On those mornings, with my cheek against the glass, I imagined the soft rub of her attaché against her leg as she waited on the station platform, filled with a communal sensation of being in on a secret—a united sense of waiting to head to a common destination, and then on the train, with the attaché at her feet, the prim way she’d hold the paper, while over her shoulder old boat yards—bright blue tarps—and track detritus roared past and the river itself stayed calm and passive, blue on one day, gray on another. At the window, I anticipated the solitude of the upcoming day with Gunner for company, maybe some playtime with another kid and his mother, who would stand awkwardly as the erotic charge failed to form between us, and because of that fact we’d feel even more awkward, aware that it should form, if not a spark then at least a slight vibration of some sort as we watched and, on occasion, shouted instructive bits of information: Be careful now, not so hard, be nice, share, be good, Gunner, let her play with that. Annie, come over here and let me tie your shoe, not so hard. Or larger, more philosophical comments that covered the gamut from sharing to being kind to each other to the way the trees look against the sky, always pointing things out as a way to teach looking, to make sure they were seeing, and then, other times, encouraging them to find deeply imaginative modes—this happened mostly with a mother named Grace, who would instruct the kids to imagine elaborate pizza parlors, saying, Why don’t you cook some pizzas for me and Mr. Allison (Call me Bob, I’d say, please call me Bob) . . .
. . . again, at the window those mornings I felt the power of the city—all that culture and commerce compacted, hemmed in on all sides by water, held in to create a force powerful enough to radiate out all the way to our house, to the plot of land and the town itself, which, I imagined, was just at the edge of the force field, catching the last bits of energy before it was absorbed by the parkland to the north, the heavy stone Palisades and trees on my side of the river, and on the other side, the wide-open land and dirt roads and split-rail fences and horse stables and large estates in northern Westchester. (The field slides farther up on that side of the river, I thought at the window. There are fewer obstructions to dull its power over on that side.) At the window, I imagined Sharon entering her firm’s building near Forty-second Street, the glossy lobby with the security man up front, watching as she swiped her card. The glass partition zipped neatly open and she felt a grandness that came from her ability to pass through, while behind her messengers and visitors waited to sign in at the desk, looking somewhat distracted, holding on their faces the placid perplexity of the scrutinized, some part of them worrying the idea that a day might come when suddenly, on a big delivery or an important appointment, they’d be denied entry.
During those morning window sessions, I imagined Sharon as she entered a loaded elevator with her colleagues and felt that New York elevator pride that comes with squeezing close without annoyance, moving up into a moneymaking venture of some sort, lifted into the coffee smell of the office space, the brief hello at the reception desk . . . I imagined . . . the lovely entanglement in a web of selfsame need, risk, and obligation. Behind me in the kitchen the coffeemaker burbled and coughed.
We’re riding on an apex, I thought, standing in the yard that day, I think. We’re on a pivot. On one side is her career and her lively step out the door, while on the other is this deep solitude, with the birds still chirping madly, startling one another into a frenzy of noise, each one simply responding to the others and the others responding in kind. The afternoon light was starting to wane slightly over the water, catching riffles far out, as the smooth, wide, glossy patch near the center began to swirl itself away and waves worked themselves in, lapping the retaining wall. Then the birds seized up for a second, turned themselves into a fury of flapping, papery in nature, like long skeins of tissue being shaken out. I noticed all that as I turned to look at Gunner again. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself in any way, because I cherish these moments with my boy, delight in being with him. I relish the line I have to walk between being loving and soft and coddling one second, and the next, having to reestablish my command, or better yet, my guidance—a towering figure in his little mind—over his development at that particular point in time, I was thinking, I think. Love isn’t in the actual grab and heft of body when he comes out of school and runs into my arms, crying with glee. No. Love is the moment just as he comes out of the schoolhouse door, standing amid his friends, and searches for my eyes. Love is in the second he sees me, and I see him, dressed in one of his outrageous outfits, bright startling coats, weird hats, drooping strange pants (because we took delight in taking advantage of the fact that at that stage he had no idea what he was wearing, no sense of having to fit in, and we could get him dolled up—Sharon’s words—as cute as a button). That’s what love is, I thought each time I went to the school to pick him up. Then, as I lifted him and felt his weight, the purity of the moment vanished, and I would smell the stale, tart odor under his collar while he smelled, I suppose, the smoke and coffee on my breath and something else that later, at some point, perhaps even in memory, he would recognize as the first hints of decay.
The birds flew over the water and got about a quarter of the way across the river and then, suddenly, swooped in a wide arc back around toward the Thompsons’ trees again, catching up with one another in a teardrop, diverting me from Gunner, who, when he caught my attention again, was striking straight for the wall and the water. His tiny shrill cries mixed with the wind. In the compressed intensity of the moment, the birds were gone. The tide had shifted, heading down toward the city.
