Then her mother called from Baltimore and said, “Jenny? Don’t you write your family any more?”
“Well, I’ve been so busy,” Jenny meant to say. Or: “Leave me alone, I remember all about you. It’s all come back. Write? Why should I write? You’ve damaged me; you’ve injured me. Why would I want to write?”
Instead, she started … not crying, exactly, but something worse. She was torn by dry, ragged sobs; she ran out of air; there was a grating sound in her chest. Her mother said, calmly, “Jenny, hang up. You know that couch in your living room? Go lie down on it. I’ll be there just as soon as Ezra can drive me.”
Pearl stayed two weeks, using all of her vacation time. The first thing she did was call Jenny’s hospital and arrange for sick leave. Then she set about putting the world in order again. She smoothed clean sheets on Jenny’s bed, brought her tea and bracing broths, shampooed her hair, placed flowers on her bureau. Becky, who had hardly seen her grandmother till now, fell in love with her. Pearl called Becky “Rebecca” and treated her formally, respectfully, as if she were not quite sure how much she was allowed. Every morning she walked Becky to the playground and swung her on the swings. In the afternoon they went shopping together. She bought Becky an old-fashioned dress that made her look solemn and reasonable. She bought picture books—nursery rhymes and fairy tales and The Little House. Jenny had forgotten about The Little House. Why, she had loved that book! She’d requested it every evening, she remembered now. She’d sat on that homely old sofa and listened while her mother, with endless patience, read it three times, four times, five … Now Becky said, “Read it again,” and Pearl returned to page one, and Jenny listened just as closely as Becky did.
Sundays, when his restaurant closed, Ezra drove up from Baltimore. He was not, in spite of his innocent face, an open sort of person, and rather than speak outright of Jenny’s new breakability he kept smiling serenely at some point just beyond her. She took comfort from this. There was already too much openness in the world, she felt—everyone raging and weeping and rejoicing. She imagined that Ezra was not subject to the ups and downs that jolted other people. She liked to have him read the papers to her (trouble in Honduras, trouble in Saigon, natural disasters in Haiti and Cuba and Italy) while she listened from a nest of deep blue blankets and a nightgown still warm from her mother’s iron.
On the second weekend, Cody blew in from wherever he’d vanished to most recently. He traveled on a breeze of energy and money; Jenny was impressed. He used her telephone for two hours like the wheeler-dealer he always was and arranged to pay for a full-time sitter, a slim young woman named Delilah Greening who turned out to be better help than Jenny would ever have again. Then he slung his suit coat over one shoulder, gave her a little salute, and was gone.
She slept, sometimes, for twelve and fourteen hours straight. She woke dislocated, frightened by the sunlit, tickling silence of the apartment. She mixed up dreams and real life. “How did it happen—?” she might ask her mother, before she remembered that it hadn’t happened (the Shriners’ parade through her bedroom, the elderly gentleman hanging by his heels from her curtain rod like a piece of fruit). Sometimes at night, voices came vividly out of the dark. “Dr. Tull. Dr. Tull,” they’d say, urgently, officially. Or, “Six hundred fifty milligrams of quinine sulfate …” Her own pulse thudded in her eardrums. She held her hand toward the light from the streetlamp and marveled at how white and bloodless she had become.
When her mother left and Delilah arrived, Jenny got up and returned to work. For a while, she carried herself as gently as a cup of liquid. She kept level and steady, careful not to spill over. But she was fine, she saw; she really was fine. Weekends, her mother and Ezra paid brief visits, or Jenny took Becky down to Baltimore on the train. They both dressed up for these trips and sat very still so as not to muss their clothes. Jenny felt purified, like someone who had been drained by a dangerous fever.
