Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (21 page)

“Was Mrs. Adler
there
?” I asked sleepily.

“Yeah, and she came out normal. Normal and happy.”

“Normal and happy…”

“I can’t wait to get away. Why should I take it all on myself? I have my own life to worry about.”

“I’m falling asleep,” I muttered. “Don’t let me sleep.”

With Sheila in the room and the radio playing “Let It Be,” I slipped away, and when I woke up, sweating and terrified, Sheila was gone and the radio had been turned off. My mother, whose built-in radar monitored my levels of consciousness, scuffled into the room with a tray of cookies and a glass of milk.

The next day, in what can only have been a gesture of either true love or true desperation, my mother decided to contact Dr. Know-It-All. The answering service informed her that Dr. Moore was out of town.

My mother was skeptical: Dr. Moore was no doubt making up stories to avoid going out in the cold—all very well for some people. Remembering that I’d been to her house, my mother asked me for the address. She sat down at the kitchen table with the telephone book in front of her and ran her finger down the list of Moores. Halfway down she found not Vera’s number, which was unlisted, but Patrick’s.

The door to my room was open when she phoned, and I heard my mother’s end of the conversation—
yes yes Maya’s mother who is this—

I assumed she was talking to Patrick. I got up to pee and brush my teeth, then returned to bed. I hadn’t washed in days, but I felt clean; Bubby was now changing my sheets every morning, and twice a day my mother rubbed my back and legs with a warm, wet towel, as if I really were bedridden. I shut my eyes and forgot about Patrick and his mother.

I was half-awakened from sleep by the sound of Anthony’s voice. I was sure I was dreaming; so far it was a good dream, but a good dream could skid into nightmare in a matter of seconds. Anthony was asking my mother, “How are we today, Mrs. L?”

I opened my eyes and leaned forward so I could peer into the foyer. There he was, standing in the dim light in his socks, wearing jeans and a dark-blue pullover, his black coat slung over his arm. I grabbed a pair of pyjamas from my bureau and slipped them on.

Fanya as usual eclipsed any surprise I might have felt. She lifted her arms as if facing a volcanic eruption and sank back into the small, flimsy seat attached to the telephone table. My mother had acquired this perilous piece of furniture by collecting several hundred supermarket stamps, and I was sure the chair would one day break away from the table and poor Fanya would come crashing down to the floor.

—it’s the child the child—

Anthony was unimpressed. “Take it easy,” he said.

—the child the child—
my mother began to wail—
we all we all saw with our own eyes—

In response either to the claustrophobia my mother generally elicited in people around her, or to an intuition that I was watching him, Anthony turned around. He saw me staring at him through the half-open door, and without further ado he abandoned my mother, came into my bedroom, and shut the door behind him. He looked older—not only by three years, but as if he’d moved into another stage of life altogether. He was more sedate yet also more scattered, more efficient and energetic yet wearier—as weary as me.

He dropped his coat on the desk, and without a word lay down beside me, placed his arm around my waist, and shut his eyes.

Anthony! It was not my father but rather a surrogate brother who had appeared out of nowhere. His body was snug against mine, and his socks warmed my ankles. I remembered the postcard he’d sent me from New York, and I wondered what it would be like to be intimately acquainted with Bleecker Street, the Chelsea Hotel, Spanish Harlem …

I, too, dozed off. When I woke, a long time later, he was gone. I hadn’t dreamed it—Anthony had come to visit. That’s what you were supposed to do, visit the sick. Anthony understood what was happening to me because he was in the same predicament, exactly the same. We’d crashed into the present, and seeing it up close, stripped and exposed, we no longer had any inclination to focus on what lay ahead, couldn’t focus on it. But Anthony hadn’t solved the problem by becoming a recluse; he’d gone off in search of greener pastures. With his arm around me, I had slept peacefully for a change, a deep sleep, free of nightmares.

