Father of the Rain (17 page)

“You probably won’t believe this,” he said finally, staring straight ahead, “but I’ve never crossed the color line before. It just never seemed worth it somehow. I wasn’t raised to believe that we’re all the same deep down. My grandmother used to say to me and my brothers, Stay away from white girls. Stay away from them. She was from Vidalia, Georgia, and had a million stories from her childhood. They all ended the same. The black man ended up either dead or in jail. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, there weren’t white people. Not in my neighborhood. Not on the streets, not at school, not in the shops. I knew they existed—I saw them on TV or if we got in my uncle’s car and went somewhere—but I didn’t think there were very many of them. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about white people. And then one day my uncle came by and took me and my cousin to a movie. I think we were six. He had some discount for a theater across town. We got there and there was a thick line of white people down the entire block and around the corner and down another block. All white. I didn’t understand where they could have come from. I still remember the feeling in my chest, terrified, utterly terrified, but also something else, a little thrill or something, because the world was different from what I had thought.” He was still looking straight at the lake, fingers
looped around the steering wheel. I wanted to touch him again. “In there, holding your hand, I got that same feeling.”

We reached for each other at the same time. Hands, then mouths, then our bodies pressing against each other. I could not stop tears from leaking out, so great was the relief of his touch and the end of his anger. I hoped he wouldn’t notice but he did; he found them and licked them and apologized for yelling. I wasn’t used to apologies. It brought on a few more tears.

I’d always paced things carefully with men, offered up my body piecemeal, resisted exploration of theirs until I felt certain the emotional connection was keeping pace with the physical. My mother had told me not to make love without love, but I had become a freakish air-traffic controller, determined to land the two, love and sex, at precisely the same time. It rarely worked. The orchestrating itself derailed things. With Jonathan I lost interest in control, lost the ability to control. And that first sex in the car by the lake was always with us, every time we made love afterward, and never once did I regret it.

I can’t offer anyone a real goodbye at the end of the night. When people hug me, I insist I’ll see them soon, I’ll see them around. Julie squeezes me hard. This is the end of our life together. I took all my things out of our apartment this morning and crammed them into my car. There is only a little hole for me to squeeze into tomorrow and drive to California.

“I hate this,” she says. “I hate that I’m not going to find all your dirty dishes in the sink tomorrow night.”

“Please don’t make me cry. If I start, I won’t stop.” But I feel numb, nowhere close to tears.

She kisses me on both cheeks and leaves them wet. She promises to visit in the fall. It doesn’t feel real, my future, all that I have
worked so hard to make happen. But the future always sits uneasily with me. I’ve never been able to really trust it. I’ve trained myself not to look forward to things very often. And I’m tired. I’m bone tired. Part of me just wants to curl up on a couch and sleep for a few years.

Dan is the last to leave. From his car he asks, “Can I use that bit about your father not going to the funeral?” He means in a story. “Please? I’ve already wrung my own childhood dry.”

“Go ahead,” I say, and then he is gone, just a hand out the car window, and then that is gone, too. He was my very first friend here.

Jonathan and I stack the dishes in the kitchen and lie on his bed in our clothes. It’s how we’ve always done it, like teenagers, as if each night we spend together is our first. My old boyfriend David used to have to brush his teeth and change into a clean T-shirt and fresh underwear before he got near the bed, and liked me to do the same. I couldn’t stand the sterile marriedness of it. I make sure I don’t always sleep on the same side of Jonathan’s bed when I stay over. I don’t want ritual or routine in a relationship. Ever.

Jonathan traces a finger along my temple and around my ear. When he takes off his glasses you can see that he has little stripes of tawny gold in his dark brown eyes. “You were so funny when people were toasting you. You looked like they were giving you an enema.”

“I hate watching people have to come up with nice things to say.” I kiss his finger, the tender pink pad of it. “Thank you for the party.”

“You’re so welcome, my Daley bread.”

We kiss hard, our hands reaching for bare skin. He lifts a breast out of my bra and into his mouth and my groin starts to ache. I wonder how long our desire will last. We’ve signed a year’s lease in California. Will we still touch each other so hungrily after a year of living together?

He pulls me on top of him. I feel him hard beneath me under his jeans. I push against him lightly, then harder, feeling the rush,
the swell, the want. “Everything on earth should be just this simple,” I say. I take his earlobe in my teeth and feel him moan. “Tell me what it’s like again,” I whisper, still grinding against him, feeling the exact shape of him through our clothes.

