The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  Next, he took Dr. Graham to court, and this time a judge not only dismissed his case, but ordered him to pay the doctor’s attorney fees. He filed a claim against the neighbor whose sprinklers turned his lawn into “a swamp,” and also against the neighbor whose rumbling garage door opener purportedly cracked his plaster walls. Most ominous of all, he began to prepare proceedings against Gary’s wife, Sharleen, and Ron’s wife, Nancy, claiming they had promised to repay him money he’d long ago loaned to my brothers.

  “I’m entitled by law,” he’d say when I tried to convince him to drop the suits, “to take action against a party eight times before they can even think of claiming malicious prosecution. Believe me, I know what I’m doing. I didn’t just fall off the boat, you know.” He represented himself in court and lost each case. The judges were corrupt, he’d claim, his witnesses inarticulate. Defeat never seemed to give him pause or lessen his zeal for prosecution. He was in the throes of a lawyerly tantrum; if the world refused to yield to his will, he’d force it to yield to the letter of the law.

  I protested his plans to sue my sisters-in-law, though to stay in his good graces, my objections were tempered. In the convoluted scheme of things, I found it flattering to be, along with Betty, one of two people in his life exempt from litigation. My worth as a son was verified daily by the absence of a summons to appear in court. Betty must have been as backhandedly flattered as I. As a nurse, her bedside manner was stern, but off duty, so to speak, she flirtatiously teased my father about his bullheadedness, charmed by the very trait that made him a difficult patient, not to mention a tenacious legal foe.

  Every now and then, my father and I met for dinner at the Brass Pan. Some nights, when the waitress asked for his order, he’d tell her a story based on his choice of entrée, so that filet of sole, for example, segued into a fishing trip with my brothers. At first I thought his brevity—a boat, an ocean, three rambunctious seasick boys—was in deference to the busy waitress. Then I’d see that he was stranded in the shallows of a thought, unable to remember more. On other nights, he’d stiffen and eye the waitress with suspicion, tense as a man being cross-examined. She’d hover above him, pencil poised, till he blinked and finally lifted his hand, pointing to a dish on the menu.

  Eventually, he grew too distracted by his legal battles to return my phone calls. On the rare occasions when we spoke, he said he was too busy to meet me for dinner. More often than not, the answering machine picked up after several rings and played its refrain: I am not at home at this present time.

  After months of an elusiveness he couldn’t be coaxed out of, I drove over to my father’s house one afternoon to ask why he’d been unwilling to see me, why he hadn’t returned my calls. Such phases of estrangement were nothing new; for as long as I can remember, our relationship had been punctuated by weeks of his withdrawal followed by fits of generous attention. But there I was, hoping, I suppose, to make the reinforcement schedule a little less variable.

  Dad answered the door of his Spanish house, preoccupied but glad to see me. Time had taken a belated toll, as though weariness had waited till now to irrevocably claim his face; his eyes were puzzled, hair unkempt, chin bristling with patches of stubble the razor had missed. His polyester jumpsuit, after years of looking supernaturally pressed, was finally worse for wear.

  Betty rushed in soundlessly from the kitchen. She’d recently left the home care agency, taking short-term jobs that didn’t require her to drive too far from Hollywood, and she was dressed in her uniform and silent white shoes. “I’m going to say hello and good-bye,” she announced, slinging her purse over her shoulder. As she had on the day of her interview, Betty stood squarely, the very picture of dependability, and yet she had about her a breathlessness, an air of agitation I hadn’t noticed before. Even this slight change in her seemingly limitless composure—it had to be limitless, I thought, if she maintained a peaceful relationship with my father—forced me to recognize just how much I depended on her to take care of him. “Your dinner’s in the refrigerator,” she shouted at my father. “Give it five minutes in the micro.”

  She looked at me and whispered, “Remind him. Five.”

  “What?” said my father.

  “I left Mrs. Travisi’s number near the phone,” she shouted. And then she was gone.

