Imaginary Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

isn't really dead," Ava announced. I could hear the sound of genuine jubilation in her voice, of conviction. "No one really dies. We all come back. I knew it when I was in India. You mustn't think of her as lost forever."
My mother looked to Aunt Debs.
"Yes," Debs agreed. "It's a comfort. Somewhere your Fran and my Teddy go on. Transformed." She exhaled, and we watched her cigarette smoke hang in the air for a moment like a magician's rope trick.
Then my mother bolted upright on the couch. "You're crazy!" she shouted. "Both of you."
"No, Hen, you don't understand"
"You've always been crazy. Only now you call it religion. We're leaving. Get our coats," she ordered my father.
"Please," Aunt Debs begged, tears streaming from her eyes.
"Wait, Ma," I called to her as she punched her fists through her coat sleeves.
"Wait for what?" my mother said, turning on me the same venom she felt for the aunts. "My Frannie's dead. Who cares if she comes back as something else? She isn't coming back to those four children. Or," she socked her chest, "to me.''
That was the last time she ever saw the aunts, though she and my father eventually retired to Florida. The aunts tried to contact her repeatedly, but she dismissed all apologies and offers of reconciliation and returned their letters unopened. And I think, mild as she was, that she took pride in having taken so absolute a stand against them. Years afterward she refused to speak their names. She tended her anger like a rock garden, nourishing it once a year on the anniversary of Fran's death. Fifteen years later, when I came home for a visit, I saw her light the yahrzeit candle and heard her say bitterly, "Back as a flame? Only a little flame?"
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The aunts left the day after the funeral, hugging thin coats around their print dresses at the airport as we waited for their call to board the plane. I knew I'd want to defend them if their names ever came up, if I ever found myself sorting through the family mythology. And

 

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I knew I'd never change my parents' minds about the incident. They needed that anger too much. I could imagine myself far into the future, living perhaps in Taos or San Francisco, some place I'd never been, talking to a child with a face I couldn't picture clearly, a dark face like mine. I'd tell her about the weddingnot my own, but Fran's.
When their plane taxied down the runway I wished I were on it with them, our faces leaning together in a threesome toward the small window, the city spreading out below us like a game board. The trip south would have felt like walking under a very large shade tree, a tree so large that the coolness under its branches went on and on into nightfall.

 

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Goldring among the Cicadas
Harry Goldring was fifty-nine years old and still worried about upsetting his mother, Bella. On alternate Wednesdays, he ate lunch in her apartment. Today, he was going to talk to her about moving to a retirement village. He really was. She would pitch a fit. He would feel disloyal.
Despite his age, Harry still felt like a young man with his whole future stretching out before him. When he dealt with Bella, though, he felt old. He thought this was unusual. Most people he knew complained of feeling like little kids around their parents.
While Bella stuffed peaches with cottage cheese, Harry studied a photo of his younger brother. Mel was pushing fifty, but in the pic-

 

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ture on Bella's mahogany sideboard he was a perpetual nineteen, tan and muscular from months of holding action against the Japanese.
Bella noticed Harry staring at the picture. "Such a handsome boy," she said. "We almost lost him."
Harry asked if she wanted a glass of tea, but it was too late.
"Quinine, quinine, quinine," she chanted, cutting her peach into bite-sized bits. "I never saw a human being take so much medicine. We supported the drugstore."
Next she would be calling Mel her Yiddishah Marine. Harry resisted the urge to remind her that he