The Testing of Luther Albright Page 5

  I told a quick version of this story.

  “Was it hard?” Elliot said.

  “No. That’s what irritated him about the manager.”

  “He was irritated?”

  “I think so.”

  “What did he say?”

  I thought about this: on the way home in his service van, his voice rising. “I can’t really remember. But it was the kind of thing that annoyed him.”

  The waitress brought our pancakes and sausages on platters and little side plates, all balanced on her forearms and splayed between her fingers. Elliot moved his notebook aside for her and kept scribbling.

  “What didn’t you like about him?” he said.

  Liz cleared a space for the food, repositioning flatware, moving packets of jam.

  “He was my father,” I said.

  Elliot said, “Well maybe once he irritated you or disappointed you or something.”

  When I was twelve, I had won first prize in my school science fair, and then in my county, and went on to the state competition. I took my place there between two people whose display hinges were attached crookedly to boards that had not been beveled or sanded, and I made a note of this to point out to my father when he met us there after his morning service call. At two o’clock the judges came to shake my hand and examine my project. They made notes on clipboards. My mother looked at her watch. By four o’clock they had announced me the second-prize winner over a squeaky PA. They gave me a ribbon and people took photographs. Those who had won nothing began taking their boards down and carrying them out under their arms. We drove home in a car my mother had borrowed from a neighbor in exchange for a chicken casserole. Rows of poplars receded over the hills. Factories began to pop up and then again to disappear. When we got home, we found my father playing solitaire, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in the sink.

  Elliot’s pancakes were steaming. In a minute he would pour too much syrup on them and eat them.

  “He was my father,” I said.

  THAT WEEK, ELLIOT BEGAN RESTORING THE FIVE-HORSEPOWER engine from our old push mower in the basement. It was his idea, and immediately, I assumed an assistant mechanic’s role. He cleaned and gapped the spark plugs, tinkered with the throttle, tightened the manifold screws and gasket. Now and then I went up to the kitchen for cool cans of soda and set them sweating on the pressboard where he bent over a plate of chrome, his breath clouding the surface. I handed him tools, and without turning, he checked the supervisory aspect of my assistance. “Not yet,” he said, and dawdled over the last moments of his task.

  I learned a new rhythm. I searched for ways to help that did not seem to irritate him, and soon found the boundaries of his patience. Advice was acceptable only in the form of stories about a centrifugal pump I had tried to build when I was his age. Offerings to his cause were accepted as well. I brought him an engine compression tester and a three-gallon can of gas, and when after four days it was still stalling out, I went to the library.

  I browsed the stacks for the manual with the most technical tone, one that appeared to have been written for mechanics themselves. This was all I had come for, but when I stepped up to the circulation desk, an onion-scented girl with an opal at her neck slipped a card into its pocket. She wore brown lipstick and her hair tight at her neck in a bun and a watch too large for her slender wrist. “Good day,” she said, and suddenly the plea implicit in these talismans of maturity moved me. I pictured my son beside me, our faces overlapping in his mirror, his face covered in foam. A towel swaddled his shoulders, making him look small. A conversation outside the bathroom would allow him more dignity. I thanked the girl and went back into the library.

  There were a number of books in the young-adult section, but I spent an extra ten minutes searching the card catalog to find one in General Interest: The Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming. Shaving technique was tersely reduced to its essentials. “To begin, soften the beard.” “Address difficult areas last.” There were diagrams to clarify the orientation of the blade. By copying these onto the back of the text, I was able to fit it on a single page. The photocopy machine bulb flashed like sheet lightning, and I pictured myself mentioning it in the basement, maybe as he fitted his safety goggles over his head. I have a description somewhere that might save you some nicks. The physics are actually sort of interesting. His eyes would disappear behind a dull plane of reflected light. Metal contracts when it’s cold, as you know. A cold blade will give you a closer shave.

  IT IS A SIGN OF HOW SUCCESSFULLY I HAD MISLED HER ABOUT my worries that that night after dinner, Liz suggested a neighborhood walk. We had begun them before Elliot was born. They’d been Liz’s idea, at first a way of learning about my interest in construction and later of working on what she had probably come to explain to herself as my insufficient store of self-esteem. After Elliot was born, they stopped, until he was of an age when she knew my knowledge would seem a kind of magic trick to him. We had not taken one in a long time.

  Now the moon was nearly full, and the sidewalks, slick with late rain, were alive with lamplight. She wore a lavender windbreaker with its hood raised and the drawstrings pulled close across her bangs and beneath her chin and somehow still looked lovely; her beauty was that bright. Elliot’s jacket was open and caught gusts of wind. Years ago, Liz had purchased Thermos mugs with lids for these walks, and we each carried one filled with hot chocolate. When we got home, Elliot would open his to spoon cool marshmallows from its bottom.

