Sleep (11 page)

The irony now is that David can hardly remember more than a handful of real confrontations between the two of them. The
worst had been when he had broken into one of his father’s work sites with some of his friends and crashed a forklift into a foundation wall, ending up riding home in the back of a police car. His father hadn’t said a word, had simply pulled off his belt when the police were gone and lit into him, the whole time David thinking,
Now everyone will see what he is
. And yet the truth was that this kind of violence was rare in him. That was the summer of David’s trip to Italy with his mother, which might have been a twisted compensation for the beating, though it felt more like his father simply giving up on him. In the fall, Danny started joining in on their father’s hunting trips, as if the implicit partitioning of him and Danny between their parents had finally been formalized. David can still remember the blackness that used to go through him when Danny returned from those trips, the feeling he had missed out on some rite of passage, something that might have given a shape to the violence in him.

“You can just see the top of it from here, Davie, the one in fieldstone.”

David has blanked out again. They are on the bypass that skirts the old town centre, which is just visible beyond an expanse of golf course and new housing.

“Used to be an old mill, if you can believe it. We’re trying to get it back to what it was. Maybe you could swing around with Mom next weekend to have a look. Jamie was saying Marcus asked if he could come up again.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll have to see. I might have something planned.”

They go past their old neighbourhood, a stretch of modest split-levels and bungalows that from the highway looks almost bucolic now, the sterile, unbroken lawns of the old days having given way to actual landscaping and full-grown trees. Beyond it, though, instead of the open vistas, there are only more houses, and then the strip malls and fast-food drive-throughs,
the stadium-sized reception halls, the big-box plazas. A place without a centre, David thinks, but then it comes to him that Danny’s mill is the centre, where all of this, all this progress, got its start. Back in its day it was probably as much of an eyesore as this sprawl is, spoiling the river and the view.

“Looks different out here now, doesn’t it?” Danny says. “I know you guys in the city look down on us but you won’t get a better espresso than here, never mind the chain stuff downtown.”

Even the cemetery looks nothing like David remembers it, hemmed in by highway now and the entrance marked by a big arching gateway. Several mausoleums in polished stone rise up near the entrance like condo buildings for the dead, with glassed-in fronts that look into double-storeyed lobbies complete with seating areas and potted plants. Beyond them is a row of family-sized crypts, each with its elaborate statuary and rusticated flourishes. At least their father had had the grace to die before this sort of excess had become the norm, his own grave in an older section where the same arched slabs stretch row after row like the cookie-cutter gravestones of war cemeteries.

Their father’s stone, in rose-coloured marble, bears a porcelain cameo of him from a few years before he died. It is a shock to David how young he looks in it, how striking, rugged and lean like a leading man from the 1950s. The headstone is a double one, their mother’s name already etched out eerily next to their father’s and beneath it her birthdate followed by a dash, as if the span of her life since his death has been merely a malingering.

Danny has dropped the back gate of the SUV and pulled out four shot glasses and a bottle of Courvoisier from a plastic bin. He pours a generous splash of the brandy into each of the glasses.

“What is this?” David says.

“Has it been that long? Come on, Davie, we always do this, every anniversary. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

“He doesn’t remember because he’s never been here,” his mother says.

“That’s not true, Ma. He always used to come.”

Danny passes the glasses around. He pours the extra one one over their father’s grave, like a priest anointing a penitent.

“To Dad,” he says, raising his own glass and knocking it back.

From out of the bin he pulls a box of Montecristos.

“Davie, drink up, you look like you’re going to bust a gut. Don’t you remember how every weekend he used to have his cognac and his stogie? No matter what was happening, he had to have his little island of
me
time. The cigarettes were a habit but the cigar was something else. It was an occasion. Something holy.”

None of this jives with what David remembers of their weekends. What David remembers is the air of threat hanging over the house that there would be some new incident, some provocation.

Danny holds out a cigar.

“Keep it as a souvenir if you don’t want to smoke it. It’s twenty years now, Davie. At some point you have to make your peace.”

Even his mother has lit up. The smell pulls at David, though he can’t make out where it is leading him. With cigarette smoke it is different: twenty years on and the least whiff of it is still enough to call up his father as surely as if he were standing before him.

“If he wanted to make his peace,” his mother says, “he’d have done it by now. He never cared about family, not really. If he did, he’d still have one.”

Danny goes white. “Ma, you’re not being fair.”

“I’m just saying the truth, that’s all. He is what he is.”

David turns away. He downs his cognac and sets the glass in the bin, then wanders off along the row of tombstones.

“You go too far sometimes, Ma,” he hears Danny say.

“Never mind too far. It’s the only way to make him hear. Your father knew that.”

The surrounding graves read like a street plan from the old neighbourhood in the west end, the half-familiar names, the half-familiar faces staring out from the porcelain cameos. Bouquets of flowers in various stages of decay spew out from metal urns set into the bases of the graves. David remembers his mother once railing against all the rotting flowers, seeing them as some kind of desecration. As if they could matter. As if any of this does, these rites for the dead still as steeped in unreason as the ancestor worship of the Romans, with their death masks and their house shrines and their offerings of cake and wine to appease the underworld’s demons.

David had not made it in time for his father’s last moments. There was a call one morning from Danny at the hospital saying he was close to the end, but by the time David arrived from downtown he was gone. He had visited a few days earlier and his father had still had the indestructible air of someone who might go on for months yet or years, though he was reduced by then to little more than a sack of bones.

David was left alone with him while his mother went down to eat.

“Call the nurse,” he said. It was hard to tell by then what was his old hardness and what just him conserving his breath. “I need to get out of this room.”

