Most of the climactic events at Grove seemed to take place on the porch during "milk and cookie." Another night, the scowling union man, two places ahead of Stern, fell forward and died. The patients made a circle around him, as though he were "it" in a sick game, and Rooney hollered, "Give him mouth-to-mouth." Afraid he would be called upon to do this, Stern said, "I'll get someone," and ran wildly into the field beyond the building, making believe he was going through the proper procedure for handling recent deaths. He came back after a few minutes to look at the union man on the floor. It was the first dead person Stern had seen, and the man did not look sweetand peaceful, as though he were asleep. He looked very bad, as though he had a terrible stomach-ache. No one had done anything yet, and the half man was now standing in the circle, croaking, "See what happens. See." It was as though he was allowed to stand with the others only on occasions such as this, a thing he knew all about. Finally Lennie arrived, stern and poised, and leaned over the man. "This is a death," he said coolly, and Stern thought to himself, "Why did Fabiola send me here? How can I possibly be helped by seeing guys dying and half men? He made a mistake."
Yet, despite the wild urination and the curled-up dead man, Stern's pain diminished gradually. Sometimes, when he sat in the fields on endlessly long afternoons, waiting for the days to pass, he would probe his middle cautiously, as though he expected to find that the ulcer had only been playing dead and would leap out at him suddenly, bigger than ever. But the circle of pain had grown small and Stern thought how wonderful it would be if the kike man was getting smaller too, if when he got back to his house, he could find the man completely gone, his house erased, all traces of him vanished, as though he'd been taken by acid or never existed.
One morning, late in Stern's stay, word spread that two industrial teams were coming to play baseball for the patients at the Home. There was much excitement, and Stern felt sorry for those shriveled people whose only fun had been at YMCA's and merchant marine recreation parlors. Not one had ever seenMy Fair Lady, and it was small wonder they looked forward with such delight to a clash between two industrial teams. In early evening, the night of the game, Stern took his place in the dumb march formation and walked to the field, poking his belly and feeling around for the pain flower. It had been replacedby a thin, crawling brocade of tenderness that seemed to lay wet on the front of his body and was a little better than the other. But he wondered whether the ulcer might not roll forth in a great flower once again, at the first trace of friction, and then he would have the two, the flower and the brocade. He was aware that in just a few days he would have to go back to the kike man. What would happen if he merely drove by once, saw the man's great arms taking out garbage cans, and felt the flower instantly fill his stomach, one glimpse wiping out five weeks at the Grove Rest Home? And what if it went on that way, five weeks at Grove, one glimpse at arms, another five weeks at Grove, arms, until one day the flower billowed out too far and burst and everything important ran out of him and there was no more?
Stern walked behind the tall, sputtering, explosive boy, who led the march with Rooney in his arms. "You know who we ought to take up a collection for?" Rooney asked Stern as the Rest Home people took seats in the front row of the small grandstand.
"Who's that?" asked Stern.
"Yogi Berra," cackled Rooney. "I understand he's down to his last thirty-five cents." The tall boy poured him onto a bench in the front row and he clung gelatinlike to it, saying, "That Berra doesn't make ten bucks the whole season," and shaking with laughter. Stern sat between the tall, erupting young boy and Feldner. The boy, who was alternately nice and violent to Stern, asked him, "Did you ever play any ball before you picked up all that ass fat?"
"A little bit," Stern said. "And I'm not that heavy back there." He was afraid of the boy's sudden eruption and wondered why the boy couldn't be nice to him all the time. Violence was such a waste. It didn't accomplish anything. Stern had to worry that the boy would suddenly erupt and push him through the grandstand seats, maybesnapping his back like wood. He wanted to tell the boy, "Be nice to me at all times and I'll tell you things that will make you smart. I'll lend you books and, when we both get out, take you to a museum, explaining any hard things."
One of the teams represented a cash register company and the other a dry cleaning plant, and as they warmed up, the old actor ran out onto the field, stuck a bat between his legs, and hollered to the grandstand, "Hey, get this wang-wang. Ain't she a beaut?" A tall, light-skinned, austere Jamaican Stern thought might have been a healthy-legged brother of Lennie was the umpire, and he thumbed the actor back into the stands, saying, "Infraction," and then folded his arms and jutted his chin to the sky, as though defying thousands.
In the stands, Feldner, in a bathrobe and slippers, shoulders stooped from years of bending over crap tables, said to Stern, "We had softball games when I was working under one of the Venezuela rejymes. You know how long that rejyme lasted? Four days. I really backed some beauties. That's how I got what you got."
Stern felt sorry for Feldner in his bathrobe, a man whose shoulders had grown sad from so many disappointments, and wanted to hug him to make him feel better. Once, Stern's mother, infuriated at having her clothing allowance cut down by his father, had gone on a strike, wearing nothing but old bathrobes in the street. This had embarrassed Stern, who had turned away from her each time she had walked past him and his friends. Now Stern wanted to embrace Feldner as though to make it up to his mother for turning his back on her saintlike bathrobed street marches.
Stern watched the men on the two teams pepper the ball around the field and then looked at them individually, wondering if there were any on either team he couldbeat up. They all seemed fair-skinned and agile, and Stern decided there were none, until he spotted one he might have been able to take, a small, bald one playing center field for the cash register team. But then a ball was hit to the small player and he came in for it with powerful legs churning furiously and Stern decidedhemight be too rough, also. He imagined the small, stumplike legs churning toward him in a rage and was sure the little man would be able to pound him to the ground, using endurance and wiriness and leg power.
A black-haired Puerto Rican girl came to sit with the tall, erupting, blond boy. She helped a nurse take care of a group of feebleminded children connected to the Home and Stern had seen her with a pen of them, doing things slow-motion in the sun. From a distance she seemed to resemble Gene Tierney, but up close he saw that she was a battered Puerto Rican caricature of Gene Tierney, Tierney being hauled out of a car wreck in which her face had gone into the windshield. She did things slow-motion, in the style of the retarded children she helped supervise. Sitting on the ground in front of the tall, blond, fuselike boy, she said, "You promised we were goin' dancin'."
"Shut your ass," the tall boy said. "Hey, you want to hear one? Two nudists, man and a broad, had to break up. You know why? They were seein' too much of each other."
The Puerto Rican girl giggled and leaned forward in slow motion to tickle the tall boy. Stern saw her as a Gene Tierney doll manhandled by retarded children in temper tantrums, then mended in a toy hospital.
"Your sense of humor is very much of the earth," she said.
The tall boy introduced Stern to the girl. "This is Mr. Stern," he said. "He's a swell guy, even though he's got a fat ass. I'm sorry, Mr. Stern; only kidding. He's really a good guy. Real smart."
