5.

The difficulty of this confession was to make clear that the blame and humiliation are mine alone. But something has gone wrong. I switch the TV back to Godzilla wagging a train car in his teeth.

“You’ve constructed the story that suits you. I just want to know what you plan to do.”

I tell her, “I’m going back.”

“Where are you?”

“I mean I’ll talk to her. To Elaine.”

It was nearly ten when I called a cab from my study. The night express arrived in Albany at 4:15 A.M. And as the train rolled into the white of the moon on the Hudson, after the miles of black cornfields and forest skirting the Mohawk River listening to the man across the aisle unwrap toffees from red cellophane, I had imagined spotting my mother’s angular face on the station platform. Despite Dain’s smirking from the luggage rack, we would share a subtle smile to say, What a lark, that we should always be so glad to see each other, after the blasted hopes and untimely deaths of the other half of this family … what strange irony that it is still so good to see you. So good.

But she was not there. I hadn’t told her I was coming. And I felt pathetic for imagining this scene. At the station curb I turned down three cabs, walked two blocks and took a room on the third floor of a cheap hotel. I sat on the nubby concave bed, slipped off my shoes and watched a Godzilla movie, then pay-per-view pornography. The sight and sound of enormous wet anatomy had a strangely calming effect. I called her hotel. It was 5 A.M. But she would be awake, reading budget assessments and impact reports for her interview.

I did not tell her where I was. She seemed glad to hear my voice. We discussed her talks with the firm the day before, assessing its tactics against development in the Adirondacks.

Then there was a pause. I watched the cock of a blonde man ripple down the throat of a woman wearing gold earrings. She asked, “There anything wrong?” I shut the thing off.

Despite their bickering over how well he had tied down the suitcases, the thing I kept wondering, as we continued the drive to the Kennebucks, was whether I might have a moment alone with Uncle Charlie. After Angelica’s magical touch to my private parts, hope was mixed with dread that while Dottie passed around snapshots of their last trip to Las Vegas, Charlie would wink and lead me up to his musty attic. He would take out his gun collection, his rack of pipes the doctor had made him stop using—which we would look over distractedly, until he brought the magazines from a small green trunk. The ones I could not believe the women inside posed for—on their hands and knees, wearing what seemed completely superfluous underwear—and then went out shopping and mailing letters like everyone else in the world.

In the early months after Dain was dead, over breakfast and dinner in that house that had never been square but now seemed more skewed, the floors uneven as a ship’s deck, each door missing its jam by a smirking half inch, I would imagine Angelica in such undergear. It distracted me from my mother’s verbal attacks against the doctors and lawyers, and the look of my father—gone gray under the eyes—listening like a deaf man trying to make us believe he understood. Then the essay he’d started in the waiting room was published.

“I was thinking about the article,” I told her. “The one he wrote about Dain.” (She said nothing.) “I know how it hurt you.”

There was another long pause. Then a sigh. I knew, because she’d told me, she wanted to save her energy, to overcome the signs of her age at her interview. But she could not resist saying once again, “Your brother was a name for feelings he’d never allowed himself to feel. It wouldn’t even occur to him he was exposing my grief—or yours for that matter.”

“You remember, the day the magazine arrived, he was so nervous. You could follow the piddled cigarette ash up the stairs to his attic. Like a track in a fairy-tale.”

That evening, under our separate lights, I was reading a history of the Boer War and my father was rattling the pages of the newspaper when my mother opened the magazine. The house in the evening still felt uncannily silent without Dain, as though the lights were always duller and the upholstery had absorbed all sound. Then my eye was caught by the flare of a match across the road, one of the FBI men lighting a cigarette. She closed the magazine with a slap.

“Have you read it since then?” I asked her.

“Of course not. Is this really why you called?”

I watched the red tip of the distant cigarette. It pierced the center of my father’s chest in the reflection of us not looking at each other. In the glass I watched her stand and walk from the room. She shut the kitchen door behind her.

He’d said nothing about the article coming out. We listened to her rip each page, then push the shreds down through carrot peelings and egg shells. I think he’d expected it to create an opening between them. He was so still. Like a rack made to hold his glasses that roundly reflected the room. It was as though the heart had been pulled from his chest, and he was just waiting to be dead. I spent my week’s allowance on another copy of the magazine. But it was not until I heard it read aloud that I understood.

In our fifth-grade speech class, Miss Stone had brought in a tape recorder so we could hear ourselves speak. I said I wanted to listen again, during lunch period, to my talk on the exploitation of farm workers. But once I was alone in the chalk-dry air, I read from my father’s article.

“Did I ever tell you I read it? I have a copy even now.”

Her Bette Davis pitch: “How touching.” I switched the TV back on. The blonde man reached down to woggle the woman’s breasts.

