Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (46 page)

“A man has taken Lars,” Miss Huk rasped.

Buckling his trousers, Andrei sped out of the room. The kitchen maid grabbed his razor and scampered after him. Miss Huk brought up the rear.

On the first floor Andrei plunged into the kitchen, returned with the cleaver; and the three raced down the wooden steps of the inn and through the scrub to the road. They turned downhill. Patches of snow from the last storm still clung to the mud.

Miss Huk ran, and her thoughts ran, too. Perhaps the Americans had arranged to dispose of their child. They could not transform him. They could not cosset him forever. Her heart thudded. Lars would not love. He would not marry. He would not wonder, even; he would recognize and classify. He would learn more Latin names and remember each one. It was a kind of happiness—she could tell them that.

The three reached the shallow steps of Junius Bridge. Andrei raised the cleaver. The kitchen maid waved the razor. Miss Huk slowed to a walk.

The chief Belgian stepped into their path, both arms aloft. “The boy is safe,” he said.

Lars was standing at the railing, near but not next to his father. The phony scientist was also standing on the bridge, his arms tied behind his back. The second Belgian was there, carrying a coil of rope. Beyond them, in the middle of the bridge, stood the Albrecht car, Mrs. Albrecht at the wheel, and next to it a strange green car, the third Belgian at its wheel. The cars would block traffic. When was there any traffic?

The Belgian with the rope marched the bound man forward and pushed him into the backseat of the green car and got in front beside his compatriot. Hikers indeed. The car backed off the bridge, turned, and headed toward Sklar.

Lars was examining something on the railing. She knew what it was. A speckled moth deposited her eggs here. The larva spun a cocoon around itself. The whole process was a biological curiosity—the moth should have chosen wood, not iron—but some ancestress had made the mistake long ago, when the Junius was reconstructed, and the error was replicated generation after insect generation; new moths kept emerging from the bridge.

Andrei and the kitchen maid, their weapons lowered, turned and began to walk up the road. The chief Belgian followed them. Christine Albrecht started her car and drove a few yards and picked up her husband. They sat side by side for a moment, not looking at each other, his hand covering hers on the wheel. Then they drove on toward the inn. Lars, after a final inspection of the cocoon, followed his parents’ car.

When everyone was out of sight Miss Huk lowered herself down the bank. Her boots squelched on the mud. She peered under the bridge.

Blue eyes in a fat face stared at her.

“You know I would never …,” he began. “I sit here of an afternoon, I like the design of the iron …,” he began again.

“I do know,” she reassured him. “Come home now.”

She climbed the bank again. She was catching up with Lars … no, he had lagged behind. “The cocoon on the bridge,” she said.

He turned his head toward her, though his gaze strayed elsewhere.

She kept him waiting. At last he looked at her.

“
Hepialus lemberti
,” she rewarded him. His eyes locked themselves to hers for a moment, pupils penetrating pupils, like sex she supposed.

IV.

A
NDREI DREW RIBBONS
of sound from the painted instrument.

Lars sat like a stone on one of the carved benches. In a row of folded chairs sat the other guests and Miss Huk, all listening. The handyman, elbows on the bar, listened. The splotched cook, shoulder against the doorjamb, listened. Somewhere the kitchen maid listened, too.

Christine Albrecht seemed to be only half listening. She looked weary beyond repair. After the applause she slipped away. Robertson Albrecht watched her climb upward; Miss Huk, nearby, watched him. “May we go into the book room?” he said, his eyes still on his wife.

They sat side by side. “I am sorry about this afternoon,” he said, with his tensile gravity. “We are used to kidnapping attempts, we are prepared for them. But I would have spared you.”

She nodded.

“We will leave tomorrow, along with our offensive bodyguards.” Silence lay between them like an animal. “Thank you for the comfort of your inn,” he said. “Lars,” he said, then paused. “Lars is not particularly precocious, doesn’t read anything except entomology, doesn’t even read very well.”

She favored him with her expressionless gaze.

“My brother in New York, my partner, he too is … narrow.” She spoke at last, as loudly as she could. “It is possible that in a century or two the interpersonal will cease to be of value.”

