In the Early Times Read online

  Baby, I’ll try to love again, but I knowww…

  The first cut is the deepest, baby, I knowwwww…

  As we zipped past the office parks of the Jersey exurbs, I saw Walker resting his head on Addison’s lap. She was stroking his hair. I touched Amanda’s hand and flicked my eyes back, and she glanced around casually. When our children sense parental doting or Instagramming, they behave like an old-time mercantile partnership asked for a donation: the blinds drop and the locks snick shut. Amanda, who’s determined to preserve them at each poignant stage, has taken thousands of photos of them alone and together. “You’ll thank me later!” she says, when they fuss and groan.

  She herself often radiates inwardness, that unselfaware quality photographers hope to catch. My enduring images of Amanda are mental snapshots: the intent way she cups my face with both hands, then eases in with an eye-on-object focus, only at last parting her lips. The precise way she positions a heavy pillow atop her head to spatchcock herself into sleep, then slips one foot outside the bedcovers as a thermoregulator. The ebullient way she measures Walker and Addison against the pantry cupboard, elated by debatable gains since she measured them two days earlier. The all-in way she plays basketball for her urban-league team, the Foulmouths—boxing out, double-teaming, scrapping for loose balls. The brisk way she chest-passes laundry into the washing machine, then gives it a nod and a smile: Go get clean and I’ll see you soon!

  Our friends view me as even-keeled, calm in a crisis, a counterbalance to Amanda’s excitability, a perception Amanda shares, mostly. I often wonder how our children see me. Is the father I wanted the father they want, too? Or is the father I got the father I’ve inevitably become?

  Walker seems unusually self-possessed: he sits at the cool kids’ lunch table, a confidant who reserves judgment. Descending from his upper bunk for breakfast, he floats his feet halfway down the ladder and then nods back off. He required his baby teeth to drop on their own—no twisting or wiggling—and never left them for the tooth fairy: “I’m not selling part of myself for a dollar!” Instead, he hid them in the saltcellar, a tiny china chicken on our dinner table. He hates hikes and museums because they encourage dawdling. Obsessed with sports, he loves to discuss Saka’s passing skills or the fortunes of Nike, the most glorious empire known to man. His other treasures emerge obliquely. When Amanda and I fight, it is Walker who steps in as a teary referee.

  While he keeps being replaced, in rapid match cuts, by new actors playing taller Walkers, Addison has remained a waif. Happiest racing through the Hunger Games books for the fourth time, she often has no idea what month it is, or where that month falls in the year, guessing that February follows October in the same way she hazards that Idaho is a country. When she tries a deadpan look for a selfie she cracks up at the idea that anyone would voluntarily drain her expression of animation. In this she takes after Amanda, who always has a relaxed smile for the camera, while I usually look like mug-shot Gary Busey.

  Addison is a brooder. Mildly obsessive-compulsive—cupboards are ritually caressed, furniture reflexively peeked under—she has worn her cat’s-ears headband day and night for nearly three years to prevent an IED from blowing up our family. She gets stomachaches, and then she gets stomachaches from worrying that she’s going to get stomachaches. Like my mother, whom she takes after to an extraordinary degree, she’s a perfectionist prone to depression. Amanda recently found her at the kitchen table at 2:30 a.m., her head buried in her homework.

  Amanda, for her part, had awoken tense with worry and gone to the bathroom to find that the toilet wasn’t flushing—and the kids’ toilet wasn’t, either! After coaxing Addison into bed, she emailed everyone in the building and constructed a “Climate change has swamped the water tunnels and shattered our sewage pipes!” scenario that kept her up till dawn. She regularly patrols our apartment, worried that the stove may spontaneously ignite or that a burglar might be hiding in the four-inch cranny under our bed. War-gaming these premonitions, she’ll round the corner, see a stranger, and jump in alarm. It’s just me, your husband.

  Three days later, she texted me, “What’s the novel about the looming cloud? The wife wears a sweatsuit.”

  “White Noise,” I replied. “Why? Is your mind taking a doomy turn?”

