“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t fly home until Wednesday. I could stay almost till then.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“If you feel sick or you need anything, wake me.”
I thanked him. He sprang from my sleeping place and hurried back to his own. I thought, for the first time: he sort of looks like me. The shape of his face, texture of his hair. Those big green eyes. I wondered if he’d had the same reaction when he’d spotted me in the harbour, if even before he’d recalled my portrait he’d sensed a kinship. If, seeing me, he’d felt for a moment less alone.
The sky was blue, the sunlight searing. We lazed in the garden’s shade. I had with me a well-thumbed book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi and theologian; Isaac had brought Notes From Underground.
“My dad gives me reading lists. I’m developing at an accelerated pace.”
“What else has he gotten you to read?”
“Lots. All of Shakespeare. Plato, Homer. Emerson and Whitman. Henry Miller.”
“Really? Henry Miller? How old were you when this happened?”
“Twelve?”
“I think that might be child abuse.”
“Nah. I read Miller before I knew what the big deal was about cunts or cocks. It was just a story. Sort of boring, actually. I think he wanted me to be bored so I’d remember my boredom when I had to figure sex out later. Like maybe then I wouldn’t go crazy imagining it was the best thing ever.”
“He’s a controversial guy, our father.”
“He also pointed out the parts of Dante that show what some people think happens to you if you live like Henry Miller.”
I laughed. “Do you believe that? You’re blown around by terrible winds eternally for your sins of lust?”
“There’s no reason why it couldn’t be true. Although, like, there’s also no reason why it has to be. My mother sort of believes it.”
“Really. I thought she wasn’t a fan of the church.”
“She thinks there has to be some sort of other reality. Or else what’s the point of her voices, you know? She thinks there has to be something after she dies to prove her life meant something.”
And if in the meantime she’s miserable to the person to whom she owes the greatest part of her care, the son she brought into the world, if she condemns him to a life of trying fruitlessly to piece together why he wasn’t worthy of his parent: too bad. Her higher calling exempts her from any charge of mere cruelty. Tough luck to be born the mystic’s child.
“What about you?” He twirled blades of grass, slipped them beneath his rolled up shirtsleeves, at ease. “You believe in all that afterlife stuff?”
“It isn’t a huge part of Judaism. The tradition is more this-worldly, more about sanctifying the everyday. Did our dad never talk to you about it?”
“Nah, he’s not religious. He hates that stuff.”
And yet his life here was all reverence. This garden. His art. The love he had for his second family.
“What was he like when you knew him?”
“I remember I sensed his unhappiness pretty clearly at times. I never understood it. I’m not sure he did either.”
“Yeah. Yeah, Dad’s a strange one, huh? I mean he’s nice and all, but he’s pretty hard to get a read on. I never know what he’s thinking.”
“You must know how much he worries about you.”
“Yeah, I dunno.”
“He does. A lot.”
“I’m going to read for a while, okay?”
The woods must have scrambled my sense of time, because it was only as sundown approached on the following evening that I realized it was Shabbat. I hadn’t welcomed the Sabbath without Aaron in nearly three years. Every Friday evening in Toronto, he and I would walk to our little synagogue, daven, return home to eat a feast of a dinner, and spend the rest of the evening reading and fucking. The next morning we’d rise early and return to shul, after which we’d meet friends for Shabbat lunch, usually at the home of Dave and Julie Greenberg, a young couple like us: raised in secular Jewish families, not wholly reconciled to that inheritance, curious. Back at our apartment, the afternoon would again be spent in rites of sex and study, before the first stars appeared in the Saturday sky and the holiness of the day — so the story went — departed. For three years this discipline had been a deep and constant pleasure in my life. Strange that I should forego that pleasure to break bread with my reverent atheist of a father.
He laid out dinner, a vegetable lasagna. Patricia, bedridden since morning and seized by hacking fits, had gotten herself to the kitchen table and sat, rigid, next to Isaac.
I took a breath, told myself it didn’t matter if they thought me pushy or foolish, and asked my father if he had any candles.
