The Sentimentalists

by Johanna Skibsrud

  Though my father remained with us for some time after that – scuttling the soft waves beside us during our growing-up years, our noble père petrel, floating just above the surface, as though held there by the last and most remote suspension of our faith – the boat, after that first summer, was also abandoned. My father working on it only in fits and starts, and, except for a single, brief renaissance which I have already described, this progress, too, ceased finally, long before I might have remembered it.

  Still, the boat remained, perhaps especially for my mother, as though a physical memory; a last symbol of the one-time greatness of her expectations, and evidence that the future was still, in fact, in progress: that with the correct effort, tools and expertise it remained to be realized. Her optimism (having sprung from a deep well of unspeakable anger that at that time I could not guess at or understand), counteracted the effect of the years which had by that time stretched the boat’s boards nearly to bursting, was as impermeable as the toughest and most enduring stain.

  When my father finally disappeared from us in the summer I was twelve, after years of false starts, in which he spent his winters out west, returning to us later and later each year with the spring, the boat was moved, along with us, to my grandmother’s house in Orono. In fact, my mother brought with us very little else; only what she could fit into the back of the car (a small Honda, about to embark on its final voyage). The rest of our things were doomed to remain, haunting the house that my father had built, living in its nether regions among the exposed wiring. At least, that is, until the land was sold to the paper company, and the house, eventually, torn down.

  Really, there was no single or specific reason that we knew that that departure was to be my father’s last – his exit at that time had been no different than on any other occasion – but I recall that we were very certain, and that even Helen and I, who were still very much children then, turned resolutely, when he was gone from the drive, back to the house. That we gathered our things deliberately in the large canvas bag that my mother had provided, and which, on more ordinary days, we had used for excursions to the beach or to town.

  In the same way, I suppose, that for the drowning man there comes, though several times he raises himself above the surface, the irrefutable moment in which it is certain that he will not raise himself again, and the last bubbles of his final exhalations arise and disperse, and an invisible seal is drawn across the waves … we gave him up.

  Somehow, though, long after we had turned away, a phantom faith remained in me, long after its object had been lost. It came in bursts, in brief hallucinatory flashes, like the intermittent blinking of a dead satellite which still rouses itself on faulty wiring as though it were a dying star. So that even in those after-years, when my father had disappeared completely beyond the line of our horizon, it seemed as though, on fine days, I could see him still – a faint outline, a trace of himself – buoyed by the stubbornness of my memory, walking tentatively along the endless and otherwise uninhabited waters of my childhood.

  3

  My father had discovered Henry after an eight-year search that began the day my sister Helen was born. Because my mother had planned her family carefully (there were exactly two years between us and our birthdays were in the spring), Helen and I were eight and six years old the summer my father drove us north to meet Henry. It seemed strange and it became a joke between the two men later, that it had taken my father eight years to track a man who lived – and whose family for generations beyond recall had lived – a four-hour drive away.

  When we were young we called Henry our grandfather because we had no better term to describe the relationship. We did this for the benefit of other people, and never in front of him. “To stay with our granddad,” we told the kids at school when we left at the beginning of every summer for Casablanca. At the government house, though, he was always just “Henry,” and was not, in fact, related to our family at all.

  In the small Maine town where we spent our early childhood, my father’s having “come from away” (among other of his eccentricities) was enough to set us somewhat apart, so it was in contrast to this that we respected the fact that Henry had, on both sides of his family, lived in Casablanca, both the old and the new, for what was as good as forever. No one talked anyway of where they had first come from, and it seemed that it was enough to say that they were an original family from the original town.

  On that first trip to visit Henry, my father packed us into the back of his red Datsun with a cooler that he’d filled with sandwiches and beer, and we all drove together, my father, my mother, Helen and I, all the way to Casablanca. He made it a point when he could to pass by on our way the towns we liked to pick out on the map, the ones with the foreign-sounding names. Oxford, Poland, Norway, Paris, East and West Peru.

  When we got out in Egypt for gas, my father said, “These Mainers have the right idea. You can see the whole world without leaving the state.”

  My mother sat very still next to my father in the cab of the truck and every few minutes she turned angrily in her seat to rap three times on the glass. We knew what that meant. Sit down. Don’t fight. Be careful.

  Still it could not interrupt the perfect pleasure and excitement we felt then, bouncing around in the back of the truck on our way to a place we’d never been, with a foreign-sounding name more exotic than most.

  “Isn’t that the way of it,” Henry would say later, when they lived together in the government house (to snap my father out of a funk and get him laughing). “It’ll take a man most of a life to figure out that what he’s looking for is four hours away.”

