Things Invisible to See

For Ilse and Howard

If thou beest borne to strange sights,

Things invisible to see
…

John Donne, “Song”

I
N PARADISE, ON THE
banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe is playing ball with His archangels. Hundreds of spheres rest like white stones on the bottom of the river, and hundreds rise like bubbles from the water and fly to His hand that alone brings things to pass and gives them their true colors. What a show! He tosses a white ball which breaks into a yellow ball which breaks into a red ball, and in the northeast corner of the Sahara Desert the sand shifts and buries eight camels. The two herdsmen escape, and in a small town in southern Michigan Wanda Harkissian goes into labor with twins. She will name them Ben and Willie, but it’s Esau and Jacob all over again.

In the damp night of the womb, when millions of chromosomes are gearing up for the game of life, the soul of Willie says to the soul of Ben, “Listen, you can be firstborn and get out of this cave first if you’ll give me everything else. Brains, charm, and good looks.”

“Who knows what looks good?” murmurs Ben.

“Okay, brains,” says Willie. “Just give me the brains and you can have everything else.”

They agree that Willie should have what the world calls brains: that is, a highly charged left hemisphere that will make him a master of languages, mathematics, and train schedules. He will be right-handed and a rich man.

To Ben go the sinister mysteries of the left hand and the dark meadows of the right hemisphere, where clocks lose their numbers and all roads lead to everywhere.

Their mother worked at the front desk of Goldberg’s Cleaners & Tailors. Their father, Aaron Harkissian, used to drive the delivery truck for Clackett’s Fine Foods.

They rented the bottom floor of the rundown duplex on Seventh Avenue from a man who lived in Detroit and had once owned Ann Arbor’s smallest funeral home on that very site. Above them, families moved in and out; the Harkissians never introduced themselves. Behind the duplex, in a jungle of sumac, bindweed, and ailanthus, you could find half a dozen sample gravestones, nameless and without ornament, if you knew where to look. At the far end of this jungle lay the boundary of South Avenue Park.

What both boys remembered about their father, before he skidded one icy morning into the path of an oncoming car to his death, was the park after supper, that last summer with him in ’31. Ben and Willie were eight. Papa would bring his glove, an old Rawlings made for a giant sloth; Ben could fit his whole face into the palm. He loved the smell of leather and sweat and that other smell he could not name which made him feel sad and powerful at the same time, the smell of games played and won by his father long before he was born, on sandlots in a town called Onaway, in northern Michigan, which furnished the rest of the world with steering wheels and said so on the sign marking the city limits.

“‘Onaway steers the world.’ That’s what it said,” laughed Papa.

Hidden in the thumb of Papa’s glove was the silver coin that had protected him all through the war, and Papa liked to tell them the story of how he’d found it. They always asked him to tell it; the jungle between South Avenue Park and Seventh Avenue was the forest in Aix, where Papa had crawled with half a dozen buddies into a trench they hadn’t dug, and the grenades were zinging over their heads and the rockets were exploding on all sides of them, and there, close to his elbow, gleamed this coin. A silver coin: a man in a winged cap on one side, a skull on the other. (In the jungle it shone on Papa’s outstretched hand like the wise eye of a magic animal.)

Private Harkissian tucked it into his pocket and fired at the invisible enemy beyond the trench.

Everything fell silent.

With a thin, whizzing cry, a single grenade rushed toward him, changed its mind, and veered sharply to the left, as if it had remembered a previous appointment.

Ben guessed Papa was right when he said that probably the man who lost the coin was dead. Papa said that if you could look Death in the eye (he brought the coin close to Ben’s face), you could challenge him to a game of poker and maybe win a reprieve. Or gin rummy. Or dirty eights, if that was the only game you knew. (It was the only game Ben knew.) He didn’t say that the coin was a powerful charm against fear, hurt, and hand grenades, but Ben grew up believing that if his father had had it in his pocket the morning his truck skidded on the ice, the coin would have saved him.

In the summer twilight that promised to go on forever, Ben and Willie and their father found seats in the half-empty bleachers in the park and watched the men work out. There were always men working out, and sometimes there were real games—Ann Arbor High against Dexter High, or Flat Rock, or Saline; or the Methodists against the Baptists, or the Broadway Rangers against the Liberty Street Badgers. It didn’t matter. They’d watch anything.

Of those evenings Ben remembered that night never came till the lights began to go on at nine, and then it came all at once, and he remembered that the ball was alive, not as he and Willie and Papa were alive but dumb, inscrutable, mischievous. The players smashed it and caught it and spit on it and they still couldn’t go to the places it went, high over the trees and out of sight. One minute you had it safe in your glove and the next minute you lost it.

Willie remembered the names of the teams and the statistics.

Walking home, they abandoned the jungle for the sidewalk. Under the friendly elms and the streetlights, Papa talked about the Tigers and why they should never have traded Fothergill to the White Sox. He talked about Hugh Jennings and Ty Cobb as if he knew them personally. And there was no end of stories he could tell about Ty Cobb taunting Cy Young.

“Now, let’s see your fastball. I could count the stitches on the last one.”

Briggs Stadium, Papa assured Ben, was a good ballpark for left-handers. And then, remembering Willie, he’d add, “Of course, it’s a good ballpark for right-handers, too.”

