me down the driveway. He stood close to my father, without words. They each blew smoke into the air. John lapsed briefly into a posture of what seemed like supplication, but it was as though he were looking over his shoulder, making sure no one noticed. “It’s that bad?” John asked.
My father crossed his arms, huddled within himself, somehow managing to appear unembarrassed.
“How can you have let it get to this? You?” John’s voice verged on a whine, as if, in spite of everything, he still expected my father to unzip this suit of clothes and emerge as the man he used to be.
“Listen, I’ve got a stack of bills for you,” John said, breathing to calm himself. “They’re at home, in my office. But under the circumstances …”
“Why don’t you give them to me?” my father said.
John hesitated a moment. “All right.”
He moved across the street, toward his house. We followed at a distance. In the large front window of John’s house, we could see Emma rocking the baby, looking out at us, trying to get a glimpse of my father. She didn’t wave, nor, seeing him, did she turn away. She had begun managing my mother’s life for her, taking her shopping, making sure she got to the hairdresser.
“You all right?” my father asked, while we were waiting, just to say something.
“Yes.”
A voice rang out then, sudden and shocking as the appearance of a deer. It was a woman’s voice, and though it was coming from the wrong direction—from the houses peeking out of the woods past John’s—it sounded enough like my mother to be her. It was high and musical, Italian-sounding. She was calling someone—a child or a dog—and my father, hearing that voice, snapped to attention.
He laughed lightly when he realized it wasn’t my mother. Still, a change had come over his face. Something of his old melancholy, his handsome confusion, returned to him, replacing the slack and satisfied look he’d worn since he’d left us. We were waiting for John to come out with the bills, and I knew that in this caught state of waiting, with the woman calling her dog, my father’s stomach was clenched—I could practically feel it—as though he had to be on guard against something that could still pull him back to this life.
When John came out and approached us, he said, “Are you sure you can pay these, Lou?”
My father’s voice was slightly higher than usual. “Yes.” It was as if he had to work past an obstruction, and I thought I knew what the obstruction was.
He remained in this silent, chastened state as we walked down the hill, took the bus, rode across town. Only women took the bus: nurses on their way to work, a woman and her son down the aisle from us. It was unusual for a man like my father to board; the women all seemed aware of him, but did not stare. It was half a mile from the place where the bus stopped to the rooming house. A party of French Canadian workers was in the hall. They were smoking in their T-shirts, and holding long-necked bottles of beer. It was their usual Friday night practice, a gathering at the end of the workweek. They interrupted their noise to allow my father and me to pass. There was a pause, too, so they could consider this man and his son in all the ways they probably habitually did, with suspicion and wonder.
The room was dark.
“He’s not here,” my father said, nearly under his breath, but just loud enough so that I could not mistake his panic.
He turned on a light and moved around the room, searching for a note on the table, or on one of the nightstands, then went to the window to look outside. He came back to the door and opened it, but there was only the smoke of the workers’ party, so he closed it. He kept his hand on the knob.
He sat in a chair and put his hand over his face.
After a minute or so, he looked up. “You hungry?”
“I’m okay.”
My father seemed alone then, and collapsed, like some plan of his hadn’t worked. And because I understood it wouldn’t be so bad for me if this plan of his failed, I said nothing.
But it wasn’t good, either, to see my father like this. He was having trouble looking at me, and time moved slowly.
Finally, Bob Painter did come home, though he came home drunk and much later than expected. He came home, announced by a car full of the grounds crew from Vanderbruek. They dropped him off in front of the house, and we heard them; my father went to the window to look outside and listen, and I saw his face, complicated and full of too many emotions to count.
When Bob Painter came through the door, he glanced at me as he habitually did now, disappointed to see me, or as if my presence implied something—that I was a witness to facts about him he’d rather have kept private. He held on to the doorjamb, as if to keep himself upright.
“Who drove you?” my father asked. He was calm now, or else wanted not to show Bob what it had been like for him to wait.
“Wellsie.” Bob Painter groaned, and headed for the bed, to lie down.
“I thought we arranged you were going to take a ride from Ed Kennedy?”
“We did, but listen. They wanted to take me out.”
“Wellsie did.”
“Listen …” A low growl seemed all he could manage. “It’s important, that they wanted to do this. Can you understand that?”
Bob Painter sat halfway up in bed. “Get the boy outta here so we can talk straight, willya, Lou?” Sometimes Bob Painter’s face took on a grizzled, unhealthy look that was frightening.
“He’s not going.”
“All right, so they wanted to take me out and I went.”
“With Wellsie.”
“Yes.”
“Drinking.”
“Yes. Oh shit.” His hand went to his head. Bob Painter, big and burly and always seeming on the verge of violence, had started to cry.
“Can you understand what this means to me, that they wanted to take me out?”
“Bob, stop.”
Bob fell into sobs, his hand going up and down in front of his face like he was rubbing something invisible to us.
“Can’t.”
“Bob.”
“Can’t. I can’t.”
My father looked at me but didn’t settle on my eyes. He put his hand on my shoulder and led me out the door, past the workers, who were quiet to let us by. We stood on the porch, and I could hear his breathing, mixed with the voices that had started up. It seemed the men were listening to the sobs of Bob Painter, which were audible even this far away.
After a while, my father said, “This has got to change.” He ran his index finger several times across his lips, as though he were cleaning them.
I kept my silence.
“This
