Michael Hoffman

First segment

Allow me to introduce myself: Len Fishman, 46. I live with my mother in a yellow room. In a yellow room in my mother's house, I mean. The den. It used to be my room. It became a den when I moved out. It's still a den, though I have moved back. Temporarily, supposedly. But - what has happened to me? I seem to have lost the will to move. I don't know whether I have come back here to live or come back to die. Anyway, I'm here. Wait, my mother is calling me. Yes, mother? I see. It's time to go to the hospital. Today's my turn. If I'm too busy she'll go for me... No, mother, no, mom, I'm not too busy. I'm on my way.

***

The hospital - the Albert Einstein Hospital Geriatric Center, to give it its full name - is a white X-shaped building seven blocks from our house - four long blocks, three short - just across the street from my old high school. Although I grew up so close to it, I scarcely had an inkling of what it was. Oh, of course, even as a child I could have identified it as a senior citizens' home, everybody knew that much, and one of my friends even had a grandmother who lived there. If he ever visited her, he never said anything about it. I don't think he ever did, because this particular friend of mine and I, we had no secrets from one another. Where is he now, I wonder?

It was a beautiful sunny day in May. A jogger huffed past me, reeking sweat. From the opposite direction came two teenagers on roller blades, and then they too were gone. The lilacs were in bloom. I know - I mean, I would have known anyway, but I was made doubly aware of the fact when I went for a walk with my mother the evening before. She paused in front of a lilac bush, breathing in deep and savoring the aroma. "French lilacs," she said. Then, "Oh, I must pick one and take it home! Surely the owner wouldn't mind? I wouldn't if it was mine!" No sooner had she plucked the flower than we heard a voice pipe up: "I won't tell if you don't!" It was a high-pitched, musical, girlish voice, so that we were surprised - at least I was - to look up and see a woman of roughly my mother's age, a stout beaming lady with short-cropped gray hair. "Aren't they lovely!" she exclaimed. "They're French lilacs," said my mother. "Oh, are they?" said the lady. "How can you tell?" I stood there wearing my mask, my familiar neutral mask that was my face minus any marks of boredom, resentment, or consciousness of my own ridiculousness, while my mother proceeded to instruct the lady in the fine distinctions between one variety of lilac and another. Their conversation went on and on. The lady had been a real estate agent. She had sold most of the properties on this street, had been in the neighborhood for I forget how many decades. Her son was - how old was I? Forty-six? Well, three years younger, his name was such-and-such, would I know him? He was in Toronto now, a prominent stockbroker. Her hair was so short now because it had all fallen out in chemotherapy, it was just starting to grow back; thank God she was fine now, but what a time she'd had! Did my mother know Doctor So-and-so? Yes, certainly my mother knew him, he had seen her through her own breast cancer... Anyway, all this is by way of explaining how I was so acutely aware of the fact that it was lilac season.

The weather being so fine, many of the patients, some in wheelchairs, were sitting outside on the little walk between the front door and the driveway. Some were attended by family members, others by paid companions. One old man in a Montreal Expos baseball cap screamed, "Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY!" I remember how that furious cry of his had turned my blood to ice the first time I'd heard it. Now I merely exchanged a shrug and a knowing smile with his son, who seemed never to leave his side. He must have had some other occupation - or maybe he was like me. It's a busy world, but not everyone is occupied.

I threaded a path through the assemblage and went inside. The usual crowd, the usual sounds, the usual smells. "Get me out of here," murmured an ancient crone in her wheelchair near the far wall. "Get me out of here. Get me out of here." She spoke to no one in particular, in a toothless mumble that drained her words of all complaint. She didn't want anyone to get her out of there. Maybe she once had, or maybe it was some other place in her distant past that she had once sought release from, the words long outliving the memory. What business was it of mine?

"Hey! How ya doin'?" one of the orderlies saluted me, grinning and punching me lightly on the shoulder. If you'd read One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest and remembered Kesey's "black boys", you'd see something devilish in this towering fellow with his white uniform and his sparkling teeth like stars in a night sky. In fact he was kindness personified. He'd take my father with him on his night rounds when dad couldn't sleep. "Come along now, Hank. You'n me, we's go put this place in order." My father's name is Saul. Why Trevor called him Hank he himself knew best. However that may be, dad answered now as readily to Hank as to Saul, joining him with a sense of the importance of his mission written all over his face.

"Go upstairs and see Anette. She pinin' for you."

I fell in with his banter. "You're just saying that."

"Hones', man!" His face was the very picture of righteous indignation. "All you go' do is crook yo' li'l finger, and she drop everything and follow you back to... where was you, last?"

"Dar es Salaam."

"No shit!"

"Any idea where my father's at?"

"He'll be wandering around, as usual. No strings on ol' Hank, I'll say that for him. Catch you later, eh?"

The inmates - the polite term, of course, is "residents" - were given the run of the place. They all wore bracelets on their wrists which would set off an alarm if they tried to leave the building, so there was no serious trouble they could get themselves into. My father did sometimes make a nuisance of himself in the kitchen. He had become a compulsive eater - friends who had known him in his slim, elegant days would scarcely recognize the bloated figure he presented today - and prowled constantly for food. Other patients quietly enjoying cakes or cookies sent by relatives had to be constantly on guard against his marauding. This was the more puzzling in that he seemed altogether to have lost his sense of taste. The way he mashed his desert cake in with his meat gravy made it difficult to keep him company through his evening meal. Other than that, though, he was generally quiet and well-behaved, unobtrusively wandering about like a man enjoying a leisurely evening stroll absorbed in his own thoughts.

I took the stairs up to the third floor, where his room was. The elevator I avoided unless I was with him - there are no words to adequately describe the claustrophobia one feels packed into that slowly ascending cage with the broken people.

On the third floor I met Anette, pushing a wheelchair. Her face lighted up at the sight of me. If my mother hadn't told me on unimpeachable authority that she was forty, I'd have taken her for twenty. She wore tight jeans and a tight blouse. Her lustrous black hair hung loose to her shoulders. Like so many of the staff here, she was from the Philippines, from Palawan. Even to so outlying a place as that I had been - where hadn't I been? - which raised me enormously in her estimation.

"Len!" she cried. "He's come for me. My boyfriend's come for me. He's going to take me away from here, far away, just us two."

"Shut up!" shrilled the lady in the wheelchair.

"Oh, shut up yourself," said Anette imperturbably.

"I'll kill you!" moaned the lady. Withered Beauty was my name for her. I imagined she must have been beautiful once, before a stroke and dementia had had their way with her. Her whole remaining vocabulary seemed to consist of vile imprecations, and for Anette, heaven knew why, she had conceived a special hatred. "Whore! Piece of shit!"

"So what else is new?" said Anette. "Buy me a drink? I'm off at six."

"What'd my father think? You know how special you are to him."

"Oh, and he's special to me! Good old Saul, I don't know what I'd do without him. But I can't build a future with him. He's married."

"True."

"How come a good-lookin' boy like you never married?"

"The only women I could ever get it up for were women in magazines."

There were times, I must admit, when I was tempted to yield to Anette's advances, which were frequent and bold. Certainly she was attractive, even if she was forty. Why didn't I? Well, her laughter. Her laughter was appalling: a series of shrieks and gasps, each shriller than the last, until finally it reached a crescendo and she was reduced to mute, contorted helplessness. It was repulsive. She laughed, of course, now. Withered Beauty was furious. She drew herself up as best she could - she was paralyzed from the waist down - and squealed, "Bitch! Cunt!"

"Hey, hey, what's goin' on here?" This from Clara, the head nurse, a woman of my age, ramrod straight, with cropped iron-gray hair, a general's stride, and a face - well, my mother, who was very fond of her (everybody was; her sternness was a front; even Withered Beauty sensed her kindness, and responded to it) - my mother called her Horseface - not to her face, of course. "What's goin' on? Len, you're a welcome guest here, as you well know, but if you're gonna be stirrin' things up I'm gonna have to ask you to leave."

"If he leaves I leave too!" cried Anette, clutching my arm.

"Well, let him stay then, I can't do without you," said Clara. "How are you today, Edith?" she said, squatting down so she could talk to Withered Beauty face to face.

"My legs are no good," sobbed Withered Beauty. "My legs are no good."

"I know, honey, I know. I have to go see Mrs. Schwartz in occupational therapy. Would you like to come with me?"

"I want some ice cream."

"We'll see what we can arrange. Len, your dad's in Mrs. Wallenberg's room. We're gonna have to watch those two. Anette, see to Mrs. Siegel, I think it's time to change her diaper."

***

My dad was, as Clara said, in Mrs. Wallenberg's room. Mrs. Wallenberg sat on the edge of her bed. Dad was in an armchair. Mrs. Wallenberg, leaning forward, spoke in low, urgent tones, very anxious to get her point across. Dad leaned forward too. He listened attentively. He nodded. Yes, he said, Mrs. Wallenberg was right, one hundred percent right. I stood in the doorway watching them. Though Mrs. Wallenberg faced me, she seemed utterly unaware of my presence. The language she spoke - was it Polish? Russian?

She broke off at last, according me a smile and what sounded like a cordial greeting. Dad looked around. Seeing me, he flashed me a look of surprised pleasure. His whole wasted face lit up. "Adam!" He rose from his chair and came towards me, arms extended. He hugged me, kissed my cheek, extended his own cheek to be kissed. "What a delightful surprise. When did you get into town?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday! The planes were flying yesterday, then?"

"Only in the morning."

"Oh, so they were flying in the morning."

"Why shouldn't they be?"

"No reason, I guess."

"Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?"

Dad paused for a moment, as though considering whether this would be wise, and then, coming to a sudden decision, said, "Yes! I am going to introduce you. Yes."

Mrs. Wallenberg said something in Polish, speaking in the same low urgent tone she had been using before. "I see," I said. "Dad, it's a beautiful day, would you like to go for a walk?"

"Yes. Yes, I would."

"Let's go then. Mrs. Wallenberg, thank you very much for the tea and cakes." I felt myself blush. How dare I mock these people? I can only say in my defense that the words rolled off my tongue irrespective of my better judgment. To put it another way: The place was getting to me.

***

Though I assured him it was as warm as mid-summer, dad insisted on having his heavy leather jacket. We proceeded down the corridor to his room. A wheelchair-bound woman, looking rather young for the milieu, looked me straight in the eye and then, indicating my father with a slight movement of her head, said, "He's crazy, you know." "Ignore her, dad," I said, though in fact he paid her not the slightest heed. "Here, this is your room."

"Mr. Fishman, Saul," he said, reading the name card on the door.

"Listen dad," I said, bracing myself. "We're going to be going for a pretty long walk. Why don't you go to the bathroom first?"

"The bathroom?"

"We don't want to have an accident, do we?"

"No," he agreed. "No. That we don't."

"Well then. I'll wait here, and you..."

Sometimes he rebelled. Today, fortunately, he was amenable. He peed without incident, flushed the toilet himself, and was ready for the long involved procedure that putting on his jacket demanded. There was a zipper to be fastened, and innumerable buckles, each one of which he insisted on buckling. Thus armored, he was ready to set forth.

