Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Tell my dad he tries to control too much. He worries too much too,” Paul says. With his warty, tattooed hand he gropes down at his pleasure unit and gives it a delving scratch just like Irv, as though all lights were out and no one could see anyone. Then he sighs: great wisdom conferring great patience.

  “I’ll see he gets that message,” Dr. Tisaris says in an echoless, professional’s voice.

  And it is this voice that makes me wince, a not-small, mouth-skewing wince up from my knees, sudden and forceful enough that I have to clear my throat, turn my head away and gulp. Here is the voice of the outer world become primary: “I’ll see he gets that message; I’m sorry, that job’s filled; we’d like to ask you some questions; I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now.” And so on, and so on, and so on all the way to: “I’m sorry to tell you your father, your mother, your sister, your son, your wife, your dog, your- anybody-you-might-ever-know-and-love-and-want-to-survive has left, disappeared, been called away, injured, maimed, expired.” While mine—the silenced voice of worry, love, patience, impatience, comradeship, thoughtlessness, understanding and genial acquiescence—is the small voice of the old small life losing ground. The Hall of Fame—impersonal but shareable—was meant as the staging ground for a new life’s safe beginning (and nearly, nearly was) but instead has had itself preempted by a regional hospital full of prognoses, voices without echoes, cheery disinterest, cold hard facts impossible to soften. (Why is it we’re never quite prepared, as I’m not now, for our plans to work out wrong?)

  “Do you have any kids?” Paul asks sagely to his tanned doctor in a voice as echoless as hers.

  “Nope,” she says, smiling jauntily. “Not yet.”

  I should stay now, hear his views on child rearing, a subject he has unique experience with. Only my feet won’t hear of it and are inching back, shifting direction, then shoving off, getting out of range fast across the bullpen, headed for the doors, much as when I heard him years ago conferring ardently with his made-up “friends” at home and couldn’t bear it either, was made too weak and sick at heart by his inspired and almost perfect sufficiency.

  “If you have any,” I hear him say, “don’t ever—“ Then that’s it, and I am quickly out through the metal doors and back into the cool watery room for relatives, friends, well-wishers, where I now belong.

  By four Ann has not arrived, and Irv and I elect a walk out of the hospital, across the lawn and onto the summery afternoon streets of Oneonta, a town I never once for all my travels imagined myself in; never dreamed I’d be a worried father-in-waiting in, though that has been my MO for moons and moons.

  Irv has blossomed into even wider good spirits, the net effect of awaiting dire events that aren’t truly dire for him, that will make him sorry if things go bad but never truly bereaved. (Much like your Aunt Beulah’s second husband, Bernie from Bismarck, who takes it on himself to tell jokes at your grandfather’s funeral and in doing so makes everyone feel a lot better.)

  We troop purposefully out across the tonsured Bermuda grass and onto the warm sidewalk where hilly Main drops quickly toward town and is now much busier than when church was going. Here great shagbark hickories and American chestnuts, descendants of our central hardwood forest primeval, have bulged their roots through the aged, crumbly concrete and made strolling a challenge. Ranked along the descending street are old sagging frame residences built on the high ground above retaining walls, going gray and punky from the years and soon to be settling (if work’s not done and done soon) into perfect valuelessness. Some are deserted, some have American flags flying, a couple show familiar yellow ribbons, while others show signs that say FOR RENT. FOR SALE. FREE IF YOU MOVE IT. In my trade these are “carpenter’s specials,” “starter homes for newlys,” “not for everyone” homes, “mystery abounds” homes, “make offer” homes—the downward-tending lingo of loss.

  Irv, being Irv, means to take up an issue, and in this case the issue is “continuity,” which is what his life at least seems to him to be “all about” these days—recognizing, he willingly admits, that his concern may be “tied to” his Jewishness and to the need to strive, to the pressure of history and to a certain significant portion of his life spent on a kibbutz after his first marriage went down the tubes and wrecked continuity big-time, and where he harrowed the dry and unforgiving Bible land, read the Torah, served six nerve-racking months in the Israeli army and eventually married another kibbutznik (from Shaker Heights), a marriage that also didn’t last long and ended in scalding, vituperative, religiously dispiriting divorce.

