It is a blistering Tuesday in June, and Adam is on something of a shopping spree. We are moving ever so slowly through the newest and grandest of our city’s malls, inching our way across its broad promenade past the chain stores and eateries, ascending and descending its three sets of escalators.
Today, we will visit the eight jewelry stores spread throughout the mall. His diligence reminds me of the man in Jesus’ parable who is seeking the pearl of great price, but this afternoon it’s a bracelet we’re after.
We have it down to two, one in silver, another in 14-karat gold. The first allows for charms, the second is fancy. The first is a little plain and clunky, too large for a slender wrist; the other is filigreed and delicate, too old-fashioned for a teenager.
The clerks are mostly women who know him and greet him warmly. He enters each shop with the assured air of a regular, and a high roller at that. Last week he was trolling for diamonds with Tracy; he bought an expensive piece for Jenny and had it gift wrapped in silver foil with white ribbons and bows. The women in the stores must wonder what he is up to. Some of them know.
We have come back to the first store, where the clerk has not waited on him before and doesn’t seem to know him. She is heavily made up and her hair is dark and perfect. She glistens with store product. She gives away her age by the size of her glasses, which are saucers with burgundy rims.
She is not the ideal person to wait on my son, who for all his shopping experience is lacking jewelry store etiquette. When he examines a bracelet he does not first compliment it with “Oh, that’s nice,” but simply studies it like a rabbi poring over the Masoretic text. It has been this way in every store. He has felt, fingered, and rotated against the light every bracelet in the entire mall and perhaps in the entire city and surrounding county.
When she pulls some other merchandise out of a drawer, he asks, “Where did you get those? Aren’t they good enough to display?” She is growing impatient with his manner and his rambling questions, and even more impatient with me for trying to smooth over his insensitivity with fatherly chuckles, as if my boy has just asked the cleverest question in the class.
She wants to know, “Is it for a special occasion?” expecting a description of the occasion but getting only “Yes.”
“Does she wear a lot of jewelry?”
“Oh, yes,” he answers confidently, as if he would know.
“The young people seem more comfortable with sterling silver these days. She might prefer silver to gold. What do you think?”
“That’s hard to say,” he replies, now realizing that he is over his head in this conversation. “I really don’t know,” he says, defeated.
She sighs, briefly gazes out into the mall at nothing in particular, then comes back to make her own careful assessment of Adam, looking not at his shaved head but into his eyes. It is a look that begins in annoyance and ends in revelation. Scales are falling from her saucer eyes. Under the fluorescent lights, something is thawing in her, and suddenly she gets it.
Still looking into Adam’s eyes, she says softly, “I’m sure you know what she likes.”
We take the silver. He politely treats my offer to buy a charm as a paternal tic and refuses. “You can’t get this one,” he says.
He is closing in on his goal of eighteen birthday gifts for his unborn daughter. Only two more to go. He chose a Duke cheerleader’s outfit for her third. She will be adorable in it, sitting in the rafters of Cameron Indoor Stadium with her grandparents, doing the cheers and precision hand movements. Only we won’t let her say, “Go to hell, Carolina / go to hell,” or if we do, it will be our secret.
He has also bought a ceramic frog with a bubble-maker, a white cotton dress with ruffles and a bow for her seventh Easter, and fourteen other gifts.
Adam’s pantry is almost full.
I am tempted to tell him that what he is doing is over the top. I want to warn him against trying to control eighteen years of the future, which is too much future for anyone to master, but I know how he will reply: “Oh, and why do you teach, if not to control the future? And why did you tell me what to do when I was a kid, if not …” So I tell Jenny instead, “His future is the child’s sparkling DNA, her eyes that will dance like his, and her values that you and Adam share. They will all be hers, and he will always be with her.”
But Jenny only replies, “It pleases him.”
He no longer talks to me about the future, but he apparently still passionately believes in it. He is exercising his terminal imagination and taking great pleasure in mentally placing his child at the center of the scenes these gifts will create. He can see her sitting in the middle of a circle of children shredding the wrapping paper and bows and opening his gift.
What could be less grim than going to the mall and shopping for a little girl you love? Jenny tells me that when they shop for their daughter they are never sad, even though they know they are “pretending.”
