by Greg Baxter
Yes, he says, I must have slept, a good half hour has done the trick. But my back is killing me. Let’s go for a walk anyway. Did you get anything for a headache? Some ibuprofen, I say. I pop two tablets out of the foil and hand them to him. He swallows them without water. I take two myself. I hand two to Trish and she puts them in her bag—a small side pocket—for later. Trish looks at our trays of food despondently. They are untouched. Are you absolutely certain you won’t eat something else? she says. My father says, I can’t, sorry. Maybe later, I say. Trish softly shakes her head. My father stands. He is a bit wobbly. He has been sitting a long time and nearly has to sit again. I’ve had to help him stand or walk or sit a few times this trip, and it never gets less strange. The last time I saw him, six years ago, just a year after his retirement, he was fit, stable, and he still had enough strength to lift heavy things from his truck. But now, just six years later, he’s an old man. He’s frail. He can’t lift anything heavy. He gets tired easily. It’s perfectly normal for his age. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is how fit he was at the age of seventy. Here, I have walked him up hills. I have walked him down steps. I have helped him cross very busy roads. I have had him put his arms around my neck and lifted him out of a taxi. I tucked him into bed one night, because he’d become light-headed and a little breathless, but refused to go to the hospital. When I turned the light off, he said, Goodnight, son. I said, Goodnight, Dad. Now, as he wobbles, nearly falling back into his seat, I take his arm. Now I guide him from around the table. His balance returns—it comes slowly, arising in his eyes—and he seems steady, so he draws his arm away from mine. You okay? I ask. I’m okay, he says. Without fuss the four chairs around the table are taken by others.
When my father and I arrived at the airport this morning, we said good-bye to our driver, the Turkish man with the huge, furry-hooded jacket, and had a brief argument over whether or not to tip. We didn’t tip. We simply said thank you, and he told us to have a safe flight. It was still dark. But the bright white lamplight along the entrance to departures, in the fog, made the darkness glow. We watched the shuttle drive away. Part of me had wished to say to the driver, Listen, we’ve made a mistake, any chance we could go back to the hotel? Maybe they would be merciful and let us check back in to one of the rooms, just for two or three hours. If not, then at the very least we could find some couches in the lobby and close our eyes for a while. I really don’t know how I am still awake, and I don’t know how my father is still awake. I have slept four, maybe five hours in the last two days, and my father has probably slept less. We arrived in Munich yesterday, very early, off an overnight train, and we paid a visit to the undertaker to make sure Miriam’s body had arrived without any problems, and that all was set for the journey today. On the train we had a compartment to ourselves. When we realized that we were on our own, and we closed the door for the night, we figured we would sleep for sure. We stretched the seats out into beds across the whole cabin. The beds were wide. Though the seats we’d reserved were beside each other, because we had the whole compartment we chose to leave the space of one bed between us. We lay down, propped up on some pillows, but fixed cushions that ran vertically between the seats meant we couldn’t see each other, only our bodies and legs and feet. We pulled white bedsheets over ourselves. They were coarse and smelled like soap. My father had no book with him, so I gave him a music magazine I’d brought with me. My father gave the magazine a perfunctory flip-through and sighed and asked if he could switch off the light. Of course, I said, and I turned on a little penlight that arched down from the console behind my bed. I had a book about Europe during the Thirty Years War—more than any other type of book, I read history books, and I had picked it up at an English-language bookstore not far from Miriam’s apartment in Berlin. I read and took notes for an hour before finally turning off my light and closing my eyes. My father said, I can’t sleep, it’s no good, you can turn your light back on if you like. I said, This is a fascinating book. He said, You’ve always taken notes, but what for? I haven’t always taken notes, I said.
You sure have, obviously before you can remember, you were taking notes.
Was I?
You were taking notes since your mother was pregnant with Miriam. She was monitoring her progress—because she’d had the problematic pregnancy with you—and you monitored her progress with her. Then you didn’t stop. When Miriam was four or five, you taught her to take notes.
Otherwise I can’t focus, that’s why I take them, I said.
I’m the same, or at least I was, he said. But where do they go, once you’ve got them down?
I thought for a bit. I said, Nowhere, my memory, I suspect.
