Marc came back from the bathroom, feeling refreshed. He had slapped on a bit of aftershave. He did his best to combat the odors of others by always smelling good himself.
“He doesn’t recognize me,” the mother said to her boyfriend.
Marc saw that the pillowcase was draped over the infected sex organ, and felt relieved. “I think we should call the doctor,” he said.
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“We could take him to the hospital.” He noted with satisfaction that he was willing to drive there for the second time in one night.
“What will they say when they see him? Don’t we have anything in the house to fix him up?”
“Water,” Xavier whispered.
The mother dreaded taking her son to the hospital. She didn’t know what she would tell the doctors. She knew many of them personally, from the Rotary Club. A broken nose was one thing, that could happen to anyone, but a dark-blue sex organ?
“It looks infected,” Marc said. He didn’t want the mother to get upset. Truth was, it didn’t look infected, it looked worse than that. He had seen pictures of wounded soldiers from the First World War, in close-up. That’s what Xavier’s sex organ reminded him of most.
“I know,” the mother said. “We’ll put iodine on it. We still have some.” Once again, there was hope. There was hope again, that monster.
Before Marc could say a word, she hurried to the bathroom. He heard her rummaging around, heard something fall to the ground, and a few moments later she came back with a vial of iodine. She pulled the pillowcase off her son’s body, which resulted in another bout of screaming. She was getting used to that. Her mother had screamed a lot, too, right before she died. She had screamed horribly when the Russians raped her. Xavier’s mother had thought that was strange. Screaming didn’t change anything, so why scream?
“Why are you doing this to us?” the mother asked. “What have you been up to, Xavier? What on earth have you been up to?” She opened the bottle and dribbled iodine onto her son’s inflamed member.
Xavier’s body shook. He made movements that reminded his mother of a spastic. At least she had been spared that, a spastic baby. Horror-film noises came from the boy’s throat.
“It stings a little, I know,” the mother said to the boy. “But we have to disinfect the wound.” And she dribbled a little more iodine onto the blue sex organ.
Her motherly love was every bit as great as her fear of what people might say. And people always said a lot. More and more, in fact. They had opinions about everything. Even if you lived the way they did, ate the same food, went on vacation to the same mountain villages, they still found something to complain about.
“It looks like he’s having an epileptic fit,” Marc said.
“He hurt himself,” the mother said. “He was probably playing games with the other boys.”
She bent over and held the boy’s head in her hands. “You bad boy,” she said. “Aren’t you a little too old for games like that?”
“Water,” the boy whispered. “Please, water. It hurts.”
“He wants some water,” Marc said.
“He’s probably dehydrated after all that carousing.”
Xavier’s mother knew about feeling dehydrated. After Xavier’s grandmother had been raped and had screamed so horribly that it gave her daughter a headache, she had turned to the bottle.
Marc fetched a glass of water, moistened his stepson’s lips, and poured a little water down the boy’s throat. He avoided looking at the scene of the disaster. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe we should call somebody.”
But the mother said, “Let’s wait and see if the iodine helps.”
Together they lifted the boy and put him on his bed.
Xavier screamed again.
“Now close your eyes and go to sleep,” the mother said. “And if you need anything, just call.”
“Water,” the boy whispered, “please, more water.”
“What’s that smell?” the mother asked.
She and Marc both inhaled deeply.
“Smells like blood,” Marc said.
The blood-soaked bandage was still lying on the blanket. Marc acted as though he hadn’t seen it. The mother thought the boy should learn to clean up after himself. Coddling him would be a mistake; if he was coddled, nothing would ever become of him.
“It’s something else,” Mrs. Radek said. “It smells awful.”
The mother began nosing around. She shoved aside a few books about the history of the Jews, even came across a Jewish prayer book, but found nothing that could explain that awful smell. Then, beside the bed, she found the piece of kosher Gorgonzola that Mr. Schwartz had wrapped so carefully in wax paper.
“Look,” she said, “look at this.”
She sniffed at the Gorgonzola, then made her boyfriend smell it as well.
“Whew, that stinks something awful,” Marc said. He didn’t like cheese much; he preferred luncheon meat.
“Where did you get this?” the mother asked, waving the Gorgonzola in front of the boy’s eyes.
There was no reply.
“Where did you get this?” she asked a little more loudly.
Still no answer.
“All right,” she said. “If you’re not going to tell me, I’ll just have to throw it away.”
She went downstairs and tossed the Gorgonzola in the garbage. She didn’t want nasty things in her house.
When she returned to the nursery she saw that Marc was squatting down beside the bed, caressing the boy’s cheeks.
“Leave him alone,” she said. “He’ll feel better tomorrow, and then he’ll be off doing whatever he pleases.”
The mother and Marc went back to their room. “Sleep is the best medicine,” she had said before they left the nursery. “Xavier, sleep is the best medicine.” She hated to see her only child suffer like this. A child didn’t always have to get its way, but this was a bit much.
In the bedroom, Marc nuzzled up against the mother’s left breast. He wanted to make up for it, the broken nose and his being so unkind when she had stood in front of him and shown him everything she’d never really dared to show him before.
But the mother wasn’t about to let herself be placated so easily. She pushed him away; she was thinking about her child.
The boy lay in the room beside theirs and had to go to the toilet. He felt paralyzed, he couldn’t move. There was nothing but the pain; it had spread to his head now, too. “I have to go to the toilet,” the boy shouted as loud as he could, but the grown-ups didn’t hear him.
“I can’t, not right now,” the mother said. “You have to understand that, Marc. I have other things on my mind. Less than two hours ago you broke my nose, and now you want to do it again.” She took a deep breath. “Now you want to come right inside me. But that’s not the way it works.”
“I don’t want to come right inside you,” her boyfriend said. “We can also do it very gently.”
“Forget it,” the mother said. “You want to come right inside me, and I’m not going to let anyone come right inside me — enough is enough. After dinner you had your chance, you could have done anything you wanted with me, but you blew it. You had to go and listen to your Benny Goodman, and now there’s not going to be any more coming inside me.”
It was good to talk that way, she thought. She should do it more often. It would make her fantasy flare up, like bellows to a hearth.
She pulled the blanket up to her chin.
In the next room, the boy shouted, “Mama!”
And Marc said, “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” the mother said. “I’m sorry, too.”
Her boyfriend thought for a minute. “Would it be okay,” he asked, “if I satisfied myself while I looked at you? I won’t bother you. You can even go to sleep if you want.”