Ending (12 page)

The boys spun on the chairs as I had done as a child and looked solemnly back at the reflection of their faces rising from the pink capes as my father cut their hair.

My mother, not in uniform now, walked around the shop and out of habit rearranged jars and bottles and opened drawers and shut them. “Sweetness!” “Dollface!” she cried alternately to the children and pinched their cheeks and caught them with kisses. When their hair lay in wet, final grooves and their smells were flower sweet, she gave them money. Their fists overflowed with coins.

“They don’t need money,” I said.

But I was overruled. “Let them buy something,” she said.

“What are you going to buy, Champ?” my father asked.

“Let them buy toys. Let them buy candy.” They were spilling out their love in frantic lavish drifts and it made me feel sad.

On the way home we stopped at the playground, even though it was a very cold day with a stinging wind. There were only three or four other children there, neglected children perhaps, or ones with crazy mothers like myself. They moved aimlessly, like bums, from one thing to another, sifted darkened sand in the sandbox, hung listlessly from the swings, and eyed one another as potential enemies. There is something dangerous about days like this, I thought. The wind was bitter and there were tears in my eyes that did not come from the grief hoarded and hidden somewhere below.

Another woman came into the playground, and it was as if I had willed her there for distraction or companionship. She was overweight and cozily sloppy, with wildly windblown hair and what appeared to be house slippers on her feet. She was looking for her dog. A leather leash dangled from one hand and she whistled repeatedly, a rising, questioning sound. Then she walked to the bench where I was sitting and she smiled at me. “That dog’s going to drive me nuts,” she said.

I nodded.

“Ninety bucks on training,” she said. “Forty bucks on shots. Fifteen on
grooming.”

“I know.”

“Then he takes off like a bat out of hell. Males. I’ll never get another one, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded again and she was encouraged. She sat down next to me. “Those your kids?”

“Yes,” I said, too weary to explain that just two of them were mine.

She whistled again, softly. “Some gang. God love them. No wonder you keep them out on a day like this. They must drive you up a wall.” She squinted at me, speculating. “You
look
tired.”

“Well,” I said. “My husband is very sick.”

“Ohhhhh. So you want to keep them out of his hair, huh?”

“No, no, he’s in the hospital.”

“Serious, huh?” She leaned close to me, so that I could feel her coat sleeve against my own.

“Serious,” I repeated. “He’s dying.”

She moved away slightly as if I had startled or offended her. Her head was cocked to one side. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said. She stood and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Rusty! Rusty!” she bellowed, and then she sat down again. “Maybe I’d be better off if he never came back,” she confided.

“He has cancer,” I said, unrelenting.

“That so?”

“He’s thirty-two years old.” I stared at her, pressuring her for a response. Why shouldn’t she know? I wanted her to know.

But she was crafty, evading my evil eye.
“My
husband doesn’t believe in doctors,” she said. “He says they’re all crooks. Hocus-pocus. And who do you think pays for all those fancy offices? For those nice leather couches and all? And those vacations they take! Do you think there’s a doctor in New York on a day like this? No, they’re smart. They’re in Florida, in Arizona. They’re out on the golf course, taking life easy. On
your
money,” she added, pointing an accusing finger.

“He’s dying,” I said again, believing it myself in a terrifying swell of knowledge. I wanted to shake that woman until she said yes, acknowledged the truth about Jay, about me, about herself.

But she moved farther away on the bench, her face closed against me. “Even vets,” she said. “Fifteen bucks every time that lousy dog gets a sniffle. Do I have to pay for his wife’s fur coat?” Her voice was shrill and plaintive with all the unsaid words. Is it
my
fault? What do I have to do with death?

I had an urge to hit her, to punch her in the face, as if the infliction of pain would be the first step in the right direction. But rage and pity rose up in conflict. Poor stupid woman, plump as a bird in her brown winter coat, the leash coiled in her lap.

I stood. “There’s your dog,” I said, pointing into the distance past the playground.

She jumped up, shading her eyes. “Where? I don’t see him.”

“There,” I said. “He’s just turned the corner.”

She was willing to be convinced. “A big fellow, black?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, wanting her to be gone, feeling the tears frozen in their tracks on my cheeks. She went off finally, whistling again, and I called to the boys, telling them it was time to go home.

