by David Bergen
“It’s me,” Morris said.
“Hi, Dad.”
“What are you doing?” “Studying bio.”
“What’s that background noise?” “TV. My iPod.”
“Okay.”
The girl was wildly talented. She was eighteen, in grade twelve, and she had none of her father’s greed and calumny, or her mother’s severity. She was interested in fish and marine life. Morris liked to call her Cousteau, a nickname she accepted with equanimity. The truth was that he had never used Libby in any of his columns, and he never would, though she would be the least likely to complain. She was innocent; a stark contrast to her brother, Martin, and her older sister, Meredith, who was twenty-five and angry and full of entitlement. Meredith lived with a younger man named Glen who disliked Morris. Or perhaps Glen was afraid of him. One couldn’t be certain, though he thought that Glen was doltish and immature and had every reason to fear his girlfriend’s father. Glen and Meredith had a child, a son of four, whom Morris adored, but he could only adore him from a distance. In a column, written almost a year ago, he had talked with affection about his grandson, Jake, and then he had described Glen as rabbit-like, soft and pale with a curious nose that twitched. When he wrote the column he had believed that it was more humorous than withering, but Meredith was furious and cut him off from seeing Jake. If he saw his grandson at all now, it was when Lucille had him and Morris happened to drop by. Mystified by his daughter’s anger, he had refused to understand the strife he had caused. He missed the boy and now, on the phone, he thought he heard Jake in the background.
“Is Meredith there?” he asked.
“She is,” Libby said.
“With Jake?”
Libby said yes. She said that Glen was there as well. Morris heard the warning in her voice and he suffered a moment of empathy for her. She shouldn’t have to be privy to all this nonsense.
“Give Jake a hug, okay. Tell him it’s from Grandpa.” “I will.” Libby’s voice was soft and low. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Just checking in. Doing a father’s job. How are you?” He wanted to keep her on the phone, hear her voice. She was the only one in his life who did not judge him, who did not see something dire in him, who did not want to wring repentance from him.
“I’m good.”
“School?”
“Good.”
“You still seeing that Mr. McKibben?”
“His name’s Shane. He’s actually a doctor of English, Dad. And we aren’t seeing each other. He’s just a friend.”
“Of course. That’s what I meant. It’s just, now that you’re over there and I’m here, I don’t know what’s going on. Not as much.” He stopped talking, aware that he was asking for more than she wanted to give. Mr. McKibben was an older man, almost twice her age, who was a professor of English at the university, and Morris knew that they spent time together and were perhaps having sex. This worried him. Several times he had dropped by the university and gone to the English department in order to talk to the man, but all he’d discovered was a closed door and on the door the man’s name: Shane McKibben. One time, late on a Thursday after his men’s group, a sliver of light showed from under the door and he’d knocked and called out, but no one answered. He’d scribbled a note on a scrap of paper. He wrote:
Mr. McKibben, my name is Morris Schutt and I believe you are spending time with my daughter Libby, who is eighteen and in grade twelve. How old are you, Mr. McKibben? What do you imagine can come of this relationship other than some superior damage to my daughter? I am not threatening you, Mr. McKibben, I am simply advising and my advice is that you gently and kindly tell my daughter that you have made a mistake and that you will not see her again. Thank you. Morris Schutt.
Such restraint and decorum. He was pleased with himself. He folded the paper and slipped it under the door and then went down on his hands and knees to see if there was indeed someone in the room, if he might be able to glimpse a passing shadow. He saw nothing. He had expected that Shane would tell Libby about the note, but she said nothing. And they still kept seeing each other. Now, hearing his daughter say that she was only a friend with Dr. McKibben, Morris held back any speech he might have prepared and he said, “The debating team? That going well?”
She made a sound that was soft and very Libby-like, and he imagined that she was busy with something electronic, perhaps looking for a song, or texting someone, maybe sending Shane a message. He felt himself sink as he recognized that she might be pitying him.
“Is your mother there?”
“Hang on.”
