Lily King - Father of the Rain

“It’s like you don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“After I told you he liked you, everything you did said stay away.”

I was stung and stunned by this. Stay away . I somehow said stay away with my outside while my inside was yelling come here .

“I cannot believe you made out with a cop. You really do have a thing for uniforms,” Julie says.

“Please don’t tell anyone.” I mean Jonathan. If she is in touch with him. Which is a question I never ask. It’s better for me not to know.

“So what are you doing on the Thursday before Columbus Day weekend?” she says.

“Not much. No, actually,” I say, pretending to look at a calendar, “it’s a very hectic day. The dogs are going in to have their toe-nails clipped.”

“I cannot get there too soon.”

“What?”

“My father’s birthday present. A night in New York to celebrate my grandparents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, then a trip up the New England coast. Give me directions to your house.”

“Whoever that was put a smile on your face,” my father says.

“My friend Julie. She and her father are coming here next Thursday.”

“To stay with us?”

“No, just for lunch. I think we should take them to the Lobster Shack.”

“What’s this we shit?”

“Oh, Dad, please join us. I want you to meet her. She’s my very best friend.”

“Is she your vewy vewy bestest fwiend? Bester than me and Maybelle?”

“It’s a three-way tie,” I say, rubbing Maybelle’s little head.

“Where’re they from?”

“Brooklyn. But he lives in San Francisco now and she lives in Albuquerque.”

“San Francisco. He a fag?”

“Dad.”

“I’m just wondering.”

“He’s had three wives.”

“Jesus.”

I don’t bother to remind him that he is not far behind.

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a doctor.” I didn’t want to tell him that, either. He doesn’t like being around strangers with successful careers. At least I was careful not to say Jewish psychiatrist.

On Thursday he is cranky all morning. The tractor isn’t working properly. The new guy at the hardware store is useless. He screams at the dogs. I see him glance at the clock, like he used to, waiting for it to be drinking hour. I think he does it to get a rise out of me, but I don’t react.

And then they are here, Julie leaping out of the car even before her father cuts the engine, dodging the dogs up the path, reaching me at the bottom of the porch stairs. She’s cut her hair straight across at the jawline. She told me but I forgot. She’s wearing new clothes. She looks different, older. She’s a full professor now. It’s disorienting, seeing her here in my yard. She is Michigan and card games and all-nighters and Jonathan on the floor with us because we never did get a kitchen table, all of us eating his $3 spaghetti. Her hug is tight. There are so many things I can’t have back.

“This town is so cute! I’m not sure I ever knew it was on the water, I mean right on the water. I always pictured it so gloomy and sinister. And this house is enormous. It’s like a B & B.”

Her father comes up the walkway, tucking in the back of his shirt. “I’m starting to understand why even Berkeley might have paled in comparison.” He kisses me on the cheek.

“It wasn’t really a choice of geography, per se.” I hear the sudden peevishness in my voice and soften it. “Thank you for making the detour for me.”

“Hardly a detour. You were always part of the plan,” he says.

I haven’t seen Julie’s father in a couple of years. He looks the same, a medium-sized man with a full head of silver hair he wears cropped square, a grown-out buzz cut. I wonder if he remembers the diamond-in-the-rough comment and what he will say after this visit. There’s always the expectation on Julie’s part that we will get along instantly. But it has always hurt a little to be around them.

My father comes out on the porch. I lead them up to meet him.

“You found us,” he says, and puts out his hand. “Gardiner Amory.”

“Alex Kellerman.”

There’s always tremendous subtext when two men of their generation shake hands. It’s always a power grab. I watch my father accentuate his height advantage while Alex stands with his thick legs too far apart, as if he might need to crouch and spring.

“And this is Julie, Dad.”

My father’s shoulders soften and he bends his elbow as he takes her hand. “Great to meet you. I know Daley misses you a lot. Her housemate now isn’t much fun.”

I’ve never in my adult life introduced my father to anyone.

Alex peers in the house. He wants to have a look around, as I would in his place. But I only have a few hours with Julie and do not want to spend it in the New England WASP Museum. I suggest a walk on the beach and then lunch in town. Alex asks if he could use the restroom.

I walk him through the pantry and dining room to the bathroom off the den.

“The light’s a little tricky,” I say, punching the round black cylinder hard.

“Whoa,” he says, noticing the team photographs. At the feet of the boys in the front row was always the same black board with white letters and numbers identifying the team and the date. 1940–1949 were the years accounted for at St. Paul’s, and I knew that wouldn’t slip Julie’s father’s notice. Two great-uncles of Julie’s had died at Treblinka while my father was at a fancy boarding school.

“Which one is your dad?” he asks, tapping the glass of the Football Thirds, 1941.

I put my finger on the smallest boy in front, looking warily ahead but not at the camera.

“He looks scared, doesn’t he? Imagine having been shipped away from your mother at such a young age. Hey, here he looks about twelve and already on varsity,” he says, tapping another picture.

“He was always good at tennis.”

“He’s half the size of his teammates.”

“He was really small, and then he shot up. Look.” I point to a photograph on the other side of the bathroom, near the sink. In it my father is on the far right, his hair darker and his face much narrower, holding one of the oars, the tallest man on the team. He looks as if he has better things to do than stand around having his photograph taken by some moron.

“It’s a real slice of history, isn’t it?” he says.

“One privileged sliver of it, I suppose.” All the St. Paul’s boys stare at me, fresh cut grass on their cleats. Then I remember Alex wants to go to the bathroom and I quickly leave him to it.

On the porch, my father and Julie seem to be talking about pool vacuums. He’s making an effort with her. He’s facing her directly, not looking off somewhere like he often does with people, and bending toward her to make sure he hears her response. He asks if she’s made some friends in Albuquerque yet, and she says she thought in a warmer climate people would be more approachable, but the people in her apartment building are always rushing downstairs with mountain bikes on their shoulders, no time to chat.

“You’ll have to get yourself a mountain bike, I guess,” my father says.

“Yup. Right about when hell freezes over.”

My father laughs. Julie, I see now, is the kind of woman my father would call a real pistol.

We get in their rental car, the men in front.

“So here we are with our fathers,” I say quietly.

“Just another regular day,” Julie says.

We look at the backs of their heads and laugh.

I point out the Vance sisters’ driveway.

“The ones who called each other mother and father,” Julie says, as if it’s from a book she read a long time ago.

I show her Mallory’s parents’ house, and then, quietly, Patrick’s old house. The beach lot is full so we park in the driveway of a summer house that has been empty for years. All the green shutters have been pulled closed.