The Moribund Moose(Barry) At eight p.m., Ruth Ostrowski cracked the bathroom faucet and began filling the tub at a lazy dribble. Except for a slight limp, the aftermath of hip surgery, the pear-shaped, soft-bellied woman moved about the cramped bathroom with the somnolent ease of a tai chi master. Before the bath was half full, a rust-pocked Subaru with a blown muffler rumbled into the driveway. Her five-year-old grandson, Clyde, trudged up the brick walkway, a bulging pillowcase slung over his shoulder. The dark-haired boy wore a tattered, flannel jacket, too short at the wrists and flimsy for the frigid, late December weather. Noticeably underweight with knobby knees and ankles, the child exuded a feral wariness as he sidled, like an under-aged convict assigned a new cell block, toward the house. The boy’s mother watched from the car. A brief moment passed before the noisy engine fired up and she was gone.

Hustling Clyde into the bathroom, Ruth methodically stripped him naked. Straight black hair framed an economical mouth and walnut-colored eyes. The skin glowed pallid, almost ivory, below an unruly mop of dusky hair. “I’ll be just a moment.” She carried the soiled clothes and underwear to the front door and flung them outside on the frosty stoop. In the bathroom, she fished a container of Kwell from the medicine cabinet and began teasing a fine comb through the child’s black hair.

“Ain’t got no nits this time, Nanna.”

Putting the comb aside, she kissed the boy’s neck. “A precautionary gesture.” Ruth felt the words congeal in her throat along with a decade of unanswered prayers.

Clyde poked distractedly at a scab on his leg. “Mommy’s sending me a postcard from Muscle Beach.”

Ruth’s husband, Fred, wandered into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet seat. An easygoing Taurus by temperament, he was a big-boned, slope-shouldered man. “Melba flying to L A?”

Ruth adjusted the chrome lever and increased the flow of warm water. “Smitten by wanderlust and an ex-con named Ralphy.” She ran the soap between Clyde’s toes and the clear water clotted over with a dingy film. Bending over the tub, she dowsed his fine hair with avocado shampoo. “Do me a favor,” she said without looking up. “There’s a pile of dirty clothes outside the front door. Put them in the washer along with the contents of the pillow case and run everything through the light-load cycle.”

“Detergent?”

“Arm and Hammer… on the counter by the light switch. Half a cup should suffice.”

Fred went off to see to the laundry but returned a minute later. “Found this at the bottom of the pillow case.” He held a tattered library book. Six months overdue, the slim volume chronicled a boy’s trip to an island off the coast of Indonesia to visit the Komodo dragons.

When he returned, Fred intercepted his wife just outside the bathroom door. He rubbed his stubbly chin. “You had that appointment yesterday. What’d the doctor say?”

*****

Ruth Ostrowski’s midlife crisis - if that’s what it truly was - hadn’t come in the normally prescribed manner. Rather, it snuck up on her incrementally, one negligible tribulation after another; it bushwhacked her with night sweats and terrors, sent her caterwauling toward menopause and the outer rim of her twilight years. And now, compounding her inner blight, the first frost, like a silver-haired, uninvited guest, blanketed the New England landscape. “Psychiatrist,” Ruth corrected. “It’s okay to use the ‘P’ word.”

She waved a pair of slightly dingy underwear in the air. “Clyde’s waiting.”

“He can wait a minute longer,” Fred said gently. “What’d the shrink say?”

“Dr. Shulman says I’m suffering an involutional depression, a sadness that simply wells up from inside. I fall to pieces for no apparent reason. Which is to say, I am a fraud, phony, dissembler, emotional charlatan, impostor - a woman who hasn’t even earned the right to her foolish misery.”

“What else?”

“The depression’s just a symptom, not the root cause. He gave me some pills and billed my insurance for a hundred-fifty bucks.”

Fred shrugged. “Take the medication; we’ll worry about ‘root causes’ later.”

“I flushed the pills down the toilet before breakfast. The entire bottle.”

Fred groaned. “Cripes!” Even when upset, an evenhanded sympathy undercut his sarcasm. He eyed his watch. “We’re low on milk. I’m going to the market. Might as well pick up some extra fruit and cereal.”

