Duet for Three (28 page)

“So if Mother was yelling about something, or you two weren't getting along, or if something happened at school, or I just got pissed off, I'd think about him looking for me and getting closer and then bingo, here he'd be. I'd lie in bed and wait for the knock on the door and imagine going out to the top of the stairs and he'd be standing in the hall down there saying, ‘Give me my daughter, I've come for Frances,' and Mother would say, ‘No, you can't have her.' And I'd speak up and say, ‘Here I am, Father,' and we'd meet on the stairs running toward each other and he'd scoop me up and race out and we'd drive away like fury. We wouldn't even stop to pack my clothes. I think,” and she grinned, “I pictured him with a convertible. We'd go really fast, and there'd be a big wind in my hair. I mean, it was like having another life, kind of an escape.”

“But you never said. All these years, you never mentioned it.”

“Oh well, even when I was a kid I must have known that if he'd wanted to find me, he could have. It wouldn't have been exactly hard. I guess I didn't want to know that, and if I'd said anything, I would have had to see.”

“But you still wanted to find him?”

“Of course. Because he could have found me if he'd wanted to, and I wanted to know why he didn't.” She spoke as if that should be evident to Aggie; and it did seem an obvious enough desire, now that she'd mentioned it.

“Boy, am I dumb!”

“Why?”

“Oh, because by now I should know better. I mean, I made up all this stuff about a reunion, long-lost father-daughter, hugs and tears, all that, and I should know by now that things never turn out the way you imagine.” There was a peculiar hard tone there that spoke of other disappointments, perhaps, that Aggie didn't know of.

“I tell you, Grandma,” and she laughed, “it scared the shit out of him when I called and told him who I was.”

“Why, what did he say?”

“None of the things I'd made up for him, for sure; he just gulped and sputtered and said stuff like, ‘My my, little Frances, who'd have thought, after all these years.' When I said could we get together because I wanted to meet him, he said sure, but I could practically hear him thinking how to handle it. I guess it was partly my fault. I never thought of him having a real life. I only ever thought of him as my father, not somebody who'd have other things going on. I can see why he was upset.” When she paused, Aggie just waited silently.

“Anyway, we arranged to get together in the bar at my hotel, but then he said, ‘But how will I know you?' and that shook me up too. I really am so stupid. Somehow I'd been thinking that of course we'd know each other, that there must be some kind of instinct about things like that. So I laughed and said I'd be wearing a carnation in my lapel, and he didn't get it, he didn't understand I was kidding. So I had to go down to the flower shop and get a damn carnation for my damn lapel.

“But he was right. We could have passed on the street a million times, and I would never have dreamed he was my father.”

“He's not what you pictured, then?”

“You could say that,” Frances said wryly. “You know, when Mother wouldn't talk about him, I thought he must be kind of sinister or decadent or something, and then you used to say he was attractive and sort of charming. So I imagined somebody fairly good-looking, maybe with a moustache, a bit devilish but debonair, you know? Something like David Niven in those movies in the sixties maybe. But here's this old shrimpy, nervous-looking guy saying, ‘Excuse me, would you be Frances Benson?' and it wasn't exactly a moment to stand up and throw my arms around him.”

“But wasn't he glad to see you?”

“Not so's you'd notice. What he was, was nervous. Kept on with that ‘Well well, so you're little Frances' until I couldn't stand it, so I started asking him what was new, what he'd been doing with his life. You know, being the interviewer.”

“And?”

“And he runs his own furniture store, which he talked about for a while, but there's only so much you can say about furniture, so I started asking if he lived alone, or how he lived, and then he really got rattled. Grandma, did you know he and Mother are divorced?”

“Divorced! Of course not. She flat refused.”

“Well they are. Apparently he got one when the laws changed and all you had to do was be separated for a few years. Why on earth didn't she ever say anything?”

Spilled secrets piling up here. Aggie felt a bit short of breath. But “She probably just went to her room for a while. She has a way of licking her wounds in private.”

“Oh, but that's so sad!”

“I don't know. You seem to have managed to keep some things to yourself, too.” If Aggie sounded sharp, she didn't much mind. “Anyway, what else did you find out about him?”

“That he's married again, mainly. To a widow who had kids. He's a grandfather now. He showed me their pictures. His wife's kind of dumpy and blonde, and there are two girls and a boy from her first marriage, and then this one grandson. He's got a little white frame house with lots of flowers and vines. He said he likes gardening when he gets home from work. He's not a bit what I expected from the way you and Mother talked about him. I mean, gardening!”

“He certainly seems to have settled down, at any rate.”

“Maybe,” Frances laughed, “it was the love of a good woman. Or maybe it was the good woman he couldn't stand.”

“Did you ask him why he left?”

“Oh yes, and he was about as helpful as Mother. Said they weren't suited, and it was nobody's fault and he was sure she was a good woman and obviously a good mother, but he'd thought it best to split while they were still young enough to start again.

“So I said, but what about me, I'd been just a little kid, and I could see somebody walking out on a marriage, but not leaving their own kid.” She looked as she might have when she was speaking those words to her father, as if she might cry.

“He just said he was sorry, of course, and he'd missed me and it was all very sad, but he didn't think it was good for a child to grow up in a house where the parents weren't happy.”

“What did you say?”

“I said bullshit, and that made him jump. I told him people just say that sort of thing when they're copping out, and he obviously hadn't wanted to be bothered with me because if he had he would have made some effort to see me in a quarter of a century. Old hypocrite.”

“Still, you know,” Aggie reflected, “he might be right, in a way.”

