Cormorant Books

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Midway (Preview)

St Paddy's Day

The old man was eighty years old. Ben Allan knew he wasn’t going to remake his personality now.

He watched his father Morris gazing down the wide street at the back end of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The old man’s eyes were tearing, the wings of his nostrils were red and his nose was running like a schoolboy’s. And, like a kid, he paid no attention to it. A blare of trombones from the brass bands rode the cold wind and, on its wings, a burst of police sirens.

See you next year, came the sirens’ salute. But you couldn’t count on that rendezvous.

“Now this is the part of parades I love best,” Morris Allan announced.

“Really?” Ben asked. “What part is that?”

“When the parade’s passed. When it’s all over. All over but the shouting.”

His father laughed. He was proud of his sense of irony that was still in fighting trim after all these years. A smartass remark was his preferred form of communication. Ben had had a lifetime of his own to understand how that worked, though when he was younger, and the butt of his father’s method, he was a lot less appreciative.

“Look at me!” Morris Allan liked to boast to his son when they were out for one of their health walks. “A clod of Russian peat mud falls from my soles with every step. But you, kid, you’re right at home here. You were born into the New World! It was made for you.”

“Sure, Pop,” Ben would humour him. “The New World fits me like a glove.”

The two men began walking down the middle of St. Catherine’s street, along the green stripe painted there in honour of the day. St. Catherine was the patron saint of spinsters. Just about every big street in Montreal was named after a saint, though some of them were purely local. Taking in the parade had been Morris Allan’s idea, just his kind of perverse pleasure, freezing his eighty-year-old backside watching the Irish march by. Well, as long as it gets him some exercise, Ben thought, who am I to criticize?

A parade marshallette came striding up to the Allan men. She must have become separated from the procession, either that or gone awol and ducked into a bar. She looked the part of the perfect Irish lass, with ruddy skin and burnt auburn hair the colour of rust, probably reinforced by a Miss Clairol rinse.

She stopped in front of the two wind-blown men, obviously in need of her good cheer.

“Everybody’s Irish today!” she declared.

She stepped up to Morris Allan and held out a green insignia. A shillelagh, or a shamrock, or a schmeggeggy, he didn’t know what the thing was called. Some pagan, leprechaun-green symbol made of brittle, cheerful plastic.

“If you’re Irish,” Morris Allan answered in his best hound-dog voice, which must have tickled the ladies pink back in the days of Glenn Miller, “then I am too!”

He brought his wrinkled face close to hers so she could pin the bauble to his coat. He wore an overcoat full of querulous, old-country spirits that looked as if they had escaped from a Gogol play. Hungrily, Morris Allan breathed in the scent of the woman’s fresh-scrubbed skin, and the wind and perfume and cigarette smoke in her hair, and behind it the smell of a hastily prepared meal, something eaten right out of the frying pan, a minute steak drenched in meat tenderizer. The wonderful power of being forty again — it could bring a dead man back to life. He didn’t see what was obvious to his son, a man more attuned to the rhythms of women that age: the marshallette was exhausted to the very core. St. Catherine indeed, Ben thought.

She shied away from Morris, polite and subtle enough so he didn’t have to notice. The problem was his mouth. His baby teeth had never given way to the adult set that was supposed to last him the rest of his life, which, he liked to point out, was turning out to be much longer than he’d expected. Eighty years of use had worn his teeth down to stubby nubs where food debris caught and fermented. The acid smell of his recent meals was hard to take, even for those who loved him unconditionally. “My infantile mouth,” he liked to lament, then he would jam his little finger between his teeth in search of leftovers.

“There!” the Irish woman said. She stepped back and admired her work. “It looks absolutely natural on you.”

She laughed at her own joke. Nothing looked less natural than an old Jew wearing a green plastic shamrock. Her tableau was something right out of Diane Arbus. Happy with her cultural mischief, she turned and went on her way. Father and son watched her move out of their lives and into someone else’s, leaving behind a peaty aroma of Jameson’s and the sting of menthol cigarette smoke.

“Spreading joy wherever she goes.”

“She liked me better than she liked you,” Morris Allan boasted.

“That’s the age factor. You’re non-threatening.”

“The hell I am! I’d take her home and fuck the stuffing out of her. I’d bend her over my knee and spank her bare bottom. I’d change her oil and put in a fresh quart. I would too!”

