Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff
He hadn’t found much to be pleased with, least of all the long hours of useless witness to his mother’s dying—not being able to reach her, not knowing what to do or say. None of this was as he’d hoped—the two of them recalling old times as the shadows lengthened, reclaiming their partnership, abolishing the wariness that had somehow grown up between them. He tried; he talked brightly of his wife and children, all the while knowing she was beyond curiosity, if she could understand him at all. He did it, he knew, to drown out the hard work of her breathing, to fill his own head with the sound of ordinary talk and distract himself from his impatience for the end—for her sake, he tried to believe: for her release.
He felt he’d been cast in a low part, as when he ransacked the apartment for her jewelry. He had done this after a funeral-home director told him that others with access—caregivers, building staff—might help themselves if he didn’t get there first. “It happens all the time,” the man said sadly. It was a ghoulish business, rifling through every drawer and cupboard while his mother lay curled on her bed. Now and then she stirred and he froze like a thief, hand in a coat pocket, under a pile of sweaters, holding his breath. It was all there, everything he remembered, anyway, and none of it worth stealing; maybe his daughter could use this stuff for playing dress-up. And he’d given himself yet another reason for feeling morally dwarfed by the underpaid women who’d looked after his mother and liked her and now simply and helplessly grieved for her.
The funeral home was just a few blocks away. This was the fourth one he’d arranged to visit. He was after the most basic plan: cremation, placement of ashes in a generic container, filing of death certificates. His mother wanted cremation and would certainly approve of his comparison shopping. She herself had a flinty incapacity for the pieties of mourning. Two weeks after her last husband’s death she was on a cruise ship in the Aegean. When her cocker spaniel—Mugsy, dearer to her than any husband—got run over by a truck, she bought a life-size statue to mark his resting place in her backyard, yet the statue was of an Airedale; she’d picked it up for a song after the guy who’d commissioned it reneged on the deal.
Grolier and Sons Colonial Memorial Chapel had a Spanish-mission look that immediately put him on alert. Who but the bereaved would pay for the fancy tile roof, the faux bell tower? The prices he’d already been quoted ranged from eleven hundred to a ballsy eighteen hundred bucks for the same minimal service. What kind of nerve did Grolier and Sons have?
He was met at the door by a tall woman in a black suit. She had close-cut black hair with a streak of white across one temple, and her lips were painted a deep maroon. She regarded him so fixedly as he introduced himself that he stammered his own name and lost hers altogether. “Come,” she said, and he followed her down the hallway in a trail of perfume spiced faintly with sweat. The building was cool and silent, hushed. The woman told him that everyone else was out on duty. They had two burials that afternoon, and she’d left one of them early to meet with him. If she seemed—“how does one say?—out of sorts, yes, out of sorts,” it was because she’d been caught in traffic and reached the home only a few minutes earlier, late for their appointment. She thought she might have missed him. Most unprofessional! But it seemed he had been late too, no? So they were even. “Even-steven.”
The woman showed him to a small office and listened while he described his mother’s situation and what he had in mind. She kept her eyes straight on him as he spoke. He was again made awkward by the directness of her gaze.
“This is the hardest part,” she said. “My old papa died last year and I know this is no picnic. You were close to your mother, yes?”
“We were close.”
“I can tell,” she said.
He asked her what Grolier and Sons would charge for what he wanted.
“So,” she said. “Down to business.” With a few practiced tugs she pulled off the black gloves she was wearing, then shrugged off her jacket and took a printed sheet from the tray on her desk and began to mark various lines with a highlighter. Her fingers were plump and bare of rings. Of course—the gloves. As he waited, her name came back from wherever it had gone. Elfie. It didn’t fit. There was nothing elfin about her, nothing light or elusive. In this little room he could smell her plainly through her perfume, more salt than sour. Her breasts swelled the fabric of her sleeveless blouse, and her arms were heavy and rounded, not fat but with the fullness of forty-five, fifty years. She had a large, almost coarse mouth. She pursed her lips as she toted up her figures, then pushed the paper across the desk and sat back.
“You can do better,” she said. “I can recommend other homes better for you.”
His eyes went straight to the bottom of the page. Twenty-three hundred. He was careful to show no reaction to this almost comical sum. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Grolier and Sons Colonial Memorial Chapel is a full-service home,” she said. “Everything top drawer. You want Grandpa buried in a Viking longboat, you come to Grolier and Sons Colonial Memorial Chapel. Don’t laugh. I could tell you stories. Now—shame on me! You will forgive me for leaving you high and dry all this time. Orange juice? Evian?”
He was about to refuse, but the juice sounded good, and he said so.
“Or beer? I have beer.”
He hesitated.
“Good,” she said. “I shall join you.” She rolled her chair to a small refrigerator in the corner. “Water,” she said, rummaging. “Water, water, water.”
“Water will be fine.”
“No. Too late for that. Come.”