There remained the elevator ordeal to live through. Physically, dad was quite capable of walking down three flights of stairs, but for some reason he recoiled from the staircase as I did from the elevator. "Here, dad," I said. "You push the down button. No, not that one. You don't want to go up, do you? This one here. Good. Now, if we're lucky it'll reach us sometime before breakfast tomorrow morning."

When it did finally come, we had, as usual, to squeeze ourselves in, gently but firmly. The corridors were bad enough, but here in this little box the depths of human debility seemed bottomless. Heads seemed to loll more precariously, tongues to hang out more hideously, and blank stares to be all the blanker for being confined. Wheelchairs came in every shape and size; some were rolling coffins. There were walkers, canes, crutches... It stopped on the second floor. My heart sank. It was already too packed to breathe. A raggedly bearded hollow-eyed man, unattended, got in. A lady whose toes he may have stepped on let out a little shriek. I had never seen this man before, but he seemed to know me. Ignoring the shriek, he glared at me. "Why the hell," he demanded furiously, "was I born a Jew? Eh? Why?"

***

Dinner was served early, at four o'clock. After he had eaten I walked dad over to the third floor TV lounge. There I sat him down and, after a decent interval, said goodbye. He always accepted my departure with equanimity. "I have to go and help mom," I'd say, and he'd nod his understanding and say, "Yes, of course, go help your mother" - generously ceding me to her. I bent down and embraced him. He returned my embrace with feeling, but when I glanced back from the door leading to the stairwell, his face was blank. Had he already forgotten having spent the afternoon with me? I knew the answer to that, for once, moved by I don't know what impulse, I went back to him, and he greeted me with the familiar pleased surprise, as though he had not seen me in ages.

I could never go straight home after leaving dad. Sometimes I took a walk; sometimes I dropped into the Four Corners for a drink. It had not been there in my childhood; nor had the little shops and restaurants on either side of it. Otherwise, the neighborhood was remarkably as I had left it nearly thirty years before. Many of the people I passed on my walks were, I'm sure, not strangers, though unrecognizable to me in their old age, as I was to them in my middle age.

The bar was dim and cool, crowded enough to be friendly, spacious enough not to be oppressive. The clientele was mostly young and upwardly mobile, not of my generation. Strange: scruffy clothes were once a symbol of defiant youth, and here was I, in my jeans and T-shirt, among these stylish dressers twenty years younger than me.

"Hey Len."

"Bill."

"The usual?"

"Double."

"Tough day?"

"No."

He knew his business, knew when to talk and when not to. He set my drink in front of me and left me to myself. I sipped my scotch and closed my eyes. A vast sense of well-being came over me, incomprehensible but no less satisfying for that. If only, I thought, I could pass the rest of my life enclosed in this moment, the taste of scotch in my mouth and the murmur of sane inconsequential conversation in my ears, harmonizing, as it seemed, with soft tinkly piano jazz emanating from somewhere. What were these young people talking about? Business? Love? I smiled, and whatever it may have looked like, my smile, it felt like one of seasoned age reflecting with tolerant understanding on youth and innocence. Make money, children; make babies; have pleasure. You'll wake up soon enough.

Someone clapped me on the shoulder. Startled, I wheeled around violently. "Geez, sorry man! I thought you were... gosh, I coulda sworn!"

The spell broken, I gulped down the rest of my drink and went outside into the bright early evening sunshine.

 

Second segment

came home to find my mother deep in conversation with a stranger in the vestibule. "Here he is!" she said, at which the stranger turned to me with a smile and an outstretched hand and said, "I'd've known him anywhere!"

"But he doesn't seem to know you," said my mother, smiling mischievously at my stupefaction. Stupefied I was, for the man whose hand I was shaking - my first impression was of a short, stout, robust, good-natured man of about my age - was, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely unknown to me. At that moment the phone shrilled. "Excuse me," said my mother, bustling off to answer it and leaving me alone with the gentleman.

"Ron Bloom," he said easily. "You were one of my - "

"Mr. Bloom!"

"I was going to say," he resumed, his smile broadening, "that you were one of my more promising pupils. And now I've come to check up on you, to demand an accounting, to see what you've made of yourself."

"Seriously, what...?"

"I'm campaigning for a seat on the municipal council. Your mother was kind enough to ask me in and listen to my spiel. We've been stagnating too long under the old leadership. It's time for new leaders with a new vision. I'm gonna shake things up, make heads roll."

"You had a knack for that..."

"Len." My mother came back. "I'm sorry to interrupt. "Adam's on the phone, wants to talk to you."

"Adam's your brother. I taught him too. I never forget a student. Never. Let me give you my card." He drew a pile of cards from his jacket pocket, peeled one off the top, and handed it to me. "Give me a call sometime, we'll have a drink. Mrs. Fishman, thank you again. I'm counting on your support. Good evening, all."

In the kitchen the telephone receiver was balanced precariously on the back of my chair. "Yo."

"So how's your favorite teacher and mine?"

"I didn't recognize him till he introduced himself, and then I saw he hadn't changed a bit."

"Doesn't it make you wish you were still in Africa?"

"Everything makes me wish I was still in Africa."

"Fishman the rain king."

"What do you want, Adam?"

"Me, nothing. Joan wants you for dinner. 'Call him yourself,' I said. But you know her - she's shy. Eric's coming. He's real anxious to see you."

"Eric! Jesus Christ."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, just... When's the last time I saw him? I was a teenager - a kid!"

"Does it give you goose bumps all over?"

"Supposing I say yes?"

"Think mom can spare you for one night?"

I looked at her questioningly - I hadn't heard her come into the room, but there she was - and she, apparently knowing what it was all about, said, "Go! Go!"

"I have mom's permission."

"We dine at eight. Bring a bottle of white wine, something a little less swishy than Chardonnay if you don't mind. Ciao."

"Eric'll be there," I said to my mother.

"They're practically neighbors. They run together twice a week."

"I know."

"So why...?"

Mother could never have been a bartender. She was no respecter of pensiveness. "I'm trying to remember the last time I saw him. I couldn't've been more than sixteen, an awkward age, and he - "

"You were older than sixteen. You were at his wedding. He was married at twenty-four, which would have made you eighteen."

"You're right, as always. Come to think of it, a year or two after the wedding I ran into him by chance downtown. It was a Saturday afternoon. We went back to his apartment together - Barbara was out somewhere - and snorted cocaine. But that's not - "

"You snorted cocaine?"

I smiled. Pretending not to know I was shocking her, I went on: "It was the first time I'd ever had anything to do with him, ever even seen him, maybe, outside the family. That was the one time we weren't older cousin and younger cousin - just two guys who happened to know each other."

"Eric smoked cocaine?"

"Snorted. I daresay that for all your remarkable insight into people's characters, so celebrated among your admirers, there're things about Eric you never saw, because he made sure you never saw them. When it came to manipulating his public image, his skill bordered on genius. I was going to say, though, that when I think of him now what I remember is not so much that but me as an awkward, clumsy, slightly retarded boy of fifteen-sixteen and him as a dashing and sophisticated young man in whose presence I felt so ashamed to be me that I... that I... hm. How I survived it all without laying hands on myself is more than I can say. Instead of killing myself I disappeared. God, I... He'd be past fifty now."

"Fifty-three."

"Have you seen him lately?"

"He calls periodically. Just before you came he went to the home to see your father."

"What's he look like?"

"Still very handsome. A little gray. All in all, a very distinguished-looking man. But not happy, I've always felt. Something went out of him when he and Barbara broke up."

"Wasn't he the one who left her?"

"Yes. And he's regretted it ever since."

"I trust he doesn't let his new wife see that?"

"New wife? They've been married twenty-five years!"

"Of course. You see how one loses track of time."

"I think she does see it. She's no fool. She's too clever to say anything, but also too clever not to know."

"What's her name again?"

"Rose."

"How nice, how quaint. Have they got any kids?"

"No. Isn't it strange. You, Adam, Eric - and not a single grandchild to comfort the old generation in its declining years."

"Poor mother. What about Barbara, what ever became of her?"

"I still see her from time to time. She calls me, we go out for coffee. She's got two lovely girls."

"So you still see her."

"Oh, we were very close at one time. She was like a daughter to me. And she lost her own mother not long before her marriage, so I think she kind of saw me as a mother."

"A universal mother is my mom. Well, well. Does Eric know you see her?"

"Oh, yes! He asks me about her. It's his tone when he says, 'How's Barbara', or 'Have you heard from Barbara lately', that convinces me he never really got over her."

"How much of life one misses, being away."

***

Adam and Joan lived in Lower Westmount, in a charmingly untidy third-floor flat in an apartment building that had once been a mansion, subdivided long since, the aristocracy having been supplanted by the bourgeoisie and the bohemians, into residences of more modest and functional proportions. Joan is a fashion designer and Adam a has-been writer - perhaps you've heard of him, or of his novel, Family Tree, which was something of a bestseller fifteen-odd years ago - enough of one, anyway, that on the strength of it he quit law school and became a full-time writer, but nothing much came of it beyond a short story here, an essay there. He ekes out his literary income with part-time work - gas station attendant, hospital orderly, security guard, whatever. Some of his stories are based on his varied work experiences. It is a strain, sometimes, to be the anonymous older brother of a semi-famous man, the more so since literature was to have been my own career. I had shown promise as a youngster, and was encouraged by my teachers, not least by Mr. Bloom, who once, in an unguarded outburst of admiration for my style, said, "I wish I could write like you!" Then I had a nervous crisis, or whatever budding geniuses had in those days, and threw away my notebooks. Adam, three years younger and shivering throughout childhood in my shadow, must have inherited my muse. I'll never forget the time I was browsing in a book shop in Bombay, and happened to see his book. I'd had no contact with my family in years, and it was a bolt straight out of the blue. Did I snatch the book and rush with it to the cash? I did not. I slunk out of the bookstore, found a hole-in-corner bar, and proceeded to get sick drunk.

But this is by the way. I was merely saying that Joan and Adam had divided their apartment, living room and bedroom aside, into two studios, hers filled with fabric, sewing machines and mannequins, his with books, papers, a notebook computer, and a small green parrot, no bigger than a budgie. Adam swore the parrot talked, but I had never heard it.

Joan, as was her habit, threw her arms around me and, standing on tiptoes, kissed me. Still in her embrace, I passed Adam the wine I'd bought. He took the bottle out of the bag and studied the label. "Australian," he said. "Well, I'm sure that'll take us down new paths of discovery."

"There was Australian wine at Ivan's party," said Joan. It was exquisite." I saw Adam wince, very much as he had years and years before when he watched me make hydrogen sulphide with my basement chemistry set. Words like "exquisite" did that to him.

Eric came forward. "Hey hey!" he said. "Look who's here!" We shook hands with feeling. Mother was right. He was still a handsome man, strikingly so. His smile was dazzling. My consciousness of my own awkward appearance, never far from the surface, became the more intense in his presence, just as it had in childhood. "Welcome home to the land of your forefathers."

"Thanks," I murmured.

"How does it feel to be back?"

"Weird!" To hide my confusion I became voluble. I told of having intended to come by car, only to have my mother veto the idea. I would be drinking, she said, and had better not drive. I protested; she put her foot down. She would not let me have her car, and that was that. She would, however, pay my cab fare - an offer I contemptuously declined and took the bus. "Imagine," I cried. "Reduced, at age forty-six, to asking my mother's permission to take the car - and to having it denied! I mean, Jesus H. Christ! This is what I ran away from twenty-five years ago!"