The nurse hooked up a tank for his oxygen and David wheeled him out to the hospital garden. The sun was out, one of the first warm days, and a forsythia bush was in full bloom and around it a bed of tulips, also yellow, so that the effect was like a child’s papier-mâché model of a sunflower or of the sun itself. David parked his father next to the flowers thinking,
This is what you won’t have
, hardly knowing whether he meant it in anguish or in spite.

“You finish school yet?”

David had cause to wonder afterwards if this had been his father’s stab at some sort of reconciliation, though at the time all he let himself hear was the familiar contempt.

“Not yet, Dad.” He had started his doctorate by then, but this was a level of detail he would never have gone into with his father. “A few more years still.”

His father grunted.

“Always a few more.” Pause. Breath. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m doing what I like, Dad. I’m doing what I want.”

“I know what you want. You want me dead.”

David felt his whole body go weak. To answer him would just be to fall into his trap.

“Take me back. I don’t want your mother to worry.”

It was their last exchange.

After his father died David left almost at once for Rome, to do research for his dissertation. He remembers that time now as if it were part of some different life he had led. The ochre-coloured walls of the university, the cavernous lecture halls, the midnight walks past the Pantheon and the Campidoglio and the Colosseum; the smell that he remembered still from childhood, of sweat and car exhaust and history. By mid-October the tourists had gone and he had the city practically to himself, wandering the Forum from morning to dusk until he had covered every inch of it, every ruined temple and state house, every heaved-up back alley, every shop. The weather had been perfect for touring, day after day the same cloudless skies, the cool mornings, the dry midday heat, the long sunsets with their light like the last gasp of the fallen world. And the whole time he had felt, for what seemed the first time in his life, utterly self-sufficient, complete, with no sense of striving beyond that of immersing himself in his work. The
clearest mark of the change in him was that he hardly so much as looked at a woman his entire stay, though in his former life it had felt like his very being had depended on the ceaseless job of coupling and disengaging.

He gave barely a thought to his father. It was as if every trace of him had been stripped away with his death, as easily as that. Then one week he rented a car to visit some Roman sites in the north of the country and his second day out he passed a direction sign on the expressway listing a name that seemed to come out of a dream: his father’s hometown.

On impulse he took the exit. Soon the flatlands of the Po had given way to gloomy foothills that felt still as raw and lost to the world as they might have been when the Gauls had scrounged their living among them. He had to stop for directions at every village, each one more insular and becalmed than the last, with the same central bar with a few thatch chairs out front, the same old men who would argue and contradict and fail to come to consensus.

After hours of driving he reached the town. It was bigger than he’d expected, sitting on a slope that overlooked a river valley and spread along a series of switchbacks that tentacled out at every curve into spruce-looking residential enclaves. He passed houses in pink and yellow stucco, children in pressed uniforms, balconies where women had set out their linens to air or old people sat watching television or playing cards. There was a jewellery shop on the main strip, a shop that sold baby clothes; there were pedestrians, cars, a cenotaph, two sets of traffic lights. At the bottom of the town, a factory that made hardware for windows and doors, its parking lot packed, its loading bays bustling. A display board in the lobby window showed off its wares, beneath the motto “From our house to yours.”

The town was nothing like David had imagined it. Or rather, he
hadn’t
imagined it, except as a backdrop to his made-up histories, vaguely rundown and miserable and grey, not this burgher’s town practically Swiss in its air of prosperity and self-satisfaction. Yet somehow it felt more sinister in its ordinariness than the colourless place of his fantasies. He stopped at a public phone to check the directory and there they were, half a dozen listings under his own family name, he had only to drop a token into the phone and dial the numbers. He thought of showing up at some stranger’s door, of seeing his father’s face again, of having it seen in his own, and already felt steeped in lies. Felt that whatever he was after would only recede the more he sought it.

He got back in his car and drove on.

It is getting late. He can feel his guts starting to tighten at the prospect of the shouting match with Julia that his mother has made clear she will make no effort to avert. This is how she guards her place at the centre, by sowing dissension in every quarter, dividing and conquering. Who knows if she hadn’t done the same between him and his father. “Just between you and me,” she used to say, when she’d given him some special indulgence or concession. “Your father doesn’t have to know.”

Without realizing it he has wandered halfway across the cemetery.

“David, we’re waiting for you!” his mother calls out. “Then you complain you’re in a hurry!”

Riding home he can’t get the cameo of his father out of his mind, staring out from his grave so hearty and hale.

“You know what it is,” his mother says. “It’s because you weren’t there at the end. That’s why you can’t make your peace.”

“Ma, don’t,” Danny says.

“I’m just trying to help him. It has to weigh on him. Even Nelda was there, you weren’t even married yet.”

“For Christ’s sake, Ma, it wasn’t his fault. It’s not like he had a cell phone or anything back then.”

“Your father was waiting for him, you could see it. That’s why he held on. And then he couldn’t wait.”

You want me dead
. What if that had been a chance his father had offered him, something to push past? What if the only real obstacle between them had been that they’d both clung to the same insoluble lump, their stupid pride?

He had slept at some girl’s place that night, which was why Danny hadn’t reached him until the morning. “A couple of hours, maybe,” was what Danny said. “It’s hard to tell.” David showered and shaved, ate his breakfast. Got stuck in traffic. The whole time in a sort of fugue state, outside of himself, pretending not to hear the voice at the back of his head telling him that if he was lucky, he’d be too late.

“Davie, don’t listen to her, it wasn’t like that. It was his time, that’s all. You came as fast as you could.”

David sits silent.

By the time they get back to Danny’s, David feels wound up like a caged animal. He hears a movie blaring from the basement, probably one he’ll end up catching grief over from Julia, and starts down to get Marcus, the unreasonableness swirling in him, looking for an outlet. All he needs now to make the day complete is to blow up at Marcus over some trifle.