What Was Mine: & Other Stories (20 page)

It was not until a year later, when he looked her up in the phone book (the number was still listed under my father’s name), that he saw her again. That time I went along, and was bought a paper cone filled with french fries. I played cowboy, circling with an imaginary lasso the bench on which they sat. We had stumbled on a carnival. Since it was downtown Washington, it wasn’t really a carnival but a small area of the mall, taken over by dogs who would jump through burning hoops and clowns on roller skates. It became a standing refrain between my mother and Herb that some deliberate merriment had been orchestrated just for them, like the play put on in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

I, of course, had no idea what to make of the world on any given day. My constants were that I lived with my mother, who cried every night; that I could watch only two shows each day on TV; and that I would be put to bed earlier than I wanted, with a nightlight left burning. That day my mother and Herb sat on the bench, I’m sure I sensed that things were going to be different, as I inscribed two people destined to be together in an imaginary lassoed magic circle. From then on, we were a threesome.

He moved in as a boarder. He lived in the room that used to be the dining room, which my mother and I had never used, since we ate off TV trays. I remember his hanging a drapery rod over the arch—nailing the brackets in, then lifting up the bar, pushing onto it the brocade curtain my mother had sewn, then lowering the bar into place. They giggled behind it. Then they slid the curtain back and forth, as if testing to see that it would really work. It was like one of the games I had had as a baby: a board with a piece of wood that slid back and forth, exposing first the sun, then the moon.

Of course, late at night they cheated. He would simply push the curtain aside and go to her bed. Since I would have accepted anything, it’s a wonder they didn’t just tell me. A father, an uncle, a saint, Howdy Doody, Lassie—I didn’t have a very clear idea of how any of them truly behaved. I believed whatever I saw. Looking back, I can only assume that they were afraid not so much of what I would think as of what others might think, and that they were unwilling to draw me into their deception. Until I wandered into her bedroom, they simply were not going to blow their cover. They were just going to wait for me. Eventually, I was sure to stumble into their world.

“The secret about Uncle Herb doesn’t go any farther than this house,” my mother said that night after I found them together. She was quite ashen. We stood in the kitchen. I had followed her—not because I loved her so much, or because I trusted her, but because I was already sure of Herb. Sure because even if he had winked at me, he could not have been clearer about the silliness of the slammed door. She had on a beige nightgown and was backlit by the counter light. She cast a pondlike shadow on the floor. I would like to say that I asked her why she had lied to me, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have dared. Imagine my surprise when she told me anyway: “You don’t know what it’s like to lose something forever,” she said. “It will make you do anything—even lie to people you love—if you think you can reclaim even a fraction of that thing. You don’t know what
fraction
means. It means a little bit. It means a thing that’s been broken into pieces.”

I knew she was talking about loss. All week, I had been worried that the bird at school, with its broken wing, might never fly again and would hop forever in the cardboard box. What my mother was thinking of, though, was that can of paint—a can of paint that she wished had missed my father’s head and sailed into infinity.

We looked down at the sepia shadow. It was there in front of her, and in front of me. Of course it was behind us, too.

Many years later, the day Herb took me out for “a talk,” we drove aimlessly for quite a while. I could almost feel Herb’s moment of inspiration when it finally came, and he went around a traffic circle and headed down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays the Merry Mariner was open only for dinner, but he had a key, so we parked and went inside and turned on a light. It was not one of those lights that glowed when he played, but a strong, fluorescent light. Herb went to the bar and poured himself a drink. He opened a can of Coke and handed it to me. Then he told me that he was leaving us. He said that he himself found it unbelievable. Then, suddenly, he began to urge me to listen to Billie Holiday’s original recordings, to pay close attention to the paintings of Vermeer, to look around me and to listen. To believe that what to some people might seem the silliest sort of place might be, to those truly observant, a temporary substitute for heaven.

I was a teenager, and I was too embarrassed to cry. I sat on a bar stool and simply looked at him. That day, neither of us knew how my life would turn out. Possibly he thought that so many unhappy moments would have damaged me forever. For all either of us knew, he had been the father figure to a potential hoodlum, or even to a drifter—that was what the game of pretense he and my mother had been involved in might have produced. He shook his head sadly when he poured another drink. Later, I found out that my mother had asked him to go, but that day I didn’t even think to ask why I was being abandoned.