“Why?”
“It’s Friday night.”
He rose and rummaged under the sink, where he retrieved a book of matches, a candle, and a tarnished silver holder. He set the candle in front of me, lit it, and turned away.
I covered my eyes, sang the prayer. Since there was no wine on hand, I proceeded, according to tradition, to say Kiddush over the bread.
“Shabbat Shalom,” I said.
“Shabbat Shalom,” said Isaac. His parents stared at him.
“So what are you painting right now?” I asked my dad.
“Same as usual. What’s on my mind.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll know when I’ve finished.”
“Dad’s been selling work like crazy.”
“Isaac is my biggest fan. My second biggest.”
He glanced at Patricia. She didn’t acknowledge him.
“You must be proud that my dad’s work is getting recognition.”
She was silent.
“Patricia isn’t thrilled that I sell my paintings.”
“How many have you sold?”
“I’m not sure.”
“A dozen,” said Isaac.
“Be quiet,” said his mother.
“Why can’t he answer my question?”
“He wasn’t asked.”
“Isaac, how many paintings has your father sold?”
“A dozen.”
Her chair scraped backwards. With the table as a support, she pushed herself to her feet, picked up her plate, and hobbled into the bedroom.
“Excuse me a moment,” my father said.
Isaac stood, snatched our plates, brought them to the sink and scrubbed them, hard.
When my father emerged, he stepped outside to smoke. I trailed behind him. He stood on the porch and listened to the night with lupine attention.
“I’m sorry for the pain I caused you,” he said.
The breath left my chest.
“How have you grown up to be so loving? Why don’t you hate me?”
“Just the way I’m wired,” I said, barely.
“You should lash out at me. Leave me.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, you lost that privilege.”
His laugh was hoarse.
I took his hand. “Let’s go be with your family. It’s Shabbat.”
Just after dawn, Patricia woke in terrible pain.
My father pretended to be calm and focused as he rooted through her supply of medications, his eyes squirrely with panic. I offered to help; he brushed me off. I stepped outside in time to see Isaac run into the woods. Not long afterwards, my father burst onto the porch and, with a soft voice and wild eyes, asked me to get his son, put him in the car with me, and drive into town as fast as I could to fill a prescription.
I found Isaac reading in the garden, told him what his father had requested. At first he shocked me by resisting. Wanted to stay where he was. His muted revenge. Stepped on and neglected by his mother all his life, it wasn’t that he hoped for her to suffer, he just didn’t care to be involved in the scramble to relieve her pain. Finally I convinced him — said I wanted his company myself, which I did — and together we drove out of the woods, the
morning damp and grey.
He directed me to the pharmacy in town. I parked and hurried out of the car, prescription in hand, and was about to head inside when I realized he wasn’t following me.
“I’m gonna go to the library and use the Internet.”
“Not now. Please.”
“Just want to check something real quick. I’ll be back before you’re done.”
I couldn’t waste time arguing. The sound of Patricia’s pain reverberated in my head.
In the tiny pharmacy, little more than a supply closet in a bungalow that also housed a doctor’s office, I waited in line for ten minutes. When it was finally my turn, the woman behind the counter scrutinized Patricia’s prescription with a zeal that struck me as judgmental. I tried to imagine what I’d say to my dad if his son slipped away on my watch. He’d insist he didn’t blame me — nobody could stop Isaac if he were determined to run — but he also wouldn’t know who else to blame, besides himself. Isaac must know what difficulties he’d create for me if he disappeared now, I thought. We’re friends — surely he wouldn’t choose such an awful moment for his escape. But when the pharmacist returned with the drugs, he was still nowhere to be seen.
I waited ten more minutes and began to drive around town in search of him. I parked by the harbour and scanned the decks of boats, dashed into surf shops and the bank and the supermarket to see if anyone had noticed him come in or pass by. No such luck. As I’d expected. He knew the town, knew I’d be looking for him, knew where he could hide. I couldn’t linger with the drugs in my car and my father alone with Patricia, waiting. I’d have to come back for him.
