The Bill from My Father (19 page)

“No. I
want
you to stay now that you're here. I'm just trying to explain why I reacted the way I did at the airport.”

“So now you explained it. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

There had to be more. In the shower, I'd rehearsed ways to tell him that his surprise was an intrusion disguised as kindness, a success usurped. But now, I couldn't recall what I'd wanted to say, or why each of us always found it so important to win the other's capitulation. After all was said and done, my father had come here because he was proud of me.

“We'll have lunch tomorrow,” he said.

The dining room at the Warwick, with its ambient chimes of silverware and ice, offered a quiet retreat from the city. My father looked small and harmless as he sat waiting for us at a table. He peered nearsightedly around the spacious room, hands folded before him in a boyish pose, almost contrite. As Brian and I walked toward the table, it struck me that he was not at all the giant of the nursery I was prone to imagine; when I didn't have the actual man before me, he ballooned into myth. There arose a somewhat leery conviviality as we seated ourselves at the table. Brian had had experience with couples counseling, but of course, expecting him to mediate the situation between my father and me would have burdened him with a professional responsibility while he was on vacation. It would also mean that the couple to be counseled was you know who.

“So, Mr. Cooper,” asked Brian, “what have you been doing?”

My father toyed with the silverware. “Nothing much. I watched a little TV.”

“What did you watch, Dad?”

My father cocked his head and thought. “They got this channel where they show you all about the hotel, where the lobby is, and the fire exits, et cetera.”

Brian and I looked at each other.

“Have you gone anywhere, Mr. Cooper? I hear there are some wonderful restaurants in the area.”

“I had breakfast at a deli across the street. Haven't had corned beef hash in so long, I'm telling you I got tears in my eyes! Don't tell Betty, though. If it was up to her, I'd be eating air.”

“Is there anybody you know in New York who you could go to dinner with tonight?” Please, I prayed.

“We'll find the name of a great place,” offered Brian. “And make your reservations.”

“I got relatives in Jersey. Or used to twenty years ago. I should look them up next time I'm here.” His hearing aid squealed with feedback and he fiddled with its tiny dial.

“The thing is, Dad, we can't go to dinner with you tonight.”

“I know,” he said curtly. “You're
very
busy.”

The maître d' brought us huge glossy menus, the covers printed to look like marble. I opened mine, expecting an engraving of the Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt honor thy father, who gazeth at the entrées
. Without lifting his eyes from the menu, he waved his hand in a gesture of largesse. “Get whatever you want,” he said. “Sky's the limit.”

The morning of the ceremony, I added an additional paragraph to my acceptance speech. In it, I thanked my father for reading me stories as a child. His rapt voice had transported me, I wrote, and his enthusiasm for telling tales had introduced me to the power of language. I wasn't certain whether my father had, in fact, read me stories as a child, but he wouldn't contradict the sentimental notion, and our collusion would be a kind of bond.

That evening, when the elevator doors opened on the tenth floor of the Time-Life Building, my nerves lit up like a chandelier. The representative of PEN introduced himself and pointed to a table where the books by the various winners and nominees were on display. My father had stationed himself beside it, staring down at a small stack of my books. I waited to see if he'd pick one up to
peek at a page or turn it over to scan the jacket copy, but his hands stayed clasped behind his back.

Half a dozen awards were handed out during the ceremony. Almost every author who received one had written a speech identical to mine, a sort of apologia in which they expressed surprise at having won and either implied, or insisted, they were undeserving. The motif of modesty had been exhausted by the time I walked up to the podium, but I'd already revised my speech that morning and was far too nervous to change it again. When I came to the part about my father, I looked up from the wrinkled sheet of paper, eager to find him among the crowd and make eye contact, but I had to look back quickly for fear of losing my place. The paragraph I'd added struck me as a little schmaltzy, and I worried that my apparent sentimentality would discourage people in the audience from buying my book. In the end, it didn't really matter; my homage was meant for Dad's ears alone, and reading it aloud righted the night.

