My father called on a clear morning in October. This is in White Pine. We’d had days and days of rain. Storm after storm and then, one morning, blue sky.
Tess refused to be still. She no longer read. Wouldn’t sleep. Was always at a window. Despite the gloom, the fires I lit, she wouldn’t stay with me beneath the blankets, wouldn’t slip her feet beneath my legs. I tried to read, but mostly I watched her patrolling, leaving and returning. She wasn’t eating much and her face had taken on an angular severity, which made her eyes appear wider-set than they were. All her softness was gone, and in its place, an unmitigated fierceness. She paced the house like a fighter waiting for the ring. Tess, her constant moving and the ceaseless rain had caused me such a sense of suffocating claustrophobia that when the phone woke me that morning, and I heard my father’s voice, and saw the sky, I was gone before she’d opened her eyes.
He was on a bench down at the waterfront with a bag of donuts and coffee for us both. I was so glad to be there. I think that deep comfort had to do with the relief of having him next to me right as the shell was cracking.
I was dominated by fear. Once again, the world felt precarious and fragile and I was grateful to have my father, upright, still, the way he had always been.
Constancy, kindness and faith, his greatest gifts to me.
It is what I imagine offering to my own son one day.
Steady, I would so much like to be steady.
I kissed the top of his head and sat with him. He put his arm around my shoulder. Whenever we met, after a day, or a month, always there in his face was a flash of boyish excitement. I don’t ever remember meeting him, not once in my entire life, without seeing it. This expression indistinguishable, really, from that of a boy meeting his father. And sometimes it caused a pressure in my chest, something unsettling I couldn’t identify. But today when I saw him, his eagerness, there was no irritation. I only loved him.
His warmth in the cool morning. The soft, round smell, Right Guard and Royall Lyme and some other thing that language can do nothing for.
There’s a smell of coffee too, and of those fresh donuts. Glazed and maple.
White seagulls circling above and strutting in front of us.
“I saw Mom the other day,” he said.
“How is she?”
“Seems the same. She always seems the same.”
“Does she still tease you?”
He laughed. “Not for a while.”
The teasing was about being a Quaker. It had been me who’d told her and it was the last time I’d seen my mother smile. I mean smile with her whole mouth, with a little glee.
“You like that,” I said.
She closed her eyes and nodded her head, suppressing a laugh.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, Joey. It’s just that your father is extraordinary. The man cannot be broken. He sees peace everywhere. Calm in all corners. You and me, we see war. Not your dad. You should learn from him all you can.”
“You mean you and Tess,” I said.
“Me and Tess what?”
“See war in all corners.”
“And not you, Joe?”
I shook my head. “Not the way you two do.”
She nodded in her deliberate way, looking at me as if she were trying to work something out, trying to find a quality in my face she could not.
“What?”
“Well, you are, after all, a man. No way around that in the end. A fact’s a fact.”
“Sink or swim,” I said and smiled at her.
“That’s it, Joe. Sink or swim. Fight or die.” She leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “Despite those facts, I love you. And I love that girl of yours, too.”
“I know you do,” I said.
“Which? Which do you know?”
“Both, Mom, both.”
Now my father was talking. We’d finished our donuts, the coffee was nearly cold, the sun was up high enough to cut the air, to warm our bare necks.
“I get the impression she’s drifting. Faster and faster,” he said.
It was true. As if her eyes were draining out. A recession, a withdrawal. Something she couldn’t help. What I kept thinking, but never said to him, was that what it was, what she couldn’t help, was dying in there.
“Anyway,” he said. “She told me something I don’t understand.”
“About what?”
“What are you planning, Joe?”
“What did she tell you?”
He finished his coffee, crumpled the cup, shot and missed the trash can across the walkway.
“Joey. Please don’t do anything stupid. We’ve had enough. You and I. We’ve had enough of it all.”
We watched a decrepit fishing boat kill its engine and glide into the harbor.
“I don’t know what she’s planning,” I said.
“She?”
“Tess.”
He stood up, grabbed the cup and dropped it into the can. He took his time, but when he came back to the bench, he said, “It’s not just Tess.”
“I have no plans, Dad. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t know what’s happened to her. And I don’t know what she’s planning.”
“It’s Mom, too, Joey.”
“She’s what? Giving instructions?”
He shrugged. “Impression I have.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She doesn’t really tell you anything, does she? But that’s not the point. What I’d like, Joe, is for you to stay away from it. And I’d like for you to talk to Tess. Keep her away, too.”
I thought of her looking down on the street from our bedroom window, the black mask, her visits to The Pine.
I hadn’t seen him so angry at my mother in many years.
“Easy to preach crime from prison,” he said.