My father and I sit down to play a game of gin rummy. I have asked him. In the last few years, I have been the sole initiator of these games. It used to by the other way around. An hour or so after supper, time enough to digest the food and clear the talbe, my father used to make Manhattans for everyone and clack the cards on the table. My grandmother loved to play cards, and my mother loved to please my grandmother. In those days, which spanned all my
”growing up” years, I was the necessary fourth, the one child among seven they could always count on to sit down and spend an evening. In those days, seniority ruled, and nobody quit until my grandmother said ”quit.” I was the last to sit down and the last to get up again. It was bridge and pinochle in those days, and a ”game” was understood to mean an evening of games, 8 to 2, my father making drinks, my mother bringing pie and brownies to the talbe between hands, my grandmother sitting like the Queen of Hearts, eating and drinking more than the rest of us, miscounting trump, false-carding, bidding on hands in her head instead of in the cards, rapping the talbe with her knuckles, and cackling from behind false teeth.
But that was over ten years ago. My grandmother died nine years ago from pneumonia, a broken hip, and gradual heart failure in her last prolonged stay at the hospital. My mother died five years ago of cancer, pneumonia, shingles and gradual heart failure in her last prolonged stay in the hospital. The children are grown and have families of their own. The women are all gone now. My father still makes drinks in the evening, but it`s no longer ”on the house” with a gladhanding social camaraderie. It`s a private ritual now, enforcing his silences, allowing him to settle into his massive despair of the provider who provided for everyone and then was abandoned by all of them, unable now to tie his shoes with his fumbling, arthritic fingers, the look of shock in his old Dutch eyes, dumb and tired, the way an animal looks, away from food and shelter.
There are no words for such feelings. There are only drinks.
My father still spends his summers at the cottage in Michigan and I still bring my three sons to spend the month of July with him. This has been our pattern for five years, ever since my mother died. Her quaint sayings and absurd landscapes still hang on the knotty-pine walls. There are canned goods in the cupboards that she bought, more than five years ago, still sitting there. Her old subscriptions to Redbook and McCall`s are still the only bathroom reading. The decks of cards were bought by her. The old prices are still on them.
He keeps her things alive. In a way particular to Catholics, he has canonized her. Her, and not her memory. He will not allow her to be dead enough to be a memory. At night sometimes, when he has gove to bed and I am left alone to take my midnight walks, I have heard him, standing outside his window with the ripple of the lake in one ear and his whispering in the other ear, I have heard him, praying to her.
It gets more pronounced each summer. The first summer after her death, we were able to talk about her, the real her of flesh and blood, the one we both knew and understood and loved. The second summer, her name did not come up, unless I forced it up. And he answered by quoting her, the way politicians quote Will Rogers. By the third summer, her name had become a sacred thing, and, if I mentioned her name, we were no longer speaking of the same person. His memory no longer coincided with mine. It was no longer true that she had temper tantrums, that she wore his socks on cold evenings, that she used to buy his shirts in volume, years in advance of when she would give them to him. It is no longer true. The repetitions of a lifetime take on new meanings, abruptly, almost maliciously. As with my mother`s memory, so too with playing cards. I have played cards with this Dutch farmer of my father for over half my life, and yet it is different now. It is ripe with all the unsaid things between us. We sit down like strangers, more comfortable with the cards than with each other, and, for us, as for many fathers and sons, it is easy to be awkward.
”The usual stakes?” he suggests, writing our names down on a piece of paper.
I continue to shuffle the cards.
I wonder why he has asked. The stakes have always been the same. If the game is gin rummy, the stakes are a quarter of a cent a point, and a good night`s work means winning a dollar or two. He knows the stakes.He knows I know them, and yet he has asked. I think it is more than just to hear himself talk, more than just syying something stupid and trite when there is nothing real to say. I think it is habit, my father`s need to know that something will not change around him.
I nod. I give him this assurance. I continue to shuffle.
