My father-in-law returns from the bathroom. I’m at the stove making breakfast. Sunday morning, his house. Ours is next door.
“Do you ever stand a few inches from the mirror?” he asks. “Stare at yourself? A ten-minute look into your own eyes?”
At eighty-three, he understands nothing about seventeenth-century art, but he knows the tormented face of Rembrandt’s 1659 self-portrait. He saw it on a slide, he’s told me, projected in a high-school psychology class. That was many decades ago, in Cleveland, but the image, preserved in his hippocampus, haunts him now.
“I avoid introspection as a rule,” I say.
“What? Speak up.”
“I’d be afraid to do that.”
He shivers. “Holy God. It teaches you something.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Like who you are. How low are the lows.”
“How low are they?” I stir eggs with the black plastic spatula and give him a minute. “You don’t know?”
“I can’t remember it.”
“It?”
“The low. The thing.”
“There’s no thing, Dad.”
He disagrees by nodding. “Yes, there is. Something sickening, something appalling.”
“There’s really nothing.”
“I erased it because I can’t live with it. Your mind does that,” he says.
“It’s not the missionary woman, surely.”
He scoffs. “No, no, no.” But the panic is real. He pulls a fork from the drawer, hungry, but he’s moving through a long corridor in his head. At each door a knock. “I did something evil, Nicholas.”
Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.” His expression, as he tries to force himself through the portal, is terrible to see. Tabitha has to walk away.
Does his memory even function anymore? His few dozen anecdotes are fixed, like beetles pinned to cardboard. He tells them over and over, but they have no explanatory power. What was my point? asks his puzzled smile. I related that for a reason, but what reason?
The ur-story, which I’ve heard so many times I can see it like a movie, is about growing up in Cleveland at age nine. Every afternoon on his walk home from school, the Italian kids would catch him at the end of Murray Hill Road. If he cut through Dewald Park, they’d ambush him on East 119th Street. If he went down Mayfield, they’d be waiting in the alley. They owned the neighborhood. They made him miserable. His fear made him miserable.
One day his dad, Alphonse, retrieved some ancient boxing gloves from the attic: burnt maroon, the leather wrinkled and cracked, dirty laces. Still in his railroad overalls—faded blue with white pinstripes, the gleaming Norfolk and Western badge on the bib—Alphonse dropped to his knees and showed his son how to jab, how to keep his guard up, how to feint, how to throw a straight right. He clipped the boy on the nose. “Keep your hands up!” he barked, his hair matted on his forehead from the cap he’d tossed aside. The gloves felt weighted on the boy’s fists, clumsier than he’d expected. He jabbed and jabbed, weary, aching. “Move your feet,” said his dad on his knees on the green rug in the tiny Cleveland house in 1945. The boy jabbed and jabbed, and learned how to explode with the right hand. “Block and strike,” his dad said. “Fight me!”
Still Sunday. Late afternoon, a chilly October day in Ohio, and somehow he’s launched the Dixon riding mower into the hawthorn bushes. He’s cut a ragged gap in the hedge that separates our houses. The mowing deck of the Dixon is twisted. The front wheels are off the ground. The birdbath is knocked over. Behind the steering levers he sits tipped back like an astronaut, like a kid stranded on the space-capsule ride at the fairgrounds.
“Call me shit for brains,” he says. A branch has pierced his calf, his white athletic sock stained with blood. “I meant to reverse, but I shot forward.” He hobbles into the garage, pushing me away. “Let me walk.” He sits on an upturned milk crate while I pull off his sock and shoe, roll up his pant leg, and make puddles on the cement floor with warm water and a rag and a bar of soap.
He stands and takes a brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the top of the garage refrigerator. “You want the bubbles,” he says, and he sloshes it over the nickel-sized wound.
He limps around the garage, a test lap. “Did I tell you about the missionary woman?”
“Nine times this week.”
“One night. One time I listen to my pecker. Damn it.”
One night, but the husband discovered it this month, forty-one years later. A fat envelope arrived in our mailbox and in the Wisconsin and Minnesota mailboxes of Tabitha’s two siblings: printouts of the recent emails along with a melodramatic letter. “Ask your DAD about these emails!!!! What a grate Christian man he is!!!! To seduce my wife!!!!” Bill Heckathorn, from St. Louis. Also with dementia, apparently.
Feeling insufficiently avenged, Bill telephones as well. If a Nazarene doesn’t have another Nazarene’s information, he knows someone who does. Bill phones the landline. He phones each of our cells—my father-in-law, Tab, her two siblings, me. He rages and sobs until we hang up. “My entire Universe!!!!” says the letter. “Blown to bits!!!!!!!”
“Did I tell you how it happened?”
“Tell me again.”
