The Bill from My Father (11 page)

I liked to visit my father during this fictitious phase of his marriage. Once a week, after my three o'clock class, I'd maneuver my sputtering Fiat up the driveway, and before I came to a full stop, he'd appear at the front door, his jumpsuited figure sunstruck against the dark interior of the house. Even if his hearing aid had been turned up all the way, the sound of the engine couldn't have alerted him to my arrival, so it wasn't completely far-fetched of me to believe that he may have been waiting at the living room window, the brick-and-mortar curtain parted, his breath clouding a pane of glass as he scanned the length of Ambrose Avenue searching for my car. As soon as I walked through the door, he'd open a can of salted peanuts and we'd sink into the living room couch just in time to watch
Wheel of Fortune
. I think I speak for both of us when I say that we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could yell out answers to the word puzzles without our usual displays of competitiveness and poor sportsmanship.

When it came to words, my father believed I possessed an
unfair advantage. I'd intuited the rules of grammar at a young age. Idioms and figures of speech stuck in my head as stubbornly as TV jingles. Yet I wasn't able to explain to my father (or to myself) that language helped me navigate a world of half-truths and lawyerly rationalizations.

For all his impassioned eloquence in court, my father still made verbal slips, such as,
You want I should check the time?
or,
The guy don't know what he's talking about
. And when he did, his eyes widened at the realization, and he'd bluster with fancy, ready-made phrases:
Be that as it may … In light of the fact … Contrary to popular opinion … By the same token
. Still, vestiges of the scrambled syntax he'd inherited from his Russian immigrant parents, along with the “dem” and “doze” of an adolescence spent on the streets of Philadelphia, seeped into his patterns of speech. It wasn't uncommon for high and low diction to collide midsentence:
Be that as it may, the guy don't know what he's talking about
.

To this day I know almost nothing about my grandparents (had he spent his fund of stories on my brothers?) except for this: Abe and Ruth Cooper—an Anglicized surname given to my grandfather, a barrel maker, at Ellis Island—parted company with friends by calling out in unison, “See you yesterday,” instead of, “See you tomorrow.” My father laughed when recounting the story, but it caused him to blush with an ancient shame. What embarrassed him, it's taken me decades to realize, wasn't just his parents' grammar, but their “yesterday” in the larger sense: the backwardness of greenhorns slow to adapt.

His parents spoke broken English. My parents spoke broken Yiddish, but only in the presence of other Jews or when they wanted to talk in code around their children. They shifted into Yiddish with the relief of people removing a pair of tight shoes, their conversation suddenly peppered with exclamations such as
Pish!
and
Feh!
Liberated by Yiddish, my father shrugged theatrically, batted at the air, and cast imploring glances toward God. Should he stare into the distance, his sighs prolonged, I'd wonder if he was telling stories about his childhood in Atlantic City or his adolescence in Philadelphia.
Perhaps such stories were diluted by English, vibrant only when told in the language of his past.

My longing to return with him to the scenes and people of his youth (if the past, in fact, was what he'd been discussing) amounted to a shared nostalgia, each of us, in his different way, succumbing to the gravitational tug of a lost world. When I could no longer contain myself and ventured a question, he seemed pleased, but instead of answering, he'd turn toward whomever he'd been addressing and make, in Yiddish, what I supposed was a comment about my curiosity. It was disconcerting to see him inspired to such expressiveness by a language meant to exclude me, his mother tongue providing a kind of exuberant background music as I went about my chores.

Nothing infuriated my father as much as having his grammar corrected, especially by a precocious kid. In the rare instance I dared to correct him—“The guy
doesn't
know what he's talking about”—he'd glare at me, his body rigid, the tell-tale vein protruding at his temple. He wanted to defend himself, but once he'd been admonished, he couldn't fire back. I hadn't simply pointed out a grammatical error, I'd declared myself American—more American than he—and lumped him in the league of greenhorns. His only recourse was to leave the room before he proved me right with a flustered rebuttal or a wordless blow.

