Your Sad Eyes And Unforgettable Mouth Part 12

"Oh! That's okay, Sheila. Thanks, though. You're very nice to me. I'm just not ... I'm not ... what's the word? I'm not..."

"Brave?"

"Yes, that's it. I'm not brave enough. I'm going to stay here for now. Sheila?"

"Mmm."

"I've been having such nightmares. I can't get rid of them."

"You mean like n.a.z.is chasing you? I get those all the time."

"No, no, nothing like that. No, it's more like objects start talking-or animals, or babies-and then anything can happen and I can't wake up. I know I'm dreaming, and I try to wake up, I try everything I can think of, but I can't, I'm trapped in the dream. I never knew fear was so hard to take. I don't think I even knew what fear was, really."

"How did your mother survive, do you know? My mother was with her parents and some other people, they all had to strip and dig a big hole and then get inside and be buried alive. And her mother just said to her, run. And so she ran. They shot at her, but they didn't get her, they missed, and she saw a wagon on the road and she climbed under the sacks of barley or whatever. Insane, man. What are the odds? I wouldn't be here if not for a crazy wagon and whoever gave her clothes and a place to hide. They put her in a convent, actually. My father got a job in a work camp, and he was good at it, so they kept him alive. What I don't get is how anyone stayed alive in those conditions. Wouldn't you die of typhoid or whatever right away?"

"Oh, who cares," I said, barely listening.

Sheila shrugged. "Taboo subject. Too gruesome, or something."

"I really don't care," I repeated.

"f.u.c.k this suffering," Sheila said complacently. "Karla's father-he really should be committed. Have you seen the marks on her arms? He completely lost his mind over there. On the other hand, look at Mrs. Adler, dancing when Ephraim gets all the answers right."

"Mrs. Adler..." I said absently, as if I were very old and hadn't seen or thought of her for years. She was determined to be happy, determined to enjoy life. All the pieces of her life were in place, held together by logic and popularity.

"Was Mrs. Adler there there?" I asked sleepily.

"Yeah, and she came out normal. Normal and happy."

"Normal and happy..."

"I can't wait to get away. Why should I take it all on myself? I have my own life to worry about."

"I'm falling asleep," I muttered. "Don't let me sleep."

With Sheila in the room and the radio playing "Let It Be," I slipped away, and when I woke up, sweating and terrified, Sheila was gone and the radio had been turned off. My mother, whose built-in radar monitored my levels of consciousness, scuffled into the room with a tray of cookies and a gla.s.s of milk.

The next day, in what can only have been a gesture of either true love or true desperation, my mother decided to contact Dr. Know-It-All. The answering service informed her that Dr. Moore was out of town.

My mother was skeptical: Dr. Moore was no doubt making up stories to avoid going out in the cold-all very well for some people. Remembering that I'd been to her house, my mother asked me for the address. She sat down at the kitchen table with the telephone book in front of her and ran her finger down the list of Moores. Halfway down she found not Vera's number, which was unlisted, but Patrick's.

The door to my room was open when she phoned, and I heard my mother's end of the conversation-yes yes Maya's mother who is this- I a.s.sumed she was talking to Patrick. I got up to pee and brush my teeth, then returned to bed. I hadn't washed in days, but I felt clean; Bubby was now changing my sheets every morning, and twice a day my mother rubbed my back and legs with a warm, wet towel, as if I really were bedridden. I shut my eyes and forgot about Patrick and his mother.

I was half-awakened from sleep by the sound of Anthony's voice. I was sure I was dreaming; so far it was a good dream, but a good dream could skid into nightmare in a matter of seconds. Anthony was asking my mother, "How are we today, Mrs. L?"

I opened my eyes and leaned forward so I could peer into the foyer. There he was, standing in the dim light in his socks, wearing jeans and a dark-blue pullover, his black coat slung over his arm. I grabbed a pair of pyjamas from my bureau and slipped them on.

Fanya as usual eclipsed any surprise I might have felt. She lifted her arms as if facing a volcanic eruption and sank back into the small, flimsy seat attached to the telephone table. My mother had acquired this perilous piece of furniture by collecting several hundred supermarket stamps, and I was sure the chair would one day break away from the table and poor Fanya would come cras.h.i.+ng down to the floor.

