"Be Heavy"

by RICHARD HAGOPIAN

1

MY COUSIN Donabed made our house his home three days after his mother, my father’s sister, died in the old country. He came with his deep, sad face and flashing eyes at the request of my father, who wrote him a long letter upon hearing of my aunt’s death. It was a letter filled with pathos and the kind of deep understanding only death in the family can bring out. And Donabed was touched. He was no child, this Donabed; he wasn’t a day under thirty-eight, but we saw his bright eyes fill with tears when he came to our house, when he touched my father’s cheek with his and expressed his saddest thoughts of life, death, and the withering family tree.

“You have make me happy man,” he said to the assembled family. And he especially addressed some appropriate remarks to the children, who had clustered around the first orphan they had ever seen, and who were wondering if this would be the first relative who would give nickels and dimes instead of a penny or two. He said he would love to live with us — that he would love to eat and sleep under the same roof with us. And he did all these things. He lived with us; and he ate and slept more than any of us — even my brother Reuben.

But we all were happy to let him do these things, especially my father, who had always favored Donabed and made his name a byword whenever he wished to discuss the things of the mind with his children. As far back as I can remember it was always: “Be heavy like your cousin Donabed.” And even though Donabed was a hefty man by weight, my father did not mean heavy in this sense. He meant the heaviness of seriousness, the kind that comes with long study, the love of argument, music, and painting. That is the kind of heaviness he meant.

When Donabed came to our house it gave my father a chance to start out afresh about the heaviness of his nephew. He loved to talk about him, especially when the younger man wasn’t about, saying, “My children, watch your cousin Donabed and be heavy like him. My children, listen to that man. He has studied everything.”

It wasn’t long before Donabed was bearing out my father’s words by saying important things, by impressing everybody he met.

“Can you control you sensation?” He flung fearless questions like these at my growing sisters. If my parents were around, they nodded assent. They knew that he knew. They knew that he was expressing in the American tongue what their language and old-country reticence embarrassed them to say. They knew that their children needed moral instruction. Donabed was doing all this the fearless way — the heavy way that didn’t embarrass anyone.

The encouragement of my parents resulted in Donabod’s finding any and every occasion to lecture the youth of our family, until no day passed without some stark and shocking question being fired at either my sisters or me.

Coupled with his great heaviness for moral instruction, Donabed had another consuming love. He loved Art. He loved to talk about Art. He loved to talk about its value, how, “When evolution no good, revolution coming. Everything change, die, no good. Only Art live, always good.”

This was interesting at first, even though we didn’t understand what he was saying, but after a while it became tiring. Yes, and it always ended up with Art’s being the salvation of the world.

Sometimes he brought home pamphlets and books and forced us to read them, saying, “Read, read good stuffs. Too much jonk you teacher give you in school. Read what big man say.” Then with great sarcasm: “Let me see jonk you read in school.”

And when we showed him our textbooks he flipped his fingers through the pages hastily; then tossing the book aside, he authoritatively proclaimed them to be “jonk.”

After a little while we read as little “jonk" as possible and as much “deep book” as he could find to bring home to us. But just reading the Art books wasn’t enough; we had to listen to long lectures about them. He loved to talk about the human figure as being the most beautiful thing in life.

“See line from here to here?” Then he produced a picl ure of a naked man or woman and we all looked for the line. Once my sisters began to giggle in the middle of one of his lectures. This made my cousin furious.

“Why you laugh?” he inquired indignantly. “Control you sensation.” Then he pounded his fist on the table dramatically and the lecture came to an end. He told my father about this episode — about the picture and how my sisters had giggled. My father seemed a little surprised when he heard about the naked pictures, but he had confidence in his nephew, and that evening he lectured us.

“When people try to teach, be smart, listen. Be smart. Don’t be zero.”

We realized that my father was on Donabed’s side and that he meant what he said. He was even copying his nephew’s English. After that we listened more closely when he showed us pictures of naked men and women and instructed us about “line from here to here.”

This went on month after month, and it all amounted to this: we could now see line from here to here and control our sensation at the same time. And that was something.

2

BUT this kind of thing was beginning to tell on us, especially when he began talking about “different school of the master.” We couldn’t quite figure out what the masters were doing in school, and the special fact that he tried to impress upon us that “one school use line from here to here; other school change line from here to there.”

Nothing was sacred to our cousin — not even our young, tender period of youth, our pleasant little foibles and bits of foolishness. It was always: “Grow, grow, read good book, look at picture of master. Art is best thing in life. Try to make evolution of you life.” Then for the thousandth time: “When evolution no good — revolution coming!”

