Different Seasons (36 page)

“Quit it, Morris,” Lydia said on these occasions. “You can’t take a joke, you never
could
take a joke, sometimes I wonder how I could marry a man with absolutely
no
sense of humor. We go to Las Vegas,” Lydia had said, addressing the empty kitchen as if an invisible horde of spectators which only she could see were standing there, “we see Buddy Hackett, and Morris doesn’t laugh
once.”

Besides arthritis, warts, and migraines, Morris also had Lydia, who, God love her, had developed into something of a nag over the last five years or so ... ever since her hysterectomy. So he had plenty of sorrows and plenty of problems without adding a broken back.

“Morris!”
Lydia cried, coming to the back door and wiping suds from her hands with a dishtowel. “Morris, you come down off that ladder right now!”

“What?” He twisted his head so he could see her. He was almost at the top of his aluminum stepladder. There was a bright yellow sticker on this step which said: DANGER! BALANCE MAY SHIFT WITHOUT WARNING ABOVE THIS STEP! Morris was wearing his carpenter’s apron with the wide pockets, one of the pockets filled with nails and the other filled with heavy-duty staples. The ground under the stepladder’s feet was slightly uneven and the ladder rocked a little when he moved. His neck ached with the unlovely prelude to one of his migraines. He was out of temper.
“What?”

“Come down from there, I said, before you break your back.”

“I’m almost finished.”

“You’re rocking on that ladder like you were on a boat, Morris. Come down.”

“I’ll come down when I’m done!” he said angrily. “Leave me alone!”

“You’ll break your back,” she reiterated dolefully, and went into the house again.

Ten minutes later, as he was hammering the last nail into the rain-gutter, tipped back nearly to the point of overbalancing, he heard a feline yowl followed by fierce barking.

“What in God’s name—?”

He looked around and the stepladder rocked alarmingly. At that same moment, their cat—it was named Lover Boy,
not
Morris—tore around the comer of the garage, its fur bushed out into hackles and its green eyes flaring. The Rogans’ collie pup was in hot pursuit, its tongue hanging out and its leash dragging behind it.

Lover Boy, apparently not superstitious; ran under the stepladder. The collie pup followed.

“Look out, look out, you dumb mutt!” Morris shouted.

The ladder rocked. The pup bunted it with the side of its body. The ladder tipped over and Morris tipped with it, uttering a howl of dismay. Nails and staples flew out of his carpenter’s apron. He landed half on and half off the concrete driveway, and a gigantic agony flared in his back. He did not so much hear his spine snap as feel it happen. Then the world grayed out for awhile.

When things swam back into focus, he was still lying half on and half off the driveway in a litter of nails and staples. Lydia was kneeling over him, weeping. Rogan from next door was there, too, his face as white as a shroud.

“I told you!” Lydia babbled. “I told you to come down off that ladder! Now look! Now look at this!”

Morris found he had absolutely no desire to look. A suffocating, throbbing band of pain had cinched itself around his middle like a belt, and that was bad, but there was something much worse: he could feel nothing below that belt of pain—nothing at all.

“Wail later,” he said huskily. “Call the doctor now.”

“I’ll do it,” Rogan said, and ran back to his own house.

“Lydia,” Morris said. He wet his lips.

“What? What, Morris?” She bent over him and a tear splashed on his cheek. It was touching, he supposed, but it had made him flinch, and the flinch had made the pain worse.

“Lydia, I also have one of my migraines.”

“Oh, poor darling! Poor Morrist But I
told
you—”

“I’ve got the headache because that
potzer
Rogan’s dog barked all night and kept me awake. Today the dog chases my cat and knocks over my ladder and I think my back is broken.”

Lydia shrieked. The sound made Morris’s head vibrate.

“Lydia,” he said, and wet his lips again.

“What, darling?”

“I have suspected something for many years. Now I am sure.”

“My poor Morris! What?”

“There is no God,” Morris said, and fainted.

