It Takes a Worried Man

The Leavings of Panic

At the moment Pearl Harbor was attacked, my father was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes in an Oklahoma movie house. A blind girl had just handed Charlie Chaplin a flower, and my father, the projectionist, was supposed to switch reels. As he reached for a film canister, he dropped a lit match. Within minutes, flames wrapped the tiny projection booth. He stumbled out, yelling, “Fire! Fire!” People hustled from the theater. They stood across the street, watching the building collapse.

Hours later, when the streets were dark, my father returned to the theater’s ruins. He’d lost his watch getting out and thought he might find it among the charred and crumbling bricks. It had been an early Christmas present from his own father and losing it, he knew, was a greater reason for alarm than the property damage he’d caused. He was seventeen, still a minor, insolvent; besides, the theater was insured against accidents. The watch was the only loss his father would have to cover.

By now the news of Pearl Harbor had spread. He heard talk on the street, in front of a market — some old men of the town wondered if America would enter the war. He was approaching draft age; these somber speculations must have troubled him. But he was, that evening, preoccupied with his watch.

The fire marshal had cordoned off the theater’s remains with a thin white rope, but when my father arrived, no one was guarding the smoldering pile of wood and steel and stone. The toes of a woman’s shoes poked through the rubble. He noticed cups and tattered popcorn buckets, the leavings of panic: a jacket, a glove, a still-smoking scarf, a sketchpad and a broken pencil. He ducked beneath the rope, kicked through ashen bricks, and bending down, injured his arm so severely on a hot piece of metal, he was later kept out of the army.

He always claimed to hate the movies, but whenever I heard him tell this story, he relied on a kind of Hollywood melodrama.

My mother was a nurse in the Oklahoma City hospital he went to for his burns. He fell in love with her during his brief recuperation. “While my friends were dying on the battlefields of Europe,” he’d say, “I was having my arm bathed by a beautiful woman. Just think. If I hadn’t hurt myself, I would have missed the great romance of my life.”

As I grew older, and learned about the Second World War, his time frame seemed terribly wrong to me — several months passed, I read, between Pearl Harbor and American troop deployments in Europe — but no matter. His tale was wonderfully dramatic. When he got to the hospital scenes, he’d always raise his shirt sleeve and show his listeners the scar on his arm. Then he’d hug my mother.

For me, the important part of the story was his father’s reaction to the loss of the watch. My grandfather, a grave Methodist minister, was easily disgruntled. He never forgave my father’s negligence. It was, to him, a sign of moral laziness. “If you can’t take care of a simple object,” my father remembered him shouting, the night the theater burned, “how can you be trusted with matters of conscience, matters of the soul?”

It’s incredible to anyone who ever heard Dad talk about all this that the old man was less concerned about Dad’s arm than he was about the watch, but I always believed it. As a child, I saw Grandfather Darnell’s obsession with nice things — jewelry, shoes, belts and ties, furniture for the church and the house. Many times I witnessed him belittling my father’s character. Often I heard him say that marrying my mother was the only smart thing my father ever did.

My parents’ marriage has always baffled me. Now more than ever I want to comprehend it because next week the woman I hope to marry will move her things into the small house I’m renting. She’ll bring her daughter with her — if she can — an eight-year-old named Cassie.

“Mommy!” Cassie calls to Sharon now. “Watch me do a cartwheel!”

Sharon’s husband chuckles, sitting next to her, next to me, on the cool grass. He has no clue what will happen on Monday (“He hasn’t had a clue about me in years,” Sharon insists). He doesn’t see me yet as the man who wrecked his life by falling in love with his wife. Tonight, I’m just a good friend, sitting with his family on this dusty old baseball diamond, in the heat of south Texas, watching the Fourth of July fireworks.

Dozens of other families crowd around us, on blankets, in lawn chairs, eating potato chips, swigging Cokes, keeping an eye on the sky. Several yards away, behind a chain-link fence, golfers knock balls into the dark on a dimly lit driving range.

Cassie and about half a dozen other girls cartwheel near the pitcher’s mound. Sharon claps. So does her husband, Clay. So do I.

I’m aware that I’m about to do something my father would never have dreamed of. I’m about to violate the sanctity of marriage, what he called the “great romance.” More to the point, perhaps, I’m about to take decisive action. That, more than anything, is what he never dreamed of. At least until the end. If even then.

On the other hand, my mother might appreciate what I’m going to do, and why. I haven’t spoken to her in nearly five years, so I can’t say for sure. I have only the past, my parents’ puzzling dance, as an answer to my questions.

Decisive action Mom understood — though she considered me, like Dad, woefully incapable of it (the way Sharon apparently sees Clay).

The sanctity of her marriage to my father Mom understood as a useful fiction, I think, until something better came along.

“Ta-da!” Cassie shouts, coming out of a cartwheel. She raises her arms, then bows.

My mother’s family was rich, descendants of the first Irish blacksmiths in Oklahoma City. Her maiden name was Kelly, also Grandfather Darnell’s Christian name. When I arrived on the scene, I was christened Kelly, in his honor.

In the mid-fifties, around the time I was born, my mother’s father, already flush with real estate and oil, established a chain of department stores called Duffy’s, in Oklahoma City. Duffy’s sold kaleidoscopes, hula hoops, 3-D glasses, baseball cards, cheap crystal goblets, Christmas lights filled with bubbling water. I loved these stores. The salesclerks were friendly, easygoing; they’d let you dawdle in the big, wide aisles as long as you wanted, a strategy that usually seduced customers into buying at least one useless item before they left.

My father’s father ran up enormous bills with the clerks. Rings and bracelets for his wife. Lawn furniture, an outdoor grill. Seat cushions for the pews in his church. It seemed to me, when I was old enough to understand the concept, that he had a limitless charge account with Duffy’s.

In time, Dad referred to the stores, and to all of my mother’s relatives, as “Duffers”—a disparaging term he’d picked up from his golfing buddies, I learned in later years. It meant someone who couldn’t hit the ball well. At some point, the word became, for Dad, an all-purpose insult. “That old duffer shouldn’t be allowed on the road!” he’d say of a man who cut him off in traffic. Listening to the State of the Union speech on television, he’d grouse about the President, “This duffer’s bound to raise our taxes.”

