arry was in the children's room, waiting for his nieces to return.
He had told them it was time to start thinking about bed, and now he sat
on a bedspread printed with red balloons, watching the girls'
reflections in a heart-shaped mirror. Greta mounted the step stool by
the sink and began to gnaw on her toothbrush. Charlotte splashed water
on her face and swirled toothpaste around her mouth with her tongue.
Harry lost sight of them briefly as they bent into their towels. Then
they appeared again and increased in size until they burst out of the
frame and stepped into the room.
Harry had placed two glasses of water on the night stand between the
beds. He had turned down the girls' coverlets, hung their clothes over
a rocking chair and lined their shoes neatly by the dresser near the
door. The overhead lamp was as large as a beach ball and painted to
look like a globe. Harry liked to stoop beneath it and say he carried
the world on his shoulders.
When he said to turn out the lights, Greta jerked the cord on the
bedside lamp and Charlotte padded over to the dimmer. The globe faded
and disappeared, leaving their shadows on the wall.
"Look!" said Greta, who was four. "Uncle Harry looks like a
Buzzard's."
Buzzard's Bay was where the family fled to escape New York in
August, and Greta was forever confusing the place with the bird. But
she was not so off base: in silhouette, as in life, Harry loomed and
hunched like a vulture.
"I think he looks like a bear," Charlotte said, looking not at his
shadow but at his face. Harry, who always wore his cabby's cap, had
small dark eyes and a bulbous nose. A raised vein stretched from his
left temple to his chin. His cheeks were grizzled and supple.
Charlotte, nine, was quite attached to him, and would slip her hand into
his for comfort, or to snag the pieces of hard candy he often rolled
around in his palm.
Harry laughed and tousled Charlotte's hair. "Let's not forget to
close the shutters."
"But how will we breathe?" Charlotte asked.
"Not to worry," he assured her. He inserted his thumb and his
forefinger between two wooden slats and gingerly pried them apart.
Light from the building next door cut a jagged path through the room.
"We'll be able to breathe through here," he said.
Across the street was a single room occupancy hotel. Most of its
residents were elderly. Harry and the girls watched them cook meals on
hot plates, talk on the phone and look at t.v. The girls had names for
the patrons and did imitations of how they moved about their quarters.
Fuzzy used two canes and bobbed his head when he walked. Nice Lady had
two miniature poodles. Mad was always slamming down the mouthpiece of
his phone, and Gloria, who wore a flower in her hair, was friends with
both Nice Lady and Fuzzy and could sometimes be found in their rooms.
Harry turned to see if Charlotte was mollified. But Charlotte,
blinking in the funnel of light, was delicately picking her nose.
"Charlotte Malden," he said, "that is something you should do in
private."
"Sorry, Uncle Harry," the child murmured, her hand fluttering to her
lap.
He knew that moments later, she would be doing it again. Her thin
nervous finger would rise up, searching, until it paused at the
indentation just above her lips.
arry had some eccentric notions of propriety, none of which he
applied to himself. "Take your hands out of your pockets," he would
tell the girls. "Salute your mother for this meal." But he belched in
public and had a disconcerting way of crossing his arms and scratching
his elbows. And he was not their uncle -- at least, not directly. He
was their father's uncle, their grandmother's baby brother. "You're a
character all right," his nephew George liked to say, "but you've got a
great big heart."
"You've got eyes like two piss holes in a snow bank," said his
sister.
It was 1973, but he called binoculars field glasses because that was
what they called them in the movies he had seen as a boy. He had never
been in a war, but he had driven a cab, and could tell many harrowing
stories. In addition to field glasses, he said "shoes and stockings,"
"five and dime," and "steereo." "Let's play a record on the steereo,"
he would say. Or: "Get on your shoes and stockings, girls. We're
going to the five and dime." The girls' mother, Ellen, told Harry to
stop wasting his pension on trinkets and clothes. But it was not about
the money -- Harry had plenty. Or that she thought he would spoil them
-- he didn't. It was that the girls loved him, and listened to him, and
preferred his company to their mother's. How could he have known his
nieces would become so attached? He had no children of his own and had
been a bachelor all his life. It was not his fault that when the girls
ran to him, Ellen looked angry and hurt.
