Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

FOLEY’S POND

Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which couldn’t have taken more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara — the family called her Babs — slid under the chain link and waddled down to the water. This was 1979. She was two and a half.

The day Nate Zamost came back to school, we refrained from playing Kill the Guy with the Ball. At recess, we stood around in a ragged circle on the edge of the basketball court and spoke to one another in polite murmurs. We were a group of guys in junior high who hung out together. It’s not like we weren’t capable of understanding. Some of us even had sisters. Instinctively, we seemed to get it that our role was not to understand, or even console, but, in the spirit of funerals, to act. That being authentically sorry, whatever this might have looked like, would have been out of place, even unwelcome. So we stood there and looked at our shoes and kicked at loose asphalt. Nate went along with it. He played chief mourner by nodding his head slowly. I remember Stu Barkus finally trying to say something.

“Look, it’s not like it’s your fault,” Stu said. “I mean, how could you have known she knew how to slide under the fence?”

Nate looked up from his shoes.

“I taught her.”

What could anybody say to that? Barkus took a stab. He’d always been decent like that.

“Well, it’s not like you told her to do it when you weren’t looking.”

“I didn’t?”

Barkus had nothing to say after that. Nobody else did, either. We let the question hang there. Like Stu Barkus, Nate Zamost was a gentle guy. He was also the biggest of us and had a very hard head, but during Kill the Guy with the Ball, Nate would always go for your ankles and take you down easy. The rest of us were more interested in the raw clawing, the scrum and the mayhem, than in the ball itself. It was the killing-the-guy part. Yet who’s to say what goes on behind closed doors between siblings? Nate, like all of us, was thirteen that year. His parents went out for a couple of hours and left him in charge.

Remembering all this now, what comes to me most vividly is my own private anger toward Nate, anger I can still summon. Foley’s Pond had always been our secret place and now everybody in town knew all about it. It was wedged inside a small patch of woods, between where Kimball Avenue ended in a stand of bush and trees and the Edens Expressway fence. To the east was the public golf course. Some said the pond wasn’t natural at all, that it had been created by runoff from the golf course, that it was nothing but a cesspool of chemicals. Proof of this theory was embodied by the large corrugated drainpipe that hung out over the edge of the pond. Whatever flowed from that pipe wasn’t water. Once, Ross Berger dove into Foley’s and rose up with green hair and leeches on his thighs. Someone shouted, “It supports life!”

We all stripped to our underwear and jumped in. It was like swimming in crude oil. A fantastic place, Foley’s — scragged, infested, overgrown, and gloomed long before Nate Zamost’s sister wrecked it. How many mob hits, feet tied to bricks, bobbed and swayed at the bottom of that fetid swamp? All the missing kids in Chicago, all were dumped in Foley’s

After school we’d retreat to the pond and talk down the waterlogged afternoons. There was nothing beautiful about the place, even in April, except that it was ours. There is something overripe about spring in the Midwest, the wet and green world, the ground itself putrid, rotten, oozing. Foley’s was protected by a canopy of trees. The sun crept through only in speckles. Foley’s in the rain, the rain smacking the leaves, how hidden we were, talking and talking and talking about God only knows what. Had we been a few years older, we might have drunk beers or smoked joints or brought girls, so they could scream about not wanting to go anywhere near that nasty sludge. It was 1979 and we were thirteen and conspiratorial, and what was said is now out of reach, as it should be.

It took them eleven hours. Foley’s was a lot deeper than anybody had thought. The fire department’s charts turned out to be inaccurate. Police divers had to come up from Chicago. I think of their rubber outfits, their masks, their flippers, how they waddled along the edge of the pond like big penguins before descending, slowly, into the water. And something else that by now most people may have forgotten and newcomers would have no way of knowing. When they finally did recover her all those hours later, deep in the night, and laid Babs on the grass, Nate’s mother refused to acknowledge that the mottle of bloated flesh lit up by high-powered flashlights was her daughter or anybody’s. Mrs. Zamost didn’t know Foley’s. Ross Berger was down there twelve seconds and came up looking like an alien. Mrs. Zamost didn’t scream. She wouldn’t even touch it. I was there, just outside the ring of lights. She wouldn’t even kneel down and touch it, just shook her head and stepped backward into the dark.

Foley’s is a real park now. The Park District manicured it. The trees have been trimmed. There’s a wide wood-chip path leading off Kimball Avenue. And they’ve installed bird feeders, long poles topped with small yellow houses.

OCCIDENTAL HOTEL

He met her at the Occidental in Buffalo, Wyoming. She was a maid at the hotel. She’d come west from Missouri not intending to do much more than stop and work for a few weeks before heading to California. But there was money to be made at the Occidental, especially during conventions. This was February 1912. He’d come for a convention. The state Republican Party was meeting to decide on a successor for McClintock. It was after nine in the morning. She’d knocked on the door twice and waited. Silence. She took the key out of her apron and unlocked the door. A man was sitting on the bed, pulling on a boot. His face was so still it could have been made of wax. His eyes. Even from the door, in the dim light, she could see them, huge and glassy and full of motion. Like small heads bobbing in water.

This one must have checked in late. She held the door.

“Sir?”

“No, come in, come in. I was just, well… Yes. Just. I was just. All right, then.”

He pulled on his other boot and, edging his way past without touching her, left the room.

The Occidental wasn’t elegant. It was sturdy. The winds of the high plains pounded it, and the hotel stood its ground. On rainy or snowy days, the cherrywood of the walls and all the furniture gave off a sweet, malty smell. She liked the hotel best in the early mornings when the smells — in the thick silence — were more pronounced than the noise. Noise could overpower so many other things.

Two nights later he said he’d leave his wife for her. They were in her small room across the street and down the block from the hotel. He said she’d ransacked his heart the moment she unlocked the door to his room. “You’re not a housekeeper,” he said. “You’re a vandal.”

“You looked like you were about to weep,” she said.

He laughed. “Politics. I was thinking how we were going to have to settle for Gilhooley if Collins refused to stand. Gilhooley. As if that matters now. Let Gilhooley be King of Prussia!”

Toward dawn he fell asleep. She watched the sun gray, then pink, the frost-crusted window. She saw how dingy and small the room was going to look to him when he awoke. A man with a house and daughters. This wasn’t something she ever thought about. Men didn’t look at her room. They looked at her. Her with her stockings on and her with her stockings off. One of his hands lay across her stomach like a plump fish. Moist. The fish rode the rise and fall of her stomach. She wanted it off. She wanted it gone. She had once loved a man in Cape Girardeau, but not enough had come of it. And yet it isn’t this man or that man or any man at all. Isn’t it the sun leaking through the window again? Isn’t it the sun trying to melt this frost? Isn’t it this narrow bed and breath dissolving into memory?

SPOKANE

If I tell you something will you listen? Will you not leave and will you listen?

I’ve listened before.

But will you listen now?

I said yes.

It’s another story, Barry.

All right.

Another story story.

I said fine.

It was when I was living in Spokane. I hadn’t been there long. Two weeks maybe. I met this guy in a coffee shop.

Right.

Right. Same as always. I liked the book he was reading. We talked about who knows what, and I liked him. I let him take me home and I fucked him. It was gentle, slow. I was new to the city and it was dreary, but I liked the hills and the way the trees grew up out of the sidewalks sideways. Another week with him and I broke my lease and moved into his apartment on the first floor of a little frame house in what people called the even shittier part of Rupert Heights. Because I liked him and it meant saving on rent. My job was decent. I taught art to the second grade at a Montessori school. Liberal, but they only went so far. The pay sucked. His name was Edward. He worked in a B. Dalton in a mall and lived off money his grandfather left him. Maybe he was twenty-four. He said he wanted to go back to school and finish at some point. He had a clarinet in his closet he never played. We lived on a little hump in the street and there was good light in the morning and I set up a darkroom in the bathroom. He didn’t mind that I blacked out the little window. For five, six months, I was happy. He was quiet. He could just sit, you know? What I’ve never been able to train myself to do. Just sit for hours, not bored, not anything. Thinking, I guess. And I thought, I’m smart. I finally made a decent decision in my life and my work is coming along and this Edward with his calmness. Don’t laugh at me. He listened to me. I’d tell him everything. About my mother driving all over the lawn and then into the front door, the whole time screaming that we were all foreigners to her, that she didn’t know a single soul in our house, that it wasn’t even her house. All the shit you’ve had to hear. And he’d endure it. He never asked questions. His upper lip sometimes quivered, that’s all. And you can’t know how after talking to myself for so long what it was like to just have this person watch me and listen. I shot him. The pictures are probably still in a box somewhere. And I listened to his stories about his grandfather who worked in a mill, who moved out there from St. Louis to help build the Coulee Dam. He didn’t have many friends except for a couple of guys he sometimes played chess with at the coffee shop up the block. Another two or three from the bookstore. He said when he was through reading all the books he wanted to finish, he’d drive to Seattle and make more friends. At night we rented old Bruce Dern movies. I remember one where someone was trying to blow up the Super Bowl. Edward had very timid eyes. He looked away from you when you looked directly at him; he looked away when you kissed him. Fucking him was good and gentle, and when we were through he’d stand by the window wrapped in the top sheet and tell me about his grandfather’s prize tomatoes. How his grandpa once took his fattest, spoogiest tomato to the same guy who bronzed baby shoes and said, Immortalize this, why don’t you? He never mentioned his parents except once to say they lived in Houston. Another time, though, he told me about a mother who left her kid in the bookstore. The kid was three or four and she wasn’t abandoning him or anything — she must have just forgotten she was with him and wandered out of the store without him. The kind of thing every mother probably does once in her life and then has nightmares about for years, but Edward said that what made him remember was that the kid didn’t seem to notice. He looked around. Seeing his mother wasn’t there anymore, he went on flapping through a picture book until the mother came back ten minutes later, hysterically shrieking apologies to the kid, to Edward, to everyone standing around. The kid hardly looked up. That night I gripped Edward hard. I tried to love him. From the gut, I tried, and it didn’t matter, none of it mattered.

