“What? What did you just say?”
“Marry me.” Henry kneels down on one knee.
“Oh, Jesus,” she says, turning away. “Get up, Henry. Don’t do this.”
“Cathy Nicholas,” he says, “will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
“What the hell are you doing? Huh? I’m breaking up with you and you’re proposing? Jesus. Amazing.”
He stands. “What? Why not get married? I love you. You know I do. I’d do anything for you….”
“Except move away. You’ll do anything for me except move away from here. To the city. To wherever. You won’t leave.”
“But why do we have to leave? Huh? Is it so terrible here?”
Cathy opens her mouth to speak but stops herself.
He practically whispers this part: “I can’t leave and you know it.”
He is aware that his voice is cracking back a lump in his throat.
“It’s just I want something different,” she says. “I came from a place like this. I always swore I’d get out. Live in the real world.”
“And this isn’t the real world, is what you’re saying. This, this lamp,” he says, voice stronger now, pacing the room, “this lamp isn’t real. This chair. This chair is fake. This isn’t a real chair.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. No, I don’t. What’s real, Cathy? I’ve never been real to you. I’ve always just filled up space until something better comes along. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know you’re killing time with me? But nothing better has come along, has it? Huh? Maybe I’m real. Did you ever think of that? Maybe it’s me that’s real. This town that’s real. Maybe everywhere else is fake. Did you ever think about that?”
She hangs her head. When she looks back up she doesn’t have to say the words. He just goes to the door to unbolt the top lock she always has such trouble with.
They never said goodbye. That was the last time he saw Cathy Nicholas. Until this day. The day she came in to look at tuxedoes for her fiancé and his groomsmen.
“I guess he’s real,” Henry says out loud.
He looks over his shoulder at the freshly lighted exit sign. On his way out the door he touches each rack he passes by. Cotton. Gabardine. Wool. Pressed wool. Worsted wool. Polyester. Silk. He ticks the fabric talismans off in his mind. He turns off the overhead light and locks the glass door.
It is exactly five-fifteen when he pulls up to the house.
Henry pushes at the front door that now catches and has to be kicked from the bottom in order to fully open. Another mental note to get someone over here to fix that.
“Hey, Mom,” he says as he drapes his coat on the coatrack filled with faded old jackets and windbreakers and a baseball cap.
She is in the living room. Eyes fixed to the television he bought for them a few years ago. He was quite pleased with the upgrade. A clearer picture, a wider screen and not so thick, so that the table it rested on (a low-ish cabinet, one wobbly leg, with books stacked in the shelf beneath the set) could be pushed back, closer to the wall, affording a few more inches of a living room that over the years felt smaller and smaller to him. Look at this, he began the show: finally an easy remote control—one that works—so you don’t have to get up to change the channel. And look, no antennae on top to adjust—it’ll pick up the stations without it. And look at this and this. And look at that, he’d pointed out all the features that had so impressed him at the electronics store half an hour away. And I’ve got a power strip back there now so you won’t have to worry about it surging. See how good the picture looks? And that’s on every station, even channel four. You know how that used to be so grainy? See that, there? It’s clear. And see this? His thumb clicking on the volume button then the channel selector. It’s so easy, he said.
The presentation was useless. He saw it the minute he looked at her. His mother appeared dwarfed by televised progress. As if the extra four inches of screen had been subtracted from her frame. A trade-off he immediately regretted.
This Henry realized once he placed the remote control in her lap. She’d looked at it as if it were an unwanted stray cat that appeared out of nowhere, moved in, jumping on her small lap, hoping to be pet. To be welcomed. She’d looked down at it—the remote—and back up at him in wonderment. Her eyes, formerly large and, while vacant, at least beautiful still. Dark brown. So dark her pupils were indistinguishable. Eyes he had inherited. That moment, though, the time he’d made the gift of the television, they were hollow. Empty. He tried to lock them with his. At least they used to do something, he’d thought at the time. At least they’d cry. Or squint in anger. Or occasionally curl up into a smile: forced up by now-wizened cheekbones.
