Babe the Blue Ox

IN THE same spring that I began catching the afternoon DJ’s and spending my off-hours perfecting a hollow baseball bat, my father was hospitalized. For our last visit with him we drove to the hospital in Uncle Teddy Bear’s convertible — my mother up front beside Uncle Teddy Bear, busy writing long lists to herself on household notepaper, and Sis and I in the back seat, our hair unseated by the wind. No matter how obvious it was to us or how appropriate it was to my father, we were not to mention Death; this was my mother’s single requirement for that trip. “Now I don’t want you children saying anything about the doctor’s opinion” was the way she commanded us. And so, when we four stationed ourselves like compass points at the corners of his bed, we stood piously. It occurred to me that if he died at that very moment and if we could have mustered the strength to lift his frame, wasted but still huge, we could have been his pallbearers.

Because of my enchantment with such journalistic paradoxes as no china came from China and no Turkish towels were seen in Turkey, I was always disappointed to find his sheets tucked into hospital corners. The clear plastic oxygen tent and the elaborate machine going “bup, bup, bup” discreetly off to the side were also missing. Uninspired, I busied myself at the foot of his bed sliding my lucky little finger — the one with the family ring, the family crest — inside the prim fold of the sheet. Across from me, my sister intently chewed her fingertips. My father, for his part, was propped up by a stack of pillows and looked willing, as he always did for our visits.

Uncle Teddy Bear, the nominal family head and cheerleader in the past weeks, remarked, “Ralph, I can say this: you sure look better. To me anyway. What do you say, Sarah?”

“Definitely,” my mother replied.

My father winked openly at Sis, and she dropped her hand from her mouth and smiled in return. “To top it all, I think I’m getting athlete’s foot,” he whispered.

I winced; quelling the urge to whisper back was the hardest thing about visiting him. For hours I had practiced his whisper toward the vestibule mirror, but since Sis refused to listen, my friends were the only ones to hear my skill, and even they, although captivated, refused to believe that his voice had come to that. I considered it some sort of warrior’s complaint, a battlefield scar.

My mother, who was dismayed by the most innocent mention of my father’s condition or devices, tried to skirt his humor about athlete’s foot by asking if he was eating well. When he answered, grinning, that he got his liquids, she showed us her profile and sighed noisily. My father rapidly changed the subject and inquired about my hollow baseball bat, if it was illegal. “Sort of,” I admitted, and as he laughed his new soundless laugh, I coined a smile.

As usual, it fell to him to direct the conversation. This time he imagined for us the overrunning of his room with the flowers from his well-wishers. The ranks of sprays and bouquets were laid out against three walls of his room, setting up a thick florist smell as bothersome to me as the odor of our downstairs powder room.

“Take some of the damn things home with you, Sarah,” my father said. “I feel like I’m living in a rain forest.”

“You said it,” Uncle Teddy Bear agreed. “Boy, oh, boy.”

“I love the scent,” my mother said. “It’s like a wonderful little tropical country. No one ever gave me flowers like this.”

He offered them again. “I can’t find any more nurses who’ll take them.”

“Used up the supply of nurses already, darling?” She twisted a cigarette into her holder, saying, “I hope they won’t mind me stretching the rules a teeny bit. What a magnificent aroma.”

“The days are long gone when you needed buckets of flowers to cover up the stench of people dying,” my father whispered forcefully. “It’s all fumigated nowadays. Sanitized.”

My mother clapped her hands, a curt and foolish sound. “That sort of talk gets us nowhere, Ralph.” She blew her nose and mumbled a long sentence at the same time; the only word I caught was “smell.” “I suppose we ought to be going,” she said, discarding the handkerchief into her alligator purse.

My father protested, and my mother sighed and said, “Well, if you must know the truth, darling, I can’t stand to hear you talk like that in front of the children.”

I was indifferent, looking out the window until I felt his glance, and Sis had been absorbed in scratching the back of her neck. He gave us a quizzical little nod, a change came over his face, and he said, “I wish you wouldn’t go right now.”

Uncle Teddy Bear, perplexed by my father’s tone, coughed against his fist. “Is there anything you want from your house? Or mine too, for that matter.”

