My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by Unknown

  “Well, she should wake up and get over it” was Deb’s response, so loud I feared it could be heard upstairs. Amazed, I realized that she wasn’t tuned as finely as I to the waves of my mother’s anger. She wasn’t built from birth to receive them.

  Near the sofa where we sat, my father, dolefully correcting math papers in the rocking chair, said, “Mildred doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s her femininity acting up.”

  Femininity explained and justified everything for his sexist generation, but not for mine. I was mortified by this tension. That same visit, perhaps, or later, Deb, thinking she was doing a good deed, on Sunday morning began to weed the patch of pansies my mother had planted near the back porch and then neglected. Deb stood uncomprehending, her feet sweetly bare in the soft soil, like Ingrid Bergman’s in Stromboli, when I explained that around here nobody worked on Sundays; everybody went to church. “How silly,” Deb said. “My father all summer does his walls and things on Sundays.”

  “He’s a different denomination.”

  “Jim, I can’t believe this. I really can’t.”

  “Sh-h-h. She’s inside, banging dishes around.”

  “Well, let her. They’re her dishes.”

  “And we have to get ready for church.”

  “I didn’t bring church clothes.”

  “Just put on shoes and the dress you wore down on the train.”

  “Shit I will. I’d look ridiculous. I’d rather stay here and weed. Your grandparents will be staying, won’t they?”

  “My grandmother. My grandfather goes. He reads the Bible every day on the sofa, haven’t you noticed?”

  “I didn’t know there were places like this left in America.”

  “Well—”

  My answer was going to be lame, she saw with those sterling blue eyes, so she interrupted. “I see now where you get your nonsense from, being so rude to Daddy.”

  I was scandalized but thrilled, perceiving that a defense against my mother was possible. In the event, Deb stayed with my grandmother, who was disabled and speechless with Parkinson’s disease. My rudeness to Reverend Whitworth was revenged when, baptizing our first child, his first grandchild, in a thoroughly negotiated Unitarian family service in the house of her Lutheran grandparents, he made a benign little joke about the “holy water”—water fetched from our own spring, which was down below the house instead of, as in Vermont, up above it. My mother sulked for the rest of the day about that, and always spoke of Catherine, our first child, as “the baby who didn’t get baptized.” By the time the three other babies arrived, Deb and I had moved to Massachusetts, where we had met and courted, and joined the Congregational Church as a reasonable compromise.

  We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of mid-morning, by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound, but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. “We boil at different degrees,” Emerson had said, and a woman came along who had my same boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, Deb claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine; I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers. It sounded like second-hand feminism, but I didn’t argue.

  After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”

  “He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

  . . .

  My reflex is always to come to Deb’s defense, even though it was I who wanted the divorce. It shocks me, at my high-school class reunions, when my classmates bother to tell me how much they prefer my second wife. It is true, Sylvia really mixes it up with them, in a way that Deb shyly didn’t. But, then, Deb assumed that they were part of my past, something I had put behind me but reunited with every five years or so, whereas Sylvia, knowing me in my old age, recognizes that I have never really left Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. The most recent reunion, the fifty-fifth, might have depressed Deb—all these people in their early seventies, most of them still living in the county within a short drive of where they had been born, even in the same semi-detached houses where they had been raised. Some came in wheel-chairs, and some were too sick to drive and were chauffeured to the reunion by their middle-aged children. The list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony crone-hood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead.

  But we don’t see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children—the same round fresh faces, the same cup ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the locally bred swing bands that serenaded the blue-lit gymnasium during high-school dances. We see in each other the enduring simplicities of a town rendered changeless by Depression and then by a world war whose bombs never reached us, though rationing and toy tanks and air-raid drills did. Old rivalries are rekindled and put aside; old romances flare for a moment and subside into the general warmth, the diffuse love. When the class secretary, dear Joan Edison, her luxuriant head of chestnut curls now whiter than bleached laundry, takes the microphone and runs us through a quiz on the old days—teachers’ nicknames, the names of vanished luncheonettes and ice-cream parlors, the titles of our junior and senior class plays, the winner of the scrap drive in third grade—the answers are shouted out on all sides. Not one piece of trivia stumps us: we were there, together, then, and the spouses, Sylvia among them, good-naturedly applaud so much long-hoarded treasure of useless knowing.

  These were not just my classmates; they had been my father’s students, and they remembered him. He was several times the correct answer—“Mr. Werley!”—in Joan Edison’s quiz. Cookie Behn, who had been deposited in our class by his failing grades and who, a year older than we, already had Alzheimer’s, kept coming up to me before and after dinner, squinting as if at a strong light and huskily, ardently asking, “Your father, Jimbo—is he still with us?” He had forgotten the facts but remembered that saying “still alive,” like the single word “dead,” was somehow tactless.

  “No, Cookie,” I said each time. “He died in 1972, of his second heart attack.” Oddly, it did not feel absurd to be calling a seventy-four-year-old man on a pronged cane “Cookie.”