Not one day passed without our cousin’s having impressed upon us the value of Art, of good Art, where the line went from here to here. How many happy meals were interrupted and made sad when, after having eaten his fill of stuffed grape leaves, or in the midst of a mouthful, he exclaimed, “What jonk teacher tell you in school today?” But before we could answer he had already commenced on the value of Art.

Sometimes his criticisms of our schoolteachers and their jonk overflowed and some of it touched my father and mother. He never came out and accused them directly of not having brought up their children on something more substantial than jonk, but some of his remarks made my father look a little confused. Once our cousin even went so far as to say that poor people who had no job shouldn’t have large families, and all the time he was looking at me, the youngest member at the table. My father looked at my mother, but she changed the subject with some strange remark about the apples in the back yard.

After a while dinner became a time to be dreaded. Everyone was on edge —the whole family. One had to do all of one’s eating before cousin Donabed got in the first word, because after that there was no eating. How fervently we prayed that cousin Donabed might have a good appetite that evening so that he would eat much and give us a chance to eat much before lecturing us! Everybody looked worn, even my father. He was beginning to look weighed down with our cousin’s heaviness. And even though he didn’t say much — for the sake of his dead sister, we thought — things couldn’t go on this way. No, they couldn’t go on this way.

One evening a crisis came and hung over our family until our cousin left. We were all eating dinner when out of a clear sky my sister began to giggle.

“What is it?” asked my father as he salted his soup,

“Something funny our teacher said in school today,” answered my sister through her laughter.

The humor in her eyes was contagious, and whether it was just that we had waited for such an occasion to join in her laughter, or whether it was from the nervous reaction in anticipation of what was to follow, we all joined in my sister’s chuckling, until even my father smiled and commented, “What crazy kids I have. They laugh for nothing.”

But the troubled look on my cousin’s face showed that he did not approve of laughter at the table; especially over nothing.

“What for you laugh for?” he questioned my sister crossly. “For jonk you teacher tell you in school? In my family we don’t laugh like sillies at eat-time!” He voiced this in my father’s direction.

My sister stopped laughing. Something in my cousin’s voice had hurt her, as it had hurt the rest of us, for we had stopped laughing too. Suddenly, without warning, my sister burst into tears and fled from the table. For a moment after she left there was silence; nothing happened. Then my father dealt the table a tremendous blow with his fist, and in the angriest Armenian I have ever heard, exploded: —

“For the love of God, you have brought tears to this happy table. You have changed an innocent child’s laughter into crying.” Then with the veins in his head sticking out, and in emphatic English: “What the hell business you come my house to make my kids crazy!” He continued to look murderously into my cousin’s face, repeating, “What the hell business,” four or five times more.

When my cousin regained his composure from this surprise attack, he wiped his mouth, muttering, “You are not talking to a child. You are talking to your dead sister’s son. He is not a child. He was merely trying to teach your mannerless children manners.”

He left the room. I think my father would have thrown something after him if my mother hadn’t moved the sugar bowl and the soup things out of his reach.

After that there was an unhealthy silence around our house. No one seemed to be happy in the same room with anyone else. The children banded together in a group and usually talked in hushed whispers, except when they were away from home and could feel free to gloat a little about the victory they had won over their painful cousin. The hardest job of all fell on my mother. It was she who had to keep the peace. It was she who had to see that in spite of the strain between the various members of the family, each one was fed and kept clean. At times when the tension became too great and she was irritable with my father for some little thing or other, he quickly perceived the cause of all that was wrong and threatened to remove it.

“Tomorrow he goes.”

“No, no, Dikran, that would be foolish. What would people think?”

“I don’t care what people will think. I am sick and tired of having that lazy man in my house.” Then he expressed his reasons. “It is six months and not a day’s work has he done. Six months! What is he thinking about? What does he think of all day when he is in bed? How old does he think a man must be before he thinks of going to work and raising a family? When I was his age I was the father of three children, with one coming.”

But he stopped here because, the year after, he had been stricken with liver trouble and his oldest son had had to go to work in order to support him and his family.

But my mother was willing to suffer a little longer and leave things in the hands of God.

“He is your sister’s son. After all, it is better that he should be here than in New York. The job he had in the restaurant was no good for him. Besides, what Levon Pesa said about the women in New York — ” Then she stopped and changed the subject.