Before we left the restaurant he told me—as he had the night I found him naked in my mother’s room—how much he cared for me. He also gave me practical advice about how to assemble a world.

He had been the one who suggested that the owner string netting on the walls. First he and the owner had painted the ocean: pale blue, more shine than paint at the bottom, everything larger than it appeared on land. Then gradually the color of the paint changed, rays of light streamed in, and things took on a truer size. Herb had added, on one of the walls, phosphorescence. He had touched the paintbrush to the wall delicately, repeatedly, meticulously. He was a very good amateur painter. Those who sat below it would never see it, though. Those who sat adjacent to it might see the glow in their peripheral vision. From across the room, where my mother and I sat, the highlights were too delicate, and too far away to see. The phosphorescence had never caught my eye when my thoughts drifted from the piano music, or when I blinked my eyes to clear them of the smoke.

The starfish had been bought in lots of a dozen from a store in Chinatown. The clamshells had been painted by a woman who lived in Arlington, in the suburbs, who had once strung them together as necklaces for church bazaars, until the demand dried up and macramé was all the rage. Then she sold them to the owner of the restaurant, who carried them away from her yard sale in two aluminum buckets years before he ever imagined he would open a restaurant. Before Herb and I left the Merry Mariner that day, there wasn’t anything about how the place had been assembled that I didn’t know.

Fifteen years after that I drove with my fiancée to Herb’s cousin’s house to get some things he left with her for safekeeping in case anything happened to him. His cousin was a short, unattractive woman who lifted weights. She had converted what had been her dining room into a training room, complete with Nautilus, rowing machine, and barbells. She lived alone, so there was no one to slide a curtain back for. There was no child, so she was not obliged to play at anything.

She served us iced tea with big slices of lemon. She brought out guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips. She had called me several days before to say that Herb had had a heart attack and died. Though I would not find out formally until some time later, she also told me that Herb had left me money in his will. He also asked that she pass on to me a large manila envelope. She handed it to me, and I was so curious that I opened it immediately, on the back porch of some muscle-bound woman named Frances in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

There was sheet music inside: six Billie Holiday songs that I recognized immediately as Herb’s favorites for ending the last set of the evening. There were several notes, which I suppose you could call love notes, from my mother. There was a tracing, on a food-stained Merry Mariner place mat, of a cherry, complete with stem, and a fancy pencil-drawn frame around it that I vaguely remembered Herb having drawn one night. There was also a white envelope that contained the two pictures: one of the soldiers on Guam; one of a handsome young man looking impassively at a sleeping young baby. I knew the second I saw it that he was my father.

I was fascinated, but the more I looked at it—the more remote and expressionless the man seemed—the more it began to dawn on me that Herb wanted me to see the picture of my father because he wanted me to see how different he had been from him. When I turned over the picture of my father in profile and read “Guam,” I almost smiled. It certainly wasn’t my mother’s handwriting. It was Herb’s, though he had tried to slope the letters so that it would resemble hers. What sweet revenge, he must have thought—to leave me with the impression that my mother had been such a preoccupied, scatterbrained woman that she could not even label two important pictures correctly.

My mother had died years before, of pneumonia. The girl I had been dating at the time had said to me, not unkindly, that although I was very sad about my mother’s death, one of the advantages of time passing was sure to be that the past would truly become the past. Words would become suspect. People would seem to be only poor souls struggling to do their best. Images would fade.

Not the image of the wall painted to look like the ocean, though. She was wrong about that. Herb had painted it exactly the way it really looks. I found this out later when I went snorkeling and saw the world underwater for the first time, with all its spooky spots of overexposure and its shimmering irregularities. But how tempting—how reassuring—to offer people the possibility of climbing from deep water to the surface by moving upward on lovely white nets, gigantic ladders from which no one need ever topple.

On Frances’s porch, as I stared at the photographs of my father, I saw him as a young man standing on a hot island, his closest friend a tall broomstick of a man whom he would probably never see again once the war was over. He was a hero. He had served his country. When he got off Guam, he would have a life. Things didn’t turn out the way he expected, though. The child he left behind was raised by another man, though it is true that his wife missed him forever and remained faithful in her own strange way by never remarrying. As I continued to look at the photograph, though, it was not possible to keep thinking of him as a hero. He was an ordinary man, romantic in context—a sad young soldier on a tropical island that would soon become a forgotten land. When the war was over he would have a life, but a life that was much too brief, and the living would never really recover from that tragedy.

