Читать книгу The Late Matthew Brown - Paul Ketzle - Страница 10

one

Commuters filed out of the terminal, many with the frantic look of those who have let time escape them. They spoke into their cell phones with a running staccato—yep, no, uh-huh, no way, sure, sure—as they wound through the impatient boarders, the well-wishers, the anxiously waiting friends and family. A red-headed woman in her pink blazer and retro cat-eye glasses stood slightly behind an elderly minister, stiff and collared and sucking on a piece of hard candy, or maybe a breath mint, while about his waist a troop of Brownies swarmed.

A young girl walked out of the gate. Ratty overstuffed duffel slung across her back, thick hair pulled into tight, though unruly, braids. She matched her mother’s description over the phone to a tee—Faded denim jeans with a patch over the knee. Lips pursed and forehead wrinkled. Her expression, a mixture of interest and serious concern. She had refused to have a picture sent, insisting that our first glimpses had to be face-to-face. And in that moment, I remember thinking that she looked so completely like herself, like a celebrity whose face you’ll never mistake.

Her airline chaperone asked me for some kind of identification, a license, a passport, any legal document at all, and then asked me to sign for her. As I did, I could not take my eyes off her.

“Wow,” I said, once we were left alone. “Wow.” Nothing else came to mind. I opened my mouth, expecting, hoping something more natural or appropriate for a first meeting of father and daughter to emerge. All I managed was, “Look at you. You’re here.”

“Yep,” she said, matter-of-fact, shrugging her shoulders and holding me in a steady, not unfriendly stare. “I’m here.”

“Well, then,” I stammered. She was expecting something more, I could tell. I would have expected more in her place. Perhaps she was disappointed with me. Our first ever meeting, face-to-face. She let her expectations hang there, loose but close, like her carry-on. “So…,” I said, still searching. “Shall we….”

“Close your eyes,” she said, abruptly.

“What?” I laughed.

“Just close your eyes. Please.”

She seemed serious. Her voice held the unmistakable weight of command.

“All right,” I said.

All around me, I could sense the bustle of movement, a human energy. Somewhere close, the beep-beep of a tram carting perhaps some disabled person from one gate to the next. Someone laughed across the terminal, forceful and loud, but with little mirth. And I at once sensed that I did not know if she was still in front of me, or where she was at all. I imagined her using this moment to run off, hurrying off to a different gate with a ticket secretly stowed in her bag for the emergency return flight. Just in case.

Finally, she asked, “What color are my eyes?”

“Your eyes?”

Her voice was still directly in front of me. Behind my eyelids, I could picture her clearly, a small form staring up in curiosity, her long brown hair, her green patched shorts, her fingernails bitten to the nub. Her eyes, though, were a complete blank. “Your eyes,” I said again.

“Sure,” she said. “You were just looking right at me.”

“Yeah, but…”

“What color are they?”

I’ve always hated tests, the bulging pressure of knowing something for certain—the shame of being wrong. In that moment, I saw eyes, of every sort and shade—peering, probing, various.

“Brown,” I guessed.

“You’re guessing.”

“Green, then.”

“They are not green.”

“Blue?”

I heard the disappointment in her sigh.

“No. You were right the first time. They’re brown.”

“Didn’t you say I was wrong?”

“I said you were guessing. It doesn’t matter.”

“Can I open my eyes, then?” I asked.

“I’m sure you can….”

I opened one eye in a squint to see her still standing in the same spot while the flow of the crowd streamed around us. “You sure you’re only twelve?”

g

In anticipation of my daughter’s first ever visit, I had purged my home, then restocked it with what seemed to me the more proper vestiges of fatherhood. At the used bookstore, I loaded up a hand cart with as many hard-bound and dusty classics as I could carry, a complete works of William Shakespeare in thirty-seven volumes, a Holy Bible the size of a phone book—items suggesting a moral fortitude and cultural grace that I thought best to pretend I possessed. From the bottom of the closet, I discarded all the automotive and semi-pornographic magazines; I placed all sharp objects high out of reach. I piled my low-grade alcohol into large crates and stored them in the basement, behind the exercise bike. Then I removed the exercise bike to a makeshift at-home gym, really just a converted shed, which I soon filled with free weights, a bench press, an 80-pound punching bag, and a used Nautilus, circa 1984.

