The doctor stopped, looked at me strangely, as though expecting the household son to appear. Smiling, I answered, “Yes, Bill.” I pulled up a chair. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
The doctor had a squeaky voice, out of sync with his tremendous girth and his ancient sequoia face. “I was very early, my dear.” His voice reminded me of a winter sleigh ride, crisp and thin on a cold icy night.
The Pain. The awful Pain. Tell us how to stop the Pain. The blindness, well, that was fact now. But the Pain, excruciating, crippling, numbing.
At that moment my mother and Fannie, breathless, rushed up the steps. We three Ferber women stood there in a line, a hesitant link of blood, frozen before a dying father. Silence. We waited. The doctor made a rumbling noise, swallowed, and said that there was nothing he could do because the shrinkage of the optic nerve created the Pain. Perhaps an elixir, a tonic. But there was nothing that he…
My mother fluttered around the porch like a sun-mad fly, out of character. Usually she was matter-of-fact and logical; severe, humorless. And Fannie, her eyes following our mother’s swooping, helpless movements, was on the verge of weeping. How much more futile optimism could we allow? It made me furious. I hated the doctor, that rotting mound of flesh, the buttons of his silk vest ready to pop.
I stared into my father’s passive, resigned face, realizing that he didn’t care any more. These were gratuitous moments for his wife, his daughters. He sat there staring, but that was the wrong word: staring. You can only stare if you have sight, I thought, horribly. No. Suddenly I had no word, no vocabulary for the scene. Helpless, I panicked: these were the limits of lexicography. There was something beyond language that mattered more.
I wanted to cry.
Later, the doctor gone after being given a thick slice of poppy seed kuchen and a glass of root beer, as well as his generous, if unwarranted, fee, I sat alone outside with my father, quiet. Inside my mother banged the cupboards. I understood the signs. It would be a long night. After each lame visit from a doctor my mother acted like a maddened caged animal. Sometimes she struck out at her husband, as though his blindness and his Pain were a personal quirkiness he could control, conditions he created to get at her, ruin her life, destroy her days. Those nights Julia Ferber sat in the kitchen playing solitaire on the oak table, game after game, the sound of cards being slapped down enough to drive me mad. There were times she was unable to speak to my father for hours afterwards, as though for her to utter a kind word would betray the resentment she harbored. My father, who understood, hid in the corners of the house.
We never talked about it because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my mother, whom I loved, could blame a hapless man for being…hapless.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” I whispered into the silence.
He reached out and found my hand, held it.
“Tell me about your day.” A lazy grin. “Mr. Ryan must be overjoyed with your Houdini piece, no?”
I thought of Matthias Boon’s coldness all day long. The intimidating Mac had left the back room and wordlessly dropped a sheet on my desk, my printed Houdini piece, his grimy thumbprint on the corner. He’d never done such a thing before, and I had no idea what it was all about. Now and then he’d step into the front room and address some concern with Sam, but rarely to Matthias Boon. This morning he’d given me a preview of my article, which would appear in the afternoon paper. When I started to thank him, he was already leaving, his hulking back to me.
I withdrew the galley sheet from my pocket and read my own words to my father. I wanted him to hear my interview before it appeared that afternoon. He leaned in, intent. I read well, dramatic, with flair, the product of Ryan High School’s rigorous elocution regimen. When I got to the end, my father was smiling.
“Well?”
“You have a news nose.”
I glowed. “You think so? So you like it, Father?”
“All Jews are escape artists.”
“What does that mean?” I was startled.
“You know the history of our people. Think about it, Pete. Escape from shackles, bondage, struggles to survive. To escape endless persecution.” He was now grinning. “Houdini is simply the first to make a spectacle out of it…to make others pay for the privilege of watching. The immigrant who broke free.”
“But that’s not the point.”
“Of course, it is.”
I’d always considered my mother the shrewd, intelligent force in the family: domineering, pessimistic, logical. A rigid woman, horribly unhappy. I’d inherited my mother’s acumen, her perceptiveness. My father-well, I’d long ago labeled the handsome, dreamy man as the vagabond poet, the helpless businessman, the sad wanderer out of Budapest into America, the man who’d played, feebly, a few strains of Mozart on the violin that now rested in the dining room hutch. Listening to his careful words, I feared I didn’t know my own father.
A voice from inside broke the quiet conversation. “Ed, did you see Kathe Schmidt today? I hope she remembers to come tomorrow morning to help Fannie with the dress patterns.”
I called back. “No, I haven’t seen her since yesterday.” At the Elm Tree Bakery, wooing (and abusing) Jake Smuddie, fluttering those eyelids and spewing venom toward Frana Lempke, who still held a place in the footballer’s heart. “Don’t worry. She’ll be here.”
“How do you know?” My mother loomed in the doorway. “God, I wish these people had a telephone like civilized people.” She didn’t look at my father.
“Her mother wants her money. I’ve met the woman. She’s greedy.”
“That’s cruel,” my father whispered to me.
“No, it’s true. You know that Kathe doesn’t like coming here. She’s made that clear. She’d rather run around town but she has no choice.”
“Still and all…” I could hear displeasure in his tone.
“I don’t mean anything bad.”
My father tapped my wrist. “Of course you do.”
Esther was running down the street, cutting across a lawn, even stepping over a bed of iris. Her long dress got caught on a protruding root of an old oak tree, and she grabbed at the fabric to rip it free. “Edna, Edna.”
My father answered. “Esther, what is it?”
Esther caught her breath on the lower steps, so winded she couldn’t speak, her face flushed and sweaty. I rushed to her. “News.” Esther threw her hands up into the air. “I have news.”
Esther, the town crier with the innocent face. I was the notorious town reporter, the town snoop, yet Esther, popular and garrulous, with a multitude of casual friends, always joining this clique or that, a social bumblebee, really reported the scintillating gossip or puerile revelations. People readily shared confidences with Esther, things they’d never reveal to me. She knew about secret engagements, hasty weddings, abandonments, even hush-hush pregnancies long before such news became commonplace; in her quiet, demure way, she often informed me of sub rosa life in quaint Appleton. Errant girls squired out of town in disgrace, drunken remarks spilled at a beer tavern, the dangerous behavior of the blacksmith’s youngest daughter; even, shockingly, the lewd suggestions made to her and other girls by Seymour Weiser as they walked by him after Friday night services. She had no need of a printing press. I-for three dollars a week-was the ho-hum chronicler of social teas and church bazaars and honeymoon couples catching the 7:52 morning train to Milwaukee on their way to Niagara Falls.
Fannie and my mother joined us, and Esther, finally making it to the top step with my arm on her elbow, blurted out, “Frana Lempke. Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“We think-Milwaukee.” She swallowed. “Chicago. New York.”
I was irritated. “All of them?”
Esther shot me a look before mumbling, “Gone.”