One True Thing (7 page)

I looked down at the three of us in the photograph, frozen in brilliant color beneath a sunny blue Cambridge sky. And I wondered how much I, too, had made possible my father’s unthinking primacy. Or was it their marriage I safeguarded, my mother ever sweet-tempered without the demands of my father’s intellectual
arrogance, my father still enamored of his wife because he had another companion for his life of the mind? How providential that most children left home when they did, before they were wise enough to understand their parents.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” I said aloud, and as I stared at the picture it became abstract, a blur of color and light, subject to a hundred interpretations. Then I stepped back and it rearranged itself into what it had always been, a still life of happiness. My eyes were dry and sandy. I felt tired and sapped, as though I had been living here like this my whole life. As indeed I had, looking for myself in the space between the two of them.

I
felt undone by that night’s exchange with my father, as undone as I had been the day, years before, when I first began to understand that it was not only his work that kept him on the Langhorne campus long after classes were done for the day. Langhorne, too, had a library, though not as large and distinguished as Columbia’s. There was something churchlike about it, with its long and narrow stained-glass windows commemorating Shakespeare’s heroines and its plain benches flanking the big oak tables. I, too, went there to fill in the gaps in my public school education with ambitious social studies projects and papers on Conrad and Melville that were half cribbed from literary criticism texts.

I don’t know what brought my father to the library one afternoon when I was working there, at a table with a gaggle of girls doing a group project deconstructing T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. But I heard them clearly once he had stalked down the center aisle and into the stacks: the divine Professor G, one said, and who is it now, said another, since his teaching assistant went to Colby?,
and I’d do him, said one with curly black hair and a big gap between her front teeth.

No, they squealed, and a boy scratching away at a legal pad with a stack of reference books in front of him turned to glare at them. He’s old, he’s married, he grades so hard, they whispered.

He’s my father, I thought.

I could imagine the man he was to them, because I had seen that man myself, though rarely at home, where, it occurred to me, he rested up for the hard work of becoming that George Gulden, the lover, the dazzler, the charmer. I find it difficult to talk about my father’s charm today without reducing it to something akin to a snake in a basket and a fakir with a flute, talking about it the way you talk about drinking when you’ve been sober for years and all you can remember about a beer is what it was like to wrap your arms around the toilet at three
A.M
. and catch the sanctifying smell of bowl freshener as you threw up.

But it was a real true thing. My father was cordial to men, albeit intent on making his word known, his word law, but to women he was courtly and so warm he appeared to be courting even the elderly and the very young. “My dear Mrs. Duane,” he would say as he stepped to the counter in the bookstore, “where might I find
In Cold Blood)
Your help will serve, not only me personally, but an entire generation of impressionable students who think of Truman Capote as a guest on
The Dick Cavett Show
. And, by the by, if the jacket of that new Norman Mailer stacked in the window fades, will you consider pitching them all as a service to mankind, or, in deference to the head of women’s studies, who buys those copies of Germaine Greer you persist in ordering, a service to humankind?”

Mrs. Duane was a sophisticated woman, the widow of a former State Department official who had remarried and moved to the country from an apartment on one of the museum blocks off Fifth Avenue. But she was helpless before the stream of pleasantries that my father could pour from the pitcher of that personality. I had watched her once shift a huge stack of
The Canterbury Tales
from
one wall to another because my father had complained about finding them in the short-story section. “I would say, George, that you had the gift of blarney if only you were Irish,” she had said more than once. “I have gemütlichkeit,” said my father, “that’s what it is, whatever it is, be it some rich fruit dessert with clotted cream or a disease of the pancreas, I have it and it is yours. Have you the book?”

“I have,” Mrs. Duane said. And if she hadn’t, she would have gotten it.

He did this with me, too, when he remembered, although never once after I had come home to care for my mother. I can still remember how he taught me the ABCs in the evening before bed, when we were living in a small two-bedroom apartment on a back street far from the university in Princeton and I saw him on weekdays only when I was bathed and brushed and perfect in my long eyelet nightgowns. (My mother made those nightgowns. “I cannot for the life of me find a decent nightgown for a little girl anywhere!” she would say to her small group of faculty wives, who were perfectly satisfied to put their own children into Mickey Mouse pajamas or Doctor Dentons.)
“A
is for Aaaah-aaaah-aaaah-CHOOOOOO!” he would sneeze.
“B
is for blunderbuss.
C
is for cancan dancers kicking up their heels for Toulouse-Lautrec in the fin de siècle.” And so on until we got to
Z
, which was for Zsa Zsa Gabor. No one said Zsa Zsa like my papa.

Sometimes, particularly if one of my girlfriends was in the car, he would sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” or recite slightly dirty limericks or compliment the girl extravagantly on an
ACT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY
T-shirt (“Can human understanding surpass the sentiments now beating within—whoops, atop—your breast?”) Of course, they loved it all. “My father sits in the car and farts and tells me to shut up while he gets the sports scores off the radio,” said Jennifer Buckley, whose father owned a company that built supermarkets and public schools. “Your father knew one day that I was wearing Giorgio. Excuse me, but no contest.”

But a man who can identify perfume on an eleventh grader sitting
in the back seat of his car may have certain shortcomings as a father. One night in December, home for Christmas my first year at Harvard, I went to his office, high in one corner of an old limestone building that houses the English department and its classrooms. Grandma Nina had called from Florida, telling my mother in Polish that Grandpa had had a stroke and that the doctors believed he was going to die. The phones at the college were out of order because of a winter ice storm, some cables down, and so I took the footbridge, holding tight to the railings as the wind made the walkway sway, trying not to look at the cold river below, the water high on its banks.

