by Warren Adler
“What are you doing?”
“Things.”
“Just curious.” He grew silent for a moment, speculating. Was she a prostitute? A drug addict? Her exterior seemed hard, her aspect vulgar. How did she survive?
“I’m sure you know that we’ve been looking for you a long time.”
He felt this overwhelming need to know. She continued to eat, as if she had not heard his words.
“I am your father, Peggy.”
Her use of the old term “daddy” had probably encouraged him. But then, that was the only word she had used for him from the moment she had learned to talk. He was daddy. Daddy. Perhaps he should have put it differently: I am your daddy.
“I’m Betty now,” she said.
“Not Peggy?”
“Peggy no more.”
“Do you use your last name?” he asked. Obviously not, since she was untraceable under the family name.
She shook her head.
“What is it now?”
“It’s not important,” she said.
“Are you married?”
Instinctively he looked at her left hand. There was no wedding ring.
“No way,” she said.
He watched her in silence as she ate her sandwich, occasionally washing it down with a sip of Coke. Frustration was beginning to gnaw at him. He wanted to tear away her sunglasses. Why are you hiding? He wanted to scream out the questions. Finally, he said:
“Is there anything I can do? I mean to help.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“Look Peggy . . . I mean Betty. I’m not asking for an explanation. It’s too late for that. You know that the family has split. Charlotte must have told you. Someday . . .” He felt himself losing control, took a deep breath, then began again. “I have an idea.” He had been thinking about this ever since he learned where she was. “At the very least, call your mother and brother. Even to just say hello, even to say ‘I’m alright.’ Just that even.”
She appeared to be listening but made no comment.
“Better yet, you might hop a plane. I’ll give you money for the ticket. Just drop by, even if it’s just to chat, or give us a telephone number. Having contact, even at a distance, wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
He had rehearsed a thousand speeches in his mind and this was coming out badly. His emotions were charging and recharging, running the gamut, eroding his discipline. She remained silent. Beyond the dark glasses, he couldn’t even tell if she was listening, although he seemed to sense that she was watching him. There were so many things he wanted to say, especially the one statement meant to spur guilt: Your disappearance broke up the family. How could you?
He held back, of course, fearing her anger. Because she was nineteen, he had no legal hold on her. Before he had met her, he had taken out five hundred dollars from an ATM. He hadn’t very much more in the account. If she needed anything, anything, he would have found a way to provide it. He was her daddy, for crying out loud. She was his child, he thought. Why was she doing this?
“Tell you what,” he said, forcing a broad smile. He wanted to reach out and embrace her, forgive her, end this baffling alienation. “As I said before, no explanation needed. I just want you to know that we are there for you, always and evermore. You are our daughter. Nothing can ever break that bond. Do you understand that, Peggy?”
“Betty,” she said, finishing the Big Mac. She wiped her lips, and he noted that the napkin was smeared with lipstick.
“Betty,” he repeated, continuing his smile. His eyes hurt from trying to see beyond the dark lenses. He removed the cash from his pocket. It was folded, mostly fifties. “I want you to take this. No conditions. If you want to see your mother, you could buy a ticket. I live in L.A., and if you want to join me there, you are more than welcome. Do you understand what I’m saying? Whatever has happened is water under the bridge. Maybe some day . . .” He stopped short. Going there seemed pointless at that moment.
He reached out and touched her palm. It was cold. But the touch of her flesh triggered memories. Suddenly he saw her for the first time from behind the glass of the maternity ward, a tiny bundle of flesh, her features contorted with crying. Was it the cry of joy or pain? Had she been sorry to be born?
He pushed the bills into her hand and closed her fingers over it.
“Remember, if you ever need anything.”
She nodded and her lips seemed to offer a smile, but he wasn’t sure. Then she stood up and looked around.
“Be back. Off to the ladies’ room,” she said pleasantly. He watched her go.
“I’ll wait,” he said, but as soon as she was gone, he went into the men’s room. It was empty and he leaned against the sink, broke down, and sobbed like a child. He could not stop. As a man came in, he dipped his head into the sink and tried to stop sobbing by sloshing cold water on his face. Finally, he succeeded and wiped his face and eyes on a paper towel, looking briefly at himself in the mirror.
“Why?” he asked his image, striking out with his hand against the glass. It did not break the mirror, although he did feel the pain in his knuckles. Taking a deep breath, he did the best he could to appear calm and went back into the dining room and sat at the same table where his chicken sandwich lay, cold and soggy. He lifted his coffee container and sipped, but the coffee was cold as well.
He waited for her return, watching the door of the ladies’ room. He continued to wait. A heavyset, young Hispanic woman was cleaning dirty tables and he gave her five dollars to check on his daughter in the ladies’ room. She came back quickly.
“Gone,” she said.
He sat for a few moments more, got up, went outside and looked in either direction. There was no sign of her.
The Obituary Reader
by Warren Adler
“It’s the first thing I read,” Barry Fine said, referring to the obituaries.
