Then the manager stepped to the microphone and smiled and said that Mr. Carmody would now be signing books. “Because of the large turnout,” the manager said, “Mr. Carmody will not be able to personalize each book. Otherwise many of you would have a long wait.” Carmody thanked everybody for coming on such a frigid night and there was warm, loud applause. He sat down at the table and sipped from a bottle of Poland Spring water.
He signed the first three books on the frontispiece, and then a woman named Peggy Williams smiled and said, “Could you make an exception? We didn’t go to school together, but we went to the same school twenty years apart. Could you mention that?”
He did, and the line slowed. Someone wanted him to mention the Dodgers. Another, Coney Island. One man wanted a stickball reference, although he was too young to ever have played that summer game. “It’s for my father,” he explained. There was affection in these people, for this place, this neighborhood, which was now their neighborhood. But Carmody began to feel something else in the room, something he could not see.
“You must think you’re hot shit,” said a woman in her fifties. She had daubed rouge on her pale cheeks. “I’ve been in this line almost an hour.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to be light. “It’s almost as bad as the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You could just sign the books,” she said. “Leave off the fancy stuff.”
“That’s what some people want,” he said. “The fancy stuff.”
“And you gotta give it to them? Come on.”
He signed his name on the title page and handed it to her, still smiling.
“Wait a minute,” she said, holding the book before him like a summons. “I waited a long time. Put in, ‘For Gerry’—with a G—‘who waited on line for more than an hour.’”
She laughed then too, and he did what she asked. The next three just wanted signatures, and two just wanted “Merry Christmas” and then a collector arrived and Carmody signed six first editions. He was weary now, his mind filling with images of Molly Mulrane and Seanie’s face and injuries he had caused so long ago. All out there somewhere. And still the line trailed away from the table, into a crowd that, without his glasses, had become a multicolored smear, like a bookcase.
The woman came around from the side aisle, easing toward the front of the line in a distracted way. Carmody saw her whisper to someone on the line, a young man who made room for her with the deference reserved for the old. She was hatless, her white hair cut in girlish bangs across her furrowed brow. She was wearing a short down coat, black skirt, black stockings, mannish shoes. The coat was open, showing a dark rose sweater. Her eyes were pale.
Holy God.
She was six feet away from him, behind two young men and a collector. A worn leather bag hung from her shoulder. A bag so old that Carmody remembered buying it in a shop in the Village, next door to the Eighth Street Bookshop. He remembered it when it was new, and so was he.
He glanced past the others and saw that she was not looking at him. She stared at bookshelves, or the ceiling, or the floor. Her face had an indoor whiteness. The color of ghosts. He signed a book, then another. And the girl he once loved began to come to him, the sweet pretty girl who asked nothing of him except that he love her back. And he felt then a great rush of sorrow. For her. For himself. For their lost child. He felt as if tears would soon leak from every pore in his body. He heard a whisper of someone howling. The books in front of him were now as meaningless as bricks.
Then she was there. And Carmody rose slowly and leaned forward to embrace her across the table.
“Oh, Molly,” he whispered. “Oh, Molly, I’m so, so sorry.”
She smiled then, and the brackets that framed her mouth seemed to vanish, and for a moment Carmody imagined taking her away with him, repairing her in the sun of California, making it up, writing a new ending. Rewriting his own life. He started to come around the table.
“Molly,” he said. “Molly, my love.”
Then her hand reached into the leather bag and he knew what it now must hold. Passed down from her father. A souvenir of long ago.
Yes, he thought. Release me, Molly. Yes. Bring me your nickel-plated gift. Do it.
Her hand came out of the bag, holding what he expected.
RUN KISS DADDY
by Joyce Carol Oats
“Tell Daddy hello! Run kiss Daddy.”
He’d been gone from the lake less than an hour but in this new family each parting and each return signaled a sort of antic improvised celebration—he didn’t want to think it was the obverse of what must have happened before he’d arrived in their lives—the Daddy departing, and the Daddy not returning.
“Sweetie, h’lo! C’mere.”
He dropped to one knee as the boy ran at him to be hugged. A rough wet kiss on Kevin’s forehead.
The little girl hesitated. Only when the mother pushed more firmly at her small shoulders did she spring forward and run—wild-blue-eyed suddenly, with a high-pitched squeal like a mouse being squeezed—into his arms. He laughed—he was startled by the heat of the little body—flattered and deeply moved, kissing the excited child on the delicate soft skin at her temple where—he’d only just noticed recently—a pale blue vein pulsed.
“What do you say to Daddy when Daddy comes back?”
The mother clapped her hands to make a game of it. This new family was so new to her too, weekends at Paraquarry Lake were best borne as a game, as play.
“Say Hi Daddy!—Kiss-kiss Daddy!”
Obediently the children cried what sounded like Hi Daddy! Kiss-kiss Daddy!
Little fish-mouths pursed for kisses against Daddy’s cheek.
Reno had only driven into the village of Paraquarry Falls to bring back semi-emergency supplies: toilet paper, flashlight batteries, mosquito repellant, mouse traps, a gallon container of milk, a shiny new garden shovel to replace the badly rusted shovel that had come with the camp. Also, small sweet-fruit yogurts for the children though both he and the mother weren’t happy about them developing a taste for sugary foods—but there wasn’t much of a selection at the convenience store.
In this new-Daddy phase in which unexpected treats are the very coinage of love.
“Who wants to help Daddy dig?”
Both children cried Me!—thrilled at the very prospect of working with Daddy on the exciting new terrace overlooking the lake.
And so they helped Daddy excavate the old, crumbled-brick terrace a previous owner had left amid a tangle of weeds, pebbles, and broken glass, or tried to help Daddy—for a while. Clearly such work was too arduous for a seven-year-old, still more for a four-year-old, with play shovels and rakes; and the mild June air too humid for much exertion. And there were mosquitoes and gnats. Despite the repellant. For these were the Kittatinny Mountains east of the Delaware Water Gap in early June—that season of teeming buzzing fecundity—just to inhale the air is to inhale the smells of burgeoning life.
“Oh! Dad-dy!” Devra recoiled from something she’d unearthed in the soil, lost her balance, and fell back onto her bottom with a little cry. Reno saw it was just a beetle—iridescent, wriggling—and told her not to be afraid: “They just live in the ground, sweetie. They have special beetle work to do in the ground.”