His mother had called and asked him to come home and he had said he had a responsibility to the director and the cast to be in the play. He could hear from her silence that she was shocked to hear him talk of responsibility in refusing to come home and help, and the truth was that he had shocked himself by saying it.
He hadn’t realized how scared he was to see his father until his mother’s call. He hadn’t intended never to return; he just had no immediate plans to do so. Jenna had been the best excuse possible, but now she didn’t seem like much of an excuse anymore. He could say he was staying in Chicago to work on things with her—my future wife, he could hear himself rationalizing later, or at least that was how I thought at the time—but he saw the truth of their relationship too clearly to allow himself to pretend later that he hadn’t.
Had he tried to grow up quickly to cover up feeling like a child? Had he asked her to marry him because he needed a grand unifying theory to explain his absence? The thing was, he himself had been scared of marrying her. He didn’t want it, really, any more than she did. He was more relieved than brokenhearted, but now he had to think about everything he wasn’t doing. He had run out of excuses not to go home.
? ? ?
He quit the play, crammed his pair of army duffels full of dirty clothes, and got on a plane. His mother said she couldn’t pick him up, so he took the bus and train and walked from the station.
He squeezed through the back door with the bags and was struck by the punishing volume of the television coming from the den. He remembered his mother saying tests had revealed that his father had lost some hearing. He headed toward the den but found his father in the vestibule, balanced precariously on a stepladder, looking through the little windows set into the front doors. Connell muted the television and went back and called to him, but his father only mumbled something, so Connell walked over and touched his shoulder. “Dad!” he said, more forcefully. “I’m home.” The news seemed to leave no impression at all, though he’d been away for almost a year.
“He’s out there.” His father gave Connell a serious, confidential look.
“Who?”
“The man,” he said darkly. “That man. He always comes.”
“Where is he?”
Connell raised himself on his toes and looked out. No one was there except the gardener, who had finished pruning the hedges and moved to the house next door.
“Do you mean him?” he said, pointing. “You mean Sal?”
“No, no, no.” His father’s eyes flashed; his hand twitched; his hushed tone and terrified stare implied that anything was possible. Connell wanted to believe in his father’s continued ability to perceive danger accurately. Had he arrived just in time?
Connell turned again to the window; then he backed away, feeling foolish.
“Come down off there,” he said, holding his father’s elbow, but his father stood frozen. “It’s just a step. Just put your leg forward.” His father offered a tentative foot, then retracted it and tried the other. “Lean on me,” Connell said, and his father did. Once on firm ground, he clapped a couple of times before he seemed to register his son’s presence and looked embarrassed. He went to the window again. He was animated now, his finger jabbing at it.
“He’s there! He’s there!”
Connell darted over. His father was right: the man was there, and he was famously unstoppable. He might deliver death and destruction; he might deliver circulars for the Food Emporium.
“Dad!” he said. “Don’t you know that’s the mailman?”
The mailman disappeared behind the hedge. “I don’t trust him,” his father said, and then headed for the kitchen with a surprising quickness in his step. He lifted one of the blinds in the window above the sink so high that his whole face would have been visible from the other side.
When his father moved aside, Connell saw that the blinds were bent in several places. His mother must have reconciled herself to living with them rather than replacing them over and over. This one change amounted to a revolution in her thinking.
His father opened the door and then the screen, which swung back hard and crashed into him as he headed outside. When he returned, he was pressing a bundle of mail against his chest with both arms. Some pieces fell to the floor and he released the remainder onto the island like a cascading pile of apples.
“What are you doing?” Connell asked, flabbergasted.
“I get the mail.”
“Just like that.”
“I get it every day.”
“But a minute ago you were saying you didn’t trust him. You were totally spooked.”
“He comes every day,” his father said. “I don’t know who he is.”
“He’s the mailman,” Connell said desperately.
“I don’t trust him.”
“Dad,” he said, “he’s the mailman.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“But you know he’s delivering the mail?”
“Yes,” he said reasonably. “He comes every day.”
“So why are you suspicious of him?”
“I don’t know who he is,” he said. “I get the mail every day. That’s my job. I have other jobs.”
