Last month, I lured him from his self-imposed office hours for a walk around our block. My ailing father insisted on bringing his briefcase. “You never know,” he said. We soon passed a huge young man, creaking in black leather. He carried a guitar case. The kid’s pierced ears and eyebrows flashed more silver than some bait shops sell. His jeans, half down, exposed hat racks of white hip bone; the haircut arched high over jug ears. He kept scouting Father’s shoes. Long before fashion joined him, Dad favored an under-evolved antique form of orthopedic Doc Martens. These impressed a punk now scanning Dad’s Sherman tank of a cowhide briefcase with its chromium corner braces. The camel-hair overcoat was cut to resemble some boxy-backed 1947 Packard. And, of course, up top sat “the gray.”
Pointing to it all, the boy smiled. “Way bad look on you, guy.”
My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was, “I think he likes you.”
Dad’s face folded. “Uh-oh.”
Once a year, Mom told brother and me how much the war had darkened her young husband; he’d enlisted with three other boys from Falls. He alone came back alive with all his limbs. “Before that,” she smiled, “your father was funnier, funny. And smart. Great dancer. You can’t blame mustard gas, not this go-round. It’s more what Dick saw. He was lighting a cigarette for Paul, his best friend, when a Nazi sniper—half a mile away—vaporized Paul’s head. Your father came home and he was all business. Obedient. Just facts mattered. Before, he’d been mischievous and talkative, even strange. He was always playing around with words. Very entertaining. Eyelashes out to here. For years, I figured that in time he’d come back to being whole. But since June of ’45 it’s been All Work and No Play Makes Jack.
“On our fifth anniversary I hired an overnight sitter for you two. He and I drove to a famous Asheville inn. It had the state’s best restaurant, candlelight, a real string quartet. I’d made myself a green crushed-velvet dress. I was twenty-eight and never in my whole life have I ever looked better. You just know it. Dick recognized some man who’d bought two adding machines from his firm. Dick invited him to join us. Then I saw how much Integrity Office Supplier was going to have to mean to him. And us.
“So, don’t be too hard on him. Your father feeds us, saves for you boys’ college. Dick pays our taxes. Dick has no secrets. He got hurt but he’s not hurting anyone.” Brother and I gave each other a look Mom recognized and understood but refused to return.
The office seemed to tap some part of him that was either off-limits to us or simply did not otherwise exist. My brother and I griped he’d never attended our Little League games. He missed the father-son Cub Scout banquet; it conflicted with a major envelope convention in Newport News. Mother neutrally said he loved us as much as he could. She always was a wry, energetic person—all that wasted goodwill. Even as kids, we knew not to blame her.
By the end, my father was a fifty-two-year veteran of Integrity Office Supplier, Unlimited. An early riser, six days a week he shaved and gargled. Mom sealed his single sandwich into its Tupperware jacket; this fit accidentally yet exactly within the lid compartment of his durable briefcase. Dad would set the hat in place, nod in our general direction, and hurry off. If he had been General Eisenhower saving the Western world or Dr. Salk sparing children polio, okay. But yellow Eagle pencils? Utility paperweights in park-bench green?
Ignored, Mom turned the spare room into her sewing studio. Economizing needlessly, she stayed busy stitching all our school clothes, cowboy motifs galore. For a while, each shirt pocket bristled with Mom-designed embroidered cacti. But Simplicity patterns were never going to engage a mind complex as hers. Soon she was spending mornings playing vicious duplicate bridge. Our toothbrush glasses briefly broke out in rashes of red hearts, black clubs. Mom’s new pals were society ladies respectful of her brainy speed, her offhand wit; she never bothered introducing them to her husband. She laughed more now. She started wearing rouge.
We lived a short distance from both our school and his wholesale office. Dad sometimes left the Plymouth parked all night outside the workplace, his desk lamp the last one burning on the whole third floor. Integrity’s president, passing headquarters late, always fell for it. “Dick, what do you do up there all night, son?” My father’s shrug became his finest boast. The raises kept pace; Integrity Office Supplier was considered quite a comer. And R. Richard Markham, Sr.—handsome as a collar ad, a hat ad, forever at the office—was the heir apparent.
