Thy Neighbor Read online

  “Because it doesn’t belong,” she answered, consolingly but with an undertone of sternness.

  “You mean it’s rude,” I said tartly.

  She leaned forward to catch my eyes, which were safely back on the sugar bowl.

  I was thinking of Eliot’s line about coffee spoons, and the way Mom had once said it to me when I was in elementary school after she’d come back from a conference with my teachers.

  “Oh, Nicky, my love, I need a martini. And quickly. Those people. God. What a parade of Prufrocks.”

  And then she waved her arms, laughing and saying the line, cueing me to join.

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

  I looked up very slowly to meet Mrs. Bloom’s eyes. She took my chin in one hand.

  “No, Nick,” she said. “I don’t mean that it’s rude.”

  She sighed, dropping her hand to my arm and patting firmly.

  “I mean that it’s polite.”

  She stood up and crossed to retrieve the coffee. The machine was burbling and belching out its last steam.

  “I don’t want polite,” she said, grasping the decanter, “and neither do you. I’ve had far too much of polite from everyone. I don’t think I could take it from you, too.”

  “But I owe you an apology,” I countered. “I’ve insulted you by coming here. I have no right. No place.”

  “You’ve insulted me by saying you’re sorry. And for that”—she smiled self-mockingly—“I generously forgive you. But your coming here—” She paused thoughtfully. “Well, you have no idea.”

  She poured the coffee and placed the decanter on a trivet in the center of the table.

  “Nick.” She sighed, easing herself back into her seat. “Seeing you is like a holiday from seeing the rest of the world. The polite world where polite doesn’t give a damn.”

  She replaced her hand on my arm, then the other, and shook my wrist for emphasis.

  “But you do give a damn. That’s why you’re here. I know that. And that’s also why it wouldn’t have mattered when you came so long as you didn’t tiptoe in with flowers or send a prompt card. I consider it a compliment that it took you this long.”

  “A good deed of omission,” I ventured. “How convenient.”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, bosh. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It wouldn’t kill you to take a little credit for something, you know.”

  “If only it would. I’d be giving myself A’s across the board.”

  She frowned disapprovingly.

  “Don’t ever wish for death.”

  She put a half teaspoon of sugar into her mug and stirred it for a long time, slowly, the metal spoon tinkling a lazy tidal rhythm, like a ship’s bell in a deserted harbor at night.

  “You must have more discipline than that,” she said.

  I thought of letting this go. It seemed, at first, so out of place, the misfire of an old woman’s mind. But I felt a blush of anger in my ears, automatic, marshaling to the defense, and I knew that the remark was quite well placed after all.

  “Discipline?” I spat, more derisively than I’d meant to. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Her voice grew suddenly sharp.

  “Everything. It has everything to do with it.”

  Well, well, I thought. A fierce heart beats in Old Mother Hubbard.

  But the flash of temper didn’t last. She seemed to regret it immediately.

  “Effort,” she murmured, pursing her lips empathically, “is all that is required.”

  And slip slip. As fast as that, the past was there again—again—and I was on my knees with Mom in the upstairs hall praying in front of the crucifix.

  What happens if you stop trying?

  You must never do that.

  Why?

  Because it is the gravest of sins.

  Why?

  Because it is at the root of all the others.

  “You sound just like my mother,” I said.

  “Well, then she understood a great deal and you should have listened to her.”

  “I did listen to her. All I did was listen to her and repeat. I can still hear her voice. Every single day, at every turn. All that fucking—sorry—all that poetry she spouted coming back to haunt me. I was thinking of her just now, in fact, looking at your sugar bowl, hearing one of those damn lines.”

  She looked immensely pleased, then sad, her features seeming to fall into her thought.

  “Yes. I know just how you feel. I had to give away that bird, God help me. Oh, that bird. Do you know she sounded just like Robin, the intonation of her voice, the pitch. Just perfect. Like a recording. It was incredible.”

  She paused, putting her fingers to her mouth to stifle a sob.

  “Horrible,” she whispered.

  It was then that I knew my real reason for going there. To feel worse. To watch this resilient woman cry, and to provoke it.

  Nice work.

  Keep at it and you’ll unravel years of her famous effort by nightfall.

  Key word: her.

  Her effort.

  The labor that has given her rest.

  Another casualty of your ego.

  And these thoughts, too, just more arrogance.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, seeming to read the self-censure in my face. “It would take a great deal more than your guilt to unsettle me.”

  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  “You’ve really done your homework, haven’t you?” I said instead.

  She cocked her head and nodded, raising her brows to the obvious, as if I were a lazy pupil slow to catch on.

  “Discipline,” she said decisively. “I told you. Know where you stand and stand there. Once you know yourself well enough to do that, you’d be surprised how easily you can read other people.”

  “But that’s just it,” I said. “I don’t want to stand here.”

  She blew a raspberry of dissent.

  “You most certainly do. I’ve never seen a person so in love with his grief.”

  “Oh, and you’re not?” I blurted.

