The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  He had always been a little nervous around Dary when she was young, but somehow that nervousness hadn’t gotten in the way. The first time he took her to the White Mountains to cut down a tree was also their first trip without Maida, and he worried he might do something stupid to jeopardize his daughter’s safety and well-being. He thought of a certain class of fathers as being innately, almost fatefully, careless of children, and while he mentally maligned these men, he also sometimes feared he might be one. But the trip had gone fine. His child had evoked in him a desire to be a better father than he was, someone more playful, more ingenious, more fun. On the car ride up he stuck Cheerios in his nostrils and sang “Deck the Halls,” changing the words so that “boughs of holly” became “cows and French fries,” which to his amazement had the desired effect: his daughter squealed with laughter and made him sing it again. When it came time to pick out a tree, he told her the secret to choosing the one to take home was to find the one that smelled the loneliest. Her eyes widened as he said this, and then she went around using her tiny mittened hands to clap various branches to her nose. On the way home they stopped at a roadside restaurant and posed together for a photo imitating the giant wooden bear making a fierce clawed gesture over the parking lot. And when he looked into the future, he thought that for years they would still be visiting these stations of love, only Dary would be taller and possibly wearing braces and he would be slightly more tired and there would be gray in his hair.

  He still remembered the end of those times. One year she asked him why they drove all the way to the White Mountains when they could buy the same kind of tree from the Boy Scouts, who maintained a seasonal tree lot across from the bank. Because she was only nine and because he hadn’t perceived the seriousness of her question, he repeated what had often been said to him as a child, which was that sometimes you did things a certain way because that’s how they had always been done. The expression on her little face after he said this showed alarm. It was as if the trust she’d had in him suddenly fell away and she saw him not as her father but as a regular person. For the first time, it seemed to occur to her that other Ashe family traditions might be arbitrary, and if arbitrary, then also maybe not mandatory. That year he found himself at the Three Hearths Inn drinking a peppermint hot chocolate by himself, surrounded by little girls in black velvet dresses, none of whom was his.

  Then in one of those strange turns that life makes, doubling back as it dogs forward, Dary inadvertently revived the family traditions by starting to bring his granddaughter to Colton for Christmas. Annie proved herself a willing, malleable companion for holiday pastimes. Under his tutelage she became expert at rolling paperback books into poster tubes before wrapping them and eating two whole maple-frosted eclairs at the Three Hearths Inn. And since he was no longer in any shape to be cutting down trees, they had added a new tradition of going as a family to the children’s museum, where Annie loved the replica of a whale.

  But this year Annie was bleary and sluggish in the mornings, rising late and then squinting at everything with a slightly tense expression. After her morning shower an hour would often elapse before she emerged from the steamed-up bathroom, and if he asked her what had taken her so long, she looked startled and then replied, “Oh, nothing.” If he asked her if she wanted to go to the Three Hearths Inn, she wasn’t hungry, though twenty minutes later she was likely to be begging her mother to order a pizza. “Eat a piece of fruit,” her mother said, and this induced a look of horror on Annie’s face, as if only two options were left to her in the world—pizza or starvation—and her mother had consigned her to the dire one. She tepidly investigated a banana, and with some noises of protest made a drawn-out performance of peeling it, grimacing at the brown spots. But when the telephone rang, the performance was immediately abandoned and suddenly she had no time to finish the banana or a sentence.

  The caller was often one of Ed and Gayle’s grandchildren, up from Boston or New York, visiting for the holidays. Annie had always been encouraged to think of them as cousins, and in the past Gene had been under the impression that she found these alliances fostered by adults to be inauthentic and tiresome. She often referred to Colin’s son as “Fangnose” and Michael’s son as “Smelly Luke.” She was friendlier with Colin’s daughters, at least since the camping trip, though she hadn’t mentioned them once she returned to California and began school. But now the cousins consumed her thoughts and she was anxious to know what they were doing when she wasn’t with them, and whether they were having any fun without her, and whether her absence had been adequately noticed and mourned. It amazed him she had time to miss them since she saw them every day, leaving her almost no time for him.

  Once when she returned to the house after having been out all morning and he asked her where she’d been, she said she’d been helping to pick out a present.

  “Nice of you to help your mother,” he said.

  “Oh, it wasn’t Mom. Max couldn’t figure out what to get his sister.”

  “Colin’s kid? ‘Fangnose’? That Max?” Her impassive face told him he was right. “I thought you loathed the guy.”

  “I don’t loathe anyone, Grandpa.”

  “Loathe is dislike.”

  “I know what it means. Or, whatever, I get it.”

  “This is the first time I’ve heard you refer to Max by his real name. All this time it’s been ‘Fangnose this’ and ‘Fangnose that.’”

  “Well, I don’t call him that anymore.”

  He was surprised by the amount of independence she was given—the way she would be permitted, for instance, to go over to the Donnellys’ for the whole day and not return until after dark. He tried to remember the age at which your child stopped requiring a babysitter and became the babysitter. With Dary, he had been shocked by the proximity of the two roles: one day your child was being put to bed by the neighbor girl and the next your baby was putting someone else’s infant to bed.