He does another peg-leg lap, circling his Silverado. “We lived in St. Louis. She was on leave from Belgium, touring the Nazarene churches. ‘The worldwide harvest,’ that was her theme. She told the Sunday-school kids maybe they’d turn out to be missionaries. They ate it up. Missionaries were heroes, of course.” Yes, they were both married, but in the fourth-grade room where he taught the Bible lesson, the woman thrilled him with her jewelry, the girlish toss of her hair. She wore an exquisite Belgian shawl that slid from her shoulder. What slayed him was her demonstration of how a European argues in a café, a coy back-and-forth of her finger, No, no, impossible. Her bracelet slithered along her wrist. She smiled over at him. Impossible. She knew what she was doing. Julie Heckathorn.
“Missus,” he says, “Mrs. Julie Heckathorn.”
“What year are we talking?”
“Hell if I know—’77, ’78? Why would she email me?”
“It’s what you old people do. You get sentimental. You go back in time. Why did you answer her?”
She’d found his address and emailed him a hello. He’d responded. Prudent at first, but by the fourth or fifth message they were flirting and reminiscing about the hotel room. The bathtub. Her blue heels. “Remember the mirror?” she’d written.
At eighty-fucking-three.
“You’ll be eighty before you know it,” he says. “You’ll see how it is. We’re not dead people.”
The “one time” he listened to his pecker—that wasn’t true, as Tabitha and I have known for years. There was Vanessa: a college senior who boarded with him and Ruth. She lived upstairs for one semester and made herself a little too much at home. I came over one morning in my pajamas—this is years ago, when the twins were still little—to borrow some cereal and found her alone in the kitchen in lilac sweats and a thin gray hoodie. She raised her nose in the air when she saw me. She pushed down the toaster and warmed her hands over the vents while we talked in short sentences about daylight savings time, whole wheat versus multigrain. But the silent subtext, my actual question, was So, what’s going on in this house? and the answer I got was What do you think? Her toast popped, and she got the butter from the fridge and took her plate to the table. She sat down, looked at me in annoyance, then lifted a blanket from the back of the love seat and wrapped herself up in a cocoon.
Later there was Maddy, the runner, who got him doing half marathons in his sixties. He trained religiously. He ran a few halves, then a full. He fainted in the heat in the Columbus National, but it didn’t stop him. He rubbed Vaseline over his bloody nipples. He bought new shoes every month because he’d wear out the soles. Maddy was brassy, loud. I have a memory of her in a white bikini in her backyard, a broiling July afternoon, beer and barbecue. She looked me up and down, her eyes confident and contemptuous.
She met all of us at the same party, Ruth included, which Maddy enjoyed; that was part of the fun. Ruth was not a runner, not a drinker, not a bikini-wearer. I overheard Maddy say to my father-in-law, “Get that bitch a pair of Nikes.”
Here comes Tabitha up the stone path that skirts the hedge. We’re both fifty-seven, our birthdays two days apart. Of the three siblings she’s the youngest, but not the brat—the opposite. The responsible one, the Nazarene girl, the hard worker, the caretaker. She’s a physical therapist, and her vocation is her steady light. There’s no complaining from her about the things I would complain about: the scheduling, the long days. She stares at the tilted Dixon but doesn’t stop. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“The damn mower,” says her dad. He opens the garage refrigerator and grabs the enormous box of Cabernet. Every evening he pours four ounces of wine for his heart and drinks it down like medicine. Tabitha joins him sporadically on the weekends. She usually treats this father-daughter bonding with irony, but tonight she’s got tears in her eyes.
Her dad gimps through the door and leads the way into the kitchen. He pulls out the Pyrex measuring cup and two glasses, bending over and closing one eye like it’s a lab experiment. The wine glugs out. He watches it hit the line, sets down the box, then pours the wine from the cup into Tabitha’s glass. Then he does the same for himself.
“Cracker?”
“Sure.”
He digs in the cupboard and finds a sleeve of smashed rye crisps.
“Skol,” he says.
“Skol,” says Tabitha.
Down the hatch. It takes five seconds.
“Guess who just called,” says Tabitha. The tears appear again.
“Old Bill Heckathorn.”
“Wrong. Their son.”
“He called me, too!” I say. “He was nasty.”
“Super nasty. Hard-core Christian-y. Who the hell is he?” says Tab. “He doesn’t count.”
The hell sounds innocuous enough, but she swears once a year, so I take it as a warning.
“Don’t answer,” he says. “Let it ring.”
Tab’s face is flushed. In a minute her tongue will thicken. She fills her glass with water from the tap. “I’m glad Mom’s not around for all this crap.”
“Hey, she knew. We talked it out forty years ago.”
Tabitha stares at him.