“Please, Dad. Don’t talk like that, okay?”

“Like what? What way am I talking?”

Ben looked into his father’s face. He saw how genuinely hurt and confused he was.

“What’s all the fuss?” his father pursued.

“You’re supposed to set the example. I’m the wayward one, remember? I’m the son. You’re the father, right?”

The old man considered his appearance. The worn shoes, the flapping scarecrow pants, the hands scaly and reddened by the wind, the teary eyes, the sunken mouth. Getting old is not for wimps. He started slapping at his Gogol overcoat with both hands. “This is an example? An example of what? Tell me that much!” He went on slapping at his coat, as if punishing himself for being such a poor example — but of what? The shamrock fell onto the pavement, neither man noticed.

Watching a parade was not exactly a traditional father-son activity, like playing catch. But the two Allans had to find something to do together, since the old man could never throw a ball, let alone catch one, even in his youth. He prided himself on being unathletic. If you didn’t have to exert yourself, why bother? Being sedentary was the closest you could get to the aristocracy.

His wife Jeannette, on the other hand — now there was an athlete. A sporty figure in her black stretch slacks and the brown leather jacket frayed at the wrists, which she wore to hang out the laundry on the line that ran from the cherry to the apple tree in the dusty yard behind their building in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. The fruit was good only for grackles, but the blossoms warmed her heart every spring.

She hummed the Internationale as she pinned the clothes to the line, the edges of two garments on a single pin. Jeannette was such a good ballplayer that her friends called her Willie Mae, the female version of the Say Hey Kid. She was the star of the Unitarian picnic ball games that she and Morris joined after they’d abandoned the faith of their fathers, but still wanted communion, if not with God, at least with the Left and other Jewnitarians like themselves. She was a sly pitcher with a stutter-step delivery that had opposing hitters confused, watching her hand instead of the ball.

“You sure you’re ready?” she would tease them. “You don’t look ready! Here comes the pitch, try and hit it this time.”

And with nimble steps, she would spin the ball their way.

Strike three, yer out!

Rest in Peace, batter.

Not only was she a better ball player than her husband, all in all she was a better American, a more modern person. She dismissed the Old Country religion as a ragbag of superstitions long before he did. She already owned an automobile by the time they met, though sadly, one cold night the radiator burst because she hadn’t learned about antifreeze.

She excelled on the intimacy front too. She personally introduced him to the mysteries of the clitoris, then proved its existence to him, because at first he’d been skeptical, since until then he’d heard only vague, uninformed rumours about it. And she was right — there it was, that hidden thing, its own secret, its own reward. “Why should such important things be so hidden?” he asked her, as if she were personally responsible for its design. Jeannette laughed at him, then smiled to herself. What a pragmatist she’d ended up with, when all the time he’d tried to pass himself off as a poet. Well, at least he could recognize a good secret when he saw one.

Jeannette’s winning ways endured until the very end. She even conquered death before he did — what Morris Allan called the great foot race. Though she tried to establish an amiable, neighbourly relation with the enemy, her cancer — she always insisted on the possessive — would have none of it. It killed her in the end.

A half-dozen white, middle-aged males came barging down the middle of the street towards Morris and Ben Allan. They were armed with plastic cups overflowing with green beer. On St. Paddy’s Day, the cops let you drink as much as you liked, you were free to wobble your way down the middle of a downtown street, a transgression that only the bravest would try in this harsh climate. The men’s coats were open to the March wind. Barely forty, and already they wore their weight badly, though they were anything but ashamed. On the contrary: they looked proud and self-satisfied. Their weight kept them anchored safely to the ground, and that was all right with them.

Morris Allan watched them sweep past, leading with their bellies and their double chins. He shook his head. They were aggressive in their ignorance, and perfectly content with their limits. He couldn’t imagine how that must feel — like paradise, he supposed.

“Too bad everybody can’t be beautiful like you and me,” he said to his son once the gang was out of earshot. Then he dislodged a bit of lunch from between his teeth.

“St. Patrick’s used to be a dangerous time,” he went on. “They beat up your mother’s little brother Teemb one time on 12th Street, just because he was a Jew. A half-dozen of them they were, against just him. He wasn’t even five feet tall.”