Because one day your Edward, your beautiful Edward of the silence, was gone. And all your dreams were shattered.

I asked if you were going to listen.

It’s just that we’ve been here before. Different guy, different city — What about that guy from Wisconsin? The circus clown?

Trapeze artist. From Baraboo. Right, so Edward left. You’re right on top of this, Barry. I wasn’t there a year. It was December. But because it was his place and he had to come back eventually, I stayed. I promised myself that when he comes back, I’ll move out. That I would tell him, Look, we had something for a while, and hey it didn’t work out. No hard feelings. You move on. Here’s your key and the past-due rent. So long, I told myself I’d tell him. So long. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to being left. It’s like meeting yourself again. It’s not all that lonely. One week went by. No cryptic letter saying it was a great ride but I’m confused. I’m gay. I’m Buddhist and I need to go on a pilgrimage like Siddhartha. I’m scared of love because this one time I got hurt so bad… Nothing. Zero. I went over to the bookstore and the manager said Edward hadn’t shown up and hadn’t called in. And he was sorry, because he liked him and the customers liked him. Edward was the anchor of the sales team, the guy said. A real future in book selling. I asked at the coffee shop and the people said they hadn’t seen him around. Edward’s friend with the scarf, the chess mullah, he called himself, said maybe I needed some patience, that maybe I just needed to wait Edward out for a while. When I said I was thinking of going to the police and filing a report or something, this asshole just looks at me and says who am I to say who’s missing and who’s not. Missing from where? Another week went by. I went to the police and they opened a file and said they’d call me if anything turned up. I checked the hospitals — nothing. Meanwhile, I started going out more. To clubs with some other teachers from work. I even dated a social studies teacher a few times, nice guy with a mile-long forehead. The first of the month came around and I didn’t pay any rent because I didn’t know who to pay it to. I’d given my checks to Edward for my half. I figured I’d wait until someone called or came around asking. Of course I went through his stuff. Nothing in his papers but some receipts and Visa bills. No family pictures except a bunch of his grandfather leaning against a Buick. So he had no cards from his mother and nobody ever called him? I thought maybe he threw the cards out or his parents didn’t know where he was living. Unlike me, he didn’t feel the need to blab his history to people who wouldn’t want to listen anyway.

What’d this guy look like?

He was bulky, not fat exactly. And he wore it kind of happy, you know? And tall. I think he had more trouble with being tall. He was one of those tall guys who doesn’t know what to do with his height. The kind of guy that lanks around and apologizes for having to stoop through doorways, except that Edward never apologized, he only sort of waved.

And thus: Shy and gentle! Big and tall! Edward roams. Gone what? Two, three weeks? Rent need not be paid. Sounds like a good deal.

There was a blind guy who lived upstairs.

Now you’re just making shit up.

Not totally, mostly blind. His name was Mr. Ludner. He was easy to forget about. He was so quiet, but some nights Edward would go up there when I was working in the darkroom and sit with him. Mr. Ludner sold televisions at Sears for something like fifty years, and he’d lost his sight gradually, until one morning — this is what he told Edward — he woke up and he couldn’t shake out of the blur of his dream. Then he understood he wasn’t sleeping. Sometimes — this was the only time you ever heard a peep out of him — he played Mozart arias and tried to sing along in what he thought must have sounded like Italian. Mr. Ludner lived on a small pension and disability. Sears gave him a washer-drier when he retired, which he said was funny since he’d worked in home electronics. And those arias coming from upstairs. Mostly you just forgot about it and then there it was. The music, and him up there alone, singing alone.

Stace.

You know how I am.

The guy’s missing. You’re talking about pensions.

Right, because for you this would be easy, because for you saying anything is easy.

I’m listening.

Like I said, I was going out with friends more. Finding a life in the hills of Spokane. It’s not a bad city, really. You’re either from there or you’ve fled there, and the people who flee there are always somehow a little better off than they are in other places. Spokane takes all comers. People who’ve failed in Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle now grace the crumbling sidewalks of a city that’s always dying but never pronounced—

Stace—

He had such gentle fingers. He’d start at my head and run his hand down the length of my body and stop at the bottom of my feet and then just kneel on the floor and stare. And he’d talk to my feet. He’d draw little maps. The Coeur d’Alene River. The old Pacific and Northern Railroad line. The dirty bottoms of my feet, Barry. And I hardly knew him, but I let him look at me in that cold bedroom with one window that only shut on an angle. We plugged the gap with old towels, but it didn’t do much good. We slept under mountains of blankets, and I’d wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed, so I’d walk around with those blankets on my back like I was one big turtle, because it was still so cold.

This isn’t right.

And he didn’t just talk to Mr. Ludner. Sometimes they played chess, too. And Edward put a bandanna over his eyes and played blindfolded to make the teams fair. They played chess in the dark in Mr. Ludner’s little kitchen. So three weeks after Edward left, I finally asked Mr. Ludner if he had any idea. I hadn’t wanted to bother him before, upset him. I was standing at the bottom landing and he was coming slowly down the stairs, his long thin cane in front of him, tapping the stairs. Mr. Ludner? I said. Edward’s gone. He’s been gone almost a month. The old man kept heading toward me down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he looked at me. Normally he didn’t face you when he talked — he talked to you in profile — but that morning he faced me and he said, Yes, that must be true. Three weeks at least. Mr. Ludner straightened his tie. Even though he was retired, he always wore a tie when he left the house. I told him I don’t even know if Edward has any family. All I know is that he had a grandfather who died and I’m here in his apartment and I haven’t paid any rent. Mr. Ludner laughed when I said that about the rent. Why, my dear, I don’t pay any rent, either. Why not? I said, and he laughed again and said, You don’t know, do you? Interesting young man Edward. Modest to the teeth. He owns this building, my dear. Passed down to him from the very grandfather you mentioned. His parents are both gone. And he’s a good man to let me spend my retirement peanuts on things other than rent. Like fresh fruit, for example. I’m of the opinion that fresh fruit, far more than those vitamin pills they peddle to seniors — But I paid Edward rent, I said. I wrote him checks for my half. Well, he must have mailed the check to himself, Mr. Ludner said. I found out later he never deposited any of my checks. You know how I am about my checkbook. I wouldn’t have noticed in a thousand years the money wasn’t gone.

All right, now I just want to know.

So this shocked me a little, that he actually owned the house and never said anything, but then I figured he was probably embarrassed. I mean, who at twenty-four owns a house?

Just tell it.

Right, cutting to the chase now, Barry. One night toward the middle of January, Mr. Ludner was playing Mozart when the power went out. It was minus who knows what the fuck with the wind chill. Coldest night of the year and we’ve got no lights. I opened the inside door and called up to Mr. Ludner, who said the fuse box was in the basement. It was one of those old-fashioned basements with the double doors, you know, that open upward. I asked Edward about the basement once and he said there was nothing down there but mice and rusting bike parts. I crept around the apartment and found a flashlight in the utility drawer. Then I called up to Mr. Ludner and asked him if he had a key No key necessary, he says. The basement doors are always open.

Wait! Say no more! You went down there, and there was Old Edward, Mr. Bohemian Spokane, down in the cellar with his head blown off.

He used Hefty bags and rubber bands.

Come on.

Not come on.

Stace, I was kidding.

He took pills, but before that, he wrapped himself up in garbage bags because he didn’t want us to smell him. And we didn’t, because of the plastic and because of the cold. Mr. Ludner said it was probably because he wanted to die in his grandfather’s house, the house his grandfather left him, but that he also wanted us to go on living there because he was a good man. Mr. Ludner said Edward was a good man. When I found him, there were these black bugs that live straight through winter, the kind that sort of hop backward, crawling all over the plastic. He was still wearing shoes. But let me back it up, Barry. Let me take it step by step. I went around back to the basement doors and brushed away a crust of old snow, pulled them open, and went down the wooden stairs. I found the fuse box on the far right wall, where Mr. Ludner said it would be, and flicked the switch. I heard Mr. Ludner shout out the window, Hurrah! Mozart came back on. Then I found a string for the light and pulled. Not much there. Like Edward had said. Some cardboard boxes. A pair of old ski poles. A tire. A stack of waterlogged phone books. And then right beside the furnace, I saw a mattress with some books on it. A dirty yellow pillow. Some socks. And a bag of Cheetos. Edward thought it was funny that he still loved Cheetos. The crunchy ones, not the puffy. He said he hated the way the puffy ones melted in your mouth before you even had a chance to chew. And I thought, Holy shit, he lives down here. But for some reason, I wasn’t really freaked out. I just whispered, Edward? Edward? Jesus, Edward, why are you living down here when you’ve got a nice apartment upstairs? When it’s your house? I’ll move out and you can have your place back, but for godsakes, don’t live down here. And I’m talking to the walls of the basement as if he can hear me, as if he’s hiding in the dark corners and watching me. Isn’t that nuts?

I love you. You’ve got to know I love you, honey, I—

So I walk around whispering to him, thinking he’s either hiding or he’ll be back soon and I’ll wait for him and tell him, Look, I’ll leave. I’ll find a new place—

Shhhhhhhhh. It’s all right. Enough.