Grating and insincere though my voice sounded in my own ears, the story went over well. It broke the ice. All laughed and agreed that my mother, for all her virtues, was a difficult woman. "She's a control freak," said Joan. If a subject invited a cliché, trust her to utter it. I retreated into sullen silence, uncomfortably aware of having exaggerated both my own desire to take the car and my mother's opposition. Adam had resentments of his own to vent, and even Eric, though he said nothing, seemed to enjoy hearing my mother raked over the coals.

"So tell us about your travels," said Eric when Joan went into the kitchen to put the finishing touches on dinner and we three gentlemen were seated in the living room nursing Adam's excellent Canadian Club rye.

Well, here's my chance to shine, I thought - but after all, "my travels" encompassed a quarter of a century. Where to begin? What little adventure to extract from the mass of happenings, large and small, that comprised my life? My mind was blank. My memory absolutely refused to come to my aid. Sipping my whisky, I mumbled this and that, but I failed to hold my audience, and Eric and Adam were soon launched on desultory talk about people I didn't know, restaurants I'd never heard of, and TV shows I'd never seen.

***

Over dinner we talked about my father. To Eric he was a favorite uncle, and Joan, marrying into the family, loved and admired him - so she said, and her ministrations on his behalf, spoken of with such gratitude and at such length by my mother, left no room for doubt, though the nasty thought occurred to me, its backlash making me feel small and mean, that she doth protest too much. Ironic how dad, a great lover of family gatherings, was in his absence uniting this one. Eric's father, my Uncle Al, had been an argumentative and opinionated man, a vigorous supporter of a free-market economy, the right of the rich to rule, and the deferent if not altogether reverent (reverence was an emotion we all agreed was beyond his range) worship of the God of our fathers. He and my father had been ideological adversaries, their shouting matches on occasion striking panic into me as a child and also, I was pleased to learn now, into Eric. We feared they would come to blows. Unquestionably my father held the intellectual upper hand, effortlessly, so it seemed, driving Uncle Al into corners he somehow never managed to see until he was properly boxed into them, the titters of the listening children (Adam professed to remember none of this) deepening his mortification and rendering him even more intellectually careless. But as Eric said now, with a twinkle in his eye, "My father could beat up your father" - for Uncle Al swam, skied and played squash, and my sedentary, exercise-allergic father would physically have been no match for him. When not arguing, however - and even then, I suppose - they were the best of friends, playing golf together (it was my father's one open-air activity) and sometimes lingering for hours over a chess board in total silence and unshakeable concentration. Moreover, Al was unfailingly generous with his stock market tips, and these, as my father had always been the first to acknowledge, were the basis of our family's modest prosperity. My father's talent was for abstract argument. As a businessman he never made much of a showing.

"Where's that interview," said Joan to Adam, "where you say your father was your main literary influence?"

I raised my eyebrows at that.

Adam was in a sullen mood. "What do you mean, where is it?"

Going over his head, so to speak, Joan said to me, "It was a few years ago, in the Globe and Mail. The interviewer asked him who his influences were, expecting to hear Joyce or Hemingway or whoever, and Adam said, 'My father.' It caused a sensation."

"What sensation did it cause?" Adam demanded truculently.

"The following week there was a letter to the editor - "

"So? A semi-literate letter to the editor is a sensation?"

"All right, so maybe 'sensation' isn't the right word. Excuse me, your Highness. Forgive me. All I meant to say - "

"And all I meant to say," Adam cut in, "is that I was sick to death of the same boring unimaginative questions asked by dull-witted interviewers who haven't even bothered to read your goddamn book."

"He did, it's true, write beautiful letters, your father," said Joan.

"Damn right he did," said Adam. "There isn't a writer living, and that includes me, if you call me living, who can touch him, though he never published a line and never thought of publishing." He turned to me. "Were you at the hospital today?"

"Yeah."

"Was old Mr. Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY! in his usual place?"

"He was there. I don't know if it was his usual place."

"What about the donkey-woman?"

"The donkey-woman? Which one's that?"

"The one who sits in her wheelchair braying like a donkey until she sees someone else in a wheelchair, at which she momentarily interrupts her braying to cry, 'Look out! Here come the cripples!'"

Eric and I laughed. "I don't think I know her."

"Meet me there on Saturday. I'll introduce you. Did you take in the concert?"

"Concert! No. Is today Wednesday?"

"Today is Wednesday. Joan? Am I right?"

"It's Thursday."

"What concert?" Eric asked.

"Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon there's a concert in the shul. The rabbi sings Mein Yiddishe Meidele, Michelle belts out By the Rivers of Babylon, and then the microphone is passed to Madame de la Dangling Tongue, who croaks It's a Long Way to Tipperary. Mom says the rabbi sings beautifully. No doubt you think so too."

***

Seizing an opportunity, Eric took me aside. "Your brother's gonna start smashing plates any minute. Let's you and me make a tactful exit. Joan can handle him when they're alone."

"You've seen this before?"

"I have, yes. Often enough to be on the watch for a certain look of Joan's, which conveys something like, 'We're family, I don't have to stand on ceremony with you, get out.' We can go over to my place and finish the evening there, if you like. I live just around the corner. Have you ever met my wife? No, of course you haven't. Well, you won't meet her tonight either. Thursday nights she spends with her mother, and I revert to my nasty bachelor habits, picking up strange cousins and taking them home and whatnot. Imagine people like us, on the very threshold of old age and still under the thumb of our mums and dads. I have a T-shirt that says, 'I'm an orphan, thank God!' I'd've worn it tonight, but thought it might be tactless. Joan! Thank you for everything, it was delicious. Adam, if you're running tomorrow, be outside at seven thirty."

 

Third segment

"It's funny," I said. "Just this afternoon I was telling my mother how once upon a time you brought me to your apartment and brought out your stash of cocaine."

"Did I really? When would that have been? I don't remember."

"You were living on Brodeur."

"Ah. I can't think which of us was the more indiscreet - me for corrupting a boy scarcely old enough to take responsibility for destroying his own life, or you for telling your mother and shattering, I'm sure, her image of me. Anyway, this is my little igloo."

"It's beautiful," I said, surveying the living room. It's hard to describe. Almost everything that could conceivably be white was: the walls, the shag carpet, the sofa, and an armchair, one of two. The other was a black leather La-Z Boy. Between the chairs was a glass coffee table. On the coffee table was a glass vase in which was a single white rose. On the wall above the sofa was a painting that seemed to me - I know nothing of art - an abstract study in various shades of black. The only other furnishings were a wide-screen TV set and a CD player, next to which was a rack which must have held at least two hundred CDs. Of his early bookish predilection there was not a trace. Nothing, not even a newspaper, paid tribute to the printed word.

"Did you design this?"

"Me? No. Rose. It's Rose's handiwork, even the rose. I balked a bit at the rose, which I thought a little too cute, but I was outvoted. Sit down. Make yourself at home. I can't offer you cocaine, all my suppliers having long since been rounded up, but I've got fair scotch, good vodka, excellent California red wine, 1997..."

"Oh... whatever you're having."

"Let's not have any of that now. How do you expect to get ahead in the world if you can't even make so simple a decision?"

"I don't expect to get ahead in the world."

"Come, come, you're still young! You've a future!"

"Well, if you put it like that, I'll have a glass of wine."

"Clean glass, or dirty? Never mind. Leave it to me. Sit down. Take the La-Z Boy and meditate on the painting. I'll go down to the wine cellar and be back in a jiffy."

He was back in a jiffy, or perhaps my meditation on the painting had distorted my sense of time. Before I quite knew it there was a wine glass in my hand and Eric was saying, "What kind of background music do you fancy? Jazz? Classical? Rock? Fusion? Gospel?"

"Jazz, I think."

"Piano? Sax? Clarinet? Flute?"

"Flute."

"Sorry, we're fresh out of flute jazz this week. How about The Magic Flute? Or is that too fruity?"

What was the matter with him? Was he nervous? He seemed as awkward in my presence as I had always felt in his. "Supposing," I said, "we follow Plato's advice and dispense with the flute girls and the other entertainment, giving ourselves over instead to the divine joy of dialectic."

"You're thinking of the Symposium. The company discourses on love, which Aristophanes explains as a desperate quest for lost wholeness."

"Do you know when I first read that?"

"Would it have been under my influence?"

"It was. You were doing it in college, and were over at our house regaling my parents with stories from it, talking as only you could talk. The very next day, without a word to anyone, I found it at the library and read it in one sitting. How much I understood I don't know. I was all of fourteen. Funny how I suddenly remembered."

"Why 'without a word to anyone'?"

"God knows. That was just my way. Everything I did, every impulse I had, embarrassed me. The Symposium and Don Quixote." I felt myself blushing. "Those two books never left me during my travels. They kept me sane, I think. Or should I say, they would've, if I'd had any sanity in me to begin with."

"Sanity. People speak of sanity as something everybody has, except the mad few. My own feeling, for what it's worth, is that very, very few of us are sane. Don Quixote kept you sane, you say, and yet he of course was mad."

"I've spent the better part of the two weeks I've been back in the company of the mad. Just now I don't have it in me to romanticize them."

"Can you see Don Quixote at the Einstein?"

"Very clearly."

"More wine?"

"Please."

***

"Do you remember Barbara?"

The question came abruptly, after a fairly long but, to me at least, not uncomfortable silence. I had been sunk in a pleasantly tipsy haze, idly gazing at the lamplight through the red wine in my glass and thinking - daydreaming, rather - about how very odd it was to be in this particular person's company after all these years. But a certain sharpness in his tone suggested - this could of course have been my imagination - that Eric had been studying me intently all the while, waiting for the right moment. How he judged the right moment had come I don't know. Did I remember Barbara? I remembered who she was, certainly, I said, but very little about her appearance or her character. "If I met her on the street, I surely wouldn't know her."

"Well, I met her on the street, and I knew her. And she knew me."

"Oh? When?"

"Immediately."

"Pardon?"

"We knew each other immediately."

"I meant - "

"You meant when did we meet, not when did we know each other. Sunday afternoon. Rose and I were downtown shopping. She and her brood were downtown shopping. She has two daughters."

"Yes, I know."

"You know?"

I felt myself blush. Had I been indiscreet? "My mother mentioned it."

"Here, let me fill your glass." He leaned forward from the sofa with the bottle, and I did likewise from the chair with my glass. "Surprisingly good," he said, "this California stuff. My father, as you may remember, fancied himself a wine fancier, and insisted that anything other than French wine was either grape juice or piss. I grew up believing him. One of the symbols of my adolescent rebellion was a suddenly acquired partiality for German wine. Later on I spread my wings even farther, and here I am in California."

"It seems excellent to me. But I know nothing about wine."

"What was I saying? Oh yes. Two daughters. Do you have any children?"

It seemed an odd question from a cousin who knew perfectly well I was not married - but of course there was nothing odd about it. "Yes." He showed no surprise. "How many?"

"One."

"That you know of. And possibly several that you don't, scattered all over the world. It must give you a strange feeling. Where is the one you know of?"

"Thailand."

"This would've been before AIDS."

"Yes."

"Boy? Girl?"

"Don't know. Didn't stay around long enough to find out."

"The girl came to you and said she was pregnant, and you fled."

