The Night Listener and Others (26 page)

Hunting was his passion, and I think he was always a bit sad after my interest in it had waned. I’d been an avid small game hunter through junior high school, until I’d learned that I had quite a lot of talent in drawing. An art teacher encouraged me, and soon my free time and weekends were taken up at a drawing board my father constructed for me in his workshop. His opinions of my work, however, were not always complimentary. He cared nothing for my still lifes and portraits, and a charcoal portrait of him that I did for a Father’s Day gift was put away in the back of some closet.

He loved my wildlife art, however. With pen-and-ink I had gradually achieved a limited mastery in detailed animal heads, and he greatly admired the near photographic technique. He would watch for hours as I dipped the pen, drew a single line, wiped the nib, and repeated. His favorite gift was one I did in secret and gave him for his fifty-fifth birthday, a few years after Mother had died. It was a large and highly detailed pen and ink of a buck’s head and antlers. As a model I’d used the ten-point mounted trophy that he had hanging in his den, a deer he had bagged when he was in his late thirties, and the largest he’d ever gotten.

He was enraptured by the drawing, which was the most detailed piece I had done at the time, every hair standing out starkly against the dazzling white of the Strathmore board. The only difference between it and the mounted head was the more realistic glitter of the eye, as the cheap glass eyes that the taxidermist had supplied had clouded and dulled over the years.

I had framed it in a rustic wood, and he hung it immediately beneath the mounted head, remarking that although it couldn’t take the place of the stuffed trophy, it was the next best thing. The comment neither surprised nor offended me. He always preferred reality over symbol.

By the time I was eighteen, my art had won me a great many awards as well as a scholarship to a prestigious university. I was selling my work at summer shows and in a few galleries, but still my father wondered when I was going to do something to earn a steady living. I could not seem to convince him that I could indeed make a comfortable income from freelancing. Perhaps it would have been easier had I fully believed it myself.

He missed me desperately when I went away to school, though I didn’t realize to what extent until my junior year, when I decided rather abruptly not to go home over the Thanksgiving vacation, but to remain at school in order to complete the projects required by a very heavy course load. As I recall, I treated the decision rather cavalierly when I discussed it with him on the phone, and later learned through a letter from an uncle, my father’s brother, that he had been crushed by it, refusing to go to their house for holiday dinner, as we always did, and taking several sick days off from the tool and die cutting shop where he worked. My father never told me of his disappointment, which made my guilt all the stronger, and I made it a point to spend as much of Christmas vacation and semester break with him as was possible.

The summer of my graduation I got married, and the first of the two breaks with my father began.

Rachel was an art student who had received her teaching degree when I’d gotten my B.A. Although an artist herself (sculpting was her chosen medium), her talents lay more in the field of creative and original teaching methods for elementary art, and some of my most joyous moments were spent watching her work with the faculty children in the university’s model school.

We’d fallen in love over a period of knowing each other and dating on and off for years, so it was an open and easy relationship. Considering our respective strengths and wishes, we thought it best for Rachel to support us both at first with her teaching, while I continued to build a base as a freelance fine and commercial artist.

My father was stunned by my announcement of our forthcoming wedding, even though I had often told him about Rachel, and had even brought her home on my senior year semester break (she had slept in the guest room, but we had found an opportunity to make giggling and nearly apprehended love in the single bed in my old room, surrounded by Tigers pennants and Middle-earth maps).

At first I thought his objection might have been that Rachel was Jewish, though her faith had lapsed years before and her family were Reformed Jews to begin with. When I asked him if that was his objection, he grabbed onto the idea like a drowning man at a lifeline, though I could tell from his expression that he hadn’t even considered it before.

“Yes,” he’d said, “yes, that’s part of it! It’s very hard for two young people anyway, without that added to it. I mean, two different cultures, and any children…”

I’d laughed, and he had turned pale, realizing that he sounded like an ignorant bigot, and we talked no more about it. Several days later, however, he did a complete reversal and started talking almost nonstop about what a wonderful wife Rachel was going to be, how good it was for men my age to get married, and a number of other homilies that, considering his own experience in marriage, rang lifeless and false.