It was only a month-long visit. I figured I could assume the mantle of perfect fatherhood for that long at least. Lacking any experience with pre-teen girls, I called upon my closest friend, Janice, to counsel me.

“You were a young girl once,” I said. “A while back.”

“Thirty years ago. Thanks for reminding me.”

“What do I do? I want to make a good impression.”

“You should aim lower. Settle for a decent working relationship.”

“I’m going to decorate a room just for her.”

She sighed and said, “This can only end badly,” then hung up.

I wanted to create a sense of belonging, the feel of home, despite the fact that we were total strangers to each other. I pillaged Toys R Us, absconding with a cart full of stuffed creatures. Hippos. Bears. Androgynous sprites. A case of dolls, some talking, some mute. Then, I acquired a bed to place them on, as much as a place for her to sleep, a pink and white floral canopy with matching comforter, dresser, chifforobe, hope chest and vanity. And flowers, flowers everywhere. Hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark stars and smiling planets decorated her ceiling.

But with her first look at her room, my daughter just laughed.

“You’re joking.”

“No joke,” I said

“What’d you do? Call in a cheerleading squad?”

“I thought it was nice,” I said.

“It is,” she said. “So very nice.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

She paused, fixing me with her stare, as if still trying to sum me up. She put a hand on my forearm.

“I can see this is going to take some work,” she said with a heavy sigh, pushing me back out of the room and closing the door between us.

g

My daughter’s name is Hero.

There is no part of that sentence I feel any responsibility for, but some things simply cannot be helped. The subtle events of life, those small, unnoticed moments that at the time seem so remote, come back to you in the most unexpected and frightening ways. Past overtakes present. It returns in the form of twelve-year-old girls who look upon you with pursed lips and oh-so-skeptical frowns; who avoid your eyes when you walk into a room; who stand noticeably apart from you reading grocery store tabloid banners, laughing quietly to themselves without sharing the joke, while you hunt frozen dinners and avoid the prying disapproval of other shopping parents.

I navigated the food aisles with an overladen grocery cart, the left front wheel whirling and spinning without ever seeming to touch the floor. The cart stubbornly veered to the side, and I nearly took out a display of cereal boxes, then a tattooed stock boy pricing cottage cheese, before ramming into an open freezer resting in the middle of the aisle, scattering its stacks of fish sticks out across the linoleum. Mothers shook their heads and turned away while a pair of college students, drunk or stoned, burst into giddy fits. My daughter, circling in an orbit that kept her far from me, focused her attention elsewhere, leisurely brushing her fingertips along a row of soup cans before sashaying around the corner and down another aisle.

If you live in a place long enough, it begins to occupy two spaces in time at once, or sometimes even more. A row of neat, multicolored condos now, but formerly a high vacancy office plaza. A multiplex movie house that once had been a mini-golf arcade, which had been built over an old mom and pop grocery. Once, a field of tall thin pines, where impatient teens would throw caution and clothes and themselves to the knobby ground—now, a deluxe supermarket with pharmacy, sushi bar and three-level parking. They’re all here. Pasts encroaching upon the present, reasserting themselves in a swell of memories.

Once an independent, childless thirty-something. Now—

They tell me I am Hero’s father, confirmed by tests that go all the way down to our shared DNA. Less than a year ago, I’d received the subpoena, lawyers requesting that I donate “material” for a paternity test in a divorce proceeding—for a woman I could only vaguely remember. Oddly, I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, hadn’t seen a reason to refuse or protest. I’d believed the whole thing impossible, absurd. A mere lark, a simple mistake from which the wonders of modern science would surely absolve me. Then the results had come back positive.

