The Night Listener : A Novel (33 page)

“Damnedest thing. It’s all numb down one side.”

“Was this from the stroke?”

He grunted yes.

“I thought it just affected your face.”

“Well, I had another little one last night.”

“Jesus, Pap.”

“It wasn’t a big one.”

“Does your doctor know?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did you tell Darlie and Josie?”

“Hell, they don’t need to know everything. They just get hysterical.”

I gaped at him in amazement. “I’m gonna get that way myself in a minute.”

“It’s nothing, I tell ya.”

“So why tell me at all?”

No answer.

“Talk to me, Pap.”

“I’m talking, goddammit. I talk all the time.”

“Yeah. About stuff that doesn’t matter—communists and liberals and scenery. But you never talk about your feelings. If you’re scared, why don’t you just say so? I’d really like it if you could.” He grunted. “You’ve been out there way too long.”

“No, Pap, this has been going on forever. I’ve accommodated your embarrassment for so long that I actually feel it myself. And that makes me crazy, because you’re the only person on earth I do this with.”

“Embarrassment? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Maybe that’s not the word, I don’t know. There’s just this stiffness that happens. This dance of avoidance we do. You’re not comfortable with me. I used to think it was because I was a sissy and you knew it.”

“That’s not true at all. Ask your mama…”

“She’s dead, Pap.”

“Well, she’d be glad to tell you if she was here.”

“I want you to tell me. Were you afraid I’d just be a bigger sissy if you held me from time to time?”

“Held you?”

“Yeah. Held me.” How pathetic it felt to be having this over-wrought
East of Eden
conversation so late in both our lives.

“I held you all the time, goddammit.”

“When I was a baby, maybe. When you were posing for pictures.

But I’ve never had so much as a hug from you that didn’t feel like an uncomfortable duty. I just waited for the moment when you’d have to pull away.”

“That’s a damn lie.”

“No, Pap. It always got to be too much for you.”

“Well, I’m sorry if it seemed that way.”

“It was that way. It is that way.”

“Well, case closed. I guess I’m just a sorry bastard.”

“No. Nobody thinks that. Why do you always do that?” (Jess did this too, I realized, retreating in a cloud of righteous anger whenever we swerved too close to the tender heart of things.) “Can’t you just say that it’s hard for you to be intimate?”

“Well, that’s a fascinating theory, but—”

“You wanna hear the rest of it?”

“Hell, no.”

“Well, yell for the nurse then, because you’re gonna get it.”

“What the hell is the matter with you, anyway? You’re fifty years old, and you still care what your father thinks.” How mean he could be sometimes. And how accurate.

“And you don’t?” I asked.

“Don’t what?”

“Care what your father thought?”

His eyes turned as flinty as arrowheads. Gathering my courage, I free-fell into the abyss. “Why don’t you ever talk about him, Pap?” He stayed surprisingly calm. “So that’s where you’re heading.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Do you mind?”

“No. But it’s not gonna happen.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is you’re expecting. There’ll be no epiphanies on this deathbed.”

I smiled at him. “This isn’t your deathbed.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“You’re right. We better talk fast.”

He just grunted at my effort at levity. After a moment of awkward silence he said: “Go ahead then. Shoot.”
Shoot
.

“Well,” I began, “do you know why he did it?”

“No sir, I don’t.”

“He didn’t leave a note or anything?”

“No.”

“That must have been terrible. Not knowing for all this time. I can’t imagine.”

There was no response for a while, and then he shrugged. “You can’t spend your life fretting about something like that.”

Can’t you? I thought.

“Did he do it in your room?” I asked.

“My room? Hell, no. Where’d you hear that?”

“Just…around.”

“It happened in the garden shed.”

“Where was that?”

“Back where we put the lych-gate. Christ, do you want a map?”

“And you were…how old…seventeen?”

“Something like that.”

Something like that? Who wouldn’t remember exactly?

“It was during the Depression, right?”

“Yep.”

“So it could have been about money.”

