Father of the Rain (21 page)

We pick out pairs of blue, gray, and black socks. We’re going through the pants rack when my father looks over into the women’s section, says, “Duck!” and pushes me down by the shoulders into a little nook.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

“Is it Catherine?”

“Christ, no. You can’t buy muumuus in here. It’s Tits Kelly. If she sees us, we’ll never get out of here.”

The wooden floorboards creak.

“Fuck. She’s coming. Suck in your gut and don’t breathe.”

No one in town ever calls her anything else, except to her face, and I can’t even remember what that name is. She’s a terrible busy-body and, as my father has said a million times, completely humorless. The ultimate condemnation.

Brenda McPheney comes over and asks her if she’s looking for something special.

“Not really,” she says, more of a sigh than words. Brenda goes back to her sweater folding. Mrs. Kelly cuts a long, low growling fart. Dad looks at me, delighted, making an O with his mouth and squeezing my finger to help him stay quiet. I laugh in silence, my stomach knotted in pain. We are bent over and mushed together to fit in this tiny hole in the wall. I don’t know how it’s possible she doesn’t see us, but she takes her time choosing a man’s shirt. Finally, she brings her selection to Brenda at the register.

“I wonder who she’s buying that shirt for,” my father says on the way home. “Husband Number Two left her last spring. You ever hear the story of little Davy Kelly and the two C-pluses?”

I have, but he’s in such a good mood. “No.”

“No?” He’s thrilled. And he tells me about how in fourth grade little Davy Kelly brought home a report card with two C-pluses in math and social studies. Little Davy, according to his mother, never got anything but As. Then she found out that in both math and social studies, little Davy sat next to Ollie Samuels. So Mrs. Kelly marched over to the Samuelses’ at dinnertime, stood in their kitchen, and demanded that Ollie tell her what he’d been doing to distract her son during math and social studies. Ollie told her he’d stopped talking to Davy long ago, when he realized Davy was paying Lucy Lothrop ten cents for her answers in English and only gave Ollie a nickel for his.

My father laughs like it’s the first time he’s heard it himself. It seems to me a story much older than Davy Kelly, a story my father might have heard on a radio show when he was little. It’s just the kind of story he likes, about people getting their comeuppance. In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.

I figure it is time to ask about work. “What happened with Hugh, Dad?”

“Fuck him.”

“What happened?”

“That’s over with. I’ve retired.”

When we get home, there is a message on the machine in the kitchen. “Hey there, Gardiner, it’s Patrick. I’ll call another time. All right. Hope you’re well.” You can tell he was nervous. The message is breathy and full of lurches, not really Patrick’s normal phone voice, which is, at least with me, as goofy as he was as a kid. It makes me miss him. I’ll call him as soon as I get away from here.

“You should call him back.”

“I’m not calling him back and you’re not either, you hear me?”

“He adores you, Dad. You can’t just drop him.”

Watch me, his eyes say, glaring at mine.

He goes upstairs and changes into his new pants and blue socks with geese flying on them. I go to the bathroom off the den and stare for a long time at the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall, my father’s team pictures from St. Paul’s and Harvard, rows and rows, years and years, of white English-looking boys holding oars and footballs and tennis racquets. I have seen these so many
times I can quickly find my father in each one, his small nervous face in the earlier ones, when he was only eleven and twelve, and then his more mature, impatient expressions later on. Clearly no one was encouraged to smile in photographs back then, so it is impossible to say if he, or anyone, was happy.

He fixes himself a drink when he comes downstairs. It isn’t yet noon. We sit by the pool. I bring out tuna fish sandwiches, and we play backgammon while we eat them. The sun beats down. The pool glimmers and beckons. I’m not sure I still own a bathing suit, and if I do it’s buried in a garbage bag somewhere in my stuffed car.

He makes trips to the poolhouse to refill his glass. I watch his bowed spine, his splayed step, the need on the way in and the fulfillment on the way out, that first sip of a fresh drink, eyelids swooning shut, lips amphibious, reaching out and around the curve of the glass, desperate to make contact with the alcohol. Sixteen more hours until I can drive away from the sight of it.

The sun sears my back.

