Ghost Dance (5 page)

“Well, if you’re sure,” my mother says, smiling.

Already my father is cultivating his numerous eccentricities, watering them, feeding them, making room for them, so that by the time I knew him they were enormous and in full, brilliant flower.

I bet my mother liked
Waiting for Godot
. I’m sure she liked the idea that my father went to plays at all—daring plays, “mysteries wrapped in enigmas.” He must have seemed risky to her, exciting and intelligent and also quite handsome in his gray flannel suit—the opposite of most of the other men she had met, the presidential cabinet members and investment bankers and other miscellaneous shareholders of the future.

I hope they were happy that weekend, against that elegant backdrop of ivy and dark wood and mountains, with less than a month left until their graduation.

They dance together the rest of the night, and when my father finally looks at her full face, he is silenced by what he sees and hardly speaks at all again after that.

They must have looked lovely together as they swirled around the center of the dance floor for all to see.

“Look, Turin’s stopped talking,” Teddy says to Joel, and they shrug.

My father becomes even more lost as he hugs my mother and they listen to the silence outside, alone during the band’s break, standing precariously on the verge of their adult lives.

The band returns for one final song. And yes, my parents indeed look lovely together—like figures of marzipan poised on the top of a wedding cake. As the heat rises, my father’s new jacket blurs slightly. He seems to be melting into my mother’s arms. He breathes one last deep breath and looks for the first time directly into her bottomless blue eyes. She takes him in and he holds on tightly, as the wafer-thin dance floor slowly begins to spin.

A few notes of the guitar—the bass—my father gets up, a small flurry of motion. He smiles, swings back and forth on his heels, snaps his fingers: a trumpet, snare drum. He starts to sing with Billie Holiday.

“The way you wear your hat,” and he gestures to his head.

“The way you sip your tea,” and he picks up an invisible cup, his pinkie in the air.

A tinkling of piano.

“The memory of all that”—and extends his arms—“no, no, they can’t take that away from me”—and brings his arms to his chest.

He does a little soft-shoe on the deck of the ship. The first touches of silver gray at his temples shine in the moonlight.

“No, they can’t take that away from me.”

Sometimes, to get our father to speak, we would invent homework assignments in which it was necessary for him to answer questions. This to us seemed the ultimate in legitimacy, and we could not imagine how even our father could refuse under these circumstances to speak. We could not picture him standing like some fullback in the way of our educational progress. Surely, we reasoned, Father remembered the importance of homework. There were some things no one forgot.

We were wildly, obsessively interested in the things he would not talk about and, while at times I enjoyed imagining what he might be thinking as he drew lines on graph paper or lay on the floor staring at the ceiling, some things we wanted—needed—real answers to.

“Sit down, Daddy,” we’d begin. “There’s something we’ve got to ask you.”

“It’s important,” Fletcher would say.

“Sit down, it’s for school.” Father seemed impatient. He smiled a little but we didn’t know why. Fletcher looked behind me to see if someone else had entered the room. My father’s preoccupied look always alarmed him.

“We’ll
fail
if you don’t help us,” Fletcher said, and I knocked him with my elbow. The word
fail
, a word meant to be saved for the final summation, the best word we had, slipped out early and seemed to have no effect on him at all.

“Well, if you want the truth,” I said calmly, “we may not get into college if we don’t hand in this homework. That’s how important it is.”

My father must have chuckled slightly at this point because we weren’t anywhere near college age yet. I think I was in sixth grade that year, Fletcher was in fifth. I wonder if he detected that the whole assignment had been a fabrication. I think he must have. I hope he did.

“We need to know our family history,” we explained, “you know, all about the relatives, who they were, what they were like, if they had a job, what it was,” we said as casually as we could. “We need information.”

“Make up whatever you like,” he said. “Really, I don’t mind.” He was smiling.

Fletcher was already exasperated. “But we need the truth, Dad,” he said, “or we’ll fail.” There was that word again. “We’re serious.”

My father put on his coat. “I think I’ll go for a walk, children. Please,” he said absently, patting our heads.