  “Find a really bad one,” Liz said to me.

  “We’re coming up on one of the worst.”

  “Oh goody,” she said.

  I stopped in front of an older shingled rambler that had sold, I guessed, on the extravagance of its landscaping. Plum trees flanked the sidewalk, and the lawn was hemmed in by a series of carefully tended herb and flower beds. Wisteria vines overhung the front door, and the house itself seemed to rest on a foundation of enormous, dark-leafed camellia bushes. I said, “This garden is beautiful, but the house will have dry rot problems. The bushes will trap moisture against the shingles and breed fungi that will feed on the wood. Eventually, it will turn brown or white and crumble to the touch.”

  The moonlight cast shadows on Elliot’s face. When I got home from work, I had given him the mechanic’s manual, and he had examined it silently in the basement, his arm touching mine once and recoiling. I had not mentioned the physics of shaving.

  He sipped his hot chocolate.

  I said, “The one next door will have rot problems too.” It was a new ranch house with a swing set in the front yard. “What’s causing it?”

  Elliot said, “The gutter is blocked.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Puddles next to the foundation.”

  “And?”

  “Those dirt stains under the downspout.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I touched his hair.

  Typically we stayed within blocks of our own home, but now Liz led us the quarter mile along the river to the new development that fronted onto the golf course. All of the houses were large, four thousand square feet or more, with Jacuzzi tubs sunken into their rear patios and flagstone driveways, but their unfortunate secret was that they were built on a site of soft clay. Clay drains poorly. In wet weather, it can compress unevenly, placing stress on the foundation. A contractor can reduce the risk of this by sinking the footings more deeply. It’s what I had hoped for when I saw the bulldozers pushing elm stumps and licorice weed across the field towards the access road, but the footings on these houses were not even as deep as those on my own.

  When we passed between the lantern posts onto its wide streets, she led us downhill towards the artificial lake on the ninth hole. Rows of saplings with root-balls wrapped in burlap sat waiting in the muddy yards.

  She stopped in front of a big one on a corner lot. “This is it,” she said.

  “This is what?” I said, although suddenly I knew just what she meant.

  “The house Robert Belsk
y bought.”

  The house was huge, the largest we had yet passed, with a three-car garage and two-story columns flanking its front door.

  She said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  “About the design, I mean.”

  It was dark, but by taking a step into the yard, I could see that holes had been drilled around the base of the columns for drainage. A copper roof edge glinted along the eave, and a flat of clay tiles lay neatly stacked in the street.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “But there are things, aren’t there?” she said. “Things any engineer worthy of promotion should have been able to see?”

  Sometimes I think helping me must have been a very difficult calling.

  I led them onto the unlandscaped lot. Gravel crunched beneath our feet. From the front, it appeared to be only two stories, but the property sloped to the rear, where the developers had included a daylight basement. The backyard half of the lot looked level, but if you walked north, you could see that it sloped slightly towards the house.

  “It will have drainage problems as soon as the rain begins,” I said, and she leaned over and kissed me on the shoulder.

  But in bed that night, she did not fall asleep. My wife’s sleep was distinguished by a slight sound she made with her tongue against her soft palate, as if she were tasting things in her dreams; and tonight, when I woke in the dark, she was silent. Downstairs in the living room, the grandfather clock I had built from a kit during her first pregnancy tolled the half hour, a single, muffled bong. The sheets tingled beneath my arms. My ears buzzed with the effort to hear her breathe. It was a shock when she spoke. “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “Neither can I.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What’s on your mind?” I said.

  “What’s on your mind,” she said.

  “Is that a question or an answer?”

  She laughed, but still did not move.

  When we were first married, she had wanted to get pregnant, and I had wanted to wait. After five years, I finally conceded, and then we had trouble. She kept a small calendar to keep track of her ovulation, then an extra pillow to slip under her hips after we tried, and she had two miscarriages, children we had already named. When we overheard those names in public, she was careful not to look at me. At first I made sure to mention these episodes later, in the car as we stared at the road ahead, or in the bathroom at night as we washed our faces, and she would kiss me in a spot more tender for its remoteness—at my jawline, or on the crown of my head. After a while, though, the repetition of these exchanges seemed painful in itself, the familiarity of the words and actions freighted with sadness, and I stopped. Elliot had no name until after the nurse took him down the hall to bathe him. It was the first time we had discussed it. We both suggested names far less popular than the ones we had chosen before, and it was clear from this to both of us that we had separately planned for disappointment.

  The pause had lasted twenty seconds now, too long for a change of topic, and finally in a way that might have passed for answer to her question but was not lying, I reached under the sheet and drew her towards me in the dark. But this time I couldn’t silence her so easily. Each day her patience was thinning.

