Independence Day

8

Clarissa Bascombe has snugged something tiny and secret into Paul’s hand as we were leaving. And on our way up to Hartford, on our way up to Springfield, on our way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, he has held it without acknowledgment while I’ve yodeled away spiritedly about what I’ve thought will break our ice, get our ball rolling, fan our coals — start, via the right foot, what now feels like our last and most important journey together as father and son (though it probably isn’t).

Once we swerve off busy CT 9 onto busier, car-clogged I-91, go past the grimy jai alai palace and a new casino run by Indians, I set off on my first “interesting topic”: just how hard it is right here, ten miles south of Hartford, on July 2, 1988, when everything seems of a piece, to credit that on July 2, 1776, all the colonies on the seaboard distrusted the bejesus out of each other, were acting like separate, fierce warrior nations scared to death of falling property values and what religion their neighbors were practicing (like now), and yet still knew they needed to be happier and safer and went about doing their best to figure out how. (If this seems completely nutty, it’s not, under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence.” It’s totally relevant — in my view — to Paul’s difficulty in integrating his fractured past with his hectic present so that the two connect up in a commonsense way and make him free and independent rather than staying disconnected and distracted and driving him bat-shit crazy. History’s lessons are subtle lessons, inviting us to remember and forget selectively, and therefore are much better than psychiatry’s, where you’re forced to remember everything.)

“John Adams,” I say, “said getting the colonies all to agree to be independent together was like trying to get thirteen clocks to strike at the same second.”

“Who’s John Adams?” Paul says, bored — his pale, bare, beginning-to-be-hairy legs crossed in a concertedly unmanly manner, one Reebok with its Day-Glo-yellow lacing hiked up threateningly near the gearshift lever.

“John Adams was the first Vice President,” I say. “He was the first person to say it was a stupid job. In public, that is. That was in 1797. Did you bring your copy of the Declaration of Independence?”

“Nuhhhn.” This may mean either.

He is staring out at the reemerged Connecticut, where a sleek powerboat is pulling a tiny female water-skier, billowing the river’s shiny skin. In a bright-yellow life vest, the girl heels waaaaay back against her towrope, carving a high, translucent spume out of the crusty wake.

“Why are you driving so effing slow?” he says to be droll. Then, in a mocking old-granny’s voice, “Everybody passes me, but I get there just as fast as the rest of ’em.”

I, of course, intend to drive as fast as I want and no faster, but take an appraising look at him, my first since we shoved off from Deep River. His ear that wasn’t bammed by the Mercedes’s steering wheel has some gray fuzzy litter in it. Paul also doesn’t much smell good, smells in fact like unbathed, sleep-in-your-clothes mustiness. He also doesn’t seem to have brushed his teeth in a while. Possibly he is reverting to nature. “The original framers, you know,” I say hopefully, but instantly getting the Constitution’s authors muddled up with the signers of the Declaration (my persistent miscue, though Paul would never know), “they wanted to be free to make new mistakes, not just keep making the same old ones over and over as separate colonies and without showing much progress. That’s why they decided to band together and be independent and were willing to sacrifice some controls they’d always had in hopes of getting something better — in their case, better trade with the outside world.”

Paul looks at me contemptuously, as if I were an old radio tuned to a droning station that’s almost amusing. “Framers? Do you mean farmers?”

“Some of them were farmers,” I say. There’s no use trying to haul this business back. I’m not facilitating good contact yet. “But people who won’t quit making the same mistakes over and over are what we call conservatives. And the conservatives were all against independence, including Benjamin Franklin’s son, who eventually got deported to Connecticut, just like you.”

“So are conservatives farmers?” he says, feigning puzzlement but ridiculing me.

“A lot of them are,” I say, “though they shouldn’t be. What’d your sister give you?” I’m watching his closed left fist. We are quickly coming up into the Hartford traffic bottleneck. Elaborate road construction is on the right, between the interstate and the river — a soaring new off-ramp, a new parallel lane, arrows flashing, yellow behemoths full of Connecticut earth rumbling along beside us, white men in plastic hats and white shirts standing out in the snappy hot breeze, staring at thick scrolls of plans.

Paul looks at his fist as if he has no idea of what it contains, then slowly opens it, revealing a small yellow bow, the twin of the red one Clarissa gave me. “She gave you one,” he mutters. “A red one. She said you said you wanted to be her bow, but it was spelled another way.” I’m shocked at what a shady, behind-the-scenes conniver my daughter is. Paul holds the two loose ends of his yellow bow and pulls them tight so the two loops daintily involute and make a knot. Then he puts the whole in his mouth and swallows it. “Umm,” he says, and smiles at me evilly. “Good ribbance.” (He’s constructed this event, including the change in his sister’s story, just for a punch line.)

“I guess I’ll save mine till later.”

“She gave me another one for later.” He gives me his slant-eyed look. He is far ahead of me and will, I know, be a struggle.

“So okay, what’s the problem with you and Charley?” I am maneuvering us past the Hartford downtown, the little gold-domed capital nearly lost in among big insurance high-rises. “Can’t you two be civilized?”

“I can. He’s an asshole.” Paul is watching out his side as a squad of befezzed Shriners on Harleys comes alongside us. The Shriners are big, overstuffed, fat-cheeked guys dressed in gold-and-green silk harem guard getups with goggles and gloves and motorcycle boots. On their giant red Electra Glides they’re as imposing as real harem guards, and of course are riding in safety-first staggered formation, their motor noise even through the closed window loud and oppressive.

“Does braining him with an oarlock seem like a good solution to his being an asshole?” This will be my lone, unfelt concession to Charley’s welfare.

The lead Shriner has spied Paul and given him a grinning, gloved thumbs-up. He and his crew are all big, jolly cream puffs, no doubt on their way to perform figure eights and seamless circles within circles for happy, grateful, shopping-center crowds, then hurry off to lead a parade down some town’s Main Street.

“It’s just a solution,” Paul says, returning the lead harem guard’s thumbs-up, putting his forehead to the window and grinning back sarcastically. “I like these guys. Charley should be one. What do you call them?”

“Shriners,” I say, returning a thumbs-up from my side.

“What do they do?”

“It’s not that easy to explain,” I say, keeping us in our lane.

“I like their suits.” He makes a muffled and unexpected little bark, a clipped Three Stooges, testy-terrier bark. He doesn’t seem to want me to hear it but can’t resist doing it again. One of the Shriners seems to catch on and makes what looks like a barking gesture of his own, then gives another thumbs-up.

“Are you barking again, son?” I sneak a look at him and swerve slightly to the right. An accident here would mean complete defeat.

“I guess so.”

“Why is that? Do you think you’re barking for Mr. Toby or something?”

“I need to do it.” He’s told me several times that in his view people now say “need” when they mean “want,” which he thinks is hilarious. The Shriners drift back in the slow lane, probably nervous after I swerved at them. “It makes me feel better. I don’t have to do it.”

And frankly there’s nothing I feel I can say if greeting the world with an occasional bark instead of the normal “Howzit goin’” or a thumbs-up makes him feel better. What’s to get excited about? It might prove a hindrance under SAT testing conditions, or be a problem if he only barked and never spoke for the rest of his life. But I don’t see it as that serious. No doubt, like all else, it will pass. I should probably try it. It might make me feel better.

“So are we going to the Basketball Hall of Fame or not?” he says, as though we’d been arguing about it. His mind is now who knows where? Possibly thinking he’s thinking about Mr. Toby and thinking he wishes he weren’t.

“We definitely are,” I say. “It’s coming up pretty quick. Are you stoked for it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Because I have to take a leak when we get there.” And that’s all he says for miles.

In a hasty thirty minutes we slide off 91 into Springfield and go touring round through the old mill town, following the disappearing brown-and-white BB. HALL OF FAME signs until we’re all the way north of downtown and pulled to a halt across from a dense brick housing project on a wide and windy trash-strewn boulevard by the on-ramp to the interstate we were just on. Lost.

Here is a marooned Burger King, attended around the outside by many young black men, and beside it, beyond the parking lot, a billboard showing Governor Dukakis smiling his insincere smile and surrounded by euphoric, well-fed, healthy-looking but poor children of every race and creed and color. No garbage has been picked up here for several days, and a conspicuous number of vehicles are abandoned or pillaged along the streetside. A hall of fame, any hall of fame within twenty miles of this spot, seems not worth the risk of being shot. In fact, I’m willing to just forget the whole thing and head for the Mass Pike, turn west and strike off for Cooperstown (170 miles), which would have us rolling into the Deerslayer Inn, where I’ve booked us a twin, just in time for cocktail hour.

And yet to bag it would be to translate mere lost directions into defeat (a poor lesson on a voyage meant to instruct). Plus not going, now that we’re at street level, would be tantamount to temperamental; and in my worst 3 a.m. computations of self and character, temperamental’s the thing I’m not, the thing that even a so-so father mustn’t be.

Paul, who is ever suspicious of my resolve, has said nothing, just stared at Governor Dukakis through the windshield as if he were the most normal thing in the world.

I therefore execute a fast U-turn back toward town, cruise right into a BP delimart, ask directions out the window from a Negro customer just leaving, who courteously routes us back onto the interstate south. And in five minutes we’re on the highway then off again, but this time at a perfectly well marked BBHOF exit, at the end of which we wind around booming freeway pilings and run smack into the Hall of Fame parking lot, where many cars are parked and where a neat little grass lawn with wood benches and saplings for picnickers and reflective roundball enthusiasts borders the Connecticut, sliding by, glistening, just beyond.

When I shut the motor off, Paul and I simply sit and stare through the saplings at the old factory husks on the far side of the river as if we expected some great sign to suddenly flash up, shouting “No! Here! It’s over here now! You’re in the wrong place! You missed us! You’ve done it wrong again!”

I should, of course, seize this inert moment of arrival to introduce old Emerson, the optimistic fatalist, to the trip’s agenda, haul Self-Reliance out of the back seat, where Phyllis had it last. In particular I might try out the astute “Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.” Or else something on the order of accepting the place providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Each seems to me immensely serviceable if, however, they aren’t contradictory.

