3
Unlike a city apartment, a house with an attic means never saying good-bye to anything. The Garner family attic swelled with the past: boxes of moth-eaten clothing, much of it sewn in that little room at the end of the hall, and the sewing machine itself, which hadn’t been donated to the Salvation Army after all but sat here surrounded by boxes of patterns; the small plaster replicas of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David, once displayed on end tables in the living room, and the end tables themselves, carved from an ugly mustard-tinted wood; the electric typewriter, flecked with Liquid Paper, on which I’d tapped angsty poetry in high school; an outdated stereo system that my father always called the hi-fi; a German knife set that I suspected might have some value. How difficult could it be to let go of a card table—a cheap piece of junk when it was bought and now an actual piece of junk, wobbly, broken, its veneer peeling off? Or a faddish appliance—a fondue set, a Crock-Pot, a carpet broom? How about a plastic Christmas tree, originally a convenience for parents of small children but over time a tacky embarrassment?
The more I took in, the more I understood the difficulty: Everything bore my mother’s imprint. Each worthless item was something she’d chosen, no matter how long ago, or had used, no matter for how short a time. Or else it contained a dormant memory that needed only the focus of my attention to activate: the time Dee and I dressed those statuettes in Barbie doll clothes—Malibu Venus, David in madras—then waited for Dad, sighing through his nightly perusal of the newspaper, to notice our alteration, the two of us finally erupting with so much suppressed laughter that Mom dashed in to see what was wrong. Or the time a birthday party devolved into a food fight as my friends used cheese and chocolate fondue for spin art on the kitchen table. Mom was furious at first but eventually relented, flinging a forkful of wet chocolate into my hair.
I came upon a stack of boxes, each labeled, in black Magic Marker, LEGAL, and used my fingernail to slit one open. Inside was everything related to the lawsuit my father brought against the hospital where my mother had died. I pulled out a few manila folders and scanned the contents: research into heart disease, photocopies of my mother’s medical history, correspondence between doctors and lawyers. Medicine and law, two languages good at obfuscating meaning. I dug some more, not even realizing what I was looking for until I found it: a file folder marked SETTLEMENT. I read a memo from my father’s lawyer, spelling out the situation. After weighing all the evidence, the judge in the case was prepared to decide against him, to give him nothing. My father was advised to accept a settlement of one hundred thousand dollars, enough to pay his attorneys and the private investigators they’d hired and have a little left over for himself, and to promise, in exchange, to drop any threat of appeal. A hundred thousand dollars was more money than I’d earned in my entire life, but considering the many years he’d spent on the case, and the fact that he’d once spoken confidently of millions of dollars in damages, my father must have seen this as next to nothing. I couldn’t quite believe it had collapsed this way, a decade-long odyssey abandoned with the scrawl of “Edward Garner” on the bottom line. The lawsuit had never been about the money for him, but about getting someone to take blame for his wife’s death. And no one had.
I hadn’t thought about any of this in years—the shock of her death, the way it extinguished in him what little mirth he’d had. (Never again would he laugh at something as silly as the Venus de Milo in a bikini.) I felt an ache behind my eyes, along my neck, and a pressure pulsing in the air around me. I should have gone to New York like I’d wanted. I could have been ambling in and out of galleries, shopping for cheap sunglasses on St. Mark’s Place, smoking a joint with old friends while we reminisced about the shit we stirred up in our twenties.
You have to own your issues. This was Woody’s voice, the therapeutic language he relied on, which drove me crazy but tailed me everywhere. He’d spent years in therapy, not because of any particular catastrophe, but to develop a protective coating against life’s unexpected twists. You have to deal, he liked to say, and you have to be ready. I thought of my family as having been dealt a lousy hand, one with the Death card smack in the middle; we had never figured out how to play our cards. When I left my family, I left my issues behind. Now here I was back at the table. Okay, I would stay a little longer, long enough to feel these old aches, admit to them, own them, then get back to the home I’d made for myself, where I could put them to rest, once and for all.
The sun slid past the tiny windows under the eaves. I pushed past the legal files, dragging a floor lamp on an extension cord, and found other items that had been my father’s—not my mother’s or theirs together, but his alone. A bowling ball and shoes (he’d played in the town league), his Army uniform (he’d done a few years of peacetime duty in Germany, where he’d met my mother), a tuxedo that might have been the one he was married in (no wedding ring in the pockets). I had my eye out for that unexpected something that would ignite the proper emotional epiphany; I would carry this home to Woody to show him that I’d done the work.
After uncounted hours, I didn’t find much. My father was a pack rat, something I realized I shared with him. My father had never gotten over my mother, something I already knew. My parents’ tastes were tacky in a mid-seventies kind of way—something of a badge of honor for a thrift-store hound like me. I could search here all day and never achieve the desired epiphany. I stood up quickly, steadied myself against the wall while the head rush flooded in, shook the pins and needles out of my limbs. I grabbed the case containing the German knives, which would make a good gift for Woody, who never put any effort into stocking his kitchen. I turned to leave.
Then my sights landed on a taped-up shoebox marked SAN FRANCISCO. It sat atop a dresser near the door; I must have walked right past it on the way in. I stopped and picked it up. In smaller print was written JUNE ’60–JUNE ’61. Another reminder that my father had once lived in my adopted city.
What had he told me about that time? If I remembered correctly, he chose San Francisco because he had a friend there, and because back then, we all thought we wanted to be beatniks. He worked odd jobs but never made much money. He saw Monk play live. And, oh yes, his most dubious claim: He had encountered Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats himself, at a bar in North Beach. They had a brief exchange of words; Kerouac was embarrassingly drunk and hostile to his young fan’s enthusiasm. Not long after that, my father returned to New York, broke and disillusioned with all things beatnik. That’s all I knew. A sketch, barely an outline.
Even years ago, when I was still making the occasional phone call to my father, I never bothered to find out more about his time in San Francisco. Our calls always flared into harsh verbal volleys—him lecturing, me reacting—and after each one, with nothing but scorched earth left between us, we retreated a little farther from the heat. The Kerouac story is a good example. I never believed it had happened because of the way he’d used it against me: a cautionary tale about the perils of rebellion, individualism, artistic freedom. Eyewitness testimony to the harder they fall.
How strange to discover that he had saved things from those long ago, much disparaged days. How curious.
I looked again at the dates on the box. My father had stayed only a year in San Francisco. I’d lasted a decade. When I first moved there, he called it Never-Never Land. He was certain I would retreat back East, just as he had. Had I stayed so long just to prove him wrong? As I stood there, surrounded by the full sum of his life—the domestic clutter, the orderly boxes, the failed lawsuit—this seemed like a real possibility. If so, then I guess I’d won. I’d held out. He was gone, and I was Peter Pan.
I heard another voice, that of my friend Brady, who edited the radio show I’d produced: It’s all material, dude. Freelance producers are always on alert for the next story, an item to be exploited. When something of so-called human interest drops into your hands, you’re obliged to notice. To take interest. See where it leads.
When I left the attic, I took the box marked SAN FRANCISCO with me.
That night after dinner, Deirdre sat me down, with Andy at her side, and told me that they were going to move Nana to a nursing home. Not a nursing home—something for people more active than that. Senior housing. They’d worked it all out. There was a place just one town over. Nana could stay there all