A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  In order to know these figures, one would have to count. One would have to stand on the bridge and look out at the houses on either side of the banks. And then one would have to count, patiently, carefully. One would write the figure in a small notebook.

  Which, as it happened, was something he always carried with him in his pocket. A small notebook. All his life.

  And then, make a second count of all the windows. To be sure.

  And why would one do this? What other reason could there be for knowing the total number of windows that overlooked the bridge and having these figures available, at a moment’s notice, committed to memory?

  I flashed back to that night I was alone at the house and he called me. “Son, I’ve stolen a car and I’m going to drive out there and kill you.” As an adult, I’d decided he must have been drunk. He must not have known what he was saying.

  And when the police arrived at his house and then phoned to scold me for calling them, when they handed the phone to my father and he spoke without a trace of alcohol in his voice, I’d let this go, too. I’d decided, I don’t need an answer for that.

  Now, sitting in my apartment, I understood something. My father was a careful construction. A studied husk. That’s why when he smiled, it was wrong. The smile simply unzipped his face to reveal the darkness behind it.

  Throughout my childhood I’d seen him sitting in that rocking chair staring at the wall. And what had I thought about that? I suppose, I hadn’t thought much. It frightened me, but I didn’t know exactly why.

  But now, I knew why. Because all that time, he’d been thinking.

  His mind moving like a muscle.

  I put out the cigarette and shoved my chair away from my computer. What, then, had he done with all that rage? Where did all that other stuff within him go?

  And then I wondered, are there memories missing?

  I knew I couldn’t remember my father much at all until I was five or six. For me, that’s a long time. After all, I could remember the farm in Hadley and I wasn’t much older than one. So if pieces of those first six years of him are missing, couldn’t there be others also cut out of my mind?

  I didn’t want to know.

  My phone call hadn’t set me free. It had made me sick.

  I’D RENTED A car one Saturday I returned to Massachusetts. I drove to my old house and saw it was a new color now. It looked smaller. Somebody had replaced the deck. I parked at the end of the driveway and for ten minutes, watched the house as though it might do something—shift position on its lot or flinch. I knew it was the house I had grown up in but it was hard, somehow, to feel this. I was tempted to ring the bell and ask if I could just take a look around inside. But I did not. I had business to take care of.

  Then I drove the unfamiliar route to my father’s new town. My mother and my father lived in the same town, even after all these years. Divorced for longer than they were married, some bond between them could not be broken. My father lived on his mountain and my mother lived in the village itself, right on the river.

  I parked and walked the short distance to the bridge. I walked to the very center and could see my mother’s apartment. Buildings lined both sides of the riverbank and I didn’t need to count the windows to know how many there were. My father had done that already.

  I leaned over the railing and looked at the water below. I stood up and looked toward the end of the bridge on my mother’s side. I imagined her walking toward me, a smile of recognition on her face. And then, as she stepped beside me, pushing her over. I closed my eyes and tried to see it in my mind, tried to feel my hands against her shoulders, the thin fabric of her blouse as I pushed. I tried to hear her scream. And then I opened my eyes and I understood something. I knew one thing, and this knowledge was as unique to me as my breath or my fingerprints.

  I could never do it.

  Not if there were a gun to my head.

  And I couldn’t push my father off the cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard, either. I’d wanted to, once. And I almost had the chance. But I couldn’t have done it, not then, not now.

  My father hadn’t pushed my mother over the bridge. He may have known how many windows were there but he hadn’t done anything to her. Could he?

  I didn’t know. And I probably never would. Part of me wanted to believe my father wasn’t a murderer, either. Part of me wanted to believe he’d stood on this same bridge and after counting those windows, understood that he couldn’t do it, either.

  But in the chambers of my heart, in my very valves, I believed my father was flawed. I believed my father was really not so different from the serial killers I’d read about in all those books. I didn’t want this to be true but I felt that it was.

  My father and I would never be close. He would never give me what it was I wanted from him. And somehow, I seemed almost all right. I used to believe I couldn’t grow up right without a father, that I would never be “normal” without one. But maybe, a father is really a luxury after all. Maybe you could grow up without one.

  Another thing was clear to me in this moment: I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on.

  A breeze blew up off the river, a gust so powerful it knocked me off balance and I stumbled. And I realized, my knee didn’t hurt. Not at all. And I wasn’t tired. I glanced down, examined my arm. I touched the smooth skin, free of psoriasis, not crusting and peeling, not raw and bleeding, not angry and red, but pale and soft and alive.

  I was not my father.

  But I wasn’t quite myself yet, either.

  NINETEEN

  Ten years later

  THE LARGE DINING room table and eight chairs had been moved out of the room and I wondered briefly where they could be stored. The sideboard was still in place, though it was covered now with the supplies one requires to transport the living into death—hypodermic needles, a plastic rack filled with small glass ampoules, a portable cardiac monitor inside a padded canvas carrying case. A steel-framed hospital bed had been positioned in the dining table’s place and in this bed, my father lay, his withered body wasted down to under one hundred pounds. His skin was the color of butter and the whites of his eyes were bright yellow and made me think of a wolf’s.

