The Wooden Sea (19 page)

That suit. I remembered so well the navy blue suit he was wearing.

"I just walked in and when I saw you I couldn't believe it. Because I have a son, he's seventeen?

And well, you look exactly like what I think he'll look like when he gets older. It's uncanny."

I poured sugar into the coffee. "He must be a handsome boy."

My father was a very uptight guy and incapable of saying anything funny. But he was a wonderful, appreciative audience. The moment those words were out of my mouth he laughed so hard he started coughing.

"Sit down before you collapse." I almost, _almost _ended that sentence with, "Dad."

He sat and I slid him my glass of water. He slurped a swallow and shook his head. "You took me off guard. I'm Tom McCabe "

When he put his hand out to shake I said, "Bill Clinton."

"Nice to meet you, Bill. But I can't help thinking I should call you Frannie.

That's my son's name."

I nodded, smiled, sipped the coffee, and almost choked. "Sorry I can't help you there, Tom. I'm Bill, married to a woman named Hillary and we have a daughter named Chelsea."

He drank more water. "Yes, but the likeness is still amazing. Do you mind if I ask what you do?"

Looking down at the counter, I nodded mysteriously and said after a pause

"Politics."

_"Really?" _He was impressed. My father loved politics. He often read to my mother from the _New York Times _about the bullshit going on in Washington.

Invariably he had a comment on it. "That's just amazing."

He chuckled and rubbed his face hard with both of his hands. "My son will be lucky if he stays out of jail. Frannie is a mess."

It felt like he'd stabbed me in the heart. But why? I _ran _the jail now! All these years later I knew I'd succeeded and that before he died, Tom McCabe had been very proud of me. I'd become the kind of upstanding citizen he'd always hoped for. So why did his remark hurt me? Simple: Because no matter how old you are, the relationship with your parents is like a dog being walked on one of those retractable leashes. The older we get, the further we wander. Years later we're so far away that we forget we're on their line. Predictably, though, we do reach the end, or they press the rewind button for some reason, and a second later we're back at their side with a bad case of whiplash and once again hoping for their approval. No matter how strong or distant we are, Mom and Dad still have that power over us and never lose it.

"Maybe you're being too hard on your kid, Tom." I couldn't look at him.

"You wouldn't say that if you knew my Frannie."

"But maybe as a kid I was enough like him to know what I'm saying."

"Bill--"

"Here you go." Alice put my plate down with a thump. "Anydiin? else you'd like?"

The eggs' weak yellow contrasted the bark-brown bacon. Haute cuisine a la Scrappy.

I looked at her and smiled. She didn't smile back. "Anything wrong?"

"Yes, I asked for some hash browns with it."

"No you didn't."

My father piped right up. "Yes he did. I heard him order hash browns."

Alice frowned and put a hand on her hip that in no uncertain terms said, "You wanna make something of it?" I remembered when I was younger we used to call this girl who we all lusted after "the bitch with the tits." That is, once upon a time before the world became politically correct. But I also remembered something else about Alice that was far more important.

Waving away the potatoes I said, "It doesn't matter. They'll just make me fat. But do you mind if I ask you a question?"

Her hand didn't come off her hip. "That depends. What?"

"Do you know this man's son? Do you know Frannie McCabe?"

Her whole face slowly lifted into a great wide smile. "Sure I know Frannie.

He's a nice kid."

"Nice? How? In what way?"

"Don't you know him? You kinda look like him." She checked Dad to see if he agreed.

"We were talking about him and wondered what other people who know him think."

"I told you--Frannie's nice." The brick was coming back into her voice. I felt like launching my scrambled eggs into her cleavage but couldn't because she had something I needed at the moment. If I pissed her off I wouldn't get it.

"So that's all, he's just nice?"

The young waitress squinted across the room to see what her old man was doing. He was still nose-deep in his toilet paper, which gave her the green light to keep talking to us.

"When Frannie comes in here with his friends he acts tough and plays the bigshot. But when he's alone he's sweet and sometimes does real nice things."

