Things Invisible to See (3 page)

Her marriage to Hal Bishop and the move to Ann Arbor changed her. She heard fewer such sounds, and the minds of animals gradually were closed to her, as if her own mind hid a sanctuary for birds and beasts to which she had lost the way. Sometimes, when she received bad news, the gift would surface, and Helen would say, “This knowing a thing before it happens is terrible. It’s a power from the devil.”

Hal taught chemistry at the University and did not believe in the devil. But Helen’s father would say, “It’s a gift from God. You’re a good girl. Why shouldn’t God give you a little something extra?”

I
F ONLY HE’D BEEN
someplace else.

“Willie?”

Ben knew Willie was a light sleeper. The shape under the covers did not stir.

“Willie, I think I killed somebody tonight.”

A hand snaked out and switched on the reading lamp hooked over the bedboard.

“What are you talking about?”

“I hit a baseball across the river at Island Park and it konked somebody.”

Willie sat up.

“You know for sure it hit somebody?”

“I heard an ambulance.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“I ran,” said Ben. “We all ran.”

“Better to walk,” said Willie. “When you run, you admit your guilt.”

Ben shook his head.

“I should’ve waited. I should’ve waited to see how bad it was.”

“What do you mean you should’ve waited? You want to go to jail? You want to be paying somebody’s doctor bills for the next ten years?”

“I want to know who I hit.”

“If it was real bad, it’ll be in the paper tomorrow,” Willie said reassuringly.

“Will it tell which hospital?” asked Ben.

“It always tells which hospital. For God’s sake, Ben, don’t hang around the hospital asking questions.”

Willie turned off the light and slid back under the covers.

“It might not be serious. Don’t worry about it till you know. Thank God for one thing.”

“What?” asked Ben in a tight voice.

“You didn’t get caught.”

The light of what their mother called the hunter’s moon silvered everything in the room except the balsa model Piper Cub which seemed to float just below the ceiling, out of the moon’s reach. Their father had made it for Ben’s fifth birthday (Willie had received a box of soldiers), and the balsa struts were so complicated and the tissue wings so delicate that neither Ben nor Willie had been allowed to touch it. Hanging on the wall just below it, their father’s mitt gathered the moonlight in its sunken palm.

Lord, make it so that whoever I hit isn’t hurt.

“Willie?”

Light on again.

“What is it now?”

“Can you pray that whoever I hit isn’t hurt?”

“You think God listens to me and not to you?” grumbled Willie, secretly pleased, since he himself believed this was true.

“Come on, Willie. You’ve had more practice.”

With a snort of irritation, Willie climbed out of bed, knelt at his bookcase, and pulled out
The Book of Common Prayer.

“Can’t you just pray from your bed?” asked Ben, a little awed.

“I don’t address the Supreme Being of the universe lying in bed,” answered Willie.

He opened the door to the wardrobe he shared with his brother.

“Guess you have to get dressed to talk to the Supreme Being of the universe, huh?” said Ben.

Willie cast him a chilly glance.

“I’m putting on a bathrobe.”

Like an overgrown shepherd in a Sunday school pageant, he opened the prayer book and cleared his throat. Ben, deeply touched by all this effort on his behalf, listened attentively as Willie’s voice tolled:

“‘Oh, most gracious Father, we fly unto Thee and implore Thy mercy for Thy servant lying under the visitation of Thine hand. If it be Thy will, preserve his life, that there may be place for repentance; but if Thou has otherwise appointed, let Thy mercy supply to him the want of the usual opportunity for the trimming of his lamp.’”

“How about the baseball?” asked Ben, to whom the lamp seemed a peculiar digression.

“The prayer includes all particular situations,” replied Willie.

“But will God know we’re talking about a baseball?” persisted Ben. “Couldn’t He—I know this sounds funny, but there are so many big problems, wars and floods and ships going down and—”

“He looks into our hearts,” said Willie.

“Oh. Our hearts.”

Willie found his place and continued.

