My Father More or Less

4

Eyes down, shoulders slumped forward as though to make himself less conspicuous, Tom goes to 27 Foxglove Road to visit Astrid and her convalescent father. Her dad has been quite a trial since returning from hospital, Astrid has confided. The blows on the head have left him with only patches of memory and even those were not wholly to be trusted. There were mornings when he didn’t recognize his own daughter. In the beginning it had made her cry but she had learned to deal with it, or if not quite that, had come to accept his periodic blankness as a temporary disorder. With her dad unable to work, there was little money coming in, next to nothing. And her dad couldn’t be left alone, was prone to violent, heart-stopping fears, Astrid required to look after him day and night. Or if not Astrid, someone else. A friend named Mary Flaherty came over to sit with him while Astrid worked three days a week at American Express on Regents Street.

They were having tea in the parlor, Tom and Astrid, when the father bawled “Asty” from the room next door. Astrid looked into his room to see what he needed.

“Who the hell is that strange boy?” he asked.

“Da, that’s the American boy,” she said softly. “His name is Tommy.”

“I don’t recall having had that pleasure,” he said. “You can tell me over and again that I’ve met the lad but I can’t believe something for which I have no experience, can I?” For the third time (or fourth), Astrid presented Tom to her father. He shook Tom’s hand, said, “Heard so much about you, Tom, I feel like I know you already. Astrid, I suppose, has told you of our situation. We don’t do so badly, the two of us. Wouldn’t you say so, Asty?”

“You do,” she said with mournful insistence, “very, very well.”

“I’m not the one to sit idly by and be pampered,” he said to no one in particular. “That’s the worst of it. The best of it is having Asty about to give me a hand.” He held on to his daughter’s hand like a lover.

“He self-dramatizes,” she said to Tom when they were alone. They sat in the parlor, talking in hushed voices while the father watched television on the other side of the door. The shabby sitting room diminished with increasing acquaintance, seemed barely larger than the space taken up by its two occupants.

The conditions of Astrid’s life, the combination of misfortunes, moved Tom to a kind of passion. “I’d like to take you away from all this,” he said, the joke a disguise for something genuinely felt.

“You’re going to take me away from it all, are you?” she said, averting her face.

It was not as if he thought her beautiful or sexy or scintillatingly intelligent, though he aspired to discover one or another of these qualities in her. It was not even that she loved him or found his company amusing or reassuring, or offered him, even for a moment, some gratifying illusion.

“Do you think you could go out with me some time?” he asked.

Her brow knitted. “I don’t really know what you have in mind.”

He had nothing in mind beyond a further statment of what he might do for her if she would only let him. “We could to a movie or go out for dinner or rob a bank,” he said.

She didn’t laugh, was not easily amused, which was the thing about her that fascinated him most, her relentless, unassuming, weightless gravity.

He got up dutifully to go. “I’ll be back,” he said after they had shaken hands.

She brushed her straw-colored hair from her eyes, said goodbye with measured indifference, all her energy committed to a flutter of embarrassment.

He was writing a letter to his mother, inventing the details of his stay in London (creating himself a as a character he might sympathize with), when the ubiquitous Mrs. Chepstow knocked at his door, her face preceding the knock by a fraction of a second. His father had called, she said. She presented him with a half sheet of letterhead that had an out-of-city phone number printed on it in childish hand.

O. Chepstow watched him descend the steps from the doorway of her apartment. “You’re asked to ring back immediately,” she said as he passed.

Tom thanked her for the message, said he would make the call at first opportunity.

Astrid opened the door in slow motion, squinted at him, perplexed by the light.

“You said to come over on Saturday,” he reminded her.

She nodded, though seemed to have no recollection of any such invitation. “My da had a bad night,” she said. “He woke up around two in the morning with the impression that he was supposed to be at work. He put his clothes on over his pajamas and, in his super hurry, he fell down half a flight of stairs. We thought he might have to go to hospital.”

“That’s terrible,” Tom said.

They sat apart on the vinyl couch in the foyer in which they almost always spent their time together.

“How is he?” he asked. “Is he at home?”

Astrid looked up, smiled wanly, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Did you say something? I was in a bit of a reverie.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s not your fault.”

The conversation tended to die between them, and Tom felt dismissed by her silence, sought out a gesture that might reclaim his call on her attention. “You know I’d like to help you,” he said.

Astrid was staring at her hands. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “What can you possibly do for me?” Despite the complaint in her tone, he could tell she was pleased.

He thought of taking his father’s gun from his pocket and showing it to her.

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

“Forget it,” he said.

“No, tell me.”

He let her lean forward before he answered and even then he hesitated, drawing her out, sharpening expectation. He mumbled, embarrassed by the crudeness of his offer, that he might be able to lay his hands on some money.

She seemed scandalized by his offer, by the weight of its temptation. “What would you think of me, Tommy, if I took money from you?” She put her hand on his arm, then quickly drew it back.

He offered a secretive smile in answer, felt for the first time in her presence a small breath of desire, an unanticipated wind from the south.

