City on Fire (27 page)

The new communicants sat on the church’s frontmost bench. Even from way back, he could see Mickey’s big red head. You weren’t supposed to clap or anything. The music from the organ was thinner and more plastic-y than he would have expected. It sounded like the organ at an Islanders game. The weirdest thing, though, was the way the people in front of him kept talking to Jesus, as if he were not dead but floating right over their heads. As indeed he was, a glazed, roughly life-sized plaster figure, glossy as a waxed apple, bolted to the baby-blue wall. Hear us, Lord Jesus. It was as if the church was a house Jesus was haunting. He tried to imagine Moses or Abraham haunting the temple, but couldn’t. The patriarchs who haunted Jews were those, like Grandpa, who were still alive.

Afterward, at the Sullivans’, there was a big white store-bought cake decorated with a cross. He wondered if this, too, stood for something—if he was plunging his fork into the spongy brain of Christ, and if so, if he should eat it, or if the Jewish or the Christian God would consign Charlie Weisbarger, who at this particular moment was faithful to neither, to the flames of hell. Yet he couldn’t help himself. The cake was drier than it looked, but the spun-sugar flowers, hardened to a crust, gave him a pleasantly headachey feeling.

“So what did you learn today?” Grandpa asked when he got home. He was a tall man, thick in the middle, with a head as big as a cigar-store Indian’s, and impossibly lush nose-hair. Two deep creases framed his chin, making it look hinged. His suitcase sat beside him on the living room sofa. Dad, as if to give his father room, had perched on the decorative hearth. Mom reclined in the recliner, where Dad should have been. Obviously, Charlie had interrupted something.

“We’re up to, um, Deuteronomy.”

“He’s not talking about with Rabbi Lidner, Charlie. Maimie Sullivan called to say you’d left your sweater at Mickey’s. And you’ve got icing around your mouth.”

“Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t want Mickey to think I didn’t want to go to his party.”

“You don’t need to explain it,” Dad said. “Your grandpa just wants to know if you learned anything.”

The set of Grandpa’s jaw seemed even more wooden than usual. Charlie did his best not to look. “Well, they’re a little weird about their Messiah.” They were quiet, so he went on. “It’s confusing. If he was really the Messiah, then why would Hashem let him die? On the other hand, if we’re always waiting around for Messiah, aren’t we going to miss him when he comes?”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Grandpa said, mysteriously. Then again, everything he said was mysterious.

Dad said, “From a party, you got all this?”

“Well, not exactly.” He could have tried fibbing again, but couldn’t stand the way secrets seemed to make a distance among them. “I went to the service, too.”

“Charles Nathaniel Weisbarger.”

“What? I don’t see what the big deal is, if I can go to the party.”

“It’s this deception, Son.”

He couldn’t help thinking some of this was for Grandpa’s benefit. To his surprise, though, the old man took his side. “Why wouldn’t the boy be confused? You want honesty, and meanwhile you’re keeping this from him.”

“Keeping what from me?”

“Dad—,” his dad said.

“Kid, you’re going to be a brother.”

“What?”

“David—”

“Dad, you’re going to have to go now. Go take your nap. This is our affair.”

It was the first time Charlie had ever known small, mild-mannered David Weisbarger to stand up to Grandpa, and the old man took it better than he would have expected, except that at the threshold of the room, he turned and looked straight at Charlie. “Remember, there are two ways to pull a bandage off.”

“How is this a bandage?” He turned to his mom. “I want a brother. A brother is great. A sister is fine, also, if that’s what you pick. I just don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me. Is this something you decided just now?”

When they’d heard the door shut upstairs—it was Charlie’s room Grandpa stayed in when he came to visit, demoting Charlie to an air mattress down here—Dad said, “What your grandpa was trying to say, Charlie, is it’s not another adoption. Your mother is pregnant. We wanted to tell you, but it’s never a sure thing early on, especially at her age and with our history, and we didn’t want to upset you. Things have been touch and go; it’s why your grandpa’s going to be here until the babies come. Mom’s on bed rest …”

“But it looks like you’re going to have siblings, honey. Two of them. Twins.”

For a minute, Charlie hesitated. Twins. He felt like the needle on The Price is Right, when the big wheel goes around and around, different possibilities ticking past, the possibility that you’ve won big, won nothing, something in between.

“You know this doesn’t mean we’ll love you any less,” Mom said.