Ben Allan had heard this story before. Every year at this time, actually. The travails of Little Teemb. He was so small his own family nicknamed him “Thimble.” But they couldn’t pronounce the word right, and it came out of their mouths as “Teembo,” and eventually they settled on “Teemb,” which was easier to say. His problems with the Irish on 12th Street were nothing compared to what he suffered at the hands of his own family.

Among the Allans, he had to play the archetypal Jew in the Gentile world, a big responsibility for such frail shoulders. To be that Jew, naturally he had to be a little guy, a regular Tom Thumb, a David facing off against Goliath.

Of course, Little Teemb triumphed before the final curtain fell. He made himself into the Caribbean king of notions and sundries, a travelling salesman in the tropics. He peddled ribbons and buttons and other useful stuff from Cape Haitian to Cienfuegos, and everywhere he went he left behind a trail of athletically inclined, butterscotch-eyed children with a knack for commerce. In Miami, where he took his retirement, with still no excess weight on his frame, he was the champion of the over-seventy-five tennis league. He died on the courts — where else? — and was carried down to the Jewish cemetery on his racket, like a Greek warrior on his shield.

How could a dead man be carried on a tennis racket? Only in a Little Teemb story could that be done.

Meanwhile, father and son Allan moved down the street, minding their own business. This was Montreal at the beginning of a new millennium, not the Dirty Thirties in Chicago. Since the Gentiles were not going to provide any more distractions, Morris Allan took an interest in a road apple left behind by a police horse. He nudged the turd with the tip of his shoe. Alarmed, Ben watched his father carry out his investigations.

Morris Allan pointed to the lump of waste on the street. “It doesn’t smell like anything,” he complained.

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“I’m losing my sense of smell. Well, why not that too?”

“You can’t smell a stink anymore, is that the problem? Look at it as a blessing.”

Morris Allan turned and looked at his son as if he were some sort of Amazonian Indian who couldn’t understand the concept of snow. His gaze was level, though his head bobbed ever so slightly, touched by Mr. Parkinson’s hand.

“You don’t get it, do you? I love the smell of horse manure. There’s no better smell.”

With a skilful toe, he flipped over the horse dropping.

“Once a week,” Morris said, “I got to help my father clean out the stall where he kept his horse. Your grandfather. You never knew him. He had a horse and cart. He rented it, I don’t see how he could have owned such things. It was for his work. He picked up the stuff nobody else wanted, he was a junkman, he recycled, that’s what they call it nowadays. Sundays was for cleaning out the stall. That’s when I got to help. The good smell of the manure, the horse was so quiet and warm ... I used to get that same smell in a glass of bourbon, back when I still drank. I had a stiff broom and a wooden shovel, then sawdust on the floor, and I was finished. My father watched and smoked. It was the only time I got to be with him. My mother used to laugh. ‘Why does the boy want to do the dirtiest job there is?’”

“And your father?”

“He didn’t say anything. He smoked. It kept his mouth busy. He never said anything, not as far as I can recall. Maybe he said, ‘Good boy.’ Maybe he didn’t. They didn’t have this communication business back then. But they did have quality time. Your generation didn’t invent that. Cleaning horseshit out of a stall — now that was our quality time.”

He stopped. “Wait, I do remember one thing he said, from back when he served in the Czar’s army. ‘It’s all right to use a public woman, but don’t nod to her in the street if you see her the next day.’” Morris Allan laughed. “Great advice that was! That’s paternal counsel you can live by!”

“No one goes to the whorehouse anymore,” Ben pointed out. Morris waved off the objection.

“One day you’ll thank me for giving you an unhappy childhood,” he told his son. “It’ll give you something to write about.”

“Who says I need something to write about?”

Then a moment later, Ben Allan came up with the answer he should have produced spontaneously.

“And anyway, who says I had an unhappy childhood?”

The two allan men began walking the long blocks through downtown Montreal, towards the quieter streets that led up the Mountain, where Ben had left the car. Punished by the wind, Morris could not move fast enough to warm up or let his son do the same. They had already had their disagreements on the subject of parking.

“Apply for a handicap decal, we’ll put it on my car. It’ll come in handy when we have errands to run,” Ben suggested.

Morris Allan would have nothing to do with it.

