Three Short Novels (13 page)

19

T
he presence of Max Laurie was like a great impassable hand between herself and her son. The disintegration of the man, the constant grappling for his body by nothingness, served as a barrier between herself and her son, who was becoming, that summer of his sixteenth year, the man she had imagined for him when he was a child.

Each day of the warm spell at the end of summer she bathed Max's body as he lay in his bed. “I wish I had never hurt anybody in my life,” he said to her, stroking her arm.

“How many have you hurt?” she asked, humoringly.

“Everybody I've ever known,” he said. “Not deliberately. I'll say deliberately, because in the back of my mind I knew what I was doing. I used to say it was circumstance, but I think it was me. I don't know what it was. It might have been circumstance after all. But whatever it was, nobody should be hurt. They'll die too, and whatever dies shouldn't be hurt while it's alive.”

“You want to be a saint?” she asked.

He frowned a deep, intolerant frown that closed his eyes, a frown that was a revelation to her of the turbulence at his core. Then, still
with his eyes closed, he began stroking her arm again.

“The only reason I'm talking this way,” he said, “is because I'm sorry nobody knows who the other one is, what's troubling him, what's in his heart. I don't know why you brought me here. I know it wasn't because of any great love for me. I don't know why, but you've been more than kind, and whatever it is that's troubling you, I want you to know that I wish I could help you, and that's the way I want you to remember me—that I wished I could help you.”

“You help me,” she assured him.

“Sometimes I feel like I haven't been tested yet,” he went on, “that my life hasn't been lived yet. I feel like a boy who hasn't been put to the test yet, and I feel old, like I've been through the mill. I feel both. But I think I feel mostly that I haven't been tested yet, that more was expected of me. But what? What more? I should have done what I want others to do for me now—weep over me. It's the indifference that scares me. When so many die at once, in the war, in the concentration camps, what else can you do but be indifferent when one man passes out of the picture? Or maybe it was the indifference that led to everything. That's why I feel my life hasn't been lived yet. What did I do about the indifference? Was I supposed to do something about it?”

“I don't know, I don't know.” The cloth was absorbing the heat of his body. She dipped it into the bowl of tepid water and continued to bathe him, resisting the loss he was leading her into, the loss not only of him but of all the men of her life, the men she had believed were all more than this man's body was telling her they were.

He stroked her bare arm, down from the shoulder. “I wish somebody would keep a light on for me, like my mother did for my father,” he said. “It's one of those Jewish customs I forgot about. You light a candle or you keep an electric light on—every year on the day the person died. For his spirit. We had a dark hall in the apartment, we left the light on there. The way mother told it to me, it's to light
his way to God. I used to think it took an awfully long time for him to find his way, it went on year after year. It's just a matter of being remembered, that's all. I did it one year for my mother and then I forgot, or I was ashamed to do it. Depends on who you're living with at the time. Maybe nobody does it anymore. Not since so many died at once. What's one light? But I think I'd like you to do it for me anyway. No promises, nothing like that,” he insisted. “No promises.”

20

W
hen Max was taken to the hospital she kissed his brow and his hands in the presence of her father. She promised him, kissing his hands, that she would come by to visit him the next morning. Although he appeared to know what was happening to him, that he was being conveyed away, he did not seem aware of her kissing or of her promise or even of her presence.

In the hour following, she sat out in the garden, grieving over him, knowing that she would not visit him tomorrow or any day, that the sight of him while she kissed him had been the last sight. Around her she heard the sounds of the neighborhood's tranquility on a warm evening at the end of summer, but listened for sounds of violence and for violence without sound and for the return of her son that would deafen her to all sounds. With cigarettes falling from the package held upside down in her hands, she wandered into the living room and lay down on the sofa to wait for him. Exhausted by the heat of the day and by the countless nights of interrupted sleep, she slept, and was wakened by the fear that her son was not returning. It was night. She lit the lamp by the sofa and slept again.

“Is Max dead?”

She found she was lying on her side with her hands under her cheek, like a child. He had asked if Max was dead, she knew, because she had thrown herself on the sofa and appeared to be waiting to tell him. For no other reason would she be lying out there so startlingly.

“Where were you?” she demanded, sitting up, her question accusing him of solitude, of his young and slender body, of his response to the night, his skin paled by the night but everything else deepened—his curiosity, his innocence, his eyes. “You don't know and you don't care, that's what you think of Max.” He went on toward the stairs to escape her anger, and she called after him, “David? Do you hear me?”

She followed him to where he waited by the stairs, his back to the wall. “They took him away,” she cried, gripping his arms, lifting her face for him to see the spasms of grief, and he put his hand clumsily at the back of her head and pressed her face against his chest. With her hands covering her face, she went with him up the stairs as though returning to her bed to find rest and a cessation of grief and of all demands upon her, glimpsing through her fingers her bare feet climbing.

They sat together on her bed in an embrace of grief, until his consoling, his stroking her face and hands drew her down, drew him down beside her. She held his head with both her hands so that he could not elude her mouth moving over his face as if they both would die if she lifted it away, as if she were charged with the task of keeping them both alive. Against her mouth she felt his face pleading with her to save him from the world's chaos and to take him into the heart of that chaos. She undressed him and herself, his clothes among her own, as if she undressed one body, freeing them both from the flickering show of concealing and revealing that had gone on for the years of his life, and at last he lay beside her as he was to lie beside other women who were to be less now, forever less, than she, even as everyone in his life to come was to be less. She took his hands, guiding them to console her over more sorrow than he could ever imagine,
guiding his body onto her body, at last obliterating the holy separateness she had given him at birth.

