It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  Dad worked late each night. I’d come home from school and bake us both pot pies, leaving his in the oven to warm. He tried to act cheery when he came through the door, though he always looked rumpled, like he’d been in a wreck.

  His puns made less and less sense. “Another day, another dollop!” he’d chirp, a little too loudly.

  He couldn’t sleep. Finally, I talked him into seeing a doctor, who prescribed a mild sedative. He also diagnosed Dad as deeply depressed and urged him to see a therapist. Dad wouldn’t do it. “Waste of rainy-day pennies,” he mumbled. “He’ll just tell me to look ahead, forget the past. Hell, I know that stuff already.”

  Finally, I broke down and called my mother, but she wouldn’t talk to him, not even when I pleaded. “Kelly, I tried for years to get your father to lighten up. To march into life. He’s always been depressed. I can’t help him any more, and neither can you. You’ve got your own worries. How are your classes?”

  “Fine.”

  “You pull that math grade up?”

  “A little.”

  “Good.” Her voice softened. “I know things are hard now, son, but you mustn’t let anything affect your school success. And for goodness sakes, get out and have some fun. Are you dating anyone? Got a girl?”

  “No.”

  “You could do a little marching yourself.” She tsk-ed. “I’m afraid you’ve inherited your father’s shyness.”

  “Dad says it’s the Irishman’s curse.”

  “Shyness?”

  “He calls it ‘melancholy.’”

  “Well, I love the Old Country,” she said (she’d never been there), “but that part of its legacy I could definitely live without.”

  I promised her I’d work on getting out more.

  “In the meantime, you let your dad take care of himself,” she said.

  But he didn’t know how. Sometimes, when he met new colleagues through work, or found new golfing partners, he’d repeat the theater story, ending with the love of his life. He didn’t tell these people his wife had left him.

  As I listened, the story seemed to me now not the romance I’d always heard with delight but a catalog of failure. Failure to join his buddies on the battlefields. Failure to hold on to my mother.

  One afternoon, he said he was “hemmed in” by all “these damn Kellys”: my mother’s snooty family, his own father, who blamed the end of his marriage on the “moral lassitude” he’d shown since he was little. Even me.

  “If I never hear the name ‘Kelly’ again as long as I live, it’ll be too soon!” he yelled, waving his arm. I’d interrupted him in his studio while he was trying to paint. Some friends and I were convening at a movie. I needed cash.

  His portraits, copied from the film books, from celebrity magazines, hung like giant Hollywood posters on his dark-gray walls. He fumed, in a world of his own. “What the hell do you all want from me? Haven’t I paid and paid and paid?”

  “All right,” I answered. “It’s no big deal. I’ll borrow it from my pals.”

  That night he apologized. He’d waited up for me in the kitchen. It was after ten o’clock. The faucet dripped, as erratic as a faulty old heart. In the next room the TV shouted, “You gotta see it to believe it, friends! Lowest prices east of Pecos!”

  “What show did you see?” he asked me. He boiled a kettle of water for some tea.

  “A dumb mummy thing, at a second-run place. An old Boris Karloff.”

  “No good?”

  “Nah. I’d seen it before, on TV”

  He didn’t know what to say to make things better between us, except he was sorry he’d snapped at me. I told him to forget it, but even then I knew I’d never lose the memory of that afternoon. When he’d raised his arm in anger, his old wound had puffed up at me like the hood of a cobra.

  “I haven’t been to a movie in years,” he said quietly into his cup. “Never saw one I liked, even remotely. Well. That’s not true.” He tapped the tabletop. “There was one—Twelve, no, Ten Days That Shook the World, about the Russian Revolution?”

  “Don’t know it,” I said. “Why’d you like it?”

  “Oh, I enjoyed the battle scenes. They were exciting, the kind of thing I figured I’d missed in Europe. Truth is, I used to think—” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid, I used to think I might like to paint movie sets. Backgrounds, landscapes, those sorts of things.”