That same imagination was at work earlier in the week when he commissioned a dollhouse for her. He and Jenny had discovered our pastor Tom Colley’s genius for building enormous model airplanes, ships, and his specialty: large, made-to-design, authentic-to-the-smallest-detail dollhouses. Adam and Jenny visited the craftsman in his workshop, an attached garage that resembled Geppetto’s studio. Tom, Adam, and Jenny then nosed around our old house in Durham to take some photographs for Tom to work from. When she is five or six, the child will have a Dutch Colonial dollhouse that looks like the one her father grew up in.
Tom also asks his clients to supply a Bible verse for the underside of the house. We saw it not too long ago, furrowed into the wood in Adam’s own hand, like a lover’s initials carved on a tree:
With the dollhouse, as with the other birthday gifts, he is putting his shoulder hard against the door separating time from eternity. He himself already has one foot in eternity, but this child will be a creature of her own generation. She will know and say things we can’t imagine, and face challenges we don’t want to imagine. It will be years before she becomes fascinated with him and pounds her fists against the same locked door.
Love, Daddy. With that, the door gives a little, almost cracks. You can feel the elemental power of love testing its own limits. He was able to love his unborn daughter and not merely an idea of her, just as we are still capable of loving him and not just a memory of him.
The eighteen gifts and the dollhouse occupy the same borderland as the birthing classes he and Jenny attend. With the Lamaze classes he is forging another material connection between himself and the future. “I’ll be her coach,” he tells Sarah confidently. “I have to help Jenny breathe,” he says, alluding to the controlled breathing techniques she is learning.
The future is the baby waiting to be born.
As the month of June wears on and his strength begins to fail, he worries about his stamina holding up during a long labor. He speaks more frequently of “being there” for the delivery but in a secondary role to a professional delivery coach. He asks us if we would be willing to pick them up and drive them to the hospital when the day comes, since he won’t be driving. Finally, he telephones his sister, asking her to coach Jenny through labor. This birth will still be a “miracle,” he insists, but his role in it is diminishing. That door is closing too.
With our purchase in the bag, we head to a mall café for our refreshments. It is adorned with beach umbrellas and bathed in the music of the Caribbean. In the jewelry store I sensed that his hesitation over the more expensive bracelet had something to do with its price, and so I return to the subject. “You aren’t made of money, you know. Why don’t you at least let me help.”
At the mention of financial dealing, his mental file server selects one of the many set pieces he has memorized over the years, this one from one of his favorite films, Good Will Hunting. We are sitting in our beachfront café, drinking coffee (or at least I am), and he is riffing into my ear Ben Affleck’s blue-collar Chuckie: “Allegedly, your situation for you would be concurrently improved if I had two hundred dollars in my back pocket right now.… Until that day comes, keep your ear to the grindstone.”
I do love this horsing around with him. “See, as long as we can hang out at the mall and you can make me laugh, I refuse to wear sackcloth and ashes,” I say a little too enthusiastically. “We’re walking around heah” (doing a little Chuckie myself). He is somewhat alarmed by my enthusiasm and replies with his palms on the table, “Okay,” but in a tone that says, “Relax.”
We are in such a good, loose mood that we casually break another rule, this one against reminiscing. To talk about the past these days seems dangerously close to summing up a life. But with the bracelet in the bag, our snacks going nicely, and the entire future off limits, we have nowhere to go but the past.
My son and I have what G. K. Chesterton called “the slow maturing of old jokes,” and today they appear to be approaching their maturation date. The set pieces are so familiar to us we can identify them by their code names: Paper Route, Cardinals in Atlanta, A Day on the Kennedy, Roommate on Drugs, Bar Exam Hell, Lost on the River, and quite a few others.
“Well, at least we had our Paper Route,” I open, identifying the piece we are about to perform. “When I was a kid I had to go out every day at five in the morning …”
“But on Sundays the Globe-Democrat was too heavy, so PaPa drove you in the Gray Ghost,” he says, completing my sentence. He even knows the name of the defunct St. Louis newspaper and the nickname for our family’s 1953 Dodge. This is a prelude to the story of his paper route, which was really our paper route because we did it together. The Advertisers were dumped by the hundreds on our front porch every Tuesday to be banded for delivery on Wednesday at the latest. He didn’t like the banding part and sometimes let the papers pile up in the living room for a few days, filling the house with the odor of damp newsprint and petroleum. He didn’t like the delivery part either, because by the time we loaded the bag it was too heavy for him to carry on his bike.
