It

backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadn’t he thought with a kind of mad joy I’m going to fall! I’m goingto find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me! . . . ? Hadn’t he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own self –serving adult ideas over whatever his child’s mind, always roaring with confused surmises and half-perceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought . . . or tried to think?
Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen.
Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr Gardener picking up the shoe-measuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesman’s face again. Mostly he remembered his mother’s wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, ‘Don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever. ‘ It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the baby-sitter had taken Eddie to the
public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer day — this had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down. She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must never do that, never, never, and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang.
She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy. Eddie’s terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward.
The threat had been serious, he knew that much.
She had been so scared. That was how he knew.
So terrified.
‘Marty,’ he said across this gulf of years, ‘would you give me a kiss?’
She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. If we were in water, he thought, she’d drown us both.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he whispered in her ear.
‘I can’t help it!’ she wailed.
‘I know,’ he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with rib-breaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. ‘I know, Marty.’
The taxi-driver honked again.
‘Will you call?’ she asked him tremulously.
‘If I can.’
‘Eddie, can’t you please tell me what it is?’
And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest?
Many, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. ‘It’s started again,’ Mike said; ‘Will you come?’ Mike said. And now I’ve got a fever, Marty, only it’s a fever you can’t damp down with aspirin, and I’ve got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won’t touch, because that shortness of breath isn’t in my throat or my lungs — it is around my heart. I’ll come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.