Heft (30 page)

I wanted to tell her this. Instead I said, “There was my father, waiting down at the bottom of the gangplank with hundreds of other onlookers. I recognized him but he looked older.”

He looked at me & then away. He looked at me & then away.

He stood up from where he leaned against the railing.

At ten feet away I said his name.
Arthur.
I could not bring myself to call him Dad.

He looked at me again, & he did not smile.

I was close enough now for him to shake my hand, but he didn’t. He reached out and put one hand on my shoulder.

“My goodness,” he said.

•

“What was your father like? When you saw him again?” asked Yolanda.

“He was the same but different. We drove together from Southampton, where the ship had come in, to London. He was quiet, you know.”

He had an Aston Martin. I could not fit in it well. It was a two-hour drive to London, & we stopped once along the way for lunch. He sat across from me & ordered a prawn cocktail. Then he ordered steak and chips & I ordered the same.

“You look like Anna,” he said. “Almost exactly like Anna.”

My mother had always told me I looked like him, but I did not say that, I could not imagine saying that. Instead I said, “People used to tell us that.”

“I was so sorry to hear about her death,” said my father.

“She’s better off,” I said, which was & was not true.

“What are you going to do with yourself now?” asked my father.

“I’m not quite sure,” I said. “College. I don’t know.”

“Have you applied already? Have you gotten in?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where?”

I had applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, Amherst, and, as a backup, New York University. Of these, I had been admitted to Amherst and New York University.

“Amherst College,” I told my father.

“Amherst,” he said, looking off into the distance. “That’s in Maine?”

“Massachusetts,” I said.

“It’s very good?”

“It’s very good,” I said.

“Excellent,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I did not eat much of my lunch. I was starving but embarrassed. We were quiet for most of the rest of the trip.

“Would you like to take a detour through Maidenhead on the way into London?” he asked. “It’s a bit out of the way, but.”

“OK,” I said.

I vaguely remembered parts of it from a visit in my early childhood. I had gone with my parents to visit my Granny Conan. He pointed out to me the places that would have been important to my mother: her childhood home, Granny Conan’s home; a park she loved; his house, his favorite store, which still existed. The church they both went to with their parents.

I didn’t say anything, but I happened to know that it was at this church that they had met. At a dance. I had heard the story over & over again from my mother. My father had been the most handsome boy in the room. Her friend Lorraine had pointed him out to her specially. My mother hadn’t thought he could possibly notice her. But then he did, he did. He came walking over. He was wearing a beautiful suit. He had asked her to dance. Not her friend Lorraine, who was considered a beauty, & who had been sitting right next to her. Not Lorraine. My mother.

“There’s my school,” said my father. I could only see a glimpse of it from the road. The sign in front of it said St Piran’s, which was a name I knew from the tales my mother had told me about my father’s life. “I spent a number of terrible years there.”

“Did my mother?” I asked—for I realized suddenly that for all the time my mother spent describing my father’s childhood, she had never told me much about her own education. Or else I had forgotten. Already I was beginning to forget.

“Heavens, no,” said my father. “It was for boys then.”

When we got to London everything changed. The women were dressed in what looked like costumes to me bubbly dresses or striped tight pants. The men as well—brightly colored suits and ruffled shirts and polished boots. We pulled into a parking lot below a very fancy stone-sided building with turrets and gables and crenellations. He jumped out without parking his car and wordlessly handed the keys to a boy about my age. I had a harder time getting out & it took me a moment to regain feeling in my legs. They had been mildly asleep for half an hour. I got my suitcase out of the trunk and held it awkwardly. Behind us, the boy parked the car like an expert. I couldn’t drive. I still can’t.

“This way,” said my father.

The lobby of his building was polished. Every surface looked as if it had been rubbed with a soft cloth until it gleamed. There were fancy women walking back and forth in fancy ridiculous hats. Their boots clacked across the floor. There were little dogs in little handbags.

