Authors: Heidi Jon Schmidt
Now I continued to pretend. “—at the simpler things in life,” I said. This was a phrase of his, and to speak it was a way to say, covertly, “It’s okay, it’s only money you’ve lost, nothing important.”
“The
simpler things in life.
Exactly,” he said. “
Exactly.
There are so few people, sweetie, who really understand.…” He turned to me with a true smile, even a loving smile, and I felt, and despised myself for feeling, overjoyed. His discourse on simplicity carried us to bedtime, when he cleared the newspapers off the sofa, pulled it out for me, and gave me sheets, the same ones Grammy had ripped up their worn middles and restitched for him before she died. As I made up the bed I heard him brush his teeth while the bathroom radio gave the financial news. A cold rain pricked at the window, and under the marquee of the defunct movie house across the street a tired prostitute looked up and down the empty street. I went to pull the curtain, but of course there wasn’t any.
“You know, the way you’re standing, you could almost have been your mother for a minute there.”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him come out of the bathroom.
“Sweetie,” he said, coming toward me, “it’s only me.”
I was afraid for a minute he was going to put his arms around me, but instead he took off his shirt.
“Would you mind just looking at my back for me? This—boil, or whatever it is—I…” He trailed off—I could see he didn’t like to ask.
“Oh, Pop, I don’t know anything about boils,” I said, but after all he was alone, while I had Louis to look at any boils of mine, so I sat him down to examine him. His skin was coarse and oily—I remembered all I knew about skin, how it’s the body’s largest organ and full of various glands. How heavy a skin is, like a wetsuit: I pictured his folded over the back of a chair. The sore was a round raw center in a nimbus of pus, and I saw he’d been picking at it, like a child who can’t leave a scab alone.
“Press it and see what’s in it, sweetie,” he said. “I thought something crawled out of it yesterday.”
He looked up at me and some ancient, familiar shadow crossed his face. Was he cut so absolutely free of his moorings, so adrift in fantasy, that his night-terrors were as alive to him as his island dreams? I felt frightened myself, suddenly—he seemed a mire that might any minute pull me in, and I tried to remind myself that he was only a man, a lost, confused man who had no one to care for him but me.
I set my finger to the edge of the inflammation, and the pain pleased him. “It’s doesn’t sting,” he said, “more like a burn…”
“It just needs to be disinfected,” I said. “There’s only a little swelling here, nothing to worry about.” Truly, I thought it might want lancing, but I knew if I suggested that he’d ask me to do it, and dabbing it with a bit of cotton soaked in witch hazel was almost more than I could bear.
“That’s good,” he said with a little shudder. “That’s so good.”
“There,” I said. Blood poison was unlikely, and no one would count me responsible if his blood was poisoned, or neglectful if he died. I probably wouldn’t feel more than the occasional prick of guilt myself—nothing compared to the way I felt for hating him so. “I think it’s going to heal up fine.”
“It’s wonderful to have family, isn’t it sweetie?” he said, standing up, relieved, it seemed, of every fear and sorrow by my little ministration. “So few people understand that, that it’s family, not glamour, or money, or fame, that’s the important thing.”
He turned, glowing with good feeling, to hug me.
I knew it would be insane to scream. I leaned stiffly toward him, patting his back above the sore, concentrating on my breath so as not to panic, doubly gentle because I felt as if my fingers might sprout claws.
“Is there a sheet or something I could tack up over the window?” I asked when he released me.
He looked puzzled. “Nobody can see in here, sweetie,” he said. “We’re on the sixth floor.”
He was right, of course. Still I felt exposed.
“If you’re nervous,” he said, “you can come in and sleep with me.”
His voice was studiedly casual, but his eyes had the angry gleam of a man who has bet everything on a single number and is watching the wheel spin. It was a proposition, and I felt the room swinging around me like a nauseating carnival ride, in the center of which I—my heart, breath, mind, and most of all my eyes, must keep fixed absolutely still.
