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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
'The best short story writer in the world' Susan Hill 'This book is a spectacular literary revelation' Sunday Times The collected stories of an award-winning, modern classic American writer who has been compared to Alice Munro, John Updike – and even Anton Chekhov Tenderly, incisively, Edith Pearlman captured life on the page like no one else. Spanning forty years of writing, moving from tsarist Russia to the coast of Maine, from Jerusalem to Massachusetts, these astonishing stories reveal one of America's greatest modern writers. Across a stunning array of scenes-an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, an old woman's deathbed confession of her mother's affair-Edith Pearlman crafts a timeless and unique sensibility, shot through with wit, lucidity and compassion. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe Edith Pearlman (1936–2023) published her debut collection of stories in 1996, aged 60. She won The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Binocular Vision. She published over 250 works of short fiction in magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work won three O. Henry Prizes, the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and a Mary McCarthy Prize, among others. In 2011, Pearlman was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, which put her in the ranks of luminaries like John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.
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“[Pearlman’s stories are] meticulously made, miraculously precise, and so fully populated that you marvel one mind could invent so many distinct human beings from scratch”
FINANCIAL TIMES
“A spectacular literary revelation”
SUNDAY TIMES
“A genius of the short story”
GUARDIAN
“Lucid, witty, devastating… a masterclass on how to deliver literature’s bittersweet blow in simply a few pages”
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
“The equal of Updike or Munro”
INDEPENDENT
BINOCULAR VISION
EDITH PEARLMAN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANN PATCHETT
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
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forjosephvi
CONTENTS
BINOCULAR VISION
INTRODUCTION
To that great list of human mysteries which includes the construction of the pyramids and the persistent use of Styrofoam as a packing material let me add this one: why isn’t Edith Pearlman famous? Of course by not having the level of recognition her work so clearly deserves, she gives those of us who love her the smug satisfaction of being in the know. Say the words Edith Pearlman to certain enlightened readers and you are instantly acknowledged as an insider, a person who understands and appreciates that which is beautiful. Still, I think that Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories should be the book with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure. Put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That’s where they belong.
I first read Edith Pearlman when I was the guest editor for Best American Short Stories, in 2006. Somehow two of my favorite stories in the more than one hundred I was given to choose from—“On Junius Bridge” and “Self-Reliance”—were by the same writer, a writer I’d never heard of. How was this possible? Katrina Kenison, who was then the series editor, told me that finding new Edith Pearlman stories year after year was one of the greatest pleasures of her job. After a ridiculous amount of consideration, I decided to include “Self-Reliance” in the collection, only because taking two stories by the same author simply isn’t done. From there I went straight to her backlist: How to Fall, Love Among the Greats, and Vaquita. My transcendent love for Edith Pearlman was sealed.
xBut even when love is sealed, it can still grow. When Best American Short Stories 2006 was published, there was a party for the book in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for that party three actors were hired to do readings of three of the stories from the collection. It was going to be my job to do the introductions, except that two days before the event, one of the actors fell through. I was told it would be up to me to read “Self-Reliance.”
While I am no stranger to giving public readings, there’s a big difference between reading your own work and performing someone else’s work alongside two professional actors. And so I locked myself in my hotel room and, sitting in the middle of the bed, I practiced. It is not a long story and I easily read it aloud twenty times before I was sure I had it. I am here to tell you: There are very few things that hold up to being read twenty times aloud, and very, very few things that improve with every pass, but the more I subjected “Self-Reliance” to repetition, the more it bloomed. I felt like a junior watchmaker taking apart a Vacheron Constantin. I knew the story was good when I first read it, but when I had read it twenty times I could see that it was flawless. Every word in every sentence was indispensable, every observation subtle and complex. The rhythm of the language carried the reader forward as much as the plot. Every time I thought I had mastered all of the nuances, the story offered up another part of itself to me, something quiet and undemanding that had been standing back and waiting for me to find it. This is not to say that the stories in this book need to be read repeatedly in order to be fully comprehended. It’s to say that there is such richness in them, such depth of spirit, that they are capable of taking you as far as you are willing to go.
It is without a trace of vanity that I tell you I brought the house down that night. Edith Pearlman herself was in the audience, which made me feel like I had the lead in Uncle Vanya on a night that Chekhov was in attendance. My only challenge was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, “Did you hear that? Do you understand how good this is?”
A year later, I was asked to give a reading at my public library in Nashville for adult story hour (grown-ups who come together at lunch to hear grown-up fiction) and I had the chance to read “Self-Reliance” again. A repeat performance! The considerable crowd xiwent wild. They wanted to know how they had they never heard of Edith Pearlman before. I told them I understood their confusion. I had used less than half of my allotted hour and so I suggested a discussion of the story.
“No,” someone called out. “We want another Pearlman story.”
“Read another story,” the audience cried.
So I picked up one of her books (it was a library, after all) and started to read aloud. And even though I wasn’t prepared, the brilliance of the work carried me through. It turned out to be the second-best reading I have ever given.
When I was asked to write this introduction, an invitation I leapt at, I sat down to read the manuscript with a pen in my hand. I thought it would be a good idea to underline some of the best sentences so I could quote them along the way, but I could quickly see the ridiculousness of that idea. I was underlining the entire book. Okay, I thought, just put a check by your favorite stories so you can be sure to mention them, but by the time I’d finished reading the book, every one of them was checked. Every story.
What you have in your hands now is a treasure, a book you could take to a desert island knowing that every time you got to the end you could simply turn to the front cover and start it all again. It is not a collection of bus crashes, junkies, and despair. Despair is much easier to write about than self-reliance. These stories are an exercise in imagination and compassion, a trip around the world, an example of what happens when talent meets discipline and a stunning intelligence. This collection offers a look at an artist at the height of her powers. Once you have read it, I hope you will go forth and spread the news. Edith Pearlman has been a secret much too long.
ann patchett Author of Run and Bel Canto Nashville, July 2010xii
SELECTED STORIES2
Inbound
ON THE SUBWAY Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem. Then she read the names from the bottom up. Saying something backward made it easy to remember, sealed it in.
