Life Drawing: A Novel

by Robin Black

  “I knew it,” she says. “You’re tired.”

  “Yes.” I open my eyes. “Tired. But I’m not sleepy.”

  “That’s good. Because I’m …” She laughs. “I should have warned you. You’re in no danger of dozing off. I’m mildly famous for driving like a …”

  “Maniac?” I ask. “Is that how that sentence ends?”

  “That sounds about right. I may have heard that word tossed about before. Once or twice.” She takes a curve with a gusto that lands me right against the door. “I’m very good though,” she says. “I just … I just enjoy myself …”

  “Okay.” I sit up straighter, braced. “So, what about your parents?” I ask. It isn’t a subject change—the car is full of our mission, of my concern.

  “My parents?” she asks, as though I have inquired about a pair of unicorns. “Oh, they’re just fine. Young. Mid-seventies. Fit. They require no care and … and that’s probably just as well, as I can’t imagine myself back there. My sense of filial duty is …” She slams us to a stop. “My sense of filial duty is not all that it could be. And impossible as this now seems, I fell so madly in love with Paul there was no chance I’d stay over there. He was a student in London, that’s how we met. Now of course there’s also Nora. It’s unimaginable being that far from her, especially with her father …”

  She lets the thought go unfinished. It’s often unclear how much she wants this subject pursued, so for some time I say nothing, just sit, holding on, thinking how strange it is that this road I have driven dozens of times, so sorrowfully bland, is now mined with near misses and jolts.

  “I’m sorry,” she says at a particularly sharp swerve. “But you were warned.”

  If she were Owen, I would answer, “Well, I was warned when it was too late—which technically isn’t a warning at all,” but I don’t quite feel the closeness yet for that. And so instead I say, “It’s not bad having a little excitement in my life,” and she says, “No indeed. It’s not bad at all.”

  Her cell phone chirps. “Not while you’re driving,” I say, and she tells me to extract it from her bag. On the screen there’s a text: “Labor Day weekend’s good. Heather can drive.”

  I read it to Alison, whose demeanor suddenly shifts. What I’d thought was enjoyment, even happiness, was nothing compared to what she looks like now.

  “Nora,” she says, unnecessarily.

  The mention of one young woman has brought another to my mind. Laine. To whose email I have yet to reply. “Well, here we are,” I say, as Alison slides into a space marked Family.

  As a child, I had been only vaguely aware that my father had served in World War II, just at the tail end, stationed in England—doing what? I never asked. My mother’s death, barely mentioned though it was, seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone—not necessarily sudden deaths, but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.

  That was what I thought about as I sat in my father’s room, having introduced him to Alison, whose British accent had spurred him to say, “Oh, I remember you. You’re that girl my buddy had the big crush on. Kenny. He cried on the boat all the way home. Did you know?”

  Maybe we do move from one era of our own lives to another, the way we change residences. Doors shut, no key left in the mailbox, only the uncanny slippage of my father’s mind allowing him to sneak back in.

  I could imagine, as I listened to them “reminisce” about the war, that the death of his thirty-one-year-old wife might so have redefined him that even memories of war had felt out of reach. Another life. But how had I failed to be aware of that whole era of his history? How had his role in World War II not entered my consciousness? All the work in which I’d been immersed, Jackie Mayhew, Oliver Farley, others, and it had never struck me that my father too had been an American boy sent over to Europe to fight?

  It was stunning how successfully he had cut us off from his past.

  His face showed no more sign of the struggles of the night before than of the great conflict of sixty-five years earlier. I had been cautioned not to mention the incident. To the extent that he was shifting into a phase in which agitation might spur on violence, it was counterproductive to confront him, I had been told. And so I just sat there, relieved that for once I could visit and allow someone else to carry the conversational water. And Alison, for her part, turned out to be remarkably good at following the odd turns of his thoughts. She was perfectly content, it seemed, to play the part of a girl, resurrected, the long-lost love of a long-lost friend from a long-lost time.

  As they chatted, it crossed my mind to ask him the questions I never had. What was it like going to war? What was it like being a Jew in Europe then? What was it like fearing death? Losing friends? Being so far away from home? But I couldn’t bear the prospect of discovering that the memories had all fallen through the holes in his brain.

  “Betty!” A coughing fit followed my father’s proclamation. “That’s your name,” he said, his fist still up to his mouth, catching more sputters. “You’re Millie’s friend. Kenny’s girl. Betty.”

  “I knew you’d remember!” Alison said. “You were always good like that. So clever!”

  I had imagined they might find common ground as high school teachers. I had thought that was to be the surprise of the day: that she would be able to draw him out on those years when he taught, help me locate the father I could remember though he could not. I had thought briefly too that he might cast her as my mother; though the fantasy made me feel a flash of childlike shame. But no, she was to be Betty. Betty the British girl. Not some figure from my life with him, but flesh-and-blood evidence of a story that had nothing to do with me.

  As if on cue, as though he had caught a whiff of my melancholy, he turned and asked, “Were you there too?” his eyes rheumy and full of concern.

