The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “We haven’t been together for years,” I said.

  “I know he moved out—”

  “Agnes, Gordon has a new lover. Someone he lives with. In fact, the lover’s not even all that new. They’ve been together for more than a year now.”

  “Lover,” Agnes said vaguely. She twisted one of the pot holders as if she were trying to wring it dry. “It’s like Davis getting remarried, isn’t it?”

  I resented the comparison. Even Gordon didn’t deserve to be compared with Davis. “Well. . .”

  “But if you look at it the right way, it’s a relief. I’m relieved Davis is getting remarried. I really am.”

  She looked relieved, even uneasily happy. She had on a belted green dress that brought out the color of her eyes and showed off her legs. Although she frequently covered them up, Agnes’s legs were her best feature, pretty and unexpectedly shapely. She looked around the room, from the windows to the doorway, to make sure we were completely alone. “I want to tell you something,” she finally said, “about. . . Dad.” She went to the bookcase and moved the fake fern a fraction of an inch to the right, stared at it from a different angle, and moved it back. “I’m glad he’s not here, Clyde. I know he wouldn’t have come even if I had invited him, but I’m glad I didn’t invite him. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy myself for one minute.”

  I looked over at her, standing there beside the bookcase, nervously fidgeting with the phony plant. For years, I’d been waiting to hear her acknowledge some flicker of doubt about our father, encouraging her to utter some word of criticism that wasn’t framed as a concern about his health, but now that she had done so, I felt oddly alone, as if she’d abandoned me in the middle of a crowded train station.

  “About that nurse of his,” I started.

  “I know all about her,” she said. “I’ve known all along.”

  “You figured it out?”

  “He told me,” she said. “He told me about her, but he made me promise I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “But, Agnes, he told me himself, months ago. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t care about that. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. What matters is that I told you. Now he doesn’t have it hanging over our heads.”

  There was a loud crash from the kitchen, a heavy pan hitting the floor, and Donald shouted one of his odd, invented curses. “I hope Barbara didn’t do that,” Agnes said, and hurried out.

  I sank back into the chair and stared at the birds flying above the autumnal field, so absurdly close to the ceiling that they appeared about to fly right into my apartment upstairs.

  “I’m sorry we don’t have a dinner table,” Donald said, “but I nearly went broke on the rest of the furniture. Or let’s just say I would have gone broke if I hadn’t maxed out my credit cards.”

  He’d lined up the platters and bowls of food on the coffee table, and we had served ourselves and were eating with the plates balanced on our laps. Donald and Agnes were sitting on the love seat, their shoulders pressed together. The only time I could remember seeing Agnes and Davis actually touch in public was when they’d been instructed to kiss by the priest who married them. And even that had been an awkward, embarrassing moment; Agnes had stepped on the hem of her dress and lurched toward Davis, and he’d ended up kissing her abruptly and grudgingly.

  “I think this is much more comfortable,” Agnes said. “It’s like a big picnic.”

  “I hate picnics,” Barbara said.

  For once, Agnes had convinced Barbara not to wear her overalls. Instead, my niece was squeezed into a denim dirndl that came down to the middle of her thighs and, underneath, a pair of black tights with great jagged holes in the knees and the shins.

  “Oh, honey, you’re just saying that. You used to love them. When your father was away on business, I’d pack a basket, and you and I would go out to Salem Willows, right by the ocean. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember we saw someone get shot there.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Donald said. “I’ve never been near the place.”

  Agnes jabbed a potato with her fork and dropped it onto Donald’s plate, mumbling something about the weight she’d gained since they’d started going out. Donald cut the potato in half and stuffed it into his mouth.

  “We never saw anyone get shot, honey. We heard the gun go off, and we didn’t find out about the murder until later. But you used to beg me to take you there. You’d go picking wildflowers and bring me a little bouquet. My allergies must have been better in those days.”

  “That whole idea is so humiliating, Mom. What kind of freak would pick wildflowers for her mother?”

  Otis was sitting in front of the coffee table with his eyes glued to the turkey, apparently waiting for the right moment to sink his teeth into it and carry it off, bones and all. I reached down to pat his head, and when he turned around and looked at me longingly, I slipped him a thread of meat from my plate.

  “Hey, Clyde,” Donald said, “what do you think of this: I’ve been trying to talk your sister into coming to work at the clinic.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Well. Long commute, isn’t it?”

  “It’s only half an hour,” Agnes said. “Nearly everyone at West-Woods commutes to the city.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve never been entirely clear what you do there. At the clinic.”

  Donald put his plate down on the coffee table, mopped at his mouth with a napkin, and commenced an impassioned tirade against minoxidil, hair transplants, and a variety of gruesome surgical procedures, all of which he described in minute detail. “That’s what we don’t do,” he said, and for the next twenty minutes, he related the finer points of The Program, the foundation of treatment at the clinic. Each patient was first given an in-depth evaluation, in which strands of hair were plucked from the head and sent to a laboratory in Duluth for analysis. The Program itself consisted of a series of treatments that began with scalp massages, shampoos, heat caps, and ice-water rinses and progressed to ultraviolet lamps, injections of herbal extracts, and electric shocks from something Donald affectionately called the “stun gun.” Most patients were expected to show up three times a week for half-hour sessions. “But only for the first year,” he assured me.

