Prisoner's Dilemma Read online

He was interrupted by sister Rachel, who stuck her head in through the front-room door to check on the Boy Talk. “Okay, Rach,” Artie said, drawing her in. “For ten points . . .” He held up an index finger. Attempting to imitate his father’s voice, Artie looked at her bluntly and said, “Calamine.” But he couldn’t keep the questioning out. Dad’s voice had had no interrogative. Pop’s had been pure command.

  Rachel scrunched up the skin below her eyes, thought a moment, then did a search-me, Emmett Kelly look, brows grotesquely up and mouth pulled down to the right. “You two are both whacked, as far as I’m concerned.” She looked at Eddie Sr., who now lay on his left side, facing the side porch wall, ignoring his kids and taking perverse pleasure in the ellipsis game. Certain that the man couldn’t see her, Rach made a motion toward her brother, an inquiring sweep of hands around her eyes. But before Artie could respond with an equally covert gesture, Dad supplied, “Nope. Nothing yet. Your poor father has so far tonight behaved himself perfectly. Give an old guy some time to warm up.”

  Rachel, herself an in vivo variant on their father’s black humor, shook her head in resigned admiration, mildly amused at Pop’s once more raking them over the coals. Artie paled, again beaten. He looked at his sister. She shrugged and said, “Calamine, is it? Can’t help you, Boy Scout; the tall trees will show you the way.” She crossed to her father and sat on the bed next to him. She turned him over like a five-pound sack of turnips, gave him a painful, therapeutic pinch on the deltoids, and asked, “Throw up?”

  “‘Throw up?’ Is that an inquiry or an order? ‘Throw up?’ That’s exactly the kind of question your mother always asks. These little, two-word interrogations that I’m supposed to answer intelligently. Give it to me with syntax, will you? I can handle it. I’m an educated man, you know.”

  She jabbed him in the solar plexus and smiled. “Sure y’are, buddy. So’s my old man. Have you regurgitated yet this evening, sir? How’s that?”

  “No, I haven’t regurgitated. Do you want me to? I can give it the old college try.”

  “Stop harping on college already. I promise to go back and finish as soon as they start granting degrees in dilettantism.”

  She rolled him over on his belly again, launching him wallward with an affectionate shove. But Eddie Sr. rolled right back around, saying, “And I promise that as soon as I throw up I’ll bring you a sample.”

  “Gaaa. That’s disgusting. Definite lowbrow humor. When did you grow up, the Depression?” But despite her faces and her jabs at the man’s midsection, Rachel was, as always, enjoying herself immensely. She was at her best with their father when he was his most boorish. Then she could deride him with lines like the Depression one, hold up his own favorite hobby horses for ridicule.

  Nor did she pick only on the sick; she went after Ailene, too, whenever she got the chance. Rach never let her mother forget that day, ages past, when the woman reprimanded four ingenuously foul-mouthed children who had come home full of the joyful discovery of dirty words. Appalled at the naifs, Mother had demanded, “Who do you think I am, one of your alley friends? I’m your mother, you know.” Now that the four kids were grown, Ailene could not say the word potty without Rachel jumping on her with, “Who do you think you are, one of our alley friends? You’re our mother, you know.” And their father: their father was their father, as he was tonight again intent on proving.

  Rachel folded a pillow over the old man’s face and left him where he lay. On her way back inside, she made a point of stepping on her brother’s big toe and grinding it into the carpet, grimly warning, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” At the door, she turned and said, “You deal with him, Artie. For a change.”

  “Terrific,” replied Artie, who had been dealing with him the only way he knew how. But he was glad at her exit. With Rachel gone, he could think more clearly. Truth was, his sister’s burlesque left Artie as queasy as Dad’s own. For all her insouciance, Rach could not pinch the word out of the man. It had to be removed by incision. Artie had it almost worked out, that calamine rub. The only thing preventing the recollection was his own reluctance to rebleed. But the alternative to remembering was worse. He turned in the rocker to look at Dad. “We are young,” he said.

  “Warm,” said Eddie Sr.

  “We are very young, and all together. Sometime in late summer.”

  “Very warm,” said his dad.

  “We haven’t moved to Illinois yet. But I think we’ve left the Brook Street house already.”

  “Exactly. Getting hot.”