By the time Ben and Willie were fourteen, their teachers knew that Willie was destined for great things. Unlike Ben, he carried himself as if his presence on the planet were cause for the rest of humanity to rejoice. He had fine features and dark curly hair, short to keep the curl from showing, and he could make a cheap suit look expensive just by wearing it. He had small hands and flat feet. “Easy out, easy out,” the kids in the infield called when he came to bat. In ninth grade he gave up baseball. He said he was giving it up forever.

People said that Ben looked like his father: the same long legs, the same loping stride and easy grace in a game. Willie, they said, took after Wanda. It was kinder than saying he looked as if he came from a different family.

In school he was always making deals. My tuna for your cream cheese. My Famous Funnies for your Ace Comics. Saturdays he packed groceries for Clackett’s Fine Foods. He was ten when the banks closed in ’33, and years afterward he still didn’t trust the First National to keep his money. He saved it in fruit jars, lined up on a shelf in the wardrobe. And he kept his pennies separate from his nickels, and his nickels separate from his dimes, and his dimes at a safe remove from his quarters and half-dollars.

Paper dollars he took to the bank, for silver ones.

When his mother needed change for cigarettes, he loaned it to her at a penny a week interest. When Mr. Clackett gave him an Indian-head penny to buy gum (he never gave away his fine foods), Willie said, “It might be worth something,” and stashed it away in a fruit jar to let it ripen. He knew that time would make treasures of his trivia. His Roosevelt-Garner campaign button. His 1907 Tigers American League pennant. He took no special pleasure in Roosevelt’s victory or the Tigers’ pennant beyond the hope that someday his souvenirs “might be worth something.”

If Ben got a penny, he spent it on gum. Anything bigger went for comics, which he read to pieces and gave away. To his mother, he always seemed in the process of giving himself away, too, piece by piece. He’d lose his cap the first day of school, his jacket by the end of the first week. He never took a shirt off at the end of the day; he tore it off, and one by one the buttons grew weak and departed. No matter what size pants his mother bought him, they rode a couple of inches above his ankles. He was tall and awkward, with reddish blond hair that was all cowlick and no style. That was fine with Ben. All he asked of it was that it keep out of his eyes.

People said that Ben was good with his hands and that Willie couldn’t change a light bulb.

But at sixteen, when Willie was working the register at Clackett’s Fine Foods, Ben was no longer fixing things at Bacco’s Fix-It Land. Once Ben fixed a thing, it never ran the same way again. He fixed Mrs. Bacco’s faucet, and when she turned it on, no water came out, but she heard a man’s voice singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and she called the police. A policeman came and heard nothing, but he knocked the faucet several times and water gushed out. There were no charges and no explanations.

He fixed Mrs. Lieberman’s Hoover and it lost all appetite for dust and paper and would pick up nothing but gold. It didn’t wait for scraps to fall its way, either. Visitors complained of gold fillings vanishing from their mouths, wedding rings gliding off their fingers, and Mrs. Lieberman called a Hoover serviceman and told him to “fix it right.” Unfortunately, he fixed it shortly before she lost her gold earring—an anniversary present from her husband, who owned a jewelry store—and though the cleaning woman ran the machine hither and yon through the house, it picked up dust and paper but failed to find the earring. Then Mrs. Lieberman railed against it, and the motor died, and it sulked in the cellar like an injured suitor till she gave it to the cleaning woman, who found that it ran perfectly and gave it to her dentist in exchange for a new gold molar.

By the time he was sixteen, Willie had the worst case of insomnia his mother had ever seen. Nobody knew how much money he’d saved, but thinking what he’d save for and what he’d spend it on kept Willie awake every night for hours. On the pale green Monopoly board of his future, he bought the house they lived in and the lot behind it and he raised the smallest funeral home in Ann Arbor from the dead. Everybody died, didn’t they? Everybody needed a stone. It was a risk-free, steady-growth business, especially if you catered to the Negro clientele. Flu, diphtheria—everything hit harder on Catherine Street. And he’d insist on cash payments. None of this paying with a chicken here, a day’s labor there.

It was during his seventeenth year that Willie shed his indifference to God and started attending St. Joseph’s, which had the richest congregation in Ann Arbor. The church, a massive fortress of stone, and the parish house and the rectory faced four different streets and had the whole block between Shiawassee Avenue and Main to themselves. As the Sunday-morning custodian, Willie earned two dollars, part of which he was expected to return to the coffers of the church by way of the collection plate. He arrived an hour before the eight o’clock service, vacuumed the rector’s study and the library, brewed the coffee and set the urn and cups on the long library tables. Before the ten o’clock service he washed the cups, made a fresh pot of coffee, and set everything out once more. Though he attended both services, he could take Communion only at one of them.

“The high point of Sunday morning for all of us,” Father Legg told his parishioners, “should be the moment when the All Powerful joins with the weak and human.”

For Willie this happened not at Communion but when Father Legg, white-haired, rosy-cheeked, and slim, looked into the kitchen and praised a properly set table or a well-scrubbed sink.

“Willie, my lad, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

All this industry bred in Willie a desire to have a study as orthodox and High Church as Father Legg’s, a room that spoke of authority and good taste to those invited to enter it. On the bookshelves running the length of two walls were prayer books, hand-bound volumes of the monthly bulletin, and curios sent to Father Legg from foreign missions. A pair of tiny shoes that once belonged to a Chinese footbinder. A grain of corn from Egypt, over a thousand years old.