Authors: Tobias Wolff
“Something turned his hair white.”
“I’ll give you the short answer, laddy. That’s the one you’ll think you understand. Genes.”
“I know that’s the usual explanation.”
“The only explanation, boyo.”
“The only scientific explanation, you mean.”
“Don’t be a silly cunt.”
“There are cases.”
He put down the model. “You can’t be serious.”
“There are.”
“Christ!” He threw himself back hard against the chair and looked around at the waiter as if to call him as a witness to my stupidity.
“I know of one personally.”
“Oh you do, do you? You didn’t see it happen, did you? No. How curious. Every mother’s son
personally
knows of a case, and nobody has seen it happen. You know what I fucking hate?” He leaned toward me. “More than anything else, sonny, I hate the condescension of ignorant sissies with all their
more things in heaven and earth Horatio
bullshit. It’s too much to bear. You want a mystical explanation? Call it fate. Say, ‘It was written.’ That would be the whole bloody truth.”
“It happened to someone in my ex-fiancée’s family. Not an actual family member—”
“Don’t!” He put his hands over his ears.
This conversation passed from my mind until just after Tet, when I was searching through one of the makeshift hospitals in My Tho for some people who had disappeared without trace. I was dull from the smell of carbolic and sepsis and from the sight of all these bereft, mutely suffering people with their terrible wounds and lopped limbs. It was odd to feel the wholeness
of my body as I made my way among them. And then I saw Doc Macleod across the room, walking regally between a row of cots. He saw me at the same time and stopped short. “My God, man,” he said. “Your hair! It’s white as snow!” He caught me completely flat-footed, and before I could stop myself I felt my hand fluttering toward my head. He smiled and shook his finger at me and moved off down the aisle, trailed by a fussing retinue of Vietnamese doctors and nurses. He was in his glory.
J
UST BEFORE
Tet my father sent me a belated Christmas card in which he said he watched the Vietnam news every day and was “damned proud” of me. I knew he meant well, but I couldn’t help wondering what he had in mind. What did he think I was doing over here? What would he
like
me to be doing? Something “hush-hush,” maybe, something understatedly brave and important as in the stories he used to tell, or imply, about flying with the RAF and serving with partisans just about everywhere. But maybe not. In fact I didn’t know what he expected from me, or what to expect from him.
He had gotten out of prison a couple of years back while I was in Officer Candidate School. A friend of his from the old days found him an apartment in Manhattan Beach, and my father wrote me from there to send news of his release and simply to wish me well. There was no humbug in the letter, no talk of impending deals or bum raps. He said Geoffrey was helping him out every month and that was how he’d gotten my address. Years had passed since I’d heard from him
or made any effort of my own to get in touch, and I was astounded to see his broad, outsized scrawl, the letters almost like ideograms, on the envelope. I sent back my own good wishes and thereafter we exchanged notes every six months or so.
When I was in language school my father wrote to propose that he come to Washington for a grand reunion. He could catch up with his boys, meet Priscilla and Vera, and pay his respects to our mother (he had either forgotten, or didn’t care, that she had married again). He saw no reason, if he found Washington to his liking, why something couldn’t be worked out with his parole board that would allow him to move there.
Geoffrey and I had a talk about it. His sense of humor was not on display. To him, the idea of the old man in Washington was a pit filled with man-eating possibilities. I could see his point. For once in his life he was solvent and in place, even, as book editor of the Washington
Post
, something of a personage in town, a favored ambassador from the trivial but charming realm of literature. Priscilla was expecting their first child in a few months.
Enter the old man. It was obvious to both of us how the play would go, we knew the script by heart: exotic cars paid for with rubber checks, stereos and Dunhill lighters charged to “my boy over at the
Post.”
Landlords, grocers, clothiers, purveyors of wine and spirits, loan sharks, all clamoring for justice—to Geoffrey. The whole thing would fall on him. It was unthinkable. But Geoffrey had thought about it; that was what made it hard for him. He had a lingering dream of somehow bringing the old man back into the family,
and would have done just about anything to pull it off except let him destroy his life.
