Sourland

voice, that he thought he’d recognized me as I crossed the lobby and came here to sit, he’d thought it might be me — “Or some older sister of little Madelyn Fleet” — but he wasn’t sure that he could trust his eyes — “You’ve gotten taller, Madelyn. And you carry yourself — differently.” In embarrassed confusion I laughed, leaning away from him; my face throbbed with blood; I was overwhelmed by such attention, and did not know how to reply. There was nowhere to look except at Mr. Carmichael’s flushed and roughened face, and his eyes so warmly intent upon me beyond the smudged lenses of his sunglasses. Mr. Carmichael’s breath smelled of — was it whiskey? — a sweetish-sour odor with which I was long familiar, for all my male relatives drank whiskey at times, and certainly my father drank whiskey. It had not been the case during my year of seventh-grade math that Mr. Carmichael had singled me out for any particular attention, or praise; I could not have claimed that Mr. Carmichael had ever really looked at me, as an individual; though I’d been one of five or six reliable students who’d usually received high grades, I hadn’t been an outstanding math student, only a doggedly diligent good-girl student. Nor had I been one of the popular and flirtatious girls in our class who’d had no trouble attracting Mr. Carmichael’s attention. Yet now he was asking, “Why are you here in this depressing place, Madelyn? I hope it isn’t a family emergency….” He did not seem to be teasing but spoke sincerely, with sympathy; lightly his hand rested on my shoulder, to comfort. I was frightened now for such sympathy left me weak, defenseless; I did not want to cry; in my bedroom I’d cried until my eyes were reddened and swollen like blisters but I had not cried in front of anyone except my mother. It would be held against Harvey Fleet’s daughter that she was “cold” — “snotty” — stiffening in her relatives’ embraces and shrinking from their kisses with a look of disdain. Yet how could I bring myself to say to Mr. Carmichael, My father is upstairs in the intensive care unit, he had surgery this morning to reduce swelling in his brain, he has not regained consciousness after a terrible beating…. Quickly I told Mr. Carmichael that my mother had come to see a friend in the hospital who’d had minor surgery and I’d been with them for a while then became restless, couldn’t breathe, came downstairs to read my novel but couldn’t concentrate, and now I was thinking of going home. (For suddenly it came to me; I could leave this hateful place, I could go home without my mother.) Mr. Carmichael said he’d had enough of the hospital too. More than enough. He’d drive me home, Mr. Carmichael said now, nudging my ponytail, and I laughed, saying thank you but I could take a city bus, or I could walk. (In the heat, the three-mile walk would be punishing. My mother would be astonished and would not know if she should be apologetic or disgusted with me.) Mr. Carmichael squinted down at me through his sunglasses, saying in his brisk-bemused-teacher voice that his car was out back: “C’mon, Madelyn. I’ll drive you home.”

How was it possible to say no?

“This is a little detour, kid. Our secret.”

It was dusk. We were late returning home. Yet we were driving east along the river, back toward Sparta. If we’d been headed home, as we were expected, my father would have been driving us west. The air at dusk was humid and porous as gauze and through the Cadillac’s lowered windows warm air rushed that smelled of something overripe like rotted fruit and beneath, a fainter, sour smell of rotted fish.

It was a festive time of evening! I was very happy. On the river there were ghostly white sailboats and power-driven boats that glittered with lights against the darkening, choppy water and on shore, in the park where the blues festival was being held, there were steadier lights like flames.

A detour. Our secret. These mysterious pronouncements of my father’s were usually made in a playful voice that carried an unmistakable warning: do as I say, without acknowledging that I have said it.

By these words I was given to understand that my father didn’t want my mother to know we’d gone back into the city. I liked it that there were such understandings between my father and me, which excluded my mother.

