And Sons (26 page)

Even if sickly sweet, how could anyone not wish for a version of this? But before Richard could say anything, Andrew ripped up the script by noticing the lack more than the gain. “Wait. Where’s Andy?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said.

“Is he here? In the apartment? Have you seen him yet?”

Richard stepped back. “We’ve been waiting for the both of you.”

Gerd appeared from the kitchen.

“When did you become a nun?” Andrew asked.

“It’s my old uniform.” She pulled at the fabric. “Guess I’ve lost some weight.”

“Has everyone met Gerd?” Andrew gestured introductions with his
hands, which looked heavy and unwieldy, knuckles like knots of lead. “She’s a much more important person than this costume suggests. Put on normal clothes, please.”

“Okay.”

“And where’s Andy?”

“Upstairs. Should I get him?”

“Please, and if he’s still in bed, empty a bucket on his head, like my stepfather once did—twice actually. I used to sleep like that. You know what my first thought waking up would be? I can’t wait to go back to bed. Now I can’t sleep at all. Now my first thought is, Did I really sleep? Because if I did then my dreams are nothing but dreams of not falling asleep. How’s that for cruel? The gout doesn’t help either. I have gout by
the way. Funny word.
Gout
. And
goiter
. I don’t have a goiter, but
gout
makes me think of
goiter
. Sounds almost Victorian. Dickensian. Goiter & Gout. Now there’s a law firm, with Rickets & Scurvy as future partners.”

As Gerd headed upstairs, Richard and Jamie shared a look, which I tried to join since I had the inside track on the man and could convey his fragile state of mind with a simple furrow and tilt. But the brothers weren’t interested in my insightful semaphore. “We should sit down,” Richard decided, his hand returning to his father’s shoulder.

Jamie agreed.

“No,” Andrew said, “let’s wait for Andy first.”

“But Dad—”

“No, we’ll wait.”

“Sure, but—”

“We’re going to wait right here, so enough.” A pause. “Please.”

Richard relented as if he could see the smaller man peeking around the larger façade, the man who was powerless to grant you your childhood wish, who could only push into your hands the desire to be an adult. “Um Dad, this is my family,” Richard said.

“Yes, of course, your family. Hello.” Andrew accepted the introductions. “Forgive my appearance, my reality as well. Glad to meet you. Thanks for coming. Hope you enjoy the show.”

“Dad,” from Jamie.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“And how old are the two of you?” Andrew asked Emmett and Chloe.

“Sixteen,” Emmett said.

Chloe remained unnaturally quiet.

“She’s thirteen,” Emmett said.

“Sixteen and thirteen. Both good ages. Both difficult, in their way. I’m seventy-nine. Nearing eighty. I never thought I was going to be this old, thought I’d die middle-aged, like my own father. Coleridge, you know, the poet, of ‘Kubla Kahn’ and ‘Ancient Mariner’ fame—Do they still read him in school?—he would have been a greater man, certainly more famous, if he had died earlier, right up there with Keats, who if
he had lived longer would have been discussed in the same breath as Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Who, you say? Exactly. Sometimes life can seem like an experiment gone wrong. But enough of that. My best days ahead are somewhere upstairs, coming down soon, I hope. Andy’s only seventeen. You’ll like him.” As Andrew talked a few of the pieces of toilet paper loosened and began to wave in the word breeze, adding an element of suspense to his stream of consciousness, until finally one
detached and helicoptered to the floor. “Uh-oh,” he muttered, “I’m molting.”

“Maybe we should get you to a chair,” Jamie said.

“If anything I could use a bier.”

“Kind of early for that,” Richard said.

Andrew spelled “B-I-E-R” then asked if he required a definition. This brought a half smile to Emmett’s face and gave Andrew his first taste of success as a grandfather. “Regardless,” he went on, “you’re right about it being too early for a beer. Emmett, my boy, do you think you could do your grandfather a tremendous favor and go down that hall to where there’s a bar, really just a bottle of Dewar’s, and pour me a
drink in one of those stubby glasses?”

“No problem.” Emmett disappeared, already his ally.

“Dad, he’s only sixteen.”

“It’s not a particularly difficult drink to make.”

“I want to make a Dewar’s too,” Chloe piped in.

“See what you’ve done,” Richard said.

“I think I like having grandchildren around.”