“‘Stir up in him such sorrow for sin and such fervent love for Thee as may in a short time do the work of many days; that among the praises which Thy saints and holy angels shall sing to the honor of Thy mercy through eternal ages, it may be to Thy unspeakable glory, that Thou hast redeemed the soul of this Thy servant from eternal death and made him partaker of the everlasting life, which is through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’”

Whose prayer keeps buzzing round Your left ear?
sings Gabriel.

And God answers:
That’s Elena Kohn. Somebody stole her suitcase on the platform of the Nuremberg station.
The pale wings beat harder.
She had all her money and her passport in that suitcase,
He adds.

And that prayer scratching Your right shoulder?

Wei Wu,
says God.
His father has been dying for forty-five days. Cancer.

And that one passing back and forth like a film over your eyes?

Willie Harkissian in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
sighs God.
Up to his old tricks.

Willie arranged his bathrobe on a hanger and climbed back into bed. Ben closed his eyes.

If he’d walked to Mike’s Grill five minutes earlier, whoever he’d hit would not have occupied that fateful space in Island Park. If Clackett had pitched to Henry instead of to Ben, the ball would have barely dribbled across the street. Henry was no hitter once darkness came on. If Sol had paid for his malt with a five-dollar bill and had to wait for Mike to make change, whoever it was would already have passed by.

To hit a ball into the darkness. That was truly a goofy thing to do.

Close your eyes. Imagine you are in outer space, standing on a distant star. Now look back at the earth.
He could almost hear his father, telling him what he’d always told Ben when everything went wrong.

From a star whose single beam of light cut across the vast loneliness of inner space, Ben looked back and fell in love with the earth. It wasn’t perfect, but it was there. It was better than nothing, better than empty space. On the face of the waters moved convoys, merchant ships, battleships, troop carriers. In the bowels of the deep lay destroyers, U-boats, submarines. The
Reuben James.
The
Kearney.
The galleons, rafts, longboats, and fishing craft of his ancestors, their bones and booty and baggage. The sleep of slaves, of princes, of pirates. Of men and women searching for a better life.

And over the continents, over the ragged carpet of Russia, over North America and South America kissing at the Panama Canal, over the Great Wall of China and the gigantic bean that was Australia, over the silence of Antarctica, flew swarms of fighters, their small weapons glinting in the beams of the indifferent sun.

When Ben opened his eyes, Willie was gone and everything in the room looked as if it had a hangover. The grey pallor of early morning sifted across Willie’s desk, his papers stacked in two piles with their corners trued off, and across his own desk, littered with school-work, over which half a dozen baseball trophies stood guard. In this light, the little golden players did not look worth winning.

Why should prayers work? thought Ben. If prayers worked, Hitler would have been stopped at the border of Poland by angels with swords of fire.

He could hear his mother moving around in the living room, which was also her bedroom. When she was tired, she slept in her clothes like a traveler, taking off nothing but her stockings and underpants. It didn’t matter to Wanda what she slept in, as long as she had clean underpants when she was awake. And not torn, either. If she were in an accident, she didn’t want people talking about her that way.

Since she had never, in all her life, had her own room, she did not miss having one now. If she ever made enough money to buy a house as big as the one she grew up in, she’d rent rooms, the same as her mother did. As a child Wanda would come home from school to find that her room had been rented and all her things moved into another room, vacant—but for how long? The best rooms never stayed vacant. They had brass beds and marble sinks with oval basins. Once for a whole week she slept in a brass bed and washed at a marble sink—Wanda and her mother laundered all the sheets and towels, made the beds, dusted the rooms, and after someone moved out, scrubbed the floors on their hands and knees.

Her father sent money. He never came to visit, because it turned out that he already had a wife when he married her mother, but sometimes he sent a doll to Wanda on her birthday.

To Ben as he entered the kitchen, she looked thinner, almost a stranger with short grey hair—he still could not get used to her with bobbed hair—laying the cereal dishes on the green oilcloth.

“Marsha called,” she said.

“When?”

“Last night. Didn’t you find my note on your bed?”

“I must have slept on it. Did she say what she wanted?”

“You think she’d tell me?”

