My Father's Tears and Other Stories Read online

  An embossed chocolate box shaped like a heart held proof that his mother had at least once cut her hair. Verna Rahn’s Haircut, she had written in her little backslanted hand, June 18, 1926. (Moths ate some of it!) So this was its second packaging; bound with black thread, it was so long Benjamin didn’t dare pull it from the box, which still smelled, very faintly, of chocolate. He let the hair stay in its thick coil, nested in tissue paper. Its color was an innocent pale shade of brown with no gray in it—light brown, like that of Jeannie in the song. A country shade, he felt. Experimentally he touched it, and moved his hand quickly away, as if he had presumed to stroke something alive.

  And he found, folded at the bottom, under crocheted blankets and lace tablecloths and an Agricola pennant of purple-and-gold felt, something that he could never have given his mother but that his father had: a varsity football sweater, heavy-knit of yellowed white, the chest stiffened by its broad letter, the sleeves pinned up with oversized safety pins that were still there, their rust stains spread into the thick yarn. Another pin, in the back, took a tuck. This sweater, and the pins that had adjusted its fit on her slender body, gave off heat and implied the chill of vanished winters—mild moist Pennsylvania winters, young couples strolling the campus with open coats and unbuckled galoshes, their laughter making small white clouds.

  His father had come to college on a football scholarship, though he always maintained he was too tall and skinny for the game. He had kept playing through a series of broken noses that became a feature of his mashed and melancholy face. Photographs survived, of him crouching purposefully in the unpadded leather helmet of the time. Under the folded sweater there was a game program that included Agricola’s schedule; the team had played, amazingly, Cornell and Columbia and Rutgers. The little college had been overmatched—cannon fodder. His father had given his mother his all. He had clothed her in his pain, and their son had tagged on behind, uncertain what was so funny, but happy to be jealous.

  Varieties of

  Religious Experience

  THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall. He lived in Cincinnati but happened to be in New York, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights; her apartment had a penthouse view of lower Manhattan, less than a mile away. Standing on her terrace, he was still puzzling over the vast quantities of persistent oily smoke pouring from the Twin Towers, and the nature of the myriad pieces of what seemed white cardboard fluttering within the smoke’s dark column, and who and what the perpetrators and purpose of this event might have been, when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise. The earth below, which Dan could not see, groaned and spewed up a cloud of ash and pulverized matter that slowly, from his distant perspective, mushroomed upward. The sirens filling the air across the East River continued to wail, with no change of pitch; the cluster of surrounding skyscrapers, stone and glass, held its pose of blank mute witness. Had Dan imagined hearing a choral shout, a cry of protest breaking against the silence of the sky—an operatic human noise at the base of a phenomenon so inhumanly pitiless? Or had he merely humanized the groan of concussion? He was aware of looking at a, for him, new scale of things—that of Blitzkrieg, of erupting volcanoes. The collapse had a sharp aftermath of silence; at least, he heard nothing more for some seconds.

  Ten stories below his feet, too low to see what he saw, two black parking-garage attendants loitered outside the mouth of the garage, one standing and one seated on an aluminum chair, carrying on a joshing conversation that, for all the sound that rose to Dan, might have been under a roof of plate glass or in a silent movie. The attendants wore short-sleeved shirts, but summer’s haze, this September morning, had been baked from the sky, to make way for the next season. The only cloud was manmade—the foul-colored, yellow-edged smoke drifting toward the east in a solid, continuously replenished mass. Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything.

  Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books—Kierkegaard, Chesterton—read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building—its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds—would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

  No. The great No came upon him not in darkness, as religious fable would have it, but on a day of maximum visibility; “brutally clear” was how airplane pilots, interviewed after the event, described conditions. Only when Dan’s revelation had shuddered through him did he reflect, with a hot spurt of panic, that his daughter, Emily, worked in finance—in mid-town, it was true, but business now and then took her to the World Trade Center, to breakfast meetings at the very top, the top from which there could not have been, today, any escape.

  Stunned, emptied, he returned from his point of vantage on the penthouse terrace to the interior of Emily’s apartment. The stolid Anguillan nanny, Lucille, and Dan’s younger granddaughter, Victoria, who was five and sick with a cold and hence not at school, sat in the study. The small room, papered red, was lined with walnut shelves. The books went back to Emily’s college and business-school days and included a number—Cold War thrillers, outdated medical texts—that had once belonged to her husband, from whom she was divorced, just as Dan Kellogg was divorced from her mother. Had Emily inherited the tendency to singleness, as she had inherited her father’s lean build and clipped, half-smiling manner? Lucille had drawn the shade of the study window looking toward Manhattan. She reported to Dan, “I tell her to not look out the window but then the television only show the disaster, every channel we switch on.”

  “Bad men,” little Victoria told him eagerly, her tongue stumbling—her cold made her enunciation even harder to understand than usual—“bad men going to knock down all the buildings!”

