CHAPTER 4

I was lost in thought sitting across the table from Brenda when a cicada smacked against the dining-room window and fell onto the outside sill. Its lacy wings buzzed frantically.

“Guess what?” Brenda said. She was unusually perky and girlish. She speared a chunk of chicken and diced celery with her fork. My father would have complained that chicken salad was not a proper meal for someone coming all the way from California, but I thought the cold supper was perfect in the blistering heat.

“I can’t guess. What?”

“I’ve been dating.” She popped the forkful of chicken into her mouth and chewed close-lipped and smiling.

“That’s nice.”

“James,” she said. “Not Jim, and never Jimmy. I met him at the singles group where I met your dad.”

“OK. James.” I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t very well take the moral high ground about her dating so soon after her husband died. Certainly not on my father’s behalf. In the first place, there was a twenty-five-year age difference between my father and Brenda, which already made him suspect. And in the second place, he’d played by his own rules so why couldn’t she? When Brenda moved in, he was still seeing Darleen, his favorite, on the sly. Not much moral ground there. I didn’t want to hear about Brenda’s dating life, though.

“Can I let Hoffman in?” I said.

“Go ahead.”

I went out and unlatched the side gate. Hoffman jumped up. He was a big shaggy mutt no one bothered to train. I plucked a locust off his back and threw it in the grass. He followed me into the house and I gave him a treat from the box on top of the fridge.

“So what do you think?” Brenda said, when I sat down again.

“What do I think of what?”

“Of James.” She waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“I don’t know.”

She lit a cigarette. “Don’t feed Hoffman from the table,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“He’s rich, you know. James is.” Brenda tossed her head back and blew out a cone of smoke. She must have wanted to freak me out with her new boyfriend—prove she was a rebel, not the boring bookkeeper I easily ignored in the past. She finally showed some personality during my father’s illness, but what she thought was cool was just cold. “He’s really got you under his thumb,” she’d said a few times as I hurried to refill a humidifier or fetch my father a cup of tea. Maybe she was right, he had me under his thumb. But he was dying. If he wanted a cup of tea, I would bring him tea.

Now she was goading me again, telling tales as if we were in the same class in junior high. I watched her carefully. I wondered if she had heard that my mother recently got a surprise check in the mail. I didn’t think Brenda knew yet. She would have made a big stink about it if she had heard. Eventually, she would find out. For the time being, my mother was keeping the news to herself. She told only Susan and me, and Uncle Harry, who at that particular moment was tight with my mother. Then Uncle Harry flipped to the other side, although he swore he hadn’t talked to Brenda. He did talk to me, though. He called and started yelling: “You made a promise to your father! Don’t you dare break it!”

Uncle Harry had a point. I made a promise to my father, and so did Susan. Brenda inherited the house plus money from my father’s insurance policy and a savings account, but she expected more. Specifically, the money from a credit-union account my parents opened when Susan was born. As soon as my father got sick, Brenda demanded he change the beneficiary on that account from Eve Aronson née Braverman (my mother) to Brenda Aronson née McLean. It wasn’t right to leave money to an ex-wife, Brenda argued, and eventually my father agreed.

During one of my sister’s visits in the winter, he called us to his bedside. He said everything he had would be split between Brenda and the two of us except for the house. That went to Brenda alone. He asked us to promise no matter what, in addition to the house, Brenda would get a full fifty percent of his estate. Susan and I would divide the other half between us. We promised. He had only been married to Brenda four years, and it was our childhood house. But we were terrified at the thought of his death and would have agreed to anything he asked.

In the end, though, he never completed the forms required to change beneficiaries, and my mother’s name stayed on the credit-union account. Now Uncle Harry wanted me to persuade my mother to return the $20,000 check to the estate. The money would then be divided according to my father’s instructions. “It was my brother’s dying wish,” Harry said.

Could I break the promise I made to my father? We’d gotten so close during his illness. Always on his terms, though. We still weren’t able to talk about a lot of things. I never confronted him about the past. Not really. I didn’t stand up to him. I never thought about what I might need or deserve from him—or how early on, I was left to fend for myself.

“What about the promise he made?” I said to Uncle Harry.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Uncle Harry said. “What promise?”

“The promise to protect me,” I said, my voice catching on the last two words.

“Yeah, so?”

“So he broke it.”

