All My Relations (23 page)

“My wife, the journeyman drywaller. She's teaching me to do arches,” Dominic said.

“We can pick 'em, Dom. Women,” Harry said. He steadied the gypsum panel while Dominic scored the back with a utility knife, preparatory to bending the curve.

After a while Dominic said, “It was awful for Mom to go so slowly, but thank God it gave us all a chance to be there.” He remembered her shrunken, bright-eyed face still pleading and directing: Buy her a slip that didn't make her thighs sweat. Hold hands. The family obeyed. They surrounded the bed as if it were a palanquin that presently they would raise and transport to a delightful, refreshing spot.

Dominic remembered finding Harry crouched at the foot of the bed, in the dark, a mound barely larger than their German shepherd.

He set down the knife and gripped Harry's shoulder. The two men paused a few seconds, then resumed cutting the board.

“Grandpa Harry took us to a bar,” Marco said as his parents were putting him to bed. He felt bad ratting on his mother, but the continued silence about Harry's activities gave him a sick churning in his stomach.

“Barhopping with the old man?” Dominic said.

“It wasn't worth mentioning, but I was going to tell you,” Ella said. “My real crime is he's been hanging Sheetrock. I can't set a bodyguard on him. I'm gone hours a day.”

“Let's get him the hell away from here,” Dominic broke out. “Send him to Cancun. Money's coming in. A few weeks, we'll be contracting out this shit.”

“Honey, I can't take any more ‘few weeks.' I'll quit the school.
We'll hire us some men, I'll be out here all day with a bullwhip over them. I'll tie ol' Harry to a saguaro.”

“You love that job,” Dominic said, stricken.

“I love you. I love our family being together.”

“You're punishing yourself for letting Harry work.”

“Would you mind not interpreting everything by your piddling rules, even if you're right?”

Dominic grinned tightly at the numbness settling over his heart, in the place occupied by his house.

Harry culled Manpower for potential drywallers, Ella's assistants. The most competent, a Mexican carpenter, was deported by the INS after a week. Harry saber-sawed cutouts for electrical boxes. And Harry hung Sheetrock—but only when Marco was in school, at Ella's insistence. “Bad enough I lie without making the boy a liar for me,” she said. She dug a trench for the backyard wall. Eighteen inches beneath the surface, her shovel struck caliche, which she'd break apart with an iron bar. Ella's formerly soft white arms were browned and lumpy with muscle like old mesquite pods.

For his part, Marco kept his mouth shut whatever his suspicions about Harry, an intuitively pragmatic choice. He and his mother depended on each other to get through the day, while his father inhabited the air, terminal-hopping between Tucson, Denver, and Phoenix.

If in his home market Dominic tiptoed a financial tightrope, Denver was the equivalent of seven-league boots. Hospitals within spitting distance of each other accepted bids for nearly identical multi-million-dollar imaging systems. Soon, Dominic thought, every school nurse would be demanding her own MRI. Logging four million in sales his first two months, he was flown overseas for seminars and conferences. In climatized capsules he soared from hemisphere to hemisphere, cloud-continents outside his window, the curve of the planet below. Drowsing,
he jerked awake with a daydream: his family had separated. Marco would go with Ella; practically, that would be the result, whatever the custody settlement, because of Dominic's traveling. Harry would stick with those two, moving in as he became infirm. Ella sponge-bathing Harry's scrawny, sinewy body.

Dominic would remain plastered to the sky like a cathedral angel.

Sheetrock was hung, taping began. Frustrating to learn, the technique of “mudding” panel joints with compound, embedding paper tape, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, mudding the finish coat, was phenomenally boring when mastered. At first Ella's joint knife skidded fitfully, leaving a trail of blobs and gouges. Simply aligning the tape exhausted her patience.

Under Harry's tutelage, Ella learned the sensuousness of tools. With the pressure of a finger, the blade yielded to the slopes of a valley joint. The sander floated rather than rubbed, feathering the edges of a seal. Weight alone told her if she'd scooped sufficient mud onto the knife.

But the repetition, its tyrannical productivity, left her deadened and sour.

“I don't know why he bothers coming home at all,” Ella told Harry over a pitcher of draft. “Himself.” She laughed.

