The Only Son of the Doctor.
Louisa was surprised that she was with a man like Henry, after all she had been through. She liked to tell him that he was the best America could come up with. She told all her friends about his father, who had built half the houses in the town where Henry lived, who had gone broke twice but had died solvent; about the picture of his eighteenth-century ancestor, dumb as a sheep but still a speculator; about his mother, who had founded the town library. And she told them- it was one of her best stories now- that when she had agreed to go to bed with him, he had said to her, "Bless your heart."
It was to expose him that she had wanted to meet him in the first place. There had been a small piece about him in the Times, and she had not believed that he could be what he seemed, a country doctor who ran a nursing home that would not use artificial means to keep the old alive. The story said he was in some danger of being closed down; the home was almost bankrupt.
If things looked simple, Louisa"s genius was to prove that they were not. She wrote to the doctor about his home, hoping to unmask him and his project. The Times had been almost idolatrous; they described reverentially his devotion to the aged. They described the street where he lived as if they had dreamed of it over the Thanksgiving dinners of their childhood. Louisa drove the 120 miles from New York hoping to see behind the golden oaks a genuine monstrosity, hungering to discover, in the cellar of the large farmhouse the doctor had converted, white skeletons behind the staircase, whiter than the Congregational church that edified the center of the village. At the very least, she hoped to find the doctor foolish, to catch him in some lapse of gesture or language so that she could show the world he was not what he seemed.
When he opened the door to her, she saw that his face was not what she had expected. The eyes were not simple: blue, of course they were blue, but they were flecked with some light color, gold or yellow, warning her of judgment, of a severeness at the heart of all that trust. And she knew he was a man who was used to getting whatever woman he wanted. She could tell that by the way he closed the door behind her, by the way he led her into the living room.
"Tell me about yourself," she said, pressing the b.u.t.ton of her tape recorder. "Tell me how you came to such work."
His voice was so perfectly beautiful that she felt she had suddenly stepped into a forest where the leaves were visible in moonlight. He said he was devoted to stopping the trend of prolonging agony. That was what had made her love him first: those words "the trend of prolonging agony." It made change sound so possible; there was such belief implicit in that construction: that life was imperfect but ordinary, and not beyond our reach.
He had thought he would be an actor, he said, after college. He said his dream was to play light comedy; he had wanted to be Cary Grant. But she could see his gift was not for comedy. His gift was for breaking news. She knew, sitting in his living room, that his was the voice she would have preferred above all others to speak the news of her own death. He said he had decided to take up this work, after years of practice as an internist in Boston, because he had seen how impossible it had been for his mother to die well. So he had come back to his hometown, where his father had built half the houses, where his mother had founded the library, to start an old-age home.
He asked Louisa for her help in keeping the home alive, for it was, as the Times had suggested, in danger of bankruptcy. The piece she wrote about him and his work brought floods of contributions. She talked her friends into helping him with a fund-raising campaign. His own efforts had been small, and local, and hopelessly inefficient. He wrote all the fund-raising letters himself, at a huge black manual typewriter. He was always writing letters, always meeting with the board of directors. The board was made up of townspeople: the lawyer, the minister, the princ.i.p.al of the high school. When she came up from the city to speak to the board, to advise them on the first steps of their fund-raising campaign, her dif-ferentness from them made her feel like a criminal. Later she would be able to sit with them at the doctor"s table and joke or help them peel potatoes. But that first meeting of the board made her think of the city mouse-country mouse tales she had read as a child. Sitting around her at the doctor"s table, all those people made her feel edgy and smart-alecky and full of excessive cleverness suspiciously come by. She felt as if she were smoking three cigarettes at once. They turned to her with such trust; they were so impressed by her skills; they were so sure that she could help them. Their trust made them seem very young, and it annoyed her to be made to feel the oldest among them when in fact she was the youngest by fifteen years. The night of that first meeting of the board, she went to bed with the doctor because he seemed the only other adult in town.
By the time the campaign was over and the committee had raised its money, she had got into the habit of spending her weekends with him. They never said that she would do this; she simply called on Thursdays to say what train she would be taking Friday. And he would say: "This is what I"ve arranged for us. We"ll have the Chamberlains on Sat.u.r.day; Sunday we"ll take a picnic lunch to the river."