In the apartment Paul dropped his coins carelessly on the first surface he encountered, but Harry buried his as proper treasure in the bottom of the toy box.

I lay down on the bed and listened to dance music on the radio. From the apartment next door, I could hear sporadic bumping noises of life. I hummed along with the tune on the radio and then I thought about tomorrow and I wondered if Jay would look different after the few days we had been apart. When would we finally look directly at one another in affirmation of the terrible truth? And what would we say?

Harry came in and watched me from the doorway. I jumped from the bed and swept him into my arms and began to dance around the room with him. He made himself rigid, throwing back his head and howling in what might have been either pleasure or despair.

Hearing the noise, Paul rushed into the room and began to cry, “Me! Do it to me!” He hung on to my legs, dragging his weight.

We danced and whirled and lurched around the room to some innocent bubbling tune of the fifties, until I was exhausted and we fell onto the bed in a warm tangle of the children’s arms and legs. “What’s going to happen?” I said. “What’s going to happen?” Nobody answered.

F
RANCIS SAID, “I WONDERED
what happened to you.”

“I had a cold. I haven’t been here for a few days.”

“Well, I’m only passing through now myself. I’m on my way home.”

If he was going home, why didn’t he leave then? But he was a man in no hurry, open to any possibilities. I was afraid that if he spoke any longer, I might learn something about him, that he would reveal his history and his pathos to me. Yet I stood there with my hand poised on the lucite handle of the hospital door. With a single gesture I could let myself inside and leave him on the other side of the thick glass. And yet I waited, delaying the confrontation with the odors that frightened Eddie, with the rat’s maze of corridors, and finally with Jay.

“A cold is dangerous in Jay’s condition,” I said.

“It must have been hard to stay away.”

“Yes.” My hand curled over the handle. “I don’t know if he’s changed.”

“Try not to be afraid. He’ll see it in your face.”

“Do you see it?”

He studied me carefully. He smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “I see a lovely face,” he said.

Blood rushed through the dusty chambers of my heart. “Don’t say that.”

“I’m only telling the truth,” he said.

My hand squeezed the handle of the door and pulled. “I have to go now.”

“Don’t forget,” he said.

In the elevator, climbing to Jay’s floor, I wondered what he meant, what it was he wanted me to remember. Then I was there again in that familiar place, with my heels clicking a cadence as I walked toward Jay’s room. Practicing in my head the smile that I would use and the way my eyes would look and the words hello hello hello darling hello. With the click-click of my heels I went past the other rooms and they looked out at me with a dull lack of interest, while I thought hello hello hello …

Then I was in the room and he was not the same. Would never be the same. So yellow, so thin in just a few days. His ears were large, larger than I remembered them, as if they had grown to accommodate all the sounds he would have to gather and hoard for all time.

“Hello, darling.” My voice. “Hello, Martin.” How odd that we remember language and the proper words for all occasions. There was no end to my words. I told Jay about Atlantic City and he laughed because I made him think that it was funny. I told him about the funny fat woman on the bus and the nutty woman at the hotel and the man’s suitcase in the bus station. I clowned and rolled my eyes. I imitated everyone’s voice and I was surprised at my uncanny knack for doing it.

Martin giggled and said that I should have taken pictures. He had never been to the beach in the winter. It was one of the things he was going to do.

I saw that Jay squinted now, as if he were trying to remember something, and that his hand went again and again to his back.

“Legerdemain, sonny. That’s big for magic. Oh God.” I wiped my eyes with a tissue.

Jay said, “I wish I had been there with you,” and I stopped laughing and looked hard and mercilessly into his eyes. That was the first step.

Then Martin’s parents came to visit and they brought his grandmother, who was dramatically old and tiny. “Look who’s here,” his father said in that harsh voice, and he propelled the old woman toward the chair next to Martin’s bed.

Martin was embarrassed and pleased at the same time. He kissed his grandmother’s cheek and I imagined the thin papery taste. She could hardly be heard, her voice now worn away to the whining thread of sound on an ancient phonograph record.

Martin’s father spoke for her. “Grandma came all the way from the Bronx,” he announced.

Her head, her hand, moved in spastic leaps.

