The victim (5 page)

5

AFTER a hurried supper of a sandwich and a bottle of soda at a stand near the ferry, Leventhal crossed to Staten Island. He walked onto the deck with his hands in the pockets of his fully buttoned, wrinkled jacket. His white shoes were soiled. Posted beside a life ring, his dark forehead shining faintly under his ill-combed, thick hair, he gazed out on the water with an appearance of composure; he did not look as burdened as he felt. The formless, working, yellowish-green water was dull, the gulls steered back and forth, the boat crept forward into the glare. A barge was spraying orange paint over the hull of a freighter, which pointed high, lifting its bow out of the slow, thick cloud. Surely the sun was no hotter in any Singapore or Surabaya, on the chains, plates, and rails of ships anchored there. A tanker, seabound, went across the ferry's course, and Leventhal stared after it, picturing the engine room; it was terrible, he imagined, on a day like this, the men nearly naked in the shaft alley as the huge thing rolled in a sweat of oil, the engines laboring. Each turn must be like a repeated strain on the hearts and ribs of the wipers, there near the keel, beneath the water. The towers on the shore rose up in huge blocks, scorched, smoky, gray, and bare white where the sun was direct upon them. The notion brushed Leventhal's mind that the light over them and over the water was akin to the yellow revealed in the slit of the eye of a wild animal, say a lion, something inhuman that didn't care about anything human and yet was implanted in every human being too, one speck of it, and formed a part of him that responded to the heat and the glare, exhausting as these were, or even to freezing, salty things, harsh things, all things difficult to stand. The Jersey shore, yellow, tawny, and flat, appeared on the right. The Statue of Liberty rose and traveled backwards again; in the trembling air, it was black, a twist of black that stood up like smoke. Stray planks and waterlogged, foundering crates washed back in the boat's swell. The specialist was coming. But what he could do depended on Elena. Contagious cases were hospitalized; the health authorities were called in. But the first doctor seemed to have given up the struggle with Elena, and presumably he knew the law. With unconscious grimness, Leventhal prepared himself to struggle with her. As long as she held out, all the specialists in the world were futile. The prospect of interfering, rushing in to rescue the boy, was repugnant to him; it made him feel, more than ever, that he was an outsider. But what could you do with Elena? To begin with, ordinary good care might have kept the child from falling sick, and judging from what he had seen... well, her fear of the hospital was an indication of her fitness to bring up children. Some people would say that she loved them and that her love made up for her shortcomings--not to look too closely at those shortcomings. Love, by all means. But because the mother and the child were tied together in that way, if the child died through her ignorance, was she still a good mother? Should someone else--he thought of it seriously--have the right to take the child away? Or should the fate of the two of them be considered one and the same, and the child's death said to be the mother's affair only because she would suffer most by its death? In that case the child was not regarded as a person, and was that fair? Well, that was the meaning of helplessness; that was what they meant when they said it. Now with that in mind you could understand why little children sometimes cried the way they did. It was as if it were in them to know. Unfair, thought Leventhal, not to say tragic. He began to consider his own unfortunate mother whose large features and black hair he could summon up very faintly. Invariably he saw her wearing an abstracted look, but he was not in fact sure that her look was abstracted. Perhaps he attributed it to her. And when he examined his idea of her more closely he realized that what he really meant by abstracted was mad-looking; a familiar face and yet without anything in it directed toward him. He dreaded it; he dreaded the manifestation of anything resembling it in himself. A period of coolness toward Harkavy had followed the latter's remark about persecution. Knowing his history, how could Harkavy say that to him? But eventually he satisfied himself that Harkavy was merely thoughtless and didn't sufficiently understand what he was saying. Until he spoke, he himself didn't know what was coming. So he had forgiven Harkavy, but he was left more conscious of his susceptibility to remarks of that kind. He was afraid the truth about him was so apparent that even Harkavy might see it. He had spoken of his fears to Mary late one night in bed. She laughed at him. Why did he accept his father's explanation of his mother's illness? And he had never really learned the facts about it, it was true. He