It was partly his voice that made her love doing these things. His voice made everything simpler; it could reclaim for her pleasures she had believed lost to her forever. Her first husband had told her she was a disaster with tools. The doctor (his name was Henry; she did not like his name; she did not like to use it, although she admitted it suited him) taught her simple carpentry. He made it possible for her to ask questions that were radically necessary and at the same time idiotic: "When you say joist, what exactly do you mean? How does a level work?" He made it possible for her to work with things whose names she understood.
She had learned, particularly in the years since her divorce, when people had invited her for weekends out of kindness, that it was impossible for a person living in the country to take a city guest for a walk without reproach, implied or stated. She could see it in the eyes of whatever friend she walked with, the unshakable belief in the superiority of country life. People in the country, she thought, believed it beyond question that their lives had been purified. They had the righteousness of zealots: born again, free at last.
This had kept her out of the country. The skills she prized and possessed were skills learned in the city: conversation, discrimination. She remembered a story she had read as a child about a princess who had to go into hiding on a farm. How she suffered at the hands of the milkmaid, who set up tests that the princess was bound to fail: the making of cheeses, jumping from hayloft to haycart, imitating the calls of birds. The milkmaid took pleasure in convincing the princess of the worthlessness of the princess"s accomplishments. And she did convince her, until a courtier arrived. The milkmaid was tongue-tied; she fell all over her feet in the presence of such a gentleman, while the princess poured water from a ewer and told jokes. Louisa saw herself as the princess in the tale, but the courtier had never come to acknowledge her. Always she was stuck in the part of the story that had the princess spraining an ankle on the haycart, unable to imitate the cry of the cuckoo! On the whole, she had found it to be to her advantage to decline invitations to any place where she would be obliged to wear flat shoes.
But she loved simply walking in the country with Henry. He had a way of walking that made her want to take month-long journeys on foot with him. He did not spend time trying to get her to notice things- bark, or leaves, or seasonal changes. He would walk and talk to her about his mother"s father, about his days in the theater, about his work with the aged. He would ask her advice about the wording of one of his letters. Always, when they were walking, he would soon want to go home and begin writing a letter. So that for the first time in her life it was she who begged to stay outside longer, she who did not want to go indoors.
And his house was the most perfect house she had ever known. It had been his family"s for generations. The living room had thirteen windows; he kept in a gla.s.s-and-wood cabinet his great-grandmother"s wedding china. But his study was her favorite room. He had a huge desk that he had built himself, and on the desk was a boy"s dream of technology: an electric pencil sharpener, a machine that dispensed stamps as if they were flat tongues, boxes for filing that seemed to her magic in their intricacies. He had divided his desk by causes; it was sectioned off with cardboard signs he had made: nuclear power, child abuse, migrant workers. He never mixed his correspondences. But the neatness of his desk was boyish- not an executive neatness, but the kind of neatness that wins merit badges, worried over, somewhat furtive, somewhat tentative, more than a little ill at ease.
And he had pictures of ships on the wall of his study. Ships! How she loved him for that! It was impossible that any other man she had ever known well- her father, her husband, any of her lovers- would have had pictures of ships. All the men in her life had doted on the foreign, which was why they were interested in her. Why, then, was Henry interested? Sometimes she was afraid that he would realize he had made a mistake in her, that he would wake up and find her less kind, less generous, less natural, than the women he was accustomed to loving. She was afraid that he had misunderstood her face because he liked it best after s.e.x or early in the morning. He liked her best without makeup, and he didn"t notice her clothes. Other men had loved her best when she was dressed for the theater or parties. Henry preferred her naked, with her hair pulled back. This disturbed her; it made her feel she was competing in the wrong event. She could never win against girls who dashed down to breakfast after taking time only to splash cold water on their eyes. She had some chance against women who invented their own beauty. But he would dress her in his shirts; he would kiss her before she had washed her face. Now she did not wear makeup when she was with him- he had asked her not to so simply. How could she refuse such a desire, spoken in the voice she loved? But she was afraid that she could lose his love, in some way she could not predict, if he loved her for herself the first thing in the morning.
