Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [197]
When the call came, I’d been standing in the lobby of my hotel in San Francisco. It was cocktail hour. Business men and women sat around a small fireplace sipping complimentary wine, talking quietly to one another or on their cell phones. Jazz was playing softly on the sound system, light brushwork on cymbals, a throbbing bass, a lone horn. Outside, on the other side of the street, candles burned in the windows of a restaurant, and I stood near the revolving glass door with my new book in my hand, this novel that was now being reviewed around the country, the response overwhelmingly positive. It was strangely hard to take, all this good news, and earlier that day, cold and sunlit, I’d walked up and down Nob Hill, I’d walked through Chinatown and Ghirardelli Square, I’d looked for gifts to buy my kids, and I felt blue. Nothing good ever comes for free and something bad was going to happen and when would it come knocking?
This was neurotic and self-absorbed, I knew, but as I stood in that lobby, just minutes from walking out the door and down to the Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore to read, it was as if I hung suspended in this membrane I’d learned all those years ago to break, this barrier between what was and what would be, and now came the ringing of the phone at the front desk, then my last name being called in the air. It was from the man who’d checked me in hours earlier. He was older, his hair short and gelled, his tie in a snug Windsor at his throat. He held his hand over the receiver as if it were a home phone. “There’s a call for you, sir.” Then I was standing at the desk, the jazz and cocktail chatter behind me. Fontaine was crying so hard she couldn’t get her breath to speak.
“Honey, what? What?”
I saw my children’s faces—six-year-old Austin’s deep brown eyes, swollen from allergies, his curly hair; Ariadne and how she’d make a face at me and laugh, as if she were fourteen and not four; two-year-old blue-eyed Elias, his big hands and feet, his patient sweet stillness—which one, which one. “Fontaine—”
She kept crying and couldn’t stop.
“Just tell me. Tell me.”
There was the shudder of her breath. “Your dad—”
Relief jabbing into my heart, a half-breath of gratitude, then the knowing and a right cross of black grief before I even asked the words and she confirmed them, and I was climbing carpeted marble stairs, the stairwell bright and quiet, a sound coming from me from so long ago, Pop’s breath in the air just three nights before, just three nights, and I was unlocking my door, then I was facedown on the mattress crying Daddy Daddy, a word I hadn’t used since I was a young boy and in it was mine but also the voices of my own children calling for me, and my father’s voice for his father, too. I had lived thirty-nine years without ever losing someone this close, so fortunate really, so blessed, so why did it feel so familiar? Why did this feel like the second punch following the first?
Then I saw it, Pop’s back as the four of us followed him down the porch stairs, Mom crying inside the house. There was the glint of frost on gravel, Pop tousling my hair, then his old Lancer driving down the hill and Jeb running after it, You bum! You bum! You bum!
Jeb opened the lid and I climbed out. I was blinking in the light at my friends, at my younger brother who held out his hand.
THE LADY I’d bought the plot from said her men would dig as soon as the thaw began. I asked her if she owned her own backhoe. She said no, they dig it themselves.
I could feel the blood descend into my hands. “Would you mind if we did that then? His sons?