“She even tries to stay home sick when there’s a good movie on in the morning,” Susan was saying. “She plans her whole life around the TV schedule.”
“I do not,” Helen said into her glass. “I never do.”
“Are you kidding?” Susan cried, goading her. Showing off, too. “Who circles all the old movies in the TV Guide every week? And puts those reminders on the bathroom mirror, like National Velvet, Tuesday?”
Helen dropped her chin yet again, drew her raised shoulders nearly up to her ears. “No, I don’t,” she said softly, while her sister said, “Of course you do, don’t lie,” and laughed.
I crossed the narrow room and took my brother’s hand from his knee without a word. Without a word, he gave it to me. “I’m of the same mind,” he said to the girls. “A good old movie on TV can make my whole day.” His flesh was cold and there were graying, golden hairs on the backs of his pale fingers. I slipped the kitchen shears between the plastic cuff and the blue underside of his narrow wrist. I neatly cut the thing in half, then touched his knee before I carried the bracelet to the trash.
“Guess I won’t need that anymore,” he said, and I tried to sound lighthearted. “We know who you are,” I said.
Gabe turned to Helen, “What’s the movie today?”
Helen raised her eyes to the clock on the wall. She had a narrow face and small dark eyes, black-lashed and lovely. She had perfect vision, both girls did. A blessing from their father. “A Hitchcock,” she said. “Shadow of a Doubt.”
“Joseph Cotten,” he said. “Another good one.”
Helen said, “I don’t know who that is.”
Something authentic entered my brother’s smile. “Joseph Cotten,” he said. He shifted in his chair, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. He looked at me. “Whatever happened to Joseph Cotten?”
I shrugged, aware of, grateful for, the grace of this ordinary conversation. “Who knows?” I said airily. “All those old actors. Probably making commercials.”
“Probably dead,” Susan said.
“It’s from nineteen forty something,” Helen added. “The movie, nineteen forty-one or nineteen forty-two.”
“Ancient history,” Gabe said. “Your mother was still a babe in arms.”
I laughed. The air in the warm room had grown a bit lighter. “Hardly,” I said. “I was working at Fagin’s by then.”
Gabe smiled a warmer smile. There was as well the grace of a shared past. “The consoling angel,” he said. He tapped the crushed pack against his palm, extracted a single, filtered cigarette and then the matchbook inside the cellophane. I took an ashtray from the windowsill and crossed the room to put it on the table. Again, I touched a fingertip to his knee. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I did get five new dresses out of the deal.”
And I saw my daughters glance warily at each other: they knew this story, too.
Gabe bent his head as he struck the match and then waved it in the air when the cigarette was lit. He blew the first smoke toward the ceiling. “We were all great fans of the afternoon movie out there in the insane asylum,” he said.
The side door burst open and Tom bustled in once more, talking. He was saying how earlier that summer he had hung two tennis balls from the rafters of the carport, a parking guide for Susan, to keep her, he said, walking into the tiny kitchen, swinging his keys, from knocking us all off our chairs in the middle of dinner when she put the front end through the dining-room wall—as women drivers, no doubt, were apt to do. In fact, just yesterday, he said—and look at all this lovely mint, will you, Gabe, grows wild in our own yard, we should make mint juleps—just yesterday, he went on, he saw a woman take out a hedge on the corner of her own lot as she backed down her driveway at what must have been forty miles an hour, her husband standing on their front steps with his hands in the air.
He demonstrated, throwing his hands straight up and then letting them fall back in despair to his own bald head.
He turned to Susan, who was leaning against the kitchen counter, tolerating him, but fondly, fondly. There were times through my daughter’s adolescence that I would have been grateful to have some of that fondness. “I’ll probably get an extra year or two in purgatory,” Tom said, “for adding another woman driver to the world.”
He poured himself a glass of iced tea and loaded it with sugar, even though Susan told him there was honey in it already. “So here’s the thing,” he went on, addressing Gabe. “I put those g.d. tennis balls up there myself, and yet every single time I pull into the carport, they hit the window and I jump about a mile. They about give me a heart attack every time.”
The girls started laughing. He about had a heart attack, they repeated, laughing, every single time. Jumps a mile and cries, Jesus H. Christ.
“Sometimes worse,” Helen added.
“Sometimes he says, “ ‘Holy shit,’ “ Susan said, and I cried out, stamped my foot, as if to crush the scuttling word. Susan said, “I’m just quoting.”
“I don’t know why I can’t remember they’re there,” Tom was saying. “They get me every time.”
This, was, of course, a lie. They had startled him once, but never again. The rest was an act, a comic set piece he had honed over the past few weeks. I knew this. The girls knew it, too. The sudden start, the cursing, the hand to his startled heart, were all part of the joke. One of his jokes on himself, meant to get us laughing at him, meant to get his daughters’ impulse to mock him seem only a weak afterthought to the way he mocked himself. I knew this. The girls knew it.
Gabe was smiling at us all through the smoke from his cigarette.
“He thinks it’s the roof caving in,” Susan said. “Or meteorites.”
“Yellow flying squirrels,” Helen added, giggling. She looked at her father. “Well, that’s what you said yesterday. You said, Goddamn yellow flying squirrels.”
Tom turned his straight face to Gabe. “You see what I put up with here?” he said calmly. “With the boys away, I’m the only man in the house, and this is what I have to put up with. Thank God you’re here.”
The smoke poured out from Gabe’s small smile, it rose up from the cigarette in his hand. His legs remained crossed, his arms crossed over his lap; the wrist of the hand that held the cigarette, bare now, was long and blue-veined and covered in pale hair. The distance between the boy he had been, my brother, and this stranger sitting here now behind a veil of smoke seemed vast. I felt a sudden vertigo, looking across it, and leaned against my daughter’s bare, damp arm as Tom began to tell Gabe a story about some flying squirrels that had once invaded the crawl space behind the upstairs room (“Where you’re staying now, Gabe, but don’t worry”) and the comical pair of exterminators—“Mutt and Jeff”—who had captured the things and taken them home for pets. One of them, the little one, coming to the door some days later wearing the baby squirrel on his shoulder like some kind of mountain-man pirate—“I kid you not.”
He was a man who loved to talk.
“Did you see that toupee?” he had said as we left the room in the ancient Brooklyn hospital where Gabe’s nightmare had been described for us. He shook his head and let out a single sigh as we headed down that bleak corridor.