  Silence.

  * * *

  —

  Walker, Addison, and Amanda in Indonesia, 2018.

  * * *

  —

  As a writer for The New Yorker, I love portraying outliers: a Hollywood agent who doesn’t schmooze; a venture capitalist who relishes the limelight; scientists who believe in the possibility of immortality. In order to understand the rules the rebels are breaking as well as those they’re trying to establish, I ask about everything.

  This approach works best with strangers. In my family, questions are traditionally limited to how you slept and whether you unloaded the dishwasher yet. Still, you’d think that by now, in my mid-fifties, after years of observation, I’d have a fix on my closest relatives. But fitting your family together begins as a jigsaw puzzle and becomes an anxiety dream. You assemble the exterior first, the frame—your parents and your own childhood—and your pattern matching improves as you work the pieces, amassing colors and motifs. Yet the central portrait, of your own marriage and children, keeps shifting as you all age, the lobed outlines morphing in your fingers. You begin to wonder if the frame is as fixed as you had thought, and then even your vantage point begins to feel unstable—or mine does, anyway. Sometimes the puzzle itself seems to be floating away from me.

  I told myself it wasn’t a midlife crisis, because that’s when you want to be someone else. I believed that I’d gotten through most of that kind of flailing about before my life began in earnest; nearly forty when I married Amanda, I was forty-three when Addison and Walker were born. I told myself I was just having a midlife slump. A crisis is vivid (the crimson Ferrari, the pink slip); a slump is simply a gray mass of days. I’d wake pinned by cares at 5:00 a.m., the hour of remorse: overdue tax payments; overdue museum-permission forms; an overdue article; Roth IRA regret. Sometimes I’d pad into the kids’ room to admire them as they slept—Addison clutching a stuffed penguin, Walker hand to heart, pledging allegiance.

  When you’re young, the past is just steps behind you, tracks in the snow. By plopping each boot in its previous imprint, you can backtrack to inhabit twenty-one, fourteen, six, four. Gradually, imperceptibly, the snow melts and the track muddies and a silent severing occurs. Twenty-one is somewhere to the rear, but the way back is a bog and darkness is drawing on.

  Still, I came to believe I was a better father nearly every day, a better writer, more myself. (There was a huge asterisk attached to all this positive self-talk, but I tried not to think about it.) Then, the moment competence seemed at hand, decline heaved into view. Attempting to outrun it was ludicrous, of course. I sometimes think of the elderly Tolstoy fleeing his wife and his doctors, fleeing for his life, and getting as far as the waiting room of a train station at Astapovo, where death was waiting. Then I think, Tolstoy? Bit of a reach.

  * * *

  —

  Mom saw herself as overmatched but valiant; her favorite self-descriptive adjective was “desperate.” Even her accounts of picking up dry cleaning fizzed with drama. She’d declare, “I crept out at the crack of dawn” or “I scurried home,” verbs suited to a small animal in a children’s book. When she was weighing what her grandchildren should call her, a top candidate was “Mousehead”—Day’s nickname for her short, gray, post-chemo hairstyle. Our kids, who never got to meet her, call her “Foffie.”

  A poet in her youth and later a painter, Mom was above all an artist of domestic life. She made exquisite meals in the Julia Child manner, then hid any leftover date-and-nut bars or almond cake under her bed, to be rationed out as she saw fit. She arranged each room of her house for maximum effect, and it remains a minefield of me
mory-bombs: her still lifes, needlepoint pillows, peekaboo nooks concealing televisions and stepladders, silver objets deployed around the living room like actors in an Albee play.

  Though Day spends most of his time in the open kitchen and dining room, his custody of it extends only to the contents of the freezer. Mom dominates the area still with her hexagonal window plan, pegboard wall, Marimekko pot holders, and shelf of skeptically annotated cookbooks. Ringed in by her bequests, Day couldn’t have escaped to a retirement community if he’d wanted to, which he adamantly did not.

