“Am I the first one here?” I asked.
“Danny and Caroline’ll be here soon,” Mom said. She was looking at the suitcase Dad was carrying: she had an eye for expensive things. “Nice bag, honey.”
“A gift from Isaac,” I said.
“I thought so.”
We walked into the living room: low ceilings, smooth walls, a mustard-colored sofa, a new red-brick fireplace with glass doors over the hearth. The console stereo was playing, tuned to an easy listening channel.
“We’ll take you for a tour later on, Congressman,” Dad said.
“Place looks great,” I said.
“Well, there’s plenty of work to do,” he said, pleased. He’d been a frustrated handyman all his life—but he’d always refused to improve property he didn’t own, not wanting to be a sucker for the landlord.
“Does anyone want to come out to the backyard with me and plant some tulip and daffodil bulbs?” Mom asked.
“Mom,” I said, “it’s the dead of winter. There’s snow and ice on the ground.”
“Her bulbs came late,” Dad said. “Mail-order crooks.”
“If I get them in now, they can be up by spring,” Mom said.
“But the ground’s frozen,” I said.
“You just do a little at a time,” Mom said. “It’ll look so pretty when they come up in spring. I really don’t want to miss that.”
“Dutch bulbs,” Dad said, with displeasure.
“Dad’s on a Buy American thing,” Mom said.
“Half the American Beauty roses come from the Middle East,” he said, as if that opened the case and shut it. He turned to me. “Did you catch that thing on the news about Jamaica? By next year, we’re going to be getting thirty percent of all the plastic bottles used in this country from Jamaica.”
“I didn’t catch that,” I said.
“It was on the evening news,” he said. “John Chancellor.”
“I don’t have my staff yet so there’s no one to brief me,” I said, with a large accommodating grin.
“That’s why you have to take me to Washington with you, big shot,” he said, sending his luxurious eyebrows up and down, and then winking. “Since I became a senior citizen—which is what they call us people they throw onto the scrap heap—my mind’s been going a mile a minute. I’ve been reading history, philosophy, all that stuff a work-ingman’s supposed to leave to his betters.” He pointed at me, as if I might be a part of that mass of jackasses and snobs who’d been underestimating him.
A little later, Dad went down into the cellar to investigate the boiler, which he thought was pumping out heat a little erratically. Mom had work in the kitchen and I followed her in. She opened the oven and peered in at the Christmas turkey, which was draped in a butter-soaked dish towel and sat on the oven rack like a Latin American dictator in a sauna.
The kitchen was blue and yellow, pleasantly old—though our table and chairs from Brooklyn looked a little edgy in their new home. Mom’s old bulletin board was there, too. Every day she made a list of things to accomplish and kept it on view as a public record of her dutifulness, even when the end of the day would find only half the list checked off. Next to her list of tasks were assorted supermarket coupons, a flyer announcing a New Year’s Eve Get-Together sponsored by the Rockland County Support Group, a bill from the Heigh-Ho Snow Removal Service, an ad from Willow Books for A History of Altered Consciousness, an article from Family Circle about children from racially mixed marriages, and a postcard reminding her the county Democratic Party was having its steering committee meeting January 6.
“The Democrats pretty well organized around here?” I asked.
She was just closing the oven door. Her thin, almost stern face was flushed from the heat and she dabbed at it with her open hands. “Not like the city, hon,” she said. “Sort of amateurs, really. Eddie and I end up running the meetings, even though we’re newcomers.”
“I’m sure they appreciate it,” I said.
“I don’t think so. You know how people are.”
How people were was her specialty. She narrowed her glance as she looked at me and reminded me of what I’d always believed about her—that she was powerfully shrewd, cleverer than most, able to X-ray artifice right down to the corrupt bones of motive, the cloudy marrow of hidden intentions. She was, after all, a cop’s daughter, used to life on the edge. She had a Lutheran’s sorrow over human corruption and a street kid’s confidence in her own ability to get through it. I never met her father: dead of a heart attack at forty-two, buried in his sergeant’s uniform. Grandma was a cloud filled with bad weather, Dutch and German, enormous, disgusted with the world, quietly apocalyptic in her rocker with a blanket over her big, square knees.
