Authors: David Gilbert
Andrew was still in the bathroom.
Andy was still upstairs.
Gerd was changing in her room.
I was near the door so I answered.
Richard stood front and center, the bow to the family ship. When he saw me, his expression ran aground. “Philip?”
“Hi, Richard.”
My hands were still wet from the flowers.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, wiping away the moisture.
“I’m staying here.”
“Here as in here, in this apartment?”
“Yes.” I smiled at the family behind him. “Please, come in.”
Richard remained stuck by the door as the rest of the crew abandoned ship. I introduced myself and told them I was an old friend, like since forever, but then I noticed Richard flinch so I clarified the relationship. “Our fathers were very old friends, like from day one.”
“How nice,” Candy said, sharing with me her undeniable warmth. She wore tight embroidered jeans and furry boots, a coat more in tune with ski slopes than sidewalks. I half-expected her to whoop and come to a sliding stop. It was odd to think of Richard’s family as tourists here
in New York, but that’s what they were, and for that reason their faces lacked a certain patina, of the city in their blood, I suppose, which made them
seem extra shiny, untainted by the everyday corrosions of ambition.
“Let me take your coats,” I said.
Richard refused the offer. “Where’s my father?”
“He’s still getting ready,” I said. I brought them into the living room, improvising my duties as host. Thankfully the glob of spit from a few nights ago had been cleaned up or had dried into nothing. Or was it my imagination? I did my best to advertise the furniture as if great comfort lay ahead rather than mild suspicion. Small talk commenced regarding their visit to New York—any sights? any shows?—with Candy taking on the role of
spokesperson. Most of my attention wavered sideways, onto Richard and how the years had treated him versus how they had treated me. He was definitely winning. But his trim physique and solid good looks had no love for the competition, his eyes the veteran of—
“What?” he said with an accusatory tilt.
“Excuse me?”
“You were staring at me.”
“No,” I said. “Or I don’t think I was.”
Thank goodness Gerd walked in just then. She was wearing of all things a maid’s uniform, which gave her the distinct impression of being swallowed whole by a leaping killer whale. “This is Gerd,” I said, my tone not entirely sure.
Gerd smiled—I imagined teeth digging in—and mentioned food.
It seemed everyone had already eaten at the Carlyle.
“No food at all?” she asked. “I thought this was a brunch.”
“I had waffles from Belgium,” Chloe said. “They were beyond delicious.”
Emmett rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I had toast from France.”
“Mom!”
“Emmett.”
“You heard that, waffles from Belgium?”
“Not now, Emmett.”
“You want her to be a waffles-from-Belgium kind of person?”
Richard stepped in. “Emmett, please.”
But Emmett was pushed a little further. “Tonight I guess I’ll have chicken from parmigiana.”
I have to say I instantly liked the boy, the way he slung a softer version of his father’s glare, like he was taking in a pleasant sunrise and not the heat of the day. I was on the verge of adding my two cents about veal from picatta when Richard, staring at me, toggled his head so that the past jibed with the present and I was once again a sign of uncomfortable humidity. “Why are you here, Philip? Don’t you have a family?”
“We recently split, my wife and I.”
Candy sighed her sympathies.
“And I lost my job.”
More sighs from Candy.
“And I don’t know if you heard but my father died last week.”
Sighs verging on coloratura from Candy.
“Your dad nicely invited me to stay here until I get back on my feet.”
“That’s really sweet,” Candy said. “Friends and family are so—”
Richard cut her off. “Yeah, we’re very sorry. Where are you sleeping?”
I paused, possibly for effect. “Your old room, I think.”
“My old room?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Richard’s eyes seemed to sink until level with a watery horizon, miles of visibility turning into a few grasping inches. Even his children noticed, I think. They watched him like he was too far away to help. Candy went over and slipped an arm around the latitude of his belt and gave him a sexy equatorial squeeze. “Strange being back, huh?” she said.
Richard asked again where his father was.
Candy squeezed tighter. “Has it changed much?”
He muttered about coming all this way, about making an effort.
Candy jostled him hard enough to clear the skip.
“What?”
“Has the place changed?”
