New Yorkers (21 page)

“Are you in pain?” said the doctor.

She shook her head. Her eyes opened. Then she closed them.

“Is there much flow?” said the doctor in a stage whisper to Anna, who faintly signaled no. The doctor advanced to the bed and looked down on the brown topknot newly tied. “Ruth dear. What’s happening to you happens to all women. You understand that.”

Her eyes opened directly into her father’s, to one side of the doctor. She kept them that way.

“We used to give Holland gin for it,” he said. “To Rosa and Athalie.” He smiled weakly, reaching for her hand above the coverlet, but the doctor’s strong fingers, feeling for her wrist, barred his. The doctor spoke over a shoulder to Anna. “Was she delirious? Earlier?”

“I don’t think—” said Anna. “I don’t know.”

“She was delirious,” he said loudly, looking around him in each face. But no one regarded him, except the child.

“Going to put you to sleep,” said the doctor. “Like an old office injection, that’s all.” He spoke again over his shoulder, as if she couldn’t hear him, “I don’t want to give her anything more by mouth.” Then he turned back to her, but his double-speaking hadn’t nullified her force, only his. “But Ruth darling, maybe you want to talk a little first.” He meant that he did.

She would not answer. And he scarcely waited.

“The other that’s happened to you. That’s not ordinary; no one could say it. You’ve lost a mother, in a terrible way. But it should help to know your mother was sick, dear, in her mind. That can happen.” The doctor’s tenderness was like the rabbi’s—for a large practice.

And he, the husband, did not deny it. Didn’t say: “Not sick—angry, wild, intransigent, spoiled at forty-six, but until now never really despoiling!” (And maybe in your mother’s flights of anger, my child, maybe even the spiritual assertion, against my calculating chess-ways, of the other beauty in the universe?) Would this have been a better legacy? But paralyzed, he couldn’t say no to anything.

“Cry a little,” said the doctor. “Be brave, but cry a little too.” He offered a shoulder, but she refused it, with the same stare.

“Shall I leave the room?” said Joel. “Want to talk to Anna and Daddy?”

But her stare had been for them as well. She would take her sins somewhere else.

Then, downstairs, they heard the sound of that man’s minions—the sound of stretcher-bearers—in houses with staircases, and maybe even those without them, one of the unique sounds of the world. He’d heard it three times before in a dwelling of his, the last in this particular one, when old Mendes had left it. In their sudden silence, the doctor gave her the needle.

“I go down,” said Anna, hushed. There ought to be some respect paid, by someone from the inner house, as a body went out a door. He couldn’t move, lulled into letting Joel take his place with his daughter,, leaving it to Anna to find, between known limits and unspoken excesses, her anomalous place.

As Anna passed the blue lamp, she turned it off. On the half-drawn window shade, the red-penciled glow along its lower edge deepened. A golden blot of light ran like mercury to its center and hung there gleaming, moving on and off with the wind. Then a moan came from the bed, and Anna without comment turned the blue light on again and went out, shutting the door.

“Well…” said the doctor. “You’ve got them to live for, Simon. A fine girl and boy.” He must announce births the same way.

Outside, the street was rising in beautiful health and clatter. The blue light seemed to melt, not quite to fade. The doctor gave a final pat to the girl, who lay with her palms upturned now, lids slipping. In the small profile, neat as marble, he saw his fatherhood. “Well, good-bye, old girl,” the doctor said, in a voice like a punch. “You’ll be all right. Come and see me later in the week.” And to Simon, in the voice which ran back and forth between’ the generations—and got nowhere—“She’ll be the bright little mother of this house, you wait and see. She’s going to live to make you and David happy.”

“And herself,” he said—as if he gave and answered the responses here. To his sole credit he had said that, though her lids were closed now. “And herself.”

The doctor shook his hand.

Downstairs, he heard or interpreted a murmur between Anna and the doctor at the door. The house had the acoustical whims of an old dwelling; sometimes he imagined it let each inhabitant hear only what he wanted to hear.

When Anna came up again, the smallish room, not dormered like Anna’s fourth-floor quarters, but narrowing as brownstone third floors seemed to do against all actual measurement, was filled with the girl’s regular breathing. They could marvel at how, in a sickroom, the patient’s breath was consoling beyond anything else—and could leave her.

