Big Fish (2 page)

His Great Promise

T
hey say he never forgot a name or a face or your favorite color, and that by his twelfth year he knew everybody in his home town by the sound their shoes made when they walked.

They say he grew so tall so quickly that for a time—months? the better part of a year?—he was confined to his bed because the calcification of his bones could not keep up with his height's ambition, so that when he tried to stand he was like a dangling vine and would fall to the floor in a heap.

Edward Bloom used his time wisely, reading. He read almost every book there was in Ashland. A thousand books—some say ten thousand. History, Art, Philosophy. Horatio Alger. It didn't matter. He read them all. Even the telephone book.

They say that eventually he knew more than anybody, even Mr. Pinkwater, the librarian.

He was a big fish, even then.

My Father's Death:
Take 1

I
t happens like this. Old Dr. Bennett, our family doctor, shuffles out of the guest room and gently shuts the door behind him. Older than old, a collection of sags and wrinkles, Dr. Bennett has been our doctor forever. He was there when I was born, cutting the cord, handing my red and shriveled body to my mother. Dr. Bennett has cured us of diseases that must number in the dozens, and he has done so with the charm and bedside manner of a physician from a bygone age, which, in effect, he is. It is this same man who is ushering my father from the world and who comes out of my father's room now and removes the stethoscope from his old ears, and looks at us, my mother and me, and shakes his head.

“There's nothing I can do,” he says in his raspy voice. He wants to throw his hands in the air in exasperation but doesn't, he's too old to move that way anymore. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If you have any peace to make with Edward, anything to say at all, I suggest you say it now.”

We've been expecting this. My mother grips my hand and forces a bitter smile. This has not been an easy time for her, of course. Over the past months she has dwindled in size and spirit, alive but distanced from life. Her gaze falls just short of its goal. I look at her now and she looks lost, as if she doesn't know where she is, or who she is. Our life has changed so much since Father came home to die. The pro­cess of his dying has killed us all a little bit. It's as if, instead of going to work every day, he's had to dig his own grave out back, in the lot behind the pool. And dig it not all at once, but an inch or two at a time. As if this is what made him so tired, gave him those rings beneath his eyes, and not, as Mother insisted on calling it, his “X-ray therapy.” As if every evening when he returned from his digging, dirt rimming his fingernails, and sat in his chair to read the paper, he might say,
Well, it's com
ing along. Got another inch done today.
And my mother
might say,
Did you hear that, William? Your father got another inch
done today.
And I might say,
That's great, Dad, great. If
there's anything I can do to help, just let me know.

“Mom,” I say.

“I'll go in first,” she says, snapping to. “And then if it seems like—”

If it seems like he's going to die she'll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.

So with this she gets up and walks into the room. Dr. Bennett shakes his head, takes off his glasses and rubs them with the end of his blue-and-red-striped tie. I look at him, aghast. He is so old, so terribly old: why is my father dying before him?

“Edward Bloom,” he says to no one. “Who would have thought it?”

And who would have? Death was the worst thing that ever could have happened to my father. I know how this sounds—it's the worst thing that happens to most of us—but with him it was particularly awful, especially those last few preparatory years, the growing sicknesses that disabled him in this life, even as they seemed to be priming him for the next.

Worse yet, it made him stay at home. He hated that. He hated to wake up in the same room every morning, see the same people, do the same things. Before all this he had used home as a refueling station. An itinerant dad, home for him was a stop on his way somewhere else, working toward a goal that was unclear. What drove him? It wasn't money; we had that. We had a nice house and a few cars and the pool out back; there seemed to be nothing we absolutely couldn't afford. And it wasn't for promotion—he ran his own business. It was something more than either of these things, but what, I couldn't say. It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration; getting there, wherever it was, wasn't the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never ending. So he worked and he worked. He was gone for weeks at a time, to places like New York or Europe or Japan, and would return at some odd hour, say nine at night, and fix a drink, reclaiming his chair and his titular position as father of the house. And he would always have some fabulous story to tell.

