Expensive People (6 page)

Father had two brothers and, like him, they had left Philadelphia and rarely returned. I had an uncle in Italy, whose business was connected
with a medical supply company and was always on the verge of being raided by the police; and another uncle who, just like Father, was always being promoted and shoulder-tapped by other corporations, transferred and stolen and relocated back and forth across the country as if he were a precious jewel. The two brothers rarely met, though once they bumped into each other in a men's lounge at Midway Airport. One was on his way to a board meeting in Boston, another on his way to Los Angeles. I forget which was which. And I think they met one other time, when Father was searching for Nada and turned up at various relatives' homes, unwelcome and always drunk, demanding information; but maybe the brother hadn't been home when Father arrived.

Father hadn't graduated from college but had skipped out after his sophomore year (never to open another book unless it was a paperback left on an airline seat) and joined the Army, did well, was discharged and taken into a small Rhode Island concern that manufactured plastic Christmas tree ornaments, and did so well with sales that he was snapped up by a business that dealt with blotters, paper tubes, and corrugated cardboard. His star rose so rapidly that he hopped about from bolts manufacturers to underwear manufacturers to a brief spell with a top-security concern that made, overtly, children's toy bombers; from there to vice-presidencies in seat-belt companies, wastebasket companies, certain curtain companies, certain steel companies, and so on to the present. It exhausts me to think of all this. I never had a job in my life and never will, unless you want to call this memoir my life's work, but Father has had innumerable jobs. Perhaps he's had so many, did so much, because he could sense that his only child would accomplish nothing. But Father didn't really sense anything. He didn't bother figuring out emotions or intangibles. His IQ^, you'll be interested to know, was only 120. What accounts for his success, then? (At this writing he is president of Crescent Steel.) Good stomach juices, I think, and an acute apparatus for balance in his inner ear. One of Nada's annoying friends, a psychiatrist named Melin, declared in my hearing (I was behind a sofa) that Father's business successes were due to a gland no more than an inch long at the base of his spinal cord, but he might have been joking. That bastard Melin was a big joker.

What else would you like to know about Father? I want to draw him in here so that when you see him, in the following pages, you'll know who he is even if he behaves strangely. Most novels, which are fiction
and therefore limited, have to build up characters slowly and don't dare allow them to be eccentric or surprising unless this is planned; but my memoir deals with real people, who are already alive and quite ordinarily living but who may then do things that seem out of “character”: a gentleman who is also a son-of-a-bitch, a dope who is also shrewd, etc. Father's waist sagged despite his golf and steam baths, and he was too vain to wear glasses, so he had to hold his newspaper slightly off to one side when he read (though he didn't read much), and he was fond of wrestling matches on television, and he liked steaks with mushroom sauce, steaks with garlic, steaks on boards, and steaks pierced through their bloody hearts on silver sticks, only one kind of potato (mashed) and lots of cheap doughy bread, and sweet, ghastly sweet, little pickles—baby midget gherkins he'd eat by the handful, chomping and chopping his way with his big teeth. And Scotch. Too much Scotch. His clothes were expensive because he had no idea there were cheaper clothes available, but on him they looked as if he'd worn them on an overnight plane ride from Calcutta or Tokyo. With his cheerful, sad brown eyes, always a little puffed, he looked like a bloated elf, like a man who has been awake all night, lying in his rumpled street clothes. I have a photograph taken of him in Tokyo, incidentally. He is standing with his arms folded in imitation of a great statue of Buddha that is in the distance behind him; both he and the Buddha look drunk, though the Buddha does not look as rumpled as Father. The back of the photograph is scrawled over with Japanese, and the “secret” of the message has long been lost to Father. (I have a drawer full of photographs and other sentimental trash I've brought along from my life as a child, my living life. I'll go through them in a later chapter and remark upon them, especially Nada's. But how strange these people have already begun to look, especially myself!)