No other schoolboys had sturdier pastel subject dividers, more clip-in see-through three-ring pen caddies. The night before school started, Dad would be up late at our kitchen table, swilling coffee, “getting you boys set.” Zippered leather cases, English slide rules, folders more suitable for treaties than book reports (Skipper, a Dog of the Pyrenees, by Marjorie Hopgood Purling). Our notebooks soon proved too heavy to carry far; we secretly stripped them, swapping gear for lunch box treats more exotic than Mom’s hard-boiled eggs and Sun-Maid raisin packs.
II.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, Dad’s Integrity Office Supplier got bought out by a German firm. The business’s vitality proved somewhat hobbled by computers’ onslaught. “A fad,” my father called computers in 1976. “Let others retool. We’ll stand firm with our yellow legals, erasers, Parker ink, fountain pens. Don’t worry, our regulars’ll come back. True vision always lets you act kind in the end, boys. Remember.”
Yeah, right.
My father postponed his retirement. Mom encouraged that and felt relieved; she could not image him at home all day. As Integrity’s market share dwindled, Dad spent more time at the office, as if to compensate with his own body for the course of modern life.
His secretary, the admired Miss Green, had once been what Pop called “something of a bombshell.” (He stuck with a Second World War terminology. Like the hat, it had served him too well to ever leave behind.)
Still favoring shoulder pads, dressed in unyielding woolen Joan Crawford solids, Green wore an auburn pageboy that looked burned by decades of ungrateful dyes. She kicked off her shoes beneath her desk, revealing feet that told the tale of high heels’ worthless weekday brutality. She’d quit college to tend an ailing mother, who proved demanding, then immortal. Brother and I teased Mom: poor Green appeared to worship her longtime boss, a guy whose face was as smooth and wedged and classic as his headgear. Into Dick Markham’s blunted constancy she read actual “moods.”
He still viewed Green, now past sixty, as a promising virginal girl. Their small offices adjoined. Integrity’s flagship headquarters remained enameled a flavorless mint green, unaltered for five decades. The dark Mission coatrack was made by Limbert—quite a good piece. One ashtray—upright, floor model, brushed chromium—proved the size and shape of some landlocked torpedo. Moored to walls, dented metal shelves. A series of khaki filing cabinets seemed banished to one shaming little closet. Dad’s office might’ve been decorated by a firm called Edward Hopper & Sam Spade, Unlimited.
For more than half a century, he walked in each day at seven-oh-nine sharp, as Miss Green forever said, “Morning, Mr. Markham. I left your appointments written on your desk pad, can I get you your coffee? Is now good, sir?”
And Dad said, “Yes, why, thanks, Miss Green, how’s your mother, don’t mind if I do.”
Four years ago, I received a panicked phone call: “You the junior to a guy about eighty, guy in a hat?”
“Probably.” I was working at home; I pressed my computer’s “save” button. This, I sensed, might take a while.
“Mister, your dad thinks we’re camped out in his office and he’s been banging against our door. He’s convinced we’ve evicted his files and what he calls his Green. ‘What have you done with young Green?’ Get down here ASAP. Get him out of our hair or it’s 911 in three minutes, swear to God.”
From my car, I phoned home. Mom must have been off somewhere playing bridge with the mayor’s blond
wife and his blond ex-wife; they’d sensibly become excellent friends. Mother, overlooked by Dad for years, had continued finding what she called “certain outlets.”
When I arrived, Dad was still heaving himself against an office door, dead-bolt-locked from within. Since its upper panel was frosted glass, I could make out the colored clothes of three or four people pressing from their side. They’d used masking tape to cross-hatch the glass, as if bracing for a hurricane. The old man held his briefcase, wore his gray hat, the tan boxy coat.
“Dad?” He stopped with a mechanical cartoon verve, jumped my way, and smiled so hard it warmed my heart and scared me witless. My father had never acted so glad to see me—not when I graduated summa cum laude, not at my wedding, not after the birth of my son—and I felt joy in the presence of such joy from him.
“Reinforcements. Good man. We’ve got quite a hostage situation here. Let’s put our shoulders to it, shall we?”
