Mary Coin (2 page)

2.

P
rofessor Dodge? Sir?”

Walker looks vaguely around his classroom. The students watch him curiously, at least the ones not texting or trolling the Net on their computers. “I’m sorry?” he says.

He is back home, in San Francisco. It has been a week since he left his father at the hospital in Fresno, but he still feels unsteady, as if he has just stepped off a boat. Walker settled George into a private room, met the nursing staff, bought a sad bunch of dyed carnations from the gift shop and put them in a plastic water jug by his father’s bedside. As George slept, Walker studied the small, twitching motions of his eyeballs beneath their veined lids as if he might infer something about his father’s thoughts. Despite the fact that George slept under a blanket of morphine, his face was tense, his jawbone prominent, as if he were gritting his teeth, steeling himself for the oncoming disaster. Knowing that he might not see his father alive again, Walker wanted to say something, but he thought it would be cruel to wake him. The choice had felt selfless, but now Walker realizes he had simply been a coward; he had not known what to say.

It is September and the beginning of his semester-long class, which is called “Images: Codes and Democratic Valuation” in the university’s course catalog but which he privately refers to as “Teaching Them How to Look at Stuff.” The students are either edge-of-the-seat eager or hoodie-enshrouded nervous as he clicks through a PowerPoint display. He must have asked a question before he became distracted. He calls on a student now.

“Connotatively speaking, the image suggests bravery and victory,” a boy says about the photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.

Walker suppresses a sigh. Those words:
structuralist, syntactical, punctum . . .
They have become signifiers in their own right of a certain analytical bent that Walker is, more and more, finding beside the point. He’d just like the kids to say what they think when they see the pictures. But he also knows that the students are like foals trying out their legs, and that these words make them feel powerful and adult. He will not deny them these moments of muscle-flexing self-regard.

“Well—Topher, is it?” Walker says. The boy wearing fashionable glasses preens, thrilled that his name has registered so quickly with his professor. “That’s a good start. Anybody else?”

A girl raises her hand. Walker thinks her name is Sally. He’s still working out his mnemonics. Funny hats = Sally. Orange puffy hair = Andre.

“Like, all for one and one for all?” Sally says.

“Okay. So what we’re talking about—bravery, victory, collective effort—these are the first layers of meaning. But now we need to look beneath those layers.”

The class is quiet.

“What we have talked about so far is the information that’s there for the taking. The text, if we were speaking in literary terms. Now let’s look at the subtext.”

Blank faces. Worried faces. How-will-I-get-an-A-in-this-class? faces.

“Think about what an image represents on a subconscious level,” Walker continues.

The class shifts uncomfortably, but he doesn’t interrupt the silence. Silence, like boredom, can be a great instigator. And then: a hand rising, stealthy as a periscope.

“Yes? Remind me of your name?” Walker says.

“Elvis, sir.”

Elvis. Lord.
“Yes, Elvis?”

“I’m thinking about maybe that it has to do with what people wanted to think about the war.”

Walker nods. “Keep going.”

“They didn’t want to think, like, it was a waste of time.”

“Okay. You’re on a good track here. Anyone want to jump in?”

Hands pop up. Some wave back and forth, a grade-school habit that never fails to charm Walker, reminding him how young his students are and how much he enjoys teaching them.

“Everyone wanted to feel like we’d saved the world from the Nazis,” someone says.

“Well, this is a photograph from the Pacific, but you’ve got the right idea.”

“I heard it was posed,” a girl says. He thinks her name is Elsie. Doubting Elsie. Good. He needs a doubter.

“So what do we make of that?” Walker says. “What if the photographer posed the picture?”

“Then it’s, like, made up?” someone calls from the back of the room.

“So it’s a fiction?” Walker asks.

“But the battle really happened. They really won.”

“What if it were a painting?” Walker says.

“That would be made up,” Elvis says.

“So we expect a photograph to tell us the truth.”

The class is silent in the face of the conundrum.

Walker remembers when he taught his children how to decode the Saturday-morning advertisements. Alice and Isaac had thought the world was filled with toymakers and cereal companies dedicated to inventing what children dreamed of. To find out that their desires were simply the function of corporate manipulation, and that Alice wanted an Easy-Bake Oven because she was told to want one and not because she had ever fantasized about baking small, rubbery-tasting cakes—her sense of betrayal was heartbreaking. Lisette had been furious. Why didn’t he just blow the whistle on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy while he was at it?