”You want a drink?” he asks.
He has already poured himself a drink. I don`t drink alcohol. He knows this. And yet he asks.
”Yes,” I say, ”I`d lie some iced tea.”
”Make it yourself.”
There is something offended in this self-styled bartender. If you won`t drink his drinks, you won`t have him behind the drink very long.
Two years ago, the last time we all got together at Christmas for a family reunion, the unspoken motivation being that each Christmas might be the last with him, he stayed with my older brother, and my boys and I stayed with my younger sister. The cottage is closed in the winter; no heat, no water, no access to the driveway with all the snow and ice. My father showed up on Christmas morning at my sister`s apartment and asked us if we wanted a drink. He had his portable kit with him in the car.
”No thanks,” my sister said.
”No thanks,” I said.
And he went out to the car, we thought, to get the kit for himself. But he didn`t come back. He drove away.
”You want a drink?” he repeats, stubbornly.
Iced tea is either beneath him or beyond him. He will not stoop to such company. I don`t drink alcohol, as I said, except with my father.
”Sure, I`ll have one.”
”What?”
I wouldn`t know the difference between scoth and bourbon, between soda water and straight. I want to make it simple.
”I`ll have what you`re having.”
He seems both pleased and annoyed. There`s not much skill to making the smae drink twice.
I look at the score pad. I am struck by the devastating changes in my father, from summer to summer. He used to be what people called a ”towering man,” but now he shuffles to the sink on broken arches, his back is curved, his shouders bent, his baggy pants have lost their butt. This man used to remind me of the fierce white birches that encircle the cottage and put a whistle in the breezes from the lake before they come through the cottage. Now he looks like a weeping willow.
My father built this cottage with his own hands, the year I was born. White bricks surrounded by white birches, the blue-shingled roof, the red chimney that has never been used, the piebald look of summer lawns alternating with winter woods, these were my first memories.
Now my sons collect those memories. Ian fishes off the end of the dock, useing circus peanuts and red licorice when he`s run out of worms. He and David chase frogs, collect clams, make terrariums in empty pickle jars. And they include Daniel when they build their intricate forts out of overturned lawn chairs, stacked higher than any enemy could ever climb. And, when they come in form sunburn or boredom, their bodies lulled by health and bursting with the idleness, I feed them orange sherbet in the afternoon. They call it
”Shubert.”
My father stands at the screen door and worries about them. They might drown if they swim beyond the end of the dock. They might catch a disease from a toad, get hurt by collapsing lawn chairs, wake up other retirees with their incessant laughter.
He worries most when the clouds swarm the sky and take the color out of the lake. He doesn`t mind the rain so much. In fact, he likes to take mid-day naps in his black recliner, the sound of the rain soothing his worry lines. But he jumps at the thunder, and her perspires if there is lighting.
He worries most about the lighting.
”Haven`t you dealt yet?” he asks, still trying to get the ice cubes to come out of the tray, his back turned to me.
”I was waiting for you to cut.”
”I trust you,” he says mechanicaly.
”I don`t want to cheat you,” I tease.
He doesn`t bite. This banter used to have some body to it in years gone by. He used to like to give challenges and take them, somehow measuring his worth by his skill at cards. Now he doesn`t seem to care. He`s more concerned with his weak wrists that can`t even get ice cubes out of the tray.
”Doesn`t matter,” he mutters. ”I`ll beat you anyway.”
I am still shuffling the cards when he comes back with my drink. The last outboard motors have been silenced with the sun going down. We have both the front and back doors open, but it is still too soon for the evening breezes. It is a time of stupor, the colors fading as the smells of fish and scaweed come through the heavy air, and bugs crawl up and down the screens, trying to get in for the light.
I am still looking at the score pad and wondering if some pod or alien being has not taken over my fther`s body. He used to write ”We” and
”They,” underlined and separated by a dividing line. Now there is only my first name and ”dad,” both written in squiggly, unsure hand, as though his handwriting, beyond the effects of arthritis, were a victim of his bad memory, the sign of his internal lying, the equivalent of Pinocchio`s nose.