“A wheeler-dealer, that’s what you are,” he told his son. “You just want the sticker to park wherever the hell you want to when I’m not around.” Besides, Morris Allan wasn’t handicapped. He was just terminally slow, and passionately interested in everything around him. Not only the horse turds that brought back such happy memories, but the newspapers that skittered by in the cold embrace of the wind. His special talent was reading the headlines as the papers blew past. It was amazing how much money you could save in a year by reading that way.

“Too bad we don’t have a stall to clean out,” Ben told his father as they walked. “You and me. It would be good for us.”

His father raised his rheumy eyes.

“What is this, what we’re doing, if it’s not quality time?” Morris Allan was a specialist in the changing psycho-jargons of the day. Intensive tv-watching will do that for a person.

“All time should be quality time,” Ben said. “Unfortunately, it’s not. Most of the time I’m just trying to get somewhere else.”

“Well, you are a family man,” his father told him. “A kid, a wife, a job. Like the Greek in the movie said, the whole catastrophe.”

A new object caught Morris Allan’s attention: a pair of shoes set neatly by the front door of a business. They weren’t derelict. A little run-down at the heels maybe, a little scuffed in the toes, but nothing that a respectable middle-class guy wouldn’t hesitate to wear on a weekend.

“I wonder who lost them,” Ben said. “He must have cold feet by now.”

His father sized up the shoes, then glanced at his own. “They’d fit me, I’m willing to bet. And they’re in better shape than mine.”

“Come on, you can’t do that. You don’t know who they belong to!” Morris Allan smiled. The kid was a pushover. Toy with his middleclass need to maintain appearances, and he’s yours.

“Some guy,” he mused, “walked away from his shoes. Left them here. Walked away from his life. That’s a good one!”

“He did it barefoot too,” Ben added, relieved that his father wasn’t going to put on some stranger’s shoes after all.

“That’s the only way to go,” his father said. “Keep it simple.” Then he saw that the shoes were parked on the doorstep of a shoemaker’s shop.

“Look at this! They must have walked here by themselves. Save our soles! Who says shoes don’t have a mind of their own?”

When they finally reached ben Allan’s car, Morris leaned heavily against it to catch his breath. He was all out of jokes. His back was aching, and the walk had exhausted him, especially the last half block as the street climbed the flank of the Mountain, still covered in snow. But he was not too tired to notice the car parked in front of his son’s serviceable sedan. It was the same make and model as his, and the same forest-green colour mottled by rust. Behind it stood another one, identical. Only the odour-suppressing cardboard pine trees dangling from the rear-view mirrors inside the other two cars set them apart.

“Do you really think you can be happy in a democracy?” Morris wondered.

“Democracy guarantees you the pursuit of happiness,” his son told him. “It doesn’t guarantee you’ll catch it. Which is why everyone is so busy in a democracy. Busy in hot pursuit.”

“All those choices,” the old man lamented. “We didn’t used to have that problem. You go into a grocery store, there are rows and rows of cereal boxes. How do you choose? How do you know which one is best?”

“It’s actually easier than it looks.”

“Is that so?”

“The cereal is all the same. Just the boxes are different. So it’s not such a terribly hard decision after all.”

Morris allan slumped into an unresponsive state during the ride back to his residence. If you didn’t know better, you might have called it sleep, a well-deserved rest after a day spent taking in the parade on the cold streets. But Morris’s rest was born of something more sinister. A tiny stroke, some synapse misfiring due to the grime of age, had pushed him into momentary unconsciousness as Ben drove him home, around the foot of the extinct volcano that stands in the centre of Montreal.

This sort of accident had happened before, and more than once. The first time, at the giant Metropolitan food store, had been a shock. Ben’s wife had sent him there to buy a few canisters of those sugar-ridden fruit-punch drinks that his son Tony loved. Ben invited his father along for the ride. The idea was to get Morris to pick out a few fresh fruits and vegetables. If his father chose them himself, he might actually eat them once he got them home.

It happened in the cereal aisle. Maybe that’s what the old man had been getting at with his comments about democracy, happiness and breakfast cereals. There was logic to his father’s wanderings after all — if only Ben could follow it. In that aisle, Morris Allan suddenly froze, as if he were paralyzed. Ben went on walking another dozen steps before he realized his father had fallen behind. There was emptiness where he should have been, like the time Tony disappeared into thin air in a department store when he was a kid. Except this time, Ben had lost his father, not his son. He wheeled around and there was Morris Allan standing in the middle of the aisle, a few paces back, staring straight ahead. The slight tremor in his hands was his only sign of life.

