Honeydew: Stories Part 16

Many decades later she did mention the queer incident to her mother.

"No!" Her mother raised head and shoulders with such sudden force that the IV pole shook.

"Lie down, dear," said Sallyann, glancing at the monitor.

Her mother subsided into the pillows. "I a.s.sumed that you drew Maurice."

"I drew a blank."

"You married Maurice," her mother reminded her.

"Among others," Sallyann reminded her in turn. "Franco and Nils-who knew then that they existed? Their names weren't even in the hat."

"Franco," her mother murmured; and even though her voice had been weakened by the troublesome business of dying, it managed to convey the distaste she had felt for Sallyann's middle husband.

Sallyann smoothed the pillows. "My gorgeous Franco had a bad character but he was pa.s.sion made flesh. All cats are not gray at night...Did you really think they were?"

Her mother's heart was unstoppably failing but she was in no pain and her mind was clear. "I thought-I still think-that people are more similar than different. I think that any reasonable couple can...invent its own romance...make its own happiness. See how right I was with Helen and Steve, with Marcie and Biff."

"Marcie and Biff both play around, I hear."

"Look who's talking," her mother said. Her affectionate hand found her daughter's.

Sallyann wore contact lenses these days. Her still fiery hair was coiled around her head. She had fulfilled all possible promises: had become stunning, had become worldly, had become an important anthropologist, had lived in various places, had married and divorced and borne interesting children. Though nearly seventy she would probably marry yet again. It had become a gratifying habit, more enjoyable each time she did it; but the man in the fedora still occupied pride of place in her heart. Now she had returned to G.o.dolphin to nurse her ancient, twice-widowed mother.

"So it was you who drew the blank," her mother was whispering. "All along I thought it was June."

No one will ever know the name of June's intended. She pocketed the paper she had lifted from the hat. While the other three girls were reading theirs-or, in Sallyann's case, trying to read hers-June was merely musing. Once home, she went into the bathroom and, face averted, tore the paper into many pieces and flushed the pieces away.

She too felt relief, deeper than Sallyann's. She would not merely delay; she would retire. She could pretend that Celibacy was the name she had drawn; she was freed now to become that endearing thing: an old maid.

At college in Maine she had been languidly studying the history of music. Now she switched to biology; and in graduate school she made fungal morphology her specialty; and there, among the mushrooms, she found her life's sustaining interest. It was a particular organelle called individually the parenthesome, though it always came in pairs. She spent her postdoc investigating its properties, and, with a succession of cherished lab a.s.sistants, she spent the years afterward discovering its many uses. She, and they, received awards and honorary degrees. When she was fifty she bought a cottage on a hill. She grew roses and dahlias and poppies. She was the cellist in an amateur string quartet that met faithfully every week and gave occasional recitals. She kept in touch with old friends.

"You knew there was a blank?" Sallyann asked her mother.

The old woman briefly lifted her chin: Yes.

"Did you put it into the hat?"

The barest side-to-side motion: No.

"But you let it stay there."

This was not posed as a question; and she hadn't the strength to reply; and anyway there were too many answers. Because she had been acting as agency, not executive: she'd been as pa.s.sive as the fedora. Because chance allows itself an occasional collaborator. Because Helen needed an opportunity to discharge her malice. Because the one blank paper made the game more interesting. It was only a game, after all. Who could have known that the girls would play it so seriously. Who could have predicted that a woman addled by bereavement could wield such influence over four sprites with their lives ahead of them, with choices thick at their feet.

Sallyann saw that her mother could no longer speak. She bent over the loved face. "You did a marvelous thing," she said. "We are all happy enough."

Sonny Of all the books Mindy's father received during his illness and convalescence, his declared favorite was Legends of the Jews. Fat warty Rabbi Goldstone lugged the set into the sickroom on one of his unwelcome visits and deposited all six volumes with a G.o.dly thump onto the bed, as if the learning inside might overcome ills of the flesh. Mindy's mother, Roz, gave the rabbi one of her ambiguous smiles-this one, Mindy knew, meant "Strike me dead if I open one of those tomes." The book Roz grabbed from a stack sent by patients was B.F.'s Daughter-the first J. P. Marquand since the war. She admired Marquand's well-bred characters.