He heard her holler and then there was silence and finally the static of the phone being handed over and Lucille said,“Don’t you have your men’s club tonight?” She sounded breathless, disappointed, as if she’d run a long distance, anticipating perhaps someone else.
“Tomorrow night. Thursday. And it’s a men’s group, not a club. Robert called. He said that my columns have become wistful and disjointed.”
“Yes?”
“He said he talked to you.” “He did. Yesterday.”
“So you knew this already. You knew I was being laid off and you didn’t let me know.”
“Morris, you aren’t laid off. A hiatus—that’s what they’re calling it.”
“And you agree? That I’m wistful?”
“Did I say that? I never did. You know I don’t read your column anymore. I don’t need to read fiction that is passed off as truth. I don’t need to read about myself. Meredith was right to challenge you.”
“How long do you think she’ll stay angry? I miss Jake.”
“You might try apologizing. Talking to her. And then talking to Glen and showing some kindness to him. Don’t you get lonely, Morris? I feel for you.”
“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t need your amazing capacity to pretend to understand. And as far as the column goes, I told Robert that I was finished. I won’t be writing anymore.”
“I wonder sometimes.” Lucille’s tone crept upwards, ever so slightly, and Morris knew that she was standing, back arched, chin raised, with her left hand, the one free of the phone, held out from her body, bent a little, as if to ward off a blow. “I wonder if that woman hadn’t lost her son, if you hadn’t corresponded with her, if I had been more vigilant, if I hadn’t settled into my own sadness, and if I had forgiven you, whether we would still be living in the same house.”
“That’s such an interesting word,” Morris said. “If.”
“Why can’t you answer the question, Mo? Why can’t you dip a little into your thinking? Are you thinking?”
“Too much. Though my thinking is shallow. I have to think about my thinking.”
“And you don’t cry.” Lucille’s voice was softer now, as if she had sat down. He imagined her in the kitchen, or perhaps the soft red-leather chair in the den. “What will you do?” she asked. “It isn’t good for you to have all this time. You’re only fifty-one, Morris.”
“Oh, I’ll keep writing my columns for myself. Bob said that at some point I would move past the nonsense and rediscover the path of righteousness. The money path, as he calls it. He’s a parasite.”
Lucille ignored this. “You’re taking Libby out for lunch Saturday. Don’t forget.”
“Hnnh. I remember.” He studied his hand and said, “My right palm is all flaky. There’re cracks on my fingertips, sometimes they bleed.”
“Go to a clinic. It might be eczema.”
“It was way easier when we lived together, don’t you think? We’d play doctor. Give Jake a hug from me, okay?”
“I do. I always do. Lunch on Saturday. Pick Libby up at noon. Bye, Morris.” And she hung up.
Ursula was an American woman who wanted to be but was not yet his lover. She was six years younger than he was and he had come to know her in December of 2006, when she sent him a letter in response to one of his syndicated columns that he had written ten months after his son died. The column, one of the hardest he had ever written, an
d something he had put off for a long time, had been about a young soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. He had described the soldier’s fear and his bravery, and he had referred to the boy’s e-mails and phone calls to his parents in which he had talked about the good that the army was doing. He had also mentioned his own fear and the boy’s doubt, the sense that people at home didn’t truly believe or support what the soldiers were doing. “There are times, Dad, when I’m not even sure. I get scared, Dad. Scared that I’m going to be killed over here.” The whole column was written in the third person, and only at the end did Morris write, “This boy? This beautiful twenty-year-old with his life ahead of him? This boy who was killed? This was my son.”