When we took the elevator up I think my father was nervous about being in it with someone my size. An Indian elevator man said, “Good afternoon, Mr Opp.” But my father said nothing about who I was.

His apartment was the penthouse. The elevator opened directly into it. It was large & spectacular & modern, & I was very surprised. I had thought—it was an integral part of my ideas about my father—that he preferred old things, that his taste ran toward antiques & dark wood & brass. This was what our house was like in Brooklyn. Our brownstone that he had chosen especially for us, his family. My house was my father’s house, always—my mother always told me how much he loved our house.

But this apartment was open & airy, with a wall of windows that looked out on the city. Modern art covered the walls. A plush zebra-striped carpet covered a large part of the floor. There was a giant vase with tall white branches coming out of it like crooked fingers.

“Here we are,” said my father. “Let me take your luggage.” He took it before I could say anything, & it was only then that he finally looked at it.

“I recognize this,” he said. But it was too late.

I was alone. I shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. My pants cut into my belly. My shoulders strained against my silly turtleneck sweater.

I heard tiny footsteps walking down the hallway to my left, & when I turned around to look there was a little boy, five or six years old, red-haired & tiny & knobby-kneed. He was wearing short pants like the ones my mother had put me into on my first day of school.

My heart dropped.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“William,” he said.

“I’m Arthur,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

He sidled toward me. He was very serious. He had his hands in his pockets.

“Where’s all your things?” he asked me.

“My father has them,” I said. & realized then what I should have said. I felt huge. I felt I was an imbecile.

He looked at me.

“You’re from New York,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. His accent. Before I got to school and had it beaten out of me, I used to have an accent like his. When I was a very small boy and spoke mainly to my mother and father.

“Daddy used to live there,” he said.

“Yes, he did,” I said.

My father’s girlfriend’s name was Alexandra. She had red hair like her son. It came down to her waist. She was younger than my father, but not by all that much. She was very beautiful and very kind. She scooped William up when she found him talking to me and turned him upside down like it was nothing.

“Oh
Arthur
,” she said. “We are
so glad you’re here
.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she smiled in such a way that it looked like she was frowning.

My father came back into the room and said “Ah, well, you’ve all met each other.”

We went to dinner that night at a very fancy restaurant where they all knew the chef. I sat across from them, my father and Alexandra, and William sat next to me, except when he was up & running about the restaurant. Alexandra asked me lots of questions about New York and said she had a number of connections there, & that the next time she visited she would be sure to look me up & we’d have tea. I’ll be at college in Massachusetts, I thought, but I said nothing. She asked me if I’d been to several restaurants in Manhattan that I had never heard of. It meant to me that my father had been in my city without calling me. The chef came out after the meal and knuckled the head of young William, who grabbed his wrist and clung to it & tried to hang off it. Alexandra swatted her son playfully. “Monsieur Molineux,” said Alexandra to the chef, “
C’était tres bon. Trop bon
.”

My father worked all the next week. I saw London. I stayed out of the house for as long as I could. When I had visited every museum & every neighborhood that I wanted to see, I sat on benches in Hyde Park & wrote in my diary. I was sad. I missed my mother. William, by this point, had figured out that we were brothers, of a sort, & referred to me constantly as such. The differences between us made me very embarrassed. I wished I could be more natural around him. But I didn’t know how to be.

Once, Alexandra told me that it must have been difficult growing up the way I had, and that she understood because she’d had a mother like mine. “Still,” she said. “What a terrible loss. I’m so sorry.”

It wasn’t Alexandra’s fault that she said those things. I still don’t think it was her fault. My father had probably lied to her.

On Friday evening he sat down across from me—I had been lying on a sofa, thinking nobody was home, and when he entered the room I sprang to my feet—and asked me, “Arthur, have you given any thought to when you’d like to leave?”

I hadn’t. I was not sure what to say.

“I suppose you have plans for the summer?”

I did not. I made something up. A job that I did not have.