Paul twists around and frowns back at the metal-and-glass Hall of Fame edifice, which looks less like a time-honored place of legend and enshrinement than a high-tech dental clinic, with its mulberry-colored, fake concrete-slab façade being just the ticket for putting edgy patients at their ease when they arrive for the first-time-ever cleaning and prophylaxis: “Here no one will harm, overcharge or give you bad news.” Above these doors, though, are cloth banners in several bright colors, spelling out BASKETBALL: AMERICA’S GAME.

As he looks back, I notice Paul has a thick, ugly, inflamed and unhealthy-looking seed wart on the side of his right hand below his little finger. I also note, to my dismay, what may be a blue tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, something that looks like what a prisoner might do and Paul may have done himself. It spells a word I can’t make out, though I don’t like it and decide immediately that if his mother can’t pay attention to his personal self, I’ll have to.

“So what’s inside?” he says.

“All kinds of good stuff,” I say, postponing Emerson and trying to ignore the tattoo while mounting some roundball enthusiasm, since I want to get out of the car, possibly grab a sandwich inside and make a last-ditch phone plea to S. Mantoloking. “They’ve got films and uniform displays and photographs and chances to shoot baskets. I sent you the brochures.” I’m not making it sound spectacular enough. Driving off might still be easier.

Paul gives me a self-satisfied look, as if a picture of himself shooting a basket were a source of amusement. For half a dollar I’d give him a flat-hand pop in the mouth too, for having a goddamned tattoo. Though that would violate, within our first hour together, my personal commitment to quality time.

“You can stand beside a big cutout of Wilt the Stilt and see how you match up sizewise,” I say. Our air-conditioning is beginning to dissipate at idle.

“Who’s Milt the Stilt?”

This I know he knows. He was a Sixers fan at the time he moved away. We went to games. He saw pictures. A basket in fact is bracketed at this moment to my garage on Cleveland Street. He is now, though, onto complexer games.

“He was a famous proctologist,” I say. “Anyway, let’s pick up a burger. I told your mother I’d buy you a sports lunch. Maybe they’ll have a slam-dunk burger.”

His eyes narrow at me across the seat. His tongue flicks nervously into each corner of his mouth. He likes this. His eyelashes, I notice for the first time (also like his mother’s), have become ridiculously long. I can’t keep up with him. “Are you hungry enough to eat the asshole out of a dead skunk?” he says, and blinks at me brazenly.

“Yeah, I’m pretty hungry.” I pop open my door and let stiff dieselly breeze, freeway slam and the gamy river scent all flood inside in one hot, lethal breath. I am also tired of him already.

“Well, you’re pretty hungry, then,” he says. He has no good follow-up, so that all he can say is: “Do you think I have symptoms that need treatment?”

“No, I don’t think you have any symptoms, son,” I say down into the car. “I think you have a personality, which may be worse in your case.” I should ask him about the dead bird but can’t bring myself to.

“A-balone,” Paul says. I stand and gaze over the hot roof of my car, over the Connecticut, over the green west of Massachusetts, where soon we’ll be driving. I feel for some reason lonely as a shipwreck. “How do you say ‘I’m hungry’ in Italian?” he says.

“Ciao,” I say. This is our oldest-timiest, most reliable, jokey way of conducting father-son business. Only today, due to technical difficulties beyond all control, it doesn’t seem exactly to work. And our words get carried off in the breeze, with no one to care if we speak the intricate language of love or don’t. Being a parent can be the worst of discontents.

“Ciao,” Paul says. He has not heard me. “Ciao. How soon they forget.” He is climbing out now, ready for our trip inside.

Once in, Paul and I wander like lost souls who have paid five bucks to enter purgatory. (I have finally quit limping.)

Strategically placed, widely modern staircases with purple velvet crowd-control cords move us and others, herd-like, all the way up to Level 3, where the theme is basketball-history-in-a-nutshell. The air, here, is hypercleaned and frigid as Nome (to discourage lingering), everyone whispers like funeral-parlor guests, and lights are low to show off various long corridors of spotlit mummy-case artifacts preserved behind glass only a multiple-warhead missile could penetrate. Here is a thumbnail bio of inventor Naismith (who turns out to have been a Canadian!), alongside a replica of the old Doc’s original scrawled-on-an-envelope basketball master plan: “To devise a game to be played in a gymnasium.” (Success was certainly his.) Farther on is a black-and-white picture display featuring Forrest “Phogg” Allen, beloved old Jayhawks chalkboard wizard from the Twenties, and next to that, a replica of the “original” peach basket, along with a tribute to YMCAs everywhere. On all the walls there are grainy, treasured period photos of “the game” being played in shadowy wire-window gyms by skinny unathletic white boys, plus two hundred old uniform jerseys hung from the dark rafters like ghosts in a spook house.

A few listless families enter a dark little Action Theatre, which Paul avoids by hitting the can, though I watch from the doorway as the history of the game unfolds before our preprandial eyes, while the action sounds of the game are piped in.

In eight minutes we progress briskly down to Level 2, where there’s more of the same, though it’s more up-to-date and recognizable, at least to me. Paul expresses a passing spectator’s interest in Bob Lanier’s size 22 shoe, a red-and-yellow plastic cross-section model of an as-yet-unmangled human knee, and a film viewable in another little planetarium-like theater, dramatizing how preternaturally large basketball players are and what they can all “do with the ball,” in contrast to how minuscule and talentless the rest of us have to suffer through life being. In this way it is a true shrine — devoted to making ordinary people feel like insignificant outsiders, which Paul seems not to mind. (The Vince was in fact more welcoming.)

“We played at camp,” he says flatly as we pause outside the amphitheater, both of us looking in as huge, muscular, uniformed black men ram ball after ball through hoop after hoop on a mesmerizing four-sided screen, to the crowd’s rapt amazement and smattered applause.

“And so were you a major force,” I ask. “Or an intimidator, possibly a franchise or an impact player?” I’m happy to have unfreighted exchange on any subject, though I stare at his shorts, tee-shirt and skinthead and don’t like any of it. He seems to me to be in disguise.

“Not really,” he says, absolutely earnest. “I can’t jump. Or run. Or shoot, and I’m a lefty. And I don’t give a shit. So I’m not really cut out for it.”

“Lanier was a lefty,” I say. “So was Russell.” He may not know who they are, even though he’d recognize their shoes. The audience in the jam-o-rama amphitheater makes a low “Ooooo” of utter reverence. Other men with their boys stand beside us, looking in, uninterested in sitting down.

“We weren’t really playing to win anyway,” Paul says.

“What were you playing for? Fun?”

“Thur-uh-py,” he says to make a joke of it, though he seems unironic. “Some of the kids would always forget what month it was, and some of them talked too loud or had seizures, which was bad. And if we played basketball, even stupid basketball, they all got better for a while. We had ‘share your thoughts’ after every game, and everybody had a lot better thoughts. For a while at least. Not me. Chuck played basketball at Yale.” Paul’s hands are in his shorts pockets as he stares at the ceiling, which is industrial modern and shadowy, with metal girders, trusses, rafters, sprinkling-system pipes, all painted black. Basketball, I think, is American’s postindustrial national pastime.

“Was he any good?” I may as well ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, digging a finger into his mossy ear and creasing the corner of his mouth like a country hick. A second loud “Ooooo” comes from inside. Someone, a woman, shouts out, “Yes! I swear to God. Look at that!” I don’t know what she saw.

“You know the one thing you can do that’s truly unique to you and that society can’t affect in any way?” he says. “We learned this in camp.”

“I guess not.” People out here with us are starting to stray away.

“Sneeze. If you sneeze in some stupid-fuck way, or in a loud way that pisses people off in movies, they just have to go along with it. Nobody can say, ‘Sneeze a different way, asshole.’”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Does that seem unusual?”

“Yes.” Gradually he lets his eyes come down from the ceiling but not to me. His finger quits excavating his ear. He is now uncomfortable for being unironic and a kid.

“Don’t you know that’s the way everything is when you get to be old? Everybody lets you do anything you want to. If they don’t like it, they just don’t show up anymore.”

“Sounds great,” Paul says, and actually smiles, as if such a world where people left you alone was an exhibit he’d like to see.

“Maybe it is,” I say, “maybe it isn’t.”

“What’s the most misunderstood automotive accessory?” He’s ready to derail serious talk, alert to the dangers inherent in my earnest voice.

“I don’t know. An air filter,” I say, as the dunk-o-rama film gets over in the auditorium. I have seen no big cutout of Milt the Stilt, as was promised.

“That’s pretty close.” Paul nods very seriously. “It’s a snow tire. You don’t appreciate it until you need it, but then it’s usually too late.”

“Why does that make it misunderstood? Why not just underappreciated?”

“They’re the same,” he says, and starts walking away.

“I see. Maybe you’re right.” And we both walk off then toward the stairs.

On Level 1, there’s a busy gift boutique, a small room dedicated to sports media (zero fascination for me), an authentic locker room exhibit, a vending machine oasis, plus some gimmicky, hands-on exhibits Paul takes mild interest in. I decide to make my call to Sally before we hit the road. Though I have yet to see a legitimate snack bar, so that Paul wanders off in his new heavy-gaited, pigeon-toed, arm-swinging way I hate, to the vending-machine canteen with money I’ve supplied (since his is evidently for some other uses — a possible kidnap emergency) and my order to bring back “something good.”

The phone area is a nice, secluded, low-lit little alcove beside the bathrooms, with thick, noise-muffling wall-to-wall covering everything, and the latest black phone technology — credit card slits, green computer screens and buttons to amplify sound in case you can’t believe what you’re hearing. It is an ideal place for a crank or ransom call.

Sally, when I punch in her 609 number, answers thrillingly on the first jingle.

“So where in the world are you?” she says, her voice tingly and happy but also a voice that’s taking a reading. “I left you a long and poignant message last night. I may have been drunk.”