It takes him a second to find his voice. “You know it’s Paloma Street when you see the big fence covered in bright red flowers. And then five houses down you see a tree out in front. Enormous. Maybe a eucalyptus. Please take off your clothes.”

“Tell me about the front door.” He flew out to California last month and found the cottage for us.

“Yellow. It’s yellow.”

“And the little window in the door?”

“The color of pale green sea glass. Please.”

I pull off my jeans, clumsily. I’m like a drunk when I’m horny, completely without fine motor skills. Jonathan scoots himself down and pushes my legs apart. He grins up at me, then slides a finger up inside me. I’m wet and swollen and it goes in easily. He pushes it in and slides it out and pushes it in again. Unable to wait, I press myself to his mouth, feel the warmth of his tongue on my clit and the finger drawing back and forth inside me. I can feel the orgasm now, assembling in the distance then moving swiftly in, opening up, opening me up, coming, coming closer, coming to split me down the middle.

But the sudden ring startles me. “Just the phone, tweety,” he says without lifting his head.

Three and a half rings, then the machine catches it. The orgasm veers off. My brother comes on. “Jesus Christ, Daley. Where the fuck are you?” There’s a panic in his voice I’ve never heard before.

“Don’t,” Jonathan says as I pull away from him. “Please don’t.”

But I’m already across the room, reaching for the receiver. “Garvey, what’s wrong?”

“Oh fucking Christ. There you are.”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh my God. Dad. Dad is what’s going on.”

“Is he okay?” I feel that cool whiteness that happens just before you hear someone is dead.

Garvey starts laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. “No, he is not okay or I wouldn’t have been leaving you so many goddamn messages.”

I look at the machine. A red 5 flashes. “Please calm down and tell me—”

“You haven’t been here. You have no idea what I’ve seen in the past—”

“Garvey, you are scaring the shit out of me. What’s going on?”

“Catherine left him.”

He’s alive. That’s all I care about. “When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”

I wait for the rest.

“He is a fucking
mess
.”

I snort. “Tell me about it.”

“No, Daley. He’s totally lost his shit. He’s threatening to kill all his dogs. And Hugh fired him. It was Hugh’s wife who called me. He’s drunk ‘round the clock. He’s unrecognizable.”

“Unrecognizable would be Dad sober. Dad drunk is not at all foreign to me.” All those years that I had to go up to Myrtle Street every weekend, every vacation, while Garvey showed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

“Daley.” His voice cracks. I haven’t heard him like this since Mom died. “You gotta come here and help me out.”

“What? No, Garvey. I’m driving to California tomorrow.” He knows all about Berkeley. He calls us Malibu Smart Barbie and Black Marxist Ken.

“He’s talked about offing himself.”

“Oh, come on. He’d destroy every living thing on this planet before he’d kill himself.”

“No, Daley, you have to believe me. I think he might hurt himself. I need some backup here.”

“I’m not coming. Not right now. I have a job that’s about to start in California.”

“Stop saying
California
like it’s so important. I’m in
Massachusetts
and I need your help with our
father
. Two, three days, that’s all I’m asking. Just to kind of settle him down. You’re good with him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You are.”

“I couldn’t even get there tomorrow. I’ve got to send out this article I just finished and have lunch with my advisor and—”

“I know. You’ve very busy. Get here when you can. Just for a day or two.”

“Goddammit, Garvey.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Jesus Christ, Daley, thank you.”

Jonathan is sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. I sit beside him. I have no clothes on.

“I have to, Jon. I have to. Garvey sounds really freaked out.”

“He always sounds freaked out.”

“Not like this. My stepmother has taken off and my father is falling apart.”

“What can you do in two days to fix that? Nothing.”

“I don’t want blood on my hands. I don’t want to hear that my father shot himself while I drove to California.”

“That’s just Garvey being hyperbolic.”

“He needs my help.”

“I don’t think you’ve spoken to your father since I’ve known you.”

“Probably not.”

“But within seconds you’ve decided to fly off in the wrong direction to a man who’s not even a part of your life.”

“Garvey needs help.”

“Are you going to tell your father you’re moving in with a black man?”

“Not if there are any knives around.”

