The Lost Father (37 page)

I went back a little so they couldn’t see me and just leaned against the house. Down the hill you could see Racine and its few lights, the dark outlines of buildings along the river, the sinister night lights and smoke of the paper mills. I took a breath and made myself join the crowd. Why, I was wondering, why was that always so hard? I grew up private. We didn’t mix in close with big groups.

It was a man running on a wagon wheel, lit to fire on each end, and himself eating flames. Inside, the old music lifted on. The circle around the fire eater murmured loudly. The moon was full and close-seeming, veined with a crooked line of blue-gray like a map. People’s feet were stamping, they started to clap.

A cute guy in medieval clothes I didn’t know was saying to someone
else in a low voice, “The Briggses’ll accept any eccentricity except pretension. As long as you’re yourself.”

That was enough. I climbed the steps back inside. People felt obliged to compliment the Briggses. And it was money. That’s what it was, just money.

I found a phone in the empty den and closed the door to call Stevie Howard. His mother, June, answered and told me the plane was grounded in Chicago, in a blizzard. She was calling the airport every half hour and they still hoped Stevie and Helen and Jane would get in tonight. She apologized again for not having room for me. I told her once more it was no problem, not to worry, and then I hung up and sat in the scratchy plaid chair a moment. I liked being alone during a party. I was thinking how strange it was to be closer to the Howards but stay here, because they didn’t have room. And it didn’t take being that close to the Briggses to stay here. This place was sort of like a compound.

When I went back, I found three old women bent cooing over the puzzle table. “When I was young I was a fancy worker,” Viola Pride was saying. “There’s only so much bridge you can play.” Viola now taught bridge Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

The puzzle they had spread out before them was of the Grand Canyon in lurid colored detail.

Near them Letitia Skees was talking to an old nun, whose chin was kept bound by her white habit, and to the Joker. “I think a man alone is very sad,” she was saying. “A woman is different.”

The nun didn’t seem to be able to hear. Her head nodded along amiably to everything.

“People ask me,” Letitia continued, “if I go out on dates. And the answer is yes and no. I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be married. But I still need touching and hugging like every person does. So I have friendships which give me the hugging and touching I need. I have a friend, we go for breakfast once a week at the bay shore at seven-thirty in the morning and we take a thermos of coffee and we just have breakfast and we sit on a blanket and watch the sun come up.”

“How about you?” I asked the nun. I meant about friendship.

“Oh, me?” she said. “I don’t know.”

“What about you, Sister Maren?” Letitia said. “The girl is asking do you need loving and hugging too?”

“I like to know who’s going up with who,” she said.

The Joker had joined the older women at the puzzle table. They were talking about the chef of the fanciest restaurant in town, La Nuit. “Of course she wants everybody to think she’s French,” the Joker was saying, “but we all know she’s from Belgium.”

Belgian restaurants were a new trend in New York City. I hadn’t been to any but you just could tell from people talking and articles in the newspaper.

Emily stood eating one of my small red bananas. Dorothy was now passing out the raspberry and strawberry gemlike tarts.

Pat Briggs and the woman novelist stood by the mantel over Tom Harris talking to the man in the reindeer outfit, with two pine cones attached to his forehead as antlers.

“You’ve got to let her drive, Mack,” Pat was saying.

Behind me I heard Otto Kapp say clearly, “I am not. I am not afraid of it. Pff. Not at all.”

A group of young boys in white choir robes pushed out from the kitchen then, red turtlenecks poking up to their chins. They formed a triangle on the left of the fireplace, opposite the Christmas tree. The room stilled. They each held one gold bell lifted, shoulder high. The only light in the room was from candles and the fire and the chandelier. Otto Kapp, sandaled and robed as Gandhi, stood before them, arms lifted, and for a long moment drew out the room’s silence like a perfectly rosined violin bow on string.

Tad arrived. Merl and Emily rushed over to him and helped him off with his coat. He rubbed a hand on his stomach and whispered something to Merl and then they all went to the kitchen, where he stayed a long time, eating. When Emily came back out, she was holding a child’s satin kimono from Tokyo for Tom Harris.

