Either Side of Winter (24 page)

‘When did you start smoking?’ she said.

‘I don’t smoke!’ Exasperated, emphasizing each word in turn. Undeniably pleased, too, obscurely flattered. ‘You’re as bad as my mother. Sometimes I have a cigarette, that’s all.’

Oh, Rachel thought, applying the whip internally, I am a tight, prissy little girl. But these pains offered some consolation. She suffered in more ways than one though the sufferings also alleviated each other. Vanity and grief offered balms fraternally. But still deeper hungers demanded satisfaction. They parted at the corner of 82nd and First; Rachel then turning happily enough towards the richer quieter side streets to the east.

Dying, he did in fact pick up her flu bug; the very human, very lively suffering contrasted strangely with his other grander affliction. A fuzzy head, the shakes, a runny nose, made him childish, loving. Kissing her goodnight, he asked her for an extra blanket over his feet. Laid on top, not tucked in: at his age, to find yourself fighting in bed on your own! No good. He fought enough with her mother; he didn’t need to have it out with the sheets.

When she came back, rug in hand, a green army blanket from her grandfather, he said, ‘I’ve been thinking, I want you to know. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame Tasha.’ Her name sounded very tender in his mouth, a word with vintage. ‘Rest
assured, whatever your suspicions, what happened between us happened
between us.
There were no third parties that mattered. OK, that photographer, an insignificant man.’ Rachel asked if she could get him anything else. He said Alka Seltzer, but made a face at his first sip and gave it back to her. As if to say, what does it matter? I’m through with these medicines. She moved to bring it back to the kitchen, but he wanted to talk.

‘I thought, let her be happy if she can.’ Rachel was standing in the bedroom door; he never let her go. ‘But soon as I left, your mother put him out on his ear.
Reuben didn’t mind enough
was all she cared about. I was worried about her, not these
dudes
. Tasha has a suspicious taste in dudes. Look out for it. Long hair, leather jackets, zoot suits, the works. I didn’t suffer much for my own sake. These were small men, peanuts. Couldn’t buy a girl a cup of coffee. Real nothings; two weeks with him was enough.
What did I care, I had you.
But living with your mother was something else, I tell you, something else. Who am I talking to,
you
know. She was very depressive, very difficult. Eager, unhappy, both. But things had been done to her, partly in my name. That affair with Jimmy never got to run its course. These relations have a way of coming round. OK, I take responsibility.’

The next night, at the height of his fever, he couldn’t feel his feet. He complained miserably of the cold. ‘It’s like the grave in here,’ he said. ‘Touch my hand.’ Rachel knew he was teasing her with these remarks; dying had given him great funds of humour. The kind of joke he always liked: uncomfortable rather than amusing. But it was worse when his humours passed. ‘They’re trying to freeze me out,’ he said. ‘I won’t let them. I’ll kick.’ The way he said ‘kick’, Rachel had never seen such mean spirits, such pettiness. All the while the vents made a constant rumbling like a washing-machine. Hot humid air dripped from the inside off tall windows. She sweated and smelt strongly of her sex, even in spaghetti strings and softball shorts. Her blood swelled just below her
skin, the softer blonder hairs on her arms, her legs, her upper lip waved lightly standing on end. A real animal, that’s what she felt like in all that heat, a real caged animal.

As she kissed him goodnight, he whispered, ‘I’m very cold I can’t feel my feet why don’t you come in to bed with me? Rachel. Rachel.’ Such tenderness, she couldn’t resist it. She took off her shoes and climbed in, turning her back. He held her shoulder in his arm and pressed against her from behind. The bed stank of unhealthy sleep. She held her breath, counting, one two three, and breathing out. Inhaled carefully through her nose till her cheeks plumped up – such a child, at seventeen; acting like a girl, on her first trip down the subway, among dirty men – and began her count again, one two. His hands felt like a sack of frozen peas. He disgusted her; she disgusted herself. ‘I’ve never had a woman in this bed. I want you to tell Tasha that. I’ve never had a woman in two years.’ She became sensible of certain involuntary reactions; human nature at its simplest responds to the feel of things and makes mistakes. ‘Go now, go now,’ he said, sobered. ‘It isn’t right, a beautiful girl like you.’

