I was to live in Main Building, where she had once lived. As my father drove home on the curving Taconic Parkway, perhaps this made some sort of lovely sense to him and he said to himself, “Life works”—said it out loud alone in the car, “Life works; things turn out,” and for a moment he felt at ease in the deep green of late summer in the Hudson Valley. I’d like to think that he took a deep breath and was happy to be alive — and that the world loved and accepted my father as well. For an instant, as my father drove back to Connecticut, the future must have seemed manageable to him. I want to believe that that night my father saw in his mind my mother and me in that great building together at the mouth of the campus, and that his complicated emotions simplified and things fell into place and he smiled to himself.
Much later, when I would try to picture the two white headlights careening into the back of the car, I would think of that early morning when my father turned on the headlights of the Oldsmobile so that we could make our way to it, through rain, in darkness.
“Everybody up,” my father chirped like a songbird early that morning, coming into my bedroom first, then Fletcher’s, then to the guest room where my grandparents were asleep. “Come on, come on,” he said with an unrecognizable zeal that woke Fletcher and me almost immediately with its strangeness.
“It’s four in the morning,” I heard my grandmother say.
“That’s right, it’s four in the morning — it’s time to get dressed.” He was already dressed as he walked back and forth from room to room. He had slept in his clothes, I was sure. They were wrinkled and tired on his body. His hair stuck up in strange places.
“It’s four in the morning and it’s pouring rain,” I could hear my grandmother saying over and over.
My mother floated into the room wordlessly and looked out the window into the darkness. She went to my closet and picked out a yellow plaid dress for me to put on. She would choose red overalls and a striped shirt for Hetcher. My mother liked to dress us in bright clothing. She always believed, I think, that if we were dressed inappropriately for the receipt of bad news, we would somehow be spared it. She herself, when she was finally ready, wore a pink suit and a large white hat, her hair pulled away from her face.
My grandparents, the first to respond to bather’s wake-up call, were the last to be ready, and, as we sat on the love seat in the hallway, my mother, Hetcher, and I, holding sweaters and raincoats in the dark, my father paced back and forth.
“Where are they?” Father muttered under his breath.
“Grandpa is trying on bow ties,” Fletcher said, as if he could see through the walls to the guest room.
“How do you know?” I whispered, but he just shrugged his shoulders. He was wearing brown and white saddle shoes and his feet swung back and forth in the air. They did not nearly touch the ground. He looked ahead unblinking.
“Give them another minute, Michael,” my mother said.
“Here they come,” said Fletcher, in his strange wav, and Grandpa appeared, like magic, on the arm of his dour wife. Fie looked fresh and bright and wide awake. In spite of our great curiosity and our cheerful attire, we looked like sleepers next to him.
“Well, finally!” my father said, clapping his hands double time. In his head he heard the music that would move us bravely forward. It was so unlike him.
“In the rain,” my mother sighed, as if she had just noticed it.
“Rain is good luck, Christine,” my grandfather winked. My grandfather’s whole posture suggested that he thought this was going to be one of the greatest days of his entire life. He had chosen a yellow bow tie with maroon spherical shapes on it. I le was putting rubbers over his best dress shoes.
“OK, is everybody ready now?” my father said, chirping again and clapping his hands. “Are you ready, Mother?” he asked. “Put on your coat.”
Grandma, who long ago had stopped loving my father, just looked wearily at him without saying a word. Withheld love had aged her. My father stood momentarily paralyzed in the bitterness of her stare, but somehow clapped his hands and began to lift his feet like some college bandleader, whistle in mouth, baton in hand, finally gathering the momentum to break from her and lead his colorful, sleepy parade out into the dark, wet springtime.
“But we can’t see anything, Daddy!” we screamed with a thrill. Bad weather had blindfolded us. The wind was spinning us around and around. Father ran ahead to turn on the headlights of the car for us. Without sight we could hear better, and we listened to his footsteps racing across the wet gravel of the long driveway that wrapped around our house. Fletcher took my hand. Grandfather put his arms around us, stooping with care so as not to let any part of his pants touch the grass. We looked at him through the windows of our rain slickers and smiled at his infectious smile. The lights went on. My mother, off to one side, held a large umbrella over her head and, even at five in the morning in the rain, she was an image of such beauty that I felt out of breath just looking at her and had to take off my hood.
Grandma just sighed, standing on the porch watching us in the black grass.
“It’s going to be a long day,” my grandmother said, though even she with her “negative thinking,” as Grandpa called it, could not guess how long. Right from the beginning, as my father got into the car and fumbled with the keys, my grandmother was suspicious. She had a right to be, I suppose. My father had mysteriously asked them to come from the farm in Pennsylvania to join him on a very important trip, but he had neglected to say where they were going or when they might be back. Fletcher and I, typically good-humored children and always poised for adventure, did not care so much about the details; we just watched Father, who did not seem like our regular father. For everyone but Grandmother it was enough to see the amazing color in mv father’s face that this trip, wherever we were going, had produced. Anything we were about to do seemed certainly worth it to see Father this way.
Sliding into the passenger’s seat and looking over at him, my mother seemed overcome with nostalgia. She must have thought to herself that his eyes looked as they once had, long ago, focused and clear. And for a moment my grandfather, getting into the back seat with my grandmother and Fletcher, looked up, as if he were wondering who this wonderful young man was who was driving his family in the dark, for my father was a son my grandfather had never seen before. He was taking charge. He was going somewhere.
“We’re really on our way now!” my grandfather said, adjusting his bow tie and patting my grandmother on the back.
“There are no sandwiches,” Fletcher whispered in my ear, leaning forward from the back seat. It was a sign we were not going far, for Father always made sure there was something to eat. He always fixed us the most elegant lunches to bring to school, chicken and pineapple salad, cucumber sandwiches, cinnamon and apple tea or hot chocolate with orange peel.
My father drove wildly through the early morning, flying down the suburban streets much faster than he had ever driven before, until the passengers began to complain.
“Michael, please,” my mother said quietly, “please, not so quickly.”
Taking her cue from my mother, my grandmother began in her solemn voice, “I don’t know why you feel we have to leave at this unreasonable hour but if you don’t slow down, I’m getting out right here and you can forget the whole thing. Why you need us all here in the first place I’ll never understand.”
“Just close your eyes, Maria, and enjoy the ride,” my grandfather said. But he, like the rest of us, must have wondered exactly what it was that my father was up to.
I sat between my mother and father in the front seat and noticed that he lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator in deference to his passengers, but after a while he seemed to forget and I watched his foot sink back down onto the pedal.