In the Absence of Angels (16 page)

He wandered back into the room, dawdling. It
was
a parlor, very unlike the Frenchy living rooms of his friends. Opposite him, the wall was half covered by a tremendous needle-point picture, framed in thick, curdled gilt, of Moses striking the rock and bringing forth water at Meribah. “And Moses lifted up his hand,” it said in the big Doré Bible, “and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.” The faces of Moses and the Israelites were done in such tiny stitches that they looked painted, and there was a little dog lapping at the gush of water, which had minute, glistening beads worked into it. Diagonally across the room from the picture, the wreathed cherubim of a Vernis-Martin cabinet were flanked by a green marble column, on which poised an anonymous metal girl, arms outflung against a verdigrised apple tree, which sprouted electric-light bulbs.

He went over and fingered the Victrola, the only relatively new thing in the room. Slanting back on its lemon-oiled shelves lay all the newly acquired Red Seal records: Galli-Curci in the sextet from “Lucia”; the Flonzaley Quartet, whose sprigged mustachios he knew well from the Victor catalogue; and Alma Gluck, singing “From the la-and of the sky-ee blue” and then “wawtah” very quick. He would have liked to play that one, or “Cohen on the Telephone,” but he was sure that he would not be allowed to today.

Walking into the hot, brassy clutter of the kitchen, he stopped at the icebox and drew himself a glass of water from a pipe than ran back into the ice chamber — a fixture in which his mother took pride but which he thought overrated.

“Can I have some of Dad’s French Vichy?” He wasn’t even sure that he liked its flat, mineral taste, but it was something of a feat to get it.

“No, you can’t,” said his mother, gingerly taking a tray of prune pockets out of the oven. “I can’t be sending to the drugstore all the time. Catering to the fads and fancies of a lot of — A boarding house, that’s what I’m running! You’d think they all
lived
here!”

“Mother, what did Uncle Aaron die of?” he said idly.

He already knew the answer. He rarely needed to ask an explicit question about family affairs. By picking up crumbs and overtones at the endless family gatherings, he had amassed his information. His Uncle Aaron had had pneumonia and had been convalescing on an upstate farm all spring. But his mother said, “Of old age, I guess,” and gazed past him. Kinny’s father, years older than she, was only a decade younger than the dead uncle. The family was getting down. His father had only sisters now. Kinny began to eat a prune pocket.

“You wait till you get to the table. One of these days, you’ll burst!”

“Hattie!” a sharp, high voice called. “Hattie!” Then a small bell tinkled insistently.

“Go in and see what Grandma wants,” his mother said. “Tell her the optician’s man will be in this afternoon. And if she asks about a letter from Aaron, for goodness’ sakes don’t say anything!” She sighed. “I’m sure I don’t know what they’re going to tell her
this
time.”

He idled slowly down the hall to his grandmother’s bedroom, although he knew she had already been helped to her sitting room, where she spent most of the day. Light filtered through the half-drawn shades over the huge bed, with its wide panel of burled Circassian walnut, topped by a two-foot pediment of acanthus leaves. He swung himself onto the broad footboard, high as his shoulder. Up to it swelled the feather bed for which his mother was always wanting to substitute a hair mattress. Everything was big here — the looming wardrobe, where he had sometimes hidden, choking, among the tight-packed camphored clothes; the long chests, with their stretches of cold, fatty-looking brown marble; the towering, grim-latched trunks.

On his confirmation day, just past, when one of the trunks had been opened for the presentation of a gold watch with a remote, scrolled face, he had been allowed to finger a drawerful of Virginia Treasury notes with the serial numbers marked by hand in brown ink, and a miniature envelope, addressed in long-essed script — his grandmother’s wedding invitation, dated 1852. Still in her twenties, his grandmother had married a man well past fifty, and her youngest son, Kinny’s father, had waited for marriage until he, too, was almost fifty, so if you figured back, here was he, Kinny Elkin, in 1924, with a grandfather, sunken in the ciphers of time, who had been born in the eighteenth century. In his mind, he saw the generations as single people walking a catwalk, each with a hand clutching a long supporting rope that passed from one to another but disappeared into mist at either end.