“Do you miss New York?” I asked Mom.
“Like crazy sometimes, to tell you the honest truth. Your father loves all the quaintness out here and it’s good having our own place to park the car. But it’s so goddamned quiet here you can hear your arteries hardening. And it really drives me nuts sometimes being surrounded by a bunch of spoiled broads never did an honest day’s work in their lives. You know all those ladies on the TV commercials about to burst a blood vessel because their husband’s underpants didn’t come out of the wash white enough? Well, they’re real, Fielding, and they’re living right here. You see them in the A & P huddling around a box of detergent like it was a radio and there was a war on.”
“But you’re busy enough, aren’t you?”
“Oh sure. What did you think I was? Complaining? I’m just getting used to things.” She shrugged her small round shoulders, her way of not so much accepting fate as sloughing it off.
She went to a cupboard and took down seven dinner plates and then put them on the counter. They were red and white with a circular design, like a close-up of Donald Duck’s eyes when he is losing his self-control.
“We’re kind of surprised you decided to come for Christmas,”she said. “There’s so little time before the election. We figured you’d be too busy.”
“I have a couple of days,” I said, with a slight petulance in my voice. But her maternal muscle, never awfully developed when it came to things like little slights and misunderstandings, had by now completely atrophied; she failed to rise to my bathetic bait.
“Well, I shouldn’t worry. I guess if you’ve made it this far you can make it the rest of the way without your mommy telling you what to do.”
“They say I’m a sure thing,” I said, shrugging. I took a green bean out of the colander and Mom slapped my hand.
“Dad’s beside himself with this whole thing,” she said. “He hasn’t slept in nights.” She glanced toward the doorway to make certain we would not be overheard. She was always scouting out her privacy: family members, passersby, people in the next aisle at the supermarket—all potential snoops. “This whole thing has made him real proud.”
“You know,” I said, “if you think about it, it’s kind of depressing. I mean—I thought everyone was already pleased with me.”
“Now, I knew you’d say it. I knew you’d turn this all around so it would end up hurting your feelings. And you know what I’m saying here, so there’s just no excuse. All I’m trying to say is how high his hopes have always been.”
“Not yours?”
“Of course mine. What’s wrong with you today? Golly, Fielding, I’m trying to talk about Dad and you keep trying to turn the conversation back to yourself. What’s wrong? Are you feeling insecure or something?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“Well, that’s one luxury you can’t afford. You’ve got to learn how to take it on the chin and keep coming back for more.” She raised a warning finger. “You’re a shrewd cookie, you are, and you know how to win.”
“I know how but I don’t know why,” I said.
“Don’t be a wise guy,” Mom said. “If you don’t know why by now you better make up a reason because you don’t have the time to be thinking of it now. I think Dad might be gi
ving you some position papers, just things he’s written down. I want you to be sure to thank him and let him—” A sudden intake of breath, as if cold fingers had touched her. “Well, that’s just wonderful, honey. That’s really funny.”
I should have been disoriented but I knew this abrupt change meant that Dad was now in earshot. For all Mom’s deafness in matters of phones and doorbells and movie soundtracks, she was keen as Cochise when it came to her husband’s footsteps.
Dad came into the kitchen wearing a green wool parka, rubber snow boots on over his trousers, unfastened. He looked like a large sloppy child.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“My God,” said Mom, with some artificial heat in her voice, “can’t two people have a conversation around here without having to explain it all away to someone else?”
