Ann, in amongst the hydrangeas, and for the first time today looks purely beautiful—pretty enough for me to exhale, my mind to open outward, and for me to gaze at her in a way I once gazed at her all the time, every single day of our old life together in Haddam. Now would be the perfect moment for a future-refashioning kiss, or for her to tell me she’s dying of leukemia, or me to tell her I am. But that doesn’t happen. She is smiling her stalwart’s smile now, one that’s long since disappointed and can face most anything if need be—lies, lies and more lies.
“You two have a good time,” she says. “And please be careful with him.”
“He’s my son,” I say idiotically.
“Oh, I know that. He’s just like you.” And then she turns and walks back toward the yard, continuing on, I suspect, out of sight and down to the water to have her lunch with her husband.
8
Clarissa Bascombe has snugged something tiny and secret into Paul’s hand as we were leaving. And on our way up to Hartford, on our way up to Springfield, on our way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, he has held it without acknowledgment while I’ve yodeled away spiritedly about what I’ve thought will break our ice, get our ball rolling, fan our coals—start, via the right foot, what now feels like our last and most important journey together as father and son (though it probably isn’t).
Once we swerve off busy CT 9 onto busier, car-clogged I-91, go past the grimy jai alai palace and a new casino run by Indians, I set off on my first “interesting topic”: just how hard it is right here, ten miles south of Hartford, on July 2, 1988, when everything seems of a piece, to credit that on July 2, 1776, all the colonies on the seaboard distrusted the bejesus out of each other, were acting like separate, fierce warrior nations scared to death of falling property values and what religion their neighbors were practicing (like now), and yet still knew they needed to be happier and safer and went about doing their best to figure out how. (If this seems completely nutty, it’s not, under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence.” It’s totally relevant—in my view—to Paul’s difficulty in integrating his fractured past with his hectic present so that the two connect up in a commonsense way and make him free and independent rather than staying disconnected and distracted and driving him bat-shit crazy. History’s lessons are subtle lessons, inviting us to remember and forget selectively, and therefore are much better than psychiatry’s, where you’re forced to remember everything.)
“John Adams,” I say, “said getting the colonies all to agree to be independent together was like trying to get thirteen clocks to strike at the same second.”
“Who’s John Adams?” Paul says, bored—his pale, bare, beginning-to-be-hairy legs crossed in a concertedly unmanly manner, one Reebok with its Day-Glo-yellow lacing hiked up threateningly near the gearshift lever.
“John Adams was the first Vice President,” I say. “He was the first person to say it was a stupid job. In public, that is. That was in 1797. Did you bring your copy of the Declaration of Independence?”
“Nuhhhn.” This may mean either.
He is staring out at the reemerged Connecticut, where a sleek powerboat is pulling a tiny female water-skier, billowing the river’s shiny skin. In a bright-yellow life vest, the girl heels
waaaaay
back against her towrope, carving a high, translucent spume out of the crusty wake.
“Why are you driving so effing slow?” he says to be droll. Then, in a mocking old-granny’s voice, “Everybody passes me, but I get there just as fast as the rest of ’em.”
I, of course, intend to drive as fast as I want and no faster, but take an appraising look at him, my first since we shoved off from Deep River. His ear that wasn’t bammed by the Mercedes’s steering wheel has some gray fuzzy litter in it. Paul also doesn’t much smell good, smells in fact like unbathed, sleep-in-your-clothes mustiness. He also doesn’t seem to have brushed his teeth in a while. Possibly he is reverting to nature. “The original framers, you know,” I say hopefully, but instantly getting the Constitution’s authors muddled up with the signers of the Declaration (my persistent miscue, though Paul would never know), “they wanted to be free to make new mistakes, not just keep making the same old ones over and over as separate colonies and without showing much progress. That’s why they decided to band together and be independent and were willing to sacrifice some controls they’d always had in hopes of getting something better—in their case, better trade with the outside world.”
