Someone (22 page)

I said to my mother, “I didn’t know.”

My mother nodded. “It was a terrible thing to have him do,” she said. And she dropped her hands into her lap, as if from sheer weariness. “Terrible for him.”

She said, “He was all of what, twenty-three? Barely ordained. And your father so wasted by then. His bowels coming up to his throat, if you want to know the worst of it.” She fluttered her thin hand from her breast to her chin to illustrate.

I didn’t want to know the worst of it.

“Even as Gabe was putting the holy oil on him, the poor man was heaving and choking. Cruel. That cancer. Cruel of me to make Gabe go through it. I should have banned him from the room.”

“I don’t remember,” I said, moving to a corner of the dining room to avoid the draft from the open window—ever vigilant now against drafts, missteps, scalding water. I was a mother now and all the terrible things that could maul a child, snatch him from the world, had bared their teeth and trained their yellow eyes on me. The baby was warmly asleep against my shoulder. “I hardly remember that time at all,” I said.

My father a pale figure in the hospital window. All those strangers passing through the lobby, some crying, some carrying armloads of flowers. And then Fagin’s benign shadow. The Mc-Geevers with their mouths full of broken teeth standing over the coffin in the living room, telling someone in the crowd that a man so thin was a walking invitation to misfortune. And then that sweet sleep in the car on the way home from Calvary, one of the sweetest sleeps I’d ever known. Gabe in his collar then, looking down at me, his red eyes puzzled. “You slept? How could you have slept?”

“A blessing for you,” my mother said. “Not to remember.” And she once again touched her lips. “It was my fault, asking him. The poor child’s hands were trembling and the tears were running down his face. And your father was choking back the black bile, trying to encourage him. Trying to help him with the Latin.” She put her fingertips to her chin. “Moving his lips like he used to do when Gabe said his poems. Moving his lips because he couldn’t speak. There was a terrible odor. Rot and bile. The man’s body wasted to nothing. Radium was what they gave him to drink. Poison. His face a skull. The dear man.”

With her hand to her chin she paused and closed her eyes
again. I could hear the water boiling in the pots on the stove. I could hear the traffic in the street outside.

“I think your brother’s vocation was squashed right there and then, in that room, if you want to know what I think.” And she opened her eyes again. Behind her thin glasses they were black with her anger.

“I think it was the end of that poor boy’s sweet faith, to see your father suffer the way he did. To see his body suffer. Here he was, newly minted, full up with all the words they’d given him out there, at the seminary, all the prayers, and here was the sight of his father’s body reduced to a whimpering, suffering thing.”

She paused and lifted one of the white diapers, struck it against her lap, once, twice, three times. A keening gesture I had come to know. “How was he to go back to his parish,” she said, her voice low, “and stand in the pulpit and tell the people looking up at him that there was any mercy in this world? How was he to console them?” She glared at me, although it hardly seemed it was me she was speaking to. Her lips were wet with her fury. “His vocation ended right there in that hospital, if you ask me. I’ve always thought it. I’ve thought it for a long while.” And then she suddenly looked at me directly. “But don’t you dare tell him I said so.”

I shook my head. I would not.

My mother began to fold the diapers once more. “So it was terrible for me to bring it up again, at the hospital, when that priest showed up with his black bag. Terrible of me to throw that memory in your brother’s face when what he was trying to do for you was what he still hoped was right. The very best thing he knew, still. Trying to assure me that you’d get into heaven after all your pain. But I wouldn’t be consoled. I didn’t want you in heaven, I wanted you alive, on earth, with your child. When the priest came in again, I swung my purse at his head.”

“Your mother did get her Irish up” was how Tom described it later, in his own version of the scene.

In both versions, Gabe simply put his hands on my mother’s shoulders and said, “Now, Momma, quiet down.” He showed her his empty palms, as if it should be apparent that whatever they once had held, they held no more. I knew the gesture. “Let Father bestow the sacrament,” he said. “He’s a good priest. I’ll stand by his side.”

