Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [195]
“But I couldn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“I’d just gone to Mass. I didn’t want to ruin how I felt.”
“How did you feel?”
“Holy.” He smiled. In the gray-white light of the TV, there was a puffiness around my father’s eyes I hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t look well. He had both elbows on the arms of his wheelchair, his shoulders hunched, and he told me of his friend who came down after and couldn’t stop shaking. He had just sinned and could not keep his hands and fingers still. As Pop drove them away from the house, the shaking one began to pray to himself prayers Pop knew by heart.
He began talking about his own father, and while I don’t remember one detail of what he said, I can still hear Pop’s voice, the acceptance in it, the forgiveness, and it brought me immediately to one of those weekends when I’d spent the night at his and Peggy’s house on campus. When I woke in the spare room late in the morning, Pavarotti was singing and I knew my father was in his room writing. He sometimes played opera as he wrote, and lately he’d wear a Japanese kimono at his desk.
But when I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, he was standing in his kimono at the countertop, a cup of steaming tea there, and he was crying. I asked him if he was all right. Did something happen?
He glanced at me, his eyes shining. “I’ve been writing about my old man.” He shook his head. “I’m more like him than I ever thought I was.” He lowered his chin and cried and I hugged my father and he hugged me back.
Maybe my father’s forgiveness for his father had begun then, maybe later or earlier, but as I sat on Pop’s couch at nearly three in the morning, my glass long empty, Pop talked about his own father as if he were simply another man in the world like he was, just another man climbing out of bed each day to try and do the best he knew how to do. I listened and I nodded. I said little and did not need to say much. That had been true of my father too, hadn’t it? He’d done the best he’d known how to do, and if it wasn’t enough, then we still had this, didn’t we?
Across from me in the window was my reflection lit by the artificial light of the TV, a grown man sitting near another man in a wheelchair. Nine miles down the river, my own children slept in a house without me, and tomorrow I was leaving.
I stood and told my father it was time for me to go.
“All right, man.” He smiled up at me and raised his arms for a hug. I leaned down, the glass in my hand, and hugged him with one arm. His back felt broad and thick, and I could smell his Old Spice, the dried cognac on his whiskers. He held on and looked into my face and said to me what he said to all six of his children all the time, those three words his father had never said to him. I said them back and kissed him on the lips.
He took my glass and rested it in his lap with his, then he turned his chair around, gripped the railings, and pulled himself up the plywood ramp into his dining room and kitchen. He switched on the overhead light. I put on my jacket and opened the door. The stars were out, the air so cold my lungs ached with the first few breaths. Pop followed me out in just his black shirt and sweatpants. He stopped at the end of the landing before the descent of the first ramp. He was talking about this new novel I’d written, his tone generous and encouraging, the way it was with most young writers, including me.
I turned and waved and headed down the first ramp, then the second, third, and fourth. From the driveway I could see him in his wheelchair beneath his porch light, his breath thin and white, rising into the air where it vanished. Beyond him was the steep hill behind his house, the bare poplars in snow, their upper branches against the stars.
Pop was talking, and while I couldn’t make out his words, his tone was upbeat, and I knew he was still speaking about me and my new work.
“I’ll call you from the road, Pop.”
He called out something else I couldn’t hear. I started my car and didn’t give it enough time to warm up. I backed it to the frozen snowbank,