The Story of My Father Read Free Page A

children, my father had recently agreed to sell his house in New Jersey; we thought he was too isolated there since my mother’s death six years earlier. My sister and I had helped him divide up his possessions. Some were shipped ahead to Denver, to an apartment near her where he was going to live for a few years. Some were given away—to the four of us, if we laid claim to them, or to the Salvation Army. Some I had hauled to his summerhouse in New Hampshire in a big rental truck. But there were the last few items left for him to live with until the closing, and he’d told me recently on the phone that he was going to rent a small van and take them up to New Hampshire himself.
    What my husband and I concluded now was that it must have been on the way up to or back from this chore that he’d gotten lost in western Massachusetts and somehow seemed confused enough to warrant a kind of detention, if not arrest.
    It takes more than two hours to get from Boston to the other end of the state, plenty of time for me to imagine multiple variations on this story, other plot lines that might have led to this outcome. But what I couldn’t do for the entire length of the trip was to imagine my father at the center of the drama. That remained a mystery to me: what the actor had felt, what he could have been thinking as he acted. What on earth he was
up
to.
    My father was a small man, trim and neat. He had a gentle, nearly apologetic voice. He cleared his throat often, a tic and also a response to chronic dryness. He often had trouble being forceful or direct. I couldn’t imagine him—so modest, so self-effacing as to be almost comical sometimes, so much wishing
not
to be trouble for anyone—doing what the police described: stumbling around the countryside trying to wake someone, ringing doorbells in the middle of the night.
Bothering people.
Not my father.
    I was appalled when I first saw him, through the glass pane of a door the police pointed me to. He was sitting up, alone in a kind of waiting room set with several chairs. He appeared to be sleeping. When I came into the room, his eyes opened. He saw me with a kind of relief, but with none of the deep recognition that lights a face.
    He looked terrible. He was unshaven. He was wearing old clothes, worn and wrinkled and faded. He had on a particularly unfortunate hat he was fond of, a canvas hat he often wore when he went fishing. It was misshapen and stained. He looked like a vagrant—though later it occurred to me that in those same clothes, even wearing that same hat, he had often looked quite different: an outdoorsman ready to pull on waterproof boots and go fishing; a mycologist off to go collecting; a hiker ready to face Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson. So it wasn’t the clothes so much, I think, that startled me. It was the vacancy of his face, the look of nonrecognition—not so much of me as of the world—that made him seem homeless,
lost,
in some profound and permanent sense. That revised the meaning of the clothes. That said, “I belong nowhere, to no one.”
    His responses were without depth too. He did apologize for the inconvenience to me, but casually, as though I’d had to drive a few blocks out of the way for him. “Sorry you had to come get me.” That was it.
    He was tired, I told myself. Exhausted.
    The police gave me his wallet and the few other possessions they’d taken from him. They still hadn’t found the van, they said, and they expressed doubt, in front of him and speaking of him in the third person, that there was such a vehicle. I fell in with this rude behavior, to my shame. With Dad standing right next to me, I said, “Well, he lives in New Jersey. He must have gotten to western Mass somehow.”
    The policeman shrugged. He was a nice man, really. He had told me, before I saw Dad, that the people he’d waked in the night had been frightened of him, he seemed so agitated. He’d told me Dad had been “seeing things.” Now we agreed that