Eagle Eye (2 page)

Yet he kept firm in his trust that all those he knew, or had known or would ever know, would always have a place, someplace. So since each person must be his kind of pyramid—he admitted that—maybe everybody, all told and down the ages, did have a place somewhere.

Ike, whose grandfather had served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and lived to tell of it, had been going to be a military historian. Only way, Ike had said, to deal with war. He’d expect to be exempted in order to chronicle it, he’d said shrewdly. Around a corner he used to come yelling—“Trapped on the Meuse! Remember Verdun!”—he preferred wars that were way back. Once in a while, even long after the Bronsteins moved to off Madison, Bunty, yearning a little, could remember his face. Slowly he’d begun to build up a confidence that one day he would run into Ike again, that some day, in the New York way, he would run into them all.

Maeve and Quentin—Buddy, like Bunty, was a nickname—generally lived with him in the state of equidistance all three felt was normal, and safe. His own reality was like a bubble’s in a pot, always breaking into new bubbles, on the liquid effusion of sunsets and stomach-aches in which he sank at night and next morning rose, with all his small wits. He came to know that now and then there was more; they could get to him. Their respective sadnesses interested him: how his mother’s was sometimes a woman’s sadness; his father’s a man’s. How this sadness was sometimes private, sometimes mutual and joined.

Usually he stood apart from them at these times because he didn’t have it. At first he seemed to himself lower than them, because of his lack (by this time he took for granted that everybody was trying to find a merit that would justify them for being). Gradually he took himself to be higher, or at least out of the circumstances. This happened whenever his parents’ conjoining mood, flowering like an embrace, hovered over “what it took to live here.” Not only money; though that of course came into it; where you lived and how, came in as much. With who and what people were around. This last, rarely said, he would often hear, like the tinny overtones on his father’s old Kranich & Bach piano, inherited from
his
boyhood, and the one piece of furniture they always took along with them.

What he could never hear fully was what they were yearning for, comfortable as they all were, and getting more so. Everything they wanted seemed to be flowing toward them. In his father’s office, ever larger on each state visit, lines of desks were starred with faces Bunty didn’t know anymore, or who didn’t know him. At home, sofas overflowing with pillows, the beds changed for posture ones, and pictures of a kind he had never seen before on his home walls. What was this yearning that went always a little ahead? Now they had it, now they didn’t; they had some of it, would they get all of it?—their faces said to him as they stood there. Maeve the redhead, with her narrow bones, fine skin and freckled hands whose large joints she complained of, was three inches taller. To Bunt, already taller than both, his father now looked endearingly small and solid, his face cherub-nice, not cherub-nasty—a teacher had taught him the difference. “The nicest smart man I ever met,” one of the desks had confided. “Is he ever gonna get places. You watch.”

Where? Though he was involved and grew to know when he was, he wasn’t the main focus of it or of them; he could stay subterranean. Or—when he felt it did momentarily light on him, like over a school or a Sunday suit—scornfully above. Even though he hadn’t yet identified the nature of this pot of gold that kept them dancing—except that it wasn’t just gold. Probably it was like sex, he decided, staring at them with eyes that were conceded to be Buddy’s, twitching the ears on a head only just darker red than hers, pursing a wider version of her mouth, and squinting through specs with the same correction Buddy had had at his age, and outgrown. And possibly, like sex, once you had it, as Ike had said, you’d always want it. The thing traveled ahead. Zitkower, his present crony, was a Polish-Hungarian Catholic, and couldn’t be asked.

“Boy, can you pick ’em,” the maid said when he brought Zitkower home, the last of five Bunt had been carefully trying out in succession since he’d switched schools, and the craziest looking. The maid, already onto the standards of the Bronstein house, stuffed them all to the gills with goodies anyway, and Bunt ignored the comment; he knew certain flaws in her she wasn’t aware of—like those pointy nails and the white-cracker way she had with the cigs—and which only he knew had to do with what propelled the Bronsteins, would soon make them give her notice, before he had to go through the pain of finding she had a name and a character he might learn to cherish. His final allegiance had been to a colored girl anyway, Marlene. Real Southern, not Haitian. The last of whom he had been scared of and had caused to vanish, he rather thought, by squinting eagle-eye and mentioning the
Tontons Macoutes.
After that, the Bronsteins had begun shakily ascending the ladder of another kind of help altogether, called by the agency “ethnic American,” and so far, no improvement.

