by Jan Cherubin
“Can I let Hoffman in?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
I went out and unlatched the side gate. Hoffman jumped up. He was a big shaggy mutt no one bothered to train. I plucked a locust off his back and threw it in the grass. He followed me into the house and I gave him a treat from the box on top of the fridge.
“So what do you think?” Brenda said, when I sat down again.
“What do I think of what?”
“Of James.” She waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
“I don’t know.”
She lit a cigarette. “Don’t feed Hoffman from the table,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“He’s rich, you know. James is.” Brenda tossed her head back and blew out a cone of smoke. She must have wanted to freak me out with her new boyfriend—prove she was a rebel, not the boring bookkeeper I easily ignored in the past. She finally showed some personality during my father’s illness, but what she thought was cool was just cold. “He’s really got you under his thumb,” she’d said a few times as I hurried to refill a humidifier or fetch my father a cup of tea. Maybe she was right, he had me under his thumb. But he was dying. If he wanted a cup of tea, I would bring him tea.
Now she was goading me again, telling tales as if we were in the same class in junior high. I watched her carefully. I wondered if she had heard that my mother recently got a surprise check in the mail. I didn’t think Brenda knew yet. She would have made a big stink about it if she had heard. Eventually, she would find out. For the time being, my mother was keeping the news to herself. She told only Susan and me, and Uncle Harry, who at that particular moment was tight with my mother. Then Uncle Harry flipped to the other side, although he swore he hadn’t talked to Brenda. He did talk to me, though. He called and started yelling: “You made a promise to your father! Don’t you dare break it!”
Uncle Harry had a point. I made a promise to my father, and so did Susan. Brenda inherited the house plus money from my father’s insurance policy and a savings account, but she expected more. Specifically, the money from a credit-union account my parents opened when Susan was born. As soon as my father got sick, Brenda demanded he change the beneficiary on that account from Eve Aronson née Braverman (my mother) to Brenda Aronson née McLean. It wasn’t right to leave money to an ex-wife, Brenda argued, and eventually my father agreed.
During one of my sister’s visits in the winter, he called us to his bedside. He said everything he had would be split between Brenda and the two of us except for the house. That went to Brenda alone. He asked us to promise no matter what, in addition to the house, Brenda would get a full fifty percent of his estate. Susan and I would divide the other half between us. We promised. He had only been married to Brenda four years, and it was our childhood house. But we were terrified at the thought of his death and would have agreed to anything he asked.
In the end, though, he never completed the forms required to change beneficiaries, and my mother’s name stayed on the credit-union account. Now Uncle Harry wanted me to persuade my mother to return the $20,000 check to the estate. The money would then be divided according to my father’s instructions. “It was my brother’s dying wish,” Harry said.
Could I break the promise I made to my father? We’d gotten so close during his illness. Always on his terms, though. We still weren’t able to talk about a lot of things. I never confronted him about the past. Not really. I didn’t stand up to him. I never thought about what I might need or deserve from him—or how early on, I was left to fend for myself.
“What about the promise he made?” I said to Uncle Harry.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Uncle Harry said. “What promise?”
“The promise to protect me,” I said, my voice catching on the last two words.
“Yeah, so?”
“So he broke it.”
I asked my mother why she hadn’t taken her share of the money years ago when she and my father split up. He’d bought her out of the house, so why didn’t they divide up the cash too? “It was a mistake, obviously,” she said. “But at the time, I wanted to leave on good terms. I didn’t want to fight with him. I didn’t take it because . . .” She paused. “Because, honestly, Joanna . . .” Her spoon scraped the bottom of her coffee cup, an idle stir. “I never dreamed he would get married again.” He was a philanderer. She thought he wanted his freedom.
Once in a while, “just for fun” my mother would say, she fished a random letter from the war out of an old cardboard box. She’d read aloud from the onionskin writing paper, laughing here and there at a private joke, and then her voice would trail off, and I’d realize she was reading to herself, and I’d have to remind her that I was there, that I wanted to hear, too.
Somewhere in England
23 Nov 1944
Dearest Evie,
This terrible parting must come to an end. Then we’ll love each other always, won’t we darling Evie? We’ll never let anything come between us, because if the biggest catastrophe that has ever befallen mankind could not come between us what else could?
Yours forever,
Clyde
“You know your father was supposed to be a writer,” my mother said wistfully.
