My Father More or Less Page 18

  “I’ll come for you in the car,” he said, though once made, he regretted the offer, felt exploited.

  “You don’t have to if you’re busy,” Tom said. “It may not be anything at all. These three punks—they’re just kids really—have been following me for over an hour. I don’t know what they want and I don’t think I want to find out. They’re rather horrendous looking actually.” He laughed his nervous laugh.

  “Why don’t you call the police?”

  “I can’t do that. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

  Terman couldn’t admit that he didn’t. “I’ll come down in the car and get you. At this time of day, it’ll take at least twenty minutes.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to come after me. I mean, that wasn’t the reason I called.”

  “You don’t want me to come or you do?”

  “The phone booth I’m in is in front of a pub called The Wycherly Arms. There’s a Pizza Land and a Sketchley’s down the street on the same side and a Chinese Restauant with these skinned ducks hanging in the window across the street. If you don’t see me, I’ll be moving around. Look for me in front of the pub or in the phone box. Okay?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can, Tom. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  “So in about twenty minutes, right? I’m depending on it.”

  What he felt before, what he had named as rage, was nothing to the bloodstorm in his head as he unlocked the door of the car, as he climbed in behind the wheel, as he fought the key into the ignition. What he didn’t know was whether his anger was directed at Tom for getting into trouble or at the thugs harassing him.

  He was off, debating the unmoving traffic, rushing and stopping to no useful purpose, unforeseen obstructions at every turn. Attempting to circumvent the worst of the traffic, he took himself further and further out of the way, wanting above all to keep moving. The trip would take longer than estimated, perhaps twice as long, and he could imagine Tom thinking that he wasn’t coming or that he had intentionally delayed. He found his son’s distrust unforgivable.

  Terman drove down Holland Park Avenue, which turned into Not-ting Hill Gate, then turned south on Kensington Church but the traffic was so dense it seemed preferable to make his way on narrow side streets. Each new route seemed less felicitous than its predecessor and so he rued his choices, his judgment awry. The more frustrated he became the more he resented his errand. He could readily imagine Tom, accosted in the phone box by the toughs, pulling out his father’s revolver in a moment of desperation. What would follow? If the gun were loaded, and if there were no other choice, Tom might wound one of the boys to frighten them away. More than likely nothing exceptional would happen. It was not impossible that Tom had made up the story about being followed or had exaggerated an ordinary street confrontation into melodrama. It was melodrama, however, that teased Terman’s imagination, the pleasures of the improbable.

  I watched them huddle together in front of a record shop, looking over toward me as they conspired. They wanted trouble, were addicted to it, and they had fixed on me as their target. So I knew when they walked off that it was only a ruse and that they would be back, hoping to catch me off-guard. What I didn’t expect was that they would show up again as quickly as they did. One of them, the one with the purple streaks in his hair, showed his head from around the corner opposite the street they had turned up. When he saw that I was watching him he scuttled back. They had concocted some cretinous plan, had split up and were laying for me, supposedly out of sight, in three different spots. A dessicated woman, about my mother’s age, who had been standing outside the booth, knocked on the glass with a key. I opened the door without thinking. “Do you mind, luv?” she said, squeezing past me.

  It was hot in the car, his shirt sticking to his back, and he unrolled the window while waiting for the light to change. The light defied anticipation, stayed red for a prolonged time. Terman took the occasion to open the street guide on the seat next to him, to check again where he had to go. The light was still red when he looked up and he thought just my luck to get stopped indefinitely at a broken light. A horn honked from behind, a mild squawk. Even after three years in England, he tended not to understand, or pretended not to, the mysteries of London traffic. He drove like an American, he thought, justifying his negligence.

  The light was still red. He remembered, or had the illusion of remembering, the day he announced to Kate and Tom that he was moving away. He had put it off as long as he could, awaiting a moment when such unsettling news might be given with grace and reassurance. It was when he recognized that no such moment would ever arrive, that there never had been and never would be an appropriate moment to tell his children he was leaving them, that he was able to tell them at all. Kate, who was seven and a half, went to her room and closed the door, saying she didn’t think she wanted to talk about it now. He remembered her marching out of the living room like an adult, like the person she might imagine herself becoming fifteen years later. He called after her to say he would visit on weekends, that it wasn’t as if he were leaving forever. “Don’t lie to her,” Magda said. “Once he steps out that door we’ll never see him again.” Tom, who was four, for whom none of it made much sense, was sitting on his lap. “Would you read me a book?” he asked. Terman said he would but first he wanted to see if Kate was all right. “It’s not fair,” Tom said. (Even then, particularly when his own wants were at issue, he had a passion for invoking justice.) Terman said, “You pick out a book and I’ll come right back and read it to you.” When he came into Kate’s room she was lying on her bed, facing the wall. She was stoney, had willed herself into an inanimate state. “It’ll be all right, Kate,” he said in a weary voice. “I promise you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, tried to turn her toward him. She was so rigid there was no moving her without the use of force. She was still immobile when he gave up and left the room. Perhaps if he had stayed with her, it would have made a difference in both their lives. In the living room, on the yellow corduroy couch, Magda was reading to Tom from The Wizard of Oz. He offered to take over but Magda said nothing doing. “We’d like you to go,” she said. He stood his ground, thwarted. “See you soon, Tom,” he said. There was no answer or none he remembered, neither wave nor nod. “Read,” he said to his mother and Magda repeated in an overly inflected voice the sentence she had read when he entered the room.