When the family got off at the Harvard Square station she frowned at a platform sign. “Outbound?” she asked her mother.
Joanna was bending over Lily’s stroller, adjusting the child’s harness. So Ken answered. “Outbound in this case means away from the center of the city,” he said. “There are two sets of tracks, coextensive.” He paused. Coextensive? Sophie had learned to read at three; her vocabulary at seven was prodigious; still … “They coextend,” he tried. “One set of tracks carries trains outbound and the other carries them …?”
“Inbound,” Sophie said. “Then when we go back to the hotel we’ll go inbound. But why aren’t the inbound tracks next to these ones? Yesterday, under the aquarium …”
Ken inhaled deeply; for a moment Sophie regretted getting him started. “This Harvard Square station used to be the terminus,” he told her, “the last stop. When the engineers enlarged the system they ran up against the sewers, so they had to separate inbound and outbound vertically.” He had invented this explanation, or maybe he’d heard it somewhere. “Inbound is one level below us.” That much he was sure of.
The family walked down a shallow ramp to the concourse. Sophie led the way. Her straight blond hair half covered the multicolored hump of her new backpack, a birthday gift from her parents. During their early-married travels Ken and Joanna had worn explorers’ rucksacks to out-of-the-way places. After Sophie was 4born they traveled only to France, always with their little girl. This venture from the northern plains, across half the country, was the first family excursion since Lily’s birth two years ago. “An excursion is a loop,” Joanna had lightly explained to Sophie. “We start from home, we end up at home.”
Ken, pushing the heavy stroller and its calm passenger, kept pace with Sophie. Joanna was at his heels, swinging the diaper bag and her scuffed brown pocketbook.
On the concourse Sophie paused. “The stairs are at the left,” Ken said. Sophie started toward them, her parents like friendly bears behind her. Other people on the way out pushed through unresisting turnstiles, but because of the large stroller Ken and Joanna and Sophie and Lily had to use the gate near the token vendor’s booth. The stairway to the street was broad enough to climb together. Ken and Joanna lifted the stroller between them. All four, blinking, reached the white light of Harvard Square at the same time. Lily, startled and amused by the hawkers, made her familiar gurgle.
“Mama,” she said to Ken.
“Dada, darling,” he returned.
“Dada.”
“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” said Sophie, dancing in front of the stroller.
“Mama,” Lily said.
She was not yet able to say her sister’s name, though sometimes, on the living room floor, when Sophie was helping her pick up a toy, Lily would raise her odd eyes and gaze at the older girl with brief interest.
She had Down’s syndrome. At two she was small, fair, and unfretful, though Ken and Joanna knew—there was little about Down’s that they did not now know—that the condition was no guarantee of placidity. Lily was just beginning to crawl, and her muscle tone was improving; the doctor was pleased. In the padded stroller she could sit more or less erect.
“Lily clarifies life,” Sophie had heard her father say to one of his friends. Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals 5before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.
Even today, walking through the gates of the university that looked like the college where her parents taught, but redder, older, heavier; leaving behind shoppers in Harvard Square; feeling a thudding below their feet as another subway hurtled outbound or inbound; selecting one path within a web of walks in a yard surrounded by buildings … even today, in this uncrowded campus, they moved as a cluster.
“Massachusetts Hall,” Ken pointed out. “The oldest building in the university. That’s the statue of John Harvard over there. And dormitories new since our time—would you like to live here someday, Sophie?”
“I don’t know.”
Clumped around the stroller they entered another quadrangle. There was a church on one side and, on the opposite side, a stone staircase as wide as three buildings. The stairs rose toward a colonnade. “That’s the fifth-biggest library in the world,” her father told her.
“What’s the … sixth?”
He smiled. “The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. You were there.”
Paris? Sophie recalled stained glass. They’d had to climb narrow, winding stairs to reach a second floor. Her mother, soon to give birth, had breathed hard. Blue light from the windows poured upon them—upon her tall, thin father, her tall, bulging mother, her invisible sister, herself. She recalled the Metro, too, as smelly as day camp.
“The Bibliothèque?” her father said again. “Remember?”
“No.”
“Ken,” said Joanna.
They drifted toward the fifth-biggest library. Joanna and Ken carried the stroller up the stone stairs. Sophie, in a spasm of impatience, ran to the top, ran down, flew up again. She hid behind a pillar. They didn’t notice. She welcomed them at the entrance.
Inside, an old man sat at a desk inspecting backpacks. The family crossed a marble hallway and climbed marble stairs that ended in a nave of computer terminals. At last Lily began to whimper. They pushed the stroller into an area of card catalogs. Joanna picked Lily 6up. “We’ll go into a big reading room,” she crooned into a lobeless ear. “We’ll look out a window.”
Sophie watched them walk away—her mother so narrow in the familiar black coat. “Where are the books?” she asked her father.
“My little scholar,” he said, and took her hand.
The entrance to the cave of books was just a door. An ordinary, freckled boy who looked like her high school cousin casually guarded the way. Her father fished in every pocket for the card that would admit them; finally he found it.
“Children—,” began the boy.
“Ten minutes,” Ken promised. Sophie had heard this tone reassuring a woman who had slipped on the ice in front of their house; her father had used it also to soothe their cat when she was dying of cancer. “We’re in town from Minnesota. I want her to see this treasure. Five minutes.” The boy shrugged.
Sophie followed her father through the door. Her heart, already low, dropped farther, as when some playground kid shoved her. Upright books were jammed shoulder to shoulder within high metal cases, no room to breathe, book after book, shelf above shelf, case following case with only narrow aisles between. Too many books! Too many even if the print were large. This was floor 4 east, said painted letters on the wall.
They walked up and down the aisles until they reached the end of 4 East. Then they turned; 4 East became 4 South. Behind a grille stood an aisle of little offices, all with their doors closed. Sophie wondered what her mother was doing. Section 4 West came next. It was just like 4 East, books, books, books; a tiny elevator hunched among them. “Where does that go?” she whispered.