She led him farther down the hall to a large office paneled in dark wood and furnished like a gentleman’s club. Oriental rugs, red leather sofa and chairs, bookshelves filled with leather-bound books. Elfie waved him to a chair. She took a bottle and two tall glasses from a refrigerator built into the wainscoting. She poured the beer with some care, handed him a glass, and settled herself behind a massive desk covered with photographs in silver frames. “Salut,” she said.
“Salut.”
She took a long drink and ran her tongue over her lips. Then she bent forward abruptly and turned one of the photographs facedown on the desktop.
“This is good,” he said.
“Czech pilsner. The best.”
“Are you Czech?”
“Would you think me Japanese had I given you Asahi? No. I am from Wien. Have you been?”
“Twice. Beautiful city.” He was pleased at knowing that Wien was Vienna.
“I suppose you went for the opera.”
Tempted to lie, he decided against it. “No,” he said. “I don’t like opera.”
“Nor do I. I find it preposterous.” She reached out and turned another photograph over.
“So,” he said, “how did you end up here?”
“Miami, USA? Or Grolier and Sons Colonial Memorial Chapel?”
“Either. Both.”
“That’s a long story.”
“Ah, the old Foreign Legion dodge.”
She cocked her head and waited.
“When you ask a legionnaire about himself, he always says, ‘That’s a long story.’ They tend to have histories that don’t bear much scrutiny.”
“As do we all.”
“As do we all,” he said, not unhappy to be thought the owner of such a history.
“Were you a legionnaire?”
“Me? No.”
“But you were a soldier. I can tell.”
“A long time ago.”
“Oh, a long time ago! You are so old.”
“Thirty years ago.”
“It leaves a mark,” she said. “I can always tell.”
“Really?”
“Always.”
They talked on, and all the while it seemed to him that they were having another conversation. In this parallel conversation he was saying, I do like the way you talk, and she was saying, I know you do, and what else do you like? He was saying, I like your mouth and how you look at me over the glass
He’d sensed this kind of communion before. Now and then, when he was younger, it proved to be not entirely one-sided. He felt it less often these days, and when he did he tended to discount it as wishful thinking. Soon enough he would ridicule himself for imagining that he was an object of desire to this woman, who after all was simply winding down after a long hot day and enjoying—playfully, to be sure—the interest he couldn’t conceal.
That’s how he’d see it later on, leaving some room to wonder, naturally. But in the instant he had no doubt that he was indeed her momentary weakness, that if he stood and took his glasses off she’d smile up at him and say, Yes, and so? He had no doubt that if he came around that desk she would stand and meet him with that loose-looking mouth of hers, then sink with him to the floor, onto that nice Bokhara, her hand at his belt, her breath in his ear, Ah, my legionnaire!
And why not! They were both realists, they hated opera, they knew what was waiting for them in another twenty, thirty years, if not tomorrow. Why shouldn’t they kick off their clothes and come at each other and make love—no, not make love: fuck! Fuck like champions in the sight of heaven and earth, just because they wanted to, without a thought in their heads but yes yes yes!
All he had to do was take off his glasses and stand up.
Why didn’t he, then? All sorts of reasons, no doubt: a long habit of fidelity, if not the actual virtue; the absolute trust of his children; perhaps even a childish sense of being watched by the God he lazily believed in. Any of these might have been at work below the horizon of his awareness. What he was aware of, all at once, was the irritation of finding himself in a play he disliked—Freud’s play. Freud! Why did he have to go and think of him? He could just see the Viennese smarty-pants stroking his beard in smug recognition of the part he was playing, abandoning himself to Eros to obliterate his fear of death. The Great Explainer would have a field day with his mortuary lust, his deep pleasure in a drink by the beach, in sunlight and the sound of breaking waves, in fleeing his mother’s apartment late at night to cruise down Collins Avenue in a red sports car, watching the girls in their slinky dresses and towering heels shimmy and sway as they moved from club to club.
He had, that is to say, a picture of himself enacting the most exhausted and demeaning of clichés. It offended him. It chilled him. He finished his beer, thanked the woman for her time, and shook her soft hand at the office door. He insisted on seeing himself out so he wouldn’t have her at his back, watching him cross the empty parking lot toward that gleaming, ridiculous Miata.
As he approached his mother’s apartment he heard raised voices speaking Spanish. Her door was open. No, he thought, no, not while I was gone. But he found her still alive; she didn’t die until later that night, while he was down the street eating a plate of fried plantains. At this moment she was thrashing weakly back and forth between Feliz, who looked coldly at him, and an older woman named Rosa. His mother was shouting, the same word: “Daddy! Daddy!” Her eyes were open but unseeing. Rosa crooned to her in foreign singsong while Feliz tried to hold her hands.
“Daddy!”
“He’s here,” Rosa said. “Your daddy’s here.”
“Daddy!”
Rosa raised her eyes to him, pleading.
“I’m here,” he said, and she fell back and looked up at him. He took Feliz’s place beside her on the bed and stroked her hand. It was down to bone.
“Daddy?”
“It’s all right. I’m here.”
“Where were you?”
“At work.”
The room was dim. The two women moved like shadows behind him. He heard the door click shut.