  In fits and starts my father’s search for Henry Carey – father of the late Owen Carey – had been orchestrated in all the states of the union. He did not think to look in Canada. And though my father could recite with startling accuracy a description of the lake road, the dock, and the government house, long before he ever lay eyes on it; though he knew the inlets and coves where the remains of the old houses that could not be relocated were found, and could describe the lean of the semi-submerged steeple of the United Church with a borrowed gesture of his hand, he had no idea where it was, or if it in fact had existed at all.

  “Pack some sandwiches then Henry,” my father would say, by way of a response, slapping his thigh and coughing out a laugh. “If it’s that close, man,” he’d say, “what are we waiting for?”

  We stayed two weeks with Henry our first summer, and most of that time we spent out on the lake, fishing or otherwise just poking along the shore. Scrambling out onto the islands and imagining the original Casablanca that lay buried below.

  Dressed in bed sheets in Henry’s backyard, we playacted the lives of the former residents of the town, imagining them preserved down there somehow. As if, like it was a ship, they’d gone down with it, and existed there still.

  I didn’t imagine then that Henry, who was alive and watched television in the evenings and fixed – hunkered down in his wheelchair – the motors on boats, had lived in that make-believe town.

  I collected rocks that first summer along the shore, carried them in my pockets home to my mother, and laid them on the table as my offering because she never came with us in the boat. “This one is for how much I missed you,” I said. “It’s the largest one. This one,” I said, “is for being happy, and this one is for being mad.”

  “Why were you so happy?”

  “I got to steer the boat a bit.”

  “And why were you angry?”

  “Helen wouldn’t play. This one,” I said, “is for feeling bad about how Henry always has to sit in a chair.”

  Owen had been a friend of my father’s and then he was killed in the war.

  We knew this only through my mother, because neither my father nor Henry ever spoke of Owen, and had perhaps forgotten (or so it seemed) the manner in which they were connected at all.

  As to the linear details of the story, we knew only that much. Until I was a teenager, for exampl
e, I was under the impression that Owen had been a boyhood friend of my father’s, and that my father himself had never fought in a war. These misunderstandings were not the fault of my mother, as she herself knew even less than we did, never having had the added intimacy of the long summer evenings and eternal, rainy afternoons in which we explored the peripheries of Owen’s third-floor room. There, his collections of mica and rock crystal had been allowed to remain, as though through the centuries, lining the long windowsills and guarding the bookcases that housed adventure novels and instructional manuals for simple carpentry and windsurfing which we thumbed through with the breathlessness of historians, absorbing the slightly damp smell of their thin pages through our fingers. When, from the sheer weakness of our wills, we took the mica from the shelf and – at the instant of contact – the dry leaves peeled and crumbled to dust, we placed it back as quickly as we could, as though we had been burned, and gazed in despair at our hands where the remnants of the rock remained, like a proof, on our skin.

  After that first summer we spent all of our vacation months with Henry and my father. Even when he began going west for his winters he still drove to meet us there. First from Alberta, and then from British Columbia. They too were exciting and foreign-sounding names when they arrived on the return addresses of his occasional letters.

  Sometimes, during the long school-year months that we spent with our mother, I dreamt of joining him there.

  The first summer we left her alone, to make us feel better, my mother joked at how exotic our lives had become. “The children will be summering in Casablanca,” she said in a fake English accent, and that night we ate off a tablecloth and she served us our juice in wineglasses, which we promised not to break. Then, when my father disappeared completely and my mother mentioned, not long after, our summering in town, our faces crumpled in a distress that was for my mother so familiar and sad that she quickly changed her mind. “No reason to interrupt our plans,” she insisted, hurriedly, and that summer we went up to stay with Henry just as we had done before.

  So for the four years that spanned the summers I was twelve through sixteen and we didn’t hear anything from our father at all, we continued to spend at least half of every summer at the government house in Canada. Just Henry was there, and his nurse, Susan, who watched out for us too – but only part-time. I imagined that my father must have found himself in a foreign city too distant, finally, even to write, and I stopped, in those summers, entertaining thoughts of joining him there.

  It turned out that what my father had found was Fargo, North Dakota. The year I was seventeen, his first sober year that anyone could remember, he resurfaced, telephoning my mother from that town. Shortly thereafter he resumed his summers at the government house, with Henry.

  We kept up with the two of them mostly by mail after that, because both Helen and I had summer jobs or other excuses that kept us away by then. We didn’t, after my father’s return, spend much time at the lake at all.

  It seemed, because of this, very sudden that my father grew old. It was Helen, finally, who noticed. She said, “He doesn’t have anything keeping him there anyway. This year he might as well stay.”

  There really wasn’t anything that tied my father to Fargo. It had been an accident in the first place that he’d ended up in the town. He hadn’t, originally, even intended to pull over, for food or for gas, but by the time the palace was sold he had stayed ten years. In that length of time it was true he’d acquired many friends, but they were mostly old drinking buddies from the period of time at the beginning of his stay before he got sober. When he did, those friendships dwindled, and by the time he left they had turned into a “checking up” on the guys now and then. He had his AA sponsor Gerry there – that was something – but Gerry and he rarely saw each other either. “Don’t need him like I did,” my father told me. “I think the guy’s in rougher shape than me.”

