Acquainted with the Night (12 page)

I carry his urine in a blue plastic jug given to me by an orderly like a sacred trust, to present to the proper nurse. I cannot find the right nurse, they all look alike. I have never looked at them, only stepped on the toe of one, in protest. As I search, a new patient approaches me, a small woman with straight white hair drifting about her cheeks in a girlish bob. “Have you seen my children?” She has a sweet face and a gentle, pleasing voice. “No? You haven’t seen them? Two little children, a boy and a girl, curly hair?”

I shake my head again. “I’m awfully sorry, I haven’t.”

The next day I see them. They visit with her in the, waiting room, large, weary, middle-aged, and kind. They treat her ever so kindly in the waiting room, and she treats them with aloof politeness. An hour after they leave she stops me in the corridor. “Have you seen my children? A boy and a girl, curly hair?”

The day before the operation, cousins whom I cannot bear arrive to pay their respects. I wish the flasher would come in and perform for them but he stubbornly stays away. I even consider going to fetch him, but that would be exploitation. My sister is doing her duty entertaining the guests. Let her. She is the big sister.

“Take me out for a drink,” I whisper to my nephew, her older son.

He is a smart boy, though only twenty-three. He understands that his mother and I are losing our father and must be treated like children. He rises promptly like a great blond hairy tree, six foot two, and steers me to the elevator.

“I bet I can drink you under the table,” I say.

I order Johnnie Walker Red, he orders Johnnie Walker Black. I wonder what is the difference between the red and the black, but not wishing to appear so ignorant in front of a younger man, I don’t ask. From the way he drinks I realize he is an adult, and feel almost resentful that he grew up secretly, behind my back. I imagine now that women look at him with lust. I try, merely for distraction, to look at him with lust but cannot manage it.

During the third double Scotch my nephew says, “Have you met the woman who’s looking for her children?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I thought if we could introduce her to Six-two-four Avenue D maybe we could make a match.”

I choke with laughter, sputtering Scotch all over the table. What a brilliant sally, a pinnacle of wit. I wish I had thought of it. Yet inside I am thinking, That is really in bad taste. Such bad taste. Young people.

He drinks four, I drink only three. I feel old, middle-aged. What do the other drinkers think about us? I don’t look old enough to be his mother, nor young enough to be his girlfriend. They think he is a young man doing a middle-aged woman a favor, which he is. I wonder if I am boring him with my gloom. The hours I spent holding the book for his mother long before he was born or even dreamed of come back to me.

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:

You eat your victuals fast enough;

There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,

To see the rate you drink your beer.

But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,

It gives a chap the belly-ache.”

That is unfair. He is a good boy and I love him dearly. I put my hand on his. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” What I really want to say is this:

’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale

Is not so brisk a brew as ale:

But take it: if the smack is sour,

The better for the embittered hour;

It should be good to heart and head

When your soul is in my soul’s stead;

And I will friend you, if I may,

In the dark and cloudy day.

But I don’t think he cares for poetry. I doubt if his mother ever told him how I held the book for her; she is not given to discussing the past, says she remembers very little.

The day of the crucial operation we crowd into the room to see my father wheeled out on the stretcher. There are too many of us for comfort, but what can we do? Everyone has a right to be there, everyone wants to say goodbye. Once again, his lips are sealed in wrath. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, dying. Selfish. Brain. Heartless. I shout all this at him from behind closed, withering lips. What about us? What about me? Not one word for me? His eyes open. He looks around at us one by one, enumerating the members of his tribe. He is groggy from the shot, but he says mildly, “If you’re all here, then who’s home taking care of the little girls?”

Those are my little girls he’s talking about. He has forgotten nothing and no one, keeps us arrayed in his eye like a family portrait, precious and indestructible. My heart leaps up, to a grief that cuts like a knife.

“Six-two-four Avenue D? Six-two-four Avenue D?” He edges up and appeals to the crowd of us around the stretcher. We ignore him. Go find the old woman with the children.

