The Bestiary (10 page)

W
HEN
I
FIRST
went away to school, I only saw my father at hotels or furnished apartments which he would sublet for the one month I wasn’t at summer session. Even for him, this became too irregular—or too inconvenient—and so, in my third year, he bought an apartment in Boston that became my nominal home. It was really a mailing address.

A sign of my father’s continued prosperity, the apartment was in a block of expensive brownstones canopied by maple trees near Kendall Square—a far cry from our old Bronx neighborhood. Yet the furnishings were equally drab and heavy and, like every apartment he’d ever chosen, the air itself felt dark. An inky mist seemed to hover just below the ceilings. There were two bedrooms, and a kitchen overlooking a bare yard. The kitchen was equally bare. Except for the groceries purchased for immediate use, the cupboard was occupied by the same yellowing box of kosher salt, a dusty bottle of vinegar, and a tube of toothpicks. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were still there. My father visited several times a year—the same routine he had followed in New York. Except the rest of the time the apartment was unlived in, or else I was there alone.

Alerted to his arrival by the usual terse postcard, I would make the five-hour train ride to meet him. Sometimes it was around a holiday weekend, but never at Christmas. With the Morettis I had always alternated between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so every other Christmas Eve I was a regular at the headmaster’s house, one of those students (the others were invariably from foreign countries) who didn’t go home. We dined stiffly with the headmaster and his family, made small talk, and felt—at least I did—like intruders required to give command performances. I was at once jealous of the headmaster’s children and repelled by their stiflingly good manners. I also felt sorry for them. Already residing in a fishbowl, they were no doubt irritated by our presence during one of the few times the campus emptied. My table conversation was limited; since I wasn’t from Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, the family was politely curious about my background, unusual name, and Greek and Italian ancestry, which was exotic in those parts.

The rendezvous with my father were lonely enough, but the time I spent alone in Boston was worse, especially in August when the summer sessions ended. It was because I was such a summer school regular, accumulating credits, that I was able to graduate from high school a year early.

When I did see my father, he asked perfunctory questions about my schoolwork, but since he had no interest in books or learning, and I had no desire to share my newfound passions, those discussions went nowhere. We dined out and passed most of the meals in silence, the conversation limited to the food before us, the weather, and the day’s headlines. Once when I asked him—affecting a tone of clinical inquiry—about our long silences, he readily attributed them to his years in ships’ galleys.

“At sea you don’t talk much over meals,” he explained, as if this had any bearing on our circumstances in a steakhouse in the North End.

The fact is, nothing had changed since I was a boy: he was disinterested, I was angry, and the rift between us had only deepened. I never succeeded in penetrating his opacity, emotionally or intellectually. I had to admit that, despite my education, his was the stronger mind; he could always repel me.

Finally I felt so defeated that I decided I had nothing to lose by confronting him. I asked why he bothered crossing the ocean to see me at all.

“You’re my son.”

“Then why can’t I visit you in Europe?”

“I’ve told you, my life there is all business. I’m never in one place for long.”

I didn’t understand how anyone’s life could be all business.

“I have a place in Athens,” he went on, “where I hang my hat. But it isn’t a real home. I still spend a lot of time on ships.”

“This apartment is also a place where you hang your hat. And it isn’t a real home, either.”

“Then why not get together here?” he asked with mock innocence.

Our conversations had achieved a new level of absurdity.

When I questioned him about his life, he remained guarded and elusive. The litany was always the same: he had the place in Athens; he owned several freighters; he was often at sea. He kept his office on one of the ships, he said, not in some airless building in Piraeus. “Unlike most shippers, who sit on their asses, I still like to handle a rope and a wrench,” he added self-righteously. Most of his business now was in Africa and the Far East.

It wasn’t clear how he had put together such an enterprise. Thrift and hard work were his ready mantra, but as I got older, that seemed an awfully facile explanation. I wondered where he had acquired the business acumen to invest his small savings so shrewdly while expanding so fast. And who had assisted him? Did he have partners? Patrons? He wouldn’t say. Nor did he ever express pride in what he had accomplished. To him—despite the fact he had started out as a coal stoker with a ninth-grade education—that would have been effusive, boastful, against his code. Anyway, he never would have shared such thoughts with me. His idea of intimacy was to offer me a medical report, also superficial: blood pressure up; left shoulder arthritic; bone spurs in his heel. His more serious problems, dry cough and shortness of breath, he never discussed. Obviously the years of breathing coal dust in confined spaces had taken a toll on his respiratory system. It sounded to me like emphysema in the early stages, but when I asked about it, he insisted that the cough developed when he quit smoking, because his lungs were purging themselves. “A doctor in Malta told me so,” he said solemnly.

Behind these meager facts loomed the question of the life he really led in Europe—the central mystery of my childhood. I had always assumed there must be some correlation between his efforts at concealment and the magnitude of the facts being concealed. Why would he work so hard to hide something small? I had my fantasies: that he had remarried; started another family; maybe taken a mistress? But why would any of those scenarios necessitate a double life? And why would he have to keep me away at all costs, especially as I grew older? I figured he possessed the guile to pull off a large-scale masquerade of that sort, but I didn’t credit him with the necessary imagination. Or maybe the explanation was simpler: not a double, but a single life, a dreary reversion to his earliest model: remote, friendless, built—as he insisted—around work. Maybe he was being honest when he said that it would be no different seeing him in Athens as in Boston—or Bombay or Lisbon. Every place in the world essentially becomes the same when you are that isolated.