  Some houses are garrulous, their interior life voluble on the lawn (the busted TV, the worn-out davenport). Mom’s, an old stucco gatehouse largely hidden from the road, was private, cozy, and exacting. Pungent with woodsmoke and Chanel No. 5, her lair demanded that visitors toe the mark. The blue armchair Day had chosen to answer Timmie and me from, for instance, was the one Mom positioned me in, in 1997, to ask me about my then-dismal romantic prospects. In her journal at the time, she registered “sadness about Tad and his slight attention to me,” adding “Tad is rude at times” and “Tad’s not getting married. Not my fault. My life shouldn’t be spoiled by his choices.”

  Acknowledging that she hadn’t always been the most obliging mother, she told me she wanted to fix things between us. “It seems easier now to raise children, because they have those carriers where you go into a museum and the child goes with you,” she said, referring to BabyBjörns. “I can imagine, as a grandmother, wanting to take a child to a museum. But when I was a child that never happened, so I basically liked to spend time alone.” Training her blue eyes on mine, that tractor beam, she said, “Day and I tried very hard to pass on less loneliness than we got.”

  That struck me as true, and admirable, and insufficient. “It was a worthy goal,” I said, staring her down. She was right: I could be sort of an asshole.

  * * *

  —

  I asked Day, “Is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask us, or tell us?”

  “No.” That familiar asperity, when he felt or anticipated a challenge.

  Timmie cleared her throat. “Is there anything you wish had been different between you and the three of us?”

  “I never thought of that,” he said. His cheeks began to burn. “And now that I do, I don’t like the idea. So the answer is no.”

  “And what about between you and Mom?” Timmie continued.

  “Well, that was an intimate affair. Forty-three years.”

  “So there’s a lot there,” she said, encouragingly. “Is there anything you wish had been different between the two of you?” He’d been stunned, after Mom died, to discover that while she’d saved every Lands’ End catalogue since 1963, most of his cards and letters to her had vanished. He searched the seven nooks where she answered mail and had a locksmith open her three locked chests: all were empty. His fear, I’d later learn, was that she had burned his correspondence “the year she wrote that she did not love me anymore, and told me not to answer.” They each impressed on us that life was not a potluck but a formal dinner with French menus. You could so easily choose wrong.

  After a silence, Timmie asked, “You still with us?”

  “I’d like some ice cream now.”

  “We’re almost through.”

  I looked doubtfully at our list. “Was there a specific time—a minute, an hour, a week—when you felt acute happiness?”

  “No.”

  “What is your proudest accomplishment?”

  “Running Swarthmore for nine years.”

  Timmie asked, “What was the lowest moment in your life?”

  “Sometime in Buffalo when I feared that I wasn’t going anywhere.” The hand flick: move on.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “Is there one religion that seems closest to your idea of God?”

  “Buddhistic Presbyterianism.” When he was eight, he’d had an epiphany in Sunday School and yearned for God to test him as He had tested Abraham, but at that age you don’t have sons to sacrifice. Unsentimental about most holidays, he loved giving Valentines to Mom and Timmie and later to his daughters-in-law. In 1982, he sent me one, writing, “I deny the thought that it may be un-American or unmanly for a father to send a Valentine to his son.” It was a postcard of a mournful seventeenth-century painting of Christ, chosen, he said, “because the face of Jesus is dark, robust, enduring.”

  Day was delighted when anyone likened his pendant earlobes to the Buddha’s, and he relished the Eastern saying “Before enlightenment: chop wood, draw water. After enlightenment: chop wood, draw water.” He loved chopping wood. Drawing water, and other household tasks, not so much. After Mom died, I had to tell him the facts of life about the dryer—that it had a lint screen, for instance.

  I observed, “Buddhists and Presbyterians have very different ideas about why we’re here and where we’re going.”

  “That’s true,” he said with satisfaction, as if I’d made a rookie mistake. “And in the truth of that resides my comfort.”

