The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ I pull over and turn the painting upside down on the holder.

      At home, they’re still glued to the TV. I go out back and change into my regular clothes. I use the garden hose and a brush to scrub the paint out of my hands. I start dinner and tell Billy he can eat with us or take off and do whatever he wants. I give him five bucks, the keys to my motorcycle.

      Dinner doesn’t go too badly. Billy stays and is on his best behavior. There’s no overt lip-smacking; no farting, not out loud anyway, no belching. He claims he gets stomach aches if he doesn’t fart and belch on schedule. Mom’s behaving, too. We get through the meal fine but I develop indigestion waiting for something to happen.

      After dinner, Billy leaves. I wash dishes and sit with Mom in the living room. For some reason, the TV isn’t on. Maybe Billy’s maniac approach satiated even Mother. I want to talk about how it was when she and Dad were young, how they met, what they planned. I know I’ll never get it anything like straight. I know too, she won’t actually be lying either. Her fantasies, even more than with most people, get realer, truer, to her with time.

      I’m interested in listening. I’m beginning to realize I’ll soon be the oldest branch on the male end of our particular genealogical tree. With Dad gone, I’ll have no more direct access to tribal family information. I should’ve talked more with my grandparents to find out what they were like, what they thought. I’m needing cementing. There’s something tenuous about being male, nothing in line, all so zigzag. I want some Mother glue to help stick myself together.

      It’s astounding what Mom doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how many brothers or sisters her mother had. She knows a bit about her father’s family, the black Protestants, but nothing about her mother’s. My God, we all disappear so quickly, so easily.

      She tells how she met Dad under an awning outside Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. She was fifteen and it was raining. She’d snitched her older sister Maggie’s hat to look dressed up and older. The rain was ruining it and she was crying. Dad shared his umbrella with her.

      I can’t imagine Dad carrying an umbrella, especially at eighteen, but times change. For the greater part of his life, Dad wouldn’t even wear a hat in the rain; said it was good for his hair, made it curl. That all changed when he went bald.

      At this time, Mom is only a year out from under her nervous breakdown and working in a candy factory. According to Mother, from the beginning she knew Dad was the man for her. I wish I’d talked with Dad about what he remembers.

      Mother had been dating another fellow, ‘a very nice Jewish boy from a very well-off family’, to use Mom’s exact formula. I’ve heard of Sidney Parker often enough all my life. ‘He didn’t have a Jewish name, but he was Jewish.’ Probably every woman has some man she brings up as the one she might have, should have, would have, married. Maybe men do this, too, and I just haven’t noticed it.

      Mom switches on the TV. She has a fairly consistent evening schedule of particular shows. There’s also a Dodger game, but Mom doesn’t like baseball. We compromise. I see the second inning through two out in the third, then all of the seventh and eighth. By this time, the Dodgers are behind eight-three, so I imagine they lost. Johnny Carson takes preference.

      Between the third and seventh innings, we watch a show called All in the Family. Mom insists the star of this show looks like me. He’s called Archie Bunker, a sort of hard-hat, hard-nosed jerk with all the racial, cultural prejudices of the poverty mind. I think he’s supposed to be basically sympathetic.

      Maybe it’s like seeing yourself by accident in a three-way mirror at Sears. You see things you don’t let yourself see usually: the thickness of your neck, the real extent of your pot, the generally crappy posture; but I can’t accept myself that way.

      Sure, we both have blue eyes, OK, but then so did Adolf Hitler. We’re both cursed with turned-up noses; how about Bob Hope? But Bunker has white hair and I don’t. Maybe it would be white if it hadn’t fallen out; who knows? The main thing is, he looks so stupid, tight-together pig eyes. But I might look stupid, too, if my hair hadn’t receded, making me look as if I have a high forehead. I hope my soul isn’t as hidden from me as my physical identity.

      ‘See, doesn’t he look like you, Jacky? Doesn’t he? Even the profile; see that? If only you didn’t have a beard.’

      I triple-resolve to never never shave off my beard. Also, I start on an instant diet. It lasts three days.

      I like to eat; I won’t look in mirrors. What the hell, fifty-two is fifty-two; I have to look like something; I can’t always be a boy.

      It’s amazing how much they squeeze into those situation comedies. Eleven minutes of any half-hour show is reserved for ads and station breaks. So they work it all out in nineteen minutes.

      No wonder everybody’s anxious and feeling there’s no meaning or continuity to things. You watch TV long enough, you get a warped view of the world. Normal-paced living seems slow, boring.

      After Johnny Carson, I put Mom to bed, with Valium beside a glass on the bedside table. I don’t want any more of the drug-addict business. If she can’t sleep she can take them; it’s her life. I’m learning, but slowly.

      Now I can’t sleep. I find myself staring at those ‘by the numbers’ paintings Dad did of The Blessed Mother and The Sacred Heart. For some reason they’re hung the wrong way. Usually they’re hung with The Sacred Heart on the left as you look at them.

      I can’t say I’ve ever consciously noticed a special way to hang these pictures but it must have seeped in during nine years of parochial school.

      I don’t think enough, ideas come out of nowhere. Maybe that’s what thinking is. But right then an idea comes. At my age now, I’d consider Jesus, even at his oldest, thirty-three, as a snot-nosed kid, a hotdogging post-adolescent. I lie there in the semidark. Johnny boy, you’re getting old all right.

      When I was a kid, the beard made Jesus look older, like another breed of human being, more serious, a grandfather or father figure.

      Now the kids are the ones with beards. Having a beard is the same as wearing jogging shoes or sweat shirts, a cheap shot at staying young.

      I look at Mary. She couldn’t’ve been more than sixteen or seventeen when she had Jesus. Now, let’s say the archangel Gabriel really did come down and tell her about God being the father and the baby being God, too, and telling her what to name it; would she still be believing that seven, eight months later?

      And Joseph, if he’d really had nothing to do with her, what’s he thinking?

      And what happened to Joseph? You never hear about him after Jesus is twelve. Even if he isn’t Jesus’s father, they could at least say he died or ran away or got run over by a rampaging donkey; something.

      And what a lousy day they chose to celebrate Saint Joseph’s birthday, two days after Saint Patrick’s. They don’t actually know when either of them was born, so they could’ve picked any day. Joseph is limited to holding off donkeys and cows while Jesus is being born; then to giving a few carpentry lessons.

      Next, there’s the marriage feast of Cana. Mary’s all of forty-six, forty-seven; nice age for a woman, fully mature and no real decrepitude set in yet. So Mary pushes Jesus into his career before he’s ready; wants to show her friends what a hotshot son she’s got. I wonder if he did a few parlor tricks at home first, to practice.

      Or maybe Mary was tired СКАЧАТЬ