“Sure. A hot-water bottle.” This amused him more than anything else he’d said. And then, brightly, he told us about a book he was reading — Jefferson’s letters — and reached for it on the nightstand. He found his place, said, “Listen to this,” and as we all cocked our ears for what was going to be scarcely audible, began to read aloud, casually and articulately. On some sort of telling point at the end of the second sentence, he looked up.

My mother startled us by ordering, “Stop that. For Christ’s sake, cut it out. You can’t read. It’s bad for your voice.” She turned away from the bed and shook her head so violently that strands of hair slipped their bobby pins and fell over her temples.

“I agree with Sarah,” Uncle Teddy Bear said hastily. “I think it’s bad for you.”

“Nonsense,” he told them. “ Just let me finish this for you. It’s brilliant.” Instead of beginning where he had left off, he returned to the first sentence. My mother bolted, slamming the door; it rebounded to give us a view of her trotting away down the hall. I smirked. For a few seconds my father read his book silently, and then he said to his brother, “You’ll help out with things, won’t you, Feel?”

“Sure I will, Ralph. You know that. Lookit, I’d better catch up with Sarah. She was in quite a huff,” and he went off after my mother.

As I shifted toward the stack of get-well cards, my father said, “If the sum of those cards meant anything, I’d be Paul Bunyan. I’m going to send every one of them a diehard card,” and he chuckled to himself. And then abruptly, he turned solemn and ordered my sister to his side.

Sis approached him hesitantly, walking her hands along the edge of the bed. When abreast of him. she suddenly lurched for his hand and brought it, wrapped in hers, against her chest. Steadily he drew her down until he could whisper in her ear: when he stopped, she kissed him damply between the eyebrows. But he wasn’t finished; he either repeated or added to what he had said before, and finally she withdrew nodding. They both appeared grateful. “OK, kids. Go find your mother and Uncle Teddy Bear.”

Going down in the elevator, Sis talked to herself while tentatively pressing the buttons of the selfcontrol panel. “What did the old man say?” I interrupted her.

“Nothing,” she replied amiably.

Together we found my mother and Uncle Teddy Bear in the parking lot where they waited for us with the engine running, and from there to our driveway my mother sobbed — a convulsive tearless sort of lament. My sister and I looked away.

FOR several minutes in the evening before my father’s death I stood in the pantry behind Sis and watched her backside as she mixed old-fashioneds for my mother and Uncle Teddy Bear. I was a student of her boxy figure while she was still and of her graceless seafaring walk while she was moving. When I told her, “It’s like we’re waiting for a monster. A monster from the deepy depths,” I was trying to decide where the bra straps lay under her blouse.

“I suppose” was all she would say.

The hospital had forewarned us, and during that evening the household was hushed and expectant, a vigil which quickly became tedious. To relieve my boredom, I took the tray of drinks from Sis and carried it to the adults in the parlor, hoping my mother’s antics had improved. Earlier in the evening she had alternated aimless pacing and prattle with sitting stock-still; now she was stretched out on the couch, her head in Uncle Teddy Bear’s lap.

“How you doing, Jake?” asked Uncle Teddy Bear as he reached for his drink. “How you feeling, boy?”

“OK.”

“Good, good. That’s what we like to hear.”

In spite of her position my mother sipped her drink agilely. “Sit down, Jake. Your uncle and I want to have a few words with you.”

I sat down obediently on the edge of the marbletop coffee table. By turns they gave me their thoughtful and dutiful talk: that Uncle Teddy Bear could not stay with us forever, that I was going to be the Man of the House (“But you want to know something?” Uncle Teddy Bear said. “I think you’re up to it. Or we wouldn’t talk to you like this. You can bet on it”), and that, as a hardboiled but necessary revelation, my father was not going to last much longer. It all seemed reasonable to me, reasonable and inappropriate, and I skirmished by staring at their shifting eyes. It was Uncle Teddy Bear’s turn to add something when my mother rolled away from me and said into the back of the sofa, “Damn, damn, tell him to go away, Tech He looks just like Ralph.”