  * * *

  —

  When I was doing physical therapy recently for a frozen shoulder, I glimpsed my face in the mirror and my whole body stiffened. I’d never perceived a deep resemblance to my father in photos, but my bleached wince was exactly Day’s in a painting Mom made of him after he had prostate surgery at fifty-seven: stripped and scoured, ashen in his flannel bathrobe. The painting revealed what Day sought to keep hidden—and what I had inherited, to my dismay: a hatred of indignity. And my increasingly noisy sneezes! I thought. Day’s sneezes echo like rifle fire in a box canyon. And the way we bang our heads! Day was always reeling away from low doorways and glaring back. And my sweet tooth! When Walker and Addison see me angling toward the cookie jar, they cry, “Daddy, no!”

  A few months before that weekend, I was visiting Day and one morning a new health aide arrived for her shift, came in through the front door (everyone uses the back), walked upstairs, knocked on my door, and pushed it open. I started up from the sheets, bewildered by this stranger in a pink smock. “I’m Angela, and I’m here to take care of you,” she said, advancing with a placatory air.

  “No!” I said. “No, you want my father.” I pointed to the far end of the house. She studied me, uncertain.

  When Day began to fail, it felt like he was tugging me with him. My sense that we’re tethered on a conveyor belt had given rise to two absurd and contradictory beliefs. One is that when he goes over the edge, I’ll be pulled over, too. The other is that if I can dig my heels in, somehow, I can stop the belt.

  * * *

  —

  “What are your feelings about death?” I asked.

  “I have no feelings,” Day said. “Certainly, no fear.”

  “Have you come to any determination of the purpose or meaning of life?” Timmie said.

  “No.”

  “Is there anything important you would still like to do?” I asked.

  “Sure.” His voice was softer, less decided.

  Timmie inquired, “And what might that be?” His eyes fluttered. “A nap, maybe?”

  He laughed. “I am thinking about it. I’m just not getting anywhere.”

  He lived largely in his youth now, writing about his mother and father. But then he’d always maintained a shallow depth of field as a historian and spiritual supplicant, telescoping right past us in the foreground. When he went abroad he’d prepare at least six words of courtesy in the local language, seeking in exchange only the secret of how to escape himself, of how to live. Or at least a little consolation. Succor would come from strangers, if from anywhere.

  “Well, those are our questions,” I said. “Is there anything else we should have asked you about?” That’s how I usually end interviews. The person I’m talking with rarely raises a new topic, but the question rounds the session
off. And sometimes—

  “Oh, yes,” Day said, brightening. There was always that undertow beneath the swell of his logic—a riptide of eagerness. The child playing hide-and-seek who peeps over a sofa, hoping to be seen. “You should have asked me about my sex life.”

  “What do you want to say about it?” I asked, cautiously.

  “That it was not promiscuous, but it was imaginative.”

  Timmie and I exchanged another look: yuck. “Anything else on that? Or do you want to leave it there?”

  “I’d like to leave it there.”

  “Perfect. Any other topics?”

  “My sporting life. Soccer and squash.” He played varsity soccer and squash at Williams, and kept them up.

  “Those are things that made you happy?” Timmie said.

  “Yes.”

  “What was the high point of your soccer life?” I asked.

  “Playing in that league in the Philippines. With practices and games, I played almost every day.”

  “And of your squash?”

  “Being number two in the USA at age seventy-five.”

  “You almost won the Nationals, right?” In that tournament, veteran players age into a new division every five years. I began playing the Nationals myself a few years ago.

  “I had the winning shot on my racquet,” he said, wistfully. His right arm carved the air, redirecting the ball.

  * * *

  —

  When I was three, we moved to Ithaca, New York, for a year while Day studied Bahasa, the predominant Indonesian language, at Cornell. It’s the first house I remember: small, cool, strafed by morning light. One evening, Mom and Day had a cocktail party in the backyard: pigs in a blanket and Herb Alpert on the stereo. I clambered out of bed and saw Day whoop as a champagne cork shot into the night. I padded through the crowd and reached up as he filled the plastic flutes. “Elizabeth!” he called, and jerked his head at Mom, who led me back inside.