“Are you already drunk?”

“Not already. If anything I’m giddy from loss of blood. It’s the Coumadin’s fault. Either way, the match is about to burn my hand and I’m just thrilled at having company—not company, family, back in this apartment after too long a time, and perhaps I’m nervous, and I thought a drink might settle me down. I am also, Richard, quite old enough to be drunk at any hour.”

Emmett reappeared with the scotch near the lip, every step a test of balance.

“Now there’s a boy with a good solid pour.” Andrew lowered his head as if taking communion, sipping a half inch before accepting the glass. “My compliments. The ratio of scotch to air is flawless. Yes, I really do like having the grandchildren around. Chloe, dear, there’s a syringe in my desk drawer—I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Andrew suppressed a rare smile. “We are all agreed, I need to shut up. Maybe
I’ve been working too hard.”

“Working on what?” asked Jamie, curious. “Something new?”

“The same old same old really.”

Gerd came back downstairs. “He’s on his way.”

“Excellent. The family reunion can soon begin.” Andrew took a serious slug of his drink, then another. “We are all feeling happy, right?” he said, wiping his mouth against his sleeve. More confetti fell from his face, and I imagined myself falling as well, letting go of whatever bloody scrap I was holding on to and drifting away. What was I doing there anyway? Andrew put the glass down on a nearby table and commented on the lovely flowers, and before
I could’ve excused myself, I was drawn back in.

“Philip did all the flowers,” Gerd said.

“Forgot you were here, Philip.”

I heard the smirks from Richard and Jamie in my head.

Faggot
.

“A talent just like your mother,” Andrew said. “What kind are they?”

Philip the fag
.

“Carnations, monkshood, lobel.”

Phaggot
.

“Does the Southampton house still have those wonderful gardens?”

Phaggot flower boy
.

“I’m not sure. I haven’t been there in a while.”

Roses are red
.

“I remember that rose garden,” he said.

Faggots are Philip
.

“But no point in getting rolled by useless memories.”

Hearing Andrew mention useless memories, I saw an opportunity to ask about
The Wizard of Oz
and perhaps educate Richard about our fathers’ past, but once again I was frustrated by an entrance, this time Andy, who appeared at the top of the stairs, like some allusion to a fairy tale, and A. N. Dyer was determined to uphold the spell, practically applauding his arrival. “Here he is, in the flesh.”

Andy, hair styled by his pillow, took in this tableau. He seemed dubious of whatever awaited him.

“Come on down,” Andrew said.

“What happened to your face?”

“It’s all the pills. They water down the blood.”

“You look trapped inside a snow globe.”

“See, he’s funny,” Andrew said to the group. “Very funny.”

Andy came down the stairs, but before greetings were exchanged he rubbed his face as only a teenage boy can, investing himself fully in the task. “Hey,” he finally said, blinking us into being, more pauper than prince.

“Of course, you know Jamie,” Andrew said.

“Oh yeah, hey.”

“And this is Richard and his family, Candy, Emmett, and Chloe.”

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“Nice to finally meet you.” Richard extended his hand like a marine.

“Sorry about being asleep,” Andy said. “Kind of rude of me.”

“That’s okay,” Andrew told him. “A boy needs his sleep.”

A brief silence followed, everyone smiling with no direction, one of those awkward moments where families realize they are essentially a collection of strangers with a few things in common, like this old, unsteady man here who looked around as though waiting for his offspring to notice the obvious.

“Well,” Andy finally said, “what this boy really needs is a big cup of coffee. Anyone else?” Only Emmett took him up on the offer and they both headed into the kitchen. Emmett might have been a year younger but he seemed older by four, safely on the other side of adolescence while Andy struggled through chin-high water. But their faces were obviously stamped from the same Dyer mold—the wedge nose, that brow—that made its first American
mark with Jacob Dierickx, who amassed a tidy sum in the manufacture of wampum, only to be outdone by his Anglicized descendants, in particular Peter Dyer and his foresight in repurposing a rope factory into the Union army’s biggest supplier of fabric. It was odd to think of Andrew and Richard having teenage boys in common.

With the boys gone, Andrew seemed to instantly flag, like a man who had just missed his flight and whatever the pleasant destination had been lost. He turned to Richard and Jamie and told them that they needed to talk “sooner than later,” he said, “like now.”

