He thought it was his fault, my father said.
I know, John said. So you think he’s trying to make amends?
In his way.
It’s too late for him to do the honorable thing, John said.
I don’t know that honor has anything to do with it, my father said.
He was three and a half, John said. He tipped onto his left haunch and reached around to his back pocket. Oh god, no, thought my father. He looked at the vending machines and tried to will them to explode. Please, god, no. John took out his wallet and flipped it open, dipped his fingers inside, and extracted the photo, the one that he himself could not bear to look at. He held it up so my father could see it. Among the limited benefits of my father’s solitary profession was a conviction, arrived at through years of probing the dark matter within himself, that a person with a story always wants to tell it.
It was a benefit because, as uncomfortable as other people made him, as soon as he realized everyone else was dying to blab, he never had to do anything but ask questions. It was amazing what people would tell you. No matter how sorrowful, no matter how shameful, all stories lie in wait of a sympathetic ear. But he didn’t want to hear this story.
The mechanism my father engaged to keep from bursting into tears was complex. He tried to summon up the vampire Saltwater, the one who sucked at the ripe neck of humanity in the name of fiction, but he wouldn’t rise. That character, so familiar, had no place here. There was nothing sinister about lending John his ear, nothing parasitic about one person listening to another, enacting the old communion that had kept humanity glued together for millennia. When would he let go of this idea of himself as a menacing force? The job was certainly easier if he only pretended to shoulder the burden, but in the end he took the burden anyway, no matter what he told himself, not because he was a saint but because he was nothing more than a man who could not resist the ache of empathy.
We were in Florida, John said.
My father wanted to bolt. He had to get out of there.
My mother and father had a place down on the Gulf, John said, and we were all there together. My sisters and their families. My wife. Our little boy.
My father stayed put.
22.
He knew the story. He’d heard it two years earlier, a glass of Cragganmore in his hand, which he had, midway through, put down out of respect for Albert, who was gripping his own two-handed, fingers laced tight. My father had felt that the act of cradling his own drink, as if in the expectation that he might be moved to sip from it in response to a ribald comment or in a moment of contemplation, conveyed a sort of casual hope, an expectation of entertainments to come. Yet any deviation from the gruesome tale Albert was relaying was inconceivable. So he’d set his glass down on the coffee table, a monstrous mistake, one he recognized almost immediately, and his eyes fell back again and again, gazing at it with increasing urgency, thirsting for a gulp of erasure, but unable to make himself pick it up.
In 1963, Albert had purchased a house in Sarasota. Four bedrooms, pool, a wedge of private beachfront, a low, long modernist slash set into the white sand with palm trees for shade and bougainvillea crawling along the fence. It was penicillin for the gray New York winter.
I bought it for Sydney, Albert said. So I told myself. We’d taken a vacation down there, just the two of us, winter of ’62. Had quite a time. We were like kids again. I had an agent on the phone the day after we flew home. Signed the papers in April. A little temperance on my part might have been in order, but it was as if I were under the influence of some kind of drug. Only time in my life I’ve let passion get the best of me.
We enjoyed that house immensely. When there was no moon, it was as dark as pitch, and the frogs sang all night. Like paradise. The winter of ’73, John and his wife had been there for a few days, and their boy was with them, of course. He was three, quite a talker. And at the age where they collect absolutely everything. He had his little pail filled with shells and dead bugs, scraps of plastic, whatever he came across. He could barely carry the damn thing by Tuesday. It was a Tuesday when Tracy and Filomena got there with their families. I can’t remember my own name sometimes but I can tell you it was a Tuesday.
Albert was affectless. His voice didn’t waver. The story came out of his mouth as evenly as a kite string unspooling into the sky. Why would I expect histrionics? my father thought. These things happen every day.
As if to answer him, Albert said, Normal Tuesday. That’s the bitch of it, of course. There’s a pleasant breeze, and the pleasant breeze doesn’t stop blowing. The palm trees keep swaying, the waves keep breaking. You hear the cars out on the road, and of course the people inside are carrying on with their lives as if nothing has happened. Their day is a normal day. Go to the beach, take a nap, make a sandwich. And for a moment or two, you yourself don’t know that anything has changed. The event has taken place, yet you still occupy your happy place among the unwitting.
There was no signal, no sign. I don’t believe in omens, Albert said. Convenient answers to thorny questions.
My father nodded.
Everything that’s gone wrong with this country boils down to convenience. And the first convenience is superstition, Albert said.
He paused to consider the clock on the mantel.
This will all go, he said. I’ll lose all of it. The ability to reason, the ability to make a convincing argument. I’ve seen it. It all goes, and it goes in a horror. At the end you’re just holes for food to go in and out of.
He paused again to look at the clock.
It was boiling out. We had the air on and the doors were closed. We were inside, he said, just on the other side of the sliding glass doors. Fil had made a recording of John at some festival or another, and she’d put it on the reel-to-reel. Fil was very supportive of his singing. She and Tracy were his protectors, his biggest fans, of course, as older sisters will be. And there’s John, in the middle of this, like a king on his throne. Now, you lose sight of your child, you don’t hear him playing, you wonder where he is, don’t you? You wonder where your child is. Wouldn’t you wonder where your child is?
I suppose so, my father said.
That clock, Albert said.
My father turned to look at it.
It was a gift, but I can’t remember who it was from. Now, I focus my mind on retaining the details of that day and I still have them. He tapped the side of his head. Not for long, though. Not for long.
A death certificate, he said, requires classical precision. It puts one in the mind of those little monks at their desks, toiling over their Latin manuscripts, don’t you think? Wet-drowning. Asphyxia. The language, I’m talking about. This is an area that would appeal to you, I’d think.
My father made a plaintive gesture.
I went to the—to see the body. I went to the. Goddamnit. Good poets read medical texts and good doctors read poetry. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that what they say?
Sounds plausible, my father said.
Plausible, Albert sniffed. Indeed. A plausible thing to say. I won’t mind losing the proper names for things, not as long as I can still imagine the thing itself. You’re not one of those neoliberal bed wetters who believes that without the word to describe it, the thing evaporates? Disciple of high priest Chomsky? You’re not a member of that faction, are you?
Oh, I don’t think so, my father said.
Yes, I wouldn’t have taken you for one of those. The conceptual—that’s what worries me. I’ll lose the abstractions and I won’t even know what I’ve lost. I saw this happen to my father. At first you can’t call up the words for things. That’s just forgetting someone’s name. You can still carry on a conversation. The name is lost in the clouds, so what? But losing time—my father’s comprehension of time vanished and just like that, he was an empty body. His ability to remember numbers, gone. Ability to understand numbers, gone. Once that went, he was a different man. Really quite something. At first all the grudges and the old hatreds that were the fiber of his being rose to the surface. He was a holy terror for a year or so. And then they fell away. Just vanished. He lost all shame. He was an open book, guileless, like a child. A completely different man.