  “And the kids have something. Some illness. The kids always had something, didn’t they? Whoever invented childhood diseases must have been able to retire early.” He looked to his father for an encouraging word. But he had already exceeded the usual seldom. The man had returned to the old arm crook and challenging silence.

  “It was for us. The calamine was for us, wasn’t it? Wait a minute. It wasn’t disease. Here it comes. I’ve got it. Aptos. That summer in California.”

  It came out of Artie in one piece, the pain of the excision far greater than the pleasure the unrecoverable moment had once given. Intact in front of him, transplanted to the Second Street front porch through a contest of personalities that Artie should have been wise enough not to enter, was the image of a summer from the Hobson past, a seaside vacation from years before.

  A summer in a bungalow by the ocean: perhaps the best vacation the family had ever taken together, their only extended trip besides the ongoing one, the one Pop now took them on. They had had the whole summer, and three months to young children is time without end, time stretching endlessly in all directions. Pop patrolled the cottage in a cotton T-shirt and straw hat and any of a number of fifties checkered pairs of shorts: a T-shirted, checker-shorted, four-kidded Crusoe playing camp counselor and lifeguard and quiz master all at once, using any antic, however unforgivable, to soup up and egg on the progeny.

  SUMMER OF SLATE and unseasonable shale, tones and halftones, relentless in their regularity, all the way out to Monterey. Dad paces the captain’s walk, hands behind back, bellowing in that unmistakable bass, “Many brave hearts are asleep in the Deep.” He orders Eddie Jr., not yet six, “Down to the mess with ye, and back with a grog if y’will, Master Stubb.”

  “Yie, yie, Cabin.”

  “And have Mr. Starbuck report above decks.” Mr. Starbuck is Artie. But Artie is not around to play. Artie’s over bay side, standing over a horseshoe crab, the legs and all the working underparts exposed. He explains to Rachel how he has read somewhere that this thing is a living fossil that has been around since the dawn of life on earth and hasn’t changed at all while every other form of life has been steadily improving. “Well, if it’s that old, we better not kill it,” Rachel says, matter-of-factly. And transcending the ordinary sadism of children, they let it go.

  Lily is still active with her paints, and this summer keeps, for the first time ever, an earnest diary: “Today was very foggy. The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife. (This is a figure of speech.)” Eddie Jr., playing at surf casting, accidentally lands an eighteen-inch striped bass. Had he known there was any chance of his actually catching such a thing, this silvery creature gasping on the beach, he would never have pretended to fish in the first place. It is hard to say whether boy or dying fish blanches more. Mother cleans the animal in the sink for dinner. The family makes the most of things, and eats. Dad explains there is no escaping the food chain. All things turn their trim function on this forgiving earth.

  Dad is Ahab, up and down the beach searching for a certain piece of driftwood, while mother, his perfect foil, never leaves her bungalow chair for fear of getting sand in her knitting, the articles of winter practicality she makes merely by clicking sticks through mounds of Canadian wool. At the end of each row, Mom puts down her handiwork and sings a little something herself: “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.” Only she sings “You and I,” instead of “You and me,” because of the predicative nominative,
which is good grammar.

  She goes indoors and hides when Ed takes the kids swimming. Eddie Jr. makes a mighty effort to tell her: “It’s not swimming, Mom, it’s body surfing.” And one does it like this: open the chest, breathe deep, then push, push a little more, wait for the back swell, then get out in front, feel the curl breaking a bit, and glide easy and stroke, the whole force of the ocean behind you. Only don’t get too far out in front or you will get crunched and crunched bad, tossed over and over into the churning sand, unable to tell which way is safety.

  When the whistle blows (the fat man is up on shore, T-shirt, shorts, beaten-up straw hat, roving the terrain like a pro) it means everybody out of the water and count off. One two three four. Four children present and accounted for. The whistle goes off every few minutes; Dad carries it on a lanyard Mom has made for that purpose. When Rachel complains, “Can’t you see that we’re all here without this numbers thing?” he makes the JDs count by twos, and the next time by threes, and that’s education. That’s what he does for a living. Eddie Jr. says: “It goes up by four each time! Let’s stay out here till we get to googol.” And Lily, showing off, says “Googolplex.” And they invent names for what numbers come next.

