“Late fifties.”
But he’d seemed much older to me, his hair entirely gray, his face heavily furrowed with deep wrinkles about his eyes and the corners of his mouth.
“Did you get along well, the two of you?” Rebecca asked.
We had, but he had brooked no whining, no grieving, no self-pity. The past was past in his book, and only a fool or a coward dwelled upon its scattered ruins.
“He tried his best to do things with me,” I told Rebecca, “things a father would have done.”
And so we had camped out from time to time, and fished in the local ponds. In the summer, he took me swimming, snoozing on the shore while I bounced about in the water.
The problem was his health. My first impression of him had been that he was vigorous and robust. But actually, he was rather frail. In the winter, he suffered from long, dreadful colds, and seemed particularly susceptible to digestive problems. He called whiskey his “medicine” and drank as much as he liked as often as he liked, though in all the years we lived together, I never saw him drunk.
I don’t think I ever really knew him, as I admitted to Rebecca, but I did remember one incident when I was twelve, something which made me think that there was something deeply wrong with Quentin, something which seethed just below the surface.
It happened on a fall day, with the sky very low, hanging like a flat gray ceiling above my head. I’d been working on the front porch, mending some of the lobster cages which Quentin had hauled in the day before. It was tedious, uncomplicated work, no more than a matter of hammering in a few loose nails. I’d finished up within an hour or so, and after that I wandered around the house to the backyard. Years before, Quentin had built a small wooden shed there, a ramshackle structure which he used partly as a work space, partly as a storehouse for his fishing supplies. In the fall, he went there to mend his nets, and he’d gathered a huge pile of them together in the corner.
The shed had a few small windows, and that afternoon I absently walked over to one of them and glanced in. Quentin was sitting on a stubby wooden bench, working to separate two tangled nets. His face seemed very taut and impatient, and I noticed that his fingers were trembling. His face had taken on a reddish tint around the cheeks and his eyes appeared to glisten slightly, as if he were about to cry. Suddenly he threw the nets down, then picked them up again and began to sling them about, whipping them violently at the shed’s skeletal supporting beams. I could see small puffs of dust come from the posts as the nets bit into them and hear the hard slap of the cord as it whipped about furiously.
In a moment, he stopped, then collapsed, exhausted, onto the spindly wooden stool he’d been sitting on before it all began. His head dropped slightly, and he wiped his mouth with his hand. His shoulders were lifting high and rhythmically, so I knew it had taken almost all his breath to groan the single word he said into the dusty interior of the shed.
“It was a woman’s name,” I told Rebecca.
She glanced up from her notebook, her face very still, intense, searching. “A woman’s name?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I have no idea who she was.”
She seemed to consider the story a moment, turning it over in her mind. Then she sat back slightly, as if to regain her focus.
“When did you leave Maine?” she asked.
“Not until I went to college. Aunt Edna had sold the house on McDonald Drive and put the money in an account for me. That’s what I used to pay for college.”
“And after college, you never lived in Maine again?”
“Only for a little while. I went back to take care of Quentin. He was dying by then.”
Old and frail and drinking far too much, he’d needed me to stay with him during the last weeks of his life, and so, directly after leaving college, I’d returned to the little house by the sea.
Quentin hadn’t died quickly. It had taken a long time. Nor had he approached death gracefully. Instead, a bitterness and rancor had slowly overwhelmed him, filling his days with mean-spirited discourses on the inadequacies of life.
For nearly three months, I listened as he lay out on the back porch, staring fiercely at the sea, while fuming against and damning to hell almost everyone he’d ever known. He railed against his own parents, against Edna, against a host of double-dealing business partners. One by one the names passed his lips carried on a curse. Except one.
“He never said anything bad about my father,” I said to Rebecca. “Not a single word.”
Rebecca looked surprised.
“As a matter of fact,” I added, “the only thing he ever said about my father was sort of complimentary.”
“Complimentary?”
“One night, he was really having a bad time,” I went on. “He was railing about things, as usual. But all of a sudden he stopped. Then he looked at me, and he whispered, Ah, your father, Stevie, he really took it by the balls.’“
Rebecca said nothing, but I could see something moving behind her eyes.
I shrugged. “He died ten days later,” I added. “I never knew exactly what he meant.”
Rebecca lowered her eyes toward her notebook, wrote something there, and then looked up at me. “Did he ever mention the woman again.” she asked. The name he said in the shed that afternoon?”
I shook my head. “No,” I answered, then smiled lightly. “I guess she’ll always be a mystery.”
Rebecca did not return my smile. “Like a lot of things,” she said, but with a curious unease and sense of strain, as if it were a fate she was still unwilling to accept.
FIVE
IT WAS NEARLY a week before I heard from Rebecca again, and I remember that the days passed slowly, like soldiers in a gray line. During that interval, I often thought about the life my family had lived on McDonald Drive. I recalled how, when I was very small, Laura had taken me out to the swings and played with me for hours. My father had often sat in a small wrought iron chair and watched us. “Don’t swing him too high,” he would caution at those times when Laura’s natural energy would get the better of her and she’d send me hurling skyward, my feet soaring into the summer air.
There were other memories, too. I could recall my mother piddling about in the garage, moving small boxes from one place to another. She seemed always to be hunting for something small and inconsequential that eluded her again and again, a pruning fork or a spool of thread. Jamie would joke about it from time to time. “Everything she touches disappears,” he once said with a mocking grin.
There’d been a fireplace in the living room, and I remembered the sounds the fire made in the winter, along with the rhythmic thump of the axe when my father chopped wood beneath the large maple tree in the backyard.
Smells returned. Laura’s nail polish, the raincoat that Jamie often hung wet in the closet we were forced to share, my mother’s cooking, always bland and unaccented, the smell, I often thought, of little more than boiling water. And last, my father’s hands, the strange odor that always came from them, and which, one night during that week before Rebecca called again, I actually mentioned to Marie.
“Like soil,” I said suddenly, as we sat at the dinner table one evening. The words had come from nowhere but my own mind. We’d not been talking about my father, or anything even remotely connected to him.
“What are you talking about, Steve?” Marie asked.
I felt embarrassed, surprised by the level of my own distraction.
“I was thinking about my father,” I explained quickly. The odor of his hands.”
“Why were you thinking about that?”
It was the perfect chance to tell her about Rebecca, her book, the meetings I’d had, the ones I expected to have in the future. And yet, I found that I couldn’t do it.