Dictation (18 page)

"A family member? There aren't any around here, there's only me."

"He goes every Thursday, I guess to see his wife."

"His ex-wife. He's been divorced for years."

"Well,
he
didn't want that divorce, did he? He's a man who
likes
being affectionate—maybe not to you. He gives back what he's given, that's why, and believe me he doesn't need you to turn up with your smelly old veggies once in a blue moon." Behind her the mob was breaking up. It was distracted, it was annoyed, it was impatient, it was uprooted, it was stretching its limbs. It was growling, and not in the universal tongue. "Just look what you've done," Annette accused, "barging in like that. We were doing so beautifully, and now you've broken the spell."

Circumspectly, I wrote the news to my mother. I had been to Simon's flat, I said, and things were fine. They were boiling away. His old life had nicely recommenced: he had a whole new set of enthusiasts. His work was reaching the next generation; he even had an agent to help him out. I did not tell her that I hadn't in fact
seen
Simon, and I didn't dare hint that he might be courting Essie again: wasn't that what Annette had implied? Nor did I confess that I had unwrapped the fifty-dollar bill and kept it for myself. I had no right to it; it couldn't count as a commission. I had done nothing for Simon. I had failed my mother's charge.

My mother's reply was long in coming. In itself this was odd enough: I had expected an instant happy outcry. With lavish deception I had depicted Simon's triumphant renewal, the future of GNU assured, crowds of mesmerized and scholarly young people streaming to his lectures—several of which, I lied, were held in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, at the very lectern Lincoln himself had once sanctified.

And it was only Annette, it was only the Village revolving on its fickle wheel: soon the mob would be spinning away to the next curiosity.

But my mother was on a wheel of her own. She was whirling on its axle, and Simon was lately at the distant perimeter. Her languorously sweeping Palmer arches were giving way to crabbed speed. She was out of time, she informed me, she had no time, no time at all, it was good to hear that Simon was doing well, after all these years he was finally recovered from that fool Essie, that witch who had always kept him down, but so much was happening, happening so fast, the gallery was flooded with all these tourists crazy for crafts, the place was wild, she was exhausted, she'd had to hire help, and meanwhile, she said, your father decided to retire, it was all to the good, she needed him in the gallery, and yes, he had his little pension, that was all right, never mind that it was beside the point, there was so much stock and it sold so fast that she'd had to buy the building next door to store whatever came in, and what came in went out in a day, and your father, can you imagine, was keeping the books and calling himself Comptroller, she didn't care what he called himself, they were importing like mad, all these kachina dolls from Japan, they certainly
look
like the real thing, the customers don't know the difference anyhow...

It seemed she was detaching herself from Simon. The kachinas had freed her. I was not sorry that I had deceived her; hadn't she taught me how to deceive? For my part, I had no desire to look after Simon. He was hokum. He was snake oil. What may have begun as a passion had descended into a con. Simon's utopia was now no more than a Village whim, and Annette its volatile priestess. But what had Essie, sewing her old eyes out in the lint-infested back room of a neighborhood haberdashery, to do with any of it—on Thursdays or any other day? She had thrown him out, and for reason. I surmised that along with Simon's infidelities she had thrown out her fidelity to GNU. How many strapping young Annettes had he cosseted over the decades?

I did not go back to Simon's place. I did what I could to chuck him out of my thoughts—but there were reminders and impediments. My mother in her galloping prosperity had taken to sending large checks. The money was no longer for Simon, she assured me; I had satisfied her that he was launched on what, in my telling, was a belated yet flowering career. The money was for me: for tuition and rent and textbooks, of course, but also for new dresses and shoes, for the movies, for treats. With each check—they were coming now in scrappy but frequent maternal rushes—Simon poked a finger in my eye. He invaded, he abraded, he gnawed. I began to see that I would never be rid of him. Annette and her mob would drop him. He would fall from her eagle's claws directly into my unwilling hands. And still I would not go back.

Instead I went down into the subway at Astor Place (where, across a broad stretch of intersection, loomed my lie: the venerable red brick of Cooper Union), and headed for the Bronx and Essie. I found her where time had left her, in apartment 2-C on the second floor of the old walkup. It was not surprising that she did not recognize me. We had last met when I was twelve and a half; emulating my mother, I had been reliably rude.

