Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

He turned back around to me. He was still yawning, so I had to yawn. It was cold. It was windy and damp, and there was no visibility. Instead of rushing inside, we waited in the fog. We’d be indoors for a long time, breathing indoor air. I was trying not to let myself think of the journey itself. I was trying to think only of our destination, of landing and getting our bags. It’s hot at home, so once we step into the night air our clothes will feel heavy. The funeral will take place two days from now, on Tuesday. I advised my father to keep it small, but he’s invited all my mother’s old friends, so it won’t be small. He gave Trish the numbers of my mother’s closest friends — women to whom he has probably not properly spoken since my mother’s death, since her funeral — and they took over. My father’s car is parked at the airport. He says he’s certain he’s parked in the long-term lot, but I’m worried it’s the short-term lot, and we’ll have to pay a couple hundred dollars. We will drive home from the airport with the windows down. I will drive. The journey from the airport to my father’s house takes about forty-five minutes. On that drive you find long stretches of pine forests and swampland, and refineries loom and blink beside the interstate. It is very close to the Gulf. The air smells like sewage, petroleum, and salt. When we get home, my father will turn the lights on in the kitchen and the living room, but not any other lights, go to the bathroom, take his various pills. He’ll look through his mail without opening any envelopes. We might take a walk in darkness around the backyard. I might dip my feet in the pool. We will sit in front of the television, try to find a movie or some golf, or check the weather. He will fall asleep a few times finally and declare that it’s bedtime. He will get up from the sofa, stretch and yawn away the stiffness that’s accumulated in his arms and neck and back, walk sleepily to the doorway to his bedroom. He will turn around and salute me and say See you in the morning.

When my mother died, twenty years ago, I expected that my father, Miriam, and I would go through a brief period of centripetal anguish. I expected I would come home from London to bury her, see my father and sister mourning, and closeness would develop, a strengthened sense of being responsible for each other’s well-being. I expected we’d all spend a few days together in the house, having dinners, doing housework, discussing whether to sell the house or refurbish it — my mother left instructions to sell and move away, but if we did not sell, she wanted us to renovate, tear down a couple of walls, make the place more modern, and put in skylights. Miriam had said to me, on the telephone, when my mother got sick, that she was going to quit college and travel. She had taken a while to get through three years’ worth of credits at college — more than three years, anyway. She did extremely well, but lacked motivation, and in her opinion, the time she’d spent going to classes, taking exams, studying and writing about subjects that didn’t excite her, was too long already. I knew how eager she was to leave the country — I had been just as eager, and the longer I lived in London the happier I was that I’d left home. Now she could finally go. I had a few hundred pounds saved and exchanged them for American Express travelers cheques, and had planned to give them to Miriam.

My mother died at the age of fifty-three. She and my father first met in New York. He was studying history at Princeton. She was at Vassar, studying anthropology. My mother came from a semi-prominent and highly conservative Southern family, and she used to say it was embarrassing for all of them that she went to college in the northeast, spent all her time in New York City, and met a German-born academic who was neither handsome nor dashing nor rugged, just quiet and polite and modestly intelligent, and who seemed to come from no family at all — his mother was in California, alone, and he never saw her. My parents married after my mother graduated. My father completed his doctoral studies and started teaching in California. My mother moved there with him. I used to look occasionally through an album that contained photographs of a small green wooden house on a small patch of dead grass. In one, my mother and father are standing in front of the house on a sunny day. My father’s arm is around my mother. My mother is smiling but my father is not — he smiles all the time, but never for photographs. I don’t know if my parents had few or many friends, but I like to think they went to parties and felt like part of a community. They looked like a couple that people would want to meet and know. When I was a teenager, that photo gave me the idea that living in a little green shack on a dead California lawn, with a German husband who taught history at a liberal university — on top of four successful years at Vassar — had given my mother a sense of having achieved a small victory over the people she had grown up among.