”So, deal already,” he says, impatiently, as though we had other things waiting for our attention.
I deal. And then I have to wait. I sort my cards quickly, arranging them by pairs or by sequence. My father is thinking about what card he will give me, even as he sorts.
He usually tests me at the beginning. He will give me a face card, and, if I take it, he will say, ”I knew it,” and not give me any other face cards. Or he will give me an ace or deuce, with the same strategy. He watches my discards. If I putdown the seven of clubs, for example, his next discard will be another seven or the eight or six of clubs. He tries to cushion his discards by surrounding mine.
The rules to gin rummy do not change with the seasons, but the mind-set behind those rules does. At lest, it used to change. It used to be that gin rummy in the winter was a fast-paced game, lots of taunts and challenges, a real killer`s instinct in the score. And it used to be that summer gin rummy was a way to ignore the heat. You didn`t hurry for a card, you didn`t remember the other`s pickups so rigorously, you didn`t work up a sweat.
But there was something else. It used to be an understood rule between us, my father and me, playing as we were, mano a mano and between men, that you waited to gin. Now my father goes down as soon as she gets down to ten. He goes for the disarry in my hand, not the perfect matching of three or more cards in his. He has sunk to the level of surprise attack now. He is especially eager to go down if he knows I am collecting face cards.
Sometimes, I get cought up in his strategy, and I too, try to go down as fast as I can. But more often, I am in no hurry to finish the game, and, consequently, I give up on winning as the only outcome. I play defensively instead. I try to collect little ones, I try to confuse him by discarding cards that I had previously picked up, I try to get down to five or less and wait for him to go down. this is how I counter his surprise attacks with a surprise of my own.
In gin rummy jargon, this is called ”getting burned.”
My father has gotten burned constantly in the last five years. He wears the simmer of the sun on his face and hands. His forehead looks like suede sometimes, even with all the deep worry lines. His jaws have dropped, and his mouth looks wired on, the box configuration of puppets. His bighands, his beautiful Dutch hands that were always the symbol for me of manhood and protection, nowcurl at the joints in ugly distorted shapes, gnarled like tree roots, the jutting veins looking like dry twigs that would snap if you touched them.
We have a rhythm to these visits, my father, my sons and I. He notices my sons the first two days, ignores them or loses patience with them the next three weeks, then buys them toys and apologizes to them for being mean and old when we are packing to leave. They have asked me why he makes these apologies, because they know it will be the same the following summer. In a strange way, they like him, even when he yells at them or kicks them or ignores their questions, precisely because he never changes. He is someone they can count on for being constant.
I see to their needs as well as I can, always mindful of my father`s presence, his needs, his disapproval. My father and mother were from the ”old school”: She never went into the work place and he never went into the kitchen. And so my single-parenting is an eyesore, something he can never fully comprehend. He still asks about my ”other half,” even through my marriage collapsed five years ago, about the time my mother died. That year, the first time he saw me alone with my sons, he had tears in his eyes. I caught him at his tears. There is no flow to Dutch weeping, no sound to that sobbing. You catch that kind of crying by instinct, because you yourself are Dutch, and you know there is invisible weeping around you, the way arthritics can tell when it`s about to rain.
When I asked him about his tears, he resented it. But he resented my situation even more, and so he spoke.
”That`s not man`s work,” he said, bitterly.
His meaning was clear enough. Men raise money, women raise kids.
I have tried to teach my father how to cook. I bring recipes with me to the cottage in summer. I ask him to stand by the stove with me. I have tried to teach him how to bake instead of fry, how to cut down on oil, salt, sugar, caffeine, how to spice foods, how to make soups out of leftovers, how to add fiber to his diet.
