All the Roads That Lead From Home (6 page)

During the
three-hour drive northward from Virginia, you consider the information you
received about the incident in question. Your father was standing on a chair
which he’d brought into his closet. There was something he wanted on the top
shelf, what, you don’t know. You don’t know what things he brought with him
from the old house. You don’t even know what his room looks like. As to the
fall itself, it was assumed that fluid in the inner ear was to blame for the
loss of balance, also the medications he took to control blood pressure, and
quantity of scotch consumed against the advice of his doctors.

The
hospital hall is quiet and the rubber soles of your shoes squeak on the flecked
vinyl floor. The noise slows as you near his room. You’re afraid to enter,
afraid of your own thudding heart.

His eyes
open at the light touch of your hand.

Dar, is
that really you? Did you really come all this way?

With a
little tease in your voice you say,
Come on now, don’t sound so surprised.
Then
you look for evidence of Leslie, some gift she might have left, a bouquet of
flowers or a box of his beloved chocolate cream. There’s nothing.

You take a
chair and draw it to the bed. You mention the weather there in Pennsylvania, and remark that your spring at home is several weeks ahead. How silly you
sound, because any fool knows that spring travels from south to north.

The
radiator bangs, then hisses. The ugly beige curtains don’t quite close,
allowing a column of glare to fall across the floor.

The nurse
comes to take your father’s temperature. She takes his blood pressure, too. She
refills the pitcher of water, slides the thermometer from his lips, reads it,
and drops it in the pocket of her bright, floral-print smock. Then she’s gone.
You wish she were still there, occupying space between you and your father.

Guess they
told you what your dopey ’ole father did. Sailed right off that damn chair.
The bruise on his cheek is florid and difficult to look at.
There were no major injuries, otherwise. He’s being kept for observation only,
for an assessment of his mental state, and to determine if he’s fit to return
to independent living.

Suddenly
his face tenses, and his eyes focus on you hard. You’re reminded of a picture
taken years before, a candid shot by a student wanting to capture your father
in mid-lecture. The expression is the same, fierce, intent, totally absorbed.

Did I
ever tell you about Stu Drake?
he asks
you.

You hear
that Stu was another Illinois grad whose straight teeth and high grades put him
in the cockpit by the summer of ’42. Stu wrote often about training
paratroopers, the wide billow of the silk growing smaller as they dropped away.

So, that’s
what your father thought of as he fell. About dead soldiers, their chutes
becoming shrouds.

Your
words, not his. The drive has made you punchy. And the call from your husband
on your cell phone as you reached town, his voice full of remorse about last
night’s disagreement which you can’t at the moment remember.

Did I
ever tell you how I wanted to be a pilot? Failed the physical. Know why?
Your father taps his crooked front teeth.
Wouldn’t fit
inside an oxygen mask. Probably saved my damn life.
His voice becomes as
thin as the late afternoon light.
I was lucky. Luck is a kind of
responsibility, and I didn’t know what to do with it
.

 He wants
something to drink, something alcoholic, which he’s not allowed. You consider
buying him a bottle, hiding it in your large, messy handbag, and sharing it as
the night comes on. You won’t, though, because he’s still talking and needs
your audience even more than he needs the alcohol.

She
hated me for what I did. I suppose she told you all about that, though, didn’t
she? Sometimes I feel like picking up the phone and trying to set the record
straight, but what’s the use?
Your father
has forgotten that your mother’s been dead for ten years.
She thought I was
arrogant, do you know that? She accused me of thinking that ordinary people
were too stupid to be trusted with the knowledge I had, but that wasn’t it at
all. I couldn’t talk about my work because I took an oath of secrecy. An oath
is supposed to mean something.

Information
has become declassified and television shows about the war years, specifically
the code-breaking efforts on the part of the United States and Great Britain have aired, yet your father keeps quiet.

He’s grown
tired, and closes his eyes. In a few minutes he’s sound asleep. It’s unnerving
to sit there, with him so still and peaceful. You feel as if death could enter
at any moment without your knowing. But he’s not close to dying. He won’t die
for another four years, by which time you’ve given him a very late-arriving
grandson whose creation took faith and artificial means.

Later you
stretch across the orange bedspread in your motel room and think of your father
trying to make up for being lucky, for not talking, for wanting Leslie to eat
her vegetables, but not for you, never for you. Maybe in his eyes you just
weren’t weak enough.

How
well you’ve turned out, Dar. You’ve got such character. Don’t need a thing from
anyone. You’re one independent gal.

His words,
not yours, whenever the conversation failed, as it always did, because you
didn’t want him to call. Didn’t want to tumble into something you didn’t
control, where the weight was all on his side.

In the
morning you find you’ve slept in your clothes, and the bed is as rumpled as
you, but only on your half. You call your husband. He’s glad you did. He wants
to know how your father is.
Out of it, really out of it
, you say. You
say you’ll be home tomorrow, and remember to say that you love him.

I love
you, too, Dar.

Your
father is awake, and has had his breakfast. Egg has spilled on his front. He’s
fretful, and his bent hands pluck at the bed sheets.

I don’t
know if I can go on helping my friends, Dar. I think I’ve run through all my
money.

You nod.

I hate
letting them down, but I don’t know what else to do.

You’re at
a loss now, in the face of this candor, this worry. Your father never showed
worry before. Only steely calm, even when his second wife berated him, or when
Leslie said she hated him, or when you accused him of arrogance that day on
campus.

You
make people into puppets! Sitting there in the dark, pulling strings!
You’d learned that he had put in a good word at a college
you’d applied to, just as a way of helping things along. You didn’t want help.
You had faith in your own merits, or at least you argued that you did. In truth
you had no faith at all.

