“That’s not possible,” Peter said, but after a few minutes’ search it became clear that it was—that unless the valises had walked off by themselves, someone had taken them. Peter tried, to neither’s satisfaction, to explain his mistake to the boy, his words inadequate to the well-meaning failure of his intentions.
“Why didn’t you take the bags with you?” the boy asked.
“Now you tell me,” Peter kidded. “Why didn’t you tell me before they were taken?” Neither was amused; the father, if possible, more aggrieved even than the son. (If Peter had wanted to disappoint the boy, he couldn’t have arranged things more effectively.)
“Maybe someone took them by mistake,” the boy said. “If he did, when he discovers that they’re not his, he’ll want to bring them back.”
Mourning their loss, they decided—there was no point not to—to try the Lost and Found, in case, by some odd chance (neither believing in it), the bags had been returned.
“Dad, over there,” the boy said, pointing to the newspaper stand in the center of the room. “That’s them.”
The man the boy had pointed to was walking in long strides toward an exit, a brown valise in each hand, a newspaper tucked under his arm. Peter had to run to catch up with him.
“Excuse me,” Peter said, one eye on his son, one on the small dark-haired man he was talking to, “did you happen …?” The man didn’t turn his head, kept on going as though no one had said anything to him.
“Mister,” Peter said, his son watching him, “I’m talking to you.”
The man stopped, glanced at Peter without turning around, still holding on to the valises. “I no speak good,” he said in a thick Spanish accent. “You want something?”
“Those valises,” Peter said, “are they yours?”
The man shrugged at his failure to understand, smiled at the boy.
“That’s all right,” the boy said, touching his father’s arm, “I don’t think they’re my bags, Dad.” “Are you sure?”
“Mine were different,” the boy said.
“Sorry,” Peter said to the man. “A mistake.”
“Mistake,” the man repeated, nodding. He went on, cautiously at first, quickening his pace, it seemed to Peter, as he reached the exit.
“Are you sure they weren’t your bags?” Peter asked again.
“I don’t think they were,” the boy said.
The old man at the Lost and Found took Peter’s name and address, though he felt impelled to advise him that if they were new suitcases there wasn’t much chance of anyone returning them. “Mostly,” he said, “what shows up here is stuff nobody wants. You know how it is: finders keepers, loosers weepers.”
“Well,” Peter said, bravely putting his arm around the boy, “the only thing for us to do, Phil, is get you a new set of clothes. Okay?”
“Okay,” the boy sighed, as though it made no difference one way or another, his loss irremediable. His father’s son.
As they walked up Sixth Avenue, Peter felt an increasing, exhilarating sense of expectancy, though he had no clear idea what it was he was expecting. It had started at lunch, this manic sense of his that everything, everything under the sun he wanted, was possible. It had started when Phil seemed to warm to him for the first time, to forgive him his blundering at the airport—and whatever else there was to forgive. “We each made one mistake today,” his son had said. And listening to a story the boy was telling him, Peter had a recollection of himself talking to his own father with the same kind of fervor and difficulty—unable somehow as a child (and later?) to make clear to his father what he meant, the way he meant it. It struck him that this boy, his son, was extraordinarily like himself. And then—the best part of it—he had the sense, in being a father, of being again a son. It made him impossibly happy.
So they spent the afternoon—the two like long-distance runners—hurrying from one department store to another, buying things for the boy, all of it vaguely unreal to Peter, the boy a mirage on the desert of his need. There were things Peter wanted to tell him—all he knew; less and less, it seemed, every day—but he didn’t know where to begin, or how. It would have to wait. The prospect itself, for the moment, was enough.
It was a sultry day, and they couldn’t walk more than two blocks at a time without feeling the embrace of their clothes, the exhaustive pressures of the city. In his expansiveness (the city hardly spacious enough to contain him), Peter bought the boy much more than he had planned to buy, bought him—the buying an unexpected pleasure—new luggage, a cord summer suit, three pairs of pants, six sets of underwear, eight pairs of socks, four wash-and-wear shirts, polo shirts, a pair of desert boots, ties, a mohair sweater, a sports jacket. Whatever the boy needed he bought for him, whatever he wanted.