Ben went to his father’s side. Together, they gazed down the brightly lit aisle with the tinkling music of consumerism in their ears. Then the oddest thing happened to Ben. He entered his father’s world, a place he had no business being. The aisle began to swim. The gay, seductive colours of the Froot Loops and Organo-Krisp boxes ran together into a melting, Salvador Dali stream of confusion, a decision that could not be made.

Ben did not like the feeling one bit. He put his hand into his pants pocket and drew out the shopping list his wife Laura had prepared for him. In her precise artist’s hand, she had sketched a cylinder and coloured it citrus yellow. A carton of frozen juice. Next to it, another just like it, coloured purple, for grape flavour.

He had an errand here, a purpose, and it was not to submit to paralysis at the hand of cereal boxes. He slipped his wife’s list back into his pocket, then put his hand on his father’s shoulder. Morris looked up at him and blinked hard.

“What? What’s wrong? What do you want?”

Then he thrust his little finger into his mouth.

That quickly, everything went back to normal: his father’s crude gestures, his comical crankiness, their usual jousting and jiving. Ben wondered where his father had been for those few seconds as he stood in the aisle. The noonday demon — was it melancholy or old age? — had stopped the clock for him.

Ben drove as smoothly as he could over the winter-damaged pavement to keep from waking his father. He was an untrained caregiver, and every session with the old man, each of his father’s losses, no matter how small, exhausted him. He knew he should develop some kind of defence system against what was happening to Morris and himself, but he didn’t know where to start.

Then there were those extravagant things his father had taken to saying, like this afternoon with the smoky-haired Irish woman. I’d bend her over my knee.... And the rest that Ben preferred not to repeat, but couldn’t help remembering, I’d change her oil, and the picture of his father those words conjured up. An old man with a defiant, raging phallus, a Philip Roth character, right in his own family.

As a child, Ben imagined his father as a model of proper behaviour. Finally, the son had reached the age when he was ready to revise family history. He glanced over at Morris. His collapsed mouth was working over some food debris, and he was wearing a perplexed expression even as he slept, as if wondering how old age could have happened to him. There was certainly nothing proper about the old man now, and there probably never had been. It had taken Ben this long to figure out that basic truth: Morris Allan was a man like all the rest.

A few minutes later, ben pulled into the parking lot of his father’s residence and cut the motor. His father snapped awake.

“Where am I?”

“At your place. That’s where you wanted to go, remember?”

“Of course I do!”

Morris Allan glared at the facade of the Mature Living Centre. “You know you’re supposed to drive around to the side.”

Ben did know that. He knew all about his father’s aversion for the front lobby where the residents of the Centre gathered in their wheelchairs and flopped against their walkers, displaying the insults of age. Morris went there once, the day he chose the Mature Living Centre as his future home, then announced he would never go again.

“I don’t get it,” his son reasoned. “You want to live here, but you don’t want to go in the front door. Do you mind explaining?”

“It’s them!” Morris pointed his chin in the direction of the old people.

“What about them? They’re just hanging out.”

“They stink,” his father declared loudly, doing his best to make sure everyone who wasn’t deaf could hear him.

He was right. No amount of Pine-Sol or Mr. Clean could mask the cutting ammoniac essence of old age. The old folks had fought air freshener and won, hands down.

“Don’t they know they stink?” Morris pursued.

He raised his voice a notch to hit the tone he used when he figured the world needed one of his lessons.

“Maybe they don’t know,” his son offered. “Or maybe they’ve transcended petty social conventions.”

“Nonsense. Transcendence is for me. Not them.”

“I’m sure they feel the same way.”

“I doubt it.”

“Maybe they want to stink. Maybe they’ve gotten tired of a lifetime of soap. Maybe they’re making a statement.”

“If you call drooling a statement.”

“They probably don’t care very much for you either. Look at you — you’re not disabled enough to be here. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I guess that’s what you wanted.”

“Are we going to go through this again?”

