The Holiday Season

by Michael Knight

  I’d planned to go on home and come back in the morning but I made up my mind then and there to spend the night. It seemed like the right thing. And my place wasn’t much besides. I was on the road enough that it didn’t make sense to spend a lot on rent so I kept a room in what amounted to a boardinghouse here in town. I liked the idea of sleeping in my old bed. The posters and pennants on the walls, all left over from my boyhood. The musty blankets. There was still a working phone on the nightstand. I wasn’t ready to pack it in so I called Ted.

  “It’s late,” he said, after I’d identified myself. “We’ve got kids here, pal. The girls are out by eight o’clock.”

  “I just wanted to check in.”

  “How’s Dad?”

  “He’s all right,” I told him. “A little down, you know, but all right. Don’t forget to call tomorrow.”

  In my pocket, I found the ID tag. I’d forgotten it was there.

  “I’m not an idiot,” he said.

  “It’s just that you sounded pissed last week.”

  “To be honest, I was pissed. I am pissed. I think I have a right to be pissed that my father doesn’t want to visit his granddaughters on Thanksgiving. We’ve come to him every holiday since the girls were born. I miss Mom, too, but I have a family to think about. It’s been three years.” Ted paused, took a breath. “And you’re not doing anybody any good humoring him. You should be here, Frank, not holding his hand. I’m your brother. You haven’t even been over to check out my new house.”

  “I’ve been busy. I’ve been out of town.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right. He’s a grown man, Frank. You’re both grown men.”

  I stretched out on the bed, clipped the ID tag between my teeth. How familiar all this was—the spongy mattress, the window leaking a draft over my feet, my brother’s voice on the phone, my father snoring down the hall. Ted and I had shared that room until he went away to the University of Alabama. I’d gotten in the habit back then of calling him after everyone else had gone to bed, listening to his adventures, fraternity stuff and stuff with girls, nothing major, but it all seemed foreign and magical at the time.

  “I guess.”

  Ted said, “It’s true.”

  “He’s got this neighbor. This crazy French lady.”

  There passed a stretch of silence on the line.

  “I fail to see the relevance,” Ted said.

  In the morning, as promised, we visited my mother’s grave. It was cooler than the day before, cold enough to mist our breath, a suggestion that winter might at last be on its way to Alabama. Dad didn’t say a word about me sleeping over. For a long time, we stood there without speaking. I tried to think about Mom, tried to pray but I didn’t know what to ask of God. She was or was not in heaven by now and I had all these mixed feelings about religion to begin with. I tried, after a while, to empty my mind, to pay homage to my mother with silent meditation, but life kept creeping in. I couldn’t quit thinking about Ted, wondering if he was sorry that he wasn’t coming for Thanksgiving, and I was worried about what to tell Dad about Madame Langlois.

  My mother was originally from Baton Rouge, a big, Cajun-looking woman, dark hair, dark eyes, broad shoulders, just over six feet tall, though she disliked her size and lied about it on her driver’s license. She moved to Mobile to take a job at the Planned Parenthood Center here. The work was trying and turnover was quick and my mother was bright and capable. She was managing the center inside two years. That’s how she met my father. He was still practicing law back then, had agreed to do some pro bono stuff for Planned Parenthood. Decades later, when the cancer forced her out of work, Mom said to me, “The good news is I’ve seen the last of all those stupid, careless girls.” I’m still not sure if she was kidding. There was real bitterness in her voice. At the time, I believed she was angry at her illness, not her job, but I don’t know. That kind of work, there’s never any end in sight. It can’t help but wear a person down. In old pictures, the first thing you notice is my mother’s carriage, how proud-looking she was, how erect, even with two young sons hanging on her like chimpanzees. But her height worked against her over time and even before she got sick, she was stooping a little, as if leaning into wind.

  Back on the road, headed home, I asked, apropos of nothing, why Dad didn’t take another crack at national office. It’s not like he lost in a landslide. His opponent nipped him by 4 percent.

  “Well,” he said, then he went quiet a moment, gathered his thoughts. He kept his eyes on the windshield. “You have to remember I’d already been on the city council a long time so I’d made plenty of enemies. Even in the party. Plus, this district is pretty conservative, you know that. They wanted a moderate to run against the Nazis that pass for Republicans in this part of the state. Plus, I’m sixty-six years old.” He switched on the radio, spun the dial, turned it off. “Plus, your mother—she was pretty disappointed.”

  When they got married, Dad had just hung out a shingle and he was taking a lot of court-appointed cases to stay afloat. The way I understood it, it was Mom’s idea for him to run for city council, not to win necessarily but to get his name out there, to give him a forum, which might drum up better-paying business. But he did win, to their surprise, and it turned out he liked having a say in how his city worked. I wondered if Congress wasn’t her idea as well.

  We drove a while in silence, past a church, a pawnshop, a Burger King. Then it was my father’s turn for non sequitur.

  “Your brother is a lucky man,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s making money hand over fist and he’s got Marcy. I hope he knows how lucky he is.”

