My father’s house would be loud with talk and laughter, Ella Fitzgerald singing on the stereo, the phone ringing, the clank of silverware, the toilet flushing, the hollow roll of sliding doors opening out to the deck where Pop and Jeb and Mom might go to smoke. There was the creak of the oven door, the spray of water on dirty plates, the smell of coffee and wine and hot olive oil. There was the late-afternoon light coming through the bank of windows that looked out over Pop’s pool and the road below, the rising field of wheat-colored grass, the ridge of bare trees. In Pop’s small house, the light was the color of fire, the kind that came from a hearth this family sat around as if we’d never been fractured, as if we’d never been broken up into pieces that had also, somehow, found their way back home.
ON ONE of those Sundays, Pop and Jeb and I sat at the end of the Cajun Boardwalk sipping drinks and shooting the shit. The sky was gray, the leaves beginning to yellow. The air smelled like rain and the cigarettes my brother and father were smoking. Pop had just written a new short story that was also a western, and Jeb and I were teasing him about some of the practical details being off: in the story, the protagonist builds a coffin for a dead man, then digs his grave near a stand of trees, and he does it all in a three-hour afternoon.
We told him that even with power tools, there was no way his character could build a coffin so fast. And that six-foot grave was near trees with roots. The hole alone would take two to three days for one man to dig with a pick and shovel.
“Old man,” Jeb said, smiling, “do you even know what real work is?”
“Not manwork,” I said. Jeb and I shook our heads and sipped our drinks, and Pop was laughing, clearly enjoying himself. “Well, I’m declaring poetic license, damnit. All the wood and tools were already in that barn ready to go, and there was sand near those trees.”
Sand. Jeb and I kept shaking our heads.
“And when I die you boys can build my coffin and dig my grave and then you can see how long it takes.” He laughed and raised his drink and sipped from it, his eyes bright and mirthful, his cheeks a deep red, his whiskers thick and gray and white.
IT WAS true, he never had done any work with his hands. We never once saw him push a lawn mower or even change a lightbulb. But he seemed proud that his sons were carpenters, and now it was late at night in February, and I was sitting on his couch in damp clothes because I’d been working the wet saw most of the night in Suzanne’s new house five miles down the river. It was a project Jeb and I—and even Pop—were doing together.
Suzanne had bought a house in Amesbury up the hill across from a brick hat factory on the Merrimack. Her house was old and only had three rooms. Its sills were rotted, and most of the first-floor joists were too. When you stepped into the dark, mildewed bathroom you could feel the floor sink an inch under your feet, the toilet shifting off its wax ring in the floor, the smell of sewage seeping from the pipe. There was a chimney stack in the kitchen that needed to go, and a leaking roof and drafty doors, and all these just had to be addressed before she could move in; Pop offered to pay for the materials, Jeb and I signed up to contribute the work, and this is what we three did together the last months of Pop’s life.
I had just sold my third book and had enough in the bank I could do this, but Jeb had to turn his back on his bills for this job. Like always, it was good working with him again. He did the design and layout of what turned into a new kitchen and bathroom, a new floor frame and rear outside wall, and I went to work with him cutting and nailing and driving into place. Many days after we’d been working four or five hours already, the noon sun high over the Merrimack and the hardwoods on the other side, Pop would drive up in his Toyota with its handicapped controls, and he’d tap the horn and hold up a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts and a tray of coffees in Styrofoam cups. We’d walk out thirsty and hungry in our leather tool belts, sawdust in our hair and across our forearms. We’d thank him but say, “You just get up, writer boy? It’s lunchtime. Where’re the subs?”
He’d laugh, and we’d eat our doughnut lunch under the sun in front of Suzanne’s small new house.
Once a week or so, I’d swing by his place for a check for the lumberyard, and he’d write one out at the dining room table. One morning, he was finishing up praying with his rosary beads, something I didn’t know the first thing about. He looked up at me and said, “I was praying to my father.”
“Your real father?”
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know you could pray to dead people.”
“Oh yes, son. I talk to my daddy all the time.”
Over the years Pop had written and talked about him. I knew he’d been a surveyor and a good provider for his wife and two daughters and baby son. I knew he’d golfed every Saturday, then played cards with his friends. I knew he used to ridicule my father for being a dreamer, “All you’re good for is shooting Japs in the backyard.” I knew that Pop had joined the Marine Corps to prove to his own father he was a man. I knew that my grandfather had never told my father he loved him and my father had never said those three words back.
This is all I knew, and it wasn’t much.
ONE AFTERNOON, Pop pressed the button that activated the electric winch that lowered his wheelchair from its metal container bolted to his roof. He transferred to his wheelchair, and Jeb or I backed him to Suzanne’s door and pulled him into her house where we pushed aside tools and scraps of lumber and showed him our latest progress. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling we’d just framed in the kitchen, at the new skylight, a square of blue sky above. He said, “Y’all are doing holy work for your sister. This is holy work.”