For a
moment your waving arms and loud voice seemed to throw him off balance. His
face opened, then closed right away because someone walked by and called his name,
a colleague with a briefcase and expensive shoes. As your father called back
you walked off, perhaps not having the will to try to get his attention a
second time.

You didn’t
go to the college he talked to. You went somewhere else, far away out west. The
desert air was good for you. You put down roots in the dry ground, yet you
returned, not to your home town, but further south. Why did you come back East
at all?

“Can you
help me, Dar?” Your father’s voice is quiet. He doesn’t look at you. “I think I
may need help.”

“You mean
pay another bill?” This would be as easy as the last, because you and your
husband are frugal, even cheap, and you’ve got a lot put by. The balance in
your money market account alone is over sixty thousand dollars.

“No, no, I
couldn’t take a penny from you. Just help me manage what I’ve got. I can’t seem
to keep track of it these days,” he says.

You agree
to take a look at his checkbook and see if you can make sense of it.

He directs
you to his rooms, his “cottage,” he calls it, at the retirement home. The
receptionist in the main hall opens the door for you, but doesn’t leave you the
key. The front room is larger than you expected, with a sliding glass door.
Outside the door is a small concrete slab meant to serve as a patio. There’s a
single folding chair there, and an empty glass someone overlooked. You lift the
glass and smell it. You bring it inside and rinse it in the tiny
stainless-steel kitchen sink.

The
bedroom is much smaller. Cardboard boxes line one wall, stacked three high. The
dresser is low, one you remember from childhood. A bright red drop of nail
polish, like plastic blood, remains in the corner where you spilled it over
thirty years before. The checkbook is there, in the top right-hand drawer, just
as your father specified. You toss it on the carefully made single bed. The
closet is almost too small to get the chair into, but you manage. On the shelf
are boxes with letters inside. None are from you, because you never wrote.
There are sweaters, shoes, a curled-up belt, a hat your father must have held
onto from the Fifties, the last time anyone wore such a thing. There is also a
framed photograph of you. You’re not smiling. The background color is too
brightly blue, and you remember it as your class picture from the fifth or
sixth grade. Unlike everything else on that shelf, it’s been dusted, kept
clean.

Was he
getting it down, or putting it back? Or just taking a moment to look at it,
wipe it off, then return it to the dark? There are no other photographs visible
in the tiny apartment, or in any of the drawers you go through, even those in
the kitchen, only yours.

You take
the glass you just rinsed and fill it with a little scotch from the bottle by
the toaster. On the small sofa you drink some, and then drink some more. The
lake can’t be seen from where you sit, but it’s there for sure, long and deep,
only a few miles away. On its shore there’s a park where you went in summers
before your parents split up. You fill a blue plastic bucket with pebbly sand
and take it to where they lie on wide, striped towels.
What a pretty bucket,
you father says, rising up to see better. Then,
I have a secret to tell you!
The secret is I love you!
Now off you go, find me some more sand for
your bucket.

Years
after the bucket is lost you eat a TV dinner in your father’s dark apartment.
There’s a game on the black and white set, the antenna off kilter, the picture
in and out.

Who
scored?
he calls.

Pittsburgh
,
you’re happy to say,
knowing the teams at last.

He stands
in the low kitchen doorway, a can of beer in his hand. He says he’s getting
married again soon. You nod.
Mom
told me
, you say.

The final
quarter is underway, Pittsburgh reaches Miami’s 10-yard line, and still in the
doorway your father says,
I want you to know that I won’t have any more
children. You’re the only child I have, the only one I want to have.

Years
later you call up to say you just got married. A silence falls on the line. In
the background there’s a game playing, and you have to wonder if it’s football.
I wish you’d told me, Dar. I would have liked to give you away.

You finish
your drink. Something within you shifts, then drops like a single flake of
snow. You put the glass down, and sit a little longer in the quiet of your
father’s empty house.

You find
the checkbook in the bedroom. Inside bears your father’s neat, square hand. You
take it along to look at later, and realize how very glad you are you made the
trip.

Angie needed a drink and
had already waited ten minutes for Fran to offer her one. Finally she went into
the kitchen, found a glass, and returned to the living room. She joined Fran on
the soft leather couch and helped herself to the whiskey from the crystal
bottle on the coffee table.

The
funeral had been long. A lot of people Angie didn’t know gave voice to her
father’s good deeds,
I remember when he taught Bess to play her first scale
,
and
He guided Collin through his first recital
. Fran was the last to
speak. She cried as she described their seven lovely years together—
a second
marriage for us both but even better than the first
—then closed with
your
music is silent now, my love, though for you my ear remains keen
.

To Angie,
it was a big bore. She’d given up on her father years before and was only there
to get something for her trouble, something she could take away and hang onto.

“Find out
about insurance,” Kevin had said as Angie boarded the bus to Ann Arbor. “An old
guy like that, he’d have insurance.” He didn’t, though. He didn’t have a will,
either.

“Because
he wasn’t planning to die,” said Fran, when Angie asked why not. “Don’t you
think he’d have put his affairs in order, otherwise?”

Angie
sipped her drink. Her father was only sixty-two. He’d been a piano teacher.
Angie’s mother had been one of his students. Their marriage was four months
older than Angie, a last-minute arrangement, she was always told. Angie was
five when her mother ran off with another man, and she remembered nothing of
it, though her father said she’d been right there, watching the car drive away.
What Angie did remember was her mother’s absence, the sudden silence in the
house, and then a postcard from Montana saying,
I made a mistake.
Her
mother didn’t write again, she didn’t come home, and went on living with her
mistake, Angie hoped, until word came of her death from pneumonia in an Arizona hospital three years later.