Collected Stories

resembling wheels), he hung by his fat arms from the shining apparatus, he jogged on a treadmill with an odometer, and he tugged at the weights. When he worked out on the Exercycle, the orange-slice wheels of his underpants extended the vehicular fantasy, but he was going nowhere. The queer things he found himself doing as a rich man, the false position he was in! His adolescent children were rednecks. The druidic Spanish moss vibrated to the shocks of rock music. The dogs bred for cruelty bided their time. My brother, it appeared, was only the steward of his wife and children.

Still, he wanted me to observe him at his exercises and to impress me with his strength. As he did push-ups, his dipping titties touched the floor before his chin did, but his stern face censored any comical comments I might be inclined to make. I was called upon to witness that under the fat there was a block of primal powers, a strong heart in his torso, big veins in his neck, and bands of muscle across his back. “I can’t do any of that,” I told him, and indeed I couldn’t, Miss Rose. My behind is like a rucksack that has slipped its straps.

I made no comments, because I was a general partner who had invested $600,000 in the wreckage of rusty automobiles. Two miles behind the private park, there were cranes and compactors, and hundreds of acres were filled with metallic pounding and dust. I understood by now that the real power behind this enterprise was Philip’s wife, a short round blond of butch self-sufficiency, as dense as a meteorite and, somehow, as spacey But no, it was I who was spacey, while she was intricately shrewd.

And most of my connubial ideas derived from the gentleness and solicitude of my own Gerda!

During this last visit with Brother Philip, I tried to get him to speak about Mother. The interest he took in her was minimal. Family sentiment was not his dish. All that he had was for the new family; for the old family, nix. He said he couldn’t recall Hammond, Indiana, or Independence Boulevard. “You were the only one I ever cared for,” he said. He was aware that there were two departed sisters, but their names didn’t come to him. Without half trying, he was far ahead of Andre Breton, and could never be overtaken. Surrealism wasn’t a theory, it was an anticipation of the future.

“What was Chink’s real name?” he said.

I laughed. “What, you’ve forgotten Helen’s name? You’re bluffing. Next you’ll tell me you can’t remember her husband, either. What about Kramm? He bought you your first pair of long pants. Or Sabina? She got you the job in the bucket shop in the Loop.”

“They fade from my mind,” he said. “Why should I keep those dusty memories? If I want details I can get you to fill me in. You’ve got such a memory hang-up—what use is it?”

As I grow older, Miss Rose, I don’t dispute such views or opinions but tend instead to take them under consideration. True, I counted on Philip’s memory. I wanted him to remember that we were brothers. I had hoped to invest my money safely and live on an income from wrecked cars—summers in Corsica, handy to London at the beginning of the musical season. Before the Arabs sent London real estate so high, Gerda and I discussed buying a flat in Kensington. But we waited and waited, and there was not a single distribution from the partnership. “We’re doing great,” said Philip. “By next year I’ll be able to remortgage, and then you and I will have more than a million to cut up between us. Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with the tax write-offs.”

I started to talk about our sister Chink, thinking my only expedient was to stir such family sentiments as might have survived in this atmosphere where the Spanish moss was electronicized by rock music (and, at the back, the pit bulldogs were drowning silently in the violence of their blood-instincts). I recalled that we had heard very different music on Independence Boulevard. Chink would play “Jimmy Had a Nickel” on the piano, and the rest of us would sing the chorus, or yell it out. Did Philip remember that Kramm, who drove a soda-pop truck (it was from affection, because he doted on Helen, that he called her Chink), could accurately pitch a case filled with bottles into a small opening at the very top of the pyramid? No, the pop truck wasn’t exactly stacked like a pyramid, it was a ziggurat. “What’s a ziggurat?”

Assyrian or Babylonian, I explained, terraced, and not coming to a peak. Philip said, “Sending you to college was a mistake, although I don’t know what else you would have been fit for. Nobody else went past high school…. Kramm was okay, I guess.”