How do you describe your own wife? Her inner life? I find it almost impossible. She flunked kinesiology back in PT school and had to drop down to the class behind her and repeat the year. The humiliation was too much, and she wanted to quit school altogether. In her bedroom, twenty years old, crying, face buried in her pillow. He came in, sat on the edge of the bed. I was there because we were dating by then. My dad had gone AWOL when I was ten, and her dad stepped in, looked out for me, took me to Cardinal games, taught me how a car worked, made sure I stayed in school. As teenagers Tab and I went slow, slow, slow, but it was strong from the beginning, like a huge, silent tree in a forest. That night he said to her, “Here’s what will happen: You’ll drop down a year. You’ll retake kinesiology. You’ll pass with an A. You’ll finish the program. Graduate. Take the licensing exam and ace it. You’ll get a job, start your career. You’ll be a physical therapist for forty years. And no one will care. No one will even know it took an extra year to get started. And you’ll have joy. You’ll love your life.”
That’s what he told her. And it all came true.
She stands at the counter. The wine with her dad is the only alcohol she touches, so she’s basically lit. Her neck is pink, even her earlobes. “Maybe you did do something, Dad.”
“It’s not the women.”
“I don’t mean the women. I mean something else. What else are we going to find out?”
The kitchen is silent. My father-in-law does a deaf act. He stares through the sliding glass at the twilit yard layered with leaves.
“Maybe I don’t really know you,” says Tabitha.
“Well . . . that’s what I’ve been saying. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” After a minute he adds, “But your mother and I were one soul.”
Another beetle pinned to the cardboard:
In 1957 he transferred from Washington & Jefferson, where he had a football scholarship, to Olivet, a little Nazarene college in Illinois. Ruth was a preacher’s kid from St. Louis. A sophomore with two boyfriends. She worked part-time in the college mail room. One day a package addressed to him bounced back to the P.O. The next afternoon Ruth walked all the way out to the athletic fields wearing her new sweater. She thought she should hand-deliver the package to the new transfer student, the tough city kid who looked like Joseph Campanella.
She spotted him from the sunset gazebo on the pinnacle of the hill and kept her eye on him as she descended the many steps to the field. But as she strolled along the sideline, stepping over loose footballs and around blocking sleds, she pretended she didn’t know where he was. She stood with perfect posture, her hand a visor. She looked this way and that, turning so he could view her from all sides. She was searching for the new transfer student, and she couldn’t find him because she barely knew what he looked like, so she needed to twirl on the chalked sideline, straight as a pin, with the shrill blasts of the coaches’ whistles and the crunch of pads and the lonely thump of a football lofted into the air—
“You’re laying it on thick,” I say.
“What part?” he says. “It’s all accurate.”
I drive us to church for the evening service—the contemporary worship with electric guitars and purple lighting and a discreet fog machine behind the drummer. My father-in-law’s gray hair is smashed flat from pillows and sofa cushions and no shower. His old jeans fall off his butt when he stands for prayer, so the row behind us can see his flimsy briefs, the elastic band torn away from the cotton. Tabitha buys him three-packs of boxers, but the hoary underwear returns. He fits his enormous black reading glasses on his head so he can look at the program, then returns them to his shirt pocket to read the screen where the lyrics scroll. Tab is in her super-soft white sweater, the fuzzy one. I don’t know the material.
Afterward in the parking lot we meet two hulking men in their thirties. My father-in-law coached them in football. In his spare time he helped with the offensive line for the local high-school team, the Yellowjackets. They squeeze his shoulder, genuinely pleased to see him. On the muddy field he would jump around like a teenager. He put a whistle around my neck and dragged me out there, too. We showed the kids how to run-block and pass-block, how to trap, how to get outside on a sweep, how to set up for a draw play, how to sell it to make the linebackers drop off so the running back could sneak into the seam. He patted helmets, pounded shoulder pads. “That’s a super job, Ernesto!” He’d get down in his three-point stance, burst forward like a missile. His hat would fly off his gray head.
As we stand near the cars, my wife’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She looks at the number, and her mouth goes tight as she swipes to answer. I make various motions, but she waves me off and puts the phone to her ear. “Hello?” Her voice rings across the parking lot.
The pastor stops to say a benediction to my father-in-law. Meanwhile Tabitha listens to the voice on the phone and stares at the blue-and-white handicap stencil on the blacktop. “You know what?” The streetlamp bathes her like a stage light. “I’m glad my dad fucked your mom.” A pause. “You don’t like it? But who the hell are you? That’s my question. What does it have to do with you?” Some of the Nazarenes scoot toward their cars. A few others drift closer, trying to be inconspicuous. “Good for him. I hope he enjoyed himself. I hope he stuck it up her missionary ass.” Tabitha holds the phone in front of her face now. She speaks at the device instead of into it. “What’s your wife been up to lately? That’s what I’d worry about.” The pastor bites his lip in anguish. “That’s right. Call me whenever you want to hear it again. You soft dick.”