In his view (for reasons cloudy to me at first), the biggest duffers on the planet were my mother’s folks and her sisters.

“You’re just jealous of their assets,” she’d tell him. She hated it when he twisted the sounds of words.

“Assets? You mean the stuff they sell? Half-assed is more like it.” Always, he offered his comments good-naturedly, with a disarming, just-a-joke offhandedness. But he’d rarely go shopping in the stores. Mom and I went alone, often, to one Duffy’s or another, buying crayons, Elmer’s glue, or panty hose and eyeliner.

Usually I’d find something — a flashlight, a package of nails, a box of Titleist golf balls — to take back to Dad. If he’d been particularly sardonic that day, kidding Mom about her family, she wouldn’t let me get him anything, and I’d cry.

I remember standing with her one cold, misty evening in front of the flagship store, in downtown Oklahoma City. “Confidence,” she told me. I was eight or nine years old. “When you’re grown, you want to be successful like your grandfathers, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, noting the way she’d skipped over Dad, a silence she fully intended me to grasp.

“All right, then. Confidence — and ease.” She squeezed my shoulders and made me stand up straight. “Ease with people, with business, yourself. Look over there. See our Duffy’s sign?”

She pointed out the “warmth” of its curly red letters, the U’s “friendly” scoop, the “comfortable” Fs. My father could scoff all he wanted, but she made it clear that the name itself — down-to-earth, intimate, firm — was a big reason for the stores’ success. “My father was a genius to think of it. He knew the sound of it was right. Can you hear it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Straightforwardness, without apology. People want that. They respond to openness. See what I mean?”

“I guess so,” I said. Why did she sound so angry?

“Good.” She licked her thumb and smoothed my curly hair. “Don’t let your father kid you. There’s a lot to be learned from that sign.”

“You mean I should imitate it?”

“Exactly.”

I remember thinking, as the tall letters glimmered in the gold and purple dusk, she seemed nervous, unsure of me, the way she responded to my father’s silly puns. She sounded like my grandfather, scolding his flock.

Cassie walks on her hands, along the third-base foul line. “Kelly, catch me if I fall!”

“You got it, kid.” I laugh and step behind her, holding my arms like a loving embrace, ready to encircle her legs if she starts to topple. Watching us, Clay smiles and takes his wife’s hand. Sharon flinches, ever so slightly, then rubs his arm stiffly. My good friends.

Above us all, green and white fireworks unspool like spider webs. Golf clubs thwack in the grass. Tonight, on its “birthday,” as Cassie puts it, America is prosperous, at peace.

Now she wobbles, says, “Oh!” then pitches forward. I snap shut my arms, but somehow I miss her. I stand there, in the outfield, hugging warm air while she wails at my feet, staring in disbelief at the grass burns on her knees.

Her father comes running, scoops her up with ease. Instantly, she’s giggling.

If I can’t take care of a little girl.

Still gripping his daughter, Clay pats me, reassuringly, on the back. We turn and smile at Sharon.

Shortly after finishing college with a degree in petroleum geology, Dad married my mother, landed a job with an oil company in Dallas, and drove her, with two suitcases and a set of bone china, across the Red River in an old rented Ford.

“All right, good riddance,” Grandfather Darnell told him bitterly the day he left. “Anybody who’d choose to live in Texas hasn’t got the sense God gave a squirrel.”

He’d wanted Dad to become a man of the cloth. He confessed this to me in one of the few conversations we had when I was a child (the men in my family were as notoriously short on words as they were on forgiveness).

“Especially then — the postwar years — I wanted him in the church. America was having a party,” he said. “On top of the world, we were. Money and booze. A housing boom. Terrible.”

“Why was it terrible?” I asked.

It was August. My father and I had driven up from Dallas for a visit. My mother must have been with us, but I don’t remember her being there. She was already pulling away by then.

I was sitting with my grandfather in his backyard garden, late in the afternoon, watering his fat tomatoes. Dad was inside. He’d found an old sketchpad of his in the basement and was thumbing through its pages.

“Why? Because we were in danger of succumbing to the pleasures of the material world, that’s why. We were celebrating, blindly, when what we should have been doing was thanking the Lord for our blessings. More than ever, right then, we needed men of the Word, to keep America on its path to greatness. Do you understand?”

“Mm-hm.” I didn’t.

“But your father never paid me any mind.” He squinted at Dad through a dusty bedroom window. “As a boy, he was constantly daydreaming, your father. Collecting rocks, listening to crickets, drawing pictures.” This was the first I’d known of Dad’s art. “Idle nonsense.”

He leaned over me, then. I felt the heat of his breath. “Don’t ever forget this, son: God demands of all His children a life of full atonement for our sins.”

“What sins?” I said.

With two large fingers, Grandfather Darnell lifted my elbow so water gushing from the hose in my hand would hit the right spot. “The sins of the fathers,” he said. “Someday you’ll have to decide. Are you going to run from the truth like your dad, or are you, perhaps, going to assume my earthly burden and joy?”

I stared at him, wildly confused. My arm was tired. I dropped it a little, splashing mud on the side of his pinewood garage.

He snatched the hose from my hand. “I’m talking about the ministry, Kelly. You’ll know it if you ever hear the Word. You know what I’d like you to do?” He sounded furious. “I’d like you to listen for it. Will you? Listen close, for me. It could come tomorrow. It could come many years from now.”

Right then, the only word that came to me was duffer.

He placed a palm on my head and spoke to the clouds in the sky. “Lord, it would please me so if this boy were to take up my calling.” He inspected me closely — my posture, my nervous smile — as if I were a struggling, sad patch of his garden.

Later that evening, I was in the yard with Dad. At first he said he was getting some air. Then he admitted, “I needed a break from the Old Prophet.” He laughed. He lit a cigarette. “Always on my ass.”

He never said much, but when he talked to me, I think he talked straight.

I asked him about the ministry. For a while he didn’t answer. Then: “I considered it seriously. Atonement. That was the word he used on me, year after year, and it certainly had an effect.”

Crickets whirred beneath lightly stirring, moonlit leaves. Through the house’s open windows, TV laughter.

“Why didn’t you end up preaching?” I asked.

“College.” He bent down, plucked a chalky rock from the soil. “You’ve heard your grandpa talk about God’s Plan, right?”

“Again and again.”

