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Their father’s face is clear in my mind from the photographs that surfaced once Jackson and James were “old enough,” but I do not recollect any of the times he showed up on our street to smile and squint at James and Jackson through his thick Buddy Holly — esque glasses.
The pictures of Thomas are of a birdlike man dressed in ill-fitting suits, thin ties, and sharply angled dress shoes. He looks both embarrassed by and friendly toward the camera, and seems always to be leaning: it’s like all the objects of the world constantly presented themselves to him in support. The sun often in his blue eyes, which are so light they seem almost diaphanous. He has the slight smile of a person who is in on a joke you are not.
Jackson later put up a photo of him in our apartment. It came not out of a sentimental place or an effort to miss someone he barely knew, but rather a black humor that most found disturbing but I, as someone who was also parentally ghosted, found hilarious. In it, Thomas is nearly literally dancing on a grave. The background is a Confederate cemetery he stopped by on a road trip at twenty-two or so; he has his hands out on either side of him, a bottle of beer dangling somehow from between the middle and index fingers of his left hand. His right hand is four inches higher, his feet placed one in front of the other. The photo is taken from the back, and the wings of his coat indicate motion; he doesn’t know there’s a picture being taken, but his face is turned just enough to indicate he is smiling.
Jackson had it blown up to a 14-by-16 and hung it between the two windows we frequently kept open despite the weather. The enlargement resulted in a graininess, and friends or acquaintances visiting our apartment for the first time liked to cluck their tongues and remark how striking it was, sometimes even going so far as to assume it was this writer or that artist captured by such and such a photographer. On one occasion, when the asker was particularly thoughtful and mistakenly convinced of her cultural awareness, when she went so far as to insist she knew the image of this obscure poet walking on a graveyard and had seen it in a gallery in London, Jackson and I looked at each other and laughed, inclusively, at length. When we finally calmed down enough to explain that the washed-out image was no poet but rather just the long-dead, drug-addled father of Jackson here, no one thought it was very funny. Many people don’t understand, I suppose, that while respecting the dead is important, it’s not always easy and it’s generally pretty boring.
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What we perceived as an enmity between our parents was not quite that — though Julia often sold it that way. There were feuds and sideways looks, snippy comments to us about the other’s parenting that we were meant to deliver. A couple times, when we were younger, our parents had taken battle stances on our respective front porches and hollered. It would always be pretty late when it happened, and the neighbors’ windows would light up, slow and weary, like the sighs they were no doubt emitting in their bed- and living rooms. The fights always concluded with my father more amused than angry, delighted at Julia’s easy female temper, and her, livid, slamming things around in the kitchen pretending to be looking for something — but when Thomas was found dead in a flophouse in Oakland when Jackson was eight and James almost seven, it was my father who took Julia to identify the body and bring her glasses of yellowish water as she cataloged the erratic and strange evidence that her children’s father had left behind. Perhaps my father was remembering that it had been Julia who stayed with him the first hour in our house without my mother, who had made him coffee and sensed he didn’t want to talk and instead put on a Neil Young record she knew (somehow) he liked, soft but not so soft he couldn’t hear the generosity of the words: Will I see you give more than I can take? Will I only harvest some?
It was this never-ending series of owe-you-ones that bound them together even beyond the fact of their children’s hips being attached. Because they’d seen each other at their worst, I think, they felt relieved to leave those moments where they were — bury them in the dirt as opposed to making them a foundation. It was beautiful in the sad, secret way illicit affairs are: relationships that choose what to include, that are shaped only by the circumstances the participants experience together. It allowed, from what I can tell, my father to sustain a picture of himself he more or less liked: jaded and cynical but resilient, always willing to tell or hear a good joke. As for Julia, I can’t say exactly what it gave her, only that the times I secretly glimpsed them drinking coffee at our kitchen table, she seemed to hold herself differently, her shoulders lower, and spoke in soft peals I’d never imagined could come from her and found quite lovely.
They had quite a bit in common, given their dead spouses and the children they’d been left to raise alone in a town that had grown to overflow with nuclear families with two Volvos that escorted their sons and daughters to not only baseball but also piano and art lessons. Only my father had learned to laugh at these people, and Julia secretly envied them; she cursed her shotgun wedding to the man who, with the arrival of the second young, grabby boy, ran off quicker than you could say child support.
“Irony” is a word I hesitate to use. My life has been marked, dyed, twisted, by the unexpected or inconvenient, and any safe patterns I could identify would seem forced. In any case, when my father and Julia essentially united after Jackson and I separated, “irony” certainly seemed to be the word the rest of the world wanted to employ. It was something of a concession on both of their parts, but they seemed oddly happy to make it.
Were they dating? I asked. Not exactly. They had simply decided that officially being on the same team seemed to make sense. Julia put her house on the market (it sold in a matter of days) and moved the few doors down into my old bedroom. My father had been diagnosed with emphysema three years before, and the disease was starting to close in. He took the invasion gracefully and with wonder; he was amazed at the ways his body, of which he was so long the master, started submitting to another owner. Julia supervised his breathing exercises, took walks around the block with him, refilled his prescriptions at the pharmacy, grew to love the finicky, aging cat. They cooked elaborate dinners that they ate before the flickering of the Turner Classic Movies channel; she revived my father’s garden while he watched from a chair set up in the sun. They swapped sections of the newspaper over breakfast, they played Scrabble with my father’s house-sized Oxford English Dictionary open and ready. Julia took on the domestic role wholeheartedly as she’d never done before: she sewed new curtains of panels of sheer pastels for the living room, she painted their mailbox yellow, she wore floppy sun hats and made sun tea. Talking to my father on the telephone was like a three-way conversation, him often repeating to Julia what I’d just said, or me waiting while they laughed their way through a private joke.
I was happy for them, though I couldn’t help but feel strange that after Jackson had cut-and-dry removed himself from our long-woven history, our parents had found a way to enforce it. We had so long kidded about them getting together, but when they actually did, he wasn’t around to balk at the punch line.
It crossed my mind whether it would have happened if we’d stayed together, whether it had been pending awhile but their children being romantically linked had prohibited even the discussion. And if it had, was it better that Jackson and Ida — a dangerous, circuitous affair that had festered too long — had ended, so They could begin? Did the factually old deserve more than those who simply felt too aged for their own good?