After the Parade (38 page)

“My mother doesn't help with the cooking?” he finally asked.

Gloria had taken a pint box of fish fillets out of the freezer and was running hot water over it. “I guess you like sunfish?” she said.

“I haven't had them in a while.” He did not want her to think he hadn't had them because he didn't like them, so he added, “They're not easy to come by in San Francisco.”

The truth was that he thought of sunfish as specific to his childhood, along with lutefisk, which his mother had served in place of meatballs as the Thursday special the last two weeks before Christmas. She prepared it with boiled potatoes and a white sauce of butter, flour, and water, and on the side was a sheet of potato
lefse,
everything on the plate as white as snow. Then she added string beans and lingonberry
sauce, the green and red giving the plate a holiday feel. On those two Thursday nights, people lined up outside the café to get in.

“Why don't you serve lutefisk every night?” he had asked.

“That's not the way it works,” she said. “Folks are only this interested because I don't serve it every night. That's human nature. Besides, I couldn't stand the smell of it every day.”

His mother hated fish. Didn't Gloria know this?

“Your mother caught these sunfish last summer,” Gloria said.

“My mother caught them?” he said. She had also hated fishing, though she had gone only once that he knew of, with his father when they stayed at Last Resort on their honeymoon. She had told him the story of that trip numerous times, and always she stressed that she had never been so aware of her life ticking away as when she sat in that boat waiting for a fish to bite.

“Sure,” Gloria said. “All summer long she's out on the lake. Winter too. She's got a fish house that one of the neighbor boys hauls out with his truck after the lake's solid. He gets it all set up for her—puts in the stove, stacks some wood, drills a few holes, brings in her card table and chair. Every morning she packs sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and I don't see her until bedtime most days.”

Gloria worked a butter knife between the fillets. “Try not to judge her too harshly,” she said now that her back was to him. She plugged in a frying pan and dropped a chunk of Crisco into it. As it melted, she dredged the fillets in flour and then lined them up in the pan. “Anyway,” she said, “she's a different person.”

At supper his mother dished up several fillets of the sunfish and ate them without comment. “How's work?” she asked him.

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” he said. He took a bite of his fish and thought about how much better it would be fried in butter.

“Yes,” said his mother. “Actually, I do. I know some things about you, you know, about your life.”

“How?” he said. “How do you know these
things
about me?” He knew that she was lying.

“Well,” she said. “I shouldn't say how I know because that involves other people, and it's always best not to involve others, but I know you're a teacher.”

She put another piece of fish into her mouth and swallowed quickly without chewing, which was what he did when someone served him onions and there seemed no polite way to avoid them. Gloria was wrong. His mother had not changed. She still hated fish. Except now she was a person who would pretend she did not hate fish, which meant Gloria was right. He felt his chin quiver, which meant he was about to cry. He did not want to cry, not here in front of his mother. He was no longer the same person either, and he did not want her to think he was, to think he was still the boy who cried about everything. At a dinner party once a doctor had told him a trick she used to keep herself from crying when giving families bad news. She pushed out her jaw. He tried it, and it worked. He turned to Gloria and said, “Supper was very good. Thank you for cooking and for inviting me to join you.”

“You were always so polite,” said his mother. “That was another reason the kids were afraid of you.”

“No, that's why they didn't like me,” he said. “When you're polite to people who don't deserve it, they think you're mocking them.”

“I think Aaron has lovely manners, Dee,” Gloria said. “We're just not used to such things.” She stood and began stacking the dishes, and Aaron rose to help her. His mother sat staring down at her plate, but Aaron took it from her and carried it into the kitchen. A few small bones from her fish were lined up and teetering on the rim.

“Aaron,” said Gloria, “you'll stay the night.”

It was after eight. He could not imagine leaving now, trying to locate a town big enough to have a motel. “Thank you,” he said. “You're sure it's no trouble?”

“It's no trouble,” said Gloria. “We'll put you in Clary's room.” They heard his mother's chair scrape back from the table. She did not say good night.

*  *  *

It was just as he remembered, the shelves of books with their spines turned in, keeping their titles to themselves. He sat on the bed, Clarence's bed, and laughed at the memory of his young self advising Clarence to turn the titles outward. In the corner beside the desk, turned inward like a naughty child, was Clarence's wheelchair, the afghan that had covered his legs folded neatly across the back. Aaron rose from the bed and gripped the chair's handles, recalling how he had maneuvered it so carefully down the hallway while Clarence berated him for his clumsiness.

He could hear Gloria moving around the house, closing up for the night. His mother used to engage in a similar routine when he was a boy, a routine that had angered his father, who liked bedtime to be a fast transition into sleep. After checking the doors and windows, she would pause longest at the oven, staring at the dials, and then, still unconvinced, she would open the door and put her head inside. From his bed, Aaron had listened for these familiar sounds, even though the routine often ended with his father screaming, “It's off.” Once, as his mother crouched before the oven, head inside, his father had come up behind her and pushed her in. Aaron had seen it happen. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, needing another glass of water, but he had crept back to bed with his empty glass.

His day had started in a nondescript airport hotel in Minneapolis and was ending in Clarence's bedroom. He imagined he would lie awake all night, trying to sort through everything that had happened in between. In fact, he fell asleep immediately. When he awakened—minutes or hours later—he moved from deep sleep to consciousness quickly, aware of something, a
presence
there in the dark. It was the sort of dark that seemed both vast and one-dimensional, and he stretched his hand into it, colliding with something hard—metal and rubber. It was Clarence's wheelchair, pulled up beside the bed.

