Aloft (11 page)

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heading for New York or the art house cinema in Huntington Village. Of course I never said anything but wondered to myself what my daughter and her friends really thought of things, and of themselves, whether given a choice they'd remain just as they were or instead trade their black Edgar Allan Poe capes for field hockey skirts and Ray-Bans and the attentions of boys from Jack's crowd, the type who could swim (and soon enough drink) like fish and instinctively lace a pure backhand down the line. It turns out that Theresa and Alice and Jadie are exactly the sort of midnight-eyed young women you see increasingly in magazines and on billboards, which to me is a generally welcome development (being the father of such Diversity), though I'll not lie and say I'm at ease with most of the other attendant signs of our cultural march, one example being how youths from every quarter openly desire to dress as though they're either drug-addled whores or runaways or gangstas or just plain convicts, as though the whole society has embraced dereliction and criminality as its defining functions, with Theresa of course once pointing out to me that decades of governmental neglect and corporate corruption and pilfering have resulted in this hard-edged nihilistic street-level expression. At the risk of sounding like my father, I'll say that her reading of this doesn't really wash with me, though I have recently begun to accept her notions about the ineluctable creep in the realm, that the very ground beneath my feet is shifting with hardly my notice, to travel invisibly, with or without me.

Though I did actually utter "My bad" the other day to Miles Quintana, after messing up a cruise reservation. So maybe I'm moving along, too.

"Do you remember," Theresa says to me, "how the three of us melted the top of the bathroom vanity with a curling iron, and you came home to all those fire engines in the driveway?"

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"I don't. Did I get upset?"

"I thought you were going to have a coronary," Alice Woo says. "I'll admit right now that it was all my fault. I desperately wanted curls, just like these guys."

Jadie cries, "We practically fried your hair. But it wouldn't take."

"You needed Jeri-Curl," I say, trying my best. The girls chuckle, Paul laughing loud in his special way, a nasally yuck-yuck.

"You know, Mr. Battle, I was totally afraid of you," Jadie now says. She's very dark-complected, with immense brown eyes and a tiny silver stud piercing in her nose. Later on I'll learn that at merely thirty-one she's chief corporate counsel for a software company, where I suppose piercings and tattoos are a-okay, and maybe recommended issue, like French cuffs used to be. "Theresa can tell you. I'd always ask if you were going to be home. I thought you didn't like us coming over."

"That's not true," I say. "I was always happy for you guys to hang out."

Theresa says, matter-of-factly, "Jerry just didn't like it when people were having fun and he wasn't."

Alice offers, "That's understandable, isn't it?"

"You got that," I say.

"Sure," Theresa says, "but for a
parent?"

This momentarily quells the moment, not to mention cutting me deep, because of course she's right in both principle and practice. I've never sat by well when others were at play, not when I was five, or fifteen, or fifty. I'd like to believe this was a question of my desiring involvement and connection, rather than of envy or selfishness. I'd like to blame my ever-indulging, spoiling, obliging mother (God bless her), or my wonderful brother Bobby for guiltlessly using up the years of his brief life; A L O F T

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I'd like to blame my father for giving me almost everything I required but really nothing I wanted, but that's the story of us all, isn't it, or of my particular American generation, or maybe just me, and nothing one really needs to hear about again.

"Though to be honest," my daughter now says, actually loop-ing her arm into the crook of mine, "at least Jack and I were instructed by the master. Paul can tell you what an ornery bitch I can be, if I see he's doing a crossword when I'm washing the dishes."

"She once squirted me with the Palmolive," he says. "Right on my pajamas."

Jadie nods. "But our Theresa was like that from the beginning. When we played Barbies, Alice and I always had to keep our dolls in the camper, cleaning and making the beds, while Theresa's Barbie was outside tending the campfire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows."

"My Barbie was chef de cuisine. You were my
femmes de
chambre.
There had to be a clear order to things."