For George and Ellen had brought this arrangement upon themselves.
Because he was seventy-six and their Upper West Side apartment was
spacious, they reasoned that Harry need not spend his sunset years
alone. They portrayed the arrangement as an act of kindness, a gesture
in the spirit of family warmth. The fact that a baby-sitter was the
by-product of this gesture they rationalized as a happy coincidence.
Harry saw things differently, however. His niece and nephew were
inept parents in desperate need of help. Ellen was harmless, meek and
full of whimsy, but George was positively hopeless. He took after his
father, a boorish Neanderthal, who smoked cigars and had no imagination.
Why his sister Martha had married the man was to Harry one of life's
mysteries.
e set two chairs in front of the window, which he offered to the
girls.
"But where will you sit?" Charlotte asked.
"I'll stand behind you," he said. "My back is bothering me,
anyway." He opened another slit in the shutters for Greta, and a third
one, up above, for himself. "Where are the field glasses?" he asked.
"In Daddy's drawer," Greta said.
"Well, go get them, dear," Harry said.
Greta scrambled out of her chair and went in search of the
binoculars. Charlotte pulled her knees to her chin, shivered slightly
and hugged her legs.
"Are you cold, Charlie?" Harry asked. "Would you like a sweater or
a blanket?"
"Could I have my blanket?" the child asked. "Could you wrap me up
like a mummy?"
"It would be my pleasure," Harry said. "Stand up and I'll embalm
you." He took the balloon bedspread and shook it out. It hovered above
them like a tent and then wilted. Greta came back with the binoculars
and darted excitedly under the blanket.
"Stop it!" Charlotte shrieked. "Stop it, Greta! You're ruining
it!"
"Wrap me up!" Greta said. "Wrap me up, too!"
"Girls," Harry said, "if you don't stop screaming, I'll put you
both to bed."
Being "put" to bed was different than "thinking" about bed. The
girls quieted down. Charlotte held a corner of the bedspread while
Harry gently spun her around. When she was wrapped up, she hopped over
to her chair and Harry helped her sit down. He yanked the matching
spread from the other bed. Then, gently and carefully, he spun and
wrapped Greta, picked her up and placed her in her chair.
"Are we all set, girls?"
"All set," they answered.
"Well, let's hope for something good."
The three of them peered through the spaces between the slats,
waiting for the drama to begin.
t was a harmless sport he had practiced for as long as he could
remember. As long as no one was the wiser, he didn't see anything wrong
with it. Only twice, when things at the Earl of Durham got lurid, did
he insist that they had to stop: one time, two old men looked as though
they were going to kiss; and another time, a woman was crying and
shrieking and hitting what looked like a cat. Charlotte saw the woman.
Uncle Harry knew that she had. He played other games with them for a
month, waiting for Charlotte to say something. After the girls were
asleep, he would look out his bedroom window, hoping to catch up with
his neighbors. But by that time, it was late; most people had drawn
their shades, and all he could see was the occasional silhouette
reaching to turn out a light. With no one to watch, getting into bed
felt untimely, as though he were stepping into his own coffin. He would
switch on the radio and let the sound that filled the room prevent the
walls from closing in on him. When he could stand it no longer -- the
child never said a word -- he simply resumed the game.
"I can see a dog," Greta said. "I see a dog on a bed."
"That's a -- " Harry adjusted the binoculars -- "why, you're right,
Gret. That is a dog on a bed."
"I can see two ladies dancing," Charlotte said, leaning right up to
the shutters. "Well, look at that," Harry said. "Two ladies
dancing their hearts out."
Greta had struggled out of her wrapping, but Charlotte remained
swathed in the bedspread. As she tilted forward, her brown hair shining
in the patch of yellow light, she looked otherworldly and exotic, like a
butterfly in a cocoon.