Lumped against the far wall like an old sack of leaves. And you want to know what my first thought was? Totally ridiculous. That it was a bag of clothes somebody had meant to drop off at the Goodwill and never got around to — I thought maybe I’d rummage through and find a good pair of Levi’s. Least Edward could do was leave me a good pair of Levi’s before I went my merry way. Then I stepped closer, and it couldn’t have been more obvious what it was. And I started to smell him, even though he was half frozen. But it’s strange. I wanted to touch him. I wasn’t terrified and I didn’t scream when I felt the squish of decay. Like this was all very fucking normal. Like this was the way some people lived and died, and this was the way other people found out about it. Like I wasn’t surprised. And I knew — without knowing why or how — that he’d done this to himself. Edward in late morning, on the stoop. Edward sitting on the sidewalk with a long piece of grass in his mouth. Edward naked, kneeling. Edward in a wool hat with a tassel. Edward holding a bronze tomato, early evening. Edward eating cereal with a fork. Edward wrapped in plastic bags and rubber bands. And I’m still calm and I just walk right out of there and up the stairs and go to Mr. Ludner’s and knock on his door and go into the dark of his apartment with his Mozart and tell him Edward’s dead in the basement. I’m pretty sure Edward’s dead in the basement. And he stood up, said quietly, Would you wait a moment? Would you sit down and wait a moment? Then he picked up his cane by the door and went down the stairs. Tap, tap, tap, down the stairs slowly. I listened to him, listened to each step. And Mr. Ludner found him down there, somehow, and ripped the bag open and felt his face, Edward’s decomposing face. Then he left him and came back up the stairs. He called to me from the landing. Miss Mueller, he said, looks like our boy didn’t want to trouble us. Then Mr. Ludner gagged. I sat there in the dark with that music on the stereo and listened to the old man retch. The coroner said it’d been at least a week, maybe longer.

Stace.

He was living down there, Barry, reading, and when he couldn’t even do that anymore—

Stace.

Don’t touch me.

Stace.

I said don’t touch me.

THE POET

Since his stroke, the old poet hadn’t been able to read his poems, much less write any new ones. Still, those few summers he had left, they trotted him out, a novelty act, and stood him up at the podium. He’d stare forward, eyes wide, clearing his throat. His redheaded lover would hold him by the elbow and he’d do the best he could, retrieving half-remembered phrases out of the dark muddle of his brain, and the crowd, not knowing much more about him other than that here before them was what’s left of an important voice, would watch with reverence, even awe, and then, finally, fear.

As he asked: Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts?

HERB AND ROSALIE SWANSON AT THE COCOANUT GROVE

Two decades later Herb Swanson began to tell the story at dinner parties. He knew every inch of the trivia. He knew that the forgotten movie star who burned to death that night was named Buck Jones. Nowadays people don’t know the guy from Adam, Herb would say, but back then Buck Jones, no joke, was big as Gene Autry. Herb knew that the final death toll was 492, including the five firemen, not 474 like some accounts still claim. Herb knew that the name of the busboy who struck the match to start the greatest conflagration in the history of Boston — to this day you can’t call a business Cocoanut Grove within Boston city limits, not even if you sell coconuts — was named Stanley Tomaszewski. Wretched Stanley Tomaszewski. He’d been trying to change a lightbulb. He needed light to see better and so lit a match. The ceiling caught. Tomaszewski escaped out the kitchen door and lived the rest of his life guilt-struck in Waltham, listening to those screams in his sleep.

Then Herb would lower his voice and say in a whisper coated with breathy awe: Listen, it’s just after ten. Ro and I are upstairs in the dining room. Micky Alpert’s just launched into the first chords of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” There are palm trees and piña coladas all over the place, like we’re in Tahiti. Corny, but you buy it. There’s glamour in that kind of nonsense. And you’re out on the town with your girl and you’re thinking this is it, this is what it comes down to, seeing and being seen, you remember? You’re young; you can’t imagine anything other than being young. And the music and the drinks and the waiters spin through the crowd with trays hoisted over their heads like ancient high priests sending up offerings to the gods when it—

When it—

Herb would always hustle past the actual fire part. What mattered when Herb told his Cocoanut Grove story was the great aftermath. The courage of the firemen, the heroics of the policemen, the essential contributions of the Women’s Army Relief Corps. How the people of Boston, Massachusetts, joined together in the face of such disaster, a beautiful thing amid all that incalculable horror. It even prepared people, Herb would say, for what was to come soon enough with our boys being sent home from France wrapped in the flag.

Still, Herb couldn’t completely ignore the fire itself. His credibility depended on it. The almighty fact of his and Rosalie having been there, having survived it. Got lucky was all he’d really say. Our number wasn’t up. All there is to it. Our table was near one of the few exits that didn’t get blocked up with people right away. We were the fourth couple out the door. For years Rosalie never said anything when Herb told the story, and this, too, gave it a mystique. It was too painful for her to talk about, to remember. Yet at some point, when both of them were well into their sixties, as Herb continued to rattle on and on about flammable ceiling material, how the biggest problem from a fire-safety perspective was that the few exit doors opened inward, how there were no sprinklers either, how four brothers from the little hamlet of Wilmington, Massachusetts, all died in it and the town put up a statue of them on the green — Rosalie began to enter the story with her own details, quietly at first. She’d talk about how the fire was less like a wall and more like a flapping curtain. She’d talk about its not being hot either, but windy. She’d talk about the soot-covered sailor in the famous Life photograph, an unconscious barefoot girl draped across his arms like a bride, the sailor all the newspapers called an angel dispatched from heaven. Well, yes, I did see him that night, Rosalie would say. Before it. A hard man not to notice — let me be honest. But I wasn’t a slouch then, either. I swished by him in my latest red dress. I was thin then, if you can believe it. Still hippy, but thin, maybe even a little pretty in a certain light, and yes, sailor boy winked at me. And Herb would shout across the table (because even then it was a performance and they were still in cahoots): Everything she says is true. Pretty? To hell with pretty! Beautiful! Beautiful then, beautiful now, my Rosie. I wanted to break the jack-tar’s neck, but Rosie said, Let him stare, it’s patriotic.

And Rosalie, whispering now: After he left that girl on the sidewalk, that sailor went back inside.

And Herb: Poor kid. Died of his burns two days later at Boston City.

Herb Swanson was a dentist, everybody’s favorite dentist. In his line, he needed a reputation for telling a decent story. Rosalie didn’t need stories any more than she needed these interminable dinner parties Herb loved so much. Yet there was something, wasn’t there, even for her, about that fire? Maybe it was that sailor’s famous, cockeyed, confident face. An unshaped face, an unravaged face. In any case, something happened when Rosalie joined in. It was as if she’d actually known it. As if that dead boy was more to her than just a picture she’d seen so many years ago in a magazine. Because none of it was ever true. The Cocoanut Grove didn’t happen to them. She never saw that sailor, before or after, and neither had Herb. There was no “Star-Spangled Banner,” at least not in their ears. (Herb read that somewhere; Herb read everything somewhere.) As for the sober facts: They were at that club that night. This much was whole truth. But Herb’s stomach was acting up, and this time it was more than a bad case of gas. They left an hour before the fire. Saved by indigestion! But what kind of story would that make? A one-shot laugher, not the kind you tell and tell again. And far beyond this, it was not the kind of story that gave you the incontestable authority of the messenger. And only I am escaped to tell thee. Anyway, twenty, thirty, forty years on, who was going to know or care? Harmless table talk. And if you think about it, in a way, they had escaped, hadn’t they? They just didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they retrieved their coats from the hatcheck sweetie (she didn’t survive — she was from Malden, engaged, one of the last bodies recovered) and marched out into the chill and brr of an ordinary Boston November night. Why split hairs? Escaping’s escaping.

Rosalie began to play along more intensely. Her eyes would get bleary. She’d talk with her fork suspended near her mouth, as if something crucial to understanding everything had only then just crossed her mind. Everybody would stop chewing to listen. Like a horde except that nobody was moving in the same direction. You see? Had people moved in the same direction, maybe it would have been different. See? What you have to understand is that it wasn’t the heat or the flames or even the dread smoke, it was how the people—

Then she’d pause and take a breath, her fork still up in the air by her ear: I’m not saying I blame them. No. God, no. I love them. How can you not love them?

Somehow her saying this was worse than the melting walls and the charred bodies and the unopenable doors, or even the useless, desperate screams, which she never talked about but were always there in her voice. Herb knew how many fire departments responded to the alarm, trucks as far as New Bedford roared to Boston. Herb knew the score of the Boston College — Holy Cross game. B.C. 12, Holy Cross 55. He knew how many young and virile lives were saved by that humiliation, because Boston College called off the victory party scheduled for that night in the Grove’s Melody Lounge. He knew the name of the last Buck Jones picture, Forbidden Trail, where Buck, playing a cowhand, not only saves Mary and her mother from the villain Mr. Coffin, he also rescues a man from a burning cabin. All this before being unjustly accused of arson and murder himself! But Herb Swanson had no talent for putting people inside that nightclub, and the truth is that he began to be a little frightened by his wife. The last thing Rosalie cared about was hoodwinking anybody about what she did or didn’t see one night in 1942, and yet when she got started in about things like fingernails tearing the flesh of the shoulders, it was as though she couldn’t stop. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. Clawing each other. Even husbands and wives. And Herb would watch her anxiously, fidgeting, waiting for an opening and a chance to recapture the story. Bring it back to the busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, and an interview he did with the Globe on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, in 1972, where he said he prays for the souls of those innocents every day and often visits their graves, the ones that are here in Massachusetts. He told the reporter that the movie star was buried too far away, but that he’d always wanted to make that trip out to California. There’s your human interest. Stanley Tomaszewski guilty and prostrate before the headstones. Because it was almost as though Rosalie (even though she always denied it) judged people for trying to save themselves, which was wrong and terrible and not at all the point. The point was glory. The point was redemption. Think of all the good that came out of that fire. Municipal solidarity. Nationwide sympathy and understanding. New fire codes for every public building in the United States of America. Pivotal advancements in emergency medicine and response…

And there’s a night, isn’t there, when Rosalie stares at Herb and there’s nobody else in the room, even though they are having dinner with the Selvins and Tony Bickleman and his latest wife, Maureen, and they’re all sitting right there. Not their fault, such rage, Rosalie says, not their fault. There’s nobody else in the room, and Herb watches her watching him, and he tries not to listen, and he vows to himself he’ll never bring any of this up again, ever. He even goes one further and promises himself that one of these days he’ll come clean, which after all these years would make a good story in itself. It never happened, folks. We weren’t there. My dear friends, let me be frank, the long and the short of it was (pause, drumroll) Pepto-Bismol. I stand before you a prevaricator. And he can hear Harvey Selvin saying, For Christ’s sake, Herb, it’s a story. And Tony Bickleman: And I wasn’t shot at Anzio either, shot at, but not shot. I always say shot. What’s the difference? Coulda bin, couldn’t I a bin?

