424
PARTISAN REVIEW
The old man began to cry.
From the kitchen, Sadie said: "He imagines things all the time.
He thinks there are men in there. Tell him they're shadows ."
"Do the men bother you, Daddy? Do you want me to tell them
to go away?" Clara said .
"No."
"Are they kind?"
"They're good guys."
"Good."
"It's that other guy I can't stand. The one that was with me
when I was born, the one that looks like me. The one who does ter–
rible things. Always did terrible things."
u~h,
Daddy," Clara said. "I don't think he ever meant to do ter–
rible things. I don't think he's bad. I know he's not bad." She held her
father's hand. She knelt at his bed and pressed her cheek against his,
happy, absolving.
"You don't know shit!"
the old man yelled. "Give me a cigarette,"
he whispered.
Clara thought: God, the smell.
"Don't trust that Clara," the old man said, "she's not so nice ."
"It's me, Daddy, Clara, I'm here."
"Oh."
Clara, who was drunk, told her daughter: "Grandpa said he
couldn't trust me."
"He meant because you wouldn't give him a cigarette ."
"That's not what he meant. My brother wouldn't give him a
cigarette either."
"You know Grandpa loves you, Mommy."
But that was exactly what Clara didn't know. She arranged all
the proofs in her mind, she remembered endearments, reconcilia–
tions. But she could not connect the proofs, the endearments, the
reconciliations, with the man who lay burning, dying. Perhaps the
fever has burned away all that is false in him, she thought; in which
case, he does not love me.
She drank.
The old man's father had died whistling a bird-call. The old
man's mother had died with the words
veal cutlets
on her lips. What
do these things mean.
If
only she could remember what he'd looked
like before he'd become this thing. Clara no longer knew for whom
she cried. She dreaded her visits to the airless, phantomed room.
