I told him, and he lectured awhile, and we made up facts for the paper and books for the bibliography. My father would have been scandalized, but the teachers rarely noticed. They told me to type instead of print or complained about jelly stains or said I should be more focused. I usually got B’s on those papers; they were “creative,” “lively,” “energetic.” I only failed one: Mike had convinced me to write a paper on Lefty Frizzell, the country singer, and then proceeded to sing all night long. I got only one sentence out of him: “Intelligent people realize that Lefty Frizzell is synonymous with heartbreak.” The teacher failed me because she noticed that one of the books I cited was edited by me and translated by Howard Johnson.
Mike insisted on looking at the papers when I got them back, and swore at the teachers under his breath. He’d hand them to me, muttering, “What do they know.”
Mike taught me how to be fearless; Jackie had nothing to fear. He inherited Dad’s need to constantly know a new thing, but turned it toward physics, biology. Not even the bullies bothered him. He grew up broad-shouldered, like Bobby, as if he’d acquired those genes by transference, cross-pollination.
Honestly, it never occurred to me, not until recently, that Mike and Bobby might have had something better to do. They seemed happy: they hung around, didn’t they? Bobby invited his musician friends to the house—thin red-haired women like matchsticks, men with pewter belt buckles sinking into their soft bellies. A whole series of skinny girls snuck in and out of Mike’s room. One even found the kitchen and burned something resembling breakfast until Bobby came and gently took the spatula from her hand, sending her back to Mike.
Gert was the only other regular still puttering around the house. Bobby had insisted on not replacing boarders as they moved out over the years, developing a sudden concern for strangers traipsing through our rooms, forgetting that was how he had become ours. Gert was getting older and vaguer; her paintings got more obscene and specific. You could pose for her fully clothed, ankles crossed, a bouquet of flowers and a serious expression, and she would return you stark naked, knees in opposite corners of the frame, your tongue lolling one way and your eyes another—she charted every hair and gland as carefully as a medieval cartographer, guessing badly. She didn’t understand why people weren’t willing to sit for her or why, if they did, they declined to look at the results. My senior year in high school, she moved to a retirement home in Florida to “paint on the beach.” Dad would have loved to hear that one.
“So you’re an orphan,” my friend Jenny said to me our junior year in high school. We sat in the kitchen, drunk enough on sweet wine that the late afternoon sun thrilled and amazed us. “No,” I said. “It’s my mother who’s dead. My father’s still around.”
“Oh.” Her parents were divorced, and she thought she understood.
“Cambridge, somewhere,” I told her. “We get postcards.”
“So he just left?”
“Yup.” I poured the last of my wine into my mouth. Mike had taught me to be cavalier about such things.
“Why?”
“Who knows? I mean, my father has his own problems.” This was something that Bobby said to us often, usually when he got a check that said my father would not be back, not soon: your father has his own problems.
“It was just time for him to leave,” I told Jenny.
And I believed it, I did. People were always moving out of the house. Why should my father outstay his welcome? What was so special about him? Sometimes when I missed him, I imagined that, by the time he left, I’d had about enough of him, that everyone, including me and Jackie, had been secretly hoping for weeks that he would go.
One evening, Mike told the story about the man who couldn’t ever remember to fill his gas tank. “We got calls from him all the time,” said Mike. “Stranded at the mouth of the turnpike at rush hour; in the middle of downtown Waltham. He was mad as hell whenever he came home, but he always claimed that the average American ran out of gas three times a year, and when he did it that often we could make fun of him, but not until then. Christ, he must have done it that often.”
“That was Dad,” said Jackie, who never forgot anything.
“Of course. It was Pete.” Mike rubbed his head in embarrassment.
Slowly, we filed Dad between Candy and Mr. Nobody: someone who used to live here.
It still makes sense to me. If you’re unhappy, you leave. Maybe if I’d known my mother, she’d tell me that people have to compromise. My friends, motherly and helpful, still explain this. They mean men, of course; but I find it hard enough to compromise with the facts of living: a need for vitamins, the ringing telephone. Life yells: accept me, take care of this, you’re not paying attention. Compromise with a person? Out of the question.