“And I tried to call you right back all this morning, to see if you’d fly up here in a chartered Cessna and come to Cooperstown with us. Paul thinks it’d be great. We’d have some fun.”

“Well. My goodness. I don’t know,” Sally says, acting happily confused. “Where are you right now?”

“Right now I’m in the Basketball Hall of Fame. I mean we’re visiting it — we’re not enshrined here. Not yet anyway.” I feel the most buoyant good spirit expand in my chest. All is not pissed away.

“But isn’t that in Ohio?”

“No, it’s in Springfield, Mass, where the first peach basket was nailed to the first barn door and the rest is history. Football’s in Ohio. We don’t have time for that.”

“Where are you going, again?”

She is enjoying all this, possibly relieved, acting breathless and appealed to. Plans might still spring to life. “Cooperstown, New York. One hundred seventy miles away,” I say enthusiastically. A woman several nooks down leans back and glowers at me as if I were making a call that amplified my voice in her receiver. Possibly she feels at risk being near a person in legitimately high spirits. “So whaddaya say?” I say. “Fly up to Albany right now, and we’ll pick you up.” I am talking too loud and need to put a lid on it before a Hall of Fame SWAT team is summoned. “I’m serious,” I say, more modulated, but more serious too.

“Well, you’re very sweet to ask.”

“I am very sweet. That’s right. But I’m not letting you off the hook.” I say this a bit too loud again. “I just woke up this morning and realized I was crazy as hell last night and that I’m crazy about you. And I don’t want to wait till Monday or whenever the hell.” For a nickel I’d muster Paul right back to the car and beat it back down to South Mantoloking along with all the other beach yahoos. Though I’d be a bad man for doing so. Being willing to invite Sally in on our sacred hombre-to-hombre is already bad enough — though like anybody else, Paul’d have more fun being along on something technically illicit. The world, as I told him, lets you do what you want if you can live with the consequences. We’re all free agents.

“Could I ask you something?” she says, two jots too serious.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It may be too serious. I’m not a serious man. And it can’t be about you not coming up here.”

“Would you tell me what you find so enthralling now that you didn’t notice last night?” Sally says this in a self-mocking, good-natured way. But important info is being sought. Who could blame her?

“Well,” I say, my mind suddenly whirring. A man exits the bathroom, so that I get a stern whiff of urinal soap. “You’re a grownup, and you’re exactly the way you seem, at least as far as I can tell. Everybody’s not like that.” Including me. “And you’re loyal and you have a quality of straight-talking impartiality”—this sounds wrong—“that isn’t inconsistent with passion, which I really like. I guess I just have a feeling some things have to be investigated further between you and me or we’ll both be sorry. Or I will anyway. Plus, you’re just about the prettiest woman I know.”

“I’m just about not the prettiest woman you know,” Sally says. “I’m pretty in a usual way. And I’m forty-two. And I’m too tall.” She sighs as though being tall made her tired.

“Look, just get on a plane and come up here, and we’ll talk all about how pretty you are or aren’t while the moon sets on romantic Lake Otsego and we enjoy a complimentary cocktail.” While Paul goes who knows where? “I just feel a tidal attraction to you, and all boats rise on a rising tide.”

“Your boat seems to rise most when I’m not around,” Sally says with distinctly diminished good nature. (It’s possible I’m not providing convincing answers again.) The woman in the far phone nook snaps closed an immense black patent-leather purse and goes striding quickly out. “Do you remember saying you wanted to be the ‘dean’ of New Jersey realtors last night? Do you even remember that? You talked all about soybeans and drought and shopping centers. We drank a lot. But you were in a state of some kind. You also said you were beyond affection. Maybe you’re still in some state.” (I should probably toss off a couple of barks to prove I’m nuts.) “Did you visit your wife?”

This is not the wisest tack for her to take, and I should actually warn her off. But I simply stare at my little black phone screen, where it states in cool green letters: Do you wish to make another call?

“Right. I did,” I say.

“And how was that — was that nice?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do you think you like her better when she’s not around?”

“She’s not ‘not around,’” I say. “We’re divorced. She’s remarried to a sea captain. It’s like Wally. She’s officially dead, only we still talk.” I’m suddenly as deflated by a thought of Ann as I was happy to be thinking of Sally, and what I’m tempted to say is, “But the real surprise is she’s leaving ole Cap’n Chuck, and we’re getting married again and moving to New Mexico to start up an FM station for the blind. That’s really the reason I’m calling — not to invite you to come up here, just to give you my good news. Aren’t you happy for me?” There’s an unwieldy silence on the line, after which I say: “I really just called up to say I had a good time last night.”

“I wish you’d stayed. That’s what my message said, if you haven’t heard it yet.” Now she is mum. Our little contretemps and my little rising tide have gone off together in a stout, chilly breeze. Good spirits are notoriously more fragile than bad.

A tall, big-chested man in a pale-blue jumpsuit comes strolling down the phone alcove, holding a little girl by the hand. They stop along the opposite phone bank, where the man begins to make a call, reading off a paper scrap as the little girl, in a frilly pink skirt and a white cowboy shirt, watches him. She looks at me across the shadowy way — a look, like mine, of needing sleep.

“Are you still there?” Sally says, possibly apologetic.

“I was watching a guy make a phone call. I guess he reminds me of Wally, though he shouldn’t, since I don’t think I ever saw Wally.”

Another mum pause. “You really have very few sharp angles, you know, Frank. You’re too smooth from one thing to the next. I can’t keep up with you very well.”

“That’s what my wife thinks too. Maybe you two should discuss it. I think I’m just more at ease in the mainstream. It’s my version of sublime.”

“And you’re also very cautious, you know,” Sally says. “And you’re noncommittal. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure that’s what you meant last night about being beyond affection. You’re smooth and you’re cautious and you’re noncommittal. That’s not a very easy combination for me.” (Or a good one, I’m sure.)

“My judgments aren’t very sound,” I say, “so I just try not to cause too much trouble.” Joe Markham said something like this yesterday. Maybe I’m being transformed into Joe. “But when I feel something strong, I guess I jump in. That’s how I feel right now.” (Or did.)

“Or you seem to anyway,” Sally says. “Are you and Paul having lots of fun?” A shift back in the direction of rising spirits, speaking of smooth.

“Yeah. Loads and loads. You would too.” I get a faint but putrid sniff of the dead grackle still on my receiver hand. Apparently it’s to be on my skin forever and ever. I intend to ignore this last remark about seeming to jump in.

“I’m sorry you don’t think your judgment’s very sound,” Sally says, falsely perky. “That doesn’t bode very well for how you say you feel about me either, does it?”

“Whose cuff links were those on the bed table?” This, of course, is rash and against all good judgment. But I’m indignant, even though I have no good right to be.

“They were Wally’s,” Sally says, perky but not falsely. “Did you think they belonged to somebody else? I just got them out to send to his mother.”

“Wally was in the Navy, I thought. He almost got blown up in a boat. Isn’t that right?”

“He did. But he was in the Marines. Not that it matters. You just made up the Navy for him. It’s all right.”

“Okay. Yeah, I was callin’ about this house you got for rent on Friar Tuck Drive,” I hear the big man say across the alcove. His little girl is staring up at her dad/unc/abductor as if he’d told her he needed some moral support and she should focus all her thoughts his way. “What’s the rent on that one?” he says. He is a southwesterner, possibly a twangy Texan. Though he isn’t wearing dusty old Noconas but a pair of white Keds no-lace low-tops of the male-nurse/minimum-security-prisoner variety. These are Texans without a ranch. My guess is he’s busted out of the oil patch, a new-age Joad moving his precious little brood up to the rust belt to set life spinning in a new orbit. It occurs to me the McLeods may likewise be in hot financial water and be in need of a break but are too stubborn to say so. That would change my attitude about the rent, though not totally.

“Frank, did you hear what I said, or have you just drifted off into space?”

“I was watching the same guy trying to rent a house. I wish I had something I could show him in Springfield. Of course, I don’t live here.”

“Okay-yay,” Sally says, ready for our conversation to float off too. I have registered whose cuff links they were, though they aren’t any of my business. The Navy-Marine mixup I can’t explain. “Is it pretty up there?” she asks brightly.

“Yeah, it’s beautiful. But really,” I say, suddenly picturing Sally’s face, a winning face, worth wanting to kiss. “Don’t you want to come up here? I’m popping for everything. Your money’s no good. All you can eat. Double stamps. Carte blanche.”

“Why don’t you just call me some other time, okay? I’ll be home tonight. You’re very distracted. You’re probably tired.”

“Are you sure? I’d really like to see you.” I should mention that I’m not beyond affection, because I’m not.

“I’m sure,” she says. “And I’m just going to say good-bye now.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

“Good-bye now,” she says, and we hang up.

The little cowgirl across the alcove gives me a fretful look. Possibly I was talking too loud again. Her big Texan daddy swivels half around to look at me. He has a big tough-jawed face, unruly dark hair and enormous pipe-fitter’s mitts. “No,” he says decisively into the phone. “No, that ain’t gonna work, that’s way outa line. Forgit that.” He hangs up, crumpling his little scratch of paper, which he drops on the carpet.

He fishes in his breast pocket, pulls out a pack of Kools, takes one out with his mouth, still holding little Suzie’s hand, lights up one-handed with a thick, mean-looking Zippo. He blows a big, frustrated, lung-shuddering drag right at the international NO SMOKING insignia attached to the carpeted ceiling, and I immediately expect to be drenched in cold chemicals, for alarms to trigger, security people to skid around the corner on the dead run. But nothing happens. He gives me an antagonistic look where I’m lost in front of my phone screen. “You got a problem?” he says, fishing back in his cigarette pocket for something he doesn’t find.

“No,” I say, grinning. “I just have a daughter about your daughter’s age”—a total fabrication, followed hard by another one—“and she just reminded me of her.”

