Man Walks Into a Room (29 page)

The study was filled with books. Many were in German. Max had escaped to America just before war had broken out and got a job teaching at the university. Samson walked along the wall of shelves, running his finger across the spines. He heard the high pitch of his aunt’s voice exclaiming something he couldn’t make out. He was aware of the faint pleasure of privacy. He came across an old photograph, unframed. It was black and white, or more yellow than white, printed on thick pa
per. It showed a family, eight or nine children standing stiffly around the parents. The clothes were high-necked and pompous. He studied the faces with a cruel attentiveness and found them ugly. He had no idea who they were, only that they somehow belonged to Max’s past, and this vaguely annoyed him. Max had never mentioned them, and Samson felt a secret had been kept from him. He must have stood there holding it for a while, because then someone was coming down the hall looking for him. When Max walked into the room and saw him holding the picture an inscrutable expression passed across his great-uncle’s face. Samson looked at him dully, but in his heart he felt the small irreparable injury of a child whose trust has been broken. Wordlessly he returned the photograph to the shelf. Then he passed Max and walked out of the room into what was left of the afternoon.

At the front desk Samson was told that Max was watching TV in the common room. The attendant, a man in a skinny tie, seemed surprised that the old man had a visitor. Samson had wondered whether the attendant might recognize him—surely he must have been there before to visit Uncle Max, especially when he’d come back to California during his mother’s illness. Maybe it was even he who had first brought Max to Fairview. But the man only looked Samson over with suspicion: the last surviving relative who probably looked disheveled and filthy, reeking of sweat and the stink—so disgustingly human—of despair.

Samson warily pushed his license across the desk. The attendant held it pinched between two fingers and studied the picture. He entered Samson’s name in the visitors’ book.

“I guess you’re probably itching to see your—”

“Great-uncle.”

“Your great-uncle. Great-Uncle Max,” the attendant repeated as Samson followed him down the hall. They entered a large sunny room with a linoleum floor. A few residents were seated at one end in front of a large-screen TV on which a woman was demonstrating how to prepare a chicken dish.

“There he is,” the attendant announced cheerfully, as if he were pointing out a rosy newborn and not an old man in a ratty terry-cloth
robe. “Great-Uncle Max!” the attendant sang out, bounding up to the stooped figure in a wheelchair. “Look who’s here to see you!”

With great effort, the old man turned at the waist as if the vertebrae of his neck had been soldered together. The wry expression was clouded by senility, but unmistakable.

Samson had to restrain himself from leaping forward and lying prostrate before the wheelchair, from sideswiping the smug attendant and tackling the old man in an embrace that might crush his brittle, porous bones. Max’s thin hair had receded to a scraggly garland around his head, leaving the high dome of his scalp completely bald. The polished shine was extraordinary. The ears that in Max’s younger days, when there was still enough hair to frame them, had merely stuck out as if registering dissatisfaction or a lively inner life, now shot out from both sides at an angle well over ninety degrees. They had hinged forward over the years, and while the rest of him had shrunk, the ears had grown in size to reach nothing short of prizewinning.

Max looked the attendant over, then sleepily shifted his gaze to Samson.

Uncle Max had loved children, and could always make them laugh with a trick or a joke, but never had any of his own because of an illness his wife had as a child that had made it impossible for her to conceive. Sitting in his bathrobe was what was left of the man who, after listening to Samson sing the praises of Hunter Froubuck’s fishing trip with his father, had made two fishing poles out of sticks,
out of sticks for crying out loud,
strung with fishing line with a brass hook knotted at the end, and taken Samson to a little stagnant body of freshwater. They’d caught nothing but eels.

“Do you recognize this young man?” the attendant asked, raising his eyebrows in mock suspense. In the heavy pause that followed, Samson half expected the attendant to throw wide his arms and announce in a canned baritone, “Max Kleinzer,
this is yooour life!”
while the geriatrics did jazz fingers in their wheelchairs.

“Who?” Max asked, the sound muffled and inhuman, like the distant query of an owl.

Samson stepped forward in an attempt to cut the attendant off.

“Uncle Max, it’s Sammy. Sammy Greene, your nephew. Remember?”