Dad grinned.

From time to time I’d attended Grandfather’s church, a milk-white A-frame near several old farms, south of Lawton, and heard him stress God’s Plan. The days I went, I felt sheepish, climbing its steps dressed in a pressed cotton suit while in the grasshoppery fields all around us, men grunted and sweated over tractors. Grandfather Darnell said they’d never make it into Heaven, putting work ahead of the Lord. “Indigent souls,” he called them.

“Well, in college, I learned how these suckers are formed,” Dad said. He dropped the rock in my palm. “I learned about the fire in Earth’s belly. And I couldn’t believe any more.”

“In God?”

The TV roared.

“God. Atonement. The whole shebang.” He squeezed his hand over mine, around the rock. “There now. Feel that? What does it tell you?”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed the grainy edges.

“Feel any Plan?”

“No.”

“Anything at all?”

I guess not.

He took the rock from me. “Accident,” he said, waving it. “That’s all. Sometimes, in life, it’s a blessing. Most times it’s not.” Ashes dribbled from his Camel onto the grass. He tossed the rock over a low wire fence, into the alley. “Ah well. End of sermon. Sorry about that. I guess I’m my daddy’s son after all.”

“Ah well,” I echoed.

“We’d better get back inside or he’ll think we’re out here sneaking smokes.” He laughed and shook my shoulder.

On that same trip, I asked him to show me where the theater used to be. The place he’d burned to the ground. We were walking downtown with Grandfather Darnell, past a Rexall Drug Store, a bowling alley, and a beauty parlor. “I don’t remember, exactly,” he said, scratching his head, walking quickly. “I think it was near the end of the block here.”

Grandfather Darnell broke away from us and went to stand in a vacant lot, up to his knees in sticker burrs. “Here,” he said. “Or there.” He pointed across the street to another empty field. “It doesn’t really matter. Many of the old buildings along this street are gone now, but if you concentrate hard, the Lord will help you feel the pain of those who suffered here.” He shut his eyes. “Can you feel it?”

Dad stared at him with what clearly was dismay.

“Who?” I said. “Who suffered here?”

“Indigent souls. From the poorhouse up near Lawton. From the farms when they failed in the dust and the wind. In the winter’s bitter cold, all the lost sheep would flock into town, along Main Street here, looking for a place to spend the night, to get warm. War veterans, Indians, Old Lady Jones — ”

“That’s enough,” Dad said.

“Who’s Old Lady Jones?” I asked.

“Enough gloomy talk. This was a booming little town after the war,” Dad said. “Folks had it good here.”

“Not all folks,” Grandfather said. “I tried to help your mother’s family get established here. Did you know that?” he asked me. “Good businessman, your mother’s father. Long before the fifties, I was after him to open up a store here, to boost our local economy. The picture wasn’t quite as lovely as your dad makes it sound. A lot of the buildings here were already old then. Rickety, unsafe. Like the theater — ”

“Okay. Really. That’s enough,” Dad said.

“If we’d had a Duffy’s back then, it could have started an economic renaissance here, and we’d all have been better off.” He patted my head. “A minister has to look after his flock, not just with prayer, Kelly, but with an eye on the world as well. Sadly, the city fathers didn’t see things my way. Not for the longest time.”

Dad looked at Grandfather, and I thought I saw in his pained, tightly drawn lips the frightened young man he must have been the night he lost his watch in the blaze. “Goes with the territory,” he said quietly. “Fathers. Not seeing things.”

Dad liked his work in Dallas and he made a decent living. He bought a nice house for us, hit the links every Saturday and Sunday. The old scar on his arm — parchment-brown now, scrunchy as tinfoil — glowed whenever he wore his pastel golf shirts.

My mother still worked part-time as a nurse in an obstetrics clinic, counseling pregnant women, a job she didn’t need but enjoyed; once each month, she flew to Oklahoma City to help her family with inventories and other Duffy’s matters.

Besides playing golf, my father spent his free time painting. After finding the old sketchpad in his father’s basement, he’d come home and converted the guest bedroom into a studio. He built his own easel, arrayed tubes of Winsor & Newton oils on a ratty old card table. On the walls he hung photos torn from Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post, interiors he might want to paint someday. Books on graphic design, theater set painting, and most interesting to me, because they were big and glossy and full of pretty girls, art design for the motion-picture industry cluttered his desk, along with rocks of every “accidental” shape, which he used as paperweights.

That room, I see now, was his sacred space, his escape from the chancy, combustible world. He’d stay in it for hours, in full control of his materials, and he wouldn’t say a word. This drove my mother batty. She was an active woman, from a family of movers and shakers. Even as a girl, she’d attended balls, political rallies. I used to hear her stories about them. Now, she zipped around Dallas in a sporty little Mustang, from the League of Women Voters to the Old Homes Preservation Society to various garden clubs and high-profile charity meetings.

She complained, often and loudly, that Dad never accompanied her anywhere, never took an interest in her civic concerns. When her appeals to his conscience didn’t work, she railed against his art. “Every damn weekend, Ray, it’s this cluttery old room — ”

“Honey, I don’t know what to say to your hoity-toity friends.”

“For God’s sake, you’re a grown man. It’s time you lost a little of that diffidence, don’t you think?”

“It’s easy for you. You grew up with rich folks.” He’d make a pun on a senator’s name — “Gridlock” for Griffin, something like that, hoping to laugh off her anger.

After the worst of these fights — and they deepened, decayed in tone and effect, over time — I’d sit in my room down the hall, listening to my mother dress while my father adjusted his easel. Sometimes his “curse of an arm,” as he called it, stiffened up on him or cramped, as it did on the golf course, but the moments always passed and didn’t affect his work.

I think he had genuine talent, but he never composed his own images; he copied pictures from the magazines onto his canvases, apparently lacking confidence to shape his own world.

“I know what this is about,” my mother told him one night after a particularly nasty quarrel between them. “Drawing and painting again. Don’t think I don’t know.”

My father tried to make a joke, some kind of wordplay — I don’t remember. My mother stood in the hallway in her slip. “If you want to stir up your old misery, that’s your business, Ray, but don’t expect any sympathy from me, you hear?”

He tried to hug her. I was watching from the doorway of my room. Brightred paint like crackling flames smudged his fingers. They slid around her hips. “Don’t touch me!” she yelled, pulling at her straps. “You’ll ruin it, Ray!”

