The Bill from My Father (14 page)

Rapid blinking = disbelief

Sustained smile = waning patience

Cleaning his nails with the tines of a fork = outright hostility

Napkin origami = boredom

Latinate discussions of the law = disregard

As the evening wore on, he might decide to weigh the evidence—her manner, figure, intelligence, wit—then interpret each aspect of her character according to the opinion he'd formed when she'd first stepped through the door. In this way our father foresaw the future, then brought about the future he foresaw.

However eagerly the rest of us had waited to lay eyes on the girl we'd been hearing so much about, to discover if she matched or contradicted the pictures in our minds, when the doorbell rang we'd dash into the entry hall and turn toward my father as he opened the door, holding our collective breath and assessing him as if
he
were the stranger who'd come to pay a call. How odd it must have been for the nervous girl standing outside, whose back was perhaps being stroked for reassurance by the brother who'd brought her, to look upon the photogenic cluster of us casting sidelong glances at Dad, unable to tear our eyes away till the last brassy notes of the doorbell faded. Of course we welcomed the girl, soaked her up, but all the while we noted every twitch and furrow, every shade of appraisal on Father's face.

Gary's girlfriend, Sharleen, attended UCLA and came preapproved with what my father considered a stellar pedigree: her father directed movies starring the Three Stooges. Since Sharleen had grown up around movie folk, my father decided to show her his suave side. He poured her a glass of boysenberry Manischewitz (thick as pancake syrup) at just the right angle to let the full bouquet escape, all the while proclaiming her lovely and commending his son's good taste, for which he was quick to take credit: “Where could my boy have got it from?” With her glossy blond hair, her green eyes outlined like Cleopatra's, Sharleen was game for my father's compliments and quick to return his banter. Versed in flirtation, leggy and bold in her miniskirt, she knew the precise amount of surprise with which to register his suggestive remarks—“They didn't make young women like you in
my
day. It was probably against the law!”—both playful enough to scold him and stern enough to draw the line. In the meantime, Gary, knowing what he did about the goings-on at the office, must have detested every mock-coy minute, yet I saw him brighten and start to enjoy himself the moment dad had said “my boy.” The encounter with Sharleen left our father happily flushed, as if she'd raced him a couple of laps—and let him win.

You can't imagine our relief once those evenings got off to a good start. There existed a mysterious aspect of my father's charm that was difficult for those affected by it to explain, for unlike charm in its common incarnations, my father's didn't promise you fondness so much as it promised to spare you from the trouble he'd cause if you dared to give him grief. He used his charm to protect you from himself, which was, in the end, an act of kindness.

I'm sure Ron's girlfriend, Nancy, was nervous on her first visit to our house, yet she seemed to take the evening in stride, relaxed while walking the get-to-know-you gauntlet. She assessed us while we assessed her. Nancy, it gradually became clear, could be quick with her laughter and opinions, but more often than not she listened intently and her face went still. She followed conversations without a lot of nods or “uh-huh's,” those signposts that let the speaker know
he's in the lead and being agreed with. Her reserve bothered my father, and instead of taking it as patience, he took it as her groundless resistance to his hospitality. He liked ingratiation in his women, and it was clear that his usual means of making an impression—the dapper flirt, the attorney whose cases were covered in the
Herald
—were not about to work with Nancy. The last straw was her failure to sustain appreciative laughter at the jokes he told during dinner, and though she threw her head back and smiled, mere bemusement didn't make the grade. Nancy possessed a student's seriousness and curiosity; she was earning a degree in Jewish education. Her fluency in Hebrew and familiarity with Talmudic scholarship was a reminder of the Jewishness my father held on to with one hand and batted away with the other. This, along with her jet-black hair, her dark eyes gleaming with thoughts held back, must have intensified his impression of her supposed antipathy. Certain from the start that she'd judged him harshly, he never cared to draw her out.