"Listen to this one," the boy continued. "I know a guy who was invited out by Rita Hayworth. He was in her house at the time." The tall boy erupted with laughter and the Puerto Rican girl tickled him again in slow motion. Turning to Stern, she said, "He's a natural man. I'd like to feel his energy coursing through my vitals." In the distance, Stern had imagined her hips to be flaring and substantial, but actually they had a kind of diving, low-slung poverty about them. She wore a skintight blue skirt, and Stern wondered whether she hadn't worn it for an entire year and was to wear it the next three until poverty-stricken Puerto Rican underwear came bursting through its fabric. Still, the combination of Latin eroticism and intellect flashes appealed to him. It was a painful thought, and he actually gritted his teeth as it came to him, but he had to allow it to come through. This tattered Puerto Rican watcher of feeb kids was probably smarter than his wife, close to what he'd really wanted. She probably knew undreamed-of, exotic Puerto Rican love tricks. He could bring her lovely sets of underwear, tighten up some of her poetic allusions, and make her the perfect wife. He wished she was tickling him instead of the tall boy. Stern smiled at the girl. He wanted to tell her he knew better jokes, smooth situational ones, and if only she gave him a fair chance, several days of intensive conversation, she would see he was a better bet than the tall, corny boy. But he felt very old and heavy and was unable to speak.
"Got another," said the sputtering, fuselike, blond boy. "Would you rather be in back of a hack with a WAC or in front of a jeep with a creep?"
The girl dug her fingers hungrily into his ribs, saying, "You promised we'd go dancin'."
"Eat shit," the tall boy said, brushing her aside. "You know," he said to Stern, "I was once in bed for eight months. My kid sister took care of me in a little room justbig enough for the two of us. Every once in a while my veins give out and I can't do anything. I don't give a shit. You live, you live; you die, you die. Only thing I care about is freedom and old guys not pushing you around."
The game had begun now, and the wheelchaired Greek boy had maneuvered himself alongside the bench in the front row. He stuck his hand under the Puerto Rican girl's dress and she cringed back against the tall, grenadelike youth, saying, "I intensely dislike duos." Stern wondered what would happen if he went under there, too. He envied the wheelchaired boy. He'd gone under and nothing had happened. He hadn't been hauled off into court.
The Greek boy stared out at the cash register company pitcher and said, "He's a crudhead. I could steal his ass off. He makes one move to pitch and I'm on third like a shot."
"What are you gonna do?" said the tall boy. "Crawl on your balls?"
"Shut up, tithead," said the Greek boy.
Feldner nudged Stern and said, "I used to like baseball, but there was only one rejyme ever let us play." Then he hollered out, "Swing, baby, swing; you can hit him, baby," as though to demonstrate to Stern his familiarity with the game.
"See," he said, and Stern wanted to take him around and soothe him for being a bathrobed failure who was worried about a mysterious new something inside him.
Sitting in the grandstand now, feeling Feldner's warm, bathrobed bulk against him, Stern, despite the tender sheet that lay wet against the front of his body, felt somewhat comfortable and took a deep breath, as though to enjoy to the fullest the last few days before his return to the kike man. He was afraid of the charged and sputtering boy on his left, afraid that in a violent, pimpled, swiftlychanging mood he might suddenly smash Stern back through the grandstand benches. Yet, despite the grenadelike boy, Stern still felt good being at a ball game among people he knew, broken as they were. He had cut himself off from people for a long time, it seemed, living as he did in a cold and separate place, and he thought now how nice it would be if all these people were his neighbors, Rooney in a split-level, Feldner next door in a ranch, and the old actor nearby in a converted barn. Even the half man would not be so bad to have around, living out his time in an adjacent colonial until the last half was taken away. All of them would form a buffer zone between Stern and the man down the street. That way, if the kike man ever came to fight him on his lawn, his neighbors would gather on the property and say, "Hands off. He's a nice guy. Touch him and we'll open your head."
Late in the game, a line drive caught the little bald cash register outfielder in the nose and he went down behind second base with a great red bloodflower in the center of his face. There were no substitute ballplayers, and the austere Jamaican umpire, flipping through the rule book, said, "Forfeit," jutting his chin toward the grandstand, as though ready to withstand a hail of abuse.
"I'll run that coon the hell out of here," said the wheelchaired Greek, waving his fist. "I come to see a ball game."
"That's right," said the tall boy, pimples flaring, beginning to ignite. Suddenly, his face softened. He grabbed Stern's collar and shouted, "We got someone. This guy here will play. Don't mind his fat ass." To Stern, he said, "I didn't mean that. I know you can't help it." He turned to the Puerto Rican girl and said, "Hey, a man brings home a donkey, see. So all day he goes around patting his ass."
The girl smiled, showing salt-white teeth with only the tiniest chip on a front one. She lay back, putting her head on the tall boy's lap and waggling a leg lazily, so that agleam of Puerto Rican underwear caught the sunlight. "Boredom and you are ever enemies," she said to the tall boy. "Please sneak out and take me dancin'." The others in the stands were cheering for Stern now, and he stood up, afraid the tall boy's pimples might sputter into violence again and also not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings. It was easy to just start trotting out toward the field. He fully expected to turn back with a big smile and say, "I'm not going out there. Not when I'm sick." But he found himself jogging all the way out to center field, unable to get himself to return. Winded, he stood in a crouch, hands on knees, as though capable of fast, dynamic spurts after balls. He hoped the Puerto Rican girl was watching and would see him as being potentially lithe and graceful, equal to the tall boy. Feldner ran out in his bathrobe and slippers and said, "Do you know what will happen to you? With what you got? You play and you're dead in a minute and a half."
Stern motioned him back, saying, "I'm not sure I have what you had. Everyone's got a different kind of thing." But when Feldner turned away, discouraged, Stern was sorry he had been harsh to a man in a bathrobe.
From the stands, Stern heard the Greek boy shout, "You show 'em, fat ass," and Stern hoped the girl would not think of him only as a man with a giant behind. The austere Jamaican umpire checked Stern, looked at his rule book, said, "Legalistic," and turned stoically toward the wind.
The second hitter hit a pop fly to short center field, and Stern, since childhood afraid to turn his back and go after balls hit past him, joyfully ran forward and caught the ball with his fingertips, so thrilled it had been hit in front of him he almost cried. He did a professional slap forward and returned the ball to the infield, wishing at that moment the kike man was there so he could see that Jews did not sit all day in mysterious temples but were regular and played baseball and, despite a tendency to short-windedness, had good throwing arms.
A sick, reedlike cheer came from the torn people in the grandstand after Stern's catch. At the end of the inning, he trotted toward the dugout and heard the Greek boy say, "Nice one, fat ass, baby," but he averted his eyes with DiMaggio-like reserve and sat on the cash register team's bench. Feldner came over in his bathrobe and said, "What did I tell you?"
"What do you mean?" said Stern.
"Look at yourself. You should see your face."
"I look all right," said Stern. "And I'm playing now." Sitting among the lean, neutral-faced cash register team, he was ashamed of Feldner's bathrobed presence and motioned him away. But, as Feldner left, Stern again regretted his curtness and wanted to shout, "Come back. You're more to me than these blond fellows."