The guard waved me through, and when I got to the fourth floor the office door was closed, but I could hear sounds from within, moans, the thump of the old springs on my father’s shabby leather couch. “God, Beth,” I heard, even through the closed door. “Jesus Christ, Beth.” Beth was the name of a fierce feminist American history professor who was visiting from Rutgers. This is so banal, I thought to myself, using one of my father’s favorite words, so banal, people do this all the time. Carefully and quietly I took a sheet of stationery from the desk of the department secretary and wrote “Your wife wants you.” But I stood there and listened for a long time before I slid it under the door. Even now, all these years later, it gives me a sick feeling to think of it.

I don’t know whether my father knew I knew. Our relationship underwent a change after that. I was less supplicant, more judge, and I was a person who, when called upon to judge, always judged harshly. A girl once dropped out of our creative writing seminar at Harvard because we had to read aloud and then talk about one another’s work, and after four sessions she could not bear, she told the instructor, to hear what I would do to her stories, based on what I had done to others. I was unrepentant when the instructor told me this. “That’s her problem, isn’t it?” I said.

I judged my father just that harshly, or maybe more so because I’d imagined he had adjudged me wanting for so long and in so
many ways. But nothing seemed to have changed between my parents, then or ever. And it was much later that I made the connection between what had happened and my enduring love affair with Jonathan, in which I wanted and hated him in relatively equal parts. When we went back to Cambridge after that Christmas vacation, Jonathan was amazed to discover the things I had now decided to do when we were in bed together. And not just in bed—I once slid my hand into his lap and inside his fly during an art history lecture, an explication of the Arnolfini wedding portrait, those two whey-faced people in elaborate robes preparing for a tedious eternity together. It is amazing to me now how far I was willing to go to mimic my father. It would make an interesting case for any psychiatrist.

We never spoke of what had happened, my father and I. The closest we ever got was when I came home six months later for summer vacation. I told my father of an encounter I had had with a professor in the Harvard graduate English department, who was also a novelist of some note, after I sent him some stories of mine. He had not liked the stories, I could tell by his careful and rather empty comments, although he had told me he had never seen brown eyes quite as dark as mine—“really, truly black!” he fake-marveled. I knew after only a year at school that this was clumsy code for “Be friendly and I’ll take you to dinner and to bed.”

I told my father of how, looking at my name at the top of each page, he had said, “There was a George Gulden in my grad school group. He was a smart guy but kind of a pain in the ass. He just dropped off the face of the earth after he got his degree.”

We both knew what that remark was code for, my father and I, as we sat eating vegetable lasagna and Caesar salad, but he did not flinch and I told the story casually. My mother turned away, turned to the stove, and Jeff and Brian gaped. My father smiled thinly and said, “He’s a very poor writer, and he was a very poor doctoral candidate. Did he like your stories?”

I didn’t answer, and my father smiled again, knowing what that was code for. I remembered I had answered the writer in my
mind, had imagined saying, with hauteur, turning away his offer of another beer, “He’s my father. And you’re an asshole.” I imagined myself stalking out and leaving my manuscript on the table. Instead I had ducked my head and said nothing, took my stories and walked home in a driving rain, so that the manila envelope was the consistency of cereal by the time I got inside my dorm room. Jon was waiting on the bed in his underwear, reading a biography of Jefferson. “Did you sleep with him?” he asked. “You are a pig, Jonathan,” I said, dumping my ruined manuscript in the basket. “Yeah, but I’m your pig,” he said, crooking his finger at me, and over I went again.

H
ospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated; the sheets are changed. But transient as it all is, if I went to Montgomery Medical Center today it would be a kind of homecoming, although one of the small desires of my life is that I never ever see the place again, its awkward red-brick bulk, its tiered parking garage and automatic double doors.

For four months it was our sometime world, where my mother saw her doctor and had what she still preferred to call her treatments. Its floors were covered with gray linoleum speckled with white and black so aggressively ordinary as to be offensive; its intercom interruptions and the glass-fronted cabinets filled with pointed things became the backdrop of our life together.

Off one of the corridors that fanned out from the lobby we waited in molded plastic chairs to be ushered into a cubicle where the closest thing my mother had to salvation, before morphine became her saving grace, could flow slowly into her veins and try to kill off the cells run amok. They’d wanted her to check herself
into the hospital for the chemotherapy but she’d refused, and so I brought her every three weeks and we spent the day amid the sharp smells and clamor of the outpatient unit.

They’d made it pretty, the chemo cubicle, with flowered wallpaper and a bright blue leatherette recliner. Even the chemicals were somehow decorative, the crystalline bags glimmering silver in the overhead light of the windowless room. It took almost the whole day to get it all in, drop by drop by God-please-let-it-work drop.

Oh yes, I prayed in that cubicle and in the hallway outside and in the cafeteria, where I went as much to shake off the feeling of being buried alive that I felt in that tiny room as because I really wanted another cup of coffee. But I prayed to myself, without form, only inchoate feelings, one word: please, please, please, please, please.

My mother made me wait outside when she was examined by her doctor. She was a rather fierce-looking woman, Dr. Cohn, with the strong and handsome face that you see on old coins. She wore simple sheath dresses of slate blue or taupe or dull prints, as though they were bought mainly because they were unobtrusive beneath a white coat. I remember how firm her handshake was, so definite, like everything else about her. I thought she was rather cold, but since then, since I’ve gotten to know more oncologists, I realize that she only had the slight wariness that so many have, faced as they are so often with certain failure.

Certainly Dr. Cohn was kind to my mother. She always came downstairs to visit during her chemotherapy, took her hand, and talked with her quietly about her symptoms as the chemicals did their methodical drip-drip dance.

“There’s platinum in this stuff, Ellen,” my mother said, smiling, during the second round, “just like in my wedding ring. That’s why my mouth tastes like tin.”

“Is it working?” I said.