As Dog Is My Witness (28 page)

T
he house, a large brown
Victorian, was one of the largest in town, although it wasn’t at
all ostentatious. The owners had needed the space because they had
seven children.

I remembered when a swing and several bicycles were
on the wrap-around porch, but now it was bare, perhaps due to the
weather.

Screened-in during the summer months, the porch
lacked insulation or windows, so this cold winter day, it was no
place for civilized conversation, or even uncivilized
conversation.

Having dropped The Mole off at Newark Liberty
International Airport (a post-9/11 compromise name so stupid
there’s no point in even recounting the tale) with specific
instructions to get himself good and lost, Mahoney and I stood
waiting at the front door, his Trouble Mobile parked at the curb.
Big, Bigger, and Biggest were probably in the neighborhood, but the
black SUV was no longer visible, and neither were they.

Mahoney’s breath, visible in the cold, was a little
heavier than usual, resembling the steam that comes from a horse’s
nostrils on chilly days. After a silent drive of a little less than
an hour, I wasn’t sure how he was reacting to The Mole’s
revelations. I didn’t think he was contemplating violence, but
silence often doesn’t tell you all that much about a person’s
intentions.

There wasn’t much in the way of Christmas decoration
on the house, but the string of lights that ringed the windows was,
at least, colorful. Jews like me (that is to say, the kind that
consider themselves Jewish, minus the messy “religion” part) like
to drive around and look at the Christmas lights every year, mostly
because we never have the nerve to call attention to our houses by
making them look like Disney World rides. The only reference to
Jews decorating their houses for a holiday had to do with lamb’s
blood, and is best left unemulated in Central New Jersey. Still, I
do prefer the colored lights to the current trend toward
white-only, which seems not only unimaginative but somehow
segregationist.

The pause since Mahoney had pushed the doorbell
hadn’t been long, but he was already shifting his weight from leg
to leg, as if he expected to jump one way or the other, but didn’t
know which. After what seemed an eternity, but was really about
fifteen seconds, the front door opened.

Behind it was a tall, thin, bald man in his
mid-seventies, wearing wire rimmed glasses and corduroy everything,
including a vest. I was glad I’d left Ethan home—the sound of all
that corduroy rubbing together would have left him quivering on the
ground. Sometimes, Asperger’s kids are unusually sensitive to
sound.

The man looked surprised when he saw who was at his
door, but he smiled. “Jeffrey,” he said to Mahoney. “We weren’t
expecting you until tomorrow.”

“Dad,” Mahoney said. “May we come in?”

“Of course, of course,” he said, stepping aside to
let us out of the refrigerator and into the house. “You must be
freezing.” I think he was referring to Mahoney’s rather distant
behavior, but we were damn cold, so I was glad to walk inside.

It had been a good number of years since I’d set foot
inside Mahoney’s boyhood home in Bloomfield. It was a lot different
now, with the seven kids (Mahoney being the eldest) all grown and
gone. Mahoney had tried to get his parents to sell the place and
move into something more manageable, but they weren’t ready for an
“active adult community,” and liked the familiarity of the house.
Truth be known, they were probably happy to have all that space to
themselves after the years of raising such a loud, boisterous
brood.

Things certainly were neater now. There were no
jigsaw puzzles partially completed on the dining room table, no
rollerblades on the floor by the door, no piles of laundry in
various stages of completion, no constant flow of humanity through
the kitchen, and, alas, no bearded collie named Marvin, the
biggest, friendliest, stupidest dog ever.

These days, it looked more like the kind of house two
senior citizens lived in, without the burden of a mortgage. It was,
indeed, a testament to retirement—Mahoney’s father from the Newark
police force, and his mother from teaching art to grammar school
children in Irvington. Now, an easel was prominently displayed in
the living room, where one might expect a television. A model train
set was cleverly constructed to follow the thick wooden molding
over the dining room doors, and piles of fishing, boating, and art
magazines were near the easy chairs, of which there were a goodly
number.

“Aaron Tucker,” Mahoney’s father said, looking me
over fondly. “Haven’t seen you in years.”