Perhaps it's poetic justice that I eventually came to share my father's dread of self-betrayal, came to know firsthand his fear that he risked ridicule and ostracism merely by opening his mouth to speak. Throughout my adolescence I worried that if I didn't watch every word I said, my sibilant
s
's and flamboyant gestures were sure to articulate, all too clearly, who and what I was.

After Anna left him, however, my father and I found ourselves able to communicate with unusual ease. He finally seemed convinced that teaching three classes a week constituted a legitimate workload. I learned to defer to his opinions and to tread lightly around conversational powder kegs. “God bless you!” he'd blurt whenever I used a word that sounded to him like a bunch of noisy syllables.
Chanteuse
. “God bless you!”
Phlegmatic
. “God bless you!”

In order to keep up the appearance of normalcy—that is, in order to perpetuate the myth of his marriage—I kept thinking I should inquire about Anna, but every time I thought of asking where she was, I heard his answer echo in my head:
What do I look like, the FBI? She'll be back when she's back, and until she is, she's somewhere else
. That he'd edited a wife out of existence didn't strike me as a portent for the future of our own relationship. Or perhaps I chose to ignore it. In those days we'd come as close to courtship as a father and son can come.

While watching contestants spin the wheel of fortune, its prizes and penalties blurring together, we passed the can of peanuts back and forth. Light dimmed beyond the picture window. We were too mesmerized by Vanna White turning blanks into letters to wrench ourselves from the sofa and switch on a nearby lamp. As darkness enlarged the living room, our guesses at the unsolved puzzles—“The something you something may be your something!” “Never something today what you can something tomorrow!”—rang truer than any adages I knew.

My father sprawled on the king-size mattress, his crutches propped against the bedroom wall as if they were holding it up. Woozy from anti-inflammatories and winded from our trip up the stairs, his eyes slowly closed. I stood at the foot of the bed and watched him sleep, just as he may have long ago stood at the foot of my bed and watched me. His eyes darted beneath the lids, mouth twitching with sentiments that were anybody's guess. In the throes of a dream, he flung out his arm and it came to rest on the empty side of the mattress. My mother's side. Anna's side. Now Betty's, I supposed. On the nightstand lay her white leather Bible, a crimson ribbon saving her place.

Distant voices from
This Is Your Day
drifted upstairs. Benny Hinn and his congregation were speaking in tongues. Vowels reverberated. Consonants clicked. I made a mental note to use the word
glossolalia
when explaining onomatopoeia to my class. A kind of murmuring
religious fervor charged the air, and I couldn't help but wonder if Betty lay beside my father at night and read Bible passages aloud, promising an afterlife in return for placing his faith in Jesus. Given his gout, she had a captive audience, and if they were in fact
sleeping
together, I wouldn't be surprised if my father listened to excerpts from the New Testament in the hope that his attentiveness might lead to sex, though how he'd manage to have sex while his toe was swollen was something I no more wanted to think about than he'd want to think about me having sex with my mental-doctor friend. Having sex with Brian, however, was something I not only wanted to think about, but found myself thinking about whether I wanted to or not. My father and I were allied in our attitude toward physical gratification; we considered ourselves lucky that we were driven to distraction by sex instead of by some monotonous hobby like stamp collecting. The only difference was that I wanted to have sex with a doctor and he with a nurse. This may explain why he'd greeted the news of my relationship with Brian with equanimity, and why I had written about his extramarital affairs with what I hoped was a similar equanimity, though it was hard for me to appreciate our mutual equanimity while knowing he'd explode if he ever found out that the essay had been published in a literary review, and was about to appear in my first book, a collection of essays from a university press.

Now I had to keep the news of my publication secret from the one person I most wanted to impress with the fact that all those years I'd spent hunched over my desk, typing with two index fingers, had, at the age of thirty-eight, finally led to the publication of a book. Of course, I'd brought this problem upon myself by writing about him, but Dad never expressed interest in my work, and I couldn't ignore a subject that took hold of my imagination with such insistence.