"Something like that."

"It's hardly gentlemanly."

"Hardly."

"Hm."

"You were saying about Barbara."

"We met, as I said. Rose didn't notice, and her husband doesn't know me."

"You didn't speak to her, then?"

"Not a word. But our eyes met."

"And?"

"Unbeknownst to anyone, our eyes met. And in that instant, that instant when our eyes met, I understood, for the first time in my life, what love is."

He was smiling, and his tone was as calm and playful as before. Was he testing me? A moment before I had introduced myself to him as a father, and here he was, deliberately, it seemed, putting me back in my place, as if to say, There's only room for one man in our relationship, and I'm it.

"You love her, then?"

"And she loves me. I saw it. There is no mistake, no possibility of a mistake. The look in her eyes - I wish I could describe that look. It was..." He shook his head. No use trying to say what it was.

"Maybe it was a mystical experience."

"Barbara and I were high school sweethearts. We were college sweethearts. After college we got married, neither of us ever having loved anyone else or even thought of loving anyone else. And almost from day one after the wedding things started to go wrong. 'Things,' I said. There were no 'things'. It's the way we felt. It was as though - it suddenly hit me: someone had stamped a label on me that I'd never be able to remove as long as I lived: 'Barbara Weiss' husband.' What's wrong with being Barbara Weiss' husband? Well, what's wrong with being Farmer John Smith's cow? Nothing - but a man is not a cow, and takes offense at being branded. Out of sheer rebellion - sheer perversity - I started seeing Rose on the side."

Perhaps he grew suddenly abashed; or perhaps he felt he had told everything essential, and that the rest could be left to my imagination. In any event, he fell silent. Neither of us moved, neither of us spoke. Again, the silence did not weigh heavily on me. My glass was half full, and the wine was good company. It was true, as I had confessed before, that I knew nothing about wine, but the atmosphere was such that this fruit of the California vine seemed peculiarly delicious, a subtle taste purveying subtle thoughts - nothing I could have put into words, or would have wanted to, but oddly satisfying all the same.

***

I have no clear recollection of getting home that night. Perhaps Eric drove me, or maybe he called me a taxi. When I woke up, the sun was streaming through the half-open blind into the yellow room. The little clock on the little couchside table read 9:46. What time had I gone to bed? I had no idea. One o'clock? Two? Three? I felt fine - neither tired nor hung over. I got up, did a round of calisthenics, neatly folded up the sheets, turning the bed back into a sofa, and sallied forth to greet the new day.

My mother was in the kitchen, nursing her second cup of coffee. She turned around at my entrance, her smile as sunny as the day. "Hi!" Hastily she stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray - she knew the smoke bothered me - and pushed back her chair. "I'll make you some coffee."

"Sit, sit!" I said. "I'm a cripple all of a sudden? I can't make my own coffee?" I kissed her on the cheek.

"What time'd you get home last night?"

"You didn't hear me come in?"

"No."

"About two, it must've been. Don't know, really."

"There's a bagel on the counter. Pop it in the toaster for a minute or two."

"I think I'll just have Corn Flakes, if you don't mind." I bustled about, steeling myself to stifle my annoyance when my mother commented, as she inevitably would, on my weird, bizarre and utterly perverse habit eating Corn Flakes without milk.

"How's Eric?"

"Eric's fine. He took me back to his place after dinner."

"What did you talk about?"

"About you, mother. We spent the whole evening talking about you behind your back."

Her face fell, and I was immediately sorry. What provoked me to say these things? Why couldn't I talk to her as one normal adult to another? Does everything, when you return after a long absence to the place you grew up in, conspire to turn you back into the adolescent you had been before you left? Eric, my mother, even Adam - even Joan, who I hadn't known then - all seemed to bring out the fat, obnoxious, morbidly shy teenager in me. I was just beginning my apology - and how many times had I apologized in the two weeks I'd been back? - when the telephone rang, cutting me short.

"Who could that be?" said my mother. It was her never-failing response to the ringing phone, though, friendly woman that she was, she had any number of friends and it rang frequently. If only, I thought, I had somewhere to go, something to do!

"It's for you," said my mother, startling me out of my gloomy reverie.

"For me! Who is it?"

"Mr. Bloom."

Mr. Bloom. My English teacher. Had I not turned in my assignment on time? Were my footnotes found wanting? "What does Mr. Bloom want from me at this late date?"

"Sh!" My mother ostentatiously covered up the mouthpiece. "Tell him I'm not home!" I whispered. But I took the proffered receiver. "Hello."

"Len! How are you? I didn't get you out of bed?"

"No, no."

"Listen, I've arranged a little class reunion in your honor. There are a few of us still in town, and I reached Kenny Grossman in Ottawa... What do you say? Is next Saturday night okay?"

"Next Saturday night?" Class reunion? Kenny Grossman? What was he talking about?

"At first I thought we'd have it at a restaurant, but my wife said, 'Wouldn't it be better to do it at home, where you can stretch out at your ease and make as much noise as you please?' Good point, I thought. We can order in a Chinese meal from Ruby's, put on some music from the good old days when rock'n roll was rock'n roll and not cranked-up elevator music, knock back a few beers, and wax nostalgic over how wonderful everything used to be and how sour it's gone since. What do you say? If Saturday is inconvenient - "

"No! No, Saturday's fine," I heard myself say, my heartiness a self-conscious attempt to conceal the unutterable depression I was feeling.

"Good! Bring over the best of your sixties' record collection. Next Saturday - the 27th - at eight. I'm at 5704 Fairside, corner of Guelph."

 

Fourth segment

Adam!" The cry, so shrill, so near, startled me; there was a clutch at my arm, and a laughing, girlish (though not young) face confronted me with its simultaneous delight and defiance. "You thought you'd shaken me off, all those years ago, and yet - here I am!"

I made a tentative attempt to yank my arm free; she clung tighter. "You've got the wrong party," I said. "My name's not Adam, and to the best of my knowledge - "

"To the best of your knowledge what?"

"I've never set eyes on you before in my life."

"Oh, sure." Her laughter was scarcely sane. She was speaking as loudly and unrestrainedly as if in the privacy of her own bedroom, whereas in fact we were in the middle of the street skirting the high school grounds - a soccer game was in progress scarcely an arm's length away, the shouts of the players punctuating our conversation. Cyclists, joggers and roller bladers passed us. A stout elderly lady laden with shopping bags was approaching from the direction of the mall. "Sure. You're not Adam Fishman - of course not! As if I could possibly be mistaken - it's only been twenty-two years, after all!"

"I assure you," I said, trying to be both convincing and soothing while at the same time veiling and suppressing my rising panic, "I am not, have never been, and don't expect ever to be, Adam Fishman."

"Who are you, then?" she demanded, her tone truculent but wavering. Her grip on my arm slackened.

"You see that building over there?" I pointed. "Know what that is?"

"Yeah."

"What?"

"The Einstein home."

"The Albert Einstein Hospital Geriatric Center."

"So?"

"My father's there. I'm going to visit him. I've been in town two and a half weeks after an absence of twenty-six years and seven months. My father doesn't know me, but he seems to enjoy my company, and so I go. There's to be a concert this afternoon, in the shul. The rabbi will sing, and my mother says he sings beautifully. Is there anything else you need to know about me?"

"I'm terribly sorry, I seem to've made a mistake. I could've sworn - "

"Would you like to come with me to hear the rabbi sing?"

"You're making fun of me. Look - I'll just disappear, and you forget all about me. Okay?"

It seemed like a good idea to me. I watched her as she hurried away, the odd thought occurring that a clatter of heels would suit the scene well, but she was wearing sneakers. At one point she turned to see me standing there and gave a tentative little wave before turning into the next street, whether to avoid me or because that's where she was bound I of course had no way of knowing.

So here was a new mystery to contemplate. Imagine life being so full of them in this suburban little backwater, backdrop of my childhood. Who could she be, and what was Adam to her? Somebody he'd abandoned? Twenty-two years ago, she said. I was forty-six, which would make Adam forty-three; he would have been twenty-one at the time. The lady looked like someone who might have been pretty twenty years ago - but no; come to think of it, her beauty was of that sort which is always in the past. At twenty, people would have said of her that she must have been a pretty child; at ten, that she had surely been an adorable baby. Such thoughts she engendered - and yet even as I stood there I could scarcely recall her face to mind! Well, it didn't matter.

"Hey man!" Trevor's cheery greeting. "You be takin' in the concert?"

"You bet."

"Old Hank's a real music lover."

"Sure is."

"Better hurry, if you wanna get a seat."

"I made reservations weeks ago."

"Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY!"

"Same to you, Mr. Glazer, same to you. Catch you later, aye?"

Withered Beauty was in the lobby, unattended for the moment. She had been sitting passively until I moved into her field of vision. Suddenly a tremor passed through her and she screamed, "Your whore's upstairs!" All heads, sane and insane alike, turned in our direction. I felt myself blush scarlet. Withered Beauty glared at me. I ducked into the stairwell. On the third-floor landing, Anette fastened herself to me, her smile revealing a faint lipstick stain on her teeth. "Take me to the concert?"

"Can't. I've got a date."

"What a fool I am, wasting my youth on you."

"You can't say I led you on. Right from the start I said I was unworthy of you."

"You were kidding, but it's true. You are unworthy of me. If only you knew what a jewel I am."

"Here's my date right here. Dad!"

He was shuffling our way, and hearing my voice he looked up, momentarily startled, and then his face broke into a happy smile. His lower denture, I noticed, was missing. "Burt! Burt, how are you? It's been a long time, a long time. Too long." He extended his hand, and I shook it. His grip was surprisingly strong. Who would Burt be?

"What happened to your teeth?"

"My teeth?" He pondered a moment, and then said, "Nothing. Nothing happened to them. Listen, Burt, supposing we go out for a bite of lunch, and then we'll go over those papers. The boss wants to... wants to..."

"What happened to his teeth?" I asked Anette.

"I'll look in his room." She was playful when opportunity permitted, but when there was work to be done she was all business. She bustled down the corridor, the swing of her hips sending a pang through me. She was throwing herself away here. Why?

"Dad?"

"Len!" He presented his cheek to be kissed. "They said you wouldn't be here today."

"Who said?"

"Burt and the others. But I said to them, 'Of course he'll be here!' And you see I was right."

"Which just goes to show that you know me better than they do."

"You bet!"

"What do you say, should we take in the concert?"

"What concert?"

"They're having a concert, in the shul. The rabbi's going to sing. And Michelle too, I understand."

"Where's Helen?"

"Mom'll be here tomorrow. She's meeting Isabel, they're going out for coffee. Do you remember Isabel?"

He looked at me strangely, as though puzzled at my imagining he could possibly forget Isabel. "Of course I remember. Isabel Goodman. And how's Ed?"

Isabel Goodman it was, and Ed was her husband. "He was quite well, last I saw him." True enough, although that must have been thirty years ago; Isabel had been a widow for eighteen years, mother had told me.

"Len, we must discuss the... the... you know, the diaries."

"Diaries? What diaries?"

Anette came running up. "I can't find them anywhere. What did you do with your teeth, Mr. Fishman?"

"What did I do with my teeth?" Dad echoed. He laughed in that self-deprecating way he'd always had. "I don't think I did anything with them."

"Are they in your mouth?"