In the iron ore mine when he was five, the Finns had pointed out stalactites, which he did not touch, though he had imagined how they would feel: cold and smooth and slick. He had thought of the stalactites when he laid his finger on Clarence's tusk. But had the tusk been slick? He could not remember, the tactile part of the memory simply gone.
How was it possible to lose part of a memory, for one of the senses to stop contributing? If he reached out into the darkness again, would his fingers remember how Clarence's tusk had felt in the seconds before Aaron said, “I love them,” or in the seconds after?

Clarence had been crying. He understood this only now.

“Aaron,” said a voice from the dark, “why are you here?” It was his mother.

S
he had awakened him like this once before, when he was five. Nearly five. It was New Year's Eve. His father had had to work the night shift, and he and his mother stayed up late watching television and eating popcorn with an ease that felt festive, neither of them saying aloud what they both knew: it was his father's absence that made it feel like a holiday. He did not remember falling asleep, but he woke up in his bed, the room dark, his mother beside him. “Welcome to the seventies, Aaron,” she said. She smelled of alcohol, though she was not a drinker, and crackers. He recognized both as she leaned close to kiss his forehead, the latter an everyday smell that he associated with soup and upset stomachs, the former a rarer odor that occasionally wafted from his father's glass at the supper table. She remained there with him a long while, her breathing unsteady, her hand warm on his brow, before she stood and whispered, “Don't be afraid of the world.” Years later he thought that she had been talking to them both.

“I'm not sure why I'm here,” Aaron said. “All these years, I've never tried to find you.” He could not see her face or gauge her reaction. Maybe that had been her plan all along—to wait for darkness, believing it would make them both braver. “When I thought of you, I sometimes thought of you alive and other times, dead.” Or maybe she had awakened him from the fog of sleep in order to have the upper hand. “But mainly I didn't think about you.” Only then did he consider that she had no plan, that she had gone to bed, expecting to sleep, but the need to talk had overwhelmed her.

She did not respond, which unnerved him, though he recalled from his childhood this manner of listening that involved silence. It was not particular to his mother. He was the one who had changed, who had come to believe that a person had to say he was listening in order to be listening.

“Walter always felt I should look for you,” he went on, filling the silence. “But that was Walter.”

It was the first time he had referred to Walter. He decided that he would provide no clauses or parentheticals to establish the details of his life, to explain who Walter was, who
he
was. He would not make it easy for her.

“How did you and Walter meet?” asked his mother, surprising him.

“In the café.” He took pleasure in revealing that Walter was someone for whom she had once cooked. He did not explain the rest of the story, how he had met Walter again after she left, how they had come to live together and be lovers. Let her wonder.

“So you're a homosexual,” she said at last.

He had always hated the word
homosexual,
which tended to be used by those uncomfortable with the compactness of
gay,
those requiring just a few more syllables. “Well, yes,” he said. “I believe that's been established.”

“It was Walter,” she said.

“What was?”

“Walter was the one who told me things about you—that you were a teacher, that you were good at it, that you had moved to San Francisco.”

“You talked to him?”

“No,” said his mother. “He wrote to me.”

“When?”

“After you left.” She sighed. “But also once before that. Maybe ten years ago. You had just moved to New Mexico, and he wanted me to know that you were fine, that you were a good teacher and a good person. I still remember what he wrote:
Aaron's students love and respect him. He's great at what he does. He is a compassionate human being
.”

“Did you write back to him?” he asked.

“No. What would've been the point? He didn't write because he wanted to make me feel better. He wrote because he was angry at me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Aaron,” she said, sounding sad and wise and like a mother. “He wanted me to know that you didn't need me, that you were just fine, that you had managed nicely without me. He didn't say that the two of you were—you know—but I could tell because he was just so angry.” Aaron did not know what to make of this, how to reconcile what his mother was telling him with the way that Walter had always talked to him about his mother, patiently, as though Aaron were a student in need of his advice.

“Did you come here to Gloria right away?” Aaron asked, even though he knew the answer. What he wanted to know—what he was trying to bring the conversation around to—was why she had left.

“It's not like that,” his mother said. “Why does everything have to be about that?”

“About what?” he said, not understanding her response or the irritation in her voice.

“About”—she paused and even her pause sounded mad—“about love.”

The afternoon that he opened the envelope Bill had given him and looked at his mother's address, he had not recognized it as Gloria's. He had gone to Bill's funeral that morning and then to the hippie café to drink several beers in his friend's honor, and though he was not drunk, he thought that the funeral and the beer explained what he did next: he dialed the telephone number for Charles Gronseth, which Bill had also included. Charles Gronseth picked up after just two rings, and when Aaron identified himself, there was silence and then Charles Gronseth said, “Just a minute, please,” and Aaron heard him say to someone, his wife he supposed, “It's a client.”

Bill had told him that Pastor Gronseth was no longer a pastor. He was just Charles Gronseth, married for the third time and living in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he sold insurance, successfully Aaron
imagined, for Charles Gronseth had always been good at talking, at making people afraid of the unknown.

On the other end, Aaron heard footsteps, a door closing. “What a nice surprise,” said Charles Gronseth. “I thought you might call.” His voice was hearty, but the two statements contradicted each other: one could not be both surprised by a call and expecting it. Charles Gronseth was nervous, which made Aaron feel oddly better.

“I hear you're selling insurance?” Aaron said.

“Aaron, let's cut past the small talk,” Charles Gronseth said. “You're calling because you want to know about your mother. I told everything to that detective, but I guess it still doesn't make sense to you, so let me explain it one more time.” He paused. “And then I'm going to ask you never to call here again.”

Aaron felt a shot of rage, but when he spoke, he said only, “Fine.”