All Our Yesterdays (19 page)

She never said things at random, like I did, simply because they popped into her head. Her mind didn’t work associatively. She was encouraging me, though not very much.

“I always remember,” I said, “when my father would go to work when I was a little kid, I was scared, because I felt like there was no one to take care of us.”

“You and Peggy.”

“Yeah.”

“God,” Grace said, “how awful.”

“For her too, I suppose. I’m way past liking her. Or forgiving her, for that matter. She was pretty unforgivable. But I can sympathize with her. She was overmatched. Here I was this sickly precocious kid,
smarter than she was when I was very young—and I knew it at some scary, not quite conscious level. I entered very early into a conspiracy to pretend that she was not more childlike than her child.”

“You probably scared her,” Grace said.

“Sure. Because she also knew at some not quite conscious level that she was more childlike than her child, that she herself needed to be taken care of, so how was she supposed to take care of me? She was scared because she didn’t know what to do. Scared because she seemed to have no maternal instinct to trust, scared because her husband seemed to know what to do and seemed to have a parental instinct and seemed to trust it and seemed to take better care of me than of her, though she needed it as badly as I did. If she lost him, not his love, and apparently not his lovemaking, but if she had lost his—what—his adult-ness, it would have been as bad as if I lost him. We’d both have been orphans in the storm.”

“And that,” Grace said, “made her mad as hell.”

“At him, at me. Every day. Every day that he was able to take care of me when she couldn’t, every day when he had to take care of her when she couldn’t, every day it rammed home her failure, and her helplessness, and every day enraged her.”

Grace had made some smoked turkey sandwiches with yellow mustard on whole wheat bread. We were eating them and drinking tea, at her counter. The limb of a tree outside was thrashing in the wind and its movement, alternately shadowing and revealing the snow-blurred streetlamp at the end of the parking lot, made sporadic patterns on the high stark white wall of her living room.

“You seem to understand her plight very well,” Grace said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny you should notice.”

Grace had cut the sandwiches diagonally into triangles; she took a significant bite of the pointed end of one.

“So what did he do?” she said.

“Gus? He got me away from her as much as he could. Which was hard, because he had to work. He was our sole financial support. But he’d take me places, and then he got some money.”

“Un-huh,” Grace said.

“I guess we know where….” I said.

“By blackmailing my father,” Grace said.

“Yeah … For me, I think. So I could go to a private kindergarten. I hated the kindergarten and it scared me to be away from my mother. But it calmed her down a little. That way she had mornings free, and only had to deal with me until my father came home, if he was working days. If he was working nights, she didn’t have to deal with me at all, because he’d get up when I came home from kindergarten, and play with me. I was too shy to play with other kids, and it must have driven my father crazy, because I wasn’t interested in anything he knew anything about. I didn’t like baseball, or fishing, stuff like that.”

“So what did he do with you?”

“He read to me a lot, and we went to museums and historical restorations and places: Plymouth Plantation,
Old Ironsides
, the Museum of Fine Arts.”

“Gus doesn’t seem like a Fine Arts kind of person,” Grace said.

“But I was,” Chris said. “It was less the exhibits
than the place. Museums are a controlled environment. I liked that. I felt safer there.”

“Was your mother better?”

“At least different. Gus had hung it up, really. He never argued with her. They didn’t talk much or go out much. They slept in twin beds, and I’m sure that’s all they did. I think she was probably relieved that she didn’t have to … ah …” I looked for a word.

“Service him,” Grace said.

“Yeah.”

“So it was better.”

“It was quieter, but they still had their battle, and I was the place they fought it. My father had no one else to love. My mother was jealous of it and wanted me for herself. Not as a child, but as a playmate, or maybe plaything, I don’t know. To her I think I was more like an anatomically correct doll. And once I reached a point where I was less dependent, didn’t require her to be a grown-up, then we sort of got on better. There was a period, a kind of stasis, after I had become less needy, and before I became too smart, when she could sort of relate to me like a plaything, or a pet.”

“But you had your father, you knew he loved you.”