  “That’s an awful lot of buildings, Vicky,” he said. When he talked to children, something severe and legalistic within him resisted imprecision.

  “Why does God let bad men do things?” Victoria asked. The child’s face looked feverish, not from her cold but from what she had seen through the window before the shade was drawn. Dan gave the answer he had learned when still a believer: “Because He wants to give men the choice to be good or bad.”

  Her face, so fine in detail and texture—brutally fine—considered this theology for a second. Then she burst forth, flinging her arms wide: “Bad men can do anything they want, anything at all!”

  “Not always,” Dan corrected. “Sometimes good men stop them. Most of the time, in fact.”

  In the shadowy room, they seemed three conspirators. Lucille was softly rocking herself on the sofa, and made a cooing noise now and then. “Think of all them still in there, all the people,” she crooned, as if to herself. “I was telling Vicky how on Anguilla when I was a girl there was no electricity, and telephones only for the police, who rode bicycles wherever they wen
t on the island. The only crime was workers coming back from three months away being vengeful with their wives for some mischief. The tallest building two stories high, and when there was no moon people stay safe in their cabins.” Then, in a less dreamy voice, one meant to broadcast reassurance to the listening child, she told Dan, “Her momma, she called five minutes ago and work is over for today, she coming home but don’t know how, the trains being all shut down. She might have to be walking all that way from Rockefeller Center!”

  Dan himself, before returning to Cincinnati today, had been planning to take the subway up to the Whitney Museum and see the Wayne Thiebaud show, which was in its last days. Dan relished the Disney touch in the artist’s candy colors and his bouncy, plump draughtsmanship. Abruptly, viewing this show was impossible—part of an idyllic, less barricaded past.

  “So we’ll all just wait for Mommy,” he announced, trying to be, until Emily arrived, the leader of this defenseless, isolated trio. “I know!” he exclaimed. “Let’s make Doughboy cookies for Mommy when she comes home! She’ll be hungry!” And he leaned over and poked Vicky in the tummy, as if she were the Doughboy in the television commercials.

  But she didn’t laugh or even smile. Her eyes beneath her bangs and serious straight brows were feverishly bright. She was burning to know what new and forbidden thing was happening on the other side of the window shade. And so was Lucille, but she denied herself turning on television, and Dan denied himself another visit to the terrace, to verify his desolating cosmic intuition.

  . . .

  Emily was home in an hour, safe and aghast and sweating with the unaccustomed exercise of marching down the East Side and across the Manhattan Bridge in a mob of others fleeing the island. Dan’s daughter at thirty-seven was slim and hard and professional, a trim soldier-woman a far cry from her indolent, fleshy mother. She turned on the little kitchen TV right away and was not pleased by the smell of fresh-baked cookies. “We’re trying to train Victoria away from sweets,” she told her father, and when he explained how he and Lucille had sought to distract the child, commanded, “Let her watch a little. This is history. This is huge. There’s no hiding it.” In the Heights, she told them, auto traffic had ceased, and men with briefcases, their dark suits dusted with ash, were stalking up the middle of Henry Street. She hid the warm cookies on an out-of-reach shelf; she sent Lucille off to pick up Victoria’s older sister, Hilary, at her day school; she gave a supermarket shopping list to her father while she went to the bank to withdraw plenty of cash, just in case society broke down totally. Vicky went with her.

  Dan found early lunch hour in progress on Montague Street. Voices twanged over the outdoor tables much as usual, though self-consciously, somehow, as if unseen television cameras were grinding away. The street scene seemed enacted; even the boys loafing outside of the supermarket appeared to be conscious of a new weight of attention bearing upon them—the importance, in the thickened air, of survivors. The air smelled caustic and snowed flurrying motes of ash. Sensory impressions hit Dan harder than usual, because God had been wiped from his brain. In his previous life, commonsense atheism had not been ingenious enough for him, nor had it seemed sufficiently gracious toward the universe. Now he had been shown how little the universe cared for his good will.

  He entered the supermarket and pushed his cart along. The place was not crowded with panic shoppers, but rather empty instead, and darker than usual, sickly and crepuscular, like one of those pre-Christian afterlives, Hades or Sheol. A few people moved through the aisles, past the bins of bagels and shelves of high-priced gourmet snacks, as if for the first time, haltingly; they scanned one another’s faces for a recognition that was almost there, a greeting on the tips of their tongues. Incredulity edged toward acceptance. They were coping, they were not panicking, they were demonstrating calm to the enemy.

