Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 11
Junior looked ashamed of his own embarrassment, and his head tilted downward as if avoiding eye contact with me rendered him invisible. I considered not meeting our parents to please Junior, but it would make me miserable and I needed to see my father once more. Junior could hardly accuse me of being selfish for wanting to see my parents.
“I want to see them again.”
“Again? Who died?”
“No one,” I lied. “It’s just an expression. I meant I’d like to see them young again.”
“I know you’re lying,” Junior declared before turning his head away to stare out the window. I felt awful. No one should know when their parents are going to die; if you love your parents, and I did, it would only make you needlessly sad, and if you loathed them, it would only make you frustratingly impatient. I’d already burdened Junior with the suicide of our sister; adding our father’s death would make me insufferable.
Junior rubbed his forehead slowly. “What am I going to tell her?”
He appeared to be ashamed of me being twenty years older than him. Normally, aging occurs gradually, and yet here I was, him, instantly middle aged. It had to be as disturbing as going through puberty in a day would be.
“I don’t know.” Then an idea occurred to me. A lie that involved money entering Junior’s wallet would probably placate our mother. I’d worked for some major oddballs over the years, but she never made derogatory comments about any of them—even the guy who looked and sounded like a carny who hired me in high school to sell souvenirs at Buffalo Sabres hockey games. Her goodwill could be bought; she’d glad-hand anyone who signed her kids’ paychecks.
“Tell her what you told Carol. I’m a comic book dealer who asked you to accompany him on a cross-country buying trip. I’m paying you and you’re gaining experience.”
Junior nodded. “That might work.”
“What are we going to call you?” Taylor asked. “It might be weird if you’re both named John and look like you’re related.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” I said. Neither had Junior. We discussed possible names and settled on Kurt, as a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. All of us loved his early science fiction stories.
I felt uneasy as we turned onto Palmer Avenue. At my parents’ house, I always became a Janus-like figure, simultaneously glad to be there and anxious to leave.
My parents still lived in the same house I grew up in, a Dutch Colonial revival with a gambrel roof that they’d purchased from my grandparents, a house that my mother would still be living in almost sixty years later, in 2006! This isn’t uncommon in Buffalo, where once people acquire a living room, they often end up dying there. We lived in Kenmore, an older suburb of Buffalo. When I was young, elm trees formed a canopy over the street, and driving to our house was like passing through a tunnel. But in the late ’60s all the trees died from Dutch elm disease and were replaced by other species that still looked spindly more than thirty years later.
We pulled up to the back door, where my parents had recently installed a cement driveway next to the house, which served as a patio during the summer and off-street parking for my mother’s car during the winter. A gas grill, a teak umbrella table with matching chairs, and several colorful windsocks mounted on poles were carefully arranged next to a whimsically painted wooden sign that said, “Your smile is all the sunshine I need!” The paint on the sign was weathered, giving the message a plaintive air when my mother left it sitting out all winter. In the flowerbeds surrounding the house, she planted ceramic geese, wearing floppy yellow hats and blue kerchiefs about their necks, and a ceramic squirrel, frog, and turtle. In her assessment of people, my mother was often brutal and shrewd, but she liked to think of herself as sentimental, making the saccharine décor of her yard as misleading as a witch’s gingerbread house. She was kneeling on the ground, leaning over a flowerbed, wielding a three-pronged gardening tool, swinging it viciously, bringing up green-stemmed weeds with each blow.
My mother stood up and turned in our direction when she heard the car doors open. Her smile at seeing Junior was instantaneous. She was fifty-three—only seven years older than I was—and she was still slim, with her hair dyed a frosty golden shade that I thought of as “Hard Blonde.” Ravi jumped out of the backseat and immediately squatted on the lawn to urinate.
There was a hurried round of introductions, handshaking, and a kiss on the cheek from Junior. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing the dog,” she said before crouching down to pet him. Ravi immediately rolled on his side, encouraging her to rub his stomach. “Frisky will be fine with him for one day,” she added.
I’d forgotten about my mother’s crazy, antisocial cat but knew Ravi ignored cats and Frisky hated and avoided everyone—except for my mother—so I didn’t foresee any pet problems. Taylor politely complimented her garden, and she smiled. “I love flowers, but killing bugs and pulling weeds in my garden is more fun than growing things. It’s awful. If I go out and kill things for an hour, I feel like a million bucks!”
