TWENTY-EIGHT

“Which one do you think?” Sofia asked.

“When was the last time he wore this?” I asked, fingering the lapel of a blue striped seersucker, one of those suits you take one look at and think: mistake.

“Never,” she said. “He bought it for a conference in Greece one summer, but then there was a strike at the Athens airport and the meeting was canceled.”

My dad’s suits were displayed on the bed, five of them. They were sinister, headless ensembles waiting to turn into men. My dad was not usually comfortable in traditional men’s clothes, preferring to wear khaki field clothes, denims, all-cottons that absorbed sweat and were easy to wash. But he gave lectures and met with supervising committees, explaining why another grant for research on the life cycle of the medfly was a must.

The house my dad shared with Sofia was one of those buildings with too many windows, a view of cypress trees out one side of the bedroom, the Bay out another side, glass everywhere. Daniel was watching television in a distant room, a sound of explosions and screeching tires as the housekeeper’s voice reached us, asking him, didn’t he want to watch Goofy.

“What did he say he wanted to wear—gray or off-gray?” I asked. “Or maybe this nice granite gray.”

“He just said he wanted argyle socks.”

The legendary argyle socks that had brought him luck years ago must have been long ago worn through to so much string. I doubt Sofia understood the full implication of his request as she found a pair of Byford knee-high wool stockings in his top drawer.

“I bet he didn’t insist that he had to wear a suit,” I said.

“I said I’d pick out something handsome,” said Sofia, looking a little lost among jockey shorts and V-neck T-shirts.

I pulled open the closet door, a storage room big enough to walk into. His field boots were lined up in the half dark, along with other shoes, burgundy loafers, shiny black dress oxfords. I chose a pair of crisp brown pants, what a commanding general would wear going to war. I found a cotton dress shirt, fresh from the cleaner, still in its plastic wrapping.

“Which shoes?” Sofia asked.

I had already selected a pair of nearly new loafers. I imagined one of the nurses having to tie shoelaces, my dad having to endure being dressed by someone he hardly knew.

Was I trespassing? I told myself I wasn’t, but why did I wait there in the hall? I barely nudged the door to his office, letting it swing open.

Sofia had turned off the distant television and was giving instructions, vanilla pudding only after Daniel ate the green bean casserole for lunch. The beans were from my garden, and Sofia had created a novel and tasty meal that Daniel would chew but would not swallow.

His study, my mom would have called this room, enjoying the fact that her husband was a scholar. But Dad would have called it his fort, finishing his tuna salad and saying “back to the trenches.” He would spend hours peering through a binocular microscope, examining the jugular lobe of a wasp’s wing.

But I had never spent more than a minute or two in this newer working place, the one Sofia must have helped him set up. It looked like the office of my childhood, aside from the updated computer and printer. Books and journals were haphazard if you glanced at them, but they were arranged to be within easy reach, the Audubon guides to everything from trees to mammals just beyond the Merck Manual and his brace of dictionaries, English, German, Latin. And there was, as always, the slight smell of mothballs, the camphor that protected some of the hundred-year-old specimens of monarch butterflies.

I found Sofia holding up scarves, letting them fall one by one to the floor, scarlet, uranium yellow, brilliant silks, gaudy patterns.

“You didn’t deal with his mail,” I said.

Sofia gave me one of her pretty looks, eyelashes and incomprehension, but I could tell that she wanted to be alone.

“There’s a gigantic pile of envelopes you haven’t even opened,” I said.

“I paid all the bills,” she said, “and I opened anything that looked like a get-well card.”

“But there’s all his journals, and articles people have sent him, and catalogs, and announcements—” Weeks worth. It was a crisis, all the work that had piled up.

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” she asked. She let a long gauzy silk drape over her arms and held it up so the light fell through it, studying the way the room looked strained through silk.

Jesus, I thought. Doesn’t matter.

“He can’t remember,” Sofia said.

She glanced to see the effect the words had on me.

“He can’t remember the shooting,” she said. “He thought he could help the police, but he can’t.”

A painting was slightly crooked on the wall, an acrylic, a scarlet mountain. There was art in every room of the house. Sofia’s parents made money manufacturing patio doors.

“It’s normal to have retroactive amnesia regarding a very bad trauma,” she was saying. “Many people can’t remember the events just before a very grievous injury.” She let the silk scarf fall to the floor.

I slowly shifted the objects on the dresser from one place to another, jewelry box a little closer to the mirror, bust of Pasteur toward the edge of the dresser, beside the pearl necklace. Dad had won the bust in high school for his ant map, a chart of the paths worker ants took from the insect colony to a cube of moistened sugar. The bronze had a slot in the base if you turned it over. You could use it as a piggy bank.

I found myself able to ask, “Does the detective know?”

“He suspected as much.”

“They should postpone the hearing until Dad feels better,” I said.

“It’s been almost a month,” she said, “since the arrest.”

“They can use hypnosis,” I heard myself offer. “Put him in a trance and record what he says.”

Sofia gave me a look of kindness before she shook her head.

“They can give him more time,” I continued. “Let him get back to being more like his old self.”

Sofia tucked the underwear and socks back into the drawer and closed it very gently. She nudged the bronze Pasteur back against the mirror.