The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  And so, after he’d refused the last round of chemo, Alice— having just dragged her feet through the end of her twenties— quit sleeping with a boy eight years her junior, “took a break” from completing her dissertation, and came home. She embarked on bathing her father, on crossing into the underworld of washing soiled sheets and pillowcases and carpets, of mashing tablets into chocolate ice cream and listening to doctors’ instructions. She decided whether or not to give him all the whiskey he asked for, and the decision always seemed to be yes. They watched CNN and CNBC and reruns on cable. She heard about his postdoctorate years, an English rose called Polly who liked walking in the Chilterns, the remarkable adventures of old Dr. Flowers, who, before selling him the house, had inspired his years in Paris.

  And now it was November.

  The last of the warmth had been squeezed out of the landscape, and no matter how extravagant Alice was with the heat, a chill was ever present. It seemed her father held on through his favorite season, when the leaves fell orange into blue water and the summer people all went home.

  He’d recently become interested in objects. Two days ago she’d spent an entire afternoon in search of a few missing items—a tennis racket, a painting—which he’d decided with touching insistence that he needed her to have. And her most recent mission, what Alice held in her dry pale hand: a photograph of this house’s original owners, a photograph from his study that he’d decided in a panic that he needed to see immediately. The photograph had always lived on the same top shelf in his study, where it was poorly lit and rarely taken down for a closer look. Dr. Flowers had been given the photograph by an elderly neighbor when he’d first moved in. The elderly neighbor had become affianced in the house during a Christmas party in the early 1920s and had somehow ended up with the portrait, which depicted a five-member family wearing attire that called to mind the phrase landed gentry: the mother and young daughter wore starched white shirts; the father and boys donned suspenders. A black, jowly dog sat obediently facing the camera. Mr. and Mrs. Frank Storrs and family was carefully printed on the back of the photograph (now hidden by the frame), 1825. Alice was surprised that it was this photograph and not an obscure one of Charlotte that her father wanted to see. His bedside table was full of Charlotte: at the beach, in moody profile, with Alice in her arms, with Gus going clamming in the bay. He liked to analyze the photographs, commenting on what made them particularly good.

  Alice took the last of the stairs two at a time (she was always in a hurried state whenever she approached his room), and then, having not broken the habit, leaned on the wooden ball atop the banister, which, as the wood had begun to seriously rot, came right up and off in her hand. She rescrewed it precariously, as she’d done for weeks now, and joined her father on his bed once more.

  “You found it,” he managed, his voice hoarse and low.

  “Of course,” Alice said, handing him his reading glasses. “No one moved it,” she said, forcing a smile. “It was right where you left it in your study. Why did you want to see it so badly?” she asked, smoothing out on his forehead the still-thick unwashed hair.

  He didn’t answer; he only watched the faces in the picture as if at any moment they might impart some secret wisdom.

  “It’s amazing to think they all lived here,” Alice said, trying to encourage him to speak. Lately he’d fallen into silence for hours at a time. Even his pleas for morphine were muted.

  “I’ve always hated old photographs,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re familiar with those old formal photographs of banquets you see sometimes? The ones with a sort offish-eye lens and everyone in the room is facing the camera?”

  Alice nodded.

  “I used to detest those especially. I was only able to think of how all those people, so … earnest in their black tie and their gowns, so somber and even pretentious for the camera— they’re all dead. That’s what I always used to think about this photograph too. They’re all dead. I never thought much more than that.”

  “And what do you think now?”

  “Oh”—he smiled— “oh, well, now I think—they lived.” And after putting forth a little laugh, he began to cough. Alice propped him more comfortably on his pillows. “Your mother always thought like that. These people in the photograph, they were more alive to her than half our neighbors. She formed stories about each of these people based on the way they looked in the picture. Oh, what was it?” He looked at the picture more carefully, pointing to each person. “I think this brother was jealous of that brother because he was a better athlete or whatnot, while the brother who was athletically superior often came to blows with the father. I can’t remember what she made of the mother and daughter. They were no doubt the most interesting ones.”

