Rembrandt's Hat by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Letter

AT the gate stands Teddy holding his letter.

On Sunday afternoons Newman sat with his father on a white bench in the open ward. The son had brought a pineapple tart but the old man wouldn’t eat it.

Twice during the two and a half hours he spent in the ward with his father, Newman said, “Do you want me to come back next Sunday or don’t you? Do you want to have next Sunday off?”

The old man said nothing. Nothing meant yes or it meant no. If you pressed him to say which he wept.

“All right, I’ll see you next Sunday. But if you want a week off sometime, let me know. I want a Sunday off myself.”

His father said nothing. Then his mouth moved and after a while he said, “Your mother didn’t talk to me like that. She didn’t like to leave any dead chickens in the bathtub. When is she coming to see me here?”

“Pa, she’s been dead since before you got sick and tried to take your life. Try to keep that in your memory.”

“Don’t ask me to believe that one,” his father said, and Newman got up to go to the station where he took the Long Island Rail Road train to New York City.

He said, “Get better, Pa,” when he left, and his father answered, “Don’t tell me that. I am better.”

Sundays after he left his father in Ward 12 of Building B and walked across the hospital grounds, that spring and dry summer, at the arched iron-barred gate between brick posts under a towering oak that shadowed the raw red brick wall, he met Teddy standing there with his letter in his hand. Newman could have got out through the main entrance of Building B of the hospital complex, but this way to the railroad station was shorter. The gate was open to visitors on Sundays only.

Teddy was a stout soft man in loose gray institutional clothes and canvas slippers. He was fifty or more and maybe so was his letter. He held it as he always held it, as though he had held it always, a thick squarish finger-soiled blue envelope with unsealed flap. Inside were four sheets of cream paper with nothing written on them. After he had looked at the paper the first time, Newman had handed the envelope back to Teddy, and the green-uniformed guard had let him out of the gate. Sometimes there were other patients standing by the gate who wanted to walk out with Newman but the guard said they couldn’t.

“What about mailing my letter,” Teddy said on Sundays.

He handed Newman the finger-smudged envelope. It was easier to take, then hand back, than to refuse to take it.

The mailbox hung on a short cement pole just outside the iron gate on the other side of the road, a few feet from the oak tree. Teddy would throw a right jab in its direction as though at the mailbox through the gate. Once it had been painted red and was now painted blue.

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