The Affinities Read Online Free PDF Page A

been the subject of my father’s attention often enough that I recognized the symptoms.
    â€œWe waited dinner for you,” Mama Laura said. “Come in and wash up. Geddy’ll take your suitcase up to your room, won’t you, Geddy?”
    Geddy seemed pleased to take charge of the duffel bag into which I had thrown a couple of changes of clothes. “Thanks,” I said.
    â€œDon’t be too long,” my father said. He hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen him. Same crisp blue shirt, same crumpled black tie loose around the collar. He was a tall man, but not fat. People said I looked like him, and I guessed I did, but the only time I saw the resemblance was when I was tired or angry. As if some perpetual discontent had left its mark on his face.
    At the table we didn’t talk about Grammy Fisk—at least not right away. We had had the essentials of that conversation already, by phone. A second health crisis had awakened Granny Fisk in the small hours of the night, one that had nothing to do with her gallbladder. This time, Grammy Fisk hadn’t apologized for the trouble she was putting everyone to, hadn’t insisted on getting dressed before the EMT guys showed up. She had woken up unable to move or feel the right side of her body; she was blind in one eye; her speech was slurred and indistinct; and she could communicate nothing but a groaning, awful terror.
    By the time she reached Onenia County Hospital she had lost consciousness. Scans revealed massive intracranial bleeding—a stroke, in other words. She had been comatose for the last two days, and while my father couldn’t bring himself to say it (“Prospects don’t look so good” was the closest he could come), she wasn’t expected to recover. The hospital had promised to call if there was any change in her condition; we would all drive there in the morning to keep vigil by her bed.
    â€œNot that she seems to notice,” my father added. “I don’t think she knows we’re even there, to tell the truth.”
    Mama Laura had prepared a huge meal, including sweet potatoes in brown sugar and roast chicken, but no one had much appetite, least of all me. We watched each other pick at our plates. At forty-two, ten years younger than my father, Mama Laura still had the timid demeanor she had brought to the family when she married him: an instinctive caution that showed in her body language and in her face, always turned a shy quarter-angle away. Concealed under this deference was a genuine love of the work that embedded her in the family. We could have afforded all kinds of help, but Mama Laura refused to consider hiring a maid or a cook. It was not that she thought of herself as a servant. She expected to be appreciated for what she did. But it was also her way of demonstrating her right to be among us. She fed us and cleaned our house, and that entitled her to a certain non-negotiable minimum of respect, both for herself and for her son Geddy. Tonight she gazed forlornly at the platters of untouched food on the table, though she had taken little of it herself.
    â€œAll that trouble in the South China Sea,” my father said, “and the Persian Gulf. It’s not doing our business any good. Or this town.”
    That was his idea of something neutral to talk about. He aimed his remarks at my older brother, Aaron. Aaron sat next to me, shoulders squared, knife and fork poised over his plate—Aaron’s appetite seemed relatively intact. And as always, he knew what was expected of him. “The Chinese,” he said, nodding, “the fucking Saudis…”
    The dynamic was so familiar I hardly had to listen to the rest of it: my father’s opinions, amplified by my brother. Not that Aaron was faking it. He shared my father’s conviction that America was a fallen Eden and that what lay beyond its gates was a wilderness of veniality, poverty, and low cunning.