Bob had been dating a woman named Grace, whose fleshy arms and loose dresses made her seem as soft as bread. Her hair was tied back in a limp ponytail. She wore no makeup and smelled of soap. When Bob offered her a drink, she settled for a glass of water instead of wine. Her name and modest appearance led me to believe that she'd rejected worldly things for the sake of some religious principal. Bob treated Grace with care verging on caution, gallantly assisting her when she sat or stood, refilling her glass before she had to ask. She moved with a sleepy tranquillity that made me want to whisper in her presence and protect her contentment.

Regardless of Grace's almost contagious calm, her visit to our house agitated my mother, who boiled an unusually perfunctory meal of chicken and potatoes and initiated several long pauses during dinner while joylessly chewing her food. Every bland bite was a lesson to us all. My father also seemed to hold a grudge. He hardly bothered with the standard rush to judgment. He let Mother do the disparaging. He sat back in his chair, a passenger.

“Why don't you like her?” I asked my mother later that night. “I think she's nice.”

“Yes,” said my mother, drowning a stack of dishes in the sink, “she's very maternal, isn't she? Naturally a child would be drawn to her.” I was so insulted by being called a child that it didn't occur to me that my mother was telling me—which is to say, telling me without telling me—that Grace was pregnant. Family rumor had it that my father, believing the child wasn't Bob's, paid Grace a handsome sum to stay away. True or not, she stopped seeing my brother abruptly and never gave him a reason why. Bob must have been mystified to think that love and not animosity had brought his loneliness about, as if the two emotions were interchangeable, different routes to the same sorry state.

When first Gary, and then Ron, hinted at the possibility of leaving the firm, our father suspected Sharleen and Nancy of conspiring to incite mutiny. The idea that his sons were manipulated by their wives was easier to take than the possibility that they'd arrived at the decision on their own. It was easier to blame the supposed machinations of ambitious women than it was to admit how much he didn't want his sons to go. Then Bob considered leaving, too. Never one to grovel, Dad aimed for groveling's opposite: the pretense that he couldn't have cared less. He said there were plenty of young men fresh out of law school who'd give an arm and a leg to have what his boys were throwing away. “Go ahead and leave,” he told them. “See how long you last.”

The brief history of my brothers' apprenticeship at the Spring Street office is best summed up in the changes that took place on the frosted glass door, the gold letters stenciled on and then scraped away by the Continental Building's maintenance man:

Cooper

Cooper & Cooper

Cooper, Cooper & Cooper

Cooper, Cooper, Cooper & Cooper

Cooper, Cooper & Cooper

Cooper & Cooper

Cooper

I came to consider this a poem of sorts, an elegy entitled “Cooper & Sons.” It may not have rivaled the couplets my father composed for
The Case of the Captive Bride,
but it carried as direct a message, and he was just as much its author.

My father came home later and later, less and less. Every morning he left my mother's allowance on the kitchen counter. How else, but by letting herself be placated, was she to have money? She didn't drive, didn't possess the skills to earn an income. Her dependence—she knew it pressed upon her husband, that it nagged him as much as it did her—was a weapon as surely as Bob's Smith & Wesson.

When Bob had lived at home, he never would have believed that those mornings he'd spent grooming himself in front of the bathroom mirror with Ron and Gary would one day be replaced by the fear of his own reflection. Fear was there before he awoke in his bed at the Emerald Arms. He could hardly bring himself to leave the warm sheets, sheets that preserved him like a leaf between the pages of a book. He could hardly bring himself to walk across the cold floor when he knew what he'd see in his bathroom mirror: bruises from blows so soft and common he couldn't recall what caused them. Knocking on a door, bumping his knee on a table—these were enough to change him, to discolor his skin with the purples and yellows of rotting fruit. Blood seeped from his gums for hours after he brushed his teeth. It tinted the water and sluiced through pipes, washing out to sea. The sea became clouds. The clouds became rain. The rain, inescapable, pelted his roof.

My parents didn't tell me he'd been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease until the day his Pontiac, loaded with his possessions, pulled into our driveway. The sight of it stung, but I didn't ask questions; by then I knew my parents' tactics: mother believed it was best to wait until the last minute to break bad news, postponing the shock, whereas father believed that by never breaking news of any kind, shock was prevented altogether. Ron and Gary had moved away from home, and since Bob had been the first to strike out on his own, his return was especially portentous, as if forces were at work to draw matter backward, and the work had just begun.