  He nodded, his expression grave as well as, mildly, puzzled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to tell you,” I said, though my father would have been over a hundred and running up big bills in a nursing home. As it happened, his dying was less trouble to me than Reverend Whitworth’s.

  “And your mother, Jimbo?” Cookie persisted.

  “She outlived him by seventeen years,” I told him, curtly, as if I resented the fact. “She was a happy widow.”

  “She was a very dignified lady,” he said slowly, nodding as if to agree with himself. It touched me that he was attempting to remember my mother, and that what he said was, after all, true enough of her in her relations with the outside world. She had been outwardly dignified and, in her youth, beautiful or, as she once put it to me during her increasingly frank long widowhood, “not quite beautiful.”

  My father had died when Deb and I were in Italy. We had gone there, with another couple in trouble, to see if we couldn’t make the marriage “work.” Our hotel in Flo
rence was a small one with a peek at the Arno; returning from a bus trip to Fiesole—its little Roman stadium, its charming Etruscan museum built in the form of a first-century Ionic temple—we had impulsively decided, the four of us, to have an afternoon drink in the hotel’s upstairs café, rather than return to the confinement of our rooms. The place, with its angled view of the Arno, was empty except for some Germans drinking beer in a corner, and some Italians standing up with espressos at the bar. If I heard the telephone ring at all, I assumed it had nothing to do with me. But the bartender came from behind the bar and walked over to me and said, “Signor Wer-lei? Call for you.” Who could know I was here?

  It was my mother, sounding very small and scratchy. “Jimmy? Were you having fun? I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “I’m impressed you could find me.”

  “The operators helped,” she explained.

  “What’s happened, Mother?”

  “Your father’s in the hospital. With his second heart attack.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Well, he sat up in the car as I drove him into Alton.”

  “Well, then, it isn’t too bad.”

  There was a delay in her responses that I blamed on the transatlantic cable. She said at last, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” Except when we talked on the telephone, I never noticed what a distinct Pennsylvania accent my mother had. When we were face to face, her voice sounded as transparent, as free of any accent, as my own. She explained, “He woke up with this pressing feeling on his chest, and usually he ignores it. He didn’t today. It’s noon here now.”

  “So you want me to come back,” I accused her. I knew my father wouldn’t want me inconvenienced. The four of us had reservations for the Uffizi tomorrow.

  She sighed; the cable under the ocean crackled. “Jimmy, I’m afraid you better. You and Deb, of course, unless she’d rather stay there and enjoy the art. Dr. Shirk doesn’t like what he’s hearing, and you know how hard to impress he usually is.”

  Open-heart surgery and angioplasty were not options then; there was little for doctors to do but listen with a stethoscope and prescribe nitroglycerin. The concierge told us when the next train to Rome was, and the other couple saw us to the Florence station—just beyond the Medici chapels, which Deb and I had always wanted to see, and were destined never to see together. In Rome, the taxi driver found us an airline office that was open. I will never forget the courtesy and patience with which that young airline clerk, in his schoolbook English, took our tickets to Boston the next week and converted them into tickets to Philadelphia the next day. More planes flew then, with more empty seats. We made an evening flight to London, and had to lay over for the night. On the side of Heathrow away from London there turned out to be a world of new, tall hotels for passengers in transit. We got into our room around midnight. I called my mother—it was suppertime in Pennsylvania—and learned that my father was dead. To my mother, it was news a number of hours old, and she described in weary retrospect her afternoon of sitting in the Alton hospital and receiving increasingly dire reports. She said, “Doc Shirk said he fought real hard at the end. It was ugly.”

  I hung up, and shared the news with Deb. She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, “Cry.” Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.

  Kinderszenen

  WINDOWS FRAME PICTURES of the world outside. A window overlooking the side porch shows the painted beaded porch boards and the curved backs of the wicker furniture and, beyond the porch edge, the bricks of the walk where it broadens beneath the grape arbor and the ragged gaps of sunlight and scenery between the grape leaves. Ants make mounds like coffee grounds between the bricks, and the grapevines attach themselves to the boards of the arbor with fine pale-green tendrils that spell letters of a sort: these are things Toby knows from being outside and looking directly. What he does not know and never thinks to ask is who built the arbor, whose idea was it, his grandparents’ or that of the people who owned the house before them? He will never think to ask. He once began to collect tendril letters—A, B, C—to make the whole alphabet but never got through D.

  When Daddy flips a cigarette off the porch in the evening from sitting on a wicker chair with the other grown-ups in a row, its red star traces lopsided loops before shattering into sparks on the bricks. The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall. The panes in the window have bubbles in them, like hollow teardrops, that warp the edges of things when Toby slightly shifts his head, a little like the way that bad boys hold a magnifying glass above a scurrying brown ant until it stops moving and shrivels up with a snap you almost hear, feeling it within yourself.

