“I guess I knew that without knowing it.” I scour my two fingers on the turf to clean off the death smell.
“He’s for the party of money, tradition and influence,” she says, way too big for her britches, since Charley’s tradition and influence are paying her bills, keeping her in tetherballs, tutus and violin lessons. She is for the party of no tradition, no influence, no nothing, also like her father.
“He has his rights,” I say, and add a lackluster “I mean that.” I can’t help conjuring what Charley’s cheek looks like where Paul has whopped him.
Clarissa stares at her blade of grass, wondering, I’m sure, why she has to accord Charley any rights. “Sweetheart,” I say solemnly, “is there anything you can tell me about ole Paul? I don’t want you to tell me a deep dark secret, just maybe a shallow light one. It would be as-you-know-held-in-strictest-confidence.” I say this last to make it halfway a joke and let her feel comradely about providing me some lowdown.
She stares at the thick grass carpet in silence, then angles her head over and squints up at the house with the flowering bushes and the white porch and stairs. Atop the highmost roof pinnacle, in the midst of all the springing angles and gable ends, is an American flag (a small one) on a staff, rustling in an unfelt breeze.
“Are you sad?” she says. In her sun-blond hair I see a tiny red ribbon tied in a bow, something I hadn’t noticed but instantly revere her for, since along with her question it makes her seem a person of complex privacies.
“No, I’m not sad, except that you can’t go with Paul and me to Cooperstown. And I forgot to bring you anything. That’s pretty sad.”
“Do you have a car phone?” She raises her eyes accusingly.
“No.”
“Do you have a beeper?”
“No, afraid not.” I smile at her knowingly.
“How do you keep up with your calls then?” She squints again, making her look a hundred.
“I guess I don’t get that many calls. Sometimes there’s a message from you on my answering box, though not that often.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t answer me about Paul, sweetheart. All I really want to do is be a good pappy if I can.”
“His problems are all stress-related,” she says officially. She plucks up another blade of quite green and dry grass and slips it into the cuff of my chinos where I’m cross-legged beside her.
“What stress is he suffering from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that your best diagnosis?”
“Yes.”
“How ’bout you? Do you have any stress-related problems?”
“No.” She shakes her head, makes a pruny pucker with her lips. “Mine’ll come out later, if I have any.”
“Who told you so?”
“TV.” She looks at me earnestly as though to say that TV has its good points too.
Somewhere high in the firmament I hear a hawk cry out, or possibly an osprey, though when I look up I can’t see it.
“What can I do about Paul’s stress-related problems?” I say, and, God be gracious, I wish she’d pipe up with a nice answer. I’d put it in place before the sun sets. Somewhere, then, another noise — not a hawk but a thumping, a door slamming or a window being shut, a drawer being closed. When I look up, Ann is standing at the porch rail, watching down on us across the lawn. I sense she’s just arrived but would like my chat with Clarissa to come to a close and for me to get on with my business. I make a friendly ex-husband-who-wishes-no-trouble wave, a gesture that makes me feel not so good. “I believe that’s your mom,” I say.
Clarissa looks up at the porch. “Yeah hi,” she says.
“We better dust off our britches here.” She will, I see, out of ancient, honorable loyalty, offer no help with her brother. She fears, I suppose, divulging compromising secrets while claiming only to love him. Children are wise to adult ways now, thanks to us.
“Paul might be happier if you could maybe live in Deep River. Or maybe Old Saybrook,” she says as if these words require immense discipline, nodding her head slightly with each one. (Parents can break up, fall out of love, get searingly divorced, marry others, move miles away; but as far as kids are concerned, most of it’s tolerable if one parent will just tag along behind the other like a slave.)
There was, of course, in the savage period after Ann moved away in ’84, a dolorous time when I haunted these very hills and stream-sides like a shamus; cruised its middle-school parking lots, its street corners and back alleys, cased its arcades and skating rinks, its Finasts and Burger Kings, merely to be in visual contact with where my children might spend the days and afternoons they could’ve been spending with me. I even went so far as to price a condo in Essex, a sterile little listening post from which I could keep “in touch,” keep love alive.
Only it would’ve made me even more morose, as morose as a hundred lost hounds, to wake up alone in a condo! In Essex! Awaiting my appointed pickup hour with the kids, expecting to take them back where? To my condo? And afterward, glowering back down 95 for a befuddled workweek till Friday, when the lunacy commenced again? There are parents who don’t blink an eye at that kind of bashing around, who’d ruin their own lives and everybody’s within ten miles if they can prove — long after all the horses are out of the barn — that they’ve always been good and faithful providers.
But I simply am not one of these; and I have been willing to see my kids less often, for the three of us to shuttlecock up and back, so that I can keep alive in Haddam a life they can fit into, even if pre-cariously, when they will, and meanwhile maintain my sanity, instead of forcing myself into places where I don’t belong and making everybody hate me. It’s not the best solution, since I miss them achingly. But it’s better to be a less than perfect dad than a perfect goofball.
And in any case, with the condo option, they would still grow up and leave in a heartbeat; Ann and Charley would get divorced. And I’d be stuck (worst case) with a devalued condo I couldn’t give away. Eventually, I’d sell Cleveland Street as a downsizing measure, perhaps move up here to keep my mortgage company, and grimly pass my last years alone in Essex watching TV in a pair of old corduroys, a cardigan and Hush Puppies, while helping out evenings in some small bookshop, where I’d occasionally see Charley dodder in, place an order and never recognize me.
Such things happen! We realtors are often the very ones called in for damage control. Though thankfully my frenzy subsided and I stayed put where I was and more or less knew my place. Haddam, New Jersey.
“Sweetheart,” I say tenderly to my daughter, “if I lived up here, your mother wouldn’t like it at all, and you and Paul wouldn’t come stay in your own rooms and see your old friends-in-need. Sometimes you can change things and just make them worse.”
“I know,” she says bluntly. I’m sure Ann hasn’t discussed with her Paul’s coming to live with me, and I have no idea what her opinion will be. Perhaps she’ll welcome it, loyalty aside. I might, if I were her.
She reaches fingers into her yellow hair, her mouth going into a scowl of application. She pulls the little red bow out along the fine blond strands until she frees it still tied, and hands it to me rather matter-of-factly. “Here’s my latest present,” she says. “You can be my bow.”
“That’s another kind of bow,” I say, taking the little frill in my hand and squeezing it. “They’re spelled different.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s okay, though, this time.”
“Thanks.” Once again, sadly, I have nothing to trade as an act of devotion.
And then she is up and on her bare feet, spanking the seat of her red shorts and shaking out her hair, looking down like a small lioness with a tangled mane. I am less quick but am up too, using the tetherball pole. I look toward the house, where no one’s standing on the porch now. A smile is for some reason on my lips, my hand on my daughter’s bony bare shoulder, her red bow, my badge of courage, clutched in my other hand, as we start — the two of us — together up the wide hill.