“You said that?”
“Yes.”
He laid a hand on the scrap file. His forehead was a little damp from where his hair had rested. He had taken an evening shower, probably because he had done push-ups in his room. Liz used to wash his hair with something that smelled like daisies to me, and I remembered that now, his slicked back hair, wet feet slapping on the hard wood; he had made a game of being dried. Part of me wanted to tell him the other things I had said, but I felt the need to be careful, and I knew these things would appear in the paper anyway.
He said, “How did you say it?”
He held my father’s dollar bill in his hands.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Like what kind of words did you use?”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Was it an accusation, the way you said it?”
“I guess we’ll see in the paper.”
He folded the dollar bill. Once; twice; again—a tight little roll of green.
He said, “Isn’t it bad for your department, what you said?”
Of course it was, and although it’s obvious to me now that he was in fact desperate to hear that I had finally given my anger sway over principle, I myself was too ashamed of this to do anything but mislead him. “Public sentiment will affect the decision about structural modifications,” I said. “There’s a lot of money at stake. That’s important too.”
He looked up at me. “That’s what you were thinking when you talked to her?”
It was the first time, I think, I ever lied to him about my own character. “Yes,” I said.
Elliot followed me down the stairs then. He stumbled once to keep from overtaking me, and I noticed that one of his knees popped loudly in its socket every time he stepped down. We moved together like this, silently aware of each other, into the kitchen, and made a quick dinner of scrambled eggs and bacon, which we ate in front of the TV news. In a hospital in Utah, Barney Clarke had died after one hundred and twelve days of life with the world’s first successfully implanted artificial heart. Elliot went upstairs to his typewriter to finish off his report on my father, and although a number of times I tried to force myself to stop listening, I did not hear the last keystroke until an hour after Liz got home and slid quietly into bed beside me in the dark.
It isn’t necessary to recount what the article said. It quoted me exactly, and because the Sacramento Bee is not one of the country’s largest papers, it didn’t make as much of this as it might have with more reporters to research my allegations, but it made enough of it to appear damaging to my department. Elliot was quiet at breakfast, his report sitting next to his napkin ring in its blue cover where I imagine he had hoped it would demand attention.
When Liz read my quotation, she looked up at me with more interest than she had shown since she started work at the Crisis Center but, to my surprise, showed no suspicion that what I’d done was anything but carefully considered.
She smiled. “Did you really say this?” she said.
“Something like that.”
“What made you decide to do it?”
“It just seemed right,” I said.
She nodded as if this confirmed her expectation and looked down again to finish the article. I was at first relieved, but there was a fear I didn’t quite understand already beginning to haunt me. The man she had known before I sent her away was a man who suppressed all impulse. By now she was too distant from me to guess that my self-control had finally been plundered by my sorrows.
Elliot said, “Did you tell your boss, Dad?”
“No,” I said. “It was too late for him to do anything. He’d just have worried until he read the article.”
“Won’t he be mad?”
Liz said, “Your father’s their best engineer.”
“Yes,” I said. “He’ll be mad.”
“What do you think he’ll do?”
“Give the nice office to someone else next time,” I said, and I laughed. I had given it a great deal of thought in the car on the way home, and here is what I imagined: a nervous and stern reminder about politics, and next, the subtle but distinct beginning of Belsky’s ascension—better office assignments, invitations from Howard, and, some years from now, a leapfrogging promotion to Branch Chief when Howard retired.
A timer buzzed, and Liz rose from her chair without finishing the article to take a cookie sheet of frozen doughnuts from the oven. She checked her watch and set about rearranging a stack of volunteer training manuals in her briefcase. She spread them between the compartments and transferred a thick binder to the outside pocket. Then she checked her watch again and clipped across the tile floor in her pumps to take three champagne flutes from an upper cupboard. She transferred our orange juice from their tumblers and toasted my integrity and bravery, as if she believed my speaking to de Silva were the considered act of conscience I had tried to make it seem. Elliot smiled and passed a hand over his mouth—a tick left over from the weeks before he began shaving—and stood in the driveway at Liz’s command to see me off to work. Looking at them in my rearview mirror, I thought of myself in the service van with my mother outside my father’s first solo job, and I inhaled a bit of doughnut and had to pull over four blocks from my house to collect myself. Tears had welled up, partly from the quick shock of choking that always makes me briefly imagine and accept death, but mostly, I still think, from the unsettling parallels of that memory.
At the office, I was afraid to leave my car. When I finally did, I stood at the lobby store looking at ballpoint pens and watching the crowd gather by the elevator until I remembered that I had been relocated to the second floor. I slipped to the stairwell door and walked up. The hallway was empty and smelled of cafeteria grease. I closed my door and waited. To pass the time, I drew my blinds and looked out the window. Traffic was bunching and spreading in its odd patterns. A helicopter passed low to report, and then banked off to the left.
The first knock on my door was not Belsky, but Howard. I asked him in, and when I sat down, he made a decision to stand. He held his pad in one hand, but it bore no notes, and he did not pick up my picture frame. He closed my door and said, “What were you thinking?”