IT WAS after eleven o’clock and I’d been working at Suzanne’s house since eight that morning. The sky was clear and the stars shone over the hat factory and the ice floes drifting down the Merrimack for Newburyport and the black Atlantic. Hard snow covered the ground, the tree branches bare and frozen, and when the wind picked up they sounded like dry bones knocking together. The following day I was flying to the West Coast to start a book tour for my new novel, a story I’d written about a woman who loses her father’s house to an Iranian colonel, a proud man who tells himself he always puts his family first. This had taken me four years to write. When I began it, Fontaine was pregnant with Austin. Now, two days before its publication, we had three kids. These had been the most joyous years of my life, but this book was shot through with bitterness and loss, and I was dreading the reviews.
Earlier in the day I had hung two doors and hadn’t gotten to the bathroom till sundown. It was a small space, but I wanted to get all the full pieces set into mortar, then the cuts too, something a real tile man would take two days for. I was to be gone for over a week, but the plumber couldn’t do his finish work till the floor was down, and I’d arranged for somebody to come grout the tiles on Monday. I had to get done tonight.
Suzanne’s house was unheated. In the halogen light I worked under I could see my breath, but now the night had gotten so cold the mortar was setting up too fast so I’d turned on the oven in the kitchen and opened its door and rested the bucket of mortar on the floor in front of it. Beside my wet saw the growing stack of tile scraps were framed with slivers of ice.
The night before I hadn’t slept much. This was something I’d grown used to since we’d started having kids six years earlier. It wasn’t simply the duties that came with caring for babies and young children—getting up to carry my infant son or daughter to Fontaine’s breast for a feeding, burping them after, maybe changing a diaper; it wasn’t only that one of them was older now and had had a bad dream or needed to be carried to the bathroom through our dark bedroom; it was that since becoming a father, I now slept like a soldier on watch in enemy territory. It had been ten years since that hot afternoon and Mozart’s Requiem and the screaming woman on the sidewalk, but the world had never seemed so dangerous. Anybody or anything could hurt my kids at any time, a gut-sick feeling every mother and father knew. It was the shadow side of a love so large my bod
y could not hold it all, and I was beginning to believe in the soul.
The phone rang as I knelt at the wet saw and fed a full tile through the spinning blade. Icy water sprayed my fingers, hands, and wrists. I usually wore a mask for this, but I was beyond tired and wanted to get home, my lungs sore now from a fine mist of porcelain dust. I coughed and flicked off the saw, wiped my cut tile dry, and answered the phone.
“Hey. You coming over?”
“Pop?”
“Yeah, it’s on soon. You almost done?”
“What’s on soon?”
“The fight, man. De La Hoya.”
Five or six times a year Pop would host a poker night, or if there was a major fight on pay-per-view, we’d do that. Jeb and I would come over, his son-in-law Tom, Sam Dolan, the Haley brothers, Jack Herlihy and others from over the years, mainly friends of his sons who’d become his friends too. We’d drink beer and whiskey, smoke cigars and tell bad dirty jokes, Pop sitting happily at the head of the table in his wheelchair, everybody at the same height.
On fight nights we’d crowd into his narrow living room, some of us standing on the wheelchair ramp and leaning on the railing, others sprawled on the couch or standing near the dark windows with a beer. Pop would always be in his chair close to the TV, and I found myself explaining the smaller things to him, how the corner man rubs Vaseline on the fighter’s face to help prevent cutting, how each fighter will try to combat that by throwing punches with a twisting motion to more easily tear open the greased skin of his opponent, how hard it is to find your punching range when the other has good feet and can bob and weave, how truly hard it is to take a punch or a flurry of them, not only to keep your cool, but to keep your fear locked in some tiny room deep down inside.
“I forgot that was tonight, Pop. Who else is there?”
“Nobody.” He told me a few had called and said they couldn’t make it. The others just hadn’t shown up this time. “You coming?”
I pictured him sitting alone in his small house on the hill, an expensive pay-per-view fight on to watch by himself. “I can’t, Pop. I’ve got to get this floor done. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I think you’ll regret it. It looks like it’s going to be a good one.”
“I’ll try, but I don’t think I can, Pop.”
He told me he thought I should come over anyway, and we hung up.
I was in Suzanne’s bathroom, pushing my cut pieces into mortar when the phone rang again. I took my time answering it. I had to first clear the mortar from between the tiles so it wouldn’t harden there and make grouting difficult. I did this with the end of my combination square, dragging it through the eighth-inch gap between tiles, then wiping it off with a cold rag. My eyes stung from fatigue, and I had at least another hour of this floor ahead of me. The ringing phone was a nail tapping into my skull.
“Hello.”
“You’ve got to come over. You’re missing all the prefight footage, man. This is going to be a fight.”
“I’ve been here fourteen hours, Pop, and I’m still not done. I just don’t think I can make this one.”
“You’re going to regret it.”
“I know.”
“You see De La Hoya? Man, he looks in great shape.”