As for Mindy and her two sisters, they liked best the optical-illusion book, Masters of Deception, brought to the door by the maid of Mrs. Julius Barrengos, who lived in a grand house on the next street. Masters of Deception's ill.u.s.trations included paintings and engravings by Dal and Magritte and Escher. Impossible things made possible-a hat floating between clouds like a bird, a watch dripping like syrup. Transformation was the game: just what the Margolis girls were looking for.

Retransformation, really. Their father had already been transformed from a hearty man into an invalid. So Mindy and her sisters wanted to return to what they'd all lately been-a reasonably contented family of six: two parents; one maiden aunt, Cecile-she chose the latest Perry Mason from the stack; and three princesses, otherwise called daughters. "Fairy tales always have three daughters," Thelma noted. "The older two are mean, the youngest is nice." At twelve, Tem was the youngest. "Though Beauty's sisters are not so bad..."

"Three sisters are endemic in drama," said Talia, the oldest. "Chekhov wrote a play of that very name, and think of Lear..."

"I never think of Lear," said Mindy.

"What's a Lear?" said Tem.

Talia at sixteen was the family intellectual. She was in the eleventh grade's first group in the three-track high school. Mindy, two years younger, was in the ninth grade's first group. Tem was still in untracked grammar school.

Talia persisted. "Lear, a king, had three daughters: Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia."

"In the gender category our family doesn't balance," Mindy said, disregarding those made-up names.

"Dad and Mom hoped you'd be a boy," Talia told her.

"After me they hoped that Tem would be a boy," Mindy said.

"I am a boy," Tem said. "Sometimes."

Whatever Dr. and Mrs. Margolis had hoped for, they expressed only satisfaction with the brainy, underweight Talia, the curly, pretty Mindy, the st.u.r.dy Tem. Tem had a talent for drawing-faces in particular-which she exercised with particular vehemence during her father's recovery. It was Tem who had first lit on Masters of Deception. She soon learned to reproduce the optical illusions at the beginning of the book. Her favorite was the standard schema of profile confronting matching profile with a s.p.a.ce between them. Anybody staring at the drawing got freed suddenly from profiles and found herself looking instead at the silhouette of a vase created by slanting foreheads, prominent noses, rounded lips, and jutting jaws. Tem drew pairs of matching profiles with a neat vase between them, and then pairs of nonmatching profiles producing severely asymmetrical vases in danger of falling over.

As for Legends of the Jews, all three girls could see Dr. Margolis, through the half-open bedroom door, propped up in bed with one of the volumes splayed on his lap. Every so often he turned a page. So Talia abandoned Deception and chose a volume of Legends for herself and read it in the living room on her father's leather recliner. She copied phrases into a spiral notebook. Uninvited, she read pages from the Legends out loud to her mother, who, Mindy noticed, only seemed to listen; to Tem, who glared as if annoyance could transform Talia into a pillar of salt; and to Mindy, who liked the thought of G.o.d becoming soft, melting like a watch, saving Isaac, saving Jonah.

But Mindy liked best the paintings of Arcimboldo. He was a famous sixteenth-century Italian, the book told her. His portraits were composed of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. That is, he painted representations of fruits, vegetables, and flowers so arranged that together they formed the likeness of a grotesque person. They had helpful t.i.tles, and after a while you saw that, say, the portrait called Autumn, a face in profile, had a pumpkin for a hat, grapes for hair, a potato for a nose, a cherry for a wen. His cheek was an apple, his ear a lemon slice. The Gardener, an a.s.sembly of oversize root vegetables, bore an unhappy resemblance to Rabbi Goldstone. Each vegetable or piece of one was rendered so precisely that Mindy wanted to eat it right off the page, or, if hygiene demanded, plunge it into boiling water first.

Fruit played its part in the Legends too, Talia told her: Eve's apples of course, but also many other juicy foodstuffs, like pomegranates. "'Moses was commanded to cause a robe to be made for Aaron,'" she read. "'Upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet...and bells of gold between them...Aaron's sound shall be heard when he goeth unto the holy place before Jehovah, and when he cometh out, that he die not.'"

Mindy's cla.s.s had done mythology last year. "In Ancient Greece the pomegranate was a symbol of death."

