“You don’t believe in time?” I ask.
“For the moment, I do.” He gives me a sly smile. I get the joke and we bump fists like the kids do nowadays. At this “moment in time” I ache over how much I love him.
“She’s drinking,” he says out of nowhere. He’s got a long sad face. He takes my index finger and wraps his own fingers around it. “One day, grandpa, I’ll be able to merge into other universes. I shall call myself The Permeator and solve TOE.”
“What’s this TOE?”
“The theory of everything, grandpa,” he says, as if I should know. “I expect that won’t be soon enough, though.” Tears start down his cheeks. I know what he means: I’ll be dead by then.
What I do next I’m not proud of. I call Cheryl when I know Rex isn’t at home. She agrees to meet me at Lighthouse Point, and I wait for her on a bench. I can see her approaching across the grassy park behind the bluffs. It’s the day before Halloween, and Abby has asked if we could take her out in our neighborhood, where she knows more people (and can get better candy, she believes).
“What’s so important?” Cheryl says, getting right to the point. I’ve only seen her a couple of times since that first night at Seabright. She wears a baseball cap with her hair in a ponytail threaded through the back. From one shoulder to the other she keeps shifting her suede handbag.
“I wanted to talk,” I say.
“So let’s talk. I’m here.” She’s wearing open-toed white sandals and I see her nails don’t have that pearly polish they did the first night. Now they’re chipped and dull, and I wonder if she ever took Abby for the manicure she promised. “If you came here to give me a lecture, you can save your breath. I’m not in the best frame—”
“I don’t want to lecture. I want to make an offer.”
“What offer?”
I gesture toward the bench for her to sit down. It’s eleven a.m. and people are coming to eat their lunch. She sits carefully, not taking her eyes off me. I see an unhappy woman, a tormented person, a scared little girl inside her, but I got to do what I think best.
I reach in my sport coat and take out money from my inside pocket and hold it in my lap, then cover my hands over top like I’m putting a damp cloth over warm dough.
“What’s this?” Cheryl asks.
In the park, there’s a bunch of people around my age doing Tai Chi. They’ve got loose white clothes on and look like ghosts. The waves crash below, seagulls above caw, and here I sit with ten thousand dollars in my lap.
“You can get a new start,” I say.
“Are you trying to buy me off?”
“I’m giving you options.”
“Oh, my God. You think I’m going to take this money and leave the kids? You must really think I’m scum.”
“Not everybody should be a parent.”
“You arrogant old man. Who the hell do you think you are?”
I expect ugly names, but she hasn’t walked off yet. “You let us take care of the children. Maybe you live nearby. Maybe you live, say, in Watsonville and run a coffeehouse. I don’t know. Maybe you want to go away and think about whether you’re up to being a mother with full responsibility right now.” I don’t say maybe you shoot the money up your arm and drink it away. “Maybe we have an agreement about this, and then nobody makes a big legal scene.”
Cheryl’s mouth twists in an unpretty way, like she could spit on me, which would not be a surprise or undeserved.
“You’ve always hated me,” she says.
“I don’t hate anyone. I’m a practical man.”
“I’ve never been a whore. No matter what happened I’ve never gotten that low. You want to know something? This is lower than that.”
I look at my fingers. They got dirt wedged in them from crawling around under one of my houses to fix a pipe.
“Rex would think you’re despicable. You’d be lucky if he ever speaks to you again. You’ll be lucky if I ever do. Shit, you think you can hustle me!”
“I’m making you an offer. What you do with it is your decision.”
“I should tell you to shove that money up your ass.”
When I hear this word, this simple word “should,” because everything when you think about it comes down to the difference between should and did, I know what will happen. I stand up and leave the money on the bench. I count to myself, one, two, three seconds, and I know if I make it to ten, she won’t run after me and throw the money in my face. When I get to nine, I keep walking. I’m afraid to turn around, just like in the Bible because I’ve done a terrible thing that could turn me into a pillar of salt. But I don’t look behind me. I don’t look ahead. I just keep going.
Lives of the Fathers
My father is telling me about Victoria again. I smile, nod, remind him I am a journalist and that I cannot just sit down and write a book about Victoria because he is sure it will make a bestseller, full of romance, intrigue, and heartbreak.
“It’s rags to riches to rags again!” my father says, not listening. “A story you won’t be able to put down!”
“You’ve told me.”
“What happened to her would be no big deal today but back then, who did such things? She was a bohemian! And beautiful, everyone says so. It’s a tragedy! And don’t forget the love story here, Adam. The composer. At that time he was nobody. That anybody should know he would become Mr. Hollywood, least of all Victoria! The two of them were bohemians! In Atlantic City they’d take a room together at the Shelburne—torn down years ago—and go to the shows and the dances and the burlesque houses, and the liquor they drank…all without care what people thought! They believed in free love. Okay, so maybe it’s not front-page news now—”
“Please, Dad,” I say. “Can we get on with this?”
