Encouraged? I wanted to poke-poke at that word. My courtship of Grandfather was not encouraged—it was required. Dad would brief me on what constituted acceptable behavior in my grandfather’s house, urging me to feign being a Tigers fan, and a Lions fan, and to pretend to look forward to those dreary, humid weekends in the cabin. I was a spy and Dad was my handler. In 1970, my hair was long, and one Saturday, waiting for Grandfather’s car to arrive, I braided it, inspired by Iron Eyes Cody, the crying Indian in the anti-littering ads on TV. When I emerged from my room in braids, Dad said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?,” and frog-marched me back to the bathroom. “This is not a game.”
“I made a very bad mistake,” my father said, taking another sip of his vodka before putting the glass onto the table and moving it farther away, out of easy reach. “All those weekends with that jerk. What I”—he hit the heel of his hand against the side of his head. “I was too wrapped up with my own parental issues to understand how it felt to you to spend that time with a man who had so disrespected your mother.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, that was the main thing, wasn’t it? When your mother and I got together, that jerk said”—here Dad’s voice became an ignorant growl—“‘She’s ten miles beneath you, boy. Her father is a house painter. She is trash. And if you don’t do exactly what I say, you’re finished around here. Finished!’” He stopped for a moment, massaged his throat. “This is how he spoke about the woman I loved. A woman who, by the way, anyone without poison in their blood would recognize as one of the finest people who has ever lived. I see now that what was happening . . .” He squinted and turned his head, as if a vision was materializing in the dreary light of the fluorescent tube that softly hummed above the kitchen sink. “I was put smack-dab in the middle of my earliest childhood traumas, which all involved protecting my mother from his tyranny, his moods.”
Was Dad in therapy? Parental issues. The recapitulation of childhood traumas. Since starting at Adler, I had gone through four shrinks; when I traveled I kept my appointments via phone. I believed in psychotherapy and I needed it, but nevertheless there was something unsettling in picturing Dad with a box of tissues at his elbow. Even at their most disappointing, we prefer our parents to remain fixed poles, unchanging and predictable, not works in progress.
“These feelings,” Dad was saying, “controlled me more than I could control them. I wanted to be a good father to you, Kip. In light of what my father did to me, I wanted that more than anything.”
“But you were. You were a terrific father. You were the best father I ever had!” The joke stabbed into the back of the emotion, which was my intention, but Dad took it differently and his eyes filled with tears.
“There’s a lot of regret, Kip.”
I knew this was where we were headed. I could sense it, the way you can smell the nearness of rain. We were about to revisit the conversation in which he blurted out how repulsive it was to measure the necks and limp wrists of the various fairies who came to him for customized shirts. As much as it had wounded me then, I had also taken a kind of comfort in the outburst, figuring that my father—who loved me, who was gentle and kind—would not make odious remarks about the men he measured if he suspected for a moment I might take them personally. Yet even then, rendered half stupid by my need to believe in my father’s love, a smaller yet persuasive part of myself suspected that Dad sensed in me a vulnerability to a so-called lifestyle that was abhorrent, disgusting, and disqualifying, a subculture of the contemptible who he imagined were making up for their inability to multiply in the normal way by luring unsuspecting suckers into their doomed community.
“I remember you were extremely accommodating when it came to my weirdness about what I could eat and what made me sick,” I said. “You knew this pizza place where they put hardly any tomato sauce on it, just brushed it on like a pink wash in a watercolor.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Taste of Capri. I knew the owner quite well. Poor guy just passed. Not really all that poor, actually. He took the franchise route and made important money. There were seven Tastes of Capri in Michigan alone. Good old Andy Manzardo. I can’t tell you how good it makes me feel that you remember those pizzas.”
“Well, all right then.”
“He never married,” my father said. “Everyone used to pester Andy about it. I guess that was pretty stupid. What did we know, right? It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t mind tomato sauce anymore,” I said. “I actually like it, done right.”
