by Bill Clegg
Part Two
Hap
His father sings in his sleep. Mostly jingles from the forties—Brylcreem, Schlitz beer, Camel cigarettes. How mild, how mild, how mild can a cigarette be? Smoke Camels and see. His voice is radio smooth, soothing, at least two octaves higher than his regular speaking voice, and sounds young, despite his seventy-nine years. In between the jingles, the same old Bing Crosby song, “Swinging on a Star.” Carry moonbeams home in a jar…
After four days sitting at his father’s bedside, Hap only now notices that the tissue-thin hospital gown bunching around his neck is covered in snowflakes. Small and blue and perfectly spaced a quarter inch or so from each other against worn, gray cotton, their whimsy in this decidedly non-whimsical hospital room like a knock-knock joke slipped into a eulogy.
How many people have worn this gown, Hap wonders. And how often did those sitting bedside wince when they realized their loved ones were covered in snowflakes? Maybe for some it was a comfort, something that lifted their mood, amused them even, if only briefly. Possibly this was the point of the design: to sneak light into a situation that had none. Is that what his father’s subconscious was doing now, returning to these old songs?
Hap had been aware, dimly, from a story he’d overheard Alice, his mother, tell when he was a kid, that his father sang advertising jingles on the radio in college for pocket money. But that’s all he knew—it never occurred to Hap to find out more. It was the same with his father’s job as a photographer with a news agency. He knew little more than that it required him to travel to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Another murky half-fact that speckled what little he knew of his father’s life, most of which—like singing in college—now sparked more questions than answers. Four days after Hap’s father had fallen down the lobby staircase at the Hotel Bethlehem, surfacing from more than twenty-four unconscious hours, not recognizing his son or knowing his own name, Hap knew his chance for answers had likely passed.
His father mumble-hums the Bing Crosby again. The words are now marbles in his mouth, impossible to decipher, but his pitch is still perfect, the sound carefree, bright, from a long-ago time in his father’s life when the future was more vivid and mattered more than the present. When he still had a future, Hap thinks bitterly, standing up and away from the bed, the idea of a point in life where the future ceased—for his father, for him, for anyone—settling on him now, at forty-eight, like a slow, cold fog. He leans awkwardly against the wall next to the one small window in the room, a single pane with no handle or latch that looks over a narrow courtyard to another bank of small-windowed rooms.
Across the way, two floors below, a teenager curls in a window well, head down, arms up and tangled across his face; back and legs twisted into a pretzel that from two flights up looks cozy. Only a kid could bend his body into such a small space, Hap thinks. And only an oblivious, self-centered boy could find comfort here.
The exact type of medical calamity the boy is attending is out of view from where Hap stands, the only visible clues a short expanse of putty-colored linoleum floor, and what looks like a pile of coats on a gray metal chair, a perfect replica of the one Hap has been sitting in. He can’t help but wonder who in this boy’s life suffers just out of sight in the same bed his father lies in now, under the same water-stained dropped ceiling, between the same pale pink walls (besides the snowflakes, the only other flicker of whimsy in the place). The boy twists again but miraculously retains his leg and arm-knotted, torso-bent shape, like a snake in motion, coiled. A flash of resentment heats to an instant and sharp pain at Hap’s temples. Is there anything more galling than the sight of a young man? More revolting than all that possibility possessed by a creature so completely ignorant of it? Fuck no, Hap answers his own questions, out loud and louder than he intends, looking away and back toward his father, who is silent now, his chest rising and falling mechanically with the thrum and wheeze of the oxygen machine wheeled alongside the bed. This here, this mess is the very opposite of the rubber-limbed nimrod below.
Young and dumb and full of cum, the crude phrase pops into his head uninvited, something he must have heard in a movie he’d seen on HBO, or, even more likely, something his childhood best friend Gene would have said in high school, or even now over dinner to provoke Hap’s wife, Leah. As if they were both in the room now, huddled on either side of him looking out the window, Hap can hear Gene reduce the boy with this phrase, and in response he can hear Leah just as clearly, with false playfulness and palpable sarcasm in her voice: Playing the part of Gene Grant this evening: Gene Grant! But looking at the boy now, a simple pile of limbs and skin and solipsistic impulses, he can’t help but see him as Gene would. A lucky little fucker.
Hap slumps into the window well. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to silence his mind by picturing Leah and their newborn and still unnamed baby girl curled in his childhood bed at Alice’s house less than a mile away. He has seen them only briefly in four days; the last time, yesterday afternoon in the hospital lobby for twenty minutes. Leah pleaded with Hap to come back to his mother’s house and spend the night. Hap, I can spell you here. I’ll sit with your father, sleep in the chair next to him, while you get some rest and spend time with the baby. When he said he couldn’t, the angles of her face shifted from exhausted and compassionate to fully alert and impatient. She grabbed his wrists and as she spoke her voice pierced above the lobby noises and people nearby turned to see. Leah did not quiet her words. You’re missing it, Hap. She’s been alive six days and you were around for exactly one and a half of them. Your father is unconscious, and it’s terrible, but your daughter is awake—every three hours, around the clock, hungry and beautiful. Her first week is nearly over and you won’t be able to go back to day two where you left off and experience it when you’re ready. When it’s done, it’s done.
