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 way I cannot fully account for and which certainly does me very little credit.

In the event it was not Trevor who came to my aid but Anette, and not in answer to a call from me but simply in the course of her rounds. She happened, in other words, to be passing by.

"Why, Mr. Fishman," she said calmly. "Where would your clothes be, now. Shall we get you dressed? Wait just a sec, I'll run out and get you a fresh diaper."

How she managed it I can't say - I scarcely had the courage to look - but within a very few minutes and with a minimum of fuss she had my father into his clothes. "There!" she said. "You can turn around now, Len. Well? What do you think? Is he a picture, or is he a picture?"

"Thanks, I..." I simply didn't know what to say. Grinning, she pinched my cheek. "Wanna be my boyfriend?"

"Anette, if there was anyone on earth whose boyfriend I wanted to be, you'd be the one."

"How nice. I'll take that thought home with me tonight and slip it under my pillow. Oh! Here's Mrs. Wallenberg. Mr. Fishman, look who's here. It's Mrs. Wallenberg, come to see you."

"Mrs...?" The look of concentration that came over his face was familiar to me from my childhood, when I understood without it ever having to be explained to me that it meant, "Don't talk to me just now, I'm thinking." It was no use. The name Wallenberg meant nothing to him. But here was the lady herself, with her mournful, other-worldly face and her gossamer floral-print nightgown that left more of her exposed than I would want any daughter of mine showing in public, and to her my father now turned his friendly attention. "Are you Mrs. Wallenberg? Come in, come in" - he took her arm and led her gently inside - "we've been waiting for you, haven't we, Dave?"

"We certainly have," I said. Who was Dave?

Mrs. Wallenberg began to speak. She spoke articulately and persuasively, though without raising her voice. My father listened intently.

"What language is she speaking?" I asked Anette.

"Lithuanian."

"Ah."

Mrs. Wallenberg had made her point, and wound up her speech with a question. She looked up at my father in anticipation of his answer. My father did not keep her waiting. "Four score and seven year ago," he replied. "I think... that is..." He turned to me. His confidence had suddenly deserted him, and now, faintly bewildered, he asked, "It was four score and seven years ago that we came, wasn't it, Dave?"

"Yes. It'll be four-score and eight years in January."

"January. That's it, yes. My first son was born in January."

That was true. "Dad, what's your first son's name?"

"My first son's name." Again that look of concentration came over him. "Leonard."

"That's right! Dad, look at me. Who am I?"

"Who are you." It seemed to him a silly question. He thought for a moment, not very hard, and said with a shrug, "I don't know." What difference did it make? read the subtext.

"Dad, please. Bear with me. It means nothing to you, but it means a lot to me. Who am I?"

Mrs. Wallenberg began to speak again, this time addressing me. Her tone was stern, her eyes contained a hint of reproach; she even feebly wagged her finger at me. She was not so much angry, it seemed, as disappointed, as though I had failed to live up to her expectations. "What's she saying?" I asked Anette.

"How should I know?"

"Doesn't she speak English?"

"Mrs. Wallenberg, do you speak English?"

She replied to this at some length. While she was speaking Joan came in. She caught my eye. "Hi," she smiled.

"Where's Adam?"

"In bed. No, no, don't panic" - which was her way of being funny, for I doubt very much that my face registered anything like panic - "it's just a slight fever, he'll be on his feet in a day or two. And so I came to do the honors in his place. Dad, how are you?" She went up to my father and, on her tiptoes, kissed his cheek. It was the first time I'd ever heard her call him dad. "It's a beautiful day. Shall we go for a walk?"

"Yes, let's," said dad, very agreeably. "Where is my jacket? Sarah" - this to Mrs. Wallenberg - "where did you put my jacket?" Sarah was his sister, my aunt, with whom there had been some sort of falling out before I was born, so that though I knew her name I had never seen her, and I don't think anyone in this branch of the family knew, or cared, whether she was alive or dead.

"Oh, dad, you don't need a jacket," said Joan, "it's a lovely hot day! It's almost June! Trust me. Leave your jacket where it is, and let's go."

"Yeah? And what if it rains?"

"Rains! There's not a cloud in the sky!"

"I don't see what that has to do with it."

"You don't see what clouds have to do with rain?"

"Joan, for God's sake," I cut in wearily. "Who're you arguing with? If he wants his jacket, let him wear his jacket, what's it to you? Let's get the hell out of here already!"

 

Ninth segment

There was a park across the street from the hospital, called Centennial Park - what centennial it commemorated I had no idea; it had not been there in my childhood - and there we headed. The lilacs had fallen, but the crab apples were in majestic bloom - to me they looked like Japanese plum blossoms, but Joan assured me they were crab apples - as were the azaleas and forsythia, which identification is also courtesy of Joan. As we entered the park I was startled by a loud crack, followed by a shout. Turning, I saw a rink for roller-blade hockey; somebody had fired the puck into the boards.

"Well, dad, wasn't I right?" said Joan. "Isn't it too hot for a jacket?"

"It is not. On the contrary," pronounced my father triumphantly, "it's damn cold!" And he raised the zipper even higher, all the way to the throat.

"Adam doesn't have a fever," she said to me in a low voice, taking my arm and leading me just a little ways apart. "He said he's not coming any more. He can't take it, it's doing bad things to his head."

"What's doing bad things to his head?"

"This place - I mean that place, the hospital. It's getting to him."

"Well it's understandable. Whyn't you guys take a trip or something?"

"And who's gonna do my work?"

"Other people take vacations. Why can't you? Wasn't that the point of my coming back? There was all this going on at home, Adam said, and it was all falling on his shoulders, and yours - and what was I doing on the other side of the world that was so important I couldn't get my ass back and do my share? I had to admit he had a point, and so I came. I don't suppose I'm doing any real good, but I do think I'm doing my share, if the measurement is time spent here. So go, take off, get away from it all for a while. Who's stopping you?"

"I have orders to fill; I couldn't possibly leave before September."

"So send him off to the country for a week without you."

"He wouldn't go without me."

"No? He's that attached to you?"

"No, I think it's more that he can't bear his own company."

"Well what do you want me to do, exactly?"

"You don't like me, do you?"

She said this so matter-of-factly, so casually, that it was a moment before its significance reached me. And as soon as it did I understood something I hadn't understood until that instant. No, I didn't like her. Why not? I didn't know. From the moment I'd been introduced to her, I realized now, there had been in me an instinctive recoil from her, an unconscious - now suddenly conscious - aversion. No, "aversion" is too strong a word. She rubbed me the wrong way. That was it. She was friendly, intelligent, kind, caring... there wasn't a fault to be found with her. No, the fault was in me. Lots of people rubbed me the wrong way, people whose proximity might have done me good, if I had let them get close enough.

Busy with this new train of thought, I neglected, I suddenly realized with a blush, to contradict her, as common decency required I do, and so the statement stood. "Look, dad, ducks!" I heard her say. Following her outstretched finger, I saw a family of ducks - mom, dad and a brood of babies - making their way across a pond.

"Those aren't ducks," my father said. How interesting, I thought. He seemed to contradict everything Joan said. Did he feel about her as I did?

"No?" said Joan. "What are they, then?"

"I don't know."

"They're ducks! Ducks!"

"Joan," I said gently, taking her arm. "Take it easy."

***

We ended up at the same restaurant where I'd had lunch with Linda, and the same waitress served us. There was the barest trace of a knowing glint in her eye, as much as to say, "You change your woman as often as you change your shirt, don't you?" I looked away in embarrassment. "Just coffee," said Joan. "The same," I mumbled.

"I never argue with him," I said, resuming the conversation that had started in the car. "What's the point? It's not as if you can teach him that ducks are ducks and a jacket is out of place on hot days. His brain's not functioning. He likes to talk because it's a bond with the person he's talking to, but making sense is beside the point."

"Do you know that he helped me with my thesis?"

"Your thesis?" I didn't know she'd written one.

"I knew your dad before I knew Adam. Did you know that?"

I didn't. I knew nothing of their past. I had simply taken them as I found them; somehow they inspired in me not the faintest curiosity as to how they came to be that way. My brother and his wife. Joan was simply my sister-in-law, just as Adam was simply my brother and Eric simply my cousin. It had very little to do with me.

"I was a student, working summers and Christmas breaks in your dad's office. Typing, filing - what do students do now that computers make all those old summer jobs unnecessary? A lot of girls are turning to prostitution, casual as you please, I read in the paper the other day. Your dad - he was like no other boss I'd ever had. I'd worked in offices before, and the businessmen were businessmen, pure and simple. Your dad would ask me about my studies, and when I told him I was reading Camus, he said, 'I didn't think much of The Stranger, but The Myth of Sisyphus makes many interesting and subtle points.' 'Well, good,' I said, hoping my surprise didn't show, 'maybe you can tell me about some of those subtle points, because I think they're a little too subtle for my feeble brain!' He was able and willing. He had a gift for making deep ideas clear, clear enough that even I could understand them a little. He's a sage! Did you know that? Your father's a sage!"

"Was a sage," I corrected.

"Was. And not only Camus. Homer, Nietzsche, Faulkner, Whitman... If he hadn't read a book I came to talk to him about, he was perfectly willing to read it then, and when I thanked him profusely, he'd smile and say 'Why? It does me more good than it does you!'"

"And that's how you met Adam?"

"Adam was a friend, maybe more than a friend, of one of the girls in the office, Nicole - red nails, red lipstick, ugh! - who spread the rumor, which reached Adam, that" - she could not repress a giggle, and her gray eyes sparkled - "that your father and I were having an affair. I suppose it was natural enough that a rumor like that would get started. He used to take me to lunch a lot. That's where we did most of our talking. And one day Adam showed up at the office, fire in his eyes and claws out for the little tart who was, you know, breaking up his parents' happy marriage and all that."

"And you managed to convince him that the rumor was groundless?"

She smiled. "Actually, his plan seems to have been not to confront me but to win me away from your father. And against all odds - I had a boyfriend, he had a girlfriend - he did!"

"You're joking!"

"Abridging. There were nuances that defy easy telling and are none of your business besides. So! I've told you the story of my life. Why don't you tell me the story of yours?"

"You know - once upon a time I kept a diary. For years. And into it went every thought that occurred to me, every event that happened to me. And then I stopped. Know why?"

"No. Why?" She giggled.

"Because I grew up. And what does it mean, to grow up? It means to understand that your life is not significant enough to merit a diary."

"Significance is a childish illusion?"

"That puts it very well."

"And so you won't tell me the story of your life? You won't help me get to know you?"

"Tell me something, Joan - is it possible to get drunk on coffee? Because I kinda think you are."

"Well, if I am, it must be possible. Now that you mention it - I do feel a little drunk."

"Do you know Anette, at the home?"

"The Filipina? The nurse?"

"Not nurse. Attendant. But yeah, her. She pretends to be in love with me."

"I don't think she's pretending."

"Oh? She's spoken to you about it?"

"Woman to woman. She's a pretty girl."

"Ah - I've given you an opening, and now you're going to play her advocate."

"Not if you don't want me to."

"I told her once that the reason I couldn't fall in love with her was that - I don't remember exactly how I put it - I could only love women in magazines."

"She mentioned it."

"Did she! Look, Joan, you talk about getting to know me. Are you sure you want to? Because sometimes a certain mood comes over me, and if I'm given the least encouragement it all pours out, all the filth of my soul, the filthier the better. The things I'm normally ashamed of become, when I'm in this mood, a source of pride. You said before that I don't like you. The truth is I don't like very many people, and I won't insult you by lying and saying you're a shining exception, but even in my chilly little self there lurks a kind of... what should I call it? Compassion, for want of a better word, and I would prefer to spare you me at my ungentlemanly worst. Why don't we settle, then, for being two people who can sit down together and chat comfortably over coffee about things that don't matter very much but are fun to talk about anyway, and skip the heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul bit?"

Without moving a muscle, she retreated; I felt it. "Okay," she said, disconcerted but resigned. "If that's the way you want it."

The silence that followed would have been uncomfortable had I not suddenly thought of something. It was one of those things that, once thought of, seem so glaringly obvious you are stupefied at yourself for having missed it. What is the link between perception and reality? So many things go on around us unnoticed; our consciousness could reach out and touch them, but doesn't - why not? - and then suddenly it does - why? My diary... my father's diary... How could my father's mention of his diary have failed to suggest my own, and how could my incidental mention of mine to Joan have failed to immediately suggest his? And having at first failed to make the connection, why did I then, a propos of nothing, do so long after the conversation had gone off on a tangent? And now that the connection had been made, what to draw from it? That writing diaries ran in the family?

"What happened to your diary?" Joan asked.

While I had been musing over the mystery of consciousness, she, evidently, had been groping painfully for something to say - anything - finally coming up with a question, delivered in a tone, that bore all the marks of timid awareness of foreknowledge of how little it would be appreciated.

"I burned it," I said.

"Burned it!"

"Sh. Keep your voice down. Yes, burned it. All seven volumes. 'Volumes' - that's rather a big word for a bunch of tattered pocket notebooks filled with barely legible handwriting. It was on a beach in Tiberias - that mean anything to you? Tiberias? Holy city in the Holy Land of our ancestors, on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked on water. Fed 'em one by one to the bonfire. We had this bonfire going, a bunch of us, and a jug of homemade wine, and a girl with a guitar was singing We Shall Overcome in Hebrew. Wonder where she is now."

"What were you doing in Tiberias?"

"Worked on a kibbutz nearby. Peeling potatoes, washing dishes. Not for long. They asked me to leave. Said I lacked 'the kibbutz spirit.' Which was so self-evidently true I didn't even try to contradict them."

 

Tenth segment

Excuse me," said the bearded man with a timid smile. "Are you the gentleman from the press?"

