The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  He glanced at me. “I was thinking of your dad, maybe.”

  Liz said, “Dad’s dad?”

  “If it’s okay with him.”

  And finally a stab of the anxiety I had been feeling all week shot through me. Elliot’s thumbs were poised to split his bare orange into sections.

  “Of course,” I said. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

  That night, while I was brushing my teeth, Liz opened the bathroom door. She had already changed for bed, a pink T-shirt so worn from sleep and laundering, fine holes rimmed the letters: Davis Women’s Fun Run ’61. She pulled down her underpants and sat on the toilet, and I listened for the familiar sound of her pee in the bowl. She said, “So what do you think that’s all about?”

  “What’s what all about?” I said, although of course I knew what she meant.

  “Him picking your dad.”

  I cocked my head slightly to indicate thinking. She stood and flushed. The water would pass through the fixture trap, down the branch drain to the soil stack. From there, it would fall twenty feet to a pitched run that would carry it under our lawn to the city sewer. She stepped beside me and washed her hands in the sink, watching me in the mirror with a patient, open look I still picture for strength when I try to strike up a conversation with someone in the coffee room at my golf club. Clear water swirled in the basin and down under the stopper.

  I said, “He’s curious, I guess.”

  She picked up her toothbrush and wet it under the stream, her eyes still on me in the mirror.

  I said, “I can’t blame him.” I picked up a bar of face soap. “He never got to meet my parents.”

  I lathered a long time, and then rinsed with cupped hands, and dried with my eyes closed, and although at the time it was blind instinct born of a tightness in my chest that made me do such things, in retrospect I see what a transparent discouragement such evasions must have been to her. When I opened my eyes to hang my towel, she was already in bed, and when I joined her there, she smiled and turned to switch off her lamp. I switched mine off as well, and before the cover of dark could restore her courage, I pulled her toward me in the sole gesture of intimacy that never leads to conversation.

  I slept quickly after this, but woke within the hour. I was flatly afraid, and with the earthquake as scapegoat I again allowed my fear of loss to gather, not around my wife and son, as it should have, but this time around the fragile workings of our house. In the trace of moonlight, I glanced at the corners of the ceiling where I had coped the moldings to fit them flush. The following morning when I ran a faucet to wash my hands, I listened for water hammer. Although for some of these things I could not even use the earthquake as justification, I began my annual maintenance tasks early. On Monday, I flushed the drains with baking soda and hot water. On Tuesday, I emptied the sediment from our water heater. On Thursday, I vacuumed our smoke alarms. And on Saturday, six days after the earthquake, I asked Elliot to help me check for cracks in our foundation.

  He followed me around the perimeter with the caulking gun. Since his early boyhood, I’d involved him in household maintenance, and the reliability of my program made him itchy for signs of failure. We had reviewed three sides of the house when I found the first: a six-inch fissure wide enough at its center to accept a nickel. At first the quickening of his attention gave me a sudden empty feeling, but as he leaned close and brushed my shoulder, I chided myself: anything unusual is intriguing. Then he turned to me. He wanted to know how wide a bead of caulk he should pull, and although I’d been watching the changes in him for several months, I have to say that it wasn’t until that moment that I noticed the beginnings of a mustache. The sun was bright, his face no more than ten inches from my own, and the hair was blond and so fine it was almost transparent. A sprinkler ticked at the far end of the lawn. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a car door slammed. “Don’t worry,” I said finally, but in this context, perhaps because of the surprise on my face, he didn’t understand me. He waited, as if I might say something he had been waiting years to hear. A better father would have thought to speak a word of affection or wisdom into that silence, but I did not. “Just pull the trigger,” I said; “I cut the nozzle to a size that will determine the bead,” and when I said this—maybe it’s hindsight that colors my memory, but I do not think so—something like disappointment overcame him. His head dropped at my words, so slightly I never would have noticed it had it not been for the faint mustache. At this new angle, the light left it, and the fine hairs disappeared in shadow. Then he shifted slightly on his haunches—I remember that his weight crushed a sweet smell from the grass—and drew a thin seam of caulk along the crack.

  That afternoon, he worked upstairs in his bedroom, typing an outline for his report on my father. As I changed out of my work pants, long pauses fell between each strike of type ball against ribbon. I went downstairs to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. Liz was in the living room, labeling the leaves of a photo album from our trip to the Grand Canyon. I had planned, for my part, to spend the rest of the day on interior weatherproofing, checking for drafts by running a dampened hand along the edges of our windows and doors. But now I was distracted by thoughts about my son. How would this go? I have some extra razors, if you ever need them. Or this: Would you like me to teach you to shave?

  Outside, a squirrel backed up the trunk of our elm tree, its small hands gripping the furrowed bark. Elliot’s typewriter sounded upstairs, six hesitant strikes, and then silence. I took a wheat cracker from a mason jar on the windowsill and rubbed the salt from its surface with my thumb. I set the cracker first untouched on the countertop, and then in the waste can beneath the sink where the evidence of my indecision could not be detected.