“Kinny! Grandma wants you!” From the sitting room down the hall he heard the familiar clank-clank of the gadrooned brass handles on the sideboard. Grandma would be standing stiffly with the yellow box of preserved ginger, uglily lettered in black, clutched in one knuckled hand, waiting for the small afternoon ceremony that had been her only apparent notice of him for as long as he could remember. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went down the hall.

She stood there just as he had known she would, a dainty death’s head no taller than he, in the black silk uniform of age, one hand wavering on her cane, the other tight on the yellow box. The sparse hair, dressed so closely on the skull, enlarged the effect of the ears and the high nose with its long nostrils; the mouth, a mere boundary line for tributary wrinkles, firmed itself now and again. She was neat as old vellum, and though time had shrunk her to waxwork, it had left her free of the warts and hairs and pendulous dewlaps he saw on other old people. Her admitted age was ninety-three, but the family was of the opinion that she had concealed a few years, out of vanity.

“Here I am, Grandma.” He moved toward her.

“Come here, child.” Steadying her hand with his, she fumblingly placed in his palm a few tawny sugared slices of ginger. Under her waiting gaze, he placed a slice in his mouth and chewed. There was a small, acrid explosion in his throat; his eyes pinkened, but he swallowed obediently, knowing that she thought she was giving him a confection of which he was fond.

“Thank you, Grandma,” he said thickly, his mouth on fire.

“All right, now.” It was time for the other part of the ceremony. Slowly she leaned on his arm and he guided her steps across the room to the wicker armchair, into which she tottered, bearing down heavily on his shoulder and sending the cane in a rasping slide to the floor. Feeling in a pocket at one side of the chair, she brought up her glasses, polished the lenses with a bright-pink cloth, and put them on. Opening a folded afternoon paper, she began to read the headlines with the aid of a handled magnifying glass the size of a small saucer. The ritual was over. After supper, Kinny’s father would read her the articles she asked for, or, in his absence, Kinny would declaim them with careful dignity.

Dangling his legs from the dark old couch, he tried to place just what pulled at him so strongly in Grandma’s rooms. Here in the sitting room, there were only a few steel engravings of Biblical scenes and a big, dark cloisonné pot stuffed with some brackish moss that never seemed to grow or die. Everything was still, but if he sat long enough, he felt the dim waves of history lapping at him, a moving, continuous stream that culminated in him.

He went restlessly toward the window and mooned out at the river. Maybe he could call for Bert, and they could go out and get some isinglass from the rocks that stuck out all over the ground across Riverside Drive. Bert maintained that if you could peel a whole clear sheet of it, it could be sold, like tinfoil.

“Call Hattie,” said his grandmother fretfully. “Ask her if that optician man is coming.” He had never heard her speak of the steady contraction of her sight, or of any other physical drawback, but Mr. Goldwasser came once a month and carefully did something — a plucking or trimming of the short, stiff eyelashes that tended to mat in the corners — which she thought beneficial.

“Mother said to tell you he’s coming.”

In the kitchen, his mother was discarding her apron.

“Here they come,” she said. “Kinny, get away from that table.” She brushed past him. Under Josie’s reproachful, bovine stare, he took another prune pocket and stood at the head of the hall, watching.

Kinny’s father, Aunt Flora and Aunt Amy, and his father’s cousin Selena, old as the aunts, came in from the foyer. He thought that they looked furtive, as if they’d been doing something they shouldn’t and were glad that it was over. Amy’s face, wry and puckered now under her great bird’s nest of iron-gray hair, was tiny and aquiline, with a short arc of mouth, and was supposed to be very like that of her mother as a young woman, but she had none of her mother’s cameo neatness, and was always leaving untidy packages and having to come back for them, so that “something Amy left” had become a byword in the house.

“I think I dropped my gloves at the —” she said tremulously, and stopped. Nobody said the usual “Oh, A-amy!” His father groaned and walked heavily to the sideboard. Rooting in one of the compartments, he brought out the decanter.

“Now, Joe, do you think you’d better?” said his mother. “Come on, everybody. It’ll do you good to eat something.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Hattie,” said Aunt Flora testily, jerking back the white pompadour that reared high over her rouged beak of face. Her inimical glance seemed to concentrate the momentary feeling of the others. Hattie hadn’t just been through what they had.

