Straight Man

lived in then would be leveled a few years after we moved out, along with all the others on that block, to make room for a medical school annex. The house’s previous owner, also a professor, had apparently been a different order of being from William Henry Devereaux, Sr., because his basement was full of tools. There was a huge workbench, complete with a heavy, cast-iron vice at one end and a jigsaw I discovered how to turn on at the other. There were also a sander and several drills and a special tin case containing dozens of drill bits. One whole wall sported hooks from which hung hammers, planers, handsaws and hacksaws, and the grips on all of these were worn smooth with use. Off in an unlit corner stood a cluster of yard tools: two or three rakes, a snow shovel, a hoe, a spade. I remember thinking when I discovered the spade that there’d been no reason to borrow one from our neighbor when my father dug the hole to bury Red. To my knowledge, my father never ventured down into the dark cellar, so he never knew what tools were at his disposal. When the furnace went out, he called for help, and when the repairman arrived my father showed him to what he understood to be the door to the cellar where the furnace was located. That was about as much information as he could furnish.
    His tools were nearly all I knew about the man who’d occupied the house before it became ours, except that he had lived there for many years. We’d heard he never married, and therefore had no children. Which seemed to me a shame, because when I handled his tools, I always pictured a man who wouldn’t have minded the company of a boy like me as he worked. I’d concluded he might even have enjoyed it.
    The afternoon my mother crept noiselessly down the cellar stairs instead of calling to me as she usually did, I had taken a coil of rope, climbed onto a chair, and tied a knot onto one of the pipes that formed a complex grid running along the ceiling of the cellar. The moment before I turned around and saw her, I had been testing the rope by yanking on it with both hands, to see if the knot would stay tied, if the pipe would hold my weight. To another kid, I would have looked like I was about to swing, Tarzan-like, from one imaginary tree to another, but at the moment our eyes met, I knew this was not the conclusion my mother had come to, and I let loose an explosion of violent grief I had not known until that very moment I possessed.
    How did I get from the chair I was standing on and into her arms? How did I know to go there, know that she would not be angry? There was no way to explain to my mother what I didn’t fully comprehend myself—that I didn’t want my life to end, rather just to know that the pipe would hold me if I needed it to later, if things got worse, if they became unbearable.
    And how did she know the right words to whisper as she clutched me to her, her fingers digging in beneath my jutting boyish shoulder blades? How did she know to say that we—she and I—were going to forget this? How did she know to whisper these words so fiercely that I would have no choice but to believe her? Did she recognize the ambiguity of her message to me? Was it the pain of his abandonment we would eventually forget? Was that what she meant? Or was it the fact that she had come down into the cellar and found me standing on a chair? Both, I felt certain. What I didn’t know was how we’d manage to do this necessary thing.
How
would we forget? Was it time we would put our faith in? God’s grace? Each other? It didn’t matter. Only her certainty mattered. It simply would be done. I had her word. I was to trust her, and I did.
    By the time I open my eyes, the world has tilted back again, and the boxcars are merely boxcars, not the skyline of some lost, submerged city. Not even squinting at them, blurring the edges of my vision, can make them into anything but what they are. Which is just as well. It is a mistake, I feel certain, to be sentimental about a boy visited by a fleeting thought, a passing sorrow. After all, not far from where I sit, a manmy age, a man named William Cherry, has recently surrendered his life by lying down on the track and allowing something larger and more powerful than himself to bear away and out of the world some pain I will never know. What I wonder is this: Did this world tilt for William Cherry, as it just did momentarily for me? Had he forgotten that the world could do such a thing? Did the visible