  “Certainly the mother,” said Alice.

  Her father dismissed this with a slight grimace and a shake of his head. “Your mother saw everyone as being alive but in different degrees. I never really understood that.”

  “Yeah, well, she was a mythmaker,” Alice said.

  It had been a week of rain—days all like this one where morning, afternoon, and evening melted into one another without distinction. It occurred to Alice that she couldn’t be sure what day it was. Eleanor had come on Tuesday, she knew, wearing a bright pink boat-neck sweater and carrying a huge bouquet of gerber daisies that now sat on what remained Charlotte’s side of the bed, already dropping petals. Eleanor was still her best friend, the now pixie-chic gamine who was a successful producer for children’s television. When in the midst of New York name-droppers, she liked to mention, with a straight poker face, how she had a close personal relationship with Big Bird. So Tuesday had been Eleanor. Was today Thursday? Saturday? With his thin long fingers gripping the Storrs family photograph, her father turned to Alice as if he’d just remembered something important, but when she met his eyes he only returned his gaze to the strangers in the picture sitting on his front porch.

  “I need you to promise me something,” he said quietly.

  Alice swallowed hard.

  “No reception here. Not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After,” he said. And when Alice refused to understand: “The funeral.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine. Now I need you to get something for me.”

  “Of course,” said Alice, her voice hoarse and unfamiliar. “Anything.”

  “The attic,” he said. His fingers were shaking. His skin was yellowish green. “Two boxes—there are two boxes on the landing. One for you and one for your brother.”

  Alice climbed the familiar stairs—noting how the temperature significantly dropped and how the wind could be heard whistling through the treetops, rattling the old storm windows. She’d been making trips up here more and more frequently and was surprised, as her eyes lit upon them, that she hadn’t noticed the boxes before. Two plain brown packing crates sat side by side: Alice, one read, in her father’s purposeful hand; August, read the other. They were both lined and filled with newspaper, and as Alice lifted hers she could see smaller boxes inside—stamped tin, velvet, carved balsa wood—containing, she knew, her mother’s clip-on pearls and costume beads— Charlotte’s personal treasures that had been too sad to previously consider. The good stuff, as Charlotte had called it, was housed in a bank safe and had been formally passed along to Alice, but the daily baubles—Charlotte’s colored glass, her Lu-cite bangles—they had seemed too much a part of her, and over all these years they’d remained in their little boxes that Alice had so loved. There was more, but she couldn’t yet let herself look. She picked up Gus’s box and, placing it atop her own, made her way back down the stairs. His box didn’t weigh much, and when she peered inside, she was surprised to see nothing more than a framed picture of Charlotte and Gus clearly taken right before she died, and a manila envelope marked For August in her father’s hand.

  “I’m back,” she said, and Alice tried to smile, tried not to allow her
face to betray how, on entering this room, his weakened appearance still shocked her.

  How he sighed then, as she set the boxes down, a wheezy, stilted sigh. “Thank you.”

  Alice nodded, looking at how carefully he’d assembled these boxes, how their labels were taped neatly with packing tape. “When did you do this?”

  He shook his head and mumbled.

  She realized they were both looking at Gus’s box. Alice was fingering the edges of the newspaper while glimpsing the unfamiliar photograph of Charlotte and Gus. Charlotte was laughing and Gus was not; his arm was firmly wrapped around her shoulders. Their father must have found this picture— maybe even on an undeveloped roll of film—and had it framed especially for him. This gift was breaking her heart. The very nature of such thoughtfulness was painful in light of her brother’s long absence.

  “Gus is coming Sunday,” she said suddenly.

  After he was quiet so long she thought he’d drifted off, he muttered, “Is that right?” as if he knew she was lying.

  “He is.”

  “Baby,” he said carefully, “I am past pretending.”

  Oh, no, you’re not, Alice thought, glancing at the photograph of a smiling, happy Charlotte, a fun-loving-mother

  Charlotte, a Charlotte-as-pretty-wife. But what she said instead was, “He called earlier when you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you. He said he was coming tomorrow.” There was no need, she thought, to start being truthful now.

