Collected Fictions (28 page)

THE DOG

I WAS NEVER IN A PLACE LIKE THAT.
I was an American boy when they had places like that. So everything I say is just me imagining things. Except for the names, of course. I know the names. I have a list. I have been making a list. You couldn't guess the names I already have on it. But I am not anywhere near finished yet. There is just no telling what it is going to take for me to get the list completed. Because the point of this is they only want you to hear about a handful. They only want you to hear about the same ones which they want you to hear about, which are the same ones which everybody all over the world has already heard about. Whereas there were secret ones. There were hundreds of secret ones. Even hundreds is a big understatement. Not even thousands is an exaggeration. You think thousands is an exaggeration? Because it's not! Because they had them everywhere. You couldn't guess where they had them. You would faint dead away if I told you where they had plenty of them. You would think what a liar I was if I told you, or was crazy or was worse.

Here is one of the famous ones.

Ravensbrück.

You probably heard of that one. Did you hear of that one?

I just told you—so now you heard of that one.

Not like Oswiecim.

Imagine having to say Oswiecim morning, noon, and night. This is probably why they didn't call it Oswiecim but called it Auschwitz, even though, hey, Auschwitz wasn't its real name.

But take my real name.

You know what I should do?

I should probably have a list for it.

WHAT IF THEY HAD A BARBER
at Treblinka?

Or at Buchenwald?

Or at Dachau?

I have been thinking about this. I have been thinking about what if they had to have a barber to get off all of the hair off of them for when the women came in and the girls—get off all of their hair off everywhere—because didn't they do that, didn't they take off their hair off for something, didn't they take it all off of the girls off and the women off for some us-hating purpose?

So they must have had a person who did it. They must have had a person who cut off the hair off. It must have been a person who would be good at it and who would not get tired from doing it and who would know how to keep on doing it, to keep just cutting and cutting and not giving anybody who asked the wrong answers. Because look at how hard it would be for you to just keep doing it, you would have to be a one-hundred-percent professional—all of the girls coming in at you and taking their clothes off and all of the various and sundry women.

So what do you think about the question of who would be the person who did it?

You think it would be a job which they would give to what kind of a person?

Tell me which sex at least!

Tell me how old in years at least!

Tell me if this person should be a person who is short or who is tall, just as far as someone reaching!

BETWEEN 1938 AND 1944
, I made regular visits in from Long Island to my father's place of business. It wasn't just my father's business. It was his business in business with his brothers. It was the business of making hats for girls and for women and then of getting places like Macy's and Gimbel's to buy them and make my father and his brothers rich. So I was telling you about between 1938 and 1944. Because I would come visit my father at my father's place of business and my father would show me around to all of his workers in all of the divisions and then my father would call up for his barber to come up for him to give me a haircut, and then a man would come up and would do it.

Then this is what my father would say.

"Now that they've cleaned you up, let's go out and put on the dog."

Then my father would give the man the money and take me out to a Longchamps for lunch and then, later on, take me over to DePinna's for something new, like for new leggings or for knickers to go with my new coat.

The money my father gave the barber, you know how he did it, gave him the money?

He slipped it to him.

My father slipped it to him.

You know, slipped it, palmed it, passed it off—a way the handler works the hand.

BIRKENAU
.

Carthage.

Oz.

New York.

KNOWLEDGE

SHE SAID, "YOU WANT ME TO KISS IT
and make it well? Come sit and I will kiss it and make it well. Come let me see it and I will kiss it and make it well. Just take your hand away from it and let me just look at it. I promise you, I am just going to look at it. Oh, grow up, could looking at it make it worse? Do us both a favor and let me look. I swear, all I am going to do is to look. So is this it? Are you telling me this is it? This can't be it. Are you sure this is it? You are not really telling me this is what all of this fuss is about. Is this what all of this fuss is about? I cannot believe that this is what all of this fuss is about. You have been making such a fuss about this? Don't tell me this is what you have been making all of this fuss about. You call this something? This is not something. This is nothing. You know what this is? I want to tell you what this is. This is nothing. Does it hurt? It doesn't hurt. It couldn't hurt. Why do you say it hurts? How could you say it hurts? You really want me to believe it hurts? Is this what you are telling me, you are telling me it hurts? Because I cannot believe that this is what you are telling me, that you are really telling me that a thing like this could possibly hurt. A little thing like this could not possibly hurt. Do us both a favor and don't tell me it hurts. So when I do this, does it hurt? What makes you say it hurts? Are you certain it hurts? How could it hurt? Give me one good reason why it should hurt. I should show you something that hurts. I am going to give you some advice. You want some advice? Count your lucky stars you don't have something that hurts. You know what you are doing? Let me tell you what you are doing. I want you to sit here and hear me tell you exactly what you are doing. Because guess what. You are making something out of nothing. You want me to tell you what you are doing? Because this is what you are doing—you are making something out of nothing. So don't act like you didn't know. You know what? You're not doing yourself any good when you put on an act like as if you didn't know. I am amazed at you, always putting on an act. So how come you never figured this out for yourself? You should have figured this out for yourself. Why should you, of all persons, not be the one to figure this out for yourself? I want you to promise me something—next time promise me you will figure things out for yourself.

