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I wrote Utch that they were coming, and why. 'If you see a couple carrying an ugly painting down the street, arguing about what to do with it, stay out of their way,' I wrote.
Then the dreams started and I couldn't sleep. They were about my children, and Severin Winter would have understood them. There was one in which Jack is riding on the Strassenbahn. He argues with Utch to let him stand on the open platform, and she gives in. The tram comes to a whiplash bend, and when Utch looks back, Jack's gone. Then there's one about Bart, unused to city people. Utch is getting some bread to feed the pigeons in a park, and Bart is standing where he's been told to wait. The car, which looks like an old Mercedes taxi and reeks of diesel fuel, is not a taxi; it pulls to the curb, motor spluttering, and the driver says, 'Little boy?' Because it's a dream the driver speaks English, even in Vienna, and Bart walks over to see what this terrible man wants.
I had to go somewhere; I had to get away. If I was going to Vienna, I needed to borrow a little money from the old source. Oddly, I was even thinking about the Brueghel painting again - about my unidentified character, the lost burgher and that abandoned book. And I owed my parents a repeat of the old ritual. It was better than staying at home.
My mother met me at the Brown Street door. She gushed, 'I never knew so many Cubans went to live in Nicaragua, and I never knew what was so special about Havana cigars before. I'm glad you used the foreign title - how do you say Joya de Nicaragua? - because it seems, well ... different. I'm just not sure it's at all suitable for children, but I suppose publishers know who's reading what these days, don't they? Your father, I think, is still finishing it. He seems to be finding it very funny; at least he laughs a lot when he's reading, and I think that's what he's reading. I didn't find it all that funny myself - in fact, it seemed perhaps your bleakest book - but I'm sure he's found something I missed. Where are Utch and the children?'
'On vacation,' I said. 'Everything's fine.'
'It is not, you look simply awful,' she said and burst into tears. 'Don't try to tell me,' she said as she led me down the hall, crying in front of me. 'Don't talk. Let's see your father. Then we'll talk.'
In the den, the familiar late-afternoon sunlight dappled the open pages spread around my father and in his lap. His head was familiarly bent, his hands typically slack, but when I looked for the glass of Scotch pinched between his knees, I knew immediately. My father's knees were splayed apart and the spilled Scotch puddled the rug at his feet, which were twisted uncomfortably - that is, uncomfortably for anyone who could still feel. My mother was already screaming, and I knew even before I touched his cold cheek that my father had finally finished something, and that once more the particular book responsible for putting him to sleep was not knowable. But it might have been mine.
After the funeral, I was touched that my mother's recovery seemed slowed by her worries about Utch and me. 'The best thing you could do for me right now,' she told me, 'is to get yourself to Vienna immediately and clean up the trouble you're having with Utch.' My mother was always a great one for cleaning up everything, and, after all, it's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.
'Remember the good times, can't you?' my mother said to me. 'I thought you writers were supposed to have such good memories, but I guess you don't write that sort of thing, do you? Anyway, remember the good times; that's what I'm doing. I think you'll find that once you start the process of remembering, you'll just go on and on.'
So. I remember - I will always remember - Severin Winter in his infernal wrestling room on a day we three were supposed to pick him up there. We were all going to the city for an overnight - a movie and a hotel. (Our first hotel and our last.) Severin said he'd wait to shower and change when we reached the hotel.
'God, then he'll sweat all the way in the car,' I complained to Utch.
'It's his car,' she said.
Edith picked us up. 'I'm late,' she said. 'Severin hates me to be late.'
Near the gym I saw Anthony Iacovelli trudging through the snow. He recognized Severin's car and waved.
'An ape loose in a winter resort,' said Edith.
We waited, but Severin did not appear. 'Thank God, he's probably taking a shower,' I said.
Then Tyrone Williams came out of the gym, his black face like a coal moon floating above the snow; he came over and told us that Severin was still up there, wrestling with Bender.
'God, we'll have to carry him to the car,' I muttered.
'Let's go up and get him,' Edith said. I knew she was thinking that he wouldn't be so angry if we all appeared.
Down on the dark mud floor of the cage a lone shot-putter was heaving his ball. It whapped the mud like a body dropped unseen from the board track. An irregular thudding came from the wrestling room. Edith pulled on the door, then pushed it.
'It slides,' said Utch, opening it. Inside, the incredible damp heat blew against us. Several wrestlers sagged against the walls, sodden with sweat, watching Severin and George James Bender. Earlier, it might have been a match, but Severin was tired now. He grunted on his elbows and thighs, straining to lift his stomach off the mat; whenever he'd struggle to his hands and knees, Bender would run him forward like a wheelbarrow until Severin's arms buckled and he pitched down on his chest. When Edith said, 'Sorry we're late, love,' Severin looked too tired to get up again. He raised his head off the mat and looked at us, but Bender pushed it back down; Bender hadn't heard anybody - I doubt if he ever did. Severin fought up to his hands and knees again and Bender drove him forward. Then Severin began to move. He sat sharply under Bender and pivoted so fast that Bender had to scramble to keep behind him. Then he shrugged Bender's weight off his back long enough to stand and grabbed a fistful of the boy's fingers around his waist, peeling them apart and suddenly sprinting across the mat like a halfback breaking a tackle. Bender dove for his ankles but Severin kicked free; his breathing was fierce, great, sucking breaths drawn from some old reservoir of energy, and he crouched, bent double, hands on knees.
Then Bender saw us, and he and the other wrestlers filed from the room as serious as Druids. Edith touched Severin's heaving back, but quickly wiped his sweat off her hand on her coat. Utch gave Severin's drenched chest a hearty smack.
Later I said to Utch that I thought Bender had let him go, but she said I didn't know anything about it. Severin had broken free, she could tell. Whatever, his extra burst had been a special performance for us, so I said, 'I didn't know you had it in you, old boy.'
He could barely talk; his throat seemed pinched, and the sweat ran in an unbroken rivulet off his bent nose, but he winked at me and gasped, loud enough for the women to hear, 'Second wind of the cuckold.'
Our first and last night in a hotel, Severin Winter, as always, provided us with a topic for conversation. His vulgar one-liner kept Edith and me up all night.
'And what did you talk about?' I asked Utch in the morning.
'We didn't talk,' she said.
Early one morning I took a goodbye walk. I was on hand to see the maintenance men unlock the new gym, unbolt the old cage and air out all the ghosts and germs in there. Behind the tennis courts a young girl was hitting a ball against the backboard; her soft blows made the only sound I could hear. No one was running on the board track. I stood on the dusty floor of the cage, which was beginni
ng its slow summer bake, and in the loose system of nets that keep the baseballs from breaking the skylights. I sensed someone standing, as still as I was standing, at the door of the wrestling room. There was a shadow near his cheek - or was it a hole? I suppose I gasped, because of course I was sure it was Utch's old bodyguard come to America to perform a promised slaying: mine. Then the figure seemed discomforted by my stare and moved out from behind the concealing nets. He was too young; there was no hole in his cheek, I realized, merely a black eye.
It was George James Bender; he recognized me and waved. He hadn't been exercising; he was dressed in ordinary clothes. He'd only been standing in the old cage, remembering, like me. I hadn't seen him since his upsetting loss, and suddenly I wanted to ask him if it was true, if he'd slept with Edith, if any of that impossible tale was true.
