A Memory of Sound - Part IV

(Part I)

(Part II)

(Part III)

“Meredith has been seeing Father.”

Dan sat at his mother’s kitchen table, spinning his coffee cup, intently staring at the single drip that had run down the side and dried there.

Mother sighed. “I know.”

Dan looked up, surprised. “You know? She told you?”

“Your father told me.” Mother looked at him side-eyed, waiting to see the effect of the information.

“He told you? He told you? You talk to him?” Dan’s voice was a mixture of outrage and disbelief.

“Of course I do.”

Dan looked at her, mouth open, and the full truth occurred to him. “You’ve always talked to him,” he near whispered.

“Of course I have, Dan. He’s your father. He was my husband.”

“He left us!” Dan’s voice grew louder and cracked.

“He’s still your father and he has a right to know…”

“He has no such right!” Dan yelled and rose from the table. “He has no such right! He left you and he left us and it was his choice to not be a part of this family.”

“You have no right, Daniel, to tell me what I can and can not tell my former husband about his children. My children. Your father left for reasons that had nothing to do with you. He didn’t call because I asked him not to. What happened, it happened because of us, not because of you. If you had ever opened your eyes to what was going on around you, you may have seen that. Instead, you chose – and continue to choose – to be a completely self absorbed little shit.”

Mother was close enough that he could see the spittle flying from her lips and feel her hot breath on his face. She smelled of maple syrup.

Suddenly, he was eight years old again, in this same kitchen. It was his mother’s birthday, and he’d gotten up early to make her a surprise breakfast - pancakes, her favorite. Dan had burned the first batch, but the second set had turned out golden and round and hot. He put her plate on the tray with a small pitcher of syrup and a saucer of orange slices arranged like rays of sunshine. He folded the napkin the way they did at the beach hotel they’d stayed at the summer before; a tidy little triangle, standing up on its own.

He walked down the hall to his parents’ room, carefully holding the tray. With every tentative step, the knife clinked against the saucer, and Dan winced. It won’t be a surprise if she hears me coming! Finally, he reached his parent’s door. It never latched quite right – when you closed it, you had to pull in and up, otherwise it didn’t catch and would open with the slightest pressure. Mother had told Father countless times to fix it, but he’d never gotten around to it. Dan nudged it with his foot, and the door opened soundlessly.

They were awake, because he could hear them, talking? Maybe? But they were completely under the blankets. His father was making a low growl and his mother seemed to be having difficulty breathing. Was she sick?

“Mom?” he said, and gingerly sat on the edge of the bed.

His father angrily threw back the blankets, knocking the tray from Dan’s hands.

“Get out!” Father yelled.

“Oh! Oh, Dan!” Mother said.

Dan’s eyes burned with tears and he clumsily tried to clean up the mess. Pancakes and oranges on the bed, and maple syrup dripping into a sticky mess on the floor.

“Get out!” repeated Father, his face red.

“It’s okay, Dan, honey. I’ll get it.” Mother caught his eye and held him there. I’m sorry, the look said.

Dan had that same feeling now, standing in his mother’s kitchen. His face hot with shame and embarrassment, he turned without speaking and left, closing the door behind him. 

A Memory of Sound - Part III

(Part I)

(Part II)

Dan could not understand why Meredith was so quick to forgive. The man hadn’t seen fit to participate in their lives when they’d needed him most, what use did they have for him now? Dan had weathered his teens and college years largely alone. Mother had been so focused on Meredith and her boyfriends and prom and whatever else girls do, she’d had no time for Dan.

When he’d gotten the job at the bank (on his own merit, unlike many of his fraternity brothers), he’d managed to navigate the corporate waters on his own. Dan was nothing if not capable. There’d been a few missteps – a hysterical girl and ill-fated pregnancy in college; a few months where he’d struggled to balance his drink and his work. But Dan had worked it out. He was so confident in himself that he barely noticed that he went home to an empty apartment. So focused on his ability to exist as a single entity, he was completely unable to recognize his own misery.

Through it all, Dan harbored the seed of discontent, stamped with his Father’s name, deep within himself. He tended it with bitterness and fed it with each missed momentous occasion. By the time Meredith told Dan she’d spoken with Father, the seed had wrapped its black roots around his mind, choking out any memory of decency associated with his father.

