“Don’t start, Mother.”
She threw open the door of the refrigerator.
“Look,” she challenged. “Look at all this, eggs that you didn’t want, look at the size of them, cheese, Gruyère, Oka, Danish, Camembert, some cheese and crackers, and who’s going to drink all the wine, that’s a shame, Lawrence, look at them, feel the weight of this grapefruit, we’re so lucky, and meat, three kinds, I’ll make it myself, feel the weight.…”
Try and see the poem, Breavman, the beautiful catalogue.
“- here, feel the weight.…”
He heaved the raw slab of steak at her feet, splitting the wax-paper on the linoleum.
“Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life than stuff food down my face? I’m not starving.”
“This is the way a son talks to his mother,” she informed the world.
“Will you leave me alone now?”
“This is a son talking, your father should see you, he should be here to see you throwing down meat, meat on the floor, what tyrant does that, only someone rotten, to do this to a mother.…”
He followed her out of the kitchen.
“I just asked to be left alone, to wake up by myself.”
“Rotten, a rat wouldn’t treat a mother, rotten as if you were a stranger, would anybody throw meat and my ankles are swollen, beat you, your father would beat you, a rotten son.…”
He followed her up the stairs.
“You can make someone sick with your screaming.”
She slammed her closet door. He stood beside it and listened to her opening and shutting the big drawers.
“Get away! A son talks to a mother, a son can kill a mother, I knew everything, what I have to hear, a traitor not a son, to talk to me, nobody who remembers me to talk …”
He heard her slide open the dress compartment. First she tore the sleeves from some old housecoats. She tripped over a tangle of hangers. Then she began on an expensive black one she had bought in New York.
“What good are they, what good are they, when a son is killing a mother.…”
He heard every sound, his cheek pressed against the wood.
4
At night the park was his domain.
He covered all the playing fields and hills like a paranoiac squire hunting for poachers. The flower-beds, the terraces of grass had an aspect of formality they did not have by daylight. The trees were taller and older. The high-fenced tennis court looked like a cage for huge wingless creatures which had somehow got away. The ponds were calm and deadly black. Lamps floated in them like multiple moons.
Walking past the Chalet he remembered the masculine smell of hockey equipment and underwear, the thud of skates on wooden planks.
The empty baseball diamond was blurred with spectacular sliding ghosts. He could hear the absence of cheers. With no bikes leaning against them the chestnut tree and wire backstop seemed strangely isolated.
How many leaves have to scrape together to record the rustle of the wind? He tried to distinguish the sound of acacia from the sound of maple.
Just beyond the green rose the large stone houses of Westmount Avenue. In them the baseball players were growing their bodies with sleep, resting their voices. He imagined that he could see them dimly through the walls of the upper storeys, or rather the sheets they were wrapped in, floating row upon row over the street, like a colony of cocoons in a moonlit tree. The young men of his age, Christian and blond, dreaming of Jewish sex and bank careers.
The park nourished all the sleepers in the surrounding houses. It was the green heart. It gave the children dangerous bushes and heroic landscapes so they could imagine bravery. It gave the nurses and maids winding walks so they could imagine beauty. It gave the young merchant-princes leaf-hid necking benches, views of factories so they could imagine power. It gave the retired brokers vignettes of Scottish lanes where loving couples walked, so they could lean on their canes and imagine poetry. It was the best part of everyone’s life. Nobody comes into a park for mean purposes except perhaps a sex maniac and who is to say that he isn’t thinking of eternal roses as he unzips before the skipping-rope Beatrice?
He visited the Japanese pond to ensure the safety of the goldfish. He climbed through the prickly bushes and over the wall to inspect the miniature waterfall. Lisa was not there. He somersaulted down the hill to see if it was still steep enough. Wouldn’t it be funny if Lisa of all people should be waiting at the bottom? He sifted a handful in the sand-box to guard against polio. He did a test run on the slide, surprised that it squeezed him. He looked gravely from the lookout to guarantee the view.
“My city, my river, my bridges, shit on you, no I didn’t mean it.”
The bases had to be run, the upper ponds examined for sail-boat wrecks or abandoned babies or raped white nurses. Touch the tree trunks to encourage them.
He had his duty to the community, to the nation.
At any moment a girl is going to step out of one of the flowerbeds. She will look as though she has just been swimming and she’ll know all about my dedication.
He lay under the lilacs. The flowers were almost gone, they looked like molecular diagrams. Sky was immense. Cover me with black fire. Uncles, why do you look so confident when you pray? Is it because you know the words? When the curtains of the Holy Ark are drawn apart and gold-crowned Torah scrolls revealed, and all the men of the altar wear white clothes, why don’t your eyes let go of the ritual, why don’t you succumb to raving epilepsy? Why are your confessions so easy?
He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren’t going to dynamite
