The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  And so the video stayed in my drawer.

  Brian and I drove out to the trailer one afternoon to sort through what was left of my father’s possessions. Once we entered Oxnard, the sky turned misty from sprinklers dousing rows of green crops on either side of the highway, an occasional stunted rainbow hovering in the spray. I’d loaded the back of my car with cardboard boxes and garbage bags and, in case those weren’t enough, an empty suitcase. Since I’d last been to the trailer, his small chaotic office pushed at the edges of memory, growing steadily larger and more promising until I thought of it as an unexplored geological site that might yield torn ticket stubs, stereopticon slides of the grandparents I hardly knew, a sheaf of old letters he’d sent to my mother, rich with the endearments I’d never heard him utter aloud. These finds were unlikely, but some unconditional wishfulness, some hunger for history, made me eager to search through the rubble for clues to my father’s lifelong silence.

  Motley dogs, timid in the daylight, watched from a distance as we unloaded the car. Balancing boxes in our arms, Brian and I mounted the metal steps. I was too encumbered with stuff to turn around and check, but I heard what sounded like screen doors creaking and window blinds raised in the nearby trailers. The Siesta’s residents must have been accustomed to the sight of neighbors vacating the premises at all hours of the day and night—these were homes on wheels, after all—and here we were, two strangers with grave faces come to strip the trailer of everything but echoes, then pack up the salvage and drive away. As I bent down to find the key Betty left for us beneath the mat, aluminum siding shimmered in the periphery of my vision, as if the last place my father called home was built from a substance as fugitive as dew.

  He’d amended his will with handwritten codicils nearly a half a dozen times in the month leading up to his hospitalization. Either Betty or I would be named as beneficiary—until the next pendulum swing of his allegiance. One of us always loved him more, and thus the other, loving him less, proved themselves undeserving.

  Because he and Betty had argued about the missing salad tongs on the day he made what turned out to be the last revision to his will, her name had been stricken and replaced with mine. I became my father’s heir by default, though I’d done nothing special to earn my position as beneficiary apart from being too far away on a certain day to be fingered for stealing the family silver. Betty had been there, and I thought it only fair that she receive compensation for sticking with my father during a period when he most needed, and was quickest to challenge, her sincerity, a test of endurance even for a woman devoted to ailing bodies and lost causes. I phoned Betty at her cousin’s and offered to sign over my father’s share of the trailer; as the sole owner, she could either move back there or sell it and keep the proceeds. I was certain that my father, in his right mind, would have wanted me to do this for her. Betty thanked me, her throat clenched against welling emotion. “It’s sad,” she managed to say, which just about said it all. Eulogies tend to idealize the dead, and I’m not about to gild my father’s flaws, but in the pause that followed, I pitied the man his alienating rage, a burden he’d been helpless to temper or change, and I looked back on his outbursts with a mixture of awe and fondness.

  “This is silly,” said Betty, “but I still expect him to come walking through the door.”

  I know, I wanted to say. I still expect him to push me through it.

  “I’m starting to see how moving here was a mistake God wanted me to make. He’s led me to a whole new life! Not that your father was a mistake. I didn’t mean it that way. No, your father was … he was my …”

  “The two of you were like husband and wife.”

  “Like is right,” she sighed. “Living in the trailer would be hard after all that’s happened. If I sell it for a fair price, I can afford an apartment sooner than I thought!” One blessing begat another, and Betty happily counted them aloud. Just when it had seemed she couldn’t generate new clients through word of mouth, the home care service she’d worked for in Los Angeles was able to assign her a number of jobs in and around Oxnard, where an influx of retirees and the construction of low-cost convalescent homes had invigorated local growth. “Old folks go for trailers in a big way. Less rooms and doodads. Let’s face it,” she added cheerfully, “the Golden State is aging!”

  At several points during our conversation, I was tempted to ask her about To Hell and Back. Had she really expected my father to switch lords at the last minute? By now, though, it seemed small-minded to express my displeasure, especially about a gift I made sure he never received.