“Yeah. I knew that, but sometimes I would think he loved her. In retrospect he didn’t, he was just trying to find a way to make her a mother for me. But the stakes were too high when I was little. I couldn’t afford any uncertainty.”

“Poor Gus,” Grace said.

“Yeah, he’s a pretty straight-ahead guy, not stupid, but I think probably not so complicated then as he’s become, and he was faced at home with this dysfunctional
wife and this odd little kid that he loved. And he couldn’t make it work.”

“And he had a mother too,” Grace said.

“Yeah, and she was no day at the beach either.”

“But he did love you and he does.”

“Oh, God, yes,” I said. “Too much probably.”

“Sort of a variation on the Sheridan tradition,” Grace said.

“We are an obsessive lot,” I said.

H
e went with his father to Fenway Park. He was fourteen and disinterested. He was agile enough and, like the grandfather he’d never met, he was tall and naturally strong, but he didn’t like sports. He never had. He’d rather have gone to the movies. He felt sullen as they went in, got peanuts and a program, and walked up through the stairwells. His father paused at the top of the stairs and looked at the bright green space, for a moment. Chris found the gesture really assy.

They were behind the first base dugout in some box seats that someone had given Gus. The Red Sox were playing Detroit. Chris didn’t even know what the Detroit team was called, and he didn’t want to know.

“See this guy,” Gus said, pointing, “the guy in right for the Tigers?”

That’s what they were called. Big deal

“That’s Al Kaline.”

Like it matters
.

“I know you don’t know him, but just remember him. Someday you’ll be proud to tell people you saw him.”

In the box next to them was a man, his wife, and four boys. All of them had baseball gloves. The older two had scorecards, as did the man. The mother was still attractive. Her hair was blond. Her eyes were shaded by a big straw hat. She held the smallest boy
on her lap, and pointed things out to him softly. The father and mother brushed against each other often in the box and when they did they usually looked at each other and grinned. They looked at each other often when one of the boys said something they liked. And they grinned when they did that too.

“They gonna pitch Lolich today?” one of the kids asked in that annoying know-it-all way kids had when they talked sports.

“Bad news for Yaz,” his brother said.

“Look at the arms on Willie Horton,” his father said.

“Which one’s he?”

“Black guy down there by the batting cage.”

Chris looked at the thickly muscled black man standing next to what must have been the batting cage. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You like this okay?” Gus said. “You don’t like it we don’t have to stay, you know? Tickets were free, don’t cost us anything either way.”

“I don’t want to leave,” Chris said.

The game started, and Chris watched it as hard as he could, but nothing much seemed to happen and when something did happen it didn’t look very interesting. And he was never sure when he should cheer. The four boys in the next box were raucous and excited. Chris found them irritating. He looked at his father and saw him glance at the boys and their mother and father. And a surge of recognition went through him. Suddenly and clearly he experienced his father’s loss. He would later think of it as an epiphany. The people in the box next to them were what Gus had hoped to be. The woman in the next booth holding the small boy on her lap leaned over and whispered
in her husband’s ear, he whispered something back, and she reddened a little and they both laughed, and Chris saw before him the unutterable gulf which loomed beneath his father, and experienced it as if it were his gulf, and knew for a moment what his father had lost and never spoken of, as if he had lost it.

He looked at the big man beside him, thick bodied as a tree stump, as unyielding as adamantine. His father looked at him and smiled and put one of his thick arms around Chris’s shoulders and patted his upper arm.

“It’s nice of you to come with me, Chris,” he said. “I know it’s not your favorite thing to do.”

And Chris nodded without speaking and looked away toward the game in progress so that his father wouldn’t see the tears which filled his eyes and blurred the bright green field before him.

W
hen Gus dropped him off at college, it was the first time Chris had been away from home. They drove up alone. The car was packed with things Peggy had decided Chris would need at college, but Peggy’s back hurt her, she said, and the long ride would aggravate it, and then she’d have to stay in a motel, and she could never sleep in a strange bed.

“How’d Ma hurt her back?” Chris said as they drove west on Route 2, through the still summer landscape.

