Small Changes (24 page)

They finally extracted Phil from Bellevue, looking starved and pallid. “That’s a hellhole. But what a drug traffic. If all I wanted to do was get high, I’d never have to leave.”

“Phil.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Do you understand what happened? About my mother?”

“Still alive, isn’t she?”

“Yes, and so are you, no?”

“Phil’s card in the poets’ union requires this sort of thing
once a year,” Jackson said on Phil’s right side.

“What happened is that you betrayed me. Yes. You two met, without my permission. Over my drugged and tied-down body. In secret. In the farthest realms of my paranoid imaginings, you met and signed a devil’s pact against me.”

“Phil, I wouldn’t even say we got on.”

“She called me a senile monkey,” Jackson drawled. “A tight-assed self-righteous creep. She insults with energy but lacks your style.”

“Maybe she sees through you. You are both forgiven.” He made a sign of the cross. “Forgiving is a pious hoax. Who ever forgives for something they haven’t forgotten? Every time you remember a thing that hurt you, you charge that account a little more. Dig this: we’ll go around with wee laser guns. When we mean to forgive somebody we’ll put the laser gun to our skulls and blow out that memory: gone. Forgiveness will enter the world. Until then, I forget nothing.”

She saw them off to Boston together, in a rented car loaded with their few boxes and suitcases. They both traveled light. Their massed possessions did not quite fill the trunk and back seat. On the sidewalk outside Donald’s apartment on West Eighty-second, she stood and waved while they careened off through the maze of double-parked cars. Jackson was driving, Phil had his feet on the dashboard and his head hanging out waving back to her. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye. She found herself sniveling as she walked away.

In the next ten days she finally got into the Theory of Complex Variables. She carried it to the hospital where she sat beside her mother’s body for several hours a day. A woman with a tumor in her throat lay in the middle bed now, though the old woman Mrs. Katz was still penned in her crib.

Miriam’s eyes would glide off the dismal pages to her mother’s slack yellowed face, to her hand lying limp with the wedding ring thin and gold and worn almost smooth from a filigree pattern, cutting into the finger. Sonia’s face looked bitter in abandonment. She imagined entering her mother’s head telepathically to communicate—what? Mother, I love you, let me live … differently? The better afternoons were those with Allegra sitting there too, both of them feeling strongly their mother’s daughters and talking quietly. Remembering. Merging their childhoods.

When school reopened, Lionel decided they should go.
Allegra said to her, “Besides, he’s tired of having us around. We’re noisy. Suppose he got stuck with us living here with him forever—two unmarried daughters. He’d
plotz.”

Allegra and Miriam kissed good-by with affection for the first time. Allegra was going to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York near Cornell but rather less demanding. They agreed not to write unless they had something to tell.

Back to Ann Arbor Miriam went, to her comfortable room in the elite murmur of Martha Cooke with its blind statues and the nervous click of pills like worry beads, the hilly streets of tall oaks and maples just beginning to turn salmon and orange and gold and flame, the white wooden houses with big front porches and towers perched at the corners. She went back to her quiet affair with her ex-section man with its once- or twice-a-week meals and to bed with music and reasonable conversation and a certain amount of history of the Civil War era freely taught. She plunged into her classes and found the Theory of Complex Variables every bit as hideously stony and arid as it had seemed when she was sweating her palm print into the book all summer. For the first time she was not only doing less than well in a math class but loathing every minute. However, Theory of Discrete Systems was delighting her. She began to consider changing the direction of her studies to something involving computers.

Lionel kept saying how little money there was, and how he could not send her anything to live on above the dormitory. She cast around for a way to combine curiosity about computers with making some cash. She found a job building mathematical models of enzyme systems on a computer for a professor in bio-chemistry. It was all right. It was even interesting. She enjoyed that kind of playing. But working fifteen to twenty hours a week for him and taking a full load of classes left her little time for exploring her fellow humans. That would have to wait awhile. She was subdued and depressed still. She was surer than ever that she was going to move into computer science when, midway through November, Sonia officially died, and she flew back to Brooklyn for the funeral.

