“Her father barges into the apartment, pushes her husband aside, tells her he’s going to pack all her things and take her and the kids to stay with him till he finds her her own place. She says she can’t leave him. It’ll be just what he wants. He’s at least an adequate provider though so niggardly at times, even if he’s always the big spender with his friends, that she has to steal from his wallet when he’s sleeping or showering or forge his signature on savings withdrawl slips. It isn’t that she still has a lot of feeling for him left. He’s too thoughtless and avaricious and there’s never any real lovingness or anything much there but self-centeredness and she expects he’ll one day give her syphilis if she ever gets back in his bed. He treats the children like distant relatives or better yet as if they’re the next-door neighbor’s or even better yet as if he’s their avuncular bachelor uncle who once every two years comes to visit them for a few days. He simply isn’t cut out to be a husband or father, but as a devoted brother and son he’s the best. They weren’t kidding, whoever told her, that they broke the mold when they made him. But it’s no joke. He’s going to be in serious trouble one day, not just some petty night-in-the-clink stuff, and that’s when she’ll pack up the kids and leave here. She’ll have to. He’ll wind up in prison and she won’t be able to afford this place. But to give him that pleasure now? He won’t moon for her or beat out his brains as to what he did wrong that she left and he’ll even be relieved to be on the loose again. Even? He’ll call it a red-letter day, whatever that is. Besides all that she’s sick of him needing her just to have someone handy to shut-up, keep the kids out of his hair, cook and serve him elaborate just-like-momma-made breakfasts and dinners every day when he wasn’t taking other people out to eat or mooching a meal, and to throw her weekly allowances across the dinner table at her as if she weren’t a low-priced chippy but a clean whore. None of these are really good-enough reasons and it isn’t that she feels the kids need at least a shadow of a father around till they’ve reached whatever’s that certain age, but for no known reason to herself she’s going to stay, and she takes out the few clothes he put into the valise, closes it, puts the clothes back in the drawers and asks him to put the valise back up in the closet.”
“For a few years he thought of himself as a serious painter and painted nothing for most of those years but large canvases based on photographs of his parents with his two older brothers. They were six and two then, seven and three, five and one, four and a few months, and in a few of them and especially in the ones he liked to paint most, she was pregnant with him. You couldn’t tell from the photographs but she told him she was when he showed her them. ‘That’s you,’ she said, pointing to her flat belly. ‘I carried small. People when they saw me in my eighth month would often say I never looked slimmer, am I on a special diet? My diet was that I didn’t eat much when I was pregnant because almost everything I ate I threw up. That meant you kids came out frail and diminutive, and two of the three boys were so unnourished they almost died from it, but I forget which ones. Anyway, the third was almost no better off. I was nauseous with all my boys from the day after conception till a minute before they put me out to deliver them. In fact with you that’s how I knew I was pregnant. But with Vera, don’t ask me why, I didn’t have a single sick minute with. And she came out twice the size of any of you, and rosy, exuberant, almost a movielike version of a lively newborn, and howling inside the birth canal during the last few seconds of travel before she shot out. People have always said that was impossible, but I heard her. All ironic, of course, since by the time she was three she was sick with the disease that would gradually ravage her till she became half her natural weight and greatly shrunken, all feathers and empty bones. But the sickest I ever got was with you. I often couldn’t leave my bed for days. If I look happy in this photo with you it was because I was a good poser, having had a little experience as a dancer and model, since at no time did I feel any cause to smile. I literally cursed you daily for being inside me and I think a few times I consciously tried to abort you and swore over and over never another. But while I was so sick, tossing around all night and not permitted any more complex medicine than a spoonful or two of simple pink antacid for fear it’d harm the baby — doctors knew so little about it then — your father slept like a log and groused when I didn’t, since in bed I sometimes kicked him in the belly for being so healthy and sleeping so well. But for all those nine miserable months, I had nine wonderful ones nursing each of you. It was a pleasure in every way. Your father loved the way I’d filled out and, let’s face it, got all hepped up when he saw my breasts spread and the baby being fed, and became for the only time sort of solicitous and very affectionate to me and I also never felt hungrier or physically better. But nothing was worth so much nausea and I cursed you boys so much when I was carrying you that I’m surprised none of you came out with the plague. Maybe Vera’s illness came from all those accumulated curses against her brothers finally heard. A backlog of them and really only one higher being to answer them, so it took a while and because of the delay got misdirected. Odd how it turned out, with you the worst to me ending up the healthiest child. But who knows what Alex’s health would have been if he hadn’t drowned when he was twenty-six — maybe a lot better than yours. But if there’s one thing I really know it’s that I would have, if given half the chance, died right then and there or just a slow death but with her pain and disfiguring illness, simply to give her a completely-free-of-it healthy or just normal few years. But who’s to say what I’m saying has any sincerity behind it when I know even when I’m saying it that wishes aren’t granted and prayers are never answered nor curses ever heard.’ ‘Well, I think we should at least leave a little of it open,’ he said and she said ‘If you want.’”
