They May Not Mean To, But They Do

15

Daniel took Ruby and Cora to the Museum of the City of New York. He thought they would like the Victorian dollhouse, but they preferred an exhibit on graffiti. Then they walked down Fifth Avenue, past the hospital, toward his parents’ apartment, and the girls insisted on getting ice cream from a vendor although it was windy and cold.

“Let’s sit in Grandpa’s park,” Ruby said. “Maybe we’ll see the rat.”

They sat on the cold bench and watched pigeons fluff themselves against the wind. There was no one else there. Daniel wondered if his father would ever see the park again, if he would ever leave the apartment again. For all he knew, his father was slipping into a new stage of dementia, leaving the park, the apartment, the entire world. Leaving Daniel forever.

The world without Aaron Bergman was unimaginable to Daniel. Even this pocket park, where he sat on a bench in a swirl of dead leaves with his daughters, was confusing without Aaron. Why was the park here if not for Aaron? Why were any of them in the park if not for its association with Daniel’s father?

“It’s weird without Grandpa here, isn’t it?” he said.

“Do you think raccoons come here?” Ruby asked.

“Or the coyote?”

His father was the embodiment of the word “entitled,” Daniel understood that. It was a kind of strength, he understood that, too — Aaron’s sense that whatever the world had to offer, it was certainly on offer to him, and deservedly so. Daniel envied him that confidence. Perhaps it arose from being born into a well-to-do family. But it had stayed with Aaron even when he lost his fortune. A small fortune, but Aaron had lost it, lost a profitable, solvent, well-run family business.

My daddy was a gambler, Aaron used to sing, and Daniel would joyously sing along. They listened to Woody Guthrie records while Aaron’s business swelled up into a big balloon of impossible debt and then, one day, just like that, popped and shriveled and disappeared. Daniel had been quite young, so young he didn’t really remember being well-off. What he remembered were the years afterward, one surefire scheme after another, his mother getting a job, taking any freelance work she could rustle up even as she went back to school. He remembered the need, not for the family to live — there was always, miraculously just enough for that — but the need inside his father, the need for money, and for money to make money, and for that money to make more money, and for the lost money to reappear as borrowed money and the whole thing to start over again.

“I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, I thought you know’d,” Daniel sang in a nasal country-Western voice.

“Daddy,” Ruby said. She tugged at his arm. Things about him had started to embarrass her.

“Hard travelin’, hard ramblin’…”

“Hard gamblin’,” Cora joined in.

“You both make me sick,” Ruby said. But she joined in eventually, too. There was no one to hear them. Just an old man with the same red walker Aaron had, and by the time he reached the bench, the song was over.