Jacob's Folly Read Free

not want to be rescued. He looked down at his mother. “It’s hissing,” he said.
    â€œTell Mrs. Bobik—a dish of milk.” Leslie took his mother’s advice. Mrs. Bobik handed Leslie a dish of milk. He left it above the dormer window, just outside the opening, and called to the cat.
    It took a long while, and he lost part of his audience down on the ground—kids being called away by their mothers to go to school—but eventually a scrawny gray cat walked unsteadily out into the sunshine, like a hostage freed after a month in a cave. She sniffed the milk and began to lap it. Leslie was afraid to move lest he scare the animal, yet he knew he needed to get to the next step in the proceeding. The mewing inside was so thin and high it could only be kittens. The stray had crept up Mrs. Bobik’s lattice and along the roof to nestle in a private birthing room.
    There were actual cheers as Leslie reached in and pulled out the first frail, mewing creature curled over his hand, a tiny orange tabby, and the exhilaration he felt was total. To be so high up, watched by all, and executing such a good deed—he was hooked to rescue for life.
    The sun was high in the sky and Leslie had missed both math and science classes by the time he handed the last kitten down into the crowd of mothers, tiny children, his siblings, and the few kids his own age who had ducked their parents and played truant for the sake of this spectacle. Each kitten handed down—there were eight of them—got a new home that day—and thus began a line of cats that even now, twenty-six years later, populated the town of Patchogue, Long Island. As for Leslie and his family, they adopted a fine tom kitten they named Bob. Mrs. Bobik kept the mother, a fellow victim of abandonment, and slept with her every night, which seemed to do wonders for the poor woman’s nerves. The damage to her house was fixed for free that very afternoon by a divorcé with jug ears and a thin mustache,Vincent McCaffrey, who cannily used the event to court Leslie’s winsome mother. Ten months later, McCaffrey legally lifted from her the great name of Senzatimore (
Senza-timoray
, meaning, Leslie’s timorous father had told him wistfully many times, “fearless” in Italian) and became Leslie’s stepfather. McCaffrey wasn’t a bad man, but it was too late to start loving another father, and Leslie felt forced into the world. What he really wanted to do was become a fireman, but his mother begged him not to. Her father—a fireman—had died in a fire, and the thought of losing her son as well as her husband gave the poor woman hives. So that was out. But, determined to make something of himself in spite of his father’s voluntary demise and the shadow of doom it had cast on his children, Leslie joined the Navy at seventeen and earned a college diploma while sailing around the world. Returning home, he took out a loan and revived his father’s boat repair business, Senzatimore Marine. At twenty-nine, Leslie began to volunteer in the Patchogue Fire Department. He was on his way.
    I perceived all this in a futuristic gush as I hovered over the big man: images of his past and inner workings batted at my vision in a vomitous stream of moving pictures, a cacophony of sounds and thoughts. It was an empathic overload, a strain to organize coherently, overwhelming in scope. I imagined what it must be for the Creator himself, who saw and heard the entire world, every thought and action, every tear and fart. I wondered if God was a madman by now, having hallucinated like this twenty-four hours a day for millions of years.
    This new, angelic awareness had left me with a distinct sense of unease. I saw into this man so easily, like a hot knife piercing a tub of chicken fat; he seemed good through and through. What did he need an angel for? Very good men irritated and embarrassed me; I had always tried to avoid them. My heart