the handful of letters i removed from the moving boxes as samples lie in some cabinet or other, but I don’t dare look for them. I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed. The weight these samples are to bear. Was that everything? Yes, that was everything. How am I to let go of the thought of what’s not in them? Of the words that went up in smoke with cheese rinds and moldy lemons and herring skins? No, I don’t want to look for those letters.
◊
Only a few years after I entrusted the dumpster with my letters, no one wrote letters anymore. If I scroll to the bottom of my inbox, I find the earliest email from my dad, it’s from 2001. He’d just visited Gussie in Texas. She still lived in the house where we had visited her four years earlier, but things are no longer what they used to be.
She tries to speak, he writes, but it is impossible to understand anything anymore.
It was especially difficult on the telephone, but it was also a frustrating experience for each of them in person.
What really gets to him is the discovery that the two women who’ve alternated in taking care of grandmother for a year have systematically stolen her money. She is very confused right after she gets her medicine, he writes. She will sign any check!
I’m trying to take care of the situation without bringing in the law, he writes.
He’s put her on a waiting list for a nursing home in Lockhart.
It’s not what he wants to do.
Gussie doesn’t go to the nursing home. She remains in her white house for another two years until she at the age of ninety-seven gets a chance to tell Preston that she knows he was the one who planted the pecan tree. My dad drives down with Marcel to clear out the house. They rent a van and fill it with whatever furniture they can use. There are also a number of bronze figurines my grandmother called cloisonné and pronounced closi-nay that are worth something.
They put the rest of the stuff on the lawn and sell it off at one of the kinds of yard sales she would have arranged herself. A middle-aged Mexican woman buys the green kitchen table along with the chairs and the chipped Villeroy & Boch beer mugs with the art deco ladies and a rug beater made of plastic.
Clearing out a house isn’t easy at all. There was the rock collection no one was allowed to touch, rocks my dad had brought home from every corner of the globe, and which my grandmother had placed on a wooden tray with corresponding labels, Iran, India, Venezuela, Finland, etc. Now he’s the one who empties the tray in the driveway, so the rocks can join those already there. My grandmother had made certain that everything was in perfect order, and still it was difficult. My dad is tired.
I imagine him emptying the tray, and I think of Paul Auster and his dad’s ties.
My dad thinks he ought to do something about The Board of Growing Pains before the house is put on the market. Who would want his children’s and stepson’s and deceased niece and nephew’s shifting heights other than him? But he can’t muster the energy. The dust and the furniture and the drudgery and the house that stands forlorn and empty, its walls pocked with faded patches where the family portraits had hung until recently.
Board of Growing Pains, indeed.
He lets it stay.
The child, the old man, open on both ends.
He suddenly feels old.
◊
And then one day I cross a lawn in Manchester. A few steps ahead of me, my sister walked on her tiptoes, her hair hanging loose on her face, her hands dug deep into her pockets. We were part of a small group on its way toward a corner pub to meet with my dad and some of his colleagues for happy hour. Walking beside me was Patrick, who must have been one of my dad’s PhD students, and two or three other young guys our age, all of whom were my dad’s former PhD students.
So there we were, on the grass, Patrick beside me, talking. He reminded me of a beached whale, not only because he was big and soft, but also because there was something helpless about him, something completely transparent. You could see right through him. The word that comes to mind is innocent.
I recognized his type from school, it was rare to see such traits, which so obviously emanated from him, allowed to survive all the way into adulthood. There was always someone who enjoyed ruining people like Patrick, just as there’s always someone who’ll smash an egg or pluck the petals off a flower and toss the stem away. But Patrick was almost thirty. That impressed me. It showed something about physicists, I thought, how they understood that they needed to treat him with the right kind of tenderness, that they valued a man like him, it was a little like finding a four-leaf clover in a field.
And it occurred to me that my dad was part of that world and had probably been among those who’d treated him with the right kind of tenderness.
As I walked along with such thoughts, Patrick talked, his soft flesh bubbling over with emotion, and the person he talked about was none other than my dad. How he’d written him recommendations, how he’d helped him land research positions, how he owed my dad more than he could ever explain to me, and I imagined Patrick as an impossible piece of furniture no one had room for, and how my dad had nevertheless managed time and again, with his extensive letter-writing and string-pulling, to find a place for him.
Your father, Patrick said, is like a father to me.
It was a Greek eureka moment. My dad, I realized there on the lawn, had been someone’s dad, and I was happy that he’d been Patrick’s. I understood that Patrick was also transparent to my dad. It was as if we’d once again stepped into a room, my dad and I, and had witnessed the same thing, just not at the same time. If Patrick were to swim in these waters, he needed someone to hold a hand underneath him in the deep end. And that’s what my dad had done. Held his hand underneath him in the deep end.
Before my dad appeared at the pub and joined the group, the others told me similar stories: How he’d helped them, written letters, recommendations, called around, how he’d published scientific articles with them to get their names out there.
He went out of his way to help me, said one.
He did the same for me, said another.
