Father of the Rain (8 page)

I go out the back door. I have the idea that I will walk home to Mom’s, but then I hear a BB hit the side of the house and don’t want to risk it. It’s too dark to see where Frank is. I push out the little chest of drawers that has some gardening stuff in it from against the wall and sit behind it for protection.

My father is always in a good mood in the morning. He is up before anyone else, showered, shaved, and dressed in bright colors. He sings in the kitchen as he makes coffee and feeds the animals.

I can hear him humming below my window in the guest room, on his way to clean the pool. I slept in my clothes, so I catch up with him before he reaches the poolhouse.

He stops humming; then he says, “Does it look a little cloudy to you?”

The water is its usual rich clear turquoise, but I want to do the chlorine test with him afterward so I say, “A little.”

He connects the pieces of the vacuum cleaner, the long silver shafts and the rectangular head, then sidesteps slowly along the edge of the pool, the long pole sinking as the vacuum travels toward the drain in the middle, then rising up over his head as he brings the vacuum closer, directly beneath his feet at the bottom of the pool. He gives me turns, helping me when I let it out too far and don’t have the strength to pull it back, and for brief flashes I feel just like I used to feel when this was my only home and my mother was still asleep upstairs and nothing had changed. Even though it’s going to be a hot day, it still feels like the beginning of fall. The leaves are brittle and loud when they shake in the breeze.

My father used to sing a back-to-school song he got from an old ad on TV. He changed the words and put our names in it. He always sang it when my mother and I came home with shopping bags in early September. The tune would linger in the house for weeks, someone breaking out singing it just when the others had nearly forgotten. The tune is in my head now, but I know if I sing it, it will be a betrayal. I know—I sense all the new rules, though I could never explain how— that I’m not allowed to refer in any way to the small particular details of our past life together, the details that made it uniquely ours. We had an array of refrains among us, my father, my mother, Garvey, and I, clusters of words repeated so many times I thought they were universal clichés until I slowly learned, one by one, that they belonged solely to us.
I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time
, is one. It came from my parents’ honeymoon in Italy. On their third day in Rome, my father returned to the hotel room with a puppy. My mother was not happy about this and the puppy sensed it. He bit her little finger, which is why my father named him Pinky. I was born
twelve years after their honeymoon, but the expression was still very much alive, used by all of us in our sulky but self-mocking moments. But I know this expression and all the others have to be buried now. They are a dead language. If I ever said,
I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time
to my father, something would perish between us, as if I had broken a blood oath.

And so I do not sing the back-to-school song as I push the vacuum toward the middle of the pool and pull it back to where I stand at the edge. And I do not ask about Nora, whose bureau has been cleared off, her Jean Naté, silver pillbox, and photograph of her and my father in Maine gone, her drawers empty, and even her soft blue bathrobe no longer hanging in her bathroom.

“You missed a spot,” my father says of a thin line of dirt I was just going back to get.

“Okay.”

“How’s Mr. Morgan doing?”

This surprises me, for I would have thought that speaking of my mother’s father would be completely against the rules. “He’s good,” I say, then wish I’d just said okay, in case my father was hoping my grandfather missed him.

“Still playing a lot of golf?”

“Every morning. He won the tournament this year.”

My father laughs. “You know, all his life he was a terrible golfer. Never got better. Year after year.” I know this story well, but my chest swells at my father’s telling of it, my father talking about my mother’s father, those two smashed sides of me fusing briefly. “And then”—my father lets out a shrill wheeze of delight—”he had that stroke, remember, in ‘sixty-seven, and suddenly he could hit that ball like nobody’s business. He was hitting in the seventies.”

I laugh as if I’ve never heard it before. I feel like I’m glowing. I don’t want him to stop talking about Grindy. “He still has that smelly old spaniel.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, but he hasn’t heard me. His attention has moved on. “You missed another spot right there.” He takes the vacuum from me and finishes the rest of the pool. We do the chemical tests but he won’t let me hold the little vials or squeeze in the drops. Then Patrick comes out and he and my father start talking about grub control and some sort of seeder or feeder. My father wants to show Patrick something in the machine room. It’s hot and electric-feeling in that room and they stay in there for a long time, my father wanting to know if Patrick thinks the pressure on the something-or-other is too low. I go to the minifridge and pull out a tiny can of V8 juice. Then I go into my mother’s rose garden.

