Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  Clarissa ceases larking with the tetherball when she sees me and stands eyes-shaded, averting her face and waving, though she can’t tell it’s me she sees—possibly hopes it is and not a plainclothes policeman come to ask questions about her brother.

  I wave back, realizing for some reason known only to God that I have begun to limp, as though a war had intervened since I last saw my loved ones and I had returned a changed and beaten veteran. Though Clarissa will not notice. Even as rarely as she sees me—once a month nowadays—I am a timeless fixture, and nothing would seem unusual; an eye patch, a prosthetic arm, all-new teeth: none would rate a mention.

  “Hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee,” she sings out when it’s clearly me she’s waving welcome to. She wears strong contacts and can’t see distances well, but doesn’t care. She darts and springs barefoot toward me across the dry grass, ready to deliver a big power hug around my aching neck—which every time hurts like a hammerlock and makes me groan.

  “I came as soon as I heard the news,” I say. (In our makeshift, make-believe life I always arrive just in time to face some dire emergency—Clarissa and I being the responsible adults, Paul and their mother the temperamental kids in need of rescue.) I am still limping, though my heart’s going strong with simple pleasure, all tightness in my brain miraculously dispatched.

  “Paul’s in the house with Mom, getting ready and probably having an argument.”

  Clarissa, in brilliant red shorts over her blue Speedo suit, jumps up and gives me her hammer hug, and I swing her like a tetherball before letting her sink weak-kneed into the grass. She has a wonderful smell—dampness and girlish perfume applied hours before, now faded. Beyond us is the boathouse crime scene, the pond again dense with pink fleabane and wild callas and, farther on, the row of dense motionless tupelos and the invisible river, above which a squad of pelicans executes a slow and graceful upward soar.

  “Where’s the man of the house?” I let myself down heavily beside her, my back against the tetherball pole. Clarissa’s legs are thin and tanned and golden-sheeny-haired, her bare feet milky and without a blemish. She arranges herself belly-down, chin-propped, her eyes clear behind her contacts and fastened on me, her face a prettier version of my own: small nose, blue eyes, cheekbones more obvious than her mother’s, whose broad, Dutch forehead and coarse hair match Paul’s looks almost completely.

  “He’s work-ing now in his studi-o-o.” She looks at me knowingly and without much irony. It’s life to her, all of this—few tragedies, few great singing victories, everything pretty much good or okay. We are well paired in our family unit.

  Charley’s studio is half visible beyond a row of deep-green hardwoods that boundaries the lawn and stops at the pond’s edge. I see a glint off its tin roof, its row of cypress stilts holding up a catwalk (a project Charley and his roommate doped out as a joke freshman year, back in ’44, but that Charley “always wanted to build”).

  “So how’s the weather?” I say, relieved to know where he is.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Clarissa says noncommittally. A skim of sweat is on her temples from belting the tetherball. My back’s already sweaty through my shirt.

  “And how’s your brother?”

  “Weird. But okay.” Maintaining her belly-down, she rotates her head around on its slender stem, some routine from dance class or gymnastics, though an unmistakable signal: she is Paul’s buen amiga; the two of them are closer than the two of us; this all could’ve been different with better parents, but isn’t; do not fail to notice it.

  “Is your mom okay too?”

  Clarissa stops rotating her head and wrinkles her nose as though I’d announced an unsavory subject, then rolls over on her back and stares skyward. “She’s much worse,” she says, and looks unconvincingly worried.

  “Worse than what?”

  “Than you!” She rounds her eyes upward in mock surprise. “She and Charley had a howler this week. And they had one last week too. And one the week before.” “Howlers” mean big disputes, not embarrassing verbal miscues. “Hmmmm, hmm, hmm,” she says, meaning most of what she knows is being retained silently. I of course can’t quiz her on this subject—a cardinal rule once divorce has become the governing institution—though I wish I knew more.

  I pluck up a blade of grass, press it between my two thumbs like a woodwind reed and blow, making a sputtery, squawky but still fairly successful soprano sax note, a skill from eons back.

  “Can you play ‘Gypsy Road’ or ‘Born in the U.S.A.’?” She sits up.

