7

The little old woman sat in the straight-backed chair. I could remember the sturdy shoes: how thin the ankles had become: she was so tiny: her feet scarcely touched the floor. Aunt Dora was eighty-six years old. The house was very clean. She had lived in the same tiny flat for twenty-seven years. She was smiling at me. Asher! she had cried when I had rung the bell. She was very pleased I had come to see her. My coming at all was a surprise.

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “What can I tell you?”

Years before at Christmas I had bought the TV set that stood in her living room. The set, she informed me, still worked perfectly. I was still being thanked for it. She had always been energetic. Those sturdy shoes had gone to so many markets.

“Oh, my dear, what can I tell you?”

That every Monday there were injections from Dr. Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin’s offices were across the street. She did not have far to go in the cold. She felt safer with the doctor so close.

We mustn’t grumble, Aunt Dora said. Her hands were clasped in her lap. She was littler than I remembered. There was a strange gray patch of skin on her upper lip. Her fingers bent arthritically.

In Memorial Hospital, after the prostate operation, after the urinary infection, after the successive tremors of the heart, the old upholsterer her husband had tried to jump out of the hospital window. May he rest in peace. She was penniless because all the insurance money had been used to pay for the operations.

“Oh, my dear, what can I tell you? I’ve had my share.”

She bustled about, and made tea. In the bedroom the double bed was neatly covered with a blue chenille bedspread. When you are old there is too much room even when the bed is not too wide and the flat is tiny. I sat in the kitchen. I put the slice of lemon in my tea. Aunt Dora was afraid she had bored me with her miseries. I had come across the continent and here she was talking of what it is better not to talk about. How was my wife? How was my work? How was I?

A desire to tell this little old woman all that was wrong sprang to my lips. To confess that all was not well. That my wife was not fine. That my work did not exist. But I could not. I was, after all, their famous man. My name was imprinted there: my photograph had appeared here. I had escaped their common fate. Or so they thought. So poor Aunt Dora thought. Asher was well off: Asher lived in a place of perpetual sunshine: Asher had a fine wife. Oh, my dear, I should have said, as Aunt Dora said, what is there to tell? I was condemned to a fiction of myself. To a false well-being. To a counterfeit success. I smiled. My wife was fine, I said, I expected to be working soon, I was all right. I drank the hot lemon-flavored tea. We went back into the living room. Again we sat in the old straight-backed chairs that many years ago my uncle had upholstered. I could remember him with the mouthful of brass tacks spitting them into the palm of his hand and lifting them with the magnetized head of his hammer.