Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt Page B

my father. Grandfather and I—and sometimes the second wife—we hadn’t driven this far just to shake some soft hands.
    “So why bother?” we agreed, and I often didn’tsee my father. Easy to make excuses in the gaudy life—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—riding on my way somewhere and smoking a cigar, stinking up the driver’s daddy’s car.
    “I live here,” I said by way of a good night at my grandfather’s door, yet forgetful of the driveway lights, which shone through falling snow, pooling white on white when next I saw them.
    Morning, my grandfather at the table talked of lights left on. He said, “You are not with your father. There are rules in this house, remember,” rules I was told my father never followed—which was why, then. The inexorable logic, how hard I worked to live by it as Grandfather’s darling. No thank you, no I couldn’t, no, please, to what he took from Daddy to give to me.
    Petting my watch on any Sunday’s visit, my father said to me, “So the old man won’t die with it still on his wrist.” Lucid on the subject of anyone’s belongings, noticing the second wife’s new rings, my father seemed alert to the getting. The shadow boxes and the canes, the grandfather clock, the shoehorns, the brushes, the studs, the links, the pins—such enameled old blue—my father knew the history to and wanted them. He said so. My father said to my grandfather, “When were you last dancing?”
    My grandfather’s smile had teeth for this part. Such things as he had were his to give, which he did when he was not afraid of dying—or so my father said. My father said to my grandfather, “Maybe not dancing, but traveling—are you thinking of traveling again?” To the places I had seen in photographs—Grandfatherbackdropped by the walleyed rams at Karnak—would he travel there again, as once he had, a young man in a high collar, unused to such heats, yet smiling?
    Upright before whatever scene the camera found him, my grandfather had traveled, had been to, had seen the famous cities before the modern wars rubbled them. He had plundered the shops famous for their porcelains and brought home plate and platter and sconce: the teardrop chandelier above the table where we ate, and the canes, of course, from London. I heard him speak. Those are Portuguese, those Italian, but the bronze Diana—oh, God, who knows from where? “I bought it,” he said, “but your grandmother was offended by the figure’s upturned breasts. Your grandmother,” he said, “you can imagine how she suffered your father’s first attack, the second—all those wives.”
    Grandfather’s disappointment, I could hear it in his voice when he said his good nights, the way the words came out words—and was it with some longing, and for what, from a man who had had and had? Mistresses, my father told me, he had glimpsed in the crowds of the company parties, ladling the punch, stacking plates high with sandwiches. “My poor mother,” my father said.
    Sometimes on our Sunday visits, my father cried to remember her. “Mother, Mother,” he said while my grandfather looked on and the second wife coughed, embarrassed.
    The way my father dressed, grown fat from too much sleeping, in mismatched clothes, seedy as a poet now that he knew himself as poor—and happy to bepoor. Look how he was loved, and he pointed to the men who swayed at his door, saying, “Professor James, sir, may we come in, please?”
    “Don’t ask them in,” I said. “Be someone different.”
    Be one of the boys at the concerts, at the ceremonies, at the breakfasts. They rarely spoke of my father, or if they did, it was, “How’s Jim?” How was it at this last new place? Expensive as hell was what my grandfather said, but we wanted him well again—didn’t we?
    My grandfather said, “Poor Jim.”
    The second wife said, “Of all the men.” She said, “I gave him you, didn’t I?”
    But everything we did, I thought, we did for money.
    In my