HOLDING HER SUITCASE very tightly, she stood on her toes and kissed Theo’s ear and let him lift their son into her arms, then turned around and realized everyone else had already boarded long ago. A long long time ago. She turned and ran past the empty check-out desk and the unguarded passenger door, and skimmed across the dark airfield to the plane, which blinked and hummed, a huge comic animal, striped black down one side like a skunk’s dream of flight. How cold, how dark the air was turning! She climbed up the steps, ducked her head, and hugging the child against her, stepped into the body of the plane, somewhere near its eyes. A stewardess, in a camel’s-hair mini-dress, slammed the door behind her.
Inside, men and women were reading, adjusting their seats, squeezing their coats into the overhead racks. Erica worked her way down the aisle to a window seat over the wing. Nestling her suitcase under her, she buckled her safety belt, settled the sleeping child on her lap, and pressed her face to the pane of glass, very small, one vertebra among a hundred. Far away, behind a huge plate-glass window, the land people waved like observers at an aquarium.
The motor rumbled alive; there was a smell of shoe polish and gasoline as the plane turned, gathered its bulk, and headed for the broad road to heaven. Ahead of them, the airstrip was lit with tiny blue lights like cornflowers, bright on the bare field. Out of the corner of her eye Erica noticed a woman tenderly fluffing her hair. That, and the curve of Anatole’s cheek against her shoulder, and the hands waving on the far side of the darkness crystallized and crushed her, as suddenly the earth seemed to split in two and she felt herself torn from him, tossed high, and snuffed out, over the fiery body of the plane that carried her. She did not know what sky or what field received them.
With a cry she awoke. Or was it the child who cried out? Beside her, Theo slept on. Groping for her glasses, she squinted at the clock. The hands pointed to seven; the plane left Albany at nine. The drive to the airport took two hours.
“Get up!” she shouted, jumping out of bed. A heap of books crashed to the floor. Already she saw her mother’s disappointed face in the lobby of the air terminal in Detroit. And her father—would he be disappointed?
Theo opened one eye.
“The plane will be twenty minutes late,” he said, as if he had learned this in his sleep.
Anatole was lying on his stomach in his crib, head up like a turtle, leaning on his elbows, babbling at the tulips she’d cut from the seed catalogues and pasted on his crib. His thin blonde hair lay in distinct lines across his scalp, like sea grass combed flat by the water. Not a hair out of place, she told Theo. Hair that only a mother could see, Theo told Erica.
She laid the child on the rug and wrestled him into his new blue overalls while the cold air mottled his skin, making all the veins prickle alive underneath. Would he take care of her when she got as old as her father? She could not imagine herself as old as her father, or this child coming to see her on her eightieth birthday—a finely carved edifice toppled by a stroke.
“My boon companion,” said Theo, standing in the doorway, hands slouched over the waist of his Levis, “Are you almost ready?”
Now she found herself once more at the passenger gate, kissing Theo’s lean bristly cheek and taking Anatole from him, yet not exactly as she had dreamed it. In the dream—in all her dreams—she was younger and smaller and always alone, wearing the brown knee socks and red tarn she still wore, and the green wool cape she’d lost long ago in the Cleveland bus station. And everything was dead quiet, as if someone had forgotten to turn on the sound.
“Am I crazy? I never came home for his birthday before. He has to have a stroke to get me home.”
Theo pulled the sleeve of his army jacket out of Anatole’s mouth.
“He’s an old man. You don’t need any other reason to go.”
“Maybe,” she whispered, “he won’t even know who I am.”
She found a seat next to a portly man with white hair who was gazing earnestly out of the window. The stewardess bobbed down the aisle with an armful of telephone books in Kodak-yellow plastic covers.
“Would you like a magazine, sir?”
He closed his beat-up paperback copy of How to Sell Yourself but kept one finger at his place.
“What have you got?”
“We have International Business, Business Week, International Travel—”
Erica laughed. Cuddled on her lap, Anatole cracked open his eyes and sucked his thumb hard; there was egg, she noticed, on the cuff of his new sweater. The man looked at them both, puzzled.
“I don’t believe I’ll take any, thank you,” he said, and opened his book to a chapter near the end: Failure Is Death.
“How old is he?” cooed the stewardess.
