“Yes, well, who knows,” Stefan says. McKee continues to shine the light as Stefan lifts the cage from the table and walks with it to Mrs. Angawa’s desk. He puts it squarely on top. The light from the streetlamp streaks through the center of the cage. He moves it back, angling it so most of the cage is in darkness.
“Let’s give it fresh water,” McKee says. He looks around. He dumps Mrs. Angawa’s pencils, all sharpened to a perfect, sharp point, onto the top of the desk and carries the cup into the hallway. Stefan listens while his footsteps recede.
“I had a premonition, too,” Stefan whispers to the rabbit, putting his fingers through the cage until the tips of his fingers touch its white coat. “A premonition that you were dead, which would have been one more thing than the children could stand. But I guess that premonition was wrong.”
He sits on a corner of the desk facing into the empty classroom, legs crossed, chin cupped in his hands.
“Here you go, bunny rabbit,” McKee says, coming back into the room. He has dropped the flashlight through a belt loop. When he gets to the cage, he opens the door carefully and slips his hand in. Slowly, he pours water out of the cup.
“Should have dumped the old water out, but this’ll be good enough,” McKee says, tapping the empty cup several times on the side of the bowl. It is the same sound — or similar to the sound — Francine made recently, standing by the public phone, telling Stefan how her life was turning out.
“Missed my guess about you,” McKee says, slapping Stefan on the back. “What do you say I buy you a beer before you go home. Might take a load off my chest if I could talk about it. She really was a nice lady, you know. Ain’t no story I’d tell that wouldn’t be sure to prove that.”
As McKee closes the door behind them and locks it, Stefan hears the rabbit lapping water.
“McKee,” Stefan says, walking beside him, “all my life I’ve felt like I was just making things up, improvising as I went along. I don’t mean telling lies, I mean inventing a life. It’s something I’ve never wanted to admit.”
“Oh, I knew you wasn’t talkin’ about lies,” McKee says. “I knew just what you meant.”
WHAT WAS MINE
I don’t remember my father. I have only two photographs of him — one of two soldiers standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their faces even paler than their caps, so that it’s difficult to make out their features; the other of my father in profile, peering down at me in my crib. In that photograph, he has no discernible expression, though he does have a rather noble Roman nose and thick hair that would have been very impressive if it hadn’t been clipped so short. On the back of the picture in profile is written, unaccountably, “Guam,” while the back of the picture of the soldiers says, “Happy with baby: 5/28/49.”
Until I was five or six I had no reason to believe that Herb was not my uncle. I might have believed it much longer if my mother had not blurted out the truth one night when I opened her bedroom door and saw Herb, naked from the waist down, crouched at the foot of the bed, holding out a bouquet of roses much the way teasing people shake a biscuit in front of a sleeping dog’s nose. They had been to a wedding earlier that day, and my mother had caught the nosegay. Herb was tipsy, but I had no sense of that then. Because I was a clumsy boy, I didn’t wonder about his occasionally knocking into a wall or stepping off a curb a bit too hard. He was not allowed to drive me anywhere, but I thought only that my mother was full of arbitrary rules she imposed on everyone: no more than one hour of TV a day; put Bosco in the glass first, then the milk.
One of the most distinct memories of my early years is of that night I opened my mother’s door and saw Herb lose his balance and fall forward on the bouquet like a thief clutching bread under his shirt.
“Ethan,” my mother said, “I don’t know what you are doing in here at a time when you are supposed to be in bed — and without the manners to knock — but I think the time has come to tell you that Herbert and I are very close, but not close in the way family members such as a brother and sister are. Herbert is not your uncle, but you must go on as if he were. Other people should not know this.”
Herb had rolled onto his side. As he listened, he began laughing. He threw the crushed bouquet free, and I caught it by taking one step forward and waiting for it to land in my outstretched hand. It was the way Herb had taught me to catch a ball, because I had a tendency to overreact and rush too far forward, too fast. By the time I had caught the bouquet, exactly what my mother said had become a blur: manners, Herbert, not family, don’t say anything.
Herb rolled off the bed, stood, and pulled on his pants. I had the clear impression that he was in worse trouble than I was. I think that what he said to me was that his affection for me was just what it always had been, even though he wasn’t actually my uncle. I know that my mother threw a pillow at him and told him not to confuse me. Then she looked at me and said, emphatically, that Herb was not a part of our family. After saying that, she became quite flustered and got up and stomped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Herb gave the door a dismissive wave of the hand. Alone with him, I felt much better. I suppose I had thought that he might vanish — if he was not my uncle, he might suddenly disappear — so that his continued presence was very reassuring.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “The divorce rate is climbing, people are itching to change jobs every five minutes. You wait: Dwight Eisenhower is going to be reevaluated. He won’t have the same position in history that he has today.” He looked at me. He sat on the side of the bed. “I’m your mother’s boyfriend,” he said. “She doesn’t want to marry me. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere. Just keep it between us that I’m not Uncle Herb.”
My mother was tall and blond, the oldest child of a German family that had immigrated to America in the 1920s. Herb was dark-haired, the only child of a Lebanese father and his much younger English bride, who had considered even on the eve of her wedding leaving the Church of England to convert to Catholicism and become a nun. In retrospect, I realize that my mother’s shyness about her height and her having been indoctrinated to believe that the hope of the future lay in her accomplishing great things, and Herb’s self-consciousness about his kinky hair, along with his attempt as a child to negotiate peace between his mother and father, resulted in an odd bond between Herb and my mother: she was drawn to his conciliatory nature, and he was drawn to her no-nonsense attitude. Or perhaps she was drawn to his unusual amber eyes, and he was taken in by her inadvertently sexy, self-conscious girlishness. Maybe he took great pleasure in shocking her, in playing to her secret, more sophisticated desires, and she was secretly amused and gratified that he took it as a given that she was highly competent and did not have to prove herself to him in any way whatsoever.
She worked in a bank. He worked in the automotive section at Sears, Roebuck, and on the weekend he played piano, harmonica, and sometimes tenor sax at a bar off Pennsylvania Avenue called the Merry Mariner. On Saturday nights my mother and I would sit side by side, dressed in our good clothes, in a booth upholstered in blue Naugahyde, behind which dangled nets that were nailed to the wall, studded with starfish, conch shells, sea horses, and clamshells with small painted scenes or decals inside them. I would have to turn sideways and look above my mother to see them. I had to work out a way of seeming to be looking in front of me and listening appreciatively to Uncle Herb while at the very same time rolling my eyes upward to take in those tiny depictions of sunsets, rainbows, and ships sailing through the moonlight. Uncle Herb played a slowish version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on the harmonica as I sipped my cherry Coke with real cherries in it: three, because the waitress liked me. He played “As Time Goes By” on the piano, singing so quietly it seemed he was humming. My mother and I always split the fisherman’s platter: four shrimp, one crab cake, and a lobster tail, or sometimes two if the owner wasn’t in the kitchen, though my mother often wrapped up the lobster tails and saved them for our Sunday dinner. She would slice them and dish them up over rice, along with the tomato-and-lettuce salad she served almost every night.