The Vagabonds (18 page)

Nurse Betty fluffed up a pillow and placed it at his head. She was saying “Roosevelt,” and he pictured Franklin Roosevelt, the pince-nez and cigarette holder, the armchair and top hat and bright flash of teeth. He, Aaron, had lost his right arm. To be precise, he told her, he hadn’t lost it as in
misplaced,
he had lost the
use
of it, and all such loss was relative: he could see his forearm encased in the black cardigan, and if she pricked it it would bleed. He had had what they call an infarction and also a series of strokes. If she stroked it it would bleed. President Roosevelt’s loss had been worse, but all across the nation people failed to understand the extent of his paralysis, and they believed he would walk in due time. In the course of events Franklin Roosevelt died, and then they had the haberdasher and then the goatish one, John Kennedy, and all across America the public had been ignorant; they did not know, for example, about old Woodrow Wilson and the nature and importance of his stroke. By contrast the last President, the one who came from Texas, lifted his shirt for reporters so they could photograph and everyone inspect his operation’s scar. Is there no dignity, he asked her, is there no privacy left?

“A beautiful morning,” Nurse Betty declared.

“Yes.”

“Makes you
glad
to be alive!”

He smiled.

“Roosevelt,” she said again, or something very like it, and Aaron remembered the Roosevelt Baths, how he would sample the waters, and afterward he and a fellow from Mortgage and Loans—who? Jimmy Wallison, Peter Austine?—would take a room together and lie in the sulfurous egg-smelling baths, the hot beaded water and pore-cleansing steam, and discuss the Yankees and the pennant race and then they both would enjoy a massage and, later, a cigar. There was one masseur he liked—who? Jimmy Wallison, Peter Austine?—and he could picture the man’s rolled-back sleeves, the meticulous tiepin and apron and well-muscled arms and wintergreen and talcum powder and, always, a two-dollar tip. Oh it was wonderful once in this town: the baths, the Spa, the racing touts, the Gideon Putnam for breakfast, the bacon and sausage and poached eggs he loved. He had been wandering, he recognized, and in the light of the forsythia was wondering how best to rock here in peace if not quiet while waiting for his daughter and his grandson to arrive.

“Well,
here
they are,” Nurse Betty told him, and he smiled at her: his faithful attendant, his good-hearted girl. When a person has turned ninety-two, the quality of light and the feel of a pillow behind you, the memory of eggs and sausages piled on a plate: these
matter,
he wanted to tell her, these cannot be ignored. They used to call it Murderers’ Row, not Tinkers to Evers to Chance who were fielders but Ruth and Lou Gehrig and everyone else, and he himself had objected—Aaron remembered this clearly—to calling them “Murderers” even in jest: a bat is not a gun. A glove is not an axe. The white pinstripes, the cap, the cleats—all these bespoke a uniform, and it was true that the house Ruth built was an engine of capital driving the Bronx, and it was true also they called them the Bombers, but all such military language was, he maintained, irrelevant; it was cold beer, it was Cracker Jacks and the bleacher community buoyed by hope. These
matter,
he told her, these can’t be ignored.

He had not been religious. He had no use for temple and had not attended
shul.
There was, however, proof of God—not the white-haired white-bearded old man in the clouds but a principle of divinity, the idea that made him pious—and it’s the way the willow and the chestnut tree exist together, side by side, yet never once in nature will you find a chestnut on a willow tree. Or willow leaves on chestnut branches, turn by turn. Such a distinction is nature’s device and a complexity of pattern only God Himself could have created, the divine presence everywhere, boy.

He announced this to his grandson who was leaping up the porch. From the running board of his old Model A to—what car was Alice driving now, a Mercury, a Lincoln?—running up the driveway’s slope was a small step for mankind, was it not, for at present they walked on the moon. David was a happy child, David was here for a visit, and behind him with her stately gait advanced his daughter Alice with a handbag at her wrist. In such a light, in the dazzle of his one good eye, she reminded him of his dead wife, her mother Elizabeth née Dancey when she herself was forty and resplendent in her beauty and, he grieved to remember it, grief.