We spoke for a while longer, and when it was obvious that we weren’t going to fall asleep soon, I drew the curtains wide so we could watch outside. We propped ourselves up on the pillows again and watched the dark countryside go by. The train was smooth, but we were really flying. We shot through isolated clouds of fog. We saw some snow. Mostly it was sleeting. Every once in a while, something bright went by—a bridge, a fortress in the distance. From time to time the train slowed down at a fogged-over station, or in fogged-over towns. Sometimes it stopped, and the hydraulics whined and exhaled. My father tried to convince me that once we got to the States, I ought to stay for a while. It was obvious, to him, that I needed to get out of London, even if it wasn’t obvious to me, even if it hadn’t occurred to me. I told him I was doing fine, and anyway it wasn’t possible. I needed to get back to work. After that, we started to doze off, but by then there wasn’t a whole lot of night left. When we got to Munich and met the undertaker, he asked if we’d like to see the coffin, which was closed, and my father, surprisingly, said it wasn’t necessary, that we’d wait until we arrived in the States.
When the hotel shuttle was out of sight, I said, I could use a coffee. I could use some coffee myself, said my father, what time is it? It’s six, I said. When are we meeting Trish again? he asked. Ten-ish, I said. My father said, Oh. But he knew what time it was, and he knew we had to wait until ten to meet Trish. I was worried he was going to start complaining that I should not have let him leave the hotel, I should have forced him to try and sleep, but he just yawned. He looked behind him, through the entrance, and up—the structure on that side, the check-in side, is a great glass box, and there are four levels in it, arranged like steps—wondering if he would finally run out of space to outpace his worry and his sorrow. Yesterday, when we arrived in Munich, we left our bags at the train station because check-in at the hotel wasn’t until the afternoon. The visit to the undertaker’s upset him, and it really hadn’t been necessary, everything could have been confirmed with a phone call. He asked if the coffin would be loaded discreetly and humanely into the airplane. The undertaker assured us that it would be, and moreover, it would be situated separately from ordinary luggage. The coffin would rest in a dedicated section of the cargo hold, and be placed there in a dignified manner by the undertakers, working with the baggage handlers. The undertakers themselves would ensure that the coffin was safely in place and secure. But what about our connection in Atlanta? he asked. The undertaker, who was of medium height, bald, with a thick mustache, and who wore the customary black suit with a white shirt and black tie, said that the American undertaker, who would receive the body under the terms of agreement, would make sure everything was handled appropriately in Atlanta. When we were finished, we still had a couple of hours before check-in at the airport hotel. Before we left Berlin, Trish had offered to come meet us while we were in Munich, treat us to a coffee or a drink, but my father told her it wasn’t right or necessary, that her coming to the airport on Sunday was enough. But as soon as we left the undertaker’s, I could see he regretted her absence. He wished to see her. His nerves were destroyed, and he was pale, and his eyes were red and melancholic, and I figured it was because he’d run out of things that had to be done before our departure. I said I was going to the museum where they had some Klimt paintings.
A painting I had loved all my adult life was here—though I had only seen it in books and on computer screens—Music I. My father was disappointed in me. I told him to go for a walk and meet me later.
He turned back around to me. He was still yawning, so I had to yawn. It was cold. It was windy and damp, and there was no visibility. Instead of rushing inside, we waited in the fog. We’d be indoors for a long time, breathing indoor air. I was trying not to let myself think of the journey itself. I was trying to think only of our destination, of landing and getting our bags. It’s hot at home, so once we step into the night air our clothes will feel heavy. The funeral will take place two days from now, on Tuesday. I advised my father to keep it small, but he’s invited all my mother’s old friends, so it won’t be small. He gave Trish the numbers of my mother’s closest friends—women to whom he has probably not properly spoken since my mother’s death, since her funeral—and they took over. My father’s car is parked at the airport. He says he’s certain he’s parked in the long-term lot, but I’m worried it’s the short-term lot, and we’ll have to pay a couple hundred dollars. We will drive home from the airport with the windows down. I will drive. The journey from the airport to my father’s house takes about forty-five minutes. On that drive you find long stretches of pine forests and swampland, and refineries loom and blink beside the interstate. It is very close to the Gulf. The air smells like sewage, petroleum, and salt. When we get home, my father will turn the lights on in the kitchen and the living room, but not any other lights, go to the bathroom, take his various pills. He’ll look through his mail without opening any envelopes. We might take a walk in darkness around the backyard. I might dip my feet in the pool. We will sit in front of the television, try to find a movie or some golf, or check the weather. He will fall asleep a few times finally and declare that it’s bedtime. He will get up from the sofa, stretch and yawn away the stiffness that’s accumulated in his arms and neck and back, walk sleepily to the doorway to his bedroom. He will turn around and salute me and say See you in the morning.
