My provisional answer was a shrug of the shoulders. “I was dumbfounded—”
“Bewitched,” said Alice, with a laugh.
“Yes, bedazzled, confused. Like walking into a real daydream. And besides, I wanted to hear the song through to the end.”
Dolly smiled as though I brought her some maternal satisfaction. “He was only being polite.”
With a crisp snap, Jane uncapped a bottle of ale for the old man. As she handed it to him, she added, “He was raised to follow etiquette and decorum. You can always tell a gentleman by his manners and whether he was brought up proper.”
The old man drank deeply and then stood, the crumbs in his lap tumbling to the floor. “You were a good boy. Listened to your parents, kept your room tidy. The kind of boy who could occupy himself with a book or a pencil and some paper, always off drawing buildings and such in the corner of the bedroom. And then, following the rules: always stay on the outside of the sidewalk when strolling with a lady, hold open doors for strangers with packages, help old women across the street, and that sort of thing. You were a good boy, perhaps to a fault.”
His sentiments encouraged distant memories to unmoor from my hippocampus. “You seem to know a great deal about me and my life, and I’ve been meaning to ask you all night: are you my father?”
The three women in the room sniggered at either the na?veté or the audacity of my question, and some whispered bit of editorial gossip raced among them. From the magazine rack, the baby stirred in his sleep as a vision knitted his doughboy features and troubled his tender soul. He kicked both legs together like a tree frog and then raised a protective fist, only to let it drop in slow motion as he relaxed again. What dreams could such a young person possibly have? What dreams might visit us in the womb? If Bachelard is right about the need to sweep out the phantoms and shadows of our dreams when we rise each morning, what is swept away when a child is born and first awakens to the world? Can he remember anything of prior existence?
“Will you not answer a direct question?” I asked again. “You do not look exactly like my father, or at least what I remember of him, but you share some familial characteristics and you appear to be the right age, had he lived, and you have treated me like a son, with a mix of love and disdain. Will you make me guess?”
He quaffed the dregs of his ale and set the empty bottle on the windowsill. A few crumbs stuck to the collar and sleeves of the terrycloth robe, and he picked and rolled them between his thumb and middle finger only to drop the crumble to the small rug in front of the toilet. With the toes of his left foot, he rocked the magazine rack like a cradle, humming under his breath a short, well-known lullaby, all the while glancing upon each person, though never looking me in the eye, before settling on his wizened reflection in the mirror. Startled by his own appearance, he combed his upswept silver hair with the rake of his fingers.
“Are you deliberately avoiding me?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes and suddenly stopped to focus on a spot directly above my head. “Not to change the subject,” he said, “but do you have a small electrical fan built in to this room, of the kind designed to exhaust fumes and circulate the air?”
Petulant, I answered, “Yes. A ceiling fan.”
“Ordinarily, is it black and made of cast iron?”
I looked up. Where the ceiling fan had always been, a much larger black disk appeared to be working its way through the plaster. Instead of the usual hum of the fan, the surface began to groan and splinter.
“Would you kindly,” the old man asked, “take two steps either to your right or to your left?”
The object above expanded in size and circumference, and from the twelve o’clock position a handle emerged just as the frying pan loosened from its moorings and fell, crashing to the floor with a bang, cracking the tiles, and clattering as it bounced until it settled on a spot. The skillet, large as a hubcap and blackened with the seasonings of thousands of meals, was solid and heavy, and had I not moved, the weight might have fractured my skull or broken my neck. The old man reached out with a bare foot to assess its density, but he could not budge the cast iron so much as a millimeter.