I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and let it out and opened my eyes. I knew what my mother expected of me, and why she expected it, and even why she should expect it. I switched off the silent TV. “Okay.”
As ungainly as always, pants hoisted high, four inches of white socks showing between cuffs and shoes, he came into the room, and my mother closed the door as she stepped into the corridor, leaving us alone. He didn’t so much as glance at me but went to a window and stood gazing out at the summer day, which was as bright and warm as if no tragedy had ever occurred in the city.
When he didn’t say anything, I wondered if I should speak first and what I should say, but then he found his voice.
“I came by myself. I know buses. It’s not so hard. One transfer that was a little tricky, that’s all.” After a pause, he continued. “I don’t cry, see. I haven’t for a long time, and I’m not going to start now. You cry in our house, man, it’s like you let them win. I figured that out a thousand years ago. Even when they say ‘Take it to the garage,’ you can’t go out there and get weepy, because they’ll know. I don’t know how they know, but they do. Amalia said sometimes she thought they fed on our tears because they couldn’t make any more of their own. But then she always backed off and said it wasn’t their fault, something had happened to them to make them that way. I’m not so generous.”
I realized that nothing I could say mattered at that moment. Malcolm needed to talk, and he needed me to listen, no matter how difficult listening might be.
“That morning,” he continued, and I knew the morning he must mean, “she got up really early. She had a lot to do before she could take us for some fun without getting a lot of crap from them. She has to make them breakfast every morning, two different ones at two different times because they hardly ever eat together and they never want the same thing. I emptied the last night’s ashtrays for her, those two never think to do it, and changed the birdcage paper, did some other things. When the old man had breakfast and left for work and our old lady had her breakfast tray in her armchair in front of the TV, Amalia still had to do a bunch of stuff, so that when we got home from Midtown late afternoon, she’d be able to put dinner on the table and on the TV tray by the time he came back home bitching about everyone at work. You’d think he had to teach every idiot on the shop floor how to use a lathe every day, as if the whole crew of them can’t remember their job overnight. So Amalia, that morning, she’s peeling carrots and putting them in a bowl of water, and I’m peeling potatoes and putting them in another bowl of water, and we’re getting things done until she comes to the mushrooms. The lord and lady, they like their mushrooms. I mean, if there’s meat in the meal, there’s got to be gravy, and the gravy’s got to be chock full of sliced damn mushrooms. Or if there’s not gravy and it’s lasagna, that damn lasagna better be so thick with mushrooms you could choke to death on them. So Amalia, she’s got pounds of mushrooms, I don’t know how many, and she has to get them cleaned and peeled the way they like them, all before the three of us can catch that bus. But she won’t let me help, she says I’m too rough with mushrooms. Even if the damn mushrooms are in the damn lasagna or covered in gravy, the master of the lathe and his beloved can tell if they’ve been roughly handled, and you better steel yourself for the whining and the scolding and the general all-around pissiness.”
He paused to take a few deep breaths and steady himself. Still he faced the day rather than face me.
“So Amalia, she’s hurrying to get all those mushrooms done, trying to hurry without being rough, God forbid, and I’m watching her hands shake. I mean, she’s so
nervous about those freakin’ mushrooms, about doing them right and getting all of them done on time, as if the fate of the world depends on it. I look up at her face, and she’s focused on those mushrooms, man, totally focused, biting her lip to help her concentrate. She’s this brilliant person, brilliant person, she knows art and architecture, she knows music and books, and she can write, oh man, she can write, she’s going to be the most famous writer in the world or something, she’s got this full scholarship for four years, and they don’t see it or don’t care, all they want to do is bust her ass if she doesn’t prepare enough damn stupid mushrooms or doesn’t do them to the highest standards of the Pomerantz house.”
He didn’t speak for a long time, breathing hard and fast at first, almost gasping, but in time he grew calm.
“They make noises since it happened. The kind of noises they know they’re supposed to make at a time like this. How awful it is. How unfair it is. How much they miss her. How empty the house seems now. But it’s all just noise. There’s not a tear between them. They get takeout for dinner from this restaurant, from that one, and they complain about it. They try TV dinners, and they complain about them. They watch the boob tube like before. I swear, they talk at the walls instead of to each other. I take it to the garage without being told to take it. The only thing that’s really changed about them, besides what they have to eat, is how much they smoke. They’re two factory stacks, worse than ever, like they’re trying to fill the house with smoke so they won’t notice … she’s gone.”
At last he turned from the window and came to the bed and stared at my useless legs.
“She was so damn close to a clean getaway, you know.”
I dared to speak. “I know.”
“Full scholarship, the university in September. She could have been anything. Which is another reason I won’t cry. Hell if I will. She had it all. She was pretty and brilliant and funny and graceful and kind. She was so kind to everyone. She understood more about life, about the world, than I ever, ever, ever will. She lived so intensely, man, just so intensely. She lived more in seventeen years than most people would in a hundred, and that’s nothing to cry about. That’s nothing to cry about, is it?”
I said, “No.”
At last he met my eyes.
I said, “I loved her, too.”
Fortunately, earlier I had been taken off the IV drip as well as off the catheter. After Malcolm put down the safety railing, he climbed into bed with me, no less clumsy than ever. He put his head upon my chest, as if he were smaller than me, younger than me.
One of the many wonders of this world is that, if we allow it to happen, anyone newly met can all but overnight become a central figure in our lives, hardly less essential to us than air and water. Although we’ve made it a world of hatred and envy and violence, the preponderance of evidence proves to me that it is a world created to inspire friendship and love and kindness.
He said, “Don’t hate yourself, Jonah. You’re not your father and you never could be. You’ve got to be yourself, you and me still the way we’ve always been with each other. You’re all I have now, Jonah. Just you. Just you.”
His pledge never to cry lasted only until then.
86
So many people came to visit me at the hospital, but the one I most expected—Miss Pearl—never appeared. She had said that she’d given me more help than she ever should, what happened next would be up to all the people who lived along her streets, and my part of what happened next was up to me. I still hoped to see her again.
Until we were on our way home in Grandpa’s twenty-one-year-old Cadillac, I hadn’t given a thought to the cost of the medical care. I knew we had an inexpensive form of insurance, and suddenly I realized that the care I’d been given must have been the best.
Riding beside me in the backseat, Mom said, “The hospital refuses to bill us, sweetie. And all the doctors, too. We don’t want charity. We made our case to be allowed to pay over time, but none of them will take a dime. I don’t know, it is a Catholic hospital, and maybe all those years your grandma worked for the monsignor is why.”
I said, “There sure are good people in the world, aren’t there?”
“There sure are,” she agreed.
From behind the wheel, Grandpa Teddy said, “And I’m proud to be a chauffeur today for two of the best of the good. What say we stop at Baskin-Robbins and relieve them of three hand-packed quarts of ice cream for dessert, each of us with the right to pick one flavor?”
Mom said, “You don’t have to ask me twice.”