“Can you afford all this?” the boy wanted to know.
“Why not?” was his answer. Why not? Even if he couldn’t, he could. It was the kind of day when he felt there was nothing he couldn’t afford.
The boy looked at things as if he could own them with his eyes, yet the pace of the city, the stampeding quality of the crowds, the traffic, the noise, which Peter had learned to take for granted, were a little frightening to him. “Are there always this many people?” he asked his father.
The sun weighed heavy on Peter’s eyes. “It’s the heat,” he explained. “It gives you the sense of it being more crowded than it really is.”
The boy looked unconvinced. “I hate to be around when it’s really crowded,” he said.
For a moment Peter suffered the boy’s remark, slighted, as if it had been meant as a slight. He got over it, forgave the boy, though somewhere inside him it left, he sensed, the hairline of a scar.
They went into Schrafft’s for the air conditioning and a cold drink—a lemonade this time, their third stop in the past hour.
“Tomorrow,” Peter said, “I’d like to take you to the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Would you like that?”
The boy said that he thought he would, looked disappointed.
“Is there something else you’d rather do?”
Phil shrugged. “Whatever you want to do, Dad.”
“I live in New York,” his father said, pleased at the boy’s good manners, also a little disturbed by them, by the distance they imposed. “I have the opportunity to go to these museums every day if I want to—which means, Phil,” he added sadly, “I don’t go very often. Do you know I haven’t been to the Museum of Natural History since I was a kid your age? Okay, we’ll compromise. We’ll do everything. Whatever we ever wanted to do, we’ll do. Okay?”
The boy smiled over his lemonade, nodded.
Peter’s exhilaration soared in him like a dream. “What would you like to do first?” he asked, impatient himself to begin.
The boy kept one hand on his packages. “I’d like to see those museums,” he said. “Also …” He hesitated.
“What?”
“My grandmother gave me a list of some places.” He reached in the breast pocket of his jacket for a slip of paper which had, it seemed, been clipped to the pocket for safety. “She thinks I lose things,” the boy said apologetically.
Phil read the list to his father while Peter sipped his lemonade, the crushed ice teasing the nerves of his mouth. “The World’s Fair. The Statue of Liberty. Some Broadway shows. The museums …” He looked up—a laugh breaking loose as if the coincidence of it, if that’s what it was, made the bond of a joke between them. “The Empire State Building,” he continued, still laughing to himself. “Chinatown. The subway. The UN. Times Square. Coney Island. Radio City.” The boy put the list back into his pocket.
“Is that all?”
“After that, I’m on my own.”
“We’ll do the whole list tomorrow,” Peter said, “so then we’ll be free of obligations.”
The boy’s forehead wrinkled, his eyes turned dark as if he owned a wound somewhere which Peter’s joke had brushed against. “Is that go
od, to be free of obligations?” he wanted to know.
“It’s the only obligation to have.”
“I don’t understand. People shouldn’t have obligations, or they should?” The boy stared blindly at the empty glass in front of him, like an old man in his grief. “I don’t understand.”
If he could explain this to the boy, Peter decided, he could explain everything to him—what he had failed to accomplish, what he had wanted—why for fourteen years he had done nothing but bum around the country, a man retired from the world of obligations, his only purpose not to have any. When he thought about it, he had no words to explain it even to himself; yet somewhere at the purest nerve of himself he knew the why of what he meant. Examples crowded in his mind, none of which seemed exactly to the point. “What I’m saying,” Peter said, “is that you shouldn’t do anything for any other reason than that you want to do it.” It wasn’t quite what he meant.
The boy raised his head, squinted at his father as though he were looking into the sun. “What if you don’t want to do the things you’re supposed to do? Some of the chores I have—some of them I don’t like to do. Should I tell my grandmother that I don’t want to do them?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
The boy seemed to accept this on faith, waiting, at the edge of his patience, as though the two of them were on a train going through an extraordinarily long tunnel.
“It’s not easy to explain,” Peter said.
Phil nodded understandingly.
