Frog (81 page)

Denise smiling and talking continuously, one or the other or both at the same time, energetic talk, lots of face gestures, he can't see it but thinks from the way their arms are positioned that they might even be holding hands—waving at him forlornly, curiously, bewilderedly, for a few seconds Olivia staring him in the face with a look saying you know darn well what you're doing's totally wrong and absurd, he waves back and whispers “I'm your daddy, honey, don't look at me like that, and besides, you know how horrible I feel so don't make it worse,” says loud enough for them to hear if they can hear him through the closed window and door and with all the appliances in the house going, for he didn't see anyone get up to turn them off, “I swear I never wanted to leave you two, it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, in the world, the universe, whatever's more than that, for you mean everything there is to me and leaving you is like a death that's quick but pain filled and unforeknown and-foretold—I don't quite know what I meant by the last part of that but it sounded right and may be—that I've always loved your mother from the minute I set eyes on her, second, instant, and that instant to maybe a minute after it across a room filled with partygoers, chatter and tobacco smoke—some day if either of you want I'll tell you about it and exactly or as close as I can get to it and if my memory by then's still good, how I felt and what I remember her response to me was when I finally did get up the guts to go over to her to introduce myself—it's true she and I have had our spats and brawls but we seemed till now to have been able to talk them out, I don't like her illness any more than you do, condition, affliction, hate it, damn it, would kick its ass in if I could, but occasionally it gets to me in other ways, that she can't do almost anything she used to like helping with the cooking, cleaning and shopping and your homework and getting you kids to your various activities and schools and just seeing the things around the house that need picking up before someone trips over them and breaks a limb, so all the extra work I have to do, and while I'm at it all those tedious to good books with the horrible readers of them on tape she gets I also if I'm in the house have to listen to, I didn't want to storm out of here looking and acting like such a fool, I don't like pretending I know where I'm going now and what I'm going to do, I'm in fact trying to find out why I did what I did before by talking about it and related things here with you,” they wave only their fingers this time and turn around, Olivia putting Alex's arm around her shoulder and holding it there and with her other hand holding her book close to her face, Eva back on Alex's lap and kissing his visible hand, Alex and Denise laughing now and jabbering when the laughing stops, they don't turn to the window once, he doesn't understand it, if he were Alex he'd look and see what he's doing out there and then tell her and then for them both to smile and wave to him that it's all all right and to come back in, he wishes he knew what they were talking so actively about, vigorously, spiritedly, he's glad his brother's back, nobody can hear him but if he said that aloud and someone could hear him he'd want that person to know he's happy as can be to see his brother after thirty years, happy he's alive, looking well, intelligent, everything intact, glad he's able to make Denise laugh, glad she's laughing, that his kids love their uncle, glad everyone there's happy and having such a good time, though wishes things could be switched around a bit to a lot—brother back, that unchanged, healthy, intact, etcetera, Denise laughing, smiling, animated, both animated but he seated between them holding their hidden hands and Eva on his lap and Olivia on the other side of Alex or Denise with her arm stretched behind whomever she's sitting beside so her hand's on his shoulder or neck, patting it, habit she got from him when he used to pick her up to comfort her before she could even walk or when he'd walk her to sleep, or just resting on or stroking it, goes to the dogwood tree in the front yard, only tree there, centered in the small lawn, doesn't know why he went to it or what he's going to do there, stare at it? walk past it and then where? snap a branch off and toss it over or into his hedge and then what? all the streetlights on the street and the cross one go on at once though the sun's still almost straight up and bright, never liked the tree even when it blossomed pink or gave on a hot day enough shade to sit beneath, which he never did, always preferred sitting in the rocker on the covered porch and close enough to the railing to put his feet up, little table by the chair to put down his newspaper or book and drink, its branches are sharp and have scratched his arms when he's