PREFACE
DIAMOND STREET is autobiographical, faithfully — all facts true, all events actual occurrences (though I have changed the characters' names). I am the character "Joseph."
Often DIAMOND STREET feels dark, sometimes even horrific. But it is not a horror-tale; and sometimes it is tender, empathically compassionate.....
Though mostly DIAMOND STREET feels tragic, it fits the classic Greek form of comedy. Its protagonist, "Joseph," prevails in what is every pure creature’s aspiration.
In mounting evolutions, Joseph attains critical epiphanies and vital psychic & physical victories and, in the closing scenes, a rare kind of triumph of spirit, a triumph specially remarkable because of Joseph’s young age and the psychosocial environments he suffered from infancy through most of his seventh year, when (two months before the eighth anniversary of his birth) the story ends.
DIAMOND STREET is part of a book — “Map” — which comprises a set of long short stories that interrelate like parts of a novel but can stand as independent novellas or novelettes. Map traces the journeys — geographic & psychosocial journeys — of a character called “Joseph,” the protagonist of the entire book.
Of Map’s eight stories, three — “Maine,” “Philly 1 New York,” “Homeward the Ohio” — are published. Maine was a winner of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’s 1991 national fiction contest; and NEGATIVE CAPABILITY published Maine. Philly 1 New York received two awards (one from NEGATIVE CAPABILITY).
One vital way, Émile Zola’s fiction guided my writing of DIAMOND STREET — and of the entire book, Map, of which DIAMOND STREET is part. Zola rendered abundant, meticulous detail of inanimate and non-human contexts of acts, experience, and words of his characters and each character’s anatomy, bearings, colorings, clothes. Such depictions bestow his novels uniquely vibrant life.
Still, DIAMOND STREET’s language and structure are peculiar — throughout, of canonic form like that of 15th and 16th century polyphony or the music of Johann Sebastian Bach or Anton Webern’s final 16 works. Much, its vocabulary pursues imperatives of sounds — their shapes, rhythms, vectors, hues... — sometimes more than denotations of words or linguistic connotations of prose-syntax. The peculiarity deserves exposition.
The text bears some obscure words like “lorn” (OE, E: lost; ruined; undone; forsaken; desolate; bereft; forlorn) and “traject” [truh-JEHKT (accent 2nd syllable)] (L, OF, F, E: trajectory, an act of trajecting, a trajection; transmission, an instance of transmission; a ferry; a passage; a crossing-place; a ford). Such words happen, despite their obscurity, because they are the only apt-meaning words that both fit and further the music, colors, plays of masses & gravities, and winding, interweaving, inter-permuting geometries of the story's senses and necessary design.
Like Ezra Pound, I favor words rooted in dialects of peoples who formed England and its tongue — words of Celtic, Saxon, Old Norse, or Norman French blood, not of Latin or Greek descent. But I do not sacrifice the story's images or musics to that preference. So, sometimes the narrator speaks words like “octopodes,” “metabolized,” “nebulæ,” “transmogrified” — because only they perform the context-vital visions and sounds.
Much, DIAMOND STREET embodies a notion like Robert Frost's “sound of sense” or like the architectural aspect of true music — the sense-of-sound notion that sound bears its own meaning even if the sounding words are intellectually insensible. So, DIAMOND STREET prays that one read it aloud: for, the text’s music — visual music — forms much of the text’s import.
True music (Johann Sebastian Bach's, Josquin Desprez's, Anton Webern’s, Johannes Ockeghem ’s.....) occurs as migrating shapes constantly mutating (themselves & all others) kaleidoscopically, like the géométries flamboyantes of High Gothic church-architecture. So, e.g., saddening sounds bear special shapes, as do sounds of sadness — gently descending crescents turning into deep curves plunging hard down, like the lips & brow of a woman bewailing the death of her infant child.
Consider DIAMOND STREET's 5th paragraph:
An amphibious plane struggled toward the river, the body tentcloth and sticks, the lone engine purling metal whirs, in tooled parabolas, through silence, down to Diamond Street, its raw gulch coursing straight and arid, eastward toward the port. The plane's traject, its distant angles, transmogrified the night's geography.
Consider the word “amphibious.” Notice that no logic or intellectual reason required the plane be amphibious, even a plane flying in the scene being described. Hear the flat-smooth sound/rhythm of most of “amphibious” — the flat-smooth, cut by the last syllable's open-grunt (“ou” sounding as “uh”) snapping down into aspirate leak (the “s”). Compare the language “the lone engine purling metal whirs, in tooled parabolas, through silence, down to Diamond Street.”
Forget whether you know exactly what is a parabola or how it differs from an hyperbola or whether you know exactly what is a purl. You know a parabola is a dramatic curve. You know a purl is a knitting stitch; you know the look of knitting.
You know the sounds of metals — what most people imagine when they see the word “metal.” You know metal conducts heat (so metal would feel cold in the weather of the beginning of DIAMOND STREET). You know that metal is lifeless and, commonly, rather hard (even if pliable). So you can appreciate “metal whirs” — and you know the meaning of whir & know a plane’s lone engine will whir.
A metal whir is not just a whir made by moving metal, like parts of a plane’s engine. A metal whir is a whir that acts and sounds metallic. It mimics the sound-vibrations transmitted — trajected — by utterance of the word “metal.” The word’s syllable “met” [“meht”] sounds icy-smooth-flat (like, but more than, the first three syllables of “amphibious”). Its syllable “al” [“uhl”] sounds kindred to the “ous” of amphibious, but draws-in/collapses-dead (does not thin down sharp to blank, like the “s” of “ous” of “amphibious”).
Now hear “purling metal whirs.” Feel the senses and shapes of your mouth as you say those words.
You know silence [“through silence”]. You “know” that between heavenly bodies [like Earth and Moon of “the moon obsolesced every street lamp there” (of the story’s 1st ¶ )], the empty space is silent. You apprehend that in killing-cold nights (like that of DIAMOND STREET’s opening), the atmosphere may feel like voids surrounding planets. So you sense, as with your skin, the nature of the silence “through” which the metal whirs cast themselves “down” (to Earth).
Now see & feel the shape of your pronouncing “silence.” Pronounce it slowly, discernibly in two syllables, though without clearly separating the two. Sense its sound of falling expiration, of numbing into naught.
You know the plane’s sound is curving “down.” You see and hear the word “down,” and you know its meaning — know it not just in your frontal lobe or your ordinarily recalled experience of going down, but also because of the shape of the sound of the word “down” & the shape of your mouth when it utters the word “down,” specially if your vocal apparatus executes the word’s sound carefully.
Now speak & hear “tooled parabolas.” The sounds appear as shapes of sadness becoming fear collapsing grief. The sound “tooled” plays a gently down-moving crescent. The sound “parabolas” pulls the “tooled” sound outward, then plunges it into sea — for, the sound “luhzz” (parabolas’ last syllable) drowns the curve into obliteration.
Now consider “purling.” The “purl” sound shapes a down-curve falling fast-farther than “metal whirs.” But in its immediate phrase, its down-pull forms an incipience tentatively undone first by the contractive-then-choking “ing” (of “purling”), next by “metal,” but re-begun, though more tentatively, by “whirs.” Then, “tooled parabolas,” draws the “purl” sound into realization of its auguring.
Reconsider “amphibious” — flat-smooth first, then cut by open-grunt (“uh”) that falls off instantly by work of snapping-down aspirate leak (of “s”). So “amphibious” (its sound) presages, therefore emphasizes, the shape and direction of the sounds of the plane’s “lone engine” — its “purling metal whirs, in tooled parabolas, through silence, down to Diamond Street.”
True music renders DIAMOND STREET its life another way. Words and phrases form inter-evolving architectural motifs, as of the multidirectional canons of Johann Sebastian Bach. So, e.g., “burst” repeats in both like and contrary contexts as it retains or shifts references of character or event or transmutes from, or into, “erupt,” “gush,” “seep,” “fulminate,” “vomit,” “explode”...and, so, unfolds, by transfigurings, the story’s happenings and participants and their behaviors, experiences, and effects.
The latter music-aspect manifests with diction, syntax, contexture, timbre, pitch, meter, rhythm, and tempo, and by inversion, retrogression, augmentation, and diminution of pitch, meter, rhythm, speed — in implicit polyphony, as occurs often in Johann Sebastian Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites.
Inversion, retrogression, augmentation, diminution? See here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here.
Below is one example — a kaleidoscopically repeating scene of Joseph’s father’s (Vendl’s) throwing Joseph’s mother (Nän) to a “floor” & her defending herself violently. I have highlighted (with bold-italic typeface) some key terms developed in other text set farther below.
Vendl grabbed Nän's hair, slammed her to the floor, like a ham on a string, a thumb's breadth from Joseph's face, divorced into bewilderment, a plummet of eggs — fragments, nebulæ, quaking.
* * *
Screaming so volcanically his words eluded apprehension, Vendl grabbed Nän's hair, slung her to the floor, like a ham on a string, a hand's breadth from Joseph's face, a puzzle, shaping. Nän's glass sharded toward the door. Her body blared a thud that jarred the whole flat. Her breath gushed, as if air bursting a gashed tire. She gasped, like pierced vacuum, and shrieked like Bedouin wives when their men charge to battle — her tongue trilling shrill, her wail fiercer than bagpipes’ screeching through fog into war.
* * *
Nän's hand hooked Vendl's ankle. She shot her fist into the soft of his knee. Like shark's, her teeth stabbed his calf, ripped its flesh. Blood oozedfrom him, drained into her mouth, between her teeth, past the corners of her lips, down across her jaw.
The shock felled Vendl. Nän sprang on him, dug her fingers in his eyes.
He pulled his head away before she blinded him. His fingers clasped her throat — like anacondas.
* * *
Nän slammed his body on the radiator, crashed his head into its silvered iron, kicked his gut. He lay limp, breathing. She dragged him to their room, dumped him on their bed, shrouded him with quilt, quit the chamber, lightless, shut its door, as if setting a land-mine.
* * *
Dawn still feathered sea some tens of leagues east. Thuds and ravings startled Joseph from rare thorough sleep.
Glass shattered. Lènya scooped Joseph to her chest. His arms circled her neck. She cradled him to Nän and Vendl staring through the window of their room.
A door hammered a studded wall. A nude young hag shot, screaming, from the next house west, her thin arms flailing, her red hair mazed like raveled yarn. A tall man chased her, his bed-clothes striped like costumes of Jews captive in Nazi camps. The door swung shut behind. He tackled her on raw pavement. She squirmed to face him, bit into his arm, clawed his eye, neck, cheek, jaw. His fist bashed her temple. She fell limp. He rose, tugged her up, slung her on his shoulder, hauled her back to their house, crashed its door.
Light seeped into time, corrupted darkness. A siren neared. An ambulance — royal blue and orange — halted outside, azure lights whirling on its roof, the Seal-of-Pennsylvania painted on its cab. The siren stopped. Two men emerged, their garments white. They climbed to the erupted home.
So, very much, DIAMOND STREET’s music forms the interplaying elements of its sense. But, for the story’s first ten paragraphs, the matter is not only the there-local music’s immediate meaning. The matter is also that, like an embryo’s DNA, those ten paragraphs’ sounds, rhythms, images, and events portend — even encapsulate — the whole remainder of the story, the molecular forms & actions of its playing-out, the chemistry of each human act and experience. And the latter quality draws great moment from a strange & potent fact.
The first eight paragraphs bear no human, no beast, no life — except a distant hint of some unknown creatures’ imagined sight and feel of “odor’s memory” and an ethereal trace of some unidentified, indeterminate sycamores “abducted from the nurtures of streams”:
The land — its concrete, stone, its graveled tar, its glass and disembodied wood — suffered no trees, no vegetation. But for some who abided the turn of leaves in city parks or at sidewalks notched to bind young sycamores abducted from the nurtures of streams — for them the buildings' colors drew into the inner eye, and to the touch of odor's memory, November's hue, clumped and burning, or rotting in gutters. All year the district bid the feel of bare, of dying-seasons.
The 9th paragraph mentions a “Joseph” who lived in a flat & whose birth was recorded in a “City Hall” & Joseph’s “dad” who sat a chimney & spied an attribute of “City Hall.” But “Joseph” & “dad” might be cardboard cutouts a cynic named. We cannot feel they bear life but count them merely semblances of past events that, perhaps, may join future’s possibility: “life” is a “chaos” of artificial things.
The tenth paragraph begins: “The coal man knew the underneath.” But the coal man & his ken are unidentified, obscure, absent, appear never, save as if marks of inanimate aspects of a cellar where the only events are qualities or actions of stone, metal, “carbon rocks” (coal), oxidation (“fire”), and contraptions that did not, could not, live.
Surely humans waged the war of the story’s 2nd paragraph & built the cars & city structures of the first 6 paragraphs & the 8th & 9th. Surely a human piloted the 5th paragraph’s amphibious plane.
But (like “Joseph” & “dad” & “coal man”), armies, pilot, and builders hover traceless in insensible ethers, as if long-departed spirits or dreamed hallucinations. Yet they & their inanimate companions (street lamp, moon, concrete, stone, graveled tar, glass, disembodied wood......) stand vital atoms of the whole story’s DNA & the life it becomes. They & their milieu form germ & womb of evolution of the protagonist — his world, awareness, empathy — a work of primitive wisdom.
END OF PREFACE
================
[Now, below, the story’s text.]
DIAMOND STREET
A True Story
That night of winter, of onyx sky, noon would have siphoned scarce-more light into Norwegian fjords. Through those lorn hours, the moon obsolesced every street lamp there — pearl-globed & gas-fired then, and burning low, from parsimony, for war infesting Europe, North Africa, the islands of Pacific seas, the East from Japan to the Caucasus.
The terrain emulated desert, the air dry as June of summits of Antarctic heights. Brownstone tenements and macadam streets parodied arroyos and buttes saguaros inhabit, or canyons that blemish lunar schemes.
The land — its concrete, stone, its graveled tar, its glass and disembodied wood — suffered no trees, no vegetation. But for some who abided the turn of leaves in city parks or at sidewalks notched to bind young sycamores abducted from the nurtures of streams — for them the buildings' colors drew into the inner eye, and to the touch of odor's memory, November's hue, clumped and burning, or rotting in gutters. All year the district bid the feel of bare — of dying-seasons.
An amphibious plane struggled toward the river, the body tentcloth and sticks, the lone engine purling metal whirs, in tooled parabolas, through silence, down to Diamond Street, its raw gulch coursing straight and arid, eastward toward the port. The plane's traject, its distant angles, transmogrified the night's geography.
The tenement rows reduced to bars of umber blocks mosaicked erratically by oblong glows that thin dark bands and wiry crosses severed into radiant squares. The street became a brace of lined processions of illumined blurs that channeled passing vectors of vermilions and whites, once warning signs and beaming eyes of Plymouths and Fords.
Below, shadows fattened, everywhere. And in the iced-thick air, within the stark of brilliance of a moon grown mammoth as another Earth, the auras, the many overlapping auras, dwindled — as if vapors spread through cosmic void, or floods bled into sand.
Alike, the great stone blocks, their rectangled shadows, the long macadam bar, the azure globes, the glowing squares — all, and their societies, enjoyed the pure-of-element and clarity-of-line one sees in certain stage sets, surrealist paintings, bleak cartoons. Only where the few surviving auras — the strong ones — shrouded them, precisions yielded to the edgings of obscure.
Within that tenement (sixth of the north of the block), through that blaring oblong plane, there, on the fourth story, lay the flat where Joseph lived. Above, the roof, its asphalt tundra, bore a chaos of lumps, seams, jutting pipes, crooking vents, a steel-caged skylight screening the well of a stair, a tinny casement of a trap door capping the summit of a rusted ladder sprung inside.