“Well, I hope he’ll act like his father. Your father was a great man, Jake. Great. Maybe you’d better pull out of here for a while; your mother’s a little upset. You can understand that.” Mulling over the man-to-man tone of his last sentence, I left them alone.

At the kitchen table Sis was dexterously cutting out pictures of fashion models for her collection. Later they would be taped on the wall of her bedroom, chinking in between the ones already posted, i took up her fountain pen and drew in underclothes on her rejects as I repeated the conference in the parlor. “They’re all shook up,” I said.

“All shook up,” she repeated, snipping an oval around two arm-in-arm models. “It’s natural.”

“Natural as sin. Natural as nature. Snatch ural. Why don’t they do something besides lie around? Uncle Teddy Bear just sits around on his fat behind.”

“He does a lot.”

“Like what?”

“It’s very important to Mummy to have him around, Jake. You have to understand that. He helps keep her calm.”

“Keeps her lid screwed on.”

Sis smiled absently, keeping her eyes on her work like a seamstress. Nothing I ever said could budge her; my mother, currently off-bounds, was a much better target. The magazine turned one way and the scissors another until I said, “Are we going to move?”

“How do you mean?”

“After the old man dies?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, opening the shears into an X and laying them on the page. “Maybe he won’t die.”

“But he’s going to,” I insisted.

“Yes, I know. But maybe he won’t. Maybe nothing will happen at all.”

I proclaimed, “Everything’s going to happen,” trying out a flamboyant, but to me harmless, sentiment.

“Maybe everything will just fizzle out,” she said, “Just go off on its own.” In small jerky arcs she crumbed the slivers of paper with the dishcloth. “Whenever you have a chance, Jake, I wish you’d take out the trash.”

“ ‘And wash out the pail,’ ” I recited. “Are you going to sell your beetle?”

On her sixteenth birthday my father had given her a small foreign car. It sat in the garage for two months while my mother checked and rechecked with the director of the department of motor vehicles, and finally, on the same day my father had gone to the hospital, Sis was given permission to drive it to school and afterward until sunset. Considering my question until I thought she had veered from it, she said flatly, “No.”

That night I was unwatched and unprompted, and went to bed late. Just before dawn I was awakened by my mother’s wailing; it was Sis, dressed in wintertime pajamas, who came into my room and said the hospital had called — my father was dead. She told it as though it were news, with a hint of emergency in her voice.

WHEN I came down late in the morning, Sis was scrambling eggs for Uncle Teddy Bear, who was beating the bottom of the sink with his fist. The garbage disposal had stopped working in the middle of the orange peels, and Uncle Teddy Bear first flayed it, then teased it with a pencil. “All we need,” he said on his way to the phone. “All we need. This is all your mother needs.” After the repairman, he called the family minister. It took several calls to rout him out, and he and Uncle Teddy Bear immediately began bickering. “What do you mean by that sort of statement?” I heard Uncle Teddy Bear shout into the receiver, and, “I’m not asking for your opinions, John, I’m asking for your services.” Finally he said, “Then let him rot for all I care, you hypocrite. The letter of the law, my whatzis,” and deserted the house by the garden door. Sis gave me his eggs, and being either gracious or muddled, a cup of coffee.

If Sis was upset by the telephone conversation, it was concealed from me behind the household motions of scrubbing breakfast dishes. When my mother appeared, Sis served her silently, and for a while it seemed as though my father’s funeral were forgotten. Eventually, Sis sat beside my mother and described Uncle Teddy Bear’s failure. “Oh, God,” my mother whimpered when Sis was finished. “I just can’t face that. Try and do something, will you? Find another minister. Do anything.” While my mother stared into her coffee, Sis telephoned a Unitarian minister who had at times been my father’s handball partner. Swiftly they decided upon cremation (as my father had wished), no funeral (a surprise, a request given out in the handball court), a memorial service (even if he had forbidden it). Sis said “yes, yes” several times and hung up, but instead of looking appeased, her face was set in a workaday attitude, as though something had neutralized her success.

Later in the morning I went to use the pantry toilet and found the door locked. “Is that you, Jake?” she called out.