  Mr. Starbuck gets taken out to sea in an undertow. He remembers thinking distinctly: “I should have known. The stream of white bubbles is the giveaway.” And when being swept out to the Aleutians seems certain, he looks back to shore, and thinks: This is my family. That’s our summer rental cottage on Aptos. We’re on vacation. I was born in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. Counting by eights is the hardest. Many brave hearts are asleep in the Deep. Mom runs down from the bungalow, out of her chair at last, and Dad takes off his T-shirt and hat and runs too. His belly is already a monster, but his legs and arms have not yet reached the extreme emaciation of later years. Just as he is about to surrender and drift, Artie remembers something. He swims parallel to shore, instead of toward it, and when he clears the undertow, he is strong enough to crawl back in.

  He lies on the beach like that striped bass for a while. But soon Artie jumps up and proudly explains to his mother the parallel-swimming trick that just saved his life. Something he’d read in a science magazine, and it worked just like they said it would.

  The morning after an especially rough surf, four sore kids lie bedbound in collective grief greater than any the world has seen since Lily got them all the chicken pox from some kid in the alley. Each has been crunched by breakers many times over, and their sand-pounded sores threaten to fester. Mom yells something supposedly not at Dad about how if Edward won’t drive up the coast for medicine, she’ll get the Rambler and go herself. Dad tries using the battle-scars line, the one about how “Wounds are the price of freedom.” Then he tries “Shake it off,” which is psychology, and he gets about 40 percent of Eddie Jr. to come over to this way of thinking. But the older kids tell both parents to be quiet and let them die in peace.

  When all four give up on the chance of any salve coming to them in this lifetime, only then does Dad explain to them, whispering at first, then chanting, louder: “The Sea will provide.” Something mysterious and convincing in the litany draws the four of them up short for a minute, just listening. “The Sea will provide.” He leaves his children and goes down to the beach, combs it far out of sight, and returns triumphantly twenty minutes later, toting a flask washed up from a foreign coast, labelless but watertight, delivered up in the nick of time, drifting in for just such wounds: calamine.

  ARTIE FORCED HIS father’s one-word chunk of history to the surface. But far from being cathartic, the story of medicine from out of the sea disconcerted him even more this second time around. Nothing appealed to him less this evening than the idea that his life, his father’s, the family album, had all been easy once. The interval of lost time came and visited on the front porch, saw the mess it had made, and instantly disowned its offspring.

  Artie looked at his father, stripped of whistle, and then at his own thin arms and legs, so unlike the ones that had pulled him out of the undertow. He had accomplished nothing in the intervening years except the steady conversion of early hope into adult confusion, with no indication of how the one had become the other.

  Pop mumbled, kapok-muffled. “Good man.” He sounded sicker than the three days’ symptoms warranted. “Knew you had it packed away.” Artie focused on the note of congratulations, ignoring the overtones. He decided that he had accumulated a hefty enough bank balance of contrition through the years to justify his gloating, just this once, over the strength of his memory. Recalling that lost summer, reminded of how his father had always combined just such taunts, pedagogy, and oracular beachcombing to produce balm out of nowhere, Art looked away again onto the silent lawn and let a feeling of All Clear come over him.

  Maybe Pop’s disease was something harmless, after all. It wouldn’t be the first missed diagnosis in history. Whatever ailed the old lifeguard, Artie decided, the fellow sharing the porch with him this evening was still a good person. His heart filled with a magnanimity toward Dad that ordinarily rarely bothered him, and Artie at once wanted to do something special for the man.

  “Come on, big guy. Let’s go inside and deal some cards.” Among Ailene, Lily, Rachel, and Eddie-boy, they could easily scrape up another partnership. Dad often said he’d made sure to father sufficient children always to be able to make up a table. Bridge allowed him to hold forth on statistics, to comment on the psychology of intimidation, to wheedle Lily or Ailene. And in this way, Artie could test his longstanding hypothesis that nothing administered to his father’s perennial illness as well as setting up a dangerous cross-ruff. Nothing restored him to health like going down heroically in Three No Trump.

  Artie stood and moved for the door. Lawn and streetlamp, a seaside summer, had taught the two of them all they were going to learn this evening. It was time, Artie felt, to return to the small consolation of family. Art was two steps to the door when he heard something that dropped him in place and overhauled his evening plans. His father was calling his name, but in another man’s voice.