Our solution was that we would pile the papers in the back of our station wagon and I would troll through the neighborhood, with him perched dangerously on the tailgate of the wagon tossing out the papers. Many of his tosses landed on the roofs of houses or in the bushes.
This paper route was fun.
“But you always had something to do on Wednesday nights,” he remembers.
“And you never got the papers banded till Friday,” I counter. “And when we were finished, you always had twenty leftovers. What exactly did you do with them?” I ask, although there was never a time when I didn’t know.
As winter came on, we decided that the weather was too cold to deliver the papers at night with the tailgate open to the elements. That decision took us to Saturday afternoons, which was usually reserved for college football.
We hated our paper route.
In the end, the distributor wrote Adam a letter of termination, which I delivered to him in Duke Medical Center, where he was spending the night with a case of pneumonia. With the crest of the Advertiser on the letterhead, it was the most official document he had ever received. He was both honored and bemused: although the pink slip was addressed to him, Mr. Richard Adam Lischer, he knew we had both been let go.
We received the letter on his fourteenth birthday, January 28, 1986. The rest of the world remembers it as the day the Challenger exploded like a Roman candle in the winter sky. On this afternoon in the mall we are remembering it for the umpteenth and last time as the day we got fired from our paper route.
Sometimes I say to Tracy, “You know what I regret? I regret that I never took Adam camping. Or fly-fishing in Montana. I wish we had done some serious climbing in the Rockies. Damn.”
Tracy replies, “Which mountain in the Rockies did you have in mind?”
Whenever I mentioned my regret to my grown son, he would reply indignantly, “What do you mean no adventure? We’ll always have the Eno.”
He says it again today in our Caribbean café. “You should have tied a bandana on one of the trees on the bank,” he opens. “Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten lost on the river.”
“It was a good day for the Underwear Brothers,” I reply. He has a good laugh at the thought of the two of us swimming in the Eno River in our underwear.
“The trouble was,” he remembers, “you had just hurt your back. And we were always pulling the canoe over the rocks.”
“Trouble was, it got late, we got lost and missed our port.”
We beached the boat and pulled it over some rocks about a third of the way up a steep embankment. Then Adam and I shinnied through the mud the rest of the way up. We made our way to an unfamiliar asphalt road and simply stood there dirty and exhausted. The only mark of civilization was a small sign advertising a Primitive Baptist church.
We have come to the plateau of the first punch line. He will never forget that I stood in the road and hitchhiked while he hid in the weeds. “You said to me, ‘We are going to do that thing I have always said if I catch you doing it I will beat your butt.’ ”
“You mean we’re going to hitchhike?” I say, trying my best to imitate a boy of ten.
We have now approached the second punch line. A few decent, Baptist cars passed until, finally, two guys in a filthy Grand Am pulled over and offered us a ride. One of them wore a Hawaiian shirt, the other had no shirt. “Hop in, pohdners,” says the guy in the shirt. They were smoking weed, and the back of the car was littered with beer cans.
Adam loves this part. One of the guys turns and leans across the seat toward us, friendly-like. “Beer?” he says.
I say, “You looked at me as if splitting a cold one was a genuine option.” At that, Adam tips his chair back and laughs toward the ceiling. We are really into it now. With every telling, the soup thickens: in this version we are a little more desperately lost than before, a bit muddier as we shinny up the embankment, our rescuers slightly more stoned than in earlier accounts.
But, too quickly, we’ve come to the last line in the story. It’s the third and final punch line. The two men in the Grand Am drop us at a convenience store where we can make a phone call to Tracy. As they weave their way down the road, they perform their roles to perfection, and one of them calls back to Adam and me, “Give peace a chance.” Even my ten-year-old knows this is a somewhat dated phrase.
“Give peace a chance,” we say in unison in the Caribbean café.
The end.
The key to the story is remembering the same points, reciting them together, and laughing at the same punch lines, which we are doing as rehearsed. We have always done it this way—until now.
Today I have taken a wrong turn and gotten lost on another part of the river. Mentally, I’m still back in the cove where the Eno runs unusually deep and not a sound can be heard from other boaters or the tumble of modest waterfalls downstream. Beneath a canopy of river birch, willow, and summer sky the two of us are laughing and spurting brown water through our teeth and diving for my baseball cap. We swim in circles round and round one another in a pool of mottled light, as if each were the other’s shore. We have forgotten about the drifting boat and the lateness of the hour.