“I hope I don’t look all that different, Sergeant
Mahoney,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

“You’re still a kid,” he said with a warm grin. “And
drop that ‘sergeant’ stuff. I’m retired, and you’re old enough to
call me Al.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said honestly.

He was about to respond when his son, whose glances
around the room added to the tension of the situation, said,
“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s inside,” the elder Mahoney said, pointing
through the dining room to where the family room once was, a place
where the television did in fact exist, and where ex-Sergeant
Mahoney had once devoted himself to his laserdisc collection.
Outdated forms of technology, apparently, run in the family.

“I need to talk to her,” Mahoney said, walking
briskly through the dining room.

“I think I’d better go with him, uh
. . . 

“Al,” said Mahoney’s dad, who seemed to know he
wasn’t supposed to follow us.

I almost had to run to keep up with Mahoney, but when
we made it into the family room, he stopped dead in his tracks, and
I very nearly bumped into him like a character in a Warner Brothers
cartoon. With the camera in front of Mahoney, you wouldn’t see me.
You’d just hear the Carl Stalling music and see Mahoney slightly
flinch when I inadvertently smacked into his back.

And there are those who say my generation didn’t grow
up with an appreciation of fine art.

I peered around his side to see his mother, a tall,
hearty, dark-skinned woman with brown hair of a shade different
than the one I remembered, in a pair of blue jeans and a green
sweatshirt over a longsleeved flannel shirt. She looked up from her
work in the heavily decorated room. Her work appeared to be
wrapping a gift, and she immediately looked startled and a little
irritated.

“Oh, Jeffrey,” she said to Mahoney. “You’ve spoiled
the surprise.”

I moved out from behind him and she noticed me.
“Aaron!” she said, opening her arms. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Hi, Mrs. . . .  She held up a finger
to remind me of our decades-old agreement. “Sorry.
Mom
.” I
wondered how my mother would feel about my calling someone else by
that name, but this didn’t seem the time.

Isobel Mahoney, born in Venezuela, walked over and
gave me a warm matronly hug. Her son, stupefied, gave me a look
that was neither warm nor matronly. He, for one, remembered why we
were here.

“Mom,” he said a little more forcefully, and she let
go of me and faced her son, who was only a few inches taller than
she. Isobel slightly shook her head.

“Oh, fine,” she said. “If you can’t wait.”

She walked back to the table where she’d been working
and picked up a box partially obscured by green foil wrapping paper
with gold bells printed in vertical rows. She held it out to
Mahoney.

“Here. Merry Christmas.”

Possibly without even knowing he was doing so,
Mahoney held out his hand and took the box from his mother. He
looked at it.

A boxed set of DVDs: the entire
Planet of the
Apes
movie series. Mahoney, she knew, was a huge
Apes
fan—in every possible sense of the word “huge.”

“Mom,” he said for the third time, holding out his
hands to gesture, but looking merely confused.

“Is that all you have to say?” Isobel frowned at her
son. “Why did I bother?”

“Mom, I came here today because of the man you sent
to sabotage my work.”

Isobel went back to the table and picked up another
gift, taking the wrapping paper from Mahoney and using it on the
new box. Waste not, want not, I guess.

“Oh,
that
,” she said.

Oh, that
?

Mahoney didn’t so much sit as melt into a low sofa,
which at one time hadn’t been so low. His knees seemed to give up
their mission and surrender to the enemy—gravity—and he sank into
the sofa in a gesture of futility I hadn’t seen from him since he
was eighteen years old.

“I don’t understand. You
admit
you sent
someone to mess up all the work I was doing?”

She had folded and taped the wrapping paper expertly,
and was wielding ribbon like most people use a fork on spaghetti.
“Of course, I admit it,” Isobel answered. Even under stress, her
voice never held the slightest trace of an accent. “I did it for
you.”

That was enough for me. Now
I
sank into the
couch, too, although it wasn’t quite as long a trip, since my knees
started out closer to the ground. I sat next to Isobel.

“Aaron,” she said, “since you’re so close, would you
mind lending me a finger?” She indicated a spot to hold the ribbon
while she created an elaborate knot of some kind, and even without
thinking, I obeyed her request. “Thanks, dear.”