"Uncle Harry," Charlotte asked. "Can they see us?"
"No, dear," he said.
"But why can't they?" Greta asked.
"Because we don't let them."
"But why?" Charlotte asked. "Why don't we let them?"
"Because they are entitled to their privacy," Uncle Harry said.
"But why?" Charlotte asked again.
"Trust me," he answered, scratching his elbows through his worn
flannel shirt.
is nephew, George, was a good-looking man who had never cared for
school but had a naturally inquisitive nature. He was quick with
numbers, persistent in his strategies, and dull in conversation.
Harry's sister, Martha, thought George was a genius. George was not a
genius, but like geniuses, he was impressive and odd. He had a
phenomenal memory and could break down anything -- a television, a stalk
of celery, a house fly, a crayon -- into the sum of its parts. He
calculated figures in his head and took probability into consideration
even at the supermarket checkout counter. His co-workers would probably
have been surprised to learn that he had any sex life at all. They
would have been amazed had they been told that, as George made love to
his wife, he preferred to face her scalloped back than meet her
glass-green eyes. The peculiar structure of the Maldens' apartment,
which wrapped around an interior courtyard like an enormous letter C;
the layers of old paint that rendered certain doors ajar; the position
of Harry's bathroom window; the play of shadows on a common curving wall
-- these things had ensured his command of the subject, and he received
each new bit of information with a keen, reluctant eagerness.
Harry also knew that George often worried about the girls. "Watch
me, Daddy! Watch me!" they always said, and George would watch, and
smile, but it was plain to Harry that he did not always know what they
wished for him to see. Earlier that day, George thought Greta wanted
him to watch her jump off the couch. "Very good!" he said. She did it
again. "Nice!" he exclaimed. She did it a third time. "Okay, Gret,"
he said. "You're a great jumper, but enough jumping for now." She
looked confused. "But Daddy," she said. "Didn't you see my panties?"
Charlie was different. Not a show off. But George found her hard
to read, too. He told Harry that she said she had nightmares, but
whenever George asked her what they were about, he could not make sense
of what she said. Someone's bare feet resting on top of a fence. A
raccoon with a silver fish in its mouth, scurrying across the floor.
George couldn't imagine what was frightening about these images, what
someone at age nine could possibly have to fear. Monsters? She seemed
beyond that to him. Thieves? They had never been robbed. Murderers?
How would she even know they existed? But the thought of her lying
awake at night filled his heart with grief. He said he thought she
should see a doctor. He said he would mention it to Ellen. In the
meantime, he said, he trusted that Uncle Harry would see that Charlotte
got some sleep.
Ellen, he knew, also worried about Charlotte. The week before,
while Charlotte and Greta were out with George and Harry was reading the
paper in his room, Ellen had confessed to her women's group that her
eldest child didn't love her anymore.
"What is George doing to encourage this?" one of the woman asked.
Harry's room and the living room shared a common wall.
Another said, "It's not George. It's Harry. Harry wishes he could
fulfill what he believes is Ellen's physiological destiny."
He put down his newspaper.
"Nonsense," said a third. "Both George and Harry are loving fathers
and happy in their roles. It's your mother-in-law, Ellen. Charlotte
sees how she undermines you."
He was about to take up his paper again when Ellen blurted that
Charlotte had been born to turn away from her, an infant they kept in
swaddling clothes because she could not tolerate her mother's touch.
The nine-year-old Charlotte was just a more extreme version of what she
had been as a baby, more insulated than ever now, swathed in
innumerable, invisible layers that Ellen knew she would never unravel.
When Ellen hugged her, Charlotte stiffened slightly, enduring it,
hugging back as best she could, and when it was all over -- when Ellen
felt she had subjected her daughter to as much affection as the child
could bear -- Charlotte went in search of Uncle Harry.
ncle Harry," Greta squealed, "you're a schnoodle!"
She could not stop laughing. Charlotte rolled her eyes.
"What's a schnoodle?" asked Harry.
"It's from some stupid book her friend Nell has," Charlotte said.