Dominic couldn't fathom Marco. One moment the boy was shinnying up Dominic's leg, both arms—at last—hugging tight, a familiar game. The next he was jabbing Dominic's nose and armpit with a T square while his father hunched over the floor plan. The night before, Marco had said, “Get your smelly feet off my bed” while Dominic tried to read him a story.

With a linebacker's build in hand-tailored fabric, and genial professional confidence, Dominic had his admirers on the road. He was accustomed to offers of dinner, and franker invitations. Since he and Ella were making love so rarely, he repressed desire
altogether. Instead he gift-shopped. Saleswomen were infatuated with his gelded brilliance. The oak-framed wall mirror—so tasteful, sturdy but graceful, a hint of recklessness in ornament yet without ostentation. No less than style he appreciated comfort in choosing his wife's shoes—fortunate wife! The electronic baseball game, ideal for father-son weekends.

The presents irritated Ella. Dominic's bargain discoveries for the house, such as the antique wagon wheel, went directly into storage. “Honey, you want to stoke me, buy me a drywall crew,” she said.

Soon, Dominic promised.

Ella was bored with her self-reliance. Requiring no will to maintain, it lifted her from bed in the morning, performed multiple duties, and retired with her at night. Unnervingly, this competence doled out even spontaneity and love. Her play with Marco was exactly inventive and silly enough, her rejoinders to him the proper balance of tenderness and instruction. When Dominic hired contractors to finish the house and Ella returned to the school, she pleased her students effortlessly. The flagstones she indifferently laid for the patio walk arranged themselves into a harmony that defied improvement.

As a warehouse assistant loaded bags of ready-mix concrete into her station wagon, Ella became aware of the man's hands passing inches from the tips of her breasts. The thought of his knuckles gently bending back her nipples occurred to her. Evidently her musings were forceful enough so that he paused, remarking, “This walkway, it would be some job to handle by yourself.”

“I manage,” Ella said.

Harry's voice, when Ella called him for a drink, was a coded mumbling she scarcely could understand. But he met her at the sports bar. Though she'd repeatedly invited him to inspect progress, it was the first she'd seen of him in a month, since the subcontractors took over, and his face was thin and pouchy.
Only when Ella relayed compliments from the drywall crew did he perk up, stroking his watered-back hair. Then he subsided again into his beer.

Though Ella fed him lines about his New Jersey exploits, he didn't bite, instead complaining that Dominic's brothers and sister had stopped sending anniversary cards since Bernice's death. “Of course, from Himself, some gilded tablets from the Hilton gift shop. Moses on the mountain.”

Ella asked the proper consistency for ready-mix, mortaring the flagstones.

“Hell, I'll come do it myself,” Harry said. Though Ella had seen him drink far more, the two pitchers left him blithering, sunk in his chair. He said he was too drunk to drive home. Contemplating the ten-mile round trip to his apartment, Ella agreed that he could stay at the Airstream. Marco was sleeping at a friend's.

The night air rushing in the car window invigorated him. “Hey bunnies,” he called, as two jackrabbits strobed across the high beams. “Got yourself a real house in the country now,” he told Ella.

Stretched full-length, Harry actually made the bed appear large. “Just your boots off is enough,” Ella said, unlacing them. She loosened his belt. Rather than the clingy, semitransparent nightgown, she considered her one set of emergency pajamas, but they would be sweltering.

When she came out of the bathroom, changed, Harry's clothes had molted neatly onto the floor, leg openings of his Jockey shorts like two eye holes. Ella could imagine perfectly, between her sheets, the browned leathery body, penis lolling in its nest—was the hair still black?

“See you bright and early,” she said.

“I'm not turning you out of your bed,” Harry protested. “Put a two-by-six between us. I'm passing out, that's it.”

“Good
night
.” She touched the top of his head. Seeing in his frank stare that she was fully revealed, Ella could not leave.
She must suggest a cold glass of water, useful in preventing hangover. She must lean across the bed, adjusting the curtain.

Finally she lay down on the kitchen bench. The filmy nylon breathed across her body with the hum of the fan.

In the morning Harry treated Ella with the shy consideration of a new lover. She was mute with embarrassment, clumsy, upending a wheelbarrow of ready-mix over the flagstones, dropping a trowel on her foot. She couldn't wait to drive Harry away.

