I'll Never Know
Robert Wexelblatt
Parents are a given for most children, two more unchosen facts of life, like the kitchen clock or the bedroom wallpaper. But there must be some children, like me, who are mystified by their parents, especially by how they ever came to be married. By the time I was an eight-year-old, having observed familiarity without affection and dependency without warmth, I concluded Mother and Father were ill-matched, that somebody at the wedding should have leapt up and spoken rather than forever holding their peace. The wedding guests weren’t many or likely to leap. I’ve seen the faded Polaroids. There were my two widowed grandmothers, two aunts and one uncle, a brace of teenage cousins, a few friends. Everybody looked at the camera with the same fixed grin, inverse of the fixed frown deployed at funerals. In their formal portrait, Mother stood to the left of the wedding cake in her plain white dress. She had the wan smile of a reluctant bungee-jumper who decided to take the dare. On the right of the cake, Father appeared pleased with himself, the way he used to after checking some chore off his list. The picture is really of the tall wedding cake.
I’ve often wondered about the history of their courtship, whether they were briefly infatuated, deluded, terrified of winding up single. Neither would tell me much about their dating apart from that they were fixed up on a blind date. As for the rest, they might almost have forgotten. I knew that they had sex at least once—I was the evidence—but I couldn’t be sure if they’d done it twice. I was an only child.
As mothers go, mine was dutiful but undemonstrative, a constant presence in our semi-detached house, but a passive one. Like the wallpaper in the narrow bedroom that had once been my nursery, I would have missed her instantly if she weren’t there. The blue-gray wallpaper was old and had a repeating pattern of an airplane, train, and ocean liner. The train, liner, and plane all were streamlined, in the style of the 1930s. Like them, Mother might have been seething with potential energy, with dreams of travel and escape, but she didn’t move. She was more like my father’s hired housekeeper than his beloved, a timid cook and cleaner with an inclination toward agoraphobia. Did we love each other? Yes, but in an abstract way, founded on the fact that she was the mother and I was the child.
It was my father who generated the weather in the house—his moods, ideas, weariness, irritation, sobriety, occasional exaltation. He was a pharmacist who owned his own store and so wielded the dual authority of science and business. On the other hand, he was dissatisfied with himself because being a pharmacist lacked the dignity of being a physician, physicist, or chemist, while running a drug store that stocked candy bars, comic books, and condoms under the counter hardly made him a captain of industry. Once—it was when he was driving me to my interview at the university he’d attended—he let slip that he had aimed for medical school. I wanted to ask if he’d flunked Chemistry 101, but didn’t dare.
As a result of this mixture of complacency and insecurity, my father was sensitive about his status. He had the anxiety that characterizes the middle of the middle class, worried about slipping down, aspiring to move up. Perhaps that’s why he so much wanted me to excel, to distinguish myself, to be impeccable in my deportment, to make not just prudent decisions but wise ones. There was some blueprint of excellence in his mind which I was to fulfill and which he ceaselessly admonished me to follow; but this pattern wasn’t his, or at least he didn’t present it as his. He was not a paragon, a celebrity, an award-winner; he was not famous—but someone else was.
The Author hovered over my childhood and pervaded my adolescence, a god dictating commandments like Moses’, and, like Mohammad’s, speaking through his messenger. Father was this deity’s secretary and prophet.
I heard the story early and often, how, as a freshman, my father made friends with a classmate who lived in the dorm room next to his.
“Neither of us could stand our roommates—shallow, crude, rowdy, angling for invitations to pledge fraternities. We bonded. We ate together, talked late into the night, exchanged books, dissected or idolized our professors, analyzed the school’s social structure, chewed over all the big questions you ask at that age. We stayed close for all four years. And we still are. We correspond regularly.”
The Author majored in history. He knew French and Latin, already and took up Greek. He made Phi Beta Kappa, graduated Summa cum Laude and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He started graduate school but dropped out when his first novel was a sensation. That modest bildungsroman was assigned in my eleventh-grade honors English class. My father beamed when I told him, beamed the way he didn’t in the wedding picture or when Mother laid out our Thanksgiving feast.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said to me during my senior year. “It’s extremely important to make good friends in your college years, superior friends.”