Bob reclaimed his old room. Placed books and blankets exactly where they'd been. Took the same seat at the dining table. Made his furtive entrances and exits. Yet he went about life at an eerie remove, as if he'd recalled his habits but not their motivations.

Round after round of radiation hollowed him out, left him stunned by his cells' rebellion. During his decline, gravity exerted a stronger pull inside our house than out. As a countermeasure, my parents discussed, in buoyant voices loud enough for Bob to overhear, rumors about miraculous remissions, experimental treatments in clinics across the Mexican border, a promising new drug made from ground apricot pits (an early version of Laetrile) that would be available any day now, any day. Bob would have none of it. He was done with hope long before the rest of us. Always a quiet boy, his silences widened, a gulf empty of everything, even disbelief. The animal peering out from his eyes knew only a dull and faithful waiting. His uncommon stealth, his gift for moving unseen through city streets, dwindled into mere invisibility. He kept to his bedroom. Sleep, a great labor, was accomplished in fits and starts, unrelated to the earth's rotations and beyond the logic of clocks. His black hair grew sparse, exposing the shiny pallor of his scalp. Papery from radiation, particles of dry skin drifted to the floor when he scratched his arms and legs. I'd sit cross-legged on the white carpet, answering his questions about what had happened that day at my elementary school or in the neighborhood, and he'd prop his head on the pillow, listening with a dim but wistful interest.

“Maybe it's better,” he once said out of the blue, “that Grace isn't around to see me like this.”

“Like what?” I said, knowing perfectly well.

“Do you know why she broke up with me?”

“No. Why?”

“I don't know either. I've gone over it a hundred times. There's too many pieces missing, too much that won't add up. I'm a detective and I should be able to figure out this kind of thing in my sleep. I was ready to … I would have done anything for her. Now, every time I think about her I hate her more. I hope bad things happen to
her. Not like this,” he said, looking down at his body beneath the blanket, “but bad.”

That's when I got it in my head that Bob was dying of love, and that this phrase, which I'd heard on the soap operas my mother watched, wasn't the dramatic exaggeration I'd thought but a diagnosis as dire as Hodgkin's.

In the end, the stories I reported to Bob during those afternoons in his room, the adolescent pranks, the feuds and flirtations among our neighbors, concerned people who were privileged with good health, people free to yearn for, or dread, or simply expect consequences. Telling my brother about a single day had the unintended effect of suggesting that days would eventually pass in his absence, one after another, until no story, however rich with incident or filigreed with gossip, could do justice to their sum. If talk reached too far into the future, Bob would swiftly yield to fatigue—a privilege of the sick—and close his eyes to convince us both he'd fallen asleep. Rising from the floor to leave, I'd sometimes find shed bits of his skin clinging to my palms, as pale and weightless as flecks of ash. I began to examine my hands again and again to see if I held him without knowing it, if some measure of his flesh was mine. I'd brace myself and watch my fists unfurl. A fortune foretold. A prognosis. Afraid of contagion, I avoided touching the carpet with my bare hands, even decades later when I watched my father search through it for a key.

The rift between my parents widened with Bob's illness. I recall them engaging in only one civil discussion during that period. A truce had been called long enough for them to slump on opposite ends of the couch like two weary travelers waiting for a train, exhaustion all they had in common. They didn't look at each other as they spoke but stared into the middle distance, considering what to rename their son. Changing a person's name, according to Yiddish lore, is a way to change that person's fate. They were seeking a name as different from Robert as language would allow. Nor could they choose the name of someone they knew or had ever known. It had to be a fresh appellation, stripped of both good and bad associations.
My parents didn't put much stock in superstitions held over from the Old World, but neither were they so removed from the Old World that they could ignore a chance to waylay fate. They tested names aloud, as though for a newborn—Benjamin, Paul, Andrew, Carl—to hear how the sound of it fared in the world. Hadn't this tactic worked for Gary? For Tony Curtis?