  The thin glass divides the world outside, which is ordinary, from inside the house, where something is out of the ordinary and feels sad and wrong. The assumption that the town is an ordinary one and just like many another is in the air, along with fireflies in summer and snowflakes in winter. Toby sees nothing ordinary about it. It is a tiny piece of the world but the piece nearest him. In his heart he knows that it is the best town in the world, and he the most important person, though he would never say that to the grown-ups he lives with. There are four—Mother, Daddy, Grandfather, and Grandmother—the same way the house has four sides.

  On the side with the porch and the grape arbor, toward the alley that runs behind the square-trimmed hedge, where bigger boys walk along, talking loudly and rudely on the way to the school grounds and the baseball field, there is a side yard. Toby’s mother and grandmother preside above this fussy, complicated area, a showplace of flower beds and flowering bushes maintained for the neighbors in case they walk by and look in over the hedge. The bushes need to be clipped and to have their lower branches held up while Mother, red-faced and almost angry, pushes the lawnmower, with its noisy scissoring, underneath to get at the secret grass growing there. She calls this job “holding up the bushes’ skirts,” which has a naughty sound to it that nevertheless doesn’t make it fun. She calls Toby outdoors to do it, away from his toys and his children’s books and his pretending things to himself. The stiff branches poke his arms and face and some have little thorns that scratch, it seems on purpose. If he isn’t careful he could lose an eye. His mother doesn’t care about that; she is always working in the garden in pants with dirt-stained knees. Toby likes her better when she dresses up to go to the city on the trolley car, in a brown skirt and coat and a little hat tilted on her head, walking down not the alley but the street at the front of the house, along the sidewalk under the horse-chestnut trees, to the avenue where the trolley runs.

  Across the alley is the vacant lot where the bigger children in summer have noisy games, with a lot of shouting and tumbling down into the grass, grass so tall it goes to seed at the top and at the bottom never loses the dampness of dew. Beyond this shaggy lot, houses stretch one after the other to a farm where the pig pen smells terrible. Some of the houses are tucked back from the sidewalk, like Toby’s own—“out of harm’s way,” as Grandfather likes to say, twiddling his cigar on the sofa and putting on that foxy sly look that irritates Mother so. She says he should smoke his cigars only outdoors. Most of the houses along the street have just a little piece of grass in front of their porches, and many are really two houses, with two different house numbers and shades of paint, joined in the middle, so each has windows only on three sides, unlike the nice long white house Toby lives in.

  The other side yard is toward the Eichelbergers’, an elderly couple of which Mr. always wears a creased gray hat and Mrs. has a goiter hanging under her chin. Toby is afraid of the narrow gloomy yard in their direction and hates even to see it out of a window. Mr. and Mrs. Eichelberger always seem to be creeping about together, murmuring together, poking at things. Mother says their tragedy is they never had any children. Toby is an only child and so is his mother, so he escaped into life by the narrowest of chances.

&
nbsp; People call his house white but in fact it is yellowy—“cream,” he has heard his mother say. Cream, with green wooden trim, including the windows. In crayoning at elementary school a picture of the house where he lives, he discovered that green and yellow go together in a way some colors don’t. Black and orange also go together, as at Halloween, and purple and gold at Easter, and red and green at Christmas. Red, white, and blue together in the American flag are like three notes on a brass trumpet. Discovering such harmonies excites him, more than it does other children.

  His playmates, when he has them, come to him through the side yard toward the alley, by the little brick walk leading in past the pansy bed from the gap in the hedge. The gap used to have a heavy green-painted gate that creaked and clanged until eventually Grandfather gave it to the scrap drive for the war. It was rotten with rust anyway, he said, and he was sick of painting it. Wilma Dobrinksi, who is a year ahead of Toby at school and tall for her age in any case, peeks in at the gap to see if he is in the yard or on the porch, so she doesn’t have to knock on the side door and face Grandmother in the kitchen. Grandmother makes her feel unwelcome. Yet Wilma is the best friend he has. The only friend, in a way. She takes all his suggestions for games and activities. Sometimes on the side porch they turn the wicker chairs upside down and pretend they are caves in which they are hiding from Indians or bandits. Or they cut out and color paper apples and pears and bananas and set them up in an empty orange crate to sell to imaginary customers.

  Wilma likes his back yard, its lush lawn and abundance of trees compared to her own. Hers is beaten bare of grass by all her family and has a cross dog tied at the lower end. The dog lunged at Toby once, yanking his chain and his snarl showing horrible blue gums. Toby tries never to play at the Dobrinski house, which is small inside, and doesn’t have much plumbing. Mrs. Dobrinski gives Wilma a bath by standing her naked on a chair in the kitchen and wiping her all over with a washcloth wet in a soapy basin. Toby knows this because he once peeked through a crack where the kitchen door didn’t close completely, until Mrs. Dobrinski announced out loud that he wasn’t being very nice. How had she seen him peeking? Had his spying eye gleamed in the crack? Girls, he observed, had bottoms like he did but in front there was something different, hardly anything, a little dent.