The man looks down at the child, who must be eight and who looks up at him smiling, charmed by being noticed but unsure exactly how to be charmed. “You want me to sell this one to you?” he says, at which moment the little girl throws her head back and lets her whole self go limp so she’s hanging off his big mitt, smiling and shaking her pretty head.

“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” she says.

“They’re too expensive for me,” he says in his Texas accent. He raises his child off the ground, limp as a carcass, and gives her a dainty little swing out.

“You cain’t sell me,” she says in a throaty, bossy voice. “I’m not for sale.”

“You’re for sale big time, that’s whut,” he says. I smile at his joke — a helpless fatherish way of expressing love to a stranger in a time of hardship. I should appreciate it. “You don’t have a house to rent, do you?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not from Springfield. I’m just here for a visit. My son’s running around in here someplace.”

“You know how long it takes to get up here from Oklahoma?” he says, his cigarette in one side of his big mouth.

“It’s probably not that quick.”

“Two days, two nights straight. And we been in the KOA for three damn days. I got a highway job starts up in a week, and I can’t find anything. I’m gonna have to send this orphan back.”

“Not me,” the little girl says in her bossy voice and lets her knees give way, hanging on. “I’m not an orphan.”

“You!” the big guy says to his daughter and frowns, though not angrily. “You’re my whole damn problem. If I didn’t have you with me, somebody would’ve been considerate of me by now.” He gives me a big leer and a roll of the eyes. “Stand up on your feet, Kristy.”

“You’re a redneck,” his daughter says, and laughs.

“I might be, and I might be worse than that,” he says more seriously. “You think your daughter’s like this outfit?” He’s already starting to walk away, holding his daughter’s tiny hand in his great one.

“They’re both pretty sweet when they want to be, I bet,” I say, watching his child’s quick knock-kneed steps and thinking of Clarissa giving Ann and me, or possibly just me, the finger. “The holiday’ll probably change everything.” Though I don’t know how. “I’ll bet you find someplace to stay today.”

“It’s that or drastic measures,” he says, walking away toward the lobby.

“What’s that mean?” his daughter says, hanging onto his hand. “What’s drastic measures?”

“Being your ole man, for starters,” he says, as they go out of sight. Then he adds, “But it might mean a whole lot of things too.”

Paul, when I walk out to find him, is not waiting with an armload of vending-machine provisions but has taken up an observer position alongside “The Shoot-Out” exhibit, which dominates one whole wall-side of Level 1 and where a lot of visitors have already become noisy participators.

“The Shoot-Out” is nothing more than a big humming people-mover conveyor belt, just like in an airport, but built right alongside and at the same level as a spotlit arena area, full of basketball backboards, hoops and posts, at varying heights and distances from the belt — ten feet, five yards, two feet, ten yards. Along beside the moving handrail and between the little arena and the people-mover itself, a trough of basketballs is continuously being replenished through a suction tube under the floor, exactly in the manner of a bowling alley rack. A human being getting on the moving floor (as many already are) and traveling at approximately one half of one mile an hour, can simply pick up ball after ball and shoot basket after basket — jump shots, hooks, two-hand sets, over the back, one’s whole repertoire — until he reaches the other end, where he steps off. (Such a screwy but ingenious machine has undoubtedly been invented by someone with a dual major in Crowd Control and Automated Playground Management from Southern Cal, and anybody in his right mind would’ve fought to get ground-floor money in on it. In fact, if the Hall of Fame management didn’t insist that you first mull past murky old Phogg Allen pictures and replicas of Bob Lanier’s dogs, everyone would spend his whole visit right down here where the real action is, and the rest of the building could go back to being a dentist’s office.)

A pocket-size grandstand has been built just on the other side of the conveyor, and plenty of spectators are up there now, noisily ya-hooing and razzing their kids, brothers, nephews, stepsons who’re taking the ride and trying to shoot the eyes out of all the baskets.

Paul, who’s on the sidelines by the entrance gate, where there’s a line of kids waiting to get on, seems on the alert, as though he were running the whole contraption. He is, however, watching a scrappy, thick-thighed white kid in a New York Knicks uniform, who’s hustling around among the backboards, kicking trapped balls toward the suction tube gutter, tipping stuck balls out of the nets, snapping vicious passes back at kids on the conveyor and occasionally taking a graceless little short-armed hook shot, which always goes in, no matter what basket he shoots at. No doubt he’s the manager’s son.

“Did you try out your patented two-hand set yet?” I say, coming up right behind Paul and over the noise. I instantly smell his sour sweat smell when I put my hand on his shoulder. There’s also, I can see, a thick scabby jag in his scalp, where whoever authored his skint haircut made a mistake. (Where are such things done?)

“That’d be good, wouldn’t it,” he says coldly, going on watching the white kid. “That nitwit thinks because he works here his game’s gonna improve. Except the floor’s tilted and the baskets aren’t regulation. So he’s actually fucked.” This seems to make him satisfied. He has purchased no food that I can see.

“You better give it a try,” I say over the basketball clatter and the thrum the giant machine’s making. I feel exactly like a dad among other real dads, encouraging my son to do what he doesn’t want to do because he’s afraid he’ll be bad at it.

“D’you always dribble before you shoot?” someone in the bleachers shouts out at the moving conveyor. A short bald man who’s about to try a precarious hook shot yells back without even looking: “Why don’t you try eating me,” then wings a shot that misses everything and causes other people in the bleachers to laugh.

“You do it.” Paul snorts a disparaging little snuffle. “I saw some Nets scouts in the crowd.” The Nets are his favorite team to belittle, because they’re no good and from New Jersey.

“Okay, but then you have to do it.” I cuff his shoulder in an unnatural comradely way, catching another unappetizing look at his offended ear.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he says without looking at me, just watching the bright, indoor air a-throng with orange balls.

“Okay, you just watch me, then,” I say lamely.

I step around him and into line and am quickly right up to the little gate behind a small black kid. I take a look back at Paul, who’s watching me, leaning an elbow on the plywood fence that separates the arena from the waiting line, his face completely unawed, as if he expects to see me do something stupid beyond all previous efforts.

“Check out how my balls rotate,” I call back at him, hoping it’ll embarrass him, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.

And then I’m up on the rumbling belt, moving right to left as the rack of balls and the little forest of stage-lit baskets, backboards and poles begins quickly gliding past in the opposite way. I’m instantly nervous about falling down, and don’t make a move toward a ball. The black kid in front of me has on a huge purple-and-gold team jacket that says Mr. New Hampshire Basketball on the back in sparkling gold letters, and he seems able to handle at least three balls at any one time, virtually spewing shots at every goal, every height, every distance, and with each shot emitting a short, breathy whoof like a boxer throwing a punch. And of course everything goes spinning in: a bank, a set, a one-hander, a fall-away, a short-arm hook like the ball boy’s — everything but an alley-oop and a lean-in power jam.

I lay hands on my first ball halfway through the ride, still not confident about my balance, my heart suddenly starting to beat fast because other shooters are behind me. I frown out toward the clutter of red metal posts and orange baskets, set my feet as well as I can, cock the ball behind my ear and heave up a high arching shot that misses the basket I expected to hit, strikes a lower one, bounces out and nearly drops in the very lowest goal, which I hadn’t actually seen.

I quick grab another ball as Mr. New Hampshire Basketball is putting up shot after shot, making his stagy little whoof noise and hitting nothing but net. I take similar aim at a medium-height basket at a medium distance, hoist my shot off one-handed, though well gyroed by a good rotation I learned from watching TV, and come pretty damn close to making it, though one of Mr. Basketball’s shots hisses through just ahead and knocks mine down off into the gutter. (I also lose my balance and have to grab the plastic escalator handrail to keep from falling over sideways and causing a pileup.) Mr. B. flashes me a suspicious look over his gigantic purple roll collar, as if I’d been trying to mess with his head. I smile at him and mutter, “Lucky.”

“You’re supposed to dribble before you shoot, you cluck,” the same idiot yorks out again amid a lot of other shouting and metallic hum and machinery smell. I turn around and take a squinty look at the crowd, which is essentially invisible because of the bright lights on the baskets. I don’t really give a shit who yelled at me, though I’m sure it’s not someone whose son is in the audience, smirking.

I complete one more wayward shot before I’m to the end — a lumpy, again off-balance one-hander that clears everything and drops behind the baskets and the wooden barrier, where basketballs aren’t supposed to go. “Good arch!” the little wiseacre gym-rat kid cracks as he climbs back to retrieve my ball. “Wanna play horse for a million bucks?”

“Maybe I’ll have to start trying, then,” I say, my heart pounding as I step off the belt onto terra firma, all the excitement over now.

Mr. New Hampshire Basketball is already walking away toward the sports-media gallery with his father, a tall black man in a green silk Celtics jacket and matching green leisure pants, his long arm over the boy’s scrawny shoulders, no doubt laying out a superior strategy for rubbing off the screen, picking up the dribble, taking the J while drawing the foul — all just words to me, a former sportswriter, with no practical application on earth.

Paul is staring at me down the length of the conveyor. Conceivably he’s been barking his approval while I’ve been shooting but doesn’t want it known now. I have in fact enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly.

“Take your best shot!” I shout through the loud crowd noise. The ball boy, off to one side now, is chatting up his chunky, pony-tailed blond sweetheart, laying his two meaty hands on her two firm shoulders and goo-gooing in her eyes like Clark Gable. For some reason, having I’m sure to do with queuing theory, no one is on the conveyor at the moment. “Come on,” I shout at Paul with false rancor. “You can’t do any worse than I did!” Only a few spectators remain in the darkened grandstand. Others are heading off to other exhibits. It is the perfect time for Paul. “Come on, Stretch,” I say — something I vaguely remember from a sports movie.

Paul’s lips move — words I just as well can’t hear. A jocose “Up your ass” or a lusty “Why don’t you eat shit”—his favorite swear words from another, antique vintage (mine). He looks behind him, where there’s now mostly empty lobby, then just ambles slowly up to the entrance in his clumsy, toes-in gait, pauses to look down toward me again with what appears to be disgust, stares for a moment at the spotlit baskets and stanchions, and then simply steps on, completely alone.