He was pretty satisfied with Zitkower. Since coming into the new school district, he had had no one. Had to be somebody neither a toady or to be toadied to, brainy but not all bookish, a natural apartment-house kid—some of the ones moving in or back from the suburbs were too much, and not a creep—like the three in his grade who had just shaved themselves tonsures. Just somebody with a little motherwit, and on roughly the same standing generally. Like Ike.

Witold, shortened to Witty, had also just moved in from Central Park West. Their rooms had been bigger up there, too, and though their present decor was nothing like the Bronsteins’, or the maid’s either, but crabbedly middle-Europe on both counts, the food for alternate homework visits was good and plentiful, in that style. There was the same sense too of a current flowing through the house upgrade. And about to dislodge it, though at the Zitkower’s the brains were differently divided. Witty’s father, second-in-command of a restaurant and also a wine authority, was already talking of an apartment with a real dining-room, in a tone Bunt recognized. Obscure, and reaching. And sad.

“You’ll get it,” Bunt said. Aloud. Surprising himself.

“What are you, a magician?” Mr. Zitkower—“Zit”—said.

“Nah, just an authority on real estate,” Witty had been to Bunt’s room and knew he always saved over the Sunday section and read the listings with a mixture of anticipation and gloom.

Mrs. Zit, an interpreter for the UN, was the brainy side, though she spoke suddenly from behind her book—and clearly not for the first time, of “moving out.” The suburbs.

“I won’t go,” Witty said. “The kids coming in from there are impossible. And you should
see
the Catholics.” He wore a large ivory cross, hung on a wire which induced a rash on his neck but which he wouldn’t change, and had just initiated the school to the skinhead style of hair. The cross was a put-on; he was a regressed choir-boy. Not at all bookish, but the Jesuits had given him a good, firm way with the studying. And he was an only. An only child. Bunt’s tries with those who weren’t had never been quite as comfortable. And one with the daring—Bunt’s mouth had fallen open—to say what he just had. Though the Bronsteins never poached socially on the families of boys he brought home, and Bunt was grateful for it, he now wondered if he mightn’t introduce to them the Zitkowers, perhaps invite them to one of Maeve’s “do’s” as she was now calling them, or get his parents invited to the Z’s Sunday open-house. He saw himself and Witty on the sidelines, picking it all up, Witty’s head shifting side to side like a sparrow’s and not only from the eczema—and his own eagle-sight. Then, at the appropriate time, they could discuss and define this current that was in their families, this energetic sadness that was so much the same.

At this time, he had about accepted, out of the mouths of his parents, that New York was to blame. These days, a Saturday mood overtook Maeve that both the Quentins—Buddy and Bunt—recognized. This would come on after the football scores, or mid-way through the opera, before evening, and always when his parents had no evening date. The weekend shopping had been done, that morning at the latest. But there would still be time to buy something. Or to see the streets. Or to meet somebody they might know. Or to acquire somebody they knew slightly, to know better.

“Look, I feel New Yorky,” his mother would cry. “Let’s go to Sherry’s before it closes. Or to Charles’s. Let’s go get some gormay.” On the way out she would swing her basket almost vertically. “Watch it, Maeve, you’ll crown me,” his father would say, but he always went amicably, more recently shooting a look at Bunt which thrilled him. Now and then his father said “I’ll go for you, or Bunt will. What’s your need?” Running to check her make-up she batted a hand at him.

Say one thing, he remembered those walks, most of them cold ones. Their summers went another way, he to camps, they to trips, in a set-up which did have a kind of boring permanence. On the walks their family connection became clearer, almost stately. Just at that hour they could saunter, wistful but comfy. Triviality swayed in the air, all the nice kinds—smoke rounding from lips, wind in skirts, and block after block a peculiar under-rhythm like a smile stretching and waning, as people toddled to the plateglass, worshipful, and receded warmer than they had been. It was holy to shop. Yet if he ever had his own sadness it might begin on these walks.