"From the - " I had never seen him before; he must have been a newcomer. After a long rainless spell the weather had turned cold and drizzly, and the patients, inmates, residents - after six weeks I was still stumbling over what to call them - who would normally have been sitting outside were making the best of their leisure in the lounge. Clara looked up from her conversation with Withered Beauty to say hello to me, and Withered Beauty, sour to the point of abusiveness with everyone else but putty in horsefaced Clara's hands, followed Clara's lead far enough to accord me a mournful smile of welcome. "Your dad's in the arts and crafts room, working on an apron for your mum," Clara announced briskly. "Go see how he's getting along. We're bringing out the artist in him."

"I will," I said. "Thank you."

"Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY!" bellowed the gentleman who routinely bellowed that. I smiled to myself, remembering how it had once shocked me. His son gave me a little wave of the hand, which I acknowledged with a smile and a slight inclination of the head. Looking around, I noticed the rabbi, his childish bearded face seeming to float above the others, deep in conversation with Madame de la Dangling Tongue. No doubt they were discussing the numbers they would perform at the next concert. Mrs. Wallenberg was there too, talking to a lady in a wheelchair whose back was to me. Maybe she's finally found someone who speaks her language, I thought hopefully. Not far from her was the hollow-eyed, bearded man who had once come into the elevator raging at having been born a Jew. He was docile enough now - medicated? - sitting in a corner of a sofa staring placidly at the opposite wall. He had seemed then, and once or twice afterwards, to bear me particular and inexplicable malice. I wondered if the sight of me would rouse him, and even toyed with the notion of bringing my presence to his attention, just to see how he would react. Aren't we all prey to such thoughts? And shouldn't we be judged by our resistance to them? So I told myself, feeling small and unworthy, a child in a man's skin, as I threaded my way to the door. There the gentle newcomer accosted me.

"From the press?"

"Yes." His long white beard tumbled in disarray down to the middle of his chest. It was the first thing you noticed about him. Other impressions followed, one by one and in no particular order: his bald veined skull topped by a pale blue keepah and fringed by a border of unruly white hair, his kind and gentle gray-blue eyes magnified absurdly by thick bifocals, the two canes resting on the chair beside him, the yellowed but large and strong teeth - his own? - revealed by his timid, slack smile. He was alarmingly thin; his dark suit engulfed him. "Yes," he said, "I am expecting a gentleman from the press."

"No, I'm afraid I'm not him. But - " I had always kept my distance from the people here ("You keep your distance from people everywhere!" I imagine my sarcastic mom interrupting in her half-exasperated affectionate way, hitting the nail on the head as usual), answering more or less politely if addressed directly, but asking no questions and showing no curiosity, afraid of being trapped in an endless confidence terminable only by rudeness. But somehow this strange gentleman interested me enough to tempt me out of my prudence. "From the press?"

"Yes. Oh no no, not about me." His smile grew more timid even as it broadened, and he raised a hand as though warding off an accusation of immodesty. "Oh no. It's not me they want to know about. It's my father. I am famous only insofar as I am my father's son. Please." He patted the chair beside him. "Sit down."

"I have to go and see to my own father," I said, surprised to find myself sitting down even as I spoke.

"You've heard of Abraham?"

"Abraham who? The patriarch?" He nodded. "Yes, I've heard of him."

"He was my father."

"Ah," I said. "Then you must be Isaac."

"That is correct. I am Isaac."

"All the pieces fall into place. What a scoop! An interview with Isaac the son of Abraham!"

"I'm afraid there's so little I can tell them!"

"Oh? Why?"

"My memory fails me. I was just a child, hardly more than an infant. It is true, of course, that at my age long-forgotten scenes of childhood come back to one, but it all seems like a dream - so hard to put into words!"

"I can imagine." I stood up, disappointed almost to bitterness, though I'm not sure exactly why. I seem to have expected something from this man, and to have felt that his babble was a poor return for my expectations. "I have to go now. My father is waiting for me."

"Your father is Mr. Fishman?"

That gave me pause. "Yes. How did you know?"

"One could scarcely miss the family resemblance."

"Couldn't one indeed?"

"We had a long talk this morning, he and I. A man of remarkable intelligence and openness."

"What did you talk about?"

"All intelligent talk revolves around one subject: life. With foolish people one can talk about Einstein's physics, and it's nothing but trivia. With intelligent people, one can talk about buying vegetables at Loblaw's, and somehow your conversation touches the very essence of being. But of course, you know this yourself."

"I do?"

"Your father is in the arts and crafts room. You are his son. Please. Don't keep him waiting. You and I - we will have a chance, I'm sure, to talk at our leisure another time. I am delighted to have met you, Mr. Fishman."

***

"We spent most of the afternoon in the arts and crafts room. He's making an apron for you. It's a surprise."

"Len - can I speak frankly to you, without being afraid that you'll bite my head off?"

"Mother!" I sank down to my knees at her feet and gazed up in supplication up at her face. Perhaps it was the odd angle from which I was seeing it. Never before had it looked so withered. When I had first seen her on my return, I noticed, of course, that she had aged, but no more than I had prepared myself for; she was older, but still recognizably my mother. Now for the first time I looked at her and saw an old, old woman. My little jest had started off spontaneously enough, but, suddenly deflated, I had to force myself to keep it going. "How can you say such a thing! Is that how you repay my devotion? By being afraid I'll bite your head off?"

"Oh, stop!" she said, laughing in spite of herself. I resumed my chair, sipped my tea and waited, my senses dulled by a feeling of leaden oppression.

"Len, I'm worried about you."

"Worried about me! Whatever for?"

"For six weeks you have been going to the hospital almost daily. Your devotion to your father is admirable, to say nothing of the load you have taken off my shoulders, because before you came I was going every day and feeling as if I was on the brink of cracking up. You have been an enormous help to me, and having you at home like this has eased the loneliness of my... my..."

"Your widowhood, mother."

"An awful thing to say, but yes. My widowhood. Len - even as I enjoy your company, and benefit from it, I think to myself, 'He's in the prime of life, he's healthy, intelligent, shouldn't he be out there working, playing, living life to the full, instead of being stuck here dancing attendance on his moribund parents? And added to all my other worries and regrets is the guilt at keeping you here and depriving you of your life!"

I smiled, one may imagine how mournfully. "The sad fact is, mother, you're depriving me of nothing."

"How can that be?"

"Oh, one thing and another. The truth seems to be that I'm tired of life. I came home not exactly to die, but... well, let's say to rest. To press the pause button. To step briefly into a state of suspended animation. You've nothing to feel guilty about. You're not keeping me here against my will. When I'm ready, I'll go. Does that reassure you?"

"I don't understand you. I know nothing about you. You're my son, but you're a total stranger."

"Don't all mothers feel that way about their grown children?"

"I don't feel that way about Adam."

"Oh?"

"No. He's living a life that I can understand. It's comprehensible to me."

"I wonder if it would be if you saw it closer up." Think before you speak, my father had often told me. Good, simple fatherly advice. Why was I so incapable of following it? The fact is, what mother had said about Adam had sent a pang of jealousy through me. Stupid, but there it is. If our intelligence governed our feelings, our feelings would be more intelligent, but less... less something else. Less feeling. Less destructive too, of course. As if my mother didn't have enough worries on her aging mind, here was I, apparently bent on giving her one more. Predictably, she did not let my remark pass.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, mother, I meant nothing," I said peevishly. "I only meant... well, it's obvious, isn't it? The closer you get to anyone, the less comprehensible that person seems. People are mysterious. They only seem understandable from a distance." Let the phone ring, I thought, or an earthquake - anything to put an end to this conversation and my idiot babbling.

"Who's this Lisa you're seeing?" my mother asked suddenly.

"Lisa?"

"It's none of my business, of course."

"You mean Linda. Who is she? An old friend from school. I met her at Mr. Bloom's. I'm not 'seeing' her, I'm just..." Just what? "We're old friends, that's all. Speaking of Bloom, he's doing a fine job as a municipal councilor, isn't he? The community feels more... what's the word? - more vital already."

I finished my tea, rinsed out my cup as I'd been taught to do as a boy, and, careful to filter out any trace of abruptness from my expression and gestures, I eased my way into my room and softly closed the door. It was a den now, my old bedroom, and yet here, right here, on this very spot where the sofa now is and where my desk used to be, I had sulked, pondered and dreamed my teenage years away. I would do this with my life, I would do that. Here was my sanctuary, my escape from the trivia of the outside world. Here was begun the diary that had gone up in smoke on the beach at Tiberius. Here were jotted the jottings that convinced Mr. Bloom, among others, that I was a budding writer. Here, late into the night, after everyone else was asleep, I had pored over Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, throbbing to their rhythms long before I understood how little I understood them. Was it too late to start again? Surely not! What's forty-six? People live to ninety, a hundred nowadays, and there's talk of a lifespan of two and three hundred years just around the corner. Money I needn't worry about. It's amazing, almost embarrassing, how respected English teachers are in some parts of the world. There are doctors who would have envied my salary. And it was all intact - I spent hardly anything. I wasn't quite a millionaire, but, single as I was, and modestly as I lived, my savings would support me for years and years to come. I could dismiss all thoughts of money from my mind, simply floating on the cushion I had sewn for myself. I could write, think, read. And also, good Confucian that I was, I would meet the filial obligations I owed my parents, helping and comforting my mother and, by visiting him, giving my father probably as much happiness as he was capable of appreciating.

Late that night, when my mother was asleep, I stole downstairs to the tool table under which were boxed my father's notebooks.

 

Eleventh segment

Joe Tucker traveled, it seemed, a good deal on business. Linda was not too clear about what his business was. Whether that reflected his secrecy or her obtuseness I couldn't quite make out. Maybe she just didn't care. In any case, for all his supposed jealousy he certainly left her on her own a good deal, and she seemed to enjoy my company. Was there more to it than that? Yes and no. I think if I had asked her outright, Do you love me?, she would without hesitation have answered yes. More accurately, she would have nodded her little head very vigorously while looking up into my eyes with that half-smiling, half-pleading expression of hers, an expression which seemed to say, Do what you have to do but please, please, do it gently. But frankly, I found it hard to take her or her love seriously. She was a forty-six-year-old high school girl, and she had a crush on me, just as she'd had when she'd been a fifteen-year-old high school girl. And me? I'm almost tempted to say that I was a forty-six-year-old child, and I had a crush on her as I'd had when I was a grade five child. Yes, but at the same time I was also a shrewd and calculating adult thinking to himself, She's a friend of Sonia Halkin's who might one day be persuaded to fix me up with her, so to speak. Was I thinking that? Again: yes and no. Sonia the little girl I loved tenderly, the passage of years having if anything deepened my feelings. But Sonia the Wall Street lawyer terrified me. Why? I don't know. I'd never been to Wall Street and, strange though it may seem, I don't think I've ever met a lawyer face to face, so there was no personal experience behind my fear. But both "Wall Street" and "lawyer" are symbols of power, of awesome, almost occult power, and no other combination of location and occupation could have brought home to me so clearly that the Sonia Halkin I would encounter today, if I were in fact to encounter her, would certainly be no child.

Mr. Bloom took a great deal of pleasure in our reunion - Linda's and mine, I mean - and did his best to promote it, even to the extent of putting his house at our disposal when it was vacant, as it often was. His wife was away so much that I still hadn't met her; his daughter, a doctoral student on summer vacation, was bumming around Europe; and he himself found council business taking up a good deal of his time. He threw himself into it with characteristic enthusiasm, taking a stand, as he put it, on behalf of youth in a rapidly aging community. "We need basketball courts, skating rinks, youth clubs!" he would urge in the face of the dazed indifference of his aged fellow councilors who, if they could be said to have any interests at all, were preoccupied to the exclusion of all else with facilities for the elderly. Mr. Bloom would browbeat them mercilessly: "I'm not saying the needs of the elderly are not important. Of course they are. But listen to me now. I've worked with young people for thirty years and I know a thing or two about them. They will not be ignored. They have energies that we reverend seniors have lost and may no longer understand, but believe me, it's there, that energy, and if it isn't channeled constructively, it'll explode in destruction! Just glance at the rising juvenile crime stats, if you think this is a figment of my imagination." He was a persuasive and eloquent man, and, novice though he was, had already been marked as a force to be reckoned with.

***

Of course, I could simply have said to my mother, "Listen here, mom. Although I live under your roof, I am a man of unquestionably mature years and not bound to seek your approval for the way I live." Why didn't I? Well, for one thing, the idea of having that kind of argument with my mother at my age was so comical that I laughed all my anger away. Forty-six! Why, when my mother was my age I was eighteen, already thinking of her as an old woman! It was too silly. Another option was to move. Even that would have had echoes of a distant past: me at nineteen stalking into the house and interrupting my parents' evening coffee to announce that I was moving out, John Nathan had invited me to share his apartment. The invitation was timely; there'd been a family fight about something-or-other; I suppose I could dredge it out of my memory if I felt like it, but in all honesty I don't. What difference does it make? Back then, if we weren't fighting about one thing, my parents and I, we were fighting about another. The length of my hair, the hours I kept, my occasional drug use. The usual teenage stuff. My mother was in tears, but I stood firm. I was tired of living like a child; goodbye mom, au revoir dad, etc. etc. So yes, I could have moved, but even that would have had overtones in my mind of teenage defiance, overtones which mocked my impulses and kept them in check.

The incredible fact is, my mother had taken it into her head to disapprove of my relationship with Linda. She spoke to me with surprising vehemence, the timidity she seemed to have felt in my presence since my arrival suddenly gone. "She's a married woman, a mother of young children. How dare you break up a home?" "Mother," I remonstrated, "you're laboring under a misapprehension. We're old friends, nothing more. Nobody's breaking up anyone's home." "Oh, please!" she'd retort. "Just because I'm old you think I'm deaf, blind and stupid? Since my cataract operation two years ago I see just fine, thank you!"

