The Collected Stories (15 page)

Therefore, the following—a compendium of motivations and griefs, life to date:

Truthfully, Mondays through Fridays—because of success at work—my ego is hot; I am a star; whoever can be warmed by me, I may oblige. The flat scale stones of abuse that fly into that speedy atmosphere are utterly consumed. Untouched, I glow my little thermodynamic way.

On Saturday mornings in my own home, however, I face the sociological law called the Obtrusion of Incontrovertibles. For I have raised these kids, with one hand typing behind my back to earn a living. I have raised them all alone without a father to identify themselves with in the bathroom like all the other little boys in the playground. Laugh. I was forced by inclement management into a yellow-dog contract with Bohemia, such as it survives. I have stuck by it despite the encroachments of kind relatives who offer ski pants, piano lessons, tickets to the rodeo. Meanwhile I have serviced Richard and Tonto, taught them to keep clean and hold an open heart on the subjects of childhood. We have in fact risen mightily from toilets in the hall and scavenging in great cardboard boxes at the Salvation Army for underwear and socks. It has been my perversity to do this alone, except for the one year their father was living in Chicago with Claudia Lowenstill and she was horrified that he only sent bicycles on the fifth birthday. A whole year of gas and electricity, rent and phone payments followed. One day she caught him in the swiveling light of truth, a grand figure who took a strong stand on a barrel of soapsuds and went down clean. He is now on the gold coast of another continent, enchanted by the survival of clandestine civilizations. Courts of kitchen drama cannot touch him.

All the same, I gave Clifford one more opportunity to renege and be my friend. I said, “Stinking? I raised them lousy?”

This time he didn't bother to answer because he had become busy gathering his clothes from different parts of the room.

Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia—something I never have heard of—if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.

Clifford was on his hands and knees looking for the socks he'd left under the armchair on Friday. His back was to me; his head convenient to the trajectory. And he would have passed away a blithering idiot had I not been blind with tears and only tom off what is anyway a vestigial earlobe.

Still, Clifford is a gentle person, a consortment of sweet dispositions. The sight of all the blood paralyzed him. He hulked, shuddering; he waited on his knees to be signaled once more by Death, the Sheriff from the Styx.

“You don't say things like that to a woman,” I whispered. “You damn stupid jackass. You just don't say anything like that to a woman. Wash yourself, moron, you're bleeding to death.”

I left him alone to tie a tourniquet around his windpipe or doctor himself according to present-day plans for administering first aid in the Great Globular and Coming War.

I tiptoed into the bedroom to look at the children. They were asleep. I covered them and kissed Tonto, my baby, and “Richard, what a big boy you are,” I said. I kissed him too. I sat on the floor, rubbing my cheek on Richard's rubbly fleece blanket until their sweet breathing in deep sleep quieted me.

A couple of hours later Richard and Tonto woke up picking their noses, sneezing, grumpy, then glad. They admired the tick-tacktoes of Band-Aid I had created to honor their wounds. Richard ate soup and Tonto ate ham. They didn't inquire about Clifford, since he had a key which had always opened the door in or out.

That key lay at rest in the earth of my rubber plant. I felt discontinued. There was no one I wanted to offer it to.

“Still hungry, boys?” I asked. “No, sir,” said Tonto. “I'm full up to here,” leveling at the eyes.

“I'll tell you what.” I came through with a stunning notion. “Go on down and play.”

“Don't shove, miss,” said Richard.

I looked out the front window. Four flights below, armed to the teeth, Lester Stukopf waited for the enemy. Carelessly I gave Richard this classified information. “Is he all alone?” asked Richard.

“He is,” I said.

“O.K., O.K.” Richard gazed sadly at me. “Only, Faith, remember, I'm going down because I feel like it. Not because you told me.”

“Well, naturally,” I said.

“Not me,” said Tonto.

“Oh, don't be silly, you go too, Tonto. It's so nice and sunny. Take your new guns that Daddy sent you. Go on, Tonto.”

“No, sir, I hate Richard and I hate Lester. I hate those guns. They're baby guns. He thinks I'm a baby. You better send him a picture.”

“Oh, Tonto—”

“He thinks I suck my thumb. He thinks I wet my bed. That's why he sends me baby guns.”

“No, no, honey. You're no baby. Everybody knows you're a big boy.”

“He is not,” said Richard. “And he does so suck his thumb and he does so wet his bed.”

“Richard,” I said, “Richard, if you don't have anything good to say, shut your rotten mouth. That doesn't help Tonto, to keep reminding him.”

“Goodbye,” said Richard, refusing to discuss, but very high and first-born. Sometimes he is nasty, but he is never lazy. He returned in forty-five seconds from the first floor to shout, “As long as he doesn't wet my bed, what do I care?”

Tonto did not hear him. He was brushing his teeth, which he sometimes does vigorously seven times a day, hoping they will loosen. I think they are loosening.