Peter listened to the unintelligible clamor of his thoughts. The boy’s extended patience measured the extent of his failure. All the things he had had to tell him at a distance—the sum total of his life’s knowledge—seemed now, with the boy sitting across from him, nothing—only the possibility of silence. Nothing or something. Which? When he closed his eyes, he heard his father’s voice like an echo from somewhere in the dark ages of his skull. “Once in a while, Peter,” the old man was saying, holding his trumpet up to the light, admiring it with something like awe, “a couple or three times maybe in my whole life, I get a beautiful, sweet sound out of this thing. That sound, Chickie, that’s what it’s all about. That’s the sweet mystery of life, right? There isn’t anything in the world you could give me, money included, that I would respect or value more. Not ten million dollars. If’s like conversing, Peter, I’m telling you, with the angels—the cream of the angels.”
What sound? The joke of it was, his father had been, at his best, a third-rate musician. And the last time he had seen him—two years ago—he had given up playing altogether. What sound had he heard? More important: what sound had he thought he heard? Are we all of us, Peter wondered, deceived by the immortal whispers of our desire? Or had his father, for all the years of drudgery and small competence, been granted a moment of something beyond the possibility of his powers? Peter looked up to see if anything had been said. The boy’s green eyes—like crystal—questioned him. The silence was there between them like a trust.
“The best way to do things,” Peter said, his voice hoarse and strange to him, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time, “is to be able to do them out of love.”
The boy brooded, said nothing.
“Obligations are inhuman,” Peter added.
“Dad,” Phil said, looking into himself, his eyes ravaged by some intolerable comprehension, “was the reason you never asked me to come and live with you before because you didn’t want to do it out of obligation? Is that why?”
Peter shook his head, his throat so dry that it seemed no words would ever come out of him again.
“Anyhow, I’m glad you asked me now,” Phil said.
The waitress took the lemonade glasses away, mopped the table with a white cloth. “Will there be anything else?” she asked.
“Nothing else,” Peter said.
“Would it be all right if I had some ice cream, Dad?”
They each ordered banana splits—Peter’s first, if he could trust his memory, in over twenty years. Though it was sweeter than he might have liked in ordinary circumstances, he managed to enjoy it, enjoyed the boy’s enjoyment of it—Phil humming to himself as he ate.
“So far I really like New York,” the boy said, licking the syrup from his lips. “It’s a neat town.”
“It’s a town to conjure with,” Peter said.
‘Yeah,” the boy said as though he knew what it meant. “It’s a town to conjure with, all right.”
Whatever his reservations about the boy before, he was whole-hearted now—a boy to conjure with, he thought. And then it struck him—the purpose of things suddenly becoming clear—that there was something he had to do, that had to be done now, the moment of its awareness the moment of its necessity.
In the phone booth before he made his call, he had to wipe his eyes, the confusion of tears perennially blurring his purpose.
He called Lois at work.
“What did you do with your son?” she wanted to know.
“He’s here.” He looked through the glass of the phone booth to make sure. Phil was waiting for him, looking mild and pleased and a little worried. “We’re at Schrafft’s.”
Silence, then a laugh. “Peter, you’ve always hated Schrafft’s.”
She knew him better than he knew himself. “We’ve had banana splits,” he said, as if it were an accomplishment.
“Which one’s the son and which is the father? I can tell you’ve really hit it off like brothers.” She bit her tongue.
“The reason I called, Lois, is that I … that I think …” He started over: “Why don’t we get married?”
She took a deep breath. “And adopt Phil?”
“And adopt Phil.” Now that it was done, yet nothing actually done—his book only slightly more than half finished—his spirit soared. There was too much of him for the phone booth to contain, the air crowded with spirit, so he opened the door. The sudden draft of air conditioning, the unexpectedness of it, chilled him.
“You’re mad, Peter,” she said in the voice of love. “Must I give you an answer this very minute?”
“You know I’m impatient,” he said.
“You’re out of your mind. Do you want to come to my place for dinner?”