On the evening of the beating that was never to be explained, for which no “assailant” or “assailants” would ever be charged, my father was distracted and appeared to be in a hurry. We’d left the blues festival abruptly for he’d said that we had to get home and now, not ten minutes later, he was headed for downtown Sparta and his office on East Capitol Street. Gripped between his legs was a bottle of ale he’d brought with him from the festival. The dashboard of the car gleamed and glittered with so many dials, switches, controls you’d have thought you were in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

The car was my father’s newest: a showy 1959 cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with Spanish red leather interior, a chrome grille like shark’s teeth, swooping tail fins and flaring taillights. A massive vehicle twenty feet in length, like a yacht it glided past ordinary traffic seemingly without effort. Within the family it was believed that Harvey Fleet had acquired this car from one of his gambler friends in Sparta in need of quick cash but my father typically offered no explanations, he’d only just driven the Cadillac home: “Look out in the driveway. Anybody want a ride?”

My father was like that: impulsive, unpredictable. He was a man of secrets and he was generous when he wanted to be generous and not so generous when he didn’t want to be. He owned properties in Sparta and vicinity, mostly rentals, and recently he’d become a developer, with partners, of a new shopping center north of the city. Business was the center of my father’s life. Yet you could not gain entry into that life by asking him about his work, for when relatives asked him such questions he would say, with a disarming smile, “Can’t complain.” Or, “Holding my own.” He would not elaborate. He had as little interest in boasting of successes as he had in acknowledging failures. If a question was too personal or pointed he would say, “Hell, that’s business” — as if his business affairs were too trivial to speak of. Yet you knew that what Harvey Fleet meant was None of your damned business.

We had stayed at the blues festival for less than an hour and during that time I’d seen how my father, in his trademark white cotton shirt (no tie, open at the collar) and seersucker trousers (melon colored, for summer), and canvas shoes (white), moved easily among the crowd shaking hands with people who were strangers to me; being greeted by the musicians, most of whom were black men (young, middle-aged, elderly) eager to shake Harvey Fleet’s hand for Harvey Fleet was one of the sponsors of the festival — “A friend to blues and jazz music.” (Was this so? At home, my father never listened to music of any kind, never even watched television.) In Sparta, my father had many friends: local politicians, the chief of police, the district attorney, county officials. On a wall of his office were framed caricatures of Sparta personalities, including Harvey Fleet, crude but clever line drawings by a cartoonist for the Sparta Herald who’d exaggerated my father’s vulpine good looks, his thick dark hair springing from a low forehead, his fistlike jaw and his trademark smile so wide and emphatic it looked riveted in place. Years later I would see on TV the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice with flawlessly blond Lana Turner and darkly handsome John Garfield and it would be a shock to me, how closely my father had resembled Garfield when he’d been young. At the blues festival to the sexy- seductive strains of “Stormy Weather” — “Mood Indigo” — “Sleepy Time Gal” — I’d seen how my father was acquainted with women who were strangers to me, some of them very attractive, and I thought, My father has his secret life, which none of us can know.

I wondered if it was better that way, our not knowing.

Though you couldn’t question him about his past, my father sometimes spoke of his youthful nomadic adventures: he’d quit school at fifteen and gone to work on a Great Lakes freighter bearing iron ore from Duluth to Buffalo; he’d hitchhiked out west, worked in Washington State, and in Alaska, where he’d worked on salmon fishing boats. His own father, Jonas Fleet, who’d died before I was born, had been exhausted and broken by the age of fifty, having worked in a Lackawanna steel mill; my father was determined not to emulate him; he said, “There’s better use for a man’s lungs than to be coated with steel filings.” In the army, in World War II, he’d been stationed in Italy, and the names of Italian regions and towns — Tuscany, Brescia, Vicenza, Parma — rolled off his tongue like an exotic sort of music, which meant little to his listeners. Of these long-ago adventures he’d had before he returned home to Sparta he spoke in a tone of wistfulness and pride; he’d made it through the war without being seriously wounded or “drove crazy” and of ugly memories he did not speak, at least not to us.

He laughed often. He liked to laugh. There were some in our family who distrusted my father’s laughter, which made them uneasy. Why is Harv laughing? Is Harv laughing at us? You understood that there was a prevailing joke to which my father’s joking alluded, but it was a private joke not accessible to others. “The only laugh that matters is the last laugh,” my father said. “And that isn’t guaranteed.”