“Jeffrey Dahmer probably said the same thing,” I joked, but no one laughed and everyone looked vaguely confused. Of course, the famed cannibal/serial killer was probably still premeditating in 1986. Fortunately, everyone decided to step around my remark as if nothing had been said.
My mother had questions, and Junior explained he was accompanying me on a comic book buying expedition, pointedly mentioning that he was getting paid, before adding that Taylor was a friend of his who was getting a free ride out to New Mexico. It sounded reasonable, and our mother smiled acceptingly and then invited us into the house for coffee.
“How far west are you going?”
“California. We’re going to see Carol.”
She seemed surprised we were traveling that far but didn’t ask any more questions. I was sure she had some, but she would wait to get Junior alone before asking them. We entered the back hall and climbed the four steps to the kitchen that our father had remodeled in the early 1970s. The bottom halves of the walls were covered with blue paneling imprinted with a wood-grain pattern, a faux finish tall tale that was about as believable as a gigantic blue ox named Babe. On the refrigerator hung long out-of-date family photos, cartoons cut out from the Buffalo News, held up with Buffalo Bills and Sabres magnets, and my mother’s combination shopping and to-do lists that read like a cryptic outline for a murder mystery, written in her old-fashioned good penmanship cursive: “Be tough,” “Throw out books,” “Worrying doesn’t help,” “Sponge candy,” and “Knife sharpening.”
On a wall hung a recent purchase of my mother’s, a clock that marked the hours with portraits of different species of birds instead of numerals. On the hour, the call of each species cried out. It was already a quarter past whip-poor-will. There was also a motivational plaque featuring a photo of dewy-eyed baby bunnies on heavily shellacked redwood printed with a gold-tone calligraphic message: “Today— Anything Is Possible!” I always found the message more ominous than comforting, but my mother liked it, and so I resisted pointing out to her the message’s ambiguity. (Like a farmer making foie gras, my mother thought a heart needed to be force-fed in order to enlarge it.) We sat down at the kitchen table as my mother pulled a package of unbleached coffee filters out of a cupboard. Junior commended her for buying them. “You’re helping the environment.”
She pursed her lips while scooping coffee into the filter. “I don’t know if I like these. The brown coffee filters look exactly like the white ones, used. How do we know that’s not what we’re getting?”
Junior and I smiled, and seeing that it was all right to smile, so did Taylor. She then smiled tentatively, indicating that she hadn’t tried to be funny but knew she had been. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Junior opened a cookie jar to check the contents. “You’ve been listening to Dad too much.”
“I don’t listen to him!” she said, swatting the air to brush away that idea.
A small calico cat crept up the back stairs, saw strangers
and Ravi in the kitchen, hissed fiercely, and then retreated back down the steps into the basement.
“Is she afraid of the dog?” Taylor asked.
“No. Frisky’s not afraid. She hates everyone! She only likes me.”
My mother sounded thoroughly delighted about nurturing her cat’s xenophobia.
Junior asked where our father was, and her reply was, “He’s out.”
Growing up, I knew more about Santa Claus’s workday than my father’s. When my father left the house to work for the state police, none of us could exactly say what he did all day, and on his days off, we couldn’t have told you how he spent his time either. In some ways his leaving the house was like letting the cat out—he went somewhere, but no one in our family was especially curious about what he did or where he went. (There ought to be a special word for mysteries that interest absolutely no one. I suggest ennuigma.) From his occasional remarks, I assumed my father visited car mechanic friends at their body shops, got a haircut, or ran errands. When his parents were still alive, he visited them frequently—they’d lived ten blocks away—but since their deaths, I wasn’t sure how he filled his time. As an adult, I knew my father’s job title, First Sergeant, and his rank, second in command of Troop A, which encompassed the eight westernmost counties in New York State. I also knew he no longer went out on patrol, and had a desk job at the state police headquarters in Batavia. I pictured him ordering badges and bullets, but after that I blanked. For years I was under the mistaken impression that we were very different men until I grasped that I probably showed the same lack of interest in his life as he did in mine.
