they might have it too easy: “What’s a little argument or slap in the face,” he used to say.

The craziest thing about it, and what had exasperated Caroline, was that Paul remained so good-hearted about the whole thing. Every time something like that happened, he wanted to move out, and his mother, her two daughters married and living on their own, would beg him to stay. And she would needle her husband until he apologized. He probably felt genuinely sorry, but, in Caroline’s eyes, what he said made the situation even more pathetic. “You know, son, no matter what I say to you, or if I hit you now and then, you know that, underneath, I really love you.” Or: “A fight is a fight, and passes, but our blood will bind us together forever.” And Paul would think: Okay, cool está bien, hombre, and that would be it, until the next time, and Caroline would go out with him, and they would sit in the park, and this cool Cochise-looking hippy would start crying with frustration, and she would kiss and hold him, in the way that he had held her, with great tenderness and compassion, when Robert had been killed, and she was beside herself with confusion and grief.

Then she would tell him, “You’ve got to get away from him. He may love you, but that’s not the way people are supposed to show it.”

“I know, but really, Caroline, he’s a good guy, deep down.”

And she’d say to him: “My God, what’s he got to do, kill you?”

Over time Antioch changed her. With each year she felt herself more mature, declared that she saw things with more clarity. Like her mother she was attracted to the arts, and had studied languages—Spanish, to her father’s amusement, Italian, and a smattering of French. After two years of study, after several intensive “saturation” courses in Spanish, she could have a good conversation with Luis and Carmen if she liked, and so impressed her future father-in-law, Luis, that he commented in front of his son, “My goodness, she speaks better than you do.”

After her third year in college, when she felt that she needed time to think about their relationship, he felt like killing someone, but didn’t; he felt like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the church basement, but didn’t; he felt like shoving his father out the window, but didn’t.

(Curiously, everybody who later read his book A History of Cuban Hippiness, 1990, was surprised by his candor, for in that “novel” he described the pure agony of that rejection—accustomed as he had become to bedding her down within the very first day of her visit home, and suddenly finding himself alone in the world, in a sense. In any case, one of the things that would impress Ives was how, despite such mangled, horrible feelings of confusion and pain, Paul Ramirez had managed to keep himself out of trouble. In that book, there were hints about how certain people in the neighborhood had helped the protagonist, how reading different books early on, which he borrowed from a family whose father, Mr. Currier, worked in advertising, had exposed him to ideas and possibilities that he might not have had otherwise: certainly he would not have found them in his own home, and so he cited that kind of exposure to literature as an important, life-saving influence. There were other influences: being around the work ethic, and people who bought all that hokey stuff in the Bible, made a difference too. And although Ives did not care for certain of the graphic sex scenes, which he suspected might have been about relations with his own daughter, even when he was told that it had been “made up,” so much love and good feelings came through in the book that all was forgiven. And reading, he could not help but wonder how years ago that other troubled young man, Daniel Gomez, might have fared given just a few better breaks; perhaps his son would still be alive and saying 9 A.M. Mass that coming Sunday somewhere in the city.)

Hitting the road with the Savages, Paul Ramirez experienced fleeting comforts and amusing interludes; a few years later found him finishing school at City College and moving out to San Francisco, coming back and finally beginning to reconcile with his father.

For her part, in the spirit of the times and not wanting the life of her mother, Caroline thought she should see something of the world and signed up for the Peace Corps, which sent her off to Nepal. One of Ives’ happier times took place during a four-month period before she left for the Peace Corps, when she came to work at the agency, in the “international” division (one executive and a clerk). Regarding his smart daughter with great pride every time he ran into her, which was daily, he would eavesdrop on her speaking her Italian or French or Spanish on the telephone.… And he loved the fact that Mannis had come into his office one day to say, “Nice job you did raising your daughter, Ives.” He’d gotten so used to riding the subway with her in the mornings and seeing her on a regular basis that when she gave notice he fell into a deep funk again.

Traveling to Nepal, and for a period of time so much longer than Ives, loving her so, would have wanted, she spent two years in mystic Kathmandu and in the foothills of the Himalayas, teaching English and modern hygienic practices to the good-natured people who lived there. Then she passed another year in independent travel through that region, at the edge of the world.

HER MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE EXPLAINED

There was the autumnal day when the first of several crates began to arrive at the apartment. They contained, Ives would later observe, rubbings made of rice paper and chalk, taken from many a Brahman temple wall, a number of them images of men and women, limbs entangled, sexual organs engaged in amorous sport—the prankish, juvenile Krishna or Bala Gopola, “the cowherd lad,” with various women, most prominently his mistress, Radha, at play in their gardens of love. And there were representations of Vishnu and Siva, Lords of the Universe, and a box filled with what seemed to Ives like ordinary stones, in fact s’alagram stones, symbolic of Siva.

Much was there that baffled Ives, and intrigued him—numerous representations of Hindu deities, some of which Ives could not identify and some which he could, and many representations of mandalas and other such mystic symbols. Some cloth paintings were representations of the All-Seeing Eye, the eye of the Buddha. And with them were all kinds of craftswork, many samples of Tibetan textiles, such as one might find in Kathmandu, items that she’d hoped to sell in New York for a little money, while settling down again.

She had discovered, it seemed, the mystical.

She had left in ’77, returned in early ’81, face weathered, expression transcendent, twenty-seven years old. One of the first things she did when they met her at the airport was to kiss and hug them for a long time. One of the first things she had asked for, when she got home, in an accent slightly tinged with Nepalese: a Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s jelly sandwich on soft Wonder Bread. Then she took a bath for two hours, reading foolish magazines in the tub. Later she stood for long periods of time at the window just watching life on the street. Then she seemed to revert to a neighborhood teenager again, listening to the Shirelles and Beatles on her phonograph, calling a few friends. She had just walked into the living room eating a Hershey bar—she’d lost a lot of weight—to join her father as he watched television, when she asked, “You hear anything from Paul?”

Ives told her: “You know he’s in California writing for a newspaper or something. You wouldn’t recognize him.” And he made a snip-snip haircut motion with his index and forefinger around his ear.

That night “Uncle” Luis and “Aunt” Carmen came by—a happy reunion, after so long; Caroline was even glad to see him. They had dinner—a pot roast, though she could not remember eating very much meat, and contented herself on vegetables and rice. She was starting to eat, when Ives, still upholding his tradition of saying grace, led the family in a brief prayer. That had struck her as something far and remote from her life—after a while the image of Jesus had reformed in her mind as some kind of swami—and then she brought things out to show them, and gifts—beautiful scarves and bracelets for Carmen, and for Luis a prayer stone, which he thought a paperweight, even when she explained its mystical import—“On it is written in Tibetan the words Om Mani Padme Hum, a chant to the lotus that is the center of the universe.”

“Muchas gracias,” he told her, meaning it.

And then there were the questions. What did you do? How were the people? Were you treated right? And they were happy enough, and interested by her responses. Then the subject of Paul came up. Carmen, who’d always been fond of Caroline, asked, “And did you keep in touch with him?”

“Sometimes, but the mail can be very very bad. And I don’t think I’ve talked to him on the phone since I left.”

Excited as a child, and reading correctly a bit of longing in Caroline’s face, Carmen sprang up, saying in rather agitated Spanish, “I’m going to call him right now, why, he’ll be so happy to hear from you.”

She did so, but when Caroline got on the phone, their voices sounded strange to one another, and his tone was cooler than she had ever remembered: and he was a little evasive.