Paul looks at me contemptuously, as if I were an old radio tuned to a droning station that’s almost amusing. “Framers? Do you mean farmers?”
“Some of them
were
farmers,” I say. There’s no use trying to haul this business back. I’m not facilitating good contact yet. “But people who won’t quit making the same mistakes over and over are what we call conservatives. And the conservatives were all against independence, including Benjamin Franklin’s son, who eventually got deported to Connecticut, just like you.”
“So are conservatives farmers?” he says, feigning puzzlement but ridiculing me.
“A lot of them are,” I say, “though they shouldn’t be. What’d your sister give you?” I’m watching his closed left fist. We are quickly coming up into the Hartford traffic bottleneck. Elaborate road construction is on the right, between the interstate and the river—a soaring new off-ramp, a new parallel lane, arrows flashing, yellow behemoths full of Connecticut earth rumbling along beside us, white men in plastic hats and white shirts standing out in the snappy hot breeze, staring at thick scrolls of plans.
Paul looks at his fist as if he has no idea of what it contains, then slowly opens it, revealing a small yellow bow, the twin of the red one Clarissa gave me. “She gave you one,” he mutters. “A red one. She said you said you wanted to be her bow, but it was spelled another way.” I’m shocked at what a shady, behind-the-scenes conniver my daughter is. Paul holds the two loose ends of his yellow bow and pulls them tight so the two loops daintily involute and make a knot. Then he puts the whole in his mouth and swallows it. “Umm,” he says, and smiles at me evilly. “Good ribbance.” (He’s constructed this event, including the change in his sister’s story, just for a punch line.)
“I guess I’ll save mine till later.”
“She gave me another one for later.” He gives me his slant-eyed look. He is far ahead of me and will, I know, be a struggle.
“So okay, what’s the problem with you and Charley?” I am maneuvering us past the Hartford downtown, the little gold-domed capital nearly lost in among big insurance high-rises. “Can’t you two be civilized?”
“I can. He’s an asshole.” Paul is watching out his side as a squad of befezzed Shriners on Harleys comes alongside us. The Shriners are big, overstuffed, fat-cheeked guys dressed in gold-and-green silk harem guard getups with goggles and gloves and motorcycle boots. On their giant red Electra Glides they’re as imposing as real harem guards, and of course are riding in safety-first staggered formation, their motor noise even through the closed window loud and oppressive.
“Does braining him with an oarlock seem like a good solution to his being an asshole?” This will be my lone, unfelt concession to Charley’s welfare.
The lead Shriner has spied Paul and given him a grinning, gloved thumbs-up. He and his crew are all big, jolly cream puffs, no doubt on their way to perform figure eights and seamless circles within circles for happy, grateful, shopping-center crowds, then hurry off to lead a parade down some town’s Main Street.
“It’s just
a
solution,” Paul says, returning the lead harem guard’s thumbs-up, putting his forehead to the window and grinning back sarcastically. “I like these guys. Charley should be one. What do you call them?”
“Shriners,” I say, returning a thumbs-up from my side.
“What do they do?”
“It’s not that easy to explain,” I say, keeping us in our lane.
“I like their suits.” He makes a muffled and unexpected little bark, a clipped Three Stooges, testy-terrier bark. He doesn’t seem to want me to hear it but can’t resist doing it again. One of the Shriners seems to catch on and makes what looks like a barking gesture of his own, then gives another thumbs-up.
“Are you barking again, son?” I sneak a look at him and swerve slightly to the right. An accident here would mean complete defeat.
“I guess so.”
“Why is that? Do you think you’re barking for Mr. Toby or something?”
“I
need
to do it.” He’s told me several times that in his view people now say “need” when they mean “want,” which he thinks is hilarious. The Shriners drift back in the slow lane, probably nervous after I swerved at them. “It makes me feel better. I don’t have to do it.”
And frankly there’s nothing I feel I can say if greeting the world with an occasional bark instead of the normal “Howzit goin’” or a thumbs-up makes him feel better. What’s to get excited about? It might prove a hindrance under SAT testing conditions, or be a problem if he
only
barked and never spoke for the rest of his life. But I don’t see it as that serious. No doubt, like all else, it will pass. I should probably try it. It might make
me
feel better.