I’m slow, always slow, always a few steps behind everyone else. That was the way I was then and that’s the way I am still. It took me a few minutes to piece it all together: Anthony was Tony, the brother Patrick had mentioned. At Bakunin, he’d been Antonio,
Anton, Antoine, even Antonius, but never Tony—like me, he must have been hoping for a breach. Now it turned out that we were all linked, like the dancers at the end of
The Seventh Seal
; everyone knew everyone. Patrick had mentioned that his brother was living in California—he must have moved from New York to California, and now he was back in Montreal for a visit. Or maybe he’d returned for good.

As soon as I made the connection, I spotted, as if in confirmation, a bulky white envelope leaning against my radio. It was a letter, addressed to Tony Moore, 4 Hillside Road, Beaconsfield. The envelope was made of textured paper, soft as fabric, and the handwriting was tall and spidery. Under overlapping postmarks, the faded stamps—a sea-dragon, a grey and gold goddess launching rays of light—seemed to transmit a foreign loneliness. The return address was barely legible, but I was able to make out the first and last lines:
Gerald Moore, Japan
.

Anthony had left me a coded message. That’s what Anthony did—he used codes. I’d thought when we were at Bakunin that he was being evasive, but I was wrong: he was trying to say more this way, not less.

The letter inside the envelope took up several sheets of pale blue airmail paper, folded in four and covered with the same spidery handwriting. I padded to the kitchen, dug out a box of soda crackers from the cupboard, and returned to my room. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I began to read.

Here’s the letter, which I’ve kept inside my diary all these years. It’s remarkably well preserved. Well, maybe it’s not that remarkable: in terms of document conservation, even a hundred years in dry, anaerobic conditions is not a long time. Only in small-scale human terms is it nearly impossible to reconcile the stark numbers with our own inept tallying.

March 17, 1968

Dear Tony, my firstborn son, it’s two in the afternoon here and your birthday. I had such a longing to talk to you but don’t have your latest number or, in fact, any number for you. There’s so much I want to tell you, not my usual rambling, but more in the way of biography or autobiography or what have you, and even if you don’t want to read it now or ever, at least I want you to have the option, and also to tell you where you can find more information. I’m in a small room here, on a mat on the floor, paper-thin walls, or rather bamboo thin, and I can hear the woman who runs this place cleaning up. There are chickens in the courtyard, though it’s not really rustic; the noise and hullabaloo outside feel urban, the smells are urban. It’s another universe here, and since I barely speak a word of Japanese, I’m as good as deaf and mute.

I’m waiting for word from the monastery, and if they take me, I may not have another chance to write. I don’t know what the arrangements are there, what one can and cannot do there. I feel so far from being where I long to be, though even thinking in terms of a goal is probably all wrong … but I promised I wouldn’t ramble and I won’t. What I want to do is tell you some things that I woke up this morning wanting to tell you—maybe because suddenly you seem old enough, or maybe it’s that “lonely impulse” Yeats describes—do you remember our Sunday nights, reading poetry by the hearth? One of the memories I cling to. The Yeats poem was a favourite, wasn’t it? Do you remember? “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” …There is something about telling, just telling, that seems almost like soaring through enemy fire.

What I’m trying to say is that the impulse may be thoroughly self-centred, a way of shedding something or other before I enter the monastery—if I do go in; a way of trying to move on, or move somewhere, or learn not to move—or whatever it is I need to learn and unlearn. If the
impulse is self-centred, forgive me. I feel I’ve lost touch with who you are to such a degree that I can’t gauge these things properly, and maybe that was never my talent. Certainly I have much to atone for as a father, as I well know. For that, I don’t deserve forgiveness, though forgiveness is something I now know has to do with oneself, not others, both the doing and the requesting. Anything else is just manipulation. I’m rambling again … my worst trait, or one of them, anyhow.

In any case, I would like to tell you about Vera, and also about how we met and how you came to be. If you don’t want to know about it or be dragged into it, here is your chance to stop, throw the letter in the fire, or put it away for another day. Above all I need to say at the outset that this is in no way any kind of justification or even explanation. Why things fell apart, you know as well as I and better, looking at us with your child’s all-knowing eyes. But where it all began—that’s what I want to tell you. You have already heard some things about how it happened that we met and married, the usual answers one gives to a child. We left out all save the quaint, picturesque details, or rather details that could be made to sound quaint and picturesque—Vera was delayed in London, we met in Hyde Park, etc.