“We’ll go out to eat somewhere. Why don’t we go to Chinatown? It’s on the boy’s list. Okay? His grandmother gave him this list of places to see. And Lois, in the rush I nearly forgot to mention it—I love you. And the boy. All of us.” (And Diane, he neglected to add, but that was another matter.)
“You really are mad.”
“I’ve never felt better in my life.”
“That’s what they all say.”
They arranged to meet at five-thirty on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, the three of them: the father, the son and the former wife.
It was four-thirty. They went to Peter’s apartment by cab—an interim trip—to wash up (and dress for dinner) and to get rid of the packages, which by this time were becoming a burden. While the boy showered, Peter dreamed. Was it the heat? He had an incredible feeling of clarity. His life seemed to lay itself out before him. In a series of slidelike recollections, half-forgotten events recalled themselves to him with extraordinary vividness of detail—a day in the country with his father and mother and Herbie, a game of stick ball in the schoolyard, his first meeting with Lois—not quite as they had happened, but as he would have wished them to be, happening now like a command performance, a family reunion, the best and least likely fragments of his past coming together into some ultimate focus of meaning. At the last, he saw himself sitting with Rachel at the edge of a lake; her green eyes, when he looked at them, the image of the boy’s. It was almost, the sum of it, too much for him to bear. Peter made an entry in his notebook. “One has only to wait for the past,” he wrote. “At the end is clarity.” He felt compelled to add, “All clarity perhaps is illusion,” but then crossed it out.
It was ten after five. A heavy breath of storm in the air. The sk
y in shadow, the clouds like a congregation of mourners. The sun still burning somewhere, streaks of fire in the distance like the faded shreds of a scarf. They set out.
“Do you think you can walk it?” Peter asked the boy. “It’s about a mile and a half to where we’re going.”
“I can walk it if you can,” the boy said.
“Let’s see if you can.”
They went down Broadway from Seventy-third Street to Fifty-ninth, Peter setting a fast pace, Phil asking questions of his father as they walked, Peter slowing down only to answer them.
They were at Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue at twenty-five past five. It had started to drizzle. A hot wind, almost liquid, raising dust from the pavement. Steam. The dark sky hanging so low that it seemed to Peter that he could reach up if he wanted to and puncture it with his finger. It tempted him to try—a sore temptation it was—but he was not fool enough actually to do it, the gesture performed only in the presumption of his imagination. It began to rain a little harder. Peter increased his pace, began to jog—the boy keeping up with him—the worst of the storm apparently ahead. Lois waiting. Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth.
“Race you to the next corner,” the boy said. Go! They were off.
Peter slipped on a sheet of newspaper which had floated under his feet, but managed, as a matter of will, not to fall. Phil nearly bumped into a fat woman carrying an umbrella and a small dog, stopped to apologize, and came in second to his old man. They embraced, winner and loser. What seemed remarkable to Peter was not that he had gotten to the corner ahead of his son but that he wasn’t even out of breath. He had never felt better in his life. They took shelter under the canopy of a store, the rain beginning to fall in earnest.
“Phil, I’ll tell you what—I’ll race you the rest of the way,” Peter said.
“This time I’m going to run you into the ground,” the boy bragged.
“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”
Now! “Go!”
The boy got a good jump and Peter, saving himself for the end, found himself almost two steps behind as they approached the corner. Though the light apparently had just turned green, Peter worried about the boy running blindly across the street; cars (especially taxis) had a way in New York of coming out of nowhere. So he opened up, for his son’s sake, increased the length of his stride—the boy would see, a matter of pride between the two of them, that his father could still outrun him, could outrun anyone if he had to. It gave him a marvelous lift to run with total freedom, the rain a blessing, birds singing to him as he ran. He had never, his legs like springs, moved so quickly in his life. At forty, he may have been—no way of knowing for sure—the fastest man in the world. He flew by his son at the corner, who seemed merely a shadow as he passed him, an imprint on the landscape. It was then that he felt something snap, a weight of metal cracking into him—or was it the storm?—lifting him, turning him over and over. And still he raced. Until it was too dark for him to go any farther. He saw the face of lightning. The rains fell.
A Man to Conjure With Page 27