Anna in Chains (7 page)

She tried to go back to sleep. She kept remembering how Irving had grabbed her hand. An old turkey. A no one. Still, his fingers had felt alive. There was heat and strength in them. She had felt something, a feeling. This was astonishing, to feel something and to think about it. To bother to think about something and to feel pleasure from it.

Anna tiptoed out of bed, put on her clothes, and went down in the old elevator to the lobby. The light of dawn was just arriving through the windows; the desk clerk, a Cuban named Jesús who always wore a dirty black suit, was sleeping on one of the old couches. Anna didn't know what to do with herself. The cards from last night, she saw, were still on the table outside. She could play solitaire. She could actually walk to the ocean and watch the sunrise.

Would it be dangerous? To go alone to the beach? Did they have muggers in Miami Beach? Never mind muggers, she would go anyway. At her age forget everything. Doom was just as likely hiding in her arteries as on the sand.

Irving was still outside on the front porch, sleeping in his chair, his head back against the stucco wall. Had he really been there all night? Anna stared. She thought she could see dew condensed on his bald head. His white shoes glowed in the dimness. Maybe he was dead. She went over to him and tapped on his skull. He jerked upright.

“Dummy,” she said with relief. “You don't have a bed?”

“I wasn't sleeping,” he said, straightening his eye glasses. “Just taking the air.”

“Who cares?” Anna said. “I'm going beachcombing.”

“I'll come with you.”

“I'm going alone,” Anna said. “I need an adventure. When did I ever see the sunrise? In California, you only get sunsets. And at the end of the day, who's going to run to the beach?”

“Here no one runs, we all walk,” Irving explained, as he creaked himself out of the chair. He offered Anna his arm. “But allow me to come along and be your bodyguard.”

They saw it happen, a fuzz of pink over the blue horizon, a blur of white cloud, and then the emerging burning ball, coming up on a fountain of flame.

“That alone,” Irving said, standing against the rail of the narrow boardwalk while seagulls screeched and wheeled overhead, “…and you could believe in God.”

“You believe?” Anna asked.

“What am I, some kind of sucker?”

“Smart people, really smart people—some of them are believers.”

“I'll take my medicine straight,” Irving said. “I'll face the firing squad without a blindfold.”

“It would be nice to believe something,” Anna said. “Then you could have reasons, you could have meaning, you could have a social center, you could have someone to say a prayer when you're dead. This way, like for my husband Abram, I had to hire a stranger, a baby calling himself a rabbi, he reads from a printed sheet ‘This was a good man, a good husband, a good father.' A know-nothing.”

“If I were going to believe, I'd choose Jesus,” Irving said. “He's the best deal around. But no one in Miami Beach, Florida, in the Jew-nited States of America, thinks he's worth two cents.”

“They prefer Moses?”

“He can't hold a candle. All he did was talk to God in the burning bush. The trouble is, when you're this old, you should have something to hang on to.”

“How old?”

“Ninety-two,” Irving said. “Come June.”

“My husband died at fifty-five,” Anna said. “You had a whole lifetime extra over him.”

“It's never enough,” Irving said. “It doesn't feel like I even started yet.”

They began to walk along the wooden boardwalk. Two seagulls lit on the railing and walked right up to them. They stared boldly, craning their beaks forward.

“They want something,” Anna said.

“So who doesn't?” Irving answered. The sun was well out of the ocean now, getting redder.

“Look,” Anna said. “Is that beautiful or is that beautiful?”

“You're what's beautiful,” Irving said.

“Don't get carried away, Irving,” Anna said. “My week is up. I'm going home tomorrow, and anyway I'm not available.”

“My mistake. The first day I saw you on the porch we should have got acquainted. I should have talked to you sooner. You got a boyfriend?”

“My heart belongs to Arthur Rubinstein,” Anna said.

“He's younger than me? Richer?”

“Never mind,” Anna said. “It's not going anywhere with Arthur and me.”

“Even at our age we have a right to pleasure,” Irving said.

“Don't lump yourself together with me,” Anna said. “You're old enough to be my father. Look how you can hardly walk and I'm limber on my toes like a ballet dancer.”

