The next day they drove to the hospital. Daniel cracked the car window, and the winter air drew his cigarette smoke out like a thin ghost. He saw square porches, bricked-in flower boxes, and shiny black lampposts standing before each entrance walk; the familiar landscape soothed the itch of memory. He hoped they would pass the church with the stained-glass windows he and his friends had smashed with rocks when they were in the sixth grade. The day after they’d done it, he’d heard his mother on the phone, discussing the incident, which had destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of stained glass. She had speculated, as had the papers, about the rise in juvenile crime and what it meant.
“You must’ve been very angry,” Jacquie had said when he told her about it.
“I was just being a kid,” he’d returned.
“A very angry kid.”
He’d rolled his eyes.
The ugliness of the hospital pleased him; it seemed appropriate. The lounge was furnished with smudged plastic chairs, a vinyl couch with a strip of duct tape on it, and a candy machine. People sat in various attitudes of unhappiness. Daniel looked at them. One man looked back. His hair was standing up, and his hands appeared numb. He looked as though he might say something hostile. Daniel looked away.
A girl with a bitter mouth and blue eye shadow that deepened violently in the crease of her lids handed them purple guest passes. A female voice, enlarged and blurred by a loudspeaker, clouded the hall. The elevator bore them up. They entered a room. Daniel saw a person he didn’t identify as his mother until Albert said, “Mom?”
Tufts of pale, silken hair floated from her partially shaved head. Blue veins lined her scalp. The skin on her face and neck was lax, but it looked stiff as old papier-mâché. A ghostly array of bottles hung from metal poles around the bed. Little rubber tubes were taped against her arms. A thick rubber hose protruded from her distended mouth like a visual bray of anger. She was held erect by a brace at her back. It was a minute before he noticed that holes had been drilled into the frontal bone on either side of her forehead and metal rods had been driven into the holes. Her head was suspended in a metal hoop centered by the rods. Her eyes were closed. Her breath rasped. Daniel thought, Frankenstein. He began to sweat.
“You can talk to her, Dan,” said Rose. “She’s sedated, but she understands.”
Albert sat in a chair beside the bed and touched the papery arm. “We brought Daniel, Mom. He’s here from California.”
Her eyes opened.
Daniel’s ears were suddenly filled with internal noise. A tremulous black fuzz blocked his vision. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He stumbled out, palming the bumpy wall of the hallway. He banged his shins on a bench and sat on it, dropping his head between his knees. The fuzz parted to reveal an expanse of gold-flecked tile.
“Daniel?” Rose’s voice. “Are you all right?”
When they got back from the hospital, their father called. He invited Daniel out to dinner, without Albert and Rose. He preferred taking his sons to dinner one at a time, a preference neither brother questioned.
Before hanging up, his father said he was involved in a new business. His last venture, importing tropical fish, had lasted two months.
“It’s some weird thing to do with informational videos,” said Albert. “Some crap for tourists in hotel rooms.”
“That sounds viable,” said Daniel.
“I doubt it,” said Albert.
The comment annoyed Daniel, and he changed the subject. “Has he seen Mom?”
“Yeah,” said Albert. “He’s been good that way.” He sighed and stiffly stretched in a hard, ungiving little chair. “He was there the first night they brought her in. All Mom’s family were there, and I guess it was a bad scene. It might’ve been better if Rose and I were there, but we didn’t arrive until after.”
With a sort of angry relish, Albert told his second-hand version of the story. When their father arrived in the waiting room, no one in the family could tell him what exactly had happened to their mother, what condition she was in or where she was, apparently because they had been given inadequate information by the hospital staff and were too timid to press for more. Their father roared around the waiting room, cursing and calling them all sheep. Aunt Pauline wept and Uncle Jimmy called their father a bastard. A nurse came out of her station and told their father what he needed to know, and everybody shut up.
“Once again, Dad does the thing everybody wants done but no one will do,” said Daniel.
“Yep,” said Albert. A smile of unhappy vindication made his dull eyes glint. “Later, after we got there, Grandpa came up to Dad and tried to make up, but Dad told him to fuck off.”
“Oh, man.” But Daniel felt a sneaking little triumph for his father.
Albert half looked away, as if he knew what Daniel felt and didn’t want to think about it. Instead of saying anything, he got up and went to the refrigerator to get a drink from his water jar. He was only thirty-five, and already he walked like an exhausted man in late middle age.
Daniel and his father went to an expensive mall restaurant with a railroad theme. Booths were tricked out to look like the seats in trains, and there were framed pictures of trains on the walls. Wait-people dressed like porters had their names affixed to their jackets on plastic cards. Daniel never went to restaurants like this in San Francisco, but he secretly loved them; they made such an effort.
His father sat away from the table, his long legs crossed, a cigarette lax in his fingers. He was very handsome. He wore an expensive suit. His eyes were harsh and watchful, his thin mouth downwardly taut. Daniel admired him.
As they ate, his father described his new project, producing instructional videos for people who have to stand in line, at the post office or the DMV or anyplace where lines are formed.
“I was thinking maybe you could represent us in San Francisco.” His father’s eyes shifted up. “If you’re interested.”
“I’ve never done that kind of work before.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’d be a natural.” His father speared a slice of lobster meat with a tiny aluminum pick. “The next time you start worrying about your career as a musician, I want you to do this: Just put on your best suit, then go stand in front of a full-length mirror and take a good look at yourself. Just see what a good impression you make. You’ll always have that. Whatever happens, with your music or anything else, you can always sell.” He drew on his cigarette, his eye wrinkles tensing. “Although you would have to cut your hair.”
No matter how thoroughly his father failed, Daniel saw him as a suave, sneering gambler who might win at any time. The ridiculous tropical fish business, the trips to South America, the drunken squabbles with surly young girlfriends in motel restaurants, the seedy hotel rooms, the dirty socks that surely accumulated under the beds of the wifeless—it all merely added to his allure. Even the vision of his father rising from a badly scrambled bed in a box-shaped motel room and staggering into the bathroom to vomit gave Daniel a pang of admiration and love. When he was a teenager, his father had said to him, “You’re the son I don’t worry about at all. You’re a cat that lands on its feet. You could be stuck in the middle of the desert and you’d find your way.” He loved his father for saying that to him.