“A year and a half,” said Erica. “Going home for his grandpa’s eightieth birthday,” she added, feeling it was expected of her, and as she said it, her father sounded oddly like a legend, not merely old, but ancient. He was fifty-seven when Erica was born, yet when she was five and going to school that first fall day, he walked so fast that she could not keep up with him. Every morning, after the news, her father turned up the radio in his room so that Erica could hear Uncle Buster, who at eight-thirty turned his magic eye on boys and girls, hurrying to dress for school all over America. This morning it looks like the boys might win! I see a little girl in Oklahoma who isn’t even out of bed. Now the girls are ahead: I see a boy in Illinois who can’t even tie his shoes! Erica did not like the magic eye and always got dressed in the closet.
Several years later she thought she heard that voice when she lifted her head to look at the clock during a spelling test. I see a little girl in Detroit who can only spell half the words. Who, thought Erica, could that be? She herself studied every afternoon for the sheer joy of it, walking over to the chemistry building and clutching her books as she climbed the dingy stairs to her father’s office. Her father sat at a desk strewn with letters, calendars, photographs, and fossils, and she breathed in the strong clean smell from the adjoining lab. On the bookcase which reached nearly to the ceiling sat a white owl, the pet of a graduate student.
“Daddy, it’s me.”
He swiveled around and smiled.
“Well, you can sit here if you want to study. I was just going to finish up some work in the lab. What’s this—a book on bees?”
He flipped through it.
“I’m earning the beekeeper’s badge in Girl Scouts.”
“But you’ve never kept any bees.”
“I don’t have to. I only have to give a report.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in bees.”
She unloaded the rest of her books and pushed his papers aside.
“It’s the first badge in the book. I want to earn them all, alphabetically.”
As she read, munching on the sesame bars he kept for her in the top drawer, the radio in the lab buzzed the news. Russian troops were retreating across Poland. Outside, the maple leaves bobbed and washed and scattered the clear October sky. The sound of her father’s footsteps was as comforting as a heartbeat. Now her mother said that he could not even stand up without a walker.
What was a walker?
When Erica called home, her mother would tie Daddy to the chair by the downstairs telephone, then run upstairs to the bedroom extension. He loved to listen in, though he never spoke much, and he couldn’t hear well at all.
“How’s Minnie?”
“Nutty as always. Ever since she moved in with us, she wants to take us to that health resort in Miami.”
“That would be nice.”
“But she wants to go by taxi, so we won’t meet any hijackers. Did I tell you about her retirement dinner? The other teachers got together and gave her a bicycle.”
They would chatter about Anatole and about Theo’s new job as a monkey-nurse for the Zoology Department and how somebody had promised to come from a big gallery and look at his new piece—a galaxy of one hundred moons cut from old fenders—and hadn’t shown up, and sometimes Erica could hear Daddy breathing, and then she remembered she wanted to talk about him. So after awhile her mother would say loudly,
“Nice talking to you, Erica. Goodbye.”
Adding a low whisper, “It’s not a real goodbye. Don’t hang up, Erica.”
Then in a loud voice again, “Goodbye. You can hang up now, Daddy.”
Sometime he wouldn’t hang up but would linger on, hoping to hear a little more, till Aunt Minnie came and helped him to his chair in front of the television.
The plane rolled forward, creaking softly, as if someone were pulling it by a string. Globes of light bubbled across Anatole’s closed eyes. For an instant the machine hung back, then it gave a roar and charged. The child awoke with a cry and Erica lurched forward and grabbed him and clenched the armrest. All at once they were leaving the earth, it was angling away under them, and already the trees looked small and new. The man put away his book.
“Punkins down there,” he observed, wagging his head at Anatole, who stopped crying and leaned toward the window to look. Below them lay the gold tarnish of the maples and the Monopoly board of human ambition, each field as straight as if plotted there at the beginning of time.
“Will you look at those trees!” he exclaimed.
“Where are you from?” asked Erica.
“I was born in Buffalo. Ever ride the old Wolverine that run from Buffalo to Detroit? I’m sorry to see ’em take that train off.”
Sun burnished the hair that shone gold on his wrists, beyond the white cuffs. Had her father looked like this when he traveled to give lectures? She always gave him socks and handkerchiefs for his birthday, and he always left them in expensive hotels all over America. And when he came home at night—it was always night when he came home—she would stand by his suitcase, which lay open on his bed, and wait to plunder the silken pockets for the miniature bars of soap stamped with Statler or Ritz. Sometimes he remembered to ask the desk clerk for matchbooks, from which he removed the matches, for he did not smoke. She had, at the height of her collection, over a hundred match covers and forty bars of soap, which she could never bring herself to use, because having forty of them was more important than being clean.
