_Prologue_
[Illustration]
One day in early summer it seemed, miraculously, that Stern would not
have to sell his house and move away. Some small blossoms had appeared
on one of the black and mottled trees of what Stern called his Cancer
Garden, and there was talk of a child in the neighborhood for his son,
a lonely boy who sat each day in the center of Stern's lawn and sucked
on blankets. Stern had found a swift new shortcut across the estate
which cut his walking time down ten minutes to and from the train, and
the giant gray dogs which whistled nightly across a fence and took his
wrists in their mouths had grown bored and preferred to hang back and
howl coldly at him from a distance. A saintlike man in brown bowler
had come to Stern with a plan for a new furnace whose efficient ducts
would eliminate the giant froglike oil burner that squatted in Stern's
basement, grunting away his dollars and his hopes. On an impulse, Stern
had flung deep-blue drapes upon the windows of his cold, carpetless
bedroom, frustrating the squadron of voyeurs he imagined clung
silently outside from trees to watch him mount his wife. And Stern
had begun to play "Billy One-Foot" again, a game in which he pretended
his leg was a diabolical criminal. "I'll get that old Billy One-Foot
this time," his son Donald would say, flinging his sucking blanket to
the wind and attacking Stern's heavy leg. And Stern, whose leg for
months had remained immobile, would lift and twirl it about once again,
saying, "Oh no, you don't. No one can ever hope to defeat the powerful
Billy One-Foot."
It was as though a great eraser had swept across Stern's mind, and he
was ready to start fresh again, enjoying finally this strange house so
far from the safety of his city.
* * * * *
After leaving the home-coming train on one of these new nights, Stern,
a tall, round-shouldered man with pale, spreading hips, flew happily
across the estate, the dogs howling him on, reached his house, and,
kissing his fragrant, long-nosed wife deep in her neck, pulled off a
panty thread that had been hanging from her shorts. He asked her if
anything was new and she said she had taken their son Donald about
a mile down the road to see the new boy she'd heard about. When the
children ran together, the boy's father had stopped cutting his lawn,
pushed her down, and picked up his child, saying, "No playing here for
kikes."
"What do you mean he pushed you down?" Stern asked.
"He sort of pushed me. I can't remember. He shoved me and I fell in the
gutter."
"Did he actually shove you?" asked Stern.
"I don't know. I don't remember. But he saw me."
"What do you mean he saw you?"
"I was wearing a skirt. I wasn't wearing anything underneath."
"And he saw you?"
"I think he probably did," Stern's wife said.
"How long were you down there?"
"Just a minute. I don't know. I don't want to talk about it any more.
What difference does it make?"
"I didn't know you went around not wearing anything. You did that at
college, but I thought you stopped doing that."
Stern knew who the man was without asking more about him and was not
surprised at what he had said. The first Saturday after they moved in,
Stern had driven around the sparsely populated neighborhood, smiling
out the window at people and getting a few nods in return. He had then
come to this man, who was standing in the middle of the road. The man
had taken a long time getting out of the way, and when Stern had smiled
at him, he had tilted his head incredulously, put his hands on his
hips, and, with his shirt flopping madly in the wind, looked wetly in
at Stern.
Stern had held the smile on his own face as he drove by, letting it get
smaller and smaller and sitting very stiffly, as though he expected
something to hit him on the back of the head. On one other occasion,
Stern had driven by to check the man and had seen him standing on his
lawn in a T-shirt, arms heavy and molded inside flapping sleeves,
his head tilted once again. And then Stern had stopped driving past
the man's house and, through everything that happened afterward, had
blacked the man out of his mind. Yet he had waited nonetheless for the
day his wife would say this to him.
* * * * *
There was half an hour of daylight remaining. Stern's son flew to
the top of a living-room bookcase and said, "Get me down from this
blazing fire," and Stern climbed after him, throwing imaginary pails
of water on the boy, and then swept him down to administer artificial
respiration. They saw Popeye together on television, Stern's wife
bringing them hamburgers while they watched the set. When he had eaten,
Stern said he was going to see the man, and his wife for some reason
said, "Be right back."
He did not take the car, wanting the walk so he could perhaps stop
breathing hard. On the way over, he kept poking his fingers into his
great belly, doing it harder and harder, making blotches in his white
skin, to see if he could take body punches without losing his wind. He
hit himself as hard as he could that way but decided that no matter
how hard you did it to yourself, it wasn't the same as someone else.
As he hit himself, a small temple of sweetness formed in his middle;
he tried to press it aside, as though he could shove it along down to
his legs, where it would be out of the way, but it would not move.
The man's house was small and immaculately landscaped, but with a
type of shrub Stern felt was much too commercial. It might have been
considered beautiful at one time. A child's fire wagon stood outside.
Stern walked past the house, near to the curb, and then walked on by
it, stopping fifty yards or so away in a small wooded glade and ducking
down to do some push-ups. He got up to nine, cheated another two, and
when he arose, the sweetness was still there. He saw that he had gotten
something on his hand, either manure or heavily fertilized earth. He
wiped it on his olive-drab summer suit pants and kept wiping it as he
walked back to the man's house again, past it, and on down the road to
his own.
His wife was scrubbing some badly laid tile on the floor of the den,
pretending the deep crevasses didn't exist. She was a long-nosed woman
of twenty-nine with flaring buttocks and great eyes that seemed always
on the edge of tears.
"Can you remember whether he actually shoved you down?" he asked her.
"Whether there was physical contact?"
"I don't remember. Maybe he didn't."
"Because if there was physical contact, that's one thing. If he just
said something, well, a man can say something. I just wish you had
something on under there. I didn't know you go around that way. Don't
do it any more."
"Did you see him?" his wife asked.
"No," said Stern.
"It doesn't make any difference," she said, continuing on the tile.
_Part One_
It was a lovely house, seated in the middle of what once had been a
pear orchard, and yet it had seemed way out on a limb, a giddy place
to live, so far from the protection of Stern's city. Mr. Iavone, the
real-estate agent who had taken Stern and his wife to the house, said,
"If you like this one, it's going to be a matter of kesh. Tell me how
much kesh you can raise and I'll see what I can do." Mr. Iavone was a
grim, short-tempered man who had been showing them selections all day,
and when they finally drove up to this one, Stern felt under obligation
to buy some house, any house, since Mr. Iavone had spent so much time
with them. Golden children began to spill out of it, and the one that
caught Stern's attention was a blinking woman-child with sunny face and
plump body tumbling out of tight clothes. Stern, had his life depended
on it, would not have been able to tell whether she was a woman or a
child. Iavone, in an aside to Stern, told him that the girl-woman was
the reason the Spensers were selling the house, that she had taken to
doing uncontrollable things in cars with high-school boys, bringing
shame to Mr. Spenser, her father, who was in data systems.
