He lit a cigarette. “Fair enough,” he said.
I’d spent the final year of my father’s marriage agonizing over whether or not to tell him about Elisa’s affair. She’d asked my father for $6 million to build a boat and sail around the world with her new “friend,” and my father had taken this at face value. But when Elisa attended Arkady’s yoga workshop in Mexico, one night at the bar she’d bragged about her liaison. “Eric would do anything for me,” she told the group between gulps from her Corona. “Because he doesn’t know about sailor boy.”
My own marriage had been failing at the time. Financial stress had been hard on the relationship, as had trying to run a business together. And taking care of a new baby, I hadn’t had the bandwidth to grieve Charlie properly. I feared sometimes I might be carried away by the torrent of my own anger and sadness, and distance became my new mode of survival, all those unresolved feelings having calcified into a wall that kept everything out, even happiness. The withdrawal from the marriage happened over a period of years, and during that time both Arkady and I hoped the distance was only temporary. Perhaps it had been easier to focus my attention on my father’s problems.
Then one day, when Mishka was almost four, I called my father from an airport and told him that Arkady and I would be separating. “We’ll remain good friends, though,” I added. “Just as you and Mom always managed to.”
“Elisa’s moving out, too,” my father said. He soon filed for divorce, at Bill Penner’s urging, and the round-the-world boat trip was canceled.
We left the restaurant, my father, Mishka, and I, and drove over to my father’s house, the lush summer lawn out front in full bloom. For the first time in thirteen years, there was no need to check my father’s driveway for Elisa’s car, hoping she would be out.
My father had just finished remodeling. “How do you like it?” he asked when we came inside.
I peered into the living room from the hallway and spotted a real skeleton sitting in an upholstered armchair. My father had always been fascinated with skulls and bones, and often had a skull sitting on a bookshelf. “It’s beautiful,” I said, reminded suddenly of his solemn statement about Elisa eight years before: “If anything ever happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.”
A few months later, my father, by now suffering from diabetes, noticed an infection in his leg. An infected sore, hardly unusual in a diabetic, could have been treated easily enough. But he decided to let it go—for months. Did he suppose he had lived long enough—or that living without money was a fate worse than death? Perhaps systemic gangrene seemed a better choice than poverty.
Calling me late one night in San Francisco, just to talk, he seemed uncharacteristically at peace. We discussed the weather and my book, avoiding entirely the subject of the business. I told him how much Mishka loved the toy electric car he’d sent for Christmas. For once he didn’t tell me to “speak English” when I said Mishka instead of Michael, our running joke. We laughed a lot. He seemed almost high, in fact. Unfettered. Something was wrong.
“Dad, it’s late . . . what are you doing awake?”
“I love you, Franny,” he said then.
I told him I loved him, too, and clung to the silence that followed, before he hung up, as if everything we’d ever wanted to say was there in that pause.
When he collapsed on his bathroom floor two days later, Ingrid, his housekeeper, took him to the hospital. He forbade her to call anyone in the family.
One week later, he died alone at four o’clock in the morning.
SELF-PORTRAIT OF ERIC STROH, 2004
In my father’s house just before the funeral, I noticed that the skeleton that had been sitting in the armchair was gone. I went and sat in its place, taking in the scene for the last time. Soon everything in the room would change. Several antique handguns sat on top of the mantel. Rare books filled the bookshelves. The eighteenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes flanked the fireplace, and I was transported back to that Easter weekend long ago; I heard my father’s shoes crunching the Manhattan pavement, felt his warm, protective grip on my hand, inhaled the exhaust from the taxis passing us on Park Avenue. My father looked down at me and smiled, just before we crossed the street. “Having fun, Minuscule?” he asked.
Clutching his hand more tightly, I told him I was.