They took him to Santo Donato and his doctor told him, at about the same time that he would have ordinarily been sitting down to one of Lydia’s wretched suppers, that he would never walk again. By then they had put him in a body-cast. Blood and urine samples had been taken. Dr. Kemmelman had peered into his eyes and tapped his knees with a little rubber hammer—but no reflexive twitch of the leg answered the taps. And at every turn there was Lydia, the tears streaming from her eyes, as she used up one handkerchief after another. Lydia, a woman who would have been at home married to Job, went everywhere well-supplied with little lace snotrags, just in case reason for an extended crying spell should occur. She had called her mother, and her mother would be here soon (“That’s nice, Lydia”—although if there was anyone on earth Morris honestly loathed, it was Lydia’s mother). She had called the rabbi, he would be here soon, too (“That’s nice, Lydia”—although he hadn’t set foot inside the synagogue in five years and wasn’t sure what the rabbi’s name was). She had called his boss, and while he wouldn’t be here soon, he sent his greatest sympathies and condolences (“That’s nice, Lydia”—although if there was anyone in a class with Lydia’s mother, it was that cigar-chewing
putz
Frank Haskell). At last they gave Morris a Valium and took Lydia away. Shortly afterward, Morris just drifted away—no worries, no migraines, no nothing. If they kept giving him little blue pills like that, went his last thought, he would go on up that stepladder and break his back again.

 

When he woke up—or regained consciousness, that was more like it—dawn was just breaking and the hospital was as quiet as Morris supposed it ever got. He felt very calm... almost serene. He had no pain; his body felt swaddled and weightless. His bed had been surrounded by some sort of contraption like a squirrel cage—a thing of stainless steel bars, guy wires, and pulleys. His legs were being held up by cables attached to this gadget. His back seemed to be bowed by something beneath, but it was hard to tell—he had only the angle of his vision to judge by.

Others have it worse,
he thought.
All over the world, others have it worse. In Israel, the Palestinians kill busloads of
farmers who
were
committing the
political
crime
of going
into
town to see a movie. The Israelis cope with this injustice by dropping bombs on the Palestinians and killing children along with whatever terrorists may be there. Others have it worse than me ... which is not to say this is good, don’t get that idea, but others have it worse.

He lifted one hand with some effort—there was pain somewhere in his body, but it was very faint—and made a weak fist in front of his eyes. There. Nothing wrong with his hands. Nothing wrong with his arms, either. So he couldn’t feel anything below the waist, so what? There were people all over the world paralyzed from the
neck
down. There were people with leprosy. There were people dying of syphilis. Somewhere in the world right now, there might be people walking down the jetway and onto a plane that was going to crash. No, this wasn’t good, but there were worse things in the world.

And there had been, once upon a time,
much
worse things in the world.

He raised his left arm. It seemed to float, disembodied, before his eyes—a scrawny old man’s arm with the muscles deteriorating. He was in a hospital johnny but it had short sleeves and he could still read the numbers on the forearm, tattooed there in faded blue ink. P499965214. Worse things, yes, worse things than falling off a suburban stepladder and breaking your back and being taken to a clean and sterile metropolitan hospital and being given a Valium that was guaranteed to bubble your troubles away.

There were the showers, they were worse. His first wife, Ruth, had died in one of their filthy showers. There were the trenches that became graves—he could close his eyes and still see the men lined up along the open maw of the trenches, could still hear the volley of rifle-fire, could still remember the way they flopped backwards into the earth like badly made puppets. There were the crematoriums, they were worse, too, the crematoriums that filled the air with the steady sweet smell of Jews burning like torches no one could see. The horror-struck faces of old friends and relatives... faces that melted away like guttering candles, faces that seemed to melt away
before your very eyes
—thin, thinner, thinnest. Then one day they were gone. Where? Where does a torch-flame go when the cold wind has blown it out? Heaven. Hell? Lights in the darkness, candles in the wind. When Job finally broke down and questioned, God asked him:
Where were you when I made the world?
If Morris Heisel had been Job, he would have responded:
Where were You when my Ruth was dying, You potzer, You? Watching the Yankees and the Senators? If You can’t pay attention to Your business better than this, get out of my face.