Summer, Joseph's dad sat that grey brick chimney. He could spy Will Penn's bronze hat greening over City Hall, where dwelt the one true record of Joseph's entering the universe.
The coal man knew the underneath, the subterrane of salamanders. There, in the haven of her belly, the brown stone beast wombed an iron monster. It devoured carbon rocks, metabolized them into fire. The coal man fed his bounty down a telescoping straw, and the monster swallowed, roared, and spewed-out steam through the mother's arteries, into her louvered organs.
Thanksgiving passed unnoticed as always, like yuletides gone. But on the twelfth day before Christmas, Joseph's mother, Nän, his sister, Magdalènya, and Tillie, his paternal aunt, gathered in the kitchen space to cheer an early anniversary of Joseph's birth.
The three sat the tips of a perfect triangle, its lines pressing the circle of the table's edge. Twelve legs encountered old oak slats collected into floor. The maple legs (four, baring) surrounded Joseph, like ancient monuments eroding in a waste. He could peer through gaps and find his mother's knees, and his sister's. But Aunt Tillie had given him some modeling clay — synthetic. And, forgetting — as one would a fish long garbaged — forgetting the kiss that introduced the tribute, he absorbed his whole attention in the fake mud.
The stuff came cast in cubes wrapped in cellophane. Each presented special color — lichen, ochre, ruby, moss, tints of setting suns, several tones of Europe's flesh, an ocean of sapphire melting......
Nän and Tillie laughed and prattled like noises of working shores. Lènya — Joseph called his sister so — Lènya pondered the whirs of the amphibious plane, its destination. The sum sound ranged plangent. But like a fraud of sea rushing from a shell cupped upon a foreign ear, the clamor only whisked Joseph, with feather sense, fleeting with the ticks and hisses of the radiator.
One could fix the radiator geometrically, by picturing a line from the crestpoint of Tillie's brow through the table's horizontal plane, into Joseph's cranium, its pure center, then directly to the mid of its dorsal rim (the apogee) and level-south into a brilliant air, from tight abreast Nän's hip due forward long as Lènya's body. But, in Joseph's awareness, the whole room's existence rendered not a hundredth of the force his breath spoke snuffing the two candles stuck in the cake now pruned to a wedge and languoring atop the table, above him.
The radiator bore a valve that regulated inner pressure, like kidneys of beasts. That moment — the climax of a rumbling up the common stair and through the outer hall — the valve banished a blow dazzling as locomotives’. Just then, as if a crazed wave bursting a levee, Joseph's father, Vendl, crashed in.
The door whipped just past Lènya's chair, crashed the party wall. Vendl staggered fore, two strange women stumbling behind. His madness — its energies, their currents — swept the room, like prison searchlights, moray eels, tentacles of giant octopodes, all weaving, thrashing. As if prey of mantis, before her blink could register the strange women's shapes, Lènya felt her body snatched up stiff and buglike in Vendl’s mitt, which could straighten horseshoes, or snap a mason's wrist, as if clicking castanets.
Vendl's face writhed, fevered — a reflection snarling in a torrent stream. His veins readied for stroke — each raveling worm ripe to fracture its chrysalis.
As if a dozer shunting trash, Vendl shoved some money into Lènya's seized hand, dropped her, dazed, to attention.
His voice bloomed, lava pouring — “Ghit me more beer, brat!” — then napalm flaring — “An' don't come back widh-out-it.”
His timbre clenched into grind-wheels grating, Panzers trampling coal: “Or I'll gih yih the real beatin' yih never had.”
Lead supplanted Lènya's skeleton. She numbed; and her mind froze, a fossil cast in amber.
Vendl's arm arced around, rammed the shallow of her back. She jolted into sense through the void that had housed the door, its knob embedded in plaster, trapped in lathing near the brick and weeping mortar of the fire wall.
Lènya clambered down the stair, her eyes a skull's, her lips trembling after words lost in sargasso, her hands' rays the filaments of bulb-lights shattering. Vendl grabbed Nän's hair, slammed her to the floor, like a ham on a string, a thumb's breadth from Joseph's face, divorced into bewilderment, a plummet of eggs — fragments, nebulæ, quaking.
Lènya opened the master door, stepped into a clear of darkness, her breath frosting instants before her, like fog expanding on frozen gas. The cold, the lush of its calm, the bright of its silence, the pure cold, the night, the bare of night, the stark of its freedom — all felt warm, a mother's embrace, the full of its protection.
From the outer landing, of granite toned like mourning doves, she lowered her body just one plane, then another, then collapsed, a fallen doe, on the final step, its marble a spume become ice, deep rose flecks spangling its sallow — acid hail riddling a glacier of flesh. Summers, she sat that wide banquette with Nän and Joseph, Joseph sipping from Nän's great breasts. Now, within the shadows of opposing structures, against the walnut rock that formed the plunge of balustrades that harbored her, she awaited to ascend the tablet stone that would transfigure her to Body-of-Christ.
Always when she watched Nän suckle Joseph, she wished she had breasts. The moment Joseph left Nän's womb, Lènya flew the chamber of second grade and skipped into the schoolyard, to jump rope, her apprehension unaware of Joseph's advent. She never owned dolls. When Nän weaned Joseph, a season after she baked his first birthday cake, Lènya became Joseph’s mother — early mornings, weekends, evenings after school, while Nän tended house for the Cohens — till he could play alone enough to join Nän where she worked.
Lènya stared at the frost murmuring its spread upon a window of the car parked empty before her. Her sight toured the patterns of crystal, mad figures leafed and powdered on shrill and black of glass, their wild’s arrays miniature galaxies sparkling in moonlight drenching her vision's west. Among the shadows of opposing structures, below the walnut rock that formed the lintel of the door, between descending balustrades, there — like fat mazed with blood and petrified — the final step, its marble, lay smoothed and cupped beneath her, like a whetstone worn by butchers' knives.
Her memory saw Joseph's first birthday cake — chocolate, topped with sweet meringue, specked with minced cured cherries. On the blue car's window, frost became sugardust. She imagined Nän baked her a birthday cake, when yet she fed from Nän's breast. Her throat muttered — a slain goat groping for serenity. Her mouth drooled as if a hard gash burned with salt.
She licked her lips, wrapped her arms around her chest, her scant bulk mantled only by the airy frock she wore to celebrate, this second occasion, her brother's nativity. The night's deep cold felt parched, brittle, the floor of winter of a Mongol plain.
Her breath froze into dust, and she knew the window's frost, its embroidery, stood a hoar trace of what gone body turned its visage to the glass and issued into other time and space. The remnant hovered, still, an astral relic, like a thumbprint, lifted with transparency, yet left where it lay. Mr. Pon, her teacher, showed her class a strange museum. She recalled a slab of mud metamorphosed into rock that bore impressions of primordial crabs and jellyfish, ghosts transfigured into voids of intricate hollows.
As traffic spoke life in her canyon, a fresh peace blared plague. The oblong glows vanished from the blocks that lined the arroyo, the vanishings a pattern of impervious code, scripts contrived for robot pianos, their workings tombed afar in nameless lands.
Her eyes sealed. Her countenance bowed toward absent earth. Her palms shielded her ears. Then, sleek, raven, like a snow-owl's call, a wilderness assailed her milieu's geometry, ravaged its angles, besieged its squares.
Where could she find beer? How could she buy any?
With tranquility of somnambulists — transfixed by inner force she shadowed with divining-rods some squandering twilight lost — Lènya raised her body, dragged it up two planes into the vestibule, its coppered walls impressed with warts aligned into flowers. Her hands closed the great oak door, and she transported her anatomy down into the stone beast's belly, down to greet the iron monster, its blood-teeth rabid, flashing.
Near the furnace, by the coal bin, a broom leaned against a wall scarred and wrinkled as a man who'd fended torment through a century. At the far side, in a niche imprisoned by steam pipes swaddled in asbestos, the janitor stowed a cardboard box. She freed and dismantled it, piled its matter where she swept beside the boiler, curled her body on the stiff pallet, her fingers bleeding in the shelter of her thighs and on the dun of her bed.
She knew Nän would give Vendl good fight — Nän the peasant scion of Magyar hordes that terrored Europe. If she, Lènya, returned, that night, no beer in hand, Vendl's fists would air his rage on her flesh. She would evade him now and till his drunk's awareness mislaid the evening in some nether reach of his unconscious. She huddled deeper in herself, within the boiler's warmth, her breath counting heartbeats, her sense praying sleep.
Her eyes began to fibrillate — like strobe lights.
Vendl tore her to his bed (Nän gone, Joseph dreaming). He undressed her, made her disrobe him, fondle his man's organ. “See how it rises. Look! How it rises!”
He put his member in her mouth. She choked.
He slapped her, pressed her shoulders down, locked her mouth. With his knees, he spread her legs. Her eyes teared, but she couldn't cry or scream. He rammed himself into her.
Done, he beat her. “If yeh rat to yer mother” — he whispered, a furnace steaming to vent — “I'll show 'er the bruises I gave yeh, an' tell 'er yer makin' it up, 'cause I punished yeh, an' yeh wanna ghit even.”
Her dream changed — as if by mercy, the portly lord of it. August's coarse growth, its torpored heat, relented backward into spring's defected promise — somewhere tender green.
A man appeared on Diamond Street. His hat's brim flopped and vaulted as he strode, his black hair shooting from under. His jaw bristled a nascence of greying beard. His hands, gnarled, cunning, extruded from his jacket’s sleeves, like wolf eels peeking out from hollows. Beneath his sailor's garb, his flesh massed boulderish, like the old brown stones that formed the tenement.
He led a pony just by walking before it — no rein. Its rope-halter bore no bit: A hackamore, some call it. The little horse's fur looked chocolate, its mane and tail lush cream flowing.
“Pony rides! Pony rides. Who'll take a pony ride?”
Lènya ran to get the pennies she saved in a crock Nän trashed for its rifts. She found just 24. Still she had to try.
She lifted Joseph to the seat of a chair, then the top of the table. He mounted her, his legs straddling her neck. She collected her pennies in two hands. Joseph rode her four storeys down the stair, out the coppered vestibule, past the granite landing, down between the sculptured balustrades, across the rose and buttered beige of marble step — to the sidewalk, its pebbled grey cracking.
“Oh Mister. Mister. Can Joseph have a ride? I have all these pennies.” She opened her hands into his.
“I know you want another penny. But it's only one penny. And no one else wants a ride. You'd make my brother so happy. Please, Mister. Please!”
The man put his hat on Joseph. Its brim sat Joseph's shoulder. His big brown eyes saw hardly out under. Like a catapult, the man hoist Joseph to the pony's back and handed Lènya the reins dangling from the halter.
Dawn passed. The fourth grade bell summoned. Her dream retreated, a wearied ratchet cranking it into space. Through a glass pane, squat, beside the coal chute, in and downward reached a bar of light, its spread tip perching warm on her face, painting her eyes the hues of junipers, trees of her unknown.
“The bell!” She raced to groom herself, change her garments, pluck her coat from its roost, acquit herself to her school desk, before the bell tolled twice.
Surely a bus was porting Vendl to work. But would Nän punish her? She couldn't spare delay. “Please, mother, be gone, with Joseph.”
* * *
“Ghit me more beer, brat! *** Or I'll show yih the real beatin'....” Lènya clambered down the stair.
Screaming so volcanically his words eluded apprehension, Vendl grabbed Nän's hair, slung her to the floor, like a ham on a string, a hand's breadth from Joseph's face, a puzzle, shaping. Nän's glass sharded toward the door. Her body blared a thud that jarred the whole flat. Her breath gushed, as if air bursting a gashed tire. She gasped, like pierced vacuum, and shrieked like Bedouin wives when their men charge to battle — her tongue trilling shrill, her wail fiercer than bagpipes’ screeching through fog into war.
The bedlam stormed among the ticks and hisses of the radiator — which one could locate with a surgery: Slice one keen line straight along the thread of Tillie's skull. Cut sharply to the edge of the table. Razor twenty inches front and perpendicular the forward wall. Drill groundward through the table's plane, into Joseph's cranium. Puncture to his mind's pure center. Scalpel squarely to the break below the bone-rim, the climax of his spine. Lance dead south, level, into blazing space, two times far as Lènya's measure could extend.
Aunt Tillie (constructed like a part-crushed bowling pin and needing gauge by scale befitting yearling yaks) — Tillie threw her body off her chair and tight against Joseph. She huddled him against the worn oak boards — a walrus warming pups on a wharf.
Nän's hand hooked Vendl's ankle. She shot her fist into the soft of his knee. Like shark's, her teeth stabbed his calf, ripped its flesh. Blood oozed from him, drained into her mouth, between her teeth, past the corners of her lips, down across her jaw.
The shock felled Vendl. Nän sprang on him, dug her fingers in his eyes.
He pulled his head away before she blinded him. His fingers clasped her throat — like anacondas.
Hard farming cast Nän's neck a panther's. Its renitence marshaled time for her to crush the organs of his seed. He loosed her, his arms flailing — mitts like paws, pose a bear's, its chest gulping blasts of magnum. His roar fit the beast he'd become.
Nän slammed his body on the radiator, crashed his head into its silvered iron, kicked his gut. He lay limp, breathing. She dragged him to their room, dumped him on their bed, shrouded him with quilt, quit the chamber, lightless, shut its door, as if setting a land-mine.
The two strange women laughed, as at a stand-up comic only they perceived. The bleached blond walloped the other's shoulder. They stumbled out, crows waltzing.
Tillie cradled Joseph to his crib, his fake clay left deranged beneath the table. She hummed — Yiddish melodies: lemon, salt, honey. He began sleeping. As if stuffing a trunk another's hands had gorged, Tillie jammed her body into Lènya's berth.
Nän's sense rejoined the human apperception. She opened a window, called for Lènya. Only silence replied. Her vision combed all it could, but found no shape of her daughter. For an atom of time, she set to scour the streets. But she could miss her child with every turn. She would stand watch home.
She wrapped herself in winter coat, adjourned to the parlor, planted her body in the only armchair, angled toward the master door, which she'd rescued from impalement and returned to its frame. But in the gap of violet charred into black before first ash of dawn, her vigil resigned into slumber.
Soon, outside, the junkman's horse clomped hollow music, sixteenth notes and double-dotted quarters. The pattern played ostinato under clatters of glass — bottles full and white or emptied grey, marshaled in the steel grate hampers milkmen toted door to door.
Nän jolted conscious — as a tub-cart lurches when a spooked mule rips it from inertia. She heard rasping like granite augering brass. It raided her forest of dream, burned it out to stark of waking verity.
Vendl stood at the ice-box, his face warping, trenched like African masks, his bearing a panicked ape's. “Where's my lunch, damn-it? Why ain’t yeh packed it? I'll be late! I gotta work t' support yer brats. I need food. Ghit it! Now! An’ clean this mess! I'm yer husband!”
Nän scanned the parlor and kitchen, left her chair, found Tillie in Lènya's bunk, looked in the bath. Lènya appeared nowhere. Nän couldn't tarry Vendl. He might discover Lènya’s absence, recall the night before.
She quick-stepped to the scored pine counter separating ice-box and stove, their porcelain chipped, structures rusting. She carved some chicken; sandwiched it (with lettuce, onion, mustard, salt) between pumpernickel slices; wrapped the product; couched it in a lunch-tin; added apple, pint of milk. “Sorry, Vendl. I vwasn't vwake.”
He snatched the box — his maw sneering, his teeth gnashing-out chaos that rips livers from kills. He slammed the door, trundled away. His snarls shrank like ice boiling. His being blurred to a smudge fleeing horizon.
Nän tucked the bread in an enamel canister, shut the onion in a jar, stowed it in the ice-box with the mustard, lettuce, and fowl.