“Come on, you can tell us,” we said in our friendly way, as Father knotted his plaid scarf, wishing, I think, that he had a dog he might call to his lonely side.

“What’s the secret?” we yelled to him out the front door.

“Yeah, what’s the big deal?” we shouted, and our voices seemed to echo against his receding body.

“Hey, you can tell us!” Fletcher said, but Father, a brisk walker, could not possibly have heard him. Already he was far down the hill, out of reach of our voices.

He looks to the sky, then down at his feet. I le picks up a few leaves from the ground as he walks. They look to him like the hands of children, and he closes his own hand around them and crushes them.

Fletcher took out the family tree he had sent to Minnesota for. We studied it closely, each name with its own line, but finally the names were only ink on paper, they had no resonance, there was no flesh on their bones except what Fletcher and I imagined there. We stared at the page, then began our litany of questions.

“You can tell us,” we said, sitting on the window ledge watching for the figure of our father to return. “Did Uncle Louie rob banks? Was Aunt Anastasia a drug addict? And Andrew here, who was he? Did he tight in the Boer War? Was he born out of wedlock? Was his real father a drunk? No, no, a man with one arm?”

“May be a king,” I said.

“I doubt it. Father would tell us about a king.”

“Right,” I said, though I was not sure.

“Did Frank rape college students across the Midwest in the 1950s? Did they call him Frankie? Was Aunt Virginia institutionalized? Did she open her wrists in the bathtub? Did she leave a note? And who is this Grisetti fellow? It looks like he married his sister here,” I said, pointing to a line on the chart. “He’s probably a hunchback,” I told Fletcher. “Look, his son only lived four years. What happened to the child? Did he wander in front of a car one day when the parents were arguing in the bedroom? What were they arguing about? Had the hunchback taken a lover? Or was it the wife who had, in some profound despair? What made them forget the child?”

We could go on and on for hours like this some days. But in the end we never felt completely satisfied. There was something missing. I would never be as good at inventing as my mother, I thought. I would never see the Topaz Bird.

The truth would be better, we thought. Inevitably though, when it came time to write my autobiography in ninth grade, mine
was
pretty good. It began:

“Aunt Anastasia, a morphine addict, looked to the sky and sighed, though her eyes were still covered by the sleeping mask she wore to bed each night. Even in complete darkness, Aunt Anastasia saw what most people never did.”

I liked my autobiography but agreed with the comment scribbled in the corner by some skeptical teacher: “This is good, but it lacks authenticity.” That’s what all those distant family members seemed, finally, to lack. I liked Aunt Anastasia especially, but I think she came from a Bertolucci movie my father took us to one dark afternoon. They all seemed like movie characters in the end somehow—distant, too easy to love.

I suppose they will look just like everyone else when I finally see them. If they could still talk, their concerns would probably be ordinary. If they could still talk, their concerns would be of money and weather, I’m sure of it. Nothing to be frightened of, Daddy. Nothing to hide.

We are sitting in a dark room together. Outside it is always raining. We are both thinking of Mother, who is far away, but neither of us mentions her. The music seems melancholy to me. Her flight from Paris will not arrive for five days yet. He is stretched out on the couch in the dark. I am lying on the floor. Soon he will get up and begin to conduct his imaginary orchestra, so moved is he by the music. He forgets that I am in the room at all until he is back on the couch again and I speak.

“Tell me some names, Daddy,” I whisper.

“Rameau,” he says.

“Rameau,” I say.

“Ravel,” he says.

“Ravel,” I say.

“Satie.”

“Satie.”

“Gabriel Fauré.”

“Gabriel Fauré.

“Saint-Saëns.”

The record ends. “Saint-Saëns,” I say into the silence.

If those relatives could still talk, their concerns would be simple, Daddy. They would beg us to eat. They would tell us that everywhere there are children who are starving.

I did not mean to leave you there with the Topaz Bird flying so near, its feathers pointed, its claws so sharp. I did not mean to leave you there alone, your New Year’s resolutions crumpled in your shaking hand, a pocketbook holding the whole weight of your great confusion.

