Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (29 page)

“The kids’ apartment out there … it’s adorable,” Lucienne said.

“With all that clutter, how can anybody tell?” Harry said.

“Mostly Jotham’s paints and canvases, that clutter,” Justin bravely admitted.

“Miriam drops her briefcase in one room, her pocketbook in another, throws her keys on the toilet tank,” Lucienne said. “I raised her wrong,” she continued, in mock repentance.

“They like their jobs. They both seem happy,” Judith said, turning her large khaki eyes to Harry—a softened gaze. Justin said, “They do,” and Lucienne said, “Do,” and for a moment, the maître d’ if he was looking, the fiddler if he was looking, anybody idly looking, might have taken them for two couples happy with their connection by marriage. Sometimes what looked so became so. If Jotham was a bit high-strung for the Savitskys, if Miriam was too argumentative for the da Costas, well, you couldn’t have everything. Could you?

“Many people have nothing,” Harry said aloud, startling Judith, alerting Justin’s practiced empathy—“Yes?” the doctor encouraged—and not at all troubling Lucienne, who was on her fifth breadstick.

T
HE APPETIZERS CAME
—four different dishes full of things that could kill you. Each person tasted everything, the Savitskys eager, the da Costas restrained. They talked about the Red Sox, at least the Savitskys did. The team had begun the season well, and would break their hearts as always, wait and see. The da Costas murmured something.

The main course arrived, and a bottle of wine. Judith poured: everyone got half a glass. They talked about the gubernatorial race. The da Costas were staunch Democrats, though it sometimes pained them. “No one cares enough about the environment,” Judith said. Harry nodded—he didn’t care about the environment at all.

The fiddler fiddled. They talked about Stalin—there was a new biography. None of them had read it, and so conversation rested easily on the villainy they already knew.

Harry finished the rest of the wine.

They talked about movies that both couples had seen, though of course not together.

There were some silences.

L
UCIENNE WOULD TELL
the story tonight, Harry thought.

She would tell the story soon. The da Costas had never heard it. She had been waiting, as she always did, for the quiet moment, the calm place, the inviting question, and the turning point in a growing intimacy.

Harry had heard the story scores of times. He had heard it in Yiddish and in French and occasionally in Spanish. Mostly, though, she told it in her lightly accented English.

He had heard the story in many places. In the sanctuary of the synagogue her voice fluted from the bimah. She was sitting on a Survivor Panel that time. She wasn’t technically a survivor, had never set foot in a camp, but still. He’d heard it in living rooms, on narrow backyard decks, in porches attached to beachfront bungalows, in restaurants like the Hussar. Once—the only instance, to his knowledge, she’d awarded the story to a stranger—he’d heard it in the compartment of an Irish train; their companion was a priest, who listened with deep attention. Once she’d told it at the movies. They and another couple had arrived early by mistake and had to occupy half an hour while trivia questions lingered on the screen. That night she had narrated from his left, leaning toward their friends—a pair of lesbian teachers—on his right. While she spoke she stared at them with the usual intensity. Harry, kept in place by his wife aslant his lap, stared at her: her pretty profile, her apricot hair, the flesh lapping from her chin.

Whatever language she employed, the nouns were unadorned, the syntax plain, the vocabulary undemanding: not a word that couldn’t be understood by children, though she never told the story to children, unless you counted Miriam.

He could tell the thing himself, in any of her tongues.

I was four. The Nazis had taken over. We were desperate to escape. My father went out every morning—to stand in line at one place or another, to try to pay the right person.

 

That morning—he took my brother with him. My brother was twelve. They went to one office and were on their way to a second. Soldiers in helmets grabbed my father. My brother saw the truck then, and the people on it, crying. The soldiers pushed my father toward the truck. “And your son, too.” One of them took my brother by the sleeve of his coat.

 

My father stopped then. The soldier kept yanking him. “Son?” my father said. “That kid isn’t my son. I don’t even know him.” The German still held on to my brother. My father turned away from them both and started walking again toward the truck. My brother saw one shoulder lift in a shrug. He heard his voice. “Some goy,” my father said.

