“Mom,” I say, “she’s gone again, okay?”
My mother nods.
“Let’s just try to find her, okay?”
She nods again.
“Mom?”
She keeps nodding. I can’t even imagine what’s going on inside her head. She just keeps pacing silently, nodding.
“Okay, Mom?”
“Yes,” she says at last. “Okay.”
And nods again.
4
My father used to smoke incessantly.
I loved to watch him paint.
I have seen many movies about painters, some famous, some striving to become famous, and none of them have ever seemed convincing to me. When my father painted, there was nothing but him and the canvas. He was utterly alone with the canvas. I would come home from school and walk into the spare bedroom of our apartment, on the north side, where the light was good, and he would be standing at the easel wearing jeans and sandals and a blue smock like the ones French street cleaners wear, and which I think he actually bought in Paris, I know he had dozens of them, all of them paint-spattered. The smocks themselves looked like one of his canvases.
We were still living in the building on Seventy-second Street at the time — yes, the one where Mr. Alvarez was super — and he would always ask me when I came home from school, “Is your father still painting?” and I would say, “Yes, he is, Mr. Alvarez,” because what else would my father be doing but painting? I sometimes thought he painted day and night. I sometimes thought he never slept. All he did was paint and smoke his little Brazilian cigars, which he called in a thick fake Spanish accent, “gringo steenkers,” blowing out clouds of smoke and grinning like one of the banditos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was never without one of those little cigars in his mouth. Never. He would lean in close to the canvas, as if scrutinizing each dollop of paint he applied with putty knife or brush or even thumb, squinting at every new stroke, puffing on the cigar, backing away, dipping into the riot of color on the enamel tray he used as a palette, lunging at the canvas again, puffing, painting. I loved to watch him paint.
He was a large man, my father — I talk about him as if he’s dead, when I know he’s not — and he overwhelmed the easel and the canvas and the tiny room in which he was permitted to work. But even later, when he was recognized and rich and had built for himself the huge studio in Connecticut, he triumphed over this larger space with the sheer bulk of his size and the energy of his attack upon each oversized canvas. He always painted big. Fair-haired and pale-eyed, he slashed at the canvas like a Viking invader hacking a hapless black-Irish peasant to bits, trailing a wide red gash here, exploding a burst of white there, dipping his thumb into burnt umber or cobalt blue, poking it at the canvas as if gouging out an eye. The flaxen hair and blue eyes in fact bespoke of fierce Norwegian ancestry, not for nothing had Norsemen once sailed up the river Shannon. The gentleness of his spirit murmured of something quite else. Soft green hills and drifting mist. Smooth brown whiskey. A lullaby on a moonless night. A keening graveside woman. My father’s soul was Irish to the core.
When he read to us at night...
I have to tell you, first, that he loved to play board games with us. Along around five-thirty or six each evening, he would come out of his studio (he called even the tiny back room a “studio”), stinking of cigar smoke and turpentine, and even before my mother called us to dinner he would say, “Hey, kiddos, some Monopoly after supper?” (He still called dinner “supper,” the way Grandma Kate always did.) Or Risk, which was another game. Or Clue. My mother would always tell us to finish our homework first, but every night, nonetheless, we would sit down to play a board game for an hour or so after dinner.
My sister didn’t like playing board games. “Are you bored, darlin?” my father would ask her. (He was an inveterate punster, which my mother said was his way of taking revenge on the English language, the same way she maintains sarcasm is her way of doing it.) Annie was indeed bored, and a punster in her own right. “No, Dad, just Terry-fied of losing,” she would say, making a pun on my father’s name, which Aaron never seemed to get even though it had become a standard response to my father’s board/bored question. A fiercely competitive player, Aaron was too busy concentrating on the game itself, whichever game it happened to be. Whenever he was losing, he would knock the board and all its pieces off the table. “Oop-a-la!” my father would shout, and burst out laughing, but my mother would send Aaron to his room, anyway.
At night, after we had carefully put whichever game away, its pieces still in position for the next night’s foray, we would go into the room Aaron and I shared, which was larger than Annie’s, and we would curl up on one of the beds, and my father would read to us. He read all sorts of bedtime stories to us, but his favorite — and ours as well — was The Once and Future King. Even Aaron liked this one, though I think at first he identified with Kay, “who was too dignified to have a nickname” and who would be called Sir Kay when he grew older. Aaron didn’t know, of course, that the Wart would grow up to be King Arthur.
There were four volumes in the book, but my father read only the first one to us, and so we didn’t learn anything about the interlocking Arthurian tales of incest and infidelity. Neither did any of us have the slightest inkling that at this exact moment in time our father was “playing around,” as my mother later explained it to us, and might therefore have had an affinity for the Guinevere-Lancelot parts of the story, if ever he’d got around to reading those to us, which he never did. What interested us about The Sword in the Stone, as this first volume was called, was not T. H. White’s concern with force majeure (which we wouldn’t have recognized if it came up behind us and hit us on the head with a club) but instead the way he and Merlin together worked their magic.
Aaron was eight years old in that year before my father abandoned us. Annie and I were each four. In the soft light from the lamp beside Aaron’s bed, we listened to my father’s liquid voice as he began reading to us yet another time, crediting the book and its author each and every night before continuing with the story — “This is The Once and Future King, by T. H. White” — and then conjuring for us the twelfth-century England White had created.
Spellbound, we listened.
This was the opening epigraph of the first volume, and my father read it with portentous intonations proper to the magical proceedings that would follow.
“Who’s Grandma Marie?” Annie asked.
“It’s Gram-a-ree,” my father said. “It’s White’s name for England. It also means magic.”
“Who’s Merlin?” Aaron asked.
“A magician,” my father said. “Are you going to listen to this, or shall we just turn out the lights and go to bed?”
“What does ‘Where you and I shall fare’ mean?” I asked.
“In a minute, it’s going to mean fare thee well.”
“What’s fare thee well?” Annie asked.