"You're who?" She peered warily through the peephole. On my side I saw a sad brown eye startled under its drooping hood.

"It's Phyllis," I said. "Ruby and Dan's daughter. From down the block."

"They left the neighborhood years ago. I don't know where they went. Ask somebody else."

"Essie, it's
Phyllis,"
I repeated. "My mother used to take me to hear Uncle Simon."

She let me in then, and at the same time let out the heavy quick familiar sigh I instantly recognized: as if some internal calipers had pinched her lung. She kept her look on me fixedly yet passively, like someone sitting in a movie house, waiting for the horses on the screen to rear up.

"How about that, Simon's cousin's kid," she said. "Your mother never liked me."

"Oh no, I remember how she admired your singing—"

"She admired Simon. She thought he was the cat's pajamas. Like every other female he ever got near, the younger the better. I wouldn't put it past him if he had some girlie in his bed right now, wherever he is."

"But he comes to see you, and he wouldn't if he didn't want to be"—I struggled for the plainest word—"together. Reconciled, I mean. At his age. Now that he's ... older."

"He comes to see me? Simon?" The horses reared up in her eyes. "Why would he want to do that after all this time?"

I had no answer for this. It was what I had endured an hour or more in the subway to find out. If Simon could be restored to Essie, then—as Annette had pronounced—things would go back to the way they once were. The Tower of Babel had nothing to do with it; it was rather a case of Damocles' sword, Simon's future dangling threateningly over mine. I wanted him back in the Bronx. I wanted him reinstalled in 2-C. I wanted Essie to claim him.

Her rooms had the airless smell of the elderly. They were hugely overfurnished—massive, darkly oiled pieces, china figurines on every surface. A credenza was littered with empty bobbins and crumpled-up tissue paper. An ancient sewing machine with a wrought-iron treadle filled half a wall; the peeling bust of a mannequin was propped against it. In the bedroom a radio was playing; through spasms of static I heard fragments of opera. Though it was a mild Sunday afternoon in early May, all the windows were shut—despite which, squads of flies were licking their feet along the flanks of the sugar bowl. The kitchen table (Essie had led me there) was covered with blue-flowered oilcloth, cracked in places, so that the canvas lining showed through. I waved the flies away. They circled just below the ceiling for an idling minute, then hurled themselves against the panes like black raindrops. The smell was the smell of stale changelessness.

Essie persisted, "Simon hasn't been here since never mind how long it is. Since the divorce. He never comes."

"Not on Thursdays?" The question hung in all its foolishness. "I heard he goes to visit family, so I thought—"

"I'm not Simon's family, not anymore. I told you, I haven't seen him in years. Where would you get an idea like that?"

"From ... his assistant. He has an assistant now. A kind of manager. She sets up his meetings."

"His manager, his assistant, that's what he calls them. Then he goes out and diddles them. And how come he's still having those so-called meetings? Who's paying the bills?" She coughed out a disordered laugh that was half a viscous sigh. "Those famous Park Avenue moneybags?"

The laugh was too big for her body. Her bones had contracted, leaving useless folds of puckered fallen skin. Her hands were horribly veined.

"Listen, girlie," she said, "Simon doesn't come, nobody comes. I do a fitting for a neighbor, I sew up a hem, I put in a pocket, that's who comes. A bunch of the old Esperantists used to show up, this was when Simon left, but then it stopped. By now they're probably dead. The whole thing is dead. It's a wonder Simon isn't dead."

The flies had settled back on the sugar bowl. I stood up to leave. Nothing could be clearer: there would be no reconciliation. 2-C would not see Simon again.

But Essie was pulling at my sleeve. "Don't think I don't know where he goes anyhow. Maybe not Thursdays, who could figure Thursdays, but every week he goes there. He always goes there, it never stops."

"Where?"

I asked it reluctantly. Was she about to plummet me into a recitation of Simon's history of diddlings? Did she think me an opportune receptacle for an elderly divorcée's sour old grievances?

"Why should I tell you where? What have you got to do with any of it? Simon never told your mother, he never told anyone, so why should I tell
you?
Sit down," she commanded. "You want something to drink? I've got Coca-Cola."

The bottle had been opened long ago. The glass was smudged. I felt myself ensnared by a desolate hospitality. Having got what I came for—or not having got it—I wanted to hear nothing more.