We declined our father’s offer to join us, and he took it like a sport—nothing ventured, nothing gained—and said no more about it. But I’d gotten interested in seeing him again, and after my orders for Vietnam came in I arranged to take a quick detour to Manhattan Beach.
It started badly. When I got to LAX I couldn’t find the envelope with his address. He was not allowed to have a phone—Ma Bell couldn’t afford him. I tried calling Geoffrey, and got no answer. Then I remembered that a few months back there’d been a flap over some slippers and a tobacco pouch my father had charged at a Scandinavian imports store and neglected to pay for. He’d almost gone back to prison on account of it, but Geoffrey made good for him and the owner dropped charges. The name of the store had stayed with me. I looked it up in the phone book and found my way there.
My luck turned. The owner was on the premises and eager to be of help. A tall man with a mild, cultivated air and a faint accent, he immediately produced my father’s address and insisted on driving me there. As soon as we got in his car he began to apologize. He never should have gotten the police involved, and he wouldn’t have if he’d known Arthur was on parole. Never! Not for a moment! He was deeply sorry for the trouble he’d caused. “Such an extraordinary man, your father. Such things he has done. The airplanes, the dam in Turkey.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him.
“Such interesting conversations we had.”
He went on this way until we reached the apartment, a converted garage on the ground floor of a stucco house. I could see the ocean between two apartment buildings at the end of the street; when the store owner turned the engine off I heard the crash and surge of waves. He came around to open the trunk for me and this was when my father stepped outside. He must have seen us pull up. He looked wary, and no wonder. I had omitted to tell him I was coming, because up to the last minute I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. He hadn’t seen me for six years, since I was fifteen; I did not look like that boy anymore, especially in the uniform I’d worn so I could fly military standby. At first glance I was just a stranger with badges and shiny boots, the embodiment of civic compulsion in the company of a man he had defrauded. I wouldn’t have recognized him either. He wore ugly black glasses. His face had thickened, his nose gone puffy as a cauliflower. He needed a shave.
“Hello, Arthur,” the store owner said. “Here is your son.”
He looked at me. “Toby?”
I put my hand out. He stood there, then took it, then bent toward me and kissed me clumsily on the lips.
The store owner put my duffel bag on the sidewalk. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said to me. Then, sadly, “How are you, Arthur?”
“Tops, Peter. Hunky-dory.” As we watched the car pull away my father asked me how I happened to arrive with “the melancholy Dane.” I began a narration, but once I came to the matter of the unpaid bill he shook his head to let me know he’d heard enough.
It was a bad beginning, and we had trouble getting past it. My father went back and forth between cuffing my arm, calling me Buster and Chum and the pet names of my childhood, and standing back with a puzzled, watchful expression. He didn’t know what to do with me. Of course I’d been a jackass to surprise him, but it went beyond that. It had to do with the whole of our history. He must have wondered where we stood in all this, what I’d forgiven, what I held against him, what I held against myself. I had questions of my own. The air between us was heavy with them.
After I’d changed clothes and had a sandwich we escaped the apartment and followed the walkway above the beach. The afternoon light glared on the water. My father noticed that I was squinting and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket. “Go on,” he said, when I tried to refuse.
“What about you?”
“I’m used to it.”
They were aviator glasses, the real thing, much better than the shades I’d left in the apartment. He had me put them on, take them off so he could make adjustments, put them on again. “Perfect,” he said. “M-made for you. Keep ’em.”
I can’t.
“They’re yours. End of discussion.”
I had the sense to stop arguing and after that he seemed happier to be with me. We walked and talked until he got winded and sat on a bench with his hands on his knees, looking for all the world like the old Jewish guys I used to see on the benches in Sarasota when I was a kid. Fleshy, bald, sorrow-eyed, hair bristling
from their ears. That shouldn’t have come as any surprise—he
was
an old Jewish guy, whether he admitted it or not—but I hadn’t been prepared to see him in just this light. Not my father, whose physical presence could crowd a room, whose deep voice and imperial bearing had served as collateral for the most fabulous promises and claims. I never saw him do a moment’s exercise, but the one time he ever really hit me—I’d asked for it—my head snapped back so hard that it shocked him even more than me, and he burst into tears. Even when I loved him, even when I despised him, there had always been a certain fear. No more. His weakening put me at ease. I waited as he collected himself, and let him set the pace on the walk home.
