eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.
For Konrad Beezo, who didn’t appear to be handsome under the
greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose
personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under
ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable
expectation.You could understand-though not excuse-his violent
reaction to the loss of her.
Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the
homicidal clown.Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the
creche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the
crook of his left arm.
At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice
the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in
Alice’s Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for
reason or for the laws of physics.
Dad might have seized Beezo’s wrist and, with his strong baker’s hands,
fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that
would have put the baby at risk.
With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared
indignant, offended.Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were
trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that
its father was a mad clown.
Thank God for the baby, Dad has often said.Otherwise I would have
gotten myself killed.You’d have grown up fatherless, and you’d never
have learned how to make a first-rate creme brulee.
So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my
father, “Where are they, Rudy Tock?”
“Where are who?”Dad asked.
The red-eyed clown appeared to be both wrung by grief and ripped by
anger.Tears streaked his makeup.His lips trembled as if he might
sob uncontrollably, then skinned back from his teeth in an expression
of such ferocity that a chill wound through Dad’s bowels.
“Don’t play dumb,” Beezo warned.“There had to be other nurses, maybe
another doctor.I want the bastards dead, all of them who failed
her.”
“They ran,” my father said, certain that it would be safer to lie about
having seen the medical staff escape than to insist that he had
encountered no one.“They slipped out behind your back, the way you
came, through the waiting room.They’re long gone.”
Feeding on his rage, Konrad Beezo appeared to swell larger, as if anger
were the food of giants.No Barnum & Bailey buffoonery brightened his
face, and the poisonous hatred in his eyes was as potent as cobra
venom.
Lest he become a stand-in for the medical staff no longer within
Beezo’s reach, Dad quickly added, with no trace of threat, as if only
being helpful, “Police are on the way.They’ll want to take the baby
from you.”
“My son is mine,”” Beezo declared with such passion that the stink of
stale cigarette smoke rising from his clothes might almost have been
mistaken for the consequence of his fiery emotion.“I will do anything
to keep him from being raised by the aerialists.”
Walking a thin line between clever manipulation and obvious fawning in
the interest of self-preservation, my father said, “Your boy will be
the greatest of his kind-clown, jester, harlequin, jack muffing
“Jackpudding,” the killer corrected, but without animosity.“Yes,
he’ll be the greatest.He will.I won’t let anyone deny my son his
destiny.”
With baby and pistol, Beezo pushed past my dad and hurried along the
shorter hall, where he stepped over the dead nurse with no more concern
for her than he’d have shown for a janitor’s mop and bucket.
Feverishly trying to think of something that he could do to bring down
this brute without harming the infant, Dad could only watch in
frustration.
When Beezo reached the door to the expectant-fathers’ lounge, he
hesitated, glanced back.“I’ll never forget you, Rudy Tock.Never.”
My father could not decide whether that declaration might be an
expression of misguided sentimental affection-or a threat.
Beezo pushed through the door and disappeared.
At once, Dad hurried back to the first delivery room because his
primary concern understandably remained with my mother and me.
Still unattended, my mother lay on the birthing bed where Dad had
moments ago discovered her.Though still gray-faced and soaked with
sweat, she had regained consciousness.
She groaned with pain, blinked in confusion.
Whether she was merely disoriented or delirious is a matter of
contention between my parents, but my father insists that he feared for
her when she said, “If you want Reuben sandwiches for dinner, we’ll
have to go to the market for cheese.”
Mom insists that she actually said, “After this, don’t think you’re
ever going to touch me again, you son of a bitch.”
Their love is deeper than desire, than affection, than respect, so deep
that its wellspring is humor.Humor is a petal on the flower of hope,
and hope blossoms on the vine of faith.They have faith in each other
and faith that life has meaning, and from this faith comes their
indefatigable good humor, which is their greatest gift to each
other-and to me.
I grew up in a home filled with laughter.Regardless of what happens
to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter.And wonderful
pastries.
In this account of my life, I will resort at every turn to amusement,
for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm
for misery, but I will not beguile you.I will not use laughter as a
curtain to spare you the sight of horror and despair.We will laugh
together, but sometimes the laughter will hurt.
So… Whether my mother was delirious or sound of mind, whether she
blamed my father for the pain of labor or discussed the need for
cheese, they are in relative agreement about what happened next.My
father found a wall-mounted phone near the door and called for help.
Because this device was more an intercom than a phone, it did not have
a standard keypad, just four keys, each clearly labeled: staffing,
PHARMACY, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY.