Outwardly, incredibly, I could detect no clues about the life my father led during the roughly 340 days of the year I did not see him. He dressed better, had plenty of money, ate in better restaurants, but, still, he felt like the same man who inhabited my earliest memories: humorless, taciturn, giving me all I needed materially, yet displaying little generosity of spirit, toward me or himself. Whatever he had lived through, and suppressed, and however that had transformed him internally, he kept hidden. At that he was masterly.

All the while, for seventeen years, he had consigned me to limbo. I refused to remain there any longer. I wanted out.

I got my opportunity—if you can call it that—just after Mr. Moretti’s funeral. My father summoned me from school. He had rented us rooms at the Devon Hotel, near Central Park South. I was surprised; it would be the first Christmas I spent with him in many years. It was not the way I wanted to return to New York just then, but his invitations arrived infrequently. And I wanted to see what he had in mind.

On Christmas Eve we set out from the hotel, up Seventh Avenue, into a freezing wind. Other people were doubled over, but I tried to emulate my father, who, having endured the harshest conditions on the decks of North Atlantic freighters, strode unbowed, erect. The snow crystals froze in his moustache and on his eyebrows, yet he didn’t flinch. His black overcoat, taut across the shoulder blades, barely contained his bulky frame. His thick wrists protruded from the sleeves. His gloveless hands were clenched.

Though I’d grown several inches in the previous year, I realized I would never be his size. I would make it to six feet, but no taller. And though I was strong, I was slim; I wouldn’t have his big arms or barrel chest. I had my mother’s hair, and her lighter coloring, and set far apart over a nose with a small bump and the right cheek more sharply planed than the left, her eyes, too, the same dark brown. My grandmother used to tell me I looked like her younger brother, Ennio, who had been killed in the First World War. She showed me a bleached picture of a handsome man in an Italian Army uniform, cap pushed back, cigarette between his fingers, smiling wryly beside a fountain.

My father and I had dinner in a gloomy Turkish restaurant. Blinking colored lights framed the window in which a scrawny fir tree was draped with tinsel. The meze were displayed on a side table beneath a fake wreath: eggplant dip, turnip pickles, stuffed grape leaves, and sardines. My father drank two large rakis—unusual for him—but his outward demeanor never changed. I had baklava for dessert while he puffed a cigar, eyeing me absently. Then we walked across Fifty-first Street to Rockefeller Center.

At the rink, Rimsky-Korsakoff was blaring from the speakers. Floodlights illuminated the towering Douglas pine, adorned with thousands of bulbs, a silver angel poised at the summit. A children’s program was under way: skaters costumed as animals spinning in formation, brandishing torches, performing tricks. There were tigers, lions, a moose, a walrus, but the best skater was a golden bear. He was juggling red balls. With each circuit of the rink, he tossed the balls higher, never dropping any or losing his rhythm, even when he leaped through a series of hoops. After taking a bow, he led the other animals off the rink and a wave of human skaters replaced them.

I remembered what I read about bears in the Hereford bestiary:

Bears eat ants when they’re sick from too much honey. And a dying bear sings.

My father and I stood at the brass railing before the Christmas tree. He hadn’t said a word since dinner, and now he started talking.

“I used to come here with your mother. She liked to skate, you know.”

I didn’t know, of course, because he had never told me.

“Most of the time she skated at the rink on Merrick Avenue,” he went on. “The rink was next to the elevated line, so the trains kept drowning out the music. She had always rented skates. For Christmas I bought her a pair, but she only wore them a few times. They were white with red laces.” He looked at me. “She had to stop because she was pregnant.” He turned back to the rink. “She said she’d skate again after you were born.”

He might as well have punched me in the stomach. Had he brought up the taboo subject of my birth because he wanted a contrite acknowledgment, once and for all, that if it hadn’t been for me, my mother would be alive?

He could have saved himself the trouble, I wanted to shout. But I didn’t have the courage to call him on such things. The anger I nursed ran so deep, and our relationship was so tenuous, that I was convinced if I lashed out, the consquences could be irreversible. My great fear was that my father was waiting for just such an opportunity to cut what remaining ties we had.

The wind made my eyes water. As I gazed at the skaters, most of them young, wearing brightly colored scarves and gloves, my anger ebbed into a familiar sorrow. My mother, I thought, had once been one of them, at her death just a few years older than I was that Christmas. My conception of her, drawn from the wispiest of vapors, had evolved over the years. I had come to think of her almost as a peer—one who happened to live in another time—whom I could relate to, not as my mother, but as another teenager. It was a paradox that the older I got, the less remote and timeless she seemed. My father, on the other hand, had become more of a stranger than ever.

“The last time we came here,” he was saying, “we stayed until all the other skaters left. Then we watched the ushers sweep the rink and shut the lights. And she said, ‘I wish I could stay here forever.’ That’s how happy she was.”

I looked at him. “And you, were you happy?”

He nodded. “I was.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

He seemed taken aback. “Because we’re here.”

“And if we weren’t, you wouldn’t have told me at all.”

He shrugged and turned up his coat collar. “We’re here. And now we should go.”

That was all he was going to give me. And that was the end for me.

A month later, I severed what little contact I had with him, telling myself—with more anger than conviction—that for once I was abandoning him. I did it by postcard.

Dad:

I won’t be meeting you in Boston anymore. It’s too painful for me to see you when I know you keep me out of the greater part of your life. That was hard enough when I lived with Grandma and Evgénia. Now it seems impossible.

Yours,
Xeno