When he asked where we intended living, I told him the truth. Rachel was looking for a teaching position near Chicago, because jobs there would be easier to find, and it would have been nearly impossible for me to freelance without the easy proximity to prospective clients and galleries a major metropolitan area could offer. I didn’t know why this information came as such a shock to him, as I couldn’t conceive of his expecting us to stay in the small town in which I’d grown up. Yet it surprised him greatly, and sent him into another blue funk that finally disappeared two days before the wedding, when he and I drove to Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Rachel’s family lived there, and the wedding was to be held in the synagogue they attended. Rachel had originally wanted a civil ceremony, but her mother was insistent and neither Rachel nor I had any strong objection to a religious service.

The Golds were friendly and outgoing, and made both my father and me feel very much at home. Mr. Gold was a deer hunter too, and I saw much of my father’s unease pass away the instant he spotted an eight-point rack serving as a hall tree in their entry.

In fact, I had seldom seen my father as happy as on that first evening with the Golds. He laughed at Mr. Gold’s stories, joked freely about the marriage and the possibility of grandchildren, and even relaxed enough to have a few guiltless glasses of wine. That evening in our motel room he told me that I was marrying into a very nice family, that Rachel was a lovely girl, and that I should be very good to her.

I suppose I grunted something into the darkness while we lay there trying to grow accustomed to the metallic growl of the ice machine. Then after a few minutes he spoke again, so low I could hardly hear him.

I’m not completely sure, but I think that he said, “Don’t ever kill her.”

I was near sleep, but the words pulled me back from the abyss and a chill crept over my shoulders so that I pulled the covers up around them. Had I heard him wrong? “What’s that, Dad?” I said.

There was a deep sigh, and he answered, “Nothing. Nothing. Goodnight.”

The next day was low-key. We slept late, had a rehearsal in the afternoon, and then a nice dinner for family and friends. Tony Corelli, a college room-mate, was my best man, and he and some other friends and cousins who would be ushers had arrived that afternoon. After the dinner, they, both fathers, and I had a “stag party” in the private room of a club Mr. Gold belonged to. There were no naked girls popping out of cakes, but the beer and scotch and dirty jokes flowed pretty freely until it became too much for my father, who pleaded tiredness. He drove back to the motel and I followed well past midnight with Tony, a little tipsy but far from drunk.

As I quietly unlocked the room door, hoping not to disturb my father’s sleep, I became aware of a dry barking sound, like a dog vomiting up grass. My father was sitting in his t-shirt and boxer shorts in front of the TV. The sound was turned all the way down, so the only noise was his crying. I asked him what was wrong, my voice slightly slurred by the drinks I’d had.

He said nothing, shaking his head, words choked by tears.

“Come on, Dad,” I said. “What’s the matter? Please tell me.”

“It’s just…” Another heaving sob shook him, and I sat on the arm of the chair, my arms around his shoulders. “It’s just that I lost your mother, and now I’m losing you too, and I don’t think I can take it. I just don’t think I can take it…”

I told him that it would be all right, that Rachel and I would visit him often, that we’d only be a little over 150 miles away, that he could visit us too, that we’d call often, he could call anytime, and on and on and on, and it didn’t do a damned bit of good.

He finally pretended that it was going to be okay and went to bed, but his ragged breathing told me that he was still awake far into the morning.

The wakeup call came too early, but I needed the extra time to fully recover from the previous night. My father and I showered and shaved, had breakfast in the coffee shop with Tony and the others, then dressed for the 10:30 wedding. He seemed fine again, happy, friendly, and anxious for the ceremony.

