Erasure (32 page)

“It’s like him to spring this on us.”

I laughed. “What are you talking about? He tried to cover it to the end.” As I said this, I wasn’t sure it was true. “He asked Mother to burn the papers.”

“Listen to that,” Bill said. “He asked
Mother
to
burn
the papers. Mother’s afraid to boil water too long, lest it combust.” Bill was right. He was as sharp as ever and, as ever, had a better read on Father than I ever could. Enemies always understand each other better than friends.

“Anyway, there’s nothing to do about it. There’s nothing in the letters, nothing else in the box.”

“There’s something in that box, believe me. Look again. But I don’t want to hear about it.” A man’s voice spoke to Bill and he answered, calling the man “darling.” I couldn’t deny that hearing it made me cringe a bit and I felt badly for the reaction.

“Well, I’d better go check on Mother,” I said, using Mother as an excuse to get off the phone, but I also immediately noted the possibly perceived implication that I was the one going to care for our mother.

I could tell Bill was angry. “Talk to you later. Maybe I’ll make a trip back this fall to check on the hospital and everything.”

I allowed him that. “Okay.”

I stayed about the house all day and there was no call from Marilyn. I lied to myself, tried not to admit that I was in fact waiting for her to ring me up or come by. Mother was down for one of the great battery of daily naps on which she had come to rely for a semblance of stability. Her most lucid moments seemed to occur when she first awoke and after that there were any number of cracks in the surface of her world through which to fall. There was no steering her toward solid ground; she stepped where she stepped.

So, Mother was asleep. I stepped out the back and stood on the pier for a while, contemplating lighting a cigar. Then I went back into the house to find Lorraine and Maynard, as best I can describe it, rubbing gums. I cleared my throat to make them aware of my approach.

Maynard sat at the table. “How is your mother?” he asked.

“Not so well, Maynard.”

“Is she still asleep?” Lorraine asked.

I nodded and put on the water for tea. “So, what are you two young people up to?” I asked.

They giggled like young people. “We might as well tell you,” Maynard said.

“Maynard,” Lorraine complained.

“He’s going to find out anyway.”

I looked at Lorraine, then back at Maynard. “Find out what?”

“We’re getting married,” Maynard said.

The news made sense, but was no less shocking for that fact. “You’re kidding me.”

“No sir, I’m not,” he said.

I looked at Lorraine and I was filled with sudden panic. “And where will you live?” I asked them.

“Here in my house,” Maynard said.

“Thank god,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Lorraine said.

“I meant ‘of course.’ I’m really happy for you Lorraine. I really am. Congratulations, Maynard, you’re getting a fantastic partner.”

“I know that all right,” the old man said. He reached over and took Lorraine’s hand.

“Is it going to be a big ceremony?” I asked. “Or an intimate, special, small thing.”
For which I will not pay and perhaps not attend.

“Small,” Lorraine said.

Maynard looked at me with his ancient, milky eyes and said, “I’d like you to be my best man.”

“Really?”
Are you crazy? I don’t know you from shinola.

“Your family has been so kind to my Rainey and you mean so much to her. I just want you to be a part of it.”

“Don’t you think you should ask a good friend?”

“Friends all dead,” he said.

So, what do you say to that? I said, “I’ll be honored.”

“And I want your mother to be my matron of honor,” Lorraine said.

“Okay.”

“We’re tying the knot on Saturday,” Maynard said.

“That’s two days away.”

“We’re old. We don’t have time to waste.” Maynard laughed and then Lorraine laughed with him.

Their laughter was genuine, sweet, beautiful and I felt happy to hear it from Lorraine. Listening to it, I realized that I had never heard the same quality in the laughter shared by my parents, though I’d no doubt they loved each other very much.

“Saturday,” I said.

It was Christmas break of my freshman year in college. Father was excited to have me home and telling him about my classes and my professors. Ever since I began reading serious literature, he had forced the rest of the family to endure our discussions at the table. When I was eleven, he would prod me with simple questions, get me tied up and laugh a bit at me. When I was fourteen, he would bait me, twist me up, confuse me, then laugh a bit at me. At eighteen, he honestly seemed to believe I could add something to his understanding of novels and stories. I told him that I had read Joyce in a class. Bill moaned. One would have thought that his second year in medical school would have proved a more normal common ground between physician and son. Lisa was about to graduate from Vassar and had adopted a kind of death-girl attitude in spite of her being off to medical school the next year.

“We read
Portrait
and
Wake,”
I said.

“I see they’ve refrained from using complete titles in university these days.”

I laughed and Father laughed, but the rest of the family, I’m sure, read his comment as contentious and condescending.

“What did you think of
Finnegan’s Wake?
“ Father asked. He turned to Bill. “Have you read it?”

Bill shook his head.

Father took a quick bite of potatoes and returned his attention to me. “So?”

“I think it’s overrated,” I said.

He stopped chewing.

“Or not rated correctly, anyway.”

“That’s youth talking,” Father said. “The word play alone makes it a remarkable book.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And it’s multilingual and all that, but still.”

“I’d think that you’d never consider fiction the same again after reading that book.”

“Well, you don’t actually read it,” I said. “You look at it for a long time, but you don’t really read it.”

“My point exactly.” He laughed and drank some wine. He offered a nudge of his elbow toward Lisa as if to include her.

“Okay,” I said. “This is what I wrote in my paper.” I looked at Mother and my siblings and felt sick, like I had been seduced into slitting their throats. I looked at my father’s excited eyes. “In spite of the obvious exploitation of alphabetic and lexical space in the
Wake
and in spite of whatever typographical or structural gestures one might focus on, the most important feature of the book is the way it actually conforms to conventional narrative. The way it layers, using such devices as metaphor and symbol. What’s different is that each sentence, each word calls attention to the devices. So, the work really reaffirms what it seems to expose. It is the thing it is, perhaps twice, and depends on the currency of conventional narrative for its experimental validity.”

Father looked at me for a long time. He then looked at his other two children and put his fork down. “I hope before you go to bed this evening, you kiss your brother.” Then he stood and left the table.

Of course I felt bad for my brother and sister, but I felt worse for myself. I didn’t enjoy being so set apart and I was well aware, painfully aware, of the inappropriateness and incorrectness of Father’s assessment of me. At eighteen, I realized I was eighteen and not so smart or special, and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my own ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact, my brother, second-year medical school student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, “Geek.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said.

Lisa hit the top of the stairs as I said this, gave me an almost sympathetic look, shrugged and stepped into her room. The closing of her door was just ever so slightly louder than a normal closing of a door and so she too managed to slap me about some.

But how bad Lisa and Bill must have felt. They were far more accomplished than I at the time (and later). I had done nothing yet. I viewed my father’s favoritism as irrational and saw myself as being saddled with a kind of illness, albeit his.

Numbers 23, 24

Wilde: I’m afraid for the voice.

Joyce: What do you mean?

Wilde: The way writing is moving. All voice will soon be lost and what will we be left with?

Joyce: Pages.

Wilde: And story?

Joyce: What is story anyway? Just a way to announce the last page.

Wilde: Have you ever walked through a thunderstorm carrying a long metal pipe?

Joyce: No, I haven’t.

Wilde: You should try it. Joyce: Are you upset?

Wilde: No, just announcing the last page.