“Up to five and six,” he whispered back. “Down to three and two and one and A and B—”
“Are the five minutes up?”
“—and C and D.”
This time it was Sophie who led the way—easier than she’d anticipated: you just hugged the perimeter. There was even an exit sign. The freckled boy outside nodded at them.
Her mother waited next to the stroller. Lily was sitting in it again, sucking on a bottle. Sophie kissed Lily seven times.
“Was she impressed?” she heard her mother ask.
“Awed,” her father said.
7She gave Lily a ride, moving among card drawers on wooden legs. Ken and Joanna watched their children appear and disappear.
“Those silent stacks,” he said. “The elevator, where I first kissed you—I’d forgotten it.” He kissed her again, lightly, on the elegant cheekbone that neither girl had inherited.
She kept her face raised, as if seeking sunlight. Then: “Let’s try the museum,” she said.
“Sophie will like the Renoirs,” Ken agreed.
But at the museum Sophie found the Seated Bather spacey. Her father directed her gaze toward a painting of ballerinas haphazardly practicing. What was the point of that? Only one work caught her interest: substantial angels with dense overlapping feathers and bare feet reflected in the sand. “So you like Burne-Jones,” he rumbled.
They were soon back on the street again, talking about lunch. Ken and Joanna decided on a favorite restaurant, hoping it still existed. They headed in its direction on a sidewalk next to the backs of buildings. “The library’s rear door,” Ken said, pointing. Sophie averted her gaze. They crossed the street at the traffic light.
That is, three of them did. Sophie, her head still awkwardly turned, got caught on the curb as the light flashed don’t walk. Her parents lumbered away. Other people bore down upon her, blocking her view. By the time the crowd rushed past, the cars on the street had begun to roll again, and she was forced to stand still.
That was all right. Standing still was what she was supposed to do when she became separated from a parent. “If both of us run around, you see, the chances are that we’ll never be in the same place at the same time,” her mother had explained.
“Like atoms,” Sophie said.
“I guess so … But if one of us stays put, the moving one will eventually cross the still one’s path.”
It made sense. Sophie had imagined that, in such an event, she would turn cool, a lizard under a leaf.
Instead she turned hot, even feverish. She sang “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” under her breath. The sign changed to walk. She sang “Rhody” backward. Her mother would soon cross her path. But her mother could not leave the stroller. The sign changed back to don’t walk. Her father, then. He would stride across the street, 8two leaps would do it, he would scoop her up, he would put her on his shoulder, though she was much too big for such a perch. She would ride there for blocks and blocks; the restaurant would have a peaked roof and a lot of panes in the windows; they always chose restaurants like that.
Joanna had maneuvered the stroller rightward, had taken a step or two, had turned back for Sophie, not seen her, looked right, twice, and then left, down a pedestrian walkway, and spotted amid a crowd of kids around a mime the fair hair and multicolored backpack of her daughter. Her heart bobbled like a balloon.
“Where’s Sophie?” Ken said at her shoulder.
She pointed confidently and pushed the stroller close to the slanted window of a bakery. She’d lift Lily out and all three would have a good view of the mime—he was deftly climbing an invisible ladder—and of the delighted children, particularly Sophie in her new backpack and her old turquoise jacket, only that kid’s jacket was green and she was taller than Sophie and her hair was yellower than Sophie’s, much yellower. Only an unnatural parent could mistake that common candle flame for her dear daughter’s pale incandescence.
Sophie, telling herself to stand still, was jostled from behind. She turned to object, but the jostler had disappeared. The sign changed to walk. Without forethought, though not unwillingly, she leaped into the street.
Sweaty, gasping, she fetched up on the opposite curb. She did not see her family. She saw strollers here and there, but none of them were Lily’s; they were the fold-up kind for regular kids. She saw a wheelchair. That wasn’t relevant, she scolded herself, brushing her nose with the back of her hand. Lily would walk someday. A jester with a painted white face seemed to wave. She ignored him. She drifted toward the center of the square. Earlier she had noticed a newsstand … a kiosk, her father had said.
The newsstand turned out to be a bright little house of magazines and newspapers and maps. A man wearing earmuffs sat at a cash register. The place shook slightly every few minutes: the subway was underneath.
There Sophie waited, alone and unknown and free.
9By now her parents would have retraced their steps. They had already crossed her empty path.
She felt most comfortable near the far wall. Foreign newspapers overlapped one another. There were French papers. She recognized Le Monde from that trip to Paris. The World; her father, if he were here, would request the translation. There were newspapers from other parts of Europe, too—she could tell that their words were Spanish or Italian, though she did not know the meanings. In some papers even the alphabets were mysterious. Letters curved like Aladdin’s lamp, or had dots and dashes underneath them like a second code. Characters she had seen in Chinese restaurants stood straight up, little houses, each with a family of its own. Lily might learn to read, her mother had said. Not soon, but someday. Until that day, all pages would look like these, confusing her, making her feel more left out. Still, in a few years’ time she would be walking. She would stand close to Sophie. Maybe too close. What does it mean? she would whisper. What does it mean? she would whine, and pull at Sophie’s sleeve.
The man with the earmuffs gave Sophie an inquisitive look. She turned to study a newspaper. Each word was many letters long, and each letter was a combination of thick and thin lines. She knew all at once that this was German. Her father played Bach on his harpsichord, from a facsimile of an old manuscript; the title and the directions were in German. If Sophie stayed in this pretty little house for the rest of her life she could probably learn one or two of the languages whose alphabet was familiar. Here was how she would do it: she would read the English papers thoroughly and then, knowing the news by heart, she would figure out the words’ partners in the other papers.
Joanna and Ken were behaving sensibly. Joanna was waiting near the mime, who was now walking an imaginary tightrope. He stopped, alarm on his painted face. He was pretending to lose his balance. His stiffened body canted slowly sideways in discrete jerks like a minute hand until at ten past the hour he collapsed into himself and in a wink became a man hanging from a tightrope, left arm upward and unnaturally long, right one waving desperately, legs splayed.