  “I wasn’t,” I said, standing up. “But how nice that the two of you can catch up.” I touched the back of his chair. “I just want to go speak to the … the …” I let it go unfinished, as I left the room.

  At the nurses’ station, I peered over the counter, my head between the two enormous, unchanging displays of plastic flowers, and I asked if Lydia was available; but of course she’d gone home after working the night shift. I considered jotting something down, leaving her a message along the lines of: It isn’t you … don’t feel bad … it isn’t you; but what might be said casually in person felt clunky and presumptuous as a note.

  “Would you please tell her that I thanked her for her care of my father?” I said. “I know he hasn’t been the easiest … I know she got the brunt of it last night.”

  The duty nurse looked at me with genuine kindness. “Oh, we’re used to those things,” she said. “Your father’s a lamb. He can have a bad night once in a while. He’s no trouble at all.”

  “You called me this morning, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” she said. “We have to make the calls. But please don’t worry about us.”

  Looking at her, I thought Laine would have liked to paint her face. She was maybe ten years older than I, bright strawberry blonde hair, unusually dark brown eyes. Clipped, combed eyebrows. And her nose was asymmetrical, one nostril round, the other pinched—defying definition, just as the depth and gravel of her voice argued with the chipper sentences she spoke. Her face seemed like a collection of features hurriedly thrown together, not a coordinated expressive instrument. I could never capture that. But Laine, I knew, excelled at just such challenges.

  “He goes to lunch soon,” the nurse said. “Will you be staying? You and your friend?”

  I looked up at the big clock behind her, identical to the clocks that had graced every classroom I had ever been in. Every classroom in which my father had ever taught. It was past noon. “No,” I said. “We’ll be heading out now.” I
thanked her again, and made my way back down the hall.

  My departure from my father’s room was barely a footnote to “Betty’s” farewell. He seemed so sad to see her leave that I feared another deluge of tears, but her repeated promise to return soothed him enough that we could extricate ourselves without a flood.

  We were silent as we walked through the air-conditioned, fluorescently lit halls to the door, just murmuring a simultaneous thank-you to the guard who opened the door. We were silent as we stepped into a world that seemed to have been set on broil during our hours inside. It was only as we approached the car that Alison spoke.

  “I can’t imagine how difficult that is for you,” she said. “If it were me … Honestly, it must just be impossible to manage … Though …” We had reached the car. “Though he seems to be a nice enough man.”

  A nice enough man. Yes. That was what he had become—when he wasn’t throttling nurses or drowning in his own tears. “Well, he was pretty damn stern when I was a kid,” I said. “It’s hard to see now. He seems so mild, I know. But he was … he was very tough with us. We weren’t … we weren’t an affectionate kind of family. We were never … never soft, I suppose. Never tender.” I groaned as we slid into the stifling air. “Jesus Christ. And people leave their dogs in cars.”

  “Only people who want to kill their dogs.” Alison pressed both buttons so our windows opened at once. “This sort of heat absolutely never happens in England. Not like this. Once in a century.” She began backing out of the space.

  “That’s the most I’ve ever heard him talk about the war,” I said. “By a long shot. It was strange to think of him having this whole … this whole era of his life that he just erased. Or buried. And then it comes rolling back. When you’re old. And mad as a hatter.” I looked out the window. A long stretch of office buildings passed, low-lying, sand-colored. A regular rhythm of For Rent signs. “It’s a very funny business,” I said. “This whole life thing.”

  “Well, that’s certainly true. There’s little doubt about that. When you were out of the room? He was talking. I don’t know if you know this, maybe you do. About some woman? When he was in England?” She stopped at a light; and I realized that her driving style had changed, had become almost stately by comparison.

  “Betty?”

  “No. Not her. I gather there was another girl? You probably know this.” But I could tell from her tone that she didn’t really think I did.

  “A girl in England? No. I never heard about that. I barely even heard he’d been there.”

  “Millicent,” she said. “Millie to her chums.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “Of course. An English girl named Millicent. What else would she be named?”

  “Well, Fiona. Dorothea. Dotty. Gladys.”

  “So, what about this girl named Millicent? Millie.”

  “Oh, it just seemed … at one point he seemed to think I was her. I gather they were quite an item.”

  “Is this where you reveal to me that I have an older brother living in England with Millie, his mum?”

  Alison laughed. “No. I think at most it’s …”

  “Did he say he was in love?”

  She took a curve with the same notable care. “Not in so many words. He told me, well, he didn’t exactly tell me anything, since he thought I already knew. He was just talking over old times. Something about the pub and the walk home. And what a shrew Millie’s mother was. My mother, I suppose. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it …”

  “No, I’m glad you did. That explains why he was so distraught when you left.”

  “It just felt peculiar to me. Him telling me. And me not telling you.”

  “Peculiar,” I said. “Yes. That would have been peculiar. For my father who thinks you are his girlfriend from 1945 to tell you a story and you not to tell me.” I looked at her. “What part of life isn’t peculiar, Alison? Seriously? At what point, really, do you stop and say, well, this is really strange? This part. Not that part. But this part.”