  “That’s my whole repertoire on grass,” I say, putting my two hands down on both her kneecaps, which are cold and bony and soft all at once. Conceivably she can smell dead grackle. “Your ole Dad loves you,” I say. “I’m sorry I have to kidnap Paul and not all two of you. I’d rather travel as a trio.”

  “He’s much needier now,” Clarissa says, and drags a blade of grass all her own across the backs of both my hands where they rest on her perfect kneecaps. “I’m way ahead of him emotionally. I’ll have my period pretty soon.” She looks up at me profoundly, fattens the corners of her mouth and slowly lets her eyes cross and keeps them that way.

  “Well, that’s good to know,” I say, my heart going ker-whonk, my eyes suddenly hot and unhappily moist—not with unhappy tears, but with unhappy sweat that has busted out on my forehead. “And how old are you?” I say, ker-whonk. “Thirty-seven or thirty-eight?”

  “Thirty-twelve,” she says, and lightly pokes my knuckles with the grass blade.

  “Okay, that’s old enough. You don’t need to be any older. You’re perfect.”

  “Charley knows Bush,” she says with a sour face. “Did you hear that?” Her blue eyes elevate gravely to mine. This is bottom-line business to her. All that Charley might conceivably have been forgiven is reassigned to him with this choice bit of news. My daughter, like her old man, is a Democrat of the New Deal bent and considers most Republicans and particularly V.P. Bush barely mentionable dickheads.

  “I guess I knew that without knowing it.” I scour my two fingers on the turf to clean off the death smell.

  “He’s for the party of money, tradition and influence,” she says, way too big for her britches, since Charley’s tradition and influence are paying her bills, keeping her in tetherballs, tutus and violin lessons. She is for the party of no tradition, no influence, no nothing, also like her father.

  “He has his rights,” I say, and add a lackluster “I mean that.” I can’t help conjuring what Charley’s cheek looks like where Paul has whopped him.

  Clarissa stares at her blade of grass, wondering, I’m sure, why she has to accord Charley any rights. “Sweetheart,” I say solemnly, “is there anything you can tell me about ole Paul? I don’t want you to tell me a deep dark secret, just maybe a shallow light one. It would be as-you-know-held-in-strictest-confidence.” I say this last to make it halfway a joke and let her feel comradely about providing me some lowdown.

  She stares at the thick grass carpet in silence, then angles her head over and squints up at the house with the flowering bushes and the white porch and stairs. Atop the highmost roof pinnacle, in the midst of all the springing angles and gable ends, is an American flag (a small one) on a staff, rustling in an unfelt breeze.

  “Are you sad?” she says. In her sun-blond hair I see a tiny red ribbon tied in a bow, something I hadn’t noticed but instantly revere her for, since along with her question it makes her seem a person of complex privacies.

  “No, I’m not sad, except that you can’t go with Paul and me to Cooperstown. And I forgot to bring you anything. That’s pretty sad.”

  “Do you have a car phone?” She raises her eyes accusingly.

  “No.”

  “Do you have a beeper?”

  “No, afraid not.” I smile at her knowingly.

  “How do you keep up with your calls then?” She squints again, making her look a hundred.

  “I guess I don’t get that many calls
. Sometimes there’s a message from you on my answering box, though not that often.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t answer me about Paul, sweetheart. All I really want to do is be a good pappy if I can.”

  “His problems are all stress-related,” she says officially. She plucks up another blade of quite green and dry grass and slips it into the cuff of my chinos where I’m cross-legged beside her.

  “What stress is he suffering from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that your best diagnosis?”

  “Yes.”

  “How ’bout you? Do you have any stress-related problems?”

  “No.” She shakes her head, makes a pruny pucker with her lips. “Mine’ll come out later, if I have any.”

  “Who told you so?”

  “TV.” She looks at me earnestly as though to say that TV has its good points too.

  Somewhere high in the firmament I hear a hawk cry out, or possibly an osprey, though when I look up I can’t see it.

  “What can I do about Paul’s stress-related problems?” I say, and, God be gracious, I wish she’d pipe up with a nice answer. I’d put it in place before the sun sets. Somewhere, then, another noise—not a hawk but a thumping, a door slamming or a window being shut, a drawer being closed. When I look up, Ann is standing at the porch rail, watching down on us across the lawn. I sense she’s just arrived but would like my chat with Clarissa to come to a close and for me to get on with my business. I make a friendly ex-husband-who-wishes-no-trouble wave, a gesture that makes me feel not so good. “I believe that’s your mom,” I say.

