I wasn’t his father. Bobby Swiss was.
III
Adam showed me how to get onto the Internet. The door to his room was open when I passed by and I stopped, stared in. He was at his desk, the computer screen glowing in front of him.
He turned, smiled.
“What’s up, sport?”
“Browsing.”
I leaned against the doorjamb. “Surfing?” I was showing off. I knew the term.
“C’mere. I’ll show you. I’m downloading an article off the Web.”
The Web. Magic words to me. Information out of nowhere.
“It’s on Madagascar,” he said. “Amazing place. Fourth largest island in the world. A micro-continent. It broke off from Africa 125 million years ago and drifted into the Indian Ocean. The people of Madagascar are called the Malagasy.”
“This is what you’re doing?” My smile mocked him good-naturedly. “When you could be watching TV?”
“Right.”
“Where did this all come from?”
“We studied it in anthropology last year.”
I’d lost track. “I didn’t even know you took anthropology.”
“It was one of my options. They make you take options. Try to broaden you.”
“Must be awful.”
“Terrible.” He smiled. “But every now and then some stuff sticks.” He looked at me. “Don’t tell any of my friends I was doing this on my summer vacation. It wouldn’t look good.”
“Course not.” I frowned. “What would people think?”
“Exactly.” He sat back. “What would you like me to find for you, Leo? I’ll show you how to use it.”
I didn’t know. I had to think.
We played around for quite a while before I got rolling, and then I typed in “1960 Chevrolet Impala,” my first car, just to see.
“1960 Chev,” Adam said. “Jeez. Talk about anthropology. This is a dig. This is archaeology.”
The search engine produced a list of them. We visited several sites. Some had them for sale, others listed specs, etc. Fascinating. I saw myself behind the wheel. I saw myself a kid again.
The past: 125 million years or thirty-five years. Bits of it could be retrieved, examined. Once again, I envied Adam his chance at an education—something I had missed.
I saw myself driving that Chev, through Detroit, through Toledo, through Ohio, to Dayton.
Dad’s old room needed painting. When Jeanne and I rolled up the rug in there, I saw her pick something up, turn it over, examine it. “What’s this?”
It was a tiny wire brush, about three inches long, white bristles at each end. It was bent, twisted. I knew what it was.
“It’s used to clean an electric razor.”
Jeanne didn’t say anything. She handed it to me.
I was kneeling on the floor. I sat back on my heels, held it.
The next morning, the red garnet ring had moved from the ashtray to the dresser. The razor brush was gone.
He was in the room. He was under the rug. In the tackle box behind the furnace.
I didn’t know where he was.
But I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t escape it. I knew what I had to do.
IV
That year I started my four weeks vacation the last week of July. Jeanne’s three weeks wouldn’t begin until the first of August. When I told her that I was going to Dayton by myself, she looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What are you talking about?”
“Three days,” I said. “I’ll drive. I think I can do it in three days—there and back.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Maybe four. I’ll be back before your holidays.”
She shook her head slowly, uncomprehending. Her eyes clouded.
“Four hundred miles or so. I’m guessing.”
We were in the kitchen. She sat down, finally stared at me. “What’s going on in your head?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to explain it.
“I have to,” I said.
She waited.
“By myself.”
She lowered her head, pressed her brow with the palm of her left hand. Slowly, she nodded.
“I’ve been having dreams,” I said.
“I know.”
It was my turn to nod. Of course she knew. Then: “I’d like to see Bobby Swiss.”
“Oh, Leo.”
“Before Adam does.”
She looked sad.
“I don’t want Adam to get hurt,” I said.
“He’s twenty-one. He’s a big boy.”
She was right. “This is for me.”
Her eyes deepened. “It was more than twenty years ago, Leo. A lifetime. What are you thinking?”
“It’s not that.” I shook my head. “It’s the dreams.” Impossible to explain, I thought.
But Jeanne waited, patient.
“I need to be alone.”
The silence expanded. Floating between us, I saw the chipped lamp, the ring, the electric razor. A young man in a Dublin pub. The Greyhound Bus Station in Dayton.
“Alone with my father,” I said.
She sat back, looked at me.
“And Adam’s.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “Are you okay, Leo?” The Kentucky drawl that I loved. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know what to tell you. I just have to chase this. It won’t go away.”
“We’re still okay? You and me?”
“We’re wonderful.”
She smiled.
I wondered how to say it. I wondered how to tell her that the past had moved inside me, that I had to take it back where it belonged.
“To Dayton?”
I nodded. “To Dayton.”
That was Saturday. I told Adam that I had to go to Cincinnati to see Uncle George, Aunt Amanda’s husband, that he needed financial help with his business.
I left Monday morning.
PART TWO
The Music
The ancestors come into our homes like guests who need no invitation.