"Forget it.

"I do not need anybody to promise me anything.

"Let me ask you something.

"No, better not, better skip it.

"The answer would make me sick.

"Listen, you know what is wrong with you? Because there is something very, very, very, very, very, very wrong with you. I guarantee you, I promise you—a person's mother, a mother knows."

BEHOLD THE INCREDIBLE REVENGE OF THE SHIFTED P.O.V.

HOW SHALL WE SAY THE CLOCK WAS BOUGHT
and paid for? For surely the seller's sticker on the thing declared a figure remarkably bolder than these youngsters could decently manage. But they were so keen, the two of them, so ungovernable in their zeal. Of what earthly pertinence was it that their purse could scarce stand up to the swollen demands of the humblest item in this shop? And the clock, oh my, as to its forbidding tariff, great heavens, this, please be clear, was certain to be seen by most shoppers as another, and much harsher, matter entirely. But what, please be, did other matters, certain or otherwise, have to do with anything when it was naught but the pressure of necessity itself that rested its infinite weight on the possessed hearts of these young people? For there the clock stood in its stony oaken case, all solemnity in its olden bearing (after all, the sticker stated "Early Nineteenth Century" no less legislatively than it stated the price) as it spoke its artful speech of sturdiness, of continuity, of permanence, offering to deliver these affiliations first and therefore, when the time was right, everything else.

It said it could confer on them as much.

Or so we heard it pledge its word to the new homemakers, and they heard it too.

"Wow, that's no joke!" the boy announced with some excessive gusto, meaning to exaggerate his astonishment not just for the good fun of making fun of himself but also to suggest to the shop's proprietor—who had hovered into position—that, in fact, for these two customers, the amount would be no large sum at all.

"But only think of it!" the girl exclaimed. "I mean, wouldn't it be like an heirloom really? I mean, when we have a family, couldn't we just sort of pass it on to them the way real people do, sort of like generations upon generations forever?"

The boy colored at his spouse's high sentence, wanting to hurry to correct her where it had struck his ear that the girl had gone with it, great Christ, a measure or two too far. But the boy knew the damage had been done, that it was always already centuries too late ever to withdraw the smallest wrongness, that the proprietor— the man hovering ever more tellingly into position—a lofty enough presence to hover, actually—had heard all, judged all—"generations upon generations forever" indeed!—doubtlessly savoring the evidence on a tongue that would publish conclusions elsewhere.

Ah, God, the boy could hear the verdict carrying down the ages after him: "Innocent young dear has gone and got itself a goodish burden, now hasn't it? Dreadful silly luckless sap."

That did it, or so it seems not unsafe for us, less lucklessly, to suppose.

At any rate, grinning horribly, the boy motioned for the girl to fetch the "family" checkbook from her handbag—so that, by whatever means fiscal, the clock was got—and a note was accordingly made and thereafter wired to the fancy key that poked from the fancy keyhole whose lock could let you get at the lordly pendulum either for the errand of starting it up or, if ever required, shutting it down.

Sold
.

And so forth and so on.

We are reporting they bought the clock.

A "GRANDMOTHER CLOCK
" was what status the thing was rendered by the reference books in which its kind was pictured, this, it is not unlikely, in pursuit of a program to restrict the object to a rank not so grand at all—and though the provenance of the clock was very probably more local than not, still (the seller had seemed so tall, so hovering, so . . .
otherly
)
,
once the clock had taken up its post against their bedroom wall (there was really nowhere else for them to fit their purchase, what with the premises being—the marriage was hardly yet out of its cradle—so cruelly unbaronial), the owners succumbed to the practice of engaging the phrase "our imported piece" whenever inquiries were made by one or another young couple who, after very persuasive fare indeed, at the card table set up for the purpose in the kitchen, were escorted back into the bedroom for a bit of TV with coffee, dessert, and cordials.

