Ending (3 page)

Martin’s parents arrived. They were all thin people who seemed too old to have a child of Martin’s age. They both shook hands with us with a solemnity that might be reserved for formal occasions. The father had a hoarse rasp of a voice. The mother whispered, “Isn’t this nice? I was worried that he might have been put in with someone” (here she paused and. looked around cautiously), “someone very
ill.”
She explained that Martin was recovering now, that he had been sick with terrible complications after his appendix had ruptured. “He’s getting better now, but he was
desperately
ill.” She was in love with the sounds of those words.
“Desperately,”
she said.
“Touch and go. In God’s hands.”
Was I to learn a new vocabulary?
“Life and death,”
said Martin’s mother.

“That’s right,” his father concurred at intervals in his terrible voice.

“Martin is our only child,” the mother said.

“That’s right,” said the father, as if we might not have believed her.

Jay and I decided to go to the solarium, another occasion for handshaking. Even as we walked down the hall, the chorus of their voices followed us: the main theme of the mother, the tired rasp of the father, and Martin, piping, clear, asking questions, talking, talking, hanging on.

At the elevator, Jay said, “I feel like a fool.”

I
N THE MORNING HE
called and said that the weather report was very bad, that the roads were slick already and that he didn’t want me to come. He whispered because Martin was sleeping. “That poor kid,” he said. “He was up all night.

I found myself whispering back. “If I stay home,” I said, “maybe I’ll bake something. Or I’ll do hems. I’ll write to your mother.”

Jay said, “You don’t have to do penance, Sandy. The roads are bad.”

It was true. The matter was out of my hands. I didn’t have to go. I
couldn’t
go. I looked out through the window for reassurance and saw the whiteness and felt the windowpane shudder with the thrust of the wind.

“Is my daddy in the hospital?” Paul asked, peering into the depths of his soup.

“You know perfectly well,” I said.

“Perfectly well,” he echoed. “Perfectly well.”

Harry was drawing a picture for Jay. It was a scene of a summer’s day with V-shaped birds in flight across a blazing sky, and oval clouds, and in the corner a very small figure launching a kite.

“Daddy will love it,” I told him. “That’s a wonderful picture. He’ll show it to everybody,” I said. “He’ll really love it.” When I went to see Jay again, I would put Harry’s picture on the nightstand next to the cards from friends and the plant from the camera crew. Everyone had sent get-well cards, the sort that ridicule any indulgence in sickness, that threaten you to get well quickly (or else!), that make wisecracks about expensive doctors and sexy nurses.

In the afternoon I didn’t bake or sew or even write to Jay’s mother. I called my friend Isabel on the telephone.

“Are you scared?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what to say, Sandy. I want to say maybe it will be all right. But I’m afraid you might hate me for it.”

“I wouldn’t, Izzy.”

“You might. False hopes are cruel, because they make you seem less than you are. Remember when everyone used to say that Eddie would come back, that it was only a fling?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to believe them, but I despised them at the same time for fooling me. I wanted to believe anything. I loved stories about other people: distant cousins, old neighbors who had been through it all and survived. Men who came back with their tails between their legs. Wives who were celebrated with ticker-tape parades and monuments to their righteousness. But it is different for you, Sandy. There’s hope. I mean you don’t know yet.”

“That’s right. Mrs. L., Joseph’s mother, knows hundreds of
identical
cases. They were all saved by Alka-Seltzer or something.”

“How does he feel?”

“Mostly tired. He
wakes up
tired. He looks lousy and his back aches.”

“Do you want to come here? Do you want to stay with me?”

I thought about Isabel’s apartment, of the four places set at the table for the three children and herself, the displacement of male character in every room. Like a liquid, she had spilled over onto all the places Eddie had been. Her papers and books were scattered on his old desk, her makeup in crazy disorder everywhere. Her belongings swelled in closets and drawers.

“Thanks,” I said. “We’re okay.”