“Aren’t you hot, Dad?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe we should move under the tree.”

“No.”

He beats me.

“Have a swim,” he says.

“Will you?”

“Nah. Not today.”

“I guess I could just jump in in my clothes.”

“Take ‘em off. No one’s looking.”

He leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes.

I jump in in my shirt and shorts. The water is colder than I ever remember it. Everything in my body withdraws, as if trying to contract to a single point. By the time I reach the shallow end I can’t
feel the skin on my legs. As I get out, the water rolls off them as if over rubber.

My father is laughing. “I thought you’d at least test it with your toe!”

“What’d you do, fill it with ice cubes?”

“Haven’t turn on the heat yet.” He wipes his eyes. “You should have seen your face. Priceless.”

I flick water from my hair at him.

“Nice tits.”

“Dad.”

“Why do you wear such baggy clothes? You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, believe me.”

I can’t find my voice.

My father rolls doubles and hoots.

“I would appreciate it,” I begin, shakily, “if you would not speak of my body like that again.”

“And I would appreciate it if you would just roll the dice. I was giving you a compliment.”

Eventually he goes inside to take a nap. Fourteen more hours.

I call Jonathan from the poolhouse but only get the machine. I love the quick rumble of his voice. I feel like calling back just to hear the recording of it again. In a week we’ll live in a cottage in California together.
Stop saying California like it’s so important
. It
is
important. It is deeply important to me. What if one of us doesn’t make it out there safely? I’m bad at trusting the future. It seems suddenly improbable that both of us will make it there alive. I have an urge to get in my car and outrun fate.

I get up off the floor of the poolhouse and go back out into the heat. I cross the grass to the tennis court. I reimagine the rose garden, the scrolled bushes, the faint blue paint of the fountain’s basin, the smell of the black leaves when we cleaned it out the first nice day of spring. I see my mother in her kerchief and gardening gloves
and me asking her as she sprays for aphids what a French kiss is. She wore bright cotton shifts, laughed loudly when Bob Wuzzy or Sylvie Salters was over, had so many convictions. And then in Paul she found a true partner, a fellow believer, and I would hear them on the couch late into the night talking about his cases, about the abuse of children and the rights of minorities, talking seriously, though laughter would always burst out unexpectedly. It didn’t include me, and maybe that accounted for some of my sullenness with them, but it’s still my idea of love, of harmony, that sound of them on the couch with all their beliefs and hopes and laughter.

I think I fall asleep in the grass. The next thing I hear is the snap of the screen door. I look up and my father is crossing the lawn again, showered, in another new pair of pants, drink in hand. Martini number five? Six?

“Ahhh,” he says loudly, for my benefit, as he sits down. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Twelve hours. Or I can leave at five in the morning, not six. Eleven more hours, then.

“I’m going to start cooking.”

“It’s barely six.”

“Early supper tonight.” Again like my mother, speaking cheerfully while fleeing the place he was, her words shot through with a lightness she did not feel but needed for protection.

I try to cook slowly. Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, lima beans. More foods of my childhood. I wonder what he’d do if I served him a tofu curry or
bi bim bap
and laugh out loud, imagining his over-reaction. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of him through the window, sitting and staring at the pool. He makes his trips to the bar in the poolhouse; he switches from the chaise to a chair. The dogs follow him, resettle against his feet. When a neighborhood dog barks, all four of them lift their heads and tilt their ears, Maybelle rising to her feet. My father speaks to them. Settle down, fellas, settle down, he’s saying.

Before I call him in, I drag the old glass-top table from the pantry back into the kitchen where it belongs. I set it with some old linens Catherine never used that I find in the dining room. They are perfectly pressed—my mother would have sent them to the dry cleaners—and smell of the pine of the sideboard drawer they have sat in for the past two decades. I remember the pattern, small white daisies on cornflower blue. The creases in the tablecloth stand firm no matter how many times I smooth it. The napkins are slightly frayed at the corners, but when I stand back everything looks as lovely as it used to be.

I don’t know how he’ll react. The table in this position is where my mother left her note before we left. But my father, when he comes in, seems not to notice at all. He is breathing in his heavy, drunk way. He puts his glass above the knife and sits in his old seat, the seat facing the stove, as if that intervening score of years never happened.