"Shut up," Tem said to both her sisters.

There were no pomegranates in Arcimboldo's work, but there was all that familiar produce. It reminded Mindy of Louie the vegetable man.

Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of a.s.sorted clothing from a junk shop. He was called the vegetable man because he owned a fruit-and-vegetable truck.

Before Louie the Margolises had had a different vegetable man-Paci, born in their middle-size New England city but of Italian descent, like almost one-third of the population. Another almost-third was Irish. The third nearly third was Yankee. There were Negroes too, slighted in so many ways-housing, city services, schools, employment-that it was a wonder they didn't revolt. To Roz, instructed in hierarchies by her beloved Marquand, the city's ethnic groups formed a ladder-Yankees on top, then Jews, then Italians, then Irish, then a bunch of others like Armenians, then Negroes. She graded Jews within their category too. On the Jewish ladder the rungs were occupations: professors on top (there was one Jewish professor in the local college), then doctors, then lawyers, then businessmen (unless very successful, in which case they moved above lawyers). Beneath middling businessmen were high school teachers, inevitably unmarried, living with their mother or taking up residence in their younger brother's house, like plain Cecile; and then people who worked with their hands, like chiropodists, and then tailors who worked on their knees. Beneath tailors were vegetable men. Like the lone professor, there was just one of those, Louie.

These rankings were flexible; personal characteristics like beauty, musical talent, and tragedy could elevate a person's status. Murky pasts, schnorring relatives, disappointing children, and the failure to marry could lower it. This ordering of people, Talia informed her sisters, was rather like the divisions in heaven, where...

"Don't tell us!" Mindy said.

Talia's eyes watered. Mindy had noticed that Talia was less know-it-all these days, even though her new gla.s.ses made her look like a genius. That was paradoxical, Mindy thought (she was improving her word power).

"Okay, tell us," Mindy relented.

"You are not heavenly material," snapped Talia, recovering. "Here on earth Mom's rankings show how uneasy she is about us." Though by being children of a doctor they occupied the next-to-highest rank, Talia explained, there was always the danger of unfortunate friendships leading to inappropriate attachments or-G.o.d forbid-inappropriate marriages. "Mom's seen it happen in life, she's seen it in-"

"I will marry an appropriate prince," said Tem, who was apparently a girl today.

"-Marquand. So she wants to teach us where everybody stands."

Their mother's instruction was casual: murmurs over the slender shoulder as she stood at the sink, her face not quite in profile-curls obscured a portion of the smooth brow and the cheek, and all you could see was the brief nose. Or perhaps during a trip to the ice cream store: pretty Mrs. Margolis and her girls. Of Mr. Shapiro, who sold insurance, she confided: "Men in the insurance business can't make a living doing anything else." Of a nurse at the hospital, an ebony beauty: "I wonder if white boys fall for her." s.e.x appeal could lead directly to miscegenation. Of Mrs. Barrengos, who'd attended college out of town and didn't play canasta and wore prewar clothing: "She's like a Yankee." Embezzlement could move somebody's level from high business to criminal (below vegetable man). The discovery that a seeming aristocrat was in fact Jewish moved him above even the Yankees he had infiltrated. Roz Margolis liked Houdini, or at least the idea of him.

In fact, she liked just about everyone. Position on the ladder did not indicate human worth. She liked Louie. She had liked Paci too, even though he'd left the vegetable trade for a position in an unspecified enterprise. The city had an active Mob.

Louie arrived in the back vestibule every Thursday afternoon around four. Usually his son came with him. His son was in Mindy's grade, but he was in group two with mostly Italians. He was Louie's image, but a little shorter. It would have been hard to be much shorter. He had the same large curved nose, and he wore similar secondhand clothing. Louie called the boy Sonny and referred to him as Sonny, though Mindy knew his name was Franklin. Sonny had inherited or adopted Louie's deferential manner.

"Hangdog," defined Talia.

"Preoccupied," Mindy said. She thought that Sonny had things on his mind, even though his mind was not superior...not yet, anyway. Talia knew of a few kids who had started in group two and got shifted to group one and ended up at Harvard. Talia herself was planning to go to Harvard.

"Sonny has green eyes," Tem said.

