III. The Way Out
1
To show the fly the way out of the bottle? Break the bottle.
There was the shock of my brother Hendrick's call. One evening at dusk in June 1965. When I was staying in a rented cabin near Burlington, Vermont; living alone for the summer, immersed in my writing. The telephone rang and there was my brother Hendrick!- with news so unexpected, at first I couldn't grasp what he said.
Hendrick's deep gravelly voice and nasal upstate New York accent. Jarring to my ear, for I spoke with him rarely; I spoke with my brothers rarely; you might have thought that I was estranged from them, or that they'd cast me off, and forgotten me. And so my brother Hendrick's voice frightened me as if he were calling me to account for something I'd failed to do, some family obligation I'd failed to meet in my desperate flight from Strykersville one day to be construed as my career, my destiny. My voice went small and vulnerable, stammering-"Yes, Hendrick? W-What?" Not absorbing what Hendrick was saying with such urgency as if the distance between us, approximately three hundred miles, were compounded by a distance in time; for Hendrick and I hadn't seen each other since our grandmother's funeral and burial in the Lutheran cemetery eighteen months before; and in my confusion as I stood in a doorway of the rented and unfamiliar cabin at the edge of a small lake I struggled to recall Hendrick's adult face for his boy's face had vanished, I knew, it wouldn't be to that brash careless good-looking face I must appeal but to a face matured and thickened about the jaws, Hendrick now thirty years old and though the youngest of my three elder brothers no longer young; my only brother not yet married, my only brother not yet a father, yet Hendrick was mysterious and inaccessible to me as the others; at the time of my grandmother's funeral his eyes had drifted onto me, with baffled affection, perhaps not affection but a subtle resentment in which there dwelt some small measure of admiration, for Hendrick believed it was unfair, God-damned unfair, that I'd been the one to leave Strykersville on a scholarship to a highly regarded university while he, smart as I, maybe smarter, certainly better at math, and as deserving, had had to work at demeaning jobs to support himself through school; he worked now at General Electric in Troy, New York, and the few times we'd met in our new, awkward disguises as adults I'd felt the weight of his brotherly disapproval, his envy and dislike a hand shoving at me, backing me from him, I'd seen those mica eyes even as he forced a smile for his younger sister, I'd wanted to plead with him Please! please don't hate me, Hendrick, our lives are only luck. But I knew that such a remark would only embarrass him, as he sounded for some reason embarrassed now, and incensed, over the phone-"Jesus! What a trick. When we'd thought all these years he was dead."
"Hendrick, what?" I must have heard, but I hadn't heard. I was having difficulty getting my breath. "Who-is dead?"
"'Was dead. Turns out, after all, he isn't!'
"Who?"
"The old man, who the hell else? Who else was dead, whose body we never saw buried? Who else for Christ's sake I'd be calling you about?"
He meant who else, what else, had the two of us in common, except our father? The burden of his memory?
Otherwise, Hendrick and I were strangers.
Faintly I asked, "Our f-father is-alive?"
"Only just barely. A nurse or someone, a woman, called. This time he's dying for real."
"But he's alive? Our father?"'
He'd been assumed dead for years. He'd disappeared into the West. I couldn't remember how my brothers and I had referred to the man, forever mysterious in absence, who'd been our father. Through the years of my growing-up. And my brothers, my tall beautiful brothers, so often absent from me, too. We hadn't said Father, I was certain. We hadn't said Daddy, Dad.
Hendrick said, "Right. He's living in a place called Crescent, Utah. About two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City. He was in a hospital in Salt Lake, now he's been discharged. They let him out to die by his request. I didn't speak with him myself, for all I know he can't talk. Just this woman. Who she is, I don't know. Maybe they're married. Y' know, he's fifty-six? He's dying of some kind of cancer." This was said in the tone of voice in which a minute before Hendrick had muttered the word trick.
"Cancer!"
When I'd lifted the ringing phone I'd had no expectation of hearing alarming news. Few people knew where I was, few people had any need to call me. If I'd had to guess who the caller might be I'd have guessed it was a wrong number. Who? I'm sorry, no. There's no one by that name at this number.
Hendrick was speaking rapidly now, wanting to end the conversation. Maybe he'd become emotional after all; or maybe the subject was distasteful to him. He would supply me with the telephone number of the woman who'd contacted him, her name and address in Crescent, Utah, and I could call her myself; no further information about my father because Hendrick had no further information, and wished none. I was fumbling with a pencil, trying to write on a scrap of paper, blinking back tears. Alive! Our father was alive. He'd never died. It would be one of the profound shocks of my adult life as the news of his sudden and unexplained death had been one of the profound shocks of my adolescence. You could see why Hendrick had said trick for there seemed to be an element of trickery in such shocks, and in trickery an element of cruelty.