"Are they...?" He opened his mouth rather wider than necessary, and ran an exploratory finger along his upper teeth. "Yes, they seem to be."

"The lower ones. Are the lower ones there?"

"The lower ones. No, I would say not."

"Where are they? What did you do with them?"

My father knitted his brow. He seemed to be thinking very hard, searching his memory, but after a time he shrugged, laughed, and said genially, "I don't know."

"We'll keep our eyes open," Anette said to me, "and if we haven't found them by Monday we'll make a dentist appointment for him."

"Sheila," said dad, addressing Anette, "what ever happened to that painting of mother's, you know, the seascape?"

"Who's Sheila?"

"His sister," I said.

"Mr. Fishman! It's me, Anette! I'm not your sister, I'm your girlfriend, remember?" She put her arm through his and smiled as though posing for a photograph.

"Come on, dad, let's go to the shul and see the concert."

"I don't have time for any concert. I have to see to those diaries."

***

We entered the shul to a patter of applause, which was not for us of course but for the rabbi, who had just finished a number and was conferring with the piano-player about the next one. Clara saw us, and marched over. "Mr. Fishman! How are you today? Come, there are two seats over this way.

We threaded our way through the crowd, carefully dodging the wheelchairs, canes and walkers. Come to think of it, Dad was one of the few residents who could walk unaided. Clara seated us. My neighbor on the left was the lady Adam called Madame de la Dangling Tongue. A stroke had left her unable to put her tongue into her mouth. Her mouth was wide open, and her tongue hung out over her chin like a slab of red meat on a butcher's hook. Watching her being fed, needless to say, was not a pretty sight. For a split second I thought I caught a malicious glint in Clara's eye. Was she doing this on purpose? But no, that was silly. It would simply never occur to a woman like her that a man like me, well-intentioned but weak of flesh, would feel revulsion first of all, and sympathy only secondarily, in the face of this grotesque suffering.

The rabbi was a long thin fellow with the face of a child between his beard and his skull-cap. Not only was he no singer, he could not even carry a tune. Adam had said that mother thought the rabbi sang beautifully. This was not possible. If she had said such a thing, it was no more than her way of honoring the rabbi's generous heart, for my mother knew music and in her younger days had been a proficient singer herself, a member throughout my childhood of this or that choral group. As for me, I conceived an instant dislike for him. His tuneless voice grated on me, and his slack smile - I couldn't help this - roused such a mindless aggression in me that the vision that came to me unbidden, of me knifing the rabbi in the guts and him moaning in weak outrage, gave me an intense stab of momentary satisfaction.

"Zum gali gali gali

"Zum gali gali.

"Zum gali gali gali

"Zum gali gali."

"Dad?" I was going to suggest a walk, but, turning to him, I saw the rapt expression with which he took in the song. It was an expression that in a different setting would have been sublime but here was vaguely horrible. It might have been the heavenly choir he heard, welcoming him to paradise. Was it possible - such was my next thought - that he heard sounds inaccessible to my corrupt ears? Maybe my senses missed a great deal. Maybe Dad and these others - Withered Beauty, Madame de la Dangling Tongue - were the way they were because they were on their way to other worlds, distant corners of this infinite universe, and had already left us far behind. Only their shadows remained. They seemed crazy and incapable to us because their attention was focused elsewhere, on the new homes they were on their way to but hadn't yet arrived at, where the rules were different, where light did not travel at 186,000 miles per second and e didn't equal mc squared. What was my father seeing? How many moons were there in his sky, what sort of cloud formations?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Doesn't the rabbi sing beautifully?"

"Adam! What are you doing here?" I hadn't been expecting him.

"Ah, bonjour madame," he said politely to my neighbor. "I trust I am to have the honor of hearing your soaring rendition of It's a Long Way to Tipperary? Or maybe you were thinking of doing Hava Nagilla for us today?"

The woman's face shone with pleasure, though her expression scarcely changed. Where I heard only sarcasm, she heard kindness.

"Wow, listen to that applause," said Adam. "And just look at His Holiness, blushing and bowing his thanks! If he's not careful, his success will go to his head."

 

Fifth segment

"AJQ 369. BTS 902." The concert over, we took dad first to the toilet - he resisted briefly but yielded when Adam made it clear, in that way he had, that he would not put up with any nonsense - and then out for a walk. In the parking lot the car license plates attracted dad's attention, and he stopped to read each one.

"I had a run-in with a friend of yours," I said to Adam. I told him the story. He was puzzled. "Who could it have been? Unless... Doreen? Impossible. I didn't ditch her, she ditched me. Was quite broken up about it at the time. That was before I discovered true love in the arms of my Joan. Describe her. Large dark eyes? Slightly sharp nose?"

"Really, I didn't notice - "

"Writers are supposed to notice!"

"I'm not a writer."

"Boys, boys," said dad. "No fighting."

"Would you believe it, dad? Len here meets a woman who mistakes him for me, calls him every name in the book on my behalf, and he can't even describe her! Was she tall or short? Fat or thin?"

"Medium height and build, I'd say. She wore sneakers."

"Sneakers. Good. I'll have my men fan out and comb the district for a woman in sneakers. What color was her hair? You must have noticed that, at least!"

"Brown."

"Light brown or dark brown?"

"Dark."

"Doreen's hair was light - it was sunlight, cascading sunlight! But a woman's hair color is apt to change in twenty years - from dark to light, from light to dark. These things have been known to happen. God, how I wish I'd done what you did - disappeared! What a coup that was! For twenty-five years, a whole quarter of a century - disparu sans trace. And then suddenly - presto! He's back! Tell me something. Did you come back on purpose, or did the spell just wear off, like Cinderella's at midnight?"

"Maybe that was it. I don't know."

"Wanna come over for supper tonight?"

"Can't. Goin' to a party - a class reunion. At Mr. Bloom's."

"Lucky you. Well! Dad? I have to go now, Joan's expecting me. I'll come and see you again tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay! And thank you again. Thank you for everything." He extended his hand, and shook Adam's firmly.

***

"Mom, mother, mummy - can I call you Helen, mom? What was I going to say? Oh yes! Did dad ever keep a diary?"

"A diary! No - why?"

"He mentioned a diary. Mentioned it a couple of times. 'Diaries,' actually. Plural."

"Well, he mentions lots of things. The other day he said to me, 'You bitch! All you ever do is spend my money!'"

"I know. You told me."

"It seemed worth repeating. My point is that there's not much connection between what he thinks about and the world as we know it."

"Point well taken. Probably it's just meaningless babble - though why should a diary of all things occur to him? Anyway - I better go."

"You're not going like that!"

"Like what?"

"In jeans? And that shapeless t-shirt?"

"That's exactly how I'm going!"

"Oh, Len, you're not in high school any more!"

"'Bye, mom." I kissed her lightly on the cheek. "Don't wait up for me."

***

Fairside Avenue, where Mr. Bloom lived, was only a few blocks from our place. Had he lived here in my high school days? If so, I'd had no idea he was so close. In this community, to live in such proximity to someone without knowing it would be impossible now - you'd be bound to run into each other at the mall, at a restaurant, somewhere - but not then, when the neighborhood was purely residential and people went downtown for all entertainment and even most routine shopping.

Fairside, Fairside... what was it about this street? Of course: Sonia had lived here. My first love. We were nine. Grade four, it would have been. In Mrs. Barth's class. Sonia. Years and years later, long after she had vanished, I fell in love with Sonia in Crime and Punishment on her account. I still love her. Why don't I play with Anette? Because I'm saving myself for Sonia, who might one day return. Ah, Sonia, Sonia, do you remember how your fat homely little knight, hopelessly unworthy of your beauty, sacrificed himself for you, bore the brunt of Mrs. Barth's furious wrath that it might not fall on you? We had been assigned a composition on - I still remember! or rather, it all came back to me as, clutching my bottle of white wine in my right hand, I walked, my trepidation growing with each step, to Mr. Bloom's Fairside Avenue residence - spring. It was spring - April to be exact, not lilac season - and I was busily writing away, quite losing myself in the task, about the slush that had invaded my left boot that very morning. At some point I became aware of my angel, sitting beside me, furtively peering in my direction. My concentration slackened; my attention wandered to meet her. Yes, she was copying my essay! Pretending not to notice, I nonetheless slid my paper over towards her, so that she could make it out more easily.

The next day Mrs. Barth was, as I said, furious. She was probably not as fearfully old as she seemed to us then - might she have ended her days at the Albert Einstein? - but she certainly wasn't young, and to us she seemed terrible. "Lenny and Sonia are to stay after the bell," she said. Oh, happiness! Oh, bliss! We would clean the blackboards together, and I would... "Now then," she said when everyone else had gone. There were our essays, side by side on her desk, and with a ruler she rapped first one and then the other. "Confess! Which of you copied the other?"

"I copied hers," I blurted out without a moment's hesitation. Sonia gasped. Mrs. Barth glared at me. I blushed - I know I did, I must have! The words poured out of my mouth; where did they come from? Never had I been so articulate. I couldn't, I said, think of anything to write, I tried and tried, until finally, desperate, I peeked over at Sonia's, thinking that her story might give me an idea - honest, Mrs. Barth, that's all I wanted, an idea, but then before I knew it my pencil seemed to be moving of its own accord...

She would give me extra homework, she would call my parents - her threats rained down on me, thick and fast, but I stood firm. When at last she let us go we went outside and Sonia fell into my arms, weeping... Lord, Lord, why did the very best moment of my life have to come when I was nine years old? And why did You take her away from me so soon? For that very summer she left, and never word have I heard from her since!

***

"And here he is, the guest of honor!" cried mine host as, all a-tremble, blushing no doubt, more dead than alive, I set my bottle of wine on a table and, struggling to make my grin look a little less sheepish, surveyed the company. My classmates, friends and enemies of my adolescence - in vain I searched for a familiar face. The scene swam before my eyes. There were fifteen, twenty people in the room, men and women, some sitting on the sofa, others on the rug. Had Mr. Bloom really kept in touch with them all, and were so many living close enough, in these frenzied and centrifugal times, to come on such short notice? Though no one was dressed formally, all, I saw, were attired rather more elegantly than I was, and I thought, and was immediately annoyed at myself for thinking, that maybe I should have listened to my mother. "Hey, Fishman!" said somebody. "Après moi le deluge! Ha ha!" A roar - a deluge - of laughter erupted, and I felt myself go scarlet. I squinted at the speaker - who was he? Black curly hair going gray and thin; coarse face; thick eyebrows. "Après moi le deluge" was the quotation I'd chosen to typify myself in the high school annual - God only knows what it meant to me then. "Clouch 'im! Clouch 'im!" cried somebody else. I smiled at that - a reference to a card game I'd been good at. The clouch was the queen of hearts; woe to whoever ended up with her.

"Children! Children!" Mr. Bloom's voice rose above the hubbub. "Let the man get his bearings! He's been away, after all, for twenty-five years!" The ensuing collective gasp sounded rather stage-managed. "Where hasn't he been?" Mr. Bloom resumed in awe that plainly wasn't to be taken too seriously. "He has, as they say, seen the world, and will shortly deliver his report. But first - Len" - his voice suddenly changed, becoming natural - "you look a bit as if you've just landed from the moon. Don't you recognize us?"

