The Bradbury Report (11 page)

We arrived late afternoon on Maundy Thursday. Sara's mother met us wearing a black velvet dress with a single strand of pearls. Her hair was pulled back severely and tied off with a black velvet ribbon. She was small and plain. She was in her mid-fifties, but looked much older. The skin on her face and hands was dry and papery, her knuckles prominent, her fingernails, beneath the polish, ridged and bitten. Her hair, which had been blonde—Sara had a picture of her mother as a young girl in Bergen; she had been pretty—was now pure white. She was thin, even gaunt, and curved inward. She was skittish. She didn't say much; after twenty-five years in America she was still not comfortable with the spoken language, especially not before strangers. When she saw Sara, she began to cry. After a suitable delay, Sara's brother and sister drifted into the entryway. They were both still in high school and living at home. They were unambiguously glad to see Sara and, though not overtly impolite, paid me little attention. They were good-looking, relaxed, confident kids. They are both still alive and have, I believe, fared reasonably well. Except for the dutiful Christmas card from the brother's wife, to which I don't respond, I have had no contact with either of her siblings since Sara died. Sara's brother is an electrical engineer. He lives in San Diego and has a daughter. Her sister is married, in Minneapolis, to a Somali with whom she's had five children. Though we are not related by blood, these children are my nephews and nieces, whom I will never know. The last I heard, Sara's sister had converted to Islam, which I was happy to hear, imagining her father's reaction. Sara's father and mother are long dead.

What explains Sara? How could she have come—so fine and sensitive and graceful—from the commingling of two such parents, one of them positively malefic? So our genes are
not
our fate? Persuade my clone of that. I didn't meet her father—the house was big enough that I didn't run into him—until Saturday afternoon. The reason for his absence, given me by Sara's mother—she was anxious to soften any
possible offense I might take—having to do with the various offices and functions attendant on Holy Week that required his presence and ministration, seemed plausible enough. We'd been assigned separate bedrooms: Sara her old room on the second floor, and me one of the several guest rooms on the floor above. He had come to Sara's room, in the evening, after I had gone to sleep, and again in the morning, before I'd emerged for breakfast.

We all went to a Good Friday service at the church, where I saw Sara's father for the first time, and heard him deliver to the assembled and somber few a brief meditation on the meaning of the Passion. I was predisposed to admire it, but I found his meditation platitudinous and bland—on the Passion!—found
him
affected and smug.

After lunch on Saturday afternoon, Sara told me her father wanted to see me in the library. I would be in his house four days—he was there, too, off and on—and this was to be our only meeting. Sara led me—silently, guiltily, I thought, very much as if she were leading me to a special doom in which she was complicit—to a part of the house I'd not yet been in. It was, as they'd all been instructed to call it, their father's wing, and contained, in addition to the library: his bedroom—her mother had her bedroom in another part of the house; his bathroom—he liked to take long baths and often did not complete his morning toilet until early afternoon; his sitting room, which I could see as I passed it, was spacious; and an indoor stationary lap pool, for his use only.

He was waiting for me in the library. The room was a hexagon, which is an odd and disorienting shape for a room. Except for the door through which Sara and I entered, and the large sash window in one of the western walls—the drapes on this window were tied back, and the afternoon sun streamed through it—the rest of the wall space was taken, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves. These shelves were made from a kind of pickled pine. They were simple and elegant. Whatever the merits of the individual books it contained—for anything I knew, he'd bought them by the yard—the collection was extensive. I'd estimate there were two to three thousand volumes, maybe more than that, some of them leather-bound sets, almost all the rest clothbound. Here
and there, space on the shelves was made for small, effeminate porcelain figurines—florid little shepherds and shepherdesses—and also for various diplomas and awards Sara's father had earned, and photographs of him with assorted luminaries from the larger ecclesiastical world and the local political scene. The floor was made of wide unvarnished pine planks. Much of the floor was covered with an oriental rug, clearly old, its colors muted and quite beautiful. Near the center of the room, not quite facing the door, was a large, dark oak double desk with a deep-red leather inset top. One could sit on either side of the desk, or, as originally intended, share it. From the late Jacobean period (“Sheffield, circa 1625,” he said to me, when we were alone), the legs and edges of the desk, elaborately carved and detailed, looked almost medieval. The desk chair was straight- and high-backed, of the same dark oak. There was a green-glass reading lamp on the desk, an old-fashioned and ornamental inkstand, a framed photographic portrait of him standing behind his wife and children, and a silver tray with a crystal pitcher, several tumblers, and a silver bowl for ice. In one of the room's six equal angles stood a large antique globe, in another a simple Shaker-style reader's stand (when I was a young boy I drove with my parents into Maine, to Sabbathday Lake, to hear the very last of the vestigial Shakers sing their hymns) with, open upon it, an oversized and illuminated bible. Beside the window was a scuffed brown leather wing chair with matching footstool, and a tall brass standing lamp. It was the kind of room in which one might expect to encounter, if not Erasmus or Galileo or one of the lesser Medicis, at least a man with some education, a modicum of discernment, and unconstrained access to cash, who had an overweening interest in appearing connoisseurish (how to explain those figurines?), old-moneyed, and learned.