Behind my brother's hurried voice there came a faint, querulous cry that might have been a child, and a sound of coughing. Was Hendrick living with someone? What was Hendrick's life, unknown to me? Of my three brothers Hendrick was the closest to me in age yet he was seven years older; an immense gulf, in childhood; I had no idea what his life was like now, and could not ask. At my grandmother's funeral Hendrick had stood tall and somber and frowning, apart even from his brothers, with that subtle air of resentment as if the elderly woman's death, like her life, had had very little to do with him; with his own inner, private life; my grandmother had not been a woman of much sentiment or feeling, she'd loved only her son, the man who was our father; in loving her son, she'd exhausted her capacity for emotion; he'd broken her heart, possibly; he'd broken all our hearts; no one else had the power to break my grandmother's heart, and no one else would have wished to have that power. At the funeral my brother Hendrick had watched me covertly; I'd felt uneasy under his gaze, and at the same time defiant; for what right had he to judge me; if I'd seemed to have excelled in a world he had been barred from entering, how was that my fault; I refused to be made to feel guilty by another's envy, as I could not feel pride or superiority for such a reason; I could not form any judgment of myself based upon my family's judgment of me, for they hardly knew me; my brother's unsmiling eyes, my brother's stone-colored eyes like my own, and like our father's. When Hendrick smiled, as sometimes he did, it was a quick teasing flash of a smile and you saw the possibility of warmth in him, and trust.
Before you could respond, the smile vanished.
How badly now I wanted to say, "Oh, Hendrick, why did he do this to us, do you think? Please don't hang up, talk to me."
How badly I wanted to say, "Would you come "with me to Utah, Hendrick? To see him? Before it's too late? We could drive out to-gether." How badly I wanted to plead, "You won't let me go alone, will you?"
But I knew what the answer would be. Instead I thanked Hendrick, and hang up the phone.
2
Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.
The last time I'd seen my father, that sudden rough embrace. The touch of a man who hadn't touched me in years. I would remember it for days, for years.
Four years ago. When he'd come to my high school graduation.
The shock of seeing him there in the audience! For I hadn't known he would be coming, I hadn't known he was in Strykersville. (He'd arrived the previous night, staying at a motel in town.) The prevailing fact of my father during my years of growing up was simple, blunt: when the man was home, he was home; when not, not. To be in one place for long, he'd have to be dead my brothers joked of him. But there unexpectedly he was in the high school auditorium. In a white shirt open at the collar, in matching coat and trousers. His hair, what remained of it, slicked back on his head; his nose flattened, bulbous; his jaws unshaven. And I, the girl valedictorian, in a black academic gown of light wool like a nightgown and a pasteboard-cloth black cap, its tassel swinging dangerously near my left eye. At the age of eighteen I more resembled a precocious thirteen-year-old boy; one of those small-boned ferret-faced individuals who ascends to a stage, a podium, confronting an almost palpable wave of resistance in an audience; a polite, subdued, yet perceptible resistance; who is both terrified yet fearless, borne aloft like Icarus by a mere voice, mere words, the very audacity of performance and a passion to utter something not yet said that would not otherwise be said except in this way. And the audience is startled into listening, and startled into applause. And afterward the doubt Did it really happen? Did they really listen, and applaud? And what does applause mean? After the ceremony ended, in a haze of smiles and handshakes and congratulations I'd looked around to see him headed for me, my father who was taller, larger, more physically present than any other man in the room; my father with the manner of an upright, just slightly swaying steer; unshaven, flush-faced with drink, and his eyes bloodshot yet gleaming with a combative paternal pride. He'd grabbed me and hugged me, breathing his hot-fumey breath into my face, advising me in a careless loud voice Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.
It's advice I have tried to remember. Even when I've betrayed it.
3
Alone I drove to Crescent, Utah. Twenty-five hundred miles.
It was estimated that my father might live another three or four weeks; I was in terror of flying to him; not of the flight itself (though I'd never flown in an airliner before) but of getting too quickly to my destination.
I would spend days (and nights) on interstate highways in a Volkswagen bought for $535 the previous year, with faulty brakes, a faulty muffler, a noisy motor; a stick shift that operated with some resistance; unless I kept most of the windows rolled down at all times, an odor of carbon monoxide wafted from beneath the dashboard. Except: what you can detect, isn't the poison. Fresh air dispels it! It was a 1959 Volkswagen with no heat or air-conditioning, of course; what "heat" there was blew in through vents from the motor onto my legs. Yet I loved this, my first car; I was naive enough to love its very smallness and economy; its hunched-beetle shape; unless it was a fetal-shape; originally plum-colored but now weathered and rusted to no single hue. There was a spiderweb crack in the windshield in front of the passenger's seat as if a luckless ghost-passenger had been catapulted into the glass, striking headfirst.
