“Self-sufficient,” I remind him. “You’re keeping an edge.”
He agrees reflexively and begins an aimless rummaging through the clutter of his family business. What the doomed will never learn. But it seems that Sonny, if only for the time being, has gone off the edge of his map. This comforts me; I feel less out of touch. And probably Sonny will regain his bearings in the clean, fresh, pastel symmetries of Cherry Ames, in the confidence of highly trained professionals and the irrevocable snip.
No daughters for Dawn. I see her sulking at the sink, molars clenched as she peels crust from a skillet. Her grudge will be immaculate and worth holding on to. Her back will be a broad wall in the bed, her face thick and curt in the long mornings.
I am expecting to be asked for dinner, and certain I will stay.
25
SON OF A LOAN officer, debating team captain and cum laude grad, Tory essayist, figure man, braggart, moralist, fixer, my father goes through life with antennae fully extended, alert for the smallest threat and ever ready for battle. No grievance escapes notice, and no surly mechanic or slow-witted bank teller escapes imperial rebuke. He is a tireless author of letters to the editor, will hang on the phone an hour or more, waiting his turn to cross swords with a radio talk jockey.
Never, in any comradely way, have we been close, but at the time when such things still mattered, I did all I could to displease and disappoint him. We overlapped, then, as adversaries, like ink stains on an office blotter. His dictates and my flaunted heresies notched together, achieving an intimacy that we never could.
When Carla and I were still quite small, he began to organize us in dispute games, assigning pro and con roles on a current events topic or courtroom recreation. The winner was rewarded with a blue ribbon strip pinned on by the loser. Another learning experience was trying to mediate between him and our mother — in short, learning not to. Their harsh, spiraling set-tos were precious to them, the cream in their coffee, oddly but consistently comforting, and not to be intruded on. Later, having the eligible skills, Carla and I were allowed to come in and widen the war, sniping away at targets of opportunity until we, and usually mother too, were routed by Gordo. His triumphant rages would immobilize the house. He’d bellow and stamp like some parodic Lear while we hid out in our rooms.
Carla pretends that he has softened in recent years, paled like his pearl-gray eyes. But I say once a bully, always a bully. She wrote me to describe his long afternoon walks, his enthusiasm for azaleas, the swaying of his liver-spotted hands over reference books as he composed another crossword puzzle.
“He’s not as ashamed of retirement as I thought he’d be. True, they’ve kept him on some sort of oracular retainer….”
No doubt. This is the man who finessed the Hotel Armonk case and quashed a governorship. Carla, gently wishful, veils the record of the past with her azaleas. But I remember the cruel mimic, the arm-twister, the scary drunk who grew more silent and impermeable as the level in the bottle fell, the unending smallness of this man who had his monogram faced in brick above the fireplace and once threw a close friend’s toupee over a yacht railing in order to resolve a cribbage argument.
“I’m certain he’s ready to reconcile,” Carla went on. “If only you’ll make the first move.”
Dear, dimly available sister, it’s already done. We are as reconciled as two sums in an accounting ledger.
I was living in L.A. the last time we spoke. Violet and I were separated but not yet divorced, and I was brimming over with aimless nostalgia. It was Easter Sunday and the Long Lines were overloaded with ritual calling.
“What’s up, Dad? Are you dyeing eggs?”
“No.”
“It’s eighty degrees here and I can see palm trees from my window.”
“Eggs, trees. I suppose you’ve got a couple of canaries with you.”
The gaseous hush of vodka was in his voice.
“Just me, Dad. Me, myself, and I.”
“Fine, fine. And what are you doing for money?”
“That’s not why I called.”
“All right then, surprise me.”
I could see him looking at his watch, at his dull reflection in the black surface of the hall table.
“Actually, I was trying to remember which cheek your ski-pole scar is on. It’s been that long.”
“The Alps, my God. Now there’s one sight I go right on seeing. Nothing on your horizon, is there? Movieland. All that stucco. Marquees and fruit juice stands instead of peaks.”
“And not a crumb of snow.”
“So then. You’re still with that whatsername of yours?”
“Not right now.”
He filled the space for judgmental militance with a slow question. “Shall I send a check?”
“That’s not why I—”
“Yes, fair enough. You don’t have to shout.”
No, I really didn’t have to. Finally.
“Your sister has invited me for holiday dinner,” he went on blandly. “The wine will be corrosive and the lamb will be underdone. Some little barefoot friend of hers will ask me to dance.”
“Give Carla my love.”
We exchanged bad jokes, promised to send postcards, and that was it.
26
DEFINITIVE TECHNIQUE. PRECISE SCRUTINY. A conviction that nothing is missed. Certain group vanities are encouraged among the staff here, keeping foremost in mind that we register only as units in a system. A system, elementary in its perfection, to surround and contain a precise whole. And each movement within the system a refinement, a distillation. They want us comfortable in such beliefs, like mice in a warm winter burrow.
Do I contradict? I typify. Another nibbling mouse, a 2T five-year man sent down to this edit room dismal as a Bulgarian subway, on an errand that demonstrates the system’s reach, the ability of its agents in the field to surround and contain. Their booty is now before me, racks and racks: the random tape inventory of a small independent station in west Texas, now, along with its owner, defunct. It had offered the sort of programming favored in trailer parks and residential hotels, old reruns and cut-rate movies, a world of black-and-white. It had offered a removal in time, an undoing of age and failure, something to still the guts. Cramped, retching feed clerks, the manicurists and windmill mechanics, muttering, smoking, sniffling, conjuring dust shapes from out of the furniture, were soothed by Petticoat Junction and Mr. Ed. In sepia Mexican melodramas, they found a past more favorable than their own. And now, under my hands, all would enter into the system, a minute flicker of refinement.
The tepid denouement of Bachelor Father unspools before me, a commercial extolling the spreadability of a peanut butter named for J. M. Barrie’s androgyne. I reach for cold coffee and a fresh log sheet, am riven by a voice.
“Rich in emulsifiers,” my mother says.
The last television appearance of her paltry career, a cosmetics spot. Immaculate, she moves dreamily at the edge of a formal garden.
“Treat yourself like royalty,” my mother says.
On her pilgrimages into Manhattan, she usually had lunch with Sonia Brooks. They had both sung in the choir at Temple University, had both seen their young ambitions wither in the perpetual shade of a city too tall. Sonia would never get a seat on the stock exchange and my mother wasn’t going to star in a prize-winning revival of Anna Lucasta, so they foraged for ethnic restaurants and obscure museums, drank in hotel bars and flirted hazardlessly with waiters.