And later he would bring out his slides, mostly of banquet tables where other chemistry teachers sat before water glasses and chrysanthemums. What was chemistry? She did not know. Not till she was sixteen did she understand that her father was well known to many who would never meet him. That summer, when her mother left for Corona to see Grandfather through the last months of his life, Erica kept house for her father. She cooked great pots of squash and corn, tomatoes and Brussels sprouts, as she had seen her mother do, for he ate no meat, and she learned to shop at small expensive stores for the delicacies she knew would please him—pomegranates, mangos, and avocados. Evenings she sat at his desk in the sun parlor and typed his letters, mostly to young men in India and Japan who wrote—Honorable Professor!—begging the honor of studying with him. He stood behind her chair, leafing through the day’s mail and dictating replies.
Sirs, I enclose two dollars. Please renew my subscription to the letters of Nostradamus.
She ended the sentence, but he did not bend over to sign.
“Erica, have you ever read the letters of Nostradamus?”
“Never heard of him,” said Erica. “Who is he?”
“A prophet. Born in the sixteenth century. There’s a medium in California who gets prophecies from him. Your mother doesn’t believe a word, but maybe you’d like to read through them.”
From the desk drawer he pulled out a package of mimeographed sheets and put them into her hand. She took them cautiously, as if they might burn her.
“What does he say will happen?”
“He predicts a great explosion on the West Coast, possibly an invasion.”
After he had turned off the lights and she lay in bed waiting for sleep, she heard the loud whisperings of his prayers from the next room, and listening hard, she caught the sound of her own name.
A man’s voice filled the cabin with the information that they were flying at thirty thousand feet. Yet it seemed to Erica that they were standing still, that nothing in this country was moving and nothing would ever change. Far across the shining pasture of clouds stood a farmhouse in an orchard, bleached white as in a negative, for all that showed her a dark face on earth gave her a light one here.
Fasten your seatbelts, please, flashed the sign over the aisle, and she tightened her grasp on Anatole, who was beginning to squirm on her lap.
“There will be a twenty-minute delay,” crackled the pilot’s voice, “due to fog in Buffalo.”
But beyond the window, the sky dazzled her and hurt her eyes: a floor of clouds, inflated with light, stretched for miles in every direction.
“Why is it so nice up here and so bad down there?” asked a child’s voice behind her.
“The weather,” said a woman’s voice, “is on earth.”
Two hours later they plunged into a gray rain and touched down in Detroit.
From the passenger’s entrance, she could see her mother standing behind the lobby railing. In her bulky plaid coat and babushka, she looked like a peasant woman around whom chic young girls eddied and vanished. How round her face looked under the pincurl bangs springing from under her scarf. Erica had worn scarves as a child, and curls—wetted every morning and spun around her mother’s fingers. In the winter they always froze on the way to school and wept down the back of her dress all morning.
“I’m here!” called Erica.
“Aw,” cooed her mother, reaching out to kiss Anatole’s sweetly indifferent cheek, “what a little skeezix!”
They all three collided in an awkward embrace.
“You’re too thin,” said her mother, pulling back. “Have you been dieting again? Where’s your suitcase?”
“I’m carrying it. This—here.”
She pointed to the flight bag over her shoulder. Her mother shook her head, the way she’d shaken it the last time Erica came home, with her best taffeta dress mashed into her book bag.
“How’s Daddy?”
“Very quiet,” said her mother. They walked toward the main exit across acres of light that filled the terminal—for all its traffic—with a luminous emptiness. “I don’t believe he’s said three words today. I had to call off the party. Thought it might be too much for him. But he wanted to come to the airport.”
“You mean he’s in the car?”
“With Minnie. I could hardly get her to drive out here, she’s so afraid of getting polluted.”
The cars glittered row upon row, like a vast audience waiting for the curtain to rise. What color was her father’s Buick? Erica could not remember, though he had driven her in it often. He had even won a certificate from the Buick dealer for being the oldest man in the city to have driven nothing but Buicks for the last thirty years, ever since the day he stepped into his Plymouth, braked with the accelerator and flew clean through the garage, bringing down the clothesline in Mrs. Treblecock’s yard. Like Superman, he walked away whole, attended by little puffs of smoke.