“In Nagoya,” he said on one such night of arrival, my mother in her chair, he in his, and me on the floor at his feet, “I saw a two-headed woman. I swear to you. A beautiful two-headed Japanese woman who performed the tea ceremony with such grace and such beauty. You really couldn't tell which head was prettier.”

“There's no such thing as a two-headed woman,” I said.

“Really?” he said, cornering me with his eyes. “This
from Mr. Teenage-Been-Around-the-World-Seen-Everything,
thank you very much. I stand corrected.”

“Really?” I said. “Two heads?”

“And every inch a lady,” he said. “A geisha, in fact. Most of her life spent hidden away learning the complex
tradition of geisha society, and rarely seen in public—
which, of course, explains your skepticism. I was fortunate enough to be allowed access to the inner sanctum through a series of business friends and government contacts. I had to pretend that nothing was the least bit strange about her, of course; had I so much as raised an eyebrow, it would have been an insult of historical proportions. I simply took my tea as the rest of them did, uttering a low-pitched ‘Domo,' which is Japanese for thank you.”

Everything he did was without parallel.

At home, the magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence. He drank a bit. He didn't become angry, but frustrated and lost, as though he had fallen into a hole. On those first nights home his eyes were so bright you would swear they glowed in the dark, but then after a few days his eyes became weary. He began to seem out of his el­ement, and he suffered for it.

So he was not a good candidate for death; it made being at home even worse. He tried to make the best of it in the beginning by making long-distance calls to people in strange places all around the world, but soon he became too sick to do even that. He became just a man, a man without a job, without a story to tell, a man, I realized, I didn't know.

“Y
OU KNOW WHAT WOULD
be nice right now?” he says to me on this day, looking relatively well for a man who, according to Dr. Bennett, I might never see alive again. “A glass of water. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” I say.

I bring him the glass and he takes a sip or two out of it, while I hold the bottom for him so it won't spill. I smile at this guy who looks not like my father anymore but like a version of my father, one in a series, similar but different, and definitely flawed in many ways. He used to be hard to look at, all the changes he'd been through, but I've gotten used to it now. Even though he doesn't have any hair and his skin is mottled and scabbed, I'm used to it.

“I don't know if I told you this,” he says, taking a
breath.
“But there was this panhandler who stopped me every
morning when I came out of this coffee shop near the office. Every day I gave him a quarter. Every day. I mean, it became so routine the panhandler didn't even bother asking anymore—I just slipped him a quarter. Then I got sick and was out for a couple of weeks and I went back there and you know what he says to me?”

“What, Dad?”

“‘You owe me three-fifty,' he says.”

“That's funny,” I say.

“Well, laughter is the best medicine,” he says, though neither of us is laughing. Neither of us even smiles. He just looks at me with a deepening sadness, the way it happens sometimes with him, going from one emotion to another the way some people channel surf.

“I guess it's kind of appropriate,” he says. “Me using the guest room.”

“How's that?” I say, though I know the answer. This is not the first time he's made mention of it, even though it was his decision to move out of the bedroom he shared with Mother. “I don't want her to go to bed every night after I'm gone looking over at my side and shivering, if you know what I mean.” He somehow feels his sequestration here to be emblematic.

“Appropriate inasmuch as I'm a kind of guest,” he says, looking around the oddly formal room. My mother always felt that guests had to have things just so, so she made the room look as much like a hotel as possible. You've got your little chair, bedside table, harmless oil reproduction by some Old Master hanging above the chest of drawers. “I haven't really been around here so much, you know. At home. Not as much as we all would have liked. Look at you, you're a grown man and I—I completely missed it.” He swallows, which for him is a real workout. “I wasn't there for you, was I, son?”

“No,” I say, perhaps too quickly but with as much kind
­ness as the word can possibly hold.