And it troubled her that she could not predict in Henry the faults that would cause her one day not to love him. Would she one day grow tired of his evenness; would she long for storms, recriminations? She felt she had to ask him about his wife; they had gone on for months saying nothing about her. What kind of woman would leave such a house, such furniture? Henry said only that she was living in New Mexico, she had a private income, they wrote twice a month. He said nothing that would allow her to look into herself for the wife"s faults, to see in Henry the wife"s objections. In time she grew grateful for his reticence. She was, for the first time, safe in love. He did not look, for example, at other women in restaurants. He did not see them. Perhaps it was because she and Henry spent so much of their lives away from each other. It made her gentler, that lack of access. It made him, she thought, less curious.
She asked him once if he had ever thought of asking her to come and live with him. He looked at her strangely; she could tell that he had not thought of it. That look surprised her, and it embarra.s.sed her deeply. And then she began to feel that look as an extreme form of neglect. They had been together for six months; they had been in love. And he had not thought of living with her. He said (one of those truths he thought there was no reason not to tell), "I just don"t think of you as making much impression on a house. I don"t think of you as caring about it."
"Of course I do. I like having a beautiful place to live."
"Yes, but I mean you don"t become attached to a house itself. You become attached to the things in it."
There was no way she could prove him wrong. She would have to do something so extreme that everything in her life would have to change utterly. She would have to build herself a house in the woods and live in it for years to prove to him that she cared about houses. And she was ready to do it; she awoke next to him at four in the morning and she thought that that was just what she would do. She would quit her job; she would stop seeing him. She would build herself a house to prove to him that she cared about houses. In the morning she laughed to think of herself writing a letter of resignation, buying lumber, but she was frightened that because of him she had entertained, even for a moment, such a fantastic renunciation. She saw that loving someone so calm, so moderate, that being loved so plainly and truthfully, could lead to extremes of devotion, of escape.
He accused her of being unable to resist the habit of separating sheep from goats. It was a loving accusation. He told her that her habit of sheep and goats had lifted from him a burden; he did not have to look so clearly at people when he was with her. She made a list of the phrases he used to defend the people she criticized: "good sort," "means well," "quite competent at his job," "very kind underneath it all." He put the list on the cork-board above his desk. He said he kissed it every morning that she was not there. He touched it for good luck, he said, before writing a letter.
One Thursday in August when she called he said, "My son is with me." She had made his son one of the goats. Partly it was an accident of their ages; his son was nearly her age and she resented him for it. But it was a cla.s.s resentment as well, and a historical one. Henry"s son- with, she thought, using a phrase her mother might have used, all the advantages- had gone the way of the children of the affluent sixties. He had dropped out. Dropped out. It was such a boring phrase, she had always thought, such a boring concept. Dropped out. And yet she resented his. .h.i.tchhiking through Denmark while she was working as a waitress or in the library to support her scholarship, resented him for not carrying on his father"s line, for not having an office by this time, with pictures of ships. And she did not comprehend how he could resist all this. All this: she meant the house with all the windows, the attic full of old letters, the grandmother who was named for her great-aunt, killed during the Revolution. Before Louisa met him, she decided the boy was thickheaded. She could not be sympathetic to this boy who had left his father. When his father was the man she loved.
On the train up, she tried to remember what Henry had told her about his son. There had been the same reluctance to talk about his child as there had been to talk about his wife, and she had been as grateful. He had said something about the boy"s. .h.i.tchhiking through Denmark. And there was something about a fight. She remembered now that there was some reason for her wanting to forget it. She had not liked Henry"s part in it.
The family had been vacationing in Europe and Henry"s son had refused to return home. He was fifteen at the time, and he wanted to spend the year in Scandinavia, hitchhiking around, earning money at odd jobs. Why Scandinavia? she had asked, searching for some detail that would make the boy sympathetic. It simply took his fancy, Henry had said. He had, of course, insisted that his son come home and finish high school. His son had refused. Finally, after a week of silence, the boy had said, "Well, there"s only one thing to do. We"ll have to go outside and fight."
"What did you do?" Louisa had asked, with that combination of thrill and boredom she felt when she watched Westerns.
"I let him go."