He received Ursula’s letter via his agent. She wrote:
Dear Mr. Schutt,
My name is Ursula Frank and I live on a dairy farm two hours from Minneapolis. This is not far from where you live, and though an international border separates us, I feel very close to you today. I just finished reading your column about your son who was killed in Afghanistan. My heart broke as you described your son’s death. I also had a son who was killed during the war, only he was in Iraq. His name was Harley. He was nineteen and he was killed last year by a bomb that exploded underneath the Humvee he was driving. He died immediately. When I heard about my son’s death and felt that first wave of shock, and then waited and waited and finally watched his casket being lowered from the transport plane, all of that was easy compared to what came after, and that’s why I’m writing you. It’s amazing to hear from someone who has lost a son to war like me and who is able to write about it in such a public way. I’ve read your column before but I’ve never thought, Oh, I should write him. And then, when I read your last column, I felt that you were sitting right beside me, telling me the story of your son. I’m not sure how to talk about your son or how to talk to you. Oh, I know that you are famous and that I’m just small fry and that you probably won’t even read this letter, but I wanted to send it, I wanted to write it on actual paper, using a pen, and I wanted to fold it and push it into an envelope and put a stamp on the envelope and drop it into a mailbox. These small things are what save me these days from my constant fear. Even though the worst thing that can happen has happened, the death of my child, I’m still very angry. And I’m afraid. In your article you mentioned the word “fear” and I thought to myself, Oh, he might be afraid as well. Is that true? Thank you for listening.
Sincerely,
Ursula Frank
Her writing was so formal and yet so clear and so moving that he wrote her back immediately. He too wrote on paper, with a pen, and mailed it to her through regular post, making sure his own return address was written on the top left-hand corner. He first talked about her son, and how sorry he was, and he said that he might be able to gauge her grief, though grief was personal and he didn’t want to be presumptuous. He said that he did not see her as “small fry,” not at all. And he certainly wasn’t famous. And then he addressed what was most poignant in her letter, the question of fear.
Oh, yes, Ms. Frank, I am afraid of many things. Of sleeping and dreaming of my son and then waking to find that I was only dreaming. Of the darkness, of death, of life itself, of plodding through the day, always aware that I am alive when my son is dead. That makes me unbearably sad and it makes me fearful. And I am afraid of the possibility that I will lose my daughters as well, or my grandson, Jake, who grasps after life, though I do not see him often and have been told that I cannot see him. What kind of world is it that we live in where a grandfather cannot spend time with his grandson? And truth? I am afraid of truth, because if I truly look at myself, I will despair. Of happiness as well, because if I am happy, then I have let go of my sorrow.
I was walking by the river the other day and I saw the ducks and they were diving for food, their tiny rumps pointing to the sky, and I stood and watched them, little things, no need of lodging or clothing or money, just the feathers on their backs and their webbed feet, such intricate elaborate instruments, and for a brief moment I forgot who I was, and when I returned to myself, I realized that I had been experiencing happiness, allowing my emotions to whip my reason, and I was filled with panic. I am full of betrayal and selfishness. And you. I am afraid of you, Ursula, because you allow me to speak in this manner, freely, with no editing, no red pencil striking out the emotion. Are you Jewish?
Morris
And so began a correspondence that was intelligent and flirtatious and raw. And hidden. Morris did not tell Lucille about Ursula, and because he was the one to retrieve the mail, Lucille remained unaware. The privacy and the secrecy allowed his imagination to soar in the letters; so different from the mundane scribblings of a columnist. He was starting to see that by confessing to the public he had damaged himself and his family. At the time, he believed it had been healthy, that he was honest and worthy, that he was truer than the average man. Now he saw that he had been deceiving himself. This secret correspondence with Ursula left him giddy and alive. He talked about Martin and she talked about Harley. She told him about her life as the wife of a dairy farmer. She’d met her husband when he spent a year working in Holland. They fell in love; she quit school and moved to America, a country that was very different from the one she was raised in. “I never planned to be a farmer’s wife,” she wrote, “but here I am, in the middle of a life that I chose when I was too young to know better. I always imagined I would have a career of my own, use my education.” She apologized; she hated whiners. She said that her husband Cal had closed himself off after Harley’s death, and if she didn’t have Morris to talk to, she would be alone in the world. He echoed these words and, in a moment of brilliant betrayal, said that he felt closer to her than he did to his own wife. This did not surprise or frighten Ursula. She agreed. They spoke of longing and loss and they spoke of sex. He said that ever since Martin died he had become more interested in sex, as if death had dredged up some hidden desire inside of him, as if this was his way of overthrowing his own demise. He said that his wife found his feelings contrary and frightening. She claimed that he was in denial and that sex was masking his grief. It wasn’t normal to want to have sex when you were broken-hearted. “It is what it is,” he wrote. “I refuse to be conquered by despair.”