"You see what isn't there," I said. "And anyway, why should you consider it your concern? It is the custom, I believe, for men my age to conduct their affairs as they see fit, without asking their mothers' permission. Or am I wrong?"

If I thought that would cow her, I was mistaken. "It's not a question of asking permission. It's a question of right and wrong."

She went on, me only half attentive. My mind was reeling with the absurdity of it all. It is simply unheard of for a mother approaching eighty to disapprove so strongly, to the point of confrontation, of her middle-aged son's relationships with a woman. She might have grounds if I were flouting her sensibilities by bringing the woman home, but nothing of the sort. Linda had never crossed this threshold; she and my mother had never met. Once or twice they had spoken on the telephone, but even then, no more than "Is Len there please?" "Yes, one moment please," or variations on that theme. What could have set her off in this way?

Did she want me to leave? Had her guilt feelings over my supposed ruined life reached such a pitch that she was contriving a quarrel in an effort to make it impossible for me to stay? Was she unselfishly sacrificing her benign and sensible image in my eyes, risking my dislike, as a way of getting me back on my feet? Or - this suddenly occurred to me: Perhaps her vehemence on a subject I would have thought self-evidently none of her business was aroused precisely because it was her business. Perhaps a threat similar to the one I supposedly posed to the Tuckers had come, unknown to me, into our home. Joan had told me just recently about her suspected affair with my father. She'd told it as a joke, and I had thought it funny, but Adam at the time evidently hadn't - he'd reacted vigorously and promptly. Had he known something I never did know? No, ridiculous, ridiculous!

"Mother, listen to me. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, between Linda and me that her husband shouldn't know. Very likely he does know. I haven't told him myself, because I have nothing to do with him, but I'm sure she has. Okay? We're old friends, that's all. I liked her a lot in grade five, but I never had the courage to tell her so. We go out for coffee and talk about old times."

Mom let the matter end there, but not without giving me to understand, with an expression that I don't think I have ever seen on anyone else's face, though it came so naturally to hers, that said, You'll have to do better than that, chum! I felt myself flush. She was, of course, right. I was lying. Shall I set down the truth here, just for the record? Very well: I'd slept with her on two occasions on Mr. Bloom's excellent sofa. And yet, I'm tempted to say that my lie to my mother contained more truth than a bare statement of the facts. I am not (the reader will have gathered as much) possessed of an overpowering libido. I am not impotent, but most of the time I would rather be doing other things. Since the subject has come up, let me add that I recall only three sexual congresses that gave me real pleasure. All three were with the Thai girl who is the mother of my child. One evening she confessed to me that she was pregnant. "Confessed" is the right word. She blamed herself. What was going on in her mind? I have only the dimmest notion - I spoke nothing of her language, and she spoke little enough of mine - but she seemed embarrassed and contrite, as though aware of her physical clumsiness or moral obtuseness, I'm not sure which; maybe both. As for me, my response - how much of it showed I don't know - was that of a man discovering for the first time that there is such a thing as cause and effect in the world, that sex and pregnancy are linked, that the one involves the risk of the other. There was no playacting in this: I was genuinely astonished. I don't understand it myself, now, but the memory of the feeling is too vivid for me to deny it, senseless though it is.

I fled. First thing next morning I was out of the village, two days later out of the country. I have never returned.

If I am implying that my relations with Linda gave me no pleasure, I am not being quite accurate. No, there was something. When, taking her in my arms, I closed my eyes and imagined us the ten-year-old children we had been when I was fond of her, I was infused with a feeling... I don't quite know how to describe it. A feeling that to die at a moment like that would redeem even the most mis-spent life, would give meaning to the most utter chaos. But then I opened my eyes (why couldn't I keep them closed just a little longer?) to find us transformed into adults, and pleasure transmuted into disgust. No, disgust is too strong a word. Indifference? But to be indifferent to the woman in your arms - is that not disgust? Maybe the real reason I didn't protest more strongly against my mother's disapproval was that I agreed with her. She was right: I was risking the destruction of a family, a family with children, for a woman who bored me and whose love for me, if that's what it was, oppressed me.

This thought suddenly occurred: Was the child mine? I mean the Thai child. Isn't it strange! It had never, not once, entered my head to question it, and yet - obviously - it is by no means obvious! I had only slept with the woman - girl - three times. How many others had there been, on how many occasions? Dozens, very likely hundreds. What sort of mind is mine, blind to the plainest insights until suddenly, a propos of nothing, they strike me? Thinking about Linda I was suddenly flooded with illumination concerning an incident a quarter of a century old - an illumination that would surely have escaped nobody else for even a moment, let alone decades. Lying on a sofa in what had been my childhood room, on the very spot where stood the desk on which I had done my homework and read my Nietzsche and so on, my life simply vaporized. I once saw a science fiction movie in which a man slowly turns invisible. The invisibility begins at his feet, gradually working its way up. So it was with me. Soon there wouldn't be anything left of me. You might say, What's so momentous? A child you've never laid eyes on, to the point of not even knowing whether it's a boy or a girl, turns out possibly not to be yours. So? Granted, granted, your objection is well taken. What difference should it make? None - and yet it does make a difference. It makes all the difference. I can't explain it. I was like a cartoon character who hasn't quite begun to fall, though the ground has vanished beneath his feet.

 

Twelfth segment

***

The phone rang, and rang again. I tensed. It was not the best time for a call from Linda. But no footsteps sounded along the corridor to my room; no timid knock broke the silence of my yellow door. It was not for me. I sighed with relief, and returned to my thoughts, which had been, oddly enough, of Joe Tucker. Wouldn't it be amusing, I mused, if the cuckolded husband came after me. How I would pay him back for that childhood thrashing! Stupid insolent lout! I am not a fighter, have never been one, have always, in fact, shrunk from physical contact of any kind. Wayne Lister, for instance, is constantly clapping me on the back, throwing his arm around my shoulder. Did he do that as a boy? I have no memory of it. Anyway, boys as a rule don't. It's an adult affectation. Does he not sense how much I dislike it? Sometimes I think he does sense it - I don't exactly conceal my discomfort - and does it on purpose, his way of saying, This is me! Take me or leave me! More and more I leaned towards leaving him - our reminiscing was growing stale. As for fighting, I don't know which element is stronger in me, cowardice or disgust. Probably they are equally mixed. I won't pretend not to be a coward. Once in India I came upon a man mercilessly beating a girl. It was on a dusty highway somewhere in the south, the noonday sun a pitiless glare, the heat fusing my brain to the roof of my skull. Who were these people? What could their quarrel have been about? I was alone. The man took no notice of me. The girl's eyes opened wide in naked appeal. She looked about fourteen. I walked on, pretending, quite absurdly, not to notice. Shall I try to describe my self-disgust? What for? I'm sure it's familiar to many in this unheroic age of ours. There's a twist to my cowardice, however: I shrink as much from striking as from being struck. Somehow Joe Tucker was the exception, in my thoughts at least, and sometimes I quite lost myself in fantasies of me pummeling him mercilessly.

I gasped aloud, having altogether dismissed from my mind the possibility of a knock, and having besides not heard the footsteps that normally presaged it. "Yes, mother," I murmured sheepishly. She stood in the doorway, very amused at my discomposure. "Who's coming for you? Who're you hiding from? Don't worry, I won't let them get you!"

"I happened," I said peevishly, "to have been thinking about something else."

"You were lost in thought."

"Yes. I was lost in thought. But why are you standing?" I scrambled to my feet and with mock ceremony ushered her into the armchair opposite the sofa. "Be so good as to sit down. There, that's better. Now, how can I be of service to you?"

"You'll never guess who I just got a phone call from."

"Queen Elizabeth."

"No."

"Mahatma Gandhi. No? Well, I give up. Who did you just get a phone call from?"

"Barbara."

"Oh?"

"She's dying to see you."

"Yes, I'm sure she is. She and I were very close."

My mother's lips tightened. "Why must you always be so... so..."

"So what, mother?"

"So unapproachable!"

"How is she?"

"She's fine. She's all excited - Cynthia won a scholarship to the U of T."

"Cynthia being - "

"Her older one. Audrey's in grade ten."

"I'm sure she's doing very nicely too."

My mother shook her head. "She doesn't have her sister's brains. Not that she's stupid - she's not flunking out or anything - but Barbara says she's more interested in boys than books. From the time she was ten, Cynthia had made up her mind, she was going to be a doctor. And now she's going into U of T pre-med - on a scholarship!"

"Well, it just goes to show."

I remembered Eric's account of their meeting - their eye-contact. I hadn't seen him since. Had anything come of it? Maybe it was all his imagination? Certainly the impression my mother conveyed was of a contented matron totally absorbed in her family - she went on to speak of the dinner they had had in celebration of their twentieth wedding anniversary, a lavish affair at Benedict's (whatever Benedict's was; my mother mentioned the name with the air of conveying a world of meaning in those three syllables, but it meant nothing to me).

"Have you ever met her husband?" I asked.

"Once, years ago. Very, very nice man. Very intense, very intelligent."

"What's he do?"

"He's a rabbi."

"A rabbi!" Immediately I thought of the rabbi at the Einstein, the gangling man with the vacuous air, the childish face and the tuneless voice.

"At the Beth Jacob, on Circle Road."

"No kidding."

"She's coming over for coffee the day after tomorrow."

"Who?"

"Barbara."

"Oh."

***

Imagine my surprise when, thumbing through the Gazette the next morning, I saw on page six my friend Isaac's photograph. His appointment with the press had not after all been imaginary. The little story accompanying the picture was headlined "One Hundred Years Young". It was his hundredth birthday! Never would I have taken him for so old a man - although my experience, limited as it's been, suggests that eighty is about as old as it is possible to look. The physical difference between eighty and ninety is rather like the difference between five billion dollars and six billion dollars - substantial, no doubt, but beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals. I scanned the story: not a word about Abraham. The interviewer seems to have confined himself to pedestrian topics, and Isaac's answers were brief and to the point. The secret of his long life was an acceptance of things as they were. Yes, it was possible to be happy in old age; all one needed was serenity of heart. If he had the magic power to become young again, would he use it? Yes, he would. What age would he return to? Forty. At that age, he explained, the energy of youth and the wisdom of age are in perfect balance.

He was sitting outside when I arrived shortly after lunch, conversing with Mr. Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY. The latter's son looked on with his habitual jovially blank expression. Isaac smiled at me, and raised a hand in greeting. "Your father's in the lounge, chatting with Mrs. Wallenberg."

"Congratulations. I saw you in the paper."

"I did my best, but - oh dear, such a shame my father isn't here in person to tell his story! I'm not eloquent at the best of times, my memory, as I've said, is hopelessly muddled, and even what I remember I scarcely understand."

"Did you understand it better when you were younger?"

"I suppose I thought I did. The difference between youth and age is that youth imagines it sees clearly, while age knows it doesn't."

"Hm."

"Pull up a chair," said Mr. Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY's son. He rose to his feet and extended his hand. He seemed pleased at the opportunity to introduce himself. "Nathan Glass. Glazer, originally. My father, George."

"George Glass." The name rang a very faint bell. Nathan noticed my inquiring expression, and smiled. "Yes, the George Glass."

"I'm sorry," I said. "The name is definitely familiar, but I can't quite place it." As if to excuse myself, I added, "I've been away a long time."

"Glass Houses."

"Ah! Of course!" I was immoderately delighted. For years the Glass Houses column had graced the Saturday Gazette. George Glass was the best political satirist in the country, wickedly witty and subtly profound at the same time. More prestigious publications were after him, it was generally known, but he was not interested; he was happy where he was and would remain so, as long as his editors continued to acknowledge his perfect freedom; he asked nothing more. Very often Mr. Bloom would bring his columns to class as examples of crystal clear writing with not a word wasted. He once paid me the compliment of saying that at its best my writing was worthy of a George Glass column, and I well remember how I flushed with pride, because George Glass was one of my literary heroes, although (perhaps because), as a "mere journalist," he was not accorded true literary status.

My thoughts were suddenly interrupted. "Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY!"

"Sh. Dad, please." His son flushed to the roots of his sand-colored hair. He grinned sheepishly.

Speaking hurriedly, eager to put him at his ease, I began to tell him something of what his father had meant to me. "He was my earliest inspiration, my teacher, he fuelled my early dreams of being a writer..."

"He was good all right," said Nathan. "One of a kind. Yep."

In his tone was an undercurrent of suppressed bitterness, that of the son who fails to measure up to his father. He cocked his chin ever so slightly in his father's direction, as much as to say, Look at him now. I felt a creeping dislike for this tall ineffectual-looking man I had seen so many times without knowing who he was. "And what do you do?" I asked him.

"I work at the Gazette too, just like my father before me. Don't quite cut the figure he did, though."

"But don't I see you here all the time?"

"Work nights. Midnight to six a.m. Man the police radio. Chase fire engines. That kind of stuff. Nights there, days here. Great life."

"Yes, well..."

"Have a word with him. Tell him what he meant to you. When you speak directly to him he understands, more or less."

"May I?"

"Of course."

"Mr. Glass? Mr. Glass, I... my name is Len Fishman. In high school my favorite teacher used to bring your columns to class, and..."

"Fishman? Fishman?"

"Yes, my name is Fishman."

"And what kind of undersea aquatic monster is a fishman, eh? Tell me that!"

"Forgive him in consideration of his former greatness," said his son acidly.

"Mr. Fishman." The relief of Isaac's interruption was enormous. "Let me take you to your father." As purposefully as his limited strength allowed, he led me inside. "Catch you later," said Nathan with a brief wave.

***

"What a horrible man!" I murmured.

"Who?" asked Isaac.

Momentarily surprised at being thus reminded I had a listener, I lapsed into silence.

"If you mean Nathan," Isaac went on, "you must make allowances. "George was, as you said, a fine writer, but as a father..."

"Do you know them?" I asked.

