David Gates: The Wonders of the Invisible World

“You’re pregnant and you’re drunk?” he said. “Don’t you know what that can do? Do you care ? How could you do it? What the hell is going on in your mind?”

“I’m not drunk,” I said.

“You’re a whore,” he said. “Where did you go this afternoon?”

I wasn’t angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn’t understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

When Billy gets home, his nephew’s playing with that thing where marbles roll down slanting wooden rails and drop through holes onto the rail below. It takes a supposedly entertainingly long time for a marble to make it all the way down. This was Billy’s toy when he was a kid; Deke found it in a box in the basement.

“Hey, tiger. How was your day?” He sets the Times on the dusty Baldwin spinet and nods at Mrs. Bishop.

Deke says, “Watch this.” He lets a marble go.

Billy waits until it’s halfway down to say “Cool.”

“Yeah,” Deke says, “but watch. ”

Billy watches the marble roll and drop, roll and drop, then turns to Mrs. Bishop. “How was it today?”

She looks over at Deke. “He’s a good boy.”

So nobody’s giving him a straight answer. But at any rate the TV’s not on. Unless she just now snapped it off, having heard his car. He could touch a wrist to it and check, but that would be a bit much. Cassie had let Deke have a TV in his room, which he’d watch for hours while she did what she did. Seven years old.

“I guess Uncle can take it from here,” Billy says. He opens the hall closet, hangs up his jacket and gets out Mrs. Bishop’s coat. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? But Mrs. Bishop used to baby-sit Billy and Cassie when they were little — she seemed old then, is old now — and this arrangement would be even more bizarre if the boundaries got blurred. Mrs. Bishop’s all right, just boring and religious. As far as Billy can tell, she simply regards him as a “bachelor,” maybe not even “confirmed”: she’s been keeping him up to date on her semi-bohemian granddaughter, now divorced and living in Saratoga. “Thanks again,” he says, and holds up her coat as she backs into it. “Oh. By the way. Your honorarium.” He hands her an envelope with a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. “So we’ll see you Monday?”

“Lord willing,” she says. It sounds to Billy like some old ballad. Lord Willing rode home on his snow-white steed/And spake to his servants three/O something something something something/And all for the love of thee. Billy’s a tad overeducated for all this — and of course fatherhood had not been in the cards — but he’s doing it.

He listens for Mrs. Bishop’s car to start up, then says, “So it’s you and me, partner. Got a whole big weekend ahead of us. And tonight’s a bath night.” Billy’s funning: every night’s a bath night. Cassie had him using the shower — when she thought of it — but Billy’s theory is that a bath is not just relaxing but primal, a ritual no kid should be done out of. So it’s play a quick game of something, put together a dinner while Billy’s in the bath, then right into p.j.’s, eat dinner, brush teeth, read and safe in bed by eight o’clock.

Since Deke’s already into the marble game, that’ll be tonight’s amusement. Billy chooses a clear marble with red boomerang shapes inside — God, he remembers this very marble — and sets it at the topmost point, then lets it go. Zoop plop, zoop plop, zoop plop. “Kewel,” he says in his mindless-hippie voice.

“Kewel,” says Deke. He’s good at mindless hippie. “Can Caleb come over for a playdate?”

“This is somebody in your class?”

“Kind of. He’s in my reading group.”

“Does he want to come over?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh. So I guess step one is for you to ask him, and then I can call his parents. What’s his last name?”

“Jacobson.”

“Really. I wonder if — I think I might know his dad. So what do you want for dinner tonight? We’ve got pasta or spaghetti. Which would you rather?”

Deke gives Billy his faux-disgusted look.

“Okay, pasta it is. To tell you the truth, I hate spaghetti.”

“It’s the same thing. ”

“Oh,” Billy says. “Well, in that case.” He goes into the kitchen and runs water into the big Revereware saucepan. They’ve had pasta the last three nights. Deke would eat it indefinitely, and Billy doesn’t care. If they want variety, they can always get a different Paul Newman sauce. Deke has come in to watch. “Today the marinara, tomorrow the world,” Billy tells him. Deke laughs; he seems to like stuff that’s over his head. If he’s going to be with Billy, he might just as well.

This is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, while Cassie — as Billy explains it to Deke — is “getting better.” But he doesn’t see why they can’t just keep going. After her thirty days in the hospital, she moved into a halfway house and went back to work, but nobody involved with her treatment — Cassie included — seems in any hurry about reuniting her with her son. And Billy isn’t pushing it.

After high school, Cassie had gone to Boston to study piano and composition at Berklee. Billy thought she had the true gift. How many eighteen-year-old girls — especially in Menands, New York — aspired to play like Red Garland? But she also had the other thing, which he guessed went with the gift, and she lasted less than a year. Selling her baby grand, she later told him, had bought only two months’ worth of dope, but it was two months to die for. Then she’d done her scary turnaround: stopped using, cut off the down-to-her-ass hair, bullshitted her way into a job with Shawmut Bank, married Vic, got pregnant, divorced Vic, had the kid. By the time she crashed and burned this fall, she was making a hundred thousand dollars a year, living in a co-op apartment tower with a view of Boston Harbor — and, it turned out, using big-time and sleeping about one night in four. Ever since Berklee, she’s refused to touch a piano, even last Christmas when their dying mother bullied them into singing carols. Billy finally had to back them up, picking out the chords with aching pauses in between as he tried to get his fingers on the right keys.

The place Cassie’s in has a no-number pay phone in the front hall; they can make one call a day and are allowed no incoming calls at all. She phones every other night and talks first to Deke (whose end of the conversation is mostly No and Yeah ), then to Billy. She often says she’s glad Deke’s “in good hands.” Which always makes Billy think of that Sherwood Anderson story.

But he secretly thinks that Cassie secretly knows Deke is in better hands. Back when Deke was born, it was Billy who talked her out of naming him Duke, in honor of Duke Ellington; did she really want to give her kid a name like a German shepherd? Billy’s enrolled Deke in school here, the school where he and Cassie used to go. He drops him in the morning on the way to work, Mrs. Bishop’s there when he gets off the bus in the afternoon, Billy’s back by six, then it’s two hours to bedtime. All do-able. Dinners had seemed daunting, but pasta’s just a matter of putting on water and heating up sauce; in another pan he steams vegetables with his mother’s vegetable steamer, a thing that looks like a Bucky Fuller dome on little legs. Once a week, he has Mrs. Bishop put a chicken in the oven. He’s bought age-appropriate CD-ROMs: The Magic School Bus Explores in the Age of Dinosaurs and The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System, each described as “A Fun-Filled, Fact-Packed Science Adventure.” (He passed on The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body. ) He reads Deke bedtime stories, and he’s gotten good at doing the characters’ voices, even in crap like Bugs Bunny and the Carrot Machine, where he has to do the proto-faggot Elmer Fudd. He’s made Deke a go-to-sleep tape of Horowitz playing a sequence of sweet, unjumpy pieces: the quieter sections of Kinderszenen, a couple of gentler Chopin waltzes. And he’s considered teaching Deke the first couplet of “Now I Lay Me,” without the die-before-I-wake part.