64
Connell was leaving for college soon. His mother told him to take his father out for the day. Batting cages and driving ranges, their go-to spots for years, were out, and there wasn’t a game at Shea. He brought him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with him.
The lobby was aswarm with refugees from the rain. “It looks like a waiting room for a train station,” his father said, and the remark’s aptness took Connell by surprise. He was taken back to another time, years before, when the two of them stood at the top of the Met’s steps, about to go in. “This is what makes our country great,” his father had said as he rubbed two quarters together. “This is more than enough to get us in.” He had handed Connell the coins. “Bygone philanthropists, men of vision and character, gave something back to the people. To see all this priceless art, you pay what you feel you can.” His father had paid the suggested rate anyway.
Connell led him up the endless flight from the lobby. They stood in front of a painting called “The Gulf Stream” that depicted a lone man on the deck of a small, broken-masted boat in a little plateau between substantial waves on the open sea, sharks circling. The man leaned back against an elbow, looking like a champion of calm, or else like a man resigned to his circumstances.
“Homer,” his father said.
“You know him?”
“He’s one of my favorites. When I was a kid, I picked up a book on him in the library on Union Street. I didn’t know who he was. I just liked the picture on the cover. I kept that book for months.”
“I didn’t know that.” Connell was taken aback at the thought that his father remembered aesthetic preferences. He thought with a pang of the many afternoons they’d spent on different floors of the house. He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.
“This looks like dire straits,” his father said. “I wonder what he did when he was in dire straits.”
“Who?” Connell asked. “Homer? Or the guy in the boat?”
His father only nodded. “Thank God all these artists did what they did,” he said, “or we’d have nothing.”
Connell laughed. “Maybe not nothing,” he said.
? ? ?
The rain was coming down in sheets when they left. His father’s hands were shaking. Connell put a hand in his armpit and guided him down the wet stairs, rain whipping at them from all directions.
At the bottom, his father stopped short, and Connell was annoyed. He wanted to get out from under the stinging droplets. In the thick gray of the avenue he could hardly see his father’s face behind the rain slicker’s hood and his wet glasses.
“You all right?” he asked, and then he saw the bright flash of a toothy smile.
“It’s so beautiful,” his father said.
“What is?”
“This,” he said, gesturing around. “Everything.”
? ? ?
He went looking for some tape in his father’s study and found him sitting there staring up at his diplomas. Some books on the ends of shelves had fallen over, and Connell stood them up. A fine layer of dust covered everything.
A couple of hours later, he brought the tape back and found his father in the same position. At first he thought his father must have fallen asleep, but then he saw that he was awake and staring at the wall. Connell asked him what he was thinking about.
“It must have taken a lot of work to get these,” his father said.
? ? ?
Connell’s mother was at work when it was time for him to head to the train to go to the airport to leave for Chicago for the first time. He wished she’d taken the day off. He slung an army duffel bag over each shoulder and got his backpack on and started walking. His father was walking into town to go to church, so they walked together.
When they crossed the overpass that stretched across the Sprain Brook Parkway, Connell saw cars streaming by in both directions and thought of how much a map of roads and highways, when it included all the little ones like this, looked like a map of rivers, or an illustration of the circulatory system. He stopped and watched for a while. He was having another of those inchoate ideas that he couldn’t entirely articulate to himself. He knew that these cloudy notions would come into sharper focus when he was away at college, where he would divest himself of the stultifying habits of personality and the false conclusions of biography and shine the light of pure reason on experience.
When they reached the bridge over the Bronx River a block from the train, his father was the one to stop. He leaned over the stone wall. At first Connell thought his father’s mind was just wandering, but then he wondered whether his father might not be imitating him from a few minutes earlier, so he put one of the bags down and tugged on his father’s sleeve as cars sped past. “Dad!” he said, more exasperated than he had intended. His father shook his head and pointed down at the water. “What is it? What’s up?” Then Connell saw a frog on a rock, lazing in the sun. Maybe this was the frog’s habitual spot. Maybe his father had seen it before and remembered to look for it. He seemed pleased that Connell had been there to see it too. He clapped, and it jumped into the river and left a ripple on the water.
He was half a block away when he saw the 12:23 train pull into the station. If he ran, he could make it. His father looked stooped and pale from the heat and uneasy on his legs. Connell could take the next train, at 12:55, or even the one after it; he had plenty of time to make his flight.
He led him under the tracks to Slave to the Grind, the coffee shop he had haunted all summer.
“Two brain freezers,” he said when they got to the counter. After he’d said it, he felt like a fool. If his father noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Connell bought a corn muffin for them to split. He led him to a table in the back, where they drank and ate slowly.
“I’m sorry to be going so far.”
“Have fun,” his father said. “Study what you want.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Forget that. Live your life.”
Outside, heat radiated off cars, and the sun pounded through a severely clear sky. The town thrummed with end-of-summer energy. He had another twenty minutes until the 1:23.
“You okay getting back by yourself?”
His father nodded. They walked to the station.
“You didn’t make it to church.”
“That was just as good,” he said, pointing toward the coffee shop.
He watched his father walk off to get the newspaper; then he took a seat in the shade on the cool concrete bench and pulled a book out of his backpack. Thoughts of his father walking home alone to the empty house kept distracting him, so that he had read only a single page when the horn announced the approaching train, but in his flurried efforts to put his book away and get his baggage settled before the train arrived, he was able to forget about his father entirely.