"I was an intimate family friend. He treated his children - there was a daughter too - like dirt under his feet. Stormed jealously over every scrap of attention his wife paid them. Was forever afraid of being upstaged by them - and made sure he wasn't. You must be understanding towards Nathan."

"You say there was a daughter. Was."

"She disappeared decades ago. Nobody has a clue where she is, or even if she's still alive."

I was suddenly struck by something. "Isaac, may I ask you a question? Why are you here? I mean - "

"Yes I know what you mean. I am in possession of my faculties and to all appearances capable of looking after myself. But the fact is, the outside world bewilders me, bewilders me terribly..."

"Me too," I said.

***

They were holding hands. My father and Mrs. Wallenberg were holding hands! "Dad, for God's sake!" I burst out. Isaac laid a hand on my arm. That was all it took to make me feel foolish. Why shouldn't they hold hands? "My mother is coming," I said defensively.

"Will she be jealous, do you think?"

In any case my father had let go of her hand and risen to welcome his guests. "This," he said proudly, presenting me to Mrs. Wallenberg, "is my son Leonard." The lady smiled her funereal smile, bowed slightly, and said something to me in Lithuanian. I returned her smile, less funereally I hoped. My father had known me! That was exciting indeed. "How are you, dad?" I said.

"Oh - as well as can be expected. I'm not a young man any more. You must make allowances."

"Yes, of course," I agreed. Indicating Isaac, I said, "Do you know this gentleman?"

"This gentleman. No, I... Without my glasses, you see, I can't..."

"Where are your glasses?" He was wearing them.

"My glasses?" He shook his head. "I don't know."

"Dad, mom's coming today. She'll be here soon."

"Mom's coming today. Well, if she comes I'll certainly be pleased to see her. We have..." He addressed himself now to Isaac. "I wonder if you agree with me that opening the branch in Cornwall is the wrong way to go. We have fifty percent of our sales merchandising in the area, and the... the... Oh, shit, I don't know!" He laughed.

"Mr. Fishman," said Isaac, "do you remember what I was telling you yesterday?"

"What you were telling me yesterday? No, I don't think... no, I don't," he declared triumphantly, his failure of memory - or perhaps it was his clear recognition of his failure of memory - apparently affording him considerable pride. "I do not remember what you were telling me yesterday. Je ne me souviens pas."

I raised an eyebrow at that. The French phrase was a new departure.

"I was telling you," said Isaac, unfazed, "about how God gave us His only begotten Son that we might be cleansed of sin by His blood."

"Isaac!" I cried. "What's this? I thought you were the son of Abraham." I was in the absurd position of having to choose one form of insanity over another. Minutes ago, of course, I had been congratulating him on his sanity. Now the truth was clear. Sanity and insanity were states he slipped into and out of. At will? I somehow thought so, not unaware of how odd that was. Well, I was growing accustomed to oddness.

Isaac smiled. "You don't understand," he said. "To the passionate man, all life stories are his own. It is only the weakling who inhabits one soul and one body. Your father understands that. Don't you, Saul?"

"Oh, yes," said my father. "Yes, absolutely."

"Look, dad, here's mom. Mother, over here. You're just in time. The festivities are at their height. Clara! So nice of you to drop by." I was babbling like a fool; I couldn't stop myself. "Have you no wine for us today?"

"Don't you get smart with me, young man," said that pert lady. "I know how to take the wind out of your sails."

"You do! What do you have in mind?"

"Just push me an inch too far and see, if you dare."

"Exactly what I used to tell him when he was a little one!" beamed my mom. "Didn't I, Len?"

"That you did, mom, that you did. You knew how to handle me all right."

***

We went for a walk, the four of us: mom, dad, Isaac and I. Mrs. Wallenberg declined my mother's polite invitation to accompany us. More accurately, she said something in reply to it, and then shuffled away from us in search of new companionship.

It was hot. The sun burned in a blue, cloudless sky. At first dad insisted on taking his jacket, but mom put her foot down. Absolutely not, she said; was he crazy? Suddenly there occurred a shocking spectacle. Dad raised a hand as if to strike her, and shouted, "You stupid bitch!" Mother had spoken to me of these rages of his, so utterly out of character, but never having seen them I suspected her of exaggerating. My mother, taken no less by surprise than I was, gasped and retreated a step. Clara stepped forward. "Now Mr. Fishman, let's have none of that if you don't mind! Your wife is absolutely right. It's too hot for a jacket." And that settled the matter. My father's anger vanished. He laughed, shrugged his shoulders, agreeably chirped "Okay!" - and the four of us went out. In the elevator my mother flashed me a look that said, Well?

We waited a long time for a break in the traffic wide enough to allow us to cross the street at dad's and Isaac's pace, then entered Centennial Park. The summer holidays had begun, and children were everywhere. "Oh, look at the kites!" I heard mom say to dad, who looked where she was pointing and murmured, "Yes! Yes!" Mom turned to me. "Do you remember how we tried to fly that purple kite of yours at Beaver Lake?" I didn't, but said I did. "You were... oh, seven, eight. Your father spent all of Saturday night putting it together precisely according to the instructions, and on Sunday morning all four of us piled into the car - Adam was just a little one at the time - and off we went. And she just refused to take to the air."

"Was I very upset?"

"Actually, I think your father was more upset than you were."

"I was just about that age," murmured Isaac in my ear. He was pointing to a little boy of about three, holding his father's hand. They were Hasids, with skullcaps and side curls. The father had a thick dark beard - which provoked another reminiscence from mother. "You were about that child's age. We were walking along Cote St. Catherine Road, where we lived at the time, and a Hasidic gentleman passed us, at which you blurted out, at the top of your little lungs, "Mummy, why does that man have steelwool all over his face?" Isaac joined my mother in her laughter, and I, absurdly, reddened. Encouraged by Isaac's laughter, mother turned to him and said, "You just never knew what he would come out with!"

"And what did the gentleman say?" Isaac asked.

"He showed absolutely no reaction. I don't think he spoke English."

"What do you mean," I said, drawing Isaac a bit apart, "you were that age?"

"When my father took me up to the mountain."

"Tell me about it."

"As I said, the memory is very vague. We said goodbye to my mother - "

"Whose name was?"

"Whose name was Sara. We said goodbye to my mother, father took me by the hand, and we set forth."

"On a donkey?"

"Yes, of course. That was the way we traveled in those days. My father, you see... my father was a strange man. He was restless, could never settle anywhere. He was born in Ur, one of the greatest cities on earth at the time, and was quite a young man when it was sacked. The family fled the carnage. He never spoke about it, and my own knowledge of what happened is extremely shadowy. Maybe the events of those days explains his wanderlust. They went first to Haran - "

"Look, ducks!" said my father, very excited. They were the very ducks that Joan had pointed out the other day. He had insisted then that they were not ducks at all, but now in her absence had apparently come around to her way of thinking on the subject.

"Would you like to feed the ducks?" my mother asked.

"No," said my father. Turning to Isaac, he asked, "Why don't they chop their heads off?"

"Saul!" cried my mother, horrified. "That's a terrible thing to say!"

My father beamed triumphantly. He seemed to take my mother's outrage for a compliment.

"Well, go on," I urged Isaac. "What happened at Haran?"

"Nobody knows, nobody knows. They worshipped the moon god... I'm sorry..." He seemed to lose the thread; it was a bit like listening to the car radio at night, picking up a distant station and losing it as it fades out.

"What moon god?" asked my mother, overhearing just those words.

"Oh, nothing. We're talking about the gods Isaac's parents worshipped before the one true God got in touch with them."

And so the matter passed off as a joke, and we continued our walk more or less uneventfully.

 

Thirteenth segment

To what extent," wrote my father, "can an honest man feel indignation about anything? If he's accused, he's guilty." "What is this insatiable hunger of modern man to be entertained? What bottomless misery lies concealed beneath that hunger?" "I have known moments of very deep joy, and moments of very deep sadness - and yet I always have the feeling that this joy, this sadness, correspond to nothing in the so-called 'real' world."

The Aphorisms of Saul Fishman. They absorbed my nights, these yellowed random jottings, as his living corpse absorbed my days. I lost sleep over them. Two and three o'clock in the morning would find me in the unfinished basement by the tool table, my former laboratory, poring over those notebooks of his, while my mother snored overhead.

There would be seemingly meaningless notations like, "The smell of onions"; "the Lodz ghetto"; "a woman with crooked teeth," followed by an abrupt burst of apparent self-revelation: "Sometimes I look out at the world and I see a graveyard; other times... other times, despite my rather cranky exterior, I am infused with such ecstasy that it takes every ounce of strength I possess to keep it under some semblance of control."

My father, a cranky exterior? Never, no way! He was as cheerful and easygoing a man as anyone could claim for a father! Why did I leave them? Why did I disappear for twenty-five years? Good God, had I no inkling of the simple universal fact that parents need their children, that a child cannot vanish without murdering his parents? And I did it so casually, so blithely. "The smell of onions" - what was going on in his mind when he scribbled that? What's going on in his mind now? Who was "the woman with crooked teeth?"

Night after night I would lose myself in thoughts like these. Most of the fragments were undated; almost none of them could I meaningfully attach to the father I thought I knew. If not for the characteristic handwriting, the dissociation would have been total. "Of what use is intellect, when all it leads to is contempt for one's fellow man?" "Our civilization's greatest pleasure is buying, its greatest achievement is selling." "That winter, the snow came before the leaves fell." "Passion: the separation of an act from its consequences."

Etc., etc. "I talk so that no one will notice my silence."

"Dad, look here." An unseasonably cool day made a jacket natural, and under it I hid (from my mother, of course) an A4 notebook. If dad saw anything strange in me taking him to his room, which I habitually avoided, from the cafeteria where I found him scrounging, to a new and inexperienced staffer's consternation, for food, he showed no sign. "Sit down," I said, closing the door behind me. "I want to show you something." Agreeably he sat down in one of two armchairs, and I sat opposite him in the other. I handed him the notebook. "Does this mean anything to you?"

Idly he thumbed through it. "No."

"No? Nothing? Don't you remember you once said something about you have to see to the diaries, or attend to the diaries, or... how the hell did you put it?" Calm, I told myself desperately. Calm, calm is what's needed. But how to be calm, when every instant you're afraid the door will open and Anette will walk in, or Clara, or - worst possibility of all - Adam? But Adam had said he wouldn't be coming any more, and, to my surprise, actually hadn't shown up for... how long had it been? At least a week. I would have to call him. Had dad noticed his absence? The words to ask him welled up - but I repressed them. First things first. To everything there is a season. Right now it's diary season. "The handwriting, dad. Don't you recognize the handwriting?"

"I do not," he declared, very positively, as though defending himself against a shameful charge.

"You wrote this, dad. It's your handwriting. Look here." I snatched the book from him, at which he showed not the faintest surprise. "'This phase of history,' you wrote, 'is just about over.' What could you have meant by that? Or this - listen: 'What we call language now is no more than the grunting of apes. In the future, perhaps, man will learn how to speak.' Dad? Here, what about this: 'You are a girl who will never, thank God, become a woman. A woman is a girl in whom decay has set in.' Who did you have in mind when you wrote that, dad? Was it mother? Your girlfriend? Who?"

I looked up. I could have sworn I heard the door open - but no. My imagination, or somebody else's door. "Dad, listen to me. I am a man whose little bit of solid ground is turning to quicksand beneath his feet. Okay? I have no wife, no family, no occupation - nothing but an old mother, a senile father, a yellow room in my mother's house, and enough money to last me the rest of my life even if I live to be very old - though probably not enough to keep me here if ever that becomes necessary. For years and years I thought I had a child whom I'd never seen - now even that very slender wisp of reality has turned to mirage. Are you listening, father? Your son is telling you the story of his life. And now there are these diaries of yours, dissolving my memories of you and replacing them with - with I don't know what. Why is all my certainty turning to mystery? It's not as if I had an oversupply to begin with, you know! - of certainty, I mean. Dad? Speak to me, for Chrissake! One word! Just one word, and then go back to - well, to whatever home you've found refuge in."

He chuckled. I knew that chuckle. It was the chuckle he used to accord me when, as a boy, I had told him some joke or said something with the obvious intention of being witty, and he, with evident paternal enjoyment, lowered himself to my level and laughed, not because, as I thought then, he found my wit particularly scintillating, but because my childishness amused him. It was a pat on the head, that laugh. "Dad..." I got up and, tossing the notebook on the bed, embraced him awkwardly. He returned my embrace. I don't know if at that moment he knew who I was, but my attentions clearly pleased him, and he wanted me to know it. His cheek brushed against mine. It was rough. They hadn't shaved him properly. "Dad, I have to leave a little early today, okay? Barbara's coming over for coffee, and I promised mom I'd put in an appearance. Do you remember Barbara? Of course not. I hardly do myself."

"Eric's wife?"

He did it again. Even in this sadly reduced state, he was full of surprises. I picked up the notebook and slipped it under my jacket. "I'll see you tomorrow, dad, okay?"

***

Barbara could wait. She may have been dying to see me, but I was not dying to see her. I was dying for a drink. I am not and never have been a heavy drinker, but there are times when the desire just to have the taste of scotch in my mouth is as intense as it must get for any alcoholic.

"Hey, Len."

"Bill."

He set down my scotch in front of me and I sipped with closed eyes. Bliss. That's the only word for it. If there is greater happiness on earth, I have never known it. And if there is pain intense enough to overwhelm the pleasure of the first sip of scotch sipped with closed eyes, I have never known that either. The second sip is even better, the third better still. Letdown begins with the fourth. I can keep my eyes closed no longer. Why? I don't know. Oh, I can force the lids shut, I suppose, but it's like forcing your head under the covers after you've woken up. No, my best escape from the world is precisely three sips long.

"Where is everybody?" The bar was empty except for Bill and me.