“I don’t know.” He looked around. “It seems emptier, that’s for sure. And grayer. Depressing. Like crashing down into Kansas instead of Oz.”
“And whose feet are under the house?” Candy asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, baby.”
I couldn’t help but grin.
“What?” Richard said.
“Nothing.”
“No, please, I insist, what?”
And so I told him, smiling because it was a fond memory, how every time I thought of that movie I remembered how the Dyers came over to our house during that summer when the rain never stopped, and how my father had a 32 mm print of
The Wizard of Oz
and he would set up the projector in the living room and pull down the screen, and we kids would gather around and watch it over and over again. “Seems so prehistoric now,” I said. “That was our
VCR.”
Richard shook his head. “That happened maybe once.”
“It happened all the time, at least that summer.”
“Once.”
“That summer was like the summer of
The Wizard of Oz
,” I said.
“I remember once and it was at someone’s birthday.”
“Yes, my birthday. But then we kept on going. It was like every day. I showed the movie to my kids a couple of months ago, a rite of passage, I think, and it really is quite fascinating,” I said, perhaps slipping into teacher mode, “how we all see
The Wizard of Oz
when we’re about the same age, like six, seven years old, right. We all share that cultural DNA, that Oz gene. And for the two of us”—I directed my attention to
Richard—“it goes all the way back to our fathers, who saw it together when it first opened in August of 1939 at the old Capitol Theatre in Times Square. And afterwards Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney got up onstage and did a little routine.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Richard said,
asshole
in the subtext.
It was a reasonable question. But first, a bit of backtrack: After my father died my brother was appointed the executor—more like executioner—of the estate while I took on the job of archivist. It was a task no one else desired or deemed important, since the value was sentimental and by then mourning had become monetized, but I needed something to fill my time, so I holed up in his library and began to sift through his papers, well maintained
as befitting a good lawyer. There was plenty of surface: maintenance records for bygone vehicles; warranties for old appliances; invoices stretching back fifty years; decades of tax returns; letters, memos, notes involving assorted trustee duties; records of semiprofessional obligations; collections of expired passports and driver’s licenses in which I could see him age in bureaucratic leaps; even a copy of my grandfather’s will that had specific instructions concerning the
distribution of his tennis trophies as well as his 1928 Davis Cup team blazer (it went to Uncle Jimmy, the eldest). None of these things were precious, but it is amazing how a bill of sale for a 1972 Ford Country Squire ($4,318.67) can surprise you with tears. But there were glimmerings below the surface: an accordion folder filled with letters my grandmother had saved, letters my father had written from school, well scripted and postmarked once a week, their content Soviet-style
propaganda—
The varsity baseball team should be stellar this year
—though once in a while a flash of truth—
I am happy, or happier, but I am still lonely, but maybe that’s just my lot, or should I say my lack of a lot
—slipped in. Then there were the letters from my mother, with her optimism for the future even if the future reached only a few days:
I just know we are going to have a lovely Saturday night together
. She was thirty-one when
she wrote that, and thirty-three when she wrote,
In a week I become Mrs. Charles Henry Topping, but tonight I remain Miss Eleanor Garrison Gould, the troublesome Ellie, a stubborn EGG soon to be hatched. What kind of bird will I be? Hopefully not one your father will want to shoot!
Considering those times, my mother was old when she got married, older than my father, and though I never heard any reason why this was the case, there were whispers from an aunt that she had had her heart
broken, terribly broken, and it was a minor miracle that she had recovered at all. Recovered? Had this aunt suggested something
I was too young to understand? I never did unearth any letters from my father to my mother, which was a relief since I could only take so much intimacy. But the real find in terms of this story came from an old shoe box, Weejuns from Bass, size five, retrieved from the far reaches of the lowest drawer. Inside were twenty-two letters from A. N. Dyer,
a few of them bearing the brunt of obligation, a mother’s striving for manners, though most seemed inspired by actual friendship with my father. That said, I could never tell the tone of these one-way conversations. Defensive? Dismissive? Good old-fashioned ribbing? There were other things in that shoe box too: a pretty good drawing of a cocker spaniel; a half-full pack of Lucky Strikes; a gnawed number-two pencil; a red rubber ball; an unfired shotgun shell; a wrinkled Exeter tie; a
handkerchief crusty with blood; a collection of brass buttons. I had no idea what to make of this mishmash, but they contained an energy, a consciousness of touch, that begged for my hands to complete the circuit. My father’s secret stuff. Loose photographs were in there as well, snapshots of Charlie with Andrew in front of Buckley, in Central Park, at the beach in Southampton, the two of them side by side yet formal, like already veterans of the past, soothsayers who saw their own fate.