But she had my arm in her grip. "At my time of life I'm not still squatting down there in the back room of somebody's pants store, you understand? I've got my own little business, I do my fittings right here in my own dining room. The point is I'm someone who can make a living. I could always make a living. My God, your mother was gullible! What wouldn't she believe, she swallowed it all."

My mother gullible? She who was at that very hour gulling her tourists into buying Pueblo artifacts factory-made in Japan?

"If you mean she believed in Simon—"

"She believed everything." She released me then, and sank into a deflecting whisper. "She believed what happened to the baby."

So it was not simple grievance that I took from Essie that afternoon. It was broader and deeper and wilder and stranger. And what she was deflecting—what she was repudiating as trivia and trifle, as pettiness and quibble—was Simon and his diddlings. He had his girlies—his assistants, his managers—and for all she cared, staring me down, wasn't I one of them? No, he wouldn't go so far as his cousin's kid, and even if he did, so what? It hardly interested her anyhow that I was his cousin's kid, the offspring of a simple-minded woman, an imbecile who would believe anything, who swallowed it all, a chump for any hocus-pocus...

"Ruby had her kid," she said—torpidly, as though reciting an algebraic equation—"she had
you,
and by then what did I have? An empty crib, and then nothing, nothing, empty—"

When I left Essie four hours later, I knew what had happened to the baby. At Astor Place I ascended, parched and hungry, from the subway's dark into the dark of nine o'clock: she had offered me nothing but that stale inch of Coke. Instead she had talked and talked, loud and low, in her mouselike whisper, too often broken into by her big coarse bitter croak of a laugh. It
was
a joke, she assured me, it was a joke and a trick, and now I would know what a gullible woman my mother was, how easy it was to deceive her; how easy it was to trick the whole world. She clutched at me, she made me her muse, she gave me her life. She made me
see,
and why? Because her child was dead and I was not, or because my mother was a gullible woman, or because there were flies in the room? Who could really tell why? I had fallen in on her out of the blue, out of the ether, out of the past (it wasn't
my
past, I hadn't come to be anyone's muse, I had only come to dispose of Simon): I was as good, for giving out her life, as a fly on the wall. And did I want her to sing? She could still sing some stanzas in GNU, she hadn't forgotten how.

I did not ask her to sing. She had hold of me with her fingernails in my flesh, as if I might escape. She drew me back, back, into her young womanhood, when she was newly married to Simon, with Retta already two months in the womb and Simon in his third year at City College, far uptown, dreaming of philology, that funny-sounding snobby stuff (as if a boy from the Bronx could aspire to such goings-on!), unready for marriage and fatherhood, and seriously unwilling. And that was the first of all the jokes, because finally the other boy, the one from Cincinnati who was visiting his aunt (the aunt lived around the corner), and who met Essie in the park every night for a week, went home to Ohio ... She didn't tell Simon about that other boy, the curly-haired boy who pronounced all his
r
's the midwestern way; even under the wedding canopy Simon had no inkling of the Ohio boy. He believed only that he was behaving as a man should behave who has fathered a child without meaning to. It was the first of all the jokes, the first of all the tricks, but the joke was on herself too, since she was just as much in the dark as anyone: was Retta's papa the Ohio boy, or Simon? Simon had to leave school then, and went to work as a salesman in a men's store on East Tremont Avenue. Essie had introduced him to her boss; she was adept with a needle, and had already been shortening trousers and putting in pleats and letting out waists for half a year.

Their first summer they did what in those days all young couples with new babies did. They fled the burning Bronx sidewalks, they rented a
kochaleyn
in the mountains, in one of those Catskill bungalow colonies populated by musty one-room cottages set side by side, no more than the width of a clothes line between them. Every cottage had its own little stove and icebox and tiny front porch. The mothers and babies spent July and August in the shade of green leaves, among wild tiger lilies as orange as the mountain sunsets, and the fathers came up from the city on weekends, carrying bundles of bread and rolls and oily packets of pastries and smoked whitefish. It was on one of these weekends that Essie decided to tell Simon the joke about the baby, it was so much on her mind, and she thought it would be all right to tell him now because he liked the baby so much, he was mad about Retta, and the truth is the truth, so why not? She had been brought up to tell the truth, even if sometimes the truth is exactly like a joke.