Ruth nodded, her lips stretched thin with impatience. “We'll be just fine.” Fred bussed his wife on the cheek and disappeared out the back door.

*****

Clyde cupped his palmsds together, a familiar ritual. From under the sink, Ruth produced a can of Palmolive shaving cream and squeezed a spiral mound onto his outstretched hands, and the boy smeared the foam on the sliding shower door creating an impromptu finger paint. Twenty years earlier, she had done the same for Clyde’s mother. The ritual could last upwards of half an hour, depending on the child’s ingenuity; the cleansing of body parts was only a small - in some ways, insignificant - aspect of the whole.

“Momma don’t bathe but once a month,” Clyde said. Ruth had let the water down and the boy was slithering back and forth on his belly in the last, few inches of tepid water. “Says it robs a person of their natural, body oils.”

*****

On the living room mantel was a picture of Clyde’s mother in her early teens - sunburned, lithe, svelte, and drug-free. Now a dozen years later when Melba came to visit, her cellulite-encrusted buttocks spilled over the sides of the rattan, kitchen chair, causing the woven seat to sag like a hammock. The woman seldom bothered with bras.

Melba, the maternal moron, the frumpy, wild-eyed woman with the IQ of Brussels sprouts and none of the redeeming virtues. Twenty-four years ago she was baptized into the Christian community. Not that month-old infants could consciously participated in the sacrament. The year following her confirmation, she stopped attending Holy Communion and confession. At fourteen, she was collared for shoplifting - a pocketful of candy bars, eye shadow, lipsticks and lubricated condoms - at the CVS two doors down from Ro-Jack’s Supermarket.

Later that same night, Ruth hovered just outside her daughter’s room. Melba was lying fully-dressed on top of the disheveled bed reading The National Enquirer. “About what happened earlier today ...”

“I stole a few shitty things.” Melba picked at an inflamed mosquito bite on her elbow. “A few dollars-worth of crummy merchandise. Nail me to the goddamn cross, why don’t you!”

“It’s the principle.” Ruth felt her conviction faltering.

“Yeah, the sacred principle.” Melba was clearly bored with the conversation.

“Unfortunately it is the principle.” Ruth rose to her feet. Her hip was beginning to throb. She had an appointment scheduled with an orthopedic surgeon for the middle of the week. Without another word, she limped from her daughter’s room.

God had played a cruel trick on Ruth Ostrowski. Or perhaps it was the Devil - with God’s tacit forbearance - who beguiled her daughter. Even Ruth’s Biblical namesake, the Moabite widow and daughter-in-law of Naomi, eventually remarried and lived happily. With no wealthy landowners waiting to make an honest woman of her, Melba’s prospects weren’t nearly as promising.

Recently, Ruth had begun to dichotomize, to think of Melba as two separate entities: the good child (leading up to but not including adolescence) and the demonic beast possessed of evil urges and equally sordid intentions. Melba, who at twenty was having sex for money in the back seat of cars on Potters Avenue in South Providence, passed bad checks and pawned stolen jewelry didn’t need psychotherapy so much as an exorcist.

*****

It was after eleven before Clyde settled in for the night. Crawling out from under the covers he curled up in his grandmother’s lap. “What’s wrong with your nose, nana?” Clyde asked when Ruth bent down to adjust the waistband on his pajamas.

“Nothing,” she replied. “It’s just shaped a bit differently.”

As a landscape artist, Ruth understood the vagaries of form and line, how an otherwise pleasing sketch could be structurally undone by one unseemly flaw. In her particular case, a clear, milky complexion did little to enhance an otherwise unremarkable face. The wide, pulpy nose proved a disconcerting focal point, drawing attention away from a strong chin and full mouth. Age had only deepened the chasm between modestly pretty and disconcertingly plain.

“Did you know, Nana, Komodo dragons can grow ten feet long and 300 pounds?”

Only fifty pounds heavier than her flabby daughter. “Imagine that!” Ruth eyed her grandson uncertainly.