The Allan males had quarrelled over the choice of the Mature Living Centre, but what old folks’ home is chosen in an atmosphere of contentment? And it wasn’t even a heartfelt quarrel, since Ben knew he had no chance of winning. Morris Allan was overqualified for this facility, with these kinds of people. The few who could still respond to stimulus gathered in the lobby in prayerful attitude at the foot of a tall metal post onto which a television set was bolted, too high up to let anyone change the channel. On the screen, if the audience was lucky — and often they were — a war would be playing. Gulf War I, Gulf War II, the reruns of some war declared won long ago, even as the casualties kept mounting.

Ben had nothing against the lobby-dwellers; he didn’t have to live with them. He wondered what they understood from the pictures on tv. It was clear from their rapt attention that they appreciated the pyrotechnics, the noise and flashes of light and grainy, fleeting images shot from thirty thousand feet. This was entertainment, not politics, and even less so news. They seemed to have grasped that much, which put them right at the avant-garde of society.

The quarrel over the residence began after Jeannette’s death, when Ben invited his father to leave Chicago and come live with him in Montreal.

“It is not good for man to be alone,” Ben told him.

“Don’t quote Scripture,” his father told him. “It isn’t natural on you.” Then to his utter surprise, Morris accepted his invitation. Half of it, anyway.

He agreed to come to this foreign city in a foreign country that was happy to welcome him, even if he was the furthest possible thing from a productive member of society. Morris Allan would never add a cent to the gdp, even if he lived to be a hundred. But economics did not dissuade the immigration bureaucrat who received him and his son in a drab office in downtown Montreal where a picture of the Queen and two crossed beavers presided. The bureaucrat behaved more like a social worker than a border guard. Morris Allan’s pensions from one source and another would leave him in a comfortable state, he assured the Allans. Besides, the solicitous official added, uniting families was a Canadian government priority.

“Jesus Christ!” Morris Allan burst out. “I could have used you around the house back when I was raising the kids!”

The half of the invitation Morris Allan did not accept involved living under his son’s roof.

“I’m not going to come and live with you, so stop asking,” he told Ben after their date with the immigration department. “I had a lifetime of domestic routine. Do you honestly think I need any more at this point in my life? Anyway, your wife would kill you if I accepted, and you damned well know it. I’m not just doing myself a favour, I’m doing you one too. So thank me. Look for some kind of place for me, okay? And please, no Jewish Home for the Aged with a Sabbath elevator that automatically stops at every floor. If I’m surrounded by my own kind, it’ll kill me. You don’t want that on your hands, do you?”

Ben struck back by refusing to look for a home on his own. Morris Allan had to join in the search, otherwise the deal was off. The search did not take long. Morris set his heart on the very first place he visited, the Mature Living Centre, set in a 1950s-era suburb with low bungalows, tight backyards and trees struggling to make their way in the world. It was the one residence on Ben’s list most unsuited to Morris, where he would practically be the only person who could walk and talk and eat and look after his personal hygiene without help.

In the land of the blind, Ben thought the day his father moved in, dragging his own suitcases up the stairs of the side entrance. But later, when the synapses of Morris Allan’s brain began making strange and unrepressed leaps, Ben wondered whether his father hadn’t picked this place in preparation for what he knew was coming. upstairs in the centre, ben watched the battle between the key and the lock, but did not offer to help. He was not allowed to. The key quivered in his father’s hand, and would not stay still long enough to enter the lock. But his father had perfected a method that allowed him to retain his autonomy, as living on one’s own was called in the jargon of aging. Morris Allan placed the key next to the lock with one hand, then steered it home with the other. His face lit up with brief triumph, then he stepped into his small suite of rooms.

He went and sat down heavily in his armchair. Ben hovered by his side for a few seconds, then looked for something to do. On the bookshelf, he found his favourite photograph of his mother and wiped the patina of dust off it. In it she looked like the Queen of Sheba, or Esther, one of those lusty Bible heroines. Dark-red lips, even in the black-and-white snapshot of the time, heavy breasts, jet-black hair, a dress with flowers on it that Ben knew were red too, as red as her lips, hibiscus, something luxuriant and tropical, the last flower you would ever see in Chicago, which was the point of a dress like that.

In the photo, she balanced lightly on Morris’s knee, which was no mean feat since she was easily as big as he was. He had one hand around her hip, and the other clutched an empty glass. The great age of mixed drinks: highballs, they were called.