A
FTER THE CONCERT
, the room moved more loosely. Pat stood talking to his father’s longtime rival, Frank Umberhum, who ran Shauer and Schumaker. Up until recently in the Midwest, the same people owned furniture stores and funeral parlors. The merchandise lines were shown together at the big buying shows, made by the same manufacturers. Pat’s father had had the largest furniture collection in town, at Briggs’s. Now in Racine, there were two large funeral families who also owned furniture stores. Shauer and Schumaker and Van Zieden Grieden. Whether you went to one or the other depended entirely on your family. It was like which brand of toothpaste you used.

“Remember ‘Fish or Factories,’ ” Pat was saying and nodding.

“I sure do. We gave ’em a fight.”

Pat stopped to explain to Tad how he and Frank had lobbied forty years ago to ban PCBs from the Fox River. The paper mills had mounted an advertising campaign in the
Press Gazette
with full-page ads that said FISH OR JOBS.

“Hey, want to do the Ouija board over by the fire?” Eli Timber asked. “Emily and Danny and a couple of us are going to set the thing up by the dog.”

They were already opening the board in front of Tom Harris’s creche.

Pat Briggs was lifting a cloth coat onto the woman novelist’s shoulder.

“I’m driving,” the Reindeer was saying, wobbly, one of his pine cone antlers awry.

“No you are not,” she said in her tiny voice. Keys threatened in her hand.

“Ann,” Pat said, “Toddy Sullivan wanted to say good-bye to you.”

The Queen of Hearts stood over me with the Dunce. “Excuse me but I just realized who your mother is. And I have a message to you from Ted Stevenson. He says hello and that he’s so proud of you being in medical school and all. He said he was going to write you a letter one of these days.”

“Where is he now?” I asked. “Minnesota still?”

“Oh no, he moved from there some time ago. He’s a professor now in Nebraska. What is it, Edward, is it Wayne State?”

“They said it was Wayne State. That’s what they said.”

“Professor of what?”

“Well, of ice skating, I suppose.”

A
T THE
O
UIJA BOARD
, Eli went first. He closed his eyes for a too-long time while all our fingers were cramping on the heart. It’s like fingers poised over a piano, not the most comfortable position. He got a grin as the heart skated over the board.
“A
love-of-my-life question,” he said. The thing landed on YES but then it moved, clunking off the board at the bottom. He shrugged. “Guess nothing lasts forever.”

“Not of yours,” Emily said.

I told Emily I liked her dress and asked her if it was from Briggs’s. She thanked me and said no, it was couture.

Then I felt like a dummy. “What’s that?”

“It’s the top line a designer makes, so there’s only a few. They only make a couple and they sell out right away.” She was saying all that as simply as she could. For a second, I hated her.

“Oh.” I didn’t know these things. And I should have. There was so much.

We stopped talking because the heart was looping raucously around the board, we all bent over swaying with it. We must have looked like something religious. I thought of a glass of water.

“What’d you ask now, Eli?” Danny said.

It was sort of thrilling to be pulled like this, the thing really did seem to own a life. “I asked about Mai linn,” he said. And that stilled it. It answered these letters: WATAD.

“I’m next,” Emily said, and then Pat Briggs came and asked her to come say good-bye to someone. Danny was talking to Eli so I turned to Otto Kapp.

“What aren’t you afraid of?” I asked. As soon as I said that, I heard how it sounded. Emily gave me a look from under her hair. I’d just been trying to make conversation. This is why I was such a hit at parties. Poise was not a word people would have used to describe me.

“I’m not afraid of death because I have already seen it. I went to the Black Forest in 1969. One year after my wife died.” His mouth puckered and he said, “Fef.” He had many lines on his face but his skin was dark enough and his bones clear enough that it looked good. “I saw my wife there for a moment, she just came like on an errand to tell me something. And she said, ‘It’s all right Otto, don’t worry.’ Her voice—it was her voice, I was married to her thirty-two years—came down from the trees. And so I don’t worry anymore.”

He looked away and after a while I turned to Danny. “So what do you think of Tad?”

He smiled. “Tad is a tad Tad,” he said, smiling.

Then Emily returned and we did her question. The heart was sluggish. All our fingers waited, light, but the plastic stayed where it was.

“Come on, Emily, out with it,” Danny said.

