My Father More or Less Read online

  It could not be said that he hadn’t felt anything. What didn’t he feel? An obscure free-floating ache accompanied him on the return from Heathrow, the skin of his face stretched tight against the bones, his eyes, despite sunglasses, troubled by the muted English light. There were a number of things he had to do and he concentrated on the sequence of the doing, his consciousness a scratch list of notes to himself. Take in the milk. Open mail. Account his feelings. Wash the dishes in the sink and put them away. Finish packing manuscripts. Settle accounts. Make all the beds. Go to the post office. Settle accounts.

  The intruder’s room, which was unlocked and temporarily unoccupied, smelled of some deodorizing substance, a sweet treacly odor with a dank subtext. Terman sat at the table the fat man presumably used as a desk and stared at his reflection which glowered back, no comradship there, narrow-eyed and hard. He made disdainful faces at the opposing face and was responded to in kind. Whatever the fat man had been working on was apparently locked away in the attaché case on the bed or had gone with him. Only a few blank sheets of bond occupied the work table. There was nothing Terman wanted from the intruder beyond the absence of his intrusion and even that prospect offered no long-lived pleasure. He went through the wastebasket and caught the name Henry Berger on a discarded sheet of manuscript. “I can’t take you with me, sweetheart,” he was saying to an unidentified woman. The woman said: “I can make a terrible enemy when left to my own devices.”

  After heaving the attaché case through an open window, Terman went to his own study and completed the packing of manuscrupts he had started the evening before. A rhythm established itself, an odd metronomic music that was sometimes indistinguishable from the beat of his heart. When he was done he addressed the packages to his American agent, wrote two long overdue letters, loaded the car and drove to the post office.

  He left the car where he had parked it near the post office and walked back to the house he no longer thought of as his special province. His son was gone—that registered for the first time in a while. Some weeks ago—it might have been yesterday—he had been anticipating the visit (not altogether happily, let it be admitted), and now it was over. He was whistling or the man that wore his clothes and walked in his shoes and animated his bones was whistling. His behavior seemed inexplicable even to himself.

  On his walking in the door—the house was less familiar with each revisit—he remembered typing the last line of his first novel and then floating from his chair more in relief than triumph, emptied of everything, the satisfaction as sharp as a toothache in the night. The recollection came and went, taking away more than it had brought. What was done was irrevocably done. He would never know again, except as memory allowed, what it was like to complete the last line of that first book. The memory of it only made him more aware of the real thing that was lost to him. No pleasure had been so intense in his life, or so he imagined, as the completion of that first book. He fastened on the notion of loss and the arbitrariness of memory. The aging process rode roughshod over everything, leaving dust and decay in its wake.

  This section of his life was done with, he told himself, as if he were referring to a piece of writing, a novel or a screenplay. It was time to move on, he thought, to find another space in which to move, the language without specific reference. He put his typewriter into its faded blue case and closed the cover.

  Each succeeding move invented itself. He phoned Isabelle and caught her, as she said, on the way out. “I’ve called to say goodbye,” he said. She didn’t ask where he was going, goodbye to what? “You’re all right, are you?” she asked. He felt, he said, at the top of his game. “Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Sweetheart, is it? Yes, I’m sure. Is there anything else you wanted to say before I hang up on you. I do have to go in minute.”

  The minute passed. He said goodbye a second time. She said, “Speak to you anon,” and was gone. (Later, on the way to work, or on the way home, she might wonder at the implication of his call.)

  The desk was all but clear. He thought of polishing it, but settled for dusting it rigorously with an old sock. The gun, which occupied a central place, had to be moved and removed, shifted from place to place like an unwanted child. The dusting completed, he lifted the pistol from the desk and balanced it in his palm. It was loaded for use—the whole point of a gun was its function—or had he only imagined himself loading it? He checked and double checked. What he wanted to say to Isabelle was that he could still remember having cared for her, though the feeling, which ebbed a little each day, was disappearing. For a moment, he felt an extraordinary tenderness for the few remaining objects in the room: couch, desk, desk chair, manuscript boxes, false starts on balls of paper in the waste basket. He held the gun to the side of his head.

  Everything was in order or—there was that alternative—the disorder was in itself complete. Still, he might have missed something, forgotten some crucial detail, left something undone thinking it done. Had he made the beds? Had he accounted his feelings at the moment he raised the pistol to his head. At the moment after that. At the one after that. At this moment? The next step, the step that followed the step before it, that step following on the heels of its predecessor, was to…. The sentence, suspended in possibility, moved inexorably toward a resolution it would never achieve.

  He is sure that no one has followed him on the last lap of his journey and almost equally certain that no one knows he is in Washington, D.C. He has written nothing down, has confided in no one. The evidence, the full burden of his discovery, is lodged in his head. He hails a cab but instead of going directly to the White House, he stops off at the Phillips Museum. He calls his contact from a museum phone and says, “Expect me at exactly five minutes after one.” “I’ll leave word at the desk that you’re to be sent up on the President’s elevator,” the friend says. “What name are you using?” “Lukas Terman,” says Berger.

  He goes through the museum, moving intently from painting to painting, as though he might carry with him the memory of so much extraordinary work. The camera scans the paintings, as Henry Berger might, its eye crossing the walls like a beam of light.

  When he leaves the museum he gets into another cab and instructs the driver (or so we imagine)—we perceive the conversation from outside the cab, from the distance of a bystander—to take him to the White House. We follow the taxi through the streets of Washington, Berger’s eyes closing and opening, tiredness catching up.

  We pick up Henry Berger as he leaves the cab and walks tentatively up the White house steps, the sun, glancing off the facade, blinding him. Among the crowd of tourists, there is no one he knows. A fat man, camera around his neck, wearing a sky blue shirt with a flame of ghastly orange flamingos across its front, seems to want to ask Berger something, steps awkwardly in his way. “Yes?” “Got the time?” asks the pilgrim. Berger, smiling, a tourist himself at this moment, lifts his left arm to glance at his watch. “Five after one,” he says, or starts to say, one hand eclipsing the other. There is a gunshot from the camera or from somewhere above and beyond the camera. A carnation of blood appears at Berger’s chest. Someone cheers or jeers. The detective’s face register’s all, amazement, the cancellation of hope, the death of passion, disillusion beyond further disillusion. The camera catches him in freeze frame as he falls backwards, the steps moving under his feet, his arms out anticipating momentary flight.

  The 747 taxis down a runway, changes direction, stops and starts, trapped in indecision. And then without further announcement, just when I think we’ll never go anywhere, we tear loose from the earth, ascend with heartbreaking abruptness.

  I remember this time when I was a kid of eight or nine and I was eating breakfast by myself in the kitchen (corn flakes with half-thawed frozen raspberries) and the doorbell rang and we weren’t expecting anyone and I answered (my mother out shopping, Kate playing solitaire in her room) and my father was there and he lifted me onto his shoulders and I asked him if he had come to stay and he
mumbled something which I took to be yes and for that moment before I heard in echo what he actually said I had this sense that everything was all right not only that but it was going to be all right for a long time to come and until I realized that I had misheard his answer I was so glad so glad I mean I can’t even remember the feeling only that it rang in my head like a siren or a scream and I didn’t want to give it up (I was flying on his shoulders) and when it was gone it was gone.

  The Dzanc Books eBook Club

  Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.