Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.”

  The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.

  I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”

  It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

  So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

  The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.

  He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

  “All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”

  He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you.

  You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

  So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

  “Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

  I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV

  station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

  “Doing fine,” the blind man said.

  I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

  My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said,

  “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”

  My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

  “It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.

  I did it. I closed them just like he said.

  “Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”

  “They’re closed,” I said.

  “Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”

  So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

  Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?”

  But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

  “Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”

  My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

  “It’s really something,” I said.

  A Small, Good Thing

  Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry. She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for the child’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age—a man old enough to be her father—must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her—not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end; and beside the table a metal container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was playing country-Western music.

  The baker finished printing the information on the special order card and closed up the binder. He looked at her and said, “Monday morning.” She thanked him and drove home.

  On Monday morning, the birthday boy was walking to school with another boy. They were passing a bag of potato chips back and forth and the birthday boy was trying to find out what his friend intended to give him for his birthday that afternoon. Without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb at an intersection and was immediately knocked down by a car. He fell on his side with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road. His eyes were closed, but his legs moved back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something. His friend dropped the potato chips and started to cry. The car had gone a hundred feet or so and stopped in the middle of the road. The man in the driver’s seat looked back over his shoulder. He waited until the boy got unsteadily to his feet. The boy wobbled a little. He looked dazed, but okay. The driver put the car into gear and drove away.

  The birthday boy didn’t cry, but he didn’t have anything to say about anything either. He wouldn’t answer when his friend asked him what it felt like to be hit by a car. He walked home, and his friend went on to school. But after the birthday boy was inside his house and was telling his mother about it-she sitting beside him on the sofa, holding his hands in her lap, saying, “Scotty, honey, are you sure you feel all right, baby?” thinking she would call the doctor anyway—he suddenly lay back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and went limp. When she couldn’t wak
e him up, she hurried to the telephone and called her husband at work. Howard told her to remain calm, remain calm, and then he called an ambulance for the child and left for the hospital himself.

  Of course, the birthday party was canceled. The child was in the hospital with a mild concussion and suffering from shock. There’d been vomiting, and his lungs had taken in fluid which needed pumping out that afternoon. Now he simply seemed to be in a very deep sleep—but no coma, Dr. Francis had emphasized, no coma, when he saw the alarm in the parents’ eyes. At eleven o’clock that night, when the boy seemed to be resting comfortably enough after the many X-rays and the lab work, and it was just a matter of his waking up and coming around, Howard left the hospital. He and Ann had been at the hospital with the child since that afternoon, and he was going home for a short while to bathe and change clothes. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. She nodded. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be right here.” He kissed her on the forehead, and they touched hands.

  She sat in the chair beside the bed and looked at the child. She was waiting for him to wake up and be all right. Then she could begin to relax.

  Howard drove home from the hospital. He took the wet, dark streets very fast, then caught himself and slowed down. Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction—college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment firm.

  Fatherhood. He was happy and, so far, lucky—he knew that. His parents were still living, his brothers and his sister were established, his friends from college had gone out to take their places in the world. So far, he had kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned. He pulled into the driveway and parked. His left leg began to tremble. He sat in the car for a minute and tried to deal with the present situation in a rational manner. Scotty had been hit by a car and was in the hospital, but he was going to be all right. Howard closed his eyes and ran his hand over his face. He got out of the car and went up to the front door. The dog was barking inside the house. The telephone rang and rang while he unlocked the door and fumbled for the light switch. He shouldn’t have left the hospital, he shouldn’t have.

  “Goddamn it!” he said. He picked up the receiver and said, “I just walked in the door!”

  “There’s a cake here that wasn’t picked up,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “What are you saying?” Howard asked.

  “A cake,” the voice said. “A sixteen-dollar cake.”

  Howard held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand. “I don’t know anything about a cake,” he said. “Jesus, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t hand me that,” the voice said.

  Howard hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and poured himself some whiskey. He called the hospital. But the child’s condition remained the same; he was still sleeping and nothing had changed there. While water poured into the tub, Howard lathered his face and shaved. He’d just stretched out in the tub and closed his eyes when the telephone rang again. He hauled himself out, grabbed a towel, and hurried through the house, saying, “Stupid, stupid,” for having left the hospital. But when he picked up the receiver and shouted, “Hello!” there was no sound at the other end of the line. Then the caller hung up.

  He arrived back at the hospital a little after midnight. Ann still sat in the chair beside the bed. She looked up at Howard, and then she looked back at the child. The child’s eyes stayed closed, the head was still wrapped in bandages. His breathing was quiet and regular. From an apparatus over the bed hung a bottle of glucose with a tube running from the bottle to the boy’s arm.

  “How is he?” Howard said. “What’s all this?” waving at the glucose and the tube.

  “Dr. Francis’s orders,” she said. “He needs nourishment. He needs to keep up his strength. Why doesn’t he wake up, Howard? I don’t understand, if he’s all right.”

  Howard put his hand against the back of her head. He ran his fingers through her hair. “He’s going to be all right. He’ll wake up in a little while. Dr. Francis knows what’s what.”

