We Are Not Ourselves (75 page)

He was now a favorite son among the doormen. He had helped deliver the super’s kid to the doorstep of respectability. There would be privileges attached to his new status, something subtly easier about his experience on the job. And something like a home was available in the building—in the lobby, in the locker room in the basement, in this, the super’s apartment. He could come over for more of these dinners. He could live through Peter for at least four years, guiding his decisions, giving him the benefit of his perspective, sending him off to a good college on a scholarship. And when Peter came home from college, and later when he came up to visit from his loft apartment downtown, when he pulled up in front of the building in the company town car, dropping in for dinner with the folks, Connell would open the car door without resentment, because by then he would be old enough not to feel resentment anymore. All he had to do was bide his time. Everything would get simpler once enough years had passed. He wouldn’t need to go anywhere; he could stay in the lobby and the years would come to him.

If you had to pick a perch from which to watch the world go by, Connell thought, the lobby wouldn’t be the worst—especially on quiet summer evenings when you had all the doors open and you got a nice breeze going and dusk was overtaking the city, the setting sun reflecting off the windows on the other side of Park.

When Mr. Marku proffered the coffeepot, Connell held his hand over his mug. Mr. Marku looked determined as he asked if Connell were sure
he didn’t want another cup. Mrs. Marku cut another piece of cake, and a queasy feeling of betrayal set in as Connell watched it cover his plate. He knew it was only cake, but it took on a strange, almost numinous power. It felt as if he would be giving up on an idea he had of how his life would go if he ate it. He would be declaring a new oath of allegiance. They were buying his future off for so little: a home-cooked dessert, the promise of further intimacy, a hint of family, an elder brother status of sorts. He had no energy to fight them, not when he had nothing better to argue for. His hand was drawn to his fork and he pressed down into the cake, watching a chunk separate from the rest. He took his hand away from the mug and let it be filled. Peter looked on quietly, taking everything in, an observer more than a person observed. Connell was surprised to suddenly see, with a piercing keenness of perception, that this was no longer his own experience. He was in the middle of an experience Peter was having. He hadn’t seen the usurper coming.

96

W
hen Eileen was a teenager, she had dreamed of going to Death Valley and sleeping under the night sky and its canopy of stars. As a fifty-eight-year-old woman, she compromised and stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn, a luxury resort.

She went in February, during the cool season, because she’d never been able to stand the heat and didn’t want to bake her pale skin in the sun. Despite this precaution, after the first day, when she took a walk out into the immense emptiness of the desert and felt spooked, she found herself indoors most of the time. She stayed on the resort’s grounds, splitting time between the dining rooms, the fireplace lounges, and a deck chair by the heated pool.

One night she went with a group into the national park. She stood on the Racetrack Playa, which was cracked and dry enough to resemble the skin of a lizard. She didn’t need a guide, or even a rudimentary understanding of astronomy, to know what she was seeing when she looked up, because it was simply and unmistakably the Milky Way. The guide pointed out sailing stones: wandering rocks, he said, pushed along their lonely way by means that had never been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. One of the tourists held forth about how the movement of these rocks might be due to the effects of wind or ice. His grip on the science was shaky, Eileen could tell, his knowledge anecdotal and obviously derived from popular magazines, a pale shade of Ed’s earned erudition. Ed wouldn’t have spoken unless he knew what he was talking about. She would have enjoyed watching him soak it all up, the flickers of a theory in his gaze. She could have taken a lesson from his patience with this nattering tourist. He would have liked the way these stones left a long trail, never coming to rest, defying explanation.

97

O
n the first anniversary of his father’s death, Connell took the train to Bronxville to go to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. His mother picked him up at the station and drove to Tryforos & Pernice.

“Get something nice,” she said.

He was overwhelmed by the choices and selected a premade, mixed-bouquet arrangement. When he returned to the car, his mother was annoyed.

“They didn’t have any roses?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just got what looked nice.”

“Those are mums and daisies. You should have gotten roses.”

“You didn’t say anything about roses.” His mother looked genuinely upset. “I can go back and get roses.”