The conveyor moves him seemingly much more slowly than I myself was moved, and certainly leisurely enough to get off six or seven good shots and even to dribble before he shoots. The ball boy takes a casually demeaning look to where Paul is moving along in his garbage-pail shoes and sinister haircut, hands fixed oddly on his hips. He cracks a nasty grin, says something to his girlfriend so she’ll look, which she does, though in a kinder, more indulgent older-girl’s way at the goony boy who can’t help being goony but has a big heart and racks up top math scores (which he doesn’t).

When he comes to the end — having faced the baskets the whole way, never once looking at me, just staring into the little arena like a mesmerist, never taking a shot or even touching a ball, only gliding — he just wobbles off on the carpet and walks over and stands by me, where I’ve been watching like any other dad.

“High fives,” a straggler shouts in a ridiculing voice from the grandstand.

“Next time think about trying a shot,” I say, ignoring the shout, since I’m happy with his efforts.

“Are we coming back here anytime soon?” He looks at me, his small gray eyes showing concern.

“No,” I say. “You can come back with your son.” Another batch of adults is invading the bleachers, with more sons and daughters plus a few dads beginning to line up at the gate, checking out how the whole gizmo works, calculating the fun they’re about to have.

“I liked that,” Paul says, looking at the stage-lit posts and baskets. I hear the surprising voice of some boy he once was (seemingly only a month ago, now disappeared). “I’m thinking I’m thinking all the time, you know? Except when I was on that thing I quit. It was nice.”

“Maybe you should do it again,” I say, “before it gets crowded.” Unhappily, there’s no way for him to stay on The Shoot-Out for the rest of his days.

“No, that’s okay.” He’s watching new kids glide away from the gate, new balls arching into the vivid air, the first inevitable misses. “I don’t usually like things like that. This was an exception. I don’t usually like things I’m supposed to like.” He stares at the other kids empathetically. This cannot be a simple truth to admit to your father — that you don’t like the things you’re supposed to like. It is adult wisdom, though most grown men would fail of it.

“Your ole man isn’t very good at it either. If it makes you feel any better. He’d like to be. Maybe you can tell me what you liked about it that made you quit thinking you’re thinking.”

“You’re not that old.” Paul looks at me peevishly.

“Forty-four.”

“Umm,” he says — a thought possibly too fretsome to speak. “You could still improve.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Your mother doesn’t think so.” This doesn’t qualify as a current event.

“Do you know the best airline?”

“No, let’s hear it.”

“Northwest,” Paul says seriously. “Because it flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.” And suddenly he’s trying to suppress a big guffaw. For some reason this is funny.

“Maybe I’ll take you out there sometime on a camping trip.” I watch basketballs fill the interior air like bubbles.

“Do they have a hall of fame in Minnesota?”

“Probably not.”

“Okay, good,” he says. “We can go anytime, then.”

On our way out we make a fast foray through the gift boutique. Paul, at my instruction, picks out tiny gold basketball earrings for his sister and a plastic basketball paperweight for his mother — gifts he feels uncertain they’ll like, though I tell him they will. We discuss a rabbit’s foot with a basketball attached as an olive branch gesture for Charley, but Paul goes balky after staring at it a minute. “He has everything he wants,” he says grudgingly, without adding “including your wife and your kids.” So that after buying two tee-shirts for ourselves, we pass back out into the parking lot with Charley ungifted, which suits both of us perfectly.

On the asphalt it is full, hot Massachusetts afternoon. New cars have arrived. The river has gone ranker and more hazy. We’ve spent forty-five minutes in this hall of fame, which pleases me since we got our fill, exchanged words of hope, encountered specific subjects of immediate interest and concern (Paul thinking he’s thinking) and seem to have emerged a unit. A better start than I expected.

The big, jumpsuited Oklahoman is sprawled out with his tiny daughter under one of the linden saplings by the river’s retaining wall. They are enjoying their lunch from tinfoil packets spread on the ground, and drinking out of an Igloo cooler, using paper cups. He has his Keds and socks off and his pants rolled up like a farmer. Little Kristy is as pristine as an Easter present and talking to him in a confidential, animated way, wiggling one of his toes with her two hands while he stares at the sky. I’m tempted to wander over and offer a word of parting, talk to them twice because I’ve talked to them once, act as a better welcome committee for the Northeast Corridor, dream up some insider dope “I just thought about” and am glad to find him still here to share — something in the realty line. As always, I’m moved by the displacement woes of other Americans.

Only there’s nothing I know that he doesn’t (such is the nature of realty lore), and I decide against it and just stand at my car door and watch them respectfully — their backs to me, their modest picnic offering this big, panoramic, foreign-seeming river as comfort and company, all their hopes focused on a new settlement. Some people do nicely on their own and by the truest reckoning set themselves down where they’ll be happiest.

“Care to guess how hungry I am?” Paul says over the hot car roof, waiting for me to unlock his side. He is squinting in the sun, looking unsavory as a little perpetrator.

“Let’s see,” I say. “You were supposed to get us something from the fucking vending machines.” I say “fucking” just to amuse him. The freeway pounds along behind us — cars, vans, U-Hauls, buses — America on a move-in Saturday afternoon.

“I guess I just facked up,” he says to challenge me back. “But I could eat the asshole out of a dead Whopper.” An insolent leer further disfigures his pudgy kid’s features.

“Soup’d be better on an empty brain,” I say, and pop his door lock.

“Okay, doc-taaah! Doc-tah, doc-tah, doc-tah,” he says, snapping open his door and ducking in. I hear him bark in the car. “Bark, bark, bark, bark.” I don’t know what this is to signify: happiness (like a real dog)? Happiness’s defeat at the hands of uncertainty? Fear and hope, I seem to remember from someplace, are alike underneath.

From the linden tree shade, Kristy hears something in the afternoon breeze — a dog barking somewhere, my son in our car. She turns and looks toward me, puzzled. I wave at her, a fugitive wave her bumpkin father doesn’t see. Then I duck my own head into the hot-as-an-oven car with my son and we are on our way to Cooperstown.

At one o’clock, we pull in for a pit stop, and I send Paul for a sack of Whalers and Diet Pepsis while I wash dead grackle off my hand in the men’s. And then we’re off spinning again down the pike, past the Appalachian Trail and through the lowly Berkshires, where not long ago Paul was a camper at Camp Unhappy, though he makes no mention of it now, so screwed down is he into his own woolly concerns — thinking he’s thinking, silently barking, his penis possibly tingling.

After a half hour of breathing Paul’s sour-meat odor, I make a suggestion that he take off his Happiness Is Being Single shirt and put on his new one for a change of scenery and as an emblematic suiting-up for the trip. And to my surprise he agrees, skinning the old fouled one off right in the seat, unabashedly exposing his untanned, unhairy and surprisingly jiggly torso. (Possibly he’ll be a big fatty, unlike Ann or me; though it doesn’t make any difference if he will simply live past fifteen.)

The new shirt is Xtra large, long and white, with nothing but a big super-real orange basketball on its front and the words The Rockunderneath in red block letters. It smells new and starched and chemically clean and, I’m hoping, will mask Paul’s unwashed, gunky aroma until we check into the Deerslayer Inn, he can take a forced bath and I can throw his old one away on the sly.

For a while after our Whalers, Paul again grows moodily silent, then heavy-eyed, then slips off to a snooze while green boilerplate Massachusetts countryside scrolls past on both sides. I turn on the radio for a holiday weather and traffic check and conceivably to learn the facts of last night’s murder, which, for all the time and driving that’s elapsed, occurred only eighty miles south, still well within the central New England area, the small radar sweep of grief, loss, outrage. But nothing comes in on AM or FM, only the ordinary news of holiday fatality: six for Connecticut, six for Mass., two for Vermont, ten for NY; plus five drownings, three boating per se, two falls from high places, one choking, one “fireworks related.” No knifings. Evidently last night’s death was not charged to the holiday.

I “seek” around then, happy to have Paul out of action and for my mind to find its own comfort level: a medical call-in from Pittsfield offers “painless erection help;” a Christian money-matters holiday radiothon from Schaghticoke is interpreting the The Creator’s views on Chapter 13 filings (He thinks some are okay). Another station profiles lifers in Attica selling Girl Scout cookies “in the population.” “We do think we shouldn’t be totally prevented from adding to the larger good”—laughter from other cons—“but we don’t go around knocking on each other’s cells wearing little green outfits either.” Though a falsetto voice adds, “Not this afternoon anyway.”

I turn it off as we get into the static zone at the New York border. And with my son beside me, his scissored and gouged head against his cool window glass, his mind in some swarming, memory-plagued darkness which causes his fingers to dance and his cheek to twitch like a puppy’s in a dream of escape, my own mind bends with unexpected admiration toward meisterbuilder O’Dell’s big blue house on the knoll; and to what a great, if impersonal, true-to-your-dreams home it is — a place any modern family of whatever configuration or marital riggery ought to feel lamebrained not to make a reasonably good go of life in. A type of “go” I could never quite catch the trick of, even in the most halcyon days, when we all were a tidy family in our own substantial house in Haddam. I somehow could never create a sufficiently thick warp and woof, never manufacture enough domestic assumables that we could get on to assuming them. I was always gone too much with my sportswriting work; never felt owning was enough different from renting (except that you couldn’t leave). In my mind a sense of contingency and the possibility of imminent change in status underlay everything, though we stayed for more than a decade, and I stayed longer. It always seemed to me enough just to know that someone loved you and would go on loving you forever (as I tried to convince Ann again today, and she rejected again), and that the mise-en-scène for love was only that and not a character in the play itself.