A roach climbed the canister’s side, raced across its lid. The creature seemed elegant, benign, deserving grace. Nän compared its fine limbs with her wide hands and visible reaches of her arms, the protrusive gnarls of her knuckles, the knobs of bone near-jutting from the outer corners of her wrists. On the crisp wrap of the roach's legs, tiny thorns perfected the inevitable, the near-eternal, an envy of brain and sight.
Nän's eyes, their azure, drew darkness. On hide stretched tough around her sinew and bone, wrist to hand, a faint, thin fleece performed a joke — like decadence, anemia.
Nän gathered the dishes from the night (two glass mugs, four jelly jars, seven dime-store plates, a medley of counterfeit silver); slithered them into a rubbery pan; ordered the green spruce chairs around the faux oak table, among its maple legs; retrieved a cracked serving dish, a cake-wedge shriveled on it. Her hand grabbed a crooked fork, nudged the dead pastry till it slid into the melee of crumpled cans and papers visiting the scuttle dented beneath the sink. The serving dish dropped in after. She watched it sunder — then quit for the bath.
Her shoes squeaked march-time across the parlor floor, its linoleum (cracked, gouged) mimicking a Chinese rug. She headed for the rag-mat flung before the sofa (its burgundy faded, mohair frayed). As she walked the mat, the squeaking halved to up-beats, as if her right leg shattered and a fat peg supplanted it.
The light, its colors, merged with her skin and hair, partitioned her body at its hips. Past the dull plum chair (its stuffing troughed, its edges tattered), mock-parchment window-shades hung semi-drawn. Sun shone near-level with the parlor. Joseph cried.
Nän had no choice but work. She washed, dressed (starched, white), bundled Joseph, entreated Tillie to wait for Lènya, to call the school and police. Tillie (loath to pry her carcass from bed) — Tillie rubbed her eyes. Like a crude-oil pump bobbing in autumn wheat, her head nodded “yes” some lavish count of times, among the ruffs of haggard linen armoring her neck against the blanket's bite.
* * *
The trolley rolled as if a great ship, its sprung wheels throwing spheric whirs, droning coos purring in the cave beneath the cabin floor and seeping above, where Nän held Joseph close on her thighs. The sound and feel transported Joseph into orchid bliss like ecstasy rising from massage.
He remembered — in his mouth, skin, breath, belly — old other rides, when still Nän suckled him (as when they journeyed to Tillie's home). He nestled his head amidst Nän's great breasts, pressed his palms to the pliant globes, closed his eyes, rounded his lips expecting milk. Nän pushed his head away, her whole face echoing the hard pink native to her cheeks. “You're too beeg for dzat Zhoseph!”
Next September, Joseph would enter kindergarten. But still he wet his bed.
Nän craved to believe his bladder the culprit. She took him to a physician, Dr. E, and told her hope. She, herself, unzipped Joseph's fly, presented his penis. E forced a catheter far inside, drew urine. Nän caught Joseph's penis in the zipper as she shut his fly. He shrieked, a snared beast — many searing expirations.
E found nothing wrong. Nän took Joseph to a specialist, then another two — each occasion repeating her hope and exactly the same behavior. All denied Joseph bodily defect.
Still, often, Joseph yellowed his sheets. When he did, Nän “beat” him, if Vendl didn't. Always she hung the wet linen from Joseph's window, front of the tenement, over Diamond Street.
The trolley reached the cobbled lanes of Germantown, entered Chestnut Hill, passed the antique homes and charming shops of many casts and colors. Joseph smiled, pointed, bounced, sounded little puckered noises chimps and dog-kinds speak.
At the end of the line, a fat bus waited. Joseph loved its creamy lemon and olive green, the aroma of its diesel fumes, its gurgled rumblings, the animal brown and smell of its leather seats. He licked his lips. The scene imparted to his memory the fond sensations of his favorite treats — braised cabbage, chopped liver, kasha, garlic pickles, chocolate ice cream.......
The bus halted in the belly of a whorled descent of thin black road shaded by plumes of lumbering maples. Nän took Joseph's hand, led him up the gravel of the driveway to the seven-gabled mansion hulking at the top of the hill — Dr. Cohen's house, its six turrets surmounting all near trees.
It stood centered on a vast terrain regaled with sculptured hedges, gardens opulent as smart, and landscaped arbors — chestnut, cedar, walnut, beech, hemlock, maple, locust, ash, poplar, spruce...... At the iron gate, a tamarack guarded, its trunk an obelisk challenging heaven, its cortex mottled by armor hued for other worlds. Around a pond adorned with purple blooms and rocks of myriad colors, sycamores ranged their bodies — Hindu dancers frozen in trance.
Granite (rude-chunked, martial-toned) and hoary timbers (maple, walnut, oak) formed the mansion's structure. Slate sheeted its roofs, trimmed and guttered with bronze and tin.
Joseph strode the flagstone walk, climbed the marble stair, entered past the carved elm door looming at the inner verge of the portico. He felt transported to the Norman castle painted in his picture-book whose captions he’d striven, vainly, to read.
Each time Joseph sojourned there, Nän, the Cohens’ vassal, cooped him in the “dungeon” (Joseph’s term). Sometimes she immured him hours between visits, which might burgeon into searches of the house or stretch to rapid meals downed in a corner of the kitchen.
But Joseph imagined his dungeon a cell set for ransomed nobles, or rival kings. It bore desk, chest, dresser, bed — all mahogany, each assembled just with dowels. Flowered paper dressed three walls. The fourth — the outer (thicker than Joseph's arm could reach) — was clothed with canvas dyed to match the roses of the paper's motif. Its middle suffered notching by an alcove beveled to a window thrice Joseph's height.
Joseph counted trees of seeming-countless species arboretumed there. Robins, sparrows, finches, crows, bluejays, starlings, ravens, geese......performed prolation canons against waves of stalks and branches, whistlings of stems and leaves, percussions of rain, streaks of sun and cloud, all muting, swelling, surging, shifting — among lumens bent for moon.
Mostly Joseph furnished his own company. At Diamond Street, Lènya attended him much his waking time: he couldn't find playmates, even amuse himself alone outside — amidst traffic of grown-ups and motored beasts.
In his room, above Diamond Street, tarnished paper cracked and peeled from plastered walls. Leaks blotched the ceiling — where the sole lamp, a milky bowl, clung by blatant screws. Blue paint tried to mask the plywood framing Joseph's bunk. Lènya's, wider than a cot, exposed its yellow pine and scrunched so near Joseph's the kids had to squeeze sideways between.
One window, unscreened, faced southward over Diamond Street. Nän hung Joseph's flagrant sheets from its ledge. She fixed them to the sill with the base of the frame that held the bottom pane. They dangled like signals, white and amber, down the outer surface of the brownstone wall.
That next afternoon, Joseph dreamed himself to sleep in the Cohens' dungeon. When Nän came to fetch him dinnertime, she found him wetting the linen she washed just sunrise before.
She couldn't suspend the evidence from the window there; the Cohens might ban Joseph. So she “beat” him more than when he sinned at home. She commanded he not scream or cry: the Cohens would fire her; she'd “beat” him again, worse. Joseph crushed his pillow on his face.
Nän felt satisfied. She lifted the pillow, wiped Joseph's eyes, hugged him, combed his hair, let him explore the grounds — alone.
Joseph knelt at the pond, where a brook fed. His vision reveled in primeval greens of lapping currents, deep and high — Talmudic ghosts rocking an obeisance of bendless logics, theorems fleeing ground and root. His sight slipped every mooring, liquid like glitters of carp, so many sequins sleeking their riddles through the warm swirls bubbling with wonder at each frog's leap.
From the bed, beneath mystic flows lavishing a flora shy and tender as belly-fur of new-whelped wolves, the dark, its cool, the feral darkness, reached above to pet him into swoon. He accounted the sycamores sheltering the pebbled shore. Their boughs seemed women's limbs, smooth, deft, graceful, alluring, some that might engulf him like his mother's, their lusts hidden. But in the great, gnarled trunks — writhing under ancient winds and older strugglings for sun — he beheld a legion of hard fathers. He would have wailed (in fear, for joy), if none but wordless brutes could hear.
* * *
“Which stretches farther, rubber or skin? Answer: Moses tied his ass to a tree and walked fifty miles.”
Joseph would learn that joke in grammar school. He doubted the Bible counted mileage. But his skin had empirical sense of elastic.
Nän “beat” Joseph a special way. She grappled a portion of flesh (chest, back), hoisted it an inch from bone, twisted it — leashed him tight. Then, in unwagerable pattern, she executed three maneuvers: (1) Slapped his face. (2) Pounded some ample segment of his body with the bottom of her fist. (3) Dug clenched knuckles in his cheek, then kidney, then ribs — gyred her instrument clockwise and back, grinding past right angles each direction. She growled, like quartz crushing under tungsten steel — her mouth grinning, teeth vised.
* * *
Next Friday, Good Friday, Nän took Joseph to another specialist — Dr. F. Mahogany wainscot decked F's office. He hunched behind a table of ebony and teak parquets. A coarse tweed jacket jutted drab from under his eburnean coat.
Around F’s head strapped a leather band. The band wore a silver disc of delicate concavity, a hole at its middle. Joseph saw such crown-wear on others of F's kind. But never did he witness any give it use — unless enigma's seduction. Did it emblem status or glory — like feather headdress of Pawnee chiefs?
The light — its dim, its ashen peach, its matte tangerine — drank all shadows, and sweat them, lavishly, as vaults of haze flushed by smoke exuding from the pipe F's mouth sucked. Joseph fancied the aroma — as he had the scents breathed from buses that hauled him to the Cohen estate.
F's whole language — set, word, rhythm, tone, gesture, bearing, glare — foretold another urethral probe. Like a supplicant consigned to resignation, Joseph opened his fly. Nän slapped him. She would present his penis to the test.
F prescribed sulfa. But he didn't explain why microbes would make Joseph wet his bed.
Joseph dared not tell the dream that happened always just before he felt warm wet slink into clammy chill: he left his bed (of dream) for a toilet (of reverie), and, reaching it, eased taut press, felt soothed, as if suckling Nän’s breast and swooning. If Vendl knew, he would beat Joseph raw, for yielding to sloth. And Nän?
Seasons passed. Still Joseph awakened dry barely half his mornings.
Sulfa sapped Nän’s income, invited yeast to swarm the crooks of Joseph’s lips, indwell his excreting organs. Nän stopped buying it, ceased beating Joseph when he soiled his bed, even hid soilings from Vendl.
Soon Joseph kept his linens dry. And he subtracted incontinence from his wending list of floggables.
* * *
Till Joseph reached second grade — when he started cooking for himself — always Nän made food for him — when Lènya didn't. Nän loved eastern Europe's dishes (like baked cabbage stuffed with kasha, garlic, onion, paprika, and chicken-fat) — and Yiddish food, despite she was Magyar and Orthodox Catholic.
Joseph liked Nän's fare, except lima beans, which she boiled to the texture of putrefied head-cheese enveloped in rotting intestine. The first time Joseph tried to eat Nän's limas (mounded on his plate), he vomited his inaugural taste. It showered Lènya, splattered her plate, sprayed the whole table. Nän slammed Joseph’s face. “Don't vwaste food!”
Nän took a soup spoon, scooped a pile of limas, forced them into Joseph's mouth, her hand clasping his head above the nape of his neck. He tried to eat them, his lips and mouth smarting from the spoon. He chewed fast, a dozen times, swallowed, then choked, ran to the bathroom, puked.
Nän followed, slapped his ear as he knelt, head drooped, at opening of toilet. She grabbed the flesh of his shoulder, twisted it tight, yanked him up, dragged him back to table, shoved another bean-pile in his mouth, shut it till he swallowed, gyred her fist into his chest. “Now you eat all dzem — not vwaste good food. People starve een my countrly — een vworld.”
Joseph's stomach fulminated. But fright vanquished spasm, kept the limas down. Next time, though, he attended dinner with a plan — and hanky in pocket.
He swallowed three limas, then asked to listen to “The Shadow.” Vendl — out drinking then — Vendl kept a radio on the table, but let no one use it. Always Joseph struggled finding stations with the parlor’s big, wood squawkbox. Always his tuning murdered time and served up ragged blurts and scratchy noise that would wear Nän's patience and (worse to Nän) cut into his eating. Nän marched quickly to the fir-shelled contraption, tall as Lènya. She flipped a switch, turned two knobs, zeroed in.
While Nän faced away, Joseph retrieved his hanky, charged it with beans, wrapped it round them, pocketed the bundle. When Nän returned, he forced the rest down his gullet, waited for Nän to wash dishes, slipped to the bath, puked what he could, popped the bundle from his pocket, flushed the limas with his vomit, rinsed and wrung the hanky, stashed it with the laundry crammed into the hamper adjoining the tub.
But Joseph couldn't cast enough tricks. Nän caught him hiding beans. She grabbed his flesh, hoisted and twisted it, slapped his temple, slammed a fist to his chest, jammed its knuckles in the troughs dividing ribs, ratcheted her mitt across his chest’s bones and hollows, her voice growling, mouth grinning, teeth vised. “Vwait I tell yourl fahder!”
There, on the tired oak slats lined beneath the table, Joseph sat crying so wildly he hiccupped. Nän turned to Lènya, pounded over to her, whacked her face with open hand. Lènya toppled from her chair. She knew Joseph was trashing “goood foood” — and didn't rat.
Lènya propped her body into sitting. Nän slapped her again, and more. Lènya's balance couldn't stand the blows. She lay, weeping, tucked to herself, as if unborn. Nän’s fist never hit Lènya, never twisted her flesh.
Joseph stood, ran from the kitchen. Nän scraped a knife from the table, flipped it at Joseph. The knife’s blade hit the blade of his shoulder.
Up the stairs stumbled Vendl, his gait a staggered ragtime. His footsteps drummed like dump-trucks trudging ‘cross eight-by-fours of oak-plank bridges.
He wore a leather jacket (frayed, brown, cracked) and “porkpie” hat (slate, felt, squat like slice of stovepipe, brim arched cockeyed down). He might have bought his togs from a gangsters' haberdasher.
His forehead angled forward to wide, sharp brow that overhung (like a balcony) his eyes, stark, jet. His hair blared cool sable, midnight bright at sea. From its long waves, terse curls feathered, like epigrams, on his ears, flamboyant as Buddha's.
His nose (sharp, protracted, peaked) cut keenly fore, then back up under, tip to base. It looked a project of a mason battered dead, his carving undone.
A cleft split his chin — square-bottomed, but (as if suspended, not constituent) tethered feebly to his jaw. His lips seemed always stretched — even when he lazed, sleeping — as if born tensile, of breadth half wider than appeared. From nose to lips the spread ranged greater than the span dividing his eyes.
His posture hung like Neanderthals’ — but stronger, and more when he was drunk (all fear, all constraint, then, vanished). Like great apes’, his legs — thick, corded, weirdly broad at calf — his legs rarely quite straightened; and fate did not proportion them to pretty scale against his upper limbs, gangly, like orangutans' (sinews cable steel, forearm longer than reach of elbow to socket). His trunk (like gorillas') measured deep as wide, greatest at bottom ribs — its muscles long, stretched, sprung, arched, nowhere bulked or rounded.
Vendl looked simian — arboreal. Times past, he painted houses, laid roofs, glazed tall buildings cast on skeletons he set, danced on their bones, like a lemur larking in trees.
Joseph heard a round stagger heavying near. He imagined himself a rodent darting into corners, under beds, squeezing into gaps of woodwork, climbing to a cupboard's summit, wriggling under closet floors...... His heart thundered toward fibrillation. He craved to scream, for help, from strangers walking Diamond Street, from Tillie (somewhere unknown) from God, the coal man, the devil. But he paced, only paced — silent — as if resolute.
