The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  There was something to this. In a protected solitude there was no one to judge the directions his mind pursued, no one to call this detour a productive one and that one a waste. Leaving behind the desire to please, the desire to be right, he observed how the mind eventually calmed itself with its own wildness, and how the further out of bounds it drifted, the more settled it grew. These idle, motiveless hours in his office were the one part of his life that belonged to him entirely because they were separate from his identity as a husband, father, and provider. The pleasure he derived from this freedom was contingent on not being responsible to anyone else in the world.

  He turned the lights on. A grown person could stand comfortably where he was near the door, but as you traveled toward the outer wall, the roof drew closer to the floor and made the space beneath it largely unusable except for storage. This oddity suited him; in addition to keeping the rent low, it provided an annex for the boxes he was planning to sort through when he found the time. They were filled with useful things: shoelaces, seasonal decorations, women’s toe stockings, tins of off-black shoe polish, half-filled notebooks and notepads, wholesale catalogs spanning four decades, and unsold inventory in the form of men’s and women’s shoes made in U.S. factories that didn’t exist anymore.

  Of the 212 steps in the manufacturing process, he could speak knowledgeably about most of them—how the tanned hides were cut with metal dies, or the vamps punched for laces, or the shoes tacked to wooden lasts, or the outer soles stitched to welts, or the heels nailed and stitched to the soles, or the soles trimmed, or the edge of the soles pounded with hot irons, or the soles sanded, or the uppers waxed and polished. He’d gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of showing his customers how to identify a quality product—to gently scratch an outer sole with a thumbnail to test how deeply the leather had been tanned, or to remove an insole to examine how the shoe had been constructed, always looking for stitching in two directions (the top and the bottom) and whether the crossed threads lay flat in the groove of the sole.

  He hadn’t seen it coming, the shift in attitude in his customers. The new customers came into the store already knowing what they wanted and grabbed directly from his displays. They appeared hassled when he suggested beginning with an accurate measurement, and they regarded with suspicion his attempts to engage them in friendly conversation, as if they feared becoming a victim of a scam. He was baffled to discover his expertise treated as irrelevant when clearly it wasn’t, judging by the number of people who asked to try on dress shoes in the size of their athletic trainers. He would kneel in silence as an impatient customer pressed the toe of the shoe and declared that it fit properly, when it was plain to see that the ball of his foot didn’t match up with the widest part of the shoe. Or he would listen to a woman who had a high instep insist she didn’t need the wider width. These same people complained openly, bitterly about his prices. They demanded discounts he couldn’t give them, citing prices online he couldn’t believe existed. How did they expect him to live? He had to pay for the same things as everyone else. Groceries, prescriptions, property taxes, the cars. When he thought of these customers buying shoes at three in the morning in darkened rooms glowing sickly blue, he imagined their sense of triumph and happiness having created a world that successfully circumvented people like him.

  He removed a blank notepad from the drawer of his desk and found the pen he liked to use, a black ballpoint with a little gold kiwi bird on it—a gift from a distributor. He had not gotten rid of the large paper calendar from 1998 tucked snugly at the corners into its vinyl case lying on his desktop. On the corner of his desk was a pair of tan calfskin half-brogues that had been ingeniously constructed; each toe was slightly more recurved on the inner vamp than the outer, so that in spite of the asymmetry of the toe medallion, one half of the shoe appeared to mirror the other. If at times he found himself wondering what he’d been up to all those years—what it had all been for, the effort to run the store and keep the business afloat—he could turn one of those shoes over in his hand and remind himself he had given people the opportunity to own a piece of American craftsmanship they could use.

  He rubbed the toe as he did when he needed something extra, luck or a little self-trust, whatever would temporarily silence the doubting voice within that often suggested, as it did now, that his mind was not the right instrument for his life. Because the truth was that he still had no idea what to put into the eulogy. On the one hand, he had his feelings, private and chaotic, and on the other, there was the eulogy, public and requiring an intelligent summing up, a coherence the feelings did not lend themselves to. He might attempt some approximate projection, most likely flawed, of what Maida might have wanted said about her, but that also seemed wrong. Was he simply to report his feelings? And if so, this demonstration—who was it for? Was it meant to console others or himself? It seemed unlikely that any public expression of feeling could relieve his or anyone else’s grief.

  What was familiar in all of this was the sense of futility. His father had been dead for more than sixty years and still he remained an impenetrable figure. Years after his death, Gene’s mother would recall some characteristic of his that corresponded to nothing of what Gene remembered about him, and he found himself wondering if his own memories were false. How was it that his mother spoke of his father’s selfishness and laziness when Gene remembered eccentric generosity and propulsive enthusiasm? Even after the tannery cut his father’s hours and there was never enough money, it was just like his father to come home with some unusual bounty: a whole sack of warm pumpernickel loaves still in their crimped paper jackets; a pair of wooden tennis rackets with square heads and string sharp as wire; a record player in a grooved walnut box with an Artie Shaw record already inside. When Gene thought of his father it was of his restless pleasure tangling with his finds—frying up the bread with butter and onions for supper, or racing into the street to hit a tennis ball with Gene, or carrying the record player on his shoulder over to the neighbors’ house after dinner. But because Gene’s mother had lived longer, her version of his father competed against all the others with an outsize power, either augmenting a distance that had always existed between the boy and the man or else creating that imagined distance, which had the same effect.

