by Jan Cherubin
I turned out the light, satisfied with my decision, but ashamed of what had become of my family. I could hardly believe we’d fallen so far in just a few months. In September, my father had been full of vitality and happy, for the most part. It was the last time I visited before he got sick, and he was mowing the lawn with his ancient gas mower and hauling forty-pound bags of peat moss from the car. I helped him dig up rocks, for what reason I couldn’t remember. He complained about Brenda, but no more than usual. He told me he was busy putting up peppers and beans, taking a watercolor class, absorbed in a book called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.
Fred and I were back from a trip to Ireland, and stopped in Baltimore before heading out to LA, excited to show my parents our pictures. After bicycling around the Ring of Kerry, and several days in Dublin, we decided to go to Belfast. We hadn’t intended to—it was 1986, still the midst of the Troubles, and the place was bombed every other day—but we were two hours away and I felt I had to see it again. I half-hoped Fred would let me off the hook, say the trip was too dangerous, but Fred was eager to go.
Down the Grand Parade the familiar shops were thrilling and when the taxi driver got lost, I gave him directions from memory, although it had been twenty-five years. Since children roamed freely in Belfast, at least back then, I knew my way. The cab turned onto Orangefield Gardens and dropped us at No. 19. I was dumbstruck standing in the garden where I kicked a ball by the pansy patch those many years ago. What was it about a place where you lived that you hadn’t been back to for a long time, not even once, and then you went back to it? It was enchantment.
I’d been told so many times I was too attached to the past. Better to live in the present and plan for the future. The past was for has-beens, it was a rut you got stuck in, the past was dead. But I thought the past wasn’t dead since it was always there, whereas the present died the second it happened. I stood in the street in front of No. 19, my mind bending along with space and time, and I stared up at the second floor. As an equal-opportunity time traveler, I dreamed not only of the past, but of the future. I remembered doing so behind the casement windows with the wardrobe looming in 1962, imagining our return to America. Our bedroom walls were pink in the USA. Girls wore cotton shorts and sleeveless blouses. I dreamed of crowds cheering upon our return to the New World. Everyone would be astonished by my transformation.
In a rare happenstance, what I had fantasized behind the casement window about my triumphant return came true. Scores of neighbors from Cedar Drive and most of our Baltimore relatives lined up behind a velvet rope at Friendship Airport and cheered for Susan and me. It was a spectacle in part because we were children traveling alone—our mother and father ditched us for the summer, sent us home to live with our grandmother for eight weeks while they stayed behind to drive around Europe in the Renault and help my father get over Caitlyn Callaghan. In Germany, guards shouted at my parents “Halt! Kein Ubertreten! Achtung!” for ignoring the no trespassing signs leading into a Bavarian castle, thus reminding my mother and father of the circumstances under which they fell in love in 1942 and renewing their bond. Susan never forgave them for the eight weeks she suffered separated from her parents by an ocean, or for Belfast in the first place, but I was full of myself, trailing my older cousins on the way to Carvel’s during the soft summer nights when we lived at my grandmother’s house. From the moment I first came down the steps of the jet plane and crossed the tarmac holding hands with the BOAC captain, I felt full of myself, flushed and feverish, though not in a sick way. The stewardess had given us cherry candies and my lips and fingers were stained red. In photographs taken by a neighbor, I appear lit from the inside, cheeks ablaze, shining eyes, bright lips, and a front tooth missing. I’d just turned seven, and I had so much to tell. When finally I was able to speak over the noise, out came a full-blown Ulster accent, and Tom, who once played with me by the creek, stood back.
My parents pored over our pictures and the street map Fred bought at the same newsagent’s where I once paid tuppence for sweets. I didn’t expect much of a reaction from my dismissive father who liked to brush you off when you most craved his approval. But I could see it meant something to him that Fred and I went to Belfast. He was emotional in a quiet way. He took off his glasses to study the photos, some from the Falls Road (the other side of town from Protestant Orangefield) where British soldiers pointed their rifles at people on the street and then turned them on our cab. My father asked a lot of questions, and then he was silent, lost in thought.
He might have been thinking had Caitlyn known of the Troubles to come, she might have seized the opportunity my father offered in 1962. She might have seriously considered uprooting her family and moving them from Northern Ireland to live among the Jews of Northwest Baltimore, where they could heat up a chynik and have their tea in peace. Eventually Caitlyn and her family did leave Belfast, only much later, after her brother was blinded in an ambush. I found a snapshot among our baby pictures of Caitlyn in a floppy hat meant to protect her porcelain skin from the harsh Australian sun.
He cleared his throat. He blinked. Was it the memory of Caitlyn? Or just the likelihood he would never go back to Ireland as I had?
“You liked it there, did you?” my father asked.
“This time or last time?”
“When you were little,” my father said.