He resists my teaching, not because of the lessons themselves, but because they come from a man and they are going to a man, and, as far as he`s concerned, neither one of us has any business being in the kitchen at all. I was some how less than a man for knowing these things about cooking, for clothing my children and taking them to school, for not being rich enough to afford a woman who could do these things or showhow smart enough to have avoided the collapse of my marriage in the first place.
Now he has resolved the question. He thinks of me as he thinks of himself. We are both widowers, our women have gone, and he no longer pronounces my ex-wife`s name, as though she had become as profance in his memory as my mother was sacred.
And we have found a rhythm to these visits. I allow the friction between my father and my sons. At the same time, I stand between them sometimes, to protect my children from his worst despairs or deepest drunks. I come as my father`s son, I become my father`s maid and companion, I have even learned to tolerate his silences with my own. Somewhere in those yearly months of July, the weather changes from pleasant spring to sweltering summer, and I change with it. I become my father`s father, and this transformation is the same as my mother`s memory: my father would never admit to its truth.
He maintains this vague, biological echo that he is still my father. Periodically, he asks if I need money. This asking comes out of fatherly habit, not ongoing concern nor genuine curiosity. He doesn`t want to know the answer. His will is written, his money is already allocated in estate, and he knows that all seven children will get the same amount when he dies.
The present is never dealth with.
He is as obsessively fair as he is stubbornly proud. He cannot give a nickel to one of us, without giving a nickel to all seven of us, and filing an entry for same in his books. No one will ever say of his memory that he played favorites. My mother used to send us money on the sly, never telling him. She stayed current and played to our needs or her whims of the heart. He remains deliberately ignorant and plays to his books. There are no false entries in those books.
He lays down his cards, going for eight. I lay mine down more slowly, letting them speak for themselves. He counts. I have only three. I get twenty- five points for burning him, plus five for the difference in what we had in our hands, plus the box, each box being worth a nickel.
”Why didn`t you go down for yourself?” he asks.
”I was waiting to gin,” I say, which is the safe answer.
The truth is that I waited, savoring the cards and this closeness with him, I waited and prolonged the hand, becuase I wanted to get to know my opponent, this man who seeded me, my father, my constipated father. I waited because I love this man and don`t know how to tell him, how to ask him, how to let go of him.
”Lying there,” he says, ”like a snake in the grass.”
The cliches are not important. They are as coded as the bourbon is strong. They always mean more in time than in language.
”Damn snake in the grass,” he says, writing down the score and shoving the cards toward me disdainfully. ”You want another drink?”
I have not finished the drink in front of me. The ice cubes have melted in the hot stillness of early evening. Fruit flies, small enough to get through the screen doors, are assaulting the light bulbs, falling in piles on the table. My drink has left a little pool of condensation, in which some of the fruit flies have drowned.
I give my glass to my father. He will know what to do with it.
His eyes are glazed. Drink affects his eyes the same way tears do. The same mist. Is this simply another view of my father weeping, like the Barthelme story? Or is this our serious caricature of the gin rummy game with Death in the Woody Allen story? What I have read interrupts my perceptions of this reality, sometimes in haunting ways, sometimes in hollow ways. My father no longer reads anything more then the sports page in an occasional newspaper. His eyes are too glazed for anything else.
He tells me about the woman in Florida who became his companion after my mother`s death. This woman was a good companion for my father at first. She liked to play bridge, she liked to play golf, she liked to play the stock market and talk business. She even liked driving in the car, listening to the oldies on EAZY 101, and eating at mid-range restaurants after searching out the sales in Fort Myers or Naples or Miami.
But then she got cataracts and started going blind. Suddenly, playing golf meant looking for her ball after every hit. and she began to play bridge with a heat lamp on behind her, so that she could see the cards.