Ken had gone looking for Sophie. He would follow their route 10backward to the museum, into the museum, from the Burne-Jones camp-counselor angels to the Degas and the Renoir. He would return to the library if necessary; Joanna imagined his tense interrogation of the man who inspected backpacks. The mime was collecting a thicker crowd; she had to crane her head to watch him. Sophie would enjoy this outdoor show once Ken found her, if she had not been snatched into a car, if she were not to end her life as a photograph on a milk carton. Joanna must not think that way, not not not; she must imagine normal outcomes like normal mothers, like mothers of normal children. The girl has wandered off, ruining our day because of some rush of curiosity, hyperintuitive they call her, I call her inconsiderate, doesn’t she know enough to make things easier, not harder, don’t we have it hard enough already with little Miss Misfit here, oh, my sweet Lily, my sweet Sophie, my darling daughters; and so I’ll gaze at Lily dozing and think of Sophie when she was an infant and slept on her side in her crib with arms extended forward and legs too; she looked like a bison on a cave. I remember, I remember … She probably remembers, she with the genius IQ who can sing songs backward. Ken loves to show off her memory and her queer talents, his prize onion. The mime’s pedaling to safety; he’s earned that applause. Haven’t I got coins for his hat? But I can’t leave the stroller, we can’t leave each other, any of us. Of course Sophie will remember to stand still as soon as she realizes she’s lost. Where would she go? She doesn’t know this town. She’s seen only the museum, she didn’t like it, and the library, she hated it; Ken was hurt. She liked the subway. All kids like the underground: sewers, buried treasure, zombies. All kids like trains. They want to be headed somewhere, inbound, outbound …
Ken’s face was putty.
“The library?” she needlessly asked.
“No,” he panted.
“Come,” Joanna said. “I know where she’ll go.”
Sophie, wriggling one arm out of the backpack, decided to start with the French newspapers. She was to study French next year anyway, with the rest of the special class. But she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t soar with the new subject. She was tied to her first language, hers and Lily’s. Still, she’d learn the rules. She’d listen and sometimes talk. Now, staring at Le Monde, pretending that the 11man with earmuffs had gone home, she let her eyes cross slightly, the way she wasn’t supposed to, and she melted into the spaces between the paragraphs until she entered a room beyond the newsprint, a paneled room lit by candles, walled in leather volumes, the way she had wanted the fifth-biggest library to look. Though more books had been written than she could ever read—she had realized that as soon as she saw Section 4 East—she would manage to read a whole lot of them, in golden dens like the one she was seeing. She would read as many as her parents had read. She would grow as large as her parents had grown. Like them she would study and get married and laugh and drink wine and hug people.
Steadied by this vision, she let herself look further. Her life would be lived in the world, not in this paper house. She foresaw that. She foresaw also that as she became strong her parents would dare to weaken. They too might tug at her clothing, not meaning to annoy.
Lily would never leave her. “She will always be different, darling,” her mother had said. At the time Sophie had thought that her mother meant we will always be different. Now she added a new gloss: I will always be different.
She felt her cheek tingle, as if it had been licked by the sad, dry tongue of a cat. At full growth Lily’s head would be almost level with Sophie’s shoulder. Lily would learn some things. Mostly she would learn Sophie. They would know each other forward and backward. They would run side by side like subway tracks, inbound and outbound. Coextensive.
She had to return to her family now; she had to complete the excursion. She shoved her free arm into the strap and settled the backpack on her shoulders. She walked past the man in earmuffs without saying good-bye.
Ken and Joanna bumped the stroller down the subway stairs. Ordinarily they would have joined the line at the token vendor’s booth to be admitted through his gate. Instead Joanna inserted a token and hurried through the turnstile. Ken handed her their little girl across the device. He pressed his own token into the slot and turned around and lifted the stroller above his head and burst through the stile buttocks first. They put Lily back into the stroller and rushed toward the ramps.
12“Outbound?” said Ken.
“She knows better.”
On the ramp they had to arc around an old woman who had paused mid-journey with her trash bag on her left and her collapsible cart on her right. “That’s okay,” she called.
The inbound train had just left. The platform held five people who had missed it: three students, one bearded man, and a tall black woman—an islander, Joanna could tell; her regality proclaimed her origins, that magazine under her arm was probably in French.
Sophie wasn’t far behind them. She had found the subway entrance as soon as she left the little house. While her father was bearing the empty stroller backward through the turnstile, she was beginning her descent from the street. While her mother was choosing inbound, Sophie was thinking about joining the line of token buyers, of promising to pay later. She decided not to risk conversation with the man in the booth. By the time her parents reached the inbound platform she was slipping underneath the turnstile. She started down the ramp.
She saw them before she reached the bottom. Her mother sat on a bench, holding Lily in her lap. Her father, standing, bent over them both. They looked like everyday people, but Sophie wasn’t fooled—her mother’s knees were knocked together under her coat and her feet were far apart, their ankles bent inward so wearily that the anklebones almost touched the floor. Without seeing her father’s face, she knew he was close to tears. An old woman with a cart leaned against the wall. As Sophie appeared the woman said, “Now your reunion,” in a conversational tone, though rather loud.
Ken turned and unbent: a basketball replay in slow motion.
Joanna took relief like an injection; pain was killed and feeling as well. She saw that the child had undergone some unsettling experience, but Joanna had no sympathy to offer now. Perhaps this once Sophie would be given the blessing of forgetfulness.
And indeed Sophie moved forward with a light tread, as if she had not just witnessed the future unrolling.
Lily attended slackly. But then she raised her mittened hand.
“Phie!”
Day of Awe
HE WAS THE LAST JEW in a cursed land.
A ruined country, a country of tricksters. Rich haciendas hid within the folds of mountains. Guns lay under crates of bananas. Even the green parrots practiced deception. They rested in trees, not making a sound; suddenly they rose as one, appearing and departing at the same time, leaving the observer abandoned.
The only Jew!
In truth, there was a second Jew: his son, Lex. They faced each other across the kitchen table. Lex seemed to pity the plight of his father: that on the eve of Yom Kippur there was no corner in the city where a Jew could pray for forgiveness with nine others.