"This is sounding very sexy," Eunice says, flanked by Rosario, who is bearing a tray of canapes. Eunice explains they are "po-lenta blinis" topped with Sevruga caviar and lobster meat and chived creme fraiche. I'm sure Eunice did put together at least one or two model canapes, as I witnessed once at another party, with Rosario making the rest. Everybody takes one, Rosario nudging me with the tray edge to grab a couple more. I comply.

"Incredible. Did you really make these?" Alice asks, to which Eunice smiles modestly but distinctly. Rosario drifts across the massive deck, to offer them to the others.

"It wasn't so difficult. The key is good components."

"We would have been happy with carrot sticks and onion dip," Theresa says, "but I'm glad you went all out."

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"Oh please, it's nothing special."

This is true. Ever since she and Jack got married I've never had so much Muscovy duck and Dungeness crab and Belon oys-ters coursing through the old iron pipes. Rita cooked fancy but always with modest ingredients, being loath to use anything that cost over $3 a pound. With Eunice it's only the rare and
cher,
artisanal meats and breads and cheeses, exotic flown-in fishes and fruits, wines from exclusive "garage" vintners, coffee from secret hillsides in Kenya and Nepal and Vermont. As she says, it's all about the components, which indeed are often wondrously tasty, reminding one of the fundamental goodness of the plain and natural; but there's still, I think, an even more satisfying gut-strum in what someone can magically do with a little herb and spice and heat, Rita's pulled-pork casserole being exquisite proof of that. Eunice can surely wow almost anybody with her deft arrangements, but I will swear there's a
love
to be found in your basic Crock-Pot alchemy, which even the sweetest lobster tail or dollop of sturgeon eggs cannot easily provide.

"I still cook the way Jerry taught me," Theresa says. "Remove pork chops from package, generously salt and pepper, bake at 375 degrees until there are no signs of moisture."

"Amazingly, it works with any meat or fish," Paul says.

"Fowl, too."

"Now, I wasn't that bad," I say, mostly for the benefit of Eunice, for Alice and Jadie were sometimes actually there, watching me along with Theresa as I fumbled through the cabinets for the Shake 'n Bake and Hamburger Helper before Rita showed up. I couldn't afford a full-time nanny, and Battle Brothers was sinking fast, and I'd get home at six to cranky, hungry kids and burrow through the freezer for something that wasn't too brown-gray at the edges. "You have to realize I never A L O F T

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had to cook until Theresa's mother died. Then it was every night I had to come up with something."

"At least until I took over," Theresa says.

"You were very advanced."

Eunice asks, "Why didn't you have Jack cook? He's older."

"I. don't know. I guess Jack just didn't seem up to it."

"Jerry was afraid of feminizing him," Theresa says, right on cue. And here comes the rest. But she looks up at me and appears to wink—which is the tiniest thing but wholly a salve. What she says isn't quite right, though, which I can say with some surety because I wasn't completely unaware of what I was doing back then. The fact of the matter was I didn't want Jack to have to think of his dead mother every night, at least in a ritualized way, which in my thinking was sure to happen if he had to don an apron and fry up hamburgers. For a year or so after she died he hardly said a word, he was just a kid with eyes, and as Theresa seemed the sturdier of the two in almost all respects, I made an executive decision to have him do other chores like repainting the back fence and raking leaves and hosing out the garbage cans, which he never once complained about, and I like to think it was the bracing physical activity that eventually snapped him out of it, though I'm probably mistaken on that one.

Some of Theresa's college friends (retro eyeglasses, thrift-store chic clothes, goatees galore) come around, and the talk gets a bit too pop-cultural and swervy and superallusive for me, and so I wander about the deck, briefly mingling with couples who are obviously friends of the hosts. They're decent enough people, well-heeled youngish parents with stiff drinks padding about in upturned collars and Belgian driving loafers, crooning incessantly about the cost of beach houses and Jag convertibles and nannies, the basic tune being why all this good living
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G - R A E L E E

should be so dear (though of course if it weren't, what would they take such fascination in, or not-so-sly pride?). One magnificently bronzed, lean-armed woman named Kit sits me down and practically goes stone by stone through the immense landscaping project she is having done on her North Fork property, the massive excavation and Teletubbies berming, the football-field-length retaining walls of Vermont slate, the 2000-square-foot limestone patio and the bluestone-decked and -bottomed pool, and the literally hundreds of mature shrubs and trees, the job (which Battle Brothers Excalibur is fortunately doing) to ring up at nearly three hundred grand alone. The recession is not of her world. Kit isn't complaining or angling for special treatment, but rather simply telling me her story, as if she is some Old Testament figure chosen to endure an epochal test from which she might someday emerge righteous and whole.