As I entered the woods, the car’s air conditioner on full blast, my phone vibrated on the passenger seat.
“Sorry. Need some time to think.”
My gut leaped into my throat. “Where are you?” “Don’t worry, I’ll call you later when I wanna come back.”
“Wait, Isaac — ”
He hung up. The little prick, I thought, dizzy with relief.
I rushed into the house, it sounded just like I remembered, or worse, or very much worse, my dad had lost all semblance of composure, he snatched the drugs from me and disappeared into the bedroom to administer them, and it was half an hour before he emerged and shut the door behind him and the house settled into a black silence.
Sweat-soaked, he asked: “Where’s Isaac?”
I explained.
When I’d finished, he walked across the room and ripped away the boards nailed over the windows. They were thick boards; he flung them down like kindling. When all the windows had been revealed and the room was illuminated with a quality of daylight that was wonderful perhaps not only because it replaced the morbid dimness, he slid to the floor, spent.
“Much better,” he said.
Shortly after two in the morning, my phone rang.
“I’m ready to come home now.”
I sped through the woods, my high beams shocking the trees out of their sleep. My son twisted inside me. What was I still doing here? Why was I putting myself under all this strain? If something were to happen to the baby, I’d never forgive myself.
My brother crouched on the curb in front of the pharmacy, pale in the streetlights’ glow. He looked so small and vulnerable that it took all my resolve to stay angry.
“Get in.”
We drove in silence. He sat with his eyes closed.
“It’s not that I don’t understand,” I said, as we entered the black tunnel of the woods. “But you’ve got to pick your moments better. He had enough to deal with.”
“Wasn’t about him.”
“I need to leave soon, you know that. He won’t have my help on days like today, he’ll need you. You can make each other’s lives easier right now.”
He didn’t speak for the rest of the drive.
The reunion between father and son was understated. My dad didn’t chastise Isaac, just told him there were leftovers from dinner and his mother was in less pain. Isaac hurried into his bedroom, and my dad went to check on Patricia for what he said would be five minutes.
An hour later he hadn’t reappeared. I waited on the couch, stared at my reflection in the uncovered windows steeped in night. The house was still and silent apart from the occasional creak of wood.
David kicked. I had a cramp. And that cramp crested into another, and another, and my heart started to pound, and then the cramps subsided, thank God, but I thought, and it was like a slap to the face: I must be absolutely out of my mind.
I packed in a hurry. I left a note for my father on the kitchen table, slid another note under Isaac’s bedroom door. And I slipped out of the house.
In an hour I was back on the highway, a knife’s edge of the day’s first light on the horizon. The rush of freedom, the relief were overwhelming. I was halfway to Victoria before this began to chill me.
IV.
The landlady raps at the door. Phone call for you last night, she says. Who, he asks. Claimed she was your daughter?
A charge leaps from his gut to the top of his scalp. What’s the number. She gives it to him. Right away he calls. His daughter’s husband’s recorded voice asks him to leave a message. He says only hello, please call, I’m here. For an hour he waits for the phone to ring. It doesn’t.
Claustrophobic, he slips out of the house and walks down to the beach. The early summer air is crisp. He stands, as usual, as is his routine, not far from where he stood when, nearly twenty years earlier, he looked out to sea and summoned the shapes of his life back east and found them evanescent. Here, before the tribunal of the mountains.
He remains in Vancouver because the hum of city life numbs him. That numbness he once sacrificed everything to escape has become a necessary salve. To live without his son, without knowing his son is safe and healthy, is impossible. He lives impossibly. Why can’t he let him go? Because he’s getting old? Because of his stiffening back, his weakening vision — his fear of dying alone? Or because his son is a necessary part of him: a tandem heart, an extension of his breath. Hannah grew up largely without him, without the best of him, but of Isaac’s childhood he witnessed most of the waking minutes. He educated him. He taught him what he valued, what he doubted. His son’s sense of beauty is his. And his son’s laughter.