“I can’t really talk now, but can I call you tomorrow?” he asked. “Then we can catch up, okay?” And shortly they’d hung up.

Later, holding forth with an elated madness in her eyes, she talked about her “most interesting experience.”

“Imagine an avenue of incredible temples, and crowds and crowds of Hindus, many of them naked, gathered to cremate their dead. Imagine spending one day and then the next and then the next watching the pyres burning along the Ganges. And at sunset the bodies burn; you see pyres everywhere along the banks. Bodies crackling, the fat spitting, and from time to time you see a bird swooping down to take a piece of something, or you see a wild dog, and there are packs of them, carrying away bones in their mouths. You sit and stare until you begin to feel the souls of these dead people so thickly in the air around you. You inhale and you think, my God, you’re breathing in the essence of a human being’s spirit. And even though it all reminds you of death and of how useless and fragile we are, you somehow get a kind of faith. You feel good inside, you feel as if whatever happens to the body the soul will go gushing out, to become a part of something unimaginably serene.

“… Well, I was there with a friend one evening, and we were watching the water, shimmering wildly with sunlight. There were squiggles of light moving about, agitated, and as we stared at them, they clearly became the letters of some kind of alphabet, nothing we could read, but ancient sorts of letters—like Sanskrit, or hieroglyphics. And yet, even though I couldn’t make out their meaning, I felt that I was being told something.…

“Then, what happened was this, I was staring at this writing when it began to rise up out of the water, that odd script floating in the air for a few moments before us, each of these letters, and there were about five or six of them, flattening out like banners. And suddenly…” And she shut her eyes even while touching the fluted stem of a wine glass, searching for the right words. “Suddenly these banners coiled up into something of a cylinder and began to roll and pitch forward toward us.”

“Goodness,” said Carmen. “Were you scared? Did your friend see it, too?”

“Yes, that’s why I know it wasn’t a hallucination or mirage, if that’s what you were thinking. In fact, my friend asked, ‘Can you see it too?’ And I could, something very real, though I have no idea what it might have been. Anyway, it happened very quickly, in a few seconds. Was it a sign? I don’t think so, but it was something out of the ordinary, supernatural.… So we left that place, feeling divine, and we told a few people. The word is that our karma was good and that we engendered the appearance of this miracle, if one could call it that. And it was wonderful, until it occurred to me that this apparition had nothing to do with us—and that vanity had led us to believe that it had.” She shrugged, sadly.

“A mystical experience? Would you call it that?” asked Ives.

“I don’t know, Pop. Maybe. That happened over a year ago and I still don’t know what it was supposed to be about. Just that it left me with a humbled kind of feeling. I mean unless you’ve gone through that kind of thing it’s quite impossible to convey, do you know what I mean?”

“I can imagine it would be that way,” Ives told her, remembering his own experience from long ago.

And Ramirez nodded, and then said, “The only kind of spirits I care about are these,” and he raised a glass in a toast to her return.

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE THAT SHE’D ONLY TELL HER HUSBAND, after they’d been married in 1988. By then they could look back at seven years of renewed courtship and love, the two joined by mutual interests—literature, sex, religion—and concern for their parents, no matter what their difficulties. She taught literature in college, he wrote and struggled along, integrity intact. They would have two little girls and a boy. Now and then, when they wanted to get away and have “fun,” they would rent a car and drive up to the house near Hudson and move in for the weekend, holing up as Ives and Annie did, reading and passing their time tranquilly. One late autumn night, around ’92, they were talking about that first phone call together when she had gotten back from her stint in the Peace Corps and how she figured he already had a girlfriend, or someone in bed with him at the time. And the story she had recounted for her mother and father, and for Carmen and Ramirez, about the hieroglyphic letters, now nothing more than a distant memory, that had risen out of the Ganges.… They were in bed when she told Paul, whom she now called Pablo, that there had been more to that story: she swore that “he,” Robert, was present that day in the soul-thickened atmosphere—and his apparition, her imagining of his presence, followed her around for days, but that no matter in what direction she turned, she did not find him.

THEIR JOURNEY

It was fortuitous: just when his wife began to have less patience with him, Ives went ahead and planned a trip to the British Isles, as he had promised that previous Christmas. She could not have been happier. It came just in time. After Ives had placed limits on the things he considered worth doing with Annie, she began to construct a life separate from him. She went to lectures with brainy university friends, on “literary” themes that would have put him to sleep, and she took special exercise classes. She would sometimes sit quietly in the back of a jazz bar with a book, liked to see arty films, and spent more and more time, when she was not working with kids, in libraries, accumulating notes on Lawrence and Dickens. Sometimes they would go out to dinner and pass their time together in silence. For the past few years it seemed that their three grandchildren gave them the greatest reason, aside from love and morality, for staying together.

There used to be occasions when Annie still got admiring looks from men, but those had passed: if she had stripped down under the lights of the Art Students League, she would have been one of those older women who somehow conveyed that she had once been spectacularly attractive and athletic. Her flesh wilting and riddled by hairline wrinkles, breasts that were still large but that had flattened out, a few telltale veins up her thighs, saddling buttocks, a pubic mound of gray hair still dark at its roots. Even so, with her still lovely and youthful face and interesting body she would have been a joy to draw. Sometimes when she sat across from Ives she would have feelings of hatred for Gomez, for having ruined her marriage. She would reach over and tenderly touch her husband’s chin, while he was eating his soup, and touch his ankle with her toe. Sometimes she would not have minded risking the embarrassment of disrobing at the Art Students League, just to be reminded what it was like to have a man look at her body again. She could stand naked in the same room as Ives and he somehow averted his eyes.…

The worst time had been during her menopause, when the hormonal changes going on inside of her began sending tongues of fire through her belly and her chest and up through her head. She felt so restless and impatient with others that she would take the subway to Fiftieth Street and wander around that part of Manhattan for the whole day. One afternoon, fresh from buying several new dresses at Saks, where she usually never shopped, she came out through the revolving doors and for a few moments had the impression that it was 1948 again and that she was on her way to the Art Students League. On that day she fantasized that men were looking at her again, and she began to accentuate her walk, as if on a tightrope, her spreading hips going up and down. She entertained the thought of their excitement, and grew wet fantasizing about it. Then she stopped before a window mirror to fix herself up, and her crow’s feet, emanating from her lovely blue eyes, and the width of her face and figure reminded her that she was no longer twenty-two.

Another day, she went down to the Village and hung around in bars drinking mugs of beer and chain-smoking cigarettes and, though she knew she would never have an affair, she had several hopeful conversations with much younger dashing-looking artists, who would have tried to jump her in her youth, but who now must have thought she was waiting for her son. She took a taxi home and wept, thinking about how to an older person youth seemed smug and aloof and exclusive.

As far as Ives was concerned, all was well with her, so out of touch had he become with her feelings. She remembered a time when, without saying a word, she would have a sad thought and he, sitting by an easel or by his drawing board, would somehow know. Putting aside his brushes or pen, he would throw on a jacket and step out to hunt down some chocolates, which she loved, and a bouquet of flowers. Or he’d say, “To heck with this work, let’s catch a movie, huh?” Now he sometimes seemed deaf and blind when it came to her feelings.

Still, she loved him.