“They all fled to Miami after the revolution,” Lex said. “Taking their money with them.”
Robert winced.
Lex said, “We’ll find you a minyan, Bob.” He looked at his father with compassion.
But was it really compassion? Or was it the practiced understanding of a professional social worker? Just as he had adjusted to his son’s use of his first name, Robert had reconciled himself to Lex’s womanish vocation. But he had not become accustomed to the nods, the murmured assents. He himself was an investment consultant.
“We’ve gone through the guidebooks,” Lex reviewed. “Shall we hunt down a Shapiro in the telephone book? A Katz?”
Father and son laughed. Their own name was Katz.
14The little boy looked from one to the other.
He was a thin child despite a seemingly insatiable appetite. His name, Jaime, printed in Lex’s hand, adorned the crayoned scribbles taped to the refrigerator.
There they sat, in front of those unambitious efforts, in the scarred kitchen of a small house on a muddy street in the capital city of a Jewless country. Robert was still wearing his pajamas. Far away in Beverly Hills, the drawings of Robert’s granddaughter, Lex’s niece, also decorated a refrigerator. Maureen Mulloy, the signature read. Maureen Mulloy printed her washerwoman’s name herself. The Mulloys’ Mexican housekeeper hung up the artwork. Who else could do it?—Maureen’s parents practiced law twelve hours a day.
Jaime. It was pronounced “Hymie.” Robert speared a slice of papaya from the breakfast platter.
Lex was reading the telephone book. “No Shapiros, Bob. No Katzes, either. I’m not even listed—my phone belongs to the organization.”
Robert ate a slice of pineapple.
“I’m going to call the embassy,” Lex said.
“Ex,” said Jaime, slapping Lex’s arm. “Tengo hambre.”
“Qué quiero?” Robert attempted. “I mean, qué quieres …” Lex had already risen. He and Jaime stood side by side, composedly surveying the contents of the refrigerator, a slight young man and a very slight child. “Qué quieres,” Robert repeated, softly. His hesitant spoken Spanish was getting him nowhere with the boy. Why had he spent a month listening to those damned language tapes? Why had he come here, anyway?
Five days ago he had descended the aluminum steps of the airliner and stepped onto the tarmac, already blistering at two in the afternoon. He was used to hokey airports. He wasn’t used to the absence of jet lag, though—he seldom journeyed from north to south. The sun had stood still on his behalf. No need to nap, no need even to eat, though on the ride from the airport Jaime insisted on stopping for a tamale. “Ex, Ex!” he shouted, pointing to the stall. Lex pulled over. Robert smiled at Lex, indulgent parent communing with indulgent parent. But Lex ignored the smile. His attentiveness toward this soon-to-be-adopted son was meant to be approved, not joined.
The boy dropped consonants, confusing Robert. That first 15afternoon, Robert looked at a picture book with him. Vaca, cow, became aca; caballo, horse, callo. Little Maureen would become Een, he supposed, if the cousins—could he really call them that?—ever met. They might not meet for a long time. The family was scattered: Robert and Betsy in Massachusetts, their daughter Mulloy née Katz out in California, Lex here in Central America two years already, God knew how much longer.
“I’ll stay until the adoption is final,” Lex said late that night, after Jaime had finally gone to bed. “That’s another six months. Afterwards …” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I won’t go to Chicago, that’s for sure. I don’t want to be in the same city as Ron.” Ron was his ex-lover. “Perhaps Jaime and I will come back to Boston.”
Robert nodded. “There’s a bilingual program in the schools.”
“Spare us.” Lex rolled his eyes. “We’ll continue to talk Spanish at home,” he went on. “Jaime will pick up English at school, in playgrounds—as immigrant children have done for generations.”
He can hardly speak his own language, Robert didn’t say. He can’t count. He doesn’t know colors. “How old is he? Seven, you wrote? He’s … small.”
“We use the evidence of bones and teeth,” said Lex. “Central Americans are smaller than North Americans, and those with a lot of Indian blood, like Jaime, are the shortest. I’ll invent a birth date when I apply for his passport. I’m going to say he’s five. He’s about three emotionally—a deprived three. No one ever sent him to school. When I first met him at the local orphanage a year ago he didn’t talk at all. He’s matured considerably since being with me.”
Robert felt weary, as if jet lag had claimed him after all.
And so he had gone to bed, in the narrow room off the kitchen. His window faced an inner courtyard just big enough for a clothesline, a sink, and a single tree that bore hard citrus fruits. There the parrots hid.
After Sunday, Robert was on his own for a few days. Lex was working, and Jaime attended day care. Robert awoke each morning to the sounds of the two at their breakfast. He figured out most of what they were saying. Jaime repeated the breakfast menu, the few chores, the routine of the day care center. Then he repeated them again, and again. Between repetitions Robert heard the rustle of the newspaper and the slur of rubber wheels along a linoleum floor. Jaime was playing with his small toy car. He supplied the motor 16with his own throat. “Oom!” Twenty-five years earlier, Robert and Betsy had shared the Globe while, at their feet, two charming toddlers rummaged in a pile of Legos. Jaime wasn’t ready for Legos, Lex had explained. He wasn’t ready even for the starter set Robert had brought as a gift. Jaime didn’t get the idea of construction. He had probably never seen toys before the orphanage found him—maybe he’d played with a couple of spoons, or filled an old shoe with dirt. Maureen, Robert remembered with satisfaction and guilt, could already erect elaborate towers.
Before leaving for work, Lex always knocked on Robert’s half-open door.
“Entra!” Robert practiced.
Lex would then say something about the day ahead. Would Robert like to visit the university? Lex could give him a library pass. If he wandered into the outdoor market, would he please pick up a pineapple? Jaime, still on the floor with his murmuring car, poked his head between Lex’s knees and then raised it, his little golden face between the denimed legs solemn, or perhaps only uncomprehending.
