Let’s say I’m in semi-retirement, then.
Your idea or the shrink’s?
To go to three a week? Mine.
Bravo. He’s dependent on you, not the other way around. Just make that your mantra and you’ll survive.
Spoken like an old pro.
Trained courtesy of the Albert Caldwell Foundation for Assholic Children. John tugged at his scarf. So how’d he do?
My shrink?
My old man. On the test.
Some weeks better than others. The last couple of times, though. Not so great.
He’s still sharp in a lot of ways, you know, he knows how to cover, John said.
I know.
Have you noticed he’ll get polite when he doesn’t know what you’re talking about? Nice change of pace. So maybe there’s an upside.
How old are you? my father said.
Thirty-one.
He moves like an old man, my father thought, especially when he talks about Albert.
My father said, When I agreed to proctor the evaluation, he gave me a packet of mimeographed sheets and a letter. He told me to hold on to the letter until he failed the test. So I did. Then, last Monday, he failed it, so I went upstairs to my place and got the letter. I don’t know what it said, but he told me we were done.
Done as in don’t come back?
Yes, my father said.
Hm. Mostly dates of naval battles, I assume, the questions?
Family dates. Other highlights. But mostly family.
Like what?
What year he made partner. What year he got married. That sort of thing.
What other family questions? John said.
Names. Dates of birth.
Date of death?
My father blinked. Yes. Of course. That was the only question that mattered.
How long has this been going on?
About a year. I’m a quarter through the stack of mimeos. I don’t know if that meant he thought he’d last longer.
You know the important dates.
I suppose.
Okay. So at this point you’re a more reliable family historian than my father.
If an encyclopedia’s better than a novel, maybe.
And what’s the most important date? John asked. If there was any challenge in his voice, my father didn’t hear it. He heard only genuine curiosity.
The day your son died, my father said.
An important question.
Yes, my father said. When I said it was the only one that mattered, I mean it was the only one that mattered. None of the other questions counted toward the final score.
Only the last one.
And he never missed it?
No.
Not until the last time?
That’s right.
So that letter, John said.
Instructions to himself, I suppose, my father said, and he understood that John had reached the same conclusion, the only possible conclusion, and he watched the younger man with apprehension. What had he done?
I’m sorry, my father said quietly, as though he couldn’t bring himself to speak so useless a sentence.
That’s what they say. John cleared his throat.
How could any person survive it? my father thought. If you’re young, maybe you have a chance, by the grace of ignorance. You’re young and you think, Maybe I can go on, maybe I can persevere and fight my way out of the grief, and by some accident of memory if I live long enough the images will fade and … But of course you can’t. This is a thing that’s inscribed on your bones. An old man knows you can’t.
He thought it was his fault, my father said.
I know, John said. So you think he’s trying to make amends?
In his way.
It’s too late for him to do the honorable thing, John said.
I don’t know that honor has anything to do with it, my father said.
He was three and a half, John said. He tipped onto his left haunch and reached around to his back pocket. Oh god, no, thought my father. He looked at the vending machines and tried to will them to explode. Please, god, no. John took out his wallet and flipped it open, dipped his fingers inside, and extracted the photo, the one that he himself could not bear to look at. He held it up so my father could see it. Among the limited benefits of my father’s solitary profession was a conviction, arrived at through years of probing the dark matter within himself, that a person with a story always wants to tell it.
It was a benefit because, as uncomfortable as other people made him, as soon as he realized everyone else was dying to blab, he never had to do anything but ask questions. It was amazing what people would tell you. No matter how sorrowful, no matter how shameful, all stories lie in wait of a sympathetic ear. But he didn’t want to hear this story.
The mechanism my father engaged to keep from bursting into tears was complex. He tried to summon up the vampire Saltwater, the one who sucked at the ripe neck of humanity in the name of fiction, but he wouldn’t rise. That character, so familiar, had no place here. There was nothing sinister about lending John his ear, nothing parasitic about one person listening to another, enacting the old communion that had kept humanity glued together for millennia. When would he let go of this idea of himself as a menacing force? The job was certainly easier if he only pretended to shoulder the burden, but in the end he took the burden anyway, no matter what he told himself, not because he was a saint but because he was nothing more than a man who could not resist the ache of empathy.
We were in Florida, John said.
My father wanted to bolt. He had to get out of there.
My mother and father had a place down on the Gulf, John said, and we were all there together. My sisters and their families. My wife. Our little boy.
My father stayed put.
22.
He knew the story. He’d heard it two years earlier, a glass of Cragganmore in his hand, which he had, midway through, put down out of respect for Albert, who was gripping his own two-handed, fingers laced tight. My father had felt that the act of cradling his own drink, as if in the