Only love or loneliness can change the part of a man’s hair. The following June, a pale path appeared in the center of Mike’s head. It was love. He let his new girl braid his hair, too—a fat rope down the back, or twin cords by each ear. Bobby started calling him Pocahontas.
“Shut up, white man,” Mike answered peevishly.
“‘By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water—’”
“Okay, okay,” said Mike.
After a while, Bobby didn’t even have to make an Indian reference; he’d just quote in the right cadence: “Mich-ael will you set the table, pour the water, mix the biscuits.”
I had been looking forward to a useless summer palling around with Mike—he was old enough that when we went into bars, I wasn’t carded. But Mike had other plans. His new girl looked like the old girls. For all I knew, he was working through one large family.
I moped around the house. Having attended exactly four gym classes in three years, I received an empty tube at graduation. Bobby suggested summer school; Mike promised me that if I wanted, he could get me into college, diploma or no, money or no. This made me nervous. It’s true that Mike could talk his way into almost anything, rarely paying for movies or plays. His ruses, however, generally depended on a friend who had taken an overdose and had gone into the theater to die, having spent all the happy moments of his life there.
“Just let me go in and walk him out,” Mike told the managers. “I won’t make a fuss, I promise. Just give us a little dignity.”
I pictured Mike somehow talking the two of us into college. We’d sit in a Poli Sci lecture, and the campus police would burst in, pointing at us. “THERE THEY ARE.” We’d escape wildly, jumping off the backs of chairs, other people’s heads, then disguise ourselves as Pakistani chemistry students and duck into a lab until we were found again.
Instead, I got a job dispatching for Boston University’s buildings-and-grounds department. After a year, I was eligible to take classes free; after another year, I took them up on the offer. I started with a night course on archaeology, and one day, while I was reading a magazine, I found this article.
A colossus once stood in an Eastern country. It was built before written language, but later documents tell us that there have never been words to describe it, never will be. After years in the heat, the marble muscles tired and let go of the features: an ear fell, the girdle. A finger points at visitors to the Louvre; Madrid holds its chin; a lip pouts singly in Cambridge. But its nose is in the land of its carving, in a room built especially for it. The man who guarded it for years, seemingly reverent, one day tried to smash it with a sledgehammer. Other guards wrestled him to the ground, first turning his hands to rubble, then killing him. Now an elderly woman sits with her back turned to it—strict instructions—too weak to destroy it. She has a gun on her lap, ready to shoot madmen on sight. It is a voluptuous nose, speaking volumes on masonry, and culture, and a lack of words.
At that moment, reading the article, I ached for my father. He spoke to me only of strange facts, of ridiculous deaths, and suddenly I wanted him there, telling me that story; I wanted to tell it myself. I imagined he’d listen carefully, which shows you how little I was thinking of the actual man.
III
Jackie finished high school and, with his excellent grades and extracurricular activities, won a full scholarship to the University of Maryland. Bobby gloated around Mike: his child was on his way to a happy, normal life.
I took a summer class called The Sociology of Deviance. The teacher and I were both amazed at just what the students found deviant, not to be borne in polite society: sneezing in libraries, littering, speeding, playing music for money in the park. The professor stood at the front of the room, almost pleading, saying, Please, don’t any of you know drug addicts, alcoholics, religious nuts.
The heat in my attic was unbearable that August. One night, as I pulled my pillows downstairs to sleep on the couch, I heard a steady clattering from Dad’s bedroom. I pushed the door open; a movie of a wedding played on the far wall. A man stood to the right of the projector’s beam, his back toward me. I recognized Dad at once: he was drunk. He stepped into the jet of light, letting it hit him between the shoulders. I could almost see his muscles relax under it, warm as water. He took slow steps away from me. The movie covered him, found its way onto the wall. For a minute I thought it might be a film of my parents’ wedding, then a custard pie streaked across Dad’s back; no. Dad tried to examine the picture, blocking out whatever he put his face to with his shadow. I said, “Daddy.”