“Yes.” I watched him watching me. What did he see? That a child other than himself could feel deeply? That adults and their affairs weren’t the only worthwhile experiences?
“The year was meaningful?” he said.
“Very.”
“I can see that. I know that now.”
Fred had meetings in LA, so he left and I spent a few more days in Baltimore. My father suggested a trip to Annapolis with Hoffman. It was probably the best all-around day we ever had together. My father was in an especially good mood. He was glad I liked his dog, but it was more than that. We were comfortable with each other that day. Maybe because I had gone back to Ireland. And maybe because the two years I’d been living in California had given us perspective. He could see from a distance that I was like him. We were interested in the same things. A son might not have been like him.
At the marina in Annapolis, we sat on a bench and ate cheesesteaks and several people stopped to admire Hoffman, and that was when my father got the National Dog idea. Hoffman was a handsome golden mutt and everyone seemed drawn to him. So my father decided he should take Hoffman to Washington and have him declared the National Dog the way Congress had recently passed a bill making the rose the national flower. I pointed out that the rose was a kind of flower, not a single flower, and that almost certainly other dog owners would object, each believing their dog deserved the honor. My father came up with a solution. Instead of actually taking his dog to Congress, he’d write a screenplay about taking his dog to Congress.
When I got back to California, he called every day, which he’d never done before. He’d start out saying “Yeah?” but quickly get to the point. He wanted Fred to help him write a treatment. Fred got on the phone. “We’ll all be rich!” my father said, and for weeks Fred and I passing in the hall would repeat the comment and laugh.
Toward the end of October, the calls petered out. Maybe the screenplay was more challenging than my father expected. Maybe it stirred up feelings of regret. I dreaded hearing he had writer’s block, and flashed on the day I unearthed Ye Olde Picture Booke when I was twelve and suggested he do something with his talent. Write your own book, he snapped. Now when I remembered wandering the house searching for him, holding the album open in my hands, a line from James Joyce always came to me: I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.
“I stopped work on the screenplay,” my father said. “Can’t do it anymore.”
I hated hearing this. “Don’t give up,” I said. It was true his screenplay idea was basically a Disney movie and hardly reflected the lost time he’d captured in his orphanage album, or the political insight he show
ed in his letters during the war. But I thought the whole wacky National Dog conceit was pretty good, and I was a little embarrassed on his behalf to hear he was thwarted. “I love the National Dog,” I said. “Fred does too. Fred says you have a great plot. What’s the problem?”
“I have a headache,” my father said. “A terrible headache that won’t go away.”
The sheet bunched up and the nubby sofa fabric chafed my face. I tossed and turned. Drastic measures. Lock Brenda out. The key doesn’t fit! I drifted in and out of sleep, grinding metal in my ears, Brenda trying to insert her key again and again, then banging on the door, glass shattering, a suitcase lobbed through the window. Enough. I was overthinking, worrying, and that led to indecision and paralysis. To be or not to be. I was going to do it. I had nothing more to lose. I punched my pillow and sank into a deep sleep.
Dishes were clattering in the kitchen when I woke up. Why hadn’t Brenda left for work yet? I had to call the locksmith. I fumbled for my glasses and my watch. It was eight-thirty! She should have left more than an hour ago. Then it struck me. It was Monday. My heart sank. Monday, President’s Day! I had completely forgotten Brenda and everyone else in America had a three-day weekend! She wasn’t going to leave for work at all. My plan would have to wait. And even worse, I had to spend another whole day with her. I didn’t know how I would make it. Saturday and Sunday had been unbearable.
Thank God my mother was coming home from New York. Although I promised my father I would stay with him every night from now on, the long weekend made it too hard. I’d go crazy if I didn’t get away and spend the night at my mother’s. I had to talk to her, tell her about my plan. I felt a little guilty since I had promised him, but this was the last time he’d ever be alone with Brenda, because the next morning was Tuesday, no holiday I could think of—Brenda had to go to work—and the locksmith would come and Brenda would be out of the picture.
My mother called from New York and I tried to tell her what was going on but she broke in to say Marty had to spend an extra day at the convention and she was unsure whether she was going to stay there with him or come home by herself on the train.
“Please come home,” I said.
“I can’t decide. It’s freezing, but we’re still having great fun. Last night, we walked thirty blocks without even realizing it, from Gramercy Park all the way uptown.”
“She’s impossible,” I whispered. “She’s gone off the deep end. I’m calling around for nurses. LPNs are cheaper than RNs, but still expensive. Anyway, I can’t talk. So come home. I need you.” I was unaware I sounded like I’d gone off the deep end myself.
“I’ll see,” my mother said. “Let me talk to your father.”
“Pick up the phone, Da,” I said. “It’s Mom.”
“Evie?”