The oddest thing of all was that while I loved Father I did not really believe he was my father. All my life I had visions of another man, my true father, and while he might appear in the body of the father I had been stuck with, his voice, his personality, and his soul were entirely different. For instance, my father was always happy. What can you do with a father who is always—nearly always—happy? He was happy putting up with Nada's boorish intellectual friends, he was happy with me when I failed him as a son (when I tried out for sixth-grade baseball at Wells Lorraine Boys' School my glasses were broken in the first
fifteen minutes), he was happy when around him everyone was miserable, in bad weather, in stock-market declines, national emergencies. Listen to him come into a room, carrying his drink, and declare in a loud nostalgic voice:

“What good does it do, eh? What good does it ever do? You give your best and you drop dead like Arnold did. My God, what a shame. What a shame. He was what? Only forty-five? When I think of what he had to offer! What that man had to give! Right? You know … well, I mean … I mean all the
potential
that man had to give, it's a goddam shame.” And he would shake his large head slowly and stare at the tip of his shoe and after a philosophical moment in which he let his ice clink he would start to nod his head, as if making his way up from the bottom of a dreary sea of sorrow. And his shoulders would make an attempt at straightening, one maybe a little higher than the other, and by the time he raised his glass to his mouth he would have “come out of it.” “But you know life's got to go on and nobody realized that more than Arnold. If anybody knew that, he knew it. I think … I think maybe I'm crazy, but I think that we owe it to him to keep going, keep his memory going, you know, and keep thinking about him while we go on living. He would have wanted it that way. Wouldn't he? Yes, that man would have imirted we be happy right now no matter how miserable we felt because life has to go on and nobody knew it more than Arnold …” (I used to spy on their cocktail parties all the time.)

But just the same, though I knew him so well, I somehow didn't think he was my real father. I thought that another father might be waiting somewhere off in the wings and that at the next cocktail party, if I listened hard and crept as close to the living room as I dared, I might hear the strong, hard, even brutal voice of my true father.

On our way back from that walk, heading into the wind, we were just passing the house Nada believed Edward Griggs lived in when the man himself turned in to his driveway. He was driving a car I didn't recognize. Nada seized Father's wrist in that urgent, melodramatic way she had and said, “What did I tell you? Look!” We were blocking
his driveway, and the gentleman in the car nodded at us and smiled uncertainly. Father, a little confused, nodded energetically and smiled back. But he neglected to move out of the way, so the man in the car— should I call him Griggs?—sat for a moment without moving. His smile gradually faded.

Finally he did the only right thing: he lowered his window and leaned head and shoulder out. Father approached with a step bouncier than usual. Nada did not budge.

“I believe you're our new neighbors. Just moved in, haven't you?” the man said.

“Yes, just moved in!” Father cried cheerfully.

This was the moment for them to admit knowing each other or to puzzle out identities, but, for some strange reason, they did no more than stare worriedly at each other.

“Nice house down there,” the man said.

“Nice, very nice! Nice neighborhood also,” Father said. “Nice town!”

“It is nice, yes,” the man said slowly. He was looking at Father in a reluctant, perplexed way. “I have always thought so, in the short time I've lived here in Fernwood.”

“Is this Fernwood?” Father said. But he recovered at once, laughed, reddened, and launched off on another enthusiastic speech. “We've just moved in too, but of course you know that, haha! You just mentioned that, or did I mention it? No, you mentioned that
you
have been here only a short time. We've been here a week now. How long have you been here?”

“About a week.”

The man who might have been Griggs was trying not to look at Nada, who was staring gloomily at him. A few awkward seconds passed. I stamped on the sidewalk, letting my weight fall on one foot, then the other. Nada put her arms around me and kissed my ear. “Poor little boy, freezing out here while that idiot in the car pretends not to recognize us. How stupid! And that bigger idiot pretends not to recognize
him?

“We'll have to get together sometime,” Father said.