  The light was still red. He was thinking it was odd how rarely he went to the movies in London during the past year. Once a month on the average and more often than not to the National Film Theater or the ICA. It was particularly odd because he used to go all the time, an insatiable witness, addicted to images in the dark, finding miraculous accidents in the most commonplace work. The light was green (finally), but the cross street was backed up and the light came red again before he could move through. Terman turned the car around and went the other way, took a left and then another left. A woman he thought he knew—it was odd how familiar and unfamiliar she was at the same time—was walking on the right side of the street, rapt in self-absorption. He rolled down the passenger window and called her by the first name that came to mind.

  Before I could think of anything to say—I have trouble getting my story together—she was in and I was out. In a panic I stood with my back to the phone box for the longest time, waiting for her to finish her call. After a point, I walked over to Pizzaland. One of the punks, the smallest of the three, a ferret-faced kid with acne scars, emerged from the doorway. He grabbed my arm but I was too strong for him and knocked his hand away. When he brought out a penknife I had no choice but to show him the gun and, in a gesture I regretted even before its conclusion hit him with it across the face in an awkward jabbing motion. Then I ran in what I thought to be the only safe direction available. I didn’t look back, though I assumed the other two, if not all three, were converging on me. I don’t know what I regretted most, that I had hit him with the gun or that I hadn’t hit him hard enough. If I could ke
ep away another ten minutes, I estimated, my father would appear with the car. Then I had the perception—it came unbidden which gave it added weight—that my father had seemed unsurprised at my news. I mean, why shouldn’t it surprise him that these three punks were trailing me around London. What did he know that I didn’t? Whatever his part in the business—I didn’t actually believe he had hired these kids to harrass me—I began to have doubts that he would show up as promised. He was capable, I knew, of finding excuses for indefinite delay. I didn’t see my pursuers when I glanced over my shoulder, but then one of them turned the corner and pointed a finger at me.

  “My name isn’t Isabelle,” the woman said in an American accent.

  The woman looked more like Magda than Isabelle and perhaps thinking of Magda, he had confused the two. “Excuse me,” he said.

  When he stopped at the next corner for a light she wandered over to the car. “What a series of coincidences,” she said. “First at the airport and then here. Don’t tell me you still don’t know me.”

  “Why should it matter whether I know you?”

  “It matters to me. It makes me distrust my own identity if someone ignores me. Where are you going, Terman? Maybe you can drop me off somewhere on the way.”

  The light had changed and the car behind him registered mute disapproval. “I’m going to Broadwick Street,” he said. “Do you know where Broadwick Street is?”

  She came around the other side and climbed into the passenger seat, transferring the street guide to her lap. “I haven’t the smallest notion,” she said. “What’s there?”

  She deigned to read the street guide for him while Terman rushed obliquely to his destination, detouring whenever traffic blocked his way.

  “You were so awful to me at the airport,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing you a favor. I didn’t even like you much in the old days when we were all such good friends.”

  Terman had to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting the car that had stopped abruptly in front of him. He held out his arm to keep Lila from pitching forward.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t let me hit my head,” she said. “I used to think—it was also Magda’s opinion—that you were the most self-centered person of our acquaintance. Still, you were nice with the children at times, you really were. Take a left at the next corner. Was it that you didn’t like adults or that you didn’t like me and my then husband, or was it that you were secretly shy? I always meant to ask you but in those days I didn’t have the courage. It’s different meeting someone years later in another country. You always looked so angry, you know, so fierce really as if you wanted to kill anyone who got in your way. I thought of you, you’ll laugh at this, as a buccaneer. It was undeniably attractive in a certain way, though I think one had to have a masochistic streak to find it so. Take a left here. Tell me the truth. What was your impression of me in those days?”

  He edged his way through traffic, trailed by some unnamable dread. That it mattered to him that he reach Tom was indication that he was capable of feeling. His sense of urgency was in itself like passion. He sensed, on the other hand, that he would probably never reach Tom and that in the long run it wouldn’t matter. Before he knew it, he was there. He drove down Broadwick at ten miles an hour, waiting for Tom to declare himself. A trick had been played on him. There was no Sketchley’s, no Chinese restaurant with ducks in the window, no phone in front of a pub called Wycherly Arms. “Could there be another Broadwick Street?” he asked her.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Will you ever forgive me? We’re on Broadwick Place not Broadwick Street.” She checked the street guide, advised him to take a right turn at the corner they had already passed.

