Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (36 page)

From our last bedroom, reserved for guests, I got a dark glimpse of the Simons’ big bedroom. I knew there was a small bedroom, too, for my friend Elaine lived in an identical apartment down the street. The small bedroom faced the backyard, a skimpy strip of grass and six little garages, one each for the six apartments. I would never get to see that bedroom. The room I did see had a double bed with an afghan at its foot, folded into a perfect right triangle. This application of geometry to daily life gratified my critical ten-year-old self.

D
URING THAT MONTH
, which included a school vacation, I discovered that Mrs. Simon was a great tidier. Often I would find her in the living room, readjusting an antimacassar or rearranging candy in a dish or polishing the glass door of the bookcase. Serious cleaning was done once a week by a regal mulatto woman, but sometimes Mrs. Simon would stand at the kitchen sink, her stubborn profile lowered, fiercely scrubbing something. Occasionally she lay down in the bedroom. And often she disappeared. Perhaps she was talking on the telephone in the hall, a windowless place my binoculars could not penetrate. Or perhaps she was walking a few blocks to Elm Street, as most of the women in our neighborhood did most days, in order to pick up some fish and vegetables, or a library book. Once in a while I ran into Mrs. Simon on just such an errand. We were the same height—I was a tall child and she a small and somewhat bent woman—and her expression was as steely as her curls. Our eyes met, with no mediating binoculars. “Hello,” I’d whisper, suddenly shy. She never answered.

In the late afternoons, Mrs. Simon got busy. She stirred pots on the stove. She set the table in the dining room. She folded the evening paper several times, this way and that, and finally laid it on the arm of Mr. Simon’s chair. Again she adjusted the antimacassars and arranged the candies.

Darkness came at 4:30. From the window of our spare bedroom, reading by flashlight, I kept track of the cars returning to the six garages. A floodlight illuminated the area. When Mr. Simon’s car appeared, I would close my book, switch off my flashlight, and raise my binoculars.

Mr. Simon, a tall man, would unfold from his automobile. He’d pass a hand over his gray hair, raise the door of the garage, get back into the car, and drive it into the garage. He usually sat there for a while, giving me a chance to inspect his license plate, which had three numbers and two letters. I have forgotten them all. My eyes caressed the curve of his car trunk. I noticed the branch caught on the fender. Where had he been driving, to collect such a trophy? Was he a salesman? What did he do while Mrs. Simon and I were watching the clock for him?

In the midst of my musings, Mr. Simon would reappear, briefcase in hand, and roll down his garage door. That handkerchief, hanging from his overcoat pocket—might it slip out? Would the drop of the handkerchief be marked only by me, whose presence was as undetectable as God’s? And if I alone saw cloth meet asphalt, could the handkerchief really be said to have fallen, or would it be like the tree I’d learned about in class, the tree that cracks unheard in the forest and thus provides a philosophical question for the ages? Surely Mrs. Simon, who sorted her laundry with as much finickiness as a forty-niner panning for gold, would notice a missing item. But the handkerchief clung to his pocket as Mr. Simon walked slowly across the backyard and toward the rear door of the apartment building.

I glided into my parents’ dark bedroom. My mother was duplicating Mrs. Simon’s activities in our kitchen downstairs, my father was saving people’s vision in his office. I turned my magic glasses onto the Simons’ bright living room, only a few yards away.

How I yearned to witness Mr. Simon’s return. Alas, it always took place in that inner hall. It must be like my father’s homecoming: the woman hurrying to the door; the man bringing in a gust of weather and excitement; the hug, affectionate and sometimes annoyingly long; and finally the separation, so that two little girls rushing downstairs could be caught in those overcoated arms. But at the Simons’ there were no children. Perhaps the pair exchanged a dignified kiss.

Our dinner coincided with theirs. And then I had to help my mother with the dishes. It wasn’t until evening that I saw the Simons again.

This was my favorite scene. The couple by the fireplace and the invisible guest. I could see how motionless Mr. Simon’s long face was as he read the paper, page by slow page, and how stiffly he held his shoulders under the jacket he never took off. I could almost hear the tick of the mantelpiece clock.