Vendl rode the door when it opened. His tilt straightened when it hit the wall. “Where's my supper?”
Nän guided Vendl to the table, sat him on a chair. She massed some brisket — stewed — in a bowl, piled kasha on a plate with limas, turnip, beet, cabbage, rye bread (buttered rich).
Vendl wiped his dish with his bread. Nän told him Joseph's trick. Vendl rose — a well's depths exploding. He slapped his chair to the floor, stomped toward Joseph's room. His child lay shivering under blankets.
“Take my strap off, brat! I'll teach yeh t' respect food! I'll teach yeh not the waste th’ money it costs — an' my hard work t'ghit it!”
Joseph uncovered, drew his body to the edge of the bed, unbuckled Vendl's belt, eased it from the loops restraining it. He shook handing the implement to Vendl, but stood, turned, dropped his knickers, stripped his shirt, knelt bedside, bent over.
Vendl snatched the buckle, wrapped some strap around his wrist, gripped a further portion, whipped the rest to Joseph's back. Lènya leaned on the arch bounding kitchen from parlor — exit beckoning. She winced at each crack, lightning on Joseph's flesh. She wept — Joseph screaming.
Joseph's history caldroned a glut of corresponding fates — like Vendl’s beating him for resisting another enema or not taking cod liver oil. “How many beans didgeh trash? Tell me! Yeh ghit one lash fer each. Howdjeh like that, brat? An' that, an' that, an' that, an' that......? Maybe now yeh'll eat what yeh're told — an' like it.”
Vendl’s arm slacked, like a Percheron run to ground. His eyes flicked shut. His drunk felled him, soft, against the window wall. He sank to the painted floor. The street lamps' meek incandescence distilled on his face. His breath slowed, fuzzing to snores, his mouth drooling. Joseph tuned the bill of floggables: bed-wetting subtracted; lima-dodging added on.
* * *
Easter neared. Morning stretched and yawned. Somewhere daffodil and crocus opened to a sweet sun stroking their petals. Above, between russet walls of city canyon, a chary blue spread heavenward, forever.
Lènya held Joseph on her lap, the two stationed on the marble of the wide banquette, its faint concavity — its rose specks ardent in its pale spread between hennas of graven balustrades. In the pitch-filled breach that cleaved sidewalk from curb, they saw a frail green of dandelion, shivering, alone, in first April breeze.
In her hip pocket, Lènya harbored fifty cents, the sum of pennies she saved — by skipping milk at school — since Joseph's second birthday. The day before, she asked a grocer to change her cache to one big silver coin.
Always, Saturdays, the man brought the pony. She would wait with Joseph — even past noon, though she feared she'd miss the week's one airing of “Let's Pretend.”
Trucks became infrequent. Sun pressed high, far from the river — bore down near plumb, like the single light of their room. From round the corner he appeared. His hat's brim bucked and buckled as he strode, his black hair shooting from under. His jaw bristled a nascence of greying beard. His hands — gnarled, blunt — extruded from their sleeves like badgers guarding. His sailor's garments sketched a human fort beneath — Norman, granite.
A pony followed just behind, its nostrils snorting near the old man's hip, its reins' ends tucked beneath its saddle. It wore a rope halter, no bit — a hackamore, the knowing called it. The old man's fingers made the halter — of salvage line and seaman's knots. The little horse seemed molded from chocolate, like its saddle (army, pre-war, surplus) — except its mane and tail, cream flowing.
“Pony rides! Pony rides! Two bits around the block.” He sang his lure on two notes, a minor third apart — as if chanting a child's invocation. “Pony rides! ......”
Joseph's body proved the pony man's — and Vendl's and Nän's, their peasant heritage — if exceptions prove rules. Even Lènya would mature a more imposing specimen. But the matter misleads — as Joseph's modest embouchure disguised a mouth that would beat a high school dare to swallow a four-inch pie in one bite.
Joseph's face felt soft to pity's vision. But sculptors would admire its cubist shapes — blocked rounds, cupped angles, curved squares......defying norms of perspective — except his hair, hued and waved like the pony's mane, yet textured like a burro's winter coat.
His face befit a man of years — forehead’s broad pitch steep as roofs of gothic France, temples sheer wide cliffs, cheekbones Asian, Magyar. His eyes, deep umber, shone darkness — darker than the brownstone of his tenement, darker than the walnut rock that formed lintel of its door, darker than the shadows of its balustrades — huge dark of Christ's wisdom: char of torment, coal of endurance, logic of infinite doubt.
Lènya lifted Joseph from her lap, stood with him, kissed his head. “Mister! Mister!” Her arms flailed the air, and she bounced like a buggy. “Can Joseph ride?”
She presented the man her half dollar. He catapulted Joseph to the saddle. Lènya led around the block. The man strolled behind. Joseph pet the pony's neck, laughed so open his mouth hurt.
When they returned twice to their tenement, the man whistled, and the pony stopped, Lènya still clutching its halter but nuzzling her nose meekly at his brow. Always the pony slumped, its head surrendering low.
Suddenly, like conception, a rent mast hurling toward sea, Lènya stared into the pony's eye. As if seized to the heavens the instant of her vessel's breach, she knew the pony's tragedy: it was hers. She wept, and her lips brushed the pony’s face, lighted on the wisps of hair that edged its ear. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
A transport plane deranged the atmosphere, its noise whorling, a barbed electric, a ravel snapped, the steel rasping from Vendl's rage. Lènya wondered what adventures it would haul its cargo to become — elsewheres of imagination.
The man skimmed Joseph from the saddle — the way hunger slithers seals from boulders into surf. Joseph felt every nerve rush against the leather's curve, as if the last time Nän would pet him, ever.
Lènya captured Joseph's hand, led him over pebbled grey, and butterscotch and cherried marble, and up bespeckled treads, between ascending balustrades, and past the oaken door. Beyond the vestibule (flowers warting from copper greening), they galloped wooden stairs (Joseph barely touching any), sprinted through the hall (its floor pine, gummed, scored, its walls’ plaster sallow, failing, its dank and violet falling, and moss sense spreading, in fade of light, beneath a tin cap blasting every creak and whisper) — and Joseph a centipede.
Lènya squirted in, scurried to the table. She'd never used the little radio — though she adored its pearled sienna, its bakelite gloss, its jumble of vaults, its bastard art deco.
She tried (as if a bomb-trigger) the left-most knob, stenciled like a silver-dollar, edge ridged round. The ridges gripped her thumb’s flesh. The sense felt lush, and she rubbed a fingertip around the edge.
The knob resisted. Its pressure reached the apex of a keen divide, then yielded, with stifled click, and flipped, blaring, into new dimension, the realm a pinwheel-spring attains when it slips its prison and you can't force it back inside.
As if an instrument of quills, a quick voice scratched out spiels of prickly cadence with piercing facts — battles, numbers wounded, counts of dead...... She turned the center knob, in tempo of dirge, her touch a safe-cracker's. Seconds ticked through spurts of noise, thrashes of babel. Then, like the snap of rending, magic — “Let's Pretend.”
She eased the knob immeasurably back, then forward — once, twice, even four times more, as always Vendl did — till she found the point of balance. She installed herself in the nearest chair, tilted toward the program, widened her grey beryl eyes. Joseph climbed to her lap, wriggled his head in the trough that merged her throat and shoulder, till his cheek and temple perched just right.
The theme-tune slowed to final close. Nän summoned Lènya to her duty at the stove. Vendl arrived just half drunk, smiling. “Come'ere, Joseph.”
Joseph crept to the door, where Vendl stood, arms extended. His body shot up skyward, swirled in air above his father's head, swooped elliptic waves, a hawk searching, a kite. But he couldn't laugh, for fear of crying.
“Let's go listen tih-th’ news, m’ boy. I'll fly yeh tih-th’ table.”
The radio spit into action — but “Peter and the Wolf,” not war reports of Ed Murrow. “What's this? Who touched my radio? Ghit over here Magdalènya. Nän! C’m'ere. Now! I want the truth! Er I'll punish all-uh-yehz.”
Lènya studied her shoes, scuffed, discolored, pinching her feet. Nän's gaze raked her children, one, then the other, with rhythm of a mercury pendulum.
Chin pressed toward chest, caving, Joseph scanned the down-curved seams of his sister's eyes, the crooks of her bearing, her lips vaulting like slivered moons careened. Like voices tumbling into shattering sound, her terror’s arcs, their earthward turns, plunged her into swells fainting, crescendoing down. Before he could design, even fathom, his impulse, Joseph stood and slid his ribs along the table's rim, until, a sparrow's breadth from Vendl, he whispered: “I did it, Daddy.”
That day Vendl wore suspenders. He reached to his waist, felt absence. “At least yeh got th’ guts t’ admit it, punk. But that's no ‘xcuse. Ghit the m’ room, brat. Ghit my strap! Yeh knew nobody touches my radio. Yeh've wrecked it!”
Vendl's father, a junkman, bequeathed him the contraption. He fixed its tuner with a long rubber band that slipped if you didn't work the knob right. Vendl left the thing set always for the one station he hearkened to: Retuning bled patience.
“There, brat. Ye're gettin' off easy. That's 'cause yih fessed up. Yeah — an' I'm feelin' soft.”
Joseph's body convulsed behind tears. Vendl hung his strap on a chair and flapped his arm, stiff from the intensity he devoted to punishment. Joseph's shirt blotched red. Nän stood brittle, a wood soldier. Her eyes parched, stone, fastened on Vendl.
“If yeh don't stop cryin' now, I'll whip yih more, brat.” He rubbed his elbow and shoulder, then grimaced, his lips a bear-trap yawning.
“Magdalènya! Ghit me a whiskey. Rye. In the cabinet. There. A shot. Full. And don't spill it! Or I'll spill you! It costs money.” He dumped his body on a chair. “Ghit it now. I'm tired.” He rubbed his forehead and eyes, sloshed his tongue around his teeth, gums, and hard pallet, and drooled. “I missed the news!” His drool spattered Lènya, the table, his radio, and Nän. He sighed, tremoloed, like hope dying.
“Yes, Daddy.” She fetched Vendl's wish, looked back thrice across her shoulder, toward Joseph, her eyes blinking like caution-lights of road-crossings.
Nän sprang fore, slapped the drink from Lènya's hand, ripped into the kitchen, grabbed an iron pan, waved it high. Joseph clutched at silence. Vendl retrieved the glass, veered toward the squawkbox lolling in the parlor.
Lènya shouldered Joseph to bed. She spoke no thanks, but pet his temple, many strokes, kissed him tenderly as Mary did dead Jesus, hugged him full into sleep, and wept beside him, prayed him through the valley of the night.
* * *
Nän quit work early — noon — that Saturday. The Cohens greeted her exit with champagne, her first of the French stuff.
Vendl designed the morn for noisy chores covert in the bedroom. The night before, late, after Lènya followed Joseph to sleep, Vendl arrived sober, by taxi limousine. The driver helped him pile boxes on the sidewalk. Vendl ventured a tip, a little silver, which the driver stripped from Vendl's hand, as if slug from leaf.
Just when Lènya offed the radio, at the end of “Let's Pretend,” Vendl dawned grinning from the bedroom, locked the door, marched to the parlor, cradled Joseph in one arm, Lènya in his other, danced them to the kitchen, sat them on the table, jaunted to the ice-box, returned with beer. “Here kids. Try some.”
Joseph sipped first. The fizz would have tickled him to smile, but it cut too sharp. Lènya ruled that beer bettered soda — except lemon phosphates, which puckered her thirst, specially Augusts.
Vendl guzzled the rest. But before he finished (the bottle still pointing down his gullet), Nän entered, buoyant as a new father offering cigars.
She ran to the table, swooped her children side-by-side, hugged them fast together, reached her lips high, back, sidelong, to kiss Vendl, her neck arched steep, round, protracted with suppleness of cheetahs, but torsioned hard, to edge of pain. Her eyes flared, like new suns near regarded, her whole body hazed in bright vibration.
“Guess vwhat, Zhoseph! Guess my leetle ghurl! Vwe gonna take beeg trip, habve beeg surlprise. You told dzem, Vendl?”
“Yeah, kids. We're gonna take two subway trains; an' the second goes outa its tunnel an' climbs up above the ground. On stilts! An' then we'll take a trolley ride — teh such place like yeh've never seen. An' we're gonna be happy.”
The second train broke into open air and chugged about rooftops. Vendl piggybacked his son to the head of the car, the front car, one hand holding Joseph's foot, the other a doubled waxed bag. He opened the prow window. Air rushed their faces. He loosed Joseph's foot, rummaged the bag, wiggled out a kosher garlic pickle.
Vendl’s fist held the pickle, offered Joseph first bite. Joseph's mouth wet. Fluid swilled his pallet. His new front teeth clipped a morsel. His mouth sucked it in. His tongue slurped it, rolled it round. Its juice exploded when his teeth crushed it. All the while, alit on Vendl's shoulders, his spare body flounced as if dangling by a spring.
Nän and Lènya chattered on a long banquette stretching sideways, fore to rear, its cushions sheathed in straw, snug-woven, varnished stiff. Sometimes, near-silence nudged its way into their occupation, as when Lènya watched Nän peel waxed cellophane from hunks of store-bought cake, the crinklings, then, the only commotion the two “girls” (Nän's label) added to the din shrewing the carriage like a melee of circuses.
As the train managed the first raised turn (tight, struggling), its wheels screeched against the track. Lènya shuddered at a spiked, heavy smell she might have thought a stench had she understood it. Joseph didn't notice the odor, his nose delighting in pickle. Later he learned such offal spills from pig-slaughter.
They reached the terminal, a stop called “Bridge Street,” the title of a thoroughfare that bridged nothing, spanned naught. Vendl lifted Joseph to the floor. They joined Nän and Lènya at the center exit. Joseph took Lènya's hand and Vendl's, and Lènya took Nän's, so the children were bracketed between their parents.
Outside the station, Joseph's smelled a scent he loved. All around, at curbsides and on great macadam lots, buses — creamy mustard and olive green — fat buses rested, puffing dulcet fumes. From the building's north, across a black, bent road (white-belted at middle), a great tracked yard sprawled — filled with trolleys.
Joseph hopped and galloped tiny steps rhythmed like the “Lone Ranger” passage of the William Tell Overture. But on the side where Vendl gripped his hand, only Joseph’s toes touched the ground, often scraped it. By dictates of traffic signals Vendl’s witchcraft interpreted, the four negotiated chaos at a junction of four great streets. Nän surveyed the trolley yard to find the right car.
The trolley pitched and waddled up a serpent hill, its railway set in a ribbon of cobbles centered in a street wider than any the children had seen. Joseph rode Vendl's lap, Vendl hugging him, each pointing — in competition — to every sight of a galaxy new to Joseph. Lènya drank amazement: the array of things — theaters, banks, garment shops, groceries, produce-markets, fish-stores, churches, flowered lawns, eclectic architecture......
The street leveled-out, straightened on a long plateau. The trolley settled to a gentle roll, its wheels cooing. The sound, its feel, assured Joseph's rouging sense: the episode bore reality.
At a distant stop, along a clear span flanked by plane trees, the four descended a telescoping stair, to pavement. They skeltered to a walkway, promenaded to a side street — “Wellington” — and angled west.
Along the sidewalk, cool and shadows spread beneath a train of tall oaks fatting in a thin grass lane edging off the south before the curb. At the north, above the lawns before the houses, soft light trickled through a still cortège of maples intorted at limb and trunk, their winged seeds flitting onto earth, awning, bird-bath, car, gravelly concrete......even Vendl's fedora, the crater of its crown, the scoop of its brim.