“That’s ridiculous,” Mildred, his wife, said. “It’s like a kind of death watch.”
They sat over breakfast every day in their Manhattan apartment reading the New York Times. He looked at the table of contents and always insisted on reading the obituaries before other parts of the paper.
He had just turned seventy and although he had always read the obituaries casually, he spent more time at it these days, reading the small paid-for obits as well as the headlined deaths. It was not uncommon for him to find familiar names among the paid-for obits since he had grown up in New York City and had gone to elementary, high school, and college in New York and had worked there all of his life.
Of course, it was mostly males he had known who periodically showed up in the paid-for obits, which were inserted by relatives of the deceased or organizations that he had joined. Not everyone inserted these paid announcements. Still, it was the only way he could possibly be informed about the death of anyone he had known in his lifetime. It was less likely that he would find females he had known because the chances were that most of those from his generation used their married names.
Barry was still healthy at his age and busy with his accounting practice, but he had already attended a number of funerals of people in his age bracket, both relatives and friends, and the idea of diminishing time was beginning to occupy his thoughts.
“Today’s seventy is like yesterday’s fifty,” his wife told him, irritated that he was dwelling too heavily on the subject of life’s end. She was sixty-five, and they had been married forty-one years. Their two children were grown, had their own families, and lived in other parts of the country. It was one of their regrets that the kids hadn’t stayed in New York, but, as they both acknowledged, the world had changed and mobility in pursuit of career advancement and economic self-interest was the operative word these days.
With regret, both husband and wife discussed this often, since they were what were called empty nesters and, although they saw their children and grandchildren a number of times each year at holiday occasions, it wasn’t the same as growin
g up within easy each reach of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who all lived in the New York area. Both of them had been brought up within close proximity of extended family circles, which was less the norm these days.
Barry admitted that he read the obituaries from right to left, meaning that he read the ages first, comparing them to his own. When he saw reports of people dying in their late eighties and nineties, he felt encouraged about his own future, and when he saw people who had died younger than himself, he counted himself among the lucky survivors with, admittedly, some secret satisfaction. Mildred insisted that he was being ghoulish and obsessed with dying, although, to be sure, she too read the more publicized obituaries of the various celebrities whose deaths were sensationalized.
He would often mutter the same comments each time he read the obituaries, much to his wife’s amusement; like “Everybody dies” or “Our world is disappearing,” especially when a movie star, politician, sports figure, or popular singer’s death was announced. They were, after all, part of the culture of his time and their dying was certainly a benchmark event, a chapter ended, one more nail in the coffin of their generational experience.
At times, he would discover that when he mentioned people popular in his youth to a much younger person their eyes would glaze over with non-recognition. The older he got, he noticed that whole categories of younger men and women had no knowledge of the people who were significant to his generation. At first, he had attributed this lack of knowledge to ignorance, until it became apparent that the names, like products that had disappeared, were no longer applicable or relevant and had disappeared from any mention in the media.
Although he tried to keep up with the popular culture, he could no longer identify the names of people about whom he read in the gossip columns or in the magazines he skimmed through while waiting for his doctor or dental appointments. When he spent any time with his grandchildren, he would see how truly far the gap between the generations had widened.
Another thing, aside from optimism or luck, that he gleaned from the obituaries was a kind of stimulant to long-term memory when he read the obituary of someone he had gone to school with or who touched his life in some significant way.
One day, he read in the paid-for obituaries the death of Aaron Schyler. He hadn’t thought seriously about Aaron for many, many years, although the incident that hung forever in his mind had occurred more than fifty-five years ago. Not that he had been in denial, but it was, certainly at the time and in the immediate aftermath, a memorable event in his experience. Not long after that event Aaron had disappeared from his life, and he had never heard from him or about him. Until that moment.
As teenagers, perhaps during a two-year period, say ages thirteen to fifteen, they were inseparable, true buddies. They played together, studied together, were always in each other’s houses, which adjoined one another in the Brooklyn neighborhood where they both lived. They went to the movies together every Saturday, were on the same baseball team, had puppy-love affairs with girls who were also fast friends, did their homework together, and supported each other in all of their endeavors.
They joined the Boy Scouts the same day and went to Boy Scout camp together in Narrowsburg, New York. Not a day went by when they didn’t see each other. Seeing Aaron’s obituary brought back the old memory of that time in Boy Scout camp that could never be completely erased or dismissed.
While at camp, they often took overnights with their camp mates and invariably shared a pup tent. What had happened between them, in retrospect, was merely a minor incident and one that was common among teenage boys in that era and probably more common today.
It was, he remembered, a particularly cold night, and they shared a sleeping bag and found themselves sleeping like spoons. What had happened was that during the night Barry had awakened with an erection and induced himself to orgasm by putting his penis in the crack of Aaron’s rump. The activity had awakened Aaron and instead of objecting, he had said, “Now me.” And Barry had reversed himself.
