Frog (61 page)

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and then scratched out with a pen. It took him a while to decipher it; held it up to the light; held a lit match behind it; tried erasing and then dissolving the ink. “She's okay now, out of the hospital first on some stupefying and now a tranquilizing drug. Roof door's been padlocked, violating all F. D. laws. Just hope she doesn't incinerate the place to kill herself next time and the ground floor exit's blocked. I know what your impulse is but don't waste your hard-earned dough and scant day-off time coming in to see her. We've been told to put the whole thing away for good. Poor kid. Who could blame her? Newspaper articles and photos enclosed. They don't even come close. Don't let on I wrote.” He calls home, Alex answers and says—Vera or the folks must have been near—“Hi, everything's jim-dandy here, the folks fine, Vera's just great, you're lucky to be away. City's been sticky with humidity and temperatures in the upper nineties for a week, so even with the fans blasting at high we can't sleep.” By the time he gets home at the end of August all the newspapers about it have been thrown out. He tries talking about it once but Alex says “Shh, shut your trap, someone might hear; anyway, it's old news.” There's a brownstone on the block for Christian missionaries passing through on their way to Africa or on their way back to wherever they live in the States. She becomes friendly with the woman who runs it, is invited in for chats, then prayer meetings, Bible classes, dinners in the refectory, Sunday teas. She makes friends with the young violinist son of a couple who work there. They stayed in New York rather than go back to Africa or wherever they came from in the States because their son got a full scholarship at Juilliard when he was fifteen. Howard finds this out only years later at a chamber music concert near the summer cottage he and his wife rent, when his mother's up visiting. “That man playing,” she whispers, “—the one sweating so. I'm sure he's the same violinist Clintwell Vera was friends with at the Heatherwhite House.” “Come on,” he says, and she says “Seriously. He's heavier and older, but the same sweet soulful face, and he used to sweat a lot then too.” After the first piece he says “I never knew about him. I mean, he's a fantastic violinist and all that. I even have a couple of his recordings—one a Bartok violin-piano duo and the other a Bach partita, I think, with a sonata or another partita on the other side-but with Vera?” “You were away. California. Should we speak to him after, though he probably won't want to know she didn't survive.” “It was so long ago; he won't remember her.” “Of course he will. They were close friends. She used to bring him home for lunch, play checkers and cards with him in her room, do all sorts of things together: sit out in the backyard and tell funny stories and laugh. For a while I even thought if there was anyone who'd marry her, it'd be he. Simply because he'd overlook her illness, being so involved with his violin, or out of some Christian act, do it because of that. They weren't in love, I don't think, and she was a few years older; but he was very religious and withdrawn and shy and had no other real friends, she said, so I don't think there was any young person closer to him at the time. Then he graduated and moved away.” They see him talking to a couple on the veranda during intermission. He's holding his violin and bow, though he didn't play in the second piece, and is mopping his hair with a hand towel. Probably he was in a studio in back practicing, for it isn't that hot. “I have to know—you coming with me?” and she goes over, excuses and introduces herself, says how much she enjoyed his performance even if she isn't the greatest connoisseur of classical music—she likes it, though, make no mistake about it—but she wonders, mainly because her son thinks she's imagining it—she points to Howard who shakes his hand, says “Howard Tetch, her son; enjoyed your playing very much, very very much”—if he could be the same Clintwell who lived with his parents in the Heatherwhite House in New York City many years ago and knew her daughter Vera. “Sure, Vera; Vera Tetch. She helped me,” and turns to the couple and says “Her daughter helped me with my writing and math when I was a young man or I would have flunked,” and asks her and doesn't seem surprised to hear Vera died twenty years ago. “I'm sorry. Thank you for stopping by,” and resumes talking to the couple, something about an excellent inn nearby with an unbeatable breakfast. After about two years of being around the mission house, borrowing their pamphlets and books, going with some of them to a religious retreat for a week, she announces at dinner “I hope this won't be taken badly by any of you, but I plan to convert.” “Over my dead body,” his father says. “If she really wants to,” his mother says, “and she feels it will help her in ways, there's nothing we can do.” “You're going to tell me? Over my dead body.” Vera says “I'll do what I have to; I'm old enough; there's no law to stop me,” and leaves the table. “You're old enough to be confused,” his father shouts after her. “There might be no law but I'll stop you by locking you in your room. By burning down that Christian house. By getting the police after them and running them out of town.” A few months later she says “I've an announcement to make. I don't know if any of you will like it, but I'm now a Christian. I didn't go through any ceremony, but I feel I am and for now that's enough for me. So from now on, please don't consider me a Jew.” “You didn't go through a ceremony, you're no Christian,” his father says. “And even if you did go through one, I wouldn't accept it. You were born a Jew, your mother and father are Jews, your whole family is, from your brothers on down, so you're stuck with it. It's the best religion, so feel