—Saying of the Malagasy of Madagascar
EIGHT
I
Dixie. The name conjures up magnolia blossoms, the Deep South. Yet Toronto has a Dixie too—or did have. Just northwest of the city, in what is now suburban sprawl, the village of Dixie sprang up in the early 1800s at the crossroads of Cawthra and Dundas. It wasn’t called Dixie immediately. It had to gestate through Fountain Hill, Sydenham, Oniontown, until a local doctor, Beaumont Dixie, donated land for a chapel. Buffalo Bill Cody himself, of Wild West fame, was baptized in that very Dixie Union Chapel. The chapel is still there, but the village is gone, buried beneath strip malls and six lanes of traffic.
In the back of a drawer at home, I have an old receipt, for cemetery plot number 620, in Peace Mount Cemetery, Dixie, Ontario, dated February 21, 1926. It’s for the sum of twenty-five dollars, received from Martin Radey.
Martin Radey was my mother’s father, my maternal grandfather. He died in 1950. He and his first wife, Maggie, who died in January of 1926, are buried there.
Besides her children, my mother, who died in 1984, has no more living relatives. Her brother, Jack, disappeared back in the thirties. A few summers ago, for the first time, my brother Dennis and I visited plot 620, out of curiosity. There was no monument, no marker of any kind, just a shallow impression in the earth between two other stones. Except for us, no one knows—or cares—that they’re there.
On the 401, heading southwest out of Toronto, I passed Dixie Road. It came back to me: my brother and I standing there on the grass, the August sun beating down on us, staring downward, puzzled that no one had ever mentioned that there was no stone, no indicator of any kind.
But they are there. My grandparents. In an unmarked grave. I could feel them as I drove by, off to my right, slightly to the north.
I was
going south. Into the past.
Shortly before Windsor, still on the Canadian side, I stopped and had the number six McNuggets Meal at a McDonald’s.
The signs said “Bridge to USA—left,” and “Tunnel to USA—right.” I went left—up and over. The high road. On the bridge, cars crawling, the afternoon sun was a white- hot light on the Detroit River below.
Traffic stopped. I hung there, suspended, in my 1993 Honda Civic coupe. I pretended I was in my 1960 Chev. The road beneath me vibrated, throbbed, wiggled.
Route 75 South, from Detroit to Toledo: smokestacks, steam, factories. Refinery vats on the right, the Ford plant on the left. Hydro towers marching along beside me for miles, sentinels, four arms spread.
Bob Evans, Super 8. A steady stream of eighteen-wheelers.
Factories gave way to farmland. Flat, nothing. I pulled the visor down to shade my eyes.
Near Monroe, there was a sign that said “Dixie Highway.” The past was still with me, everywhere.
Coffee at a Speedway Service Center in Monroe. The place was full of smoke. I dawdled, looked for maps, but they were all out.
“Ohio Welcomes You to the Heart of It All.” The road, which had hummed and clicked evenly from Detroit, smoothed, silent. I was somewhere else, somewhere new. This was different.
Toledo hovered, a barrier to Ohio.
I saw the first sign for Dayton as I circumvented the city, then a dozen more (“75 South—Dayton”) leading me around it, steering me past false exits, distractions, pulling me south. At the tip of Toledo, the three lanes became two, the road simpler. I was being funneled, drawn down purposefully, toward Dayton.
A new sign told me it was 135 miles.
A string of geese: a V on the horizon. The bumper sticker ahead: “Pray Hard and Live.”
The sun fading on my right-hand side.
Exit 181: Bowling Green and Bowling Green State University. I didn’t want to drive in the dark. I wanted to see everything.
I took the exit.
II
I don’t know what made me pull into Bowling Green. I knew it had something to do with the name itself. It was a name I’d heard of. In fact, I even knew there was another one: a Bowling Green, Kentucky. Maybe that was the one I’d heard of. I wasn’t sure.
A college town: Burger King, Big Boy, Best Western, Ranch, McDonald’s. I drove west along the exit road from 75, on Wooster, past the university, stopped at an unnamed store whose windows were covered with ads for Marlborough Country, Budweiser, Camel, Virginia Slims. I took six cans of Miller High Life from the cooler, paid the girl behind the counter, put them in the trunk of my car, got in and drove back along the route I’d just traveled into town.
I ate dinner at Chi-Chi’s. I had the chimichangas and a beer, watched three blond college kids drink margaritas, enjoy a life I had never known.
“Where are you?”
“Bowling Green, Ohio. I’m in a Days Inn.”
A hesitation. “You’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m even sipping a cold beer.”
“Wait a minute. I’ll get one. I’ll join you.”
It was 9 P.M. I smiled, waited. Pictured her running to the fridge. Wondered if I’d been crazy leaving her behind.
She was back. A drink, a sigh. For my benefit. “That’s better.”