“Of course, your mother’s right,” he confided to me one day in that little back room. I was fourteen or fifteen. Mom had left for Oklahoma City. It was a hot, early fall afternoon, flies batting the screen of the room’s open window, a sprinkler sighing in the still-springy yard. Dad’s silver Cutlass gleamed in the drive.

On a shelf behind his easel a transistor radio screamed, “Ten, five — touchdown! Touchdown! The Fighting Irish have taken the lead!” He always listened to football or baseball while he worked. He knew batting averages, pitchers’ ERAs; concentrating on cold, hard facts, he told me, freed the rest of his mind to wander with the paint.

That day, his shirt, pale red, smelled of turpentine. He lit a cigarette.

“Right about what?” I said.

“Hm?” Inspecting his canvas again, he’d forgotten I was even in the room.

“You said Mom was — ”

“Oh. Right about me.”

“How?”

“I am jealous of their assets. Her family, I mean.”

With a palette knife, I picked at a dried medallion of ocher on one of his tabletops. “We’ve got money,” I said. “Don’t we?”

He laughed. “Oh, we’re getting by. We’re getting by just fine. It’s not that.” He plopped a wet brush into a little jar of Liquin. “It’s … their behavior, I guess, their attitude, a way of approaching life. I don’t know. A kind of arrogance. I don’t like it — especially when they turn it on me — but you have to admire it. They know how to get what they want.”

His paintings darkened in spinning shadows from the front-yard trees, rigid in their strict geometry. “Confidence, you mean? Ease? What Mom’s always saying?”

“Yes, I guess that’s it. Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and she’s not going to — ” He shrugged. “Ah, hell. I think I was exotic, something different for her at first. A charity case, maybe. Lord knows she loves her charities.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “Till she gets bored with them.”

His face seemed to vanish. He turned from me, back to his work. Afterwards, I was aware of the Kellys’ contempt for him in ways I hadn’t noticed before.

That year my mother’s father bought a summer cabin for us on the Illinois River in northeast Oklahoma. We went there on fishing trips, sometimes with Mom’s folks and her sisters. They never spoke directly to my dad. Her father bragged about his annual profits, his parties and social affairs, his “friends in high places” (he joked that he “owned” Oklahoma’s governor, that he’d bought every cleric in the state — “Get ’em where their faith lies, that’s the bottom line”).

Whenever my father tried to say something, the Kellys looked away from him, as though they couldn’t bear to watch this commoner with his dingy old arm. A gaggle, Mom’s sisters. Noisy, indistinguishable to me, even now.

In the city, on those rare occasions when he’d visit a Duffy’s store — when nothing else was open, say — Dad paid cash. I remember Grandfather Darnell ordering the kindly clerks to “charge it,” but Dad didn’t seem to have an account with the chain. Once, he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to purchase the oil paints he was after. I asked him why he didn’t just write them a check, but he shook his head, certain they’d refuse to accept it.

“But this is Mom’s store!” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Mom’s. Not mine.”

One afternoon, I ran into Cassie and Sharon in a Safeway. They were shopping for candy. Sharon and I talked for a long time until Cassie became exasperated, wanting her gumdrops. “You two act like you’re married whenever you’re together,” she told us, rolling her eyes.

Tonight, as the fireworks unravel just beneath the clouds, Cassie, delighted, wriggles in her daddy’s lap, then Sharon’s, then mine. She closes her eyes and pretends to be a blind girl, feeling the features of each of our faces, misidentifying us on purpose, and laughing. Her fingers brush Sharon’s mouth, then reach up to tap my lips. “This is Mommy and Daddy,” she says, then she finds our hands and brings them together.

Clay smiles, awkwardly. “Watch the fireworks, baby,” he says. “Ooh, there’s a pretty one!”

“I’m bored.” Eyes wide open now, she stands and grabs my hand. “Let’s play ‘Mercy.’”

“How do you play?” I ask.

“I hold your hand and twist your arm until it hurts too much and you say, ‘Mercy.’ Then you do it to me. Whoever goes the longest, wins.”

“That’s not a very nice game, honey,” says Clay.

“Yes it is.”

“Come sit on Daddy’s lap and watch the fireworks. I’ve got some gummy bears in the bag over here.”

“I don’t want to!”

“Sweetie — ”

“No!”

She collapses, sobbing, against my chest. I hold her and rock her gently. Clay looks alarmed. Watching him, Sharon’s eyes fill with tears. “Bathroom,” she mutters, standing, shaking, brushing grass from her knees. “I’ll be right back.” Quickly, she walks away, leaving us silent, behind home plate. Cassie twists my arm.

The day came when Mom didn’t return from Oklahoma City. She called to tell him, “Ray, I don’t want to be married any more. I’m going to stay here and help with the stores.”

I’d just turned seventeen; we all agreed I’d stay with Dad in Dallas, to finish high school.

Neither of my folks offered me a reason for their split except “irreconcilable differences.” I knew it meant, “Don’t ask any more questions.”

“Why’d you marry him in the first place?” I asked my mother, testily, on the phone one day.

“I loved your father — ”

“But he wasn’t rich enough for you?”

“Kelly, that’s enough out of you,” she said, and we didn’t call each other for a while after that. She sent me a little money each month, suggesting I put it aside for college, and left me her Mustang to drive.

Dad worked late each night. I’d come home from school and bake us both pot pies, leaving his in the oven to warm. He tried to act cheery when he came through the door, though he always looked rumpled, like he’d been in a wreck.

His puns made less and less sense. “Another day, another dollop!” he’d chirp, a little too loudly.

He couldn’t sleep. Finally, I talked him into seeing a doctor, who prescribed a mild sedative. He also diagnosed Dad as deeply depressed and urged him to see a therapist. Dad wouldn’t do it. “Waste of rainy-day pennies,” he mumbled. “He’ll just tell me to look ahead, forget the past. Hell, I know that stuff already.”

Finally, I broke down and called my mother, but she wouldn’t talk to him, not even when I pleaded. “Kelly, I tried for years to get your father to lighten up. To march into life. He’s always been depressed. I can’t help him any more, and neither can you. You’ve got your own worries. How are your classes?”

“Fine.”