  “Like in the books you have?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t enjoy the films much, I just wanted a big audience for my work. When I ran the projector, I saw how amazed people were, staring up at the screen.”

  “Why didn’t you try it?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t good enough, really, I wasn’t….” He wagged his head again. He laughed. “The movies. I guess, finally, I never understood their appeal.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, the larger-than-life vistas, sure. That I can see. But sitting there with a batch of strangers in the dark, trapped in those flimsy old seats…”

  I had the feeling he was about to tell me something more, but he stopped right there. I swallowed my yawns in case he’d go on. He didn’t. Already he’d said more in one night than he usually did in a week. He rubbed his cheeks, badly in need of a shave, and finished his cold green tea.

  Matters of conscience. Matters of the soul.

  As I watch Cassie now, in her daddy’s lap, shaking gummy bears out of a box, I recall my grandfather’s sermons, his stern, judgmental stares, and experience as fury the fireworks bursting above me.

  I will hurt this man, I think, smiling at Clay. I will disrupt his family.

  And even as I think these things I want to reach out and shield him, to warn him about me.

  One day, early in our affair, as we stood together nearly popping out of our clothes with desire, Sharon and I agreed, in the way of all illicit lovers early in their affairs, “We can’t do this. We have to stop now.”

  Tonight, watching her face, I know: We are going to do this thing.

  It’s bigger than us. The emotion. The passion. Easy to say, and no less true for being clichéd.

  She’s been unhappy for years. “Clay’s a good man, but so damn passive,” she told me once. “He doesn’t know how to take care of me.” If I weren’t here, she’d leave him sooner or later anyway. Yes, probably so, I assure myself.

  But late at night, trying to sort through it all, I wind up thinking about my father, about an afternoon when I picked up a rock in his studio while he was mixing his oils. The rock was pretty, and I was studying its irregular shapes in the light. “Nothing special,” he told me. “Just sandstone.” He explained to me that one billion new grains of sand form on earth every second. Flakes of chipped stone, saltated in rivers. We can thank the wind and desert basins—atmospheric and geographical accidents, random luck—for the fact that we’re not all buried up to our necks.

  Now, his words linger when I think of Cassie, of Sharon and Clay’s marriage.

  Random luck.

  Irregular shapes.

  Thank the wind.

  “Say it!”

  “Mercy!”

  Dad spent most of the month after my high school graduation in the Kellys’ cabin on the river. Mom agreed to let him stay there as long as he wanted; she was busy in Oklahoma City tending to the Duffy’s empire and getting her picture in the papers.

  She’d begun appearing at Bricktown restaurants with a handsome up-and-comer, a potential gubernatorial candidate. He was tall and blond, and I hated him, just from his photos. We’d never met. I hadn’t visited Mom since she’d left us in Dallas.

  While Dad vacationed in the woods, I stayed behind to be with my friends—we’d be splitting up soon for college—but one Saturday I drove up to see him. He’d taken his Cutlass and left me the old Mustang, urging me to tune it up before I headed out. I didn’t (Mom never serviced the car either—“too busy,” she’d say, flitting off to a fund-raiser—another of my parents’ m
any flash points), and I made the trip just fine. When I arrived he was stacking firewood on the cabin’s front porch. He looked pale and thin to me, his hair grayer than I’d remembered. We sat by the river, sipping warm canned beer.

  He was dusty and unshaven, like the farmers in the fields around my grandfather’s church.

  “Are you going to swing through the city on your way back to Texas? See your mother?” he asked. He spoke of her cautiously, as if the energy of his words—any unintentional emphasis—might jar her from his mind.

  “Haven’t decided,” I said. “She’s hanging out now with that GOP geek.”

  He laughed. “Rich damn duffers. They own the whole state.” He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket. “My friends died in Europe so America could fall into the hands of these lousy sharks who turn right around and sell us out to Germany and Japan anyway. Isn’t that a kick in the ass? Is your mother happy?”

  “Beats me.”

