Circle View (16 page)

T
HE trouble began on a recent Friday evening, when, as a matter of habit, I had arranged myself in the easy chair. Both hearing-aid receivers—the old-style transistor-radio type—sat balanced on my lap, and between them a bowl of shelled walnuts. On the magazine table I placed a bamboo coaster cradling a tumbler of scotch eased down with ice water. I wore electric hunting socks because my feet will chill in winter, no matter how warm the house. Wired up, literally, from head to toe, I pointed the remote control and clicked on WAMR to hear
The Friday Night Big Band Revue
, that week featuring Artie Shaw.

I watched the display on the stereo light up like an airport. I leaned back my head and closed my eyes. Then, instead of music, the speakers burst through with a violent hiss of white noise that startled me so, I spilled my walnuts. The problem, I decided, had to be signal interference from the microwave towers that muck up the fairways across the Naval Academy back nine. When I adjusted the tuner, I found noise across the entire band. With no CDs for the new stereo, no music, no walnuts, no good reason to drink my scotch, I sat there, stuck.

Outside, in the cold, my neighbors' houses shone with strings of colored lights and floodlit cutouts of Santa and his reindeer. I pointed a flashlight at my roof and saw my antenna leaning on its side, blown over by the strong winds blown off the bay. The stuffed owl I had rigged beside the antenna to scare away the seagulls had rolled down against the gutter, its wire feet sticking out. No one bothers with the owls anymore. I remember when every rooftop had one, when boys sold them door-to-door. Now my neighbors' shingles are white spattered with droppings; the rowdy gulls float over their dormers, roost in their chimneys.

After assessing the damage, I went inside and called Janey on the hearing-aid phone she bought me last Christmas.

“Listen, Janey,” I told her, “I have to go up and fix the antenna. How about if you and Pete come steady the ladder for me, hold the flashlight.”

“Dad, it's nighttime, and there's snow falling. And anyway,
you
do
not
set foot on any ladder. You know you get dizzy.”

“Pshaw,” I said, a word not part of my ordinary vocabulary, but something I'll say to exasperate her. “I'm not too old to climb my own roof.”

“I want you to promise me you won't.”

“You're treating me like a child, Janey.”

She sighed. “Pete and I will do it, Dad, but not tonight.”

The antenna in question is nothing more than a simple yagi-uda modification. Not much on range, but it pulls in the signals of the local stations well enough. I had originally rigged it up for my wife's television. She would watch game shows and shout at the contestants on the screen while she ironed clothes. Sometime after Agnes passed on, I bought my first hi-fi stereo. Pete, Janey, and I climbed to the roof and connected the antenna to the stereo's receiver, then stood and examined the results of our efforts. Not until a few years later did this strike me as strange—standing on the roof with my daughter and the man she would eventually marry, the three of us making small talk like strangers at a cocktail party.

“Raymond, tell me again about this antenna,” I remember Pete saying, the wind lifting his hair from his bald spot. “You helped design it or something?”

I repeated the story of my study and work on the yagiuda, as I'd done for him half a dozen times before, at his request. I knew it was his way of humoring me, of making conversation, getting along. At the time I was still Senior Research Engineer at ENTEC; I retired last August on disability. Janey did not listen to the story. She had heard it enough times before.

“Listen,” I said into the phone, “you have no business on ladders yourself.”

“Dad, I'm only three months. I'm not even showing.” I could hear the blush in her voice at my mention of her pregnancy.

Every Christmas Eve when Janey was a child, Agnes would have me climb to the roof to stomp around in my muddy work boots. “Hurry off to bed!” Agnes would tell Janey, “Santa's here!” After ten minutes I'd stop and sit on the asphalt shingles to smoke a pipe and enjoy the quiet cold. Through the joists and beams I'd feel the bass drum of her running steps: from the den to the bathroom to her bedroom. Remembering all of this, I forgot to speak.

“Dad?”

“I need my music, Janey. There's nothing else I can say on the matter. This is non-negotiable.”

“Please
don't do anything on the roof. Pete and I will stop by tomorrow.”