While listening to my father’s written words, played back in my own faltering voice, I stared at the obscenity carved into the center of my desk. At the end of the essay he described the way Dain had looked the evening he died.

yet in looking into the face of my own son, while feeling the awful waste of youth and a mind barbed with potential, I could not look into those sickening yellow eyes, could not sense the air of death as dense as the smoke of a funeral pyre without knowing that I was staring deep into the face of my own mortality, sprung from my life, and tragically to precede it. Thus does the body give the lie to ambition. Thus does flesh steal the last light from the mind.

When the bell sounded, staring up at the two tones of pale green in the walls, the portraits of Emerson and Webster and Bryant, something popped inside me, like a release of dry spores.

“Seriously, Joseph. You can hardly stand my mulling over the past.” (Pause.) “Has Baxter run out of adventures?”

I walked the three miles home, cut through the orchard to keep from seeing George and Allen, and climbed to my perch in the oak tree.

It had been a rainless spring and the front door of the house was open. The flap of pigeons’ wings in the barn made a sound like fingers upon a loose drum. My father was sitting over his typewriter on the third floor. I could see him pause, covering his face in his long hands, working out a tropical romance set in Burma.

Then it became clear to me. He hadn’t only forgotten my mother and me. As my mother would say all these years later, he’d left Dain out of his article too.

From among the soughing dry leaves, I watched him poke away at the old Smith-Corona, creating lines that women would admire on subways and in waiting rooms all over the country. Through the creaking branches, I recalled the sound of her hands pressing shredded paper through a day’s garbage. For the first time, my eyes twitched. The doctors would insist it was a nervous condition. But at that moment, I felt the universe trying to throw me to earth for thinking ill of my father. I suffered that condition for two years. Until that very afternoon, on our way to visit the Kennebucks.

“I was reminded the other day,” she tells me, changing the subject. “I was thinking about that routine he had. The way he talked about his brave stand against McCarthy.”

“Did I wince?” my father would ask us over the dinner table, shaking his fist at Dain and me. “Did I tremble?”

We shouted, “No siree!”

“No sir! Not William Stoyanovich!” And then he would lean across his plate, wagging his finger. “So long as you know the truth. Let ’em sing for it.”

And then my mother would laugh, her rough, mannish chortle, because her boys were laughing. Her hair was short then, her eyes still sharp and cool. And we would look at her. To hold onto the rare image of her joy. It was after the hearing that they decided to move in together, knowing her mother would be suspicious, and that his parents, amid their icons of Virgin and Child, would consider him dead.

“I was reminded because I ran into Gertrude Douglas yesterday, outside the capitol. You wouldn’t remember her. She was in the Party before his campaign. She’s a Republican fund-raiser now, I’m sorry to say. My God, did she have evil to say of your father. Her husband was blacklisted because of him and it stills dogs her. His was one of the names he handed over.”

“Names?”

“Names. Names, you know.”

The blonde man begins to tremble. I turned the TV off, then back on. An Asian man enters her from the back side. Anatomy goes in and out like Chinese handcuffs.

“I did give you his journal. Don’t tell me it’s taken you twenty-five years to read it.”

Curtly: “Yes. Yes, of course, I know you gave it to me.”

While she recalled the fund-raiser’s days in the Party, I finally grasped it. My father was an informer. The one proud moment in his life was a lie.

I cut her off: “I never asked you. How could he run on the ticket, if—”

“He cut a deal. They got the names. He was allowed to be a hero in public. He was too young to be a New Dealer after all. He wasn’t the only one.”

The blonde man started his short strokes. I felt the entire balance of our relationship shift in a direction I couldn’t grasp. I was not sure what I was saying when I started, “I never told you what I found.” (Silence.) “I told you, didn’t I? Twenty-five years ago, as you point out. He tried to make it look like an accident.”

Coldly, “This is what you called at 5 A.M. to tell me?”

I pressed my free hand between my knees. It was as though I were falling, and this was the only hope of grabbing hold: “He was already sick when he killed himself.”

“How could you know that?”

I wanted to tell her about Felice and Elaine. I didn’t want things to go this way. I shut my eyes tight, but the words kept coming, “I met him for dinner.”

“He told you—Why are you telling me this now?”

“He may not have been unhappy. He may just not have wanted to die that way.”

I turned off the lamp bolted to the nightstand. The parts on the screen loomed even larger and I turned the light back on. I pressed my thumb to an aching spot in my forehead.

“But I’ll bet he never saw anyone. Illness was the wrath of God. He was as Catholic as his own father.”

I took a breath and told her, “I had to fix it. He’d done a bad job, or he’d fallen awkwardly. I had to rearrange him. I did it for Angelica. And for Will.”

“But he had to suffer. He felt he had to pay for his sins.”