“What’s this?” Henry’s father said when he came in the door to the new television. His tone accusatory, as if he’d found a dog had soiled the carpet.
“Hey, Mom?” Henry asks over the volume, increasing over the years to near deafening levels. Reflecting the decline, too, in his parents’ hearing.
“What?” she says.
“Just coming by to say hi,” Henry says. He crosses the room into the kitchen to locate a smell that had greeted him on entry. He knew it wasn’t coming from the refrigerator because he’d just brought over fresh groceries two days earlier. In the cabinets no cans were found to be leaking. Baked beans, Campbell’s soups, cling peaches—all appeared all right. It had to be the trash.
The foot pedal releases a foul odor so putrid he has to let the cover fall back down in order to take a deeper breath and hold it this time so he can see in to what it was. Opening it again, even through held breath, the stink must have entered through his ears, he thinks, because he can stand it no longer and reaches around the rim for the edges of the plastic trash can liner. He cinches it up and carries it out.
“Mom? What was that that smelled so bad?”
“I can’t see with you standing there,” she says, leaning her tiny body to one side so she can see past him. He moves to block her again.
“I’m asking you a question. What did you and Dad eat that smells so bad?”
“Your father isn’t here,” she says, leaning to the other side. “Move, I can’t see.”
“I know he’s not here, Mom,” Henry says. Blocking again.
“Henry Thompson Powell, if you don’t move this second,” she says in her old I’m-your-mother-and-you-better-listen-tome voice. He finds it strangely comforting.
When he moves away she gyroscopes back to center for Wheel of Fortune. Henry goes into his father’s study to leave a note and finds his note from the day before still there, exactly where he left it. Usually his notes were balled up and tossed into the trash, leaving a clean fresh yellow sheet for the following day. This was highly unusual and not at all like his father to overlook the very thing smack in the middle of his desk.
Upstairs he finds their bed unmade…another red flag. Henry’s father had made the bed every single morning of their married life. Spread pulled so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom,” he says, shrugging on his coat.
The park is his first stop. In all the years since his high school discovery of his father’s “new job” he has never once let on that he knows the secret. At first he thought he would keep it to be used in case of emergency—some kind of blackmail he tucked away to be trotted out triumphantly if a wish needed to be granted and his father wanted badly enough to keep this from his mother.
But news of the football scholarship—a full ride, they’d promised him—had distracted him at first and then there were no other occasions that would have called for his blowing his father’s cover.
It had fallen to Henry to get himself ready for college. All the money he’d made at Baxter’s went to bed linens, toiletries, an art poster—Van Gogh’s Starry Night—he regretted the minute he got to his dorm and saw others unfurling Farrah with hard nipples and race cars and rock bands, tacking them to their painted c
inder-blocked walls with school-approved tacking paste that could be removed easily once the school year was over. He’d put the poster tube in the back corner of his tiny closet.
School supplies like paper, notebooks, pens and pencils were all covered by the scholarship. So were textbooks. And the meal plan. So it was okay that Henry had only seventy-five dollars in his pocket when he arrived at school. The bookstore was filled with T-shirts that read, “Westerfield: the Harvard of New Jersey,” which he had thought quite clever until years later when he saw someone in a shirt that read: “Vanderbilt: the Harvard of the South.”
He assumed he’d find a job before the money ran out not realizing being on the football team was a job in and of itself. His dorm-mates had a seemingly endless supply of money they used indiscriminately to make long phone calls on the single pay phone in the middle of his hall and to drink bottomless pitchers of beer. Henry was relieved to know he had a curfew—all the players did, even the upperclassmen. It provided a built-in excuse not to go anywhere that would have required a cover charge or alcoholic beverages.
By the end of the first month at school he had been proud that he had only spent five dollars and fifty-three cents but was dismayed to realize he had no idea what he’d spent even that meager amount on.
