“Nothing.”
“You like rivers?”
“I like rivers.”
“You like the Point?”
“Sure, Terkel.”
“Studs Terkel,” he says, putting two and two together. “I like the man.
The Good War.
But I don't know why, exactly, you're calling me by his name. Would you like to explain that, sister?”
“No,” I say, and he throws his head back for a laugh.
We drive to the Point, the place in Pittsburgh where the three rivers meet.
On the way down to the river he asks me why I want to get drunk, what was I trying to forget, and I tell him. He nods, hardly saying a word, and I suspect I sound trite and pathetic.
“Subtle rewards will be yours,” he says, mysteriously.
After that, we're quiet. We find a bench in the dark by the black river. He pours us rum and coke in yellow plastic cups.
“So tell me about yourself, Studs.”
“Absolutely not. It's my least favorite subject.”
I laugh, and he smiles over at me. For the first time, I see something in his face that looks like wisdom.
We watch a slow black barge push its way downstream.
“We could be quiet together all night like this. You ever been quiet with someone before?”
I laugh nervously and say I guess I haven't.
“Whatta ya think? Give it a shot?”
I shrug. A wave of loneliness comes over me. I don't want to be quiet. I want great talk. I want an old man's story, unraveling in my heart, distracting me, carrying me away.
But it's like he pulls silence down from the sky and covers us up. I feel suddenly that even if I wanted to speak, I couldn't. Or that if I did, the words would vanish in the air before their meaning could be felt. I'm afraid. I close my eyes and swallow down a sense of rising panic. Maybe he's crazy, this old wizard who pulled silence over the top of us like a see-through circus tent.
Maybe he'll throw me in the river, and then things will be even quieter.
No. This family bum exudes warmth. Settle down. Breathe.
I can hear the wind in the trees, the distant sound of traffic, the slap of the river against the bank, and his breathing, and my own breathing, and a sound like the moon's heartbeat. After a while passes I hear the rum pouring into a plastic cup, followed by coke. I take the cup and realize I would rather jump in the river myself than say “thank you” and tear the fabric of this silence.
Even my mind grows silent. Or nearly so. Maybe every so often Henry skates by, the sound of the blade sharp and disruptive. But out here by the river with this silence he seems infinitely smaller.
Maybe we're almost meditating.
We breathe, we look at the river, we breathe. The sky opens up, gets bigger and brighter. We don't shift our posture. We don't fall asleep. In fact I feel radiantly awake.
A long time passes before he stands up. I stand up after him and then we walk back to the car. We listen to our footsteps crunching over half-frozen ground. He wears old brown boots.
In the car the silence is more intense, like we're indeed underwater, but still breathing magically, easily. He drives us to his apartment in a neighborhood called Swissvale, across from a little bowling alley. I once bowled there in high school with a boy named Sam Stein whose ambition was to be mayor. I remember how at the time it seemed incredible to me that Sam could imagine himself in such a position. My ambition at that time was to somehow survive high school.
On the old man's front porch the little bowling alley looks like a dream.
Upstairs he gets eight glasses and sets them on the table, then pours ice water into them from a jug. We each drink four, smiling now, understanding that neither of us will be the first to speak.
He shows me to a bed on what used to be called a sleeping porch. The kind of porch you find sometimes at the seashore, in the front of the house, with windows that swing open. In the corner of the sleeping porch is a card table, a deck of cards, and a little lamp. He plugs in a space heater. A statue of Mary is on the windowsill. My mother once had one like it.
He leaves me alone.
I sleep well, under a heavy red plaid quilt that smells like earth.
In the very early morning I hear him in the kitchen.
Will we talk? Will the family bum persona come back, the one I'd met just last night in the yard? And will I return too, with my voice shot full of yearning?
He turns and hands me coffee, cocks his head toward the door. Then I'm in my coat, following him down the steps and out into the cold so he can drive me home.
Before I get out of the car we grip each other's hands, and for a moment breathe in what feels like perfect unison.
The morning is cold, clear, a streak of red in the sky. The streak has a sound I could never describe.
For a moment I hesitate. I almost say, “Will you call me?” or “Can we be quiet again together sometime?” But I know, somehow, this is not to be repeated.