-it's the child the child- Anthony was unimpressed. "Take it easy," he said.

-the child the child-my mother began to wail-we all we all saw with our own eyes- In response either to the claustrophobia my mother generally elicited in people around her, or to an intuition that I was watching him, Anthony turned around. He saw me staring at him through the half-open door, and without further ado he abandoned my mother, came into my bedroom, and shut the door behind him. He looked older-not only by three years, but as if he'd moved into another stage of life altogether. He was more sedate yet also more scattered, more efficient and energetic yet wearier-as weary as me.

He dropped his coat on the desk, and without a word lay down beside me, placed his arm around my waist, and shut his eyes.

Anthony! It was not my father but rather a surrogate brother who had appeared out of nowhere. His body was snug against mine, and his socks warmed my ankles. I remembered the postcard he'd sent me from New York, and I wondered what it would be like to be intimately acquainted with Bleecker Street, the Chelsea Hotel, Spanish Harlem ...

I, too, dozed off. When I woke, a long time later, he was gone. I hadn't dreamed it-Anthony had come to visit. That's what you were supposed to do, visit the sick. Anthony understood what was happening to me because he was in the same predicament, exactly the same. We'd crashed into the present, and seeing it up close, stripped and exposed, we no longer had any inclination to focus on what lay ahead, couldn't focus on it. But Anthony hadn't solved the problem by becoming a recluse; he'd gone off in search of greener pastures. With his arm around me, I had slept peacefully for a change, a deep sleep, free of nightmares.

I'm slow, always slow, always a few steps behind everyone else. That was the way I was then and that's the way I am still. It took me a few minutes to piece it all together: Anthony was Tony, the brother Patrick had mentioned. At Bakunin, he'd been Antonio, Anton, Antoine, even Antonius, but never Tony-like me, he must have been hoping for a breach. Now it turned out that we were all linked, like the dancers at the end of The Seventh Seal The Seventh Seal; everyone knew everyone. Patrick had mentioned that his brother was living in California-he must have moved from New York to California, and now he was back in Montreal for a visit. Or maybe he'd returned for good.

As soon as I made the connection, I spotted, as if in confirmation, a bulky white envelope leaning against my radio. It was a letter, addressed to Tony Moore, 4 Hillside Road, Beaconsfield. The envelope was made of textured paper, soft as fabric, and the handwriting was tall and spidery. Under overlapping postmarks, the faded stamps-a sea-dragon, a grey and gold G.o.ddess launching rays of light-seemed to transmit a foreign loneliness. The return address was barely legible, but I was able to make out the first and last lines: Gerald Moore, j.a.pan Gerald Moore, j.a.pan.

Anthony had left me a coded message. That's what Anthony did-he used codes. I'd thought when we were at Bakunin that he was being evasive, but I was wrong: he was trying to say more this way, not less.

The letter inside the envelope took up several sheets of pale blue airmail paper, folded in four and covered with the same spidery handwriting. I padded to the kitchen, dug out a box of soda crackers from the cupboard, and returned to my room. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I began to read.

Here's the letter, which I've kept inside my diary all these years. It's remarkably well preserved. Well, maybe it's not that remarkable: in terms of doc.u.ment conservation, even a hundred years in dry, anaerobic conditions is not a long time. Only in small-scale human terms is it nearly impossible to reconcile the stark numbers with our own inept tallying.

March 17, 1968 Dear Tony, my firstborn son, it's two in the afternoon here and your birthday. I had such a longing to talk to you but don't have your latest number or, in fact, any number for you. There's so much I want to tell you, not my usual rambling, but more in the way of biography or autobiography or what have you, and even if you don't want to read it now or ever, at least I want you to have the option, and also to tell you where you can find more information. I'm in a small room here, on a mat on the floor, paper-thin walls, or rather bamboo thin, and I can hear the woman who runs this place cleaning up. There are chickens in the courtyard, though it's not really rustic; the noise and hullabaloo outside feel urban, the smells are urban. It's another universe here, and since I barely speak a word of j.a.panese, I'm as good as deaf and mute.