  Dan returned to the apartment laden with plastic bags, two on each hand; the handles, stretched thin by the weight of oranges and milk and cranberry juice, had dug into his palms. Emily had come back with plenty of cash and several plans. Already, signs advertising communal events were going up on lampposts: there were blood donations up at the Marriott, near Borough Hall, and a special service at Grace Church at six. In the subdued camaraderie of the crowd at the Marriott, the father and daughter filled out laborious forms side by side and were told, by bullhorn, to go home, the blood bank was overflowing: “There is no more need for the present, but if any develops we have your names.” The fact had dawned that there were almost no mere injuries; the bodies were all minced in the two vast buildings’ wreckage.

  At the church, where he and the four females he escorted found room in a back pew, Dan marvelled at the human animal: like dogs, we creep back to lick the hand of a God Who, if He exists, has just given us a vicious kick. The harder He kicks, the more fervently we cringe and creep forward to lick His hand. The great old church, a relic of post–Civil War ecclesiastical prosperity, was for this special occasion full, and the minister, a stocky young woman wearing a bell of glossy, short-cut hair, announced in a clarion voice that at the moment several members of this congregation were still among the missing. She read their names. “Let us pray for their safety, and for the souls of all who perished today, and for the fate of this great nation.” With a rustle that rose into the murk of the stony vaults above them, all bowed their heads.

  Dan felt detached, like a visiting Martian. His sense of alienation persisted in the weeks that followed, as flags sprang from every Ohio porch bracket and God Bless America was written in shaving cream on every shop window. Back in Cincinnati, having returned, two days later than planned, by bus, he looked across a river not to smoking towers but to Kentucky, where each pickup truck sprouted a soon-tattered banner of national pride and defiance. Heartland religiosity, though its fundamentalism and bombastic puritanism had often made him wince, was something Dan had been comfortable with; now it seemed barbaric. On television, the President clumsily grasped the rhetoric of war, then got used to it, then got good at it. The nightly news showed how, in New York City, impromptu shrines had sprung up on sidewalks and outside of fire stations across the city. Candles guttered under color Xeroxes of the forever missing, memorial flowers wilted in their paper cones and plastic sheaths. Dan found himself aggrieved by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through this tired old magic of flags and candles—the human spirit stubbornly spilling its colorful vain gestures into the void.

  Some days before Dan’s revelation, a stocky thirty-three-year-old Muslim called, like millions of his co-religionists around the world, Mohamed, briefly hesitated before ordering a fourth Scotch-on-the-rocks in a dark unholy place, a one-story roadside strip joint on an unfashionable stretch of Florida’s east coast. His companion, a younger, thinner man named Zaeed, lifted his slender hand from the table as if to protest, then let it weightlessly fall back. Their training regimen had inculcated the importance of blending in, and getting drunk was a sure method of merging with America, this unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures. The very air, icily air-conditioned, tasted of falsity. The whiskey burned in Mohamed’s throat like a fire against which he must repeatedly test his courage, his resolve. It is God’s kindled fire, which shall mount above the hearts of the damned.

  On the shallow stage, ignored by most of the customers scattered at small tables and only now and then brushed by his own glance, a young woman, naked save for strategic patches of tinsel and a dusting of artificial glitter on her face, writhed around a brass pole to an irritating mutter of tuneless music. She was as lean as a starveling boy but for the protuberances of fat that distinguish women; these, Mohamed knew, had been swollen by injection to seem tautly round and perfectly doll-like. The whore was entwining herself upside down around her pole, and scissoring open her legs so that a tinsel thong battered back at the light. Her long hair hung in a heavy platinum sheet to the
stage floor, which was imbued with filth by her sisters’ feet. There were three dancers: a Negress who performed barefoot, flashing soles and palms the color of silver polish; a henna-haired slut who wore glass high heels and kept fluttering her tongue between her lips and even mimed licking the brass pole; and this blonde, who danced least persuasively, with motions mechanically repeated while her eyes, their doll-like blue outlined in thick black as in an Egyptian wall-painting, stared into the darkness without making eye contact.

  She did not see him, nor did Mohamed in his soul see her. Zaeed—with whom Mohamed was rehearsing once again the details of their enterprise, its many finely interlocked and synchronized parts, down to the last-minute cell-phone calls that would give the final go-ahead—had been drinking sweet drinks called Daiquiris. Suddenly he excused himself and hurried to the bathroom. Zaeed was young and resident in this land of infidels less than two months; its liquor was still poison to him, and its licentious women were fascinating. He had not grown Mohamed’s impervious shell, and his English was exceedingly poor. The whore’s globular breasts hung down parallel to her lowered sheet of hair while her shaved or plucked crotch twinkled and flashed.

  Through half-shut eyes and the shifting transparencies of whiskey, Mohamed could see a semblance to the ignorant fellahin’s conception of Paradise, where sloe-eyed virgins wait, on silken couches, among flowing rivers, to serve the martyrs delicious fruit. But they are manifestations, these houris, of the highest level of purity, white in their flesh and gracious in their submission. They are radiant negatives of these underfed sluts who for paltry dollars mechanically writhed on this filthy stage.