Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

T here was a sixth call. From my son Paul Bascombe, on the road, telling me he and “Jill” wouldn’t make it in tonight — last night, now — due to “hitting the edge of some lake-effect snow” that “has Buffalo paralyzed clear down into western PA.” They were “hoping to push on past Valley Forge.” Weighty pauses were left between phrases—“has Buffalo paralyzed,” “lake-effect snow,” “western PA”—to denote how hysterical these all are, requiring extra time for savoring. The two of them, he said, “almost picked up a flop in Hershey.” I’ve invited them to stay here, but Paul doesn’t like my house and I’m happy for them not to. I have a sense, of course, that Paul has surprises for us. Something’s in his flat, no-affect, Kanzcity-middlewestern, put-on phone voice that I don’t like, since he seems to strive too hard to become that strange overconfident, businessy mainstreamer with a mainstreamer’s sealed-off certainty riven right into the lingo. I haven’t given up on the notion of things generally “working out,” or with either of my children “fitting in,” but I’d also be pleased if they both thought these things had happened. I halfway expected Paul to say he’d “rest in the City of Brotherly Love,” but he couldn’t have suppressed a shout of hilarity, which would’ve ruined it.

Nine years ago, when he was an unusual and uninspired senior at Haddam HS — it was during the two years when Ann’s husband, Charley, had his first cruel brush with colon cancer and Ann simply couldn’t deal with Paul and Clarissa — Paul lived with me in the very house on Cleveland Street where he’d lived as a little boy, the house I bought from Ann when she moved away from Haddam and married Charley, and of course the very house she lives in this morning. It was the time when Ann — for some good reasons — thought Paul might have Asperger’s and was forcing me, at great expense, to drive him down to Hopkins to be neurologically evaluated. He was evaluated and didn’t have Asperger’s or anything else. The Hopkins doctor said Paul was “unsystematically oppositional” by nature and probably would be all his life, that there was nothing wrong with that, nor anything I could do or should want to, since plenty of interesting, self-directed, even famous people were also that. He named Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Carlyle, which seemed a grouping that didn’t bode well. Though it was amusing to think of all four of them writing greeting cards out in K.C.

The day from that relatively halcyon time which I remember most feelingly was a sunny Saturday morning in spring. Forsythias and azaleas were out in Haddam. I had been outside bundling the wet leaves I’d missed the fall before. Paul had few friends and stayed home on weekends, working on ventriloquism and learning to make his dummy — Otto — talk, roll his bulging eyes, mug, agitate his acrylic eyebrows over something Paul, his straight man, said and needed to be made a fool of for. When I came in the living room from the yard, Paul was seated on the old hard-seated Windsor chair he practiced on. He looked dreadful, as he usually looked — baggy jeans, torn sweatshirt, long ratty hair dyed blue. Otto was perched on his knee, Paul’s left hand buried in his complicated innards. Otto’s unalterably startled, perpetually apple-cheeked oaken face was turned so that he and Paul were staring out the window at my neighbor Skip McPherson’s Dodge Alero, which McPherson was washing in front of his house across the street.

I was always trying to say things to Paul that were friendly and provoking and that made it seem I was an engaged father who knew things about his son that only the two of us could know — which maybe I was. These were sometimes dummy jokes: “Feeling a little wooden today?” “Not as chipper as usual?” “Time to branch out.” It was one reliable strategy I’d found that offered us at least a chance at rudimentary communication. There weren’t many others.

Otto’s idiot head swiveled around to peer at me when I came through the front door, though Paul maintained an intense, focused stare out at Skip McPherson. Otto’s get-up was a blue-and-white-plaid hacking jacket, a yellow foulard, floppy brown trousers, and a frizz of bright yellow “hair,” on top of which teetered a green derby hat. He looked like a drunk bet-placer at a second-rate dog track. Paul had bought him at a going-out-of-business magic shop in Gotham.

“I’ve decided what I want to be,” Paul said, staring away purposefully. Otto regarded Paul, batted his eyebrows up and down, then looked back at me. “The invisible man. You know? He unwinds his bandages and he’s gone. That’d be great.” Paul often said distressing things just to be, in fact, oppositional and usually didn’t really know or care what they meant or portended.

“Sounds pretty permanent.” I sat on the edge of the overstuffed chair I usually read my paper in at night. Otto stared at me, as if listening. “You’re only seventeen. Somebody might say you just got here.” Otto spun his head round full circle and blinked his bright-blue bulbous eyes, as if I’d said something outrageous.

“I can act through Otto,” Paul said. “It’ll be perfect. Ventriloquism makes the best sense if the ventriloquist’s invisible. You know?” He kept his stare fixed out at Skip, who was working over his hubcaps.

“Okay,” I said. Somebody might’ve interpreted this as a silent “cry for help,” an early warning sign of depression, some antisocial eruption in the offing. But I didn’t. Adolescent jabber designed to drive me crazy, is what I thought. Paul has put this instinct to work in the greeting-card industry. “Sounds great,” I said.

“It’s great and it’s also true.” He turned and frowned at me.

“True. Okay. True.”

“Greet ’n true,” Otto said in a scratchy falsetto that sounded like Paul, though I couldn’t see his whispering lips or his suppressed pleasure. “Greet ’n true, greet ’n true, greet ’n true.”

That’s all I remember about this — though I didn’t think about it at the time in 1991. But it’s probably not something a father could forget and might even experience guilt about, which I may have done for a while, but stopped. I also remember because it reminds me of Paul in the most vivid of ways, of what he was like as a boy, and makes me think, as only a parent would, of the progress that lurks unbeknownst in even our apparent failures. By his own controlling hand, Paul may now be said to have gotten what he wanted, willed invisibility, and may already be far down the road to happiness.

C larissa’s beau, the New Hampshire Healey 1000 guy, I’m grievously forced to meet as I make my hurried trip through the kitchen, wanting to catch a bite and beat it. I intentionally stayed in my office, hoping the lovebirds would get bored waiting for Clarissa’s “Dad” and head out for a beach ramble or a cold Healey ride for a shiatsu massage up in Mantoloking. I could meet him later. But when I head through, my Surf Road listing papers in hand, aiming for a fast cup of coffee and a sinker, I find Clarissa. And Thom. (As in “Hi, Frank, this is my friend Thom”—I’m guessing the spelling—“who I woogled the bee-jesus out of all night long in your guest room, whether you approve or don’t.” This last part she doesn’t say.)

The two of them are arranged languidly, side-by-side, yet somehow theatrically intent at the glass-topped breakfast table, precisely where Sally gave me my bad news last May. Clarissa’s wearing a pair of man’s red-and-green-plaid boxer shorts and a frayed blue Brooks Brothers pajama shirt — mine. Her short hair’s mussed, her cheeks pale, her contacts are out, and she has her long-toed bare feet across the space of chairs in Thom’s lap and is studying an Orvis catalog. (All evidence of a “committed relationship” with another female gone. Poof. Things happen too fast for me — which, I guess, is a given.)