"There’s something wrong with Morton,” I said, wiping my feet at the door. I had been kneeling at the pond’s edge; I probably had half of the backyard on the bottom of my shoes. I could be excused the travesty of tracking mud into the house today because my best friend was dying. But Christ himself could return and Be would have yelled at him for getting blood on the carpet. You don’t name your daughter Beatrice and provide her with an exhaustive and inviolable list of inviolable etiquettes and expect her to be laissez-faire. My shortening her name to Be did nothing to loosen her up.
“I think this may be…” I tried to say, but my throat tightened.
“He’s a fish,” she said, wiping the counter down, but also dabbing her eyes. Weakness to Be’s mother was not to be tolerated. She whispered, “how can you tell?” She looked around in case her dead mother walked in.
“He’s glassy eyed and swimming in circles just like the doctor said he would.”
“Again, he’s a fish,” she said, rearranging the condiments on the top shelf of the refrigerator. “How can you tell?” she asked again.
She said she never understood my relationship with a carp and yet, in our twenty years together, she never questioned his presence. Maybe she knew too well what it was like to be confined.
I saved Morton from the ignominy of my grandmother’s gefilte fish. My grandmother should have been banned from entering any kitchen; the gefilte fish she made should be classified as a war crime. Everyone in the family had their special way of crushing the patty to make it look like more than was actually consumed.
I was a lonely child as my father was a vice president for AT&T and we moved a lot, mostly to get away from his family. My older sister Brenda was allergic to basically everything and so there was no chance we would be getting a cat, a dog or even a hamster. I spent my days building Lincoln Log villages populated by imaginary pets.
When I was nine years old, we moved back to Philadelphia where my father’s family lived. He felt guilty that he had been to one to escape, something my grandmother could smell on them. That Passover, my father took my grandmother and me to buy fish. I had no idea of why she wanted me to go along so I defaulted to my common fantasy of a puppy.
We went to South Philadelphia, which had one time been a Jewish neighborhood but was then the dictionary illustration of urban decay. The store did lousy job promoting the sale of fish. The windows behind the grates were covered with old newspaper. The store that was lit by five bare light bulbs dangling from the ceiling and smelled like an abandoned dock.
The counter was an old wooden door balanced on two barrels. Behind it, barrel-shaped as well, was a man in a tight stained tank top. There were scales on his hairy arms, in his thick beard, in his ears and his bushy eyebrows. There were no signs or a cash register—just an old cigar box jammed with damp bills. You entered, muttered and gestured the approximate size of the fish you were looking for. The monger jammed his arm into the squirming barrel of fish and came up with an offering. Once confirmed, he would place the fish with one arm on the counter and then the other hand would reach for a bat with which to brain the fish.
All of this was horrific to a young boy who just wanted something to cuddle with. Each fish, freed briefly from the roiling tempest only to be dispatched by a blow to the head. I was not much of an existentialist then, but there seemed to be some crushing futility to it all.
My grandmother pointed into the barrel and said “towards the back. Not too small.” The monger nodded and plunged his arm in up to the elbow. He brought the fish up, writhing and arching---a look of terror in its clear eyes. He placed the fish down and lifted the bat over his head.
“Bubba. Papa,” I said, grabbing my father’s arm as if he was the one with the bat. “Please let him live.”
My grandmother looked at me as if I had accepted Jesus. My father leapt at the opportunity to demonstrate his moral superiority. “Wait,” he said to the fish man. “We’ll take it live.”
“Live?” the monger and my grandmother chorused.
“Yes,” my father said. Just put some water in a bag and we’ll take the fish with us.” If his goal was to embarrass my grandmother—mission accomplished. “Here you go,” he said, handing the writhing bag to me.
My mother assumed that Morton would have a life expectancy that could be measured in days. He spent his first evening in the bathtub as my grandmother angrily consumed her chicken soup, eyeing the unused plates she had set aside for gefilte fish.
The next morning, I was delighted to find Morton still alive. I placed my hand in the water and he swam back and forth like a cat. My mother came in, already on edge from spending the night with my grandmother. My father had not consulted her when he called an audible on Morton. Just another “long distance decision,” he made for which she would have to bear the consequences.
Morton was moved to the laundry sink in our basement and to a galvanized tub whenever my mother did laundry. Morton defied the odds and survived, when we moved to Cleveland, then to Seattle and back to New Jersey. We bought an aquarium in which he would watch the world go by as we traveled to each new home.
Every day when Morton heard me drop my school bag, he would plash about downstairs. He surfaced, waiting for me to rub his head. My mother once asked a veterinarian how long she could expect the fish to live; she nearly vomited when he said 40 to 50 years.
She probably bided her time for when I went to college. All she would have to do was forget to replace the plug and there would be a sorry-not sorry call to me at BU. After all, I had left Morton with her when I knew my father would be traveling most of the time.
Mom could never pull the trigger. Maybe she saw in him a fellow traveller who had no say in where he went. She even shed a tear when I moved into an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue that conveniently had a claw-footed tub that none of my roommates used. Morton excused beer cans in the tub and an occasional drunken game of “Toss the Carp,” if it meant we would be close.
Morton and I moved into our own apartment after college and I knew that Be was the one when she didn’t think it was odd to have a 35 gallon galvanized tub in the living room with two wooden shelves across it to serve as a coffee table. She had grown up in a house in which conforming was the only goal. A carp as a pet could be the silver flag of her rebellion. Morton sensed it, too, as he surfaced whenever she came out of the bedroom. It is not often one chose one’s mate based on pet preference; but I have seen a lot of relationships built on less.
When we bought our first house, a bungalow in Berwyn, I dug Morton a pond out back. In the winter, I moved him to a tank in the basement, even though the vet assured me he could survive the winter with a de-icer and an air stone. I set up an old television on my workbench so we could watch television together under the low ceiling.
I guess Morton didn’t get gotten the memo that he had another twenty years left. Three separate vets said there was nothing to be done about his lassitude and suggested a peaceful end. I remembered the shocked monger, bat now dangling impotently from his hand as if he won a one-way ticket to Brigadoon. I remembered my father’s smile, finally forgiven for escaping. And then tears in my grandmother eyes, surprised by a rare beauty in an ugly life.
I looked over at Be, who was crying, trying hard it by scrubbing harder. Poor Morton, he was the only one fine with being confined.