The Bill from My Father (20 page)

There was little to learn from my nights of surveillance. Light would suddenly burn in a window, but I couldn't see anyone move through the rooms. Even if I had, what would a glimpse of his silhouette tell me? A walkway led toward the large front door, the stepping-stones flat and blank in the moonlight. Betty's yellow station wagon was parked in the driveway on the nights she wasn't working, but my father's Cadillac always sat there, gleaming, impassive, white as an iceberg. Despite my vigilance, nothing happened, except that every now and then I'd glance at my phosphorescent watch, its ghostly hands advancing.

During the first year of our estrangement, my entreaties and apologies and furious demands for contact were recited into his answering machine. On a few occasions he picked up the phone, then slammed it down at the sound of my voice.

By the second year, resignation took hold. I'd lost the desire to drive by his house or reach him by phone. I recalled that afternoon less often, and when I did, I refused to probe the memory for meaning.

By the third year, his absence settled inside me like a stone.

“I realize my phone call must come as an unpleasant surprise,” the social worker told me. “But I believe your father's deterioration is significant enough to make legal guardianship a necessary step. We routinely ask the nearest relative before resorting to a court-appointed guardian, since it's in the client's best interest to place their finances in the hands of someone they know.”

Mr. Gomez assured me that I didn't have to make up my mind right away; it would be several months before the case came before
a judge. An anonymous caller had phoned Adult Protective Services to say my father needed help. If I assumed legal responsibility, my father's Social Security checks would be placed in a trust, and he'd need my permission for every expenditure: medicine, groceries, clothes.

“Careful monetary management is especially crucial in your father's case,” said Mr. Gomez. “As you may know, the bank has begun foreclosure on the house.”

I couldn't bring myself to tell Mr. Gomez that I hadn't known a thing about it. I certainly couldn't explain that even if Dad and I
had
been on speaking terms, he might not have bothered to mention foreclosure till a moving van pulled up to the curb.

“Hello?” said Mr. Gomez.

If the city was a compass, my childhood house was magnetic north, and always would be no matter where I moved.

I promised Mr. Gomez that I'd give our discussion serious thought, and said good-bye. I'd become so guarded against any emotion having to do with my father that the prospect of seeing him again roused only a dull ambivalence. After three years, I'd finally decided it was
I
who didn't want contact with
him,
a decision that redefined circumstance and made my banishment bearable. And now, out of the blue, a social worker urged a reunion.

If I did take responsibility for my father's finances, wouldn't receiving an allowance from his son—an
allowance!
—cause him to resent my authority, just as I once resented his? How well would he be able to understand that I hadn't wanted or asked for this role?

Had I been in my father's position, I'm the last person to whom I'd give fiscal responsibility. I can barely balance my checkbook, let alone manage someone else's finances. Ask me about money, and instead of thinking
stocks and bonds and dividends,
I remember a trick my father showed me when I was six. He rolled up his sleeves, waved his empty hands in the air. “See,” he said, “there's nothing there.” With a little flourish, he reached out and plucked a quarter from my ear—were there more coins, I wondered, hidden in my head?—leaving me, as only he could, slack-jawed with astonishment.

*  *  *

I'd been writing when the telephone rang. Though I don't usually answer the phone when I'm working, I was expecting a call from Mr. Gomez.

“Bernard?”

“Dad?” Saying the word made my mouth go dry.

“I sold the house and the people who bought it want to move in pretty soon, so I've been cleaning out closets and I came across all sorts of drawings and photos of yours. You wanna come get them? Is four-thirty good?”

“Four-thirty's good.” I wasn't sure I was ready to see him, but assent was automatic.

“Okay. See you later.”

“Wait,” I blurted. “How have you been?”

“Fine. And you?”

Three years. “I'm fine, too.”

“Good,” he said, “as long as you're fine.” His harried voice softened. “Well,” he said, “I'm really swamped.”

Only after I hung up the phone did I realize he hadn't said hello.

