Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Fathers and Sons (Fiction)

(1991)

Cleaning out the house was the most difficult part.

His mother's funeral had been in October; now it was Christmas week. The house was unoccupied for the first time in more than fifty years. Walking into an empty house would have been easier; it was unsettling to see all the furniture, associated with memories going back as far as he could make them, not serving any purpose except awaiting their final destination-repurposed or retired. All the older, used-up and unwanted artifacts would go to the dump. This was what they were here for. He knew this was not going to be easy, as it seemed they were at once attending to, and facilitating, the last rites of the house-a house that had surreptitiously assumed its own identify during the time it had served and sustained his family.

Immediately, and without warning, the father felt the perceptible weight of history shifting to his shoulders. It's me now, he thought with a sluggish panic. I'm the one, the next in line. He looked at his son and realized, not for the first time, that rites of passage did not present themselves when you were prepared for or amenable to them; they occurred according to whatever natural (or random) order they happened to follow. The family name, he thought. My son's the last one; it either continues or ends with him. And then, he's still a kid. There is plenty of time to think about that. There were more immediate concerns to attend to.

...

His son had been able to say it. The one thing he most wanted to hear; the thing he needed to hear, even if he was unable to articulate (or acknowledge) it until the second it was said-because it might not have been said.

"I'm here," his son said. "I'm not going anywhere."

They had looked out at the Boston skyline earlier that morning. Halfway up Blue Hills Reservation, Big Blue-the miniature mountain where they had hiked and had picnics for decades. They walked, then stood, then sat, mostly silent, not saying much as little needed to be said. They had gotten through the funeral, the first holidays, and now they had the rest of their lives to live. But first they had to clean out the house.

...

The attic had not been entered in who knew how long. The son had never been up here and the father had not seen the inside of it since well before his wedding. Years of dust and darkness seemed suspended in the air, a sentient presence ambivalent about being disrupted after so much time. The space was a personal museum of desks, drawers, papers, books, pictures, clothes, and bags, all long-since relegated to supporting roles, now artifacts of personal authenticity. Two iron bed frames seemed to have taken root in the wooden floor; a vintage Victrola in which mice once made a nest had transformed into a shapeless form of petrified neglect. A sealed box revealed outfits he and his sisters had worn as children. As he sorted through tiny pairs of white shoes and the old-fashioned dresses and suits, he looked up at his son, understanding that most of these articles he held were over fifty years old-more than two of his son's lifetimes.

He could feel the tears coming and he stared down at his hands. One drop clung to his eyelid, holding on for its life. Finally, reluctantly, he allowed himself to let it out. He saw his son watching him and before he could stop it, he heard himself speaking: My mother lived in this house for sixty years and then died, alone, in a hospital...

It's alright, Pop. We still have our family; we still have each other.

Yes, we do, he said, embracing his son, the boy who was not quite a man, but close enough. We have each other, and that's all that matters. I love you...

This is what he wished to say. It was what he could almost hear himself saying. But such things are seldom said between fathers and sons. Instead, he focused his eyes on his hands, and then the floor, slowly regaining his composure. He put the clothes back in the box and said nothing.

...

It took most of the afternoon before they had finally transported everything into the rented moving van. His parents, like so many who had lived through the Depression, were reluctant to discard almost anything. There will probably be some valuable antiques in that attic, his wife had predicted. Probably, but he didn't have any particular inclination to establish which items, blanketed in black soot, might have been worth something.

After the last load had been taken to the landfill-which swarmed with seagulls, obscenely out of place as they circled the mounds of trash, an ocean of sorrow-it seemed as though he held the last fragments of his family's story, the secrets of his childhood, in his hands. Throwing the boxes and bags into the larger piles of other boxes and other bags-the spoils of separate family's discarded goods and detritus-seemed like a sacrifice to the memories of our deceased: they were lost in one another, in themselves, absorbed into the moving stream of shared recollection, all mixed up and intermingled. Different, the same, ultimately dissipated in time.

Like our souls, he thought, looking at the discordant array of rubbish, dispersed like abandoned and broken down buildings. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Everything is accounted for, our bodies, our belongings, our souls. Heaven, Hell, Nowhere: a junkyard of expired souls. Unless, of course, there was a more profound, impenetrable plan, a purpose that obliterated or redeemed this cycle of despair. It was one or the other, either an infinite sanctuary or the emptiness of oblivion. He knew what he chose to believe; what he needed to believe.

...

Later, as they pulled out of the driveway, the father looked up at the house, scarcely visible in the frigid twilight. It stood, imperturbable, looking down at him like it always had. In its silence, it seemed to signal something that nobody but him could understand.

He forced himself to look back one last time as they drove away. The house appeared to have withdrawn into itself as though, with a resigned sigh, it had finally surrendered to a deep slumber.