“Dad?” I grabbed the padded shoulders of his overcoat. These crumpled to reveal a man far sketchier hiding in there somewhere—a guy only twenty years from a hundred, after all.
“Dad? Dad. We have a good-news bad-news setup here today. It’s this. You found the right building, Dad. Wrong floor.”
I led him back to the clattering, oil-smelling elevator. I thought to return, tap on the barricaded door, explain. But, in time, hey, they’d peek, they’d figure out the coast was clear. That they hadn’t recognized him, after his fifty-two years of long days in this very building, said something. New people, everywhere.
I saw at once that Miss Green had been crying. Her face was caked with so much powder it looked like calamine. “Little mix-up,” I said.
“Mr. Markham? We got three calls about those gum erasers.” She faked her normal tone. “I think they’re putting sawdust in them these days, sir. They leave skid marks, apparently. I put the information on your desk. With your day’s appointments. Like your coffee? Like it now? Sir?”
I hung his hat on the hat tree; I slid his coat onto one wooden Deco hanger that could, at any flea market today, bring fifty-five dollars easy, two tones of wood, inlaid.
I wanted to have a heart-to-heart with my father. But I felt so disoriented. Then I overheard him already returning his calls. As usual he ignored me. And, within this radically altered gravitational field, that seemed a good sign. I sneaked back to Miss Green’s desk and admitted, “We’ll need to call his doctor. I want him seen today, Miss Green. He was up on four, trying to get into that new headhunting service. He told them his name. Mom was out. So they, clever, looked him up, found his junior, and phoned me to come help.”
She sat forward, strenuously feigning surprise. She looked rigid, chained to this metal desk by both gnarled feet. “How long has he been like this?” I somehow knew to ask.
Green appeared ecstatic, then relieved, then, suddenly, happily, tears came pouring down—small tears, lopsided amounts, mascaraed grit. She blinked up at me with a spaniel’s gratitude. In mere seconds, she confessed Dad’s years-long caving-in. She hinted she was passing on the task. My turn.
Miss Green now whispered certain of his mistakes. There were forgotten parking tickets by the dozen. There was his attempt to purchase a lake house on land already flooded for a dam. Quietly, she admitted years of covering.
From her purse, she lifted a page covered in Dad’s stern Germanic cursive. Blue ink fought to stay between red lines.
“I found this one last week.” Green’s voice seemed steadied by the joy of having told. “I fear this is about the worst to-date we’ve been.”
I read the note:
If they say “hot enough for you?” it means recent weather. “Yes indeed” still a good comeback. Order forms pink. Requisition yellow. Miss Green’s birthday June 12. She work with you fifty-one years. Is still unmarried. Mother now dead, since ’76, so stop asking about Mother, health of. Your home address, 712 Marigold Street: Left at Oak, can always walk there. After last week, never go near car again. Unfair to others. Take second left at biggest tree. Your new Butchers’ name is Al. Wife: Betty. Sons: Matthew and Dick Junior. Grandson Richie (your name with a III added on it). List of credit cards, licnse below in case you lose wallet agn, you big dope. Put copies somewhere safe, 3 places, write down, hide many: You are 80, yes, eighty.
And yet, as we now eavesdropped, Dick Markham dealt with a complaining customer. He sounded practiced, jokey, conversant, exact.
“Dad, you have an unexpected doctor’s appointment.” I handed him his hat. I’d phoned our family physician from Miss Green’s extension.
For once, they were ready for us. The nurses kept calling him by name, smiling, overinsistent. I could see they’d always liked him. In a town this small, they’d maybe heard about his trouble earlier today.
As Dad got ushered in for tests, he glowered accusations back at me as if I had just dragged him to some Nazi medical experiment. He finally reemerged, scarily pale, pressing a bit of gauze into the crook of his bare arm, its long veins the exact blue of Parker’s washable ink. They directed him toward the lobby bathroom. They gave him a cup for his urine specimen. He held it before him with two hands like some magi’s treasure.