good it's still yours. But tell the world you're a Christian and I'll tell them right back you're crazy.” She says nothing, leaves the table crying. The next day she leaves a note by the phone saying “Please keep this here till everyone has read it. Dear family, don't include me in any of your Jewish religious observances from now on, except if you only want to invite me as an outsider. Thank you. I love you all always and I will pray for you all always too, no matter what you might think of that. Vera.” That's the last she brings it up at home. She talks about it privately with his mother, his father never mentions it again to her. She goes to church with some mission people on Sundays and religious holidays, spends lots of time in the mission house setting up tables for dinner, cleaning up rooms as best she can, doing little chores. She says she does all this because she wants to and that they've offered her money for her work but she's refused. When she dies several mission house people come to the chapel that night to pay their respects. Vera's in a closed casket in the room, the funeral's the next day. The woman who runs the mission house kisses his mother's cheek, shakes everyone else's hand, asks if she can speak to the family outside the room. His father says “I know what you're about to say and it's no.” The woman says “Perhaps you do know but my conscience compels me to tell you, to find out. May I speak?” “Speak, speak.” “Vera told me a few months ago, long before she went into the hospital, that if she died—” “That she wants to be buried a Gentile with a Gentile ceremony and so forth. I know; I told you I did.” “But she wouldn't mind what kind of cemetery she was buried in, Jewish or Christian, but would prefer, if it was the former, to be near her parents.” “She wants to be this; she wants to have that; she can't have both and everything. I hope you told her that. Because where we have our plots is a place for Jewish burials and monuments only. Maybe on one side of us and along the road to it are other cemeteries for Gentiles, but that's nothing to talk about since she's going in the ground tomorrow.” “I told her there was a problem and also to tell everything she told me to her parents. She said she tried, but wouldn't explain further. I said if what she wants does happen, and that I don't think it'll happen at a time when I can be of any help—I meant by that to try to tell her I was much older than she and so would die long before her—I'd do what I could. But that she should still try to work it out with her family.” “Did Vera ever say anything about it to you?” his father says to his mother. “She said she was undecided about everything,” she says, “but leaned to being a Christian.” “There, case closed. A Jew's buried a Jew, otherwise he can never be at rest. His soul. I think that's Jewish law. If it isn't, it's still what I want for her.” “I only wanted to get it off my chest,” the woman says. “As far as I know she was never baptized. Even if she was, and I don't see how I couldn't have known of it, you've gone through too much with her these last few years and we'd never think to interfere.” “Can't we make some sort of compromise?” Howard says to his parents. “Mind your business,” his father says. “It's too late for anyone to stick his nose in.” When she's in the hospital the last time, Howard says to her “Want me to read anything to you? Or tell you a story, or reminisce?” She shakes her head. “I've brought an anthology of poems. The Oxford, look at it; enormous. It could be from any century you want.” Shakes her head. “From the Bible then?” There's one on the side table, with several ribbons and envelopes sticking out of it as bookmarks. “No,” she says, “nothing feels right. For a while I liked it. Maybe the next day.” “I could start at the beginning. It'll give me something to do, so for me. And I've never read any of it except in Hebrew school when I had to for my bar mitzvah, so it'd be a good chance for me to get in to it again. I'll skip all the lists, just concentrate on the beautiful parts and good stories.” Shakes her head, seems to lose consciousness. “People call her the mayor of the block,” his mother says in a letter. “Almost everyone who lives on it, or at least gets out onto it, knows her, and same with lots of people from other blocks who walk through ours to get to the subway or bus and back or who work around here. She sits against the railing out front and people stop to talk to her. Every now and then one of them asks if she wants to go to the store with them or a museum or have lunch at the luncheonette down the street or one of the restaurants around. I think for the first time since she was five she's really happy. She's opened up. She wishes strollers, some of whom she doesn't even know, a ‘good day' or expressions like that. She watches over babies in carriages sometimes in front of a building, if someone asks her to, or a double-parked car if the driver's not going to be too long. And of course the people at Heatherwhite House have been a godsend. Not only welcoming her in but twice rushing up the block soon as I phoned them, when Dad and Vera fell at the same time in different rooms and I couldn't pick either up. And when the weather's not so nice, she goes there, sometimes for all day, or friends she knows from the neighborhood come to see her here. She's reading; she's busy; she's taken an interest in ancient choral music and stained glass, all from going to church. She never seems to have enough time to do everything she wants to, which is terrific. She's deteriorating physically, though. Her face looks wonderful—bright and cheerful, that gorgeous smile—but her body has more of those café au lait spots than ever and a couple of new spongy fibromas on it. The neurologist wants to see her, but I don't see how we can put her through more surgery if he asks for it. Suppose she says no—that she doesn't even want to