“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked. My dad looked away from her and didn’t say anything. Maybe because he already knew why not.
“You know why not?” Mother said. She wasn’t looking at me when she said this. She was looking at my dad. “Because of all the swearing and drinking and sex and crazy people and insane asylums and electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy and misogyny and football and English teachers and. ”
That “and” hung there for a while, like a promise of something worse to come. “. Watertown,” Mother finally said. Like I said earlier, I was born in Watertown. My dad was born in Utica, which is in upstate New York and, according to my dad, just like Watertown except not as far north and so not as great. But Mother was from Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I haven’t been there, but she always said it was beautiful. Maybe that’s the problem with being someplace beautifuclass="underline" it makes it impossible to live anywhere else that’s not. Because Mother had a tough time living in Watertown, where she’d come to work as a lawyer for a soldiers’ spouses’ advocacy group, met my dad, had me, and never left. Whenever she said the name “Watertown,” it sounded like what a dog would sound like when it said the word “cat.” In any case, I put my head down — you put your head down when your parents talk like this — and waited for whatever Mother would say after “Watertown.” But she didn’t say anything. After a good bit of silence, I heard someone’s footsteps leading away from the living room, and a second after that, I heard the front door slam. I looked up. Mother was gone and my dad was standing there by himself, holding the book, looking sheepish and a little scared. My dad was a big guy. His forearms were thick, hairy, sun-spotted logs. But he was sensitive, too, like a bear with hurt feelings. After Mother left the room, I wanted to hold his hand and tell him everything would be OK.
“I’m sorry, bud,” my dad said, “but your mother doesn’t want you to read this book.”
“Why not?” I said. “Are there bad guys in it?” I didn’t normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults.
“Your mother thinks so,” my dad said. “Your mother thinks there are bad guys everywhere.” His voice cracked a little, and I thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t. “Just promise me you won’t read it,” he said. My dad said this in such a way that it was clear I’d be a bad guy if I read the book, and he’d be a bad guy if he let me, or at least Mother would think we were.
“I promise,” I said. My dad nodded. After that, we didn’t say anything for a while. I don’t know what my dad was thinking. But I was still thinking about A Fan’s Notes.
“Is this book your favorite?” I asked him.
“This book is ‘my delight, my folly, my anodyne,’ my intellectual stimulation,” my dad said. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean, and my dad must have realized it, because he then said, “Bud, it’s the only book I’ve read in the last fifteen years.”
I put my hand out. My dad hesitated, then handed the book to me. On the cover it said FREDERICK EXLEY in red letters, and underneath that, A FAN’S NOTES in yellow. There was a drawing of a desk, with a typewriter on it, pieces of blank white paper flying from the typewriter out an open window and into the blue, blue sky. There were leaves on the floor (they must have come in through the open window), and also on the floor was the shadow of a man standing in the doorway. But the cover didn’t say what kind of book it was, whether it was a novel, like the America on the Same Page book, or a play, like Waiting for Godot, or what. When I was in third grade, some of the kids in my class couldn’t remember the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and so my teacher, Miss M., made two posters. One of them said, FICTION — BOOKS OR STORIES THAT ARE NOT TRUE, LIKE MAKE-BELIEVE OR FANTASY STORIES. The other said, NONFICTION — BOOKS OR STORIES THAT ARE TRUE AND REAL. THEY TEACH AND INFORM US. I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was “A Fictional Memoir.” I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn’t make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy. Anyway, I closed the book and looked at the cover again. The corners of the cover were torn and wrinkled, the spine was split, and so many pages were dog-eared that you might as well consider the whole book dog-eared. It looked like it really was the only book my dad had read in fifteen years: it looked used, but more than that, it looked loved. When I saw how loved it was, I suddenly wanted the book, bad, wanted to know what was in it. But I couldn’t read it. I’d promised my dad. I handed the book back to him and he took it, and I said, “Can I at least sit next to you while you read it?”
My dad smiled and said that I could.
Where I Needed to Go
Anyway, back in my dad’s hospital room, I read that first part of the first sentence and then looked over at my dad. His eyes were still closed; his chest was still rising and falling. I tried again: “‘On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–,’” I read, “ ‘while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants — Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.’ ”
Then I stopped and looked at my dad again. He was still asleep, but his chest wasn’t rising and falling as much. What did that mean? Did it mean that my dad wasn’t breathing as hard as before? And was that a good thing or a bad thing? Either way, I knew my reading hadn’t kept my dad awake, which is what I wanted it to do. Did it mean that I hadn’t read the first sentence the way it should be read? Or did it mean that I shouldn’t have read the first sentence at all? It had a heart attack in it, after all. Considering how sick my dad was, maybe he didn’t want to hear about Exley’s bad heart just now. I could understand that. Maybe the second sentence, or paragraph, or page, would be more appropriate. But I didn’t know for sure — because of course I’d never read the book, because my dad had made me promise I wouldn’t. So I just sat there, looking at my dad, wondering and wondering what to do, until I remembered Z.
Z. was a kid in my first-grade class. When Z. and I were six years old, Z. got cancer: he was bald, and dying. Everyone knew this, including Z. Every night in the hospital, he’d watch his favorite baseball team, the B.’s., and his favorite baseball player, M.R. Watching M.R. made Z. happy, but it didn’t make his cancer go away. So one day M.R. came to visit Z. in the hospital. There was a picture in the newspaper; in it, M.R. had his arm around Z.’s shoulder and Z. was smiling, like he knew, now, somehow, that everything would be OK. And it was. Z. is still alive, and his cancer is gone and his hair is back, and he’s in fourth grade, where I should be.
Anyway, once I thought of it, I knew what had worked for Z. and M.R. would work for my dad and Exley. Or at least I knew it would work if A Fan’s Notes was a true story, if the Watertown in the book was the Watertown I lived in, and if Exley was still in it. There was only one way to find out.
I got up from my chair, kissed my dad on the forehead. It felt slick and cold, like someone had rubbed a greasy ice cube on it. I told him that I’d be back soon, and that I was so happy he was home, and that I loved him. I didn’t tell him where I was going, because I thought he might not like it. I just put the book back in my backpack, shouldered the backpack, and left the room, then the hospital. My bike was where I’d left it: in the bushes right outside the front doors. I got on it and pedaled. Because I knew where the New Parrot was: it was past my school, up the big hill, on upper Washington Street, going south out of town. I knew exactly where it was and where I needed to go.