The Sentimentalists

by Johanna Skibsrud

  This is what Henry thought when he began to overhear his father describe Jacqui to Owen, in this or that particular way (Jacqui wringing clothes out in the sink as though strangling a goose, or bending with a shout, to hide her hand of whist from Henry with the wandering eye), and he regretted bitterly in those moments that he had not had the chance to build Jacqui a house of her own, where she could have lived – instead of in parts – as a whole. Entire. In the way that she had been for him in the first instant that he saw her – in the sixth grade, which he had had to repeat – as she stepped into the room,and he had felt it enter him in a single rush. That first – absolutely whole, absolutely perfect – moment of human love.

  It was Henry who broke the news to the grandfather, and to Owen. Over breakfast the next day, having waited a full twenty-four hours after first hearing the news himself. Having made several telephone calls to the newspaper and to the fire department, to verify that, indeed, what he had heard had been true. When he found that it had, he told his family so – choosing to present the situation just as it had been presented to him. It was part, Henry said (alone, over his breakfast cereal, to practice the words before informing Owen and his father), of the greatest technological feat so far known to man. And marked (he added) an era of true progress, in which we (and now Henry looked up, at the table, still empty, nodding in the imagined directions of where his father and Owen would be) – evidently – have a part.

  Owen and his grandfather were far less optimistic than Henry, and Henry, it turned out was less optimistic than he imagined himself to be. But, unlike his father, he was as resigned as he had been as a child, when it was his father who’d said move, and he’d picked up his pin and he’d moved.

  People called the town “Casablanca” now. And while, like the rest of the residents, Henry packed silverware into boxes and watched angrily as the trees were cut down and the oldest houses burned (so that the field Henry’s father had laboriously cleared could not in the end be differentiated from the rest of the landscape), Henry’s father pursued a different course. At the beginning of July, in that last summer, Henry watched as his son followed his father back and forth from the gravel pits to haul buckets of coarse sand to the top of the yard where, when Jacqui had kept it, the garden had been.

  There, his father marked the outline of his own dam,sticking in the uneven ground twelve mismatched spikes which would become (Henry’s father assured Henry in the evenings), with the help of Owen’s gravel and a system of loosely interlocked stones, a single, impenetrable wall.

  The stones he rooted for himself from the new garden: a small plot at the front of the house, and also from the back, where a dilapidated stone fence snaked, half hidden in the grass.

  Owen had been given the chore of hauling the gravel because it was a long walk to and from the pit, a mile each way. The days were hot and the wheelbarrow was so old that the wheel turned crookedly. On the return run the gravel tilted once in every rotation, nearly spilling each time, and clanging metal so sharply on metal that Owen’s days – getting on now into the middle of July – were emblazoned long in his memory by the click-clank, clickety-clank of the wheelbarrow, rhythmic as a drumbeat, hot on the road.

  At first, Henry, observing the production from the kitchen window, had forbidden Owen to help.

  “He’s just gone a bit crazy, Owen, with the news,” Henry told his son, while filling the feeders on the porch one day, and meeting Owen on the stair. “Don’t you encourage him.” Then, in sudden disgust at something he could not name, and perhaps at something of what he himself had said, he threw a handful of seeds violently into the yard.

  The few birds, who had come shyly to watch, rose and scattered.

  “Really,” Henry said, composing himself again. “He should be used to it.” He winked at Owen. “When I was a boy,” he said, “we moved every week.” But Owen didn’t laugh as he might have at another time. And it occurred to Henry, for the first time, that he didn’t know his son. Or have any idea what Owen could have been thinking then, or at all, during the many long hours of that summer that he had spent with the grandfather out in the yard.

  Until then, Henry had only falsely assumed that the memories of his own childhood had been – imbued in the blood – passed on like a latent gene. But Owen of course, it occurred to Henry now, equally knew nothing of what his own life had been. Except, that is, for the map of the world.

  “Now, just say flat-out no,” Henry said, just to say something, though his conviction had wavered. “He’ll forget about it soon enough, with any luck.”

  Then he turned his chair and wheeled it out along the porch to the second feeder, allowing Owen to pass. Chipping the hard bits of feed from the spout, where they’d jammed.

  Still, Henry imagined that it might be easy again; that they might slide, get rid of the ghosts that they loved too well; move, maybe even farther afield. Settle in Toronto, maybe. Where Owen could go to the university, and they could live in a house with linoleum flooring, and no stairs (which in the old place his father was made to struggle with, up and down, each way, pausing for breath at each of the two narrow landings, his old black lungs startled by the thin air). There would be a backyard for himself and the birds. A small one, because he could not turn about in it, after all.

  Owen could mow it himself, in a quarter of an hour.

  Two weeks had gone by since Henry had first forbidden Owen to work on the dam, and Owen had only begun to work harder.

  “He’s crazy enough,” Henry said one evening – trying again – as the two of them wrapped dishes together in the kitchen. “Now this is too much. If they can sink a town, they can certainly sink a half-built fence. It wouldn’t even keep a goat out.”

  Owen, who had been standing on a high stool, reaching into the far recesses of the old cabinets, nodded, passing Henry a gravy tureen.

