A Doubter's Almanac (50 page)

I pulled out my phone again and dialed. From the living room came the startlingly loud ring. When I found the extension, the light on the answering machine was blinking. I knew what it would say, but I held the glow to it anyway:
MESSAGES FULL
.

I stepped to the bottom of the stairs. “Dad?”

Through the side window my glance fell again on his car. I saw now that it had a flat tire—left rear, all the way to the rim. He wasn’t driving, then. Someone must be doing his errands for him.

A woman.

If I waited here, would he walk in with her? Standing at the window, I understood that this was exactly what he’d done. In five minutes, in an hour, he’d be coming in the door with some rumpled young thing on his arm. That’s what I had to prepare for.

Or I could just drive back up the road to the hotel.

But then what? He wasn’t even checking messages. When we’d spoken, I’d told him exactly when I’d be arriving. He wouldn’t have forgotten: dates were numbers.

In the shallow closet at the rear of the pantry, I found the old sheets from my childhood bed. Stiff but still clean enough.

Upstairs in my old bedroom, the table lamp still worked. The same ancient shades with their bent-twig pulls still hung over the windows. The same oval rug still covered the floor. Paulie’s framed drawing of a sunrise, still propped next to the mirror. I pulled the sheets over the mattress.

What kind of woman would choose a life like this? The tidy kitchen, the tended garden. But you still couldn’t get around the fact of what it all was.

When I pushed open the door to my parents’ room, I was wary. I guess I expected to see the first real evidence of whoever she was. I flipped on the light, and what I actually noticed was that it didn’t look at all like the rest of the place—the blankets on the bed had been pulled into a heap, and the floor was scattered with cigarette butts. She wasn’t taking care of him: that’s what crossed my mind. It was only then that my eyes traveled across the room and saw that in the chair by the window sat an enormous, wild-haired man, staring out into the dark.

“I’m sorry,” said a high voice. The head didn’t turn. In the glass I saw the face.

“Oh, God—” I said.

The voice was a young girl’s. It was my daughter Emmy’s.

“It’s you, Hans,” he said feebly. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, God, Dad. It
is
.”

I’d seen him ill before, but this was different. He looked like two men—a fat one sitting on a thin one. His flesh had been stretched to bursting, and the weight of it had pulled him forward over his knees, where his huge arms hung like two more legs. They almost touched the floor. He was panting, and through his swollen eyelids he looked out from a pair of tiny crescents. At the corner of one, I could see a bloody wedge. That’s where my gaze finally settled, on that rheumy red triangle at the side of his eye, which still seemed somehow like a view inside him.

“What’s happened, Dad?”

“Entropy.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not okay at all. I’m sick.” He lowered his head. Then, in his strange new voice, he added, “I’m sorry, Hans. I truly am.”

—

I
N THE KITCHEN
I heated a hot dog in the skillet and brought it upstairs on a piece of bread. The hot dog and the bread were the only things I found that weren’t inside a bottle.

“Entropy always wins,” he said.

“I guess it does.”

“What are you doing here? Did she call you?”

“She did, Dad. If you mean Cle.”

“It’s none of her business.”

“Well, it’s
my
business now. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“What was there to say? I have something wrong with me. Dr. Gandapur can tell you the rest tomorrow.”

“Does Mom know?”

He turned slowly to the wall. Then he looked down at a newspaper that was trampled on the floor. After a moment, he said, “Wait a minute—today’s not Tuesday, is it?”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Well, the doctor comes tomorrow anyway. Every Monday and Wednesday.” He smiled weakly, then returned his gaze to the window. “Turn off the light.”

“What?”

“Just turn it off. Then come over here.”

In the dark, the smell was stronger: bourbon and sweat and a sweet rankness like an open can of corn.

“Look at this,” he said. “You can see the road.” When I reached him, he managed to lift an arm to point. “I can see all the way to the end. Saw you drive up. Saw you poking around down there.” He was panting. “It’s all changed, hasn’t it?”