tried to mow close to it and the top of his head once when he bent down under the low branches to get the mower right up to the trunk, is that it with all dogwoods or just pink-blossoming ones or just his: low branches and sharpness? all or most of the house alarms in the neighborhood go off, four or five of them, loud almost simultaneous hum starts up from what seems like all the air conditioners in the neighborhood, though it can't be fifty degrees out, fifty-five, he wasn't serious before about her smile and what it could do concerning electricity and giving off energy and moving solar systems and stuff, it was what literary people, even people with just literary pretensions, and of course some nonliterary people who happen to know the word, like to call, well, like to call, exaggeration for want of the fancier literary word he can't come up with now but which sounds Greek and has some part that sounds like bell or ball in it but always slips his mind when he wants to use it, bill, bull, boll, but he'll see: usually two days at the most, three, after he can't recall it he comes across it in a newspaper article or magazine when he hasn't seen it in one for months, sees an ant crawling up the tree trunk and immediately drops to his knees under the branches, resights the ant and squashes it with his thumb, then thinks why'd he do that? it wasn't in the house or heading for it and even if it were heading to it, it was just one, he probably wanted to take something out on something, let off steam, thinks of slapping his hand against the trunk for the same reason, beating it, then maybe both hands and then maybe his head, to take it in his hands, which would have to hurt by then, and slam it against the trunk till he gets too dizzy or tired to or collapses or his head splits open, but that would make no sense either unless he wanted Alex or Denise to come out to help his head, which he doesn't think he does, and though a gash wouldn't bother him much or the blood—his head got knocked around plenty when he was a kid, though never self-inflicted, with scars dotted along the sides and his continuing baldness revealing a few forgotten creases on top—he wouldn't stick himself with the pain that goes with those slams, flicks the ant off his thumb, sees several more crawling up the trunk, “You you-yous,” holding his fist over them, crawls out from under the tree and goes into the house, doesn't know why, maybe to sit between Alex and Denise, put Eva on his lap, Olivia's hand on his shoulder or back and even patting it for her in case she doesn't, for one thing to finally find out where he's been for thirty years and how'd he get here, for another—well, lots of anothers but one's just to apologize to them all for his behavior before—nobody's there, shuts off all the appliances and lights, looks out the living room window to the lane of grass between his house and the shrubs that belong to the next, out the kitchen door to the backyard and swing set, shouts for them and then goes upstairs, shuts off Denise's typewriter and all the appliances and lights, she could be showing Alex his studio and the guest bed in the basement, even making up the bed for him if he's bushed, for he might have come a long way in a few days, not had much sleep—runs the two flights downstairs, front door knocks, shuts off all the appliances and lights there and the sump pump which continued pumping when there was no water left to dump, upstairs, front door ding-dongs and knocks though doesn't remember shutting it, looks through the small door window to see if it's Alex or Denise—window's too high to see if it's the kids if they're standing close to the door—a woman, shuts the porch light, opens the door, strangely familiar, not strangely but queerly, familiarly, family, it's—she's—he's sure what his sister would look like if she'd lived another twenty-four—five—four years, “Hello,” she says, “How do you do, but I'm sorry, if this is for my wife, for she doesn't seem to be here though she was a few minutes ago,” “No, I'm not here for her but would love meeting her and the children eventually,” “Then if it's for anything like some organization or charity—a donation, something to sign, a petition, and then a donation for the costs of printing and distributing the petition and keeping the organization going—we don't do that here—it's my, not my wife's, repudiation or reaction against or whatever you want to call it of all door-to-door solicitations and canvassings, no matter how—not ‘important,' not ‘good' in the sense of the right thing, moral, virtuous, not ‘upright,' not ‘upstanding,' but a certain word I'm looking for—,” “‘Well-intentioned, well-meaning, high-principled'?,” “That's right—any of those, but we don't, much as we might approve of what you're pushing—supporting—canvassing for and want us to join, give to, support or sign, anyway, along those lines, and you should see me—hear me—when I get them over the phone—I'm rapidly—rabidly—against the private home phone being used for solicitations and ads of any kind and the recorded ones—you know, or maybe you don't, but the ‘Hi, I'm Chuck Computer and are you sure you have enough cemetery plots?'