Frog (4 page)

“But your mother. Didn't she say it never happened?”

“To me, yes. She says it happened to Alex. He says it did happen to him but nothing about a kitchen or pair of pants, which she seems to remember hearing he did it in, or my dad. That he was in a bathtub by himself—one of the first times. Till then he had always bathed toe-to-toe with Jerry, but Frieda throught they were too grown-up for that so had it stopped—when he suddenly shit. Two big—”

“Come on, spare me.”

“So he called out that he'd just made kaka in it. Frieda came, grabbed some of it out of the water and put it in his face. He said he never kakaed again in the tub or anywhere but in the potty, or at least that he doesn't remember being anything but toiletized after that.”

“How about you?”

“I don't know if what Frieda did to me stopped me from having kaka accidents or even was the last time she put it in my face. I do think it happened to me. For sure. Memory of it's too vivid for it not to have happened, but I guess that doesn't have to be the case.”

“So, are you going to see her?”

“Yes, I think so, you mind? I had Olivia two hours today, so I've at least done part of my daily share. When I come back I'll take her to the park or something and you can get back to work.”

He goes to his mother's. Has the keys, lets himself in. “Hi, hi, it's me,” he says, walking through the living room. They're having coffee and cookies in the kitchen. Frieda sees his mother look up at him and smile and turns around. “Oh my, look who's here,” she says. “What a nice thing to do,” and holds out her arms. He bends down and kisses her cheek while she hugs him around the waist. Still that strong scent of that German numbered cologne she always wore. He wondered on the subway if he should bring the shit incident up. If it did happen to him or has he been imagining it all this time? If he has been imagining it, that'd say something about something he didn't know about himself before. But he'd never bring it up. It would embarrass her, his mother, ultimately him. Or immediately him, seconds after he asked it.

“You didn't bring the little one,” Frieda says. “Or your wife. I never met them and was hoping.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't even think of it. Maybe no time to. When my mother called you were coming, I just ran right down.”

His mother asks if he wants coffee. “Black, I remember, right?” Frieda says.

“Always black,” his mother says.

Frieda talks about her life. He asked. “As I told Mrs. T., we're still living in the same small house in Ridgewood and we'll probably die there. That's Ridgewood Brooklyn, you know, not Queens. There, just over the line, it's always been very different. But our area's been much improved. Young people are living in. Excuse me, moving. Many good whites, blacks, Spanish—hard-working people, with families, and honest. You'd like this: some artists, even. For years we couldn't go out on the streets after six. Even during the days it was dangerous sometimes. We needed escorts—you had to pay for them; they simply didn't volunteer—just to go shopping.” The same high reedy voice, trace of a German accent. Must be a more accurate way—a better way—to describe the distinctiveness of it, but it'll do for now. “Martin is as well as can be expected for someone his age.” He asked. “He still does all the baking at home. Breads, rolls, pies, cakes—he does one from the first two and one from the second two every other day. I don't understand how we stay so thin, and he still only uses real butter, a hundred percent. The baking company gave him a good pension, and with the Social Security we both get—Dr. T. helped set it up for me. I really wasn't eligible to be paying for it at the time, but oh my God, could he finagle. For good reasons mostly, I'm saying, for he knew we'd need it later. So, we live all right and have no complaints other than those every old person has. But Mrs. T. looks wonderful, thank God,” and she knocks twice on the table. “Such a tough life, but she never changes, never ages. She'll always be a beautiful bathing beauty and a showgirl, which she only stopped being, you know, a few years before I came to work for her. She's amazing,” and squeezes his mother's hand. “The parties you gave then—I still see them in my head.”

“That's what I just told you about yourself,” his mother says. “Look at her. Everything's the same. She doesn't age.”

“No no no no.” She closes her eyes modestly. Those stove hoods for eyelids. Not stove hoods but something like them. Roll tops of roll-top desks. Her sister is very sick. He asked. “She lives with us now. She has since Fritz died. I don't want to say this, but it's possible she won't live out the year. Age is awful, awful, when it gets like that.”