My father cares for this woman, but he cannot endure the pain of her gradual dependency and the inevitable blindness. He spent two years seeing my mother into the grave from the ravages of cancer. He cannot go through it again. Yet he feels terribly guilty. There is in my father the struggle between the urge toward easy living, uncomplicated relationships and simple pleasures, and the guilt that strangles his urge at every turn. He carries his guilt in a physical way, like a plaster cast around broken limbs. At his core, I suspect that he has always felt guilty, but now at his age, I think his guilt is that of the survivor, the feeble looks on those who came back from the camps, who returned from the wars.
He comes back to the table with our drinks and a new deck of cards. I have skunked him in the first game, and that is always fair call for a new deck of cards. I make no protest, I even offer to keep score.
He ignores my offer.
This is Dutch pride. He has always kept the books. From expenditures to card games, he has always controlled the pad and pencil. He is too proud to accept my offer, and I am too proud to repeat it.
Our Dutch pride has a form. It speaks when spoken to, but it is more likely silent or evasive. It accomplishes by doing. And it is lonely, respectfully so, intolerably so. It lives by codes like honor, duty, hard work, endurance. It accepts no dole, no pity, no interference. By these standards, a man is often measured by how alone he stands. We were not raised to join clubs, believe in unions, take out loans, use credit cards, do therapy.
My father`s primary pleasure after retiring from his appliance business came from playing golf, a game he took up at sixty and played with manic passion, day after day, nine holes or eighteen, with friends or alone. I do not play golf by myself or away from my father, but I took up the game to be with him: sometimes his caddy, sometimes his companion, always his pupil. For the last two summers, he has had trouble gripping the clubs, raising his shoulders, digging in with his cleats. And his focus has shifted, from the drives to the putts, from the long distances he used to cover to the short strokes he can still control. And, for the last two summers, his pupil has learned well enough to beat the teacher. I am mistaken when I think that he will be proud of me. Aging brings with it not just a gradual debilitation in physical prowess but also an intense narcissism. My golf score can only be interpreted as a sad commentary on his own.
Now he tells me that he rarely golfs anymore. Why? I ask him. He is silent. I press and he evades. It is the arthritis in his big Dutch hands, of course. It is also the pressure from steel arch supports in his cleats, pressure that reduces him to a barefoot hunchback after the golf. And it is also the stomach ulcer, the prostate operation that leaves him with too little control of his bowels, the aching lower back that forces him to drive the links in a cart, when his friends are still walking their clubs. But his conclusion to the summary is also the closest he comes to the truth.
”I can`t get the scores I want anymore,” he tells me.
And, if he cannot score in the forties any longer, then his pride will not let him play.
It will not let him surrender the score pad. It will not let him miss Mass on Sunday. It will not let him lean on any of his children for support. It will not let him remarry.
AND so I deal the new deck of cards, lonely myself and starved for conversation with this man. The evening breezes are whipping up, the alcohol warms us from inside, the fireflies flit through the wavering birches, the boat makes swallowing sounds as the waves make it bang against the dock.
Soon, as it does each night at the lake, the air will turn cold, thick and crisp, a stiff drink all its own. The woods grow enchanted in their umbrella of total darkness. Crickets run the choir, but their sound is somehow muted by the sense of smell, rich and fertile, along the ground and up in the trees, the smell that permeates the night. Smells of fish and seaweed, smells of ferns and pines, smells of damp sand as the dirt roads cool. Worm smells, coffee smells, smells of mint and jasmine and juniper. And bonfires. The smells of burning.
Sitting inside with my father, I suddenly want to be outside by myself. I want to take in these trees and breezes that know nothing about Dutch control. I want to throw flat stones across the top of the water and hear them skip more than I can see them. I want to stand at the end of the dock under this fishbowl sky, hands in my pockets, bear-stubble on my chin, my father`s baseball cap on my head, running my tongue across mossy teeth that I stop brushing when I`m at the cottage. I want to give in to that melancholy in me, the one that still mourns my sorry marriage, the one that remembers the puns my children make with the sense of time passing, bodies growing older, unfulfilled desires growing more poignant as they become less and less possible.