When his father called him home he had not thought of the Park Bench Blackmail Plan. It had not even occurred to him. When it did cross his mind—on the achingly long drive back with the guy he had found on the bulletin board, a guy who didn’t talk much and had a penchant for country music radio stations—he knew it would not have worked. His father would never have been cowed by an idle threat from Henry. Besides, in his mother’s state this bombshell of information would have been disappointingly ignored.
It is still light out when he pulls up to the far end of the park.
Henry had not realized the depth of his worry until the moment he sees his father. Alive. At least he’s alive, Henry thinks.
But walking across the brown grass in his Allen Edmonds shoes crunching on sticks and pinecones, his heart quickens to see that his father is not much more than alive. In a blinding flash, he sees his father as the rest of the world sees him. An old man in a worn suit, frayed at the cuffs and at the pocket openings. A suit that, on his father’s shrinking frame, appears comically large—the shoulder pads extending at least two inches past the skeleton underneath. A grim circus clown suit. His father’s face is crumpled. Dilapidated like a gloomy house kids throw rocks at and dare each other to go near in famous Gothic Southern novels.
“Dad?” he says. He is standing in front of his father but kneels when he sees his father cannot seem to move his neck. His eyes darted up to Henry’s face when he approached but they appear to be the only thing working in Edgar Powell’s body. Immediately Henry sees his father has also wet himself. And sat in it. Most likely overnight.
“Dad, let’s get you into the car,” Henry says. But this is easier to say than do as Edgar Powell is stiff in the seated position, briefcase neatly at his feet, never opened. A can of diet Coke rolls back and forth on the paved path a few inches from the bench.
“On three,” he says, recalling paramedics from long ago. He finds he does not mind reaching his arm underneath his father’s bottom. This is my father, he thinks. This is the man who invented me. His other arm is behind his father’s head, along his neck so that Edgar Powell’s head is up against Henry’s chest. “One, two, three.”
It takes all Henry’s strength to lift his father. “Okay, okay, I got you,” he says between breaths. It is all he can do to get to his car. “It’s okay, Dad.”
The tiny, raspy groans scare Henry. It is the only noise his father makes.
Henry balances his father on the hood of his car while he fumbles the passenger side door open, and then it’s a real trick getting him into the car but he does it and is soon speeding to the hospital.
“Your father’s had a stroke,” the doctor is saying. Henry nods yes yes I expected so. He can’t seem to speak, though. As if they’d both lost the ability to talk.
“We’re going to keep him here awhile to assess the damage,” the man is saying. He has a white coat on and Henry does not know what to make of this: the doctor has the very same Allen Edmonds shoes on that he does.
“Why don’t you go home and get some sleep,” he tells Henry. “We’ll know more in the morning.”
They had had to wait four and a half hours for his father to be seen and assigned a room and doctor. Four and a half hours in the emergency waiting room filled with unrecognizable faces Henry kept hoping would become recognizable. He searched the face of everyone rushing through the sliding glass ER doors but no one was familiar to him. They wouldn’t be, of course, because they were in the hospital two towns to the west of their own. But they were almost familiar. Henry thinks of these people he would know intimately if he lived here. A parallel universe to his own. Their features are not much different from his. Having read a month-old Time magazine cover to cover and then a two-year-old Forbes, he sized everyone in the ER waiting room. Literally. Size 38 waist, I’ll bet, he’d think. 42 Long for that guy. A game that lost its amusement almost as soon as it started.
And all the while Edgar Powell sitting, stone faced and brittle next to him. Waking rigor mortis setting in. Henry did not mind the smell of urine. It was a sweet smell that reminded him of childhood bed wettings that had temporarily won his mother’s albeit negative attention.
“Can’t he lie down?” Henry had asked on checking in. “He’s got to lie down.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse had said. “All our beds are taken right now. Sorry.” But she did not look sorry in the least. Not one bit.
