My Father More or Less Read online

  He looked sick, so I said if he wanted to pay her, if that would gratify him, to go ahead.

  I picked up the valise to carry down the stairs and my father said he would take it and pulled it from me, then I tried to take it back. “I can handle it,” I said.

  We were both holding on to it, then both let go, the overstuffed valise falling to the floor with a thud. He apologized for letting it drop and I said well it was my fault too, then I remembered something and reached under the bed for a copy of a book I had stashed there.

  “Is there more?” he asked, dragging the valise to the door.

  “I thought you might be interested in having this,” I said, my voice full of phony self-amusement. I handed him the novel which was not in the best condition, having been scrunched in my jacket among other displaced possessions.

  “I’ve been looking for copies of this,” he said, clearly upset at its condition. “I’m very pleased to have it, Tom.” He came over as if to put an arm on my shoulder then stopped himself, or else had never intended any more than an undefined step toward me. “Where did you come on it?” he asked.

  “It came on me,” I said or something equally ambiguous. I imagined he thought I had taken it from his study and was now giving it back under the pretense of a gift. There were a few other things under the bed I had somehow forgotten and I thought it might be a mistake to leave them behind for Mrs. Chepstow to take to heart. I filled my jacket pockets with odds and ends.

  He was still unbending the book, worrying it back to its origingal condition. “This novel was rejected twenty-seven or twenty-eight times in America over a four year period before it found a publisher,” he said. “If for that reason alone, it’s been my favorite. I reworked it a number of times, trying to make its obvious flaws less apparent. I doubt that I made it any better but when it appeared in print what had been wrong with it miraculously vanished.”

  “Well, I’m glad I got the right book,” I said, “the appropriate symbol.”

  I carried the valise down the stairs, my father occupied with his book. He stopped at the landlady’s apartment and knocked forcefully at the door, demonstrating how to make his presence felt.

  It was odd that she didn’t answer right away; she tended to live close to the sound of things, eager for some invasion of her lonely privacy.

  “She must be taking a nap,” I said.

  I tried the door and discovered it unlocked, and we looked at each other with what I thought to be some kind of understanding.

  “I’ll leave a check for her on the table in the hall,” he said.

  Terman called, “Hello,” opening the door just enough to permit his voice to carry, thought he heard something in reply, a hiss, a muffled groan. He called again, heard what sounded like the echo of his own voice.

  “Let’s go,” Tom said. He picked up his suitcase and they walked down the remaining flight of steps to the front door. Terman heard something from upstairs that turned him around, an ashtray falling or the slamming of a window, the whispering of conspirators, the creak of steps. He wrote a check for sixty pounds and left it on the long table in the foyer, considered his obligation discharged.

  The car was unusually sluggish, moved as if it were riding through sand, which seemed perfectly reasonable to the driver, an extension of some feeling about himself. It was Tom who suggested that something might be wrong. He got out and discovered that a back tire was flat. The slash marks just above the tread indicated sabotage.

  Tom got out of the car and offered his regrets. Father and son stood bent over the damaged tire in shared grievance.

  Why only one tire? Terman was wondering. It seemed, if nothing else, a failure of the imagination.

  Henry Berger enters the almost pttch-black interior of an abandoned church, whistling to himself. As soon as he adjusts his sights to the dark, he determines a figure standing next to the pulpit.

  “Don’t come any closer,” a voice says, a burnt out whisper. “I am of no use to you once you know who I am. Please turn your head.”

  (The figure in the shadows is tall and angular, elongated even further by the shadows.)

  “I understand you have some information for me.” Henry Berger says.

  “I have no information for you,” says the other. “I can tell you nothing. If you’re going to discover you’ve been moving in the wrong direction, you’ll have to do it on your own power.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “It’s your view, I understand, that as eight figures on a certain list of ten have died in suspicious circumstances, one of the two remaining figures is the assassin?”

  “How do you know what my view is?” Berger turns himself slightly to the left, inclining his neck.

  “I’ve asked you not to move,” says the voice. “Your pursuit of this assassin has occasioned, what?, five additional murders, the killing of accomplices, the covering over of tracks.”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “A whisper in the dark, a disembodied voice. The real assassin is above suspicion, long since discarded from your concern.”

  “Are you telling me that the murderer is not a member of the so-called Folkestone Conspiracy?”

  “You persist in misunderstanding me,” says the voice. “I’ve not said that everyone on that list is above suspicion. In your pursuit of the simple, Mr. Berger, sometimes you overlook the brillantly complex. I have only a few more minutes to spare. Do you understand what it is you don’t know?”

  Berger is silent, takes a deep breath. “The assassin is on the list of ten, but is not one of two presumably still alive. You’re indicating that the murderer is one of the murdered. One of the apparently murdered. Is that right?”

  “That’s at least one of the possibilities,” says the sandpaper voice. “The pursuit of this assassin may take you places you had been better advised to avoid. Mr. Berger, please count off ten seconds to yourself before going through the main doors. I suggest this measure for our mutual security.”

