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to her, he came home once. She said it broke his heart not to see his father more. She said they had always been close when he lived at home, that he played baseball for the high school team and that his father never missed a game. He was a crack shortstop, she said, and a superior hitter.
    She called my son “Bop Bop” because of the way he bounced in my arms. It was one of the first things he learned to say, and when he was in the backyard on summer evenings he would call “Bop Bop” plaintively until she came to her apartment window. As she raised the screen the cats would begin to mass in a great Pavlovian gesture at the head of the alley. “Are you being a good boy?” she would call down. Bop Bop would smile up, his eyes shining. “Cat,” he said, pointing, and the cats looked, too. Some summer nights she and my little boy would sit together companionably on the front stoop, watching the cars go by. She did not talk to him very much, and she wasn’t tender, but when he was very good and not terribly dirty she sometimes said he looked just like her own little boy, only his hair wasn’t quite as thick.
    Last year she fell on the street and broke her hip, but while she was in the hospital, they found that she had fallen because she had had a stroke, and she had had a stroke because of brain cancer. I went to see her in the hospital, and brought a picture of my son. She propped it against the water pitcher. She askedme to take care of her parakeet until she came home, to look in on her husband and to feed the cats. At night, when I came back from work, they would be prowling the yards, crying pitifully. My dogs lunged at the back windows.
    When the ambulance brought her home, she looked like a scarecrow, her arms broomsticks in the armholes of her housecoat, her white hair wild. A home health-care aide came and cared for her and her husband. The woman across the street told me she was not well enough to take the bird back. The cats climbed the fire escape and banged against the screens with their bullet heads, but the aide shooed them away. My son would stand in the backyard and call “Bop Bop” at the window. One evening she threw it open and leaned out, a death’s head, and shouted at him, and he cried. “Bop Bop is very sick,” I said, and gave him a Popsicle.
    She died this winter, a month after her husband. Her son came home for the funerals with his wife, and together they cleaned out the apartment. We sent roses to the funeral home, and the son’s wife sent a nice thank-you note. The bird died the next month. Slowly the cats began to disperse. The two biggest, a torn and a female, seem to have stayed. I don’t really feed them, but sometimes my son will eat lunch out back; if he doesn’t finish his food, I will leave it on the table. When I look out again it is gone, and the dogs are a little wild.
    My son likes to look through photo albums. In one there is a picture of her leaning out the window, and a picture of him looking up with a self-conscious smile. He calls them both “Bop Bop.” I wonder for how long he will remember, and what it will mean to him, years from now, when he looks at the picture and sees her at her window, what reverberations will begin, what lasting lessons will she have subliminally taught him, what lasting lessons will she not so subliminally have taught me.

BOOKWORM

    I came late to the down comforter. I thought it was a fad. Ducks have never looked particularly warm and cozy to me, and two hundred dollars seems like an awful lot to pay for a blanket. Now I admit I was wrong. Even on summer nights I lie beneath its featherweight and feel secure. Over the intercom on the table just next to my left ear, I imagine I can hear the sounds of the children snuffling softly in the rooms on the floor above. There is pink fiber-glass insulation in my crawl space and an infrared light illuminating the backyard with a bulb the electrician says may last my lifetime, if I don’t live