10

Just off the Freedom Trail (Phil)

Phil came back to Boston with anxiety and mixed urges. Something snotty in Boston stuck in his craw, cozy and stratified and damp at the core: he hated to come back, he hated to be away too long. Cambridge was even worse: the imperial domes of M.I.T. fading into its industrial fringe, separated by careful demolition from the nearby slums where he’d spent his lousy childhood. But this time he returned on his own terms, with a meal ticket, a synecure, a niche.

He even managed to visit his mother every two weeks with only minor friction. The older of his stepbrothers was married and living in Schenectady. The younger had dropped out of school and the old man had got him apprenticed in the union. He was still at home, but he’d grown his hair long and smoked dope and Phil liked him all right. The old man was having trouble with his heart and Phil tried to behave himself. His mother was looking older than she should and tired. Arthritis knotted her hands till she could hardly comb her hair. He thought of the years of her life spent cleaning other people’s floors and chattered about how well he was doing for himself.

He and Jackson rented a floor-through on Pearl Street in Cambridgeport, a mixed-up area where nobody was in the majority. The old frame houses crowded the rambling brick sidewalks, but in spite of the tides of through traffic, the neighborhood felt green and pastoral, especially in the summer. Big maples and horse chestnuts. Kids sitting on steps playing guitars, children with their wagons and bikes, dogs in back yards. Fences every place. Every front yard the size of a tablecloth had a wire fence or a privet hedge around it. Jackson was driving a hack, Phil picked up a part-time bartending stint and they eased into life in Cambridge.

People drifted through their apartment, crashed there, came and went in that ebb and flow Phil liked. Jackson was loosening too, took readily to the traffic. He was dropping his monkish withdrawal. Getting more into his old army role of father confessor, listening and nodding and mumbling in his chest and scratching his balls and looking wise.

On and off girls lived with them. Of the women Phil brought home, a certain tithe would always fall for Jackson, hoping and hanging on and maybe sharing his mattress for a while. Jackson was bone and steel and brain: he couldn’t be caught. Once in a while they would get into a little momentary tug-of-war over a piece, but it never lasted. It was a game. With a regular kitchen, Jackson took up cooking and they started eating well. Jackson got involved in the local food co-op and guys from that came through talking and arguing and eating and turning on together. Always they had food to eat and dope to smoke and wine to ease the body and friends to rap with and things happening and warm bodies to take off to bed. After the tensions of New York and the manic din and weird funky anomie, it was all easy. He was doing okay hustling J. Singleton Proxmire, professor of English, and making it in his department. Two of his poems got accepted by the
Hudson Review
, where J. Singleton Proxmire had an in, and three by a little poetry mag called
Barking Dog.
He felt good. Things were coming on for them.

They weren’t that far from East Cambridge, where he’d grown up in Roosevelt Towers. But he put off going by. He had some funny notion he had heard coming out of his mouth one time he was stoned with Jackson. He would go over there and he would meet himself, fifteen, mean, sore, halfway to a junkie. And
zap
, he would be transferred back to his undernourished asthmatic adolescence, simmering with hatred and self-hatred, back on the corner hanging out, shooting up in the hallways, getting laid among the garbage in the vacant lot behind the high rise, marked
KEEP OUT
, though it held nothing even they could find to steal.… His buddy Joe Rosario was the only person he could ever talk about class and poverty to without fudging it in rhetoric, without exaggerating one way or the other. Joe was in Boston too, teaching at Northwestern, but he was knocking himself out in the anti-war movement and went to seven meetings a week. Phil
only saw him when Joe had a drink at Finnegan’s Wake.

Then in early June Miriam turned up. Since she was starting graduate school at M.I.T. in September, she had decided there was no point spending the summer in Brooklyn. She had a job lined up and she obviously expected him to live with her somewhere.

Nine months, long time. He remembered how she had left him when her family whistled. Remembered her crying and crying like a busted hose. As he met her at the airport and brought her back to Pearl Street, he realized he was no longer in love with her and experienced a wild sense of liberation, like a wrecking ball swinging free. She sensed that quickly—she was always quick—sensed him holding back. The next morning she started looking for a place. She lucked into a sublet from an Italian-American social worker who was going to Europe for the summer. But in a week of installing her at the acute angle of Hanover and Charter in the North End, he was hooked again. Back to wanting her. Caught in that sense of intimacy.

