Someone (3 page)

My brother said, “ ‘Ozymandias,’ “ as I lifted my teacup again. I felt my mother’s finger against my thigh, a quick poke to remind me to listen.

I listened, my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger. I was thinking of a baby wrapped in sparkling clothes, being pushed slowly in a white carriage, slowly through the city of light, toward Brooklyn, when I felt the sting of a slap against the back of my head and then its quick echo of pain. I pulled my finger from the cup. My mother hadn’t raised her eyes from her lap.

Gabe finished the poem and returned to his place at the table to drink down the cold tea and devour whole the bit of cake, his face flushed with his triumph. Patiently, my mother turned to me to ask what would happen if a teacup shattered while my fingers were inside it.

Some neighbor or faceless relation was named, a silly girl who’d “sliced herself good” with her hand inside a glass while she was washing up. A suggested image of soapy dishwater darkened with blood following me to the bath, where I watched my mother’s blurred red hand as it tested the seamless stream of steaming water.

I deployed all my excuses in a rush: the water was too hot, the house too cold, I’d had a bath last week, I had a stomachache, I was sleepy. But my mother had a grip on my arm, and my thin legs were all obedience. They raised themselves against my
will, up over the cold rim of the high tub and into the steaming water, where the pain from the heat became a chill in my spine and my thin body—bright red to my calves but pale white, nearly blue, through my chest and my arms—became no more than a scrap of cloth, a scrap of cloth caught and shaken and snapped by a sudden wind. I wanted to weep. I wanted to be sick. I saw for a terrible moment that my body was a scrap of cloth, that my bones were no more than porcelain, as were my rattling teeth and the china skull that contained them. I saw how a hoop of light, the water’s shifting reflection, swung up to the top of the tile wall, and then swung down again, carrying me with it, nauseous and full of despair. I sat. The warm water covered my arms and touched my chin. My mother let go of my forearm, although the imprint of her grip lingered.

There, she said. There now. After all your fussing. You just have to get used to it.

In those days I still slept in the crib that had been my brother’s, in a corner of the small room I shared with him. A peeling lamb painted on the headboard, a blurred line of grass and meadow flowers at the foot. Low light. Prayers. My parents’ dry lips to my forehead and some single, barely whispered word at the end of the day that told me I was cherished above all things by these indistinct and warm-breathed shadows, leaning over me at the end of the day.

Gabe came in sometime later. Another blur of darkness and light—dark clothes and fair hair—coming in to take the pajamas out from under his pillow. When he returned, he was a brighter blur because he was dressed in them. Through the bars of the crib, I watched him kneel to say his prayers and then pull down his covers and climb into bed. He slept on his back, a wrist over his eyes, like another picture book illustration I had seen, of
a laborer resting in a field. The light stayed on most of the night, and this gesture, his wrist thrown over his eyes, was his silent accommodation to my fear of the dark.

I woke to find the light had been put out. There were only the soft-edged, geometric patches of streetlight on the ceiling, across one wall. I threw a leg over the side of the crib, fitting my toe into the space between the bars, and carefully—I was not an athletic child—leaned to bring the other over. I lowered myself to the cold floor and then crossed it on tiptoe. Gabe opened his blankets for me in the same way he did everything: quietly, methodically, with a good-natured but stoic acquiescence to duty. A dutiful child. Wakeful himself at that hour.

I told him I’d had a bad dream, making it up as I went along: a terrible, white-fisted giant with swollen cheeks had carried me to a high, precarious place I could not climb down from, and Gabe listened carefully, commiserating briefly, marveling appreciatively each time I whispered, “And then,” adding another horror. He said, I never dream. I never have a dream that I remember. His features were a blur, although our faces were only inches apart. And yet the handsome, high-colored, precisely featured boy who was my brother during the day, the brother I saw with my glasses on, was far less familiar to me than this one of uncertain edges and soft darkness, with a spark of wet light in his mouth or his eye when he said that if I was good and didn’t kick, I could stay. I made my promises, and he accepted them, but he moved anyway to the far side of the narrow bed, all the way up to the wall—the wall we shared with the Chehabs’ building—turning his back to me and putting his hand on the cool plaster. The soft sheets retained their odor of sunshine against the warmer, closer scent of my brother’s scalp and breath and skin. With his back turned, he told me to say a prayer to keep the nightmares away. He said if I prayed, the Blessed Mother would keep the nightmares away.