Stricken by the same fear, then, they were unable to move apart. The fear that someone, everyone, would discover them if they moved, that even the slightest movement would reveal them, that everyone in their life must sense their presence here together and would sound the alarm if they attempted to return into the order of things. Furtively, in stages, she unbent her legs, but he moved suddenly, arresting his body in a nightmare fall, and she held him down, warningly. The lamp by the bed was on; holding him to her with one arm, she lifted her other arm to switch it off. Then, in the dark, it seemed to her that she had never been so conscious. Never so conscious before of her dominion.

21

T
he hour before dawn foretold how stifling the day was to be. Although his face was only a few inches away, it seemed to have suddenly receded far into the past, lapsing into sleep, into unconsciousness to elude a comprehension as hoveringly near as her face. She drew herself away from him. She found her negligee on the floor and, drawing it around her, wondered where to go to hide from him so that when he woke he could claim he woke from a dream. But when she moved toward the door, he flung himself off the bed, falling to the floor.

The sounds of his body thrashing against the floor deafened her to her own voice calling to him. Kneeling by him, she found him very still, the stillness as frightening as his paroxysm.

“I'll sleep here, I'll sleep here,” he said. But when she stood up, relieved to hear him speak of sleep, he lifted his head, coiling himself toward her feet, biting her ankle above the place his hands gripped it. She struggled to be free, wailing, and he released her, flinging himself away from her.

She went out to the garden and lay down on the canvas cot, on the
scattered leaves. She lay unmoving in the warm dark that was filled with the voices of birds like the sound of daylight breaking through in many small places, and, sleeping, dreamed that she was running backward into sleep, a stumbling, ungainly, heavy backward run into sleep, escaping her son running toward her, her son at the age of three or four, in a white suit, with everything clean upon him, running toward her to wipe his face in her skirt and leave an irremovable stain.

She opened her eyes to the sunlight of midmorning and closed them again. She was lying in the sun, unprotected by shadow, exhausted by the sun and by sleep itself, by the days and nights without sleep, by the memory of the night, and unable to rise and drag the cot into shade. She slept again, this time her sleep an oppression upon her like a sorrowfully familiar body, and woke to the sun exactly overhead, her face upward to it, the negligee fallen open and her body in a slattern's torpor. Rising, she returned to the house through the dense, obscuring sun, but stood outside the door, afraid to enter and afraid to see him again, wanting never to see him again and never to be seen by him, and, at the same time, feeling the loss of him as if he had died while she slept and her grief was never to be less.

For the rest of the day she remained in the garden, by the table in the shade of the umbrella, or wandering the narrow flagstone paths, waiting for her son to come out to her and forgive her. At the end of the afternoon, overcome by the conviction that she had denied all day, the conviction that he was gone, she entered the house. The silence, and even the fact that she could not find him, did not prove that he was gone; the silence was his taciturnity that she had experienced for so long. She accepted his absence only when she stood by the window of her bedroom, looking down on the leaf-littered cot where she had lain. Sometime during the morning, she knew, he had looked down, and it was to be his last sight of her.

22

E
arly in the evening she went out, afraid that he might return that night. She concealed her face with cosmetics like an actress hoping to conceal herself with a false face. She put on a yellow taffeta dress she had bought a year ago when Max had come to live with her; she put on her gray calf shoes whose color was a subtle silver, also bought a year ago; and though the night was warm she put on her long mink coat that Russell had given her for her birthday, their last year together. She had the appearance of a woman convalescing, who, in haste, in terror of falling ill again, applies her beauty awry. Afraid to remain at home and afraid to go out, she drove to her parents' house. The excuse that she gave to her mother, who was home alone, was that she had been on her way to a dinner party and felt ill and, since she had been near to her mother's house, she had decided to rest there awhile.

“My God, Viv, furs. It's a warm night,” her mother said when Vivian threw off her coat to lie down on the sofa. “Is it chills and fever?” She placed her small, smooth palm on Vivian's forehead. “You're tired out. You've exhausted yourself taking care of Max. Are
you cold?” She laid the fur coat over her daughter, up and over the breasts in the tight, saffron taffeta cups and up over the bare shoulders. “You may have caught something from him. I don't mean what he had, of course. I mean something else—the fear. When a young person like you is around somebody who's dying, she can't help but catch the fear.”

“It's something I drank,” Vivian called after her mother, who was already on her way through the delicately tinted rooms to the kitchen. She lay waiting for whatever her mother would bring, gazing down the length of her body, the length of the fur coat, to her feet in the silver shoes. If any confession was ever to be made it would not be made to her mother. A confession could never be made to any woman; there was more shame in confessing to a woman and nothing to be gained by it, no forgiveness that meant anything. To confess to a man, whether it led him to despise her or to forgive her, meant more, but it was not to be made to any man, either. She drew the coat over her mouth and nose.

Her mother returned, bearing a teapot and cups on a tray. “If you'd rather have coffee or sherry . . . ”

“No, no, it's tea I wanted.” She swung her legs down and sat up, holding her coat up around her to her chin, and reaching around it to lift the cup and saucer from the tray.

“You're thin,” her mother said. “You're thin as a rail. You ought to go to Hawaii. Teresa's there—she's always lots of fun—and some of your friends.” She found her niece's letter in a novel on the coffee table, unfolded it, and read, while Vivian held the coat to her chin and sipped tea, commenting on the pleasures to be found in the islands.

“You haven't been out in so long,” her mother said, apparently wondering if the year of her daughter's devotion to Max had damaged her wits so that, the day after the man was taken away, she stumbled out into the world, dressed as though on her way to a ball and
going nowhere. “You look beautiful, but you've got so thin and you don't look after yourself. You ought to have gone to Nicole's to have your hair done.”