I treat my deafness as a kind of footrace between debility and technology. As my nerve damage progresses, the world is slowly muted. I even things out with better hearing aids, more powerful stereo equipment. This strategy lets me keep
my music—Duke Ellington, Count Basie
, Art Tatum—but listening through the earpiece is no better than listening through a tin cup. A matter of poor design. This current stereo was given to me by Janey and Pete just last month, my birthday. Cutting edge hardware, with a remote-controlled multi-disc CD player and a quartz-lock digital FM tuner, but no turntable for my 78s. I admit to this nostalgia, hanging onto those ancient wax sides, stacked away in the basement like some rubber sword I keep to wave in the face of obsolescence. I make no apologies.

The next morning I pulled the ladder from the shed and propped it against the house. The ladder is cracked in places, paint-spattered and held together with duct tape; I won't trouble buying a new one. This past June, I failed to hear the burned-out bearing in the motor of my electric hedge trimmer, and spent the morning shaping my boxwoods until the trimmer smoked and caught fire in my hands. I threw it to the ground, my palms and fingertips seared. Janey and Pete came by the next day and loaded my power tools into the trunk of their Honda. “For your own good,” they told me. They hired a boy to come out once a week and care for the lawn. Now she wants me to sell the house—I tell her my clothes, by God, I'm keeping.

During the afternoon the doorbell buzzed, and I expected Janey and Pete. Instead there stood a young woman from down the block—Kate Warner—with her child Mindy in tow. Kate Warner reminds me a bit of Janey—wide, brown eyes and straight hair. Pretty. She smiled and motioned over her shoulder, saying words that sounded like an electric hum to my ears.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't understand.” I nudged the volume controls on the receivers in my vest. She leaned toward me, her soap smell pushing into the house.

“Your TV antenna, Mr. Hopkins. It's blown over.” The little girl looked up at me.

“A dead bird's in your rain spout,” she said. I leaned down, as much as my back would allow.

“Well, you're mighty observant, aren't you?”

“What's
aservant?”
she asked, and hid behind her mother's leg.

“I'm aware of the antenna,” I told Kate Warner. She shrugged, smiled again, and said something else I couldn't hear as she turned away. When she was halfway down the block, I remembered to say thank you. I have the manners of a goat.

Over the years, Agnes became the link in a line of transmittance by which Janey and I could communicate with one another. How else for me to describe it? Evenings, as I sat in my study working on reports, Agnes would tap on the door to let me know Janey needed money for a class trip, a candy sale, or some such thing.

“Why didn't she come to me herself?” I asked without fail. Agnes, God bless her, would shrug; she honestly did not know. I would open my wallet or pull out car keys.

“Tell her to have a good time,” I'd say, and transmission of the message was complete. It was that way all our lives together. This was the best we could do. When Agnes died, we lost our link. Pete is a youth counselor for Social Services, and I believe he has been urging Janey to—how would he phrase it?—to try to deal openly with our relationship. Lately, she takes me to dinner so we can reminisce about such things as family vacations. I can recall only brief weekend trips to symposiums where I delivered papers on electromagnetic interference and ate lunches in banquet rooms and officers' clubs. Janey's favorite phrase is this: “We had our own kind of fun.”

When Janey was still a baby I would take her with me to the field behind the Navy-Marine Corps Stadium, sit her in the grass while I swung a driver and five-iron, knocking shag balls. Hitting the ball seemed to me nothing but pure motion, a synergy of mind and muscle. I never enjoyed the game of golf—rides in little carts, bets on ten-foot putts. Keep it. An open field I needed, my woods and a five-iron, a shoebox of balls, a tree at which to aim. As I learned power, began to get behind the ball with all my spiraled energy, I found I could send them high over the wall of the empty football stadium, disappearing into its mouth. I felt like Zeus, raining hailstones down on the mountain.

“You see that, Janey,” I'd say. She sat, in her clay-stained jumper, looking up at me. Before I realized, she was out of diapers and into dresses, taking off with boys in cars, and I could no longer knock drives over the stadium wall. Now and again I still whiff at balls in the backyard. Short chip shots, pitch and runs. It's a diversion.