When he was younger and they used to go out with Carmen and Luis, she did her best to pick up the Latin dance steps, but he, having no sense of rhythm, and feeling vaguely foolish, just trudged along: but at least he tried. Now as an older man, Ives found those efforts at gaiety undignified. The last time they’d all gone out together, before Carmen’s health began to decline—a party for Ramirez’ sixty-fifth birthday, held in a rented Knights of Columbus Hall in Astoria, Queens—Ives sat off in the corner, wearing dark glasses and watching life pass him by. Now and then, he would chat in Spanish, for years later he was still famous, in a limited sense, as the father of that poor, unfortunate boy. So people who knew this went out of their way to befriend him; some insensitive few, drunk and carried away by the memory of that tragedy, foisted their outrage and sympathy upon Ives, who, even after so many years, did not like to hear about it. After a while he sat at Ramirez’ table, picking at his food and wanly waving hello to passersby. Annie in a low-cut black velvet dress, which Caroline had made for her, passed her time dancing, occasionally with men, but her partners most often being a cluster of fun-loving Cuban women, who remained in front of the bandstand. To his credit Ives did dance two slow boleros, but he was so self-conscious that it was impossible for her to get lost in the music; enough was enough, she sometimes thought.

In recent days, on their once-a-week outings, they would head uptown to visit Ramirez and his wife, poor Carmen on the downside of her illness, cancer, yet ever faithful and sweet-tempered, a friend to them as ever. No doubt about it, after years of a seemingly endless ordeal, Carmen herself, whom Annie often accompanied to the hospital for her chemotherapy, knew that she was on her way out, and yet the only thing she could ever talk about was the love she felt for her husband, despite his harshness, for her children and grandchildren and for Ives and Annie, insisting when they came over that one sit on each side of her on the couch, so that she could hold their hands. She was impressive in her resolve and her lack of fear, and she cried only when she would have a reminiscence about her children when they were young, or about some incident involving Robert, like taking him to the movie Three Coins in the Fountain with her kids, and how well behaved and gentlemanly he had been. She spoke often of God, and carried a rosary, a crucifix, and a pendant with her mother’s picture in it. At times they would find her in the company of her cousins, long settled and prospering for the most part in the States—though some were barely surviving. Sometimes she was well enough to dance a few steps of a cha-cha-cha, but most often she would be in bed, staring at the ceiling and barely aware of anyone else in the room.

As to her husband’s infidelity, she seemed to have forgiven him, and encouraged him to find a mistress, not a wife, after she was gone, as they would be reunited forever as man and wife in eternity, “as beautiful young people.” She even joked, saying to Luis, “Now I’ll finally get to see what you look like with hair.” And she touched his face and then fell asleep, and he and Ives and Annie would sit around for hours, Ramirez having nothing new to report.

With several ventures behind him, a union pension, social security, and some savings, though not a lot, after so many years of hard work, Ramirez had finally retired himself, just in time to spend most of his days, good or bad, in that apartment, doing the same things over and over again, or else taking his wife out in a wheelchair, which she hated, as it made her feel old and helpless.

It all cut to the bone. Ives was unable to imagine Ramirez without her, as she had always been able to bring out his most tender side. He could see Ramirez sinking into total irascibility and solitude: with many acquaintances, he, because of his rough nature, had few close friends outside of Ives. Over those years Ives sometimes had the impression that Luis had simply tolerated him, though Paul had told him, “No, he respects you and loves you like a brother.” And Annie would miss Carmen’s visits, their Chinese meals, their outings to church, to Mass, or to play Bingo on certain nights, or to participate in a clothing drive or bake sale or raffle; and Annie would take her to browse in bookstores and to lectures, here and there in town, and to movies and senior citizens’ exercise classes. In more than thirty years, Annie and Carmen never had one argument, nor any unpleasantness, nor misunderstandings that did not involve Carmen’s sometimes shaky English. She exuded so much goodness and was so lacking in malice toward others that she may well have been a saint; and for that reason it almost made sense that she had such bad martyr’s luck.

MR. CHARLES DICKENS?

Surprising himself—surprising everybody—Ives had, as he promised, booked the tickets. All arranged, it seemed a dream, their journey to begin and end in London, and taking them to Ireland, Scotland, and other parts. They went by rail and by car in September, when the weather was mild. Interested in the literary ambience, she planned to soak up the atmosphere and allow it to influence her readings of Fielding, Smollett, and Dickens, whose books she brought along. And she had been working on a children’s biography of Dickens, which she hoped Ives might illustrate, so part of their plan was to make like tourists, and the other to go about with sketchbooks and diary, and to absorb the spirit of those places like young students. They were happy, buoyant—“ghosts,” as it were, finally, it seemed, to be left behind them.

If they had a worry, it was about Carmen, who seemed not long for the world, but she felt insulted at the notion that she would “suddenly” die after having coped with one thing or the other for the past seven years and had practically gotten out of bed to run out around the block to make sure that her American friends had some happiness, by way of their late-life journey. And they left sadly, reluctantly, feeling as if they might never see her alive again.

A WEEK OR SO AFTER THEIR DEPARTURE, RAMIREZ RECEIVED THE first of three postcards—one from London, one from Edinburgh, one from an inn in the Burren in Ireland, for they would be away for a month. He was glad to have received these cards, and instead of throwing them in the trash he put them in the top drawer of a Chinese lacquered table, usually reserved for bills. But before stashing them, he read them aloud to his wife, as he had read her El Diario and People, which she liked very much. It was tough going sometimes, given her physical suffering and the fact that, because of all the drug treatments and pain, she had gotten to a stage where she would have waking dreams: she had wanted to be a dancer when she was a girl in Cuba and so he would sometimes find her in bed, eyes shut, yet with one arm raised above her, her hand, a lovely ballerina’s hand, making curving motions, and he would hear her humming—melodies that only she could identify. At other times, he leaned close to her and whispered, “Carmen? Carmen?” and she answered, “No, no, you’re mistaken, my good man,” in an aristocratically inflected, Spanish-accented version of English. “I’m not she, I’m Grace Kelly. Don’t you recognize me from my movies?”

Then she cried out with pain, and jolted back to reality, tears rolling down her face. That’s what offended him more than anything else: that he couldn’t help her. There were times when he entertained some rather dark thoughts, like taking a pistol, such as that which he also kept in the lacquered Chinese table, wrapped in a rag and held tight by three tightly wound rubber bands, and shooting her outright. But he couldn’t, and yet, because he knew what she was going through, he felt a different kind of rage. Why her pain? When some others like that phony son of a bitch upstate, whom his dear, naive friend Ives had started to believe, was now living the good life?

Lord, how he sometimes felt like getting his car and driving up to Lily’s, where Gomez worked, and bringing about a few moments of justice in this world.…

On the afternoon he received the first postcard, he read it to her. In that first postcard Ives and Annie mentioned that London was a revelation, “nothing like Harlem… or Brooklyn.” The black men spoke like English lords and everything was storybook tidy. And they had gone to the Dickens House museum, 48 Doughty Street, to see where Charles Dickens had once lived and worked, and Carmen, coming around momentarily, said, “Ay que nice?” But then she said, perhaps remembering one of the lectures Annie had taken her to, “Ah, Charles Dickens, el gran escritor.”

Luis smiled and flipped the card over to look at its photograph of the restored Dickens House, and he seemed perplexed, because for a long time whenever he had heard that name Charles Dickens he would think that he was an English actor. (On the other hand, in his fantasies of England, he thought the men all wore brushed derbies, carried umbrellas, and hid teacups in their coat pockets.) A writer? Charles Dickens. Yes, now he could add it to his list of writers he knew something about: José Marti, for there wasn’t a Cuban, left or right, who hadn’t known him; Raymond Chandler; and of course the famous Ernest Hemingway, who used to come visit him at the Biltmore, in the years before he shot himself.