You’re getting the chair, I said, stop. No more warnings, I yelled as I charged down the hill. He was way ahead of me, of course, and in a moment he’d be at the wall and starting—naturally—his tiptoe tightrope walk along the structure, testing his own sense of balance and fear as it relates to the drop and the water below. (In the summer I’d lower him down to the beach, feeling his shoulder and joints and tiny chest at the tip of my fingers. Then we’d sit on an old pickle bucket and fish.) In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance at glory of a sort, perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember. But he was at the wall, wobbling along, and then he tumbled backward, throwing his arms up in the air.
That’s it, I said. That’s it, Gunner. No more warnings. (Half thinking that perhaps this was actually my fourth warning, and that he’d long forgotten the first one, a few hours ago, before we went to preschool.) Across the river on the Westchester side, a train charged up the tracks like a sliver of glass, and when the wind died I heard not only Gunner’s giggles, as he swayed, but also the deep rumble of the diesel express that would go past Ossining, past Croton, and all the way up to Poughkeepsie, and I felt, hearing it, a sorrow that came not only of my inability to get to him on time but also something much deeper—I’d later think—that had to do with the fact that as he fell over the wall, he fell back with his eyes wide, terrorized by the way his balance had defied him.
Then I got to the wall and looked down and saw that the tide was still coming in and he was lying on his side in a few inches of water, with a shawl of wet, black sand around his collar, and his socks muddy, and his eyes guilty but also comic, looking up at me, establishing a long, sustained moment of good eye contact. Keep looking, I thought. Don’t ever stop. Continue to look at me like that for the rest of time, I think I thought. Then the fear that had began to form when I was halfway down the yard caught up, pure, sharp, and eternal in form, and struck me under the ribs. I was weeping softly as I lowered myself down to help him, lifting my palms and supporting his feet so he could clamber over the wall.
Then he stood atop it and looked down at me, his old man, as I wiped my eyes. He was looking down at a bright red face, bewhiskered and ruddy. A mouth moving on that face was saying, That’s it. You’re in the chair. It’s the chair for you, lit
tle man. No snack. Just the chair. I mean it. I gave you three, at least, maybe four warnings, the mouth kept saying. You’re damn lucky the tide wasn’t all the way up. Meanwhile, the day had folded into itself and combined with the terror to become vivid and pristine and perfect. Across the river the train was gone.
Then, as the wind roared along the Palisades at Hook Mountain and took on a northerly bite, as night began to descend upon the water and the tidal flow established itself in a southerly direction, working firmly past the bridge pylons, churning up white Vs, my son leaned and offered his hands to help me over the wall, and the air between us, before we actually touched, filled with an astonishingly pure love. It was there for a few seconds, and then it vanished, and I took him into the house to the chair, where I told him to sit until Sharon came home.
He resisted, squirming from the chair, but I insisted, saying, Sit there and wait until your mother gets home. Your time’s not up. Your time’s not even close to being up.
STEVEN MILLHAUSER
A Voice in the Night
FROM The New Yorker
I
THE BOY SAMUEL wakes in the dark. Something’s not right. Most commentators agree that the incident takes place inside the temple, rather than in a tent outside the temple doors, under the stars. Less certain is whether Samuel’s bed is in the sanctuary itself, where the Ark of the Covenant stands before a seven-branched oil lamp that is kept burning through the night, or in an adjoining chamber. Let’s say that he is lying in an inner chamber, close to the sanctuary, perhaps adjacent to it. A curtained doorway leads to the chamber of Eli, the high priest of the temple of Shiloh. We like such details, but they do not matter. What matters is that Samuel wakes suddenly in the night. He is twelve years old, according to Flavius Josephus, or he may be a year or two younger. Something has startled him awake. He hears it again, clearly this time: “Samuel!” Eli is calling his name. What’s wrong? Eli never calls his name in the middle of the night. Did Samuel forget to close the temple doors at sunset, did he allow one of the seven flames of the lamp to go out? But he remembers it well: pushing shut the heavy doors of cedar, visiting the sanctuary and replenishing the seven gold branches with consecrated olive oil so that the flames will burn brightly all night long. “Samuel!” He flings aside his goat’s-hair blanket and hurries, almost runs, through the dark. He pushes through the curtain and enters Eli’s chamber. The old man is lying on his back. Because he is the high priest of the temple of Shiloh, his mattress on the wooden platform is stuffed with wool, not straw. Eli’s head rests on a pillow of goat’s hair and his long-fingered hands lie crossed on his chest, beneath his white beard. His eyes are closed. “You called me,” Samuel says, or perhaps his words are “Here am I; for thou calledst me.” Eli opens his eyes. He seems a little confused, like a man roused from sleep. “I didn’t call you,” he answers. Or perhaps, with a touch of gruffness, since he doesn’t like being awakened in the night: “I called not; lie down again.” Samuel turns obediently away. He walks back to his chamber, where he lies down but doesn’t close his eyes. In his years of attending Eli he’s come to understand a great deal about the temple and its rules, and he tries to understand this night as well. Is it possible that Eli called his name without knowing it? The priest is old, sometimes he makes noises with his lips in his sleep, or mutters strange words. But never once has he called Samuel in the night. Has Samuel had a dream, in which a voice called out his name? Only recently he dreamed that he was walking alone through the parted waters of the Red Sea. Shimmering cliffs of water towered up on both sides, and as the watery walls began to plunge down on him he woke with a cry. From outside the walls of the temple he hears the high-pitched wail of a young sheep. Slowly Samuel closes his eyes.
