The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  Madolyn watches him, too, shaking her head. “I found him under the couch. Under all the webbing.”

  In her lap, my mother twitches.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I snap.

  “What there was. A lot of ugly smears of God knows what, all over the walls and the floor and even the ceiling. A lot of web. A lot of mess. All the windows smashed out, and wind just whipping everything around. No bodies. Not Stan’s. Not Leyton Busby’s. Not Evie’s. No one’s.”

  “Are you…” I don’t want to say it, or think it. Most of all, I don’t want my mother to hear it. It comes out anyway. “Are you seriously saying she was…?”

  Madolyn strokes a curved, clawed hand down my mother’s cheek. Her face is so blank, you could project anything there. At the moment, insanely, I’m projecting grandmotherly kindness. The moon has just started to rise behind her, and there’s this white nimbus floating around her fuschia head.

  “Well, that’s one of the possibilities, I suppose,” she says. “I’ve thought of a few others, down the years. Mostly, I try not to think about it, to be honest. All I know for sure is that Evie wasn’t in there when the cops came. No one was. And no one saw or heard from her, or from Leyton Busby, ever again. And that ever since, I’ve been keeping a good watch. I don’t know what for, exactly. But I watch that building real close. The whole neighborhood, really. Just…seems like what I’m here for, maybe. And I keep my own house clean.”

  It’s the way my mother’s lying there, I think, that makes me break down and weep. The way her knees have drawn up. The shudders wracking her. “You become the neighborhood,” I whisper.

  “Second time you’ve said that,” said Madolyn. “What’s it mean?”

  “Hell if I know. Evie used to say it.”

  Leaning back on her hands with my mother in her lap and Evie’s turtle nosing around near her hip, Madolyn glances down at what’s left of herself, or maybe my mother, both of them suspended in pale moonlight. Then she looks across the street toward her own home, where she’s lived alone, I’m all but certain, for going on thirty years. Then she looks up at Evie’s windows.

  “You know what I think?” Her voice is like a rainstick, a rattlesnake’s warning, a fire going out. Like she’s praying and fighting and giving up all at the same time. “I think maybe if you live long enough, and you see enough...” Again, she glances down. “And you lose enough, and life gets at you enough, and does what it’s going to do...”

  Then she looks at me. Actually reaches out and wipes some of my tears away, while the shakes seem to sizzle out of my mother, through the grass like lightning, and up into me.

  “Sooner or later, Hon. For better or worse. You become you.”

  The Pikesville Buffalo

  “I saw, or dreamed that I saw, standing upon the extreme verge of the precipice, with neck out-stretched, with ears erect, and the whole attitude indicative of profound and melancholy inquisitiveness, one of the oldest and boldest of those identical elks which had been coupled with the red men of my vision…

  A negro emerged from the thicket, putting aside the bushes with care, and treading stealthily. He bore in one hand a quantity of salt, and holding it towards the elk, gently yet steadily approached…The negro advanced; offered the salt; and spoke a few words of encouragement or conciliation. Presently, the elk bowed and stamped, and then lay quietly down and was secured with a halter.

  Thus ended my romance of the elk. It was a pet of great age and very domestic habits, and belonged to an English family occupying a villa in the vicinity.”

  Edgar Allen Poe, “Morning on the Wissahiccon”

  Late that November, a few months after his twenty-four-year-old wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, Daniel felt a sudden urge to see the Great Aunts. He tried Ethel first, calling five times over a two-hour period, but kept getting the busy signal which meant either that she was talking to one of her children or stepchildren or—more likely—that she’d taken her phone off the hook to avoid talking to them. Finally, he called Zippo and got her on the first try.

  “Of course, dear,” she told him, sounding muffled as ever, as though she were speaking through the orange wool shawl she always kept about her shoulders.

  “Could you beam the news over to Aunt Ethel?”

  “What? Oh, Daniel.” It was an old joke, his father’s, about the telepathic link that seemed to connect the sisters.

  “How’s your lovely Lisa, honey?” Zippo asked.

  “Okay, I think. Still not sleeping very well. The doctors think they got it all.”

  “Poo-poo,” said Zippo, and Daniel hung up.

