Then it became tiresome to wait.
Then Rexler was fretful.
He might have been alone for as long as an hour.
Did he, Rexler now wondered, have any idea as to what was keeping Albert? He may have had. All those young women passing through the screen door, promenading, swinging between the creaking chains.
Without haste Albert stepped between the green plots to the Ford. Smiling, a pretense of regret in his look, he said, “There was more business to do than usual.” He mentioned a lease. Baloney, of course. It wasn’t what he said but how he spoke that mattered. He had a lippy sort of look and somehow, to Rexler, his mouth had become an index: lippy, but the eyes were at variance with the lower face. Those eyes reflected the will of an upper power center. This was Rexler’s early manner of observation. His eagerness, his keenness for this had weakened with time and, in his seventies, he did not care about Albert’s cunning, his brothels, his secret war against his brother Ezra.
At the first candy store Albert parked the Ford and gave Rexler a copper two-cent piece—a helmeted woman with a trident and shield. With this coin Rexler bought two porous squares of blond molasses candy. He understood that he was being bribed, though he couldn’t have explained exactly why. He would not in any case have said a word to Aunt Rozzy about the house with all the girls. Such outside street things never were reported at home. He chewed the candy to a fine dust while Albert entered a cottage to make the rent collection for his mother. Not a thing a university man liked doing. Although where money came from didn’t much matter.
Albert was in a better humor when he came out and gave little Rexler a joyride through the pastures and truck gardens, turning back just short of Dor-val. Returning, they saw a small crowd at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk. There had been an accident. A man had been killed by a fast train. The tracks had not yet been cleared and for the moment a line of cars was held up and Rexler, standing on the running board of the Model T, was able to see—not the corpse, but his organs on the roadbed—first the man’s liver, shining on the white, egg-shaped stones, and a little beyond it his lungs. More than anything, it was the lungs—Rexler couldn’t get over the twin lungs crushed out of the man by the train when it tore his body open. Their color was pink and they looked inflated still. Strange that there should be no blood, as if the speed of the train had scattered it.
Albert didn’t have the curiosity to find out who the dead man was. He must not have wanted to ask. The Ford had stopped running and he set the spark and jumped down to crank it again. When the engine caught, the fender shuddered and then the file of cars crept over the planks. The train was gone—nothing but an empty track to the west.
“So, where did you get lost such a long time?” said Aunt Rozzy.
Albert said, “A man was killed at the Grand Trunk crossing.”
That was answer enough.
Rexler was sent down to the garden in the yard to pick tomatoes. Even more than the fruit itself, the vines and leaves carried the strong tomato odor. You could smell it on your fingers. Uncle Mikhel had staked the plants and bound them with strips of cloth torn from old petticoats and undershirts. Though his hands were palsied, Uncle Mikhel could weed and tie knots. His head, too, made involuntary movements but his eyes looked at you steadily, wide open. His face was tightly held by the close black beard. He said almost nothing. You heard the crisping of his beard against the collar oftener than his voice. He stared, you expected him to say something; instead he went on staring with an involuntary wag of the head. The children had a great respect for him. Rexler remembered him with affection. Each of his olive-brown eyes had a golden flake on it like the scale of a smoked fish. If his head went back and forth it was not because he was denying anything, he was warding off a tremor.
“Why doesn’t the boy eat?” Aunt Rozzy said to Albert at dinner. “Did he let you stuff yourself with candy?”
“Why aren’t you eating your soup, Robbie?” Albert asked. His smile was narrow. Albert was not at all afraid that he, Rexler, would mention the girls on the porch swing or his long wait in the car. And even if something were to slip out, it would be no more than his mother already suspected. “I’m just not hungry.”
Shrewd Albert smiled even more narrowly at the boy, bearing down on him. “I think it was the accident that took away his appetite. A man was killed on the tracks as we were coming home.”
“God in heaven,” said Aunt Rozzy.
“He burst open,” said Albert. “We came to a stop and there were his insides—heart, liver….”
His lungs! The lungs reminded Rexler of the water wings used by children learning to swim.