“Here’s the rub,” said my father. “The three of us are going to the shore next week to visit Alexandra’s parents. I’d invite you, but I thought that.”

He did not finish.

“Anyway I’ve bought you a return ticket,” said my father. “Different ship. You can exchange it if you like,” he said. “I don’t mean to rush you. Stay as long as you like. Use the flat while we’re gone.”

I decided that I wouldn’t.

On the day I was to leave, my father asked if I would mind terribly if he sent me to Southampton on the bus—he had a work obligation that he simply could not escape. Alexandra said, “You must come back and visit us anytime you like. William will be so sad if you don’t.”

“He had a family over there,” I said to Yolanda. “A different family.”

“Oh
no,
” said Yolanda.

“Yes, he did.”

“What about your mom?”

“He wasn’t married to the woman over there. They just had a son together.”

“You got a brother, then,” said Yolanda. “You told me you didn’t.”

“I suppose I do,” I said.

“What’s his name?” said Yolanda.

“William,” I said.

“You don’t talk to him?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t talk to any of them.”

I never saw them again in my life. I know that my father married Alexandra after my mother’s death, for in his biography it says so. I do not know what William is doing. I know that my father is still alive, for I get Christmas and birthday cards from him—this tradition began upon my departure from London & has not ceased—along with the money that he puts into the fund he established for me as a boy. But I know nothing else about him beyond what I read in the papers. The three of them exist in my mind as a hallucination or a mirage. That week exists in my mind as the week I lived somebody else’s life. Not mine. Certainly not mine.

I told the girl none of this. I said, “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” said Yolanda.

She paused. “How long you been inside here?”

“Here inside this house?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten years.”

“Till now,” she said.

“Why now?” I asked her.

“Because we went for a walk!” she said triumphantly. “We went outside.”

“You’re right,” I told her.

She went to bed not long after that. She put her sweatshirt’s hood up again. Ascending the stairs, she looked like a gnome, or like somebody’s good-luck charm.

• • •

I
talked to Lindsay’s dad. He got home before Lindsay’s mother.
Lindsay and I were sitting in the living room. Lindsay said, Dad. We need your help.

He sat down across from me on his couch. I was in an easy chair. I hadn’t seen him since the Thanksgiving football game, and I don’t believe I had ever looked him in his face before. It was a nice face. It looked like Lindsay’s. Open. I told him everything I could tell him. I see, he said, over and over again.

He said, This must have been very hard for you.

I can see why he is a good superintendent and probably a good father.

I could see him thinking about his son. I do not know his son’s name. Lindsay’s brother’s name. I felt bad for her. She was looking at the wall next to my head, and it was very clear that she was remembering him. It occurred to me that it was wrong of me never to ask her his name and never to tell her to put her head on my shoulder and cry.

Mrs. Harper came home later with Lindsay’s two sisters and looked surprised to see me. Do you guys want pizza? she asked, and there was nothing I wanted more, but I told her I had to go. Mr. Harper shook my hand when I left and held it.

Kel, he said. You’re going to be fine. OK? OK? You’re going to be fine.

•

When I walked out I forgot where I had parked my car for a minute. On the street, said Lindsay, from inside the door. When I turned around she was a dark shape in the window. Behind her was her brightly lit house.

I went to Dee’s. I tried to call him on my way but he didn’t answer. So I just went and rang the doorbell. Rhonda answered the door. She had dyed her hair blond and there was a purple streak in it. There was a new gap in her teeth that you could see when she smiled. She’s known me since I was born.

Oh, baby, she said to me. Oh, you poor kid. She put both big arms around me and then put one on the back of my head. It wasn’t awkward, it felt good. She hummed to herself. She was always fucked up when we were kids, always with a different guy. My mother used to say she had a reputation in high school. When I slept over at Dee’s, sometimes we heard her fighting loudly with whatever man she had over. Dee would cover his head with a pillow. I would pretend I was asleep so he would not be embarrassed. I would not tell my mother for fear of her not letting me stay there anymore.