Acquainted with the Night (11 page)

The talk shifted to the broken mailboxes, the uncollected garbage, the inadequacy of guest parking, and the poor TV reception, yet every few moments it returned to the graffiti, obviously the most chafing symptom of decay. To Mrs. Saunders the progress of the meeting was haphazard, without direction or goal. As in the past, people seemed more eager to air their grievances than to seek a practical solution. But she conceded that her experience of community action was limited; perhaps this was the way things got done. In any case, their collective obtuseness appeared a more than adequate safeguard, and she remained silent. She always remained silent at tenants’ meetings—no one would expect anything different of her. She longed for a cigarette, and inhaled deeply the smoke of others’ drifting around her.

At last—she didn’t know how it happened for she had ceased to pay attention—a committee was formed to draft a petition to the management listing the tenants’ complaints and demanding repairs and greater surveillance of the grounds. The meeting was breaking up. They could relax, she thought wryly, as she milled about with her neighbors, moving to the door. She had done enough painting for now anyway. She smiled with cunning and some contempt at their innocence of the vandal in their midst. Certainly, if it upset them so much she would stop. They did have rights, it was quite true.

She walked up with Jill. Harris was still downstairs with the other members of the small committee which he was, predictably, chairing.

“Well, it was a good meeting,” Jill said. “I only hope something comes out of it.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Saunders vaguely, fumbling for her key in the huge, heavy tote bag.

“By the way, Mrs. Saunders ...” Jill hesitated at her door and nervously began brushing the wispy hair from her face. “I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s your first name again?”

In her embarrassment Jill was blinking childishly and didn’t know where to look. Mrs. Saunders felt sorry for her. In the instant before she replied—and Mrs. Saunders didn’t break the rhythm of question and answer by more than a second’s delay—she grasped fully that she was sealing her own isolation as surely as if she had bricked up from inside the only window in a cell.

“Faith,” she said.

The longing she still woke with in the dead of night, despite all her work, would never now be eased. But when, in that instant before responding, her longing warred with the rooted habits and needs of a respectable lifetime, she found the longing no match for the life. And that brief battle and its outcome, she accepted, were also, irrevocably, who Franny was.

The profound irony of this turn of events seemed to loosen some old, stiff knot in the joints of her body. Feeling the distance and wisdom of years rising in her like sap released, she looked at Jill full in the face with a vast, unaccustomed compassion. The poor girl could not hide the relief that spread over her, like the passing of a beam of light.

“Isn’t it funny, two years and I never knew,” she stammered. “All that talk about names made me curious, I guess.” Finally Jill turned the key in her lock and smiled over her shoulder. “Okay, good night, Mrs. Saunders. See you tomorrow night, right? The boys are looking forward to it.”

“S
IX-TWO-FOUR AVENUE
D?” the old man asks me. He clutches at my wrist with knobby fingers. “Six-two-four Avenue D?”

“I’m very sorry. I can’t help you.”

“Come on, don’t pay any attention,” my father mutters impatiently, pulling at my other arm. We proceed. Behind my back the old man whimpers to a woman by his side, “No one wants to help me.

“That’s the way it is with these young people. They won’t give you the time of day.”

Anger and guilt rise in me simultaneously like twin geysers. I hastily prepare two lines of defense, one to assuage the guilt, the other to justify the anger. Number one, he’s already asked me three times today. Number two, I have enough troubles of my own.

I am taking my father for a stroll down the hospital corridor, our arms linked at the elbow like a happy couple on a date. An intrusive third wheel is the IV tube dangling from its chrome stand, a coatrack come to life. My father is here in order to die. Even now, terminally ill, he walks very fast, he runs.