“Who was the man?”
“A drunkard,” said Aunt Rozzy.
Uncle Mikhel interrupted. “He may have been a railway worker.” Out of respect for the old man no more was said, for Uncle Mikhel was once a CPR laborer. He had been a conscript on the eastern front during the Russian war with Japan. He deserted, reached western Canada somehow, and for years was employed by the railroad, laying tracks. He saved his groschen,_ as he liked to say, and sent for his family. And now, surrounded by grown sons, he was a patriarch at his own table in his own huge kitchen with large oil paintings out of the junk shop hanging on the walls. There were baskets of fruit, sheep in the fold, and Queen Victoria with her chin resting on her wrist.
Cousin Albert had turned things around with sparkling success and seemed to be saying to little Rexler, “See how it’s done?”
But Rexler was transfixed by the chicken soup. As a treat, Aunt Rozzy had served him the gizzard. It had been opened by her knife so that it showed two dense wings ridged with lines of muscle, brown and gray at the bottom of the dish. He had often watched the hens upside down, hanging by trussed feet, first fluttering, then more gently quivering as they bled to death. The legs too went into the soup.
Aunt Rozzy, his father’s sister, had the family face but her look was more sharp and severe by far. There was nothing so red as her nose in zero weather. She had cruelly thick legs and her hindquarters were wildly overdeveloped, so that walking must have been a torment. She certainly did not put herself out to be loved, for she was wicked to everyone. Except, perhaps, little Rexler.
“Did you see what happened? What did you see?”
“The man’s heart.”
“What else?”
“His liver, and the lungs.”
Those spongy soft swelled ovals patched pink and red.
“And the body?” she said to Albert.
“Maybe dragged by the train,” he said, unsmiling this time.
Aunt Rozzy lowered her voice and said something about the dead. She was fanatically Orthodox. Then she told Rexler that he didn’t have to eat his dinner. She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he visited Lachine he shared Albert’s bed, and in the morning he would sometimes stroke Albert’s head, and not even when Albert fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew in close rows, row after row.
These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life—his being—and love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul.
Aunt Rozzy had the face, the fiery face of a hanging judge, and she was determined to fix the blame for the accident on the victim. The dead man himself. And Rexler, walking in Monkey Park and beginning to feel the strain of his excursion, the weakness of his legs, sat down with the experienced delicacy of a cripple on the first bench he came to.
Cousin Reba, always ready to disagree with her mother, said, “We can’t assume he was drunk. He may have been absentminded.” But Aunt Rozzy with an even more flaming face seemed to believe that if he was innocent his death was all the more deserved. She sounded like Bertolt Brecht when he justified the murder of Bukharin. The one thing to be proud of, according to the playwright, the only true
foundation of self-respect, was not to be taken in by illusions and sentiments. The only items in the book of rules were dead items. If you didn’t close the book, if you still harked back to the rules, you deserved to die.
How deep can the life of a modern man be? Very deep, if he is hard enough to see innocence as a fault, if, as Brecht held, he wipes out the oughts which the gullible still buy and expels pity from politics.
The destruction of the dwarf brick houses opened the view of the river, as huge as a plain, but swift nevertheless, and this restoration of things as they had been when first seen by explorers opened Rexler himself to an unusual degree, so that he began to consider how desirable it could be to settle nearby so that he might see it every day—to buy or rent, to have a view of the rapids and the steely speed… why not? He was a native son, and he had no present attachments in New York. But he knew this was an impracticable fancy. He could not (for how long?) spend his final years with no more company than the river. Since giving up his Brecht studies, he had no occupation. Brecht was light on the subject of death. If he was to live with Stalinism this lightness was essential. Hence the joys of the knife, as in “Mackie Messer,” so many years on the hit parade. All that pre-Hitler Weimar stuff. It was Stalin, whom Brecht had backed, who should have won in 1932. But Rexler did not intend to go public with such views. He was too ill, too old to make enemies. If he turned polemical the intelligentsia would be sure to say that he was a bitter aging hunchback. No, for him it was private life from now on.