He opened the front door and a gust of wind fluttered the newspaper at his feet. His heart racing, he picked it up and carried it to the living room and sat down on the sofa that hid his mother’s bed. With studied casualness, he laid aside the comics and opened the paper and scanned the headlines.

ROOSEVELT PROPOSES OPENING MINES, PENDING MEDIATION BOARD STUDY

“Turn on the light,” said his mother. “You’ll go blind.”

NAVY REPORTS II DEAD

His eye glided past the picture of a shadowy ship sinking, and he turned the page.

Nothing, nothing.

That meant it wasn’t serious.

Like a man whose sentence has been lifted, he sped back to the first page.

In the Navy’s third report on the
Kearney,
the missing are now listed as dead. The U.S. Destroyer
Kearney,
it was disclosed, was torpedoed in the course of a great all-night battle between escort warships and a Nazi U-boat wolf pack that attacked a convoy of merchant marine men in the bleak waters southwest of Iceland on the night of October 16.

For the first time since the European war started, the Navy Secretary was constrained to issue a bulletin concluding with such words as “the next of kin of the missing have been notified.”

The Secretary told a press conference that the United States, like the British, would not give out marine sinkings. As he expressed it, German morale is depressed by having U-boats and their crews go out and never come back, leaving the survivors at home without word of their fate.

“You didn’t read the comics first,” remarked Wanda. She handed Ben a glass of orange juice. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you pick up the paper and not head straight for
Terry and the Pirates.
”

On his way to the comics, Ben’s eye caught an item on the facing page.

A 17-year-old Washtenaw County girl suffered a concussion last night when a stray baseball struck her in the head.

Miss Clare Bishop, of 201 Orchard Drive, was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital by ambulance following the 8
P.M
. accident at Island Park. She is reported in serious condition.

State police said she was walking with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Bishop, and her aunt, Mrs. Nell McGuinley, when the ball struck her.

No arrests were made.

“Call Marsha, won’t you? She thinks I don’t give you her messages. She’s been trying to reach you for two days.”

It could have been worse, he told himself. The ball could have killed her. Things could always be worse.

“I’ll get out of the kitchen,” said Wanda, “so you can have privacy.”

When he heard the first ring, he tucked the receiver under his chin, opened the icebox, and solaced himself with the chocolate pudding Willie had passed up at dinner the night before.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice. Not Marsha’s.

“Can I speak to Marsha?”

“Whom shall I say is calling?” inquired the voice, in cultured tones. Couldn’t be her mom. Maybe the new maid?

“Ben.”

“One moment, please.”

He waited a good deal longer than one moment. Marsha’s house was huge. Probably it took her half an hour to walk from one end to the other. He imagined his voice, a wind-up toy of himself, padding across plush carpets from one room to the next, through shoals of what Marsha called her stepfather’s Grateful Patient presents. A brass peacock, its tail set with hideous glass eyes … a curio cabinet full of antique spectacles. Marsha’s stepfather specialized in disorders of vision.

The windup toy hadn’t even reached the kitchen when Marsha came to the phone.

“Ben, the red rains have fallen. It’s okay.”

“What?”

“I’m not—you know.”

“Well, that’s wonderful,” said Ben. He tried to sound relieved, but half a dozen false alarms had immunized him against taking her seriously.

“Can you get off work on Wednesday? I could cut class. We could drive into Detroit and knock around Hudson’s. It’s a great place for lunch on Wednesdays. They have fashion shows in the dining room.”

“I can’t think of anything I need to buy at Hudson’s,” said Ben.

“Don’t you give your mom a Christmas present?”

“Yeah, but Christmas is more than a month away.”

“In a month everything will be picked over,” snapped Marsha. “Besides, we could ride the escalators.” Taking his silence for consent, she added, “You can pick me up around ten in the morning.”

Click.

She never said good-bye, and she never gave Ben a chance to say it.

Clare Bishop. Who was Clare Bishop? He knew the name of everybody in his class. Two hundred names. He didn’t recognize hers. He dragged out his old yearbooks, determined to find her.