“No can do,” she said.

It had to be about Mai linn, I decided. Or Tad. Or even me. Then the thing began to move in infinitesimal circles, it cranked and looped its way slowly and stalled on YES.

“Oh good,” Emily said, with a certain kind of smile I recognized on her and then I understood that the question wasn’t people at all
but was about the jacket she’d been calling all over the continent for. Yes, she would get her coat.

Then it was my turn. I asked about the box. Would I find the box this week? By that time in my life I knew better than to ask a question without deadlines. The heart felt dizzy and warm but random. It spelled W then MAYBE then IS then T.

“We still haven’t done Danny-my-man,” Eli said.

“Or Otto,” I said.

“Not me,” Otto said, “I have no question.”

I had another question. I asked if I would have a long life. The thing moved off the top of the board, over the round face of the moon. All those years of “Does he love me?” and now my question was “Would I live long enough?” I was old enough to know that you can outlive love and that, eventually, you will want to.

Danny closed his eyes a second then opened them. “Okay, I’ve got mine.” The thing went in fits and starts, jagged, and only stopping on the beige blank places of the board where nothing was printed. Finally it ended, clear on NO.

That was it. We all took our hands off. Merl came and squatted down, asking Emily and me to help Dorothy with something in the kitchen, and the two of us staggered up.

We found her bent over four trays of meringue mounds, lighting them with a cigarette lighter. They flamed blue. The girl dressed as an elf carried the first, Emily the second, I was third and Dorothy last.

“What is this?” I whispered over my shoulder.

“Hmph,” Dorothy snorted. “Baked Alaska.”

It was dark in the room and murmuring ohs for the flaming desserts mixed with a thinning applause from outside, here and there I saw a flame reflected in a bell set on a table or on the mantelpiece, one still in a boy’s hand.

I looked back at Dorothy. “Don’t you mean miniature Baked Alaska, more like Baked Delaware?” and then as I turned I was falling, I saw Emily in front of me and her hair and the long gown and flames were sliding, I managed to right the tray on the ground but there was a lot of commotion, I started to apologize and almost cry but a crowd had gathered not by me but to my left a little and then I saw them swatting at Emily’s hair. A bad metal taste rose. From somewhere else, the real lights flicked on. Then it was simple. I’d tripped on Emily’s gown. Dorothy and I cleaned up, took the tray to the kitchen, and by the time we returned Emily looked fine, people stood
awkwardly eating their desserts in the light. I heard footsteps in the foyer. I’d ruined the party. Ended the mood. People were beginning to get their coats.

Emily yawned. She lifted the piece of her hair that had burned up to her face. “Smell,” she said.

Just then we began to hear the music, a flute, from the stone garden in back. Merl Briggs clapped her hands over her head. “Circle, everybody,” she yelled. “Join up in the circle.”

The awkward line of held hands drew us all outside and there, on the stone terrace, was a small stand of women playing wind instruments and three folk dancers who joined in among us and led the widening circle in a simple vine step. Everyone joined: the choir boys, the habited nuns, Tad, the hip religious, what was left of the costumed revelers. And then it struck me as I watched one of the nuns in habit, face down, following a dancer’s feet on the stone ground, her soft chin and cheeks falling out of the stiff white ramikin—it wasn’t that the nuns couldn’t dance. They just didn’t know how to waltz.

8

I
HEARD THE VACUUM
going somewhere in the house. Merl probably.

All the guests were gone. The paper sounds of their last good nights, called from outside, had fallen and settled long ago. It was late. Emily’s door was open and she was snoring in a curl on her bed, the dress a tangled mess on the floor, Tom Harris enrapt inside it, his tail beating a steady knocking rhythm. I’d come upstairs to change. I had a thing about dressing up. As soon as the party was over, I put on my jeans and big socks and a loose shirt. I couldn’t lounge around in a tuxedo, even one Pat was going to throw out the next day. I went downstairs and found Dorothy sitting, hat and scarf and coat and gloves on, at the edge of the piano bench, waiting for Pat Briggs to drive her home. We heard his footsteps overhead.

The vacuum kept going in a far distant corner of the house.

“I’ll take you, Dorothy,” I said.

“He’s comin’.” She nodded.