In the secondhand Volkswagen I would drive the width of New York State (for I'd been staying in northern Vermont when Hendrick's call came) and I would pass within fifty miles of Strykersville; I would continue west driving along the southern edge of Lake Erie and through Ohio and through Indiana and through Illinois and through northern Missouri and through Kansas and through Colorado and so at last into eastern Utah, on I-70 to the small town of Crescent, Utah, population 1,620. This, the journey of my life. I will get there on time! In New York, in Illinois, and in Colorado I'd telephoned the soft-spoken woman known to me only as Hildie Pomeroy, to ask after my father and to learn that he was in "stable condition" and "waiting for you." To save money, often I slept in the car; not at night but mornings or late afternoons in convivial roadside rest areas and parking lots of restaurants; not in the backseat (for a stranger might drift by to stare in at me open-mouthed and vulnerable in sleep as an infant); it was one of the haunting notions of my life, about which I'd tried to write, except not knowing how to seize the notion, the image, the riddle in order to write about it coherently, how we never see ourselves sleeping; we never see ourselves open-mouthed, vulnerable as a baby in sleep; in just such a way we never see ourselves, at all; we have no clear idea of ourselves; our mirror reflections reflect only what we wish to see, or can bear to see, or punish ourselves by seeing. Nor can we trust others to see us either. For they too see what they wish to see, with their imperfect eyes. In my car, often I remained in the driver's seat when I slept, my hands in a pretense of gripping the wheel so that (though deeply unconscious, head lolling like a stroke victim's against the seatback) I was primed for immediate action, escape. In public rest rooms I managed to wash myself, even my sweaty-sticky windblown hair; I didn't eat often in restaurants, but bought packaged food in stores because it was cheaper, and I filled paper cups with drinking water to take with me; I'd allotted myself a certain amount of money to take me from Vermont to Utah, and begrudged spending money on myself and not on gas, oil, services for my car. Already on the first day of driving, nearly eight hours, I'd become hypnotized; my eyelids drooped with a wish to sleep, unless it was a wish to dream without the interference of sleep; the Volkswagen was so small that it quavered in the wake of larger vehicles that passed in hissing contempt; even other Volkswagens sailed past me, though their drivers often waved or honked in a gesture of camaraderie. My car shuddered if driven at a speed beyond fifty-five miles an hour and there was such a maelstrom of winds whipping my head, I came to think that the Volkswagen was somehow myself; or, in its woundedness, my father. Amid traffic, I was less susceptible to irrational notions and hypnagogic images; on the open highway, median stripes to the left of my vision, gravel shoulder to my right, open countryside, empty sky, I began to sink into that seductive and treacherous state of mind that precedes sleep; I felt a pang of hurt, that Hendrick had refused to accompany me; I seemed to recall that I'd actually asked him, and he'd said no. He hadn't called me back; I told myself that I hadn't expected him to call back; I had no number for him, and so could not call him; nor did my brothers Dietrich and Fritz call me; I told myself that I hadn't expected them to call; I was not disappointed, and I was not hurt. To them, he's dead. They can't love a dead man as I can. I fell into the habit of speaking aloud in the car for the noise of the wind and the motor was such I could barely hear myself, this exempted me from embarrassment or blame. The soliloquy of the self, plotting what's to come. For what is life, its myriad surprises, except what's to come. I seemed to see my father as he'd been at my high school graduation except he was in the old farmhouse, in the kitchen where so often he'd sat, smoking cigarettes and drinking late into the night; he was willing to look at me, and to speak with me, and I could ask him any question I wished; but suddenly I was frightened, and could not speak. For what do you ask your father, if you have but one question? I might have asked, earnestly Is any future preferable to any past? Do we live only in time? I tried to recall what Vernor Matheius had said once about time but I could not retain both Vernor Matheius and my father simultaneously; I would not have wished Vernor to have met my father, or even to have seen him; nor would I have wished my father to have met Vernor, or even to have seen him; and so Vernor Matheius faded. Midway through the endless state of Kansas I began to hallucinate flat-land even in my sleep; my hallucinations and the landscape were identical; I could not escape the one without being swallowed up into the other; I would sink, I would drown, I would die. Midway through the endless state of Colorado I began to hallucinate mountains far ahead at the horizon; mirage-mountains delicate as watercolor mountains in a Japanese print; yet these mountains weren't mirages, they didn't fade but deepened; they didn't retreat with the horizon, but drew nearer; and suddenly it was evident that the mountains at the horizon were moving toward me; I was moving toward them along the highway; suddenly it was evident that the mountains would enclose me, in time; I would gaze out on all sides and see mountains on all sides; I smiled at the revelation-"The Rocky Mountains! They're real."