“Practiced by a few eccentric devotees,” he agreed. “Like swordplay.”

“I could keep the boy,” she heard herself cry.

“No,” he said, perhaps sparing her, perhaps turning the remainder of her life to ash.

J
AY’S GRANDSON
—his only child’s only child—married a young woman born in Kyoto. Mika had an enchanting chin, like a little teaspoon. She wore sweet pastel suits with bits of lace creeping out of their Vs. Who would believe that she spent her days making money from money? The young couple occupied an apartment in Tokyo where appliances folded up to fit inside other appliances. Woody, too, was an investment analyst.

“I think I’ll take up Japanese,” Jay told his daughter on the flight home from the wedding. She looked at him. At your age!—but she didn’t say that. She was as tactful as his late wife, Jay thought, his eyes briefly stinging: Wellesley girls both. His daughter also didn’t point out that there was no need for so heroic an effort—the young couple was fluently bilingual, and if they had children the hybrids would be brought up bilingual, too; and anyway, how often would Jay lay eyes on those children? She and her husband were hale enough to make the exhausting trip from Godolphin to Tokyo and back two or three times a year. Not Jay. Nor did his daughter mention that language study required an unimpaired memory. At seventy-five, Jay had difficulty recalling the names of traded Red Sox players, and it was a good thing that name tags had been provided to the members of his Class for their fiftieth reunion. At the Night at Pops the lyrics to “Fair Harvard” had also been handed out, another aid to recollection. The Class stood and sang:

O Relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,

That hast long kept their memory warm,

First flow’r of their wilderness! Star of their night!

Calm rising thro’ change and thro’ storm.

Jay still had a respectable baritone. Sonny Fessel, his old roommate, who had made a fortune in rhinoplasty, could barely manage a croak. But Jay, despite his strong voice, wasn’t altogether well. He suffered from a blood disorder. The disease was indolent now, but who knew what it had in mind. And his pressure was high.

The ivory hands of the stewardess removed his tray. “I’m looking for something to do,” he explained to his daughter. He was retired from a career as an actuary that had ended with an honorable stint as state insurance commissioner (Woody had inherited Jay’s skill with numbers; “numeracy,” they called it these days). He’d given up his weekly squash game when the club adopted the new, soft ball and enlarged the old courts. His town, Godolphin, a leafy wedge of Boston, was governed by a town meeting —a glorious circus—but its week-long sessions occurred only twice a year. The rituals of Judaism left him cold. His immigrant grandfather wrapped in a tallith was a sentimental memory, not a model. His father’s religious involvement had begun and ended with Brotherhood breakfasts, and Jay himself had quit Sunday school the day after his bar mitzvah. But now … he was dawdling through his days, his appetite flat, his blood thin. The study of anything might be a tonic.

Once back home he investigated workshops for elders at Godolphin High School. Bookbinding? Stained glass? He considered the nonsectarian courses given at the temple: Is Zionism Dead? maybe, or Great Jewish Women, taught by the rabbi herself, a blonde with an old-fashioned pageboy haircut. But Japanese I, offered at the Godolphin Language Center, trumped Theodor Herzl and Rosa Luxemburg. When Jay read the course description he breathed again the scent and heard the sounds of his recent week in Japan—blossoming, rustling trees; glowing incense sticks at noisy city shrines; a soupy smell at a particular noodle shop where “The Girl From Impanema” had been playing on a radio next to the register. He remembered fabrics, too. On the Philosopher’s Walk, in Kyoto, he had encountered a group of uniformed children who did not separate to let him pass but instead surrounded him, engulfed him in their soft navy serge. His new granddaughter’s grandmother, a handsome woman with hair dyed deep brown, had come to the wedding in a traditional garment—crimson silk, with a cream sash. He almost hadn’t recognized her when the family met in a restaurant a few days later—she was wearing her everyday pants and turtleneck then. Her English was serviceable. “Hoody is gentle and kind,” she said to Jay.
We are so pleased
, she implied.