I'm waiting for word from the monastery, and if they take me, I may not have another chance to write. I don't know what the arrangements are there, what one can and cannot do there. I feel so far from being where I long to be, though even thinking in terms of a goal is probably all wrong ... but I promised I wouldn't ramble and I won't. What I want to do is tell you some things that I woke up this morning wanting to tell you-maybe because suddenly you seem old enough, or maybe it's that "lonely impulse" Yeats describes-do you remember our Sunday nights, reading poetry by the hearth? One of the memories I cling to. The Yeats poem was a favourite, wasn't it? Do you remember? "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" ...There is something about telling, just telling, that seems almost like soaring through enemy fire.

What I'm trying to say is that the impulse may be thoroughly self-centred, a way of shedding something or other before I enter the monastery-if I do go in; a way of trying to move on, or move somewhere, or learn not to move-or whatever it is I need to learn and unlearn. If the impulse is self-centred, forgive me. I feel I've lost touch with who you are to such a degree that I can't gauge these things properly, and maybe that was never my talent. Certainly I have much to atone for as a father, as I well know. For that, I don't deserve forgiveness, though forgiveness is something I now know has to do with oneself, not others, both the doing and the requesting. Anything else is just manipulation. I'm rambling again ... my worst trait, or one of them, anyhow.

In any case, I would like to tell you about Vera, and also about how we met and how you came to be. If you don't want to know about it or be dragged into it, here is your chance to stop, throw the letter in the fire, or put it away for another day. Above all I need to say at the outset that this is in no way any kind of justification or even explanation. Why things fell apart, you know as well as I and better, looking at us with your child's all-knowing eyes. But where it all began-that's what I want to tell you. You have already heard some things about how it happened that we met and married, the usual answers one gives to a child. We left out all save the quaint, picturesque details, or rather details that could be made to sound quaint and picturesque-Vera was delayed in London, we met in Hyde Park, etc.

Here then is what actually happened. The memory has done the opposite of fade; it gets more vivid with time. Isn't that odd? Like a backward spring, propelling me into the past and giving me more of it each time I visit.

It was a year after the war-that you know. June 2, 1946, to be precise. London was still in ruins, though also in the throes of reconstruction-not just the buildings, but everything-peace, the future. It's hard to describe the atmosphere of that year. Horror and grief swept up and discarded, as if it were a duty to dispose of them, which of course it was. To be replaced by work and hope.

My brother Anthony, whose name we gave you (perhaps wrongly), fell in Dieppe in August of 1942. Of course he was the talented one; a brilliant painter with a great future ahead of him ... and I can't blame my mother or anyone else for resenting that I was the one who was spared and now I was the one who was going to inherit the family fortune-and I didn't give a d.a.m.n about any of it. Instead, for reasons that were obscure even to me, I was studying for the ministry before the war broke out, despite my conviction that the story of G.o.d and the subsequent addendum of a Son were fiction. I suppose you'll find this incomprehensible, but I thought even so that I could somehow do some good. Or maybe it was all some adolescent romantic urge to escape from the madding crowd that to this day has a hold over me.

I left my studies as soon as the war came. How could I ever have thought that an atheist would really fit in? I must have been mad. I started off as a Conscientious Objector-volunteered to do any job that didn't involve carrying a weapon. I wasn't a fanatic like some of the others, who refused to partic.i.p.ate in any way at all. After Anthony was killed, I would have fought, in fact, but I was needed where I was. Mostly I helped to clear up after the bombings. Thousands of bodies had to be buried, thousands of homeless people had to be sheltered and fed. It was Russian roulette, every minute of every day and night; you never knew where the next hit would be, and towards the end, with the diabolical V2s, there wasn't even the five- or ten-second warning.

