Father of the Rain (24 page)

He was small and narrow, almost scrawny, when he was younger, with square teeth too big for his face, but now he is long and broad, shirttails hanging out, an overgrown prep-school kid. I know the type and avoided them in college, those guys who never quite adjust to the world that isn’t boarding school, who can’t believe their angelic faces, long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes, and quick sardonic responses are no longer enough to impress every teacher or get every girl. They have a knack for sniffing me out, those disillusioned preppies, sensing my background despite all I have done to disguise it, and I run from them as fast as I can. Boys like that turn into men like my father.

I keep my back to him, moving toward poetry at the back. I hear him sink into a cane chair, prop up a book in front of him, unwrap the sub.

“I’m ready to settle up,” I say, after I hear the foil crumple and drop into a trash can.

His head jerks up from his book. I suppose my voice hasn’t changed either. “Jesus. I thought my mother was delusional.
Daley Amory’s in town, Neal. That go-getter is a professor at Stanford
.” He does a pitch-perfect imitation of his mother. But I don’t like being used as a prod. I didn’t realize she had a cruel streak. She seemed glad to have him home, proud of his store. The brief performance leaves me at loss.

“Berkeley, not Stanford,” I say, finally. And then, looking around, “This is a great store.”

“Yeah, well, I think I should call it Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow, but maybe everything is like that.” He clears a spot on the card table. “Here, put those down here.”

I slide my stack of books onto the table, nudging off a receipt pad. I bend to pick it up, noticing that the last person has bought
The Pickwick Papers
for $3.95.

“Your dad okay?” he asks as he writes down my books, his tone already apologizing for the question. How much has he heard? What does the town know?

“Yeah, I think he is.” I want to tell him that my father is at his second AA meeting, that he dresses for them like he’s going to a cocktail party, and who knows who is in there or what they talk about. I want to ask him if he has known anyone who has gone to that meeting in town and if it really might work—no, I don’t want to hear any stories of failure. “How are your parents?”

“They’re all right. They endure.”

His mother was such a presence that I barely remember his dad. A beige windbreaker is all that comes to mind.

I don’t know what to say after that. I watch him write, the handwriting familiar, bunched.

“Congratulations on the job at Berkeley,” he says, handing me my books, the receipt stuck in the middle of the one on top. “That can’t have been easy to get.”

I smile more than I should. “Thanks.” That job is my talisman against all this. “Take care of yourself, Neal.”

I look back before stepping off the stoop, but he’s putting the cash box back on the floor.

I head back toward the church. “Well, that was awkward,” I say to the empty sidewalk. “Not sure he even noticed the boobs.”

And then I hear it, the sound of heavy pieces of metal knocking against one another. I’m flooded with an old feeling, a delicious anticipation. It’s coming from behind me, across the tracks. I turn and, sure enough, the trucks and trailers have just arrived. The true sight and sound of summer in Ashing: the carnival is being set up.

I wish I could go watch like I used to with Patrick and Mallory, straddling our bikes outside the fence, sometimes for hours at a time, mesmerized by all the trailers and what came off of them, the enormous limbs of rides like the Scrambler and the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, the horses for the merry-go-round on their poles, the big crowns of lights and mirrors, upholstered seats, little boats and planes. Once a boy about our age brought us some fried dough from his family’s stand a day before the carnival actually opened. We devoured it and asked him questions about his life, if he got to ride for free, what was his favorite ride, his favorite food, his favorite town. “Not this one,” he said. “Rich towns like this keep all their pennies up their asses.” We laughed hard and a couple of other boys came over, but that caught the attention of a big guy attaching the fake balcony to the haunted house. “Hey,” he called down to us, “don’t harass the kids. They got work to do.”
Rich towns like these, Pennies up their asses
, and
Don’t harass the kids
all became refrains for us for years.

I sit on the bench outside the library until the clock strikes eight, then I cross the street and wait in the car until my father comes out. I recognize hardly any of them from the night before, but again they all make a point of saying goodbye to my father.

“All righty then,” he says when he gets in. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”

“How was it?’ I think I can risk it, given his good mood.