“So are we going to the Basketball Hall of Fame or not?” he says, as though we’d been arguing about it. His mind is now who knows where? Possibly thinking he’s thinking about Mr. Toby and thinking he wishes he weren’t.
“We definitely are,” I say. “It’s coming up pretty quick. Are you stoked for it?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Because I have to take a leak when we get there.” And that’s all he says for miles.
I
n a hasty thirty minutes we slide off 91 into Springfield and go touring round through the old mill town, following the disappearing brown-and-white BB. HALL OF FAME signs until we’re all the way north of downtown and pulled to a halt across from a dense brick housing project on a wide and windy trash-strewn boulevard by the on-ramp to the interstate we were just on. Lost.
Here is a marooned Burger King, attended around the outside by many young black men, and beside it, beyond the parking lot, a billboard showing Governor Dukakis smiling his insincere smile and surrounded by euphoric, well-fed, healthy-looking but poor children of every race and creed and color. No garbage has been picked up here for several days, and a conspicuous number of vehicles are abandoned or pillaged along the streetside. A hall of fame, any hall of fame within twenty miles of this spot, seems not worth the risk of being shot. In fact, I’m willing to just forget the whole thing and head for the Mass Pike, turn west and strike off for Cooperstown (170 miles), which would have us rolling into the Deerslayer Inn, where I’ve booked us a twin, just in time for cocktail hour.
And yet to bag it would be to translate mere lost directions into defeat (a poor lesson on a voyage meant to instruct). Plus
not
going, now that we’re at street level, would be tantamount to temperamental; and in my worst 3 a.m. computations of self and character, temperamental’s the thing I’m not, the thing that even a so-so father mustn’t be.
Paul, who is ever suspicious of my resolve, has said nothing, just stared at Governor Dukakis through the windshield as if he were the most normal thing in the world.
I therefore execute a fast U-turn back toward town, cruise right into a BP delimart, ask directions out the window from a Negro customer just leaving, who courteously routes us back onto the interstate south. And in five minutes we’re on the highway then off again, but this time at a perfectly well marked BBHOF exit, at the end of which we wind around booming freeway pilings and run smack into the Hall of Fame parking lot, where many cars are parked and where a neat little grass lawn with wood benches and saplings for picnickers and reflective roundball enthusiasts borders the Connecticut, sliding by, glistening, just beyond.
When I shut the motor off, Paul and I simply sit and stare through the saplings at the old factory husks on the far side of the river as if we expected some great sign to suddenly flash up, shouting “No! Here! It’s over here now! You’re in the wrong place! You missed us! You’ve done it wrong again!”
I should, of course, seize this inert moment of arrival to introduce old Emerson, the optimistic fatalist, to the trip’s agenda, haul
Self-Reliance
out of the back seat, where Phyllis had it last. In particular I might try out the astute “Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.” Or else something on the order of accepting the place providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Each seems to me immensely serviceable if, however, they aren’t contradictory.
Paul twists around and frowns back at the metal-and-glass Hall of Fame edifice, which looks less like a time-honored place of legend and enshrinement than a high-tech dental clinic, with its mulberry-colored, fake concrete-slab façade being just the ticket for putting edgy patients at their ease when they arrive for the first-time-ever cleaning and prophylaxis: “Here no one will harm, overcharge or give you bad news.” Above these doors, though, are cloth banners in several bright colors, spelling out BASKETBALL: AMERICA’S GAME.
As he looks back, I notice Paul has a thick, ugly, inflamed and unhealthy-looking seed wart on the side of his right hand below his little finger. I also note, to my dismay, what may be a blue tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, something that looks like what a prisoner might do and Paul may have done himself. It spells a word I can’t make out, though I don’t like it and decide immediately that if his mother can’t pay attention to his personal self, I’ll have to.