"Rudolf the Schnoodle!" Greta cried.
"Do you like noodles with your schnoodle?" Harry asked. Greta
shrieked with delight.
"Uncle Harry," Charlotte yelled over the gales of Greta's laughter,
"I have a story to tell you!"
"Go ahead, dear," Harry said. He told Greta to quiet down.
"There was once a little girl," Charlotte said, "who belonged to a
circus. She could walk on the tightrope and she could ride the trapeze.
And she loved them so much that she never came down. She ate her
supper at a table and chair that were balanced on the tightrope. At
night, she hung upside from her trapeze to sleep."
"Did she go to school?' Greta asked.
"No," Charlotte said. She closed her eyes and continued, making the
story up as she went along, describing the brightly striped tent, the
colored spotlights, the harlequin pattern on the girl's body suit, and
the animals, who were like aunts and uncles to the girl, especially the
elephants, who liked to stand on their hind legs and tickle her with
their trunks.
"She sounds like a mermaid," Harry said. "Mermaids never leave the
water."
"Yes," Charlotte said. "Sort of. Except this story has a sad
ending."
"Oh, dear," Harry said. "She doesn't fall, does she? She doesn't
get herself hurt?"
"Not exactly," Charlotte said. She explained that the girl was
alone in the tent every night, suspended from the ceiling, with no one
there to watch her as she swayed to and fro. "One day, she climbed
down, because she was so lonely. But she had forgotten how to walk! So
she had to go back up to her rope and her swing and she had to stay
there forever. Because she tried to walk but couldn't anymore."
"Surely someone could teach her," Harry said.
"No, they couldn't," Charlotte explained. No one knew her well
enough, because she spent so much time in the air.
s a boy he had heard his father and his sister Martha whispering
about whether were missing something. Never a date, always smiling,
slow-speaking, a mama's boy -- they said his mother always tried to
bring him her way. She would keep him around the house and talk to him
about her nonsense -- the beaux she had had, what a beauty she had been
-- even now, Martha talked about how she could still see Harry as a boy,
chopping citron for Christmas cakes, spinning some yarn that their
mother would laugh about, the two of them in their own world. But their
father knew that he was different. Used to wear him out because of it.
With his belt or the back of his hand. Used to threaten to make him
wear dresses. When Harry was sixteen, his father brought him to a
whorehouse. What went on there that night his father couldn't possibly
have imagined. It certainly didn't do the trick.
George's father had taken George to a whorehouse when George turned
sixteen, and Martha had proudly announced to Harry that George had come
home looking like he knew what had hit him! But if she was implying
that her brother Harry was missing something between his legs, then
surely her son George was missing something between his ears. He was
book-smart, but he had no common sense. He could solve any problem
involving numbers, but not the problem of what do to about his daughters
and his wife. Ellen sat back and kicked off her shoes while Harry did
all the work. And George was clueless when it came to raising children.
id you clean your plate?" Martha asked.
Charlotte held the phone with both hands. His sister's voice was
clearly audible on the other end of the receiver. "Yes, Grandma,"
Charlotte said.
"Tell me the truth. I've seen you push those fish sticks around,
but I've yet to see you put one in your mouth."
"I ate three," Charlotte said. "Greta wants to say hello."
Greta, at the sound of her name, grabbed the phone from her sister.
"Grandma, I jumped -- "
"Speak into the receiver, honey."
"I jumped so high I touched the ceiling!"
"My! What a big girl you are. Did you eat your dinner?"
"No," Greta said.
"No?"
"Yes," Greta said.
"Put Uncle Harry on."
"Martha?"
"Harry? Did Greta have anything to eat?"
"Yes, dear. Not to worry."
"They'll come up stunted, I tell you. Their minds will be
deranged."
Harry laughed. "That's want I'm here for. To see they come up
right."
"Where are George and Ellen tonight?"
"Out to dinner and a movie."
"Ellen needed a break, huh?" Martha was obsessed with what she
perceived to be her daughter-in-law's unwarranted need for breaks from
her children. "She's slipshod, frozen food mother, I tell you.
