The next day, after breakfast, I touch base with work. Things are good, but I can tell that I need to go back, as much for my own sanity as for any other reason. Part of me… well, fine… most of me misses the city and the grit and the noise and the vitality. I can take only so much lazy bucolic-ness. New Yorkers—even adopted ones—need their nature lined and limned by buildings; this flat, rolling landscape stretching to a hazy infinity is too much for us to take.
But, there’s the other complication, as well.
I pick up the phone, put it down, pick it up again. I am reminded of my father’s attempts to start the engine of his deathtrap truck. Teresa walks into the kitchen, sees me.
“Do it,” she commands, grinning.
I do it. And get voice mail. I mutter and stammer into the phone. I’m sorry about and can we try this again and call me when you get a chance… and I limp to an unimpressive finish. Hell; even I wouldn’t call me back. Teresa shakes her head when I’m done.
“Thank God you don’t talk for a living,” she says. I indicate with a certain raised digit that she is, indeed, number one in my life right now. She chuckles and pours herself a coffee, comes to sit next to me.
“So, what’s on today’s agenda?” I ask.
“More of the same, I guess. Plus Daddy, I assume.”
“Good,” I answer. “Maybe seeing it will scare him away.”
“If I’d known he was going to show up, I would have left all of it,” she says. “We do all the work, he gets to waltz right in. Not fair.”
“Show him the basement. We haven’t done much work down there.”
She looks into the middle distance, tapping her lower lip as she thinks. “True, true. Perhaps he’ll meet with an unfortunate accident.”
I chuckle. “You’re not supposed to tell me these things. Plausible deniability and all that. And then it becomes a death house. Harder to sell.”
“We’ll just say it’s haunted. People love that shit around here.”
“Yeah… but he’d be the world’s worst ghost. He’d take all their liquor.”
“And all the loose change.”
“House would smell like cheap beer and Camels.”
—
My phone’s buzzing when I step out of the shower. Naked, I sprint to it; it’s Tom, and I don’t want to miss it. I perch, still damp, on the edge of the bed.
“Hey,” I say.
He chuckles. “What the hell kind of message was that?”
I grin, although he can’t see it. “Sorry. Performance anxiety, maybe. First day with a new tongue.”
He chuckles again. “Ri-i-i-ight. Anyway… uh, sure. I’m up for a reboot.”
“Well… we’re going to be at the house this morning. Of course.”
“And I’ve got a meeting with the lawyers. Sounds like fun all around.”
“Well… Daddy’s going to be there, probably. At the house. You should come over when you’re done. Say hello, and whatever.”
“Good lord… JD Davenport… how is the old, uh… so-and-so?”
“The term you’re looking for is ‘son-of-a-bitch’… and still alive and kicking. Unfortunately.”
Tom chuckles. “I should come over. It’ll be—” He breaks off as some voice, unintelligible, says something in the background. “Sorry,” Tom says, when he comes back on the line. “We have to—they’re calling us in.”
“Where are you?”
“Lawyers. Already.”
“And here I am not even dressed yet.”
“Hmm. Hold that thought, lazy-ass. On the other hand, you get to put up with your dad all day, so… ”
“Well, it’s two against one. Three, if you count Duane. I think we can take him.”
Another chuckle. “Break a leg. Uh… Miss Bossypants is glaring at me. Gotta go. Not sure how long this will take, so… ”
“No problem. Just… whenever.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Later.” I hang up. I look down at myself. Tom’s rumbly voice… just the thought of him… has worked a kind of magic on me in the brief time I’d talked with him; my better half has announced its intentions and is staring up at me with its one blind eye.
“You’re not helping,” I say to it.
—
My father is already at the house when we show up. He can’t get in—the first thing we did was to change the locks—so he’s just sitting there in the driveway, door open, perched sideways on the seat. He appears to have been…
“Drinking,” Teresa mutters, as Duane parks his truck. “Of course.” She looks at me. “Gonna be a long day, brother.”
“Stay positive,” I say, as we clamber out of the truck and start unpacking supplies.
“Fuck positive,” she retorts.
“Maybe he’ll pass out.”
“Not likely, if you’ll remember. Man could put away a case of beer and still drive. Judging by the look of his truck, I think he’s already done it a time or two.”