  She didn’t say anything in response, and for a time we just drove on. Past first one strip mall to the left, then its twin to the right. And I thought about Millicent. A girl in England. Just an hour before, less than that, I had been theorizing that the war must have been blown from my father’s memory by my mother’s death, and thinking myself so insightful. Life and its walls, its before and after events. But maybe the war had always been a taboo subject—because of Millicent. Maybe he had promised my mother never to bring it up. Maybe his proposal to her had included a confession that there had been another love. “Her name was Millie and until I met you I never thought I’d love again.…” Maybe he’d been doing all those pull-ups all those years to be ready to reclaim his British rose once his daughters were all out of the house. But then she too had died. Or she’d run off with the greengrocer. Or they’d carried on in secret and he never told us, lest we feel our mother betrayed. Maybe dear old Millicent was the answer to the puzzle of why my father never settled with anyone else for all those many decades of widowerhood.

  As we drove, it crossed my mind that if I’d ever had children and then became demented enough to blurt, they would be asking each other, Who the hell was Bill? on their drive home. Except the chronology was off. If I’d had children, there wouldn’t have been a Bill. For a moment, I thought that with great conviction—as I had for many years. If my sister had lived. If my uterus had filled with life. If everything had gone according to plan, then I wouldn’t have …

  But who knew?

  “It really is amazing,” I said, “how little we understand about anything.”

  “Yes.” Alison raised both our windows. “Tell me if it gets too cold. I often think that about newborns, you know. That we’re always focused on how much knowledge they acquire. But then there’s also the business of learning how much cannot be known. Knowledge acquisition on the one hand and ignorance acceptance on the other.”

  “I suppose that’s right.” I thought then of launching into a whole theory about the role of religion in providing a story one could tell oneself; but I didn’t want to be rude about Alison’s child, now officially due to visit over Labor Day. And truly, my tired, unsatisfied heart wasn’t in the project of pointing out how badly other people were managing their lives or what illusions they needed in order to get by.

  “This is the best mall around,” I said, pointing. “If you run out of paints and need an emergency supply. There’s a craft store there. It’s not top-line stuff, but it’s okay if you’re desperate. Though I probably have anything you need. I tend to stock up for years at a time.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, then she lightly touched my arm. “You look so tired, Gus. Why don’t you close your eyes. I promise not to drive like a lunatic. Why don’t you try and get some sleep.”

  “Your daughter,” I said, “she really believes in it all? I mean, the heaven part? We’re all going to just keep on? A great big reunion one day.”

  Alison sighed. “Something like that. I haven’t questioned her too closely on certain things. Like the afterlife. Heaven. Hell. It would be hard for me to know how to deal with her believing in hell, I think. Much harder than just telling myself to be glad she thinks we’re never really going to have to say goodbye.”

  “Right,” I said. “I can see that. Never having to say goodbye.” I thought of Charlotte. “It’s easy to scoff,” I said. “But I do understand the appeal. I would like to never say goodbye. Ever, I mean. Never again,” I said. “There have already been too many goodbyes,” I said, as I closed my eyes.

  “Sweet dreams,” Alison said, with another pat on my arm. “Sweet dreams, Gus, and no more goodbyes.”

  8

  I had imagined Nora small. All through Alison’s chatter about her, I had assumed she would be shorter than her mother—for no good reason at all. Small, but with the same round lines, soft curves of Alison’s figure, face, hair, even her personality. And I had also imagined her mousy—an indescribable qual
ity, but a distinctive one nonetheless—doubtless because the most interesting thing I knew about her was her religious belief and my mind ran too easily to some absurd stereotype. All of it was a far cry from the lanky young woman in shorts and a tank top who appeared with Alison at my kitchen door Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend.

  “This is Nora!” Alison said it as if she had pulled a rabbit out of her hat, rather than welcomed her daughter from Boston. Ta-dah!

  I said hello, and we shook hands. I ushered them in. “You had an okay drive?” I asked, noticing the gold cross, barely half an inch, on a near-invisible chain around her neck. “It’s a pretty day for it, anyway,” I said. “Long trip though.”

  “It was good,” she said. “Just under six hours.” She shrugged in the way only young people do, as though her shoulders were first pulled by strings, then dropped. “We talked. It didn’t seem too long.” I could hear a trace of her mother’s accent in and around her own Boston one.

  “Her friend Heather drove her. They’ve known each other from diapers.”

  “Heather has a boyfriend in Philadelphia,” Nora said. “So it’s pretty much on her way.”

  “Well, it’s very nice to have you here. And I know your mother is excited. I hope she’ll share you with us a bit.” To my own ear, I sounded false, like a character on TV. Next, I would be talking about us girls going out to do a little shopping. “Would you like to sit, have a drink? It’s early but I always feel like on holiday weekends the rules don’t count. I could mix a pitcher of something light. Sangria?”