Lènya's head arced left, then right, religiously — oscillating like a metronome, her pale hair swooping round her neck. Her speech shrunk to “Oh!” and “Look!” — which she uttered in myriad combinations, wildly sorted, quicker than her face’s switching aims.
Joseph loved trees — because he'd met many breeds and races, more because Diamond Street knew none. But he spent his wordlessness — his Ooos — on the gables (just trinkets) and turrets (toy burlesques) of row homes, not mansions, like Dr. Cohen’s. Soon, he saw a pattern: First house matched third. Fourth mirrored fifth. Second copied sixth, the reverse of the seventh.
Joseph began to skip. His Ooos yielded to song: “Three blind mice, three blind......”
Nän took up the canon: “Three blind......” Lènya waited to fit her voice — the way she'd timed her leapings onto merry-go-rounds at school, so she wouldn't bump another kid or miss a handle and fall. She figured the right point: the instant Joseph began to sing “cut” — of the sentence “They cut off their heads....”
At the point where they'd turn a dog-leg to St. Vincent Street, they reached Roland Avenue, thick-trafficked, like the way of the trolley. The road looked ripply wet: a magic desert suns devise to conjure phantom lakes — convection waves that grasp, like ice, and bend, into trembling, the searing light that creates them.
On one corner — northeast — locals thronged a meat-and-produce-market. South, across Wellington, a drugstore bid patronage with three giant crystal bulbs stained ruby and swinging on a wrought iron brace bolted to madder brick climbing from granite foundation.
At the southwest corner, a quaint, cluttered store pressed against a creek stone wall that met the northern limit of the cellar that housed the mysterious establishment. The wall extended from a buttress of the north façade and restrained a dark, grassed knoll, squat and tabled just below the neighbor first floor and threatening always to crumble to the brief grey plaza fronting the joint.
Vendl led the family to the wall. “Wait here. I'll be back — widh treats!” He grinned and hoisted his brow, a bandit toppled by a blind man's cane.
A bell chimed its signal that silver advanced to an old brass register, ornate-reliefed, polished gleaming. The curio lurked upon a lame shelf mortised into a corner.
The corner hid behind a cardboard rack that sported candies, packaged cakes, piles of model aircraft kits, a plaque-display of cigarettes and tricky lighters, egg-crates stuffed with sampled comic books and thumbed pulp fiction, bubble-gum dispensers, bins of fountain pens, a wire tree fruited with a swarm of buttons clipped to waxy cards...... The camouflaging teetered (like experimental witchcraft) on a chromed steel counter topping an acrylic case satiate with notions, watches, jewelry...... Assembled model warplanes dangled on a march of twines hung from blackened pipes stuck in plastered walls — mobiles swooning in the wobbly currents issued from a wood-blade fan jutting from a pocked tin ceiling.
Joseph would learn, soon, that other bells sounded there — bells and flashing lights that obscured the ringing of the register, as fireworks eclipse the backfires of engines and gunshot-kills, the way seduction disguises fraud, the way torture erases lust and want, fear and anxiety, psychic deprivation — whenever boys played pinball near the high, wide window, its poster-ads, neon signs, piles of random stock disordered, hapless, on its sill, in the corner, at the front, near the door. Vendl ordered Joseph not to play or he'd punish him: “Y’ll jist waste my money. Yih’d never win a cent. Yeh can’t bet on moxie yih’ll never ghit.”
Vendl emerged with ice cream, two cones each hand — double-decker: cherry on lemon, chocolate on tangerine. He stretched his arms wide-forward, adjured selection. “Now lick; don't bite. The cold's bad fer yer teeth, an' lickin' makes it last long, an' it costs money, so respect it.”
A block and a quarter more away and all still slurping Vendl's indulgence, the clan encountered a crop of newborn homes: row, brick near pink, set back well from the street. Each main entrance rested thrice Joseph’s height above the sidewalk — and half that measure higher than the belt of terraced lawns that paralleled the residence-queue (broken just by stairs and slender walks) and stretched to the end of the road.
Nän broke stride at the lower of concrete stairs leading to the door of one of the houses. Just west of the portal, at the far top of the lawn, a blue spruce pointed its plumpness straight to the sun. Near the upper set of steps, amid a fresh turf swath sequestering that house's white slab walk from the next’s, a juniper flourished, its trunk a monument of property-divide.
On the door’s lintel — its porous stone — sat a raised intaglio, an embossment of Portland cement, the brightest tint of dun. Its root shape mimicked a halved millstone, but its raised border sprouted ribs that merged into a hub at the center of its base. It spread as if a Chinese fan, or Old Novgorod bride’s tiara (the frail, cloth halfmoon’s many-colored frame silhouetted by torrid sunlight) — or like bony crests that outcropped from spines of certain dinosaurs. In its lines Joseph saw the Nippon flag — sliced across its middle. It aspired to mark the dwelling distinct from its mirror-mates.
Head uplifted, shoulders squared, Vendl scaled the lower steps and peacocked forward on the walk — as if leading a college procession or coronation parade. He hesitated at the upper stair, smiled back across his shoulder toward the three he left short-breathed behind. Then he filled his lungs, ascended to the door, slid a key into the lock, turned it rightward.
The lock clicked. The door swung open. As if obeying a conductor's cue, at the same atom of time, Joseph and Lènya gaped their mouths, vaulted their brows, flung their arms wide, gasped like harmoniums. Vendl entered sideways, beckoned the kids follow. They rabbited up to the top stair's summit — and stopped there like planes landing on flattops. First Joseph, then Lènya, peeked in, through the parlor, all directions. “Well, don't jist stand there. Ghit in!”
Unnoticed, Nän, too, alighted on the landing, just behind. Her arms gathered her children, swooped them into their virgin home.
Against the western wall spread a new sofa — mohair, hemlock green — flanked by two queer lamps surmounting etched wood stands, fresh-purchased. Past an arch, in the dining room, a long table posed its shape, hand-graved, rock maple. Its top endured a fat glass pane. Vendl cut the glass, and ground and polished its edges, which milked a shadowy turquoise from all light diffused to them. The pane parted from the table near the table’s rims, their corners beveled, the bevels curved.
“Go to dzeh keetchen, cheeldren. Szee vwhat you szee.”
“Look, Lènya, a refrigerator, like the one in Dr. Cohen's house.” “Oh! Joseph, do you see? A new breakfast table. What pretty colors, and sparkles like mother of pearl, and silver legs, and chairs with orange pads.”
Joseph rushed at the table, climbed a chair to the window, and beamed. “Oh, Lènya, a yard and grass and a little tree, and its leaves are red and tiny.”
Nän made dinner. Vendl took the children upstairs. “Look kids, yehz each have yer own rooms, an' new beds. An' here’s where me and yer mudder sleeps.”
Joseph eyed the curtains dusking the room. “Can we go outside, Daddy, and play on the lawn?”
Vendl nodded disgruntlement. “Kids! ...... Oh...... Take 'im out, Magdalènya.”
Lènya sat the top step, leaned back on the door, watched over Joseph. Joseph spilled to the terrace, corkscrewed down its embankment, somersaulted on its square plateau, felt the needles of the spruce and leaflets of the juniper. “Ooo, this tree's leaves look like Mommy's lace, but they feel rough and sharp.”
Joseph hopped around, squealed like a baby. Lènya breathed deep, sighed full, looked above the rooftops. The sky seemed the aura of a robin's egg, the sun its yolk.
“Dinner's ready. Yer muddher's servin'. C’m-on, kids.”
Embroidered silk veiled the dining table. New china (matching, gold-rimmed) graced the cloth. Real silver complemented every serving bowl and plate. “Deese ahre my vwedding presents, cheeldren. I save dzem for dees. My moohder's seester vwas keeping dzem for me.”
Joseph looked: No lima beans; but spinach. He fixed on an image of Popeye squeezing a can of boiled-dead leaves — squeezing till lid burst and contents gushed into the weird sailor's mouth. “I'll eat that green stuff, Mommy.” Nän's smile brightened like her eyes.
The excitement tired Joseph early. Lènya piggybacked him to bed.
Dawn still feathered sea some tens of leagues east. Thuds and ravings startled Joseph from rare thorough sleep.
Glass shattered. Lènya scooped Joseph to her chest. His arms circled her neck. She cradled him to Nän and Vendl staring through the window of their room.
A door hammered a studded wall. A nude young hag shot, screaming, from the next house west, her thin arms flailing, her red hair mazed like raveled yarn. A tall man chased her, his bed-clothes striped like costumes of Jews captive in Nazi camps. The door swung shut behind. He tackled her on raw pavement. She squirmed to face him, bit into his arm, clawed his eye, neck, cheek, jaw. His fist bashed her temple. She fell limp. He rose, tugged her up, slung her on his shoulder, hauled her back to their house, crashed its door.
Light seeped into time, corrupted darkness. A siren neared. An ambulance — royal blue and orange — halted outside, azure lights whirling on its roof, the Seal-of-Pennsylvania painted on its cab. The siren stopped. Two men emerged, their garments white. They climbed to the erupted home.
Joseph heard four knocks. Three bass voices traded tones. A silence passed. The white-clad men lugged the hag on a stretcher. She lay dead still, torso wrapped in canvass shirt that wouldn't open at front. Her arms crossed her chest, her hands disappearing with the garment's sleeves drawn tight around her back. The two men packed her in the van. Its siren shrieked in waves. The cacophony faded.
* * *
Screaming so volcanically his words spilt inaudible, Vendl grabbed Nän's hair, slammed her to the floor, a hand's breadth from Joseph's face, a chaos, breaking.
Nän's body played a thud that jarred the whole apartment. Her breath exploded like air burst from a gashed tire. She warbled shriller than bagpipes wailing through fog into war.
Her hand snared Vendl's leg. Her fist bashed his knee. Her teeth ripped his calf. Blood gushed into her mouth and past the corners of her lips, down across her jaw.
The shock felled Vendl. Nän sprang on him, dug her fingers in his eyes.
He lurched his head away before she blinded him. His mitts clenched her throat — like anacondas.
Her hand crushed the organs of his seed. She rammed his hulk into the radiator, crashed his skull into its silvered iron, rose, kicked his gut. He lay limp. She dragged him to their bedroom. Joseph heard her growling.
* * *
That day, Joseph graduated Kindergarten. Others had studied only the images of picture-books. Joseph read — and wrote (with letters he saw in “THE INQUIRER”).
Bedtime weeks before, he left a note on the kitchen table: “PLEASE MOMMY A DOG.”
Nän met Joseph at school. Beside her sat a fox terrier — hair ivory, blotches (earthen, sable) mottling it. Her body wiggled, tail swishing the ground, head cocked sprightly right, ears perking, tips hooked fore. Nän saw an ad in a paper. “Terrier. Smart; loyal; age 2: To good home for costs of shots, leash, harness.”
“Oh, Mommy: is it mine?” He leaned toward the little creature. She balanced on her hinds, licked his cheek. He knelt and hugged her. They tumbled together on the blacktop.
“Yohrl seester names her Teepy [really “Tippy,” which Nän could not pronounce]. But szhe ees yourl’z, Zhoseph — only yourl’z.”
Often Joseph joined other boys in games: “red rover,” “tag,” “stick ball” — mostly “war” (he always field-doctor, for how his bandaging pleasured the other boys). But he loved Tippy more than he liked anything, or any person, even more than he cherished Lènya. He stayed much just with Tippy, ran and explored with her, played “fetch” and “wrestle.” She protected him. (Fox terriers just look cute.) Always — almost always — she stayed near, devoutly, without schooling, without leash.
One Monday Tippy marked her scent on the bounds of the house and her every path, sniffed the air like a huntress, behaved as if Joseph turned ghost. She worsened all week.
The next Sunday, Tippy darted past a stick Joseph threw. Joseph chased. Tippy ran too fast.
Suppertime came and left. Nän wouldn’t let Joseph look for Tippy. “Teepy vweel come.”
Joseph didn't eat or sleep, left bed sunrise, dashed through the house. “Tippy! Tippy!” He played hooky, searched all day, dragged in after Nän washed evening dishes. Vendl banished him, hungry, to bed. “Ghit ready for my strap!” His edict blotted into Joseph's stare, like mercury in brine. “Yes, Daddy.”
Tuesday, when final bell rang, he raced home for news. “Is she here, Lènya?” “A woman phoned, Joseph. She found Tippy.”
* * *
“Mommy! Mommy! Where's Tippy? There are fireworks tonight. Can we go — with Tippy?”
“Teepy's een dzuh basement. She must stay all-uh time for vwhile, excep’ pee pee.”
“Is she hurt, Mommy? Was she bad? Are you punishing her?”
“No Zhoseph. You come szee.”
Joseph scampered down the stair — his knees flexing near ninety degrees, his body bent deep — to see most soon beneath the parlor floor and spot Tippy quick. She lay a crescent on an old quilt folded twice. Strange wee creatures, maybe mice, clustered at her belly.
“Go close, louk, Zhoseph. But don't touch babies for tlree days. Dzey're too leetle, vweak. Teepy vwould be ‘fraid, bad ubvszet.”
“Babies? Tippy has babies? Oh, Mommy, she's so pretty. Look how she cuddles them. And she's licking the teeniest, and her eyes are closed. What's that one doing?”
“Eet's sucking meelk from Teepy's breast. Vremember? I gabve you meelk like dzat vwhen wvere leetle.”
Vendl burst into the house. His gait announced him drunk. Joseph dashed to greet him.
“Daddy! Daddy! Tippy has babies. Come see!”
“What?! That’s it! I ain’t gonna put up wid‘em pissin' and shittin' all over the place, and I ain’t gonna feed that bitch an’ her damn whelps, too. I'm ghittin' rid-uh all-of-'em.”
Joseph grabbed Vendl's shirt (its tails half hanging from his pants) and tugged it. “You can't, Daddy. She's my Tippy, my best friend. I love her, and she loves me. Her puppies are her babies. I was your baby — and Lènya, too.”
“Ehhh...shuttup, punk...... You brats cost enough of my money!”
Tippy near leaped up the stair, sprung at Vendl. Just when her teeth would have scored, booze made her target reel. She arced by him, between the fridge and the counter near the sink. Her body slipped across the floor. Her crown hammered a table leg — steel leg, bitter dense.
Vendl stumbled to her — her consciousness dazed, struggling to right itself. He grappled her neck, yanked her high, slung her to the alcove at the basement stair. His boot bludgeoned her belly. She soared beyond the bottom step, struck the concrete wall, a foot thick against the terraced earth and higher than Vendl could reach. Her body flopped deadlike.
“Daddy! What have you done? You killed my Tippy!”
“Ghit outuh my sight. Ghit — yeh little wimp.” Vendl’s forearm snapped into Joseph’s chest. The boy’s back slammed the refrigerator. He dropped to the floor. “If yeh don't ghit outuh my sight, now, I'll kick yeh down there t’ join 'er!”
Vendl seized Joseph's arms, slid him up the shell of the refrigerator, whipped him to the open of the room, flung him through the arch, past the dining table, to the edge of the parlor. “Ghit upstairs t’yer room. Now! An’ stay there......till I tell-yih t' c’m-out.”
Joseph raised himself, sobbing, limped to his room. Vendl searched a phone book, made a call. “Yeah, yehz come‘n' ghit'em — all‘of'em.”
Nän cradled Tippy in her arms, dirged up the stair to the kitchen. “You deed not kyeel her, but you hurlt her bad, you bastahrd. Vwhat weel happen to her babies?”
“It don't matter. I took care of it. You'll see.”
“Vwhat habve you done, you feelthy preeck?”
Vendl shot his elbow into Nän's chest, just above Tippy. Nän dropped the dog. Vendl threw a left hook squarely into Nän's temple. She fell, her head colliding with Tippy's ribs.