Father didn’t mean useful contacts; he didn’t mean networking. He meant I should make friends like the Author—that is, people who would ascend into the firmament.
The Author never visited us but, every summer for five or six years, my father locked up the store, packed a bag, and headed off for a long weekend with the Author in the Green Mountains. Mother and I were stranded without the car.
The first such trip came when I had just started high school. He came back excited.
“He has a big white farmhouse—two hundred years old!—and, down the hill, there’s a little birch copse with a studio he built just for writing. His wife’s charming and was glad to meet me. If they’d been at home, I’m sure his two daughters would have been charming, too. I saw photographs. They’re both very pretty.”
These daughters interested me. “What are their names, the two daughters?”
My father frowned. “Not for you,” he warned. “Anyway, like I said, they weren’t at home.”
I imagined that these pretty, nameless daughters had escaped, had gotten free of their charming mother and omniscient father. Boarding school? The L.L. Bean lake houses of friends? Paris, Florence, Rimini? Anywhere away from the big white farmhouse?
My father always returned from these long weekends abnormally happy, almost starry-eyed, irrepressibly quoting the Author’s apothegms which he invariably twisted into pistols aimed at me.
Even though it was I, Claudius on PBS: “Too much television’s just as bad as too much sugar.”
When I got a mediocre grade on an Algebra test: “The difference between ignorance and stupidity is that only one of them is curable.”
When I was hesitated between mowing the lawn and clearing out the garage: “Eat the best lambchop first; better to choke on it than the bad one.”
When, after a family barbecue, I repeated my cousins’ criticism of their father and my uncle’s of them: “Always defend the young against the old and the old against the young.”
On my personal hygiene: “It’s hard to be virtuous when your hair is dirty.”
The year the Author won the Pulitzer Prize, my father acted as if he had. There was champagne and the promise of a new bike. Over the celebratory supper, my father burbled with nostalgia, with surprising anecdotes like the one about how the two of them had gotten drunk on cheap vodka, hung a speaker out his dormitory window and blasted Beethoven into the quad at midnight. Another was about how the Author had been hired to write a paper for a rich but ungifted classmate.
My father chuckled at the memory of the hoax he said and the Author had cooked up together.
“We wrote a paper proving that baseball had been invented by the poet Edgar Allan Poe and not the publisher Abner Doubleday.”
Was this my father?
In those years, he shared similar anecdotes with me at odd moments, apropos of nothing, usually when it was just the two of us in the car.
“This one weekend, we took the train to New York. Somebody’s parents were away and gave us the keys to their apartment in Greenwich Village. Danish furniture, two Léger lithographs, bookcases on every wall, huge record collection. We went to a jazz club and heard Bill Evans. We talked our way into an after-hours club and heard Lenny Bruce.” While these stories were not exactly edifying, most came with a moral. “Evans and Bruce—both done in by drugs.”
One Saturday, when I’d taken in the mail, I asked my father why I never saw one of the Author’s letters.
“He sends his letters to me at work,” he replied.
“Do you save them?”
“Save them? What do you think? I keep them in a special drawer. Locked,” he added curtly.
All through those years and even after I went off to the same university my father attended, I was treated to the Author’s advice, subjected to Authorial authority. He had a lot to say on the subject of marriage.
“Be careful not to make a woman pregnant and don’t marry before thirty. Thirty-five would be better.”
“Nature decks girls out gloriously for a decade. Remember that’s to trap young men. Nature doesn’t care about you or her—just wants babies.”
“Adolescence is a battle between culture and hormones.”
“When you’re tempted to propose, ask yourself whether you’d want to talk to this person when you’re both fifty.”
The Author was pithy and his maxims had scope. Some were practical, but others were profound or puzzling.