Honestly, Harry. There's nothing we can do."
He wanted to placate her, but all he could ever say to his sister
was, "Yes, dear. I know."
reta was curled up in her chair, mumbling, half asleep.
"She wants another glass of water, Uncle Harry," Charlotte
translated.
"Could you get it for her, Charlie?" Harry asked.
"Are the lights on in the kitchen?"
"Yes."
"And in the hallway?"
"Yes, there too."
"Okay," Charlotte said. "I'll go."
Harry picked Greta up and tucked her in. She opened her eyes once
and then fell fast asleep. He heard the water running in the kitchen,
heard a cabinet door open and close.
"Uncle Harry?" Charlotte called.
"Yes?"
"May I have a glass of water, too?"
"Of course, dear, of course," he said, opening the shutters and
pushing back the chairs. His answer woke Greta and she turned over and
coughed. He smoothed her hair back from her forehead and glanced out
the window.
There, on a double bed in a brightly lit room, writhed two half-clad
figures. The man was on top of the woman and was slowly rotating his
hips, gracefully and rhythmically, then faster, bouncing up and down
quickly, his back arching before he collapsed. The skin on his back and
his buttocks was starkly white. The woman beneath him was cast in
shadows. The man was young, and Harry was stirred by his physique and
his intensity in all the old, familiar ways. His groin tightened when
he saw the man, but there was that bitter tightness in his throat as
well.
He had not gone looking for this. He had not.
The woman's hands were on the man's back. Then they slipped down to
his buttocks and stopped.
He heard Charlotte switch off the tap, heard the creaking of the
floor boards as she made her way back to the room. Quickly, he closed
the shutters.
"Uncle Harry?" Charlotte asked. She stood in the doorway, holding
two glasses of water.
"Let me help you, darling," Harry said. He leapt to her side and
took the glasses from her hands.
"What were you looking at, Uncle Harry?" she asked.
"Nothing, Charlie. Now get into bed."
"But I need my water."
"Here."
She gulped it down. He had an idea. "Now you'd better use the
bathroom."
"But I don't have to."
"But you will. Go on now. I'll wait right here."
She looked at him closely. "Are you tricking me?" she asked.
"I just don't want you to wake me up later."
At that, Charlotte looked a little hurt. "Okay, I'll go," she said.
"But open up the shutters, Uncle Harry. I don't like to sleep with
them closed."
He peered out the window to see what was going on. The flickering
neon sign, just outside their window, bathed the room in blue light.
They were lying side by side now. The woman's skin looked hard and
silvery in the dark. The man, whose stomach was taut as he stretched
out on his back, looked strangely beautiful, as though he were carved
out of stone.
Charlotte came back. "Uncle Harry," she whined, "push open the
shutters."
"Only if you turn on the light," he said. "We're going to play a
little game."
Charlotte was thrilled. "Oh, what game? What game, Uncle Harry?"
"It's called Opposites," he said.
"How do you play it?" Charlotte whispered excitedly. "Will you
teach me how to play it?"
Greta rubbed her eyes and turned over again. Harry gently pulled
the blanket over her head.
"What are you doing?" Charlotte asked.
He explained that the game involved turning on the light. And doing
jumping jacks, he said. The game involved much activity, and he didn't
want to wake Greta.
But when he snapped on the switch that illuminated the globe, Greta
woke up. "What happened?" she asked, her voice muffled by the
comforter. She pulled down the covers and sat up, blinking.
"There, there little chicken," Harry said, patting her head. "Lie
down like a good girl. ItŐs time to go back to sleep."
"What does 'opposite' mean?" Charlotte asked. She had inched toward
the window and was now leaning against the sash, her wishbone arms
folded across her chest, her head canted, her mind devising something.
She ran her fingers lightly over the frowning slats.
"Come now, Charlie," he said. "You know what 'opposite' means."
Deftly, she flicked open a slat and smiled at him.
"Charlotte," he said, "you get into bed, too."
Greta giggled.