“I doubt it seriously. He was just depressed, that’s all. There was nothing crazy about him.”

“Is that what people said?”

“No. Hell, no.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Well, some folks just automatically assume…” He couldn’t finish, so I did it for him:

“That anyone who commits suicide is crazy. Or gay or something.” His face was afire in a matter of seconds. “How dare you say such a thing?”

“Oh…maybe because I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“Well, he wasn’t. Ask anybody.”

“And I wasn’t suggesting that he was.”

“The whole damn world’s not that way, you know.”

“Oh, I know.”

“He was a decent family man.”

“Fine. Thanks for sharing. I’m glad we’ve cleared him of that shameful possibility.”

“That’s not what I meant, goddammit. Don’t twist my words. We weren’t even talking about you.”

“No.” I mustered all my calm. “You’re right. Tell me what he was like.”

He sulked for a while. “He was a good man, like I said. A gentle-man. You would have liked him, if you’d met him.” It was an odd moment, this hypothetical introduction to someone who’d been gone for sixty-five years. Still I fleshed out my grandfather, giving him colors and textures and smells the way I’d done with Pete, building someone out of nothing, because a ravenous mind demanded it.

“Did he look like us?”

My father thought about that for a moment. “He was a good-sized man.”

I gave him a crooked smile.

“So that’s one thing you can’t keep blaming me for.” I studied him soberly for a moment. “I don’t blame you for anything.”

He grunted. “Sure as hell feels like it sometimes.”

“I got a lot of good things from you, Pap. Your sense of humor, your love of an audience. Your political indignation.” His eyes narrowed dubiously at the last point.

“It’s the same instinct,” I added, “just aimed in a different direction. I wouldn’t be who I am if it weren’t for you, Pap.” This was too much for him. “Now I know I’m dying.”

“I wish you hadn’t been angry all the time. I do wish that. And I wish it for Mummie, too. She walked on eggshells for you, Pap.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“That,” I said quietly. “That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not easy to deal with, you know. The way you’re always ready to explode.”

“You don’t know the slightest goddamn thing about—”

“I do, Pap. I was there. And I know what it’s like to accommodate someone else’s anger, because I ended up marrying you.”

“What?”

I grew almost feverish with mortification. Where had that come from, and why had I decided to put it into words?

“Forget it, Pap.”

“No, you said something.”

“It’s just that…you and Jess are both wound so tight. And I dealt with it the same way Mummie did.”

“Which was?”

“Always smoothing things over. Eating my own anger, because two pissed-off people is more than one marriage can bear.”

“Your mama and I loved each other deeply.”

“I know that, Pap.”

“So if you’re comparing us to you and that fella…”

“Jess, Pap. His name is Jess. And I
am
comparing you, because you two were the only model I had. You should be flattered, because Jess was just a younger version of you. He was just as stubborn and protective and just as mushy on the inside, but he didn’t keep me at arm’s length. And that felt so damn good, I have to tell you.” There were tears in my eyes, and the old man saw them.

“Christ, son. Did he die?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

I swiped at my eyes, composing myself. “He moved out a few months ago. I haven’t been dealing with it very well.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to tell me I was better off.” My father studied me for a long time, then slapped the bed with the flat of his hand. I could tell this wasn’t an angry gesture, but its meaning eluded me at first. Funny, considering how often I used that semaphore myself to let my dog know it was all right to join me on the sofa.

I stood my ground, pretending I hadn’t read him. His hand came down again, slamming the sheets even harder.

“Goddammit, I haven’t got all day.”

I went to the bed and crawled onto it without a word. One of his hands jostled me to his side as if we were shipmates meeting in a bar. The other, the one that had lost its feeling, stroked my head with clumsy tenderness.

I know that this happened, because I was there, gazing down on those two old men as they braved the terrors of love.

