"You don't understand him," Sabine said, laying out four slices of bread. She had convinced Dot to switch over from white to whole wheat.
"I always thought if Guy had been around, my Guy, your Guy, it would have been easier for them. They could have had another man to watch, somebody else to try and be like. My father was dead, and thank God for that, and Howard's parents have both been dead for years. I thought at first maybe Haas could fit the bill. They like Haas fine, but he's so shy. It's almost like he's too small for them. But Guy could have taught them things, how to have a sense of humor for one."
"You can teach them that."
"It's different when you're a boy. It has to come from a man, preferably a father."
"Well, it sounds like nothing came from Parsifal's father, and he turned out fine."
"Guy was different," she said, her hands sorting in an automatic rhythm. "He had so much to him. Hell, he went off to California and rewrote his whole life history. He could be his own Either. My boys aren't like that. At heart they're followers, and there's nothing wrong with that, but they'll stay exactly where they are for the rest of their lives unless somebody shows them what to do." Kitty scooped up a bundle of white clothes with both arms. "I'm going to get started on this," she said, and headed down to the basement.
Of course the father Sabine would pick as a general role model to all boys would be her own. How happy she had been on the days he picked her up from school as a surprise and took her with him to CBS to prepare for the nightly news. Sabine sat quietly in the darkened editing room, watching him slice away at world events and tape them back together. President and Mrs. Kennedy stepping off the plane in Paris, waving to the dark and boiling crowd below them. Her father ran that piece back and forth, back and forth, again and again because Sabine could not get enough of them, his handsome smile, her delicate wrist disappearing into a buttoned glove. Once Walter Cronkite was in Los Angeles on special assignment and while Sabine sat on her stool he peered around the door. "Oh, thank goodness you're here!" he said to her. "We need you to read the news tonight." He managed a look of such sincere desperation that Sabine wanted to say yes. His famous face was thrilling in person.
"I can't read the news," Sabine whispered.
"Are you sure? Plenty of good stories tonight."
Sabine shook her head. Walter Cronkite wore the loveliest suit.
"What do you say?" her father asked her.
"No, thank you, Mr. Cronkite."
"Well," he said, his mustache spreading into a smile, "if you change your mind…" And then he waved good-bye and closed the door quietly behind him.
"That's the boss man," Sabine's father said. "Maybe you should think it over."
After the work was finished, Sabine's father said good-evening to everyone, secretaries, newsmen, copyboys, janitors. She loved the giant cameras that watched them pass with their lone eyes. She loved the clicking of typewriters down every hallway. She held his hand all through the building and down onto Fairfax Street, where they walked the four blocks home. "Here, you can walk," her father would say. "Here, the weather is always like paradise."
It was years before Sabine realized that her father only picked her up on the days when the news was especially good, when the film he had to edit was beautiful, so that Sabine grew up believing that the evening news was a daily reflection on the world's wonders. Her father did not speak of unhappiness. He did not brood late at night, alone in the living room. "What fortune," he said to Sabine when she finished her dance recitals, showed her report card, walked into a room. "What fortune," he said when her mother brought the Sunday brisket to the table on a wide oval platter. "What fortune," he said on the day Parsifal married Sabine. Her father took Parsifal in his arms, kissed his cheeks. "Now I have a son." They all laughed, but he stuck with it. "Let me speak to my son," he would say to Sabine on the telephone.
"Forty-five years old and I have a father again," Parsifal would say.
Now Howard Plate's sons were moving two miles across town to live in their grandmother's house.
Kitty and Sabine did the laundry and did more laundry. They stripped the beds, folded underwear. Kitty ironed a few shirts and hung them in the closet in Parsifal's room while Sabine carried her clothes in neat stacks across the hall and laid them in Bertie's dresser.
"I hate to kick you out," Kitty said. "But you couldn't put those boys in a double bed."
"Of course not," Sabine said. "Don't even think about it." She did not look back over her shoulder as she left, but she felt the loss. She would miss the terrible plaid carpet, the baseball trophies with his name etched into the small metal placards, the nights of lying in the little bed and thinking about Parsifal. She found the bag of building supplies she had bought at Wal-Mart and moved them out with everything else. "I should make the boys a house," she said to Kitty. "I could make them a model, the White House or Monticello. I could even show them how to do it."
"Make them your house," Kitty said, dumping rolls of socks into a drawer. "That's what they'd like to see."
"Phan's house?"
"Your house, Phan's house. They'd be thrilled with that."
Dot brought the boys home at three o'clock. The three of them crept through the back door silently, unlaced their boots, and slipped across the floor in their sock feet. She had told them in the car coming over. It was the only thing that could account for such quiet.
"Hey," Kitty said, coming from Parsifal's room where she had just finished making up the beds. "You're home."
"We're home," Guy said, his tone and manner completely devoid of a living pulse.
"So you know."
How nodded his head while Guy slid towards the refrigerator, opened the door to shoulder width, and buried the upper half of his torso inside, looking for nothing in particular.
"They're taking it real well," Dot said, pulling off her mittens and then her scarf. "We had a good talk coming home, didn't we, How?"
"Sure," How said, his lovely hair flattened to the sides of his head from the stocking cap his grandmother had made him put on.
Guy stayed inside the refrigerator, his hips swaying back and forth as if he were thinking so hard about loud music he was actually able to hear it.
Kitty went over and hugged How. He was half a head taller than his mother and he rested his cheek against her forehead. When she let him go, she went to Guy and put her arms around his waist, pulling him both towards her and back so that he was forced to come out. "Aren't you cold enough yet?"
"Not quite," he said.
"Don't be mad at me, Guy. I really couldn't stand that right now."
He stood up, red faced and sad. He had gotten taller in the last week. "All right," he said, and put an arm loosely around her shoulder. "See?"
Kitty kissed his cheek hard. "Okay," she said. "We'll figure something out. Until we do, I've got your room all made up."
"Where's Aunt Sabine going to sleep?" How said.
"In Bertie's room."
"Then where'll Bertie be?"
"Enough questions," Dot said, not wanting to get into the matter of exactly where Bertie was sleeping. "There are plenty of soft surfaces and plenty of pillows. It's my house and I promise you that every person in it wall get a good night's sleep."
"Sounds like a campaign promise to me," Guy said.
Dot handed him a cookie and he took it like a child. "Then I want to know what I get if I win the election."
"Sabine's going to build us a house," Kitty said. "A model of any house we want. I thought it would be nice if she built her house in Los Angeles."
"I've seen the houses she builds," Dot said, happy to take the subject beyond failed marriages and who got what bed. "Just exactly like real houses, only miniature."
"You know how to do that?" How said.
"That's what I do for a living," Sabine said, "in California."