“The lizards, which inhabit several tiny islands off Indonesia,” she read from the illustrated book, “run swiftly, swim, dive, dig, walk on their hind legs and climb trees. Unlike other reptiles, their body temperature remains constant day and night and they can survive up to six weeks without water.”

“Like camels,” Clyde interjected.

“The tongue is forked like a snake’s,” Ruth continued to read, editing as she went, “and, used for both taste and smell, can locate rotting carrion over five miles away.”

Clyde nuzzled his cheek against her forearm. “You left out the part where the dragon kills a water buffalo.” Ruth had purposely avoided reference to the water buffalo, fifteen times the dragon’s body weight. The dragon slaughtered the dumb animal by literally thrashing it to death with its muscular tail. Thump! Thump! Thump! In addition to water buffalo, the dragons supplemented their diet with domestic goats and an occasional villager or two.

What sort of nitwit gives a five year-old such books?

When Melba was the same age as Clyde, Ruth stocked the bookcase with Winnie-the-Poo, Beatrice Potter Classics (The Tales of Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Jeremy Fisher and, of course, Peter Rabbit), Curious George, Ticki Ticki Tembo, and the Madeline series:

“In an old house in Paris covered with vines,
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines....”

*****

In the morning, Ruth sorted through the summer-weight clothing and quickly discovered nothing suitable. When she returned to the bedroom, Clyde had kicked his sneakers off and flung the socks into the far corner.

“Stupid socks!” He stuck his tongue out and made a razzing sound.

“What’s wrong with your socks?”

“They’re stooopid! Stoop, stoop, stoooopid. The most ridiculous socks in the world. Even stupider than ...”

Ruth stared at the boy trying to decode the convoluted message implicit in his theatrical tirade. “That will get you far in life.” The woman located another pair of faded socks and bent forward but the child pulled his foot away. Grabbing the ankle, she fitted the sock over the toes, but Clyde stabbed the air violently, slingshotting the clean sock into the far corner of the room, bursting into hysterical laughter.

“This is getting tiresome,” Ruth muttered peevishly.
“Too small! All my socks are too small,” Clyde blubbered through a fog bank of tears then slumped against his grandmother’s chest and began sucking his thumb.

Only now, did Ruth actually look at the orphaned sock barely half as big as the child’s foot resting in her lap. The heel petered out around the instep, the remaining material, including trim, just barely covered his ankle. “How foolish of me,” she whispered. “How very, very foolish!” She kissed Clyde on each of his toes. “We’ll go to the mall and get you new clothes,” she spoke in a conciliatory tone. “What do you say?”

“I want my mommy.”

*****

Ruth heated the car for ten minutes before bustling the boy off to the Emerald Square Mall. Four-toddler. All of the bedraggled clothes Clyde brought over were a full size too small. In the children’s section of Sears Roebuck, Ruth located everything she needed. An hour later on the way back to the car, Clyde pulled up short. “The old socks were stupid. Stoop, stoop, stoop, stooopid!” He mouthed the words like a talisman, a verbal charm which, if invoked with sufficient sincerity, could ward off an army of evil spirits.

Back in the kitchen, Clyde wriggled his toes luxuriously in plush, new socks which rode halfway up his slender calves. “Let’s color.”

“Haven’t any crayons,” Ruth replied, “but I know something that’s even more fun.” She brought the boy into the den. On an easel near the window was the crude draft of a painting she had begun months earlier, shortly before her mother’s death from liver cancer.

*****

For twenty years, Ruth Ostrowski worked at her oil paintings - mostly folk art motifs in the American primitive tradition - colorful and carefree New England land and seascapes done in a simple, unadorned style. Despite modest success, she always considered herself a pretender - more dilettante than serious painter. Not that she wasn’t accomplished in the technical sense, but her mother’s funeral and recent emotional upset had sapped her strength, paralyzed her artistic will.

Clyde selected a china bristle brush, a hard-to-find, wedge-shaped beauty which Ruth had special ordered from an art supply house in New Jersey. Stabbing at a mound of vermilion paint, he smeared it on the canvass, where a flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. In the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed safely beyond the reach of the child’s outstretched arm. “Nice choice!” Ruth clapped her hands, a robust pitter-patter.

Anticipating Clyde’s artistic excesses, the grandmother began mixing some of the more extravagant colors - neon purples, aquamarines, blood oranges and lemony yellows - leaving them scattered in glistening globs on the pallet.

“Does your mother ever color with you?”

“Mmmm.” Clyde was too absorbed in his brushwork to give the question any weighty consideration. The child swirled thick, gooey paint over the top right corner of the painting and watched it drip to the bottom of the canvass eradicating a marshy wetland where phragmites grass rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. The prickly grasses quickly disappeared, buried beneath the onslaught of dripping sludge. Clyde leaped in the air and pirouetted. “So beauuuutiful!”

Ruth took the paintbrush, cleaned it with a rag dipped in mineral spirits before handed it back to the child. Clyde sniffed the bristles before settling on a lime green which he mixed with ochre, producing an uneven blend of gray-green and sickly orange. He scraped the wet brush across the sky, and the weather grew abruptly overcast, menacing.

“Every night I play Candy Land.”

“How nice! Your mother -”

“No, I play alone,” he interrupted, anticipating his grandmother’s thoughts. “Sometimes I get Queen Frostine and that makes me happy. But last night I drew the plum card and had to go back to the beginning.”

Queen Frostine.

From her own experience as a young mother, Ruth knew that the card with the sweet-faced, blue fairy transported the lucky player to the far edge of the Ice Cream Sea, within spitting distance of a winning card. “That always made me happy, too.”

The phone rang. Ruth went into the bedroom and picked up the receiver. “Would have called earlier, but there was a slight problem.” Fred was on the other end of the line. “One of our commercial accounts, a restaurant, is without heat. Ignition transformer blew… had to get a supplier in Westerly to messenger the part up to us. What a nightmare!”

Though Ruth had no interest in such matters, her husband always described mechanical problems in graphic detail. An aquastat was circulating cold water; sediment build up was clogging a Watts Regulator—as if mentioning the brand made an appreciable difference in her understanding. “It creates a hotter spark, like the coil in a car.”

Ruth gazed out the window. In the yard a black poplar stood naked to the rough wind; the spade-shaped leaves and feathery gold catkins tinged with raspberry had long since blown away. The wind had picked up, hurling a fistful of maple leaves soundlessly against the window. Another week or so and the maples, too, would be stripped bare. “What creates a hotter spark?” Ruth asked.

“The transformer,” Fred said. “How’s Clyde?”

“He’s painting in the other room.”

“I’ll check back in a few hours,” he said and hung up.


“Great-grammy went to live with the angels,” Clyde said without looking up when Ruth returned.

“Yes, that’s true.”

“In heaven.” Clyde shook his head with the brashness, the false bravado unique to egomaniacs and very young children. A half hour later, the beach south of Chappaquiddick was gone, washed away in smeary tsunami of psychedelic hues; all the foliage and birds had been annihilated, caught up in a cyclone of fantastic color, buried beneath the soggy rubble of paint several layers thick.

Clyde stepped back, placing the ruined brush next to the palette. “All done!”

Ruth knelt down, kissed the child. “From Grandma Moses to Jackson Pollock in ten minutes… the abstract expressionists have nothing on you.” She put the paints away and went off to check the mail.

When she returned, Clyde was in the living room admiring a picture in a beige frame - a print of the French actress, Jeanne Samary. Ruth had purchased it during a Renoir retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“Pretty woman!” Again the ingenuous certitude.

The lustrous skin tones along with the artist’s clever use of chiaroscuro intrigued Ruth. She admired the seamless melding of impressionist and traditional styles, the artist’s ability to paint a single figure and make the subject infinitely interesting - aesthetically irresistible. “I went to the museum hoping to break through my creative impasse ... to jump-start my moribund muse.” Ruth knew that what she was doing - talking to a child this way - was foolish, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Yes, I understand!” the young boy hadn’t a clue what his grandmother was talking about.

“Now I’m feeling even less inclined to pick up a brush.”

“Don’t be sad, Grandma,” Clyde urged with genuine sympathy.

*****

Ruth’s mother died the week before Easter. The day she passed away, Ruth drove through a blinding thunderstorm to Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence and rode the elevator to the third floor. In a room at the far end of the hall, an old woman with sunken cheeks lay sleeping. A feeding tube taped to the side of her nose hung limply on the pillow; another transparent catheter trailed alongside the mattress, draining its content into a half-filled plastic bag.

“Good morning, mother.” She kissed the woman but there was no response. Her pale skin felt clammy. The silvery hair, which was rather long, lay neatly about her forehead. “Aunt Theresa stopped by last night and asked for you.” She scanned her face for any fleeting signs of recognition.

Her mother’s metastatic liver cancer spread from a distant cancerous organ, and yet it was the recently diseased liver that was killing her. The disease was twenty times more common than hepatocellular liver cancer, four times more frequent in men than women - not that these obscure, oncological facts offered Ruth much solace. From November through March, her mother lost thirty pounds. When they brought her for testing the admitting doctor reported, “She’s quite anemic. Ascites are pooling in the abdominal cavity.”

“Ascites?”

“Serous fluids,” the physician explained. For all his technical expertise, the doctor’s tone was unnervingly dry, businesslike. “We’ll need an MRI and needle biopsy for tissue confirmation.”

MRI. Needle biopsy. Ruth felt utterly wrecked inside. “You don’t seem terribly optimistic.”

The doctor looked at her flatly. “Short of miracles, these cases don’t produce many happy endings.”

*****

A dark-skinned nurses aide entered the room. She took the woman’s pulse and blood pressure, scribbling some notes in a manila folder. “Was my mother awake at all today?” Ruth asked.

“Earlier when we bathed her.” She fluffed the pillow and straightened the covers. “Doctor upped her medication so she don’t hardly feel no pain.” The aide disappeared out the door.

“I brought some poems,” Ruth said, drawing a paperback from her raincoat. The spring afternoon was still light but with the false brightness that precedes a quick fading to dusk. She opened the book at random. “The one we read yesterday about the meadow mouse was awfully nice, don’t you think?” Ruth directed her words at the aluminum bed rail as a steady trickle of urine eased down the tube into the collection bag. “Of course, the second half of the poem, when the mouse climbed out of the shoe box and ran off into the countryside, was a bit unsettling.” Her voice trailed away. Ruth momentarily closed the book, resting it on her stomach, and slumped in the chair.

Yesterday, she read straight through for half an hour in a hushed, singsong voice. Had her mother heard, grasped the symbolism, the literary allegory, the author’s evanescent stream of consciousness? The presence of mind required to grasp a Roethke poem - had this been bartered away for so many extra milligrams of Demerol? Besides the bruised flesh, what was left of Ruth Ostrowski’s mother?

The black aide stuck her head in the doorway. “I was going to bathe your mother, but if you’d rather I come back …”

Ruth swallowed hard. “What’s your name?”

“Andrea.”

“Give me five minutes, Andrea.”

“Okay.” She went away.

Coloreds - that’s what they called black people when Ruth was coming of age. You said ‘colored people’ - the connotation not nearly as nasty as it sounded at face value - and relatives smirked - not scornfully, not in deprecating rage, but rather, as though at some private joke to which young children were not privy. Now this soft-spoken black woman with a gracious smile was doing for Ruth’s mother what hardly anyone else in the family possessed either the stomach or presence of mind. Ruth opened the book again and thumbed through to the end of the slim volume. “Moss-Gathering… one of your favorites...”

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark green,
the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony like an old-fashioned doormat,...

When the poem was done she regretted the unfortunate reference to cemetery baskets, but her mother never stirred, and Andrea had returned with an armful of towels and washcloths. A full two-thirds of the light had drained out of the late afternoon sky. The aide flicked the florescent lights on. Ruth placed the book of poems underneath her mother’s folded clothes in the nightstand and left.

After the funeral, Ruth felt her mother’s absence like a phantom limb - a wedge of her soul gouged away, a brightness diminished. Forever. When you reached a certain age, Ruth mused, you didn’t replace such losses; rather, they reconfigured your life or what little was left of it.