Your grandparents stayed out in their big house in Hertfords.h.i.+re, though one wing was being used for some military purpose or other. They were involved in art evacuation and all sorts of other wartime projects. After Anthony was killed, they went on, stoically, but they needed me more than ever, supposedly to help out in the family business, though really for moral support, and I made up my mind to yield as soon as the war was over. I would become a part of the family antiques firm, in spite of my deep aversion to that whole scene. Auctions made me sick, everything about them. And I had no talent for it, no gift at all. I couldn't tell one saucer from another, one century from another. I never told you or anyone else about my aversion to your grandparents' occupation, mostly because I didn't think Vera would understand, and we had enough chasms over which to shout at each other, and you know if there's anything Vera loves besides her sons, it's beautiful things. I only thank my stars that when we first met, I was a well-brought up English boy and didn't breathe a word against my parents or what they did, and by the time we were close enough for me to tell her ... but I'm jumping ahead.

Back to the fateful day. I was sitting on a bench in Hyde Park with a sandwich I wasn't eating-it just lay on my lap, wrapped in paper. I didn't want to eat in front of the woman who was sitting on the bench opposite me because she looked hungry and food was still very scarce, and anyhow it seemed rude. Of course I couldn't go up to her, a total stranger, and offer her half my lunch.

So I sat there with the sandwich on my lap. I'd stayed on volunteering, with your grandparents' blessing, of course, and I'd been at it all week, clearing debris sixteen hours a day, but I'd changed back into civilian clothes. I was headed for Hertfords.h.i.+re for a weekend leave, and I dreaded going, as usual, so was taking my time, gathering emotional energy for the journey. The woman-Vera-was wearing white gloves and her hands were folded on her lap. I'd never seen anyone sitting so motionlessly, as though she were posing for a painting, or had turned into one.

I tried not to stare. She was haunted and haunting then, and the attraction I felt was like a sort of rope hauling me towards her-towing me, that's what it felt like. There is no real explanation for these things. Somehow I found the courage to cough and then smile at her, and she didn't smile back, but she nodded and that was encouragement enough for me. I asked her whether she was a visitor-she had a small suitcase with her, so it seemed all right to ask.

She nodded again and said, "I was supposed to leave today for Canada. The s.h.i.+p has been delayed, they do not know for how long."

She spoke excellent English, though with a European accent-she's almost lost it entirely now. I introduced myself and she said, "I'm Vera Elias, from Prague." I said something daft about the weather, and I wanted the earth to swallow me up in shame, but at the same time I just couldn't let go. I really was worried about her. So I asked, "Have you got a place to stay?"

She said, "I have an address of someone ... I have not yet contacted." She stared at me with those blue eyes of hers, and both of us knew that I was going to offer her a place to stay and that she would accept. Because there was absolutely nothing available that summer. It was impossible to find a room anywhere; there were still thousands of homeless people. It turned out later that the address she had was of the cousin of a maid who had worked for her friends in Prague. At best she would have shared some attic bed.

I said, "I have a flat where you could stay, if you like. I was on my way to my parents' house in the country, so you'll have the place to yourself. I can check in on you in the morning." And then I asked her if she'd like to share my sandwich. "It's beef," I said, because it occurred to me that she might be Jewish.

She removed her gloves and accepted half my sandwich, but her hands began to tremble so uncontrollably that I had to take it back. She was perfectly composed otherwise; only her hands shook. I could tell it wasn't that she was ill-it was nerves. I'd seen that sort of thing often enough after a bombing, trying to give tea to people who had lost their homes and possibly half their families, and their hands shaking so they couldn't lift the cup.

She said calmly, "I'm sorry, it must be the journey, it's tired me out," and that helped a little, but I was at a loss. "Let's walk," she suggested, "and I'll eat while walking." On the second try she dropped the sandwich on the ground. She laughed. That's your mother for you, isn't it? She laughed at herself and picked it up. Though everything was still being rationed, I didn't want her to eat bread that had fallen on the ground. She seemed amused at my concern, but she separated the two pieces of bread and managed to eat the part that hadn't touched the gra.s.s, and the rest she scattered for the birds.

We walked and she told me that with the help of the father of an old schoolmate of hers she'd succeeded in getting a student visa for Canada and now she was going there to complete her medical studies, which had been interrupted by the war. I started telling her about myself, but I saw that she wasn't interested, or couldn't concentrate, so I stopped.