He shrugged. "How's your dad?"

"Wait, Bill, I want to - " I drew the notebook out from under my jacket. "Listen to this." I thumbed the pages. In my nervous excitement I was unable to find the passage I was looking for. My eye lit on this instead: "She says, I love you, I'll love you till the end of time, with all my soul - if you never make me sleep with you. Because if I sleep with you you'll disgust me - I know, that's how it always is - please!"

"Well?" he said. I'd been thinking of a cryptic remark about God, which under a sudden impulse I'd wanted to share with this person I was distantly friendly with but who meant nothing to me - there are certain things one can share only with people like that. But here was a new wonder to contemplate. "Nothing, nothing," I mumbled, hastily shutting the book and thrusting it back under my jacket. "Pour me another drink." Had this been my mother talking? Or had dad conceived it, so to speak, out of whole cloth? "Never mind the drink. I better be going. Bill, listen. In this world I doubt there's anyone who leads a more uneventful life than me. And yet..."

"And yet what?"

"And yet what indeed. Catch you later, eh?"

***

"So." She embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. "This is what Lenny has become. The last time I saw you you were Audrey's age. No, maybe Cindy's."

"I was Cindy's age going on Audrey's. I was very young for my age."

"You still are. You could pass for ten years younger. While I..."

"You could pass for ten years younger too," put in my mother in a tone that brooked no dissent. "Without question." Ten years younger than sixty maybe, I thought to myself. She had aged... I was about to say shockingly, but what is there shocking in a fifty-year-old woman looking fifty? Well, it is a bit shocking, when you last saw the woman in question at the climax of her beauty. There had been something terrifying, to me, in her beauty. I was a maladroit eighteen-year-old boy, easily terrified. She was Eric's girl, Eric's woman, and my childish admiration for my older cousin redoubled on this evidence that he could tame such a beast. Me she left utterly speechless. If I managed to stammer hello it was a good day. Did I love her? No, absolutely not. I was terrified of her, purely and simply. Once - I'll never forget this, now that I've recalled it again - she held out her hand to me and said, "Let's go for a walk, you can show me the neighborhood." It was early in their relationship. Eric had all his life been very close to my mother, and there would have been nothing unusual in him bringing his girlfriend over for afternoon coffee. In the course of these little visits Barbara and my mother struck up an enduring friendship that survived the family connection. The occasion I'm recalling may have been her third or fourth visit. Maybe she had noticed my awe and thought to put me at ease. Or maybe she thought to enjoy it at her leisure. Anyway, speechless with terror, I followed her outside, blushing furiously as I pictured Eric and my mother laughing over how I had stolen his love. Where would Adam have been? He is absent from the recollection. It must have been the summer he went to camp. Anyway, we walked, she asking me this and that, me seeing a hidden meaning in every word she spoke, a hidden meaning I dimly perceived but despaired of understanding. I pointed out my old high school when we came to it (so I was probably in first year junior college). She showed a polite interest, and then said, "Does your girlfriend live around here?" I shudder even now to imagine the color my face must have been as, barely conscious, I nodded. "Show me her house," she said. Fairside Avenue was two blocks away. "There," I whispered, my throat like chalk. "What's her name?" "Sonia." "Sonia! Is she Russian?" "Her... her grandparents, I think."

I emerged from my reverie to find mother and Barbara still disputing whether Barbara looked younger than her age, and if so, how much younger. "I am a matron," Barbara said, her tone as emphatic as my father's had been in his interminable arguments with Uncle Al. "Whether I look forty-eight or fifty-one hardly matters. I am a stout, shapeless matron, sexually attractive to no one except, occasionally, to my husband. "Shapeless" was an exaggeration, I thought - for a matron she had a decidedly pleasing appearance - but the rest of her self-description was undisputable. My mother disputed it, however, very vigorously. No, she said, if she were Barbara's husband, she would keep her on a short leash for fear of... etc. Any minute now, I thought, one or the other of them is going to ask me for my opinion - and what would I say? Fortunately it didn't come to that. Barbara turned to me with a smile and said, "Anyway! Tell me about yourself."

"Shall we take a walk?" I said. "I'll show you my old school."

She didn't skip a beat. "And how's Sonia?"

"Last I heard," I said, "she was a lawyer on Wall Street."

***

"Well, what did you think of her?" asked my mother as we sat down to dinner.

I shrugged. "Why is it necessary for me to think anything of her? You have a way," I went on, seeing her frown at this new evidence of the coldness she so frequently reproached me with, "of seeing everybody you know as remarkable. The number of remarkable people in the world is very small, and yet somehow they all seem to wind up in your little orbit. What do I think of her? Exactly what she thinks of herself. She's a matron retaining traces of her former attractiveness."

"Will you come with me on Saturday night?" Barbara had invited us to dinner. Mother was delighted - she was dying to meet her very intense, very intelligent rabbi husband and the two girls, one of them a scholarship student, who surely would have altered out of all recognition since she had seen them last. I, rather less delighted, had not committed myself. I hemmed and hawed, thought I might have an engagement, would see what I could do, etc. etc. "I don't know," I said. "Mr. Bloom invited me over." Strange how I could never think of him as anything but Mr. Bloom. "For Chrissake, call me Ron, willya?" he would say in playful exasperation, and for a while I would make a point of doing so, but no sooner did the conscious control relax than I slipped without realizing it back to Mr. Bloom. Actually, it had very little to do with him. He had invited me over, that was true, but only to use his apartment in his absence if I wanted to - he and his wife were at their cottage at Lake Something-or-other - and whether I wanted to depended on whether Linda could get away. The fact is, I was more eager than usual to see Linda. She had promised, in response to a suggestion I had tried to make as subtly and unobtrusively as possible, to contact Sonia. "Don't mention my name!" I cried, the prospect of her clumsily doing precisely that suddenly occurring to me and horrifying me enough to make me blow my casual cover. "Why on earth not?" she asked in surprise. She smiled. "I know - you're secretly in love with her. You're just using me to get next to her." Was it by design that God gave us so little control over our facial muscles? What information would mine have conveyed to a shrewder observer than Linda? But her playful suggestion quite tickled her, depriving her of what little wit she had. She giggled, stood up on tiptoes to peck me on the lips, and said, "Don't worry, I won't give you away." That had been our last word on the subject, and now I was waiting for the call - there was no telling when it would come - that would tell me what had followed.

"By the way," said my mother, "have you heard from Adam lately?"

"No, I haven't. As a matter of fact I'd been wondering about that. I've been thinking of giving him a buzz."

"Better not," said mother.

"Oh?"

"He has these moods... You know, he's been wonderful to us, absolutely wonderful. What I would have done without him when your father started to... act up - before we knew what it was, and then after, when we did know, and he became progressively harder to handle... how I would have survived it without Adam I simply don't know. Whenever I called him - and I called him often, maybe more often than necessary, I don't know, I was so... so hopelessly out of my depth - he would be at my side within minutes. Once - oh God - I woke up suddenly; he was gone. It was ten past four in the morning. I threw on my robe and went into the kitchen. There he was, slumped on the chair. 'Saul!' I cried. 'Saul!' No response. I thought he was dead. I rushed to the phone and dialed Adam's number. 'Call an ambulance,' he said, 'I'll be right over.' I called the ambulance. And who do you think got here first? The ambulance? No, Adam!"

"What was it?"

"He woke up at the hospital. The doctors ran tests - could find nothing. Then one of the young doctors, he must have been an intern, he looked barely old enough to be Bar Mitzvah'd, said to me, 'Mrs. Fishman, are there any pills at home he could have gotten into?' 'Well, there are my tranquilizers,' I said, 'but I keep them well hidden.' Very well hidden, I would have thought - under a pile of clothes in my dresser. 'Check them,' he said, and when I got home I did, and sure enough, four were missing. Oh, that's just one example - there are many others! And Adam was... a rock. Joan too - she was wonderful. She had a way with him... There were times when he would suddenly go off his rocker - well, you saw at the hospital! And Joan could talk him down - that's her expression, 'talk him down' - very much the way Clara can. I can't. I lose my cool too easily. I have so little cool to begin with! Understand - to me, this is not a patient, somebody whose condition I can simply take as a given and work from there. This is my husband! The man I shared my life with! Our meeting, our falling in love, our courtship - there was such a thing as courtship in those days - it's as vivid to me as this present moment is. More, in some ways. And I see him now, and..." Her lower lip trembled, but she clamped her lips tight as it to say, No nonsense, now!, and resumed. "So I am very, very grateful to Adam, and to Joan, and of course to you" - it was touching the way she didn't want to leave me out - "but these moods come over him, and when they do, it's best to leave him alone."

"Tell me about courtship, mother."

"Let me ask you a question. Have you ever presented a girl with a bouquet of flowers?"

"Never."

"One Sunday afternoon - this was after mama died and I was living with your Uncle Al and Aunt May - who wanted me around like a hole in the head - one Sunday afternoon your father rang the bell grinning from ear to ear and blushing like a summer rose, and in his hand was a bouquet of wildflowers. He had picked them himself at Mount Royal. 'Wildflowers for my wildflower.' That's what he said as he presented them to me. 'Wildflowers for my wildflower.' Maybe that sounds corny today, when everything between 'nice to meet you' and bed is considered a waste of time - "

"I don't think it sounds corny." What I was thinking was, 'Promise me you won't make me sleep with you, because if I sleep with you you'll disgust me.'" Was that you, mother, speaking those lines? Should I ask? Ridiculous - how could I? What business was it of mine?

"Would you believe," my mother went on, "that Al imposed a curfew on me? I could go out on dates, by his leave, but I had to be back at eleven. His word was law. And I wasn't sixteen at the time, either. I was twenty-four."

"Why didn't you tell him to go screw himself?"

"In those days, telling people you loved to go screw themselves didn't seem so important, somehow."

"A tyrant is a tyrant. And God knows Uncle Al would have been the better for being told to screw himself."

Mother laughed. "That he would."

The phone rang. Mother winced involuntarily. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking the same thing: How unfortunate that this pleasant tête-à-tête should be interrupted.

Something odd was going on at the other end. Mother turned pale. "Whom do you wish to speak to?" she demanded in the assertive tone of people who don't want their bewilderment to show. "Hello? Who... Len? Yes, he's here, just... It's for you," she said, passing me the receiver. "Whoever it is, she's hysterical."

"Hello! What... Linda? Is that you?" The story emerged in fits and starts, through racking sobs. Joe Tucker had committed suicide. He had checked into an Ottawa motel and gassed himself. "What am I supposed to do now?" she sobbed. "What am I supposed to do now?"

 

Fourteenth segment

Rabbi and Mrs. David Paltiel lived on the second floor of a duplex in Snowdon - less than a mile from the apartment in which I'd spent the first four years of my life, before we moved to Nectar, mused my mother as we drove there in the Pontiac Grand Am that had been my father's. "The tank," she called it, she having shortly before my return, and to her subsequent regret, sold poor Petunia's great-great-great-granddaughter. "Park here," I said, seeing a space. She braked hard, causing me to lurch forward and the driver behind us to sound his or her horn. "Oh, I'll never get in there!" mother protested. "Of course you can!" I said. "Here, slide over, I'll park." She hit the gas rather more forcefully than necessary, as if to put me in my place. "By the time we find a space big enough to suit you, dinner will be over," I grumbled. "They'll wait," she said, and drove on.

The space we finally found, after much circling, was a five-minute walk from the house, which was all right because the rain that had spattered the windshield on the way seemed to have stopped especially for us, and my mother said, and I didn't disagree, that the walk would do us good.

It will naturally be supposed that Joe Tucker's suicide no more than two days before was much on my mind. Why was I accompanying my mother to a dinner I was less than enthusiastic about, instead of staying with Linda and comforting her to the best of my ability? Because we had quarreled. I had of course sped to her side immediately, going to her house - one of those nouveau riche monstrosities in Hampstead - for the first time ever. The children were at their grandmother's. They knew nothing. Weeping helplessly, Linda threw herself into my arms, murmuring brokenly, "Oh my God, oh my God." I must, if I am to be honest, go on to describe a scene that does me very little credit. Since it would be as dishonest to linger over it as it would be to omit it, I will be brief. I have mentioned the peculiarity of my nature which makes sex rather less important to me than it seems to be to the common run of mankind. Freud, for whom history and art are just sex by other names, is incomprehensible to me, as are the notions of people who live, die, fight, and generally commit the most ludicrous violations of common sense, all for sex. So why, suddenly, when this woman, her face contorted with weeping, threw herself into my arms - a woman I cared very little for, though I had taken some pleasure in her evident love for me - why was I suddenly aroused as I had never, ever been before in my life? In my distraction I could have ripped the clothes off her. Very likely I would have, if her own arousal had not made it unnecessary. We rutted like animals - on the sofa, on the rug... Little Linda Erdman. And there we were, lying spent on the rug, me with a vague image in my mind of a house gutted by fire, she still murmuring "Oh my God, oh my God" and I murmuring "Little Linda Erdman, little Linda Erdman" like an idiot, when suddenly she turned on me. There was a look of hatred in her eyes which transformed her almost out of all recognition. Had I said something offensive? Done something gross? I am at a loss. Her raving as she flung my clothes at me and hustled me out of the house I am incapable of transcribing - it lacked all coherence. The "little Linda Erdman" bit seems to have rubbed her the wrong way; a mocking rendition of my affectionate murmuring recurred in her tirade. In retrospect it occurs to me that I protested very little against her manhandling, for the truth is that lying there a moment before the eruption, the delights I had tasted were being slightly tainted by a new and unpleasant thought: namely, that Linda had in effect married herself to me, artfully collaring a replacement papa for her two children, on whom, by the way, I had never once laid eyes. Then suddenly she exploded, and, shocked though I was, I was not slow to see that I was being given an out. "I'm going, I'm going!" I shouted as, before I properly had my pants on she began hysterically shoving me towards the door. "And don't call me again, okay? From now on I don't exist as far as you're concerned!"