“The trick is not to sell your soul, not to the Devil—and not to God, either.”
“Choose your clothing carefully when you’re twenty-six. It’s how you’ll want to dress for the rest of our life.”
“Keep your overhead low, but not so low you hit your head on it.”
“It’s more important to choose work that makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning than a job that pays handsomely and makes you hate the alarm clock.”
“A lot of risky things will seem to you like bicycle-riding: at first it seems impossible to stay up, then impossible to fall.”
“Never confuse sitting still with going in every direction at once.”
My father relished these philosophical nuggets, even the most cynical, praising the Author for anchoring his abstractions in his deep novelist’s understanding of humanity. I wrote a lot of them down in a spiral notebook, grudgingly.
“An honest man admits the constancy of change; a dishonest one changes constancies.”
“A potato has less potential than a farmer.”
“The rich man steals; the poor man dreams of theft.”
“All numbers are prices; all names are stories.”
“For some people, all roads are nothing but middle.”
My father read all the Author’s books as soon as they were published and studied the reviews, rejoicing in the good ones. The few that were bad infuriated him.
“Just listen to this moron!” he’d exclaim from his recliner then read the offending criticism aloud, scoffing after every offending sentence.
“This latest offering is one-fifth Graham Greene and four-fifths Mickey Spillane. What a hack. Even his insults are plagiarized!”
During my father’s weekends in the Green Mountains, Mother was like a rubber band given a break from holding things together. Not that she was focused on me or kicked up her heels—like the rubber band, she relaxed but didn’t do anything. Still, I noticed that she moved differently, took longer strides and deeper breaths, and her cooking showed some more imagination. She never asked why she too wasn’t invited to the Green Mountains where she could be introduced to the Author, keep company with his charming wife, and admire the pretty daughters—if they chanced to be at home. Her exclusion was simply a given. My father didn’t want either the Author weren’t to be distracted. The male bond was exclusive, the reunion strictly stag. I can remember only one remark my mother made on the subject. I had said something about it probably being good for my father to spend a little time away from the store. Mother smiled ambiguously then, to my astonishment, she too quoted the Author, one of my father’s favorites: “There’s no such thing as a well-earned vacation.”
The Author’s books were good and most had happy endings; the kind where the camera cuts off when lovers join. Though he was deeply perceptive and free of illusions, the Author was not only a professional success but also contentedly married. If he was happy himself, why shouldn’t he favor happy endings? But then why would he say things like this to my father: “Men and woman are always at war; but a perpetual war requires an infinite number of truces”? I found it hard to reconcile the generous and humane novels with the strictures and scornful observations my father so loved repeating. I found none of them in the novels so they must have come from their correspondence and conversations.
After graduation, I didn’t return home. I chose a booming coastal metropolis and found work that was challenging even if it didn’t always make me leap out of bed in the mornings.
A Walgreens opened up two blocks from my father’s pharmacy. He lost customers and grew despondent becoming as taciturn as my mother, who by then left the house only to buy groceries. Both of them aged quickly as if in a race to the finish. They shed weight and appeared to me to be drying out, as if the climate in the straitened house had become parched. My visits stimulated no joy either in them or me, though I tried to cheer them up. I brought them bagels, imported cheeses, bottles of oyster sauce; I told them stories slowly and made jokes manically; I described my work and new friends—good, talented people even if none could, I assured my father, compare to The Author. As far as I can recall, during these visits he seldom quoted the Author but I do remember that, after dinner one night, he mentioned having gotten a letter from the Author. He pointed a finger at me and spoke solemnly, as if pronouncing a prophetic judgment. “The man’s so wise. Listen to this: ‘Most people live their lives in elevators—going up or down they visit the same places.’”
When customers became downright scarce, Father sold his store to a national chain of cafés, and retired. He grew querulous, withdrawn; his memory slowly dissolved like an icicle in an early thaw. Mother took care of him. He didn’t thank her and she didn’t complain. There were visits to a cardiologist.