When they were gone Robert heaved himself out of bed. He boiled bottled water for tea and ate three plain crackers. Despite this abstemious caution he invariably passed several loose stools and a quantity of brownish water. “Nothing to worry about as long as there’s no blood,” Lex had told him after the first episode, the second night of the stay. Lex’s voice had been reassuring but his lips were prissy; and Robert, standing outside the bathroom with his belt unbuckled, raised a defiant chin like a child who had soiled his pants.
But the morning diarrhea always left him feeling better, as if he had explosively asserted himself in these austere surroundings. He next read the front page of the newspaper, using the dictionary often. Then he took a shower in cold water and shaved in cold water and got dressed. He stuffed his fanny pack with map, dictionary, currency, and flask. He wore it frontwards: a tummy pack. After putting on sunglasses and a canvas cap, he left the house.
He had arrived on a Saturday; by the end of Wednesday, the day before, he had tramped all over the city. He had wandered into the barrios. He refused Chiclets and Valium peddled by street vendors. He stumbled upon a small archaeological museum tended by some 17devoted women. There he learned that the great-beaked toucan was considered an incarnation of the devil.
And he stared at the windowless edifice within which members of the National Assembly, according to the new popular insult, farted their disagreements. He traveled by bus to two hot, dusty towns. Both had museums of martyrs. Back in the capital, he had spent late Wednesday afternoon at the huge outdoor market. Pickpockets roamed the place, he had heard. He kept his fingers lightly on his canvas pack.
He bought Betsy a necklace of black coral. Though he loved and admired her, he missed her very little. Her absence this trip had not been a matter of dissension—they had farted no disagreements. There were reasons for her not coming: Lex himself had been home recently; his house here had only a single guest bed; and this not altogether regular situation—a young man becoming a father to a young boy—seemed to demand the presence of an unaccompanied older man, the older man, the grandfather.
Grandfather! To a child whose whole being seemed at odds with itself—the eyes soft, even tender; the mouth, with its widely spaced teeth, slack; the body taut, subject to occasional spasms. Yet he would become part of the family, a Katz. Jaime Katz. What would Robert’s grandfather, a rather sallow person himself, have made of such a development? He recalled Zayde Chaim shawled in silk on the Days of Awe … and it was at that moment, standing in the market, his hand on his canvas belly, that he remembered what day it was. The day before the day before Yom Kippur. In twenty-six hours, Kol Nidre would be sung.
Now, on Thursday morning, the embassy answered Lex’s inquiry: to its knowledge there was no community of Jews in the city, in the country. Lex hung up. “They have one Jewish staff member. She goes home to Texas for the holidays.”
“We’ve struck out.”
“I’m sorry,” Lex said, and stood up. “I have to go to work. About tonight … I had forgotten Yom Kippur … a few people from the organization are supposed to come for dinner.”
“Let them come,” Robert said. “I’m not such a worshipper, you know. I don’t fast. At your bar mitzvah I had to retool my Hebrew, and even then it wasn’t so hot.”
“Jaime?” Lex called into the bedroom. “Rápido, por favor.” He 18turned again to his father. “You worked over those syllables like a diamond cutter. Betsy used the transliteration.”
“She’d never studied Hebrew.”
“But you were heroic. For my sake.” He bowed his head.
“I wish I could do it again with my high school Spanish,” said Robert, hot with embarrassment.
Lex raised his head. “For his sake,” he said, indicating with what seemed to Robert a faggy lift of one shoulder the child in the bedroom. A vat of lava bubbled in Robert’s intestines; he managed to contain it. How reckless he’d been to eat that fruit. Jaime was taking his sweet time putting on his backpack. The shabbiest barrio kid in this mess of a country had a backpack. “Vámonos!” Lex said at last.
Jaime came running. Lex went outside to warm up the Jeep. Jaime turned in the doorway and waved a silent good-bye to Robert—he had yet to call him by name. Farewell here was signified by a beckoning gesture. The motion startled Robert every time; it startled him now. He took a step forward, as if the child were really summoning him. Then he halted, hissing. This place! An invitation to come closer was made in an equally ass-backward manner: wrist limp, you wagged the back of your hand at the person you wanted, as if shaking him off.
Was the child laughing at him? No, it was only one of those wet smiles. Robert dutifully mimicked Jaime’s come-hither movement. He felt like a cop directing traffic. He felt like a dirty old man. Jaime grinned and banged out. Robert bolted for the bathroom.
He spent Yom Kippur Eve with a gaggle of gentiles. They weren’t bad, Lex’s fellow workers. A high-minded couple in their sixties, slack of belly, gray of hair, giving their final years to just causes. A pretty young nurse. A second, older nurse, freckled and tough. Some others. They ate rice and beans, expertly seasoned by Lex. Jaime played on the floor. Occasionally he whined for Lex’s attention. Lex would finish what he’d been saying, then he’d turn his eyes to the boy and listen to the high voice repeating short, insistent phrases, and reply with a “sí” or a “no” or some grave explanation.
The adults talked of the torments of the country, the centuries of cruelty as one generation mistreated the next. “The church has a lot to answer for,” said a fierce Canadian woman. “Those first 19missionary schools—they taught us how to inflict pain.” He wondered what she meant by “us”; then he remembered that she was a Native American, a member of an indigenous people. He had met her earlier in the week when she’d dropped by. With her untidy hair and glasses and dissatisfied mouth she’d reminded him of his cousin from the Bronx. He’d met the churchy couple earlier also, at an evening lecture on cooperatives that Lex had taken him to. But this was the first social gathering Robert had attended, and he realized belatedly, when it was almost over, that it was a party in his honor.
Early the next morning they packed up the Jeep. They were to spend the weekend visiting orphanages in the mountains—Robert, Lex, Jaime, and Janet—the freckled nurse, not the pretty one.
Janet did the driving. She knew how to handle a Jeep. She drove fast on the two-lane highway, passing whenever she could. When they were stopped by a pair of very young men in fatigues, each holding a tommy gun, she answered their questions with such authority that Robert expected the teenage soldiers to stick out their tongues for her inspection. Instead they waved the Jeep on. Robert jounced along in the front seat. In the back Lex showed Jaime how the big bricks of Legos fit together. Jaime watched indifferently, his fingers around his toy car.