“Hey,” he says, after which he coughs for a bit. “Don't hold back or anything, just 'cause I'm, you know.”

“Don't worry.”

“The truth and nothing but the truth.”

“So help me—”

“God. Fred. Whoever.”

He takes another sip of water. It seems not to be a matter of thirst so much as it is a desire for this element, to feel it on his tongue, his lips: he loves the water. Once upon a time he swam.

“But you know, my father was gone a lot, too,” he says, his voice crackling soft. “So I know what it's like. My dad was a farmer. I told you that, didn't I? I remember once he had to go off somewhere to get a special kind of seed to plant in the fields. Hopped a freight. Said he'd be back that night. One thing and another happened and he couldn't get off. Rode it all the way out to California. Gone most of the spring. Planting time came and went. But when he came back he had the most marvelous seeds.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “He planted them and a huge vine grew up into the clouds, and at the top of the clouds was a castle, where a giant lived.”

“How did you know?”

“And a two-headed woman who served him tea, no doubt.”

At this my father tweaks his eyebrows and smiles, for a moment deep in pleasure.

“You remember,” he says.

“Sure.”

“Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”

I shake my head.

“It does. You never really believed that one though, did you?”

“Does it matter?”

He looks at me.

“No,” he says. Then, “Yes. I don't know. At least you remembered. The point is, I think—the point is I tried to get home more. I did. Things happened, though. Natural disasters. The earth split once I think, the sky opened several times. Sometimes I barely made it out alive.”

His old scaly hand crawls over to touch my knee. His fingers are white, the nails cracking and dull, like old silver.

“I'd say I'd missed you,” I say, “if I knew what I was missing.”

“I'll tell you what the problem was,” he says, lifting his hand from my knee and motioning for me to come closer. And I do. I want to hear. The next word could be his last.

“
I wanted to be a great man,
” he whispers.

“Really?” I say, as if this comes as some sort of surprise to me.

“Really,” he says. His words come slow and weak but steady and strong in feeling and thought. “Can you believe it? I thought it was my destiny. A big fish in a big pond—that's what I wanted. That's what I wanted from day one. I started small. For a long time I worked for other people. Then I started my own business. I got these molds and I made candles in the basement. That business failed. I sold baby's breath to floral shops. That failed. Finally, though, I got into import/export and everything took off. I had dinner with a prime minister once, William. A prime minister! Can you imagine, this boy from Ashland having dinner in the same room with a—. There's not a continent I haven't set
foot on. Not one. There are seven of them, right? I'm start­ing
to forget which ones I . . . never mind. Now all that seems so unimportant, you know? I mean, I don't even know what a great man
is
anymore—the, uh, prerequisites. Do you, William?”

“Do I what?”

“
Know,
” he says. “Know what makes a man great.”

I think about this for a long time, secretly hoping he forgets he ever asked the question. His mind has a way of wandering, but something in the way he looks at me says he's not forgetting anything now, he's holding on tight to that thought, and he's waiting for my answer. I don't know what makes a man great. I've never thought about it before. But at a time like this “I don't know” just won't do. This is an occasion one rises to, and so I make myself as light as possible and wait for a lift.

“I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.”

For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn of events, was here at home all along.

“Ah,” he says, “
those
parameters,” he says, stumbling over the word, all of a sudden seeming slightly woozy. “Never thought about it in those terms, exactly. Now that we are, though, thinking about it like that, I mean, in this case,” he says, “in this very specific case,
min
e
—”

“Yeah,” I say. “You are hereby and forever after my fa­ther, Edward Bloom, a Very Great Man. So help you Fred.”

And in lieu of a sword I touch him once, gently, on the shoulder.

With these words he seems to rest. His eyes close heavily, and with an eerie sort of finality that I recognize as the beginning of a departure. When the window curtains part as though of their own accord I believe for a moment that this must be the passage of his spirit going from this world to the next. But it's only the central air coming on.