Straight Man

sends its children off to be educated, often at great expense. Their naive hope (they don’t see it as unreasonable) is that the kids they send off will return more affluent but otherwise unchanged. Certainly not contemptuous. Angelo now regards his little girl’s chosen mate, listens to her learned speech, witnesses the way she’s raised her own kids, as well as her devotion to what he considers society’s dangerous youthful dregs, and cannot help but feel the complete repudiation of himself as a man and a father. Shortly before we were married, Angelo visited us at the dingy apartment where we were living and trying to save money. He took us out to dinner and encouraged me to tell him my plans. I don’t remember what I told him, but when I finished he turned to his daughter and said, “Where did I go wrong, little girl? Can you at least tell me that much, because I’d really like to know.”
    Of course, Angelo is not the first parent ever to ask this question, it occurs to me as I sit in the rutted dirt driveway that leads to my own daughter’s house. Lily, who agrees with my mother that I am unprepared for my father’s return, considers my own relationship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., unnatural, but I think our emotional distance is both sensible and admirable. Our disappointments in each other are deep and probably irrevocable. That we don’t give voice to them, that we don’t try to change each other or ask what the other cannot give, is both wise and prudent. Angelo could get away with asking his daughter where he went wrong because he knew she loved him far too much to answer. My father and I not only understand clearly where we’ve failed in each other’s estimation but also know that a full, detailed explanation awaits the one who is unwise enough to ask the wrong question.

CHAPTER
22
    I head to campus over the mountain so I can sneak in via the back gate. People may be waving signs with my picture on them at the front entrance.
    I stop at the intersection across from The Circle Bar and Grill, and though I’m not hungry, it’s tempting to pull in and have breakfast in the company of men like Mr. Purty. That is, I’m tempted even before I see a pickup truck that looks like Mr. Purty’s towing a U-Haul trailer pull in, and a man who looks like Mr. Purty, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and a western shirt, get out of the truck. I pull into the parking lot and I have to toot twice before he looks up, and until he recognizes the tooter, he looks like he’d like nothing better than to kick the tooter’s ass. The pointed toes on his cowboy boots appear particularly lethal, so I stay in my car and roll down the window. On second observation, Mr. Purty looks like a man who’s been stomped by a man wearing boots similar to his own.
    “Henry,” he sighs.
    “Hi, Mr. Purty,” I say. “What’ve you done with my mother?”
    “She’s back at her place,” he shrugs. “Her and your dad. You know how much a hotel room costs in New York City?”
    “Let me park, Mr. Purty,” I tell him. “I’ll buy breakfast.”
    “Okay,” he says. “Beats me why people live in a place like that, what with the price of everything.”
    I pull in next to his truck, which looks different, somehow. It’s still bright and shiny, but it seems altered in ways I don’t immediately identify.
    “They done some job on it, didn’t they?” Mr. Purty says when I get out and he sees me inspecting it. “Took my hubcaps. Stereo. Speakers. Mirrors.”
    I glance inside the cab, and sure enough, wires are dangling from the dash.
    “They stole my tark, too,” he says, indicating the bare bed of the pickup. “Why would anybody want to live in a place like that? We wasn’t gone no more than twenty minutes.”
    “You insured, Mr. Purty?”
    “Yeah, it ain’t that,” he sighs meaningfully. “We made it back in one piece, anyhow. That trailer’s full of your dad’s books. They put the furniture in storage. Couple nice pieces, too. Worth more than all these books. Not that anybody wanted my opinion.”
    We contemplate the U-Haul.
    “They’re two peas in a pop, them two,” he remarks.
    Over more scrapple and eggs I get the story. More than anything it’s a tale of Mr. Purty’s finally understanding the true folly of his long courtship of my mother, something he has suspected for a long time, though even when my mother announced my father’s return, he apparently still held out some kind of hope. Only