So goes the broken record of his late life, echoing inside him as he shuffles down the beach full of young people at the start of their lives, beginning their search or their denial of the search, waking to the mystery and living it in the blood or locking it securely in an airless vault to be opened after death. The scent of the sea rocks him. The mystery, he thinks, the old mystery, still there, still just out of sight. Reveal it. Reveal it now or let it not be revealed forever. I’m tired of waiting.
He paints for an hour when he gets back to his room, drinks more coffee, eats toast and fruit. Waits for the phone to ring. He paints a while longer. This, in his numbness, has become his life. He has no friends. He reads voraciously, half-convinced that some book exists, if only he can find it, that will lead him to his son. For similarly chimerical reasons, he frequents an Internet café a few streets over. Strangely, his recent painting, born of this benumbed shadow of a life, has met with a warm reception. There are now a handful of galleries on the west coast that display his work and sometimes even sell it. The income is helpful; when, on that last evening of his previous life, he walked into the bank and cashed half his liquid assets, he didn’t expect he’d need to make the money last this long. Years ago, he would’ve been gratified by the attention his art’s received. But his world without his son is a magic lantern show. Will I ever stop feeling guilty, he wonders. Will the day come when he’ll seem to me like any other grown child, gone off to make his own life? Is my attachment unnatural, he wonders. As unnatural as once my detachment was? Why this anxiety when maybe he’s thriving, happy? Why this fatal weight that never leaves me?
The phone rings as he puts his painting aside for lunch. Hannah’s voice seems to him changed. Matured,
more darkly melodious. Hannah, he says, all other words stunned into silence, the way they were when he first saw her grown into a woman, when she trespassed into his sanctuary and the pain of leaving, the consciousness of what he’d left, came flooding back. As it does now. With surprising ease, she says. I wasn’t hiding. You’re still painting? There’s nothing else. His daughter is silent for a thickening moment. Before she speaks again, clouds pass and his room is filled with light of a fine dappled quality, ghosts of leaves speckled along the walls, his arms. I’m sorry I left the way I did, she says. I panicked. It wasn’t fair. I’ve wanted to apologize for a long time. The absurdity of his daughter’s contrition makes him feel sick. Please, he says. But when I tried to get in touch with you again, the woman at the gallery in Victoria said all her recent letters to you had been returned. I didn’t know how to reach you. I wasn’t reachable, he says. Your landlady tells me you’re on your own now. Why don’t you visit us? David’s two. Come meet him. Stay with us for a while. I couldn’t trouble you, he says. Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. Family’s family.
He protests for twenty minutes, but his relief when she doesn’t relent makes him sob uncontrollably as soon as he hangs up the phone. Within a week he’s packed up everything he owns, deposited a number of paintings at a gallery in Kitsilano for safekeeping, and gotten himself on a flight. He hasn’t been on an airplane since his long ago journey west, and as the plane takes off he trembles, hands vised around the armrests, knuckles blanched. He calms when the plane reaches its cruising altitude, grows so relaxed that he almost drifts off to sleep. His mind leapfrogs between thoughts. How strange to return home so suddenly after so many years. To return, he thinks with a flicker of lancing grief, to the scene of the crime. Rebecca Weiss. He can hardly recall her face.
He dozes for a while, wakes shortly before landing, and becomes aware of a tidal pain at the edges of his perception. By the time he’s off the plane it’s overwhelmed him. As he wheels all his belongings in his carry-on, shuffles towards the concourse where his daughter awaits him, every nerve in his body radiates grief. He doesn’t understand why he’s still alive. He feels ancient. Pain crests into panic and his legs fail; he collapses against a wall in a hallway outside the concourse, struggles to make the breath go down. How has he wound up like this? Nothing left to desire, nothing to live for. What mystery, he thinks. The only mystery is by what means the world eviscerates you. Once that’s revealed, there’s no question left to be asked. All that remains to desire is oblivion.
Faithful and Other Stories Page 12