And their eyes said the same thing Patrick had spoken aloud only a few moments ago: He was like a father to us.
I turned to my sister, and she looked at me, a brief moment. She thrived with her anger better than I. The little bell over the door jingled right then. We turned and there he was, our dad, stooped forward with a bewildered look on his face on entering this dimly lit pub full of people. After a few confused seconds in which we sat waving, and his glasses fogged up, he made his way to our table.
We made room for him on the bench between us. He had no idea of the depth of devotion that he’d sunk into. Someone ordered more beers for the table, and we stopped discussing things that meant anything of importance.
That we were in Manchester at all was due to the conference being held in honor of my dad and three of his colleagues. All of them turned sixty-five that year, and their colleagues and former students were paying tribute. Big brains flew in from all over the world to give lectures and discuss the newest discoveries in quantum physics. We were all gathered in a large hall, a celebratory dinner. Chandeliers, round tables, long white tablecloths, servants bearing platters.
I thought: It’s a family celebration.
This is his family, Patrick and all the others.
My dad and his thousand sons.
◊
The subject of his latest email is Physics Tree. It’s about just that. The family in the hall with the white tablecloths, his scientific fathers and his thousand sons. On the internet he stumbled across a database where someone had taken the effort to map out who had been instructed by whom. They’re even calling it a scientific family tree. In addition to the physics tree, which of course is his biggest, he has also found his mathematics tree and his chemistry tree.
You can find Niels Bohr among my great-great grandparents, he writes.
He even uses the word children about his students, but with air quotes.
The l
ist of my ‘children’ is way incomplete, he writes.
I have thirty-six in total.
I ask him if Patrick’s on the list.
Not officially.
It turns out he wasn’t, as I’d thought, my dad’s PhD student, but someone whom he’d helped along the way in addition to all the others.
I think of Patrick and the others. How he could have flaunted them. Shielded himself behind them, made himself immune to criticism. But he didn’t pluck them and put them in his buttonhole. He didn’t hold them up like a shield. He simply pushed forward, quietly, concentrated. Twisted the yellow pencil and wrote. Wrote his letters. Erased with his eraser. Chose his Hallmark cards. Floated in the darkness and thought up theories on matters fundamental.
The number of letters I wrote for Patrick, he writes when I ask, might be around one hundred. My dad and his one hundred letters.
it’s april again.
I’m sitting in a big house in upstate New York and gazing across a field that’s covered in fog this morning. Beyond the field is the forest. Each day after lunch I walk through it to the meadow with two horses, one brown and one black, and a knock-kneed dwarf donkey. A few weeks ago, I brought a couple apples with me, and they liked them, so that’s what I’ve done ever since. The black horse shows no interest, but the donkey and the brown mare faithfully come up to the fence to munch the apple. Yesterday I heard the owner call out from some place beyond the stable. Burrito! Burrito! and the donkey turned and trotted across the field, still munching on his apple. The way its barrel-shaped middle swung from side to side before it disappeared behind the shed.
I share the house with a few other writers who, like me, have been granted a residency, a room, a warm meal, and a little peace and quiet to write. My desk is next to the window.
I think of the cherry trees in front of my kitchen window back home, whether or not the flowers have bloomed.
Precisely one year ago today my stepfather died. The days here are warm and the nights are cold. My uneasy nights have glided into the background.
Glided into the background is the fact that my dad can die.
I’m three hours by plane from St. Louis. My dad buys me a ticket. He’s also gone out and purchased an air mattress, which he’s pumped full of air and made ready in one of his rooms. Over Skype he asks if I want to visit his favorite used bookstores. He’s written a list and suggests a used bookstore tour.
It’s amazing how much stuff you collect in just one month. There’s an enormous duffel bag on the gray rug jam-packed with clothes and books and printed manuscript pages. It must weigh at least a fifty pounds. Why don’t I have a suitcase with wheels? I think as I summon all of my strength and heft it up on my back.
I feel like Kafka’s beetle.
If I fall over, I’m doomed.
◊
The apartment he lives in is on the top floor of the garage complex behind the house. I remember seeing it long ago when two of my sisters shared it. It occurs to me that it’s the first time I have seen something of my dad’s, a place that’s his, apart from his office. It’s surprisingly cozy, an L-shaped apartment with two large rooms on one arm of the L and a few smaller ones on the other. Every two weeks, a woman comes to clean. The stone tiles shine, it smells like cleaning products here. He has prepared the room in the back for me.
On the table and the shelf, organized in stacks, are his old comic books, the ones he pointed out to me in the kitchen cupboards thirty years ago.
I almost don’t recognize him: He’s as excited as a little boy.
He has moved the comics from the house, he says, spending two days doing so. He spent another two days organizing and sorting them, a massive undertaking. On each stack is a piece of lined, yellow paper on which he has written the issue count for each year.
On a box on the floor, my dad’s block letters: valuable batman comics.