But my father was not willing that the matter should die so easily. He proclaimed that it was a matter neither of our cousin’s health nor of the women in New York, but just the moral obligation he felt toward his dead sister.

“He is not good. Any job is good for him. About the other things? These things will happen if lie is in New York or any other place in the world. Ach, I am sick and tired.”

Then with the realization that he had committed another grave blunder in his life by inviting the orphan Donabed to our house, he became sad and smoked numerous cigarettes.

3

WITHIN a fortnight my mother was complaining of her heart. She said it pounded so hard she couldn’t breathe. The next day she had a bad spell and my father put her to bed and called the doctor. The doctor came and saw my mother; then he talked with my father for a long time behind closed doors. We couldn’t hear a word of what he said, but when he left, my father was a different man. He looked determined. When we asked him what was the matter with our mother, he merely replied that she was tired, that she had been working too hard. We felt that the strain of trying to keep our home together since the evil Donabed had disrupted it had proved too much for her heart. It had made her so tired that now she was sick.

And from the look in my father’s eyes it was no secret to us that he planned to remove the cause of her illness as soon as it returned from the library. It would be a painful job, and if they had words or even blows (for my father really looked determined), my mother might hear them and get worse. All this worried the children. We talked things over and wondered what we could do. But we found no solution. My father couldn’t be approached. So we said nothing and just waited for our cousin to come home.

But our waiting brought someone other than my cousin Donabed. It brought another man —an Irishman, I think. He came just an hour after the doctor left. He came in a large blue automobile. The first thing he said when we opened the door was: —

“There’s nothing to be worried about. I’m Inspector Shanahan from headquarters and I’ll be wantin’ to ask a few questions.

“Is the Missus of the house in?” he asked my father.

“She sick,” my father answered, pointing to the door of her room.

“Ah, that’s a shame,” went on the inspector as he took out a little book from his pocket.

My father looked worried. “No one hurt my family?” he questioned eagerly.

“No, no, nothing like that,” went on the policeman bravely. “I just want to ask a few questions about someone who’s living here. They tell me he’s a hefty man with black hair. Does a person answering to that description live here?”

We all looked at my father. He was excited and hadn’t got the drift of the policeman’s English. We translated for him.

“He my nephew. He live here since mother die; my sister, in old country.”

“Ah, that’s a shame, surely a pity. But where is he now?”

“In the library, I think, mister,” said my sister.

“ I would have thought so,” said Mr. Shanahan. “And now let’s take a look around if you don’t mind.”

By this time my father was so alarmed he couldn’t understand a word the stranger was saying and we had to translate everything. The policeman was a nice man and after a while he spoke only to the children, saying, “Tell the old gentleman this” or “Ask him that.”

“ I’d like to look around a bit in his room. Where does he sleep?”

We pointed to Donabed’s door. We followed him and stayed outside the room and looked in. The policeman was looking for something. He went through everything, tables, drawers, under the carpet — everywhere. Finally he lifted up the mattress and, after one look, said, “O.K.”

By this time my father was at his side. “What O.K.?” he asked. “What these things?”

“Art pictures,” answered Mr. Shanahan, still examining the things under the mattress. “Lots of complaints about pictures being torn out of books at the library. Been going on for some time.”

My poor father was beside himself. “We honest people,” he pleaded. “Thing like this never happen in family whole life. My wife sick, please don’t say nothing.”

“No,” said Mr. Shanahan, “that ain’t our business. You’re good people. I know your boy Jake. By the way, how is Jake these days?”

And we all answered, “Swell!” Were we proud of our brother!

The policeman made a few notes in his book and picked up the pictures, some of which we recognized as the ones from the school of master with line from here to here.

“Well, I’ll be leaving you now. And I hope the lady of the house will be feeling all right again soon, W’e’ll be pickin’ the heavy fellow up at the library.”

“Will they put him in jail?” ventured my sister.

“Well, I don’t think we’ll be too hard on him. First offense. Good-bye.”

We all said good-bye and watched the blue automobile go off. A lot of people were standing around outside. They must have seen the police sign on the car. Without a word, my father closed the door.

For a long time no one spoke. My father sat down in a corner and smoked, inhaling great drafts of smoke. The rest of us tried to do something, but we felt funny inside and couldn’t. Once when my mother called from the other room, I went over to my father to ask what I should do. But I couldn’t talk. There were tears in his eyes. He turned his head away. Then we all felt ashamed and sad. We knew we shouldn’t see our painful cousin again. That was wonderful. But we were wondering deep inside if it was worth it if this was the price of having him go.