The pain at his temples has spread to the top and back of his head. He holds his face in both hands. He thinks about the most recent names Leah has suggested—Kelly, Emma, Faith—all three from her family: aunt, sister, grandmother. He tries to remember his daughter’s pink, bunched face to see if any of the names stick. But he can’t. He’d spent so little time with her before he left abruptly. Since then he’s seen and held her only twice, briefly. He tries to picture her again and fails. All he can remember is her jet-black tufts of hair, nothing like his or Leah’s shades of blond.
He rubs his eyes out of frustration and what he sees instead of his daughter’s face is his boss’s a few months ago, reacting when he told her he was leaving The Philadelphia Inquirer to be a stay-at-home dad for a few years. Amused disbelief gave way to confusion and eventually landed on contempt. His boss was new, a forty-something former New York Times culture editor who’d taken a buyout and moved to Philly for the job. She and Hap barely knew each other, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the conversation that followed was a short one amounting to asking Hap to pack up his office and surrender his building pass and bathroom key. Eighteen years at the Inquirer as a reporter and editor and a finger pointed to HR was his goodbye. His remaining friends at the paper—most were laid off or had left in the last decade of mergers and downsizing—organized a send-off in the bar at the Outback Steakhouse not far from the old department store building where the paper moved after its once-grand, long-occupied fortress had been sold. They shoved three tables together, wrapped a bottle of tequila with the sports page, and toasted to his early retirement. Hope your wife doesn’t get fired, he’d heard as he put on his coat and said his goodbyes. He recognized the tipsy lisp of a young, recently hired online advertising guy: It’s not like editorial jobs for middle-aged white guys at newspapers are growing on trees. Indeed. Leah’s job as associate dean of interdisciplinary programs at Lehigh looked pretty secure but so had the newspaper business, which had steadily been constricting around him for the last fifteen or so years. Perhaps a college education of the four-year, liberal arts variety would soon be considered just as unnecessary as the morning paper.
Hap closes his eyes and starts to hum, an old trick his mother taught him to empty his mind when he was stressed. When he opens his eyes and looks down across the courtyard, the boy in the window is gone. Worry replaces bitterness and Hap squints to see who or what has called the kid away. But there is no information in what he sees: an unobstructed view of the floor, the metal chair, the shucked coats, a wedge of pink wall. No glimpse of the wrecked body causing the teenager to be in the hospital on a Tuesday morning; nothing to suggest who from his enviably young, dumb life was strung up with tubes pumping painkillers and antibiotics into their weary veins, dozing under a thin garment of snowflakes, singing songs for the last time.
Alice
She’d forgotten about babies. Not since her twenties, when Hap was an infant, had she experienced the immediate and finely tuned connection between a brand-new life and its mother. She hadn’t remembered that like the most sensitive barometers, newborns gauge grades of absence and attention, fear and frustration, even in the most present parent, reacting instantly to the faintest disturbance; sometimes, happily, with coos and giggles, but much more frequently with fussing and volcanic screaming.
Her granddaughter, still unnamed at six days old, and still too new in the world for coos and giggles, has wailed almost nonstop since Hap and Leah brought her home from the hospital. Hap had been with them for a day and a morning before he left to meet Christopher at the hotel and never came back. And now Leah’s disappearances keep getting longer. At first she would politely hand Alice the baby with apology and profuse thanks and then step outside to call Hap, usually without success, leaving messages and sending texts until she came storming back through the front door ten or fifteen minutes later. Now she doesn’t bother to say she’s heading out, just throws her coat on and either leaves the baby screaming in the bassinet or thrusts her into Alice’s arms as if somehow she’s to blame—not only for the child’s upset, but for Hap’s abandonment.
Today marks Leah’s longest absence. She left after three and has been gone for more than two hours. No texts or messages of explanation, nor any promises to return. She’s following her husband’s example, claiming her own freedom in a time when she should be surrendering to the blunt truth that for now and the near future she has none. Meanwhile, their child screams—for milk, diaper changes, and constant, round-the-clock love, the warm skin of her mother’s arm and hands and breasts. Alice walks the house patting her tiny back, bouncing gently, mimicking the snug safety of the womb she’s just left. After completing yet another lap around the upstairs bedrooms and hall and beginning to descend the stairs, she feels, and not for the first time in the last few days, a creeping sense of history repeating itself, delivering a twisted karmic taunt. She wonders if this is the closing of a long, old loop or the beginning of a new one. Or perhaps a shadow from another time dancing on the wall to remind her what Mo always said: There are no accidents, no chance encounters. Only the plan, unfolding as it was always meant to.
So much of Alice’s life seemed determined by happenstance and accident it was hard to accept the idea of a predetermined destiny. She found the suggestion insulting, as if she’d had nothing to do with any of it. Still, she knew how someone’s arrival or exit could reroute your life. For Alice, Christopher’s arrival and his exit had done just that.
