“Don’t, lad,” their mother said quietly.
“No, Mama, I want to know. Did you? Did you find your fortune? Oh, you must have done, you must have. God knows our prayers have been with you — Ma’s, anyway. She took money off the table just to buy the damned candles to light for you.”
“Shut up, son. Don’t blaspheme.”
“No, Ma. Tell him. Tell my bigshot brother how you turned the parish into a Broadway with those candles you kept burning for him.”
“He came in a cab, Arthur,” his mother said shyly.
“Did he? Did he now?” Arthur said contemplatively. He seemed to subside, considering his brother, sizing him up as if looking for a purchase before attempting to scale him. Which of his brother’s faces would be the easiest for him, he seemed to wonder. Then, suddenly, he raised both arms, brought his fists down viciously and beat mercilessly at his thighs and legs. “What about me?” he screamed. “What about me?”
“Arthur,” his mother said. “Darling.”
“Shit,” he yelled. “Shit on that.”
Their mother looked helplessly at Dick Gibson.
Dick went to his brother and put a hand on his shoulder. “You say shit to our mama? You’re shit yourself.” With that he grasped the rubber handles at the back of the wheelchair and overturned it, tumbling his brother.
Arthur bounded up quickly and held out his hand. “Long time no see,” he said.
“You had me going at first,” Dick said.
Arthur shrugged. “Ah, it’s a tic,” he said. “Like Mama’s imitations.”
“Beware of imitations,” his mother said, a sybil in a cave.
They were zany, and Dick remembered why his family’s characters oppressed him so. It wasn’t simply that they worked so hard to show off. Rather it was that their divertissements were a delaying action that held him off. In a while they would drop their roles and behave normally. Their masquerades were reserved for homecomings like this one, or leavetakings, or their first visit to a patient in the hospital, say. It was their way of concealing feeling, thrusting it away from them until all the emotional elements in a situation had disappeared. In this way his family life was as sound, that is to say as even-keeled, as any. It was like living with lawyers, with cops who had seen everything. If he were to die right then and there, they would probably make his body a prop in a game, and the game would continue, the show go on until every last atom of their grief had been absorbed — until, that is, real grief would be ludicrous, coming so past its time. Oh, they were hard. He recalled the story Miriam had told about her father, how she’d had to shield him. Why, his family was like that and he hadn’t even known it. Why couldn’t folks take it? Why did they insist upon the quotidian? What was so bad about bad news? Surely the point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional. The range of the strange, he thought.
Dick asked for his father and was hurt when they brought him up to date in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It meant that they had already absorbed his homecoming and that their long neutrality had begun.
And it had.
Except for his dealings with his father, whose roles were endless and played with a rabid verve, a hammy, polished vehemence. The man had become a missing person. That is, he had somehow done away with the father Dick remembered — once a heavy smoker, he had even given this up — and had taken on a variety of characteristics which had nothing to do with himself. (And nothing to do with the man he’d asked about, whose situation had been subsumed in a painless generality; “Fine,” his mother had said when he’d asked. Not even “Foine.” Fine, then. But could her placid sketch of the man be another performance? Was neutrality itself a further concealment, a new way of handling the really felt?) His father’s behavior shocked him. In the past his dad’s performances during those momentary seizures of spirit that were an affliction to all his family — Dick, the exception, was their audience, though his bland submission to their moods, like the drowned man’s in a first-aid demonstration, may also have been a sort of performance, as his leaving home may have been, or even his famous apprenticeship — had been strictly amateur, never parodic and thus professional, like Arthur’s or his wife’s. His father’s roles had always been only a sort of graceless variation of his usual condition, as someone with a head cold is said to be “not quite himself” while it lasts.
When Dick Gibson had left home a few years before, Arthur, then a boy just entering high school, had been ferociously exuberant, proud, almost worshipful in Dick’s presence, developing the conceit that Dick had enlisted in the navy and was off to see the world, have adventures, fight the country’s enemies, get drunk in the world’s low bars. He was kid brother to Dick’s hero and bounded about the older boy like an excited puppy. Given Arthur’s superior height, this was quite patently ludicrous, and Dick was actually physically cowed by the broad, satiric slaps and jabs with which Arthur mocked his brother’s shy, serious journey. His mother, on the other hand, called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into the sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf. The talisman was no St. Christopher’s medal but only a penny some child had laid on the streetcar tracks.
But his father, an inventor who had had something to do with the development of radio and who was essentially a serious man, had merely joked lamely with him, rather embarrassed, Dick thought, and perhaps a little impatient for the train to leave. “Listen, kiddo,” he’d told him, “good luck. Stay out of jail.” Then he’d made a fist — noticing the fingertips, not tucked into the palm but exposed and almost touching the wrist, Dick was ashamed of his father’s forceless fist — and pretended to clip him sportily on the jaw. He’d hit him with the wrong set of knuckles, and Dick had felt the gentle flat of his father’s fingernails on his cheek. Now he wondered if this might not have been the subtlest turn of all.
The man never let up. There was something driven and fervid and accusing in his narrow postures. He concentrated the full force of his masquerade on Dick alone, and it was always as if the two of them had never had anything to do with each other before, as if the father, now pontificating, now relaxed and expansive — though always abrupt, like someone speaking out at prayer meeting — was seizing some initiative the son had not even known was at stake, throwing him off balance, casting first stones.
“Today, downtown, I bought my paper from the man at the corner of Carnegie and Allegheny. You’ve probably seen him though you may never have noticed him. He is a fixture there — the sort of person of whom it’s idly said, ‘Him? He’s probably worth plenty.’ He’s a cripple, an amputee. His name is Harold, though I don’t know how I know this, we’ve never been introduced, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning his name to me. He has no arms. He merely stands, sentinel-like, behind his stock of newspapers and administers their sale. Customers count out their change from a bowl of coins and bills beside a greasy iron weight that lies across the top paper in the pile.