He said, “You’d think a guy like that could afford a better rug.”
He said softly, leaning to speak softly into my ear, “A psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake.” He held my hand. “Wearing a rug like that.” He chuckled. “Talk about a cry for help”—the very words the doctor had said about Gabe—“terrible-looking thing. You wonder his wife doesn’t tell him. Must itch like hell.” Sailing us both down that bleak hallway until we’d reached the door of the ward where Gabe was lying, sedated, his back to us, his face to the wall.
Helen said, “May I be excused?” when her father came to a pause, never an end, to his flying-squirrel story. It was five of four.
“The movie,” Susan said, all wisdom and forbearance.
Tom did a theatrical stagger. “Tell me you’re going to watch a movie … on a nice summer day?”
“It’s hot,” Helen said, and Susan cried, “Dad, she does this every day!”
I added that she had been swimming in the Graysons’ pool all morning.
But, of course, in those days Tom was never home from work at this hour to know this was his daughter’s summer routine. He’d only taken the day off to drive out to Suffolk to fetch Gabe.
“And where is Lucy Grayson?” Tom asked, looking under his elbows. He explained to Gabe, “The neighbor kid, Helen’s best friend. Her shadow. They’re usually joined at the hip, those two.”
“Her Gerty Hanson,” I told Gabe, bringing him in.
“She’s home,” Helen said quickly. And before I could catch his eye, Tom asked, “What? Did you have a spat?”
Helen lowered her chin and Gabe leaned forward again, over his crossed knee and his crossed arms.
“I hope she hasn’t stayed away,” he said, “because of me.” And then, in the sudden awkwardness that followed, he turned toward the table to put out his cigarette, as if to give us all time to rearrange our faces. I had indeed asked Helen not to bring Lucy over until we had Uncle Gabe well settled in.
“Believe me, Uncle Gabe,” Susan said kindly, “you’re not missing anything. This girl has the most annoying voice you’ve ever heard. Like Minnie Mouse if Minnie Mouse smoked a carton a day. Right?” she asked Tom. She was quoting him.
Tom laughed and said, “Right. A twelve-year-old with a voice like a consumptive hooker.” And I cried out another objection.
“Can I go?” Helen whispered, her eyes to the clock just over the kitchen doorway. “It’s starting.”
Gabe leaned to return his cigarettes and his matches to his pocket. “I’ll watch it with you,” he said. “If I may.”
There followed a sudden bustle in the crowded little room. Helen rushed to the basement stairs to get the TV turned on—it was an old set and needed a few minutes to warm up. The rest of us followed. The basement was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. It smelled heavily of damp earth and heating oil. Helen already had the set on and had taken her usual place in the worn chair closest to the TV. I directed Gabe to the old couch. Susan, saying she would watch only for a minute and then go wash her hair, took the rocking chair beside them. Tom didn’t have the patience to watch television in the middle of the afternoon—and could never watch any movie silently, anyway—but stayed long enough to see everyone settled. He had some errands to run, he said, and showed me a prescription from Suffolk cupped in the palm of his hand. “Enjoy the show,” he said, and then climbed the basement stairs, his step light, his hand held lightly over the banister.
I went back to the laundry room to empty the drier and start another load. I finished my ironing, carried the fresh clothes to the bedrooms upstairs, and put them away, then went down again to put the new load into the drier. Susan was still watching the movie with Helen and Gabe—there was forties movie music and the voice of a young actress. Only Gabe noticed me as I came down the stairs, and he raised one hand from his thigh.
When I went upstairs again to start dinner, I found Tom reading the paper on the screened porch in back. I peeled the potatoes and set them to boil. Then I poured a beer into a pilsner glass from the freezer and brought it out to him. He said, “Thank you, dear,” and offered me the first sip. This was our routine. First and best, he sometimes said. I tasted the foam, the icy beer underneath, and then handed it back to him. “Should we offer one to Brother Gabe?” he asked.
I shrugged. “What do you think?”
“Drink’s never been his trouble,” Tom said. And paused. “Although there was some discussion, out there, about your father being a drinker. Sins of the father, you know. All that Froodian stuff.” He widened his eyes, mocking himself and the doctors simultaneously.
I looked into my hands. It was Tom who had driven out to Suffolk every Thursday night to sit in on the therapy sessions in the men’s ward. When we visited together, we drove out on Sunday afternoons. We brought Gabe cigarettes and candy and sat outside when we could. We talked about meaningless things and saved our pity for the other patients, whose trouble was evident in their puzzled faces or the defeated slump of their shoulders.
I told Tom once that there was something of Gabe’s old seminary about the place. He had laughed and said there was also something of the stalag.
Tom said now, “It’s just their way of trying to find someone to blame for his trouble.”
Through the screened wall behind him I could see the early-evening sun casting long shadows across the back lawn, the small patio and the flower beds and the ocean blue sides of the pool. I could hear the gurgle of the filter and the metallic pock and shallow calls of the kids in the next yard, playing ball.
It was a homely room. The floor was painted concrete and the screens stained here and there with rust. Even then, the cushions on the wrought-iron garden chairs were yellowing beneath their painted vines, splitting along the seams. There was a sickly looking Wandering Jew and a spindly spider plant in the corner, a basket of old pool toys no longer used. Beside it, Tom’s easel and paints and a nearly finished painting of the bed of impatiens in the front of the house. Both inexpert and pretty.
“Will we ever know,” I asked him now, “Gabe’s trouble?”
Tom placed his beer on the glass-topped garden table. Were I to dream again, I would dream myself into this room, at this hour. I would take the fading cushion beside him.
“We only know what the doctors tell us,” Tom said. “Depression.” In those first weeks, he had come back from his visits to Suffolk and joked that this was the first time he had ever heard the word used without the “the.”
“Which pretty much tells us nothing,” he added.
“What’s the prescription for?” I asked him, and he said gently, “Only to help him sleep.”
I said, “He never was an easy sleeper. Even as a kid.”
And then Susan appeared in the doorway to say, “Well, that was ironic.”
I looked at her over my shoulder. “What?”
“The movie,” Susan said, moving into the room. She had stayed to watch it all. “Do you know what it’s about? It’s about Uncle Charlie. He comes to visit his sister”—she bobbed forward a little as she said it—“his sister and his niece, his sister’s daughter.” She bobbed again. “The niece thinks Uncle Charlie’s the most charming guy in the world, just worships him, until she finds out he’s a murderer. That he murders old women and steals their money. And their jewelry. So of course, he tries to murder the niece, too. He even looked a little like Uncle Gabe.”
I said, “Susan,” because Helen was already behind her. Gabe following. They both seemed a little subdued.