Vendl stepped across the bodies, into the kitchen, got his whiskey, poured a double shot. Over the bodies again, he careened to the parlor, planked into his thick-stuffed chair.
Firecrackers exploded. Vendl jerked up, joggled his head, stumbled past the bodies, lumbered to the basement. From a stash beneath the stair, he snatched a large carton. By ones and twos, he slung Tippy’s pups in, reckoned them seven, snarled and hauled the box to the kitchen, punted Nän off Tippy, ripped the creature up, added her, unconscious, to the squealing heap.
Nän forced herself erect. “Vwhat habve you done, Vendl?”
Joseph couldn’t bear being confined away from Tippy. He skulked downstairs, a step above the parlor. Through a gap between balusters, he sighted Nän and Vendl, heard the puppy noises teeming from the box.
Just then, dusk nearing, a blue and orange ambulance arrived. A streetlight — shy, gas — struggled to illumine the Seal-of-Pennsylvania laced on the cab.
A man swivelled out, marked the address, sauntered up the steps, rang the bell. Sensing Joseph terrored on the stair, Vendl sneered, growled, nabbed the carton, squeaked the door ajar as if cracking a vault.
The man squinted in. “Are you Mr. Yu-sche... Uh...... Yuuu...?”
“Yeah. That's me. Yihz from the pound?”
“Yes Sir. I've come...”
“Yeh've come t’th’ right place, kid. Here. Take'em.”
Vendl tried to yield the box. The man halted him. “First, Sir, you need to write in this form what you want done. And sign it.”
“Got a pen, kid?”
The man returned to the ambulance, slid the box in the rear compartment, climbed into the cab. The engine puttered, naïvely as an ox. Joseph broke past Vendl's legs, streaked to the curb. “Please, Mister. Don't take them. Tippy's my best friend. We love each other. They're her babies.”
“Sorry. Gotta do my job.” The man leaned aside, turned a knob, pulled another. The babies yipped and peeped. A sharp hiss streamed from the rear. The puppy noises slowed to none. The man leaned again, turned a knob, pushed another. The hissing ceased. “It's over, sonny — quick. They didn't feel nothin', just sleep.”
Joseph fainted. The man erupted from the cab, knelt, lifted Joseph's head. Nän rushed to Joseph, scooped him in her arms, cradled him back to the house.
Vendl slumped in the lush of his chair, glass in hand. “Well, the vermins is dead.”
The ambulance strolled away — stuttered like the rubber quills that pluck the pegs of fortune wheels in carnivals. Fireworks racketed, as if guns brawling in war — killed all trace of the ambulance.
Lènya returned from a party. Her smile vanished — a sail slashed, flapping toward the deep. Her face emptied — a ship torn, being gulped into sea. She whimpered treble moans — cries hope coiled in bilges shivered by masts ceded to blizzard wind: music of negation.
* * *
One VJ Day, then another, slipped from memory, since Japan's surrender. Yet, in Joseph's neighborhood that second night of September, folks regaled the air with pyrotechnics — and their bellies with booze. Joseph would remember forever.
Bombs amazed the sky, as if stars were visiting Earth. Joseph lay nude, perspiring, sleepless.
He started school tired next day — early, to be processed. Grown-ups ordered him to lines at desks. An older student took him to an aging nurse, who hiked him to a bald physician.
Sweat drenching her brow, spotting her garments, a squat, hatted woman — pink suited, hair bleached — ushered Joseph, and a score of others, to the basement's northern brink. They crowded in an aqua room, chilled, damp, the chamber of the second grade. Joseph secured a maple desk, its scarred varnish layered like the planet’s age, its oak panels lending gravity to must. The woman introduced Miss Lenska, who smiled — as if for camera — when the woman proclaimed her “city's best.”
“Good morning children.” Her tune befit a colloquy blabbed with a Barbie doll, anatomically incorrect. “Good morning Miss Lenska.” The males accorded their castration — Joseph, alone, dissenting, his heed accounting the maze of pipes and valves traversing broad sweeps of void inches from the ceiling.
The woman called Joseph's name. The room snapped into silence, as if a hypnotist uttered a code that thrust the whole population — save her and Joseph — into instant cataleptic paralysis (like a movie live but stuck as if dead). Joseph raised his arm, the rod of a catapult, jolted to attention. She commanded he follow her.
Wordlessly, she led him to a great glass cage, its frame dark mahogany, its bottom planted in a dull green box pressed on marble flooring of a hall that housed another part-transparent room. She knocked. They entered. “This is Joseph Yuschevinsky, Sir.” The woman turned and left.
“Hello son. I'm the Principal.” He gestured toward a slender lady sitting by his desk, its pine and olive-painted steel. “This is Miss Wren, a social worker.” He stuck a finger on his brow, as if completing an electric circuit. “But you don't know what that means. Don't worry. You'll see when I tell you why she's here.” His throat rasped a guttural noise, and coughed.
“Miss Wren will take you to a courthouse — a big one, downtown. Your parents are separating. A court must determine your living arrangement. You'll be Miss Wren’s charge till the judge decides. Do you understand?”
For Joseph, all comprehension hovered under bats swooping somewhere through a jungle of alien time and space. He felt surprise strewn like jarrings of auto wrecks, bewilderment diffusing like fuzzing blurs that spread through waking from bludgeoned sleep. He nodded yes — and eyed Miss Wren as a dog examines his mistress when she smacks him for a “bad” so old he can't identify the deed.
Miss Wren’s hand clasped Joseph's, led him away. A black Chevy waited. “There's our coach-n-four, lad.”
He'd never traveled in a car. Nän and Vendl couldn't drive. Vendl's hard thrift forbade cab-rides. But the carriage's mode — its form, tenor, method of acquittal, even smell — did not touch his appetite or judgment. He steeped in terror, a rabbit cringing in the syntax of an owl.
They drove past Diamond Street. He felt the journey's fate seethe deep primevally beneath the crust of his beginnings — there, in that structure where his family's society, its churn and magma, hardened into character of ridge, scale, claw, and spur — except Lènya.
He begged to see his early home again. “Please, Miss Wren. Please!” His eyes teared. He knelt on his seat and faced her, his hands folded as for prayer.
The car lost speed, then halted. A fingertip tapped the steering wheel. The car turned. “Just ten minutes, Joseph. The judge will dock me if we're late.”
He rang a bell. An old woman peered through blinds, then let him in. “It's Joseph! Where have you been?”
“I want to see the basement. Take me? Please?” He regarded her limp, its elliptics, the bone-contortions of her hands, her cane, its form's austerity, the complex of its scratches and chips. He began to cry. She wiped his eyes with her hair — white, abundant — and hugged him. His head nuzzled her breasts. He stopped weeping.
They saw the coal man's monster — sleeping. Joseph wept again, bolted off, his hands, feet, fingers, knees, even once his nose, comporting him up the cellar stair. The pony man, his little horse, and Lènya waited on the sidewalk. Joseph fell, chest throeing, eyes swollen into slits, gushing tears. He searched his back for welts. Vendl would beat him for being weak.
He tried to remember a time — one strong time — where good dwelt, unmolested, in its own working. The labor engaged him, almost like a game, balanced him enough for returning to the car.
Lènya spent her savings for his pony ride. Tippy gave her life for her pups. The old woman hugged him, took him to the basement, wiped his tears. He, Joseph, bore Vendl's strap to save Lènya. He would treasure those goods always.
At the courthouse, Nän waited in the vestibule. A strange man stood beside — as would a novice owner of a mustang mare who'd won a derby.
Nän drew Joseph to her chest, kissed him. He studied the strange man. “Dees ees VRoland.” He accounted the man against the chaos of the store of the corner of Wellington Street. “He ees my new goood flriend. You gonna like heem. Come szeet vweed us — helre.”
Roland offered his hand. Joseph busied his fingers at a shoelace.
“Would you like to go on a boat ride with Mom and me — a big boat, with a giant motor? We can ride it out to sea.” Roland knelt, sighed, put a sweaty palm on Joseph's cheek. “I know this is hard, son, and I can't do much to soften it. But here's a little present — to say hello. Maybe it'll mean some happiness.”
“Son?” — Joseph puzzled, wincing. He untied his shoelace, a third time, tied it again.
Joseph taught himself to tie his laces. He invented a knot, tied it with half the steps the standard knot requires. He didn't notice till he left his teens. A girlfriend mocked him. “Everything you do [she popped her bubble gum] is weird.” Another girlfriend craved to be a merchant seaman. She adored Joseph's knot, his sleek execution. “So elegant — like all your moves.”
Joseph tied his neckties oddly, too — and just as quick, half the normal rule. But then, in the courthouse, he proved, to Roland, by frequent demonstration, that he couldn't do anything right — tie a knot, pay attention, shake hands when he ought, act interested, nice.
Roland stood a head taller than Vendl. His belly bulged deeper than his shoulders spanned. He wore a flat straw hat and horn-rim glasses. He slicked his blond hair straight with Brill Cream — back behind his temples, round his ears, down to his neck. His jaw jowled. His mouth barely had lips. His Hawaiian shirt (blossoms, trees — pink, brown, green, blue, ivory) gaped near its collar, roughed at his belt. His arms’ thick shunned apparent muscle. His forehead glistened — sweat on grease oozing to his tiny eyes. His brow twitched hasty ciphers.
He pried one of Joseph's hands from its sham occupation, closed it tight around a five dollar bill. Joseph winced again. “Thank you...Mister.”
Miss Wren took Joseph's arm, hoist him erect. “Joseph must see the judge now. And you must join your attorney in court.”
Lènya sat in judge’s chamber. The judge greeted Joseph. Joseph rushed to Lènya, hugged her, nudged his head in the hollow of the merging of her shoulder and neck. They wept.
The judge said Nän and Vendl wanted legal separation and he’d grant it. “But with whom do you want to live, son?” Joseph couldn't talk, even hear, through his weeping. The judge stood. His breaths descended, became vocal, thick. “I guess I have no choice. I'll decide by what your parents say.”
Nän insisted she loved her children but couldn't afford them. Vendl accused her of adultery. Her lawyer said he'd prove Vendl “cruel and dangerous, a womanizer, a drunk.” Vendl's attorney laughed. “Well that's a pot calling a kettle black.”
The judge glared at Vendl, like a freight train speeding behind its light. “Do you want your children, Sir?”
“I don't want th' trouble, Jehdge. But she ain't fit — er even there enough t' have'em.”
“Bailiff, sit with the children while I talk with Miss Wren.”
At the brown cathedral past the edge of the green of Logan Square, the big clock chimed twice, with clipped, muffled tones, then, after time, the same thrice, and, at last, in different rhythm, five times, long and full, a church-bell joining.
Footsteps multiplied and quickened in the vestibule, where Roland waited. Car-horn blasts and motor-sounds proliferated, intensified.
Miss Wren reappeared alone. She took the children to her car.
They drove south a while, east of Independence Hall, then more south, and stopped at an old brick building, its walls soiled orange-rust, windows like a factory's. Above the main door, a large lavender placard bore the words “THE SHELTER” and, below, a scripted title: “Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”
Miss Wren delivered the children to Mother Superior, who rang for two nurse sisters. One led Joseph to a windowless room, stripped him bare, dumped his clothes into a speckled box, tossed it to a labeled shelf. She set her hand on his shoulder, took him to a great white open place, schooled him in entry routine.
He passed, nude, shivering, from station to station, his hands cupped on his male parts. He felt not human, or alive, but a gadgetry submitted to a machination-check.
At each stop, a nun questioned him, wrote on forms. A white-clad sister pricked his arm with needles (though his flesh and record proved he'd got the vaccinations before). Others deloused him (though he had no lice and the agent burned), shaved his head and slicked it thick with ringworm cure (though he showed no symptoms), poked his groin (to test for hernia), jammed a probe into his rectum (to hunt out absent worms)......
A black-robed nun led him to a store-room, picked him some clothes — brown knickers (tweed to rasp him), short, blue pants (recycled wool), a flannel shirt (plaid, two sizes big), a couple jerseys (sallow white), a zippered jacket (faded rose), eight briefs (to pinch his skin), six argyle socks (four matching), and oxfords (clay and mayonnaise). He couldn't guess her body's shape, except her hips. Her face — flushed, acrid, immaculate — presented him an etched map of webbed erosion (flesh veined, bloated, flagging like a turkey's jowl).
She showed him to the dorm he'd share with twenty-seven other boys, his age, older, younger. They descended to the basement on an iron stair, turned two corners of an avocado hall. “There!” She pointed to a swinging door (old cream on plywood). They pushed into an amber-lighted room, trod the main aisle eleven paces.
“This will be your bed. Here, in front, in this box, store your things. This other box — look! pay attention! (she grabbed his ear, yanked it) — this, beside yours, is the charge of the boy who sleeps the cot above. Dinner happens in a half hour. Be on time — or don't eat. Lights out 9:30, free time between — here, around the bunks, or in that empty place, there, before the bath. I made your bed this time. But it's your chore. Keep tidy!”
She turned as if legless — spun on spider's thread, in liquid air, slow current — then marched away, a dress marine (though a frail arced sway tainted her gait and her thighs seemed to savor her habit’s caresses).
Clutching, still, his garments to his chest, Joseph sat an edge of his bed, his bare flesh itching on the army blanket. His eyes tried, trembling, to fix on his toes — hammer toes, contorted like the hands of the old woman who limped with a cane. He knew not how to move or acknowledge the others' presence, or his own being there.
A weight pressed the thread of his bunk. A dark arm draped his shoulder. “Yawl don't be 'fraid. Ah help yuh. Ah knows whawt yawl feels — just like Ah be mah fuhst nahght. Come awn! We tawlk. Yawl feel bettuh.” (Joseph's eyes narrowed, reddened, began to tear.) “Gwawn, cry. Ah deeid. An' Ah's off duh street! Yawl ghit tough. Ah help yuh. ...... Mah name's Tony.”
Joseph turned to see the face that spoke. He'd seen dark people ride trolleys, buses. Sometimes dark workmen walked Diamond Street. But he'd never felt a dark skin's touch or looked in its owner's eyes or received a dark boy's personal — even intimate — communication.
Joseph peered round the room. A pale, leaden green covered concrete walls. Wide, squat windows opened awning-like into failing sun that fuzzed through tiny fluffs and whirling specks (like soda effervescence) — on its damping way into the room. Above, iron pipes devised geometries to decorate the ceiling. Beneath a window — middle of the far wall — a coal stove burned.
Most boys there wore dark skin, coarse hair. They seemed to view him tenderly as Tippy did her pups — with regard of empathic charity — except a tall boy, blond, fat, grimaced, sneering from an upper bunk. From a few boys he knew at school and in his neighborhood, and long from Vendl, Joseph learned the tenor of that pale boy’s mein: raking hate, seething violence. But Joseph brewed the pluck of terriers, and nothing that boy might try could match what Joseph took from Vendl and Nän.
Tony helped Joseph meet the other boys, ushered him to dinner, eased him through kitchen routine. They played cards, traded stories — Joseph struggling to keep awake — till a nun ruled lights out. In grim collapse, Joseph found sleep.
But at some black hour he did not know, doors clapped, lights flashed on, and the whole dorm startled awake. At the entry stood a nun, her pose swagging, mouth oozing drool, forearm bound in plaster cast. She growled and reeled along the aisle between bunks. Her eyes cased the room like crocodiles scouring a swamp.
“You! You! I cook your food, wipe your puke, wash your filthy clothes, scrape your sheit from your drawers.” On her mind's knolls, crags, and boulders, pits and crevices, a mold crept, darkly, till it choked her sight. “Tonight — one night — I took a little rest, sipped some brandy, and fell downstairs — 'cause you left a ball on a tread.” Her right hand jounced like a jackhammer, pointed to fresh, white cast. “Now! This!” Her eyes blared. Rage imbrued her face. Throughout the room, dread suffused the flow of life, like ink spilling from a squid.