  And, of course, he had those two and a half welded-together trailers.

  So in the end it seemed that my sister Helen was right, after all – as she often was, or assumed herself to be. My father loved the lake, and he loved Henry; they were, and had been for as long as I could remember, the best of friends. Even their brief political spats seemed between the two of them recreational and benign. Sometimes my father would even interrupt his own argument by saying, “I don’t like disturbances in my place. You either lay off politics or get out.” He would say this in his Humphrey Bogart voice. Our whole family could quote Casablanca, practically from beginning to end. We’d learned it as kids, after our first trip up to the lake with my mother and father. I think everyone in Casablanca knew that movie pretty well, but my father knew it better than anyone. He was best, too, at impressions. Especially of Bogart. He had a memory for that sort of thing.

  It was Ingrid, though – “It’s a crazy world … anything can happen” – that was his favourite. He’d put on his high Bergman voice when he said it, and sometimes just repeat it to himself, over and over. Like maybe Henry would have said, “Ye think this rain’s gonna last all week?” And my father would wander around in his Bergman voice saying, “It’s a crazy world …”

  Other times he would look up at the sky if an airplane was overhead, or out the window, if a seaplane landed out on the lake, and say in another fake, falsettoed voice, “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll be on that plane …”

  He got a lot of mileage, anyway, out of that film.

  4

  So it was in the following April, after my father’s last – stockmarket – winter in Fargo, that Helen left Sophia at our mother’s house in Orono, and we flew together to meet him out there. We rented a small U-haul trailer, and then the three of us – Helen, my father and I – crammed into the front of the old Datsun’s tiny cab and drove the two days to Casablanca. My father smoked cigarettes out the window and Helen and I fought the whole way.

  At first, Helen had forbidden my father to smoke in the truck, but then we were stopping every half-hour at rest stops and finally she gave in. “It’s either that or spend another day on the road,” she said. “Another hour would be unbearable.”

  Somehow, my father would always forget to open up the window when he first lit a cigarette, and it was the closest thing that Helen and I came to agreeing on the entire trip. After the first puff of smoke filled the car, we would yell out, in unison, “The window, Dad!”

  It never failed, he forgot each time. We would watch him as he readied to smoke and every time felt sure that he would, just that once, remember. We found it unbelievable that he should forget every single time. But he did. It made us crazy in those moments. Watching him. Feeling the pressure build as we waited for him to strike the match – our cue to yell.

  In reminder to myself that although it felt like it might there was no way that a two-day trip could last forever, I imagined the different ways I might recount its events even as they occurred. When my father, for example, shifted in his seat and Helen bumped into my hand on the stick as I drove, when he interrupted our long deliberate silences by saying, “Tell me stories, my sweethearts,” I would silently address an invisible, future audience: “He could never sit still,” I told them. “He was always squirming around … knocking us into the gearshift … asking for stories …”

  When he spun the radio dial to the classic rock station and Helen spun it back after a song or two to NPR, saying, “Just for the news,” I’d say, “and to make it worse, he and Helen fought over radio stations the whole fucking way.”

  Helen or I always got stuck in the middle when we drove, on account of my father’s legs being so much longer than our own, and his smoking. We could never relax there, but sat straight as pins, our knees bent in toward the gearshift, cringing away from his spontaneous, unbearable hugs, and waiting for the relief of the yell that we shared every time he lit up a smoke.

  It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told,
and the past tense is used.

  I can imagine, for example, that we’re out there still: Wisconsin, maybe, or else cutting through the Upper Peninsula, passing Escanaba, skirting Lake Michigan, heading towards Sault Ste. Marie at the Canadian border. Driving that same red truck that is junked behind Henry’s government house now. The truck I’d climbed as a kid and later, red and itchy from the fiberglass of the cap, scratched from my legs patches of prickly skin. “It wasn’t all that long ago, you know,” my father said often on that trip east, whenever we recounted snippets of this sort of memory to him. “You always make it sound as if it happened a long time ago.” Then, a little later, to break a silence: “How does the time pass so goddamn quickly?”

  On the one hand it’s true. I can remember climbing onto my father’s shoulders as if I were doing it still – balancing there, a leg on each side of his neck, my hands in his hair, then stepping off onto the roof of the cab. I remember how my foot felt leaving his shoulder, how the muscle beneath his light shirt sprang back into its place as my foot left and settled on the solid lid of the truck. I remember showing my pimply red legs to my mother, bits raw from my scratching, and her voice, irritated, saying, “I don’t understand why he let you climb on that truck.” There were little bits of glass, she told me, buried in my skin and that’s why they were so itchy and sore.