Dad pressed security and informed the answering officer that people had
been shot, that the assailant, costumed as a clown, was even then
fleeing the building, and that Maddy needed immediate medical
assistance.
From the bed, clearheaded now if she had not been previously, my mother
cried out, “Where’s my baby?”
Phone still to his ear, my father turned to her, astounded, alarmed.
“You don’t know where it is?”
Striving unsuccessfully to sit up, grimacing with pain, Mom said, “How
would I know?I passed out or something.What do you mean someone was
shot?For God’s sake, who was shot?What’s happening?Where’s my
baby?”
Although the delivery room had no windows, although it was surrounded
by hallways and by other rooms that further insulated it from the
outside world, my folks heard faint sirens rising in the distance.
Dad’s memory regurgitated the suddenly nauseating image of Beezo in the
hallway, the pistol in his right hand, the baby cradled in his left
arm.Bitter acid burned in my father’s throat, and his already harried
heart raced faster.
Perhaps Beezo’s wife and child had died at birth.Perhaps the infant
in his arms hadn’t been his own but had been instead little James-or
Jennifer-Tock.
I thought “kidnapped,” Dad says when he recalls the moment./ thought
about the Lindbergh baby and Frank Sinatra Junior being held for ransom
and Rumpelstiltskin and Tarzan being raised by apes, and though none of
that makes sense, I thought it all in an instant.I wanted to scream,
but I couldn’t, and I felt just like that red-faced baby with its mouth
open but silent, and when I thought of the baby, oh, then I just knew
it had been you, not his at all, but you, my Jimmy.
Desperate now to find Beezo and stop him, Dad dropped the phone, bolted
toward the open door to the hallway-and nearly collided with Charlene
Coleman, a nurse who came bearing a baby in her arms.
This infant had a broader face than the one Beezo had spirited into the
stormy night.Its complexion was a healthy pink instead of mottled
red.According to Dad, its eyes shone clear and blue, and its face
glowed with wonder.
“I hid with your baby,” Charlene Coleman said.“I hid from that awful
man.I knew he would be trouble when he first showed up with his wife,
him wearing that ugly hat indoors and making no apology for it.”
I wish I could verify from personal experience that, indeed, what
alarmed Charlene from the get-go was not Beezo’s clown makeup, not his
poisonous ranting about his aerialist in-laws, not his eyes so crazy
that they almost spun like pinwheels, but simply his hat.
Unfortunately, less than one hour old, I had not yet learned English
and had not even sorted out who all these people were.
Trembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried
me to my mother.
After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more
pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.
Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been
worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes, ’cause if you turn out to be an
ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”
Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent
events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when
the shooting started.
Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and
difficult labor, Dr.MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate
a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis.He divided his
attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to
the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by
the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital
generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric
service.
Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care.She unknowingly suffered
from preeclampsia.During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and
experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and
that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn
child.
Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely
from the failure of her cervix to dilate.Intravenous injections of
synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of
the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.
Natalie delivered first.Dr.MacDonald tried everything to save her-
an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of
anticonvulsants-but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a
massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.
Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby
and his dead mother, my mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel
me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.
The Jimmy Tock show had begun.
Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he
had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr.MacDonald delivered me and,
according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package
would surely grow up to be a football hero.
Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother
promptly passed out.She didn’t hear the doctor’s prediction and
didn’t see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector,
Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.
After Dr.MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and
then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had
satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would
come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled
off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the
expectant-fathers’ lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.
Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words,
paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious
voice imaginable.
Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse
Coleman heard the uproar.She understood the tenor if not the
specifics of Konrad Beezo’s reaction to the loss of his wife.
When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear
Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in
the thin blanket.
In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her
arms the Beezo baby.Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown’s
intemperate outburst.
Lois made a fatal mistake.Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward
the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his
infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense
grief from which his rage had flared.
Herself a refugee from an abusive husband, Charlene had little faith
that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even
in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and
with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial.
Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for
manners.Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.
She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the
neonatal care unit.As that door was swinging shut behind us, she
heard the gunshot that killed Dr.MacDonald.
This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled,
most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying.An enormous view window
occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or
grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.
With the infants were two creche nurses.They had heard the shouting,
then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than
Lois had been.
Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the
babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital
staff that he could find.
Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant-and
fretted about those they were forced to leave behind.Frightened by a
second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view
window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.
The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly
man slept on unaware.
A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the
flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with in
sectile energy.
Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together
until Charlene heard sirens in the distance.This welcome wail drew
her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of
the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.
Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby,
crossing the rain-washed blacktop.He looked, she said, like a figure
in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on
the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of
the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.
Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is
filled with the poetry of the South.
Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and
under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and
true color of his car could not be discerned.Charlene watched him
drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the
nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling
darkness.
With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rum-pelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.
Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length,
and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my
grandfather on his deathbed.His first proof, however, that the events
in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural
came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket,
exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had
predicted.
“Syndactyly,” Dad said.
“It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him.Then her eyes widened with
surprise.“How do you know such a doctorish word?”
My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with
amazement fingered my fused toes.
Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was
born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now.Things often
prove to be fused in unanticipated ways.Moments separated by many
years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been
folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda
arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying.People unknown
to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as
two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.
Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory
of the procedures.I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.
With all due respect for the memory of Dr.Ferris MacDonald, I never
became a football hero and never wished to be one.My family has never
had an interest in sports.
We are fans, instead, of puffs, eclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles,
and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the
Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight
that my mother produces.We will trade the thrills and glory of all
the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner
together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a
fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of
coffee.
Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet.My weight
has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight
pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not
as large as I appear to be to most people.
The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions-that everyone would call
me Jimmy-has also proved true.
Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal
to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate.Even if
I introduce myself as James, and with emphasis, they at once begin
addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as
though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes
were fused.
As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to
transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five
terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father.They were
terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with
the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were
days filled with much else, as well.Much else.
And now … one more to go.
My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy
of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the
next five would be fulfilled.My childhood and teenage years passed
uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a
yo-yo on the string of fate.
Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached-
Thursday, September 15,1994-we worried.
Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.
She has a curious relationship with caffeine.Instead of fraying her
nerves, the brew soothes them.
If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon
she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a
windowpane.If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake,
so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but
also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.
Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of
the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate No-DOz
caffeine tablets as if they were candy.
Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining
about?When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap
coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.
As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in
fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and creme brulee
that had a sandy texture.He could not concentrate on his recipes or
his ovens.
I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well.In the last
two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might
have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more
often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs.And I do
admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to
hang a picture for her.But it was her foot, not her head, and the one
instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight
of steps and didn’t break anything.
Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had
given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one.Obviously,
regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that
day.
“Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and
mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned.“And paralysis and brain
damage.”
She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a
sense of the fragility of life.
As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading
me to sleep.Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which
she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should
have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud
on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three
little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had
proved faulty.Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.
And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first
of my five ordeals…. PARUTftLQ
Might as Well Die If I Can’t Fly
A,
t nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents
and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be
able to stand up from without our knees buckling.
We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for
getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me.
We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach
September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their
encounter with the wolf.
Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf.
That is, she would play the devil’s advocate and relate to us what
flaws she saw in our precautions.
As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using
sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.
In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not
wealthy,
just securely middle class.Although my father makes a fine salary as
a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don’t come with his
position.
My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting
pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits,
parakeets, and once a r^nilk snake that came to pose and didn’t want to
leave.
Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren’t so
cozy that it feels sumptuous.The ceilings are not high and the
proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished
with great care and with an eye to comfort
You can’t blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa,
under the claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in
the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting
weeks that he adopted us.Earl was the milk snake, and the home from
which he’d come was a sterile place with
stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses
for house plants.
Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a
book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a be-jeweled
winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room.This is because
to the Tock family, food-and the conviviality that marks our every
meal-is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.
Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.
Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner
with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which
we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous
that none of us is overweight.
Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the
waist.He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then
loose on him.
Mom’s caffeine tolerance is not the most significant curiosity
regarding our unusual relationship to food.Both sides of the family,
the Tock
side and the Greenwich side (Greenwich being my mother’s maiden name),
have metabolisms as efficient as that of a hummingbird, a creature
which can eat three times its body weight each day and remain light
enough to fly.
Mom once suggested that she and my father had been instantly attracted
to each other in part because of a subliminal perception that they were
metabolic royalty.
The dining room features a coffered mahogany ceiling, mahogany
wainscoting, and a mahogany floor.Silk moire walls and a Persian
carpet soften all the wood.
There is a blown-glass chandelier with pendant crystals, but dinner is
always served by candlelight.
On this special night in September of 1994, the candles were numerous
and squat, set in small but not shallow cut-crystal bowls, some clear
and others ruby-red, which fractured the light into soft prismatic
patterns on the linen tablecloth, on the walls, and on our faces.
Candles were placed not only on the table but also on the sideboards.
Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we
were at dinner but that we were conducting a seance, with food provided
to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.
Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to
think of it as the condemned man’s last meal.
Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as
a McDonald’s Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We
were prepared for a long evening together.
Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a
position he inherited from his father, Josef.Because all breads and
pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o’clock in the
morning at least five and often six days a week.By eight, with the
baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with
Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.
That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an
apprentice baker for two years at the same resort.The Tock family
believes in nepotism.
Dad says it’s not really nepotism if your talent is real.Give me a
good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.
Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen.When baking, I am Gene
Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.
Dad would be going from our late dinner to work, but I would not.In
preparation for the first of the five days in Grandpa Josef’s
prediction, I had taken a week’s vacation.
Our starter course was sou bourek, an Armenian dish.Numerous
paper-thin layers of pasta are separated by equally thin layers of
butter and cheese, finished with a golden crust.
I still lived with my folks in those days, so Dad said, “You should
stay home from midnight to midnight.Hide out.Nap, read, watch a
little TV.”
“Then what’ll happen,” Grandma Rowena imagined, “is that he’ll fall
down the stairs and break his neck.”
“Don’t use the stairs,” Mom advised.“Stay in your room, honey.I can
bring your meals to you.”
“So then the house will burn down,” Rowena said.
“Now, Weena, the house won’t burn down,” Dad assured her.“The
electrical wiring is sound, the furnace is brand new, both fireplace
chimneys were recently cleaned, there’s a grounded lightning rod on the
roof, and Jimmy doesn’t play with matches.”
Rowena was seventy-seven in 1994, twenty-four years a widow and past
her grief, a happy woman but opinionated.She’d been asked to play the
devil’s advocate, and she was adamant in her role.
“If not a fire, then a gas explosion,” she declared.
“Gee, I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the house,” I
said.
“Weena,” Dad reasoned, “there hasn’t been a house-destroying gas
explosion in the entire history of Snow Village.”
“So an airliner will crash into the place.”
“Oh, and that happens weekly around here,” my father said.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Rowena asserted.
“If there’s a first time for an airliner to crash into our house, then
there’s a first time for vampires to move in next door, but I’m not
going to start wearing a garlic necklace.”
“If not an airliner, one of those Federal Express planes full of
packages,” Rowena said.
Dad gaped at her, shook his head.“Federal Express.”
Mom interpreted: “What Mother means is that surely if fate has
something planned for our Jimmy, he can’t hide from it.Fate is fate.
It’ll find him.”
“Maybe a United Parcel Service plane,” said Rowena.
Over steaming bowls of pureed cauliflower soup enlivened with white
beans and tarragon, we agreed that the wisest course for me would be to
proceed as I would on any ordinary day off work-though always with
caution.
“On the other hand,” Grandma Rowena said, “caution could get him
killed.”
“Now, Weena, how could caution get a person killed?”my father
wondered.
Grandma finished a spoonful of soup and smacked her lips as she had
never done until she had turned seventy-five, two years previously. She
smacked them with relish, repeatedly.
Halfway between her seventh and eighth decades, she had decided that
longevity had earned her the right to indulge in certain small
pleasures she had never previously allowed herself.These were pretty
much limited to smacking her lips, blowing her nose as noisily as she
wished (though never at the table), and leaving her spoon and/or fork
turned useful side up on the plate at the end of each course, instead
of useful side down as her mother, a true Victorian and a stickler for
etiquette, had instructed her always to do in order properly to
indicate that she had finished.
She smacked her lips again and explained why caution could be
dangerous: “Say Jimmy’s going to cross the street, but he worries that
a bus might hit him-“
“Or a garbage truck,” Mom suggested.“Those great lumbering things on
these hilly streets-why, if the brakes let go, what’s to stop them?
They’d go right through a house.”
“Bus, garbage truck, might even be a speeding hearse,” Grandma
allowed.
“What reason would a hearse have to speed?”Dad asked.
“Speeding or not, if it was a hearse,” said Grandma, “wouldn’t that be
ironic-run down by a hearse?God knows, life is often ironic in a way
it’s never shown on television.”
“The viewing public could never handle it,” Mom said.“Their capacity
for genuine irony is exhausted halfway through an episode of Murder,
She Wrote.”
“What passes for irony on TV these days,” my dad noted, “is just poor
plotting.”
I said, “I’m less spooked by garbage trucks than by those huge concrete
mixers they drive to construction sites.I’m always sure the part that
revolves is suddenly going to work loose of the truck, roll down the