I am helping my father move into an apartment outside Philadelphia, a few miles from the house he has lived in for thirty-seven years. My mother died last year and although he didn’t want to move, the place has become much too big for him. “I forget things. I’ll come home from shopping and leave the groceries in the car and then I’ll look out the window later and see the trunk open and remember that’s where the groceries are and I haven’t finished taking them in.” He told me this over the phone, long distance to Tucson, where I work for The Arizona Daily Star. “Maybe if I had a smaller place I could keep track of things better.” It was the opening I’d been waiting for. “I’ll help you move,” I said. After our mother died, my sister and I had begged him to find a place he could manage; he wouldn’t consider it at the time. “Where will you find a view like this?” he said, pointing to the park across the street.
But in thirty-seven years—the house is as old as I am, my parents moving in two weeks before I was born—the area has deteriorated. Next door, on what used to be the spacious front yard of an older home, three small bungalows have been squeezed together, only eight feet apart, the minimum allowed by code. And the park, neglected over the years, has litter clinging to the backstop of the baseball diamond where I once charged around the bases and dove head first into home, winding up in the hospital with a broken collarbone. (I was safe.) The once stately oak trees at the park’s entrance stand like weary, bent petitioners at a gate, too many unpruned branches broken and dead from storms, swinging loose in the wind like discarded canes. On weekends and holidays teenagers wash and wax their cars on the grass, letting the soapy water run into our driveway. My father sees none of this, just his preserved view of many years ago: my sister and I on skis about to descend the mild incline of the park’s snowy hill toward a stream that now has soft-drink cups and rusty hubcaps in it.
“A beautiful woman once, even your mother admitted as much. Gorgeous red hair and a figure that made history. Like a goddess she walked around. Yet innocent. She knew nothing. A schoolteacher she wanted to be when I met her. No wonder he fell for her.”
“Who?” I say. My father has a habit of referring to everyone as “he” or “she,” a problem worsened by age.
“The composer,” he says, looking at me surprised. “He was nobody back then, a few minor songs he wrote. Victoria showed them to me. My own were better.”
Today the composer is a famous man, an Oscar-winner for his movie themes. This is the “love interest” my father wants me to include. My father sees it all, the innocent girl from Philadelphia, the New York composer (unknown and struggling) falling in love on the boardwalk, Victoria’s subsequent initiation into decadent Manhattan society, their torrid ten-year affair, the terrible fights, his jilting her after she is hooked on drugs, her acting career ending in nude photos for girlie magazines, the simultaneous meteoric rise of the composer (“True to life,” my father says, “the S.O.B. gets what he’s after!”), the eventual end of Victoria in an institution, where she leads a reclusive life for the next twenty years.
“I’m telling you,” my father says. “It’s what the public wants to read. You can’t take an hour a day to work on an idea that will bring you millions?”
I wrap the wine glasses in newspaper and put them in the box. My father is holding up a decanter that I remember us using only once—the night my parents had an engagement dinner for my sister and her husband, who live in Seattle now. Before my mother died, my parents bickered constantly. Whatever anger was buried during our childhood surfaced in those later years after my sister and I moved away from home. My father, insisting my mother not work (she’d been an office manager in a Manhattan bookkeeping firm), had taken her away from her five sisters in New York to Philadelphia, where he wanted to settle after the war. Her lifelong struggle with agoraphobia grew worse and frustrated them both. Near the end she was afraid to leave the house at all for fear of…well, anything from crime to not having a bathroom nearby for her bladder, which was always acting up from her diabetes and the drugs she took for high blood pressure. My father retired to take care of her (he wouldn’t put her in a nursing home), helping her to the bathroom, getting her meals, doing all the shopping, making the beds, keeping the house clean. My mother didn’t want a maid. The house had been her whole life. One minute she would yell at my father for overworking himself, the next she would complain he didn’t do things right, the way she’d done them when she’d been able to get around. Nearly blind and barely able to walk, she nevertheless followed after him, criticizing him for the way he loaded the dishwasher, wiped down a table, threw in the laundry without sorting it first, left the butter out, put away silverware…“Who ever heard of keeping silverware in a second drawer?” she’d say. Or, “You bought that lousy Tyson’s chicken again.” Or “Why didn’t you get that Tyson’s chicken we always eat?” My sister and I pleaded with my father to just bring someone in; what was Mom going to do? Stop the person from cleaning? He wasn’t young himself, seventy-two. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “She’ll pull out of this,” he’d say, blind to my mother’s condition, desperate to deny anything was really wrong. “She’s just venting,” he’d say. “It doesn’t bother me. She puts up with my craziness and I put up with hers. We’ve been doing it for forty years. That’s what love is.” And he’d go back to buying the wrong kind of mayonnaise or running the dryer on high or ironing a blouse that she hated to wear, a thousand little stubbornnesses they assaulted each other with every day. I think it would have gone on like this forever had she not suffered a stroke and been helpless to protest, paralyzed, unable to raise even a finger to scold him. He brought in a housekeeper then, a victory for neither of them.
Now, my first time home since the funeral, my father and I haven’t spoken once about my mother’s death, how frightening and horrible it was to watch her decline. Instead, he talks only about Victoria. “I never touched her, Adam. She would call and say, ‘Newman, I’m lonely. Why don’t you ever come see me? I’m by myself here tonight.’ ”
“So why didn’t you go?”