Slowly, I moved my hand under his pillow until I made warm contact with his own. He was holding his rosary. He moved his hand away until my fingertips touched only the cool beads.

He fell asleep in small starts, resisting it. As if, I imagined, the sandman had hold of his ankle and was slowly tugging him under, all against his will. As if he struggled to remain awake. I looked at the lozenges of light on the wall, one was a rectangle, one was a crucifix. I tried out a few prayers, but since the nightmare I had described was a lie, there was nothing, really, to ask protection from. I heard my brother’s knee or his hand or the ball of his foot strike the wall now and again as he was tugged under. A thump and then a thump, and then I knew he was sleeping.

In the morning, the ambulance at the curb gave up a hot breath. Children had gathered, women with coats over their shoulders, men in shirtsleeves. Across the street, curtains were drawn aside, there were faces at windows, one of them ghoulish with shaving cream. First a murmur among the crowd: women with their fingers to their lips or their hands to their hearts, men conferring softly. Then, as the minutes ticked by, the revving excitement, the pleasure of something happening that would distinguish the ordinary day: the thrill of the disrupted routine, of a dull breakfast left on the table, of schoolbooks still at the door. An excitement that sounded first in the children’s voices—a sudden laugh, a loud cry—but then infected the grownups as well—a sneeze and a cheery “God bless,” another trill of laughter—as if we had forgotten, for a minute, that some kind of crisis, some crisis at the Chehabs’, had gathered us all here on the damp sidewalk at 7:00 a.m.

And then the ambulance man backing through the basement
door, and then the suddenly arrested sound of human chatter gave way at once to the collective intake of breath when those assembled on the sidewalk saw that the stretcher contained a body covered from toe to head—only a slip of Pegeen’s sloppy hair showing beneath.

From the opened door behind the second ambulance man, Mrs. Chehab’s cry was a spiraling wail. Most of the women, and many of the men in the street, blessed themselves. My mother put a rough hand to my shoulder and then pulled my face into her apron, which was still a little damp from last night’s washing up. All instinct, I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around my mother’s waist, gripping the apron, the rough wool of her skirt, nestling into that familiar darkness and feeling the sudden warmth of my brother’s two hands as he pressed them against my ears, trying to spare me the sound of the women’s prayers and exclamations, of Mrs. Chehab’s lament, of the slam and the slam again of the ambulance’s broad doors.

All of which, nevertheless, I heard.

It was the next evening that we walked in solemn stillness up the steps of the Chehabs’ house and into the crowded living room. It was painful, the way my mother gripped my hand as we made our way through that forest of adults, all red knuckles, for me, and wedding bands and the hems of jackets, until the figures suddenly parted and there before the glass of the bay window was the gleaming box and Pegeen in its satin bed. She wore her white graduation dress, and her red confirmation rosary was threaded through her still fingers. There was a single taper beside Pegeen’s head, its light reflected in the black window in such a way that, for a moment, I believed her thin and waxy nose now bore its own flame.

I felt a pair of large hands slip themselves under my arms, warm and strong. And then I was aloft. The light grew brighter
and the darkness fell away. I clutched the hard edge of the box, resisting even as I gave in, put my face to the moon-colored brightness of Pegeen’s cheeks, kissed her, and then saw my own white face briefly reflected in the dark glass of the bay window as I was returned once more to the pooled shadows of the floor.

