Paulette approached, sniffling.
“Shut up, Smallette. What’s the matter with you? He hurt Mom.”
“He hurt me just as badly. Did you hear what he said?”
Now my mother stirred. She rose, wiped her cheeks on her blouse, and looked around. Bernie was sprinting back and forth between the cliff edge and our blanket, as though doing line drills. “Please, you two,” said my mother. “Please, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” said Paulie. “We don’t have to go back with him.”
“Then how do you propose we get home, Smallette?”
“We’ll leave him here.”
“Please,” my mother said again. “Please.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” said Paulie. “You can tell us.”
“I’m fine, honey. I’m sure he’s terribly sorry.” But these words seemed to affect her almost as deeply as the slap had. She slumped forward again, and the tears came freely. She was leaning on all fours now, trying to control herself, her gasps punctuating the rumble of the river. I saw my father turn toward the sound, then back to the water.
He stood there like that, his back to us, for a good long time while my mother’s crying slowly diminished. Soon Paulette had stopped sniffling, too, and with a starched-blouse propriety she set about gathering up our picnic trash. She knelt rigidly and replaced everything in the wicker basket, her face a mask now of resolve. I think my sister had always imagined herself a war nurse; and here we were at last, at war.
I myself was passing the skirmish by rubbing my mother’s shoulders, and she was raising her head now and then to thank me.
It might have been a quarter of an hour later that my father, at the edge of the cliff, finally turned to us again. He leaned forward and set both hands on his hips, then dropped the bag to the ground.
My mother rose to her knees.
He tilted up his head so we could see his face — he was smiling, rather sheepishly, it seemed. My mother smiled back.
Then he coughed again.
Afterward, there was a moment marked only by the tympanic rumble of the river and by the wobble of his slightly swaying torso against the sky. The next cough was shorter but strangely crisp, like the snap of a stick. His hand moved to his breast pocket. When it came away, I saw it — the smashed pomegranate again. He looked up, frightened. The globule had attached itself to his shirt, like the gaping, purplish wound from a bullet. I swallowed. I was still on my knees, still patting my mother’s shoulder, and she was still looking up at me, still vaguely puzzled, as though I were a sympathy machine that she’d somehow forgotten how to switch off; but suddenly she shoved away my arm and sprang to her feet. The blanket was in her hand, and we were running. When she reached him, she pressed it to his face and lowered him to the ground. My father thrust away her attempts and cupped his hands over his own mouth. He was on his knees now, every few seconds spasming forward at the neck and emitting from his lips another crisp hack followed by a bright red stream of blood, a stuttering river that quickly became a spreading puddle below him, into which he leaned forward finally and collapsed.
Professor Gamble
LATER THAT MONTH, on the way home from the Southern Ohio Lutheran Medical Center, where Dad had been recovering, we stopped at the Greenway Shopping Center, and my parents went into the A&P together for groceries. Dad had been in the hospital for three weeks, and his gait was still wobbly. He was pale, and there were weirdly colored bruises all over his hands. As the doors of the A&P closed, I saw him bump into a shopping cart and almost fall over.
A few moments after that, as I watched from the backseat of the station wagon, I saw him emerge without my mother from a side exit and limp away down the alley. I couldn’t tell where he was going, but several minutes later when he returned to the car, I could see the bulge under his jacket.
Perhaps he did intend to try. I give him credit for that.
During those first weeks at home, he slept late every morning, took a nap every afternoon, and retired early every night. For my daily mathematics sessions, I sat on my mother’s side of the mattress. But he was clearly less interested in the material now, and we spent a good amount of time reviewing things I’d learned long ago. It wasn’t even clear to me that he remembered what he’d already taught me. “Hans,” he said one afternoon not long after his discharge from the hospital, “I don’t think this stuff is all that important, actually.”
“What? Why not?”
His eyes moved about nervously. “What we’re doing right now. Integration by parts. It’s heuristics, not mathematics. And it’s plainly obvious. Why don’t you just go outside and play?”
Through the window I could see the top branches of the mulberry, under which we normally sat for my lessons. In the shade of that tree was where he’d taught me this very material several years earlier. “Well, for one,” I said, “I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?” He looked out the window himself for a moment but quickly shifted his gaze to the door. Then he shifted it back to me. I could see that something was agitating him. His eyes jumped around as though they couldn’t decide how to look at anything. “Neither would I,” he said. “Not anymore.”
He raised his right arm from the sheets then and examined it. He’d been in the hospital for the good part of a month, and the arm itself looked like something that had fallen out of a rotting tree. My father at the time was not much older than fifty, but the flesh hung off the bone like a shirtsleeve. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at the fingers.”
He pointed them into the air. They were pale but otherwise appeared normal enough: chicken-bone knuckles, one of the digits bent slightly inward, as it always had been.
“What?” I said.
“You’re not looking.”
“The middle one’s bent?”
“It’s been that way since I was younger than you. Look closer.”
I leaned in. “Your hand’s shaking,” I finally said.
“That’s correct.”
“Can’t you stop it?”
“I probably could. But I find it riveting, don’t you? I want to explore the theory.”
“The theory?”
“The theory of human strangeness. Look at it, Hans.”
I did. Extending all the way up his arm was a shivering tremor, as though somewhere near his shoulder a clock motor had been sewn into the flesh. With the other hand he reached behind the mattress, came up with a bottle, and took a gulp. “This stops it,” he said. He held it up. “This is the cure.”
“I see.”
“But it’s running low.”
He let the arm drop and took another drink, then set the bottle back behind the headboard. For a time, we just sat there, staring out the windows. A few minutes later, when he raised the arm again, the tremor had stilled. “Hans,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Fuck you, Dad.”
“Fuck you, Son.”
We both laughed.
“What did you need me to do?”
“Never mind. Your mother wouldn’t approve anyway.”
I looked at him. Something in his face had changed during his stay in the hospital. Some aspect deeper than the purely physical. Whatever it was, it had occurred abruptly. He rubbed his brow, and when the arm came away, sweat showed on his hand. Since his return, the tilt of his outlook had somehow been reversed; he’d always been an introvert, yet his eyes had always looked unmistakably out at the world. Now they pointed inward. The pupils drifted this way and that.