By the time Kit is all but strapping me into her Mercedes SUV to drive me out east to her place in Southold and show me the work-in-progress, Jack pats me on the shoulder, having returned from the store. Kit practically leaps into his arms, hugging him a bit too firmly for even a pleased and grateful customer, and I'm sure it's nothing even though you still hear stories these days of people offering more than loads of money to get good contractors to sign up for a job. In my day you had to dress nice and chat for as long as the customer wanted when you showed up to give an estimate, parking yourself for a long spell at a lady's kitchen table trying not to stare at the widening gap in her robe and listen to whatever she needed to tell you about her never-home husband or sick mother or super-rotten kids, knowing that nine times out of ten you wouldn't get the job. Jack chastely pecks her on the cheek and excuses us, saying A L O F T

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that the Battle men are being requested inside, and Kit tugs at his hand, reflexively unwilling to let him go.

I trail Jack into the house. He's just a shade shorter than I am, 6'1" or so, and built a bit differently, being lower-slung than am, his torso longer and thicker and his gait just like Daisy's was, meaning he moves in a slightly bowlegged fashion, knees pointing outward, a little bit like a pet iguana we once had, their similarities something I used to tease him about. He's got a hockey player's body, though he never played that, sticking to football and lacrosse, sports in which he excelled. As already mentioned, he's very good-looking, probably professionally so, and I can say with .some pride that he's got my best features, which are a strong chin and a thick tousle of naturally wavy hair and those sparkly eyes that some people have, speckled (and in our case, hazel-colored) irises that certain folks not-so-brightly wonder aloud about—namely, whether they're bad for your vision. But it's flattering, anyway, and as Jack knows well enough is almost unfairly attractive to the opposite sex, for really all you need to do is just meet someone's gaze and hold for a moment, like the first time I met his mother, or when I met Rita, take a long, slow-shuttered picture, and watch the thing steadily develop. I go into all this mostly because I find myself admiring Jack and Theresa more and more, not so much for the people they are (they are fine people) but for their physical qualities, and I know you'll think I do so because ultimately it's all about me, my legacy and what I've bestowed upon them and so on, but it's just the opposite. Perhaps it's seeing them both here today, in full-blown adulthood, but the notion occurs that whatever I have given them is in fact very little, and diminishes with each day, and that it's already happened that they define me probably more now than I do them, which of course is just as well.

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I I
A N G — R A E L E E

In the kitchen Nidia points us toward the powder room saying it's Pop, my father, who I didn't realize was already here but of course had to be the whole time. Eunice is talking to him through the locked door, Rosario standing by. When she sees us she steps back and says he's been moaning as though he's in pain but won't let anyone in. Just then Pop yells, "I don't need anybody. You people go away" He says
people
like we're a crowd on a subway platform, nobody he cares to know.

Jack tries the knob and says, "Come on, Pop. Let's open the door now."

"Everything stinks!" is his answer. For some reason this is my cue to make a try.

"We just want to know that you're not hurt, Pop. Are you hurt?"

"Is that you, Jerome?"

"Yeah."

"Where the hell have you been?"

"Outside on the deck."

"Well, then, everybody clear out. I only want Jerome to help me. I want my son."

"You still have to open the door for me."

"I can't," he says, weakly now. "I can't."

Jack pulls out his fat Swiss Army knife (which I taught him from early on to carry always) and plucks out its embedded plastic toothpick for me, so I can push in the lock.

"Okay, everybody scram," I say loudly. "I'll take it from here." Jack opens his hands and I wave him and Eunice and Rosario away, as well as the few kids—none from our clan—