Here then is what actually happened. The memory has done the opposite of fade; it gets more vivid with time. Isn’t that odd? Like a backward spring, propelling me into the past and giving me more of it each time I visit.

It was a year after the war—that you know. June 2, 1946, to be precise. London was still in ruins, though also in the throes of reconstruction—not just the buildings, but everything—peace, the future. It’s hard to describe the atmosphere of that year. Horror and grief swept up and discarded, as if it were a duty to dispose of them, which of course it was. To be replaced by work and hope.

My brother Anthony, whose name we gave you (perhaps wrongly), fell in Dieppe in August of 1942. Of course he was the talented one; a brilliant
painter with a great future ahead of him … and I can’t blame my mother or anyone else for resenting that I was the one who was spared and now I was the one who was going to inherit the family fortune—and I didn’t give a damn about any of it. Instead, for reasons that were obscure even to me, I was studying for the ministry before the war broke out, despite my conviction that the story of God and the subsequent addendum of a Son were fiction. I suppose you’ll find this incomprehensible, but I thought even so that I could somehow do some good. Or maybe it was all some adolescent romantic urge to escape from the madding crowd that to this day has a hold over me.

I left my studies as soon as the war came. How could I ever have thought that an atheist would really fit in? I must have been mad. I started off as a Conscientious Objector—volunteered to do any job that didn’t involve carrying a weapon. I wasn’t a fanatic like some of the others, who refused to participate in any way at all. After Anthony was killed, I would have fought, in fact, but I was needed where I was. Mostly I helped to clear up after the bombings. Thousands of bodies had to be buried, thousands of homeless people had to be sheltered and fed. It was Russian roulette, every minute of every day and night; you never knew where the next hit would be, and towards the end, with the diabolical V2s, there wasn’t even the five- or ten-second warning.

Your grandparents stayed out in their big house in Hertfordshire, though one wing was being used for some military purpose or other. They were involved in art evacuation and all sorts of other wartime projects. After Anthony was killed, they went on, stoically, but they needed me more than ever, supposedly to help out in the family business, though really for moral support, and I made up my mind to yield as soon as the war was over. I would become a part of the family antiques firm, in spite of my deep aversion to that whole scene. Auctions made me sick, everything about them. And I had no talent for it, no gift at all. I couldn’t tell one saucer from another, one century from another. I never told you or anyone else
about my aversion to your grandparents’ occupation, mostly because I didn’t think Vera would understand, and we had enough chasms over which to shout at each other, and you know if there’s anything Vera loves besides her sons, it’s beautiful things. I only thank my stars that when we first met, I was a well-brought up English boy and didn’t breathe a word against my parents or what they did, and by the time we were close enough for me to tell her … but I’m jumping ahead.

Back to the fateful day. I was sitting on a bench in Hyde Park with a sandwich I wasn’t eating—it just lay on my lap, wrapped in paper. I didn’t want to eat in front of the woman who was sitting on the bench opposite me because she looked hungry and food was still very scarce, and anyhow it seemed rude. Of course I couldn’t go up to her, a total stranger, and offer her half my lunch.

So I sat there with the sandwich on my lap. I’d stayed on volunteering, with your grandparents’ blessing, of course, and I’d been at it all week, clearing debris sixteen hours a day, but I’d changed back into civilian clothes. I was headed for Hertfordshire for a weekend leave, and I dreaded going, as usual, so was taking my time, gathering emotional energy for the journey. The woman—Vera—was wearing white gloves and her hands were folded on her lap. I’d never seen anyone sitting so motionlessly, as though she were posing for a painting, or had turned into one.

I tried not to stare. She was haunted and haunting then, and the attraction I felt was like a sort of rope hauling me towards her—towing me, that’s what it felt like. There is no real explanation for these things. Somehow I found the courage to cough and then smile at her, and she didn’t smile back, but she nodded and that was encouragement enough for me. I asked her whether she was a visitor—she had a small suitcase with her, so it seemed all right to ask.