His oldest daughter can’t believe it at first. No, she believes it. “Daddy isn’t coming home anymore,” Denise tells her. “Why?” “Daddy passed away.” “What’s that?” “Oh Jesus, how should I explain it? It means Daddy’s not coming home again ever.” “But why not?” “You still don’t know what I’m saying?” “No.” “All right, plain and simply: he died.” “I know what ‘to died’ is. You don’t have to explain to me. I know I won’t see him anymore. I feel bad, but it’s OK.” She can hardly sleep, is morose most of the day. When she can sleep, she twists around fitfully, has nightmares she says she’d tell what they’re about if she could remember them. “All remember is big teeth in every one of them, some with no faces, and scary dancing deer.” Eats little, won’t play, never laughs, avoids her baby sister, talks mostly in whispers, doesn’t want to go out or to school, sits by herself all day at school looking at books or staring out the window or keeping her eyes shut. Starts to play by herself with a bear she’s renamed Daddy. Dresses it in cloth napkins, toilet tissue and doll socks, feeds it her snacks, takes it for strolls around her room in her doll carriage, puts it to bed at night and covers it up to its neck and hums or tells stories to it, but she won’t sleep in her bed. She sleeps with Denise for weeks, clutching a soft shark. The youngest child asks for Dada several times a day. Phone or doorbell rings: “Dada.” Comes into the kitchen while Denise is cooking or cleaning and says “Dada, where?” and looks around for him there. Other times: goes into the coat closet, shuts the door and when Denise looks for her and finds her sitting in the dark there, says “Dada, looking.” Says “Dada out,” and turns with little quick steps in a circle, meaning she wants him to take her out. Sometimes puts her hat on, carries her coat or snowsuit around the house saying to Denise or to no one “Dada work.” That could mean she wants to be in the back- or front yard where she thinks he’s working or in the cold basement where he did his schoolwork and typed. But she doesn’t seem sad, sleeps the same, hasn’t lost her appetite, wants to play with Olivia, cries or screams when Olivia ignores her or shuts her door on her or pushes her away, goes to her toddler group once a week with no fuss. Years later when they talk about him, she gets sad. “I wish I’d known him. First I wish he were here. He wouldn’t be that old. Even if he were, he’d be a big vigorous sixty-five. I’ve so little to almost no memory of him. Sometimes I think I’ve more than that, but then I suddenly know I’ve been leading myself on.” When they’re adults they sometimes look at photographs of themselves with him, with Daddy alone, of Daddy alone, Daddy as a baby and a boy, with Mother, holding both of them, cheeks against his, week after Eva was born. “This was the first time we took you out after you came home from the hospital,” Olivia says. “I can’t say I remember the event, but I do recall the photo.” Daddy and Olivia hamming it up for the camera, Eva crying behind them. “I’m sure he didn’t hear you — I wouldn’t say the same for me — or he would have stopped clowning immediately to take care of you. Mother probably just didn’t see you through the viewfinder.” Daddy carrying them in a garbage can, standing beside them seated on a camel, squeezed inside an igloo with them he made in the street after the city’s biggest snowstorm in a decade, holding them in one arm on a beach. “He was always so lean and muscular,” Eva says. “Look at that neck. No wonder Mom fell for him at his age.” “He was still doing a thousand pushups a day when he turned fifty,” Olivia says, “then as a birthday gift to himself dropped to nine hundred. And running three miles every morning except on the first day of a bad flu or when the streets were coated with ice. He was a little bit too musclebound and showoffy for my tastes.” “Daddy a showoff? According to Mom he was self-deprecating and overly self-critical, hid himself in dark clothing, was taciturn at gatherings, wouldn’t be interviewed, was invited to but never wrote articles or reviews, even in class, was unduly apologetic to his students and scarcely expressed his views.” “Musclebound and vain, then. He used to flex his chest and arm muscles in front of my bedroom mirror some mornings after he thought he got me back to sleep. And I once walked in on him pulling himself off in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, though their sex life, Mother’s said, except when she was just being generous with her body, was nothing but ripe and raw.” Eva holds up several photos. “What beach is it?” Olivia doesn’t know, calls Denise. “Chincoteague,” she says, “home of wild ponies and soggy oysters. We went there for a weekend every spring and fall, before and after the tourist season. This was going to be a family tradition, your father said, even after you both got married and had children and if the oyster beds survived, but it only lasted four to five years. I remember that day well. You can always tell a great day when we have so many photographs of it, though there were some great days when we overexposed the film or quickly ran out of it. It was so windy on the beach that your father, with the emergency shovel he always kept in the car next to the emergency rope, flares, books, pads and pens, dug a hole in the sand deep enough for all of us to sit belowground and have lunch, even if Eva was still only nursing. I wouldn’t go down. It just seemed too silly. I knew people would pass, hear us and take pictures of us down there. I also didn’t trust the walls. I felt if they collapsed he’d only be able to get you two out and I’d be buried alive with Eva’s breasts.”