He’d wanted to call Father and berate him. Tell him to leave his sister alone. He’d wanted to tell him exactly how much they didn’t need him, how little their ‘Father’ mattered. But days turned into weeks and the call was never made. Because in the very center of his capable self - his no-nonsense, fuming, miserable, self - Dan was a coward.

“Come to lunch,” Meredith pleaded. “Come and talk. We don’t have to talk about the past, we can talk about movies! He knows so much about movies!” Movies are the finest friend of the solitary man, a fact Dan knew well. For months, she hounded him and finally, he relented.

“Just lunch,” he said.

The morning he was to see his father, Dan woke as usual, shaved, showered and dressed. He looked in the mirror and adjusted his neat tie, then leaned over the sink and violently vomited.

He walked into the bank, pale and sweating. His secretary leaned across her desk with a grin of greeting. “Hold my calls,” he barked, barely glancing her way. Dan closed his door and aimlessly pushed paper around his desk. Right before lunch, he found himself bent over the toilet in the men’s room, dry heaving fear.

Dan walked slowly to the restaurant. He didn’t want to be the first to arrive. As he approached the café, he could see them through the plate glass window. Meredith, animated and bright and nervous, kept glancing at her watch. Father, small and neat and cool, did not seem to notice the time. He was ageless; his skin pulled taut and smooth across his forehead, his neck slim and his back straight. At fifty, he appeared no different than he had at thirty. He’s not throwing up in the sink, thought Dan.

Dan stood and watched too long. Father happened to glance out the window, and caught Dan’s eye. Father’s gaze narrowed and his brow furrowed, but he did not speak. Dan turned on his heel and ran. He ran from the restaurant and his father and his hopeful sister. He ran straight home to his apartment, called back to the office feigning illness, and climbed into bed. He stayed there for three days.

He did not answer the phone and when, on the third day, Meredith came knocking, he reluctantly answered.

“Dan! What’s happened to you?”

“Sick. I’ve been sick.”

She pushed her way into the apartment and busied herself in the kitchen, making coffee. She talked nonstop. “When you didn’t come to lunch I was so worried! And Father was so disappointed!”

Maybe Father hadn’t seen him after all. Or he hadn’t told Meredith.

“We waited forever!” she went on. “Then your office said you were sick and you wouldn’t answer the phone and…Oh! Dan, what is it?”

Dan sat on the couch and held his head in his hands and cried. Great, heaving sobs that shook his body and filled the small apartment with their despair. Suddenly, Meredith understood everything. She understood her brother’s coldness and distance and the depth of his loneliness.

“Oh, Dan,” Meredith sat next to him and tenderly, hesitantly, put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll never ask again.”

She never did. It was the last time they spoke of him until Dan called her to say Father had died. The oddity of that suddenly struck her. Why had they called Dan, instead of her? 

A Memory of Sound - Part II

 (Part I)

The trees were long bare, and the cool days of fall had morphed into the bitter cold of winter. Meredith had been walking alone, making quick time down the few blocks between the beauty school and her apartment. She barely registered him at first, standing there at the newsstand. As she passed, she heard him say, “Do you have the Journal?” and that was all it took to identify him.

When you have a father who rarely speaks, you take note of his voice. You memorize the sound, the cadence of his words, the tiny tics that make it his. Every word that came from his lips seemed to say to Meredith – Listen! In the years since he’d left, Meredith had replayed the few conversations they’d had, his voice on a constant loop in her head. She willed herself not to forget it. When she heard it that day, she was surprised that the voice did not come from within her head, but from Father himself. After so much time without him, she found herself face to face with the man who’d abandoned their family. She couldn’t think of anything to say, but – “Dad?”

His eyes widened and, for a moment, held the panicked look of an animal that’s given to run. But then they settled, and he looked at her square.

“Hello, Meredith.”

What developed wasn’t really a relationship, certainly not one between a father and a daughter. It was more a cautious dance. They spent an hour once a week over coffee, engaged in small talk. She talked about her roommate and beauty college; he talked about his accounting job and movies. The uncomfortable silences were too many to number.

She hadn’t told her mother that she was seeing him, and months went by before she dared broach the subject with Dan.

“Why on earth would you want to see him?” Dan had been predictably angry, and terribly confused. “What could he possibly do for you now?”

“It’s not a matter of what he can do for me,” she sighed. “Don’t you want to know that part of you?”

“He is no part of me.” Dan’s mouth turned down at the corners, a telltale signal that he was done with the conversation. Meredith wouldn’t doubt if no one went into the making of Dan. He seemed to spring forth, fully formed, with his hair carefully combed and his sensible shoes tightly tied. Meredith was certain she’d never be that self assured.

