Lead Us Not Into Penn Station

Chapter 1

Mr. Meadoff turns to his children, the long way around. His eyes are on the knife in his hand. He watches lest jam from its blade drip to the linoleum floor. He has wiped the blade on the bread before he turns, but still he watches. There will be no spill.

He turns because he needs to say something. Sensing his purpose from the look on his face or the way he turns, slow and without weight, as if submerged, the children settle to quiet. But he has no words. He is the message. A bottle washed to shore is no less a message for lack of a note.

He looks on his children. A moment passes while they wait for him to speak, and he turns again. The remaining quarter-circle. Continues his route, completes it, again faces the counter and resumes his chores. He makes each child a second sandwich. The children are marooned with their anticipation. They have been raised on cause and effect, so that chaos disquiets them. They look at each other, giggle. Joyce shrugs to show her perplexity. Rochelle, the middle child, rotates her index finger by her temple, to signal that their father is mad.

Laughter bubbles up, catches in their clicking throats, bubbles through Joyce's full mouth. Milk trickles out behind Joyce's taut lips, behind the fingertips she presses to her mouth. Now Danny and Rochelle shift their glee from their antic father to Joyce's predicament. Can it be developed, can it be brought to crisis? She may leak milk through her nose. She may spray chewed sandwich. It is all repulsive, all possible. Danny mugs like a dimwit, crosses his eyes, wags his head and Rochelle signals lunacy with both hands. Finger propellers cutting faster. Too late, Joyce has brought herself under control.

Their father feels the shimmer of their glee. He knows he is odd, turning the long way around--it would have been quicker to turn clockwise, to the right. Shuffling, not a military turn, but a shuffling. The slow planing of one foot smoothing ground then the other blading over, a masonry of a turn. Then at last when he faces them, faces where they sit for Saturday lunch eating butter and jelly sandwiches on balloon white Rainbow bread, he lifts his eyes as if it was he who had been summoned. It makes sense that they think him mad. Sensible children, Mr. Meadoff nods to himself, sensible children are a blessing.

Mr. Meadoff spreads butter first. Not too thick, evenly to the edges. Then the jam. He is a painter with a palette knife, and he spreads grape jam over a slick and perfect layer of Technicolor yellow. The grape is Technicolor too, the purple of some Amazonian moth. Is that a serious daydream for a man to have? That he is a painter making jelly sandwiches? Or are they the idlings of a man of no substance, a luftmensh?

He studies his task. Sugar gives his children energy. When his wife makes the sandwiches, she still keeps an eye to the jar. He can tell from the way Miriam measures everything out. She sees the family stores depleting, computes how much they have left, and considers when to note a replacement on her list. Not he. The years of watching how much grape jam goes on bread are behind him. He spreads with a luxuriousness that has been assured by the recent years of his business. Successful years, blessings and luck. He spreads an abundance of jam, with a confidence born of his company's after-tax earned income of 1951 and 1952 and 1953 and the first quarter of 1954. Those were years of substance. Years of a man of business, not a man of air.

True, since then it has not been so good, he thinks as he squares away three sandwiches on the wooden cutting board. Just as it seemed that the curve of Meadoff prosperity would climb like one of those aircraft carrier planes, the ones off Leyte in the newsreels, forever on a sunbent arc, just as it seemed that people would forever buy knit underwear from Paradise, the figures began to tail off.

He removes a bread knife from its magnetic wall holder and, his left hand steadying the first sandwich by opposite corners, steadying it professionally, the way a counterman might, he slices on the diagonal. The colors, the white of the bread, cut through to reveal glistening stripes of yellow and purple, support Mr. Meadoff's security. The sandwiches are geometry, geology, nourishment. They confirm his well-being. Never mind the last five fiscal quarters. Paradise Knitwear would come back.

Mr. Meadoff stacks the triangular sandwiches on a single plate and presents them to the three children. Joyce does not want seconds. Danny eats hers.

"Are you feeling all right, Joycey?" Wouldn't you know Joyce would lose her appetite as soon as his wife leaves. This is the worst time for her to fall ill. School is ending, the expanse of summer is only beginning. She assures him she is fine. Summer is the polio season. If she were to come down with something, these last days of June would be a hazardous time. He tells her not to get overheated. When his wife comes back from the white sales downtown he will pass this news along. Hazards lurk everywhere for his children. There is no relief.

Danny is telling his plans. Tomorrow he and his pals are going to Coney Island. Rochelle wants to go.

"You must ask your mother."

Mr. Meadoff knows her mother will say no.

He watches furtively while they finish their lunch. How many Saturdays, how many butter and jelly sandwiches can there be left? All of his life seems stitched together with time. The Hong Kong orders need to be shipped this week. The sixty-day letters of credit will expire Monday. They need to be rolled over to cover the shipments. The factors are owed monthly cash reports, but he doesn't want to deliver them until Hong Kong ships. And the bank papers: the renewable notes and revolving terms. Living with the factors is living in a quilt. You escape from one sewn square to another identical patch. The quilt is an endless recursion. The squares repeat, no pattern of the fabric the same as another and together they make a single pattern, one, stretched to the horizon.

What recurs is the trivial, the appearance of life. Orders are filled, notes are paid, new goods are produced, new notes signed. He pays the bank, the bank pays the factors, he needs to order more goods so he goes to the bank. What is stable and recurring in his life is the trivial. What is transient, uncatchable, is the center of life. These three, Danny feeding the last almond-colored corner of bread into his mouth, Rochelle arranging the crusts on her plate, Joyce spinning her glass and drawing letters on the table with traces of milk, it is they and nothing else that make life unbearably short. Mr. Meadoff pulls away his lidded glance and begins the dishes. When the children were younger, he would often slip into their rooms at night to watch them sleep, but that act has become too painful now. He turns away and lifts the unilever on the sink to rinse the few plates and single knife, stained with a color some chemist at General Foods has instructed the world is grape.

Years ago when his business was getting started, Mr. Meadoff often had nothing to do at the office. At noon he would walk to Union Square, this was before they moved uptown, and feed sparrows. No orders, no backlog, no problems. He would take the remains of his lunch, nothing more than crumbs--who had food to spare?--and spread them on the sidewalk in front of his park bench. Sparrows would appear out of the air. Dozens of them, where have they been? They eat pecks and drips, they eat like birds, and then they fly off.

Are my own children so insubstantial? Where do they go, what do they think about? Is there possibly time for them to learn of all the hazards that leap at their heels? Subway trains that can sever limbs, whole city blocks on their walk home that look like other blocks, electric outlets, electric wires, electric toasters, scissors, needles, dogs, heights, depths, water. There is water as close as Prospect Park--last week two boys drowned in it, swimming against the law. Two boys from Crown Heights, a nice neighborhood though not as nice as theirs. It is his task to teach them, yet what has he just done? Made six jelly sandwiches and washed up.

This is a good home, he knows. Miriam often says that very thing. They have made a good home for their children. Still, two boys drown in the lake, in the lullwater by the boathouse. From the hill where he took Joyce and Ro-ro sledding last winter, he might have seen the spot where it happened. Would there be a spot on the water? They make laws against swimming and you make a good home, and still.

Again he turns, this time to tell them, at last to speak to them, say something, anything, but they are gone. They are forever going. Their gaits, slow and fast, remain beyond the speed of his voice, and Mr. Meadoff knows his warnings will not catch them.