  The subject of Mom made him fade. We listened to the water through the trees. I sipped my beer, stymied by our shyness—our melancholy—and idly poked a spider with a stick. It swiveled on whiskery legs. Dad pulled a nine iron from the trunk of his car and walked away from me, to plunk a few old balls into the weeds. He stirred up bees, squirrels, a couple of garter snakes, lazy and long.

  Inside the cabin, I saw he’d been painting. I loved the warm smells of the turpentine and the oils—always had—but the new work was gray and black and white. On the easel, half-finished, a portrait of Charlie Chaplin. He gripped a rose.

  I knew this pose: it was the famous scene from the end of City Lights, when Charlie’s true love, a blind girl who’s just had her sight restored by a miraculous operation, can see him now for what he really is—not a classy, wealthy man, as he’d led her to believe, but a bum.

  Dad lit a Coleman lantern. He didn’t say a word about the painting.

  I’d planned to stay with him three or four days, but it was plain to me his charged silences were going to drive me crazy. I could handle them at home: I had TV there to distract me, and my friends were always dropping by. But here, with only crickets and the occasional calls of an owl to break the monotony, I couldn’t escape his sadness. It wrapped him up—his red, watery eyes, his trembling lips. He was Boris Karloff’s mummy, stale, barely breathing.

  He’d developed a facial twitch, a little pull of the mouth. A rash of hair circled his chin. His stomach growled, even after we ate. A systematic revolt of the body. I couldn’t stand to witness it.

  So I fished with him for a day, then told him I needed to head on back. I had a lot to do this summer, before college started in the fall. I’d been accepted at SMU, in Dallas, but I planned to move out of his house and into a dorm.

  “All right. I’ll be home in a couple of weeks,” he said. We stood stiffly in a field, near a bare patch of rock: raggedy, dark, accidental. He waved his pitching wedge. He lopped off a sunflower’s head. “Mow the lawn.”

  “I will. Are you sure you’ve got everything you need here? You doing okay?”

  He scratched the top of his head, where his hair was thinnest. “I miss your mom,” he said softly.

  I glanced away, at the cabin. “I know,” I said. I moved to give him a hug. His arm cramped; he couldn’t control it. We bumped each other awkwardly.

  I didn’t get far. A radiator hose popped on the highway, so I pulled into a roadside garage. The mechanic held a trouble light underneath my hood. Old acne scars lined his face, heavy crosshatching like you’ll find on certain savings bonds. He was as silent as my father.

  I wasn’t a big baseball fan, but I knew a little lingo from Dad; it was, I thought, a safe topic. I asked the mechanic who he thought would win the pennant. “You got the wrong fellow for sports, mister,” he said. He switched on an old army radio on a shelf behind a torn-up V-8 engine. A Baptist evangelist, as vigorous and gravelly as Grandfather Darnell, said we were heading for Hell.

  A yellowed newspaper clipping fluttered on a cork board by the radio. An eight-year-old named Kathy Smithers had been struck by lightning near the river and killed. I glanced again at the fix-it guy. The name “Smithers” was sewn onto the breast pocket of his workshirt. I couldn’t see a date on the paper, but the color and its stiffness made it seem at least a few years old.

  The man tinkered with my car with an earnestness Grandfather Darnell would have dismissed: “Excessive attachment to the business of this world.”

  Back in Dallas, when my mother called with the news, I tried to pin the time frame in my head. As well as I could figure, the cabin had burned while I was standing there reading that death notice as the grim mechanic, Smithers, replaced my hose.

  I’d been not two miles from the spot, and I’d driven home, knowing nothing.

  He’d doused the place with turpentine, then used a cigarette. It had taken less than twenty minutes for the cabin to collapse into a sticky mass of ashes.

  I heard that one of the volunteer firemen on the scene, a high school kid, had managed to save a pair of shoes, a couple of brushes, and part of a large gray canvas: the Little Tramp’s hopeful smile.

  Before the funeral, my mother sat with me in my grandfather’s church. She looked younger than she used to. I wondered if she’d had a facelift, if she’d highlighted her hair for all the newspaper photographers who followed her around now. Maybe she was just more relaxed in her new life than she’d ever been. More at ease.

