The Lost Father (34 page)

“Got to get dressed,” she breathed. “What are you gonna be?”

I’d let the backpack slide down off my shoulder.

“Huh?”

“What’re you going to
be
tonight?”

Then I remembered. Of course. Merl had written me. I was supposed to bring a costume. This was a dress-up party.

“Um, surprise,” I said.

“Yes, would you please check?” she was saying louder on the phone. “I’ll wait.”

“Emily, what are you going to be?”

“Angel,” she said, then looked back down to the phone, where apparently some voice in California had returned to help her get the one more thing she momentarily wanted absolutely. “Yes, could I please speak to the manager.”

T
HE WHOLE HOUSE
had been done once by a decorator in 1963 and it was still that way. The dining room was cabana style with wide black and white stripes and the living room was a kind of fancy I couldn’t identify. The windows all had floor-length drapes coming out from behind valances with scalloped edges. What was I going to be, I wondered, walking through the house. A fire shifted and broke in the fireplace and candles in silver and glass containers burned. No one was in the room. On tables at the ends of couches slipcovered with pictures of dogs hunting in cattail marshes were cut-glass bowls of miniature apples. Coming to this house, all I’d thought of was the box. I’d drawn it in margins of patient charts, then erasing again. It looked like this: a plain brown cardboard box, corrugated, the kind one uses moving. Just that there was, somewhere, a box with attempts like mine.

I’d always been so certain I was the only one in the world looking for him.

I passed the den and saw Pat Briggs at the far end crouched by the fireplace, moving logs. He was wearing a football player’s outfit he was too thin for.

I found Dorothy in the kitchen, with about twenty colored tin trays of food. She snorted. “Here, try.” She handed me a tiny Italian tomato half with something white on it and a snipping of basil, pressing it between her blunt fingers as if it was hard to keep a hold of something so tiny. Merl had always loved miniatures. When Emily was a child, Merl collected dollhouse furniture, and now the house was full of bonsai and miniature fruit.

Dorothy stood by the sink with a stream of water running. She spread a net of tiny grapes open between her fingers, delicately, as if she were opening a part of the body.

I hugged her and closed my eyes against her back. She smelled faintly of sugar.

“I better clean up and get my stuff upstairs.” I took two bunches of island bananas, each no bigger than fingers, from my backpack. “I brought these for Merl.” I wasn’t big on presents but I’d hoped she hadn’t discovered these yet. I’d never seen them in the Midwest. One bunch was red, one yellow.

“Oh, that she will like.”

The room I was staying in was shoe box-shaped with one high window, which I closed. I opened my pack on the bed and took out the dress. It was wrinkled. I set the shower running and hung it up to steam. Then I lay down on the bed.

I was staring at the pinwheeling patch of uneven paint on the ceiling thinking that I’d been a tomboy and now it was getting late. I hadn’t learned the other yet. My time with my mother was remote and wasted, we had loved things, and people, but it was only ours. Like Emily’s life, you could tell about it. Here in the house, there were framed pictures all over the walls. They slanted on crooked nails in the hallways, they hung everywhere, on little draped tables they were propped in silver frames. At what age she did what. Guys who fell in love with her would want to see them. I could imagine Tad in a wool vest, picking up the picture of her bald in a lace dress on a horse. He would look at her lips and perfect head, wondering what it meant, her blank, clear expression. It meant nothing, I mouthed to no one, absolutely nothing. She had always had costume parties and she was always something like a princess or a fairy or a mermaid. When she was eight they’d had a dress-up party in Briggs’s. They’d closed up, let the little girls rampage and then had them photographed in the store windows like mannequins. I’d been there. I was a pirate, with scarves tied on my pantlegs. There’s one great picture of Mai linn and Emily and me in the window, the year Emily was bald, our limbs posed jerkily as if we were really made of materials.

But my years with my mother weren’t like that. The two of us standing like bowling pins different places on a blacktop gas station lot, hands on hips, looking at the sky. My T-shirt sleeves rolled up on my arms, my nails bitten, my arms strong and a man’s hands. I learned how to self-serve and fill it up. My mother didn’t want to gas up her clothes. “I hate the smell,” she’d said. “Pyew. I can’t stand it. It makes me dizzy.” She lifted her groomed hands to her nose and sniffed.

I was never so faint.

T
HE DOORBELL CHIMED
and I heard footsteps. I thought of the box again. I had to say something right away tonight, I decided. I pushed my shoes off. The bed felt good, the little chenille bumps. I didn’t want to go down yet. The sky was pretty with gray clouds from the
small window up here, divided by a near black bare branch, ticking against the glass.

I came here my first Christmas in the East and that was my first time away from Bud Edison. I discovered then that you really fall in love with people during the time they’re not there. You do it all by yourself.

We’d strategized at the supper table. Emily and I decided the coolest thing was to send him a postcard with nothing on the back but just my name. I sent him one with a picture of the paper-mill works. He’d hated it but not really. It made an impression for so long I felt guilty it wasn’t really my idea.

It wasn’t the same with Jordan. But I remembered little things I liked. One time in bed when I was on my back and he verged up like a sail.

I opened the bathroom door to check on the dress. Steam ghosted in, filming the window. Then Pat Briggs was at my door in a new costume. He was wearing some kind of muslin gown and sandals.

“What’s going on in here?”

“I’m unwrinkling a dress.” I peeled off my sweatshirt in the bathroom and pulled the dress on. It felt clammy, especially where it touched the back of my neck.