  After a while, Henry didn’t mention it anymore.

  2

  That night after the meal, Henry pushed from the table. “Save your fork,” he said, “there may be pie,” then he let his own knife and fork rain down on his plate, making a loud clattering noise. My father repeated those last words, “May be pie, yep,” as Henry wheeled himself into the other room, as if agreeing with something. But it didn’t ever mean anything when Henry said that. It was just an old expression of his or a joke whose origin everyone had, by then, forgot. We hardly heard him when he said it, and there rarely was, if ever, pie to eat in that house after any meal. Sometimes Susan, the nurse, would bring some dessert down, or once in a while my father would pick up a flat store-bought pie that no one was ever thrilled about. It’s the dimensions of a pie, after all, that can be, when they are, so satisfying. Those flat pies would just sit on the counter for a while uneaten, until, that summer, I threw them out.

  I wondered what they’d done when I wasn’t around to throw out all the food that spoiled.

  By that time Henry was settled, with his notebook, in the other room. We could hear the click of the television and then the low roar of the game on. My father and I remained, without speaking, working on our own puzzle: the still as-yet-unsolved crossword of the day before.

  It wasn’t until the game was over, and Henry had wheeled himself from the TV to his adjacent bedroom, and we heard the final grunt of his last pushup against the ledge of the bed – seven of which he orchestrated nightly with the diligence and raptness of prayer – that my father, with his good hand in the air, his finger raised and pointed to the ceiling as if he too had stumbled upon a moment of divine inspiration, announced that the puzzle was complete.

  The next morning, when the telephone rang, my father lunged for it, thinking it was Helen, but it was the hospital instead. As we drove across the border that afternoon, my father stared out the window in the same relative silence, unusual to him, as he had coming back that way the week before.

  This time, though, when he caught me looking as I drove, he would lean over to pat my knee, smiling wanly, saying something
like, “Watcha thinking, Honey,” without expecting a reply. I believe he felt sorry for me.

  The x-ray, which had been taken of my father’s shoulder the week before, had illuminated a large mass in his right lung, and though he was sent test to test all afternoon, as I waited, reading magazines in the empty hospital hall, each test (due, they said, to a general deterioration of the lung) came back “inconclusive.” And so, although it was assumed that my father had, by that particular day in June, progressed into the late stages of an aggressive lung cancer, we were sent away, in the end, without a diagnosis.

  That night my father drank his first beer since Fargo. It had been thirteen years. Then he drank twelve more. “Let’s not be so fucking morose around here,” is what he said, when he opened up the third can.

  I left the house and walked down to the dock. I didn’t want to be outside, but I didn’t want to be inside either. I stood for as long as I could down there, concentrating on a small point of light on the opposite shore. Then, because I could think of nothing else, I turned and followed the familiar beam of Henry’s own porch light back up to the government house.

  The possibilities of a life, it seemed, were small.

  At first, as I had made my way from the dock, Henry’s light too appeared like a distant star – one that was perhaps already dead – but then, as I moved closer, up the hill and away from the water, it became a large animal eye, and then, bigger than that, a star again. Only this time very vibrant, certainly living. And then it was just what it was: a lamp, glowing on the outside rail.

  My father was on his fifth beer when I returned. Henry saw me first and gave me a look, and his look said, What can I do. So I looked back. Nothing.

  I sat down at the table across from Henry and picked up the day’s crossword, but it was already complete.

  Henry was, for once, not watching the game, but he had his notebook out still, and once or twice he glanced at it, but he did not seem to be working on anything. After a while, my father, who really was in a jovial mood – certainly not morose – and who would continue to be until his thirteenth beer felled him, said, “Well, Henry, what d’ye got?”

  Henry shrugged. “Nothing yet.”

  My father moved to the fridge where he opened a sixth can.

  “Did I ever tell you, Honey, how it was that Paul Erdos here,” and he leaned around to slap Henry on the shoulder, “saved my life?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Erdos!” My father shouted, and sat down at the table. “You haven’t saved the world yet,” he said to Henry, who smiled, and to hide the smile bent again as though to work in earnest at a problem that did not seem to be actually written on the page. “You got to start somewhere, though,” my father said, “don’t you? You got to start someplace.”

  “Who’s Erdos?” I asked.

  My father coughed out a laugh and pointed with his good arm at Henry again. “You’re looking at him!” he said. “Okay,” I said. And picked up the paper again, though there was still nothing to read.

  My father did not give up so easily, though, and so he told me this story, just as he had been intending to do all along.

  “I was God knows where,” he said. “Some awful town halfway between the coast and Fargo. Sick. Sick, drunk, and doing this puzzle at a crummy hotel. And I’m almost done. There’s just this one clue left, this one goddamn clue, I’ll never forget. ‘The man who loved numbers’ it was, and I’m thinking, dammit, I know that guy, that’s Henry.”

  “He tried plugging that in there,” Henry said. “Right amount. Wrong letters.”