“The thing about marriage is, it’s not for everyone,” my father said. “And that’s okay. It’s a big world and there’s room for everyone.”
He looked relieved, unburdened. This is what he’d wanted to say. He was as close to speaking the truth as he dared to venture. Not to actually speak the truth, but to scale a little promontory from which the dim outlines of the truth could be seen. That great gated city in the mists.
“I made a lot of shirts for that man. My clients are the cream of the crop, men who don’t hesitate to pay three or four times the store price for the right shirt. The funny thing is when I am seeing customers I make sure to wear a custom shirt, but other than that I buy most of my shirts right out of Macy’s.” He squinted at me, took in what I was wearing, and nodded approvingly. “Very nice, by the way.”
“Probably Bergdorf Goodman.”
“Ooof,” he said, rubbing his thumb and two fingers together.
“Or maybe Macy’s.”
“Somehow I doubt it. My son is a rich man, a very wealthy man indeed.” He saw I was about to object, but he stopped me with a raised hand. “Which comes as no surprise. I always knew you were going to be special. And a smart cookie, too, make no mistake about it. Smarter than your old man, that’s for sure. I don’t see you getting tied down to any one person. Hey!” He slammed both his hands onto the table and the sudden noise almost made me yelp. He was closing the door to the room in which his innermost unhappiness lurked, but I had gotten a glimpse of it. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make you three shirts.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, no, I want to. It’s an honor. And you know what? It’s good business. The people you mix with, the hoi polloi? They see you in a Hilary Custom Shirt and they say, Hey, where’d you get that shirt? And some of them could end up right here, getting measured for shirts of their own. Right?” He struggled out of his chair. To my great regret, the head of his penis came through the pajama flap, like the head of an anxious actor parting the curtain to see if the house was full. “Wait right there,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Upstairs. I’ll bring down the sample books, do the measurements, and we’re off to the races.”
“Dad, it’s really so late. . . .”
“I’m striking when the iron’s hot. I’ll be right back. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. There’s yogurt, real New York yogurt. I’m going to check on your mother, and then I’ll be right back with everything we need to get you the best shirt money can buy. Which will be free. I’m still the father, right?”
“What does that have to do with paying?”
“Just . . . just let me do this my own way.”
I heaved the exasperated sigh of an adolescent but did nothing more to stop him. The house now was fully carpeted, wall to wall on every square foot of it. It was a continuous pale green, all off the same roll. When I lived here with Lois and Loretta, the floors reverberated beneath our hormonal hoofbeats, room to room, up and down the staircase, but now, when it seemed to me my parents needed it least, footsteps were soundless.
I checked my phone to see who had been trying to reach me. A call from the Manhattan Theatre Club, probably to remind me to renew my subscription. Three calls from my office. A call from the airline, something they’d instituted the year before, a kind of faux concierge service, checking in with frequent first-class passengers to make sure everything had been to our liking. A cal
l from Thaddeus. Another call from Thaddeus. I checked my watch. It was too late to call him back, no matter how much I wanted to.
Fifteen minutes passed and I decided what had happened—I was sure of it—was he had stretched out next to Mom and accidentally fallen asleep. I waited a few more minutes just to be sure. Finished my drink. Took my notebook out of my jacket’s inside pocket and tore out a piece of paper and wrote him a note. See you in the morning. Great talking with you. Much love. By the way, hoi polloi doesn’t mean fancy people. It actually means just the opposite. I slipped the note under the sugar bowl and sat there for an extra moment or two, just enough time to come to my senses. I grabbed the note and ripped it in half, and in half again. I didn’t even want to put it in the garbage, though nothing I had ever touched deserved more to be put into the garbage. I shoved it in my pocket, turned off the kitchen light, and climbed the silent stairs to my boyhood bed, thinking to myself: In a sense, all of us continue to sleep in our childhood beds.
