I encounter Exodus and a rock named Peter.

Maybe if I’d known I’d be the only non-family member, I wouldn’t have accepted Hank Feit’s invitation to his Passover dinner, but there I was on his front porch that April Tuesday twilight. His teenage daughter Georgette opened the door. She was 15, brunette like Hank; her computer-wiz brother Billy was a coppery redhead like his mother, Marion. Billy stood behind Georgette to greet me; at 12, he was already her height. Georgette wore glasses that fell down her nose. Probably my attention made her shy at least momentarily because she backed away and let Billy lead me straight to the kitchen. He congratulated me on my new computer (which he’d recommended) and said if he could ever be any help…but without awaiting a reply, he disappeared.

In the kitchen around a small oak table sat several redheads from Marion’s family. There were enough platters of food to impress Pamela, had she been present. She was not. I was introduced all around and given a drink and then shepherded into the living room where the Victorian furniture was crowded with Feit-side relatives, gesturing with hors d’oeuvres as they argued politics. Hart had announced his Presidential candidacy, which would soon collapse in clumsy sexual scandal. Such corruption in high places made my writing of WITHIN HEARING timely, although probably too tame. Truth always outraged fiction, which was why we had to keep lying to survive.

Or revising, a translation of the same idea. I was seated at the dinner table for the Passover seder, a revision of Christ’s Last Supper as I knew it. We did not, however, remotely resemble DaVinci’s tableau. There were more than 12 + 1 of us of various ages, including toddlers, and there was constant movement to and from the table. Wildly different from the regal stasis of the epic portrait, we were a circus image: children were passed around, crying, cajoled, caroling – likewise, Marion passed food from the kitchen to the dining room where it was received by others and moved around the table. Only three of us remained seated during this choreography: Hank’s 90 year old grandfather, 15 year old Georgette, and me. Grandpa Joe sat across the table facing me, and Georgette was to my immediate right.

Georgette was in charge of the religious ceremony that preceded the meal. I was assigned to ask The Four Questions, not as the youngest (Georgette explained) but as the most ignorant. I had to agree. These four questions explained why the ceremony was celebrated in this particular way. I hadn’t before taken part in a religious holiday created for home observance; I liked that. Unfortunately, Georgette’s earnest retelling of the enslavement of the Jews and their persecution at the hands of the Egyptians made me feel a Pharaonic spy. We daubed ten drops of sweet wine onto our white plates. Georgette pushed her glasses up on her nose between each drop, as if personally hardening Pharaoh’s heart after each plague. I wondered why God needed so many lessons, having made His point the first time Pharaoh backed off, but I silently acknowledged that my life was an object lesson in a point being made and not learned. Telling myself that Divinity and Mystery were synonyms, I attempted further religious humility.

I was unconvincing, but I enjoyed eating a hardboiled egg dipped in a glass bowl of brine that was passed around. It was followed by similar dipping of fresh green parsley that tasted like Spring. I had a hard time, though, with a chunky mix of apples, walnuts, sweet wine, and burning horse radish topping a cracking piece of matzo. These, Georgette explained, represented the bricks of the great pyramids. I thought of the Cajun expulsion from Canada to Louisiana as Georgette recited a final Hebrew prayer. Then everyone but me sang a song about enough, during which I thought of Carole’s childhood fantasies…the Mississippi was the Nile, and she was Pharaoh’s daughter … or Moses’s sister.

After the ceremony, the actual dinner began. Georgette started a meal-long dialogue with me. But she credited everything she said to Grandpa Joe. He was the only one present wearing a skull cap, over his baldness, and he did absolutely nothing but eat. He was a thin man, shrunken with age, with skin like crazed porcelain. His concentration on eating whatever was put before him had a religious purity unmatched even by Georgette’s zeal. He had separated the hardboiled egg, white from yolk, sliced each into small bits before dipping every particle and then lifting each to his mouth with perfect care. A plate piled with foods – chicken, beans, potatoes, salad – provided Grandpa Joe with choices and maneuvers I watched with fascination, especially when Georgette was developing one of her great rhetoricals that I tuned in and out of.

“Grandpa Joe says that God has a sense of humor,” Georgette said, “but He is not a comedian.”