I was not used to his being direct, and it took me a few seconds to answer. “I wasn’t. It was a mistake.”
“You’re damn right it was.”
I was suddenly amazed that I had not thought more about what I should say.
I said it again: “It was a mistake.”
He wiped his hand across his brow. There was a sip straw peeking out of his shirt pocket. “I can’t believe it was you. I thought it would be Belsky who would do it. I’ve been by his office six times to remind him not to, he’s such a hothead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That doesn’t help me.”
“I know.”
“You see what I have to do, don’t you?”
Suddenly I did. “I don’t think that’s necessary. People will know better.”
“No they won’t.”
Now he picked up my picture. I tried to think of alternatives I might suggest, but I couldn’t come up with any.
He said, “I’ll give you a choice, but it has to be bad enough to send the message,” he said.
“I’ve never done anything like it. You could say you took that into account.”
“People won’t remember your history; they’ll just remember that nothing happened to you when you shot your mouth off and said what everyone wishes they could say.”
“I could write something to the paper. A clarification.”
“Back-page stuff,” he said. He looked at the photograph of me with my family in front of the house I had built. “Damn it,” he said. He took the sip straw out of his pocket but didn’t put it in his mouth. “So what part of the state would you pick if you had to?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Come on.”
“Sacramento.”
“I’m giving you a choice.�
�
“It doesn’t matter; I won’t take it.”
“Fresno then,” he said, and by lunchtime I was loading packed boxes into my car. Office workers were eating their lunches from paper sacks in Capitol Park. When I got home, the house was quiet. I ate some crackers from a plastic sleeve and drank a glass of milk. Then I went to the basement and took out my toolbox. Liz had been complaining that a safety feature on her hair dryer was making it shut off after increasingly short intervals of use. I didn’t think it would be difficult to fix this, and I wanted to be busy when they got home. I was standing at the kitchen counter removing the pink plastic casing from the handle when I heard the car pull into the driveway. Elliot opened the door, and Liz came in behind him.
When she saw me, she looked at the watch she had bought for work so she could track the length of her calls. “They did something crazy, didn’t they?”
“As a matter of fact, they did.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Dad got fired?”
“Not fired,” I said.
“Sacrificed,” said my wife.
I fit a tiny screwdriver bit into a hole on the hair dryer nozzle. “They offered me a transfer to Fresno.”
“And?” Liz said.
“I resigned.”
She set her briefcase on the counter. “Good for you,” she said, but she did not look at me. She was tucking the folders of volunteer training handouts back inside the zippered flap.
“Did you yell at them, Dad?”
Liz looked up. “Of course he didn’t.”
“But they took his job.”
“From your father? They didn’t take a thing!”
“They didn’t?”
“Does he look upset to you?”
“No.”
“Ask him if he’s upset.”
“Are you, Dad?”
I made myself smile. “Of course not.”
“What did I tell you?” she said, and she touched the shaved nape of her neck.
6 The Lie
ELLIOT’S QUESTION STAYED WITH ME EVEN AFTER HE HAD handed in his finished report and giving him an answer could not help him. Most often I would think about it at night as I tried to fall asleep, which became increasingly difficult for me. My unemployment itself did not cause much stress—I expected finding a job to be easy, and in fact I had received my first offer just a week after my resignation—but nevertheless, I found myself operating on fewer and fewer hours of sleep. Sometimes I would rise and eat a snack in the slats of moonlight cast by our shutters on the kitchen table. Sometimes I would go to the basement. And sometimes I lay in bed next to Liz pretending to be asleep so that she wouldn’t know my anxiety was mounting. When I woke, I kept my eyes closed and my arms at my sides. I might tick through my calendar of appointments for the week. There was a lot to juggle. Consulting engineering was a growing field that decade, and as a candidate I was sought after. I recall a few days when I had two breakfasts, and one when I had two lunches. I ordered a salad to keep my appetite for the second seating.
But more often than not, what I did was turn over answers to Elliot’s question in my mind: the strange catalogue of moments with my father when I remembered being afraid. One night, a week after my resignation, I woke hot and perspiring. I should have risen to open the windows or turn on the air-conditioning, but by then, for reasons I can no longer fully reconstruct, I had decided letting Liz know I was awake would be dangerous to me. Instead, I gently peeled back the bedspread and let my perspiration evaporate through the top sheet. As I waited for this to bring me some relief, listening to the sound of Liz’s tongue searching her mouth and the thick shade scraping the window casings, I thought about the first time my father came home two hours late. He came through the kitchen door and set a paper bag on the table.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“That’s all right,” my mother said. Although I had witnessed her weeping a few times when she thought she was alone, she always managed to give my father what she thought he needed. “Dinner’s still warm.”
“I was doing a little shopping.” He did not look at me. I was sitting on a stool near the kitchen sink. My mother drew a ham out of the oven and set the pan on the counter.