On his birthday every year one sister calls the other and the one who’s called usually says something like “I know why you’re calling; I still miss him too.” “If only you could remember him better,” Olivia says, “it would make these memory days more memorable. I have to do it all for us, which makes me distrust my memory somewhat, going so uncorrected and uncorroborated.” “I feel I’m remembering him a little more each year. The smile, which I keep seeing: sort of soft, benign, kind of bringing me in, no artifice.” “Photographs. What about his black scowling look, or the reproachful one, which could go on for hours. Nobody I’ve known was ever more up and down, back and forth, than Daddy. In that way, bad father. One moment he’d be all over Mother and me with praise and fondling lovingness and be thoroughly sincere about it. Then I’m off to first grade and can’t find my eyeglasses and he’d rave, stamp and complain how she was the last to see them and I’m old enough to remember to take care of them and the money they cost and he’ll be late again getting me to school, meaning he’ll have to park the car and walk me to my classroom, and what the fuck the glasses doing for me anyway? — ’You go to an eye doctor; he always prescribes — bunch of born hustlers!’—and shove his arms up to his shoulders in the kitchen trash can looking for them, thinking you might have dropped them there or Mother or me with some other garbage by mistake. And then apologize profusely when he finally drives me to school, for making me so sad and afraid and resentful and possibly a little screwy with his sudden changing moods. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll stop doing it, my lovey-dove — I swear,’ and kiss my head and hands and also my eyes, if we didn’t find the glasses, and say ‘So, are we friends again?’ and I’m telling you, cry sometimes too because of what he’d say was his base treatment of me. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, or I did but knew I didn’t want to be there.” “I’m glad I missed it.” “You didn’t; you simply don’t remember it. Listen, I saw him a few times, though he never did it when Mother was around, throw you on the bed when he was changing you, angry that you peed just after he put a fresh diaper on. Or wipe your face so hard with a paper towel that I thought he’d take your skin off, all because you wouldn’t eat what he thought was the minimum amount for you or you stuck your hand in the gooey food or dropped some of it on the floor. He couldn’t stand a mess, books out of place, records out of their jackets, a disheveled room.” “Actually, if I had the choice I’d want to remember what he did to me no matter how bad it was. Anything. But you know, a few weeks ago, when I was waking up, I suddenly saw myself falling asleep on his shoulder. Now that had to have happened, since I can’t remember you telling me of it regarding either of us and I never saw a photo of it.” “He had a sleeping shoulder, he used to say — but you wouldn’t remember him saying that.” “I certainly don’t ever remember talking to him, being talked to by him, anything with talk, except in my dreams, where he’s gone on about all sorts of things in speedy stream-of-c style, and more times than not that he wants me to be or why I should become one, a pianist who concentrates on Mozart and Bach and Satie and in the orchestral-piano works conducts while she plays. But I’m sure I remember the shoulder and much of the scenery surrounding it. Was the guest bed in the room with my crib a big oak double one with a headboard taller than most men?” “I told you that; my very words.” “You did? Then did I have an oval mirror above my dresser that was too high to look into except when someone held me?” “We both did, which I’ve also spoken of, though I got to see myself in it via a chair. Mother said that whenever she couldn’t walk one of us to sleep — they alternated nightly on the one being walked — she’d give us to him and we’d flake out in minutes. He used to sing songs to me when he put me to sleep like that.” “My shoulder memory doesn’t include that, but I’m sure he did the same for me.” “I know he did. You were in the next room and I never permitted my door being closed at night. I only found out later about him singing to me when I asked why he sang to you when he never had to me and he said that for more than two years I got the exact same special heed. They used to put me to sleep the same time as you then — eight-o-dot. I thought it unfair, considering our age difference and that I needed no sleep cajolery, but anyway, I could hear him singing to you in his high lyrical baritone gone to seed and a number of times saw him singing while walking you when I barged in to say good night to him. Love songs, mostly — how you were without doubt the weirdest, most worthless, least pleasurable — no, really, the fairest most gorgeous adorable mild-tempered redolent intelligent creature in all the galaxies, bar none, not even the ones to be discovered yet, and how sleep would only make you more squeezable, beautiful, smart and sweet. And all the words made up on the spot it seemed and I believe same went for the melodies when they weren’t lifted from old show tunes and radio theme songs or from his favorite operatic arias or piano or liturgical scores. This is fun, Eva. Work on, without my help, bringing back other memories of him. It’s not as if I’m talking to myself anymore.”