He revolved slowly on a heel, wobbled, and looked into the eye of the projector, as if that’s where the voice had come from. He smiled, maybe finally seeing what he wanted projected onto the whites of his own eyes.
Then he noticed me, and opened his mouth a bit. A derby hat floated on his shoulder. I waited for him to speak, to tell me the story of where he had been; or, at least, the life and death of the bemused, stony-faced, derbied man who now found himself on Dad’s shirt.
What my father said was, “Please baby, later.”
Later turned out to be breakfast. When I walked into the kitchen, Dad was in his old spot, Jackie on one side, Bobby on the other.
Bobby turned his face to mine. “Your father wants the house back.”
“Not want,” said Dad. “Need.” Last night his face was mottled with baggy pants, indignant ladies, and fictional pies. Now I saw it. His nose had sagged, his eyes seemed further apart. The globe of his head had lost its pull, and things were drifting into space. “I need money,” he said.
Jackie touched the edge of the table, then checked his fingers for splinters. “Well timed,” he said. “Now that the children have been brought up.”
“True enough,” Dad said.
“They have been that,” said Bobby.
“I didn’t want to have to do this,” said Dad. “This was not in my plans. I wanted you kids to have the house.”
“Thanks for the loan,” Jackie said.
“It’s not what I want.” My father tried to purse his mouth, but his lower lip had lost its elastic.
“I have a question,” Jackie said. “Did you plan your departure? Did you invite these people here so that you could leave your kids with them?”
Dad laughed, then shook his head. Two very distinct gestures. “No. That’s not it.”
“What, then?” I asked, speaking for the first time that morning.
I recognized the look on his face: preparation for a truth.
He said, “‘Some have entertained angels, unaware.’”
“What’s that,” said Jackie.
“Bible,” answered Dad.
“No joke. What does it mean.”
“It’s about hospitality. Being nice to the downtrodden,” Dad said.
“It’s about God,” said Bobby.
That night, on my way to the attic, I heard Bobby crying, just as I had heard Candy every night for a month ten years ago. I still remembered those scattered, breathy sobs. Bobby’s tears were soft and masculine. The long breaths he drew had all the wrinkles pressed out of them.
In the morning, like Candy, he was cheerful.
Bobby moved to Waltham; Jackie left for Maryland; Mike married his girl and jetted to Nepal. I got a postcard from him that said how happy he was to be in a foreign country for the first time in his life. It occurred to me that he’d been only twenty-one when he moved into our house.
I was tired of Boston, of knowing the bus schedule by heart, being able to direct tourists. Through my contacts at BU, I got a job at the University of Rhode Island and moved to Providence. I dreamt of things falling apart by pieces: the colossus, Dad’s face, the house.
I last saw my father two years ago, halfway between now and then. I had driven to Boston to meet Jackie, who was on spring break; we went to see Bobby play in a Cambridge bar, one of Dad’s old haunts. He had told Jackie that it was an old-fashioned Irish band, but it turned out to be, instead, Bobby, a guitarist, and an unhappy woman with a set of spoons who couldn’t quite keep up with them. The place was packed, and Jackie and I squeezed into a table at the back. A waiter stopped to collect our cover charge and drink order. I asked for a vodka and soda, and knew I was in the right place when he said, “Large or small?”
Bobby was great. Better than that, he was handsome, his hair brushing the collar of his shirt. Halfway through a song, someone yelled, “Go for it, Bobby!” It was a huge drunken man who looked vaguely familiar—he might have stayed at the house for a few days, years ago. He toasted Bobby, smiling, in the middle of a serious crowd. Dad was sitting next to him, his hands holding a wrestling match with his chin, which wanted to hit the table and was winning. I decided not to tell Jackie, not because I thought seeing Dad would upset him, but because I was worried it wouldn’t.