He didn’t want to think about the books and articles that had made his Lachine cousins so proud of him. “Just look how Robbie overcame the polio and made something of himself,” Cousin Ezra would tell his growing children.
Nobody could say exactly how extensive Cousin Ezra’s realestate holdings were.
But toward the end, dying of leukemia, Ezra greeted Rexler by throwing his arms wide. He sat up in his hospital bed and exclaimed, “A maloch_ has walked into my room.” His color was his father’s exactly—very dark and with pleasant folds, and he had become the Old Testament patriarch through and through—an Abraham bargaining with the Lord God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah or buying the cave of Machpelah to bury his wife.
“Angel,” Ezra said with delicacy because of the mound on Rexler ‘s back: not exactly a pair of folded wings. The truth at that time was that Rexler looked like one of the cast of a Brecht—Kurt Weill production: hands sunk in his trousers’ pockets and his skeptical head—it was too heavy, it listed—needing cleverly poised feet to support it. His hair was gray, something like the color of drying Oregano. What did his dying cousin make of him, of his reputation as a scholar and a figure in New York theatrical circles? Rexler had gone against the mainstream in the arts, and his radical side was the side that had won.
All those years of error, as it now seemed to Rexler. Hands clasped behind his back he tramped, limped, along the Lachine Canal, thinking that his dying cousin Ezra gave him high marks for his struggle against paralysis.
Here in Lachine, Rexler had had a second family. After Uncle Mikhel and Aunt Rozzy died and Ezra had assumed the role of patriarch, Albert had refused to acknowledge him as such, “recognized, was willing.” In this matter Rexler saw that he had relied on the mainstream. It was an inconsistency.
Strictly speaking, the child with normal spine and arms and legs was transformed into the deformed man in the loden coat, the theatrical hat pulled down over the thick sideburns.
It had been better on balance to be a revolutionary than a cripple. “Have I ever told you, Robbie, that we are descended from the tribe of Naphtali?” said Ezra.
“How do we know that?”
“Oh, these things are known. It was passed on to me and I pass it on to you.”
In a month’s time Ezra was dead. Years ago he had exhumed Reba’s body and she was buried beside her parents. They were all to be together. Twenty years later Matty joined them. Only Albert remained. At eighty he was still an _homme р femmes.__ But they wouldn’t stay put when they found out what was expected of them. Now he was no longer a seducer, he was a petitioner or suppliant. The meanness, however, hadn’t gone out of him. Only he was weakened, he couldn’t enforce anything, and he played humble. The last of his wives had left him within a year. Back to Baltimore.
Albert sent for Rexler. He was by now the last of the Rexlers. “Only the two of us left,” said Albert. “I’m so glad you came. The family doted on you.”
“When I got polio my childish charm was shot down.”
“Of course it was very hard. But you fought back. You became a distinguished man. I used to give copies of your books to my literate clients.”
Evidence of wasted years, Rexler thought, if anyone wished to make a case against him. However, you don’t waste the time of a dying man with disclosures, confessions, repudiations. “One day I went with you in the Model T,” said Rexler, “and you parked in front of a clapboard house across the tracks. Then you went in. Was that a whorehouse?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you were there for such a long time and I played with the pedals and the steering wheel.”
Albert smiled forgivingly. It was himself that he forgave. “There were a couple of houses.”
“On this one there was a veranda.”
“I wouldn’t have paid much attention….”
“And on the way home there was an accident on the Grand Trunk tracks. A man was killed.”
“Was he?”
Albert had no memory of it.
“Minutes before we crossed. His liver was in the roadbed.”
“The things kids will remember.”
Rexler was about to describe his surprise at seeing a man’s organs on the ties and stones on the roadbed but he caught himself in time luckily. Albert’s skin cancer had metastasized and he hadn’t far to go. His still-shrewd eyes communicated this to Rexler, who backed off, thinking that for Albert that afternoon, when he and the girl had lain chest to chest, his heart and lungs pressing upon hers, had added up to a different sum. Rexler had come to say good-bye to his cousin, whom he wouldn’t be seeing again. Albert was wasted; his legs forked under the covers like winter branches, and his courtroom voice was as dim as a child’s toy xylophone. He sent for me, Rexler reminded himself, not to talk about my memories, and I think I look alien to him, that seeing me is a disappointment.