  The next morning, he awoke before five, kissed Lisa where she lay twisting in the blankets, and, for the first time in over a year, drove the hour and a half from his dumpy beach-neighborhood shack on the Delaware coast into Baltimore, then out Reisterstown Road toward Pikesville. The early morning gray never lifted, and the grass everywhere had already died. Something about the old neighborhoods near the Great Aunts had always unsettled Daniel, even during his childhood, when he’d visited them every weekend. The low, red-brick houses seemed to have too few windows, too many chimneys, and they were always tucked back in the shadows of the tallest trees on their lots like little warrens. Rotting, unraked leaves littered the lawns. The oaks and elms and black locusts stood midwinter-bare.

  Pulling up outside Ethel’s house—which was small, stone, and too long at either end for its slanted roof, as though emerging from the maples with its hands on its hips—Daniel shut off the car and was surprised to see his own hands shaking. He sat a few seconds, staring through the windshield at the gray, thinking not of Lisa but of cancer. It was true, what Zippo had told him not long after his father had died. Cancer didn’t just kill people; it blurred them, left a hazy, pointillist blotch where memories of the lives they’d lived before the disease should have been.

  Abruptly, he slammed his fist down on the horn. For all they knew, Lisa really was finished with cancer. Forever. They’d caught it early, taken it out. He really needed to get the hell over it.

  Which was exactly why he’d come. Popping open the door, he stepped onto the pavement, expecting Pikesville silence, winter wind. Instead, he got Xavier Cugat.

  Before he even reached his Aunt Ethel’s front steps, Daniel was smiling. It wasn’t just the incongruity—all those congas and horns sashaying down this street of old homes and older Jews—but the volume. Daniel swore he could see the surrounding houses shuddering on their foundations, the drawn curtains in nearby windows twitching their skirts. He half-expected the police to arrive any second.

  Daniel tried the front doorbell first, but of course, that was useless. Hunching against the cold, he slipped around the side. He was already past the screened-in porch when his Aunt opened the side door.

  “Oy-yoy-yoy,” she said, nodding at his coat, one hand fluttering off the hips she could no longer shake and making mambo motions. “Is it really that cold out?”

  Daniel stared. The rooster-crest springing from his aunt’s scalp glowed a luminous, freshly dyed red. She was wearing blue-jean shorts, a yellow T-shirt with a Queen of Hearts playing card and the legend Aunty Up, Baby imprinted on it, and yellow vinyl slipper-sandals that displayed her virtually nail-less hammer toes in all their glory.

  “Can’t you feel it?” Daniel half-shouted, moving forward to give her a kiss.

  “Skin of a crocodile.” Aunt Ethel pulled demonstratively at the folds on her forearms.

  “Toes of a troll.”

  She smacked him playfully on the cheek, kissed him in the same place, then used her thumb to smear the lipstick she’d imprinted there. “You find a troll who looks this good at eighty-two, give him my number, okay?” With an arthritic lurch Daniel realized afterward was a butt-bump, Aunt Ethel shuffled off inside, beckoning him with more of her rhythmic, slinky hand movements.

  “Aren’t you worried about the neighbors?” Daniel called, shutting the door.

  �
��What?”

  “The racket. What if they call the cops?”

  “The music? Honey, everyone within four blocks is stone deaf.”

  She disappeared into her tiny kitchen to bring him the bagel, lox, and purple onion tray he knew she’d have prepared and refrigerated for him last night. The stereo shut down, and for one delicious moment, Daniel found himself alone, submerged in the familiar dimness of his Aunt Ethel’s house.

