The Namesake (26 page)

The landscape jerks forward, falls away, the train casting a passing shadow on an expanse of nondescript buildings. The tracks resemble endless ladders that stretch ahead rather than upward, rooted to the ground. Between Westerly and Mystic, the tracks are at an angle, embedded into the sloping land, so
that the whole train threatens, ever so slightly, to topple over. Though the other passengers seldom comment on this, the way they do, for example, when the engine changes at New Haven from diesel to electric with a sudden jolt, this momentary shift never fails to rouse Gogol from his nap, or the book he is reading, or the conversation he is engaged in, or the thought that has gathered in his head. The train tilts to the left heading south to New York, to the right on the way to Boston. In that brief period of suggested peril, he thinks, always, of that other train he has never seen, the one that had nearly killed his father. Of the disaster that has given him his name.

The train rights itself, the angle falls behind. Again he feels its motion at the small of his back. For several miles the tracks hug the ocean, which is close enough to touch. The shallowest waves lap against mere inches of shore. He sees a stone bridge, scattered islands the size of rooms, gracious gray and white homes with pleasant views. Boxy houses built on stilts. Lone herons and cormorants perch on bleached wooden posts. Boats with naked masts crowd the marina. It is a view his father would have appreciated, and Gogol is reminded of the many times he had driven with his family, on cold Sunday afternoons, to the sea. There were times when it had been so cold that they had simply sat in the car, in the parking lot, looking at the water, his parents sharing tea from a thermos in the front seat, the engine running to keep them warm. Once they had gone to Cape Cod, driving along that curving piece of land until they could drive no farther. He and his father had walked to the very tip, across the breakwater, a string of giant gray slanted stones, and then on the narrow, final inward crescent of sand. His mother had stopped after a few stones and waited with Sonia, too young to go with them, at her side. "Don't go too far," his mother had warned, "don't go so that I can't see you." His legs began to ache halfway there, but his father marched ahead, stopping at times to lend Gogol an arm, his body slightly tilted when he rested on a rock. While on these rocks, some far apart
enough to make them pause and consider the best way to reach the next one, water had surrounded them on both sides. It was early winter. Ducks swam in the tide pools. The waves flowed in two directions. "He's too little," his mother had called out. "Are you listening? He's too little to go so far." Gogol had stopped then, thinking that perhaps his father would agree. "What do you say?" his father had said instead. "Are you too little? No, I didn't think so."

At the end of the breakwater, there was a field of yellow reeds to the right, and dunes beyond, and the ocean behind it all. He had expected his father to turn back, but still they had continued, stepping onto the sand. They walked along the water to the left, heading toward the lighthouse, past rusted boat frames, fish spines as thick as pipes attached to yellow skulls, a dead gull whose feathery white breast was freshly stained with blood. They began to pick up small, faded black stones with white stripes running around them, stuffing them into their pockets so that they drooped on either side. He remembers his father's footprints in the sand; because of his limp, the right toe of his shoe was always turned outward, the left straight ahead. Their shadows that day were unnaturally slender and long, leaning in toward each other, the late afternoon sun at their backs. They paused to regard a cracked wooden buoy painted blue and white, shaped like an old parasol. The surface was wrapped with thin brown strands of seaweed and encrusted with barnacles. His father lifted and inspected it, pointing to a live mussel underneath. Finally they stood by the lighthouse, exhausted, surrounded by water on three sides, pale green in the harbor, azure behind. Overheated from the exertion, they unzipped their coats. His father stepped away to urinate. He heard his father cry out—they had left the camera with his mother. "All this way, and no picture," he'd said, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket and began to throw the striped stones into the water. "We will have to remember it, then." They looked around, at the gray and white town that
glowed across the harbor. Then they started back again, for a while trying not to make an extra set of footsteps, inserting their shoes into the ones they had just made. A wind had picked up, so strong that it forced them to stop now and then.

"Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head.

"How long do I have to remember it?"

Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near.

"Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."

A year has passed since his father's death. He still lives in New York, rents the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He works for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, is the additional absence of Maxine. At first she'd been patient with him, and for a while he'd allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents' house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she'd tolerated his silences at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she had not understood being excluded from the family's plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke's ashes in the Ganges. Quickly they began to argue about this, and about other things, Maxine going so far one day as to admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that struck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue anymore. And so, a few months after his father's death, he stepped out of Maxine's life for good. Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter's engagement to another man.

On weekends he takes the train to Massachusetts, to the house in which his father's photograph, the one used during
the funeral, hangs in a frame on a wall in the upstairs hallway. On the anniversary of his father's death, and on his father's birthday, a day they never celebrated when his father was alive, they stand together in front of the photograph and drape a garland of rose petals around the frame and anoint his father's forehead with sandalwood paste through the glass. It is the photograph more than anything that draws Gogol back to the house again and again, and one day, stepping out of the bathroom on his way to bed and glancing at his father's smiling face, he realizes that this is the closest thing his father has to a grave.

His visits home are different now; often it's Sonia who does the cooking. Sonia is still living there with his mother, settled back into the room she had occupied as a girl. Four days a week she leaves the house at five-thirty in the morning, takes a bus to a train that takes her to downtown Boston. She works as a paralegal, is applying to law schools nearby. It is she who drives his mother to weekend parties, and to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. Their mother has become thinner, her hair gray. The white column of her part, the sight of her bare wrists, pains Gogol when he first catches sight of her. From Sonia he learns of how their mother spends her evenings, alone in her bed, unable to sleep, watching television without sound. One weekend he suggests going to one of the beaches where his father had liked to walk. At first his mother agrees, cheered by the prospect, but as soon as they step out into the windy parking lot she gets back into the car, saying she will wait.