Suddenly she recognized his slouched tweed cap and ran to open the door.
“Daddy! It’s me! Happy birthday!”
His face looked furrowed and brown as a walnut, and his white hair lay thicker than she had ever seen it. His eyebrows were so black that she drew back with a start. Always he had enjoyed the attentions of the barber, and the ritual of lathering and shaving each morning, of plucking stray hairs from his nose, and anointing his head with oil, so that Erica had never seen any part of him growing wild. She kissed his cheek, freckled and sunken, while Anatole bobbed up and down in her arms and reached for the planes that roared overhead.
“He looks pretty foxy, doesn’t he?” said Aunt Minnie. She had put on her wig for this expedition, and Erica felt oddly touched. She knelt so that her son was eyeball to eyeball with her father.
“This is Grandpa. Can you say Grandpa?”
“Pa,” said the child and stared at him.
“He knows you, Daddy. He carries your picture around at home.”
Sitting in the backseat with Anatole on her lap, she touched his lips with her finger, but when she took it away, he went on making airplane noises and pushing his fist through the air over her father’s head.
“Remember Sammy Elderfield?” her mother asked suddenly. “They have a new baby. You remember Sammy from second grade?”
“Not very well.” She remembered a figure in a blue corduroy jacket but could not make out the face.
“They had a boy. It’s a shame about his ears.”
“What’s wrong with his ears?”
“He has one of Mona’s and one of Sammy’s. Sammy always had lovely ears. Such awful things can happen—it’s a wonder people have children at all.”
Anatole leaned his chin on the back of the seat and his fist came to rest behind her father’s collar.
“Can you say Minnie?” asked Erica.
“Minnie,” said Anatole, peering into her purse and pulling out a blank check scribbled with wilting letters.
“Can you say A?”
He looked at his feet and said nothing.
“Oh, Mother, I taught him through G last night, and he’s forgotten everything.”
But when the car turned into the driveway, he said in a voice so small that Erica alone heard it:
“A.”
At lunch, Erica could not take her eyes off her father, except to watch Anatole. Her father ate at one end of the table, silently spooning up pureed peas, and Anatole ate at the other end in Erica’s old highchair, steering with a doughnut. Through the French doors she could see Aunt Minnie on the back porch in slacks and trenchcoat, rummaging among boxes and bags lined up on the sofa.
Her mother shook her head.
“She never sits down anymore, since she got so healthy. She eats only one meal a day, a protein drink.”
“A what?”
“A protein drink. I’ll make you one, if you like.”
Aunt Minnie burst through the back door, clutching half a dozen vitamins to her bosom.
“I got some organic spinach at the market this morning, if anyone wants to try it.”
“No thanks. You got to boil up half a pound to get a tablespoon.”
“Where do you get all this stuff?” asked Erica.
“Why, there’s a health-food salesman who comes around once a week,” said her mother. “A young fellow. Isn’t he nice, Al?”
The old man nodded, pushed aside the empty dish in front of him and reached for the stewed prunes.
“His hair was beautiful,” remarked Minnie. “He told us about a program, guaranteed to help you or your money back. You eat one banana mashed in protein powder for breakfast, six lecithin tablets at each meal, and kelp flakes for dinner. En-Er-Gee Proy-To power. Very spluzy stuff, seven dollars a jar.” She held up a small can, labeled with Atlas fully flexed, and glanced at Erica’s father, who was leaning forward and straining his arms against the edge of the table. “Think that program is making him any better, Erica?”
“Daddy, stay with us for a while,” pleaded her mother. “You haven’t seen Erica for a year.”
“I’ll miss the kick-off,” he said sadly.
Mother sighed.
“Erica, you take one arm. Al, push yourself up.”
Though her mother helped to support him, Erica had never before raised such a dead weight. Yet it was he who taught her how to float when she was five, and his hands that let her lie on the surface of the water. Now just let go. Don’t kick. Later, digging in the sand, she looked up and saw his belly rising far off like an island in the deep water where he floated for hours, as if he were napping in his own bed. Dragonflies paused there and flew on. In the water he took care never to disturb them; on land he took a net and caught them, and the butterflies too, so that Erica could study them and learn their names.
