I didn’t do anything but stare at the bedroom ceiling, so pale and quiet, dutifully holding His tongue. Somehow, out of pure exhaustion, I fell asleep.
For the next three days — frittered away on the couch in front of Cherry Jeffries — I found myself imagining Dad’s final moments in our house, our beloved 24 Armor Street, setting of our last year, our last chapter, before I “conquered the world.”
He was all plan and calculation, all bird-quick glances to his wristwatch, five minutes fast, silent steps through our dim-drenched rooms. There was nervousness too, a nervousness only I’d be able to detect; I’d seen him before a new university, giving a new lecture (the barely discernible trembling of index fingers and thumbs).
The change in his pocket rattled like his withered soul as he moved through the kitchen, downstairs to his study. He turned on only a few lamps, his desk lamp and the red one on his bedroom nightstand that drowned the room in the jelly-red of stomachs and hearts. He spent a great deal of time organizing his things. The Oxford shirts on the bed, red on top, followed by blue, blue patterned, blue-and-white stripe, white, each folded like sleeping birds with wings tucked under them, and the six sets of cufflinks in silver and gold (including, of course, his favorite, those 24-karat ones engraved with GUM, given to Dad for his forty-seventh birthday by Bitsy Plaster, age 42, a misprint by the jeweler due to Bitsy’s bubbly handwriting) all tucked into the Tiffany felt pocket like a bag of prized seeds. And then there were his socks herded together, black, white, long, short, cotton, wool. He wore his brown loafers (he could walk fast in them), the gold and brown tweed (faithfully hanging around him like an old dog) and the old khaki slacks so comfortable he claimed “they made the most unbearable tasks bearable.” (He wore them trudging through the “squishy Thesis Statements, fetid quagmires of Supporting Evidence” inevitably found within student research papers. They even allowed him to feel no guilt as he wrote C-next to the kid’s name before continuing on, relentlessly.)
When he was ready to load the boxes and duffle bags into the car — I didn’t know what waited for him; I imagined a simple yellow cab driven by some sea urchin driver with goose-bumped hands, tapping the steering wheel to Public Radio’s Early Bluegrass Hour, waiting for John Ray Jr., Ph.D., to emerge from the house, thinking about the woman he left at home, Alva or Dottie, warm as a dinner roll.
When Dad knew he’d forgotten nothing, when it was all gone, he walked back inside and up to my room. He didn’t turn on a light, or even look at me as he unbuckled my backpack and perused the legal pad on which I’d scrawled my research and theory. After he reviewed what I’d written, he returned it to the bag and hung it on the back of my desk chair.
He was incorrect putting it there. That wasn’t where I’d put it; I’d placed it where I always did, at the end of my bed on the floor. Yet he was pressed for time and no longer needed to worry about such details. Such details mattered very little now. He probably laughed at the Irony. At the most unlikely of moments, Dad took time to laugh about the Irony; or, perhaps it was one instance he didn’t have time to, because if he moved toward Laughter, he might have to continue down that shoulderless, exitless road of Feeling, which could lead one, rather swiftly, into Whimpering, Full-on Howling and he didn’t have time for that kind of detour. He had to get out of the house.
He looked at me as I slept, memorizing my face as if it were a passage of an extraordinary book he’d come across, the crux of which he wished to commit to memory in the off chance he found use for it during an exchange with a Dean.
Or else, staring at me — and I like to think this was the case — Dad came undone. No book tells one how to look at one’s child one is leaving forever and will never see again (unless it’s clandestinely, after thirty-five, forty years, and only then from a great distance, through binoculars, a telephoto lens or an $89.99 satellite photo). One probably gets close and tries to determine the exact degree of the nose from the face. One counts freckles, the ones never noticed before. And one also counts the faint creases in the eyelids, in the forehead, too. One watches the breathing, the peaceful smile — or, in the absence of such a smile, one willfully ignores the gaping, wheezing mouth, in order to make the memory polite. One probably gets a little carried away, too, introducing a little moonlight to silver the face, covering up those dark circles under the eyes, sound-looping adorable insects — better still, a gorgeous night bird — to lessen the cold, cell silence of the room.
Dad closed his eyes to make sure he knew it by heart (forty-degrees, sixteen, three, one, a sea way of breathing, peaceful smile, silvery eyes, enthusiastic nightingale). He pushed the comforter close to my check, kissed me on the forehead.
“You’ll be fine, sweet. You really will.”
He slipped from my room, downstairs, and outside to the taxi.
“Mr. Ray?” asked the driver.
“Dr. Ray,” Dad said.
And just like that — he was gone.
The Secret Garden
The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn’t notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night.
I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors — childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman’s chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floated like noodles in soup.
I ditched school like a boy with rusty breath and glue-stick palms. Instead, I took up with Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605) — one would think I’d have driven to Videomecca and rented porn, at the very least Wild Orchid with Mickey Rourke, but alas, no — then some steamy paperback I’d kept hidden from Dad for years called Speak Not, My Love (Esther, 1992).
I thought about Death — not suicide, nothing that histrionic — more a begrudged acknowledgment, as if I’d snubbed Death for years, and now, having no one else, I had no choice but to exchange pleasantries with him. I thought about Evita, Havermeyer, Moats, Dee and Dum forming a nighttime Search Party, wielding torches, lanterns, pitchforks, clubs (as bigoted townspeople did when hunting a monster), discovering my wasted body slung over the kitchen table, arms limp at my sides, my head facedown in the crotch of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903).
Even when I tried to collect myself, pull myself together as Molly Brown had done in that Titanic lifeboat, or even find a productive hobby like the Birdman of Alcatraz, I failed. I thought Future. I saw Black Hole. I was spaghettified. I didn’t have a friend, driver’s license or survival instinct to my name. I didn’t even have one of those Savings Accounts set up by a conscientious parent so their kid could learn Money. I was a minor, too, would remain so for another year. (My birthday was June 18.) I had no desire to end up in a Foster Home, the Castle in the Sky of which was to be supervised by a pair of retirees named Bill and Bertha, who wielded their Bibles like handguns, asked me to call them “Mamaw” and “Papaw,” and got tickled pink every time they stuffed me, their brand new turkey, with all the fixins (biscuits, poke salad and possum pie).