“You do?”
You handed it to me. An ordinary envelope. Inside, a card from the government regarding my change of name. No longer just little Hughie. No longer just the son of your old friend who left me in your care. I was now Hughie Harper. You and the doctor have adopted me, in expectation of your own marriage, in expectation of a final form to life.
“You’re part of the family, Hughie,” you said, laughing at your little prank.
“That’s right,” I said.
It is not precisely what I’d hoped for, but it is enough. Now, Sammy, you will get your inheritance, your grandfather’s fortune, with no legal troubles at all. And as for my new mother: it is as close as I will ever get, dear Alice, to crawling into your womb to die.
“Chin up,” you said, and raised the camera. I smiled; ecstatic flash of light. So there will be a photograph of the creature for the doctors to delight in; perhaps a frontispiece to a study. She lay her camera down again.
“Are you happy?” Alice asked me.
How can anyone answer this, at any moment?
She’s left now to join Sammy out among the graves. And here I am, avoiding the next part as long as I can. Ants crawl across the page. You know how it goes, don’t you? When you sit at midnight, and ask something terrible of someone? You know what happens in the morning.
When I awoke that first morning, the morning after I’d left Hughie’s room, the world was bright and cold. I could hear a radio downstairs, and someone singing along, and I saw that the other bed was empty and that I’d thrown my own bedclothes on the floor. I was all alone. The goldfish swam in their Precambrian tank. Through some extrasensory perception, Buster had figured out I was awake and came leaping into the room, ears flying, to lick my face before I could ward him off. He jumped onto the bed and took hold of a stuffed animal by the neck—a tiger—giving a good fight before dropping it, licking me again, and darting back downstairs. More voices. I should join them. But I waited a moment. This would never come again. The sun through the shades in an early morning blue; it would never come again. Whatever
had happened, whatever Hughie decided to do, it was done—and nothing would be the same after this morning. And that sun. I had seen it years before, on another morning, when I awoke to find my world utterly changed, once before, covered in a film of snow. The same silence in my heart. The same light in the air, bright as luck.
Out in the hall, I passed the sewing room, but the door was closed.
I could smell waffles from the stairs, and I stopped again. Waffles, and something else frying; it smelled astounding. The radio was playing “The Best Things in Life Are Free” and I could hear Sammy mock-crooning to it, padding around the slick floor in his little slippers, probably singing to the microphone of a whisk. Buster’s nails made tap-dance noises; I imagined he was following Sammy, probably begging for scraps. And Alice in her bathrobe, stirring the eggs—for it must be eggs. The green bathrobe, the one she bought a month before she left me. Her hair in a kerchief. The dreamy eyes of someone who has had just one sip of coffee.
“Hey there, late sleeper!” she said when I came in. Old smile, old Alice. Just the two of them.
“What’s for breakfast?” I said.
“Duckbrains,” my son told me, then whispered something in Buster’s ear.
Just the two of them.
My old wife tapped Sammy with a spoon. Yellow robe, ponytail; no matter. “Eggs and waffles and toast. Duckbrains are extra.” She turned to me. “Where’s your daddy, little Hughie?”
“I don’t know. Still sleeping, I guess.”
“Not in his room,” she said. “He took his car.”
“Maybe he went out for more duckbrains,” Sammy offered.
She crouched down and squinted at our son: “Maybe he did! Duckbrains!”
“Ha!” said Sammy.
As I sat down and Alice poured me some orange juice, I tried to remember every detail of the moment. The ribbon sewn into the curtains, and the tea-stain of light across the bottom. The smell of waffles and burned toast; the sound of Alice scraping the black bits into the garbage. Her plain face, and how, in the part of her hair, where I had first kissed her back in another century, gray roots showed beneath the dye. How the radio was slightly off its station, and some news report could be heard like a ghost under the new song it was playing.
Alice’s brown eyes brightened.
“Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye!
” she sang, tapping her feet, turning up the radio, then she hit Sammy with the spatula and he joined in.
“Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don’t cry!”
It was going to be this way as long as I wanted. Hughie had made it happen. I was going to be here with my wife and son, singing to the radio, half a year, perhaps, before I was too far gone. Was there any luck like mine, anytime in history? And what if the best happened; what if my curse somehow came undone, reversed itself, and instead of slowly dying, melting into a child’s body, I would begin—today, this morning, in this kitchen—to grow forward? There are stranger miracles. Every few weeks, Sammy and I would stand against that kitchen door for measurement, and there it would be: an inch, two inches. Older and bigger like all the other boys, regaining the hands and fingers I used to have—and the handwriting as well, dear Reader—and the eyes, the laugh, all of it. A new chance, a new life. Then there would come a day when I was visiting old Mom—me and Sammy, back for Christmas—a day fifteen years in the future when I would be in my twenties and handsome again, and she would look at me, quite old herself and feeble, and wonder if it was age, or just the prickings of memory, that reminded her of an old husband, old Asgar, as young as he looked the evening she left him.
“Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye!”
Where would Hughie be about now? Oh, somewhere past Eppers,
fiddling with the dials of the radio to get
Amos’n’ Andy
to come in clear. I guessed he’d stop at some service station and have all the fluids replaced, the fabric cleaned, remove all trace of the time spent on the road with a beastly betrayer, and a messy one. A new chance, a new life. Lean against a water tank and pull out the map—where to now, pal? Could a man live out his years in Missoula, Montana, in a small house near the center of town, and buy his groceries at the Saturday market where he could eye the men lifting cargo onto the railroad cars? Or a city life, in New York, with an apartment high above the park and a doorman who appreciated it when you asked about his kids? Or even, in the last decades of this life, back to San Francisco? Back across a ferry into the fog. A house out on the edge of a cliff, with a view of the Golden Gate, the sounds of foghorns lulling an old man to sleep at night. A country to pick from. A new love, somewhere, hidden. And years to find it.
“I’m so happy you and your dad came,” Alice said. “I haven’t been so happy in—”
“Let’s not wait for him, though,” I said. “He’s probably on one of his morning walks.”
“I’m starving!” Sammy revealed.
“You sure?” she asked.
“Let’s eat.”
I was home. Finally, home. And the sad, the hopelessly sweet and sad part of it was that, in knowing this, I would always be alone.
It was three hours before the policeman came to the door. By then, Sammy and I had finished the dishes and Alice had us already involved in her project of pulling out all her books to dust the bookshelves. They were spread out on the floor around us, an ocean of pages, adored by my old wife through all the dull, happy, and awful moments of her private life—for books are selfish things, unshareable, and every tome I dusted made me think of time she had not spent with me. I recognized so many of them. Then the
doorbell rang and Alice had to step gingerly over her Dickens to answer it. Sammy’s weary sighs. A policeman’s voice, a wail from my old wife. Yes, yes, at last. I had used up the luck of the world.
A fisherman found the car in Indian Lake, five miles from town, and it was pure chance that he was there that morning and had noticed the fender gleaming in the muddy water. All doors were locked and the money was still in the sock, soggy but intact, and I applaud this county’s police department, and its dredging crew, for their small-town honesty. The car had not sunk immediately; apparently, as heavy as it appeared, the Chrysler had drowned as far as its windows and then begun to float. At that point, according to the coroner’s report, the driver had taken an old army gun out of the glove compartment (left open) and shot himself once through the mouth. It was probably ten minutes before the rest of the car began to sink, and then, with all that metal and the weight of the unusual radio, it would have gone down quickly. Maybe three minutes, maybe less. Of course, the driver was already dead. No shot had been heard, but then it was early morning and roosters were crowing, and anyway, no one lives near Indian Lake since the factory closed in’24.