Truth be told, he told the nurse (who was not listening, was making the boy welcome and handing him a peppermint), he could not remember the cause of the sorrow but only its lineaments: tears, the black dress, the cheekbones and the almond eyes and full lips set against him, her face on the pillow but turned to the wall and the dark splay of hair on the sheets. He had been so proud of her, so—Aaron confessed it—
vain,
so pleased that this beautiful woman accepted his ring and his name. She was twenty years younger than he. She was a daughter of the Danceys and that meant something in this town, it meant respectability and land, it meant a pleased awareness on his part—and, on the part of others, alarm—that she condescended to marry a Jew. Not condescended, no,
agreed, decided, chose
to accept his proposal and to tell him yes. For this he had been grateful, although in time he came to learn that hidden in his wife’s romantic history (but had he suspected it, asked himself why?) lay something not quite so respectable, neither spotless nor unstained, and Elizabeth had tricked him—no, not tricked so much as deluded,
misled
—into believing what she was was spotless, stainless, acquiescent willingly in this their married life.

“Good morning, Daddy,” said Alice.

“Morning?”

“It’s eleven o’clock,” she said. “Ready to roll?”

He smiled. “Where are we going this morning?”

“The store. David needs new shoes, his feet are getting—”

“Shoes?”

“Yes. For running in,” she said.

“He’s ready,” said Nurse Betty. “He’s been sitting here an hour now.”

He raised himself up from the chair. It was not difficult, really, not painful but slow, and together with his cane and coat they made a processional down not the stairs but the gray adjacent painted ramp, while the nurse remained behind (collecting the blanket, the pillow, the teacup) and what he wanted to discuss with her (the bombing, the tunnels, the Ho Chi Minh Trail) faded from him briefly and he felt himself descending as his grandson skipped and juddered and his daughter took his arm. Now what do you make of it (bombings and rice crops and temples destroyed), he had been planning to inquire, to solicit an opinion, and instead they shopped for shoes for this cavorting grandson and Alice’s third child of three. His daughter was aggrieved. She was—nowadays they would call it—
depressed.
She had inherited not only her mother’s dark beauty but nature, and there was the goatish George and his fondness for women and gin. He, Aaron, was not fooled by this; he knew his son-in-law, the fellow’s shiftless habits, and knew his daughter suffered them and turned her face to the wall.

There had been enough blame to go round. There had been, on his own part, if not ignorance, willed innocence, and he repeated the words to himself:
ignorance, innocence,
which? What might have been a blessing for Elizabeth became instead a curse; what could have made them happy made them sad. Her history—he pondered this—her
his
story could have been glad. Yet there had been devotion once, unstinting attention on his part, and there had been his strong right hand before he lost the use of it, before he misplaced his palm on her cheek, and when he discovered the Vagabonds’ gift in the office of Trusts and Bequests.

The writer Karl Marx was a fool. He had meant well, perhaps, and put his finger on the problem of the bourgeoisie, but what he failed to understand is how we like to mow our lawns and mow them all the more attentively if mortgaged; it’s the triumph of capitalism, really, a man tends what he owns.
Das Kapital
dismisses what the common man works hard to have: a roof and lawn and garden of his own. Sigmund Freud was not much better; Herr Sigmund failed to understand that all is not always ego or id, a man goes to the office and, because it is his business, opens the Dancey file, reads it and discovers his wife had a baby out of what in those years people would call
wedlock,
and that that baby is provided for, as well as her heirs and assignees, and all other issue till time out of mind.

“Careful,” she urged him.

He got in the car.

“Bye-bye,” called Nurse Betty.

Now David was jumping around in the seat and Alice was starting the motor once more and in a cloud of spraying gravel together off they went. He himself had gone to Sarasota, fleeing south for seven years in wintertime, not following his darling but the starling in such flight. This too was language, Aaron understood, mere language: the comfort of rhyme. In truth he had no darling but his daughter any longer and did not know if starlings left; the black crow remained in the bleak winter trees, and no doubt also the raven remained—but he never had been able to distinguish between them, the raven or starling or crow. In truth he had enjoyed the train—the sleeper car, the dining car, the long migration down the coast—and then the little circus town, the Ringling Brothers’ mansion, the bright flamingos everywhere, and heat. From Saratoga to Sarasota, the best of both possible worlds. He had deeded his daughter the cottage, and then he had flown (well, motored; well, taken the sleeping car) south.