The regular flower beds—daffodils in early spring, then tulips and peonies, daisies and lilies—begin outside the living room’s French doors, where they curl around a stone terrace, drop alongside a set of stone steps, spread along the edges of another, smaller terrace, then drop again to fan out along the stone walls that are the border of the main body of the garden, an English garden with a floor of grass and two long, squat hedges whose ends are scrolled toward each other. On either side of these sculpted center hedges, in long dense prickly rows, are the beds of roses. At the far end of the garden is a small fountain painted robin’s-egg blue with a centerpiece of two pudgy children holding a large fish that spurts out water. Behind the fountain are two sets of moss-covered steps that lead to a black wrought-iron door, which opens onto that patch of woods on the inside of the curve of the back driveway. The garden and the door seem to belong to something much more ancient than the house and the driveway.

On a summer day, in full sun beneath a dark blue sky, this garden is magical. My mother is normally in it somewhere, crouched down beside a rosebush with her gardening basket, a kerchief holding back her hair, her gloved hands digging deep into the dirt. She has many varieties of roses and knows all their names: Southern
Belle, Black Magic, April in Paris, Mister Lincoln. If I don’t understand the name, she’ll explain it to me. A full pale pink rose with a tiny yellow center is called Christopher Marlowe, and she tells me all about his plays, the one about the doctor who exchanged his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magical powers, and the one about the queen and the sailor who fall in love in a cave during a storm. Her roses are different colors and shapes, some thin and delicate like a teardrop, others thick and fluffy with a million petals. They are pale yellow, dark pink, deep red, salmon, lavender, and white. The white ones are the puffiest. They look like they’re made of meringue. I used to play around the fountain, trying to catch the eyes of the smiling children wrestling their fish, running up one set of steps to the black door and down the other, around and around, until I got so hot I’d fling off my clothes and slip into the cold, ice cold, fountain water.

But now everything in the garden is dead or dying. The heads of the roses, if they have not already fallen off, are dry and drained of color, their leaves hole-punched by insects. Every plant is encircled by a wreath of its own debris. The grass is burnt, the shrubs white with aphids. The fountain water is olive green. A black sludge covers the bottom. Nothing trickles out of the fish’s mouth. This whole spectacular place, the most spectacular thing about the property, is being punished for having been my mother’s.

While my father and Patrick move from poolhouse to shed, drive off someplace and come back, and operate many machines all at once, I try to resuscitate the garden. I drain the fountain, scrape out the slimy leaves and dirt, and refill it. I spray the shrubs and rake up all the death. And then I water. I press my thumb down on the lip of the hose to create a spray like my mother always did. I can feel the leaves and roots of the plants thanking me as they gulp the water down.

“Well, you’ve been a busy little bee this morning,” Mrs. Tabor says when she brings lunch out to the pool.

“It will perish if no one tends it.” I’ve been reenacting scenes from
The Secret Garden
as I work and haven’t completely stepped out of character.

My father puts the back of his hand to his forehead and tips his head to one side. He’s taken my accent for southern and become Scarlett O’Hara instead. “Oh, my. It will simply perish. Whatever shall we do?”

“I could think of a thing or two,” Mrs. Tabor says in her regular voice, smiling at my father as she sips her drink.

She drinks vodka like my father but mixes it with orange juice during the day. My father used to have a rule about waiting until five o’clock on the dot before having a drink (sometimes we’d watch the clock on the stove and count down the last minute together), but now I wonder if that had been my mother’s rule. Today he drinks two martinis with lunch.

After he’s finished his sandwich, he pushes his plate away, sits back, and sighs. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Mrs. Tabor chortles.