He changes the projected image, and now an obscure photograph appears: a woman herding a yak through a rice field. Sunlight shimmers on the watery landscape. This is a photograph taken during the same war, not far from where battle was waged. “So tell me about this one,” he says.

Confronted with an unfamiliar image of no obvious importance, the students have less to say. Some stare at their notebooks, hoping he will mistake their inability to answer for thoughtful preoccupation. It will be a few weeks before they begin to understand how their own perceptions are blunted by images whose meanings have been narrowed by repetition, how their responses are, in many ways, as codified as their fancy words. For some it will take a whole semester to look at pictures they recognize and see them as strange.

“This is not a class about looking,” Walker says, “which is what you do when you see a photograph you’ve been told is objectively important. You look. You agree with what you have been instructed to think.” He mimes a caricature of an intellectual—serious frown, hand stroking goatee, nodding sagely, as if there is nothing he does not already know. The kids laugh. “But then you look away and you stop thinking. You stop imagining,” Walker continues. “This is a class about seeing. And seeing is something else altogether. Seeing is about looking past surfaces of predetermined historic and aesthetic values. Seeing is about being brave enough to say: This unimportant image or piece of information that no one cares about? Well, there is a story here, too, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

He takes a breath. “For your first assignment, I want you to choose five things from your dorm room and describe them.”

“Just, like, describe?” someone says.

“As if you were a historian trying to piece together a moment of time from what you see around you. Objects tell stories. I want you to make connections between the items in order to come up with some idea of what they represent.”

“Don’t they represent us?” Elvis says.

Walker smiles. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

•   •   •

O
n his way back to his office, he checks his phone. Lisette has called three times in the last hour, which means that something is going on with Alice. It is a horrible feeling to think that if he hadn’t noticed the messages, then whatever turbulent moment is playing itself out in Petaluma would pass and he would hear about it only as a story tied up neatly by an ending: Alice having skirted some emotional danger zone yet again. Really, Walker thinks in silent argument with his father, it is not the future he avoids but the present, which vexes with its roils of impetuous emotions, its lack of perspective, its unobscured now-ness. The present provides neither the gentling amber light of nostalgia nor the bright possibility of hope. It requires that a person take a look at himself in an unforgiving mirror and say,
This is all that I am: a marginally respected academic, a failed husband, a deserter of children.
Two years ago, Lisette moved on to another marriage and a town north of San Francisco. Walker worries that Alice’s defiance and bitterness is something more insidious than typical teenage anger, and that Isaac’s equanimity is the mask of a boy trying to be the one who doesn’t cause trouble in a troubled house. When Walker publishes, Alice and Isaac attend his talks with unconcealed misgiving. They cannot figure out exactly why their father has spent two months in a town in Minnesota collecting photographs of dead babies in their Lilliputian coffins and studying the death rolls of an insane asylum, or why he can become obsessed with a photo album discovered in an attic in Idaho that belongs to a family that is not his own. Walker has placed a flattering monograph about his work on the coffee table in his apartment in the city the way his mother once left
The Joy of Sex
on his bed. But he doesn’t think either Alice or Isaac has read it. Perhaps it is difficult to see their father written about in terms that don’t apply to their small intimacies and frustrations with him. Or maybe the work suggests that he has an emotional life they have nothing to do with, which the divorce has made abundantly clear.

“Harry had to pick her up downtown,” Lisette says, as soon as she answers her phone. “She was plastered.”

“It’s good that she called you instead of driving,” he says.

“She didn’t call. Some guy called.”

“At least she has decent friends.”

“The same decent friends who buy a sixteen-year-old booze.”

“That’s what a teenager would call good friends.”

Lisette exhales heavily; she’s not ready for jokes. “She graces us with her presence Monday through Thursday nights. All bets are off on the weekend unless she needs money. I have no idea what she’s doing out there. I don’t know who she is.”

Walker can hear the panic in Lisette’s voice. She has a mind that races from fact to disaster in mere seconds. It is his job to slow her down, to remind her how many steps there are between Alice, their difficult teen, and Alice, the drug-addled streetwalker.

“How is Isaac?” he says.

