The Summer Son (17 page)

D
AD’S SECRET HAD NOWHERE TO HIDE.
I had kicked in the door of its sanctuary, and now it lay bare for anyone to see. The audience for this lie consisted of just one man, and I waited silently for his arrival, even as the rage boiled inside me.

I had almost missed it. At the bottom of Dad’s box, I found pictures of me spanning my school days. Not just the early years, when Dad was still in my life, but later, too, after we’d lost Jerry and Dad and I had retreated into silence. On the back of a photo, Mom had jotted the year and the grade, and a taste of bittersweet filled my mouth. My heart brimmed at the realization that he’d had these pictures of me even as I denied him my attention. Seeing Mom’s handwriting where I didn’t expect it took my breath. I lingered over the photos, and her words, remembering.

I was closing the box when I saw the corner of the envelope peeking from the fold of the cardboard, a wisp of paper gone yellow with age.

Mom’s perfect cursive script crossed the envelope, inscribed, simply, “Jim.”

July 3, 1971

Dear Jim,

I think we both knew this day would come, and I think we both know it’s for the best. The cuts and unkindnesses have come from both of us, and for a long time, but it would not be right for me to leave without apologizing. I will spend the rest of my life regretting what I did to you, and that is without regard to anything you’ve done to me. It was wrong, and it never should have happened. I am so sorry.

This may be difficult for you to believe, but I do not consider this marriage a failure, even though divorce is where it is going to end. Every time I look into our boys’ eyes, I see pictures of you and me. Jerry is so like you, it makes me laugh. Mitch, I’m afraid, isn’t like either of us, and maybe that’s a good thing. He has a beautiful spirit. We made that together.

Somewhere, at the very core of all of that, there is still a 19-year-old girl who thought you were just about the most amazing thing she had ever seen. She’s buried under a lot of years of struggling and fighting, and she’s weary now, but she’s still there. I hope to rediscover some of her once I get to Washington. I’ve missed her. Maybe you could find him again, too.

I’ll miss you. I love you.

Your wife (at least for a little while longer),

Leila

I waited for him. Three o’clock came and went, and I had long since expected him to roll up, to find the letter sitting on the kitchen table. I had pushed everything off to make sure he didn’t miss it. The porcelain salt and pepper shakers rested on the floor, shattered and spilling their contents on the linoleum.

I was placid, at least outwardly. I could wait all day. I could wait longer than that. I already had.

Dad had called me some variation on “candy ass” more times than I could begin to remember, but it wasn’t until his pickup hit the driveway that I gave honest consideration to the idea that he might be right. In that moment, my afternoon of defiance—a pose so easily struck when I was in the house alone—turned to deep dread. The shed doors, blown off their hinges by my angry feet, lay in a heap in the yard. He would surely see that, surely know what I had done and what I had found, and there would be no more dodging what we had spent this week, and years before it, dancing around.

That’s what I wanted. A showdown. A let’s-lay-our-cards-on-the-table, free-flowing exchange of invective. Like a petulant child, I had pointed and pouted, and I was about to get what I asked for. In that moment of certitude about what was coming, I also found unwanted clarity. This thing between Dad and me—this rock that we couldn’t roll off the only road between us—was going to blow sky-high. Only in that moment did I consider the collateral damage, and when I did, my heart seized up.

Dad came through the door slowly.

“Why, Mitch?” he said when he saw me. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

My legs buckled. I steadied myself and grabbed the letter from the table.

“Why did she apologize to you? What reason in the world did she have to apologize to you?”

With trembling fingers, Dad took the letter from me and reacquainted himself with the words that he surely knew. They had been important enough to him to keep all these years, just like the letters from his sister.

Finally, he sighed. The long, heavy release did nothing to cut the tension.

“What do you think you know about your mom and me?”

I took a hard step toward him.

“I’m not doing this answer-a-question-with-a-question bullshit. You answer me first.”

“Goddammit, Mitch, I’m going to tell you what you want to know. Just answer my question.”

I took time to consider my words, even though my tongue had been pregnant with them for as long as I could remember.

“I know that you were awful to her. I know that you cheated on her. I know that you disregarded her. I know that when she finally had enough and left you, you didn’t give two shits about us. You just let us go.”

Dad didn’t flinch.

“Your mother told you all of this, did she?”

That stopped me cold. If she had, I didn’t remember it. I fast-forwarded through my memories and was hard-pressed to think of a time that she had ever bad-mouthed Dad. Mom saw the possibilities in everything and the best qualities in everyone—even the people she had no reason to trust. People like Dad.

“Not in so many words, no, but I know what I know.”

Dad sat down in his recliner, and he waved me to the couch. I took a seat and kept my eyes on his.

“I was a bad husband. You’re right about that. I worked too much, I was gone too often, I took Leila for granted, and I spent evenings in bars that I should have spent at home, with you and Jerry and your mom. But I never cheated on her.”

I didn’t believe him. “OK,” I said. “Even if that’s true, why did she apologize to you?”

He waited an uncomfortable while to answer.

“Because she cheated on me.”

I wanted to punch him in his lying face. I reeled at the gall of his dropping such a scurrilous lie on me about my mother, one he knew I couldn’t refute now that she wasn’t around to shame him for what he had said.

I sat and I listened as he followed with a bunch of platitudes about the woman he had just called a whore.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Leila. I didn’t give her much to hold on to, and she got lonely. She was a young woman with a lot to offer and a husband who wasn’t giving her the attention she needed. Hell, as much as it bothered me, I understood it.”

My bile bubbled over.

“You’re a fucking liar.”

“I’m not, not about this.”

“You’re the cheater.”

“Nope.”