He lets go of my hands, smiles, and I stand and watch him drive away.
How lit with grace the world seems nowâfor these few moments by the curb where the sky shines red through the black arms of a bare tree, on a cold Christmas morning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the year 2000.
What happened? What kind of magician was that family bum?
I get into bed. This life is big.
W
ERE YOU A THOUGHTFUL SORT
seated with the pastor's brother at a long table of strangers one evening, he would likely draw your eye, though at sixty-two he was a man who liked to keep his profile low. The years of struggling to make a name for himself as a cabinetmaker were over. It was known that he was the best. He not only worked beautifully with wood, but carved intricate designs that recalled the meticulous beauty of other centuries.
He was soft-spoken, and his dark eyes were both kind and excessively vigilant. He was one-quarter Cherokee; it showed up in his bone structure, and years ago, in his night-black hair. He dressed in shades of brown or dark green, and had finally cut his ponytail in order to cultivate more privacy. The ponytail had invited too many people to approach him to ask whether he was Willy Nelson, or Willy Nelson's brother. In the old days he'd played along with this, made up stories about what Willy was like when he was a kid. “He and I would jump trains at night, back when America was more trains and fields than cars and lawyers.”
The pastor's brother really had hopped into boxcars long ago, but was now relieved to live a life whose confines he knew well. Despite arthritis he worked with his wood, he taught cabinetmaking at the community college and woodworking at the local arts center, and had mentored young people for decades. He loved his wife, Rachel, and after twenty-six years of marriage was capable of believing that he was loved by her in return.
His daughter, Maria, lived in Oakland, California. She was an exâdrug addict apocalypse artist who sent him homemade cards revealing a streak of insane humor that scared him. She would feature President Bush dressed like a sexy waitress asking idiotic-looking customers in patriotic T-shirts, “How would you like your end-time sirloin cooked?” Everything was
end-time
with Maria. He tried not to think of her too often, but in his town a handful of minivans were adorned with bumper stickers that said
Warning: In case of rapture this vehicle will be unmanned.
That was a particularly annoying symbol of end-time wackiness, and wasn't Maria smart enough to know that end-time crap had existed since first-time? He knew the answer to that. She was smart enough, certainly, but something somewhere had gone wrong with her. “She came into the world with her screws loose, and that's how she'll leave it,” his father had once remarked. His brother, the pastor, had defended her. “She's a good kid,” he'd said. “We don't know the whole story. Give her time.”
He loved his brother fiercely for those kinds of moments, despite all the Christianity, which he felt was an insult to their Cherokee grandfather, a figure who'd been inexplicably crucial to him as a child, a man who'd lived in a tiny house that had been flooded by the river's rising. He remembered himself as a small boy swimming through those ruined rooms, his grandfather's rocky laughter dancing in the water. The two of them sat together in a chair later that evening in a neighbor's house, listening to a ball game on the radio. How, he'd wondered later, could certain Christians in the wide, taut net of his family condemn a man who knew how to sit with a boy in a chair and listen to a ball game the very night his house gets flooded, the very night he loses the nothing he'd had? What kind of religion would exclude a man like him?
Back at the table of strangers, you'd also notice how the pastor's brother had dark eyes gently regarding whoever spoke to him; you'd see how generously he listened, nodding, smiling, making whoever talked with him feel utterly at ease. In fact, had he not been assertively male in appearance, he would've seemed almost womanly in this regard. He had none of the usual male discomfort in the face of talk; he didn't sit back and cross his arms over his chest, he didn't let his eyes wander around the room, nor did he interrupt, or ever try to dominate a conversation. He had such a deep sense of human vulnerability this listening was actually hard work; you could catch him wincing on occasion. These qualities, innate tendencies that had deepened thanks to a troubled daughter, made others value his presence and think of him as the salt of the earth.
One winter night when he was listening to NPR's account of the Muslims and Hindus killing each other in India, the pastor called.