Around the middle of the 1980s, not long after he retired, Herb did stop telling the story, at least in public. And when he stopped, Rosalie stopped. She’d never initiated it; she only carried it places it wasn’t supposed to go. Herb in his chair in the den looking out at the backyard and Rosalie on the patio reading, slowly turning pages, or not turning pages at all, the woman could spend five minutes on the same page, and still the ceiling ignites and the flames spread across the walls and he tries to run and can’t. Herb flings himself against the crowd, elbows cocked like an offensive lineman, trying to use his bulk to plow forward, stumbles, shouting absurdly, “Make way! I’m a doctor!” while Rosalie remains behind, at their table. Rosalie sips her Scotch. She crosses and recrosses her legs. She rubs the clean white tablecloth with her palm. After he stopped telling the Cocoanut Grove out loud, this is the part that was most alarming. This is what made Herb try to banish those two words from his brain the way the city of Boston forbade them from the commercial register. Rosalie serene while he and everyone else in the place—

Not in his dreams, in the morning, in the den, in his chair, awake.

When she died, it all got more vivid. The specter of her sitting and watching. She left the same way. That morning she’d been talking about craving fresh cucumber salad. When was the last time I had cucumber salad? At my aunt Gert’s in the fifties? As she napped in the guest room with her clothes on, a stroke took her away, on a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known her. He had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had, in her way. And she’d always been Rosie, always the girl in the red dress who got the twice-over from sailors and sauced it right back. Still, she always held herself, not alone, apart. Maybe this was why people craved her sole attention. When the kids were little and even after they’d gone away, they were still always trying to get their mother away from Herb in order to be listened to, beg advice, confess. They didn’t want Herb’s bigheartedness, his hugs, his compassion. Mom, I shoplifted. Mom, I’m strung out. Mom, I’m getting a divorce. Mom, I’m broke again. Mom, I’m tired, I can’t figure out why I’m so so tired all the time. And she’d stare back at them as if they were strangers. No answers or empathy or even comfort. But something. What did you give — what? Tell me. Talk to me, Ro, I’ll listen. Herb in his chair by the window, overlooking her azaleas. The glare of the sun white now against the glass. A frenzied waiter douses a blazing tinsel palm tree with seltzer water, and Rosalie laughs, raises a long, thin finger slowly to her lips, and breathes, Let it come, Herb, just let it come—

My old boss E.J. once told me he was famous for goofy hats. This was when he worked the lock-in ward at Hennepin County. The hats, E.J. said, came to represent his solidarity with the ones called patients. One day he’d wear a sombrero, the next a feathered Tyrolean, the day after that a plastic hard hat with placeholders for two beers they gave away free at a Twins game. He said they began to trust him and treat him as if he were one of them, which meant they toned down the loony and just talked to him the way they talked among themselves, which was like everybody else in the world talks to everybody else in the world, normal with a touch of nuts. E.J. told me this as he lay in a bed at Nicollett Methodist. How that job on the psych ward was less about the daily incidents of mayhem, which he could recall vividly, than a sense of camaraderie he’d never felt before or since. Looking back, he wondered whether he hadn’t been most alive, most in tune with his fellow men, those years he worked the lock-in. They trusted me, E.J. said. They had not a thing left to lose. This was when he could talk, because in the weeks and days before he died, he stopped talking altogether and only screamed if you went near him. The nurses needed two orderlies to hold him down to give him his shots. Last I spoke to him was on the phone. I put the receiver down on the table and just listened.

MINNEAPOLIS, 1997

AT THE KITCHEN TABLE

The lady officer told her if she wanted a family burial she’d have to make special arrangements for him to be retrieved. The state will assume all burial costs if this isn’t the case, but in such case he can’t be buried anywhere but in the Department of Corrections’ own plot in Murfreesboro. In whichever case, she, Mrs. Alper, the lady officer said, was required to come up to Caledonia tomorrow morning to sign identification papers and to collect personal items such as are wanted. The rest will be properly disposed of. But please, Mrs. Alper, understand, if you wish to take your son’s body home, you must be accompanied by a licensed mortician and a funeral services vehicle. Then she said in a lower, different voice, a voice that nearly recognized the notion of sorrow: You can’t take him home in your own car is what I’m saying is D.O.C. policy.

Mrs. Alper? Hello? Are you there? Mrs. Alper?

Jean Alper at the kitchen table, Gastonia, North Carolina. September 1986. Tomorrow is tomorrow. The phone is on the floor. It’s ceased to repeat itself. There may be other sounds out the open kitchen window, but she doesn’t hear them. Someone might be mowing a lawn. She wouldn’t know. It’s still today and he’s lying on his back someplace they keep cold. It’s cold where they’ve got him, and she imagines a large walk-in refrigerator stacked tall with frozen breaded chicken patties and white plastic buckets of soup, frost growing up his fingernails, across his eyelids. She wants to laugh. It’s June. So cold. She tired, Lord, did she tire. Maybe she could have tried harder, but with Aubrey dead and her brothers so far away and her working nine, ten hours a day, it was hard. She could have moved them away from here, but where? Charlotte? She didn’t know anybody in Charlotte. She knew hardly anybody in Gastonia anymore. Anyway, some years you had to sit tight with what you had. Well, I can make excuses till kingdom come and they won’t call an undertaker or iron a decent dress by 5:30 tomorrow morning. At least three hours to Murfreesboro, and shouldn’t she be there by nine? He did what he wanted, stubborn as his father, but Aubrey, when it came down to it, was all bluster. Knock the man over with your finger. Jordy, though, never afraid of anything or anybody. Since he was three and tearing up the carpet, her tomato plants, hair of neighbors’ daughters. The neighbors called him Pixie Terror until he got so big so fast he was just Terror. Then they didn’t call him anything. Her fingers thump the table in the silence. So cold. It isn’t as if she doesn’t have people to call. Vince in Wilmington and Dave and Julia in Louisville. It’s how to say it. Who’d believe it? That it was only simple fear. Jordy? Man the size of a small office building. Because inside there something happened. Supposed to, right? Supposed to change you, right? On visiting days she’d say, What, baby, what? Him sitting there fiddling with his shirt like it had a button, but there were no buttons. They hurting you? Somebody touching you? And him shaking his head, not that, and waving her away and coughing and laughing and saying, Stupid enough to end up here, stupid enough to be rattled by the doors. And when she drove home that day, she thought she understood. So easy. Funny almost, doors. As if he expected there not to be any.

The way he said it, like doors existed independent of what he was doing in there, and yet she understood. There’s doors and there’s doors. Once, another day, he’d rammed his head against the wall in that little ferociously lit room like she wasn’t there at all, kept doing it and doing it and doing it, until the guard came and pulled her away, his forehead gashed and pouring. It wasn’t a steady descent to wherever the fear was taking him; it was slow, and some visiting days it wouldn’t be there at all. Some days he let her touch him, his body falling so heavily into hers he’d almost knock her over. A few of the guards were kind. They sometimes looked at her as if she were a vision of their own mother driving four-plus hours to be humiliated, to be searched, to have the insides of her thighs patted down for the love of a son who didn’t deserve it. Lots of guys had to talk to their visitors through the glass, but for Jordy Alper’s mother they unlocked the lawyers’ room, and Jordy would say, All right, Ma, in here you have to talk like a lawyer. How’s my appeal going? And she’d say all she could think of to say, which was I’ve been filing motions galore for you, honey, and it’s all a wait-and-see, and sometimes his hands would grip the table in order to talk and he’d say things he never said in his life, like Tell me about you, Ma, talk about you, and she’d try and he’d listen, clutching the edge of the table. Mostly he stopped shaving, but some days she’d get there and he’d be clean-shaven and this made it worse, not because he was so pale and bleeding at the chin but because he’d want so much out of it. He’d force himself to laugh hard and long at her stories and smile with his face when he talked, and watching him perform would exhaust her, and he’d read this exhaustion in her eyes and stand up and call the guard and say, Let her go home. No, who’d believe it? My God, so cold. But hadn’t anybody ever noticed that even after he sprouted up taller than his father and uncles, he still slouched into rooms like he was embarrassed about something? Because people turned from the boy. They always had. She’s making excuses. He was a chubby baby with fat, grippable elbows. He never cried, only yelped sometimes, and some nights Aubrey couldn’t stand to be near his own son, because he said the baby looked at him with eyes that weren’t a baby’s. Sorrow’s years different from sadness. Maybe she’s always known this. She looks at the table. There’s a small plate with a half-eaten piece of toast. She doesn’t remember it. Sadness, always lots of it, but this is something new and will become part of her in a way Aubrey’s absence never has. The call a shock and nothing at all like a shock. Sitting right here, the phone rings, the lady officer says words, and all of it the start of something she always knew she’d be.

Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s not even a word for what I am now. Jordy, my only only. Why not scream it? She sits, motionless now, already hating two tongue waggers from work, Brenda and Denise. (You hear it? About Jean’s son? Awful, just terrible, but that boy was bad bad news. Made holy terror look like Donny Osmond.) Funny, isn’t it? Hilarious — and then they talk about you in the parking lot.