 

Yes, there were worse things than breaking your back, he had no doubt of it. But what sort of God would have allowed him to break his back and become paralyzed for life after watching his wife die, and his daughters, and his friends?

No God at all, that was Who.

A tear trickled from the comer of his eye and ran slowly down the side of his head to his ear. Outside the hospital room, a bell rang softly. A nurse squeaked by on white crepe-soled shoes. His door was ajar, and on the far wall of the corridor outside he could read the letters NSIVE CA and guessed that the whole sign must read INTENSIVE CARE.

There was movement in the room—a rustle of bedclothes.

Moving very carefully, Morris turned his head to the right, away from the door. He saw a night-table next to him with a pitcher of water on it. There were two call-buttons on the table. Beyond it was another bed, and in the bed was a man who looked even older and sicker than Morris felt. He was not hooked into a giant exercise-wheel for gerbils like Morris was, but an IV feed stood beside his bed and some sort of monitoring console stood at its foot. The man’s skin was sunken and yellow. Lines around his mouth and eyes had driven deep. His hair was yellowish-white, dry and lifeless. His thin eyelids had a bruised and shiny look, and in his big nose Morris saw the burst capillaries of the life-long drinker.

Morris looked away ... and then looked back. As the dawnlight grew stronger and the hospital began to wake up, he began to have the strangest feeling that he knew his roommate. Could that be? The man looked to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty, and Morris didn’t believe he knew anyone quite that old—except for Lydia’s mother, a horror Morris sometimes believed to be older than the Sphinx, whom the woman closely resembled.

Maybe the guy was someone he had known in the past, maybe even before he, Morris, came to America. Maybe. Maybe not. And why all of a sudden did it seem to matter? For that matter, why had all his memories of the camp, of Patin, come flooding back tonight, when he always tried to—and most times succeeded in—keeping those things buried?

He broke out in a sudden rash of gooseflesh, as if he had stepped into some mental haunted house where old bodies were unquiet and old ghosts walked. Could that be, even here and now in this clean hospital, thirty years after those dark times had ended?

He looked away from the old man in the other bed, and soon he had begun to feel sleepy again.

But he would not think of that. He would not
allow
himself to think of that.

Drifting into sleep, he thought of a boast he had made to Ruth (but never to Lydia; it didn’t pay to boast to Lydia; she was not like Ruth, who would always smile sweetly at his harmless puffing and crowing):
I never forget a face
. Here was his chance to find out if that was still so. If he had really known the man in the other bed at some time or other, perhaps he could remember when... and where.

Very close to sleep, drifting back and forth across its threshold, Morris thought:
Perhaps I knew him in the camp.

That would be ironic indeed—what they called a “jest of God.”

What God? Morris Heisel asked himself again, and slept.

Todd graduated salutatorian of his class, just possibly because of his poor grade on the trig final he had been studying for the night Dussander had his heart attack. It dragged his final grade in the course down to 89, one point below an A-minus average.

A week after graduation, the Bowdens went to visit Mr. Denker at Santo Donato General. Todd fidgeted through fifteen minutes of banalities and thank-yous and how-do-you-feels and was grateful for the break when the man in the other bed asked him if he could come over for a minute.

“You’ll pardon me,” the other man said apologetically. He was in a huge body-cast and was for some reason attached to an overhead system of pulleys and wires. “My name is Morris Heisel. I broke my back.”

“That’s too bad,” Todd said gravely.

“Oy
, too bad, he says! This boy has the gift of understatement!”

Todd started to apologize, but Heisel raised his hand, smiling a little. His face was pale and tired, the face of any old man in the hospital facing a life full of sweeping changes just ahead—and surely few of them for the better. In that way, Todd thought, he and Dussander were alike.

“No need,” Morris said. “No need to answer a rude comment. You are a stranger. Does a stranger need to be inflicted with my problems?”