FRANIS

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

hrough the great god Franis I learned many things.  In and out of our minds he twined like chokeweed through a chain link fence.  Aaron and Sheinie and I pressed our ears to the Franis grates, cool in the summer, hot in the winter.  Hot and breathing fire was Franis, roaring into our ears and leaving marks on them like a gravestone rubbing, red marks, his curlicue grillwork.  He tattooed our ears when we strained to hear Mummy and Daddy hiss at each other across the kitchen.  He tattooed our cheeks when we giggled our secrets down the ducts: Psst!  Shh!  What did the moron . . . ?  Hee hee!  Shh!

I remember Mummy and Daddy facing off, Mummy by the sideboard her father, Zaydie Jake, built, Daddy by the hallway door where the steamy dark rushed in like warm water over hot stones.  She yelled, "Look what you're doing to the kids!"  He: "Shh!  Shh!"  We crouched by the register, by our Franis grates, and giggled.

One summer twilight I heard them in the cellar.  Mummy was by the washing machine.  I see the mortar cracking under the head‑high cellar window, which is propped open to let out the soap smell and the steam.  I see the stick that holds it open like the block the dentist put in my big brother Aaron's mouth once to keep it open when Aaron kept falling asleep.  The stick casts no shadow, the sun newly set, the sky fire‑red, though during the day sometimes I would sit low to the concrete floor and watch that shadow move, hour on hour, sensitive child.

I was upstairs pressing my ear to Franis.  Something in the air.  Unnamable, the shiver before a storm.  A mortal sadness that the grownups hold sometimes, hold and hide, but we kids always sniff it and have to sit for hours on the concrete cellar floor to ward it off by watching shadows, or else we throw stones against Mrs. Owerbach's window, like the weather service seeding clouds to damp the blow of a spawning hurricane.

My ear to Franis.  Daddy says, "Fanny . . . "

She says, "What?"  She says it too fast.  She's cutting him off.  It's not an invitation, not a question, not like "Over" on Highway Patrol.  It's don't say anything else, Izzy.  I know what's coming, and it stinks bad.  It'll ruin my whole life.  Just shut up.

Please, Franis, make them both shut up.

Franis could have done it.  He could have turned everything around, even though it was almost too late.  Even now, me huddling over my word mill in a Super 8 motel on the high desert, Alturas, California, in sight of Mount Shasta, at two o'clock in the morning, remembering the little suck of air when Daddy cracked his damper, even now, Franis could reach back and shut it quick.

Yes, I could hear the suck and the click of Daddy's tongue, the lipsmack sound that Mummy missed, even though she was standing next to him, missed for the rustle and the slide of the sheets she folded.  I heard it through Franis, my ear pressed hard, my throat a pipette, my chin aquiver, not crying, not crying, plenty of time for Franis to intercede there and forestall, forfend, Franis Magnus Gratia Plenus, the black years of pillows with poison notes pinned to them and the banging on walls all night long while I trembled between my sheets like shook sheet metal, and the car rides with little beatings and he shouting through the shivering house, "To be or not to be . . . . !"  He turned up, what, three times, I think that many, three times, incredible to imagine now, poor everybody in this Vale of Tears, and each time more horrible even though we were more dead to it, more desiccated and wind‑whistle reamed in our souls by it.  He'd turn up in some motel, discovered by a cleaning lady, sprawled out next to an open empty bottle of Sominex tonight and sleep, safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep.

Forfend, O Franis, while his mouth is opening, slo‑mo as in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the skin just unzipping with that lipsmack sound, but he hasn't said it yet, and she hasn't said yet what she will say, forfend, forfend, I beg you.

Outside my motel window, a flatbed truck piled high with baled alfalfa, ghostly in fluorescent street light, just downshifted.  Screams of doomed gear teeth recall the rusted hinges of Franis's door, sooty, round as a baker's belly, where my father used to shovel coal till Franis changed over to a diet of oil, oil, dead dinosaur grue for the god of ducts and fire and flue, obeisance to Franis.  O, forfend!

One night, quiet night, not shaking between my sheets for the fear of him, I shook myself instead, dreaming of Miss America, tickling till I fountained, when Daddy strolled in, oddly tranquil.  I was still pulsing with it, my first, I think, astonished, when he leaned down all paternal and compassionate and laid a hand on my shoulder, just as if he hadn't lifted a bentwood chair over Mummy's head the night before, or taken me for rides to slap me up and give me the third degree.