  “Arthur,” he said, and, “Son.” He spoke the words sharply, each syllable rising up eerily by spectral fourths. He barely whispered, as if too big a twitch of the vocal cords might pitch him over a ledge that had just opened up underneath him. Something is happening, his father’s voice telegraphed. Something I do not want to go through by myself. At the same time, the tone carried an awful fascination, as if a frightened rare animal had appeared from nowhere in the dark yard, one that Dad wanted Artie to see without scaring.

  A salt-pillar glance back over Artie’s shoulder confirmed the worst. Pop lay on the displaced mattress, on neither one side nor the other nor even face down as Rachel had left him, but unnaturally on his back, shock-side up, staring up at the ceiling as if reading something there. He clearly saw something, a picture, a scene of terrifying and unnameable wonder, etched on the white boards.

  Before Artie could do anything to arrest it, the awful moment was on him. The air turned metallic as he breathed. Time thickened and molded over. Artie’s thighs refused to move, and he felt an overwhelming desire to sit down and do nothing, pinned at the bottom of an ocean of atmosphere. He had seen Pop’s attacks before, more than once. But this time, the hidden horror in his father’s voice blew his composure apart. Artie, from infancy, had a secret terror of sirens at night, of how easily they reduced the givens of the world to nothing. Now, sirens clanging on all sides, his courage crumpled and his equanimity stripped off smoother than steamed wallpaper, with nothing but gaping plaster underneath.

  Averting his eyes from the white-wood ceiling, Artie assumed a matter-of-factness he did not feel. He returned to bedside, exhaling a bit of air in the closest motion he allowed himself to breathing. When he felt a small patch of earth resolidify under his feet, he risked a look at his father’s face: the man’s saucer eyes squeezed into a wince so severe that Art imitated it involuntarily. Dad’s hands clenched the rattan bed box, keepin
g his discarded body from falling farther.

  How could Artie have thought a bridge game possible, and only seconds before? He would now be lucky to get the body upstairs and in bed without going to pieces himself. He loosened his father’s clamped knuckles, saying, “Okay now, okay,” although his father had by now gone under, eyes closed, and could hear nothing. Gradually, Artie started to believe his own attempts at solace. He sat at the foot of the bed and stroked his father’s flinty shins. He repeated one more “Okay,” which became an “Oh, Dadimo.”

  He was all at once taken with the urge to sing a refrain of “Many brave hearts are asleep in the Deep,” but he was unsure if the joke would be in good taste, even the already-questionable taste he’d inherited from the man in question. He said instead, “The Sea will provide,” offering a little crumb of comfort, although his father could no longer hear him. He pinched a row of Dad’s hammer toes until they turned red, counting off, as he grabbed each in turn, “Eight, sixteen, twenty-four,” and a hesitant “thirty-two.” Then he grabbed the man’s torso and held on. As the fellow would not be able to feel him for some time, no one would be the wiser.

  2

  Not surprisingly, the four kids split widely on a diagnosis. Spread over the spectrum as on every other issue, they were not yet, early in November, even unanimous on whether Pop really needed diagnosing. As in all complex matters, the four Hobson baby-boomers, although identical genetic material raised in the same household with militantly unfair equality, swore by four radically different verdicts of what, if anything, was wrong with Pop.

  They seemed to agree secretly never to reveal outwardly that they were blood relations, variations on a theme. Sixteen years earlier, when Arthur was only nine, Lily eight, Rachel seven, and Edward, the caboose, just two, Ailene carted all four in the two-toned Ford to a photographer’s shop in Teaneck, New Jersey, and came away with a montage of four oval faces in a frame, the kind still rampant in the early sixties. A duplicate print hung in the photographer’s shop window for a few seasons, drawing smiles from passersby who thought they could see in each pronounced forehead and high cheekbone an uncanny familial persistence. Among the aunts and uncles, the game was to pick out, from the fourfold photograph, who had whose eyes and whose cheekbones. This favorite holiday talk made Rachel crack the same joke annually from age eight to fourteen: “If I’ve got Pop’s nose, I better give it back before he blows.” What passed for sense of humor, at least, they shared congenitally.