be examined by him—what am I to do? I think I can convince her, but do I want to? Everything will change for her—her mood, on and off the street, so no more big smiles and spontaneous yoo-hoos—and there isn't a fresh place on her neck or back to cut through anymore and I don't want them going through old scars…” His brother Alex saves money for a trip around the world. Bus to San Francisco, tramp steamer to Japan, teaching English there for several months to earn some more money, then Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and so on. Two days before he's to leave she takes the bus ticket and several hundred in cash from his drawer, flushes the ticket down the toilet, spends all the money on gifts for relatives, anonymous donations by mail to charities, a lavish lunch at an expensive restaurant for friends and acquaintances, a hundred dollar bill to a scavenger going through garbage cans on the street. That's what she tells his mother. Alex postpones the trip. Doesn't want to take money from his folks or borrow it from anyone. “I want to go free and clear,” he writes Howard. “I also don't want to speak to Vera yet why she did it. She's not ready, it might hurt her too much, she's got her own problems, and I already know why. She's jealous of my being able to clear out when I want for as long as I like, and we've gotten tight since I moved back home, so she also doesn't want me to go. By staying a few more months I can earn back the bus ticket and what she stole and also do what I can to get her used to my going more and to what she did to me….” He rents an apartment on the East Side, borrows his brother Jerry's convertible to move his books and typewriter and some furniture and boxes of different things. It takes several trips. She drives with him, holds onto the mattress handle to keep it from falling out while they go across town, stays in the front seat
while he carries his things to the top floor. Every time he comes downstairs she smiles and waves at him. One time she has her straw sun hat off and is brushing her hair. Another time her head's back and she's smoking without removing the cigarette from her mouth and her arms are stretched out on top of the seats. Another time she's singing along with the radio. Another time she starts up the car—he left her the key to show a policeman in case one says the car's illegally parked and has to move—and honks, pats the passenger seat next to her and says “Hop in.” Another time her sweater's off and the sleeves are tied around her neck and she's behind the steering wheel and pretending to drive. “I'm doing something useful for you by coming along, aren't I?” she says once. “Without you I couldn't leave my stuff here or go upstairs. It would have all had to be done by professional movers I can't afford.” He goes up, comes down. She's put two lamps and a box of clothes on the sidewalk. “I feel as though I'm your girlfriend, doing good things for you. Not helping you carry your stuff up because it's too many flights and too heavy things for a girl to climb up that far with them who's even in the best shape.” “I wish you could see the place, help me arrange the furniture and suggest what colors I should paint it—both rooms. Just give me advice; the woman's touch.” “I'll fly. Or carry me. I'm pretty light.” He laughs and she says “I mean it. On your back, not in your arms, and once I'm up, I'll get down the stairs myself.” He thinks it'll be memorable for her, exciting, she'll talk about it a lot, think he took one of her suggestions seriously, and later he'll tell her he's going to take every bit of advice she gave him upstairs. He parks the car in a good spot, bends down, she gets on him piggyback, and he starts upstairs. The flights are long and steep and he's exhausted by the time they reach the fourth floor. He puts her down, says “I don't think I can make it. All that moving before did me in. Maybe another time when I'm not so wiped out.” “No, now. We won't think of it another time. Either of us won't be in the mood. Or you'll feel silly doing it or you'll know your neighbors by then so you won't want to be seen with me on your back, and by that time you'll have painted the rooms and settled on where all the furniture should go. If you feel too weak carrying me, sit me anywhere till you feel strong again.” He does it that way next flight: stops every five or six steps and sits her down. His shirt's so soaked that her skirt and blouse get wet. She says “No problem. When we get home I'll put them in the laundry bag and take a bath.” She does half the next flight by sitting on the bottom step and pushing herself up step at a time. Then she says she hasn't the energy to do it that way anymore and he says he doesn't see how he can carry her up any farther. A door opens one floor below, no head sticks out and she says “New neighbors, don't worry; heavy luggage, just moving in.” “Hi,” he says, “how do you do; Howard Tetch. I'll be in 6D.” Door closes and he gets her on his back and lugs her to the top, sets her down, gives her her crutches and they go into the apartment. She looks around, checks into everything including the shower stall and oven and broiling compartment and refrigerator's vegetable bin and butter chamber and little freezer and every drawer in the dresser left behind, suggests paint colors and furniture arrangement and where all the pictures should go on the walls and that he should get shades and a new toilet seat, cleans the inside of his windows and the bathroom mirror, takes some hangers out of a box and hangs them in the bedroom closet, puts a cake of soap in the soap dish above the bathroom sink, gets out two mugs and a pot and a box of teabags his mother gave him before they left and makes them tea. “One real piece of advice, though it'll cost you,” she says. “Get window grates in the living room or they'll be climbing down the fire escape into your apartment every other week. When