He said, "I see you tossing and turning.  What's troubling you, son?"

"Nothing, Daddy.  I'm okay.  Good night."

He let it go.

There was a time, much later, when I thought I could turn it all around myself.  I was home from college with a nickel bag of marijuana, a bundle of yarrow stalks, and a heart full of despair--no, say, a heart emptied of all but despair, despair like the sludge left at the bottom of a cistern in a dry season.  If you're thirsty, you suck on that, even that, believe me.  I got high late at night in my little room that used to be Zaydie Jake's room, the one with the cedar chest, but he had to move out when Daddy got the way Daddy got, which Franis forfend.

Daddy lumbered in, Frankenstein's monster, cross‑eyed, thick‑browed, getting fat now from the drugs they pumped into him at the state hospital, that and from the boredom boredom boredom boredom when you've sucked even the sludge out of that damn cistern.  He lumbered in and sat down on my bed that used to be my Zaydie Jake's bed, narrow, with the curving pale green bar of the bedstead.  Cool it was against my shoulders on a hot and sticky night.

For the first time since before the cellar, I felt my daddy's warmth.  Thank you, marijuana, for opening up the registers of the senses.  I felt the sincerity behind his crossed eyes.  He was wearing his bathrobe with the stripes the color of dried blood, like Matisse's bathrobe in one of his self‑portraits.  He plumped himself down on my bed, and I could feel the ripples in the mattress, like rings in a mud pool when a belly slaps it.

He said, "I know you've been letting the air out of my tires before I get up to go to work.  I just want you to tell me why you do it."

The way the bed is situated, the grate is behind and below where Daddy has settled.  If I speak, the two of us will be broadcasting together from this room.  Franis will carry us throughout the house.  I feel the responsibility of this.  I am speaking not just to Daddy but to the whole family, see?  Marijuana reveals to me the responsibility of this.  It enables me to drill through those crossed eyes twixt ridges of sinew, never cutting vessel or bone straight into my father's heart.

 

ot like when I was fourteen and I sat next to him on his bed in his room with the three locks and his sign on the door that said:

 

"MONSTER

               KEEP OUT"

 

Not like then, near the pee stain that he'd made on the wall, bedridden after the back operation, when he couldn't hold it anymore‑-Who could?‑-and Mummy scrubbed and scrubbed but never got it out, and she cursed him for it out loud while she scrubbed, and to this day, in a lonely motel room on the high desert, in sight of Mount Shasta, I have not forgiven her that.  Back then I sat next to Daddy in that Monster Chamber of his, all stalactites and spiny death, and demanded that he tell the straight truth goddammit, why couldn't he just drop all that bullshit about people tape‑recording his conversations and stealing his tools at the factory and Uncle Morris and Aunt Fae and Mummy, for Christ's sake, and my Zaydie Jake, of course, plotting against him and putting funny things in his food?  Back then I screamed, "I love you, I love you, I love you," and I hammered his chest, but he grabbed my fists and held them.  Then I cried, then he cried, and he said, "I love you too.  Do you think I want it to be like this?"  Then he took my wet cheeks between his palms, and he said, "Why can't you just leave off spying on me?"

It echoed down into Franis's dark iron belly, poison sound waves caroming through the ducts.  Mummy must have been listening in another room, listening the way people do who are telling themselves that they don't hear it; they sort laundry and look out the head‑high window at a fading sky.

I wonder if Sheinie was listening, tattooing her sweet little ear against the register while tears welled.  Why did you let it happen, O Franis?  Why couldn't you have stopped it in the cellar when she was sorting the laundry and he had only just opened his mouth but not yet spoken?

 

he marijuana night, it wasn't like that.  I had learned my lesson.  I had learned my lesson that there is no point in debating the truth with a schizophrenic.  You can't make him see the light by hammering his chest and crying.

From what fiery hole do all those semis issue?  Mount Shasta?  It is a volcano, after all‑-blew within this century, said the desk clerk‑-and the towns down around there better sit up and take notice when the air goes brimstone dark and nostrils curl.  Just like Franis, I said.  She said, what?  She said it too fast.  I said, Glad I don't live there.