We went to my service flat in Fitzrovia and when we got there she asked me not to go to Hertfords.h.i.+re. She said she wanted me to sleep with her because she didn't like sleeping alone. I a.s.sumed she meant sleep on the sofa, but that's not what she had in mind ... Forgive me for writing about this. I don't know how to leave it out. I wondered what I'd done to deserve this angel landing in my life from out of nowhere. And then she decided to tell me about her experiences during the war. I think it was because she thought she would never see me again and she wanted to discard as many of her experiences as she could relate in a single night, record them in another brain, my brain, and then leave them behind forever, like an exorcism. That's what I think. There may have been other reasons ... some sense of duty, some historic urge. Or a deeper need-who knows? I felt it was because she trusted me. She didn't love me or desire me, she thought it was only some chance encounter, and she knew I was safe.

As it turned out, we spent the whole of my leave together. After I'd heard her story I was afraid to touch her, but the last thing she wanted was to be cast out because of her experiences, to be pitied or set apart, and I understood that. I owe your mother so much-beginning with the vistas of freedom that she opened to me. Mostly, I was just overwhelmed-first with joy, then grief and horror. I confess I knew very little about the atrocities. There were rumours all the time, and an abysmal waxworks exhibit based on those rumours, with a free amus.e.m.e.nt corner for children, which I kept hoping someone would have the decency to shut down. The stories in the newspaper about what the n.a.z.is were up to were often just as sensationalistic, and that created a screen, because you didn't know what was true and what wasn't. Everything is hidden in war, everything is censored, secret, even information about the bombs falling on your head. A month before the war ended, some newsreels came out, but I didn't join the queues to see them either. I suppose I'd had enough of dead bodies, and I couldn't help wondering whether the people in those queues were motivated by the same sort of prurience that drew visitors to the waxworks. It took me weeks, really, to a.s.similate everything Vera told me, and I began taking an interest after she left. I felt there wasn't enough awareness, and I wrote an article, but no one would publish it. It was "in poor taste", its sources were "questionable", it was time "to put all that behind and move on".

Then Vera left for Canada. She wouldn't let me see her off. It never occurred to me that she might be pregnant, even though she wouldn't let me take any precautions-she seemed convinced it wasn't necessary. When she found out that she was expecting, she remembered the address in London, and she wrote to me there and told me. I don't know what she had in mind; I have never asked her what she was thinking. Maybe she barely knew herself. Of course, I was beside myself with happiness, that she was willing to take me, to marry me, because I was heartbroken, really heartbroken, when she left.

The thing is, my dear boy, and this is what my letter is really about, I wrote everything down, after she left. I think I got most of it, because there are things you hear that you can't forget even if you want to. She doesn't know that I did this, though I think she hated me simply because I knew, and my presence reminded her, when the plan had been to forget. I put a dent in that plan, do you see? So telling her would have made it even worse. I suppose I was misled by her one-time outpouring, thinking it was because of who I was, not knowing it was an aberration and that what she trusted was that I would vanish along with her story. And in due course I did. I have vanished.

Now, Tony, this is very important. I've hidden the notebook in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. It's brown, leather-bound, with our family name embossed on the front. The key to the cabinet is in the jade cigarette case next to the paints in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I don't know why I hid the key, maybe to protect you. But if you want to read about your mother's past, that's where the key is. It's a choice you must make for yourself.

I'll just tell you this one thing, before you decide. Vera was married before the war and had a baby. Her husband and the baby were both shot together the day they were arrested, because her husband protested. That was how they got people to be quiet and do exactly as they were told ... shoot on the spot anyone who spoke out, or a child who was crying, or a mother who was hysterical or even someone who was sitting quietly, just to keep everyone terrified. So that's what happened. Her husband was holding the baby and they were shot together.

The rest, everything that happened to her after that, or at least what she managed to tell me, you can read in the notebook.

