Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,53

be removed and off somewhere distant, some beach, some riverbank, some deep swell of happiness, some Joshua place, some little hidden moment, a touch of Solomon’s hand.

Sitting here, absent from them. Letting them close the circle.

Maybe, yes, it’s just pure selfishness. They did not notice the mezuzah on the door, the painting of Solomon, didn’t mention a single thing about the apartment, just launched right in and began. They even walked up to the rooftop without asking. Maybe that’s just the way they do it, or maybe they’re blinded by the paintings, the silverware, the carpets. Surely there were other well-heeled boys packed off to war. Not all of them had flat feet. Maybe she should meet other women, more of her own. But more of her own what? Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world’s oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons. She feels a pang, a return. Dear Mother, this is just to say that I have arrived safely, the first began. And then at the end he was writing, Mama, this place is a nothing place, take all the places and give me nothing instead. Oh. Oh. Read all the letters of the world, love letters or hate letters or joy letters, and stack them up against the single one hundred and thirty-seven that my son wrote to me, place them end to end, Whitman and Wilde and Wittgenstein and whoever else, it doesn’t matter—there’s no comparison. All the things he used to say! All the things he could remember! All that he put his finger upon!

That’s what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

But no, not past, not him, not ever.

Forget the letters. Let our machines fight. You hear me? Let them go at it. Let them stare each other down the wires.

Leave the boys at home.

Leave my boy at home. Gloria’s too. And Marcia’s. Let him walk a tightrope if he wants. Let him become an angel. And Jacqueline’s. And Wilma’s. Not Wilma, no. There was never a Wilma. Janet. Probably a Wilma too. Maybe a thousand Wilmas all over the country.

Just give my boy back to me. That’s all I want. Give him back. Hand him over. Right now. Let him open the door and run past the mezuzah and let him clang down here at the piano. Repair all the pretty faces of the young. No cries, no shrieks, no bleats. Bring them back here now. Why shouldn’t all our sons be in the room all at once? Collapse all the boundaries. Why shouldn’t they sit together? Berets on their knees. Their slight embarrassment. Their creased uniforms. You fought for our country, why not celebrate on Park Avenue? Coffee or tea, boys? A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

All this talk of freedom. Nonsense, really. Freedom can’t be given, it must be received.

I will not take this jar of ashes.

Do you hear me?

This jar of ashes is not what my son is.

—What’s that now, Claire?

And it’s as if she is rising again from a daydream. She has been watching them, their moving mouths, their mobile faces, but not hearing anything they’ve been saying, some sort of argument about the walking man, about whether the tightrope was attached or not, and she had drifted from it. Attached to what? His shoe? The helicopter? The sky? She folds and refolds her fingers into one another, hears the crack of them as they pull apart.

You need more calcium in your bones, the good doctor Tonnemann said. Calcium indeed. Drink more milk, your children won’t go missing.

—Are you okay, dear? says Gloria.

—Oh, I’m fine, she says, just a little daydreamy

—I know the feeling.

—I get that way too sometimes, says Jacqueline.

—Me too, says Janet.

—First thing every morning, says Gloria, I start to dream. Can’t do it at night. I used to dream all the time. Now I can only dream in daytime.

—You should take something for it, says Janet.

Claire cannot recall what she has said—has she embarrassed them, said something silly, out of order? That comment from Janet, as if she should be on meds. Or was that aimed at Gloria? Here, take a hundred pills, it will cure your grief. No. She has never wanted that. She wants to break it like a fever. But what is it that she said? Something about the tightrope man?