“No, those are fine,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t know the difference anyway. He probably would have picked the same ones you did.”

•  •  •

Gusting winds rolled across the burial yard. His mother cleared her throat.

“Dear God,” she said, “watch over the soul of my dear husband Ed.” She looked at Connell. “Let him know that we miss him and love him.” She looked at Connell again. “I’ve never been much good at prayer. If there’s a heaven, your father is there. That’s one thing I know. Ed,” she said, turning back to the grave, “there’s not an hour goes by that I don’t have you on my mind. Maybe you know that already. Maybe you can listen in on my thoughts. If so, that’s a nice thing. That means I probably don’t need to speak at all. But I can’t stop talking now that I’ve started. Sometimes it feels like
you never left. I go to tell you things and you aren’t there. I fold the paper down to tell you about an article and you aren’t sitting across from me. Connell misses you. I’d catch you up on everything that’s happened in the last year, but if you can hear me, then you know it all already. If not, I’d just be talking to myself. I love you dearly. I guess we’ll say the Our Father now.”

She started to say the Lord’s Prayer and Connell joined in. It had the soft familiarity of a bedtime routine. The words came easily to him; he wondered if they were stored so deep that they’d be among the last things he remembered when he died.

When his mother finished, she patted the ground in search of pebbles to leave on the gravestone. It was a Jewish custom she had picked up like a magpie building a nest of grief. The capillaries in her cheeks were red, but the cold seemed to have no other effect on her. She was tough, but as they stood in that astringent wind, Connell thought of her living in the house alone, so many empty rooms, all of them still and quiet. After he left the house later, after tea and cake, she would remain behind in it. He had been glad when she told him she was thinking of selling it, but in the end she hadn’t put it on the market; something held her back.

His mother put two pebbles on the gravestone and stepped back, buffeted by wind. “Your father picked this spot out,” she said. “We looked at the brochures right after we moved. This was before we knew anything about his illness. It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wanted to see the plot of land, so we came out here and looked at it. This area wasn’t filled in yet, but they had it all planned out. Your father wanted to be on this hill. He would have loved a day like this, chilly and misty, the sky full of rain clouds. I don’t know if you remember, but he loved cemeteries. Any trip we took, we had to stop at a cemetery. He liked to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. Maybe I should have come up with something better.”

He considered the carved words: “Beloved husband and father.” It was boilerplate, but novelty wasn’t called for on a headstone, and it was a fitting summation of his father’s life, even if it fit a lot of men’s lives. Beneath that spare etching was a space where the inscription for his mother would go. She was standing with him now, and the day would come when she no longer would be, when he would arrange for the lowering of her into the
earth. He wanted to put his arms around her and shield her from what was to come, and he felt a kind of panic bloom in his chest. The most he could do to try to chase it away was drape an arm across her shoulders.

“This was the only real estate your father ever really cared about,” she said, as if in answer to a private thought. It was a paltry plot, but the view was beautiful. If you added the adjacent space that Ruth and Frank McGuire had bought, it started to look like a little neighborhood. They’d been trailblazers when they’d secured the plots, but in the intervening years the march of mortality had swept past the area and filled it up, and another vanguard was forming a little way up the road. There wasn’t room there for Connell, which was just as well. He would make his own decision about a final resting place, or perhaps someone he didn’t know yet would make it for him.

Real estate
. He couldn’t help hearing another meaning in the phrase. What was his father’s real estate? There was the investment portfolio, and the house and the things in it; there was the contribution to science; there were the altered lives of the students he’d taught, and the impacts those students had had, and would have, on others. And then there was him.
He
was his father’s real estate. At the moment he was an underwater asset.

He picked up a pebble and added it to the little pile atop the gravestone. They headed toward the car.

“Your father got a kick out of the fact that Babe Ruth was buried here.”

Connell remembered reading about ballplayers driving to Ruth’s grave to soak up some luck, but he hadn’t realized this was the cemetery in question.

“Where’s the grave?”

“Not far.”

“Did Dad ever see it?”