Or so I thought. Immediately after the ceremony I found my father milling in the crowd and raced up to ask him how he'd liked my speech. “Couldn't hear a damn thing,” he said, chuckling at his rotten luck. His hearing aid, unable to distinguish between foreground and background noises, had amplified both. From the rear of the auditorium, my father saw me reading in the distance, but he heard ubiquitous coughs and whispers, a battle of creaking leather coats, the rubbery acoustics of someone chewing gum.

That trip to New York completely changed my life. In three days I'd charged so much money to my credit card that I had to teach two additional classes when I returned. Along with teaching, I began to publish in a few well-paying magazines. My combined income was still meager by any standard except my own, but at last I could speak my father's language, a lexicon of hard cold cash.

By that time, however, my father reacted to news of my solvency with a foggy acknowledgment. At the mention of money he'd look at me wistfully, nod his head, then look away. My father was going
broke from lawsuits. Although Betty, true to her word, had paid the phone bill, Dad filed a harassment suit against Mr. Delaney. A judge dismissed the case before he heard it, admonishing my father to pay his phone bill on time and scolding him for clogging an overtaxed judicial system with a frivolous complaint.

Next, he took Dr. Graham to court, and this time a judge not only dismissed his case, but ordered him to pay the doctor's attorney fees. He filed a claim against the neighbor whose sprinklers turned his lawn into “a swamp,” and also against the neighbor whose rumbling garage door opener purportedly cracked his plaster walls. Most ominous of all, he began to prepare proceedings against Gary's wife, Sharleen, and Ron's wife, Nancy, claiming they had promised to repay him money he'd long ago loaned to my brothers.

“I'm entitled by law,” he'd say when I tried to convince him to drop the suits, “to take action against a party eight times before they can even
think
of claiming malicious prosecution. Believe me, I know what I'm doing. I didn't just fall off the boat, you know.” He represented himself in court and lost each case. The judges were corrupt, he'd claim, his witnesses inarticulate. Defeat never seemed to give him pause or lessen his zeal for prosecution. He was in the throes of a lawyerly tantrum; if the world refused to yield to his will, he'd force it to yield to the letter of the law.

I protested his plans to sue my sisters-in-law, though to stay in his good graces, my objections were tempered. In the convoluted scheme of things, I found it flattering to be, along with Betty, one of two people in his life exempt from litigation. My worth as a son was verified daily by the absence of a summons to appear in court. Betty must have been as backhandedly flattered as I. As a nurse, her bedside manner was stern, but off duty, so to speak, she flirtatiously teased my father about his bullheadedness, charmed by the very trait that made him a difficult patient, not to mention a tenacious legal foe.

Every now and then, my father and I met for dinner at the Brass Pan. Some nights, when the waitress asked for his order, he'd tell her a story based on his choice of entrée, so that filet of sole, for example, segued into a fishing trip with my brothers. At first I thought his
brevity—a boat, an ocean, three rambunctious seasick boys—was in deference to the busy waitress. Then I'd see that he was stranded in the shallows of a thought, unable to remember more. On other nights, he'd stiffen and eye the waitress with suspicion, tense as a man being cross-examined. She'd hover above him, pencil poised, till he blinked and finally lifted his hand, pointing to a dish on the menu.

Eventually, he grew too distracted by his legal battles to return my phone calls. On the rare occasions when we spoke, he said he was too busy to meet me for dinner. More often than not, the answering machine picked up after several rings and played its refrain:
I am not at home at this present time
.

After months of an elusiveness he couldn't be coaxed out of, I drove over to my father's house one afternoon to ask why he'd been unwilling to see me, why he hadn't returned my calls. Such phases of estrangement were nothing new; for as long as I can remember, our relationship had been punctuated by weeks of his withdrawal followed by fits of generous attention. But there I was, hoping, I suppose, to make the reinforcement schedule a little less variable.

Dad answered the door of his Spanish house, preoccupied but glad to see me. Time had taken a belated toll, as though weariness had waited till now to irrevocably claim his face; his eyes were puzzled, hair unkempt, chin bristling with patches of stubble the razor had missed. His polyester jumpsuit, after years of looking supernaturally pressed, was finally worse for wear.