Chapter 14
Stoned Again
I returned Thaddeus’s call from the Detroit airport right before boarding but he didn’t answer, and I called him when I landed at LaGuardia, and a third time around eleven in the morning, from my office.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” he said. “But I’m frantic right now. I’m supposed to go to Florida in the morning. Grace is having a show there—a solo show, isn’t that fantastic?—and tomorrow’s the closing party. I missed the opening and I can’t miss this. David was supposed to come down from Skidmore to look after the place and, frankly, look after Emma, who’s having some difficulties and we don’t want to leave her on her own. But the little jerk just canceled on me. Completely spurious reasons.”
“I’ll stay with her,” I said. “I’ll hop on a train and be there at the end of the day.”
“Oh man, that would be amazing.”
“Emma? Come on, it’s a pleasure. Great news about Grace, by the way. Really.”
I boarded the three o’clock Amtrak, out of Pennsylvania Station. Though it was Friday, the train was half empty. We rolled north, through the catastrophe of the Bronx, the looming catastrophe of the nuclear power station farther up the Hudson. Several insurers had refused to write policy for it until a credible evacuation plan could be presented, some way for the hundreds of thousands of jeopardized people to escape the radioactivity should there be a meltdown or any other serious malfunction, and so far no such plan existed. I fell asleep. One moment my brain was full of chatter, hyperbole, justifications, and theories of human behavior, a few of them road tested, others shaky to say the least, and the next moment I just went dark, a plunge so precipitous it was like a dress rehearsal for sudden death.
A stone the size of an orange struck the very window upon which my head rested. The Amtrak windowpane was thick enough to absorb the blow; a starburst of cracks appeared. I looked around at the other passengers, feeling somehow sheepish that my window had been the one to be hit, but no one was looking my way. Had no one heard? Were they all so accustomed to these attacks that a mere solitary stone failed to register or registered as something so trivial that it didn’t warrant interrupting their reading, their conversation, their telephone calls, their laptops, their idle contemplation of the passing landscape? I was underslept, dislocated, full of anticipation to see Thaddeus, my mind a palette onto which color from too many tubes of paint has been squeezed, making the whole thing a blurry mess. The conductor dozed at the back of our car, with his arms folded over his chest and his cap balanced on his knee. My heart was racing and I stood in the aisle like a child who cannot fathom the willful blindness, the sheer hypocrisy of the adults in the room. “What the fuck?” I shouted. “Didn’t anyone see what just happened?”
The person sitting in the seat across from mine was an exquisitely groomed woman in her forties, with pearl earrings and an ecru silk suit that matched her hair. Her left arm was in a sling and she had been working on her laptop using one hand. “It’s actually getting better,” she said, in a voice that was calibrated to calm you down. “They’re slowly but surely giving up.”
“But who?” I asked. “Has anyone figured that out?”
She made a dismissive sound, and waved her hand, as if to indicate a world beneath her contempt. The train sped around a curve and, stumbling, I allowed the momentum of it to return me to my seat, where I sat next to the cracked Plexiglas, feeling both ridiculous and self-righteous. Forty minutes later we arrived at the Leyden station. I pulled my bag down from the luggage rack and made my way to the exit. The ecru woman was continuing north, but she looked up from her work as I waited in the aisle for the doors to open. She smiled at me, winked, and gave me the good old thumbs-up. We were somehow on the same side, in it together.
Chapter 15
Faux Pair
“There’s my au pair!” Thaddeus called, as soon as he saw me in the train’s open doorway, getting ready to step down onto the platform at Leyden. The wind came off the river strong enough to make you think you could lean your weight against it, as if it were a wall. Thaddeus was dressed for milder weather in a thin, zippered jacket, hatless, gloveless, ever the optimist. As he reached up to take my bag from me, his jacket hiked up. All he had beneath it was a T-shirt and that rose, too, revealing a patch of stomach, with tight little black curls of hair on it, like drops of rain. I felt desire as a kind of wretchedness.
