The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco Read Free Book Online Page A

Friday night and she can’t wait to get back.
    “I might just go with you,” says David. “I like that show.”
    “Oh, Leah would be so happy! Remember when she used to say, ‘Bob’s your uncle’—whatever that means, and you’d say ‘No, it’s “Dave.” It’s “
Dave’s
your uncle,” darling.’”
    He laughs. “Let me think about it.”
    “Oh
please,
” Joanna says. “Don’t think about it, or say ‘maybe.’ Just come.”
    Claire takes the BarcaLounger and raises her feet from the floor.
    “I used to think,” says David, “hell, I’m single: white, male, unattached. I could live in Saratoga and be helpful to her—Mom. Why not just move back to this town. I used to ask myself what kept me from calling it home again and if it really
felt
like home and whether she would want me here or not.”
    “Of course she would have,” says Claire.
    He pokes at the fire; it flares.
    “It couldn’t have been easy,” says Joanna. “These years. For Mom.”
    “No.”
    “What I wonder,” she continues, “is how much you understand it when you lose your memory. Your grip on things. If you know, I mean, you’re losing it or if it just goes away.”
    “I can’t remember,” David says.
    “Ha-ha.”
    “All right. Bad joke,” he says.
    “So Alzheimer’s can be a kind of comfort, maybe, a way of making things bearable. Like going into shock, I mean, when the pain’s too extreme for the body to bear. When you’re on system overload you faint . . .”
    “She didn’t have Alzheimer’s,” says Claire. “Not really.”
    Joanna stands. “I don’t know what else you’d call it. It’s like being a little bit, oh, a little bit a virgin. Mom always did seem—what? Forgetful, secretive.”
    “Secretive?”
    “There was a lot,” says David, “she didn’t want to talk about. Or not to me, at any rate . . .”
    “Because you were the baby. You were the one she would try to protect.”
    “Do you remember that jingle—how does it go?” Now it’s Claire’s turn to mediate, and she does this gratefully. “‘A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’”
    “‘Takes him a wife?’ Isn’t it ‘finds him a wife’?” David asks. “Or maybe it’s ‘brings home . . .’ Whatever.”
    “Will you?”
    “Will I what?”
    “Bring home a wife,” Joanna inquires. “Is there a candidate?”
    He shakes his head.
    “I’m going up,” Claire says. “Beakes will be waiting for us . . .”
    “Good night.”
    “Sleep tight,” says Joanna. “Sweet dreams.”
    “I will”—he turns to her—“I’ll go with you. But now I need to try to sleep . . .”
    “Good night,” says Claire.
    “Good night.”

III
    2003
    S ardines, he tells himself, or cat food: the smell in his room is of old canned fish, and he wonders if their mother kept a cat. He does not know. David sits. At nine or ten he had wanted a dog; he read
Lad, a Dog,
and all the Lassie books, and he begged his mother for a collie. He would feed and groom it, he promised, and it would be a watchdog and in case of fire would save everybody’s lives.
    But Claire was allergic to dog hair, or so Alice said, and by the time she left for college he wanted a pony instead. He had kept hamsters and a canary and goldfish and buried them under the lilac bush when, turn by turn, they died. Now in his bedroom, in the wintry dark, David remembers what it felt like on a school night to be doing homework with his mother at the kitchen sink, her back to him, arranging, rearranging things. There would have been music, the six o’clock news, that parental routine she mustered the years of his childhood. His mother would be occupied chopping or slicing or rinsing or drying until, of a sudden, her hands would go slack, her eyes would go vacant, unfocused, and she would stand immobile for what seemed to him like minutes, facing the wall.
    “Are you all right, Mom?
Mom?
” he would ask, and—if he asked it