“Sammy Greene!” the attendant boomed, grabbing Max’s wheelchair by the handles and rolling him over to the window. Samson trotted after them. Max kept his eyes trained ahead.

“Sammy?” Max said in a groggy voice. “Sure, I remember.” The attendant whirled Max around and backed him up against the window so that the late-afternoon light streamed in from behind, illuminating the ears like lamps.

“Sammy Greene! Ta-daaa!” the attendant echoed again. Then he turned and made off down the hall before Samson could club him with the jawbone of a donkey.

The old man’s hands were clasped stiffly on his lap as if he were waiting for the curtain to go up at a play. They sat in silence, looking at each other.

“Who did you say you were?” Max finally asked.

“Sammy. Beth’s son.”

“Who?”

“Beth’s son.”

“Edison?”

“Your great-nephew.
Samson.”

Max stared at him blankly.

“You remember?” Samson asked.

“Can’t say I do.”

He studied Max’s face, wondering what his great-uncle saw. He remembered how during the first days back in New York, those clear spring days when the light was thin and impartial, Anna had appeared to him as a distant and indivisible whole, the way a bird is reduced to a spot of blackness in the sky. Even her desire for him to remember her did not lessen this elemental quality of self-containment. But as the days passed, the appearance came unraveled. He began to notice the small details she was made up of: the way she made a small popping noise with her lips when she was about to say something difficult, or
played with the ends of her hair when she was watching TV, or drank her coffee with the spoon still in the mug, and so on. Eventually he found he could only see her as a collection of such fragments.

Max’s face registered nothing.

A year or so after he’d found the photograph in Max’s study, a man from Max’s boyhood in Germany had come to visit. He was a little man with a limp and a high-pitched laugh, whose thick hair shone with pomade. Samson was sure he’d never seen him before, but the man embraced him with great affection. He smelled of pine, of a place thickly forested. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked in a grating accent. Everyone turned to Samson, waiting. The man smiled expectantly. A whole minute passed, but Samson could conjure no recollection. Feeling his face flush with shame, he turned and fled the room. He refused to even look at the man during the rest of his visit.

Samson smiled weakly and pulled up a chair.

“How are you, Uncle Max?”

Max seemed relieved to change the subject. “Fine. I can’t complain really. Still can eat. The food is terrible, but I can eat it. To think, all those years Clara—do you know my wife, Clara?—all those years I ate Clara’s cooking like an ungrateful wretch. Now I eat, I don’t even know what you would call it. A nice word for the food here I can’t think of. I watch the cooking show every day on TV. Cordon bleu. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of that.”

“I knew Clara,” Samson offered.

“You knew Clara?”

“Sure.”

“You ate her cooking?”

“Plenty of times.”

It was true: she had been a good cook, if a little heavy-handed. Everything she produced had a sort of glazed quality, not greasy but actually appearing as if coated in melted glass or sugar. The roasted chicken, the carrots, the pineapple turnover, all looking hard and shiny as gems.

“Tell me she isn’t an excellent cook,” Max said, lost in the twilight of the present tense.

“She was excellent. She was a very good cook.”

“The best.”

“You look good, Max,” Samson lied.

“I feel okay. There was a time you could say I looked good. Back in the day. That’s what people used to say. I’d walk into a room and they’d look and say, ‘Now that’s a handsome man.’ I could have had my pick of the girls.”

Max fell silent and Samson wondered what vision of female beauty his great-uncle had stumbled across in the murkiness of his mind. A submerged moment and then Max surfaced again.

“But I loved Clara. Right off, first time I saw her, I knew she was the one. She was sitting outside in the sun, unwrapping a sandwich from wax paper. Wearing a gray dress.”

“Really.”

“Gray, I said. Cinched at the waist.” Max patted his knee and ebbed back into silence.

It seemed unwise to bully him into remembering, to risk confusion and panic. But if there was any chance at all that Samson was going to discover where his mother was buried he would have to prod Max in the right direction. He pulled his chair closer and laid a hand on Max’s, applying a slight pressure. The sun dipped behind a cloud and the old man’s ears dimmed and went out.

“You say you knew my wife?” Max asked, looking up.