“And wasn’t he right?” my mother said, smiling at me, changing allegiance, or so it seemed to me, simply by wiping the spit from her lips and shaking the anger from her eyes. She folded and smoothed and patted down the clean diapers on her lap. “Weren’t you better the very next morning? Almost a miracle.”

I nodded. I thought of that solid door and the slip of my shucked body falling against it. I supposed I now had in my own life an equivalent experience, perhaps, to Gabe’s dark night in our father’s hospital room or Tom’s long fall from the plane, or any of the lonely journeys the dead had taken, journeys that couldn’t be shared or even sufficiently described. Now I had my own mystery, mine alone, my singular experience never to be shared or even sufficiently described, try as I might, over the years: death’s door, I would say. Like being run over by the Coney Island Express. None of it sufficient enough to convey what I had been through. Now I knew the quick work pain could make of time, of a lifetime. Now I knew what it was to abandon modesty, body, the entreaties of those who loved you, who wanted you to live.

“It was just that the infection cleared up,” I said. “That penicillin did the trick.”

And my mother, now that she had soothed herself, shaken off the memory of her anger at the priest, at Gabe, at the injustice of my own suffering, glanced at me with sly eyes, with that secret smile about her mouth that warned against the risk of drawing too much attention to the deepest joys. My mother reached
out and put her hand to the baby’s back. He was curved warmly against my shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said.

On a Saturday in cool October, two months after my ordeal, Tom put the bassinet and my suitcase into the trunk of the car, tying the lid half closed with rough string. He was giddy, going in and out in his good overcoat. My mother went before us down the stairs with a shopping bag full of the meals she had cooked, Gabe was behind us with the baby in his arms. Tom put one arm around my waist and gripped my right hand with the other as I leaned against the banister, taking one step at a time at his insistence. “I’m really fine,” I said, although the cold air and the sunlight on the sidewalk made my head swim. He eased me into the front seat of the car, only a twinge in my abdomen as I sat—an echo of the insult. Gabe leaned down to place the baby in my arms.

As Tom and I pulled away from the curb, I waved to the two of them, my mother and my brother. They were standing on the sidewalk together—my mother looking very small beside him. Gabe as handsome as ever. I knew they would watch until the car rounded the corner, and then they would go up again together to finish out the suddenly quiet day.

At the apartment in Rego Park, all was Spic and Span and lemon polish and the lingering odor of the apple pie Tom had taught himself to bake that morning, only the beginning of his efforts to make up for a wife who would not learn. There were roses in a vase on the table in the small kitchen. The crib was ready in the single bedroom and our bed was crisply made. He carried up the bassinet and the bottles and the shopping bag of food, while I changed the baby’s diaper and fed him a bottle and put him into his crib. Then Tom made tea and cut two pieces of the pie. I admired the roses while we ate at the small table. Tom
told a funny story about the two ladies in the grocery store who had advised him about the best apples to choose.

“While the baby’s asleep,” I told him, “I might go lie down.”

He brought my suitcase in, and I changed out of my dress and took off my stockings and put a housecoat over my slip. I put my glasses on the bedside table. He smoothed down the bedspread for me and took a throw from the closet—all wordlessly, so as not to wake the sleeping child. He lowered the shades while I stretched out on the bed, and when he leaned down to kiss my forehead and whisper sweet dreams, I took his wrist and said, “You lie down, too.”

He walked around the bed, sat at the edge, and untied his shoes. He lay back, somewhat cautiously, I thought, and, with as much distance between us as there could be in a double bed, reached over and took my hand. He gripped it, briefly, to assure himself that I was there, perhaps, or maybe simply to convey that he was grateful for the assurance. I heard him sigh and knew without turning my head he had closed his eyes. I lifted his hand and brought it to my lips.

It was not that my life was less valuable to me now that I had glimpsed what it would be like to lose it. My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child’s need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents’, my brother’s, even Tom’s, had failed to do. Love was required of me now—to be given, not merely to be sought and returned. My presence on earth was never more urgently needed. And yet even the certainty of that fact seemed reason to throw away caution, not to heed it.

I kissed his hand and moved it to my heart. We turned to each other.

“Oh, Marie,” he whispered. “We have to be careful.”