After his funeral, I visited Mother every other weekend. When I suggested she sell the house and move to an apartment, she said she was fine where she was, and I didn’t need to worry about her, or come so often.
On one visit, I asked her what had become of the Author’s letters.
“What letters?”
“The ones he kept at the store, in the locked drawer.”
She made a sour face. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
It was a shock but not a surprise when she died only four months after my father. I was now an orphan, facing life without the parental barrier against mortality you don’t know was there until it’s gone.
A newspaper article that said the Author was a candidate for the Nobel prize and speculated on his chances. It made me think he might not know that his old friend had died, that there were unanswered letters, and that I ought to tell him.
I had no address for the Author, not in the Green Mountains or anywhere else, so I wrote to his publisher, explaining the relationship between the Author and my late father, and asking if they would kindly forward my enclosed letter. My letter to the Author was short; each of the five drafts was briefer than the last.
A week later, I received a reply from the Author’s editor. She regretted to tell me that unfortunately two weeks earlier the Author had suffered a stroke, one that was not incapacitating but which could not be called mild either. She was in touch with him, of course; they spoke regularly by phone, and she had told him about my father’s death.
“He said he didn’t recognize your father’s name and had no recollection of him. His memory is still good, but it’s not impossible the stroke has erased your father from it. I’m terribly sorry.”
Was it all true but, as the editor said, erased? Editors know about erasures. Or was it a fantasy, a self-aggrandizing delusion, some attempt to be warmed in reflected glory? Had my father and the Author even known each other? Were there no trips to Greenwich Village, no weekends in the Green Mountains, no letters? Where would he have gone on those long weekends? Fishing trips? Another woman? Were all those relentless, apodictic admonitions and chastisements, those bits of wisdom and pity proverbs, really my father’s?
I don’t know and I can’t know.
I’m looking now at the last sentence of what will probably be the Author’s final novel which, like his first, is a story of a young man freeing himself from his family and setting out on life.
The sky is a father’s face; the sea mother’s breast; but all the earth is one’s own.
Robert Wexelblatt
Parents are a given for most children, two more unchosen facts of life, like the kitchen clock or the bedroom wallpaper. But there must be some children, like me, who are mystified by their parents, especially by how they ever came to be married. By the time I was an eight-year-old, having observed familiarity without affection and dependency without warmth, I concluded Mother and Father were ill-matched, that somebody at the wedding should have leapt up and spoken rather than forever holding their peace. The wedding guests weren’t many or likely to leap. I’ve seen the faded Polaroids. There were my two widowed grandmothers, two aunts and one uncle, a brace of teenage cousins, a few friends. Everybody looked at the camera with the same fixed grin, inverse of the fixed frown deployed at funerals. In their formal portrait, Mother stood to the left of the wedding cake in her plain white dress. She had the wan smile of a reluctant bungee-jumper who decided to take the dare. On the right of the cake, Father appeared pleased with himself, the way he used to after checking some chore off his list. The picture is really of the tall wedding cake.
I’ve often wondered about the history of their courtship, whether they were briefly infatuated, deluded, terrified of winding up single. Neither would tell me much about their dating apart from that they were fixed up on a blind date. As for the rest, they might almost have forgotten. I knew that they had sex at least once—I was the evidence—but I couldn’t be sure if they’d done it twice. I was an only child.
As mothers go, mine was dutiful but undemonstrative, a constant presence in our semi-detached house, but a passive one. Like the wallpaper in the narrow bedroom that had once been my nursery, I would have missed her instantly if she weren’t there. The blue-gray wallpaper was old and had a repeating pattern of an airplane, train, and ocean liner. The train, liner, and plane all were streamlined, in the style of the 1930s. Like them, Mother might have been seething with potential energy, with dreams of travel and escape, but she didn’t move. She was more like my father’s hired housekeeper than his beloved, a timid cook and cleaner with an inclination toward agoraphobia. Did we love each other? Yes, but in an abstract way, founded on the fact that she was the mother and I was the child.