“I was alone.”
“I know. It’s all right now.”
Her fingers tightened on his.
He no longer knew how to be a son, but he still knew how to be a father. He held her hand in both of his. “Everything’s fine, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine. You’re my own darling, my sweet pea, my good girl.”
“Daddy,” she whispered. “You’re here.”
Nightingale
Dr. Booth took several wrong turns during the drive upstate. It vexed him to get lost like this in front of his son, especially since the fault lay with the lousy map the Academy had sent him, but Owen was in one of his trances and didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on the far distance and his lips formed whispery sounds in a cadence that suggested poetry or music. Dr. Booth knew better than to try and make sense of it, but he couldn’t stop himself. He thought he recognized one word—nightingale—and that awoke a memory of three children, himself and his older sisters, sitting in a garden at dusk while somewhere above them a bird sang. It was, he knew, a trick memory, a mirage; there had been no such garden and no such evening. Still, the thought of his sisters, one drowned in a boating accident courtesy of her dimwit husband, the other far away and silent for years, made him even gloomier than he already was.
Owen did not want to go to the Academy. He’d made this plain when the idea first came up, but as Dr. Booth and his wife continued to discuss it, doubtfully to begin with, then slowly surrendering to its tidal pull, the boy had less and less to say. He receded farther into the very remoteness Dr. Booth had been trying to lure him out of, and now, having failed, proposed to damn well force him out of with the school’s help.
Dr. Booth had never heard of Fort Steele Academy until the brochure arrived in his mailbox. The cover showed a pair of uniformed boys standing guard on either side of a gate. It was snowing, and they appeared to have been there for some time; a good two inches had gathered on their epaulets and caps. The last page of the brochure carried a statement by the commandant, Colonel Karl: “It is no kindness to the young to pretend that life is not a struggle. The world belongs to men of unbending will, and the sooner that lesson is learned, the better. We at Fort Steele are dedicated to teaching it by every means at our disposal.”
Dr. Booth could well understand why Owen didn’t want to go to the Academy. He was comfortable at home. He had his foolish dog, his lazy friends, the big house with all its sunny corners for reading, or for staring at nothing and making funny noises, or whatever he did all day. When Dr. Booth went into the kitchen, there was Owen. In the living room, Owen again. The front yard, Owen; the backyard, the basement, the hammock—Owen! As a boy, Dr. Booth had delivered a hundred and eighty newspapers before school and hustled subscriptions at night. He played football. He ran for president of his class. Those memories of his own youth had figured heavily in the decision to send Owen away, but now, reviewing the list yet again, he thought he must be leaving something out, something conclusive. There was more; surely there was more.
“It won’t be so bad,” he said.
Owen was silent.
“Give it a chance, son. You might even like it.” When Owen still didn’t answer, Dr. Booth said—almost cried out—“It’s for your own good.”
“I know,” Owen said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s what you want.”
This was the very answer Dr. Booth would have hoped for, and he knew he should be satisfied with it, but he wasn’t. It troubled him. Just then the road came to a fork not indicated on his map, so he had to do some guesswork. He decided to take the right branch, then at the last moment swerved onto the left, which led through a dense stand of maples that hung darkly overhead and opened up to reveal, across from a field golden with hay, the gates of Fort Steele Academy. Dr. Booth slowed down. He wasn’t ready, he wanted a moment to probe the doubt he felt, but when his car came into view the two cadets at the gate snapped to attention and held their salutes until he’d driven between them onto the grounds of the school. Owen braced his hands against the dashboard, and Dr. Booth heard him say something under his breath. They bumped over the cobbled lane toward
“Son,” Dr. Booth said, “what did you mean, it’s what I want?”
Owen stared at him without comprehension, then looked back at the line of cadets.
Dr. Booth stopped the car. “Well? Owen? What do I want?”
“For me to grow up,” Owen said, watching one of the cadets march toward them. He was tall and his chin was long and sharp and his belt buckle flashed like a beacon. Carrying a clipboard in a crisp, prescribed-looking way, he stopped in front of the car and waited as Dr. Booth and Owen got out.
“Name, sir?”
“Booth.”
The cadet ran a finger down the clipboard. “Booth, Owen G., blood type A.”
“That’s my boy.” Dr. Booth smiled at Owen, who stared dead ahead. He’d attempted to square his thin shoulders and was holding his arms straight at his sides. He had never looked so young. Dr. Booth made up his mind to have a talk with Colonel Karl before he left. He wasn’t going to leave his son here without some definite assurances.
“Private Booth is late, sir. Roll call for new men was thirteen hundred hours.”
“I’m aware of that. We had some trouble getting here. A lot of trouble, in fact. That map is practically worthless.”
“I’m sure you have excellent reasons, sir. The fact remains, Private Booth is late. Private Booth will report immediately to the quartermaster. When Private Booth has drawn his gear, he will move smartly to D Barrack and await orders. Corporal Costello will escort him. You can leave his bags here.” He snapped his fingers, and another cadet stepped forward from the line.