Stranger, Father, Beloved (10 page)

As they sipped their tea, they set out the cards and began their game. Michael preferred it when his mother or one of the other ladies won. For when he won, as he often did, he became embarrassed and quickly gathered the old, brittle cards together to start a new game. After an hour or two, when his mother started to tire, Michael escorted her back to bed to lie down for a little while and then made lunch for the group. After a meal of sandwiches with a few potato chips, Marilyn once again made her way back into the living room for another hour of cards. Then Betty and Anne left, kissing Michael and fussing over him before he closed the door.

Next Michael faced the only awkward part of the day, the span of time after his mother's friends left and before dinner. There was nothing to do. This block of time was troubling, as both of them were moody at the hour of four p.m., their personalities tired and soured, struck with a certain rush of melancholy that colored the progression to dusk. She chose this time to clean her dentures, which were her principal source of anguish. Throughout her life, she had flossed and brushed her teeth after every meal to preserve them for as long as was humanly possible. The method had worked until she was seventy-five, by which time her teeth were in such bad shape that she'd had to
get the dentures. She called them “a disgrace” and fussed over them in private and in his company only.

When she was irritable, her normally saucy comments had a biting edge, and this mean-spiritedness was something Michael respected in her, even though he hated to be on the receiving end of such sharp-tongued commentary: “Don't stare at me with that gaping stare, it's not attractive. You shouldn't tease Betty so much—she can't handle it. She's not the kind of person who can handle that way of teasing. I'm sure she's at home right now, thinking of all the things you said to her. Don't drop that with your fumbly fingers.” Though they had both been mean, Michael mused that he had turned out so differently from his parents. Neither of them had had mental troubles that he could detect. Where had his twisted mind come from? They were both bizarre in their own ways, but neither of them was a “disturbed person.”

When he pushed her into the corner of the kitchen in her wheelchair and they began cooking dinner together around five, they would both become lively, almost giddy, as food was in sight, and the rest of the evening was a breeze ahead of them. Michael placed a cutting board on her wheelchair tray. She liked to have something to do with her hands, and she would slice up a tomato with her knotty arthritic fingers. Then they would finish the crossword begun earlier, mulling over meaningless conversations, retelling old jokes such as the anecdote of his father putting the cork in his ear at The Old Inn, or the day he'd appeared at the pool in his army-green swimming trunks and done a cannonball into the pool. His father had rarely acted out or shown emotion of any kind, so that the times he had were unforgettable for the family.

“The house is nice with you here, Michael,” she said as she sliced the tomatoes. He turned to her, and she quickly said, “No, no, don't
worry about not being here all the time. I'm like you—I like being alone. I always have. I have my friends and nurses for company. They drive me crazy sometimes, though, so clumsy! They seem to take up the whole room. I liked one girl a lot, Cora, but she had to move back to Trinidad to be with her husband. Sad to see her go . . .”

His mother had become more solemn after his father's passing, but it also seemed as if a burden had been shed. The vigilance over him and his activities, which had lasted for almost fifty years, had been released upon his death. Though he had never strayed from her again after the incident when Michael was eight, a minor, ever-present wariness hung about her previously carefree self, as if she had known she was now in charge of this man who had almost ruined them. She had had so many suitors before she had agreed to marry his father that Michael wondered if she regretted her choice. She had been beautiful, a tall Greta Garbo type, and could have had her pick of men.

Michael's father had loved that his wife was a great reader, like himself, though her focus was literature. At cocktail parties, her long lean figure perfectly displayed in a tasteful black dress, she would often surprise the men with a witty comment about a new book or about political developments from reading the paper, and he saw his father's face soften and shine with admiration as he watched her, his cultured and intelligent wife who knew when to stay quiet and when to dazzle all around her with a quick, clever remark.