The house had many rooms, a dizzying number to Stern, for whom the
number of rooms was all-important. As a child he had graded the wealth
of people by the number of rooms in which they lived. He himself had
been brought up in three in the city and fancied people who lived in
four were so much more splendid than himself.
But now he was considering a house with a wild and guilty number of
rooms, enough to put a triumphant and emphatic end to his three-room
status. Perhaps, Stern thought, one should do this more gradually. A
three-room fellow should ease up to six, then eight, and, only at that
point, up to the unlimited class. Perhaps when a three-roomer moved
suddenly into an unlimited affair he would each day faint with delirium.
While Stern examined the house, Mr. Iavone sat at the piano and played
selections from Chopin, gracefully swaying back and forth on the stool,
his fingers, which had seemed to be real-estate ones, now suddenly full
of stubby culture. (Later, Stern heard that Mr. Iavone always went
to the piano for prospective buyers to show he did not drive a hard
bargain. Actually, his favorite relaxation was boccie.)
Mr. Spenser, a man with purple lips and stiff neck, who seemed to Stern
as though he belonged to a company that offered many benefits, walked
around the house with Stern, clearing his throat a lot and talking
about escrow. Stern listened, with a dignified look on his face, but
did not really hear Mr. Spenser. Escrow was something that other people
knew about, like stocks and bonds. "I don't want to hear about stocks,"
Stern's mother had once said. "It's not for our kind. Not with the way
your father makes a living. There's blood on every dollar." Stern was
sure now that if he stopped everything and took a fourteen-year course
in escrow, he would still be unable to get the hang of it because it
wasn't for his kind. Still, he felt very dignified walking around a
house with a data systems man and talking about escrow. Mrs. Spenser
invited Stern and his wife and child into the kitchen and brought out a
jar of jam.
"Did you make that in this house?" Stern asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Spenser, a skeletal woman Stern imagined had been worn
down by her husband's dignified but fetishistic lovemaking requests.
"This is quite a house," said Stern.
The price was $27,000. Someone had told Stern always to bid $5,000
under the asking price, and, adding on $1,000 to be nice, he said,
"How about $23,000?" Mr. Spenser muttered something about expediting
the escrow and then said OK. Stern's heart sank. He had been willing
to go to $25,000, and his face got numb, and then he began to tingle
the way he once had after taking a one-penny sharpener from the
five-and-ten and then waiting by the counter, unable to move, to get
his Dutch Rubbing from the store owner. Getting the house as low as he
had, he felt a great tenderness for Mr. Spenser; he wanted to throw
his arms around the stiff-necked man, who probably knew nothing of
Broadway plays with Cyril Ritchard, and say, "You fool. I just got
two thousand dollars from you. How much could you get paid by your
company, which probably gives you plenty of benefits but only meek
Protestant salaries? Don't you know that just because a man says one
price doesn't mean that's all he'll pay? You've got to hold on to those
two thousands, because even though you're a churchgoer you've got a
glandular daughter who'll always be doing things in cars and forcing
you to move to other neighborhoods, pretending you're moving because of
oil burners or escrow."
Mr. Iavone left the piano and said to Stern, "I see we have nice people
on both sides. Would you like to leave some kesh now?"
"I want someone to see the house," said Stern.
"But you've already talked price," said Mr. Iavone. He grabbed his
coat and slammed the top of the piano. "You bring people out, you're
a gentleman with them, you spend the day," he said, "and you wind up
holding the bag. You think they're nice people.... I closed three
million dollars' worth of homes last year."
"I've always lived in apartments and I want someone I know to look it
over. Then I'll buy it," said Stern, but Iavone slammed shut the front
door. Mr. Spenser cleared his throat, and Stern was certain that the
next day he would tell the other data systems people in his company
about the tall, soft man who had come out, talked price, and then left
without buying, the first time this had ever happened in the history of
American house-buying.
"I think I'm just going to take it without doing any inspecting,"
said Stern. "Sometimes it's better that way." Mr. Spenser called back
Iavone, who came in and said, "I knew there were nice people on both
sides. If we can get the kesh settled, we'll be on our way." There was
much handshaking all around, and Iavone played a jubilant march on the
piano.
* * * * *
The closing was held several weeks later in the office of Mr. Spenser's
attorney, a polite man whose barren office had only one small file
in it. Stern felt a wave of pity for this attorney whose entire law
practice could be squeezed into that little file cabinet. He wanted to
say to him, "Stop being so polite. Be more aggressive and you'll have
larger cabinets." Stern's own attorney was Saul Fleer, an immaculate
man with clean fingers, who took out a little pad when he met Stern
at the station and, writing, said, "The train was eighty-nine cents.
I enter every penny right in here." Stern and Fleer had cokes, Fleer
paying for his own and then writing "$.05" on the pad.
At the closing, Mr. Spenser and his wife sat upright, close together,
their arms locked as though they were about to defend a frontier home
together. Their marriage was a serious one; this was a serious, adult
matter; and at such times they locked arms, sat upright, and faced
things together. They blended in with their polite lawyer, and Stern
had the feeling they paid him in jellies.
Stern thought Fleer drove too hard a bargain and cringed down in his
seat each time Fleer, pointing a clean finger at legal papers, shouted
at the Spensers' attorney, "You can get away with this out here. If I
had you back in the city, you wouldn't try anything like this." Stern
wanted to tell Fleer not to yell at the man, that he had only a small
file.
On the matter of who should pay a certain fifty dollars, Fleer said,
"I'd like to see you try a trick like this in the city."
Iavone said, "You put a gun right to my head. I have three million
dollars' worth of closings a year, and this is the first time I've ever
had a gun put to my head."
He walked out of the room, and, after a while, the Spensers, arms still
locked, rose grimly and followed him, as though their property had been
erased by an Indian raid. Their attorney, smiling politely, walked out,
too. Stern wanted to be with them on the side of politeness and marital
arm-linking and not have an attorney who waved fingers at people and
was from the city.
"Do I have the house?" he asked.
"You saw what happened," said Fleer, stuffing papers into a briefcase,
his face colored with anger. "They're strong out here. I'd like to get
them in the city." Then Stern, because he didn't want Iavone to fall
under his yearly three million, because the polite lawyer's tiny file
touched him, and because he felt vaguely un-American, whispered, "I'll
pay the fifty." Fleer said, "Aagh," and threw up his hands in disgust.
Stern went to the staircase and, in a cracked voice, hollered, "Mr.
Iavone." The papers were signed, and immediately afterward Iavone began
calling him "Stern" instead of "Mr. Stern." At the end of the closing
Mr. Spenser handed over the key, and Stern, who had always lived in the
city, suddenly became frightened about being away from it. He wondered
with a chill whether he really did want to live "out here."
