8 Plus 1 (12 page)

The clock in the steeple of the Congregational Church in the square stroked the hour of nine and we listened to its echoes in the crisp morning air. The army bus stood at the corner and I was fascinated by its color, the olive drab giving an air of emergency to the gathering of people on the sidewalk. The fellows who were leaving for military service were not yet in uniform, but already there was a hint of the military in their bearing. A soldier in uniform paced the sidewalk impatiently near the bus.

My father and I stood with Armand in front of King’s Shoe Store. My mother had remained at home, having kissed Armand goodbye without allowing tears to fall, and unwilling to take the chance of breaking down as he got on the bus. The other children were in school, but my father had allowed me to see Armand off.

“I hope they send us down South for basic training,” Armand said. “At least, it’ll be warm there.” His voice seemed unnaturally thin and high-pitched, and his eyes searched the square,
looking for Jessica. I saw her first, the blond hair vivid in the drabness of the morning. She walked swiftly toward us, opening her arms to Armand as she approached, but she arrested the gesture when she saw my father. They had not met since that terrible Sunday in the parlor.

My father shifted on one foot and then another. Finally, he looked down at me. “Come, Jerry, let’s go find that soldier and ask him when the bus is leaving …”

“Thanks, Pa,” Armand said.

As we approached the soldier, he placed a silver whistle in his mouth and blew it fiercely. He called out: “Okay, you guys, fall in. On the double. On the double …” He would have made a fine cheerleader.

My father and I returned to Armand and Jessica, who were holding hands, huddled together as if the day had suddenly turned too cold to bear.

“It’s time,” my father said, touching Armand’s shoulder.

Armand drew back his shoulders and shook hands with my father. He punched me lightly on the arm. He turned to Jessica and kissed her gently on the cheek and then gathered her in his arms, holding her closely. He pulled away from her abruptly and looked at us all for a long moment, his face pale and his chin trembling a little. And then he walked quickly toward the bus and was lost in the crowd of fellows who were leaving with him.

Jessica turned away from us. She kept her face averted as the bus gradually filled, as the soldier took one final look around the square, as the motor
roared into life. Armand waved to us from inside the bus, but there was little comfort in that last glimpse.

The bus turned the corner and was gone. The people began to disperse and my father, Jessica, and I seemed to be alone as if we were standing on a small invisible island there in the square. She still did not look at us, although I could see the reflection of her face in a store window. Clutching her coat at the neck, she left us abruptly, walking away without warning.

My father watched her go, shrugging his shoulders.

“Pa,” I said, “you were wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?” he asked gruffly, pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket.

“You said Protestants have no heart, that they don’t laugh or cry. Jessica was crying. I saw her face and she was crying just like you cried the other night at supper.”

He looked at her retreating figure. He blew his nose feebly and the sound was not as magnificent as usual, barely audible above the traffic. He lifted his arms and let them drop at his sides.

“There’s no fool like an old fool,” he said, mysteriously. Then: “Come, Jerry, let’s go find her before she’s too far away …”

I had to run to keep pace with him as we threaded our way through the crowd. We finally caught up to her near the drinking fountain on the other side of the square. My father touched her arm, and suddenly she was folded in his embrace and never before had I seen people look so happy while they were crying.

I left the newspaper earlier than usual that particular afternoon, for a reason I have now forgotten. Driving through the downtown area, I remembered an errand that had to be run. Which meant I would have to turn around, drive across town, find a parking space, and so forth. I drew the car up at the curb, pausing there, letting the traffic flow by, wondering whether the errand was worth the bother.

“Dad!”

I turned at the voice. My son, Peter, then in high school, was regarding me with surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I explained. “And what are you doing here?”

He told me that school had ended early because of a teachers’ conference. He looked at me curiously as he got into the car. I felt his eyes on me as I drove. Once, glancing at him, I was startled to see something that resembled suspicion in his eyes. Why? Then I realized he had suddenly seen me out of context, in a car downtown in the middle of the day, not at home, not at work. We drove along without further comment.

