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 good, 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.”