I COME DOWNSTAIRS in the morning and my father is at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. The coffee machine is gurgling on the counter.
“Couple of minutes we’ll have a good cup of Joe,” he says, looking at me over his glasses.
“Smells good.” I’m anxious to talk with him. This is the first chance we’ve had to be alone, and I’m worried we won’t get to talk before the kids wake up. I ask him if my brother is still asleep.
“No. He went off to a doctor’s appointment. He had these kidney stones a few weeks ago. He didn’t want me to say nothing to you. He’s all right now. This morning’s just a checkup. He was in a lot of pain there for a while, until he passed them. Little calcium deposits, I guess they are. The doctor told him it was from the limestone in the water around here. He’ll be back in an hour or two. Sounds like the coffee’s ready. What do you take in it? Milk?”
“No. Nothing,” I say. “Just black.” I’ve turned a section of the newspaper toward me, and it happens to be the obituaries. “How bad can the water be?” I ask. “These two women both lived into their nineties. I think you ought to bottle some of this water; you’d make a fortune. Look—here’s another one: eighty-eight.”
“That’s great if you have your memories,” he says, pouring the coffee. “It ain’t worth shit if you don’t have your memories.”
“Are you all right?”
“What do you mean? My health? I’m good. I’m good.”
“You lost some weight.”
“Oh, hell, yeah! Forty-two pounds. I’m walking five miles a day, and I don’t eat nothing after five o’clock. That’s all. Everything else is the same.”
“You look great.”
“Oh, Kitty keeps me busy. I put some new storms up for her. And the dog is good for me. He likes to get out and run. You want some toast or something?”
“No.”
“So. I found out about Tom. He’s living up in Whitehall. North of here. He got arrested. They arrested him.”
“When was this?”
“Way back in seventy. You were in college.”
“The year Mike died.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right. I thought I remembered something like that. After you were here last time. Thinking about it, I mean.”
“You mean back then.”
“Huh?”
“You heard about Tom getting arrested right after it happened. Back in 1970.”
“Yeah. I don’t think I paid much attention to it.”
“That was a hard year.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what happened to him? Did he go to jail?”
“Like I say, I don’t remember, but I hear they convicted him. They called it ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor.’ He wasn’t allowed to coach anymore, and he had to go see a counselor or something. Anyway, he moved out of town. I know guys who know where he is.”
“Fuck him,” I say. My father flinches. “Leave him alone. I’m done with it. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor? Counseling? Give me a break. Fuck him.” I wave my hand in disgust. “What time does the supermarket open?”
“Why?”
“I just want to buy a few things.”
“Why? What do you need? I went shopping. I got cereal and milk and eggs and lunch meat and bread.”
“I thought I’d try to make that cake, the one that Margaret was talking about yesterday.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE, I lay awake upstairs in what had once been my bed, listening to my father snore. Robert was downstairs on the sofa; Veronica was sleeping on a cot next to me. It took me a long time to quiet myself. Just as I was about to fall asleep, my mother was there with me.
I don’t believe in visitations from the dead. I believe in memory, desire, and a deep-down hunger for symmetry. So it didn’t surprise me that along with my sense of my mother’s presence came the feeling that it wasn’t me, but her granddaughter, who slept with one arm dangling, her face turned away from me, whom she’d come to visit.
Veronica’s birth had been difficult. Kathi labored long and hard, and during the last hour or so of pushing, she had sat on my lap. I alternated rubbing her lower back, slick with sweat, and, between contractions, twining my arms around her from behind and humming to her what I hoped was reassurance. She was in ferocious pain. The smell of blood was in my nostrils. My legs were numb. The nurses’ voices suddenly became more urgent. Then the midwife spoke. “Girl,” she said.
Later, with Kathi and Veronica both asleep, I headed for the hospital snack bar for a cup of coffee. I was wearing a T-shirt the nurses had given me: GLAD TO BE A DAD, it said. Heading back upstairs, I stepped into the elevator and found myself in a group of men. As we rose, the tallest of them, in a chalk-stripe suit, extended his hand to me.