It's not that writing had been my way to understand him; his life was larger and more surprising than my capacity to understand it. Understanding my father was as unsustainable a state of mind as euphoria or patience. Maybe I understood him for a few minutes at
a time, and maybe, for a few minutes at a time, I understood him better than anyone else understood him, but if I said my understanding was definitive, I'd be saying that the man was static, a done deal, a wrapped package, never slipping out of character or spilling over with contradictions, never driven by affinities and fears that even he himself couldn't fathom. By delving into the riddle of him, I hoped to know his mystery by finer degrees. Through language could I inhabit him as much as he had inhabited me. Through language I could dream that dream called Father.

When I bent close to make sure his foot was securely elevated on the stack of pillows, he winced in his sleep, as if his swollen toe was so tender he could feel the pressure of my passing shadow. He lifted his head, aimed his gaze in my general direction. His mouth was dry from diuretics, his voice weak and garbled from sleep, as if he were one of the distant multitudes talking in tongues. He said (I'm guessing), “You're just going to stand there?” Then his head fell back and he started to snore.

After leaving my father to his afternoon nap, I remembered something on the drive back home that I hadn't thought about in a long time: my father and I both possessed identical moles on the bottoms of our right feet, smack in the center. Neither my brothers nor my mother could boast such a mole, and so this shared trait, which he'd brought to my attention when I was a boy, suggested that no matter how distant we were from each other, a line drawn between those two points would always unite us in a filial connect-the-dots.

As I waited for a traffic light to change, I wondered if the mole had in fact been a childish fantasy, a willful elaboration on a freckle or a speck of dirt, marks I'd imagined in order to link myself more closely to a father whom I suspected, even back then, of being remote and unknowable. Just as I was about to reach down and pry off my shoe so I could check and see if the mole was still there, the light turned green, and the driver behind me began to honk, and since I needed that foot to press the accelerator, I was forced to wait till I got home.

Brian was reading
Modes of Psychotherapy
when I rushed through
the front door. I plunged into the nearest chair and yanked at my laces. He looked up from his book and asked, “Is there something in your shoe?”

“I think so,” I said. “At least there used to be.” I tossed the shoe to the floor, shucked off my sock, and there it was, as concise and final as a period, as indelible and dark as ever.

“Your father's in serious arrears,” said the man from the phone company.

“Serious arrears?”

“It's been six months since he's paid his bill. Our Collection Department sent him the usual overdue notices, of course, and then the matter was turned over to me. I'm Mike Delaney, regional supervisor. I've contacted him several times to answer his questions and help arrange a payment plan, but I'm afraid that courtesy hasn't worked.”

According to Mr. Delaney, my father denied having made the calls he'd been charged for, refused to pay for them “come hell or high water,” and finally threatened to sue Pacific Bell for harassment. On the one hand, this threat had been peppered with enough legal jargon to make it plausible. On the other, it was fantastic enough to qualify my father as a crackpot, though the supervisor used a more tactful term. After being warned that his phone would be disconnected, my father said he'd be happy to rip it out of the wall himself if it meant that Delaney couldn't bother him again. When told that his account would be turned over to an independent collection agency whose tactics would make Pac Bell's look like a walk in the park, he'd calmly replied, “Let them get me.”

As a last-ditch effort to reason with my father, or to find a third party who could, Mr. Delaney searched through company records to find out who Dad had named as the person to notify in case of an emergency. So often had my father been sardonic about my “sit-around-and-daydream” writer's life, so often had he told me I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on, that it surprised me to learn, by way of this phone call, that the name he wrote in the blank was mine. Perhaps he'd wanted to provide the name of another relative, but there'd been fewer and fewer with whom he'd kept in touch since my mother's death. Naming a former colleague was out of the question since he no longer socialized with anyone from the Continental Building. He couldn't have named a next door neighbor due to his long-standing feud with the neighbors on the right, because their sprinklers made the lawn soggy on his side of the property line, and with the neighbors on the left, because he was sure their automatic garage door opener vibrated powerfully enough to cause hairline cracks in our living room walls. Even if he'd arrived at my name after excluding half the population of Los Angeles, I felt chosen, honored, exonerated.