by Bill Clegg
After Mo died, Hap, for the first time, began to question his relationship with the man he saw once a year but had always worshipped. Why only once a year? Why no sleepovers or trips or baseball games? Instead of asking his father directly, he began to avoid him. When his father sent him infrequent emails to make plans or try to schedule phone calls, Hap at first made excuses to evade seeing or speaking with him; eventually, he stopped responding. After Mo’s death, it felt like a posthumous insult to carry on as they had. But it was only partly about Mo; as time passed Hap became less and less comfortable with the man he had his whole life insisted on calling Dad. When Hap was a boy and later when he was in college, Alice suggested he call him by his name, as Hap had always done with her, and with Mo, but he’d refused and kept on saying Dad, which, he sees now, helped convince him that in fact he had one.
Tired of making excuses, Hap eventually agreed to meet Christopher for dinner at a restaurant in Washington Heights to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday, albeit one month and ten days late. At the end of a long and awkward meal, his father pointed out—with what appeared more like curiosity than pain—that it had been seven years since they’d shared a meal. At first it didn’t seem accurate and before Hap responded he counted out the two times they’d seen each other since Mo died. He knew it had been more frequent when he was a kid but how much more? At first he could not recall and then remembered the rule: Father’s Day or birthday, he’d have to pick one or the other so his father could plan ahead to be in Bethlehem in June or July, but never both. Had Hap lied to himself when he thought this was a fun game? Did his father snow him so completely all those years that he didn’t see what was happening? And yet here he was, across another restaurant dinner table, calmly asking what was wrong. He looked at his father’s thick silver hair and the wrinkles around his eyes, the evening stubble along his strong jawline. Abruptly, he recognized that less than three feet away from him sat a man he knew almost nothing about. The table, napkins, water glasses and food between them appeared like unconvincing props in an amateurish portrait of a father having dinner with his adult son. That this was their relationship after almost forty years of meals like the one they were having that night confirmed for Hap that he did not want to have another.
When he remembers that dinner now, he thinks it must have been the last time he was still young enough to make a decision based on the belief that there would always be time. There was his father, nearing seventy, trying to maintain the ultra-thin thread that had been their connection all these years. And in response, Hap ceased all contact. Until that point he’d managed to stay in touch, if erratically. Hap would send the occasional email, forward an article once or twice a year, photographs—of the lobby of The Jerusalem Hotel where he knew his father had stayed many times, of his first desk at The Philadelphia Inquirer. But from that night on, he let his father’s calls go to voicemail, stopped replying to emails and notes, and nine more years passed without seeing him. The next time he would see him would be on the lobby floor of the Hotel Bethlehem.
His father had wanted to meet his granddaughter, that’s what he’d written in his email. The word granddaughter seemed funny coming from this man he once idolized, and also like a lie considering he’d never met his wife, Leah. He had not been at their wedding two years before, not because he chose not to, but because Hap had forgotten to invite him. Alice never reminded him, nor mentioned his absence. But she did include him in a group email announcing the baby’s birth the morning after she was born. Hap received an email from his father later that day stating that he was on his way from New York and would be staying at the Hotel Bethlehem. When Hap emailed back to say he’d check with Leah about timing, he didn’t get a response, just a phone call at eleven the next morning saying he’d arrived.
* * *
Ya gotta go. The voice is a foghorn, loud and blunt.
Bethlehem’s own Maureen O’Hara is clicking off lights and moving out beyond the counter that separates the cafeteria kitchen from the dining area.
We shut down between lunch and dinner.
Hap looks down at the cold, orange, breadcrumb-crusted macaroni and cheese on his plate and realizes he hasn’t yet taken a bite.
Just a sec, he mumbles as he scarfs down a few forkfuls of the rubbery mess, which he swallows with a swig of room temperature milk.
Up Up Up she chants joylessly, both hands animating the directive. Up Up Up.