  I’d like to claim that my call to Betty was inspired by sheer generosity. In truth, I was glad to get rid of the trailer; once I signed it over, there’d be no reason to visit the dusty, somnolent land of Siesta ever again. I’d come to think of Oxnard as the seat of my father’s undoing. As far as I was concerned, his destitution’s one and only saving grace lay in the fact that its prominent landmarks—the hospital, the trailer park, the fields through which he’d wandered to prove his independence—were a far cry from the city where he’d made a living. Los Angeles would always represent his years of striving, whereas Oxnard would always be the wall against which his years of striving collided. I hoped that some unruined version of him might be easier for me to preserve at a geographical distance, his bankruptcy and madness kept separate by ninety miles of seaside towns and inland counties, gas stations and fast food franchises growing like reeds along the banks of the interstate.

  A blast of heat came at us as I shouldered open the door. The power had been turned off and trapped air simmered within the trailer’s walls. We cranked open every window in the empty living room, T-shirts clinging to our sweaty skin. Betty had moved her belongings to her cousin’s. Gone was the hutch, the dinette set, the hands lit up in prayer, the sofa she’d slept on while undergoing her transformation from my father’s lover back into his nurse.

  Brian and I carried boxes to the threshold of my father’s office, its floor hidden beneath layers of paper. Important documents and family artifacts would be taken with us so I could comb through them more carefully at a later date. The rest was destined for landfill. Grimy, uneven light from the window mottled the walls and highlighted a small photograph hanging in a Plexiglas frame above the desk. Intrigued, Brian ventured into the room, nearly slipping on loose sheets of paper as smooth as shale. “Have you seen this?” he asked. He stepped aside as I approached, giving me a head-on view of a snapshot neither of us had noticed last time we were here. It showed Dad wearing madras shorts, a thin summer shirt, and a nautical cap with a black visor. A camera hung from his neck like a pendant. Shot against an arid, glaring background, he’d drawn himself up to full height and squinted into the distance. In his fixity and anticipation, he rivaled the gazers of the ancient world: Ulysses leaning from the prow of his ship, Penelope scanning the sea at dusk. Beside him stood a figure swaddled from head to toe in dazzling white robes. “Must be from his honeymoon in Greece,” I said, and just as I did, I realized that the robed figure beside him wasn’t a figure at all, but a figure’s absence. Anna had been scissored out of the scene. Given the tremor in his hands, he’d excised his second wife with surprising precision, leaving only a telltale sliver of her dark arm. It was as if he’d gone on their honeymoon alone.

  I asked Brian why he thought my father would hang the photo right out in the open where Betty could see it. “He’s warning her to watch her step. She could be snipped from a picture, too.”

  “Bingo, I think.” I threw my arm over his shoulder and thanked him for never making me feel expendable.

  “I promise to love you uncategorically,” he said, “as long as you agree to a few conditions …”

  I braced myself, waited.

  “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.”

  We opened the window and basked in a meager breeze. We decided that the best way to proceed would be to start at the far end of the room and work our way toward the door. We each cleare
d a place for ourselves on the floor, then sat there and procrastinated. It was one thing to look down at the paperwork a man has accumulated over the course of his life, and quite another to sit within it, surrounded on all sides by records of what he’d earned and owed, accountings come to nothing and close enough to touch.

  There was no way to begin other than to reach out and grab the nearest file. A quick scan of the contents told us whether it should be placed in the save or toss pile—two piles virtually indistinguishable from the other piles rising all around us.

  “I don’t trust the whole idea of closure,” I told Brian. “TV and radio shrinks say you can get over grief by following specific steps. One, two, three, and the sadness is over.”

  “Dividing a complicated process into simple steps is comforting to people. They’re less overwhelmed. It gives them a sense of control.” He held up a faded takeout menu. “Toss or save?”

  “Toss.”

  “How constructive would it be,” he continued, “if I told a grieving client that no matter what steps he takes, he’ll miss the other person for the rest of his life.”

  “What do you tell a grieving client?”

  “I tell them there’s no timetable.”

  “So you don’t believe in closure?”

  He glanced around the room. “I believe in cleanup.”

