St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) (2 page)

I looked again at Jeanne, then Adam. When she caught my eye I said, "Why don't I get us all some coffee?"

Adam is a big, good-looking kid. I still thought of him as a kid, even though I was staring at his dark five o'clock shadow and his hands on the table in front of him were bigger than mine. But twenty-one. When you're fifty-one like I am, twenty-one is hardly on the map.

Looking at him, though, digesting his question, unsettled by my own new loss, a collage of myself at his age drifted back: the 1960 Chev Impala with 111,000 miles on it, my job as a truck driver's helper, delivering office furniture around the city, the summer of '64, the Beatles. Girls. Drinking. Living in my parents' basement. Girls.

Adam was a quiet kid. You start being quiet around your parents at puberty. Too much stuff going on inside. But sliding free from my flash of nostalgia, watching his patience after dropping his bombshell, I realized that he was definitely on the map, and had been for a long time.

Adam never called me Dad. It was always Leo. When he was twelve, shortly after we'd moved here, he asked me why there were cracks in the wall and ceiling of his room.

"I haven't painted them yet," I said.

"I don't mean that. I mean how do the cracks get there in the first place. If a house is built properly, shouldn't there be no cracks at all?"

I shrugged. "The house is old."

He was quiet, considering it.

"Must be sixty years old," I continued. "Houses settle. Cold and heat, expansion, contraction. It just happens."

He was sitting in his bed. I remember that it was winter, that it was cool, that his room needed better storm windows.

He waited for more. But I didn't tell him anything more. I didn't tell him that everything settled, everything cracked, that the rocks and sands shifted beneath your feet. I knew that he would find out for himself soon enough.

My father always made instant coffee, but we've got a new Philips Cafe Classic. I paid about sixty bucks for it at Zeller's, and within a month, somewhere in its innards a hose clamp came loose, flooding the kitchen counter with hot water. I ignored the warning on the bottom cover ("Do not remove—repair should be done by authorized service personnel only"), unscrewed it, and fixed it with needle- nosed pliers. Its parts spread open, exposed, it was, I realized at the time, a lot like an electric razor.

That night, I poured three cups from it, black, set them on the kitchen table.

"How come you never asked before?" Jeanne sipped the coffee, watching her son.

Adam hesitated, seemed to think about it. But I guessed that he'd already thought about it a lot. "Didn't seem to be important."

"Why is it important now?"

He shrugged.

"Is it because of Gramp?"

Gramp was my father. Tommy Nolan.

"Maybe."

"It's only natural."

"Were you ever going to tell me?" he asked suddenly.

I sat still, watching them, seeing new things, things I hadn't seen before.

"I told myself I'd tell you whatever you wanted to know if you ever asked. Well"—she tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear, like she always did—"you've asked."

I cradled my cup in both hands, feeling its warmth. Waited.

"He was in Dayton, last I heard. Dayton, Ohio. But that was a long time ago. Maybe he's not there anymore. I don't know." Jeanne paused, did some more thinking. "You're twenty-one, Adam. He left before you were born. That's a long time. I haven't seen him since." She fixed her eyes on him. "I've always believed that it wouldn't serve you well to speak ill of him, so I never spoke of him at all." She sighed. "The long and the short of it is that he knew I was pregnant and he left. He didn't want to get married. Your Aunt Amanda met him on the street in Cincinnati, must've been fifteen years ago. It was him spoke to her. She told me how she couldn't believe his nerve, coming up to her like that."

I listened to the Kentucky drawl that she had never lost, that I would never want her to lose.

"He told her he was working in a factory in Dayton. That's how I know what I know."

"Did Aunt Amanda tell him about me?"

"She told me she said to him that he had a son, and that he should go see him, do something about it, do what was right. But I never heard from him. He never called, nothing. This was about five years before Leo and I met. Leo's your daddy, honey. He's the one helped me raise you. He's the one helped put food on the table, pays for your schooling. You know that."

"I know it." He looked at me. "You've been great, Leo. You know I know that." He shook his head. "But this isn't anything against Leo. And it's not meant to upset you, Mom." He folded his left hand into a fist and held it against his chin, under his lower lip. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

None of us knew. This was a new place. We hadn't been here before.

III

That night was the night of the first dream.

I dreamed I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, thought it must be Adam. When I saw him, though, it was my father, wrapped in old, frayed towels mottled with bloodstains. I remember remarking that it was a disgrace the way those with whom he was staying were taking care of him.

When I woke up, it took me a long time to get back to sleep.

In the morning, dressing, I reached for my watch and rings—part of the daily ritual. I keep them on the bookshelf by my bed in a four-by-six ashtray that Jeanne bought me for $1.29 in Las Vegas. And I don't even smoke. Nobody in our house smokes.

It's adorned with a back-shot of three girls in thong bikinis, legs dangling in a pool. Adam tells me those bikinis are called butt-floss. You can always learn stuff from kids.

My watch, my wedding ring, and my father's ring.

Only the red garnet—my father's ring—wasn't there.

Puzzled, I looked on the floor, on the shelf behind the tray, even on my finger. I saw it in the center of the dresser.

I had no memory of leaving it there. In fact, I had a distinct memory of studying it, then placing it in the ashtray, a new nightly addition.

I rubbed my forehead.

When I opened the drawer with my socks and underwear, his glasses and razor were sitting there staring at me. I was sure that I had left them on the night table in his old room down the hall.

