Collected Stories

long?) spend his final years with no more company than the river. Since giving up his Brecht studies, he had no occupation. Brecht was light on the subject of death. If he was to live with Stalinism this lightness was essential. Hence the joys of the knife, as in “Mackie Messer,” so many years on the hit parade. All that pre-Hitler Weimar stuff. It was Stalin, whom Brecht had backed, who should have won in 1932. But Rexler did not intend to go public with such views. He was too ill, too old to make enemies. If he turned polemical the intelligentsia would be sure to say that he was a bitter aging hunchback. No, for him it was private life from now on.

He didn’t want to think about the books and articles that had made his Lachine cousins so proud of him. “Just look how Robbie overcame the polio and made something of himself,” Cousin Ezra would tell his growing children.

Nobody could say exactly how extensive Cousin Ezra’s realestate holdings were.

But toward the end, dying of leukemia, Ezra greeted Rexler by throwing his arms wide. He sat up in his hospital bed and exclaimed, “A maloch has walked into my room.” His color was his father’s exactly—very dark and with pleasant folds, and he had become the Old Testament patriarch through and through—an Abraham bargaining with the Lord God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah or buying the cave of Machpelah to bury his wife.

“Angel,” Ezra said with delicacy because of the mound on Rexler’s back: not exactly a pair of folded wings. The truth at that time was that Rexler looked like one of the cast of a Brecht—Kurt Weill production: hands sunk in his trousers’ pockets and his skeptical head—it was too heavy, it listed—needing cleverly poised feet to support it. His hair was gray, something like the color of drying Oregano. What did his dying cousin make of him, of his reputation as a scholar and a figure in New York theatrical circles? Rexler had gone against the mainstream in the arts, and his radical side was the side that had won.

All those years of error, as it now seemed to Rexler. Hands clasped behind his back he tramped, limped, along the Lachine Canal, thinking that his dying cousin Ezra gave him high marks for his struggle against paralysis.

Here in Lachine, Rexler had had a second family. After Uncle Mikhel and Aunt Rozzy died and Ezra had assumed the role of patriarch, Albert had refused to acknowledge him as such, “recognized, was willing.” In this matter Rexler saw that he had relied on the mainstream. It was an inconsistency.

Strictly speaking, the child with normal spine and arms and legs was transformed into the deformed man in the loden coat, the theatrical hat pulled down over the thick sideburns.

It had been better on balance to be a revolutionary than a cripple. “Have I ever told you, Robbie, that we are descended from the tribe of Naphtali?” said Ezra.

“How do we know that?”

“Oh, these things are known. It was passed on to me and I pass it on to you.”

In a month’s time Ezra was dead. Years ago he had exhumed Reba’s body and she was buried beside her parents. They were all to be together. Twenty years later Matty joined them. Only Albert remained. At eighty he was still an homme р femmes. But they wouldn’t stay put when they found out what was expected of them. Now he was no longer a seducer, he was a petitioner or suppliant. The meanness, however, hadn’t gone out of him. Only he was weakened, he couldn’t enforce anything, and he played humble. The last of his wives had left him within a year. Back to Baltimore.

Albert sent for Rexler. He was by now the last of the Rexlers. “Only the two of us left,” said Albert. “I’m so glad you came. The family doted on you.”

“When I got polio my childish charm was shot down.”

“Of course it was very hard. But you fought back. You became a distinguished man. I used to give copies of your books to my literate clients.”

Evidence of wasted years, Rexler thought, if anyone wished to make a case against him. However, you don’t waste the time of a dying man with disclosures, confessions, repudiations. “One day I went with you in the Model T,” said Rexler, “and you parked in front of a clapboard house across the tracks. Then you went in. Was that a whorehouse?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you were there for such a long time and I played with the pedals and the steering wheel.”

Albert smiled forgivingly. It was himself that he forgave. “There were a couple of houses.”

“On this one there was a veranda.”

“I wouldn’t have paid much attention….”

“And on the way home there was an accident on the Grand Trunk tracks. A man was killed.”

“Was he?”

Albert had no memory of it.

“Minutes before we crossed. His liver was in the roadbed.”

“The things kids will remember.”

Rexler was about to describe his surprise at seeing a man’s organs on the ties and stones on the roadbed but he caught himself in time luckily. Albert’s skin cancer had metastasized and he hadn’t far to go. His still-shrewd eyes communicated this to Rexler, who backed off, thinking that for Albert that afternoon, when he and the girl had lain chest to chest, his heart and lungs pressing upon hers, had added up to a different sum. Rexler had come to say good-bye to his cousin, whom he wouldn’t be seeing again. Albert was wasted; his legs forked under the covers like winter branches, and his courtroom voice was as dim as a child’s toy xylophone. He sent for me, Rexler reminded himself, not to talk about my memories, and I think I look alien to him, that seeing me is a disappointment.

In the upside-down intravenous flask a pellucid drop was about to pass into his spoiled blood. If other things could be as clear as that fluid. Probably Albert had asked one of his daughters to telephone me because he remembered how things once were. The uncritical affectionate child. He hoped I might bring back something. But all he got from me was a cripple at his bedside. Yet Rexler had tried to offer him something. Let’s see if we can ratchet up some ofthat old-time feeling. Perhaps Albert had got something out of it. But Albert had taken no conscious notice of the man hit by the train. There never was a conversation about that and now Albert too was buried with the rest of the family—“my dead,” as Ezra spoke of them. Rexler, who didn’t even know where the cemetery was and would never go to visit it, walked lopsided in the sunny grass of Monkey Park beside the canal locks. Deep-voiced, either humming or groaning, he turned his mind again to the lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of the shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or a refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties. How finite they looked.

His deformity, the shelf of his back and the curved bracket of his left shoulder, gave added protection to his hoarded organs. A contorted coop or bony armor must have been formed by his will on the hint given that afternoon at the scene of the accident. Don’t tell me, Rexler thought, that everything depends on these random-looking parts—and that to preserve them I was turned into some kind of human bivalve?

The Mercedes limo had come to the canal for him and he got in, turning his thoughts to the afternoon lecture he didn’t particularly want to give.

A Silver Dish

WHAT DO YOU DO about death—in this case, the death of an old father? If you’re a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who’s been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages as being on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That’s what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis.