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By Root 12465 0

on the grass very clear to me—the rocky crannies and glens and secluded byways where we took our greasy brown paper bags and half-pint cartons of Sealtest milk and the Oscar Williams anthology of American verse, much thumb-stained and dog-eared, whereby I attempted to continue Sophie’s schooling in poetry that plump Mr. Youngstein had inaugurated months before. One place, however, I vividly recall—a grassy peninsula, usually unpeopled at that hour on weekdays, jutting out into the lake where a sextet of large, rather pugnacious-looking swans coasted like gangsters through the reeds, interrupting their swim long enough to waddle up onto the grass and scrounge competitively, with aggressive hissings from their voiceless throats, for the crusts of our poppyseed rolls or other leftovers. One of the swans, a small male considerably less agile and scruffier than the others, had also been injured near the eye—doubtless in encounter with some savage Brooklyn biped—and was left with a walleyed appearance that reminded Sophie of her cousin Tadeusz from Lodz, who had died many years before, at thirteen, of leukemia.

I was unable to make the anthropomorphic leap and thus failed to comprehend the resemblance between a swan and any specific human being, but Sophie swore that they were dead look-alikes, began to call him Tadeusz and murmured to him in little glottal clucks and clicks of Polish as she heaved at him the debris from her bag. I rarely ever saw Sophie lose her temper, but the conduct of the other swans, bossy and preemptive, so fatly greedy, infuriated her and she yelled Polish swear words at the big bastards and favored Tadeusz by making sure that he got more than his share of the garbage. Her vehemence startled me. I did not—because I could not at the time—connect this energetic protectorship of the underdog (the underswan?) with anything that had happened in her past, but her campaign for Tadeusz was funny and immensely appealing. Even so, I have another and personal motive for sketching a picture of Sophie among the swans. I realize now, after much racking of my mind, that it was here on this little promontory later in the summer, during one long afternoon session which lasted until the sun began to sink far behind us over Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, that Sophie told me in a voice alternately desperate and hopeful but largely desperate about part of this last convulsive year with Nathan, whom she adored but whom even then (even then as she spoke to me) she had come to see as her savior, yes, but her destroyer as well...

When to her fathomless relief he returned to her room that day, half an hour later, he came to her bed and gazed down at her once more with his gentle eyes and said, “I’m going to take you to see my brother. Okay? I’ve made a few phone calls.”

She was perplexed. He sat down beside her again. “Why are you going to take me to your brother?” she asked.

“My brother’s a doctor,” he replied, “one of the best doctors going. He can help you.”

“But you...” she began, then halted. “I thought...”

“You thought I was a doctor,” he said. “No, I’m a biologist. How do you feel?”

“Better,” she said, “much better.” And this was true, not the least, she realized, because of his comforting presence.

He had brought with him a grocery bag, which he now opened, extracting the contents rapidly and deftly and laying them out on the large board near the end of her bed which served as a kitchen table. “Vot a mishegoss,” she heard him say. She began to giggle, for he had gone into a very low-key comedy routine, his accent all of a sudden profoundly and luxuriously Yiddish as he catalogued the bottles and cans and cardboard cartons pouring forth from the bag, his face furrowed in a perfect replica of some elderly harassed, purblind, nervously parsimonious Flatbush storekeeper. He reminded her of Danny Kaye (so many times she had seen him, one of her few movie obsessions), with this wonderfully rhythmic and absurd inventory, and she was still shaking with silent laughter when he ceased, turned toward her and held up a can with