More jagged the horizon became. The interminable midwestern plains of farmland and dull-grazing cattle had fallen away behind me, now a different and more vigorous-seeming cattle were grazing in a different, harsher landscape; here the landscape was sepia-colored as if bleached by a harsher sun; in the distance, a lunar landscape of hills strewn with boulders, strange rock formations, mountains topped with streaks of white like paint. Here, you are made to realize that a landscape is a living thing; a landscape exerts life; a landscape enters through the eyes, and breathes into you; in the West, I could no longer be the young woman I'd been in the East; in Crescent, Utah, a place unknown to me, a young woman impatiently awaited me who was myself, yet altered; in Crescent, Utah, I was determined to be this young woman. My father's daughter. The temptation in such landscapes is to believe that beauty exists in a profound and secret relationship to you. The temptation is to believe that you are the first to have fully seen. I saw that the high-desert landscape shifted continuously in hue and texture with the rapid, skittish movement of light in the enormous sky; unlike the East, where the sky was diminished by treelines, and sometimes obscured completely. My eyes, accustomed to the foreshortened landscapes and horizons of the East, squinted at so much space in the West; impossible to see such vast space without seeing time; vast reaches of time before human history, human speech, the human effort to name such mute phenomena as mountains, rivers, canyons, plateaus, glacial troughs. Such mute phenomena as rock, sand, salt flats, buttes, mesas, bluffs, badlands. Crossing the Colorado River, driving into the Grand River Valley and westward into Utah I saw a world of desolation and beauty open up before me, and my heart quickened with hope; I'd forgotten that my mission was to sit at the bedside of a man dying of cancer; I would pay for such forgetfulness, but not immediately. In my little car that vibrated with excitement. Place-names romantic and exotic to my ear as poetry. Roan Cliffs, San Rafael Valley, Sand River, Dirty Devil River, Green River, Sego Canyon, Dimes Canyon, Death Hollow, Hell's Backbone, Calf Creek Falls, China Meadows, Desolation Canyon, Dead Horse Point, Islands in the Sky.
And Crescent, to which I'd been summoned.
I began to tell myself, fatigued by driving, that I might live in Crescent. Hypnotized by the highway, by the steady, numbing pressure of my sandaled foot against the gas pedal and by a continuous sun-glare I began to tell myself a story of how my father had summoned me to Crescent for a purpose. For the fact of his being in Crescent could not be an accident, could it?
"Daddy? This car, I bought with part of the advance a publisher gave me for a book. A book of stories. My first." I tested these astonishing words and my voice began to quaver. For how would the man I'd known as my father whom I'd never called Daddy, Dad receive such news? Would he be proud of me? Or indifferent? Would a book of stories, and such elusive "poetic" stories, mean anything to a man, a laborer, who rarely read more than newspapers, so far as I knew; a man born to semi-illiterate farming people who owned no books as if in repudiation of any intellectual or spiritual life beyond the dumb stares of farm animals? (Except: in my grandmother's parlor there was a Holy Bible, as this revered book called itself; unread, except by me, out of curiosity and skeptical wonderment; unread, yet kept in a conspicuous place on a lace-covered tabletop; my German-born grandmother's grudging concession to America, and to Christianity which was synonymous with America. The Holy Bible's simulated leather covers and many of its pages were covered with a powdery, smelly mushroom-colored mold in the humidity of Strykersville summers.)
Now in Utah, that hitherto unimaginable state, on a well-traveled I-70 approaching Crescent, where I hoped to find an inexpensive motel, already I was praying (I, who'd never believed in the God of the Holy Bible, nor even in the God of Spinoza) that my father would live to see this book of mine published, at least. Another six months! He would live to see my name, which included his name, on the dust jacket of the book; he would hold the book in his hand and tell me how beautiful it was, and he loved me.
4
"Yes, Erich wants to see you. But he doesn't want you to see him." How intimate my father's name, on this stranger's lips. A hunched little woman with a fussily made-up doll's face and a breathy, girlish voice, yet a voice of steely resolve, this woman who'd introduced herself as Hildie Pomeroy, my father's friend. At 3 Railroad Street she'd opened the front door of the clapboard bungalow as if she'd been waiting for me just inside. There was muted surprise in her face, seeing me; for, however my father must have described me, I didn't look like that young woman; and Hildie Pomeroy, who stood no taller than four feet ten inches, and who appeared to have something twisted in her upper spine, wasn't the woman I might have expected, my father's friend and protector. We stared at each other blinking. At the Economy Motel (Singles $6) I'd had a bath for the first time in memory, soaking in a hot tub; I'd washed my hair, combed damp and wavy and shapeless to my shoulders; I'd changed into a fresh but rather wrinkled long-sleeved cotton shirt and cotton slacks, and I smelled of soap, shampoo, toothpaste; I was visibly nervous; surely I didn't resemble the literary-minded intellectual daughter of whom my father might have spoken. And here was Hildie Pomeroy in nurse-white: rayon shirt, rayon pants, crepe-soled canvas shoes that looked freshly whitened. Brisk and efficient except so unexpectedly made up, like a showgirl: distinctly rouged cheeks, oily crimson mouth, black mascara beading her eyelashes; and her hair!-savagely dyed black, quite long and unwieldy, but coiled and crimped about her head with plastic flower-barrettes. The woman looked like a painted windup doll whose back had been cruelly broken. Seeing the surprise in my face she said, drawing herself up to her full height, "You can talk to him, dear, but he won't be able to talk to you. I will do that for him."
"But he-he is-conscious? He isn't-?"
"Your father is sick, dear. He's had three operations in the past year, for cancer of the throat and esophagus." Hildie spoke in hissed sibilants, pausing. "He has lost fifty pounds and he-has been disfigured by the surgery. He's only himself, dear, for a few hours at a time. Most visitors he won't let in, no more. Only me 'cause I'm his friend and he trusts me." Hildie flashed defiant eyes at me. "I'm his only friend."
