You don’t love a whore, Albert responded between bites of game hen.
What did I expect? Fil said. It’s a trap. Everything is a trap with you.
If you don’t want the money, don’t take it, he said. You’re an adult now. You can choose.
And if I choose not to? Fil said. What will you have on me then?
Then I’ll have done my job.
Your job as a parent was not limited to paying whatever bills I incurred for the first eighteen years of my life. Can you even comprehend that?
Well, more than eighteen, wouldn’t you agree? You’ll see, Albert said, still scooping food into his mouth.
I’ll see what? How easy it is to buy off my own kids?
Albert put down his fork, folded his napkin, and left the table, and later he’d hand-delivered the rent check for Fil’s apartment in the West Village.
Daddy, she said, this is the whole problem.
I don’t see a problem, he said.
She’d taken the check.
John would never take anything from him. Went to college on scholarship, Juilliard the same. Worked to pay rent. Insisted on his independence even though he lived only three blocks away. Albert had found out after the boy died—John as unwilling to take his money then as ever—that he and Bronwyn had been accepting money from her parents all along. Well, let him come begging now that the river’s gone dry, Albert thought.
It was an accident, my father said to Albert. Your presence at the scene of an accident doesn’t qualify you for the torments of hell. Is this Dickens? A plot you cooked up when you realized you were going to lose your mind, just to keep things interesting? It’s absurd.
Albert absorbed my father’s words with a placid, almost bored expression on his face. You’re afraid, Albert said.
There’s certainly something for me to be afraid of, isn’t there? my father said. You kill yourself and I go to jail?
Oh, let’s be men about this. You know I won’t allow that. You’re afraid, Albert said, because it would require you to modify your ethical model. I’m proposing a return to the old, vengeful gods. A life for a life.
Albert stole a glance at the clock, then resituated himself in his chair. You’re afraid that if you go along with me, you will have to hold yourself to the same standard. Isn’t that it? You have a pragmatic reason to fear my plans. These phobias of yours, your fear of the world itself, they all come from whatever unspeakable act you committed. What was it, I wonder? What could have been so terrible that you have sacrificed your sanity to make amends? We’re actually in agreement here—you might not know it, but we are. You believe in a life for a life, too. But you haven’t been able to kill yourself, not quite. Why is that, Erwin?
Because I’m a coward, my father said.
Yes, you are, Albert said. Don’t you worry about the legalities. I guarantee that you will be amply protected.
I’m sure, my father said.
Before my father left that night, Albert told him a final story: A dirt baseball diamond in Central Park, 1956. John’s team in the field, John playing second base, his jersey tucked into his dungarees like all the other boys, smacking his glove like all the other boys. Albert in the passel of parents behind the low fence along third, having walked up from his office on this blazing July day to watch his son, and John a little jumpier for it, but a little lighter on his feet, too, yelling No-Hittah, No-Hittah to the pitcher in the jacked-up voice that possessed them all when their fathers showed. John kept checking, and there he was, in a wool suit, a crisp white shirt and tie despite the crushing heat, his black shoes and hat, there among the other fathers in their shirtsleeves, shirts with their names sewn on the chest, which John, at ten, could decipher, as he could decipher a hat embroidered with a company name above the bill, or wearing the top two buttons of one’s shirt open so that the curly hair formed a rude, isolinear wedge, all signals of a lack of fatherly fitness to John, of the working-class slob who sweated for his dough.
Two strikes and a ball into the count, the batter, rattled by the runt second baseman who wouldn’t shut the hell up, let fly with a wild swing that bestowed all his animus unto the ball, a line drive that, miraculously, shot like a bullet directly at the loudmouth on second. John almost got his glove on it but his bony thigh took the blow, and the ball dribbled off toward first, where the hitter stood triumphantly with one foot on the bag, his round little fists on his waist.
John was writhing in the dirt. He looked once, twice toward his father, the other fathers turning to each other to make way for the one among them who would step up to the fence, awaiting the signal from the coach, a CUNY kid working at the Y for the summer, to summon him over. The coach crouched down by John and put a hand on him. He looked in the direction of the parents, his mouth open as he scanned the faces, the coach who really just wanted to get on with the game, kids these days go down like