Outside, summoning all his failed strength, he said to Anna, “What did she say? Did she say anything more? When you brought her up.” But Anna was weeping and he saw that she hadn’t broken down until now. The red tears made channels in her face, ran from the corners of her mouth. Her lips swelled with them. He put his arms round her, for the only time in their history. He thought she made as if to put him off, but she was only finding room between sobs, to speak. “She ask me for the blue paper on the light,” said Anna. “Dey were babies, Mrs. Mannix teach me how to do it. So I do it. Then she don’t say nothing. She was being sick both ways, vomit and the other, but after we fix her, and it was over, she creep to me but she don’t say nothing, only one thing.” The sob choked her; he could see it in her throat there, a red bit of meat in the throat of this red woman. From the skylight above, the sun in its great morning vibration shed for one passing minute a claret warmth straight down through the landings of the house. “‘Make it the night before this one, Anna,’” said Anna. “That’s all she say to me. ‘Anna, Anna, make it the night before.’”

And after that—he could go to his son. When Anna saw the direction his steps took, she said David’s name and gestured she would come along, but he resisted the temptation to take her with him, to save himself from the ordeal before him—by David’s one sight of her: tear-blinded mime—and went down the hall alone.

David’s room, allotted the firstborn, was much larger, and providentially so, since—from the moment his total deafness had been confirmed at the age of fourteen months—the room had begun to fill with apparatus, from all the electrostimulatory devices, wired and graphed and belled, which could be made to correlate sight and sound, to the merely practical audiovisual alerts and signals, plus a range of stereopticons and oscillators purchased on advices now lost. A sight of the room gave pause to any man who thought he knew the boundary between scientific and quack. David insisted on keeping them all, toy and grim; they were, as he said, his auditory memory. For this, their Smithsonian clutter, neatly as he tended it, was cheap enough price to pay. But these apparatuses had done even more. In the first years, for the Judge, rising early for a workout with the child as other men rose to cold showers and barbells, these devices had been the bridge to his actual belief in the deafness of the child.

Months past the diagnosis, he had remained unconvinced. There was no heredity of it for one thing; on either side,, the hearing of grandparents, their collaterals, and even their parents had remained acute. Though he knew well enough that Mendelian laws allowed for this, to the end that anybody could inherit anything—including the will to disbelieve it.

But David himself had confounded the doctor. At times he appeared to turn at a voice behind him—or to the current of warmth behind it, as even now. In the physiotherapist’s office of the school David had ultimately gone to, there was a sign
Use the tantrum
—
it is their way;
for it was a cliché that a deaf child was frustrate. And here came David, never saintly, not passive, but equable and busy even at two; from the first, his rage, if it was there, had refused to remain incommunicado with life. No child, even the handicapped one, it was said smartly to them, is ever average to his parents. But by what exquisite joinings of sight to sound, night to day, had this child taught himself not to be mute?

Going down the hall to his son’s room that night, he wished for one of those mornings of uncertain agonies but happinesses too, both hallowed now. For, such exercises, with such a child, were a bridge to love also. Already he’d been unsure this boy was his son. By the time he had taught himself and them all, in these devoted mornings, that the boy was truly deaf, he had also convinced himself of the other thing. By exquisitely non-electrified communication with the past (Mirriam’s) through the quality of the present he and she manufactured daily, or even with the boy himself (all means which he knew were suspect), he had decided it. The boy was not his son—if only because he could still think of him as “the boy.” Doggedly, he searched out stories of real offspring who disavowed real fathers, counseled his own ego once more to give up its games—and took up lipreading. It was possible that real fathers went through stations of trial like these to get to their sons; contrarily he himself had known fathers of adopted ones, who were to paternity born. There was ground for his doubts—one. He would
not
ask. If Mirriam had ever said, or hinted, late as it was he would have accepted either way, with lip, heart and loin. He even craved it. Meanwhile, as the boy steadily grew independent, the mornings lapsed, the bridges were left untended, the boy went to school to better tutors; he himself grew as used to a six-foot son as his own father must have done to one of his height—never used to it. Only the machines in David’s room remained as was. And in the end, as often in the concerns of those who lived with Mirriam, he himself had been left unsure of anything.