He is preparing to take his registration exam, the two-day ordeal that will enable him to become a licensed architect, to stamp drawings and design things under his own name. He studies in his apartment, and occasionally up at one of the libraries at Columbia, learning about the matter-of-fact aspects of his profession: electricity, materials, lateral forces. He enrolls in a review class to help him prepare for the exam. The class meets twice a week in the evenings, after work. He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an in
structor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive. It's a small class, and afterward several of them soon begin going out for drinks. Though he is invited to join them, he always says no. Then one day, as they are all filing out of the classroom, one of the women approaches him, and says, "So what's your excuse?" and because he has none, that night he tags along. The woman's name is Bridget, and at the bar she sits beside him. She is starkly attractive, with brown hair cut extremely short, the sort of style that would have looked disastrous on most women. She speaks slowly, deliberately, her speech unhurried. She was raised in the south, in New Orleans. She tells him that she works for a small firm, a husband-and-wife team who operate out of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. For a while they talk about the projects they are working on, the architects they both admire: Gropius, van der Rohe, Saarinen. She is his age, married. She sees her husband on weekends; he is a professor at a college in Boston. He thinks of his parents then, living apart for the final months of his father's life. "That must be difficult," he tells her. "It can be," she says. "But it was either that or adjuncting in New York." She tells him about the house her husband rents in Brookline, a sprawling Victorian that costs less than half of their one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. She says that her husband had insisted on putting her name on the mailbox, her voice on the answering machine. He had even insisted on hanging a few items of her clothing in the closet, putting a tube of her lipstick in the medicine cabinet. She tells Gogol that her husband delights in illusions like these, is consoled by them, whereas she finds them simply to be reminders of what is missing.

That night they share a cab back to his apartment. Bridget excuses herself to use the bathroom and when she emerges her wedding ring is absent from her finger. When they are together, he is ravenous; it has been a long time since he's made love. And yet he never thinks about seeing her at any other
time. The day he sets out with his
AIA Guide to New York City
to explore Roosevelt Island, it doesn't occur to him to ask her to come along. Only twice a week, the nights the review class meets, does he look forward to her company. They do not have each other's phone numbers. He does not know exactly where she lives. She always goes with him to his apartment. She never spends the night. He likes the limitations. He has never been in a situation with a woman in which so little of him is involved, so little expected. He does not know, nor does he want to know, her husband's name. Then one weekend, when he is on the train to Massachusetts to see his mother and Sonia, a southbound train slices by, and he wonders if perhaps the husband is on the other train, on his way to see Bridget. Suddenly he imagines the house where Bridget's husband lives alone, longing for her, with his unfaithful wife's name on the mailbox, her lipstick beside his shaving things. Only then does he feel guilty.

From time to time his mother asks him if he has a new girlfriend. In the past she broached the topic defensively, but now she is hopeful, quietly concerned. She even asks once whether it is possible to patch things up with Maxine. When he points out to her that she had disliked Maxine, his mother says that that isn't the point, the point is for him to move on with his life. He works to remain calm during these conversations, not to accuse her of meddling, as he once would have done. When he tells her that he isn't even thirty, she tells him that by that age she had already celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary. He is aware, without having to be told, that his father's death has accelerated certain expectations, that by now his mother wants him settled. The fact that he is single doesn't worry him, and yet he is conscious of the degree to which it troubles his mother. She makes a point of mentioning the engagements and weddings of the Bengali children he's grown up with in Massachusetts, and his cousins in India. She mentions grandchildren being born.

One day when he is speaking to her on the phone, she asks him if he might be willing to call someone. He had known her as a girl, his mother explains. Her name is Moushumi Ma-zoomdar. He remembers her vaguely. She was the daughter of friends of his parents who had lived for a while in Massachusetts, then moved to New Jersey when he was in high school. She had a British accent. Always with a book in her hand at parties. This is all he remembers about her—details neither appealing nor unappealing. His mother tells him that she is a year younger than he is, that she has a much younger brother, that her father is a renowned chemist with a patent to his name. That he called her mother Rina Mashi, her father Shubir Mesho. Her parents had driven up for his father's funeral, his mother says, from New Jersey, but Gogol has no memory of them there. Moushumi lives in New York City these days, is a graduate student at NYU. She was supposed to have been married a year ago, a wedding that he and his mother and Sonia had been invited to, but her fiancé, an American, had backed out of the engagement, well after the hotel had been booked, the invitations sent, the gift registry selected. Her parents are a bit worried about her. She could use a friend, his mother says. Why doesn't he give her a call?

When his mother asks if he has a pen to take down the number he lies, telling her yes, not listening as she recites it to him. He has no intention of calling Moushumi; his exam is coming up, besides which, as much as he wants to make his mother happy, he refuses to let her set him up with someone. He refuses to go that far. The next time he is home for the weekend, his mother brings it up again. This time, because he is in the same room with her, he writes down the number, still with no intention of calling. But his mother persists, reminding him, the next time they speak, that her parents had come to his father's funeral, that it was the least he could do. A cup of tea, a conversation—did he have no time for that?