“Morning,” he said finally, giving it an ironic lift.
“You seen the orange juice?”
He considered this a moment, taking a judicious bite of his sandwich and patting his lips with a paper napkin. For a moment he caught the shrewd eyes and faintly bemused smile of General Philip Van Wart (1749–1831), whose portrait, by Ezra Ames, had hung beside the kitchen window since his death. “What about in the freezer?”
Mardi swung back the plastic door to the freezer compartment without comment. As he watched her snatch the garish container from the shelf and fumble with the electric can opener, he was suddenly seized with the desire to shake her, shake her till she woke up, cut her hair, stuffed her miniskirts and fishnet stockings in the trash can where they belonged and rejoined the community of man. So far as he could see, all she ever did was chase after a bunch of characters who looked as if they’d crawled out of some cave in New Guinea, espouse sexual liberation and freedom for the oppressed peoples of Asia at the dinner table and sleep till noon. She’d graduated from Bard in June and the closest she’d come to a career move since was an offhand comment about some bar in Peterskilclass="underline" in the fall, when so-and-so left for Maui, she might be able to get a gig tending bar two nights a week. Nothing definite yet, of course.
Shake her! a voice raged in his head. Shake the piss out of her!
“You seen mom?” she murmured, overfilling the English scratched-ware pitcher. A vaguely yellowish liquid seeped from pitcher to counter, from counter to floor: drip — drip — drip.
“What?” he asked, though he’d heard her perfectly clearly.
“Mom.”
“What about her?”
“You seen her?”
He’d seen her all right. At dawn. Backing the station wagon out of the driveway for the trip up to Jamestown and the Indian reservation. The wagon was so overloaded with old shirts, rags, staved-in hats and odd-sized, out-of-fashion shoes that it had listed dangerously, like a foreign-registered freighter coming into port with a load of ball bearings. Joanna, her hair in curlers, had given a stiff, humorless wave and indicated that she’d be home the following day, as usual. He waved back, numbly. Anyone who’d seen them — he in his grandfather’s silk Jakarta dressing gown, standing there in the birdy hush of dawn; she, grim, makeupless and bland, wheeling out of the driveway atop her mound of trash — might have thought he’d just fired the maid or struck up a nefarious bargain with the Salvation Army. He glanced up at his daughter. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her.”
This information didn’t seem to have much effect on Mardi one way or the other. She drained a glass of juice, poured another and lurched toward the table, where she collapsed in the chair, glass clutched desperately in her hand, and made a peremptive snatch for the paper. “Christ,” she muttered, “I feel like shit.” It was the most communicative she’d been in recent memory.
He was about to inquire as to the cause and root of this feeling, as a way perhaps of drawing closer to her, commiserating with her, bridging the gap between the generations, when she lit a cigarette, and exhaling in his face, said: “Anything in this rag today?”
Suddenly he felt humbled, weary, a lip-speller in the presence of the Great Enigma. In his most inoffensive tone, generally reserved for fellow members of the Van Wartville Historical Society, he said, “As a matter of fact, there is. Down at the bottom there. A thing about the son of a man I used to know — a real hard-luck case — who had an accident last night. Funny, because—”
“Oh, who cares?” she snarled, pushing herself up from the table and crumpling the paper in her free hand. “Who gives a good goddamn about you and your old cronies — they’re just a bunch of Birchers and rednecks anyway.”
Now she’d done it. That urge to shake her, to slap some awareness into those smug lifeless eyes, seized him like a set of claws. He jumped to his feet. “Don’t you talk to me like that, you, you. … Look at yourself,” he sputtered, flying into a denunciatory harangue that savaged every aspect of her hippie credo, behavior and habits, from her grinding moronic music to her unwashed, unshorn tribal cohorts, and ending with a philippic on one of those cohorts in particular, the Crane kid. “Skinniest, dirtiest, unhealthiest-looking—”
“You’re just mad because his grandfather won’t sell you the precious property, aren’t you?” She sliced the air with the edge of her hand, as absolute and immovable as a hanging judge. “Is that all you can think about, huh? History and money?”
“Hippie,” he hissed. “Tramp.”
“Snob. Dirt-eater.”
“Christ!” he roared. “I was only trying to make conversation, be nice for a change. That’s all. I used to know his father, this Van Brunt kid, that’s all. We’re two human beings, right? Father and daughter. Communicating, right? Well, I used to know this man, that’s all. And I thought it was ironic, interesting in a kind of morbid way, when I saw that his son had lost his foot.”
Mardi’s expression had changed. “What’d you say his name was?” she asked, bending for the paper.
“Van Brunt. Truman. Or, no, the son’s named something else. William or Walter or something.”
She was on her knees, smoothing out the newspaper on the threehundred-year-old planks of the kitchen floor. “Walter,” she murmured, reading aloud. “Walter Truman Van Brunt.”
“You know him?”
The look she gave him was like a sword thrust. “Not in the biblical sense,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
Prosthesis
Walter was lucky.
Two weeks after his collision with history, he left Peterskill Community Hospital with a new plastic flesh-colored foot, courtesy of Drs. Ziss and Huysterkark, the Insurance Underwriters of Pensacola Corporation, and Hesh and Lola. Dr. Ziss, after three vigorous sets of early-morning tennis, had been called in to the emergency room to ensure safe closure of the wound. He debrided the damaged tissue, recessed tibia and fibula, brought down two flaps of skin and muscle for cushioning and sutured them together over the bone in a fishmouth closure. Dr. Huysterkark had appeared the following afternoon to provide hope and demonstrate the prosthesis. The Insurance Underwriters, in collaboration with Hesh and Lola, footed the bill.
Walter had been dozing when Huysterkark turned up; he woke to find the doctor perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair, the plastic foot in his lap. Walter’s eyes went instantly from the doctor’s patchy hair and fixed smile to the prosthesis, with its bulge of ankle and indentations meant to delineate toes. It looked like something wrenched from a department store mannequin.
“You’re awake,” the doctor said, barely moving his thin, salmon lips. He wore a scrub coat and two-tone shoes, and he had the air of a man who could sell ice to the Eskimos. “Sleep well?”
Walter nodded automatically. In fact, he’d slept like a prisoner awaiting execution, beset by irrational fears and the demons of the unconscious.
“I’ve brought along the prosthesis,” Huysterkark said, “and some”—he’d begun to fumble through a manila folder—“supporting materials.”
Though Walter had graduated from the state university, where he’d studied the liberal arts (a patchy overview of world literature, a seminar on circumcision rites in the Trobriand Islands and courses in the history of agriculture, medieval lute-making and contemporary philosophy with emphasis on death obsession and existentialist thought, to mention a few of the highlights), he was unfamiliar with the term. “Prosthesis?” he echoed, his eyes fixed on the plastic foot. All at once he was seized with panic. This obscene lump of plastic, this doll’s foot, was going to be grafted in some unspeakable way to his own torn and wanting self. He thought of Ahab, Long John Silver, old Joe Crudwell up the block who’d lost both legs and his right forearm to a German grenade in Belleau Wood.