And the following summer, when she could have accepted more lucrative offers in Philadelphia or Newark, she chose Baltimore instead. She joined two older pediatricians, entered Becky in nursery school, and shortly thereafter purchased her Bolton Hill row house. She continued to feel fragile, though. She went on guarding a trembly, fluid center. Sometimes, loud noises made her heart race—her mother speaking her name without warning, or the telephone jangling late at night. Then she would take herself in hand. She would remind herself to draw back, to loosen hold. It seemed to her that the people she admired (one of her partners, who was a wry, funny man named Dan Charles; and her brother Ezra; and her neighbor Leah Hume) had this in common: they gazed at the world from a distance. There was something sheeted about them—some obliqueness that made them difficult to grasp. Dan, for instance, kept up such a steady, easy banter that you never could ask him about his wife, who was forever in and out of mental institutions. And Leah: she could laugh off the repeated failures of her crazy business ventures like so many pratfalls. How untouched she looked, and how untouchable, chuckling to herself and covering her mouth with a shapely, badly kept hand! Jenny studied her; you could almost say she took notes. She was learning how to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity.
“You’ve changed,” her mother said (all intensity herself). “You’ve grown so different, Jenny. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong, but something is.” She wanted Jenny to remarry; she hoped for a dozen grandchildren, at least; she was always after Jenny to get out and mingle, socialize, make herself more attractive, meet some nice young man. What Jenny didn’t tell her was, she simply couldn’t be bothered with all that. She felt textureless, so that events just slid right off her with no friction whatsoever; and the thought of the heartfelt conversations required by a courtship filled her with impatience.
Then she met Joe with his flanks of children—his padding, his moat, his barricade of children, all in urgent need of her brisk and competent attention. No conversation there—she and Joe had hardly found a moment to speak to each other seriously. They were always trying to be heard above the sound of toy trucks and xylophones. She didn’t even have time for thinking any more.
“Of course, the material object is nothing,” said the priest. He winced at a squeal from the waiting room. “That’s unimportant, the least of my concerns. Though it did have some historical value. It was donated, I believe, by the missionary brother of one of our parishioners.”
Jenny leaned back against the receptionist’s window and touched a hand to her forehead. “Well, I don’t …” she said. “What did you say this was?”
“A rhinoceros foot,” said the priest, “in the shape of an umbrella stand. Or an umbrella stand in the shape of a rhinoceros foot. It was an actual rhinoceros foot from … wherever rhinoceri come from.”
A naked toddler shot out a door like a stray piece of popcorn, pursued by a nurse with a hypodermic needle. The priest stood back to give them room. “We know it was there in the morning,” he said. “But at four o’clock, it was gone. And Slevin was in just previously; I’d asked him to come for a chat. Only I was on the phone when he arrived. By the time I’d hung up he was gone, and so was the rhinoceros foot.”
Jenny said, “I wonder if his mother had a rhinoceros foot.”
“Pardon?” said the priest.
She realized how this must have sounded, and she laughed. “No,” she said, “I don’t mean she had rhinoceros feet … oh, Lord …”
The priest said, “Dr. Tull, don’t you see this is serious? We have a child in trouble here, don’t you see that? Don’t you think something ought to be done? Where do you stand, Dr. Tull?”
Jenny’s smile faded and she looked into his face. “I don’t know,” she said, after a pause. She felt suddenly bereft, as if something were missing, as if she’d given something up. She hadn’t always been like this! she wanted to tell him. But aloud she said, “I only meant, you see … I believe he steals what reminds him of his mother. Hoovers and umbrella stands. Doesn’t that make sense
?”
“Ah,” said the priest.
“What’s next, I wonder,” Jenny said. She mused for a moment. “Picture it! Grand pianos. Kitchen sinks. Why, we’ll have his mother’s whole household,” she said, “her photo albums and her grade-school yearbooks, her college roommate asleep on our bed and her high school boyfriends in our living room.” She pictured a row of dressed-up boys from the fifties, their hair slicked down wetly, their shirts ironed crisply, perched on her couch like mannequins with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates on their knees. She laughed. The priest groaned. A little blue plastic helicopter buzzed across the waiting room and landed in Jenny’s hair.
8
This Really Happened
The summer before Luke Tull turned fourteen, his father had a serious accident at the factory he was inspecting. A girder swung around on its cable, hit Luke’s father and the foreman standing next to him, and swept them both off the walkway and down to the lower level of the factory. The foreman was killed. Cody lived, by some miracle, but he was badly hurt. For two days he lay in a coma. There was a question of brain damage, till he woke and, in his normal, crusty way, asked who the hell was in charge around here.