* * * * *
Later that afternoon, he drove to the house with his wife and child
and, as if to certify his possession of it in his own nonlegal way,
Stern, in suit and tie, rolled from one end of the wide lawn to the
other while his wife and child shrieked with joy. The boy had large
eyes and a strange, flaring nose, and his looks changed; in the bright
sun he seemed pathetically ugly, but then, coming swiftly out of a
sleep, or by lamplight, hearing stories, his face seemed tender and
lovely. Stern, standing on the lawn now, made up a game right on the
spot called "Up in the Sky" in which he took his child under the
armpits and swung him first between his legs and then up in the sky as
far as he would go. On the way down once, the boy said, "Throw me up
high enough to see God."
"How does he know about God?" Stern asked, a little chilled because he
wasn't sure yet what God things to tell the child and hadn't counted on
it coming up so early.
"A little girl on Sapphire Street where we used to live," said Stern's
wife.
"God can beat up a gorilla," said the little boy as Stern flung him
skyward. Stern threw him up again and again, once with viciousness, as
though he really did want to lose him in the sky so that he would not
have to figure out what to tell him about God.
A stab got Stern in the bottom of his wide, soft back then and he
dropped to his knees and said, "Everyone on the giraffe." His wife and
child got on, Stern becoming excited by the heat of her crotch. He
went across the lawn carrying them, but there was a strained frivolity
about the game. He wanted someone to see him, and when a car drove by,
he smiled thinly, as if to say, "We're home-owners. See how much fun
we always have and how we fit in." But when the one car had passed,
there was no one left to show off for; in the distance there was a
bleak, lonely, deserted estate, where once a man named Bagby had each
Sunday skidded through the snow in a horse-drawn sleigh, entertaining
his grandchildren. Stern went inside his house and walked from room to
room, giving each one a number and hollering it out aloud as he stood
in the center of each. "I always wanted a lot of rooms," he said,
clasping his long-nosed, great-eyed wife to him. "Now look how many
I've got."
* * * * *
After moving in officially several days later, Stern hired a trio of
Italian gardeners to prepare the elaborate shrubs for summer--two old,
cackling, slow-moving ones and a fragrant and temperamental young man
who spoke no English but had worked on the gardens of Italian nobility.
The old men made straight borders along their flower beds, but the
young man did his in curlicues, standing off after each twirl and
making indications of roundness in the air with his hands. Their price
was three dollars an hour, and as they moved along Stern began to worry
that they weren't working fast enough. He saw the shrub preparation
costing him $800, leaving him no money for furniture. Stern wanted to
tell the young man to stop doing the time-consuming curlicued borders
and to do straight ones like the old men to keep the bill down. But
he was afraid to say anything to a handsome young man who had worked
on the grounds of Italian nobility. Stern watched the gardeners from
inside the house, ducking behind a curtain so they wouldn't see him.
He hoped they would hurry and perspired as the dollars ticked away in
multiples of three. The old men rested on their rakes now, poking each
other and cackling obscenely at the handsome young man as he made his
temperamental curlicues. Then Stern lost sight of the young man and
imagined that his long-nosed, great-eyed wife had inhaled his fragrance
and dragged him with a sudden frenzy into the garage, her fingers
digging through his black and oily young Italian hair, loving it so
much more than Stern's thinning affair, which fell out now at the touch
of a comb.
But the young gardener was making tiny paths in the backyard rock
garden, and when he and the two cacklers were paid and had left, Stern
called his family together and said, "We've got paths. I'm a guy with
paths." Even though they were narrow and largely decorative, Stern
insisted his wife and child walk in and out of the paths with him, the
whole child and half his wife not really fitting and spilling over onto
the grass.
* * * * *
That night, Stern gathered his wife and son to him and they sat on the
front steps of the house, Stern feeling the stone cold against his
wide, soft legs, bare in Bermuda shorts. They watched it get dark, felt
the air get dewy and unbalancing. "This is the best time," he said, as
though he had lived ten thousand nights in houses, analyzing all the
various hours of the day for quality before settling upon this one as
the best. The night made him feel less jittery and isolated. Whatever
bad was out there would wait until the next day. He had his boy on his
lap and his wife's hips against him and he was sitting on stone steps.
He might have been in the city with a thousand families all around him,
ten minutes from his mother's three rooms. As he sat on the stone, a
fire truck screamed to a halt before his house and a man in a fireman's
uniform raced across his lawn to the steps. The man was small and
had low hips with powerfully thick legs. Stern, walking through meat
sections at supermarkets, had always wondered who bought the pork butts
and ham hocks, strange cuts of meat Stern would never consider. It
seemed to Stern that this man was probably someone who ate them, and,
instead of making him undernourished, their gristle and waste went to
his legs and perversely made him wiry and powerful.
"We're having a firemen's ball," the man said. "Do you want to go? The
twentieth of this month."
Stern smiled in what he thought was home-owning folksiness and said,
"We can't make it that night. I'm sorry."
The fireman wheeled on his trunklike legs and ran apishly back to the
truck.
"You were wrong," his wife said. "Everyone buys tickets. Nobody really
goes. You just give them the money."
Stern, in Bermudas, ran across the lawn, shouting, "I'll take two after
all," but the truck had already screamed off, and Stern heard a voice
yell "Shit" into the night.
"My first thing in this town," said Stern, "and I've got an enemy."
He put his great, soft body on the stoop against his wife's hips,
not at all comforted by the night now, and imagined his house with
all its rooms burning to the ground, his child's hair aflame, while
thick-legged firemen, deliberately sluggish, turned weak water jets on
the roof, far short of the mark.
The Spensers had failed to tell Stern to spray the area, and, a month
after he moved in, a caterpillar army came and attacked the grounds.
When Stern first saw the insects, he said, "I'm going to get them,"
and went out to the lawn and began to flick them off the shrubs and
then step on them when they were on the ground. But there were huge
wet clumps of them on everything, and he called the spray company.
"It's too early to get after them," the man said. "If you get at them
too early, you just waste your spray. You've got to wait till they're
sitting up perky." Stern waited a day and then called again; another
voice answered and told him, "It's too late. You missed the right time.
They're in there solid now."
"The other man in your place said to wait," Stern said.
"I'll rap you in the teeth you get smart," the voice screamed. "I'll
come right over there and get you. You want to make trouble, I'll give
you trouble all right."
Stern bought some chemicals in a store and said to his wife, "I know
there are billions, but I'm going to get every one of them. This is
our house." He went to work on a beautiful mountain ash tree first.