After you left, Dad left, and after Dad, Fletcher, too. I never thought this would happen to us, that we would end up like this: hundreds of thousands of miles apart, flung like fish across the water, scattered like ashes.

They have already begun hanging this season’s wreaths. It’s hard to think of Christmas coming at all this year. You’d never know it’s November, it’s much too warm. Winter approaches tentatively—in a rush of cold air, a sudden chill at the back of the neck that comes from nowhere and then disappears as quickly. The last time I saw you it was January and there was snow. This year winter approaches with great awkwardness.

I would not place you in this uncertain season.

I try to picture you safe in some eternal summer—lying in a white hammock, your notebook open on your lap, above your head a slow fan blowing a cool breeze—a safe place, where a small woman brushes your beautiful hair and sings you songs and brings vou tiny sandwiches to eat.

I would not place you in this dangerous city—climbing in high heels three flights to some dark hallway, or sinking into a plush rug on Madison Avenue, or crying because no taxis come.

No, somewhere you are waiting and you are safe. Martinique? Guadeloupe? Crete? Somewhere you are all right, free finally of your jewelry, free of your awful accessories—light.

What I see sometimes is my real mother looking out at me from a place where she is not crazy at all, and she talks to me. “Vanessa, don’t let them put me here,” she begs. But there’s no convincing them. They are taking away her belt and necklaces. And we must leave her there, shivering, standing in her underwear.

From the fashion pages she reads to me of the new collections of Calvin Klein and Yves St. Laurent: the billowing sleeves, the padded shoulders, the pleated skirts. I dress her in my mind in the fashions of spring.

“And from the young designers,” she reads, “three-quarter-length coats in giraffe and leopard designs and wide, western-type lizard belts. And red hats,” she says, “shaped like snails!” She laughs and laughs, tilting her head back.

Although I walked through a fog of fashion, through hats and gloves, through linen, through fields of her silks, I recognized him immediately. I could not possibly have missed him; he was the man I had been looking for so long—an enormous man, a man so large he might blot out the sun with his body, a man whose great hands might wring the world of its oceans of salty tears. Did he recognize me, too, as the person he had loved long and hard in a silent, private part of his brain? I think he did, right from the start—that was the brutal handsomeness in his face as he got closer. He knew it all: that our love was doomed and that it had been doomed from the minute we had begun to imagine each other, long ago. He stepped forward anyway and tried to forgive in advance everything he knew would happen, just as I tried, too, as he came nearer.

He sweats as he comes toward me as if it is through great fire that he walks. Still, he does not rush, he savors each slow step, and with each step I feel a rumbling in my body, a disorder. What is this disturbance, this uneasiness, not altogether unpleasurable, this feeling that there is now here to go, no way out? What is this surrender? He stands in front of me, not knowing either, just staring at me. Beads of sweat collect on his forehead; he wipes them away with a handkerchief.

“This mildness will kill us,” he says, shaking his head, looking into the distance. He stares at a spot far off. “This haze we are forced to see everything through.” His eves return to me. He focuses in like a camera and holds me frozen in his words, his voice. I shiver.

“I have seen you here many times,” he says. “I have watched you here day after day. I have spent hours and hours on trains imagining you, your life.”

“I have never seen you before,” I say, “I would have remembered.”

“No,” he says quietly, then laughs. “You could not have seen me.” He laughs again. “I often imagine you are waiting for someone who will never return.”

“That’s not true,” I say.

“I have seen you look through this station, lost in the past, no hand in the present or future. I know that look by heart. You could not have seen me through such eyes.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You are waiting here for someone, for something. Am I wrong?”

I just look at him. His hands are the size of human heads. His thighs are the bodies of sleeping children.

“You never get on a train. You never rush, you move in slow motion, stand under the clock, move toward that ticket gate over there sometimes, then come back. I have invented many lives for you, made up many stories. But most of the endings are sad.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “but what you don’t know, is that you can change the ending. Close up you are even more beautiful than I had imagined you would be.”