  Berger counts slowly to five, then stops abruptly. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  Henry Berger turns abruptly in the direction of his informant, his gun in hand. For as far as the eye can see, there is nothing.

  Terman unlocked the door to his house, handed in Tom’s suitcase, was about to close the door when he noticed someone sitting on the sofa, head tilted forward.

  “Is that you, Max?”

  The figure seemed to move his head forward in approximation of a nod.

  “What are you doing?” Terman asked.

  “I’m thinking,” the figure said in a midwestern accent. “Does that meet with your approval?”

  “Are you a friend of Max Kirstner’s?”

  The weary nod was repeated, a gesture so small as to deny its moment as it passed.

  This odd presence disconcerted him. “Is Max in the house somewhere?”

  The figure seemed to shrug, though it may only have been the effect of the damp chill in the room. “Are you through asking questions?” he asked. “I don’t like being interrupted when I’m worrying an idea. So if you don’t mind.”

  When he got back to the taxi in which Tom was waiting, he instructed the driver to take them to the Tate Gallery. He made no mention of the intruder in his living room.

  “To tell you the truth,” Tom said, “I’d rather do something else.”

  “We’ll go wherever you like,” Terman said.

  “The thing is, I don’t know where I want to go, Dad. Could you suggest some places?”

  It felt to him as if his skin were being cut away in narrow strips. He recited a litany of names. “The Tower of London, The National Gallery, The British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey.”

  “I have difficulty looking at things,” Tom said, his tone apologetic. “No powers of concentration.”

  They arrived in front of the Tate without having decided on a destination.<
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  Terman paid the driver, the bill coming to a pound forty more than recorded on the meter, one of the mysteries of London travel he had never resolved. Nothing ever cost what it appeared to cost.

  Instead of going into the museum, they crossed the street and walked along the bank of the Thames toward Westminster, the direction as arbitrary as the walk itself. After a point they sat on a bench facing the river, though for all the attention they paid it, they might have had their backs to the water. Terman was thinking how the disappointments they felt in each other’s company seemed to multiply, seemed to carry the weight of earlier disappointments, seemed to carry the weight of disappointments between fathers and sons impressed in the history of the race. Tom took off his workboots and socks and massaged his feet. “I’m cold,” he said.

  Terman took off his jacket—he himself was sweating from the heaviness of the weather—and handed it to Tom. The boy put it on over his field jacket, struggling to get his arms through the sleeves. It didn’t work and then it did. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get the buttons to close.

  “Just wear it over your shoulders,” Terman said.

  Tom shook his head—that it didn’t fit was another disappointment—and he returned the corduroy jacket to his father who was disappointed to have it back. “When I’m cold,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how much I wear. Sometimes I walk around the house with four or five layers of clothing on and I can’t get warm.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Tom said. He hugged himself, stood up, sat down, blew into his hands which he then rubbed together. “There are worse things,” he said, “aren’t there? I mean, people are starving in Cambodia.”

  His father’s shadow seemed everywhere in evidence, seemed to grow more oppressive even as its source diminished. Tom felt deprived of language in the presence of that shadow, aware of the self-consciousness of his least remark. The more he faulted himself, the more he blamed the other for being the occasion of his failure.

  “Let’s walk some more,” Terman said.

  They walked along the bank to Westminster Bridge then crossed over to the other side of the Thames. Tom was cold, still cold.

  They stopped for something to eat in a cafeteria in the basement of Royal Festival Hall, though in fact neither ate. Tom wanted nothing. Terman, though hungry—the same unappeasable hunger he had felt all week—abstained. He had a cup of black coffee, the fluid thick as ashes.

  Terman imagined their time together as a segment of a film. You could perceive them from overhead, from one side (or the other) from front or back, in close-up or medium shot, or through metaphoric correlative. The father was smoking a cigar; the son sucked idly on a drinking straw, the accompanying can of Coca Cola of no interest to him. The pained looks on their faces might be mirror images of one another, though otherwise the resemblance was slight, almost circumstantial. They had learned to look like one another, had grown that way.

  Purposelessness, thought Terman. What wasn’t? He damned the waste of time and even so the aging process increased its pace, denied escape, denied intention.

  They were either at each other’s throats or stiff and formal, a pair of wire coat hangers in the same closet. “I live by my wits,” Tom wanted to say, “so have more trouble surviving than most.” His tongue was tied. He couldn’t take anything from his father, not even a can of Coca Cola, without feeling like a sellout, disloyal to his mother, a thief of self.

  Terman was aware as they sat dawdling over cold coffee and warm Coca Cola that time was passing at some accelerated rate, that there were jobs of work he had set himself to do not being done. Years back, before he had given himself to screenwriting, he had outlined a series of ambitious novels that would take him the rest of his life, or longer, to complete. He had started the first, had put it aside to work on the second, and had discarded both at some point to earn his keep. What he had done (more than a thousand pages in manuscript), what he had set himself to do, barely interested him any longer. Only the sense of urgency remained.

  “What should we do now?” he asked his son.