They stopped late in the morning in a lush little town. There were coffee estates nearby, Janet said. In the courtyard of a restaurant, parrots watched from fronds. Jaime ran toward a cat he knew and settled down in a corner of the courtyard. The proprietress-cook brought the child a dish of pasta before welcoming the others in perfect English. She had a large, curved nose and a wide smile. “She’s Chilean,” Janet said when the woman had returned to the kitchen. “Her corn lasagna is terrific. She’s been active in revolutionary politics.” Robert understood: arms smuggling.
Two graceful waiters with angelic faces served them. Robert knew not to take their androgyny seriously. “Girlish on the outside, tough guys within,” Lex had said about similar men. “Not gay.” Robert did not ask whether Lex had enjoyed a native lover. Some years ago he had ascertained that his son practiced safe sex; he and Betsy wanted to know nothing further.
The corn lasagna was indeed delicious. Jaime shared his pasta with the cat. Robert would have liked to linger over coffee, to walk 20around this town and visit its museum of martyrs; to return at the cocktail hour and enjoy an aperitif with the South American adventuress while the parrots dozed. Instead he paid the bill and shook her hand and bid good-bye to the birds with the proper summoning gesture.
In an hour they had left the highway and were climbing. Farms gave way to trees, boulders, scrub. Janet expertly circled craters in the road. Bracing himself against the plunges of the Jeep made Robert weary—or perhaps it was the lunchtime glass of Chilean wine. He leaned against the headrest, closed his eyes … and was awakened by something creeping along the side of his neck. He slapped the creature. It was a small hand.
“Sorry, Jaime. Excúlpame. Hey!” for the child had slapped him back.
“Jaime.” Lex’s voice was as authoritative as Janet’s. Some low, rapid Spanish followed. Then came a tap on the shoulder and a presentation across that shoulder, in front of his face, of three Lego bricks imperfectly joined.
“Asa,” Jaime said.
Casa. House. “Bueno,” Robert said, mustering enthusiasm. He turned to meet those attractive eyes, that odd mouth. Lex smiled primly.
Just before two o’clock they reached the town where they were to spend the night. Robert carefully got out.
“You need a back rub,” noticed Janet.
The town square was a bare knoll. A church faced the square. Its stucco walls seemed to be unraveling. The one-storied inn sagged toward its own courtyard. Robert was shown to a rear bedroom. From his window he could see oxen.
Janet and Lex invited him to walk to the orphanage with them. “Thanks, no,” he said. “I’ll sit in the courtyard and read.” And write another postcard to little Maureen.
But as soon as they had tramped off, he felt forlorn. He would not stay; he would follow his son.
They had told him that the orphanage lay two miles out of town, on the straight road west. He walked fast, at first. Within five minutes he had caught sight of them, and soon he was passing the low stone huts that they had just passed, each with its open door revealing a single room, the same room—a couple of cane rockers, a table. 21The same expressionless woman stood in each doorway. Children played in the mud. Had Jaime been born in such a home? More likely he had sprung from a shack like those Robert was passing now—tin and slats, the latrine in back made decent by a curtain.
Lex and Janet walked together in the middle of the road. Jaime darted from one side to the other. Janet was taller than Lex. Her light brown hair humped over her backpack and draggled, khaki on khaki.
At the end of the road a crowd of small boys waited behind a gate—just a couple of horizontal logs—a not entirely successful attempt to keep out nearby animals. Jaime scrambled between the logs. Lex and Janet vaulted them.
Robert climbed over the top log, his bones creaking. He heard, as if in the distance, the sound of crying. Perhaps it was his own old-man’s wail.
He had landed amid the boys. Boys, boys everywhere. Boys: grimy triangular faces under black bangs. Boys: wearing clothing that a decade ago and a continent away had been high style—rugby shirts, jams. Boys: none seeming above ten years old, though he knew better. Perhaps some were twelve. Boys: waiting for guns and cholera.
“Bob!” Janet cried. Lex smiled a welcome.
They made immediate use of him, sending him to listen to the complaints of the orphanage director, a fiery young man with a thin mustache. Robert, sitting down, surrounded by boys, riffling through his dictionary every few words, managed to make out that the problem was money, both cash and credit. Supplies were low. The last cook had made off with the radio. Robert wrote down everything the fellow said and then got hustled away to umpire a three-inning softball game. The boys were not adroit. Then Lex arranged an obstacle race. Robert was assigned to hold an inflated clown’s hand in front of his chest. This hand had come out of Janet’s backpack; she’d blown it up in three exhalations, her freckles enlarging and then diminishing on her cheeks. Each obstacle racer had to slap the hand; some kids slapped Robert by mistake. Their teeth were as white as Chiclets.
Soon they were corralled into a grim refectory. “Cerca me!” some pleaded. He sat down next to a little beige fellow with reddish hair. 22All the boys were given crayons and paper. The stuff might have been gold. They drew for half an hour, in blissful silence. Meanwhile Janet examined some inflamed ears—she had an otoscope in her backpack, too. Lex talked with a scowling child in the director’s meager office. The child looked less angry after the session.
Robert praised the artwork. He helped the artists print their signatures. The red-haired runt was Miguel O’Reilly. Miguelito was particular about the slant of the apostrophe in his name.
These outcasts—did they know how deprived they were? Lex had told him about them: some abandoned at the gate as infants, some starved and abused before they arrived as toddlers, some rescued from prostitution, or at least reprieved from it. Jaime had served for a while as the mascot of a street gang.
To the boys Robert must seem a patriarch. They were respectful of his Spanish—the stunted vocabulary, the lisp of remote conquerors. They were respectful of his gray hairs, too. In their country a man of his age should already be dead.
The light was reddening, the shadows were lengthening, the parrots would presently lift themselves without a sound from their trees. The afternoon would soon end. Somewhere, elsewhere, maybe in Miami, a congregation was praying together, was feeling united, singular, almost safe.