He sat with the card, examining it, and finally he asked, “And what did Mr. Dickens write?”

Halfway to some other world, she started to say War and Peace, but then she changed her mind, and blurted out, “I can’t remember, but they were good books, my love.”

HE WEPT

It had been a lovely trip, London everything they had wanted and imagined—for Annie, reading selections from several Dickens novels at the time, it was an enchantment; they took strolls through the Queen’s gardens, fed the swans in Regents Park; tried to envision the shantytowns that Dickens had once written about, along the Thames, the city’s architecture sometimes suspending their notion of modern time. In fact, out of their usual context for a glorious period of several weeks, the veil of grief had somehow lifted from their hearts, Ives regaining a sense of childhood wonderment about many things. Walking about the city with a black-bound sketchbook, Ives drew madly, as he once had as a kid; for several hours he sat in the Assyrian room at the British Museum sketching griffin-kings, and among their greatest joys were their visits to the fifth-floor archives room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they looked through cartons of original artwork. There Ives and Annie spent hours going over the drawings of Sir John Tenniel of Alice in Wonderland and Punch magazine fame, those of Shepard, who illustrated Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh series, and among so many others, the drawings of Seymour and Cruikshank, the venerable illustrators of the works of Charles Dickens himself. There was a true joy in studying the erasures, the paste-ups, the blotched samples of work, which, once repaired, appeared in a refined state for the pleasure and admiration of the public.

They flew to Ireland for a week and then traveled to Scotland, meeting people here and there. Ives would not leave Annie’s side, and for an older couple they seemed still deeply in love. It was invigorating to be away: liberal as he had always been and more or less remained, he felt nearly envious of the tribal peace he sensed in the small towns they passed through; he imagined what would happen if one were to transport the people who lived on a single New York City street “uptown” to one of those towns.

Mainly, it was an emotional experience. Annie posing for photographs on one of the Highland passes, Ives taking her picture and feeling as if he were floating high and free above the tenements, and wishing that his adoptive father and his son, Robert, could also take in that beautiful and worldly splendor. He wept, at one point, with happiness, and realized that he had not openly wept in years. Among the passing clouds and falcons, overwhelmed by the sun’s grandeur, he looked in four directions, the Highlands seemingly going on forever, and he found himself pinching the bridge of his nose, unable to stop his eyes from tearing.

CARMEN

For several weeks after the funeral, Ramirez holed up in his apartment, keeping to himself: he did not answer the doorbell when it rang nor his old metal-case telephone. But then one Sunday in mid-December he decided to see Ives, and called him. He’d been in bad shape, but Ives had left him alone, knowing what it was like to lose someone you loved so much. Part of it was the shock: Ramirez had no idea of just how deeply he had loved his wife, no idea at all, and even though he had fooled around a little over the years, he had been surprised at his grief when he watched her coffin lowered into the opened ground.

When she’d finally died, and he and his son, Pablo, and two daughters attended the funeral, it seemed as if it were happening to someone else; that he hadn’t given her a bad time and created so many scenes at home about his son; that he hadn’t said some of the things that had frightened her so or threatened to throw her out of the apartment and divorce her if she made a fuss. Then it hit him that he was dreaming and that she was gone and he started to wish he had told her the kind of corny things one heard in movies and songs and on Valentine’s, the very syrup that used to turn his stomach and make him think that only a sucker or a fool would talk that way. He wished that he had brought her more flowers and less heartbreak, that he hadn’t dominated and ordered her around so much, hadn’t acted like what his own son called, in that piece-of-shit book he wrote, a “well-intended but sometimes unfeeling, overly impulsive, hot-headed macho bully.” (Offended, Ramirez had never gotten further than that phrase, on page 67 of A History of Cuban Hippiness.) And he wished he had paid more attention to her when she really started to get sick, instead of thinking that it was some kind of scam to get his attention. That once he knew for sure that she was bound to go sooner or later he hadn’t begun to lose his temper with her because it was taking so long. Wished he hadn’t acted as if he wanted it to be over with, conveying that feeling with his short fuse and the way he looked at her when the treatments made her hair fall out and she lost her late-middle-aged beauty, resenting her as if she had just dropped a baby out a window. And on the days when she felt better and sat up in bed like a child home from school on a rainy autumn day, and called out to him playfully, “¿Quiero saber, Luis, si tú me quieres?”—“Luis, do you love me?” he wished that he had said “Yes” with some kind of conviction rather than with the sequence of grunts and annoyed yeses that made her feel as if she had done something wrong. And he wished that he had been able to convey with greater sincerity a measure of faith when she would call him over and ask him to pray by her side, and he tried, mumbling prayers whose words he did not even know anymore, but he was a lousy actor. He regretted all that.

What really fucked him up was that, even though he wore a thin gold crucifix around his neck, he really hadn’t believed in God. To him He was one of the greater inventions of man. But toward the end, when his wife had to be taken to the hospital “for good,” and seemed, after so many years of devotion, to have lost her faith, entering a state of fear and panic and bedevilment that lasted for days, he wondered how much of his attitude, and indifference, had rubbed off on her. Because toward the end she started to have a vision of an emptiness before her, something that would swallow her forever, oblivion, and had started to scream and cry and shake, sometimes in her sleep. They tried everything to soothe and reassure her, brought in priests, turned up the telenovelas—the Spanish-language soap operas—kept her room filled with flowers. It was bad: one morning she started swearing that there were devils roaming the ward. When her own husband sat by her on the bed, to assure her that there were no such things, delicately taking her hand and gazing upon her with all the sweetness in the world, she started to cry, “Begone, espíritu malo! ¡Váyate!” And when he took her hand again, she sat up and imagined herself at the head of a Good Friday procession, winding through the streets of their neighborhood. She could see a man carrying a cross and hundreds of believers following behind him, hands folded in prayer. And she saw herself addressing them in a tormented, hoarse, and mysterious voice that could be heard above the sorrowful Spanish chants, which echoed eerily for blocks and blocks around; it was with that ferocity that tender Carmen, eyes wide and head held high, shouted a message as if to a congregation: “Listen, my children, listen to the truth: Satan is denial and blindness; he is the deceiver of men; he is the curtain that has hidden God from us and has brought us grief and suffering; he is the negative; he is doubt! He is death; he is against goodness; he is the destroyer of men; he is hopelessness. Listen and pray and cry out ‘Hallelujah!’ Raise your arms and beg God to have mercy on our souls.…” And she went on with such effect that even those people who did not understand Spanish trembled; and the nurses had to sedate her.

When she came out of that delirium the next day no one could console her about the bleakness of her visions, nor did she recognize anyone, nor could she stop her anguished prayers, nor could she control her fear; and because she was close to the end, they brought her grandchildren in to say their farewells to their abuela. That’s when they found out that the youngest, three-year-old Carmencita, after her grandmother, easily calmed her, the panic ending when the girl, fresh and sweet-smelling from a strawberry bubble bath, leaned over the bed, placed a rose in her hands and planted a kiss upon her tearful face. With that her sobbing stopped and panic left her and her expression changed, as if in a fairy tale; her fear of death and the devil lifted, and for a moment she became aware of who was in the room, and, seeing her husband, said, “Ay, Luis,” and then she was dead.