I was waiting for you downstairs some very suspicious-looking characters were looking at me on the street. If I hadn't been sitting in the car I'm almost sure they would have stolen it or at least felt around inside for dope and change.” His mother asks him to come along with them to Washington. “We'll train down, you'll have your own hotel room, we'll try to be in an adjoining double. She always wanted to see the Capital. You worked there, it's nothing new for you, but if she gets sick or falls down and I have to pick her up on the street, I'm going to need someone and you can also show us things ordinary tourists never see. That little subway in the Congress building you spoke about. We'd both be interested, and maybe we'll go visit our congressman and stand in that place under the dome there where you said someone can hear you whispering from the other end of the room. And her operation's in less than a month, so I said I'd take her anywhere she wants that's within a few hours by train from New York, and no expense spared for either of you. It could be her last trip anyplace, for who knows what condition she'll be in when they discharge her or, God forbid, if she'll even survive it sufficiently to ever get out of bed.” “The White House,” he says. “The Capitol, the Smithsonian, or the Phillips Gallery—you can't believe the little masterpieces they have there,” and Vera says “Suddenly none of those places seems very interesting.” “The zoo. It's outside, where we should be on such a beautiful day, and if it's too tough walking around we'll borrow a wheelchair if they have them. Smokey the Bear's there, or one of his descendants with his name, and she says “That's stupid, that dumb bear in trousers.” When they finally get her to leave the hotel she only wants to sit on the Mall writing picture postcards to relatives and friends and snacking on hot dogs and sodas from vendors. She also wants to be photographed with whatever famous building or monument that can be seen behind her while she sits on one of the benches or pool walls on the Mall, bangs combed down to her eyes, hands folded on her lap, serious face, shirt buttoned to the top and pulled up to cover half her neck, crutches always out of camera range. He goes into the National Gallery while they stay outside, hurries through a few of what were his favorite rooms, from a pay phone there calls some old girlfriends in Washington. One's married with two kids, two aren't listed anymore, one agrees to meet him at the hotel bar around nine the next night. At dinner in the hotel his mother says to her “If you're not enjoying yourself here or are disappointed in anything, say so and we'll do whatever you want,” and she says “There's too much to see that needs walking or bumping along in some dumb tour bus. And I don't want to be shoved around in a wheelchair and be stared at, and besides that I miss my own room,” and they go home right after breakfast the next day. On the train he says to them “Damn, should've mentioned the Washington Cathedral and the Arab mosque,” and she says “That would have been nice. I thought of it, saw them on the map, but didn't think you'd want to go.” Large group photo he has of all twenty children or so and the owner and two counselors at the summer camp they went to for two months. Most of the campers standing or sitting on the dock, feet in the water or dangling above it. Few, like him—the older boys—standing in front of the dock in water up around their waists and chests. It's obvious he's freezing, teeth chattering, so probably the professional photographer had them stand in the water too long. Or maybe they'd been swimming awhile, photographer came down and told them to stay in the water longer till he took the photos. She's standing on the dock, only in her underpants, hands, which she's squeezing together, hiding most of her face. Little part of her face he sees is smiling sweetly. Her body looks healthy: legs straight, solid lean torso. She's the prettiest girl there her age, even if her hair's been clipped badly by the camp owner. He thinks she used a bowl to do it, or maybe that's what his parents said when they saw the photo or when he and Vera got home, and he took them literally. His mother thought she should spend the summer in the country, being with other kids and him, good air, cool nights, eating food straight from the farms and lots of activities, before she was operated on for the first time that fall. Years later she told him the doctors had said there was a fifty-fifty chance Vera would survive the operation and that when she was wheeled into the intensive care unit they never thought she'd pull through. “My one regret is that I let them go ahead with it.” “What could you have done? Tiger in one door, lion in the other, both mean and hungry.” “There might have been other ways. Diet, for instance, but nothing I explored. The surgeon was very prominent and convincing and quite striking looking and also a former classmate of our pediatrician, so I needed more will power than I had and your father said to do what I thought best, he was staying out of it. But if she had died unscathed and with only a little pain in three years, which is all they gave her without the operation, wouldn't it have been better than living horribly for twenty?” He's in her hospital room and she's pointing to her mouth with her arm that's attached to the IV. She can't speak because of the tube in her throat. “You're thirsty?” She nods. “I can't give you anything with that thing in you,” pointing to her throat. “I'll have to ask the nurse.” He's in her hospital room and she's sleeping. Tubes in her, but she looks calm, sleeping without making a sound. He sits beside her, takes her hand in his and kisses it. She opens one eye and looks at him. He says “I'm sorry, did I disturb you? I'm sorry,” and kisses her hand and puts it back on the bed. Her eye closes and she seems to be sleeping again.