* * *
He’d given her his seat on the bus. That’s how it began. She was coming back from a job interview at Sarah Lawrence College and nearly missed the five-thirty Greyhound to Philadelphia. By the time she boarded the bus it was filled with commuters and holiday shoppers and many of the women, and some men, had loaded the seats next to them with department store bags packed with wrapped gifts. Most were turned toward the windows feigning sleep or simply scowling to discourage anyone from asking them to make room. There was nowhere to sit. And then a hand on the back of her arm and a friendly voice. Here, Miss, take my seat. It was such a simple act, one that from the distance of years seems kind, of course, but also perfectly ordinary. Still, it was the moment that brought Christopher Foster into her life. She can’t remember exactly how she responded to him, if she spoke or gestured her appreciation, but she does remember the young man grabbing his small overnight bag from the floor in front of him and retreating to the back of the bus where, she would find out later, he’d persuaded an older gentleman—a talkative dressmaker from Chestnut Hill who made regular trips to the garment district in New York—to allow him to help move the bolts of fabric from the seat next to him to the rack above.
It does not surprise Alice to remember who sat next to Christopher but not who sat beside her. She can even recall the fabrics the dressmaker bought that day—dark paisley silk and ivory velvet—but has no memory of what she wore. It would have included a blazer of some kind—she’d always worn a blazer on job interviews—but whether it was the navy or the gray one, slacks or skirt, turtleneck or blouse, she has no idea. This was what frequently happened to her with Christopher. He told stories about his life in such a way that they eclipsed whatever else might have been competing for her attention; in them he animated his world so vividly and with such precision and intimacy, that it came to matter more to her than her own.
When the bus pulled into the Philadelphia station, Alice waited in her seat so she could thank him when he passed. As he made his way down the narrow aisle and came into view, she was caught off-guard by his looks. She’d only had a brief glimpse when he’d offered his seat; she was too harried from rushing and too desperate to find somewhere to sit down to get a good look at him. But she could see him now. With thick, fair hair and dark blue eyes, dressed in a white button-down shirt, brown corduroy slacks, and a short, half-zipped navy cotton jacket, he was the epitome of her idea, then, of a clean-cut, handsome young man. He looked like Ryan O’Neal in Peyton Place. As he approached, Alice forgot what she wanted to say to him. Are you ok? he asked and gently touched her arm for the second time that day.
Right away, they started dating. Christopher was working for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the city desk. Alice was completing her PhD at Penn, beginning to search for a teaching position at a university. For six months it was a whirlwind of meals in the immigrant neighborhoods of Philadelphia and weekend trips to New York where Christopher still kept his apartment from his undergraduate years at NYU and journalism school at Columbia. He introduced her to Japanese steak houses and off-the-grid soul food restaurants where people served biscuits and chicken on fold-up tables in their garages. He also took her to her first rally to protest the war in Vietnam. Alice had studied United States history with a focus on Pennsylvania and New York during the Civil War. She had been somewhat sequestered in the protected bubble of Bryn Mawr, though less so at Penn, and she didn’t consider herself political. She followed the news and feared, as most people she knew did, an escalation of the conflict. After the Gulf of Tonkin attack the year before, she became especially worried for her cousins who were in their late teens and likely to get called up. But her relationship to events was distant compared to Christopher’s friends, who were either conscientious objectors burning their draft cards or active in anti-war rallies and publications. Some had even been arrested. Christopher was against the war but did not burn his card. He said if he was drafted he would go, that he didn’t believe in the war, but if he had to serve he would use it as an opportunity to photograph what was happening. When he first explained this to Alice, she thought he was unbelievably brave and more than a little naive. But the longer she knew him, the more she suspected it was the fear of retribution from his family that kept him from setting fire to that piece of paper. In the end, he never got called up. He was thirty-one by the time the first lottery was conducted in 1969 and the boys who went were mostly teenagers or in their early twenties.
Christopher was restless in the winter and spring of 1966. He was stringing at The Inquirer but itching to leave the East Coast and work where important things were happening. Alice had dated boys in school but none o
f them had ever cared about anything the way Christopher did. And until then she’d not been open to much more than the occasional date and had little interest in passionate men. She’d been focused on her studies and had worked babysitting and dining hall jobs to pay rent, buy food, clean her clothes, afford bus-fare—the day-to-day expenses not covered by the scholarships that had delivered her from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She kept in touch with her family but they still teased her for getting too smart for them, too big for her britches. The accusations, even in jest, bothered her, so Alice came home on weekends just frequently enough that her mother stopped sending postcards with notes on the back reporting that everyone wondered when she’d come home next.
Falling in love with Christopher—a project her family could understand and fully support without hesitation—gave her a pass not to see them so much. Christopher had a very different relationship to his family, but they, too, appeared relieved to see he’d finally begun to get serious about someone. According to his brother’s wife, Ellen, whom Alice met only once, Christopher had not introduced a girl to the family since high school. At the time, it made sense to Alice that he kept his personal life discrete from his family whose politics and beliefs were at odds with his own. Both his parents were politically and socially conservative—his father an Eastern District federal judge in Philadelphia and his mother a housewife who spent most of her time involved in fund-raising efforts for the restoration of local landmarks as well as the private day school for girls she’d attended. Alice knew the school because many of her classmates from Bryn Mawr had gone there.