 

So they let my brother go. He came running home, and he showed us the ripped place on his sleeve where they had held him. We managed to get out that night. We went to Holland and got on a boat for Argentina.

 

T
HE DESSERT CAME
. Four different sweets: again they shared.

Lucienne said, “We will go to Santa Fe in September, for the holidays.”

Judith said, “We will go for Thanksgiving.”

“And the kids will come east for … in December,” Justin said.

The young couple spent half their vacation with one set of parents, half with the other. “More room in their place,” Miriam told Harry and Lucienne. “More food here.”

The bill came. They paid with credit cards. The nervous waiter hurried to bring their outerwear—two overcoats, and Judith’s down jacket, and Lucienne’s fur stole inherited from her mother.

“Judith,” said Lucienne. “I forgot to mention your father’s death.”

“You sent a kind note,” Judith said, in a final manner.

“My own father died when I was a little girl,” Lucienne said. “But when my mother died—I was fifty already—then I felt truly forlorn, an orphan.”

“Dad’s life satisfied him,” Judith said.

The fiddler had paused. A quiet moment. Justin leaned toward Lucienne.

“You were a little girl?” he said softly. “What did your father die of?”

The patrons were devotedly eating. A calm place. A growing intimacy.

“Where?” he asked.

She lifted one shoulder, and lifted her lip, too. “Overseas,” she said. She stood up and wrapped herself in her ratty stole; and Harry had to run a little, she was so fast getting to the door.

O
NE AUTUMN
D
ONNA’S
L
ADLE—A
soup kitchen for women, operating out of the basement of the Godolphin Unitarian Church—became all at once everybody’s favorite cause. “There are fashions in charity just as in bed slippers,” sniffed Josie, who had been working as a part-time volunteer since the Ladle’s beginning, six years earlier. “Don’t count on this popularity to last, Donna.”

Donna never counted on anything to last. But she was grateful for the new help regardless. A group from a local synagogue undertook to deliver cooked delicacies. The members of Godolphin Helping Hands raked each other’s closets for clothing contributions. Maeve, a nearby Catholic women’s college, posted the Ladle’s flyer on its bulletin board. As a result, a few eager students appeared almost every day in the lower depths (Josie’s phrase)—the big basement dining room with its scabby walls, the ancient kitchen presided over by a black oven, a couple of side rooms whose high windows let in little light. Some students needed firsthand material for term papers on poverty. The others showed up out of simple good-heartedness. “Mother Theresas in designer jeans,” Josie said privately to Donna. But to the Maeve students, Josie was a model of patience, repairing the Cuisinart whenever they broke it, and demonstrating a restrained kindness toward the guests that the girls meant to emulate, really they did. They just couldn’t help overreacting to the tragic tales they heard. They were frequently in tears. Their eyes, even when red with weeping, were large and lovely.

“Those kids are prettier at that age than I ever thought of being,” Donna remarked at a staff meeting. “Is it their faith?”

Beth said, “It’s their smiles. All those buckteeth bursting out at you.” And she smiled her own small sweet crescent. “Orthodontia can be a cruel mistake.”

Pam went further. “Orthodontia is child abuse.”

Her colleagues laughed with her at this distortion. Boyish Pam, round Beth, and lanky Donna were not caseworkers, not sociologists, not child advocates—they were just the full-time staff of the Ladle and its director, three overworked young women—but they had seen children who had been abused. They had broken bread with the abusers. They had witnessed—and put a stop to—beatings by enraged mothers. “You can’t hit anybody here,” they each knew how to say in a voice both authoritative and uncensuring. A few weeks ago, Pam, turning white with fury hours after the event, reported to the others that she had interrupted Concepta peppering her grandson, a
niño
of eighteen months.

“Peppering him?” Donna asked. “Peppering him with what?”