Oh god she would go mad; she would go mad. How could anyone bear to live in these circumstances? But surely, this kind of thing was always going on. She wasn’t in the least unusual. Reuben used to say, years ago, at the house on East End Avenue, when they were all together, when Tasha asked him to help with this or that, around the house, in the garden; when one of their few friends was having people round, he used to complain, just keeping the lid on his voice, ‘I’m under intolerable pressure.’ At work, sometimes he added: at work. If he lost his temper, if he didn’t eat, if he couldn’t bear company, that was his excuse. Rachel never liked the phrase; the pedant in her baulked. A grown-up phrase: dramatic, untrue, unlike him. Of course, he
tolerated
it, he didn’t go under. But she remembered it now, sympathetic: that feeling of coming to boil. She kissed him goodnight and stepped straight in the shower before bed.

In the morning, a Saturday morning, he said, ‘You need a day off. I want you to buy yourself something, something for your mother. Spend a little. Feel free.’ A windy sun blew litter down Park Avenue. Spring was coming in a hurry. Rachel could smell it; she wanted to get out, out. Sunshine the colour of apple juice fell in the kitchen window.

She said, ‘What should I get for Tasha?’

‘You know me. I never had any taste. Your mother was always very superior; I never dared pick out anything for her. The way she turned up her nose. I couldn’t keep up with the fashions. Real
Port Jervis,
she used to say. I mean look at this place, just empty. I don’t even try any more. But you, you’re a beautiful girl. You’ll know.’

Later, before she went out, he said, ‘It’s a wonderful thing to give pleasure to your mother. She’s very susceptible to it.’ A repeated sentiment; still, he had not uttered it in years. It drew fresh blood. ‘Very generous,’ he added, considering. She kissed his brow. In the end, she bought her pearls from Bendel’s. Tasha had once said to her, ‘When all else fails, there’s always pearls.’ The way Tasha skipped to the long mirror in her bedroom, her touched-up vanity – like a little kick of sugar in her tea – Rachel thought these things would appal her. Instead she had to fight back tears; she had stepped into the shadows, merely a go-between.

She began to play a game in her head with Mr Englander, simply to pass the time in class. She sat mostly in a far corner of the room, where she could look out, across the table and the assembled heads, through three tall windows to the outside air. A chestnut spread its branches high enough they sometimes knocked their knuckles on the panes. She heard the wind in it, plangent, gusty, wet exhalations. Its leaves had grown full, large in the palm, with fat fingers. Through them, uneven clouds shifted rapidly. At odd angles, light broke through, sharpened by these obstructions, strongly radiating from a central point. The blue skies of growing spring were
urgently, repeatedly interrupted. Between the leaves, downhill, the landscape fell away towards the Harlem River and Manhattan. She pretended that Mr Englander was sneaking sly looks at her, and kept her eyes fixed on him, ready to respond.

Of course, Rachel suspected what lay behind this… recreation.

Her father was dying; his old assertive manner weakened by bedrest and wide regrets. His insistent recollections exposed a patchwork life. She had never guessed before he was unhappy, no, not unhappy – unsatisfied. Not that either; rather, what he longed for surprised her. Sure, he’d had great personal success; the kid from Port Jervis had come up in the world. A rich lawyer, a big man, his daughter educated at great expense, in the best traditions. But what should he do with his memories of sandlot baseball? Every day after school till the sun dropped, and later some summer nights, when the lights from the Walgreen’s car park glimmered on. There was Bobby Spandau, now a claims adjuster in Syracuse. The Polkawitz boys, who all three went into their father’s shoe-store chain, and expanded into Middletown. And Erwin Manno, later a basketball coach, fired for passing out bribes, diddling exams. (There had been a tearful confession of guilt, broadcast live on local news. Reuben’s sympathies had been painfully refreshed, yes, he wanted to suffer with Manno, make equal expiation: we have all come a great way from what we were.) Important figures now with no part in his life; these, once, had been to him all in all. And little enough he had to show for their replacement: a failed marriage; alimony payments; two kitchens, three sitting rooms, a dining room, five bathrooms, seven bedrooms, maintained on his nickel; sure, a beautiful daughter. OK, he had achieved a certain personal dignity; but it helped him little enough with his hair falling out in her hands. His appetites diminishing, his thin frame, always a source of pride, now ridiculously exaggerated: as if he claimed kinship with other survivors, mocking
them. What Rachel wanted, he knew, was that this final process should be presided over by his own firm will; she couldn’t bear to see him in this matter as helpless as she. So he was disappointing her, too.