  I thought about my brother’s wife, how beautiful she was, how unflappable with Ted and the girls. And I thought about the twins, Lily and Colleen, each a lovely and perfect replica of the other. And I thought about my brother, too, how he was always telling me, without actually saying the words aloud, that it was high time to get serious about my life.

  I said, “You had Mom.”

  “Your mother, who lived her whole life right, died at sixty. That’s not luck.”

  I could imagine several replies, all of them having to do with how fortunate my father was to have found someone to love at all, but it didn’t make sense to argue. I considered broaching the subject of Madame Langlois but before I could speak, my father bolted forward in his seat.

  “Turn here,” he said. “Here. Quick.”

  I followed his directions through a four-way stop.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to show you something. I was visiting your mother not too long ago and got turned around on the way home so I’m not a hundred percent. It’s here somewhere.” He was sitting on the edge of his seat, hands on the dashboard, eyes scanning out the window. “There,” he said. “Take this right.” He directed me to a nondescript brick rancher, told me to pull over at the curb. He was out of the car and on the lawn before I had time to kill the engine. It took a moment to realize what it was he wanted me to see: what looked like a dollhouse in the grass, plantation style, maybe four feet tall, a miniature Cadillac parked out front.

  When I opened my door, I heard Elvis doing “Spanish Harlem.”

  “It’s Graceland,” my father said.

  “It’s what?”

  “Look in the windows. It’s an exact replica. The jungle room. The bathroom where he died. It’s Graceland down to the last detail.”

  I walked over and peeked inside. There was an Elvis doll in a sequined Vegas jumpsuit sprawled on a tiny leather couch, feet propped up like he was winding down after a show.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  “It’s up year-round. They pipe music in and everything.” Dad pointed at a speaker on a corner of the rancher. “Twenty-four hours a day, though I understand they turn the volume down at night. The neighbors just got used to it, I guess. I talked to the owners last time I was here. The wife grew up in Memphis. Nice people. Love Elvis, of course. The
y voted for me many times.”

  “I have no idea what to think about this.”

  “Isn’t it perfect?” my father said.

  Elvis sounded deep and sad as ever, just about right for that late November morn.

  While he napped, I raked and bagged and contemplated my father in his retirement. Dad made up his mind to call it quits in 1998, near the end of his last term, and his decision took everybody by surprise—his colleagues, his secretary, his sons most of all. He was still a young man, relatively speaking, and he had nothing particular in mind for the rest of his life and he refused to give anybody a reason. When we asked, he’d go on about how he was fully vested in his pension plan and we didn’t have anything to worry about. At first he took some pro bono cases and advised other lawyers now and then in their dealings with the city and I was happy for him. It looked like he was getting back to where he started in the world. That was something I could understand. At some point, however, he quit working altogether (it took Ted and me a while to arrive at this conclusion) and what I couldn’t figure was how he filled his days. He had no hobbies to speak of. Most of his friends were still employed so he wasn’t hanging out with them. I didn’t want to ask him what he did with all his time. It seemed intrusive, potentially embarrassing, but I was concerned. I had an image of him lounging in his recliner, drinking scotch in the middle of the day and watching the world go by on CNN.

  When I finished the leaves, I headed for Winn-Dixie, loaded up on basics: soup and cereal, bread and fruit, coffee and milk. That’s all Dad ever bothered with by himself, and pretty much all I could afford besides.

  Afterward, I stopped off at my place to pick up a change of clothes. I lived in a converted Victorian on Dauphin Street, four bedrooms in all, two up, two down, with a communal kitchen and TV room. The landlady, Mrs. Mauldin, kept one of the downstairs bedrooms for herself, some kind of tax dodge, a way to write off the mortgage or something, but she had another residence in Maryland and was hardly ever around. Next to her lived a deaf woman named Chloe Jones. She was always talking to herself, narrating, I supposed, her interior life. “I don’t know about hot dogs,” she might say when I passed her in the hall, her deaf woman’s voice all loud and glottal. Or, “I wish I was left-handed.” I figured it had something to do with her inability to hear, with the way she negotiated between thought and word and sound, but it’s possible she was merely strange.

  My room was on the second floor, down the hall from Lucious Son. He didn’t have a job as far as I could tell and he always had people coming and going and the air seeping out from under his door reeked so frequently of pot I was pretty sure that’s how he paid his rent.

  Lucious was practicing martial arts in the parking lot when I pulled in. His father was Korean, he’d told me, his mother from Trinidad, his fighting style a hybrid of techniques they’d taught him as a boy. He swiveled his hips and snaked his arms and hopped from foot to foot. None of it looked particularly dangerous.

  “Gimme some of that good stuff,” he said as I stepped out of the car.

  I thought about it for a second. The leafless trees. The pewter sky. The weird kung fu.

  I said, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile / This day shall gentle his condition / And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here / And hold their manhood cheap whiles any speaks / Who fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

  He’d overheard me rehearsing after I moved in and now he made requests.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said.

  He balanced on one foot, palmed his fist at about the level of his belly button and gave me a bow.

  I went on up to my room. There wasn’t much to look at. The old pine desk, the bookshelves stuffed with paperbacks, the scuffed and rugless hardwood floor. The radiator was off and it was cold. It felt like nobody had been in there for a long time.

