Long Made Short (8 page)

A crow in the tree that their crow flew in crowed. “It doesn’t necessarily have to
be the one you shot at,” she said. “That’s a favorite resting and gabbing place of
theirs,” he said. “In fact—I just figured it out—I bet it’s nesting there, or protecting
a nest of another crow there. That’s why it swooped down on us. Because I’ve never
seen one so aggressive, except with dogs and cats.” “It could be sick,” she said,
“distemper, or whatever crows get.” “No, it looked too healthy on the ground. Children,
wonderful, just what we need around here, more crows. But I like the idea of an animal
protecting its young or soon-to-be young or someone else’s.” A crow crowed from the
tree. “See, it agrees with me. We won’t tell the Chamberlains this part, because it’s
getting too silly. But this, yes,” and he aimed his finger at the tree and said “Bang-bang-bang,
bang-bang, bang, bang, bang-bang,” moving his finger around to different places in
the tree. He imagined several crows dropping out. “Ah, wonderful, a longer sleep tomorrow
morning, maybe even after that a caw-free afternoon nap. Actually, I’m glad I didn’t
hit any. Some of them might have been young. Let’s go in before we truly get silly.”
“Did we shut off the cellar light?” she said. “I don’t remember. I’ll see you inside.
Put up the water, or take out the ice tray,” and he headed for the cellar. A crow
crowed from the tree. “That a boy,” he said, “or that a girl. Whatever you are, crow,
crow.” What I’d like to know, he thought, peering into the cellar and seeing it was
dark, is why I didn’t hear her breathing or feel her neck pulse or her heartbeat when
I checked. The pulse, even in the neck, can be a little difficult to find, and I was
nervous. Even her heartbeat, but her breath? He flipped the cellar doors closed with
his feet. They made a loud double bang, and she yelled from kitchen window “What’s
that?” “Just closing things up,” he said, “and the light was out. You do it? Because
I don’t remember I did,” and he went inside.

Gordon hears voices in his head again today. They tell him don’t go out, stay in,
don’t bother to make lunch, have a snack, say something nice to your wife next time
you see her, don’t be a fake, make sure to give your kids a kiss when you pick them
up and ask them what they did, where’re you going? what’re you doing? stay put, get
up, run in place a bit, don’t budge, read, nap, think about things, think about Louise.

He thinks about Louise. She was very young when he first knew her, they both were,
three, four, five years old. They played together for years. Her house, his. She once
let him see her with her panties down. People said they were like husband and wife
sometimes. That they were sure to marry each other when they grew up. “Do you want
to?” they asked and he said yes. “Do you want to?” they asked her and she said “I
don’t know, I think so, it’s not something you can just say, maybe yes.” He took her
to his basement. That was one of the places they played. He said he’d give her something,
he forgets what, no doubt something he thought valuable and which she would too, and
she said “Don’t tell, don’t ever tell or I’ll never play with you again,” and showed,
let his eyes stay on it for a few seconds from a few feet away, and when he stuck
his hand out to touch, he wasn’t going to go further, he didn’t know there was anything
further, she said “Don’t be a pig,” and pulled her panties up and dropped her dress
over them. They continued to play together a few more years, but less and then much
less. She had her girl friends, he had his friends, all boys. He last saw her when
she was around ten. They’d been going to different schools for a couple of years,
she to a parochial one, he to a public. She moved off the block. He didn’t know she
had till she was gone. That was it, never saw or heard from her or anything about
her again.