Bull's-eye! Come on, Alice--tell Tom the story.

It looked like she was going to leave it at that so I goaded her on.

"Nice? Like what?"

"Like me and my boyfriend have troubles, right? Like we're not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. Well, one night in here we had this bad fight--"

Again she looked up to see what the boss was doing. "And I really lost it.

Luckily the place was pretty empty so when I started crying like a hysteric, nobody but Frannie really noticed. But he was so nice. He was here alone, like I said, and we talked for like two hours about it. He didn't have to do that.

He wasn't playing Mr. Tough Guy or nothing, just being nice. And what he said was smart too.

He said things about people, you know, in general which I thought about a lot after. Then the next day he came in? He gave me a copy of this record I said
Page 105

I like, _Concrete and Clay _that we both said we liked. He didn't have to do that either. He's okay, Frannie." She said that looking straight at Dad.

I gave a satisfied hum. "Good story, Alice. Could I have my hash browns now?"

The warmth in her eyes snapped shut like sprung mousetraps. "What did you say?"

Leaning forward, I spoke loud enough so that Scrappy could have heard even if he'd been dead.

"I said I want the hash browns you haven't brought me yet, dear."

"Wutz da problem?" said a voice like an incoming bazooka shell lobbed at us from behind the cash register. It launched our waitress double time toward getting my potatoes.

In the meantime I began eating the unwholesome food in front of me and it tasted great. After a few mouthfuls, I pointed the fork at my father and said, "Don't always judge a thug by his cover, Tom.

Sometime if you sneak into his room at night, you'll probably catch him reading under the blankets with a flashlight."

He grinned at the silliness of the image. Public Enemy Number One reading under a blanket?

But something in it must have wrenched him too because the next moment he looked like he almost believed what I said might be possible.

We were quiet then but it didn't matter because it was enough to be with my old man again, drinking weak coffee at Scrappy's Diner. And morbid as it sounds, I appreciated him so much more knowing what life was like when he was gone. However long this lasted, this dream or nightmare or whatever it was, there was no other place on earth I wanted to be. Sitting at the counter in this dump, convincing my skeptical father his son had good stuff in him and would eventually prevail.

Although more people came and left, the diner stayed relatively quiet.

We didn't talk much while I ate. Alice brought my potatoes but sailed them down the counter at me as if they were a Frisbee. Dad ordered a blueberry muffin and a glass of orange juice from another waitress.

When they came he ate very quickly. I was pushing a last piece of toast around the bare plate to sop up whatever last tasties were left.

When I was done I looked to the left and saw her coming toward us.

Her name was Miss Garretson. Victoria Garretson. She taught music at Crane's View Elementary School. Always a little hefty and rosy-cheeked, she had a 24/7

unflagging enthusiasm for her subject and job that invariably turned most of her students off from the force of its wind machine. For three years she had been my music teacher. You couldn't hate her because kids only hate teachers who literally hurt or diminish them in some ugly way.

We just couldn't stand

Miss Garretson's arm-waving, cheek-puffing glee as she conducted us through Stephen Foster songs, or tingled triangles, shook the maracas. Thanks to her, if I never hear or see another maraca in my life that'll be just fine. What did she look like? Like a youngish woman who sold bed sheets in a department store and talked about them for too long. Like a secretary in a failing real estate office. She looked like a picture of someone's aunt.

"Tom! What on earth are you doing here this early?"

Tom? Miss Garretson knew my father? Knew him so well that she called him by his first name?

"Vicki! Hey there! I should ask you the same question."

_Vicki?_

She simply stood with her hands held in front of her, staring at me.

She had big lips and wore too much dark lipstick. It took me a few moments to realize she was either waiting to be introduced or for both of us to stand and show we were proper gentlemen.

Eventually Dad stood up but I didn't.

"Vicki Garretson, this is Bill Clinton."

I nodded and gave her a midrange smile. She gave me an unsubtle once-over with her eyes. It sent me back forty years to the days she used to give me another kind of visual once over: to check if my seven-year-old zipper was open or if there was breakfast jam on my Mickey Mouse Club T-shirt.