Stern got to bat in the inning. Afraid the dry cleaning pitcher had discovered his Jewishness and planned to put a bloodflower between his eyes, too, he swung on the first pitch, hitting it on the ground. Forgetting to run, he stood on the base path and actually squeezed with his bowels, hoping the ball would get past the third baseman. When it filtered through the infield for a hit, Stern hollered "Yoo" and ran to first, sending home the runner in front of him and tying the score. His team won in that inning and the patients gathered round him on the field. "You clobber their ass, baby," said the Greek boy with genuine sincerity, reaching up from the wheelchair to pat Stern's back. The tall boy, with gentleness in his lips, the ticking in him fading, said, "No fooling, you get around good. I mean, for a guy with a can like yours." The Puerto Ricangirl, still lying on the bench with gaping skirt, said, "We're all goin' dancin' tonight. Either alfresco or in my place. The group has much charm." Only Feldner had misgivings. "You signed your death warrant out there," he said, and for a moment Stern felt a bubble tremble outward inside him; he was certain he was going to have to pay for his indiscretion by starting from scratch with a brand new ulcer, slightly larger and a fraction more formidable than his first. But the bubble fluttered and withered, like a wave breaking, and the patients kept congratulating him. He had struck a blow for sickness. As a reward he got to carry Rooney back to the porch for evening "milk and cookie."
Late that night, the tall, blond boy and the wheelchaired Greek came for Stern as he sat alone on the porch. The others had gone to bed and the tall boy said, "We're meeting the kid with the boobs on the outside tonight. I figure we get a few beers and, later, diddle her boobs."
"I take her upstairs and do some jazzing," said the boy in the wheelchair.
Stern, flattered at being selected by the two, and not really sure how to say no, got up from his chair, giddy and dangerous in the night. The trio started down the corridor and then heard Lennie rasping and clattering after them, a man with a machine shop going full blast below his waist.
"There is to be no disobedience of the nighttime rules," he said, and, as the boys turned to face him, Stern wondered which side he would be on in a fight. He imagined Lennie standing against the wall, looking patiently at Stern, while the tall boy bent his contraptions and tore out his clamps and gears and the Greek boy hit him many times on the head to no avail. Stern pictured himself watching this, frozen to the side, asking Lennie, "Do you need any help?" And then Lennie, his machinery mangled, finally turning from Stern with great calm and slowly rising up, trunklike and great-armed, to hug the breath out of the two boys, subduing them for the night.
As it was, the Greek boy merely wheeled around, saying "Coon fucker" under his breath, and the tall boy, with great sweetness, said, "We were just being happy with Mr. Stern for getting a hit with a fat ass."
The two boys returned to the dormitory, and as Stern walked after them, the Negro stopped him and said, "There can be a little staying up later sometimes. If authorities come, though, I didn't see you."
Stern said, "Thank you," but he felt very uncomfortable about the favor and wanted to do a thousand quick ones for the Negro. He wanted to tell him that if he ever got into trouble with the police, he could hide in Stern's house, or if he ever wound up helpless and drugged on Welfare Island, Stern would go take a taxi in the middle of the night and cut through red tape to get him into a decent hospital. But the Negro clattered off in a metallic symphony and Stern sat guiltily on a chair, staring off at the winking lights of Rosenkranz. He stayed up late, sucking in the dewy air, exulting in its freshness, aware there were only a few days before his return to the kike man and yet thrilled that there were those few days. He wished that he were clever enough to stretch his mind so that he could turn those days into eternities, fondling each second, stretching it, cramming a lifetime into it before yielding it selfishly for the next one. Perhaps if he stayed on the porch and stared at the night, pinned it with his eyes, he would be able to hold it there and forever block out daylight. Across the field he studied Rosenkranz and wondered whether at some future date he might not himself be taken there, ulcer-free but a mindless urinator now, squatting beside the others, filling the corridors with a giant stream and cackling at the walls.
The following night, the three evaded Lennie and dashed drunkenly at midnight across the lawn toward the main gate, the tall, blond boy propelling the Greek ahead, as though the wheelchaired youth were a wild street hoop. "We meet that coon fucker tonight," said the Greek, his vehicle skidding across the wet grass, "he and me going to tangle asses." Stern kept looking back over his shoulder at the main building, as though he were a child running away from home, taking one giddy step and then another but always remaining close enough to dash back and say he was only fooling. He wondered what punishment Lennie would mete out if they were caught—and could he protest it to a higher authority without appearing to be anti-Negro? If Lennie made him stay in his room, for example. Since there were only a few days left, he would probably stay in there and let it go without fuss.
The tall boy suddenly released the wheelchair and flicked his body to the top branches of a tree like a whip, swinging easily in the wind. "Aren't I a crazy bastard?" he said from above. "That's what the guys said when I was working on high wires. I never used a safety harness. I don't care if I fall down and break my head." He swung from branch to branch like a lean night animal and the Greek boy said, "I'm cutting out. I don't want to do no stuff on trees. I want to do some jazzing."
"How you going to get up here?" said the tall boy. "With your bony ass?"
Stern wanted to tell him not to make fun of the young Greek's missing leg, but the tree swings had intimidated him and he had no desire to run up against the tall boy's explosive wiriness. Dropping easily to the ground, the tallboy flung the wheelchair on ahead of him and said, "Did you see me up there? Aren't I one helluva crazy bastard? I don't care what happens to me."
Stern said, "You were very good up there," and the boy said, "But sometimes everything stops in me. I lay in bed for six months and I can't get out. My kid sister brings me soup. It's in my veins. That's what I'm in here for."
There were no guards at the gate, but as they rolled toward it, Stern had a sudden fear that Lennie had been watching them all along; the instant they passed the gate, he would have them picked up in trucks and initiate punitive measures.
"They don't like you to go through this gate," Stern said, but the Greek boy, wheeling right through, said, "I got to hop on something. Then I'm happy." And Stern raced along after the pair. The three of them traveled seven blocks in darkness, and when they came to a small bar and grill the blond boy said, "I can taste that brew already. I can't go no more than a few days without a few brews." The Puerto Rican girl was waiting for them in a booth, and it seemed to Stern that she was more like Tierney than ever, Tierney after a session with two longshoremen who'd been paid to rough her up a little, not to kill her but to change her face around a little. She wore a bulging black sweater, and her paper-white teeth were chipped a little. Stern, drunk with the danger of having run away from the Home, wondered what her teeth would be like on sections of his body; perhaps they would nibble erotically at him in the style of some primeval creature of the Puerto Rican rain forests.
"And so ends my solitude," she said as the blond boy slid in beside her.
Stern, a weakened, dropping, off-balance feeling coming over him as a result of her literary flourish, took a seat across the table. The Greek boy swung close, chewing onhis nails, examining the chrome and red leather décor. "This place stinks," he said. "We got better places in East Harlem."
"Get this," said the blond boy, poking the girl in the ribs and winking at Stern. "You know what a kiss is? An upper persuasion for a lower invasion." The girl pecked at his ear with her chipped teeth and said, "Forever play the jester." The proprietor, a tall, toplike man who looked out on the street as he spoke, came over and asked, "What'll it be?"
"We're just in here nice," said the blond boy. "We came in here nice and all we want to do is drink nice. Nobody bothers us, we don't bother nobody. Right, Mr. Stern? Didn't we come in here nice?"