The titles pop for me in comic book-like letters: Astounding, Weird Tales, Donald Duck, Amazing, Fantastic, Analog. Paperbacks with tattered spines. Hundreds of volumes. Stack after stack.
We don’t have to look at them now, he says. But one of these days we should set aside some time to look at them together. It’s late, and I’m tired. I am to sleep in the center of my inheritance. I fall asleep to the smell of old paper. It’s like camping in a used bookshop.
Jessica lives in the little apartment below, the one he lived in the last time I visited them, and which I never got to see. She divorced her husband in L.A. and moved back to St. Louis not too long ago. The three of us arrange to go for a walk. We meet her out in front of the garage. There she stands, Jessica, shy and uncomfortable, in a pink turtleneck sweater and pleated skirt. Around the turtleneck hangs a chain with a gold cross that she keeps fingering.
It must be at least fifteen years since I’ve seen her. She must be the only one in the family who isn’t rail thin, it’s as if someone has taken the Jessica I knew and puffed air into her. Without thinking, I hug her, but it’s like hugging a doll. She tolerates my touch in a way that seems to me practiced, like something to be overcome.
The street is patchy with sunlight. The houses look just like I’d remembered them, the little redbrick house where the father in the Black family used to mow his lawn, the house at number 25 where we once lived, and The Cookie Lady’s white house which, it strikes me now, resembles a wedding cake.
Jessica has a job in social services. She helps the elderly manage their lives. She drives around in a car. She belongs to a church. She has an email address, but she never responds to emails. I feel as though I’m interviewing her, and when we return the house, it occurs to me that she might view my interest in her as a form of verbal touch. The curtains are drawn in her apartment, and things are scattered about, even on the floor. Excuse the mess, she says. I refrain from hugging her, and she disappears into the darkness.
I’m saving Gussie’s Bible for her, my dad tells me when we return to his apartment. She is the one who will appreciate it the most.
In the living room, beside his work desk, is his old travel chest. It’s dark brown, with a metal clasp and stickers from back when he lived in Copenhagen. I hope he will save it for me. I am the one, I think, who would appreciate it the most. One evening we drag our chairs over to the chest and open it. The chest is filled with old photographs. Though I only saw him for a few days each year, there are hundreds and hundreds of photos of me when I was little. I’m surprised to see so many. Some of them he developed along the way and sent to my mother, but most of them I’ve never seen before.
I didn’t know you had all of these photographs, I say.
You’ll have them some day, he says. But not now. I’m not ready to let go of them yet …
One evening after dinner, we drive to Sabrina’s. It’s like looking at myself seven years ago. She opens the door wearing jeans and a T-shirt, almost as shy as Jessica. She retrieves a bottle of wine from the fridge and tries to open it before giving up.
You live such an interesting life, she says as she hands me the bottle and the corkscrew. Me, I’m just a mom.
Her husband isn’t home. We sit on the sofa, three in a row, and sip our wine. It’s difficult to make eye contact with her kids, who run on the tables and climb the shelves. Sabrina seems to have grown accustomed to the noise. My dad sits as quietly as a mouse watching his grandchildren, almost lost, as if he sees them through a pane of glass.
Eugene arrives. He lets himself in and sinks down into the armchair as if he’s the man of the house. The children climb all over him, and he stands up with them hanging on him like Christmas ornaments and they squeal with delight.
The little ones. Sabrina and Eugene have no other name but the little ones, as if they weren’t two individuals but one. An image appears in my mind, the two of them on that night many years ago when I first arrived from Denmark. They lay curled into each other like in an egg, and it occurs to me that all other moments were embedded in that moment. They’ve always been each other’s m
om and dad.
Another evening we eat at Carissa’s. She has married a man who is nice to her, and they have a daughter who resembles her. There was a time when she didn’t care much for food, but now she chops and dices and fills pots and pans with organic ingredients and a big fat country chicken, and outside her husband is barbecuing.
There’s a moment when we are alone in the kitchen. We stand right in front of the stove, she with a cutting board full of chopped carrots, which she sweeps down into the pot with a knife. I know her. It’s as if all the years pile on top of one another, like stacking cards: except for the pans with proper food, we’re back in the kitchen at Washington Terrace. I see her from a distance. There she stands, tall, straight, thin. The years have pulled out her mother in her, just as they have no doubt pulled mine out in me.
She sets the chopping board on the table and turns toward me. I want to apologize, she says.
For what?
Last time. I was so jealous of you.
I am so surprised I don’t know what to say.
Anyway, she says. I’m not jealous anymore.
What now? I ask. I hope we might be able reconnect.
Now? She says. Now I’m just too busy …
◊
In front of the garage with my dad’s and Jessica’s apartments, on the other side of the cemented patch of the yard, the house glowers at us with black, empty eyes. My dad needs a particular book, and we head over there to find it. The darkness and the solemn atmosphere in his library, it’s like entering a giant mahogany box. He opens and closes the glass doors in his bookshelves, it feels as if we’re petty thieves.
Do you wanna see the house again? he asks after we find the book.
Lone Star Page 18