  It made him wonder about the life span of relationships, about when they were allowed to be declared over and dead. Was it never? Did they go on until everyone with a memory of the person was dead? That seemed too long. Already for most of his life he’d had two fathers—the living father and the dead one. Now he feared it would be the same with Maida: not one, but two. People he didn’t know were writing notes to him about episodes from Maida’s past, and at least as far as he could tell they did so because the news of her death awakened long-dormant feelings and memories they felt a duty to record and transmit. Some of their stories were charming and some were appalling (one high school friend had written about an accident with a home-bikini-wax kit), but even the least of them aroused in him a strange mixture of gratitude and possessiveness, a relief to be learning what had been previously unknown and a despair that he couldn’t touch these parts of her, that they remained sealed in the past as other people’s memories.

  There was a knock at the door, followed by a groan of physical effort. The door opened, scraping over the carpet. Annie did a silly promenade into the room, twirled, then assumed a still pose in front of his desk with her chin slightly raised in the air and her eyes cast down. He felt he was being asked to notice her beauty and that he couldn’t help noticing it. She had velvety dark lashes and a high pale forehead and slender shoulders that poked through the wavy tangles of her hair, giving her the appearance of a minor goddess, a sculpture you might find peering out of an alcove at the back of a vine-thick garden. She was more beautiful than her mother had been at her age, and it left him wondering, as it often did, who was responsible for her face.

  He would probably never get used to the idea that his daughter knew more abou
t the sperm donor’s taste in music (he was fond of the Eagles) than his face, the likeness of which Dary had never seen. When Gene learned this, it had appalled him, though he’d had no shortage of grounds on which to raise objections to his daughter’s decision. It had taken him a long time to recognize that the more he expressed his discomfort, the less Dary would disclose to him. Maida had encouraged him to focus on the future, the one in which she prudently anticipated that he would want to have a good relationship with his grandchild—an unlikely outcome if he alienated his child in the process of her becoming a mother. How grateful he was to Maida, then and now, not because she had magically smoothed over his differences with Dary, but rather because the future his wife had helped him envision had in fact arrived. He loved his granddaughter more than he thought possible. Sometimes it was easier to love a grandchild than a child.

  He’d been in the habit of telling Annie how beautiful she was until Dary asked him to stop, or to find something else to praise besides her looks. He hadn’t stopped thinking she was beautiful, but mostly he had stopped saying it.

  When he asked her what she was doing that day in town, she told him she had been in the store downstairs. He asked her if she knew that was where his store used to be.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But then you ran out of money.”

  “That’s not exactly how it happened.”

  “Mom said—”

  “Did she tell you how much she used to love the store as a kid? It was a little girl’s dream, all those high heels. You wouldn’t know it now, but your mother used to be a dress-up girl.”

  Annie picked up one of the shoes from the corner of his desk. She peered inside it, sniffing a little, then quickly drew back with exaggerated disgust, though he happened to know it didn’t smell of anything but the leather it had been made of. “How come you sold shoes, anyway?” she said.

  “Everyone has to sell something. And my father—your great-grandfather—worked in a tannery. Do you know what that is?”

  “Great-grandfather wanted you to sell shoes?”

  “He died when I was just about your age. I never got the chance to ask.”

  “Then how come you didn’t decide to do something else? Something more fun? Why didn’t you make ice cream? Or work at the zoo?”

  “Is that what you’re going to do when you grow up?”

  “I’m going to be famous.”

  “What for?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the way I dress, and the music I listen to, and just everything.”

  He noticed then that she was wearing the Sugar Dakota necklace. So she had bought it. “I hate to break it to you, Annie Moon, but you don’t have a rich—family.” He had almost said “father”—he had wanted to—but he caught himself in time. “You’re going to have to find a way to make money.”

  “Famous people make lots of money.”

  “Sure, but they did something to become famous first, right?”

  “Not everyone has to make money, Papa.”

  “You either have to make it, or you have to have it already. Trust me.”

  “Are you making money? Is that why you’re here?”

  He told her he was trying to write.

  “A book?”

  “No, about Nana. For the memorial.”

  “Still?”