In the upside-down intravenous flask a pellucid drop was about to pass into his spoiled blood. If other things could be as clear as that fluid. Probably Albert had asked one of his daughters to telephone me because he remembered how things once were. The uncritical affectionate child. He hoped I might bring back something. But all he got from me was a cripple at his bedside. Yet Rexler had tried to offer him something. Let’s see if we can ratchet up some ofthat old-time feeling. Perhaps Albert had_ got something out of it. But Albert had taken no conscious notice of the man hit by the train. There never was a conversation about that and now Albert too was buried with the rest of the family—“my dead,” as Ezra spoke of them. Rexler, who didn’t even know where the cemetery was and would never go to visit it, walked lopsided in the sunny grass of Monkey Park beside the canal locks. Deep-voiced, either humming or groaning, he turned his mind again to the lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of the shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or a refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties. How finite they looked.
His deformity, the shelf of his back and the curved bracket of his left shoulder, gave added protection to his hoarded organs. A contorted coop or bony armor must have been formed by his will on the hint given that afternoon at the scene of the accident. Don’t tell me, Rexler thought, that everything depends on these random-looking parts—and that to preserve them I was turned into some kind of human bivalve?
The Mercedes limo had come to the canal for him and he got in, turning his thoughts to the afternoon lecture he didn’t particu
larly want to give.
A SILVER DISH
WHAT DO YOU DO about death—in this case, the death of an old father? If you’re a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who’s been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean!_ As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages as being on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That’s what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis.
Woody, a businessman in South Chicago, was not an ignorant person. He knew more such phrases than you would expect a tile contractor (offices, lobbies, lavatories) to know. The kind of knowledge he had was not the kind for which you get academic degrees. Although Woody had studied for two years in a seminary, preparing to be a minister. Two years of college during the Depression was more than most high school graduates could afford. After that, in his own vital, picturesque, original way (Morris, his old man, was also, in his days of nature, vital and picturesque), Woody had read up on many subjects, subscribed to Science_ and other magazines that gave real information, and had taken night courses at De Paul and Northwestern in ecology, criminology, existential-ism. Also he had traveled extensively in Japan, Mexico, and Africa, and there was an African experience that was especially relevant to mourning. It was this: on a launch near the Murchison Falls in Uganda, he had seen a buffalo calf seized by a crocodile from the bank of the White Nile. There were giraffes along the tropical river, and hippopotamuses, and baboons, and flamingos and other brilliant birds crossing the bright air in the heat of the morning, when the calf, stepping into the river to drink, was grabbed by the hoof and dragged down. The parent buffaloes couldn’t figure it out. Under the water the calf still thrashed, fought, churned the mud. Woody, the robust traveler, took this in as he sailed by, and to him it looked as if the parent cattle were asking each other dumbly what had happened. He chose to assume that there was pain in this, he read brute grief into it. On the White Nile, Woody had the impression that he had gone back to the pre-Adamite past, and he brought home to South Chicago his reflections. He brought also a bundle of hashish from Kampala. In this he took a chance with the customs inspectors, banking perhaps on his broad build, frank face, high color. He didn’t look like a wrongdoer, a bad guy; he looked like a good guy. But he liked taking chances. Risk was a wonderful stimulus. He threw down his trench coat on the customs counter. If the inspectors searched the pockets, he was prepared to say that the coat wasn’t his. But he got away with it, and the Thanksgiving turkey was stuffed with hashish. This was much enjoyed. That was practically the last feast at which Pop, who also relished risk or defiance, was present. The hashish Woody had tried to raise in his backyard from the African seeds didn’t take. But behind his warehouse, where the Lincoln Continental was parked, he kept a patch of marijuana. There was no harm at all in Woody, but he didn’t like being entirely within the law. It was simply a question of self-respect.