At home, my mother unpinned her hat and my father returned his fedora and his topcoat to the closet. Mrs. Chehab, they were saying, had noticed the dirt on Pegeen’s coat and the tears in her sleeves, circles of soot on the knees of her good stockings, well before yesterday’s last tumble down the basement stair. Pegeen had always been a clumsy girl, they said, although Fagin, the undertaker, suspected something more than the fall had killed her: Some burden in the brain, he had said.

My mother turned back the good tablecloth and my brother brought out his books. On this evening, to make up for the time lost on our visit to Pegeen, we had our tea quietly as he studied among us, the only sound in the room the ringing of my father’s cup against the saucer, which I imitated with the clanging of my own. The visit to the Chehabs’ had deprived us of our evening walk to the speakeasy as well.

And then my brother closed the thick book before him and reached for another from the pile beside his chair, this one worn and leather-bound, with thin pages. He turned them, and then, with his hands tucked under his thighs, bent over the book to read. I saw my parents look to him, to the top of his bowed head. It seemed to me they were watching him slyly, as if, were he to raise his head again, their eyes would dart away.

He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. “ ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?’ “ he read. “ ‘Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head
are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’”

My mother’s head was bowed. My father’s two hands remained folded together over the china cup, arrested in that surreptitious moment of their steadying each other against the trembling that his evening constitutional usually kept at bay. Out on the street, a truck carrying bottles rattled by. One happy voice shouted to another.

Into the silence that followed I said, “Amadan.”

I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother’s startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. “Amadan.”

The pretty room tilted then—folded white tablecloth and black polished wood and the light of the simple chandelier—as my mother, with an iron grip on my upper arm, swung me out of my chair and into the tiled bathroom where the cup was filled beneath the silver stream of warm water and the soap dipped into it, once, then twice. “Again,” my mother said as I tasted the bitter water and, leaning over the porcelain, spit it out into the sink.

In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, “A fool. It means someone’s a fool.”

Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father’s shout of laughter when my brother asked him, “Who is?”

They called me “our little pagan” after that, whenever their pride in my brother’s saintliness was in need of some deflating. Self-deflating, as was their way. When the priest from St. Francis
came to say there was clearly a vocation. When the letter from the seminary arrived.

“We’re not so enamored of the priesthood as some,” my mother said, washing the dishes after the priest had come for tea, blushing with pride, but also holding her lips in such a way that made it clear she was not going to go overboard—as she would have put it—with her delight in Gabe’s success. There were just as many men in rectories, she said, who were vain or lazy or stupid as there were in the general population.

“One bishop,” my father joked, his hand to the top of my head, “and one little pagan. We’ve run the gamut in just these two.”

I climbed the staircase of Gertrude Hanson’s house, my hand on the wide banister. The carpet here was threadbare and there was the familiar odor of dust in the air. What light there was came through the transom above the entrance or filtered down in a single yellow shaft from the dirty skylight four stories up. Gertrude Hanson’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on the heavy door. The corridor was warm and airless. I heard Mrs. Hanson’s voice inside, laughing, and I rose up on my toes.

“Come in, Marie,” Mrs. Hanson called. “We know it’s you.”

Because this was the Saturday-morning routine, Gerty and I being even then the best of best friends. I opened the door and leaned in.

The Hansons’ front room was crowded with furniture: the great black dining-room table, eight chairs with tapestry seats, a heavy sideboard, a tea cart, a china cabinet with bowed glass—indication, in those days, of a family’s propriety and prosperity. Twice in my recollection I had arrived at Gerty’s on a Saturday
morning and been startled to find the front room starkly empty, only the lamps still there, the good dishes and the tea set piled in a corner on the bare floor. “Repossessed” was the word Gerty used with an easy shrug. But on this morning it was all solidly in place, and beyond it I could see Mrs. Hanson in a wide chair just outside the kitchen entry, her bare feet on a plump hassock, her hands beckoning. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Come in and take this poor child out into the fresh air. She’s been cooking all morning.”