Mahoney seemed to be shrinking as I looked at him,
and under any other circumstances, I probably would have found it
amusing, or at least let him
think
I found it amusing. I
decided against speaking at all.

He finally managed words. “You did it
. . .  for me?”

“Certainly,” Isobel nodded as she tied off the knot
and gave me a signal to let go. “You know how I feel about you
running all over the state, getting yourself into all sorts of
situations in all sorts of weather. It’s dangerous. We’ve talked
about it enough times before, haven’t we?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“No ‘but’ about it,” Isobel continued, on a roll now.
“I’ve told you time and again. I get out of bed worrying about you
in the morning, and go to sleep worrying about you at night. But
would you listen to reason? Nooooooo, not you! ‘It’s what I’m best
at, Mom; I’ve got to do what I want, Mom.’ Huh!”

She turned to me without missing a beat. “I made
Christmas cookies, Aaron. Would you like one?”

I figured she wasn’t mad at me, so I said “sure.” She
reached behind her and found a plate of cookies wrapped in
cellophane and ribbon.

She pulled the ribbon off.

“I don’t want to be any—” I said.

“Nonsense. You go ahead,” she said, cutting me off.
Mahoney looked like his head might leave his neck entirely and go
flying around the room.

“So let me get this straight. I wouldn’t quit my job,
so you decided to have someone drive around after me and make it
look like I couldn’t fix cars anymore?”

Isobel nodded. “That’s right. If you weren’t going to
be reasonable, I figured it was necessary to convince your
employers you were slowing down. After all, Jeffrey, you’re in your
mid-forties now! That’s no age to be driving all over the place
with grease on your hands. It makes much more sense for you to be
working behind a desk, supervising, using your brain.” I didn’t
agree with her, but the chocolate chip cookies were really good.
Isobel couldn’t just stop there, though. “Like Aaron does,” she
added.

I almost choked on the cookie, but managed, through
the power of sheer repetition, to keep eating. It helps to stay
practiced. Mahoney’s eyes were so narrow now he looked like Clint
Eastwood staring into the sun.

“Mom,” he said, barely keeping himself under control,
“I understand you’re worried, but trying to get me fired isn’t
going to solve the situation. You have to understand. Twenty-five
years ago, I stopped living under your roof. I’m a grown man
now.”

“Then where are my grandchildren?” Ah hah! I sat
back, crossed one leg over the other, and chewed my cookie,
confident in the knowledge that I had twice reproduced. Well, not
all by myself, but you get the idea.

I knew for a fact that Mahoney and his wife Susan had
made a very early decision not to have children, partly because
Mahoney, as the eldest of seven, felt as if he’d helped raise six
kids already, and wasn’t especially fond of the experience. He and
Susan enjoyed their life together and didn’t want to change it.
They were exactly the kind of people who
shouldn’t
have
children, and were quite content knowing that.

But Mahoney couldn’t tell his mother he didn’t want
her to have any more grandchildren (the other six Mahoney children
had provided her with nine so far) because of the chaotic way he
had been raised. Isobel was not one for recriminations,
particularly when aimed at her.

“Susan can’t have children,” he said quietly. As he
spoke the words, I could hear the clever rationalization rolling
around in his head: “Susan can’t have children because we’ve
decided we’d be bad parents—I didn’t say she
physically
couldn’t have children.”

But his mother was tougher than that. “You can
adopt,” she said.

“We don’t want to. Besides, this really isn’t about
whether or not we have kids, is it, Mom?” Mahoney, awakened by the
competition, was leaning forward now, rising to the occasion. I did
what I do best, and took another cookie.

Isobel, halfway through another package (the woman
had nine grandchildren and seven kids, after all), stopped and
exhaled. “No,” she said. “It’s not. You’re right. I just hate the
idea of you out on the Turnpike in a snowstorm in the dark. Is that
so awful?”

Mahoney stood up and walked to his mother. He
gestured for her to stand, and she did. And my friend embraced his
mother and held her close.