This was a rebuke to me and my brothers; a rebuke I accepted as our due; I would not protest. "On the phone you said he knows he's-dying?"
Hildie shook her head sadly. "Oh, he knows, but he don't know. Or don't want to know. Sick people are like us only just different. Their minds play the same kinds of tricks on them our minds play, but more pathetic. A person sick like your father, sometimes he's so weak he can't move his head, can't open his eyes to see, can't talk even if he wanted to talk, and gets confused where he is, who's with him, what's happening… I had nursing classes," Hildie said, as if I'd challenged her. "In Salt Lake City I was studying to be a nurse."
"I see. That's so-fortunate. For my father."
I smiled foolishly at my father's friend in white. I didn't know what to say to her, to placate her anxiety about me.
Hildie snorted with derisive laughter, mirthless and startling. "Oh, yeah! But he'd a whole lot rather be well."
Hildie Pomeroy was so much shorter than me, she stood with her neck sharply craned; her head, that seemed disproportionately large for her stunted body, was crooked upward at a painful angle. I felt that simply by standing before her, looming over her, I was discomforting her; my very presence must have been an impediment; the poor woman spoke breathlessly, stroking her hair and fussing with a little gold cross on a chain around her neck. (Her neck, too, had been powdered, but less effectively than her face; you could see a cross-hatching of lines in the powdery surface.) It seemed to me that Hildie Pomeroy had rehearsed some of her remarks; she'd repeated things she'd told me on the phone; her need was to establish absolutely and beyond my questioning her connection with the man who was my father though this connection was a mysterious one, not to be spelled out, neither was it to be doubted by me, an intruder. Hildie fixed me with bright, damp, intensely brown eyes; startlingly beautiful, thick-lashed brown eyes; I could see that a man might fall in love with such eyes.
I must have seemed to Hildie to be in a state of shock; instead of expressing anguish, or grief, I was smiling; my smile felt as if it had been stapled into my face. A remote, ironic voice sounded in my ears And I've come so far! Hildie was saying, matter-of-factly, "Your father has told me, dear: you remember him as he was. That is his hope. I'll take you to where he's lying, out on the back porch, during the day he likes the back porch, the TV's out there, too, it's a portable TV I can move real easy, and the porch is a comfortable place for him when he wakes up and doesn't know where he is, it's consoling. You know, your father did not have an easy life. Even before this, before the operations. When you're bad sick, and go a little out of your head, and your legs and sometimes even your arms don't feel like they belong to you, what you want most is to be consoled. So your father -wants me to bring you out back to where he is, dear, he's been waiting for you all day. But you'll have to close your eyes. Or I will hide your eyes somehow. So he can see you. Then you can maybe turn around, your back to him, or you can sit, dear, there's a nice chair I brought out for you, and I can help you talk to him, because he can't say words now, not words you would understand but I understand; but only for a few minutes because he gets so exhausted, this time of day he's usually asleep. He sleeps through a hot afternoon and I feed him around dusk, his special foods, then he sleeps. See, dear, I know this is a surprise, the way he is, but it's his wish, and it's for the best." Hildie paused, smiling. "For you, too, dear, it's for the best."
This was a warning. I understood. A dying man. Death. You don't want to see. You're too young.
I had in fact been envisioning my father as he'd appeared to me four years before. Middle-aged but still swaggering-young, in the way that men who work with their hands and their bodies out-of-doors seem somehow to remain young; except if you look too closely into their leathery, lined faces. I'd envisioned my father waiting for me here in Crescent, Utah, a little older, more ravaged, but eager to see me, and in a different setting: an airy, high-ceilinged bedroom with a window looking out upon mountains, and a cobalt-blue sky. Crescent, Utah. The West. But Railroad Street was a narrow, poorly paved street that intersected with the town's attenuated Main Street, and the peeling sparrow-colored clapboard bungalow with the grassless front yard was on a block of similar bungalows and trailer homes; the backyard ran into a raised railroad embankment of cinders and weeds. Straggly, diseased-looking cotton woods surrounded the house. Somewhere close by, a chain saw was being used. This might be Strykersville. Near the railroad tracks. And the town of Crescent! So ordinary. Only the name was beautiful as poetry. Looking for a motel, I'd been stunned at how small Crescent was, how diminished its communal life, a scattering of wood frame churches, a downtown of about two blocks, fake-brick facades of a few newer businesses but otherwise everything was old, decades old, older than Strykersville though it must have been settled far later; farther on, the state highway was a jumble of the usual gas stations and drive-in restaurants, sports equipment stores, a derelict A & P, Discount Carpets, a drive-in theater with a broken marquee, beer and liquor stores, taverns. To have come so far: Strykersville! Except the small upstate New York town of my girlhood had had a surprisingly good public library, and a YWCA where I could swim, and I could see that Crescent, Utah, was too small for such amenities. A few minutes beyond the town limits was open country, flat and treeless and ungiving; a harsh hot wind blew; even the mountain range, on my Esso map romantically called Roan Cliffs, were dull as eraser smudges in the heat haze.