He doesn’t smile. “Don’t do this. Don’t go back there.”

He’s still trying to persuade me to head west when I squeeze into my car the next afternoon.

We’re tired. We’ve argued in circles since last night. And now I’m doing it—I’m about to drive away in the wrong direction.

“Daley,” he says. He squats beside the open car door and holds my hands. It’s still the same feeling from the general store, every time our hands touch. “Please be careful.” He, too, has an uneasy relationship with the future. We understand each other in that way.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Your father has a lot of power.”

“You’re confusing me with Julie. My father has no power over me. He wasn’t even a father.” I see he is scared for me, far more scared than I am. Clearly I’ve told him too much.

“He still has the power to hurt you.”

“No, he doesn’t. It’s all scar tissue now.”

“I’ll be at the yellow door a week from Monday,” he says, kissing me one last time.

“I’ll see you through the sea glass window.”

And then I start the Datsun and drive east.

You can’t get to my father’s house from the highway without passing the Water Street Apartments. I didn’t mean to come here first. I meant to go straight to Dad’s, but I find myself peering into my bedroom window. It’s someone’s home office now, with two computers, a fax machine, and a leather swivel chair. The posters of Robert Redford, Billy Jack, and the Fonz are gone. Paul would have taken them down when he moved out the summer after my mother died. I’m certain he’s rolled them up neatly in tubes; he’s saved everything for Garvey and me in storage somewhere.

My mother died instantly. People tried to comfort us with that. But to whom was that a comfort? To me? I would have liked to see her one last time, no matter how crushed her body was; I would have liked to say goodbye, even if she couldn’t have heard me. Was it a comfort to her? Who would choose to die instantly, without a chance to process the transition? But then, I don’t like to be startled. I don’t like to be surprised. She and Paul had eaten dinner in Boston, he’d gone to get the car, she’d decided to cross Tremont to make it easier for him to pick her up, and a car had struck her. The driver had had a few drinks in him; my mother was prone to daydreaming. It’s hard to say what really happened. No one claimed to have seen.

I walk around to the living room windows. The current tenants have a sofa where we had one, a large dining table where our small one was. I’d been in my dorm room when Paul called. I was a sophomore in college. My roommate was dating a hockey player who’d just gotten back from a game. His shoulder pads were leaning
against the wall by the phone. Paul was crying. The inside of the pads were streaked with filth.
I just talked to her last night
. I think I told this to Paul many times. It might have been the only thing I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was the only thing that made sense. Garvey came and got me a few hours later.

I often try to remember my mother’s funeral. It was at the little Episcopalian church she used to take me to before she left my father. I can remember those Sundays: my blue velvet coat, the white gloves, and my mother’s long prayers on her knees on needlepoint cushions. I don’t think she went to church after she left him. I don’t think she needed to. But I can’t recall the funeral. I don’t know what was said. All I remember about that day, that whole week, was my father’s absence.

Garvey thought my expectations were ridiculous. “You’re going to make yourself sick your whole life if you think he’s ever going to behave like a father to you,” he told me as we lay on the twin beds in my room after the funeral. “We’re basically orphans now. Get used to it.” But I could not.

I think I believed that with my mother dead the barrier between me and my father would fall magically away. I spent the second half of my sophomore year of college waiting for him to call me. I took a job that summer in a restaurant in Rhode Island and sent him my new number on a postcard, and he never called it. I didn’t visit him before I went back to school. I spent Christmas with a friend’s family. And then, spring break of my junior year, I took a bus to Boston and a train to Ashing and appeared at the kitchen door where he was feeding the dogs. “Well, well,” he said. “You pregnant or broke or both?” I stayed the night. It was just the three of us. Catherine made a roast. As they got drunk, then drunker, I waited for them to slip and make a jab about my mother, the way they always did. I waited to catch them. I was going to make a scene. A huge hair-pulling scene.
For God’s sake, she’s dead. Can’t you leave her alone now?
But they never mentioned her. He hugged me goodbye at the train the next day. “You’s a good kid for visiting,” he said. I spent the rest of the break off campus, in a friend’s empty apartment, alone, sobbing. I had held off the grief with anger towards my father, but now I was blindsided by it, terrified by the sudden gaping hole of my mother’s absence. She was my ballast, my counterweight to the downward pull of Myrtle Street, and she was gone.