Sometimes on our Sunday visits, my father cried to remember her. “Mother, Mother,” he said while my grandfather looked on and the second wife coughed, embarrassed.
The way my father dressed, grown fat from too much sleeping, in mismatched clothes, seedy as a poet now that he knew himself as poor — and happy to be poor. Look how he was loved, and he pointed to the men who swayed at his door, saying, “Professor James, sir, may we come in, please?”
“Don’t ask them in,” I said. “Be someone different.”
Be one of the boys at the concerts, at the ceremonies, at the breakfasts. They rarely spoke of my father, or if they did, it was, “How’s Jim?” How was it at this last new place? Expensive as hell was what my grandfather said, but we wanted him well again — didn’t we?
My grandfather said, “Poor Jim.”
The second wife said, “Of all the men.” She said, “I gave him you, didn’t I?”
But everything we did, I thought, we did for money.
In my grandfather’s house, I was given the room with the western view that lit up the matchstick winter trees, a book’s worth at a strike — wasteful, too early, short. Winter afternoons, pitched in dark, we sometimes slept in the library, lap-robed in Sunday’s papers, my grandfather snoring clogged snores from stories. Warty giants who lived in caves beyond the umbered forest — my grandfather was like one of those in his sleep, or that was how I saw him if I was first to wake. I saw the large sore nose, its old-age red, and the rest of him brown-speckled like an egg, and yet I kissed him.
“Too much,” my grandfather said. “That’s enough.”
There was more he was saying, except I moved away with my part of the paper, which was never Grandfather’s part of the paper. His part of the paper was nothing to read.
My father said he could not read. He said, “Now they’ve got me on this stuff, I can’t concentrate. I can’t see. All I do is sleep and sleep.”
I had never seen my father asleep, never known him to be other than fever-pitch awake; flame-tip skin and heat I had felt from his fingers at my cheeks. Not afraid of touching, my father was not, and his roiled speech — sometimes hard to follow what he said. “These drugs,” he said. “It’s not my fault”—any more than he was here in this last new place. “My own father,” my father said. “He did this to me.”
“Did what?” I asked. Left alone sometimes in his room to talk, we talked about my grandfather: hard as the stony place that he had made into a home — and me in it. What was he doing with me on the estate? was the question.
My father lifted at the skirt of his short robe. He asked, “What does he want from you?”
I scratched him.
“You would think we were lovers,” he said, and I hit at his arms, pushed at his chest with the heels of my hands, pushed at the softening parts — at his belly. He laughed and then grew angry and slapped small slaps fast, all over me, until I was backed up against the door and crying; surely, a snotty, messy kind of crying, the body in an ooze, although what I remember is the joy I felt to call my father fucker—“You fucker.”
I told my grandfather, “I wish I were yours.” Almost any Sunday I said it. Even if the second wife were present, as she sometimes was, I said, “I never want to live with my father again.” The second wife thought it best, too. In my grandfather’s house, there was routine: cook’s soft-boiled egg in the morning and a table-set dinner each night. Not as it had been with Daddy, the second wife was sure of this, how it was with my father — she had known me eating at the sink from a bag, school shoes still missing and late for school — yet she had let my father drive me.
“Good-bye. See you later. See you next Sunday, next month, next year. You wouldn’t want me to give up work. None of this, of course, means I don’t love you. Remember how it was. You understand. This is better.” Any one of us could have said as much.
Besides, I wanted every morning to break up buttered toast into the eggcup.
I wanted lots and lots of new clothes.
Keys to the car, plane ticket, passport, backstage passes.
I wanted to be between visits on a Saturday when we walked Grandfather’s gardens — him with the pruners in his pocket and a cane he used to beat at things while he pruned in rolled-up sleeves. The steeped-tea color of my grandfather’s arms, sure in every gesture, aroused me. I wanted to brush against and lick him: the pouch at his neck, his white, white hair. Stooped, skinny, abrupt in motion, loose clothes slipping off, my grandfather used his pruners. He worked beneath a weak sun and did not sweat or smell of anything more than his ordered soap, green bars with age cracks that looked like saved stones from the bottom of the lake. The lake, from whichever angle we looked, was chipped blues or grays, or buckled, as with ice; and when it was ice, we stayed indoors. We watched for winter birds — blood smears in the trees or the blue jays he detested swinging on the onion sacks and pecking at the suet. The snow was dirty; shucks of seed skirted the trees. There were pawprints and footprints and dog’s canary piddle — too many visitors on any one day.
I’m sorry, I get confused.
The snows that filled the wells of ground about my grandfather’s gardens were unmarked and falling in the lights I thoughtlessly left on.
My father was sick and had been sick for as far back as my grandfather could remember.
Imagine what it was like to have a son who said such things!
But what my father said about me! I had heard him before on how it was with me — me, a hole, a gap, a breach, a space, an absence and longing. Empty. Feckless. Stupid.
“Who can ever fill you up?” my father asked.
Then I was using something sharp on him, just to draw a little blood. I was being showy and so was he, my father — he knew about acting. He was smiling while I cut him, so that it must have been the second wife who screamed — not me. Why would I have screamed? My grandfather in the room saw what I was doing.
METROPOLIS
The things my son may see living with me — the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men — shame me. Somewhere obscured in the obscuring city is his father, we imagine. My son and I stand at what was my window, my room, where now another man sleeps, if he sleeps. But he is gone, too, in these early, strangely inky evenings — rarely blue when we stand at the window, and my son asks, “Where do you think Dad is now?” I do not know the answer to this or to lots of other questions my son might ask me, which may be why my son is angry.
Teachers, mothers, women mostly, tell me my son is angry. They tell me this in the way women do in stories about other boys now pacified and prosperous in the alchemy of growing up. “But these boys were once angry,” they say, prayered hands and lowered heads. The women carry the word angry into talk as with pincers. Bad, bad to be a boy and swinging something he is using as a weapon against a wall.
Should I start at the beginning, then, I wonder, when the rage I felt bleeding on and off for weeks made me needle myself to bleed this child out and try again? I wanted a someone committed to staying. But my son held on; I thought he had to be a girl. The boy’s head lifted to view in his easy birthing, the doctor said, “I think it’s a girl,” and that was what we saw, the doctor, the nurses, the father, me. Before the boy part slipped out, we saw this bright girl mouth pouted for kissing. “Ah,” we said.