“Peppering him with pepper. She had him on her lap and she was shaking the pepper jar over him as if he were a pizza. I don’t think any got into his eyes. But I wanted to strangle the bitch.” Pam bit her lip and bent her curly head.

“What happened next?” Donna mildly inquired.

“I said, ‘Please stop that, Concepta. You can’t hurt people here.’ And I sat down beside her and she handed the kid over with a giggle. ‘We were only having fun,’ she told me. I bounced him on my lap and he stopped crying and after a while I handed him back. What else could I do?”

“Not a thing,” Beth said softly, her plump little hands stirring in her lap.

“Not a damned thing,” Donna said.

Reporting incidents to the authorities was out of the question. Donna’s Ladle rarely knew the last names of its guests, or even their real first names if they chose to glide in under a nom de guerre. Their addresses, if they had any, were their own business. This peppering was thus far an isolated event. Concepta usually came in alone, drunk but not drinking. (“You can’t drink here” was another rule. Shouting and doping were also forbidden. All four rules were frequently broken.)

“Did you suggest the children’s room?” Donna asked Pam. The children’s room, opening off the dining room, contained donated toys, most broken, and puzzles and games, most missing at least one piece.

Pam lifted her narrow shoulders. “I’d suggested that earlier, before she decided to season him. But Concepta didn’t want her
niño
anywhere near Ricky Mendozo, and Ricky was in the children’s room that morning. ‘Might catch it,’ Concepta said.”

Ricky Mendozo’s mother had AIDS. Ricky himself was a sickly child, often hospitalized. Donna and Pam and Beth understood Concepta’s reluctance to let her grandchild play with the runny-nosed, frequently soiled Ricky. As far as the staff knew, Ricky did not have AIDS. But the staff didn’t know very much.

Some things they did know. They knew that the little kids who came in liked stuffed animals and trucks and toys you could ride and toys you could climb into. They liked crayons and paint. They didn’t like to put things away. They liked to hurl things around, and to hurl themselves around, and to sit on laps. They enjoyed ice cream, though they were fearful of getting themselves dirty. They were loud and possessive and self-centered, but they had learned somewhere that when you grabbed a toy from another child you had to shout “Share!”

But when their mothers or aunts or grandmothers or father’s girlfriends retrieved them after lunch, something frightened un-coiled within certain of these stained, smelly little persons. The children did their part in the rough ceremony of reunion—“Where the fuck’s your cap?” “Did you make a mess like always?”—by producing an article of clothing or feinting at mopping some milk. But the staff felt their hearts sink, and the Maeves claimed that theirs broke in two, at the premonition of outrage that might follow, back in the welfare motel, or the dirty apartment, or the room grudgingly loaned by a sister-in-law, places where even the bare-bones rules of Donna’s Ladle did not prevail. “He had such a nice morning,” a Maeve moaned to Josie one mild November afternoon, as the voice of Nathaniel’s mother shot through an open basement window from the sidewalk: “You do what I say, hear? Or else!”

“ ‘Or else’ may mean no more than a slap,” Josie said to the worried girl. “And he did have a nice morning. That’s important.”

It was important to keep the children’s room open, even though maintaining the play area meant that there were fewer hands making lunch in the kitchen. Some children had become regulars—Nathaniel, Cassandra, Africa, Elijah. Others visited from time to time. These days—because of the Helping Hands clothing drive—the Ladle’s youngest guests wore outfits that had originated in Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s.

But the erect and solemn girl of about seven who appeared one December morning was not wearing the castoffs of a Godolphin child—not of a twentieth-century child, anyway. Her long dress of gray flannel might have belonged to an early citizen of Massachusetts Bay, if it had not had a back zipper. The woman who accompanied the child was garbed also in a long plain home-sewn dress. They wore identical brown capes. Each had a single braid, thick and fair. The child’s straight-browed smoky eyes resembled her mother’s. But the girl lacked the scar that ran down the left side of the woman’s face, from the lower lid to the middle of the cheek.