Marion said she didn’t think much of God’s sense of humor; she mentioned Angelo.

Georgette didn’t miss a beat. “Grandpa Joe says all suffering directs us back to the Book of Job.”

“I had thought it was perhaps AIDS,” Marion said, “but leukemia, what’s the difference.”

This didn’t faze Georgette. “So he’s gay. Grandpa says, what a century! 70 years of Communism and all they got was long lines to stand on for nothing. Before the Revolution, you could get nothing without even standing on line!”

A dessert of strawberry shortcake was passed around. Grandpa Joe bent his head down, fork to the ready; he poked the cake once or twice as if to prove its existence. His expression never changed with the food. Even when he reached for the wine goblet and drank, he chewed.

“Where the Jews went wrong, Grandpa Joe says,” Georgette continued, removing her glasses and diverting my attention to her dark eyes, a response that made her blush, “was Zionism. Possession corrupts. God had given the Jews the Law, but wisely had taken away the land.”

“Was this like hardening Pharaoh’s heart?” I asked. “That is, after they are granted what they want, it’s taken back?”

Georgette put her glasses back on, the better to glare at me.

“Grandpa Joe says the symbol of the matzo is most important. It represents taking only what’s essential and being on a constant quest toward God. We’re not supposed to get complacent and safe and worry about the affairs of state. We’re supposed to be concerned about eternal ideas and be satisfied by subsistence.”

Grandpa Joe was sipping from a deep white cup filled with black, sugared coffee.

Billy said, “Grandpa Joe stopped speaking English 10 years ago.”

Then Georgette glared at him.

Hank cleared his throat and pushed his chair back. “How about some air?” he asked me.

Gratefully escaping Billy’s and Georgette’s argument, I followed Hank to the front porch. The night air was damp and cold.

“It takes a long time for Spring to arrive in the North,” I said.

“That was Georgette’s usual performance,” Hank said, lighting a cigarette forbidden in the house.

“She’s impressive.”

He laughed. “She went to Israel last summer.”

“Thanks for inviting me. I mean it.”

“We like you, Arthur. You’re a mensch.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s good.”

When we went back indoors, Grandpa Joe was working through a second slice of cake with another large cup of coffee. He didn’t even look up when I left.

It was just after 9, so I drove out to the point at the Wagner Estate and sat there with the engine off, the glow of the lighted old historical landmark behind me and the dark outline of Apple Island in the distance. When I returned to the apartment, I called home to hear my father’s voice. But a baby sitter answered. She said the Doucettes had gone to a movie. I could hear his kids playing in the background. I left a message. I pictured my father at a movie with a woman younger than Carole. What was Grandpa Joe eating now?

Easter Sunday was sunny, warm, and windy. Angelo was suddenly in the hospital after six weeks spent at his parents’ home. Jenny and I drove west along the Atlantic beaches to visit him. The ocean was separated from the highway for tens of miles only by narrow strips of sand and dunes. It unnerved me to look to my left out the car window and see breakers crashing so close by on the shore.

The hospital lobby was dressed up for Easter. Jesus stood in a wide, dry fountain filled with pungent white lilies and bright pink azaleas. The lobby was crowded with families, little girls in pastel colors or wearing white straw hats decorated with cherries or flowers. On the elevator, Jenny and I unexpectedly met up with Angelo’s father. Phil Angelo was heavier than his son, shorter, thick-jawed and big-bellied. He had dense greying hair and a squinty look around the eyes from too much work in the sun or a need for glasses he wouldn’t admit. What did I know about him? That he was a lifetime member of the NRA like his idol, Charlton Heston.

We shook hands. We got off the elevator and walked slowly towards Angelo’s room. His father suddenly stopped. I waited for him to say something.

“He’s in there with them,” he said.

Pronoun confusion. I thought he meant a priest.

“Peter,” Angelo’s father clarified.

“How is Brian?” Jenny finally asked.

“He’s here,” he said.

“It’s hard to take,” I said.

“He wants to bring the fairy home with him this time. I don’t see it.”

I looked down at the green plant Jenny was holding. “I hope he won’t be in long this time,” I said.

Phil Angelo squinted at me and pointed. “He’s down there, 214. I’ll wait outside for my daughter who’s coming. Angela.”