Through the glass we watched a car advance along the cove. Halfway around, it turned in at a driveway, then stopped at a house. The garage door slid up. A flat of light elongated itself onto the surface of the lake, then retracted.

After a time, he looked up. “Well,” he said, “thanks for coming, anyway.”

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

“A
ND IT SURPRISED
you?” said Matthew. “It surprised you that your wife was so upset?”

“I have to say that it did.”

“My God,” said Audra.

Matthew was my therapist. I didn’t know his last name. Stillwater didn’t use last names. He was a bristling, muscly guy in his fifties—retired military, maybe—with an unexpectedly kind face. A powerful combination. And he did things his own way—a fact that I’ve since come to appreciate greatly. The first thing he ever said to me was “Welcome to Vermont, Hans, from one addict to another.” Coke, booze, and gambling—those had been his own particular musketeers. This kind of matchmaking was one of the reasons the place was so expensive.

“And Audra,” he said, turning, “tell me. You mean to say that you didn’t know your husband had been using for—for what is it now, Hans?”

“I don’t know. A couple of years.”

He glanced.

“Two or three, or so,” I offered.

He glanced again.

“No, I didn’t,” said Audra. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I just needed something to calm me.”

“You needed cocaine to
calm
you?”

“Yes.”

Matthew smiled. Familiarly, it seemed. “And why do you suppose”—he turned to me—“why do you suppose you picked that way to do it, Hans? Why in front of your wife, and with your daughter right there in the next room? Most addicts I know would have gone out of their way to
hide
it. Most addicts would have made it their number one
priority
to hide it.”

“I wasn’t doing it in front of my wife. And I wasn’t thinking about my daughter. I was just doing it. In my own house. On my own time. They happened to be around.”

“We were in our kitchen.”

“Okay. In the kitchen.”

Audra glanced at Matthew. Matthew cocked his head.

Audra said, “
Please,
Hans.”

“Really,” I said. “There really wasn’t any other reason. The balloon was coming down. I just needed to get it back up in the air.”

—

T
HAT WINTER, WHEN
I’d stopped off in Tapington to help Mom ready the place for the realtor, she’d picked me up at the Springfield Airport. (Her new car was five months old by then, and it had a total of 235 miles on the odometer,
including
the 35 she’d driven to pick me up.) When we arrived at the house, I found that she’d been in the middle of packing up Dad’s things. At that point, he’d been gone for close to ten years. He’d left nearly everything, and it looked as though most of it—if not all of it—was still there. She was sorting things into boxes. “You’re not taking any of this with you,” I said, “right?”

“Right, honey. I’m giving it away.”

“Well, good, Mom.”

I don’t think she’d ever really hoped for his return; but maybe she’d thought it was important to keep his memory there for Paulie and me.

Or perhaps it was just that she’d always felt insignificant without him. That’s possible, too. My father might have been right about that.

In the house, the living-room shelves were still crowded with his mathematics books. A boxful of tumblers was still taking up a corner of the pantry. I even found his winter coat still hanging on the metal bar in the hall closet. When I lifted it, it gave off the faintest odor of cigarettes.

The house looked entirely the same.

“I only kept it this way for you and Paulie,” she said. “Just in case one of you decided to come back. But of course, neither one of you did. I can’t say I blame you.”

“I liked growing up here, Mom.”

“Well, that makes me happy.”

Slowly, we worked our way through the rooms. On the windowsill of the upstairs bath, the faded spine of my old
Scientific American
puzzle collection stood among the books. When I slid out the hardback next to it—
Women Artists of the Romantic Era
—a gold pendant dropped out. “What’s this?” I said. “It looks like some kind of saint.”

“Oh, that? Yes—I think it must be Saint Francis.”

“Is it yours?”

She reddened. “Yes, it’s definitely Saint Francis, for what it’s worth. Of Assisi. I guess I didn’t feel right getting rid of it.”

“What’s on his head?”

“A sparrow.” She took it from my hand. “Saint Francis spoke to the birds, you know.” She shrugged. “I’m sure your father would have said he was crazy.”

