Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Read online

  On Sunday nights it was my job to refill the drinks, and to tell people on the telephone that my parents were out. This work kept me pretty busy. One of the calls was always from Margie.

  “What’s he wearing?” she inquired by way of hello.

  “A cassock.”

  “Stop that! Torturer …”

  “Gray pants, gray striped shirt, tan sweater.”

  “Thanks. I’m absolutely devouring Rebecca at the Well, next week’s portion. Are you going to the ceremony for the Czech scroll?” And without waiting for an answer, “What are you wearing?” And without waiting for that answer, either, “I’m wearing an exceedingly biblical outfit. How old do you guess Rebecca was when she watered the stranger’s camel?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirteen!”

  I went back to the game. The deal had gone around to the cantor again, or so I think I remember. Seven-card Stud. Now I stood behind the patriarch. My mother was wiping her glasses with a handkerchief. She wore glasses over her Wedgwood eyes to deflect admiration, my father had told me. His great-grandmother had achieved the same thing with a matron’s wig.

  “The pair of queens bets,” the cantor said, nodding to the patriarch.

  “Ten cents,” the patriarch said.

  “I call,” the cantor said, making the cadence sound like the beginning of a declaration of love. Some thirty years earlier, just out of high school, he had fought on the beaches of Anzio. I figured he had picked up his rich tenor on the march north. He had met his wife in Paris, after the liberation.

  Sam did not conceal his disappointment in the cards he was being dealt. But disappointment was different from misery. He became noticeably miserable when the game ended and he had to go home. Sam had two sons, but both had escaped from his gloomy house. One was a physiotherapist in New York and the other was something unspeakable on the West Coast—at any rate, Sam wouldn’t speak of him.

  As far as I was concerned, Sam’s wife was as dead as Margie’s poor mother. She was just a pale face seen briefly at the kitchen window or an arm pulling down a second-floor shade. One rainy morning, when I was home from school with a cold, she ran down her front path after the mailman in order to give him a letter—perhaps one she’d forgotten to post, perhaps one that had been wrongly delivered. The mailman took the letter. Mrs. Sam turned and walked slowly back up the path. The wind further unsettled her scant red hair and her pink wrapper was coming undone and the rain lashed her squirrel face.

  “Why is Mrs. Sam so strange?” I’d asked my mother.

  “She drinks.” My mother knew about drinking. She worked in a family-service agency.

  At ten thirty, right after the patriarch had taken an entire pot by winning both high and low, Mother pushed back her chair. “Count me out.”

  “Already?” Sam moaned.

  The men continued to play. My mother took the platter from the refrigerator and plugged in the coffee while I removed the empty beer glasses from the table and cut a defrosted carrot cake into eight slices. My mother loaded the glasses into the dishwasher, and I resumed my perch on the high stool and at last allowed myself to observe the rabbi. I did this at Margie’s behest. I myself was in love with our chemistry teacher.

  The rabbi was about thirty. He had a doctorate in sociology as well as a certificate of ordination, and he knew how to play the guitar. He was haltingly eloquent. Since his arrival two years earlier, attendance at Saturday-morning services had swollen. Every Friday night, Margie washed her hair with shampoo and then with flea soap, which added body. On Saturday mornings she put on a velvet skirt and a blouse with romantic sleeves. She walked to the synagogue. After services she descended to the social hall and drank the sweet wine and the seed cookies the Sisterhood provided. Sooner or later she edged toward the rabbi. The women behind the refreshments stiffened. Poor motherless vamp! Margie said something about the Torah portion. The interpretation was always borrowed from the Hertz commentaries but the vivacity was all her own. The rabbi gave her a kindly reply. She moved away.

  The game now being dealt was seven-card Stud. The rabbi unabashedly peeked twice at his hole cards. His eyes were as black as calligrapher’s ink. There were faint smudges under them. His hair made my fingers tingle. All at once I became unable to reconstruct the chemistry teacher’s face in my mind. The white chip I had picked up earlier scorched my groin. I was no longer peeking at the rabbi for Margie’s sake; now I was feasting my eyes on him for myself. I noticed that he had stopped checking on his pair. Through the medium of the darkened kitchen window, he was feasting his eyes on my mother.