The old man, the one searching for 624 Avenue D, is the spectacle of the floor. Ambulatory, he spends long hours in the waiting room, where he occasionally urinates on the floor. Also, from time to time he exposes himself, spreading wide the folds of his white cotton gown with a quick flapping like a gull’s wings. This is disconcerting to new visitors, but my sister and I merely smile now, humoring him. We have found that a brief, friendly acknowledgment will satisfy him for the day. Between ourselves we call him the flasher, and giggle. “How’s the flasher today?” “Not bad. He looked a little pale, though.” Having seen his private parts so often, I feel on intimate terms with him, like family. He is not really annoying except when he gets on one of his 624 Avenue D jags, lasting for two or three days, after which he returns to simple urinating and self-exposure.

My father, thank God, would never expose himself. The humiliation. As a child I once accidentally glimpsed a patch of his pubic hair; he looked as though he might faint with shock when he saw me in the room. My father, thank God, is in full possession of his mental faculties. Just yesterday he gave a philosophical disquisition, shortly after taking a painkiller. “There are times,” he said, “when the mere absence of pain is a positive pleasure.” He paused, and swallowed with difficulty. We could see his throat muscles straining. “That is,” he went on, “under certain extreme conditions a negative quality can become a positive one.” My heart swelled with love and pride. Isn’t he smart, my father? He cannot resist saying things twice, though, that is, paraphrasing himself, a trait I have inherited. I think it comes from a conviction of intellectual superiority, that is, an expectation of inferior intelligence in one’s listeners.

“Six-two-four Avenue D?” The old man looms up, having padded in on soundless feet, before my sister and me in the waiting room.

“I think it’s the other way,” I say gently. “Try that way.” He shuffles towards the door. My sister and I are chain-smoking and giggling, making up nasty surmises about the patients and their visitors.

“That one will probably put arsenic in her grandma’s tea the day she gets home.” She points to a young girl with long gold earrings and tattered jeans, who is speaking sternly about proper diet to an old woman in a wheelchair.

I nod and glance across the room at a fat, blue-haired woman wearing a flowered, wrinkled cotton housedress. “Couldn’t she find anything better to visit the hospital in? He might drop dead just looking at her.”

We giggle some more. “How did the Scottish woman’s kidney operation go?”

“All right. They took it out. She’ll need dialysis.”

“At least she’s okay.” We lower our eyes gravely. We like the Scottish woman. There is a long silence.

“Norman died last night,” she says at last.

“Oh, really. Well ...” This is not a surprise. Norman was yellow-green for two weeks and wheeled about morosely, telling his visitors he was not long for this world. He convinced everyone and turned out to be right. “That’s too bad. He was nice.”

“Yes, he was,” she agrees.

Suddenly we are convulsed with laughter. Just outside the waiting room the old man has flashed for an elegant slender woman in a gray silk suit and bouffant hairdo, and carrying a Gucci bag. It greeted her the instant she stepped off the elevator. The astonishment on her face is exquisite and will sustain our spirits for hours.

It occurs to me that my sister and I have not been so close since my childhood, when I used to hold the book for her as she memorized poems. I was eight when she began college. Her freshman English teacher made the class memorize reams of poetry; thanks to him my head is filled with long, luminous passages. I sat on her bed holding the book while she pranced around the room reciting with dramatic gestures:

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

What are kinsmen, I wanted to know. And what is a sepulchre? I thought it terribly mean of her highborn kinsmen to drag Annabel Lee away, even if she did have a cold.

“‘That is no country for old men,’” she intoned solemnly, “‘The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees ...’” When she came to “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal,” she grew melodramatic, clutching her heart and pretending to swoon. I was an appreciative audience. “‘Already with thee! tender is the night.’” She would flutter her wings like a bird, and if I giggled hard enough she would be inspired, at “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” to stretch out flat on the bedroom floor.

Eliot was her favorite. But even here, though reverent, she could not resist camping. “‘I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces.’” She let her jaw drop and lolled her head about like an imbecile. She sobered quickly, though, delivering the philosophical section with an awesome dignity reaching its peak at “These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.”

“What does that mean?” I interrupted.

She could not tell me. She herself was only seventeen. But she said it beautifully, standing still in the center of the room, hand resting on her collarbone, head slightly cast down, long smooth hair falling over her shoulders: “‘These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.’”