There was little of it showing; the tree might as well have been one
large wet caterpillar. Stern sprayed at it for an hour, until his
hands were broken with blisters, but only a few caterpillars fell, not
really from the potency of the chemical but simply because they lost
their balance and got washed off. They were hardy when they touched the
ground and Stern knew they would find their way back to the tree. He
stopped spraying, and in a few days the caterpillars had left and Stern
and his wife were able to see that they had attacked in a funny way,
eating approximately half of everything, half of each bush and half of
each shrub. In front of the house stood a wild cherry tree, lovely and
fruitful on one side, black, gnarled, and cancerous on the other. The
plants never went back to normal, and since it was too massive a job
to replace each one, Stern and his wife learned to approach them only
from certain angles, ones from which they looked complete, and pretend
they were whole shrubs instead of half ones. Stern was sickened by the
diseased shrubs; it was not so much their appearance that troubled him
but the feeling that he had betrayed a sacred trust. "The house has
been standing here for thirty years with whole shrubs," he said to his
wife. "We're in it a month and there are halves."
* * * * *
There was, too, the dog escort problem. The house was somewhat isolated
from transportation conveniences, and to get to the railroad station
each day (where he left for his job in the city), Stern had to cross
the huge, long-deserted estate old man Bagby had once skidded across
in a sleigh. It was spread out over eighty acres and took Stern
twenty-three minutes each way, much too long a walk to be brisk and
refreshing. The train ride then would be an hour and six minutes, which
meant that Stern would be traveling roughly three hours each day. When
they had first considered the house, his wife had said, "Take the ride
once. It may be too long. See how you like it." But Stern had answered,
"I don't want to know about it. I love the house. If I take the ride, I
may not like it and we'll never live in this house. I love this house
and I don't want to know about any rides."
The estate was a lonely, windless, funereal place, terribly quiet,
with many odd little buildings, and for the first weeks of walking
its length Stern made it his business to investigate a different one
of them each morning. On one such morning, he climbed the watchtower
and stood on the second floor, looking out of the cracked windows onto
huge, rolling lawns and at bushes that had holes in them, seemingly
torn out at random by large fists. Stern wondered how the estate was
when it was new, and then he walked over to the main estate building.
On an impulse, he poked his elbow through a weak door panel and
looked around innocently in the clear morning as though he, too, was
surprised at all the commotion. Able to open the lock now, he waited
till the echo had quieted and went inside the estate building, sweating
hard, and then climbed the winding steps to the second floor. Doing
everything in a hurry, he stood first in the elegantly constructed
floor tub of the main bedroom and then went out to the circular
balcony, extended his arms, and hollered, "Throw them to the lions,"
to imaginary throngs below. Then he decided to take something. The
rooms seemed empty, except for a packet of newspapers tied with string.
Stern worked a single paper loose and, tucking it under his arm, walked
swiftly down the stairs. He smelled coffee burning and then ran out
the door and kept running all the way to the train, running so hard
he got a pain in his chest. He did not look at the dusty newspaper
until he was in the coach. It was dated 1946, and its recent vintage
somehow spoiled the whole estate for him; he never went into any of the
buildings again. In any case, it was not the walk through the estate
each morning that troubled him so much as the walk back at night.
At the farthest corner of the estate area, near the train, stood a
loosely scattered group of houses in a heavily wooded thatch. They
seemed at one time to be part of the estate and were still being
lived in. In darkness each night, Stern had to cross this cluster of
houses. There was no easily defined road in the area, and since it was
not a real community, the only light was from an occasional window;
Stern had to walk through using a pocket flashlight and not really
sure whether he was on someone's property. On the second night of his
estate-crossing, it was not quite so dark as it was to be later on, and
Stern was able to see two thin, huge dogs vault a fence that encircled
one of the houses and make for him with a whistling sound. They skimmed
through the night and came to an abrupt halt at his feet, their gums
drawn back, teeth white, both dogs reaching high above his waist. One
took Stern's wrist between his teeth, and the two animals, hugging
close to his side, walked with him between them, as though they were
guards taking a man to prison. Stern went along with them, not crying
out, not really sure he could cry out. The houses were fairly far off;
it would take a loud cry to reach them, and Stern was certain only old
people lived in them and wouldn't be able to make out voices in the
night. He tried not to perspire, having heard you showed your fear
that way, but he wasn't able to tell whether he was or not since it
was chilly. They walked a quarter of a mile with him that way, hugging
him tight on both sides, until the dog released his wrist, which was
soaking wet; then both turned and went back, trotting swiftly through
the night. The next day, Stern bought a penknife in the station, but
when the dogs vaulted the fence that evening, he was taken aback by
their speed and the whistling sound. He remembered hearing once as a
child that you should never draw a blade unless you really meant to
use it. Deciding the blade was probably too short, he succumbed meekly
and allowed the lead dog to take his wrist again. There didn't seem to
be anything he could do. He had heard too that you could break a dog's
back with a swift judo chop on the spine, and he took his wrist out of
the dog's mouth and tapped it lightly on its leathery back, but the
dog made a sound and he put his wrist back. He thought of walking up
to the house from which the dogs came, but he was certain the animals
were trained to kill all people who passed through the fence and would
get him in the throat before he reached the door. The houses were in
a vague sort of grouping, not in any definite town or area, and there
didn't seem to be any way to get close enough to the dog-protected
house to see its address. The following day, Stern tried to guess what
the address might be and called a number on the phone. An old woman's
voice, hearing his, hollered, "Crumbie, crumbie," and hung up. There
didn't seem to be any special police to appeal to; nor was Stern sure
an ordinance was being violated. He was afraid of the police and did
not want to call them anyway. He pictured the police in the section
to be large, neutral-faced men with rimless glasses who would accuse
him of being a newcomer making vague troublemaking charges. They would
take him into a room and hit him in his large, white, soft stomach. So
each night he continued to walk slowly through the estate, waiting for
the dogs, almost a little relieved when they finally whistled to his
side, never really sure they wouldn't decide one night to kill him in
a muffled place where there would be no one to pull them off. He saw
himself fighting silently in the night with the two gray dogs, lasting
eight minutes and then being found a week later with open throat by
small Negro children. Certain he would be killed, if not by the dogs
then because his white, soft body did not seem capable of living past
fifty, he called a broker one day and doubled his insurance.
* * * * *
There was no one to complain to. No one who could help Stern with that
kind of problem. His only neighbor at the new house was an ancient man
with a thin chest who was always being placed and arranged in different
positions. He would be placed in the sun and then shifted to the shade
when the heat got too intense for him. Then he would be moved inside
and placed before the television set, great care being taken not to
jostle him. In the wintertime he would be shifted to a train going to
Virginia, where he owned a small farm. Stern later heard that once he
touched down in the South, he would leap spryly out of his wheelchair
and rarely be seen in daylight without two plump-chested young girls at
his side.