“It's these rubber soles,” he explained. “New shoes. They glue me down. It's like wearing suction cups.”

“You want to go on the sand?” Anna asked. “You want to stick your toes in the water?”

“In my heart, I'm running down to the waves already,” Irving said, stopping to lean on the rail, breathing hard. “I'm splashing you with water. I'm ducking you under.”

“And I'm jumping over waves,” Anna said, looking out at the blue wide ocean.

“I'm tickling you,” Irving said.

“I'm laughing,” Anna said. She turned her head away from him.

“So how come you're crying?” Irving asked after a minute.

“Because it's a pity,” Anna said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “What we used to have, and what we can't have anymore.”

“At least let's take what we can get,” Irving said. He held out his hand. Anna studied it. Then she crooked her fingers in his. He brought their hands up to his mouth and kissed Anna's fingers. “I'm doing more than this with you,” he said. “Much more. You understand what I mean?”

“Don't have a dirty mind,” Anna said.

“I'm doing everything,” Irving said. “Every sweet thing. We're in heaven.”

Anna was silent.

“I'm going too far?” Irving asked.

“No,” Anna said. “I appreciate it.”

The next afternoon, the last of her visit, when the Red Top Cab had been called and was to pick her up in one hour for the trip to the airport, Anna put on her new silky flowered dress and got everything else into her suitcase. Ava was already down on the front porch playing cards. Anna realized that if she stayed here for a year, the sister business wouldn't improve. Ava wasn't going to get sentimental. A big bossy sister stays a big bossy sister. To cheer herself up, she sprayed herself five times with Ava's expensive perfume, and by the time she rode down in the elevator with her suitcase she smelled like a lilac tree. She would be lucky if in two minutes there weren't bees landing all over her head.

Irving was spiffy in a plaid jacket and a red bow tie.

He saluted her from his chair. “Forgive me if even on this farewell occasion I don't stand up,” he said. “One knee isn't so good today.”

“Stand up anyway, Irving,” Ava called over to him. “Use it or you'll lose it.”

“He lost it already,” Sadie said, with a hoarse laugh. “Otherwise I'd go with him on a cruise.”

“I didn't lose it, sweetheart,” he said, getting red in the face. “I just don't give it away to big-mouth yentas.” He turned to Anna. “You're lucky you're getting out of here. If I could go with you, I'd run in a minute.”

“So where am I going that's so special?” Anna said, suddenly seeing a picture in her mind of her tiny dark apartment, of her pianos, two of them, with the lids down over the keys, of the milk going sour in the refrigerator.

“Maybe you could get a room here,” Irving suggested. “You know,” he called over to the ladies at the card table, “I don't think Hyman rented the room yet from after when Sam Kriskin died.”

“No thank you,” Anna said. “I'm not interested in living in a dead man's room.”

“He didn't die in the room,” Irving assured her. “Only on the way in the ambulance. Not a single bad thing happened in the room. Kriskin was an immaculate person. That man was as clean as holy water.”

“What's the rent?” Anna said. It was a question she didn't expect to ask. It was meaningless, it was to make talk. It was stupid to have brought it up, what did she care? In LA she had a very good rent-controlled apartment, and, besides, she would never leave her daughters, what for? To come here and sit with some old man?

But Irving's blue eyes shone like electrified marbles, and he was already getting up slowly from the red metal chair. “We'll go in the lobby, Anna,” he said. “We'll find out the rent, maybe you'll stay, then what a time we'll have, you and I—we'll go across to the Crown every night and watch the floor show, we'll go out to dinner on Sundays with my daughter's chauffeur, we'll buy a VCR and rent a movie…”

Irving started to walk without his feet. Anna saw his upper body move toward her, but his shoes, his white shoes with the red rubber soles, stayed glued to the cement and she saw him go down like a boulder.

When she opened her eyes the next instant, he was face down on the cement porch and no one even noticed it. Ava was dealing a new hand of cards.

Irving, rolling on his round belly, was silent. He turned his head slightly to the side, and Anna saw his cracked eye glasses and blood on his forehead.

