Think of Rachel. Thinks. Standing up in front of her third-story window, and the boys shouting “Take off your clothes, Rachel”—older boys first, then the younger ones joining in—“Take off all your clothes and show us,” and she disappeared and came back without her clothes on — he’d been told she’d done this before — and they all whistled and cheered and an older boy yelled “Put one finger in your mouth, Rachel, and now the other in your peepee hole,” and she did this and they whistled and cheered. Then her mother came to the window, pulled Rachel in, opened the window wider and shouted “You bad boys, you scum of the earth, you’re the worst of the worst, ditches you should dig for yourselves and die in, picking on a poor dumb girl like this, making her do things so wicked. Go home. All of you, I know you and I’m calling your mothers, so they’ll be looking for you to scold and I hope give a beating to, so run home quick, you slime, for I’m also calling the police.” He was scared what his mother would say and stayed away from home till dinner time, and when he got there his mother asked what did he do to Rachel? “Nothing, she was up in her window when I last saw her when I was walking up the block, so what could I have done to her?” and she said “Did you encourage her to do what her mother said you did? — the gang of you, Ben, Willy, Caesar and whatever other morons you have out there, though Willy I’m surprised,” and he said “I had nothing to do with anything, the older boys were the ones who said for her to do what she did, and I just stayed there because they’d stopped and I was walking to the park with them.” She believed him but told him to walk away from things like that from now on and docked him a week’s allowance. His father heard about it later and said he was lying and raised his hand as if to hit him and sent him to bed right after supper and took away his allowance for the next four weeks and barred him from spending any of the money he made on his own. Rachel’s parents took her out of kindergarten and from first grade on sent her by bus—“At a tremendous expense to them too, which they can’t afford,” his mother said — to a religious elementary and then high school.
“So come on, out with it, what are you thinking about so deeply?” his wife says, going upstairs, which means she had come downstairs and passed him twice without him even knowing it. “Though of course if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay too,” and he says “Just some things, decisions, worries — let me first think them through a little more before I talk about them. But lots of things are troubling me, you can probably see that just from the strained look on my face,” and she says “No, you look all right, not smiling but not in any grieved or harried state.” “Well that’s good, but it’s for sure not how I’ve been feeling, for I’ve had thoughts running through like mortality, growing possibilities of sickness, painful illness, lots of nice things to look forward to — goddamn teeth every third week it seems with new problems, not to mention the daily reports of a collapsing globe, and my work, or lack of much satisfaction and completion in it. Kids growing up and leaving home and what they ultimately have to face, though who knows? Maybe they’ll do much better at it than I. And some of the terrible things I’ve done to them — you know, we’ve spoken of it — my anger, outbursts, pushing them hard, physically a few times, once slapping Sylvia’s face, ranting at them a couple of times that I wish they’d never been born or I was dead — that I find very difficult to live with. Well, not as bad as that, and the ‘live with’ and ‘was dead’ must sound funny, but also some deeper philosophical questions if some of those weren’t,” and she says “Like what? I’ve got time,” and he says “Nothing I can really talk about clearly right now — those are just floating around; but I’ll nab the buggers and get back to you with them later, I swear,” and she says “Good, I’ll be interested,” and throws him a kiss and goes upstairs.
Think about Thomas. Thomas was a new kid on the block, they quickly became friends, for a while they also used to meet almost every weekday morning and then pick up Willy in front of his building and all walk to school. Then one day Thomas wasn’t outside his building waiting for him and wasn’t in school that day and wasn’t outside his building or in school the next day and Gordon asked his mother if he could call him and did. “Thomas is ill and won’t be returning to school this whole year,” Thomas’s mother said, “thank you for calling,” and he said “Does that mean after the summer too, since it’s only April now?” and she said “No, he could be back sometime in the fall, though thank you for calling, Thomas will appreciate it,” and she hung up before he could say “Can I please speak to him if he’s not too sick and it’s okay?” He told his mother he wanted to talk to Thomas to say he hopes he’ll feel better, and she said “Possibly she didn’t realize that, I think it’d be all right to call again.” He did, asked Thomas’s mother if he could visit him—“I could do it right now, I’m just a few houses up the block”—and she said “Oh no, my dear, he’s much too out of sorts to see anyone now. Maybe in a month or so, probably more like two,” and he said “Like in June? I hope not July because then I’ll be away in camp for two months,” and she said “If we’re lucky, the end of June. But don’t you worry about him, he’ll be better soon enough and will be delighted you called.” Almost every time he passed Thomas’s building the next few weeks he looked up to the fourth-floor brownstone window where his bedroom was, hoping to see him and wave. A few times he thought he should yell up to him “Thomas, it’s me, Gordon, can you come to the window — is there anything you want — are you okay?” but never did. His mother bought a get-well card for him to sign and leave above Thomas’s mailbox, the class sent him a card they all signed, and he called him once more to see how he was — maybe even get him to the phone, since it seemed to have been long enough — and Thomas’s mother said “He’s feeling a little better, not well enough to come to the phone though, but I will tell him you called — he’s loved all the attention he’s received lately from his teachers and friends.” About two weeks later his mother said she had some very bad news to tell him and he thought “Did I do something bad I don’t know about? Are they planning to move from the city and take me away from all my friends? Is one of my uncles or aunts very sick or did one of them die?” Two of them already had, one on a golf course, the other in a bathroom, and this is how she started to tell him it. She said “Your friend Thomas died two days ago in the hospital — that’s where he’s mostly been the last few weeks,” and he said “Well not two weeks ago, because that’s when I talked to his mother and she said he was home.” “Maybe she was keeping it from you, knowing how you’d feel. He had a weak heart, something he was born with, and it simply wouldn’t work for him anymore.” She was going to the funeral, he said he wanted to, and she said it was during school hours and, besides, he was much too young to go to a young person’s funeral. “They’re much sadder than an adult’s, and it might be upsetting for the boy’s parents to see you there.” He thought it strange she wanted to go; she hardly knew Thomas, didn’t even seem to like him when he was over at the house, but he went along with how she explained it: Since he couldn’t go, it was her way of showing his feelings and the family’s respects. Later that day after the funeral he asked how it was and she said there was a good turnout, she’d never seen such an array of flowers in the chapel, the coffin was open, which she didn’t think was right, till the ceremony began. “I’m glad I stopped you from going. It was the first funeral of a child I’ve been to and was almost too sad for me to take.” He asked if any kids were there and she said “Cousins, I heard, your age and younger, which is all right I suppose if they were close, but nobody from your class.” Just about everytime he walked past Thomas’s building the next few weeks he looked at his window. The shade was always down and then one day it was up and the next day there were Venetian blinds on it. Sometimes, the next few years, he saw Thomas’s parents in the neighborhood or on the block, together or alone, and they always asked how he was and to give their regards to his parents, whom they’d barely met and probably not his father once, and a few times said he was getting tall and seemed to be sprouting a little hair above his lips and was growing up to be a fine handsome young man and asked how school was and Miss O’Brien, his and Thomas’s former teacher. Please give her their regards too. He still, when he visits his mother, occasionally bumps into Mr. Neuman, Thomas’s father, who never recognizes him till he points out who he is: “Gordon Mandelbaum from up the block, number twenty-three, my dad’s the druggist at La Rochelle.” Mrs. Neuman died about five years after Thomas. “Heartbreak over her son,” his mother said. “It had to be that, for just by her looks and build and the type of work she did for a living till that time, I didn’t think there was a healthier woman alive.”