“Hurry up.”

“Jake, what do you think they’re going to do with Daddy’s urn?”

“How should I know?” I said.

“I just hope they do something nice with it.”

“Like what?”

“Something appropriate.”

“Maybe they could put it in the vestibule,” I taunted her. “Maybe right up on the mantelpiece.”

“I just hope they —” and her voice trailed off behind the door.

Whatever slight she imagined for my father’s urn was overlooked as she served my mother and Uncle Teddy Bear on the sun porch. First came scotch, then peanut-butter-and-jellies, then more scotch. Back and forth from the kitchen she went, content in her diligence. In between two trips I overheard Uncle Teddy Bear say, “You don’t have to worry about that girl one single bit, Sarah,” and my mother answered, “Jesus” — a sort of general pronouncement.

SIS and the cook had the sherry glasses rinsed and the decanters filled and on the sideboard in time for the guests. I heard their cars coasting down the gravel driveway, and I went to peer out the stained-glass windows in the vestibule. Through the transparent eye of the Indian Maiden on the left or the clear slit which formed the musket barrel of the Pioneer on the right, I could watch them close their car doors prudently and come up the front steps as gingerly as the Indian Maiden or the Pioneer would have walked in the wilderness. Cousins, friends, and employees came in past me and were greeted by Sis, who took their coats and showed them to the sherry. She was everywhere — answering the door, shepherding them through the rooms in search of my mother or Uncle Teddy Bear, straightening rugs with the heel of her flats, and even, when dispatched by my mother, going upstairs and bringing down the wartime photograph of my father in full dress uniform on some flight deck, the customary dead cigarette in his mouth, and the planes with their folded wings murky in the background. She set it where she was told, beside the sherry.

The front rooms were steadily filling up when Sis discovered the garbage disposal repairman wandering in the back hall. They made a queer pair as she led him through the throng — the uncomfortable repairman in his overalls carrying a stained toolbox and Sis perfectly groomed in bright colors. I made a slow tour of the sun porch and living room before following them into the kitchen, where I found the disposal already fixed and Sis and the repairman at the kitchen table drinking coffee from the best china. Seeing me, Sis leapt from her seat, grabbed my hand, and yanked me toward the table, declaring that Alexander had once worked for Daddy. “Alex,” the man said, rattling my hand; “Jake,” I said sternly. He was beaming, and Sis, who repeated, “Isn’t it wonderful, Jake. Isn’t it wonderful,” was gleeful. Her joy seemed boundless; she kept reaching out for my hand or the hands of the repairman. When Uncle Teddy Bear came into the kitchen to ask about more glasses, I felt rescued. With an adult in the room the repairman became sheepish and packed his tools as Uncle Teddy Bear was saying, “Well, I’ll be. That is a coincidence.”

“It’s more than a coincidence,” insisted Sis. She showed the repairman to the back door, and while Uncle Teddy Bear and I watched, kissed him on the cheek.

Each of us took a tray of sherry glasses into the parlor, tiptoeing, because my mother, hidden among the guests, was making an announcement. “Please, everyone, no flowers. He detested flowers, I don’t know why. Give the money to your favorite charity.” Someone at the French windows asked what his favorite charity was, and my mother answered, “Mental Health.” Behind me Sis whispered, “No, it wasn’t,” and shrugged with benevolence.

My mother started a game which soon involved all the visitors — they had to guess my father’s middle name. It was a family name, one he used so infrequently that the initial was not on his checks. “A great big surprise or something,” she said vaguely, went to the person who guessed it; those who guessed and missed had to pour their own sherry. They thought privately and aloud, singly and in groups, with no one knowing it immediately. My mother began to give hints; it was German, it began with “F.” Only she and Uncle Teddy Bear appeared to know it, and at each guess—Fogel, Flammer, Finkelsdorf—Uncle Teddy Bear choked off his laughter and my mother shook her head and bit her lip coyly. She sat back in her chair, legs crossed, urging them not to give up. Someone finally shouted, “Far-outen”; Uncle Teddy Bear laughed outright, and cried, “ Freundlich.” The hilarity of the name and the sport undermined him.