  This was when he felt Maida’s absence. Not when he would have expected it, in the moments that were preloaded for sentimental grief, as when they decorated the tree or wrapped presents together, but instead when he was overcome by a feeling of not knowing something he had once known. Maida would have been able to tell him how old girls were when they became babysitters. And she also would have had something smart to say to Dary about her attitude toward Annie’s independence. Not a sharp remark but rather a discerning one, which would have disabused his daughter of her illusion that no one but she had any relevant experience in how to raise a child.

  Gene often wondered what was being lost to his granddaughter because her relation to the world was overseen by one person. It wasn’t that he thought of Dary as a bad parent, but it somehow seemed unfair to Annie to have so much power over her concentrated in a single person, a person who like everyone else had flaws and deficits that cried out for counterbalance. He didn’t understand why Dary didn’t seek that counterbalance by marrying someone who could become a parent to Annie, just as he didn’t understand why she refused to acknowledge that Annie’s biological father was a person of consequence in their lives. Somewhere in the world there was a man who had given as much of his human material to Annie as Dary had, and the undeniable fact of his existence had a bearing on their lives that couldn’t be discarded simply because he was an inconvenient figure in Dary’s mythology of herself.

  One evening Annie returned to the house rosy and animated. There was a brightness in her eyes, an uptick in her speech. Twice she mentioned Max’s name, though what she said about him amounted to very little, as if she wanted both to highlight their connection and depict its ordinariness. When Gene asked her what they had been doing earlier, she said, “Oh, nothing,” and abruptly fell silent. Then she gathered her belongings and ran up to her room.

  When Dary and Gene were alone, he asked her if she had noticed anything unusual about Annie’s recent behavior.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” she said. “Once you let them out of school, t
hey feel so free.”

  The next day he retrieved Dale Elverson’s card and dialed his number. Dale’s phone manner, courtly and self-assured, confirmed Gene’s instincts that if anyone could help, it would be somebody like him, a person who had an important law firm’s name printed on his card. When Gene asked whether, hypothetically speaking, it would be possible to identify the paternity of a child based on privately held records at one Pacific Family Center in Berkeley, California, Dale didn’t treat the request as bizarre. He merely replied that it wouldn’t be easy to do, because such facilities were set up to prevent it. Still, for someone clever enough, he suggested there was a way around everything, and he said he would be happy to look into it for Gene.

  His separation from Adele revealed something remarkable, which was that she had made his body into a different sort of body than he had known during the last decade of his marriage. He and Maida had always had a sex life, but it had been erratic. Sometimes they made love every other day for a week, and then a whole month might pass before Maida appeared interested in being touched again. In their twenties and early thirties, he had attributed this to their tension around children—he had wanted more, and Maida had vacillated between not wanting more and simply feeling uncertain, especially because her work at the day care consumed much of the energy a new baby would have required. She had been pregnant one other time, at thirty-two, and after she miscarried at eleven-and-a-half weeks, she became more certain she was finished having children. After that their sex life became more regular, but in the last decade their lovemaking seemed to drop off once again. He had more or less viewed that development as evidence of the regrettable but unstoppable slowing down of the physical aspect of existence, which was not always or often aligned with one’s inner desires. It seemed no amount of will or persuasion could alter this slowing down, and the best he could do was to try to quiet his indignant mind. But a week without Adele showed him otherwise. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night in a froth, heat emanating from his skin and his chest covered with sweat, and the thought of the way he touched her and she allowed herself to be touched sent him rolling onto his hands with a groan.

  He called her every other day, sneaking up to his room to whisper into the phone. He didn’t enjoy deceiving Dary, but he also didn’t blame himself for this. His happiness subscribed to a logic of its own, a logic that freed him from the constraint of explaining his behavior. What was between him and Adele was as pure as the physical tenderness between them, he reasoned, so a lie in service of it wasn’t really a lie. And if someone pressed him to give a name to their connection he would have called it love—the first pulse of an awakening love. But of course it couldn’t be, because it hadn’t been long enough since Maida had passed away.

  The sneakiness required to make his conversations with Adele possible, the fear of being caught by his daughter, the tremulous, exhausting suspense of being parted from the person he longed to see—all this combined in him to produce a volatile, emotional state that overflowed at the first sound of Adele’s voice and was amplified by the contrast with her preoccupied manner, which he assumed was the result of her increasingly demanding family situation. Because her son didn’t have a job and his girlfriend wasn’t speaking to her own mother, Adele was the chief person planning for the arrival of the baby. There were the myriad items to be acquired—diapers, bottles, clothes—and then the question of how to find the money to pay for these things.

  “Don’t worry,” Gene said. “We’ll find a way.”