Now a big rig loaded with pines clatters by, edges of tarpaulin flapping at the rear.  Close behind, a big tank truck moans.  In the cabs of those trucks are men of the sort my father worked with.  He was different.  They were machine‑shop jocks, stocky and strong, like my Zaydie Jake.  They were lathe‑press mavens with stumps for fingers, gritty‑eyed, foul‑mouthed, beer‑breathed.  Daddy was a cross-eyed Jew who went straight home after work, never saw the inside of a bar, never got in a fight except the lifelong one he lost.

There's another truck.  Hear it?  Baboombada boomba!  Lumber again.

That marijuana night, I was past all confrontation and past reading every psychology book in the Monroe County Library System‑-paranoid states, hebephrenia, neurotic fatigue, ibid. this and loc. cit. that‑-or the Merck Catalogue for side‑effects of pain‑killing drugs and tranquilizers: paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia . . .

See, my bad‑luck daddy was the cross‑eyed ESL Yid the other kids made fun of, K to 12.  They were third- and fourth- and fifth‑generation American kids, while he was Bubby Sophie's boy.  I taught her to write notes in English for the milkman.  My daddy was a baker who developed an allergy to flour, then retrained as a machinist and got a bad back, for which the doctors gave him painkillers.  Paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia . . . Nothing to be done about all that, I saw at last‑-it's just the lay of the yarrow stalks, trigrams, hexagrams, destiny and old Willy‑Nilly.

I just sat back and peered through the open registers of marijuana into those crossed eyes.

They weren't really crossed.  Strabismus.  Maybe a little.  Strabismus.  His Yiddisher folks from the old country, Max and Sophie ("M‑I‑L‑K, Bubby, not M‑I‑L‑C‑H.  This is America.") they got the kid special glasses, and those helped a little.  Strabismus.  But maybe it wasn't strabismus.  Maybe it was ancestral Mongolian blood from a night with a goy in the old country, one of those Diaspora nights far out of the sight of Mount Shasta from where Moses brought down the tablets, but I'm getting my mountains mixed up, or maybe it was really Franis old Mo came down from: hey, wasn't there some talk of a voice from a burning something‑-"Fanny?"  "What?"  She said it too fast.‑-or was that Shadrack, Mischak, and Abenidigo?  Strabismus.

Heliogabalus.

I saw Daddy's graduation photo once from the baking school in New York, where all the graduates' faces appeared in little bubbles, like, and they put Daddy's bubble down in the corner with the other "Orientals," my father the same, the way they saw it, a bona‑fide slant-eye, the ESL Jew.  Strabismus.

Marijuana.

We were sitting on my bed that used to be Zaydie Jake's bed.  Daddy said, "I know you've been letting the air out of my tires before I get up to go to work.  I just want you to tell me why you do it."

I said, "I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it."

And I felt the knot of my father's soul loosen.  His eyes opened up like swallow holes, moon‑wide.  An angel passed: I heard the beating of her wings.  A million ears pressed to a million registers.  A tear rolled down my sister's cheek.  My mother sighed; her chin fell to her breast as if the neck had been severed.  In his exile apartment on Monroe Avenue, a thought passed through my Zaydie Jake's mind as he turned and turned in his sleep: "Maybe he's reconciled to me.  Maybe I can go home now and live with my daughter and her kids and him, like before."

In Princeton, New Jersey, my brother Aaron cocked his head at a voice not quite heard; he threw open the window and called into the dark, "Who's there?  'Don't know why you do' what?  Is somebody speaking?"

See: my brother cups his ears darkward, then shivers to feel a tattoo pressed into it miles and years distant from its template, a rubbing from the stone of someone not yet buried.

"I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it."  It was not what Daddy expected to hear.  Franis was burrowing back through our souls, I know it, undoing all the bad that had been done, reshuffling the cards, turning hearts of stone to hearts of flesh as Jesus was supposed to but never did.  Franis put the words back into Mummy and Daddy's mouths, so that on that summer twilight, yes, they simply stood in the cellar, yes, and held hands without speaking maybe, something sweet, and watched the sunset through the head‑high cellar window.

 

aked by the white noise of an idling semi outside my window, I leap from my bed on the high desert to record the suddenly remembered fact‑-crucial it seems at this hour of the wolf‑-that central heating was invented by Benjamin Franklin.