Home lingered at the other end of the snail-trail they had left behind them, getting to be a bright, jazzy place with known corners to be knuckled into and settled on, knee-lift chairs for Buddy’s business-wracked bones, and the hot dinner left early by the help, for Maeve to queen over in her housecoat of the week. Away from it now, home was boring to remember, with an edge of pain in that—but the kind of place he must be grateful for. To be so, he had only to remind himself of certain school sermons and movies. Usually he bent his head into his chest, closed his eyes wherever he was and said sternly within his mind-cage:
Concentration Camp.
And it was true that the street, buzzing familiarly at all hours under the same mysterious sky, made him want to flail his arms and streak off—to be lonely and somewhere homebent at the same time.

“Beautiful,” Buddy said. “Look at it. And that. Maeve, did you see it? Her.” A couple had just passed, done up for the evening.

“Did you see him?”

They flirted, to show him they were wedded for life.

“There’s that model I was telling you about.” They stopped in front of a Jag he would swop any day for a Honda. “Lefthand drive though. But that’s the color.”

“Bronze … I’ve been thinking of a pair of bronze shoes but I wouldn’t know where to. Kid. Custom-made I’d have to, probably.”

He swung between their errands, long since able to tell which could or would harden into fact, and which would remain to travel ahead of them.

“What a night it is,” his father said tenderly. When Buddy blessed the weather, he felt happy; the weather could be anything. Most people were the other way round, but his father could see an environment, gauge it and maybe get it, before it saw him. “But it’s been a week. I’ll be glad to stay home.”

His mother was looking in a shop window full of towels Buddy thought he’d seen somewhere. “Yes, I
bought
some. Italian—aren’t they great? But that bathroom gets seamier and seamier. Still, where we are, we have two finally.”

“Oh not finally. Not for you, Maeve. And I’m with you. But not this year. The office is moving up. And I may have something there that’ll surprise you. Then … we might even look for a co-op.” He caught Bunt’s arm and swung along with him.

A pang went through him, that he might ever want to dwarf the world like them.

He still didn’t like his new room; the corners were not the same. Witty’s room had stayed the same wherever; he said their whole place, full of ikons, samovars and embroidered stuff, always did, no matter how they enlarged it. Maybe it was because they were Catholic. Maeve was, but it wasn’t the same. She and his father had offered him the choice: Be like she’d been, or a Jew like Buddy had. He had no reason to; it was all in the past for them. “But maybe you’d like it,” he’d said, thinking of the sadness. “Church.” They had crowed at him. He always earned credit for smartness the wrong way.

Now he put his head down and said some words to his ungrateful self.

“What’s that you’re saying?” his father said as they swung into Charles & Co. “K-k-k-what?”

“Nothing.” It was his old stutter.
K-k-k.
“C-c-c co-op.”

Maeve’s basket filled slowly with stuff they would never use except maybe the biscuits; she always bought one of anything she didn’t know.

“Calamari,” Buddy said. “We’ll never use it. That’s squid.”

“When I was a kid on the farm, my mother bought artichokes because we couldn’t grow them, and made us eat them. So when we grew up, we’d know how.”

“Why she won’t come down—” Buddy said. “She could have them every night.”

And Maeve said as usual “It’s not the artichokes.”

They had gone through all this before. Groceries seemed to bring it out in her. When Maeve’s father died, they had finally visited the farm in Amenia, New York. A stark white house, and the great swelling road, blond-green with spring then, rising to where the Berkshires cracked wide.

“God, what a generous countryside that was.”

Buddy meant that the people were meancolored, which he and Bunty had confided to each other—gray and blue tints to their skins, as if they’d never been farmers at all. Diet, his father said, but it was plain that he too was depressed by what he saw. Mr. MacNeil, the grandfather never yet seen, was a peanuty corpse with a floss of white on top, and a mick mouth which Maeve’s and his own were said to resemble. They were not like any Irish Buddy had even seen—no drinks, for one thing. Bunty, on whom great hope had been placed—“Be sure to say Granma MacNeil”—had not been a success—even his red hair and Maeve’s was a throwback, Mrs. MacNeil said, none of theirs.

This did fascinate him. “Don’t you own your own throwbacks?”