THERE HAD BEEN THE FUNERAL… AND FOR WEEKS RAMIREZ REMAINED alone. What he did was to sit in his living room, curtains drawn, window gates locked, to shut out the world. With the television and old boleros playing on the stereo at the same time, he thought about what he had seen over several nights. He did not know what to do, but after the third week he had to tell someone and called Ives. He left the apartment on Claremont at about four in the afternoon and shortly he was sitting in Ives’ living room on Ninety-third Street—Lord, he looked a mess—with a drink in hand, and could barely speak, his exhaustion being great.

There had been greetings and then a long silence.

“What is it, Luis? Are you okay?”

“Eduardo,” he said in a low voice, “I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“La muerte.”

“What? Is something wrong with you?” And more reassuringly: “Look everyone’s afraid.”

“Yes, yes. Eddie, Eddie, but it’s not that. I’m not afraid of death, but of what happens after that.… To the contrary I’m afraid that something is there. ¡Carajo!” And his tone changed, his face began to quiver, and he almost cracked the glass on Ives’ coffee table, pounding it with his fist. “The goddamned thing of it, Ives, is that I didn’t give a shit before: I didn’t believe in any of that, but now, fucking now, I’m afraid.”

Ives leaned closer.

“Of taking all my verguenzas—my shames—with me, and I’m not talking about taking them to heaven or hell, but taking them with me.”

He sounded crazy and agitated, and for that reason Ives poured him another drink. “Cálmate,” he told his friend.

Sighing deeply, Luis went on: “… She, my Carmen, came to see me for three nights in a row, after the burial. I swear on it. She did not come in rattling pots or any of that nonsense or going ooooohh like what happens in the movies. No, the first night I had gotten so drunk that I was asleep on the bed in my clothes, and at about three in the morning I felt someone in the room and opened my eyes and saw her, but only for a split second, standing by the door, and she was trying to say something to me. And I thought that I was dreaming, but the next night, about the same time, she came back, but stood a few feet closer to my bed. I could see her standing there and trying to walk ever so painfully toward me… trying to say something.… And that only lasted a moment. By the third night, I was a wreck, and could not sleep: I sat up until about five in the morning with my lamp on, and only then did I begin to doze: and that’s when she stood before the bed. You believe me, yes?”

“Of course, I do.”

“I don’t know what happens when you die, but, I can tell you, whatever goes on is painful, because her face was all twisted and contorted: it was if she had to pay dearly to come to me, even for a few moments, as if it were a tremendous burden; as if she was violating something or breaking a law.” And then his voice changed and frightened Ives: “Can you imagine what it was for Christ to come back for so long a period of time when He rose from the dead and went to visit His apostles?…

“And what she did was to hold out her hands and say in a whisper, ‘Te amo, marido,’ and then she managed a smile and she was gone.”

“And you’re sure it was Carmen?”

He sighed.

“I’m a moody man, Eduardo, but I’m not crazy. And I don’t imagine things. And I’ll tell you, after that I never saw her again. Now I want to ask you, as my long-time friend who is a real believer, what do I do with it? I still don’t feel like becoming one of those sentimental men with tears in his eyes about religion. I’ll never change. I’m the same Luis Ramirez,” and he tapped his own chest. “Only now I’m scared of death.”

And they sat for a time trying to evaluate what had happened.

THE MIRACLE OF HIS SKIN

After telling Ives his story, Ramirez hung around the apartment, and when Annie came home from running some errands, they had dinner. To his surprise it was enjoyable to be with friends, and particularly so in this instance, because even through his pain he could see that Ives seemed much happier since their return from England in early October. Ives seemed less troubled, though he had moments of melancholy. Still, he had the air of a man who had found something he had been looking for. And to a certain extent Ives had, but because of Carmen’s illness, he’d never gotten around to telling Ramirez about it. One night, after dinner, he and Ramirez walked over to Central Park with his dogs, Rex and Alice, and Ives explained the miracle of his skin.

DRIVING DOWN FROM THE ISLE OF SKYE ALONG THE WINDING ROADS that took forever, they reentered England, and on the advice of a friendly elderly woman from Manchester, a certain Mrs. Madelaine Powers, whom they had met earlier in a pub, they decided to rest up in an inn not far from Nottingham, in the Midlands, which to their delight happened to be near Sherwood Forest. A lovely but rustic inn, its walls of local oak, a smell of stone and brook water about its grounds. “Old and tranquil” was how Ives put it. A high stone fireplace sending crackly pops of smoke into the air; and in the old, well-furnished rooms, things to pick up and look at, like the pictures that Ives happily examined, hanging in the long hallway between the dining room and a sitting area, among them a nicely done children’s book illustration of Robin Hood, signed by the artist “Howard Pyle” for the owner of the inn; a framed handwritten dinner invitation, dated October 27, 1712, from one Daniel Finch, Second Earl of Nottingham, to the local curate; and a photograph of the writer D. H. Lawrence, who had been born and raised in the little mining town of Eastwood nearby.

To be sure it was not a place for luxury, in the sense of modern conveniences: old lighting fixtures appointed to illuminate the rooms, no radio or fans; a cold-storage room stood off the kitchen; water came out of hand-pumped spigots in the kitchen and washrooms (a main pump drawing well water in the front yard); the water closets, one marked with the moon, the other with the sun, at the end of yet another long, musty-smelling hall on the first floor. It was, however, despite the lack of certain amenities, quaintly nineteenth century and serene.

Their bedroom was on the second floor, a little cubbyhole really, attained at a special price, thanks to the Mrs. from the pub, a cousin of the owner, Mrs. Gwendolyn Parsons, its window looking out beyond some rosebushes into the forest, thick with elms and oaks and hedgerows, a brook’s rushing waters and bird song waking them in the morning. With the early light flowing into the room, they entangled themselves pleasurably on the bed’s crisp sheets, without making love or attempting to, yet with renewed affection for each other, it did not matter.

They stayed for three nights, got up, ate breakfast, headed out to the fields with a watercolor kit and a sketchpad, as they might have when they were younger. Touched by their reflective natures, Mrs. Parsons, in her eighties and still going strong, took quite a liking to Ives and, especially, to Annie, who had struck her as an independent kind of woman. On several occasions, they went on walks together, and would sit quietly in the woods, talking. She knew quite a bit about birds and, it seemed, was quite deeply religious: a little too influenced by the spiritualist movements of the nineteenth century, perhaps, as she had spoken of “God’s healing energies in the very air” and the “spiritual flux of nature, which is just His disguise.…”

The days spent felicitously, by evening the guests would gather in the inn’s bar, whose oldest patron, from the nearby town, was nearly one hundred and seemed to be constantly smiling, swigging down his whiskey—“a frisky fellow,” as Ives described him to Ramirez, “Sabes que quiero decir con ‘frisky’?” Ives came in to find Annie, in a floral-patterned dress, her hair tied back, a rosiness to her cheeks, sipping a “wee” dram of scotch. Later, by the fire, they each drank brandy, and waited, with the others, for the evening’s entertainment.

In the way that the inn, set up on a slight incline, was surrounded by woods, so were Mrs. Parsons’ guests, gathered in the sitting room, surrounded by a fine and very old library of books. Because there was not much else to do in the evenings, except to sip brandies and watch the fire, Mrs. Parsons, in the tradition in which she had been raised, would hobble over to a stately chair and, in a voice that was remarkably strong and in a manner that was theatrical, read aloud selections from certain volumes.