  That chilly replica of our kitchen in the window was like a photograph that a son of mine might one day look at; he’d cautiously name me and my parents and wonder about the identity of the other five figures—the theatrical man with the gray hair, the bearded old fellow, the Latin lover, the shrimp, the young man burning up inside. I thought of my inquisitive descendant, not yet born, and then I thought of the Czech Torah, alone in its locked room, waiting to be born again. I shivered and shook myself—not like a dog, I hoped, again eyeing the rabbi. Maybe like a water nymph?

  The rabbi lost to the patriarch, as I recall. It was now the last game. Dad announced pot limit, an unbuckled end to the evening. Pot limit was five-card Draw: any number of raises allowed, and you could bet the amount that was already on the table.

  My father dealt. Chips hit the table immediately. Dad’s was the only hand I could see. He wisely folded a jack/ten when it was his turn, but everybody else stayed in for three raises. At the draw everybody took two cards except for the rabbi, who took none.

  There was a hoarse murmuring at this display of strength or nerve.

  “Check,” the patriarch said.

  “Check,” the cantor echoed.

  The rabbi bet the pot. It amounted by then to five dollars or so.

  “Too rich for me,” Sam said, and folded.

  But the usurer, smiling his tolerant smile, raised back. The patriarch and the cantor folded.

  And then the rabbi raised again. I stepped down from my stool and slid behind the patriarch. I heard a squish: the pumpkin on the windowsill had imploded. I passed the cantor and stopped behind the rabbi. He held four spades to the king, and the nine of clubs.

  Shocked by this four-flush that our man of God was so recklessly promoting, I nonetheless managed to obey my father’s directions. I did not snicker, did not gasp, did not smile, did not frown, did not incline my head farther or change the angle of my shoulders or grip the back of the rabbi’s chair any tighter than I was already gripping it. But my forehead felt as if a flame had been brought very near, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that my hair was on fire.

  The usurer glanced up in order to evaluate the rabbi’s face. He could not have avoided seeing mine, too. Who could fault him for misinterpreting my close-wrapped excitement?—I must be looking down on a royal straight flush, he’d have thought; or at least four of a kind.

  “The pot’s yours,” the usurer said graciously to the rabbi. He showed his straight, which he was not obliged to do. The rabbi collapsed his own fan of cards with one hand and collected the discards with the other and merged his nothing with the other nothings. He was under no obligation to show what he’d held. I knew that good poker strategy recommended allowing yourself sometimes to be caught in a failed bluff. But a successful bluff is best not proclaimed, particularly one that you guess has been aided by the kibitzer behind your back. My father told me later that my face resembled a tomato.

  THOUGH THE CEREMONY to receive the Czech Torah was scheduled to begin at two o’clock, the entire congregation and a host of other people had assembled by a quarter before the hour.

  We crowded into the pews of the sanctuary—an octagonal room paneled in light oak, its broad windows unmediated by stained glass. The room glowed in the radiant afternoon.

  My parents and I had arrived at half past one. I entered between them as if they were marrying me, but t
hey let me take the seat on the aisle. I watched people come in. Mrs. Sam leaned noticeably against her husband. His body adopted a matching slant, and he seemed to be doing the walking for them both. Margie swished down the aisle on her grandfather’s arm. She was wearing an outfit that Azinta must have helped her assemble—an orange caftan, an orange turban, and silver earrings the size of kiddush cups. The mayor nodded to several acquaintances. The university provost nodded to no one. Other Christians looked stiffly appreciative, as if they were at a concert. Azinta held hands with her Viking lover. She wore a pioneer’s high-necked dress in a brown shade that just matched her skin. I wondered if she was now speaking with a Scandinavian accent.

  At exactly two o’clock Mrs. Cantor marched across the bimah to the lectern. In a manly voice she welcomed us. “This is a momentous occasion,” she boomed. “It is the culmination of the efforts of many people.” Her speech was brief. Perhaps it was not meant to be brief, but by the time she had reached the fifth or sixth sentence, our attention was diverted to the rear of the sanctuary.