"Look," I said to mother - "here's a parking space right in front of the house, big enough for two cars."

"Isn't it always that way? When your tank is full there's a gas station on every block; when you're running out of gas and desperate, you circle for hours looking for a pump!"

"It's the way of the world. We must learn to receive what the Creator sends us with joy in our hearts."

"Keep your sarcasm in check, if you don't mind. Our host tonight is a rabbi."

"True. I'd forgotten. God, when's the last time I spoke to a rabbi?"

"Rabbi Yanovsky at the Einstein."

"I haven't so much as said hello to him. Only by his music do I know him."

The buzzer unlocking the door sounded even before mother had taken her hand off the doorbell. I pushed open the door to see Barbara standing at the top of the stairs in what looked, in the dim light, like a shimmering white evening gown. "Did you dress up on purpose to make me feel self-conscious?" I asked, blushing for my standard T-shirt and jeans. "I told you to put on something decent," hissed mother as we climbed the stairs. "Just see what you've done," I said to Barbara. "You've made mother and me quarrel." "At least he shaved," said my mother, and so we were all laughing as Barbara took me in her arms and kissed me (it seems to have become the custom while I was away) and then accorded my mother the same treatment. The ladies complimented each other on their appearance. Barbara's get-up was actually less elaborate than it had seemed from a distance. There were footsteps, and there was the rabbi, beaming, hand extended: "You must be Len." It was not by any stretch a brilliant opening, and yet somehow the way he said it - or could it have been the expression on his face? - gave it an air of pleasant distinction. We shook hands, me tightening my grip to match his, and then he turned his attention to mother. "Mrs. Fishman! How long it's been. And yet I swear I'd've known you anywhere."

We followed them into the living room; Barbara excused herself to see to the roast; mother offered to help and would not take no-no-please-don't-be-silly for an answer; and before I knew it I was sitting in a somewhat overstuffed armchair, tête-à-tête with Rabbi David Paltiel. "Do you smoke?" he asked, helping himself from a pack of Du Mauriers on the lamp table beside his chair. "Quitting is easy, I've done it a hundred times, as the old joke goes." He lit his cigarette with such evident enjoyment that it was a pleasure merely to watch him. He was a rather short man, even shorter than I am, and I am none too tall, and though not quite what you'd call fat, his carelessness as to things like exercise was evident at a glance. But his face, without being handsome, was extraordinarily pleasant. The word radiant comes to mind, though I feel foolish using it. His expression can best be described as one of intelligent happiness, a rare enough combination in a time when intelligence seems to mean the ability to see through all surface happiness to the misery it veils. Not even the skullcap he wore could conceal that his dark hair was thinning rapidly. He had small very keen dark eyes, a nose and ears that were perhaps slightly larger than they need have been, and a thick, moist, slightly protruding lower lip. "I'm terribly sorry about your father," he said. "I only met him once, and it was years ago, but I still remember our conversation." He smiled. "Obviously not a man to shy away from an argument. Within five minutes of our acquaintance, I knew two things about him: his name, and that he doesn't believe in God."

"Oh? That surprises me. I suppose you've heard that I've been away for many years. I left home before I really had the chance to know my father as a... to know him man to man, so to speak. But since coming back I have thumbed through his... through some notes he left, and I've been struck by how many references there are to God. He doesn't seem to have been what you'd call a believer, but on no account had he dismissed the question as settled. I'd be inclined to say he was, in his own way of course, searching for God." I felt myself blush - I was not accustomed to talking this way.

"It struck me at the time," Rabbi Paltiel said, "that he was relishing the argument for argument's sake."

"Yes, that's possible. I remember him saying - he was not a boastful man but sometimes his pride in his intellectual powers did show - I remember him saying that he was prepared to argue a given question from either side, pro or con, and try to do it justice against someone arguing out of firm conviction. He was a bit like Socrates, come to think of it. Before you knew it, you'd find the ground missing beneath your feet."

"I suppose you must know Rabbi Yanovsky."

"The oafish fellow at the Einstein? I don't know him exactly..."

Paltiel's eyes widened. "Oafish? If you call him that you certainly don't know him exactly. What do you mean, oafish?"

"Well..." His oafishness had seemed to me so obvious as to scarcely require proof, and I faltered in the face of this unexpectedly direct challenge. "It's just a first impression, of course..."

Paltiel smiled. "I'll give you his book of talmudic commentary to read. Digest that, and then tell me if he's an oaf. Have you ever heard of Rebbe Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev? A Hasidic master of the mid-eighteenth century. His court - they were called courts; rather a joke, in view of their ragged poverty - his court was in Berditchev, a little town in what is today Ukraine. Anyway. One of his disciples appeared at the court of another master, who asked him, 'Why do you leave Levi-Yitzhak and come to me?' 'Levi-Yitzhak I already know,' said the disciple. 'Now I want to know you.' 'Oh you already know Levi-Yitzhak, do you?' said the master. 'You don't even know the coat that covers him.' Forgive me if I sound preachy, it's an occupational weakness."

"I wonder if we're thinking of the same person."

"Levi-Yitzhak?"

"No, Rabbi Yanovsky. The absurdly tall, gangling fellow who sings, if you can call it that - "

Rabbi Paltiel laughed. "Caruso he ain't. So far we agree. Why - do you suppose he gets up on stage there to gratify his vanity? If it gives people like your father a little pleasure - and it does - he's willing to make a fool of himself. I don't know if I'd have the courage to do it myself. You must ask yourself if you would. As for being absurdly tall - well, he certainly is that. Ah, here's my little girl. Come give daddy a kiss."

"Daddy, please, we have company."

I had not heard her come in. Cindy, I presumed, for she looked about the right age to be entering university. Her embarrassment was more humorous than real, for without the least self-consciousness she went up to her father and pecked him on the cheek. Then, turning to me, she said, "Hi, I'm Cindy."

My embarrassment was real enough. Her entry had been too sudden, and though she was not as good-looking as her mother had once been, the resemblance was striking enough to throw me into confusion. It was not only that. What should I do: stand, or remain seated? Extend my hand? Present my cheek? I was a man of her father's age, and yet I was here with my mother. An avuncular tone seemed called for, but it did not come naturally to me. While I was grappling with these weighty questions in mute, red-faced stupefaction, she vanished. The rabbi chuckled. "A regular whirlwind, that girl." Stubbing out his cigarette, he got to his feet. "Come up to my study, we will have a glance at Yanovsky's little book."

***

I love a study. The very word - used as a noun to describe a room - has a peculiar effect on me. My image of studies was fashioned by the Victorian novels I was fond of as far back as I can remember: high-backed leather armchairs, imposing desk, book cases crammed with old books, fire blazing gently on the hearth, the smell of pipe tobacco, a servant coming in with coffee, and so on. As a boy I dreamed of one day having a study of my own, to which I would retreat to write my books (with a quill pen) following a hard day in my chemistry lab laying bare the secrets of the universe.

And so it was with some eagerness that I followed Rabbi Paltiel through a narrow corridor to his. I was of course disappointed. He opened a door and flicked on a light switch to reveal a room that at first glance could have been any room in any modern house. No fireplace, no pipe rack. There was a desk, true (on which among the scattered books and papers lay an opened pack of Du Mauriers and an empty though not clean souvenir ashtray that read, "Mount Washington, N.H.") but, far from being imposing, it looked very much like the imitation mahogany one on which I'd done my high school homework. Maybe it was even the same one, the absurd thought struck me - with a brief emotional accompaniment - for my parents had sold my bedroom furniture when I moved out (at my insistence, incidentally; I got the money). And books - there was certainly no shortage of them, but the shelves on which they rested seemed commonplace. The rabbi had stacked books on them, because that was the use to which he happened to want to put them, but more mundane items - clothes, cups and saucers, a box of tissue paper - would not have been out of place on them. This sensitivity of mine to my surroundings was quite untypical of me, and I was slightly surprised by it. I can only account for it by invoking the powerful associations the word "study" has for me.

Oblivious of all this, Rabbi Paltiel marched straight to the bookshelf behind his desk and located without the faintest hesitation the book he sought. It was a slim hard-back volume. "Here," he said, opening it without even giving me a look at the cover. He pointed to a paragraph about midway down the first page. "Just read that, if you please. 'To believe in God...'"

"To believe in God," I read, "is not to be convinced that He exists in any physical sense of the word. It is to understand that human life without God is intolerable. The next step is an act of submission - an irrational act which brushes aside all rational questions such as, 'Submission to what? On what grounds?' But those questions, it will be argued, are the very foundations of the search for truth. No doubt. But man, being man, needs God more than he needs the truth. Truth is for lesser issues. For what really matters in life, illusion is the key, not truth."

"Well?" he said, snatching the book from me and replacing it on the shelf.

"Gee, what's the hurry?" I said with a little laugh.

He laughed too. "What indeed? I admit, you nettled me a bit, describing a man I look up to as a teacher, though he's a good ten years younger than I, as an imbecile. And - "

"I don't think I used the word imbecile."

"Oaf - I'm sorry. The difference is small, and my point remains. And so I wanted to give you a glimpse of the quality of the man's mind. You can see, I think, even in that brief introductory passage, that he's a thinker of no merely conventional thoughts."

"Maybe so. You hardly gave me time to take in what I read."

"Later, later. Here's Cindy calling us to dinner. Tell me, my dear, help us settle our argument - what's your opinion of Rabbi Yanovsky?"

"Oh daddy, you know my opinion of Rabbi Yanovsky."

"She thinks he's a creep," said Rabbi Paltiel, clapping me on the shoulder and laughing with such unfeigned delight that it was impossible not to join him. I even - most unusual for me - returned the clap on the shoulder. In short, I genuinely liked the man, and took my seat at his dinner table cheerfully resolved to reappraise for his sake my negative assessment of the creepy Rabbi Yanovsky.

 

Fifteenth segment

In mid-July there was a heat wave, one of those bouts during which Montreal becomes indistinguishable from Bombay and life slows to a dazed, sweaty crawl, the slightest activity requiring an effort that hardly seems worth it. Day after day the sun burned with fierce calm in a cloudless baby-blue sky. It was horrible. I was Captain Ahab, and it - the sun - was my white whale. I hated it. I wanted to kill it. "If this goes on much longer," I mumbled to my mother, "I'm gonna go insane." "What do you mean, 'go' insane?" retorted she of the sharp wit. Her humor was not always calculated to improve my mood.

She was right, of course: my complaining was childish. The house had central air conditioning, so did the Einstein, so did The Four Corners, and so did the municipal library, my other refuge - so the heat was not exactly inescapable. In my exotic peregrinations I had survived worse heat without air conditioning, and I knew, of course, as a man with a social conscience, that millions and millions of people the world over did hard labor in heat like this and didn't make half the production out of it that I was making. So I had good cause to feel ashamed of myself, and did, but my irritable resentment was stronger than my shame.

My father, however, continued to insist on putting on his jacket when I took him out. "No," I said, snatching it from him. "Absolutely not. You'll make yourself sick. It's an inferno out there."

"I'm cold," he said simply. "That wind..."

"What wind! Are you crazy? There's not a breath of air to be had and - I'll tell you what. We'll stay in, okay? Let's go downstairs to the lounge. Maybe there's something interesting doing there."

It was more crowded than usual, most of the inmates having chosen to stay inside out of the heat. Anette was there with Withered Beauty, who - was it my entrance that provoked her? - suddenly shouted out, "Will somebody please put me out of my misery!" "Sorry, lady," said Anette, "you're not worth hanging for." I raised my eyebrows at that - the unkindness was out of character for her. Was her seemingly inexhaustible patience wearing thin? "Oh shut up, cunt!" hissed Withered Beauty. Anette went white. I had never seen her out of humor. This abuse, from Withered Beauty, from a few others, she was used to; she knew it as a symptom of a horrible disease and she never took it personally. But something had snapped. She stood up and, towering over her wheelchair-bound charge, glowered at her and said loudly enough for the whole room to hear, "Now you listen to me, dear lady. If you ever, ever, dare use language like that to me again, I'll slap you so hard you'll remember your manners. Is that clear?" Plainly intimidated, Withered Beauty lapsed into a kind of whimpering silence. "Answer me," Anette persisted. "Is that clear?" Withered Beauty nodded. "All right then," said Anette. "Don't forget. As of today our relationship has changed. Len, honey, I'm so glad you've come. Have a seat."

"Sounds like you could use a vacation," I said.

"Wanna take me somewhere?"

The wind, I had noticed some time ago, had gone out of the sails of her courtship of me. Possibly she had recognized it as hopeless, or possibly she had seen at last that there was nothing particularly loveable about me. She continued to make flirtatious comments, but mechanically, out of habit, and with a slight but unmistakable undertone of contempt. Yes, Anette at forty was flowering under my very eyes. Having outgrown me, she was now putting Withered Beauty in her place. Well, good for her, I thought. But what can I say about the pang I felt at being left behind?

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

"Oh, shut up," mumbled Withered Beauty, casting a furtive glance up at Anette as though to make sure she had not inadvertently crossed the new line in the sand. Sensing no disapproval, she went an inch farther out on her limb. "Fools! Imbeciles!"

Mrs. Wallenberg approached from somewhere and, smiling her ghostly smile, took my father by the hand and led him to a vacant sofa, where they sat down. Their handholding, which had so alarmed me the first time I saw it, no longer did. I admit it rather sickened me, their grotesque parody of teenage courtship, but I was sufficiently detached now to laugh it off. "Does my mother know?" I asked Anette with a grin.

"We keep it from her as best we can."

I threaded my way through a knot of wheelchairs to say hello to the Glasses. Isaac was with them. "You're just in time," Nathan greeted me. "Unfortunately there's no chair. Standing room only."

