The Invention of Solitude Read Free

house had dropped to forty degrees. Twenty times a day the phone rang, and twenty times a day I told someone that my father was dead. I had become a furniture salesman, a moving man, a messenger of bad tidings.
    The house began to resemble the set for a trite comedy of manners. Relatives swooped in, asking for this piece of furniture or that piece of dinnerware, trying on my father ’ s suits, overturning boxes, chattering away like geese. Auctioneers came to examine the merchandise ( “ Nothing upholstered, it ’ s not worth a nickel ” ), turned up their noses, and walked out. Garbage men clumped in with heavy boots and hauled off mountains of trash. The water man read the water meter, the gas man read the gas meter, the oil men read the oil gauge. (One of them, I forget which, who had been given a lot of trouble by my father over the years, said to me with savage complicity, “ I don ’ t like to say this ” —meaning he did— ” but your father was an obnoxious bastard. ” ) The real estate agent came to buy some furniture for the new owners and wound up taking a mirror for herself. A woman who ran a curio shop bought my mother ’ s old hats. A junkman came with a team of assistants (four black men named Luther, Ulysses, Tommy Pride, and Joe Sapp) and carted away everything from a set of barbels to a broken toaster. By the time it was over, nothing was left. Not even a postcard. Not even a thought.
    If there was a single worst moment for me during those days, it came when I walked across the front lawn in the pouring rain to dump an armful of my father ’ s ties into the back of a Good Will Mission truck. There must have been more than a hundred ties, and many of them I remembered from my childhood: the patterns, the colors, the shapes that had been embedded in my earliest consciousness, as clearly as my father ’ s face had been. To see myself throwing them away like so much junk was intolerable to me, and it was then, at the precise instant I tossed them into the truck, that I came closest to tears. More than seeing the coffin itself being lowered in to the ground, the act of throwing away these ties seemed to embody for me the idea of burial. I finally understood that my father was dead.
     
    Yesterday one of the neighborhood children came here to play with Daniel. A girl of about three and a half who has recently learned that big people were once children, too, and that even her own mother and father have parents. At one point she picked up the telephone and launched into a pretend conversation, then turned to me and said, “ Paul, it ’ s your father. He wants to talk to you. ” It was gruesome. I thought: there ’ s a ghost at the other end of the line, and he really does want to talk to me. It was a few moments before I could speak. “ No, ” I finally blurted out. “  It can ’ t be my father. He wouldn ’ t be calling today. He ’ s somewhere else. ”
    I waited until she had hung up the phone and then walked out of the room.

    In his bedroom closet I had found several hundred photographs —stashed away in faded manilla envelopes, affixed to the black pages of warped albums, scattered loosely in drawers. From the way they had been stored I gathered he never looked at them, had even forgotten they were there. One very big album, bound in ex pensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover—This is Our Life: The Austers—was totally blank inside. Someone, probably my mother, had once gone to the trouble of ordering this album, but no one had ever bothered to fill it.
    Back home, I pored over these pictures with a fascination bor dering on mania. I found them irresistible, precious, the equivalent of holy relics. It seemed that they could tell me things I had never known before, reveal some previously hidden truth, and I studied each one intensely, absorbing the least detail, the most insignificant shadow, until all the images had become a part of me. I wanted nothing to be