Slowly, I moved my hand under his pillow until I made warm contact with his own. He was holding his rosary. He moved his hand away until my fingertips touched only the cool beads.
He fell asleep in small starts, resisting it. As if, I imagined, the sandman had hold of his ankle and was slowly tugging him under, all against his will. As if he struggled to remain awake. I looked at the lozenges of light on the wall, one was a rectangle, one was a crucifix. I tried out a few prayers, but since the nightmare I had described was a lie, there was nothing, really, to ask protection from. I heard my brother’s knee or his hand or the ball of his foot strike the wall now and again as he was tugged under. A thump and then a thump, and then I knew he was sleeping.
In the morning, the ambulance at the curb gave up a hot breath. Children had gathered, women with coats over their shoulders, men in shirtsleeves. Across the street, curtains were drawn aside, there were faces at windows, one of them ghoulish with shaving cream. First a murmur among the crowd: women with their fingers to their lips or their hands to their hearts, men conferring softly. Then, as the minutes ticked by, the revving excitement, the pleasure of something happening that would distinguish the ordinary day: the thrill of the disrupted routine, of a dull breakfast left on the table, of schoolbooks still at the door. An excitement that sounded first in the children’s voices—a sudden laugh, a loud cry—but then infected the grownups as well—a sneeze and a cheery “God bless,” another trill of laughter—as if we had forgotten, for a minute, that some kind of crisis, some crisis at the Chehabs’, had gathered us all here on the damp sidewalk at 7:00 a.m.
And then the ambulance man backing through the basement door, and then the suddenly arrested sound of human chatter gave way at once to the collective intake of breath when those assembled on the sidewalk saw that the stretcher contained a body covered from toe to head—only a slip of Pegeen’s sloppy hair showing beneath.
From the opened door behind the second ambulance man, Mrs. Chehab’s cry was a spiraling wail. Most of the women, and many of the men in the street, blessed themselves. My mother put a rough hand to my shoulder and then pulled my face into her apron, which was still a little damp from last night’s washing up. All instinct, I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around my mother’s waist, gripping the apron, the rough wool of her skirt, nestling into that familiar darkness and feeling the sudden warmth of my brother’s two hands as he pressed them against my ears, trying to spare me the sound of the women’s prayers and exclamations, of Mrs. Chehab’s lament, of the slam and the slam again of the ambulance’s broad doors.
All of which, nevertheless, I heard.
It was the next evening that we walked in solemn stillness up the steps of the Chehabs’ house and into the crowded living room. It was painful, the way my mother gripped my hand as we made our way through that forest of adults, all red knuckles, for me, and wedding bands and the hems of jackets, until the figures suddenly parted and there before the glass of the bay window was the gleaming box and Pegeen in its satin bed. She wore her white graduation dress, and her red confirmation rosary was threaded through her still fingers. There was a single taper beside Pegeen’s head, its light reflected in the black window in such a way that, for a moment, I believed her thin and waxy nose now bore its own flame.
I felt a pair of large hands slip themselves under my arms, warm and strong. And then I was aloft. The light grew brighter and the darkness fell away. I clutched the hard edge of the box, resisting even as I gave in, put my face to the moon-colored brightness of Pegeen’s cheeks, kissed her, and then saw my own white face briefly reflected in the dark glass of the bay window as I was returned once more to the pooled shadows of the floor.
At home, my mother unpinned her hat and my father returned his fedora and his topcoat to the closet. Mrs. Chehab, they were saying, had noticed the dirt on Pegeen’s coat and the tears in her sleeves, circles of soot on the knees of her good stockings, well before yesterday’s last tumble down the basement stair. Pegeen had always been a clumsy girl, they said, although Fagin, the undertaker, suspected something more than the fall had killed her: Some burden in the brain, he had said.
My mother turned back the good tablecloth and my brother brought out his books. On this evening, to make up for the time lost on our visit to Pegeen, we had our tea quietly as he studied among us, the only sound in the room the ringing of my father’s cup against the saucer, which I imitated with the clanging of my own. The visit to the Chehabs’ had deprived us of our evening walk to the speakeasy as well.
And then my brother closed the thick book before him and reached for another from the pile beside his chair, this one worn and leather-bound, with thin pages. He turned them, and then, with his hands tucked under his thighs, bent over the book to read. I saw my parents look to him, to the top of his bowed head. It seemed to me they were watching him slyly, as if, were he to raise his head again, their eyes would dart away.
He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. “ ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?’ “ he read. “ ‘Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’”
My mother’s head was bowed. My father’s two hands remained folded together over the china cup, arrested in that surreptitious moment of their steadying each other against the trembling that his evening constitutional usually kept at bay. Out on the street, a truck carrying bottles rattled by. One happy voice shouted to another.
Into the silence that followed I said, “Amadan.”
I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother’s startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. “Amadan.”
The pretty room tilted then—folded white tablecloth and black polished wood and the light of the simple chandelier—as my mother, with an iron grip on my upper arm, swung me out of my chair and into the tiled bathroom where the cup was filled beneath the silver stream of warm water and the soap dipped into it, once, then twice. “Again,” my mother said as I tasted the bitter water and, leaning over the porcelain, spit it out into the sink.
In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, “A fool. It means someone’s a fool.”