 

nd I felt the knot of my father's soul loosen.  In Vancouver once, in a youth hostel, I was waiting with my road buddy Robert for Rudy Sunshine to be sprung from jail so we could start our commune up north.  Up there in the Promised Land, does were going to lay their heads in our laps, see, and offer up their necks whenever we got hungry‑-that's the way we figured it.  But Rudy Sunshine had landed in jail for attempting to steal, with my skittish assistance, a blanket from the Hudson's Bay Company.

Robert blamed me, I bet, thought me unmanly.  But, hey, what was I supposed to do?  Run back and wrestle down the store dicks who had sneaked up behind us, caught  Rudy Sunshine in a full Nelson and dropped him to his knees?  Me, long ago thinned to puddle ice by the banging on walls all night long while I trembled between my sheets like shook sheet metal, puddle ice easily shattered by a child's breath?

So Robert and I were sitting in a bunk smoking Bull Durhams‑-everything happens on a bed, do you notice, or else down in the cellar‑-and he said to me, "When your father went crazy like you said and accused you of all that shit . . . "  He tilted his head a little, like a bear squinting into a tree hollow for honey.  A ghost of a smile narrowed his lips.  " . . . you sort of believed him, didn't you?"

Don't talk to me about did I believe him.  I felt the knot of my father's soul loosen.  Believe him!  That's not what it was all about when I said, "I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it."  Flights of angels burst into song.  A bright star shone over our house on Wilkins Street and shepherds admired it in fields where they lay, and three kings started out toward Wilkins Street from somewhere in Mongolia probably where my illegitimate ancestor was from.

No, it wasn't unmanly of me, Robert.  It was manly to say "I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it."

It was like, years later, hitchhiking on the Mojave Desert, when a cop stopped me for flipping him off, only I hadn't, but then I was so tired and hungry that I lost my temper, and we hissed at each other across the kitchen, so to speak, and he was about to cuff and collar me, but I stopped myself, Franis gratia, and I said, "I'm sorry, officer.  I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."  And he was so astonished‑-eyes moon‑wide like Daddy's‑-that he gave me a ride and a ten‑dollar bill.  That was manly of me to have done.  Don't you tell me.

Or like when I was walking away from that bully in Vermont, he jibing and taunting at my back.  My friends beside me whispered, "Ignore . . . Ignore . . . " but I spun around.  He straightened, set his jaw, clenched his fists, but still I came.  Then, cock‑fight close, I stopped.  I said, all iron and fire, "I don't want to fight with you."

Astonished, like Daddy, like the Mojave cop, eyes moon‑wide, he melted.  He let it go.  That was manly of me.

And don't think that just because I sit here alone in a motel on the high desert, my wife of seventeen years having dumped me for a manlier man, that there's any open empty bottle of Sominex in this particular picture.  It's not like that at all.  I don't accept her judgment: unmanly.  I do not.  No more than I accept what Robert said.

Okay, I had a father who went nuts on me at the crux, me wild for wisdom and sprouting pubic hair, a father who pinned notes to my pillow, for Christ's sake: "Beware the monster.  I'm wise to you.  I'm wise to your bitch of a mother and her bastard of a father.  Look out."

Okay, okay, girls always utterly bewildered me and bewilder me still, man without a model, ever at sea, wide, wide sea, ever the flying boy, ever the Cerberus‑luller, lute‑plucker, silver‑tongued persuader of Hades in Hell, ever looking back at last to see my beloved swallowed again.  I lacked a Daddy to give me the knack to not look back, so back she falls into the cellar of cellars, where Mummy is forever sorting her laundry and spitting out poison spit for spit for Daddy's shit.  O Franis, forfend!  Out of reach!  Out of reach my Euridice falls.  Then let the snake bite me, kill me: Ssssominex tonight and ssssleep‑-wait.

That's not what I wanted to say.  No, wait.  What I meant was that I'm my own kind of a man, Daddy despite, wifey despite, Robert despite.  I'm a lute‑toting, Hell‑harrowing, heart‑plumbing kind of a man, the kind who surprises you and makes your eyes go moon‑wide.  Who softens what's hard.

I said, "I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it," and his eyes went moon‑wide.  We were sitting on my bed that used to be Zaydie Jake's bed.  I spent most of the time away in college now, but it was still my bed when I came home between semesters or on vacations or, later, after I tried to kill myself for the second time and the college threw me out.  Sominex.  "I don't know, Daddy.  I don't know why I do it."  He looked down.  He looked up.  He was breathing through his mouth.  An angel passed.

