The Bill from My Father (29 page)

A blast of heat came at us as I shouldered open the door. The power had been turned off and trapped air simmered within the trailer's walls. We cranked open every window in the empty living room, T-shirts clinging to our sweaty skin. Betty had moved her belongings to her cousin's. Gone was the hutch, the dinette set, the hands lit up in prayer, the sofa she'd slept on while undergoing her transformation from my father's lover back into his nurse.

Brian and I carried boxes to the threshold of my father's office, its floor hidden beneath layers of paper. Important documents and family artifacts would be taken with us so I could comb through them more carefully at a later date. The rest was destined for landfill. Grimy, uneven light from the window mottled the walls and highlighted a small photograph hanging in a Plexiglas frame above the desk. Intrigued, Brian ventured into the room, nearly slipping on loose sheets of paper as smooth as shale. “Have you seen this?” he asked. He stepped aside as I approached, giving me a head-on view of a snapshot neither of us had noticed last time we were here. It showed Dad wearing madras shorts, a thin summer shirt, and a
nautical cap with a black visor. A camera hung from his neck like a pendant. Shot against an arid, glaring background, he'd drawn himself up to full height and squinted into the distance. In his fixity and anticipation, he rivaled the gazers of the ancient world: Ulysses leaning from the prow of his ship, Penelope scanning the sea at dusk. Beside him stood a figure swaddled from head to toe in dazzling white robes. “Must be from his honeymoon in Greece,” I said, and just as I did, I realized that the robed figure beside him wasn't a figure at all, but a figure's absence. Anna had been scissored out of the scene. Given the tremor in his hands, he'd excised his second wife with surprising precision, leaving only a telltale sliver of her dark arm. It was as if he'd gone on their honeymoon alone.

I asked Brian why he thought my father would hang the photo right out in the open where Betty could see it. “He's warning her to watch her step. She could be snipped from a picture, too.”

“Bingo, I think.” I threw my arm over his shoulder and thanked him for never making me feel expendable.

“I promise to love you uncategorically,” he said, “as long as you agree to a few conditions …”

I braced myself, waited.

“That was a joke.”

“Oh.”

We opened the window and basked in a meager breeze. We decided that the best way to proceed would be to start at the far end of the room and work our way toward the door. We each cleared a place for ourselves on the floor, then sat there and procrastinated. It was one thing to look down at the paperwork a man has accumulated over the course of his life, and quite another to sit within it, surrounded on all sides by records of what he'd earned and owed, accountings come to nothing and close enough to touch.

There was no way to begin other than to reach out and grab the nearest file. A quick scan of the contents told us whether it should be placed in the save or toss pile—two piles virtually indistinguishable from the other piles rising all around us.

“I don't trust the whole idea of
closure
,” I told Brian. “TV and radio shrinks say you can get over grief by following specific steps. One, two, three, and the sadness is over.”

“Dividing a complicated process into simple steps is comforting to people. They're less overwhelmed. It gives them a sense of control.” He held up a faded takeout menu. “Toss or save?”

“Toss.”

“How constructive would it be,” he continued, “if I told a grieving client that no matter what steps he takes, he'll miss the other person for the rest of his life.”

“What
do
you tell a grieving client?”

“I tell them there's no timetable.”

“So you don't believe in closure?”

He glanced around the room. “I believe in cleanup.”

The task was disheartening for Brian as well as for me. The previous year, his own father died of heart failure in the family's Wing-ham, Ontario, home.

“Do you think about your father?” I asked.

“Every day.”

“Do you feel like he'll always be with you?”

“I feel like he'll always be dead. That's why I miss him.”

Before long, we began comparing documents plucked from the rubble. Most pertained to what had become the animating force of my father's old age. File after file had been gathered toward a single, obsessive end: ten years separated Gary's death from Ron's, but weeks after each of them died, my father brought lawsuits against their respective wives. The suits demanded that Sharleen and Nancy repay him “any and all monies” my brothers had borrowed since becoming his partners at the Spring Street office. Every check of his they'd cashed, he contended, had been a loan. Canceled checks were strewn throughout the room. Along with funds to help them with an occasional house or car payment, I found canceled checks ranging from $25 to $50 and dated on my brothers' birthdays and wedding anniversaries. These too, he'd insisted, were loans.