Mindy hadn't noticed. On the following Thursday she did notice. Yes, large eyes the color of blotting paper. They must have come from Mrs. Louie.

Despite the impoverished look of Louie and Sonny, their truck was a royal wonder. Paci's wares had been arranged hodgepodge, heaps of beets consorting with mountains of potatoes only more or less separate from apples. Bruisable items were slumped in boxes blackened by age and weather. Perhaps Paci's vehicle had sometimes been swept, but what could be seen of its floor was always covered with dirt and twigs and the squashed remains of things stepped on.

In Louie's truck, boxes filled with produce were fixed to the sides, large ones below, then middle, then small, in a hierarchy of size. Louie kept his lettuces silvered with moisture-Sonny watered them at various stops in the journey. Sometimes Sonny filled a watering can from the Margolises' outdoor spigot; Mindy, wandering outside from the breakfast nook where she did her homework, admired his deftness even at this low-value task. He didn't waste motions, though he would pause briefly to say h.e.l.lo.

"h.e.l.lo," she'd say.

He watered the lettuce. Behind him, within the truck, potatoes were dotted with the wholesome dirt they'd been wrested from. Carrots came in mischievous shapes. Summer squash and zucchini lay side by side like gloves in a drawer. There was a makeshift aisle between the wares for the convenience of Louie and Sonny. It narrowed sharply as it approached the rear (really the front, just behind the cab), distorting perspective; the aisle seemed to go on for a mile. In the very back, a treasure within treasures, seasonal flowers stood in buckets. Every so often, after business was done, Louie would go into his truck and return with a bouquet which he presented to Mrs. Margolis, his cap still on his head.

Arcimboldo's work reminded Mindy of the vegetable man, and the vegetable man's abundant stock reminded her of Arcimboldo. Sometimes, standing at the rear of the truck, Mindy spotted a b.u.t.ternut squash like a bulbous nose or strawberries that side by side would have made a perfect mouth. You could put those tiny pearl onions between the berries, she said to Talia. Teeth.

"Nature imitates art," Talia explained. "That's an apothegm," she added. Again there were sudden tears behind her gla.s.ses. "I wish Daddy would get better."

On Thursdays Mindy continued to watch Louie or Sonny or both fill several slatted baskets and carry them into the kitchen and leave them there. Next week, emptied, they'd be waiting in the vestibule. Louie's system was considerate, his truck was pridefully kept in order, and though he couldn't have made a living in the insurance business, he was an excellent vegetable man.

And Sonny, second group notwithstanding, was an excellent apprentice. After awarding him her one-word greeting, after silently admiring the truck, Mindy always returned to the breakfast nook. She had a good view of the vestibule. Louie stood there having his audience with her mother. Mindy watched the two of them, Louie recommending, her mother thinking, and saying, Yes, two pounds; or Yes, a couple of good ones; or No, not today. Louie wrote the requests in a spiral notebook. Beside him, Sonny did the same, in a notebook of his own. When enough had been ordered for a one-person haul from the truck, Louie nodded at Sonny, and Sonny went outside. The rest of the Margolis order was inscribed in Louie's notebook alone. Then Louie joined his child; and soon they both entered the kitchen with baskets.

Mindy guessed she'd feel sorry when she had to stop watching this routine. But next year she hoped to play her viola in the school orchestra, which had afternoon rehearsals. Or she might go out for basketball. And sometime in the future there might be embarra.s.sment between her and Sonny. She was destined to become desirable-all three sisters were. Their mother, like a good witch, had promised them loveliness one Sat.u.r.day after an afternoon of unproductive shopping. Talia sniffed, as if she knew that tall skinny bespectacled girls rarely underwent transformation. "Can't I be a lovely boy?" Tem wondered. But Mindy trusted the prediction-she already resembled her desirable mother. She was destined to become the prettiest daughter of an acclaimed doctor-of a late acclaimed doctor, if the worst happened. Sonny was destined to remain a vegetable man's son. If he loved beyond his station, loved Mindy or some other elevated girl, that love was doomed. But this predictable disappointment seemed as far away as the receding back of the truck; now, on this year's Thursdays, Mindy still sat in the breakfast nook taking silent part in the domestic performance.