  Clarissa looks up at the porch. “Yeah hi,” she says.

  “We better dust off our britches here.” She will, I see, out of ancient, honorable loyalty, offer no help with her brother. She fears, I suppose, divulging compromising secrets while claiming only to love him. Children are wise to adult ways now, thanks to us.

  “Paul might be happier if you could maybe live in Deep River. Or maybe Old Saybrook,” she says as if these words require immense discipline, nodding her head slightly with each one. (Parents can break up, fall out of love, get searingly divorced, marry others, move miles away; but as far as kids are concerned, most of it’s tolerable if one parent will just tag along behind the other like a slave.)

  There was, of course, in the savage period after Ann moved away in ’84, a dolorous time when I haunted these very hills and stream-sides like a shamus; cruised its middle-school parking lots, its street corners and back alleys, cased its arcades and skating rinks, its Finasts and Burger Kings, merely to be in visual contact with where my children might spend the days and afternoons they could’ve been spending with me. I even went so far as to price a condo in Essex, a sterile little listening post from which I could keep “in touch,” keep love alive.

  Only it would’ve made me even more morose, as morose as a hundred lost hounds, to wake up alone in a condo! In Essex! Awaiting my appointed pickup hour with the kids, expecting to take them back where? To my condo? And afterward, glowering back down 95 for a befuddled workweek till Friday, when the lunacy commenced again? There are parents who don’t blink an eye at that kind of bashing around, who’d ruin their own lives and everybody’s within ten miles if they can prove—long after all the horses are out of the barn—that they’ve always been good and faithful providers.

  But I simply am not one of these; and I have been willing to see my kids less often, for the three of us to shuttlecock up and back, so that I can keep alive in Haddam a life they can fit into, even if pre-cariously, when they will, and meanwhile maintain my sanity, instead of forcing myself into places where I don’t belong and making everybody hate me. It’s not the best solution, since I miss them achingly. But it’s better to be a less than perfect dad than a perfect goofball.

  And in any case, with the condo option, they would still grow up and leave in a heartbeat; Ann and Charley would get divorced. And I’d be stuck (worst case) with a devalued condo I couldn’t give away. Eventually, I’d sell Cleveland Street as a downsizing measure, perhaps move up here to keep my mortgage company, and grimly pass my last years alone in Essex watching TV in a pair of old corduroys, a cardigan and Hush Puppies, while helping out evenings in some small bookshop, where I’d occasionally see Charley dodder in, place an order and never recognize me.

  Such things happen! We realtors are often the very ones called in for damage control. Though thankfully my frenzy subsided and I stayed put where I was and more or less knew my place. Haddam, New Jersey.

  “Sweetheart,” I say tenderly to my daughter, “if I lived up here, your mother wouldn’t like it at all, and you and Paul wouldn’t come stay in your own rooms and see your old friends-in-need. Sometimes you can change things and just make them worse.”

  “I know,” she says bluntly. I’m sure Ann hasn’t discussed with her Paul’s coming to live with me, and I have no idea what her opinion will be. Perhaps she’ll welcome it, loyalty aside. I might, if I were her.

  She reaches fingers into her yellow hair, her mouth going into a scowl of application. She pulls the little red bow out along the fine blond strands until she frees it still tied, and hands it to me rather matter-of-factly. “Here’s my latest present,” she says. “You can be my bow.”

  “That’s another kind of bow,” I say, taking the little frill in my hand and squeezing it. “They’re spelled different.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s okay, though, this time.”

  “Thanks.” Once again, sadly, I have nothing to trade as an act of devotion.

  And then she is up and on her bare feet, spanking the seat of her red shorts and shaking out her hair, looking down like a small lioness with a tangled mane. I am less quick but am up too, using the tetherball pole. I look toward the house, where no one’s standing on the porch now. A smile is for some reason on my lips, my hand on my daughter’s bony bare shoulder, her red bow, my badge of courage, clutched in my other hand, as we start—the two of us—together up the wide hill.