The waitress at the café pops in at our table, as if to create an intermission between our stories. We accept a second pot of tea and another cup of coffee, some nutty cake that he can’t eat, and move into new territory.
He tells me that now, in his present stage of spiritual development, he regrets that he wasn’t more faithful as a teenager. I tell him that adolescence is not famous for its spiritual depth. We agree that most teenage boys care about girls and sports, usually in that order. “Now I’m down to one girl,” he says, “and am I glad of that. No, two!” he adds with something close to glee.
“Do you go to confession?” I asked. It is an honest question posed by someone who has never been.
“Sure,” he says, “but I haven’t been a Catholic long enough to have much to confess.”
“What? Your Protestant sins don’t count?” I ask as half question, half joke.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going back to that high school junk,” he says.
“If we started confessing all the boring stuff fathers and sons do to each other, where would it end? Think of all the mistakes I made raising you,” I say. “And, trust me, I haven’t forgotten them. Oh, God, think of my temper, Adam, just think of it! And all the rest of it.” We both pause and let our minds wander back to the rest of it.
I remember the day he came home with a terrific role in his high school’s production of Anything Goes. He was bursting with pleasure: “You won’t believe what happened today! I got Moonface Martin!” Without so much as a word of congratulations, I promptly asked him if the play would interfere with his studies. I can still see his face falling. That was not a fight, but worse than a fight.
The parent’s greatest failures, however, are the systemic omissions that occur over a lifetime and can be summed up with the phrase “failure to protect.” We put you under the grace of God and convinced ourselves that your life was charmed, blessed, and secure. “Son, when you talked about monsters, your mother and I should have told you some of them are real. We lied. Evenings when you go to sleep, fourteen angels their watch do not keep. You are not protected. Sometimes your guardian angels turn out to be crows and vultures.”
“You didn’t have other sons to practice on,” he answers, interrupting my deepening vacancy. “I never give your mistakes a thought.”
“I’ve been relying on your forgiveness for years.”
“You can do that,” he says, and smiles shyly.
We are absolving one another of having occupied the same time and space—of having lived under the same roof, cluttered the same bathroom, scrounged the same French fries, dipped into the same hormone pool, adored and bedeviled the same two women, and shared the same unstable temperament—all at close quarters and in the most god-awful phases of our lives: his adolescence and my middle age.
Wipe it clean! Wipe it clean! But love it all. That’s the way we are feeling in our mall café.
The time is coming, in a month or less, when I will simply kiss his unresisting head and say Thank you for everything, thank you, thank you, thank you, and he will look up intently at me and absorb my love without changing expression. But today we are talking up a storm.
The server has returned. Perhaps she has noticed that we are using this site as a church when it was designed to be a shrine on the way to Williams-Sonoma. Her manner lets us know these tables can’t be tied up indefinitely. We’ve done two pots of tea, multiple coffees, and some cake. This is not a destination. “Anything more I can get you guys? Or will that be it?” In other words, it might be time for you two to move on.
• • •
It is still June, and my Father’s Day card arrives several days early, as if the sender has found the perfect sentiment and can’t wait to convey it. Obviously designed for a stepfather or a favorite uncle, it reads, “You’ve been like a father to me.” This has been going on for several years, ever since I inadvertently sent him a valentine on his birthday.
My Father’s Day present this year will be an outing to a Durham Bulls baseball game. I gather from comments Jenny has made that Adam considers the ball game, like our recent trip to the mall, a gift to me, the gift of himself. I will later learn from Jenny that he has taken a staggering amount of OxyContin to make it through the evening.
Adam likes baseball but has not completely surrendered himself to the game. He has not memorized the starting lineup of the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals as I have, doesn’t go weak in the knees at the mention of Stan Musial as I do, and never had a mother who once sold his baseball cards, as I did. I got him started playing Little League when he was too young and still afraid of the pitched ball, when he was thrilled to be assigned to play right field but couldn’t find right field. In those days, he ran the bases like a firefly at dusk, skipping second or third base when he felt like it, totally innocent of the immutable laws by which baseball is governed.
Adam is a socially intelligent baseball fan, able to maintain an acceptable level of patter with little effort. He is apt to inject phrases like “good field, no hit” or “high hard one” into any conversation, but he does not understand the finer points of the game, like the infield fly rule or the double switch. Whenever he doesn’t know what to say, he reverts to Tracy’s all-purpose sports comment that works in every conceivable situation: “I’m not surprised.”