"Yes," said Stern, smiling at the man, feeling the air charge up and wanting to stop whatever was about to happen. The brocade of tenderness appeared suddenly to girdle his stomach. He was not sure he could take any trouble, and he imagined himself collapsing and having to be carried back to the Home by his two friends, the Puerto Rican girl walking contemptuously behind, aware now that Stern had the least romantic disease of all.
"Brews all around," the blond boy said, his mood suddenly sweetening. When the proprietor returned to the bar, the blond boy squeezed the girl's breasts and said, "How they hangin', doll?"
"Hey, George—motorboat," he said, waggling his head from side to side against her breasts and making a droning sound in his throat.
"I don't go for that," said the Greek boy, eating deep down on his nails and leaning forward on his wheelchair, as though watching a tense horse race. "I like to do some real jazzing."
The girl sat patiently through this, running her fingers through the blond boy's hair. "The physical side," she saidto Stern, who nodded back at her, his heart in his throat, as though he too considered breast-nuzzling a bore.
The proprietor brought the beers and said, "Pay now." The blond boy said, "Remember what I said when we came in? I said we're coming in here nice. Nobody pushes us around, we don't do any bumping either. Now you come over and you say pay now."
"It's a house rule," said the proprietor, staring out the window. "Everybody pays now." Stern, the brocade tightening around his stomach and wanting to do something, put down two dollars and the proprietor took it. The Greek boy said, "You think you got such a hot place here. This place stinks." He spit on the floor and the proprietor went back to the bar.
"That's what I was telling you," the blond boy said to Stern with a pleading compassion in his voice. "Nobody gives you freedom. You come into a place nice, you know, and you just want a few brews, and look what happens."
"He thinks just because he's got a fancy place he can give you shit," said the Greek boy. "I spit on his ass."
The blond boy's mood suddenly changed and he took hold of one of the girl's breasts again. "Good set, huh, Mr. Stern?" And Stern nodded sweetly in agreement, looking apologetically at the girl, as though he was only going along with this line of conversation to be polite and really never thought of such things.
"What about the dancin'?" the girl asked, looking over at the jukebox. "Does my love feel a tango within him?"
"Dancing, shit," said the blond boy. He looked over at the proprietor, who was rinsing glasses, and said, "He comes over here again, we get him. You can be nice up to a certain point."
"He thinks he has a fancy place," said the boy in the wheelchair. "I'll cut his balls."
Stern, his stomach pumping, wanted to say, "Wait. Nofighting. You have other things, but I have an ulcer, the kind of thing you shouldn't get excited with. What if I get hit in it and get another new one?" When the proprietor came over to the table, the blond boy arranged his fingers like two donkey's ears and stuck them swiftly in the man's eyes. The proprietor said, "I can't see now," holding his eyes, and the Greek boy grabbed his hair and yanked the man's head down on his lap, saying, "I ought to cut your balls." Then he held the man by the hair in a bent-over position and the tall, blond boy began to kick at the man's upper legs, the kicks making sharp, fresh cracking sounds, like new baseballs off a bat. Stern, who had stood by doing nothing, wanted to say, "Stop, you're going too far. The hair stuff wasn't so bad, but now you can do spinal injury." But a current began snapping through him and he looked for something to do. There was one other person in the bar, a small man with a toothbrush mustache who was eating a heavy soup. Stern ran over and grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms.
"I'm not in this," said the man.
"That's all right," said Stern, ecstatic over being in the fight, his stomach free and easy. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if he could be transported in this very condition to the kike man's front porch, the current snapping through him, the same excited sweat in his arms. He was certain he would be able to fight him and not feel a single blow, and for an instant he thought of jumping in a cab and speeding back to his house, gritting his teeth to preserve the mood. The cab fare would be $150 or so, but it would be worth it. But what if the current then began to fade, the sweat dry up, and he found himself nearing the man's house with a growing fright, worrying about being hit in the ulcer? He saw that he would have to get there instantaneously or it would not work.
After many kicks, the proprietor said, "That's enough,"and the blond boy, as though waiting for him to signal with those very words, said, "Let's cut," shoving his wheelchaired friend through the door. Stern said, "I'm letting you go now," to the mustached soup eater and ran out the door after the girl, looking back at the proprietor. He was relieved to see that the man was standing; it seemed to him that only when people were on the floor might there be police involvement. The quartet ran through blackened, neatly shrubbed residential streets, and Stern wondered how running was for the ulcer. Would jogging up and down disengage it and cause it to take residence in another part of him? He was suddenly struck by the incongruity of the quartet—a grenadelike, blond boy with strange vein problems; a wheelchaired Greek; a heavy Jew with ulcer-filled stomach; and a strange, Tierney-like girl who spoke in literary flourishes. And yet they were comrades of a sort and he was glad to be with them, to be doing things with them, to be running and bellowing to the sky at their sides; he was glad their lives were tangled up together. It was so much better than being a lone Jew stranded on a far-off street, your exit blocked by a heavy-armed kike hater in a veteran's jacket.
They slowed down after a while and Stern put his arm around the girl's waist, as though he had been unable to stop and was using her to steady himself. Her neck was wet from the exercise, and the pungent dime-store fragrance of her hair brought him close to a delighted faint.
"Hey, you grabbin' my girl," said the blond boy, and, with a straight face, whipped a blue-veined, grenadelike fist into Stern's ulcer, stopping at the last possible instant and saying "Pow!" instead of landing the blow. Then he threw his head back and howled, saying, "You grab my girl, I got to give you one. Pow, pow, pow!"
"Suivez-moi to my petite habitat," said the girl, going up ahead of the group. "And a young girl shall lead them."
Not sure whether further waist encirclements were permissible, Stern walked beside her, and she said, "I used to work in a hardware store. You meet a princely selection of spooks there, it being near the main drag. One such spook came in one morning and said his friend wanted to spend the evening with me for $140. I asked him where yon friend was. He said he was across the street in a building watching the two of us with a telescope and would come down if I assented. I replied in the negative, of course. I'll entertain a man, to be sure, but not a telescoping type. You do agree there are many spooks in this land of ours." Stern, flattered that she had told him an anecdote, was not sure what to reply and decided he would tell her about his ulcer, testing her reaction.
"I've got something inside me. That's why I'm at the Home. I'm not sure how all this running around will affect me."
"The shits," she said. "I know them. The shits are a chore." She whirled around now and slid her fingers under the shirt of the tall, blond boy. "Does the darling midnight fool feel a cha-cha within him?" she asked. The blond boy took one hand off the wheelchair, tapped the underside of her breast, and said, "Flippety-flippety. Hey, Stern, you see that? Flippety-flippety."
The girl led them to the last house at the edge of a dead-end street; a sign saying "Tina's Beauty Salon" was in the center of the lawn alongside a thin and graceful tree. It had a white luminescent stripe across the bottom of its slender trunk, making it look like a thoroughbred horse's taped ankle.
"My queenly habitat," said the girl, and led them through the front door and down a long corridor with lined-up rows of hair-drying machines. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and guided them now into a small, sparely furnished room with a single bed and onewall papered with Broadway show posters. The lamplight within was warm, making her features seem smoother and heightening the Tierney resemblance; Stern, weakened now by the bulge of her black sweater, the things she had been saying, and the show posters, wondered how it would be getting a divorce, being bled financially, and starting up anew with the Puerto Rican girl in this very room.