I shifted my attention to Mrs. Simon. Cross and cross again went the needles. And up and down, up and down went the active lips, the unstoppable mouth, the mouth that never produced a word for me but spoke so easily and swiftly and continually when the beloved was home. Talking. Laughing. Talking again.

A
FTER VACATION
I visited the Simons less often. By the end of January I was dropping in only occasionally—for a moment at the end of an afternoon, say, to make sure that something was cooking on the stove.

Then, during breakfast one February morning, two policemen appeared at our back door. “Doctor, can you …?” My father did not pause even to put on his suit jacket; he just followed the sturdy officers into the yard, looking like their servant in his silk-backed waistcoat and his white shirtsleeves. They walked across the crusted snow and into the backyard of the apartment building next door. My mother stood at the kitchen window, her hand on her heart.

My father returned before we left for school. “It’s Al Simon,” he said to my mother. “He died during the night.”

My sister continued to buckle her boots.

“Was he murdered?” I said.

“No,” my father said. “What makes you ask?”

“The policemen.”

My father sighed. Then, after a thoughtful pause, “Mr. Simon committed suicide,” he told me. “In his car.”

“Did he drive it off a cliff?”

My parents exchanged frowns and shrugs. Such a child, their looks said, all curiosity and no sympathy—and this the teachers call gifted? Then, still in a patient voice, my father explained that Mr. Simon had driven into his garage, closed the door from inside, stuffed the cracks with newspapers, reentered his car, and turned on the motor.

The next day in the obituary section I could find no hint of suicide, unless
suddenly
was the code word. But the final sentence was a shocker. “Mr. Simon, a bachelor, is survived by his mother.”

I raced to my own mother. “I thought she was his wife!”

“So did she,” my mother said, admitting me abruptly into the complicated world of adults, making me understand what I had until then only seen.

“T
WO FACES, ONE NOSE
,” Toby said. “A physiognomic curiosity. Which ancestor did we get it from?”

“Isaac Abravanel,” Angelica replied, though the family’s connection to that prominent Portuguese merchant had never been firmly established.

The nose, whatever its origin, was a long thin wavy proboscis, rather comely. Except for this similar feature, the cousins looked nothing alike. Angelica had topaz eyes. Various dark colors shifted in her hair. Toby’s narrow eyes were gray, his hair a steady brown.

They were sixteen. During the school year, at home—she in Paris, he in Connecticut—each kept au courant with songs, the proper placement of studs, movies; of course they carried cell phones and knew where to buy weed. But here in Maine they could be their true selves. Their true selves were variously described by the family. Snooty agoutis, according to their younger siblings and cousins. Good sports, according to Gramp, a good sport himself. Too damned clever, said their mothers, who were sisters. The third sister, aunt to Toby and Angelica, complained that they breathed air rarefied even for this family, and we are already the most hyper-indulged characters on the face of the … Her statement dwindled as always. As for Gran—tall, crop-haired, pale-eyed Gran—whatever she thought of these particular grandchildren she didn’t bother to say.

They were enjoying exceptional educations, Angelica in her école, Toby in his boarding school. His French was almost as good as her English. Here in Maine they played tennis, hiked, swam. Gramp taught them to drive, then told them not to use the car. “Self-restraint is strength,” he explained. “Also you can be arrested for driving without a license.”

“Self-restraint is fear,” Toby said one afternoon as they walked to the little boathouse. “We are a terrified clan. Since Antwerp.”

Seventy years earlier the family had fled Antwerp for Haifa. The details of the disembarkation had been repeated again and again. Angelica could have drawn the scene. The youngest child, a little girl, ran down the gangplank, a fortune in diamonds sewn into her coat. Her two brothers followed—the older would become Gramp. Great-grandmother came next, face tragic above a fur-collared coat. She had left the graves of two other sons in the Shomre Hadas Cemetery. Great-grandfather brought up the rear. He had managed the departure from Belgium, he had swept his family to safety, his children now twice owed their lives to him. His portrait hung over Gramp’s desk in the Manhattan brownstone.