One bright day, the man sat vegetablelike in a folding chair, having
recently been placed there by his wife. Stern, in a shining burst
of weekend hope, had run out of doors with a two-pronged shovel and
was loosening the earth around one of his half shrubs, hoping that
the sun's warmth would get through to it and make the cancerous
side blossom and start to flourish. Across a low fence, he saw his
thin-chested neighbor and told him about the dogs. "They wait for me
each night," he explained. With frail wrists, the man drew from his
wallet a commissioner's badge and said, "I was very powerful when I
had my health. I was able to get stop signs put up. Forget the dogs.
I'll take care of them. Do you want to get me around a little to the
east...." Stern shifted his neighbor around, hardly able to suppress
his joy; he was thrilled to have commissioner-type power on his side
and wanted to hug his neighbor's thin chest with delight. Actually
he was a little afraid of him now, convinced that as a onetime
commissioner he had weapons nearby and probably knew judo holds, ones
you could deliver despite a thinness at the wrists. Stern looked
forward to swift action, but the dogs continued to slip through the
night to Stern's side until he decided the man had done nothing after
all. To get any action out of him, Stern imagined his neighbor would
have to be carried to the police station and placed before the chief.
The man's wife was of little help. A short woman who wore loose-flowing
Alpine dirndls, she had a garbage problem and was always carrying a
bagful out to a wire basket in front of her house to burn it. "I don't
know where it all comes from," she would say to Stern as she made her
endless pilgrimage to the basket. Often, on her way back for another
load, she would see Stern across the fence, working silently to bring
life back into his halves, and say, "I can remember when your house was
really beautiful." Once she invited Stern and his wife into her own
home. She took them into the kitchen and said, with arm extended, "This
is my kitchen." Then she took them into the living room and said, "This
is my living room," and so on through the house. She pointed to her
husband, who had been placed in front of a fishbowl, and said, "This is
my husband." Then she bid them goodbye, saying, "There was a time when
your house was so lovely." She never asked them in again.
Since the summer had been cruel to him, Stern looked forward to cold
weather, when he would at least not have to bother with neighbors
and to face the half shrubs each day. In the winter your shrubs were
not supposed to be beautiful, and Stern watched with delight as the
grass faded and the leaves dropped and his half shrubs fell in with
the bleakness as though their black cancer shapes were the fault of
the cold and not a caterpillar miscalculation. The snow came on fast
that first winter. One night it built up to eight-inch drifts and was
still dropping heavily when Stern, in low-cut Italian rubbers, left
the train. The dogs did not clear the fence, hanging back instead to
make cold choking sounds at him in the night--as though aware that the
snow would make them clumsy, unable to terrorize Stern. He was halfway
across the estate when the snow piled up knee-deep and stung its way
into his eyes. He bent his great back, lowered his head, and shuffled
into the wind; when he had walked far enough to get to his house and
still could see no lights, he knew that he had lost his way. A great
pain pounded through his nose, and he could not feel his face or catch
his breath. With no knowledge of the stars, he saw himself making an
endless circle in the snow and then falling silently asleep in a drift,
to die of frostbite yards from his new home. The wind and snow flew at
him with bitterness and his face seemed to belong to a stranger. He was
unable to go further and stopped, defeated by the wind, not after a
forty-day trek from Point Barrow, but twenty minutes from his commuter
train. Feeling ridiculous, he sat down in the snow, but then he quickly
became frightened and shouted "Get me!" into the night. He napped that
way for a moment, and when he awakened things were not too much better.
He urinated in the snow, feeling giddy and dangerous in this white
place more private than a thousand bathrooms. When the wind hit him in
his open fly, he imagined himself freezing up swiftly, breaking off
with a quick snap like winter wood, and he withdrew quickly with drops
remaining. Then, pulling his collar together and making a serious face,
he bent to the snow again, as though, by being very businesslike about
it and pretending he knew exactly where he was going, the fates would
somehow carry him to his door. Later, he came out of the estate, not
opposite his house, but in a new part of town. He had to walk three
steep hills to his house, but then, turning a corner, with everything
wet upon him, he saw it suddenly, as though through a curtain drawn
open quickly. It was bathed in frosty light and all its diseased half
trees and shrubs were cloaked with mounds of jeweled snow. It was an
enchanted candy house, the loveliest in all the world, and Stern,
standing wide-hipped and breathless as though beneath a spell, enjoyed
what was to be his finest moment of the winter.
Stern thought that in the cold weather he would turn his thoughts
inside to family and home, creating a handsome interior that would make
up for the cancer garden. He would then lead visitors swiftly through
the mottled shrubs, entertain them in interior splendor, and rush them
out under cover of darkness. The paint-store owner delivered gallons
of paint one Saturday morning, and then, when Stern raised his brush
to deliver the first dab, the owner hollered, "Don't paint." Stern
lowered the brush and the man continued to shout: "Never paint. Lay
your brushes aside and, for Christ's sake, don't paint. You paint and
you're a fool. Uh-uh. No painting, don't paint, _never paint_." And
then he lowered his voice to a whisper and added, "Until you're _ready_
to paint." He then imposed a long list of conditions which would have
to be met before it would be all right for Stern to paint. "Scrape your
walls, scrape your floors, paper your halls, drape your dainty pieces,
test your tones, check your temp, dress properly. But, for Christ's
sake, don't paint. That is, until you're ready to paint."
Stern and his wife set all the paint in the corner of the room and
waited until the ideal day came along, but it never did, and they
gradually lost interest in painting. It was decided they would get
rolling by laying tile, and Stern's father sent Crib, an ageless Negro
with great strength in his wrists, to help them lay it, his services
a moving-in gift. Stern's father, a small, round-shouldered man who
always wore slipovers, had worked most of his life in a shoulder pad
concern for his brother, Uncle Henny, expecting to be made a partner
or to take over when Henny, a coronary patient, passed on. When Henny
did expire, however, the business went instead to a distant nephew who
had always worked in civil service positions, and Stern's father had
to continue in a subordinate position, his life more or less gone up
in smoke. Crib, a sweeper and handyman, had supported Stern's father
for head of the business, almost as though it had been an election, and
now, years later, remained a faithful supporter of his.
"He a fair man," Crib once said to Stern. "And nobody cut a pad like
him. No waste." And Stern's dad, in turn, spoke with admiration of
Crib's great strength. "He must be about ninety, but he's some strong
guy. You ought to see what he can lift."
Crib appeared early one morning, wide nose parched with cold, slapping
himself as though he had come all forty miles on foot, and Stern,
who had a special feeling for all Negroes, hugged him in a show
of brotherhood. He raced upstairs to rouse his wife and bring her
downstairs, long-nosed and cranky, so she could fix some bacon and eggs
for the Negro. To make Crib feel at home, Stern howled with laughter as
his father's friend made such remarks as "It too cold for ole Crib out
here."