Being teenagers, they were seduced by the pleasure of their orgasms and spent the entire night masturbating each other. Although rarely discussed at the time, it was quite common for teenage boys to display their erections and engage in what was then known as circle jerks, where the trick was to see who squirted first. The laughable assertion in the Boy Scout handbook of that time that masturbation led to insanity was a source of amusement and ridicule at that moment of raging hormones and the discovery of the mechanics of penis erectus.
It was, after all, ages before sex education in the schools, and teenage boys usually gleaned their knowledge about the mystery of sex from other teenage boys. Neither Barry nor Aaron’s parents ever discussed sex with their sons. It was considered one of those hidden dirty subjects, never to be mentioned, and it was certainly not considered a parental responsibility to enlighten them about it. Barry acknowledged that this might not have been a universal experience, but it certainly was his and Aaron’s. It was an era long before pornography in magazines, film, and video were readily available. Indeed, teenage boys would rifle through issues of National Geographic looking for topless African women for a furtive glimpse of the naked female breast to induce sexual fantasies.
Teenage girls, Barry remembered, were even less educated on that subject, and some mothers actually taught their daughters that kissing led to pregnancy. In fact, fear of pregnancy was the absolutely primary hysterical fear of all teenage girls at that time. Such fears not withstanding, the girls were not averse to what was then called necking, and “feeling up” was what petting meant.
As for homosexuality, it was barely on their radar. In that era and in those old Brooklyn neighborhoods, people with such propensities were effeminate and fey and known as queers or homos and always seemed to be elsewhere or anonymous, at least in Barry’s circles. None of the sexual acts engaged in by teenage boys seemed outside the range of normal conduct. Barry could honestly not recall anyone he had known in those days as queer. Such memories, Barry knew, were private and unexpressed in those terms in these enlightened contemporary times and would be considered politically incorrect or misinterpreted or even homophobic by today’s standards. The world certainly had changed, Barry reflected, and he knew at least in that respect he had changed as well.
Such thoughts rose in his memory after reading the obituary of Aaron Schyler, largely triggered by that long-ago experience. It had baffled Barry for years why after he and Aaron came home from Boy Scout camp that summer, things had changed between them. It wasn’t exactly an abrupt cleavage, but something was decidedly different between them. They drifted apart slowly. Aaron developed new friendships and Barry kept his hurt to himself, never confronting Aaron for reasons for this slow alienation.
Sometime later, the Schyler family moved out of the neighborhood and Aaron and Barry’s friendship became a faded memory, although on occasion, triggered by an errant thought, Barry would ponder the puzzle of their strange drift. Was it because of that night in the pup tent? Or something else? Something inadvertently said? Some innocent slight?
It had often baffled him that although he had grown up in New York and had known hundreds of people during his childhood, youth, and business career, he rarely met anyone from public or high school and only on rare occasions someone from college. Perhaps, he decided, it was a New York thing. In the frenetic mixing bowl of a huge big city, people dispersed, moved to other places, other suburbs, other neighborhoods, and formed other friendships and alliances connected to their careers.
Occasionally, he did observe on the street what seemed like a familiar face, but often age had done its work, and it was difficult to identify for certain someone he had known long ago and he usually passed them by. He had never seen Aaron Schyler again after he had moved out of the old neighborhood, had never even seen anyone who remotely resembled Aaron in all the years that had passed.
At the breakfast table that morning, such questions came to the surface and once a
gain stimulated the old mystery of their alienation. In the obituary he noted that services would be held in the Riverside Chapel at eleven that morning and, without any clear reason or intent, Barry decided he would attend.
Barry took a place in the rear of the chapel, noting that the auditorium was respectably filled. The coffin lay in front of the chapel and a man in a dark suit spoke first. It was not a religious service, and the man who spoke offered heartfelt words of praise for Aaron Schyler, who had apparently touched many lives.
It wasn’t until a second man spoke that Barry got the obvious message. Aaron Schyler was gay, and most of the people in the chapel were males, although there were a number of women.
“I lived with this giving person most of my life,” the second man said. “He was a good loving person and made my life meaningful and important.” As the man spoke, tears inexplicably moistened Barry’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks. He did not comprehend any more of what the man was saying but his sense of loss and grieving was beyond his understanding. Still, the mystery of their alienation persisted. Was the night in the pup tent some epiphany for Aaron? Was there a lot more to it for Aaron than teenagers having a little sexual fun?
Was their intense friendship more than met the eye? Barry knew his grief was real. Had he loved Aaron in a different way? Had Aaron loved him and felt uncomfortable by the feeling or the thought of it? Or was Barry indulging himself in something that he could never understand, since he had never had any urge to make love to a man and considered himself throughout his life unalterably heterosexual?
Finally the service was over and the group waited as others filed out behind the coffin, then the audience began to leave and he with them. For some reason, perhaps it was because of the preponderance of men, or something else, he felt oddly different, as if he did not belong there.
In the street, he walked toward the subway, still filled with this overwhelming, inexplicable, and profound sense of loss.
A Dog Story