The three of them shuffled toward the television room. Not until she had to guide him did she realize how cluttered her mother’s house was. Here in the living room stood Minnie’s electric organ with its earphones dangling down the side, and there by the door were the two loveseats upholstered in horsehair, dreadful to the naked thigh. And her father so hated clutter: at the reception after Minnie’s first wedding, he had gone round as happily busy as a child, folding up the chairs after each guest who went for a second drink of punch.
As she eased her father into his big leather chair she felt the muscles of her arms tremble. Orange light beamed through the plastic embers in the fireplace and played across her father’s shoes. Her mother turned on the television and sat down beside him.
“We just had the downstairs painted, to the tune of a thousand dollars. Looks nice, doesn’t it?”
In the old days, when Erica was at home, they didn’t bother to repaint anything. When the blue paint started to chip off the bathroom floor, her mother said, “Paint me some flowers to cover it up.” So Erica painted white roses around the gray patches on the stone tile, and went on to paint roses around the toilet seat as well. She’ll paint on your coffin, warned Minnie. Mother had seen a flowered toilet seat—very posh, said Minnie—for twenty-four dollars, in one of the catalogues she read every evening. She had hundreds of catalogues heaped on the window ledge with her old piano music, back issues of Fate, Time, and the National Geographic, and some beautifully bound books on the history of witchcraft, which came after her dad started tearing out coupons for free offers. No salesman called—still, you have to watch him, Mother said.
“Who’s playing?” asked Erica.
“I don’t know,” said her father.
It was the half-time of somebody’s game. Out poured the band. Ta ra! A man in an absurd fur hat strutted out on the field, silver baton in hand, gold buttons gleaming. Behind him, the whole band was spelling out something very clever, but Erica couldn’t read it. Then the camera cruelly discovered five men in business suits, puffing and twirling and squinting under their tasseled beanies.
“We bring you the a-lum-ni,” shouted the announcer, as static from a storm far off blurred and flattened the five men into a single ruled line, zap zap into rainbow noodles, and back again. “Aren’t they won-der-ful?”
Her father’s head sank onto his chest and his eyes closed. Her mother jumped to her feet.
“Al!” she shouted. “Al!”
He stirred, opened his eyes, and gazed up at her.
“What’s the matter?”
The fear slipped out of her face.
“Would you like a glass of cider?”
In the kitchen, her mother was calm again as she hauled the big jug out of the icebox.
“I always find him like that when I go to call him for lunch. He looks sort of pathetic, doesn’t he? That’s a clean glass on the sink.”
What was dirty and what was clean? The telephone on the wall was gray with dust, and grease glazed the stovetop grill. Erica held her father’s glass while her mother poured.
And as the glass filled up and chilled her hand, she saw herself at all the suppertimes of her childhood. This is WXYZ. It is time for the six o’clock news. It is time for the weather. Fair and cloudy tomorrow. Small-craft warnings for Lake Michigan. Her father’s little portable sat beside his plate and opened like a clamshell, to show the crystals lying exquisitely under a sheet of clear amber, like the works of a watch.
Over her father’s silence, Erica and her mother chattered, interrupting him for only the most urgent requests.
Pass the to-ma-toes, Al, pass the to-ma-toes.
Because if you didn’t ask, he forgot to pass, and all the dishes stopped at his end of the table, and slowly, absent-mindedly, he finished them all. He would stare at guests as they helped themselves to seconds. There’s plenty more in the kitchen, Mother would say. We have a whole bushel of tomatoes. And he would glance round with an innocent smile, and only then would they realize he had not been watching them at all. His eyes were bright as a rabbit’s and very sharp, yet he did not see well, and that was why last Christmas he tripped over Anatole playing on the floor and nearly knocked him into the fire. It was a real fire that year.
When she was little, he carried a pince-nez for reading, and in the evening she watched it inch down the bridge of his nose toward the newspaper—plop!—and waited for him to jam it on again, and to fold up the newspaper and take out his pocket diary.
“Erica, what did I do yesterday?”
“It rained,” said Erica, seating herself on the arm of his chair. “And it was hot.”
Rain, he wrote, and frowned.
“Did I do anything else?”
“We went downtown to get your new reading glasses.”
