“Look at that big toe poking out.”
“I don’t have one decent goddamn matching pair of socks.”
“Well, let’s get you some. Today.”
“Really?” It’s as if I’ve suggested cotton candy to a six-year-old.
“Sure. Is Piper’s still around?”
“It sure is. I could use another pair of pants, too.”
Maybelle bounces at the screen door. “Oh, I sees you,” he says brightly, lovingly. “Here I am.”
And there is Piper’s, right where it’s always been on the first floor of an old house with a big veranda. Through the window I can see the madras dinner jackets, the white canvas golf hats, and the belts with sailboats or trout or tennis racquets on them. I cringe at the sight of it all. But to my father there is nothing ridiculous and foppish about this style of dress, nothing fetishistic about having symbols of wealth, little ducks or martinis, sewn all over your pants. It is all he’s ever known. This is what his whole world wears.
He pulls open the door of the shop and then stands aside to let me pass. But in the equally insulated world I have been in, men do not hold doors for women and, if they do, if they have just arrived from Pluto, women do not walk through them. I want to simply walk through the door he holds for me. Our outing has reversed his mood. I have less than twenty-four hours with him. The socks and pants he needs are only a few yards away and the smell of the store comes rushing at me, the sweet smell of new cotton clothes that brought me so much pleasure as a child. But I cannot do it.
I gesture playfully for him to go through first. He will not.
“C’mon, Dad. You’re the one with the hole in your toe.”
He laughs a disgusted laugh. “I am not going through a door held by a girl.”
“Why not?”
He shakes his head. “Is this the kind of crap you get at your fancy schools? You learn to be rude to every person who shows the slightest bit of upbringing?”
I feel the fatigue of trying to communicate with him. Twenty more hours. I go through the goddamn door.
“Hello,” a woman says to us from the back, where she’s folding cable-knit sweaters. I can only see her dimly but I recognize the voice. My father veers right, into the men’s section.
“Didn’t I go to school with her?” I whisper.
“Her? No. She’s twice your age.”
“I think it’s Brenda McPheney.”
“Oh, Christ, that’s not Brenda McPheney. Brenda McPheney was a skinny knockout of a girl.”
“She had anorexia, that’s why she was so skinny. She almost died senior year.”
“Well, she looked a hell of a lot better with anorexia.” He points to something over my shoulder. “Look at that. Isn’t that great?” On a shelf was a shiny ceramic statue of a black Lab with supplicating eyes and a real leash hanging out of its mouth. “I love that.” And he did. He stared at it like someone else might stare at a Van Gogh.
We pick out pairs of blue, gray, and black socks. We’re going through the pants rack when my father looks over into the women’s section, says, “Duck!” and pushes me down by the shoulders into a little nook.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.
“Is it Catherine?”
“Christ, no. You can’t buy muumuus in here. It’s Tits Kelly. If she sees us, we’ll never get out of here.”
The wooden floorboards creak.
“Fuck. She’s coming. Suck in your gut and don’t breathe.”
No one in town ever calls her anything else, except to her face, and I can’t even remember what that name is. She’s a terrible busy-body and, as my father has said a million times, completely humorless. The ultimate condemnation.
Brenda McPheney comes over and asks her if she’s looking for something special.
“Not really,” she says, more of a sigh than words. Brenda goes back to her sweater folding. Mrs. Kelly cuts a long, low growling fart. Dad looks at me, delighted, making an O with his mouth and squeezing my finger to help him stay quiet. I laugh in silence, my stomach knotted in pain. We are bent over and mushed together to fit in this tiny hole in the wall. I don’t know how it’s possible she doesn’t see us, but she takes her time choosing a man’s shirt. Finally, she brings her selection to Brenda at the register.
“I wonder who she’s buying that shirt for,” my father says on the way home. “Husband Number Two left her last spring. You ever hear the story of little Davy Kelly and the two C-pluses?”
I have, but he’s in such a good mood. “No.”
“No?” He’s thrilled. And he tells me about how in fourth grade little Davy Kelly brought home a report card with two C-pluses in math and social studies. Little Davy, according to his mother, never got anything but As. Then she found out that in both math and social studies, little Davy sat next to Ollie Samuels. So Mrs. Kelly marched over to the Samuelses’ at dinnertime, stood in their kitchen, and demanded that Ollie tell her what he’d been doing to distract her son during math and social studies. Ollie told her he’d stopped talking to Davy long ago, when he realized Davy was paying Lucy Lothrop ten cents for her answers in English and only gave Ollie a nickel for his.
My father laughs like it’s the first time he’s heard it himself. It seems to me a story much older than Davy Kelly, a story my father might have heard on a radio show when he was little. It’s just the kind of story he likes, about people getting their comeuppance. In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.
I figure it is time to ask about work. “What happened with Hugh, Dad?”
“Fuck him.”
“What happened?”
“That’s over with. I’ve retired.”
When we get home, there is a message on the machine in the kitchen. “Hey there, Gardiner, it’s Patrick. I’ll call another time. All right. Hope you’re well.” You can tell he was nervous. The message is breathy and full of lurches, not really Patrick’s normal phone voice, which is, at least with me, as goofy as he was as a kid. It makes me miss him. I’ll call him as soon as I get away from here.
“You should call him back.”
“I’m not calling him back and you’re not either, you hear me?”
“He adores you, Dad. You can’t just drop him.”
Watch me, his eyes say, glaring at mine.
He goes upstairs and changes into his new pants and blue socks with geese flying on them. I go to the bathroom off the den and stare for a long time at the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall, my father’s team pictures from St. Paul’s and Harvard, rows and rows, years and years, of white English-looking boys holding oars and footballs and tennis racquets. I have seen these so many times I can quickly find my father in each one, his small nervous face in the earlier ones, when he was only eleven and twelve, and then his more mature, impatient expressions later on. Clearly no one was encouraged to smile in photographs back then, so it is impossible to say if he, or anyone, was happy.
He fixes himself a drink when he comes downstairs. It isn’t yet noon. We sit by the pool. I bring out tuna fish sandwiches, and we play backgammon while we eat them. The sun beats down. The pool glimmers and beckons. I’m not sure I still own a bathing suit, and if I do it’s buried in a garbage bag somewhere in my stuffed car.