Astrid got up from the couch and looked into her father’s bedroom. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the blessed,” she whispered, her finger over her lips. When she returned to the couch she sat with her leg pressed against his.

His suggestion that they go for a walk was not premeditated, was impelled by the urgency of the moment. He had to get some air, he thought, or he would go out of his mind.

She didn’t answer, seemed puzzled by his request. “Is it all right if I smoke?” she asked.

What he wanted was more air, not less. “You don’t want to go for a walk or you don’t want to leave your father even for a few minutes?”

She dug into her purse for a pack of mentholated cigarettes. “It’s all right here, isn’t it? I mean it’s not grand, but it’s all right.”

“I wasn’t putting down your place,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite places outside the continental United States. I particularly like sitting on this couch.”

“I think you’d really rather go for a walk. Isn’t that so?” She took his hand, swung it briefly then turned it loose. “What is this passion for walking, Tommy?”

“What is this passion for sitting still, lady?” He stood up, made restless by the idea of sitting.

The phone rang and she took it in her room with the door closed.

The brief interlude seemed to revive her spirits. She was determinedly flirtatious on her return, offered him nothing beyond the transparent insincerity of her performance. “If you really want to do me a favor, Tommy,” she whispered, “you know what you could do?”

“What could I do?”

She smoked as if it were a form of nourishment, closed her eyes as she took sustenance. “I don’t think it right of me to ask,” she said.

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

She thought about it, tortured herself with indecision. “Would you”—she hesitated — “stay with my father this afternoon? Mary was supposed to come by but she had to do something else.”

He said okay, thought to ask where she was going.

She gave him his instructions and kissed him on the cheek, a sudden blossom of energy. “I appreciate this so much,” she said, putting on her coat. In a moment she was gone.

Left to himself, he looked into Astrid’s room which he had never been invited to inspect. Except for a pair of flowered panties at the foot of the bed, the room was as tidy and impersonal as a monk’s cell. He sat on her bed, browsed in her meager library, studied the photos on her dresser top. Her life seemed pathetic and ordinary, even beyond what he had imagined, though he assumed the evidence was incomplete.

He used Astrid’s phone to dial the number on the sheet of paper the landlady had given him. After the second ring he changed his mind and hung up.

The old man, as he thought of him, was calling for something or hallucinating in his sleep. “I’m coming,” Tom said. There was no sound after that, not even the sterterous breathing that came periodically from behind the closed door. Tom peeked through a crack and saw Astrid’s father standing warily behind the door with a shoe in his hand as a weapon. “It’s the American boy, Tom,” he said. “Astrid’s friend, Tom.”

When Tom got to the Green Park tube stop, Astrid was already there, looking for him in the wrong direction.

She seemed out of breath. “I thought I was the one that would be late,” she said.

As they walked into the park, she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder, wary of some invisible pursuer.

There wasn’t an empty bench and he suggested sitting in the grass.

I’m not dressed for it,” she said. “We could just walk about if you don’t mind.”

He took off his field jacket, forgetting that the gun was in one of the pockets, and spread it out on the ground.

“What’s that for?” she asked, her voice rising plaintively. “That won’t keep my dress from being squooshed, will it?”

“You’ll be careful,” he said. “You’re a very careful person.”

His remark creased her face like a shadow or a slap. He sat down first, then she sat.

“It’s not comfortable,” she said, getting to her feet. She brushed the offending touch of his jacket from the back of her skirt.

He remembered the gun, made certain it was still in his pocket before getting up.

“What time do you have?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about the time, okay? This is actually the first opportunity we’ve had to talk without your father in the next room.”

She lifted his wrist to look at his watch, studied it a moment with vacant intensity. “It’s not going, is it? How am I supposed to know when to get back.”

He shook his arm with clownish fervor until the watch took heart. After they had walked another five minutes he took a silk scarf from his jacket pocket and slipped it into her hand.

She held it without looking at it. “It’s a Liberty’s, isn’t it?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Liberty’s. Tyranny’s. It’s for you if you want it.”

She seemed burdened by the gift, though also mildly exhilarated. She kissed him on both cheeks. “That’s the way they show their appreciation in France,” she said.

“How do they do it in England?” he asked.

Once they were out of the park she became fidgety again. “I should get back to work, shouldn’t I?”

He walked her past Buckingham Palace toward Trafalgar Square then over to Haymarket to the American Express building. She was silent and he played the clown, told her jokes and anecdotes, desperate to amuse her. The more he insisted on his presence the less real it seemed to either of them.

He asked her if he could pick her up when she got off and she said she thought they might be seeing too much of each other as it was. They shook hands.

A moment after she went into the building she came out again and returned the scarf. “I can’t take this from you,” she said. “It’s beautiful and all that but I have no right to take anything from you.”

He wasn’t looking at her, was looking everywhere but directly at her. “If you’re going with someone, that’s okay,” he said. “I’m not asking for anything.” He stuffed the scarf in her shoulder purse.

“I’m off at six thirty,” she said in her plaintive voice.

He said he would come back for her, though when she kissed him on the mouth — her lipstick had a faint cherry taste — it left him oddly frightened.