Charley of course is of the decidedly other view, the one that believes a good structure implies a good structure (which is why he’s so handy with plain truth: he has the mind of a true Republican). It was fine with him, as I happen to know via discreet inquiries, that his old man owned a seat on the commodities exchange, kept an unadvertised pied-à-terre on Park Avenue, supported an entire Corsican second family in Forest Hills, was barely a gray eminence whom young Charles hardly ever saw and referred to only as “Father” when he happened to catch a glimpse (never Dad or Herb or Walt or Phil). All was jake as long as there was a venerable old slate-roofed, many-chimneyed, thickly pillared, leaded-glass-windowed, deep-hedged, fieldstone Georgian residence reliably there in Old Greenwich, reeking of fog and privet and boat varnish, brass polish, damp tennies and extra trunks you could borrow in the pool-house. This, in Charley’s view, constitutes life and no doubt truth: strict physical moorings. A roof over your head to prove you have a head. Why else be an architect?

And for some reason now, tooling along westward with my son in tow — and not because either of us gives a particular shit about baseball, but because we simply have no properer place to go for our semi-sacred purposes — I feel Charley might just not be wrong in his rich-boy’s manorial worldview. It might be better if things were more anchored. (Vice President Bush, the Connecticut Texan, would certainly agree.)

Though there’s something in me that’s possibly a little off and which I’m sure would make finding firm anchorage a problem. I’m not, for instance, as optimistic as one ought to be (relations with Sally Caldwell are a good example); or else I’m much too optimistic (Sally qualifies again). I don’t come back from bad events as readily as one should (or as I used to); or else the reverse — I’m too adept at forgetting and don’t remember enough of what it is I’m supposed to resume (the Markhams serve here). And for all my insistent prating that they — the Markhams — haul themselves into clearer view, I’ve never seen myself all that exactly, or as sharing the frame with those others I might share it with — causing me often to be far too tolerant to those who don’t deserve it; or, where I myself am concerned, too little sympathetic when I should be more. These uncertainties contribute, I’m sure, to my being a classic (and possibly chickenshit) liberal, and may even help to drive my surviving son nutty and set him barking and baying at the moon.

Though specifically where he is concerned, I dearly wish I could speak from some more established place—the way Charley would were he the father of the first part — rather than from this constellation of stars among which I smoothly orbit, traffic and glide. Indeed, if I could see myself as occupying a fixed point rather than being in a process (the quiddity of the Existence Period), things might grow better for us both — myself and barking son. And in this Ann may simply be right when she says children are a signature mark of self-discovery and that what’s wrong with Paul is nothing but what’s wrong with us. Though how to change it?

Spiriting on across the Hudson and past Albany — the “Capital Region”—I am on the lookout now for I-88, the blue Catskills rising abruptly into view to the south, hazy and softly solid, with smoky mares’ tails running across the range. Following his nap Paul has fished into his Paramount bag and produced a Walkman and a copy of The New Yorker. He’s inquired moodily about the availability of tapes, and I’ve offered my “collection” from the glove compartment: Crosby, Stills and Nash from 1970, which is broken; Laurence Olivier reading Rilke, also broken; Ol’ Blue Eyes Does the Standards, Parts I and II, which I bought one lonely night from an 800 number in Montana; two sales motivation speeches all agents were given in March and that I have yet to listen to; plus a tape of myself reading Doctor Zhivago (to the blind), given as a Christmas gift by the station manager who thought I’d done a bang-up job and ought to get some pleasure from my efforts. I’ve never put it on either, since I’m not that much for tapes. I still prefer books.

Paul tries the Doctor Zhivago, tunes it in on his Walkman for approximately two minutes, then begins looking at me with an expression of phony, wide-eyed astoundment and eventually says, his earphones still on, “This is very revealing: ‘Ruffina Onissimovna was a woman of advanced views, entirely unprejudiced and well disposed toward everything that she called positive and vital.’” He smiles a narrow, belittling smile, though I say nothing, since for some reason it embarrasses me. He clicks in the Sinatra then, and I can hear Frank’s tiny buzzy-bee voice deep inside his ear jacks. Paul picks up his New Yorker and begins reading in stony silence.

But almost the instant we’re south of Albany and out of sight of its unlovely civic skyscrapers, all vistas turn wondrous and swoopingly dramatic and as literary and history-soaked as anything in England or France. A sign by a turnout announces we have now entered the CENTRAL LEATHERSTOCKING AREA, and just beyond, as if on cue, the great corrugated glacial trough widens out for miles to the southwest as the highway climbs, and the butt ends of the Catskills cast swart afternoon shadows onto lower hills dotted by pocket quarries, tiny hamlets and pristine farmsteads with wind machines whirring to undetectable winds. Everything out ahead suddenly says, “A helluva massive continent lies this way, pal, so you better be mindful.” (It’s the perfect landscape for a not very good novel, and I’m sorry I didn’t bring my four-in-one Cooper to read aloud after dinner and once we’re staked out on the porch. It would beat being taunted about Doctor Zhivago.)

In my official view, absolutely nothing should be missed from here on, geography offering a natural corroboration to Emerson’s view that power resides in moments of transition, in “shooting the gulf, in darting to an aim.” Paul could do himself a heap of good to set aside his New Yorker and try contemplating his own status in these useful terms: transition, jettisoning the past. “Life only avails, not having lived.” I should’ve bought a tape of it and not a book.

But he’s locked down in a bit-lip sound cocoon of “Two sweethearts in the summer wind,” and reading “Talk of the Town” with his lips moving, and couldn’t give a sweet rat’s fart about what interesting movie’s playing outside his window. Traveling is finally a fool’s paradise.

I make a brief scenic turnout below Cobleskill to stretch my back (my coccyx has now begun aching). Leaving Paul in the seat, I climb out into the little breezy lot and walk to the sandstone parapet beyond which the luminous Pleistocene valley leaps out stark and vast and green and brown-peaked with the animal grandeur of an inland empire any bona fide pioneer would’ve quaked before trying to tame. I actually climb onto the wall and take several deep clean breaths, do several strenuous jumping jacks and squat thrusts, touch my toes, pop my fingers, rotate my neck as the sweet odors float in on the watery air. Beyond me hawks soar, martins dip, a tiny airplane buzzes, a distant hang glider like a dragonfly wheels and sways in the rising molecules. A door in a far-off, invisible house slams audibly shut, a car horn blows, a dog barks. And visible on the hillside opposite, where the sun paints a yellow square upon the western gradient, a tractor, tiny but detectably red, halts its progress in an emerald field; a tiny, hatted figure climbs down, pauses, then starts on foot back up the hill he’s tractored down. He moves for a long, slow ways above and away from his machine, turns and goes a distance along a curved rim top, then resolutely, undramatically goes over, disappears at his own pace to whatever world’s beyond. It is a fine moment to savor, even alone, though I wish my son could break loose and share it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him sing opera.

I stand and stare a while at nothing in particular, my exercise ended, my back loosened, my son entombed in the car reading a magazine. The yellow square begins gradually to fade on the opposite hillside, then moves mysteriously left, darkens the green hayfield instead of lighting it, and I decide — satisfied and palpably enlivened — to pack it in.

Somebody has left a plastic bag of Styrofoam “popcorn” half out of the trash can — the pale-green kernels that Christmas wreaths or your repaired Orvis reel comes boxed in. A new warm afternoon breeze is shifting wispy kernels here and there around the lot. I stop before climbing in to jam the bag down farther and to police up what bits I can with two hands.

Paul looks up from his New Yorker and stares at me where I’m tidying up the asphalt around the car. I merely look back at him from my side of the window, my hands full of clingy green stuff. He fingers his cut ear under his Walkman, blinks, then slowly makes his fingers into a pistol, points it at his temple, produces a silent little “boom” sound with his lips, throws his head back in terrible mock death, then goes back to reading. It’s scary. Anyone would think so. Especially a father. But it’s also funny as hell. He is not so bad a boy.

Short-term destinations are by far the best.

Paul and I skirt the outskirts of Oneonta a little past five, turn north on Route 28 along the newly rose Susquehanna, and in truth are almost there. (Geography, while instructive, is also the Northeast’s soundest selling point and best-kept secret, since in three hours you can stand on the lapping shores of Long Island Sound, staring like Jay Gatz at a beacon light that lures you to, or away from, your fate; yet in three hours you can be heading for cocktails damn near where old Natty drew first blood — the two locales as unalike as Seattle is to Waco.)

Route 28 takes a pretty hickory-and-maple-shaded course straight upriver through tiny postcard villages, past farms, woodlots and single-family roadside split-levels and ranches. Here is a cut-ur-own Xmas tree lot, a pick-ur-own raspberry patch and apple orchard, a second-echelon B&B tucked into a hillside sugarbush; an attack-dog academy, an ugly clear-cut bordered by a low-yield hay meadow with Guernsey cows grazing to the edge of a gravel pit.

Here you’d expect to find no planning boards, PUDs, finicky building codes, septic standards, sidewalk ordinances or ridgetop laws; just an as yet unspoilt place to site your summer cabin or mobile home where and exactly how you want it, right down the road from a good Guinea restaurant, with its own marinara and Genesee on tap, and where a 10 a.m. night owl’s mass is still celebrated Sundays at St. Joe’s in Milford. It’s the perfect mix, in other words, of small-scale Vermont atmospherics with unpretentious, upstate hardscrabble, all an afternoon’s drive from the G.W. Bridge. (Dark rumors may now and then surface that it’s also a prime location for big-city muscle to off-load their mistakes, but no place is without a downside.)

Meanwhile, my spirits have taken a strong upward turn and I’d now like to try hauling Paul into a planned off-the-cuff give-and-take squarely on the notion of Independence Day itself, and to point out that the holiday isn’t just a moth-bit old relic-joke with men dressed up like Uncle Sam and harem guards on hogs doing circles within circles in shopping-mall lots; but in fact it’s an observance of human possibility, which applies a canny pressure on each of us to contemplate what we’re dependent on (barking in honor of dead basset hounds, thinking we’re thinking, penis tingling, etc.) and after that to consider in what ways we’re independent or might be; and finally how we might decide — for the general good — not to worry about it much at all.

