Outside his house, with the dark coming on fast, Stern walked across the lawn, kicking furiously at fallen pears and crying through his nose. He did this for a long time, and he was not without the thought that perhaps it would help; he would be heard, someone would be touched, and when he dried his eyes, there would be no ulcer.
His wife had gone for the day, leaving the child in the care of a baby-sitter, and when Stern paid her and sent her away, he saw that his parents had driven out unexpectedly.
Stern's father was a small, meticulously dressed man whose years of cutting shoulder pads had made him terribly precise about details. Whenever Stern, as a boy, began the new side of a quarter-pound stick of butter that had been started on the other side, his father would slap his hand and say, "That's no way to do it. I can't understand you." He spent a great deal of time after meals scooping up bread crumbs with a precise rolling motion of the knife, not stopping until he had gotten every last crumb. His teeth were his best feature, and whenever he passed a mirror he would draw back his lips and try several varieties of smiles, practicing broad ones and quick, spontaneous grins. He had a special thin, six-note whistle, which Stern as a boy had always listened for late at night; it meant he was home, and Stern would watch him from the window, a small man, walking jauntily, on his way to the three-room apartment to practice a few quick grins before the mirror and then sit down to eat a meal with factorylike precision. Stern had not fancied the idea of having a small father, but one day he had seen this compactly built man point his nose up at a towering motorman on a crowded subway train and say, "Ah, button up or I'll dump you on your ass." The nose he had thrust up in the motorman's face had a jagged scar along its bridge which fascinated Stern. Whenever his father practiced grins, he would also check the scar, stretching it for a good look. Stern liked to run his finger along his father's nose scar, gently, as though it still might hurt. One day his father told Stern the scar had been given to him by two soccer players in a strange neighborhood who had suddenly lashed out and knocked him unconscious. The friends of Stern's father had gone looking for the men with steel piping but never found them. Stern liked that story and told it to people all the time, enjoying it when he could say, "My father's friends went looking for the guys with pipes." Stern wished he had friends who would do that for him.
When Stern's father had failed to inherit the shoulder pad business from his brother Henny, he had simply continued on as a shoulder pad cutter, smiling surreptitiously into mirrors, and seemed not to have realized that his whole life had gone down the drain. He did describe his brother Henny's death often, however, acting it out in vigorous pantomime. "They just found him sitting in a chair," he would tell the listener, "like this," and then he would let his knees bend a little, his arms sag at his sides, and pop his eyes, letting his tongue hang grotesquely from his mouth.
When the business dream had faded, however, Stern's mother had never recovered. It meant she could never own a home in Saint Petersburg and decorate it in Chinese modern. She had been a tall, voluptuous woman with much nerve. When Stern was young, she would just hail cars on the street instead of cabs, and then she and Stern would jump into them that way with whoever was driving. In restaurants she would grab celebrities and hold them by the sleeve, hollering across to the embarrassed young Stern, "I've got Milton Berle" or "I just grabbed Bob Eberle." After the business debacle, she aged swiftly and began to drink. She tried furiously to cling to her youth and did little dance steps all the time, humming to herself and executing them in subways, in bars, on the street. When she was with Stern in restaurants or anywhere in public, she would look at a strange young man and say, "He's for me" or "I could make him in ten seconds." Stern would answer, "I don't get any kick out of hearing things like that." The phrase "make" sickened him. He didn't want to know about his dated mother, with her slack, antique thighs and dyed hair, doing old-fashioned things with strange, dull men.
They waited in the house for him on this day, Stern's father in a slipover sweater, his mother in toreador pants, and they had brought along Stern's Uncle Babe, a thin man with giant Adam's apple who had spent much of his life in mental institutions. Married to a concert violinist and thought to be of modest circumstances, he had attended a recital one evening and run amok, certain there were poison gases in the air. When police subdued him, he was found to be carrying bankbooks showing balances of a million dollars. Stern had childhood memories of visiting him in frightening institutions, bringing him boxes of pralines, his favorites, and then seeing Uncle Babe led out in institution clothes, which were always too large. Stern would sit and smile at his uncle on a bench, and then, on the way home, his mother would say, "He has some head. As sick as he is, he can tell you smarter things than people on the outside."
Now, Stern's mother led forth Uncle Babe and said to Stern, "Look who I brought out for you. Uncle Babe. You always loved him."
Stern hugged Uncle Babe with great tenderness, as though to make up for all the wrongs done to him by heartless institutions, and Stern's mother said, "Get him to tell you about the market. To this very day, he has some head." Stern sat alongside his Uncle Babe and the conversation took the usual course. Uncle Babe would make a few statements about the financial world, too generalized to be put to any moneymaking use, and then would slide into a monologue about the difficulty of getting a decent piece of fish, various smells in the air, and how certain shirt fabrics itched your skin.