“Fine when Alice is not around. When she’s home, he basically lives in his room with his close personal companion, MacBook Pro.”

“Is he looking at porn?”

“Probably.”

“Do you check his history?”

“I’m not going to do that. I don’t think I want to know his history.”

They are silent for a while. They never disagree about the children. They both feel powerless in the face of the popular culture that has kidnapped Isaac’s and Alice’s attention. Neither of their children reads books. Alice plays a three-note bass in a variety of quickly disintegrating bands. Isaac knows how to create apps for his smart phone. At least they aren’t sitting at home playing Nintendo, Walker and Lisette weakly reassure each other. But of course Nintendo is a dated and benign fear. As hard as they try to keep up, Walker and Lisette fall further behind their kids, like two people chasing a train.

“Why don’t you make Alice come home at least one weekend night?” he suggests. “Tell her she has to have dinner with you and Harry and Isaac.”

“Because, quite honestly, it isn’t so pleasant to sit at the table and watch her scowl.” She lets out a pale laugh and then a sigh full of resignation.

“I know,” Walker says.

“Tell me she’s going to be okay,” she says.

“She’s going to be okay.”

They are quiet. Of course neither of them knows if this is true.

“She threw up all over Harry’s car,” Lisette says. “He told her to clean it out or pay for the detailing herself.”

“That’s good.”

“Needless to say, she’s making a production out of the whole thing. She’s got Isaac running back and forth with wet paper towels.”

“He shouldn’t have to do that.”

“He wants to.”

“Tell him to stop.”

“I’m on top of it, Walker,” she says, her tone snapping to attention.

Their amicable post-divorce relationship takes these sudden sharp turns that he is never prepared for, where he comes face-to-face with her dissatisfactions. Although the dots don’t quite connect, he knows this zinger refers to a time when he and Lisette were still married and his frequent absence from his family’s life provoked her. Her resentment made his attempts to parent when he was around feel hollow, as if he were a bad actor. His work preoccupied him so much that sometimes he sat at the dinner table looking at Lisette and the children as if they were a photograph some future historian would discover and place in a social and economic context. While he was following his intuition, digging through the leavings of forgotten lives, not promoting his career in any straightforward way, Lisette was raising children, teaching high school physics, and, as he learned, having an affair with Harry, who is now her very decent and very present husband.

“Should I talk to her?” he asks, the formulation an admission that he is ancillary to the family, a semi-useful acquaintance who can be called on if necessary. At any rate, it’s a rhetorical question. They can each lecture Alice and cajole Alice and threaten Alice. But in the end, there is nothing either of them can do.

3.

T
wo nights later, Walker is woken from a thick sleep by the phone. His father has died. The combination of being semiconscious and hearing the words he has been anticipating finally spoken as blunt, stupid fact makes him feel a confused sense of emergency. He throws on yesterday’s clothes, gets in his car, and drives through the predawn hours until he is back in Porter. It is only when he pulls up to the house, where the rising sun is just beginning to flare against the windows, that he realizes he has come to the wrong place. His father’s body is still at the hospital. For the first time in more than a century there is no Dodge living in this home.

During the next few days, his sisters, Evelyn and Rosalie, fly in from Chicago and Houston. His brother, Matthew, who has taken over the company, drives down from Fresno, where he runs Dodge Holdings from its corporate office. The meeting with the lawyer is short and unsurprising. George’s assets are tied up with the company, and he has left only small amounts to each of his children. The Dodges were always and only about the land.

Walker and Lisette decide that Alice and Isaac do not need to come to the memorial service of a man at whose behest they visited only on Christmas and Easter. Now that the day has come, though, and Walker enters the church alone, he wishes they were with him. He sits next to Angela and her mother. Beatriz is a tiny woman, and her feet do not meet the ground when she sits in the pew. He remembers how proud he was—how proud they both were—when he grew taller than his
niñera.
For years she had promised to treat him to dinner when the blessed event occurred and she kept her word, taking him to her brother’s taquería, where Walker gorged himself on carnitas and happily received the congratulatory pats on the shoulder of every patron who entered the place—most of them employees of Dodge Farms. Beatriz is seventy-five, George’s age, although she looks ten years younger, her face barely lined, her short and thick waist giving her a robust aspect. She cries softly through the service with a lack of embarrassment that Walker envies. The muscles of his face ache from the effort of trying to keep himself under control.