  The cantor stood in the open double portal. He was wearing the white robe of the Days of Awe. His arms were wrapped around the Czech Torah, not confidently, as when he carried our Law on Shabbat, but awkwardly, as if he held something fragile. The scroll, swaddled in yellowing silk, might have been an ailing child.

  The cantor moved forward. His footfalls were silent on the thick carpet of the aisle. There was no organ, no choir. There was no sound at all. Behind the cantor walked the rabbi, also enrobed. His eyes were fixed on the spindles of the Torah that poked above the cantor’s white shoulder. Behind the rabbi marched the officers of the temple, talliths over their business suits. The usurer’s tango glide was restrained.

  The little crowd of talliths followed the two white robes down the middle aisle and across the front aisle and up the three stairs to the bimah and across the bimah toward the lectern. The cantor stopped short of the lectern, though, and turned to face the members of the congregation. The rabbi turned, too. The elders, unrehearsed, bumped into their priests, and there was some shuffling on the platform, and one old man almost fell. Soon everyone was still. The cantor’s wife had disappeared. But I saw her green shoulder bulking in the front row. Then I lost sight of it as the congregation, without any signal, rose.

  “Oh God of our fathers,” the cantor began. His plummy voice broke. “God,” he began again, and this time he kept talking, though his face glistened like glass. “We of Congregation Beth Shalom accept this sacred scroll, the only remnant of Your worshippers of the village of Slavkov, whose every inhabitant perished in Majdanek. Whenever we read from this Torah we will think of our vanished brothers and sisters and their dear children. God, may we be worthy of this inheritance.”

  He began a Hebrew prayer, which I might have followed, but I was thinking of what I’d learned in confirmation class about the village of Slavkov. Its Jews were artisans and peddlers and money lenders. Some of them read the Holy Books all day long in the House of Study. Then I thought about things I only guessed: some of them drank too much and others coveted their neighbor’s silver and one or two of them lay with peasant women. A few little boys plotted to set their cheder on fire. On Sunday nights a group of men gathered in a storefront, putting troubles aside for a few hours, consulting the wise numeracy of a pack of cards.

  The cantor ended his prayer. He handed the scroll to the rabbi. The rabbi held it vertically in his arms. He turned toward the ark. The president of the congregation opened the ark. The rabbi placed the Czech Torah beside our everyday one.

  The congregation sobbed. I sobbed, too, weeping over a confusion of disconnected things, vehr vaist: Margie who missed her mother and the rabbi who lived alone; childless Mrs. Cantor and forsaken Mrs. Sam; the sons and daughters of the Jews of Slavkov, who had dreamed of love and were ashes now. My cheeks flamed. I gripped the pew in front of me, looked at my knuckles, looked up, and met the usurer’s rueful gaze.

  TOYFOLK

  IN THE TOWN SQUARE Fergus was trying out his rudimentary Czech. “Stores are on the ground floors,” he remarked. “People above.”

  “I speak only English,” snapped the news vendor, in German. His left hand rested on the awning of his wheelbarrow. Index and middle fingers were missing—their ghosts pointed at Fergus’s throat.

  “The cobblestones were light gray once. Dark gray now,” Fergus persisted.

  “I have other magazines in the bottom of the barrow,” the news vendor said, in French.

  Fergus shook his head, though without censure. An old church stood aslant in the middle of the square. The minute hand of its clock twitched every sixty seconds. Would you go mad, hearing that forever? Would you come to need it, like kisses? A line of customers stuttered into the bakery, and the greengrocer moved sideways and sideways, sprinkling water on his cabbages. Under the October sun the whole little enterprise—church, stores, peaked facades—glistened as if shellacked.

  “Good-bye,” Fergus said to the news vendor.

  “Au revoir, Toyman.”

  Fergus walked away, smiling.

  He was a division head of ToyFolk. He came to a new place after a site had been selected, and he supervised the building of the factory and the hiring of the workers, and managed the facility for a while—ten years, usually; well, it never seemed that long.