He never said this himself. He said he was happy teaching English and satisfied with his life. Only occasionally, glimmers of regret flickered through the bluster of his bootstrap optimism—two times that I could think of in particular. Once when I was twelve and I dragged out the brown suitcase with the yellow handle I found buried in the back of my closet. I didn’t remember thinking I was doing anything wrong by opening the suitcase. I must have figured if it was stored in my room, even if the room had once been my father’s den, then the suitcase couldn’t have been top secret or off limits. That wasn’t quite fair, though—he gave up his den reluctantly when Susan couldn’t tolerate sharing a room with me anymore, I was too messy, and the deal was that he’d still keep some of his things in there. At first I was afraid to sleep alone in the room lined with his bookcases, but I got used to it, even got to like it, and soon the titles glowing on spines in the dark were infiltrating my dreams. The Magic Mountain, Freud and Marx, The Adventures of Augie March. I remembered slipping out of bed one night when I was around eleven and turning on the light to read a few incomprehensible pages of a book called Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille, and then pulling out the dictionary to look up sensuality. No matter how many times I read the definition I couldn’t understand what it had to do with death. I was on my knees looking for something else, probably my Tric-Trac racing set that got shoved way back in the closet, when I first found the suitcase. I dragged it out. The button locks clicked decisively when I slid them with my thumbs, the latches sprung open and the lid popped up. Inside on top of some old manila envelopes lay a thick, crumbling black photo album. I opened the cover. It was titled “Ye Olde Picture Booke” inscribed in white ink so the lettering would show up on the black page, and then the date, June 23, 1934. I did the math. My father was seventeen that year and about to leave the orphanage. I started reading the descriptive paragraphs he’d written below the photographs, and right away I felt I knew the boy who looked out at me with a steady gaze from the steps of the Home, the boy who had written in white: “Off we go in joyful glee, a score of sinful orphans we.” The discovery was thrilling and I felt shy because of it, but I went in search of my father anyway. I wanted to look at Ye Olde Picture Booke with him, and maybe I could meld the little orphan behind the iron fence with the older boy in the photographs, and then with the man who lived in my house and was supposed to belong to me. I wandered around holding the black album open in my hands like it was the Book of Kells until I found him sitting on the edge of the bed putting on his shoes. “Daddy,” I said dreamily, still hypnotized by my journey into the past, “you should write a book.”
A shadow passed over his features. “Write your own book,” he said. He stared at the floor between his knees. Neither of us moved
, but I felt as if a door had been shut in my face. I backed out of the small space between the bed and the dresser, turned and carried away the album, leaving behind a trail of crumbling black confetti.
The only other time I witnessed a glint of ambition, I was just a little older and I stayed hidden in the hallway. He was huddled at the dining-room table with one of his students, Peter Grafton. They weren’t poring over Peter’s poetry as they often did. My father was sharing his own writing. He was showing fifteen-year-old Peter a manuscript and explaining how he put it together using diaries, letters, issues of the orphanage newspaper called the Oracle, and captions and rhymes from Ye Olde Picture Booke. That was the last I saw or heard of the manuscript. Occasionally over the years, I revisited the photograph album, but I knew enough to keep it to myself. With me, he shared only birthday rhymes. When you are fifty will I still be nifty?
CHAPTER 5
“I‘m not hungry for dessert,” I said. “Maybe we should just start. I’ll get the ladder.”
“Not so fast,” Brenda said. “Have some pie.” She was stalling, but why, when I was there to help her with a big chore? We weren’t in competition for his things. She’d told me a few times she had no interest in any of it. I thought she’d put me to work right away.
“All right. I’ll have a small piece.” I wasn’t great at mind games. I was usually stupidly guileless. But Brenda was playing at something, and so I’d have to be cunning, too. I’d pretend to get along with her for the weekend, until I collected my stuff, and then I would leave and never look back—just like Susan, who had little interest in the past. I’d be free to live my life then. I’d get out from under his thumb, and out from under Brenda’s, too. I’d stand up to the dark part of him. I’d break my fucking promise. I would not make sure Brenda got the house plus fifty percent of his estate.
I cleared the table and she brought in the dessert. The chocolate-cream pie had freezer burn, but I lied and praised it. I’d pretend to listen to Brenda go on about James, smile and compliment her dinner, admire her earrings. I decided I wasn’t going to let it bother me in the slightest that she hadn’t turned on the air conditioner even though it was still over ninety degrees outside. I’d survive—I had shorts on and a light, loose tank top—and besides, I liked having the windows open, the cicadas blindly banging into the screen. The tropical atmosphere reminded me of the days when Cedar Drive was new and neighbors came outside after dinner to escape the heat. No one even owned an air conditioner then. Susan and I would dart from house to house with the other kids catching lightning bugs while the adults brought chairs onto the front lawn and had coffee there, or on the square of concrete my mother and father jokingly referred to as the East Terrace.
We could hear the roar of bathwater filling a tub through a neighbor’s window, a screen door banging, and the voices of children younger than we were being put to bed. And then it was quiet, nothing but the chirp of crickets and the reflective murmur of our parents’ muted conversation echoing off the creek bank in the velvet night. We were like prairie settlers in those early suburban days, our wagons drawn together until morning when we woke and saw that it was light everywhere, newborn, tender as grass.
“What are you after anyway?” said Brenda between bites of pie. “Most of what your father has is junk.”
“I don’t know, his papers, gardening journals,” I said. I kept my tone flat, not wanting to arouse her contempt. Brenda was the least nostalgic person I could think of. She made Susan look like Proust. “Sure, come back and go through the house and take what you want,” Brenda had said. “But you better do it already, because I’d just as soon haul that junk down to the curb for the garbage man.”
“There could be a manuscript hidden somewhere,” I said.
