“I’d think at least five,” his mother says.
“But this was how I was able to see all this. Not worried you’d be kidnapped. Just that you might cross the street. You never did. He was a very obedient boy, Howard. But once I found you sitting on the curb — you must have done this a few times because more than a few times a doughnut or roll was missing from a bag — eating one. Then he’d come home. I used to watch you from the street. You know, sneak up from behind car to car so you wouldn’t see me following you. If someone saw me doing this with a boy today they’d think I was trying to kidnap him and I’d be arrested, no questions asked. But everyone around then knew I was your nanny. Then you’d leave your wagon out front and go into the building and apartment — the doors were always unlocked during the day — and ask me or one of your brothers or your mother to help you bring the wagon downstairs.”
“What a memory you have.”
“I don’t remember most of that,” he says. “Going into Grossinger’s for sugar and jelly doughnuts I do, but no note or wagon. Sitting on the curb eating a roll or doughnut I’ve no mental picture of, I think, other than for what other people’s accounts of it have put into my head.”
“Believe me,” Frieda says. “If you did it once, shopping with your wagon, you did it a dozen times. And when you got home, first thing you always asked for was one of those doughnuts or rolls or the end slice of the rye bread if it was rye. With no butter on it — no spread. Just the bread plain.”
“I remember liking the end slice then. The tiny piece — no bigger than my thumb — but which was usually left in the bakery’s bread slicer. In fact, I still have to fight my wife for it. At least for the heel of the bread, since it seems all the bread we get comes unsliced.”
“How is Denise?”
“Fine.”
“She’s wonderful,” his mother says. “As dear to me as any of my children, that’s the way I look at her, terrible as that might be to say.”
“It isn’t. I’m sure Howard loves to hear it. And your daughter?” she says to him. “Olivia? You really should have brought her.”
“Next time, I swear.”
His mother asks Frieda about her trip to Germany this summer, her first time back there in about forty-five years. Then she starts talking about the European trip she took with his father more than twenty years ago and especially the overnight boat ride their tour took down the Rhine. It was in this room. His father walked in from there, he ran up to him from there, arms out. From where he’s sitting — different table and chairs but same place, the small kitchen alcove — he sees it happening in front of him as if onstage. Two actors, playing father and son. “Frieda” must still be offstage or never gets on. He’s in the first row, looking up at them, but very close. Or sitting level with them, three to four feet away, for it’s theater-in-the-round. The two actors come from opposite directions — the father from stage left if that’s the direction for Howard’s left, the son from stage right. They stop, the father first, about two feet from each other. He points, with his arms still out, to his face. The young actor playing him does. He’s asking for help, with his pointing and expression. He wants to be picked up or grabbed. The shit doesn’t smell because it’s makeup. The young actor gives the impression he just tasted a little of it. But he’s not going to throw up. Howard didn’t then, far as he can remember, and that’s not what the young actor’s face says, though he does look as if he’s just gagged. The father bursts our laughing. He’s wearing the same clothes his father wore that day. Dark suit, white shirt, tie. Howard doesn’t recognize the son’s clothes. The father continues to laugh but now seems somewhat repelled by him. Scene goes blank. Curtain comes down. He’s left looking at the curtain. Or if it is theater-in-the-round, which it resembles more: blackout, and when the house lights come on thirty seconds later, the actors have left the stage. “Frieda,” he says.
“Excuse me,” she says to his mother. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to break in like that, but there’s something I’ve often wanted to ask you about from the time when I was around five.”
“You wanted to ask me it since you were five?”
“No, I mean, what I want to ask you about happened, or I think it did, when I was around five.”
“Howard,” his mother says, as if saying, since they had talked about it a few times, not to ask it.
“What is it?” Frieda says. To his mother: “What’s the big mystery?”
“No mystery,” Howard says. “Just that your memory’s so good — phenomenal, really — that I wondered if you could remember it for me from that time.”
“Why don’t we keep it for lunch,” his mother says. “I want you to join us. Frieda already told me she wants you to come too. Have anything you want.”
“Let me just finish this, Mom. I don’t think, if I’m gauging her right, she wants me to ask this, Frieda. Thinks it might offend you. Believe me, that’s not my purpose. Whatever happened so long ago is over and past, period. We all — anyway, if it did happen, you were probably doing something — I know you were — that you thought right or necessary. Or just required for what you were hired for, or something. I’m not getting this out right — and I meant by that nothing disparaging about you, Mom — but just know I’m not asking this with any harm in mind whatsoever. None.”
“What could it be? The mystery gets bigger and bigger. That I slapped you a few times? I’m sorry for that. I never wanted to. But sometimes, sweet and darling as you were, and beautiful — he was such a beautiful child, everyone thought so — you got out of control, like all children can. Out of my control.”
“That’s true. They could be something.”
“I had three very wild boys to take care of sometimes, so sometimes I had to act like that. Rough. Mean. Slap one or the other. I always tried for the hands or backside first — to get control or they’d run over me. I had a lot of responsibility taking care of you all. Your mother understood that.”
“I did. I wouldn’t have accepted outright slaughter, but certainly corporal punishment is needed sometimes. You must do it with Olivia from time to time, spank her,” she says to him. “Later, against your better judgment, you might even slap her face a couple of times. You’ll see. Children can get to you.”
“I don’t know. If I did, I’d have Denise to deal with.”
“She too. Calm as she is, and reasonable, she’d—”
“No, never. Not her, take it from me.”
“But with Howard,” Frieda says, “I just hope you’ll have forgiven me by now. But if it had to be done sometimes, it had to be done.”
“Of course. I’m not saying. But I was talking of once when you — at least my second-rate memory tells me this — when you pulled my hair and a big chunk came out. Did it? Where I walked around with a big bald spot for about a month?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Neither do I,” his mother says.
“To be honest, I do remember once putting filth in Alex’s face. He was in the bath. He made in it. Number two. I felt I had to teach him somehow not to. I don’t like it now. But that was about the worst I ever did, I think. In ways I don’t like most of it now, but then I was so much younger, a new foreigner here — well, you know. Also, since your parents didn’t object, and I always told them later what I did, I felt I had their approval. Am I wrong, Mrs. T.?”
“You had it. I’m not going to deny it now. Not for putting filth in their faces — this is the first I can remember hearing of that — but as Howard said, it’s past, finished. But no matter what happened, all my boys couldn’t have turned out better.”