Samson tried to guide the conversation toward his mother. He reminded Max of how she had been his favorite niece, how they had shared a love for sweet things and also for musicals. His mother would play the piano and Max would accompany her in his rich tenor. They sang duets by Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hammerstein, entertaining anyone who would listen but mostly themselves. Long after everyone else had turned in they kept at it, the bright chords mingling with their laughter. There had been many nights when Samson had fallen asleep on the couch, his dreams threaded with melodies from
A Chorus Line
or
Anything Goes.
Later his mother would pick him up and carry him to the car, still humming beneath her breath.

“Beth? Sure. Sweet kid. Loves to tap-dance,” Max said.

Samson gave Max’s hand an authoritative squeeze, shepherding him back to the present.

“Beth died, Uncle Max. Remember? About five years ago now.”

Max blinked and pulled his hand away. He seemed hurt by this brash statement of the facts.

“You like chocolate?” Max asked in a lowered voice, changing the subject. “It just so happens that I have some in my room. Not Hershey’s, the other kind. I’m not supposed to eat it. High blood pressure. But I happen to have some I won’t say how.” Then, as if in retaliation, he added, “I’ll tell you who liked chocolate: my sister-in-law’s girl, Beth. She loved chocolate. She had these shoes. What do you call them, Mary Janes. With the little metal taps. You could hear her coming down the hall. She would dance and then I would give her chocolate. Come—you want, I’ll give you. Not Hershey’s.”

There was something pitiful and moving about the offer of the generic chocolate—not the best stuff, not the all-American candy bar, the one they rained down on starving children after the war, airlifted in cartons the kids ripped open with their teeth, not that one but the other kind, as if there were only Hershey’s and the rest, America and the rest. There was something about the meagerness of the offer that made it seem cruel not to accept.

Samson agreed, and taking the handlebars of Max’s wheelchair, turned him toward the door. Max turned stiffly, his face clouding over. “Shhh! Keep your voice down,” he hissed, though Samson had not spoken loudly. “I don’t want any trouble.”

The Max that Samson remembered had had a resistance to authority and made a mockery of it at any cost. Once he had to be bailed out of jail after a small traffic violation because when the police officer had pulled him over he’d handed over the contents of his wallet piece by piece like a Marx Brothers scene—old movie stubs, business cards, his library card—everything except his license. Afterward Max had reenacted the scene to anyone who would listen, laughing uproariously each time. It seemed to Samson now that this pleasure in ridiculing figures of authority was in some way Max’s own muted form of protest
against the injustice of fate, against the Nazis who had taken his family and destroyed all traces of his former life. Samson felt a jolt of compassion for Max, the singular, sad beauty of kinship. He squeezed his great-uncle’s shoulder as he piloted him along, palpating it through the robe as if Max were a wrecked boxer about to make a last appearance in the ring.

On the way to Max’s room they passed a glassed-in area where ten or twelve residents stood in front of a cluster of chairs. A plump, animated woman of about sixty, wearing a yellow leotard and tights, stood in front of the room gaily singing “It’s Silver Motion Time! It’s Silver Motion Time!” The class joined in with a strangled chorus like roosters trying to keep tune with a fat canary. “It’s Silver Motion Time! Silver Motion Time!” Out in the hall, the old prizefighter brightened up and clapped along.

“That’s Ruth Westerman,” Max announced, joining in with the others in a robust and still melodious tenor.

“Now move your head up and down, yes, yes, yes,” Ruth sang out, and the bedraggled troupe nodded their heads yes, yes, yes. “Beautiful! Now shake your head from side to side, no, no, no,” and like lemmings they followed her, no, no, no. The champ shook his head as well: No Hershey’s! No trouble! No I don’t remember who you are! “What else can we move?” Ruth sang out, and a host of suggestions came back, conservative at first—“Our eyebrows!” “Our fingers!”—then increasingly bolder—“Our arms!” “Our legs!”—until finally a booming command—“
OUR PELVIS!”
Ruth Westerman turned to the doorway where the suggestion had come from. Max was still clapping. “Our pelvis!” he repeated. It took a moment for her to absorb the idea. “Our pelvis!” she finally called out, raunchily pumping her hips. After a moment of confusion about the new choreography the seniors also joined in, rocking and swaying in assent.