“Isn’t this great?”
“About time you called. I’ve been waiting all evening to have a beer with you.”
“What kind have you got?”
“Sleeman’s.You?”
“Miller High Life.” I studied the can. “The Champagne of Beers.”
“Big shot.”
“Jet-setter.”
We listened to each other breathe, smile.
“Days Inn,” she said.
“When I asked them how much it was at the Best Western down the road, they asked if I had AAA membership. I said I did. The price dropped ten percent.”
“Very shrewd.”
“They never even asked for proof.”
“And now, there you are, drinking beer, in the privacy of your very own room.”
“A king in his castle.”
“You watching dirty movies on the porn station?”
“At a Days Inn? Fat chance. Even if they were here, I couldn’t watch them by myself. You’d have to be here with me. I’d get too nuts. What’re you doing?”
“Cleaning the house. When you’re gone, I clean like a wild woman.”
“So the house’ll be beautiful when I get back.”
“It was beautiful when you left.”
“I mean more beautiful.”
“That’s better. Maybe I’ll leave the dishes for you.”
“They’re mine. Let ’em pile up. I love the dishes.”
“Thank God somebody loves them.”
“Keep Adam away from them.”
“Right.”
“Be a shame if he did them.”
“Did I hear you say ‘fat chance’ earlier?”
I took another sip of beer. I could feel her on the other end. Like I could reach out and touch her. Maybe, I thought, this is phone sex. Without the sex.
“How far are you from Dayton?”
“About two hours, I think. I’ll be there before noon tomorrow.” Another pause. “I’m right across from Bowling Green State University. It’s enormous. I want to look at it a bit in the morning, before I go.”
“I wish I were with you.”
“You’d be bored.”
“With you? Are you kidding? Have you forgotten my traveling bag, all those places, already?”
I was quiet. I hadn’t forgotten. I could never forget.
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It had been four years earlier, in September—another trip four hundred miles or so. We were veterans of the Niagara Falls Romantic Getaway (“2-night package, Jacuzzi and fireplace suite, walking distance to the Falls”); Niagara was only ninety miles from home. In fact, my grandmother, Nanny, had gone there on her honeymoon with Bampi in 1904. They’d gone in a horse-drawn wagon, one week before her nineteenth birthday. Nanny was three months pregnant with my father.
But we wanted to crank it up a notch. And after Vegas, what was left?
Jeanne heard folks talking about the Pocono Mountains in the cafeteria at work. We had to look them up in our road atlas: northeastern Pennsylvania, eighty miles from Philadelphia, two hours out of New York City.
She got the number through Information, then phoned the Pennsylvania Visitors’ Bureau. They flooded us with brochures. We found what we were looking for.
Mount Airy Lodge seemed to be as good as any. The Regency, The Golden Suite, The Villas, The Executive Suite, The Princess Suite, The Monarch Towers, and The Crystal Palace Suite. We booked the most expensive, the most elaborate.
“But we don’t need all of that.”
“We don’t need any of it. This isn’t about need.”
She looked at me.
“We didn’t need Elvis either.”
I had her.
It was The Crystal Palace Suite: your ow
n private swimming pool, right in your room. The absolutely essential heart-shaped double Jacuzzi bath. A Swedish sauna and custom-designed shower for two. Log-burning fireplace. The king-sized, round bed. Skylights. Stereo and fridge. And a completely private, outdoor garden courtyard.
Need? What were we talking about?
We took the Friday off work, left early, drove, pulled in late the same day. Friday night and Saturday night. Meals included. We drove home all day Sunday.
Dinners were at an assigned table opposite honeymooners who looked like children to us. The cuisine: upscale airplane food; the service brisk. Live entertainment, dancing: piano, bass, drums. “Memories.” “You Are My Hero,” “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” “Your Momma Don’t Sing and Your Daddy Don’t Rock and Roll.” The announcement of a thirty-eighth birthday, a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Breakfasts were equally curious; beside us: he spoke little English, she didn’t care. Both mornings he ate like a man starved, her hands shook from their nightly bacchanalia.
There was no typical couple.
We used every part of our suite, every part of the lodge. We played billiards, took walks, drives, swam naked in our very own pool, sweated in our private sauna, lolled in the heart-shaped tub, ate smoked salmon, cheese, drank Caesars, white wine, red wine, slept when we wanted. And we made love. As often as possible. In every part of our multifaceted nest.
We’d been trying to get Jeanne pregnant ever since that blinding, sunny day in Las Vegas, when Elvis gave her away, but nothing had happened. And every now and then, when confiding in close friends, we’d hear variations on the same advice:
“You just need to get away. Relax.”
“The Greek Isles. You need to go to the Greek Isles.”
“Timing. It’s all timing.”
“It never happens when you want it to. It’s always an accident.”
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 34