A small moment in an ordinary day. But that meeting turned out to contain the seeds of “Guess What? I Almost Kissed My Father Goodnight.”

Fathers are mysterious beings to their children. At least, my father was to me. Which is strange because he was an ordinary man. He worked in a factory eight hours a day, five days a week. He loved the Boston Red Sox despite their inability to win a pennant most years. He enjoyed cold beer at the end of the day. He was affectionate with his wife and children, never left the house or returned without a kiss for my mother. As I grew older, we became friends. But there were certain things I couldn’t ask him. What did he think about as he sat at the bench eight hours a day? What dreams and hopes wafted him to sleep as he took a nap after supper? Was he disappointed with his life? Or had he found fulfillment? I knew so much about him—from his shoe size (6 1/2 or 7, depending on the style) to his favorite singer (Bing Crosby), but there was so much that I would never know.

That downtown encounter with Peter caused me to wonder whether he might feel the same way. He had always seen me in the familiar role of father—but did that sudden meeting make him regard me for once as an individual, a person distinct from the father figure I had always been? And what if …

There it was again, that perennial question.

I embarked on a story in which the narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy who “investigates” his father, who learns his shoe and shirt sizes and a lot of other things, although he is searching for something altogether different. The story is told from
the boy’s viewpoint because I wanted to preserve the mystery of the father, to show that although some questions are never really answered, there are tantalizing hints and indications.

Years later, long after the story had been written and appeared in print, I asked Peter if he remembered that midday meeting on Main Street.

He thought a moment. “Vaguely,” he said.

But I don’t think he remembered at all.

Which is, perhaps, another story.

Guess What?
I Almost Kissed My Father Goodnight

I’ve got to get to the bottom of it all somehow and maybe this is the best way. It’s about my father. For instance, I found out recently that my father is actually forty-five years old. I knew that he was forty-something but it never meant anything to me. I mean, trying to imagine someone over forty and what it’s like to be that old is the same as trying to imagine what the world would be like in, say, 1999. Anyway, he’s forty-five, and he has the kind of terrible job that fathers have; in his case, he’s office manager for a computer equipment concern. Nine-to-five stuff. Four weeks vacation every year but two weeks must be taken between January and May so he usually ends up painting the house or building a patio or something like that in April, and then we travel the other two weeks in July. See America First. He reads a couple of newspapers every day and never misses the seven o’clock news on television. Here are some other vital statistics my research
turned up: He’s five ten, weighs 160 pounds, has a tendency toward high blood pressure, enjoys a glass of beer or two while he’s watching the Red Sox on television, sips one martini and never two before dinner, likes his steak medium rare and has a habit of saying that “tonight, by God, I’m going to stay up and watch Johnny Carson,” but always gropes his way to bed after the eleven o’clock news, which he watches only to learn the next day’s weather forecast. He has a pretty good sense of humor but a weakness for awful puns that he inflicts on us at the dinner table: “Do you carrot all for me? I’m in a stew over you.” We humor him. By we, I mean my sisters. Annie, who is nineteen and away at college, and Debbie, who is fourteen and spends her life on the telephone. And me: I’m Mike, almost sixteen and a sophomore in high school. My mother’s name is Ellen—Dad calls her Ellie—and she’s a standard mother: “Clean up your room! Is your homework done?”

Now that you’ve gotten the basic details, I’ll tell you about that day last month when I walked downtown from school to connect with the North Side bus, which deposits me in front of my house. It was one of those terrific days in spring and the air smelled like vacation, and it made you ache with all the things you wanted to do and all the places you wanted to see and all the girls you wanted to meet. Like the girl at the bus stop that I’ve been trying to summon up the nerve to approach for weeks: so beautiful she turns my knees liquid. Anyway, I barreled through Bryant Park, a shortcut, the turf spring-soft and spongy under my feet and the weeping willows hazy with blossom.
Suddenly I screeched to a halt, like Bugs Bunny in one of those crazy television cartoons. There’s a car parked near the Civil War cannon. Ours. I recognize the dent in the right front fender Annie put there last month when she was home from college. And there are also those decals on the side window that give the geography of our boring vacation trips,
Windy Chasms
, places like that.