“Yeah, it’s Evie. How’re you feeling?”
I stayed on the line, always eager to hear my parents being nice to each other.
“Tell me about New York,” my father said.
“Ah. New York. Well, Clyde. You know. It’s your town. We had a great dinner with Alvin and Gladys on Friday night. And I can’t believe anyone says New Yorkers aren’t friendly. We got lost yesterday, so we ask this guy for directions. Not only does he give us directions to the little theater we’re going to, but he tells us to eat at this Italian restaurant nearby and we do, and it turns out to be great, of course. You know, checkered tablecloths, Puccini, Chianti. Probably been there since the forties. What specifically do you want to know, Clyde?”
“Tell me everything.”
CHAPTER 50
My mother decided to come home. She said she’d catch the next train and we’d meet at her apartment around seven. At five, I opened the front hall closet and got my coat while taking note of his army uniform on a hanger in the back and an old fedora on the top shelf, the crown still dented from the imprint of his grip. I wasn’t the only one in the family hanging onto the past.
“Where’re you going?” my father said.
“I’m going to stay at Mom’s tonight.”
“Don’t go,” he said.
I kneeled by his chair and rested my cheek against the back of his hand. If only he would get better, we would be close from now on. We’d talk about everything. “I have to,” I said. “I haven’t had a break in days.”
“Stay with me. Please.” His frog’s eye was sealed shut, but his other eye was wide open, imploring.
“It’s only for the night,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll be here before you even wake up.”
“You will?”
I smiled. “Yes, of course. I have to be here early in the morning before Brenda leaves. You know that.” I certainly wouldn’t want Brenda to be late for work, especially not tomorrow. I wanted no obstacles foiling my plan this time.
“When I open my eyes tomorrow, I’ll see you?”
“Yes.” I laughed softly at his childlike question. “I’ll be the first thing you see.”
“You can go, then.”
The weather was mild with a drizzle. Toward the horizon storm clouds parted to show a streak of bronze sunlight and two snow-white clouds outlined in gold. It was a beautiful sight. I drove carefully on the shiny black roads. My mother’s train wouldn’t be in for a couple of hours so I thought I’d cook dinner and stopped at the supermarket. Once at my mother’s apartment, I was a little spooked by the empty rooms. She’d been away three days. I looked behind the shower curtain and bolted the door. Then I unpacked the groceries and put the rice on, and I started to feel more at ease, and set the table in the kitchen, and I called Fred. The wall phone in the kitchen had a long cord, so I could talk and pace with the phone wedged between my chin and shoulder while steaming the vegetables. I was making the simplest dinner I could think of—chicken breasts with paprika, the rice and string beans. A few minutes after I hung up with Fred, the phone rang.
“Oh, hi, Brenda. How is he?”
“He’s fine, but he wants the TV Guide. Do you know what you did with the TV Guide? I saw you walking around with it.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I might have left it on a kitchen chair.”
“No, I don’t see it. That’s a bad habit, not putting things back where they belong.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s there somewhere. I didn’t take it out of the house.”
“He wants to watch Dressed to Kill,” Brenda said.
“He loves that movie,” I said. I was glad he felt good enough to watch something so intense, or even to want to watch it.
“It’s on at eight, but we don’t know the channel. Don’t have a cow over it, though.”
It was a little after seven. My mother would be home any minute. Meanwhile, my father and Brenda had almost an hour to search before the movie started.
“Sorry about the TV Guide. I hope you find it.” I hung up.
My mother arrived winded and red-cheeked. “I see you turned on every light in the place,” she said cheerfully. She was happy to find me waiting for her.
“Oh, man. It’s been brutal,” I said.
“You made dinner! How lovely!”
“The rice is kind of plain,” I called to her as she put her bags in the bedroom. “I added some chicken broth, but that’s all I could think of.”
“Looks good,” my mother said, coming into the kitchen. “Should I turn off the burner under the string beans?”
I ladled out the food, we sat down, and I popped open a Diet Coke. “We’re getting rid of Brenda,” I said.
“Getting rid of her?” My mother laughed. She thought I was kidding.
“We’ve got to do what Uncle Harry says. Change the locks. I’m serious.” I cut into my chicken with enthusiasm.
“Whoa. Slow down. Wait a minute. I’m not so sure about this, Joanna. You’ve taken on a lot already.”
“That’s why I made the calls about nursing. I can’t leave him alone with her. Do you understand how bad it’s
been?”
“Don’t you think yo
u should consult somebody first? Like a lawyer or something.”
“Shep said he’d talk to this friend of his who just went through a divorce and had to do the same thing.”
The phone rang and I stood and answered it, pulling the cord around the corner into the living room. “Hi, Brenda.” They probably still hadn’t found the TV Guide.
“I have some sad news to tell you,” Brenda said.