He'd done that skillfully, and I picked up his hint. "Well," I smiled, "I recognize you."

Good-natured laughter greeted that, and suddenly we were all a little more at ease. "Take a minute and look around," said Mr. Bloom - "quit making faces there!" he barked in his classroom voice, which had everyone cracking up and punching each other on the shoulder. "Seriously now. Settle down or prepare to hand in five hundred words on Why I Love Emily Dickinson. Lenny, start with this clown on my right. Surely you recognize him?"

I looked at the man indicated, sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him. If I had passed him in the street it would not have so much as crossed my mind that I knew him; in the present setting, of course, it was impossible not to fancy he looked familiar. He was a pale, stoutish gentleman with a thick blond moustache, thin wire-frame glasses, and an egg-shaped, egg-bald head, the skin stretched so taut across the skull that veins were visible. He smiled and wrinkled his nose under my scrutiny. "Oh, come on, Fishman, I haven't changed that much!"

I still didn't exactly recognize him, but it did occur to me that Mr. Bloom must have had a reason for singling him out. "Wayne?" He raised a glass which I hadn't seen till then, and said, "Cheers, buddy."

"Wayne Lister."

"Mister Lister to you, pal." Somewhat clumsily he got to his feet, cast about for a place to deposit his wine glass, passing it after a moment's awkward hesitation to the person next to him, and came forward. Ignoring his proffered hand, I embraced him. "Wayne Lister! Who'd've thought we'd ever see each other again?" We had been inseparable in high school, but ended up at different universities, and so drifted apart. When I didn't have a date for the grad dance he lent me his younger sister ("I'll lend you Viv" - that's what he had said), who proved such an agreeable companion - such a quiet, gentle, shy girl - that there were actually thoughts in my head - they came flooding back to me now - of spending the rest of my life with her, not in erotic bliss - she was hardly more than a child - but in calm domestic contentment - playing house, so to speak. "How's Viv?" I said.

"Fine, fine." Naturally I wanted to know more, but I was wrenched away - so it seemed - for further introductions. If the faces were not familiar, the names certainly were, and I very soon - as Mr. Bloom had put it - got my bearings. "Remember the time I beat you up, Fishman?" grinned Joe Tucker. "I do indeed," I said, for just then I did, and I won't vouch for my tone being altogether good-natured as I said, "How about a rematch?" He wouldn't have had a chance against me today, that was plain, and it struck me then that I looked at least ten years younger than anyone in the room - any of the men, at least - with the possible exception, oddly enough, of Mr. Bloom himself.

Joe Tucker laughed. "Meet my wife," he said, beaming down on the lady at his side. She scarcely came up to his shoulders. She smiled tentatively. I waited for the rest of the introduction, and when it didn't come I smiled as best I could and said, "Hi." Joe Tucker guffawed. His wife reddened. So, I fear, did I. Now she spoke up for the first time. "You don't remember me." I looked more closely. Rather pretty, in an insignificant sort of way. Short dark hair, button nose, girlish still, as though she'd never quite left high school. Remember her? Would she have been in our class? Had I ever known Joe Tucker's high school sweetheart? Some boys at sixteen are men already, and others are still boys. Joe had been, or had seemed like, a man. I was one of the boys, and, somewhat in awe of him, had kept my distance.

The silence seemed to drag on, and Joe, apparently over-estimating my suspense and under-estimating his wife's discomfort, was in no hurry to break it. She wore, I noticed, a rather nice necklace. I know nothing about jewelry, but this particular item caught my attention, mostly I suppose because it seemed too dainty and delicate to have come to her as a gift from her husband. "Oh, come!" said Joe at last. "Surely you remember Linda!"

"Linda?" Not Linda Erdman? Well, yes, who else? A face that until her name had been mentioned had been as unknown to me as that of the most perfect stranger was suddenly part of my life. Briefly, in grade five, I had tried to console myself for Sonia's loss by conceiving a crush on Linda, who sat right in front of me, but I was shy and unable to declare my love, and, no occasion arising comparable to that which had brought Sonia and me together, I languished in helpless silence for a while and then, as is the way at that age, snapped out of it by remembering that girls were inferior objects unworthy of serious attention. Had she been in Mr. Bloom's class? "I remember you from elementary school, but not from high school," I said.

"And yet, quietly and insignificantly, I was in high school too," she smiled.

"Yes, well, that is the way of things," I mumbled. "Linda Erdman. My God, I - "

"Lenny! You bastard, you owe me two bucks. Comes into the caf whining, 'I got no lunch money, I got no lunch money!' So out of the goodness of my heart I lend him lunch money - and what does he do? Splits for Africa! Ha ha! How are ya, boy?"

"Takefman!"

And so it went, until at last I knew everyone, and everyone knew me, and after a few drinks it really was, uncannily, as if the thirty years between high school and now had never been, and we were all one big happy classroom, immersed in our childish games and adolescent romances and what the spectacles symbolized in The Great Gatsby. Mr. Bloom was a masterful host. He seemed to remember precisely who was who and who had hung out with whom; he brought people together without seeming to do so, staying with them just long enough to ignite a conversation and leaving them to themselves as soon as it became self-sustaining. Wayne Lister, I learned, was an eye-doctor whose clinic was in the Melville Medical Building five blocks from the school. Married, two kids; the older one, a boy, among Mr. Bloom's new generation of students and the younger, a girl, in Miss Ebbet's math class; did I remember Miss Ebbet? She was Ms. Ebbet now, of course, but otherwise unchanged, a dear sweet old lady at sixty just as she had been at thirty. Viv? Also married with two kids. Physiotherapist. Husband a banker. We'll have to get together sometime. What about me? Was I married? No, a rootless wanderer was I, measuring my happiness in distance. "But what did you do?" asked Linda, who had been standing there listening to us, quietly waiting for a chance to get her little word in. "What did I do? You mean how did I earn a living? Teaching English, mostly. That's how I bankrolled my travels. You can do that anywhere, and there's surprisingly good money in it. Besides, it was all I could do, having perversely dropped out of college six weeks before graduation - I simply couldn't face those final term papers! I'd had enough! To hell with school - it was life I wanted! Life! And so one night I slammed my books shut and without a word to anyone went to the bus station, figuring on going to Toronto, but I fell into talk with a girl who was going to Calgary and ended up going with her..."

I broke off, embarrassed at my prolixity, but I could see Linda was interested, and so I went on, playing Othello to her Desdemona, until Joe came over and said, "Excuse me. We better be off, don't you think, hon? The babysitter has to be home by eleven thirty. Lenny, it was real nice meeting you again, we live over in Hampstead, we'll have to get together sometime..." etc. etc. Why had I taken such a strong dislike to him? The childhood beating? The shape of his face? His gross flabbiness in conjunction with Linda's slim, waif-like delicacy?

"What does he do?" I asked Wayne.

"Joe? Don't know, really. He's in business for himself, I think, but - " He shrugged. "Don't know! Not my kind of people."

"Nor mine. His wife's nice, though."

"You'll have to come over and meet my wife."

"Listen. Do you remember a girl named Sonia Halkin?"

"Not even vaguely."

"She moved away in grade four."

"Grade four! Before my time, I'm afraid."

"Wayne, I must find that girl! I must!"

He smiled and shrugged. "Well," he said. "If you must, you must."

 

Sixth segment

"Just crash on the sofa," said Mr. Bloom.

"Where's your wife, by the way?" It was only now, at 3:30 or so a.m., the party over and everyone gone but me, that I noticed his wife's absence.

"Out of town for a week. Business trip. Some more wine? Valet! Butler! Wine, ho!"

"I really should be getting back."

"Why?"

"My mother will be worried about me. My mother worries. It's her nature to worry. When I laugh at her about it, she reminds me that, with a son like me, she would have to be a post not to worry. And she's not a post. If anything, she inclines towards hypersensitivity. I have not been an ideal son to a hypersensitive mother. Once - oh my God, Mr. Bloom, do you have any idea how weird, how grotesque it is to return to your childhood? All these things that haven't so much as crossed your mind in decades suddenly seem more real, more vivid, than anything you're experiencing at the present moment. The time my father bought my mother her first car. A 1972 Ford Maverick, chestnut-colored. I used to work summers in my dad's office, and on the way home on this particular day, my mother's forty-seventh birthday - the age I'll be my next birthday - we stopped off at the dealer's, and dad drove the Maverick home and I followed in the family Plymouth. Mom was outside working in the garden. She saw us drive up in the two cars, and never, never, now that I've remembered it again, will I forget her face! So cleverly had my father done things that she hadn't suspected a thing. The surprise was total. And she loved that car, Mr. Bloom, loved it like some people love their kids, loved it like my brother Adam loves his pet parrot, though he'd rather die than show his feelings. Anyway, two summers after that, her love for the car undimmed by the passage of time - she'd even given it a name: Petunia, she called it. Why Petunia and not Daffodil? I don't know. Hm. Where was I? Oh yes! Two summers later, my mom, my dad and Adam went to Lake George for a week's holiday. You know Lake George? They took the Plymouth, which meant the Maverick was home with me. Please don't drive, said my mother. Why not? I protested. I'm a perfectly capable driver, etc. etc. I'll feel better if I know Petunia is safe in the garage, said my mother. Aw, please, mom? Please, mom? Etc. etc. Until finally she relented. She left me the keys and the registration. For me it was like the dream of a lifetime come true: a house and a car, all to myself, for a whole week! I was nineteen years old, and life was just beginning. And what did I do with my freedom? Party? Drink? Fornicate? No. After dark I would take Petunia out on the Trans-Canada Highway and drive and drive, every night getting just a little bit farther before gravity went into action and tugged me gently but firmly back. One of these days, I thought as I drove, I will break the bonds that tie me to this insipid place, to my pedestrian little identity... Do you know the song Break on Through, by the Doors? 'Break on through to the other side!' That's what I sang as I drove. Over and over, like a mantra: 'Break on through! Break on through!'

"You'll have guessed of course where this unpardonably long reminiscence is heading. It was just on the outskirts of Ottawa. I was turning around to go home."

"You crashed?" prompted Mr. Bloom when I fell silent.

"Into a telephone pole. Lucky I wasn't killed, they told me at the hospital. That was by no means self-evident to me. God! Stupid story. What got me started on that of all things?"

"How'd your mother take it?"

"She was never the same after that. Never the same. No, I'm joking. The whole family rushed to Ottawa, assured me they didn't give a damn about the car as long as I was all right, and generally so oppressed me with love and kindness and goodness that I thought I would commit any crime, be guilty of any vileness, if only I could free myself of all that loving attention!"

"And what vileness were you guilty of?"

"Well, the thought itself was vile, don't you think?"

"Oh, if we're to be judged by our thoughts, I don't suppose many of us would 'scape whipping."

"Ah. You're interested in deeds, not thoughts."

"I am fascinated by the gap between thought and action. All action, you know, even the most reasonable, contains at least a hint of the absurd. Only thought is purely reasonable. One can't walk from thought to action; one must leap, leap across an abyss." He chuckled. "This was to've been the subject of the doctoral dissertation I never wrote."

"Why not?"

"I preferred to think it. And I never really wanted to be a professor. Strange as it might seem, I was happy teaching high school. I like teenagers. I like being with them - the boys, like Alcibiades, with their first beards, and the girls... the girls..."