Early summer, just after nine in the morning. The window’s open. The curtain bloats, settles. Jean Alper’s feet are flat on the floor. It will be a long time before the crickets shriek. She’ll wait right here.

GRAND PACIFIC HOTEL, CHICAGO, 1875

One hotel maid said her screeching resembled the sound of a peacock. Far more alarming was Mrs. Lincoln’s silence. Late at night she would dress and roam the shoe-lined corridors of the hotel as if she were searching for something in all those hallways that looked identical to everyone but her. It was those shoes. All those shoes waiting to be shined like the ghosts of so many feet.

And the corridors themselves seemed to change every time she wandered down them. There were nights, early mornings, when she couldn’t find her way back to her room. Even she changed — moment by moment — and this is why there are no safe harbors anywhere. Even our own bodies betray us, every moment of every day. Even you people who understand nothing must understand this. Don’t you see? Motion is where the loss is. If we could only be still. But then how to search? How to find?

RAILROAD MEN’S HOME

Henry’s enemy lived in the room next door. Sometimes I saw him in the hall carrying his portable television. That TV was cradled in his arm the day I shouted, I need help, Henry’s fallen down. The man walked calmly into Henry’s room and set the TV down on the floor. Then he knelt and checked Henry’s pulse at the neck, professionally, using two fingers.

“Poor sap,” he said. “He thought I’d go before him.”

“There’s no hope?”

“Someone should alert Sister Harris. She’ll want to get the room ready for the next contestant. This is prime real estate. Two windows. Most of us only have one. Can you imagine? One window?”

“Would it be all right if I had a little time?” I said.

“Of course, they’ll want to fumigate it first.”

“A few minutes, only to—”

“Who are you, anyway? A grandson? Nephew hoping for an inheritance? Pennies under the mattress? Don’t kid yourself.”

“I’m one of the listeners.”

“Listeners are supposed to spread the visits around.”

“I know.”

“You don’t think the rest of us aren’t about ready to croak? He had you convinced he was the only one?”

Together, we lifted Henry off the floor. It was surprising how light he was. We hoisted too quickly. Like when you brace yourself to raise a log that turns out to be hollow. We set Henry gently on the bed. His enemy wrenched off his tennis shoes without untying the laces. He studied Henry in his clean white tube socks. Henry was fastidious. He shaved twice a day, once in the morning and once, he said, at teatime. His enemy was on the fat side and had small, sharp teeth like a ferret’s.

“You hated him back?” I said.

The man snorted and sat down on the one chair in the room. “No. My enemy is Vern in East Wing.” He spoke to the corpse. “How about a truce, Henry? Okay? Bygones be all gones?”

I laughed.

“I’m meaning this sincerely.”

“You tortured him with the TV.”

“Look, I’m hard of hearing. For years I invited him over for Johnny Carson. And Tom Snyder’s show. He would have liked Tom Snyder. Snyder’s an intellectual, just like—”

“He said you could hear your TV in Milwaukee. He said you took a shower with it.”

“Now these are exaggerations.”

Henry’s last words to me, only a few minutes before all this, were “I tire of you.” It wasn’t the first time he put it that way. I’d always worried that my too-open eyes and never knowing what to say were literally boring him to death. Now I’d done it, I’d murdered him. Henry’s enemy looked like he was about to doze off, the TV cuddled against his chest like a baby. I walked over to the bulletin board and looked at the new Goya picture. I would check out art books for Henry from the library. He’d rip out the color plates and tack them up. Goya was his favorite. Henry claimed Goya was one of the few artists who truly understood the nature of everyday degradation. Cervantes, too. Look to the Spanish. They’ve been shat on enough to understand. This latest Goya was a drawing of a man hanging by the neck from a branch. A woman standing on the ground below him was reaching up into the man’s mouth.

“His teeth,” Henry had said. “See how it goes? Napoleon’s dragoons rape and pillage. You get strung up. All is quiet. After that, some crone sneaks up and rips off your dentures.”

I looked at the dangling man, his baggy pants, his sad feet. What good were his teeth to him now?

My job was to listen, to be a kind ear was how it was put to me, but often Henry would demand that I talk. About what? Anything, he’d say. Just talk. I told him the truth about anything I could think of. About not being sorry my dog ran away, about my lack of friends. About my parents and what strangers they were to each other. I told him the last thing I wanted to do after school was go home. He took no pity on me, which is probably why I kept showing up. Sometimes he’d hold up his hand and in this way demand silence. It was in those moments we might have known each other best, and even appreciated each other’s company.

Once, Henry said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“You end up living someone else’s life.”

“Really?”

“One day you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror. I guarantee it. One day you’ll wake up and your face — alien territory.”

“Whose did you want to live?”

“Mine!”

“So wait, I’m still confused, whose did you live?”

“Don’t you listen?”

I opened one of Henry’s windows. Rain was falling now in invisible streaks. You had to squint to see it. It’s strange to look at a street you know so well from a different angle. Here was a street I’d grown up on, walked up and down my whole life. I could never get used to the view from up there. It wasn’t the place I knew. The wet September street, the empty sidewalk, the few cars passing, and the sounds they made, rain quishing beneath tires. It’s so simple, I thought, even I could figure it out. St. Johns Avenue goes on without you.

Henry lying on his bed. His enemy tsking, gloating. I asked him again, would he mind giving me a little more time? Alone?

He stood. “You have nine hours until rigor mortis.”

“He was an intellectual,” I said.

The man nodded and, with his TV, did a little shuffle of a dance out of the room.

Not a shred of the old building remains. Where it once stood, there are three new houses, basketball hoops in the empty driveways. It was an old-age home for retired employees of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. Such places used to exist around Chicago. The home looked like a kind of Greek temple, with a set of huge pillars in front. To walk those steps was like arriving somewhere. But at the same time vines crawled all over the front, as if even then the building knew it didn’t belong in the neighborhood and was trying to camouflage itself. People seemed to notice it only after they started to tear it down. Before the railroad bought the place, sometime in the twenties, it had been a convent. When it changed over, some of the old nuns stayed on to care for the railroad men. Henry used to wonder out loud where all the young nuns went, if there were ever any young nuns. He said he sometimes roamed the halls looking for virgin ghosts to violate. He never once mentioned trains. He’d been a conductor on the Chicago/Kenosha line for fifty-odd years. I visited him on Tuesdays, sometimes Thursdays. I sat on the edge of the bed. Henry’s wet eyes were still open. His enemy poked his head back in.

“A cavalry of habits is on the way. Someone else must have heard you yelling and pressed a button. God forbid anybody gets out of bed around here.”

“All right,” I said.

“What’d you do? Drugs?”

“Stole.”

“How many hours?”

“Hundred.”

“What are you up to?”

“Passed it. Court signed off.”

“Ah, a saint.”

He stepped toward the bed and grabbed hold of one of Henry’s big toes. I made a move to stop him, but seeing it was done out of some kind of affection, I let it go.

PLAZA REVOLUCIÓN, MEXICO CITY, 6 A.M

A woman who sells television antennas in the Zócalo walks slowly through a mostly empty plaza as the sun begins to rise and thinks of her sister who lives in Ohio now. Her sister who was beautiful before she had children. Teresa never had children herself. She and Reuben tried for years. But nobody called her beautiful to begin with. Why all this again now? The light, something about the changing light. As if a sheet were slowly being lifted off the crust of the earth. She crosses the plaza and thinks of a sleeping face, some lost morning. Her sister’s name is Rosella, a name Rosella always said she hated though it went so well with her beauty. She’s not lost, she’s in a place called Dayton.

The light slants across the plaza, slightly pinkish now. The four-sided arch looms. It’s really an unfinished building they call an arch. They started to build a new parliament here, but the land was too marshy, and so they had to stop. Didn’t they take off your shoes before they started to build? Maybe politicians who build parliaments never take off their shoes. But aren’t all buildings, like people, unfinished? We build and we build and still we’re not done? I know where to find Rosella and still she’s gone? It’s a question for God, who looms above this arch as indifferent to sisters as he is to parliaments, as he seems to be about so many other things. When they were girls, Rosella once slammed her on the nose with the bottom of a teapot. Teresa forgave her sister the same afternoon. She forgives her again this morning. For the teapot. For not being beautiful anymore. For being so far away she might as well not exist. Rosella. From her eyes not from her mouth in the now noisier morning.

HORACE AND JOSEPHINE

My aunt Josephine would slip fifty-dollar bills into the front shirt pocket of my brother’s Cub Scouts uniform. Go and buy yourself something nice for a damsel, soldier. Then she’d put one of her long, exquisite fingers to her lips to let my brother know that her secret of General Grant should stay between them. And even after Uncle Horace was completely disgraced and they were living in Aunt Molly’s spare room, Aunt Josephine still did that with the fifties. Because she walked around Aunt Molly’s cramped little stucco house on Wampanoag Street the same way she did her marble-floored palace way up at the top of the hill on Highland Avenue. With aplomb and grace. The fact that Horace had gone pauper didn’t change her. Or the paintings that now hung on Aunt Molly’s walls, the paintings Josephine had hid for months in my grandmother’s attic in order to save them from the public auction.

To Josephine, the paintings, one of which she claimed was an early Matisse (a whispy nude), represented who she was, not who she once was. True, they no longer adorned a grand front hall like the one she used to hustle guests through with a flurry of wild waving: Don’t dawdle, come in, come in! Come in! Yet even exiled at Molly’s, Aunt Josephine’s eyes gave nothing away. Not regret, never anger. Uncle Horace had a similar take. His spectacular plunge from the upper stratosphere of Fall River society didn’t stop him from hectoring anyone who came near him about the glories of high finance. That he’d been brought so low was proof that he’d been a true gambler, the sort of visionary American who built this country. You think John D. Rockefeller didn’t take any risks with other people’s money? This whole damn country is built on other people’s money.