In the pickup, lying on my back on the sleeping bag, I’d been staring up at vibrating gulls, wishing Dain would return and talk to me, even if it was to tell me again to untie the suitcases, when a black shape appeared against the gray sky. It collapsed, grew into a lopsided diamond and then into a rectangle. A red shape joined it—her suitcase—and silently exploded, blossoming like flak all across the sky.

I was on my feet as we rattled onto the gravel shoulder. We had just descended a curve over a small hill. Against the horizon, I saw Allen and George pull over. My father jumped out, slipping on the mud and grabbing the truck’s bed like a bad skater. His eyes were lit up behind his glasses. The draft from the cars pressed his sweater against his ribs. My mother remained inside. Then the first piece came by.

A pair of white cotton panties, faintly stained in the crotch, cartwheeling on the spokes of a Cadillac. Then a truck with one of her high heels spiked into its grill.

They were everywhere.

Her slip, flapping from the antenna of a station wagon; a bra snagged by a bumper. A Harley’s taillight trailing a garter belt. Her good gray suit jacket, brought to attend her sister’s church as a gesture of reconciliation, ironed flat against the asphalt. Then her jewelry and cosmetics, spilled across both lanes.

I climbed to the ground. My father and I just stood there, at the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Faces stared at us through speed and glass. As her private things swirled all around, I felt as though we’d been caught looking at the magazines in Charlie’s attic. Then my mother marched past, toward where George and Allen were parked.

I don’t know where she was going. Her red blouse kept shrinking toward the Plymouth. I don’t think she knew. But age had suddenly settled upon me. For the first time in my life, I felt the burden of gravity; I felt the full mass of my own small body drawn to the face of the earth.

I turned to look at my father. His head was bowed. I thought he was sorry for humiliating her. Until I saw the pen in his hand, and one of his notepads.

He was taking notes. He was taking notes and suddenly her unearthly laughter filled the gray dome of sky. Then Dain was there, standing atop a telephone pole.

He was puffed up so badly his eyes were swollen nearly shut, his penis a round button in the shallow V of flesh above his thighs. He nodded, and I knew it was over. We were done acting like a family. And it was this moment he’d been waiting, even scheming for. He winked, then vanished into air.

I still can’t say what was in my face as I stepped in front of my father. The moment he looked at me his hands fell still at his sides. Dain was gone. But he had left something inside me. I said, “It’s over now.” My voice even sounded like Dain’s. “Things have changed too much.” His face emptied, the way it had when she tore up his article. The notepad flapped in the wind. Then I remembered Angelica touching me in bed that morning. So I said the only words that seemed sufficiently serious. I looked at a wad of pantyhose beneath the truck’s bumper. “I had sex today.” I said, into that color of unreal flesh, “So I guess I’m okay and we don’t really need you.”

At home, Angelica was frantic from Dottie Kennebuck’s phone calls. She held me tight to her breast, sobbing while my mother loaded our suitcases into the taxi. Across the road, George was talking over the radio. But Allen had stepped out. His hands hung at his sides, ready to help however he could.

In a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, after making several calls, my mother ordered dinner and promised to be back by morning. I remember watching through a thunderstorm as the traffic lights changed. It was over an hour before I recognized the Plymouth.

I went down and sat in the back seat. Allen bought me a fudge bar. The rain hissed and the streets grew empty while George told stories about Guam. And then they must have carried me back to the room. The last things I remembered were palm trees and women with round arms before I awoke looking into my mother’s sleeping face.

The hotel had left a newspaper outside each door. On the front page there were three pictures: statues of Lincoln and Washington and Franklin, with clean white gags around their mouths. The Plymouth was gone. All these years, on her trips alone into the city, she had kept a whole other life in reserve. I stood before the window listening to tires zip rainwater from warm asphalt. It was then, looking back at I understood why I had always taken the time to read the articles they did, and to study history, and follow their conversations.

I dressed and went downstairs to a deli. I bought coffee and orange juice and rolls and told the woman behind the counter that we had just moved into the neighborhood. In the room I set the things on the bureau next to the glasses wrapped in white paper.

Then I waited on the edge of her bed. I wanted her to know I understood: that our life with Dain and my father had only been preparation, so that I would know how to live alone with her. When her eyes opened, I said, “There’s a store across the street. They sell olive loaf and the kind of salmon you like.”

She covered her face. “What time is it? You’ve been out?” We had never been a casual family. She was in her underwear and pulled the sheet to her chest. I wished Dain were there to guide me. I held up the paper to show her the headline.

SPOCK PROTESTERS GAG FATHERS

Then she looked at the things on the nightstand, and the cup I was holding out. “The store has produce and things.” She took the coffee and I felt better. “So I don’t think we’ll have any problems getting food.”

My father survived a half bottle of Excedrin, married Angelica, and had another son. He also finally built a small greenhouse. Until her death, after Will had moved away with his own family, Angelica kept mums and geraniums that filled her empty house.