  He shrugged. “He has his reasons, I’m sure,” he said, as he’d said so many times before, regarding Gus’s distance from this house, their lives.

  “You and your reasons,” Alice said, but she said it too softly for him to hear. Her father, as opposed to being made angry or distraught by Gus’s absence, seemed nearly cooperative about maintaining the distance. He was always the one who made excuses for why August didn’t follow through on his plans to come home. When the plans themselves stopped, Alice had finally decided that how her father reacted was actually quite contrary to being understanding. In truth, he seemed ambivalent.

  It’s as though you can’t handle one more absent person, Alice had said to her father last year. But he’d fixed her with such a meaningful stare, a look that said, We’ll go no further. Now their discussions of August were no more extensive than what had just transpired. In the face of such dramatic inaction (or action, depending on how she chose to view Gus’s behavior on any given day) what was there, really, to say?

  As it happened, Gus hadn’t been home since he’d eked out a graduation from high school and followed Cady DeForrest to Providence. They lived together there in a house cool beyond reproach, a blue Victorian with three housemates and a turret where they slept on a king-size mattress taking up the entire floor. When Alice visited, she had been instantly taken with how many people were always coming by. Gus wasn’t enrolled in college and this didn’t seem to bother him. On the contrary, he was held up (dangerously high, thought Alice) as a paean to the free spirit—surfing the freezing waves of Rhode Island beaches, learning to cook as a souschef, reading Don Quixote and Tolstoy, a hodgepodge of social and historical texts, plus some science for good measure. His friends and Cady were reading basically the same material and paying (or having their parents pay) thousands of dollars for a designer degree, was his argument in a less than gracious mood. When Cady broke up with him, when the inevitable finally happened, he left for Indonesia, naturally, where from what Alice could gather he surfed big waves, became dangerously promiscuous, and came to believe in animism before finally moving again. Much traveling—the privilege and curse of this shrinking world— ensued, before Gus signed a lease in Santa Cruz. When Cady came to Stanford for architecture school when they were twenty-three, they immediately started up again, showing up at each other’s apartments on late Friday nights, turned on and even moved by the increasing unlikelihood of their future as a couple. Since then, for the past ten years, Alice heard about Cady only intermittently. There’d been one other “real” girlfriend named Liz, a social worker in Berkeley who, not twenty minutes after meeting Alice for the first time at a cafe, asked her (as Alice took a bite of her lunch) if eating a turkey sandwich didn’t make her feel generally toxic. There’d been restaurant jobs, construction jobs, and most recently a brief stint as a marijuana farmer on a massive operation up in Humboldt County which ended when the peaceful hippie landowners pulled out heavy artillery and told Gus that he’d best learn to operate it, because there was no way of knowing when the shit would go down.

  August was thirty-three and hadn’t come home since high school. He’d written letters to their father—long, ponderous letters in his always surprisingly beautiful handwriting, and at first he’d made promise after promise to visit, but never followed through. It was easy enough for the first couple of years when Alice and their father visited Providence, California, even Bali once—he gave them good reasons to travel, and they all pretended as if there weren’t any particular reason why Gus never came to them. But since her father had fallen seriously ill, it was conspicuous and embarrassing that Gus wasn’t pacing the same warped wood floors as Alice. He insisted, with his absence, on drawing even more attention to their past—as if, Alice couldn’t help but feel, he was staking some claim on sorrow, maintaining distance to prove the point of just how tormented he was. But then again, he was tormented. Alice could tell he was angry with himself for not having come home sooner, but the longer he’d waited to come back, the worse his fears had become. He never came right out and said so, but Alice knew that it was elaborate fear that had kept him away, and she knew he had waited so long now that his homecoming had, at least in his mind, become a thing of mythic difficulty.

  She had done just the opposite.

