418
PARTISAN REVIEW
a gesture that meant:
Words can't say.
. ..
If
words could say.
...
Ooooh.
. . .
The man in the next bed was dying of cancer; no one ever
came to see him. "Animals," the old man said. Clara's brother looked
puzzled; for once Clara understood first: Sex. He meant they were
doing sex. "I see it," he said. "I know. They take him down for x-rays
and he doesn't come back. I know. Nuns. They think I don't know.
Creeping around all night long." It was a Methodist hospital; there
were no nuns .
"Daddy's talking about sex," Clara said.
"You know you got a dirty mind?" her brother said.
What
if
rrry
brother should die?
Clara thought. Drunk, she saw her
brother's car in flames, his charred body. She allowed her son to
comfort her: "Grandpa will be all right, Ma."
Poor little boy.
She
meant her son. She meant her brother. Her son, weeping, held her
as she wept.
Daddy,
she said,
Daddy,
deceiving her son, who loved
her.
My brother,
she thought;
my brother.
She saw her brother in an
airplane, spiralling down into oily waters. She closed her eyes
against the sound of the crash.
The man in the next bed died. Clara's mother, alert with greed,
asked the Philippino nurse to tell her all about it. "Can it, Ma,"
Clara's brother said.
Well, what do you know?
Clara thought;
he told
Sadie to can it.
"I'm only trying to express an interest," Sadie said.
Like
unto Job's comforters,
Clara thought;
my mother's getting fat.
She giggled.
"Can it, Clara," her brother said.
"Terrible things, terrible things," the old man said.
"The man who was doing terrible things isn't here any more,
daddy. There's somebody else here now." The old man shouted a
curse in Italian; who would have thought he could summon up such
strength?
"Get the nurse," Sadie said.
"What for, Mother?"
Sadie bit her hand. "This is killing me," she said, her hand muf–
fling her words.
"You're killing your mother," Clara's brother said.
"Who, me? What did I do?"
I never do nothing and I never do much,
Clara thought.
"You talk too much," her brother said.
The old man was asleep now, his toothless mouth open. Clara
thought she could smell his breath across the room.