* * *
By the time Hap arrived at the hotel that morning, his father was lying at the bottom of the main staircase at the far end of the lobby. As he got closer he could smell what he imagined were soiled jeans. His father’s white shirt had dark rings of perspiration expanding from his armpits and one of his brown loafers had come loose, exposing his foot, clad in a dark green sock, bent at the ankle, dangling. Hap walked slowly toward him and heard someone say he was breathing. He was surrounded by hotel employees and a very upset middle-aged woman screaming for someone to call an ambulance. She’d sat down on the lobby floor and put Hap’s father’s head in her lap. She was wiping his sweaty brow with a silk scarf that by the look of her disheveled hair had until moments before been on her head. The image reminded Hap of a pietà he’d seen in the Barnes Museum when he was in high school, before the collection moved to downtown Philadelphia. It was a pastel from a monastery in Italy somewhere and the entire wall had been removed and installed in the museum. That’s what money can do, his teacher mumbled with reverence when the guide described where the image of the doting Madonna came from. Move mountains, museums, monasteries, even. You name it.
The woman, noticing Hap approach, looked up and scanned his face for answers.
Do you know this man?
Hap stared back at her, this stranger haloed in disheveled hair, with rouged cheeks damp with tears, his unconscious father in her lap.
Sir, I’m sorry, do you know him?
I… do… not, he said involuntarily, the unreal moment reducing him to the truth. He watched the makeshift Madonna stroke his father’s silver hair with fingers loaded with rings that tapered to long nails shiny with pale pink polish. For the first time since Hap was a boy, he desperately wanted to know who this man was. Without realizing he was speaking, he looked into the woman’s distraught face and asked, Do you?
Alice
There is no milk. The baby has not been fed and there is no pumped breast milk or formula to fill a bottle with. Alice has texted and called Leah dozens of times, but she does not respond. Despite a powerful reluctance to expose what’s going on with Hap and Leah to her nosy family, she calls her older sister Kay and asks her to pick up formula from the store and bring it over as soon as possible. It’s not ideal but it’s better than nothing. The whole of the baby’s pink and wrinkled body is now devoted to the single effort of screaming, her doll-tiny arms and legs shaking with each grunting wail like loosely attached appendages. They look as weak as Alice feels. She is almost seventy-three now, much older than the last time she did this. And unlike back then, this time she’s on her own. With Hap, and even before Hap, there had been help. There had been Lee.
Alice first met Lee in the fall of her senior year in high school. She’d applied the prior spring to a scholarship that her principal, a tough but fair woman named Marilyn Benedict, knew about, for a young woman who wants to go to Bryn Mawr was how she described it and asked her to write an essay describing what she hoped to achieve by getting a liberal arts education at the elite women’s college. Principal Benedict, herself a Bryn Mawr alum, wrote her a recommendation and sent her transcripts. At the end of September, she drove Alice in her Jeep to the Saucon Valley Country Club, a vast brick building that looked to Alice as big as her high school. When they pulled up, the woman whom Principal Benedict had instructed her to address as Mrs. Beach was standing to the left of the front entrance. She was elegant, dressed simply but expensively in a gray cashmere sweater set and navy silk skirt, and appeared nervous. Mrs. Beach was younger than Alice ha
d imagined from the little she’d been told about her: that she was a widow without children whose husband had been high up at Bethlehem Steel.
Once inside, they sat next to each other in silence for a few difficult minutes on the sofa in a kind of waiting room just off the lobby entrance to the club. The poised woman seemed to expect Alice to initiate their conversation. It’s very nice to meet you, she heard herself saying like an idiotic child would speak on a TV show. Gee, Mister. Golly, Mam. That sort of thing.
It’s very nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Beach responded, with what sounded to Alice like disappointment which was distressing because she had by now determined that there was a lot riding on this meeting. Her parents had told her over the summer that as far as they were concerned there was no money for college. If she was so eager not to go to work after high school like everyone else, she should apply for scholarships and continue to save her babysitting money and maybe consider nursing school at St. Luke’s. Nursing school was their idea of a college education and the far limit of what they could envision for their daughter who was not only a straight-A student and class secretary, but clear front-runner for valedictorian. Nursing school made sense to them because a good paying job waited on the other end. Liberal arts as a general concept did not go very far in Alice’s family. Liberal anything sounds like a waste of money to me, her father had offered, more than once. Alice didn’t know what she wanted but she knew that it wasn’t in Bethlehem. She wanted a big change and without knowing why exactly she knew a place like Bryn Mawr—where Principal Benedict went to college, and, she’d read, Katharine Hepburn—looked like just such a place. Mrs. Beach could make it happen. Alice remembers the next sentences she spoke as if she’d just said them. I’m aware that Bryn Mawr is a very competitive and expensive college. I’ve never received less than an A– on a paper or an exam and I don’t intend to start now, especially if I’m given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend such a great school. I’m very nervous at the moment, but I’m not a nervous girl. I’m only nervous because I’ve never had such an important meeting with anyone. Mrs. Beach, I hope you don’t mind me being direct. I just want you to know where I stand. I’m sure you’ve met lots of girls over the years and will probably meet many this year, too. But none of them will want what you have to offer more than I do, or be more deserving.
She had no idea where it came from. She hadn’t rehearsed or imagined what she might say. There was no situation she could compare this one to, so she’d gone in, she realized later, utterly unprepared. Still, the words came flying out, and Alice recognized right away how Mrs. Beach seemed to relax. She seemed as relieved as Alice felt, and when they exhaled at the same time, there was a brief amused moment of surprise. Mrs. Beach smiled and the barrier between them fell.
Please, Alice, call me Lee And, no, I don’t mind your being direct. I don’t mind at all.
And so began a cordial, formal relationship that by the summer before Alice left for college, had become something more. At Bryn Mawr, Alice saw Lee for lunch or supper a few times each semester, by junior year she’d occasionally come home to Bethlehem and stay at Lee’s farm in Allentown and not tell her family. And in between they spoke on the phone at least a few times a month. From the start, Lee helped Alice with more than tuition and dormitory fees. She helped her navigate the world of well-to-do girls from New York and Philadelphia and even made sure she had the right clothes and appropriate luggage to arrive with before the first fall semester. She took her shopping at Strawbridge’s in Philadelphia several times a year and at Christmas to Lord & Taylor in New York. She lent her a double strand of pearls from Tiffany that her husband had given her as an anniversary present and when she graduated gave them to her as a gift along with a typewriter and a trip to London that she accompanied her on. They stayed at Claridge’s and visited the Courtauld Institute and the National Portrait Gallery and wandered Hampstead Heath one afternoon until it became evening. By then, Alice knew she wanted to be an educator like her early mentor Marilyn Benedict, but at the university level, in the world where she’d felt happiest and most herself. Since her grandfather’s stories of her family working for Bethlehem Steel and building ships for the Civil War, Alice was fascinated by how her gritty town figured into the larger story of the country, how it was once thriving and then not, and the historical forces responsible. As she approached the next phase of her education she chose American History and eventually the role that the Lehigh Valley and the steel industry played in the Civil War as the subject of her PhD.
There were no boys at Bryn Mawr and Alice did not make meeting them a priority. She was never the prettiest girl in a room. She was slim and, according to Lee, had enviable hands and an elegant neck; but she also once joked, lovingly, that if there were bets on who would become a college professor based on looks she’d be the clear winner every time. She wore cat-eyed glasses, had slightly protruding teeth, a gift from her mother, and wore her hair in a simple flip in the style of Mary Tyler Moore on her TV show, a variation of which she maintained into her seventies. No one had come along until Christopher and when he ended things it confirmed what she had suspected from the beginning: that not only was he too good to be true, but that she was also not the type of girl who got married.
A few days after Christopher had called to tell Alice about his father’s death, he phoned again to say he was coming to Philadelphia for the funeral and suggested they have lunch. Alice was living at Lee’s farm that year. She’d begun her job at Lehigh by then, teaching and working toward her doctorate, and was saving money on living expenses. It also made being alone—for both of them—easier. Lee had been sick with pneumonia over the summer and Alice wanted to stay close in case she needed anything after her maid left in the evening.
Christopher came to the farm and though only a little more than a year had passed since their breakup, there was something less boyish about him. He was more assured, and despite prevailing ideas about homosexuality that might have suggested the opposite, he was more manly. He’d grown up, whereas before he was still a starry-eyed boy with secrets and anger, playing a part. He still had the same gift for storytelling, and he took his time telling Alice about his father’s funeral, how no one but his nephews, who were still children, greeted him warmly. His mother was ill and when he called to arrange a time to visit, his aunt told him she’d rather he didn’t, that it would upset her. His oldest brother actually said what was on most of their minds: You blew it. What did the lifestyle you chose have to do with any of us? You should have just left it alone, kept the family out of it. Though hard to hear, it was not surprising, and made his decision to stay away easier. These were not his people, they’d made that clear. He told Alice that he felt no guilt or regret with his family. Only grief. The one regret he had, and the reason he asked to meet, was having misled her. He had used her, and the cover of their relationship, as a last ditch effort to avoid coming clean to himself and to his family, he realized now. He asked what he could do to make it up to her. She said she forgave him, even if his words felt more for his peace of mind than hers, and that there was nothing he could do for her. But as Christopher left he made a point to say that if she ever needed anything from him, anything at all, she should not hesitate to ask.
Hap
When he steps from the elevator and sees the two nurses standing outside the room, he knows his father is dead. The short, older nurse disappears through the doorway when she notices Hap coming toward them; the other one looks down as she folds her long skinny arms across her chest and nervously tucks her fists into her armpits. She hunches her shoulders and hugs herself, appears suddenly cold. Hap shivers, as if by suggestion, and slows to a halt between the elevator and his father’s room. He has never been less sure what to do.
A plump, sunburned doctor who looks no more than twenty-five years old steps into the hallway. Hap has not seen him in the ICU before and for a moment considers the possibility that he’s an imposter. As the young man approaches him,
Hap’s mind lurches for ways to discredit him. He lands on and quickly abandons the possibility that his performance is actually an elaborate initiation ritual at a Lehigh fraternity. Before he can come up with alternate theories, the guy speaks.
Hello, I’m Dr. Leventhal, I’m filling in for Dr. Baker who I know has been treating your father.
His voice, discordant with his college boy face, sounds like gravel and rock salt and is at least two octaves deeper than Hap’s. It is oddly reassuring, despite its unlikely source. He says Hap’s father’s name out loud, kindly, as if he’d known about him for years. Christopher I understand Christopher Foster was your father.
Was.
Once again, Hap senses this man might be lying and in fact has never seen his father. He scans his face but sees nothing but a shiny red forehead and an ingrown hair under his (also red) nose. But when he looks into his uncomplicated brown eyes he knows that what he’s saying is true.
I’m so sorry, he went very quickly, he started hemorrhaging and went into cardiac arrest…
Went.
… something his doctors had been working very hard to prevent. But with what looked like a preexisting heart condition and high blood pressure, I’m afraid the odds were more stacked against him than we realized. I’m very sorry. One of the nurses tried to find you but it was too late.
Too late.
The doctor keeps speaking but his words are just sounds and Hap looks beyond him to the young nurse who hunches slightly, as if she’s waiting for a bus on a cold night without proper clothing. The doctor stops talking and squeezes Hap’s right shoulder. Like his voice, his grip is stronger than his physicality suggests. Hap knows he should thank him for doing his best but he says nothing. He knows he should start walking toward his father’s room, but he won’t move. Not yet. To say anything or step from where he stands would be to accept what has happened. By remaining silent, and precisely where he is, it stays unreal, before fact.