Big Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

the same thing?” Barry asked.
    “We’re better at losing than they are,” Lieberman said. “Enough philosophy. Go to bed.”
    They went. Lieberman heard Bess putting them to bed. Abe considered changing the station, watching an old movie if he could find one. Maybe Bess would join him. They’d eat popcorn and she would observe inaccuracies of human nature from time to time. Bess was a realist. Like it or not, in spite of the horrors he had seen, Abe had remained a romantic. If his unshaken love of the Cubs was not evidence of this, what was?
    And then the knock at the door came.
    Lieberman checked his watch. It was nine, still reasonably early. He hit the mute button, got up slowly, pausing to scratch the bottom of his right foot through his wool sock, and headed across the living room to the door, wondering why the visitor hadn’t rung the bell.
    He opened the door and stood facing his daughter.
    “You look very much like my daughter,” he said. “But you can’t be. She’s in California.”
    “Abe,” she said. “I’m standing in the cold.”
    “It’s not cold. It’s fall. The night is clear and cool. I’m watching the Cubs. I don’t want to fight with my daughter who’s not supposed to be here.”
    “We won’t fight,” said Lisa.
    “A new world arrives,” Abe said, standing back to let Lisa in, knowing as she did that this was the beginning of the first round, the first gambit, and that he would never keep her out of the house, that a bed waited always for her upstairs.
    Lisa came in and closed the door while Abe turned on more lights and considered turning off the game. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would concede the loss of the evening to chaos.
    “You look good,” he said, turning to face her.
    “You always say that, Abe,” she said.
    “You always look good,” he said. “You almost never look happy, but you always look good. From the second you were born you looked good.”
    “You’ve told me that,” she said.
    “I suffer from an as-yet-undetected variation on Alzheimer’s,” he said. “I repeat myself endlessly and count on the kindness of my friends and family to hide my terrible secret.”
    “It’s not funny, Abe,” she said.
    “Which is why I am a policeman and Don Rickles is a comedian.”
    “The kids are in bed?” she asked, walking into the dining room and looking up the stairway.
    “Which is why you knocked instead of ringing the bell,” Abe said. “Coffee?”
    She sat at the dining room table and brushed her hair back with her hand. Lisa looked like Bess only darker. She was a pretty woman, still young at thirty-five. A bit on the thin side, but good features. Thank God none of the Lieberman looks had been passed down to her and she, in turn, had passed none of them to her two children.
    Lieberman went into the kitchen and poured two cups of coffee from the pot that was on hot. Coffee, no coffee. It didn’t matter. Abe was an insomniac. He had ceased fighting the situation decades earlier. He had learned to live with it, spending thousands of hours in hot tubs reading magazines and books, thousands more hours watching television till dawn with a sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum or a wide-eyed Joan Crawford for company.
    When Lieberman made his way through the kitchen door, careful not to spill, Bess was back downstairs and sitting across from Lisa.
    “You want tea?” Abe asked his wife, placing one cup of coffee in front of his daughter and the other at his place at the head of the table.
    Bess shook her head and looked at her daughter.
    Abe decided to say nothing. It was the safest thing to do. He sipped and tried not to glance back into the living room at the television screen in the hope that the Cubs had miraculously overcome the Braves’ overwhelming lead.
    “Marvin wants a divorce,” Lisa said, hands folded in front of her on the table, voice striving to remain calm and even, to remain the Lisa her parents had always known.
    “Why?” asked Bess,