  9

  If I were the central figure of my own narrative, I might have conceived some final reckoning with the three punks. It would have been a different story: gunfire, spilled blood, violent deaths, an end once and for all to the claims of rebellion. They might even kill my father, stab him with a knife or beat him over the head with a tire iron. It would make my position clearer, give me traditional cause for vengeance. The one with the purple streaks in his hair might hold a gun to my head and fire an empty chamber. When I survive it’s as if I’ve already lived one life and gone into another. I would roll over on to my side, pull out my father’s gun, come up firing. The gun makes a final statement, as they say, has the last word.

  The punks have been hired by Max Kirstner, who wants the writer, L. Terman, out of his way.

  Or they have been hired by Terman, at Max Kirstner’s advice, and have taken matters into their own hands, have double-crossed their employer.

  The final episode would be between Max and Tom on one of the balconies at St. Paul’s Catherdral. Max would try to push Tom off but Tom would step aside, and Max, propelled by his own thrust, would fall headlong to his death.

  Sometimes the teller of the story has few prerogatives of his own, is carried along by (the logic of) events. In real life, heroism is just getting through the day.

  My father is in a phone box, attempting connection with the outside world. As I can’t hear him, I can only imagine his conversation. I imagine the phone ringing without respite. My father, thinking he has dialed the wrong number, hangs up, rests his head against the side of the booth. He thinks: each gesture is more pointless than the last. Or rather I am thinking it for him, imagine the language passing through his consciousness like rats in the stays of a canal. (He’s not so bad when you get to know him.) He will dial again holding the two pence piece in his other hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger of that hand. There is an answer this time and the coin is inserted in the slot. A voice appears.

  Terman felt a spasm in the muscle of his left arm, a dull spasmodic pain from elbow to shoulder. He flexed his arm a few times, massaged his shoulder, trying not to call attention to his concern. If he were dying, if his heart were failing him, he intended nevertheless to finish out the day.

  “What are we going to do when we leave here?” Tom asked.

  “We could go to a movie if that interests you.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that,” Tom said.

  They walked over to the National Film Theater—they had been heading toward it all along—to see if there was anything worth seeing. It had been Terman’s recollection that The Conversation was playing, though he turned out to be mistaken. At the NFT 2, there was a 4:00 showing of something called Bright Eyes, part of a series on child stars, and at the NFT 1 (at 4:15) was Brian De Palma’s Obsession which he had seen twice before.

  Tom said Obsession interested him but he didn’t want to press his father to see something he had already seen. Terman said he was curious to see how well it stood up. They got on the end of a queue that extended outside the door and wound, two and three deep, around the side of the building.

  Tom said he thought the English couldn’t live without queues, that they lined up in their own homes to go to the bathroom, his voice carrying, attracting a few stares.

  Terman felt the time pass as they inched forward in the disorderly queue, felt that his life would be almost over by the time they reached the window at which the leftover tickets were being sold.

  “I have two together in Row A,” said the icy young woman behind the glass, “and a single in Row B. Those are the last three I have.”

  “I’ll take the two in Row A,” Terman said, taking a five pound note from his wallet.

  “May I see your card?” she said.

  He knew his card had been missing for weeks and he made the obligatory show of searching for it
in his wallet. “I can’t seem to find it,” he said, “but I promise you I have one.”

  The young woman, who wore large tinted glasses, seemed impervious to human appeal, said you’re supposed to show your membership card when you purchase tickets.

  Tom produced a dog-eared card, palming it so his father couldn’t read the name on it, and the tickets were issued.

  “I didn’t know you had a membership,” Terman said. Tom shrugged, started to explain, ended up nodding his head.

  The auditorium was already dark when they reached their seats, which were in the far left-hand corner of the first row. The movie was starting, had started, flickering images above them and to the right. An elegant, dreamlike party ends in a bizarre kidnapping. The wife and small daughter of the wealthy and sympathetic (and complacent) protagonist are held for ransom. The police are brought in, mishandle their pursuit. The kidnappers’ car runs into a gas truck and explodes. The wife and daughter are apparently killed.

  It was hard to see things clearly when you were sitting right under the screen. Tom was breathing noisily as if in a crisis of anxiety. Years pass and the hero, still grieving the loss of his wife, vacations in Italy where he meets an art student who bears an extraordinary resemblance (they are both played by the same actress) to the woman he mourns. He falls for this ghostly double of his former wife, believing (at some level, one suspects) that it is the dead wife herself miraculously restored. The obsession is with restoration, with the illusion of immortality.

  Tom took something out of his jacket and held it guardedly in his lap, both hands over the undefined object.

  The girl has a history distinct from his own and is much too young to be the lost wife. No matter her apparent history, the resemblance is irresistible. He proposes to bring this youthful incarnation of his dead wife back to America and marry her. If he distrusts his own motives—this fixation with an image a kind of madness—he must also believe that their circumstantial meeting, like his wife’s circumstantial death, is an aspect of divine providence. Taken away arbitrarily, the woman he loves is mysteriously returned to him. Not the woman, but the image of the woman. Something is wrong, which it serves him to ignore.