“Awful,” his mother says. “No matter how good you feel one day; at our age, the next you could snap, go.”

Her nephew married and moved to Atlanta and bought a house. He asked. “They want to have children. Buy a house after you have a child, Martin and I told them, but they wanted one first. He's an air controller, went to a special school for it. Six to six for months. We loaned him five thousand dollars of our savings for the house. After all, he's our only nephew and we love him, and his wife is like our only niece. So he's like our only son in many ways. You were like one of my children when I worked here. I can still see you pulling your wagon down the street. Red, do you remember?”

“I do if he doesn't. It said Fire Chief on the sides.”

“I don't remember that,” Frieda says, “but it probably did, since it was that color red. A very fine wagon—very sturdily made—and with a long metal handle he pulled. You were so small you couldn't even carry it up to the sidewalk.”

“It was even almost too heavy for me,” his mother says. “We got it from our friends the Kashas. It was their son Carl's.”

“They were so old then they must be both dead now.”

“He did about fifteen years ago. Bea—Mrs. Kasha—moved to Arizona and I never heard from her again.”

“Too bad. Nice people. But I'd do most of the carrying up the steps for his wagon. The neighborhood was very safe then so we'd—your mother and I—let you go by yourself to the stores you could get to without crossing the street. Think of anyone letting their child do that today. He wasn't even four.”

“He was so beautiful that today he'd be kidnapped the first time.”

“You'd have a note in your hand. It would say this, when he went to Grossinger's, which is where he wanted to go most: ‘Three sugar doughnuts, three jelly doughnuts,' and perhaps some Vienna or their special onion rolls and a challah or seeded rye. You had a charge there, didn't you?”

“At all the stores on Columbus. Gristede Brothers. Hazelkorn's kosher butcher. Al and Phil's green grocers. Sam's hardware and so on. But sometimes we gave him money to buy. Shopkeepers were honest to a fault then, and when he did carry money I think the note always said to take the bills out of his pocket and put the change back in.”

“It would have had to. So you'd go around the corner with your wagon and park it outside the store. Then you'd go inside and give the note to the saleslady, who was usually Mrs. Grossinger—”

“She passed away I think it was two years ago. She had a bad heart for years but never stopped going in every day.”

“Oh, that's too bad; a very nice lady. I hope the store was kept up. There aren't any good home bakeries where we are.”

“Her son runs it and even opened a branch store farther up Columbus.”

“Good for him. So Mrs. Grossinger or the saleslady would give you whatever was on the note and you'd put the bags in your wagon one by one and start home. But sometimes I got so worried for you, or your mother did where she'd send me after you, that I'd follow you all the way there and back—maybe he was around five when he did this, what do you say?”

“I'd think at least five,” his mother says.

“But this was how I was able to see all this. Not worried you'd be kidnapped. Just that you might cross the street. You never did. He was a very obedient boy, Howard. But once I found you sitting on the curb—you must have done this a few times because more than a few times a doughnut or roll was missing from a bag—eating one. Then he'd come home. I used to watch you from the street. You know, sneak up from behind car to car so you wouldn't see me following you. If someone saw me doing this with a boy today they'd think I was trying to kidnap him and I'd be arrested, no questions asked. But everyone around then knew I was your nanny. Then you'd leave your wagon out front and go into the building and apartment—the doors were always unlocked during the day—and ask me or one of your brothers or your mother to help you bring the wagon downstairs.”

“What a memory you have.”

“I don't remember most of that,” he says. “Going into Grossinger's for sugar and jelly doughnuts I do, but no note or wagon. Sitting on the curb eating a roll or doughnut I've no mental picture of, I think, other than for what other people's accounts of it have put into my head.”