  “What kind of license do you need for this?” I asked. I was still trying to picture the “stun gun.”

  “Driver’s,” Barbara mumbled.

  “Donald has degrees from the Trichological Association of America,” Agnes said.

  “It’s a Swiss organization,” he told me.

  Each patient was given an individualized at-home hair-care regime for the few hours a week when they weren’t at the clinic, a series of scalp tonics and shampoos, follicle stimulators and deep-breathing exercises. When I suggested that the home program sounded like a full-time job, Agnes dropped another potato onto Donald’s plate and said, “Well, Clyde, it all depends on your priorities. If you cared more about your appearance, you wouldn’t mind washing your hair every once in a while.”

  “I’m going to shave every hair off my head,” Barbara said, “and have my scalp tattooed with a picture of a guy giving the finger to the world.”

  Donald burst out laughing. “Call me if you do, kid. We can use your photo for one of our ads: Don’t let this happen to you.”

  Later in the day, while we were lingering over cups of instant coffee Agnes described as “Vienna Mint Almond Mississippi Mud Mochaccino,” Donald carried the dinner plates into the kitchen and returned wielding a platter with what looked like a chocolate-covered brick in the middle. He set it down on the coffee table and looked at it doubtfully. Agnes lit up. “Mom’s Peanut Butter Holiday Roll!” she exclaimed.

  “That’s what it’s supposed to be, but I gotta tell you, I couldn’t get the damned thing to roll as much as your mother suggests.”

  I had a slim memory of this recipe—a jar of peanut butter, eight or nine different kinds of sweeteners, a pound of margarine, a few boxes of smashed-up
cereal and assorted crackers, all rolled together and coated with a can of watered-down frosting.

  Donald sawed off four thin slices and served them. My slice was surprisingly heavy, like some dense metal used by NASA. It lay on the plate, an unwholesome shade of brown, slick and damp, as if it were sweating or oozing oil.

  Donald coughed over his first forkful and put down his plate. “Heavy on the sugar,” he said. “I wonder what that Julia Child’s going to make of this item. Maybe we should leave it out when I give her the book.”

  Agnes looked at her plate sadly, then put it down.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Donald put one of his big arms around her and pulled her close. “What is it, sis?” he asked.

  “I don’t care what it tastes like. Making that was one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me.”

  “It’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever eaten,” Barbara said. But she passed her plate and asked for a second helping.

  Later in the afternoon, Barbara and I went upstairs to feed Otis. She carried him in her arms with his head on her shoulder, as if he were a baby, his hind legs tucked against the incipient roll of her stomach. “I’m turning into a blimp,” she said as we climbed the stairs. “Have you noticed?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I haven’t.”

  “Really? Then maybe I’m not. Not that I care one way or the other. Sometimes I’d like to turn into a huge, sloppy pig, so disgusting everyone would want to throw up just looking at me.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. I opened the door to the apartment, and Barbara set Otis on the floor. He embraced her leg, begging her to pick him up again. “Look at that. You’re trying to be a menace, and even fifteen-pound dogs love you.”

  She stooped down on the floor, the holes in her leggings stretching open wider, the pale flesh of her legs bulging out more. She let Otis lap at her face. “If my mother and Donald get married, I hope they wait until I’m seventeen and have moved out. I don’t think I could take twenty-four hours a day with him.”

  She picked Otis up again and carried him into the kitchen, sat down on one of the chairs by the phone, and put her galoshes up on the table. She started to leaf through Sheila’s appointment book, with a look of disgust. “If I wanted to get into college, I could, you know. It’s not like ‘They’ll never let me in’ or anything. They’ll let anyone in, as long as you meet the age requirement.” The answering machine was blinking, and she hit the playback button. “As soon as I turn seventeen, I think I’m going to move into some kind of dyke commune—” But she was cut off by my father’s recorded voice.

  “Clyde. Where’s your sister? It’s two in the afternoon. Tell your sister to get the hell up here. I need her to take me to the hospital. I think I had a stroke.”

  His voice was calm, not that much different from the way it always sounded, although perhaps a little more shaky. I checked my watch. It was after three. Barbara and I looked at each other for a moment.

  “Want me to play it again?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell anything from his voice. Wary as I was, a knot tightened in my stomach. I picked up the phone and dialed his number. It rang five times, and then his answering machine picked up. He didn’t have a message, just a long silent pause and then the beep.

  “What do you think?” I asked my niece.

  “Hard to say. He could be faking or he could be dead.”

  “You shouldn’t joke. Why do you suppose he didn’t have Diane take him?”

  “Maybe she dumped him. Should I go get Mom?”

  I thought it over for a few minutes as I paced around the kitchen, with Otis’s black eyes following my every step, and decided to go north on my own. If it was a crank call, there was no need to spoil Agnes’s day with it. And if it wasn’t, there was no reason I couldn’t take care of things as efficiently as my sister. I told Barbara to tell Donald and Agnes I’d gone off to see a movie.

