Richard Ford - Independence Day

“We’ve probably got a lot of things to talk about,” Irv says prophetically, keeping his heavy hand where it is, so that I feel forced to keep mine where it is, in a sort of unwieldy, arms-length non-embrace. Several Oneontans waiting in front of us have already cast threatening now-just-don’t-get-me-involved-in-this frowns our way, as though dangerously unsuppressed effusions were about to splash on everybody like battery acid, with violence a likely outcome. But this is as far as it’s going; I could easily tell them as much.

“We might, Irv,” I say, not knowing what those things could be.

A shadowy someone inside the Dairy Queen slides back the rickety glass on the SORRY CLOSED window and says from inside, “I can help you down here, folks.” The Oneontans all give us a hesitant look as if Irv and I might suddenly rush the other window, though we don’t. They turn back toward their own original window, consider it skeptically, then as a group all shift over to number two, giving Irv and me a straight shot to the front.

O n our way back up the hill we walk side by side, as solemn as two missionaries, I with my fast-dissolving “dip,” Irv with a pink “strawberry boat” that snugs perfectly into the palm of one big hand. He seems to be elated but containing his feelings of transcendence owing to the sober protocol of Paul’s (Jack’s) injury.

He explains to me, though, that lately he’s been going through an “odd passage” in life, one he associates with getting to be forty-five (instead of being Jewish). He complains of feeling detached from his own personal history, which has eventuated in a fear (kept within boundaries by his demanding simulator work) that he is diminishing; and if not in an actual physical sense, then definitely in a spiritual one. “It’s hard to explain in literal terms and make it seem really serious or clear,” he assures me.

I look upward when he says this, my sticky napkin squeezed into a tight dry ball in my palm, my jaw beginning to ratchet tight again after our respite. High above us, sea gulls circle dizzyingly and in great numbers on the clear afternoon air waves, framed by the old green hardwood crowns up the hillside, high enough to seem to make no sound. Why gulls, I wonder, so far from a sea?

Fear of diminishment of course is a concept I know plenty about under the title “fear of disappearance,” and would be happy to know not much more. Though in Irv’s case it has occasioned what he calls the “catch of dread,” a guilty, hopeless, even deathly feeling he experiences just at the moment when anyone else in his right mind might expect to feel exultation — upon seeing sea gulls in dizzying great numbers on a matte of blue sky; or upon stealing an unexpected glimpse down a sun-shot river valley (as I did just yesterday) to a shimmering glacial lake of primordial beauty; on seeing unreserved love in your girlfriend’s eyes and knowing she wants to dedicate her life only to your happiness and that you should let her; or just smelling a sudden, heady perfume on a timeworn city sidewalk as you turn a crumbling corner and spy a bed of purple loosestrife and Shasta daisies in full bloom in a public park you had no reason to expect was there. “Little things and large,” Irv says, referring to whatever has made him feel first wonderful, then terrible, then lessened, then potentially canceled altogether. “It’s crazy, but I feel like some bad feeling is sort of eating away at me on the edges.” He jabs with his plastic spoon at the bottom of his corrugated pink boat and furrows his big-lug brows.

To tell the truth, I’m surprised to hear this kind of dour talk out of Irv. I’d have guessed his Jewishness plus native optimism would’ve sheltered him — though of course I’m wrong. Native optimism is that humor most vulnerable to sneak attacks. About Jewishness I don’t know.

“My view of marriage”—Irv has earlier admitted a strange unwillingness to tie the knot and make little hard-body Erma Mrs. Ornstein #3—“is that I’m still ready to go whole hog and lose myself in it, but really since about ’86 or so I’ve had this feeling, and this goes along with the dread, of just losing myself period, and in Erma’s case of maybe losing myself into the wrong person and being eternally sorry.” Irv looks over at me to see, I assume, if I’ve changed in appearance, having now heard his bitter admissions. “And I do love her, too,” he adds as a capper.

We are nearly back to the hospital lawn. The old, settling houses up above the sidewalk behind aged hickories and oaks seem less decrepit now for having been viewed twice in different moods and lights. (A cornerstone principle for your hard-to-sell listing: make ’em see it twice. Things can look better.) I turn and gaze back down the hill and over town. Oneonta seems like a sweet and homey place — admittedly not a place I’d want to sell real estate, but still a fine place to live once your family has gone off and left you to your own devices for combating loneliness. The gulls I’ve seen have suddenly vanished, and the afternoon air above the treetops is now swept through by evening swifts, taking insects and filling the sky like motes. (I should call the Markhams, as well as Sally, but these needs recede, each as they are counted.)

“Any of that stick to your wall?” Irv says earnestly, knowing he’s blathered on like a mental patient and I’ve said zilch, except it’s allowable now since we’re brothers.

“All of it does, Irv.” I smile, hands down deep in my pockets, letting the warm breeze lave me before I turn back toward the hospital. Naturally, I’ve felt what Irv is feeling five hundred times over and have no single solution to offer, only the general remedies of persistence, jettisoning, common sense, resilience, good cheer — all tenets of the Existence Period — leaving out the physical isolation and emotional disengagement parts, which cause trouble equal to or greater than the problems they ostensibly solve.

Someone from a passing pickup, a tee-shirted white kid with a mean red mouth and a plump, sneering girlie with her hands parked behind her head, shouts out his window something that sounds like honi soit que mal y pense but isn’t, then floors it, laughing. I wave at him good-naturedly, though Irv is captained by his probs.

“I guess I’m sort of surprised to hear you say all that, Irv,” I resume, to try and be a help. “But I think a small act of heroism might be to go ahead and try saying yes to Erma. Even if you get whacked. You’ll get over it, just like you got over the kibbutz.” (I’m a big talker when it’s somebody else getting whacked.) “How long ago were you over there, by the way?”

“Fifteen years ago. It left a major impression. But that’s interesting for the future,” Irv says, nodding, and meaning again that it’s not interesting at all but the goddamn craziest thing he’s ever heard of, though he’ll pretend it isn’t because he feels sorry for me. (I’d have thought the kibbutz experience was last September, not 1973!) Irv sniffs the air, as if seeking a fragrance he recognizes. “Now’s maybe not the time to take that kind of chance, Frank. I’m thinking about the continuity I was boring you with, about getting a clearer sense of where I’ve come from before I try to find out where I’m going. Just take the pressure off the moment, if you see my point.” He looks at me, nodding judiciously.

“How’re you going to do that? Get some genealogical charts made up?”

“Well, for instance, today — this afternoon — this has meant something to me along those lines.”

“Me too.” Though again I’m not completely sure what. Possibly it’s something on the order of what Sally said about not ever getting to see Wally and having to get used to it, only in reverse: I am getting to see Irv, and I like it, but it doesn’t have a profound effect.