  “I just had this five-letter word,” my father continued, “with an ‘e’ and a ‘d’ and an ‘o’ at random, and that didn’t mean shit to me! I was so close, almost done the damn thing, and there was just that one little word, just two letters really, in the whole damn thing that I was missing, so I stumbled down to the front desk and I said, Excuse me, but – would you – mind – looking something up?”

  Henry laughed a little at this, in an under-his-breath kind of way. It was encouragement enough for my father to roar out his own laugh, which was checked by a cough. “It was damn funny,” he agreed, “drunk as a skunk and this nice girl saying, Certainly, sir, what can I do for you? and so then I told her and she said, I’m sorry –” my father changed his voice in mockery of her high-pitched tone. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I have that cape – a – bility.”

  “Yes, you do,” my father said, and leaned over the counter to look at her computer. “You’ve got the Internet there, don’t you –”

  “Well yes, sir, but it’s only for searching out hotels and business-related sites,” she said in her clipped, official way.

  “Well, they make you swear on a bible before they give you this lousy job, or what?”

  “You’re drunk, sir,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to return to your room, or else I’ll need to call the manager.”

  My father collected himself. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I just really need this information. You’d be doing me a huge, just a huge favour. If you could just search for this piece of information. It really won’t take a minute.”

  The girl looked around a moment and fidgeted in her chair. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Oh, good,” my father said. “Okay, this is good. Just could you type ‘the man who loves numbers’ right in the box? See if it works.”

  The girl clicked that into her computer. Her mouth a tight line, pinched in at the corners.

  “Okay, we’ve got like a zillion sites here,” she said. “Well, what for?”

  “We got, ‘the man who loves only numbers is easy to love …’”

  “Keep going …”

  “Despite his strangeness … Paul Erdos, 19 –”

  “Wait, go back, how do you spell that name – what you just said.”

  “Paul Erdos,” she said. “E–r–d–o–s.”

  My father was counting the letters out on his hand, very deliberately, like a child.

  “That’s it!” he said. “Erdos. Thank you.”

  Later, my father went to the library and looked Erdos up. “He was strange,” he said. “Completely dysfunctional. Couldn’t ever keep an apartment. He was always crashing at this or that place, friends of his, friends of friends. But the thing was, no one cared about it. Everyone just loved to have the guy around because he was such a genius. Really, the guy was brilliant. All he cared about was math. He would sit around for hours, just like our resident genius here, and come up with problems, and then solve them, and that was all there was to life, for him. That was the one thing he thought was worth a damn.”

  “So, wait,” I said. “How did he save your life?”

  “Oh, well,” my father said, and I realized that claiming that at the beginning of the story had only been a narrative device, a hook to pull me into his story about this Erdos, who was so funny to him, but about whom otherwise I would have cared only marginally.

  “Well,” Henry put in to help him out, where my father had hesitated, “he calls me on the phone one day, just right out of the blue, and starts going off, telling me, like he told you, about this Erdos fella, and how we were, Erdos and I, I mean, just alike. And he talks so long to me on the phone, and I haven’t seen him, or heard from him in so many years as you know, so finally the only thing I can think to do t’get him off the phone, stop talking my ear off, you know, was say, Now why the hell don’t you just come on back now?”

  “And so I started driving back that night,” my father said. “Didn’t know why it’d taken me so long. Kept thinking I’d clean myself up but then it didn’t matter. All the sudden I just wanted more than anything else to be at the lake, and with you kids, and Henry, like it was when –”

  My father paused and Henry rolled his chair back from the table and then forward again. It was a nervous sort of motion, and served to distract everyone, as it was meant to, from the sudden thickness in my father’s voice.
r />   “But when was that?” I asked, “That wasn’t that one summer was it? Your first summer back?”

  As far as I knew the first time that my father returned to the lake after his disappearance he had been sober for some months.

  “No,” my father said, his melancholy suddenly abandoned. “Cops picked me up that night coming into Fargo, and I got another DUI which landed me in rehab, and then in the hospital because that didn’t work. Nearly busted my gut for good in an effort of retaliation. Then rehab again, and that time it stuck. It was the following summer that I finally made it back out here.”

  “So Paul Erdos really didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” I said. “In fact, he could have killed you, not saved your life. If the cops hadn’t picked you up just then, I mean.”

  “I can’t owe my life to a couple of West Fargo cops!” my father roared. “Innit better I owe it to our Henry here?”

  “Not me,” Henry said. “My name didn’t fit, remember?”

  “Paul Er–dos,” my father said, relishing each syllable, “to whom I owe the rest of my days –”

  “A good man, a maths man,” Henry agreed.

  “And the best part, the best part,” my father said, “the wisest words any a man spoke.”

  “Oh, gawd,” said Henry, who had evidently heard all this before.

  “First,” my father said, adopting a theatrical pose, and deepening his voice so that it rang out in the little kitchen, making the room seem suddenly quite barren and small, “First you forget to zip up, and then you forget to zip down. That’s poetry,” he said.

  “That’s depressing,” I said.

  “You’re depressed,” Henry said. “This man saved his life for it.”

  “First you forget to zip up …” my father said, “and then …”

  “Put a lid on it,” Henry said. “We heard you the first time.” And then, to change the subject, he continued with his own story.

  3