It was a cartoon, drawn in smudged pencil. It showed the various bunks, a prisoner lying in each, looking, each one of them, bored and idle, and yet, in each, some personality was displayed. There was a prisoner with his hands behind his head, elbows raised, looking at the ceiling. Another on his side, frowning at the book before him (a single German word, Nein, upside down on its cover), one with his knees raised and his mouth opened, a trail of zzzz’s, another asleep on his stomach, his backside in the air. There was a window that showed black slashes of rain and, through them, a distant guard tower, a fence. There were scraps of paper on the wall behind the bunks—intimations of pinups and calendars and days crossed off. There were only touches of color, a wash of pale yellow from the single lamp that hung from the ceiling, hints of khaki and brown and blue in the soldier’s clothing, a dash of red that was a woman’s dress in the tiny drawing on the wall, its edges curling.
The three of us laughed softly—it seemed called for, given the Sad Sack details, the bulbous noses, and the zzzz’s, and the prisoner with his rump in the air. Tom laughed, too. “No da Vinci here,” he said, looking fondly at his own work. “But this is more or less the way it looked to me, if I squinted enough.”
“It’s very good,” I said, although it was indeed lopsided and amateurish, with strange proportions. “You could draw for the Sunday funnies.”
My mother said, “I like how you can see through the window.”
Smiling, blushing, Tom carefully folded the drawing along its well-worn creases and returned it to the tin. No, he wasn’t very good, he said. The guy who gave the lessons, a Southerner, was the real artist among them.
He then went on—he was a man who loved to talk—to describe the clever ways they had come up with to expand their little cache of Red Cross watercolors: boiling or mixing things, pollen and leaves, coal dust from the stove, a little ink when he could get it, beet juice, spitting into their palms to dilute some mud, some clay.
He looked up and smiled and laughed a little. “Funny enough,” he said softly, and then paused as if uncertain about going on. “Funny thing is,” he said, “I was doing exactly that one time, spitting into some clay”—he pantomimed, holding out one cupped palm, circling it with the index finger of the other, stirring—“when I thought about something from the Gospels, actually something that I think you said, Gabe,” I heard the caught and swallowed “Father.” “In a sermon, way back when.”
The man’s poor face gave everything away: he was embarrassed by where his own talk had led him, and yet driven—as if by some sudden inspiration—to go on with what he had to say.
“Shows you,” he said to me, “what a small world it is.” And then added, dissatisfied with the cliché, “Shows you nothing’s really arbitrary in this life.” He pulled himself up, leaned over the table a bit. “Anyway, here’s the thing.” He began the pantomime again. “I’m mixing up some paint and a little bit of clay, diluting it, and I spit into my palm, and I suddenly remember something you said, Gabe, about the blind man, in a sermon. Back when.” And he glanced at my brother somewhat warily.
I said, “Bill Corrigan.” I indicated the front window. “The guy across the street. He used to sit outside. His mother dressed him in a suit every day. He was blinded in the First World War. Or mostly blind. The kids used to have him call their games.”
“A blind umpire,” Gabe added.
“Gone now,” my mother said.
I said to Tom, “He killed himself during the war. Poor guy. Turned on the gas.” I pointed toward our own kitchen. “It shocked us all.” I was beginning to remember how Gabe had told me once that he’d tried to use Bill Corrigan in a sermon.
My mother said, “He had a devoted mother.”
But Tom looked at us both, shaking his head. “That’s a shame,” he said, polite and deferential, but also frowning, determined not to be diverted. “But I’m afraid I’m referring to something else. Not about Brooklyn, per se,” he added, somewhat nonsensically, but conveying anyway that he was attempting to be both intelligent and sincere. “A story from the gospels. Jesus picking up some clay and spitting into it. Putting it on the blind man’s eyes.” He looked to Gabe. “Do you remember what you said? We had a conversation about it, you and I, after Mass. We had a bite of lunch together.”
Gabe’s shirt collar was opened, and a deep flush had risen up from under it, up over his throat. The tips of his ears, too, had turned red.
“Nothing very original, I’m afraid,” Gabe said softly.
But Tom was shaking his head again. “No, no, no,” he said, so earnestly that my mother and I were silenced. Tom looked at us both, still smiling, although that hopeless uncertainty once again crossed his face. He was a guy at the mercy of his own impulse to keep talking. “You put it very well. Very profound.” He touched his balding dome as if to call forth the recollection. Seemed disappointed that he could not. “I’ll butcher it if I try to say it myself.” He screwed up his mouth, drew back in his chair. “You don’t remember?”
I looked to Gabe, hoping he would be kind. Surely it would take an effort of will not to be kind to this poor guy floundering in his own sincerity. Gabe reached out to touch the cup and saucer on the table before him.
“I probably mentioned the whole profession of faith idea,” Gabe said, relenting. “There’s really no one else in the New Testament who Jesus cures without being asked. Without a profession of faith. I always found that interesting.”
“The guy was just sitting there,” Tom added happily. “Am I right?”
Gabe nodded, generous in his small smile. “That’s right. John, chapter nine. Jesus and his disciples were having a discussion, it seems, about human suffering being a punishment for sin. The disciples pointed to the blind man begging. This man was born blind, they said, was it because his parents sinned? It was the belief in those days,” he added, young scholar, “that blindness or deformity was a punishment for the parents’ sins.”
“Grateful to be an orphan,” Tom said suddenly, and looked at my mother and me, smiling. “Or maybe that means I’m in more trouble than most.”
“Well, we’re all sinners,” Gabe said. “But the point is, no one was asking Jesus to cure the man, they were just using him to illustrate their question. And yet, Our Lord, out of compassion alone, it seems to me, approaches the man, picks up some dirt—“ He paused, ducking his head with a wry smile. “We all know the story.”
“Right,” Tom cried. He sat forward, even briefly lifted himself out of his chair. Then he looked at me and said, “There you go,” as if his point had been made. “That’s just what I was doing, fooling around with some paint”—once again he pantomimed the action, circling his finger on the palm of his hand—“a little dirt, a little spit.” He looked to my mother. “Beg your pardon,” he said. And then added, “Saliva,” correcting himself. He seemed utterly delighted by yet another connection being made, between that lonely time in the prison camp and this homely one here at our dining-room table, between Gabe’s words and his own. He looked into his palm. “And I thought about what you said, how the guy’s just sitting there, not asking, not wearing himself out with asking, you said, and, bingo, Jesus cures him. Just because he feels sorry for the guy. We had lunch together. We talked about it.” He looked up. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “It was a good thing to remember, over there. That you didn’t necessarily have to ask. Or even believe. It gave me hope.”
We were silent for a moment, and I could see reflected in his face the uncertainty with which the three of us had received his tale.