Everything was fine until we neared the end of the marriage service. Rachel and I were almost finished with our vows when I heard a low buzz from the congregation. I turned my head slightly so that from the corner of my eye I might see what all the fuss was about. Then the sound reached me. It was my father, crying dry, low, hacking sobs that grew louder until they resounded like gunshots in the modern synagogue’s vast glass and steel interior.

Suddenly I felt very angry, and I think I would have gone down into the congregation to roughly quiet him had it not been for the squeeze that Rachel gave my arm. The mild pain brought me back to myself and I finished the vows through nearly clenched teeth, stamping on the glass, kissing Rachel, and walking down the aisle, the sound of my blood rushing in my ears drowning out the cries of
Mazeltov
.

By the time we formed the reception line my father’s crying had stopped. I stormed up to him, ready to reprimand him, even abuse him, but he was ready for me, and smiled and embraced me, “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry I lost control. But I was so happy, so happy for you, happy for you both.” Then he hugged Rachel, who had come up behind me.

I told him that it was all right, and we joined the line. As friends and relatives were passing, I caught the quaint phrase,
unmanly tears
, and jerked up my head to see who had said it. It was one of Rachel’s great-uncles, a man too old to have to mind his tongue anymore, and he returned my gaze as belligerently as I had given it.

He was right. That was why I was angry. I’d thought tears were tears up to that point, that men should be able to cry and not have it cast any aspersions on their masculinity, but my father, that day and the night before, had cried a woman’s tears, and it had diminished him in my eyes.

Rachel and I moved to Chicago, and as my career blossomed my relationship with my father withered. We visited him once every month or so, and I would call on weekends, but he seemed detached from me, withdrawn as from one who had betrayed him many years before by being born.

Four years after we were married, Rachel became pregnant. It was a good time, as our finances were sound. My work was a staple in some of the better Midwestern galleries, and I’d just had my first show in New York. The year before I’d even been mentioned in a feature in
Time
entitled, “The Neotraditionalists,” although no reproductions of my work were shown. On the phone, my father mentioned having seen the article, and I thought (or hoped) his words held just a hint of pride in me, but perhaps I was wrong.

I had not seen him so excited in years as when we told him of the pregnancy. “So I’m going to have a grandson,” was the phrase he used, and he repeated it at intervals as if he could not believe the reality of it.

The first time he said it, Rachel had gently reminded him, “Dad, it could be a granddaughter, you know.”

He had only laughed and said, with a nod to me, “Not in this family, not if I know this one. It’ll be a boy all right.”

Rachel was a little unnerved by his certainty, and in the car on the way home she slid toward me and placed my right hand on her still flat abdomen where our child lay encased. “Promise me something,” she said.

I smiled and nodded.

“When we have our baby—boy, girl, whatever—promise me that when the time comes to let him or her go, you will.”

I looked at her, a little irritated that she could so easily know the secret that was never a secret. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. I know better than anyone.” I put my hand back on the steering wheel. “I’ll let him go,” I promised. “Whenever he wants to go, I’ll let him and help him and tell him I’m always there if he needs me.”

She was pleased, and soon she fell asleep as we drove west into the red dusk.

The baby arrived exactly on the day appointed by the doctor, and it was, as my father had so definitely predicted, a boy. We named him Edward after my father, and from his reaction you would have thought that it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. He doted on the child, bringing him toys far beyond his age as well as many that he could play with. As the boy grew, he in turn loved his grandfather dearly, and I often found myself just the slightest bit jealous as my son would totter from me to his grandfather, babbling little nonsense songs full of love. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a loving relationship with the boy, because I did. It was simply that “Gampa” was
special
in a way that was impossible for me to be.

I’ve never been what some people would call a loving person, and Rachel did most of the real parenting in the family. I would read an occasional bedtime story, give horsy rides on my knee, and indulge in dozens of other such father-son activities, but I never really enjoyed it the way Rachel and my father seemed to. I did much of it because it seemed somehow obligatory on my part.

Still, when he died, when Rachel died, I was crushed, totally and finally.