by Bill Clegg
At the beginning, it was Lee, of course, who helped the most. Because of the fiction of Oxford, Alice basically hid on the farm until the end of summer. In those first sequestered months after Lupita left, Alice and Lee would spell each other six hours on, six hours off and eventually Lee hired a nurse to cover her shifts. I’m too old for this, she told Alice one morning. I told Dana I’d help her and so I have. But it’s time for me to get some sleep again.
Alice and Hap stayed at Lee’s farm until he was ten months old. When they moved it was to the house she lives in now, a modest two-story Victorian she purchased with a ten-thousand-dollar down payment from Lee.
Six years later, Lee died. She came down with bronchitis, which worsened quickly to pneumonia, the third time she’d had it happen since Alice had known her. This time it didn’t go away. Alice and Hap moved back to the farm that winter. Lee refused to go to St. Luke’s, so Alice organized a schedule of nurses always to be on hand. Lee’s brother was recovering from back surgery in Florida so he and his wife did not come to see her. Dana, who was living in London, called most mornings before Alice left the house to go to work and drop Hap off at school, but she did not come.
Alice held Lee’s hand at the end, while a nurse stood by, monitoring her fluids and morphine. Before her breath became too labored and the morphine overwhelmed her consciousness, Lee tried to speak. You came…, she wheezed from flooded lungs, a faint suggestion of a smile wrinkling her dried lips.
A few weeks after she passed, Lee’s lawyer, the same one who had organized the adoption, called Alice to let her know that Lee had left a trust in Hap’s name that would pay for his college and any degree-seeking graduate studies he chose. If for whatever reason he decided not to further his education after high school, the trust would revert to the scholarship fund she’d created to grant young women from the public school systems in Bethlehem or Allentown a college education, one specifically to Bryn Mawr and another to any four-year college or university. For this, Alice was appointed sole administrator for as long as she was capable and she would also be responsible for appointing her successor so long as it was a woman. To Alice she left her jewelry, her clothing, and her books, as well as an account to draw funds from whenever she needed for whatever purpose she chose. The accountants would take care of inheritance taxes. There were no stipulations or protocols; in the will it said very specifically, I trust her. The rest of the estate—the farm and whatever investments existed, were to be liquidated and distributed to the trust, the scholarship fund, and the endowments at Bryn Mawr and Dartmouth, where her husband had gone to college. Alice was not told how much there was, but when she asked, Lee’s lawyer told her that it did not matter. He handed her the blue plastic–covered checkbook, like any checkbook from any bank, and said simply, There will always be enough.
* * *
Alice often tried to imagine what Lupita’s life became, where she ended up, whether or not she ever had another child. Mostly she thought of her when something occurred with Hap that seemed like something a mother would want to know. But when she’d been tempted to find her, to write or send a photograph or clipping, she remembered that morning on the cottage porch, how important it was to Lupita that the break between them be total. Still, when Hap’s traveling soccer team won their division championship in sixth grade, Alice clipped the photograph of him scoring the winning goal in The Morning Call and put it inside a shoe box with pictures from most of his birthday parties and Christmas mornings. Over the years she added more clippings—the Honor Roll, various sports victories, a piece in the Express about his becoming a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, both her parents’ obituaries which listed Hap as a surviving grandson. In the pile there was also an issue of the Freedom High School newspaper that contained the article Hap wrote about Christopher and his job as a war photographer. These were not keepsakes for Hap or for her. Each one was something that at one point or other, Alice had the urge to send to Lupita. Of course she wanted her to know that life had turned out well for him, that he was a happy kid and a well-adjusted adult, but she recognized, too, that a part of her wanted Lupita to know that she’d kept her word. Alice was his mother and her family was his family; he was loved and he never doubted who he was or whether he belonged. The last item she put in the box was Hap’s wedding announcement along with a copy of the program that listed the groomsmen and bridesmaids, families and speakers. Stroking the sleeping, jet-black tufted head of Lupita’s granddaughter, Alice knew what the next would be: one small lock of hair. A trace of proof she wished she could share but was bound by a promise not to.
Hap
His father was a man who carried very little. In his windbreaker pocket was a debit card and an iPhone, and in the room at the Hotel Bethlehem there had been a change of underwear and socks, a thin billfold with a driver’s license and a twenty-dollar bill, a toothbrush, a bottle of mixed pills and a pair of reading glasses. On the bus ride to Port Authority, Hap folded, held and arranged each item in different configurations on his lap. There was a set of keys, a small, thin one, for a mailbox, he imagined, two stainless steel Hillmans and a bronze Medeco. When he called Alice to tell her he was going to New York, to his father’s apartment, to find an address book to begin contacting the people who needed to be contacted, she urged him to hold off going until he’d spent a few more days home with Leah and their daughter. Stay a day, at least, she said. Leah needs you and not just to help and be with the baby, but she’s starting to come apart, Hap. This can happen. Hap heard her words, but instead of making him feel like he needed to rush home, it instigated a new sense of urgency to complete what he’d started, his father’s death like an unavoidable rite of passage. Until he’d seen it through, he knew he could not be what Leah, or his daughter, needed. Hap told Alice he’d be back early the next day.
Less than three hours after getting off the phone with Alice, he is standing at the door of a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Horatio Street.
Can I help you? A woman’s voice calls up the dark stairwell. Hello?
Slow, shuffling footsteps follow. They sound like the noise that slippers make, not shoes.
Excuse me…
The shuffling stops for a moment.
Hello?, she chimes loudly.
The shuffling begins again and after a minute the slippers and the large woman they belong to ascend into view. Hap sees long gray hair first and then a very large red wool cardigan sweater awkwardly tied with a sash to contain what must have once been traffic-stopping breasts. Hap flinches as the woman plunks her last slippered foot above the final stair and the sloppy knot of her sash loosens further.
Excuse me. I’ve been calling out to you. It’s a good thing I didn’t need your help; otherwise I’d be in real trouble.
The woman is in her mid-seventies at the very least and speaks with a half-smile that is either from forced cheer or from pain or both. She has sharp cheekbones that tent folds of pale wrinkled skin which drape below her jawline.
Hello? It is now time for you to speak.
There is something so disarming about this woman, so direct and strange, so fearless, that Hap is momentarily speechless.
The woman begins again before he is able to form a response. Shall I call the police and have them help us communicate? You and I aren’t doing so very well on our own, are we? She is still simultaneously smiling and wincing and her tone is breezy which makes what she is saying difficult to fully appreciate at first listen.
Hap stumbles through an explanation of how his father has lived here. That he’d died, yesterday, four days after falling down in the lobby of a hotel. A brain hemorrhage followed by a heart attack. He’d come to Pennsylvania to meet his granddaughter who was just born.
I’m here to collect his things, I guess, to see if I can find some kind of address book or computer file with names of friends and other family members to call.
The woman stares at Hap for a very long time. Her look is utterly blank, not probing or dou
btful, just frozen, perfectly expressionless. She breaks her stare with a blink and her eyes complicate, appear pink at the edges, glisten in the dim light. Hap expects her to speak, but instead she turns back to the stairs she rose from and with one hand on the wall to steady her, she plops one foot down on the first step, and then the other.
What is your name?, she asks for the first time, her back to him.
Hap, he responds, his voice mysteriously scratching and breaking, like an adolescent.
No, she corrects him, the light in her voice wobbling. What is your full name?
Hap Foster. On my passport it says Hapworth.
Your parents…, the woman says doubtfully, wiping her eyes and drawing a deep breath.
I’ve known Christopher for more years than you’ve been alive. She descends another step and grabs the metal banister. Carefully, she turns around on the stair to face Hap. With her free hand, she points to the door where he stands. He’s had the apartment right there since he was at NYU, when my parents rented it to him. Not many men stay in a studio apartment for that long, but Christopher… your father, as you say… never minded.
Both hands free now, she pulls her sweater more tightly around her and to Hap’s great relief re-ties the sash. She speaks again, a mix of doubt and pity in her voice.
He’s lived here since he was a boy and he never once mentioned a son.
She looks up at the ceiling and sighs as if facing a vast, costly renovation. Eventually she drops her gaze to Hap, and looks surprised to see him there. She draws a short breath and grunts as she exhales, sounding both defeated and in pain. With her free hand she signals for him to carry on trying to find the correct key. She then turns back to the stairs and starts back down again. Once she’s disappeared from view, he hears her speak one last time, but this time softly, sincerely:
My dear, if you need anything, I’m in 1C, in the apartment exactly three floors below Christopher’s.
Christopher. Never has his father’s name sounded more like a stranger’s.
So much of what his parents had told him never quite held up: their trite stories about meeting on a bus, their quickly dissolved marriage. But why had he not pressed either of them for more details before? Did he sense that the skimpy history they stuck to hid something he didn’t want to know? For a few minutes, leaning into the door, the correct key now in the lock but unturned, Hap questions whether he should proceed any further. Wasn’t there already plenty to confront without revealing more? Wincing, he turns the key in the lock and shoves the door open.
The first thing he sees is a brown leather briefcase sitting at the center of a threadbare rug like a loyal dog waiting for its owner to come home. Hap ignores it at first, scanning the four walls, one window, small sink and two-burner electric stovetop. There is a Murphy bed folded into the wall with wrinkled sheets drooping around the edges. This is not how he imagined his father living. As a kid, and after, the glamour of his exploits, the overall impression of his importance, and the nice restaurants where they met each year—all of it painted a very different picture. Hap shuts the door behind him and tries to make sense of what he sees. There are two framed photographs on the wall of children in what looks like India, standing waist-deep in water. In both images there are three boys and a girl laughing, eyes wide, transfixed by the figure snapping the photograph whose shadow falls over and around them in a long, exaggerated silhouette of a man. They seem oblivious to the Tetra Pak cartons and aluminum cans bobbing at their backs. They are, Hap recognizes, as he once was, transfixed. By the same man wearing a white shirt and worn jeans, with a Leica camera around his neck and other places in his eyes.
There is a teak and wicker lounge chair by the window with scuffed legs and low wide armrests. It is the only piece of furniture in the apartment besides a small table and two chairs next to the kitchenette. Hap sits down and allows his back and shoulders to relax into the forgiving weave. Somewhere in the building a Dolly Parton song is playing. It’s faint but unmistakable and when it shifts to the part where Dolly is speaking and not singing Hap knows it’s “Yellow Roses,” an old favorite of his mother’s. Hap runs his hands along the chair’s worn armrests and strains to hear the lyrics, which come through the floorboards like a riddle from the other side, You said goodbye like you said hello… with a single yellow rose. The teak wood is soft against his skin. He runs his thumb along its dents and dark stains and tries to picture his father here, reading, listening to music, napping. He imagines a coffee mug resting alongside him and it occurs to him that for all the meals they shared he cannot remember if his father drank coffee or tea. He looks toward the sink and sees a drying rack with a brown ceramic mug but no coffee maker. On one of the two stovetop burners there is a newish silver kettle and so Hap decides it must be tea that his father drank in the spot where he sits now. Hap closes his eyes, exhausted by all that he does not know.
Another song rises like slow smoke from the apartment below. Rickie Lee Jones. He doesn’t know the words but remembers Mo and his mother singing the song in the kitchen. He would have still been in high school, living at home. More than likely it was a weekend morning when they made almond flour pancakes topped with whipped cream Mo made from coconuts. He remembers wishing he made normal pancakes with Log Cabin syrup and not the hippie substitute like all the other weird hippie substitutes Mo had brainwashed his mother into loving. Hap remembers the song because it made no sense as Mo sang it and he was sure he had the lyrics wrong. A weasel in a White Boy’s School. We’re all in a white Boy’s School. Just like a weasel…
What are you SAYING, he’d challenged Mo. You’re mangling the words. What does a weasel have to do with school? And instead of answering, Mo smiled and sang and flipped his pancakes.
There is no wrong way to sing a song, his mother injected. Even if you wrote the song yourself. There are ways that might more or less resemble the first time you sang it, or ways people might find easier to hear or understand. But there are no wrong ways.
He remembers Mo watching his mother that morning. He looked like he was seeing her for the first time, like she looked at Hap when he gave her a story he’d written in school, or, when he was younger, handing her something he’d found on the street—an old, pale green, glass electricity conductor that once sat atop a telephone pole, an unwrapped bar of Ivory soap, an Oregon license plate. Even in high school, Hap could recognize love and here it was, brazen and unashamed and real.
Below him the song shifts to what sounds like Leonard Cohen—someone else Mo and his mother listened to. Hap still can’t shake the memory of Mo’s adoring gaze. He doesn’t remember specifically wishing his father were with them that morning instead of Mo, but he knows he did so thousands of times. He also does not remember wishing that Mo would die that day, but now, in his dead father’s tiny apartment, he knows that he did. He’d wished him dead—not because he’d hated him, but because even if he hadn’t been responsible for his father leaving, Mo blocked the possibility of his return.
It surprises Hap to see himself so clearly now, and to recognize that he too had written a false story of his family. To Leah and to anyone else he would have said Mo was a great guy and good husband to his mother. And in the moment he would have meant what he said. Even after Mo died, when he first began to see how little he knew him, he still avoided some of the harder truths of their time together. In this friendly family there was a boy who wanted the man who shared a bed with his mother dead. Hap holds his head in his hands and, as he has done so many times in the last four days, squeezes his skull and rubs his palms across his eyes and face.
There is too much to know, he thinks, noting that his phone has not buzzed with a new text or voicemail in hours. He pictures Leah leaving his mother’s house with their daughter, a cab outside waiting to take them to an airport to fly to her older sister’s house in Naples, Florida. When he called from the mortuary to tell her he was leaving for New York, she hung up the phone. Leah was like this. Words, many of them—wri
tten and spoken and at every decibel level and pitch in voicemails and emails and texts—and then nothing. After a bad fight when she’d pull away, it would take weeks, sometimes months, to re-establish intimacy.
The first time he’d encountered her capacity to shut down was a few months after they’d started dating, the night he introduced her to Gene. Hap had recently transitioned from reporting to editing at the paper, and Leah was getting her PhD at Penn. He had the idea that by coming up to New York for the night to see a play, the dinner before would be short and Gene wouldn’t drink too much. Leah had an alcoholic mother and though Hap didn’t know all the particulars of what went on in her house when she was young, he knew it was bad enough for her to move in with her aunt and uncle her sophomore year of high school and live there until she went to college. Leah did not drink and Hap deliberately kept to one beer or glass of wine when they were together, but Gene was a five-vodkas-at-dinner kind of guy, on a slow night. The pressure Gene described being under at the law firm he’d started at sounded horrifying and in the last year Hap had seen him erupt into arguments with waiters and passersby after he’d had too much. For these reasons, Hap was not in a hurry for Leah to meet him. But most of his stories from growing up involved Gene, so Leah pressed. The day of, less than an hour before they left for the train to New York, Gene called to say he’d have to meet them for dinner after the play because something had come up at work. Hap was in the bathroom when the phone rang, so Leah took the call. By the time he’d come out she had already hung up, and Hap could see something had shifted. It was early on in their relationship and Hap did not yet understand how certain situations affected her, but from that brief phone call where Gene barked the new plan, without apology or salutation, he understood that it would not be easy between them, and as a result, not easy for him.
Gene turned up more than forty-five minutes late for dinner, already drunk and distracted. Nothing terrible happened, but it was painful. Leah barely spoke and Gene completely ignored her. Hap could see that it was not anger seething under her silence, it was something he hadn’t yet seen. Fear. A kind of fight-or-flight stillness that didn’t want to say the words that would escalate the potentially volatile situation into something unmanageable. When she went to the bathroom toward the end of the evening, Gene’s only comment was sarcastic and dismissive, Got yourself a fun one. On the train ride home, Leah let the night speak for itself and didn’t add to what was obviously a bad start.