On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that those legs were my own. And neither is it easy for me to believe that the broad shoulders of that man, springing back to their shape underneath a light shirt, were the shoulders of my father.
“How does the time pass so goddamn quickly?” my father asked often, out loud. “I wasn’t consulted,” he said. “I can tell you that much. If I had been it wouldn’t have happened so fast. You know how old you two would be if I was in charge?”
“How old.”
“Eight. You’d both be eight,” he said. “All kids should stay eight years old forever.”
We’d just passed Escanaba and as we drove the light was on the window, a small and perfect globe, dipping up and down. Sometimes it was far and other times it was very close, nearly smashed on the glass. Insects, and even a small bird had already been caught that way, and this was evidenced by coloured smears on the windshield which were also reflected (in longer and darker flickering shadows) on the dash. The sun, however, was safe for many hours, until, so gradually we could not have pinpointed the moment, it simply disappeared.
“I miss my tower,” my father told us a little later, as the Datsun strained its way up a steep slope. “I always knew exactly where I was in Fargo. Hills are nice, but they’re not practical. How does anyone get home around here?”
“And also, you know what?” he continued, after a pause in which we heard only the gunned motor groan up the last rise of the hill. “I didn’t know what I was missing until I wound up in Fargo. Yah, it’s true,” he said, mocking his adopted accent. “You betcha, kids. I drove this exact way with your mother thirty years ago and you’d think things would have changed but they haven’t. I remember all of this exactly and nothing’s changed at all. It’s just I never noticed these goddamn hills before.”
My father had been sober for seven years by the time we arranged for the landfill department to drag his trailer away. Seven years by the time we convinced him to sell his few stocks, pack his computer into the U-Haul, and move to Canada for good. Ten years since he’d been hauled downtown with a DUI as he sped through West Fargo and wound up staying there. Staying, so he said (even when he was free to go) because the roads were straight and because he didn’t know a soul.
It had been fifteen years since my mother had called him from a Poland hotel with a billboard outside that said, “We Sell Sleep,” and told him, “The war can’t explain you forever, you know. I think you should be gone by the time we get home.” Accordingly, then, my father had packed his belongings and headed west.
That was the first and only time that my mother had mentioned, to my father, the war.
When my father said, “Where did the time go, goddammit?” I thought of it as if it was really a place that it got to. A place that looked a lot like the palace in Fargo, or the inside of my father’s boat, which remains, now, the original image in my mind for the realization that time can somehow just slip away.
We got to the Canadian border early in the morning on the second day of driving. Even my father was a little worried by then. We had decided to say that we planned to pass only shortly through on the Canadian side in order to bypass the lake, which stretched interruptively between ourselves and our imagined destination. But no one felt particularly certain that this was going to work. There was no one else in line when we arrived, so to make things worse, we had to linger suspiciously at some distance in order to review the offhandness of our replies, before finally creeping forward to the open window.
The official peered groggily in at us when we did finally reach him, one heavy eyebrow raised. “Nothing to declare?” he asked, when my father said as much.
“Tell him something,” Helen hissed suddenly, though this was not in the script. “They won’t believe nothing.”
“It’s true,” my father said again to the official, ignoring Helen. “We have nothing to declare. We’re just going to be in your country for a couple of hours. It’s just shorter this way. See?” He held the map up, but the official didn’t glance down to where my father pointed, or in fact respond at all. “If they just made the roads straight around here,” my father continued.
“Or if that lake wasn’t in the way,” I said.
“Don’t joke with them,” Helen hissed again, through her teeth.
There was a long pause and then the official suddenly scribbled something down on a page he had in front of him. He looked up at us again. “What’s the relationship?” he said. It was a question we had not anticipated, and so for a moment did not properly understand. It was my father who clued in first, and when he did, he answered so quickly that he stumbled a little on the word.
“Father,” he said. And we nodded our heads at the official in agreement. “I mean, I’m their father,” my father said.
“Okay,” the official said, seeming bored. “And what’s all that?” He motioned behind us to where the back of the truck was piled high, and the U-Haul dragged.
“I’m moving,” my father said. “This is all of my stuff. It’s nothing much really – just regular things. Books.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Sure,” my father said, and he made to get out of the cab.
“No, you stay there,” the official told him, and then got heavily down from his booth and moved around to the back of the truck. He waved over a couple more men, who were just standing around, and they followed. We watched them when we could, straining our necks, through the rear-view mirror. “Nothing much,” my father said. “I said: not fucking much.”
“Shut up,” said Helen.
“Nationality?” My father asked, in a deep fake voice. “Drunkard,” he responded to himself, in his best Humphrey Bogart. “‘A citizen of the world’. Do you think I should have said that?”
“Shut up,” Helen said again.
“That’s a nice computer,” the official said, when he came back around. “I just got the same one for my oldest boy.”
“Oh, it’s great,” my father said, once again loud and friendly. “And quite the deal too, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll tell you what,” the official interrupted, as if he had a deal to cut with us as well. “I can let you on through, but I bet they give you a hassle coming back the other way.”
“We’ll only be gone for a couple of hours,” my father said.