  My father and I sat down at the dining room table. Yellow legal tablets and manila folders were scattered across it, scraps of paper saving his place in law books that rose in precarious stacks. He lowered himself into a chair with a troubled gust of breath. Age had robbed my father of the prowess he believed a triumph in court could restore.

  “Are you sure you’re not angry at me about something?” I asked. “Because, if you are …”

  My father fiddled with his hearing aid. “What makes you think I’m angry?”

  “You’re so … unavailable these days.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m busy. Swamped. Do you need me to spell it out for you?” He rose to his feet, and I thought he might begin to sound out the letters. “You have no idea. No goddamn concept.”

  I stood, too, trying to rise above the childlike vantage point that came with being seated. “All I’m saying is that you have to eat dinner anyway, and we might as well …”

  “Who says?”

  “What?”

  “Who says I have to eat dinner? Where is it written? Is it written here?” He hefted a law book and let it slam back onto the table. Stray papers jumped and fluttered. I made a move to calm him down, but he began to prowl around the table, stirring up motes of sunlit dust. “Don’t you ever tell me what to do!”

  “Having dinner is not something to do! I mean, it is something to do, but I’m not telling you to do it.” At a loss for logic, I was barking back.

  “Don’t you raise your voice at me!” He rushed up and grabbed the back of my shirt, a hank of fabric twisted in his grip. “I’m eighty-six years old,” he shouted. “I can do whatever the hell I want whenever the hell I want to do it.” He pushed me toward the door, breathing hard, his face red and alien with effort.

  “Dad?”

  “That’s right,” he said. When he opened the door, the daylight was blinding. “Don’t ever forget that I’m your father. Now get the hell out and don’t come back.”

  Since high school, I’ve been both taller and stronger than my father, but just as we reached the threshold of the door it occurred to me that I might flatter him into relenting if, instead of resisting or fighting back, I let my body be heaved outside as though from an admirable, manly force.

  Acquiescence didn’t help. Before the door slammed shut behind me, I turned and glimpsed his indignant figure sinking inside my childhood house. The door hit the jamb with a deafening bang, the birds falling silent for half a second before they went back to their usual racket.

  On a daily basis I relived the particulars: the shirt taut across my chest, the heat of his breath on the back of my neck, the flood of light as the door swung wide. As with so much that’s transpired between us, the sheer abruptness and implausibility of what had happened made me wonder if I’d perhaps misperceived it. Had I said something thoughtless or cruel to set him off?

  In lieu of an explanation, I started making changes in the story. Suppose I hadn’t mentioned dinner? Suppose I hadn’t raised my voice? Suppose we’d stood instead of sitting? Say the day had been cooler, the hour later, the dust motes churning in another direction? Would the outcome of my visit have been any different? Who knew what crucial shifts of fate had hinged on the tiny details?

  Several nights a week, I had to drive past his house on the way home from teaching, and the closer I came, the greater its magnetic pull. More than once, I turned the steering wheel at the last minute, aiming my car through a tunnel of trees and parking across the street from his house. So this is what it was like, I thought, for my brother Bob: parked and watchful for hours on end. My behavior pained me, yet the urge to spy on my father was nameless, as deep and murk
y as the darkness it required.

  There was little to learn from my nights of surveillance. Light would suddenly burn in a window, but I couldn’t see anyone move through the rooms. Even if I had, what would a glimpse of his silhouette tell me? A walkway led toward the large front door, the stepping-stones flat and blank in the moonlight. Betty’s yellow station wagon was parked in the driveway on the nights she wasn’t working, but my father’s Cadillac always sat there, gleaming, impassive, white as an iceberg. Despite my vigilance, nothing happened, except that every now and then I’d glance at my phosphorescent watch, its ghostly hands advancing.

  During the first year of our estrangement, my entreaties and apologies and furious demands for contact were recited into his answering machine. On a few occasions he picked up the phone, then slammed it down at the sound of my voice.

