I told Mom I hadn't known.return to the contents"So now you know." She pushed me toward the basement stairs.
I asked, "How could that be? How could I not have known?"
"It wasn't Romeo and Juliet," she said. "Life with your father was lousy."
She shoved and I stiffened. "I think that we should talk about it."
"We just did," she said.
We stood face to face at the head of the stairs. "Do you want his Walkman?" she asked.
Fine.
"When he put it on it meant `stay away from me'," she said. "Before the Japs invented it he had other methods."
I told her I thought the funeral had gone well.
"You were a help," she said.
I told her Steve would be home soon. "I've got to get his supper."
"Then why are we standing here?" she asked, and we went into the basement.
We stopped outside the study and she approached the door with a handful of keys. "I can't remember which one opens it," she said. "Until lately I've never been inside."
The room held a typewriter, desk and chair, lots of books, a tensor lamp, and, in the corner among shadows, two four-drawer file cabinets.
The Walkman was on the desk. She handed it to me. "I was tempted to bury him with it on," she said.
The room was damp.
"Your father loved it." She pointed to the cabinets. "Pull a drawer," she said.
The one I picked was full of paper.
"Manuscripts," she said. "When he retired from the bank he came down here and was a writer."
She pulled a second drawer, and a third. "Eight drawers all full," she said. "He was prolific."
"What am I doing here?" I asked.
"This is all that is left of him," she said. "Upstairs there is not a trace that he ever lived here. You can run a fine tooth comb over every inch up there and not find a smell of your father. He's gone absolutely."
She sat and gestured toward the cabinets. "Except for this."
"What am I doing here?" I asked again.
"I want you to read it. I want to know if it's any good."
"How am I going to know?"
"You went to college. You've got a degree."
"In domestic science, Mom."
She shrugged. "I can tie it up right now and put it out for tomorrow's pickup."
"This is crazy, " I said.
"This is practical," she told me. "If he was Jackie Collins in his last days, or Hemingway, I'll get an agent and make some money. His insurance wasn't much, you know."
I said I was finding all this hard to cope with.
She rose and moved toward the door. "Your father worked to produce this and it goes out with the garbage because his daughter is too busy to read it. Is that the story?"
I said, "OK," quickly and she pulled several handfuls out of the closest drawer and handed them to me. "Come for the rest when you're ready," she told me.
I said, "I think we should get Jackie in on this."
"He's in North Carolina,"she said.
"He'll be home for Christmas."
She closed the door and locked it. "I want a decision now." She returned to the door, unlocked it and pushed it open wide. "Some air in there might help," she said.
"He wrote when I met him," she told me. "Radio plays. He sold one to a program called The First Nighter and that was the end of it. He tried like hell… wrote all kinds of stuff... plays, articles, fiction... but never sold anything again... anywhere."
On the stairs she said, "He blamed us.
He believed that without us he could have been James Joyce. He hated us."
"Not Dad," I said.
"He told me so once a week," she said.
Upstairs she said, "You want to call Jackie, fine. Don't drag it out."
The street was alive with children. With the door
open she asked, "Do you remember how he was forever playing La Boheme?"
I said I loved it.
"It was his escape from us. His idea of life was sex and poetry in an attic. The album was the first thing I threw into the dumpster."
"How could I not have known?" I asked.
She watched the children.
"Everyone I know tells sad stories about growing up," I said. "I bore people with my happy childhood."
"Tell me what Jackie says." She pushed me gently into the street and closed the door behind me.
"My field is political science," Jackie said. "I teach Horkheimer."
"You've an English lit department. Ask one of the profs there to read it."
"I don't understand any of this," he said. His sigh was a loud one. "Send me a batch and I'll see what I can do."
I had started to hang up. "She and Dad were together thirty some years hating each other?" he asked.
"I never knew," I said, and blinked hard.
"How could you know?" he asked. "We had a wonderful childhood."
Steve came in and found me getting ready to cry.
Cost of the first mailing was twenty-four dollars and six cents. Jackie called me when they arrived and said he'd passed them on to a friend who had a background in American literature.
I thought Mom might bug me but when I went, with a suitcase, to get more manuscripts, she talked only about my kids and the weather.
When Jackie called, it was to tell me that what I'd mailed were copies of Tom Swift books... "Word for word, exact typed copies, kids books written by Victor Appleton."
I remembered Tom Swift.
The next mailing was from a different drawer. His friend identified these as Dick Merriwell novels. "An ivy league Superman." Jackie said.
Another pile went from a third drawer. "A writer named Joseph Altsheler," Jackie said. "Very popular when Dad was a boy. Wrote stories of America's frontier days…lots of Indians."
"Shall I send more?" I asked.
"Plus," Jackie said, "the first three chapters of The Call of the Wild..."
"Jack London," I said, and asked, "What is it all about?"
He groaned. "You're older than me and have a Ph.D.," I told him. "You must have some answers."
"I'm going somewhere quiet and mull it over," he said.
We agreed I'd send no more manuscripts and he asked me to tell Mom he would call her soon.
I gave Mom the facts and told her that I was going to stop the mailings.
She was quiet.
I asked her if she'd wept since Dad's death. "I've seen no tears," I said.
She stared at a spot in my hair. "You don't cry over men like your father," she said.
"You wave them on their way and go celebrate."
"He sat in a damp room and copied other mens' books," I said. "Isn't that sad enough to make you weep?"
Her glance came down slowly and we were eye to eye. "Boys' books," she said. "He typed himself back into his childhood... where I didn't exist."
Her eyes stayed steady on mine. She said, "Good riddance..." and I blinked.
I told her Jackie would call and she kissed me and said to give her love to Steve and her grandchildren.
I have asked Steve if we are happy. The question did not disconcert him. "We're doing fine," he said.
I must remember to check often.