"Yes? The girls?"

"Ah, you grin, you smirk, you think to yourself, 'There must be things about him that, if known, would derail his election campaign!' Am I right? Is that what you're thinking?"

"No!"

"Bullshit. Have some more wine. This campaign of mine - it started off as a joke. The Beckman Bulletin - remember the Bulletin? You ought to, you wrote for it. The Bulletin ran an editorial: Bloom for Councilor. It went on about how the incumbent councilors had been in power - that was the expression they used: 'in power'! - since the community was incorporated, that their average age was about ninety-seven, and why didn't our very own Ron Bloom run for office? He would clear the cobwebs! He would shake things up! It was a joke, as I said, but I thought... well, I thought two things. First of all, it would make a great school project - the process, the campaign... Educational, and all that. Secondly - the leap from thought to action again. Here's how it happens, according to my unwritten thesis: out of nowhere, and for no reason, a mood comes over you, you just feel like making that leap - it's just a mood - and so you act, you fling yourself from thought to action. Anyway, I marched into the Bulletin office and I said, 'You guys, you've got yourself a candidate!' Freaked 'em out, 'cause like I said, they only meant it as a joke. And so I'm running, and the election is in two weeks."

"What if you win?"

"God forbid!" he laughed. "No, seriously. If I win, I'll take my seat on the council, and by God, I'm not sure this community won't be the better for my participation! You see that age has not dimmed my egomania."

"Do you think you have a chance of winning?"

"Absolutely. A very good chance. Once I made up my mind to do it, I went about it in all seriousness. I read up on the issues, got myself an informal team of unpaid advisors, went campaigning door to door... Well, you saw me at your mother's house. I'm not unknown in the neighborhood. A lot of people living here know me as their teacher, or as their children's teacher."

"I'm still waiting to hear about the girls," I said.

"What girls?"

"The boys with their first beards, and the girls..."

"In the course of my thirty-two-year career as a teacher I have had affairs with three students," he said calmly. "Does that shock you?"

"It shocks me that you're telling me."

"I'll demand a confession from you in return."

"My pleasure - but I'm not running for office."

"What'll you do, denounce me to the press?"

"Absurd - but then all action is absurd, you just said."

"What time is it?"

"Quarter past four."

"You sleepy?"

"No."

"Listen, then. There were three girls, but only one worth telling about. The other two just happened, and of course shouldn't have, but this one - this one was love. Love: 'And this maiden she lived with no other thought/ Than to love and be loved by me.'"

"Poe."

"I taught you well. The odd thing is, she wasn't at all pretty. A chubby, pimply sixteen-year-old with glasses. What was there in her to turn the head of a man like me? - a respected member of the community, a happily married family man - my own daughter was sixteen at the time, and my wife, though no longer young, was still - is even now, I think I can say without fear of contradiction - a very good-looking woman. A good student, serious to a fault. Would raise the damnedest questions in class! We're doing Return of the Native, and the class is plodding through it, but she - you could tell, Eustacia Vye's passion was alive for her, was real, something maybe she'd felt herself, obscurely, and I would think to myself, 'This girl doesn't look like much, but there's real blood flowing in her veins!"

"Mr. Bloom - "

"Oh, for God's sake! You're old enough to call me Ron!"

What to call him was not the point. A sudden wave of revulsion swept over me. I didn't want to hear his story. He had been one of my favorite teachers, maybe the favorite. I had respected him. I had felt then, and felt again now, that I had learned a great deal from him, some of it bearing on the texts we studied together, some of it merely from the example he set. I didn't want to hear about his tawdry seduction of a girl young enough to be his daughter. He seemed to guess my thoughts. He smiled, and sat down on the sofa beside me. "You're wrong," he said gently. "You're expecting a nasty, ugly story, told in the gloating tones of a dirty old man who's all unconscious of how dirty and old and unmanly he is. I'd hoped you would think better of me. Don't you see, haven't you read enough and lived enough to know, that real love - 'true love,' as the pop songs say - is absolutely inseparable from a bold, irrational - crazy, if you like - defiance of common sense?"

It was not a rhetorical question. He gazed steadily into my eyes, all trace of humor gone from his.

"So, I suppose, is all crime."

"Crime, sense - those are community words. They regulate our daytime affairs, and social life would be impossible without them. But Lenny, our true life, our inner life, is criminal and insane! Of course it is!"

In the silence that followed, he seemed to be studying me intently. At last a frown crossed his face, as though his examination of me had not pleased him. He stood up. Shaking his head, pacing the room, he said, "She stayed after class. She had a question. Her question was this: 'Mr. Bloom, have you ever slept with a student?' Yes, I said, I had, once. I waited. She smiled. She stood up. 'That was my question,' she said, and left." He paused. "I regard that as the most erotic experience of my life. Do you understand that?"

"I... no, I'm not sure I do."

"Nor do I. What caused me... what spell was I under that I said yes? Why didn't I say no, or sputter that it was none of her business, how dare she, and so on? What caused me to put my life in her hands like that? She would tell her parents, her parents would call the principal, I would be disgraced, fired... I don't know. I simply don't understand it. But there it is."

"Nothing happened?"

"Nothing. She came to class as before, continued to ask brilliant and provocative questions, graduated, went on to McGill and then to UCLA, and if you check out the literature section at Chapter's you'll find her seminal critical analysis of Thomas Hardy. It's one of two books she's written. The other is on - you guessed it - Poe. She never married. She's an associate professor of English at the University of Alberta. I don't envy her the Edmonton winters, but she doesn't seem to mind them."

"You've kept in touch?"

"By e-mail often, by phone now and then, face to face the odd time she's in town. What time is it?"

I looked at my watch. "Nearly five."

He went to the window and drew back a heavy curtain. Suddenly the room was flooded with sunlight. "Morning comes early at this time of year. Will you be going to see your father today?"

"Yes, this afternoon."

"You better get some sleep."

 

Seventh segment

"Would you mind," said my mother, "going downstairs and bringing up the clothes from the dryer?"

"Clothes from the dryer. I'm on my way."

"And a jar of instant coffee from the shelf."

"Jar of instant coffee. Got it. What shelf?"

"The shelves over the tool table, where I keep my provisions."

"I'll find it. Where's the clothes basket? Is it the same plastic red one the sight of which will bring back such a rush of childhood memories?"

"It is!" said my mother. "The very same one! It's in the linen closet. Wait, I'll get it for you."

"Sit. I'll get it."

"You don't know where the linen closet is."

"Why, has it moved?"

It was indeed, or could easily pass for, the very same clothes basket, nearly as old as I was. As a child, bringing up the clothes from the dryer had been my job, and this was the basket I had done it in, the same basket now in my hand, and me closer to fifty than to forty!

"There was a phone call for you this afternoon," said my mother.

"A phone call! From who?"

"She wouldn't say. Said she'd call back this evening."

She. How interesting. Three weeks had passed since Mr. Bloom's party, and in that time my social life had expanded somewhat. I had been to Wayne Lister's house for dinner twice, and met his charming wife and delightful children, and Harvey Takefman and I had gone drinking three or four times, and he had introduced me to two or three people... In short, it was just like high school, our conversation brimming with teachers, homework assignments and girls. Speaking of girls - I had not yet met Viv, Wayne's sister, but Wayne had told her of my return and she was reportedly highly excited at the prospect of seeing me again, as soon as a time could be arranged. Could the call have come from her? Hardly likely. Wayne would have taken charge of the arrangements, and even if Viv had taken it upon herself to call, she would have left her name.

So familiar was the basement I found myself in that I was actually half way across to the dryer before it occurred to me that I was seeing it for the first time in a quarter of a century. It was an "unfinished basement", as opposed to the "finished basements" of most of our neighbors - that is, the original concrete walls had not been paneled over with imitation mahogany, or the concrete floor covered with parquet or carpeting. Our neighbors, in other words, went downstairs into a second living room or den; we went downstairs into a basement.

It was just one of the little refinements that my father's singular lack of success in business, for all his brains, disqualified us from, and it was a great source of bitterness at one time to my mother, condemned to watch helplessly while her friends climbed past her up the economic ladder. I didn't make things any easier for her. There was my rather heavy-handed mockery of her bourgeois pretensions, of course, which she bitterly resented, but long before I had the vocabulary to deal in such invective, the issue was of the neighborhood kids piling over to my house on rainy days to play hockey - everyone else's basement being out of bounds because they were "finished." My mother raged and stormed against this, until at last she banned it altogether, and when I whined in protest, "What harm does it do? It's not a finished basement," she snapped back, "It's my finished basement!" To which, of course, there was no answer.

For my part, I liked the basement just the way it was, and was quite glad we were unable to finish it. Partly this was my way of taking sides with my father against my mother (theirs was a largely harmonious relationship, but whenever something did come up, I was ostentatiously on my father's side). To me this raw, pristine basement was a kind of attic, a storybook attic - I remember being confused very early in life about why everyone in storybooks always went upstairs to their attics - dusty, musty and mysterious. Not that there were any unexpected discoveries to be made here, unless some old furniture stored under white sheets and my father's golf clubs qualified. Apart from that there was the furnace, the automatic washer and dryer, and, in a far corner, the "tool table" - so-called for its original purpose as the venue of my father's suddenly awakened and rapidly extinguished interest in carpentry - whereon I had set up my chemistry lab. Would anything of that remain, I wondered as, little red clothes basket in hand, I made for the dryer.

"Phenolphthalein." The syllables formed in my mind as I approached. "Phenolphthalein." What a lovely sound - what did it mean? Was it the name of a new god revealing his presence to me and appointing me his prophet? It was not. It was a chemical, a white crystalline substance that in solution was used to test acidity or alkalinity. But it was the wonderfully euphonious name that drew me to it and caused me to favor it above all my other chemicals. Now, it was as if the vicinity itself echoed with those syllables, louder as I came nearer, until finally they resounded into meaning, bringing a smile to my lips and a glow to my heart. Yes, I remembered. Me at thirteen, Adam at ten. I was a chemist and he a police officer, he coming to my lab for a chemical analysis that would set him on the right track in the case he was on. Though hard at work discovering the origin of the universe, I was always pleased to lend him my expert assistance, for was not the fight against evil almost as important as the key to the mystery of how God had done his work? My phenolphthalein was at his disposal.

The shelves above the table, I realized at once from the out-of-place look they had, were not part of my childhood tableau. They had been installed much later, the crudeness of the work suggesting an amateur hand - my father's? Had he gone back to carpentry in his later years? There were three shelves filled with cans and jars. Beside the table was something else I didn't recognize: a large white freezer. On the table itself lay a hammer, a chisel, and a spread-out sheet of newspaper, yellowed but otherwise bearings its age rather well, I thought. What was its age? February 7, 1981. Habs clip Wings, said the headline. Montreal 4, Detroit 2. What had been going on here, what had my father been working on, what had he been hammering and chiseling? The shelves? And where had I been on that distant winter day? 1981, 1981... Niger. Niamey. Nothing wintry about that setting. A Japanese engineer I'd got friendly with in Jakarta was on his way there as part of a development aid program. Why not come along? he'd said. Why not indeed? I taught there for two years, little suspecting, on February 7, 1981, that Montreal was defeating Detroit and my father was laboring over the inelegant but ultimately serviceable shelves to which, nearly two decades later, I would be dispatched by my mother to get... what was it? a jar of instant coffee.