I was apprehensive about parenthood, my relationship with my own parents consisting mostly of a rocky and unsettled series of misunderstandings and doused hopes. I’d moved in with my grandfather when I’d turned 18, into the very house where I now lived. We had resolved most of our disagreements, though, by the time my parents died in an accident several years ago, on their first cross-country trip in the new RV after retirement, never knowing they had a granddaughter upon whom to dote.

Watching now as Hero lifted grocery bags into the truck with me, always reaching first for the heaviest, I found myself still wary, doubtful, perplexed by her stout form, muscular through her neck and shoulders, her dark freckled complexion, her flowing brown hair, her bruising wit. These traits came from somewhere, but likely not from me. Perhaps from Hero’s mother, Val, though she was only an obscure, possibly invented, memory to me, an impression of a gloriously drunken evening of debauchery thirteen years before. When I asked if she had a picture of her mother, Hero had noted that if I couldn’t remember the mother of my child, she certainly wasn’t going to help. Still, whomever it comes from, you could see that strength everywhere in Hero herself, her arms, her calves, her face. Sweat ran in streams across her forehead. She’d wrapped her long hair atop her head in a whirl and secured it with a pencil. She’d tied her long-sleeve cover-up around her waist. A rolled-up new copy of The New Yorker was stuffed into her back pocket. I could not bring myself to ask her if she’d paid for it.

I must be in there. Somewhere.

We drove along the Augustus Parkway, the capital’s main artery connecting east and west, grown rough now with age and randomly patched with black gravel squares and ovals. Cracks and potholes littered the highway. People were jerked along in their cars beside us, bouncing awkwardly in their seats. Inside the cab of my deluxe 4x4, we could barely feel a ripple.

“If you could be any person from the 19th century, who would it be?” she asked.

“Another study, is it?”

“And it can’t be a political figure.”

I unwrapped a piece of gum while we sat at the light, offering a piece to Hero. She turned it down. A blue Chevette came up close behind and nearly rammed our bumper.

“Which century is that?” I asked through my chewing.

“Eighteen-hundreds.”

“Nonpolitical?”

“Politicians are too easy,” she said.

“You’re telling me.”

Ever since her arrival, she’d deluged me with what she called her “studies”: short exercises in empathy, guessing games, tests of logic—the works. You never knew what was coming. She flew through them rapidly, never staying with one for more than a day or so, and never revealing their results. I don’t know where she found them all. Mined, I suppose, from the depths of her imagination.

“Eighteenth century, huh?”

“Eighteen-hundreds,” she corrected. “Nineteenth century.”

“Right.”

She liked to keep the purpose behind these projects a mystery, but that didn’t keep me from pressing. Somehow, I felt she wanted me to ask.

“What’s this one for?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that. It would spoil the surprise.”

“Just a hint. I’m very slow.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“At least tell me why it has to be the eighteenth century.”

“Eighteen-hundreds. Nineteenth century.”

“I’m not cut out for this,” I said. “I need help.”

She leaned forward in her seat, her hands clasped together in front of her, forearms twisted. “You’re looking for someone who is more like an idea than a person. Someone you can’t just pick out of the blue. And it can’t be a politician. If you could pick a president, say, you’d just choose someone like Lincoln. This takes a little more thought.”

I slowed at a stop sign, then rolled through it.

“You sure you’re only twelve?”

“That’s what they tell me,” she said, leaning back, folding her legs underneath herself. “But how would I know, really?”

We passed a clearing filled with busted and rusting automobiles. Buicks and Hondas and Chryslers and Plymouths, each smashed haphazardly upon the next until only a smear of blue green orange. You could almost feel the vines and tall grasses stretching up through the floorboards, before they came up under and through the hoods, running out through broken windows and crooked frames. The clearing bordered a nearly completed strip mall, newly tarred and painted parking lot, crisp and glistening in the sun. Then another mall. Then a gas station. The pace of the construction was frantic, eating up the open spaces and the plots of wild growth. Stores were going up and out of business faster than people could shop.