Then he stands up. “Well, I think it’s time for a swim.” He pulls down his swimming trunks in one fast motion.

Patrick and Elyse erupt in laughter at the sight of his bare bum and floppy brown penis.

“Well,” Mrs. Tabor says, and stands up unsteadily, “I guess I will too.” Off comes the top and then the bottom to her bikini. Her breasts hang square and low, and her pubic hair is not black but salt and pepper, like Mallory’s grandmother’s old schnauzer.

Patrick and Elyse, howling, struggle to inch off their own wet bathing suits, the struggle only increasing their laughter.

The four of them splash around together at first, then Patrick and Elyse go to the diving board to do naked jumping and screaming, and my father and Mrs. Tabor hang onto each other in the shallow end.

“Look at the old prude in her chair,” Mrs. Tabor cackles.

My father doesn’t look. He’s touching Mrs. Tabor’s breasts.

“Watch out, Gardiner,” Elyse says, looking down from the diving board, wearing only a life jacket because she can’t swim yet. “You’re gonna get a boner.”

Everyone but me bursts out laughing.

“What’s a boner?” I ask, and that puts them over the edge. Even if it’s at my own expense, I like making my father laugh. He has a lot of pretend and halfhearted laughs, but his real one makes a clicking sound in the back of his throat that I love to hear.

I cannot seem to get on my bike and return to Water Street, even though it feels like I have come onstage too late to be anything but the straight man to their summer antics.

In the early evening, without my father knowing, I call my mother.

“Can I stay another night?”

“Of course. I’m glad it’s going so well. All summer I worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“I just worried, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“You two were so close.”

After a while she says, “Daley?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you want to stay?”

“Yeah,” I say, but my throat is tight.

“Oh, honey. Maybe you should come back here. You’ll see him on the weekend. You’ll see him every weekend. And things will fall back into place with him.”

“Mrs. Tabor is here a lot.”

“Mmm,” she says, which means she already knew that. “Patrick’s one of your best friends.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Isn’t he?” She’s doing something, painting her nails maybe. The phone keeps slipping away from her mouth.

Patrick follows my father around like one of his dogs. It isn’t the same. Nothing is the same. “How’d your interviews go?”

“Pretty well. One in particular.”

“What?”

“This child advocacy lawyer needs an assistant. He’s a good guy. He helps children.”

“When will you know if you got the job?’

“Within a week, he said. But I’ve got two more interviews tomorrow. I’ll be home by four. Come home for dinner, okay? I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

I hang up and nearly pick it up again to ask her to come get me. Then Patrick calls for me, saying we’re going to Peking Garden for dinner.

I’ve come here a lot with my parents. We always got a booth along the wall and had a waiter named Roy, the owner’s son. My father would order the moo goo gai pan just because he loved to say it to Roy in a funny voice. My mother would get a drink with a bright paper parasol so I could play with it. I liked to pretend it belonged to my spoon and that the fork was in love with her, though he could never see her face behind the parasol. I never suspected we all weren’t having a good time.

There are six of us now—Frank showed up again right at dinnertime—so they put us at a round table in the middle. Mrs. Tabor is wearing a shimmery green dress that falls to her ankles and has wide sleeves that droop onto her plate and into the small
bowls of sauces without her noticing. She and my father order a new drink every time Roy comes to the table. Roy winks at me but he acts like he doesn’t know my father, who is quiet tonight, his head hung low over his plate, his eyes casting around, seeing little. I wonder if he misses sitting in our booth, the three of us on a Sunday night.

Patrick and I order spareribs. We slather on the sweet-and-sour sauce and compete to see who can gnaw down to a clear bone quicker.

“You two are revolting,” Frank says.

My father looks at me hard. “You ever see your mother eat a piece of chicken?”

“No,” I lie.

He breaks into a fake smile and chuckles. I can tell there is nothing funny about how my mother eats chicken. “She’d eat everything—tendons, cartilage, the works. Then she’d crack open the bone and suck it dry. I’m not kidding.” He shakes his head. “She was a beauty.”