  “I learned a lot in the kibbutz, Frank,” Irv says, his rattan sandals slapping the split pavement as we head down Main at a good clip. We seem by no particular design to be aiming toward a red Dairy Queen sign below on the Oneonta strip-commercial, a neighborhood where the houses stop and possibly it’s unsafe for strangers (a neighborhood in transition).

  “Everybody I know who went over there says it was pretty interesting, even if they didn’t like it much,” I say. I actually know no one but Irv who ever admitted to living on a kibbutz, and all I do know I read in the Trenton Times. Irv, though, is not a bad advertisement for the life, since he’s decent and thoughtful and not at all a pain in the ass. (I’ve now recalled Irv’s boyhood persona: the exuberant, accommodating, gullible-but-complex “big” boy who needed to shave way too early in life.)

  “You know, Frank, Judaism doesn’t have to be practiced just in the synagogue,” Irv says solemnly. “Growing up in Skokie, I didn’t always have that impression. Not that my family was ever devout in any way.” Slap-slap, slip-slap, slip-slop. Local toughs with local sweethearts notched under their bulging biceps are cruising East Main in hot-looking Trans Ams and dark, channeled S-10s. (No Monzas.) Irv and I stand out here like two Latvian rustics in native attire, which isn’t that uncomfortable since it’s our own country. (A common language alone should assure us entry-level acceptance anywhere within a two-thousand-mile radius of Kansas City, though pushing your luck could mean trouble, just like on a kibbutz, and we are now and then glared at.)

  “You have any kids, Irv?” I say, not at ease—continuity aside—with religious talk today, happier to be led elsewhere.

  “No kids,” Irv says. “Didn’t want kids, which is what shot my deal with the second wife. She remarried right away and had a bunch. I don’t even have any contact with her, which is too bad. They shunned me. You wouldn’t think that would happen.” Irv seems amazed but sorrowfully willing to accept life’s mysteries.

  “Self-sufficient thinking’s always in short supply in those kinds of places, I guess. Just like with the Baptists and the Presbyterians.”

  “I guess Sartre said freedom isn’t worth a nickel unless you can act on it.”

  “That sounds like Sartre,” I say, thinking all over again what I’ve always thought about hippie communes, Brook Farms, kibbutzes, goofball Utopian ideals of every stripe: let one real independent emerge, and everybody turns into Hitler. And if a good egg like Irv can’t make it work for him, the rest of us may as well stay where we are. I don’t know what this has to do with continuity, though I’m sure I should.

  We pass along by an old building with a dirty junk-store window display piled and jumbled with dented teakettles, wooden hotel coat hangers, busted waffle irons, bits of saddlery, snow tires, empty picture frames, books, lamp shades, plus a whole lot more crap heaped back on a shadowy concrete floor—stuff the last owner couldn’t give away when he went bust and just left. In the glass, though, I unexpectedly and unhappily see myself, in brighter colors than the junk but still dim and, to my surprise, a good half a head shorter than Irv and walking along in a semi-stooped posture, as if grasping forces were tightening strings and sinews in my gut, causing me to bunch up, humping my shoulders in a way I sure as hell never imagined myself and, now that I see, am shocked by! Irv, of course, is oblivious to his reflection. But I sternly brace back my shoulders and stiffen up like a clothes dummy, take a deep
chest breath, give myself a good erective stretching and work my head around like a lighthouse (not very different from what I did standing on the wall overlooking the Central Leatherstocking Region yesterday, but now with more cause). Irv meanwhile goes back to elaborating on his continuity concerns as we reach the bottom of the hill, passing a low-rent, two-desk real estate office, City of Hills Realty, whose name I don’t recognize from the signs I saw farther back.

  “Anyway,” Irv says, tramping right along, not noticing my furious stretching, opening a button on his gold cardigan to cool off in the warm afternoon. “Do you have a lot of friends?”

  “Not too many,” I say, my neck worked back, my shoulders squared.

  “Same here. Simulators only socialize as a group, but I’d rather take off for a long walk in the desert alone, or maybe go camping.”