Sharleen and Nancy had been more than ready to cut their losses and settle out of court; the sooner they were free of a litigious father-in-law, the better. Their eagerness to reimburse him was an insult he didn't take lightly. How dare they offer to meet his demands! He then informed them that he'd been charging 10 percent interest on the loans (a rate my brothers would never have agreed to). Since several checks had been cashed ten or twenty years earlier, the interest was often disproportionately greater than the loan. He refused Sharleen and Nancy's offer to make monthly payments. Only one crushing sum was acceptable, a reparation that would leave them broke.

The basis of these suits may have been ludicrous, yet he'd retained contacts at the Hall of Justice, and by juggling bits of evidence and wording depositions just so, he managed to take both Sharleen and Nancy to court on seven separate occasions. With dismissals, continuances, and a host of postponements, he averaged about one hearing per year. Filing an eighth suit would have constituted “malicious prosecution,” entitling his daughters-in-law to countersue, and so he seethed within the legal limit. He knew, of course, that once Sharleen and Nancy repaid him in full, they'd sever all connections. He sued to prolong their obligation rather than to settle his claim. He held them in a monetary thrall. As long as he engaged with them, he engaged with Ron and Gary.

I knew that asking him to drop the suits might touch him off, but I went ahead anyway. “Look,” I said one night at the Brass Pan, “about the suits; do you really need the aggravation?” I hadn't planned to say it this way, but once I had, it seemed a fortuitous choice of words because
Who needs the aggravation?
was the phrase he used when enough was enough, and it let him know I was worried about him. Which was true in the overarching sense that I was also worried about my sisters-in-law, and even worried about my brothers, who were beyond worry, though I did my best to fret on their behalves.

“Don't lecture me,” he warned, shifting his weight in the red leather booth.

“I just meant to—”

“Lecture me, is what you meant to do.”

He knew that I'd maintained contact with both Nancy and Sharleen since my brothers' deaths, and by further campaigning for clemency, I'd be seen as a traitor, a double agent working for their side, which might lead him to disown me yet again. But estrangement was also possible if I did nothing; every time he mentioned the lawsuits, I felt sorry for my sisters-in-law, and my fondness for him was compromised.

“Well then,” I said, clearing my throat, “I think it would be best if I didn't discuss the legal proceedings with anyone involved. Just to be, you know, impartial.”

Dad shrugged at my apparent refusal to take sides. “Fine,” he said. “If that's what you want.” If he felt betrayed, he didn't show it. Perhaps he needed a break from the demands of antagonism. His reaction had also been softened by the vodka tonic I'd urged him to order, and into which the bartender, recognizing Dad as a regular, poured a payload of ninety-proof.

Still, I couldn't ignore the very real—or rather, the very unreal—possibility that if my father could sue Ron and Gary's wives, he might decide to go after Brian. By then, Brian and I had lived together for seven years, and I wondered if the legalities of common-law marriage applied to us automatically, even though the legalities
of marriage were automatically denied. The palimony suits filed against Rock Hudson and Liberace by their …
pals
had redefined traditional divorce. If palimony made it easier for common-law couples to sue each other, did it also make it easier for a common-law in-law to sue his child's common-law spouse?

During a recent bout of insomnia, I'd thought I'd found an effective way to protect Brian from a possible lawsuit. I'd leapt out of bed, run downstairs to my study, and torn a sheet of paper from one of the yellow legal tablets on which I wrote first drafts. I chose a fountain pen (more formal than a ballpoint) and set out to create a “legal instrument” attesting to the fact that neither Brian nor I had ever borrowed money from my father, and in the event of my death, Brian should not be held responsible if my father filed suit. Until I had the time and money to hire an attorney and draw up a proper will, this document would have to do. I'd read somewhere that leaving a person one dollar makes it impossible for them to contest a will, since they haven't technically been omitted. To my father I bequeathed a buck. On the scale of fiscal insults, a dollar is admittedly harsh. It's like leaving one's parent a lousy tip, though tipping one's parent is an insult in itself. Stinting my father may sound like a way for me to get back at him for sending me a bill for my upbringing (in which case it would have done quite nicely and cost me almost nothing), but sparing Brian was foremost in my mind; I couldn't die in peace if I thought he'd have to face a costly, protracted legal battle once I was gone. And so I took the necessary step. Dad wouldn't know a thing about it unless he tried to sue my spouse. I recorded the date, drew dotted lines for our signatures, and, recalling Bob's license to carry a gun, added my thumbprint should the document's authenticity ever need to be verified.