Looking down his nose he wrote new glasses. He was pleased that he did not need glasses for driving. The voice on the car radio that warmed the dark mornings when he drove her to school—how it sparkled with news of the cold weather as she climbed out of the car one morning, knew she was late, and slammed the door on her own coat. And as the car sped into traffic, how small her fists sounded, beating on the closed windows stop! stop! But her father was listening to the news and heard nothing; the light turned red and he stopped at the end of the block.
Later he sat on the edge of her bed with a wooden box on his lap and lifted out dark panes of glass, which came to life as he held them to the light for her. How could that be? To stay so dark in his hand and to show her nothing, yet when held to the light, to show her a table of ripe melons, dew gleaming on the rinds, and behind them, a bough covered with white blossoms.
What are they? she asked.
Autochrome plates. They’ll never fade, he said proudly. He put the box back on the closet shelf. She never tried to take it down herself, for fear she would drop it. Fifteen years later, as she went upstairs, she knew she wouldn’t drop it now.
She stood on a chair and peered at the clutter while her hands pushed aside old lampshades, broken cameras, small flowered hats, and velvet-lined boxes shaped to fit brooches long since lost; a gold pocket-watch without face or works, a pair of coppered baby shoes, an American flag, her father’s bathing suit.
And here was the Adams hat he’d bought after ten years of listening to Lowell Thomas—or was it Drew Pearson? He bought it because it could be rolled up, would travel well, and would probably last forever. It came in a plastic tube and looked as shapeless as a gangster’s fedora, and her mother hid it in the attic, though he sighed over it for a year.
Behind a half-crocheted blanket, she found the box, as heavy as if it held stones.
Downstairs, she found Anatole hugging the lid of a valentine candy-box between his knees and her father slumped down in his chair, and she could hear her mother stacking the plates in the kitchen.
“Daddy!”
She grabbed his shoulders and shook him, and he opened his eyes, and a huge sense of relief ran through her.
“See what I found, Daddy,” she said.
And sitting down beside him, she pulled out a square of glass and held it up to the lamp over his chair. Between her thumb and forefinger stood a dark-haired woman in a salmon-colored Chinese robe turning her back on the camera, to show the dragon embroidered there. She was massive as a caryatid, yet she seemed to hang in empty space.
“Daddy, who is this?”
He squinted at the image in her hand and leaned his head so close to hers that she could hear his breathing, light as a cat’s; could very nearly hear his heart.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s a lovely picture.”
Suddenly Anatole scrambled up beside them.
“Look, sweetpea.”
She pulled out another slide, held it up, and lo, ripe melons swelled deep yellow on a scarlet cloth under a bough covered with dogwood blossoms, and all were charged with the far-off presence of things in a dream.
“Daddy, do you remember when you showed me that one?”
He watched anxiously as she put the glass in its dark slot and it jammed against a postcard which pulled loose and fluttered to the floor. Erica bent and picked it up. Here was a house, but none that she knew. The upper window, diamond-paned, set in half-timbers, stood open to let out a queer procession of figures who seemed to be moving on a potter’s wheel: the knight, the emperor, the priest, the angel, the fool; their course as fixed as the hands on the clock-face above them. She turned the card over but there was no message, only the name of the town: Rotbenburg ob der Tauber.
“What year were you there, Daddy?”
“Twilight,” he answered.
“But what year?”
“Why, the porter met us at the dock and put our suitcases on his bicycle and took us to the east gate. A wall runs around the city. There are two gates.”
He paused, she reached for the card but he held it firmly.
“We stayed at the Golden Hirsch. They gave us the bridal suite. From the window you could see the orchards. Everything was in blossom.”
Erica had not heard her father speak so much in years. Maybe never. Not to her, anyhow. And even now he seemed to be talking to himself. Anatole began to bounce the heart-lid on the floor, and her father’s eyes followed it, up down, up down, like an aged hawk.
“Don’t throw that,” he whispered.
The child dropped it at once and turned stumbling out of the room.
Not until she went to bed that night did Erica remember she was leaving tomorrow morning. Anatole had pushed his head into her armpit and curled up against her, sucking his thumb. How warm he felt, and how little space he took in her bed! It was the same bed she’d slept in since her fourth birthday, and the familiar skyline of clutter still rose from the top of the bureau, loaded with books, drawings, unmatching knee socks, and velvet headbands. Overhead shone the paper stars that her father had bought; they glowed in the dark. The painter worked half a day with the dictionary propped on the stepladder, open to constellations—northern hemisphere, because her father wanted all the stars in their proper positions. Guests who used the room complained the stars kept them awake, but Erica loved them, and Anatole stared quiet and astonished at Orion, the Big Dipper, and the Little Bear, before he fell asleep.
