peeped into a few more machines. On some the metal visor above the eye sockets was worn smooth and shiny. The actors in the little films were obscure, the scenes taken from all manner of unsuccessful projects and experiments with the moving picture craft. Physical comedy, pratfalls, smoke and combustion were the main fare, but there were several very odd pieces: men rowing boats and lifting dumbbells, soldiers marching like wind-up toys. He had three nickels left when he found it.
The tiny figure in profile was running in place, the muscles of her hip moving to the rhythm of Joe’s arm, her small breasts bouncing with the sway of Joe’s shoulder. She was so small and naked, so white and vulnerable jogging before the pitch-black backdrop, her long hair pinned on top of her head. Her eyes looked frightened or startled, and Joe’s heart pounded as he cranked the handle. The screen went black.
He dropped another coin and moved more slowly this time, and still again more slowly with his last nickel. When he finished and started out of the semi-open, cavernous building he felt beads of sweat dribble down his dress shirt. He stood above the gleaming ocean feeling a bit foolish and ashamed.
Penny and Maria were in almost the precise place they’d been when Joe had left, silhouettes moving in the radiant mist, wading in the surf. Joe shuffled toward them and peered down the beach for the old man. A good fifty yards south of the girls the toddler crouched and bounced atop a log, but Giuseppe was nowhere in sight. Damn that old goat, Joe said to himself, leaving a child alone by the water. He started for Jesús. Obviously, the girls hadn’t seen the old man disappear. The toddler walked on the log and pulled something off one end of it. Then he ran west, across the smooth expanse of sand, clutching something round and floppy. Kelp? Jellyfish? No: the object left the boy’s hand and rode the wind a moment like a cartoon spacecraft before it landed on the wet sand. It was a fedora.
Joe ran, too, but he slipped in soft sand and bit his tongue. He knew it was his father who lay motionless, looking from this perspective more like driftwood washed ashore than a man, and that the child was heading for the receding water. The girls heard him yell and stared at him. Joe hadn’t run for years, not since a charity ballgame, and as he lifted his legs he thought of the little naked woman running in place, how the muscles of her hip flexed. He thought how she’d been filmed in some clinical setting and possibly against her will, like a Jewess studied by Nazi doctors, and he realized that he had always held a secret love for her, for her beauty as well as her vulnerability. Baby Jesús ran with his arms out, as if to embrace the water, and Joe could see that a large wave was coming, green and gleaming like a polished stone, just starting to crest and tumble toward the child, and Joe lifted his knees and pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could.
The toddler disappeared underwater a moment before Joe ran into the frigid ocean. A black ball, more like a sea palm than the head of a child, popped above the foam. Jesús’s beautiful brown face rose above the surface of the wave, as if the sea were debating whether to take the baby or deliver him. The water knocked Joe down once, but he regained his feet. His good suit dripped and poured from the pockets, his best loafers got sucked off his feet and swallowed. He stumbled and crept in waist-high surf, and the boy floated into his arms.
The water hissed up to Giuseppe as well and soaked his old flannel shirt and khaki trousers. Joe, still up to his thighs in water, saw Maria struggling toward him, her dress soaked and clinging to her body, and in the distance Penny turning the old man onto his back because the water had covered his face. The baby wheezed and spewed seawater, the mother shrieked and staggered with arms outstretched, and Joe could see his daughter stooped beside his father. He handed Jesús to Maria and held her elbow as they trudged to shore.
Penny leaned above her grandfather the way she’d stand while examining the rocks and tidal pools, the way she’d lean on the rail other days to gaze down at the alligators. Daddy, is he, she asked, is he, is he? Before kneeling to examine him Joe already knew that his father was gone, knew as much as he’d known anything in his life that the drunk old goat, the paisano who’d followed sheep into the Calabrian hills, had finally wandered off where nobody could find him.
He could see that his daughter was taking this in, was recording in her mind the look of the corpse of the old tyrant, an artifact no more alive than a sarcophagus or a piece of petrified wood. He knelt and touched the place where a jugular should tap back, brushed his fingers across the old man’s cheek and ear, and thought of the heart of the shell and the arcade, of that moment when the design, maybe the intent, of a mystery is revealed.
Giuseppe’s eyes and mouth were open; flecks of water and mica glittered in his whiskers like stars. Joe opened his mouth and wept for the first time since childhood. He begged God’s pardon that both he and his daughter must stare into the private chambers as Penny clung to his shoulder and wailed. He asked forgiveness that they must trespass on others’ grief and feed their eyes again and again.
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