Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

When Joss got home he put the second letter on top of the first, in the bottom drawer of the dresser, underneath his sweaters. He could have stuck it between the salt and pepper cellars on the kitchen table for all his wife cared.

Mary was asleep, lying on her back, her thin hands side by side on the coverlet. She would have watched the program in the darkened living room, bourbon at her elbow, already wearing nightgown and wrapper. Already? There were days she never got dressed at all. Tomorrow, on their walk to the train, she would tell him about his performance in a flat voice. How the camera had cut him in half not once but several times. How it had dropped him entirely during the production number. How Happy held the audience in the palm of his hand. How Joss had outlived his usefulness … but she wouldn’t say that.

The specialists he’d brought Mary to always first acknowledged the tragedy of their daughter’s condition, then suggested that Mary’s attachment and grief were excessive. You could have a second child, these specialists said … You should have a second child. You are only in your twenties, Mrs. Hoyle … Later: You are in your thirties… You are not yet forty.

Hospitals had been tried; baths; insulin. Nothing made a difference. She had been a darling little thing with soft lashes when they met, but the small down-turned smile on her pointed face might have warned him of her fragility … A second child? He had too many children as it was. He had his sad-sack kid brothers, he had his damaged wife, he had Happy. And he had Theodora, Teddie, his one issue. Every Friday they went to visit her. It was Friday now, wasn’t it — he glanced at the clock as he wearily undressed: 1:00 a.m. In a few hours he and Mary would walk to Grand Central and take the train and get off the train and take a bus and get off the bus and walk two blocks. They’d come to the iron gate. The guard would nod: he knew them.

Teddie knew them. She made that hideous moan, or she covered her eyes with huge hands. Sometimes obesity seemed the worst thing about her. She wore cotton dresses made by Mary, all from the same childish pattern — short-sleeved, smocked, white collared. The fabrics were printed with chickens or flowers or Bambis. Sometimes Joss felt shamed by Happy Bloom’s drag — lipsticked face and fright wigs and bare masculine shoulders emerging from an oversize tutu, or yellow braids flopping onto a pinafore — but why should Joss feel shamed? Happy was the one who should feel shamed, big famous comedian aping big retarded girl. Aping? Happy had never seen Teddie. “How’s your daughter?” Happy would ask maybe once a year, his gaze elsewhere. “The same,” Joss always said.

Though she was not always the same. He sometimes sensed a change. The exhausted staff shrugged. “Not growth,” one of the doctors warned, his English infirm. “Not expect growth, no.” Okay, but once in a while her unforgiving expression softened a little, or her vague look of recognition slid into an equally vague one of welcome. If she could only talk. Perhaps she understood, a little. When they were alone — when Mary had left for one of her desperate walks around the fenced-in pond — he told Teddie that he loved her. He held her fat fingers. He kissed her fat cheek.

“HOYLE!”

Joss took his place at the table with Happy and the Brigadier and the writers. They revised, argued, laughed. Every so often Joss dropped his hand into his pocket and fingered this week’s letter from the Lady in Green. He knew it by heart — he memorized each one now, like a script, easy as breathing.

Happy Bloom’s loud good humor — I guess the public wants it .

Happy and the writers avoided the raw subject of the recent war. But the Europe exposed by the war had inspired many of Happy’s inventions — the British dowager, for instance; the French floor-walker; even the milkmaid who yodeled first and then warbled in Yiddish.

But you — the silent consort — are what the public needs.

The public needed the dowager’s meek husband? The floor-walker’s intimidated customer? The milkmaid’s goat — a horned, garlanded, Joss-faced goat who raised itself on two hooves and executed a double flap and a shuffle?

I absolutely adore the dancing goat.

Happy and Joss would be wallpaper hangers this Thursday. Costumed in overalls, they would lift a protesting clerk, chair and all, out of an office. They would heedlessly paper over bookcases, radiators, paintings. The rolls of wallpaper wouldn’t match. Happy would disappear into a doorless closet to decorate its inner walls. Joss would paper over the recess. There’d be shouts from the imprisoned Happy, in a variety of accents. He’d sing a few bars of “Alone”; he’d sing “Someday I’ll Find Me.” At last his head would burst through the paper, that round lovable head: the teeth, slightly buck anyway, goofily enlarged; a multitude of curls spilling over the brow; the eyebrows darkened and the eyes kohled. While Happy mugged to applause, Joss’s back would be turned to the audience — the silent consort, papering a window.

“THE SHOW WAS FUNNY,” Mary acknowledged on the train that Friday. “You were funny.” Her smile turned downward as it had in her young womanhood — but it was a smile; it was.

Teddie, sitting, looked away when they came, and banged her forehead against the hip of an attendant. After a while she stopped banging. The weather was mild for January; they sat on metal chairs in the brown garden. The paint on his chair was chipping. At these prices, you’d think … It was better not to think.

YOU KNOW SOMETHING? He depends on you! Maybe you depend on each other.

And maybe she too endured a mutual dependence, a marriage of convenience, a spousal alliance like his with Happy. Poor Happy — overbearing mother, two greedy ex-wives, years on the circuit, years in radio, and then, at last, seized by the new men of the New Medium.

Joss was doing third lead in a musical at that time, playing a father-in-law. The thing was holding on. Demobilized servicemen liked it. People were traveling again: out-of-towners liked it. It gave him a chance to hoof a little.

Happy called him. “ The Happy Bloom Hour needs you!”

“My face on a screen?” Joss said. “I can’t see that. I was a flop in Movieland …”

“It’s not the same, kid. This screen is just a postcard. People aren’t looking for handsome on it. They’re looking for uncular.”

“What?”

“Like an uncle,” screamed Happy.

“Avuncular.”

“Sure, what you say. That turkey you’re in, Joss … how long can it last? Television: it’ll be forever. Us together.” Joss said he’d think about it. “Yeah, think. I’ve got your shtick worked out already. You’ll be mute, won’t even have to smile.”

Once, early days, they had a near disaster on camera. A guest came on drunk; he flubbed, froze, fell over the cables, passed out. And one of the girls had a hemorrhage backstage and was rushed to the hospital. The props were in the wrong places because they had not yet found the Brigadier. They had to improvise an entire number. Happy wriggled into his tuxedo and pulled on a pageboy wig, blond. Joss grabbed a tweed jacket from the assistant producer. He came on slowly, the love-struck, ruined professor. He sat down heavily at the stage upright piano and played “Falling in Love Again.” The orchestra kept still. Happy leaned against the piano and sang the song with a Marlene Dietrich accent, nice, W s and R s pursed just as Joss would have done them, corners of the mouth compressed. The wheeled camera came close and Joss saw that it was focusing on his own face and he squeezed out some water. The papers made a lot of them that week, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Hoyle, bringing sensitivity to burlesque, melding tragedy with comedy, mixing tears and laughter, all that stuff.