The following morning, thinking how pleased he was going to be, I handed Brian the sheet of paper. He looked it over. And over. He registered no expression whatsoever. He said, “If it makes you feel better, I guess there's no harm in signing it.” His forbearance hit me like a brick. In the disillusioning light of day, my affidavit looked about as legitimate as play money. No, not even as legitimate as play
money, which is at least printed by a toy company. Mine was homemade and therefore
counterfeit
play money.

I unbit my lip and asked, “Was this a totally insane thing for me to do?”

“No,” he'd said. “Not
totally
.”

The two of us continued to make our way across the paper landscape. Several bloated garbage bags filled the empty living room, while the boxes and the suitcase contained scarcely anything worth keeping. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight, and we raced against the arrival of night. Every time we glanced out the window, afternoon edged closer to dusk. The sun's reds and oranges were magnified by currents of air blowing inland from the Pacific. Windblown grit pattered steadily against the trailer, a sound like faint, abrasive static. Even as the temperature dropped, the office walls radiated the day's heat, making the topmost layer of paper warm to the touch. Our judgment declined along with the light; what was important and what was not were harder and harder to tell apart.

Page after page made reference, in capital letters, to
RICHARD COOPER
and
RONALD COOPER
. I wasn't sure whether this was a legal formality or, like Dr. Rawlings's uppercase
H
, a stylistic quirk. I must have been bleary from examining so much stuff, because my brothers' names took on a third dimension, a life of their own. At times they bobbed to the surface of the text. At others they hovered above it. I can't remember whether Sharleen and Nancy were mentioned in caps. I recall only that my brothers' names were of another order, greater than the sum of their syllables.
RICHARD
and
RONALD
recurred like a chant, an incantation. From where I sat, I could see my father's IBM Selectric dwarfing the desk. The electricity didn't need to work for me to remember the typewriter's rumble when it was switched on, how the print ball leapt up and smacked the platen, every letter leaving its sting. The metal casing—thick enough to withstand a hammer—vibrated with such force that the whole machine would blur with motion and threaten to shimmy across the desk. To
lay your fingers upon the keyboard was to savor earthquakes, speeding trains. When my father sat down to prepare his greatest case—
If it please the court, I ask that history be retracted, that spent money flow back to its source
—power must have coursed through his fingers. His first son's death had been death enough. He refused to let the next deaths take hold. He replaced grief with a full-time vendetta. Shapeless rage was divided into files. For incalculable loss, a quantity of dollars. Instead of silence, nights of typing. Necromancer, demigod, my father hit the shift key and conjured sons from nothing.

A few months after we'd cleaned out my father's trailer, I sat at the desk in my downstairs study and browsed several Web sites where, for a nominal fee, the visitor could search for information about his or her ancestry. The idea had been suggested by Lynn and Monica, who'd become so computer-savvy over the years, they referred to themselves as “techno-crones.” The two of them were of the opinion that a person couldn't fully know herself unless she knew her history, which they had formerly called “herstory,” and which I currently called “mystery.” The number of ancestry sites surprised me; out of the initial dozens, Google yielded about eight pertinent hits. One site featured an animated American flag waving in the vacuum of cyberspace. Another droned a listless rendition of the National Anthem. Every site required the user to fill out a questionnaire. With no idea what the family name had been before it was changed, with no idea where in Russia my paternal grandparents had come from, I had scant information with which to conduct a search. I figured the best bet was to start with my father's name and work as far backward as the database allowed. But first, I needed to make a short list of potential sites.