By the mid-seventies it was well known throughout southeastern Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island — even the Providence Journal got into the act and put it on the front page — that Horace’s sham investment scheme, his robbing of Peter to pay Paul, as my mother put it years later, had not only bankrupted him, but nearly took the rest of the family — and much of Jewish Fall River — down as well. After decades of Horace paying 8 or 9 percent monthly interest, all his investors lost their principal when the whole thing went bust. They say nobody in the family came out unscathed when it came down to the accounting, except, as my grandmother used to mutter under her breath, Aunt Pauline’s husband, Ira, because Ira Pinkus, the lousy foot dragger, had never earned an honest dollar to begin with and knew a con when he saw one.

Horace and Josephine were our family’s famous once-hads. Horace Ginsburg was the son of an upholsterer who’d taken his father’s tailor shop and built an investment corporation with subsidiaries in five states. We used to make clothes, now all we make is money! So what if it was all a snow job, a paper swindle? A man of business is measured in this world by what it looks like he’s got, forget the actualities. And for years, in addition to the house on Highland Avenue, Horace and Josephine did, it seemed, have a Manhattan condo on East Seventy-Seventh and a beach house on the Cape at Dennis and a pied-à-terre in Nassau. What about his front-row season tickets to Harvard football? Horace didn’t go to Harvard. But what’s it matter, he used to sing, if Harvard’s not my alma matter? I give them wads, wads. Once, Uncle Horace said to my brother, You know what the secret of philanthropy is? Never give a single dime to anybody who needs it. And, of course, he had Josephine Sharkansky, the most ravishing and cosmopolitan girl of Hebrew extraction ever to grace the muddy banks of the Taunton River. They had it all, so it’s no wonder people shoveled their money at Horace. People wanted to talk about the things that Horace and Josephine talked about, modern art, Carl Jung, Nehru; travel to the places they traveled to, Saint-Tropez, Copenhagen, Nairobi. Everyone, even my never stylish, always frumpled grandparents, wanted a piece of that action.

Even after it was all out in the open, Horace and Josephine held tight to their mystique by tossing an enormous costume ball in the waning days before the auction. If we’re going to fail, Josephine must have told Horace, let’s do it grandly, loudly, with abandon, my puckery darling. Horace went as a conquistador; Josephine as Golda Meir, who, she noted, was a librarian before she became a prime minister. We lunched with her in Tel Aviv. Extraordinary woman, marvelous sense of irony…

I came along a lot later. Long after Horace and Josephine’s glory days had been reduced to stacks of overexposed photographs stuffed in envelopes and pushed to the back of lower desk drawers lined with tissue-thin white paper. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, my family’s standard of living had long since plummeted, and the house on the Cape at Dennis was a sun-glared, overexposed memory. There were other disasters: The state built an interstate smack through my grandfather’s furniture store; Uncle Charlie’s cookie business went belly-up because of the price of sugar, something to do with a coup d’état in the Dominican Republic. In the late seventies, my humbled relatives summered in the Fall River swelt.

But as a nine-year-old so shy I only stared at the stains in Aunt Molly’s carpet, even I understood there was something different about visiting this house. When we went to see Horace and Josephine, we were treated like dignitaries from the far-off Midwest. In the summer of 1976, Josephine greeted us in front of Molly’s squeaky screen door and announced: “Nephews, I’ve made pâté.” We settled in the small front room crowded with furniture and sipped tea. I’m sure it was the first time in my life I had ever used a saucer. Aunt Josephine conversed with us. My grandmother’s army of other sisters didn’t so much talk as force-feed. Plates of brownies would materialize, one after the other. They’d been baking nonstop for months. Josephine crossed her legs and asked what we thought of Andy Warhol. Didn’t we think his significance somewhat overstated? After stammering and sipping our tea, we were released to Horace, who was waiting in the spare bedroom with his pipe. We took turns kissing his fuzzled face. He was sitting in the only chair. He motioned us to sit on the bed. A gnarled man, he seemed to shrink every summer. He stood, clapped his hands, and sputtered smoke into my brother’s face.

“A peanut-butter salesman?” he shouted. “Truman hawked hats, but haberdashery is at least a profession.”

“Jimmy Carter is a businessman farmer,” my brother intoned, brushing hair out of his eyes. He’d been practicing for months to talk political shop with Uncle Horace, the only known Republican in the family. “His peanut operation is a major agricultural concern. He also served his country aboard a nuclear submarine. He’s been governor of the thirty-first largest state. He knows what he’s doing, frankly — injecting a little decency into our morally bankrupt society.”

“A ten-year-old Maoist!” Horace shouted. “God save us!”

“I’m fifteen,” my brother said.

“Listen, boy, capitalists may be dogs, but we’re the only dogs that hunt, and if you think that psalm-singing son of a bitch—”

At this, Josephine scurried into the den. “Shush.” She reminded him that we were still only kids. “Lovey, remember, the sky has yet to fall on their heads.”

“They should keep looking up,” Horace said.

Yet she calmed him. They could take it all away — every cent, the houses, the honorary degrees, and the lifetime community service medallion from the Fall River Chamber of Commerce. They could put all his heirlooms on the front lawn and he could stand there and watch while the auctioneer yodeled and the neighbors hauled off the family silver for a song, but he was still married to Josephine Sharkansky and you could see that in his watery eyes when she came to rescue my brother. Josephine, with her long blue-gray hair pulled tightly around her head, poured another round of tea into our delicate cups. My grandmother, who had been hovering in the kitchen throughout the visit, clattering pots and reorganizing drawers, emerged and said under her breath, “Jo, how can you serve children tea in the good china?”

Josephine looked at my grandmother. She’d only ever been beautiful to Horace. There was something too perfectly oval, maybe, about her face. She was called by men and by women handsome. She said to her sister, “Do you remember tea in the gazebo on Highland Avenue?”

Horace and Josephine often apologized to my brother and me for not being rich anymore. Josephine would say things like: “Oh, lambs, if things hadn’t gone to the absolute dogs, we’d all be on the Cape right now and you two would be splashing in the bay like a couple of little John-Johns.” As a consolation, they would take us to Horseneck Beach on Buzzards Bay. I remember one time we were pulling into the parking lot on one of those blazy gusty days, the waves a fluster of rising white gush, and Josephine turned to Horace and said, “Oh, Mr. Onassis. You’re always taking me places. Today, the South of France.”

Years later, when I was a freshman in high school and my brother was already away at college, I remember standing in the little kitchen on Wampanoag Street, talking to Josephine. She wanted to know what sort of education I was receiving at public school. She thought it scandalous that I hadn’t yet read The Charterhouse of Parma. How could a boy your age not be exposed to the passionate antics of Fabrizio? Horace had been skulking around, ignoring us. Talk of anything other than politics or business irritated him; he was lonely for my brother. I watched him stoop to pick something up off the kitchen floor. He tickled Josephine’s ankle with a couple of stubby, unsteady fingers. She reached down and, without taking her eyes off me, swatted. Horace muttered and withdrew like a shooed-away crab.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought it was a crawly.”

But they couldn’t carry on like that forever, and Horace, who was seven years older, eventually got sick. No one in our family ever says what anyone is sick with, sick is sick. Whatever it was, it soon became too serious for Josephine. Aunt Molly had died by this time. So they moved Horace to the Jewish Home for the Aged out on Warren Avenue. And though he never did get much better, Horace didn’t die right away, either. He lingered for years. Whenever I visited Fall River, my grandmother would conspire to keep me busy seeing other relatives, but I overheard things because she was a terrible whisperer. Once, she hid in the bathroom. The phone cord was stretched across the hall and ran under the door. Still, she practically shouted. “I don’t know, Haddy. Last Tuesday he stopped eating.” Then Josephine fell down on the icy sidewalk in front of Molly’s. They ran tests. Again, nobody talked, but we knew it was bad and that it went beyond a broken hip. My grandmother couldn’t get Josephine a bed in the Jewish Home, even though Horace’s money had put a new wing on the place back in his salad days. Ginsburg was chiseled above the front door. My grandmother stomped around the house. “Waiting list? Our Josephine on a waiting list?” She sat at the kitchen table with the phone book. “I’m going to make some calls.” I watched her finger in the rotary, poised to circle. She rammed the phone down.

“Damnit, if he didn’t steal from the father, he stole from the son.”

“What about Uncle Ira?” I said.

My grandmother stood up. Even in her sweat suit, she was square-shouldered, bulky, formidable. My grandfather had so many names for her: La Duce, Generalissima Patton. My grandfather’d been dead at least ten years by then.

“Ira Pinkus?” my grandmother said. “May we never sink so low.”

She sat down again and stared at the phone book. Horace needed special medical care and couldn’t be moved from the Jewish Home. Josephine clearly couldn’t live alone. My grandmother was stretched too thin driving around caring for Uncle Charlie and Aunt Haddy, both of whom could hardly walk, not to mention Ida in Providence with her kidney trouble and Pauline with her nerves and dizzy spells. And everybody, old and young, was too broke and too busy. There was no choice but to put Josephine in the state home across the river in Somerset. “It’s close enough,” my grandmother said. “Just across the Braga Bridge.”