“Go? To see her? I was a married man by then!”
“But before that, when she was the bohemian on the boardwalk or whatever—didn’t you even date her?” I can’t believe I’ve gotten suckered into this discussion.
“Of course I dated her—but I never touched her! ‘What a gentleman you are, Newman,’ she would tell me. ‘I’ve never met such a nice man,’ she’d say. I gave her music lessons, every Thursday at four. I taught her the piano, boogie-woogie. She wanted to be a jazz singer for a while. I brought her home to meet my mother and father and brothers! Did they like her?”
I shrug. “Did they?”
“Of course they liked her! Everyone did! She was a beauty! Hair down to there.” My father motions somewhere with his hand, the basement—or hell. I don’t know. I’m losing track of the day and the conversation. In a week I have to be back at work, and Claire, my wife, is seven months pregnant with our first child. It’s not a time I particularly want to leave her alone.
“Dad, can we talk about Victoria tomorrow? We should concentrate on packing. You just let me know what you want to keep here.”
“I’m telling you, this is an idea you can count on a hundred percent. You make a little outline and send it off. I guarantee you’ll get fifty offers.”
“It doesn’t work like that. So let’s forget about the book—”
“A blockbuster! We’re talking wide audience appeal. The younger people will understand the bohemian side, the rebellion. Him—”
“Who?”
“Her father. He was a stiffened Prussian who could spit cold water on you, icicles. You see what I’m talking about here? She rebelled against him. He was this main influence on her life and she ran away from her family to be with him—”
“Who?”
“The composer! That’s the part the kids can relate to. I’ve got notes to show you.”
“No, please. I don’t need to see them. I can imagine it if I ever want to write about this.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“Let me sleep on it, Dad,” I say, just to calm him down.
“He saw her naked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fred Rose. The photographer. He took pictures of her for her portfolio. She wanted to be an art model then. I saw them one day on his desk when he was out to lunch, the big envelope with her name. I couldn’t look.”
“That’s considerate of you,” I say.
“Did I tell you she’d have hold of my arm as we walked down the aisle of the Robin Hood Dell to our concert seats? I don’t exaggerate, thirty heads would turn.”
“Why didn’t you marry her?”
“Him,” he says.
I throw up my hands. “Who, Dad? Can’t you use names?”
“I’m sorry. The composer. She fell in love with him while we were going out. One day I went over there to take her out to Fairmount Park and there was a note on the door: she had to see me that day—urgent. I called her all day, all evening, late into the night. I couldn’t close my eyes without being frightened what had happened to her. The next day I call and she tells me she thinks we shouldn’t see each other anymore. She’s going to marry this young songwriter.”
“The composer.”
“Right. But at the time, I’m also writing songs, so I feel doubly bad. Not only has she thrown me over for another guy, but he’s a songwriter too.”
“So then you met Mom.”
“Many years later. I was a different man then. In my thirties.”
“You carried a torch for Victoria all that time?”
“Sure, what’s ten years when you know someone like her?”
I shrug.
“Tomorrow we’ll go see her. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty-five years but I think I’m ready now. You’ll go with me and take pen and paper, right? It’s all settled.”
“No, Dad,” I say. “Ab-so-lute-ly not.”
•
Victoria, Bohemian of the Boardwalk.
This is the title my father wants me to use for the novel about Victoria’s life. We are driving down Route 95, on our way to Wilmington, Delaware, where Victoria lives in a nu
rsing home.
“Dad, you don’t just drop in on someone you haven’t seen for twenty-five years.”
“Why not?” he says. “Won’t she be surprised.”
Victoria’s brother, who owns an appliance store in South Philadelphia, has given us the address. Early this morning my father called him and said we wanted to visit Victoria. I was writing a book about Victoria’s life. I heard all this as I was coming down the stairs, with sleep in my eyes, my mouth dry, aware that we’d hardly accomplished anything together yesterday. All night I’d been up packing while my father slept on the couch. “Just going to take a little five-minute snooze,” he said, and he was out for the rest of the evening.
We pull up in front of the Golden Meadows Care Center. In the lobby several people in wheelchairs and bathrobes are watching television. There is a chalkboard with a list of such activities as Senior Aerobics, Health Awareness Check, and Creative Cake Decorating.
Someone calls to my father. “Mr. Holzman, how you doing?”
It is Moses Rudolf. I haven’t seen him in over fifteen years.
“Moses,” my father says, “I had no idea you were here.” Moses is in a wheelchair, one of his legs gone. He sees us staring down.
“Blood clots,” he says. “Been quite a while now. How you all doing?” He extends his palm flat out for us to shake hands. I look down at his hand with the same amazement I did as a child. Moses had worked for my father in the jewelry store in Philadelphia. When my father would go out to lunch, I’d stay behind with Moses and watch the store. Look here, he’d say, and show me how all his fingers could bend back at the knuckles. His elbow reversed too, so he could stroke the long skull of his head with his fingers as if it were another person’s hand. It was both exciting and repelling, especially since he’d put opal rings from the showcase on his fingers to do it.
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