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“But…he won. When I removed the pouch, the cruciform on his chest fell away also. Just…fell right off…long, bloody roots. Then the thing…the thing I’d been sure was a corpse…the man raised its head. No eyelids. Eyes baked white. Lips gone. But it looked at me and smiled. He smiled. And he died…really died…there in my arms. The ten thousandth time, but real this time. He smiled at me and died.”
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
And after the good-night story, and the lullaby, and the good-night kiss, sure that she was asleep, he would begin to tiptoe out of the room only to hear the muffled “ ’Later, alligator” from the blanketed form on the bed, to which he had to reply “ ’While, crocodile.”
“Will we ever see Mommy again?” Rachel asked between sobs. She had asked this each time. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” responded Sol truthfully.
Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope. It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the doorway, said, “ ’Later, alligator.” “Huh?” “See you later, alligator.” Rachel giggled. “You say—‘In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were. “In a while, ’acadile,” giggled Rachel. In the morning she had forgotten.
