Strange Highways

high school. Unused but well polished, the desk remained as a monument.
     Putting his pipe in a large cut-glass ashtray, Henry rose from his chair, reached across the desk, and shook Joey's hand. "I saw you at Mass, but I didn't want to intrude."
     "I didn't notice ... anyone," Joey said.
     "How're you doing?"
     "Okay. I'm okay."
     They stood awkwardly for a moment, not sure what to say. Then Joey sat in one of the two commodious armchairs that faced the desk.
     Kadinska settled back into his own chair and picked up his pipe. He was in his midfifties, slightly built, with a prominent Adam's apple. His head seemed somewhat too large for his body, and this disproportionateness was emphasized by a hairline that had receded four or five inches from his brow. Behind his thick glasses, his hazel eyes seemed to have a kindly aspect.
     "You found the house key where I told you?"
     Joey nodded.
     "The place hasn't changed all that much, has it?" Henry Kadinska asked.
     "Less than I expected. Not at all, really."
     "Most of his life, your dad didn't have any money to spend - and when he finally got some, he didn't know how to spend it." He touched a match to his pipe and drew on the mouthpiece. "Drove P.J. crazy that Dan wouldn't use much of what he gave him."
     Joey shifted uneasily in his chair. "Mr. Kadinska ... I don't understand why I'm here. Why did you need to see me?"
     "P.J. still doesn't know about your dad?"
     "I've left messages on the answering machine in his New York apartment. But he doesn't really live there. Only for a month or so each year."
     The pipe was fired up again. The air was redolent of cherry-scented tobacco.
     In spite of the diplomas and books, the room wasn't much like an average law office. It was a cozy place - shabby-genteel but cozy. Slumped in his chair, Henry Kadinska seemed to be as comfortable in his profession as he might have been in a pair of pajamas.
     "Sometimes," Joey said, "he doesn't call that number for days, even a week or two."
     "Funny way to live - nearly always on the road. But I guess it's right for him."
     "He seems to thrive on it."
     "And it results in those wonderful books," said Kadinska.
     "Yes."
     "I dearly love P.J.'s books."
     "Virtually everyone does."
     "There's a marvelous sense of freedom in them, such a ... such a spirit. "
     "Mr. Kadinska, the weather being as bad as it is, I'd like to get started back to Scranton as soon as possible. I have to catch a commuter flight out of there early in the morning."
     "Of course, yes," said Kadinska, with an unmistakable note of disappointment.
     Now, he seemed to be a lonely little man who had hoped only for some friendly conversation.
     While the lawyer opened a file drawer on his desk and searched for something, Joey noticed that one of the crookedly hung diplomas was from Harvard Law. That was a wildly unlikely alma mater for a small-town, coal-country lawyer.
     Not all the shelves were filled with law books, either. Many were volumes of philosophy. Plato. Socrates. Aristotle. Kant. Augustine. Kierkegaarde. Bentham. Santayana. Schopenhauer. Empedocles, Heidegger, Hobbes, and Francis Bacon.
     Perhaps Henry Kadinska wasn't comfortable being a small-town lawyer but was simply long resigned to it, trapped first in the orbit of his father and then by the gravity of habit.
     Sometimes, especially in a whiskey haze, it was easy for Joey to forget that he himself wasn't the only person in the world whose dearest dreams had come to nothing.
     "Your father's last will and testament," said Kadinska as he opened a file folder on his desk.
     "A reading of the will?" Joey asked. "I think P.J. should be here for that, not me."
     "On the contrary. The will has nothing to do with P.J. Your father left everything to you."
     A sickening pang of guilt quivered through Joey. "Why would he do that?"
     "You're his son. Why wouldn't he?"
     Joey made a point of meeting the attorney's eyes. On this one day, even if never again, he wanted to be honest about these matters, to conduct himself with a dignity of which his father would have approved.
     "We both know the hard answer to that, Mr. Kadinska. I broke his heart. Broke my mother's heart too.