The Night Listener : A Novel

it?”
    “Hell, no.”
    “Well, yell for the nurse then, because you’re gonna get it.”
    “What the hell is the matter with you, anyway? You’re fifty years old, and you still care what your father thinks.” How mean he could be sometimes. And how accurate.
    “And you don’t?” I asked.
    “Don’t what?”
    “Care what your father thought?”
    His eyes turned as flinty as arrowheads. Gathering my courage, I free-fell into the abyss. “Why don’t you ever talk about him, Pap?” He stayed surprisingly calm. “So that’s where you’re heading.”
    “Yeah. I guess so. Do you mind?”
    “No. But it’s not gonna happen.”
    “What?”
    “Whatever it is you’re expecting. There’ll be no epiphanies on this deathbed.”
    I smiled at him. “This isn’t your deathbed.”
    “How the hell do you know?”
    “You’re right. We better talk fast.”
    He just grunted at my effort at levity. After a moment of awkward silence he said: “Go ahead then. Shoot.” Shoot .
    “Well,” I began, “do you know why he did it?”
    “No sir, I don’t.”
    “He didn’t leave a note or anything?”
    “No.”
    “That must have been terrible. Not knowing for all this time. I can’t imagine.”
    There was no response for a while, and then he shrugged. “You can’t spend your life fretting about something like that.”
    Can’t you? I thought.
    “Did he do it in your room?” I asked.
    “My room? Hell, no. Where’d you hear that?”
    “Just…around.”
    “It happened in the garden shed.”
    “Where was that?”
    “Back where we put the lych-gate. Christ, do you want a map?”
    “And you were…how old…seventeen?”
    “Something like that.”
    Something like that? Who wouldn’t remember exactly?
    “It was during the Depression, right?”
    “Yep.”
    “So it could have been about money.”
    “I doubt it seriously. He was just depressed, that’s all. There was nothing crazy about him.”
    “Is that what people said?”
    “No. Hell, no.”
    “Then why did you say that?”
    “Well, some folks just automatically assume…” He couldn’t finish, so I did it for him:
    “That anyone who commits suicide is crazy. Or gay or something.” His face was afire in a matter of seconds. “How dare you say such a thing?”
    “Oh…maybe because I don’t see anything wrong with it.”
    “Well, he wasn’t. Ask anybody.”
    “And I wasn’t suggesting that he was.”
    “The whole damn world’s not that way, you know.”
    “Oh, I know.”
    “He was a decent family man.”
    “Fine. Thanks for sharing. I’m glad we’ve cleared him of that shameful possibility.”
    “That’s not what I meant, goddammit. Don’t twist my words. We weren’t even talking about you.”
    “No.” I mustered all my calm. “You’re right. Tell me what he was like.”
    He sulked for a while. “He was a good man, like I said. A gentle-man. You would have liked him, if you’d met him.” It was an odd moment, this hypothetical introduction to someone who’d been gone for sixty-five years. Still I fleshed out my grandfather, giving him colors and textures and smells the way I’d done with Pete, building someone out of nothing, because a ravenous mind demanded it.
    “Did he look like us?”
    My father thought about that for a moment. “He was a good-sized man.”
    I gave him a crooked smile.
    “So that’s one thing you can’t keep blaming me for.” I studied him soberly for a moment. “I don’t blame you for anything.”
    He grunted. “Sure as hell feels like it sometimes.”
    “I got a lot of good things from you, Pap. Your sense of humor, your love of an audience. Your political indignation.” His eyes narrowed dubiously at the last point.
    “It’s the same instinct,” I added, “just aimed in a different direction. I wouldn’t be who I am if it weren’t for you, Pap.” This was too much for him. “Now I know I’m dying.”
    “I wish you hadn’t been angry all the time. I do wish that. And I wish it for Mummie, too. She walked on eggshells for you, Pap.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “That,” I said quietly. “That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not easy to deal with, you know. The way you’re always ready to explode.”
    “You don’t know the slightest goddamn thing about—”
    “I do, Pap. I was there. And I know what it’s like to accommodate someone else’s anger, because I ended up marrying you.”
    “What?”
    I grew almost feverish with