  The memories that assailed him centered mostly around shivas, but were no less sweet for that: there was the midnight flag football game in the sleet fourteen years ago, two days after Uncle Harry’s death, when Daniel’s father—frail already, and with a hacksaw cough, but still slippery as a snowflake—solved the absence-of-spare-socks problem by suggesting they use yarmulkes for the flags instead; there was the morning he’d crept upstairs with Ethel’s perpetually wan, humorless thirty-four-year-old son Herm after the early Mourner’s Kaddish at the shiva for Zippo’s second husband Ivan. He and Herm had used an entire roll of electrical tape, some torn-up egg cartons, and a box of discarded nine-volt batteries to try to get Herm’s homemade, childhood train set to run just one more time. It hadn’t, but the light-towers at the miniature baseball stadium flicked on a few times, and one of the crossing gates lowered and its bells rang; there was the three-hour jokefest after Rabbi Goldberg went home on the last night of Mack’s funeral two years ago. It began with Daniel’s recitation of Mack’s favorite about the rabbi, the leather worker and the circumcised foreskins, and ended when Daniel’s father—barely able to speak, and confined to a wheelchair he couldn’t even sit up in—somehow gasped his way through the Fuck One Goat joke, while all the cousins and step-cousins alternately giggled and snuck glances at Aunt Ethel’s half-horrified mouth, quivering as it fought the laughter welling behind it. Daniel had been laughing, too, until he saw Zippo leaning into the shadows against the hallway wall, her eyes riveted on his father, her mouth pursed and her shoulders drawn back as though she could do his breathing for him.

  Or had that been at the shiva for Zippo’s third husband, Uncle Joe, whom Daniel had only met twice, but who had the gorgeous lesbian granddaughter? Or for Uncle Bob, Mitchell’s shyer, gentler best friend?

  No. Mack’s, because of the jokes. Just the way Mack would have wanted it. If he’d had his way, he’d probably have had Aunt Ethel blasting Xavier Cugat during the graveside service, too.

  Standing now in Aunt Ethel’s tan-carpeted living room with the tea mugs on glass shelves and the library-sale Dick Francis hardbacks lining the walls, Daniel thought of what his mother had called Aunt Zip, years and years ago: the Angel of Mercy, or else the Worst Luck in the World. Tears teased the corners of his eyes, which had adjusted to the gloom, now. He glanced toward the wall of photos, blinked, and moved closer.

  “Uh…Aunt Ethel? Where’d everybody go?”

  In she came, balancing not just the bagel tray but a chipped, porcelain jug of orange juice and a set of thirty-year-old novelty glasses featuring stencils of Jim Palmer in his Jockey underwear on the sides.

  “Eat, you look thin,” she said, somehow maneuvering the tray and glasses onto the tiny coffee table. “I got your favorite. Onion, sesame, pumpernickel.” She gestured toward the pile of toasted bagels.

  “Just one of my favorites would have done.”

  “Well, I have to eat, too, don’t I?”

  Without waiting for him to choose, Aunt Ethel bent forward, drew half an onion bagel from the stack, and began slathering it with cream cheese and onion bits. Daniel gestured at the wall.

  “Aunt Ethel, we really have to talk about you letting the buffalo herd play with the photographs.”

  She lifted an old, open hardback off the table out of the way of the food and held it to her chest. The phone rang.

  “Ugh,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking.”

  Daniel grinned. “Okay, I’ll leave.”

  She tsked and smacked his leg with the book, then studied him a while.

  “Too thin,” she said.

  She reoffered the bagel, and Daniel took it, though he wasn’t hungry. Almost casually, he glanced at his aunt’s hands, looking for signs of shaking. There were none.

  “Seriously,” he said. “What happened to the boys?” He nodded toward the wall, most of which was blanketed with the same collage of framed snapshots of children and stepchildren and grandchildren Daniel had practically memorized during all those childhood visits, or more likely during the shivas, when there was so little to do but eat and stare at faces. But sometime in the past year, Aunt Ethel had apparently replaced the photos of herself and Aunt Zippo and the six husbands they’d buried between them.

  “They’re right there.” She began pointing down the row of new photos, each of a different shaggy, horned, decrepit-looking buffalo standing atop a grassless little hill in front of a cyclone fence. Unless it was the same buffalo.

  Laughing through a mouthful of bagel, Daniel said, “I meant your boys. Joe, Mack, Har—”

  “There’s Harry.” Aunt Ethel directed his gaze toward the farthest-right buffalo. “Sleepy-eyed and slow as ever. Here’s Joe. And see Mitchell, could he be any more of a cliché, do you think?”

  Baffled, Daniel followed his Aunt’s finger. This buffalo had one of its legs off the ground and its head lifted, gazing not at the grassless ground but through the fence.

  “Look at him,” Aunt Ethel said. “Still busy. Somewhere in that yard, some overwhelmed, mesmerized sheep dog just agreed to purchase the complete long-term care plus annuities package.”