*****

At six o’clock, Ruth gave her grandson a light supper, bath and put him to bed. Clyde rose to pee. Fifteen minutes later, the child came shuffling into the kitchen. “A bedtime story.”

Ruth led him back to bed and tucked the child under the covers. “Don’t know any.”

Clyde sat straight up and tugged at Ruth’s sleeve. His dark hair smelled sweetly of herbal shampoo. “What about the moose? The mori, mori ... moribund moose.”

Ruth felt the breath momentarily snag like a jagged bone in her throat. Her features slouched in a self-effacing smile. “Yes, I’d almost forgotten.” Fluffing the spare pillow, Ruth eased down on top of the covers. “The moribund moose,” she turned the disjointed syllables over in her mouth like flat stones. “Once upon a time in a far away land over the mountains and beyond the river, lived a moribund moose, Natasha by name.”

Clyde lifted up on pointy elbows. “I’ve a friend at school named Natasha.”

Ruth put an arm around the child, pulling him lightly against her breast. “Yes well, same name different genus. One day an evil witch put a spell on her, changing the beast into a chronic worry wart and prophetess of doom.”

Clyde shifted on his side. “Screwed-up moose!”

“Complicating matters was Natasha’s cosmetic anomaly: an utterly shapeless, nondescript snout… a nose you wouldn’t wish on your worse, four-legged enemy. Not that the other animals in the forest particularly cared since, by nature, moose are solitary, reclusive creatures, and even the most extroverted hardly ever join civic organizations.”

“You talk crazy!” Clyde tittered and rolled off the side of the bed. He fingered a spot on the flannel pajamas where the collar chafed his neck. “Something’s wrong.”

Ruth lit the light. Examining the material, she got a pair of scissors and snipped the cloth tag. On the remnant in fine print was written:

Hecho en Bangladesh.
Ver Al Dorso Para Cuidado.

Below the Spanish was the English translation. Ruth dropped the multiethnic tag into the wastepaper basket. “How’s that?”

Clyde swiveled his neck back and forth. “Much better!”

On the maple dresser lay two, triple-packs of children’s underwear - six T-shirts and underpants - plus a week’s supply of winter-weight socks. Two flannel shirts, a turtleneck pullover, corduroys and a wool hat. Melba might call in a day or so, but Ruth wouldn’t bother to tell her about the new clothes. Hecho en Bangladesh. Ver al dorso para cuidado

“The story,” Clyde interrupted her reveries. “Did you forget the story?”

Ruth turned the light off and returned to bed. “Natasha, the moribund moose, wandered the forest seeking a sorcerer, a fairy godmother, a benevolent sprite - a kind-hearted and gracious spirit with magical powers to break the witch’s spell.”

A car turned the corner. A beam of light sluiced through the window, panning the far wall before the room faded black again. “Queen Frostine has a crown and magic wand,” Clyde said.

Crooking her arm, Ruth peered at an imaginary watched strapped to the back of her wrist. “It’s seventy-nine, eleven. Very late.”

“The Candyland queen can fix everythingl” Clyde insisted.

“Queen Frostine,” Ruth said. “Really?”

“Yes, of course,” the child cooed soothingly. “Queen Frostine has a magic wand; she’ll break the evil witch’s spell and everything will be super-duper in the morning.” He wriggled his rump burrowing deeper into the mattress.

*****

At three in the morning, Fred rose to pee. Ruth waited until her husband settled himself back under the covers and leaned closer. “When Melba was still a baby, I bought a children’s edition Lives of the Saints. Do you remember?”

“A slim paperback,” Fred confirmed, “with an ecstatic nun on the cover.”

Turning over on her side, Ruth fluffed her pillow. “So many wonderful stories to choose from: Christopher, the Christ bearer and patron saint of travelers; Edward, the first Christian king of England; the scholarly Jerome, who lived in a desert cave; Stanislaus Koska, the nobleman turned beggar turned Jesuit novice; Saints Philip Neri and Mathew and Louis and Robert and Augustine.” Ruth thumped her husband playfully on the chest. “As I remember, Melba favored Sebastian, the Roman army captain tied to a tree and shot full of arrows by his fellow soldiers.”

