I knocked against the sliding glass back door. I could see the whole back part of the house through the glass. After the divorce, after Francine moved herself to Beverly Hills, my father had redecorated. He took the collected sports paraphernalia from forty years out of boxes in closets and put them on view. Francine had always insisted on plain off-white walls. My father hadn’t repainted. He’d simply tacked up an additional layer. The walls disappeared behind red and green and yellow pennants, framed ticket stubs from World Series games, Super Bowl games, basketball play-offs, horse charts from newspapers and photographs from magazines.
The room that had once been my bedroom was now my father’s racing room. The walls were entirely covered with enlarged photographs of my father’s favorite horses — Swaps, Omaha, Native Diver, Round Table and Secretariat. My father had bought a desk for the room. He sat there at night, studying his form sheet for the next day. He could still feel my presence there and I had always brought him luck. And it is true that when my father and I go to the race track together, to Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Del Mar, we often win.
“I could of got a Ph.D. for the time I’ve spent studying this crap,” my father once observed, puffing a cigar and glancing up from his form sheet.
“Some life,” Francine used to accuse him. “You taught that kid to read a form sheet instead of fairy tales.”
While I do know how to read a form sheet, to look for the horse’s past performances, his works, the company he’s raced with, if he’s slipping in class or moving up, the distance of the race, the kind of track, the jockey, the horse’s condition and breeding, I pick horses purely by intuition. I look for horses that have my initials or names that seem relevant to my life. I have never told this to my father because, after the serious training he gave me, it would disappoint him. My father’s forte is middle-range horses. He’s a master of six-to-one shots, eight-to-one shots. I pick them longer, twenty to one, twenty-five to one. My father doesn’t know how I come up with them. He’s afraid to ask.
Once at Del Mar, the summer my parents broke up, I won a three-thousand-dollar Exacta by picking Heartbreak and Mom’s New Place.
I slid the glass door open. My father was lying on the kitchen floor. At first I thought he was already dead. He heard me and pushed himself up slowly on one elbow. The veins in his neck throbbed. He was breathless. He looked almost delirious.
“I’m going to die, I know it,” my father said. He looked as if he were drowning. He had been crying. His eyes were the yellow of a cornered cat. His eyes were full and restless as a river moments before a flood.
“I’m dying. I can feel it.” His hands were fists. He was a bird with a broken wing beating the heavy useless blank sides of a day.
“Don’t quit, Daddy,” I said. “Even money says you’ll make it. Those are the best odds we’ve looked at in years. And you licked this same field before. Remember?”
Suddenly he seemed very small and old, bent, shriveled. I thought, you can’t die. And something inside me was aching, was breaking. If you die, they’ll call me a woman, not a girl. And I’m not ready, Daddy. I’m not ready for that at all.
“I’m cursed,” my father said.
I nodded my head. Horse players are notoriously superstitious. They see omens. Even my father, who is strictly a form-sheet player and denigrates those who bet on the basis of names, numbers or colors, won’t change his clothing when he’s winning. When he’s on a hot streak he will sit in precisely the same spot at the track and make his bets at the same window.
“I should have known. I was four grand up on the Santa Anita meet. I had a twenty-seven-to-one shot last week. Two sixteen-to-one shots. I should have known,” my father said.
We were sitting on the sofa in the living room. My father was drinking bourbon. He had killed nearly half the bottle.
The first time my father got cancer I was six years old. Overnight the world changed. One day my father simply stopped going to work. His big brown toolbox sat unused in the narrow tile hallway. It just sat there day after day like a big brown sore. My father stopped eating dinner. He lay in bed. He whispered with my mother.
That was the year I was learning colors at school. On Monday we learned red. We drew apples and crayoned them in. Mother didn’t have time to look at my apples.
“Apples?” My mother laughed. A strange harsh sound, not like her. “You want red. Red is blood. You’ll see plenty of that soon.” Could she have said that?
Friday we learned white and black. The neighbor boy across the street was vying for the gold star with me. We were throwing rocks down by the train station. He leaned over and whispered, “Your father’s dying.”
My father stopped driving his car. Now he sat in Mommy’s seat, leaning against the window while she drove him away every afternoon. He was taking cobalt treatments at the hospital. He was only the second one in Philadelphia to get his throat blown up by a cobalt gun. And what was cobalt? It was a kind of blue, a kind of blue you wore inside. A blue that made my father push his plate of steaming food to the floor and rasp, “Everything tastes like garbage.”
I watched my father fill his glass with bourbon. After what seemed like a long time I said, “Daddy, I need a philosophy for all this.” I was aware, painfully, achingly aware, that my father and I might never speak to one another again.
“Life’s a grab bag,” my father said. “It’s all a matter of chance. Take it off the top and don’t look back. There are no guarantees. It’s all a photo finish. You know what separates a hero from a bum? Inches. A nose under the wire.”
Was he offering me his particular brand of Zen? I thought of all the years between the cancers, years my father spent content in his special solitude. He would stand at dusk watering the backyard, wrapped in his own personal communion with peach blossoms and twilight. He watched each sunset carefully, individually. For twenty years he lived waiting for the wild cells to come again, that black invasion. The ambush at the turn in the road.
“What are you thinking?” I would ask my father as he stood with his hose pointed at the roots of the apricot tree. Francine would be at a film premiere. Francine would be out of town on business or at a budget meeting.
“I’m thinking that shit always comes back. Sooner or later.” My father would sometimes say.
Now my father looked at me. His face seemed to be slowly collapsing. Then he glanced at his watch. He turned on the television. The UCLA Bruins were playing the Washington Huskies. Dogs versus bears. Godzilla versus Mothra. God, it was all falling apart.
“I want to tell you something about your mother,” my father said during the first commercial. Young men washed in the ecstasy of macho male companionship rode a jeep through barren country and embraced at a bar piled up with beer cans. “You only go around once,” the announcer said. I thought, if this is a cosmic connection, I am grossly unprepared.
“I’m hip to Francine,” my father said. “I knew it couldn’t go on forever. I was thirty-five. She was some sixteen-year-old street kid. Crazy. Talking about poetry. Talking about communists. Running around in black tights, some kind of beatnik. Hanging out in the Village. I knew she wasn’t playing with a full deck. And skinny. She had malnutrition. She was six months away from a whorehouse. But I don’t blame her, dig?” My father looked at me hard.
“We were gamblers,” my father said. “I got sick and it changed the whole balance. Your mother has a father thing. Some complex from being deserted. The welfare people were sending her to a Park Avenue psychiatrist when I met her.” My father lit a cigar. He smoked it slowly, savoring it.