At David’s door that night, he did not hesitate. In spite of himself he slipped the knob as always, as if not to startle that deafness. In the dark, he stood by the bedside while the miracle of the retina took place, and looked long at that fine head, incandescent almost in its fastness. Men must take their chances with the morning. But this was only a boy of seventeen. On the pillow the fair head otherwise so aquilinely reminiscent of old Mendes on his deathbed grew clearer, at its ear the rigged telephone, center of other alarums here that would not ring but glow. There was something holy in such a trust in light.

He touched a switch, intending one lamp’s softness. He knew all the wiring here—or had once. Or else his hand had expressed its real intention. The room flooded harshly, from overhead. “I’m sorry—” he said.

The eyes flew open, just as if the boy on the pillow had heard. The person behind them wasn’t quite awake. It was that blank moment when the human returned to animal tensing toward danger, or kin. Then the boy sat up. He slept nude. Large as the tendons were in that big brown shoulder, it was still a boy’s. The Judge put his own small hand there, if not a father’s, a man’s. “I’m sorry,” he said again. At once in the patient face opposite, he saw the monitoring being—and found he himself couldn’t go on. His mouth would not voice or shape. He was mute.

“Father, Father, what is it? Are you sick?”

At his own motion, a pad and pencil were pushed toward him. Sometimes he and David had done that in those mornings, though in certain exercises it was forbidden. He managed to write on the pad:
Bad news.

But then, when he tried to go on with it, his trembling fingers also failed him, as if each member of his own body, when applied to, refused. He found himself staring at the boy’s face, David’s face, thinking in sacrilege that if it had been blind, then he could tell it the news, with his voice.

As if in answer, the boy knelt before him in the old posture and place, and put his own large but discerning hand against his father’s lips—which again moved. But because they did not do well, the son with the half-smile closed his eyes, the better to feel the words, as performed by the blind and mute. And so to that face above him, grown longer and equine with youth, but still to the hand of that divining child, the Judge spoke. “Shot. Your mother. It was an accident.”

Surely that was what his lips had said. In that order. But the hand feeling his mouth read otherwise, or like a true divining rod. He saw the shoulder at his own eye level shrink back in reflex. Then the hand struck him full across the mouth.

Bleeding from nose and lip, in the strangest sensation of having been
saved,
he watched his son flee the room.

Luckily Anna had been outside the door after all. For he himself was useless.
Now I can sleep
was what he said to himself. The concussion was nothing, its blood stanched with a handkerchief. Yet “Now I can sleep” he had said to himself with an exquisite lulling, cast back with a bit of hurt for himself. And staggering into his room he had done so, fallen on his bed.

Where and how David had spent the few hours between when Anna left him for her own bed and the phones began to ring, could be seen from his track. He must have come first to this room where the Judge was now sitting, his mother’s room—to find the body already taken from him. The smashing must have begun here. In here it had been merely a rending and a tearing—of the coverlet that had wrapped her, which the minions had dropped. The Judge next door, lulled, hadn’t heard. Anna, upstairs in her fastness, hadn’t heard it either, the steady frustrate rage of that descent through all the family rooms to the bowels of the house, grinding lamps to bits, stamping over chairs in a clean, methodical wake. The worst had been in the family rooms and at the front door, which still bore its grazings, irreparable in the oak. Neither Anna’s kitchen nor his own study had suffered anything, nor any windows. In effect that almost silent raging had all taken place, where it had always been—inside.

It must have been in the kitchen that the boy returned to his senses, for Anna had found food there on the table, gone after in the hunger reflex of that long bone structure, his own body, but scattered uneaten, the dish smashed. Then he had gone up to his sister’s room, to find her sleeping beyond rousing, and across the bottom of her bed had sobbed himself to sleep. For the hour or so before the world advanced again, the house might have been Beauty’s castle. When the two children woke, they were still alone. Together they must have heard Anna’s first “My hosh, my hosh!”, the trail of them as she went through the damaged house, and the Judge as he picked up and answered the first phone. Anna had found the two together, Ruth wan but the calmer of the two, David swollen to the eyes.