"Oh, but it's so unutterably special," the other wife would say. "No wonder you want it back here where you sleep, where a chic antique of its type can really be better appreciated on a much more frequent basis."

"Yeah, nice," the other husband would say. "So you guys inherit it from your families or something?"

But whatever enthusiasms the other young couple would insert into the ethers as they bit into cake and drank from goblets and sipped from demitasse cups no bigger than big thimbles, sooner or later someone would be bound to observe—generally when the clock's imperturbable chimes were finally being heard from—that the time was the better part of an hour fast.

Or slow.

But wrong.

Fast or slow but wrong.

Always wrong.

Never not anything but chaotically wrong.

Off.

Way off.

Not right.

Not once.

Nope, nowhere even close.

THERE WAS NO REMEDY
for it.

Years into the marriage, the thing still tolled the hour nowhere near the hour—and when one went to the living room (oh, as they will to all couples who achieve the early stewardship of a magisterial property, other important possessions had issued to our couple, even a commodious enough living room had) to see what time it was, one had to smack one's head and reinstruct oneself that for such a use, for telling the time, the clock wasn't any good. Whereupon, whichever of them it was, this party would then get himself prayerfully down onto his knees, would work the fancy key, would draw open the panel whose business it was to keep from view the relentless commerce of the pendulum, would put a finger out to stop it, would then reset the whole affair, hideously mindful all the while that whatever adjustment was being made will have long since, hours hence, begun to yield to the mischief transferring exacting correction into more and more violent error.

The bother was pointless.

Clock people were summoned from other counties, from distant precincts, from bizarre neighborhoods, wild sullen grisly creatures, who, angrily bearded and extravagantly undeterred, brought with them menacingly exotic instruments and, sometimes, wordless ghostly staring children, their fathers keeping to their dismal labors for days without sleep, taking no recesses for food even—greasy oblongs of oil-darkened canvas spread out all about as the place more and more accumulated the inward parts of . . .
our imported piece!
—the thing nauseatingly sundered, the inmost laid open, the hidden laid bare, the genius of the thing suddenly truly charmlessly alien, whatever the truth of its origin.

No help.

Nothing worked.

The clock kept keeping the wrong time.

But no one is saying the clock was ever a stroke less reassuring to look upon.

He who looked upon the clock was reassured.

She, too.

Made present to the wonder of things in being, of no change, of the venerable venerating itself, of nothing giving up in the teeth of everything defeating.

It was okay.

THE CHILDREN HAD COME
and gone.

To be sure, the notion of the generations was just beginning to exert itself good and proper the year the couple packed up and gave up the place where the marriage had conducted its offspring into the habits that had been proclaimed for them. So here was the time for something smaller and more manageable, for a dwelling better fitted to the compressions of middle age—and the clock, of course, went to this dwelling with them—all the time in the world for passing such a patrimony along to the first one to wed—no, to the first one to honor the ceremonies of homemaking—oh, but no yet again—to the first one to express the resolution to prostrate himself and spouse before a token of the household, consenting to welcome unto their destinies the instruction the clock would give.

BUT, LOOK
—see how we, the tellers of what is told, are not exempt from what is said?

Behold, must not the clock keep perfect time before the story can claim for itself storyhood?

And so it does!

All day.

Every day.

And all the next ones, too.

MAGIC!

How else to explain but as magic?

The spontaneous institution of what was helplessly wanted—everything in unimprovable order—nothing even a tock's tick off.

Go ahead, call the timekeepers in, get in touch with the lucky custodians, telephone from right in there—we mean from right in there in the little sleeping room the widow and I have now taken to storing the clock in and to keeping tidied and anointed for the visits of our children's children's children.

You'll see.

Say "Could you please tell me what time it is, please?"

Now watch the clock.

Right on the money, yes?

But here is the thing.

Every time the old woman and I hear it chiming the time it really is, a ridiculous condition of panic takes up our minds in its hands and twists. I mean, the clock, the good old clock—our very index of the durable order of things—has got us scared stiff.