  He swung the car around, an ill-timed audacity, a taxi coming the other way. He lived through the collision—the black Austin smashing into their left side as they turned—before he realized the cab had managed an abrupt stop inches short of contact.

  The driver shouted at him, “Trying to get us all killed, are you?”

  Terman had nothing to say in his defense, drove on with his head down, turning left at the appropriate street.

  “You should have apologized to him,” Lila said.

  “What difference would it have made?”

  “You’re as incorrigible as ever, aren’t you? I don’t know why I allowed myself to get into this car.”

  The phone box in front of The Wycherly Arms was unoccupied when he drove past, Terman discovering the pub only as it receded before him. He pulled up to the curb at first opportunity, kept the motor running. Tom’s absence determined the landscape.

  “I’ll get out and take a bus,” she said. “I don’t want to get in the way.”

  Two of the punks appeared on the other side of the street, shrunken and demented figures, sexually ambiguous, arms around each other’s shoulders like lovers. One of them might have been a woman, though it was impossible to tell which one. They seemed to him more pathetic than dangerous. He sat hunkered down in the car, observing them.

  “I don’t know when I’ve had so much excitement,” Lila said.

  Terman got out of the car after a few minutes and walked to the front of the pub. He peered into the back garden where a young couple sat eating what looked like bangers and mash, a child with a stuffed fox in its lap asleep in a stroller behind them. The commonplace scene fascinated him and he forgot for the moment the object of his search, or imagined himself as the object, the lost and forgotten child. The couple spoke German and he wondered at their apparent ease in this foreign place.

  The sight of his son coming toward him took away his breath, made his chest ache, brought tears to his eyes.

  Tom had his head down, barely acknowledged his father as he came up to him. They walked together to the car and Tom got in back slamming the door after him.

  As they drove quickly away, Terman glimpsed the two punks staring at them, one had his fist raised threateningly, the other (the woman?) made a face like a gargoyle.

  They escaped the street, rushing away in silence like thieves. “Do you remember me?” Lila asked, smiling at Tom. “My husband, Stanislaus and I used to be neighbors of yours. You used to play with my son Petey, when you were both much younger.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Are you all right?” Terman asked him.

  “I’m on my last legs,” Tom said, laughing nervously. He held out his hands. “No stigmata yet. I had a few bad moments right before you came. And I thought for a while, you know, because you took so long, that you weren’t coming.”

  “Did you ever find out what those boys wanted from you, Tom?” Lila asked.

  Tom mumbled something unintelligible, then said, “They were up to no good.”

  “I didn’t get that,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t want me to get it. I’m going back to America tomorrow and I thought I’d tell your mother that I saw you and that you were in one piece. You are in one piece, I hope.”

  “The only injuries are internal,” he said, playing to her as if she were an audience in a theater. “What you see is what you get.”

  “Where do you want to be dropped?” Terman asked Lila, though Tom thought the question was meant for him and said it didn’t matter.

  “You can drop me at a bus stop,” Lila said. “What’s your destination?” They had been driving in circles.

  “I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” he said. “I don’t want you reporting to Magda that I mistreated you.” He meant it as joke, or thought he did, though he could see from the flicker of perception on Lila’s face that she believed he was dependent on Magda’s opinion of him. Whatever Lila might say in his favor, Magda would be unimpressed. “He went out of his way for you,” she would say to Lila, “because he wanted Tom to think better of him.”

  After a while, he found himself alone with his son.

  Even though we were packing to leave, I was embarrassed for the room, wanted it to show itself to better advantage. Some pink roses Astrid had given me had withere
d away in their plastic vase, though the dead flowers were better than none at all, I thought, gave off the memory of flowers. As mediocre as the room was, I wanted him to admire it, to perceive in it endearing qualities that I had somehow missed. It was a room I had lived in and now would no longer live in.

  “I’d like you to return the things you’ve taken,” he said, glancing away from the ill-gotten goods I had laid out on the bed.

  “I can’t bring them back without asking for trouble,” I said. “Most of it’s not worth anything anyway.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Well,” I said. “I mean, what is the point as you see it?”

  “You won’t do it again?”

  It was easier to say I wouldn’t than to say I wasn’t sure so I told him what he wanted to hear. Anyway, I never thought of it as going on forever; each theft seemed final in itself.

  We heard the door to Mrs. Chepstow’s apartment close softly, the click like a sound made with one’s tongue.

  “Give it up,” he said, staring out of the room’s only window.

  “Give up what?”

  “You don’t want to have to come back here again,” he said. “It’s cleaner to move everything out, make a final break.”

  Cleanliness had never excited me much, nor had final breaks. I mentioned that I owed the landlady some money and he said he would take care of it, whch wasn’t what I had in mind.

  “She doesn’t really care about the money,” I said. “She likes to have me in the house.”

  He sat down in my one chair (I still thought of it as my chair) and stared ahead of him in disapproval. “What if I lent you the money and you paid her,” he said. “Would that make it all right?”

  “I don’t like to rush into anything,” I said.