Collected Prose

off and came to his death in a place where no one could see him. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that he vanished—as if from the face of the earth. The newspapers made much of this story (interviews with the parents, interviews with the detectives assigned to the case, articles about the boy’s personality: what games he liked to play, what foods he liked to eat), and A. began to realize that the presence of this disaster—superimposed on his own and admittedly much smaller disaster—was inescapable. Each thing that fell before his eyes seemed to be no more than an image of what was inside him. The days went by, and each day a little more of the pain inside him was dragged out into the open. A sense of loss took hold of him, and it would not let go. And there were times when this loss was so great, and so suffocating, that he thought it would never let go.
    * * *

    Some weeks later, at the beginning of summer. A radiant New York June: clarity of the light falling on the bricks; blue, transparent skies, zeroing to an azure that would have charmed even Mallarmé.
    A.’s grandfather (on his mother’s side) was slowly beginning to die. Only a year before he had performed magic tricks at A.’s son’s first birthday party, but now, at eighty-five, he was so weak that he could no longer stand without support, could no longer move without an effort of will so intense that merely to think of moving was enough to exhaust him. There was a family conference at the doctor’s office, and the decision was made to send him to Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street (the same hospital in which his wife had died of amniotropic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease—eleven years earlier). A. was at that conference, as were his mother and his mother’s sister, his grandfather’s two children. Because neither of the women could remain in New York, it was agreed that A. would be responsible for everything. A.’s mother had to return home to California to take care of her own gravely ill husband, while A.’s aunt was about to go to Paris to visit her first grandchild, the recently born daughter of her only son. Everything, it seemed, had quite literally become a matter of life and death. At which point, A. suddenly found himself thinking (perhaps because his grandfather had always reminded him of W.C. Fields) of a scene from the 1932 Fields film, Million Dollar Legs: Jack Oakey runs frantically to catch up with a departing stage coach and beseeches the driver to stop; “It’s a matter of life and death!” he shouts. And the driver calmly and cynically replies: “What isn’t?”
    During this family conference A. could see the fear on his grandfather’s face. At one point the old man caught his eye and gestured up to the wall beside the doctor’s desk, which was covered with laminated plaques, framed certificates, awards, degrees, and testimonials, and gave a knowing nod, as if to say, “Pretty impressive, eh? This guy will take good care of me.” The old man had always been taken in by pomp of this sort. “I’ve just received a letter from the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank,” he would say, when in fact it was nothing more than a form letter. That day in the doctor’s office, however, it was painful for A. to see it: the old man’s refusal to recognize the thing that was looking him straight in the eyes. “I feel good about all this, doctor,” his grandfather said. “I know you’re going to get me better again.” And yet, almost against his will, A. found himself admiring this capacity for blindness. Later that day, he helped his grandfather pack a small satchel of things to take to the hospital. The old man tossed three or four of his magic tricks into the bag. “Why are you bothering with those?” A. asked. “So I can entertain the nurses,” his grandfather replied, “in case things get dull.”
    *

    A. decided to stay in his grandfather’s apartment for as long as the old man was in the hospital. The place could not remain empty (someone had to pay the bills, collect the mail, water the plants), and it was bound to be more comfortable than the room on Varick Street. Above all, the illusion had to be maintained that the old man was coming back. Until there was death, there was always the possibility there would not be death, and this chance, slight though it was, had to be credited.
    A. remained in that apartment for the next six or seven