"Just in time for what?"

"For seeing the great George Glass at work. Oh, dad, you've dropped your pen again." He stooped to pick it up. As he thrust it into his father's hands I noticed the pocket notebook open on the former journalist's knee. "Well, go on," said Nathan to Isaac. "Continue with what you were saying. And dad, you get this down, you hear me? I want eight hundred words by five sharp."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The great George Glass is doing an exclusive interview with Isaac the son of Abraham."

"Isaac the son of Abraham," said Isaac with a faraway, wistful smile. He stroked his beard reflectively. "Yes... He was forever going on about this new god of his. We were in those days worshippers of the moon god. And my father refused to join in public prayers. This was before I was born. I heard about it much later. How much is true and how much mere hearsay, of course, I have no way of knowing. My main informant was my father's servant, Eliezer. My father himself was an uncommunicative man. We were not close..."

"You getting this, George?" Nathan demanded.

"Damn right I'm getting it," snarled George. To Isaac he said gruffly, "Go on. Continue. Details. I want details."

"Once they beat him up pretty badly, those worshippers of the moon god. His life hung in the balance. 'Sacrifice him, sacrifice him!' they cried - I am telling you what Eliezer told me. Today, of course, everyone knows that my father's god is the one true God, but in the days of which I am speaking this was by no means obvious - in fact it was inconceivable. My father and his nameless, faceless god who demanded exclusive worship were dire threats to the community, offenses to the moon god, and so, you see - "

"Yes, yes, I see," barked George Glass. "You're damn right I see. Well, go on."

"Write it down," said Nathan.

"I'm writing, I'm writing."

"You haven't written a word. Your pen's fallen to the floor again."

George's eyes blazed with hatred. "I'm writing it in my head, you fool! Do you presume to teach me my business? Let's see what you'll amount to when your time comes, Mr. Notetaker!"

The joke seemed to be getting out of hand. I thought of saying something to Nathan, but he was mortified enough as it was. His father's shaft had plainly struck home. His eyes drilled holes in the floor. Perhaps as a means of smoothing things over, or perhaps because he really was lost in delusion, Isaac continued his narrative as though nothing had happened.

"It was when, badly beaten, he lay between life and death that his god spoke to him more forcefully than ever. Though you and your wife are old you will have a son. You will be the father of a great nation. And so on. And my father murmured through broken teeth to the priests of the moon god, 'Go ahead. Sacrifice me. The Lord my God will protect me.' 'Sure he will,' sneered the priests. They pointed to his bruised and battered body and laughed, 'We all see how well he protects you.' 'You see nothing,' said my father."

Suddenly I became aware of a sound in the room, and as I did I realized that it had been there for some time, unregarded background to this bizarre conversation I was witnessing. It was a strangely beautiful sound - music, singing. What could it be? "Excuse me," I mumbled to Nathan - and went in search of it. I had not far to seek. Mrs. Wallenberg, her hand in my father's, was singing softly to him. On his face as he listened was a look of rapture.

***

Rabbi Paltiel had lent me Yanovsky's book. Its title was Yirat Shamayim: Fear of Heaven. I read it attentively, curled up on the sofa in my yellow room, hiding from the hot world outside. The main idea seemed to be the thought expressed in the striking introductory passage Rabbi Paltiel had pointed out, about belief in God being based not on God's existence but on the sheer human need for Him. The whole noisy, clamorous, disputatious impasse between believers and atheists is misguided and childish, Yanovsky held. The atheists say God doesn't exist, and seem to feel that settles the matter. It settles nothing. Of course God doesn't exist, in the sense that I or my sofa or my yellow room exist. Why should He? Who would want to worship a God who did? It is only the poverty of our language that gives us no alternative for "existence" other than "non-existence." Here perhaps the Orientals leave us behind: their "Sunyata," Emptiness, is no mere blank but creativity itself, such that "Emptiness is God and God is Emptiness." This appealed to me. I had brushed against Zen in Japan, had even undergone a bit of formal training. The notion of a Jewish rabbi incorporating Buddhist thought into Jewish belief struck me as very daring. I tried to reconcile the originality of his thought with his vacuous face and tuneless singing. In vain.

I would seek him out at the Einstein and have a talk with him, I decided, but he was suddenly as elusive as earlier he had been ubiquitous. For days on end I saw no trace of him. He neither gave concerts nor strode the halls with the absurd purposefulness that characterized him. The explanation turned out to be simplicity itself: he was on vacation.

"Shall I take you to visit him?" said Rabbi Paltiel when I dropped by to return the book. "He's at his cottage near Magog."

"Oh, please, don't trouble!" I was not the type to drop in uninvited on a perfect stranger. "I'll have plenty of opportunity when he gets back."

"It's up to you. I'm driving up this weekend, as it happens. If you want to come with me you're welcome."

"No, really." I hoped I wasn't making too much of a fool of myself.

"Audrey, my dear. Come say good evening to our guest."

Audrey was the younger daughter, at fifteen plain, sullen and pimpled. She had been present at the dinner the week before, but excused herself at the earliest opportunity, having contributed little to the conversation. A quarter of an hour or so after she retreated to her room the doorbell rang. Audrey ran out, shouting "Bye!" and slamming the door behind her. "Be home by twelve!" Barbara shouted after her. Then, to the company, "Was I like that at her age, I wonder? And was my mother like me?"

"It's parents and children the world over," said the rabbi. "Kids grow up, more or less tumultuously, and parents, more or less conservative, try to keep them babies, as mementos of the time when they were really needed."

"I do not try to keep them babies!" Barbara protested. "On the contrary" - she turned to my mother - "I want them grown up and off my hands already! It's the creeps she goes out with that I can't get used to."

One of the creeps - whether the same one who had come for her the week before I had no idea - was with her now as she came in. "We're going to my room to watch a video," she said, ignoring me. Her friend emitted no first impressions whatsoever - seemed in fact to rigorously guard himself against emitting them. His thick wavy dark hair tumbled down his shoulders and into his eyes, concealing most of his face from view. If there was any more of him to notice than that, they were gone before I had a chance to observe it.

Barbara pressed me to stay for tea, but I was in a hurry to get away. I had an appointment - with Linda. She had called, humble and apologetic, and I could hardly refuse to see her, though such had been my first impulse. As I was leaving Cindy came home. She accorded me a smile of happy surprise. Did I have to leave so soon? The temptation to call Linda and make some excuse was almost overwhelming - but no, it wouldn't do. Was I developing a crush on Cindy now? A girl young enough to be my daughter, the daughter of my cousin Eric's ex-wife who knew me when I was Cindy's age... it absolutely wouldn't do. I wasn't in grade five anymore. I said my goodbyes and hurried down the stairs. "Len!" Barbara called. I turned back. "Len, David's going to Magog on Saturday." She hesitated.

"Well?"

She joined me at the bottom of the stairs, and spoke softly. "Maybe I'll go visit your father."

"Oh? Sure, if you'd like to."

"Can I go with you?"

"Of course. Shall I pick you up?"

"Would you mind?"

"Not at all. Around one?"

"Is that when you usually go?"

"Actually, my mother usually goes on Saturday. But it doesn't matter."

"What do you do, take turns?"

"More or less. There's no formal arrangement. Sometimes the two of us are there together."

"Do you suppose your father'll know me?"

"I doubt if he'll be able to name you, but he'll be happy to see you. He's happy to see everyone."

"If your mother's going on Saturday, I could go with her."

"That's true."

"I'm making a mess of this. The fact is, there's something I... something I want to talk to you about."

"How very mysterious!"

"Yes, it is mysterious. Very. Saturday at one?"

"With my mother, or without her?"

"Without her, if you can manage it."

 

Sixteenth segment

Piloting my mother's car, formerly my father's, towards Fairside Avenue, I thought of flight. As a teenager, fresh crisp uncreased driver's license in my wallet, I had spent hours behind the wheel of my father's car - he was very liberal in allowing me the use of it, and never asked any questions about the gas I consumed - cruising along the endless Trans-Canada Highway lost in fantasies of escape. "I'll drive until I arrive at my new life, and then I'll start living it." But of course it was not my car, dinner was at six, a term paper was due Tuesday - gravity always won, and usually this side of the Ontario border, sometimes just barely across it, I would turn around and slide uneasily back into my old life, which still had a few years to run, as the destruction of my mother's car, the grim climax of that phase, proved. One day, weeks shy of my graduation, I broke loose. Where was my guardian gravity then? Sleeping? I don't know. Certainly I hadn't woken up that morning with anything in mind. My little apartment was just around the corner from the university. I left at the usual time, went on my usual rounds, came back a little early preparing to spend all night writing a paper on - I still remember - Rousseau's Confessions. On the kitchen table, among the dirty dishes, bottle of scotch at the ready and cup of coffee at my elbow, were: two pens, a pad of blank paper, the Confessions, and a biography of Bob Dylan. What tempted me into purchasing the latter at such a critical time in my academic career? I don't know, but somehow, in the bookstore the Saturday morning before, it had proved irresistible, and I had bought it. And so there I was on that Tuesday evening, sipping scotch, sipping coffee, dipping into Rousseau, dipping into Dylan - and when I regained consciousness, so to speak, I was at the bus station, with both books and very little else thrown into a little traveling bag and myself tossed to the four winds. The Rousseau remains in my possession to this day; the Dylan bio not, and it's out of print besides.

 

Seventeenth segment

I woke up Saturday morning to the distant rumble of thunder. Raising the blind I confronted a black sky. Good, I thought. Rain will freshen the air. It was not to be, however. For ten minutes in mid-morning it poured violently. Then the sky cleared and the sun broke through, fiercer than ever, seeking revenge for its brief eclipse. "I feel," I mumbled to my mother, "as though I've been buried alive in a pit of sunshine." She was all set to go to the home. With difficulty I persuaded her to let me take her place. "Phone one of your friends. Go out for coffee. Take in a movie. It'll do you good." No, she said, it wouldn't do her good, it would only make her feel more guilty. "Guilty!" I cried. "What on earth do you have to feel guilty about?"

She hesitated, then sat me down and told me. Did I remember Lil and Norm Freedman, who used to live across the street from us, they moved out a few years later, their son Stevie was two years older than me and taught me how to ride a bicycle, their daughter Marcy was four years older and was my favorite babysitter? Yes, I remembered vaguely. Well, my mother had met Lil in the mall two weeks or so ago - "the strangest thing was how easily we recognized each other, a couple of old crones who hadn't seen each other since we were young and pretty!" They had coffee, the reminiscences flowed, and by the time they were on their third refill the talk had come round to the present and my mother had confessed - "confess" may be a strange word, but the situation, so difficult to talk about, does invite reflex concealment, repressed, if at all, by something very like confession - that her husband was at the Einstein, quite out of his senses. Ah, said Lil. Norm too suffers from Alzheimer's, but she would never put him in a home. Never. No, she would nurse him herself till the end of her days... "I'm not telling it right," said my mother. "It's not as if she was bragging, or reproaching me. She said it quite naturally and simply, without the slightest affectation..."

"Mother, listen," I cut in. "I don't care what Lil Freedman is doing, I don't care what anyone else on earth is doing. In our case, there was simply no alternative. Dad is getting the best of care. You couldn't possibly have coped -"

"Lil copes."

"How do you know?"

"You mean she's lying?"

"You don't know what she's coping with, or how well, or whether Norm is the better or the worse for it."

"There are certain obligations - "

"Mother Theresa's dead, mother, there's an opening for a saint in Calcutta. Think it over."

"I'm no saint, but I am a wife."

"And if I had a wife I would be more than satisfied if she did for me half what you're doing for dad - all his life when he could appreciate it, and now when he can't. Please, mother, the situation is bad enough, we don't have to go out of our way to make it worse."

"She invited me over. They have a condominium in Bellevue Towers, not far from here."

"Well, go then. Look, I'll tell you the truth, there's no need for secrecy. The reason I want to go today is that Barbara specifically asked me to take her. She said she wants to talk to me about something."

She yielded finally. "I haven't seen Frances in ages. Maybe I'll phone her and we'll go to a movie or something."

"Actually, I was hoping to borrow the car."

"Take it. I'll take the bus."

"The bus! Mother, there are such things as taxis in the world."

"Isn't it funny? I just can't get comfortable in a taxi. My nerves seem to throb to the ticking of the meter."

I rolled my eyes.

"Oh, I know," she said hastily, "I can afford it, I'm not badly off. Do you know why, incidentally?"

"Why what?"

"Why I'm fairly comfortable financially. It never seems to have occurred to you to ask, though you knew your father's earnings were never quite..."

"Why? He made a decent living."

"He made a living that took care of our day-to-day needs. But he made no allowances for such future contingencies as, for example, being kept at the Einstein in perpetuity."

"I see. Well, how is it, then - ?"

"Your uncle Al, who dad I think rather despised, left us well provided for. He left us close to half a million dollars. That's the money that's paying for the Einstein."

"Well... All right, that's an excellent thing to know, I'm a better man for knowing it, but... what, exactly, does it have to do with taking a cab?"

My mother sighed. There was a look on her face - it's not always easy to describe the looks on my mother's face, which was remarkably expressive - suggesting mingled affection, pity and contempt for this great baby of a son of hers who could travel to the ends of the earth and understand books whose simplest thoughts would sail straight over her own un-college-educated head, and yet still know so little of how the world worked. "It's always come so easy to you," she said. "Money, I mean. You've never had to do without it. You have no notion of the despair of taking your last twenty cents to the grocery store, thinking as you go, 'What am I going to do when this is gone?' That has no place in your thinking, but it's an indelible part of mine, and you can tell me very reasonably, 'It's not like that now' - but, you know, human beings don't live exclusively in the present. All that aside - don't you think it hurt me to be dependent on my brother when I had a husband? Particularly when, as I say, my husband never made any secret of looking down his nose at my brother? He was the cleverer of the two, no doubt, and yet - "

"Mother, say no more. I'm sorry, I've been a blind fool. I'll walk to Barbara's, we'll hitchhike to the Einstein, you take the car, save your cab fare..." Why does sarcasm come so readily to me? Why haven't I learned to suppress it, when I know it is out of place and will cause pain? Why did I come back? Why don't I retire to a cave somewhere? "A monk is a man who is separated from all, yet in harmony with all." Who had said that, and where had I come across it? In the library, just recently.