It was my father who generated the weather in the house—his moods, ideas, weariness, irritation, sobriety, occasional exaltation. He was a pharmacist who owned his own store and so wielded the dual authority of science and business. On the other hand, he was dissatisfied with himself because being a pharmacist lacked the dignity of being a physician, physicist, or chemist, while running a drug store that stocked candy bars, comic books, and condoms under the counter hardly made him a captain of industry. Once—it was when he was driving me to my interview at the university he’d attended—he let slip that he had aimed for medical school. I wanted to ask if he’d flunked Chemistry 101, but didn’t dare.
As a result of this mixture of complacency and insecurity, my father was sensitive about his status. He had the anxiety that characterizes the middle of the middle class, worried about slipping down, aspiring to move up. Perhaps that’s why he so much wanted me to excel, to distinguish myself, to be impeccable in my deportment, to make not just prudent decisions but wise ones. There was some blueprint of excellence in his mind which I was to fulfill and which he ceaselessly admonished me to follow; but this pattern wasn’t his, or at least he didn’t present it as his. He was not a paragon, a celebrity, an award-winner; he was not famous—but someone else was.
The Author hovered over my childhood and pervaded my adolescence, a god dictating commandments like Moses’, and, like Mohammad’s, speaking through his messenger. Father was this deity’s secretary and prophet.
I heard the story early and often, how, as a freshman, my father made friends with a classmate who lived in the dorm room next to his.
“Neither of us could stand our roommates—shallow, crude, rowdy, angling for invitations to pledge fraternities. We bonded. We ate together, talked late into the night, exchanged books, dissected or idolized our professors, analyzed the school’s social structure, chewed over all the big questions you ask at that age. We stayed close for all four years. And we still are. We correspond regularly.”
The Author majored in history. He knew French and Latin, already and took up Greek. He made Phi Beta Kappa, graduated Summa cum Laude and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He started graduate school but dropped out when his first novel was a sensation. That modest bildungsroman was assigned in my eleventh-grade honors English class. My father beamed when I told him, beamed the way he didn’t in the wedding picture or when Mother laid out our Thanksgiving feast.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said to me during my senior year. “It’s extremely important to make good friends in your college years, superior friends.”
Father didn’t mean useful contacts; he didn’t mean networking. He meant I should make friends like the Author—that is, people who would ascend into the firmament.
The Author never visited us but, every summer for five or six years, my father locked up the store, packed a bag, and headed off for a long weekend with the Author in the Green Mountains. Mother and I were stranded without the car.
The first such trip came when I had just started high school. He came back excited.
“He has a big white farmhouse—two hundred years old!—and, down the hill, there’s a little birch copse with a studio he built just for writing. His wife’s charming and was glad to meet me. If they’d been at home, I’m sure his two daughters would have been charming, too. I saw photographs. They’re both very pretty.”
These daughters interested me. “What are their names, the two daughters?”
My father frowned. “Not for you,” he warned. “Anyway, like I said, they weren’t at home.”
I imagined that these pretty, nameless daughters had escaped, had gotten free of their charming mother and omniscient father. Boarding school? The L.L. Bean lake houses of friends? Paris, Florence, Rimini? Anywhere away from the big white farmhouse?
My father always returned from these long weekends abnormally happy, almost starry-eyed, irrepressibly quoting the Author’s apothegms which he invariably twisted into pistols aimed at me.
Even though it was I, Claudius on PBS: “Too much television’s just as bad as too much sugar.”
When I got a mediocre grade on an Algebra test: “The difference between ignorance and stupidity is that only one of them is curable.”
When I was hesitated between mowing the lawn and clearing out the garage: “Eat the best lambchop first; better to choke on it than the bad one.”
When, after a family barbecue, I repeated my cousins’ criticism of their father and my uncle’s of them: “Always defend the young against the old and the old against the young.”
On my personal hygiene: “It’s hard to be virtuous when your hair is dirty.”
