Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I'm sorry, Roy," Berry said.

"For what?"

"Your pain. Wish I could be there to help. Give everybody there my love."

"I will. And mine to everybody there." We hung up. I felt like a rat.

My father suggested we call his father in a nursing home in Connecticut. First my father talked to him and then I, the oldest son, talked to him. I'd always loved my grandfather, a tough old guy who'd come from the old country and made it as a grocer in New York. But now I hardly recognized his voice, it was so shaky and faint, like a scratchy old record.

"I'm dead," he said.

"What? Who's dead?"

"Not dead, bed-b-a-d-bed. Dey just keep you here and let you die."

"I'm sorry, Cramps."

"Can you get me out of here?"

"How?"

'Tell your pop."

"I will."

"Why you never come visit me?"

"I will."

"Promise?"

"I promise. Soon."

"Berry dere wit' you?"

"Yes."

"Good. You'll marry her, I know. Nice goil. Did I tell you that when I proposed to my wife, she said no. So I got a gun, and went over dere-Washington Heights, Magaw Place- and I said, Geiger, marry me or I'll kill you. So she did. When dey moved finally, you know dey found dat gun in the chandelier?"

"I love you, Gramps." He told me this story every time we talked.

"You need a permit now, don't you?"

"A wedding permit?"

"A gun permit. You didn't need 'em, back den. So long." I handed the phone to the next in line, my brother.

While I had been on the phone with my grandfather, my mother had cornered Jill. She'd tried to edge her toward the guest bedroom. Forewarned, Jill had faked toward the bedroom and cut toward my sister-in-law. My mother nabbed me and took me into the guest bedroom. As the door closed I heard my father say:

"Stupid idiot."

"Where's Berry?" my mother asked.

"With her parents in Maine."

"You're not breaking up with her? Not after all this time?"

"I'm not thinking about it in that way," I said, suddenly feeling a surge of love for Berry and my mother, wanting to be close to both.

"I've always before stayed out of it, but this! This girl, Roy?"

"She's a friend."

"This kind of girl is not a friend. Don't you think I love you?"

Boom. Another hit. "Of course you love me, Mom."

"Yes, I do." She sighed. "I don't know what happened to you. I remember once, you were about six, and you were late corning home from school, and you walked in and I could see that you'd been crying-something had happened-and I said, 'What's wrong, dear?' and the strangest thing happened-I could see you wanted to tell me, but then it was

like a wall went up, and you didn't. You said, 'Nothing,' you turned away and walked out. Do you remember?"

"Yes, I do." I had gotten beaten up at school, and, walking home along the railroad tracks crying, I couldn't wait to tell her. But then, as I walked into the kitchen and I saw the concern in her eyes, and as she'd asked me, something happened in me and I stiffened and made my face stiff, and said nothing. I had felt caught, frozen in the spotlight of her love.

"So what was it?" she asked expectantly, as if my telling her now could set everything right.

"I'd gotten beaten up by some kids at school, that's all." "And you couldn't tell me? Why not?" "I don't know," I said, feeling, all these years later, the same thing-caught, frozen, full of dread-like Cherokee with Lily on the beach: dreadlock.

"It's a shame," she said, "the way that wall went up. It never has come down. Like with your father. And now? What's going on now?"

"Just trying to learn to be a psychiatrist, Mom." "But this girl? I am your mother. Can't we discuss things anymore?"

"I'd like to, but it's really hard to talk." She started to cry. "You've gotten like your father; you don't talk to me. How often do I see you? Three times a year? Your visits are never long enough. I feel, Roy, that you've gotten into total selfishness. You don't smile. You need to grow up and settle down. And not with this one, no."

"I hear you, Mom. But it's late and we've got an early flight tomorrow,"

"Any words of wisdom? Any words of wisdom, Doctor, for

your mom?"

As used to her quick switches as I was, they always caught me off guard. Now, I tried to hang in. I felt for her, and wanted to say something-say a million kind, wise, funny, generous, empathic things to her-but could not.

"Stupid bitch," my father said outside the door.

A toy crashed against a wall.

"Nothing?"

"Gotta go. It was a wonderful dinner."

"You all ate it so fast. Six hours to cook, six minutes it dis-

appears." She sighed. "Maybe, if you'd stayed a doctor, we could talk?"

"A psychiatrist is a doctor, Mom!" I said, trying to hang in, hang on.

"You know what I mean-a real doctor. You keep hurting me but it's all right." She started to cry. I felt such pain. I moved to her, put my arm around her to comfort her. She seemed small, her shoulders fragile, as if the bones were precariously connected, the flesh full of doubt. Guilt tore at me.

"I'm sorry, Mom, really."

"Yes, I know. Don't worry about me. Worry about your father."

"My father?"

"He's gotten so bitter lately. He always wanted this and now that he's gotten it he's angry all the time. He loves his golf and is playing well, although for the first time ever, yesterday, he quit on the fifteenth hole."

"He didn't finish the round?"

"Said he was tired. But he's so bitter. Maybe you, Mr. Psychiatrist, can understand." We walked out.

I found my father in the bathroom, guzzling Maalox.

"Hiatus hernia and it's killing me. Every night and three bottles a week."

"Every night?" I said. This was alarming. "Have you had it checked out?"

"What's to check? A lot of the Jewish men have it and the professional men especially seem to have it. There's something I want to talk to you about and usually I do it in the dental chair but there's no chair anymore."

"You miss it?"

"No. So." He took out a list.

When I was an adolescent, into sports and girls and rarely home, my behavior had driven him nuts, but he would never say anything about it at home. Only on Sunday mornings, under the guise of working on my teeth, would he talk to me directly. We would drive downtown to the old grain-and-feed building that housed his second-floor office. Is there anything more bereft than a dentist's office on a Sunday morning? There, with the sweet fermenting scent of hay and grain mixing with the acrid antiseptic scent rising from the sterilizer, he'd put me in the chair and, as the Novocain froze my gums

then my mouth and even my lips and tongue, he would sit beside me on his stool and take out a list and read me, one after the other, my failures. At his mercy-and fearing that if I protested, the drill would do its work with a lot less mercy-I listened, enraged. Finished, he would drill. I'd always thought this normal. Always felt he was a good father.

Now, referring to his list, he said, "It was a waste when you took all those years off and I hope now you'll go straight through." His words, without the anesthesia, hit me harder. "Three years on the Rhodes in Oxford and another year off last year, and each year off is a year less of earnings and so forth. Don't mind your mother and she's just upset. Her side of the family is always upset and they're too sensitive."

"Is there something bothering you, Dad?"

"What do you mean?"

"You seem so bitter, so unhappy."

"No, no, I'm happy, very happy here and the weather's great."

"Maybe retirement's not living up to your expectations?"

"It's great and the fairways here are so lush. My golf could be better but otherwise there's a lot to do with concerts and so forth and I'm very happy."

"But what about the cursing?"