“Sure,” Richard said. “How about we all go and sit in the living room?”

“No, no, just you and me and Jamie, just the three of us in my study.”

Richard smiled toward Candy and Chloe. “But Dad …”

“That’s all right, you go and talk,” Candy said.

Chloe looked toward the kitchen. “Can I have coffee too?”

“It won’t be for long,” Andrew promised. “I’ll make it short. Or I’ll try to make it short. And then we can all catch up. But right now it’s important that I speak to these two alone. Philip, maybe you can entertain the womenfolk. I know Gerd has plenty of food. Andy can show Emmett Central Park. Walk around. Do whatever. We’ll be finished soon enough. But we need to talk, right now, just the three of us.”
Andrew’s tone suggested an offense, decades old, that was in need of airing. Why do we always expect our fathers to yell? Without further
debate Andrew started to shuffle back toward his study,
shh, shh, shh
, his left hand balancing along the wall, while Richard and Jamie lowered their heads and followed along, like the plow behind the oxen churning up a stretch of long-neglected earth.

“I can’t stay long,” I called to them.

I’m not sure they heard me. But it was true, I did have things to do. Evidence to obtain. Later that day in my father’s apartment I would liberate from his desk the box of Weejuns from Bass. Done with sharing, I would tuck this small treasure chest under my arm and would hustle to leave, my stepmother, two parts polite, one part nosy, stopping me near the front door, mindful of belongings being whisked from her possession. She would ask me what I had there,
pointing to the shoe box, and I would tell her that they were for Rufus, his first pair of grown-up shoes.

“It begins,” she’d say, trying to smile.

“It begins,” I would tell her.

The door to the study closed.

The secret to being a good thief is being as obvious as possible.

I
MAGINE A VORTEX
, slow-turning but gaining steam, drawn together by lungs: Richard and Jamie sitting on the couch, breathing in the mildew of wet battling dry, while their father sighed near the window with more pose than purpose, rocking as if the expanse of Central Park were his Wailing Wall, the sons keeping silent behind him, waiting for him to say something, to give center to this respiring tension but also glancing around the room, always a mystery growing up, other fathers leaving in the morning for midtown or downtown, but their father simply walked down the hall and shut that always forbidding door, usually only working at night, which added to the mystery, as if this were his secret lair, his Batcave, his Fortress of Solitude, where he tried saving a world he himself created, Richard and Jamie sometimes setting their alarms for past midnight so they could sneak downstairs and kneel by the door and hear the
booms!
and the
pows!
and the
splats!
of the typewriter and envision the battles within, surely more than words put on paper, surely something epic at hand, though the truth was that their father could only relax in the early-morning wilderness, comfortably alone and industrious, unlike the daylight hours where real people had real jobs and he suffered through hateful meaninglessness—
I am nothing
—the definition of himself growing wobblier by the instant
—you are nobody
—the people on the street living a life he could only imagine, both alien and common, reaching all the way back to when he was a boy peering from the window in his bedroom and layering upon himself specific detail after specific detail—wearing one red sock, one blue sock, earmuffs, a baseball mitt for a hat, reciting “You Are Old, Father William”—until he was
certain, or fairly certain, that he had reached a level of absolute distinction and he could unwind himself from the burden of everybody else, the same sort of freedom he found when sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, never suspecting his sons sometimes listened by the door, their entry forbidden without a knock and a very good reason, though eleven-year-old Richard once slipped in while his parents were eating dinner and he hid behind those emerald curtains—the velvet now moldy green—determined to catch his father in action, Jamie given the task of engineering a bad dream and rushing downstairs to pound on the door, thus allowing Richard’s escape, and all evening long Jamie practiced his nightmare about quicksand and sinking into a belowground world, hoping he might impress with his imagination, but when the time came Jamie slept through the alarm—or so he claimed and would still claim sitting with his brother and waiting for his father to finally speak, but really Jamie wanted Richard to stew behind that curtain, already interested in his own passive effect, a shady witness at nine, and the well-thought-out plan turned into a boy trying his best to remain still to the point where even now Richard thought he could detect a tremor in the curtain as his father stood a few inches from that past and stared at the crushing blueness of the everyday world, broken only by clouds approaching from the west like a posse kicking up dust, Jamie and Richard and Andrew, the three of them trying to brace themselves against whatever might come next.