Think about Willy. His wife passes and says “Really none of my business, but aren’t
you going to move from that chair today?” and he says “It’s Sunday, day of resting,
and kids are out, so what’s the difference? Besides, I’m thinking,” and she says “Of
what?” and he says “Just thinking; I don’t want to break it, so I’ll tell you later.”
Willy was his best friend for years. Soon after he first met Willy, Gordon said if
he wanted he’d teach him how to box. Gordon thought himself a pretty good boxer. An
uncle had given him two pairs of gloves and a mouthpiece and he used to practice in
front of his mirror in his undershorts and sometimes punch his pillow across the room.
They went to the basement and put the gloves on—he forgets how they were able to tie
the last glove; probably Gordon, feeling he had the advantage, left one of his gloves
untied and the one he was able to tie he did with one hand and his teeth—and he showed
him how to jab, punch, feint, dance, block a punch, keep the face and neck covered,
what going below the belt meant, and after a while Willy said “No more, I give up,
my face hurts, I’ll never get the hang of it.” A few months later Willy asked for
a rematch and Gordon thought this was a good chance to try out the fancy footwork
and bolo punch he saw in a movie newsreel of a recent champion middleweight fight,
and they went to the basement and Willy outboxed him from the start. Willy hurt his
nose—he was about two inches taller and ten pounds heavier and had a much longer reach
than him and was now wearing his own mouthpiece—made his lips bleed, punched him silly
and danced around and ducked in a way that Gordon, after the first of what were going
to be three two-minute rounds, ended up swinging wildly and a couple of times landing
on the floor. He never said to Willy “You beat me good, how the hell you learn all
that so fast and where’d you get the mouthpiece?” He just stepped back, spit out his
mouthpiece and took off his gloves and said “I’m bushed, been feeling weak for days;
let’s go out and play.” They never boxed again, never fought, except for a few quick
arguments, in any kind of way. They usually walked to school together, met outside
after school to walk home, spent time together weekends, did this till they graduated
in the eighth grade. Then Willy went to an agricultural high school in Queens—his
grandfather owned a farm near Hartford and said he’d give him half of it—and Gordon
to a special academic one in Brooklyn, and they didn’t see each other much for a year,
and then not at all unless they bumped into each other on the subway going or coming
home from school or on the block or in a neighborhood store or movie theater, let’s
say. Then Willy’s dad got a super’s job in an apartment building on the East Side,
and Gordon never saw Willy again till about twenty years later when Willy was at their
favorite Central Park West corner watching spot with his kids for the Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day parade and Gordon was back with his folks till he got his own place. Willy introduced
his girls to him—“This little pip-squeak was one of your daddy’s friends when he lived
here.” He said what he did—a printer upstate—and then the parade started and Willy
pushed his kids closer to the police barricades and then under them so they could
all sit on the street, and when it was over Gordon thought he’d talk some more with
him over coffee and juice and English muffins or something for his kids at the Cherry
Restaurant on Columbus, but couldn’t find him.

Think of Rachel. Thinks. Standing up in front of her third-story window, and the boys
shouting “Take off your clothes, Rachel”—older boys first, then the younger ones joining
in—“Take off all your clothes and show us,” and she disappeared and came back without
her clothes on—he’d been told she’d done this before—and they all whistled and cheered
and an older boy yelled “Put one finger in your mouth, Rachel, and now the other in
your peepee hole,” and she did this and they whistled and cheered. Then her mother
came to the window, pulled Rachel in, opened the window wider and shouted “You bad
boys, you scum of the earth, you’re the worst of the worst, ditches you should dig
for yourselves and die in, picking on a poor dumb girl like this, making her do things
so wicked. Go home. All of you, I know you and I’m calling your mothers, so they’ll
be looking for you to scold and I hope give a beating to, so run home quick, you slime,
for I’m also calling the police.” He was scared what his mother would say and stayed
away from home till dinner time, and when he got there his mother asked what did he
do to Rachel? “Nothing, she was up in her window when I last saw her when I was walking
up the block, so what could I have done to her?” and she said “Did you encourage her
to do what her mother said you did?—the gang of you, Ben, Willy, Caesar and whatever
other morons you have out there, though Willy I’m surprised,” and he said “I had nothing
to do with anything, the older boys were the ones who said for her to do what she
did, and I just stayed there because they’d stopped and I was walking to the park
with them.” She believed him but told him to walk away from things like that from
now on and docked him a week’s allowance. His father heard about it later and said
he was lying and raised his hand as if to hit him and sent him to bed right after
supper and took away his allowance for the next four weeks and barred him from spending
any of the money he made on his own. Rachel’s parents took her out of kindergarten
and from first grade on sent her by bus—“At a tremendous expense to them too, which
they can’t afford,” his mother said—to a religious elementary and then high school.

“So come on, out with it, what are you thinking about so deeply?” his wife says, going
upstairs, which means she had come downstairs and passed him twice without him even
knowing it. “Though of course if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay too,”
and he says “Just some things, decisions, worries—let me first think them through
a little more before I talk about them. But lots of things are troubling me, you can
probably see that just from the strained look on my face,” and she says “No, you look
all right, not smiling but not in any grieved or harried state.” “Well that’s good,
but it’s for sure not how I’ve been feeling, for I’ve had thoughts running through
like mortality, growing possibilities of sickness, painful illness, lots of nice things
to look forward to—goddamn teeth every third week it seems with new problems, not
to mention the daily reports of a collapsing globe, and my work, or lack of much satisfaction
and completion in it. Kids growing up and leaving home and what they ultimately have
to face, though who knows? Maybe they’ll do much better at it than I. And some of
the terrible things I’ve done to them—you know, we’ve spoken of it—my anger, outbursts,
pushing them hard, physically a few times, once slapping Sylvia’s face, ranting at
them a couple of times that I wish they’d never been born or I was dead—that I find
very difficult to live with. Well, not as bad as that, and the ‘live with’ and ‘was
dead’ must sound funny, but also some deeper philosophical questions if some of those
weren’t,” and she says “Like what? I’ve got time,” and he says “Nothing I can really
talk about clearly right now—those are just floating around; but I’ll nab the buggers
and get back to you with them later, I swear,” and she says “Good, I’ll be interested,”
and throws him a kiss and goes upstairs.

