Crows (36 page)

“I thought the robe would make you happy,” he said.

“It did.”

“But not for long.”

“I put it on to show them—without you asking me to,” I said. “I was proud of it. I was proud of you. And then you had to go and shout out the price.”

“It was important that they knew.”

“No it wasn't.”

“To me, it was,” he said, poking his chest.

“Then you bought it for the wrong reason,” I said, and I tried to dart past him, catch him unawares. I went up two steps, nearly to the landing, and then I saw Amanda standing at the top of the stairs just as Rudy's hand rang down against the side of my head.

A fierce light accompanied the blow, like a flare in my skull. I was most concerned about getting to Amanda and explaining to her that this was not her father hitting me, but rather a stranger within her father whom with practice and careful maneuvering we could avoid encountering again.

He hit me a second time, open-handed, across the back of my head and I rocked forward into the scratchy carpet covering the stairs. Amanda screamed above me. I heard Rudy suck in his breath and I knew he hadn't seen her there.

“Mandy,” he whispered.

She screamed again. Blood ran from my nose in a watery thread. Only four blows over a span of months, and now blood had been drawn. “It's all right, sweetheart,” I said to her. “I'll be up to tuck you back in.”

But Amanda didn't budge. She was crying, but she also seemed to understand that her witnessing presence was in my best interests. I loved her so much then. In later years when I was a blind burden and her father was gone, when we were no longer close, I forgave Amanda for many small insensitivities out of gratitude for that saving moment on the stairs.

W
ERE
I
LISTENING
to a woman tell a story such as mine, I would have two questions for her: How often did he hit you, and did he hit you when you were blind?

Rudy struck me many times, but the Christmas nosebleed was the only outwardly apparent wound I ever sustained. He was scrupulous in his use of the open hand, swinging it like a wide board. And his violence had a quick release, venting itself after only two or three blows. For all of these reasons I might have considered myself fortunate.

I had been blind for nearly two months before he hit me when I was blind. The argument was of course about money, and we were alone in the kitchen on a summer evening. We had watched the news on TV and then come into the kitchen to make supper. Ina and Vincent were expected later and Rudy began to complain that we had had them over to our house three times in a row without our being invited there.

“They're our family,” I said. “You don't keep track of that sort of thing with your family.”

“I do,” he said. “It's not cheap having them over. Your sister drinks our beer like it's tap water.”

“It's easier for me here,” I said. “I know my way around.”

“If you'd get out some, you'd be more confident in finding your way,” he said.

“Little by little I'm getting out,” I said, wondering if I was looking directly at him, if my words were striking him in the face. “And no more remarks about my sister.”

I moved my face to catch a breeze coming in over the kitchen sink. He won't hit me when I'm blind, I thought. But I listened to the room at my back. I could picture every inch of the space, the high-ceilinged airiness, the pockets of appliance heat, and Rudy's glowering presence at the table.

“What can I say? She drinks beer to a serious extent. I love her,” Rudy said, “but facts are facts.”

“Just leave her alone.”

“If she'd leave a little to help pay her tab, I would.”

I heard his chair scrape against the floor, heard him step close to me. I decided later that he must have for quite some time been weighing the question of hitting me now that I was blind. Perhaps he didn't understand to what level he would sink if he beat his blind wife; was it a manageable level, a level that would allow him to view at least certain aspects of his life with some self-respect?

“Leave her alone,” I said, nearly in a whisper, curious myself.

He let me have it, tentatively the first time, then with increasing gusto on the two succeeding blows, so that the colorless room of my blindness began to spin, and Rudy helped me to my feet like a perfect gentleman.

He was dead within a year.

 

 

I
NA AWOKE FOR
the second time that morning with a slip of a headache and a certain scandalous fatigue. She had been up late the night before drinking Old Style and reading magazines, the papers, a book, maps, junk mail. Helene had telephoned at her customary early hour. The morning call required that Ina set her alarm so that she was awake and somewhat alert to whatever her sister wanted. Usually it was nothing. After Rudy died, Ina spent time helping Helene overcome her fear of cooking and taught her all over again how to use the stove. She turned on the burners and held her sister's hand above them so she could feel the waves of heat pushing up at her. She put Helene's fingers on all the knobs, and Helene informed her testily that she remembered quite clearly, thank you, the function of each control. She could give herself her shot and put together her meals. She knew what foods to avoid, how much she could eat of something she wasn't supposed to eat. She could take care of herself but preferred not to. So she telephoned Ina every morning to reestablish her connection with her sister, as if Ina might have taken some offense overnight and decided never to speak to her again. She wanted to be sure she wasn't alone. Her sister's sleepy voice placed her firmly back in the world. Helene thus reassured, they made a date for later in the day, to go to the Jewel.

And having done what was required of her Ina was free for a time. So she went back to sleep for an hour. And when she awoke again she felt the desire to go fishing. This was Vincent prodding her memory. She had been aware lately of a tempering of her mourning. The intervals between moments of grieving had expanded so that she sometimes found herself in the morning being unable to recall the last time she had thought about him. She took this as a healthy sign, but a lonely one as well, for even after his death Vincent remained a companion of wrenching complexity and dimension. She consulted him as often as she had when he was alive: about matters of life, how to manage Helene, what to do with the time left to her. His answers came as clearly as if he were standing behind her, whispering in her ear.

But awakening that morning with no recollection of thinking about him fresher than a half-day old, she felt too successful at putting him behind her, as if a certain forgetful loneliness were preferable to constant, memorable grieving.

So she would go fishing.

They lived across the street from the north branch of the Chicago River, and fishing was the only activity to interest Vincent that could be classified as a sport. And only then, Rudy claimed, because fishing produced something Vincent could sell.