“Oh, Grandma,” Frances said impatiently, “I'm not saying he should have stayed, just that he was still my father. You don't get divorced from that. He could have written me letters or even come to see me, but I think he almost forgot I was alive. You know, it was weird looking at those pictures of his family. Even if they aren't really his kids, they're his family and I'm not. I was just some dangerous person from the past he had to deal with so I wouldn't bugger up his present.

“I was going to tell him about dreaming about him coming along and rescuing me, and how we were going to live together and I'd look after him, all that stuff. But he wasn't that father at all. He wasn't that real. The real one turned out to be the one I made up. Isn't that strange?”

Less strange than it might have seemed a half-hour ago. And think of June, divorced and never saying.

“I don't even know if his family knows I exist. He certainly didn't invite me to meet them. By the way, he said to say hello to you. He said he always liked you. He said I probably look like you, except —”

“Except for me being big as a barn. He used to tease me about it. Are you going to tell your mother you saw him?”

“Hell no, why upset her? She's had enough trouble without me bringing him up, don't you think?”

This unexpected sympathy with her mother was a late bloom in Frances's life. Too bad it didn't extend to keeping June's secrets. Aggie wondered how Frances had failed to realize that telling was a sort of betrayal.

“Well, now you know, anyway,” Aggie said.

“That I do. Except maybe I should have left well enough alone.”

“But surely not. Surely it's better to know.”

She was startled that Frances turned on her. “Why do you always say things like that? Don't you ever think that maybe it's better not to know? Just sometimes that it's better to have something that's comforting instead of true?”

She sounded strikingly like June. Aggie said sharply, “No, I don't think that. I had enough fancies when I was young to last a lifetime and, I might add, they did me nothing but harm. They get you in the end, Frances, they really do, and it's worse, the longer they go on. They take root, and it's an awful shock when there's no living with them any more.”

Sometimes with Frances it's possible to see her mind taking over, events clicking into place. It's an odd process to watch: involves a lifting of the head, a squaring of the shoulders, a clearing of the eyes, and a kind of hardening around the mouth that has made Aggie wonder on occasion how her appearance will be affected as she gets older.

“Well, my curiosity's satisfied, anyway. And in a funny sort of way, he was a pretty good father, probably better than if he'd actually been around. The one I made up got me through some hard times.”

They heard June's footsteps on the walk. Frances uncoiled herself and stood. “Don't tell Mother, okay?”

“Of course not.”

Aggie thought later how strange it was that she was old, and Herb and June were aging, and even Frances was no longer quite young. That sense of lost time, making her long again for a comforting hand to drop on her shoulder, some familiar arm to wrap itself around her body. Some man's arm, perhaps; not even a lover's, just Barney's would be fine. It might finally be her turn to weep on his shoulder.

But oh Barney — where was he when she needed him? Gone, vanished, out of reach, the bad timing of events, just when they both might have had more than an hour a day to spare. His disappearance was more gradual, however, than an abruptly lost leg or a granddaughter who moved away; not a shock, just a matter of getting accustomed to absence. And sharp moments, frequent in the beginning, of thinking, “Wait till Barney hears this, I wonder what he'll think?”

First, his job was retired from under him, when stores and dairies and other businesses stopped making deliveries. “I guess it's just as well,” he said. “It gets harder and harder, lugging cases of milk around.”

His family's income now would consist of his pension, John's disability pension, and the part-time jobs his young grandchildren were able to pick up. “I guess we'll manage. We'll get along.”

He began to do odd jobs himself around town, partly for the money, but also for something to do. Mowed people's lawns, sometimes shovelled out driveways in winter, weeded gardens, mended eavestroughs, and fixed small appliances like toasters and kettles. “You'd be amazed, some of the things I see,” he told Aggie. “People you'd think, just from the outside of their houses or their kitchens, that they live pretty well, you get right inside and rooms are dirty or musty, or they're crammed up with fifty years of furniture — I was in one old lady's house yesterday and every square inch of her living-room walls was covered with pictures of people. I didn't think I'd ever get away. She wanted to tell me all about everybody in every photograph.”

Sometimes he didn't charge for the work he did. “Well, you figure somebody who has to get a toaster fixed instead of just getting a new one isn't exactly flush. A lot of them are old, like me.”

“You're not old.”

“Sure I am, Aggie. I'm old and I'm starting to creak and some days I can barely get started at all. But you know, those mornings I can't hardly get out of bed, I lie there and figure, well, Aggie's up working by now, I'd better get on my horse too. Some days I think I only get up because I'd be ashamed not to.”

He helped her, too, fixing small things around the house, mowing the lawn. His morning visits, though, weren't quite as early as they used to be when he was delivering for the dairy, and sometimes the shop was already open and she didn't have much time to chat. Then he might only stay a few minutes, just time for a biscuit and a greeting.

What did they talk about? Nothing so much, any more, she supposed. Now it was existence, presence, the connection that counted. They'd gotten, she thought, pretty much down to the roots of the thing.

Of course, whenever Frances had been home for a visit, there was plenty to tell him: stories Frances brought. He'd shake his head and say, “Imagine that. Who'd have thought it,” or “I always thought there was something funny about that fellow. So that's why.”

He talked about his children and grandchildren, particularly John and his struggles. “You should see him get around,” Barney said proudly when John was given one of the new improved plastic legs. “Prosthetic devices, they call them,” he laughed. “Sound like birth control, don't they? But he can swing around like nobody's business, almost as good as he could with his own.” John still couldn't find work; not only was he handicapped, but he was also no longer young himself. And he had no particular skills. “His kids are good,” Barney said, “real hard workers. It's a shame, though, they've had to grow up so fast. They've missed a lot of the fun of just being young.”