Or maybe it was just my lack of imagination to view my father as a real living boy. Either way, among these photographs was one taken in front of the Capitol Theatre under the marquee for
The Wizard of Oz
, and as further proof, Richard, you eternal prick, my father had saved the ticket stub and the playbill that was autographed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, but before I could lay down this trump the doorbell rang. It was Jamie.
Everyone was glad to see him, which was always his gift.
Richard let his family dive in first with hellos before stepping in.
“Where’s Dad?” Jamie asked.
“I have no idea.”
“But he’s here?”
“Supposedly.”
“And Andy?”
“Supposedly as well.”
Jamie spotted—“Philip?”—me standing in the background, the
nervous spear-carrier in this royal house. His natural ease with the unexpected won the day, and he approached with a handshake at the ready. “Been a while. I am so sorry about your dad.”
I was genuinely touched.
“And I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”
“Jamie was just at Sylvia Weston’s funeral,” Richard told me. “Remember her?”
“Of course. But I thought she died in the fall.”
“What fall?”
“I mean in autumn, not like in a tumble.”
“It wasn’t a funeral, per se,” Jamie clarified to his brother.
“So she’s been dead for a while?” Richard asked.
“Since late September.”
“And I’m just finding out now.”
“I guess,” Jamie said.
“Such a lovely girl,” I added, in the mood to remember and of late having a limited audience to remember with. “And totally down-to-earth. The two of you—the two of them,” I said to Candy and the children, wanting to draw them in and maybe get them on my side, “they were the golden couple of high school, like one of the seven wonders of the teenage world, the Colossus of Rhodes holding hands in the middle of the quad.”
“Calm down, Philip,” Jamie said, checking my sentiment before breaking me down to size. “Why are you here exactly? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasure to see you, I’m just curious.”
“He’s staying here,” Richard said.
“Like
here
here?”
“Like here in my room here.”
“Does Dad know or are you hiding under the bed?”
My insides rattled their old cage. “Your father’s been very nice to me.”
“Fascinating.”
“I’ve had a tough few months,” I said.
Jamie seemed to catch the rain forming within my clouds, and he frowned sympathetically and touched my shoulder, this taste of compassion nearly crushing me.
A distant fanfare of coughs sounded and we were drawn from the living room into the entry hall and this developing sight: A. N. Dyer emerging from his study. The coughing was bright enough to put the rest of him in shadow yet he managed to creep into view, wearing the same suit he wore at my father’s funeral, minus the necktie, and sporting a pair of slippers that whispered an undertone of
shh, shh, shh
. We all leaned forward upon his
approach as if reaching for ropes to help drag him forward, his hand lifting and forestalling hello for one final reach into his lungs, which was followed by a disconcerting swallow. That’s when we noticed his face. He must have recently shaved. Or attempted to shave. Tears of toilet paper clung to his cheek, chin, and jowl. He was Santa with a bloody beard, the twinkle in his eye the gunk that stops the drain.
“If you think this is bad, you should see the bathroom,” he told us.
The unexpected joke put everyone at ease, except for Chloe, who backed into her mother’s arms. I’m not sure Richard even heard the humor; he was busy following his own, more sentimental script as he stepped forward and clasped his father by the arm, his expression leafing through a dozen readable emotions before landing somewhere between apology and forgiveness. It was one of those moments, thankfully rare, when you can spot another person’s core needs,
almost by accident—absolutely by accident since those needs are almost graphic when blatant, like seeing the musculature and tendon required to prop up hope. I could see the scene playing in Richard’s head.