But instead I deal the cards. My father has brought out peanuts and pretzels, which he would have me eat, along with his sermon about losing weight. I do not eat them. I sort the cards in my hand. I decide to save cards this time that I have never saved before, keeping kings and aces at the same time, discarding impulsively. And yet, as the deck recedes and order works its way into our hands, the little moments of decision come. My father has discarded the three of clubs.
In my hand, I have a spread of queens and a spread of tens. I also have two threes and the four and five of clubs.
Of course, I want the three of clubs, even though I don`t know which way to go with it. I take the defensive posture, making my decision based on points left. If I go with a spread of threes, then I have the four and five left, and I would have to discard the five or go down for four. If I go with a spread of clubs, then I have two threes left and would have to discard one or go down for three.
Here lies the fine line between luck and predestination. I go with the spread of clubs and discard the three of spades. It fits with my father`s two and ace of spades and he gins. The three of hearts would not have helped him at all.
He thanks me for ”playing into his mitt,” takes a sip of his drink and tallies the hand on the score pad.
Then he turns on the Detroit Tigers baseball game. Radio baseball, so slow and soothing, it fills up all the silent spaces between us, erasing any need or desire to talk between us, even as it drowns out the sounds of the crickets and trees.
He shuffles the cards, and I realize I am bored with the game. When we still had partners, we used to play Hollywood-style, alternating one-on-one against our opponents, the larger score prevailing and counting simultaneously in three different games, three boxes underlined each time. Or when my mother was doing chemotherapy and too weak to do anything else, she and I played solitaire gin rummy, each succeeding hand having a different wild card, from ace to king, the game ending at king.
This game of gin rummy seems plodding, even retarded by comparison. It`s not just my father, his drinking and his silence. It`s also the pauses between cards, the length of each hand, the score pad, the peanuts and pretzels, the Tigers on the radio, all the slow-motion withdrawal, as though the ensemble were somehow an ingenious, civilized brainwashing technique, geared to kill the will in anyone.
I am desperate for the night outside. I want to take off all my clothes and swim naked in the lake, feeling the occasional nibbles of fish, who come to kiss anything that dangles. I am desperate for the intimacy of strangers, the smoke-filled country-western bar in town, the raucous women calling me
”pard” as they ask me to buy them a drink. I am desperate to go naked with a drunken woman, to lie on the greens at the golf course, roll on them after rain in the moonlight, legs and lips locked together, rolling over and over on that carpet.
”You were foolish that time,” my father reminds me, winking at the cards he shuffles, warming up to the drink and the score. ”You were playing like your grandmother.”
IN the moments of most stillness at the cottage, in these boring neutral moments, when the sun has gone down and there are no plans for the evening, for the week, the month, the future, I find my own core of narcissism and wonder why it is that the compassion only flows one way between me and my father. Why is it that I come as an intruder every summer and stay too long, trying to do for my father? He has raised his family. He owns property in Florida and Michigan. He can play golf whenever he wants, take a drive in his car whenever he wants with whomever he wants.
Me? I am a teacher, trying to raise three sons under eight on a teacher`s salary. I have nothing laid away for their future or mine. We live from day to day, mouth to mouth, rich in stories, poor in possessions. Why don`t I pity myself, then, when I am with my father in his silences? The only answer I can give myself is that I would not trade places with this man. And, in some perverse way, if you won`t trade places with someone more affluent than you are, then you must be satisfied with what you`ve got.
In this particular game, I go down on the third discard. I go down for ten, but it turns out to be better than a gin. My father has six face cards in his hand, and no three of any one of them. As he mutters his displeasure, I notice this difference between us. When I am caught like this, I lay down my hand and let him count the points. When he is caught ”for a bundle,” as he puts it, he counts them in his hand, then folds his cards and puts them on top of the drawing pile. There is no audit in his case. He is honest about counting, so there is no attempt to cheat. But I am sure he is unaware of the trust in him that he forces on his opponent.