“Congratulations!” He pumped my hand and held on to it, his other hand grasping my forearm. He looked around at the other men, who smiled and nodded, content to have him speak for them.
“What did you have? A boy or a girl?”
“A little girl,” I said.
“All right!” he said, giving my hand a squeeze. “Got any other kids?”
“A boy,” I said. “He’s four.”
“All right!” he said again, looking around at the others, his left hand moving to my shoulder. “Got it right the first time!” The others laughed.
I pulled my hand from his. The elevator doors opened. “Fuck you,” I said. He looked stunned. He turned to the others. They shrugged and rolled their eyes. I stepped from the car and the doors closed behind me.
MY FATHER GETS up from the table, walks over to the counter, and returns with a card file and the coffeepot.
MIDNIGHT CAKE
INGREDIENTS
| ¾ cup shortening | 2¼ cups flour |
| scant 2 cups sugar | ½ teaspoon salt |
| 3 eggs | 1½ teaspoons soda |
| 1½ cups boiling water | 1½ teaspoons baking powder |
| ¾ cup cocoa | 1½ teaspoons vanilla |
BOWL 1:
Cream shortening, adding sugar gradually, till fluffy.
Blend in well-beaten eggs.
BOWL 2:
Slowly add hot water to cocoa and mix until smooth.
Add vanilla.
BOWL 3:
Sift flour, salt, soda, powder together. Add to cream
mixture (Bowl 1). Add cocoa mix (Bowl 2).
Whip to batter. Bake 350 to 375 for 30–35 minutes. Test with fork.
“There was something else we were going to talk about,” my father says. When I look up from the recipe, he holds his hand up like a cop stopping traffic. “Just let me say this now. You need a place of your own, you and Kathi. I just want you to think about it. You don’t have to say nothing. I know it’s expensive up there, but prices are coming back down. You look at your finances, and if you think you can swing the mortgage, I want to help you with the down payment. Will you think about it and talk to Kathi about it?”
“Okay.”
“And just start looking around. See if there’s anything you like.”
“Dad.” Again I get the traffic cop. I reach across the table and knit my fingers with his. “Thanks.”
VERONICA IS STANDING on a chair and stirring the batter. She’s beginning to be comfortable with the dog indoors, although she monitors its every movement. Robert is in the living room, on the sofa, watching cartoons with my brother Joe.
I put the cake layers in the oven and walk into the living room licking my fingers. “You better hurry if you want some batter,” I say to Robert.
He bolts into the kitchen. “Hey! Save some for me!”
I ask my brother how he’s doing, and he tells me about his job. As he talks, I wonder why we haven’t become better friends. It’s as if our connection is based on loyalty, on our shared status as survivors, as if every sentence we utter has, appended to it, “…after all, you’re the only brother I’ve got left.” As if, in a world of disappearing brothers, all we dare ask of each other is to stay put, to remain reliably alive, thank you very much.
On the television there’s an old Disney cartoon in which Goofy is assaulted by a hideous clown from behind a mirror. The mirror is the kind that turns on a horizontal axis, and Goofy tries to escape the lurid jack-in-the-box who chases him round and round the whirling mirror, mounted on a dresser with drawers that open and shut disgorging clothes that appear to be fleeing, until we see an alarm clock, personified and animated, wake and stretch and yawn. As the clock rubs its eyes, it notices Goofy’s dire predicament, and rings and rings until he wakes.
“Are you all right?” Joe asks me.
“Yeah. Sure. Why?”
“I asked you about your job. How’s it going?”
“Sorry. I got distracted by the TV.”
“Daddy! Veronica’s not sharing!”
“UMPH,” MY FATHER says with his mouth full. We’re sitting around the kitchen table. “This is the one. Mmmmm.”
“Can I have some more milk, Dad?” Robert asks.
“Me too,” says Veronica.