"So you admit it.  The tires."

"Yeah."

"The microphones."

"Yeah."

"Plotting with the guys at my shop."

"Okay, yeah."

"The dogshit in my toolbox."

"I won't deny anything anymore, Daddy."

"The talking behind my back."

"I love you, though."

Another angel.

"I know you do, Eliot."

We sat there looking at each other and breathing.

He said, "You've got to stop monkeying around."

"I will."

"I'm sick of it.  I can't stand it anymore.  It's got to stop.  Mummy's got to see a psychiatrist.  There's something wrong with her in the head, why she does these things.  She needs help."

"I know."

"And Uncle Morris and Fae, they're all in cahoots.  They're sick.  They've got to stop."

"We'll make them stop."

"I don't hate anybody, Eliot."

"I know."

His eyes on me.  Never mind the strabismus.  It was like when I was still small but we had already converted to oil.  No more chutes from the coal truck through the cellar window‑-I mean the one on the sunrise side of the house, not the fucking twilight one.  It was like when Daddy would stand in the cellar behind the Franis repairman who had the blue overalls, to watch everything he did.

Daddy's eyes could be micrometers or baker's balances.  We kept a scale like that in a cabinet in the kitchen.  And I want to mention here that he never measured things by cups and quarts, only the professional way, with lead weights, one ounce, six ounces, one pound, and so on.  The two‑pounder was red and astonishingly small for its heft in a little boy's palm.

His eyes on me‑-I was saying, it was like when he watched that man in the blue overalls reach inside Franis, through the door round as a baker's belly, and scrape and fiddle and hammer and screwdrive.  Daddy would watch with those eyes of his, and then he could do it all himself.  He had eyes like that.  He even installed a blower, fan and housing and switches and everything, that blew cool air in the summer through the same ducts and registers that warmed us in the winter.

He could minister to Franis all alone.

Please, Daddy, couldn't you adjust the blower or the bushings or the thermostat to make Franis blow the words back down Mummy's throat?

When I was, I don't know, twelve or so, I went all around the gray damp cellar following the ducts with my hands.  They weren't hot yet.  Must have been early autumn.  At every branching there was a line valve to close or open, so you could balance the flow of hot air to this room and to that room.  I felt my way along the ducts overhead, and I turned all the little line valve handles thirty degrees, sixty degrees, fiddling, looking for the configuration that would change my life back to the way it should be.

I think of Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," and the machine that tattoos the sentence on every condemned man there.  The machine is vast and of ancient origin.  Nobody knows how to adjust it anymore or what it really means.  But they fiddle.

Daddy fiddled.  Those eyes of his.  A lot of times it was maddening.  He would fiddle with the TV set while we tried to watch Ed Sullivan.  Horizontal, vertical, contrast: you name it, he had to have his finger on it, had to get it perfect while we completely missed Señor Wences and the pyramid of singing dogs.

He was like that with everything‑-a perfectionist.  When we played basketball in the yard, when he shot foul shots, it was as if he was building himself into a machine.  He would squint those strabismus eyes up at the basket.  He shot underhand, crouching: miss, miss, miss, miss, swish!  Then every one would be a swish.  He had made himself into a foul‑shot machine.  What was the fun of that, is what my brother Aaron wanted to know, and he threw down the ball and walked off and grew up and moved away and tried to forget about the whole thing.  Even today, if I mention Daddy to Aaron, he changes the subject.

Now, Sheinie‑-Sheinie cries.  She never saw Daddy play basketball.  She's too young.  She only knew him as a madman.  It scorched her heart and sowed it with salt.  Nothing would grow there anymore.  It's all the crying that does it.  It has to do with osmosis.

So, you see, it's up to me alone, all, all alone.  Daddy is sitting on my bed that used to be Zaydie Jake's bed, fixing those eyes of his on me, with Sheinie and Mummy in bed in their room at the end of some Franis duct or other, straining their ears toward the grate‑-I think they slept together at that time for the fear of him‑-and with Aaron away in Princeton trying to concentrate his mind on something else for Christ's sake.

"I don't hate anybody, Eliot."

"I know."

