‘So,’ Sigrid says, ‘That’s what it says. What does it mean?’
‘Yeah,’ says Rhea. ‘I don’t know.’
Chapter 4
Sheldon never saw the attack on his son in Vietnam. But he imagined it, over and over and over again. It appeared faithfully in his dreams, night after night after night. Mabel would shake him awake. ‘You’re dreaming,’ she’d say.
‘No. It’s not like a dream.’
‘A nightmare, then. It’s a nightmare.’
‘No, not even that. It’s like I’m there. In the boat with him. Patrolling the Mekong. Up a tributary at night. I can taste the coffee. My feet itch.’
Mabel was forty-five. She slept naked, except for her wedding ring and a thin white-gold necklace adorned with a tiny diamond pendant at the end. She’d made it from the engagement ring that Sheldon gave her in 1951, and never took it off.
Mabel did not have trouble waking at odd hours of the night. Her husband’s bouts of fear did not disturb her. Twenty-three years earlier, Saul used to keep her up, as he was a colicky baby. Since then, she’d never needed much sleep. Since Saul died, it no longer mattered.
Sheldon’s dream started one summer night in New York, 1975. Saul was already buried. Mabel lay stretched out on top of the white sheets. She was curvy and petite, and liked to stretch her body by pointing her toes and arching her back and extending her fingers as far as she could until everything tingled. She’d hold the position until she cramped and then released…
They lay there awake in the dark.
Donny was also lying naked on the white sheet. It was scorching that summer. They had no air conditioning. An old antique ceiling fan, which looked as though it had been imported from colonial Kenya, was spinning slowly. It forced the hot air down.
Mabel switched on the bedside light.
They had not had the conversation yet. Donny had not asked the question that upset him. He had been, at least until tonight, prepared to go on like this. To wake in the morning, go to the watch-repair shop, put on an eyepiece, and replace a hairspring, oil a wheel train, change a broken balance staff, or just affix a new crown. Eat a sandwich. Come home. Make small talk. Read a paper. Smoke a pipe. Have a drink. Go to sleep. Day after day, quietly allowing time to pass while fixing the instruments that measured it.
But that summer night in 1975 was different. There was no way of knowing what made it different. Maybe it was the temperature — the way the heat in his imaginary Vietnam followed him to the lower-east side of New York, and the sweat from the jungle soaked into his bed sheets.
Maybe there was just no more room left inside him to contain his inner world any longer, and, regardless of the possible consequences, it needed to be released.
When she took his hand in hers and sighed, Donny asked the question.
‘Why are you still with me? Why haven’t you left me?’
His voice, as he remembers it, was calm. Quiet. Sincere. Drawing from a subterranean reservoir of humanity, still and quiet in our collective souls.
There was a long pause before Mabel answered. He looked at her painted toes as they flexed. She had beautiful arches.
‘You know what I’ve been thinking about?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m been thinking about those two spaceships that just found each other in all that emptiness.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She turned her head and frowned. ‘You don’t watch the news?’
‘I’ve been keeping my head down.’
‘The
‘Hope.’
‘You should have watched the news.’
‘I can’t tell if this is an answer or not.’
‘I’m still here, Sheldon. Does it matter why?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I need to know how fragile it is.’
‘It isn’t science, Donny.’
‘I’m working on a tough watch back at the shop. It’s an Omega Speedmaster. There’s a broken screw that sits just below the surface of the hammer spring. I have to strip the whole thing down to the bones to get a grip on it, and I’m not even sure I know how to put it all back together again once I do. All these in-house calibres are a little special. Anyway, it’s the same watch your astronauts wear out in space.’
‘Is this a coincidence?’
‘It’s a popular watch. I had one myself, but Saul took it. I don’t know where it went.’
‘That’s too bad. I like coincidences.’
‘Do you blame me?’
‘Do you blame yourself?’
‘Yes. Entirely. I brought him up on war stories. I told him that a man fights for his country. I encouraged him to enlist. Jews can’t get out of Russia. They file their papers to emigrate and they get blacklisted — they call them
‘You said so before.’
‘They’re smoking dope and listening to records. We’re all a bunch of change-the-world liberals now, I said.’
‘You said this before. We don’t need to do this again.’
‘I had to fill my kid with ideas.’
‘I know.’
‘I remember when Harry James hit that C-note above high C at Carnegie Hall in 1938. It was Benny Goodman’s orchestra. No one was sure if jazz deserved that level of respectability — if those musicians were serious enough to deserve Carnegie Hall. And then that one note. The city went wild. Can you even imagine a single note being heard across this country anymore? They smash their guitars on stage now. My son could have played music. I sent him to war.’
‘It wasn’t his nature.
Sheldon shook his head.
‘We used to worry that if we picked him up when he cried, he’d never learn self-reliance. What the hell were we thinking?’
‘I’m staying with you, Sheldon. I think it’s enough for now. OK?’