“Yes, he would have.”

She shook her head. “You know, Dad once stole something from my apartment. Can you believe it? Just after we met.”

“What was it?”

“A crucifix. He pulled it right off my wall.”

“Ha.”

“I took it to mean he was sensitive.”

I laughed.

“Anyway, that’s why I kept Saint Francis in the art book, because I knew he’d never look here.” She folded its chain and nestled it behind the cover again. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“What?”

“That I don’t need to hide it anymore.”

“I’m not thinking that, Mom. But you’re right, you don’t.”

She lifted the window shade and glanced out at the stream behind the house. At that time of year, it was nothing more than a curled ribbon of ice. Some kind of dull-gray winter bird was hopping on it. “Just so you know,” she said, “I don’t believe in any of it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t console me.”

“How’s it been out here, Mom?”

She let the shade drop. “Cold. But not so bad.”

“I mean, how’s it been living out here by yourself?”

“Oh, that’s such old news.” She pulled a dried washcloth off the shower rod and dropped it into the laundry chute. “After a year or two, I didn’t even miss anybody.”

“Really?”

“Well, certainly not your father. And the two of you—maybe not as much as you might think. Mostly that’s true. Mostly it’s been okay.” She stepped into the hall and moved toward the bedrooms. “Living without the two of you has been a little hard sometimes.”

“Well, you’ll have
me
now, Mom. And your grandchildren.”

“And Audra. And Paulie. Paulie will fly out to see us.”

We stepped into my old bedroom now. The books on the desk there, the smell of the sheets, the hammock springs inside the mattress—it was all an artfully preserved diorama. The only thing changed was the ficus, which had grown at least a foot and a half. It looked like a teenager I hadn’t seen in a couple of years.

Next to it by the window, Mom lifted herself up onto the ledge and sat bumping her heels against the wainscoting. She actually did appear to be happy. There was something about her that was still girlish. Was
more
girlish, even, than before. She was sixty-one. “The ficus looks good,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

“You dust the leaves, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.” She rubbed her thumb across one of the tips. “Otherwise they don’t breathe.”

“Amazing.”

“I’m just a housewife.” She shrugged. “And not even a very good one, at that. I couldn’t even do
that
very well. Your dad was right. Maybe I would have been better off with another kind of person.”

Out the window, a pair of squirrels began shaking the mulberry. I peered out at them. They were hunched in the seam of a bough, chattering, and now and then one of them would race up and down the trunk. When I was a boy, my father had given me my first lesson in differential calculus under that very bough. “I hope you don’t really believe that,” I said.

“Believe what?”

“That you didn’t do it well. That you didn’t belong with someone like him.”

“Well, part of me does.”

“Dad was ill, Mom. He was—I don’t know—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She turned, crossing her arms. “Your father’s astonishing,” she said. “That’s what you need to remember.” She hopped from the ledge and began folding towels from the laundry basket. I rose and turned the ficus on its saucer. The soil was dark with moisture, the surface dotted with tiny beads of white.

“You keep fertilizer on it, too,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“And I rotate it. For the light.”

I looked at her.

“I don’t have that much to do, honey.”

“Did you ever find anything in here, Mom?”

She raised an eyebrow. “What would I find in there?”

“Here. In the ficus pot.” The loam came up in moist clumps in my fingers.

“Hans, what on earth are you doing?”

“Did Dad ever tell you?”

“Tell me
what
?”

“About
me
?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She went back to folding the towels, but in a moment she looked up again. “What would he have told me about
you,
sweetheart?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

—

“A
ND DID
YOU
tell her?” said Matthew.

“No, actually. I didn’t.”

“What?” said Audra.

“Not then. But I did. Eventually.”

“Eventually?” said Matthew.

“The other day.”

“You just told her
now
?” said Audra.

“Well, yes.” I attempted a smile. “I skipped a couple of steps.”

“And what did she say?” said Matthew.

“She was really surprised. Shocked, I guess.”

“You didn’t expect anything different, did you, honey?”