That the mayor is at the service along with other town dignitaries does not surprise Walker, but he is taken aback by the numbers who come from the groves. Foremen and field managers fill the pews, along with their wives and children. When the service is over, they wait to speak to Walker and his siblings. As they share stories of George’s generosity during a particularly dry season, or recount how he sent a week’s worth of food when one of the men lost his wife, Walker feels his father growing less distinct until, having assumed the shape of this benevolent and thoughtful
patrón
, he becomes virtually unrecognizable. Walker is disheartened when none of the employees come back to the house for the small reception Evelyn and Rosalie have organized. He would like to talk more to them, to hear the stories they might tell that would fill in the many blanks of his father’s life. But either his sisters didn’t extend the invitation or the men and their wives do not feel comfortable coming to the
casa grande,
a title that is both frankly descriptive and queasily suggestive of plantation hierarchy.

A tall, older man still in possession of an erect posture crosses the living room and greets Walker with a firm handshake. “Which one are you?” he says.

“Walker.”

“The oldest boy.”

“That’s right,” Walker says. He loves the way the elderly see everyone else as permanent children.

“Well, son, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember you,” Walker says.

“No reason why you would. I’m Edward Dodge.”

Walker is taken aback. “Uncle Edward?”

“I guess you could call me that, too.”

Edward and George had not spoken since their father’s death, when the will revealed that the entire operation had been handed down to George. Now Edward’s vitality seems like a rebuke, the winning move in a chess game of dynastic family madness.

“Funny to be back here,” Edward says. “Place hasn’t changed a bit.”

Walker looks around foolishly, as if he had not noticed this before. He feels unaccountably embarrassed in front of this man, as if he should apologize for the fact of his father’s luck.

“Your dad and I used to come in so muddy that one of the ladies would have to carry us straight to the bath or Mother would raise a fit,” Edward says.

“My father never talked much about his childhood,” Walker says.

“He ever tell you about the boxing ring?”

“No.”

“Well, you know he was a serious boy, your dad. Skinny and not much for fighting. Then I come along like a bat out of hell, and I’m bigger even if I’m three years younger. Once I find out how little it takes to get your dad to cry, well . . .” He smiles at the memory. “So your granddad, he gets some of his men to build a boxing ring out back, wooden floor and ropes—the works—and he buys us each a set of boxing gloves. And then comes this man down from Monterey with muscles the size of cantaloupes. Says he was an amateur boxer, although who knows? Probably he got into a bar fight now and again up there with those fellows from the canneries. Well, it turns out Dad has hired this man to teach us how to box. And lo and behold, the first time George and I step into that ring, George throws me down with one punch. So Dad pays the boxing coach and sends him home, has the workers take down the ropes and pull up the floor, and that’s the end of that.” He lets out a bark of a laugh.

“Can I ask you something?” Walker says.

“Fire away.”

“Why did Grandfather cut you out of the business?”

Edward smiles in a way that suggests a private history. “He took the answer to that question to his grave.”

“You must have been angry.”

“Confused, mostly,” he says. “But I never imagined myself as any sort of farmer. I guess he knew that. And George was special to him.”

“Why?”

Edward thinks for a moment, and then laughs. “You know what? I never asked him. That’s the way of it, isn’t it? You always ask the wrong questions.”

Later, Walker stands on the porch watching the guests leave. He has the feeling that the people are taking away fragments of his father—a story or a joke or a friendly game of five-card draw played one August night when the windows were flung open against the still heat and the cicadas sang and his father wiped a sweating tumbler of Scotch against his brow.

Just before the EMTs lifted the gurney carrying his father into the ambulance, Walker caught a glimpse of George’s expression. It was etheric, trapped somewhere between living and dying. Walker had a sudden, awful feeling that his father thought he was making the journey to the hospital alone. “Dad. I’m here,” he said. “I’m going to drive right behind the ambulance. I’ll see you very soon.”

George reached up a hand and grasped Walker’s wrist with surprising force. Walker heard his father’s struggling wheezes, smelled the sour, spent odor of George’s mouth, seventy-four years of food and saliva and sucked-back tears and sucked-back feelings stored in the nooks between yellowed teeth. His eyes darted with a wild, unruly energy.

“Burn me up,” he whispered.