“She visits her husband in prison. It’s a long train ride up, or seemed that way, but now looking back she sees it couldn’t have been more than an hour and a half, maybe two. The trains were very old, the windows were still open in the hot weather then; the passenger cars were more like very long subway cars going aboveground, but between stations not as fast. All that, plus stopping at every stop, probably had something to do with making the trip seem longer. Also that she had to take the subway to Times Square and then the Forty-second Street shuttle to Grand Central to get the train. If it had had a shiny high-speed look to it she might have remembered it as going faster. It also could have been her mood. She never felt good going, always felt worse returning, so she was never able to sleep or read on the train, even a newspaper. He was awful then: cranky, angry, bitter, inconsiderate, unfeeling. Tough as it was for him to be there, it wasn’t so easy for her either. But he never said things to her like ‘How you holding up? It must be rough, not just this back-and-forth trip, but taking care of the kids and being so short of cash and going along on your own day to day. I’m miserable without you too and for what I’ve done to you, but please don’t let that add to your upset; I’ll get through it OK.’ She left the children in the care of someone. All of them except the youngest go to the same elementary school three blocks from their home, so the helper only has a few hours with them. She’s allowed to see him once a month for up to two hours, and once a week for ten minutes if she wants. Documentary trips they call those. Sign this, that’s it, out. She’s never gone up for just those ten minutes. Wants no part of them: so cold. If there’s business between them she saves it for the long visit when they can also talk about other things. The business stuff can be brutal and it’s also a long trip and so many preparations and expensive for just ten minutes. They’re not allowed to touch. Signs say it everywhere, unless the couple is given written permission by the chief guard. ‘They might give it if I’m a perfect boy for a year,’ her husband once said. ‘But fingers through the hole only, so expect no kiss.’ Glass is between them where they sit. A screened hole the size of a silver dollar in it to talk through and a hole the size of his fist at the bottom of it to eventually touch fingertips she hopes and to put things through for him to sign if she has to. When that happens a guard unlocks the hole on her side, another guard stands beside her husband, and the paper and pen, having been inspected by the chief guard in the anteroom before she comes into this meeting room, are put through by the guards. Then the hole’s locked, and after he signs, hole’s unlocked and the pen and paper’s passed through to her guard who reads it to see her husband didn’t write anything he wasn’t supposed to, like, she supposes, ‘Put a hand grenade in a cake to help me escape,’ or even ‘I love you dearly and want to screw you madly,’ and given to her. Today she wants him to sign a change-of-name form for the kids. ‘Where does that leave me?’ he says. She says ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It means no one will ever know me through my kids.’ ‘It doesn’t have to mean that. It could mean we just wanted to make their lives simpler by anglicizing their names. But all right, I warned you not to do it, you kept doing it. I warned you some more, you kept doing it some more and a whole slew of other stupid things which thank God — don’t worry, nobody can hear me — you were never caught at. I warned and warned you even more—’ ‘Stop harping on me. Don’t be a bitch. You know I don’t like bitches. I never did and you’re acting like a total worthless foul-mouthed nagging bitch of all time. It makes you look ugly when by all rights you could be pretty.’ ‘Insults won’t change my mind or the conversation’s direction.’ ‘Sticks and stones, go on and tear me to pieces and chew up my bones, think I care? Think I’d dare? blah-bah-bah, you rotten bag. Just lay off.’ ‘Stop being a jackass and trying to avoid this. Please sign. That’s all I ask. Please please sign.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We’ve gone over it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s best for the kids.’ ‘How?’ ‘You’re like a broken record.’ ‘How?’ ‘Because they’re being hounded, as I’ve already told you, hounded by their schoolmates and people because their father’s in prison and lost his dental license and was involved in a smelly citywide scandal and newspaper stories and photos of you and the whole world and his brother knows of it and other things. Because you’re famous in the most terrible low way. And through you, guess.’ ‘So it’ll be better by the time I come out.’ ‘The news stories. Think, why don’t you. Just don’t sit there pigheaded, unconcerned for anyone but you. People will never forget, or not for thirty years. The