Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (5 page)

To the boys Robert must seem a patriarch. They were respectful of his Spanish—the stunted vocabulary, the lisp of remote conquerors. They were respectful of his gray hairs, too. In their country a man of his age should already be dead.

The light was reddening, the shadows were lengthening, the parrots would presently lift themselves without a sound from their trees. The afternoon would soon end. Somewhere, elsewhere, maybe in Miami, a congregation was praying together, was feeling united, singular, almost safe.

A child with a birthmark asked to inspect his watch, looked at it gravely, then returned it with a smile. Two others insisted on showing him their dormitory. He peered under the iron cots; he was supposed to laugh at something there, though all he could see was dust. Perhaps a mouse had recently scampered.

He sat down heavily on a cot, startling the children. He drew them close, one against each knee. They waited for his wisdom. “Avinu malkeinu,” he muttered.

A bell rang: dinner. They stiffened. He let them go.

Oh the thin, hard, greedy boyness of them, undersized nomads fixed for a few years in a patch of land at the end of nowhere. Cow shit in the yard. Beans for dinner on the good days.

Jaime had entered all the play. He’d had a very good time.

They walked back to the inn in the dusk. Some of the huts were little stores, Robert now noticed. Dim bulbs shone on canned goods and medicines. Televisions flickered in the remote interiors, illuminating hammocks. How misleading to call this world the third. It was the nether.

Lex had packed a cooler of sandwiches and Cokes that morning. “Jaime can’t manage a second restaurant in one day,” he now explained to his father.

“What was the first?” Robert wondered. Then he remembered, as if from a rich tapestry seen long ago, the smile of the Chilean woman and the knowing supervision of her lime parrots.

“I have enough food for us all,” Lex said.

Janet shook her head. “I’m going to take your father to the café.”

The café, behind the inn, was an open kitchen and three tables. A couple of men dined together at one of the other tables. No menu: today’s offering was chicken in a spicy sauce. Robert hoped his stomach could manage it. He bought a bottle of rotgut wine.

“L’chaim,” Janet said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“My great-grandfather’s name was Isaac Fink,” she said. “He was a peddler who wandered into Minnesota by mistake, and stayed. The family is Lutheran to its backbones. Still …”

“Still, you are somewhat Jewish,” he said politely. “Skoal.”

They spoke of Lex’s talent and of Jaime’s eagerness. They spoke of the children they’d seen that afternoon, and of Janet’s work. She planned to spend another few years here. “Then a master’s in public health, I think.” Her face grew flushed. “I was serious about giving you a back rub.”

And perhaps this part-Jew would be willing also to inspect his tongue and massage his weary abdomen. He had assumed she was lesbian. She probably was lesbian. One could be something of everything here. “Thanks, but no,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur night.”

“Oh, I see,” was her bewildered response.

In bed alone he found himself wondering whether the handsome Chilean chef might also be a little bit Jewish. And that native Canadian woman from last night’s party—such an expert kvetch. He and Lex should have searched harder for eight more Jews. In a room behind a tailor shop in some town lived a pious old man, too poor to have fled to Miami. In one of the squalid barrios a half-Jewish half-doctor dealt in abortifacient herbs. Atop a donkey, yarmulke concealed by a sombrero, a wanderer sold tin pans. The entire population could be Jewish, Jaime included: people descended from Indians who feared the toucan—what was a toucan but a bird with a schnoz?—and from haughty Marranos who prayed to Yahweh in the basements of basements.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
found him at last master of his bowels. He packed his overnight case and walked across the square to the crumbling church. Inside, though Christ on the wooden cross was naked, plaster saints wore velvet robes. The townspeople, too, seemed dressed up. He spotted one of the men he’d seen in the café last night. Today the man was sporting the yellow jacket of a gaucho.