When Crib had cleaned his plate of eggs, Stern asked if he wanted some
milk to wash them down and Crib, with a wink, said, "That ain't what
I want." Catching on, Stern filled up a tumbler with rye and Crib
drained it, smacking his lips. "_That_ what I want," said Crib slyly,
and Stern howled with laughter once again. "Now ole Crib fix you up,"
said the Negro, rising and going to the tile. He rolled his sleeves
back over his great wrists, and Stern felt that even though tremendous
power would not be needed to lay the tiles, it was comforting to have
it on tap anyway. Crib spent the morning on his knees, measuring and
arranging and muttering, "Ole Crib forgot his tile cutter." Stern
silently placed a variety of sandwiches and another tumblerful of
rye on a loose tile near Crib, and in the evening, when the job was
finished, Stern's wife had a roast ready. Later, Crib went back to
inspect his work, shaking his head and saying, "Crib wish he bring his
tile cutter." Stern gave him twenty-five dollars, hugged him tightly,
and saw him off, thinking for a moment how wonderful it would be if he
could have Crib out there with him, using his great wrists to fight
Stern's enemies, police in rimless glasses and short, powerful-legged
firemen. "You made too much of a fuss over him," said Stern's wife,
and Stern replied, "He's a saint. We were lucky to get him." A day
later, the tiles buckled, and Stern had to put books, _A Treasury of
the World's Great Classics_, about the room to hold them down. When the
_Treasury_ was removed, great crevasses remained between the tiles and
Stern's wife said, "We really needed him."
"We got him for nothing," said Stern. "It's not a bad job. Nobody gets
tile exactly right."
But the crevasses made them suddenly lose interest in fixing up the
house. They left the paint cans in the corner of the living room. The
floors remained bare of carpeting, the windows without drapes. They
took to ducking down when passing open windows in the nude, to avoid
being spotted by cars. Upstairs, in Stern's bedroom, the color scheme
remained Mr. Spenser's winter-green selection, and inferior artwork
whipped up by the golden Spenser children still hung about the walls.
At this point, all of the sweetness seemed to drain out of Stern, a man
who had once played a thousand inventive games with his son, Donald.
There were no young children in the neighborhood for the boy to play
with, and often, with the air clear and sun out full, the boy would
sit alone on the front stoop, stroking a blanket, shaking quietly and
trying to rock himself to sleep at the height of day. "Why do you
need a blanket?" Stern would ask, and his son would answer, "I don't
know." And Stern, in early morning, jittery and uncertain, an endless
pilgrimage in front of him, would kneel at his wife's bed and say, "For
Christ's sake, see that he has activities."
"What am I going to do out here?" she would answer, and at night, when
Stern had gotten past the dogs, he would find his son standing in the
middle of the lawn, holding his blanket as though he had been there
all day, waiting for Stern to come back. So Stern, his stomach bursting
with guilt, had made up games. A favorite had been "Butterfly Hand,"
in which Stern's quiet, fat hand would suddenly begin to flutter and
wiggle. "It's turned into a butterfly," Stern would say to his son
as it flew about the room. "There'll be no controlling it now." The
hand would then go still and Stern would lift his son above his head,
the boy's arms extended, for a bout of "Airplane," carrying him with
droning sounds about the room and then bringing him in for tabletop
landings in "San Diego." Top game of all was "Billy One-Foot," in
which the boy would fight an all-out battle with Stern's leg, "Billy
One-Foot, the toughest of all fighters."
They had endless thumb fights, too, but now Stern could no longer
muster spirit to play the games. He would sit cold and heavy in an
empty room, and when the boy said, "Let's play Billy One-Foot," Stern
would pat him on the head and say, "Billy One-Foot is sick now."
Occasionally, he would swing his boy round the room in a circle,
clamping his own eyes shut in an effort to black out a vision of
himself heaving the boy headfirst against a stone wall, forever ending
thoughts of God and blankets and other children.
He had always found it amusing that his wife was lax about managing
things. "You think you can get away with carelessness because your
behind is beautiful," he would say, and clasp her surging buttocks.
But a banister was loose that winter in their bare and windy house. It
fell into no special category of repair--neither carpentry nor stairway
work--and when his wife was slow to have it attended to, Stern took to
shocking her with vivid accounts of what would happen because of her
inaction: "Your son will fall, and perhaps when you see him at the
bottom of the stairs with his head open, you'll realize the importance
of having it fixed" or "A slight push on top and he'll be at the bottom
dead." And Stern imagined such a scene, his son with cleaved skull and
Stern unable to cry convincingly. Once, a childhood friend named Ruggie
had gone to climb a fire escape and given Stern his dog's leash to
hold. Stern purposely let go the leash, and the dachshund ran a mile
before it went beneath a speeding car. Ruggie then came back carrying
the dog in a dumb march, the dachshund's body staining his sleeves,
to put him some place, while Stern watched, frozen to the ground. Now
Stern imagined himself with his son's smashed body in his arms, going
dumbly outside to put him someplace, too. He imagined a scene in which
he was putting all the dead boy's toys in a box but continually finding
new ones as years rolled by.
Stern's wife, too, became sullen, mostly about having no friends. For
a while, a distant cousin of Stern's named Barbie visited and served
as a companion to her. But she centered everything, the food in the
middle of plates, flower vases in the center of tables. She even put
Stern's son in the exact center of the couch as he watched television.
Stern's wife finally wearied of her because of having to listen to her
constant teen-age questions. Though she was far out of her twenties,
she would ask Stern's wife, "Do you think it's sinful to allow petting
on a first date?" and "Will I lose Phil if I don't let him go as far as
he wants?" When she left, Stern's wife had no one, and when he asked
her about this, she said, "I don't need anyone," and this infuriated
Stern. "You've got to have friends," he screamed at her, and then he
had a picture of all three of them, his wife, his son, himself, sitting
on the lawn, sucking blankets, shaking and trying to rock themselves to
sleep.
He had met his wife at college after being rejected by a young girl
with musical voice and tangles of blond hair who acted in Arthur Wing
Pinero plays, doing deep, curtsying walk-ons that made Stern weak in
his middle. He had scrupulously avoided taking the blond girl to bed,
preferring to think of her as "not the kind of girl you do that with"
until, disgustedly, she refused to see him, telling him, "Someday
you'll understand." A week later, he met his wife, a girl with great
eyes and shining black hair and no music in her voice, and, after an
anecdote or two to establish his charm, he went with her to a blackened
golf course and, with clenched teeth and sourness, drove his fat hand
through her summer-smelling petticoats and, as she moaned "God no,"
kissed her and tried not to think of curtsies. Later that first night,
he went into her a little, and they both froze and clung to each other.
Stern at that time boarded off campus with a trembling old ex-bass
fiddle player who sat each night wearing truss-like old-man belts and
gadgets and twanged his instrument in the basement. The old man was
not particularly nice to Stern. He feigned munificence by asking Stern
to have glasses of milk but actually used him as a sourness tester.