My mother was outraged. “Teddy, that’s not fair. I’m furious.” But everyone was occupied in agreeing with Uncle Teddy Bear. She stood up and shouted, “Ralph Freundlich Pierce! My husband!” Her handkerchief pressed over her mouth and nose, her eyes streaming, she walked out of the room and up the staircase.

Sis said good-bye to the guests at the front door, shaking hands with the men and touching the women. After the last person she double-bolted the door. “That was beautiful, that business about Alexander,” she said to me.

ON THE day of the service Sis was sober and exacting. She bustled back and forth between the closets of the house, fetching whatever my mother requested or Uncle Teddy Bear asked for on the way, and proving herself uncomplainingly capable in the hurly-burly of our separate preparations. When my mother wanted to change her veil, Sis said, “Yes, I think you do,” and found a second one in her own room. During a lull she had time for herself in the pantry toilet, and when she came out, she was painstakingly made-up, her lips still gummy with the lipstick, her eyes severely outlined, her face a different hue.

“You look like the Whore of Babylon,” I told her.

“I look all right,” she said blandly. “I’m sure.”

“When are we leaving, for Christmas sake?”

“When Uncle Teddy Bear brings his car around. Don’t you want your tie clip?”

“I look all right. I’m positive.”

But in another of the petty mishaps which had pestered us during those few days, the top to Uncle Teddy Bear’s convertible froze in an upright and rigid position like a drawbridge. My mother was snide with Uncle Teddy Bear as wc arranged ourselves in Sis’s car. “Maybe we should take a motorcycle,” she mumbled. Uncle Teddy Bear grimaced and threaded both his hands through the loop of the handhold as we eased past his car in the driveway.

“We could sail it there,” I said, cashing in on my mother’s irritation.

“Very funny,” said Uncle Teddy Bear.

“What a brown day,” my mother said, and our ill humor melted as we all looked out the windows in search of her adjective. I would have said “pea green” instead, I decided.

Usually a brisk driver, Sis drove fastidiously that morning, keeping to her lane and the speed limit. Catching her face in the rearview mirror, seeing her lips tightly rolled, I realized that her driving was more muted than curtailed. Whatever she was dwelling on served to hold her back, and as I rocked back and forth to urge more speed, she shifted languidly. “Step on it,” I mouthed, via the mirror, to her eyes; she looked back on me queerly.

My mother took this time to check our outfits. Turning in her seat, she studied me briefly and said, “Yes. Very handsome,” and granted me a smile. She gave Sis a lengthy and closer inspection before saying, “You do like that dress, don’t you?”

Sis glanced down quickly at her unbelted dress. “You don’t like it?”

“Not very much, I have to say. I don’t like being overcritical of my own children, but it’s not very becoming.”

“It’s ail right. I think it’s all right.”

“Well, you’re wearing it, not me. Who am I to say?”

“You’re my mother,” Sis said, as though it were new information.

My mother looked back at Uncle Teddy Bear and flicked her eyebrows twice.

When we stopped at the end of the line of cars, we were still a block from the church. “Go around them,” my mother ordered Sis; we pulled out and shot to the head of the line, where people let us back in with small knowing waves. Suddenly my mother blurted, “My God, your father was a great man.”

“Yes,” Sis said. “Of course, of course.”

She let us out under the portico, listened to my mother’s instructions, and drove off to find a parking space among the cars which had already filled the church parking lot and both sides of the avenue in front. My mother led us directly through the crowd in the doorway and down the center aisle to the first pew, where our seats were held for us. I felt haughty knowing that the backs of our heads were the center of attention for the whole congregation, and I concentrated on holding my neck as rigid as possible. A man behind us offered my mother fortitude by grasping her shoulder; without looking, she kissed the hand and sent it back.

Sis had not joined us by the time the readings began. In turn the three of us glanced back and to the sides, but she was missing. Throughout the selections from Ecclesiastes and Emerson I kept expecting her to sidle down the pew toward me and take her place. One of my father’s business partners read, and then a woman from Lhe House of Representatives, and still Sis was nowhere in view, By the final meditation I realized that my expectation had carried me all the way through the service. Leaving our pew, my mother was clearly upset, and I was sure Sis’s disappearance was irreversible. But she fell in with us as we passed through the church doors.