  “In love with my grief?” she said. “No. Lord, no. That’s never been my problem. I have others. Plenty of others.”

  “Like what?”

  Her eyes narrowed and darkened, but there was fondness in them still. We were having her conversation now, and she liked it that way.

  “Like terror,” she said, flatly. “I have a great deal of trouble with terror.”

  “Pardon me, Mrs. Bloom,” I countered, as usual too rough in tone, “but bullshit. You look like you’re about ready to invite the reaper himself in for a drink.”

  “One for the road,” she joked, lifting her mug to the toast.

  “C’mon. Seriously, you can’t pretend that fear is your big problem.”

  “I don’t have to pretend. If there’s one thing in this world there’s no pretense in, it’s terror. Terror is not polite.”

  “Terror doesn’t send cards and flowers?” I jibed.

  She smiled wryly.

  “He most certainly does not. But then, you know that well enough yourself. He comes in like a wrecking ball cut loose. Kerplunk.”

  Yes, I know terror well enough, I thought. You are right there. But it does not come through the wall and lodge, as graceless as an unexploded bomb. It comes like a virus in stocking feet. A creeping malaise. Just the barest scratch in the throat, a dry swallow. The prodrome of terror is just this small, a bad dream, a waking too early, an unease when the light is coming up, unease at the very fact of the light coming up.

  How is that? you say, when you are still capable of wonder. What is so wrong with the dawn? Or the night? Or these things that I see ev
ery day, and have always seen every day, but which now are so—so terrible.

  How to explain exactly what is so terrible. You cannot.

  “Kerplunk” is not the word I would choose.

  But I do not have a better one.

  Even memory fails here.

  No parrot’s line to fill the gap.

  Uppp . . . wait.

  Wait.

  Here’s one.

  Just in the nick.

  Clear your throat and enunciate.

  Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

  Teach that to a parrot.

  Yeah.

  We are never at a loss for words, are we?

  Even for a loss of words.

  * * *

  Time passed in Mrs. Bloom’s kitchen the way it passes when I’m writing this.

  Hours lost.

  Total absorption.

  Talking with her was like being on a really great first date, a chaste date, but a great one nonetheless: the kind where you look up to order another bottle of wine and the restaurant is empty and the waiters are closing out the till.

  We just talked and talked and talked, and then she heated some leftovers and we ate, and we had more coffee afterward. And it was just as she said it would be. A relief from every other strained conversation.

  For me, that even included the ones I had with Monica, because there, in that kitchen, with the reclusive, the surprising, the godsent Mrs. Bloom, there was nothing at stake. No ground to take or concede. No sexual taint. No teetering desire. No threat of any kind. And no booze, pills, powders, or weeds of any kind, either. Nothing. I was flat-out clean in the presence of another human being for the first time since my parents had died.

  And whaddaya know? I remember everything we said.

  Everything.

  She told me a lot about my mother, especially my mother and Robin. Things I didn’t know, but which rang so achingly true that I knew they must be.

  “Your mother had an obsession with words,” she said.

  “Yes, well, she was an academic at heart,” I replied. “I guess you know she had a PhD.”

  Mrs. Bloom rolled her eyes.

  “God, who didn’t?” She threw up her hands. “She wore it as a badge of her superiority, and with it she made it very, very clear early on that my husband and I were not on her level . . . that no one in the neighborhood was on her level, except, with the right coaching, Robin. But that was much later. At first it was a hard transition for them. Very hard, I think.”

  She paused, remembering.

  “You know, I’ll never forget it. She and your father had us over for dinner once when they first moved into the neighborhood. You were just a baby. They were like any young professional couple coming out of the teeming think pot of New York and finding themselves in the—what did she call it?—the great cultural wastelands of the company town, I think it was. Whatever that meant.

  “Anyway, they were desperate for company. Your mom especially. She seemed so shocked by motherhood and the whole of her new life. She always seemed to be looking around in disbelief, as if saying to herself: God, what have I done?”

  Mrs. Bloom frowned.

  “Our evening together was a total failure, of course. We had very little in common and not much to say to each other. And, well, as you know, your mother was no cook, so we couldn’t even take refuge in the food.”

  She pulled a sour face, her mouth forming a moue of distaste, her nose crinkling in rebuff.

  “Well, you see—” She sighed conclusively. “Your mother was bored, I think. Just terribly bored, and she remained that way for the rest of her life, except when she was with you or Robin. You were the bright spots in her terrible mistake. But the rest of the time I think she was dying of boredom. She was certainly dying of boredom that night with us.

  “So . . . I guess she did what bored people do. She got drunk. My, did she get drunk. And she said sharp, insulting things, most of which my husband and I couldn’t make head or tail of. Only her tone gave her away. Thinking back on it now, I suppose it can be a great blessing not to know enough to know when you’re being put down. Ignorance can be bliss. Or protection, anyway, when you’re having dinner with the likes of Diana Walsh. Then the real digs can’t hurt you. You just coast under them none the wiser, and it just seems as if you’re watching a scene in a play and wondering why the hostess is so awfully upset.”