“He stood in front of it for a long while.” She chuckled. “Silent. Sort of solemn. The way you two get about baseball.”

They drove until they reached a tall marker set back from the road, with a plinth that said
RUTH
in big block lettering under a large central stone that depicted Jesus gesturing to a little boy. One smaller stone bore a quote from Cardinal Spellman: “May the divine spirit that animated Babe Ruth to win the crucial game of life inspire the youth of America”; another
listed the years of Ruth’s birth and death, as well as those of his wife, Claire. There were baseballs stacked in a little offering, a solitary bat, baseball cards taped to the stone.

He thought of his father down the road, ignored except by family members. Death may have been the great leveler, but there were still hierarchies in cemeteries.

He went up and rubbed his palm on the gravestone. He wasn’t above asking for a little luck. He might even have knelt if his mother hadn’t been there. It felt for a moment as if he were back in church as a little boy, as if he’d placed a quarter in the box and lit a votive candle and now the time had come to say a prayer. Saying a prayer, making a wish, having a thought—were they all the same? Was anyone listening? Was there anything other than a void in the universe?
Help me
, he thought.
Help
. But the Babe just stood impassive in his frieze, a gray block, silent as the stone it was quarried from.

•  •  •

When they got to the house, his mother put on a pot of tea. Connell went into the study to use the computer. The study still smelled like his father, or at least like things he associated with his father—old books, pencil shavings, the heated metal of the desk lamp. His mother came in and picked up something from the desk.

“I was going through these file cabinets,” she said, “and I found this.” She handed him an envelope with his name on it. “Your father wanted me to give it to you a while ago, but with everything that was going on, I must have mislaid it.”

He tried not to let her see the anger that was coursing through his system like a poison. “What does it say?” he said, calmly as he could.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t exactly steam it open. I remember he wanted to get some thoughts down for you. He wanted me to wait until he wasn’t compos mentis to give it to you. But obviously he didn’t want me to wait this long.”

Connell held the letter warily. “Thanks,” he said.

“Maybe you want to be alone for this,” his mother said, and left the room.

Instead of opening the letter, which sat like an unread verdict, he went to the filing cabinet and looked through the drawers. One was full of mementoes from his youth—report cards, honors certificates, birthday and Father’s Day cards he’d written his father, art he’d made in the early school years, a once-essential stuffed rabbit he’d forgotten about. As the years passed, his father had saved increasingly more things, no doubt as mnemonic devices, until he had stopped saving anything.

In another drawer he found shoeboxes full of those four-by-six photo albums that used to come free with a developed roll. The albums didn’t have dates, but one contained shots from a cross-country meet of his, so it must have been taken during his freshman year. They were mostly shots of Connell, though there wasn’t a single photo that depicted him looking at the camera. It was as though his father had been waiting for him to turn and look at him. A terrific loneliness came over Connell as he imagined his father looking through the camera and calling for his gaze silently with his own. He was relieved to see a few landscape portraits of the meadow at Van Cortlandt Park, but when he came to a photo of his father standing with his arm around his old teammate, a sensitive kid who left the school after an unhappy freshman year—he had to jog his brain to remember the kid’s name was Rod—he felt jealous. Rod dwarfed his father; he appeared to be leaning down to be in the shot with him. Their faces were close together, and they had such smiles on. It looked as if Rod was his father’s own child.

He was terrified to read the letter; he saw that clearly. He went to the bookshelves. All that remained of his father’s library were two shelves of reference books and some hardcover volumes of philosophy and literature that his mother hadn’t parted with. Another shelf held his father’s intellectual output—a shrine of published papers, notes, and notebooks. Connell remembered how much time his father spent in the lab just before he retired. He saw now that his father must have known he’d have to give up his lab soon. Was it possible to imagine him chasing an understanding of, even a cure for, the disease he was afflicted by? Whatever he’d been working on had come to naught, but maybe it would have had an impact on the larger world. If so, then these notebooks could hold the key to reclaiming
him from the forgotten dead men on that hill. He wanted people to visit his father someday, paying posthumous respects.