“I’m okay,” I said. Very lightly, hoping I could somehow back away from him without moving. It was the first such suggestion I had ever declined. Professors were so magnificently arrogant, they’d leave the marks of their grip on my arm, asking me to bed as if they were challenging me to a duel—it would have been cowardice to refuse. And the others, the timid boys who tried a little ruse, like my father—I could never bear to turn them down. Men—you can feel their sadness—but how to assuage it? You have to do it through sex, they can’t take nourishment any other way. And I was always so grateful to be wanted, to feel them drinking their strength from my beauty, drinking and drinking until they seemed powerful as gods.
Pop shrugged. “We used to do it, when you were two years old,” he said.
“So, Columbus tomorrow!” he said when I didn’t answer. “Teaching, you say?”
I nodded.
“What would you teach?” he asked, sounding baffled.
“Comparative literature.”
“You don’t need some kind of certificate for that?”
“No,” I said, knowing he didn’t count the Ph.D.
“Amazing. Hey, you don’t think there might be a something out there for me, do you? I’ve got a real soft spot for the Midwest. Good people, salt of the earth. Nothing keeping me here—you might say I’m footloose and fancy free. We could get a nicer place if there were two of us. I’ve
been
making money.…”
To invite him would be suicide. To say no was more of a homicide. I settled for silence: cowardice seemed a bloodless crime.
“Well, just something to think about…” he said. “It’s just great to have you here, sweetie.”
He spoke so sincerely that I was afraid he was going to hug me again, but no, he went into his bedroom and closed the door, and a few minutes later I saw the light blink out beneath.
I curled against the far arm of the couch, pulling my knees to my chest, keeping the blanket tight around me, the way I used to sleep as a child. I had a recurring dream then that some awful force had come to suck me out the window, and I’d hold my breath, playing dead until it went away. I was always looking for a charm, something to wrap myself in for safety, the image of Zeus or Louis or whoever—everyone needs something like that, something to grab hold of in the dark. Now I tried to think of Cincinnati—a sleepy river town, sun on the factories, the pleasure of getting to know a new city, any city—but all I could feel was that I didn’t dare leave Louis, I needed him to keep my father at bay. After a long time I fell not asleep but into a kind of purgatorial consciousness, full of specters but still at one remove from that room.
“There’s no one else,” a voice said, so clear it seemed to rouse me, “
you’ll
have to marry him.”
Then I heard my father’s bedsprings and his feet as they touched the floor. Soon he would pad past me on his way to the bathroom. I held myself tighter, trying to take the deep, slow breaths of a sleeper. He might be only inches away from me, but he wouldn’t guess I’d awakened, and I’d never let him know.
The morning of his ninth birthday Stevie awoke with a sense of great promise and looked out the window toward Brooklyn as if he’d see the ship of his future coming in through the Narrows, guided by one of his father’s tugs. It was May, he could smell the sea, not the oil and salt of the harbor but a brilliant astringency that belonged to the open water beyond, and he heard a ship sounding: one sharp blast, another long lowing, a moan. “I yearn, I
must
go!” Then the doorbell—already! And it wasn’t even nine. Lottie got it, of course, and came into the parlor bewildered, carrying a bamboo cage with two very large spotted kittens in it. Ocelots, from Señor Villanueva, whose bananas and sugarcane Stevie’s father imported:
they grow to about three feet in length, eat raw meat, make faithful pets.
“Sweetie—no—,” his mother said, smiling uncomfortably. He was an impossible child; his every move disarranged things, she’d have to follow him through life with a soapy cloth. Yesterday, while she went over the week’s menus with Lottie, he had disassembled the toaster; now he was poking his fingers into a cage of wild animals. And his father seemed to be living another childhood, all mystery and tenderness, with this younger son—having been so stern and exacting with the other. When she’d sent Big Stephen in to speak to Stevie about the toaster, father and son sat down on the floor and put it back together, emerging proud as if it were their own creation. Who knew why they should be so close? The name, or a coincidence of temperament, or the fact that the boy, conceived by accident when his brother was nearly grown, had come when the man had established himself and could turn his heart back to his family …
“Oh, Señor Villanueva!” Big Steve said, shaking his head and laughing. “Señor Villanueva, time and again I tell you gifts will not be necessary, and time and again…”
“Sweetie, you’ll really have to speak to him more firmly,” Mama said, “We can’t—”
“Well, we
can’t
send them back,” Stevie broke in. He was so thin, still in his drop-seat sleeping suit, you could imagine the wind wafting him up like a seed. The cats tussled in the cage, one knocking the other down with a wide, clumsy paw, then commencing to wash it, while the other, the one who’d given in, had a luxurious stretch. “Isn’t that true, Papa? It’s an insult, in the South American cultures, to return a gift.”