“You are such an asshole. You act like I don’t know what I know. Do you remember the night before Jerry left? I was fifteen feet away while you fucked that girl. She wasn’t your wife. Don’t you sit there and tell me you’re not a cheater.”

“Hell, that was years after this. I’m not talking about that, and I didn’t do anything that Marie wasn’t doing herself. I’m talking about me and your mother.”

“And I’m saying that once a cheater, always a cheater.”

Dad threw the letter at me.

“Read it again, Mitch. Does that sound like a woman who’s been cheated on? Use your goddamned head.”

“Fuck you.”

He pushed the letter at me. “Read it.”

I grabbed it from his hands and read it again. And that sinking feeling came back, the same sensation that cascaded through me when Dad pulled up. Much as I wanted to believe otherwise—I had built my identity on believing otherwise—I knew he was telling me the truth. I could internalize it. But I couldn’t acknowledge it. Not then. Not there. Not to him.

Instead, I took the offensive. This scene in my head had played out in my head so many times. Not once was I rocked back on my heels. I strained to avoid it now, even as the earth shifted under my feet.

“So why the divorce? If you’re saying that she was a wonderful wife, this thing aside, why did you run her off? Why didn’t you come for us?”

“Mitch, I’m not dodging you, but I don’t know. I wanted to try. Your mom was so embarrassed by what happened. I think she saw that the writing was on the wall. We didn’t have much of a marriage. I wanted her to stay. She felt like she had to leave. And that was my fault. I felt like I had to let her go, if that’s what she wanted.”

We didn’t speak for a long time. Dad sat in his chair, I sat in mine, and we were together, but alone, with our thoughts. Mine flowed in a flood of contradictions.

Why had Mom never told me what happened?

What would she say? “Mitch, I cheated on your father”? Come on.

It’s unbelievable. How could she have been the one to do that?

She was human. She wasn’t infallible. It’s a disservice to her for you to suggest that she was, because you know better.

How could she have let me think otherwise for so long, to blame it on him?

She never did any such thing. You reached your own conclusions about your father’s infidelity and your mother’s purity, and you did so on the basis of some hard-earned evidence. Don’t slough it off on her when reality doesn’t look like the fantasy.

I can’t believe it.

Look at your own life, at your own marriage. It’s sliding sideways, and you both set that in motion. There are no white hats and black hats in these things. Everything’s a shade of gray. Your mother at least had the integrity to recognize that the marriage was broken and move on of her own volition.

I looked out the window to the west, at the sinking sun. A brilliant orange, dappled with yellow, settled over Billings.

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Your note said we needed to talk. About what?”

“It’ll keep.”

I leaned forward and clasped my hands in front of me.

“I called Kelly.”

Dad betrayed neither emotion nor motion. His eyes never left the television screen. He thumbed the remote, flipping through the cable directory, just as he had done before I spoke.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard,” he said.

I waited.

He studiously avoided my stare as he spoke, finally.

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“I wish you hadn’t kept it from me.”

He said nothing, so I pushed on.

“I know who she is. I know why you left. I know why you want to just ignore it. I also know that she loves you and misses you, and—”

“Mitch, just shut up. OK? We’re not talking about this.”

“We have to.”

“No, we don’t. No matter how new and wonderful this seems to you, it’s ancient history to me. I’m not going back there.”

“Wonderful?” I said. “How could I call this wonderful? It’s horrible. It breaks my heart. I just think…God, you know, I’m the only one left, Dad. It’s you and me. I wish you trusted me enough to let me in.”

“I wish you trusted me enough to let me say that it’s a place you don’t want to be.”

“You’ve got to open the door to someone. You didn’t with Mom, you didn’t with Marie, and I bet you didn’t with Helen. Well, Pop, you have one person left.”

“They all knew about Kelly.”

“What?”

“Your mom, Marie, Helen. They knew.”

My assumptions again twisted into something I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t have expected Marie to say anything about anything, and I didn’t know Helen well enough to talk beyond the surface of a topic. But Mom?

“Mom never said anything to me.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Dad said with irritation in his voice. “She was decent enough to keep things to herself, especially things like that.”

“How much did she…I mean, what did she—”

“She knew what she needed to know.” He hadn’t answered, but my questions were moving faster than my ability to dissect his answers.

“Well, what about Kelly? Dad, she’s haunted by this thing. She misses you. She wants to see you. Don’t you think it would be good to have a relationship with the one person in the world who was there?”

Dad looked at me. His face hung haggard.

“I’m an old man. I haven’t seen her in fifty-something years. The past is best left where it is.”

“All the time, in every case? I don’t believe that.”

“In this case.”

“Let me ask you something. Why did you keep those letters if you don’t care? Why would you keep them tied together and put away in a box? That doesn’t make sense.”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t without conceding my point, and I knew he would never do that.

“Why did you come here?”

The question hit me like a rifle shot.

“To see you. To find out what was going on. You’re the one who kept calling. Not me. Remember that?”

“But you also came because you’re in a bad way with your wife. And it seems you’ve got some other things digging at you too.”

“Don’t make this about me.”

“I’m making it about us. You know how you told me on the drive back from Split Rail that you just wanted to get some things off your chest?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Isn’t it what you want?”

“Yeah, but what’s in it for you? Why now?”

“It’s time.”

I found his serenity—or at least his projection of serenity—to be at once disconcerting and inviting. I made the snap decision to set my reservations adrift and dive in.

“Why didn’t you come to Jerry’s funeral? Why have we never been able to talk about him?”

Dad massaged his eyes. I waited.

“I had no money. I was just scraping by.”

“Mom offered to pay your way.”

“I couldn’t have done that.”

“Why?”

“I just couldn’t.”

I lost it. I stood and began shouting.