“Great-grandfather was a
type
,” Toby now remarked. “Cultivated European.”

“Prescient,” Angelica reminded him. “Without Great-grandfather you and I would never have been born.”

“We were fated to be born.”

“No, no, it was hap.” Yesterday she had won bonus points for
hap
in bilingual Scrabble. “Hap and heroism.”

Their heroic great-grandparents had settled in Jerusalem, thrived, worriedly saw the birth of Israel. Their grandfather, though, had remained only long enough to conceive a dislike for the coarse country. The end of the war found him on another ship, this one bound for Hoboken. (Two years later his younger brother emigrated to Cape Town.) The family had retained its banking connections: useful to both sons. In New York, Gramp made money from money. He was a dandy, he was musical, he married a renegade Yankee then working as a veterinarian’s assistant. Grace Larcom—Gran, now—was an only child, born late in the life of her parents. She insisted on converting, or at least declaring herself converted, though Gramp said it was unnecessary. This big summerhouse in Maine was all Gran’s straitened father and mother had to give her, and they gave it gladly. “They were relieved that I was chosen by a human being,” she’d said to Angelica in her dry voice. “They were braced for an interspecies liaison.” And decades afterward, summer after summer, Gramp and Gran’s three far-flung daughters returned with their husbands and their growing families—Angelica’s beautiful mother from Paris; Toby’s artistic one from Washington; the third sister, the one who rarely finished a sentence, from Buenos Aires.

Angelica was a month older than Toby. That made her the oldest of the nine grandchildren. This accident of rank brought little privilege—everyone had chores to do—though she did get her own room on the third floor. The third floor was reached only by a set of shabby back stairs, but rising from the spacious front hall toward the balustraded second floor was a handsome central staircase. It separated into two staircases halfway up, an enormous Y. “Fit only for an opera house,” Gran complained; still, she kept the carved posts in good repair. Except for this spectacular feature, the house was asymmetrical, and also disorderly. Parlor opened off parlor, and the pantry cupboards were decorated with stained glass stained more deeply by time, and a piano was covered with brocade edged in dusty fringe, and the whole place was strewn with heirlooms of little value if you didn’t count the occasional signed piece of silver. “Impedimenta,” Gran said. Dense pines protected the house from the prying sun. But here and there light unexpectedly winked—reflected from a copper shovel, from a chandelier long ago cut down from the ceiling and left unmourned on its side, from a decanter holding a cloudy amethyst liquid.

“That purple stuff has gone organic,” Toby suggested. “One day a flatworm will crawl out of it and we’ll have a new universe.”

Through the cluttered house moved nine adults and two teenagers and seven children, seeking each other, avoiding each other, carrying books wine rackets flowers teddy bears. The smallest ones liked riding on the shoulders of their fathers and their uncles. Sometimes Gramp played pony to one or another of them. “You’re killing me!” he complained, groaning with happiness.

Every summer the daughter who lived in Buenos Aires drew up a detailed schedule for ridding the house of unnecessary items; sooner or later she abandoned the project. Meanwhile the once-a-week cleaning was accomplished, more or less, by a mother and daughter from the nearby town. They had brown teeth. Meals were prepared by Myrrh, a large, hunch-shouldered, muttering woman who was Gran’s second cousin with a few removes. Myrrh was paid for her work, and she dined with the family—it was her family, too. She endured without comment the nightly dinners, everybody talking at once; she endured the endless Sabbath-eve meal. Gramp had returned to religion in his later years, and he recited a long individualized blessing over the heads of each of his twelve offspring. The three daughters and the nine grandchildren took turns helping in the kitchen, obeying a complicated rotation devised by Gran. While cleaning up, Myrrh grunted an occasional brief command: “Here,” or “Discard.” Recently she had snapped “Cut that out” to Toby and Angelica, who were merely standing at the trash barrel hip to hip, scraping plates.