  By the second year, resignation took hold. I’d lost the desire to drive by his house or reach him by phone. I recalled that afternoon less often, and when I did, I refused to probe the memory for meaning.

  By the third year, his absence settled inside me like a stone.

  “I realize my phone call must come as an unpleasant surprise,” the social worker told me. “But I believe your father’s deterioration is significant enough to make legal guardianship a necessary step. We routinely ask the nearest relative before resorting to a court-appointed guardian, since it’s in the client’s best interest to place their finances in the hands of someone they know.”

  Mr. Gomez assured me that I didn’t have to make up my mind right away; it would be several months before the case came before a judge. An anonymous caller had phoned Adult Protective Services to say my father needed help. If I assumed legal responsibility, my father’s Social Security checks would be placed in a trust, and he’d need my permission for every expenditure: medicine, groceries, clothes.

  “Careful monetary management is especially crucial in your father’s case,” said Mr. Gomez. “As you may know, the bank has begun foreclosure on the house.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mr. Gomez that I hadn’t known a thing about it. I certainly couldn’t explain that even if Dad and I had been on speaking terms, he might not have bothered to mention foreclosure till a moving van pulled up to the curb.

  “Hello?” said Mr. Gomez.

  If the city was a compass, my childhood house was magnetic north, and always would be no matter where I moved.

  I promised Mr. Gomez that I’d give our discussion serious thought, and said good-bye. I’d become so guarded against any emotion having to do with my father that the prospect of seeing him again roused only a dull ambivalence. After three years, I’d finally decided it was I who didn’t want contact with him, a decision that redefined circumstance and made my banishment bearable. And now, out of the blue, a social worker urged a reunion.

  If I did take responsibility for my father’s finances, wouldn’t receiving an allowance from his son—an allowance!—cause him to resent my authority, just as I once resented his? How well would he be able to understand that I hadn’t wanted or asked for this role?

  Had I been in my father’s position, I’m the last person to whom I’d give fiscal responsibility. I can barely balance my checkbook, let alone manage someone else’s finances. Ask me about money, and instead of thinking stocks and bonds and dividends, I remember a trick my father showed me when I was six. He rolled up his sleeves, waved his empty hands in the air. “See,” he said, “there’s nothing there.” With a little flourish, he reached out and plucked a quarter from my ear—were there more coins, I wondered, hidden in my head?—leaving me, as only he could, slack-jawed with astonishment.

  * * *

  I’d been writing when the telephone rang. Though I don’t usually answer the phone when I’m working, I was expecting a call from Mr. Gomez.

  “Bernard?”

  “Dad?” Saying the word made my mouth go dry.

  “I sold the house and the people who bought it want to move in pretty soon, so I’ve been cleaning out closets and I came across all sorts of drawings and photos of yours. You wanna come get them? Is four-thirty good?”

  “Four-thirty’s good.” I wasn’t sure I was ready to see him, but assent was automatic.

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “Wait,” I blurted. “How have you been?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  Three years. “I’m fine, too.”

  “Good,” he said, “as long as you’re fine.” His harried voice softened. “Well,” he said, “I’m really swamped.”

  Only after I hung up the phone did I realize he hadn’t said hello.

  I approached the house with apprehension; who knew in what condition I’d find him? Since I’d last spied on the house, the first-floor windows had been covered with bars. The front door stood behind a wrought iron grate, and no matter how decorative its design, it made the house look so aloof it might as well have been surrounded by a moat.

  No sooner had I rung the doorbell than my father appeared behind the bars, pale and slow, jangling keys like a castle keep. All the while he burbled greetings. My hands were jammed in my pockets; I couldn’t act as if things had been normal without damaging a sense of reality that, especially in my father’s presence, could flounder like a little boy’s. “Come on in,” he said, unlocking the grate. I found his hospitality suspicious, and as much as I wanted to make amends, I also wanted to run the other way. I’d come to think of my boyhood house as a place I’d never visit again, and now that I stood on the verge of return, I practically had to astral project and give myself a push from behind.