But I was not to be a Californian. Shortly after I was born, my mother’s mother became ill, with the same disease my mother would die of, and my mother moved with me back to her hometown. It was, I believe, understood that my father would follow. He liked the idea of his children growing up in a place where their mother had deep roots, and he intended to take a comparable position in a comparable university in the region. They would have more children, possibly many more. But then, when my mother was pregnant with Miriam, he got that editorship, which was something, my mother told me, that he did not feel able to pass up — it was, professionally, a major achievement for him. The natural thing to do next would have been, I’m sure, to pack up his wife and children and move us back to California, but that is not what he did. My father came home in the summers and between terms, and a number of times he got visiting professorships that moved him closer to us. But he remained, until he retired, a full-time professor in California. I had no sense, in my childhood, that this arrangement was a cause of unhappiness for either or both of my parents, and I suppose it suited them both to some degree. But it must have been difficult for my mother, and I think over time my father, who perhaps never stopped viewing the arrangement as provisional, came to feel a sense of shame about it — made worse, perhaps, because his wife and children never blamed him for it.

My father had months to prepare for my mother’s death. But when she finally died, he told us that he didn’t have time to think about the house, whether to sell or renovate — it was a very busy time for him. Then he promptly returned to California and went back to work, though not on his book. My mother left behind an inheritance. Rather than leave everything to my father, she divided it equally among the three of us. The travelers cheques I had been planning to give to Miriam felt like unnecessary charity.

I went back to London. I met a woman, a lawyer. We got engaged very quickly. We were engaged before we’d even told my father and her parents about each other. My father found this highly irregular and responded by saying he was too busy to come to the wedding, even though we hadn’t set a date. Her parents were unhappy as well. So we got married quietly and invited almost nobody. Her parents responded by giving her a huge amount of money. We combined that money with my inheritance and we bought a nice flat in Fulham Broadway.

I got the news about Miriam’s death first, before my father. The Berlin police telephoned me. I was walking into a meeting with the firm — an aerospace firm — that has taken me on to run a project for them. Though I was still officially a consultant, I’d be working on-site five days a week, and the contract was for two years. The meeting was a kind of induction. Some people from the Paris office were over — the firm was headquartered in Paris — so there’d be lunch afterward. This was over three weeks ago. It was a cold morning in London. Just as I was about to walk into the meeting, my phone rang. I was going to ignore it, but the number was not a UK number, it was a German number, and I thought it might possibly be Miriam — and since she never telephoned, it had to be an emergency. I excused myself and took the call. It obviously wasn’t Miriam, and at first I couldn’t make out who it was or what it was about. I walked toward a window — I had a view of a little lane. On the line was a very sympathetic-sounding policewoman. She asked if it was me. I said it was. I had never gotten a phone call from the police in my life. The woman explained that Miriam had died. I do not remember how I responded. I do remember asking, at some point, Has my father been told? She didn’t say anything right away, and I realized that if he had been told first, it would have been him on the phone, not the Berlin police, so I changed my question to a statement, which was just me thinking out loud. I said, I guess I will have to inform my dad now. Again, she waited, she said nothing. The meeting room was filling up. I could sense, without even seeing it — I had walked a long way to find the window I was looking out — that everybody was seated around the table already, trying to look prepared or eager by flipping through papers. I could hear some chatter, low, subdued, but it was coming from everywhere. The way an office sounds. Finally I asked the policewoman, How did you locate me? She answered, and she spoke of death notification procedures in general, and I listened very carefully. I decided I would like to know these things in order to explain them to my father. I thought my father might become emotional and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to deal with it, except to offer, as a pill for any pain he might feel, a diversion into the eccentricities of death notifications in Germany. I have such a vivid memory of staring at that little lane while the policewoman spoke. She was patient and polite, and at some point during her explanation I realized that I would have to travel to Berlin, and so would my father. I would be seeing my father for the first time in six years, and this time Miriam would be there, in a manner of speaking.