“That's an excellent idea,” the man said. He smiled shakily at Father, as if Father represented something terrifying he did not want to concede. Or perhaps he could not believe that Father really stood there, El-wood Everett himself. I thought it was strange that they did not introduce themselves and shake hands, the way adults always do, as if
they'd at last met the one person in the world they had been aching to meet. Father and this man did not behave in the usual way and being so rude made them uneasy. Father chattered nervously about the good healthy air, about the state of the economy, about skiing conditions somewhere, until Nada told me to go get him. So I went and tugged at his arm. The man in the car—even I was not sure any longer if he was Griggs or not—had to look at me and his eyes moved upon me reluctantly. I thought I saw a look of muted, uneasy recognition, but it faded at once.

“My son Dickie,” Father said.

“Yes, Dickie. Richard.”

“You know him?” Father cried.

The two adults looked at each other with reddening faces. There was a moment when they might have asked whether they'd known each other in another life, just a week past, but the moment went by and they were left stubborn and miserable in silence. They could think of nothing to say.

Finally Nada said, “Elwood, are you coming? We must go home.”

“Wife's calling,” Father said with a fast small grin.

The man raised his eyebrows in a fake perfunctory look of surprise and saw Nada, who was standing a few yards away, as if he had truly not noticed her before. He made a slight bowing motion with his head which Nada did not acknowledge.

She and I were halfway back to our house by the time Father caught up to us.

“So?” Father said.

“Was it him or not?” I asked.

“Was it?” said Father.

Nada said nothing.

“So? What did that prove? Did he know me? Did I know him?” Father said.

“I think that was him,” I said.

“How would you know?” Father cried with a hearty fake laugh. “You don't know Griggs. You'd be the last person to recognize him.”

“I think it was him.”

“But he didn't know me.”

“Yes, he did.”

“No, he didn't.”

“Yes, he did.”

Nada made a snorting sound. “The bastard was just as terrified at seeing us as we were at seeing him. None of us can ever escape.”

“No, I don't think it was him,” Father said.

“Think it was
he”
said Nada.

Fernwood was an expensive, innocent town, but it was there that all my troubles began. It was in Fernwood that I began to disintegrate as a child. You people who have survived childhood don't remember any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy ax there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else—an adult, an animal. Do I sound too earnest and knowing? Too intense? Indeed I am intense, yes. Earnest also, because who else would stay laboring over this miserable typewriter (if only I could afford an electric typewriter!), dripping lardy sweat onto the keys, for no reward? And knowing, yes indeed. Knowing. In another chapter I'll tell you about my IQ^so your faith in me will be strengthened.

So it was in Fernwood that it began. It accelerated. Any reader could tell, however, that the seeds had been sown much earlier. For instance:

I am a small child, perhaps an infant. I am a creature warm and cozy in a soft woolen outfit, wrapped in a blanket. I am sitting in a rocking chair just my size and Nada (she taught me to call her “Na-da” before any other word) is reading to me. I do not know what she is reading. I do not understand the words, but they are wonderful, like music. The cover
of her book is shiny and the light from the table by the bed strikes it, making the cover glow so that I can't see what picture is on it—maybe that picture of the rabbit in dungarees. Nada is reading in a fast, excited voice. I am happy here with her because I haven't seen her for a while, this warm, soft person with the dark hair lying loose on her shoulders; when Nada is gone off somewhere a woman with dark, dark skin and a white outfit takes care of me, pushing me out for endless walks in the sun or letting me sit wretchedly in the sun while she chatters shrilly with other dark-skinned women in white, yellow, or light blue outfits.

But now Nada is back and I can see that she loves me. She is reading me a story. As she reads her eyes keep jumping up and behind me, as if she is waiting for something. She is wearing a pink nightgown just like mine, the same color, with a silky ribbon tied at her throat. Over this she has a flowered robe. She is so pretty, this Nada, with her loose hair and her shiny, smooth face, and suddenly there is a noise outside. On the stairs. Her eyes glow up from the book and catch the light the way the book cover does, and her words stop at once, and outside there is the thud of running feet and a sudden louder thud and the sound of wood splintering, and Nada and I both look up to see a strange man crashing through the door, the door flying back and slamming into the wall, and a blinding exploding flash of light, and then everything is still again and there, behind him, stands Father.