Evenings, after I held the book and corrected her for about an hour, she would get dressed to go out on dates. Indeed, my memories of my sister at that period show her doing only those two things—memorizing poetry and getting dressed for dates. She let me watch her. She kept perfume in a crystal decanter whose top squeaked agonizingly when it was opened or closed. The squeak made me writhe on the bed in spasms of shivers. She squeaked it over and over, to torment me, while I squealed, “Stop, please, stop!” She laughed. “Come here,” she said. “I’ll give you a dab.” I went. But before she gave me a dab she squeaked the top again. When she left home three years later to get married I inherited her large bedroom. She left the perfume decanter for me, and often, feeling lonely, I squeaked it for the thrill of the shivers and for the memories.

Now she is in her forties, the mother of two grown sons. “Do you still remember all the poetry?” I ask.

She smiles. She has an odd smile, withholding, shy, clever, and she says, “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’” When she gets to “Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,” she stops, her voice choking. We light up more cigarettes. “Six-two-four Avenue D?” he asks us. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, stubs out the cigarette angrily, and stomps off to the ladies’ room.

I sit at my father’s bed, waiting for the night nurse to come. The man in the next bed and his wife are trying to make conversation with my father about an earthquake in China. My father, who in good health was gregarious and an avid follower of current events, has his lips sealed in wrath.

“Maybe he’s not quite with it, huh?” the man’s wife says.

I rise staunchly to his defense. “Oh, he’s with it, all right.”

She pulls the curtains around her husband’s bed, as she does every evening for fifteen minutes. I envision them engaged in silent, deft manual sex.

“You don’t have to stay here, you know,” my father says.

“Why not? Don’t you want me to stay?”

“Of course.”

“So I’ll stay then.” This is the closest I have come to telling him I love him. Not very close. I long to tell him I love him and am sorry for his suffering, but am afraid he would consider that in bad taste. My father does not consider love or sorrow in bad taste, only, I imagine, talking about them. That he is dying is an evident obscenity that cannot be spoken. I do not want to say anything at this critical moment that he would consider in bad taste, or that might imperil his final judgment of me. My mouth waters with the sour bad taste of unspoken words. Reality, in fact, is in bad taste.

“Six-two-four Avenue D? Six-two-four Avenue D?” The flasher is at the bedside. I point towards the door and he moves off.

“What the hell does he want, anyway?” my father asks.

“Six-two-four Avenue D.”

He shrugs and grins. I do the same, like a mirror. We understand each other.

The next day my mother and I stand at his stretcher in the corridor of the hospital basement after X-rays, waiting fifteen furious, endless minutes for an orderly to wheel him upstairs to his bed. He moans in pain on the hard pallet and wants my mother to wheel the stretcher upstairs herself. She says that is against hospital rules. Propping himself up on his elbows to glare at her, he shouts hoarsely: “Law and order! Law and order! That is the whole trouble with some people. Rules are made by petty minds, for petty minds to obey. Throughout history, the great achievements were made by those who broke the rules. Look at Galileo! Look at Lenin! Look at Lindbergh! Daring!” This speech has been too much for him. He falls back on the stretcher, his mouth wide open, panting. I grab the back of the stretcher with one hand, the IV pole with the other, and we dash on a madly veering course through the labyrinth of the basement towards the forbidden staff elevator. Our eyes meet in an ecstasy of glee and swift careening motion. I remember how he drove me anywhere I asked at seventy miles an hour, his arm out the window, fingers resting on the roof of the car, an arm sunburned from elbow to wrist. Oh Daddy, for you I am Galileo, I am Lenin, I am Lindbergh! Daring! We reach his bedside unstopped by any guardians of the law. He grips my hand in thanks, my life is fulfilled.

Actually, my mother is not at all a fanatical law-and-order person. Only right now she thinks, hopes, yearns to believe that if she obeys all the rules in life God will look down on her with favor and let my father live. I know that he cannot live, so I can afford to be lawless.