“Kip, what can I say here? One day you’re going to get fed up with saving my life and I don’t know what I’ll do after that.”
I told him about the stone and the window and the woman in ecru and what she said about the attacks coming less frequently.
“Well, that’s good to know,” Thaddeus said, as he patted his pockets, looking for his car keys. “Did you see your family while you were in Detroit?”
“I slept at my parents’ house. But I was late and my mother was already in bed. Her health isn’t that good right now.”
We were halfway up the steep staircase that led from the train platform to the little station, but Thaddeus stopped right there. “Oh no,” he said. “What’s going on?” He looked at me with his startling receptivity. Even if it was an act—what was the difference? Most people wouldn’t bother making you feel so listened to, wouldn’t make you feel that your words had such weight that they could hang on to every one of them. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. She doesn’t really trust doctors. Western medicine and all. She’s worried, though. She thinks it might be Parkinson’s. Self-diagnosis is dangerous, and now that my parents have a modem, the world is her osteopath.”
“I’m really sorry, Kip. Should you have even come here? Maybe you need to be back in Detroit.”
A couple in their thirties passed us on the stairs and waved hello to Thaddeus; he waved back at them without taking his eyes off me.
“I’m happy to be here,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do in Detroit, except go insane with boredom and irritation. She doesn’t listen to reason and my father is being . . . He’s turning into an old man, that’s what’s happening.” I started up the steps again and Thaddeus followed.
“Your parents are beautiful people,” he said.
“Didn’t you only meet them once?”
“Twice actually. Ann Arbor. And New York. Actually three times, twice in New York. But I’d think they were beautiful people because you’re their son, they raised you, and you are the kindest person I’ve ever known. That doesn’t happen all on its own. They gave you a lot.”
We made our way to the parking lot. Through all the financial upheavals Thaddeus had managed to hold on to his BMW, but it had surely seen better days. The casing on one of the taillights was missing, the side-view mirror on the passenger side was held in place with electrical tape, and the leather seats were cracked like my window on the train. We Michigan boys were taught to believe in the iconography of vehicles, that they tell as much about you as your clothes or your haircut. We believ
ed that those who drove Buicks were Republicans, those who drove VW bugs were hippies, a Chevrolet was for a worker bee buzzing his life away in the billing department at AT&T, a Peugeot was for an assistant professor who wanted to look cool but couldn’t swing getting a car that was actually good, a Honda was every bit as sexy as a spinach salad, and the Volvo owner believed in safety first and read Consumer Reports, and probably wore two rubbers when he screwed. I knew it was nonsense, but I was relieved Thaddeus had held on to the Beemer.
It took four tries before the engine caught, the fan belt shrieking.
“It does that,” he said with a grin. “But if I give up this car, I give up the ghost.”
“Totally agree,” I said. “This is a quality ride.”
“Reading anything good?” he asked.
“Not really. Kind of bogged down. What about you?”
“Winesburg, Ohio,” he said. “I think I might be nostalgic for the Midwest.”
I wondered for a moment if he was telling the truth. Those Sherwood Anderson stories were what he had read aloud to me at my hospital bedside when I was in St. Vincent’s with a lung infection. He and Grace were living on Twenty-Third Street at the time; he was writing advertising copy for B. Altman. I can’t remember how he learned I was sick. Maybe I called him. But he was there hours after I was admitted, and he looked much more frightened than was warranted by a lung infection. Half the people in that hospital were dying. Most of the staff wore surgical masks for their entire shift. I was feverish, coughing, but I knew I was going to get better and I wondered how I could reassure Thaddeus that this was far from a worst-case scenario. His chair was close to my bed and his knees touched the skimpy yellow blanket. He read beautifully, softly tapping his foot against the linoleum to keep an even pace. In “Hands” there’s a line that goes, “I am a lover and have not found my thing to love,” and when Thaddeus had read it, there was a catch in his throat and his foot was still for a moment or two.
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