Yes, I said, Chink got Kramm to pay my college tuition. Kramm had been a doughboy, did Philip remember that? Kramm was squat but powerful, full-faced, smooth-skinned like a Samoan, and wore his black hair combed flat to his head in the Valentino or George Raft style. He supported us all, paid the rent. Our dad, during the Depression, was peddling carpets to farm women in northern Michigan. He couldn’t earn the rent. From top to bottom, the big household became Mother’s responsibility, and if she had been a little tetched before, melodramatic, in her fifties she seemed to become crazed. There was something military about the way she took charge of the house. Her command post was the kitchen. Kramm had to be fed because he fed us, and he was an enormous eater. She cooked tubs of stuffed cabbage and of chop suey for him. He could swallow soup by the bucket, put down an entire pineapple upside-down cake by himself. Mother shopped, peeled, chopped, boiled, fried, roasted, and baked, served and washed. Kramm ate himself into a stupor and then, in the night, he might come out in his pajama bottoms, walking in his sleep. He went straight to the icebox. I recalled a summer’s night when I watched him cutting oranges in half and ripping into them with his teeth. In his somnambulism he slurped away about a dozen of them, and then I saw him go back to bed, following his belly to the right door.

“And gambled in a joint called the Diamond Horseshoe, Kedzie and Lawrence,” said Philip. He did not, however, intend to be drawn into any reminiscences. He began, a little, to smile, but he remained basically gloomy, reserved. Of course. He had entered upon one of his biggest swindles. He changed the subject. He asked if I didn’t admire the way Tracy ran this large estate. She was a magician. She didn’t need interior decorators, she had done the whole place by herself. All the linens were Portuguese. The gardens were wonderful. Her roses won prizes. The appliances never gave trouble. She was a cordon bleu cook. It was true the kids were difficult, but that was how kids were nowadays. She was a terrific psychologist, and fundamentally the little bastards were well adjusted. They were just American youngsters. His greatest satisfaction was that everything was so American. It was, too—an ail-American production.

For breakfast, if I called the kitchen persistently, I could have freeze-dried coffee and a slice of Wonder bread. They were brought to my room by a black person who answered no questions. Was there an egg, a piece of toast, a spoonful of jam? Nothing. It wounds me desperately not to be fed. As I sat waiting for the servant to come with the freeze-dried coffee and the absorbent-cotton bread, I prepared and polished remarks that I might make to her, considering how to strike a balance between satire and human appeal. It was a waste of time to try to reach a common human level with the servants. It was obvious that I was a guest of no importance, Miss Rose. No one would listen. I could almost hear the servants being instructed to “come slack of former services” or “Put on what weary negligence you please”—the words of Goneril in King Lear. Also the room they had given me had been occupied by one of the little girls, now too big for it. The wallpaper, illustrated with Simple Simon and Goosey Gander, at the time seemed inappropriate (it now seems sharply pertinent).

And I was obliged to listen to my brother’s praise of his wife. Again and again he told me how wise and good she was, how clever and tender a mother, what a brilliant hostess, respected by the best people who owned the largest estates. And a shrewd counselor. (I could believe that!) Plus a warm sympathizer when he was anxious, an energetic lover, and she gave him what he had never had before—peace. And I, Miss Rose, with $600,000 sunk here, was constrained to go along, nodding like a dummy. Forced to underwrite all of his sustaining falsehoods, countersigning the bill of goods he sold himself, I muttered the words he needed to finish his sentences. (How Walish would have jeered!) Death breathing over both the odd brothers with the very fragrance of subtropical air —magnolia, honeysuckle, orange blossom, or whatever the hell it was, puffing into our faces. Oddest of all was Philip’s final confidence (untrue!). For my ears only, he whispered in Yiddish that our sisters had shrieked like pa-pagayas (parrots), that for the first time in his life he had quiet here, domestic tranquillity. Not true. There was amplified rock music.

After this lapse, he reversed himself with a vengeance. For a family dinner, we drove in two Jaguars to a Chinese restaurant, a huge showplace constructed in circles, or dining wells, with tables highlighted like symphonic kettledrums. Here Philip made a scene. He ordered far too many hors d’oeuvres, and when the table was jammed with dishes he summoned the manager to complain that he was being hustled, he hadn’t asked for double portions of all these fried won-tons, egg rolls, and barbecued ribs. And when the manager refused to take them back Philip went from table to table with egg rolls and ribs, saying, “Here! Free! Be my guest!” Restaurants always did excite him, but this time Tracy called him to order. She said, “Enough, Philip, we’re here to eat, not raise everybody’s blood pressure.” Yet a few minutes later he pretended that he had found a pebble in his salad. I had seen this before. He carried a pebble in his pocket for the purpose. Even the kids were on to him, and one of them said, “He’s