I told Hildie yes, yes of course I would comply with my father's wishes, and with hers.
"I-I brought him a gift. I mean-both of you."
Holding out to the hunched-over little doll-woman in white a garishly wrapped wicker basket of fruit whose cellophane wrapper crinkled noisily. This absurd gift for a dying man I'd purchased at a food store in Grand Junction, Colorado; I hadn't known what the precise nature of my father's cancer was; I'd been assuming lung cancer. Could the poor man eat fruit? Apples, oranges, mangoes, kiwi, bananas? Was such a gift a cruel, unthinking joke? What had I been thinking? Hildie murmured thank you and took the basket from me briskly, and set it aside. She asked if, before she took me to visit with my father, I would like a glass of water; eagerly I said yes; my throat was parched, I'd been having trouble speaking. Sand and grit seemed to coat my mouth. Hildie led me farther into the house, into a cramped little kitchen with an old-fashioned humming Frigidaire and a gas stove and worn linoleum; the kitchen held an oatmeal-yeasty smell. Through its single window I saw the foreshortened view of the weedy railroad embankment about thirty yards away. What a roaring there must be, when a train came through! My poor father. Like a nurse, though not smiling, Hildie took time to run water from a faucet at the sink until, testing it with a forefinger, she judged it cold enough to drink; she filled a glass for me; I thanked her, taking it from her with shaky fingers, and before drinking pressed it against my warm forehead. It was a hot summer afternoon: in the nineties: a dry, scintillating heat, a sun-glaring-blinding heat, not humid as in upstate New York. I'm afraid. So afraid. Help me. Hildie Pomeroy was watching me closely. In that mixture of extreme femininity and steely resolve she reminded me of certain of my school classmates in Strykersville, girls who hadn't gone on to college but had remained behind to be beauticians, dental assistants, nurses, nurse's aides. Almost, observing my pale, strained face, Hildie had an impulse to touch me; to console me; I wanted her to touch me, and to console me; I was terrified of my father's dying; I did not know what I would say to him. "This is kind of you," I said, licking my lips. "This is"-my voice faltered, I hadn't any idea what I was trying to say-"so strange to me. Thank you." Hildie Pomeroy frowned. I saw that my first impression of her had been incomplete. She was a sturdy little troll of a woman, in her rayon-white costume; she might've been as young as thirty, or as old as fifty; she had short, muscled legs and thick ankles, strong shoulders and forearms; a clearly defined, shapely bust that strained at the rayon shirt; her hair so bizarrely dyed, crow-black and lustreless, and her painted doll's face, and those beautiful moist brown eyes! My father's lover! His wife? I tried to recall Ida's face and could not. I was too far away from home. Staring at Hildie Pomeroy I could not have said if she was an unnervingly attractive woman, despite her disfigured back, or ghastly; if her painted face, meant to suggest feminine sweetness, and subjugation, and a desire to please, made me want to smile in sympathy, or turn away in contempt.
Hildie saw my indecision. My fear. She touched my wrist, lightly. On her fingers were glittery inexpensive rings; her nails were small talons, painted a lurid bright crimson to match her lips. "You drove such a long distance, dear. By yourself?" She shook her head doubtfully. "It's dangerous. For a woman. How on earth will you get back? On the map, it's so far."
In my fear I seemed to be plucking at, with childish fingers, a consolation of philosophy. Nietzsche's affirmation of eternal occurrence. We have lived this life, and this hour, many times; we have not yet been defeated; we are strong enough to endure; we must only say Yes. As Hildie led me to the porch at the back of the house, to be brought into my father's presence.
She'd checked him and, yes, he was awake-"Not awake like you and me, dear, but, for him, awake." He could see me for a few minutes, no more. Gently Hildie took my hand, her warm dry fingers gripping my clammy-damp fingers, and urged me out onto the porch, positioning me where my father could see me but, my back to him, I couldn't see him. "H-Hello, Daddy? Hello. It's-" uttering my name as if my father might not know it; daring to call him "Daddy," as if that had been my name for him when I'd been a child. My knees were shaking, my eyes stared blindly into space. It was dusk; the wooden porch was shaded from what would have been a bright, pitiless sunshine by day, by an immense gnarled vine that might have been grape, or wisteria, but had neither fruit nor blossoms, only a tangle of insect-stippled leaves; and by an inexpensive screen nailed into place between the railing and the roof. The screen was a reproduction of a Japanese watercolor of foliage and butterflies, badly faded, but exquisite in design. Hildie had made up a daytime bed for my father a few yards away, on a sofa with creaking springs. I could sense his presence immediately, though I didn't turn my head so much as a fraction of an inch; I knew that he was staring at me; his vision was weakened from his illness, but he was staring greedily at me. I heard a low straining guttural Uh-uh-uhhh which Hildie quickly translated-" 'Hello!' your father says. He's so happy you are here." I said, wiping at my eyes, "Oh, Daddy, I'm so happy to be here, too. I only wish-" Hildie poked me in warning, for what was I going to say; what are the words one utters to a dying man, that require being said aloud? My father squirmed in his bed saying Uh-uhhh and breathing harshly, and Hildie translated, "He asks you to shut your eyes and turn to him so he can see your face. But you must shut your eyes tight for if you look at him, you won't like what you see. And he won't like you to see it." I shut my eyelids, which were trembling badly, and Hildie turned me to face the man in the bed; the man I believed was my father; the man who was Death, and yet my father. "Don't be afraid, dear," Hildie said, gently, aiding me by pressing the palms of her hands lightly over my eyes, in such a way that most of my face was exposed. Hildie said to my father, enunciating her words as if my father would have had difficulty hearing otherwise, "Isn't she a brave girl, to drive alone to see you, so many miles! I would love her best, too." My father must have been staring at me in wonderment for he was silent; he didn't try to speak again. His breathing had become more labored; you listened with anxious fascination waiting for such breathing to cease. It was a terrible sound to live with intimately and yet I thought This is the sound of life for Hildie Pomeroy, so long as it continues.