had only his father's word for it that she died insane. Many of the things that terrified people lost their horror when a doctor explained them. Years ago everyone spoke of brain fever; now it was known that there was no such sickness. "For my own peace of mind," Mary said. "I would try to find out what she had." But, although Leventhal then promised that he would go into the matter soon, make a real inquiry, so far he had done nothing about it. As for his fears, he was too ready, Mary told him, to believe anything and everything about himself. "That's because you're not sure of yourself. If you were a little more sure you wouldn't let yourself be bothered," she said with all the firmness of her own confident strength. And she was probably right. But, my God, how could anyone say that he was sure? How could he know all that he needed to know in order to say it? It wasn't right. Leventhal felt the presumption of it without, however, blaming Mary; he knew she expressed truthfully what she felt. "The only proof there is of anything wrong with your mother is that she married that father of yours," Mary had ended. This remark brought tears into Leventhal's eyes as he sat in the dark, cross-legged, bending away from the pillow at his back. Nevertheless Mary's words were beneficial on the whole. Till he had better evidence, his fears were the fears of hypochondria. The word was helpful; it gave them an amusing aspect. Still the fact remained that when he called up his mother's face at some moment it was, for all of that, abstracted. He gazed down at the dented deck brass. For the present he preferred to be cautious about Elena and assume that her nerves were overworked. She gave way without control to what any parent with a sick child was liable to feel. But when he allowed himself to go further, to think of more than overworked nerves and Italian emotions, he saw the parallel between her and his mother and, for that matter, between himself and Max and the two children. The last was not so important. But it gave him a clearer view of each of the women to consider that they were perhaps alike. At least you could say of them that they were both extraordinary when they were disturbed (he had not forgotten his mother's screaming)--whatever the right word for it was. The winches began to rattle, a gate dropped resoundingly in the green wooden cove of the slip. The water turned yellow and white under the bows like stale city snow. The boat started back and then, with shut engines, glided in, bumping the weedy timbers. On the long hill beyond the arches of the sheds, the house fronts were suddenly present, and Leventhal, moving ashore in the crowd, heard the busses throbbing before the station. Philip again let him in. Recognizing his uncle he stood aside for him. "Where's Elena. Is she here?" Leventhal said, striding into the dining-room. "How's the boy?" "He's sleeping. Ma's downstairs using Villani's telephone. She said she'd be up right away." He turned to the kitchen, explaining from the doorway, "I was eating supper." "Go ahead, finish," said Leventhal. He walked restlessly round the room. Mickey was asleep; the second alarm seemed to be like the first. Touching the hall door, he debated whether to go into the child's room alone. No, it would be wiser not to; there was no telling how Elena would take it. It was shortly before sundown, and there were lights in the flats giving on the airshaft where the walls, for a short distance below the black cornice, were reddened by the sky. Leventhal went into the kitchen where Philip sat beside the table on a high stepstool. He had a bowl of dry cereal before him and he poured milk over it, digging up the flap of the milk carton with his thumbnail; he peeled and sliced a banana, sprinkled sugar over it, and flipped the skin into the sink with its pans and dishes. The paper frills along the shelves of the cupboard crackled in the current of the fan. It ran on the cabinet, sooty, with insectlike swiftness and a thrumming of its soft rubber blades; it suggested a fly hovering below the tarnish and heat of the ceiling and beside the scaling, many-jointed, curved pipes on which Elena hung rags to dry. The boy's knees were level with the tabletop, and he bent almost double as he ate, spreading his legs. Leventhal reflected that he had taken the stool instead of a chair because he felt the need to do something extreme in his presence. "I used to do stunts, too, when there was a visitor," he reminded himself. "And that is what I am here, a visitor." "Is this your whole supper?" he asked. "When it's hot like this, I never eat a lot." The boy had a rather precise way of speaking. "You ought to have bread and butter, and so on, and greens," said Leventhal. Philip interrupted his eating to look at his uncle briefly. "We don't cook much during the heat wave," he said. He set his feet on a higher rung and bent even lower. His hair had been newly cut, roughly clipped on top and shaved high up the back