“We were going to open presents
after
breakfast,” Papa said. “But as we
will
have to call the zoo about these fine fellows, perhaps…”
And he led Stevie out through the garden and threw open the toolshed door. It had been transformed into a laboratory, whitewashed, with a new sink and a Bunsen burner, a rack of test tubes, clamp stands and beakers, a microscope and a shelf of chemistry books. It was 1945, the war was won, all things seemed possible. The basic elements were for sale at the pharmacy. Papa filled a flask with silver nitrate, and gave Stevie a length of copper wire.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Drop it in; it won’t explode.” Stevie did, jumping back in spite of the reassurance, and saw silver quills whoosh down the length of the wire.
“Papa!” So, there
was
such a thing as magic! It went by the name of science, that was all.
“There’s one rule,” his father said. “You must never come in here unless I’m with you. Do you understand?” Big Steve’s rules were more like promises: Stevie would do as he was told, and his father would stay beside him. Stevie nodded, meeting and holding his father’s gaze, seeing in it the proud authority that would one day be his.
His other gift was a guide to the North American butterflies, Papa having planted butterfly bushes along the garden walk. “We had them in the backyard, when I was little,” Big Steve said. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” His voice caught in his throat, and Stevie thought that if butterfly bushes could so move his father they must be the most beautiful things in the world.
“You don’t often find them in the U.S.” Big Stephen said. His spade sliced sharply into the soil, and he rubbed his shoulder: “This bursitis, it’s the cold fog. Hot damp is good for the joints.”
In fact it was cancer, of the stomach—the pain thrown from its source so for months they thought bursitis, then arthritis, then—an ulcer, maybe? By the time they knew what it was, there was nothing to be done. On Stevie’s next birthday Papa lay wasting in his bed. From which he’d have seen the butterfly bushes, if only they had bloomed. Papa squeezed Stevie’s hand: sometimes, he said, things come in late the first year. It might only be a few weeks before the bushes flowered—they might be cloaked in monarchs by July. Even now he was an optimist—it was Ellis Island confidence, the sense that, having come anonymous and empty-handed, learned a new language at night by reading two editions of
War and Peace
side-by-side, begun as a messenger and built a fleet of messengers, then trucks, ships, and now planes, the sense that, having done all this, you might be able to do anything. This confidence gave onto courage, and patience. One had been surprised many, many times. Plants may not bloom by the book, illness may go dormant and pass into memory.…
“Another few weeks may well make the difference,” he said.
But there were no buds, which Stevie couldn’t bear to tell him. How fitting, that spring should come without flowers that year, when all plans were given up and all hopes revealed to be foolish, impossible.
The rules fell by the wayside, too. Dinner, once served on the dot of six, was often forgotten entirely on Lottie’s days off. Stevie had believed his father had some kind of infrared vision and always knew what his sons were doing, could guess their transgressions by looking into their eyes. Now he skipped school; spent a whole day in the movies. It was a kind of test, and Big Steve failed it—smiling painfully from his sickbed, pretending to listen to his son’s fabrications. The pact was broken, and the next day Stevie walked boldly into the laboratory and repeated the copper and silver nitrate experiment unsupervised—there was no explosion, no thunderbolt, the sky remained cloudless overhead.
He was set on a new course: which, of all the laws he’d been taught to live by, had meaning? One by one he began to flout them. At dinner he pushed his smelts and lima beans through the hot air register under his chair. They were either consumed in the furnace or dried in the duct—whichever, they didn’t stink and no one was the wiser. He skipped school again, and this time walked home from the movies along the waterfront, where the bums, as his father called them, drank from bottles wrapped in paper bags—they looked dirty and rough but nothing like the menace he’d been warned of, and the only one who spoke to him said kindly, “Hello, son.”