His hat, briefcase, and overcoat remained behind, resting on one orange plastic chair. Toward these I could display a permissible tenderness. I lightly set my hand upon each item. Call it superstition. I now lifted the hat and sniffed it. It smelled like Dad. It smelled like rope. Physical intimacy had never been a possibility. My brother and I, half drunk, once tried to picture the improbable, the sexual conjunction of our parents. Brother said, “Well, he probably pretends he’s at the office, unsealing her like a good manila envelope that requires a rubber stamp—legible, yes, keep it legible, legible, now speed-mail!”
I had flipped through all four stale magazines before I saw the nurses peeking from their crudely cut window. “He has been quite a while, Mr. Markham. Going on thirty minutes.”
“Shall I?” I rose and knocked. No answer. “Would you come stand behind me?” Cowardly, I signaled to a veteran nurse.
The door proved unlocked. I opened it. I saw one old man aimed the other way and trembling with hesitation. Before him, a white toilet, a white sink, a white enamel trash can, the three aligned—each its own invitation. In one hand, the old man held an empty specimen cup. In the other hand, his dick.
Turning my way, grateful, unashamed to be caught sobbing, he asked, “Which one, son? Fill which one?”
III.
FORCIBLY RETIRED, Father lived at home in his pajamas. Mom made him wear slippers and the silk robe to help with his morale. But the poor guy literally “hung his head with shame.” That phrase took on new meaning now that his routine and dignity proved so reduced. Dad’s mopey presence clogged every outlet she’d perfected to avoid him. The two of them were driving each other crazy.
Lacking the cash for live-in help, she was forced to cut way back on her bridge games and female company. She lost ten pounds—it showed first in her neck and face—and then she gave up rouge. You could see Mom missed her fancy friends. I soon pitied her nearly as much as I pitied him—no, more. At least he allowed himself to sometimes be distracted. She couldn’t forget the things he couldn’t remember.
Mom kept urging him to dress as if for work. She said they needed to go to the zoo. She had to get out and “do” something. One morning, she was trying to force Dad into his dress pants when he struck her. She fell right over the back of an armchair. The whole left side of her head stayed a rubber-stamp pad’s blue-black for one whole week. Odd, this made it easier for both of them to stay home. Now two people hung their heads in shame.
At a window overlooking the busy one-way street, Dad spent hours staring out. On window glass, his forehead left a persistent oval of human oil. His pajama knees pressed against the radiator. He silently second-guessed parallel parkers. He studied westerly-moving traffic. Sometimes he’d stand guard there mornings and afternoons. Did he await some detained patrioti
c parade? I pictured poor Green on one of its passing floats—hoisting his coffee mug and a black office-phone carved big as the Maltese Falcon. She’d be waving him back down to street level, reality, use.
One December morning, Mom—library book in lap, trying to reinterest herself in Daphne du Maurier, in anything—smelled something scorching. Like Campbell’s mushroom soup left far too long on simmer. Twice she checked their stove and toaster-oven. Finally, around his nap time, she pulled Dad away from the radiator: his shins had cooked.
“Didn’t it hurt you, Dick? Darling, didn’t you feel anything?”
Next morning at six-thirty, I got her call. Mom’s husky tone sounded too jolly for the hour. She described bandaging both legs. “As you kids say, I don’t think this is really working for us. Might be beyond me. Integrity’s fleabag insurance won’t provide him the care he needs. We have just enough to go on living here as usual. Now, maybe it’ll shock you to find me weak or, worse, disloyal. But would you consider someday checking out a nice facility in driving distance? Even if it uses up our savings. Your father is the love of my life—one per customer. I hate getting any more afraid of him!”
I said I’d phone all the good local places.
She went on, “Your dad’s been home from the office—what, seven months? Most men look forward to their leisure years. When I think of everything Dick gave Integrity and how little he’s getting back … I’m not strong enough to keep him but I can’t bear to put him anywhere. —Still, at this rate, all I’ll want for Christmas is a nice white padded cell for two.”
I wished my mother belonged to our generation, where women work. She could’ve done anything. He still refused to dress; she focused on the sight of his pajamas. My folks now argued with the energy of newlyweds; then she felt ashamed of herself and he forgot to do whatever he’d just promised.
The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Page 6