Robert sat near the back and listened to the Mass. The sermon began. He did not attempt to understand it, though the Spanish was slow and simple, and the subject was
misericordia
, mercy.
Rachamim
. He thought about Lex, now packing the Jeep for the day’s trip to more orphanages. Lex was settling the bill, too. “This trip’s on me,” he’d said, refusing Robert’s money. An admirable, disappointing fellow.
May you, too, have a son like mine
, Robert thought—the old curse, the old blessing.

A small hand fell on his arm. He twisted his head and saw Jaime. The child danced away, then turned and stood in the open double doorway. Behind him was the treeless square; behind that was the inn, some other houses, the rising hills.

“Ob,” Jaime hissed. “Ob!” and he flapped his hand as if warding off a nuisance. Get lost, he seemed to say. Come here, he meant to say. Robert knew the difference now.

Ob.
Ab. Abba
, father, Abraham.
The father of a multitude of nations have I made thee.
Have you? Through whom? Through Maureen Mulloy, a half mick? Through Jaime Katz, an indigenous person?

A multitude of nations: what a vainglorious idea. No wonder we are always in trouble. How about a few good-enough places? he said silently to the priest, to the Christ, to the God rustling in his ear. How about a people that takes care of its children, even those springing from unexalted seed …

“Ob!”

Robert rose. He followed his grandson out of the dark, merciful church and into the harsh light.

O
NE EARLY
S
UNDAY MORNING
Peter Loy stood waiting for the bus downtown. It was October, and the wind was strong enough to ruffle the curbside litter and to make Peter’s coat flap about his knees, open and closed, open and closed. He wouldn’t have been sorry if the wind had removed the coat altogether, like a disapproving valet. It had been a mistake, this long glen-plaid garment with a capelet, suitable for some theatrical undergraduate, not for an ex-schoolteacher of sixty-odd years. He had thought that with his height and thinness and longish hair he’d look like Sherlock Holmes when wearing it. Instead he looked like a dowager.

It didn’t matter; this was not a neighborhood that could afford to frown on oddities. Brighton Avenue, where he now stood, was a shabby main street. Congdon Street, where he lived, was home to an assortment of students, foreigners, and old people. A young couple with matching briefcases had recently bought one of the peeling houses in the hope that the street would turn chic; they spent all their free time gamely stripping paint from the interiors. On weekday mornings white-haired women in bathrobes stared from apartment windows while their middle-aged daughters straggled off to work, and then kept on staring. The immobility of the stay-at-home mothers suggested that their daughters had locked them in, but often at noontime Peter would see one of them moving toward the corner. Her steps would lighten as she neared Brighton Avenue. Here was life! Fresh fish, fish-and-chips, Fishberg the optician … Also on Congdon Street was a three-storied frame building with huge pillars and sagging porches—a vaguely Southern edifice. Inside lived an entire village of Cambodians.

Peter had moved to this seedy section of Boston three years earlier, upon his retirement from the private boys’ academy where he’d taught English. His plain apartment here pleased him far more than his aunt’s town house in Back Bay. He had dragged out several decades in that town house, first as his aunt’s pampered guest and then as her legatee. He had sold it for a good price to the young self-made millionaire next door, Geronimus Barron. No one had hurried Peter out after the sale, though he was eager enough to leave; but within a month of his departure, Barron had knocked down the wall between the houses, gutted entire floors, and installed solar panels and skylights. The magnificent place that resulted was featured in
Architectural Digest
and the
New York
Times.
The lovely tiled fireplace in his own bedroom, Peter noted with pride, remained untouched.

The bus came. The few passengers aboard already looked fatigued. Peter, his own heart light under his silly coat, began the weekly journey.

“H
OW’S THE RESEARCH?
” Meg Wren was asking him a few hours later.

Jack and the three children were playing with a soccer ball in the field in back of the house. The field sloped gently toward the woods. A mile away was the Sudbury River. Peter couldn’t see the river now, from the kitchen, but he could glimpse it from the third-floor guest room where he stayed whenever he spent the night.

“I’m having trouble placing Mrs. Jellyby,” Peter said.

