Out of Nowhere by Keith Botsford

I admitted that since hearing from the home that Tony was dead, I’d been talking to Tony. It was a remembering thing. Getting Mandy and myself and others to remember what was Tony really like—who was this guy? Started with a lot of questions I couldn’t answer. Tony’s character was dead and gone, it wasn’t going to change any more, end of story, and picture snapped, nothing for Tony to add or take away. But he himself wasn’t concluded. As I told Francine, “You know Chicago judges can be bribed, but you don’t know for sure—until you get shafted—just how much or how badly: not until they’ve concluded.”
“So I’ve been telling you. Some of your kids wrote while you were away. They don’t seem to have been taken in by all your anger over Tony. Nor am I. I’ve been around you ten years now. They’ve been around for twenty, thirty years, which is a lot more than I’d be willing to take on if I were in their shoes. Relax. You have a right to be shaken. He was the last one who remembered you as a child. He was your older brother. He had rights on you.”
She handed me two or three letters. Their condolences made me feel bad. “I thought he was really nice,” one of my daughters wrote from Prague. “He was always nice to me.”
“They loved him, I loved him,” I said to Francine. “He was a goddam loveable man. The guys at the Shannon Bar around the corner from la Mamma’s necropolis loved him; his stockbroker loved him; priests loved him—he repented regularly. What can I say?”
Later, we sat at dinner. Just old friends, including my partner, Frank. They’d all called up to say maybe I didn’t feel like a dinner, in the circumstances. I said rubbish. I wasn’t shocked; I was just puzzled.
Over dinner, I told them the story of Tony’s death; I said I still felt misgivings. We discussed poor old Tony as we discussed cases out of court. There was a party said it was obviously an accident: he’d taken the wrong medicine or done something he’d been told not to do. Another party said the way I’d talked about him—“Wasn’t he something of a con man?”—this had to be an insurance scam. They asked about an autopsy. I said, not that I knew of, and there hadn’t been any insurance.
They were having a good time. Tony’s death had taken on fantastic overtones. It was the kind of story my friends really liked. You could swap grief for a joke among people who didn’t have to be tactful out West where you expected weird things to happen.
“Doctor Kevorkian or someone like that,” Frank said. “Farewell to your harms. Just do it. Go.” I said, “Are you trying to tell me seriously he committed suicide?”
For Christ’s sake, he didn’t have to up the schedule. He went out there to die anyway. He had only 29 per cent of his lungs. He was shot in all sorts of ways.’’
Why did I short-circuit the suicide idea? As I told Francine when everyone had gone home, because Tony looked damned cheerful, and he only had that look on his face when he had some scheme going. For some crazy reason I smelled woman. Maybe it was just Old Reliable Eileen not being there. Maybe it was habit. And maybe it was old smarts about Brother Tony. I mean, there usually was one, a woman, wasn’t there?
That all had to wait. When I finished up Tykes (I lost, as though Tony were looking over my shoulder), I went to New York.
These visits to my mother in the home were never pleasant. I hated signing in downstairs like a delivery boy. Who was going to steal one of these people? I hated the whole preview of death, the Coming Attraction. I hated walking past the chapel with its perpetual candle and its lying stations of the cross: why not put honest pictures up on the walls to tell the clients what life’s really like between arrival and departure? The weekly dances, the craft nights, bingo, sing-alongs. I hated the big freight elevators whose doors were specially timed for the lunch-and-dinner wheelchair derby and the slow, slow trip up, stopping at every floor to the twelfth. It took too much time. All that time to think about the unloveliness of the human condition.
There was a real question this time, too. Do you tell a ninety-nine-year-old woman her son is dead? Not just her son. A son would be one thing, and bad enough, but Tony was also the lifelong object of all her desires. Dead? And she was alive?
I was never sure she wasn’t just pretending she didn’t understand. Why bother to tell her, if it’s bound to hurt.
She was up on her high bed, half in and half out of this world. She looked like some small and very old angel adrift. She was in a white gown; her eyes had had the dark currant color washed out of them; her skin was so wasted you could give an anatomy lesson, joint by joint. This was a human being who’d gone back to the diapers and feeding habits of infancy, and along the way passed backwards through all the stages of her life: through my father who had betrayed her twice, once by shedding her and then by killing himself; through the beautiful young woman she’d been before she grew fat, with a wave to the Italian nightingale who’d sung Mimi at the Civic Opera (and met Father, a music-lover who sent her the flowers she had viewed with such suspicion); then back among her turn-of-the-century family—hooded-eyed grocers and restaurateurs, vast, sombre, careful men in dark hats and her older sisters who had turned out remarkably childless but had lived to a great age.
This woman had been around a hundred years as a human being and she frightened me. If I didn’t come for a month or two, she knew it and cried somewhere inside; malevolent as a child, she was saying, ‘‘It’s going to happen to you, you’ll see, you’ll see!’’
I sat down and held her hand. Some days after an hour or so the wiring might connect, a little spark of electricity leapt across the furrowed ridges of her brain. By now this rarely produced recognition. I couldn’t just treat her like a two-year-old. I remembered everything she was, which was still inside her: Tony and me as much tots as she was now, what she thought when Father left her and worse, later, when he killed himself and we, Tony and I, were taken off the first and only time to see where she came from, Agrigento, when she was nine. A holiday on which the young Jim had pointed out another of her follies, to have called me James when I was, so her cousins left behind said, so like her, and my brother Tony, Tonio, when he was, or wanted to be, so purely Anglo and the cousins thought they were being treated by him as if they pushed barrows. Usually I tried to think of things she might like to hear; today I had to tell her things she didn’t want to hear. The technique was to hold her hand and feed her the word ‘‘Mamma’’ and my name: ‘‘This is Jim, Mamma. Do you know who I am? Mamma, this is Jim.’’ If that didn’t work, I could try my few words of Italian and she might smile wistfully.
This was when she was most dangerous. She seemed to be asleep—from the effort of thinking where am I? Who’s this?—and suddenly it hit her and her hand fairly jumped out of yours, a recoil like a shot.
I said, ‘‘Tony’s dead, Mamma, he’s dead.’’
She looked at me imperiously. ‘‘You shouldn’t talk to your brother that way, saying things like that,’’ she said, angry and spiteful. ‘‘He’s older than you and he’s had a more difficult life. You both have to learn how to get along.’’