His eyes on me.  My eyes on him.  A person's face twitches.  It's easy to see in small children: the flush and fade of inklings, dozens per second‑-is it neurons firing?‑-as the mind streams this way and that like hot air through a Franis duct flowing where the line valves send it.  If you stare at your palm, even, you can see the kind of twitching I mean; blood reddening or blanching the sections of skin, as countries of capillaries boom and bust.

That's what I see in Daddy's face.  Not hate.  His lip quivers.  His eyebrow dips, then arches.  Then the electricity, the blood, the warmth, the life, whatever it is, passes to a cheek: it wrinkles‑-quizzical‑-but that passes.  In the set of his jaw, anger stirs, but that fades too, and now he looks like nothing so much as a lost child.

"I don't hate anybody, Eliot."

"I know."

His strabismus eyes shift a little as if he's trying to resolve TV ghosts‑-a little more contrast, a little less.  A tear escapes him, and his jaw stiffens to compensate.  "You all make fun of me."

"We don't mean to."

He nods.  The tear shakes loose and hits the counterpane.  I think I hear it, but you can't, can you, a tear against the counterpane?

He grunts.  He winces.  He eases his hip to one side.  "My back hurts."

"I know."

His breath warms my face, and I am so much on him and in him, like a child, cheek to grate, that I feel the warm breath scour his heart, harrow his soul of demons, evaporate the tears that line his spirit like dust and rust in an old taped duct, and flood out nose and mouth with a great rushing sound.  He hangs his head.

Then, eyes to the counterpane, he closes my hand in his.  It makes me happy.  I haven't been happy for seven years, not since that conversation in the cellar:

 

"Fanny . . . "

"What?"  She says it too fast.

"I hear Zaydie Jake talking about me behind my back."

 

ranis, O forfend, O flood back through all the Os, like ducts, O through all apostrophes stream, O I beg you, source of all warmth in the harrowing upstate winter, when snow falls on snow as silently as Daddy's tear upon the counterpane, O source of all cool too since Daddy rigged up the blower down in the cellar near the gas meter and the sewer plug.  O Franis, it is cold, cold, and it is hot, hot, and we are never happy.  Daddy will subtract his hand again from mine, I know, and hit Mummy again, and, O, the upstairs neighbor will come down again to the cellar where Daddy will hole himself up again in the dark cell that used to be the coal bin.  It's full now of crumbling crates and cigar boxes of autograph books and pins and photos from Mummy's happy life before she got married, O.  And the upstairs neighbor, that all, all honorable man, with his parallel pupils and his native English, with that hateful calm voice of his will coax the madman from his cave for the cops to pluck and plant on the funny farm‑-O, I hear the sirens nowowowowow.

And I will sit on yet another bed, with Aaron, his bed, in the addition that our exiled Zaydie Jake built, and he will read to me from "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner."

 

 

"Alone, alone, all, all alone,

"Alone on a wide, wide sea . . . "

 

 

Just to hold me this side of hysteria, bless him, me a little, what, twelve‑year‑old kid.  That was what he was reading for school then, Coleridge, so he opened it and read to me as I trembled on the bed, my tears thundering and clanging against the counterpane, even though Coleridge maybe wasn't the most appropriate thing.

Where was Sheinie that night after they took Daddy away?  Mummy was in the kitchen crying into the telephone she'd called the police on.  Where was Sheinie?  I don't remember.  I don't think I noticed.  She bore the brunt of it, you know.  Aaron went away to college in a few years.  Then me.

Where was Sheinie?

She never knew Daddy when he was happy.  He would take us for rides in our Zaydie Jake's car that he let us use.  He would drive us down this one road that sloped down toward Irondequoit Bay, for example, and it was thick with tall trees on either side, elms, I think, before the disease that killed them all.  That stretch of road was famous for its cool breeze even on the hottest days of the summer, and we would zoom down that road toward Irondequoit Bay‑-in neutral, I bet, because Daddy was capable of that kind of mischief in the old days‑-and me and Aaron would stick our heads out the side windows, for the love of that breeze, boy, on a hot, hot day, and then, at the bottom of the hill, right on the bay, there was a restaurant with the juiciest hamburgers in the world.  Oh, those days, Mummy and Daddy loved each other like no tomorrow, like no tomorrow ever, never at all, Franis, I beg you, and we would laugh and feel cool and happy, the Fintushels, just as if we were a real family: happy.  Sheinie never experienced that.

