The Distinguished Guest (11 page)

Alan could remember only the general tenor of Paul’s letters from California to him, the tone of
older friend
he sensed Paul was striving for. And the rage this evoked in him: Paul
wasn’t even a father, much less a friend! Why should Alan care about the activities of the commune Paul belonged to, about his politics, his causes, his beliefs? He’d abandoned Alan!
Why should he care about this side of Paul, this version of him? It was the other side he’d yearned for and now bitterly, angrily, given up on.

Once Lily, having seen a letter from Paul ripped and crumpled in Alan’s wastebasket, asked him if he ever wrote back to his father.

“Never,” Alan said.

“You should try to,” Lily said. “Try to forgive him. It was I, after all, who chose to end things, not he.” She stood in the doorway to Alan’s room, her dark brows
knit in concern. “I mean, if there’s anyone you should be angry at, truly, it’s me.” Her hand rose and rested on her bosom.

I
am
, Alan wanted to say. But he didn’t. He’d shrugged, and turned away, sitting at his desk, waiting for her to leave.

There was one other picture of Paul in the memoir that Alan kept coming back to. He was seated outdoors, under pine branches, wearing an old flannel shirt. He was surrounded by his children.
Rebecca had thrown her arms around his neck from behind. Her small, clasping hands made a complicated necklace below his chin, and her laughing face rested against his. Clary was leaned against his
side, looking hungrily at him and Rebecca. And Alan, the baby, was seated between his father’s legs wearing a knit outfit which left his fat bare legs and tiny, curved feet exposed.
Paul’s hands encircled Alan’s little body, supported him. Alan was tilted back against his father’s belly and chest, his head was thrown back to try to see his sisters and his
father. He was eager, smiling, sheltered by his father in the center of his own universe. When, Alan wondered, how, had all that, and the wife presumably holding the camera, become so unimportant
to Paul, so dispensable, that he could walk away from it to build the new America?

Alan had tried to find the answer to that once. He was twenty-two. It was the summer after he’d graduated from college. Paul had just had surgery and hadn’t been able to come to the
ceremony. Near the end of the summer, Alan quit his job and headed across the country, to California, on a motorcycle he’d bought with his earnings. In certain cities and towns he had friends
from college to stay with. The other nights he slept on the ground, in a sleeping bag. He had talked a good deal about this trip to anyone who would listen in the spring of his senior year.
“Hitting the road,” he called it. He said he was going to go “get straight with my father.” In a hot springs in the Anzo Borrego desert he bought a postcard with a desert
scene on it and addressed it to Gaby, in France. (At this point Gaby was more or less just an idea he had, but a compelling one. She was the older sister in a family he’d lived with on an
exchange program the spring of his sophomore year.) “Greetings from Nowhere, USA,” he wrote. “I’ve come almost all the way across this endless country at this point on a
motorcycle. It’s been a crazy, lonely, exhilarating adventure, with finding my father the goal at the end of it. This brings affectionate greetings from your admirer in
America—Alan.”

The truth was that well before then Alan had tired of the trip, of the sameness of the act of driving each long day. And the days had to be long in order for him to get all the way to California
and back to Boston before school started. He was tired of the grimy, stained, public showers in the campgrounds he stopped in every third or fourth day. He was tired of crummy food, bad coffee, of
the stink of his own sweat, of the ceaseless hot wind on his face.

Paul was dying, Alan could see that the moment his father opened the door, though he’d never seen dying or death before. Paul seemed to have shrunk into himself, and his skin was beyond
white, a grayish-yellow. He was wearing a faded denim shirt and khaki trousers that ballooned out from a narrow belt.

Alan, with his sunburned, windburned face, his Levi’s and motorcycle jacket, his bulk and health, felt too large, too loud. Excessive somehow. But Paul’s pale, pinched face opened
and lightened when he looked at his son. They shook hands.