Even though he loved and admired his wife, Michael's father had always eyed his friend's wife Sally, who was blond, unlike his wife Marilyn, and who had an hourglass figure. Sally was a bit of a flirt, and it was clear from her presence that she was not intelligent. That somehow appealed to his father's lust, and he flirted with her at dinner parties. Michael would park himself on the landing and listen to the commotion of their parties below, his father's deep laugh, the
records playing horns and trumpets, and the velvety female voices of the singers floating up the stairs. His father had come up the steps once when Michael was twelve in the middle of the party to get something from his room and seen Michael sitting there. His father had had a few drinks and his expression was more relaxed than usual.

“Did you see Sally in that green dress?” he asked Michael and grinned conspiratorially. “I'm not sure it is legal for a dress to be that low cut, I mean, if she's not looking for paying customers, that is. Could see those tits from a mile away.” He looked again at Michael and laughed. Michael tried to grin back, but it took a bit of effort, and his father became uneasy at his lack of response and stood there, shifting from foot to foot. He sighed, trudging past Michael and into his room. Michael was ashamed then—he had not given the proper response. But he didn't know why he was ashamed or how to act like his father wanted. Now he was here in the same house, the memories were as fresh as ever, but the figure attached to them was now in a box in the earth. Funny how the mind floats down the same corridors over and over, Michael mused.

After he turned out the light in his mother's room and went upstairs to his own room, Michael felt the anxiety return. These visits were so short—he barely had time to get settled in, and then he had to leave. All of the tasks that he would have to do tomorrow before leaving lingered in his mind. He would have to check the oil in the tank and fill up the car with gas. He cursed himself for not filling it up on the way there. His laziness was now crippling his good time. He had a work meeting Monday with Henry, one of the senior managers, whom he knew felt Michael was too uptight. But Henry couldn't touch him because he was so smart about staying on top of the numbers.

Without his superior intellect, Michael knew he was nothing. His mind was beginning to race. He sat on the carpet and then lay down in a ball and tightened up hard, closing his eyes. He wasn't sure if he could go back. Being in the house with his mother just worked. The two knew how to live together, and it felt as if he might indeed still be a younger man when he was here with her, one who had not chosen incorrectly but who would take the right path this time.

He opened his bottle and shook a pill loose, then crawled over to his glass of water to wash it down. Henry judged him for being so uptight, and there was not a damn thing Michael could do about it. Yes, he was not easygoing in the least, he ruined things with his uptight nature, but if they only knew how much effort it required for him to appear normal, they would forgive him his strained and stern countenance. Every second of every day was a wrestling match between him and his nerves. And it was all because he had faulty wiring.

Panic seized his heart, the whole chest constricted, as he imagined going into the office on Monday and seeing Henry's face that never quite smiled big enough for Michael; the disapproving look on his daughter's face; climbing into bed beside Nancy and switching off the lamp, feeling the mild hope for sex that drifted from her side of the bed. He could feel her expectant emotions all day, every day. They never seemed to go away.

As the minutes passed, the pill kicked in to a degree and dulled down his racing thoughts. He got up from the floor and quietly exited his room to roam the house.

The house had a smell of old wood to it, and Michael walked around the upstairs after his mother was asleep. The floor beneath him creaked, but he knew that nothing except the banging of pots and pans would wake his mother. She slept like the dead now, her bones
heavy on the hospital bed that had been moved into the house. The nurses usually bathed her before he arrived, as she liked to preserve her modesty. Once, while she was napping, he had pulled back the cover to find her TV remote and been frightened by the gauntness of her frame. There was elegance to the complete lack of fat, but her bare legs still startled him and he felt he had committed some form of treason to see below her sheet.

As Michael walked around, looking at his father's paintings through the dim glow of the antique heavy-lidded lamps in the hallway, he questioned what he would do when his mother passed away and he no longer had the delight of these simple excursions.

He got to the door of his father's old room. His father had been a stoic man, with distinctive features, and even in his last years, when his face had been rumpled with lines, he had had features that were unique and dignified. In his final years, Howard would still receive phone calls from friends and relatives asking his advice on various matters. He was thoughtful and didn't rush into speech, and when he did speak, he spoke the truth. When Michael had seen him in court, he had sat above the others in his black robe, considering the truth as he studied the men and women placed in front of him. He had listened to the lawyers prattle on, unmoved like a boulder, and when he had spoken, the room seemed to tremble. What would it be like to be that confident?

