Still, my father had the features of a French legionnaire. An aristocrat. A mystery writer. A painter of abstractions. Give him a series of hats—a black beret, a turban, a sailor’s cap—and you could have had your classically attractive anyman: sailor, artist, sultan. Instead, he was simple. Friendly. A school administrator. As he passed the secretaries who were at his disposal with their beige panty hose, soft breasts behind soft sweaters, toes pinched into skinny shoes, my father glistened.
“Good morning, Mr. Connors,” a woman with a file folder in her hand said, fanning the folder in our direction, opening her eyes wide. “Is this your daughter?”
“No.” My father raised his dark deadpan eyebrows at her. “Mindy, I’d like you to meet my new secretary, Kat.”
Every time my father said this, and my father said this all day, a woman would open her slippery red mouth as wide as she could to laugh.
What’s wrong with this picture? I thought, remembering the puzzles we puzzled out in kindergarten—
Three dogs and a toaster: Which one doesn’t fit?
At home, my father’s corniness would be met with grimaces from my mother, pain spreading itself across her face as if she’d been poked in the small of her back by a very hot pitchfork, or she’d shake her head. She might say, “Oh, please,” or leave the room—or, if they were in the car together, look out the window blankly, saying nothing.
But here, his corniness was charming. Back in their break room, over cups of instant coffee and sandwiches slipped out of plastic bags and a haze of cigarette smoke winding exotic, haremlike, around them, those secretaries must have talked about my father like a pleasant, shared master. Here and there, a foot was slipped out of a shoe, tucked up under a thigh.
He could have had one or two of them, I’m sure. The skinny blond. The sweet and slightly giddy one. The one with shapely calves sashaying beneath her pleats.
Flattered to be chosen, she would have kept it quiet. She’d have met him on the sly, in a motel, black teddy stashed in her pocketbook, diaphragm already in. She’d have done whatever she could to please him in bed, just as she always tried to do his typing with a flourish, file his papers with style.
Then, back at work, she’d have kept her mouth shut. She’d have stopped lunching with her girlfriends if she had to, started keeping to herself. And when, a few months later, he broke the news that he couldn’t risk it anymore—his wife was asking questions—she might have been generous enough to quit, to find a job in another office, even if it meant a bit less pay, the loss of some fringe benefit she’d grown used to having but could, finally, manage without. And, years later, when she passed him with his wife and daughter on a street in town, she would politely look down at her shoes and walk on.
But my father was far too simple for this.
His imagination was limited, and, for whatever reason, it was only my mother he loved.
I know.
I know because I was their daughter. Their only child. The product of their marriage. A soft, lopped-off part of it. I saw the looks he sent her, though he hardly spoke to her. (“A man of few words,” my mother would snort at his back when he’d offered a one-word answer to some complicated question she’d asked.)
Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could lift the lid and precious gems would spill all over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy—an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.
There was never any of that in our house either.
“Evie, what can I do to cheer you up?” he might ask her on a Saturday when she’d spent all day complaining. He meant a movie, a drive, a quart of ice cream. She’d say, “Just pick up your dirty socks. That’s all I want,” and she’d be looking hard at his feet propped up on the ottoman when she said it, her jawbone making vicious little squirrel movements when she closed her mouth.
But the fact that she hated him did not seem to lessen his love for her. When she was late coming home from the mall, he’d twist the snug wedding band around and around on his finger—always conscious of her, not forgetting for a minute that he was married, looking out the window at an unfathomably high and empty sky.
He had her photo, too, enlarged, on the wall of his office, framed in oak. In it, my mother smirked into the sun at the slippery edge of a river—the Chagrin River, which ran past our subdivision, a famous river:
Once, between Cleveland and the lake, an oil glaze on that river caught fire like some stripper’s slippery negligee tossed onto the water, and it went smoking through the city and its valley of warehouses, steel mills, refineries, rubber factories—through the suburbs, where the stench and the fames and the flames were politely ignored—and it passed, then, into the country, spitting cinders into the wind, burning itself past the gawking sheep and cows, burning itself down to the great, polluted, viscous, all-forgiving mouth of Lake Erie.
That afternoon, when I was ten and went to his office with him, two or three times my father stood up from his desk, went over to that photograph on the wall, and looked carefully into it. Then he’d sit back down, seeming thoughtful, and watch the snow fall in soggy fragments of light outside.
I sat across from him. It was a long afternoon. The light from the window was so bright, we could barely open our eyes. My father tapped his pencil on his thigh, and as he did, it made a rubbery yellow blur in his hand. His desk was mahogany, buffed, with only a desk calendar, an ink blotter, a leather-bound appointment book and a coffee cup full of pens on it. I could see the elastic band of his Timex peeking out of his sleeve, cuffing his wrist with time as if he were its prisoner—time turned to x’s and scattered into the void.
My father didn’t seem to have any work to do that afternoon, and it bothered me. I could too easily imagine him sitting in that chair every day, watching the sky throw wet blankets all over the world—the parade of his life passing by the window with its threatening clowns, big-breasted women on the backs of white horses, asthmatic elephants wheezing in an icy rain as he tapped a too sharp pencil on his thigh.
As he tapped, that pencil made a solid, dispensable sound.
Then, after about half an hour of this, his secretary came in—all business, but her cheeks were flushed. She had on too much cheap perfume, and it trailed her in scented veils, filling my father’s office with an awful sweetness, like decay. It was a smell I recognized because, during that fall, each morning on my walk to school I’d passed a squirrel that had been flattened by the tires of a car and tossed to the side of the street, near the curb, where it was slowly vanishing—
And, although, after my first glimpse of that bristled, ash-blond fur softened by blood and guts and time, I’d cross the street to avoid seeing it again, I could not avoid smelling it, and the smell of it got stronger every day—sweeter and sweeter.
More like roses steeping in sugar water than dead meat by the second week.
Like an angel’s miscarried fetus by the end of the month.
Some precious rag from heaven dropped and stinking now. Lost sweetness itself by the side of the street.
This was how my father’s secretary smelled, and what she reminded me of as she handed my father a pink square of paper, smiled at me, and left—thighs rubbing nylon lightly across nylon high up under her skirt as she walked. Then my father waved the little square in my direction. “You have a dentist’s appointment tonight,” he said. “Your mother called.”
Of course, I must have known already, since she’d left the message with his secretary as my father sat in his office, only too available to talk, drumming a flaccid pencil on his pants and staring out the window, that she hadn’t wanted to talk to him. But my father looked across his nearly naked desk—just those doodles on a legal pad—and said, anyway, “Guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”