It didn’t burn and pinch in the old way, but it was strong. He still wanted to be with her, he wanted her a lot, and the talking was better. She was getting tougher, chewier. He liked sleeping at the sublet. But when he thought of them living together in the fall, he felt it as a narrowing. Suppose he wanted to bring home a girl from the bar. Would he call up first? He wanted Miriam to move in to Pearl Street. She’d be on hand for him and so would the rest of that easygoing scene. And she’d be out-numbered.

She and Jackson didn’t get on. They rubbed each other the wrong way. She brought out all of Jackson’s latent Midwestern uptightness. After all, he remembered Jackson’s ex-wife: Sissy and Miriam had nothing in common besides being female. Sissy had been slim and long-legged and narrow-hipped, blond and athletic and polished, cool and expensive. She moved artfully, climbing stairs, sitting down: he had never seen her awkward till the end, when she was scared and angry.

But Miriam with her flamboyance and her earthiness and her sensuality put Jackson right up against the wall. It tickled Phil to see him bridling and setting his jaw: her presence caused him to brood about sex more than he liked. Still, they spent far more time at her place. Days when she wasn’t working
they would sleep late, then run down five flights to shop for lunch. In the yard of the Eliot School across the street, kids would be playing baseball or basketball, and he would stop to kibitz. Old men sat out in chairs on the sidewalk, there were little old women in black gossiping in Italian.

Miriam would have her shopping bag on her arm and they would stop at the bakery for fresh hot bread. The markets spilled out onto the sidewalk with fruit and vegetables that never any place else looked so fetching, so vivid. He swore the fish was more beautiful, the squid, the crabs, the flounder, the eels, the blowfish, the steamers and quahogs, the cod and halibut, spread out in rainbow splendor on the ice. Always at noon the narrow streets were jammed, and there were even a few pushcarts. The butchers had luscious veal and furry rabbits hanging outside. They drank espresso at shops patronized by middle-aged men who eyed them curiously. But the neighborhood was still the old working-class Italian island; and not even enough freaks had moved in for people to have started being hostile. When he spoke to people in the street they answered him. Always a grand wash seemed to be in progress, sheets and shirts and tablecloths whipping in the wind off the nearby and mostly invisible bay, suspended over the narrow passageways. Miriam’s progress through the streets did not go unappreciated. Phil was constantly amused, though Miriam was not.

They spent a lot of time out of doors. They strolled past the dusty monument maker, past the workshop where the man and his son made plaster figures of swordfish, angels, mermaids, and madonnas. Miriam greeted her neighbor underneath, who had lived there for forty-three years, as she often repeated. Phil liked to rap about Boston. He felt it was something he was turning her on to, though sometimes she complained he was cramming it down her throat.

“The first draft riot occurred in the North End, you know that? They try to tell us fighting the draft is new, but that’s bullshit.”

“Was that World War I?” Miriam was eating lemon slush out of a paper cone.

“You scientists know nothing, ha. Civil War. The federal marshals handing out draft notices were attacked by a woman who thought they were after her husband. A crowd beat them up and then started fighting the police. Aw, they attacked a
police station and the Cooper Street Armory. The troops fired into the crowd and charged with bayonets. The protesters broke into a gun shop in Dock Square but the police busted obvious leaders. Twenty people were killed and five sent to prison for ‘causing’ the riot. Sound familiar?” He strolled along with his hand on the back of her neck, under the fall of her hair.

They scrambled through the hole in the fence up into Copps Hill Burying Ground and sauntered among the worn old gravestones, with the kids riding tricycles and their mothers talking and an old man reading a newspaper in Italian and a couple holding hands. It was a neighborhood park, essentially, useful and green, in spite of the tourists following the signs for the Freedom Trail from Christ Church past the bocce players. They crossed the street and stood in the shade of the old trees looking down on the play ground and across the inner harbor to the Charlestown Navy Yard, where his old man had briefly been employed, and the three masts of the
Constitution
sticking up behind the squat mass of the Port Authority building. Then they wandered back home full of goodies and laden with bags of more, well sunned and walked out, and fell into bed. They had a nice big double bed and there they would fuck under a big reproduction of Rouault’s sad-eyed
David the King
until Phil revolted and threw it in the closet. “Jesus, it reminds me of a spaniel sitting there wanting some too, with those sad soulful entreaties. Enough to take the edge off.”