Of course. What had she wanted him to do? Arrange some display of paternal weapons? He would not be the man she loved if he had forced his son to succ.u.mb to his authority. But why was she so disappointed? How would her own father have acted toward her brother? Her brother, a lawyer now with three children, would never have had the confidence for such defiance. He would have known, too, physical anger at his father"s hand. Such knowledge would have prevented risk. Louisa resented Henry"s son for knowing, at fifteen, that he could survive without the sanction of his parents. She wanted to tell that boy what a luxury it was- that defiance, that chosen poverty. She wanted to tell him that with less money and position, he could never have been so daring. She wanted to tell him he was spoiled. By the time the train pulled into the station, she was terribly angry. She realized that she had ridden for miles with her hands clenched into fists.
She was exceptionally loving in her embrace of Henry. He told her, with some excitement, that Eliot had spent the last few days painting his barn. He said, with a grat.i.tude that touched and frightened her, that his barn was now the most beautiful in the county. He told her what good stories Eliot had to tell, about Alaska, about South America. She closed her eyes. Nothing interested her less than stories about men in bars, and fights, and roads and spectacular views, and feats of idiot courage. She knew she would have nothing to say to his son. Would this make Henry stop loving her? By the time they were in front of the house, she knew she was wrong to have come.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with his legs spread out, at least halfway, she thought, into the room. Henry had to step over his son"s legs to get to the table. She followed behind Henry, stepping over his son"s black boots. She hated those boots; there was something illegal-looking about them. They were old; the leather was cracked so that it looked not like leather but like the top of a burned cake. It was an insult to Henry, she thought, to wear boots like that in his house.
"Eliot, I"d like you to meet Louisa Altiere. Louisa, my son, Eliot Cosgrove."
"Hey," said Eliot, not looking up.
Louisa walked over and extended her hand.
"I"m very glad to meet you," she said.
He did not take her hand. She went on extending it. With some aggressiveness she thrust her hand almost under his nose. He finally shook her hand. She wanted to tell him that she had got better handshakes from most of the dogs she knew.
"Why are you glad to meet me?" he said, looking up at her for the first time.
"What?"
"I mean, people say they"re glad to meet somebody. But how do you know? You"re probably really a little ticked off that I"m here. I mean, you don"t get to spend that much time with Henry. And here I am cutting into it."
"On the contrary, I feel that knowing you will enable me to know your father better."
"Watch out, Eliot," said Henry. "Watch out when she says things like "on the contrary""
The two men laughed. She felt betrayed, and excluded from the circle of male laughter. Henry had put his feet up on the table.
"I"ll go and unpack," she said, feeling like a Boston schoolteacher in Dodge City. She wondered if Henry had told his son what she was like in bed.
She looked at the barn through the window of Henry"s bedroom. She used to like looking at it; now it bulked large; she resented its blocking her view of the mountains. She kept walking around the bedroom, picking things up, putting them down, putting her dresses on different hangers, anything so that she would not have to go downstairs to the two men. My lover, she was thinking, and his son.
Henry had a drink waiting for her when she did go down. He stood up when she walked into the room. How much smaller he was than his son. It did not have to do entirely with Eliot"s being born after the war and having more access to vitamins. She had loved Henry for being so finely made that his simplest gestures seemed eloquent. Once she had wept to see him taking the ice cubes out of the tray. She remembered his telling her that when Eliot was a child they called him "Brob," for "Brobdingnagian."
While Henry talked to her about his work on the Child Abuse Committee and the letters he had received from a prominent U.S. senator, Eliot sat at the table, whittling. It distracted Louisa so much that she was not exactly able to understand the point of Henry"s letter. She stared at Eliot until he put down his knife.
"I thought whittling was something that dropped from a culture when people became literate," she said.
"What makes you think I"m literate?" said Eliot, throwing the pop top of his beer can over her head into the garbage.
"I a.s.sume you were taught to read."
"That doesn"t mean I"m still into it."
Henry put his head back and laughed, a louder laugh than she had ever heard from him.
She spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and making dinner. Bouillabaisse. She was glad of the time it took to saute and to scrub; it meant she did not have to be with Henry and Eliot. And the dinner was a success. But while Henry praised Louisa, Eliot sat in silence, playing with the mussel sh.e.l.ls. Then Henry turned his attention to his son. They spoke of old outings, old neighbors. They laughed, she was disturbed to see, most heartily about a neighbor"s wife who had gained a hundred pounds. They imitated the woman"s foolishness in clothes, the walk that forgot the flesh she lived in. They talked about their trips to Italy, to the Pacific Northwest.
Louisa saw there was no place for her. She cleared the table and washed the dishes slowly, making the job last. They were still talking when she rejoined them at the table. They had not noticed that she had left.
Henry mentioned the meeting he would have to go to after supper. He was the chairman of a citizens" committee to stall a drainage bond. Louisa was annoyed that Henry had not told her he would be away for the evening, had not told her she would be alone with Eliot. Perhaps he had guessed she would not have come if she knew.
"I think it"s good that you and Eliot will have the time alone. You"ll get to know each other," said Henry when he was alone with her in the bedroom, tying his tie.
After Henry left, she took her book down into the living room, where Eliot sat watching a country and western singer on television. She was embarra.s.sed to be sitting in a room with someone at seven thirty on a Sat.u.r.day night, watching someone in a white leather suit who sang about truck drivers.
"When did you first become interested in country music?" she asked.
"A lot of my friends are into it."
She opened her novel.
"You don"t like me much, do you?" he said, after nearly half an hour of silence.
His rudeness was infantile; no one but a child would demand such conversation. All right, then, she would do what he wanted; she would tell the truth, because at that moment she preferred the idea of hurting him to the idea of her own protection.
"I don"t think you deserve your father."
The boy stopped lounging in his chair. He sat up- she wanted to say, like a gentleman.
"Don"t you think I know that?" he said.
She turned her legs away from him, in shame and in defeat. How easily he had shown her up. He could work with honesty in a way that she couldn"t. He reminded her that he was, after all, better bred; that she was what she had feared- someone who had learned the superficial knack of things but could be exposed by someone who knew their deeper workings. She did not know whether she liked him for it; she thought that she should leave the house.
"I"m sorry," she said. "I had no right to speak to you like that."
"The real secret about my father is that n.o.body"s good enough for him. But he keeps on trying. His efforts are doomed to failure."
Did he say that? "His efforts are doomed to failure." Of course he did. He was, after all, the son of his father. And she saw that he had to be what he was, having Henry for a father. She saw it now; such a moderate man had to inspire radical acts.
"Forgive me," she said. "I was very rude."
He was not someone used to listening to apologies. She wanted to touch his hand, but she realized that for people connected as they were, there was no appropriate gesture.
"Once I was in Alaska, riding my bike through this terrific snowstorm. And I had a real bad skid. I fell into the snow. I think I musta been out for a couple of minutes. I thought I was going to die. When I came to, I could hear the sound of my father"s typewriter. I could hear him at that d.a.m.n typewriter, typing letters. I was sure I was going to die. I was sure that was the last sound I"d hear. But someone came by in a pickup and rescued me. Weird, isn"t it?"
She could see him lying in the snow, wondering whether he would survive, thinking of his father. Hearing his typewriter. Was it in love or hatred that he had heard it? She thought of Henry"s back as he wrote his letters, of the perfect calm with which he arranged his thoughts into sentences, into paragraphs. And what would a child have thought, seeing that back turned to him, listening to the typewriter? For Henry needed no one when he was at his desk, writing his letters for the most just, the most worthy, of causes. He was perfectly alone and perfectly content, like someone looking through a telescope, like someone sailing a ship. She thought of this boy, four inches taller than his father, fifty pounds heavier, wondering if he would die, hearing his father"s typewriter. But was it love or hatred that brought him the sound?
She began to cry. Henry"s son looked at her with complete uninterest. No man had ever watched her tears with such a total lack of response.
"I"ll say good night, then. I"m taking off in the morning. Early. I"ll leave about four o"clock," he said.
"Does your father know?"
"Sure."
"And he went to the meeting anyway?"
"It was important. And he"s going to get up and make me breakfast."
"What about tonight?"
"What about it?"
"Don"t you want to stay up and wait for him?"