When my mother died, twenty years ago, I expected that my father, Miriam, and I would go through a brief period of centripetal anguish. I expected I would come home from London to bury her, see my father and sister mourning, and closeness would develop, a strengthened sense of being responsible for each other’s well-being. I expected we’d all spend a few days together in the house, having dinners, doing housework, discussing whether to sell the house or refurbish it—my mother left instructions to sell and move away, but if we did not sell, she wanted us to renovate, tear down a couple of walls, make the place more modern, and put in skylights. Miriam had said to me, on the telephone, when my mother got sick, that she was going to quit college and travel. She had taken a while to get through three years’ worth of credits at college—more than three years, anyway. She did extremely well, but lacked motivation, and in her opinion, the time she’d spent going to classes, taking exams, studying and writing about subjects that didn’t excite her, was too long already. I knew how eager she was to leave the country—I had been just as eager, and the longer I lived in London the happier I was that I’d left home. Now she could finally go. I had a few hundred pounds saved and exchanged them for American Express travelers cheques, and had planned to give them to Miriam.
My mother died at the age of fifty-three. She and my father first met in New York. He was studying history at Princeton. She was at Vassar, studying anthropology. My mother came from a semi-prominent and highly conservative Southern family, and she used to say it was embarrassing for all of them that she went to college in the northeast, spent all her time in New York City, and met a German-born academic who was neither handsome nor dashing nor rugged, just quiet and polite and modestly intelligent, and who seemed to come from no family at all—his mother was in California, alone, and he never saw her. My parents married after my mother graduated. My father completed his doctoral studies and started teaching in California. My mother moved there with him. I used to look occasionally through an album that contained photographs of a small green wooden house on a small patch of dead grass. In one, my mother and father are standing in front of the house on a sunny day. My father’s arm is around my mother. My mother is smiling but my father is not—he smiles all the time, but never for photographs. I don’t know if my parents had few or many friends, but I like to think they went to parties and felt like part of a community. They looked like a couple that people would want to meet and know. When I was a teenager, that photo gave me the idea that living in a little green shack on a dead California lawn, with a German husband who taught history at a liberal university—on top of four successful years at Vassar—had given my mother a sense of having achieved a small victory over the people she had grown up among.
But I was not to be a Californian. Shortly after I was born, my mother’s mother became ill, with the same disease my mother would die of, and my mother moved with me back to her hometown. It was, I believe, understood that my father would follow. He liked the idea of his children growing up in a place where their mother had deep roots, and he intended to take a comparable position in a comparable university in the region. They would have more children, possibly many more. But then, when my mother was pregnant with Miriam, he got that editorship, which was something, my mother told me, that he did not feel able to pass up—it was, professionally, a major achievement for him. The natural thing to do next would have been, I’m sure, to pack up his wife and children and move us back to California, but that is not what he did. My father came home in the summers and between terms, and a number of times he got visiting professorships that moved him closer to us. But he remained, until he retired, a full-time professor in California. I had no sense, in my childhood, that this arrangement was a cause of unhappiness for either or both of my parents, and I suppose it suited them both to some degree. But it must have been difficult for my mother, and I think over time my father, who perhaps never stopped viewing the arrangement as provisional, came to feel a sense of shame about it—made worse, perhaps, because his wife and children never blamed him for it.
My father had months to prepare for my mother’s death. But when she finally died, he told us that he didn’t have time to think about the house, whether to sell or renovate—it was a very busy time for him. Then he promptly returned to California and went back to work, though not on his book. My mother left behind an inheritance. Rather than leave everything to my father, she divided it equally among the three of us. The travelers cheques I had been planning to give to Miriam felt like unnecessary charity.
I went back to London. I met a woman, a lawyer. We got engaged very quickly. We were engaged before we’d even told my father and her parents about each other. My father found this highly irregular and responded by saying he was too busy to come to the wedding, even though we hadn’t set a date. Her parents were unhappy as well. So we got married quietly and invited almost nobody. Her parents responded by giving her a huge amount of money. We combined that money with my inheritance and we bought a nice flat in Fulham Broadway.
