When I woke, my father was standing in the doorway with a smile, and I realized that the creaking of the stairs as he made his slow way up them had been my alarm clock. "I know you don't like to nap too long," he said apologetically.
"Oh, I don't." I struggled to one elbow. The clock on my wall said it was already five thirty. "Would you like to go for a walk?" I liked to get my father out walking whenever I visited, and he brightened.
"Certainly," he said. "Shall we go walk out Duck Lane?"
I knew this meant to my mother's grave, and my heart was not in it today, but for his sake I agreed at once, sat up, and began to put on my shoes. I heard my father make his way back downstairs, holding the railing, no doubt, and bringing both feet to each step before moving on; I was thankful for his caution, although I couldn't help remembering the quick thud of his feet coming down to breakfast or clattering back up for a forgotten book before he went to the church office. We walked slowly along the road, too, his hand on my arm and his hat on his head, and I could see on each side the beginning of summer, cool and shifting by the moment, bulrushes in the marsh, a crow rising out of them, some late-afternoon sun breaking over the neighbors' houses with the dates above their front doors--1792, 1814 (that one had just missed the British invasion, I realized, and the mayor's civil refusal to have his town burned).
As I'd known he would, my father paused in front of the gates to the cemetery, which stood open until dark, and gave my arm the gentlest pressure; we went in together past lichen-stained markers that bore the names of forgotten founders, a few with that winged Puritan skull at the top to warn us of the end to which we all come whether we've sinned or no, and then back to the more recent graves. My mother's sat next to a family named Penrose, whom we'd never known, and the plot was big enough to accommodate my father's presence once he joined her. I thought for the first time that I ought to decide whether or not to purchase a plot here; unlike them, I'd already opted to donate my body to science, then be cremated, but perhaps there was room to stick an urn between my parents; I imagined the three of us sleeping together forever in this king-size bed, my reduced self between their protective bodies.
The image wasn't real enough to me to give me any further regrets; what lowered my spirits was the sight of my mother's name and her dates, chiseled in simple letters on the granite, her too-fleeting years--what was the line from Shakespeare, the sonnet? Something, something-- "and summer's lease hath all too short a date."
I quoted it aloud to my father, who had bent to remove a branch from the plot, and he smiled and shook his head. "There's a better sonnet for this occasion." He threw the branch slowly but with sure aim into the bushes near the fence. "'But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,/All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.'"
I felt he meant me, his remaining friend, as well as my mother, and was grateful. I had tried in recent years to think of her at peace, not as I'd seen her in those last minutes, struggling against her departure from us. I wondered, as I often did, which was worse, the fact that she'd had to die at fifty-four or the way she'd gone. They went together, those two sad realities, but I never tired of trying to tease them apart, to extricate one misery from the other. I couldn't bring myself to take my father's arm as we stood there, or put mine around him, and I was very touched when he did just that for me, his skinny old hand gripping my back. "I grieve for her, too, Andrew," he said matter-of-factly, "but you learn that a person is not so far away, especially when you're my age."
I refrained from pointing out the usual difference in our perspectives: I believed the extent of my reunion with my mother would be the mingling, over millions of years, of the atoms that had composed our bodies. "Yes, I feel her nearby sometimes, when I'm doing my best." I couldn't say more around the fist in my throat, so I didn't try, and for some reason I remembered Mary, sitting on my sofa in her white blouse and blue jeans, telling me that she didn't want to see Robert Oliver ever again. There are different ways of taking grief in different circumstances; my mother had never abandoned me, except unwillingly, in those minutes that had constituted her good-bye.
We walked a bit farther up Duck Lane, and then my father indicated with a little pause and a shuffling turn that he'd had enough, and we ambled back to the house even more slowly. I commented that the neighborhood had remained tranquil despite the new expansion of the town to the west, and he said he was grateful for the presence of the river, which had prevented the interstate from coming any closer. The very quiet of the street worried me; how much company could my father have here, when we hadn't seen a single neighbor outside since setting out on our excursion? My father nodded, as if the silence around him was all to the good. At our own front walk, I paused to say something else I'd thought in the cemetery but had been unable to utter--not my longing for Mother but the other ghost who had haunted me there. "Dad? I'm not sure I've been doing the right thing. This patient I told you about."