One Thursday Sonny didn't show up.

"Sick," Louie said to the inevitable question.

Also the following Thursday and the one after that, and he seemed to be absent from school. Mindy was used to seeing Sonny with the other group-two students as they trooped through the halls. She didn't see him now.

Sonny's absence coincided with Dr. Margolis's reappearance. One Sat.u.r.day morning he came downstairs in his robe. Tem like a four-year-old hurled herself at his shins. Talia stood still, her mouth working. Mindy slid her arm under his and laid her head against his heart. The following day he came downstairs wearing slacks and a sweater, carrying Legends. A few days later he joined them for dinner; afterward he helped Aunt Cecile with a crossword puzzle. Retransformation at last...Soon he would go back to his office.

Louie was still working una.s.sisted.

But one week, like their father, Sonny stopped being sick. He was in school on Monday, and on Thursday he came with his own father to the Margolis back vestibule. It was raining. Louis and the boy wore yellow slickers, Mindy observed from her nook-did they think they were fishermen? Her mother completed the first half of the order. Sonny went out to the truck.

"I'm glad he's gotten better," Mindy's mother said.

Silence. Louie raised his head. Then he said in a dull voice: "He hasn't. He hasn't gotten better. He's not going to get better."

That was all. Her mother did not say What or I'm sorry or Doctors can be wrong or even Oh, Louie. She remained standing in the vestibule looking down at the vegetable man and he remained looking up at her, and the s.p.a.ce between their dissimilar profiles formed a misshapen vase. Then her mother turned away. Louie went out. The vase disappeared.

The girl went outside too. The rain had stopped. Around their backyard hung a mist. Sonny's slicker was folded neatly on the gra.s.s. She watched as within the illusive length of the bright truck the condemned boy, soon joined by his father, silently filled baskets with squash, apples, melons-noses, cheeks, chins-the two working with their rare efficiency, as they would continue to do while they could, until they couldn't.

Her throat ached. Sonny, intent on his task, was losing a future, his future, maybe stunted and loveless and second groupish, but his.

Friday night, Mindy and Talia sat side by side on Talia's bed, their legs dangling as if from a raft into a lake. Side by side but not hip to hip; they were separated by an expanse of tufted bedspread. And so they managed to face each other by twisting their slender torsos. The profiles did not match: Talia's nose was long and commanding, Mindy's straight and agreeable. Mindy's non-Jewish features might serve to move her even higher on her mother's imaginary ladder, might even allow her to swing over to the Yankee ladder, onto a Yankee rung, next to a Yankee boy. Her parents would wring their hands but they would not declare her dead. "Sonny has a lethal disease," Mindy said.

"Fatal," Talia corrected. "Sonny...? Oh, yes, the vegetable boy. Which disease?"

"I don't know." Mindy repeated the conversation she'd overheard.

"That's too bad," Talia said.

"It's terrible."

"Terrible, then."

"I mean...suppose it was us."

"Were we. You're always thinking of yourself."

Mindy only guessed that Suppose it was us, though brief and ungrammatical, was a necessary first step toward putting oneself in someone else's shoes, for you had only to reverse subject and complement to say Suppose we were Sonny. Suppose we faced pain and then darkness; pain, what is it like for Sonny; darkness, how will it be? But she was sure that Talia, not far from her on the bed, was insulting her and that what might have been a moment of closeness between the girls had turned into a kind of spat. "I'm sorry," Talia muttered, but too late-Mindy stood up and left her hard-hearted sister.

Hard-hearted? Talia would have said other-minded. Though she thought of Sonny as a kind of vegetable, she knew he was a human being, and therefore worth saving, like all those human beings she would be called upon to save when she finished medical school. Perhaps one day she would invent a cure for his disease. But today what Sonny needed was a remedy from the mythical past. Some functionary in the kingdom of the sick had moved her father to the kingdom of the well and replaced him with Sonny. There must be a new magic, perhaps a heavenly one. Maybe the changeable, demanding G.o.d of the Legends would let Sonny live if Louie bought him a robe edged with embroidered pomegranates. Or perhaps her mother would redeem the boy by sacrificing one of her daughters, the way Hannah devotedly sacrificed Samuel to Eli, the way Beauty's father unwittingly sacrificed his girl to the beast. The selected daughter-Mindy?-would marry Sonny, and on their wedding night he'd be transformed from a turnip into a prince; Mindy would become a princess. Talia would be rid of her.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoon Mindy and Tem were playing gin rummy. Their father had been kibitzing but he had gone upstairs for a nap. Mindy revealed the latest news.

