Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (26 page)

That afternoon they were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks. They looked as if they meant to camp there. But sleeping outside was as illegal twenty-five years ago as it is today; and these newcomers, it turned out, honored the law. In fact they spent their first night in the Godolphin Inn, like ordinary travelers. They spent their second night in the apartment they had just rented at the top of a three-decker on Lewis Street, around the corner from the house I have lived in since I was a girl.

And there they stayed for a quarter of a century, maintaining cordial relations with the downstairs landlord and with the succession of families who occupied the middle flat.

Every fall they planted tulips in front. In the spring, Keith mowed the side lawn. Summers they raised vegetables in the back; all three apartments shared the bounty.

Anyone else in their position would have bought a single-family house or a condo, maybe after the first child, certainly after the second. Keith, a welder, made good money; and Mitsuko, working part-time as a computer programmer, supplemented their income. But the Maguires kept on paying rent as if there were no such thing as equity. They owned no television, and their blender had only three speeds. But although the net curtains at their windows seemed a thing of the moment, like a bridal veil, their plain oak furniture had a responsible thickness. On hooks in the back hall hung the kids’ rain gear and Keith’s hard hat and Mitsuko’s sneakers. The sneakers’ green color darkened with wear; eventually she bought a pair of pink ones.

I taught all three of the boys. By the time the oldest entered sixth grade he was a passionate soccer player. The second, the bookish one, wore glasses. The third, a cutup, was undersized. In each son the mother’s Eastern eyes looked out of the father’s Celtic face; a simple, comely, repeated visage; a glyph meaning “child.”

Mitsuko herself was not much bigger than a child. By the time the youngest began high school even he had outstripped his mother. Her little face contained a soft beige mouth, a nose of no consequence, and those mild eyes. Her short hair was clipped every month by Keith. (In return Mitsuko trimmed Keith’s receding curls and rusty beard.) She wore T-shirts and jeans and sneakers except for public occasions; then she wore a plum-colored skirt and a white silk blouse. I think it was always the same skirt and blouse. The school doctor once referred to her as generic, but when I asked him to identify the genus he sighed his fat sigh. “Female parent? All I mean is that she’s stripped down.” I agreed. It was as if nature had given her only the essentials: flat little ears; binocular vision; teeth strong enough for buffalo steak, though they were required to deal with nothing more fibrous than apples and raw celery (Mitsuko’s cuisine was vegetarian). Her breasts swelled to the size of teacups when she was nursing, then receded. The school doctor’s breasts, sometimes visible under his summer shirt, were slightly bigger than Mitsuko’s.

The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filligreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired. When their eldest was in my class, each gave a What I Do talk to the sixth grade. At my request they repeated it annually. Wearing a belt stuffed with tools, his mask in his hands, Keith spoke of welding’s origins in the forge. He mentioned weapons, tools, automobiles. He told us of the smartness of the wind, the sway of the scaffolding, the friendly heft of the torch. “An arc flames and then burns blue,” he said. “Steel bar fuses to steel bar.” Mitsuko in her appearances before the class also began with history. She described Babbage’s first calculating machine, whose innards nervously clacked. She recapitulated the invention of the Hollerith code (the punched card she showed the kids seemed as venerable as papyrus), the cathode tube, the microchip. Then she, too, turned personal. “My task is to achieve intimacy with the computer,” she said. “To follow the twists of its thought, to help it become all it can.” When leaving, she turned at the doorway and gave us the hint of a bow.

Many townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs—shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware. The kids bought magazines and notebooks at Dunton’s Tobacco. Every November Keith and his sons walked smiling into Roberta’s Linens and bought a new Belgian handkerchief for Mitsuko’s birthday. During the following year’s special occasions, its lace would foam from the pocket of the white silk blouse.

But none of us knew them well. They didn’t become intimates of anyone. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink. One day we heard that the youngest was leaving to become a doctor; the next day, or so it seemed, the parents had decamped.

I had seen Mitsuko the previous week. She was buying avocados at the greengrocer. She told me that she mixed them with cold milk and chocolate in the blender. “The drink is pale green, like a dragonfly,” she said. “Very refreshing.”

Yes, the youngest was off to medical school. The middle son was teaching carpentry in Oregon. The oldest, a journalist in Minnesota, was married and the father of twin girls.

So she had granddaughters. She was close to fifty, but she still could have passed for a teenager. You had to peer closely, under the pretext of examining pineapples together, to see a faint cross-hatching under the eyes. But there was no gray in the cropped hair, and the body in jeans and T-shirt was that of a stripling.

She chose a final avocado. “I am glad to have run into you,” she said with her usual courtesy. Even later I could not call this remark valedictory. The Maguires were always glad to run into any of us. They were probably glad to see our backs, too.

“You are a maiden lady,” the school doctor reminded me some months later. We have grown old together; he says what he pleases. “Marriage is a private mystery. I’m told that parents feel vacant when their children have flown.”

“Most couples just stay here and crumble together.”

“Who knows?” he said, and shrugged. “I’m a maiden lady myself.”

The few people who saw Keith and Mitsuko waiting for the trolley that September morning assumed they were going off on a camping trip. Certainly they were properly outfitted, each wearing a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack.