  Did you ever take trips in Mississippi with your father?” Ann asks without genuine interest. We are seated opposite each other on the big porch. The Connecticut River, visible now above the serrated treetops, is a-glitter with dainty sailboats sporting rust-colored sails, their masts steadfast as the wind transports them up the current toward Hartford. All boats of a certain class rising on a rising tide.

  “Sure, you bet. Sometimes we went over to Florida. Once we went to Norfolk and visited the Great Dismal Swamp on the way back.” She used to know this but has now forgotten.

  “Was it dismal?”

  “Absolutely.” I smile at her in a collegial way, since that is what we are.

  “And so did you two always get along great?” She looks away across the lawn below us.

  “We got along pretty great. My mother wasn’t around to complicate things, so we were on our best behavior. Three was more complicated.”

  “Women just enjoy disrupting men’s lives,” she says.

  We are fixed firmly in two oversize green wicker chairs furnished with oversize flowery cushions of some lush and complex lily-pad pattern. Ann has brought out an ole-timey amber-glass pitcher of iced tea, which Clarissa has fixed and drawn a fat happy face on. The tea and glasses and little pewter ice bucket are situated on a low table at knee level, as we, the two of us, wait for Paul, who was up late and slow now to rustle his bones. (I notice no warm-hearted carryover from our sentimental sign-off at the Vince last night.)

  Ann runs a comb-of-fingers back through her thick, athletically shortened hair, which she’s highlighted so sudden blond strands shine from within and look pretty. She’s wearing white golfing shorts and an expensive-looking sleeveless top of some earthy taupe color that fits loose and shows her breasts off semi-mysteriously, and tan, sockless tassel shoes that cause her tanned legs to look even longer and stauncher, stirring in me a low-boil sexual whir that makes me gladder to be alive than I
ever expected to feel today. I’ve noticed in the last year a subtle widening of Ann’s wonderful derriere and a faint thickening and loosening of the flesh above her knees and upper arms. To my view, a certain tense girlishness, always present (and which I never really liked), has begun subsiding and been replaced by a softer, womanly but in every way more substantial and appealing adultness I admire immensely. (I might mention this if I had time to make clear I liked it; though I see she is wearing Charley’s pretentiously plain gold band today, and the whole idea seems ridiculous.)

  She has not asked me to come inside to wait, though I’d already decided to stay clear of the glassed-in, malaise-filled “family room,” which I can just see into through the long mirror-tinted windows beside me. Charley has of course installed a big antique telescope there, complete with all the necessary brass knobs and fittings, engraved logarithmic calibrations and moon phases, and with which I’m sure he can bring in the Tower of London if he takes a notion. I can also make out the ghostly-white beast of a grand piano and beside it a beaux arts music stand, where Ann and Clarissa almost certainly play Mendelssohn duets for Charley’s delectation on many a cold winter’s eve. It is a tiresome recognition.

  Truth is, the one time I ever waited inside (picking up the kids for a day trip to the fish elevator at South Hadley), I ended up waiting alone for nearly an hour, leafing through the coffee-table library (Classic Holes of Golf, Erotic Cemetery Art, Sailing), eventually working my way down to a hot-pink flyer from a women’s clinic in New London, offering an enhance-your-sexual-performance workshop, which made me instantly panicky. Prudenter now just to stay on the porch and risk feeling like a grinning high-school kid forced to make deadpan parental chitchat while I await my date.

  Ann has already explained to me how yesterday was much worse than I knew, worse than she explained last night when she said I thought “be” and “seem” were the same concept (which may have been true once but isn’t now). Not only, it seems, did Paul wound poor Charley with an oarlock from his own damned dinghy, but he also informed his mother in the very living room I won’t enter and in front of damaged-goods Charley himself that she “needed” to get rid of “asshole Chuck.” After that, he marched out, got in his mother’s Mercedes wagon and hit off on a brief tear, barrel-assing unlicensed out the driveway at a high speed, missing the very first curve on Swallow Lane and sideswiping a two-hundred-year-old mountain ash on the neighbor’s property (a lawyer, of course). In the process he banged his head into the steering wheel, popped the air bag and cut his ear, so that he had to take a stitch at the Old Saybrook walk-in clinic. Erik, the man from Agazziz, arrived moments after the crash—similar to how he apprehended me—and escorted him home. No police were called. Later he disappeared again, on foot, and came home long past dark (Ann heard him bark once in his room).