“I just wanted to check up on you folks. Just being a patrol car.”
“Clary’s asleep. Mom’s watching news,” Paul said, adopting his mother’s way of dropping definite articles, a midwest mannerism. They went to market. She has flu. We bought tickets.
“Who was that you gave his freedom to?”
“Ole Vassar.” Paul looked up the street. Paul names his birds after hillbilly tunesters — Ernest, Chet, Loretta, Bobby, Jerry Lee — and had adopted his father’s partiality for oie as a term of pure endearment. I could’ve hauled him through the window and hugged him till we both cried out, so much did I love him at that moment. “I didn’t give him his freedom right off, though.”
“Old Vassar has a mission first, then?”
“Yes sir,” Paul said and looked down at the pavement. It was clear I was burdening his privacy, of which he has plenty. But I knew he felt he had to talk about Vassar now.
“What’s Vassar’s mission?” I asked bravely.
“To see Ralph.”
“Ralph. What’s he going to see Ralph for?”
Paul sighed a small boy’s put-on sigh, transformed back from a big boy. “To see if he’s all right. And tell him about us.”
“You mean it’s a report.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Head still down at the pavement.
“On all of us?”
“Yeah.”
“And how did it come out?”
“Good.” Paul avoided my eyes in another direction.
“My part okay, too?”
“Your part wasn’t too long. But it was good.”
“That’s all right. Just so I made it in. When’s Ole Vassar reporting back?”
“He isn’t. I told him he could live in Cape May.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Ralph’s dead. I think.”
I had taken him and his sister to Cape May only last fall, and I was interested now that he supposed the dead lived there. “It’s a one-way mission, then.”
“Right.”
Paul stared fiercely at the door of my car and not at me, and I could sense he was confused by all this talk of dead people. Kids are most at home with sincerity and the living (who could blame them?), unlike adults, who sometimes do not have an unironical bone in their bodies, even for things that are precisely in front of them and can threaten their existence. Paul’s and mine, though, has always been a friendship founded on sincerity’s rock.
“What do you know tonight to tickle me?” I said. Paul is a secret cataloger of corny jokes and can make anyone laugh out loud, even at a joke they’ve heard before, though he often chooses to withhold. I myself envy his memory.
For this question, though, he had to consider. He wagged his head backwards in pretend-thought, and stared into the tree boughs as if all the good jokes were up there. (What did I say about things always changing and surprising us? Who would’ve thought a drive down a dark street could produce a conversation with my own son! One in which I find out he’s in contact with his dead brother — a promising psychological indicator, though a bit unnerving — plus get to hear a joke as well.)
“Ummm, all right,” Paul said. He was all Johnny now. By the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets and averted his mouth I could tell he thought it was a pretty funny one.
“Ready?” I said. With anyone else this would spoil the joke. But with Paul it is protocol.
“Ready,” he said. “Who speaks Irish and lives in your back yard?”
“I don’t know.” I give in straight away.
“Paddy O’Furniture.” Paul could not hold back his laughter a second and neither could I. We both held our sides — he in the street, I in my car. We laughed like monkeys loud and long until tears rose in his eyes and mine, and I knew if we did not rein ourselves in, his mother would be out wondering (silently) about my “judgment.” Ethnics, though, are among our favorite joke topics.
“That’s a prize-winner,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye.
“I have another one, too. A better one,” he said, grinning and trying not to grin at the same time.
“I have to drive home now, sonny,” I said. “You’ll have to remember it for me.”
“Aren’t you coming inside?” Paul’s little eyes met mine. “You can sleep on the couch.”
“Not tonight,” I said, joy bounding in my heart for this sweet Uncle Milty. I would’ve accepted his invitation if I could, taken him up and tickled his ribs and put him in his bed. “Rain Czech.” (One of our oldest standbys.)
“Can I tell Mom?” He had sprung past the strange confusion of my not coming inside, and on to the next most important issue: disclosure, the reporting of what had happened. In this he is not at all like his father, but he may come to it in time.
“Say I was driving by, and saw you and we stopped and had a conversation like old-timers.”
“Even though it isn’t true?”
“Even though it isn’t true.”
Paul looked at me curiously. It was not the lie I had instructed him to tell — which he might or might not tell, depending on his own ethical considerations — but something else that had occurred to him.
“How long do you think it’ll take Ole Vassar to find Ralph?” he said very seriously.
“He’s probably almost there now.”
Paul’s face went somber as a churchman’s. “I wouldn’t like it to take forever,” he said. “That’d be too long.”
“Goodnight, son,” I said, suddenly full of anticipation of quite another kind. I started my motor.
“Goodnight, Dad.” He broke a smile for me. “Happy dreams.”
“You have happy dreams your own self.”
He walked back across Cleveland Street to his mother’s house, while I eased away into darkness toward home.
5
The air in Detroit Metro is bright crackling factory air. New cars revolve glitteringly down every concourse. Paul Anka sings tonight at Cobo Hall, a flashing billboard tells us. All the hotels are palaces, all the residents our best friends. Even Negroes look different here — healthy, smiling, prosperous, expensive-suited, going places with briefcases.
Our fellow passengers are all meeting people, it turns out, and are not resident Michiganders at all, though they all have come from here originally, and their relatives are their mirror-image: the women ash-blond, hippy, smiling; the men blow-dried and silent-mouthed, secretive, wearing modern versions of old-time car coats and Tyroleans, earnest beefsteak handshakes extended. This is a car coat place, a place of wintry snuggle-up, a place I’m glad to have landed. If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.
Barb and Sue walk us down the concourse. They have bags-on-wheels, snazzy red blazers and shoulder purses, and they are both in jolly moods. They are looking forward to “fun weekends,” they say, and Sue gives Vicki a big lascivious wink. Barb says that Sue is married to a “major hunk” from Lake Orion who owns a bump shop, and that she may quit flying soon to get the oven warmed up. She and Ron, her own husband, she says, “are still ‘dining out.’”
“Don’t let this old gal fool ya,” Sue sings out with a big grin. “She’s a party doll. The things I could tell you would fill a book. Some of the trips we go on. Whoa.” Sue rolls her eyes and snaps her blond head famously.
“Just don’t pay any attention to all that,” Barb says. “Just enjoy yourselves, you two, and hev a seef trip home.”
“We surely will,” Vicki boasts, smiling her newcomer’s smile. “And you have a nice night, too, okay?”
“No stopping us,” Sue calls back, and off the two go toward the crew check-in, gabbing like college girls with the handsomest boys on campus waiting at the curb in big convertibles and the housemother already hoodwinked.