“And we’re American citizens,” added Helen. My father snorted through his nose. I think he was thinking about Bogart.
“Even so,” the official said – he was apologetic now – “I’m just saying you might have a bit of a delay, with all of this stuff. It might end up being quicker just to turn around. Go back through customs here. I bet they don’t hassle you so much if you haven’t actually left the country.” He pointed behind him to where a road cut back to the short bridge that would return us to US customs.
“You mean just turn around here?” my father said. He looked around at Helen and me gleefully; I could tell that he was enjoying himself now. “Should we take the man’s advice?”
Helen, pointedly, did not say a word. “This is silly,” I said quickly, giving my father a look. “Let’s just give it a try.”
“Well, decide pretty quick,” the official said. By that time there was a lineup behind us.
“Alright,” my father said, and hit the gas a little hard.
We crossed the bridge in silence. “Well, fuck,” my father said on the other side. We switched spots and I drove, which pushed Helen into the middle. “This is already the longest day of my life,” she said, buckling herself in, “and it’s only eight o’ clock.”
Then I felt her go stiff beside me. My father was getting ready to light up a smoke. I tried to concentrate on the road but I couldn’t help it, I saw it. Saw him slide the cigarette from his pack and stick it into the side of his mouth, saw him fish out a book of matches from his pocket, and saw one match ripped, the book folded, and him ready to strike.
We didn’t say a word. We were still thinking �
�Maybe,” and we held our breaths, waiting. As usual, it wasn’t until the first smoke puffed its way into the cab of the truck that we yelled. At which point my father apologized and rolled down the window – just a crack – so that the smoke spiralled up, and got sucked from the cab in a tunnel of wind.
5
I don’t have many pictures of those early days in Casablanca. It was my mother, not my father, who took the photographs. But the few I do have evoke in me a sense of moments which were perfect – self-enclosed – and which inspire me to imagine, briefly, that I’ve been like that. Uninterrupted. Completely absorbed by things. I am certain, though, that as they first occurred to me I never did feel quite as anchored in those moments as I am now willing to suppose. Even with how much we loved the lake, I remember that in those early years, and even more so later on, we were often terrifically, nearly fantastically, bored, and it was in order to idle away those long, seemingly endless afternoons, that we created the backyard stories of the old town: that original Casablanca, which lay buried three or four hundred yards from Henry’s kitchen door.
We must have known, and then ignored for lack of real evidence, that Henry, and a few others that we saw regularly around the lake, could still remember that original town. That they perhaps even felt that it was to the old rather than to the new that they more fully belonged. But because they hardly spoke of it, they did not interrupt our dreaming, and perhaps were even instrumental in leading me, at that age, to the false presumption that a thing could, quite simply, be forgot.
While Helen and I had still been making arrangements to fly out and bring my father east, he called one morning to tell me that he’d received, from Helen, a digital image of my niece Sophia and myself. It had been one taken several months before when Helen and her husband had stopped to see me in New York on their way north to ski at Stowe. That had been January. It was cold everywhere. Stowe was so cold that Helen had spent most of her time there cleaning up spilled hot chocolate in the lodge with Sophia. New York was cold too, but, “Don’t think you’re special,” Helen said when she came through. “It’s cold in Tennessee too, you know.”
My father, however, had the real temperatures. After he told me about the photograph and praised his new printer (“It’s just regular paper I got in there,” he said, “but it came out looking pretty high definition”), he told me that the thermometer had been hovering at negative thirty for four days and that he hadn’t had water for a week.
“What do you do?” I wanted to know.
“I’ve been melting snow,” he told me. “It’s not as though there isn’t enough of the stuff, goddammit.”
He’d been buying his drinking water, like always, he said, and melting the snow from his porch to do his dishes and to fill the toilet tank.
“But I can’t piss in the toilet anymore,” he told me. “It stinks too bad.”
“Where do you piss?” I asked, and pictured him shuffling out onto the porch in a forty-below night, his piss freezing above him in an arc. But: “I just go into a milk jug,” he said.
“Can’t you get someone to come out and fix your pipes?” I asked. “I mean, have you talked to someone about this?”
“Who?” my father asked me, “who would I talk to? It’s my pipe.”
I told him that someone would certainly come to look at his pipe if he called, but he said, “Oh, well, I had Lloyd over to look at it with me a while ago. It’s just that the heating tape’s all rubbed off, that’s the problem.”
“Well, I hope it fixes itself then, Dad,” I said.
“Me too,” said my father. Then, to change the subject, he said: “Gold’s up.”
“Oh, good.”
“Not too good,” he warned. “We don’t have any gold. I’m into medical devices. This one company – they’re just waiting for the FDA to approve and then they’re going to just about own the market with this new pacemaker. Everyone needs one. They also do catheters and that sort of thing. Oh and AIDS research – I’ve got a few shares in that.”
“AIDS research?” I said. “You can buy shares in that?”
“You can buy shares in everything,” my father told me proudly. “My brother Clark told me about that one. He thinks it’s big.”
