THE YANKEE CLIPPER rumbled out of South Station and began its long run down the Northeast Corridor. In New Haven while the power was cut so the engine could be changed, I waited in the airless dark with the other passengers—students, businessmen, bleary-eyed young mothers taking babies to the relatives. When the train moved again it felt like a release, a slow breath toward life. Then we cruised until Bridgeport; until Stamford. There, I saw commuters standing on the cement platform, the mirrored peaks of office towers, and, in my mind, the leafy trees that lined Willow Road.
The train pulled out. I was still on it. It was the end of June and soon I was in Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and once again my father was opening his door. He nodded, touched me shyly on the shoulder, and asked if I was all right.
We fell back into it. Still in my head from that summer is the sound of his slippered feet going past my door on his way to the kitchen. Each morning he liked to be the one to make the coffee, set out the bowls and boxes of cereal.
Sometimes as we sat reading the newspaper I’d feel his gaze light on me from across the table. I would glance up and catch him staring. Then an expression of mild embarrassment would obscure the habitual worry on his face, making him appear, for a moment, years younger.
After breakfast one morning I was folding the bed back into a sofa when I felt his quiet presence in the doorway behind me. I had been staying with him longer than a month, and in all that time not once had we discussed the real reason for my leaving Cambridge so abruptly, despite my previously stated plans to remain there. I’d told him that I was hunting for a teaching job, and had already tapped all the possibilities in the Boston area. He’d accepted my explanation—or, at least, had decided not to question me about it; it was our common habit to respect each other’s privacy. Now he handed me the last sofa cushion, helped me to make the room neat, and said consolingly, “A job will turn up. You just have to be patient.”
“I know, Dad.”
“I never told you this. After college, before I took the job with Addison, I was offered an assistant editorial position with Harcourt. Just three months into it there were cutbacks and they let me go. I felt ashamed. I was broke. I had to live with my parents for a few months, until the next thing came along.”
“That must have been tough.”
Gray light came through the sooty window that looked out onto the air shaft. We were standing together without making eye contact. This was our way. We were two men in a little room, and what bound our love, it seemed to me then, were not our successes but our failures.
“Well,” he said. “See you at lunch.”
He was turning away when he stopped, his back and head straightening—as if deep in the landscape of his memory he’d just spotted something moving.
“Are you still in love with her, Julian?”
“What?”
I had never told him about Claire. But he must have sensed something, if only half the story; in his face now I recognized the irrepressible hope that he felt on my behalf.
“Dad, she married somebody else. She’s going to have his baby.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
Quickly he turned and left the room.
I dreamed about her. Lying in the dark on the sofa bed, weighing the unlikely odds of sleep, wondering if I’d ever see her again. Then the surprise of it, each time it happened. Sometimes the dream was so hushed and still it might have been invisible, and yet tiny fragments would drop off it, as though chipped away by the dull blade of my longing, and these I carried hidden in my pockets for days, to worry over in private. Like the moment when, sitting on the landing of the steps that lead from the back of her house to the garden, she turns to me and says she can’t move, her legs won’t work, she is too weak to make it down.
I do not ask her why; I pick her up. That’s what I do. She is almost weightless. And I carry her, cradled in my arms, down the steps to the grass—until, all at once, the picture goes blank, I am awake, and those footsteps are my father’s, here in the white light of morning.