TWENTY-EIGHT

MY OLD ROOM

THAT NIGHT JOSIE put me up in my old room. It was gussied up for guests these days, but a phantom of its former self remained, like an image lingering on the retina behind closed eyes. With very little effort I could erase that walnut “entertainment center” and sketch in my old bunk bed and the cubbyhole near the ceiling that my father had built for my radio. (To show him what an unrepentant rebel I was, I had used my wood-burning kit to brand the words FORGET, HELL! into the bottom shelf.) And still there for real: that early indicator of the man to come, the stained-glass window I’d commissioned at fourteen.

I opened the door and went outside to the piazza, just to catch the effect of those dark green shutters against the pink stucco walls.

There was a lemon wafer of a moon in the sky, and the wrought-iron gates next to the streetlight cast a familiar filigree on the garden path. I was awash with memories that seemed to belong to someone else entirely. The person I had been in this place was more of a stranger to me now than my father.

“Sweetie?”

I turned to find my sister standing in the room with a cordless phone in her hand. “There’s a call for you,” she said.

I came in from the piazza with a sense of growing dread. “The hospital?”

She shook her head with a thin reassuring smile. “I don’t recognize the voice. She sounds young.”

Anna, I thought. Being motherly again.

Josie handed me the phone and left the room, pausing briefly at the door. “Come down for some eggnog if you’d like.” I watched as she eased the door shut, then sank to the edge of the bed with the phone. “This is Gabriel.”

“Thank God,” said the voice on the other end, a voice so distinctive it could only be one of two people.

“Donna?”

“No…it’s Pete.”

I couldn’t summon a response.

“Don’t freak out, okay? I know what Mom told you, but she was just trying to get people off our backs. She told Ashe I was dead, so we could get our lives back again. Mom hated all this attention to begin with. She just went along with the book because of me. And after the book fell through I figured you didn’t trust me anymore, so I just…I dunno…but then Mom told me you came to see me, and I realized how bad you felt, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you thinking I was dead. You’re the only reason I even feel alive.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. “You there, Gabriel?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you mad at me?”

I said my feelings were more complicated than that.

“Jess told me about your dad,” he said. “Is he okay?”

“No. I don’t think he has much time left.” It was hard to put that into words, but Pete was still my confessor, for better or worse.

“I’m really sorry, Dad.”

I sighed for so many different reasons. “This is weird, Pete. I have to tell you.”

“I know, but I miss you so much, Dad. I just want another chance.” He was weeping now—extravagantly—so I waited for him to stop.

“Look,” I said at last, “I’m not going anywhere. I just don’t understand. Were you hiding when I came to your house?”

“No,” he said emphatically. “I didn’t even know you were there.

I was in Milwaukee with Marsha.”

“At the hospital?”

“Yeah. Getting my fucking tests done. It was just a coincidence that I wasn’t at home, but Mom sort of…went with it. She’d already told Ashe I was dead, so she didn’t have any choice but to say it again.”

“Where’s Donna now?”

You’re talking to her, you sentimental fool
.

“Down at the post office,” said Pete. “Closing out our account.”

“Why?”

“We’re leaving day after tomorrow.”

“For good, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet. Mom won’t say. Marsha’s driving us to the airport. Mom just wants out of here.”

“And what do you want?”

“It’s okay with me, I guess. One place is pretty much like another for me. As long as there’s a telephone I’m fine.”

“Will you give me your number when you get there?” He didn’t answer.

“What’s the matter, Pete?”

“I think it’s better if I just call you. Mom would be really upset if she knew we were still in touch.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t trust you anymore. She got really weirded out when you followed her home.”

I told him I was ashamed about that.

“I kind of understand it,” said Pete, “but it really bothered her.

She thinks you’re obsessed with me or something.” That took me aback. “What do you think?” He didn’t hesitate. “I think you just love me.” I knew I was supposed to confirm this, but I just couldn’t find the words.

Pete kept on: “I didn’t know that for sure, you know, until you came to see me. When I heard that, man…” His voice cracked piti-fully.

“Are you all right, kiddo?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“I want to ask you something, okay?”

“Okay,” he said warily.

“Did something happen to your mom when she was little?” Silence.