I have asked him to play bridge when my brothers and sisters visit on the weekends, those who know how to play bridge. But I know there is a discomforting deja vu to having me as his partner. My mother was his lifelong partner at bridge, and he still forgets that I am sitting in her seat, calling me ”dear heart” from time to time when we discuss the bidding. My brothers and sisters interpret this as senility. I see it as memory that never got to be expressed.
There was a time when I could invite him to do the unexpected and he would go along. Nights when the crickets roared like a tractor, I would bring out the poles and worms, and we would go fishing. He liked to talk about
”life” at the end of the dock then, life being synonymous with business, CDs, money market funds, doing one`s taxes, one`s will or estate. We have never talked about books, films, painting, music. My father is a man totally untouched by the arts. He is a man of things in front of his nose, material things he can handle, putter with, find tools for and fix at length. A new roof, a clogged septic tank, a frayed clothesline, a leaky faucet, these are the things that own my father`s focus.
`ARE they all that good?”
”Huh?”
I have been so distracted that I forgot about the game.
”Are you going to discard or are you going to keep eleven?”
Give seven, keep eleven, go with your pockets full to heaven. The old children`s game.
I give him the seven of clubs.
He has been picking that card up all night. He does so again and gins.
”No more drinks for you,” he teases, getting up to make himself another. ”You gave me two sevens in a row.”
So I did. Was it innocent distraction? Or was it willful self-destruction, as sons have a tendency to do with their fathers?
The ironies do not escape me. My father is finally buzzed enough and winning at gin that he is having a good time, talking more, getting frisky with his taunting, even as I am getting more and more distracted, self-preoccupied, so that I am missing the moment I wanted to give him.
I imagine this conversation between us.
”Dad, some people grow up and their sense of family is as detached as the clothes they`ve outgrown. These people leave family and seek out friends, new relationships, a different sense of belonging. And there are some people who never outgrow their families. They come home like a ritual, and they are obsessed with knowing who their parents are, before they can know themselves. Do you understand what I`m talking about? You`re seventy-two and I`m almost forty, and I`m still trying to express my love for you and get love back from you. Do you understand that kind of obsession?”
I cannot imagine an appropriate response from my father. Anything too direct and encouraging would be so antithetical to his Dutch adherence to the soil, the silence of potato-pickers, and it would so offend his sense of dignity, his embarrassment at emotional disclosures, that I cannot give him words here. He nods, knowingly. He allows me to continue.
”I took that obsession into my career, Dad. I assumed that your teachings were correct: that all you had to do was perform to the best of your abilities and you would get rewarded. But, Dad, that`s not how it works. People who scream the loudest often get the quickest promotions. If you keep quiet, they assume you`re happy with what you`ve got. Do you understand my sense of failure, Dad? That I was born with the best of your drive and the best of Mom`s intelligence, and I ended up as a teacher. You know what they say about teachers, don`t you? Those that can, do; those that can`t, teach. All my education, my degrees and awards, and I have this sense of having failed you, the Dutch farmer who earned more money than I`ll ever see.”
He understands money matters, even if he doesn`t understand obsessions, and so his knowing nod here is less perfunctory, more gracious.
”And I took that obsession into my marriage, Dad. Do you know that I spent twelve years trying to give to my wife, without ever figuring out what my needs were, what it was she wasn`t giving back to me. Do you know how painful it was for me to see that marriage collapse? Do you remember how you and Mom both preached your sixty-forty theory at us? If you each give sixty percent and expect only forty percent in return, then your marriage can`t fail. And yet it did fail, and I failed you again, and you never taught me how to cope with that kind of failure.”
`AM I keeping you up?”
It`s my father`s way of bringing me back to the game, and I realize that I have talked too much in my imagined conversation. My questions are all rhetorical, pointless, moot, and so it is pointless for me to ever ask them in real conversation.
