Chapter 16

What happened was that for a long time my father couldn't get "Firecracker in My Heart" written the way he wanted it. The refrain was great but the release never sounded right, and he said he could never concentrate enough to get good lyrics for the last eight bars with Gerri around. This time he wanted to make sure the song was recorded and the deal did not fall through, so very often after dinner he'd have to leave the apartment to go to his friend's house, where there was peace and quiet and no Geraldine.

One afternoon, when my mother was out and I was in my room, my father came home early. "Anybody home?" he called the minute he opened the front door, and right away I could tell he was in a holiday mood. Gerri and I both came running immediately; that Fourth of July sound in his voice meant something good was up.

"Hiya, Neil! Hiya, Gerri!" he said, and he practically zipped across the living room to the piano, pulled his "Firecracker" music out of the bench and set it on the music stand, then plopped himself on the bench and loosened his tie. "I think I really have it, Neil!" he said. "Right in the middle of a phone call from Cincinnati when I was quoting the market price for IBM, it just flew into my head from nowhere. I better put it down quick before it gets away!"

My father doesn't get excited often, but he was really excited now. He opened the piano, tilted his head, and began to play. He played about three chords, then he stopped. He looked down at the keys, touched a couple of them and tried another chord, "What the devil is all over these keys?" he asked.

I went over and looked at the keys. I touched a couple of them. "They're sticky," I said.

"What from? What are they sticky from?" my father said. The Fourth of July went right out of his voice and the holiday expression disappeared from his face.

I figured applesauce, but it didn't matter; we both knew they were sticky from Gerri, that it was Gerri who had messed up the piano, that it was Gerri, again and again, who was fouling things up, snafuing everything.

My father got up from the bench and stalked into the kitchen. I followed him; I guess I wanted to help clean up the keys so he could hurry and get started before he lost all the stuff that had come into his head during his phone call from Cincinnati. I rushed around and found a sponge, and he held it under the warm-water tap until it was soft enough to use, and I found the Ivory soap he told me to look for and then followed him back into the living room, and oh, good, grey grief, Gerri was sitting on the piano bench and just lifting a crayon to the firecracker music, pretending to write notes all over it like my father does.

My father flew to the piano and got there just in time to grab the crayon out of Gerri's hand, before she'd messed up the whole page. Then he threw the sponge on the floor and he yelled at her.

Gerri started to scream and my father just stood there with his face turning redder and redder, holding on to the sheet music like it was a breathing baby and no kidding, his hand was shaking like there were no muscles or bones in it.

Finally, he pulled his eyebrows toward each other as if there was a stripe of horrible pain right behind them and he shook his head. "I've lost it, Neil," he said to me, and he made a fist with his hand and held it up to his mouth the way people do when they are trying to keep their hands warm. Then he slumped onto the piano bench and shook his head. "It's gone," he whispered.

Ten minutes later he was in the bedroom packing the suitcase he'd brought out of the storage room; it was the same suitcase we'd used to bring Gerri's stuff home from the training school.

Gerri was standing in the door of the bedroom, holding Woodie and watching. My father was opening drawers, pulling out socks and underwear and shirts, and stuffing them into the suitcase. His face was still red and his hands were still shaking.

"I've thought about this a long time, Neil," he was saying. "A long time. It's nothing sudden. The situation here–it's not good," he said. I could see he was perspiring. His forehead was wet and a drop of wetness was moving down the side of his head in a straight line to his chin. "As soon as I get another apartment set up, I want you to think about coming to live with me. I think it's important for a boy your age to have a peaceful home life without the sort of...pressures we're living under here."

"Dad, I don't mind," I started to say, but even as I was saying it, Gerri had shuffled into the bedroom and begun opening dresser drawers and pulling out clothes and trying to stuff them into the open suitcase. I suppose I would have thought it was funny to see her pulling my mother's bras and pantyhose out of the drawers and think she was helping, but my father didn't think it was funny at all. I think he'd had enough. He just threw a ball of socks on the bed like he hoped the socks would put a hole right through the mattress and he yelled, "GERALDINE, STOP IT!" in a dragon voice that could shatter eardrums and must have traveled through three floors.

Geraldine's eyes opened wide and her mouth opened wider. She looked as if she'd peeked into a jack-in-the-box and a fiend had jumped out. Then, oh, good, grey grief, she wet her pants. I looked down at the rug where she was standing and saw this awful dark spot that was getting bigger and darker and right away I could see that my father hadn't missed it either.

He just walked out of the room and I heard him open the piano bench and clean out the music. He came back to stuff it all into his suitcase. Then he snapped the case shut and picked it up.

"I'm going to leave it up to you, Neil, I know you'll make a wise decision," he said, and he went into the living room, wrote a short note to my mother, pushed it into an envelope, pasted it shut, and gave it to me to give to her. "I'll call you soon," he said and he sat down the suitcase and put both his arms around me. Then he just held me and held me and I thought maybe he was thinking it over and changing his mind and would go right back in the bedroom and unpack and just stay here with us like always. Instead, he just gave me one more squeeze and ran his hand over his eyes, and then he picked up his suitcase and walked out of the apartment for good.

***

Without my saying a word, my mother could see something was wrong the minute she came home. She put down her packages so she could read the note my father had given me to give her, and she went over to the kitchen doorway and leaned against it when she opened the envelope.

Gerri had learned a new word, something that sounded like "Womba," which turned out to mean Mama. As soon as she saw Mom come in, she started saying, "Womba, Womba," because she was not only thrilled to see her mother come home but also seemed pleased with herself for improving her vocabulary. So while Mom read the note, Gerri kept yelling "Womba, Womba, Womba" at the top of her lungs.

I said, "Sshh, Gerri, shh," really wishing I could stuff a couple of handkerchiefs in her mouth the way the crooks do on TV when they really want to shut somebody up, but I didn't want to upset my mother any more than she was already upset. So Gerri kept it up–Womba, Womba–sounding like a caveman about to throw a spear. I was watching my mother; her nose was getting red and she was pressing her lips together very tight. All of a sudden, she ran into the bathroom and shut the door; a minute later I heard water running. My heart felt like it was going womba womba too.

But she came out almost right away looking okay. She told me she wasn't really surprised that Dad had left. I told her exactly what had happened and she said she didn't blame my father, not one bit. Then she took Geraldine into the bathroom to clean her up and said that life was just going to have to go on and that we'd better start thinking about preparing dinner. She asked me to wash four baking potatoes and stick them in the oven. Then she quickly said, "Not four baking potatoes, I mean three baking potatoes," and she started to cry, and no kidding, it was awful.

I felt like running out of the apartment and going somewhere else like the laundry room or the garage or out on the street, maybe trying to find my father and make him come back, asking him to think it over, please. But instead I just went into the living room.

Almost immediately I could tell something was different. The piano bench was open and empty, except for a few of my Chopin exercise books and a few old songbooks, but there was something else missing.

Then I realized what it was. My father had taken the big photograph of Grandpa with him, and mine was gone too. The only picture left on top of the piano now was Gerri's, the one my mother had taken with the Polaroid and put in the white leather frame. It was standing on the piano all by itself. My father had left that one behind.