It happened that Mrs. Parsons had noticed the way Mr. Ives would studiously examine her books, and how he had seemed particularly enthralled with her 1867 edition of The Pickwick Papers—The Charles Dickens Family Edition, identical to that signed edition that his adoptive father had come by years before, and that had been stolen from their Claremont Avenue apartment. Hers also bore an inscription, not by Dickens, which had made his much more valuable, but from a husband to his wife: “To my darling, Mary—May God bless you, this Christmas and for all the Christmases to come. Edward, Hampstead Heath, 24 Dec. 1867.”

She had seen him looking through it a number of times, and because she liked them both and appreciated the drawing that he had given her earlier in the day—a rough but charming pen-and-ink rendering of Annie and Mrs. Parsons in matching sun hats walking along a garden path, picking flowers—she insisted that they accept her edition of Pickwick as a gift, even if it was worth “something”—twenty-five pounds perhaps in an antiquarian bookshop near the British Museum. From that same volume, for an hour, she had read the chapter in which Mr. Pickwick goes to Bath.

Afterward, Ives and Annie were in bed and Ives, in his usual manner, had difficulty sleeping. The darkness always inspired in him sad thoughts, memories once again pouring through him, and yet, being so far from home, and truthfully more relaxed and happy because he had finally forced himself to move away from a state approaching mummification, he could not understand why he still suffered. This trip, which he had almost dreaded, was making them both feel younger. They had so enjoyed themselves they were already making plans for the next year. Someplace far away like Tahiti, perhaps.

Even after he’d experienced a moment of pure earthly happiness in Scotland, he later trembled and suffered terribly when, coming out of a roundabout in a Scottish village, his rented car ran over a cat in the road.

He’d felt like a murderer.

But for all that, there hummed through his body a sorrow and loneliness that took him back to his son’s death. The very thought made him dig into his own skin, deep scratches further enflaming his condition of old: cutting himself and bloody and restlessly turning all night, an impossible itchiness—“un picazón” he told Ramirez—hives ravaging his knee and arm joints, bumps formed under his arms. He knew it was really bad when welts rose on his back and blotches appeared floating like large measle dots on his face, a depressing state, because he felt like a leper, not wanting to touch or be touched, and he would twist and turn and ask, “Why me?” and “Why is it going on and on?”

It was so bad at times that he had gotten into the habit of keeping his fingernails clipped, and upon occasion had been forced to go to bed wearing a mitten over his right hand. Even in good spirits, he was thus afflicted, and it made him feel that it was the price he had paid. But on that night, the brandy had agitated him—an allergist had told him not to drink, but that would make his life impossible—and he particularly suffered. Suddenly he had to sit up, the weight of the sheets and the heat of his wife’s body irritating him. Why? Then he started to sweat, and it was as if he’d poured vinegar over his cuts. Maybe he needed some air: he opened a window out to the fields, over which a half-moon sadly floated, heather glowing in its light. And a wind blew, shadows shifting in the trees, and he started to think of several things at once: of Lazarus rising and his skin stinking so much that people turned away in disgust; of his son in the ground; of his father, and, for that matter, of everybody and every living thing who had ever died in the world, which struck him in those moments as a graveyard.

Such dark thoughts provoked him; he scratched his arms until he was bleeding again, and he went back to bed, truly wearied by the endlessness of his plight. In the morning, he’d have to deal with a day of travel, after a sleepless night, and with a body that felt raw, like his heart.…

And although he told Ramirez that he had then prayed, he had lain in bed drifting, even in his discomfort, into a kind of half-sleep, imagining, nearly inch by inch, the Lord’s body and His skin. He imagined Christ as an Aramaic Jew with dark Arab’s skin. He imagined thick, bristling black hairs all over his body, slender limbs of a smooth texture, long-fingered artistic hands, covered with calluses and bruises. He imagined passing his hand across His brow and feeling healing scabs and blood-damp hair. But thinking those wounds as necessary to the resurrection, when Ives came to where the nails had pierced, he dug deeper into himself, and only stopped himself when Annie, asleep but hearing him, reached over and grabbed his arm by the wrist.

Then Ives had the dream. He was walking in a field in Riverside Park, not unlike the field outside the inn, and at its edge, near the woods, he saw a stream. This he followed around a bend into the woods, and there, at the turn, he saw his son, Robert, as he might have been at forty-three years of age: a grown man in choristers’ white-and-black robes, handsome, serenely wise, wading waist high in the water. The sight of him made Ives both happy and frightened.

A benevolent smiling presence, his soft eyes upon Ives, he beckoned his father to come forward.

Meekly, head lowered and barely able to look at him, Ives approached his son, and felt Robert’s hand taking hold of his own as he helped him to step down over some stones. For a moment he had felt mesmerized by the glowing pebbles that lay on the waterbed, ever so slightly moving in the current, and he had wanted to reach in and touch them. But his son touched his shoulder and said, “Pop, why do you keep doing this to yourself?” Then, bending, his hands cupped, his son scooped out a handful of water, and this he poured over his father’s head, and then he brought up some more and washed his limbs with that water; and then he was gone.

“AND WHAT HAPPENED, LUIS, IS THAT WHEN I GOT UP IN THE MORNING, and went to take a shower, I looked in the mirror and could not find a single mark on my body, not on my arms, or legs, not on my back. Not anywhere.”

Ramirez looked at Ives strangely, and then thinking of his own experience, revised his opinion and nodded. One of the dogs, tugging the leash, pulled Ives toward a favorite glen.

THE TELEPHONE CALL

Perhaps it was the fact that just the night before Paul and Caroline and their children had come over to have dinner and help Ives pick a Christmas tree for his living room. Perhaps it was that his daughter had been especially affectionate toward him, and a kind of mutual nostalgia affected them both, as they wandered about a large lot on Columbus Avenue, one of those places so lit by overhead floods that it seemed as bright as day. Even now, Caroline still expressed a strong aesthetic opinion, as she used to when they all walked over to Amsterdam to buy a tree, while his two granddaughters, Carmencita and Mary-Ellen (after Annie’s mother), ran from tree to tree, like excited winter sprites, tugging at their grandfather’s hand and dragging him around. Perhaps it had been the way they conned him into drawing silly cartoons, so that, reciprocating with some measure of pride, the older one, sucking on her lower lip, could climb up onto his drafting chair and, kneeling there, lean forward onto his drawing board, showing him how she could draw a popular modern cartoon character, of whom Ives was vaguely aware, called Bart Simpson. Perhaps it was the fact that Paul walked in feeling on top of the world, because he had finished a draft of a new book, about a trip he made to Cuba a few years before, and now had it with an interested publisher. Perhaps it was going through the ornaments for the children, and just sitting back, with a drink in hand and watching them speculate over the arrangement of certain lights and bulbs and such, the enjoyment of watching them set up the crèche beneath the fir. Perhaps it was the Bach chorale over the stereo or the good smells that came out of the kitchen, but when the telephone rang about eight-thirty in the evening and Annie came down the hall to say, “It’s that priest, Father Jimenez,” he took the call.

The priest was calling from the city of Troy, in Upstate New York, from the home of Mr. Gomez.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Ives, I don’t want to take your time, and I know it’s probably a bother, but it’s been over a year since we last spoke, and I’ve got to ask you once again: Would you consider a meeting with Danny? Really, he’s a changed man, and as I’ve said before a little forgiveness and goodwill would go a long way.” Then: “Please, it’s Christmas: you don’t know how dark his holidays have been: he has been sick about all these things for years.”