“What kind of shoes?” Aaron asked.

“Keds. White ones,” Alice said.

“Oh,
Mom.
”

“He doesn’t want them,” Alice said. “He wants them with arrows and colors.”

“Ah. Arrows and colors!” He nodded. And therefore he thought about arrows, the straight fledged shaft, a headdress of feathers and shells. He thought about the way bright feathered creatures disappear and then return; one day in November you notice they’re gone and one day in May they arrive. He thought about David, Joanna and Claire and how they too were ignorant—the owners of substantial equity in an enterprise not far from here, that company first called Edison Electric and now General Electric, the shares in 1926 engaged in what might be called a productive mitosis, splitting four for one, then four for one again in 1930, then three in 1954, then last year two for one, so fifteen shares in 1916 would be—he still could do arithmetic, he still had a head for computing!—
one thousand four hundred and forty shares.
And in the way such thoughts of late had led him down their circling path, Aaron remembered his beautiful bride: the night of their wedding, the nights after that. There had been, he remembered, primroses in the window box; there was a bottle of wine. There had been the possibility of—no other word for it!—
bliss.

That first time Elizabeth rose from the floor, he should have supported and not knocked her down; he should have offered Gilead’s balm and not the clenched back of his hand. Was it because of this, he asked himself, that the hand proved useless now; did he raise his hand to smite her and in turn turn powerless, and could this therefore be adduced as proof of a pattern, the workings of God? If the chestnut and the willow tree stand side by side by the edge of the road, why does the chicken cross it, and what’s the other side? He had been, he acknowledged, unbending; he should have been less so and let her explain. His wife had never lied to him, and only her silence, not speech, had misled; he did, he regretted this now.

Sometimes eight people would live in the home, or sometimes seven, or only six, but then new old ones would arrive and assume the vacant place; that’s one thing you can take for granted, Aaron knew, it’s part of God’s pattern, the young will grow old. In due course. In the course of time. You can’t imagine it, my boy, but it will happen anyhow and it will happen to you. He should have remained on the porch.

“Are you hungry?” Alice asked.

He shook his head.

“Did you have breakfast?”

Again he shook.

“We’re going for lunch afterward,” she said. “Grilled cheese for David. And, Daddy, whatever you want.”

What he wanted was to rest. What he wanted was, he told her, to lay his burden down. Franklin Roosevelt was dead, and then the haberdasher and the goatish one they killed so young, while Aaron Freedman lived. He had outlasted, if not usefulness, his time’s allotted span. If there were such a thing as justice or, not justice,
balance
in the world the man who’d raised his right arm smiting would be laid long since to rest and his bride would rise up from the floor, unbloodied, beautiful, and smile and take her grandson’s hand and buy him a pair of blue Keds.

Then Aaron remembered old Wallison’s joke, or possibly Peter Austine’s. A pair of Jews are courting and they plan to marry. They each have been married before; she’s a widow, he a widower, and now that they are older and wiser they decide to spell things out. “My dear,” says the bridegroom, “before we get married, I believe I should ask your opinion: how often you wish to have sex?”

She blushes. “I’m very grateful you ask. I think
infrequently.
”

He considers her answer. And, after a minute, inquires, “Is that one word or two?”

It was ironic, was it not, a proof of God as humorist, that he should be alive today and lovely Elizabeth dead. Aaron turned on the seat to his daughter; she signaled and drove left. But he wanted to explain to her—there was so much to tell her, and she was failing to listen; no, that was inaccurate, failing to hear—what parking in the parking lot (a slow processional now down the row, a hunt for a space where she pulled in and braked, a little rocking motion of the chassis settling on its metal springs, and then the handbrake and canceled ignition, the key, the door, the key again) he felt himself obliged this noontime to declare.

Because without such explanation he was nobody, an old man in a shopping center, a receptacle for other people’s leavings, waste, and with it he was somebody: the retired executive vice president of what had once been called the Adirondacks Savings Bank. He did not know its present name. He did not care to know. It would be changed again, of course, would merge and divide like a cancer, a not-so-productive mitosis, and there was no reason to be bothered by the nomenclature because by the time he, Aaron, learned and entered it into his statements, his checkbook, the name of the bank would have changed . . .