The girl flicked on a victrola, putting a finger to her lips, and said, "I'm just a tattered tenant here." She closed her eyes and swayed to the music as though it were a treatment; her body lagged a trifle behind the beat, in the slow-motion style of the feebleminded children she watched each day. Holding out her arms to the blond boy, she said, "Step inside this delightful sound." The blond boy came over, pinched her skirt, and said, "Check your oil." Then he pointed to the Greek boy, who sat staring out at the stars, rubbing his hands as though washing them in a sink. "Dance with George," said the blond boy. "Hey, George, dance with the broad." The Greek boy, his back to the others, a lawyer deciding a case, said, "I don't like dancing. I came out with you to do some jazzing."
The tall boy suddenly grabbed the Greek's wheelchair and pushed it out the door, saying, "I got an idea." Inside the beauty parlor room, he picked up a cigarette holder, put on a hairnet, and sat beneath a hair dryer. "Hey, look at me," he hollered back to Stern and the girl. "I'm an old broad."
The girl closed the door and said, "Boredom sets in swiftly." Still swaying to the music, she asked Stern, "What is your work?" Thrilled by her sudden interest and loving the way she had asked the question, Stern said, "Product labels. There's some writing to it, only not literary." Dancing with closed eyes and lagging behind thebeat, she said, "Someday I, too, shall write a volume. I shall include the sweetness and bile of my life." She stopped dancing now and said, "One of the spooks at the hardware store asked me to do some modeling. Bearded chap. Does figure work mean you work in the altogether, or does one get to keep a doodad on?"
"I don't get into that in my work," said Stern. "I don't like the sound of what you said, though. I have some friends who are legitimate photographers."
She changed the record to a fox-trot now and, taking off her skirt, said, "How would I look adorning magazines?"
Stern stopped breathing, and it suddenly came home to him that they were only a mile or so from the Grove Rest Home and that he was supposed to be undergoing treatment. He was certain that he would be caught, and he tried to imagine what untold horrors would await him if he were brought before the Home committee. At the very least they would throw him out, marking his records so that he would be banned from other rest homes when, at some later date, new illnesses came on. Then he imagined one gentile on the committee smiling thinly and saying, "No, no, let's let him stay," and then seeing to it that he was given a daily allotment of tarnished pills so that his stomach sprouted an entire forest of ulcers.
She put her hand on her hips in a terrible thirties pose and then took off her sweater, saying, "Oh yes, the bosom culture; I'd forgotten." Her breasts poured forward, capped by slanting, evil, Puerto Rican nipples, and Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at that very moment, sad-eyed and chattering with need, was hoisting her own sweater above her head in the rear seat of a limousine, that there was a strange sexual balance wheel at work, and that for every indiscretion of Stern's his wife would commit one too, at best only seconds later.
Like a discharged mortar shell, the tall, blond boy, a salivated look of rage on his face, charged into the room now and said, "Oh, you lookin' at my girl's nips, eh?" He shoved Stern against the wall and shot his fist at Stern's neck, stopping once again at the final instant and saying "Fwot" instead of landing the blow. Then he became convulsed with laughter, doubling up on the bed and howling, "I got you again." The boy stood up then and kissed the girl's nipples with loud, smacking sounds and said to the Greek, "Good set, eh?" Stern, feeling somehow that the girl's breasts were going to get hurt, walked over to her and said, "We were discussing something and she was demonstrating it." The tall boy said softly, "Oh, that's all right. I just like to diddle her boobs a little. George and me will take ten outside and kid around with those dryers." Then, with increasing kindness, he said, "You know the way you say things? Like what you just said? You werediscussingsomething. That's nice. The way you have of saying all the thoughts in your head."
Stern noticed now for the first time that the boy's T-shirt had holes in it, and he felt very sorry for possibly having taken something away from him. What if his veins acted up and he had to spend six months in a room, unable to swing from trees and make believe he was going to hit Stern in the ulcer?
"We can all stay in here and play around," said Stern, but the blond boy walked out, saying, "That's all right, Mr. Stern, sir." To the boy in the wheelchair, Stern said, "You can stick around," but the Greek youth, rubbing his hands, said, "No, I don't feel like it tonight. You know, some nights you're just not in the mood for jazzing." He wheeled himself out of the room, closing the door behind him, and the girl put her arms around Stern's neck and said, "Sweet riddance. Now, my knighted author, will you be with me on the highest of all levels?"
Minutes previous, when she had taken off her clothes, Stern had planned merely to stare at her and fix her in his memory. Perhaps he would tap her behind and feel her breasts in the style of the other boys and then race back across the streets to the Grove Rest Home. It seemed to him that somehow if he did more, the Home would definitely hear of it, his treatment would be disrupted at an early stage, and he would be doomed to walk the streets forever with a permanent ulcer blooming between his ribs. And, of course, if he were to go further, within minutes his own wife, skirt gaping and great eyes confident, would sink back comfortably on the rear cushions of some strange convertible.
He waited for an outraged knock at the door, the clatter of Lennie's machine-shop legs, but nothing came and he fitted his hands over the girl's nylon-covered buttocks, thinking that he had never held a Puerto Rican behind before and that maybe itwasa little different. She took his ear between her chipped white teeth, as though she were an animal pawing meat, and said, "Wondrous author of mine, explore forbidden avenues with deponent thine."
She guided him to the bed, did a dipping thing to make herself nude, and said, "Honest, do you think I'm sensitive?"
"Yes," said Stern, who loved the things she said.
She pulled him to her and said, "Then thrill my secret fibers." She put a contraceptive on him and said, "Now, honey, don't spoil it. Really, let's do a good one." It bothered Stern that she had the contraceptive on hand, but he liked the way she managed it, and the idea of her having one ready suddenly threw him into a frenzy. After a moment, she whispered, "We are as pages in a book of sonnets. Really give it to me." He said, "All right," and after a few seconds she rose and said, a little irritatedly,"Oh, you thrilled me, all right. You really thrilled me." She got into her clothes, and then the irritation passed, and she perched on the bed beside him and said, "Such loveliness I have never known." Her bare brown Puerto Rican knees excited Stern and he wanted her again. He had loved the things she whispered to him and the sting of her teeth pulling on his flesh like meat. "Tell me of your literary prowess," she said.
The door opened and the blond boy came in and said, "We're tired of sitting around out there."
Stern looked out in the corridor and saw the Greek boy's wheelchair against the window. He went outside to him and found the boy crying. "My leg is gone," he said. "I ain't got two fucking legs any more." Stern took the boy's head against his waist and rubbed his neck, trying to think of something to tell him. But there was nothing. What could he say? That the leg would grow back again? "Some people have things even worse than legs in their stomachs," he said finally. He wheeled the boy inside the room, where the girl sat perched on the bed. The tall, blond boy picked up an extra-long broomstick handle and said, "Hey, George, let's give her a ride." He quickly slid the broomstick between the girl's legs, and the boy in the wheelchair, getting the idea, dried his eyes, wheeled close, and caught the other end, so that they had her straddling the stick as though she were on a fence. They began to lift her up and down on the broomstick, the two of them howling at the ceiling, while the girl shouted, "Lemme off, you bastards." Stern shouted, "You'll hurt her down there," but she looked so awkward, he stopped loving her immediately. When she cursed at them, Stern looked at her and said, "I can't do anything."