—the worst, though I wouldn't go so far as to start or give to or canvass for a campaign against them,” same long straight dark hair combed the same way though now streaked a bit gray, hollow cheeks like hers the last few years but more like a model's high cheekbones so less out of illness—“Vera?—I mean, it can't be but who else could it but it can't, so excuse me,” “Howard,” she says, “even if I knew this was your home, for a while I was undecided it was you,” “But it's impossible, I take back what I said, or if
Vera
, then you just happen to have the same name as my dead sister, quite a coincidence I'd say, seeing how you look a lot like I'd imagine her to at your age,” “But I am your sister Vera,” and he says “But I was in the room with you—her—when she died,” “You went out of it for ten minutes at the end when I supposedly croaked,” “That's true, how'd you know? but she was so close to death when I left her—her looks were of someone dying, the darkness and paleness, the depletion and stress, and they'd asked me to leave or else I left to go to the toilet or because I needed a break from seeing her in that condition all night and early morning or just for a coffee to revitalize me after a sleepless night and maybe a bun because I was starved, and when I came back minutes later the door was closed and a nurse behind it wouldn't let me in—I'm almost sure that's how it happened, at least one of those or a combo with the coffee and bun and definitely the nurse not letting me back in and from what I saw through the door crack before she shut it on me there were lots of people in white working busily around her and calling out for things,” “A nurse came in when you were sitting beside me, took one look at me, felt my pulse and told you to leave and then called in what I like to call the goon squad—the emergency team of medical people and machines who are there to revive you but also there when all your chances with them are up and they're pulling out the plugs and cleaning you up,” “Was that what happened with her, you're saying?,” “Sure, they pulled them out of me but I was alive and hale after, though my urethra and arms sore from the catheter and IVs, just as I was hale when all the tubes, needles and plugs were in,” “That's ridiculous-she was in and out of a coma the whole night before and morning she died—I know because I stayed with her, swabbed her lips, mopped her brow—dabbed it and her lips and with water on a rag dabbed her tongue tip—she looked so sad, her eyes so weak and breathing so bad, hair so wet—I dabbed that too—all over her was this cold sweat—oh, the poor thing, why does someone so young have to go through so much woe and pain—anyone, old or young, but with her it was from when she was a little kid and went on and got worse and worse for twenty years—she even asked me—one of the last things I could make out because of her weak voice coupled with her trouble in getting her thoughts together and expressed—maybe an hour before she died when she all of a sudden jumped out of it and had unusually lucid speech for her at the time—why it had to be she who was sick for so long and had lived so abnormally and was now dying,” “I never said that about dying,” “That's true, she didn't, but what she said was, if my memory serves me right which it does rarely—variably, and locking me with her eyes while saying it—anyway, ‘How come me, Howie?' or the old ‘Why me, why me?' for she was, to illustrate how sick she'd become and what she looked like then, down to around sixty-five pounds from her usual hundred ten—'usual' meaning eight or nine years before, because her weight loss started long before the end, and sixty-five was just the doctor's educated guess—she could have been sixty, fifty-five, since there was no reason to weigh her and if they had wanted to she was too weak and frail to be moved—the gist of it is that from the moment she was put on the hospital's bed everyone knew it was going to be her last living place,” “It was all an elaborate ruse, that last night and day—my decline at home, phoning the doctor what to do, ambulancing me to the hospital and so on,” “A ruse, the weight loss and dying eyes?