“You pull that math grade up?”

“A little.”

“Good.” Her voice softened. “I know things are hard now, son, but you mustn’t let anything affect your school success. And for goodness sakes, get out and have some fun. Are you dating anyone? Got a girl?”

“No.”

“You could do a little marching yourself.” She tsk-ed. “I’m afraid you’ve inherited your father’s shyness.”

“Dad says it’s the Irishman’s curse.”

“Shyness?”

“He calls it ‘melancholy.’”

“Well, I love the Old Country,” she said (she’d never been there), “but that part of its legacy I could definitely live without.”

I promised her I’d work on getting out more.

“In the meantime, you let your dad take care of himself,” she said.

But he didn’t know how. Sometimes, when he met new colleagues through work, or found new golfing partners, he’d repeat the theater story, ending with the love of his life. He didn’t tell these people his wife had left him.

As I listened, the story seemed to me now not the romance I’d always heard with delight but a catalog of failure. Failure to join his buddies on the battlefields. Failure to hold on to my mother.

One afternoon, he said he was “hemmed in” by all “these damn Kellys”: my mother’s snooty family, his own father, who blamed the end of his marriage on the “moral lassitude” he’d shown since he was little. Even me.

“If I never hear the name ‘Kelly’ again as long as I live, it’ll be too soon!” he yelled, waving his arm. I’d interrupted him in his studio while he was trying to paint. Some friends and I were convening at a movie. I needed cash.

His portraits, copied from the film books, from celebrity magazines, hung like giant Hollywood posters on his dark-gray walls. He fumed, in a world of his own. “What the hell do you all want from me? Haven’t I paid and paid and paid?”

“All right,” I answered. “It’s no big deal. I’ll borrow it from my pals.”

That night he apologized. He’d waited up for me in the kitchen. It was after ten o’clock. The faucet dripped, as erratic as a faulty old heart. In the next room the TV shouted, “You gotta see it to believe it, friends! Lowest prices east of Pecos!”

“What show did you see?” he asked me. He boiled a kettle of water for some tea.

“A dumb mummy thing, at a second-run place. An old Boris Karloff.”

“No good?”

“Nah. I’d seen it before, on TV”

He didn’t know what to say to make things better between us, except he was sorry he’d snapped at me. I told him to forget it, but even then I knew I’d never lose the memory of that afternoon. When he’d raised his arm in anger, his old wound had puffed up at me like the hood of a cobra.

“I haven’t been to a movie in years,” he said quietly into his cup. “Never saw one I liked, even remotely. Well. That’s not true.” He tapped the tabletop. “There was one — Twelve, no, Ten Days That Shook the World, about the Russian Revolution?”

“Don’t know it,” I said. “Why’d you like it?”

“Oh, I enjoyed the battle scenes. They were exciting, the kind of thing I figured I’d missed in Europe. Truth is, I used to think — ” He shook his head.

“What?”

“When I was a kid, I used to think I might like to paint movie sets. Backgrounds, landscapes, those sorts of things.”

“Like in the books you have?”

“Yeah. I didn’t enjoy the films much, I just wanted a big audience for my work. When I ran the projector, I saw how amazed people were, staring up at the screen.”

“Why didn’t you try it?”

“Oh, I wasn’t good enough, really, I wasn’t….” He wagged his head again. He laughed. “The movies. I guess, finally, I never understood their appeal.”

“No?”

“I mean, the larger-than-life vistas, sure. That I can see. But sitting there with a batch of strangers in the dark, trapped in those flimsy old seats…”

I had the feeling he was about to tell me something more, but he stopped right there. I swallowed my yawns in case he’d go on. He didn’t. Already he’d said more in one night than he usually did in a week. He rubbed his cheeks, badly in need of a shave, and finished his cold green tea.

Matters of conscience. Matters of the soul.

As I watch Cassie now, in her daddy’s lap, shaking gummy bears out of a box, I recall my grandfather’s sermons, his stern, judgmental stares, and experience as fury the fireworks bursting above me.

I will hurt this man, I think, smiling at Clay. I will disrupt his family.

And even as I think these things I want to reach out and shield him, to warn him about me.

One day, early in our affair, as we stood together nearly popping out of our clothes with desire, Sharon and I agreed, in the way of all illicit lovers early in their affairs, “We can’t do this. We have to stop now.”

Tonight, watching her face, I know: We are going to do this thing.

It’s bigger than us. The emotion. The passion. Easy to say, and no less true for being clichéd.

She’s been unhappy for years. “Clay’s a good man, but so damn passive,” she told me once. “He doesn’t know how to take care of me.” If I weren’t here, she’d leave him sooner or later anyway. Yes, probably so, I assure myself.

But late at night, trying to sort through it all, I wind up thinking about my father, about an afternoon when I picked up a rock in his studio while he was mixing his oils. The rock was pretty, and I was studying its irregular shapes in the light. “Nothing special,” he told me. “Just sandstone.” He explained to me that one billion new grains of sand form on earth every second. Flakes of chipped stone, saltated in rivers. We can thank the wind and desert basins — atmospheric and geographical accidents, random luck — for the fact that we’re not all buried up to our necks.

Now, his words linger when I think of Cassie, of Sharon and Clay’s marriage.

Random luck.

Irregular shapes.

Thank the wind.

“Say it!”

“Mercy!”

Dad spent most of the month after my high school graduation in the Kellys’ cabin on the river. Mom agreed to let him stay there as long as he wanted; she was busy in Oklahoma City tending to the Duffy’s empire and getting her picture in the papers.

She’d begun appearing at Bricktown restaurants with a handsome up-and-comer, a potential gubernatorial candidate. He was tall and blond, and I hated him, just from his photos. We’d never met. I hadn’t visited Mom since she’d left us in Dallas.

While Dad vacationed in the woods, I stayed behind to be with my friends — we’d be splitting up soon for college — but one Saturday I drove up to see him. He’d taken his Cutlass and left me the old Mustang, urging me to tune it up before I headed out. I didn’t (Mom never serviced the car either — “too busy,” she’d say, flitting off to a fund-raiser — another of my parents’ many flash points), and I made the trip just fine. When I arrived he was stacking firewood on the cabin’s front porch. He looked pale and thin to me, his hair grayer than I’d remembered. We sat by the river, sipping warm canned beer.

