Wastrel father. He glanced at his mother. Her eyes were bright and focused on the television, but her dinner was untouched. She was not eating enough, nor was she moving enough. She was at once frail and plump. Fair enough, for a woman approaching eighty, but the house seemed increasingly ill-advised for her. Those steps, that bathroom. He wanted to remodel at least the upstairs bath, but she refused his aid. The only thing she would take from him was his company, the thing he was least capable of providing, living in New York. Was he selfish? She had sacrificed so much for him, worked so hard. He would do anything for her—except move back to Baltimore. He tried to make it home at least once a month, but it was more like every six to eight weeks, and then he was plunged into a miasma of errands. Doctors’ visits, home repairs. He still did many of those himself, as he had in his teenage years. He was handy, something that surprised people. He’d had to be, once his father decamped.
Decamped. That was a nice word for what his father had done.
Gerry did call his mother every Sunday night. After five P.M., at her insistence. “That’s when the rates go down,” she said, inured to this habit by his father’s days on the road, the collect calls coming from God knows where. Useless to try to explain to her that he could call on his cell for free.
“Mom—please eat.”
“It doesn’t taste right,” she said. “I think the shrimp is off.”
“We bought the shrimp salad today.” A treat. His mother would never buy Graul’s shrimp salad for herself. In fact, she wouldn’t shop at Graul’s at all, although it was literally walking distance from the house, could be seen from her front porch. She drove to the Giant on York Road and shopped with coupons. Graul’s was for emergencies and cakes.
“Nothing tastes right anymore. I told your father as much the other day, and he agreed.”
“Dad’s dead, Mom,” he said, not unkindly.
“Oh, I know we thought that. But can you believe it? He faked his death and skipped out on his second family.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Turns out he was in New York on Nine Eleven. Can you believe it? Or maybe he just said he was. Who would know, right? A colleague of his called his wife, said your father had an appointment at the brokerage there. The one named for a horse’s gate.”
This took a while to break down. Horse’s gate, horse’s gate—oh, horse’s gait. “Cantor Fitzgerald?”
“Yes.”
“I think that was a big hedge firm, Mom. Why would Dad have an appointment there?”
“Everybody needs office furniture,” she said placidly. “Besides, he wasn’t there. That’s the point. He saw an opportunity and he took it. He never loved her.”
“I’m not sure Dad ever loved anybody. That was his curse.”
“He loves me.”
The tense alarmed him. It was one thing to imagine his father alive, to entertain some cockamamie story about him faking his death （which, Gerry had to admit, would be absolutely in character）。 But for his mother to insist on his father’s love, something that Gerry was sure neither one of them ever really had—no, that was too much.
His first novel, Courting Disaster, had centered on their ill-fated romance, although his mother had died in that version, the victim of an illegal abortion. Why does Gerry Andersen’s art depend upon women’s death? was becoming a running theme in revisionist pieces on his work. But the novel had won a lucrative if unsung prize and it still sold robustly, so there.
“When did you see Dad?” he asked his mother.
“Oh, time is so vague to me. It was warm, but it might have been Indian summer, that spell of hot days we had in October? Yes, it was early October. We made love outside.”
“Mom!”
“It was dark,” she said. “And you know no one can see our backyard. All those trees. I felt as if I were fifteen again, Gerry.”
CNN had just called the election for Obama. Gerry remembered 2008, the one pure shining night of hope in his entire adult life as a voter. Schooled as he was in imagining the inner lives of others, he could not understand how people his age, people in his income bracket, people with his education, had considered the same thing a disaster. Could race alone explain these visceral reactions to Obama?
And was he thinking about Obama because he couldn’t bear to ponder the ramifications of his mother believing that his father still visited her, made love to her, when he had been dead for at least ten years? He had died on September 11, 2001. Not in the towers, of course.