And because he had started to lighten up over the past several months, Ives, still cautious, let slip out: “When?”

“You set the day, the time. Anytime you want. Anything would be good. You name it, sir.”

And then he heard the priest saying rapidly in Spanish to someone, “El señor tiene interés.”

He thought about it and said: “How’s Wednesday?”

“That would be fine.”

And they worked out an hour and the best route to travel. And the priest, pleased with the outcome, said, “Would you care to speak to him? Mr. Gomez is right here.”

“Sure.”

Momentarily, Daniel took the telephone, and when he started to speak he surprised Mr. Ives by the youthful pitch of his voice and its quality of weary tenderness. He had expected a blunter, deeper voice, crude in its intonations, the kind of voice, scarred and wicked, that one would expect from a felon convicted for second-degree manslaughter. They spoke briefly, mutual greetings and the expression that it would be a good thing.

“Then we’ll see each other on Wednesday, at one o’clock?”

“Yes. I’ll see you then.”

IN TROY

Annie still did not want anything to do with it, and so Ives, his heart in his throat, had asked Ramirez to accompany him, and the Cuban had a fit. But because he was Ives’ friend, he agreed to drive him up to the house in Hudson on Tuesday night, there being some things Ives wanted to bring back to New York. During that cold evening, the property covered in snow, the stars clear, Ramirez cooked up a late dinner while Ives shuffled about in his attic study, looking around for some of the earlier versions of the drawings he had made for the book that Annie was writing for children about Dickens. He had Dickens down well enough, drew him as a kindly, energetic man with a compassionate and intelligent face—in short, he recalled the qualities of his adoptive father, whose face, feature for feature, he brought back neatly in the form of an eighteenth-century gentleman. And he went through boxes of photographs, setting some aside and putting them into an envelope, and found some books to bring back down to the city, mostly history books, of which he had become rather fond: later they sat around and fell asleep, snoring loudly by the fire.

Gomez’s house was not like some of the splendid houses one would see driving around Troy; it was close to the train station, and although it was set on a lot between two higher buildings, in which mainly working-class families lived, the street itself was rundown, the very steps to his front door in need of repair. Ives and Ramirez parked, and upon approaching the entranceway saw Father Jimenez, an old man now in wire-rim glasses peering out from behind the screen. Ives was nervous. Something was strangling inside, and he worried that it might be some kind of coronary. He carried in one hand a box of bakery cookies, which he had bought because he remembered that the couple had two kids, and an envelope. Ramirez followed him and was carrying a small night bag, which he kept on his lap during the hour or so that they were there, fidgeting restlessly during the “meeting.”

Ives wore a tie and jacket, and when he was led in, he thought that whether they owned a restaurant or not these people were poor. Ives was startled. It was almost a repetition of the apartment he remembered visiting on 137th Street years before: the furniture was either worn or cheaply new and covered with plastic. The color television was the biggest and newest piece of furniture. There was shelving with little bric-a-brac here and there, cheap throw rugs, family photographs in Woolworth’s frames, and a crucifix and plaster Virgin Mary with Child on a table; the kitchen was small and narrow, with a backdoor that led out to a porch where garbage cans and bicycles were piled.

Her two sons, twelve and fourteen, were out working, but there was evidence that they had just been there. There were plates on a card table covered with leftover food and a half-empty bottle of soda. In the corner of the living room stood an artificial blue-green tree.

Gomez himself had been putting on a jacket in the bathroom, when his wife called up the stairs, shouting, “Dan, they’re here.”

He had been so nervous about finally meeting with Ives that he had spent half the morning throwing up and trying to relieve himself on the toilet. No sooner had he looked out the window, seeing Ives and Ramirez pulling up, than his attacks started all over again. Pushing open the door, he shouted, “Be down in a minute,” then spent another few minutes trying to collect himself. He was tremendously heavy, about three hundred pounds now, his head sweaty, his walk lumbering: although he had to live with the two tear-shaped tattoos on his face and still retained an air of severity, his expression, as he came down the stairs, was that of a penitent. He had put on a blue suit, a tie. His scuffed black shoes had been brightened with some enamel paint.

But when he stood on the landing and first saw Mr. Ives, he was somehow relieved: he had expected a face of torment or wrath or unending sorrow and had found an older white-haired man in a tie and jacket, almost demurely standing with his hat in hand, head lowered, his face filled with compassion. And for his part Ives, who had spent the morning replaying his son’s death over and over in his head, had expected the hardened convict of an earlier photograph. Now there he was: Ives found himself trembling—with rage, joy, forgiveness? And was his stomach in knots because he felt like leaping forward and strangling the man?

But he controlled himself and, like a fine gentleman, his smile restrained, he strode forward and put his arms around Gomez, who had started to cry, over the very goodness he had glimpsed so briefly just then in Ives’ gaze. Gomez awkwardly reciprocated, and he was touched by the scent of cologne about the face of a man who had quite carefully shaved that morning, his skin, in those moments, releasing so much pent-up grief and forgiveness, sweet as church incense. And Gomez found himself repeating, “Thank you for coming here, sir. Thank you, and God bless you.”

In those moments, Ives knew, his son was somewhere in that room, and approving of what he beheld.

NOTHING MONUMENTAL TRANSPIRED. NICETIES WERE EXCHANGED. Polite conversation. What could be said? Gomez’ continuing struggles were evident in his expression and manner, in the very setting. He did show Ives the shelf filled with the books that Ives had sent him years ago and spoke appreciatively of what he had done. He was proud of his education and hard work, but what with times being difficult, money was hard to come by. He sometimes looked down at the floor. As for Ives, he left a parting gift for Daniel Gomez to open later, a photograph of his son, Robert, at seventeen.

When they left, the priest heartily shook Ives’ hand and thanked him again: “Only God knows how much good you have done.” And “Feliz Navidad.”

They were sitting waiting for traffic to move on a turnoff to 87 South, when Ives summarized his attitude about the meeting: “You know, I’m glad I did it. It’s not anything I would want to do every year. And you know what, Luis? I think that, for all his trouble, he’s turned out all right. Don’t you think so?”

And Luis, behind the wheel, said, “Good for him that he did change, Eduardo, because if he had turned out to be a son of a bitch with you, I would have shot him dead.”

Then, just before shifting into gear and heading back toward the city, Ramirez told Ives to open his night bag; sitting snugly between a traveler’s bottle of an evergreen aftershave and his wallet was a small snub-nosed revolver with an ivory-plated handle.

IN CHURCH ON ANOTHER CHRISTMAS DAY

Ives was sitting beside Annie in his old neighborhood church on another Christmas Day looking up at the altar. There were vases with dozens of orchids on either side of the chalice and pots of blossoms set out on the marble floors and against the columns, garlands of ivy strung along the gallery above. In the choir stall they had installed the creche with its figures of the shepherds and kings and angels on high and the Holy Family inside the stable, the baby Jesus, the light of this world, at its center. And they had covered the roof of the stable with evergreen boughs and someone had burned fragrant incense. That morning as Ives first walked into the sanctuary again, hat in hand and with his wife by his side, he remembered that beautiful and familiar glory.

Here and there were some of his friends from the neighborhood. Ramirez had come in with Juanito the barber and his wife, and they had said hello and chatted for a moment with Ives and Annie, and Ives had run into Mr. Garcia and Mr. Farley, friends from Claremont, and others they had known for years, a kind of reunion taking place. He usually went to a different church, closer to home, on Ninety-sixth Street, but during the holiday he could not avoid the church in which his children had been raised, and where his son had first sung in a choir and assisted in the service as an altar boy. And where they held his funeral.