He understood at once. "You mean, by questioning the people close to him?"
I put a hand on one of the trunks of our arborvitae. It had the hairy, peeling texture I remembered from my childhood, the hardness of the wood itself just underneath. "Yes. He gave me verbal consent, but--"
"Do you mean because he doesn't know you're doing it, or because you aren't sure of your own motives?"
As always, when I approached him about something important, I was left a little speechless at his shrewdness. I hadn't actually told him either of those things. "Both, I guess."
"Look at your motives first, then, I think, and the rest will fall into place."
"I will. Thanks."
Over dinner, which I insisted on making for us, and our subsequent game at the chess table in the living room--he laid and lit a fire by sitting on a low chair near the fireplace and poking sticks into the grate--he told me about his writing projects and about a woman ten years younger than he was who drove over from Essex once or twice a month to read aloud to him, although he could still read to himself. This was the first he'd said about her, and I asked how he'd met her, a little surprised. "She used to live here and come to the church before I retired, and then she and her husband moved away, but not far, so later they would come to hear my annual emeritus sermon. He died and I didn't hear from her for a long time, but she finally sent a note and now we have these nice meetings. At my age, it can't be much, of course," he added, "or at hers, but it means a little companionship." I knew he was saying, too, that he could never love anyone but my mother and me enough to rearrange his short future. He reached for his queen and then changed his mind. "What sort of company do you keep these days?" he asked me.
This was a rare question from him, and I welcomed it. "You know I'm a worse old bachelor than you are, Dad. But I almost think I've met someone."
"The young woman, you mean," he said mildly. "Right? The one your patient abandoned most recently."
"I can't put anything over on you." I watched him move a bishop out of harm's way. "Yes. But she really is too young for me, and I think she's still wrapped up in what this other man did to her." I didn't add that my relationship with her was complicated by my having used her for professional research, or that even if she was now single, she had been my patient's lover and was therefore an ethical puzzle; all that would be equally obvious to my father. "Recently abandoned women can be complicated."
"And she's not only complicated but independent, unusual, beautiful," my father said.
"Of course." I pretended to be alarmed for my king's safety, to amuse him.
He wasn't fooled. "And you are worried, first of all, because she recently belonged to your patient."
"Well, it's hardly a matter to overlook."
"But she's single now, and done with him, in practical terms?" He gave me a sharp glance.
I was glad to be able to nod. "Yes, I very much think so."
"How old is she, exactly?"
"Early thirties. She teaches painting at a local university and paints a good deal on her own as well. I haven't seen her work, but I have the sense she's probably quite good. She's done all kinds of odd jobs in order to pursue her painting seriously. She has guts."
"Your mother was in her twenties when I married her. And I was quite a few years older than she was."
"I know, Dad. But that was a much smaller gap. And not everyone is meant for marriage the way you and Mother were."
"Everyone is meant for it," he observed with a flash of pleasure; in the gentle light from lamp and fire, he was calling my bluff. He knew I'd never risk my king, even to let him win. "The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need."
"I know, I know."
"And then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you.' "
"I wouldn't have thought you had that in you, Dad." He laughed. "Oh, I could never have said it to any woman myself."
"But then you didn't need to, did you?"
He shook his head, his eyes bluer than usual. "I didn't need to. Besides, if I'd ever said such a thing to your mother, she'd have told me to pull myself together and take out the garbage for her."
And kissed you on the forehead as she said it. "Dad, why don't you come to New York with me tomorrow? I'm going to the museum, and there's an extra bed in my hotel room. It's been a long time since you got down there."
He sighed. "That's an unimaginably big trip for me now. I couldn't walk around properly with you. Even the grocery store is an odyssey these days."
"I understand." But I couldn't help persisting; I didn't want this to be the end, already, of his seeing the world. "Well, then, wouldn't you like to come visit me in Washington this summer? I'll come up and drive you down. Or maybe in the fall, when it cools off?"
"Thank you, Andrew." He put me in check. "I'll think about it." I knew he wouldn't.
"How about at least getting your glasses replaced, Cyril?" It was an old joke, that I could use his first name when I had a special request to make of him.
"Don't be a common scold, my boy." He was grinning at the board now, and I decided to let him win, which he almost had anyway; certainly he was having no problem seeing the pieces.