I approached the house with apprehension; who knew in what condition I'd find him? Since I'd last spied on the house, the first-floor windows had been covered with bars. The front door stood behind a wrought iron grate, and no matter how decorative its design, it made the house look so aloof it might as well have been surrounded by a moat.

No sooner had I rung the doorbell than my father appeared behind the bars, pale and slow, jangling keys like a castle keep. All the while he burbled greetings. My hands were jammed in my pockets; I couldn't act as if things had been normal without damaging a sense of reality that, especially in my father's presence, could flounder like a little boy's. “Come on in,” he said, unlocking the grate. I found his hospitality suspicious, and as much as I wanted to make amends, I also wanted to run
the other way. I'd come to think of my boyhood house as a place I'd never visit again, and now that I stood on the verge of return, I practically had to astral project and give myself a push from behind.

The house was even more crammed with memorabilia than I remembered. He must have strewn souvenirs about the rooms as he cleaned out the closets, a last-minute effort to make his mark on the home he had to forfeit. The breakfront doors yawned open, his scrapbook packed in a cardboard box. The portrait of JFK leaned against the wall, as did still-lifes and landscapes by my brother Ron. Spread across the coffee table, in the careful, printed letters of my childhood, were compositions I'd written about the sun's brightness and my love of dogs; they called back the distant, mesmerizing triumph of being able to describe the world and contain it on a piece of paper. Pictures from a photo booth showed a mugging ten-year-old who bore as much resemblance to me now as I to my father; I wanted to warn that oblivious boy of what was to come. I couldn't look at the stuff for long, and I gathered it up, ready to go.

“Sit,” said my father.

I did as he asked.

“What's new?”

“Lots.”

“Written any more books of yours?”

“Trying to. Yes.”

“I see,” he said. “Tell me what else has been going on.” He leaned forward in the chair, cocked his good ear in my direction.

“Look, I appreciate your willingness to get together, but I'd think you'd be glad that you raised a son who cares enough to want to know why his father hasn't spoken to him in three years.”

His brows furrowed.

“Why haven't you talked to me?” I shouted.

“Look. You live, things happen, you go on. That's the way it works.”

“That's not the way it works for me.”

“Well, the truth of the matter is that you were getting irritated with me about my hearing aid. You were always screaming, ‘What? What? I can't hear you! Turn up your damn ear!'”

“First of all, Dad, you're the one who shouts, ‘What? I can't hear you.' Second, I'd never scold you because you're hard of hearing.”

“I'm telling you, that's what happened.”

“It didn't.”

“Did.”

“Okay,” I said. “Suppose you're right. Is that any reason not to speak to me for three years?”

My father sat back, stared into space. He gave the question due consideration. “Yes,” he said, lurching forward. “Yes, it is.”

“You see, this is why I can't just ‘go on.' Unless we can talk to each other like two mature adults, I worry that some misunderstanding might set you off again.”

“All right,” he said. “All right already.” He looked at his feet, then back at me. “I've lived in this house for fifty years. Do you remember when we moved in?”

“I wasn't born yet.”

“Do you remember what day it was?”

“I wasn't …” It seemed pointless to repeat myself. “Tuesday?” I guessed.

“No,” he said. “It was your mother's birthday. Did you know that she never knew her real birth date?”

“Her birthday was the fourth of July.”

“Ach,” sputtered my father, waving his hand. “That's the birthday they gave to lots of greenhorns at Ellis Island, people who didn't know or couldn't say in English the year they were born.”

“Dad,” I asked, “what's our original family name?”

“I sold the place to two very nice guys. By the way, how's that friend of yours, what's his name?”

“Brian's fine, he …”

“What do I need all these rooms for, anyway? It was either sell the house or get kicked out on the street.”

I shook my head in commiseration, pretending to know nothing about the foreclosure.

“Some meshuggener social worker wanted to have someone else do the real estate negotiations. Said I couldn't handle the sale myself.
I showed him. Closed escrow on my own, then told Hernandez to take a hike.”

I stopped myself from blurting,
Gomez
.

“The kicker,” he continued, picking lint from his jumpsuit, “is that I got Betty to report me to the guy in the first place.”