She paced three aisles — an arm tucked in the trough of her back — the way reviewing colonels inspect at reveille. She halted, careened forward, as if her foot had caught in a pit.
Her well arm yanked a boy from a mattress. His body flapped on the floor. He screamed. She tugged him up to standing, pounded his belly with her cast. His body crumpled limp. She shook him, as if a mop, and commanded he imprison himself in the closet adjacent the door.
She repeated the procedure at random bunks, sometimes lower cots — each remaining urchin, save Joseph, fearing she would pick him next. Joseph pondered what magic contrivance — a kindred of pinball, perhaps — would tag him the climax.
Tony squeezed into the closet. Joseph felt the nun's fingers crawl his face. Her fist gathered his hair. Her arm pulled his head. The rest ensued on a curved-then-angled line across the mattress, off into air. His sheet and blanket flounced as his body shot from under. He did not resist, but assured his feet would make touchdown. His knees flexed then extended. His neck slacked to save his head its hair.
Ice pale, except its ruddy nose, the nun's face composed itself of gauntest flesh. Her skin appeared some weathered tenting stretched across cols. Her eyes became resins — jelled in stone.
He heard her growl. The growl foretold the tactic of her casted arm. Nän and Vendl taught him well. He knew ahead when her arm would hit his belly. That razored instant, he pitched his hips back smoothly as eels swim, slower than the speed of her swing. Her arm felt impact enough to suggest her trouble prospered, though his body soaked spare little of her force.
But he failed to anticipate an advent utterly capricious; for, he could not account a vital fact: Unlike Vendl, she couldn't hold a drunk.
She redrew her arm to her torso, and Joseph prepared for her slamming her cast again at his gut. But her arm stayed! Then a sharp crack seared his shin; and fire spit acid.
His body tensed, all it could, while lurching, hunched, forward. Did her fancy count his reflex applause?
She released him. He did not cry, trekking to the closet, or any of the night, or ever again, till long a man, in psychotherapy.
* * *
Joseph lay on his bunk — upper now — an oceanography monograph capsized on his chest. He could see dry leaves — green, red, orange, brown — whisking past the two squat windows frozen before him. Sometimes, wind spoke to him — its breath, its script of raveled shapes and colors, swirling chaotically east. Today it oracled a taste of early snow.
The swinging door opened — a shy breach, as if trying its hinges and springs. Joseph ascribed the touch to a woman, but not a nun, unless fast dying.
He peered, expecting amazement. Miss Wren’s head peeked in.
He slid to the floor, tiptoed to the door. She grinned, meekly, for relief. “Joseph! There you are. I've wonderful news!” She cupped her hand at the nape of his neck, breathed out deep, glanced among the bunks, patted his head. (Was he going home? What was home? With whom?) He slipped her grasp like a dog sparring, and backed away.
“I've found you foster care — nice married folks to take you in, with three other boys: a new family, and a farm, and horse and cows, in the pretty range west of the Schuylkill. You'll go to country school, learn about growing things, animals, too.”
Joseph trod flatfoot to the box tucked beneath his bunk, started grabbing garments. “No, Joseph. You’ll wear your own things — get more at the farm. ...... Oh, and here: your mother sent a winter coat and leggings — and your mittens and pilot’s hat and rain-boots.”
Tony stood sobbing behind Joseph. Joseph wept, turned, hugged Tony, said goodbye.
Miss Wren led Joseph to the room where Joseph stripped and surrendered his raiments that day Ms. Wren consigned him to the nuns. Someone had piled his old clothes on a bench. He stripped again and re-dressed. The new leggings itched. The rain-boots pinched.
The Schuylkill — the river, the valley's colors — entranced Joseph. The great estates reminded him of Dr. Cohen's. He worked at mouthing the town names — Bala Cynwyd, Bryn Mawr, Berwyn......
Valley Forge concealed its bunkered camp beyond a shabby town and cheap hub of trivial commerce. The blight bore omen. Miles passed slower than sights. Development flattened. Towns yielded to forest and pasture, till reaped farms, hibernating, ruled horizons.
Joseph's shoulders sank, his trunk a falling curve, his vision fastened on the meldings of his thighs and knees. His brow became an old plowed field long fallow, his words silent. Miss Wren drudged to make him talk. He retorted lone syllables — “yeah,” “no,” “sure,” “so?” — and curt equivocations — “sometimes,” “maybe.”
The journey's end neared. And, words spliting, voice stuttering, Joseph wondered, aloud, for Lènya — her presence lost to him since their abandonment. “She's at THE SHELTER, Joseph. You didn’t know?”
The car mounted a gravel drive, through fields devoid of trees. At the end, a thin copse struggled to defend a spired house, heights gabled, frame wizened frail by season-swerves and weather-sieges, cladding, cedar, grey as slate where bare, but mottled like plane trees where paint layered, cracked, mildewed, flaked away.
In a near yard fenced to a ruining stable, a horse stood fast. Its color matched the old spruce livery's hue. Its tail hung drone still, save trembling in wind. Its body slumped motionless — beyond twitches of its wilting ears. At hip, flank, and shoulder, bones near sliced through skin. Its chest sagged — a hammock, laden, auguring sunder. Its neck arched groundward, head sunk — an ebbing sun.
Joseph approached the creature — his hand cupped, arm extended, as if to offer food. He meant to show a kindred's sympathy. “May I pet him, Miss Wren?”
“You must meet your foster parents now. They must decide.”
Joseph named the beast to greet him — three sounds, two pitches, up minor third, same down: “Hel-lo..., Brown.” The horse's ears stopped twitching. Joseph felt happy — though sadder than before. His memory resummoned the pony he mounted on Diamond Street, its face’s falling surrender, its throat’s bow of resignation.
Dusk swelled. Miss Wren addressed the kitchen door, knocked like a toe testing Arctic water.
Mrs. Callen let them in. “Well — our new charge. Tiny, ain't he? We'll fatten'im.”
Miss Wren acknowledged Mr. Callen and three curious boys and excused herself from supper. “I'll get home late as it is.” She stroked Joseph's hair twice, abruptly — and left.
Mrs. Callen served water, fatback, corn bread, larded black-eyed peas, a greasy pile of turnip greens, and plain bread pudding. The Callens, themselves, ate meat, too (a kind Joseph hadn't seen) — and turnip root, and tea — and fresh, pared apple with their pudding.
The state paid flat-rate stipends, by the child. The Callens squeezed a profit — handsome for their taste — by pinching costs.
Pete, the biggest boy, stirred a fuss about the menu. “Gee, dessert. What's special?”
Joseph ate a little, thanked the Callens, asked to be excused. “I'm sorry. It tastes good. But the ride was very long.”
Mrs. Callen ordered Jake, the youngest, to manage Joseph. “Show‘im his cot an’ th’ stash of beddin’. Pick‘im two blankets, a set of linens, and the pillow I just stitched.”
“An’ you, Joseph, get a pan — by the sink. Fill it with water. Take a sponge — on the shelf, there. Put'em neath yer cot. Wipe down with'em. Towels're with th’ linens. Take just one — fer the week.”
“Come’ere kid.” Mr. Callen yanked Joseph to the door. “Yer a city boy. So I better tell yuh now yuh gotta use an outhouse fer toilet.” He opened the door. “There: that wee shack near the barn.”
Joseph begged leave to test the outhouse — for the real, silent reason he asked to be excused. His fear obscured the reek and slime that greeted his entry. Grease exploded from mouth and bottom. He depleted the newspaper to wipe his person and the toilet and floor.
Mr. Callen leaned across the kitchen sink, over the pot-rack and cup-shelf, lifted the narrow window, jabbed his head out. “Ain't yuh gettin' tuh bed, boy?” His voice enjoyed the quality of goat-bleats slowed to bass pitch ricocheting in an old steel bucket.
Joseph panicked: Would he stink? Would the ordure show? Could he sponge clean unseen? Would he soil his bed-sheets?
Joseph roomed with all three other boys. “What was that food we ate?” Joseph’s guts were still writhing, his mouth burning from gastric acid gurgling his words.
Pete chuckled. Jake frowned confusion. John grinned — as if marking a quarry’s step that locks it in the jaws of a trap.
“Can't I know? Won't you tell me?”
John stuck his face at Joseph's. “Doesn't matter. Better get used t' it. It's all we ever have — 'nless they give us turnip with the greens. ...... We ain't had dessert fer a year. ...... Yih look sick, kid. Better get t' sleep. Yer up at five. They give yih chores 'at take a couple hours till breakfast. Yeah... Breakfast. That's corn mush, lard, and java. Ever had coffee? Black?”
Joseph liked coffee’s smell, but didn't know, in his head, the meaning of lard. “What chores?”
“Well, yer new, so y' likely clean th'outhouse. Ain't been done a while. Th' shit needs ghittin' out bad. ... Yih might get tih slop hogs. Yih gotta do that one good — and maybe we'll get some pork with the fatback n’ lard.”
“I don't understand. What do you mean — slop hogs? What's pork? And what's fatback come from, and lard?” What is lard?
“Yih really don't know? Well, yih'll find out when th' old man slices round a big pig's gullet an’ it squeals an’ blood comes gushin’ out an’ slimes yih good when yih help'im butcher-it. Yih'll wanna sneak a cut an' roast it — mmmmh......with puhtatuhs.”
Joseph felt sicker than ever in his life. Had his innards substance left to vomit? His father called pork evil food — foul, poison. But Joseph didn't apprehend it came from slaughtering a creature, like the pony or the old horse, “Brown,” or even like himself. He imagined biting off a chunk of his flesh. The image reminded him of Nän's teeth ripping Vendl's calf.
Just moments seemed to pass from the instant Joseph fell unconscious to the first blare of Mr. Callen's voice piercing, like welding flames, the iron of foredawn. Joseph shed his covers while he slept. When Mr. Callen came to dictate chores, Joseph lay dazed, wetting his bed.
“Well, sonny, yer gonna slop pigs. Yuh never done that, have... Wha...? ... What's this?”
Mr. Callen's question — its message — woke Joseph — as if by splash of molten lead. He panted thrice before he grasped he wasn't in the outhouse.
“What's this? A bed-wetter! Yeh'll ruin the mattress, damn yuh! I have a cure fer that.”
The man flipped Joseph on his front, beat his rear with open hand, thick, leather-fleshed. Whack! “Gonna wet the bed again? Huh?” Whack! “Want more uh this?” Whack! ......
The other boys stared the way drivers gawk when they pass fresh wrecks. Joseph twisted his neck to see back beyond his shoulder — to witness his warden. Joseph's face bore no evidence of sting — just ineffable wonder: what forces drove that man to such reaction?
Pain companioned Joseph often. Like an aging foe, it shrunk from dread to irksome colleague — dull, self-possessed. Quite other torment clenched Joseph's gut, stifled his breath.
* * *
The man loaded Joseph on the saddle. Lènya led their trek. Joseph pet the pony's flesh, smiled so his lips hurt.
The man hauled Joseph to the pavement. Lènya bowed and rubbed her face against the pony's cheek; always his head slumped low. Suddenly her skull reared back. She saw the creature through his eyes. She wept, and her lips brushed his jaw and lighted on the tender bristles edging his ear. “I'm so sorry.”
* * *
Now — a primal way the conscious mind can’t chart — Joseph sensed and understood what Lènya felt when she uttered sorrow to the pony. The old man ruled the pony tetherless. Its halter didn't bear a bit, that rod that presses back the corners of the mouth, bruises tongue and lip. But why don't humans wear hackamores, suffer their jabbing cartilage and nerve? And the pony obeyed the man for the reason it endured a saddle: a master — not love — obliged. Birth endowed the pony tedium and hard constraint — to grind away its essence, as it had even Nän's and Vendl's, the nuns', too.
The pony couldn't herd with its kind, gallop at the wind, battle to mate, forage as its body commanded, revel in native risk. Man decreed it would provide its owner meager bread to feed his boredom — by instilling oblivious children with dire misapprehension of the stuff of beasts and worth of humankind.
Lènya shared sorrow with the pony — because she apprehended their alikeness. Now Joseph knew, and took his beating well, to pay some compensation to the little horse — for his idiocy of playing tool of the creature's abuse, for being the abuse.
Joseph's countenance — its calm, its silence — quickened Mr. Callen's hand, propelled it harder, grimaced his lips into edges of incision, bared his teeth. Joseph’s face turned to his pillow. The faster the slamming grew, the more it slowed, degenerated — till it hovered like a silent movie garbled and fluttering still.
Mr. Callen retreated. Joseph rolled from the cot, removed the bottom sheet to wash it, asked the other boys to help him tote the mattress to the gravel flat fronting the barn, where he would cleanse it, air it dry.
Breeze and sun began to salvage the bedding. Joseph visited the old horse standing quiet in the stable yard and seeming, to Joseph's eye, never to have moved a millimeter from the very place he stood when Joseph named him “Brown.”
Joseph grabbed some grass and dandelion green. Brown nibbled the gift from Joseph's hand.
Long scars wove stripes chaotically through Brown’s hair, salt-dried, sweat-slicked. Harness scoured swaths of callous.
Joseph nuzzled Brown's cheek, pet his face, whispered near his ear: “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.” Brown tipped his ears forward, arched a front leg, bobbed his head, swished his tail. Joseph pondered freeing him.
That antarctic eve, after slopping pigs and tasting supper, Joseph excused himself for a trip to the outhouse, which he’d cleaned and limed after struggling through breakfast.
He passed the little shack. Its smell lingered after as he left the barn (where he'd stopped to get a coat he stashed). The odor chased him galloping across the idle field to the far wood.
A behemoth moon wrestled through hordes of clouds shoving east. The lights died in the Callens' kitchen. Joseph ambled along the forest's edge, met a woodshed near a nest of oak-stumps, gashes rutting them, maze-like — puzzles that recalled the scars marring Brown's back, records of maulings fire-logs suffered there.
He opened the door — till its hinges complained. Split logs piled to the ceiling; but a gap cut plum through the middle, top to bottom, front to back. The cut ranged narrow as the strait that parted the beds of his room at Diamond Street. A rough wood floor spanned most of the interior. Between door and logs, a bare space reached large as twice his size. But only earth composed its floor, inhabited by bugs and worms and little beasts of kinds and manners not of his ken.
Between wood-piles he’d sleep cramped, plank straight. But the high, tight sconce offered dryness and insulation and less companionship of rodents and invertebrates. There he lay.
He knew he couldn't dwell in the shed or find his keep in the forest or near towns. Eventually he'd remit himself to the Callens. But he’d withhold surrender till hunger doused his choice — despite the Callens might worsen his punition the more he mounted time away free.
He thought of Lènya, her hiding with the coal man's monster, in the subterrane of Diamond Street. He did not shrink his resolve when owls screeched and crawling things searched his flesh, or when a bat scouted the shed and varmints burrowed beneath — even when pack dogs howled. He shivered through nine dark hours — past dawn.
Bright sun succumbed to leaden clouds before morning opened into noon. Rain pummeled Joseph from the forest, back into the shed.
The torrent relented. Mrs. Callen portioned out some remnants of stale bread pudding. Joseph knocked on the door. Jake admitted him and slipped back fast to the table. Joseph stood stonelike near the sink, by the cooling wood-stove. He waited, defocused, like an old zen monk.
Mr. Callen raised an arm, pointed toward the boys' room. His wife prayed he let Joseph take some tea and cornbread. “If he gets sick, it'll cost us.”
The old man flared his lips, clenched his sight — a demon tearing his mouth, pressing his brow till his eyes squeezed to slits, his teeth grinding each other. He lowered his arm, taut as if fighting gravity, then lashed it upward, stiff, his finger pointing, rigid, away, quaking in rhythm with his skull.