He walked through the door a few minutes later. He was the same age as my mother, fifty-three, and his formerly jet-black hair was now salt and pepper. He looked like a cop from central casting, six feet tall, burly and broad-shouldered, mug-shot handsome, and he always kept his smile holstered, used only as a means of last resort. In his gray state trooper uniform, he appeared intimidating, and when he raised his deep voice, he never had to reprimand his children more than once. He grinned warmly and welcomed Junior enthusiastically, but there wasn’t even a feigned attempt at physical contact between father and son. This was years before hugging became customary between men. He shook my hand and Taylor’s and repeated our names while my mother informed him that my older brother Kevin had called from Syracuse. “He couldn’t get the day off to come home and go out on the boat.”
“You can’t really get much time off when you start a new job,” said my father as he walked down the hallway that led to the bathroom and removed his police pistol from the linen closet. Throughout my childhood, he always stashed his loaded gun in the linen closet among the towels, and it amused me to recall that he had routinely done something that would be considered recklessly negligent and probably illegal later. He unloaded it on the kitchen table in preparation for cleaning it.
There was a lull in the conversation, and Junior asked how Kevin liked his new job. He’d recently become a paramedic.
“He’s doing great,” my father said. “He knows his stuff inside and out, although he might have to work on his people skills.” He smiled. “On a recent ambulance run, he asked, ‘So your wife has asthma but you didn’t call us until after she smoked a carton of cigarettes?’ Her husband said, ‘You don’t have to be sarcastic.’”
All of us laughed. “Having a sarcastic paramedic showing up at your door might make you think twice about dialing 911,” Junior said.
“Yeah,” said my father. “Kevin will help stop your old pain, but if you’re stupid, he’ll give ya a new one.”
My father genially asked Junior about what he was doing and where he was headed. After telling him that we were traveling to California, my father suggested stopping in Roswell, New Mexico.
“What’s there?” Taylor asked innocently.
“It all goes back to Roswell,” my father declared, polishing his revolver while explaining that the government had been engaged in a massive cover-up. “The local newspaper headlined that the government found a flying saucer. Then the Feds went in and covered it up. In 1947 Roswell only had a population of 22,000. Back then, everyone knew everyone else. The editor wouldn’t get that story wrong.”
Taylor glanced at Junior but kept a bemused smile on his face, signaling to him that he didn’t need to be rescued from our father’s lecture; a neutral expression would have been a cry for help. Junior and I were no longer embarrassed by our father’s habit of casually discussing the conspiracy theories he subscribed to: the Roswell UFO cover-up, the Kennedy assassination, the faked Apollo Moon Landing, and others. Our dad was odd but remained enthusiastic about life—both terrestrial and extraterrestrial—and since he distrusted everyone equally, his chipper paranoia almost felt like an expression of brotherhood. Our father could afford to relax. He was onto all the schemes; it was the poor dummies who don’t know what’s what who should be terrified.
“Newspapers get things wrong all the time,” Taylor argued as our father’s lecture stirred the rationalist in him.
“Honey, will you cut the lawn on our grassy knoll today?” my mother suggested sweetly. She looked at Junior and quickly rolled her eyes.
“I saw that,” my father observed without raising his head. My mother had decided long ago that figuring out the trajectory points of bullets fired from a Dallas schoolbook depository was a harmless hobby, but there were times when she wished my father took no interest in anything, like her best friend Marge’s husband, Dennis.
“So you’re interested in the Kennedy assassination?” asked Taylor.
“‘Interested’ isn’t the word,” Junior said.
Our father was an expert on the Kennedy assassination and had achieved a modest renown among the “Assassinistas,” as we derisively called them, for writing the article “Was Zapruder the Shooter?” for The Depository—the quarterly journal of the Kennedy Assassination Association—laying out the case that Abraham Zapruder had actually shot the president. My father wasted no time in advancing his theory to us.
“He’s the last person you’d ever suspect. You put a gun in a home movie camera. There’s a big bang but no one looks at the guy holding the camera. Then afterwards, he comes forward with the only film of the assassination and no one thinks of connecting the dots.”
Taylor put down his empty coffee mug. “How do I know you didn’t do it? You own a gun.”