"I have a game," Charlotte said. "It's called Opposite. It's
called Now They Can See Us!"
"See us!" Greta echoed.
"Charlotte Malden -- " he faltered.
In one seamless motion, she unlatched the hook and pushed open the
shutters. Greta hopped out of bed and scurried to her sister's side.
What Harry saw first, and what he would remember most clearly, was
the sinister tableau they must have formed, three figures in a blazing
window, a flinching elderly man and two startled little girls reacting
to an unseen scene. Across the alley, the man and woman he had seen
earlier were irradiated by the ghostly blue light of the marquee. The
word "Earl" was right outside their window, although only the first
three letters were lit: "Ear." The woman was lying on her back with
her knees bent and her legs apart; the man was crouching between her
legs, his profile obscured by her thigh. The springiness of the
mattress lent an almost comic vigor to his efforts, which the bare
window and the blue light of the sign subdued into something macabre.
The girls said nothing. For one protracted second, Harry stood
suspended in his private realm, watching. Then he banged the shutters
closed and ordered the girls back to bed.
"They were naked," Greta said. "The man was biting the lady."
"No, dear," Harry said. "He wasn't. Not to worry."
"Uncle Harry," Charlotte asked, "Can we leave the light on?"
"Of course, Charlie, of course."
"And can we leave the shutters closed?"
"Absolutely."
He bent over Greta to tuck her in all around, wedging the covers
between her small frame and the mattress as he did to both girls every
night.
"Stop it!" Greta cried. "Stop bouncing me!"
"There, there," Harry said, stroking her cheek. "Now close your
eyes and get some sleep."
Charlotte got into bed and began to tuck the covers around herself.
"Uncle Harry?" she asked.
"Yes, dear?"
"What was he doing? Was he biting her?"
"No, Charlie. No."
"Well, what then?"
He hesitated. "He was kissing her."
The child looked at him as though he were out of his mind. "When
are Mommy and Daddy coming home?" she asked.
"Very soon."
"Will you tell them to come in and tell us good-night?"
"Certainly. Good-night, Gret. Good-night, Charlie."
"Good-night, Uncle Harry," they chimed in unison, and the sound,
once so familiar, now bounced coldly about the room. The girls were
lying on their sides, turned away from him, facing opposite walls.
ater, after the girls were fast asleep, Uncle Harry lay awake in
bed. Back in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 or 1914 -- he was eleven or
twelve -- he used to watch the sixteen-year-old boy next door. The
boy's father was a welder, just like his father, and the boy's father
beat him, too. But the boy did what he pleased. He went after other
boys, usually longshoremen who worked along the Potomac. He would
stroll with them to the bottom of the street, then kneel before them a
little ways off the road. Lights from passing railway trains, elevated
and to the north, illuminated the boy at intervals. When the men
standing before him grew weak in the knees, the boy would clasp his arms
around their thighs. Harry's bedroom was the attic. That was how he
could see. He would sit in his window and watch, terrified, his heart
beating madly, wildly. He would cross his arms and scratch his elbows,
wondering if anyone knew.
Harry looked out into the darkness and thought of George and Ellen
again. He thought of the girls, and how competitive Charlotte had
become, and of how Charlotte pushed Ellen away. He thought of his
sister Martha and her cigar-smoking husband, who sent George to a whore
when he turned sixteen, just as his own father had done to him. In that
dimly-lit room, a powdered, perfumed older woman had offered himself to
her, but he knew he couldn't play the part. He preferred to watch from
a darkened hall, to feel for people from a distance. Always the uncle,
never the father. Always the brother or the son.
He pulled down his shade, blocking out the silhouettes whose lives
unraveled at the level of his gaze, and who, though next door, were as
far from his reach as the stars that had shone over Paterson. The stars
had made the black nights of his boyhood throb with light and life. But
the stars above Manhattan were imperceptible. Scanning for them in the
swath of sky that remained above the shade, he longed for their
brilliance like a soul trapped in Purgatory, caught between the dreaming
and the dead.
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