My mother and I lived alone together for five years. She wrote copy and organized demonstrations against the war. I went to high school, dated girls who could recite the major dates of the American if not the Russian Revolution, cooked and did laundry, and tended her wounds whenever a demonstration turned ugly. But most of all I listened. Over breakfast and dinner, sitting in parks and wandering supermarket aisles, I listened to her explain how he had ruined her life. I even tried to fix her up—with a teacher, an IRS agent, even Hank Starnum and his tiny marijuana cigarettes—so that when I left she would have someone besides my father’s ghost.

The camera pulls back. There is a second woman in a chair rubbing her own breasts and crotch. Despite the puckering of her lips, it is clear she has a terrible overbite.

She demanded, “And what does it matter to me anyway if he was happy or not? He was a coward. What do you want from me?”

“When did you know he named names?”

“After the boy went into the hospital,” she said flatly, still unable to pronounce Dain’s name. “He thought it was a judgment. And what exactly did you call for?”

“Excuse me if—”

“What do you want from me?”

All that I’d said to Max and Sylvia, to Angus, even to Will … I saw then, it had all been mere rehearsal. The blonde man pulled out and came into the woman’s face. The woman with the overbite appeared delighted. I switched back to Godzilla. Its webbed foot crushed a bridge.

“It may be nothing.” (She waited.) “I’m still trying to understand.”

I imagined my father in a closed room, in his tie and starched shirt, whispering the names of comrades, telling himself he had to be saved for the cause he would someday lead. I wondered if there were some such mysterious calculations in my own mind, by which a young girl’s suffering would be erased. “I’ve been rather mystified myself,” I told her sincerely. Godzilla pushed over a skyscraper. Tiny bodies rained down like pods from a dry tree. “I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with Will and his family.” I tried to imagine Dain seated beside me. But there were only outlines and shadows, like television channels fighting for the same screen. “The woman’s name is Elaine. She has a daughter by her first marriage.”

“You and she …”

“No,” shaking my head. “No, in fact, I wish that it were possible … I just met the girl. Nothing’s happened—at least … I just seem to have developed some kind of preoccupation.” I closed my eyes, trying to see the numbers and equations that made everything right. I said to the darkness, “It’s her daughter.”

I sensed the brightening sky like an acid wash, reaching down through my window, and hers, to reveal her humiliation.

“I don’t know what to call it. I just feel so badly …” My hands rested upturned on my legs. They belonged to someone else. “My God, mother.”

“Why are you talking to me? Why are you telling me this? Is this something you think I need?”

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. “I don’t blame you for anything.”

“The only thing I expected …” She stops to breathe. “—was that you might try and acquit yourself with some small decency.” (Pause.) “I watched him do this, you know—give himself excuses not to give a damn.” (Pause.) “My God. My bloody, suffering God!”

Women and children were trampled by a panicked mob. Godzilla beat his chest. I closed my eyes. I made myself speak gently: “You remember when I was in college. Studying religions. I told you, I thought I was looking for a system of forgiveness.” (Silence.) “She is—Felice—she’s what I wanted from all of those disciplines.” (Silence.) “To acquit myself decently as you put it. I have to feel there’s something worth salvaging. I forgave her her hardness from the moment I saw her. There is good in the girl. Something that has survived.”

“What on earth do you expect me to say? Have you talked to the girl’s mother?” An army general and a man in a lab coat confer over a map, deciding how to lure the monster toward the power plant. Cut to Godzilla munching the train car. “You have to do that. You must. You’ve already constructed the story that suits you. I want to know what you plan to do.”

This was when I knew it is over.

“I’m going back.”

“Where are you?”

“I mean I’ll talk to her. To Elaine.”

Godzilla steps on a car. A woman grabs her own hair. Outside my room, someone kicks the ice machine. The machine coughs.

“I’m going to try to make something between Elaine and myself.” But there’s no point. It is finished.

From watching her in meeting halls and debates, I know. She cannot leave unconsidered questions before she acts. She will never discuss strategy while ethical questions remain. And now she’s blinked; she is ready to drop my motives, to discuss what I will do.

I thought I had come for judgment. But it was really for this. The compromise she never granted my father, she cannot but grant to her only son. We are all either of us has left. I pull my knees to my chest, and hold them tight. The bedcover is cool through my socks. Her voice grows weary. I want to tell her I love her. She says, “You’ll talk to her. The mother. You’ll tell her everything. So she can decide.”

I nod, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell her.” Then I blurt out, “It was only him.”

“What?”

“I never blamed you. Only him did I actually have to forgive. And I did. I don’t really know how.”

She is silent a long while. The scientist’s coat flaps, riding in an open jeep. “It’s the nature of families,” she says. “We all end up paying ransom on ourselves.”

“I just wish Dain were here. If Dain were here—”

The line goes dead.