At night, while the old man sat in his bands and trusses, Stern would
spirit the petticoated girl into his room, undressing her swiftly
and then tasting and biting her, going at her with anger and closed
eyes to drive away all traces of Victorian curtsies. She was the only
daughter of a man who had missed great opportunities as a baseball
executive and now lived with silver tongue and failing eyesight in an
Oregon apartment. Her mother was Hungarian, had lost three children in
infancy, and spent her time crocheting bitterly, dreaming of three dead
sons. Lean of funds, they had sent the girl, with heavy trunk-loads of
petticoats, for a single year of college and then no more. She dated
constantly, afternoons and evenings, an endless succession of boys.
Stern asked her what she did on these dates and she said she'd kissed
most and allowed some to "kiss her on top."
"You're the only one from New York I've known, and you're different,"
she said to him. "You care for different things. The others just care
about being a good dresser."
Psychology interested her, but she mispronounced words, and it bothered
Stern, a man who waded without joy through classics, that she had never
tried Turgenev. She had total recall of her childhood and, her voice
filled with pain, she told Stern tales that failed to move him. "I had
twelve birds, and each time I got to love one, my parents would get
rid of it. I'd come home and see it not there and look all over and
then I'd realize that they'd given it away. They'd just give me enough
time to love it, and then it would get out of the cage and make on the
floor and my father would say, 'It's a filthy animal,' and give it to
a girl friend." She was aware of her long-nosed beauty and would say
to Stern, "You should have seen me at eight. I tapered off a little
up through ten, but at eleven my face would have killed you. I don't
even want to _talk_ about my face at thirteen. I was really beautiful
then, really something." She complained much of her childhood ordeals,
telling Stern, "My mother never gave me sandwiches, even though she
knew I would have loved them. She'd give me what was inside, and even
the bread, but not sandwiches." Most of the time she would listen to
Stern, though, sitting with great and shimmering eyes as he told of
New York; and when he was finished, she would say, "You really are
different. You're not interested in shoes or dancing. You're the most
different person I know." Their talks were only bridges, and when it
seemed to Stern they had put in enough time at it so that he could
feel they legitimately interested one another, he would begin to kiss
her and bite her and stroke her and undress her and examine her while
she stood or sat calmly, great eyes shining, and let him explore her
body. When he touched her a certain way they would fly at each other
and she would do a private, nervous, whimpering thing beneath him. They
clung to each other all over the campus, and sometimes she came to his
room with nothing beneath her summer dress. She would wheel about him,
nude and happy, while Stern feigned calmness and watched her with held
breath as though it were a scholarly exercise. Then his loins would
go weak and he would sail at her and bite her thighs too hard. He did
crazy, tangled things to her, thinking he would break her frail body,
but when he had finished she would come to him with great eyes wide,
scrape his neck with her nails, and ask him to "be a man again." One
night, after finding the very middle of her in a new way, he called her
later, trembling, and said, "I shouldn't have done that to you. Let's
not do it again." But they did it again the next night in his room and
the fiddler opened the door, his elasticized old-man gadgets dangling,
and caught them at it. Stern, in an action he could not explain,
carried her, without a word to the old man, out the window and to the
garden below, and they never did that thing again.
They parted for a year. She stayed in Oregon, and Stern, heavy with
guilt as he stole a final bite, flew to New York in search of girls who
knew Turgenev. A great singing freedom came over him, but the closest
he came to a Turgenev lover in the following weeks was a divorcée's
daughter who lived in midtown, tossed her hair, ate exquisitely, and
said often, with appealing phoniness, "Perhaps I'll sleep with you.
Perhaps I shan't." Mostly for Stern it was a time of long and lonely
calls to Oregon while he tried to see how long he could stay away. One
night her phone voice said, "The funniest thing. A Venezuelan wants
to marry me. He has two children, but he says he'll leave them. I just
thought I'd tell you." Stern flew with nausea to Oregon in bad weather
and saw her at the airport, her great eyes lovelier than before, the
Venezuelan at her side. They did an intricate Latin dance for Stern,
and she said, "Look what we do together. We're always dancing." Stern
excused himself to vomit in the men's room, but when he emerged he
pretended to be confident and the Latin took his leave. In a hotel
room, she said, "You're losing your hair," and Stern said, "I don't
understand this Venezuela bit."
"I enjoy his company very much," she said, and Stern, a vomit swiftly
coming on, feigned coolness one last time and said, "I'm packing." She
let him fold his T-shirts and then put her head deep into his lap and
said, "I've been so lousy bad," and he knew he was bound to her for a
hundred years.
* * * * *
Now, together with her in this house, it was as though a small, cold
jail cell of steel had dropped out of the sky, encircling Stern's
heavy body, surrounding his movement. He tried to free himself of it;
he bought his son a trampoline. The boy saw it and said, "Daddy, put
a rope in the sky so when I jump I'll be able to catch it and stay
up there. Maybe God will catch me. God has the biggest muscle in the
world." Weekend afternoons, Stern would watch his son jump sturdily on
it, feeling this would build his body and protect him from banister
falls. One day, the two of them heard a shot and a long crinkling of
glass and saw a boy of about eighteen fly by in the street, as though
he had been fired from a gun, and land on the concrete street, his arms
stiffly at attention, a soldier still marching. Fingers had broken off
him, and his face had swiftly turned black. Riding a motorcycle, the
boy had jumped a traffic light on the corner next to Stern's house and
collided with a speeding car, which had hit him head on. Stern took
his son inside, not offering to be a witness, although he had seen the
accident and knew the motorcycle boy was in the wrong. He just held his
son tightly and kept him inside the rest of the winter, feeling the
more the boy's bones grew sturdy on the trampoline, the greater chance
he would be shot out of a cannon onto the concrete.
At the end of March that year, Stern went to cover his son at night
and saw that the boys head had swelled to twice its size. Stern kissed
the dead side while his wife called a doctor, who said, "You've never
called me before. I don't come in the middle of nights unless you're
a regular patient." Stern said he would call the man and rehearsed
the things he would say to him, that he had no right to call himself
a doctor, that he was a peasant son of a bitch, that if he wasn't a
doctor he would be selling diseased poultry to housewives. What kind of
a man was he who could go to sleep while a child's fever rose and his
face grew large and moonlike? He got on the phone and said, "I want to
tell you that I know what you said to my wife. You wouldn't say it to a
man." The doctor repeated what he had said, and Stern choked, "It's a
shame."
They called a second man, Dr. Cavalucci, hesitant because of his home
remedies. When Stern's chest had been inflamed or his wife's fingers
had curled in shock, Cavalucci, the doctor, a soft, youthful man, wary
of pills, had chuckled and begun, "Now I know this is going to sound
funny, but you know those shopping bags you get at the supermarket?
