“I guess it’s a way of remembering Grammy Fisk, too—all this,” I said.
He thought about it. “Maybe.”
“There might be some crying at the memorial service tomorrow. Are you okay with that?”
He shrugged.
“I’ll be there if you need me.”
“Amanda is nice,” Geddy said.
“Thanks.”
“Is it true, what she said about the Affinity groups?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Maybe I’ll join one. When I’m older.”
I didn’t know whether there was an Affinity he would qualify for, but I hoped so.
* * *
In the morning Aaron drove me to a family meeting prior to the memorial service. I was a pallbearer, and a deacon at the Methodist church explained what was expected of us: how to support the weight of the coffin, where the hearse would be waiting. After the briefing Aaron drove me back to the motel so I could take Amanda to the service. And while we were alone in the car he raised the subject of Jenny Symanski: ten earnest minutes of how-could-you-do-this and she-deserves-better.
“I mean,” Aaron said, “what’s she supposed to do now? Pretty girl like that, smart but no college, parents both drinking, the family business drying up in this shitty economy, and no marriage prospects because for most of her adult life she’s been waiting for you to grow a pair and ask her. What the fuck is she supposed to do?”
I didn’t have an answer.
* * *
Jenny was at the funeral, of course.
I was up front with the immediate family, in a church crowded with my father’s business associates and his buddies from the local Republican committee. Snow melted snow from shoes and boots puddled on the oaken floorboards and made the air humid. Psalm 23, a hymn, the eulogy, a benediction, and I couldn’t help wondering what Grammy Fisk would have made of all this. (“I don’t know where you go when you die,” she had once confided in me. “I don’t think you go anywhere at all except the grave.”) After the memorial service we got in our cars and trailed the hearse to Schuyler’s big nondenominational cemetery, where a machine had gouged a perfectly rectangular hole into the frozen earth. It was a gray end-of-winter day, a few flakes of snow riding on a wet wind. We stood in silence as the coffin was lowered. Blessed are the dead. They will rest from their labors. Mama Laura leaned into my father’s shoulder, weeping quietly. My father stood immobile, his features locked into a sculpture expressing, somehow, both anger and loss. Geddy stood with his head down, probably pretending he was somewhere else.
Jenny stood on the far side of the grave with her father and mother. Jenny’s mother had surfaced, though not completely or for long, from her alcoholic submersion. Her father wore a suit that must have been ten or fifteen years old, and he stared at his feet while we said the Lord’s Prayer. They bookended Jenny, who avoided my eyes—or maybe it was Amanda, standing next to me, she didn’t want to look at.
The pastor finished his go forth with God’s peace and we adjourned to the reception hall for finger sandwiches and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups. When I saw Jenny I started toward her but her parents, thin-lipped and sweating, took her arm and steered her away.
She looked back at me once, her expression unreadable.
* * *
What I wanted to say to her was this:
Like you, Jenny, I always figured there must be a place in the world for me. You know what I mean. Walking down some street on a winter night so cold your footsteps on the snowy sidewalk sound like glass being ground to sand, yellow light leaking from the windows of the houses of strangers, you catch a glimpse of some sublimely ordinary moment—a girl setting a table, a woman washing dishes, a man turning the pages of a newspaper—and you get the idea you could walk through the door of that house into a brand-new life, that the people inside would recognize and welcome you and you would realize it was a place you had always known and never really left. Like we talked about on Birch Street that one time, remember? The night of the big snowstorm, walking home in the dark after band practice.
The thing is, Jenny, there really is a door like that. There really is a house full of kind and generous voices. It exists, and I was lucky enough to find it. And that’s why I can’t come home and marry you.
I know you think it’s bullshit. I know you think I bought a sales pitch, swallowed a line, joined a cult. You think I gave myself to Tau the way people give themselves to Scientology or Mormonism or the Communist Party. But Tau isn’t like that.
It’s a bright window on a cold night, Jenny. It’s shelter from the storm. It’s everything we envied from the enclosure of our loneliness. It’s what we tried and failed to find in each other’s arms.
These were the words I couldn’t say.
* * *
During the hour-long reception my father circulated through the crowd, acknowledging business acquaintances and shaking their hands and the hands of their spouses and children. It was only when we stepped out into another flurry of wet snow that he allowed himself to indulge his grief.
Because he was both stoic and fanatically private, the signs would have been easy to miss. But I saw him turn and look back at the cemetery, where Grammy Fisk’s burial place had become invisible among the ranks of Schuyler’s dead; I saw him mouth something inaudible and swipe the palms of his hands across his eyes. My father talked about his childhood so seldom that it was almost impossible to imagine him having had one—but he had, and Grammy Fisk would have been the heart of it. He had buried his mother today, and with her a little of himself.
We headed back to our cars. I helped Amanda into the passenger seat, then walked over to where my father was still standing. We weren’t a touchy-feely family—Grammy Fisk and Mama Laura had doled out all the hugs any of us ever got—but I was moved to put my hand on his arm. I felt the gnarled density of muscle under his winter jacket. The smell of him was poignantly familiar: the aftershave he habitually used, the greasy black polish he swabbed on his shoes. Melting snow had plaited his hair across his scalp.
He gave me a startled look, then pushed my hand away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” he said. “And I don’t want it. Why don’t you just take your Arab girlfriend and go back to wherever it is you call home?”
* * *
So I said good-bye to Mama Laura and Geddy and Aaron, and we drove out of Schuyler late that night. The roads were slick with snow and there were line-ups at every gas station that was open, but we managed to fill up at a truck stop on I-90. “The craziness of the world,” Amanda said as we pulled back onto the interstate. “You know?”
Warring nations, paranoid politics, my fucking family. I knew all about it.
“Before I was a Tau,” she said, “it just seemed so overwhelming. Salute the flag. Praise God. Honor your father and your mother. These big abstractions—God and country and family. They used to have power over me, as if they were real and important. But they’re not. They’re just words people use to control you. It’s bullshit. I don’t need a family or a country or a church. I have my tranche.”
I said, “We have each other.”
“We have more than each other. We have Tau. Which is what makes it okay to admit that your dad is a racist asshole.”
The wind was blowing rags of snow across the highway, and I had to slow down. “Well, he’s more than just—”
“I know, it’s complex. It’s always complex, out there in the world. But the truth can’t hurt us anymore and we don’t have to hide from it. Your dad is many things, and one of them is—”
“A racist asshole?
“You disagree?”
No. The evidence was abundant, and I had seen much more of it than Amanda had.
She said, “How does that make you feel?”