Fred chuckled, a hollow, rasping sound. “A saintly pincushion.”

Two doors down, Clyde whimpered, a soft, keening sound. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Fred put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “Melba’s hopeless, but, if we could cut our losses and save the boy, that would be something.”

After a while, Ruth could hear her husband’s regular breathing. In the spare bedroom, Clyde let out mournful yelp like a mortally stricken animal and the house fell silent.

“Save the boy,” Ruth murmured. Save the boy. Save the boy. Save the boy.

*****

A week after Clyde’s arrival, Ruth sat down with her lawyer. “I want sole custody of my grandchild.”

“Which implies you share custody presently with your daughter,” the lawyer replied.

“Unfortunately, that’s not the case.”

“You want to become the child’s legal guardian?” The lawyer drew an elaborate daisy on his legal pad with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. “Tell me about the mother.” Ruth told him everything. As Ruth listed her concerns, the daisy gave way to a carpeted lawn with trees, verdant shrubbery and an assortment of wildflowers. “Melba’s soliciting and prior drug arrests count for nothing,” the lawyer observed. “Clyde is Melba’s biological child and, as such, you have no legal claim or status.”

Ruth glanced out the window. A squirrel was foraging its way haphazardly across the spring grass in the direction of a scraggly alder. “She’s an unfit mother,” Ruth blurted out, continuing to follow the squirrel’s higgledy-piggledy journey.

“That’s not for you or me to say,” the lawyer replied tersely. “A worse-case scenario: you report your debauched daughter to DCYF; they investigate, take the child away and put him in a foster home even more disagreeable than his present living arrangement.”

“I came here for help. This isn’t what I expected.”

By way of reply, the lawyer simply drew another ornate flower. Leaning back in the chair, he threw the fountain pen aside. Ruth waited for the lawyer to signal the meeting’s end. Instead, he smiled glacially and rubbed his jaw. “Melba’s erratic… out of control. Your best course of action may be to let her self-destruct three thousand miles away then move ahead opportunistically.”

Ruth felt a fierce clamoring in her chest. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Advantageously, strategically, shrewdly, expediently… in a way that takes advantage of circumstances that are in Clyde’s best benefit.” The lawyer rose, as though his last remark was the anticipated farewell, and ushered her out the door.

*****

Later that night, Ruth was prodded awake by an insistent, bony finger. Clyde stood quietly beside the bed. “I had a bad dream.”

Hardly a night passed when the boy didn’t cry out in his sleep - rebukes, recriminations, justifications and denials of wrongdoing. But mostly, he repeated the same two words - ‘not bad’ - an unconscious act of contrition for his ravaged childhood. “A nightmare,” she confirmed.

“Uncle Ralphy was yelling and calling me names.” Ruth lifted the covers and gathered him onto the bed. “When Uncle Ralphy comes to visit, he don’t wear no pajamas to bed.” The boy shook his head, confirming the utter truthfulness of his reportage. “He’s a noodis. Even goes around naked in the morning, too.”

When Uncle Ralphy comes to visit, he don’t wear no pajamas …

Uncle Ralphy - prematurely bald, with the letters D-E-A-T-H and S-H-I-T etched crudely in India ink across his hairy knuckles was clearly one of God’s less perfect creations – a botched effort. As though a search light had suddenly flooded the room, Ruth mashed a hand over her eyes and stifled her teacherly instinct to correct the double negative. “And your mother?”

Clyde yawned and draped an arm over her neck. Ruth removed his hand and kissed the palm. Fred stirred; he was awake but resting quietly with his eyes closed. “When Uncle Ralphy visits, she’s noodis, too.”

Ruth felt her husband flinch, an involuntary gesture. Before dozing off, Fred would digest this latest abomination, the image of his beloved Melba flouncing au naturel around the cramped, two-bedroom apartment like an extra in a low budget, porn flick. He would digest then excrete the image from his body, mind, and universe.

“You ought to know,” Ruth spoke deliberately as much for her husband’s benefit as the child’s, “that nudists go about naked for reasons of health, never convenience or crass laziness.”