The odd thing is, I think, when it is over and we bid goodbye to the waiting room, that all along I knew exactly where 624 Avenue D was. It was near my high school. I had a friend who lived in 628, in a row of attached two-family houses on a modest, decent street. Had I met the flasher anywhere else but the terminal waiting room, I would gladly have given him directions to find his way home. There, I was powerless. I wish I could explain that to him.

T
HEIR NAMES CAME TO
her in a dream, Brauer and Elemi. They were a couple, close to thirty. In the dream they walked holding hands along the southern edge of Central Park, stopping to admire the restless buggy horses pawing the pavement. Then they had breakfast in the Plaza Hotel: a waiter who bowed discreetly from the waist served them eggs Benedict and ambrosial coffee. Afterwards they walked in the park, where the smell of cut grass rose keen and fragrant. As if by telepathy, they stopped walking at the same moment and sat down on a bench to talk. Vera’s first thought on awakening was that the dream had been so realistic; nothing happened in it that could not happen in real life.

She reached for an old plaid bathrobe—originally John’s, but it had lost its aura of identity by now and felt anonymous. Vera, who was slim, had to fold over the excess fabric and belt it securely. In the kitchen she found her daughter, Jean, just sixteen, already finishing breakfast, peering through thick glasses at
Madame Bovary.
The pot of coffee was waiting on the stove. Jean made it nearly every morning, using a filter, and it was excellent. When Vera praised it, as usual, Jean slowly closed the book, her eyes fixed on the vanishing page till the two halves snapped shut. All the years of inculcating good manners have worked, thought Vera.

“Thanks. Did you sleep all right? You didn’t take any of those pills, did you?”

She was touched by her daughter’s concern. Vera only occasionally took the sleeping pills prescribed when she left the hospital five months ago, but Jean was righteously wary of drugs. She also had strong feelings against cigarettes, abortion, and war. “No, I haven’t taken them in over a week. I slept fine. I had a funny dream, though.”

“Oh, really? What?”

“This man and woman with very odd names who eat at the Plaza and walk in Central Park.”

Jean leaned forward smiling, her face resting in her palms, some strands of loose blond hair falling over her hands. “What were their names?” She was looking at her mother with almost the same eager attention she showed to her friends. Unprecedented and flattering though this was, Vera became aware that she did not wish to reveal the names of Brauer and Elemi.

“Oh, I forget. Except for the names it was a very ordinary dream, only I can’t seem to shake it. Do you know that feeling?”

Her interest extinguished, Jean carried her plate and mug to the sink. Watching her, Vera received an abrupt flash of illumination: the name Brauer had something to do with the German word
Frau,
and “elemi” was a word she had often written in crossword puzzles. It meant a soft resin used in making varnish. Also, it was an auditory inversion of “Emily,” the name of a beautiful girl she had known at college and since lost track of. She sensed at once that these connections were true and ingenious, but finally irrelevant.

Jean cast her mother a curious glance from the doorway. “You’re going to work today, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes. It doesn’t matter if I’m late. Howard is away this week and nobody else cares.” She had worked in the advertising agency for seven years. When she needed to take six weeks off because of illness after her husband’s death, they had been very understanding. She noticed, though, that on her return, Howard, the boss, had watched her closely for signs of instability, of which there were none. Vera was recovered; it would not happen again.

“I won’t be back till around seven,” Jean called from the hall. “I have the Dramatics Society.” Then she dashed back to the kitchen. “Do you think we’ll get a letter from Freddy today?”

“I hope so.” Vera smiled at her. “Any day now.” Jean’s older brother, away for his first year in college, had mentioned possibly bringing a friend home over Easter, someone Jeanie might like, Freddy wrote, since he refused to do the vivisection experiment in zoology. Although boys were Jean’s preoccupation, few met her ethical standards.