At the front door, we wait as Duane unlocks the deadbolt. Daddy comes up behind us and I can smell him; at least he’s showered, although the beard could use some attention. He belches, then giggles… and I catch a brief gust of something cheap and rank roiling around.
“Mornin’, everybody,” he says.
“Morning, Dad,” I respond, only because someone has to. Teresa says nothing; Duane’s already inside. We follow.
He stops, looks around. I wonder what he’s feeling; he hasn’t been here for twenty years or more. Not that anything’s changed… but it is cleaner, I’m sure, than he remembers.
“Where’s all her stuff?” he asks.
“Right here, Daddy.” Teresa’s voice is terse, angry.
“No. I mean… well, I thought she had a lot of crap lyin’ around, all over the place.”
“We got rid of a lot of it, Dad,” I say. “We couldn’t move around.”
My father stands there, truculent, more than a little bit drunk. Then, “Maybe you shouldn’t’a done that, son. I wanted to go through it myself. I might’ve wanted—”
Teresa glowers, opens her mouth… but Duane beats her to it.
“JD… there were animals living in here when we got here. We had to clean it up or the city was going to slap us with a fine, condemn the house as unsafe, and then none of us would be standing here.”
Not technically true, but the lie shuts him up, and I swallow a smile lest I give away Duane’s strategy. Daddy’s not likely to want to make his presence known to anybody with the power to look real close at him, even if it’s just the Woodford County building codes official. I know—all of us do—that what Daddy really wants is to paw through her stuff looking for some secret stash of money.
“Dad,” I echo. “A lot of it was just junk—old mail, newspapers… stuff not worth anything to anybody. We kept what we thought was important. You’re welcome to go through it, if you want.” I ignore another glower from Teresa, but, really… it couldn’t do much harm to let him paw through stuff, if it keeps him happy.
Teresa’s anger vents itself in a blustery bit of breath… one of many I’m certain she’ll express as this day unwinds.
“I’ll tackle the basement,” I add. Which gets me mostly out of the way.
Duane looks at Teresa. “Babe? You and me upstairs?”
Teresa looks at all of us. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Daddy,” I offer. “You can join me in the basement, if you want. She might have put some of your stuff down there and we haven’t done much with that part of the house, yet.”
That seems to mollify him, and he joins me as we break apart and go to our chores.
—
We spend the rest of the morning relatively peacefully; my father wanders around the ranked shelves lining the rough stone wall, clattering through boxes and bins. Periodically, he runs over to me with some bit of treasure, asks me if he might have it, and I agree; soon, he has a tidy pile of things arranged at the foot of the stairs… old tools, some picture or knick-knack that he remembers from our past, some of his father’s things that he’d inherited and placed down here.
I sort through the obvious bits of trash, mostly more moldering magazines and newspapers, saved for some arcane reason or another, now become nests for mice or worse. I fill trash bag after trash bag; together, my father and I lug them up the steep and narrow stairs and out into the dumpster. Every so often, I excavate another old sideboard or chair and we bump those up the stairs as well and into the living room and the light of day, where we can evaluate each piece… keep or trash?
I can hear Duane and Teresa upstairs, working quietly side by side, talking softly. Teresa is back in our mother’s bedroom, in her closet. Every so often, we meet at the back door; Duane, with boxes of my mother’s clothing and me with another bag of ephemera.
“How’s it going?” he asks me, at one point.
“Good. He’s not raising a fuss about it, and he’s actually helping.”
“He say anything about wanting to move in?”
“Not yet,” I answer.
—
Towards noon, though, my father’s voice deepens into a burry, froggy kind of rasp and he starts coughing… earnest, phlegmy, hacking fits that double him over. The mold’s getting to him.
“Daddy? Why don’t you go upstairs and outside, get some fresh air?” I suggest.
“Yeah, yeah,” he manages, when he comes up from his near-supine stance, hands braced on knees.
“I can do the rest of this,” I add. “If I find anything you might want, I’ll put it aside.”
He agrees, and clomps upstairs and—judging by the sound of his feet on the boards—across the room and out to the back of the house.
I go back to work, and slip back into the dispassionate job of combing through my mother’s idiosyncrasies.
