“No,” I said, “not at all.”
“You know what the other mothers say? The other children?”
It would have been useless to point out that I didn’t care in the least what the other mothers might say or that Prok would have a fit if he knew that I’d been within fifty feet of a church, temple, tabernacle or mosque — he hated them all, all religions, with equal fervor. Religion was antithetical to science. The religious simply couldn’t face the facts. They were living in the Dark Ages, et cetera. I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but Iris wanted to go to church, and that was all that mattered.
I will say that the experience was at least mildly interesting from a sociological perspective. The women had their heads covered, most with spring hats, but a good number with simple black or white scarves knotted under the chin, and the men — and the children too — were turned out in their best in deference to the God they’d come to worship. There was the smell Iris had spoken of — some sort of herb or aromatic gum reduced over hot coals, a holdover no doubt from the days when the devotees went largely unwashed and it was thought that contagion was bred spontaneously out of the miasma of foul air — and a whole panoply of ritual that Iris performed with a simple grace that stirred me more deeply than I wanted to admit. I watched her kneel, cross herself, dip her fingers in the holy water and let her lips move along with the priest’s in the ventriloquism of rapture, even while John Jr. gurgled and writhed at her side and she turned to hush him. In a way, the whole thing was quite beautiful, not that it meant anything and not that we’ve been back since — or not that I’ve been back — but it was like being at a concert, I suppose, when you’re free to let your mind empty itself and wander where it will.
Yes, and then we went to the park and John Jr. ran wild with the release of it, like a puppy let off the leash, and we had a picnic, though the wind made its presence felt whenever the clouds obscured the sun, which they did, off and on, all afternoon. We’d bought a box kite and assembled it at home, despite the fact that studying directions on a sheet of paper and translating them into action wasn’t my strong suit, and when I ran with it twirling and twisting above my head, my son let out a whoop of the purest, elemental joy. I paid out the line and felt the tug of nature on the other end, and it goes without saying that the sensation brought me back to my own childhood. “I want,” my son said. “Give me, Daddy. Me, me!” And I sat myself down in the naked grass with John Jr. in my lap and together we held tight to the string.
It might have been that day when he lost hold of the kite, or maybe it was another occasion, another day, another year. But I remember being confident enough to let him take it himself, to feel that mysterious suspensory tug all on his own and master it, and he ran with the thing, giggling like a maniac, paying out string, getting cockier by the minute — and that was good, all to the good — until there was no string left. Before I could reach him, before I could leap forward and snatch at it, the thing was gone, receding in the sky on its bellying tether as if we’d never had hold of it at all.
Then there was dinner, a roast turkey Iris had put in the oven before we went out, the smell of it heavy on the air as we came in the door, and the fire I made to take the chill out of our fingers and toes. We dropped John Jr. at the sitter’s — Were we going to be late? she wanted to know. No, we didn’t think so, not too late — and then drove over to Prok’s.
As it turned out, we were the first to arrive, which was unusual in itself. Mac took our coats, and Prok, absorbed in mixing cocktails — we were having Zombies, I saw — called out a brusque greeting from the chair he’d pulled up to the coffee table in the inner room. There was no fire that night, and yet the house was warm, bearing the faint olfactory traces of radiated heat, of the furnace in the basement and its conduit of pipes and radiators, and that was odd, given Prok’s Spartan tastes. He rose to greet us as we came into the room, a peck to the cheek for Iris and a handclasp and his famous smile for me, and it was like coming home all over again, arriving at a foreordained destination, the place I was meant to inhabit in my fatherless transit of the planet. Prok’s house. Prok and Mac’s. A wave of emotion swept through me, and I can’t say why or what it was about that particular moment that moved me so, though it had to do with continuity, I think, and with my sudden apprehension of it. I suppose Prok would have classified it as a chemical reaction, a fluctuation in the hormonal levels originating in the endocrine glands. Just that, and nothing more.
“Zombie cocktail?” he offered, thrusting the tall cold glasses into our hands before we’d had a chance to respond.
I noticed then that there were no chairs set up for the musicale, that the light over the phonograph was switched off and the records were still in their jackets on the shelves. Iris must have noticed it too, because she took a long pull at her drink and then asked about it in a voice that might have sounded just a shade too conciliatory: “Do you need any help with the chairs, Prok? For the musicale, I mean? We are having a musicale, aren’t we?”
Prok was finished with the cocktails now — or the first batch of them, four frosted glasses standing on the tray atop the low table, awaiting the remaining guests. He rose from his seat, warming his hands together as if at the conclusion of a job well done. “No,” he said, focusing on Iris, “I’m afraid we’ve decided to do something else altogether tonight—”
That was when Aspinall slammed the door that led to the attic and came clumping down the stairs. We all turned to watch him as he slouched across the room in his dark glasses and belted coat. The heat seemed stifling suddenly — I had to reach up and jerk loose the knot of my tie — and I wondered how he could stand it.
“Everything all set up there?” Prok asked, and I felt the first faint quickening of my blood.
Aspinall shuffled up to us and ducked his head to peer over his glasses and give Iris and me a nod of greeting before answering. “Oh, yeah, we’re good to go. But the lights, of course—”
“Right,” Prok said.
“No sense in wasting electricity—”
“Right.”
I’d never noticed before how pale Aspinall was, how bloodless and colorless, as if all those hours in the darkroom had bled him dry, and I couldn’t help asking if he felt all right—“Ted, are you coming down with something?”—instead of turning to Prok and demanding an answer to the question that was kicking and twitching like a newborn in my brain: What were we planning to film, and if we were filming, then why had the wives been invited?
Ted let out a little laugh and nodded to Iris again. His face was neutral, but the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, so that even in repose he looked as if he were smiling over some private joke. “My mother used to ask me that all the time,” he said. “Teddy, you need to get out and play with the other boys, play ball, get some sun, but I’m just a night owl, I guess. Hell, in the Village nobody gets up before noon — and those are the early risers.”
“I could sleep all day myself,” Iris said, and we all three looked at her. “And I think I would if it wasn’t for John Jr. But then you know how it is with a three-year-old, going on four—”
Aspinall didn’t know. His eyes were faintly visible behind the smoked lenses, half circles rinsed of light, like lunar bodies in eclipse. I noticed that Prok didn’t offer him a drink.