  The knitting shop—what a careful pyramid of yarns. A cat with a passion for some middle ball could set the whole thing tumbling. The druggist’s window displayed old-fashioned brass scales. Then came the premises of an estate agent. A middle-aged woman sat composedly at a typewriter; a young woman peered into a computer screen with an expression of dismay.

  And this next place? Perhaps the window meant to be revealing, but it had too many small panes. There was merchandise inside—women’s accessories? He thought of Barbara, and of his daughters and daughter-in-law; and he went in.

  Bells fixed to the door announced his presence. Something flipped onto his head and then bounced onto his shoes. A knitted clown.

  “Oh!” said a woman’s voice.

  “Ah,’’ said a man’s.

  Fergus picked up the clown and remained squatting, examining the miniature buttons of wood that ran down the torso. Each button had been carved by hand. He cradled the toy in his own hand, two fingers supporting the head. Finally he stood up, creaking just a little, and looked around.

  Dolls. Dolls crowding each other on shelves like slaves on shipboard. Dolls democratically sharing a pram. Dolls of all sizes sitting one atop the other, the largest on a rocker, exhaustedly supporting the rest.

  Noah’s ark, the animals assembled on deck to wait for the dove.

  Jack-in-the-boxes. Punch and Judy, on their sides, locked in each other’s arms. A pint-size printing press.

  Teddies … His eyes didn’t sting, really; they remembered stinging. They remembered his children asleep, favorites crooked in their elbows. They remembered the plush of his own bear.

  The man who had said “Ah” and the woman who had said “Oh” stood in front of a case of toys. They were in their middle forties. Barbara had been at her lanky best then—the rigors of child rearing past, the predations of age still ahead. For this woman, now staring at him with such assurance, beauty must be an old habit. Her pale face was surrounded by hair once blond and now transparent. Her chin was delicately cleft as if by a master chiseler. The irises of her gunmetal eyes were rimmed with a darker shade. She wore a flowered skirt, a blouse of a different flowered pattern, a shawl embroidered with yet another species.

  The man’s eyes were a gentle blue. He had a courtier’s small beard, but he was dressed in black garments that suggested the peasant—baggy trousers, a loose vest over a T-shirt.

  Fergus walked toward a shelf of windup toys. He stepped sideways. In a case, tiny ballerinas posed before a mirror, and through the mirror he saw that a curtained archway led to a stockroom.

  He glided again, and now the mirror gave him the handsome man a
nd woman in their awful clothes.

  “Is this a store?” he asked, turning toward them. “A museum?”

  “We are a secondhand toy shop,” the man answered. His accent was French. “That makes us a kind of museum. Most travelers come in only to look. But we get the occasional collector.”

  “We started out as a collection ourselves,” the woman said. Her accent was Gallic, too. “We are also a workshop.”

  The man shrugged. “I turn out some wooden things.”

  “Bernard repairs appliances for the entire population.”

  “Anna exaggerates.”

  “My name is Fergus.”

  Bernard nodded. “The American. The president of ToyFolk.”

  “This town has no secrets,” Anna explained.

  Fergus laughed. “Not president. A division head.”

  “ToyFolk will bring prosperity,” Anna said. “Everybody says so. Will you have some tea?”

  Each new posting had brought its special friends. In Burgundy he and Barbara had hit it off with a cartoonist who raised sheep. In Lancashire they spent every Sunday with the dentist and his wife, disorganized, comical, their three children just the ages of Fergus and Barbara’s own. In the Canaries the mayor, a bachelor, cleaved to them with nervous ardor. And now came this pair, served up like a final course. Toy people. What a blast.

  “We always have brought prosperity,” Fergus said, smiling at his hosts from the chair they had unfolded. Anna sat on a foot-stool; Bernard said he preferred to stand. “When we move on things are better than they were—they seem so, anyway. Delicious tea—blackberry?”

  “Yes. And your family?” Anna asked.

  “Kids all married, living in different states. Barbara joins me next week; she’s in Minneapolis visiting our grandchild.”

  “I like your action figures,” Bernard said abruptly. “They remind me of my lead soldiers. Only instead of pouring lead your factory molds plastic—yes?”