We’re back home on the front porch, the three of us, in sweatshirts and jackets. Four deer filch crab apples off the trees by the lane. An eighteen-wheeler downshifts in the distance on Highway 183. The woods make a gray canvas at the top of the rise.
Not long ago Dad drove the Dixon a few hundred feet into the copse and got lost like a child in a fairy tale. Stuck in the bracken, disoriented. He soiled his pants without knowing it and just sat there, waiting for things to change. Tabitha found him and walked him out, cleaned him up in the bathroom, laid out a set of clothes, parked him in front of the Ohio State football game, freed the mower.
He beams at me and punches me on the leg. “You’re a mess, Nicholas.” His highest compliment. I feel it, I like it, it doesn’t get old. The only fault in my character, he says, is that I don’t always “take and run with it.” He wanted me to have a vegetable garden like his. He used a flat shovel to roll up the sod, then rented a cranky machine from U-Haul and rototilled a twelve-by-eighteen-foot rectangle between our houses. Put down railroad ties as a border, even left me two gardening books on our doorstep. Then he waited impatiently for me to take and run with it.
But I never did. Seedy weeds as high as his chin and sparrows flying crisscross at the white cabbage moths—that’s all he ever got out of that patch. Meanwhile I learned the sheet-metal trade and finally stopped drinking after fifteen years—just in time, it always feels like—before the twins were born. A boy and a girl, both nurses now, both out west.
I don’t drink the wine, and I try not to remember things. One year in particular, 1996. Can’t remember a single day of it. I wasn’t employed; I know that much. Later I drove a school bus. Now the sheet metal.
But he knows all about it. “You’re a mess, Nicholas.”
Suddenly he groans and stiffens. Not a paralytic seizure. No, it’s the horror, the “thing.” He goes inward, his face contorted with pain.
I stay quiet. There’s nothing to do but sit with him. Is he across the threshold? His lips move as if he speaks to someone, as if he’s in the very center of the memory, the cinematic heart of it, but there’s no way to tell.
Tabitha gets up to go inside. She can’t watch.
He’s frozen in the white Amish rocker. Then, gradually, he relaxes, and he’s peaceful again.
Ten minutes pass. We hear the owl in the oak behind the garage. He rubs his shin and hitches up his pant leg. In the gray light I make out blood smeared on his calf, something to check on when he goes to bed.
It helps him afterward to talk, so I say, “Dad, didn’t you have it kind of rough growing up in Cleveland?”
He thinks about it, nods. “Oh, man.” Yes, he did. “Let me tell you. I was nine years old. The Italians used to beat the hell out of me. This was before Pops was in the wheelchair. Before he fell off the coal car and broke his back . . .”
Our mailbox stands beside the lane, a big black cube with a gray flag. Three years ago we found a letter inside, the envelope bursting, two stamps. Tabitha read it standing in the sunshine beside the lane, all eight pages. From Wheeler’s mom.
“Wheeler” was what everyone called him. I can never remember his real name. A heroin addict. The son of a friend of a friend. In and out of rehab four or five times. He would coin out—graduate—then relapse the very first day. The very first hour. He’d walk the twelve blocks to Rawlins Street, to the usual house, and buy the usual shit. He didn’t fake all the rehab soul-scraping and life-searching. He labored with the right attitude, but he never even came close to staying sober.
My father-in-law visited him after he landed in Knox County Jail for breaking into a trailer. He prayed with him. He listened to his stories. He took me along a couple of times. The county let Wheeler go, didn’t charge him. He got lucky, and for the next year my father-in-law met him once a week and tried to fight the battle alongside him. In the end Wheeler overdosed and died in the ER on a blizzardy night the week before Christmas. To nobody’s surprise. But it was sad. He was a kind and defenseless kid. The drugs just ran him over.
Anyway, his mom wrote Tabitha a letter. “Did you know your dad is a good man?” Eight pages’ worth.
On the porch my father-in-law finishes his story about learning to box at age nine. Learning to fight. “That was before my dad crippled himself,” he says. “That’s another chapter.” On his face a bewildered smile. A smile to placate the accusers. The boxing story didn’t explain everything. He must have left something out.
I think he means to point to the end, the healing, the flame of desire extinguished. But the words don’t rise. They stay on the ground, they go in their circles.
The screen door bangs behind Tabitha. The chains creak on their anchors as she drops next to him in the hanging swing. “Tell another one, Dad.”
“I’m tapped out, girl.”
“There’s no hurry. We’re just out here.”
He nods. He knows where he is now. We sit together, no words. The moon is almost down, the deer like ghosts under the trees. Dad’s hands are clenched in his lap, his head turned to the left so he can focus his eyes on me. Moonlight on his face. He resembles the old Dutch painter in the self-portrait. I’m strangely gratified, honored. I’ve felt this emotion before but never named it, never uttered it—how when he gazes directly at me, I’m proud.
He says, “Here’s one you haven’t heard.”