A Memory of Sound

It would have been generous to call it a studio. A rectangle of a room, sixteen feet wide and twenty two long, with the afterthought of a bathroom stuck to the far end. There was a hot plate, and a sleeper sofa, and a small table that served as breakfast table and nightstand, catchall and writing desk. It was small and neat and spare.

The man answered a knock at the door.

“Hello, Meredith.”

 “Hello, Dan.”

They stood for several seconds, uncomfortable in each others’ presence.

“Thank you for coming, for meeting me. I know –”

“Yes, you’re welcome, of course.” Dan coughed unnecessarily and shifted on his feet. “Well, I guess we should start.”

“Is this everything, then?” Meredith said. “There’s so little.” She looked at the half dozen books on the small shelf, the photograph of her and Dan as children.

“There’s more books, piles of them in the closet. He had enough time to read.” Dan laughed.

“It’s not funny, Dan! He was a sad and lonely man!” Meredith’s eyes brimmed with tears and her voice shook.

“Christ, Meredith. He wasn’t lonely. He didn’t like people and people didn’t like him and he lived alone in this shithole because he wanted to.”

“He was our Father.” Meredith whispered, fat tears rolling down her smooth cheeks.

“He was no such thing.” Dan said, disgusted. He started tossing books into a box.

Meredith sat heavily on the sofa, quietly crying. She absently picked at a run in her stocking, watching it travel down her leg.

“Oh, Meredith.  Come on, honey. I’m sorry. Let’s pack up and get out of here. We’ll go get some breakfast. How about we go to that corner joint, the one Mom used to take us to?” He rested his hand tentatively on her shoulder. He was not used to physical contact, especially not with women, not even his sister.

“I don’t understand why you hated him so, Dan!” She turned to him, her eyes big. “He wasn’t a monster, he never hurt us! He never hurt Mother!”

Dan pulled his hand away. “Meredith, you were a child. You don’t know what you’re taking about.” His voice was hard.

“But, Dan-”

“Let’s pack what we can and we’ll come back for the rest tomorrow. I have to get back to work.” He gave the photograph of the two of them the briefest glance before tossing it into the box.

“What about breakfast?” Meredith asked hopefully, though she knew the answer.

“Some other time, kid,” he replied.

When they had reached a stopping point, and Dan declared them ‘done for the day’ and left for his job at the bank, Meredith stayed to tidy up. Not that there was tidying to be done; she simply wanted to be there, alone, in her Father’s rooms. She had never been to the apartment before, and it was like opening a treasure box full of the man. Surely here she could find some token, some small insight, into her Father’s very being.

She had spoken the truth when talking to Dan – her Father had never hurt them. She’d never heard him raise his voice and he’d certainly never raised a hand against them. But despite his steady presence through most of her childhood, Meredith could not recall anything her Father had ever said to her. Not a conversation, not a comfort, not a promise or platitude or even a word of warning. There was the memory of sound, but not of substance.  It was if he were a ghost in their house, floating in the periphery of their everyday lives.

Then, when she was twelve, he truly did become a ghost – vanishing from their home with his characteristic silence. It was three days before Meredith noticed, and two more before she had the courage to mention it to her older brother.

“But where is he, Dan?” she asked.

Dan was seventeen, close to moving out, and hardly concerned. “He’s gone, Meredith. And don’t say anything Mother, you’ll only upset her.”

“So we’re supposed to pretend like we don’t notice Father is gone? That’s not normal, Dan. That’s not what normal people do.”

Dan smirked and she heard the unspoken – who says we’re normal? Then he added the real question, “Does it matter?”

No, she thought. I suppose it doesn’t.

Their Mother, to her credit, did her very best to insure the ghost father wouldn’t be missed. She didn't start to drink or take up with men or fall into religion, like many in her situation did. She simply worked very hard and watched their money and continued to be a good and fair example of perseverance. Meredith would like to say that she was kept awake at night by the sound of her Mother crying, but she wasn’t. Her Father’s leaving was the smallest hiccup. It was a non-event.

Dan went to college and got a job at the bank, Meredith grew up and moved in with a girl friend from her beauty school. Their Mother eventually remarried a car salesman; they had two small dogs, roast on Sundays, and a new Buick every six months. It was all very tidy.

Until last December.