about his father’s love for him. He made no mention of his sister Lilly, from whom he was estranged. He folded the note and put it under the saltshaker, and then he mixed himself a cup of instant cocoa and left, taking the mug he was drinking from.
Zalla was nervous. She thought he might have been drinking, though his breath didn’t smell of alcohol. He’d gone to the bathroom while he was there, so Zalla went into the bathroom to make sure everything was all right. It was, but she still had an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t until that evening, when she left for the hospital to escort my mother home, that she saw the black felt-pen graffiti on the wall in the downstairs hallway: stick people with corkscrew hair like Martians’ antennae, and a quickly scrawled SCREW YOU BLOWING THIS JOINT. She was horrified, and at first she thought she’d keep quiet about Little Thomas’s visit—just pretend it was all a mystery— but she knew that was wrong and she’d have to make a full disclosure.
By the time I heard the story, Zalla and my mother had agreed he was probably drunk—or, worse, on drugs —and that he was a coward to pretend to confront my mother, when all he did was write a note. He also hadn’t had the nerve to face his own mother, who was still living on Twentieth Street, and tell her that he was moving away. Zalla kept quiet about the thirty dollars, but the next morning she confessed that, too. In with the dishes he’d brought back were several strange, gold-bordered plates my mother had not given him; neither she nor Zalla knew exactly what to make of that. Both feared, irrationally, that someone would now come for the plates. They seemed to understand, though, that Little Thomas was gone and wouldn’t be heard from for some time, if ever. Zalla remained afraid of him, in the abstract. She said he’d crept around like a burglar. That gave my mother and me a good laugh, because he’d been sneaky all his life. Good that he spared Mother’s bathroom wall, I joked: bad enough that they’d had to call the management to apologize and to arrange to have the hallway repainted.
While Zalla watched
She asked whether I remembered the silhouettes. I did remember them, vaguely, though I had to be reminded that they’d once hung on a satin ribbon in Etta Sue’s living room. I remembered them from later on, when they’d hung below the light above the bed in my mother’s bedroom, attached to the same ribbon. There had also been one of Lilly, as a baby, and another of Punkin Puppy, in separate frames. The three framed silhouettes on the ribbon had been of Thomas Sr., Etta Sue, and the man who, Etta Sue told my mother, had cut the silhouettes. Etta Sue explained this somewhat humorous fact by saying that the silhouette cutter was going to throw his self-portrait away—he probably did it the way secretaries practice their typing, or something—and that she had rescued it from the trash. Little Thomas had destroyed
When Etta Sue was forced to move out of her house and into the Twentieth Street apartment after Thomas Sr.’s death, she had to discard many things. The furniture my mother could understand, but parting with so many personal possessions had seemed to her a mistake. When the ribbon with the framed silhouettes went into the trash, my mother grabbed it out and said she would keep it for Etta Sue until she felt better. And Etta Sue had given her the strangest look. First shocked, then sad, my mother thought. And in all the years my mother had the silhouettes hung in her bedroom, Etta Sue never mentioned them, although she did eventually ask for Thomas Sr.’s shaving mug back, and for the framed picture of herself and her husband taken at a Chinese restaurant on their first anniversary.
But the point of the story, my mother said, was this: One weekend a few months after Thomas Sr.’s death, she was taking care of Little Thomas and Lilly, and Little Thomas had gone into the bedroom while all the rest of us were in the backyard and he had taken the silhouettes out of the frames and cut the noses off. Then he slipped them all back into their frames and rehung them. It was days before my mother noticed—everyone with his or her nose chopped off, plus Punkin Puppy, earless.
She hurried right over to Little Thomas’s school and waited for him to get out. He walked home, but that day he didn’t go anywhere before she confronted him. By her own account, she grabbed the tip of his nose and squeezed it, asking him how he thought he’d like being without his nose. Then she grabbed his ears and asked him if he thought he might like to spend the rest of his life not hearing, too. She crouched and made him look her in the eye and tell her why he’d done it. It was amazing that someone didn’t notice her making such a scene and come over, she said. Little Thomas gasped when she pulled him around and shook him by his shoulders, but he never cried.
He had done it, he told her, because the faces in the frames were miniature black ghosts, there to haunt people. He disfigured them because they were ghost monsters with special powers of sneaking inside people. If he got rid of the black ghosts, cut them up a little, they would become white ghosts, with no special power.
My mother was so horrified she couldn’t stand. He had given a quite specific, terribly upsetting answer, and she had no idea what response to make, because if he really thought those things he was mad. That would make it the first incidence of real madness in the family. She was 90 percent sure he was telling her what he really believed, but she also thought there was some small chance he might be having her on. She stayed there quite a while, weak in the knees, staring into his face, looking for more information.
“You think I’d care if I didn’t have a nose?” he said. “
My mother remembered being surprised that he knew about sex—that he knew such words as “sperm” and “egg.” She didn’t remember what she said to him next, but it had something to do with how she understood that he was very upset that his father was dead and had disappeared, but that he mustn’t confuse that with thinking his father didn’t love him.
Little Thomas broke away from her. “You stupid fool,” he said. She remembered that distinctly: “You stupid fool.”
After Little Thomas’s father’s death, my mother now suddenly reminded me, someone courted Etta Sue for a bit, but eventually faded away. In retrospect, my mother said, she thought it might quite possibly have been (“Now, don’t laugh,” she said) the milkman. Because, come to think of it, why else—unless she was a little embarrassed —would Etta Sue refuse to let anyone in the family know whom she was seeing? Also, Nat the Milkman had been a Sunday painter, so perhaps he had also cut silhouettes.
“Say nothing of this to Zalla,” my mother said. It was something she had begun to say increasingly, as an afterthought, in recent years—or perhaps as an end to each of her stories, not as an afterthought, really.
I kissed her cheek and gave her hand a squeeze, turning off her bedside lamp with my free hand. It was early evening and dark. We were in autumn, the season when Thomas Sr. had slipped from high atop the mounded hay—slipped in slow motion, compared to the way his cousin Pete had been struck by lightning.