My brother told me this last part as we stood blowing into our hands at Josephine’s graveside service in the late 1990s. He said not to repeat it. He got it from my mother, who told him not to tell anybody. She’d heard it from my grandmother who’d told her, before she herself died, not to breathe a word to a soul. Stories move across my family in this efficient way. My brother said that a week before Horace’s death, a year and a half before Josephine’s, two of my cousins, Monroe, Horace and Josephine’s only child, and Hannah, Ida’s daughter, arranged for Horace and Josephine to say good-bye. At this point, Horace was blind and mostly slept all day, but Monroe smuggled him into a car — this was all against strict doctor’s orders, so it had to be done undercover — and drove him to a shopping center between the two nursing homes. Hannah delivered Aunt Josephine, who by then had lost nearly half her body weight. Horace and Josephine hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years. The family had been waiting for one or the other to die quietly, but neither would cooperate. He was ninety-five. She was eighty-eight. The two cars pulled up, and there they were, Horace and Josephine, in the parking lot of Al Mac’s. Josephine was able to stand up and walk slowly over to Horace, who was slumped in the passenger seat. Monroe opened the door and started to help him, but Horace pushed him away. He knew she was close and tried to pull himself out of the seat, but couldn’t; so Josephine leaned into the car, and Horace dropped his head on her shoulder. Then she whispered something to him. Neither of my cousins heard what she said. Maybe she told him she’d meet him wherever he was going and not to worry, they’d be flush when they got there. Meet me by the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, at Beaumont’s. I’ll be the one in the fox coat and white heels. The two of them remained slumped over each other until my cousins finally broke them apart and drove them away in separate cars.

I was six, maybe seven months old, and I had a babysitter named Eva. She was from somewhere in the West Indies and spoke with, my parents always said, the most charming singsong accent you could imagine. My father called her the governess. That night my parents were at the opera. It was February. This is when we lived on Lincoln and Webster, near Oz Park. The heat went out in our building and it got so cold that Eva wrapped me in a towel and put me in the oven. My parents came home from Rigoletto and found Eva jumping in place in the kitchen. On her head was a large furry Russianish hat of my father’s. My mother, essentially unalarmable in any circumstances, didn’t scream when she realized what was in the oven, though at first she wasn’t entirely sure what she was seeing. My father, too, he just took it in. He may have been equally astonished that the governess was wearing his favorite hat. Me? Nobody asked, but had I been able to talk I would have said I was comfortable as hell and that my removal from this new womb was as unwelcome as my previous abduction from the original. Eva had the right idea. The minute I get settled you people come and yank me out—

CHICAGO, 1969

PAMPKIN’S LAMENT

Two-term Governor Cheeky Al Thorstenson was so popular that year that his Democratic challenger could have been, my father said, Ricardo Montalban in his prime and it wouldn’t have made a 5 percent difference. Even so, somebody had to run, somebody always has to run, and so Mike Pampkin put his sacrificial head into the race, and my father, equally for no good reason other than somebody must prepare the lamb for the slaughter, got himself hired as campaign manager. Nobody understood it all better than Pampkin himself. He wore his defeat right there on his body, like one of the unflattering V-neck sweaters that made his breasts mound outward like a couple of sad little hills. When he forced himself to smile for photographers, Pampkin always looked slightly constipated. And he was so endearingly, down-homey honest about his chances that people loved him. Of course, not enough to vote for him. Still, for such an ungraceful man, he had long, elegant hands, Jackie O. hands, my father said, only Pampkin’s weren’t gloved. Mike Pampkin’s hands were unsheathed, out in the open for the world to see. He was the loneliest-seeming man ever to run for statewide office in Illinois.

It was 1980. I was a mostly ignored fourteen-year-old and I had already developed great disdain for politics. It bored me to hatred. But if I could have voted, I must say I would have voted for Cheeky Al also. His commercials were very good and I liked his belt buckles. Everybody liked Cheeky Al’s belt buckles.

Probably what is most remembered, if anything, about Mike Pampkin during that campaign was an incident that happened in Waukegan during the Fourth of July parade. Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline: PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.

My memory of that time is of less public humiliation.

One night, it must have been a few weeks before Election Day, there was a knock on our back door. It was after two in the morning. The knock was mousy but insistent. I first heard it in my restless dreams, as if someone were tapping on my skull with a pencil. Eventually, my father answered the door. I got out of bed and went downstairs. I found them facing each other at the kitchen table. If either Pampkin or my father noticed me, they didn’t let on. I crouched on the floor and leaned against the cold stove. My father was going on, as only my father could go on. To him, at this late stage, the election had become, if not an actual race, not a total farce, either. The flying-carpet incident had caused a small sympathy bump in the polls, and the bump had held.

Yet it was more than this. Politics drugged my father. He loved nothing more than to hear his own voice holding forth, and he’d work himself up into a hallucinatory frenzy of absolute certainty when it came to anything electoral. One of my earliest memories is of my parents having it out during the ’72 presidential primaries. My father had ordained from on high that Scoop Jackson was the party’s savior, the only one who could rescue the Democrats from satanic George Wallace. My mother, treasonably, was for Edmund Muskie, that pantywaist. There were countless other things, but doesn’t everything, one way or another, come down to politics? In my family, politics isn’t blood sport, it’s blood itself. Finally, in 1979, my mother, brother, and I moved out for good, to an apartment across town. But every other weekend and Wednesday nights I spent with my father in the house that used to be our house, in the room that used to be my room, in the bed that used to be my bed.

My father in the kitchen in October of 1980, rattling off to Pampkin what my father called “issue conflagrations,” by which he meant those issues that divided city voters from downstaters. To my father, anybody who didn’t live in Chicago or the suburbs was a downstater, even if they lived upstate, across state, or on an island in the Kankakee River. He told Pampkin that his position on the Zion nuclear power plant was too wishy-washy, that the anti-nuke loons were getting ready to fry him in vegetable oil.

“Listen, Mike, it doesn’t matter that Cheeky Al’s all for plutonium in our cheeseburgers. The only meat those cannibals eat is their own kind.”

Pampkin wasn’t listening. He was staring out the kitchen window, at his own face in the glass. He didn’t seem tired or weary or anything like that. If anything, he was too awake. In fact, his eyes were so huge they looked torn open. Of course, he knew everything my father was saying. Pampkin wasn’t a neophyte. He’d grown up in the bosom of the machine, in the 24th Ward. Izzy Horowitz and Jake Arvey were his mentors. He’d worked his way up, made a life in politics, nothing flashy, steady. Mayor Daley himself was a personal friend. And when the Mayor asks you to take a fall to Cheeky Al, you take a fall to Cheeky Al. That Daley was dead and buried now didn’t make a difference. A promise to Mayor Daley is a promise to Mayor Daley, and there is only one Mayor Daley. Pampkin didn’t need my father’s issue conflagrations. He was a man who filled a suit. Didn’t a man have to fill something? At the time he ran, I think Pampkin was state comptroller, whatever that means.

So the candidate sat mute as my father began to soar, his pen conducting a symphony in the air.

“So we go strong against nuclear power in the city on local TV here. But when you’re down in Rantoul on Thursday, make like you didn’t hear the question. Stick your finger in your ear. Kiss a baby, anything—”

“Raymond.”

Pampkin seemed almost stunned by his own voice. He was calm, but I noticed his cheeks loosen as if he’d been holding my father’s name in his mouth. Then he said, “My wife’s leaving me. It’s not official. She says she won’t make it official until after the election. She’s in love, she says.”

My father dropped his pen. It rolled off the table and onto the floor, where it came to rest against my bare toes. I didn’t pick it up. On the table between the two men were precinct maps, charts, phone lists, mailing labels, buttons, and those olive Pampkin bumper stickers so much more common around our house than on cars.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mike?”

I watched my father. He was gazing at Pampkin with an expression I’d never seen before. Drained of his talk, he looked suddenly kinder. Here is a man across this table, a fellow sojourner. What I am trying to say is that it was a strange time—1980. A terrible time in many ways, and yet my father became at that moment infused with a little grace. Maybe the possibility of being trounced not only by Cheeky Al but also by the big feet of Ronald Reagan himself had opened my father’s eyes to the existence of other people. Here was a man in pain.

They sat and drank coffee, and didn’t talk about Mrs. Pampkin. At least not with their mouths. With their eyes they talked about her, with their fingers gripping their mugs they talked about her.

Mrs. Pampkin?

My inclination before that night would have been to say that she was as forgettable as her husband. More so. Though I had seen her many times, I couldn’t conjure up her face. She wore earth tones. I remembered that once she hugged me and that she smelled like bland soap. She wasn’t pudgy; she wasn’t lanky. She wasn’t stiff, nor was she jiggly. Early on in the campaign, my father had suggested to Pampkin that maybe his wife could wear a flower in her hair at garden events, or at the very least lipstick for television. Nothing came of these suggestions, and as far as I knew, the issue of Pampkin’s wife hadn’t come up again until that night in the kitchen, when, for me, she went from drab to blazing. She’d done something unexpected. If Mrs. Pampkin was capable of it, what did this mean for the rest of us? I remembered — then — that I had watched her after Mike got hit by the carpet. She hadn’t become hysterical. She’d merely walked over to him lying there on the pavement (the Shriner apologizing over and over), and the expression in her eyes was of such motionless calm that Mike and everybody else around knew it was going to be all right, that this was only another humiliation in the long line that life hands us, nothing more, nothing less. She’d knelt to him.

Pampkin’s hand crept across the table toward my father’s. Gently he clutched my father’s wrist.

“Do you know what she said? She said, ‘You have no idea how this feels.’ I said, ‘Maureen, I thought I did.’ ”

“More coffee, Mike?”

“Please.”

But he didn’t let go of my father’s wrist, and my father didn’t try to pull it away. Pampkin kept talking.

“You get to a point you think you can’t be surprised. I knew a lady once, a blind lady. Lived on Archer. Every day she went to the same store up the block. Every day for thirty-five years. She knows this stretch of block as if she laid the cement for the sidewalk herself. It’s her universe. One day they’re doing some sewage work and some nudnik forgets to replace the manhole cover and vamoose. She drops. Crazy that she lived. Broke both legs. It cost the city four hundred thousand on the tort claim to settle it. I’m talking about this kind of out-of-nowhere.”

My father sat there and watched him.

“Or let’s say you’re on Delta. Sipping a Bloody Mary. Seat-belt sign’s off. There’s a jolt. Unanticipated turbulence, they call it. It happened to a cousin of Vito Marzullo. All he was trying to do was go to Philadelphia. Broke his neck on the overhead bin.”