I sat down on the stool in front of the table. Had this been my lab stool? I couldn't be sure, but it didn't feel right. My back seemed involuntarily to be seeking out a back rest, as though that's what it had been accustomed to find there. I squirmed about, trying to adjust to the new reality. My left foot kicked against something. I bent down. Cardboard boxes under the table, a whole row of them; no, "row" is too orderly a word; a whole disorganized mass of them. No need to ponder if they had been here in my time; they had certainly not been. Dismounting from the stool, I squatted down to investigate. The box closest to my right hand had had, judging from the design on its side, Valencia oranges for its original cargo. The ease with which it came mocked the vigorous tug I gave it. It scraped shrilly against the concrete floor, with such surprising loudness that, idiotically, I whispered, "Sh!" - and then laughed at myself for being so easily spooked. Drawing back the lid, I found myself face to face with JFK, 1917-1963. Well well, doesn't this take you back. Who else have we here? President Johnson, Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King, Man on the Moon, Man of the Year, Bob Dylan. Dad's collection of Time Magazines. Next? I pulled out another box, more gently this time. Report cards and other school memorabilia, Adam's and mine. Here, bound in a canary yellow folder, was Adam's report on Canada's early explorers - Cartier, Champlain, La Salle, La Verendrye. Unobtrusively, in the lower left hand corner of the inside cover, in mom's handwriting, was written "Grade 6, 1969." And oh, look! Here's me, in the school play, 1964, a slave, fourth from left, in the retinue of Pharaoh King of Egypt as he confronted Moses and his rod! 1964 - that would be... grade four! Surely Sonia would be here, odalisque in Pharaoh's harem? Wicked thought! It was a faded, blurred group photo. Try as I might I could make no identifications, distinguish no old friends, old flames old mortal enemies.

What other fragments of our lives were herein boxed and crated? In a third box I found notebooks - pocket notebooks, A4 notebooks, red, blue, black... whose would these be? Mine? Surely not! Opening the top one, I immediately recognized my father's handwriting, the round confident scrawl that made my own chicken-track handwriting seem that of a boy who would never, ever, be the man his father was.

"Inescapable conclusion from reading the Old Testament: God didn't have a clue what made the universe tick."

"Man was born to suffer. Most men suffer pointlessly and absurdly. A very few suffer tragically."

"A wise man knows perfectly well that God does not 'sendeth the rain' - and yet prays to God for rain; he knows the latest theories of mathematical physics, and yet worships a Creator, his fervor rising in proportion to his wisdom and his knowledge that there is nothing to worship."

What on earth was this? The Meditations of Saul Fishman? Impossible, my father would never write this... this... what to call it? It was not his voice. The handwriting, on the other hand, was unmistakable. "Illness is not physical but arises from a faulty mode of life." "God is doomed to omnipotence. The only thing He can't do is restrain Himself. It is up to Man to restrain Him."

Were all the books in this vein? I dug in and brought out another one, a small one, the faded red paper cover scratched, cracked and creased. "Apr. 28. Loose ends, restless, miserable. Finally called Redding in Toronto: 'Meet my train tomorrow night, I'll buy you a drink.' Good old Redding!"

Redding? Who might good old Redding be? Why was he feeling miserable? April 28 when? Good God! Flipping frantically through the pages I saw months but no years. It must be before he married my mother; the impromptu journey spoke of bachelorhood, the pages were yellow, and the handwriting seemed somehow younger. Why was there nothing about April 29? Or April 30? The next entry was June 12, and it read, "Rain. Picnic cancelled. Good."

"Len! My clothes! What are you doing down there?"

I snapped the book shut - blushing no doubt - and hastily replaced it in the box. These notebooks - could they be the diaries dad had spoken of? "I must attend to them," he'd said. What did "attending to them" mean? Nothing, mother had insisted. He opens his mouth and words come out, devoid of meaning. It was easy enough to think so, and yet here were the diaries to prove that was not altogether true.

I heard the phone ring. It rang again, broke off in the middle of the third ring, and then, "Len! Telephone!" my mother called from the top of the stairs. Well. This must be my mysterious caller. I ran up the stairs, foolishly dragging the empty clothes basket behind me.

 

Eighth segment

Is Joe that tall?" I asked.

Linda Erdman smiled. "That tall? How tall?"

"It struck me at Mr. Bloom's how small you were, almost waif-like, I thought - and yet now I see you're just a little shorter than me. It must have been your gigantic husband who so diminished you."

She shrugged, simpered, flushed.

"Were you his girlfriend in high school?"

"Oh no." She shook her head vigorously, and in that instant I suddenly understood the fleeting impression I'd had, seeing her emerge from her car in the mall parking lot, that something was missing. Her bare throat. The pretty little necklace I had admired at the party was gone. "Oh no. In high school Joe didn't go out with mousy little girls like me. He went out with Kathy Brash and the others."

"What others?"

"Brenda Holm, Penny Lang - remember Penny Lang with her guitar?"

"Vaguely."

"Wasn't it awful about her?"

"What do you mean? What was awful?"

"The way she died - oh!" She gasped, suddenly remembering. "Of course, you wouldn't know. I'm sorry. She burned to death. Someone set fire to her house."

The waitress came over. "Club roll special and a diet coke," said Linda. There was a faint undertone in her voice - my imagination? - that suggested she thought the waitress should have known without asking. The waitress turned her eyes, without the faintest movement of her head, in my direction. "Same," I mumbled. "Someone set fire to her house?"

"Oh, a long time ago! Twenty years at least. More. I don't know... It seems her father kept bad company."

What could I say? Penny Lang was at best the haziest of hazy memories to me - a classmate, but one I'd had nothing to do with; had never, as far as I recalled, so much as said hello to her. And now - a propos of what, exactly? - I was suddenly being confronted with her charred corpse, a by-product of the bad company her father kept. Could one change the subject without appearing blatantly insensitive? Linda solved the problem for me. "Oh no," she said, effortlessly switching back to what we'd been talking about before. "I ran into Joe again years, years later. He'd come down in the world a bit by then. No longer the high school hero." She seemed to relish his downfall. "If he knew I was with you now - "

"He wouldn't like it?" I prodded.

"He'd be furious! He'd - "

"But why? It's lunch with an old friend. Hardly that - an old acquaintance."

"To him, nothing's innocent."

It seemed an oddly profound remark, coming from this inarticulate girl. Woman, of course - but girlish she looked, and girlish she acted, so that it was hard to think of her as a woman of my age, a woman in her mid-forties. Come to think of it, hadn't she said something - no, Joe had said it - about a babysitter? "How old are your kids?"

"Eight and five. Why?"

"How long've you been married?"

"It'll be nine years in September."

"The children are at home now?"

"My mother's with them."

"Listen," I said. "Did you know that when we were in grade five I had an incurable crush on you?"

"In grade five?" She was interested. "No, I didn't know. Did you know that I had a crush on you in grade nine?"

"Did you really! I had no idea." We both laughed. The waitress came with our club rolls.

"I love their French fries," she said, chewing meditatively on one.

"Let's talk about our crushes better."

"I was so hoping you'd ask me to Cindy Greer's party."

Cindy Greer's party. Cindy Greer I could dimly call to mind as the "stacked" girl all the boys snickered about, but her party? "I don't think I was invited," I said.

"Of course you were!" she protested vehemently. "You were there! You danced with Francine Bukowski." It was evidently as vivid to her as the diet coke she was now sucking through a straw.

"Grade nine is a fog," I said. "I remember grade five much better."

"Grade five. Mrs. Perlman?"

"Mm. You wore braids. When you sat straight they hung down practically onto my desk. It was all I could do to keep my hands off them."

She giggled.

"Did you ever once look my way? Deign to notice my existence? No - not you! You were a queen and I was the lowest servant in your palace. How could I expect you to spare a thought for me? Listen - does the name Sonia Halkin mean anything to you?"

"Of course! She was my best friend."

My heart leaped. I'd had no idea. "Where is she now?"

"New York. Wall Street."

"Wall Street!" That was disconcerting. "What's she do on Wall Street?"

"Lawyer."

"You're in touch with her?"

"She comes to town once or twice a year. We have coffee."

"Married? Children?"

"Sonia? Divorced. Two children."

"Seems everyone with children has two," I mumbled, vaguely annoyed to think of even Sonia bogged down in so average a situation.

"Martha Travers has three," said Linda, either adroitly or innocently steering the conversation away from Sonia Halkin. A Wall Street lawyer!

"But tell me about yourself," she said suddenly after sucking up the last of her coke among the ice. "God, all those places you've been! Me, if I go to Maine for a week in summer it's a big deal. What did you do in all those places whose names I can hardly pronounce?"

"I told you - I taught English."

"No, but... I mean..."

"You mean about getting lost in the jungle while fleeing from headhunters? Stuff like that?"

She reddened.

"Getting bitten by exotic snakes and cured by medicine men beating drums and dancing around trees? Taken hostage and held captive by tribal warriors?"

"You're making fun of me."

"Nay, but let me tell thee 'of moving accidents by flood and field, of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach'. Or of 'the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders'."

"It's not very nice of you, really."

"Linda!" She was crying. I took her hand. "Linda, forgive me, I'm sorry!" How could a child like this make her way through a world like ours, which sets such cruel traps for the innocent and the unwary! I wanted to take her in my arms and protect her - protect her from the likes of me. But she soon regained control of herself. Gently withdrawing her hand, she fumbled in her handbag for some tissue paper, and blew her nose. "Must be my period coming on. I cry at the drop of a hat. I'm sorry."

"No," I said, "I'm the one who's sorry. You see, Linda, there are two kinds of people: people things happen to, and people things don't happen to. I'm among the latter. I lived in Khartoum and Marrakech like I live in Nectar. I took Nectar with me. The truth is, I have very little to show for all my years of 'going to and fro in the earth,' as the devil said. Are you in any hurry to go home? Can you spend a little more time with me? Would you like to go to a movie or something?"

***

At the Einstein, an astonishing sight awaited me: my father, sitting quietly on his bed, naked.

He seemed perfectly unconscious of the fact that he had no clothes on, or perhaps he had forgotten that there was such a thing as clothing. Seeing me, his face lit up as always, and he rose to greet me, hand extended. "Mr. Hogan! I've been expecting you. Come in, sit down." Mr. Hogan, long dead, had been his boss. "I have that report ready for you. The documents are attached - stapled, not paper-clipped. Have you had lunch?"

"Yes, dad, I've eaten. Good God, where are your clothes?"

"Where are my..." He frowned, apparently making an effort to grasp what I was getting at, but then, as though acknowledging that my meaning eluded him, laughed his self-deprecating little laugh, allowing me to see that his lower teeth were still missing, and declared, in the tone of one stating a positive fact, "I don't know."

"Come on, let's get you dressed." The fact was that my ancient dad's sagging flesh was having a deleterious effect on my filial conduct and charitable state of mind. To put it in plain English, it was horrifying. His mental condition was appalling enough, of course, but at least it was not physically nauseous. In short, I was in something of a panic, torn between conflicting impulses to slam the door shut against any possible intruders and to call out to Trevor or Roberto or one of the others for help, for even assuming I found his clothes, the thought of dressing him was affecting me in a w