II
It’s a summer night in Stratford, Connecticut, 1950. The boy, seven years old, lies awake in his bed on the second floor, under the two screened windows that look down on his backyard. Through the windows he can hear the sound of summer: the chk chk chk of crickets from the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge. For donkeys it’s hee-haw, for roosters it’s cock-a-doodle-doo, but for crickets you have to make up your own sound. Sometimes a car passes on the street alongside the yard, throwing two rectangles of light across the dark ceiling. The boy thinks the rectangles are the shapes of the open windows under the partially raised blinds, but he isn’t sure. He’s listening: hard. That afternoon in his Sunday school class at the Jewish Community Center, Mrs. Kraus read the story of the boy Samuel. In the middle of the night a voice called out his name: “Samuel! Samuel!” He was an attendant of the high priest and lived in the temple of Shiloh, without his parents. When he heard his name, Samuel thought the high priest was calling him. Three times in the night he heard his name, three times he went to the bedside of Eli. But it was the voice of the Lord calling him. The boy in Stratford is listening for his name in the night. The story of Samuel has made him nervous, tense as a cat. The slightest sound stiffens his whole body. He never thinks about the old man with a beard on the front of his Child’s Illustrated Old Testament, but now he’s wondering. What would his voice be like? His father says God is a story that people made up to explain things they don’t understand. When his father speaks about God to company at dinner, his eyes grow angry and gleeful behind his glasses. But the voice in the night is as scary as witches. The voice in the night knows you’re there, even though you’re hidden in the dark. If the voice calls your name, you have to answer. The boy imagines the voice calling his name. It comes from the ceiling, it comes from the walls. It’s like a terrible touch, all over his body. He doesn’t want to hear the voice, but if he hears it he’ll have to answer. You can’t get out of it. He pulls the covers up to his chin and thinks of the walls of water crashing down on the Egyptians, on their chariots and horses. Through the window screens the crickets seem to be growing louder.
III
The Author is sixty-eight years old, in good health, most of his teeth, half his hair, not dead yet, though lately he hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s always been a light sleeper, the slightest sound jostles him awake, but this is different: he falls asleep with a book on his chest, then wakes up for no damn reason and strains his neck to look at the green glow of his digital clock, where it’s always some soul-crushing time like 2:16 or 3:04 in the miserable morning. Hell time, abyss time, the hour of no return. He wonders whether he should turn on his bedside lamp, try to read a little, relax, but he knows the act of switching on the light will wake him up even more, and besides, there’s the problem of what to read when you wake up at two or three in the godforsaken morning. If he reads something that interests him he’ll excite his mind and ruin his chance for sleep, but if he reads something that bores him he’ll become impatient, restless, and incapable of sleep. Better to lie there and curse his fate, like a man with a broken leg lying in a ditch. He listens to the sounds of the dark: hsssh of a passing car, mmmm of a neighbor’s air conditioner, skriiik of a floorboard in the attic—a resident ghost. Things drift through your mind at doom-time in the morning, and as he listens he thinks of the boy in the house in Stratford, the bed by the two windows, the voice in the night. He thinks of the boy a lot these days, sometimes with irritation, sometimes with a fierce love that feels like sorrow. The boy tense, whipped up, listening for a voice in the night. He feels like shouting at the boy, driving some sense into that head of his. Oil your baseball glove! Jump on your bike! Do chin-ups on the swing set! Make yourself strong! But why yell at the boy? What’d he ever do to you? Better to imagine the voice calling right here, right now: Hello, old atheist, have I got news for you. Sorry, pal. Don’t waste your time. You should’ve made your pitch when I was seven. Had the boy really expected to hear his name in the night? So long ago: Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders on the radio, his father at dinner attacking McCarthy. War in Korea, the push to Pusan. Those old stories got to you: Joseph in the pit, the parting of the Red Sea, David soothing the soul of Saul with his harp. In Cath
olic working-class Stratford, he was the only boy who didn’t make the sign of the cross when they passed Holy Name Church on the way to school. Girls with smudges of ash on their foreheads. His God-scorning father driving him to Sunday school but taking him home when the others went to Hebrew class. No bar mitzvah for him. His father mocking his own rabbi for making boys jabber words they didn’t understand. “Pure gibberish.” A new word: gibberish. He liked it: gibberish. Still: Sunday school, “Rock of Ages,” the story of Samuel, why is this night different from all other nights. The boy lying there listening, wanting his name to be called. Had he wanted his name to be called? Through the window the Author hears the sound of a distant car, the cry of the crickets. Sixty years later, upstate New York, and still the cry of the crickets in the summer in Stratford. Time to sleep, old man.