  Under the drain trap was a wire basket of new yellow sponges. Inside their cellophane wrappers, they were already moist. I took one into the entry hall. My front door is a two-inch plane of solid oak, weather-stripped with spring copper and strips of felt. But one never knows. Houses settle. In earthquakes, they move. I pressed my palms against the sponge and traced the door frame as I have seen mimes do, without touching it, a pantomime of escape, checking for drafts.

  2 The Razor

  BY MY OWN ESTIMATION I HAD BEEN A DECENT FATHER, IN every way a better father than my own, but the fact was that over the summer I had suffered one small failure of composure with my son.

  It had happened in the attic.

  Every year, I had given Elliot the option of going to camp, and every year, to my quiet gratification, he had chosen to pass the long hot months with me, improving something in our home. When he was younger, I’d picked the projects myself and kept them small—painting the exterior of the garage; installing a new washer and dryer in the basement—but as he got older, I tried to win another year of his company by inviting his suggestions. When he was thirteen, he drew a sketch of the tables and cabinets that became a custom workshop in the basement. The following summer he brought home a book from the library on installing central air-conditioning. And in April of that year, he led me up the narrow stairwell to my unfinished attic.

  It had started well enough. I am a careful man—to a fault, I see now—and although by the standards of the average boy, Elliot had always been hyper-responsible, he had a boy’s overconfidence in his own abilities and ignorance of the dangers of the world, and sometimes this made him hasty. I’d done an excellent job, I think, over the years, of hiding my judgment of this. When, after several respectful hints from me about tensile strength, he’d whittled a good eighty-five percent off the body of his car for the Pinewood Derby, I suppressed my criticism and complimented him on the boldness of his experiment. When in an eight-year-old’s show of finesse he had insisted on carrying all three of our plates from the dinner table at once, I crouched to help him clean up the broken pieces and told him gently that more balance would come with practice and time.

  But that year it had been harder. He was an adolescent, and maybe it is not so strange that some
of his behavior had begun to bother me. Little things. Although I bought him a thermal cup with a flip top, he opened can after can of 7-Up and left them open and sweating on the plywood subfloor next to absorbent bats of insulation. Each day at the slightest rise in temperature, he took off his shirt and walked around the attic bare-chested, heedless of the raw boards certain to scrape his lean torso as we worked. When he was younger, he had listened to popular rock with Liz, upbeat songs that made her sashay across the kitchen, but now he set a boom box at the top of the stairs and played something so malevolent and percussive it was a menace to concentration.

  To my small credit, I recognized these irritations as petty, and I knew better than to give them voice. A teenage boy is hungry for approval, especially from his father, and in the forced ease of these liberties, I thought I recognized a clumsy stab at the air of authority that flows from the unstudied habits of a man. As far as the carpentry went, he did a decent job, but not always with the method I would have chosen. He hammered in a stylized, self-conscious way that resulted in a lot of bent nails, but they were only nails, and I never corrected his form. I let him work for hours each day without my supervision, and even in cases where the cost of repairing an error would have been significant, in time and effort as well as money, I had done no more to assist him than review his progress when I got home from work. The plan was working well, and I’d felt certain he would leave the summer burnished by success and paternal praise, until in July he’d floated the idea of adding a bathroom.

  I should pause here and explain that all of the pipes in my house are copper. Copper pipe is lightweight, strong, and more resistant to corrosion and scale than other metals, but it’s also the case that it’s difficult to install correctly. Before soldering, a substance called flux should be applied to remove surface oxide, but too much flux can cause corrosion and too little will create gaps in the integrity of the connection. Overheating will do the same. And then there is the danger. The flame on a propane torch is soundless, and, in light good enough to do the work, it’s invisible, too. If you char the wood on rough framing even slightly and don’t wash it down with water, the embers can linger for hours inside the wood and come to blaze in a breeze while you’re taking a break. After seeing my son’s pride at two months of largely solitary work on carpentry, I didn’t want to undermine his sense of competence with a month of micromanagement on a plumbing project.

  For this reason, perhaps I can be forgiven for the small deception my misguided instincts supplied when he suggested the bathroom addition. I said, “Great idea. We can plumb it with plastic pipe.”

  I still think, despite all that happened, that this was a good decision. He got started right away, and his surprise when I handed him the schematic and told him he could do all of the joining himself seemed well worth the lie my show of interest in trying plastic pipe represented. Although back then many people were excited about CPVC’s potential, I myself was skeptical, and despite what I’d implied, it offered me no mystery or challenge whatsoever. Joining plastic pipe is done with solvent cement that sets in thirty seconds, and you can cut some grades with nothing more aggressive than a sharp, sturdy knife. But I was banking on the chance that the very simplicity that secretly made it seem crude to me would allow my son an ego-bolstering success with installation.

  And I was right. He had always been a hardworking boy, but the trust I granted him seemed to inspire him. Each evening when I got home from the office, he called me up to check his work. To my great relief, the joints appeared to be clean—with a steady bead of solvent rimming each one—and at my exclamations of pride at his craftsmanship he’d had to work hard to maintain his teenager’s air of bored composure. He roughed in a toilet bend, a drum trap for the bathtub, hot and cold water supply lines, a plastic revent. He installed the toilet, then a pedestal basin, and, after I helped him heft it up the stairs in my tie and suit pants one morning, even a prefab fiberglass tub. By the end of August, the only job that remained was joining his new plumbing to my old system.