“Good.” He looks at the door of the rectory.

I can’t tell if he’s faking it all for me.

“Not too much God?” This is one of the things I’ve been worried about. My father hates God almost as much as he hates Democrats.

“No.” He’s still looking out the window, away from me. “To each his own.”

To each his own? I think of quoting this to Garvey and have to clench in a laugh.

The light is out at Lighthouse Books.

“I walked down here while you were in your meeting. To the bookstore.”

“Oh yeah? Never been in there. Nice place?”

“Small, but good books.”

“That poor kid.”

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head. “With a mother like that.”

“I like his mother.”

“Yeah, well, let me advise you right now, stay away from her. She’s got a big screw loose in her head.”

We pull into the driveway, and I realize I forgot to check the sign in the park that tells the day the carnival will open. I hope it’s before I have to leave.

I have Dad cook his own pork chop and show him how to poke holes in the potato before baking it.

We eat by the pool. The dogs swim. When we’re done, I ask him how he feels.

“Good,” he says, in his new preemptive way.

I can tell he doesn’t feel good. His right leg bounces incessantly, like Garvey’s, his eyes flit from thing to thing, and his skin is gray, not the purple gray it gets after many drinks but a pale ash. He smokes one cigarette after another, their tips trembling. I got a book out of the library to help me understand what he might be feeling, but all I learned was that each body reacts differently to the sudden absence of alcohol.

“I know it has to be really hard right now.”

He jiggles his leg. Many times he looks at me like he is going to say something and stops. Finally he says, “I’ll tell you what. I need you to sweeten the deal. I do this for you, and you come to the club with me on Saturday morning, just to hit a few balls.”

“First of all, you are not doing this for me. You are doing this for you. And second, we made our deal. I stay for six more days, and you don’t drink.”

“If I make it to Saturday, will you come? I can’t miss another week.”

I point to the court in his backyard. “We can play right there.”

“I like playing at the club. I like clay.”

“Dad, I haven’t played tennis since I was sixteen.”

“Please?” He needs me in case Catherine is there. He needs someone beside him when all eyes are on him. “Please, elf?”

It won’t kill me to be for an hour the daughter my father has always wanted. I can give him that memory before I leave. But the idea of going up the long private drive to the white columns of the brick clubhouse is almost enough to make me wish my father won’t hold up his end of the bargain.

But he does. After probably more than forty years of vigorous daily drinking, my father goes six days and six nights without alcohol. On the phone Jonathan suggests that he could have a stash somewhere. But I know the difference between my father drunk and my father sober. I know the sated smugness of the early drinks, the agitation that turns to wrath of the next few, and the slack yellow-eyed hollowness at the very end. I’ve also cased the joint. I’ve rummaged through his closets and cars, through the basement, attic, shed, and garage. Nothing. And I stay up late, hours after he does, hearing only the heavy, steady throttle of his snore.

On Friday night, after his meeting, he takes me to the Mainsail for dinner. It’s the only fancy restaurant in Ashing, with a dining room that overlooks the harbor. The entrance is a dock that rises up from the parking lot and makes everyone’s footsteps ring out. I wear a blue dress, wrinkled from days in my hot car. My father is nervous and cups his hands tight as he walks.

“Well, hello to you,” he say to the wooden statue of a boy holding a net with a wood fish in it. “That’s probably a six-pounder you got there.”

He’s worried Catherine will be here, but I’ve reassured him that she knows this is his restaurant, his territory, and she won’t dare. I hope I’m right.

Harold, the bald obsequious manager who has been stationed at the podium in the entryway all my life, bows to us. “Good evening, Mr. Amory. Good evening, miss.”

“Oh for chrissake, Harold, it’s Daley.”

He bows again. “Good evening, Miss Amory.”

“Ms., if you wouldn’t mind.”

My father lets out a small groan.

“Oh, did you get married?”

“No, but please, just call me Daley.”

“I will do that,” he says, lifting two long leather binders out of the holder on the side of his podium, his lips tightly pinched, clearly displeased by how unsmoothly this interaction has gone.