"He"ll be late. He"s at that meeting," said Eliot, climbing the stairs.
"I"ll wait up for him," said Louisa.
"Far out," said Eliot- was it unpleasantly?- from the landing.
She read her novel for an hour. Then she went upstairs and looked at herself in the mirror. She took out all the makeup she had with her: eye shadow, pencil, mascara, two shades of lipstick, a small pot of rouge. She made herself up more heavily than she had ever done before. She made her face a caricature of all she valued in it. But it satisfied her, that face, in its extremity. And it fascinated her that in Henry"s house she had done such a thing. Her face, no longer her own, so fixated her that she could not move away from the mirror. She sat perfectly still until she heard his key in the door.
The Neighborhood.
My mother has moved from her house now; it was her family"s for sixty years. As she was leaving, neighbors came in shyly, family by family, to say goodbye. There weren"t many words; my mother hadn"t been close to them; she suspected neighborly connections as the third-rate PR of Protestant churches and the Republican Party, the subst.i.tute of the weak, the rootless, the disloyal, for parish or for family ties. Yet everyone wept; the men she"d never spoken to, the women she"d rather despised, the teenagers who"d gained her favor by taking her garbage from the side of the house to the street for a dollar and a half a week in the bad weather. As we drove out, they arranged themselves formally on either side of the driveway, as if the car were a hea.r.s.e. Through the rearview mirror, I saw the house across the street and thought of the Lynches, who"d left almost under cover, telling n.o.body, saying goodbye to no one, although they"d lived there seven years and when they"d first arrived the neighborhood had been quite glad.
The Lynches were Irish, Ireland Irish, people in the neighborhood said proudly, their move from the city to Long Island having given them the luxury of bestowing romance on a past their own parents might have downplayed or tried to hide. Nearly everybody on the block except my family and the Freeman sisters had moved in just after the war. The war, which the men had fought in, gave them a new feeling of legitimate habitation: they had as much right to own houses on Long Island as the Methodists, if not, perhaps, the old Episcopalians. And the Lynches" presence only made their sense of seigneury stronger: they could look upon them as exotics or as foreigners and tell themselves that after all now there was nothing they had left behind in Brooklyn that they need feel as a lack.
Each of the four Lynch children had been born in Ireland, although only the parents had an accent. Mr. Lynch was hairless, spry, and silent: the kind of Irishman who seems preternaturally clean and who produces, possibly without his understanding, child after child, whom he then leaves to their mother. I don"t know why I wasn"t frightened of Mrs. Lynch; I was the sort of child to whom the slightest sign of irregularity might seem a menace. Now I can place her, having seen drawings by Hogarth, having learned words like harridan and slattern, which almost rhyme, having recorded, in the necessary course of feminist research, all those hateful descriptions of women gone to seed, or worse than seed, gone to some rank uncontrollable state where things sprouted and hung from them in a damp, lightless anarchy. But I liked Mrs. Lynch; could it have been that I didn"t notice her wild hair, her missing teeth, her swelling ankles, her ripped clothes, her bare feet when she came to the door, her pendulous ungirded b.r.e.a.s.t.s? Perhaps it was that she was different and my fastidiousness was overrun by my romanticism. Or perhaps it was that she could give me faith in transformation. If, in the evenings, on the weekends, she could appear barefoot and unkempt, on Monday morning she walked out in her nurse"s aide"s uniform, white-stockinged and white-shod, her hair pinned under a starched cap, almost like any of my aunts.
But I am still surprised that I allowed her to be kind to me. I never liked going into the house; it was the first dirty house that I had ever seen, and when I had to go in and wait for Eileen, a year younger than I, with whom I played emotionlessly from the sheer demand of her geographical nearness and the sense that playing was the duty of our state in life, I tried not to look at anything and I tried not to breathe. When, piously, I described the mechanisms of my forbearance to my mother, she surprised me by being harsh. "G.o.d help Mrs. Lynch," she said, "four children and slaving all day in that filthy city hospital, then driving home through all that miserable traffic. She must live her life dead on her feet. And the oldest are no help."