"Hey, Mr. Stern, keep her up there," said the blondboy, and Stern took the Greek boy's end and tossed her up and down a few times, saying, "I'm going to do this a little, too."
They finally let her down, and for an instant, straightening her skirt, she smoothed her hair and pretended nothing had happened. "Let me tell you further of my book," she said to Stern. But, after seeing her on the pole, the thought of her terrible Puerto Rican writing disgusted him and he said, "No literary stuff now."
She bent over then, holding her crotch, and said, "Ooh, you really hurt me down there, you cruddy bastards." Stern felt good that she had addressed all three of them, not excluding him, and it thrilled him to be flying out of her apartment with his new friends, all three howling and smacking each other with laughter at the pole episode. He wanted to be with them, not with her. He needed buddies, not a terrible Puerto Rican girl. He needed close friends to stand around a piano with and sing the Whiffenpoof song, arms around each other, perhaps before shipping out somewhere to war. If his dad got sick, he needed friends to stand in hospital corridors with him and grip his arm. He needed guys to stand back to back with him in bars and take on drunks. These were tattered, broken boys, one in a wheelchair, but they were buddies. They skidded across the lawn, wildly recalling the night's events.
The blond boy: "You see me kick that guy's ass? Pow, pow, pow!"
The Greek: "We almost ran that broomstick up the broad's kazoo, man."
Stern: "Did you see me hold that strong little guy at the bar?"
They split up at the main gate, each stealing back to his room separately. "Tomorrow night, maybe we do somereal jazzing," said the boy in the wheelchair as they parted.
Exhilarated as he slipped past Lennie's darkened office, Stern, approaching his room, felt his stomach and was surprised to find the tapestry still prickling raw against it. Perhaps excitement is not good for it, he thought—even good excitement. But it did not really bother him, and it occurred to him for the first time that if necessary, by God, he would live with the damned thing. He opened his door now and saw the half man, bathrobe flown apart, toothache towel around his jaw, sitting on Stern's bed. The sleeping actor's foot stirred momentarily, tapping the edge of the bed in time to some forgotten vaudeville turn. Stern wheeled around in a panic, wanting to flee the room until the half man was out of there and his bed was scrubbed. He went out into the hall, but the half man chased and caught him, gripping Stern's wrist in a death vise. "Question," he radio-croaked in the dark hall.
"What?" asked Stern, his eyes closed so he would not see the half man, not daring to inhale lest he smell his halves.
"You Jewish?" the man asked, croaking so close his mouth worked against Stern's ear.
"Yes," said Stern, shutting his eyes until they hurt.
"Me, too," croaked the man, wheeling Stern around so that he had to face him. "I'm Jewish, too."
It did not thrill Stern to hear this. It was no great revelation, and it failed to touch him, just as the man's terrible violin playing had not moved him either. He said, "OK," and freed his wrist, but as he walked away a crumbling chill seemed to invade him, starting between his shoulder blades and pouring through all of him. He turned and kissed the man and hugged him and put his nose upagainst the man's toothache towel, and then, perhaps using some of the courage he had amassed that evening, embraced the man's bad side, too.
He had counted on firm handshakes and hearty good-byes, exchanged phone numbers, pledges to continue friendships, and deep sincere looks in the eye, but on the morning of his departure he found that the people at Grove hung away from him. He was sitting on the porch with them, after leading the dumb march back from breakfast with Rooney in his arms, and he said to Rooney, "I'm all better and I'm going home today."
Rooney, who had been clinging to a pole and making waspish comments about the wealth of horse owners, turned to Stern and said, "You didn't say anything about that."
The old actor overheard Stern and said, "What did you come up for, if you were only staying such a little time? That's really country, boy, really country."
It was as though by getting healthy he had violated a rotted, fading charter of theirs and let them down. He had come into their sick club under false pretenses, enjoying the decayed rituals, and all the while his body wasn't ruined at all. He was secretly healthy, masquerading as a shattered man so that he could milk the benefits of their crumbling society. And now he felt bad about not being torn up as they were.
"I didn't know you weren't that sick," said Feldner in his bathrobe. "I had what you got, and I needed the warm of a stew in me every day for two years."
"I may have to come right back," said Stern, trying to make the man in the bathrobe feel better.
He went over to the charged-up blond boy, who was leaning on the young Greek's wheelchair, and said,"Maybe you can take a run by my place when you get sprung."
But the camaraderie of the wild evening was gone. "You weren't even in here much," said the blond boy, and the Greek youth said, "Yeah, what'd you come up here—to fool around?"
Only Lennie was consistent that morning. He had taken Stern's baggage out of the room himself, and when Stern tried to help him, he said, "No infractions on last days. There are patients who rupture before check-out, and legal suits come about. Patients to the right as we take baggage downstairs." At the bottom of the steps, he loaded Stern's valises onto the baggage rack and walked intricately into his office. "Final pill," he said to Stern, getting one ready in a little cup. When the Negro handed him the pill cup, Stern stuck a folded-up five-dollar bill in the pocket of the intern's jacket. His mother had always stuck bills in the pockets of busboys and waiters and, after each insertion, had said, "I never missed that kind of money. You should see the respect I got for it." Lennie took the bill out of his jacket, examined it, and put it back in his pocket. He started to turn around, but then he changed his mind and asked Stern, "Anyone around?" Stern said everyone was out on the porch, and the Negro said, "Come on in here then," beckoning Stern into the forbidden office. "Have a seat," said Lennie, locking them both in. He sat down himself, releasing gears and switches, and then produced a loose-leaf notebook. He thumbed through it, stopped at a page, and said, "The old actor guy. Guy you roomin' with. He go around saying he got the weakness. He ain't coming out of here. They been trying to get him ready for another operation, but he too weak." He flipped the page and said, "Girl check in here two days ago," referring to a young and prettyblond girl who had kept to herself. "She says she restin'. Well, she got something in her from intercoursin' with a man too big for her. Who else you want to know?"
"None of the others right now," said Stern, wanting to leave the room but afraid to offend the Negro.
"That's all right," said Lennie, turning to another page. "Rooney, the guy you carryin'. Bones softening up; nothing they can do on him. He be here for the duration." He flipped again. "Feldner, the Jew fella. He hit Casino. He gettin' out but ain't got no more'n a year." Without referring to the book, he said, "The half guy you see stalkin' around. He surprisin' everybody. He gawn be around when they all through."
The Negro ran through the other patients, while Stern made himself small in his chair and tried to block out all sound. After the last patient, Stern found himself putting another bill in the Negro's pocket, as though he hadn't realized what he was getting and saw now that he had underpaid.
A sweet and choirlike glow came over the Negro's face as he showed Stern out of the office and began to push the baggage cart. All the way to the administration building he blurted out secrets of the Home. "Nobody know it, but they get tranquilizer every day," he said. "Guy gonna die, we shift him to Room 12 so we can whip him out of there when he go and not shake up no one."