We had arrived late, and the band finished up the first set; Bobby leaned into the microphone and announced a short break. Jackie went up to chat. I stayed behind, not wanting to lose the table, not wanting to miss the waiter on the next campaign for drink orders. Jackie passed by my father, who saw him and just sat there. After a minute, he poked the man next to him and said something like, “Is that my boy?” The friend squinted at Jackie and Bobby, who were talking on the low stage, arms around each other. Then he shook his head.
I could tell Dad knew the truth, even though he hadn’t seen Jackie for those two years, not since Jackie had gone to college, not since he had grown three inches and cut his hair very short, not since he called me up to say that as far as he was concerned, he was an orphan with many parents.
Finally, Jackie stepped off the stage and started to walk back to the table. Dad stood up just as Jackie passed him and presented himself the way long-lost relatives do in movies—teary-eyed, ready for embrace. Jackie shrugged, then hugged him, not bending down at all, not giving up the lean height that he made seem like politeness around his elders and charm around girls. For a second I said to myself, Look at that, look how Dad’s shrunk—he’s almost a foot shorter than Jackie now. Then I remembered he had never been tall.
They were about to part, their profiles turned to me. Dad’s glasses were thick, rimless things. I couldn’t see his eyes from this angle. All I could make out was that flash of incredulous blue that said, I do not understand what has happened here.
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
Aunt Helen Beck was square-shouldered and prone to headaches. She stretched out on sofas too short for her, and let her feet climb walls or rest on end tables or knock over plants. The children in the houses she visited told Aunt Helen Beck Stories, first to their friends, then to their own children, who sometimes got to meet the old lady in real life and collect their own tales, the same ones: the healing power of molasses; the letters she dictated to dead relatives. Her fondness for reciting James Whitcomb Riley or any morbid poet with three names: Edgar Allan Poe, Edwin Arlington Robinson. She said she knew James Whitcomb Riley when she was a girl in Indianapolis and had once presented him with a bouquet of flowers at a school pageant. He was drunk.
After a while, everyone Aunt Helen Beck knew was dead, and so she wrote a lot of letters, dictated to the children, who, despite being terrified
of the enormous old lady on the sofa, loved scribbling down: “Dear Arthur. You have been dead fifty years and I still don’t forgive you.” Aunt Helen Beck would hold a small change purse in her hand and shake it as she spoke; it was leather gone green with age. Aunt Helen Beck said there were two pennies in it, though she would never show them to anybody.
“I have had these pennies for sixty-five years,” she’d say. “I intend to be buried with them.”
Aunt Helen Beck had many intentions about her death. She was about being dead the way some people are about being British—she wasn’t, and it seemed she never would be, but it was clearly something she aspired to, since all the people she respected were.
I am your Aunt Helen Beck.
That was how she began every call, no matter who answered the phone. It was important to say it as if they should remember her, though of course, having never met her, they rarely did.
Aunt Helen Beck, they’d say. How are you?
Tell the truth, she’d answer, not so good. I’m in Springfield (or Delta Bay, or Cedar Rapids, or Yuma), and I need a place to stay.
Sometimes she’d explain that she was about to visit a friend who had now suddenly fallen ill. If she had stayed with one of their siblings, she’d mention that. They’d come in a pick-up truck or a sedan or a ramshackle station wagon, and when they spotted the one old woman likewise looking for a stranger, she could see their alarm. It was as if they were scanning a dictionary page for a word they’d just heard for the first time: Good Lord. You mean that’s how it’s spelled?
Aunt Helen Beck always liked that moment. She was bigger than anyone ever assumed she’d be; she looked as if she might still be growing, her hands and knees outsize, like a teenager’s. People thought women were like dogs: the big ones were expected to die, until all that was left were the small, fussy sorts, the ones with nervous stomachs and improbable hair.
Then she got in the car with them and they drove home.
This time, it was a boat she stepped off, the ferry to Orcas Island, in Puget Sound. Already she could spot Ford and his wife, Chris: they kept still, looking through the crowd only with their eyes. Ford held his wife’s hand. Aunt Helen Beck had stayed with Abbie, Ford’s sister, a few years before. That’s when she’d gotten Ford’s address, and back then an island had sounded too far away to visit. Now she was beginning to run out of places.
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