“Then why do you watch every week?”
“To have my judgment confirmed.”
“I haven’t seen you in a while. You look pretty good.”
He coughed again. “The doctors all tell me I should be dead by now.”
“Yeah, but what do they know, right?”
“That’s what I always say.”
“Is that so?”
“Now you’re being a smartass.”
“One of my inherited traits.”
“From your mother.”
“No. From you.”
His face grayed and he hacked out something else for the paper towel. “Ah, what do you know?”
“What’s the score?” I asked.
“Fourteen-seven, Eagles.”
“They’re not playing like bums today.”
“This is the Jets. Let’s see them play the Cowboys. In their hearts they’s bums.”
We watched the game in near silence, throwing out charming bons mots as the play progressed, things like “He’s got hands like feet,” when a receiver dropped a ball, and “He couldn’t tackle his sister,” when a running back spun off a safety’s hit, but basically keeping our thoughts to ourselves, the television commentary interrupted only by my father’s coughs. We even sat in front of the halftime show, snippets from the band, hyperactivity from the commentators in the booth, a string of commercials about cars and beer. Sometime during the third quarter I realized that my beer was warming, so I took the now half-empty six into the kitchen. What I saw in the refrigerator was depressing. There was beer, there was an old milk carton, there were things I couldn’t identify in the back. Ice was growing from the refrigerant cables. What was so depressing was that the inside of my father’s refrigerator looked very much like the inside of my own.
“You should clean out your fridge sometime,” I said when I sat back down.
“Why?”
Why indeed? Stumped again, I thought. Stumped again by my father.
“What about that five thousand you owe me?” he asked after the game, when the only thing on was the golf tournament on Channel 6, which my father had decided to watch rather than do the unthinkable and turn off the set.
“That was what I came about,” I said. “Or something like it.”
“Well, do you got it or not?”
“Do you need it?”
“I could use it, sure,” he said.
“I could get it if you need it.”
“I didn’t say I needed it.”
“You said you could use it.”
“It’s not the same thing. Everyone could use it. Donald Trump could use it, but he don’t need it.”
“Bad example,” I said.
“Yeah, well, maybe.”
“Do you need it?”
“No.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I don’t have it.”
The tournament leader pulled a five-footer past the hole.
“That’s not to mean I couldn’t use it,” he said.
“I’ll get it for you, then.”
“Look at that putt he missed,” my father said, waving disgustedly at the screen. “Bums. For fifth place they get fifty thou. Who the hell cares about winning anymore?”
So we watched golf for a bit, seduced into somnolence by the rhythm of the game, the setup, the waggle, the step back, the waggle, the swing, ball disappearing into the screen only to reappear as a tiny speck spinning forward on the fairway. The shadows in the house were getting longer now, the room was darkening. I glanced over during one of the crucial putts and my father was asleep in the chair, head back, mouth open, breathing noisily through his diseased and rotting lungs. He woke up with a start when Greg Norman made a long twisting putt and the crowd applauded wildly.
“Who? What?” he stammered.
“Norman just made a putt.”
“There’s a bum. You want to know how to become a great golfer? Play Norman in a playoff.”
“The trick is getting to the playoff in the first place.”
“There’s always a trick,” he said. “I’m just telling you how is all.”
“Tell me about Grandpop,” I said and that quieted him for a moment.
“What about him?”
“I met someone who knew him from the shul in Logan. Someone who used to buy shoes from him.”
“Yeah, well, he went to shul and sold shoes,” said my father. “What else is there?”
“And sing, right?”
“Sure, he used to sing all the time. He had a voice, but it still drove me crazy.”
“How come you stopped going to shul?” I asked.
“Old men singing sad songs in a dead language. Prayers in Aramaic. You know what is Aramaic?”
“No.”
“Nothing in the world is deader than Aramaic,” he said.
“What happened when you stopped? Didn’t Grandpop try to make you go?”
“What was he going to do? I outweighed him when I was twelve. He didn’t have much control over me. I was a bad kid.”
“Did you love him?” I asked.
“What kind of question is that?”
“I’m just asking.”
“He was my father. What do you think?”
A few holes went by on the television, a few drives, a six iron to the green, a sand shot, a putt from three feet that missed, a twenty-footer that found the cup.
“When did we stop going to synagogue?” I asked.
“All of a sudden you care?”
“I’m just asking.”
“It was your mother who kept that stuff going. She wanted to belong to the fancy place with all the rich dressers. She thought belonging there would give her class. She could have married the Queen of England she still wouldn’t have had no class, and believe me, I ain’t the Queen of England. The dues were killing us but that’s what she wanted so that’s what we did. When she left I didn’t see any point.”
“I should have been bar mitzvahed,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it because I had never thought it before in my entire life.
“And I should have been rich. So what’s life but regrets.”
“If Grandpop had still been alive, he would have made sure I got bar mitzvahed,” I said. My voice seemed to fill with a great bitterness whenever I came home and it did again just then.
“You always were a whiner, you know that,” said my father. “It was always ‘I hate this’ and ‘I hate that,’ I just wanted to smack you all the time. Two people in the world knew how to get at me and they got to be my wife and kid. Well, quit being such a little whining snotnose already and grow up. Everything doesn’t got to be done for you, you can do it yourself if you want. There ain’t no age limit. Do it, I don’t care, just quit whining about it. Look, I did it and believe me, you didn’t miss nothing.”
“I didn’t know you were bar mitzvahed.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know,” he said.
“Did you have a big party?”
“It wasn’t like that then. My mother made a brisket and we had a cousin or two over, that’s all. Nowadays, shit, they set up tents and serve lobster Newburg. Lobster Newburg, clams casino, a band with a colored singer. How do you figure that?”
“I would have liked a party.”
“You didn’t have no friends. Who would we have invited, the President?”
After golf there was 60 Minutes, the little ticking clock, the talking head, the reporter with his incredulous tone as though the scam he discovered was anything but expected. I am shocked, shocked, he seemed to say, that there are companies out there defrauding the government. It was dark now, the shadows had spread to cover everything. My father’s face, slack in its thralldom of the television, was illuminated in a shifting light.
“I have a problem I need to talk to you about,” I said.
“How much do you need now?”
“It’s not like that.”