“But—”
“She has Sylvie.” She said it slowly, as if she were writing out a very simple equation on the board. “If I can’t run with her, then I can’t run at all. And if you can’t run”—she spread her hands—“then I suppose, if you’ll excuse the melodrama, you stand and fight.”
I sat looking at her for a while—an aging professor of history, nearsighted, slightly fat, and very, very angry—and wondered if Vivian knew what kind of enemy she’d made for herself.
I leaned across the desk and touched my lips to her cheek, as she had once kissed me. “If I don’t see you again—though I’m very afraid that I will—goodbye, Professor. Thank you, for everything.”
She fussed with papers on her desk, not looking at me. “Goodbye, boy.”
She cleared her throat before I reached the door. “About your manuscript, Mallory.” I turned to find her smiling beatifically, as if relieved of a great and awful burden. She said, with relish, “It’s absolutehog swill.”
My father still lived in Queenswald, but he’d long since lost the narrow gray row house. Instead, he’d worked out what he called “a cordial arrangement” with both the barkeep and her husband, which—once I’d interpreted the merry waggling of his eyebrows—I’d found indecent, illegal, blasphemous, and entirely humiliating. It had been the beginning of our worst fight.
Now, as I ducked into the amber-lit tavern, I felt nothing but gratitude, and a certain embarrassed irritation with my previous selves. I’d abandoned my father over and over, in every life I’d lived, and I was about to do it again; at least I wouldn’t be leaving him alone.
It was past supper, which meant my father was drifting between verb tenses, transitioning gently fromdrinkingtodrunk.I’d caught him just after the pain eased but before the weeping started, when his cheeks turned a cherubic red and his eyes crimped with goodwill. He used to sing to me, sometimes, in this mood. He had a lovely voice.
He saw me first through the bottom of his pint glass. His eye, magnified by beer, widened suddenly. The expression in it was intimately familiar to me, now: relief and irritation and joy. I’d had children of my own since the last time I’d seen him.
Thank God my heart was elsewhere; it would have hurt badly, just then.
“Well, well!” My father thumped his glass on the table. “If it isn’t the pride of the Cantford Department of Propaganda!”
“Hello, Dad.” He was less changed than Sawbridge had been, in this iteration of himself. I knew from my fresh-made memories that he’d still gone to war and still come back with a bad leg and a baby. He still embarrassed me; I still disappointed him; we still loved each other, however clumsily. We hadn’t yet had our biggest fight, but we were about to.
My father tilted back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. “What brings you here, son?”
I couldn’t even remember why I’d come, all those previous times. I’d made different excuses: I’d come to request that he stop sending his pamphlets to my campus address, for the sake of my career; I’d come to beg him to rent a flat of his own, for the sake of decency. But actually, I’d come for the same reason I always did.
“Just wanted to see you,” I said, and it was the truth.
My father squinted a little, uncertainly. Then he drew a curled-up magazine from his breast pocket and slapped it on the counter.The Journal of Middle Dominion Studies,issue 3, volume 44. “Read your latest, of course.”
The scorn in his voice had scalded me, once. I’d been proud of that article, and I’d wanted him to be proud, too, despite our differences. What an idiot I’d been: Why else, save pride, would a man who couldn’t make rent subscribe to all the leading history journals? What else would make him dog-ear the pages I’d written, and carry it close to his chest?
“I tried to raise you right. Tried to teach you wrong from right.” My father shook his head, dolefully. “And what have I raised? A bootlicker, it seems! A child, who still believes in fairy tales!” Here was a man who used twice the normal allotment of exclamation points.
I considered him, wondering a little. “Were you—are youtryingto pick a fight with me?”
His squint deepened, but my father didn’t abandon his script. “I don’t know,” he pronounced, enunciating very clearly, “how you sleep at night, with the blood of your countrymen on your hands.”
He let this statement hang, full of portent. I marveled. “Youwere.God, Dad, couldn’t you have found a better way to tell me about my mother?”
But I didn’t think he could have. He was an ex-soldier and a lifelong radical; fighting was the only thing he knew how to do. If he had something to say, he’d shout it. If he had something to lose, he’d hide it. It occurred to me that our most honest conversation had taken place in a jail cell, across an interrogation table.
My father’s mouth had fallen slightly open. “You’re not—you knew?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling older than myself, older than my own father. “I know everything. It’s alright. You already told me.”
He frowned uncertainly, but a drunk never trusts his own memory. He sat blinking absurdly, like a man who’s shown up for battle on the wrong day.
I’d only come to say goodbye—and to leave things a little better than I had the previous times, perhaps—but I found myself flagging down the barkeep’s daughter. She was full-grown now, and pretty in an innocent, maidenly way that made me hope she didn’t know what our parents got up to in the bedroom above the bar.
I ordered two more pints and she said, “Yes, sir,” in a breezy manner that made me feel a thousand years old.
I slid a glass across the table to my father when they arrived. “Can I ask you something?” He was peering hopefully down into his beer, as if it might help him make sense of this conversation. “What did you want to do with your life, before the war?”
He scratched at his cheek, which never quite managed to be clean-shaven or bearded. “I suppose I wanted to see the world. What small-town boy doesn’t?” I hadn’t. The woods had been world enough, for me. “I was all signed up to work a freighter, when I was drafted.”