Rachel knew that her playful interest in Mr Englander was only a kind of transference. His big-boned filled-out frame made certain assertions: I’m not going anywhere, you can rely on me. Sometimes she imagined climbing up him like a small girl, making a ledge of his kneecaps, grasping his elbow, his hip, rising to arch her arms around his neck, clinging. His accent, in spite of thirty years in the city, was pure Midwestern: patient, clear in the vowels. It suggested plain-dealing, a practical intelligence applied, in his case, to questions of some subtlety: grammar, literary reference. Reuben always admired Midwesterners. He disliked Manhattan childhoods, he often said as much – fond of his own anonymous, up-state American youth. Sand lots, high-school bands, kids going nowhere in life: at least, nowhere far.

So she dutifully followed him with blue glances. And when Mr Englander turned her way, she looked wide-eyed encouragement: as if to say, keep talking, you’re doing well. If only he would take notice. She imagined certain unavoidable confrontations in great detail. The class hour seemed long, there was plenty of time to give to such dreams. Meanwhile she kept her eyes on his clean, pink face.

There was a general storage room at the end of the corridor, one floor below, by the stairwell. An L-shaped closet with doors on both walls of the corner. Part of the unrenovated school plant: a thirty-watt bulb hung low off white cord, forcing a tall man to duck beneath it. Dimly, it lit the bending shelves, stacked with notepads, blue-backed exam books, boxes of staples, red pens. Vanilla and dust smells of breathing paper. A crate of white-out jars, mostly crusted at the lid. White-out was banned because the kids sniffed at it, but the staff still borrowed a pot from time to time – their fresh lemon and old milk odours very strong. To see in the corners you
had to swing the bulb, or hold it by the hot cord. The light, egg yellow, cast long and short shadows against the stippled-card ceiling tiles, the ceramic floor. A spot of rare peace in the school crowds, its solitude concentrated by the clamour outside. Or, when the halls were quiet, the consciousness of being hidden. Teachers sometimes sent their students to fetch something from the
cupboard,
as it was called. This usually involved a laborious hand-over of keys, a clattering drawn-out search for the right one. Sometimes, to save time, they went themselves. Rachel, quiet but dutiful, often volunteered, fisting the singled-out key in her dented palm, letting the rest dangle.

Sitting in class, she imagined carefully what would happen if she came in one door and Mr Englander, opening the other, surprised her there. ‘Rachel!’ She heard him say it, the tone shifting. ‘Rachel.’ Her name, spoken aloud, revealing private meanings. The fact of the two doors was significant. He didn’t trap her exactly, but approached in sudden view, from the entry by the stairs. To come deeper in, he would have to stoop below the bulb towards her face. The way she pictured it she didn’t flinch.

When Mr Englander caught her eye, he turned away first.

In class his manner was dilatory, collegiate. He said, ‘Sometimes you get into a business out of one kind of interest, one set of concerns. Single-minded: this is what you want to do; this is why you want to do it. Then you find, to your surprise, the compensation of… other pleasures.’ He called for a volunteer and opened the classroom door. ‘We need a king.’ One of the boys, a fat, rough-shaped kid with messy yellow hair, shoulder-length, much-loved, stepped out. ‘Kneel on the floor in the hallway, as if you’re praying. Back towards us. Not far from the doorway: so we can see.’ Rubbing a blond clump between his fingers, the kid let it fall in the wet edge of his mouth and trail out. ‘Gross,’ someone called under his breath. Mr Englander raised a flat palm, then lowered it dramatically, pointing. ‘You, Hamlet,’ he said. ‘So superior. Step
up.’ Smattering of applause among the girls. (Rachel did not join in.) Hamlet lifted himself on his elbows, swinging from the table. ‘Stand in the door with your hand in your pockets, looking at Claudius.’ He gave them each an open copy of the play.

Later, Rachel remembered the layout clearly. The boy in the hall, with bent head: a closet thespian, letting his hair hang loose across his face, arms spread wide on the dirty floor. The lounger in jeans shifting on his feet, irritable, glad to be looked at. Mr Englander, gesturing, enacting – these rehearsed thoughts. How often must he have said this bit before? And discovered, amid the necessary repetitions, a way of working out deeper feelings. Her father clearly had fallen short in this. ‘In some ways, this is the most important scene, the moment that turns Hamlet into a modern tragedy.
Now might I do it pat.
Remember the tradition of the revenge play: the hero raves, the heroine cries, all stab, and everybody dies.’ Mr Englander moved to the window ledge; the pane rattled loosely at his back. His was restless bulk. ‘Hamlet has his chance here. Consider what would follow if he makes the simpler cut. Would he become king? Marry Ophelia? Fight a civil war with Fortinbras? The play would take on wider political questions. By doing
nothing,
he drives the action inside, where it belongs, in the head and heart.’