I got the news about Miriam’s death first, before my father. The Berlin police telephoned me. I was walking into a meeting with the firm—an aerospace firm—that has taken me on to run a project for them. Though I was still officially a consultant, I’d be working on-site five days a week, and the contract was for two years. The meeting was a kind of induction. Some people from the Paris office were over—the firm was headquartered in Paris—so there’d be lunch afterward. This was over three weeks ago. It was a cold morning in London. Just as I was about to walk into the meeting, my phone rang. I was going to ignore it, but the number was not a UK number, it was a German number, and I thought it might possibly be Miriam—and since she never telephoned, it had to be an emergency. I excused myself and took the call. It obviously wasn’t Miriam, and at first I couldn’t make out who it was or what it was about. I walked toward a window—I had a view of a little lane. On the line was a very sympathetic-soun
ding policewoman. She asked if it was me. I said it was. I had never gotten a phone call from the police in my life. The woman explained that Miriam had died. I do not remember how I responded. I do remember asking, at some point, Has my father been told? She didn’t say anything right away, and I realized that if he had been told first, it would have been him on the phone, not the Berlin police, so I changed my question to a statement, which was just me thinking out loud. I said, I guess I will have to inform my dad now. Again, she waited, she said nothing. The meeting room was filling up. I could sense, without even seeing it—I had walked a long way to find the window I was looking out—that everybody was seated around the table already, trying to look prepared or eager by flipping through papers. I could hear some chatter, low, subdued, but it was coming from everywhere. The way an office sounds. Finally I asked the policewoman, How did you locate me? She answered, and she spoke of death notification procedures in general, and I listened very carefully. I decided I would like to know these things in order to explain them to my father. I thought my father might become emotional and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to deal with it, except to offer, as a pill for any pain he might feel, a diversion into the eccentricities of death notifications in Germany. I have such a vivid memory of staring at that little lane while the policewoman spoke. She was patient and polite, and at some point during her explanation I realized that I would have to travel to Berlin, and so would my father. I would be seeing my father for the first time in six years, and this time Miriam would be there, in a manner of speaking.
During the policewoman’s explanation, a man crept up behind me, stopped a bit short, and whispered, loud enough to make it impossible to ignore him, Everything okay? I turned around and straightened up, and I was going to give him a thumbs-up and a smile, but then I saw he was pointing at his wrist, at the watch on his wrist, and he was irritated. Everything okay? he said again, but louder. I did not smile, but I held up two fingers and silently said, Two minutes. When the policewoman finished her explanation of death notifications, she turned her attention to our case, to Miriam. She had been discovered in her apartment. They had gone through her personal effects and found my contact details. A coroner’s inquest would follow as a matter of procedure, and then the body, Miriam’s body, would be released. How long? I asked. Not long, she said. Even though it did turn out to be long, I don’t think the policewoman was lying. It was just that not long meant something different to her than it meant to me. I asked what would happen once the body was released, and she gave me the contact details of somebody in the American embassy who had already been fully briefed, and who had asked that I call as soon as possible. That turned out to be Trish. I hung up. I went into the meeting room and told everybody I was sorry for the delay. There were no questions about the call, but there was a woman in the room who looked like she was going to ask, politely, if I needed to go home. In the room sat the director of marketing, the senior marketing manager, two senior sales managers—one of whom was the man who came out to the corridor to hasten me—and this woman, the one who seemed a little bit different from the rest, possibly from human resources, I can’t remember. The meeting room was in a refurbished part of a grand old building, and the walls of the room were glass, and we could see, and be seen by, several people working in other glass enclosures around us. I had been briefed about the project I’d been hired to work on, but now they gave me a more specific briefing. I offered some ideas I’d been developing. The director of marketing was a woman with a French name but a London accent. She had short gray hair. She was reassuringly intelligent. The senior marketing manager was younger than me, probably in her late twenties. The two sales managers—both men, one was short with red hair and one was tall with black hair—wore identical suits, and were either terrified of the director of marketing or hated her, but it was easy to see that without her leadership they’d have been lost. With every sentence I spoke, the woman who might have been in human resources seemed more and more disappointed in me. As a result, I became more and more disappointed in myself. The meeting ended, and everyone seemed satisfied, and I was surprised to find myself thinking that the presentation had been more convincing for the numbed manner with which I had delivered it. So I was weirdly excited to have passed the first hurdle so successfully and also, simultaneously, experiencing acute and brief paroxysms of devastation and anxiety. The lunch was to take place at a French restaurant I didn’t know. Presumably the folks from the Paris office knew it and liked it. Presumably it would be outrageously expensive. We would eat and eat and eat. The wine we would order would be unaffordable without business expensing, and even though it would be magnificent, we would all pretend it was merely adequate, and that we were accustomed to wine of that standard. I thought these things when they told me the name of the place—which I have forgotten—and they all turned out to be true. We ate so much we all felt sick. We had several courses and desserts, and we got drunk, especially the London team. The men and women from the Paris team were incredibly handsome, and they made the London team seem physically repellent—they would have done so to almost any nationality. They really were some of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. The English, said one of the French guys in the bathroom—he was standing by the urinal, unzipping his pants, and I was washing my hands, looking up at him through the mirror—are a deformed and revolting race. I smiled. I have no idea if he knew I was American, and thought it might be funny to insult the English, or if he thought I was English, and wanted to let me know, in private, how much my face disgusted him. In any case, I told him I couldn’t argue, not if he were comparing the English to the French. My mother was beautiful—of Scottish descent, way back. It was too bad Miriam and I didn’t look more like her.