The most popular theory is that they have settled in some other part of the country. There they work—Keith with steel and flame, Mitsuko with the electronic will-o’-the-wisp; there they drink avocado shakes and read paperbacks.

Some fanciful townspeople whisper a different opinion: that when the Maguires shook our dust from their hiking boots they shed their years, too. They have indeed started again elsewhere, but rejuvenated, restored. Mitsuko’s little breasts are already swelling in preparation for the expected baby.

I reject both theories. Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference. Keith and Mitsuko took the trolley together, yes. But I think that downtown they enacted an affectionate though rather formal parting in some public place—the bus depot, probably. Keith then strode off.

Mitsuko waited for her bus. When it came she boarded it deftly despite the aluminum and canvas equipment on her back. The sneakers—bright red, this time, as if they had ripened—swung like cherries from the frame.

“F
AN MAIL
!” brayed Paolo. “Come and get it.”

Every Monday and Tuesday Paolo lugged a canvas sack from the studio to the rehearsal room at the Hotel Pamona. Until recently Paolo had been Paul. The change in name was going to get Paul/Paolo strictly nowhere, in Joss’s opinion; but teenagers had to transform themselves every month or so—he had read that somewhere. Before dropping off the mail, Paolo picked up lunch for the television brass and brought it back to the studio. He told Joss that he hoped to become a comedian. The letters that came out of the sack smelled of deli. Some envelopes had greasy stains.

“Missives!” He swung the sack onto the round table in the corner, loosened its neck, and allowed some of the letters to spill out—fussy business, too many little motions; but Joss kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t in the coaching game. Besides, silence was what he got paid for.

Happy Bloom had been rehearsing his opening monologue—the one he delivered in a tuxedo, the one with the snappiest jokes—in front of the wide mirror between the windows. But when he saw Paolo he whirled, stamped, and called a recess. He loved his fans. He got quantities of letters, all favorable. He was “the New Medium’s New Luminary”—
Time
magazine itself had said so when it ran his picture on the cover the previous December. Churchill had been on the cover the week before, Stalin the week afterward, you’d think Happy had conferred with those guys at Yalta. But Happy was bigger than a statesman; he was an honorary member of every American family. On Thursday nights at five minutes to eight the entire nation sat down to watch
The Happy Bloom Hour
… And on Friday nights, as maybe only Joss knew, Heschel Bloomberg, wearing a gray suit and horn-rims—without greasepaint, without toupee, unrecognized—welcomed the Sabbath with the other congregants in a Brooklyn synagogue.

Joss admired the funnyman’s faith. Himself, he hadn’t been inside a church in eighteen years, not since the morning his daughter was baptized. But he had graduated from a Jesuit high school; he had believed in things then … “I like the routine in the shul, no improvising,” Happy told him. “The cantor’s a baritone, not bad if you like phlegm.”

The Heschel Bloomberg placidly worshipping on Friday night reverted to Happy Bloom on Saturday morning. Writing and rehearsals started at nine; he usually threw his first tantrum by ten. But today was Tuesday—the show already shapely, the skits established. There’d be only a couple of outbursts.

Now Happy settled himself at the table to devour his mail. Joss strolled over to one of the windows and breathed New York’s October air. Happy might snuggle with the country; he, Joss, belonged to this stony metropolis which kept forgetting his name—oh well.

“There’s a fan letter for
you
, Mr. Hoyle,” Paolo said, and did a Groucho with his eyebrows. He extracted a pale green square from the heap and walked it over to Joss, heel-toe, heel-toe, poor sap.

No return address on the envelope. Joss opened it. Slanted words lay on a page the color of mist. He brought the letter up to his nose. No scent.

Dear Mr. Jocelyn Hoyle,

 

I’m a big reader (though small in physique). Television leaves me absolutely frigid. I don’t ever watch hardly. Those wrestlers—shouldn’t they sign up at a fat farm? Happy Bloom smiles too much. Much too much too much.

But I admire your face. Your long mouth makes thrilling twitches. Your dark eyes shift, millimeterarily. Those eyes know hope. Those eyes know hope deferred. Those eyes know hope denied. Oh!

The Lady in Green

Joss looked up. “This is a fan?” he inquired of the city. He sniffed the paper again.

T
HE SECOND LETTER ARRIVED
the next week, on show day, at the studio—they rehearsed there Wednesdays and Thursdays. Happy was screaming at the orchestra; at the properties-and-scripts woman, who held the whole enterprise together (she had a name but he called her “the Brigadier”); at the writers; at the cameramen; at Joss. Paolo came around, the sack of mail on his shoulder. Joss took the letter from Paolo and put it into his pocket, unopened.

The show went all right. They had a fading tenor for the next-to-last number leading into Happy’s windup monologue, the sentimental one. Joss stood listening to the tenor in what passed for the wings. The studio had some nerve calling this a stage, wires and cables all over the joint. He’d worked Broadway, rep, vaudeville; the worst house he’d ever played in had kept itself in better shape than the New Medium. The two circuses he’d traveled with were tight as battleships; well, circuses couldn’t afford bad habits …
Nessun dorma
, sang the has-been. He was at the point in his decline that Joss liked best: ambition flown; to hell with the high notes; emotion at last replacing resonance. He wore a tux and makeup but he might as well have been naked. Joss could sense the paunch under the corset, could imagine the truss, too—oh, the eternal sadness of fat men.