We had a couple of drinks when we got back. The apartment was small but he’d managed to furnish it comfortably and even with some style. I couldn’t help but notice the color television, as I had earlier noticed the watch he was wearing—a Heuer chronograph that must have been worth several hundred dollars. There were other objects of value, more than could be strictly accounted for by welfare and Geoffrey’s checks, but I kept my questions to myself. We washed a heap of dishes and listened to Art Tatum and got pretty loose, whereupon I suggested we go out for dinner, on me. He knew just the place. We duded ourselves up and drove there in his ’53 Cadillac, which, he hurried to tell me, he’d picked up for a song.
T
HE RESTAURANT BAR
was cool and dark. We made a stop there, then proceeded to our table with fresh
glasses in hand. By the time our meat arrived, thick bloody steaks served on slabs of wood, we were pretty well oiled, but that idn’t stop me, with my father’s judicious concurrence—“I suppose I could manage a glass”—from ordering a bottle of red.
He did indeed manage a glass. So did I. We were flush, not so much with the wine itself as with the long tangled journey we’d made to share it. My father began to preen a little. He bantered with the waiter, sent tribute to the kitchen. He exchanged greetings with our neighbors (“My boy here’s in for the day, making sure the old man’s keeping his nose clean …”). His voice grew deeper as the night went on, his phrasing and inflections more urbane. He sat up straighter, squared his great shoulders, laughed from deep in his chest as he recalled the old stories, the old names. Nothing was said about the final destination of my trip. I noticed the perfect drape of his linen jacket, the way his gold signet ring flashed in the candlelight. I could see how pleasure lightened him and restored his patrician authority. This was when I chose to ask if it was true that his family was Jewish.
He went still, the light died out of his eyes. “No,” he said. “Of course not. Why?”
“I’m just curious. They were my family too, and I don’t know anything about them.”
“Episcopalians.”
“Really? Both sides?”
“Both sides.”
“What about your mother? Her maiden name was Krotoshiner, right? Isn’t that a Jewish name?”
“German.”
“And Wolff?”
“German. East Prussian, if you want to be particular.” He looked around as if to call for the bill.
“But—correct me if I’m wrong—wasn’t your mother in Hadassah?”
“Hell’s bells, son, I don’t know. She belonged to every g-goddamned charity in Hartford, maybe she was in that one too. Sure! Why not.”
I kept after him in this falsely innocent way, as if I were just trying to clear up some minor confusions of my own, until he lost patience.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “what do you want?”
I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know what I wanted. He got up and went outside while I paid the check. I thought he might very well leave me there, but he was waiting in the car, staring dead ahead. We spoke only once on the drive home, when he ran a stop sign. I pointed this out to him. Without looking at me he said, “I stopped at the last one.”
The couch was a pull-out. We made up the bed in silence, then he asked if I needed anything.
“Could we have a nightcap?”
He was stiff about it but he poured a couple of drinks and put on a record.
“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “Who is it?”
He told me, and then told me who the sidemen were, and when it was recorded, and why it was such a hard record to find nowadays. This led him to play me several more of his treasures. He listened exactly the way Geoffrey listened, making rhythm noises, leaning forward suddenly with narrowed eyes when one of the players commenced a star solo, compelling me to listen with him. When he saw that I was fighting
sleep he collected our glasses and turned off the stereo. I stood up, weaving with drink and fatigue. “Good night,” I said.
“You sure you have to leave tomorrow?”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, kiddo …”He put his arms around me and I let myself lean against him. It was a relief not to have to look into his face anymore, into his terrible sadness. We didn’t say a word. I don’t know how long we stood like that, but it began to seem a long time. Then I straightened up, and he let go of me.