This may be the only way an as-needed parent can in good faith make contact with his son’s life problems; which is to say sidereally, by raising a canopy of useful postulates above him like stars and hoping he’ll connect them up to his own sightings and views like an astronomer. Anything more purely parental — wading in and doing some stern stable-cleaning about stealing rubbers, wrecking cars, kicking security personnel, braining stepfathers (who might even deserve it), torturing innocent birds, eventually hauling up his court appearance and how that might correlate inversely with coming to Haddam to live with me and after that with his chances of ever getting into Williams on a “need scholarship”—simply wouldn’t work. In the dizzyingly brief time we have together, he would only retreat into raucous barking, furtive smiles and sullener silences, ending up with me in a fury and in all likelihood ferrying him back to Deep River, feeling myself to be (and being) a ruinous failure. I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another — we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better.

Paul has stashed his Walkman back in his bag and set his New Yorker on the dash, where it reflects distractingly in the windshield, but he has also grabbed up the slender green-jacketed Emerson off the back seat, where it’s been on top of my red REALTOR windbreaker, and begun giving it a look. This is better than I could’ve planned, though it’s clear he hasn’t cracked the copy I mailed him.

“Do you think you’d rather have a child with Down’s syndrome or a child with just regular mental illness?” he says, leafing casually backward through Self-Reliance as if it were Time.

“I’m pretty pleased with how you and Clarissa turned out. So I guess I’d rather have neither one.” A mental mug shot of the little feral Mongoloid back in Friendly’s hours ago opens a cruel vein of awareness that Paul may think he’s that or heading that way.

“Choose,” Paul says, still leafing. “Then give me your reasons.”

On the right, outside pretty little Federalist Milford, we cruise by the Corvette Hall of Fame, a shrine Paul, if he saw it, would vigorously insist on touring since, for reasons of Charley’s Old Greenwich tastes, he’s claimed the Corvette as his favorite car. (He likes them, he says, because they’ll melt.) Only he doesn’t see it because he’s looking through Emerson! (Plus, I’m now headed for the barn and a tall, stiff drink and an evening in a big wicker rocker made by native artisans working with local materials.)

“Ordinary mental illness, then,” I say. “You can sometimes cure that. Down’s syndrome you’re pretty much stuck with.”

Paul’s eyes, his mother’s slate-gray ones, flicker at me astutely, acknowledging something — I’m not certain what. “Sometimes,” he says in a dark voice.

“Do you still want to be a mime?” We have passed out along the little Susquehanna again — more postcard corn patches, blue and white silos, more snowmobile repairs.

“I didn’t want to be a mime. That was a joke at camp. I want to be a cartoonist. I just can’t draw.” He scratches his scalp with the warty side of his hand and sniffs, then makes a seemingly involuntary little eeeck noise back in his throat, grimaces, then stations both hands in front of his face, palms out, doing the man-in-the-glass-box and, looking over at me, still grimacing, silently mouthing “Help me, help me.” He then quits and immediately begins flipping Emerson pages backward again. “What’s this supposed to be about?” He stares down at the page he happens to have opened. “Is it a novel?”

“It’s a terrific book,” I say, uncertain how to promote it. “It’s got—“

“You’ve got a lot of things underlined in it,” Paul says. “You must’ve had it in college.” (A rare reference to my having had a life prior to his. For a boy in the clench of the past, he has little interest in life before his own. My or his mother’s family history, for instance, lack novelty. Not that I entirely blame him.)

“You’re welcome to read it.”

“Wel-come, welcome,” he says to mock me. “And that’s the way it is, Frank,” he says, reverting to his Cronkite voice again, staring down at Self-Reliance on his lap as though it interested him.

Then almost surprisingly we are on the south fringes of Cooperstown, coming in past a fenced sale lot packed with used speedboats, another lot with “bigfoot” trucks, a prim white Methodist church with a VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL sign, right in line with a smattering of neat, overpriced, Forties-vintage mom and pop motels with their lots already full of luggage-crammed sedans and station wagons. At the actual village limits sign, a big new billboard demands the passerby “Vote Yes!” However, I see no signs for the Deerslayer or the Hall of Fame, which simply means to me that Cooperstown doesn’t put its trust in celebrity or glamour but prefers standing on its own civic feet.

“‘The great man,’” Paul reads in a pseudo-reverent Charlton Heston voice, “‘is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah. Glub, glub, glub. ‘The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.’ Quack, quack, quack, quack. I am the great man, the grape man, the grapefruit, I am the fish stick—“

“To be great is usually to be misunderstood,” I say, watching traffic and looking for signs. “That’s a good line for you to remember. There’re some other good ones.”

“I’ve got enough things I remember already,” he says. “I’m drowning. Glub, glub, glub.” He raises his hands and makes swimming-drowning motions, then makes a quick, confidential eeeck like an old gate needing oiling, then grimaces again.

“Reading it’s good enough, then. There’s not going to be a test.”

“Test. Tests make me really mad,” Paul says, and suddenly with his dirty fingers rips out the page he’s just read from.

“Don’t do that!” I make a grab for it, crunching the green cover so that I dent its shiny paper. “You have to be a complete nitwit asshole to do that!” I stuff the book between my legs, though Paul still has the torn page and is folding it carefully into quarters. This qualifies as oppositional.

“I’ll keep it instead of remembering it.” He maintains his poise, while mine’s all lost. He sticks the folded page into his shorts pocket and looks out his window the other way. I am glaring at him. “I just took a page from your book.” He says this in his Heston voice. “Do you by the way see yourself as a complete failure?”

“At what?” I say bitterly. “And get this fucking New Yorker off the dashboard.” I grab it and wing it in the back. We’re now encountering increased vehicular traffic, entering shady little bendy-narrow village streets. Two paperboys sit side by side on a street corner, folding from stacks of afternoon papers. Outside, the air — which of course I can’t feel — looks cool and moist and inviting, though I’m sure it’s hot.

“At anything.” He makes his little eeeck sound far down his throat, as if I’m not supposed to hear it.

My chest feels emptied with outrage and regret (over a page in a book?), but I answer because I’m asked. “My marriage to your mother and your upbringing. These haven’t been the major accomplishments in my current term. Everything else is absolutely great, though.” I am gaunt with how little I want to be in the car alone with my son, only barely arrived upon the storied streets of our destination. My jaw has gone steely, my back aches again and the interior feels thick and airless, as if I’m being gassed by fearsome dread. I wish to a lonely, faraway and inattentive god that Sally Caldwell were in this car with us; or better yet, that Sally was here and Paul was back in Deep River, torturing birds, inflicting injuries and dispensing his smoky dread within the population there. (The Existence Period was patented to ward off such unwelcome feelings. Only it isn’t working.)

“Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be if he hadn’t gotten run over?”

I’m just about to ask him if he’s been snuffing grackles for fun. “Thirteen, why?” My eyes are fast seeking any DEERSLAYER INN sign.

“That’s something I can’t quit thinking about,” he says for possibly the thirtieth time, as we come to the center-of-town intersection, where some kids dressed exactly like Paul are slouching delinquently on the corner curb, playing idiotic Hacky Sack right in among the passersby. Town seems to be a little brick and white-shuttered village, shaded by big scarlet oaks and hickories, all as charming and snappily tended to as a well-kept cemetery.

“Why do you think you think about that?” I say irritably.

“I don’t know. It seems like it ruined everything that was fixed back then.”

“It didn’t. Nothing’s fixed anyway. Why don’t you try writing some of it down.” For some reason I feel aggravated by the story of my mother and the nun on Horn Island and wanting (God knows why) more children.

“You mean like a journal?” He eyes me dubiously.

“Right. Like that.”

“We did that at camp. Then we used our journals to wipe our asses and threw them in bonfires. That was the best use for them.”

Around and down the cross street I now unexpectedly see the Baseball Hall of Fame, a pale-red-brick Greek Revival, post-office-looking building, and I make a quick, hazardous right off what was Chestnut and onto what is Main, postponing my drink for a drive-by and a closer look.

Full of baseball vacationers, Main Street has the soullessly equable, bustly air of a better-than-average small-college town the week the kids come back for fall. Shops on both sides are selling showcases full of baseball everything: uniforms, cards, posters, bumper stickers, no doubt hubcaps and condoms; and these share the street with just ordinary villagey business entities — a drugstore, a dad ‘n’ lad, two flower shops, a tavern, a German bakery and several realty offices, their mullioned windows crammed with snapshots of A-frames and “view properties” on Lake So-and-so.

Unlike stolid Deep River and stiff-necked Ridgefield, Cooperstown has more than ample 4th of July street regalia strung up on the lampposts and crossing wires, stoplights and even parking meters, as if to say there’s a right way to do things and this is it. Posters on every corner promise a “Big Celebrity Parade” with “country music stars” on Monday, and all visitors strolling the sidewalks seem glad to be here. It seems in fact and on first blush like an ideal place to live, worship, thrive, raise a family, grow old, get sick and die. And yet: Some suspicion lurks — in the crowds themselves, in the too-frequent street-corner baskets of redder-than-red geraniums and the too-visible French poubelle trash containers, in the telltale sight of a red double-decker City of Westminster bus and there being no mention of the Hall of Fame anywhere—that the town is just a replica (of a legitimate place), a period backdrop to the Hall of Fame or to something even less specific, with nothing authentic (crime, despair, litter, the rapture) really going on no matter what civic illusion the city fathers maintain. (In this way, of course, it’s no less than what I imagined, and still a potentially perfect setting in which to woo one’s son away from his problems and bestow good counsel — if, that is, one’s son weren’t an asshole.)

We cruise slowly by the unimpressive little brick-arched entryway to the Hall, with its even more post-office-ish, Old-Glory-on-a-pole look and a single flourishing sugar maple out front. Several noisy citizens seem to be parading in a little circle on the sidewalk, doing their best, it looks like, to get in the way of paying customers who have walked over from nearby inns or hotels or RV parks and want to get inside for a quick evening tour. These circlers all have placards and signs and sandwich boards and, when I let Paul’s window down to hear, are chanting what sounds like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” (It’s hard to know what could be worth picketing in a place like this.)