He shuffled into the den and sat down. Connell followed him and unmuted the television. The volume shot out like a cannon report. Connell retreated to the kitchen and picked up the fallen letters, wondering when the last time was that his father had opened a piece of mail and whether he’d ever open one again. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The den was drenched in noisy static, and he went in and found his father watching the electronic snow of a lost signal as though it were a program. His father didn’t stir in that crashing noise. He clutched the remote like an amulet. Connell tried to take it from him, but his father had an iron grip on it. Connell went to the television, lowered the volume, and changed the channel until the picture came up.
“This thing,” his father said disgustedly. “It doesn’t work.” His mouth hung open, and a little drool leaked out. Connell used his father’s own shirtsleeve to wipe it up. His father gave him a knowing look. Connell wondered how much awareness still lurked in him. A faint whining hum emanated from him.
“It’s good to see you,” Connell said, throwing an arm around him.
His father kept looking at the television but patted his own knee. “Good,” he said. “Good.”
? ? ?
They watched Columbo. Peter Falk’s Beckettian detective wore his trademark trench coat and screwed up his face in his world-weary, gently bemused way—experience and innocence mingling in him. Connell thought, Thank God for Columbo. Thank God for Law & Order reruns. He didn’t know how he would ever fill the time with his father without television.
When the commercials came on, he had no idea what to say. His mother would ride in on a barge of stories about family friends or simply accounts of her day. Connell felt disrespectful delivering reports from the front lines of experience. He felt a little better talking about things his father knew already or that they had experienced together, but it felt awkward to introduce them into conversation. Still, he could feel it coming, the need to revert to the familiar.
“I have to say I like Paul O’Neill,” Connell pronounced academically. His father continued to look at the television. “I’m not one of those Mets fans who hate a guy like that just to hate him. He’s the heart of that team, a blue-collar worker.” The silence on his father’s end of the exchange was growing desperate. “Yankees or not, it was exciting to have a New York team in the playoffs again.” This last remark seemed to have gotten his father’s attention, because his face brightened into a smile, as though it were news to him; and then Connell realized that it was news to him, even though he’d watched all the playoff games the previous October and Connell had called after every one.
“Yeah!” he said. “Good!”
Connell felt stupid for trying to tread carefully around the old man. It was time to face facts: his father’s short-term memory was shot. He probably didn’t remember anything longer than a few minutes. As soon as Connell left the room, his father wouldn’t even know he had come home in the first place. He wouldn’t have wanted his son to sit around with him on a Friday night; it would have embarrassed him, and Connell didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so he went upstairs to get ready, because there were people he hadn’t seen in a long time.
? ? ?
He still had his first bottle of cologne, which he had made last a few years by dabbing it sparingly, once behind each ear, once on either side of the neck. He had sweated it out on dance floors and left its trace in heated grapplings on couches. When he’d departed for college, he’d left it behind on the counter in his bathroom, a little offering at the altar of adolescence.
He found the bottle in his parents’ bathroom, down to the dregs. A vague horror crept into him, turning to fury. His father must have scooped the bottle up in his wanderings through the house. He could see him struggling to open it, sloshing its contents around, watching it pour through his fingers into the sink. He imagined him clapping it to his neck and chest in big cupped palms and uncoordinated splashes, trying to steal some of the future that stretched out before his son. How much could he even smell anymore? And what use did he have for cologne anyway? That part of his life was over.
Connell marched downstairs with the bottle. “Did you do this?” he asked, thrusting it under his nose. “Did you take this? There was more than half a bottle in here.”
“I don’t know,” his father said, looking scared. “I don’t know.”
This time he didn’t soften it for him.
“I get it,” he said. “You don’t know. Well, you used it. I know it’s just a bottle of cologne. But it was special to me.”
His father’s eyes widened; his forehead wrinkled; his mouth turned down. He sat back in the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Part of Connell wanted to say it was no big deal, but he couldn’t somehow.
“Look,” he said. “Just be careful with my stuff. Okay? Whatever I left in my room. Maybe you could leave that stuff alone.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He felt his resolve wavering. He had to resist comforting him. His father ran roughshod over everything, and everybody was supposed to go around picking up the pieces. You couldn’t get mad at him; you were supposed to feel sorry for him all the time. Well, forget that. Connell was the son, not the father. It wasn’t his job yet to pick up the pieces.
He went to a friend’s place in the city. They hit a few bars, closed the last one down. He took the first train home in the morning, the five-thirty.