Dom, just as you in the generosity of your genius couldn’t see the insidious debilitation offered by your son Richard’s warning letters, so too you inevitably will see what evil valences Al has plus Bob and Bob has plus Al.
Had Al that odd evening in ’53 turned up at Bob’s parents (invited let’s say by me once I knew Bob wouldn’t be there) it needed an eye not half so fine as yours to see Al’s problem. And I don’t mean the civvies lent him out of my closet — they were a near-perfect fit. I mean the distance from Al’s game shoulder to Bill Smith’s stiffly regular nod and behind Al to a blue morocco copy of Gray’s letters. Al would have put an index finger on it and on the Murphy Johnson running along beside it (though he would not have known for three or four more years who Murphy was), and Bill would have introduced himself in order to ascertain precisely how far from Brooklyn Heights Al’s origins were. Al will not be savaged by anyone, genteelly or any other way. Bill frowns discovering that only once, and then just for a minute from a bridge, did Al see the ocean before joining the Coast Guard, from which he is now in ’53 shortly to be excused. Hugh Blood’s tall, shy, lascivious sister Tracy appears at Al’s side just as Bill, still apparently (though slowly) nodding, inquires if a Reserve ensign will make j.g. in two years; Al inclines his face toward Tracy slightly underestimating her height, and by the various listeners at their different distances is heard to say at the precise volume he wishes, “I just got busted back to Radarman Third.” And just as this Bob-less scene that never was comes to a sort of end in a hearthlit soirée that did occur, the other Smith twin “Freddy” alert across the room calls without thinking, “Tracy, hey Tracy,” who’s murmuring in answer to Al, “Is that good?” while I at this really Al-less scene watch Bob’s mother’s brave fumbling with a dip-hubbed plate of raw cauliflower and carrots and a slanted rank of little curling pumpernickel rounds she brought up from the basement kitchen — she and Bob’s father don’t normally go in much for hors-d’oeuvres — and I take in Tracy’s clear rosy tan and think that if Bob and his dark-braided bride didn’t drive out of town, and if of course Al stayed on for a while in our apartment after I left for this party and my mother for hers, Bob and Al (who was indeed wearing my civvies) could both be at this moment on Brooklyn Heights.
I must open another route to Bob’s white-knuckled fist. From Gail’s fingertip I had thought to bend into a mellow Monsanto ad during the War that Perpetua Pound and I flipped past one Sunday lunchtime; it described uses of cotton in the vital chemistry of plastic and showed a mellowly half-submerged group of cotton-picking blacks medium dark (or light), a very team, a fine-toothed family of pick-together stick-together social studies. But that scene within a scene is for the moment as far out of sight as our common premise Brooklyn Heights indelibly is for Bob.
Somewhere in the late 50’s — his face all screwed up concentrating in the bright sun — he’s checking the oil in a two-year-old lemon, a station wagon. His younger son is in the living room of this largely white, largely improvised house staring into the fishtank, and Bob’s ever-loving wife, her bouffant of last night dropped and tightened into a frontier bun, stands at the window and repeats the beginning of a question, merely his name: “Bob?”—for he doesn’t answer, he draws his rag down the measuring rod, runs the rod back into the sludgy tank, and does not answer. He twists off the radiator cap; the rotted gasket hangs.
Food the little boy has sprinkled in descends like weather; his is a scholar’s dumb absorption, an inch-long neon tetra hangs while one flake passes the silky zinc-green lateral and another lands and sticks on its feathery tail. “Have you got your suit, John?” his mother asks, knowing he hasn’t. He whirls out of his concentration and grinning yells, “No, I got nothing!”
Bob brings down the hood and leans on it to lock it. “John B., you get ready.”
John B. saunters to the open window near his mother, and calls back, “I are ready.”
His father’s face sags happily. There is a universe around, by Jesus there is. Bob looks across the hood at the house, staring at the insolent five-year-old blonder than he. “Then you get out here, dear, ’r’I’ll fetch you such a wallop your fanny’ll sizzle when it hits the water.” His accent has moved north.
Six-year-old Robert with a towel and two pairs of trunks wanders into the living room Bob built.
“Robby’s got my stuff,” John B. calls challengingly out the window, but Bob goes across the grass to the cellar hatch. He calls to me to come help with the cement. Holiday labor at the island today: being his guest is a hazardous responsibility: I foresee a swell and forelean to a spumy pitch and forehear the scuff of a badly perched sack of cement as it slips into the racing bay, and my New York imagination wonders what salt-water cement is like. I prefer Robby, though John B. is more fun. When Robby walks past you you don’t instinctively reach out to grab him. John B. is used to people doing this.
Faraway on Route One a truck double-clutches. I still taste rich Welsh Rarebit.
I step off the grass down steep cellar steps and can’t see. “Can you take this alone?” Bob asks as I see him. And back past two shelves of preserve jars I find my recently dead step-grandfather, back to me, chiseling that wooden catapult-fire rifle that looked so real when I was thirteen.
I get the stone-stiff sack up into the sun.
The boys are wriggling and giggling in the second row of seats. Robby’s voice whines out, “John B. threw my suit out the window.” His mother begins to say something but Bob, emerging with a sack, says with a simplicity more humorless than final—
Dom, why am I writing this in the present, it drags at my throat-strings, you’re not here yet, is there anything to drink in your icebox near that busy phone?—
“Then Robertum you get out ’n get it, and quick,” and Robby ignores another jab from little John B., gets out, walks around behind me as I push my cement further in over the tailgate, and is handed his trunks by his beautiful mother who, about to get in the front seat, has picked them up and started to toss them in the window on that side. When she tells the blond charmer simpering pertly at the window to stop bothering his older brother, Bob says, “And wipe that suffering look off your puss, Robby. Did you hear me, dear?” “I heard you,” the prophetic assertion dimly overlaps the ambiguous question.
“He heard you,” I say, and Bob’s wife is grateful and says to me, “We didn’t mean to leave so late.” Against the high, gray garage-annex lean two planks.
My step-grandfather John, whom I once called “Zo-an,” then “Zwan,” and whom in ’43 I believe I taught the Australian crawl (and who is neither here nor there), was almost the only one of the bunch on my mother’s side who knew how to leave me alone. At three, four, five, six, seven, in their overheated living room within walking distance of the Bedford Presbyterian Church I’d sometimes find the trip from my step-grandfather’s wing-chair to the no-longer-tuned upright, to the window or the sofa imperiled by intercepting hands, though the hands grew fewer and fewer. My great-aunt, for example, even once fought over me with “Zo-an” when I’d been sitting on the rug trying to reglue the wing into the groove in the strip of balsa that served for my plane’s body along either side of which ran the rubber band that powered the prop; and having dripped a glob of that banana-sweet cement on the rug, I’d stood to go get a newspaper to put over the spot when Sue surprised me savagely from behind. She was hugging my shoulder blades to her stomach and she was all perfumed, when my step-grandfather threw down Field and Stream and blew up at her and when I struggled she let go and I fell forward and stepped on my plane but didn’t break anything because I hadn’t left the wing grooved into the body and the pieces lay flat. “Don’t you like Aunt Sue?” she said — she stood tall and straight, her blued hair tight-permed — and John and I in unison said, “No!” and she said, so promptly I felt in my chilly intestines (though I couldn’t understand that I felt) that she’d had this in readiness for a long time: “You’re not the same baby they had at the hospital, they exchanged that baby for you.” But what I neither understood nor felt was that in truth she adored me.