If you take one of them and breathe deeply into it for half an hour,
you'll get to feeling better." His treatments always involved shopping
bags or typewriter ribbons or old shoe polish cans, "the kind you
open with a penny, brown, preferably." And he would always begin his
instructions by saying, "This is going to make you feel silly, but...."
That night he touched the heavy side of the boy's face and said, "I
don't have one for his case. I'm taking him in." In the ambulance,
Stern held the child, but now he kissed the good side of the face,
afraid of what was inside the bad one, and ashamed of himself for
feeling that way, and finally kissing lightly the bad side, too. He
said to the doctor, "Anything I've got. Anything I own. Just make
him better." But he felt as though he were giving a performance and
wondered how many other men had said the same thing. The hospital had
long corridors and Stern had heard it was good but needed grants.
Inside, a cluster of young men gathered round the child, and when
Cavalucci said they were all fine specialists, Stern wondered if he
should be calling in men from Europe. When Stern was a child, a cousin
of his had once fallen in love with a dying girl, and Stern remembered
hearing that he had done everything for her, even to the point of
"bringing in men from Europe." The phrase "men from Europe" had stuck
with Stern, and he wondered how you went about getting them. It seemed
so hopeless, standing in the children's ward now, just to go to the
phone and get some of them over, and yet he felt that if he were a
real father he would stop at nothing and bring several across. The
doctors talked near the child, and when Stern asked what they were
doing, Cavalucci said that two of them didn't want to go in and disturb
the area and one did. Stern asked which one wanted to disturb it, and
Cavalucci pointed him out. He was the surgeon. When the conference
broke up, Stern glared at him but was afraid that now the man would
push home his view and not only disturb the area but also try risky,
tradition-breaking techniques. They waited round the clock while the
live part of the face took food, and then Stern and his wife went
home awhile and ate veal cutlets. They looked at each other after
every bite, and when they had finished, Stern said, "He's lying there,
his face as big as a house, and I just ate veal cutlets and kept them
down." And then Stern wondered whether to call Winkel and whether
Winkel still took cases and could come, because in his heart he still
felt that all other doctors would be wrong except Winkel.
* * * * *
As a child, being sick had not been altogether a bad time for Stern.
He would lie in his mother's bed and listen to radio shows all day,
and then at night, when his fever rose, he would pull up the covers
and wait to hear his father's whistle down the street, meaning he
was back from work. A minute or so after the whistle, his small,
round-shouldered father would stand at the bedroom door and say,
"Jesus Christ ... hmmph ... oh, Jesus Christ," and shake his head
sympathetically. Then, the first night of the sickness, Winkel would
come, his hulking body supported by reedlike legs, and thump gravely
at Stern's chest and back with thin, businesslike fingers. He liked
cherry sodas, and Stern's mother would always have one ready for him
after he finished up and washed his hands. She was a tall, voluptuous
woman with dyed blond hair who wore bathrobes whenever Stern was sick.
"Do you know what I would do for that man?" Stern's mother would say
after Winkel had left. "I owe him my life. He's some guy." Stern's
mother would then send Winkel a pair of tickets for the opera. When
Stern got older, he would say, "But you paid him for coming," and his
mother would answer, "You can't really pay a man like that, can you?
You've got a lot of growing up to do." Winkel was always grave and
unsmiling with Stern, and once when Stern had a stubborn pimple above
his eye, Winkel squeezed it with what seemed to Stern like hatred
and said, "Love sweets, don't you?" Though Winkel later specialized
in gynecology, he continued to treat Stern in his teens, and Stern's
mother said, "I thank my lucky stars ten times a day I have a man like
that. You have a man like that, you don't need anyone else." Nine out
of ten of Stern's boyhood friends were planning to become doctors, and
there was a time when Stern considered the idea too. His mother told
Winkel and the doctor said, "Why doesn't he ever come up and talk to
me? All the other boys come up and we have long talks." Stern did not
like the sound of those long talks and never went up. He knew a little
about chromosomes and Ehrlemeyer flasks, but he could not imagine ever
filling up a long talk with Winkel. Later, when Stern went to college,
he heard that Winkel had gone on to great eminence, giving talks on
television. "I can still get him, though," his mother would say. "I'm
the only one he'll still come to." Winkel had been married to a woman
whose frugality supposedly made him insane. Driving from Newark to the
opera one night, Winkel and his wife, so the story went, had gone off
the road and into a tree, the windshield shattering and glass getting
into Winkel's head. With half an hour remaining to curtain time, his
wife left him in the car, forehead red, hands locked about the wheel in
shock, and went to redeem the tickets. Weeks later, he ran amok while
performing an appendectomy and cut two deep crosses in his kneecaps
with a scalpel. Now he sat in a room, his practice gone, coming into
the street only for occasional cherry sodas. Stern knew what his mother
would say if Stern suggested that Winkel come look at his son. "Even
with half a mind he knows more than anyone else. Do you know how big
that man was? And I can still get him, too. He'll come to me in two
seconds if I want him, no matter how crazy he is."
The swelling disappeared mysteriously one morning, and in a few days
Stern, with a leaping heart, was able to carry his son into his car and
back to the house. He kept his nose deep in his son's neck and marveled
that some good had come out of the sickness. He had finally been among
people in this bleak town, nurses and doctors and visitors in the
halls. A day later, he spotted a blossom on the cancer side of the wild
cherry tree--and there were other things, too, that happened quickly. A
new stop sign on Stern's corner, one that would prevent motorcycle boys
being shot out of cannons; a shortcut across the estate; a plan to kill
his boiler; and a new attitude on the part of the dogs.
And then, of course, a week afterward, the man had said kike and looked
between his wife's legs.
* * * * *
There were only three other occasions on which Stern and his wife
discussed the kike man. One occurred the very next night when Stern,
still in his topcoat, caught her wrists around the oven and said, "I
just want to see how it happened."
"What do you mean?" she said.
"I want to get a picture in my mind of what it was all about. Get on
the floor and show me exactly how you were. How your legs were when you
were down there. It's important."
"I wont do that," she said, breaking through to clean the oven.
"I've got to see it," said Stern, grabbing her again. "Just for a
second."
"I'm not going to do anything like that. I told you to forget it."
"I'm not fooling around," he said, and, taking her around the waist, he
threw her to the kitchen floor, her jumper flying back above her knees.
"You crazy bastard," she said, flicking a strip of skin from his nose
in a quick swipe and getting to her feet.
"All right, then--me," said Stern, getting on the floor. "My topcoat's
your dress. Tell me when I'm right." He drew the coat slightly above
his knees and said, "This way?"
"I'm not doing this," his wife said. "I don't know what you want me to
do."
"Were you this way?" he asked. "Just tell me that."
"No," she said.