Three weeks later, he came home by ambulance. His thick black hair had been shaved off one side of his head, where a gauze patch covered the worst of his wounds. His face—ordinarily lean and tanned—was swollen across one cheekbone and turning different shades of yellow from slowly fading bruises. His ribs were taped and an arm and a leg were in casts—the right arm and the left leg, so he couldn’t use crutches. He was forced to lie in bed, cursing the game shows on TV. “Fools. Jackasses. Who do they think would be watching this crap?”
Luke’s mother, who had always been so spirited, lost something important to the accident. First, in the terrible coma days, she drifted around in a wash of tears—a small, wan, pink-eyed woman. Her red hair seemed drained of color. Luke would say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t hear, would sometimes snatch up her car keys as if mistaking who had called and go tearing off to the hospital again, leaving Luke alone. Even after the coma ended, it didn’t seem she came back completely. When Cody was brought home, she sat by his bed for hours saying nothing, lightly stroking one thick vein that ran down the inside of his wrist. She watched the game shows with a tremulous smile. “Jesus, look at them squawk,” Cody said disgustedly, and Ruth bent down and laid her cheek against his hand as if he’d uttered something wonderful.
Luke, who had once been the center of her world, now hung around the fringes. It was July and he had nothing to do. They’d only been living here—in a suburb of Petersburg, Virginia—since the end of the school year, and he didn’t know any boys his own age. The children on his block were all younger, thin voiced and excitable. It annoyed him to hear their shrieking games of roll-a-bat and the sputtery ksh! kshew! of their imaginary rifles. Toddlers were packed into flowered vinyl wading pools which they spent their mornings emptying, measuring cup by measuring cup, till every yard was a sea of mud. Luke could not remember ever being that young. Floating through the icy, white and gold elegance of the rented colonial-style house, he surfaced in various gilt-framed mirrors: someone awkward and unwanted, lurching on legs grown too long to manage, his face past cuteness but not yet solidified into anything better—an oval, fragile face, a sweep of streaky blond hair, a mouthful of braces that made his lips appear irregular and vulnerable. His jeans were getting too short but he had no idea how to go about buying new ones. He was accustomed to relying on his mother for such things. In the old days, his mother had done everything for him. She had got on his nerves, as a matter of fact.
Now he made his own breakfast—Cheerios or shredded wheat—and a sandwich for lunch. His mother cooked supper, but it was something slapped together, not her usual style at all; and mostly she would let Luke eat alone in the kitchen while she and Cody shared a tray in the bedroom. Or if she stayed with Luke, her talk was still of Cody. She never asked Luke about himself, no; it was “your daddy” this and “your daddy” that, never a thing but “your daddy.” How well he was bearing up, how he’d always borne up, always been so dependable from the earliest time she had known him. “I was not but nineteen when I met him,” she said, “and he was thirty years old. I was a homely chit of a girl and he was the handsomest thing you ever saw, so fine mannered and wearing this perfect gray suit. At the time, I was all set to marry Ezra, your daddy’s brother. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? Oh, I got around, in those days! Then your daddy stepped in. He was brazen as you please. Didn’t care how it looked, didn’t have an ounce of shame, just moved right in and claimed me for his own. Well, first I thought he was teasing. He could have had anyone, any girl he liked, somebody beautiful even. Then I saw he meant it. I didn’t know which way to turn, for I did love your Uncle Ezra, though he was not so … I mean, Ezra was a much plainer person, more like me, you would say. But your daddy’d walk into the room and it seemed like, I don’t know, the air just came alive, somehow. He put his hands on my shoulders one day and I told him please, I was engaged to marry Ezra, and he said he knew that. He stepped up close and I said really, Ezra was a good, good man, and he said yes, he was; and we hugged each other like two people sharing some bereavement and I said, ‘Why, you’re near about my brother-in-law!’ and he said, ‘Very nearly, yes,’ and he kissed me on the lips.”
Luke lowered his lashes. He wished she wouldn’t talk about such things.