  Her dress was black but stylish, just below the knee. She touched my cheek. We’d already acknowledged the tragedy. Now she was giving me a pep talk. “Kelly, you’re a strong young man, you’ve got to put this thing behind you. You’ll be starting fresh in the fall. There’ll be exciting teachers and fraternity parties, and you’re bound to meet some girls. You’re going to get over this shyness, aren’t you?”

  I tried to smile. That morning, in my grandfather’s house, she’d asked me to heat her a cup of coffee while she dressed. I’d burned my wrist on the kettle. Now, as she talked, I rubbed my tender skin.

  “I swear, you remind me so much of your father when we met. This distance thing he had … it was like talking to one of his paintings. People like openness, you know. They respond to it.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  My throat was dry, weak with grief. “Are you going to marry this governor guy?” I asked.

  “His name is John. He’s not the governor. Yet. And I don’t know.”

  “Are you happy?”

  She looked at me intensely to see if I was ready for the answer. “I am, son. I really am.”

  I stared at the cross in the nave. “Dad never got over—”

  “Do you blame me very much?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Okay.” She thought about this. “Okay, maybe that’s good,” she said. “Let’s talk it out. That might be healthy for us both.”

  “I can’t. I’m too sad to be mad,” I said.

  She brushed my hair. “Your father all over again. That’s why I’m telling you, don’t dwell on this. If you do, you’ll just wind up miserable all your life, like he was.”

  My grandfather was lighting candles at the altar. A few people slipped into the sanctuary. My mother lowered her voice. “Kelly, listen to me. I loved your dad. I really did. I want you to know that.” She moved a little closer to me. “He was a good man. Hard-working, honest. There was never any pretense about him, and I valued that, though God knows his moods drove me nuts. The money didn’t bother me. He made a fine living, supported us well. I had no complaints there. But eventually he got it into his head that I didn’t appreciate what he did, and he wouldn’t let go of that, just as he wouldn’t let go—”

  One of her sisters passed us in the aisle. Mom wiggled two gloved fingers at her.

  “What?” I said. “Wouldn’t let go of what?”

  She squeezed my hands, then stood hastily. “Your father chose to be a haunted man. I lived with it as long as I could. That’s al
l.”

  My eyes stung. “Haunted how?”

  She shook her head.

  I understand now, as I remember that morning, watching her march steadily away from me, that she wasn’t made for crickets, rocks, or roses: the incidental blessings of the world that had shaped—irregularly—her husband’s dreams. Her country had never been the Old One, at all—the one she pretended to love—but the productive land that always lay ahead.

  We stood behind her sisters to sign the church register. Her signature in the book was as bold as a child’s. After all the “Kellys” on the page, I hesitated, then signed my name “Duffy.” “Duffy Darnell.”

  It didn’t look warm or friendly or comfortable to me; it didn’t have an intimate or confident ring. It was the kind of name you’d expect a no-neck halfback to have. A bubba from deep in the cornbelt. Still, I let it stand.

  I sat with Mom’s family, who fanned themselves casually with hymnals. They shifted and whispered. They seemed annoyed at having to be here. Dad always knew the score, I thought. He couldn’t even die right, as far as they were concerned.

  No wonder he’d kept his feelings to himself.

  My grandfather, standing behind the altar, cleared his raspy throat. He wouldn’t look at the casket. I was the only one there, I realized with clarity and shock, sorry to see Dad gone.

  “It’s a revolution when Jesus comes into your life,” Grandfather began. I struggled not to be distracted by the candles near the coffin, the shining purple windows, the art of his sacred space.

  “He overthrows your doubts, elects the leadership of God in your heart.” He removed his thin black glasses. “Friends, I confess to you: of the many sorrows I feel this day as I bury my boy, the profoundest is my knowledge that he never accepted Christ’s healing touch.”

  Mom’s sisters nodded.

  No kind words. No fond remembrances. Only chastisement. Disappointment.

  Good riddance.