I asked my mother why she hadn’t taken her share of the money years ago when she and my father split up. He’d bought her out of the house, so why didn’t they divide up the cash too? “It was a mistake, obviously,” she said. “But at the time, I wanted to leave on good terms. I didn’t want to fight with him. I didn’t take it because . . .” She paused. “Because, honestly, Joanna . . .” Her spoon scraped the bottom of her coffee cup, an idle stir. “I never dreamed he would get married again.” He was a philanderer. She thought he wanted his freedom.

Once in a while, “just for fun” my mother would say, she fished a random letter from the war out of an old cardboard box. She’d read aloud from the onionskin writing paper, laughing here and there at a private joke, and then her voice would trail off, and I’d realize she was reading to herself, and I’d have to remind her that I was there, that I wanted to hear, too.

Somewhere in England

23 Nov 1944

Dearest Evie,

This terrible parting must come to an end. Then we’ll love each other always, won’t we darling Evie? We’ll never let anything come between us, because if the biggest catastrophe that has ever befallen mankind could not come between us what else could?

Yours forever,

Clyde

“You know your father was supposed to be a writer,” my mother said wistfully.

He never said this himself. He said he was happy teaching English and satisfied with his life. Only occasionally, glimmers of regret flickered through the bluster of his bootstrap optimism—two times that I could think of in particular. Once when I was twelve and I dragged out the brown suitcase with the yellow handle I found buried in the back of my closet. I didn’t remember thinking I was doing anything wrong by opening the suitcase. I must have figured if it was stored in my room, even if the room had once been my father’s den, then the suitcase couldn’t have been top secret or off limits. That wasn’t quite fair, though—he gave up his den reluctantly when Susan couldn’t tolerate sharing a room with me anymore, I was too messy, and the deal was that he’d still keep some of his things in there. At first I was afraid to sleep alone in the room lined with his bookcases, but I got used to it, even got to like it, and soon the titles glowing on spines in the dark were infiltrating my dreams. The Magic Mountain, Freud and Marx, The Adventures of Augie March. I remembered slipping out of bed one night when I was around eleven and turning on the light to read a few incomprehensible pages of a book called Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille, and then pulling out the dictionary to look up sensuality. No matter how many times I read the definition I couldn’t understand what it had to do with death. I was on my knees looking for something else, probably my Tric-Trac racing set that got shoved way back in the closet, when I first found the suitcase. I dragged it out. The button locks clicked decisively when I slid them with my thumbs, the latches sprung open and the lid popped up. Inside on top of some old manila envelopes lay a thick, crumbling black photo album. I opened the cover. It was titled “Ye Olde Picture Booke” inscribed in white ink so the lettering would show up on the black page, and then the date, June 23, 1934. I did the math. My father was seventeen that year and about to leave the orphanage. I started reading the descriptive paragraphs he’d written below the photographs, and right away I felt I knew the boy who looked out at me with a steady gaze from the steps of the Home, the boy who had written in white: “Off we go in joyful glee, a score of sinful orphans we.” The discovery was thrilling and I felt shy because of it, but I went in search of my father anyway. I wanted to look at Ye Olde Picture Booke with him, and maybe I could meld the little orphan behind the iron fence with the older boy in the photographs, and then with the man who lived in my house and was supposed to belong to me. I wandered around holding the black album open in my hands like it was the Book of Kells until I found him sitting on the edge of the bed putting on his shoes. “Daddy,” I said dreamily, still hypnotized by my journey into the past, “you should write a book.”

A shadow passed over his features. “Write your own book,” he said. He stared at the floor between his knees. Neither of us moved, but I felt as if a door had been shut in my face. I backed out of the small space between the bed and the dresser, turned and carried away the album, leaving behind a trail of crumbling black confetti.

The only other time I witnessed a glint of ambition, I was just a little older and I stayed hidden in the hallway. He was huddled at the dining-room table with one of his students, Peter Grafton. They weren’t poring over Peter’s poetry as they often did. My father was sharing his own writing. He was showing fifteen-year-old Peter a manuscript and explaining how he put it together using diaries, letters, issues of the orphanage newspaper called the Oracle, and captions and rhymes from Ye Olde Picture Booke. That was the last I saw or heard of the manuscript. Occasionally over the years, I revisited the photograph album, but I knew enough to keep it to myself. With me, he shared only birthday rhymes. When you are fifty will I still be nifty?