The children had come by then. Her wide hips said as much. But that night they were safely in bed down the hall, stacked like cordwood in the little room they’d divided into zones, with invisible but no less real lines splitting up the space. Ben, the youngest, had the smallest slice. You could not find two boys more different than Ben and his older brother Howard. Sometimes, with his usual dubious taste, Morris Allan wondered if he were father to both of them, and if not, which one was the intruder. And then there was Marvin, the oldest, who had his own room, and who seemed to have given birth to himself, so slight was his contact with the rest of the family.

“Stop worrying her, okay?”

His father’s voice startled Ben, and he nearly dropped the picture. Morris put out his hand but Ben would not surrender it. “I’m just taking the dust off.”

“I like the dust.”

“She’s beautiful in this picture.”

Morris finally got the photo away from his son.

“Yes. But she’s gone, and I’m still here. Well, good for her! Was I ever surprised when she came down with the cancer. She was always stronger than I was.”

“You know, death doesn’t necessarily oblige you just because you yank on its tail and double-dare it. Sometimes it ignores you, out of spite.”

“You sound like a crazy man. Since when does death have a tail?” Morris Allan put the portrait back on the bookshelf. Next to it were snapshots of Ben’s son Tony when he was little, posing with his mother Laura, who added the only Gentile touch to the family gallery. Laura had given Morris his only grandchild, since his other sons had chosen to remain childless — child-free, they called it. Long ago, Howard decided to remain a child himself, a Peter Pan who could not fly, and since he was a child, emotionally at least, he could not have children. His wife had never sprung an accidental pregnancy on him, but she’d found plenty of other ways to retaliate.

“You want to leave,” Morris Allan told his son.

“Who says?”

“You don’t sit down. You’re like a bird on a branch. You never did have any sitzfleisch. Well, good for you. You must have somewhere more important to go.”

“Not at all.”

“Somewhere more interesting than an old folks’ home — imagine that!”

Ben persevered a while longer. He washed his father’s dishes. There were only two of them, but they took some effort to clean since they were deeply incrusted with brown matter. Peanut butter, Ben hoped. At least his father was getting some protein.

Morris watched, bemused, at his son’s attempts to be useful. Ben put away the dish soap underneath the sink. There, he discovered an industrial-size, industrial-strength container of Lysol, property of the Mature Living Centre. The Lysol stood next to a stack of opened packs of Cheez ’n’ Krackers, the two making toxic company together.

He moved on to the fridge. As he suspected, his attentions were needed there too. He threw out a celery heart that had grown mouldy in its stifling plastic sack. He was acquainted with that heart: he’d brought it two visits ago, figuring his father could use a fresh vegetable to supplement the institutional stews he received downstairs in the dining room. The celery would be perfect for spreading his Cheez product on, combining dairy with the benefits of green vegetables, not to mention roughage, something old folks needed, so he’d heard. But his father never ate the celery. How could he have, considering the state of his teeth? In his zeal to do good, Ben had forgotten about his father’s mouth.

“You still haven’t sat down,” his father chided. “You’ve got hemorrhoids? Maybe a problem with your nerves?”

Ben shrugged. Maybe that was it: a nerve problem. His entire body yearned for the door, and he strained to keep that from showing — unsuccessfully, it seemed. The sight of the Lysol and Cheez ‘n’ Krackers, the rotting celery heart, all those things threw him into a deep and sudden melancholy. Maybe keeping company with old age was not such a great idea after all.

“I’ll be back,” Ben told him. “I’ll come next week.”

“I bet you will.”

“You rather I wouldn’t?”

“Do as you like.”

“I’m doing it for me, not for you, in case you’re wondering.”

“That’s good, son.” His father smiled, a rare moment of outright sincerity. “That’s what I want to hear.”

Ben headed for the door on the wings of those words. But escape was not that easy.

“You should stay with your wife,” his father told him as he reached for the doorknob. “I know it’s not easy. Especially these days.”

“Hasn’t it always been hard, even in your day?”

“No,” he answered emphatically. “There wasn’t all that free pussy running around. It’s like cereal boxes. Too many choices.”

“Women and breakfast cereal. That’s a comparison my liberated mother would have loved!”

“You leave her to me, okay? And that’s an order! Go on and take care of the living. That means yourself.”

Ben returned to hug his father. The old man squeezed his shoulders until it hurt. His embrace was better than a thousand smart-aleck jokes. Then, finally, Ben made it out the door into a world better suited to a man of his restlessness.