“Why?” I asked.

And I saw that he couldn’t resist a smile at my answer. I was
a bold piece. He made his eyes and his mouth grow serious. “You can’t endure another child.”

“Who said?” I whispered.

He shook his head. I still held his hand against my heart. “Your doctor,” he said. “Your brother. Even the priest who came to the hospital, who gave you last rites.”

“Fools,” I said. “Which one of them has ever had a baby?” But Tom closed his eyes and put his hand to his forehead. “What a terrible night that was,” he said. He whispered, “They gave you last rites,” as if the memory of it still took his breath away.

Gently, I touched his cheek to make him see me. I squinted in an effort to see him. “It was only the silly infection,” I said, and moved closer. I felt the ache in my abdomen, the muscle closing up around the ragged scar. “Next time I’ll know better,” I said. “I’ll bring my own ether.”

I began to unbutton his shirt. “Everyone says the second baby’s easier.” Put my lips to his bared throat—was there any place on a body more lonely and vulnerable? “A girl next time,” I said. “One of the nurses told me to have a girl next time. Someone to take care of me in my old age.” But he was still shaking his head.

“I’m not afraid,” I told him. I wasn’t. I had conceived our first child without any notion of the suffering involved. Now that I knew, desire—which was still there, of course—seemed small enough incentive to conceive again. It was courage now that was delightful to me. I was a bold piece. I had stood at death’s door. I had withstood pain. I knew I could make a stand against it, against time, bold and stubborn, a living child in my arms.

When he ran his fingertips over the scar that split my belly, he paused. I heard him catch his breath. “This is foolish of us,” he whispered.

I said, “I suppose it is.”

THREE

T
he first strange thing was that Tom brought him in through the front door, which we never used. I had been sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the shadow to cross the lace curtain over the window in the back door, the shadow that meant the car had been pulled into the carport, when I heard instead the rattle and bang and then the odd wheeze of the door at the front of the house. I heard Tom’s voice—loud and buoyant. “Come in, come in,” a jovial innkeeper—and another series of small crashes that was my brother’s suitcase being wrestled into the narrow hall.

Susan was at the sink, making something complicated out of the simple task of brewing iced tea—there was wild mint involved, weeds from the yard, as far as I was concerned, honey, and lemon rind—and the two of us glanced at each other at the sound of the front door opening, the sound of the storm door clutching at the threshold, with the same surprise we might have
shown if Tom had led Gabe in through the drier vent. “What in heaven’s name?” I said.

Gabe was standing alone in the middle of the living room. He had his hands at his side. Even as a boy, he had sometimes stretched his smile too wide like this. Conveyed, all inadvertently, the effort he was making to express a pleasure that was, nevertheless, authentic and sincere. It was a shy, dutiful boy’s picture-taking smile, held a beat too long. “Hey there,” he said.

He had lost weight. Something of his natural color had left not only his face and his hair but also the backs of his long hands, his polished dress shoes, the clothes he wore—a white polo shirt buttoned to the neck under a blue Windbreaker, despite the heat, and a pair of gray dress pants. Meticulous as always, yes, his broad long face was clean-shaven, his fair and graying hair carefully combed, but altogether less vivid than he had been, less present, somehow, in the world. I crossed the living room to him, Susan behind me, Helen following. Tom was already halfway up the stairs with the suitcase, and he called to Gabe over the banister. “Look out,” he said, “the gang’s all here,” as if to remind my brother that the women must be humored.

I reached up to put my palms to Gabe’s hollow cheeks. His skin was prickly, glazed with perspiration. He raised both his hands to my elbows. For a moment, we brought our faces together in the modern way, but then we stepped back, into the more comfortable distance we had known growing up. There was the scent of the institution about his clothes: cafeteria food and hospital disinfectant under his aftershave. “How was the traffic?” I said, and Gabe said, “Fine”—even his eyes had lost some vividness—while Tom cried out from the top of the stairs, “Southern State backed up through Hempstead going out. Poor fools won’t hit Jones before sunset.”

I turned to the girls behind me. I hadn’t intended it to, but it felt like a turning away.