“Mika is a
shaineh maideleh
,” he said, dredging up two of his fifty Yiddish words. He grinned—an air of mischief had always endeared him to women. “A lovely girl,” he said, though he failed to tell her he was translating. She would think her hard-won English defective; oh well.

T
HE AUSTERE BEAUTY
of the teacher of Japanese I eclipsed Mika’s prettiness as the sun the moon. Nakabuta-sensei remained standing for the entire ninety minutes of the first weekly class. Twelve pupils around a table stared up at her. The classroom in this converted hilltop mansion looked out across the river at Cambridge, at the brick Houses of Harvard, with their bell towers. The leftmost House had sheltered Jay and Sonny Fessel.

“Japanese grammar,” Nakabuta told them in her rich, unaccented English, “will seem at first incomprehensible. Please forget your attachment to plurals. Please divorce yourself from pronouns. Try to float like a lotus on our pond of suggestion and indirectness.”

A few cowed pupils dropped out early in the semester. Those who hung on were businessmen or scientists or programmers whose work took them frequently to Japan, or they were young people who had lived for a while in the country and could conduct a slangy conversation. Jay was a category unto himself: the tall old man with a few streaks of red in his white hair, stains refusing to fade; the codger who hoped to converse with descendants as yet unconceived.

In July the young couple came to Godolphin to visit Jay’s daughter and son-in-law. And Jay, too, of course. Jay told Mika, in Japanese, that warm weather had arrived early in Massachusetts next spring; no, last spring; no,
this
spring. The tomatoes were delicious, weren’t they. He inquired after her father and mother and grandmother,
chichi
and
haha
and
baba
, remembering too late that these appellations were overfamiliar. She replied that her family’s health was good, thanks, and she was sorry to see he was using a cane. She spoke in considerately slow Japanese. Ah, just his arthritis attacking, he explained;
flaring up
was the phrase he would have preferred, but you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.

T
HE SECOND YEAR
, Sugiyama-sensei, small and plain, introduced the class to the passive mood, which sometimes implied reluctance and sometimes even exploitation. She gave vocabulary quizzes every week, and taught the students to count strokes when they were learning to write kanji—like slaves counting lashes, Jay thought. She counseled them to practice the ideograms without paper and pencil, to limn the things with their fingertips on any convenient surface.

During that summer’s visit Jay took the pregnant Mika for several walks around Godolphin. His arthritis was better and he didn’t need the cane. He showed her the apartment building he’d grown up in, the park he’d played ball in, the high school he’d graduated from—all outwardly unchanged through the years. The deli even is still doing business, he reported, his syntax correct in Japanese and faithful to Yiddish, too. The population was not so diverse when I was a boy, he managed to say, though the adjective he used really meant “various.” We were then only Jews and Irish and … he didn’t know how to say
Protestants
, so he killed them off. Now we are Russian, and also Vietnamese, and also South American, and many others there is no necessity to mention, the entire final phrase contained in a one-syllable word that he unfortunately mispositioned. Mika nodded anyway, and Jay felt proud of himself, proud of all he’d learned from Sugiyama-sensei. Sugiyama’s devotion to teaching Japanese had made up for her own rather awkward English:
burn
,
barn
, and
bun
, on her tongue, were all the same word.

Y
AMAMOTO-SENSEI
, the third-year teacher, pronounced English very well. His delivery, though, was alarming. His speech was interrupted by giggles, snorts, and the
n-n
of agreement, less extended than the
n-n-n
of disagreement. Jay recoiled from this gasping, spittled fellow. In Yamamoto-san’s sallowness, in the rosy wetness of his lips, in the short fatness of his nose with its exposed nostrils, in the black rims of his spectacles, he was a painful reminder of Feivel Ostroff, who had invaded Jay’s eighth-grade class more than six decades earlier. Feivel and his siblings exuded an old-world whiff that most Jewish families had vigorously sprayed away. Under ordinary circumstances the Ostroffs would not have achieved Godolphin—the father kept a little grocery in a deteriorating section of Boston, and the brood lived over the store. But the feckless father died, and the mother’s brother, made prosperous by the war, moved widow and orphans into a big apartment on Jefferson Avenue whose rent he undertook to pay. He bought them necessaries and even bikes.