They hadn't spoken since Christmas, and that had been a short, friendly talk, involving neither of their wives, who in past years had hung on downstairs phones trying to do a four-way chat, which the pastor's brother had always found excruciating. It wasn't just that he happened to be a born phone hater, the sort who gets lonelier and restless having to hear the disembodied human voice leaking out of a plastic receiver; it was that his wife, Rachel, on the other phone would laugh in a way that seemed reserved for the pastor alone. And something behind his breastbone would rise like hair on a cat's back, until he'd break in with “Why don't we talk one at a time,” and they'd ignore him. He would then feel trapped by that familiar sense of isolation experienced most exquisitely when his brother and his wife addressed each other. His face burned with a humiliating jealousy; he would go and press his forehead against the window.
He was grateful that the calls lasted no more than twenty minutes or so. Then relieved when the pastor had grown so busy with his inner-city congregation years ago, more passionately committed than ever. The pastor and his wife, Claire, had almost no time to come visit after that. Claire was soft-spoken, a first-generation Latvian with warm blue eyes and an ability to quote long Latvian poems that seemed to always include wet brick streets. Quietly insightful, intelligent and somewhat melancholy by nature, she was an old friend by now, but too often during their visits, the pastor's brother would be
pretending
to talk to Claire, when really he'd be listening rapaciously to the conversation going on across the room, the ones where the pastor and Rachel would somehow fit Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Coltrane, and Celtic myths into the same conversation. The ones that transformed his wife (beauty almost aggressively residing in her face as she listened), and to a lesser extent transformed the pastor too, though Claire and the rest of the world had never bothered to notice. He felt stranded during these times, and because in his heart he knew his daughter, Maria, lived her entire life feeling stranded, he'd turn to her in memory, aching for that little girl she'd been, crouched in the tree fort out back, curlyhaired with a tinge of wild light in her green eyes, her smiling lips a secret, her sandals and a worn blue dress she wore like a uniform: The images seared. When he felt like that he'd write her a letter so imbued with nostalgia he always ripped it up a few hours later, despising its sentimentality. For all she knew, he was a calm and ordinary father, often monosyllabic on the telephone. Every so often sending her a check.
The pastor's call came just as he decided to turn the radio off.
“Tim?” The pastor's voice was like their father's: deep, warm. Tim's own voice seemed by contrast thin, higher pitched.
“Hey, John!”
“I've got news.” Tim stood at the front door watching it snow; his narrow street was wonderfully white in the lavender light of evening. He still loved snow, after all these years. Still loved the way it erased edges in the town's neglected streets. Loved it in his wife's hair, in his dog's sleek black coat, in his own hands when he packed it into a ball to throw. “What's up?” he said, and imagined another grandchild had come into the world. The pastor had five grandchildren already, all with biblical names like Ruth and Noah, the oldest one a great violinist.
“I'm retiring.”
“Retiring? You're kidding!”
“Hey, I'll be sixty-five.”
“But you'reâyou're in the middle of things! You can't retire! You're young!”
“I'm two months from sixty-five, brother.”
Tim had broken out into a sweat; they would have to go to Pittsburgh, they would go to the retirement party, they would go stay in the old house, the one his wife loved, they would stay for a week, and now Tim stepped outside onto the front stoop and waved at a neighbor child, a fat little thing in a blue coat and squeaky snow pants making tracks in the street. The child waved back, his face red and plump like an illustration, quaint like something Tim and his brother would have seen way back in the forties in Nebraska, where their mother had called them in from the lace-curtained kitchen window, long before John had blossomed into the spiritual man he was, long before he'd gone to Harvard Divinity School and made the entire family so proud they'd made Tim his shadow. Somebody had to be the shadow! They hadn't been emotionally sophisticated; in those days, who was? Tim hardly blamed them. In fact, he felt his own memories as clichés: Look at the brother, the pale one in the corner whose spark you can't see when the older brother is in the room. The older brother with his wide, freethinker mind (like his professor uncle) and his enormous heart (like his mother) and his quicksilver way of making everyone laugh with a one-liner. Tim was so serious, they thought, so burdened by his own jumbled thoughts and hopelessly inarticulate and emotional. (Beautiful music made him weep like a girl; he had learned to run and hide.) “A bit of the solipsist in that one,” his uncle had once declared, but that was far from the truth; it was the world that interested Tim, and had there been a magic pill in those days to take the
self
out of his self, he'd have taken it more often than not. He often imagined that everything wrong with his daughter was a gnarled weed sprung from the soil of his own twisted genes.