Alan stayed with his father for two days, and said none of the things he’d meant to say. He tried several times, but his tone as he began was always accusatory and harsh, and Paul seemed
determined to keep anything difficult from happening between them. The last time Alan started to say something, they’d just sat down opposite each other in Paul’s spartan living room.
Paul was panting slightly from the trip across the floor to his chair. Alan was skirting around the issues, his voice already beginning to harden, and Paul raised his hand as though to ward him
off. “No doubt I made mistakes,” he said. “For anything like that, I’m sorry. What’s important is, you’re here. There’s no sense dwelling on the
past.” They were silent a moment.

Christ
, Alan thought. Why did I come then?

Then Paul started to cough. Unable to stop, he got up and shuffled slowly to his bedroom. The door shut, and Alan sat alone. He looked around the room, out the window. The bright California
sunlight reflected off the naked pastel buildings opposite. There were black kids playing in the street, swearing casually at each other in the language Alan would come to use casually himself in
the next few years. For a long time, the sound of the coughing was all he could concentrate on.

Much later, it would occur to him that Paul might have been making him a gift rather than just defending himself. That he might consciously have been keeping Alan from a cruelty to him that
wouldn’t have time to heal, a cruelty that Alan would have learned to regret. And for that Alan was grateful later. But he felt robbed too, perplexed and sad about the man who was his father.
Like Rebecca, he’d taken the answers to all Alan’s questions away before Alan knew how to ask them. Who are you? What was I, to you, that you so easily left me behind?

The problem is that Alan can’t recall Paul, Paul as he was. And as the pictures make clear. He can’t recall that happy, laughing father, that young man gripping the edges of the
pulpit in his intensity. Here is what he knows: that Paul had played with them, read to them. That it was he who came in to say their nightly prayers with the children. That he’d taught Alan
to ice skate, to throw a ball. He can remember these things distinctly, but without seeing Paul. When he thinks of Paul now, it is the Paul who was dying he sees. He sees him in the naked, harsh
light of the empty living room, looking diminished and weak. He sees the pale, sunstruck world of the slum Paul lived in then. He remembers the sound of Paul’s coughing, and that across the
street, as he listened to his father struggling to breathe, a large, gray-haired black man slowly and tenderly buffed his car until it gleamed in the sunlight.

Now, seeing the letters in his father’s handwriting, he is reminded again of his loss, as he was the first time he looked through Lily’s memoir and came on the photographs. And he
feels angry at Lily for being so deeply unconscious of what she asks of him in assuming he will carry these messages away to be destroyed, in assuming, as she must, that she is the only one to whom
they matter, to whom they might bring back that lost world.

He can’t speak of this, of any of this, to Lily. He doesn’t know how to. What there is between him and her stays entirely superficial. There’s the light banter at dinner, often
a little barbed, which sometimes suddenly ends in unexplained, unexplored angry silences on Alan’s part, silences which drive Gaby wild. And then what Gaby doesn’t see, his visit to his
mother in the morning, before Noreen has arrived, to bring her coffee, to help her to the bathroom. She is in one of her white nighties then, and often she’s pulled on the frayed, stained bed
jacket she’s so fussy about against the cool of the morning air. The legs she swings out of bed with his help—which Alan has seen too much of, as he has seen too the sparse, iron-gray
flag of her pubis—are yellowed and toneless. He stands outside the bathroom in the little hallway off the guest room, his head bent to the door, as she must have stood outside the door when a
smaller Alan was inside their bathroom in Chicago, years ago. He listens for her as she might have listened for him, for her most intimate sounds, calling out, “Everything okay?” if she
seems to take too long.

What this costs him, he couldn’t say. What it costs him to slide the garbage on top of the letters which carry his past away from him forever, he couldn’t say. Whether these acts or
the anger he comes to feel at her through the course of nearly every dinner is worse, he couldn’t say. He cannot speak of any of it to Gaby, except sarcastically, and when he sees the concern
for him in her face, he tries to make a joke of it too.

Perhaps it’s in flight from all this that within a week of Lily’s arrival, Alan began to leave the office in town too, sometimes fairly early in the morning, often almost as soon as
he arrived. At first he pretended this was connected to projects that were ongoing. He checked on the house going up in Bowman until he came to feel that his too-frequent visits were becoming a
kind of curiosity to the work crew. He spent one day after that driving all the way to the little town in Vermont where he might get a church to do, just to go over a few measurements that he could
have cleared up on the telephone.

