So the practical, competent woman, every surgeon’s favorite nurse, calmness itself behind her mask and gown, ready always with the instrument needed, her pity always contained, this paragon of unflappability surrendered to her own soft interior every Wednesday and peeped at her husband from the window of Forget Me Not, saw pride and disappointment and shame and resignation, saw him kneeling like a knight — not like a servant, Myron! — in front of some woman shopping for pumps exactly the color of a certain Bordeaux, exactly the height of a certain stair rise, no, no, no, higher, lower, redder, less red, did I say I wanted a bow, a buckle, a golden chameleon climbing up my instep, amphibians give me the creeps…
“Reptiles,” corrected Flax.
The woman bought the shoes.
“Can you read their lips?” Renata inquired.
“Not exactly,” Bonnie said. “I supply.”
“That’s the how of communication, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” It was the how of family too, but she didn’t say that to the kindly spinster. All commensals supplied each other in one way or another — commensals, from com mensa, eating together. She loved mealtimes, preparing the dinner with help from everybody, using ingredients bought with the money she and Myron supplied. Dinner-table conversations were full of information, not always accurate, and full of earnest misquotations; the boys’ manners if not perfect were adequate, and the dining-room mirror obediently reflected them all, her own fat self and Myron’s balding self and Sean’s and Leo’s loved faces, and the back of Felix’s loved head, although in his darting way he showed one profile and then the other. “Salt, please,” he would say to his father. (Someday she must stop putting salt on the table.) Myron passed the salt; Myron, the fellow she had stumbled upon, literally, twenty years ago.
He’d been slumped in a chair in the surgical waiting room while his poor sick father died under the knife, it couldn’t be helped, and returning from the sad conclusion of the operation, she had tripped over his legs sticking out into the room. A small woman slept in the next chair — his sister, it turned out. It was three in the morning.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she’d said to his feet.
His eyes flew open. His mouth flew open. He wanted to ask her. It was not up to her to tell him. But she broke protocol with a gesture: she put her hand on his shoulder, and then fled. The woman beside him stirred.
Later he sought her out to thank her for the care she had given. “Papa had a good life,” wearily.
“And an unterrible end,” she said, breaking protocol again.
He’d called her a month later and they were married a few months after that.
And now there were five Flaxbaums, moving every night within a silvered oblong, a group portrait, including a corner of the couch in the next room. This portrait would disappear when the last of them underwent the physiological necessity of individual extinction, when the last memory of the last of them was gone. Then these two generations of Flaxbaums would fade from history, taking with them all their supplying and relying and self-denial and dissatisfaction and gratitude. Life and death? They were incidental, in her opinion, though of course she deplored suffering. But what counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you. That was the long and short of it. Her honorable spouse could instruct those overeducated Brits, all 850 of them, just by his own example.
VI.
Very late Thursday night (Friday at four in the morning, to be exact), in the kitchen, Flax wearing pajamas encountered Sean wearing underwear. This was not an unusual occurrence.
“Which exam tomorrow?” Flax inquired, though he knew.
“Evolution. The origin of life will be inquired about. I’ll respond that life was an accident, arising from the unexpected concentration of organic molecules in hydrothermal vents four million years ago. Then I’ll expand on that.”
He would get an A, Flax knew. He always got As. They sat down opposite each other, Flax sipping warmed milk, Sean ignoring a glass of some red stuff. Flax said, “Yes, life began like that. We were all there already — those molecules have drifted down through the millennia and become part of us. And the vents in fact are still in the ocean, and the giant tube worms that live near them.”
“Will you mention that in your…London speech?”
“Maybe. Do you want to become a physicist?”
“I…No. I hope to become a poet.”
“I thought so. And write epics?”
“No, sorry. I want to write compressed lyrics. ‘Walk on air against your better judgment.’”
“‘The beauty of innuendos,’” supplied Flax. “Felix will get baptized and become a priest,” he predicted.
“‘Guilt, justice, the desire to be good.’ Our Felix.”
Flax cleared his throat. “Poets eat, I’m told.”
“Physics will be my day job.” Sean grinned, softening the grandiosity.
“Medio tutissimus ibis,” the father said.
“‘You will be safest in the middle,’” the son translated — remembered, really; all the boys knew Ovid. “Yes, I will.”
His very dark eyes were inherited from Flax’s own father, he who had arrested on the operating table and dispatched Bonnie to Flax. The boy’s irises were almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Dark, dark brown, the distilled mixture of every shade in the world. If determination had a color…
“My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I, Jack was still making a living somewhere. I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child’s hand so gently against Leo’s infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed.” And he stretched his own hand across the table and with its hairy back stroked the cheek of his firstborn. “What on earth is that stuff you’re not drinking?”
“Mouthwash. It’s the last thing I take the night before an exam.”
“Don’t swallow, it’ll poison you.”
“I always spit.” Sean stood up, took a swig, swished, and then, holding the liquid in his mouth, walked through the dining room into the living room and, one hand on Jack, awarded Plant a pinkish stream. The creature as usual stretched its stem toward him.
VII.
On Friday evenings the Flaxbaums attended the bar and grill down the street, and idly watched its television, and talked of this and that. That Friday Flax wore his beret and Bonnie introduced her bowler. Aunt Jan Flaxbaum met them there. She was Flax’s diminutive sister, a busy dentist with crooked teeth.
“I googled King’s College on the Strand today,” Flax told his family. “I thought I’d ask for a more modest topic and more time to prepare it. On the site was a notice surrounded by a rectangle. ‘It has come to our attention that persons are sending out invitations in our name. Unless the invitation has kc.uk at the end of its address, it is fraudulent.’ There was in fact a banner of letters after the e-mail address of last Monday’s invitation, but not the ones mentioned.”
“There were some numbers too,” Leo remembered.
“There was no u,” Sean said.