Flora was the first to sit down at the table. Food, poker, and having the last word were her passions, in that order. “Come on, Amy, Selena,” she said.

Usually, Selena wore puce or mustard or reseda green, but today she wore muddy brown, underlining the mud tints in her equine face.

Kinny’s father sat at the head of the table kneading his gray curls while the others ate, in silence. Kinny stole into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Vichy. Tiptoeing into the dining room, he placed the green bottle at his father’s elbow. He heard the doorbell ring and Josie ushering somebody into the parlor. She came to the dining-room door.

“Is here the eye doctor, Mrs. Elkin,” she said.

“Take him on back to Grandma, Josie,” said his mother.

His father stirred and groaned again. “What in God’s name am I going to tell Maw? I haven’t the heart. I haven’t the heart, so soon after Nat.”

“Never thought she should have been told about Nat,” said Flora, brushing the crumbs from her black, bugled front.

“What? Maw?” said Amy heatedly. “She seemed to catch on almost as soon as it happened. She sits there half blind and part deaf, and she hasn’t been outdoors in ten years, but try and fool her about anything in the family!”

Selena leaned forward with a faint flush. “You’ve been fooling her about Aaron’s letters, haven’t you?” she asked. “Hasn’t Joe been writing them and mailing them ever since Aaron went into a coma?” She looked around the table avidly.

“Aaron and I write — wrote — a lot alike,” his father said. “I just wanted to keep her from worrying at not seeing him. I told her he might have to go out West.” He turned down his mouth wryly.

Selena leaned forward again, triumphantly. “Well, why don’t you just go on writing them?”

“It’s a ghoulish thing to do.” He rose and moved to the window. Pulling up the awning, he wound the cord hard around the hooked prong in the casement and stood looking out. It was as if someone had suddenly thrown yards of blue soft stuff into all the corners of the room and veils had settled on the furniture. The white cloth gleamed. Across the wide avenue, the people in the building opposite had already turned on their yellow squares of light.

“She asked me four or five times yesterday,” said his mother gently. “The last letter you had mailed from the farm is here, but I didn’t know what to do.”

The optician’s man came to the door and peered at them obsequiously. “Er-hmm. I’m finished now.” He held a little black bag in one hand and a round black bowler at his chest.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Goldwasser.” His father turned from the window, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. “I’ll see you to the door.”

“Just a minute, Joe!” said Flora. She pushed back the dish in front of her and swiveled around in her chair. “Mr. Goldwasser.”

“Yes?” He blinked at her politely.

“Can you tell us — how much can my mother see?”

“See?” he paused. “Why, she hasn’t had an eye test in years, Mrs. Harris. It’s hard to say. The lenses she has are the strongest made, and she’s had them a good, long time.” He shrugged. “She’s lucky not to have a cataract, at her years. She sees enough to eat, does she not, and get around a little? What I do for her only makes her more comfortable, you know.”

“Could she read, do you think?” Amy faltered, one of her bone hairpins sliding into her lap, where she worked at it nervously.

“Read!” He seemed surprised. “I can hardly think — maybe a block letter or two. You mean she still tries?” He shook his head admiringly. “A wonderful woman. Well!” He bowed and left them, followed by Kinny’s father.

“They never will come right out with anything. Doctors!” Flora snapped.

“He’s not a doctor, Flora,” said Kinny’s father wearily, returning to the room. He slumped into a chair. “I’m all worn out.”

His mother was at the
secrétaire.
She held an envelope in her hand. “Better to get it over with, Joe, or she’ll surely catch on. She complained about Amy and Flora not stopping in today.”

Amy looked up vaguely and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “I just can’t face her without showing something. I know I can’t.”

“Oh, Amy, be practical,” said Flora. “How do you think we all feel? She’s too old to suffer another shock like that. We’ll have to warn everyone who comes in to see her. Go on, Joe.

“I’m no good at that sort of thing,” he said, choking. “Not today, of all days.”

“You’ve always been the one to read to her,” said Kinny’s mother. “She’d think it strange if any of us —”

Kinny found his voice, with a croak. “I — I read to her sometimes.” He looked hastily around the table and then down at his shoes. Selena switched around in her chair and raised her brows at him.