Sliding the garnet on the ring finger of my right hand and the wedding band on the same finger of my left, I strapped on the watch, took out clean socks and underwear, and closed the drawer.

I turned and watched Jeanne sleeping, auburn hair tousled, to me, beautiful. I thought of Adam, equally beautiful, sleeping in his own room—its walls lined with new cracks, fissures that would keep opening no matter how many coats of paint were rolled over them—thought how lucky I was to have my whole family with me even while I slept.

And I looked at my hand. Looked at the ring.

Saw him on the stairs, in the night, coming up to get me.

Later that day, I put his tackle box in the basement, behind the furnace.

TWO

I

For a man like me, to have a woman is to have a destiny. Before I met Jeanne, I was going nowhere, heading for middle age like everybody's uncle, off to work daily, making meals for myself, staying comfortable, living in a one- bedroom apartment here in Toronto. Taking no risks. Jeanne changed everything.

We met back in 1984, after my mother died, when I traveled down to Ashland, Kentucky, on that family thing. Looking for my mother's brother, Jack. It's a long story, one that I'll save for another time.

We needed each other. Adam and I too. It was good. It still is. In fact, it's better than good. I've got a destiny now.

I'd never met anyone like Jeanne. Hell, I'd never even been to Kentucky before. She was waitressing in Wool- worth's, but gave it all up, that fabulous career and all its myriad opportunities, to follow me, a northerner, here to Toronto, to another country.

She had told me about Adam and his father's epic indifference on our first real date, that night in Ashland at the Chimney Corner Tea Room, on Carter near Fifteenth. It had baffled me then, and it baffles me now even more.

Since then I've heard lots more stories. I heard how strict her father was, how he wouldn't let her talk on the phone on a school night when she was a teenager, how he'd unscrew the phone's mouthpiece and keep it with him when he went upstairs to bed or out for the evening. And I got one of my first indicators of just how resourceful she could be when she told me that she went down to a phone booth on Winchester and unscrewed the mouthpiece from the phone there and kept it in her purse as a spare. There was no stopping her.

And when she'd gotten pregnant, I heard how she and her mother collaborated on the story that she was going to work in Cincinnati—live with her sister, Amanda, and her husband—to keep the truth from her father. His discipline and strictness were the stuff of family legend. ("Mark my words" was the catchphrase that reverberated throughout that little house.)

She had Adam in Cincinnati, but she didn't want to live there. She wanted to go home, to Ashland, so she put Adam in a laundry basket, got on the bus, and slipped back to the family home on Carter, east of Thirtieth. I heard about the hand-wringing, the pacing all that afternoon, waiting for her father to come home from work, trying to construct a story, any story, that would help allay his certain outrage and the ensuing volley of condemnation—not to mention his embarrassment and the humiliation at having been the butt of such subterfuge from his own wife and daughter.

Phil Berney had ruled the roost in a pretty old-fashioned way.

And so it happened like this.

"Jeanne's got something she wants to show you, Phil."

These were her mother's words, so the story went.

He was sitting in the big blue easy chair in the living room—the one that's still there—watching the six o'clock news.

Jeanne brought the laundry basket out of the bedroom and set it on the carpet at his feet.

"This is your grandson."

Nobody spoke.

"His name's Adam."

Phil Berney looked at the baby, at his daughter, his wife.

Claire Berney put her hands over her mouth. Without sound, she began to cry.

Jeanne looked at her father. "I'm sorry, Dad. I should've told you."

He still said nothing.

"I was afraid." She looked at her mother. "We were afraid. Of what you'd do, of what you'd say. I thought I was going to give him up for adoption, but I've changed my mind."

She held her ground. Standing in front of him. The baby at his feet.

The silence was a chasm. He was searching for the pieces, trying to understand. Nobody could tell what he was feeling, what he was thinking. And when he spoke, finally, softly, there was no explosion, no anger. "He can't sleep in a laundry basket," he said. He looked at his wife. "He needs a proper crib."

"Dad was nearly always right," Jeanne told me years later. "I can see it now."

The next day Phil Berney went out and bought a crib, and spent the hour after dinner assembling it. It had baseball players painted on the headboard, a ball and glove on the footboard. They think that's why Adam loves baseball so much.

I only knew Phil Berney during that first year I was seeing Jeanne. He died the next summer, when Adam was eleven.

People were still marking his words, even when I knew him.

II

Jeanne and I were married Friday, September 2, 1988, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. It was the Friday before Labor Day, before Adam had to start back to school. He was fourteen. He was my best man.

We'd been talking about getting married for over a year, but couldn't figure out exactly how to do it. Neither Jeanne nor I attended any church regularly—still don't— so that was a problem. There was which city to do it in—Ashland or Toronto. And then there was the cost—the paraphernalia, the attendants, the hall, the reception, the debates about the guest list, the gown, the tux. It went on and on. We got a migraine whenever we talked about it, so it became a topic we didn't know how to deal with.

But there was the fact that we'd been living together, both in Ashland and whenever she and Adam came to Toronto, and the fact was that we were both becoming more conscious of Adam in the middle of our cohabiting. He was a teenager. He knew what was going on. Maybe he had always known, but at age ten or eleven he still seemed to think of Leo only as Mommy's Friend. At thirteen and fourteen, he knew I was more than a friend. What kind of example were we setting? We weren't sure. New territory for both of us. And what the hell. We couldn't stay away from each other. Couldn't keep our hands off each other. Why not get married?