Saddled between a fast food joint and the foundation of some new building, I spied a farmer’s field, rows of shaggy crops and a wooden shack with a sign erected by the curbside. I pulled the Toyota off the road in front of it, coming to a sudden stop.

“Why’re we parking?”

“I always used to do this with my family. It’s a sort of tradition round here.”

“So was slavery,” she said.

“It’s my heritage.”

“That doesn’t make it mine, you know.”

Placards announced U-PICK corn strawberries peas tomatoes whatever’s-in-season. Dollar-a-pound. The man inside the shack handed us two wooden baskets without uttering a word. His face was creased and leathered, caught in a perpetual grimace.

“You want anything in particular?” I asked, handing her a basket.

“How about cotton.”

“I’m partial to corn.”

“Didn’t we just buy food? It’ll probably go bad in the hot car, you know?”

“This is good,” I said. “This’ll be good for us.”

“I don’t have to like everything, you know,” she said. “It’s okay if I’m bored.”

The summertimes of my own childhood had been filled with now-cherished episodes of bloody knees, runny noses, sweat-plastered hair, and the gathering of vegetables. On simmering Saturday mornings we’d load up the baby blue Impala, the three of us piling in each upon the other across the felt foam interior, the well of a trunk jam-packed with coolers, end-to-end—and we’d comb the fields, following row upon row upon row of corn stalks and tomato and strawberry plants and sprawling melon vines.

“You haven’t answered yet,” she said. “The study.”

“Let me think. What’s the rush?”

“No rush. Just no cheating.”

“Seriously, who am I going to ask?”

We wandered out into the field, my daughter and I, buckets under our arms and each in our own direction. I struck a path down the rows of corn stalks, which had grown brown in the drier-than-usual summer. The ears were stunted and coarse. Nothing much looked good, to be honest, but I picked anyway, walking around for half an hour, up and down the rows, rummaging through the dead and the sun-dried vegetation.

When I finally came across Hero, she was squatting beside a patch of once-hoped-for watermelon. Most had succumbed to blossom-end rot, half-grown and rounded like softballs.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen melons growing,” she said.

“This hardly qualifies.”

“Still. Call me impressed.”

She stood, unwinding herself upward and stretching. I handed her a shriveled strawberry from my basket. She ate it whole. An elderly gentleman in broad suspenders ambled by us through the rows with a nod of his head.

“Mark Twain,” I said, to which Hero cocked a sly eyebrow. “Your question.”

She frowned. “He’s the only one you can think of, right?”

“What are you implying?”

“Try again.”

“He was a writer, right?”

“I’m reluctant to offer any assistance,” she said, turning away.

I balanced my basket on my hip. “This is hard, you know.”

“No, you’re right. It’s fine. Next time I’ll give you something easier.”

We carried our laden containers back to the shack. Hero had filled hers with beans, and only beans, a couple pounds worth, at least. I went for variety: tomatoes, carrots, and as much corn as I could lift. We’d never eat it all, even if it hadn’t been dried out. This was my experience. Most of it would end up rotting in the fridge or given away to friends. It was really just for comfort and for show.

“There’s Robert E. Lee,” I said, suddenly inspired, setting the bags in the truck bed.

“That’s your answer?”

“He wasn’t a politician. Right?”

Hero shrugged. “That could go either way.”

I started up the engine and rolled back out onto the highway toward home. Hero reclined her seat and curled up away from me with a yawn.

“To tell the truth,” she said, “it didn’t matter who you picked. I was just testing myself. To see who I thought you would pick.”

“Who did you expect, then?”

She smiled. “That I don’t have to tell you.”