Charlie put his hand on her shoulder. He felt very calm now. The big wheel stopped. He had only to open his eyes to see where he’d landed. “Mom?”

“What, honey?”

“How do you think I should feel?”

Did it mean something that it took her a while to answer? “You should feel however you feel. But what I’d hope for you to feel is that this doesn’t change anything. The fact that we adopted, that should tell you how much we wanted you.”

“Okay, then, that’s how I feel.” He tested it; it felt sturdy enough to hold for now, and anyway, he hated it when she cried.

That night on the air mattress, though, he couldn’t get comfortable. Whenever he pushed down a lump, another surfaced elsewhere. He ended up spread-eagled, the blanket anaconda’d around his thighs, in light that reminded him of movies where they shot day through a filter and called it night. A toothy mass by the hearth resolved into fireplace tools. He could pick out the poker and the brush, and if he focused he could read, or imagined he could read, the word Harmony on the front of the upright piano. Houses made ticking noises at night, like cooling engines; he wondered what the physics of the thing could possibly be. Air escaping from wood? Continental drift? Mostly, though, he tried to suss out what was coming. On the surface, everything was the same, Mom and Dad and Grandpa sleeping upstairs. On the other hand, there was the great seriousness with which they’d told him, as if he was supposed to feel it had changed everything. He wondered how the Goy Messiah would have felt, when they’d told him he was getting a brother. He’d been adopted, too, in a sense. Of course, being perfect, he would have handled it perfectly. At some point, he heard the creak of the front stairs. It was his father, he was almost sure, watching him. He pretended to be asleep. And then he really was, and a hippie Jesus in a paper hat was smiling over the counter of a hamburger stand, asking could he take Charlie’s order.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN IMPORTANT that Mom was thirty-nine, because no one—not Dad, not doctors, not Mrs. Sullivan—seemed able to talk about the pregnancy without mentioning it. A blessing, was the other thing they all said. People at temple would start out talking about the Summer Olympics, or the new electric juicer they’d seen advertised on TV, and quickly it would lead to, “Well, you know, she’s thirty-nine … it’s a blessing.” A double blessing, Charlie thought, with two heartbeats. But he could feel the world rearranging itself, with the equator located somewhere along her expanding waist, on the sofa where she spent most of months seven and eight on bed rest, and Charlie way away at the North Pole.

In smaller ways, too, the terrain of his life was shifting. Dust began to gather on surfaces where she never would have let it before—the tops of towel rods and teakettles, the white knobs of the kitchen-counter radio. Nor did Dad ever turn it on anymore, even when preparing one of his specialties (tuna casserole, franks ’n’ beans, fish fingers) or the heat-n-serv pierogi Grandpa had brought back from a Polish market in the City. Finally, Charlie asked if he could take the radio up to his room. His dad, seeming exhausted all of a sudden, didn’t look up from the pot he was stirring, but said sure he could, which made Charlie wonder what else he could have gotten away with. Can I have the car keys? Can we get a dog? The next day was when you were supposed to bring your dad to school to talk about his career, but Mr. Weisbarger couldn’t come. “My mom’s due in a month,” Charlie told the teacher, borrowing his dad’s phrasing. “She’s thirty-nine. It’s a blessing.” So Grandpa came instead, and explained how to make shoes, until people were crying with boredom.

He would have a memory later of Grandpa’s arms scooping him out of a molded plastic seat in the hospital waiting room, like sherbet from a container; of expressway lights flicking past the car door against which he slumped; of waking up in the top bunk of Mickey Sullivan’s bunk bed. His bond with Mickey was already dissolving, and the adult orchestration imparted a weird flavor to what remained. They shot hoops in the driveway the next morning (or in Charlie’s case simply tried to avoid missing the backboard), but didn’t talk much, and when they did, Mickey was like a hostage reading lines on TV.

“My mom says sometimes it just takes longer when they’re older.”

“I know,” Charlie said.

“Must be some kind of vagina thing.”

“Okay, Mickey, I got it.”

“My sisters had scales when they came out. They peeled off everywhere. And gross black bellybutton stumps.”