As the door finally clattered shut Vera realized that she had not even recalled Freddy’s existence this morning before Jean spoke of him. That had something to do with the dream about Brauer and Elemi, which hovered about her still like a pleasant, warm fog. All other mornings now, when she woke she mentally ticked off the names of her two children, like a miser whose hoard has been plundered counting over with melancholy the few coins remaining. She had begun it in the hospital, spurred by a chance remark of one of the nurses: “But you’re not all alone, Mrs. Leonard. Think of your children. You have a lot to live for.” Vera had smiled wanly as the nurse, round, Oriental, efficient, smoothed unruly wrinkles in the sheets with a firm hand. Trite as her counsel was, it had helped, Vera had to admit.

Naming over her connections was not the only new habit to have taken hold since the painful weeks of her illness. With John gone, so many of her rooted personal customs had altered. (An “untimely” death, the minister had called it, and despite her suffering Vera almost grinned involuntarily: as a writer of copy she understood the lure of the ready-made phrase.) She no longer woke outrageously early on weekdays to start dinner simmering in the slow cooker; she could fix something simple for herself and Jean after work. She no longer tore the crossword puzzle out of the paper, or worried about underwear hanging in the bathroom for days or library books kept past their due date. She shopped in bits on the way home from work instead of massively on Saturdays. Magazines could be tossed out when she finished reading them, instead of accumulating in unsightly piles for John eventually to glance at. There was no need now to struggle with clothes packed tight in a narrow closet, or to feel hesitant about taking taxis home on rainy days, or talking at length to her older brother, long-distance. All winter Vera had slept in flannel granny nightgowns, heedless of appearance, and let ashtrays overflow while she smoked in bed to her heart’s content. In fact, as she often noticed guiltily, daily life was freer and easier without him. Yet she was lonely at night, and though she had tried she could not change the twenty-year habit of sleeping on one side of the bed, the right. If ever again she found herself in bed with a man, she thought in her more lighthearted moments, he had better approach her from the left or not at all.

On the bus going to work Vera let her eyes close and lapsed into a waking daze. She saw Brauer and Elemi again, this time following an Hispanic building superintendent up the stairs to see a vacant apartment. It was spacious, with five good-sized rooms and large windows overlooking Central Park. The walls were dingy, but the super promised they would be freshly painted for the new tenants. Brauer and Elemi were holding hands as before, their faces glowing with joy. When they looked at each other they knew immediately, without words, that they would take it. Brauer spoke to the super and gave him some money. Outside they stopped at the corner to buy frankfurters and orange drinks at a stand. Walking across the park, they passed the pond where miniature sailboats glided in the brilliant sunlight, then discovered a trio of students—violin, cello, and clarinet—playing ethereal chamber music under a grove of trees. Brauer tossed some coins into the violin case and they walked on, holding hands, to the Frick museum, where they sat down in the indoor sculpture garden. Vera was so enchanted that when she opened her eyes—some part of her mind attuned to the duration of the ride—she had to hurry through the crowd to get off at her stop. Again she was struck by the realism of the dream. She would have been less surprised had the dreams been re-creations of her own experience: there had been a phase, just after John’s “untimely” death, when she brooded over episodes from their past. But she and John had not done any of the things that Brauer and Elemi did.

There were meetings with clients all morning, then a festive staff lunch for one of the young copywriters, whose wife had had a baby. Through it all Vera was suffused with a calm, happy glow which made her think of Eastern philosophies of acceptance, feeling beyond desire, the flow of being. These were things her son, Freddy, home from college at Christmas, had talked about. Later, in the company library, Will Pratt, one of the head accountants, approached her, slapping her warmly on the back so that she quivered. “Hey, Vera, you’re certainly looking great today. I meant to tell you at lunch. What’s up?”

“What do you mean? Nothing is up.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t get that glow just from martinis at lunch. You must be seeing somebody.” He was gazing at her earnestly, with kindness beneath the brash grin, the nervous, swift dark eyes. She had known Will for years—he had been a help during the months of John’s dying, letting her cry in his office, bringing her cups of coffee, even fixing her slipshod account sheets without complaint—so she shouldn’t be alarmed by his bantering now. Nonetheless it made her eyelids twitch.