The admitting nurse asked questions Henry was horrified to realize he had no answers for. He knew his father’s birthday. And that he was born in 1929. But he had no idea if his father had any allergies. He and the nurse tried to get a response from Edgar on this but were unsuccessful. No surgeries, Henry was almost positive. Their insurance? No idea. Henry searched his father’s soggy wallet for a card and found none. He was surprised, though, to find a library card as he had never seen his father enter a library in all his life. Any family history of strokes? Aneurisms? Heart disease? Diabetes? Mumps? Measles? Cancer? The list was endless and Henry hung his head in despair. He knew nothing about this family. Nothing.
What about your insurance, the nurse asked Henry. Sure, sure, he handed over his card, sorry that his father had to see this. This is just the sort of thing his father would hate. Henry is ashamed he ever thought of blackmailing his father about the park bench.
“Is he going to be okay?” Henry asks the doctor still writing things onto his father’s metal medical chart. He has found his voice again. “Is he going to recover?”
“Let’s talk tomorrow when we get test results back and we know more. I’m off first thing so you’ll be seeing Dr. Bellcomb. He’s a specialist in the field. He’ll be able to answer all your questions then.”
Nothing makes a man feel smaller than being dismissed from a busy and preoccupied emergency room.
Thus Henry shrinks out through the sliding glass doors. Shoulders sloped. Arms dangling Museum of Natural History–style.
Henry drives toward his apartment with the windows open in spite of the chill, so he can air the car out…the passenger seat still smelling of his father’s decay. There is now a freeway that speeds him back to the town limits and he chooses the exit one before his own, the long way. Off the exit ramp he turns right and passes the post office. Rights and lefts he knows by heart. Slowly he reaches Main Street. Where there was once a dollar store there is now a ladies boutique, fancy purses primly winking from the storefront. The flag has been taken down from in front of the post office as is proper. Henry remembers flag etiquette from middle school when they all learned it during the end of the Vietnam War. Suburbs like his were resolute in their defiance of protests going on in the rest of the country. Hippies lived somewhere else, not
in Henry’s town, which seemed proud of the moat of indifference it had created around itself. Still, at that time, flags were hung on every other house (he counted fourteen on his way to school one morning) and Mr. Lee taught them that if a flag is not illuminated in darkness it must be taken down altogether. Or if it rains. Flags should never fly in inclement weather.
The old boarded-up store that never used to keep a tenant is now Pier One, selling low-priced wicker to the throngs of people who must want it, judging from the stacked chairs and matching tables they have on display. Further up Main is Cup-a-Joe, which always hurts his heart to look at. It is now Java Joe’s, its apron-wearing employees numerous and referred to as baristas. Its prices tripled overnight. The hardware store is still here, and so, of course, is Baxter’s. Two stalwarts that sneer at the young newcomers as if to say “We’ve been here longer than you were alive and we’ll be here when you go, thank you very much.” A right on Bridge, left on Elm (there must be an Elm Street in every town, Henry thinks) and finally another left onto a leafy street called Stony Gate. The name has perplexed Henry for as long as he can remember for there are no stony gates on the street nor have there ever been. And there it is. Fox Run. He slows while driving past and is comforted to see it has not changed. The buildings with their ivy-covered stone walls that look dirty now because it is the time of year for ivy to fall off so only the brown vines remain. They look dead but Henry knows they will regenerate again in the spring, miraculously sprouting green as they do every year. Farther down the hill from campus is the field. His car tires crunch on the gravel and he puts the car into Park but keeps it running so the lights can illuminate at least the fifty-yard line. He stares out, motor running, windows still open, heat pouring out of vents he has to readjust so they do not hit him directly.
The play has worked. Twenty-four. He catches the ball, feeling it warm still from Wilson’s pass, tucks it in close to his body for the crisscross run that takes him roughly ten yards away from where they knew the defensive blockers would gather, into a zone where he can pass to the running back. Ted Marshall. Marshall then is supposed to run it into the end zone. But where is Marshall? He remembers taking a second to sweep the field looking for Marshall—a split second—and seeing it filled with the opposing team now bearing down in his direction. Marshall’s gone.