"Children don't die," Tem countered. "Sometimes they drown, that's all."

How innocent a twelve-year-old could be. "They die of diseases too."

"In books. Not here. Stop talking. Gin."

The bested Mindy exited through the archway to the dining room just as their father descended the stairs into the hall. Tem was treated to the back view of her sister, all grace and angora, and to the front view of her parent-what a tiny nap he'd taken, how could it have been restful. Her hand itched for a pencil; she'd use the side of the graphite for those grooves on the cheeks, crosshatches for the area under the pursed lips. Dr. Margolis, Restored to Health? No: Dr. Margolis, Pretending Not to Hurt. His restoration had been so brief. She felt cruelly teased. But she smiled at him, and he managed to smile at her. He sat down on the recliner. Tem was wearing work overalls that Aunt Cecile had bought for her at a secondhand store, and she knew she resembled a construction worker, and she was sorry for that, for her father was an old-fashioned man who preferred women to look like women. "I'll be right back, Daddy," she said, and ran upstairs and put on one of those pleated skirts that hung in her closet and a white blouse that her mother had ironed. Now she was in costume-in drag, Talia had explained: she was a boy impersonating a girl. She ran back down and dropped onto the floor beside his shins and put her hand on his knee, and he took it. She placed his palm next to her cheek. Tomorrow, back in overalls, she would make him a present-an Arcimboldo-like portrait, created not out of vegetables but out of articles from his kit bag: bandages for hair, a swab for a nose, Mercurochrome-soaked cotton for a mustache, and, for eyes, cod-liver oil capsules.

The funeral took place in an unfamiliar, dimly lit shul, the plaster walls shredding. This congregation occupied a low rung on the ladder. Mrs. Louie was undiscoverable within a knot of her family. Louie was shrunken and wrinkled like a forgotten cuc.u.mber. A red-bearded rabbi tried in vain to talk sense. Roz remembered the funeral of Ca.s.sie Mae, who had worked for the Margolises. The congregation there stood up and wailed and shook its hundreds of black arms. Why couldn't this bunch of underprivileged Jews let themselves go, become unseemly fools; what a relief that would be. They could storm up to the bimah and kill the robed representative of an incompetent G.o.d.

Roz saw tears slide from beneath Talia's gla.s.ses. Mindy sobbed. Tem was stony, as if reserving her grief. Dr. Margolis had stayed home. Cecile had come; school was closed for vacation. She sat at the end of their row wearing her suit for occasions-brown, ill-fitting, with a dreadful blouse in a different brown. She looked dowdy and enviable both. She would never have to bury a child. A child's death was the one unsupportable grief; Talia had said so, Aristotle had said it to her-as if anybody had to bother to say it, as if every parent didn't already know. That insupportable grief might be destined for Roz herself, who could tell.

But for her daughters? With lips pressed together and eyes fixed on the comfortless ark, Roz prayed for them. She asked not for lives free of sorrow-what deity would heed that request? No; she made a sensible plea: she prayed that all three would turn out to be barren.

The Descent of Happiness I was eight-old enough to be taken along on a house call as long as I stayed out of the bedroom or whatever room was to be used for the examination. Little children were sometimes examined on the kitchen table spread with a quilt. In those cases I hid behind an open door or maybe squatted outside the house beneath a window so I could hear the conversation, all sentence fragments as my teacher would have pointed out, that got batted like a shuttlec.o.c.k between my father and the child's parents. But this morning my father was visiting an adult, Mr. Workman, patient and friend. Mr. Workman had a bad heart, not as bad as he thought it was, my father had told me, but bad enough to be listened to whenever he phoned.

"Can you hear that syncopation on your receiver?" he'd shouted.

"No. Sam. Sam! Take the phone away from your chest..." Pause while Mr. Workman presumably obeyed. "Put it back up to your ear and listen to me. I'm on my way with my stethoscope."