  “I’ve become an amateur trout fisherman.” I walk a little faster now. Moving my shoulders and neck have also awakened an achiness where I was whacked by the baseball.

  “See? There you are,” meaning what I’m not sure. “How ’bout a girlfriend? You fixed up there?”

  “Well,” I say, and think an awkward thought about Sally for the first time in too long. I should definitely call South Mantoloking before she gets on the train. Recalculate our plans; aim for tomorrow. “I’m pretty set there, Irv.”

  “How ’bout marriage plans?”

  I smile at Irv, a man with two wives down and one on deck, a man who hasn’t seen me in twenty-five years yet who’s trying hard to console me against bad events by the honest application of his simple self to mine. Much of human goodness is badly undersold, take it from me. “I’m a bachelor these days, Irv.”

  Irv nods, satisfied that we’re in the same semi-seaworthy boat. “I didn’t really explain what I meant about continuity,” he says. “It’s just my Jewish thing. With other people it’s probably different.”

  “I guess so.” I’m picturing the ten separate digits of Sally’s phone number, counting the possible rings and her sweet voice in answer.

  “I’d think in the realty business you’d get a pretty good exposure to everybody’s wish for it. I mean in the community sense.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just continuity,” Irv says, smiling, sensing some resistance and maybe considering just letting the subject go (I would). We’re across the street from the DQ now, having homed in here through some mutual understanding we haven’t needed to voice.

  “I don’t really think communities are continuous, Irv,” I say. “I think of them—and I’ve got a lot of proof—as isolated, contingent groups trying to improve on an illusion of permanence, which they fully accept as an illusion. If that makes any sense. Buying power is the instrumentality. But continuity, if I understand it at all, doesn’t really have much to do with it. Maybe realty’s not that commanding a metaphor.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Irv says, pretty certainly not buying a word of it, though he ought to be satisfied since my definition of community fits right into a general notion of simulation as well as his personal bad experience on the kibbutz. (“Community” is actually one of those words I loathe, since all its hands-on implications are dubious.)

  I am braced up straighter now, almost as erect and tall as Irv, though he’s meatier from all his months with a Galil strapped to his back while hoeing the dry ground and keeping an eagle eye out for murderous, uncommunity-oriented Arabs.

  “Does that seem like enough, though, Frank? The illusion of permanence?” Irv says this committedly. It is a subject he no doubt wrangles over with everybody, and may be his true interest, one that makes his happy life a sort of formal investigation of firmer stuff beyond the limits of simulation; rather than like mine, a journey toward someplace yet to be determined but that I have good hope for.

  “Enough for what?”

  We’ve crossed to the DQ, which true to the old town is an “oldie” itself, in lackluster disrepair since Oneonta has yet to blossom into a destination resort. It’s nowhere as nice as Franks, though there are enough similarities to make me feel at home standing in front of it.

  “It’s still all tied up in my mind with continuity,” Irv says, arms folded, reading the hand-lettered menu board from where we’re stopped at the back of a short queue of native Oneontans. I scan down for a “dipped” cone, my all-time fave, and feel for just this fleeting moment incongruously happy. “I was remembering while I was waiting for you at the hospital”—Irv allows a look of good-willed perplexity to pass over his big Levantine mouth—“that you and I were around Jake’s house together while our parents were married. I was right there when your mother died. We knew each other pretty well. And now twenty-five years of absence go by and we bump into each other up here in the middle of the north woods. And I realized—I realized it pacing around up there worried about Jack and his eye—that you’re my only link to that time. I’m not gonna get all worked up over it, but you’re as close to family as anyone there is for me. And we don’t even know each other.” Irv, even as he’s making his ice cream choice, and without actually looking at me, lays his big, fleshy, hairy, pinkie-ringed hand heavily onto my shoulder and shakes his head in wonderment. “I don’t know, Frank.” He looks at me furtively, then stares hard at the big menu. “Life’s screwy.”