“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Hard to remember when she didn’t have a bad back.”

“She ever see a doctor?”

“Once. He told her she’d had a muscle spasm, suggested she do some sit-ups to strengthen her stomach.”

“Sit-ups?” Chris said. “Ma?”

Gus smiled.

“I never saw her do any sit-ups,” Chris said.

“No,” Gus said. “I don’t think she’d want to give up her bad back.”

They were quiet. Chris’s face was tight, the way it always was when he was scared. When he swallowed, Gus could hear him. Gus felt much the same way, but he’d learned to bury it deeper. At Chris’s dorm there were a lot of station wagons with the make-believe wood on the sides, a lot of mothers in cashmere
sweaters and plaid skirts, a lot of fathers in Brooks Brothers sportswear.
Very few Paddies
, Gus thought.
Very few coppers
. The incoming freshmen all seemed tanned and blond, wearing standard-issue tennis sweaters. Chris looked at Gus for a moment and both of them felt the abyss beneath them. Then they took the luggage and trudged into the dorm.

“I won’t hang around,” Gus said.

Chris shook his head in agreement.

“You’ll be fine,” Gus said.

Chris nodded.

“Sure,” he said.

Gus didn’t know how to do this. He felt clumsy, he put his arms awkwardly around his son and hugged him. Chris felt awkward too.

“Call,” Gus said.

“Sure.”

“And remember the Sheridan family motto,” Gus said. “If they don’t like it, fuck ’em.”

Chris smiled a little, and Gus saw him swallow, and felt his own throat close. He made a small punching gesture with his closed right fist and turned and left.

That night he ate dinner alone at a Holiday Inn. At a table across the dining room a young man and woman had a baby in a portable bed. The woman took the child out of the bed, and held him in her lap as they ate dinner. Gus watched them, and felt his eyes fill. He thought he would cry. But he didn’t.
Probably don’t know how
, Gus thought.

T
he insistent snow fell heavily in the spring night. There was no steady gentle fall, nor drift of fine whiteness, rather the heavy plop of thick flakes designed to be rain.

“And,” Grace said, “of all people for you to run into, little Grace Winslow, of Beverly Farms. Tom Winslow’s only daughter.”

“All the colleges, in all the world,” I said. “You had to walk into that one.”

“It is a little eerie,” Grace said, “given the connection between our families that I’m the one you ask to dance.”

“I thought you looked like you’d come across,” I said.

“And you were right,” Grace said.

“Eventually.”

“I suppose you could say that the meeting may have been accidental,” Grace said. “But then, when we found out that our families knew each other, it helped us select each other out.”

“Thank you, Ms. Darwin,” I said.

“You’d rather believe in destiny?”

“If I knew exactly what I’d rather believe in,” I said, “we’d probably be married, raising children.”

Grace nodded.

“You were so smart. I’d never known anyone as smart, and yet you didn’t talk like all the boys I knew
that went to Deerfield Academy and the Middlesex School. And you were such a wiseguy.”

“It was my disguise,” I said.

“It was more than that,” Grace said.

“Yeah. Maybe it was. I’d started noticing very early in life that things are not as they are alleged to be.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “And you knew that sooner than most of us.”

“Hell of a lot of good it did me,” I said.

“It’s the basis of knowledge,” Grace said.

“For me it was the basis for paralysis. You know? Like the guy, whatsis name, in
The Iceman Cometh
, a poor weak fool seeing both sides of every question?”

“Your father and grandfather were men of action,” Grace said.

“Don’t I know it.”

“What did it do for them?”

“I rest my case.”

We were back in her den sitting on her couch, still a space between us, but Grace wasn’t pressed quite so far into her corner, I thought.
Always the optimist
. My voice was getting hoarse from talking. I sipped some tea. Grace served the tea with honey and lemon, in big crimson mugs.

“My father used to take me to the station with him sometimes. All men. Everyone so sure of themselves, or seemed so, with their guns and nightsticks. They respected toughness, and courage, and action, and certainty. And everyone respected Gus. He was a stand-up guy. And what I hated every time I went there was the fear that I wasn’t.”