—I went to her burial—the funeral first and then the burial and a year later to whatever they call that ceremony where they put the monument up and say some prayers over it,” “That's what I'm saying—it was all an elaborate ruse,” “Look-it, for argument's sake let's say you are her, but she—Vera—you would never have pulled it on Mom—for years she worked like three nurses and suffered so much then and for lots of years before and after—we all suffered but those two were very close and she was her mother so she much more,” “Mom was in on it—everyone was but you,” “But why, just for argument's sake?,” “To get me away from you,” “Oh come on, if you're going to concoct some cock-and-bull story at least have it make a little sense,” “You stuck your finger in me once and moved it around inside for a while and kept it on my clitoris when you thought you finally found it and pushed down hard on it till I felt I would scream and right after you took your finger out—my eyes were shut, I was pretending to be asleep, I was too young to know what to do, too frightened and confused to stop you—you threatened to kill me if I told anyone—you said even if it took ten years from the time after I told anyone you'd kill me when I wasn't looking or prepared for it with whatever means you had—a gun—you said you could get one—with a knife, a bat, a brick, an ice pick—with the belt you were wearing then by wrapping it around my neck and you took it off and held it tight by its ends and snapped it—by this time you must have known I was awake though I was still pretending not to be, looking at you through the thinnest eye slits, though you also must have been unsure if I was awake when you did it with your finger to me, because you said ‘You've heard me warn you and speak about this for the one and only time and if you're really as asleep as you look, then OK, and if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, even better for you,' so that's why it was all an elaborate ruse, nobody wanted me killed or for you to go through what they knew you would—remorse, prison, that you were an excitable guy so might be killed there or end up killing yourself—everybody believed your threats, even though they were made more than a dozen years before I told anyone what you did, and realized the consequences if you killed me, they said you had it in you to or to yourself or both because you could never take the shame of anyone knowing what you did to me with your finger and threat and then killing me, but they didn't want to ask you to go away to live somewhere else because they thought you'd come back on the sly to kill me or, away from them watching you, kill yourself, so they sent me away, Jerry knew where I was, Dad, they all saw me from time to time, I went to live with relatives of one of Mom's friends in Wisconsin, they weren't well off and could use the money for my room and board, the doctors and nurses all knew of the elaborate ruse, even the ambulance men who drove me that last time were in on it, the hospital orderlies and dietician on my floor who I only secretly got to use when you were away from the room,” “Wait, let's say for argument's sake again in this cock-and-bull story that's at least a bit better than before—all the names and most of the facts right and things, so more believable but still with a few holes—I'd already been out of the house working for a number of years, and didn't they ever think of therapy to help me get over it?,” “Everybody knew your views on it—you'd said plenty of times you had nothing against it for anyone but yourself,” “I'm not saying I would have changed my mind but it's possible I might have,” “As Dad used to say about you, you were always too much of a hard nut,” “He said that to whom?,” “To you, to me, and as for your out-of-the-house stuff, the folks got you to move back for a few years soon after I told them, didn't they?,” “I came back from my Washington job with little money—no, that was after Alex died, which he isn't by the way-dead, but I'll tell you more about that later, or I won't, for who are you to tell it to? and California's where I came back from a month before she died and had no money and my father was sick so I stayed to have a place to live and to help my mother with him for what turned out to be a few years, but anyway, for argument's sake for the last time, and to me this is the clincher who you're not, let's say you weren't as sick as you looked in the hospital the day you didn't die, what happened to your illness? for you were diagnosed chronic progressive or some term by the time you were twelve, and after you didn't die but to me you did—and believe me I wouldn't be talking to you like this if you really were Vera, I'd be all over her in happiness if she were alive and miserable talking seriously to someone about her death—your doctors tried consoling us by saying you lived longer than they ever expected, though credited it mostly to Mom's meticulous unsparing nursing of you,” “All part of the elaborate ruse, and the good country living might have had something to do with my complete recovery, and maybe just being away from the threat of you, or else I'd been misdiagnosed from the time I was five, repeatedly operated on when I never should have been, or some spectacular unaccountable remission that plenty of terminal people get and which eventually wiped away all