He jingled the car keys, and they caught Susan’s attention as they had done when she was an infant. This was the summer she learned to drive.
“Shall we?” he said, but Susan shook her head. “You go ahead. I’m still making the tea.” Tom shrugged. I recognized the brief struggle he made to convince himself of the unreasonableness of his hurt feelings. She had never before turned down the opportunity to get behind the wheel with him: she was, understandably, curious about this mad uncle of hers, newly arrived.
When Tom was gone, out through the side door, as was usual, Susan turned to me and said, “Why didn’t he just pull in to begin with? Why’d he come in through the front?” I offered something about getting Uncle Gabe’s suitcase up the stairs, although I understood by then that Tom hadn’t wanted Gabe to feel he had become a back-door guest.
“Weird,” Susan said, and then looked over my shoulder, to Gabe coming back into the room. She suddenly grew busy with her lemons and her mint.
“Sit down,” I said, turning to him. “You must be parched. Susan’s putting together quite a concoction.”
Gabe moved through the small kitchen. I noticed his weight loss once more. It was not a healthy loss. He took the other seat at the little café table, across from Helen, who was studying him unabashedly.
“It was awfully nice of Tom to pick me up,” he said as I served him the tea. Nothing had been added to, or subtracted from, the short smile he wore. “Coming out all that way.” His voice, too, had lost some of its luster. It had always been quiet and even-toned, but now it had a scarred quality to it, as if he had weathered, and recovered from, a disease of the lungs or the throat. “More often than not,” he said, “people leave Suffolk in cabs.”
The girls were watching him silently. I had been prepared not to mention his time at Suffolk at all.
“Which I would have been happy enough to do,” he added.
“Nonsense,” I said.
He had his legs crossed, his arms crossed over his lap. He still wore his Windbreaker, although it was warm in the house in those pre-air-conditioning days. I offered to take it from him, but he raised his hand to say he was fine. His shoes were brand-new wingtips. “It is a lonely sort of way to go,” he said. And laughed a bit. “To leave, I mean,” he said. The skin of his throat had grown corded, the chin loose, although it was clear that he had carefully shaved. “I’ve seen some of the poor loonies walk out to the cab looking for all the world like they’d rather stay.”
The word—“loonies”—startled and pained me. I could feel both my daughters straining against their instructions to remain mute. Helen, of course, was too shy to say a word, but Susan already had the questions on her tongue: Was it awful? Were there strait jackets? Were you in a padded cell?—the same questions she had asked us when we called her and Helen, quietly, into our bedroom the night before and explained to them both in serious, whispered phrases that Uncle Gabe was coming to stay for a while. Not a sick man, Tom had said—he had been visiting the hospital regularly and knew well the psychiatrists, the experts, he called them—only, he said, for a while there, a man overwhelmed. “Swamped” was the word he used. “Like by a big wave,” he told the two girls. “Like at Jones Beach.”
In fact, nearly a year ago, Gabe had walked naked out of the apartment at dawn. He had walked all the way to Prospect Park—weeping—the police report said, which was probably why he wasn’t charged with indecent exposure, only sent to the hospital, and then, after our own family doctor intervened, to Suffolk.
The scene had been described for us in the admitting room of the hospital on the evening of the day Gabe was picked up by the police. There had been a small crowd, apparently, kids mostly, following behind him as he stumbled along. Some of them had thrown mud. There were traces of it on his shoulder blades and buttocks. Others had thrown thin branches torn from trees, or bits of garbage, newspaper, or lunch wrappers, from the street. He was naked and crying. His feet were bare, one was bleeding. Someone in one of the apartment buildings had called the police. The officers approached him warily. They called him “Buddy.” They asked him where he lived, if he had any family, but he was crying and could not speak. They had nothing in their patrol car to wrap him in, and they would have put him in the car as he was, when an old woman from one of the apartments appeared, breathlessly speaking in Italian or Yiddish, the officers couldn’t agree on which it was. She had a blanket in her hands. She didn’t know him. She couldn’t give them any information, but she had, apparently, been following him for quite a few blocks, the blanket held before her.
It was a hot autumn day. They were at the dusty edge of the park, which was much neglected then. There was the clamor of the children’s taunts and the foreign woman’s words and the cars going by, some slowing, some emitting their own jeers. The sunlight itself was clamorous. Exposed to it, my brother’s fair skin would have been mottled and pale. The officers were perspiring in their uniforms, the guns in their black holsters absorbing the heat. One of them, not the one who was speaking kindly, calling him Buddy, but the other—Officers Fernandez and O’Toole, I had no way of knowing which was which—had a nightstick in his hand. My brother stood naked among them, pale and thin, his own hands at his side. He was weeping, unable to speak. They cuffed his hands behind his back. They wrapped him in the blanket the old woman had brought. He let himself be led away.
Tom and I, together in a small room somewhere inside the hospital, had listened, had flinched, had lowered our eyes even as the doctor described the scene, read off the names of the officers, said “weeping” and “crying” interchangeably. Walking out together down those awful corridors to see Gabe, I let out a single breath and shook my head. Tom took my hand. “Did you see that toupee?” he whispered.
“Every time I saw a cab pull up,” Gabe was saying, “I thought of that scene from Harvey. The one when the cab driver comes in to get paid but the sister can’t find her wallet. And while they’re waiting, he tells them how the nutty people are all friendly and happy going out to the sanatorium, but then all angry and impatient when he drives them back, after they’re cured.”
He paused, bent forward from the waist, politely, as if to see if we had heard and understood him. As if to gauge whether he had too suddenly said too much, or had spoken at all. I remembered the look, the slight, questioning, polite leaning forward from his boyhood. His hairline was receding and the light in the kitchen caught the curve of his skull in two places.
Helen said, “I love that movie.” She was sitting opposite Gabe at the small Formica table. She was not sitting up straight, she never did sit up straight. She was hunched over her glass, her pointed little chin nearly touching the rim. There was so much weedy mint in her tea it looked like an amber-lit terrarium. “Harvey made the wallet disappear,” she said.
“The pooka,” Gabe said softly, nodding. He turned toward her politely, but with some surprise, as if he had not expected her to speak.
“So Elwood wouldn’t get the shot,” she said.
He nodded again. “Elwood P. Dowd,” he said. It was the gracious wariness of an adult unused to conversing with children. “Right you are.” The cuff of his Windbreaker had ridden up a bit, exposing the pale skin. There was a hospital bracelet on his bony wrist. He looked at me. “Someone stays up to watch The Late Show,” he said, and Helen’s chin dipped farther, touched the rim of her tall glass.
Susan laughed. “And The Late Late Show,” she said. There was both big-sister mockery in her voice and, perhaps because of Gabe’s presence here, a new forbearance. There was a way her body had, in those days, of bobbing and weaving as she spoke: as if a more assertive, adult Susan—the lawyer she would become—was elbowing past the shy child she, too, had once been. Although she’d once been as skinny as Helen was now, she’d recently begun putting on weight. I was aware of the cool heft of her fleshy forearm. She was standing against the sink, her palms hooked behind her, but her body bobbing forward. I nudged her aside a bit as I opened the utensil drawer and took out the kitchen shears.