  She looked at me sympathetically, as if she knew that this had happened to me, and I nodded knowingly.

  “That’s how it was that night, anyway,” she went on. “I remember that so well. I didn’t feel hurt by the things your mother said, because I didn’t understand most of them, or I didn’t value the things she was chiding us for lacking enough to care. She cared about the lack much more than we did. Maybe because it meant that she could find no company with us. No like mind, as she might have said. And that was clearly very painful to her. Very painful. And that’s what I saw in her that night. A woman lashing out in pain and missing her targets entirely—which, of course, only infuriated her all the more.”

  She laughed regretfully.

  “Oh, it was dreadful. I felt so terribly sorry for her. I wanted just to reach across the table and take her hand and tell her that it was going to be all right. And I would have, if I hadn’t thought that she would slap me away. But that was your mother for you, crying for help in the same shrill voice that was bound to turn help away.”

  “Bound to?” I said angrily. “You mean designed to. She was so perverse. So incredibly perverse. I mean, you don’t say ‘Mayday, Mayday’ and ‘Die, peasant, die’ in the same breath. But that was standard issue for her. You’re lucky you didn’t understand her. I did, and it damaged me for life. It was made very clear to me many times over, and in just the way you describe, that I was only just intelligent enough to know how stupid I was. I was not a bright spot in her mistake. I was her mistake.”

  “Oh, Nick,” she cried. “Don’t say such a thing. You must know how smart and sensitive and wonderful you are. You must know that.”

  “On my best days, I know, a little,” I said. “And the rest of the time all I can see is the shortfall. What I lack. What I’m not. And now that my parents are gone, that’s all I’m left with.”

  “But that isn’t true,” she insisted. “That simply isn’t true. The person who came to my door knows his value, and wants to live and be happy. And he even knows his mother loved him very dearly.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But I also know that my mother was a pompous bitch. She should have worn a sign around her neck that said, BEWARE OF THE DOG.”

  Mrs. Bloom’s expression hardened with determination, but her voice was oddly pleading.

  “Yes. Okay, so your mother was a pompous bitch. So what? She was also a wonderfully complex and brilliant woman who gave my granddaughter the best of herself—the absolute best of herself—and for nothing more than the pleasure of the giving. Do you have any idea how much your mother meant to Robin? Do you?”

  “Some idea,” I said. “But not all.”

  “Well, you should know all. She meant the world. She saved Robin from the doldrums of being such a strange and lonely child. That poor girl was a wretched orphan who had lost her mother and her whole sense of self, and she didn’t have a soul in the world that could understand her.

  “Lord knows I tried. But I was never bookish in that way. I didn’t have the equipment. I gave her all the love anyone could give. I cooked for her—all her favorite foods. I played with her and tried to make her laugh. I nursed her when she was sick. I gave her hugs and pats and constant encouragement, and I think it helped a little. But I couldn’t do the main thing. I couldn’t open her mind. I couldn’t free her capabilities.

  “Your mother did. She took Robin, who
was so isolated and folded in on herself, unfurled her like a flag, and set her flying proudly at full mast. And for that I will be forever grateful to her memory.”

  She looked away out the back window and sighed long and loud.

  “Her own mother could never have done as much, I’ll tell you that. Karen was just a freewheeling sprite lost in a haze of drugs. She abandoned Robin on our doorstep and went off to destroy herself.

  “But your mother picked Robin up again, and I think she even managed to take away the pain of that first abandonment. She filled that hollowed-out child’s mind with beautiful words, and those words were like magic spells for all the hurts of the past. They shielded her, and I think they healed her.”

  She reached out and grasped my shoulder as if to transfer the passion of her thanks.

  “Did you know that your mother even bought books and maps and study aids for Robin? All the time. She even gave her one of those miniature tape recorders to carry around with her, so that she could recite poems into it.”

  Her contagious gesture had worked. I was paying very close attention, staring at her face.

  Her blue eyes were swollen and plump, like two berries popping from the reddened whites of her eyes, shining through the meniscus of tears.

  “Oh, what was it your mother said all the time?” she said. She put her forefinger to her lip pensively.

  “Emphasize the spoken word? Was that it?”

  She mulled this. Shook her head.

  “No, it was something fancier than that.”

  “The oral tradition,” I said. “Cherish the oral tradition.”

  “Yes.” She clapped her hands lightly. “The oral tradition. That was it.”

  “She thought that language was meant to be heard,” I explained. “And you’re right—she always gassed on and on about that.”

  I spoke in my mother’s exaggerated voice:

  “‘Nick, there is a direct line from Homer to Beckett through Shakespeare. The Bard wrote plays for a reason . . . And why? . . . So that his words would be heard. Aloud . . . Remember, the muse sings. She does not scratch like a chicken in the dirt. It is the lowly so-called artist who does that, and he can make no claim to any title higher than scrivener.’”