“Well, good luck,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll let you go. I just wanted to tell you about that picture, though,” my father said. “It’s really special, you know, Honey. I’ve got it sitting out here in the kitchen so I can look at it while I melt my snow.”
“This is silly,” I said. “Will you just call someone? It sounds like the third world over there.”
“It is the third world,” my father said. “But you should see my computer!”
He laughed for a while at his own joke, then asked, “Do you know how frickin’ dirty snow is, though? It looks beautiful, alright … all white and pristine … but you should see all the crap that’s in it.”
“Get some more of that tape or something,” I said.
There were two things I didn’t know about my sister Helen on the drive east, and one of those things Helen didn’t know either, and one of them she did.
The thing that she did know was that as we packed my father’s belongings into a U-Haul and drove east, her husband Tom was packing his belongings into the back of his van to drive west. He had been offered a promotion, and the position was in Omaha. It was an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. But Helen could, and by that time she already had. When we got back to my mother’s place she said, “We’ll be here just two or three more days. I want to head down as soon as I get ‘the call’.” She placed exaggerated emphasis on these last words, opening her eyes wide and bending at the knee as if pretending to brace herself against something invisible, which appeared to be quite large.
“What call?” I said. Sophia was paused halfway up my legs, giggling. Her feet were on my knees, and her body was arched out, away from me, so that her hair brushed the floor.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
“From Tom,” Helen told me.
“From Daddy!”
“What?” I said.
“He’s moving to Omaha,” said Helen. “He’ll call us when he’s all moved out.”
That was how Sophia and I learned about that.
The thing that neither of us knew was that she had carried with her, on that interminable drive east, a pearl-sized lump on her left ovary. It would be another four months before a routine checkup revealed it to her, and by that time it would be roughly the size of a pear. It was benign, the doctors said, but that didn’t make a difference to Helen.
“Other people say they could feel something wrong,” she said when she called to tell me, “you know, inside them. They say things like, I just knew … stuff like that. But I didn’t feel anything. I still don’t.”
It was late summer when Helen found the lump, and a few days after it was detected, she had it cleanly removed. After that, she was back to her usual self, and in fact, seemed more upbeat than she had in a while. Every week she called with a brand new plan for herself, and for Sophia. Meanwhile, they had moved up from Tennessee to live with my mother, and in the fall Sophia had started at the same school where Helen and I had gone. My grandmother had been dead for three years by then, and my mother was grateful for the company.
In October, Helen had driven up with Sophia to visit my father and Henry at the government house, and reported that my father had settled in “relatively well.” He had his computer set up in the bedroom, but his books were still in boxes. There was no second library, and not even a first, at the government house.
He did his crosswords on the porch by day, while Henry tinkered with the busted engines of boats. At night, he’d pick a book up at random from the box on the floor and read – from the middle, later to discard it without reading it through – as Henry worked out math problems which he designed himself in front of the television, sometimes reading his mysterious findings to my father out loud.
My father was happy, he
said. As he always had been at the government house. But still, there was something missing in his voice when he said it, and he continued to refer to the palace with a nostalgic pride that seemed to convert it, in memory (always, with the resilient optimism of a house carpenter), into something different still.
He had again bought and maintained on his bedroom computer a few shares in one or two shifting stocks, but it appeared that his enthusiasm, regarding even this particular project, had waned. When, a little later, Helen discovered the extent of his credit-card debt and insisted that my father give up trading altogether, he – with not too much of a fuss – after that, did.
In February of that same year I made the trip up with Helen and Sophia. We stayed at a hotel in town, because Sophia was allergic to cigarettes, and visited with Henry and my father in the cold vestibule where the coats and boots were kept, talking a little anxiously about how Sophia was liking her new school, what sports she was into, and that sort of thing. Everyone, even my father, seemed – in the discomfort of the vestibule – overly polite.
Then Helen and Sophia and I went tobogganing on the small hill by Henry’s house and Henry and my father watched from inside. Intermittently, my father would come out on the porch and smoke a cigarette, and when he did he would shout things at us, giving a big hearty laugh and a cough, with whatever it was that he said. “Go get ’em, Honey!” he’d yell. Or, “That as fast as you can haul that thing?”
After that we went out to dinner at Geppetto’s, a greasy Italian restaurant, one of the only food establishments in town. Again, my father spent a lot of time out on the porch with his cigarettes, even through the brief meal. He would peer in at us through the glass of the window while he smoked. Sometimes he’d wave in at us, and when he did we’d wave back in an exaggerated way.
Later that winter, though, he would grow despondent. His health had worsened quickly since the move, and by mid-winter even moving from the kitchen to his bedroom on the other side of the hall had become a chore. He remembered his palace, that last bastion of progress, more frequently as the winter lagged. “Well, I’ve burned all my bridges now,” he said to me one particularly bad night over the phone, and I felt then a sense of remorse so large – for something that I had not done and so did not know how to understand – rise sharply inside me with those words. It was as if I believed in that moment of my father’s sorrow, as he himself seemed to believe sometimes, that Helen and I, who had been complicit in his final relocation to the government house, where he was destined now to die, were responsible, at least in part, for this eventuality.
The Sentimentalists Page 3