That night, when she sat on the bed and in her soft voice began her story, there had been a power failure and I lit candles, and there were such eerie shadows in the room. Ambulances pa.s.sed every so often from the hospital nearby, and it was as if her words were setting off the sirens. I had to leave the room a few times. I pretended I was going for a gla.s.s of water, though really I needed to vomit, but I came back and listened to more, and then more, because I loved her, and when you love someone, you can bear anything. I told her I loved her, but she didn't seem to hear me. All she said was that she would not allow her past to shape her future. I think if you read what I wrote, you'll understand her better, because no matter what Vera did after the war it was heroic, and no matter how much I suffered it was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what she's been through.

I never told you any of this-how could I? It would have meant betraying Vera, and anyhow you might have misunderstood about the way we ended up marrying, because I loved you from the second I heard you existed or were about to exist, and Vera did too-she loved you and loves you both. That's what I want you to know.

I have a headache coming on-yes, I was up too late and there was too much carousing but soon all that will be over, I trust. So I'm going to stop here and mail this before I regret writing it. I hope this is not the wrong thing to do.

Your loving father, Gerald.

After I read the letter, I showered and dressed, put on my mummy outfit, and went outside for a walk. My mother and Bubby were asleep and didn't hear me leave. It was as cold as ever, but I didn't mind-I'd manage not to freeze. I filled my lungs with glacial night air until I was dizzy, then climbed one of the high mounds of snow that lined the curbs. I lay on the snowy hill and looked up at the empty sky, its stars obliterated by city lights.

Yes, I decided, I would be brave. I'd sign out of the monastery, I'd return to real life.

The next day, a mahogany sleigh bed arrived at our place. My mother was at work when the delivery men rang the bell, and I was sure they'd made a mistake-my mother never purchased anything without a great deal of pre-publicity. But they showed me the receipt, and there it was: our address for s.h.i.+pping, the Moore address for billing. Anthony had bought me a double bed.

I let the two men in. I didn't own a bathrobe, and when the doorbell had rung, I'd grabbed my winter coat. "Where do you want it?" the men asked. I was clutching the coat around me so it wouldn't slide open; my bare feet and tangled hair completed the Hogarthian scene. In only three weeks I'd lost the ease one normally has with strangers, and I found myself stuttering as I directed them to my bedroom. The delivery men looked fright-ened-they must have thought I was a mad shut-in-and they fled before I had time to find change for a tip.

Bubby and I stood at the entrance to my room and gaped. In spite of my modest efforts-clippings on the wall, an Egyptian runner draped over the lampshade-my bedroom was condemned to suburbia manque, while the antique sleigh bed would not have been out of place in one of the lost rooms of Wuthering Heights. I never dreamed I'd own anything half as beautiful as this.

"Try it," I said to Bubby. Gingerly, she uncrumpled her body on the striped silver-and-blue mattress. Her splayed feet, k.n.o.bby inside soft cloth slippers, slid sideways like small burrowing animals. I stretched out next to her and held her hand, which was as round and smooth as a child's.

"Well, Bubby," I said, "here we are."

1972.

The hospital waiting room, with its inhospitable cadmium yellow chairs. Rosie is sitting on one of the chairs, her bare legs folded sideways, an open bag of peanuts from the food machine on her lap.

It's autumn, the beginning of our final year in high school, and something has come over me. Even my handwriting, in diaries dating from this time, is ragged and jagged, as if pus.h.i.+ng against a barrier, yielding gloomily, pus.h.i.+ng again. Malfunctioning staplers, knots in shoelaces, transparent tape that twists before you have a chance to use it-every small thing sets me off. An insane perfectionism makes my life intolerable. If the peas my mother serves me are oversalted, I stomp out of the kitchen. Fanya's ludicrous response-running after me and begging forgiveness, when what I deserve is to be ignored, at best-only adds fuel to my aggravation. If it were possible, I'd be turning my mother into more of a wreck than she already is, but luckily it's not possible.