my illness's signs except the surgery scars, but I'd been slowly getting better or not worse for years, you never saw it because of all your living here and there and only coming back for days or weeks and then paying little attention to me because maybe you thought I was so ugly and deformed or you worried I might allude to the finger incident,” “Not true; the scars did scare me sometimes, especially when they were fresh and that tracheotomy one when it was still almost a hole, but I used to take you to dinner and movies—not many but some and especially when I lived in New York with Janine—your first Indian food at a place called the Bombay, those Shanghai somethings or another at 103rd and the other at 125th under the el—you defiantly ate with a fork and called Janine and me phonies with our chopsticks, which I loved you for doing and saying what you wanted,” “So you did it occasionally, or irregularly, or biannually, but as for me then, I wasn't off crutches yet but no new flareups of the disease for years, so when I did have that last setback it was all part of the elaborate ruse, our aunts, uncles and cousins knew of it, most of my church pals and all our folks' good friends, we had a makeup artist come to the house when you were out for an hour that last day to make me look suddenly worse, and then the next days at the hospital to make me look comatose and then dead, she was dressed like an orderly and then like one of the nurses who rushed into the room to supposedly pull out the plugs, we even hired an out-of-work director to stage the whole thing, of course the rabbi at the funeral was in on it, I wanted a minister but Dad said ‘Born a Jew, and since we're surviving you, die a Jew—if you outlive us you can have it the way you want,' the funeral home people knew of it—I was already on the plane to Wisconsin so couldn't see, much as I wanted to, your reaction and how everybody else acted, the body in the casket was around my weight in two fifty-pound sandbags, which is why Mom ordered the casket to stay closed, not because she thought people would be put off by my last looks, the cemetery owners, even the gravediggers there and all the guests, except the ones who only learned about it through the obit, at the funeral, burial and unveiling,” “Unveiling, that's the word I wanted,” “In the end it benefited you as much as me, as you didn't go to jail or anything like that and I didn't live around you with the threat of your killing me hanging over my head and you possibly even trying to diddle me again,” “I never would have done either, ever, I was just a kid saying and doing kid things, I passed her room, or went to it intentionally to speak to her or catch her nude, her nightlight was on, saw her sleeping on her back or thought she was sleeping, but then probably woke her with what I did, nightdress above her waist or a few inches below it or right on it, anyway, her legs pretty much open and pubic area exposed, everybody was out, I was getting a quarter an hour to act as the sitter, I got excited at what I saw as I think would any kid my age, the line of hair above her crack like a short pencil-thin mustache standing up, the crack itself for the first time, I'd never seen one even on a baby at a beach, maybe mothers and nannies suspected me even at an early age and immediately covered their girls, once my mother nude from my room into theirs when they thought I was asleep if they thought about it but I was too young to understand what it was to get excited and she was all hair there and prancing around fast, so not good for an extended look, I felt horrible for years about what I did to Vera, for a few seconds at the funeral I was glad she was dead so the secret would go with her, since neither she nor anyone else ever gave me a sign she'd told or they knew, in fact on that last hospital day I whispered to her almost up against her ear how sorry I'd always been about it and said what it was explicitly, something like ‘Your vagina that time some fifteen years back when I put my finger in, it was the most despicable thing I ever did in my life and I apologize a thousand times for it,” “No you didn't, I was conscious every second you were there, except the night when I slept, but you say it was the last day, and I'm telling you you never said anything about it, if you had I would have stopped the elaborate ruse right then or soon after, somehow made a miraculous recovery, got the makeup artist in once more, been discharged, gone home, gotten much better under Mom's care and lived a normal life there with the family and you, all things forgiven, for it would have saved us all a lot of time and trouble and the folks a tremendous expense: fake hospital care, for no matter how hard Dad tried finagling it he couldn't get Blue Cross or Cancer Care to pay, the funeral, burial and unveiling ceremonies and gravestone, and my airfare to Wisconsin and