  She said, “Is that meeting on Monday?”

  “Which meeting?”

  “New office assignments.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. Her grasping shamed me. “Nothing too exciting, I’m sure.”

  I think on some level she may have known this was not at the core of my worries, but because I had given her nothing else to work with, she laid a hand on my chest and said this: “No, nothing too exciting. Just a high corner with a view of the capitol dome.” She talked about other favors I had been shown—invitations from Krepps; briefings with politicians—whispers between soft touches of her lips and hands, and afterwards slept soundly, making that sound with her palate, the savor that told me she was asleep.

  To my small credit, I did lie awake for a time thinking maybe I should wake her and try to undo it. Say, “I think I may have hurt him.” Or even just this: “Sometimes I think he wishes I were a different man.” But there were things—the sad reckoning of our history together—that filled me with hesitation. After all my years of withholding and all her years of giving, the fact that I feared I might fail the only child my stalling had allowed her seemed an unfair burden to share.

  Instead I tried for sleep—a little exercise I had been doing since I was a boy. When I was fifteen, I had worked for my father for a summer, and in early June, I had gone to the library and checked out a book. This alone should have been a clear sign to me that he was really changing. A few years before it never would have occurred to me to rely on anything but his tutelage, but already a mistrust of his word had crept into my thinking. Alone in my room in Trenton, I had read the introduction dozens of times, until I could see the pages long after I switched off my light. The publisher’s medallion with a hammer at its center. Then the dedication: “for Gladys,” who I had decided was the author’s wife. And finally the introduction: “Behind the walls of a house,” it read, “pipes do not always run straight. They curve, branch off, and may have to be connected to other pipes of different diameters or dissimilar composition. It is the design plumber’s duty to ensure that these awkward turns and connections are made cleanly and quietly. For example, because stopping the flow from a faucet causes a shock wave that may bang loudly and with enough force to damage the system, he must install capped pipe extensions that create a cushion of air to absorb these sounds and preserve the peace a family holds dear. Although plumbing in essence is not a difficult trade, it requires careful planning to build and maintain a properly functioning water system, by which I mean to say, one that is invisible to the residents of the house.”

  Somehow the silent recitation of these lines never failed to soothe me. That night, when I’d finished them for the third time, I gave up the idea of waking her to confess my worry and resolved to seize the next good opportunity to talk to our son.

  THAT WEEKEND, IT CAME. IT WAS THE FIRST SATURDAY IN November, and when he slipped into the passenger seat, he told me to drive to the Arden Fair Multiplex. Standing in line for tickets, I made guesses—comedies he had mentioned; things his friends had recommended—and he smirked at me, passing a hand over his mouth when I looked at him, a new gesture. In the last week, the roots of the hair above his lip had darkened. Now it was visible in moderate light.

  “Dad?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  The skin on my neck tingled. “Of course.”

  “Did you ever see him really angry?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “When?”

  “That centrifugal pump I built. I let the parts start to rust in our backyard.”

  Now his eyes fixed on mine. “What did he do?”

  “He told me to finish it.”

  “But what did he say?”

  And all at once, the price I was paying for my outburst seemed unfairly high. The idea that Elliot might be wondering if he would have found a more temperate parent in my father was more irony than I could suffer without correction.

  “He said, ‘Finish that pump by Friday or I’ll take the belt to your ass.’”

  Elliot’s eyes widened. I had spanked him only once, when he was a toddler, for running into the street outside a grocery store. I still thought of this whenever he turned his eyes away from me, but I realize that probably he did not remember it.

  “Was he kidding?”

  “No, he wasn’t kidding.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I finished the pump.”

  “I mean when he said that.”

  “Which movie?” a voice said then, and instead of answering my son, I turned to it. We had reached the front of the line.

  He bought tickets for On Golden Pond, a movie about a boy hungry for connect
ion with a father, and the clumsy bluntness of the message in this choice made me feel ashamed of my feelings of persecution. I sobered myself with thoughts of the duty I’d been avoiding. In the last three days, I had been to the drugstore twice. The first time, I bought a packet of disposable razors and a canister of unscented shaving cream. The next day I went back and bought one with an odor, something called “Sport,” because I did not know what he wanted. Now in the darkened theater, the film’s bittersweet music moved me, and words began to take shape in my mind. But they soon left me. He stirred in his seat, glancing at me during scene changes. During one of these glances, I saw that his cheeks were damp, and—God forgive me—I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. He sniffled, and I leaned forward a bit, so that his face was outside my peripheral vision. But after a few minutes, he whispered to me. “Dad?”

  On-screen, the boy and the old man were clinging to a rock in the darkening water.

  “What?” I said.

  “Want more popcorn?”