Jenny and I walked the rest of the way, neither one of us saying it aloud but both thinking, Angela Angelo. To keep from laughing, I concentrated on the foil-wrapped and yellow-bowed houseplant she carried. It was more hysteria than humor.

This time, Angelo was in a large room with four beds. Each was surrounded by hospital curtains and/or family. He was propped up on pillows in one of the window bed and attached to an iv pole and small monitor. A thin hospital blanket covered Angelo, topped by his mother’s Easter coat and a grey sports jacket that I figured belonged to Peter. He stood by on the window side of the bed, farthest from Mrs. Angelo. At our entrance, the patient helloed quietly. Up close, I saw he was ruddy, sweaty-lipped, and wild-eyed. Peter looked calm and older than Angelo though he was ten years his junior. Angelo favored his mother in looks. She was a pretty, big-eyed woman in her early 50’s, tightly dressed in a beige suit, a double strand of too large pearls around her neck. Her bosom (her image evoked the word) was large, pointed and proud, apt for a Viking prow; her skirt stretched over a Great Mother’s fecund hips. When our eyes met, she sized me up, a woman accustomed to being whistled at. Angelo grinned.

“Yeah, Hopewell, you little effer, my mom is hot.”

“Shut up, sweetheart,” Mrs. Angelo said adoringly.

“Mom, you’re the biggest c-teaser I’ve ever known.”

“All you ever talk about is sex,” she said, complimented. She looked at Peter, who was discreetly looking out the window. “The best sex I’ve ever had is with a pillow,” she added.

“My life in the theater, explained,” Angelo said, inviting Jenny to put down the plant.

Then he tried to continue speaking but his voice faded, and he gave his mother a different look; instantly, she leaned in with a plastic cup and bending straw. Angelo sipped, and Peter watched. Angelo regained some breath and energy and looked at me. His eyes were large and bird-like.

“You see Poppa Angelo in the hall? I thought so. He won’t let Peter come home with me when they get the fever down.”

“Brian is going to move in with me, in my parents’ home,” Peter said.

Then followed one of those dialogues in which people communicate through a third party when the one they want to speak to is right there. Mrs. Angelo attacked, but Peter did not want a confrontation with Angelo as the weak pawn between them. I admired the tenacity in Peter’s hesitation and shyness. He looked just as protectively at Angelo as Mrs. Angelo did. Peter wanted to give the drop of water and smooth the fevered brow. It was further generosity that let him grant that grace to the mother.

“Brian is coming home with his father and Angela and I,” Mrs. Angelo concluded.

Angelo shut his eyes. “Wonderful, ungrammatical people, Hopewell,” he said. Then he opened his eyes and said to his mother, “Go see about Dad.”

Peter immediately took Mrs. Angelo’s place. I thought Jenny and I should leave them alone, but when we moved as if to go, Angelo said, “Stop right there. When you speak of this, and you will…” he quoted TEA & SYMPATHY, “…be upbeat. The thing about this leukemia-ship is that the fevers come and go and the transfusions make me throw up, but this was my first hemorrhage, Hopewell, so get the sequence effing straight. And I want to tell you a little secret since you’ll inevitably write about this: the afflicted are no wiser sick than when they’re well. Sickness isn’t wisdom. It’s ship.” He wheezed and shut his eyes.

After a few minutes he breathed normally and said, “So what’s doin’ in the real world?”

“The planets are still circling the sun.”

“You said the orbits were elliptical,” Angelo corrected.

“I didn’t think you listened.”

“I tried not to. But they’re still going around, yeah?”

“I believe so,” I said.

“Well, that’s an effing relief, isn’t it?”

Angelo’s parents were in the doorway. A pretty girl, obviously Angelo’s sister, stood with them along with a tall, saucer-faced young priest. They entered the room and approached the bed, but Angelo’s eyes had closed. His mouth was open and he breathed softly.

“Father, he’s going to my house,” Peter said to the priest, who nodded.

“He already has a home,” Mr. Angelo said taking his daughter’s hand, “with his family.”

Peter said nothing, but his jaw was set.

Jenny and I left then. As I shook the priest’s hand, I whispered to him in my thickest Louisiana accent, “Go on, Father, give ‘em hell.”