Sara's father, the Reverend Bird, stood beside the wing chair. He was holding a book, as if he'd been reading and had just risen to stretch his legs. His back was to the door, and he was looking out the window. For our benefit, I thought, he'd struck a prayerful, meditative pose. Though he could not have helped but hear us open the door, he did not turn towards us, until Sara said, “Daddy.”

Then in his mid-fifties, Sara's father was handsome, tall and slim and graceful, his posture faultless, his complexion fair and smooth. His hair was silvery and fine. He seemed to me to be more conscientiously groomed than any man I'd ever seen. He was wearing a suit, dark gray with a pale chalk stripe, and a black clerical shirt with the priestly notch of white in the collar. His shoes had been brought, by someone, to a high black shine. I could see, when he turned to face us, that the book he was holding—he kept his place in it with his index finger, to suggest he intended, shortly, to continue reading it—was Pascal's
Pensées
.

“Darling,” he said to Sara. Without moving in our direction, he lifted his empty hand and held it out to her, his palm up, his fingers extended, a flourish, as if he were asking her to dance. Or, as I think of it now, as if they had already been dancing and were in the middle of some tricky break step that had taken them, briefly, apart. Sara went to him, took his hand, leaned in, raised up on her toes, and kissed him chastely on the cheek. Still holding his hand, she looked back at me—I had remained standing just inside the door—and said, sunnily, without guile, “Daddy, this is my friend. Ray Bradbury.”

“Ray,” he said.

“Mr. Bird,” I said. I intended no slight, though on the drive back, Sara told me he'd been displeased by the lack of form in my address, had taken it as a sign of disrespect. He expected me, she said, to call him “Reverend Bird.” When I knew what it was he wanted from me, the precise code of deference required, I could not, thereafter—not once in all the time I knew him, no matter that it might have made things easier for Sara—bring myself to do it. I am embarrassed now to confess I was, for seven years, to take heart in this paltry line of resistance. “It's nice to meet you,” I said. Then: “This is a beautiful room. All these books. Amazing.” This was fawning of the worst sort, nearly pure obsequiousness.

“Thank you, Ray,” he said. “That's kind of you to say. Though perhaps more modest, more ascetic than we might have come to had my wife been given her head—you have seen the rest of the house—it is for me a beautiful room.” It was not easy to think of it as modest. “A
place of quiet and retreat,” he said. “Of study and prayer. Of sanctuary. Which I find I more and more need. I'm at peace here, among my books. As I'm sure you will understand. I hope you've been comfortable so far in your stay with us.”

“I've been very comfortable,” I said. “Thank you. And extremely well fed. I'm glad to get to see where Sara grew up. It helps me imagine her as a little girl. I'm also happy to be away from school. If you could see the way I live, you'd know I'm not used to,” indicating the room, “this level of,” I would attempt an ingratiating joke, “modesty.”

Given my usual reticence, this was a veritable aria. I saw Sara stiffen as I finished, without, at the time, understanding why. He would soon hear from Sara herself—I didn't know she'd come home to tell him this—that she and I were living together. When she told him—I was not present, and probably should have been—he was furious with her. On moral, and other, less admirable grounds. There was no reason for him to hear preemptively from me—the agent of his heartbreak, the unworthy, uncouth, godless graduate student who would separate him from the girl of his dreams—even an intimation of the truth: that we lived, his daughter and I, like squatters in a rat-trap apartment above a Hmong gift shop on the shabbiest street in downtown Ames.

“I trust, then,” he said, “you will do your best to make yourself at home.”

“I will,” I said, without any idea what we were really talking about, though I felt again, for the first time since my mother's death, the pang of orphanhood. As a graduate student, my present state was impecunious, but I was not starving or freezing or without shelter. Going forward, there was for me some likelihood of gainful, if not bountiful employment. But I had no one at my back. In the face of small favors, I would be grateful and dimwitted, slow to take umbrage. Too slow at times. Too grateful. A shriveled nut of civility.

I can't remember what Sara said, how she managed her exit, but it was graceful. She was standing beside her father, then she was beside
me, the back of her hand brushing the back of my hand, then she was gone, the clean smell of her still in the air, promising, I think, to be right back, after she did what she was pretending she needed to do. I was the perfect stooge—mildly suspicious I was being set up, too good a guest, too fatted a goose, too stupid with love, to protest. The subsequent and very unpleasant conversation between Sara's father and me lasted no more than fifteen minutes. At which point, as if she'd been watching the clock—we were done talking, and I felt pretty much dispatched—Sara, who made enough noise coming down the hall to alert us to her approach, gaily blew into the room, expecting, I suppose, to find us joined in an embrace of mutual and manly affection. She was so fine, so ungodly innocent, to see her all at once like that was a detonation in the heart, a clearing shot to the brain.

“Hello, you two,” she said, before she could take an accurate reading of the scene. “Miss me?”

Below, I provide an arrantly stark reconstruction of my conversation with Sara's father. I dispense with all interpolated notation of gesture and action, and I do this more for the sake of accuracy than of ease. During our conversation there
was
no action or gesture. At his bidding, so we would not have to call from across the room, I came closer. Hard as this is to credit, we stood, like duelists, facing one another at an uncordial distance of five or six feet, and talked back and forth.