  “It is, Irv,” I say. “It’s screwy as a monkey.” I put my smaller hand on Irv’s shoulder. And though we don’t splutter forward and glom onto each other at the end of the DQ line, we do exchange a number of restrained but unambiguous shoulder pats and glance squeamishly into each other’s faces in ways that on any other day but this odd one would set me off up the hill at a dead run.

  “We’ve probably got a lot of things to talk about,” Irv says prophetically, keeping his heavy hand where it is, so that I feel forced to keep mine where it is, in a sort of unwieldy, arms-length non-embrace. Several Oneontans waiting in front of us have already cast threatening now-just-don’t-get-me-involved-in-this frowns our way, as though dangerously unsuppressed effusions were about to splash on everybody like battery acid, with violence a likely outcome. But this is as far as it’s going; I could easily tell them as much.

  “We might, Irv,” I say, not knowing what those things could be.

  A shadowy someone inside the Dairy Queen slides back the rickety glass on the SORRY CLOSED window and says from inside, “I can help you down here, folks.” The Oneontans all give us a hesitant look as if Irv and I might suddenly rush the other window, though we don’t. They turn back toward their own original window, consider it skeptically, then as a group all shift over to number two, giving Irv and me a straight shot to the front.

  On our way back up the hill we walk side by side, as solemn as two missionaries, I with my fast-dissolving “dip,” Irv with a pink “strawberry boat” that snugs perfectly into the palm of one big hand. He seems to be elated but containing his feelings of transcendence owing to the sober protocol of Paul’s (Jack’s) injury.

  He explains to me, though, that lately he’s been going through an “odd passage” in life, one he associates with getting to be forty-five (instead of being Jewish). He complains of feeling detached from his own personal history, which has eventuated in a fear (kept within boundaries by his demanding simulator work) that he is diminishing; and if not in an actual physical sense, then definitely in a spiritual one. “It’s hard to explain in literal terms and make it seem really serious or clear,” he assures me.

  I look upward when he says this, my sticky napkin squeezed into a tight dry ball in my palm, my jaw beginning to ratchet tight again after our respite. High above us, sea gulls circle dizzyingly and in great numbers on the clear afternoon air waves, framed by the old green hardwood crowns up the hillside, high enough to seem to make no sound. Why gulls, I wonder, so far from a sea?

  Fear of diminishment of course is a concept I know plenty about under the title “fear of disappearance,” and would be happy to know not much more. Though i
n Irv’s case it has occasioned what he calls the “catch of dread,” a guilty, hopeless, even deathly feeling he experiences just at the moment when anyone else in his right mind might expect to feel exultation—upon seeing sea gulls in dizzying great numbers on a matte of blue sky; or upon stealing an unexpected glimpse down a sun-shot river valley (as I did just yesterday) to a shimmering glacial lake of primordial beauty; on seeing unreserved love in your girlfriend’s eyes and knowing she wants to dedicate her life only to your happiness and that you should let her; or just smelling a sudden, heady perfume on a timeworn city sidewalk as you turn a crumbling corner and spy a bed of purple loosestrife and Shasta daisies in full bloom in a public park you had no reason to expect was there. “Little things and large,” Irv says, referring to whatever has made him feel first wonderful, then terrible, then lessened, then potentially canceled altogether. “It’s crazy, but I feel like some bad feeling is sort of eating away at me on the edges.” He jabs with his plastic spoon at the bottom of his corrugated pink boat and furrows his big-lug brows.

  To tell the truth, I’m surprised to hear this kind of dour talk out of Irv. I’d have guessed his Jewishness plus native optimism would’ve sheltered him—though of course I’m wrong. Native optimism is that humor most vulnerable to sneak attacks. About Jewishness I don’t know.

  “My view of marriage”—Irv has earlier admitted a strange unwillingness to tie the knot and make little hard-body Erma Mrs. Ornstein #3—“is that I’m still ready to go whole hog and lose myself in it, but really since about ’86 or so I’ve had this feeling, and this goes along with the dread, of just losing myself period, and in Erma’s case of maybe losing myself into the wrong person and being eternally sorry.” Irv looks over at me to see, I assume, if I’ve changed in appearance, having now heard his bitter admissions. “And I do love her, too,” he adds as a capper.