5
And were they lovers? Never could I ask.
I was shy in the woman's presence as in the presence of any woman intimately and mysteriously connected with my father; knowing secrets about him I would never know. And how proud Hildie was of being his nurse: she sponge-bathed him daily, gently washed what remained of his hair, shaved him, fed him pureed foods, gave him his numerous pills, checked his temperature several times a day, carried away his bodily wastes that accumulated in sacs beneath the sofa. She slept in a room close by his and was wakened every night by my father thrashing about and moaning and she came to him immediately, comforted him, consoled him. "It's his wish to die at home. And this is his home now, he knows"-Hildie uttered this statement with such pride, I felt almost a surge of envy.
Hildie had met my father in the late winter of 1964, in the Rendezvous Cafe on Main Street where she worked as a cashier. He'd come into the Cafe for a drink, with a local man whom he knew, a truck driver for a gravel company in town; my father was looking for work as a trucker. This was shortly after his release from the Utah State Facility for Men at Goshen, where he'd served eighteen months of a three-year sentence on a charge of assault in 1961. Hildie passed lightly over this fact to say, with vehemence, "The other man in the fight, where they were working up in Duchesne, he was the cause. He hit Erich first, with a shovel, and Erich only defended himself. He lost control, he said. You know how a man is. 'It's like an avalanche,' he told me. 'Once it starts you don't know how it's going to end and you can't stop it.' " Hildie spoke to me in a fierce, lowered voice as to a co-conspirator. She was tugging at the thin gold chain around her neck. "The witnesses lied, the bastards! All except one. Swore on the Bible right in court, and lied! So Erich was found guilty when all he'd done was defend himself."
Guilty! Prison! My father had been in prison. The revelation was a shock to me, years after the fact, yet somehow didn't surprise me. There was a melancholy logic to it: my father had wanted us to think he'd died. Better dead, than a criminal. He'd wanted to spare us shame; he'd guessed that, for his family, grief might be more tolerable than shame.
I wiped at my eyes. It was unfair! He hadn't given us a choice. He hadn't given me a choice.
Hildie was squinting at me suspiciously. "You knew this, didn't you? Your family?"
I told Hildie yes, we'd known. Something.
"And not one of you came to see him at Goshen? That's so?"
I told Hildie yes, that was so.
"An innocent man! Your father."
Hildie was disgusted with us, shaking her head. She would have visited her beloved Erich under any circumstances. That went without question.
I was staring at my hands that looked blameless. They were slender, restless hands; attractive hands, I suppose; I wore no jewelry, unlike Hildie and her glittery rings, and only a loose-fitting inexpensive Bulova watch on my left wrist. The short, evenly filed nails I'd managed finally to get clean, at the motel, before coming to see my father. It has never been my nature to defend myself against another's moral indignation; in the presence of individuals who assume moral superiority, I lapse into silence; think what you wish to think, what you need to think, is my acquiescence. For though my brothers and I hadn't known that my father was in prison in Utah, it's quite possible that we wouldn't have come to see him in any case. It's possible that, in our deepest hearts, we'd preferred to think he was dead; he'd read our hearts correctly. This was utterly possible. I could not debate Hildie Pomeroy, a stranger who would claim to know my father better than I knew him.
Hildie said, aggressively, "He's a man of pride, your father. Anybody insults him, he gets what he deserves, see?"
I told Hildie yes, this was so.
"In the fight he was hurt bad in the throat, he said. That started the cancer. He'd have these coughing fits in the prison but they never gave a damn, said it was just from smoking. Finally they paroled him. The bastards!"
I pressed my fingertips against my eyes. I had no reply, no words. We were in the Rendezvous Cafe, in a booth near the cashier's glass-topped counter. Hildie had had several glasses of beer and spoke loudly, others in the Cafe could overhear. Very likely they were listening: they were curious about me, a stranger. It was as if the more vehemently Hildie spoke, the greater the possibility my father wouldn't die.