You know, Alice, what happened, and Sammy, you remember. The policeman who explained all this in the parlor and how I fell into the sea of books and drowned and your mother stood crumpled against the wall, howling. Something has happened to your father, little boy. To whom? To your father, Hughie Dempsey. You remember how I wept the whole night in the bunk below yours, and Buster whined to hear me; how it must have confused
you. To hear a boy whispering those curses, and damning your beloved God, and standing in the stark moonlight like a man escaped from a madhouse.
On such occasions, in a small town, there is a newspaper article, a sermon in church, and a funeral. We had all these things. The article was just about what I’ve just written, with a fisherman interview, a police comment (“We’re stunned”), and a little report about me, the son abandoned in the swamp of this death. There was a tone of fright and anger to the article. How dare he do this, to the boy, and here, in this golden town! We cannot understand. We are not like this. The sermon was similar. The funeral was widely attended, swelling with music and curious people, though no one but Alice had ever met the man.
I can’t quite remember any of it. I know I developed a twitch in one eye that took a week to go away. I think I ate all the time, and wept at night, and would not change my clothes. Even in my stunned state, even with my goblin’s blood starving every bit of me that was human, I tried to do good; I found Hughie’s wife out in Nevada and called her. This was in the funeral home, when they had left me alone for a little while with the casket (oak and bronze, lid kindly closed, old friend). I found a phone in a corner of the office, among some musty-smelling silk orchids. “Abigail?” I whispered when a woman answered.
“Yes?”
“This is Max Tivoli. You remember me, a friend of Hughie’s. I have some bad news. Hughie’s dead.”
“Who are you, young man?”
“Abigail, it’s Max. Hughie’s dead.”
The operator came on to tell me that the call was finished. I tried again, but this time nobody answered. I looked at the phone
and wondered why I had bothered. I suppose it was her right to take him, but I hadn’t wanted her to. Or for Teddy to take him, for that matter. I was glad to keep him forever with me now. I went back into the parlor, where they were all waiting for me, a bouquet of eyes staring at me because, of course, they assumed I was a broken little boy.
Alice made us stay in the house. This was all the Levy that was left in her: to sit shivah for the dead. She never went to synagogue (there was no synagogue, of course), observed no holidays, ate bacon and shrimp when it pleased her, turned on the radio on Saturdays to hear
The Goldbergs,
and as far as I knew did not believe in God, but when it came to death, she was a Jew. A little Levy girl. She had to be. Death makes children of us all; I learned this in the war.
And it did not even make sense, if you thought about it: who was she to Hughie? Not family, of course. Not anyone. They hadn’t seen each other properly in forty years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in the park. But the town treated her like a widow, and came by with casseroles and stews and roast meats. I was reminded all at once of Mother and me, in Nob Hill, fighting off the ladies in veils. They asked me about my father, and I always said, “He was a good man, and he loved me,” and they left in a hurry from the spectacle of Jews in mourning. We wore black; we covered the windows; we rent the fabric over our hearts. We kept kosher. We separated the silver as her mother used to, nearly half a century ago. It was absolute madness, but it was all that Alice had.
I’d never seen her cry before. Not in my whole life. When you squeezed her tender heart, she usually oozed anger, but Alice cried over her Hughie, yes she did. Sitting there in her black silk, staring at the wall, she let the tears trickle as her eyes smoldered in some private fire. Late at night, I heard her moaning. And I could not sleep. After all, I was the one who had given her life this final grief, after all the others.
It took her a long time to ask me. By then, none of my family had been found and I was part of the house, deep in a life I have described to you in these pages. I’d refused to live in the sewing room—“my dad’s old room,” I called it—and was already semi-permanently bunked with Sammy; I was already enrolled in Mrs. McFall’s class, already Sammy’s “duckbrain.” It was the night I’ve described to you: two insomniacs staring at the sky. My Alice in her nightgown, soft and shapeless and old in the night, inviting me downstairs for milk. We sat at the table, with Buster at our feet. She poured little moon-white glasses. Then, in a voice broken by grief, she asked me at last: