St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3)

by Terence M. Green

  He pressed the mute button on the TV, stared at the silent images. "You know," he said, "fellow in the next room died last week. I've got a spare key. I found him. He was sitting in a chair just like this." He gripped the worn arms. "Shook me up. Made me realize that some stranger was going to come in one day and find me sitting here, just like him."

  I waited a minute before trying again.

  "If you don't want to do it, I understand. But we'll buy a smaller house—we'll have to—and it'll be too late. Now's the time. We'd buy a house to suit." A pause. "You'd be living in sin with us. At your age. Think about it." I smiled.

  He stared at the television's silent, flickering images.

  "You could eat Mexican food with us."

  He turned, looked at me, still silent.

  Jeanne and I bought a big, old semidetached house in the South Riverdale section of the city. My brother Dennis and I moved Dad's belongings in the day after Jeanne and I and Adam had moved our own stuff in.

  He had this old table lamp, white shade, milky glass base shaped like a cluster of grapes. It was his mother's—

  Nanny's. It had been at Maxwell Avenue—one of the things he had kept. Dennis and I dropped it, chipped the base. There's a rough edge now, a hunk an inch or so missing.

  The lamp's another thing of his that I still have.

  FOUR

  I

  Adam brought it up again a week or so later. I was watching a ball game on TV in the kitchen as I did the dinner dishes. Jeanne was on the phone upstairs talking with her mother.

  He came in, sat down at the kitchen table.

  "You going out later?" I rinsed a plate, set it in the dishwasher, picked up another.

  "Yeah. Going to meet Jane. Go for a coffee."

  I nodded.

  "Down in the Beaches. Queen Street."

  "Nice evening. Cool, but nice." I squirted dishwashing liquid into an aluminum pot, worked the yellow nylon scrubby against the burned sediment stuck to its bottom.

  "I think I'd like to go to Dayton this summer. See my father."

  I stopped scrubbing the pot, looked at him.

  "You're not upset, are you, Leo?"

  I had to think. "No," I said. "A little surprised, though." I straightened. "Told your mother?"

  He shook his head. "Not yet."

  I dropped the scrubby in the sink, rinsed my hands, tore off a piece of paper towel. "I don't know what to say."

  He looked at me.

  "Honestly."

  "I know."

  "Maybe it's a good idea." I dried my hands, dropped the towel in the wastebasket. "I don't know." I waited a few seconds, then: "You might be moving too fast. Maybe it's not a good idea. You don't know anything about him. We don't even know if he's still there." I hesitated. "Does he even want to see you is another very real question, don't you think?"

  He toyed with the salt and pepper shakers in front of him. "Did you ever wish you knew more about your father? About Gramp?"

  "Yes." I leaned back against the counter. I watched Adam frown, run his fingers along the contours of the shakers. "Lots of times. Especially now."

  "That's the way I feel."

  "I understand."

  "Like I have to know. Have to get it straight in my head."

  I let him talk.

  "Who he is. What happened. You know."

  I nodded. "I know."

  "Do you think I'll be disappointed?"

  "Depends on what you're looking for."

  "I don't know what I'm looking for."

  "Most of us don't."

  When my father had moved in with us back in '88, after one night's sleep in his new room, he told us that he'd slept like a baby. And when he woke, he said, there were kids playing outside in the back alley. He said it was a treat to hear, especially after where he'd been, living with so many old folks.

  His life at Fellowship Towers was something that I knew little about. Three years there.

  There was a lot of him that I didn't know anything about.

  Because Nanny was the oldest, we had to defer to her. My mother told us so. This was what we heard all through my childhood on Maxwell Avenue. You can't have a bath on Thursday nights. That's Nanny's night for a bath. That's Nanny's chair. You get up and let her have it. We're going to watch Ed Sullivan. Nanny likes it.

  The word "matriarch" was one that I didn't know back then.

  My father was mostly quiet.

  When his mother—Nanny—died in '74, Dad's brother Jim had a flask of whiskey at the funeral home. He kept disappearing downstairs into the washroom, coming back up smelling of rye, wanting my father to go with him next time. Dad drank pretty stupidly when he wanted. I'd seen it. We'd all seen it. But he wouldn't go with Jim then.

  Back at the house, after Nanny was buried, my mother sent me out for a bucket of KFC chicken and served it to the family and guests that had come back with us. There was some more drinking, some coffee, small socializing. Jim was there. Suddenly my father said, "I have to go upstairs." I can still hear his voice. It was raspy. Soft. Like something was caught in his throat. No tears, though. "I have to lie down." I watched him climb the stairs. He went into his bedroom, the sanctuary he and my mother had from his mother, from us, closed the door. He stayed there until the next morning.

  I think of that climb up the stairs every now and then, wonder if my dream of him on the stairs is related.

  I have a lot of memories of people, myself included, on those stairs. I'm not sure why.

  "I won't try going to see him until later in the summer." Adam pushed the salt and pepper shakers away. "Got to make some money first."

  "Makes sense."

  I looked at him. What I felt was an impossible mixture, a quiet ache. I've felt it before and since. It's a flood, a burst, soft, like my father's voice going up the stairs to lie down, to be alone.

  When my own son was stillborn, years ago, back when I was with Fran, it was in another life. That life disappeared. It scarcely seems real. It's gone, like my mother, father, my brother Ron, like the past in general. In the here and now, sitting at the table in front of me, talking to me, man to man, was my real son, my only son, alive, needing me.

  II

  "He's going to get hurt," Jeanne said. "That's all there is to it."

  "You're probably right."

  "Why is he doing this? I don't understand. Why?"

  "Because he has to." I shrugged. "It's normal. Normal, healthy curiosity." I turned to face her. We were lying in bed.

  Searching for someone missing, from the past, was something that I understood. I'd done it. My mother's brother, Jack. He led me to Ashland, down through the States, onto the Ohio River. In the heat and the glare and the smell of oil and steel, in Ashland, I'd found Jeanne and Adam instead. Or as well. I wasn't sure. "Family is a mystery," I said, "that we have to explore."

  Jeanne looked at me.

  "We can't help it."

  She was quiet.

  "Adam can't help it."

  Another evening, watching baseball on the tube, I said to him: "You're an English major. There are books all around the place. You've read more than I ever have, probably more than I ever will. I envy you."

  "You polish off those thrillers pretty well. Nothing wrong with them. They're good. And you like Steinbeck."

  "But the courses you get to take. You're lucky. The Modern Novel. Classics in Translation." A pause. "You're lucky." I hadn't gone to university. Right from high school to work. Jeanne hadn't finished high school. My father had only finished grade school. Mom—she was the bright one, the talented one, the sensitive one: some time at the Ontario College of Art, before getting married and joining the ranks of full-time mothers and homemakers.

  "I've got a question for you, Shakespeare," I said.

  "Shoot."

  "Are there any books about fathers and sons? Any classics? Something I should read?"

  He sat, thinking.

  "I did read East of Eden. Long time ago. I guess
it qualifies as pretty good. Don't know if it makes the 'great' list or not," I added. "There's even an Adam in it. He's the father, though."

  "You read it? The whole thing?"

  "Yup."

  "Wow."

  "Haven't you?"

  "Saw the movie. James Dean."

  "Teenagers," I said.

  "I'm twenty-one."

  "He died in a car accident. Your mom liked him."

  Adam thought some more.

  "Great works that I should know," I said. "You know, like if you want to read the classic about the Depression, you've got to read The Grapes of Wrath. Or you want to read the classic about alienated youth, you've got to read The Catcher in the Rye. You know. Like that."

  "Good question," he said.

  I let some time pass. "Well?"

  "Very good question. Most of what I can think of is about how fathers and sons fight, or how the relationship is abusive. Long Day's Journey into Night. Scary. Newer stuff: Russell Banks wrote a book called Affliction. Abusive relationship. Same with Tobias Wolff: This Boy's Life. More abuse." Some more thought. "Updike's Rabbit books deal with it. They're good. Death of a Salesman. Willy and Biff and Hap. Might be as good as it gets." He looked at me. "You're a genius for spotting holes in a fabric, Leo. Next year I'm going to bring it up in one of my seminars—how there's a dearth, a gap." He pondered further. "Maybe if there's no abuse, no fighting, there's no relationship. Nothing worth writing about."

  I shook my head. "Ain't so."

  Adam looked back at the TV, stared blankly.

  "Maybe there's too much. Maybe nobody can get their head around it."

  A commercial broke the rhythm of the fourth inning.

  "Shakespeare, Hemingway, none of them could handle it. Too big." I looked at him. "I'll get us a beer, right?"

  Adam just looked at me. We were both thinking thoughts that couldn't be formed into sentences.

  I touched his shoulder as I got up and went into the kitchen.

  That night I dreamed of my father as a young man, thirtyish, acting in a play, in something like summer stock. His sleeves were rolled up and his biceps were strong. That's all I can remember.

  I have no idea what the dream meant or why I dreamed it. Maybe it had something to do with the discussion of books with Adam. I don't know.

  Later, in the dark, when I got up to go to the washroom, a light in the spare room was on. I went in, stood there, puzzled. It was the lamp with the milky glass grapes cluster, with the chipped base. The one Dennis and I had dropped when my father moved in.

  I turned it off.

  FIVE

  I

  When I was a kid—five or six years old—after my father would have a few beers—maybe New Year's, Thanksgiving, something like that, when there were lots of little kids around—he liked to shock us by calling us over and moving his dentures around in his mouth, then taking them out and putting them back in. He'd ask us to take our teeth out and show them to him. Stunned that this could be done, that we'd never known it, we'd all try, puzzled at why we couldn't do it. He always laughed. It was a performance that he staged many times, one he clearly enjoyed giving. I watched him do it years later, to his grandchildren.

  Jeanne tells me that she had an aunt who, even though she had an upper plate, also had several bottom teeth missing, and that when she ate peanuts she used her thumb as a bottom tooth.

  And I'd heard the story of Dad's sister, Loretta, who once got so drunk that she threw up in the toilet at Maxwell Avenue and accidentally flushed her dentures away.

  All of these tales, memories, images flashed through my head, a small cascade of snapshots, when I asked the nurse to put my father's dentures back in, that evening in the hospital, that evening he died.

  Dennis and I had gone, two dutiful sons, to Morley Bedford Funeral Chapel on Eglinton Avenue to make the necessary arrangements. We'd been there eleven years earlier when our mother died. The place had become a strange touchstone in our lives. The gentleman led us down into the basement to see the display and selection of caskets, arrayed there like new cars in an automotive showroom, complete with price stickers—wood polished and burnished, brass and steel buffed and glinting under the display lighting.

  We selected the second cheapest casket of the dozen surrounding us. It was tough ignoring the bottom-of-the-line container, but we raised our sights, ever so slightly, knowing that Dad would not approve of us going any higher. Only a damn fool, he'd say, would spend that kind of money on a coffin. Have to be crazy.

  We displayed him and put him in the ground in a #20 H.P. Grey Cloth Casket, manufactured by Bernier, retailing for $895. Even then, though, we didn't get off cheaply. Funeral costs are insidious, and keep on mounting: professional services, transfer cost, shelter for the deceased, full embalming, facilities, automotive, documentation, flowers, cemetery fees, funeral board licensing fee, clergy honorarium, organist, etc.

  Cost us nearly five thousand dollars to say good-bye.

  I can see Dad shaking his head in disgust, damn fools he'd say, telling us we should have buried him in the backyard.

  When I was twenty-one, Adam's age, I once asked my father if he liked his job. He had worked twenty-three years for The Globe & Mail, and was finishing up his seventeen- year stint at The Toronto Star—two of the city's daily newspapers. He worked in the Circulation Departments.

  It's a living, he told me.

  At twenty-one, I thought this was sad, but said nothing.

  I'm fifty-one now. I work in the Circulation Department of The Toronto Star—my twenty-third year. My father got me the job. By the time I was twenty-eight, I was glad to have it, to work steady, to have some security.

  I started in 1972. That was the year that my three-year marriage to Fran ended. It was one year after my son was stillborn.

  It's a living. But those words mean something different to me now. I'm older.

  "I don't even know his name," I said.

  Jeanne looked at me.

  "Adam's father. I don't even know his name."

  "Jesus."

  Another night, the routines finished, propped up in bed on our pillows, the eleven o'clock news droning on the TV set at the foot of the bed.

  She grew silent.

  "I didn't mean to upset you."

  "The past doesn't go away, does it." It was a statement, not a question.

  "No," I said. I thought about it. "It goes somewhere else. It stays, but it moves. Like to another city. You decide if you'll visit or not, if it's worth the trip. Or, sometimes, it comes to visit you, unexpected. Just shows up."

  "Bobby," she said.

  "Mm?"

  "Not Bob, not Robert. Bobby. Bobby Swiss."

  I didn't say anything.

  "That's his name."

  A weather map appeared on the screen at the foot of the bed. The blond woman demonstrated with hand motions the low front that was moving into the area, as if she were smoothing a bedspread.

  "The things we do," she said, "the people we think are interesting when we're eighteen." She shrugged, looked down at her hands. "I was a kid."

  "Even his name," she said. "It was exciting." Her foot touched mine beneath the covers. "Not as exciting as Leo Nolan."

  "Your foot's cold. That's because you leave them outside the covers at night. I don't know how you stand it. My feet are toasty and warm."

  "You're all swaddled up in the blankets all night. You're so warm you sweat in your sleep."

  "What does 'swaddled' mean? What kind of word is 'swaddled'?"

  She leaned over me, her hair falling forward. "Swaddled is what they do to a mummy when they wrap it up. It's what you do to yourself. You need me to cool you down. You sleep all whacky." She put her other foot on my leg.

  I looked at her face.

  She tucked her hair behind an ear, smiled.

  "You better cool me down." I didn't move. Didn't touch her. The moment might disappear.

  She put her head on my shoulder. Finally, I
touched her hair.

  "I'm okay," I said. "I was eighteen once." I didn't know what more needed to be said. It was the past. Moved away.

  To Dayton, Ohio.

  Randy Newman has a song called "Dayton, Ohio, 1903." It's on his 1972 album Sail Away. It talks about lazy Sunday afternoons, evokes another, gentler time.

  There's another song on the same album called "Last Night I Had a Dream." He sings about how everyone he knows is in that dream. He says he saw a ghost.

  I keep seeing a ghost. In dreams too. Like that same night. I'm gambling at the slots in Las Vegas, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts. My father comes up behind me and tells me that I'm a fool. That's the dream. That's all I can remember.

  And once again, the red garnet ring wasn't in the Vegas ashtray the next morning. I found it later that day, on the kitchen counter, beside the microwave.

  II

  Life is about timing. We all know it. Sometimes there seems to be a pattern, sometimes it's all hopelessly random. We meet people at the right or the wrong time in our lives, and based on the timing, we do or we do not have a relationship with them. Timing is everything.

  And when the timing is right, you have to gamble. I enjoy a small wager. I like the slots in Vegas. I like the blackjack tables. I like to bet on hockey games, baseball games. My friends tell me I'm a fool, but I don't see it that way. It seems to me that life is a gamble, that every decision we make is a gamble. We're always calculating the odds, at every juncture.

  Getting out of bed in the morning is a gamble.

  In my dream that night, my father had told me that I was a fool. Maybe he was right. But if he was, it wasn't because I was gambling. It was because we're all fools, some of the time. You can be a fool sitting at home in your room, all alone, not doing anything.

  In the spring of '85 I helped Dad sell the house on Maxwell Avenue. When it was empty, when everything had been cleared out, I went back for one last look around.