“What!”

“See,” said my father. “You
do
shout, ‘What!'” He bristled a moment, shifted in his seat. “It was the only way to save myself. If she said I was, you know, soft in the head, the bank couldn't foreclose.”

Betty walked into the living room and sat beside my father, her hair dyed a metallic shade of blond. She'd gained weight since I last saw her and it took her a couple of labored adjustments to settle into the valley of the couch. “Non compos mentis,” she said, shaking her head at the whole mess. “That's what the social worker called it.”

I must have been wide-eyed because my father added, “Don't look like that! She didn't tell them I was crazy out of the kindness of her heart. She gets something out of it too.”

Betty glanced at him sharply. “I was protecting us both.”

My father nodded, but I don't think he heard her.

“Did you know that Gomez called me?” I asked.

My father sighed. “I figured he might. I got a pretty penny for the place, but I owe a lot too. There are liens and things. A second mortgage. I'm looking at a mobile home in Oxnard. Not the best place in the world, but it looks just like a regular house, and it's what I can afford.”

“We,” said Betty. “What
we
can afford.”

“Betty's from Oxnard. She knows some people up there, so its not exactly like starting from scratch. You'll come up and visit.” He cleared his throat. “You sure have grown since the last time I saw you.”

“Dad, I've been this tall since high school.”

“Taller than me?”

“For years,” I said.

My father shrugged. “Then I guess I'm shrinking.”

*  *  *

After loading mementos into my car, I came back inside the house to say good-bye. Betty nudged my father and this reanimated his grave face. He slapped his palm against his forehead. “Almost forgot your present,” he said. I followed them into the kitchen. Dad stationed himself in front of the counter, then beamed at me and stepped aside.

A pink bakery box yawned open to reveal a cake, its circumference studded with strawberries of an uncanny size and ripeness. The fruit was glazed, and beneath the kitchen's fluorescent lights, it looked succulent, moist, aggressively tempting. Slivered almonds, toasted gold, had been evenly pressed into a mortar of thick white frosting, every spare surface dotted with florets.

What I noticed next made me catch my breath. Written in the center, in goopy blue script, was
Papa Loves Bernard
. For a second I thought there'd been some mistake. I'd never called my father Papa. Dad, yes. Pop, perhaps. The nickname belonged to another parent, didn't mesh with the life I knew.

I looked at Betty. For the moment her attention was elsewhere. Probably in Oxnard.

My father began yanking open drawers and kitchen cabinets, offering me anything that might not fit into his new trailer, which was just about most of what he owned. A punch bowl set, napkin rings, two-pronged forks for spearing hors d'oeuvres—artifacts from his life with my mother, a life of friends and fancy repasts. His barrage of offers was frenzied, desperate. All the while I politely declined. “This is more than enough,” I said, gazing at the cake. As hungry as the sight of it made me, I knew a slice would be sickening, dense with sugar, rich with shortening, every bite a spongy glut. Yet it looked so delectable sitting in his kitchen, Betty Crocker's Sunday bonnet. If years of my father's silence had an inverse, that clamorous cake was it. Within it lay every grain of sweetness I'd ever declined or been denied. While my father jettisoned old possessions, I swiped my finger across the frosting and debated whether to taste it.

Along with the cake and a box full of childhood memorabilia, I left my father's house with a scrap of paper on which he'd written his new address and telephone number. As I drove down Ambrose Avenue, I watched the Spanish house my family had lived in grow smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, like a stucco galleon drifting out to sea. The neighborhood hadn't changed much since the days I barreled down that same street on a pair of roller skates, vibrations from the pavement shooting up my skinny legs and rattling my teeth. Driving past the grab bag of architectural styles was like visiting Montana ranch land, the British Isles, and the French countryside in a few seconds flat. It wouldn't have seemed odd if the residents watered their lawns in costume:
Bonjour! Howdy! Jolly good day!
Hollywood had been an ideal setting for someone as tight-lipped about his past as my father, a place where a person could choose a favorite historical style and settle in with his fellow men to a cinematic vision of the good life.