He knows I understand the Mysteries, and God knows I am an all-too-willing instructor. We have been through this before. I tell him the Durham shortstop will never make it in the big leagues because he can’t field. Later, when he makes his third error of the game, Adam looks at me solemnly and says, “There you go.” Because it is Father’s Day, he treats my knowledge of baseball trivia with genuine respect, as if this information is impressive and will come in handy some day.
This night will be our final outing as father and son, the very last time we will commune through the shared acoustics of a minor-league baseball game, amidst the no-batters and hum-babes of a summer evening. It is the last time I will educate him, and it is the last time he will say, “There you go.”
It is the sort of June night that requires only a baseball game to complete its perfection. We arrive early enough to watch both teams take batting practice. He has bought good seats, perhaps too good, since they are located just behind the visiting team’s dugout, which means we will be targets for foul balls and screaming line drives off the bats of right-handed hitters. When he was a kid we would have constructed a game of being afraid. He mentions it first thing. “We could get brained in these seats.”
Baseball, especially as the Durham Bulls play it, provides an undemanding background for leisurely conversation, like a jazz guitar at a cocktail party, and that is how Adam and I are using the game. Yet we are keeping a wary eye on every ball that jumps off the bat.
At the seventh-inning stretch, we stand to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and Adam says, “I propose a toast: Father’s Day, next year, right here at the old ballpark.” He says it with very little conviction, and I nod, weakly. We clink our plastic cups of Coke and beer, and return our attention to the game.
It is clear that Adam means this to be a full outing and not a symbolic exercise. We leave in the top of the ninth so we have time to get something to eat. We walk across the street to an outdoor café in the newly refurbished American Tobacco Campus. Since our last outing at the mall, his pace has slowed by half. We enter at the back of the restaurant and move at a snail’s pace past all the tables and the ballgame crowd to the hostess station. “Just one?” the young woman asks. “No, two,” he says as if making a point. She takes a good look at Adam and waves him quickly to the nearest table.
While we wait for our food, he tells me what a wonderful wife he has, as if Jenny were a stranger to me, and repeats everything he has already told me about their evening ritual of candle-lighting, reading, and prayer. Once again, he goes over their morning routine, the anointing with sacred water, the restorative cup of tea. He recites the last half of the Shakespearean sonnet that hangs in their foyer, the one that promises,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
We are running out of things to say.
Then, as if introducing a subject that needs no introduction, he says, “I wonder what it’s like to die.” The question itself is an act of love. He understands how incapacitated I am by his impending death, and he wants to help me say good-bye, or if not to say it, to help me approach the outskirts of saying it. It is his way of letting me know that I am worthy of such a conversation, and it’s his method of protecting me from future regret or self-recrimination. See, he is implying with this offer, there isn’t anything we were afraid to talk about; we covered our bases.
“I’ve thought so much about what comes after death that I haven’t considered death itself. I think Jesus is waiting for you,” I say, barely suppressing my emotion. “You join a great communion of souls. You …”
“Not after death, but dying,” he clarifies. “The act, the event.”
“I don’t know. I wish I knew. I don’t think of it as an event.”
We both want dying to be a procession of dots that gradually fades until they disappear. We do not want it to be the tangent that grazes the crystal sphere and, touching it, shatters it. Together, we treat the subject with the realism and the mystery it deserves. Adam and I decide that the act of dying is more like manual labor to be done in this life. It is a work and, as such, the mystery of it is overrated. We move off the subject not because we are made uncomfortable by it, but because we have done our duty and can’t come up with a better answer.
Finally, he answers his own question. “It’s walking through the door into another room.”
“You won’t be alone,” I say.
“Right,” he says, with a finality that ends the conversation. “It’s overrated.”
Then we fall back into our old routine of hanging out, and with that a comfortable patch of stillness settles over us. Our words to one another were never original or profound, but now we don’t need them at all, not to clarify anything between us, not to speculate on the mystery of death, not even to break a longish silence. We have been here before, but this time it feels like a place to which we will not return.
When we get to his house I walk him from the car across the pea gravel to his front door, as if we’re a couple of teenagers tentatively completing a first date.
“Well thanks,” I say, “I had a lovely Father’s Day.”
“Yeah, man, let’s do it again.”