My mother held off until we were through the crowd and into the car. “Now where in God’s name were you?'’

“In the back,”she answered.

“Well, you certainly weren’t with us. And you should have been. You know that, don’t you?”

“It was beginning when I got there,”she explained weakly. “I didn’t mind sitting in the back.”

“My God,” my mother said. “I just can’t imagine what you were thinking of. You’re supposed to be with your family at a time like that. What do you think it looks like? To have the family split up. There are certain times when you can’t do just exactly what you feel like doing, darling.”

Uncle Teddy Bear interrupted: “Take it easy, Sarah. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“ Ted, mind your own business,” my mother snapped. “Now, darling, was that too much for me to expect? To have you sit with us?”

Looking toward her side mirror, Sis said, “Anyone can expect anything from anyone.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked my mother, more astonished than angry.

“It means —” Sis began dimly, and then gave up, letting her voice drift off to a hum.

“Let’s just drop the subject,” insisted Uncle Teddy Bear. “Let’s just forget it,”and he sat back in the seat, determining a silence which lasted the rest of the trip and even on through the minutes we waited in the parlor for the cook to set out dinner.

We sat, the four of us, evenly spaced around the dining room table, eating without conversation. Once my mother said to Sis, “Hold your fork the right way,” but Sis continued using her knife and fork in the European manner. The dessert was two scoops of maple walnut ice cream for Uncle Teddy Bear and one each for the rest of us. While I watched, Sis touched the ice cream with her fingers; she was kneading it by the time my mother noticed.

“Good God,” my mother said. “Have you lost your mind?”

Sis stopped, but her hand remained in the dish.

“Go wash your hands,”my mother said tensely. “Go wash your hands, darling, and then I think you’d better go upstairs and have a nice long nap.”

My mother and Uncle Teddy Bear decided to nap also, and so I was left to while away the afternoon in the cellar fussing with my baseball bat. Sis, who was in the habit of coming down to watch me work, never appeared; I assumed that she had fallen asleep. Without an audience my project became laborious, and I grew irritable at the mechanics of it. The stand I had constructed to hold the bat upright in the drill press was wobbly; the motor made questionable sounds; the adjustable bit refused to be adjusted. And when, finally, the cellar was Hooded with a disagreeable odor from the kitchen, I left the bench and ran up the backstairs to protest.

Sis, her face bubbly with sweat, was standing at the stove and peering into a steaming pot. As I came toward her she continued to dip a dish towel into whatever she was brewing. Annoyed by her, by the heat of the kitchen, by the foul chemical smell, I elbowed her aside and looked into the pot. It was filled with odds and ends from the kitchen meat still wrapped in cellophane, gobs of several colors, whole cartons of milk, onion skins, the handle of something, and all of it boiling in a gaseous broth. Coming back on me, she moved me aside and started me on the way to wake up my mother.

The first thing Sis said to my mother was, “It’s not for you.”

“Of course not, darling.” My mother turned off the burner and ushered Sis to the sink.

She did not have to be cajoled. Obediently she held her hands under the water while my mother washed them and then submitted them to a clean towel. “It’s not for you,” she whispered. “It’s for the repairman, Alexander.” My mother nodded.

Uncle Teddy Bear, holding his bathrobe closed around his stomach, glanced into the kitchen before using the library phone to call Sis’s doctor at the sanatorium. Sis was allowed to pack her own suitcase; the three of us waited downstairs for the doctor’s car. In a few minutes I heard her come halfway down the stairs and stop. When I went out from the parlor, she was sitting on the landing beside her suitcase. “Why don’t you wait down here?” I tried to persuade her, but she shook her head.

Through the parlor door we watched the car turn into our driveway. My mother and Uncle Teddy Bear remained sitting, and I went alone back into the hallway to face my sister. “What did Daddy say to you in the hospital?” I blurted as she passed me. She refused to answer. Tilting with the weight of her suitcase, she walked unaided out the front door and down the steps to the waiting car.