  Dad started in on me as soon as I got home.

  “What the hell?” he said. “What’s wrong with you? I can’t believe you lied.” I mean his eyes were bulging, hands waving in the air. He caught me so off guard that it took a minute to get my head around what happened. Turned out Madame Langlois had called while I was gone to propose a change of plans: She was still cooking but she wanted to eat at our house instead of hers.

  “Goddamnit, Frank.” He followed me out to my Subaru while I retrieved another load of groceries. “You promised. I sounded like a fool.”

  I noticed then that he was holding a pair of penny loafers in his left hand, fingers hooked into the heels, like he’d meant to put them on but was so anxious to let me have it that he’d forgotten. His toenails were long and yellow. I thought his feet were probably cold. My car was ping-ping-pinging about its open door.

  I said, “Look, I’m sorry. You should have seen her. All alone in this robe. It had feathers on it, Dad. I couldn’t do it.”

  He just stared. Nothing can make you feel more like somebody’s kid than that look of disappointment. Then he stomped back up to the house and I started lugging the groceries in myself, thinking I was supposed to be there to spend time with my father, not humor Madame Langlois, thinking no way did a thing like this happen on my brother’s watch. That’s when the bottom tore out of one of the bags and three cantaloupes went bowling down the driveway. I managed to catch up to the first one but the second veered off and disappeared into the gutter, while the third raced toward Mohawk, where it exploded beneath the tires of a passing SUV.

  Four o’clock found me cleaning house. I’d always thought there was something sad about that hour, that season. It had to do with early nightfall and the encroachment of another year. Dad was holed up in his room with the door locked. I did the best I could but the vacuum cleaner didn’t work and I couldn’t find a dustpan and the house was pretty far gone besides. Mostly, I wound up hiding the mess in closets and under furniture or trying to organize it (what else was I supposed to do with all those back issues of the New Yorker?) into a neater semblance of itself. Madame Langlois was due at 5:30 and it was way too late to put her off and I had no ideas. I thought about calling Ted. He’d never have admitted it but I knew it would make him happy to hear that Thanksgiving had gone to hell without him, and I was pretty sure he’d know how to make things right, but I was embarrassed and I didn’t want to give him the pleasure. He was probably sitting down right that minute to a beautifully set table with his beautiful wife and his beautiful little girls, all of them done up like something from a Brooks Brothers catalog. Or maybe they’d already finished the meal and the house had settled into nap time, a fire burning toward embers in the hearth, a football game on TV with the volume turned down low. It was cheesy, sure, but it was so bewitching in my imagination that I was jealous of Ted and irritated with Dad for his unwillingness to compromise.

  Eventually, I gave up on the house and trudged upstairs, knocked on my father’s door. No answer, but I could hear NPR ticking off the headlines on his clock radio.

  “Dad?”

  Nothing.

  “Do you think Ted voted for Bush?” I said.

  I knew the answer and so did Dad but we’d just come through a messy election and I hoped politics would provoke a response. Ted’s politics in particular. I pressed my ear to the door. Somehow, the faint droning of the radio made the silence more pronounced.

  I said, “I know Marcy has a sticker on her Suburban,” but Dad held out.

  Back downstairs, I hunted up matching place mats, set the table for three just in case. I found some candles in the pantry. By the time I was finished, it was 5:15. Still no sign of Dad. I decided to tell Madame Langlois he wasn’t feeling well. It’d be just the two of us tonight. To steel myself, I poured a great big scotch and sat at the table, took a minute to catch my breath. I was wondering if there was more to my father’s reasons for avoiding Madame Langlois than personal distaste—he seemed almost afraid
of her— when Dad himself appeared in the doorway, wearing a blazer and tie. His hair was wet-combed like a kid.

  “I need one of those,” he said, aiming a finger at my drink.

  Madame Langlois was right on time. It took the three of us two trips to haul all that food in from her car. Turkey on a silver platter. Sweet potatoes. Stuffing. Bread. Some kind of fish and mushroom casserole in a Pyrex dish. Salad in a huge plastic bowl. She had made both pumpkin and pecan pie. She insisted that Dad and I take our places at the table while she did the final preparations.

  From the kitchen, Madame Langlois said, “I hope you do not mind. The casserole, it is French. I know this is your holiday but I love to see my American friends enjoy French food.”

  She said eet instead of it. Her accent seemed somehow even thicker than before.

  I waited a second, gave my father a chance to reply. He didn’t bother. Before I could speak, Madame Langlois was running on again.

  “I had the most wonderful day in the kitchen. It gives me such a pleasure to cook for men with their appetites.”

  Zee, she said. Geeves.

  I cut a look at my father, tried, with an eyebrow thing and a complicated smile, to let him know that I was in on the joke—sure, she was ridiculous—but also gratified that he and I had been able to make her happy in this small way. He looked away, sipped at the sauvignon blanc she’d poured. He screwed his face up at the taste and went back to scotch instead.

  “Your mother,” he said, “she used to drink merlot with everything. Red meat, white meat. It didn’t matter. She knew what she liked. She’d put a single ice cube in. She preferred it just a little chilled and watered down.”