When I woke up on the kitchen floor, the room looked different, darker, smaller in the feeble light of the sun just peeping over the bottom edge of the kitchen window. Pampkin was still sitting there, gripping his mug of cold coffee and talking across the table to my father’s shaggy head, which was facedown and drooling on the bumper stickers. My father was young then. He’s always looked young; even to this day, his gray sideburns seem more like an affectation than a sign of age. But early that morning he really was young, and Pampkin was still telling my father’s head what it was like to be surprised. And he didn’t look any more rumpled than usual. Now, when I remember all this, I think of Fidel Castro giving those eighteen-hour speeches to the party faithful. There on the table, my father’s loyal head.

I was fourteen and I woke up on the floor with a hard-on over Mrs. Pampkin. One long night on the linoleum had proved that lust, if not love, had a smell, and that smell was of bland soap. I thought of ditching school and following her to some apartment or a Red Roof Inn. I wanted to watch them. I wanted to see something that wasn’t lonely. Tossed-around sheets, a belt lying on the floor. I wanted to know what they said, how they left each other, who watched the retreating back of the other. How do you part? Why would you ever? Even for an hour? Even when you know that the next day, at some appointed hour, you will have it again?

Got to go. My husband’s running for governor.

Pampkin droned on. He had his shoes off and was sitting there in his unmatched socks, his toes quietly wrestling each other.

“Or put it this way. An old tree. Its roots are dried up. But you can’t know this. You’re not a botanist, a tree surgeon, or Smokey the Bear. One day, a whiff of breeze comes and topples it. Why that whiff?”

I couldn’t hold back a loud yawn, and Pampkin looked down at me on the floor. He wasn’t startled by the rise in my shorts. He wasn’t startled by anything anymore.

He asked me directly, “You. Little fella. You’re as old as Methuselah and still you don’t know squat about squat?”

I shrugged.

Pampkin took a gulp of old coffee. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

And either I stopped listening or he stopped talking, because after a while his voice got faint and the morning rose for good.

Pampkin died twelve years later, in the winter of ’92. (The obituary headline in the Chicago Sun-Times ran: AMIABLE POLITICIAN LOST GOVERNOR’S RACE BY RECORD MARGIN.) I went with my father to the funeral. The Pampkins had never divorced. We met Mrs. Pampkin on the steps of the funeral home in Skokie. All it took was the way they looked at each other. I won’t try to describe it, except to say that it lasted too long and had nothing to do with anybody dead. They didn’t touch. They didn’t need to. They watched each other’s smoky breath in the chill air. Facing her in her grief and her wide-brimmed black hat, my father looked haggard and puny. He turned away only after more people came up to her to offer condolences. I don’t know how long it went on between them. I’m not even sure it matters. Does it? I now know it’s easier to walk away from what you thought you couldn’t live without than I had once imagined. She was taller than I remembered, and her face was red with sadness and January.

“Don’t look so pale, Ray,” she whispered to my father before moving on to the other mourners, her hand hovering for a moment near his left ear. “Mike always thought you were a good egg.”

LINCOLN

That year we lived on W Street in a small one-story house with a concrete slab in the backyard. Everybody else on our block lived in similar houses, and during the long summer we spent afternoons sitting in chairs on our respective slabs. In the Midwest, we don’t appreciate fences. Yards should blend into yards. I don’t remember any of our neighbors’ names, only that we sometimes drank a few beers together and talked about the heat. There are so many ways to talk about heat. I was an adjunct in the English Department. Sam was a poet who didn’t believe universities and poetry had anything to do with each other. She got a job at the Golden Wok, waiting tables. The Golden Wok was cheap and open late, a big sprawling place that had a way of looking empty even when it was filled with people. It was there she met someone, whether a fellow waiter or a patron, I never asked. Lincoln used to be a beautiful city. This was before it got ruined, locals said, by too many expressways. Nebraska, apparently, can never have enough roads through it. Still, there were the sunken gardens with all the flowers in a bowl and the mansions up on Sheridan Boulevard. Sam and I would drive up there and look at the houses. Once, she pointed to one of the houses and said, in all seriousness, Who would we be if we lived there?

“Coupla of rich-ass Cornhuskers,” I said.

“That’s all?”

Sometimes I think of that house. It had what Sam called a porte cochere over the driveway. Sam was from the South and said such dumb open garages were common in South Carolina.

“They’re for hairdos, you know, to protect the ladies when it’s raining.”

Near our house on W Street there was a park with a couple of netless tennis courts, and I used to sit at a picnic table under the tall trees and read for class. I remember sitting there and reading the Time Passes sections of To the Lighthouse and coming, again, to that moment when Mr. Ramsey reaches out for Mrs. Ramsey in the dark of the morning corridor, not knowing that she’s already gone. How could it still jolt when I knew it was coming, when from the first page I knew it was coming? Lincoln, Nebraska, 1999, the tall trees, nobody playing tennis.

LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE

In the unquiet of his shoe-box study, amid the noises of his house, Walt tries to read. Walt Kaplan. Furniture salesman, daydreamer, reader. It’s 1947, a year no one will much remember. After the war, but before anybody really got used to the war being over. He gives up. How could anybody read in this asylum? The peck of the clock nicks away his flesh. No matter how much I eat, he thinks, it makes no difference. I’m a fat husk. A funny thing. Sarah’s downstairs on the phone: the phone. Such fathomless yappery. Why, why must she shout? Is everyone who rings this house in need of orders? And there is the thump of Miriam’s battering up and down the stairs. Eleven years old and the kid sounds like a platoon. And he aches for her. He always has. So that somehow hearing her is the same as not hearing her is the same as her gone. What? Kid this loud? Possible? Gone? Such cacophony. I am a morbid man, a morbid, lazy sloucher. He shouts, “Knock it off, Orangutan! You got a father in here thinking.” The kid doesn’t answer. So he talks to Sarah without talking to Sarah, which is one of the great advantages of being married so long. Cuts down on the need for superfluous conversation. He talks to the idea of her. She talks on the phone.

I’m talking fundamentals, Sarah, follow me? You make something in this world, take, yes, a child, and then? Then?

Don’t be daft. We got bills to pay and cocktails at the Dolinskys’ at eight.

Dolinskys? What could we possibly have to say to them that hasn’t been said?

We can’t be late. Doris made reservations at the Lobster Pot for quarter to nine. They’ll give our table away.

So much for mine wife’s wise counsel. Not that I don’t enjoy a good cocktail as much as the next man. Glenlivet for me, thanks. Nobody can say Walt Kaplan doesn’t have a certain amount of class. But listen: What I’m getting at is silence and what it means in a world where there’s not any, at least we think there’s not any, but we got a whole lot coming, you know? I tell the kid, Knock it off, Orangutan, you got a father in here thinking… and if the kid heard, which even if she did, she didn’t, she might have stopped at my door and spoken through the keyhole and said, Thinking about what, Daddy? And I might have said, I’m remembering things, which is hard work. You think remembering things is a peanut, Peanut?

Remembering what?

Lot of things. For instance the hurricane of ’38, when I, your father—

That story!

You think a story dies?

(Her little mouth breathing through the keyhole.) Five hundred times I’ve heard that same story.

Five hundred and one, five hundred and two, five hundred and three. Your mother is home here in Fall River, and you and I, Orangutan, are out on the Cape at Horace’s place in Dennis. A little father and daughter vacation from the dragon, and the dragon calling up and squawking, Didn’t you hear the weather? Get out of there! Evacuate! You’ll get swept to—

China, the kid would say through the keyhole. We’re always getting swept to China in this family.

Precisely! And Walt Kaplan knows who’s boss. The man takes good orders, and he blankets you up. You were two years old and your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs. I ever tell you that? That your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs? Every time you tell anything, you have to add something new. And your father, great and fearless father, carries his daughter to the mainland in his Chrysler Imperial steed. Last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the hurricane of ’38 sent half the Cape into the Atlantic. They called it the Long Island Express. New Yorkers got to have their nose in everything. They even take our disasters. Rhode Island blew away, too, but nobody noticed. What’s half of Rhode Island anyway? Is your mother never wrong? No — she hasn’t got the time. She’s got Louise Greenbaum on the line. Paging Sarah Kaplan. Sarah Kaplan. Louise Greenbaum on the line. So, yes, hail the Sultana! But salute the infantryman, too. Walt Kaplan, hero of the Sagamore Bridge. Write him down as a footnote in the annals, hearty scribes!

And so Walt sits in the unstillness of his shoe-box study and thinks about fundamentals.

You make a kid, and the wind comes and tries to air mail it to Asia. Insurance got Horace a new house. The claim: Act of God. Act of God? State Farm’s going to send me a new kid? That only happens in the Book of Job. Last car, Walt Kaplan, dodges the terrible wrath of wraths, but how many more to come? How many acts has God got left? What on earth compares with the shame of not being able to protect your daughter, your only only? Let a father weep in peace, Orangutan. That fuckin’ thumping. Hellion child. The devil’s spawn. Sarah, my yappery-yapperer. Not the clock that dooms us, but the us of us. We’re walking, talking Acts of God. Don’t you get it? The thumping will not echo. It only booms in the brain, in the silence which is nowhere. A grave has more hold than the noise of this house. Miriam’s feet tromp up and down the stairs. You say I don’t get out enough, that I waste my life’s blood cooped up here being morbid, being stupid. Sarah? Sarah? You hearing me?

The kid’s gonna die, Walt. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. Tell me something else, you genius.

Don’t laugh at me, woman.

You want me to start weeping now? This minute? We got cocktails at Dolinskys’ at—

That’s it. I’m asking you, I’m really asking you — how is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?

I ironed you a shirt. It’s on the bathroom knob.

Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.