“We’ve given her a life lived in deviation,” Brookman said.
“At least,” Ellie said, “we’ve given her that!”
Brookman strongly agreed.
“Maybe because it’s after worship, Sofe asked me, Does Daddy ever pray?”
“What did you tell her?”
“She was small, maybe five or six. I said, Oh ya, ya, he prays the way ‘the English’ do sometimes. Untrue of course.”
“I don’t know if it’s untrue.” He folded his arms and walked away from the sink to the kitchen window. “I find the kind of prayer you — I mean your once people — do… uncongenial.”
“I’m sure, Stevie.”
“Look,” he said, turning to his wife a bit drunkenly. “What’s the use of it? You can’t ask God for anything. You can’t request special treatment. You can’t pray for an intention.”
“No deals,” she said. “Big God, little you. Sofe can tell you herself. Do you think she thinks of herself the way an American child would?” They both looked around to see if she was listening and lowered their voices. “She’ll tell you how we pray. How we used to pray.”
“She…,” Brookman began, but Ellie interrupted him.
“You worship Almighty God. You thank Him for his glory and you worship his will. He sent his Son. What must be, must be. You find his will and glorify it. You trust and live rightly and love. No deals.”
“You shame me,” Brookman said.
“Good,” she said. “I love you. I’m sent to explain to you that you’re other than the hot shit that you and others think you are. With the self-pity and indulgence the yokels in White Lake would call pride.”
“Pride,” he repeated dully.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Ellie said. “In my childish superstition I too still believe that God wills what I must do.” He watched her put a hand to her mouth, stunned almost at her own words. Thrilled and frightened at what he thought she might say. She let him lead her out to the cold rainy porch that opened to a dying acacia and the wooden top of a defunct well. They had tried for such a long time to have a second child. They laughed about her country potions. His wearing boxer shorts for a year, on the advice of some friend of Ellie’s. But they had never said a word about praying.
“But we did it, Ellie. We did it. Shouldn’t it be a sign for us? Isn’t it a blessing?”
“After so long,” she said. “So much trying.”
She turned her face away.
“I’m only who I am, dear one. Is it a blessing? If I let your pride dishonor me and my… children, I will have to feel my way. I will have to feel his pleasure, and if you do dishonor me — and in my benighted state I think you dishonor Him through me — I don’t know what will be commanded. I’m sorry, my Stevie, my love.
“This will sound stupid. I love you next to God. Don’t think I’m over the top. We’re not in an opera. You see that’s a commonplace, eh. All the girls where I come from, it’s required. Commanded. You’re my husband. You’re my Stevie too. But I have to feel that’s really how it goes. That has to be how it goes from now on. I must feel the rightness of things, the pleasure of things. You must make me have that.”
He moved a little apart from her, still holding her hand.
“I don’t think you ever put it to me that way before,” Brookman said.
“No, I suppose. It would have been pretty fucking uncool, back in the day. Right? But you knew, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And the old stuff comes back. We’re getting old. Maybe just me. Old stuff comes back, maybe just when I go up there.”
“Is the old stuff all we have?”
“It’s all I have, Stevie my darling. Of course I’m not as smart as you.”
12
MAUD ENDED UP in some mobbed-up club in the Meatpacking, thin film of blow on the bar, practically, more of it on the ladies’ room fixtures. The guy said he was on Wall Street. Well, his brokerage house was in Jersey but he lived downtown. Not far from Ground Zero.
“Really, my father was at Ground Zero for about half a minute.” She let that go. “My old man don’t work, he’s a cop in Queens.” The place she woke up in was a filthy apartment that smelled of asbestos and lead and dead people and guys making free telephone calls to Poland. He was gone but she didn’t steal anymore or fuck up assholes’ apartments for revenge. She might have done it once. She tried drinking his bargain scotch and could barely keep it down. The guy had left a condom floating in the toilet, which was kind of reassuring in its disgusting way. No shower, just a crummy bathtub with feet. That at least, she thought. It was a sort of date rape, but she thought the hell with it. She wasn’t sure but he hadn’t seemed to get it on. Maybe, she thought, he put the condom in the john to impress her. To induce happy false memories. Anyway, she got out of there, went home and cleaned up properly.
She slept again, but when she woke up her thoughts were about Brookman and she could not bring them to order. She tried to bring Brookman’s wife into the focus of her memory. It was ridiculous, so ridiculous — the Brookmans — that in the midst of her pain and distraction, she had a vision of the absurdity of her own grief and loss.
Female students often discreetly observed Brookman’s wife. Smiley face, big teeth, whitey blond hair in a ponytail, you could hardly tell if she was getting gray. Her eyes were a little close together and wild blue. She wore big horn-rimmed glasses. Some of them called her a dog. But with big tits. She had a big ass, oh yeah, some said her ass was humongous. But that was only because she had one and some of them didn’t. Her neck was wrinkly, her face too, from the sun. She dressed badly. She looked like one of the women on the PBS nature shorts you saw when you were a kid. Oh, Maud thought, there were a million happy-go-lucky women wearing khaki shirts being smart in nature shorts and sticking their fingers in wombats’ ears but there was only one Brookman. And only one me. Maybe on the next canoe trip she can wander into quicksand and they’ll find her horn-rims on the top and the rest of her thirty million years later. Laughing and crying, she spun around in her smoke-filled room until she sank to her knees by the bed, pressing her face into her forearm.
She burst out of her room to look downstairs and saw her father reading the day’s mail with a copy of the Gazette beside him. He looked up at her gravely.
“I owe you a bottle of whiskey,” she said. And she wanted to say don’t look so pathetic, and there were so many other things she wanted to say.
“Forget it,” he said coldly.
“No, I’ll get you one right now. I’ll go out. I’m really sorry. I’ve been out of my head.”
“Yeah. So forget it.”
She breezed past his chair to get a glass of cold milk. He followed her into the kitchen.
“Hey, Maud,” he said. He held up the college paper. “What’s this?”
“That’s my contribution to the Gazette, Dad.”
“Don’t they have a thing called hate speech?”
“It is not hate speech,” she shouted at him. “It’s the advocacy of the rights of women to access and control their own lives. And not have them controlled by — you know who I mean, don’t you, Dad? Controlled by hypocrites. You were the one who told me Grandpa’s stories of Fat Frank Spellman in New York.”
“Never mind Fat Frank Spellman,” Stack said. He ran out of breath and sat down next to his oxygen machine, though he did not pick up the tube. “Oh, Maudie, you don’t understand it at all. You don’t get it. You put yourself in danger. You think the whole world is that college?”
“If I want to speak out, Dad—”
“Oh, shit,” Stack said. “Speak out! Speak out! Stand tall! ‘Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring.’ Victory to the Vietcong! Those people don’t come from where you come from. Not in any way, get it? You’ll be the one that pays from riling up the religious fanatics and shitheads. It’ll be you that pays! Whaddaya bet? Not some rich kid. Not one of these professors. You.”