Dad shrugged. He couldn’t have cared less. “Do you want to take a walk with me?”he asked, the heartiness in his voice bordering on aggression—he had a horror of rejection that included even the most trivial matters. He hadn’t been given enough to do in his life, his spirit had been underutilized, and his sense of honor had settled into pride.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“Just down the hill,” he said. “I’m going to pick up some cold cuts at Skipper’s.”
“As if he knows what Skipper’s is,” said Mom, shaking her head.
“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s a restaurant. Near the water. Mostly seafood, but steak and chicken, too.”
“You see!” said Dad happily. He seemed genuinely impressed with my power of deduction.
“Political power’s made me a genius,” I said. “OK. I’ll keep you company.”
“You don’t need to,” he said. “I’m fine going alone. I just thought you’d be interested in seeing a little of the neighborhood.”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
He protested for a few more moments and then we left. We had to tread slowly because of ice on the steep sidewalk. Silver horsetails of exhaust plumed out of Dad’s wide nostrils. A wind was coming up off the river, with a little mournful, unstable howl in it. A thousand feet of the Hudson was visible, framed between the edges of two gray and white buildings. A flock of low-flying sea gulls winged across the frame.
“So we’ve got your Jewish godfather to thank for this,” Dad said, as we headed down toward the river’s edge.
“I suppose,” I said. I still worried that my father would feel belittled over how much I’d accepted, how much I’d needed, from a stranger.
“I guess the best thing that happened to you was when that man’s son went hippie,” Dad said, smiling. He shook his head, a connoisseur of fate, a cartographer of advantage. My father’s radicalism had never led him to the socialist parties of the thirties and forties. He believed in the distinctiveness of the working class and believed there were things a worker felt and understood that no bourgeois could ever hope to. Yet in the end, he felt the working class was a prison and while you were in it you behaved honorably, but if you were truly excellent you never stopped scheming your way out. He himself had never made it out, but now, finally, he believed he had thrown himself against the wall with enough force to allow his children to walk through it as if it was merely gauze.
“I guess that’s true,” I said. “Though I think it would have worked its way out one way or the other.”
Dad shrugged. “Bullshit aside,” he said, “you need a helping hand. He’s got the connections. The cocktail parties, the old school tie, and all that jazz. Unless you’re born rich or you’re a first-rate thief, politics is too expensive these days. What choice did you have? How’s Juliet, by the way. I thought maybe she’d be coming back with you.”
“She’s all right.”
“Nice girl. A real …” He pressed his lips together in a near grimace, the way he did when he considered any of the world’s delicate creatures. “A real lady, in the best way.”
We walked in silence for a few moments and then, to my great surprise, I said, “Do you ever remember Sarah?”
“What do you mean? Of course. How are we supposed to forget that?”
“What do you think about when you remember her?”
“I remember whatever I remember. The funeral. All the reporters, how you couldn’t get a straight story. And then the whole thing just … drifting away. Like it never happened in the first place.”
“I miss her so much,” I said. “I can’t walk away from it.” The air seemed not to conduct my voice. The words fell dead, as if I’d spoken them directly into my hand. Dad glanced at me from the corner of his eye and kept walking. We were near the bottom of the hill, a hundred feet from the shore of the Hudson. We were coming upon a large family-style restaurant called Skipper’s. The sign showed a lobster drinking a frosty mug of beer. We walked across a parking lot; the wind off the river blew snow across the yellow diagonal lines. Above us, a faint circle of sunlight was caught in the bare branches of a tree.
“You just have to keep going, that’s all,” said Dad finally.
“I know that. I am.”
He gestured to me and I followed him around to Skipper’s side entrance. It was an aluminum storm door marked DELIVERIES ONLY. Sarah used to say the whole world wants a backstage pass; even Dad liked doing things differently from the general public.
I followed him into the dark, carpeted restaurant, into the scent of lemony rug shampoo, disinfectant, stale beer. It was an enormous place, set up to feed two hundred people. The tables and chairs were nautical. It was silent save for the distant drone of a vacuum cleaner.