Think about Thomas. Thomas was a new kid on the block, they quickly became friends,
for a while they also used to meet almost every weekday morning and then pick up Willy
in front of his building and all walk to school. Then one day Thomas wasn’t outside
his building waiting for him and wasn’t in school that day and wasn’t outside his
building or in school the next day and Gordon asked his mother if he could call him
and did. “Thomas is ill and won’t be returning to school this whole year,” Thomas’s
mother said, “thank you for calling,” and he said “Does that mean after the summer
too, since it’s only April now?” and she said “No, he could be back sometime in the
fall, though thank you for calling, Thomas will appreciate it,” and she hung up before
he could say “Can I please speak to him if he’s not too sick and it’s okay?” He told
his mother he wanted to talk to Thomas to say he hopes he’ll feel better, and she
said “Possibly she didn’t realize that, I think it’d be all right to call again.”
He did, asked Thomas’s mother if he could visit him—“I could do it right now, I’m
just a few houses up the block”—and she said “Oh no, my dear, he’s much too out of
sorts to see anyone now. Maybe in a month or so, probably more like two,” and he said
“Like in June? I hope not July because then I’ll be away in camp for two months,”
and she said “If we’re lucky, the end of June. But don’t you worry about him, he’ll
be better soon enough and will be delighted you called.” Almost every time he passed
Thomas’s building the next few weeks he looked up to the fourth-floor brownstone window
where his bedroom was, hoping to see him and wave. A few times he thought he should
yell up to him “Thomas, it’s me, Gordon, can you come to the window—is there anything
you want—are you okay?” but never did. His mother bought a get-well card for him to
sign and leave above Thomas’s mailbox, the class sent him a card they all signed,
and he called him once more to see how he was—maybe even get him to the phone, since
it seemed to have been long enough—and Thomas’s mother said “He’s feeling a little
better, not well enough to come to the phone though, but I will tell him you called—he’s
loved all the attention he’s received lately from his teachers and friends.” About
two weeks later his mother said she had some very bad news to tell him and he thought
“Did I do something bad I don’t know about? Are they planning to move from the city
and take me away from all my friends? Is one of my uncles or aunts very sick or did
one of them die?” Two of them already had, one on a golf course, the other in a bathroom,
and this is how she started to tell him it. She said “Your friend Thomas died two
days ago in the hospital—that’s where he’s mostly been the last few weeks,” and he
said “Well not two weeks ago, because that’s when I talked to his mother and she said
he was home.” “Maybe she was keeping it from you, knowing how you’d feel. He had a
weak heart, something he was born with, and it simply wouldn’t work for him anymore.”
She was going to the funeral, he said he wanted to, and she said it was during school
hours and, besides, he was much too young to go to a young person’s funeral. “They’re
much sadder than an adult’s, and it might be upsetting for the boy’s parents to see
you there.” He thought it strange she wanted to go; she hardly knew Thomas, didn’t
even seem to like him when he was over at the house, but he went along with how she
explained it: Since he couldn’t go, it was her way of showing his feelings and the
family’s respects. Later that day after the funeral he asked how it was and she said
there was a good turnout, she’d never seen such an array of flowers in the chapel,
the coffin was open, which she didn’t think was right, till the ceremony began. “I’m
glad I stopped you from going. It was the first funeral of a child I’ve been to and
was almost too sad for me to take.” He asked if any kids were there and she said “Cousins,
I heard, your age and younger, which is all right I suppose if they were close, but
nobody from your class.” Just about everytime he walked past Thomas’s building the
next few weeks he looked at his window. The shade was always down and then one day
it was up and the next day there were Venetian blinds on it. Sometimes, the next few
years, he saw Thomas’s parents in the neighborhood or on the block, together or alone,
and they always asked how he was and to give their regards to his parents, whom they’d
barely met and probably not his father once, and a few times said he was getting tall
and seemed to be sprouting a little hair above his lips and was growing up to be a
fine handsome young man and asked how school was and Miss O’Brien, his and Thomas’s
former teacher. Please give her their regards too. He still, when he visits his mother,
occasionally bumps into Mr. Neuman, Thomas’s father, who never recognizes him till
he points out who he is: “Gordon Mandelbaum from up the block, number twenty-three,
my dad’s the druggist at La Rochelle.” Mrs. Neuman died about five years after Thomas.
“Heartbreak over her son,” his mother said. “It had to be that, for just by her looks
and build and the type of work she did for a living till that time, I didn’t think
there was a healthier woman alive.”