And just last week, on one of our brief visits together, while we were picnicking in Central Park, I made her angry with some stupid comment about Stew or Mitt or something, and after we fought a little she got up without saying anything and climbed the tree we were sitting under. I wanted to go up after her, grab her in the branches and shake her, I was burning to drag her back down, tussle and overcome her, but then I could never bring myself to climb beyond that first large branch, not from the height, but somehow I could never abide the subtle sway of living limbs, stake anything on their pliant strength. I just watched her until she reached the smallest branch that would bear her weight. She gazed straight down at me from almost twenty feet, unquivering, wordless, her hair rubbing against the branches, hanging those narrow bare feet out into the air.
The week after my father’s funeral Lelia slept in the room Mitt occupied his last summer, when he decided he was old enough to live by himself in the big house. My father — who could display amazing properties of emotional recovery — had long before cleared it of any signs of our boy, removing not just his few toys and summer clothes but all the furniture and wall hangings. He’d even painted the room, from its sky blue to a barren, optic white. Now done, I can still hear him thinking.
Lelia immediately dragged a mattress and a floor lamp in there and went to work on the rest of the house. The place had become overfurnished and cluttered since my mother’s death. My father habitually bought sundry pieces of furniture whenever he stepped into a store; he showed little judgment in his choices. Much of the furniture in our house was garish and oddly colored and overpriced. His penchant was for textured synthetic fabrics, often featuring some geometric design like diamonds or pentagons. He would ask Ahjuhma to place each new piece, despite the fact that she would generally leave it where the delivery men happened to put it down, just making sure the new chair or side table was kept clean for him and in good condition. From this stuff Lelia separated what we would keep and what we would sell or donate to Goodwill.
I remember a poem she wrote about a woman who cleans out her father-in-law’s house after his death, dispatching his possessions and effects with only her imagination to guide her in what she will keep or discard. As she moves through the house in the poem, the speaker begins to realize how few of her father-in-law’s possessions are actually personal, intimate in nature, and she feels as though she’s sifting through the material of a time-share bungalow, a house strangely unpossessed. She wonders, in turn, if this dead immigrant had ever reconsidered the generic still life of apples he’d hung in the upstairs hall, had ever touched again the bouquet of wooden roses placed on the tank of his toilet, had ever comfortably worn the reams of clothes in his closet, the rack filled with the suits and shoes he would buy on his days off but never wore anywhere. There are a few things that tell of his mortal presence: in his bedroom, the woman carefully bundles his dark socks and underwear in an old yellow raincoat; she finds a pornographic magazine in a drawer of his night table, from April 1978, and a few odd condoms; she smells his toothbrush — peppermint and dust; she discovers in the attic a brick-sized wad of $20 bills rubber banded inside a shoe box, probably the first large sum of cash he salted away from the IRS in the beginning years of greengrocering, money that he’d long forgotten about and never needed; and she finds faded sheets of lined notebook paper in his desk, completely written over with the American name (I had once told her) he’d given himself but never once used: George Washington Park.
He was practicing the writing of his signature.
And then, the woman begins to shift her consciousness from the dead father to the absent son, her husband. Is it the coldness of objects, she wonders, that persists? She considers her own apartment, the bed she shares with her husband; she tries to think of the things there that might signify him, call his real name. A certain paperback book, an old comb with broken teeth. And then she considers herself, wonders if a stranger could understand who her husband was by looking at her, imagines the scrolls the stranger might read on her face and body, what that writing would say: Are you at all in love? What was it then between you, in the first place? What’s left now?
After we finished dinner I took out the chocolate mousse cake with mocha icing that I’d bought from Patisserie Lind, a fancy sweetshop near the station, Lelia’s and Mitt’s favorite old place. I’d buy treats there for Mitt for being good on the train ride up. He liked best the dark chocolate hazelnut truffles, and didn’t seem to mind the slight bitterness of the hard chocolate shell. He’d put a whole one in his mouth and sit quietly and deal with it for the next quarter hour, his tongue wrestling the sticky orb. Lelia taught him not to bite through it: a good lesson in restraint. Sometimes it dropped out and he’d just pick up the slimy mass from wherever it was and mouth it again. We still have stains all over the backseat of my father’s car. When Mitt finally dissolved the outside and got to the soft center he’d mumble, “Oooh baby” to me and Lelia, and we’d oooh baby back, and then he’d mash it between his tongue and palate and stretch his messy mouth open and show us the sweet whipped guts.
As Lelia cleared the table I cut her a big slice and a smaller one for myself. Then I made the coffee, like I always used to after dinner, throwing in an extra scoop of grounds tonight for the work ahead of us. It’s the routines you follow and count on when you start something again, the way of simply doing an activity together. I used to think you ought to have sex after trouble; I got Lelia to believe this, get right back and all over each other, reaffirm your presence immediately and directly. But now I think the best way to resolve a fight is to clean the house or cook together, do something simple like that, take the energy out on a mutual project that you can share and look at when you’re done and not have to wonder what else has gone on.
When we were ready we carried the cake and mugs of coffee to my father’s study. There we found the entirety of the pictures of my family in the same cabinet where my father kept the liquor. Lelia removed the dozen or so shoe boxes of pictures from the top shelves and lined them up between us on the white shag carpet. Many of the pictures had been sent to us over the years from relatives in Korea, many of these very old, and no one had ever organized them or placed them in albums. Even my mother, who was obsessive about order and neatness in her house, chose to let the photographs of the two families get commingled and confused. When she received a photo with a letter she would immediately go and slip it inside one of the boxes, as if she didn’t want any images or faces of her old country haunting about the house.
“These are wonderful pictures,” Lelia said, shuffling a stack above her face as she lay on her back. She was wearing old jeans and a loose black zip-up turtleneck. Her long shape lurking beneath. “Look at these. I think they’re silver prints. I think it’s your mother as a little girl.”
“How do you know?” I said, sitting back against the foot of the sofa. I was looking through some shots of my father during his military service. He was startlingly smooth of face and slim and handsome, so much so that it looked as though he would always be that way, like you might have thought of a young Sinatra.
“I’ve been comparing her to ones of you at the same age. It’s pretty incredible.”
“We’re dead ringers,” I said.
“Definitely. Look at the eyes, the mouth. The jaw. Anyway, it’s not just your features. I think the expressions are exactly the same. The way you hold your mouths. So straight across and firmly set. It looks as if you’ve both just spoken something awful but true. But the expression isn’t really of sadness.”