It all reached an intolerable pitch this morning. When I arrived at school, already in a state because the bus had taken forever to come, because it was overcrowded, because why, why, why why couldn't this stupid city run more buses at rush hour, because sines and cosines were couldn't this stupid city run more buses at rush hour, because sines and cosines were idiotic idiotic, designed to bring misery to millions, were only ever meant to be studied by mathematicians- mathematicians-when I charged into school, I found everyone in a heightened state of excitement as they broadcast the news: a s.h.i.+pment of frogs had arrived at the lab for dissection. Mr. Lurie must have mentioned the dissection while I was immersed in Under the Volcano- Under the Volcano-he no longer bothered regulating my behaviour, as long as I sat in the corner and didn't disturb anyone. Or else I'd been skipping cla.s.s altogether so I could catch matinees at our downtown repertory cinema.

Dvora spotted me and came over. She held her stomach and groaned, "I. Feel. Sick." The staccato syntax meant that she was more than usually upset, but it wasn't the prospect of dissecting frogs that was making her sick. She'd been in a staccato mood for several weeks now, partly because she was hopelessly failing all her subjects, but mostly because she'd been dumped by Carlos, her drug-pus.h.i.+ng boyfriend. She wanted to run off to San Francisco with flowers in her hair, and on weekends she switched to hippie attire that was meant to convey a belligerent, anti-establishment impulse. The effect was more genial than radical; the wide print headbands suited her sweet, round face, and under tie-dyed T-s.h.i.+rts her braless b.r.e.a.s.t.s seemed to be issuing a gentle invitation.

Animals and the way we treat them-this is what I'm ranting about, here in the hospital waiting room. Rosie's also been skipping school, though not in order to watch movies downtown. Her father is sick, and she's installed herself semi-permanently at St. Mary's Hospital.

"How can people not care about animals?" I fumed.

Rosie lowered her head. "I know ... but I like steak. I'm very selfish."

There were shadows under her eyes. "Go home and get some sleep, Rosie," I said. "I'll stay until you come back. Take your time, I don't have anything else to do."

"You're so nice to me, Maya."

"I'm a b.i.t.c.h these days," I said. "I'm just a jangle of nerves."

"No, no-and you're right about the animals," she said. Then she stood on her toes and kissed me goodbye. A mystic kiss to ensure that the G.o.ds looked upon me kindly. "I'm just going to shower. I'll be back soon!" she promised.

I dug into my ever-dependable shoulder bag and retrieved a package of soda crackers and Under the Volcano Under the Volcano, which seemed never to end. You read page after depressing page, and it was still the Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, the Consul was still drunk, Yvonne was still drifting. I set the book aside and peeked into Mr. Michaeli's room, but he was asleep. At long last, Rosie returned. Patrick was walking morosely behind her, like a stalker under arrest.

"Look who I met in the elevator!" Rosie announced happily, as if we were all there for a wedding. "He's here to visit Daddy."

"I have a book for Mr. Michaeli that I promised to give him two years ago," Patrick said.

He hadn't changed-but I had. He'd been Vera Moore's son when I last saw him; now he was Anthony's brother. And not a very good brother, as far as I could tell.

Patrick sensed my critical eye, and the expanse it opened up between us relaxed him. He switched to courteous mode and asked, "How's it going?"

"I'll go see whether Daddy's awake," Rosie said.

Though there was no one else in the waiting area, Patrick slumped into a chair on the other side of the room, as far away as possible from other life forms.

"I know your brother," I told him. "He was my counsellor at camp."

"Really?" Patrick managed to modulate his voice so it hovered halfway between neutral comment and, just in case, disparagement. I remembered the strategy; he had used it when he'd referred to his father's spiritual quest. I'd never met a more distrustful person.

"Is he back in California?" A year had pa.s.sed since Anthony had slept in my bed; I'd not seen or heard from him since. I was hoping he'd call me or send me a postcard from wherever he was-New York, California, or maybe Paris or London. But he seemed to have forgotten all about me. I missed him.

"I guess so."

"I wish Anthony was my brother," I sighed. "I've always wanted sisters and brothers. I used to wish I had a twin sister."

"A twin!" Patrick shuddered.

"We had twins at Camp Bakunin. For some reason, they never even talked to each other. I couldn't understand it. One of them went off to live by herself in a separate bunk house."