“What about the letters?” she said. “Are you planning on taking those?”
“Oh right. I can’t forget the letters. My mother would kill me.”
“Your mother? What’s she got to do with it?”
“They’re her letters.” I wasn’t sure what Brenda was up to.
“Evie’s?” said Brenda.
“Yes. Evie’s. The letters he wrote her during the war.”
“Not those,” said Brenda, with a dismissive laugh. “I’m interested in the letters from Caitlyn Callaghan.” Brenda leaned back in her chair, pleased. “Ah, so you don’t know about Caitlyn, do you?”
“I know about Caitlyn. You know I do. I’m just not interested in her letters.” I stabbed at my pie.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” Brenda said.
“That’s why I want to go through the stuff,” I said. “He wanted me to. He said he wanted to leave me his books and papers. But I know about Caitlyn.” I put my fork down ready to push my chair away from the table, when Brenda leaned in confidentially.
“Just ask me, dear,” she said. “Your father told me everything.”
I should have been enticed by the offer. But Brenda’s comments about people were unreliable. Even after four years of pillow talk with her husband, I didn’t think she’d have anything of value to say. I was probably wrong, she probably knew things, but I didn’t see it. I thought he should have married Darleen. She was easier to get along with than Brenda. I would have felt weird being two years older than my stepmother—Darleen was only eighteen when she walked barefooted into his community-college class. But Darleen won me over when she said she saw my father in me, that I made her laugh because of it—something about the way I spoke, not with a masculine gravel voice, of course, but the phrasing we used and how we both blinked when we were thinking, and how our long arms were all elbows when we talked with our hands.
When I was little, I got upset when anyone said my father and I were alike. It felt false. They had to be making fun of me. “Look at her, a chip off the old block,” my father would say. Then he and my mother laughed because everyone knew a girl couldn’t be a chip. I was a fraud. They called me a chip because of trivial things. We both liked soup and sucking marrow out of bones. The examples were silly. Over the years, a few similarities surfaced that couldn’t be snickered at and I started to hope there was something to it, that it wasn’t all a joke, because I very much wanted to be like my father. Both of us liked watching the sky, noting cloud formations and constellations. That wasn’t a joke. We were both good at drawing and fixing gadgets. The things that annoyed him were the same things that annoyed me, such as people asking if you liked the movie when you were still walking slowly backward away from the screen with the credits rolling. We both loved trees and when the seasons changed, for both of us it was as if the leaves were growing out of our bodies in spring and dying on our limbs in autumn.
But his disappointment in me overshadowed everything else. He looked at girls and saw sex. He saw weakness. He started to teach me to play chess, to set paving stones in the ground, to lay out a newspaper like the Collegian boys did, but with me he stopped halfway, he never followed through. I was left knowing how much I didn’t know. Boys are smarter, he said.
“He’s mad at his mother,” said my mother.
“Look around,” he said. “There are no great women chefs. No great women chess players, no great women composers.”
Why say that to his daughters? Could he be in competition with his own children? We were girls in a man’s world. He was God. He couldn’t be insecure.
“He’s mad at his mother,” my mother said.
“So you’re going through all that crap tonight?” said Brenda.
“Tonight and tomorrow. If I don’t finish, I’ll load the boxes into the car and sort through them when I get home.” By home, I meant my mother’s apartment. I tried to sound unconcerned, but I still felt anxious about the job. I cleared the table and half-heartedly offered to do the dishes. Brenda said she’d clean up, so I went out to the carport to get the ladder from the utility room. I’d start with the attic, really just a crawl space above the hallway. I had a portfolio of my drawings from high school stored up th
ere. I held the screen door open with my hip and tipped the ladder under the doorframe. I was hoping Brenda would keep her back to me at the sink so I could slip by without comment, but it was impossible to bring the ladder into the house without rattling the door. I was careful not to bang the walls, though, walls that were now Brenda’s.
She came after me, drying her hands on her apron. “You’re not setting that thing up now,” Brenda said. “Get that ladder out of here.”
“But a lot of my stuff’s in the attic.”
“It’s late,” Brenda said. “You should have gotten here sooner.”
“You asked me to come for dinner.”
“I’m going to bed, and I don’t want you touching anything without me.”
“Hold the door open then.” I held the ladder horizontal, backed out again and left the ladder leaning against the carport trellis. I came inside. I’d go up into the attic in the morning. Brenda left sheets and a blanket on the sofa and I made up my bed, although I had no intention of going to sleep at eight-thirty. I figured I would read until she turned off her light and then I’d quietly start working in the den. I’d forgotten to bring a book, but I noticed my copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney on a shelf. I had finished the novel over the winter, but I wanted to go back to the passage when he first time travels to 1880s New York. My mind started to wander and the pages fluttered and the book dropped onto the carpet. I ignored it, staring into space, running my hand over the round top of the little three-legged table next to the sofa. The table legs were carved to look like elephant trunks, with little ivory tusks glued on. It was an anniversary present, hand-carried from India, my mother never failed to mention, by Eddie Zakian, a poet they knew when they lived in the Village.