  “Better tell them it’s a long one,” I said. “Very long.”

  AFTER BARBARA HAD GONE DOWNSTAIRS, I called my father again, and once again the only answer was the silent, portentous machine. The heat came on in the apartment—a deep whirring from somewhere in the basement and then a blast of warm stale air that blew up from the grate in the floor and sent the dust balls into a frenzy. It was drizzling now, and what little light there had been all day had thinned to lifeless gray. From the kitchen window, I could see the back porches of the triple-decker houses up and down the street and their muddy backyards, in one of which a muddy, miserable German shepherd, tied to a stake in the ground, barked at nothing in particular, his breath coming out in puffs. A dog in the rain in late November, not a cheering sight. I stood over the grate and let the heated air drive away a chill.

  There was a chance that my father actually had been stricken. Ever since he’d reached his current inconclusive level of incapacitation, my chief fear had been that he might die before we had a chance to work things out, resolve our differences, and acknowledge the mutual love dormant under the crust of hostility. I hated to admit as much to myself, possibly because I didn’t like the image of me it conjured up, dangling somewhere at the end of a thin thread of hope. But ultimately, who can resist hope, especially when it’s hope for something as amorphous and meandering as love? Gordon had spelled it out for me all too clearly.

  I’d heard plenty of stories of deathbed reunions and tearful final moments in which the family gathers around the gasping stern patriarch and all sins and slights are forgiven, anger is washed away, and blessings are handed out like chocolates. Even spiritual awakenings frequently occur in the final moments. There’s a long list of famous hedonists who renounced their worldly ways with their last breath and were discovered with their cold, stiff fingers wrapped around a crucifix.

  Otis was sitting on a chair with his head hung down, watching my every move, anticipating abandonment.

  “Don’t give me that look,” I told him. “I’m not in the mood.”

  He sighed deeply, one of those mournful, longing sighs that seemed to fill his whole body with misery.

  “You can come if you want,” I told him. “You can go in my place, for that matter. But don’t complain if you end up getting left in the car for hours.”

  I put on a raincoat and ran upstairs to my study. I’d left the envelope containing the lease Taff had given me on top of a bookcase. I stuck it in my vest pocket and headed out.

  As we pulled away from the curb, Otis stood up on the seat with his paws on the dashboard, panting and wagging his tail, checking out what had become familiar surroundings from a new perspective. It wasn’t until we got onto the highway that he settled down on the seat and curled into a ball, his eyes trained on me. Then I realized that I had brought him not for his own sake—because I didn’t want to leave him alone in the apartment—but because there was something in all that devotion and unconditional love drifting over from the other side of the front seat that I desperately wanted.

  There was no traffic, and no cops were in sight. It was just the empty highway for miles, lined with slick, stripped trees and empty, ugly housing developments and shopping malls. My vision was blurred by the rain on the windshield and the fog on my eyeglasses. I took the glasses off and followed the loud lines along the pavement.

  Surely if one of those deathbed conversions was good enough for God, it ought to be good enough for me.

  Since this visit might technically count as an emergency, I felt justified in forgoing the visitors’ lot routine and pulled into Agnes’s driveway. I snapped Otis’s leash in place and gave him a little tug to goad him out of the car. But as soon as we stepped onto the macadam, I heard the grinding rumble of the electric garage door. The garage door was one of the many supposedly modern conveniences that were part of the real estate package and general West-Woods “lifestyle,” and like many of the conveniences, it had never really worked the way it was supposed to. I stood in the drizzle, coat clutched to my chest, and w
atched as the door made its agonizingly slow ascent. At the far end of the garage, my father came slowly into view: feet encased in polished black shoes from the fifties, legs in green work pants, broad chest, and, finally, grim, scowling face, bottom lip folded down in disappointment, disapproval, and disgust.

  By the time the door had shuddered to a stop, I knew I’d made yet another error in judgment.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “What am I doing here?” It was a good question, and for a moment I felt thoroughly confused. “Well, I don’t know. I got a message on my machine saying you’d had a stroke.”

  “Don’t stand out there shouting! You think I want the neighbors hearing all that?”

  Overcoming the urge to turn and run, I stepped into the damp concrete bunker. When he moved out of his house after my mother’s death, my father had sold the bulk of their furniture. What remained was stored in Agnes’s garage, suspended on ropes from bolts he’d put into the ceiling. It was hanging above my head, all those chairs and bed frames, furnishings familiar from childhood. Otis had become adept at being led around on his leash, but he chose that moment to turn stubborn. I had to drag him behind me, and I could hear his nails scraping along the cement floor.

  “And you didn’t get a message saying I’d had a stroke,” my father said. “You got a message saying I thought I might have had a stroke and to tell Agnes to get up here. I made a mistake. It was probably just indigestion. Where is she?”

  “She’s still in Cambridge.”

  “Well, that says it all, doesn’t it? I have a stroke, and she’s too busy with her boyfriend to come and take me to the hospital. Christ almighty. Some holiday. What the hell is that?” he asked, pointing to Otis.

  “He’s the dog I’m taking care of, for the kid who sometimes answers the phone.”