The year the Author won the Pulitzer Prize, my father acted as if he had. There was champagne and the promise of a new bike. Over the celebratory supper, my father burbled with nostalgia, with surprising anecdotes like the one about how the two of them had gotten drunk on cheap vodka, hung a speaker out his dormitory window and blasted Beethoven into the quad at midnight. Another was about how the Author had been hired to write a paper for a rich but ungifted classmate.
My father chuckled at the memory of the hoax he said and the Author had cooked up together.
“We wrote a paper proving that baseball had been invented by the poet Edgar Allan Poe and not the publisher Abner Doubleday.”
Was this my father?
In those years, he shared similar anecdotes with me at odd moments, apropos of nothing, usually when it was just the two of us in the car.
“This one weekend, we took the train to New York. Somebody’s parents were away and gave us the keys to their apartment in Greenwich Village. Danish furniture, two Léger lithographs, bookcases on every wall, huge record collection. We went to a jazz club and heard Bill Evans. We talked our way into an after-hours club and heard Lenny Bruce.” While these stories were not exactly edifying, most came with a moral. “Evans and Bruce—both done in by drugs.”
One Saturday, when I’d taken in the mail, I asked my father why I never saw one of the Author’s letters.
“He sends his letters to me at work,” he replied.
“Do you save them?”
“Save them? What do you think? I keep them in a special drawer. Locked,” he added curtly.
All through those years and even after I went off to the same university my father attended, I was treated to the Author’s advice, subjected to Authorial authority. He had a lot to say on the subject of marriage.
“Be careful not to make a woman pregnant and don’t marry before thirty. Thirty-five would be better.”
“Nature decks girls out gloriously for a decade. Remember that’s to trap young men. Nature doesn’t care about you or her—just wants babies.”
“Adolescence is a battle between culture and hormones.”
“When you’re tempted to propose, ask yourself whether you’d want to talk to this person when you’re both fifty.”
The Author was pithy and his maxims had scope. Some were practical, but others were profound or puzzling.
“The trick is not to sell your soul, not to the Devil—and not to God, either.”
“Choose your clothing carefully when you’re twenty-six. It’s how you’ll want to dress for the rest of our life.”
“Keep your overhead low, but not so low you hit your head on it.”
“It’s more important to choose work that makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning than a job that pays handsomely and makes you hate the alarm clock.”
“A lot of risky things will seem to you like bicycle-riding: at first it seems impossible to stay up, then impossible to fall.”
“Never confuse sitting still with going in every direction at once.”
My father relished these philosophical nuggets, even the most cynical, praising the Author for anchoring his abstractions in his deep novelist’s understanding of humanity. I wrote a lot of them down in a spiral notebook, grudgingly.
“An honest man admits the constancy of change; a dishonest one changes constancies.”
“A potato has less potential than a farmer.”
“The rich man steals; the poor man dreams of theft.”
“All numbers are prices; all names are stories.”
“For some people, all roads are nothing but middle.”
My father read all the Author’s books as soon as they were published and studied the reviews, rejoicing in the good ones. The few that were bad infuriated him.
“Just listen to this moron!” he’d exclaim from his recliner then read the offending criticism aloud, scoffing after every offending sentence.
“This latest offering is one-fifth Graham Greene and four-fifths Mickey Spillane. What a hack. Even his insults are plagiarized!”
During my father’s weekends in the Green Mountains, Mother was like a rubber band given a break from holding things together. Not that she was focused on me or kicked up her heels—like the rubber band, she relaxed but didn’t do anything. Still, I noticed that she moved differently, took longer strides and deeper breaths, and her cooking showed some more imagination. She never asked why she too wasn’t invited to the Green Mountains where she could be introduced to the Author, keep company with his charming wife, and admire the pretty daughters—if they chanced to be at home. Her exclusion was simply a given. My father didn’t want either the Author weren’t to be distracted. The male bond was exclusive, the reunion strictly stag. I can remember only one remark my mother made on the subject. I had said something about it probably being good for my father to spend a little time away from the store. Mother smiled ambiguously then, to my astonishment, she too quoted the Author, one of my father’s favorites: “There’s no such thing as a well-earned vacation.”