  Alice had gone to college in Manhattan, just a train ride away. She’d gone to graduate school there too. She could have left, at least for a while. Her father had, in fact, given her every encouragement to apply to schools as far away as Scotland. She stayed close by with the same kind of fervor that Gus had stayed away.

  Alice now tried to relate to Gus and his fears, tried to remember how he’d felt in her arms when he came home that morning to Charlotte dead, and how he couldn’t breathe as he tried to say, I can smell her hair. She tried to relate, she tried to forgive, but instead found herself, not five minutes after she could be certain her father had dozed off with that old photograph still in his hands, going a few rooms away and dialing her brother’s number.

  Earlier in the year, when Gus had promised regularly to “look into the details” about coming home, most of their nightly conversation time had been monopolized by Gus keeping Alice abreast of what had to have been the most fruitless job search in history. Alice hadn’t done too much graphic detailing of their father’s demise, as she’d been truly concerned with the magnitude of his debts and his ever-present lack of a job.

  But after this past week of her increasingly adamant nightly requests, and after he still wasn’t here, Alice cut short any notion of pleasantries. “You’ve gone to Fiji and Bali and Costa Rica at a moment’s fucking notice,” she heard herself saying, tears blurring her vision and snot blocking up her nose, “but you can’t get it together, you cannot get yourself motivated to fly home and deal with your father?” She was yelling and it felt exactly right. She hadn’t yelled like that at anyone in a long while. She yelled only at her family; she was invariably polite to doctors and nurses and home-care attendants, with all kinds of strangers and service professionals no matter how rude they were. After hanging up, she gave Gus twenty minutes, and when she called back he had done what she’d requested. He was coming in on the red-eye. She slept in her father’s room that night.

  At four A.M. her father called out her mother’s name while Alice was awake and staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sun to rise. “Oh,” he cried, in a voice she’d never heard. His face was painted in pieces of moonlight shining in through the windows, the effect of which was harsh and haunting. “Oh,
goddamn it,” he whimpered, and crying, crying, “you, you—”

  “Shh, Daddy, I’m right here.”

  He looked at her plaintively, with the eyes of someone who knew the meaning of finished, could feel the velvet curtains closing on his face.

  “You’re dreaming,” she told him, as if that were a comfort, as if dreams were inferior or held any less meaning than the stasis his life had become.

  “Please stop,” he said so quietly and wetly, she almost asked him to repeat himself. “Please …”

  “What is it?” she said pointlessly. “What can I do?”

  “Charlotte,” he whispered, his tone suddenly stern, “where are you going?”

  Alice was unsure of what to say. Cancer talked; everyone knew this. Cancer had a reality and a language all its own. And then the face of recognition emerged, the look of simultaneous panic and relief, as he reentered the room with his disturbed soul in tow, accepting the weak and faulty body in the bed as his own.

  “I loved her,” he said. “I loved her.”

  “Of course you did.”

  And her father fixed Alice with eyes that belied his drugged, slackened face. They were eyes experienced in all types of half-truths and justifications and every manner of deception. “She needed me,” he said.

  By eight A.M. it was over; his surrender was quiet and effortless. Spin the yellow Lab had put up more of a fight, and he was 112. Alice watched her father’s last rounds of breathing and thought of how her father had held Spin in his arms and graciously injected him in the paw, ridding him of such suffering. The vet had been unreachable on a holiday weekend, and her father had driven to the lab to get the necessary poison, leaving Alice briefly alone to watch Spin breathe in and out just like her father breathed then. Alice had watched the rise and fall of her father’s blue pajama top, the loosened skin at his sallow neck. As the world of her father rose and fell, she saw nothing else; there was no weather, no light. She couldn’t have said whether the sky was flooded with sun or pouring rain when he stopped breathing. She couldn’t have said whether she was hot or cold when she drew the covers up around her father and herself, cocooning them together. She sat up on the bed, in the space he left next to his body, even after nearly fifteen years. She looked from her father to the insistence of a new day out the window, and she tried to forgive Gus for not coming earlier, for being stuck in mundane Long Island traffic not far from LaGuardia airport, the moment their father let them go.