And after each batch of secrets, Stern compulsively stuffed another bill in the Negro's jacket, wanting him to stop and tell no others, yet paying him for each pair. On the front steps of the administration building, Stern saw his wife's car. The Negro, a little flustered, strained for a climactic one and finally said, "Staff get to eat better than the patients. We get better cuts of meat and all we want." Stern let Lennie get his bags on the car rack and stuffed a final five into his pocket.
"You didn't have to tell me any of those," Stern said, getting behind the wheel and taking his last look at the Grove Rest Home. But then, lest he hurt the Negro attendant's feelings, he said, "But thanks," and swept out of the driveway.
"I thought I'd always have it in there, but the parachute is gone," Stern told his wife as they drove home. "It feels as though I have a hot tablecloth around the front of me now, but it's better than the chute."
She sat beside him with one tanned leg folded beneath her, her great eyes glistening, wet with expectancy. She wore a cotton jumper, and when Stern leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her blouse was loose and he could make out the start of her nipples beneath her half bra. It got him nervous, and he said, "Why are you wearing your blouse like that? When you bend over, people can actually see the nipples. That isn't any damned good."
"It isn't?" she said, teasing him. "Oh well, don't worry; it's only when you get real close."
"None of that's funny," said Stern. "I just got out of the goddamned place for my stomach. Do you still go to that dance class?"
"Oh yes," she said, sitting against the door, her eyes huge. "That's what saved me when you were in there. First we dance like crazy and then we congregate at the overnight diner on Olivetti Street. That's the best part. You should hear one of the girls talk. Dirtier than anything you've ever heard. She's a scream. Then José spins me home, since he lives out our way."
"Is there any more of that tongue stuff?" Stern asked.
"Don't be silly," she said. "He kisses everybody. It's what they do."
She hung back against the door, her skirt above her browned knees, and Stern wondered whether she hadgone to bed with the instructor, getting into tangled, modern dance positions with him. How did he know she hadn't spent the entire five weeks of his sickness at endless, exhausting, intricately choreographed lovemaking, flying to the instructor seconds after she had deposited Stern at the Home? She seemed curled up, contented, shimmering with peace, as though someone had finally pressed the right buttons and relieved the dry, chattering hunger Stern had never been able to cope with. Perhaps she had gone to him in a desperate way, knowing that the instructor, however thin of bone and feminine of gesture, would never allow her to be insulted and would attack any offender with Latin fury. In any case, the secret was locked between her warm thighs. He would never know what had gone on, and he felt a drooping, weakened sensation and wondered why there couldn't be a chemical test, a litmus paper you could hold up to women to find out how many times they'd been to bed since last you saw them.
"Were having a recital and I've got to rehearse practically every night. It saved me while you were away. I'd have gone crazy."
"I don't know about any recitals," Stern said. "I've got to have everything easy on me. I don't want that thing coming back. I never want to go back to any rest homes. If I go back there, I'm really cooked."
At the Home, several days before Stern left, Rooney, hanging from an overhead porch beam, had told Stern of a merchant seaman who had gotten over an ulcer and who subsequently was incapable of being riled. "You could stick it into him from morning till midnight and he'd just give you a little smile and off he'd go like a contented cow." Now, as he drove home, Stern, who had spoken sharply to his wife and had felt the hot brocade tighten against the front of him, began suddenly to follow theprocedure of Rooney's man. He held the controls gently in his hands, tapping lightly on the foot pedals and scanning the road ahead easily, as if too vigorous a motion might topple his head from his shoulders. He began to do things in a slow and mincing way, as though he might be able to whisper and tiptoe through life, hushing his way past death itself. At the tollbooth, he smiled meltingly at the uniformed attendant, and when the man took his fifty cents, Stern said, "Thanks a lot."
"Why did you thank him?" his wife asked.
"Why not?" said Stern.
Later, when they approached the outskirts of Stern's town, they drove past small houses with neatly kept lawns and Stern nodded in a friendly way to the people who stood outside them. He knew they were all gentiles and he wondered what would happen in a pogrom. Which ones, if any, would hide him and his family from the authorities? Probably quite a few, he thought; ones that would surprise him. Probably the people with the most forbidding gentile faces. Ordinarily they'd never have anything to do with Stern, but if it came to a pogrom, with New England crustiness they'd spirit Stern and his family off to attics, saying to one another, "No one's going to tell us what to do with our Jews."
As they drove past the man's house, Stern held his breath and closed his eyes for a second, as though there were a chance it might not be there. He had been away five weeks, and perhaps part of his cure was that the man's house would be swept away or that it would disappear as though it had never been there, much like his vanished ulcer. But the house stood in the same place, and Stern, as he drove by, inclined his head gently toward it, as though he would face whatever horrors lay inside with softness and gentle ways, melting them with his niceness. As he neared his own house, he wondered fleetingly what he, the man down the street, would do in the event of a pogrom. Would he startle Stern by spiriting his despised Jewish neighbors away in his cellar, hating pogroms as even more un-American than Stern?
In his house, Stern sat down in the easy chair of his sparsely furnished living room and said to his wife, "Softly and easily. That's how it's going to have to be. No noise. No upsets."
His son came out with a bandage on his elbow and said, "What's it like to die?"
Stern said, "I'm not doing any dying for a while. But there'll be no rough playing any more. Everything with Daddy is soft and easy. Where did you get the cut? That's the kind of thing I don't want to get involved in, but where did you get it?"
"I found it on me in the morning," said the boy, beginning to suck a blanket.
Stern's wife, who had been boiling eggs for him in the kitchen, hollered in, "There's one last thing you're going to get a kick out of doing. The kind of thing you'll enjoy. I'll tell you about it later."
Stern started to eat the eggs, but they stuck in his throat and he said, "What's the thing? I don't want to get into anything two minutes after I'm back from a rest home."
"I wouldn't tell it to you, except it's the kind of thing you'll enjoy taking care of. Some kids came by on a bike, older than him, and one of them cut his elbow with a mirror and called him 'Matzoh.' I've been furious, but I saved it for you because I know it's the kind of thing you'll want to settle."
"He doesn't live around here, that bad boy," said Stern's son. "He's just visiting someone here. I wish you'd make the boy die."
"Daddies don't make small boys die," said Stern. The brocade that lay across the front of him began to heat up, and he pressed his fist deep into his stomach and held it there, on guard lest another ulcer begin to sprout forth and fill his ribs.
"Nobody seems to have heard what I've been saying," he said to his wife, but then he clasped his son's head and said, "You're right; it is the kind of thing I'd like to take care of." He took the boy to his car, squeezing his hand, and for a second it seemed that the child was really holdinghishand, leading Stern and protecting him. He drove the car in a wide arc, as far as possible from the kike man's house, and the child said, "You're going too far. The bad boy won't be around here."
"You point him out to me," said Stern, the front of him on fire, crouched over as though to give the flames less area to ruin. They came to a cluster of seven boys who'd gotten off their bikes to rest, and Stern stopped the car, gripping his son's hand for courage. He went among them and said, "Someone said something to my son and cut him. They said a dirty thing to him, and it had better not happen again."