He was dusty and unshaven, like the farmers in the fields around my grandfather’s church.

“Are you going to swing through the city on your way back to Texas? See your mother?” he asked. He spoke of her cautiously, as if the energy of his words — any unintentional emphasis — might jar her from his mind.

“Haven’t decided,” I said. “She’s hanging out now with that GOP geek.”

He laughed. “Rich damn duffers. They own the whole state.” He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket. “My friends died in Europe so America could fall into the hands of these lousy sharks who turn right around and sell us out to Germany and Japan anyway. Isn’t that a kick in the ass? Is your mother happy?”

“Beats me.”

The subject of Mom made him fade. We listened to the water through the trees. I sipped my beer, stymied by our shyness — our melancholy — and idly poked a spider with a stick. It swiveled on whiskery legs. Dad pulled a nine iron from the trunk of his car and walked away from me, to plunk a few old balls into the weeds. He stirred up bees, squirrels, a couple of garter snakes, lazy and long.

Inside the cabin, I saw he’d been painting. I loved the warm smells of the turpentine and the oils — always had — but the new work was gray and black and white. On the easel, half-finished, a portrait of Charlie Chaplin. He gripped a rose.

I knew this pose: it was the famous scene from the end of City Lights, when Charlie’s true love, a blind girl who’s just had her sight restored by a miraculous operation, can see him now for what he really is — not a classy, wealthy man, as he’d led her to believe, but a bum.

Dad lit a Coleman lantern. He didn’t say a word about the painting.

I’d planned to stay with him three or four days, but it was plain to me his charged silences were going to drive me crazy. I could handle them at home: I had TV there to distract me, and my friends were always dropping by. But here, with only crickets and the occasional calls of an owl to break the monotony, I couldn’t escape his sadness. It wrapped him up — his red, watery eyes, his trembling lips. He was Boris Karloff’s mummy, stale, barely breathing.

He’d developed a facial twitch, a little pull of the mouth. A rash of hair circled his chin. His stomach growled, even after we ate. A systematic revolt of the body. I couldn’t stand to witness it.

So I fished with him for a day, then told him I needed to head on back. I had a lot to do this summer, before college started in the fall. I’d been accepted at SMU, in Dallas, but I planned to move out of his house and into a dorm.

“All right. I’ll be home in a couple of weeks,” he said. We stood stiffly in a field, near a bare patch of rock: raggedy, dark, accidental. He waved his pitching wedge. He lopped off a sunflower’s head. “Mow the lawn.”

“I will. Are you sure you’ve got everything you need here? You doing okay?”

He scratched the top of his head, where his hair was thinnest. “I miss your mom,” he said softly.

I glanced away, at the cabin. “I know,” I said. I moved to give him a hug. His arm cramped; he couldn’t control it. We bumped each other awkwardly.

I didn’t get far. A radiator hose popped on the highway, so I pulled into a roadside garage. The mechanic held a trouble light underneath my hood. Old acne scars lined his face, heavy crosshatching like you’ll find on certain savings bonds. He was as silent as my father.

I wasn’t a big baseball fan, but I knew a little lingo from Dad; it was, I thought, a safe topic. I asked the mechanic who he thought would win the pennant. “You got the wrong fellow for sports, mister,” he said. He switched on an old army radio on a shelf behind a torn-up V-8 engine. A Baptist evangelist, as vigorous and gravelly as Grandfather Darnell, said we were heading for Hell.

A yellowed newspaper clipping fluttered on a cork board by the radio. An eight-year-old named Kathy Smithers had been struck by lightning near the river and killed. I glanced again at the fix-it guy. The name “Smithers” was sewn onto the breast pocket of his workshirt. I couldn’t see a date on the paper, but the color and its stiffness made it seem at least a few years old.

The man tinkered with my car with an earnestness Grandfather Darnell would have dismissed: “Excessive attachment to the business of this world.”

Back in Dallas, when my mother called with the news, I tried to pin the time frame in my head. As well as I could figure, the cabin had burned while I was standing there reading that death notice as the grim mechanic, Smithers, replaced my hose.

I’d been not two miles from the spot, and I’d driven home, knowing nothing.

He’d doused the place with turpentine, then used a cigarette. It had taken less than twenty minutes for the cabin to collapse into a sticky mass of ashes.

I heard that one of the volunteer firemen on the scene, a high school kid, had managed to save a pair of shoes, a couple of brushes, and part of a large gray canvas: the Little Tramp’s hopeful smile.

Before the funeral, my mother sat with me in my grandfather’s church. She looked younger than she used to. I wondered if she’d had a facelift, if she’d highlighted her hair for all the newspaper photographers who followed her around now. Maybe she was just more relaxed in her new life than she’d ever been. More at ease.

Her dress was black but stylish, just below the knee. She touched my cheek. We’d already acknowledged the tragedy. Now she was giving me a pep talk. “Kelly, you’re a strong young man, you’ve got to put this thing behind you. You’ll be starting fresh in the fall. There’ll be exciting teachers and fraternity parties, and you’re bound to meet some girls. You’re going to get over this shyness, aren’t you?”

I tried to smile. That morning, in my grandfather’s house, she’d asked me to heat her a cup of coffee while she dressed. I’d burned my wrist on the kettle. Now, as she talked, I rubbed my tender skin.

“I swear, you remind me so much of your father when we met. This distance thing he had … it was like talking to one of his paintings. People like openness, you know. They respond to it.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

My throat was dry, weak with grief. “Are you going to marry this governor guy?” I asked.

“His name is John. He’s not the governor. Yet. And I don’t know.”

“Are you happy?”

She looked at me intensely to see if I was ready for the answer. “I am, son. I really am.”

I stared at the cross in the nave. “Dad never got over — ”

“Do you blame me very much?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Okay.” She thought about this. “Okay, maybe that’s good,” she said. “Let’s talk it out. That might be healthy for us both.”

“I can’t. I’m too sad to be mad,” I said.

She brushed my hair. “Your father all over again. That’s why I’m telling you, don’t dwell on this. If you do, you’ll just wind up miserable all your life, like he was.”