  The house was even more crammed with memorabilia than I remembered. He must have strewn souvenirs about the rooms as he cleaned out the closets, a last-minute effort to make his mark on the home he had to forfeit. The breakfront doors yawned open, his scrapbook packed in a cardboard box. The portrait of JFK leaned against the wall, as did still-lifes and landscapes by my brother Ron. Spread across the coffee table, in the careful, printed letters of my childhood, were compositions I’d written about the sun’s brightness and my love of dogs; they called back the distant, mesmerizing triumph of being able to describe the world and contain it on a piece of paper. Pictures from a photo booth showed a mugging ten-year-old who bore as much resemblance to me now as I to my father; I wanted to warn that oblivious boy of what was to come. I couldn’t look at the stuff for long, and I gathered it up, ready to go.

  “Sit,” said my father.

  I did as he asked.

  “What’s new?”

  “Lots.”

  “Written any more books of yours?”

  “Trying to. Yes.”

  “I see,” he said. “Tell me what else has been going on.” He leaned forward in the chair, cocked his good ear in my direction.

  “Look, I appreciate your willingness to get together, but I’d think you’d be glad that you raised a son who cares enough to want to know why his father hasn’t spoken to him in three years.”

  His brows furrowed.

  “Why haven’t you talked to me?” I shouted.

  “Look. You live, things happen, you go on. That’s the way it works.”

  “That’s not the way it works for me.”

  “Well, the truth of the matter is that you were getting irritated with me about my hearing aid. You were always screaming, ‘What? What? I can’t hear you! Turn up your damn ear!’”

  “First of all, Dad, you’re the one who shouts, ‘What? I can’t hear you.’ Second, I’d never scold you because you’re hard of hearing.”

  “I’m telling you, that’s what happened.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Did.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Suppose you’re right. Is that any reason not to speak to me for three years?”

  My father sat back, stared into space. He gave the question due consideration. “Yes,” he said, lurching forward. “Yes, it is.”

  “You see, this is why I can’t just ‘go on.’ Unle
ss we can talk to each other like two mature adults, I worry that some misunderstanding might set you off again.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right already.” He looked at his feet, then back at me. “I’ve lived in this house for fifty years. Do you remember when we moved in?”

  “I wasn’t born yet.”

  “Do you remember what day it was?”

  “I wasn’t …” It seemed pointless to repeat myself. “Tuesday?” I guessed.

  “No,” he said. “It was your mother’s birthday. Did you know that she never knew her real birth date?”

  “Her birthday was the fourth of July.”

  “Ach,” sputtered my father, waving his hand. “That’s the birthday they gave to lots of greenhorns at Ellis Island, people who didn’t know or couldn’t say in English the year they were born.”

  “Dad,” I asked, “what’s our original family name?”

  “I sold the place to two very nice guys. By the way, how’s that friend of yours, what’s his name?”

  “Brian’s fine, he …”

  “What do I need all these rooms for, anyway? It was either sell the house or get kicked out on the street.”

  I shook my head in commiseration, pretending to know nothing about the foreclosure.

  “Some meshuggener social worker wanted to have someone else do the real estate negotiations. Said I couldn’t handle the sale myself. I showed him. Closed escrow on my own, then told Hernandez to take a hike.”

  I stopped myself from blurting, Gomez.

  “The kicker,” he continued, picking lint from his jumpsuit, “is that I got Betty to report me to the guy in the first place.”

  “What!”

  “See,” said my father. “You do shout, ‘What!’” He bristled a moment, shifted in his seat. “It was the only way to save myself. If she said I was, you know, soft in the head, the bank couldn’t foreclose.”

  Betty walked into the living room and sat beside my father, her hair dyed a metallic shade of blond. She’d gained weight since I last saw her and it took her a couple of labored adjustments to settle into the valley of the couch. “Non compos mentis,” she said, shaking her head at the whole mess. “That’s what the social worker called it.”