Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Robert praised the artwork. He helped the artists print their signatures. The red-haired runt was Miguel O’Reilly. Miguelito was particular about the slant of the apostrophe in his name.

These outcasts — did they know how deprived they were? Lex had told him about them: some abandoned at the gate as infants, some starved and abused before they arrived as toddlers, some rescued from prostitution, or at least reprieved from it. Jaime had served for a while as the mascot of a street gang.

To the boys Robert must seem a patriarch. They were respectful of his Spanish — the stunted vocabulary, the lisp of remote conquerors. They were respectful of his gray hairs, too. In their country a man of his age should already be dead.

The light was reddening, the shadows were lengthening, the parrots would presently lift themselves without a sound from their trees. The afternoon would soon end. Somewhere, elsewhere, maybe in Miami, a congregation was praying together, was feeling united, singular, almost safe.

A child with a birthmark asked to inspect his watch, looked at it gravely, then returned it with a smile. Two others insisted on showing him their dormitory. He peered under the iron cots; he was supposed to laugh at something there, though all he could see was dust. Perhaps a mouse had recently scampered.

He sat down heavily on a cot, startling the children. He drew them close, one against each knee. They waited for his wisdom. “Avinu malkeinu,” he muttered.

A bell rang: dinner. They stiffened. He let them go.

Oh the thin, hard, greedy boyness of them, undersized nomads fixed for a few years in a patch of land at the end of nowhere. Cow shit in the yard. Beans for dinner on the good days.

Jaime had entered all the play. He’d had a very good time.

They walked back to the inn in the dusk. Some of the huts were little stores, Robert now noticed. Dim bulbs shone on canned goods and medicines. Televisions flickered in the remote interiors, illuminating hammocks. How misleading to call this world the third. It was the nether.

Lex had packed a cooler of sandwiches and Cokes that morning. “Jaime can’t manage a second restaurant in one day,” he now explained to his father.

“What was the first?” Robert wondered. Then he remembered, as if from a rich tapestry seen long ago, the smile of the Chilean woman and the knowing supervision of her lime parrots.

“I have enough food for us all,” Lex said.

Janet shook her head. “I’m going to take your father to the café.”

The café, behind the inn, was an open kitchen and three tables. A couple of men dined together at one of the other tables. No menu: today’s offering was chicken in a spicy sauce. Robert hoped his stomach could manage it. He bought a bottle of rotgut wine.

“L’chaim,” Janet said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“My great-grandfather’s name was Isaac Fink,” she said. “He was a peddler who wandered into Minnesota by mistake, and stayed. The family is Lutheran to its backbones. Still …”

“Still, you are somewhat Jewish,” he said politely. “Skoal.”

They spoke of Lex’s talent and of Jaime’s eagerness. They spoke of the children they’d seen that afternoon, and of Janet’s work. She planned to spend another few years here. “Then a master’s in public health, I think.” Her face grew flushed. “I was serious about giving you a back rub.”

And perhaps this part-Jew would be willing also to inspect his tongue and massage his weary abdomen. He had assumed she was lesbian. She probably was lesbian. One could be something of everything here. “Thanks, but no,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur night.”

“Oh, I see,” was her bewildered response.

In bed alone he found himself wondering whether the handsome Chilean chef might also be a little bit Jewish. And that native Canadian woman from last night’s party — such an expert kvetch. He and Lex should have searched harder for eight more Jews. In a room behind a tailor shop in some town lived a pious old man, too poor to have fled to Miami. In one of the squalid barrios a half-Jewish half-doctor dealt in abortifacient herbs. Atop a donkey, yarmulke concealed by a sombrero, a wanderer sold tin pans. The entire population could be Jewish, Jaime included: people descended from Indians who feared the toucan — what was a toucan but a bird with a schnoz? — and from haughty Marranos who prayed to Yahweh in the basements of basements.

THE NEXT MORNING found him at last master of his bowels. He packed his overnight case and walked across the square to the crumbling church. Inside, though Christ on the wooden cross was naked, plaster saints wore velvet robes. The townspeople, too, seemed dressed up. He spotted one of the men he’d seen in the café last night. Today the man was sporting the yellow jacket of a gaucho.

Robert sat near the back and listened to the Mass. The sermon began. He did not attempt to understand it, though the Spanish was slow and simple, and the subject was misericordia , mercy. Rachamim . He thought about Lex, now packing the Jeep for the day’s trip to more orphanages. Lex was settling the bill, too. “This trip’s on me,” he’d said, refusing Robert’s money. An admirable, disappointing fellow. May you, too, have a son like mine , Robert thought — the old curse, the old blessing.

A small hand fell on his arm. He twisted his head and saw Jaime. The child danced away, then turned and stood in the open double doorway. Behind him was the treeless square; behind that was the inn, some other houses, the rising hills.

“Ob,” Jaime hissed. “Ob!” and he flapped his hand as if warding off a nuisance. Get lost, he seemed to say. Come here, he meant to say. Robert knew the difference now.

Ob. Ab. Abba , father, Abraham. The father of a multitude of nations have I made thee. Have you? Through whom? Through Maureen Mulloy, a half mick? Through Jaime Katz, an indigenous person?

A multitude of nations: what a vainglorious idea. No wonder we are always in trouble. How about a few good-enough places? he said silently to the priest, to the Christ, to the God rustling in his ear. How about a people that takes care of its children, even those springing from unexalted seed …

“Ob!”

Robert rose. He followed his grandson out of the dark, merciful church and into the harsh light.

ONE EARLY SUNDAY MORNING Peter Loy stood waiting for the bus downtown. It was October, and the wind was strong enough to ruffle the curbside litter and to make Peter’s coat flap about his knees, open and closed, open and closed. He wouldn’t have been sorry if the wind had removed the coat altogether, like a disapproving valet. It had been a mistake, this long glen-plaid garment with a capelet, suitable for some theatrical undergraduate, not for an ex-schoolteacher of sixty-odd years. He had thought that with his height and thinness and longish hair he’d look like Sherlock Holmes when wearing it. Instead he looked like a dowager.

It didn’t matter; this was not a neighborhood that could afford to frown on oddities. Brighton Avenue, where he now stood, was a shabby main street. Congdon Street, where he lived, was home to an assortment of students, foreigners, and old people. A young couple with matching briefcases had recently bought one of the peeling houses in the hope that the street would turn chic; they spent all their free time gamely stripping paint from the interiors. On weekday mornings white-haired women in bathrobes stared from apartment windows while their middle-aged daughters straggled off to work, and then kept on staring. The immobility of the stay-at-home mothers suggested that their daughters had locked them in, but often at noontime Peter would see one of them moving toward the corner. Her steps would lighten as she neared Brighton Avenue. Here was life! Fresh fish, fish-and-chips, Fishberg the optician … Also on Congdon Street was a three-storied frame building with huge pillars and sagging porches — a vaguely Southern edifice. Inside lived an entire village of Cambodians.