Joseph obeyed, his hunger demurring. The old man shot up, thrust his chair aside, chased after, stripping off his belt. His strides sledged wide percussions on the knotted slats of the hall.
* * *
Along the drive, before the house, a redbud shed its blossoms. The stable yard lay empty — Brown dead, his leg having splintered while he dragged timber. John swore the carcass made December's diet — meat on every plate. “Djih-ever eat deer, Joseph, or dog-food?”
Miss Wren arrived at ten that morning, very early in the month — to cart Joseph back to the city. The timing stacked sweet luck on good fortune, for the Callens — two fortnights’ bounty free of costs and a saving of the lunch they'd have spent on Joseph and Miss Wren that day. The old couple laughed when they'd seen Joseph off. “Ain't need t' board another joung’n fer a score n' eight days, Alice.”
“Did those dear old folks tell you why, Joseph? No? Well, your parents are thinking of getting back together, with you too, and your sister — a family again. A lot depends on you — how you feel about it.”
Nän and Lènya sat at the courthouse. When Joseph appeared, Nän rose mute, her arms towing his body in, enclosing it. He pushed away, as if just to breathe. Nän loosed him, like a car sinking when a tire leaks fast. He stood, as if hanging, his spirit stilled, like old Brown. Nän turned to Lènya, to find a key. Joseph turned, too.
Joseph neared Lènya, with uncertain steps, a music-box winding down. Fingers touched. Hands clasped. Arms glided — his under hers, hers over his — then drew their bodies into full embrace. He nestled his head in the shoal of her shoulder. She rested her cheek on his crown. They sounded naught but whispered breaths.
Had you studied Nän’s look straying from her children to mark the outer world passing beyond the great glass panes of the master door, you'd have discerned a moisture gathered on the bottom lids of her eyes. “Dere's cab, cheeldren.”
* * *
The lawn, coarse, lanky, thrashed against its walls of cedar shrub stunted by a clear black earth and ragged crops (brutal as the rough-shorn hair of France's women who befriended soldiers of the Third Reich). In the concrete walk, beyond the crude wood stair, fissures splayed jagged, as if dour tendrils mimicking relentless roots that bore them.
Like every other there, that house copied the rest — its brick, rippled, jonquil, chipped and cracking. Like the fragile webwork of a dying skin, tiny rifts wove a sickness through the dun of paint scaling from the rails and framework of the porch.
Inside, pork-and-cabbage mildew veiled all color, the way salt draws at water and exposes taste. Joseph's flesh began to itch, to feel slavered. Nän's friend, Marta, showed them to her kitchen — pots dripping from the stove, glasses strewn like bells killed in chiming dead of war. Joseph excused himself, to the parlor — to its old piano, a species of machine he'd never touched. He tinkered with the keys.
Two boys tumbled down the stair that ran the far, sallow wall. One, obese, dragged the other to the center of the room, near a slipcovered couch. He descended on his prey, and his fat hands’ stumped fingers hoisted the victim's flesh and twisted it, his teeth chewing the open of his mouth. Joseph ran to tell Marta. Marta rushed to the fray, grabbed the brute's hair — her son's hair — hauled him off his brother.
The beast rolled over, face up. His body performed a frenzied dance, chest convulsing, eyes tucked under lids, maw spewing foam. Marta straddled him, sat on his breasts, grabbed his tongue.
The doorknock banged. Nän attended. Lènya followed. Vendl entered, under homburg hat, his grin a fresh gap rived in a crashed clipper, bow gaping.
He cradled two squat boxes, one on the other, and a big brown bag. “Pizza! An’ beer! An’ fruit soda fer the kids.” He missed Marta riding her son flouncing on the carpet, his tongue a rein in Marta's paw.
The monster's body quieted, limp. Marta greeted Vendl, toted the chow to the kitchen. Nän and Lènya joined her. Soon they presented pizza wedges, soda, and beer.
Vendl showed Joseph how to eat the strange food. You could see Joseph's mouth, its shape, anticipate a sludge of mold and caster oil, or the alkali of kissing Tillie in public. He tried to risk a bite. “That's okay, Son. Yeh don't have t’eadit.”
Vendl took Joseph's plate, patted his head, stroked the gold and waves of his hair. “Marta, have yih got somethin' else fer Joseph? He likes rye and scrambled eggs — if mustard's on top.”
Nän took Vendl to the kitchen. They kissed near the door. Joseph cringed.
Nän found a dozen eggs. Vendl crafted an omelet, mustard-dressed. Nän slid it to a slice of pumpernickel, topped it with another. They kissed again. Lènya cried. Joseph wondered at the whole omen.
* * *
Joseph saved near-all the money Roland gave him when they met at the courthouse. He told Vendl the source and occasion; and, recalling the pizza and omelet of Marta's party, he entreated leave to play pinball, in the variety store of Wellington Street.
“I taught yeh better 'an that. Yih go away, live widh who knows what people; an' yeh come home fergettin' what's right. I gotta game fer yeh: Work! Yer gonna help me paint th’ winduh frames an' learn t' be a man.”
Vendl snatched Joseph to the garage, where Vendl harbored paint, torches, terpentine, sanding stuffs and wire rakes, lid-removers, brushes, rags, work hats, wood extension-ladder...... “I'll pop this can. Take this stick. Stir. Like this — just like this — till I tell yih not.”
Vendl stretched his ladder several rungs beyond the roof above the garage, scampered up three storeys, torch in hand, abrasives in pocket — blithe as a chimp. Joseph sat the concrete floor, stirred as if steeped in a Buddhist rite. The torch droned dull roars — mantra of fiends — behind the sloshes gurgling in the can.
“C’m’up, Joseph! I'll teach yeh how tih burn paint. C’m’on, son.”
Joseph dropped his spatula in turpentine, scurried to the ladder — like a kamikaze consigned to hope. He scaled the first eight rungs calmly as gulls soar. Suddenly, his face peering in the kitchen, the storey above the garage, his knees denied they could bend. His breath panicked, flesh iced white, eyelids fluttered, voice vanished, hands’ grip welded to a rung. The ladder bucked, shivered, bounced, reared — though wholly still. The land — grey pavement, buff sod masking clay — the hard land undulated, wheeling.
“What's-uh matter? Yih froze, didn't-cheh? Climb, damn it! I'm comin' down t’ ghit yih. No son uh mine's gonna be afraid.”
Vendl opened a bedroom window, set his torch on the sill, backed down to Joseph. He couldn't pry him loose. So he straddled him, slid behind, planted on a low rung, leaned hard against the ladder. “I'm gonna grab yer waist. Let go, an' stand on m’ shoulders, an' I'll take yih t' the lawn, kneel like an elephant, ease yih off.”
Joseph loosed his grip the way two-toed sloths prepare to switch dependence to new limbs. Vendl ripped him from the ladder, twirled half around, dumped him on concrete. Before the boy could balance, two coarse hands lifted his body, shook it, flipped it to the grass.
“Now ghit on yer feet an' up that ladder, an' burn paint, like a man! I'm gonna be behind yeh; y’ain't gonna fall. Yer gonna climb, if I have t' shove yeh up on my back.”
Joseph lent his right foot to the bottom rung, then his left. He repeated the process every rise, rung to rung — a limping kind of effort — till he could stretch an arm and reach the torch sitting on the high sill, two floors above the garage.
“Hand me th’ torch an' I'll light it, an' yeh'll burn while I watch.” Joseph's whole body trembled, segment by segment, a dozen rhythms and speeds — a marionette, its elements hanging on rubber threads zithered by winds. He aimed the torch at the sill, sealed his eyes, swiped the instrument side to side, Vendl commanding.
“There, Daddy. The bottom's done, like you did the other places. Can I go down now?” Joseph hadn't opened his eyes.
“No! Yeh gotta wire-rake n’ sand, like I did the rest. Then yih paint. Finish whatchih start, like a mensch.”
Joseph handed Vendl the torch. Vendl passed him abrasives.
“Scratch off any paint yih left, an’ sand the whole sill.”
Joseph forced his eyes to look. Vendl fetched brushes, and the paint Joseph mixed.
Joseph's eyes shut. The ladder quaked. Still Joseph scraped and corraded — a crippled robot.
Vendl returned. “Here. Watch!”
Vendl flaunted dabs and strokes at the lintel of the kitchen window — told when to use each. He handed up a brush. “I'll hold th’ paint for yeh. ...... No! Too much, in the corner. Here's a rag. Wipe it clean. Paint it thinner.”
Joseph looked down and reeled. He saw himself plummet, over and again, as in a horror movie: A wild dive, its sheer arc filmed, the film copied over and again, the copies spliced together and together, over and over, again and again......, everything cascading.
“Stop that, damn it! Yeh'll fall on me!” Vendl slapped Joseph's rear. Joseph stiffened.
“Le'me see!” Vendl climbed behind Joseph. The ladder parted briefly from the wall. The boy's grip locked the ladder, yanked his body hard against its rungs, the flesh flaring in the inner of his fist, knuckles ivory. The brush angled sharply at the sill, bristles folding, stock slipping hand, palm pressing support, fingers yielding to instinct.
“No, klutz! Hold the brush that angle! Here. Take it! ...... Still too much paint! An' yeh didn't burn enough away! An' why ain't-yeh higher up? Ain't got no guts? Bed wetter! Can't-chih do nothin' right? I'll teach-yeh. Ghit on the roof — now, damn it! Ghit some guts! An' learn t’ pay attention t’ yer work!”
“But I mixed the paint right, didn't I, Daddy?”
“Stop whinin'! Ghit on the roof!”
Fear tumbled hard on Joseph. He held fast — like ice — lest terror plunge him to death.
“That's it! Yih disgust me! Ghit down! Now! Outuh my sight!”
* * *
Here's Wellington. Another few streets, past Cottman. Turn right six corners down. Three blocks. You'll see it, as it stood then — but taller fence, fresh blemishes, new paint on window frames, even monkey bars.
There, beyond the swings, in the wide alcove’s far corner, you see the chimney, its hidden side half-arm's length from the wall. Recess had just started. Joseph, the lone Jew, enrolled that cool September morning, a day into the start of third grade. Nän made him wear short pants, like “a girl,” “a sissy,” the other kids said. They taunted him — for his clothes, his name, his father's kind — dared him to do what none had done and few had started even trying.
Great ochre bricks formed the structure. Each bore glaze like dappled porcelain. Sleek, minuscule troughs — trillions — scattered over every plane.
A sudden rain ended warm, brusquely quick, like a summer gale. Sun splashed through clouds fraying like gauzes. The building wore sequins, even sprays of gold, except in shadows at easts of its wings and in the depth of that alcove cleaving that chimney from the near adjacent wall.
If you hovered, like cosmic dust, above, you'd see the building shaped like a papal cross, a protracted gallery bisecting six wings. At the top of that alcove (that far one of four crenelles among arms of the geometry), the chimney's high edge would show itself the cross's single quirk — like the requisite flaw of Persian rugs or the inevitable dent of Zen pottery, one imperfection a bow to Allah, the other a mark of perfection's absurdity, of the perfection only of the absurd.
“Betcheh can't. Betcheh can't. Dare yuh. Dare yuh.” The children's chant cast itself on just two notes, a minor third apart, like all children's adjurations — sweet, sour, salt, bitter, pungent...... Joseph's shoulders hiked to his ears, neck stiff, fingers clenched into fists, heart drumming stomach, vision fevering. “Jew boy is a sissy. Jew boy is a sissy. Shorty pants. Shorty pants. ......”
Joseph stripped his tweed coat. His blue shorts, white socks, and crimson shirt shouted like America's flag. His oxfords suffered many fixes; his toes buckled inside. Days before, a shoemaker added rubber soles.
Joseph squared his back against the wall, pressed his hands rearward on its surface, upped a leg, jammed its foot against the chimney, pushed his trunk and toes fiercely toward opposing aims, drew his other leg into the struggle of the first. He sat on air — his body curved, like a sculler's rowing. He slid his back a brick-row higher. His right leg followed, then his left. Just so, he shinnied ever higher — always staring at his knees and feet.
Below, the crowd, mounting, clutched a silence edging an abyss. Joseph's senses whisked him to the Callens' woodshed, to the pond attending Dr. Cohen's house, to the oceans he absorbed from the monograph he scoured at THE SHELTER.
Like a giant armored worm, a tile lip — its many lapping brackets — rounded off the crests of the outer walls. He shinnied till his feet rammed tight against the chimney's tip and his bottom pressed the summit-row of bricks. His right hand hooked a tile of the lip. His left hand arced to like grapple. His arms drove down hard, lifted his shoulders. His left leg swung beyond the crest, its heel shoving back against the wall's inner face, his loins flipping after, his whole body rolling to the roof, his right shin scraping the lip.
He did not hear the crowd's drone crescendo. He lay entranced, facing skyward, flesh warming under sun, heart whole free within a stop of time.
The Principal appeared. “What's on the roof? That new boy? God! How did he get up?”
The custodian stepped to the roof from a ladder. “Cm’on, son. I'll help yih down.” He lifted Joseph, helped him to the edge. The ladder jutted several rungs above the lip, higher than Joseph's face.
Joseph studied the near walls and chimney. He enjoined his body to descend the way it pressed him up. Seismic premonitions boiled from deepest reaches of a sea. He collapsed, unconscious.
The custodian slung Joseph on his shoulder, hauled his cargo to ground.
* * *
The phone rang in the plating shop. Vendl's foreman answered. “Vendl: boss wants you in his office.”
* * *
Joseph quivered in a great stuffed chair. Vendl knocked, with both fists, like a kettle-drummer. The Principal waived him in.
“Sit down, Sir.” The Principal gestured toward an old oak rocker, arms padded. Vendl stood.
“I'll get right to the point, Sir. Joseph climbed to the roof. The other kids ridiculed his clothes and Jewish descent, dared him to do it. I summoned you because I knew you’d want to take your son home — and I can't let him finish school today and...”
With one titanic thrust, Vendl lunged his rage to the chair that nestled Joseph. His left hand grabbed Joseph's hair, snapped him from his seat, dangled his body, shoetips above floor. His right hand collided, flat, with Joseph's face. Blue fire splashed the breadth of Joseph's cheek. His neck and body whipped — in sympathy with the hit — where his head could not lurch, his hair bound in Vendl's grip.
“Mr. Yu... Uh, Yush... Sir! Please...”
Vendl slammed another blow — to Joseph's jaw. The Principal jerked forward, dropped his chin, pressed a finger to his temple, swished a document across his desk, scanned the paper's lead.
“Ah! Yes! Mr. Yus-che-vinsky: Surely, this is not the place, Sir...”
Vendl's hand reported thrice more to Joseph's skull — above the ear, behind it, again on the jaw. The boy became the clapper of a great iron bell, his conscious mind obliterating into auras of sound, vibrations of color.
Among the grunts his lungs exploded under each jar's fury, among the sprays of heat, their blue resounding like the breakers of storms, among his father's screams, so crazed they plummeted inaudible, Joseph felt his throat propose a demurrer his lips dared mouth. His visage drew a calm from his bone, a peace Vendl sensed with frustration.
Vendl dropped the club of his arm, the bludgeon of his mitt. “Whatdgyeh say, brat?"
Joseph's being uttered serenity sipped from the little forest near the woodshed. Vendl loosed Joseph's hair and retreated, his face writhing confoundment, its veins throbbing, his bulk shuddering, his arm spastic, an android berserk, its nerves challenging his reflex.
“Daddy, I climbed. I climbed high, Daddy — alone, to the roof. Without a ladder, Daddy. And nobody ever did it before. And everybody watched. And I touched the sky, Daddy. And you weren't there.”