I imagined Pop in front of the TV in his wheelchair, watching the hype I too loved to watch. I told him maybe I’d make it over if he stopped interrupting my damn work.
“Good,” he said, and we hung up.
Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. I had just knelt at the wet saw and flicked it on. I left the blade whirring and picked up Suzanne’s phone.
“They’re saying this could be one of the great fights. You’re going to regret it if you don’t come over.”
“Pop, let me work and maybe, maybe, I can come over.”
He said more things about what he was watching. The blade kept spinning. The mortar was hardening in its bucket in front of Suzanne’s open oven.
“Pop, stop calling.”
He laughed, and we hung up again and in the next twenty minutes he called two more times. If I hadn’t been so tired, this might have been funny. Each conversation went the same way and ended the same way, Pop excited and intent, nearly urgent in his request for me to come over, me tired and cranky and barely able to hold a respectful tone.
After he called a fifth time, I hung up but kept my hand on the receiver. My lungs were raw and the overhead light was too bright and my ears were ringing slightly. Suzanne’s kitchen was almost warm now from the oven, and the air had the wet-stone scent of drying mortar, the damp cotton of my sweatshirt, the broken bone of cut porcelain. I hadn’t seen Fontaine or the kids all day and night, and soon I’d be thousands of miles away from them and gone for days, but Pop had used the same word each time he’d called. Standing alone in Suzanne’s quiet house I could hear his voice saying in my ear: You’re going to regret it if you don’t come. I think you’ll regret it, son.
I walked over to the oven. I shut the door and turned off the heat. I stepped into the cold bathroom, glanced at the section of subfloor I’d yet to cover, and switched off the light. In the front room where my wet saw was set up, I unplugged it and the halogen lamp and left my hand tools where they were. Normally, I’d clean up the site; I’d empty the wet saw tray and wipe down the motor, blade, and frame; I’d roll up cords and dump the tile debris into a barrel and sweep the floor and put away my tools. I sure wouldn’t leave wet mortar in a bucket where it would dry and harden and have to be tossed. I wouldn’t leave a floor undone that I’d promised my grouter and plumber would be ready. But I did. I turned off the kitchen light and locked the door and left everything just the way it was. Then I drove to my father’s house.
HE GREETED me at the door smiling in his wheelchair. He was wearing charcoal sweatpants and a black jersey made from some kind of shiny material not unlike satin. This was something Jeb and I would tease him about, that he liked to wear soft clothes and sleep in satin sheets.
He reached up and hugged me and slapped my back. “I have one beer. You want it?”
I did. I cracked it open and followed him in his wheelchair down the short ramp into his living room. He positioned himself in front of the flickering TV. The volume was low, and two boxing commentators in tuxedos were speaking earnestly into the camera. I sat on the couch in my work clothes, still damp from the porcelain mist, and I took a long drink from my beer and was glad I had come; Suzanne’s bathroom would just have to wait till I got back. In the morning I’d make some calls before I left for the airport.
Pop said, “Who’s going to win this?”
“De La Hoya.”
“I think so too.”
We talked awhile about the fight, about who had the reach advantage and who might be hungrier for this, Trinidad or De La Hoya? This was the only sport we could talk about because it was the only one I’d ever done and most of the knowledge my father had of it had come from these talks. Before them, he’d had only a passing interest in boxing, but now it was more than that for him, and it seemed to come from my passion for it, the way my eventual and late interest in baseball would come from my sons.
Pop had never seen me box. We’d had that night at the Tap together twenty years earlier, but my father had been on the floor and hadn’t seen me knock down the man trying to make peace. Over the years, he’d heard the fight stories about me to the point where they had taken on the mantle of myth, and this often left me feeling like a poseur and a liar, even though I had been in those fights. I had done those things.
Not long before this night, the editor of a magazine wanted to do a story on my father and me. Pop kept calling my house to hear when I could do the interview. I told him of the work yet to be done on Suzanne’s house, of my commitments at home. “I don’t know, Pop, I might not be able to make this.”
“You have to, man. It’s about the two of us. It’ll be fun.”
I loved my time with my new father. I loved our easy rapport, but I did not want to
do this interview partly because it was my book coming out, not his. Once he’d been interviewed by a woman who began to talk at length about one of the stories in my first book. Later he mentioned that to me. He said that he’d almost said to her, “Hey, lady, whose work are we talking about right now anyway?”
“I get that all the time, Dad.”
That’s where we’d left it. But why shouldn’t every journalist I’d ever talked to bring up my father and his masterful work? I was his firstborn son with the same name writing fiction, too. What did I expect? In these interviews, I was treated with a vaguely disguised pity: how hard it must be to follow the footsteps of a real master, a writer’s writer, to share his name and probably not his gifts, an assumption I shared but honestly did not think much about. Sometimes there was outright irritation that there would be two Andre Dubuses now. One journalist, a woman in her thirties who smoked one cigarette after another and wrote in shorthand, said, “God, don’t you want to do something different from your father? Why don’t you go into another field?”