  After she was gone he felt dissatisfied with himself for not having given her a better answer about his work, about why the shoe business and not something else. He believed it fell to parents and grandparents to create the impression that events didn’t arrange themselves according to arbitrary forces, at least not completely, and that labor directed in a purposeful fashion would be rewarded with desirable outcomes. He felt a responsibility to demonstrate to his granddaughter that his life had had a purpose and that this purpose was inseparable from his life as he had lived it. He didn’t always perceive this to be true—sometimes, in fact, he longed for an alternate life whose main attractive quality was simply that it was different from everything he knew—but in his everyday sort of life, the one in which he felt it was a matter of good faith and character and citizenship to be reconciled to the life he had, he told himself that his path reflected only what his path could have been, and that it was inherently meaningful in spite of his inability to fully articulate the meaning.

  But somehow, with Annie there, he had been less certain that the signs he’d followed as a young man had pointed unambiguously in this one direction. A slight shift in circumstances might have made for an entirely different life. What if Ed had changed his mind about introducing him to Maida? What if he hadn’t married her? What sort of career might he have pursued then? Without the loan from Maida’s father, he never would have been able to open the store. But without a wife or child to support, he also might have chosen an entirely different path.

  It was a game he played with himself—how far could he go, how different could his life become—before he said Stop and withdrew, reversing out of the discomfort he had caused himself. At this juncture another part of his mind took over, one that was genially affirming to the choices he had made and which, in its own conservative way, returned him once again to a known, secure world.

  He didn’t really believe any of it had been arbitrary. It couldn’t have been.

  He hadn’t misspoken to Annie when he’d mentioned his father. Not that he would ever claim, in any kind of one-to-one correlation, that he had sold shoes because his father had worked in a tannery. The truth was that he didn’t really know his father and his father hadn’t lived long enough to see who Gene became. Still, the heft of his father’s truncated life intruded on the reality of Gene’s own. That was perhaps what he had failed to convey to Annie, who was too young to comprehend how the person missing in her life might shape it anyway.

  When he got home there was a condolence card for him and several items for Dary, who was having her mail forwarded to the house for the duration of her stay. One of these was a newsletter for Annie’s school, and he glanced at it on his way into the house. There was a profile of an alumnus who made his living from juggling and origami (something about the “and” made it particularly funny to Gene—not juggling or origami, but both) and an event for parents with the author of a book called Raising Children in a Rainbow World. At the back, in the announcements, he found notices about group meetings for adoptive parents, Single Mothers by Choice, and the East Bay Queer Book Club. He wondered if this culture was part of what had drawn Dary to the school in the first place—the hope that it might attract other parents like her, women who had chosen to have children without men.

  “Do queer people read different books than other people? Is that why they have their own book club?”

  Dary was on his computer in the living room. “You know, sometimes it’s not so good to think out loud,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “It’s a serious question.”

  She asked if any mail had come for her.

  “Why is it nobody tells me anything? If there’s such a thing as a book club based on who you like to have sex with, I want to know why. How come there isn’t a book club for men who like women?”

  She extended her hand for the stack of mail that was in his hand.

  “Oh, look,” he said. “Something from Walden.” Before Dary could reach for it, he opened the envelope and saw that it was a contract. “What’s this?” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, and told him that on Tuesday she had signed the papers to hold the memorial there.

  He counted backward in his mind. “But that was the day we looked at the veterans’ hall.”

  “You had a lot on your mind.”

  “I don’t understand. They let you sign the papers without putting down a deposit?”

  “I put down the deposit. Of course.”

  “But that’s my job.”

  “Dad, this is why I’m here. You have to let me take some things off your plate.”

&nbs
p; He wouldn’t have said that he didn’t trust his daughter, but some part of him didn’t trust her. How else could he explain what he did later that evening when she was in the backyard watering the climbing hydrangea? There was nothing wrong with the tin that Maida’s ashes had arrived in except that it looked a little cheap, with the pattern of acanthus leaves on the lid already wearing away. The empty canister of instant coffee he switched the ashes to and then hid behind a box of seldom-used cornmeal was not an upgrade. He didn’t try to justify to himself why he was doing it, he just did it. The acanthus tin (filled with cornmeal for weight) was back in its original position on the sideboard in the dining room by the time Dary turned off the water a few minutes later.

  5.

  THE ORIGINAL PORCH on the Ashes’ house had been too narrow. For years Maida had wanted to redo it, but whenever they talked about it they always discovered a reason to spend the money on something else, an outcome that secretly pleased Gene. His cautious attitude toward altering the house resulted in part from his having observed the way renovation could be used as a stimulant, introducing false excitement, or worse, become an addiction that required a steadily increasing supply of money.

  The Donnellys’ unflagging interest in upgrading their own house was evident not only in the regular turnover of rooms, appliances, insulating materials, and monitoring systems, but also in the relationship with their contractor. They spoke of him in a rather startling, proprietary way, as if he were a fond part of their household while at the same time of a decidedly lower order, like a live-in servant or a nanny. At parties or gatherings of well-to-do people, Ed sometimes offered to loan out their contractor for other people’s projects, as if the man himself didn’t need to be consulted in this.