“Excuse me,” said a lady walking by, because her dog had nipped at Tomo’s shoe as they passed. He took down his arm and looked around. There was the boy, standing a few feet off. Tomo could not remember what they had been discussing. He tossed the little man a coin, because he knew every child likes a nickel to buy a bag of candy with, and every child liked how Tomo could make a coin spin in the air. The boy caught the coin in his mouth and seemed to swallow it.
“I only wanted to see you, Uncle,” the boy said, and then he ran off towards Brooklyn, ducking between pedestrians. Tomo turned and walked on, thinking, just for a moment, that the boy was very familiar, after all, because he suddenly knew how the boy had been haunting him all his life — Tomo had seen him all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, far away in London and Paris, in Cuba, Hong Kong, Portugal, and Morocco. There was no place where he was not. Tomo kept walking, thinking that very soon he would remember why the boy was so sad, and why he never got any older, but as Tomo got closer to Manhattan he began to forget about him. Walking up to the terminal he stepped over the shadow of a streetlamp and paused to read a sign far ahead — though his joints were ruined, though his heart was weak and his bladder was nervous, his eyes were quite sharp. “If the baby is cutting its teeth,” it advised, “use Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.”
“What baby?” Tomo asked aloud, and then he walked on.
“Would you like to go faster?” his mama asked him. They were driving in a speedy Talbot-Darracq, her latest automobile. She kept a chauffeur, but always put him in the passenger seat, insisting on driving herself at high speeds all over her estate at Bredon’s Norton in England.
“No,” Tomo said, knowing she would go faster anyway. His wife didn’t like automobiles. She had remained at the house to eat strawberries and doze in the sun while Tomo and his mother went out for a drive. She thought there was something obscene about automobiles. Tomo thought they were intriguing, though he would not ever drive one.
“It’s a shame they don’t make them any faster,” his mama said. She drove every day for an hour because she insisted that in doing so she was putting a little more distance between herself and death. Since her third husband, the banker Mr. Martin, had died, she’d become obsessed with her own mortality. “Not too close,” she’d say, if a person tried to kiss her, because she feared the pollution of touch.
“You quick widow!” Tomo called out to her, but she was half deaf, and could not hear him above the engine.
Often, by the time he’d reached the other side of the bridge, Tomo would have had enough of walking, so he’d take a cab to the church, struggling with his paper to pick out the address to give to the driver. It was a different church every time, and he was sure that by now he must have visited every one on the island. On that day in 1927 he went to a Catholic church on East Twenty-fifth Street, to a funeral, one that was especially dolorous and grim — that was how he liked them.
It was a sin, he knew, to lie to his wife, and probably also a sin to masquerade as a mourner. And yet wasn’t he sad for this person, this man who had died of a bleeding stomach, who was survived by a wife, seven children, and a full score of grandchildren? Tomo might go to the hospital tomorrow or the next day and fail to save a person like this man, a balding Irishman whose skin was too big for him to fit into anymore. He might go to that funeral, too, because he was drawn to them, because he had always been drawn to them.
Tomo sat in the back, and watched quietly, not crying until the end, when he approached the casket and looked in to see the face of the man. He put a hand over his mouth and wept, sure that all around people were wondering who he was, this well-dressed, hobbling old man who grieved so dramatically. A pair of girls led him back to his seat. They were sisters, he could tell. “Are you twins?” he asked them loudly, and they both told him to hush. One of them stayed with him, standing while he sat, her hand placed gently on the back of his neck.
“Listen,” he said to her. “Do you know how you are undying? Do you know how Heaven waits for the faithful? It’s the good news, that a person is such a piece of work that there can be no end to her.”
“Hush,” she said.
“Do you doubt it?” he asked. “Do you?” He held her wrist, finding her pulse and reading her perfect health in it. “You do doubt it, don’t you? You callow, doubting girl! You are afraid to die!”
“Stopper it up, Gramps,” she said, placing a soft hand over his mouth, but Tomo pushed it away. He stood up and left the church, not caring how his slow, heavy tread rang out in the air and marred the lovely, sad music.
“Was it a good day?” his wife asked him. It was the question she asked every night as they got into bed together.
“Good enough,” Tomo said. He’d spent the afternoon in Central Park, eaten ice cream on Madison Avenue, and bought an armful of daisies for his wife, enjoying, for a while, how they drew the stares of everyone who passed him.
“My feet are aching,” his wife said, after they had been lying side by side for a while in the quiet dark. They had been dancing, that evening. They were neither of them very good at it, so they did it in the privacy of their home, in the empty bedroom that had once sheltered their second daughter.
“I’ll heal them,” Tomo said, sitting up and peeling back the covers so he could get at his wife’s big feet. They were very pale, and as he massaged them they seemed brighter than any other thing in the room.
“Shall I reach under the bed?” she asked him, after he had been rubbing on her for a while, and after his hands had started to wander up her body.
“I think you had better,” he said. Even as he worked her with his hands, she reached down under the bed and brought up a little porcelain bowl. It was too dark for Tomo to see it clearly, but he knew how it was painted in blue with birds, tall herons and egrets. It made a grating, ringing noise as his wife removed the top. Age required her to augment her natural charms with petrolatum.
With his creaking joints and his crooked back, his cloudy brain and his obstipated bowels, it always seemed to Tomo that physical love should be beyond him, but it was not yet, and sometimes, as on this night, it took a supreme effort of will to keep from spending himself like a naive boy. He did surgeries in his mind as he kissed his wife and whispered her own name into her face. It made him think of hernias, what they were doing, of organs invading cavities that were not their usual homes, and so to keep himself in order he went through the Bassini repair, sewing, in his mind, the conjoined tendon and the iliopubic tract into a forbidding wall that said to the protruding viscus, Stay where you belong.
When his time came, he imagined the futile sutures bursting, the tendons ripping and breaking to release a tumbling mass of bright confetti that ignited in his brain, becoming the millions of stars that had fallen around the bridge on that distant past night. He called out his wife’s name, “Phoebe!” It was a distinct and equal pleasure, to shout it as loud as he could, in a house emptied by time, where no one could hear the name but him and its owner. His wife, a singer, answered him with a perfect C in an octave that told him he was doing well for her this evening.
He got a terrible pain in his left eye, and if his arms had not been locked around his wife, he would have clapped a hand to his face. It was painful, like being stabbed, and painful because it brought with it searing, lucid remembrance. Just for an instant, Tomo knew it was not Gob who had died at Chickamauga. His wife, he was sure, must take his screaming as a manifestation of unbearable pleasure.