The Author’s books were good and most had happy endings; the kind where the camera cuts off when lovers join. Though he was deeply perceptive and free of illusions, the Author was not only a professional success but also contentedly married. If he was happy himself, why shouldn’t he favor happy endings? But then why would he say things like this to my father: “Men and woman are always at war; but a perpetual war requires an infinite number of truces”? I found it hard to reconcile the generous and humane novels with the strictures and scornful observations my father so loved repeating. I found none of them in the novels so they must have come from their correspondence and conversations.
After graduation, I didn’t return home. I chose a booming coastal metropolis and found work that was challenging even if it didn’t always make me leap out of bed in the mornings.
A Walgreens opened up two blocks from my father’s pharmacy. He lost customers and grew despondent becoming as taciturn as my mother, who by then left the house only to buy groceries. Both of them aged quickly as if in a race to the finish. They shed weight and appeared to me to be drying out, as if the climate in the straitened house had become parched. My visits stimulated no joy either in them or me, though I tried to cheer them up. I brought them bagels, imported cheeses, bottles of oyster sauce; I told them stories slowly and made jokes manically; I described my work and new friends—good, talented people even if none could, I assured my father, compare to The Author. As far as I can recall, during these visits he seldom quoted the Author but I do remember that, after dinner one night, he mentioned having gotten a letter from the Author. He pointed a finger at me and spoke solemnly, as if pronouncing a prophetic judgment. “The man’s so wise. Listen to this: ‘Most people live their lives in elevators—going up or down they visit the same places.’”
When customers became downright scarce, Father sold his store to a national chain of cafés, and retired. He grew querulous, withdrawn; his memory slowly dissolved like an icicle in an early thaw. Mother took care of him. He didn’t thank her and she didn’t complain. There were visits to a cardiologist.
After his funeral, I visited Mother every other weekend. When I suggested she sell the house and move to an apartment, she said she was fine where she was, and I didn’t need to worry about her, or come so often.
On one visit, I asked her what had become of the Author’s letters.
“What letters?”
“The ones he kept at the store, in the locked drawer.”
She made a sour face. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
It was a shock but not a surprise when she died only four months after my father. I was now an orphan, facing life without the parental barrier against mortality you don’t know was there until it’s gone.
A newspaper article that said the Author was a candidate for the Nobel prize and speculated on his chances. It made me think he might not know that his old friend had died, that there were unanswered letters, and that I ought to tell him.
I had no address for the Author, not in the Green Mountains or anywhere else, so I wrote to his publisher, explaining the relationship between the Author and my late father, and asking if they would kindly forward my enclosed letter. My letter to the Author was short; each of the five drafts was briefer than the last.
A week later, I received a reply from the Author’s editor. She regretted to tell me that unfortunately two weeks earlier the Author had suffered a stroke, one that was not incapacitating but which could not be called mild either. She was in touch with him, of course; they spoke regularly by phone, and she had told him about my father’s death.
“He said he didn’t recognize your father’s name and had no recollection of him. His memory is still good, but it’s not impossible the stroke has erased your father from it. I’m terribly sorry.”
Was it all true but, as the editor said, erased? Editors know about erasures. Or was it a fantasy, a self-aggrandizing delusion, some attempt to be warmed in reflected glory? Had my father and the Author even known each other? Were there no trips to Greenwich Village, no weekends in the Green Mountains, no letters? Where would he have gone on those long weekends? Fishing trips? Another woman? Were all those relentless, apodictic admonitions and chastisements, those bits of wisdom and pity proverbs, really my father’s?
I don’t know and I can’t know.
I’m looking now at the last sentence of what will probably be the Author’s final novel which, like his first, is a story of a young man freeing himself from his family and setting out on life.
The sky is a father’s face; the sea mother’s breast; but all the earth is one’s own.