And then we all spoke in loud voices. “Isn’t that wonderful?” “Isn’t she something?”

But I saw that Martin’s mother was looking speculatively at Jay and that she observed the changes in him that I observed. Her mouth closed in a narrow white line over her teeth.

I moved closer to Jay in a defensive gesture and I kept my eyes on the incredible labyrinth of lines and wrinkles on the old woman’s face. To grow to such a great age, to stay past function and past ecstasy.

Then Jay took some pictures of her and she leaned forward and removed her spectacles in a final gesture of vanity. In a little while the soft bell rang for the dismissal of visitors. Martin’s father lifted his mother from the chair.

“Jay,” I said, in a voice that boomed in my own ears, “I love you. Good night, darling.”

Even the old woman turned her head at the doorway and looked back.

W
HEN NO ONE ELSE
could do it, Mr. Caspar agreed to baby-sit in the evening. “The magic man is here,” Paul announced, and a real smile opened on Mr. Caspar’s face. Our apartment faces the front of the building and his the rear, where the view is of a courtyard and another identical building. I imagined that he would wait later in the dark of my living room, looking through the window for Estrella’s return from her night prowl.

I went on my known path to the hospital and discovered that the nursing staff was nervous and expectant. Jerry Mann, the star of the television show for which Jay had been a cameraman, was on his way up. Word had already come from the lobby and there were whispers of excitement and heads poking through doorways all along the floor.

“Jerry’s coming,” I told Jay.

Martin’s parents, hearing the news, paced restlessly in the room. “Him?” rasped Martin’s father. “He’s terrific. We always watch him. Don’t we always watch him?” He turned to his wife for confirmation.

She nodded. “Do you have your camera ready, Martin?”

Martin’s father murmured, as if to himself, “We’ve watched him for years.”

Then the noise of activity grew in the hall, with a few hushing sounds, useless, perfunctory. We heard footsteps and then Jerry was there, big as life, in the doorway. Martin’s father seemed stunned for a moment. Did Jerry look so different out of the magic box? Of course. He was human now, with real skin color and pores. He had new dimension and a voice that didn’t sound familiar as it adjusted to a pitch and tone appropriate to that room. His wife was behind him and it seemed that she would save the day because she was exotic beyond belief: furred, bejeweled, theatrical. Her voice was some sort of nasal music, touched with a foreign Quality I could not place. In the open doorway, faces appeared: awed, happy, some topped by peaked nurses’ caps. An elderly patient released her hold on a walker for one treacherous moment, clutched her bathrobe to her throat with one hand and waved with the other. From the corridor, “It’s him! Yes, yes, it’s him!”

Finally, happy to be useful, Martin’s father smiled triumphantly and went to the door and shut it. When we were enclosed in that room, Jerry posed for Martin’s camera, with his wife, with Martin’s parents. The mother protested for a while, primping her hair, shredding a tissue, and then turned and spoke the very moment the shutter was opened.

Jerry called Jay “Boy.” “How are you, Boy?” “We all miss you, Boy.” He wasn’t a bad actor. He waited for Jay to answer, kept his own expression constant. Would he call me “Girl”? But he didn’t. I had met him a few times, with this wife, and the wife before this one, at studio parties, and he remembered my name.

“I watch you all the time,” Martin’s father said. His voice seemed to startle Jerry’s wife, who blinked at him. Jerry gave autographs. For want of something else, he scribbled on a piece of paper that stated
THIS PATIENT IS NOT TO BE FED ANY SOLIDS THIS MORNING.
He wrote
Yours faithfully, Jerry Mann,
in big impressive script. His wife’s perfume and the fragrance of their fame seemed extraordinary in that clinical room. With the door closed he became restless, and looked toward it with furtive but longing glances. The news of the studio ran out quickly. So-and-so is in Spain, is getting married, divorced, transferred. We sat in a dead, nervous silence that forced us to observe everything in the room: the beds, the coiling equipment, the bed charts that listed everything, even the maiden name of each patient’s mother. Into the silence Martin’s father cleared his throat with a sound of tire chains trying to grip an icy road. Then a few of us spoke at once. “Mr. Mann …” began Martin. “Well, I …” said his mother.