The Night Remembers

10

On the way home there were a few snow flurries. They made the night seem darker and more endless, and inside my car, the heater roaring, I felt isolated, as if I were trekking along across an infinite and unknown prairie. Drunks from taverns weaved home on foot, angled against the bitter wind and flurries. The closer I got to my apartment house the more patrol cars became evident, a teenage driver stopped here, an aged black man with empty eyes and a shabby topcoat stopped there.

The Alma’s parking lot was filled. My spot, clearly marked Manager, was empty. Sometimes I’d come home late, find something there, decide against hassling the residents to find out whose car it was, and park three blocks away, the closest parking area.

Lights shone in only two of the fifteen units as I made my way up the sidewalk to my apartment. The flurries were becoming real snow now. I stood outside my door letting the snow hit my face and melt. I even stuck my tongue out so a few flakes would land there. The first snow always makes me revert to childhood; over on 10th Street S.W. I was the first kid on the block out with my Western Auto sled, even if only a few flurries had been spotted. I smiled at the memory. So many decades ago. It seemed impossible — and even more impossible that the boy of that memory had anything to do with the man who stood here now, all these long years later. There were going to be a lot of different me’s crowding that coffin when the time came.

With the door only halfway opened, the first thing I noticed was the smell, the unmistakably pleasant odor of eggs, hash browns, toast, and coffee.

When I got in and closed the door, she came out of the kitchen, an apron tied around the waist of her forest-green shortie robe, a spatula in one hand and a glass of clear liquid in the other. The liquid would be vodka. She liked to drink it straight and warm. She was one of those people who got mildly drunk on two stiff drinks and then coasted on the buzz the rest of the evening.

“You want to go in and kiss Hoyt?”

“Sure.”

I went into the bedroom. In the moonlight I could see Hoyt in his blue jammies with the feet. She had him carefully propped between two pillows so he wouldn’t roll off the double bed. I went over and bent down and kissed him. His face was warm with sleep. He breathed as if he were slightly plugged up with a cold. Sometimes, like now, I just closed my eyes and held him tight. At these moments I knew he was mine and knew that however thorny my relationship with Faith, she’d given me my life’s last important gift. I touched his plump, warm little cheek with my fingers and pulled the covers up to his chest again (Hoyt was a hell of a kicker and could strip his bed in twenty minutes just by rolling around). I plumped his pillows, making sure they’d keep him from falling off.

In the kitchen, she said, “I should get him baptized.”

“I’m not pushing.”

“You’re a Catholic. You know you want him baptized.”

“I tried to call you earlier.”

“Had the phone off the hook.”

“How you doing?”

She looked at me. Her red hair slightly mussed, her green eyes red from crying earlier, she said, “Fair.”

“You must be doing better than fair.”

“Why?”

I grinned. “The food. Looks like you’re going to feed a baseball team.”

“Oh. Right.” She sounded slightly dazed. “I woke up in my apartment. It was real dark and funny.”

“Funny?”

She nodded. “You know how you wake up and you always hear cars going by on Second Avenue?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I woke up and I didn’t hear anything. It was as if — as if I’d died. It was very dark and there wasn’t any sound at all.”

I took two steps toward her. I was tall enough to tuck her into my arms. I held her just that way for a long time, closing my eyes as I had with Hoyt. I’d always assumed that because of my age, the first death we’d have to face together would be my own. All that was changed now — at least potentially.

“The bacon,” she said.

“The hell with the bacon.”

She started crying. “At least turn it off, would you?”

“Sure.”

I went over and turned it off, then took out the eight strips and laid them on the double fold of paper towel she’d laid on the counter. I daubed the excess grease off with the towels and then put the strips on a white china plate.

I went back to her and put my arms out but she said, “I guess I just don’t feel like being held anymore.” She looked at me and kind of shrugged. “I’m sorry.” She glanced at the eggs and the bacon and the toast popped up in the silver four-slice. “We should eat.”

“You really feel like eating?”

“I don’t want to waste the food. It’s your food.”

“I’m not worried about the food.”

“I could try to eat.”