Toward dusk, Janey called.

“Dad, we couldn't make it today,” she said. “Pete had an emergency at the hospital. Some kid in his Reach Out group tried to kill himself. Swallowed gasoline.”

I couldn't think of an appropriate response. “That's very sad,” I said, and for a moment felt it. “My antenna is still down.”

“None of this could be helped, Dad. You stay off the roof.”

“Pshaw,” I said.

“I'll be very angry with you.” I could picture her as she said this, clicking her nails on the formica, twisting the end of her hair.

That evening I sketched plans for a guy wire system to keep the antenna from falling once it was back up. When I looked out the window, the branches of trees, silhouetted against the streetlights, were shaking in the strong winds. I tried to recall from my sailing days the precise sound of those November gusts ripping off the bay, pushing brine into the streets downtown, right up to the front doors of the shops. I found I could not remember, and so turned on my stereo with the volume up full and for a few moments pretended that the hiss through the speakers equaled the sound of wind, the noise of sailing, the clatter of my past.

By morning, a hard rain fell. I worried that the stuffed owl in the gutter might take on water, though it was made to be waterproof—the feather wings heavily waxed, insides stuffed with dacron, glass eyes cemented in place. In late afternoon, the rain stopped. Outside, a row of seagulls perched along the gutter and on the tines of the downed antenna. The owl looked no more threatening than a lump of wet laundry. When I clapped my hands, the seagulls moved their wings and lifted. I climbed two rungs on the ladder before it began to sink in the wet ground. I stepped down and went into the house. I phoned Janey and got her machine. I've never acclimated myself to this particular technology.

“Janey?” I said, and then waited, as if she might answer. “I don't want to make a pest of myself about this antenna, but I'm not one to put things off.” I hesitated. “This is your father,” I said, and hung up.

Lately, Janey takes me places on Saturday afternoons—the Naval Academy museum, the City Dock to watch sailboats drift in and out of the bay. One afternoon, as she sat throwing cookie scraps to the mallards, she asked if I remembered a place, other than the stadium field, I used to take her. For a year, when Janey was ten, we lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. On a city playground there lay an old iron radio tower—a hundred feet long, fat as a barrel—mounted on its side atop concrete pedestals. A brass plaque explained it had been the antenna tower for WBIG, during the “golden age” of radio. Kids would dangle from the antenna, climb over and under it, walk its length with their arms held out. Occasionally I would take an hour off work and drive her to the park to see the antenna, to explain its parameters.

Once we went there in the middle of the morning, when Agnes was laid up with the flu. Women in curlers stood talking and smoking in groups while their children played on the swings and seesaws. I sent Janey off to play while I read a journal on—I still remember—terrestrial radio waves. I found an empty bench near a group of mothers with strollers, reading movie star magazines. The secret world of women. When I sat, they stopped talking and looked at me. I straightened my tie and nodded at them; they moved their strollers away. I wanted Janey beside me then, to let those women know she was mine, to legitimize my presence. I put aside the journal and looked up in time to see Janey slip and fall off the top of the antenna and land hard in the dirt below. I ran and drew her up; she held her thigh, skinned beneath the pink hem of her dress. She screamed.

“Shh,” I said to her. “You're fine, it's only a scrape.”

Her face reddened; she choked on a gulp of air and screamed again. As I held her, the women stared at us. I wished for one of them to come help.

“Please. Quiet, honey,” I said to Janey. She kept screaming, and I did not know how to make her stop. I couldn't. The women watched me, shaking their heads and frowning. Sweat ran down under my collar, and I noticed I had somehow misplaced my journal. I lifted Janey and held her in a way I hoped looked paternal to the women, but was meant to muffle her cries against my suitcoat. That was my motive, to shut her up, this injured child. While the women watched, I carried Janey to the car and got her inside, then drove till she had quieted and we could go home.

Now, as we sat on the dock, Janey smiled. “That place was the greatest,” she said, as if the incident never occurred, transformed by the alchemy of recollection.

I shook my head. “It's hard for me to remember it,” I said. Such lies come easily these days.