“So who’re those morons?” Paul says, and makes a quick eeeck followed by a look of dismay.

“I got here when you did,” I say.

“Hooter, hooter, hooter, hooter,” he says in a gruff, giant’s voice. “Neuter, neuter, neuter, neuter.”

“That’s the Baseball Hall of Fame right there, though.” I’m disappointed, to be honest, but with no right to be. “You’ve seen it now, so we can go home if you want to.”

“Hooter, hooter, hooter,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

“Do you want to just get it over with? I’ll get you back to New York early tonight. You can stay at the Yale Club.”

“I’d rather stay up here a whole lot longer,” Paul says, still watching out his window.

“Okay,” I say, deciding he means he’d rather not go to New York. Though the air of anger flushes right out of me then, and I see my job as father once again to be a permanent, lifelong undertaking.

“What actually supposedly happened here? I forgot.” He is musing out at the milling sidewalk traffic.

“Baseball was supposedly dreamed up here in 1839, by Abner Doubleday, though nobody really believes that.” All info courtesy of brochures. “It’s just a myth to allow customers to focus their interests and get the most out of the game. It’s like the Declaration of Independence being signed on the Fourth of July, when it was actually signed some other time.” This, of course, is straight from avuncular old Becker and probably a waste of time now. Though I mean to persist. “It’s a shorthand to keep you from getting all bound up in unimportant details and missing some deeper point. I don’t remember what the point is with baseball, though.” A second wave of deep fatigue suddenly descends. It’s tempting to pull over and go to sleep on the seat and see who’s here when I wake up.

“So this is all just bullshit,” Paul says, watching out.

“Not exactly. A lot of things we think are true aren’t, just like a lot of things that are, you don’t have to give a shit about. You have to make your own assessments. Life’s full of little potted lessons like that.”

“Why, thank you, then. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” He looks at me with amusement, but he is scornful. I could easily pass out.

Though I’m still not to be turned aside, under the syllabus topic of separating the wheat from the chaff, or possibly it’s the woods from the trees. “You shouldn’t get trapped by situations that don’t make you happy,” I say. “I’m not always very good at it. I fuck up a lot. But I try.”

“I’m trying,” he says — to my great and heart-wrenching surprise — moved by something. A platitude. The strength of a simple platitude. What else do I offer? “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Well, if you’re trying, that’s all you can do.”

“Eeeck,” he says quietly. “Hooter.”

“Hooter. Right,” I say, and we motor on.

I drive us farther down Main into the tree-thick neighborhood of expensive and familiar Federalist and well-preserved Greek Revivals — all in primo condition and shaded by two-hundred-year-old beeches and red oaks — which in Haddam would cost a million eight and never come on the market (friends sell to friends to keep us realtors out of it). A couple here, though, have signs on their lawns, one with a JUST REDUCED sticker. Another paperboy is here, walking his route, swinging his swag sack full of afternoon dailies. An older man, in bright-red jackass pants and a yellow shirt, is standing in a yard behind a picket fence, holding an icy drink and raising his free hand for the boy to throw him a paper, which he does, and which the man snags. The boy turns toward us idling past, waves a furtive little wave at Paul, mistaking him for someone he knows, then quickly douses it and looks off. Paul, though, waves back! As though he thought, like a good dreamer, that if we all still lived in Haddam and life was revised back to what it should be, this boy would be him.

“Do you like my clothes?” he says, closing his window with the button.

“Not much,” I say, steering the curve around onto another shaded street, where there’s a blue HOSPITAL sign, and women in nurses’ garb and men in doctors’ smocks with dangling stethoscopes are walking down the sidewalk, headed for home. “Do you like mine?”

Paul looks me over seriously — chinos, Weejuns, yellow socks, Black Watch plaid short-sleeve from Mountain Eyrie Outfitters in Leech Lake, Minnesota, clothes I’ve worn as long as he’s known me, the same as I wore the day I stepped off the New York Central in Ann Arbor in 1963 and am at home in still. Generic clothing.

“No,” Paul says.

“But see,” I say, the crunched Self-Reliance still under my thigh, “in my line of work I’m supposed to dress in a way that makes clients feel sorry for me, or better yet superior to me. I think I accomplish that pretty well.” Paul looks over at me again with a distasteful look that might be ready to slide into sarcasm, only he doesn’t know if I’m making fun of him. He says nothing. Though what I’ve just told him, of course, is merely true.

I steer us back now through a nice but less nice neighborhood of red-and green-shuttered houses on narrower streets, thinking by this route to wind back to 28 and find the Deerslayer. Plenty’s for sale here too. Cooperstown, it seems, is up for grabs.

“What’s your new tattoo say?”

Paul instantly holds his right wrist up for me to see, and what I make out upside down is the word “insect,” stained in dull-blue Bicpen-looking ink right into his tender flesh. “Did you think that up by yourself,” I say, “or did someone help you?”

Paul sniffs. “In the next century we’re all going to be enslaved by the insects that survive this century’s pesticides. With this I acknowledge being in a band of maladapted creatures whose time is coming to a close. I hope the new leaders will treat me as a friend.” He again sniffs, then worries his nose with his dirty fingers.

“Is that a lyric from some rock song?” I’m getting us back into the traffic flow, heading toward the center of town again. We have made a circle.

“It’s just common knowledge,” Paul says, rubbing his knee with his wart.

Almost immediately I see a sign I missed when Paul and I were arguing: a tall, rail-thin, buckskin-and-high-moccasined pioneer man in profile, holding a flintlock rifle, standing on a lakeshore with triangular pine trees in the background. DEERSLAYER INN STRAIGHT AHEAD. A blessed promise.

“Don’t you have a better view of human progress than that?” I push right out across Main among the late-Saturday traffic and trolley vans shunting tourists hither and yon. Lake Otsego is unexpectedly straight out ahead — lush, Norwegian-looking headlands miles away on its far shore, lumping north into the hazy Adirondacks.

“Too many things are bothering me all the time. It gets to be old.”

“You know,” I say, ignoring him, “those guys who founded this whole place thought if they didn’t shake loose of old dependencies they’d be vulnerable to the world’s innate wildness—“

“By place do you mean Cooperstown?”

“No. I don’t. I meant something else.”

“So who was Cooperstown named after?” he says, facing toward the sparkling lake as if it were space he was considering flying off into.

“James Fenimore Cooper,” I say. “He was a famous American novelist who wrote books about Indians playing baseball.” Paul flashes me a look of halfway pleasant uncertainty. He knows I’m tired of him and may be making fun of him again. Though I can also see in his features — as I have other times, and as the dappled light passes over them — the adult face he’ll most likely end up with: large, grave, ironic, possibly gullible, possibly gentle, but not likely so happy. Not my face, but a way mine could’ve been with fewer coping skills. “Do you think you’re a failure?” I say, slowing across from the Deerslayer, ready to turn up the drive through two rows of tall spruces beyond which is the longed-for inn, its Victorian porches shaded deep in the late day, the big chairs I’ve daydreamed about occupied by a few contented travelers, but with room for more.

“At what?” Paul says. “I haven’t had enough time to fail yet, I’m still learning how.” I wait for traffic to clear. Lake Otsego is beside us now, flat and breezeless through an afternoon haze.

“I mean at being a kid. An ass-o-lescent. Whatever it is you think you are now.” My blinker is blinking, my palms gripping the wheel.

“Sure, Frank,” Paul says arrogantly, possibly not even knowing what he’s agreeing to.

“Well, you’re not,” I say. “So you’re just going to have to figure out something else to think about yourself, because you’re not. I love you. And don’t call me Frank, goddamn it. I don’t want my son to call me Frank. It makes me feel like your fucking stepfather. Why don’t you tell me a joke. I could use a joke. You’re good at that.”

And then a sudden stellar quiet settles on us two, waiting to turn, as if a rough barrier had been reached, tried, failed at but then briskly gotten over before we knew it or how. I for some reason sense that Paul might cry, or at least nearly cry — an event I haven’t witnessed in a long time and that he has officially ceased yet might try again just this once for old times’ sake.

But in fact it’s my own eyes that go hot and steamy, though I couldn’t tell you why (other than my age).

“Can you hold your breath for fifty-five seconds straight?” Paul says as I swing up across the highway.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do it,” Paul says, looking straight at me, deadpan. “Just stop the car.” He is opaque and gloating with something hilarious.

And so, in the shady drive to the Deerslayer, I do. I hit the brakes. “All right, I’m holding it,” I say. “This better be really funny. I’m ready for a drink.”

He clamps his mouth shut and closes his eyes, and I close mine, and we wait together in the a/c wind and engine murmur and thermostat click while I count, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …

When I closed my eyes the dashboard digital read 5:14, and when I open them it reads 5:15. Paul has his open, though he seems to be counting silently like a zealot speaking some private beseechments to God.

“Okay. Fifty-five. What’s the punch line? I’m in a hurry.” My foot is easing off the brake. “‘I didn’t know shit could hold its breath so long?’ Is it that good?”

“Fifty-five is how long the first jolt lasts in the electric chair. I read that in a magazine. Did you think it seemed like a long time or a short time?” He blinks at me, curious.

“It seemed pretty long to me,” I say unhappily. “And that wasn’t very funny.”

“Me too,” he says, fingering his bunged-up ear rim and inspecting his finger for blood. “It’s supposed to knock you out, though.”

“That’d be a lot better,” I say. Parents, of course, think about dying day and night — especially when they see their children one weekend a month. It’s not so surprising their children would follow suit.

“You just lose everything when you lose your sense of humor,” Paul says in a mock-official voice.

And I’m back in gear then, tires skidding on pine needles and up into the cool and (I hope) blissful removes of the Deerslayer. A bell is gonging. I see an old belfry stand in the side yard being clappered by a smiling young woman in a white tunic and chef’s hat, waving to us as we arrive, just like in some travelogue of happy summer days in Cooperstown. I wheel in feeling as if we were late and everybody had been distracted by our absence, only now we’ve arrived and everything can start.