I remembered my father when he’d buy ties by the half dozen in a serve-yourself drugstore, only making sure they weren’t all the same color.
“I don’t have anything narrower,” I said.
“You may borrow one of mine,” he said. “One of my paisleys would look good with what you have on.”
“Okay,” I said. I reached up and began undoing my tie. “How come you have on a blue shirt?” I asked. “We’re not being televised tonight, are we?”
He always wore blue on the tube, to match his eyes.
“You’ll see the reason for that later. It’s a surprise,” he said. He said that Donald Divine, the ACE public relations man, was waiting for him downstairs in his study.
“When you’ve finished up here, stop in and say hello to Donald, okay, Jesse?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We’re due at the Cheeks’ at seven-thirty. … And Jesse,” he said, “I don’t insist on this, but I was always touched when my boys would answer yes, sir, instead of yeah or okay.”
“Yes, sir,” I managed.
He slapped my back and said, “I love you, son!”
“I love you, too, sir.”
We both laughed at that. Then he went bounding out of the room and down the stairs—Bud liked to say he was born with his motor running. I think they both were.
I went into my parents’ room and got one of my father’s ties. Then I just stood there looking around at all the photographs of our family. They were everywhere: on the wall, in little frames set out on top of the bureau, even some stuck into the mirror on my mother’s dressing table.
We were a pretty seedy-looking bunch in the days when Bud and I were little. My dad always seemed to be wearing a vest with his shirt sleeves rolled up. My mom was usually in some flowered dress with a hat on, even in the hottest weather. Her hair wasn’t as blond in those days, more brown than the bright yellow she’d changed it to.
In those days my mom couldn’t afford manicures or hairdressers, and her dresses came off the racks at shopping-center stores.
Our tent, in the photographs, was usually somewhere in the background. Bud was always mugging for the camera, making faces or holding up two fingers behind my head, and my socks were always falling down. I was in clothes too big for me, Bud’s hand-me-downs.
Seedy-looking as we were, we were all smiles, all of us.
In the later snapshots, particularly after Bud’d split, my father didn’t smile. My mother smiled on cue from years of practice, but my father’s emotions always went right to his face, so sometimes my mother had to remind him to leave his burdens behind while he faced people who might have greater ones.
My father’s face in one recent photograph, stuck into a corner of my mother’s mirror, looked like someone had socked him in the stomach. It was taken at the ground-breaking ceremony for The Summer House, just after Bud left. I was on one side and my mother was on the other. Donald Divine took the shot, and I remember my father’d just finished saying, “It’s just a shame one of our number is missing.”
He’d said that about a dozen times that day.
I wondered why he couldn’t remember his battles with Bud, times he’d tell Bud he was sick of the sound of Bud’s voice. One of their biggest battles was over the “prayer rugs” idea my father came up with in one of his brainstorming sessions with Donald Divine.
Supposedly, strips of our old canvas tent were to be sold for $100 a piece as prayer rugs. Smaller, wallet-size pieces were to go for $10. My father was to get up and announce that the tent was saturated and impregnated with The Power. “The power of the Lord had to pass right through the canvas, and now you can have a share of it.”
Bud didn’t like the whole idea to begin with, but when he found out the strips of canvas weren’t even to be strips of the tent, he blew up. He said it was the phoniest pitch he’d ever heard about, and he called my father a con artist.
“Bud, Bud, Bud,” my father began crooning back at him, “there’s no way to get the canvas from our tent clean. Why, it’s filthy!”
“Then don’t say it’s canvas from our tent! Don’t say it has The Power in it!”
“But”—my father’s voice with a sharp little edge to it—“it’s symbolic, not literal. Why, if it was literal we wouldn’t have enough to go around. We couldn’t even make the offer.”
“It’s dishonest!” Bud shouting. “It’s greasy!”
“I love you, Bud, but you’re going too far now, young man!”
“It’s a cheap trick!”
“I wonder, Bud, if you know how sick I am of hearing you mouth off!”
That was the only one of their fights that came to blows.
I don’t know who hit who first, but Bud stumbled over a chair on his way out of the living room, cursing and holding his eye with one hand. My father’s face was scarlet. He was breathing as though he’d run the mile, and his eyeglasses had been knocked to the floor.
Shortly after that, Bud took off.
The strips of canvas went like cold drinks on a hot summer’s day. My father said they alone paid for a whole floor of The Summer House.
Still, on ground-breaking day, it was Bud causing my father’s long face, and Bud my father was missing and mooning over.
I tried to make him feel better by telling him I missed Bud, too.
“You don’t even know how it pains me, Jesse,” he said, as though he had a knife in him and I’d scratched my elbow.
“Guy.” My mother spoke up softly, almost a whisper, which meant she was about to deliver a necessary but not necessarily welcome truth.