of his neck to a line above his large but delicately white ears. "What kind of a barber do you have?" Philip looked up again. "Oh, Jack McCaul on the block. We all go to him; Dad too, when he's home. I told him to cut it this way. I asked for a summer haircut." "They ought to take away the man's license for giving you one like that." He said this too forcefully and overshot his intended joke, and he paused and made an effort to find the right tone. "Oh, McCaul's all right," said Philip. "He takes care of us. I was waiting for the kid to get better so's we could go together. But Ma said I should go and have a trim before she had to buy me a fiddle to go with my hair. This haircut is all right for the weather. Last summer I got a baldie--all off." "Well, it's really okay." Leventhal watched him eat, penetrated with sympathy for him. "An independent little boy," he thought. "But how they treat him." He sat down by the window, unbuttoning his creased jacket, and glanced at the sky through the airshaft's black square. In one of the other flats, a girl in a parlor chair was brushing a dog that yawned and tried to lick her hand. She pushed its muzzle down. A woman in a chemise passed through the room, back and forth from kitchen to hall. Mickey's window gave on the shaft; it was on the corner, and if he were awake now he might be able to see his brother and his uncle. "The doctor's going to be here any minute." Leventhal was suddenly impatient. "I thought Elena was in such a hurry for him to come. What's keeping her?" "I'll go and see." Philip sprang from the stool. "Don't leave your supper. Tell me where she is and I'll find her." But Philip was already in the corridor. Leventhal, however, instead of footsteps, heard voices through the open doors. Had he met Elena coming up the stairs? The light went on in the dining-room, under the green glass panes of the shade, and Leventhal had a glimpse of a woman in a black dress moving beside the table. "Boy?" he called out. "Say, Phil?" "Here. Come on in." "Who is it?" he inquired in a low voice. He tried to see beyond the lamp to the other end of the room. "My grandmother." "The old woman?" said Leventhal in surprise. He had heard something about her from Max but had never seen her. He started from the doorway and, looking confused, went toward her around the dining-room table, changing his direction when she turned and sat down in the mohair armchair. "This is Dad's brother," Philip said to her. Leventhal was conscious of prolonging his nod almost into a bow; he wanted to be prepossessing. The old lady gave him only a brief sharp glance. Taller than Elena, she was gaunt and straight-backed, and the carriage of her head was tense. She wore large gold earrings. The hair came out short and white at her temples; toward the back of her head it was black and tightly knotted. Her dress also was black, a black silk, and despite the heat she wore a shawl on her shoulders. Since she remained silent, Leventhal stood undecided; it seemed inadvisable to say more; to sit down without being answered would embarrass him. But, also, it might be impolite to return to the kitchen. Maybe he misunderstood her taciturnity. However, she seemed to avert her head from him, and he had to struggle with an angry urge to compel her to face him. Nevertheless she had not spoken, and he could not be sure. It was possible that he was mistaken. "I thought you were going to fetch your mother," he said to Philip somewhat impatiently. And when Philip started to leave, he said hastily, "I'll go with you." He had decided that the grandmother's look was unfriendly, though in the dusty green-tinged light that came through the lampshade it was difficult to get a definite impression. But he felt her antagonism. In a shambling gait--the heat made him heavy--he followed Philip down several turns of the stairs to the neighbor's flat. Philip knocked, and in a few seconds Elena came hurrying out to them, eager and fearful. "Oh, Asa, you," she said. "And the specialist? Did you bring him?" "He said between seven and eight. He ought to be here soon." The neighbor, Mr Villani, smoking a twisted stogie, appeared in the hallway and cried out to her, "You let us know right away what he says about the boy up there." He looked at Leventhal, perfectly unconstrained in his curiosity. "How do?" he said to him. "This is my husband's brother," said Elena. "Yes, sure," said Villani taking the cigar out of his mouth. Leventhal impassively looked back at him, his eyes solemn and uncommunicative, only a little formally inquiring. A drop of sweat ran down his cheek. Villani, one hand in his pocket, spread his trousers wide. "You look like Mr Leventhal, all right," he said. He turned to Elena. "And what the doctor tells you, you do it, missis, you hear? We're gonna pull that boy through, so don't worry. What I think is he's only got summer fever," he said to Leventhal. "It ain't serious. My kids had it. But this missis is the worrying kind."