about uncomfortably for a few minutes, then returned to the kitchen. I switched on the light, and as I did so, my eyes caught on the half-filled mug I’d put in the sink. It sat near the drain, upright, but out of place, just as my father’s unfinished cup of coffee had rested in nearly the same position on that November day, as if waiting still for Mrs. Fields to see it. It was then that it struck me that the dream had come from him, that it was a message— although still cryptic and unreadable—from my father.
Even that night, after the visit to my father’s house and the dream that followed it, even then, it was still someone else’s question.
It was Bobby Fields’s question when we met the first day of first grade, and to which I’d been able to give the simple reply that I would lose forever in only a few years: “He owns a hardware store.”
It was Jerry Flynn’s question when I was ten, and living in Maine, and when he asked it, he meant Uncle Quentin, whom he assumed to be my father.
It was Sally Peacock’s question when I went out on my first date and had to explain, because there seemed no way to avoid it, that my father had left me years before and so, at the moment, I had no idea what he “did.”
It was Marie’s question that long night we first made love, and I told her in full and ghastly detail exactly what my father had done on that November day.
And at last, as it must always be with sons, it was my question, too.
THREE
THE USUAL BREAKFAST atrocities occurred the Monday morning after we brought Peter back from camp. Peter dropped or spilled nearly everything he touched, and Marie became increasingly exasperated with him, finally screaming at his back as he trudged, hunched and angry, out into the backyard.
Once he’d left, she turned her wrath on me, her eyes narrowing lethally, as if taking aim.
“Why don’t you ever say anything to him?” she demanded harshly. “Why do I have to do all the yelling?”
“I don’t care what he spills,” I told her with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
It was a reply which only concentrated her anger by focusing it on me.
“It’s because you don’t have to clean it up,” she shot back. “If you had to clean it up, then you’d care.”
I started to offer something in return, but she whirled around and strode out of the kitchen, tossing a wadded paper towel into the plastic garbage can beside the door.
It was typical of Marie to storm out of a room rather than engage in a longer confrontation. Even our first real argument had been a clipped and stifled affair, again with Marie leaving rapidly, this time from a car, but with the same air of unavoidable flight. Over the years I’d come to think of it as a way of avoiding some invisible line she feared to cross, a form of self-control.
I left around fifteen minutes later, waving to Peter as I headed for the car. He sat, slumped in a chair beside the pool, and as I went by, he waved back halfheartedly, then offered a knowing smile, as if we were allies in some war we waged against the central woman in our lives.
I backed slowly out of the driveway, glancing only briefly toward the house. I could see Marie at the window of our bedroom on the second floor. She’d thrown open the curtains and was standing in the full morning light, her arms folded tightly below her breasts, so that their round upper quarters were lifted and exposed beneath the partly open gown. It was a stance my mother would never have assumed, and I remember thinking, as I pulled out of the driveway, that for “poor Dottie” bedroom curtains were meant to be tightly closed. As for the woman poised behind them, a plain red housedress would do just fine.
There were other differences between Marie and my mother, as well, and on the way to my office that morning, I silently, and almost unconsciously, catalogued them.
Marie was stern and demanding, while my mother had suffered from a general lack of will, one so severe, I think, that it had even prevented her from disciplining her children. Thus, instead of ordering us to do things, help around the house, choose the proper clothes, keep our mouths shut when others were talking, she’d simply allowed us to find our own way through the maze, directionless and uninstructed.
Unlike Marie, who was self-assured and confident in her abilities and opinions, my mother had seemed to doubt her own adulthood, doubt even those of its prerogatives which my father had taken for granted and exercised with full authority.
My father.
The memory that suddenly returned him to me that morning, as I drove to work, appeared ordinary enough at first. It was clear and vivid, the setting laid out perfectly in my mind:
We had all been in the backyard, Laura and I tossing a ball back and forth while Jamie lounged in a small yard chair, leafing through some sort of sports magazine. As the minutes passed, the pitches became wilder and faster, with Laura lobbing the ball toward me at weird angles, or heaving it in a high and uncontrolled arc over all our heads.
Inevitably, one of her throws went way off, the ball crashing down onto Jamie’s magazine, knocking it first into his lap, then onto the ground.
The ball startled and frightened him, and his sudden panic had no doubt embarrassed him as well, and so he leaped to his feet, angrily strode across the yard, grabbed Laura by the shoulders, and started screaming at her. She fought back, pushing him away violently and yelling into his face. I ran over to her, trying to get between the two, and started screaming just as loudly.
We were still going at it when we heard the door open at the back of the house and saw our father step out onto the small veranda which overlooked the backyard. He didn’t say a word, but only stood, his hands holding firmly to the railing of the veranda, as he peered down at us.
All our attention was trained upon him, all our eyes lifted up, as if he were descending from the clouds. A