“That’s Skipper,” Dad said. “He does everything himself. A businessman, but he knows what work is.”
Just then, the vacuum cleaner shut off and the silence went through the restaurant like a change of light. Dad and I peered into the shadows, through the huge double doors decorated with Santas, past the empty salad bar with its Plexiglas protective shield to prevent diners from breathing on the chick-peas and pickled beets. Skipper was somewhere in there, but we could not see him. I listened for his footsteps and then suddenly we heard his voice.
“OK, asshole, get ready to die,” he said, in a voice burbling with rage.
“Hey, hey, it’s us, Skip. It’s me. Eddie. Eddie Pierce.”
Skipper emerged from the shadows, holding a very large, very black .45. It seemed that part of being a congressman was having guns pointed at me, just as part of it seemed to include listening to Sarah’s pearl ring tapping on the frozen pane of glass separating this world from the next. Skipper had a big gut and white hair, a flushed face. He looked like a loud-mouthed bigot in a bar. He smiled when he saw my father.
“Who’s that with you, Eddie?”
“It’s my son. The one I’ve been telling you about.”
“Oh-ho, Eddie’s boy.” Skipper stepped forward, but with his gun still pointing at us. He waved it slowly back and forth like a surveillance camera in a liquor store. “On your way to the nation’s capital to give ’em hell.”
“Unless you shoot me first,” I said.
Skipper smiled and pointed the revolver toward the floor and clicked on the safety. “They got ten cartons of chicken stock and a side of beef. The fucking apes.” He shoved the gun into his belt, where it dug into an overhang of gut.
“You want to be careful with those things, Skip,” my father said. I could hear by his voice that it was somehow important for my father to make Skipper like him.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Skipper. “The whole fucking reason I got this thing’s so’s the other guy’s gotta be careful. Am I right?” He winked at my father and settled his gaze on me. “Am I right, Congressman?”
“I kind of like the idea of gun control,” I said.
“Hey, hey, it’s licensed,” Skipper said, patting the black handle.
“Well,” I said, feeling a sudden buoyancy within me, like you feel when you’ve been driving for a long while and you begin to smell the ocean, “I think handguns have a pret
ty poor record here in America. When you take all the people who’ve been shot, you find a hell of a lot more good guys have been killed than bad guys.”
And so we debated gun control for a few minutes. No surprises, but it felt all right, like loosening up your forehand by hitting a tennis ball against a cement backstop. I held my ground and I didn’t make Skipper feel he was having to give up any of his. There rarely seemed a good reason to make someone feel wrong. Even if you could get them nodding in hang-dog abject agreement, the moment you turned your back they’d go off on a chase after the first point of view that reminded them of their own darkest impulses. If you had an audience, you might want to take someone apart, make an example out of him, but one on one you did better to try and make it seem that you were both reasonable sorts, both working the same side of the street. The sentence construction went like this: “I agree with you, and that’s why we have to—”
Dad was nuts over what he called my “common touch.” He thought it came from him and he loved to see me display it. When we’d taken the walk down to the restaurant, I’d assumed my father had brought me along out of simple paternal pride, to show some local lout the oldest son who’d made a name for himself. Yet now that we were here, I realized his motives had been more oddly mixed. He had also wanted me to see Skipper, thinking this man with a face filled with strangulating blood vessels was somehow emblematic of a constituency. Dad worried that I was continually having to fight off the temptation to make myself fancy, and might miss remembering that the reality of life in America grumbled in the bellies of men like Skipper.
“I’ll tell you what I’d like,” Skipper was saying. “I’d like to see this a country where people take care of themselves again and not everybody looking for a handout. I mean it,” he said. “All this freeloading shit makes me sick.”
“Are your parents alive?” I asked him.
“My ma is, thank God,” said Skipper, with a reverence quick as a blink.
“Does she get Social Security?”
“Sure.”
“I guess she’s collecting your dad’s now, too, right?”
Waking the Dead Page 12