Now, increasingly, he’s at a loss. A couple of times he’s gone down to the docks, to the water’s edge, where sometimes at that hour he can sit in the car and watch the fishing
boats come in and unload. He feels conspicuously unemployed sitting there. Several times he’s driven to the town parking lot and walked the beach, past the husbandless groups of tanned women
and little children, the clusters of teenagers with tape decks and Frisbees. He knows these people, he knows they are not from privileged backgrounds; they’re townies, with heavy townie
accents. But he thinks of how privileged they would seem to most people—the women who don’t have to work, who laugh and gossip and complain about their husbands while they turn browner
and browner in the sun, while the children run in and out of the seaweedy water and dig and build in the sand and rifle through coolers for snacks.

It had driven Gaby crazy, he remembers, the endlessly long days of supervision and talk with other women when the children were small. What was it that made her uncomfortable? She felt a
foreigner. She wasn’t used to what seemed to her then the wasteful self-indulgence of the American housewife. She had started the catering business out of their own kitchen when Ettie was not
yet two, and that was the end of it for her.

Alan feels wasteful now too, and restless—a man with visibly too little to do. By the end of the third week of Lily’s visit, he usually heads farther afield, once the hundred or so
miles to Boston, with nothing particular in mind.

He rings Thomas’s bell that cool, lovely day, but no one answers. He finds a parking place in the Back Bay and wanders its busy streets. How it has changed, he thinks, from his student
days. He had friends then who lived in rented rooms on Beacon Street or Commonwealth Avenue—jury-rigged rooms, parlors chopped in two by cheap partitions in the grand town houses. You could
hear the conversations or the lonely coughing of whoever lived next door.

Now these buildings are divided into condominiums, or in some cases, actually restored to single-family splendor, their windows swagged and shuttered, their entryways gleaming with polished
brass.

He walks in front of a building on Newbury Street where he and Gaby lived for the first years of their marriage, in the attic apartment, two rooms and a kitchenette up under the mansard roof.
From the front windows they looked out on the Prudential Building and the early plywood days of the Hancock. It was hot under the roof in the summer, and he can remember that they spent most of
their time at home naked during those months. The second summer she was pregnant with Thomas. Standing on Newbury Street, looking up at those windows, he feels an unexpected rush of pleasure at the
thought of her then, her hips widened, her belly hard and striped, her breasts fattened and silvered with stretch marks.

On another trip north he turns off impulsively at Plimouth Plantation. It’s a gray day with a light rain, more like a mist, and he hopes he’ll be, if not a solitary visitor, at least
a lonely one. But there are six or seven big yellow school buses in the lot. For a moment he considers backing out again and driving away, but something about the huddled forms of the imitation
seventeenth-century houses, their dark and cheerless austerity in the weighted wet air, moves him and he stops the engine. The moment he opens the car door, he can hear the children’s shrill
voices, carrying but cottoned in the thick air. No echo. He pays his entrance fee to a costumed woman and has an abrupt sense of the preposterousness, the strangeness of his being here. How is this
connected to Lily? Why should his uprootedness on her account result in his coming to this odd place?

But it’s not odd for him, he tells himself. He’s an architect. He’s interested in these buildings. And he does examine them carefully, the ancient post-and-beam construction,
the steep grass roofs, the tiny windows. The windows then, the guide explains, were just this small, to keep the faint warmth in winter from passing out, but they were filled then with oiled paper,
oiled to achieve translucence, to increase the dim light within.

God, the misery! he thinks. And all for what? Some ideal of life, some nearly abstract notion of freedom that turned rigid as a prison itself. He tries, standing in the single room that
constitutes the entire interior of one of the houses, to imagine a being that could do it, that could live here with his wife, his children, and not go mad. That could live here and then wish to
forge even farther in, to push the forest, the Indians, deeper back. His own ancestors on Paul’s side of the family had been here then, living in such a village as this, marrying, having
children, farming, preaching—sure that God had called them to claim this land, to change forever the way it was used. Sure that God intended them to bring light to the dark-skinned people
around them.