“Ever heard of hired help?”

“I thought you were going to say an iron.”

“I have your Christmas present from your mother. She sent it here, care of the store.”

“Oh.” I sat on the bed and held my hands together. I began to see him more as the steam thinned.

“How is she?” He looked at me from an angle, keen.

I shrugged. “The same.”

“I don’t expect any of us really change.” He wrung his hands. “But that’s a hard life out there. Hard place.”

I opened the high window and we heard a rise of laughter. People were walking down the drive. We heard the gravel move, women wobbling on high heels, grabbing their escorts’ elbows, saying whew. My mother would have loved these parties. All my life, I’d been invited and she hadn’t. In California, too. We’d sat on the bed of the small hotel when we first moved there and she’d said, “See, it’s easier for you to get in with the kids ’cause you’re young and you have school.” I’d nodded. It was true. It was easier for me.

“What are you supposed to be?” I said.

“Jesus.” He shrugged. “Merl made it up. I just have to put on something she got for around my neck. She couldn’t decide between that and Bart Starr.”

“You want me to lipstick on some stigmata?”

“Here, open it,” he said, shoving the box closer to me. “She sent us something too. Some peanut brittle. Was pretty good. We managed to finish it.”

The ribbon was a satin tartan plaid. I didn’t really like doing this in front of him, opening my mother’s present. It was a private thing. And I knew to him whatever it would be was small. Christmas was a big production for her. The paper was a ribbed pale brown. A piece of mistletoe was tied in with the bow. She’d always taken a real pride in wrappings.

I held the contents, a jar of something, up to the light. “Jam,” I said. I opened the little card. “This is currant jam I made myself,” it read. “I’m still making you the bigger present, but it’s not finished yet. I did another inch of sky today on it!”

I kept the bow intact and smoothed the paper out, refolding it.

P
AT
B
RIGGS LOOKED
at my dress. “You want to hit my closet, kid?”

That was almost a joke. So many times my mother had brought me to a party without a costume and the Briggses had let me rifle through Pat’s stuff. So I always ended up a man.

Pat Briggs had three closets, three stages of new. I found a tuxedo and began opening his drawers looking for socks. I stuffed toilet paper in the tips of Pat Briggs’s shoes. I went into the bathroom, slicked back my hair.

“Very convincing,” Pat said when I walked out.

He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a stapler. “Give me your arms.”

“Won’t it ruin it?”

“Don’t worry. It’s on the way to Goodwill.”

He stapled my cuffs together, put on his rosary and he stood in front of the mirror a moment and rubbed his palm over his head, where it would have been hair. That was something he did. He did it fast in a flickering way like he hoped people wouldn’t see it. He had that and his tick.

E
VERY PARTY
at the Briggses’ really centered around Tom Harris, the dog. When guests arrived, they would be led, either by Emily or Merl, one or two at a time, to pay homage. Pat wasn’t any better. He would shrug his shoulders and nod at the procession over to Tom Harris, but he watched too closely to really mind it. Tonight Tom Harris was stationed in a new red plaid-lined basket in front of the fireplace. Merl Briggs had added straw to make it look like a manger. On either side of him were new statues of dog angels. Tom Harris himself was dressed in a handknit red sweater. He was an old dog now, fourteen (in human years), and his eyes were yellowed and immobile. On one side his fur was scratched down to just pinkish skin. I watched Emily haul Homer Hollander, from the bank, and his wife, Eileen, over and make them kneel down as she rolled her face against the dog’s side. You could tell who was courting the Briggses’ favor. Everyone else got up and away from there as quickly as possible. The dog smelled.

The most ingratiating, and some old indulgent friends of the family, brought little gifts for Tom Harris. A limp raw bone, barbelled, lay with a big green ribbon near his head. Tom Harris seemed disinterested, a being half in the next world.

The black-and-white dining room was filled with Academy nuns. They always stood around the food, because they were shy.

I found Pat in the foyer with an older woman who was famous for having been writing a novel for the last twenty-two years. Estella Clerf. No one had ever read it, but it was supposed to be about a farm in Illinois. It was said to exceed eleven hundred pages at present. She was a woman who stood out at these gatherings, because, although she was married to the owner of the newspaper and they had plenty of money, she was the only woman of her age in the room who didn’t do her hair. It hung the way mine did, just down, and it was dark streaked with a crinkly, silvery white. She had little wire-rimmed glasses and teeth the size of corn kernels. Her voice was tiny like a little girl’s. I’d always liked her. She was part of the book group Marion Werth led the first Monday of every month. One year they’d read
War and Peace
, the next year it was the Greeks, the year after that Proust and
Menus from the White House
. They’d made the dinners, at a different house every month.

She was asking Pat Briggs why the fifth floor of Briggs’s showed furs.

“People want ’em.” He shrugged.

The woman said it wasn’t true that shearling coats didn’t really hurt the sheep.

“Ann here’s grandparents were mink people,” Mr. Briggs said, winking at me.

“I know that,” she said. “I know Ann.”

Pat Briggs turned to a couple who had just walked in and stood, pulling off their gloves, finger by finger.

Merl joined us and began to talk about the book she and Emily were writing about Tom Harris. They had been talking about this for years. They were compiling an anthology of recollections of his exploits and Emily was going to do illustrations. They were asking all their friends to contribute. Merl brought this up because she was talking to the woman writer.