Later I sat on the sofa and watched television, while Harry and Paul pushed toy cars across the floor and through the tunnel between my feet. I watched quiz programs and a woman from Ohio won two cars. She screamed, she wept, she banged her hands on the podium. “I never won anything in my life!” she cried. Tears came to my own eyes. The cars revolved slowly on a turntable and the woman applauded as if they were performers. Her husband ran up onto the stage from the audience and kissed her feverishly.

I watched an old movie with a shaky sound track and a happy ending and the tears kept rolling down my cheeks. I snuffled and wiped them away with the back of my hand. Harry fell asleep with his hand across one of his toys and Paul climbed up into my lap and sucked his thumb with greedy pleasure. I watched two soap operas. In the second one, the scene opened in a hospital corridor and an orderly was wheeling a stretcher from the operating theater. There was a child on the stretcher. The child’s head was swathed in bandages. A young couple rushed from off-camera to the child’s side.

“Not now, Mrs. Burns, not now,” said a voice, and they looked up imploringly at the face of the surgeon. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, and the camera panned to his beautiful scrubbed hands as he stroked the cheek of the unconscious child.

“Thank God!” bawled Mrs. Burns. “Oh oh thank God!” She wept into her white gloves.

“Thank
you,
Dr. Peters,” said Mr. Burns.

Organ music swelled inside my breast. My throat was thick with tears.

I watched a situation comedy with canned laughter, about a mix-up in party invitations. Someone fell over a kid’s bicycle and down a flight of stairs. Someone brought a monkey dressed as a little girl into the house. The laughter went on and on and I couldn’t stop crying. Even when Paul looked up and said, “Don’t!” Even when I smiled and made laughing noises and pointed at the screen. “Look at the s-silly monkey,” I sobbed. “Oh God, look at the f-funny m-m-monkey. Oh ha ha oh God,” gasping and gagging until the commercial when I blew my nose and began to grow calm again.

The next day there was a letter from Jay’s mother. She lives in Hawaii with her second husband. They are semi-retired now, working part time in a plant that packages tiny orchids in plastic vials and then ships them to California for distribution at the openings of gas stations and supermarkets. They’ve lived there for six months and so far she has sent a grass skirt for me, toy ukuleles for the children and a record with instruction book, called
The Beautiful Language of Hula Hands.

January 5
^th

Dear Children,

Aloha! How are you? Fine I hope. We are fine living the life of Riley and enjoying ourselves. You can’t imagine the interesting people we are meeting from all walks of life. Sam says what difference does it make what you are if you are a good person in your heart. You know him he is soft.

Seventy nine degrees here today can you believe it I am wearing only a sleeveless cotton dress in January. Please look out for a package I am sending for the children how are they? Fine I hope. Give them a big kiss. Sam says Aloha too. He is becoming an artiste in his old age and does nice paintings of the scenery. We will send you a good one to hang up. There are some girls here with bathing suits like diapers. Sam says he will come back here in the next life. You would not recognize us we are black.

Love,

Mona

I
HAVE EARLY SENSUOUS
memories of my father: the scratch of his moustache when he feasted at my throat, the exotic scent of the beauty shop that clung to his clothing and his skin, the resonance of his voice and the resultant joy in his chest at the sound of it. There was also the stern glance of my mother, frowning on frivolity.

Did I imagine their quarrels on the other side of the wall? How does a child learn such things? My mother made no mystery of them. There is a language specifically for that sort of quarrel. And I observed my father in the shop, touching the women as he spoke to them, his hand on someone’s shoulder, his fingers stroking pleasure into another’s scalp. I sat on a chair spinning around and around, catching myself in the mirrors everywhere, in love with my blond hair, with my own known face.

I imagined then that my father’s affairs were those of the heart, in the romantic sense induced by movies I had seen and magazines I had read after school in the beauty shop. In my mind he did harmless things, necessary to his sentimental spirit. I believed that he clinked wine glasses with pretty women, and danced intricate tango steps and laughed a great deal over innocent jokes.

But the language on the other side of the wall was more specific. “Tramp.” “Bum.” “Whore.”

Yet they were serious business partners. When they checked the day’s receipts, when they studied the hair-dye charts or the inventory on shampoos and rinses, there was a harmony and order that never existed in their other life.