Ursula wrote back and asked him what he looked like, and then she described herself, but she did it in a circumspect manner, so that if Morris had been asked to make a sketch of Ursula Frank, he would have been hard pressed to do so. She said that she was not Jewish. “Funny question.” Then she had given her height, five foot eight, and she said that her arms were muscular and that her bum was too big, but the other facts she offered were odd: the size of her feet, the difficulty in maintaining her nails, the mole below her right eye, a trait she had passed on to Harley. She liked to shop for fine clothes. Cal thought she spent too much money on shoes; she had no place to wear them. Morris was excited. He wrote that he loved women’s shoes. He shopped for his wife, bought her boots and outfits of all sorts. He liked the feel of women’s clothing. He liked to pass through a shop and press the cloth between his fingers. “Do you think this fey?” he asked. She responded and said that she had looked up the word “fey” in the dictionary and it meant “fated to die.” What did he mean? He wrote back that he had meant “affected,” as in, some gay men are affected. “Do you think that this behaviour is too effeminate?” She said that she did not like to think of him as gay or effeminate. That worried her. She had imagined that he was quite masculine, that he seemed strong, both physically and morally. She said that she felt guilty because she had not told Cal about her letters to him. She asked if he had told Lucille. She knew Lucille’s name, she knew what Lucille did for a living, and she was intimidated by her education and status. He wrote back and said that Lucille did not know about the letters, that this was a private affair and none of Lucille’s business. “It’s not like you and I are having sex,” he wrote. “We haven’t even faced each other, nor do we truly know what
the other person looks like, so why should we feel guilty for something that is non-existent?” She said that she disagreed. Their relationship was very real. She wrote: “I think of you often. I imagine changing this correspondence to e-mail so that you could send me a photograph of yourself. And then I think, No, this is better. I like the mystery, the sense of the unknown. So often the physical gets in the way, don’t you think?” She said that her favourite cow, Meera, had taken sick and so had to be slaughtered. He asked if all the cows had names, and she said, “Yes, this is why it’s so hard when they die.” She got up with Cal at four thirty every morning to milk. They milked again at five p.m. “The cows don’t go away,” she said.
For several months they continued this correspondence and often the letters crossed paths in the mail. Lucille discovered one of Ursula’s letters a few days after she and Morris had decided to separate. On the spring day that Lucille told him that she could no longer live with him, that their relationship as husband and wife was drawing to a close—she was so typically formal and uptight, thought Morris—they were sitting eating breakfast in the nook that had been built when Martin was three. The memory of torn-down plaster and lath, the empty hole for the large window that now looked out onto the garden. The dust and chaos and Martin wandering about, holding his toy hammer, banging ineffectually at the old lumber, imitating the workmen. Look at me. Such hope back then, no sense of needing to rehearse for what was to come. Morris had come to believe that he had failed to rehearse Martin’s death. Certainly this must have been Lucille’s method. She was prepared, like Telamon, who said, I knew, when I fathered them, that they must die. She would never be surprised. She looked up from her newspaper and, without any preamble, wondered at what point he was going to admit that he had some involvement in Martin’s death. She had raised this subject before and so the question was not unexpected. He laid down his knife, folded his own section of the newspaper, and looked at Lucille carefully. She was quite beautiful, wearing a sleeveless top that showed off the strong shoulders that he used to stoop towards and kiss. What a strange mind you have, Morris, he thought, admiring your wife, picturing yourself bending to kiss her shoulders even as she berates you. And then, suddenly, he was imagining the letterhead of some lawyer, and written beneath would be the words: “Morris and Lucille Schutt are separating due to incompatibility brought on by the anguish that arrived with the death of their son.”