Now the glue was turning brittle, and one by one the stars were falling. The first one fell on Theo’s head the night he’d walked her home so late after a party that her mother said he might as well sleep in the spare room and go back in the morning. She heard him moving about—clothes dropping to the floor, change rolling under the bed, she closed her eyes, and all at once he was standing before her, as white and naked as a fish.
“I’m Adam,” he’d said, and would have said more if they had not both heard the door to her parents’ bedroom opening. He vanished with a bound into the closet, and Erica, going to shut her door, found her father, naked and hairy as an ape, eyes tightly shut, shuffling down the dark hall toward the bathroom. The next morning, at breakfast, she saw a tiny star tangled in Theo’s hair like a sign of grace.
Anatole’s breath moved her hair, and holding him close she opened her eyes wide. All those accidents, those chance meetings and matings! Extraordinary that out of each generation one had grown up and sent forth his seed, and that this seed should come forth at this time to create this child and no other. And then, that each child should survive the difficult journey from the immortal darkness of its beginnings to the cold weather of the world.
Someone was piling another eiderdown over them.
“Mother, what time is it?”
“It’s two o’clock. I had to get up for Daddy. He wants to play the radio.”
By the time she knew she was awake, her mother was gone. Muffled voices came from her parents’ bedroom, and as she listened she felt the sheet under her turn warm and damp. Lifting Anatole in her arms she stumbled out of bed. The bathroom light cut a thin swath down the hall. Somebody had fed her, nursed her, and changed her for more nights than she could imagine. And when she was as old as her father, maybe somebody would again? She propped the sleeping child on the john, struggled to unfasten the back of his pajamas, and feeling something jab her side, she saw—for the first time—the lid to the valentine box he had smuggled into bed with him.
The sky was white; downstairs, Captain Kangaroo was singing to Anatole who had already escaped his bed. Erica jumped up and ran down the hall shouting,
“Get up! My plane leaves at ten o’clock.”
Then she caught sight of her father, dressed in his best suit, perched on the edge of the bathtub, with a silver mirror in one hand and his electric razor in the other, zz-zzz-zz. Her mother was holding him up by his belt and reading the Sunday paper.
“Look, Al, Doctor Drake died. Now you’ll be the oldest living alum. With him around you didn’t have a chance. He was a hundred and two.”
“Mother, my plane leaves—”
“Go downstairs. I got breakfast all ready.”
Her father ate alone at the dining-room table—which was set as for a wedding breakfast with cut-glass goblets, brocade napkins, and the best silver—while the waffle iron steamed in the kitchen and her mother heated the maple syrup.
“Mother, I don’t have time for breakfast.”
“You can’t take Anatole on the plane without breakfast. He can eat in front of the TV.”
“He won’t eat waffles, Mother. All he’ll eat are hotdogs and bananas. Where’s Minnie?”
“Upstairs, mixing her protein drink.”
“I got to pack, Mother. Don’t make anything for me.”
Her mother pulled out the plug of the waffle iron.
“Erica, let me get you that little rocking chair of yours I saved for Anatole. I got lots of stuff saved for you.”
“Oh, Mother, we don’t need any more furniture.”
“I got to get rid of things.” Over the hiss of water gushing into the dishpan, her voice flowed without interruption. “Minnie brought all her furniture when she moved in, and it gets so we can hardly move. That’s her umbrella on the front doorknob. I read in the papers how burglars break the glass and open it from the inside. So we’ll hear them knock down the umbrella. The other night I was sure I heard a man in the attic. I went right up and turned the key in the lock, and I haven’t opened it since.”
Every leave-taking was like this, thought Erica, as she crammed her dirty underwear into the flight bag and rummaged the bedclothes for Anatole’s undershirt. Her mother followed her from one task to the next.
“You want a glass of cider, Erica? You want to take that silver candelabrum back with you this time? I can put it in a big box and you can check it on the plane.”
Standing in the front hall, ready to go: how did I get all this stuff? I only brought one small bag. There was a shoebox of sterling napkin rings, a shopping bag full of towels, and the candelabrum which didn’t fit in any box. Her mother had powdered her face so fast that the powder lay in thick pools on her cheeks.