Where was she that night?

In her bed.  Hiding under the blankets.  Far from the register.  Deciding to run away.

 

anny . . . "  That's what Daddy said.

"What?"  Too fast.  She cut him off.

"I hear Zaydie Jake talking about me behind my back."  That's what he said next.  I think there were people all over the world tattooing their ears against their Franis grates.

And she said, "Oh, you're crazy."

 

ou divide the yarrow stalks again, again, and they fall into piles this way, that way.  Each way delineates a world.  There are all these possible worlds, as many as the hexagrams, six lines, each one broken as Daddy's back or solid as his single brow: two times two times two times two times two times two makes sixty‑four.  But then each line can be changing or stable, makes four times four times four times four times four times four, makes four thousand ninety‑six worlds.  In some of those worlds, in at least one of them, surely, she never said, "Oh, you're crazy."

That's where I want to make my home.

She didn't have to say "What?" so fast.  That alone could have made a complete difference.  You have to give your heart to a person to let them spread into it.  Then the panic that can rip one little human heart fiber from fiber and pulse from pulse will be placated.  Room for those sunamis to ripple into sweet lapping surf.

Like when a woman tightens on a man, and it hurts them both and they don't get anywhere, but if she loves him, if she invites him in, if she doesn't just, like, dump him after, I mean, after seventeen years for Christ's sake, so that he ends up all alone in some motel on the high desert, say, in sight of Mount Shasta, typing words like tears, checking under his pillow in the dark of the night, I mean motel dark, which is really dark, because if you leave on the bathroom light, which is the only thing resembling a night light in those places, then you have to live with the exhaust fan death‑rattling all night long, checking in that dark of the night, the dark of the mind, for poisonous notes that he may have pinned there, and even if there's no Sominex in this particular picture, still, there was for Daddy, three times, I think, if you can believe it, he lying there, limbs splayed, snoring probably with that death‑rattle snore they get when the throat stops being human, when the fellow has just about turned to a mass of flesh hanging off some bones in the dark of the night, and the maid screams for the motel manager, and then the police, then the state hospital, then the terrible visits when I had to smile and make pleasant conversation though he was all doped up and stinking of other madmen's tobacco, hardly recognizable as my sweet Daddy who drove us the breezy way down to the burger place by Irondequoit Bay, who Sheinie never even knew.

I think I was crazy, not like Daddy, but with a celebratory craziness, a here‑have‑my‑heart craziness that doesn't care what you put in it.  My heart is your heart.  Room for those sunamis.  Like when my brother read me, "All, all alone."  That was truly kind.  I owe him my sanity for that.  Why couldn't Mummy have been like that for Daddy, instead of standing there, all "What?" and "Oh, you're crazy?"

My wife too, why couldn't she have let me in?  Now I'm on the desert, for forty years, like the Israelites, and the only water is in rocks that God tells you to touch with your rod, but you can't help it and you strike them hard, like Moses and like Daddy with the bentwood chair over Mummy's head.  Then God punishes you, and you're stuck on Mount Nebo looking out at the Promised land, with Rudy Sunshine in the hooskow, waiting.

Ach!  It's my fault, I know it, that she dumped me.  I accept her judgment.  It's because Daddy went crazy just when I was sprouting pubic hair, so I never got the knack of women.  If you are a man, you have to be strong.  You have to lead them places.  The only place he ever showed me to lead them was the funny farm.  What do you expect?

I don't blame Mummy.  Her motto was, "Everything for the kids."  People marveled at Mummy's sweetness.  They still do.  She lives with Aaron's family in New Jersey.  Sheinie's okay.  She found herself a helluva guy and they run a daycare center on Kodiak Island, way north.  Daddy's long gone.

He made that rattling sound lying on the couch in front of the TV set during one of his furloughs from the state hospital.  He died on the way to the emergency room.  They said heart failure, but I figure there must have been some Sominex in that particular picture.  Mummy said, he was just like his old self, and we were watching the six o'clock news together, and then he died.

I get so tired hunting and pecking and listening to the semis clear their throats.  It was in the winter when he died, and Franis must have been roaring down below, turning old dinosaur blood to fire and bellowing up through the registers like Heliogabalus.  There wasn't a thing that anybody could do.