  Two months before, my father had fallen backward down his stairs. He’d been taken first to a hospital, then a nursing home for physical therapy. But the medications had been too hard on his liver. Instead of growing stronger in the nursing home, he became weaker, smaller. And now he was dying.

  A catheter bag strapped to the side of his bed frame contained only the smallest amount of urine—soon, his kidneys would cease altogether. Maybe in an hour, maybe a day.

  The hospice nurse placed a small morphine drip control wand in my father’s hand. “When you feel you need more, just push the button right there on the tip. You only need to push it once and you’ll get another dose.”

  Though it was only three in the afternoon it felt much later, because up here on the mountain where my father and his wife had lived for over twenty years, the trees blocked most of the light and the larger mountain behind the house cut the sun off a couple of hours before it set.

  My father’s wife busied herself in the kitchen, making pitchers of iced tea, wiping the counters with a sponge, brewing coffee. My father’s brother and his brother’s wife had flown up from Alabama. But my father was too sick for any socializing.

  Uncle Bob took a chair in the sunroom, just off the dining room. Aunt Relda had poured him a drink, three fingers of whiskey, and now sat with an iced tea on the sofa. My father’s wife had finished up in the kitchen and was now sitting in the recliner opposite Uncle Bob. My brother sat on the sofa beside Relda looking lost and sad. I sat on the floor at Uncle Bob’s feet, looking up at him. It was comforting to hear his full, ripe southern accent. It made me realize my father’s had been smoothed out over the years, like a stone in a river.

  “Now, you have to remember, Marist was the Catholic military school that we at
tended as boys in Atlanta. And by God, ol’ John was battalion commander his senior year there. Buddy?” And here, he looked pointedly at me. “That was no small thing. Battalion commander is the top cadet. Your daddy was the mutherfucker that got to call quittin’ time.”

  I realized I must have seen photographs of my father in his school uniform, an officer’s hat perched on his head. I stood up and walked through the dining room, past my father, who gazed at the ceiling with glassy, unfocused eyes. I jogged up the three steps and walked into his office. I pulled his old photo album from the bottom shelf of his bookcase and carried it back into the dining room. Standing beside his bed, I opened the album to the first page. “I thought maybe you’d like to look at some childhood pictures,” I said, holding the album before his eyes.

  I imagined that if I were dying it would be a comfort to see, again, my long-dead mother, my distant childhood. But my father simply closed his eyes and rolled his head away from me so that his cheek rested on the pillow. “Well, maybe later,” I said.

  A few hours later, while I sat in the sunroom listening to Uncle Bob tell more stories, I watched my brother step up to the hospital bed. Gently, he stroked our father’s head. I rose from the sofa and entered the dining room, standing back near the foot of the bed.

  In a gravelly whisper my father said to my brother, “You’ve been a good boy. A good son.”

  And then my father looked at me. For just a moment, our eyes met and I watched as he opened his mouth, as if to beckon me closer. I did step closer and placed my hands on the rail at the foot of his bed. I waited to hear what he was going to say to me.

  It was like the pause after a flash of lightning, before the thunder.

  He opened his mouth and then I saw a certain resignation in his eyes and the fire in them dimmed, then vanished altogether. He closed his mouth and then his eyes. My father had changed his mind. He had decided that he had, in the end, nothing to say to me.

  And I knew somehow these would be his last words. To my brother he had said, “You’ve been a good boy, a good son.” And to me he’d said nothing. He would not, at the very end, give me even one word.

  And standing there, I felt a sense of loss. Not for myself but for him. He had missed so much not knowing me. He had denied himself his greatest accomplishment—to just be a dad.

  Uncle Bob roared with laughter in the next room. “All their kids were cross-eyed and I was scared to death of cross-eyed folks. I would beg John not to make me do it, but he would gleefully have me follow him right past that old house filled with cross-eyed kids. Crazy, I know it, I know it. But I still don’t like cross-eyed people—they’re spooky!”

  For a while, I watched my father sleep. Briefly, he awoke and turned his face toward the window. Though he could see only the room reflected back in the dark glass, he continued to stare. I saw him shiver, then a tiny cry—a whimper—escaped him. He seemed so utterly small. Only the hospice nurse hovered near him; everybody else was in the other room. I wondered, if he’d been a different man, would everyone now be gathered around his bed, photographs scattered on the thin blanket, his favorite music playing on the stereo, laughter in the air, hands touching him? My father was dying alone, just a few feet away from his family.

  Later that evening, I left. During the drive home, I thought of my friend George, who had died so many years before. He, too, had wasted to nearly nothing, just a sliver of his former self, but somehow he’d retained every pound, every ounce of his being. George had died with his magnitude intact.

  In the morning, my father’s wife called to tell me my father had died. “There won’t be a funeral,” she said. “Your father didn’t want one.”

  The boy whose photograph I studied as a child, who was raised by three doting teenage aunts in a small white house in Chickamauga, the boy who had a drugstore all to himself and loved the Andrews Sisters, who went to Catholic military school and studied Latin and became battalion commander, who was a preacher and then a philosopher, who married my mother and terrified me so fully that I could think only of pushing him off a cliff, this man who had tumbled backward down his stairs and never healed, was, at last, dead.

  I was free of him.

  Two months later, my father’s wife gave me a box. This was my inheritance. Inside the box was an old Bible I had often admired because of its fine leather cover, the Timex watch I’d given my father as a child, a few old family photographs, and four diaries.

  It took me the better part of a year before I could bring myself to read these journals, written during the worst years of his life with my mother.

  Tuesday, May 27, 1975

  78°—Mostly cloudy am

  60°—Rain late pm

  Went by Hastings and got some Venus Velvet #1 pencils for $1.32 a dozen and a world map for $1 to put in the kitchen to go with my radio cards . . . Ford came on tonight to announce another tariff hike on imported oil which will now raise prices of petroleum products even more in this time of financial desperation. Damn heating oil is already 38.9 a gallon. Got a pair of front tires for the Chrysler on sale—cost me $64. Augusten and I went over and shopped around Northampton . . . Didn’t buy anything but he wanted a burglar alarm for $2. Felt bad today—sort of pained in the liver area . . .

  I remembered that alarm. It was white plastic with a brass-colored chain. I wanted to attach it to my door, but my father explained, “Son, we have hollow-core doors. If you try screwing this into the door it’ll just fall right out. Why on earth do you want an alarm, anyway?”

  I hadn’t told him, Because of you. Because I don’t want to wake up again and find you standing in my room watching me with that look in your eyes and something terrible in your hands.

  I hadn’t said anything at all. I’d put the lock back on the shelf and we’d gone home.

  I could see now, it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if he’d bought me the lock on that day so many years ago, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. Nothing could have kept me safe from him. There was no place to hide.

  Page after page, as his life fell apart all around him, my father wrote down the prices of corn, gasoline, and long-distance telephone calls. A stranger reading the diaries would think: What an ordinary life.

  What an ordinary man.

  Even his personal diaries had been a construction, masking who he really was inside.

  Only once did my father reveal a glimpse of his true nature.

  On a page all by itself he wrote, “Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games.”

  EPILOGUE

  IAM ON a book tour. In each city I am greeted by a media escort who picks me up at the airport and drives me to radio stations for interviews, the reading venue, back to the hotel in the evening. I am in Boston for two days. My escort’s name is Ginny and I’m fond of her. It has been a long tour and the herniated disks in my back have made it difficult.

  A number of times I remind myself of my father: as I wince when I lean forward over the baggage claim carousel to pick up my bag; in the morning when I climb out of bed and feel like I’ve been in a car accident. My father has been dead two years. I expected to feel a wave of grief hit me after he was gone but it never came.

  Ginny, though, takes my mind off my back and the fact that it has been almost two months since I have been home and I miss my family. Ginny is a tall, sweating glass of lemonade and as I sit in her car having no idea where I am—the suburbs, somewhere—I am laughing with my head thrown back. The kind of laugh that clenches your stomach and feels, always, overdue and like you will now live a year longer.

  At the end of the day, Ginny tells me, “Tomorrow, I have another author. I’m going to send my husband to take you to your event at Harvard. I hope that’s okay?”

  I tell her it’s absolutely okay. I look forward to meeting her husband.

  She tells me, “He looks like Senator McCain. You can’t miss him.”

  And when he arrives in his fashionably ramshackle 1970s Mercedes sedan, I see
that he does, in fact, look remarkably like the senator.

  With his oxford shirt, his collegiate blazer, khaki slacks, and navy and red diagonal stripe tie, he is the personification of Preppy Classic. Ruggedly handsome, he welcomes me with a firm handshake and a surprising almost bumbling warmth that takes me a little off guard. “Sorry about my car,” he says, swiping up a pile of folders and tossing them in the back. “Everybody tells me I should get rid of it but it still works. No reason to get a new car when this one keeps ticking.”

  There is a sparkle in his eye and I don’t believe him. The real reason he has not traded the old car in for a new one is because this car is the real thing. It’s a little disheveled and extremely classy and the man looks good in the car. And this is why he drives it.

  I smile. I like the guy.

  I don’t pay attention as we take off for Cambridge, because I know I will never drive in Boston. Peeling down the streets, he takes sharp corners, just makes a couple of lights, and delivers us to the venue early and with supreme confidence. We park and start walking.

  My event is in the bookstore. He opens the door for me and it’s always a little embarrassing when another man does this, but I walk through, thanking him. We take the escalator up and realize—wait, we’re in the wrong building. The event is next door.

  “But you know? I think my son’s graduation robe might be here.”

  We’ve paused on a virtually empty floor, most of the lights off. An EMPLOYEES ONLY sign blocks our way from entering the room to our right of this landing. I ask, “Robe?”

  And he explains that next weekend, his son, Sam, will graduate from Harvard Medical School. “They give them green robes to wear at the ceremony, with their names stitched onto the front. I think they’re green. They were last year, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, this is where they store the robes before the ceremony. It should be just in here. But, well, never mind. We should head next door.”