"Don't make them dead," his son said. "They're not the bad boys."
Stern grabbed the collar of one of them, twisted him close, and said, "I can really get sore, and when I do I can really start swinging. That better not happen again."
The boy looked at him evenly, without fear, and Stern released him. He must have been around twelve, and Stern wondered whether he would remember and two years later, at fourteen, with his body shaping into athletic hardness, come after Stern and pummel him to the ground.
Stern got back into the car with his son and, continuingin the arc, he drove slowly through the streets and stopped alongside a small boy with glasses and large feet who was walking next to the curb, carrying books.
"Someone said something lousy to my son and cut him," Stern said from the car. "I don't like the particular kind of thing they said."
"I'm not a little boy," said the book carrier. "I'm seventeen and finishing high school I'm small and everyone thinks I'm a kid."
"Don't make him dead, Daddy," said Stern's son. Stern felt very sorry for the small high-school student with his big feet, and yet he was thrilled to find someone in the neighborhood who read books and wasn't fierce. He wanted to invite him to his house and give him books, maybe take him to New York to see Broadway plays.
"Come over if you're near my place," said Stern, and drove off.
"I think the bad boy is visiting over there," said Stern's child, pointing in the direction of the house that darkened Stern's every waking moment. Nonetheless, he knitted his eyebrows, bared his teeth, and gunned the motor, as though, by going through the motions of outrage, he would somehow become outraged and the momentum would carry him right up to the man's front door before he had time to change his mind. He raced toward the man's house, and yet, when he reached it, the fraud of his facemaking became apparent to him and he continued on, realizing that he had never intended for a second confronting the man.
In his own home, Stern's wife asked, "Did you find him?" And Stern said, "I don't want to do any finding. Don't you realize I just came home from a Home a few hours ago?"
For one blissful second then, Stern's vision blurred and it seemed that he had gotten it all wrong, that he hadnot been away at all, and that he was to leave that very evening for a place where everything would be made better for him. But then he caught the edge of a chair, his eyes cleared, and he realized that he really had been away. The thought that he had come back to find his situation unchanged was maddening. It was as though he had been guaranteed that the treatment would heal his neighborhood as well as his ulcer—and that the guarantee had turned out to have secret clauses, rendering it worthless. The man was still there. The hospital had not had him removed. His wife had not somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His father had not gone down the street to thrust his scarred nose up in the man's face. No hand had reached down from the heavens and declared that the man had never existed. He was still right there in his house, not even seriously sick.
Stern went upstairs, and as he sat on the edge of his bed he felt a small spring inside him stretch and finally break, leaving his body in a great tremble. He lay back on the bed, as though mere contact with a bed could cure anything, but he could not quiet himself, and so he dialed Fabiola.
"A brand new thing has happened," Stern told him. "There's a tremble in me and I can't control it. The thing is, I've just comebackfrom the damned rest home. Can you just come back from a place like that and have something like this happen?"
"Yes," said Fabiola. "You'd better avoid tension or you're going to wind up back there again. Remember that and call me if you get into more trouble."
Stern got on his knees now, as though in prayer, clutching fistfuls of sheet and trying to squeeze out the tremble. The bedroom windows were darkening with night when his wife appeared, flinging off her shorts, combing her hair, and saying, "I've got to go to rehearsals."
"Look," Stern said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I really have to. I've got a new thing and I have to have you here. I'm not talking about any ulcer but something really new and lousy."
"You mean you want me to give up the dancing? It's the only thing I have out here."
"You don't know what this new deal is," said Stern. As though to demonstrate, he began to take short, gasping breaths. It started as a plea for sympathy, but when he tried to stop he found he couldn't and he began to cry. "Let's get out of here. Oh, let's sell this house. We don't belong here. You'll have to handle all the details. Oh, I'm really in trouble now."
Part Four
It wasa jangled, careening period that followed, and later he could remember it only as a black piece torn from his life rather than a number of days or weeks. He knew that it began trembling on the edge of a bed at midnight and he remembered how it ended, but he could pick out only single frenzied moments in between, as though it were all down on a giant mural he was examining in darkness with an unreliable flashlight There was no good part of the day for him during this period, but it was the mornings that seemed the worst because there were always a giddy few minutes when it seemed he was going to be all right. But a dry, shriveling tremble would soon come over him, and it was then that he had to hold on to things, as though to keep himself on the ground. He held on to chairs and desks and he held on to himself, always keeping one fist buried deeply in his side, as though to nail himself down and join together the pieces of human spring that had snapped within him. Going to work was a stifled, desperate time, and therewas at least one ride when, sealed up in the train, holding the bottom of his seat with all his might, he thought he was not going to be able to make it and said to the man next to him, "I'm in a lot of trouble. You may have to grab me in a second." He remembered that the man, who smoked a pipe and wore his hat down low, had hardly looked surprised and said, "I'll keep an eye on you," and then gone back to hisTimes.
He was certain, on these rides to the city, that he would lose his breath and begin to bite things so that heavyset men, who'd been college athletes, would have to sit on him in mid-aisle, pressing his face to the floor, while conductors signaled on ahead to alert authorities. Each time the train pulled in, Stern would race gratefully to the street, sucking in hot blasts of summer air, stunned that he had made it.
In his office, on these mornings, a motor, powered by rocket fuels, ran at a dementedly high idle somewhere between his shoulder blades. He could not sit and he could not stand, and he remembered his narrow business room as a place to crouch and sweat and hope for time to pass. A film seemed to seal him off from the others around him. Unable to think, his mind an endless white lake, he touched papers and opened drawers and felt pencils, as though by physically going through remembered motions the work would get done. He did these things in short, frenzied bursts, holding on to a table with one hand; it seemed that someone was pulling him into the ground. At noon, his fist socked deep into his stomach, as though to seal it like a cork, he would run to a nearby park, where he would fling off his jacket, lie on his back, and stick his face in the sun, praying that he might sleep or disappear into the grass. Once he slept a long while in his office clothes, his face burning up in the heat. He awakened at a crazy, magical time of day, cool and grateful, the trembling stilled, and for a moment he thought it might be over. But then the motor turned over quietly and began to hum.
There was, too, during that period, a numb and choking fear of his boss, Belavista, that formed suddenly and oppressed Stern. He crouched within his office and gripped his desk and waited for the Brazilian to call. The man's confident morning steps in the hall sent Stern looking for a place to hide. The phone ring became a knife, and once, when it was late and Belavista summoned him, he flew first to the bathroom and locked the toilet stall. He could remember that later, in the front office, Belavista had stood for a long time without talking, his charred millionaire's face staring out of the skylight, while Stern died in his tracks. Turning finally, he had said, "How are things going in there?" And Stern, his tongue shriveling in his mouth, had said, "I just can't," and had run to put his face up to the park sun, grunting and squeezing his fists blood red, as though he could force and fight his way into a sleep.
His house, once he had screamed "Let's sell," became a dirty and infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, "I saw your ad about the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don't want it to be all my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I can't tellyou how important that part is." And Stern had moaned back, "Oh, I know; I really know," joining the man in tears.