He eats the meat first. It disgusts me, the thin bone, the dead baby flesh, but I can’t help watching him eat. I feel like I’m seven years old again. The sound of his breathing, the sweat on his brow and nose, the vodka and onions and tobacco create a sort of dis-orienting fog that obscures the present for long moments at a time.

“Dad, will you promise me right now you will take care of yourself?” I say, to shake off the spell.

“I will.” He looks up from his plate. “This is good, by the way.”

“And you’ll make yourself vegetables?”

“Yup.” He scoops three lima beans onto his fork unconvincingly.

I want to ask him what on earth he plans to do with himself for the rest of his life. He’s only sixty.

He eats a few bites of the mashed potato, pushes the lima beans around a bit, and sits back. I see how drunk he is then, just before he begins speaking. “And you’ll take care of yourself, too, Daley?” I don’t like the way he says my name. He says it like Catherine used to say it, Day-
lee
.

“I will.”

“You’ll go shut yourself up in another Commie college and get even more asinine ideas in your head about the way the world should be and how everyone who ever lived before you got it all wrong?”

“I guess so.”

“Let me ask you something,” he says, pointing his fork tines at my chest. “Let me ask you. Did they ever make you study the Second World War? Did they ever teach you about this country and what it did for the world? The sacrifices that were made to save all those goddamn people who now just want to stick it up our asses? I’ll tell you what’s fucked up. What’s fucked up is everything that happened after 1955. That’s what they should be teaching you. Everything—
everything
—they are teaching you is a crock of shit, and you people are all so far gone you don’t even know it. You don’t have a clue.”

He leans forward and hoists himself up. He takes a few steps to the bar and then realizes he didn’t bring his glass and comes back for it. I see how it will be when I leave, and an image of him on the floor of his bathroom comes to me.

Ten hours. I can do this. I can say something. “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to drink yourself to death.”

He slams the glass on the counter of the bar. “You know what, Day-
lee
. Just go off to college—again. For the third decade. Spend your whole life in college. Don’t grow up. And take all your faux concern for me with you.”

“It’s not faux, Dad.” I’m surprised he has that word in his vocabulary.

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, going through his rites at the bar and returning with an exceptionally full glass, “you know why I drink? You know why? I drink because of people like you, people who think they are so perfect, who think they have all the ans—”

“I do not think I am perfect. By any means.”

“Good, because you are not perfect. You’re a disaster. You’re an embarrassment. You and your brother.” He puts his hands on his head as if they can stop his thoughts of us. And then he looks right at me with his yellow eyes. “You two are everything I’m ashamed of.”

I put down my knife and fork. I’m done taking this shit. “And you
should
be ashamed. You should be dying of shame. Because your two children didn’t get a father. They got a monster. They got a drunk, ignorant bigot who poisoned them with pure
bile
.” My argument begins to form itself. I have so much proof. I’m going to shove all my memories in his face.

He laughs. No, he doesn’t laugh, but there is no word for the noise my father makes when he is surprised and furious at the same time. “You know something. You turned out worse than your mother, you little bitch.”

The mention of my mother, his first since she died nine years ago, slits my vocal cords clean through. All I can do is get myself out of the room and up the stairs.

I cry on my bed with the despair of a child. I keep telling myself to get up and drive away. But I can’t. I feel pinned down by the weight of all the years and insults. I can hear him downstairs, doing the dishes, letting the dogs out, letting them back in. It’s a normal night for him. A quart of vodka, a vicious argument. He probably feels damn good, like he’s just played two sets of tennis. I worry he might even try to say good night to me, so I hoist myself up long enough to lock the bedroom door. The feel of the lock in my fingers is so familiar to me. It’s a little silver macaroni-shaped thing with a deep solid
thunk
when the thick tongue falls into place. I can practically feel my mother on the other side of the door, pleading with me to come down and say hello to Cousin Grace who’s come up from Westport. But I don’t want to. I’ve just gotten out the big
wicker picnic basket of Barbies and their camper from the closet and am settling in for the afternoon. I do not want to have tea with Cousin Grace.