“Oh God,” she cried out. “Look over here!”

Irving whimpered a little and stayed on his face.

“Oh—help me pick him up,
please!
” Anna cried. She could not bend down alone because of her osteoporosis and her arthritis and her collapsed vertebrae.

“We don't pick anyone up here,” Sadie said from the table. “We each got our own problems. In no time flat we could all land in the hospital.”

“They fall here every day,” Ida added.

“How many times has Irving fallen anyway?” Mickey asked, and all the women looked skyward, as if they were figuring.

Anna couldn't bear it, to see him gasping and jerking like a beached fish down there, his forehead on cement. She rushed into the lobby and grabbed a cushion from one of the sagging couches. She carried it outside and slid it under Irving's forehead.

“Don't move him,” Ava said. “Something could be broken.”

“The last time nothing was broken,” Ida said.

“But the time before, remember, it was his elbow.”

“This was a softer fall than that one. That time, he stepped out the elevator before it was level. Everyone heard him go down.”

Anna ran inside again and yelled to the Cuban clerk. “Jesús! Call the doctor, dummy!” He seemed to be counting out colored postcards of the Colby Plaza. He was counting in Spanish.

Outside again, Anna knelt over Irving. “Irving, can you hear me?” He rocked on his round stomach to answer her. “Are you okay, Irving?” she asked him. “Are you comfortable?”

“I make a nice living,” he said.

Anna looked at him, then stood up, shocked.

“A joke,” he said. Then he spit out a little blood.

“Jesús!” she yelled into the lobby “Did you call?” The man looked up from the desk, puzzled. It occurred to Anna that he was drunk.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “That old guy can't be on that pillow.” He ran out to the porch and grabbed the cushion from under Irving's forehead. “If he bleeds on this, Hyman Cohen will blow a fit! These are his new pillows!”

“Ten years new,” Ava called over to them.

“Jesús! Come here!” She called him like a dog, slapping her leg. “Help me pick him up this minute!”

“There's no hurry,” the Cuban said. “They'll pick him up when they come.”

“Who?”

“The paramedics.”

“Did you call them?”

“They have a standing appointment here,” Sadie said from the card table as she lit another cigarette.

“Go,” Anna said, shoving the Cuban. “Call them!” She watched him till he went in and picked up the phone.

While they waited, Anna sat down on the steps of the Colby Plaza and maneuvered Irving's face, still pointing down, into her lap. She stroked the few hairs on the back of his bald head.

“Don't worry, Irving darling,” she whispered. “You'll be fine, this is just a little nothing. We all have days like this. I myself fell in a hole in a parking lot a year ago. I still have a bone spur on my foot from it.”

Irving was crying.

“It hurts you somewhere? It hurts a lot?”

He nodded his head. His weight in her lap felt like the weight of one of her babies. She thought the feeling of taking care had disappeared forever, and now here it was again.

“Here they come,” Ava announced.

A shuddering vibration shook the street, and a fire truck pulled up at the curb. Four firemen jumped off; they were wearing black rubber trousers with yellow suspenders.

“Aah, it's you again, isn't it?” one of them said to Irving. Irving was sobbing without restraint now. She could feel his hot tears seep through her dress. She found his hand and squeezed it. He held on very tight.

“Don't worry, Irving dear,” she whispered into his ear. “It's only this life-and-death business we're having here. Don't take it seriously.”

The firemen were turning him over, opening a big black box, taking out rubber tubes, gauze, fancy machines. If the firemen were being the doctors, then were the doctors running up and down ladders putting out fires?

The paramedics clumped around in their huge rubber boots. “Anything hurt?” they kept asking Irving. “Where does it hurt?”

“He's fine,” Ava called from the card table. “The man is made of steel. I warned him, never wear shoes with rubber soles. And I told him, always get up slow, get your balance first. But no, a big shot, he was in a hurry to impress my sister.”

Anna shot her a look, like the look Ava had shot Anna in 1914.

“Here comes the ambulance,” one of the firemen said. “Are you going to the hospital with him?” He was addressing Anna.