“That’s not a very nice game, honey,” says Clay.
“Yes it is.”
“Come sit on Daddy’s lap and watch the fireworks. I’ve got some gummy bears in the bag over here.”
“I don’t want to!”
“Sweetie — ”
“No!”
She collapses, sobbing, against my chest. I hold her and rock her gently. Clay looks alarmed. Watching him, Sharon’s eyes fill with tears. “Bathroom,” she mutters, standing, shaking, brushing grass from her knees. “I’ll be right back.” Quickly, she walks away, leaving us silent, behind home plate. Cassie twists my arm.
The day came when Mom didn’t return from Oklahoma City. She called to tell him, “Ray, I don’t want to be married any more. I’m going to stay here and help with the stores.”
I’d just turned seventeen; we all agreed I’d stay with Dad in Dallas, to finish high school.
Neither of my folks offered me a reason for their split except “irreconcilable differences.” I knew it meant, “Don’t ask any more questions.”
“Why’d you marry him in the first place?” I asked my mother, testily, on the phone one day.
“I loved your father — ”
“But he wasn’t rich enough for you?”
“Kelly, that’s enough out of you,” she said, and we didn’t call each other for a while after that. She sent me a little money each month, suggesting I put it aside for college, and left me her Mustang to drive.
Dad worked late each night. I’d come home from school and bake us both pot pies, leaving his in the oven to warm. He tried to act cheery when he came through the door, though he always looked rumpled, like he’d been in a wreck.
His puns made less and less sense. “Another day, another dollop!” he’d chirp, a little too loudly.
He couldn’t sleep. Finally, I talked him into seeing a doctor, who prescribed a mild sedative. He also diagnosed Dad as deeply depressed and urged him to see a therapist. Dad wouldn’t do it. “Waste of rainy-day pennies,” he mumbled. “He’ll just tell me to look ahead, forget the past. Hell, I know that stuff already.”
Finally, I broke down and called my mother, but she wouldn’t talk to him, not even when I pleaded. “Kelly, I tried for years to get your father to lighten up. To march into life. He’s always been depressed. I can’t help him any more, and neither can you. You’ve got your own worries. How are your classes?”
“Fine.”
“You pull that math grade up?”
“A little.”
“Good.” Her voice softened. “I know things are hard now, son, but you mustn’t let anything affect your school success. And for goodness sakes, get out and have some fun. Are you dating anyone? Got a girl?”
“No.”
“You could do a little marching yourself.” She tsk-ed. “I’m afraid you’ve inherited your father’s shyness.”
“Dad says it’s the Irishman’s curse.”
“Shyness?”
“He calls it ‘melancholy.’”
“Well, I love the Old Country,” she said (she’d never been there), “but that part of its legacy I could definitely live without.”
I promised her I’d work on getting out more.
“In the meantime, you let your dad take care of himself,” she said.
But he didn’t know how. Sometimes, when he met new colleagues through work, or found new golfing partners, he’d repeat the theater story, ending with the love of his life. He didn’t tell these people his wife had left him.
As I listened, the story seemed to me now not the romance I’d always heard with delight but a catalog of failure. Failure to join his buddies on the battlefields. Failure to hold on to my mother.
One afternoon, he said he was “hemmed in” by all “these damn Kellys”: my mother’s snooty family, his own father, who blamed the end of his marriage on the “moral lassitude” he’d shown since he was little. Even me.
“If I never hear the name ‘Kelly’ again as long as I live, it’ll be too soon!” he yelled, waving his arm. I’d interrupted him in his studio while he was trying to paint. Some friends and I were convening at a movie. I needed cash.
His portraits, copied from the film books, from celebrity magazines, hung like giant Hollywood posters on his dark-gray walls. He fumed, in a world of his own. “What the hell do you all want from me? Haven’t I paid and paid and paid?”
“All right,” I answered. “It’s no big deal. I’ll borrow it from my pals.”
That night he apologized. He’d waited up for me in the kitchen. It was after ten o’clock. The faucet dripped, as erratic as a faulty old heart. In the next room the TV shouted, “You gotta see it to believe it, friends! Lowest prices east of Pecos!”
“What show did you see?” he asked me. He boiled a kettle of water for some tea.
“A dumb mummy thing, at a second-run place. An old Boris Karloff.”
“No good?”
“Nah. I’d seen it before, on TV”
He didn’t know what to say to make things better between us, except he was sorry he’d snapped at me. I told him to forget it, but even then I knew I’d never lose the memory of that afternoon. When he’d raised his arm in anger, his old wound had puffed up at me like the hood of a cobra.
“I haven’t been to a movie in years,” he said quietly into his cup. “Never saw one I liked, even remotely. Well. That’s not true.” He tapped the tabletop. “There was one — Twelve, no, Ten Days That Shook the World, about the Russian Revolution?”
“Don’t know it,” I said. “Why’d you like it?”
“Oh, I enjoyed the battle scenes. They were exciting, the kind of thing I figured I’d missed in Europe. Truth is, I used to think — ” He shook his head.
“What?”
“When I was a kid, I used to think I might like to paint movie sets. Backgrounds, landscapes, those sorts of things.”
“Like in the books you have?”
“Yeah. I didn’t enjoy the films much, I just wanted a big audience for my work. When I ran the projector, I saw how amazed people were, staring up at the screen.”
“Why didn’t you try it?”
“Oh, I wasn’t good enough, really, I wasn’t….” He wagged his head again. He laughed. “The movies. I guess, finally, I never understood their appeal.”
“No?”
“I mean, the larger-than-life vistas, sure. That I can see. But sitting there with a batch of strangers in the dark, trapped in those flimsy old seats…”
I had the feeling he was about to tell me something more, but he stopped right there. I swallowed my yawns in case he’d go on. He didn’t. Already he’d said more in one night than he usually did in a week. He rubbed his cheeks, badly in need of a shave, and finished his cold green tea.
Matters of conscience. Matters of the soul.
As I watch Cassie now, in her daddy’s lap, shaking gummy bears out of a box, I recall my grandfather’s sermons, his stern, judgmental stares, and experience as fury the fireworks bursting above me.
I will hurt this man, I think, smiling at Clay. I will disrupt his family.
And even as I think these things I want to reach out and shield him, to warn him about me.
One day, early in our affair, as we stood together nearly popping out of our clothes with desire, Sharon and I agreed, in the way of all illicit lovers early in their affairs, “We can’t do this. We have to stop now.”
Tonight, watching her face, I know: We are going to do this thing.
It’s bigger than us. The emotion. The passion. Easy to say, and no less true for being clichéd.
She’s been unhappy for years. “Clay’s a good man, but so damn passive,” she told me once. “He doesn’t know how to take care of me.” If I weren’t here, she’d leave him sooner or later anyway. Yes, probably so, I assure myself.