—
I resist the temptation to go through each thing I unearth, figuring out why she might have kept it. I’m fighting against my own danger of succumbing to the miasma I’m stirring up. My gloves are black with the mold and mildew, and the mask I’d reluctantly put on is doing fuck-all to keep the stuff out of my lungs. I’ve got three or four bags lined up at the stairs; I decide that I need a break and haul one up and out to the dumpster.
As I go back, I see my father in a chair on the brick patio. He and my mother had put that patio in when they’d bought the house back in the seventies; it was salvaged brick from some old house out in the country that had gracefully given up the fight against time and gravity. The patio undulates in gentle hills and valleys, victim of frost heave over the years, but it’s somehow charming and fits in with the rest of the place.
My father is staring out into the green, gloomy depths of the back yard; none of us has dared tackle the near-jungle that this place has become. We’ve talked about hiring a tree guy to come in, render his opinion on the state of the place, take out and thin where he thinks it would do good. For now, though, there’s an artistically unkempt feel to the place, and I think of Gray Gardens and other kinds of eccentricity.
My father looks up as I join him, pulling up another chair; he’s got a beer in one hand and that’s fine. He’s earned it. Silently, he leans over and extricates another one from a cheap styrofoam cooler… bought, no doubt, at the same place he found the beer. He gestures with it at me.
I smile and take the beer from him, crack it open, take a deep draught of it. “Thanks,” I offer. He smiles, and I smile back. “I found some more stuff for you to go through, if you want,” I continue.
“Thanks.” My father turns his face to me, and his eyes are red and rheumy.
“Oh, Daddy,” I sigh. “Don’t. Please don’t.” I close my eyes against his weeping.
“Sorry,” he sniffles. “Just… got to thinkin’.”
“Yeah,” I respond, trying to remain noncommittal. I don’t want to go to where I think he’s headed.
“She’s gone. She’s really gone.”
“Yeah.”
He sighs, dabs at his eyes with the back of a wrinkled and spotted hand. It’s interesting to watch this man; I’m more like him than I care to think. Everything that I might become is already written there, in his flesh. “I shoulda… ” he starts.
“Yeah,” I respond. I don’t know what else to say; he’s heard it all before. We’ve said it all before.
He glances over at me, looks away. “You hate me.”
I think about it. “No,” I respond. “Not really.”
“I think your sister does.”
“Well… you’d have to ask her. I don’t know.”
He burbles out a thick laugh, clears his throat. “I think she’d like to tear my balls off, mostly.”
Okay, it’s funny; I laugh. “Not just you. Can’t blame her for feeling that way, right? She had to put up with the brunt of it.”
“Your mother… ” he starts.
“I know. I got it, too. Hard to… well, anyway.”
“I tried, you know. To be what she wanted. Tried like hell. Maybe that was the reason things didn’t work out. She wanted… I don’t know. Jesus, or whatever. Hard to compete with that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
He turns to me. “I guess you do, don’t you?” I nod; he goes on. “You know, we talked about it. About you, about what you, well… ”
“Is that why you left?”
He shakes his head. “No. Well, a little… but most of it was that I just got tired of bein’ the man she thought she wanted. I did everything she asked me to do, but that wasn’t enough. Nothin’ I did was ever enough for her. She had this funny way, though. You remember? She’d always say how pleased she was, but she always made you feel that you’d disappointed her, somehow. You never quite got exactly to where she wanted you to be. Wherever that was. I never found out. Eventually, I stopped lookin’, I guess.”
And now I understand that some of the things that link me to this aged and tired man run underneath the book of our common flesh. “I wish you had stayed,” I whisper. “It might have helped.”
He shrugs. “Too late now, I guess. Would you have stayed?”
“I don’t know. It would have helped Teresa, though.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It probably would have.”
We fall silent, nursing our beers. My father reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, goes about that business, and the seductive smell of burning tobacco joins that of the beer. He looks at me, waves the pack in invitation. I shake my head. That, luckily, is one habit I never started… and it might go far in explaining some of the more concerning aspects of his coughing jag in the basement.
I should get back to work, but it’s nice, sitting out here in the sun-dappled yard, overgrown as it is. I can hear background noises—birds, airplanes, mowers—but can’t see their sources. I feel disconnected from the outside world.
