The New Yorker - USA (2021-12-06)

60 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021

somewhere—the ref lection from a
desk lamp exploding like a dead star.
During the calls, she tries not to look
at her own face, her long hair, her
eyes through the smudged lenses of
her glasses, the crepey skin of her
neck—how vain! Or Daniel wander-
ing around behind her as if it isn’t
much his business: communication,
children.
Did he get that from his father?
It would have been a reasonable ques-
tion to ask, a thing to discuss: genet-
ics, epigenetics, heredity, personality.
Moving on to energy, the extraordi-
nariness of light, quantum mechan-
ics, the whole wave-and-particle
thing she’s never understood though
she’s trying, something about collaps-
ing electrons, neutrons. Entangle-
ment, et cetera.
But the point is, did he get that
from his father?
Law school. Chicago. 1973. Around
the time they first met, Daniel had
told Mary Jane how toward the end
of his parents’ lives—Daniel a late ad-
dition—his mother and father spoke
only through the dog.
Mom would say, “Tell Carl yada
yada,” and then Dad would say, “Tell
Barb I’m aware of that, but I thought
we’d first yada yada yada yada.”
Six yadas. That must have been
some conversation.
You get the idea.
What breed?
This isn’t about the dog.
But if it were a basset hound or
something, with those ears, I could
picture it, an ear like a walkie-talkie.
That would have been funny.
It wasn’t funny.
Sorry.
She was a mutt. Regular ears.
A hound mutt?
Newfie mutt. Curly black hair. A
little white on her chest. Never mind,
Daniel said, and went back to his
cheesecake.
Where had they been? The stu-
dent union. A booth. This after the
class with the professor who had stud-
ied with Nabokov at Cornell, the two
of them laughing at the idea of the
professor, lost in Cornell winters, tee-
tering on the icy edge of the gorge,
then, once the weather cleared, join-
ing Professor N. to bound through

high meadows in search of lepidop-

tera. Daniel had ordered the cheese-

cake with the canned, viscous red

cherries lumped on top, the gooey

cherry sauce. He ate it with a plastic

fork. She drank coffee. Black coffee

from a Styrofoam cup. She remem-

bers best the look of Daniel’s hands.

Beautiful hands. Surgeon’s hands.

Hand-model hands. His nails filed

or just naturally rounded smooth.

Why does it matter? The look of

Daniel’s hands? The look of the cher-

ries on top of the cheesecake? But

Mary Jane would say of first loving

her husband: plastic fork, cheesecake,

viscous cherries.

T

his particular episode, if Mary Jane

were to ask Daniel, features a cou-

ple from Ontario interested in expand-

ing their brood. As young profession-

als leading very busy lives, they have

decided to knock out a few walls and

to reconfigure the attic to accommo-

date their growing family. Unlike so

many others, this show is not about

the speed of the renovation but about

quality and structural integrity. The

young couple, thumbing through vol-

umes as heavy as the O.E.D., have

learned that the attic was originally a

third floor before being converted in

the very early twentieth century to an

attic, or what was then called a ghost

floor. Given the number of children

who did not make it past infancy, and

accounting for the devastation of the

influenza epidemic at the close of the

First World War, these ghost floors al-

lowed parents to literally push daily re-

minders of past lives from their minds,

allowed the house itself to annex the

space and leave it empty. On the ghost

f loor, the quiet had dimension and

weight, an unspeakable presence.

CULTURE

They say paratroopers still yell Geronimo when they jump

Because of a movie the first ones saw the one with Geronimo

Played by Chief Thundercloud the first Tonto real name

Victor Daniels not the one with him played by Chuck Connors

Who played for the Dodgers and later played the Rifleman

Which became a nickname of Flemmi a mob killer in Boston

In real life he came home to find soldiers had killed his aged

Mother his young wife and his children that not in the movie

Somewhere sometime someone must have yelled Geronimo

When committing atrocities or about to or some such redolent

Word or phrase that too a kind of poetry even official jargon

A kind of poetry Bless comedy for an opposite rude poetry

They told me Germans murdered our cousins so I was mean

To a younger boy Leander his German parents Nana’s tenants

Good pitching beats good hitting and vice versa I never

Said half of what I said Bless Yogi Berra leaving it knotted

Bless all things that are more than one thing and all people

For our unwitting and witting witless improvised mixtures

Bless truth Bless things never known to be true or not true for

Showing me my impurity in proportions unknowable and vital