In the midst of conversation, Dominic would catch Harry shooting glances past him, for Ella. She didn't respond, Dominic noticed, but why would Harry expect she would? “I know you can't be having an affair with Harry,” he said. “But why does it seem like you are?”

“That's the most revolting thing you could have said to me if you sat around thinking about it for a hundred years,” Ella cried.

It was a bad day. Dominic had claimed he and Ella could tile the sunken tub over a weekend. But the several hundred thumb-sized cerulean chips, rather than conforming to the tight lattice flaunted by the brochure, undulated across the walls like shoals of fish.

Ella hadn't called Harry for two weeks when he happened by. She felt compelled to offer him dinner. They toured the house, treading earth-red tile in the den, pearlescent vinyl in the kitchen. The fixtures gleamed under the skylight.

“We'll be able to throw the switch next week. Dom's taking his vacation,” Ella said. It was November, a year and a half after groundbreaking. “We'll paint together, trim, at least. Aren't those cabinets stunning? Dom has good taste.”

Ella sat on the floor, Harry lounging against the sink. He looked awful, flaccid; he complained of headaches.

“I can't get over the feeling,” Ella said, “that the minute we set the last pebble on the driveway, someone's going to haul the
whole thing away, and there will be the vacant lot, and we'll start all over.”

“Jesus Christ,” Harry said, pointing. “The ceiling's bowed out.”

Ella stared but shook her head.

Harry tilted her chin. The defect was visible as a fine gradation of shadow.

Ella cursed. “By the time I get the crew out here, Dom will be home.”

“Screw the crew. I cover my own tracks,” Harry said.

“No, no, no,” Ella sighed, shoving his arms gently. “You've earned your bust over the mantelpiece already.”

Harry's face folded up like an old glove. “Dom's going to know it's us. We hung this room.”

“Dom scarcely remembers what state he lives in.”

“He'll make it his business to find out,” Harry said shrilly.

“Dom isn't that way.”

“Pardon my French, but he'll bust my balls ‘til kingdom come.”

Ella couldn't explain, though she always remembered, the hardness that set into her then. Harry's very frailty goaded her. O.K., order the materials, she said; they'd begin the following afternoon.

When Ella arrived home from school, a T-brace of two-by-fours rose from the kitchen floor to a raw gray panel of new gypsum board. Bent backward across the stepladder, clawed hammer pawing the Sheetrock, Harry seemed to be crawling across the ceiling. Sweat splashed beside Ella.

“Harry, goddamnit you come down right now.”

“Sure.” His voice creaked breathlessly. Dismounting, he moved the ladder beneath the other end of the panel, the last of four. He extended the hammer to Ella. “You do the honors. Whew.” He wiped his forehead. “Hate to live anywhere else, some place where it doesn't even crack 85 degrees in November.” Harry jack-knifed suddenly, crumpling against the wall. As Ella screamed, diving for him, he straightened, tried to push her away. “Hoo, dizzy,” he said.

He was still protesting, jeering at her, as she drove him to the hospital.

Based in Phoenix that week, Dominic had made an unscheduled two-day side trip to a remote reservation clinic site. When he returned to the hotel, a sheaf of frantic messages from Ella awaited him at the desk. Harry's stroke had occurred not the afternoon he was admitted, but the following morning.

Ella met him at the airport. “Crazy,” Dominic shouted, fast-walking her past the taxis, toward the parking lot. “Hanging drywall by himself?”

Ella was silent.

“So much woman you can make him twenty again,” Dominic said, sliding into the driver's seat. “He used to box, too, you know. Let's hang a speedbag over the hospital bed. He can work on his jab.”

“Dominic, let it go.” She was crying.

Harry looked like a goblin, fleshy nose and ears prominent in his sunken face, his weathered tan paled to a dull orange.

“Papa,” Dominic said, for the first time in over thirty years.

Harry's hand lifted in a wave.

Dominic adjusted Harry's pillows and bossed the nurses. Harry stared straight ahead, dozing intermittently. Dominic sat in the undersized chair, crushing his forehead into the mattress, waiting for tears. The inertness of his father's hand in his made him look up in dread. But the old man was gazing steadily at Ella.