***

It ended with both of us agreeing we were being silly, and with me taking the car and mother promising to oblige me by calling a cab. The heat outside was terrible. Not a trace of moisture remained on the streets to remind us of the brief but torrential morning rain. Barbara was waiting for me. She had the house to herself, her husband having gone off to Magog and her daughters being "God knows where. 'Bye mom,' they say, and if God forbid I should ask, merely by way of conversation, 'Where are you going?' I get such sour looks, the equivalent of 'What business is it of yours?', that I've learned to keep my curiosity to myself. I'm a convicted criminal, and must live like one. My crime? Motherhood. Was I like that when I was their age? I ask myself - and must answer, in all honesty, yes. I was. My mother's very existence seemed to condemn me to a childhood I no longer wanted any part of, and though I never said so in so many words, even in my thoughts, I think my true attitude, deep down in my heart where my true attitude lurked, was 'Die, you old bitch.' She did die, and so will I. Well! Talk about a cheerful greeting."

"Is Cindy like that too? I can see what you're saying applying to Audrey, but Cindy?"

"She's easier to get along with. A lot easier. Always was. But she too draws lines in the sand, and if I overstep them... Even with her I walk on eggshells."

"On the sand?"

"Eggshells on the sand." She laughed. "Sit down. Would you like some coffee?"

"Yes, please."

I sat in the living room waiting for her. Was there anything here, I asked myself idly, that set this house apart as a rabbi's home? The books in the study, which I had glimpsed the night we had dinner here - the leather-bound volumes of the Talmud, various learned works of religious commentary - those, of course. Otherwise, no. It was a suburban living room, pure and simple. It could have been a lawyer's, a doctor's, anyone's. On the little round table beside me were two framed photographs - the daughters as children. I held them in my hands and looked at them, trying to decide which was Cindy and which Audrey. They were five, maybe six. Impossible to tell. They didn't look alike, but neither did they look anything like their present incarnations. I put them back on the table and examined a seascape on the wall opposite me. It had been painted, I knew, by the rabbi's mother, who had grown up in a Nova Scotia harbor town. The sea surged with surprising violence - one wouldn't have expected such power, such intensity - I hardly know the word - from the mother of a rabbi and the daughter of a tailor. I know nothing of painting, and don't pretend to be able to distinguish good from merely competent, or good from great, but I found this picture strangely, even eerily impressive. There was nothing in it but roiling sea and roiling cloud, nothing to remind you of life or the possibility of life, and if you looked at it in a certain way, the whole thing seemed a giant mouth open just for you. She had had a bit of a reputation in her day, the rabbi had told me. Her work was displayed in galleries and written about in newspapers, "when they had nothing better to write about." That, laughed the rabbi, was his mother's own expression.

"Cream? Sugar?" Barbara called from the passage leading to the kitchen.

"Just cream."

She came in a moment later, bearing two cups on a tray. "You better change into something cooler," I said, noticing her jeans for the first time. "It's roasting outside."

"I will, when we go. When are visiting hours?"

"There are none. You come and go as you please."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"Why should it be? The inmates - I keep calling them inmates; it's probably not the best word - they wear a little white bracelet on their wrist which keeps the auto-doors shut so they can't wander off."

"That's not what I meant. I meant, what if someone decided to plant a bomb or something?"

"Why would anyone decide to do a thing like that?"

"Oh, just for fun. I'm not joking, though I might seem to be."

"What's fun about bombing a madhouse?"

"A bored young person might find it amusing. Or maybe a disgruntled relative at the end of his or her rope."

"How would visiting hours solve that?"

"I suppose it wouldn't. When I was young all regulations chafed me. Now I fret about the absence of regulations. What a funny old lady I'm evolving into. Do you like that coffee? It's Jamaican. I bought it on a whim, and David refuses to drink it."

"It's delicious."

"Have you seen Eric lately?"

"Eric?"

"Your cousin. My ex-husband."

"Yes, I know. The question was unexpected. It took me by surprise."

"Well, you remember I said there was something I wanted to talk to you about. Eric's it. I called you here specifically in order to talk about Eric. There's simply no one else I can tell this to, and I have to tell it to someone or I'll go mad. There's your mother, of course, but - well, your mother is a wonderful old lady, but she is an old lady, however spry, and she does have a way - this will sound strange after what I've been saying about my own daughters - of talking like a mother. You and I have not been intimate friends, but somehow I've always found you easy to talk to. Maybe it's because you're not the judgmental type. I feel I could tell you anything without the feeling that, whatever you may be saying, however kindly you may be speaking, in your heart you're judging me. Am I right, would you say?"

"I hadn't thought of it before, but it may be so."

"Have you seen him?"

"No longer ago than last night."

"You saw him last night?" Her self-possession momentarily shaken, she spoke perhaps louder than she'd intended to, and her hand fluttered reflexively to her mouth, as though to silence herself.

"He and Adam and I went out for a drink. Why?"

"Well, I... no, no reason, just... What would you say about his mood, his... his general bearing...?"

"He seemed his usual self." Obviously, in view of what we had talked about, it was not a theme I wanted to enlarge upon. "Of course he's practically a stranger to me at this point. Why do you ask?"

"You're surprised at my interest?"

I remembered Eric telling me weeks earlier about a chance encounter he'd had with Barbara, about how their eyes had met and how in that glance he had understood that Barbara was the only woman on earth he ever had or ever could love - or words to that effect - and I had no trouble deducing from Barbara's hints now that something had followed from that.

"For thirty years," she resumed, "it was as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. It's not that big a city, you'd think that in all that time we would have caught glimpses of one another. Nothing. Only from your mother's occasional mention of him did I so much as know he was alive. Then, six weeks ago, I was with David and the girls, we'd gone to buy Cindy a necklace as a reward for her scholarship, and we bribed Audrey into coming along by promising her a pair of earrings - otherwise, believe me, she wouldn't have been seen dead with us. She'll go around in torn jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, but for earrings she has a mysterious weakness. And that's when we happened to cross paths. He was with Rose. Our eyes met, and - "

"Yes, he told me," I blurted out, realizing only after the words had escaped me how tactless my interruption was. The thought of another poetic recitation of the meeting of the eyes was making me squirm; still, I owed it to her as a friend to stifle my impatience and keep my mouth shut. Embarrassed, I lowered my eyes and mumbled an apology.

"No, what for, don't be silly," she said. "If I'd seen him coming, I would have steeled myself, maybe we'd've said hello, and that would've been that. But it was like... one minute I'm thinking about this darling little pair of earrings Audrey chose, and how in spite of everything the girl really does have taste and maybe she'll surprise us all some day, and the next minute... he's there in front of me, an apparition, a vision. There was no time to prepare, no time to... And suddenly - suddenly what? I fell in love with him? I realized I'd been in love with him all along? Suddenly I was fifteen again... that's how old I was when I first knew him. Fifteen. Now I'm forty-nine. Well!" She placed her coffee cup on the tray and stood up. "Let me get into something a little more suitable to the weather and we'll go pay our respects to your dad."

Before I knew it I was on my feet too. Detecting - or thinking I did - a slightly mocking smile on Barbara's face, I flushed and sat down again. What could my springing up like that have meant, if not relief at having come so unexpectedly to the end of the recitation and determination to seal the conversation shut? True enough, I'd had the feeling as she spoke that I was listening through a keyhole to talk not meant for me, but wasn't that silly? Didn't Barbara deserve a better, more sympathetic listener? She had chosen me, after all, unlikely confidant though I was in my own eyes. Being chosen confers a measure of responsibility. Hoping to sound more urbane than I felt, I smiled and said, "That's the end?"

"The end? Oh God, no. It's the beginning. I've lived happily with David for twenty years. I have two children by him. Am I capable, at age forty-nine, of throwing all that over and... throwing myself into Eric's arms, throwing myself off a cliff? Am I capable of it? Let me change. I'll be with you in a minute."

Was she capable of it? She was capable of thinking it, which was already a good deal, I thought. Then something else struck me, so sharply that I called out before I quite realized what I was doing. "Barbara!"

"What?" Her face reappeared in the doorway.

"Have you spoken to Eric? I mean, have you seen him since - "

"Twice. He called me soon afterwards. We went out for afternoon coffee. My hand was shaking so I could hardly lift the cup. His too. The second time was a few hours before you came to return the book, when I said I wanted to talk to you. Coffee again. You'll never guess where. Mr. Donut, just around the corner from Easthill High. We used to hang out there as teenagers. Would you believe Eric could be so corny? You're right, it wasn't his idea. It was mine. And there, among the fifties pop and the young couples sucking coke through straws and holding hands under the table, he told me very quietly - how did I hear him over the noise? - told me he loved me, had never loved anyone but me, simply couldn't understand what perverse impulse - his words, 'perverse impulse' - had led him to throw me over and ruin his life... and I answered that I too loved him and had never etcetera. And then in the taxi home I thought, 'What have I done to myself? What have I done?' And then David came home, and the girls... it's impossible! Idiotic! Well? Do you have any advice for me?"

The mockery in her tone was unmistakable, and I no more understood what I had done to deserve it than the confidence from which it seemed to flow. Without waiting for an answer she disappeared into the passage and, presumably, into her bedroom to change, leaving me to my thoughts, which centered on one point: How was it that Eric, having recaptured Barbara's love, had attention to spare for suicide pacts with my brother? Had they been joking? I doubted it. I was not unduly alarmed - a lot can happen in three years - but I did take them seriously. Why would they want to die? Perhaps it is strange, perhaps not, that the question did not really press on me with any urgency. I doubted there was for either of them a specific reason: I want to die because such-and-such. I could understand, even without sharing, a desire to die. It was like the desire to live - if you had it, you didn't ask why. Still, it was at least interesting that Eric would be talking of death mere hours after the woman he loved gave evidence of returning his love. They were both married and the situation was impossible? Awkward yes, difficult certainly - but hardly impossible. But here was Barbara, in a blue-and-white striped culotte skirt and a light blue blouse, looking fresh and summery and smiling amiably and even a little coquettishly, all trace of mockery gone from her expression as she said, "Shall we go?" and sailed toward the door, me following and rooting in my pocket for my - my mother's - car keys.

***

In the car on the way I suddenly recalled the time I had gone into my father's room to find him sitting on the bed naked. Supposing he was in that condition now? Or he might have dirtied himself. Why did Barbara want to see him? If it was just an excuse to arrange that little talk with me, maybe I should spare her the trouble. On the other hand, back in the old days, they had been decidedly partial to one another, I remembered now. Of course! Dad helping Joan with her studies - a queer feeling, very vague, had come over me as she told me about that; I couldn't put my finger on it and dismissed it, but now it was clear. He had helped Barbara too, in much the same fashion. Doing the same for Joan, years later, must have been for him a way to relive a charming episode from the past.

"I loved your father," Barbara mused, abruptly breaking the silence. She might have been reading my thoughts, though she seemed to speak more to herself than to me. "I said it at the time in my schoolgirlish way, and I'd say the same thing now as a matron: I don't think I've ever met a wiser man."

"Wise?"

"Don't you think he was wise?"

"I don't know, really. He was my father. I guess a child takes his father's wisdom more or less for granted. I was thinking to myself just the other day: before I got the chance to know him as one adult to another, I was gone, and came back to find him like this."

"Wasn't there any correspondence between you during the years you were away?"

"There was some. Not much, and not very wise. Chatty, mostly, when not perfunctory."

"What's your earliest memory?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me your favorite color."

"I'm being serious. I asked for a reason."

"My earliest memory? My mother giving me a beating."

Barbara giggled. "Your mother beat you?"

"The memory is very vague. I hear my mother screaming, me squalling... and feathers are flying around all over the place."

"Feathers?"

"Apparently I'd been jumping up and down on my pillow until it split, spewing forth a cloud of feathers."

"Apparently, you say. A word like that has no place in a memory of early childhood."

"I'm sorry, Madam Inquisitor! You're right, though. My mother told me the story herself. I don't remember the pillow, but I do remember the beating and the feathers. You said you asked for a reason."

"Because my earliest memory is of my father, who died when I was six. I seem to see my little hand on his eye, and his glasses all askew."

"Nonsense - you wouldn't see your own hand as little."

"Can it be that you're as clever as I am? True enough, there's a photograph in the family album. This is it?" she asked when I stopped suddenly.

"No, this is the high school. Don't you remember? It's the closest parking space we're likely to find at this hour. You don't mind walking a block, do you?"

"Not in a good cause."

"Hi."

I was locking the door, and found myself confronting a woman, a perfect stranger as best I could judge, smiling familiarly up at me.

"You don't remember me," she said, apparently not at all disconcerted by my forgetfulness. "My name's Doreen. We met a month or so ago, when I mistook you for your brother."

"Oh yes!" It came back to me, complete with the detail that I had not acknowledged being Adam's brother. I suppose I flushed, for Doreen patted my arm and, seeming not to notice my instinctive withdrawal, said, "It's okay. I've spoken to him, there's no need for secrecy. I'm sorry if I was so strange that time. You must have thought... God knows what you must have thought! You're here to see your father? I won't keep you. I have to hurry. God, will this heat never end? Well!" She waved - in a peculiar way, raising her hand about shoulder level, pausing briefly, and then moving her fingers as if against piano keys - and was gone.

"Who was that?" Barbara asked.

"Damned if I know."

*

[Here endeth Part One]