"Hendrick, what?" I must have heard, but I hadn't heard. I was having difficulty getting my breath. "Who-is dead?"
"'Was dead. Turns out, after all, he isn't!'
"Who?"
"The old man, who the hell else? Who else was dead, whose body we never saw buried? Who else for Christ's sake I'd be calling you about?"
He meant who else, what else, had the two of us in common, except our father? The burden of his memory?
Otherwise, Hendrick and I were strangers.
Faintly I asked, "Our f-father is-alive?"
"Only just barely. A nurse or someone, a woman, called. This time he's dying for real."
"But he's alive? Our father?"'
He'd been assumed dead for years. He'd disappeared into the West. I couldn't remember how my brothers and I had referred to the man, forever mysterious in absence, who'd been our father. Through the years of my growing-up. And my brothers, my tall beautiful brothers, so often absent from me, too. We hadn't said Father, I was certain. We hadn't said Daddy, Dad.
Hendrick said, "Right. He's living in a place called Crescent, Utah. About two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City. He was in a hospital in Salt Lake, now he's been discharged. They let him out to die by his request. I didn't speak with him myself, for all I know he can't talk. Just this woman. Who she is, I don't know. Maybe they're married. Y' know, he's fifty-six? He's dying of some kind of cancer." This was said in the tone of voice in which a minute before Hendrick had muttered the word trick.
"Cancer!"
When I'd lifted the ringing phone I'd had no expectation of hearing alarming news. Few people knew where I was, few people had any need to call me. If I'd had to guess who the caller might be I'd have guessed it was a wrong number. Who? I'm sorry, no. There's no one by that name at this number.
Hendrick was speaking rapidly now, wanting to end the conversation. Maybe he'd become emotional after all; or maybe the subject was distasteful to him. He would supply me with the telephone number of the woman who'd contacted him, her name and address in Crescent, Utah, and I could call her myself; no further information about my father because Hendrick had no further information, and wished none. I was fumbling with a pencil, trying to write on a scrap of paper, blinking back tears. Alive! Our father was alive. He'd never died. It would be one of the profound shocks of my adult life as the news of his sudden and unexplained death had been one of the profound shocks of my adolescence. You could see why Hendrick had said trick for there seemed to be an element of trickery in such shocks, and in trickery an element of cruelty.
Behind my brother's hurried voice there came a faint, querulous cry that might have been a child, and a sound of coughing. Was Hendrick living with someone? What was Hendrick's life, unknown to me? Of my three brothers Hendrick was the closest to me in age yet he was seven years older; an immense gulf, in childhood; I had no idea what his life was like now, and could not ask. At my grandmother's funeral Hendrick had stood tall and somber and frowning, apart even from his brothers, with that subtle air of resentment as if the elderly woman's death, like her life, had had very little to do with him; with his own inner, private life; my grandmother had not been a woman of much sentiment or feeling, she'd loved only her son, the man who was our father; in loving her son, she'd exhausted her capacity for emotion; he'd broken her heart, possibly; he'd broken all our hearts; no one else had the power to break my grandmother's heart, and no one else would have wished to have that power. At the funeral my brother Hendrick had watched me covertly; I'd felt uneasy under his gaze, and at the same time defiant; for what right had he to judge me; if I'd seemed to have excelled in a world he had been barred from entering, how was that my fault; I refused to be made to feel guilty by another's envy, as I could not feel pride or superiority for such a reason; I could not form any judgment of myself based upon my family's judgment of me, for they hardly knew me; my brother's unsmiling eyes, my brother's stone-colored eyes like my own, and like our father's. When Hendrick smiled, as sometimes he did, it was a quick teasing flash of a smile and you saw the possibility of warmth in him, and trust.
Before you could respond, the smile vanished.
How badly now I wanted to say, "Oh, Hendrick, why did he do this to us, do you think? Please don't hang up, talk to me."
How badly I wanted to say, "Would you come "with me to Utah, Hendrick? To see him? Before it's too late? We could drive out to-gether." How badly I wanted to plead, "You won't let me go alone, will you?"
But I knew what the answer would be. Instead I thanked Hendrick, and hang up the phone.
2
Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.
The last time I'd seen my father, that sudden rough embrace. The touch of a man who hadn't touched me in years. I would remember it for days, for years.
Four years ago. When he'd come to my high school graduation.
The shock of seeing him there in the audience! For I hadn't known he would be coming, I hadn't known he was in Strykersville. (He'd arrived the previous night, staying at a motel in town.) The prevailing fact of my father during my years of growing up was simple, blunt: when the man was home, he was home; when not, not. To be in one place for long, he'd have to be dead my brothers joked of him. But there unexpectedly he was in the high school auditorium. In a white shirt open at the collar, in matching coat and trousers. His hair, what remained of it, slicked back on his head; his nose flattened, bulbous; his jaws unshaven. And I, the girl valedictorian, in a black academic gown of light wool like a nightgown and a pasteboard-cloth black cap, its tassel swinging dangerously near my left eye. At the age of eighteen I more resembled a precocious thirteen-year-old boy; one of those small-boned ferret-faced individuals who ascends to a stage, a podium, confronting an almost palpable wave of resistance in an audience; a polite, subdued, yet perceptible resistance; who is both terrified yet fearless, borne aloft like Icarus by a mere voice, mere words, the very audacity of performance and a passion to utter something not yet said that would not otherwise be said except in this way. And the audience is startled into listening, and startled into applause. And afterward the doubt Did it really happen? Did they really listen, and applaud? And what does applause mean? After the ceremony ended, in a haze of smiles and handshakes and congratulations I'd looked around to see him headed for me, my father who was taller, larger, more physically present than any other man in the room; my father with the manner of an upright, just slightly swaying steer; unshaven, flush-faced with drink, and his eyes bloodshot yet gleaming with a combative paternal pride. He'd grabbed me and hugged me, breathing his hot-fumey breath into my face, advising me in a careless loud voice Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.