One night, shortly after we were married, Jay and I were lying in bed together. We had come from a party an hour before and we floated in that limbo between wakefulness and sleep. I don’t remember the series of thoughts that brought me back to those former nights, but I was there again, lying in that white narrow bed, in a room that harbored different dreams. I heard the routine noises again: the dropping of a shoe with a weary thud, the sliding of drawers, the rise of my mother’s voice, my father’s answer extended into a yawn. The restless creak of bedsprings, another shoe. I was home in my own bed, lulled by the anesthetic of familiar sounds.

But then I was awakened by new sounds, the ones that threatened and alarmed: my mother’s voice rising, rising, the hard, flat counterpoint of my father’s. He told her that she was crazy, that she had a wild imagination.

“You’re
crazy,” she said. “You’re the one who’s crazy if you think I’ll stand for it. One whore after another. Do you think I’m stupid?”

He told her that she was cold, that she punished him for what existed only in her mind.

She warned that he did not know what punishment was, that she would show him, that she would teach him.

But two days later, no more, I came from school and found him leaning back in a shampoo chair, with his eyes shut. My mother was bending over him like a lover, washing his hair.

The memory made me wakeful and I sat up next to Jay in the bed. I began to talk about my parents and the pattern of their life together.

“She never forgave him,” Jay said.

“No.”

“Did you?”

“Me?
He wasn’t unfaithful to
me.”

“In a way,” Jay said, “all fathers are unfaithful to their daughters.”

“I felt sorry for him. I don’t know why.”

“For him?”

“Oh, for her too. She worked so hard. She always looked so disappointed, so bitter. But my father had an air of innocence that seemed to absolve him. He was like a naughty but appealing boy. Everyone always liked him more than they liked my mother.”

“But he wasn’t innocent.”

I sighed. “Not in the real sense of the word. Listen, he still has an eye for the girls.”

“And your mother still has her eye on him.”

“Yes.”

Jay stroked the back of my neck with one finger. “Would you let me off that easily?” he asked.

“You?”

“Yeah, under the same circumstances.”

“The circumstances couldn’t be the same. You’re not like my father …”

“But would you let me off?”

“I suppose I would kill you.”

Jay laughed. “How?”

“How? I don’t know. I guess I’d hack you up. An ax murder.”

“Which part first?”

“Ha ha.”

“I wouldn’t let you off either,” Jay said.

“What would you do?”

“Don’t find out,” he said. His hands moved under the covers.

“Is that what you’d do?”

“Maybe. Or this, or this.”

“Chop chop,” I said, reaching for him. He shuddered and I laughed.

“Shhh,” Jay said. “Don’t.” Then the play stopped and we became serious. We touched each other slowly, deliberately, armed with new ideas and a strange new excitement.

M
ARTIN WAS SITTING UP
in bed and crying. He rubbed his fist against his eyes. “I’m very emotional, Mrs. Kaufman. I can’t help it. I know it’s only tests, but I got scared anyway, when I saw him.”

But Jay
was
frightening, lying there in sleep, back from a treacherous journey, looking smaller, more wasted than he had before. His mouth was open, his brow wrinkled as if in deep thought, and a gentle snoring sound came with each breath.

I said, “Martin, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Even in the movies or a book I feel terrible when something happens to somebody. I get involved with the characters until I get emotional. Some characters I feel like I’ve known all my life.”

“The authors would be crazy about you,” I said. “Listen, if you don’t get involved you don’t feel anything at all. That would be worse.”

He looked at Jay again. “I thought it was something terrible. I acted like a baby. I’ll be surprised if they don’t move me down to the kids’ ward.”

“Jay wouldn’t let them. He
needs
you here,” I told him.

“He was talking out of his mind,” Martin said.

My heart seemed to fall sideways in my chest. “What did he say?”

“A lot of stuff.” He hesitated. “A lot of crazy stuff. Once he said, ‘I don’t want to,’ as if he was arguing with somebody. And some curse words. He didn’t even know he was saying them.” Martin flushed.