“Al, are you still eating? Hurry up, Erica has to catch a plane. Where’s Minnie?”
A general sadness wrinkled across his face. How odd that she was traveling away from him instead of he from her! Always it was she who stood on the platform, holding her mother’s hand—goodbye! goodbye! bring me a present!—while steam frosted the windows, and porters pushed carts on great spoked wheels, loaded with mail bags and suitcases. Standing onstage at her high school graduation and waiting for her name to be called, she could see her father in the very back row of the auditorium, and she could see the clock on the wall, and now he was putting on his jacket and moving toward the door, hurrying to catch the taxi that would take him to the train. “Wait!” she wanted to shout. “Come back! It’ll only be a moment longer! Four more names and it’ll be my turn!”
And then, just before she heard her own name, she saw the door close behind him.
“I believe I’ll stay here,” he said, and his voice was frail as a husk.
Erica leaned over and kissed him, then picked up Anatole.
“Wave bye-bye.”
But Anatole buried his face in her neck.
“He’s forgotten. I’ll come home again soon, Daddy.” She realized as she said it that he hadn’t asked. How dark his face looked, as if a light had burned out somewhere behind his eyes.
“Erica,” said her mother, “Minnie is waiting in the car.”
The backseat was suddenly full of packages.
“How do you think your dad looks?” asked Minnie, pulling on her gloves.
“About the way Mother described him.”
“Thank heaven he eats okay. Anything you put on the table, it just goes. I left a quart of organic prune juice and a cheesecake on the table yesterday, and he finished them both.”
“My God,” said Erica.
“You know he never used to eat cheesecake.”
The plane was not crowded, and she found a seat for Anatole by the window; they had a whole row to themselves. The smell of the vinyl upholstery made her feel queasy, and when she had fastened Anatole into his seat, she sat back and closed her eyes.
Opening them, she discovered she had come back to the little house in the orchard in the shining pasture that billowed like endless acres of fresh bread. Suddenly she wanted to walk there so much that indeed she was there, and here before her was a little station-house, weathered to pearl, and there sat her father on the platform, waiting for the train.
“I brought you a present,” he said.
In the kindly light of this country he looked younger as he opened his briefcase and shook into her hands a dozen tiny bars of Ivory, Palmolive, and Camay, stamped with El Camino Real.
She tucked them carefully into her purse and sat down beside him, for there was no hint of a train. No bell sounded, no leaf stirred.
“When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know. They’ve taken off the train,” he said and shook his head sorrowfully. “Also the tracks.”
“Oh Daddy, what a shame!”
“I’m real sorry they took off the train. There’s no way to get back home.”
“What station is this, Daddy? Where are we?”
He looked at her, puzzled.
“You mean you don’t know either?”
Together they rose and looked up and down for a sign. There was none. But from the east, a little man on a bicycle was pedaling toward them.
“Your suitcase, sir?”
“Right here,” said her father, and watched anxiously as he strapped it on the handlebars.
She raised her hand to shade her eyes; far off she could see the walls of the city.
“Have a good trip, Daddy.”
“I do miss the weather,” he said. “I mean, not having any.” And then he added, “When are you coming back?”
But before she could answer him, the plane sank into darkness, and she saw the airport twinkling beyond the window. Anatole had fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder. Hoisting him up carefully, so as not to wake him, she grabbed the candelabrum and her flight bag and eased herself into the aisle.
As she walked to the passengers’ entrance under the sullen sky, a fine rain was beginning to fall. She slipped her glasses into her purse, stepped through the last gate, and waited to be known.
“What,” cried Theo, “is that thing in your hand?”
“A candleholder. My mother gave me some stuff. I checked the rest of it.”
“Can’t you go home just once without bringing something back? Wait right here.”
He started to lift Anatole from her, but she shook her head, set the candelabrum at her feet and wrapped her arms around the sleeping child as if he were a life-preserver, kissing his eyes, his nose, his hair, till she realized the men at the ticket-desk were all staring at her. Nobody around her was kissing anyone; they were all scrambling for suitcases. How good he smelled! Tasted!
“Look, sweetpea.”
And she held him up to the window as their plane turned solemnly and glided down the runway, faster and faster, then tucked up its wheels and somewhere out of sight changed into a bird and broke through the heavy clouds into morning.