“Believe me,” Frieda says. “If you did it once, shopping with your wagon, you did it a dozen times. And when you got home, first thing you always asked for was one of those doughnuts or rolls or the end slice of the rye bread if it was rye. With no butter on it—no spread. Just the bread plain.”

“I remember liking the end slice then. The tiny piece—no bigger than my thumb—but which was usually left in the bakery's bread slicer. In fact, I still have to fight my wife for it. At least for the heel of the bread, since it seems all the bread we get comes unsliced.”

“How is Denise?”

“Fine.”

“She's wonderful,” his mother says. “As dear to me as any of my children, that's the way I look at her, terrible as that might be to say.”

“It isn't. I'm sure Howard loves to hear it. And your daughter?” she says to him. “Olivia? You really should have brought her.”

“Next time, I swear.”

His mother asks Frieda about her trip to Germany this summer, her first time back there in about forty-five years. Then she starts talking about the European trip she took with his father more than twenty years ago and especially the overnight boat ride their tour took down the Rhine. It was in this room. His father walked in from there, he ran up to him from there, arms out. From where he's sitting—different table and chairs but same place, the small kitchen alcove—he sees it happening in front of him as if onstage. Two actors, playing father and son. “Frieda” must still be offstage or never gets on. He's in the first row, looking up at them, but very close. Or sitting level with them, three to four feet away, for it's theater-in-the-round. The two actors come from opposite directions—the father from stage left if that's the direction for Howard's left, the son from stage right. They stop, the father first, about two feet from each other. He points, with his arms still out, to his face. The young actor playing him does. He's asking for help, with his pointing and expression. He wants to be picked up or grabbed. The shit doesn't smell because it's makeup. The young actor gives the impression he just tasted a little of it. But he's not going to throw up. Howard didn't then, far as he can remember, and that's not what the young actor's face says, though he does look as if he's just gagged. The father bursts our laughing. He's wearing the same clothes his father wore that day. Dark suit, white shirt, tie. Howard doesn't recognize the son's clothes. The father continues to laugh but now seems somewhat repelled by him. Scene goes blank. Curtain comes down. He's left looking at the curtain. Or if it is theater-in-the-round, which it resembles more: blackout, and when the house lights come on thirty seconds later, the actors have left the stage. “Frieda,” he says.

“Excuse me,” she says to his mother. “Yes?”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to break in like that, but there's something I've often wanted to ask you about from the time when I was around five.”

“You wanted to ask me it since you were five?”

“No, I mean, what I want to ask you about happened, or I think it did, when I was around five.”

“Howard,” his mother says, as if saying, since they had talked about it a few times, not to ask it.

“What is it?” Frieda says. To his mother: “What's the big mystery?”

“No mystery,” Howard says. “Just that your memory's so good—phenomenal, really—that I wondered if you could remember it for me from that time.”

“Why don't we keep it for lunch,” his mother says. “I want you to join us. Frieda already told me she wants you to come too. Have anything you want.”

“Let me just finish this, Mom. I don't think, if I'm gauging her right, she wants me to ask this, Frieda. Thinks it might offend you. Believe me, that's not my purpose. Whatever happened so long ago is over and past, period. We all—anyway, if it did happen, you were probably doing something—I know you were—that you thought right or necessary. Or just required for what you were hired for, or something. I'm not getting this out right—and I meant by that nothing disparaging about you, Mom—but just know I'm not asking this with any harm in mind whatsoever. None.”

“What could it be? The mystery gets bigger and bigger. That I slapped you a few times? I'm sorry for that. I never wanted to. But sometimes, sweet and darling as you were, and beautiful—he was such a beautiful child, everyone thought so—you got out of control, like all children can. Out of my control.”

“That's true. They could be something.”

“I had three very wild boys to take care of sometimes, so sometimes I had to act like that. Rough. Mean. Slap one or the other. I always tried for the hands or backside first—to get control or they'd run over me. I had a lot of responsibility taking care of you all. Your mother understood that.”