  After a time, he said, “Maybe you should go home and get some rest. I’ll stay here. Just don’t put up with this creep who keeps calling. Hang up right away.”

  “Who’s calling?” she asked.

  “I don’t know who, just somebody with nothing better to do than call up people. You go on now.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  “Really,” he said. “Go home for a while, and then come back and spell me in the morning. It’ll be all right. What did Dr. Francis say? He said Scotty’s going to be all right. We don’t have to worry. He’s just sleeping now, that’s all.”

  A nurse pushed the door open. She nodded at them as she went to the bedside. She took the left arm out from under the covers and put her fingers on the wrist, found the pulse, then consulted her watch. In a little while, she put the arm back under the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where she wrote something on a clipboard attached to the bed.

  “How is he?” Ann said. Howard’s hand was a weight on her shoulder. She was aware of the pressure from his fingers.

  “He’s stable,” the nurse said. Then she said, “Doctor will be in again shortly. Doctor’s back in the hospital. He’s making rounds right now.”

  “I was saying maybe she’d want to go home and get a little rest,” Howard said. “After the doctor comes,” he said.

  “She could do that,” the nurse said. “I think you should both feel free to do that, if you wish.” The nurse was a big Scandinavian woman with blond hair. There was the trace of an accent in her speech.

  “We’ll see what the doctor says,” Ann said. “I want to talk to the doctor. I don’t think he should keep sleeping like this. I don’t think that’s a good sign.” She brought her hand up to her eyes and let her head come forward a little. Howard’s grip tightened on her shoulder, and then his hand moved up to her neck, where his fingers began to knead the muscles there.

  “Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes,” the nurse said. Then she left the room.

  Howard gazed at his son for a time, the small chest quietly rising and falling under the covers. For the first time since the terrible minutes after Ann’s telephone call to him at his office, he felt a genuine fear starting in his limbs. He began shaking his head. Scotty was fine, but instead of sleeping at home in his own bed, he was in a hospital bed with bandages around his head and a tube in his arm. But this help was what he needed right now.

  Dr. Francis came in and shook hands with Howard, though they’d just seen each other a few hours before. Ann got up from the chair. “Doctor?”

  “Ann,” he said and nodded. “Let’s just first see how he’s doing,” the doctor said. He moved to the side of the bed and took the boy’s pulse. He peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Howard and Ann stood beside the doctor and watched. Then the doctor turned back the covers and listened to the boy’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope. He pressed his fingers here and there on the abdomen. When he was finished, he went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted the time, scribbled something on the chart, and then looked at Howard and Ann.

  “Doctor, how is he?” Howard said. “What’s the matter with him exactly?”

  “Why doesn’t he wake up?” Ann said.

  The doctor was a handsome, big-shouldered man with a tanned face.

  He wore a three-piece blue suit, a striped tie, and ivory cufflinks. His gray hair was combed along the sides of his head, and he looked as if he had just come from a concert. “He’s all right,” the doctor said.

  “Nothing to shout about, he could be better, I think. But he’s all right. Still, I wish he’d wake up. He should wake up pretty soon.” The doctor looked at the boy again. “We’ll know some more in a couple of hours, after the results of a fe
w more tests are in. But he’s all right, believe me, except for the hairline fracture of the skull. He does have that.”

  “Oh, no,” Ann said.

  “And a bit of a concussion, as I said before. Of course, you know he’s in shock,” the doctor said.

  “Sometimes you see this in shock cases. This sleeping.”

  “But he’s out of any real danger?” Howard said. “You said before he’s not in a coma. You wouldn’t call this a coma, then—would you, doctor?” Howard waited. He looked at the doctor.

  “No, I don’t want to call it a coma,” the doctor said and glanced over at the boy once more. “He’s just in a very deep sleep. It’s a restorative measure the body is taking on its own. He’s out of any real danger, I’d say that for certain, yes. But we’ll know more when he wakes up and the other tests are in,” the doctor said.

  “It’s a coma,” Ann said. “Of sorts.”

  “It’s not a coma yet, not exactly,” the doctor said. “I wouldn’t want to call it coma. Not yet, anyway. He’s suffered shock. In shock cases, this kind of reaction is common enough; it’s a temporary reaction to bodily trauma. Coma. Well, coma is a deep, prolonged unconsciousness, something that could go on for days, or weeks even. Scotty’s not in that area, not as far as we can tell. I’m certain his condition will show improvement by morning. I’m betting that it will. We’ll know more when he wakes up, which shouldn’t be long now. Of course, you may do as you like, stay here or go home for a time. But by all means feel free to leave the hospital for a while if you want. This is not easy, I know.” The doctor gazed at the boy again, watching him, and then he turned to Ann and said, “You try not to worry, little mother.

  Believe me, we’re doing all that can be done. It’s just a question of a little more time now.” He nodded at her, shook hands with Howard again, and then he left the room.

  Ann put her hand over the child’s forehead. “At least he doesn’t have a fever,” she said. Then she said,

  “My God, he feels so cold, though. Howard? Is he supposed to feel like this? Feel his head.”