I think of my father and his haphazard life, the choices he’s made… one of which was, inexplicably, my mother. My father’s education is a thin veneer over a humbler sort of man, a man content to sidle through life as best he can, bouncing from place to place in some nomadic fashion, always relying on his wits and rough good looks to charm his way from situation to situation.
My mother, in contrast, was a pinched, prim, and proper woman, smallish, anemic, constricted and confined… what, in an earlier time, might be called vaporish. Things always seemed to be a bit beyond her, outside of her abilities; my sister and I—when we were still living here—were always called upon to accomplish even the most basic of tasks.
And, because I don’t want to go back to the plague-infested basement and because I find myself enjoying the company of this near-stranger and because I simply want to know, I ask the question. “Daddy? Can I ask you something?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“You and Mom… ”
He intuits the rest, to my amazement. Lucky guess? or…
I wait. He waits, gathers himself. Thinking, perhaps. “She was always… ” he starts. I wait. “She was so… fragile. I don’t know… yeah, maybe. She always seemed to need protecting from something, I guess. She couldn’t take too much of… well, the world, maybe. People. Things. Things she couldn’t control, didn’t want to control. Blame her parents, maybe. They didn’t do the best job with her. Always thought she would find someone, because she had to. I guess she did. She found me.”
“And?”
“And… it was a thing I could do, wanted to do. She was beautiful back then, you know? Such a tiny thing, a scrap. Skin and bones. Made me feel good, to be around her. I couldn’t do a lot, but I could do this. I could protect her.”
I try to think of them, back then, before any of this. Before us, Teresa and I. Before this archaic brute of a house. Before she changed. Youth is raw strength, is an incomplete view of the world… simplifies it, thinks to conquer it with one’s particular charms. I, too, was not—am not—immune to those charms, to that wish to conquer.
In his inebriety, my father’s speech is, perversely, more precise and more controlled. The lazy drawl has been subjugated, brought under control. I think of the many things my father could have been, and of what he is, now, next to me. Does he, too, see it?
Can love—true love—start from such inequality? Is not love the marriage of equals? Given my parents’ history—and this too-familiar present—perhaps not. My father is a man who allowed himself to go only so far into himself, traded only on the surface and the superficial. My mother was a woman who seemed bemused by life and its many intricacies, delighting in none, confused by all. Her eternal wandering was no less serious than my father’s as she stumbled through a palimpsest of faiths, each one overwriting the one before it until everything became unreadable.
And I? And my sister? She’s found something in Duane, her own marriage of equals. She found a strong enough partner to wish to build upon that, to make a family. Corbin and Grace are testament to that, to some irresistible wish to go out onto the uncertain and tentative ice that is bearing and raising children.
And I?
But here is Duane, and Teresa following, bearing gifts in the form of a block of white paper in her hands that I recognize without knowing. Everything in my mother’s house has a certain meaning, a certain import; no less so these things which she hands to me, silently, knowing that I will know, and understand.
“I think we should get lunch,” she announces. She sees, I know, what my father—and I, in my sudden guilt —have been up to.
I refuse to look at these things in my hand, place them on the patio next to my feet. A scent—lavender? lilac?—wanders up to my nose… a faint and atavistic scent. A cologne my mother used to wear, some cloying and indelicate thing, strong enough to endure over a long period of time. She must have doused the pages with it, perhaps hoping that that alone would entice me into opening the letter.
Teresa bends down to the cooler, digs around, surfaces with two beers, keeps one, hands the other to Duane. There is a deceptive casualness to her actions, and something makes me look up to the house looming behind me, to the open window above me, curtains of some time-rusted lace drifting in and out, out and in. My mother’s bedroom window looked out upon this same wanton and insalubrious landscape.
I catch her eye, hold it, even as she upends a bit of the beer into her mouth. She returns my gaze levelly and I know, I know, I know that she’s been listening to us. I rush back over the things I said or might have said. Her gaze drops to the paper I hold in my hand, and then back up to me.
I look at the papers. Each block is a letter, many pages thick, with the address of my first apartment in Brooklyn prominent, overlain with the urgent red stamp. Return To Sender. I remember holding these things in my hand as they washed up upon the shores of my adopted country, remember weighing each one in my hand. What could she possibly have to say to me, I thought back then, that I haven’t heard a dozen dozen times before?
Nihil sub sole novum.
I take the letters and go around to the front of the house.
Posted 25 December 2024