  It is a little hard to remember, honestly, what our relationship was like by that point in the summer without coloring it with hindsight. As I said, his impulsiveness had grated on my nerves some, but by and large I think what passed between us was fairly simple. He told me stories. He ate food from my refrigerator. He fell asleep at my side on the couch. In other words, he was a boy, and I assumed my company did not make him think too deeply. But perhaps this is just an example of my being less sensitive or observant than I should have been because when I followed him up to the attic with the propane torch, I was not yet looking for his words to mean any more than they said.

  I sweated the first joint myself, and I worked slowly to make a point, but all the while, he kneeled beside me, leaning forward in a way that made it seem he was impatient to take over. I held the spool of solder steady, moving it around the pipe, and watched as the bead grew shiny and began to stream. Then I turned off the flame and set down the torch.

  “Can I try?” he said.

  His easy eagerness made me nervous, and I felt a quick rise of irritation, but I did not show it. I handed him the gloves and goggles, and I reminded myself that he was anxious to become a man. And the truth is, he followed my example almost flawlessly. He removed dirt from the inside of both fittings with gentle twists of a wire brush. He wiped the surfaces down with a cloth and applied a thin film of flux. He was quiet during all of this, asking no questions, and I can say honestly that at the sight of his competence what little irritation I had felt was displaced by genuine pride. It was not until he finished his prep work and picked up the torch that I felt it return. He flipped the switch and held the flame up to the pipe. “So where did you learn to do this?” he said.

  It’s worth pointing out that, initially at least, very little of my stress was caused by the substance of his question. At that moment, it stemmed almost solely from the challenge of suppressing my shock at the fact that he would consider his first novice seconds manipulating a blowtorch inches from the tinder-dry framework of our house an appropriate time to strike up a conversation.

  “Easy there,” I said. “Hold the flame back or you’ll burn away the flux.”

  He moved the flame higher.

  He said, “Do you remember who taught you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  His tone was casual, chatty. “Do you remember who taught you how to use a soldering iron?”

  “Propane torch,” I said pedantically; then I pointed at it: “Don’t forget the other side.”

  He moved it around the pipe. Without my reminding him, he also eased back the flame and touched the thread of solder to the seam above the fitting. Capillary action drew it swiftly into the joint.

  “That’s perfect,” I said.

  “Was it your father who taught you?”

  “Now just wind it around—”

  “He was a plumber, right?” he said, and he turned away from the flame to face me.

  In fairness to him, he had already withdrawn the torch from the pipe, and he was holding it very steady. He was in danger of burning nothing, not even the flux, but the fact remained that he was working with an open flame for the very first time without paying full attention, without appearing to worry, without even keeping his eyes on his work, all while trying to carry on a conversation, and I guess after a summer of watching the seeds of boyish impulse threaten to flower into the habits of a reckless man, all of this simply overwhelmed me.

  I said, “Jesus Christ, Elliot, what the hell do you think you’re doing!?”

  I can still remember the look that came over his face. He was surprised, his face drained of color and tensed in a way that is hard to describe except to say that now he looked guarded. He was not wearing a shirt, and I could see in his thin chest the undeniable but poignantly slight outlines of pectoral muscles he had been working with a set of dumbbells in the privacy of his room. All at once it seemed painfully clear to me that in raising the subject of my own
apprenticeship he had been struggling gamely to transcend the adolescence that had been drawing my secret reproach all summer long.

  Right away I did some damage control. “Actually it looks like you’re better at multitasking safely than I’d be,” I said. I had to force myself not to reach and switch off the propane torch in his hand. “I was just worried about you looking away from that flame.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  He turned back to his work, and he passed the torch near the pipe to regenerate the heat that had dissipated during my outburst.

  I said, “It just scared me for a second.”

  He drew the flame away and touched the solder to the last gap in the seam.

  I said, “I forgot how capable you are.”

  There had been other moments when I’d lost my temper with him—when he was a toddler and ran into a busy parking lot; the year before when, without calling home, he had stayed out well after dark. Standing there in the sudden quiet of the attic, watching him wield an invisible fire, I’d reminded myself of these, but two months later, as I tried to decipher the strange runes of his piercing looks and choice of report topics, it occurred to me that this flash of anger had been different in a small but important way. It was the first that revealed feelings I’d been trying to hide.

  A FILM REEL OF CLIPS FROM OUR PAST TOGETHER MIGHT MAKE my apprehension in the wake of the earthquake seem strange. Since his early boyhood, the first weekend of every month Elliot and I had gone out alone together for an activity of his choosing, and although I always worried as he grew older he would begin to postpone these dates, so far he had made careful plans for every one. In the evenings, when I settled in the basement fixing our toaster oven or cleaning the contacts on our water heater, he often slipped onto a stool with a stack of comic books to share my space in a silence so full of quiet affection, I was afraid to rupture it with speech. Even that Friday, the week I first noticed signs that things were changing, he phoned me at my office.