In the morning (his back a little better — a few tame, if uncharted, pains all that remained) Peter received a telegram from his son.
JUNE 28—
BAD SUMMER COLD. REGRET CAN’T COME TOMORROW, HAVE FEVER. COUGHING AND SORE THROAT, WILL TRY TO COME SOON. REALLY SORRY.
YOUR SON PHILIP
Peter was disappointed. Yet at the same time — he couldn’t deny it — the telegram was in its way a reprieve, a stay of execution. For all the sense of relief it gave him, he regretted the postponement and began to believe, on his third close reading of the telegram, that possibly Phil would not come at all now, that the “bad summer cold” was merely a tactful way of putting him off. On the fourth reading he was able to believe in the bad cold — too obvious a choice of excuse to be a lie. Thinking about it, however, Peter conceived of the cold (like the soreness in his own back) as a psychological convenience, the body saving the spirit from the guilt of deceit. The telegram obsessed him. Worse than not knowing the boy’s real motive for not coming was the sense Peter had that he himself had somehow unwished the boy’s arrival — a man with a gift for undoing himself. It was an extension of his theory about his own life, that his failure was a fulfillment of the desire not to have, a triumph of metaphysical will over physiological possibility — all of it (all he knew) in his travel book. A godsend perhaps: he would use the two weeks of vacation he had taken to spend with his son, in order to work some more on the book — the book for his son. The book to be a better father than the man writing it. The idea gave him solace. Yet his dreams, the one about his son most of all, continued to worry him — a hellish prophecy from the nightmare of his secret will. Avoid prophecies, he told himself. Don’t kill your father. Stay clear of your son.
| 5 |
His son. It was something to conjure with. Peter was waiting for the boy to return from the men’s room, standing guard like a deflocked shepherd over two new bought-for-the-trip-looking brown leather valises. He didn’t mind waiting, but why had the boy run off as soon as they had met, before he had even had a chance to ask him how he was? There were toilets on the plane, weren’t there? He worried that the boy had been embarrassed by the effusiveness of his greeting. A thirteen-year-old boy brought up in Ohio wasn’t used to being hugged in public, he guessed.
“Phil!” he called. The boy had come out of the bathroom, and apparently confused, was heading in the wrong direction. “Phil!” An announcement came over the loudspeaker. Some flight from the West Coast had been held up because of bad weather; another flight (from Miami) had just arrived at Gate B. “Philly!” he yelled across the enormous waiting room, panicked that he would lose him. An old man looked into Peter’s face to see if by some chance the call had been for him; the boy, still wandering at the other end of the room, gave no indication that he had heard. “Philly,” he called again, “down here!” The boy looked up, but then, as if mistaking the direction of the voice, turned into another corridor. His son out of sight, Peter went after him. The boy was talking to a policeman, on the verge of tears it seemed, when Peter reached him.
“That’s all right, officer. I’m …” he started to say when he realized that the boy, this boy he had come after, was not his son, was smaller and younger than Phil. He turned.
The policeman detained him. “Do you know this little guy?” he said.
“It was a mistake,” Peter said. “I have to find …” Looking around for Phil — his son missing, lost.
“Is this your uncle?” the policeman asked the boy, his hand like a weight still on Peter’s shoulder.
The boy looked at him closely, his reedy eyes baleful, tremulously courageous in the face of deception and disappointment. “Who said he was?” the boy said.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I thought you were my son. The thing is, I haven’t seen him in a number of years.” The boy looked away.
“C’mon, Herb,” the policeman said to the boy. “We’ll page your uncle on the loudspeaker.”
Peter retraced his steps in a hurry, Phil waiting for him disconsolately at the place of their separation. “My bags are gone, Dad,” he said.
“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.