”No,” I whisper suddenly, hearing my son call me from the bedroom.
I go to him.
It is Daniel, my youngest son, the one with the nightmares in the middle of the night, the one with big eyes and big questions for me when I least expect them.
”What`s the matter?” I ask him. ”Why aren`t you sleeping?”
”Daddy, is Grampa your father?”
”Yes, of course.”
”But is he your Daddy the way you are our Daddy?”
”Yes.”
”Then why doesn`t he kiss you the way you kiss us?”
It is true. My father is more comfortable shaking hands or having my boys give him ”five” than kissing them at bedtime.
”I don`t know, Daniel. Why are you thinking about this?”
”Because he`s sad.”
”Why do you say that?”
Children follow their own train of thought, especially in the night. They don`t have to answer questions. They keep asking their own quesions instead.
”Do you think he likes us?”
”Of course he does.”
”Not you, Daddy. Us. Do you think he likes children?”
”I`m sure he does, Daniel. He`s not around children very much, so he doesn`t always know how to act.”
”He`s really old,” Daniel says, as though talking to himself.
”Yes, he is.”
”I would still be nice to little kids when I`m that old.”
This comes from the mouth of a four-year-old.
”Go to sleep now. I`ll see you in the morning.”
He turns over, grinning as I tuck him in, glad for my hands on him.
I go back out to my father at the card table.
”I didn`t look,” he assures me. He doesn`t ask about Daniel. ”Let`s make this the last hand, okay?”
The Tiger ballgame has just finished, my father`s drink is almost empty, and he is ready to go to bed.
”Okay,” I say.
THE last hand should always be the best hand. It should go down to the bottom of the deck, with each of us holding a pair of aces as our only stray cards, each of us holding what the other wants, each of us refusing tenaciously to give in to the other, a hand so satisfactory and hard-fought that losing is as good as winning.
Such a hand is like my imagined conversations. Never happens.
My father goes down for seven on the next card. I have sixty-two points left in my hand, putting him well over game, so far over that he needn`t bother counting, except that he always counts.
Counting is his one obsession.
He reaches the final tally. I owe him two dollars and ten cents.
”We`ll play it off,” he says.
Final point of manhood between us. Had I won, he would have insisted on paying me the money, just as he always refuses to take my money when he wins. And so, sum total, he has only made sure that I know the exact amount I won`t be paying him.
It is a small point perhaps among two grown men who have so much trouble touching each other, but it matters to my father. It is his final dominance over me, after all: fathers pay out to sons, and they never take in. They play it off instead.
He looks at me a little strangely, and I realize my own eyes are glazed now.
”Don`t stay up too late, huh?”
He knows I am going for my walk outside, and still he says this every night, as though I were still a teenager on curfew.
I have tears in my eyes. I am overflowing with the love I cannot express to him, and, failing that expression, I am desperate to get away from him.
He gets up and puts his glass in the sink.
”I`ll do these dishes in the morning, huh?” he says, making me feel that I should do them tonight, before I go to bed.
”Lock the doors before you go to bed?”
”I will, Dad,” I say, hiding this scream in my chest.
”And leave the bathroom light on for the kids?”
”Sure will.”
”Okay, then,” my father concludes, satisfied that another day has been wrapped up and tucked in.
He shakes my hand and goes to bed.
And I am left with this tingling in my hand, this pain in my right hand, as though his arthritis had passed from his hand to mine. I walk out to the dock and spit in the lake. I look up at the fishbowl sky, and the stars I expected to find have all vanished. Instead, there are smears of milky-quartz clouds and occasional jags of heat lightning, sudden light without sound.
My left hand is in my left pants pocket, but I cannot get my right hand to go into its pocket. My hand is still pinging with flashes that grab and let go, grab and let go. I can`t get my father out of my hand. My father`s hands, my hands, the hands of my sons.
The lightning in all of us.