Michael occasionally felt a tinge of gratitude that his father was dead, for his life had been spent battling with the man in the subtlest of ways. Growing up, he had felt his father was constantly watching him, as if he were a criminal in his father's courthouse, as if convinced that something was wrong with him. Then, when Michael had had his breakdown at the end of the first year of university, the worst year of his life in many ways, his father had seemed frightened of him. The
breakdown had managed to confirm the suspicion that had always haunted their relationship—that Michael was indeed damaged in some unalterable way.

It was his mother who had driven him for a trial stay at Chestnut Hill at the start of summer break after his freshman year. It was she who had called him every day and showed no embarrassment for him, at least none that was visible. When they gave him a temporary diagnosis of schizophrenia, one that was eventually changed to neurotic paranoia, an ugly term but still a better one than the first, she had been at his side and had not broken down into weak tears or turned her head away. She had known all along that he was capable of greatness and had not been daunted by this awful test. Like Nancy, she had nurtured his troubled mind with unconditional love and kindness.

The nervous breakdown had come two weeks after a night of drinking. Michael had gone to a party where he hadn't known anyone. He had drunk too much and remembered standing in a corner by himself most of the night, listening to others' conversations. Then the night had turned and he could remember only flashes of it. He had his arms wrapped around someone's chest, and there was laughing around him. He could not remember who it was.

The next day, he had awakened alone on the lawn, and the hangover itself was enough to induce a state of misery. But when he walked around campus, he could feel eyes on him. He had done something wrong, but he could not remember what it was. He didn't know who else had been there. He could not remember how he had gotten home. That seemed a paltry reason to break down, but he felt a strong desire to take a whole bottle of pills, and he found his hands were shaking. He could not even explain it to his one close friend, Alex, who hadn't
attended the party. Losing all control in front of a group of strangers had brought him to his knees somehow, emotionally. He could not remember what had happened.

When Michael was released from Chestnut Hill, he had gone back to live with his parents for the summer, and the long, empty days had been excruciating. He had insisted on sleeping on the third floor, and when the heat became unbearable, he had felt too embarrassed to complain since he had chosen it in the first place. When his father returned in the middle of the afternoon from the court house, Michael would invariably be up on the third floor with his nose buried in either a novel or a book that he was reading for his second-year philosophy class that fall.

When Michael passed his father's study to go down to the kitchen, he would often listen outside the door to see if his father mentioned his name while he talked on the phone. He was sure one time he heard his father say “living with a lunatic,” but he had no proof, as the conversation wasn't even about him. His father had been speaking with an old friend who was a doctor, and they were discussing playing golf that weekend. The comment would have been completely out of context, but it was possible he had said it. Michael then began listening to every comment his father uttered. From upstairs, he would lean over the banister whenever his father spoke to hear if his name was mentioned. His father's tendency to mumble only added to the problem.

Once, during Christmas that year, his father had left the group assembled by the tree to make himself another scotch and water. Michael had been telling the family a story from school, and his father had left in the middle of it. He could have sworn he said “Fuck you” from the other room under his breath. But he had no proof. If asked, his father would only deny it.

Michael stayed at Chestnut Hill for exactly six weeks, while they tried different medications on him and a lot of talk therapy. He spoke of worrying about what other people thought of him and how, when he was drunk, those worries intensified. By the end of the six weeks, they seemed to believe he was stabilized and released him. While he was home, for the rest of that miserable summer, Michael had made a decision—to overprepare for the coming year and to make it the best academic year of his life. He read every single book on the syllabus before classes started, so that he could use the actual semester to do outside reading and research on the topics presented. His professors were amazed at his performance. He started a habit of advanced and thorough preparation for himself, a trend that continued through the rest of his four years.