"Vicki is a teacher at our school."

"Music theory and choir." She said proudly and dishonestly. The only theory this toots taught was take your finger out of your nose, child, and read the notes. I loved it though--Miss Garretson was lying to impress me.

"And what do you do, Mr. Clinton?"

"Bill's in politics," Dad chirped, full of admiration.

"How interesting. May I sit down?"

"Sure, of course, Vicki." He gestured to a stool where she proceeded to rest her not-small can.

We talked for a while about nothing. Miss Vicki was boring and self-involved.

It was plain she liked the sound of her own voice and the trivia of her life.

But my mind was only half on what was being said because I was mesmerized watching the body language going on between them: It didn't take long to read between their lines. When I had, I started grinning like a lunatic and I'm sure acting strange.

Because it was clear Tom McCabe was parking his skin Pinto in Vicki's garage.

Their conversation was full of in-jokes, references, secret sexy looks, and a casual history of things they'd done together. Not to mention the serious electricity bouncing back and forth between them. Dad was screwing my old music teacher! They spoke to each other in an intimate unguarded way because who was I? A stranger they met in a diner who neither would ever see again.

Some guy who sits next to you on a plane or you strike up a conversation with in the station while you're both waiting for an overdue train. The only thing that gave me a little distinction was I looked like Tom's son who Vicki had had as a student years before.

After _that _egg hit the heated skillet of my mind and started sizzling, another dropped right after it. Why was Dad coming out of that house across the street earlier this morning? Did he
Page 107

have another lover over there that he visited on his insomnia rounds? The secret life of Thomas McCabe. My father--Mr. Drip Dry, cap-toed oxford shoes from Florsheim, Robert Hall suit, one whiskey before dinner and never more. Always paid his taxes on time, his dues, his respects. My mother couldn't pick him out of a crowd. But now here he was doing the Wa-watusi with my elementary music teacher and maybe others too. Yee ha! Isn't life wonderful?

I wanted to take him in my arms and dance a jig. I've heard people say that one of the worst experiences of their life was discovering their parents betrayed each other. I was thrilled. I wanted to know details--every iota in Cinemascope and Dolby Surround. Crane's View was small; the walls had eyes and ears.

Did this odd couple sneak off to the Holiday Inn in Amerling with a bottle of cheap champagne, a collection of Rod

McKuen love poetry, and a transistor radio that played Ravel's "Bolero"?

I wanted to hug Dad. Or at least pat him on the back, but in these circumstances that was out of the question. I loved what I had discovered and

I loved him. Even more oddly it made me love my mother more for being so totally 180

degrees wrong about her beloved partner.

Ma, he's a _hound!_

"Tom, I've got to hit the road. But it has been a pleasure." We stood up and shook hands. I remembered he didn't give a very strong shake and there it was again after all these years. Tears came to my eyes.

Shaking hands with your father. If you love him, there's nothing greater. And I did love this man. Silently I thanked and blessed him for having had so much loving patience.

For putting up with a terrible, frustrating son who had made him suffer and worry for almost twenty years. I wanted to say to Tom McCabe, I'm your kid, Frannie the thief, the good-for-nothing you should have hated but didn't because you're a good man. But I'm all right now. I survived, Dad, and I'm fine.

Instead I smiled at Victoria Garretson (Vicki--never in my life would I have addressed the woman by that name) and turned my back on Thomas McCabe for the last time.

"Bill? Excuse me, Bill?" I was on my way to the cash register when he called my name.

"Yeah, Tom?"

"Could I pay for your breakfast? I'd really like to do that."

"Why?" Here came my tears again. I looked at Scrappy.

"Because of what you said about my son. Because maybe you're right and I just worry too much.

Because, I don't know, it's a nice morning and meeting you was an unexpected surprise."

I handed him the check. "You're a prince, Tom."

He made a strange face. I asked if anything was wrong.

"Frannie says that sometimes. `You're a prince, Tom.' But when he says it he's always sarcastic."