  The task was disheartening for Brian as well as for me. The previous year, his own father died of heart failure in the family’s Wing-ham, Ontario, home.

  “Do you think about your father?” I asked.

  “Every day.”

  “Do you feel like he’ll always be with you?”

  “I feel like he’ll always be dead. That’s why I miss him.”

  Before long, we began comparing documents plucked from the rubble. Most pertained to what had become the animating force of my father’s old age. File after file had been gathered toward a single, obsessive end: ten years separated Gary’s death from Ron’s, but weeks after each of them died, my father brought lawsuits against their respective wives. The suits demanded that Sharleen and Nancy repay him “any and all monies” my brothers had borrowed since becoming his partners at the Spring Street office. Every check of his they’d cashed, he contended, had been a loan. Canceled checks were strewn throughout the room. Along with funds to help them with an occasional house or car payment, I found canceled checks ranging from $25 to $50 and dated on my brothers’ birthdays and wedding anniversaries. These too, he’d insisted, were loans.

  Sharleen and Nancy had been more than ready to cut their losses and settle out of court; the sooner they were free of a litigious father-in-law, the better. Their eagerness to reimburse him was an insult he didn’t take lightly. How dare they offer to meet his demands! He then informed them that he’d been charging 10 percent interest on the loans (a rate my brothers would never have agreed to). Since several checks had been cashed ten or twenty years earlier, the interest was often disproportionately greater than the loan. He refused Sharleen and Nancy’s offer to make monthly payments. Only one crushing sum was acceptable, a reparation that would leave them broke.

  The basis of these suits may have been ludicrous, yet he’d retained contacts at the Hall of Justice, and by juggling bits of evidence and wording depositions just so, he managed to take both Sharleen and Nancy to court on seven separate occasions. With dismissals, continuances, and a host of postponements, he averaged about one hearing per year. Filing an eighth suit would have constituted “malicious prosecution,” entitling his daughters-in-law to countersue, and so he seethed within the legal limit. He knew, of course, that once Sharleen and Nancy repaid him in full, they’d sever all connections. He sued to prolong their obligation rather than to settle his claim. He held them in a monetary thrall. As long as he engaged with them, he engaged with Ron and Gary.

  I knew that asking him to drop the suits might touch him off, but I went ahead anyway. “Look,” I said one night at the Brass Pan, “about the suits; do you really need the aggravation?” I hadn’t planned to say it this way, but once I had, it seemed a fortuitous choice of words because Who needs the aggravation? was the phrase he used when enough was enough, and it let him know I was worried about him. Which was true in the overarching sense that I was also worried about my sisters-in-law, and even worried about my brothers, who were beyond worry, though I did my best to fret on their behalves.

  “Don’t lecture me,” he warned, shifting his weight in the red leather booth.

  “I just meant to—”

  “Lecture me, is what you meant to do.”

  He knew that I’d maintained contact with both Nancy and Sharleen since my brothers’ deaths, and by further campaigning for clemency, I’d be seen as a traitor, a double agent working for their side, which might lead him to disown me yet again. But estrangement was also possible if I did nothing; every time he mentioned the lawsuits, I felt sorry for my sisters-in-law, and my fondness for him was compromised.

  “Well then,” I said, clearing my throat, “I think it would be best if I didn’t discuss the legal proceedings with anyone involved. Just to be, you know, impartial.”

  Dad shrugged at my apparent refusal to take sides. “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” If he felt betrayed, he didn’t show it. Perhaps he needed a break from the demands of antagonism. His reaction had also been softened by the vodka tonic I’d urged him to order, and into which the bartender, recognizing Dad as a regular, poured a payload of ninety-proof.

  Still, I couldn’t ignore the very real—or rather, the very unreal—possibility that if my father could sue Ron and Gary’s wives, he might decide to go after Brian. By then, Brian and I had lived together for seven years, and I wondered if the legalities of common-law marriage applied to us automatically, even though the legalities of marriage were automatically denied. The palimony suits filed against Rock Hudson and Liberace by their … pals had redefined traditional divorce. If palimony made it easier for common-law couples to sue each other, did it also make it easier for a common-law in-law to sue his child’s common-law spouse?

  During a recent bout of insomnia, I’d thought I’d found an effective way to protect Brian from a possible lawsuit. I’d leapt out of bed, run downstairs to my study, and torn a sheet of paper from one of the yellow legal tablets on which I wrote first drafts. I chose a fountain pen (more formal than a ballpoint) and set out to create a “legal instrument” attesting to the fact that neither Brian nor I had ever borrowed money from my father, and in the event of my death, Brian should not be held responsible if my father filed suit. Until I had the time and money to hire an attorney and draw up a proper will, this document would have to do. I’d read somewhere that leaving a person one dollar makes it impossible for them to contest a will, since they haven’t technically been omitted. To my father I bequeathed a buck. On the scale of fiscal insults, a dollar is admittedly harsh. It’s like leaving one’s parent a lousy tip, though tipping one’s parent is an insult in itself. Stinting my father may sound like a way for me to get back at him for sending me a bill for my upbringing (in which case it would have done quite nicely and cost me almost nothing), but sparing Brian was foremost in my mind; I couldn’t die in peace if I thought he’d have to face a costly, protracted legal battle once I was gone. And so I took the necessary step. Dad wouldn’t know a thing about it unless he tried to sue my spouse. I recorded the date, drew dotted lines for our signatures, and, recalling Bob’s license to carry a gun, added my thumbprint should the document’s authenticity ever need to be verified.

  The following morning, thinking how pleased he was going to be, I handed Brian the sheet of paper. He looked it over. And over. He registered no expression whatsoever. He said, “If it makes you feel better, I guess there’s no harm in signing it.” His forbearance hit me like a brick. In the disillusioning light of day, my affidavit looked about as legitimate as play money. No, not even as legitimate as play money, which is at least printed by a toy company. Mine was homemade and th
erefore counterfeit play money.

  I unbit my lip and asked, “Was this a totally insane thing for me to do?”

  “No,” he’d said. “Not totally.”

  The two of us continued to make our way across the paper landscape. Several bloated garbage bags filled the empty living room, while the boxes and the suitcase contained scarcely anything worth keeping. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight, and we raced against the arrival of night. Every time we glanced out the window, afternoon edged closer to dusk. The sun’s reds and oranges were magnified by currents of air blowing inland from the Pacific. Windblown grit pattered steadily against the trailer, a sound like faint, abrasive static. Even as the temperature dropped, the office walls radiated the day’s heat, making the topmost layer of paper warm to the touch. Our judgment declined along with the light; what was important and what was not were harder and harder to tell apart.

  Page after page made reference, in capital letters, to RICHARD COOPER and RONALD COOPER. I wasn’t sure whether this was a legal formality or, like Dr. Rawlings’s uppercase H, a stylistic quirk. I must have been bleary from examining so much stuff, because my brothers’ names took on a third dimension, a life of their own. At times they bobbed to the surface of the text. At others they hovered above it. I can’t remember whether Sharleen and Nancy were mentioned in caps. I recall only that my brothers’ names were of another order, greater than the sum of their syllables. RICHARD and RONALD recurred like a chant, an incantation. From where I sat, I could see my father’s IBM Selectric dwarfing the desk. The electricity didn’t need to work for me to remember the typewriter’s rumble when it was switched on, how the print ball leapt up and smacked the platen, every letter leaving its sting. The metal casing—thick enough to withstand a hammer—vibrated with such force that the whole machine would blur with motion and threaten to shimmy across the desk. To lay your fingers upon the keyboard was to savor earthquakes, speeding trains. When my father sat down to prepare his greatest case—If it please the court, I ask that history be retracted, that spent money flow back to its source—power must have coursed through his fingers. His first son’s death had been death enough. He refused to let the next deaths take hold. He replaced grief with a full-time vendetta. Shapeless rage was divided into files. For incalculable loss, a quantity of dollars. Instead of silence, nights of typing. Necromancer, demigod, my father hit the shift key and conjured sons from nothing.