To reach the river she would have to go down concrete stairs built in the year she was born. These steps were rounded with wear, stones falling out of the mix, the pipe bannisters rusting where declarations of love had been gouged in the paint. She had run down the steps, tripped down them, paused on them to be kissed: by Vincent, by others. She was now almost seventy years old, with lovely blue eyes in a sagging face, and she could afford to lose a pound or two, but a long time ago she had been a beautiful girl. At the foot of the stairway was a small cement landing with a deliciously fragile privacy. The boldest lovers used the space to clutch at each other while listening for footsteps. Ina and Vincent had kissed there, and Vincent had pleaded to do more, and touched her breast as incentive. But she had refused, an absence of courage she now regretted.

The water was the color of packed shadows. Some days it did not seem like water so much as thick brown silk, a river of ladies' nylons. The bait Vincent used was a shred of bacon or a pinched ball of store bread. Catfish and carp, and the occasional gar, were all he ever caught. Vincent called carp crap, the big, silvery sluggards who ate the hook and whatever was aboard, and then were dragged without a hint of resistance to the foot of the landing. Vincent employed a wicked gaff Rudy had made to haul the fish from the water. He sold the carp to those less fortunate. Ina sampled a bite once, and even before the toxins injected into that water by industry and humanity were common knowledge, something in the taste of the fish struck her as evil.

Gar were just too strange; needle-nosed, spine-thin, they radiated an aura of bad luck and were cut loose immediately, the hook sacrificed.

Catfish she loved. They were blandly delicious, and went perfectly with buttered corn on the cob, fruit balls in juice, and cold beer. Catfish had a spirit when hooked that promised a fight. The whiskers that rimmed their struggling mouths were like the eyes of potatoes gone wild in the dark. But their appearances at the end of the line grew more infrequent until catching one was an event, and the last one Ina remembered landing was a fat grandfather cat hooked by Ray when he was on the edge of adolescence, and he had hated that his father had had to come to the rescue to get the creature out of the water and onto the landing.

The river was a place to go. A place where things were out of sight, where there was the possibility of being alone when life at the top of the stairs pressed in. Vincent took Ray there to tell him about sex. Ina had given Annie the same news at the kitchen table.

Vincent often went to the river alone, taking only a pole and a piece of bread, returning in an hour or so without the bread. They went there as a family, with Helene and Rudy and Amanda, because on the hottest nights it felt a degree cooler down there shooing bugs in the dark, the lines falling out of sight before they entered the water.

But then the river landing became inhabited by people of vague repute, nonfishermen, drinkers of hard liquor, individuals who seemed to appear without benefit of the stairs, by-products of what was going bad in the water. Finally she had to forbid her children to play on the stairs or to go down to the landing. She suspected Annie obeyed her, but she knew Ray had a taste for unsanctioned excitement and she saw him come up from the stairs in the dark with the other boys and race across the street until attaining the safety of his yard, while his friends dispersed like bugs caught in the light. She asked Vincent to speak to Ray, and perhaps he did, but Vincent possessed a faith in his son that was unswerving, and doubted that a few illicit trips to the river would significantly warp the basic perfection of Ray's nature.

Vincent's tackle box was in the front closet. Ina lugged it to the kitchen table. The box was constructed of khaki-colored steel and secured with a lock of considerable resolve, a lock to which Ina had no key.

She climbed the stairs to the bedroom and lay down on her bed. She brought the phone from the night table and put it on her stomach. She liked to call Ray and Annie in the morning. With the time difference, she could usually reach them before they left home for the day.

Ray's number rang. He was her baby. An inch shorter than Vincent, with a little weight problem. He had never married.

“Ray here.”

“It's me.”

“I was thinking about you,” he said brightly.

“You were not.”

“I was! I had a premonition you'd call.”

“You did not!”

“I did! Why won't you ever believe me when I tell you something?”

“What am I calling about, then?” she asked.

“It wasn't that detailed a premonition, sweetheart,” Ray said, and Ina felt the little
ting
of disappointment that was a mother's companion.

“Why aren't you at work?”

“It's only seven forty-five here,” Ray said. “The sun is barely up. The freeways are barely jammed.”

“Don's been at work for an hour.”

“Don's a fast-tracker,” Ray said. “I'm merely a laundry czar.”

“Where did Daddy keep the key to his tackle box?” Ina asked.

“Oh—I had a premonition you were going to ask me that!”

“Smarty. You did not.”

“I did. A dream: fish, key, lures, Mom.”

“You're a mean son. Do you remember?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I thought I might go fishing,” Ina said.

Ray said nothing.

“I'm not senile. You're thinking that, but I'm not.”

“That river is pure carcinogens, Mom.”

“I'll be long gone by the time the cancer grows.”

“Please don't. For me?”

A faint stain, still damp, lay to her right in the bedding, remnants of a spilled glass of beer from the night before. She shifted her leg and felt the coolness bleed through her nightgown to touch her thigh.

“Besides, that is no place for you to go. It's full of perverts,” Ray said vehemently.

“It's not so bad. The sun is out.”

“It doesn't reach down there,” Ray said. “Please don't.”

“Without that key, I won't be able to.”

“Good. Then I won't tell you.”

“Do you know?”

“I won't tell you,” Ray said.

“This is your mother—”

“I'm opening another store,” he said.

Ina hesitated, proud of her son, but irritated at being patronized. “Tell me where the key is, then I'll take an interest in your business,” she said.

She heard Ray sigh. “I really don't know, Mom.”

“All right. How many is that now?”

“Eleven, in all. Nine here, one in Boulder, one there.”

“My cleaning giant,” she said fondly.

“Everyone's clothes get dirty.”

“Where's the new one?”

“Right by UCLA,” Ray said. “It could do more business than the other ten combined.”