“Daley,” my father says when we slide into our chairs beside the enormous window, “please don’t go around trying to paint this town Commie red. Someone calling you
miss
is not trying to harm you in any way.”

“I don’t care if they’re not trying. It does harm me.”

“Why?”

“Because the terms Miss and Mrs. are like branding cattle. No one needs to know I’m unmarried.”

“Yes, they do. People want to know these things.”

“There’s this tribe in New Guinea where the available women are given a suffix to their name that literally means
tight vulva
and the taken women are given a suffix that means
floppy vulva
. Should we do that, more to the point?”

“You are making me sick to my stomach, for chrissakes.” But he is amused. He is having fun.

“Here you are, Mr. Amory.” Harold drops a vodka martini on the rocks with two onions and an olive beside my father’s right hand. “And what can I bring your lovely daughter?”

I can feel the vibration of my father’s jiggling leg on the wooden floor beneath us. I can feel the attraction between him and the martini, and his restraint, everything it takes to not get that martini down his gullet and into his blood system. He lifts it up and hands it back to Harold. “Sorry about that, sir. She’s keeping me clean tonight.”

Harold glances at me—
haven’t you made enough trouble already?
—and then sympathetically back at my father. “Excuse me, Mr. Amory. I shouldn’t have presumed.”

I watch over my father’s shoulder as Harold goes back to the bar with the drink. I can’t remember the bartender’s name but I know he has a tattoo of a submarine on his upper arm and a roll of crystal mint Lifesavers in his pocket. His head jerks up toward us when Harold speaks. He shakes his head, then dumps the drink in the sink.

My father doesn’t need to look at the menu. He always orders the filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. I hurry to figure out what I can eat. All the writing is in big slanted script. I worked in a restaurant like this in college, waited on people just like my father, with their regular drinks, their regular cow parts.

There is vichyssoise, but when I ask Harold if it has chicken stock he returns from the kitchen quite pleased to tell me that indeed it does. My father shakes his head. He apologizes to Harold when I order a plate of steamed rice and french-cut green beans.

“To each his own, Dad.”

Across the harbor, the Ferris wheel begins to turn. Its red and blue lights smear slowly into huge purple rings. It’s the first night of the carnival.

“Oh, Christ,” my father says, briefly eyeing the door. “They won’t leave me alone,” he whines, though his face betrays nothing. I wonder who it is but he’ll be furious if I turn around to look. “Here they come,” he whimpers, and then he glances up, feigns convincing surprise, and leaps to his feet to shake the man’s hand firmly and kiss the woman on the cheek. I know them, her squat forehead and his puffed-out chest. I kiss them both as they marvel at how long it has been and what a lovely girl I’ve become, and my father shoots me a look because he knows how I feel about being called a
girl
at the age of twenty-nine. I ask them about their kids, hoping to
jog my memory. Carly was in Woods Hole, Scott was working for Schwabb, and Hatch was in Colorado “doing who knows what,” the woman says, laughing.

“There’s always one of those,” the man says with a phlegmy chuckle.

“I’m two for two,” my father says. I think he’s forgotten for a moment that he isn’t out with Catherine.

“Hardly.” The woman covers up for him. “I heard this one got herself a fancy job out west somewhere.”

I remember their names, Ben and Barbara Bridgeton. Their children went to Ashing Academy with us, but none of them were in Garvey’s or my grade. My father coached at least one of the sons.

“What is your area of expertise, Daley?” Mrs. Bridgeton asks.

“Oh, Jesus. Don’t ask,” my father says.

“Post-Contact Zapotec, the children in particular, and how, if they survive, they process the high infant and pre-school mortality rates.”

I see Mr. Bridgeton shoot a look at Harold, who trots right over with their drinks.

“Okay, Margaret Mead,” my father says. “Let them sit down.”

“How long are you here for, dear?” Mrs. Bridgeton squeezes my hand.

“Until Sunday.”

“We’ll take good care of him once you’re gone. Not to worry.”

Harold leads them to their table and my father and I sit back down. “One more minute and you were going to start in on the floppy vulvas, weren’t you? And I should have warned you not to tell her when you were leaving.”