“Mrs. Jellyby?” Meg repeated, wrinkling her long brow.

Peter waited. Her blue gaze was intelligent, but he was not sure exactly how well read she was. She had been born and raised in Wisconsin and had come east after college, almost fifteen years ago, and had quickly married one of his former students. They’d met at church. “
Bleak House
?” Meg said.

“
Bleak House
,” Peter commended. “Mrs. Jellyby is the crackpot who spends all her time collecting money for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha. Her own ragged children keep tumbling down the stairs. Their house is filthy and falling apart. ‘Never have a mission,’ her poor husband warns the heroine. These days we would applaud Mrs. Jellyby’s selflessness. We’d be glad to know that she cares about Africa—funny how some things never change.”

“ ‘Ye have the poor always with you’?”

“Yes, and they’re always the same poor. Mrs. Jellyby carries her ardor to excess and neglects the need nearest her. Not a very Christian form of charity.”

Peter paused. He had been lecturing to Meg, taking advantage of her daughterly attention. In years spent among self-important high school teachers and garrulous old ladies, he had accustomed himself to the listener’s role. Now he had found someone who listened as attentively as he did. It was as if she had inherited the talent from him—or, since that was impossible, had caught it. And this house of hers—so old, and so fresh—it too seemed to want to hear what he had to say. “Mrs. Jellyby’s philanthropy isn’t very Jewish, either,” he went on. “You could make a case that her charity is in Maimonides’ seventh degree—she doesn’t know the names of the people she’s relieving and they’ve certainly never heard of her. But Dickens meant her to be a figure of fun, and he keeps arguing with me. He says that Maimonides was talking about charity closer to home, and that Mrs. Jellyby doesn’t qualify at all … I do get a bit carried away, don’t I?”

Meg was silent. Of all the silences he had ever experienced, Meg’s was his favorite. It was not disappointed, like his mother’s; not bored, like those of the women he had courted; not embarrassed, like that of the search committee that had failed to award him the headmastership; not sleepy, like students in late-afternoon remedial classes; and not terrifying, like his mute aunt after her stroke.

“I think you’re enjoying this task,” she said after a while.

“Carrot scraping?” he said, smiling. He had been scraping carrots for her while they—he—talked.

“Thinking about Dickens and Maimonides,” she said. “Finding Maimonides’ eight levels of charity in the novels of Dickens,” she carefully amended. “It does sound … nice. I knew you were interested in Dickens. But I didn’t know you were interested in Judaism.”

“I’m not interested in Judaism. Only in Jews. They’re so complicated …”

“Mmm,” she responded, noncommittally.

“Always have been.” At Harvard just after the war he had noticed that his brightest classmates were the Jewish boys. They were at home with Swift’s grotesques and Jane Austen’s ingenues. Mastering Middle English was a snap after Hebrew. Shakespeare’s tales were just another set of Midrashim. Every exchange with one of those students had left Peter admiring and envious. He wondered what encounters Meg had thus far endured—dinner-party debate? Lordly attempts at seduction? … And here was her husband, open-faced, steady as the junior high school principal he was. He walked in grinning, his arm outstretched.

The three children bounded in behind Jack: two boys and a little girl. The younger boy’s hair matched the pumpkin on the window-sill. Meg said that his coloring came from her side of the family, though her own smooth hair was brown. The children greeted Peter lightly, as if a week had not gone by since they last saw him; as if he hadn’t spent more than an hour on bus, trolley, and little train; as if he lived there always. Someday he must really live there, Meg had said more than once. The third-floor room was just the place to retire from his retirement.

A
FTER LUNCH
the three adults drank hot cider under an apple tree and talked about the children.

“They’re lazy,” Jack said. “I tried to teach Ned chess the other day. Too difficult, he said. Checkers is good enough for him.”

Meg said, “It’s good enough for a lot of people.”

“Oh, Meg. We send them to private schools. We shore up this old house for them.” He wasn’t complaining, Peter noticed; he was proud.