I can seal the windows with putty.
So. All these rooms, up and down, over and back. We shall rattle around. What a racket! Which one have you selected?
For what?
Arguments. Which one is the argument room?
Do we argue, dear?
Incessantly.
We sometimes disagree.
Incessantly. We argue about whether we argue.
You complain. That’s not the same.
You oppose me only to oppose me.
No. I try to reason …
Haw! You grew to fit into a cartoon of your father.
That’s not fair.
You stayed inside his lines.
Compared with him I have crayoned the sky.
At dusk I could mistake you for him. Ach. I’m glad he’s not here.
So am I.
Then Joseph and Miriam went their separate ways, gradually laying claim to this space or that by making various deposits (clothes, books, other obvious belongings — he coffee cups, she tea — on whatever was flat — sills, floors, tables, radiator covers); or with more deliberation declaring a proprietary interest in a sewing table by covering its cherry top with chess pieces positioned in the same brink-of-checkmate configuration as Capablanca, playing white, had cornered Nimzowitsch during a Mannheim match. Joey didn’t play chess but he possessed an International Herald Trib that mentioned the game. He said the simple wooden figures gave his (patrolled) zone in the sitting room class.
Miriam, for her part, might arrange on some shelves the beginnings of her seed catalog collection or on a fireplace mantel settle a bowl holding only two Christmas cards both from Woodbine’s one and only bank or perhaps upon a hassock pile issues of a magazine devoted solely to knitting. Empty LP sleeves did the trick for Joey until they slid under newspapers still awaiting perusal. There remained, in every room, a need for chairs. Perhaps the most peculiar of their proprietary signs were those that lay claim to a prized window-lit space — even when it had no rocker handy in which to deposit a claimant’s body — such as a saucer into which Miriam had spit tangerine seeds or a sausage saved from maceration by somebody whom neither tenant admitted being, and no one consequently would remove, or several pages torn from a copy of the magazine Modern Musical Notes with its damaged cover depicting an augmented guitar and a player piano. Oddly, no one would confess to having planted that marker either.
The problem, as even Joey was able to discern and Joseph to define it, was that neither mother nor son seemed capable of putting anything back where it belonged. In this house, with its ample rooms and many floors, there were few spaces that could be clearly marked as home for a specific implement, object, or activity, like a toilet, closet, or sink, so that the idea of a possession that was utterly impersonal in its demand for order remained to the pair more foreign than French: that the crayons belong in their box, that pins should be put in their cushion, that plates need to stack in a cupboard; or even that states of affairs had their initial conditions to which they should be returned: drawers once drawn open should be shoved shut, doors ditto, shoes kicked off need to be replaced upon their owner’s feet, a book, having been read or fingered to some sort of finish ought to be returned to its gap in the row; and lights switched on should not be left to glow uselessly and wastefully over empty chairs and blank walls or flood vacant rooms with their pointless scrutiny; that beds must be made before they are messed again, perishables put back in the icebox to perish there, the eggcup in which Miriam intermittently keeps her wedding ring scrubbed clean of egg before its next use, or that Kleenex tossed in soiled wads should be responsibly aimed and safely reach a wastebasket: otherwise all will be lost in jangles of clutter and scatter, deserts of dust that will stultify the eye, and piles of partly experienced, and only faintly understood, previous behavior will lie smothered by puddles of past time like uneven sidewalks after a very gray rain.
Several days later, Joseph had polished his reply: “I’ll bet he’s also glad he isn’t.” “… Isn’t here.” But what good is a retort if it comes a week late? and has, as he immediately saw, no originality, no snap. “I’ll wager, he’s glad, too.” Oh, dear, “wager” was the wrong word. “Wager” would bring them both back to Rudi and his winning ticket. All the words were wrong. Short ones and long. They arrived too late, like callers who just drop by to say good night. His choices were as bland as blue milk. They lacked zing. Presence, pop. He had made a mouse trap that had sprung for an ant.
Joseph had also learned to let Miriam have the last word, as if she were still the martinet mother who had borne him out of London in a boat. Nevertheless, in the attic where he had begun to accumulate clippings, he imagined several versions of what he thought might be his father’s response and practiced some appropriate performances. He often assumed the voices of others and presumed their points of view. To speak for Marjorie Bruss he donned her long blue frock, its white buttons marshaled from neck to hem. As the head of the library, she could not countenance confusion and utterly disdained those who, she said, danced the dillydally when they should be marching in squares like members of the military. The Major’s world, of fonder memory now that months of reruns had rubbed Joseph’s embarrassed role in it to a high shine, kept standard library time as it had to keep if it were going to carry out its functions efficiently. Everything in Tidytown, including the paraphernalia and litter of visitors, not just the overcoats, lunch boxes, and handbags of regulars and staff, had a place appointed for it, and there, each morning, like cadets, they answered the roll calclass="underline" books in their comforting ranks, magazines in their appropriate displays, newspapers rolled on the right sticks, stands for umbrellas and racks for hats, bulletin boards whose out-of-date notices had been harvested, light that had touched, like an old friend, its customary patches of floor, and the fresh hush that a nighttime of silence had delivered to the reading room. Soon the clash of the push-open door would be felt right up to the front desk where the Major would take her first drag of the library’s consoling atmosphere, just as Joey had seen smokers inhale their early morning smoke.
The first cigarette, whose life would be abruptly snuffed in an urn near the entrance, normally belonged to Mrs. Harley Stuart, who arrived shortly after nine with a volume recently read or recently rejected, both now to be returned, almost always with an energetic “whoof” for works deemed difficult and/or heady. Now and then she would share a naughty giggle with Marjorie Bruss, which was customarily followed by her wish for “a novel that’s daring, a story that’s new.” This request would occasion more laughter — screened by Marjorie’s white cloth gloves, her fingers pretending to be modesty’s fans — a sodalike bubbling that the lady gave off when her cork was pulled, and who otherwise never seemed, even during such stretches of snickering, to be a woman that in bed, as it was said, drank, smoked, and read, though she did, and did, she sure did.
At the end of a day, Marjorie would note with satisfaction the number of cigarette ends sticking out of the sand like projectiles from a desert war, counting them with glee, because they each represented a bomb that had failed to go off or a bullet that had missed its mark.
“I’ll bet he’s glad … I imagine he’s happy … I’m sure he’s pleased … to be absent too …” “I’ll bet he’s also overjoyed.” “I’m sure he’s relishing his absence.” “I’m glad he’s not here,” hadn’t she said? So he could say, “Now I understand the reason for my father’s disappearance.” That last would hurt her. Was hurting her wise? Why be wise when stupidity was so readily available?