Of Time and Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

and wife will be arrested in New York City as spies and taken from their two small children to be executed in the electric chair?
    Or maybe she has lost a friend in the last war and is thinking of this friend as the shutter of the camera falls, wishing he could be here to see her in her wedding car.
    Something
has
distracted her.
    I want to see some eagerness in her eyes, an eagerness to finish up with these wedding photographs so that she can be alone with my father. Eager to touch him and for him to touch her.
    It is the far-off look in her eyes that makes me wish I could do something to help her.
    I drove all the way to Pennsylvania that New Year’s Day, wishing I could do something for the people in the photograph beside me. The two of them, already fugitives from a fate that was bearing down on them as this photograph was being taken. A fate that would kill her and rip the trajectory out of his youth so that his life became tied to only one question—
How will I ever go on living?
    There they were at the very beginning of their love story, yet already hurrying toward its end, and I could do nothing for them. I could not prevent them from taking another step closer to their end.

Chapter Five
    O ur fathers, who art in old age, how we shall come upon them, in pale blue flannel pajama bottoms pulled up too high, far above their waists, the way our own children hiked them up when they were first learning to dress themselves.
    â€œOh, it’s been a sad game,” he says to me.
    â€œThere was a lot of traffic on the New Jersey turnpike, but I had it on the radio. I’m sorry they lost.”
    â€œYou must be hungry?”
    â€œNo, no, I’m fine, Dad.”
    â€œI’ll make some coffee.”
    When he stands up I put my arms around him and he says to the emptiness in this room, “Donnie’s here. My boy is here.”
    â€œI’m here.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re here.”
    A house-worth of furniture lines the walls of these four tiny nailed-together rooms. An avocado-green couch I remember. An embroidered chair I’ve never seen. The old dining-room table I’d forgotten. “I need to get Ma some new chairs,” he tells me. “These are falling apart.”
    Grateful for something to do, I am soon down on my knees checking the joints of the chairs. “A little glue, butthese are great, Dad. You couldn’t buy any as nice as these today.”
    He wanders out of the kitchen. I watch him disappear around the corner saying, “Christmas cookies, Christmas cookies.”
    Beneath the table I am his little boy again, setting up my Union and Confederate soldiers, moving cannons into place, tying horses to the oak legs. For my fort, a blanket draped across the table, hanging down over the sides. I would wait there for him to come home from the night shift. The best part was remaining perfectly still and silent, watching his shoes cross the floor, coming toward me, then turning away. He would pretend he didn’t see me there, making me wait. Then, as if it was the most sensible thing in the world as well as the thing he wanted most to do, he would crawl in beside me with his cup of coffee, the scent of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave filling the fort. “Am I your buddy today?” I would ask him.
    Now I hear him banging something in the next room. In the light, when I come upon him, I can see how the tumor has begun to drag down the right side of his face. One eye is nearly closed.
    â€œWhat’s the trouble here, Dad?”
    Again he is my own little boy, Jack, at home, trying to stuff his clothes into a bureau drawer that is already full. He tells me that the whole football team is dying—here, this shirt, these sweaters belonged to a halfback and to the tall Polish boy who kicked extra points. “Their wives keep blessing me with their clothes,” he tells me. “Look at these beautiful clothes they’ve blessed me