Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

So Mrs. Goldfanger’s relationship with her mailbox, as with many things, was an anxious one. How strange it was, then, that one August morning, having deciphered the first envelope and also its return address, she gathered up all the others without looking at them — let the Gilboas wait another day for their emeralds. She flew up the stairs, a smile on her pretty face.

Mrs. Goldfanger was eighty-five. Her doctor said she had the heart of a woman of thirty, and though she did not believe this outrageous compliment, it strengthened her physical courage, already considerable. She was not afraid of the labor of tending her husband — she could lift him from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to bed; she could help him walk when he wanted to. But her sadness was deepening. To diaper him seemed the height of impropriety, and listening to his unintelligible gabble was someday going to break her thirty-year-old heart. The assistants she hired were often indifferent; if they were kindly they soon got better jobs.

But now … she knocked at the door above her own. Tamar’ grandmother opened it, dressed as usual in slacks and a blouse. No one had ever seen her in a bathrobe.

Mrs. Goldfanger leaped into the apartment like an antelope. “It’s come!”

Tamar’s grandmother examined the official envelope and then handed it to Tamar, who had wandered in from the balcony, where she was breakfasting in her skimpy nightgown.

Tamar, too, examined the envelope. “The hepatoscopist has landed,” she said.

A YEAR EARLIER the state of Israel had entered into a treaty with an impoverished Southeast Asian nation. Under the treaty Israeli citizens could purchase the assistance of Southeast Asians for the at-home management of the elderly. The foreigners were not to be hired as nannies, house cleaners, or day care workers — able-bodied Israeli citizens were available for that work, not that they relished it. The Asians’ task was to care for sages who had outlived their sagacity.

The employers undertook the expense of airfare — round-trip airfare: workers were not supposed to hang about when their charges died. Citizenship was no part of the deal. Weren’t these people already citizens someplace else? The Law of Return did not apply to Catholics, which most of them nominally were, nor to hepatoscopists, which some of them were said to be.

As soon as a bureau had been established, Mrs. Goldfanger had applied for an Asian.

“What’s a hepatoscopist?” she asked Tamar’s grandmother now.

Tamar’s grandmother said: “Hepatoscopy is the prediction of the future by an examination of the entrails, specifically the liver, of a mammal. Properly a sheep, more practically a rodent.”

“Oh.”

“All those stray cats,” Tamar murmured. “Useful at last.”

In the weeks following Mrs. Goldfanger’s application, Tamar’s grandmother had accompanied Mrs. Goldfanger to a series of office visits. The younger old woman had helped the older old woman fill out the required forms. Every time a packet of papers arrived in the mail, Mrs. Goldfanger brought them up to Tamar’s grandmother. She settled herself at the table in the dining room. Sunlight slanting through the blind made her rusty hair rustier — more unnatural, Tamar mentioned later. “Henna is a natural substance,” her grandmother reminded her.

And now the Asian was here. Or would be here in three weeks’ time. Mrs. Goldfanger was to go to the bureau at ten o’clock on a morning in September to be introduced to the newcomer and to sign the necessary final papers.

“Shall I come with you?” Tamar’s grandmother said, sighing.

“Oh, not this time.” Mrs. Goldfanger paused. “That there should be no confusion,” she confusedly explained. “But thank you very much, for everything. I just wanted you to know.”

So it was alone, three weeks later, that Mrs. Goldfanger journeyed to the dingy office that she now knew so well. Her hand alone shook the hand of the serious man. Her voice alone welcomed him, in English. His English had a lilt, like the waves that lapped his island country. Mrs. Goldfanger, unassisted, told the bureau official that she understood the necessity for employer and employee to visit the office once every four months (later she wondered briefly whether the visits were to occur four times every one month). Her smile beckoned the man to follow.

His satchel was so small. He wore tan pants and a woven shirt and another shirt, plaid, as a jacket. She hoped that cabs would be numerous at the nearby taxi stand; she wanted him to see immediately that the country was bountiful. Providence smiled on the wish: three cabbies were waiting, and the first promptly started his engine. But before the pair could get into the vehicle a schnorrer approached. Mrs. Goldfanger gave him a coin. Joe felt in his own pocket. Oh dear. “I’ve paid for us both,” she explained.

DURING JOE’S FIRST AFTERNOON at the Goldfangers’, he spent several hours on the balcony fixing the wheelchair. Because he was on hands and knees he could not be seen above the iron railing, wound about with ivy; but on the glass table, in plain view, lay an open toolbox and an amputated wheel. Coming home from school, Tamar paused under the eucalyptus, squinted through the ivy with a practiced eye, and saw the wheelchair lying on its side, the kneeling figure operating on it. Whatever he was doing was precise, or at least small; it required no noticeable movement on his part. He maintained his respectful position for many minutes. Tamar, under the tree, maintained her erect one. Finally his bare arm reached upward — blindly it seemed, but in fact purposefully — and the hand, without wandering, grasped a screwdriver. The girl went into the building.

In the succeeding days there were signs of further industry at the Goldfangers’ apartment. The rap of hammering mixed with the mortar fire of drilling. The soprano noticed the new servant standing in front of the Goldfangers’ fuse box in the shared hall, his fingers curling around his chin. Soon the stereo equipment rose from its grave; remastered swing orchestras that Mrs. Goldfanger had not been able to listen to for months issued from the open doors of the balcony into the autumn warmth.

“Joe is a wonder,” Mrs. Goldfanger said to Tamar and her grandmother. “He’s descended from the angels.”

Tamar’s grandmother narrowed her eyes. The indentured were often industrious. A good disposition was natural to people born in the temperate zone. Sympathy flourished in mild climates; it withered in torrid ones; and in this country, amid five million wound-up souls, it was as rare as a lotus. People here had mislaid civility a century ago.

Mrs. Goldfanger gushed on about Joe; Tamar’s grandmother kept her knowledge of human nature to herself. “My husband is lucky,” Mrs. Goldfanger said.

Mr. Goldfanger’s decline had been gradual, though Tamar and her grandmother remembered that he had moved in already trembling. The children in the ground-floor apartment opposite the Goldfangers’ had never known him as other than a speechless gremlin. Those funny pointed ears, hair sprouted right out of them, and he always looked as if he were going to speak, but he never did, not one word. They had been warned not to mock him.

This family, referred to as Moroccan by everybody in the building, had all been born in Israel — father, mother, three children. The epithet derived from the previous generation and would no doubt abide for several hundred years. The Moroccan mother got vigorously tarted up for the holidays and for nights out, but at other times she hung around in an unclean satin robe. She had apricot hair and freckles and a mischievous smile. Her children were always underfoot — under her feet, under everybody else’s. Her husband ran a successful tile business; some of the most praised kitchens in Rehavia owed their gloss to him.