  Daniel started to laugh again, but the expression on his aunt’s face stopped him. She wore the same loving smile she’d always leveled at him. But she was looking at the photographs.

  “Aunt Ethel. You’re naming your buffalo pictures?”

  “The buffalo, not the pictures.” Folding the book against her chest, Aunt Ethel gave a satisfied sigh. “And we didn’t name them, what are you talking about? Did you name Lisa?”

  “What?”

  “How is she, by the way? Oy vay, she’s been through so much. You both have. So young.”

  Laying the book on the couch and pinching his cheek, Aunt Ethel toddled out of the room with the empty orange juice jug. Daniel stared after her. It should have been funny. Just the latest of the thousand ways his aunt had found to flood her days with happier thoughts than her days seemed to merit. He wondered if she’d told Zippo. Somehow, he didn’t think Zippo would be amused.

  Daniel looked down at the hardback on the couch and bent to pick it up. It had no cover. But a number of its pages had been dog-eared, and when Daniel flipped to the first, he found a passage highlighted in bright pink marker. “The Holy Spark that fell when God built and destroyed the worlds, man shall raise and purify, from stone to plant, from plant to animal…purify and raise the Holy Sparks that are imprisoned in the world of shells.” Next to the word ‘shells,’ in the mock-parchment margins of the page, his aunt had drawn a smiley face.

  Not Dick Francis, then. He flipped the book on its spine and raised an eyebrow. He’d never known his Aunt to crack a Sidur in synagogue, let alone the Kabbalah in her home.

  “You’re going to have to come to the graves, okay?” Aunt Ethel said from the other room, and Daniel started.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Thursday’s cemetery day, remember? I’d be okay skipping, I mean, they’re not there anymore, but you know your other aunt. ‘A grave needs stones.’ So come with us, and afterward we’ll go get coddies.”

  “Ugh,” Daniel murmured. “Is that even real fish in those things?”

  “What do you think the mustard’s for?”

  Daniel started to smile, but stopped halfway. He was looking at the buffalo. Remembering Mitchell coming home from work, which is pretty much all anyone remembered of Mitchell. Harry with the trains. Most of all, Mack, spooling jokes through endless dinners, teaching his Aunt to rumba on two replaced hips.

  For the first time in
his life, he wondered if it had been a good idea coming here. He leaned forward to lay the book back on the couch, came face to face with the photograph of the buffalo with its leg in the air—Mitchell—and saw the cheetah for the first time.

  Had that been there a second ago? Had he really not noticed that?

  There it was, anyway, its nose to the gate of the fence in the background, one paw through the chicken wire. The blotchy, irregular spots on its fur looked more like mange than coloration, and there was an ugly pink patch above its back right haunch and another at the base of its neck.

  “Aunt Ethel?” he called. “About this cheetah…”

  “Mack?”

  “Mack?”

  The front door burst open, and Daniel swiveled toward it. From the tiny entrance way, he heard the scuffle of heavy boot heels, started to call a hello, but stopped when he heard the tremor in Zippo’s voice.

  “They’re out. Ethel, my God, they’re loose. All of them.”

  Daniel arrived just in time to see Aunt Ethel stumbling for the front closet, grabbing at the long, yellow overcoat she’d worn all of his life, and starting out the front door before Aunt Zip put a crooked, age-stained hand on her wrist.

  “Honey, you’re going to freeze.”

  With an annoyed glance at her shorts and T-shirt, Ethel hurried off down the back hallway toward her bedroom. That hallway, too, had always been lined floor to ceiling with family photographs, including a random series of Daniel at various ages, some of them with his parents. From where he was standing, Daniel could only see that there were still pictures. Had the one of his father been replaced, also? With orangutans, maybe?

  Was there even one of Lisa? Had he ever given Aunt Ethel one?

  Then Zippo’s hand was on his cheek, pulling his gaze around. Where Ethel was essentially a fire hydrant with hammer toes, Zippo loomed like a tall, bent oak. Whatever dye she used either never took or she kept washing it out, because her gauzy hair was mostly white tinged with blue.

  “Hello, Aunt Zip.” He leaned in to kiss her, but halted midway. “Aunt Zip? What is it?”