Betty rushed in soundlessly from the kitchen. She'd recently left the home care agency, taking short-term jobs that didn't require her to drive too far from Hollywood, and she was dressed in her uniform and silent white shoes. “I'm going to say hello and good-bye,” she announced, slinging her purse over her shoulder. As she had on the day of her interview, Betty stood squarely, the very picture of dependability, and yet she had about her a breathlessness, an air of agitation I hadn't noticed before. Even this slight change in her seemingly limitless composure—it had to be limitless, I thought, if
she maintained a peaceful relationship with my father—forced me to recognize just how much I depended on her to take care of him. “Your dinner's in the refrigerator,” she shouted at my father. “Give it five minutes in the micro.”

She looked at me and whispered, “Remind him. Five.”

“What?” said my father.

“I left Mrs. Travisi's number near the phone,” she shouted. And then she was gone.

My father and I sat down at the dining room table. Yellow legal tablets and manila folders were scattered across it, scraps of paper saving his place in law books that rose in precarious stacks. He lowered himself into a chair with a troubled gust of breath. Age had robbed my father of the prowess he believed a triumph in court could restore.

“Are you sure you're not angry at me about something?” I asked. “Because, if you are …”

My father fiddled with his hearing aid. “What makes you think I'm angry?”

“You're so … unavailable these days.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I'm busy. Swamped. Do you need me to spell it out for you?” He rose to his feet, and I thought he might begin to sound out the letters. “You have no idea. No goddamn concept.”

I stood, too, trying to rise above the childlike vantage point that came with being seated. “All I'm saying is that you have to eat dinner anyway, and we might as well …”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“Who says I have to eat dinner? Where is it written? Is it written here?” He hefted a law book and let it slam back onto the table. Stray papers jumped and fluttered. I made a move to calm him down, but he began to prowl around the table, stirring up motes of sunlit dust. “Don't you ever tell me what to do!”

“Having dinner is not something to do! I mean, it
is
something to do, but I'm not
telling
you to do it.” At a loss for logic, I was barking back.

“Don't you raise your voice at me!” He rushed up and grabbed the back of my shirt, a hank of fabric twisted in his grip. “I'm eighty-six years old,” he shouted. “I can do whatever the hell I want whenever the hell I want to do it.” He pushed me toward the door, breathing hard, his face red and alien with effort.

“Dad?”

“That's right,” he said. When he opened the door, the daylight was blinding. “Don't ever forget that I'm your father. Now get the hell out and don't come back.”

Since high school, I've been both taller and stronger than my father, but just as we reached the threshold of the door it occurred to me that I might flatter him into relenting if, instead of resisting or fighting back, I let my body be heaved outside as though from an admirable, manly force.

Acquiescence didn't help. Before the door slammed shut behind me, I turned and glimpsed his indignant figure sinking inside my childhood house. The door hit the jamb with a deafening bang, the birds falling silent for half a second before they went back to their usual racket.

On a daily basis I relived the particulars: the shirt taut across my chest, the heat of his breath on the back of my neck, the flood of light as the door swung wide. As with so much that's transpired between us, the sheer abruptness and implausibility of what had happened made me wonder if I'd perhaps misperceived it. Had I said something thoughtless or cruel to set him off?

In lieu of an explanation, I started making changes in the story. Suppose I hadn't mentioned dinner? Suppose I hadn't raised my voice? Suppose we'd stood instead of sitting? Say the day had been cooler, the hour later, the dust motes churning in another direction? Would the outcome of my visit have been any different? Who knew what crucial shifts of fate had hinged on the tiny details?

Several nights a week, I had to drive past his house on the way home from teaching, and the closer I came, the greater its magnetic
pull. More than once, I turned the steering wheel at the last minute, aiming my car through a tunnel of trees and parking across the street from his house.
So this is what it was like,
I thought,
for my brother Bob:
parked and watchful for hours on end. My behavior pained me, yet the urge to spy on my father was nameless, as deep and murky as the darkness it required.