“Hey, that’s fair,” he agreed, nodding his head. “The only way you can solve any crime is to follow all the leads. I’ve collected guns since I was a kid. I own fifty-eight rifles and pistols—everything from a vintage Henry rifle to a Kalashnikov—but I’m not a gun nut. Gun nuts worry that the government will take away their weapons, while I’m convinced the government’s trying to circumvent our right to bear arms by inventing a force field that will make bullets useless.”
My father was nominally a member of the NRA and the Republican Party but routinely disagreed with them. He was convinced moles had infiltrated both organizations and most of what they put out was disinformation.
Junior suggested showing Taylor the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and then meeting my parents on Grand Island for a late afternoon boat trip. He wanted to show off Buffalo to Taylor, but I was worried about Cheney.
“We should keep to our schedule,” I warned.
“It only takes an hour or so,” my mother said.
She was right. Visiting the museum would throw us off for an hour, and I didn’t want to leave. Time travel was allowing me to experience a bizarre but delightful sense of homecoming. I wanted to spend more time with my parents when they had both been happy.
Our father said he had to buy a valve of some sort for the boat’s engine, and I invited our mother to come to the gallery with us. Junior’s smile wobbled, indicating he wished I hadn’t. I’d forgotten that I became closer to my mother after the deaths of my father and sister. I considered her to be a friend and good company, but Junior had only moved out of her house two yea
rs before and still had rope burns from her apron strings. My mother was a member of the Albright, and as we drove down Elmwood Avenue, she offered us her opinion of the current Georgia O’Keefe retrospective that was on display.
“She married this guy in New York. Then she went to Santa Fe and got creative. She has all those paintings. One looks just like the other. Hills in one after another after another.”
“Mock her,” Junior said.
My mother faced him. “I just did,” she said.
8
THE ALBRIGHT-KNOX has always been my measure of a great art museum. It has a superb collection of art, mostly European and American paintings and sculptures, mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several acknowledged masterpieces (even New Yorkers are impressed), and it can be viewed in two hours or less, tops. It’s housed in a Greek revival building built during the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, joined with a severe but complementary Modernist black glass box addition built in 1962.
Junior and Taylor were eager to see the O’Keefe retrospective. That made sense; it was 1986 and New York was in the heyday of its love of Santa Fe, a short-lived fling. The two mindsets are incompatible; hanging a cow skull on the wall of your apartment in Manhattan only triggers the impossible-to-extinguish fear that dead bones attract rats and roaches. Within a few years, my—and everyone else’s—Hopi silver bolo ties and hand-forged wrought-iron demitasse spoons ended up in storage units.
“I’m going to look around while you check out Georgia,” my mother declared as she encouraged us to see what we wanted versus doing what we felt obligated to do—not abandoning her. Junior and Taylor encouraged her to come with us, but she shook her head. “All those flowers and skulls.” She scrunched up her nose. “It’s like she’s trying to cheer me up about dying.” She flapped her hands as if she was fanning us up the staircase to the exhibit. “You go. I’ll be fine.” The remarkable thing is that she did want us to do what we wanted; her selflessness was tied to her often-professed credo: “If my kids are happy, I’m happy.” Still, spending time with her children made her happy, and I announced that I’d stay with her and told Junior and Taylor to go ahead. My mother gently patted her hair in anticipation of spending time with a friend of her son. As the boys ascended the staircase, we walked down a corridor to one of the main galleries and stopped in front of one of my favorite paintings—a wonderful self-portrait of the young Degas, looking haughty and yet also vulnerable. “Would it kill him to smile?” my mother asked as we gazed at his likeness. “He’s only twenty. I’ll bet he had bad teeth.” Suddenly, I imagined my mother recording an audio tour for the Albright. My mother liked art, but she had no reverence for the artistic, and her response to every painting was what every modern artist claimed to want, a fresh and unpremeditated viewing. “If I could steal one painting, it would be this one,” I said in front of Giacomo Balla’s futurist masterpiece, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. The painting is a foot-level view of a dachshund being walked, and the motion of the dog’s moving paws, the moving leash, and his mistress’s moving boots are painted in repeated sequences, suggesting action in a way that alluded to the relatively recent invention of motion pictures. Balla’s painting must have seemed radical at the time, but it also must have always been seen as incredibly charming.