My grandfather was lighting candles at the altar. A few people slipped into the sanctuary. My mother lowered her voice. “Kelly, listen to me. I loved your dad. I really did. I want you to know that.” She moved a little closer to me. “He was a good man. Hard-working, honest. There was never any pretense about him, and I valued that, though God knows his moods drove me nuts. The money didn’t bother me. He made a fine living, supported us well. I had no complaints there. But eventually he got it into his head that I didn’t appreciate what he did, and he wouldn’t let go of that, just as he wouldn’t let go — ”

One of her sisters passed us in the aisle. Mom wiggled two gloved fingers at her.

“What?” I said. “Wouldn’t let go of what?”

She squeezed my hands, then stood hastily. “Your father chose to be a haunted man. I lived with it as long as I could. That’s all.”

My eyes stung. “Haunted how?”

She shook her head.

I understand now, as I remember that morning, watching her march steadily away from me, that she wasn’t made for crickets, rocks, or roses: the incidental blessings of the world that had shaped — irregularly — her husband’s dreams. Her country had never been the Old One, at all — the one she pretended to love — but the productive land that always lay ahead.

We stood behind her sisters to sign the church register. Her signature in the book was as bold as a child’s. After all the “Kellys” on the page, I hesitated, then signed my name “Duffy.” “Duffy Darnell.”

It didn’t look warm or friendly or comfortable to me; it didn’t have an intimate or confident ring. It was the kind of name you’d expect a no-neck halfback to have. A bubba from deep in the cornbelt. Still, I let it stand.

I sat with Mom’s family, who fanned themselves casually with hymnals. They shifted and whispered. They seemed annoyed at having to be here. Dad always knew the score, I thought. He couldn’t even die right, as far as they were concerned.

No wonder he’d kept his feelings to himself.

My grandfather, standing behind the altar, cleared his raspy throat. He wouldn’t look at the casket. I was the only one there, I realized with clarity and shock, sorry to see Dad gone.

“It’s a revolution when Jesus comes into your life,” Grandfather began. I struggled not to be distracted by the candles near the coffin, the shining purple windows, the art of his sacred space.

“He overthrows your doubts, elects the leadership of God in your heart.” He removed his thin black glasses. “Friends, I confess to you: of the many sorrows I feel this day as I bury my boy, the profoundest is my knowledge that he never accepted Christ’s healing touch.”

Mom’s sisters nodded.

No kind words. No fond remembrances. Only chastisement. Disappointment.

Good riddance.

As smoke from the last Roman candle clears, and we stand to leave the baseball field, I almost ask Clay, “How about we go fishing next week, you and me? We haven’t been out for a while.”

But next week is impossible. Ever again is impossible.

People make choices in life. Choices with consequences.

Sermon of the day.

As he lifts his sleeping daughter, I feel the impulse to shake him, hard, by the shoulders. Irrational. I want to ask him, Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you pay more attention to your wife? Why did you put me in the painful position of having to steal her from you?

This was no accident.

One day, on a fishing trip north of Houston, when I was first getting to know him, he admitted to me that Sharon seemed restless. “I don’t think we were ever really in love,” he said. “No lightning bolts, you know? No great romance. It’s just that we liked each other, we were solid together, and when we met, we were both ready to settle down and have a child.”

Now I think: Why did he tell me this, that day?

Why did he spring this on me?

If only we’d both been better at small talk. If only we’d both known sports, the way men in America — even failures like my father — are supposed to.

If only I hadn’t taken my mother’s advice, and worked so strenuously at chipping away my shyness.

In his car, on our way to the cemetery to lay my father to rest, Grandfather Darnell handed me a shoebox. We’d arranged to sell most of Dad’s things, including the Cutlass and the house. I’d taken a couple of paintings — generic landscapes, lovely and lush, all I had space for in the dorm. The rest we’d give to Goodwill. Mom kept a chest of drawers and a trunk they’d purchased together. Grandfather asked to have back the china he’d bought them as a wedding gift, to use at church socials. The shoebox was mine.

In it I discovered cufflinks, blank notepads, a couple of tubes of paint and a brush, a ring, and a watch. Handling them was like strolling through a discount aisle at Duffy’s, toying with all the goodies. I picked up the watch. It gleamed in cold sunlight slanting through the car’s front windshield. It wasn’t the watch from my father’s old story. I knew that. This was a newer piece, unremarkable. “Grandfather,” I said, “how much did you pay for the watch Dad lost — you know, the night of the movie fire?”

He answered right away. “Twenty-three fifty, a pretty penny back then. I should have known better than to trust that boy with something so fine.”

It didn’t shock me that he recalled the precise value after all this time. I don’t know why I asked him the question, except to marvel at the depth of abuse being heaped on my father that day.

He noticed, then, the burn spot on my wrist, egg-shaped, the color of custard. “Careless this morning with the kettle?”

“Yes sir.”

He nodded. “Your mother told me. You’re not a daydreamer, are you, son?”

“No sir.”

“Your father.” He poked a finger at me. “He was dreaming that day in the movie house, drawing his silly pictures, and look what came of that.”

I wanted to shout, “It was only a watch!”

“God’s grace, nothing less — it’s the only thing that kept Sheriff Stevenson from pressing charges.”

Thank the wind, I thought. “For burning the theater?” I said.

He waved his hand. “Oh, the building didn’t matter. It was about to fall down anyway. The problem was Old Lady Jones.”

I remembered the name from long ago. “Who?”

He clucked, bitterly. “You’ve never heard this part of the story, have you?”

“No sir.”

“The family agreed not to talk about it. We all wanted Ray to move on.” His lips tightened. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Who was she?” I said.

“Sophie Jones. Indigent. Her family had busted up — laziness and liquor. Let that be a lesson, hm? We all knew her, everyone in town. Gave her money and food.”

The car bumped over ruts in the road.

“She had a room at the poor farm, up near Lawton, but she liked to sleep in town, in the library or the theater. Better heating. Sheriff’d always chase her out. For years, the movie house had a broken back door. Wouldn’t always lock. That’s how she came to be there the night of the fire.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, already guessing the answer.

“Trapped in her seat — probably drunk, more than a little crazy, that’s usually the way she was. Took a couple of days to identify the body. No family to claim her. No one, really, to mourn her passing. God had put her out of her misery. That’s what I told Sheriff Stevenson when I talked to him on Ray’s behalf. Ray was just a boy, it was an accident, I said — foolish, yes, he shouldn’t have been smoking or drawing — but not malicious. Finally, Stevenson agreed and dropped the whole thing.”