  The language of his mind already speculated in the idiom of we, and the same infatuation responsible for replacing I with we prompted him to freely and unself-consciously imagine the new shape his life might take. He had never met the unpleasant son or his girlfriend, yet he listened to Adele discuss her changing family with the delectable terror of a man being given a vision of his future. It was entirely possible that what was hers would become his and what was his would become hers. Did he really want an infant in the house? Did he want to encounter the bare-chested son in the hallway on his way to bed, wafting the smell of cigarettes after a night of partying? Would Adele let him keep his office? Would they have separate accounts, or joint?

  He reminded himself it might be a long time before any of it happened.

  His attitude toward Adele’s accommodation of her family was split down the middle. On the one hand he admired her generosity and forbearance. He was quite sure he couldn’t be attracted to a woman who didn’t embody these qualities to a greater degree than he could imagine adopting them himself. That was part of attraction—attraction was aspirational—and it was important for the women he admired to exceed him in this respect, enhancing his stature and giving him a bright mark to aim for if one day he decided he wanted to improve himself. But rushing against all of this was an opposing desire, stronger and more torrential, that Adele’s loyalty and generosity not be wasted on the feckless son who would never appreciate her efforts, when instead these same qualities of hers might nourish Gene.

  Dary had asked about the relationship only once. The two of them were in the bank to speak with someone about adding her name to his accounts. The waiting area was adjacent to the tinted glass cubicle of the banker they were waiting to see, and on the exterior of one of the walls was a promotional calendar for that same bank featuring a photo of a white-haired couple laughing together on a bench. Somehow without words you implicitly understood they had been married half a century and had planned prudently for the long happy retirement they were now living out together. Gene couldn’t help feeling the wrongness of his situation, the strange reversal of having his child become a custodian for him. If Maida was alive, she would still be managing their accounts. The only proper situation was one in which the two of them were waiting for the banker together, the same way the white-haired couple was waiting for more happiness and wealth on the bench. He missed Maida terribly in that moment, though the feeling was reduced by a sense of embarrassment: it seemed a shabby way to miss his wife, to be summoning her in his mind for her transactional competence. And it depressed him to recognize the way you missed someone was subject to degradation like everything else, so that while at first what you missed was a transcendent union with the person, later sometimes you just wished she was still managing your money.

  The calendar with the retired couple showed the wrong month. He got up and flipped the page. When he sat back down, Dary asked him how it was working out with Adele.

  “We enjoy each other,” he said.

  “So it isn’t all torture and humiliation?” There were the first stirrings of a triumphal smile on his daughter’s face.

  “Not—no.”

  “You look forward to her visits?”

  “It’s a change of pace,” he allowed.

  “Ah,” she said, and now the triumphal smile was openly arrayed on her face. “You recall how not so long ago, you went on and on about how I was trying to constrain your life?”

  He didn’t think he’d gone on and on. “I’m not complaining,” he said.

  “You have a pretty sweet deal.”

  He resented the way she made it sound like the world was doing him a favor. “It’s not all torture and humiliation for her either, you know. Some people actually think your father is good company.”

  “Good for you,” she said. “Good for you for making a friend.”

  “She is,” he said. “She’s a very good friend.”

  15.

  HE WENT WITH Annie and Dary to the children’s museum on Christmas Eve, the last possible day before it closed for the holidays, a trip that might not have happened at all if Gayle hadn’t called to say that Brian was unexpectedly driving north and would be arriving the next day. She was sorry to have to send Annie home but hoped they would understand she had to put the house together.

  Annie showed little interest in her old friend, the replica of the whale, a minke with a glum, downturned mouth and faded patches on its tuxedo-coloring where
children had worn away the hue with the oils from their hands. The one exhibit he thought for certain would bore her, the aerodynamics lab, turned out to be the one in which she wanted to spend all her time. It wasn’t really an exhibit at all but a workshop where children built so-called flying ships out of foam blocks of different colors, cranked them twenty feet into the rafters on a conveyor belt, and launched them into the air with the ostensible purpose of discovering the mechanics of flight, though the potential to have your ship collide with another person’s head seemed as much of the allure as the engineering experience. The lab was in a bright, airy renovated space with exposed air ducts painted the same bright orange as the low stools tucked under the gleaming workbench, and there was a tall glass door that opened onto a central courtyard. None of it matched the dingy, huddled brick building that was the rest of the museum.

  He was struck by how many fathers were in the lab. Some were sweetly and energetically collaborating with their children while others were simply building their own flying ships. It was an astonishing male zone of production in the middle of the museum, which was otherwise reliably a society of women, the mothers and grandmothers and babysitters pushing around strollers filled with discarded outerwear and piled-up water bottles. He wondered if the fathers had been sent here by their wives in some like-minded effort to manage the boredom and unease of men stuck at home with children during the holidays.

  He was having his own version of anxiety about Christmas, the day itself. If he found himself missing Adele on the holiday, he could remind himself he would see her again, and the disagreeable feeling would be mitigated. But if he missed Maida, there would only be misery.

  “Oh, cheer up, Dad,” Dary said.

  He wondered if he looked a little like the whale, as faded and as glum.

  “We’re here because of you,” she said. “Remember?”