He went into the bedroom.
A pair of twin beds faced a big dresser with a mirror over it. Photographs of people David didn’t know lined the mirror. A smaller dresser was beside the bed closest to the door, near the closet. A third and yet smaller dresser stood against the wall between the closet door and the entrance door to the bedroom. Each of the dresser tops was covered with stacks of newspapers and magazines. On top of another television set, on a trolley near the windows, there were more stacks of TV Guides. One of the beds, presumably the one his father did not sleep in, was piled high with cartons, envelopes, manila folders, and dirty clothes. At least a dozen pairs of shoes were scattered all over the bedroom floor. Pictures clipped from magazines and newspapers were Scotch-taped to every inch of wall space.
David stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room.
He was closest to the big dresser, so he tried that one first. The top drawer was full of his father’s socks, handkerchiefs, undershorts, and undershirts. The second drawer contained his shirts and sweaters. David opened the third drawer. It was full of bank statements still in their envelopes and rubber-banded together. Under each rubber band was a hand-lettered slip of paper identifying the year in which his father had received the statements. Even at a glance, David saw that some of the statements went back ten years. Didn’t he ever throw anything away? The bottom drawer of the dresser contained bills and receipts for all the businesses his father had opened and closed, evidence of his failures, each marked with the name of the business and the years through which it had struggled for survival. I’m looking at the history of his life, David thought, and suddenly felt like an intruder.
He was here to find a duplicate tax form.
He went to the dresser near the twin bed stacked high with cartons. The top drawer of the dresser was stuffed with postage-free return envelopes and postage-free cards torn from magazines, each marked with a date. Are these valuable? David wondered. Is there anyone on earth who collects postage-free envelopes and cards except my father? The second and third drawers contained cigar boxes. He opened one of the boxes. It was full of cigar bands. He opened another box. More cigar bands. Did people collect cigar bands? He supposed they did. He supposed people collected anything, including other people. When he was a boy, his father used to unwrap a cigar and then slip the band onto David’s ring finger. He opened another box. It was stacked with gum wrappers, matchbook covers, and bottle tops. Another box contained canceled postage stamps. Another was brimming with pennies. Another had baseball trading cards in it. Yet another was full of dice. Red dice, ivory dice, green dice, a single die on a key chain, another huge one with rounded corners. And dominoes. Three dominoes. In a box he recognized as having contained the cigars he’d sent from Dunhill’s last Father’s Day, David found yet more cigar bands and, buried under the heap, a passbook for the United First Federal Bank. He slid the passbook out of its plastic holder and opened it. The name on the account was MORRIS L. WEBER ITF/DAVID WEBER AND MOLLY WEBER. His father had withdrawn $600 in March, probably for his trip north, leaving a balance on that day of $1075.62.
The discovery of the passbook in a cigar box which could easily have been overlooked in a clutter of similar cigar boxes containing canceled postage stamps, gum wrappers, matchbook covers, bottle tops, baseball trading cards, cigar bands, dice, and three goddamn dominoes made David suddenly angry. How could his father have been so careless? He put the passbook back in the cigar box and closed the drawer. Still annoyed, he turned to the last of the bedroom dressers, the smallest one. Let me find the damn tax form, he thought. Let me get out of here. He opened the top drawer.
Photographs.
Photographs heaped haphazardly in no particular chronological order. A brown eight-by-ten picture in a professional photographer’s studio folder, his Uncle Max’s wedding day. Dashing Uncle Max beaming at the camera, his dark-haired, dark-eyed Rachel by his side smiling. David’s mother and father on their left, the matron of honor and the best man. He closed the folder. There were pictures of his mother and father standing in front of the Eiffel Tower on the European trip David’s trust fund had made possible. There were pictures of his mother when she was pregnant with David. There were pictures of David as a young boy in a sailor suit sitting on the running board of Uncle Max’s Studebaker. There were pictures of David in Army uniform. There was a picture of David in the dining room of his New York apartment, carving a Thanksgiving Day turkey while the rest of the family sat around the table. There was a picture — ah, Jesus — of David with his infant son in his arms, David’s inherited famous Weber nose flattened against his son’s plump cheek as he planted a kiss, Stephen grinning at the—
He closed the drawer.
He turned away from the dresser for a moment.
He took a deep breath.
I don’t want to be here, he thought. Not yet.
I don’t want to be rummaging through my father’s life this way. The tax form, he thought. Death and taxes. Sighing, he turned to the dresser again. The middle drawer was stacked with letters. In one corner of the drawer, near the back, he found a bundle of envelopes tied with string. Handwritten on a sheet of paper and slipped under the string were the words PRIVATE! HANDS OFF! He was tempted to break the string and read the letters. He did not. His father wasn’t dead yet. Searching through the drawer for the tax form — wasn’t it possible he’d put it with the rest of his correspondence? — he found an envelope with his own handwriting on it. The handwriting read: To Mom, with love, David. He opened the envelope, expecting to find an old birthday card in it, something he had presented to his mother years ago, accompanying a small gift perhaps. There was a letter in the envelope. He unfolded the letter and recognized his mother’s small, neat handwriting. He began reading.
Dear Morrie,
I am writing this because when I talk I get too excited and of course it stands to reason. I honestly was giving you a fair chance but I guess you did not want it as you are still lying to me. Even this week if I did not ask you about how much money the store made Wednesday, you would not have told me you had taken the day off as you said to go to your brothers in New Jersey.
So please this is such a simple request. I am asking you please...
He folded the letter again. The edges of it were brown, the ink was fading. He did not want to read it. He did not want to know anything more about his father. But he slipped the letter into his jacket pocket. And then decided to put it back in the drawer with the other letters. But left it where it was in his pocket.
The bottom drawer of the dresser was full of greeting cards his father had undoubtedly bought from a mail-order house. Birthday cards, Easter and Christmas cards for his gentile friends, Chanukah cards, get-well cards, St. Valentine’s Day cards, anniversary cards, graduation cards, even St. Patrick’s Day cards. There was a clipboard in the drawer, a lined yellow pad attached to it. On the pad were listed the names and birth dates of his father’s relatives and friends. He had kept a list over the past ten years of anyone he’d ever sent a birthday card to. David scanned the list. He found his own name and his birth date beside it. According to his father’s check marks, he had received a card from him like clockwork every August for the past ten years. He looked for Molly’s name. He looked for his Uncle Max’s. Both had routinely received cards from his father.