Look at the face on him, his mother used to say. Fondly. But the face on him now, the one he might have to avoid in the mirror and the one he wore on the street, was another matter. Richmond Hill was an immigrant neighborhood. Most people there now simply did not resemble him. They were not fair or tall. They were not bleeders, as white boxers had once been called in the fight game. When he wore his face on the street — a face now flayed by alcohol and high blood pressure and a volatile temperament — he could imagine he was being spotted as a boozy Irishman, a slave to drink and an aging ruffian. To what might be on Lefferts Boulevard a stare of curiosity at one of the aboriginal occupants of Queens by a recently arrived Bengali or Mauritanian or Parsee and those he suspected as despisers of his kind, he showed the watery blue eyes, the rosy face. His strategy was to take his glasses off so that he would not see clearly the expressions of passersby or his own reflection in store windows. Beyond his own front hedges, which he paid a friendly Ecuadorian to trim, he truly did feel responsible for his face. Almost, he thought, ashamed.
What caused him to have his bushes trimmed by a hired man was actually what drove him nearest to actual shame. He went on his errands step by step and only after using — or neglecting to use — his three maintaining inhalers. He had emphysema that the doctors now called severe. So outstripped on the sidewalk by people twenty years older than himself, blocking the progress of young women uttering impatient sighs behind him, he tried not to notice, or even to see straight. He felt ashamed of himself. Early on, before the diagnosis, he had stopped cold climbing the second flight of stairs at the deep-down Jackson Heights subway station. About to pass him on the way down was a beautiful young woman, one to speculate about, a babe. Dry-drowning as he was, she got his attention. “Oh sir!” she said. “Oh sir, can I help you?” He wondered if he would ever be the same after that.
Smoking had done it, as well as and especially his useless — as he saw it — presence at the twin towers. He never mentioned that, not that there was anyone to mention it to. Plenty of people he knew had been there. Some, quite a few, had died there. Then there were those who had been there a month and a half after and talked about nothing else. There were those who had not been there and said they had. What Stack knew was the dark side of it, by which he did not mean the misled lads from afar with their faith-based initiatives, or the poor victims, God help them, but a different human dimension. Nothing was so bad it didn’t have a dark side, Stack thought.
On a warmish morning in December he set out for the boulevard, a quarter mile downhill. It was cloudy, without the stimulation of winter. He did not need the paper to know it was a bad-air day. His tactical plan was to walk the downhill stretch, past the tidy houses of his enterprising neighbors, and buy a Times. He had once been a follower of events, but it was pretty much the sports section now. Besides the Times he would buy a Post, because it was Friday and he wanted the Sunday line. Stack had been firmly ordered to walk on errands rather than drive, the principle of use it or lose it.
He walked down the boulevard with his practiced obliviousness to what he had grown up calling the candy store, where Morris had sold egg creams and reportedly run a handbook. It was owned by a Pakistani now, an old man in a white cap that showed he had made the hajj to Mecca. He had turned out to be a jolly old-timer, cheerful, even jokey, though not as hilarious as Morris had been. A glum young relative of the old man’s was at the counter this day. Stack bought the papers and took the most level route home.
The house was neatly kept, although his household appliances needed replacing. The furniture was a museum of early-sixties style. Stack did not shop for furniture or appliances. He had bought maritime prints at one point, and they were on his walls, along with a painting Maud had done as a teenager. The prints and the painting cheered him somewhat. After his wife died and Maud passed her devout stage, he had removed the crucifix from the living room and carefully tucked it away beside Maud’s tarot cards, which she had wrapped in silk. He took down all the religious sacramentals and put them in a closet, except for a reproduction of a Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. That hung in the upstairs hall. He felt a little guilty about the stuff; it bothered him, religion aside. He would not put the objects in the garbage, which would be grossly disrespectful, and he did not want to outrage the sanitation guys.
In the evening he took his second walk of the day, to an old Presbyterian church that now had a Korean congregation. The church basement was the location of his AA meeting. No Koreans attended. An Italian-American man in his mid-seventies — slightly demented, maybe a little wet-brained — stood at the coffeepot near the door, welcoming everyone who passed through with a “Tanks for comin’.”
Afterward Stack would not remember a great deal about this particular meeting. The usual people were there. A couple of guys doing probation, half of them loaded. A few earnest Christians, an old starker from the furriers’ union of long ago. Black guys, white guys.
The speaker, a man who had been off the sauce for a year. He looked young. He was slick, he was a musician. This was his share: As a boy, he told the meeting, he and his family had observed Passover with a Seder. In accordance with tradition a glass of wine was set aside for Elijah.
“This was not sweet Concord stuff because my family did not go in for that kind of wine. This was Lafite Rothschild. So my party trick as a child was I would sneak out, grab a man’s coat and a hat I could find somewhere. Then I’d hobble in doing an old-man shtick — the prophet himself. And I’d grab the wine and drink. This amused all my relatives.
“So,” said the young man, “I’ve been in eternal pursuit of my childhood faith.”
Stack laughed in sympathy, but a feeling of deep sadness overcame him. He did not stay for the Serenity Prayer. He had the loved daughter who was rash and rebellious. Whenever he needed or wanted his wife, she was dead. He had always had the strength, or at least the toughness, to resist self-pity.
A momentary lapse, he thought. That was the joke he made to other policemen when some impulsive perp had tried to pull off some mindless caper.
“The momentary lapse of a ne’er-do-well,” he used to say, breaking everybody up.
“Tanks for comin’,” said the guy as Stack went out. He took the easiest route home.
Climbing the porch steps — like the steps to the upper floor — exhausted him. He sat down in the nearest armchair to recover his breath. Immediately he knew that Maud was home, and the ways he knew propelled him back along their history, in a way that raised and battered his heart. There was the perfume, the marijuana, the booze smell that had not been loosed on the house since her last departure, and under these, in his weak moment, all the effluvia of her childhood beloved and terrifying, of joy and rage. He stood up unsteadily and, having a practical side, reached in his pocket for the inhaler.
The stairs were a hassle but he lived from day to day. There in Maud’s bed was the lovely mess of her, hair over the pillow and the rain-wet clothes scattered around. The worst thing about her was the smell of tobacco, which, he decided, he would not abide. Not a word had come from her, but the Christmas holiday would soon be on them, something he paid little attention to but of course she would be home for that. She looked comfortable enough and would have been drinking whatever she’d brought, so he left her there.
10
IN THE LIVING ROOM he took up his reading, a book from the branch library — borrowed in its scant opening hours — on some of the intelligence aspects of the Second World War. Patton’s Phantom Army. Choosing the beaches for Overlord. He read his book until he heard Maud come out of her room.