Herb must also have believed that he was not a hero. That must have been what he was thinking when he wrote, in wispy letters, brief, transposed captions for two pictures that did not truly constitute any legacy at all.

In Cold Spring Harbor, as I put the pictures back in the envelope, I realized that no one had spoken for quite some time. Frances tilted her glass, shaking the ice cubes. She hardly knew us. Soon we would be gone. It was just a quick drive to the city, and she would see us off, knowing that she had discharged her responsibility by passing on to me what Herb had said was mine.

1

F
ran figured out that the key worked when it was inserted upside down—all the Brunettis had mentioned in the note was that the key had to be turned counterclockwise to open the door.

Chap groped along the wall for the light switch, found it, and said, “There!” triumphantly. On wooden pegs hung above the switch were the family’s ski-lift passes: Lou Brunetti, smiling the same way he smiled in his passport picture; Pia, poker-faced, self-consciously touching the ends of her hair; Anthony, cherubic and bemused, no doubt thinking: What is the family into now? Another world that his father intended to master, with books about organic gardening and expensive skis to allow people to streak through the snow.

This would have been a bit much to notice simply from looking at the picture of Anthony, but Chap had seen some of the letters Anthony wrote Fran, who had once been his first-grade teacher. She was a hero to the Brunetti family because she had put them in touch with the doctor who prescribed Ritalin for Anthony. By the time he had taken the drug for a month he had made friends. Dishes no longer toppled from the table. He began to finger-paint with great concentration. That winter, Fran had invited the Brunettis to dinner. The Brunettis had reciprocated by having them over for sweet wine, homemade biscotti, and a slide show of Capri, where they had often vacationed before they emigrated to the States at Lou’s insistence. Fran had given them
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. They had given Fran and Chap a print of the Trevi Fountain, taken from an old book, with so many birds circling the gushing water it seemed a cartoon caption should be underneath. In late summer, they had gone to the visiting carnival together. Fran had recommended her dermatologist when Anthony’s doctor was mystified by a rash behind his knees. Pia had sewn Fran’s niece’s wedding dress. When the Brunettis moved away to Vermont, Fran and Chap put on a brave front and helped pack their dishes. There was much amusement when they gave the Brunettis a bottle of champagne to open in their new home, and the Brunettis gave them a farewell present, too: a kind of Amaretto liqueur impossible to buy in the States. The women were teary, and the men shook hands, squeezing with extra pressure. Then they were gone, and after a year or so they wrote more often than they called. There was a May rendezvous in Boston, at a restaurant in the North End, when Anthony sat briefly on Fran’s leg even though he otherwise took pride in being a big boy, and talked excitedly to Chap about computers. At the end of the evening, though, in their own car, Fran and Chap agreed that the Brunettis seemed much more restrained—not with them so much as with one another. Fran wondered whether Pia resented the move. Chap thought a sort of rigidity had set in with Lou: would he ever before have had such strong opinions on regional politics? He had actually banged the table, reminding Fran of the way Anthony behaved when she first met him. Lou had spoken to the waitress in Italian, tapping the bread and sending it back because the crust was not crisp. Pia, much to Fran and Chap’s astonishment, ordered a martini instead of mineral water before dinner. In the ladies’ room, Pia confided to Fran that Lou had been urging her to see a fertility doctor because she had had trouble conceiving. She was having trouble, she told Fran, because she was taking birth control pills. Her husband was almost forty-six; she could not imagine why he would want to have more children. Alone at the table with Lou, when Anthony was invited into the kitchen to meet the chef, Chap had learned nothing more than that the natives of Vermont blamed the governor for the mosquito problem. Before they parted, it was agreed that for their vacation, Fran and Chap would house-sit for the Brunettis, who would be gone in July, visiting a cousin in Atlanta, then continuing to New York City, where at the end of a weekend they would board a cruise to nowhere. “What if the
ship
doesn’t ever leave port but the people on it all disappear instead?” Anthony had said. His father had chuckled, as Pia frowned with real concern.