I tried to remember my father’s version of the story: the jacket, the scarf, the woman’s shoes in the ashes. I could only imagine, now, a child’s shoe — the slipper of Kathy Smithers, the garage mechanic’s daughter, hit by lightning, sleek, pink, crackling with red electric sparks. The fire in Earth’s belly, fire from the sky, snuffing all our worldly failures.

“Ray could never leave it behind him,” my grandfather said. “I told him, ‘Turn to God. There’s your salvation.’ He wouldn’t do it. Hard-headed kid.”

No. Instead he’d turned to my mother — to the promise of romance; that too (as he might have put it) had gone up in smoke.

“Twenty-three fifty,” my grandfather said. “A beautiful piece of work.”

I put the lid on the box.

“So. Your mother tells me you’re attending Southern Methodist in the fall,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

He looked at me, eagerly. “It pleases me to hear you’ve chosen a church-based university.” I’d picked the school so I could stay in Dallas with some of my friends.

He stared at the wrought-iron cemetery arch as our car slid under it. Rusty angels embraced at its peak. “Are you considering the ministry, by any chance?”

The question, unexpected, stumped me. My faith had never been rock-hard (Dad had seen to that). I hadn’t prayed in years.

“Do you remember, we talked about this once when you were younger?”

“Yes sir.”

“Have you given it any more thought?”

“Well …” I had an urge to leap from the car. “Maybe,” I said, hoping this would finish our discussion.

“It would honor me to see you follow my path, Kelly.”

I nodded.

“If you were to … well, I needn’t dwell on it. Let’s just say it would go a long way toward easing my disappointment. You’d be doing the family proud. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your mother and I want you to be a success, son. You know that, don’t you? Not just in worldly terms. In matters of the soul. Do you understand?”

I said I did. I nearly blurted, “Success? Can I have your Duffy’s charge card?” He patted my knee.

The gravesite appeared to me humiliatingly small. A sand trap Dad would never pitch out of. “Goodbye, you old duffer,” I whispered, and dropped a rose onto the casket.

Three months later, my mother married her politician. “If elected governor,” he promised reporters the day he announced his candidacy, “I’ll see to it that every man, woman, and child in Oklahoma has comprehensive health care. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’ve already donated twenty thousand dollars for a new obstetrics wing of Sacred Heart Hospital.”

Mom’s touch. A good one.

He’d flown B-29s in the Second World War. His patriotism virtually guaranteed him the election. A success; a mover and shaker; not a man hounded by “moral lassitude” or lost in the rubble of doubt. No wistful, blind romance for Mom. She’d made a prudent choice this time, no apologies.

“‘God’s grace’?” she said to me at the wedding reception, at a lull in the festivities, when I told her Grandfather Darnell’s story about Dad. She was winded from dancing, and we were both standing by the punch bowl. “It wasn’t God’s grace got your dad off the hook when he burned that place down. It was my daddy’s money.”

I poured myself a drink. Someone had spiked the punch and I was feeling wobbly. “I thought he didn’t know you then,” I said. “I thought he met you afterwards, in the hospital.”

“That’s right.” She waved at one of her sisters. “But my father knew everyone in the state of Oklahoma. He understood that’s how you get ahead in business. And he made a point of knowing clerics, like your Grandfather Darnell. Quickest way into a community, he used to say, is through its preachers. So Grandfather Darnell knew who to call when he needed help.”

“What did he do, your dad?” I spilled some punch on my pants.

“Paid off the theater owners and Sheriff Stevenson so they’d keep it quiet about Old Lady Jones. In return, Grandfather Darnell began lobbying the town fathers, trying to get a Duffy’s store there. It took ten years or more, but it finally paid off, as Daddy knew it would. He was a patient man.”

Her new husband was toasting his best man now. Each word clear, precise. Correct.

“No wonder Dad felt hemmed in by the Kellys,” I said.

“They got him out of a jam.”

“Yeah, and they never let him forget it.”

The band started up again. “May I have this dance, son? You look charming tonight. You could be a real lady-killer, if you’d give yourself half a chance. Confidence, eh?” She slipped her hand into mine. I stood stiffly. “Kelly,” she said. “Please be happy for me. You and me. We both deserve to be happy for a change.”

“I’m happy,” I said. I knew I sounded angry.

“Just because I’m with John now, don’t he shy. If you ever need to talk — ”

“Right,” I said, and led her, decisively, onto the dance floor.

Headlights sweep centerfield. Dust and smoke flitter in the air. Through the haze I can’t see the golfers on the driving range, but I hear them cackling over muffed shots.

Sharon waves at me. Clay carries Cassie to their car. “Thanks for joining us,” he tells me. “It was good to see you.”

A mother calls to her child.

“You too,” I say, feeling shy again — shyer than I’ve felt in years — awful, uncertain. My knees are weak.

“Give us a call.”

“I will.”

I catch Sharon’s eye — she’s trying not to cry — then walk away, and keep walking, into a life that will never be the same again.

One night, about a month after Mom’s wedding, after my last business class of the day, I went to a cheap movie on campus: a grisly horror show. All the dead men in the world had come back to life.

In one small town, corpses converged on a shopping center. A man in fatigues, the movie’s hero, positioned himself on the roof of a furniture store with an automatic rifle. Down below, the creatures broke a plateglass window. One of them bit, with remarkable, cool efficiency, into a saleslady’s sexy bare shoulder.

“Shit, man,” said a bubba beside me, a no-neck freshman, frightened but trying not to show it. “Don’t mess with the dead, eh?”

“No choice,” I said, rubbing my arm.

“What’s that?”

“The dead will always be with us. And that, friend, is the sermon for the night, amen.”

He looked at me, puzzled, a little angry (“Smart-ass,” he whispered), and left me alone after that.

I spent the rest of the film watching the upper-righthand corner of the screen: there, my father once told me, the white circles appear that signal the projectionist it’s time to switch reels. Swirling, pale, they looked like ripples in a river. The student running the show was a klutz. He panicked. Twice, the film broke. We had a lot of delays. Toward the end, the transitions smoothed out, a bittersweet comfort, though everyone around me seemed nervous, and the movie itself was sad.