when he saw me watching, turned aside—my heart leaped and I considered making a hasty exit. Could the New York cops have found out where I was, radioed ahead to have someone pick me up here? But I told myself I was being paranoid. He stayed where he was and I stayed where I was, and between us the service droned to completion.
I heard it when the minister closed his bible, a crisp and final snap that rang in the still air. Then they filed off toward the main building, Eva Burke in the lead, the two young men bringing up the rear.
I walked up to the grave, hands in my pockets. The workmen stood aside as I approached, shovels in their hands, ready to start filling in the hole, eager to move on to the other tasks of the day. Their expressions held none of the phony sympathy you see in funeral home employees. This was their job, digging holes and then filling them in again, and it was cold and they wanted to get on with it. But they knew their place and waited for me to be done.
I stood at the foot of the trench they’d dug, looking down on the slightly bowed surface of the coffin, a simple cross carved into the wood. I’ve never known what to do at a graveside. You stand, you look. You don’t want to leave. I touched my fingers to my lips and held them out over the edge. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye.
I heard footsteps behind me. When I looked over, a man was standing next to me, wearing a tweed cap and a green windbreaker, his hands in the pockets as mine were. Under the cap, his black hair was starting to get a few sprinkles of salt to go with the pepper. He had an unkempt goatee and heavy sideburns and stood a full head shorter than me. He was the one who had been pacing by the mausoleum. At that distance I hadn’t recognized him, but now I did. I was a little surprised to see him here.
He said, “How did you know her?”
“We went to school together,” I said.
“Here in Philadelphia?”
“No. In New York.”
“Ah,” he said. Then: “I came in from New York, too.”
It was an odd comment, an awkward one. There was an uncomfortable invitation to intimacy in it, as if he was dying to unburden himself, to a stranger if necessary. I asked him the question I had a feeling he was waiting for me to ask. “How did
I asked it even though I knew damn well he hadn’t known her, had never so much as held a single conversation with her, and not for lack of trying on her part either. One of the last times he’d even seen her had probably been a day like this one, twenty years before, when the grave yawning open and waiting to be filled by impatient workmen had been Catherine’s.
But he wanted so badly to be asked. So I did.
A pained smile slid onto his face. “I’m her father,” he said.
He stuck out his hand and shook firmly when I took it. “Doug Harper,” he said.
“Robert Lee.” It was the first name that came to mind.
“You’re probably wondering why the different last name,” he said. “And why I was standing way the hell over there.” He nodded toward the distant crypt. “Her mother and I...we had a falling out. Many years ago. Many, many years.”
His eyes filled with tears then. It was the first time I’d noticed any resemblance to his daughter at all. I’d seen the man several times before, through the plate glass window at Fiorucci’s where he sold overpriced Oxfords and wingtips, walking down the street on his way home, sitting out on the fire escape of his second floor apartment with a paperback and a beer. I’d even snapped a few photos of him, though all Dorrie had needed was his address; old habits die hard. But for all that, this was the first time that I’d seen him up close, in person. And his eyes...I could definitely see her in his eyes.
Not in his narrow, lined face, not in his slight build, his lank, flat hair. He was dark where she’d been pale, wiry where she’d been voluptuous. But his eyes were soft and deep, like Dorrie’s, and troubled and sad like hers, too.
“Robert,” he said, and stopped. He turned to face me, looked up at me with a mixture of embarrassment and defiance. “Twenty-one years ago, Robert, I lost my other daughter, my older daughter. Catherine.” He nodded toward the other grave. “A short time after that I lost my wife, my family. After that, my job. Now I’ve lost my younger daughter. And there’s not a person on earth I can talk to about it.” He smiled at me apologetically. He had bad teeth. “Would you come have a drink with me, Robert? If you don’t mind listening to an old man whine about how unfair life is?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a drink with you.”
We followed the gentle curve of the walkway down to the cemetery’s front gate. Doug led me slowly down Front Street and then along West Wingohocking. That’s how you know you’re not in New York City anymore—the streets have names like “West Wingohocking.” He made an abrupt turn onto North Bodine and climbed the four steps it took to reach the front door of a pub whose only sign said PUB.
The windows were dirty, and the light filtering through them cast pale brownish shadows on the walls and the high-backed chairs at the bar. Doug pulled one of the chairs out, climbed up into it, and ordered a rum and coke. I took the seat next to his, asked the bartender to get me a beer.
“What kind?” the bartender said, and I almost replied,
“Whatever you’ve got,” I said, and watched him pop the cap off a bottle of Budweiser.
Doug took a long drink, swallowing till the glass was drained and the ice clicked against his teeth. “Give me another,” he told the bartender.
Off to one side a small television set was showing CNN, the crawl at the bottom of the screen telling us something about troop escalations in the Middle East. The sound was turned down but you could still hear them chattering.
“When was the last time you saw Dorrie?” I asked. I wasn’t deliberately being cruel, or anyway that’s what I told myself. It’s a question a stranger would have asked.
He shrugged, didn’t answer. “That’s what she called herself? Dorrie?”
“Yes.”
“She wrote to me once,” he said. “Maybe six months ago. A long letter. What she’d been doing, how she’d been taking classes at Columbia. Even included a picture of herself. My god, she was...lovely. It was like seeing Catherine, only grown up.” He took a mouthful of his drink, held it, swallowed. “She signed the letter ‘Your daughter, Dorothy.’ I guess she thought I wouldn’t know who it was if she’d signed it ‘Dorrie.’ ”
“You opened it?” I said. “The letter?”
He looked at me strangely. “Of course I did. Why?”
“She showed me that letter. It came back unread.”
He closed his eyes. “No. No. Not unread.”
“It said ‘refused.’ ”
“Right. Refused,” he said. “I did refuse it. But I opened it first. ‘Dorothy Burke’ on the envelope, how could I not open it? Burke’s her mother’s name. She took it back when she got rid of me.”
“But if you opened the letter—”
“I did it carefully, so I could seal it up again, drop it back in the mailbox.”
“Why? Why would you do that?”
He seemed at a loss for an answer—his mouth opened, but nothing came out. Finally he said, “I’d ruined her sister’s life, her mother’s life, my own. I didn’t want to ruin hers.”
“Do you understand how that made her feel?” I said. “Her own father, she finally finds you after all this time, sends you a letter, and not only won’t you meet her or talk to her, you send her letter back—”
“I couldn’t meet her. I couldn’t. Sending that photo back was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I, I...” He wound down, came slowly to a halt. “I’m not a good father. She was better off without me.”
“Probably,” I said, thinking maybe I’d stepped over the line to deliberate cruelty now. Dorrie wouldn’t have wanted that. I stopped talking, drank my beer.
“I went to her apartment once,” he said. “Went to the address that had been on the envelope, all the way uptown. I got as far as standing outside the building. I was going to push the button, say,
“Why the hell not?”