With some difficulty, he waited for the services to begin. He did not know if it was the candles or the crowd or the heating, or the heavy perfumes in the air, or his age—he was nearly seventy-five—but that morning he found himself frequently yawning. Lately, Ives had been dozing off during Mass, his eyes heavier with each visit. A kind of sweet drowsiness came over him, and the sensation that someone was about to whisper, ever so gently, “Come along now.”

It was in fact a blessing. An ability to sleep more easily and deeply had come to him during the past few years. Where he used to toss and turn and drive his wife crazy at night, no sooner would he now lay his head upon the pillow than he would fall asleep. But not into that sleep of old age, but into the sleep of a child, an infinitude of possibilities swaddling him.

AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF INDIFFERENCE, EVEN TREPIDATION, ABOUT sleeping, Ives closed his eyes and would enter his slumbers peacefully; it amazed him how much he had started to dream at night. He once mentioned this to an old Cuban woman whom he knew from his other church, and she laughed, telling him: “Oh, that, my friend, is just preparation for the other life. That happens when you get closer to the time, you know.”

THE DREAM ABOUT THE TOY SOLDIERS

The night before, on Christmas Eve, after spending the evening with Luis and the family in his living room; after a lamb dinner and after making toasts to friendship and love; after Luis had left (around midnight) and Ives had finished talking to his daughter and his sister, Katherine, about the next day’s plans (dinner at his daughter’s and son-in-law’s apartment at three), he got into bed beside his wife; after carrying on to Annie about the cruel and selfish changes in the political climate of the country in regard to the poor and disadvantaged (unfairly condemned in Ives’ words to “a hopeless future”) and after kissing his wife, Ives slept through the night serenely. That morning he awoke in his bedroom to find his son, Robert, about six years old, in red pajamas and thick black stockings, alive again and playing quietly in the corner of the room with his toy soldiers, jousting horsemen, black knights versus white, moving them across the floor. And even though Ives knew that his son had been dead for nearly thirty years, he now saw the boy looking out the bedroom window of their old apartment on Claremont into the courtyard, which was glaring white with falling snow. And once again, as he used to, Robert came to his bedside and began to tug on his pajama sleeve, and just like that, Ives found himself climbing a hill on 120th Street in Riverside Park and pulling his son along on his sled, Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Church looming above them and the Hudson covered with ice floes, stretching into the distance, the city ever quiet. In one moment his son was speeding on his sled down the long and steep slope, and the next he was carrying his son up the street, and dragging the sled behind him, the boy exhausted, feet frozen, cheeks red, the inside of his hooded snowsuit sweaty, and barely able to keep his eyes open.…

In the same dream he found himself standing before a display case of lead soldiers on the second floor of the old FAO Schwarz toy store, with his hand on his son’s shoulder, the two of them enacting their annual Christmas expedition to choose just which sets of Britains or Mignots or Imperials that “Santa Claus” would leave for Robert under the lowest branches of their tree. How was it that Ives’ face was almost touching his son’s, as he also bent low to peer into the case, his nose not an inch away from the glass? How was it that his son seemed quite real to him?

Arranged in rows were the soldiers, for the benefit of the dead: a batallion of Royal Guards in bright blue-and-white uniforms with high, stiff, cord-faced, black-brimmed shako hats with short plumes, like nutcrackers in candy-shop windows; a cohort of Swiss cavalrymen, sabers and flags-of-the-cross raised, and a contingent of outlandishly handsome French cuirassiers, in dazzling breastplates and tasseled Periclean helmets, on high black stallions, charging.…

There were North African Tuaregs and columns of mounted spahis. There were fierce Dahomean warriors and turbaned French Zouaves, and Siamese Royal Guardsmen, Sikhs from India.…

His son examined the dandyish French chasseurs a cheval, and then Crusaders fighting the Saracens. He lingered before the figures of Richard the Lion-Hearted and Suleiman the Magnificent, Ives not once leaving his side. How beautiful were the Prussian garde de corps, splendid in red-and-white-striped uniforms, hats like golden hawks upon their heads; how beautiful was his son’s soft, measured breathing.… He asked his son, “Have you decided which sets you like best?”

What about the Templars or the Maltese Knights? Or that set of Coldstream Guards? Or Somerset Light Infantry? Or the Royal Welch Fusiliers? Can you tell me, son, which of those you want for Christmas?

IN CHURCH AGAIN

And in church he recalled certain recent fantastic dreams. There had been a dream about ancient Egypt recently. Of it he could remember this: of riding across a desert in a chariot to attend a dinner party at a nobleman’s house. His driver was a Nubian slave. In that incarnation Ives was a minor architect of some kind. He wore a silken cape and a soft gold skullcap and gold bracelets around his arms. He carried vials of perfume as a gift for his friends. On another occasion he dreamed that he was a monk in twelfth-century France and that he spent most of his life carving stone sculptures for a cathedral that was being constructed in a nearby town. As this monk he witnessed a miracle: God lifting cut stones from a quarry and sending them flying through the sky to the cathedral square. He dreamed that he lived in Arabia during the time of Christ, as a Parthian, and that he had journeyed into Syria and then into Judea on business, and that as he wandered through a market he saw Jesus preaching from the steps of a temple. He remembered moving closer, to hear His voice.

HE PRAYED, HIS EYES UPON THE PAINTING OF THE MOTHER AND CHILD near the altar. He prayed for his dead adoptive father, and for his mother and father whom he had never known. For all the things he never knew.

Ives kneeling, the choir started to sing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and his head tipped back.

He thought about that crisp afternoon, years before, when the sky had opened and the world had seemed full of goodness, its meaning still baffling him.… He remembered how, in the foundling home, the nuns gathered the children around a Christmas tree, and that one of the nuns had read aloud from a book: “And behold there was a star, a beacon in the night. And from the east there came angels and kings to worship the newborn son of God.”

He remembered what it was like to go to Midnight Mass at his local church in Brooklyn, when he was a boy, how on the street corners there were bonfires glowing in the early morning of Christmas Eve, pine branches sending up flares from burning resin, how he and his brothers walked over to Flatbush to watch them.…

THERE HE SAT, AND AS WAS HIS HABIT OF OLD, HE BEGAN HIS QUIET meditations. Above the altar in that church was a statue of Christ, set back in a kind of nook, and on either side of Him, representations of the Holy Mother and Saint John the Baptist, with their expressions of divine knowledge. Looking at the altar he remembered another of his childhood thoughts: in the same way that the baby Jesus, the promise of the world, lay resting in His crib, adored by the magi and the shepherds and basking in the warmth of angelic and familial love, so did the man Jesus, down from the Cross and awaiting His final resurrection, lay resting inside the altar, beneath the chrismoned cloth. He laughed, remembering how the slightest breeze from the church’s opened doors, rustling the altar’s cloth, had made Ives’ little heart jump: at any moment, Jesus would be coming out of His resting place and the world would be filled with miracles. He would be dressed in great flowing white robes, a beautiful light filling the church.

With pained but transcendent eyes, bearded and regal, He would come down the central aisle toward Ives, and placing His wounded hands upon Ives’ brow, give His blessing before taking him away, and all others who were good in this world, off into His heaven, with its four mysterious winds, where they would be joined unto Him and all that is good forever and ever, without end.