“And if we’ve had our ups and downs,” she said, “well, I just want you to know that it wasn’t his fault, Luke. Look at me! I’m nothing but a little backwoods Garrett County farm girl, hardly educated. And I’m not so easy to get along with, either. I’m not so easygoing. You mustn’t blame him. Why, once—oh, you were in nursery school, I bet you don’t remember this—I packed you up and left him. I told him he didn’t love me and never had, only married me to spite his brother, Ezra, that he’d always been so jealous of. I accused him of terrible things, just terrible, and then while he was at work I carried you off to the railroad station and … this is funny now when I tell it, but it wasn’t then: while we were waiting on the bench a Marine threw up in my pocketbook. Came time to board the train and I just couldn’t make myself put my fingers in and get out the tickets, assuming they were still usable; and couldn’t bear to reach in for the money to buy more tickets, either. So I called your daddy on the telephone, begged a dime from a nun and said, ‘Cody, come and get me; this isn’t really what I want to be doing. Oh, Cody,’ I said, ‘we’ve got so interwoven; even if you didn’t love me at all, now we’re so entwined. It’s you I have to stay with.’ And he left off work and drove down to collect me, all steady and sure in his fine gray suit, nothing like the rest of the world. Don’t you remember that? You’ve forgotten all about it,” she said. “It’s just as well, I reckon. Luke, when you almost lose a person, everything comes so clear! You see how much he matters, how there’s no one the least bit like him; he’s irreplaceable. How he always puts us first; I mean, has never, in all his days, left you and me behind when he’s off on business, but carts us to every new town he’s called to because he won’t do like his father, he says: travel about forgetting his own relations. It’s not true that he brings us along because he doesn’t trust me. He really cares for our welfare. When I think now,” she said, “about your daddy kissing me that first time—‘Very nearly, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, very nearly your brother-in-law,’ and kissed me so quiet but definite, insisting, like he wouldn’t take no for an answer—why, I see now that’s when my life began! But at the time I had no notion, didn’t grasp the importance. I didn’t know back then that one person can have such effect on another.”
But if she was changed (if even Luke was changed—fading into someone transparent, he imagined), Cody was absolutely the same. After all, Cody hadn’t suffered the strain of that coma; he’d been absent from it. He hadn’t worried he would die, once he came to, because it wouldn’t occur to him that he was the type to die. He’d sa
iled through the whole experience with his usual combination of nonchalance and belligerence, and now he lay thrashing on his bed wondering when he could get up again. “What I mainly am is mad,” he told Luke. “This whole damn business has left me mad as hell. I felt that girder hit, you know that? I really felt it hit, and it hurt, and all the time I was flying through the air I wanted to hit it back, punch somebody; and now it seems I’m still waiting for the chance. When do I get to get even? And don’t talk to me about lawsuits, compensation. The only thing I want to do is hit that girder back.”
“Mom says would you like some soup,” said Luke, wiping his palms nervously down his thighs.
“No, I wouldn’t like soup. What’s she always trying to feed me for? Listen, Luke. If your grandma calls again today, I want you to tell her I’ve gone back to work.”
“To work?”
“I can’t stand to hear her fret on the phone any more.”
“But all along,” Luke said, “you’ve been telling her you were too sick for company. Yesterday you were too sick and today you’ve gone back to work? What’ll she think?”
“It’s nothing to me what she thinks,” said Cody. He never sounded very fond of Grandma Tull, who had called from Baltimore every day since the accident. Luke enjoyed her, the little he knew of her, but Cody said looks were deceiving. “She puts on a good front,” he told Luke. “You don’t know what she’s like. You don’t know what it was like growing up with her.”
Luke felt he did know (hadn’t he heard it all a million times?) but his father had got started now and wouldn’t be stopped. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “Listen, now. This really happened.” That was the way he always introduced his childhood. “This really happened,” he would say, as if it were unthinkable, beyond belief, but then what followed never seemed so terrible to Luke. “I swear it: your grandma had this friend named Emmaline that she hadn’t seen in years. Only friend she ever mentioned. And Emmaline lived in … I forget. Anyhow, someplace far away. So one Christmas I saved up the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to wherever this Emmaline lived. I slaved and borrowed and stole the money, and presented my mother with the ticket on Christmas morning. I was seventeen at the time, old enough to take care of the others, and I said, ‘You leave tomorrow, stay a week, and I’ll watch over things till you get back.’ And you know what she said? Listen; you won’t believe this. ‘But Cody, honey,’ she said. ‘Day after tomorrow is your brother’s birthday.’ ”