Perhaps my mother"s toleration of the Lynches directed the response of the whole neighborhood, who otherwise would not have put up with the rundown condition of the Lynches" house and yard. The neighbors had for so long looked upon our family as the moral arbiters of the street that it would have been inconceivable for them to shun anyone of whom my mother approved. Her approvals, they all knew, were formal and dispensed de haut en has. Despising gossip, defining herself as a working woman who had no time to sit on the front steps and chatter, she signaled her approbation by beeping her horn and waving from her car. I wonder now if my mother liked Mrs. Lynch because she too had no time to sit and drink coffee with the other women; if she saw a kinship between them, both of them bringing home money for their families, both of them in a kind of widowhood, for Mr. Lynch worked two jobs every day, one as a bank guard, one as a night watchman, and on Sat.u.r.days he drove a local cab. What he did inside the house was impossible to speculate upon; clearly, he barely inhabited it.
My father died when I was seven and from then on I believed the world was dangerous. Almost no one treated me sensibly after his death. Adults fell into two categories: they hugged me and pressed my hand, their eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with unshed tears, or they slapped me on the back and urged me to get out in the sunshine, play with other children, stop brooding, stop reading, stop sitting in the dark. What they would not do was leave me alone, which was the only thing I wanted. The children understood that, or perhaps they had no patience; they got tired of my rejecting their advances, and left me to myself. That year I developed a new friendship with Laurie Sorrento, whom I never in the ordinary run of things would have spoken to since she had very nearly been left back in the first grade. But her father had died too. Like mine, he had had a heart attack, but his happened when he was driving his truck over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, at five o"clock, causing a traffic jam of monumental stature. My father had a heart attack in the Forty-second Street Library. He died a month later in Bellevue. Each evening during that month my mother drove into the city after work, through the Midtown Tunnel. I had supper with a different family on the block each evening, and each night some mother put me to bed and waited in my house until my mother drove into the driveway at eleven. Then, suddenly, it was over, that unreal time; the midnight call came, he was dead. It was as though the light went out in my life and I stumbled through the next few years trying to recognize familiar objects which I had known but could not seem to name.
I didn"t know if Laurie lived that way, as I did, in half darkness, but I enjoyed her company. I only remember our talking about our fathers once, and the experience prevented its own repet.i.tion. It was a summer evening, nearly dark. We stood in her backyard and started running in circles shouting, "My father is dead, my father is dead." At first it was the shock value, I think, that pleased us, the parody of adult expectation of our grief, but then the thing itself took over and we began running faster and faster and shouting louder and louder. We made ourselves dizzy and we fell on our backs in the gra.s.s, still shouting "My father is dead, my father is dead," and in our dizziness the gra.s.s toppled the sky and the rooftops slanted dangerously over the new moon, almost visible. We looked at each other, silent, terrified, and walked into the house, afraid we might have made it disappear. No one was in the house, and silently, Laurie fed me Saltine crackers, which I ate in silence till I heard my mother"s horn honk at the front of the house, and we both ran out, grateful for the rescue.
But that Christmas, Laurie"s mother remarried, a nice man who worked for Con Edison, anxious to become the father of an orphaned little girl. She moved away and I was glad. She had accepted normal life and I no longer found her interesting. This meant, however, that I had no friends. I would never have called Eileen Lynch my friend; our sullen, silent games of hopscotch or jump rope could not have been less intimate, her life inside her filthy house remained a mystery to me, as I hoped my life in the house where death had come must be to her. There was no illusion of our liking one another; we were simply there.
Although I had no friends, I was constantly invited to birthday parties, my tragedy giving me great cachet among local mothers. These I dreaded as I did the day of judgment (real to me; the wrong verdict might mean that I would never see my father), but my mother would never let me refuse. I hated the party games and had become phobic about the brick of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream always set before me and the prized bakery cake with its sugar roses. At every party I would run into the bathroom as the candles were being blown out and be sick.
Resentful, the mothers would try to be kind, but I knew they felt I"d spoiled the party. I always spent the last hour in the birthday child"s room, alone, huddled under a blanket. When my mother came, the incident would be reported, and I would see her stiffen as she thanked the particular mother for her kindness. She never said anything to me, though, and when the next invitation came and I would remind and warn her, she would stiffen once again and say only, "I won"t be around forever, you know."