The insistence from all directions that everything was all right gave him a terrible premonition that it wasn’t, but on the second day, Dad and Grandpa came for him, and four days later Mom was home with two wrinkled little black-haired people poking out of cowls of blue blanket. Boys, apparently. Moon men. He held his breath and kissed their heads, which were hot and tiny and faintly moist, like nostrils turned inside out. He wanted to please his mom, but didn’t want to breathe in baby-scales, or space-dust. It was the reverse Mom was worried about. “We have to be very delicate. I know you’re going to be a great protector.” Then it was time for them to sleep again. Them meaning everybody but Charlie.

His inconspicuousness now was like the proverbial wish you should be careful about; it went everywhere he did, and instead of sealing him in with his parents, it sealed him out. When Mom and Dad talked to each other or to him, it was about the babies, or through the babies. Every gaseous smile, every clutch of their miniature fingers, turned out to be full of meaning. “Look, Charlie. He loves you.” Even when Mom could return to the dinner table, she kept getting up to check the crib upstairs, where Abe and Izz reliably fussed.

Then one day his dad drove him to the electronics store and led him to the aisle of gleaming stereo equipment. They’d remembered! He almost ran to the Fancy Trax record players.

“Are you sure that’s the one, Charlie? Because I’ll get you whichever you want. Under let’s say sixty dollars.”

On carpeted plinths sat ranks of wood-paneled eight-track decks, chunky-buttoned built-in phonographs, Fisher brand tuners with their etched and glowing frequency stripes, all that luminous bandwidth. At least four radio stations could be heard. Fragments of light scattered off passing cars and went wide around him. But something held him back: the sense, perhaps, that he was being bought off. He would become a bystander in his own home now, and the stereo would be his only consolation.

On the other hand, he wasn’t so far beyond the cold compass of economics himself that he failed to see these were the best terms he was likely to get.

At home, they’d turned his room into a nursery and moved him down to the basement—had rolled a harvest-gold deep-pile carpet over the poured-concrete floor. An entire level all your own, was how it had been put to him. Dad now set up the new stereo—a Scott 330R receiver with five inputs and a headphone jack and switches that said FILTER, MODE, TAPE, and LOUD—near his bed, as he’d requested, and then went back upstairs to those other sons on whom his mind had clearly been. He’d see Charlie at dinner, he said, which Charlie knew would be Stouffer’s chicken cutlets, or breakfast for dinner, again.

As soon as he was gone, Charlie lay prone on the bed, his arms stretched out like those of the savior in whom he wasn’t supposed to believe. The synthetic coverlet depicted stars and planets at distorted scales. It still smelled like the plastic it had come wrapped in. Above the ceiling, one of the twins started crying again, which made the other cry. He reached out and, having let the tuner warm up as the salesman had shown them, flipped on the speakers. There was a thunderous voice—the volume must have gotten jostled in transit—but when he turned it down, the frequency knob was still on the station it had been tuned to in the store. Over a majestic piano figure, the voice sang that Mars was no place to raise a kid. “In fact, it’s cold as hell.” The line shook something loose in Charlie. With his nose pressed to the space-age blanket and his arms now tucked under him like wings, he was crying, though not with such abandon as to carry over the music. This way he could tell himself that the reason no one came to comfort him was that no one heard.

ELTON JOHN BEGAT QUEEN, and Queen begat Frampton. How Charlie would cringe, years later, to think back on the Frampton concert at the Long Island Arena to which he dragged his father—the memory of Dad pretending not to smell the pot-smoke wafting up to the frightening nosebleeds. Of trying almost desperately to make Dad see the magic that had happened when Charlie was alone: the small Englishman down there on the stage literally making his guitar talk. And Frampton begat Kiss (the singer had grown up on Northern Boulevard!), who begat Alice Cooper, who begat Bowie … who, for a long time, begat only more Bowie.

By then, the storm of puberty had descended, turning his basement room into a kind of loamy lair, laying waste to his body, from which pimples and hairs and all manner of protuberance swelled, and filling his ribcage with feelings oddly shaped and too large to fit inside. Abe and Izzy could go for a few minutes without being held, restoring some of his mother’s autonomy, but neither she nor Dad came downstairs much, maybe on account of the smell. Not that it mattered, in the cosmic scheme of things. The planet was dying, said the ugly scary friendly androgyne staring up at Charlie from the Ziggy Stardust sleeve. Five years, that’s all we’ve got. And the album had been out awhile. According to Charlie’s calculations, the year that all the fat-skinny people and all the nobody people would cease to exist was 1977.