“I wish you would.”

She ate three eggs, four strips of bacon, and two pieces of toast that threatened to disintegrate under the weight of all the Kraft grape jelly.

“I’d hate to see what you’d do if you ever really got hungry,” I said.

She stuck her tongue out. “Very funny.”

We sat at the drop-leaf dining room table in the living room, the table I’d bought Sharon right after World War II, the table at which my boys had eaten while growing up. They were fathers themselves now, one in California and one in New Hampshire. I’d turned on the small light on top of the TV and opened the blinds so we could see the snow. It was coming hard and big and fluffy now, and it was going to stick. If it had been just any other night when Faith and I were getting along, it would have been wonderful to sit here and feel animal-snug and animal-warm sheltered from the cold and snow.

She said, “They’ve scheduled me for a mammogram the day after tomorrow. You know what that is?”

“Yes. Where?”

“Mercy.”

I sipped coffee. “You didn’t tell me what the doctor said. At least not exactly.”

“I’m sorry about this morning. I was pretty freaked out.” Then she smiled. “God, ‘freaked out.’ I haven’t said that since 1968.”

“That’s all right. I still say ‘scram.’ I don’t believe anybody’s said that since 1939.”

“ ‘Scram’?”

“Ummmm.”

“I had an uncle who used to say that.”

“He probably wasn’t your favorite uncle, though.”

She smiled. “I guess he wasn’t.”

“So what did the doctor say?”

“He said that eighty percent of the lumps found in women’s breasts are noncancerous. They’re filled with fluid and called cyst-asperate. A lot of these the doctor can check right in his office. By touching the lump, he can generally tell how well defined the edge is, how close to the surface it is.” She had a quick hit of her vodka. “I wasn’t that lucky. About him being able to tell right in his office. He said he just couldn’t be sure.”

“That isn’t necessarily bad news.”

“I know. I’m just scared.”

“Does breast cancer run in your family?”

“Two aunts. One survived it, one didn’t.”

“This could all be about nothing.”

“I know.”

“Your babysitter Marcia said her cousin Rosie turned out to be all right.”

“Isn’t she great? Marcia, I mean.” She was never more enthusiastic than when she was describing a woman she liked. She’d had problems with men all her life — too beautiful for some, not beautiful enough for others, though I found that unimaginable — and as a consequence she spoke with pure delight about women and with great guarded skepticism about men. Then, “You mind if I stay here for a while?”

I grinned again. “Honey, I’ve been asking you to move in with me for a year. Why would I object now?”

“I guess I didn’t figure you would.”

“Anything you need, you just tell me.”

“All right.” She paused and looked at me. “There’s something I should tell you.”

She used a certain tone whenever she was about to tell me something that would hurt me. She used that tone now. “I’ve been seeing somebody.”

“All right.”

“Kind of seriously, I mean.”

I nodded.

“Seriously for me, anyway. He’s the usual rotten jerk. He even hit me once. He gets real jealous and — I don’t know what to do.”

I could feel my jaw start working.

“You know how I told you once that sometimes I need you to be my lover and sometimes I need you to be my father?”

I cleared my throat. “I remember.”

“Well, for a while anyway, I need you to be my father. Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“I mean, I’m not going to see this guy. I really want it to be over with.”

“All right.”

“But I don’t feel like — well, you know, making love or anything. Can you handle that?”

“Sure.”

“And I’m really scared so I’m probably going to be kind of bitchy to be around. Will that be okay?”

I laughed. “Yeah, I sure haven’t ever seen you bitchy before.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on mine.

“God, I really do love you. You know that?”

I slept on the side of the bed with the nightstand in case the phone rang. I had a tough time getting to sleep. Hoyt rolled over against me and I just held him small and warm against me and looked out the window at the snow in the yard light. Faith went to sleep pretty fast, snoring softly and wetly in the darkness. Just as I started to drift off, Hoyt’s considerable little fist bonked me on the nose hard enough to make me tear up. Then I teared up for real and lay there cold and scared. I said a Hail Mary for Faith. I hoped Hail Marys still applied in the modern world.