The car is unoccupied. Did somebody steal it and abandon it here? Wow, great! I walk past the splashing fountain that displays one of those embarrassing naked cherubs and stop short again. There he is: my father. Sitting on a park bench. Gazing out over a small pond that used to have goldfish swimming around until kids started stealing them. My father was deep in thought, like a statue in a museum. I looked at my watch. Two-thirty in the afternoon, for crying out loud. What was he doing there at this time of day? I was about to approach him but hesitated, held back for some reason—I don’t know why. Although he looked perfectly normal, I felt as though I had somehow caught him naked, had trespassed on forbidden territory, the way I’m afraid to have my mother come barging into my bedroom at certain moments. I drew back, studying him as if he were a sudden stranger. I saw the familiar thinning short hair, the white of his scalp showing through. The way the flesh in his neck has begun to pucker like turkey skin. Now, he sighed. I saw his shoulders heave, and the rest of his body shudder like the chain reaction of freight cars. He lifted his face to the sun, eyes closed. He seemed
to be reveling in the moment, all his pores open. I tiptoed away. People talk about tiptoeing but I don’t think I ever really tiptoed before in my life. Anyway, I leave him there, still basking on that park bench, because I’ve got something more important to do at the bus stop. Today, I have vowed to approach the girl, talk to her, say something,
anything.
After all, I’m not exactly Frankenstein and some girls actually think I’m fun to be with. Anyway, she isn’t at the bus stop. I stall around and miss the two forty-five deliberately. She never shows up. At three-thirty, I thumb home and pick up a ride in a green MG, which kind of compensates for a rotten afternoon.

At dinner that evening, I’m uncommunicative, thinking of the girl and all the science homework waiting in my room. Dinner at our house is a kind of ritual that alternates between bedlam and boredom with no sense of direction whatever. Actually, I don’t enjoy table talk. I have this truly tremendous appetite and I eat too fast, like my mother says. The trouble is that I’m always being asked a question or expected to laugh at some corny joke when my mouth is full, which it usually is. But that evening I stopped eating altogether when my mother asked my father about his day at the office.

“Routine,” he said.

I thought of that scene in the park.

“Did you have to wait around all day for that Harper contract?” my mother asked.

“Didn’t even have time for a coffee break,” he said, reaching for more potatoes.

I almost choked on the roast beef. He lied: my
father actually lied. I sat there, terrified, caught in some kind of terrible no-man’s-land. It was as if the lie itself had thrust me into panic. Didn’t I fake my way through life most of the time—telling half-truths to keep everybody happy, either my parents or my teachers or even my friends? What would happen if everybody started telling the truth all of a sudden? But I was bothered by his motive. I mean—why did he have to pretend that he
wasn’t
in the park that afternoon? And that first question came back to haunt me worse than before—what was he doing there, anyway, in the first place?

I found myself studying him across the table, scrutinizing him with the eyes of a stranger. But it didn’t work. He was simply my father. Looked exactly as he always did. He was his usual dull unruffled self, getting ready to take his evening nap prior to the television news. Stifling a yawn after dessert. Forget it, I told myself. There’s a simple explanation for everything.

Let’s skip some time now until the night of the telephone call. And let me explain about the telephone setup at our house. First of all, my father never answers the phone. He lets it ring nine or ten or eleven times and merely keeps on reading the paper and watching television because he claims—and he’s right—that most of the calls are for Debbie or me. Anyway, a few nights after that happening at the park, the phone rang about ten-thirty and I barreled out of my room because he and my mother get positively explosive about calls after nine on school nights.