*****

A week passed. No word came from Melba - not so much as a picture postcard of the body builders, roller-skaters, musicians, dancers, jugglers or nutcase firewalkers on the Venice boardwalk. Ruth found day care - the same one she used the last time Melba ran off on short notice - to take Clyde. She rose an hour early and prepared omelets with mushrooms and onions which she sautéed separately and folded into the thickening egg batter along with grated cheddar cheese. On weekend she heated the waffle iron, moistening the lumpy batter with yoghurt or kefir. She cut the waffle into bite-sized nuggets, slathered it with whipped butter and maple syrup before handing Clyde a fork. Evenings, sometimes she fixed oatmeal - the original, steel-cut, coarse-grain not the quick-cooking variety. The oatmeal burping like a volcanic lava pit, she splashed a quarter inch of milk into the bowl; to this she added a generous dash of light cream, brown sugar and sliced banana.

Joyful. Sorrowful. Glorious. For Melba’s sake, Ruth prayed the rosary nightly, focusing on the solemn mysteries of Christ’s life. On the fifth bead following ten Hail Mary’s, she always added the Fatima Prayer:

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins,
save us from the fires of hell
and lead all souls to heaven,
especially those who have
most need of your mercy.

The Fatima Prayer was optional, but she favored the inclusive language and, in spiritual matters, it always paid to hedge one’s bets. At the end of the rosary on the gold-lacquered medal that connects the beads, Ruth recited the Hail Holy Queen, the perfect counterpart to the more pragmatic Fatima Prayer. The Blessed Mother would accept the sinner’s misdeeds, forgive and cleans.

*****

Saturday morning Melba called. The trip had hit a snag. “Ran out of money and the creep kicked me out.” Ruth bit her bottom lip. Where Melba was concerned, she always felt like the attendant with a short-handled broom trailing the elephants during a circus parade. “I spent last night at a homeless shelter and need cash to fly home.”

“Want to speak to your son?”

“Clyde’s not the issue.”

“Clyde’s never the issue,” Ruth muttered. “I’ll consider your request.” She hung up the phone.

*****

Ruth took Clyde to the Capron Park Zoo. They watched the zookeeper feed the smelly, unkempt lamas, then craned their necks in the tropical rain forest and studied fruit bats dozing in the artificially mist-shrouded trees. In the playground just outside the park, Clyde pulled himself, hand over fist, up a rope ladder to a platform with a corkscrew-shaped slide. His legs still bowed rickety like a cowboy’s with too much saddle time, but the upper body was filling out nicely, the face less gaunt. Twenty feet in the air, he hurried into the mouth of the plastic slide and reappeared shortly at the bottom.

Ruth pictured her daughter sleeping in a homeless shelter surrounded by winos, welfare types, runaways and mental defectives. In the morning a simple, no-frills breakfast, if Melba was lucky, then back on the street until sundown. The image produced a sharp surge of regret but no guilt. Clyde came running up breathless. “I want a white shark sherbet.”

Twenty feet away, a Hispanic girl with a runny nose was slurping on a frozen treat shaped like a fish on a Popsicle stick. “A white shark sherbet,” Ruth repeated as they headed off in the direction of the snack bar.

*****

Thursday night at three a.m. the phone rang, bludgeoning Ruth from a sound sleep. “Hi, it’s me. I’m in a bind.”

“A bind,” Ruth repeated absently. In the background she could hear a typewriter clacking away. An Officer O’Rourke was being paged over a staticky intercom. “What do you want, Melba?”

There was another nasally request for Officer O’Rourke to report to the squad room. “Some goddamn money would be nice!”

Ruth lowered the receiver into her lap. The profanity and screaming that ensued was barely audible with the receiver nestled firmly into the folds of her cotton pajamas. On the bed next to her, Fred was snoring soundly; he never heard the phone. Through the open doorway twenty feet away, Ruth watched Clyde resting under the covers. Arms splayed back over his head, the child slept slack-jawed, lips slightly parted.

“Opportunistically, Advantageously, strategically, shrewdly, expediently… in a way that takes advantage of circumstances that are in Clyde’s best benefit” Ruth murmured into the darkness as she eased the receiver quietly back on the phone and lay back down to sleep.

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