A child with a birthmark asked to inspect his watch, looked at it gravely, then returned it with a smile. Two others insisted on showing him their dormitory. He peered under the iron cots; he was supposed to laugh at something there, though all he could see was dust. Perhaps a mouse had recently scampered.
He sat down heavily on a cot, startling the children. He drew them close, one against each knee. They waited for his wisdom. “Avinu malkeinu,” he muttered.
A bell rang: dinner. They stiffened. He let them go.
Oh the thin, hard, greedy boyness of them, undersized nomads fixed for a few years in a patch of land at the end of nowhere. Cow shit in the yard. Beans for dinner on the good days.
Jaime had entered all the play. He’d had a very good time.
They walked back to the inn in the dusk. Some of the huts were little stores, Robert now noticed. Dim bulbs shone on canned goods and medicines. Televisions flickered in the remote interiors, 23illuminating hammocks. How misleading to call this world the third. It was the nether.
Lex had packed a cooler of sandwiches and Cokes that morning. “Jaime can’t manage a second restaurant in one day,” he now explained to his father.
“What was the first?” Robert wondered. Then he remembered, as if from a rich tapestry seen long ago, the smile of the Chilean woman and the knowing supervision of her lime parrots.
“I have enough food for us all,” Lex said.
Janet shook her head. “I’m going to take your father to the café.”
The café, behind the inn, was an open kitchen and three tables. A couple of men dined together at one of the other tables. No menu: today’s offering was chicken in a spicy sauce. Robert hoped his stomach could manage it. He bought a bottle of rotgut wine.
“L’chaim,” Janet said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Isaac Fink,” she said. “He was a peddler who wandered into Minnesota by mistake, and stayed. The family is Lutheran to its backbones. Still …”
“Still, you are somewhat Jewish,” he said politely. “Skoal.”
They spoke of Lex’s talent and of Jaime’s eagerness. They spoke of the children they’d seen that afternoon, and of Janet’s work. She planned to spend another few years here. “Then a master’s in public health, I think.” Her face grew flushed. “I was serious about giving you a back rub.”
And perhaps this part-Jew would be willing also to inspect his tongue and massage his weary abdomen. He had assumed she was lesbian. She probably was lesbian. One could be something of everything here. “Thanks, but no,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur night.”
“Oh, I see,” was her bewildered response.
In bed alone he found himself wondering whether the handsome Chilean chef might also be a little bit Jewish. And that native Canadian woman from last night’s party—such an expert kvetch. He and Lex should have searched harder for eight more Jews. In a room behind a tailor shop in some town lived a pious old man, too poor to have fled to Miami. In one of the squalid barrios a half-Jewish half-doctor dealt in abortifacient herbs. Atop a donkey, yarmulke concealed by a sombrero, a wanderer sold tin pans. 24The entire population could be Jewish, Jaime included: people descended from Indians who feared the toucan—what was a toucan but a bird with a schnoz?—and from haughty Marranos who prayed to Yahweh in the basements of basements.
The next morning found him at last master of his bowels. He packed his overnight case and walked across the square to the crumbling church. Inside, though Christ on the wooden cross was naked, plaster saints wore velvet robes. The townspeople, too, seemed dressed up. He spotted one of the men he’d seen in the café last night. Today the man was sporting the yellow jacket of a gaucho.
Robert sat near the back and listened to the Mass. The sermon began. He did not attempt to understand it, though the Spanish was slow and simple, and the subject was misericordia, mercy. Rachamim. He thought about Lex, now packing the Jeep for the day’s trip to more orphanages. Lex was settling the bill, too. “This trip’s on me,” he’d said, refusing Robert’s money. An admirable, disappointing fellow. May you, too, have a son like mine, Robert thought—the old curse, the old blessing.
A small hand fell on his arm. He twisted his head and saw Jaime. The child danced away, then turned and stood in the open double doorway. Behind him was the treeless square; behind that was the inn, some other houses, the rising hills.
“Ob,” Jaime hissed. “Ob!” and he flapped his hand as if warding off a nuisance. Get lost, he seemed to say. Come here, he meant to say. Robert knew the difference now.
Ob. Ab. Abba, father, Abraham. The father of a multitude of nations have I made thee. Have you? Through whom? Through Maureen Mulloy, a half mick? Through Jaime Katz, an indigenous person?
A multitude of nations: what a vainglorious idea. No wonder we are always in trouble. How about a few good-enough places? he said silently to the priest, to the Christ, to the God rustling in his ear. How about a people that takes care of its children, even those springing from unexalted seed …
“Ob!”
Robert rose. He followed his grandson out of the dark, merciful church and into the harsh light.
Settlers
ONE EARLY SUNDAY MORNING Peter Loy stood waiting for the bus downtown. It was October, and the wind was strong enough to ruffle the curbside litter and to make Peter’s coat flap about his knees, open and closed, open and closed. He wouldn’t have been sorry if the wind had removed the coat altogether, like a disapproving valet. It had been a mistake, this long glen-plaid garment with a capelet, suitable for some theatrical undergraduate, not for an ex-schoolteacher of sixty-odd years. He had thought that with his height and thinness and longish hair he’d look like Sherlock Holmes when wearing it. Instead he looked like a dowager.
It didn’t matter; this was not a neighborhood that could afford to frown on oddities. Brighton Avenue, where he now stood, was a shabby main street. Congdon Street, where he lived, was home to an assortment of students, foreigners, and old people. A young couple with matching briefcases had recently bought one of the peeling houses in the hope that the street would turn chic; they spent all their free time gamely stripping paint from the interiors. On weekday mornings white-haired women in bathrobes stared from apartment windows while their middle-aged daughters straggled off to work, and then kept on staring. The immobility of the stay-at-home mothers suggested that their daughters had locked them in, but often at noontime Peter would see one of them moving toward the corner. Her steps would lighten as she neared Brighton Avenue. Here was life! Fresh fish, fish-and-chips, Fishberg the optician … Also on Congdon Street was a three-storied frame building 26 with huge pillars and sagging porches—a vaguely Southern edifice. Inside lived an entire village of Cambodians.