I served myself hot coffee in the living room. I organized comfort in the armchair, poured the coffee black into a white mug that said
MAMA,
tapped cigarette ash into a ceramic hand-hollowed by Richard. I looked into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?

At the very question mark Tonto came softly, sneaky in socks, to say, “I have to holler something to Richard, Mother.”

“Don't lean out that window, Tonto. Please, it makes me nervous.”

“I have to tell him something.”

“No.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “It's awful important, Faith. I really
have
to.”

How could I permit it? If he should fall, everyone would think I had neglected them, drinking beer in the kitchen or putting eye cream on at the vanity table behind closed doors. Besides, I would be bereaved forever. My grandmother mourned all her days for some kid who'd died of earache at the age of five. All the other children, in their own municipal-pension and federal-welfare years, gathered to complain at her deathside when she was ninety-one and heard her murmur, “Oh, oh, Anita, breathe a little, try to breathe, my little baby.”

With tears in my eyes I said, “O.K., Tonto, I'll hold on to you. You can tell Richard anything you have to.”

He leaned out onto the air. I held fast to one thick little knee. “Richie,” he howled. “Richie, hey, Richie!” Richard looked up, probably shielding his eyes, searching for the voice. “Richie, hey, listen, I'm playing with your new birthday-present army fort and all them men.”

Then he banged the window shut as though he knew nothing about the nature of glass and tore into the bathroom to brush his teeth once more in triumphant ritual. Singing through toothpaste and gargle, “I bet he's mad,” and in lower key, “He deserves it, he stinks.”

“So do you,” I shouted furiously. While I sighed for my grandmother's loss, he had raised up his big mouth against his brother. “You really stink!”

“Now listen to me. I want you to get out of here. Go on down and play. I need ten minutes all alone. Anthony, I might kill you if you stay up here.”

He reappeared, smelling like peppermint sticks at Christmas. He stood on one foot, looked up into my high eyes, and said, “O.K., Faith. Kill me.”

I had to sit immediately then, so he could believe I was his size and stop picking on me.

“Please,” I said gently, “go out with your brother. I have to think, Tonto.”

“I don't wanna. I don't have to go anyplace I don't wanna,” he said. “I want to stay right here with you.”

“Oh, please, Tonto, I have to clean the house. You won't be able to do a thing or start a good game or anything.”

“I don't care,” he said. “I want to stay here with you. I want to stay right next to you.”

“O.K., Tonto. O.K. I'll tell you what, go to your room for a couple of minutes, honey, go ahead.”

“No,” he said, climbing onto my lap. “I want to be a baby and stay right next to you every minute.”

“Oh, Tonto,” I said, “please, Tonto.” I tried to pry him loose, but he put his arm around my neck and curled up right there in my lap, thumb in mouth, to be my baby.

“Oh, Tonto,” I said, despairing of one solitary minute. “Why can't you go play with Richard? You'll have fun.”

“No,” he said, “I don't care if Richard goes away, or Clifford. They can go do whatever they wanna do. I don't even care. I'm never gonna go away. I'm gonna stay right next to you forever, Faith.”

“Oh, Tonto,” I said. He took his thumb out of his mouth and placed his open hand, its fingers stretching wide, across my breast. “I love you, Mama,” he said.

“Love,” I said. “Oh love, Anthony, I know.”

I held him so and rocked him. I cradled him. I closed my eyes and leaned on his dark head. But the sun in its course emerged from among the water towers of downtown office buildings and suddenly shone white and bright on me. Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black-and-white-barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes.

No doubt that is Eddie Teitelbaum on the topmost step of 1434, a dark-jawed, bossy youth in need of repair. He is dredging a cavity with a Fudgsicle stick. He is twitching the cotton in his ear. He is sniffing and snarling and swallowing spit because of rotten drainage. But he does not give a damn. Physicalities aside, he is only knee-deep so far in man's inhumanity; he is reconciled to his father's hair-shirted Jacob, Itzik Halbfunt; he is resigned to his place in this brick-lined Utrillo which runs east and west, flat in the sun, a couple of thousand stoop steps. On each step there is probably someone he knows. For the present, no names.

Now look at the little kids that came in those days to buzz at his feet. That is what they did, they gathered in this canyon pass, rumbling at the knee of his glowering personality. Some days he heeded them a long and wiggily line which they followed up and down the street, around the corner, and back to 1434.

On dark days he made elephants, dogs, rabbits, and long-tailed mice for them out of pipe cleaners. “You can also make a neat ass cleaner this way,” he told them for a laugh, which turned their mothers entirely against him. Well, he was a poor sloppy bastard then, worked Saturdays, Sundays, summers, and holidays, no union contract in his father's pet shop. But pennywise as regards the kids, he was bubble-gum foolish, for bubble gum strengthens the jaw. He never worried about teeth but approved of dentures and, for that matter, all prostheses.