"An innocent man, treated like shit. I told Erich he could sue. We could sue. There's an uncle of mine in Salt Lake City, he knows one of these 'contingency' lawyers-"
I would have liked to ask Hildie Pomeroy how she knew with such certainty that my father was "innocent"; and what exactly did "innocent" mean to her? How does a woman know what she so fiercely wishes to believe? Truth is wish; we wish to believe; what we believe, we invent as truth. And where love intervenes, truth is lost. I was thinking of Vernor Matheius whom I'd loved, or had imagined I'd loved, more than life itself; more, certainly, than my own life; I was thinking of the man's duplicity, dishonesty, betrayal. I knew that I could believe the very worst of anyone I loved, no matter how much I loved him; for all things are possible. I could have believed that my father was a violent man, even a murderer; it wouldn't have changed my fundamental feeling for him. But this is unnatural, isn't it? In a woman at least. A passionate "feminine" woman like Hildie Pomeroy. As a woman you're supposed to deny ugly facts, you're supposed to be faithful, loyal. Hildie, breathing deeply, incensed, didn't seem to guess how I felt, how my heart beat in revulsion for her self-righteousness; gently, she touched my wrist as if to console me. "But I'm taking care of him now. He knows he can trust me. I own that house, that's mine. It was my parents' house for fifty years and now it's mine."
Hildie had invited me to the Rendezvous Cafe where she worked five nights of the week. The owner was an old friend of hers, and knew about my father; everyone who knew Hildie in the Cafe seemed sympathetic with her situation, asking after the man they called Erich; to a few of these people Hildie introduced me as Erich's daughter-"She's come to visit him, for now. She's a good girl." Hildie had apologized for not offering me supper at home; most nights, she ate at the Cafe; she'd gotten out of the habit of making meals for herself, only for my father. She'd been working at the Rendezvous Cafe as a waitress, then as cashier, for twenty-two years; she'd lived in Salt Lake City for a while after high school-"But that didn't work out."
A small painful drama in those elegiac words. It didn't work out.
Twenty-two years at the Rendezvous Cafe! Amid the single row of fake leather booths against a wall, the dozen tables and the sticky linoleum floor and the walls of mirror panels alternating with advertisements for beer and cigarettes; a radio permanently tuned to a local station except when the TV was on, blaring news and sports and weather and advertisements. The grease-filmed front window of the Cafe was covered partly in aluminum foil to keep out the sun, and a dully throbbing air-conditioning unit jutted out of a rear wall; a smell of beer, cigarette smoke, fried foods prevailed. Outside, pink neon tubing rendezvou cafe. In this place, Hildie Pomeroy was at home: a hunchedback little doll-woman painted and powdered and her dyed-black hair coiled around her head and affixed with showy rhinestone barrettes; wearing, for the evening, a frilly sunflower-splotched dress that outlined her shapely bosom. How like a crayon drawing Hildie looked, executed with a flourish. Seated, her head high, she might have been a normal-sized woman; so long as you faced her, you couldn't see her poor deformed spine.
When I asked Hildie whether my father had a doctor in Crescent, she shrugged her shoulders irritably. Drinking beer, and muttering what sounded like "Bastard!" Awkwardly I said, "It's very kind of you to take care of him. It can't be easy-"
Hildie flared up as if I'd insulted her. " 'Kind'! What d' you mean, 'kind'? Erich is my dear friend."
"Oh, I know. I-"
"Look, before he got so bad, we were planning to marry." Hildie spoke with an air of incredulity, as if the thwarting of such plans was difficult to comprehend. "It happened so goddam fast. After the last operation he just was-was-never himself again."
Hildie drained a beer glass, and her bright damp eyes seemed to wink at me over the rim. Marry? But why not? I had no right to doubt her word.
A customer had come to the cashier's counter to pay and to buy a pack of cigarettes. Hildie quickly heaved her trim little body out of the booth, teetered on high heels to perch on a stool at the cash register. Basking in the attention of male customers, Hildie fairly quivered with pleasure. It was as if a camera were turned on her. "H'lo, Petey! How's things?" Casual banter, long-running jokes, flirtations. In the Rendezvous Cafe, Hildie Pomeroy was a fixture, a "character"; over the years she'd been in love with Rod, with Garry, with Ernest, with Tuck; possibly with Pete, complaining jocularly about something, and picking his discolored front teeth with a toothpick. Hildie nodded vehemently, sympathetically. You listened, you nodded, you smiled and you laughed, it was what you did with your life, for, otherwise, what?
Before I returned to my motel that evening the manager of the Cafe, whose name was Rod, a burly man in his fifties with an oily pitted skin and watery eyes, shirt partly unbuttoned to show a swath of graying chest hair, that male-sexy manner that has nothing to do with a man's age or his actual interest in any woman, leaned over me in the booth, dropping his voice so that Hildie at the cash register wouldn't hear, "It's real good for you to be with Hildie right now, the poor gal's gonna be hard hit."