He said, “Guess what I bought?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I didn’t say tell, I said guess.”
“A new torque wrench?”
“Nope,” he said. “Something just for fun.”
Her back was still to him, and now he pulled the bag towards him on the table. He had landed his first customer over a year before, and now his independent practice was thriving, just as my mother had predicted. But instead of allowing her faith or his success to make him happy, he had let his suspicion of the indifference at the core of my mother’s devotion consume him. Although I suppose he still loved us, as that science fair photo suggests, his morbid quest to expose her dispassion was apparently worth the price of hiding this. He made promises just so he could break them; he brought home that picture of himself with the dancer; and now, when my mother turned from the stove, he put his hand in a paper bag and drew out a pistol.
“For target practice,” he said. “I thought Luther and I could drive out to Walpack and shoot cans. How does that sound to you, Luther?”
I glanced at my mother. Her eyes were fixed on it. I was stunned and frightened, but it’s clear to me now that this was less because of any danger the gun itself posed than the betrayal of my mother it represented.
“Okay,” I said. I almost added, If it’s okay with Mom, but these words seemed somehow pregnant with significance and complication—as dangerous as the gun itself seemed to be—and I couldn’t bring myself to articulate something explosive that I didn’t understand. In retrospect of course it is clear that this would have been the first time I’d called attention to the fact that there was a side to be taken, and this acknowledgment of conflict was something I shied from, maybe because he seemed to relish it, or because my mother, whom I loved, avoided it, or maybe, I have sometimes wondered, because it is just something of which I am constitutionally incapable, and always will be.
Remembering this, I lay awake for two hours without turning, and when I sat down to breakfast the next morning, I couldn’t meet Elliot’s eye. Although I still believed in the importance of my intentions, sometimes when he looked at me the chasm of omission in my comments for his biography made me feel secretive and shameful. I buttered my toast looking at the newspaper and he read his Road & Track. The humidity that had built in the night was just beginning to break in the form of light rain on our closed windows, and that sound, that faint spatter, was like a derisive whispering behind me. I blushed and took a sip of my coffee.
That night I woke again at one, this time to the sound of hard rain that would turn briefly to hail. I had turned the air-conditioning on, and now under the covers I was cold and wide awake. The realization that the temperature last night was no excuse for my inability to sleep only increased my agitation. I tried again to lull myself with logistics: how long it would take me to drive between appointments tomorrow; which of them would involve street parking, and which of them garages. But soon my thoughts strayed again to the question of my father. Elliot’s driver’s licensing exam was in less than a week, and I remembered how for two weeks before my own test, every night when my mother began setting our filled plates on the table, my father would take his keys to his service van from a nail on the wall and tell her it was time for my lesson. But when we got in the car, I sat a long time awaiting instruction, and invariably my father would at last put a hand on my shoulder and suggest he drive. We traded seats in the darkened street, and he took us five miles along Route 1 and then drove back on a surface road with miles of stoplights, his face changing color, red to green, at the intersections.
At the end of one of these episodes, he dropped me off on the curb. “I’m going to go out for a while,” he said.
It had to be almost nine o�
�clock.
He said, “Tell your mom I don’t know when I’ll be back and sorry about dinner.” He had not turned off the engine. He meant this. But he was still thinking. “Tell her I just went for a beer or a drive.”
I sat in the car beside him with the engine idling and tried to imagine what had changed my father. It had been months since he’d purchased that gun, and he still had not taken me to Walpack to shoot cans. Maybe he was in some kind of trouble. “Yes, sir,” I said. It was something he had taught me to say, but lately it seemed to irritate him. I walked up the porch steps and into the house.
When he started doing this every night, I began to grow certain he was mixed up in bad business, and worries about our welfare began to keep me awake. I’m not sure if it was these, or a sharp desire to take something from him that made me creep into his closet one day and slip the gun into the waistband of my pants, but that is what I did, relishing the rebellion, this small secret betrayal, even as I longed to find him in the kind of trouble from which he could be saved. That night when he dropped me off at the curb after our lesson, I got on my bicycle to follow him. I didn’t know how far I would get. He might get on the turnpike, or notice me and stop to yell, but I didn’t think about either thing. My heart beat fast, not from the prospect of being caught, but from anticipation of the danger I was now hoping I would encounter. He drove through our neighborhood, past all the row houses, and onto Route 1. I briefly lost sight of him, but the traffic lights were poorly synchronized, and this gave me a chance. I was sweating under my wool coat. The hammer on the pistol chafed against my stomach. I caught him two lights later as he turned into a parking lot shared by a Sweet Dreams Diner, a Pink Lady Show Bar, and a movie theater that was playing White Christmas. As my father got out of his van, I stayed on the corner behind a lamppost, as if its cover would shield me should he turn. I wondered which of these places harbored the crooks who were harassing my father. I bet on the show bar, but instead he walked toward the movie theater. He even bought a ticket. Then he disappeared through its double doors.
The Testing of Luther Albright Page 17