Straight Man

favorite organ we’re talking about. And I’m an intellectual.”
    Phil snorts at this. “It’s the favorite organ of all intellectuals,” he assures me. And he’s never even met my father.
    When I drive back out to Allegheny Wells to help Mr. Purty, I find he’s ignored my advice to walk away. The U-Haul trailer itself is nowhere in evidence, and when I hit the remote for the garage door opener, I see that the boxes containing my father’s books have been neatly stacked along the back wall of the garage. There must be a hundred of them. Can Mr. Purty have done this job all by himself? It’s possible that Julie helped, I suppose, but I’ve worked with Julie before, and I know that having her help you do something is a lot like doing it alone. The boxes are stacked three deep, six feet high, and they completely block the door from the garage into the kitchen. Which is okay, I guess, since there’s no longer room in the garage for my Lincoln, a car that barely fits when I inch it right up against the wall. I try not to think about the symbolism of all this—that my father’s books, the physical manifestation of his intellect—have cut me off from my own house.
    Julie is off somewhere, which leaves me alone with Occam, who is strangely subdued, as if he too were present during my visit to Phil Watson and is now contemplating the meaning of the “asymmetry” discovered during my rectal exam. When I let him out onto the back deck, instead of doing his usual frantic laps he goes over to the railing, gives the external world a leery sniff, returns to the sliding glass door, lies down with his head on his paws, and sighs. I pour myself a smallglass of iced tea, hit the play button on the answering machine, and settle onto a barstool at the kitchen island, sipping the tea cautiously, aware that any liquid I ingest will have to be expelled.
    When the machine stops rewinding I’m treated to my mother’s voice, vexed as always when she speaks to our machine, an experience she so detests that she will usually hang up rather than utter a syllable. “Henry?” she says. “Are you there?” A pause, five full beats. “Are you there? If you’re there, pick up. It’s me.” Another pause, then a muttered, “Damnation …” Followed by the sound of irritated hanging up. Then she’s back. This time no hello. “Once again you disappoint me, Henry. If you’re well enough to leave home, you’re well enough to stop and say hello to your father. Don’t call back. I’ll be out most of the afternoon and I don’t want your father disturbed. He’s not well …” Again, a hang-up. Then back again. “He’s not ill, just exhausted from the move.… I can’t do all of this myself, you know.…” There’s more to say, I can tell, but not to a damn machine.
    I try to imagine William Henry Devereaux, Sr., left alone in her flat. Will it occur to him there, or has it already, that he’s been delivered at last to retribution? He’s too keen an observer of life to believe in anything like earthly justice, but it must look like something pretty close to that. All morning I’ve been haunted by Mr. Purty’s description of my father bursting into tears. It may be that he has lost his mind, which would mean that destiny has played another cruel trick on my mother, allowing her to reclaim the mere shell of the man she’d been married to.
    When the telephone rings, I stay right where I am, empty iced tea glass in hand, numbed by a melancholy that’s easier understood than dispelled, a sadness that my daughter’s voice deepens instead of lifting. “I’m out at the house,” she informs me, “waiting for the fucking locksmith. Nobody can, like, tell you what time they’re coming anymore. You get a morning appointment or an afternoon appointment.…”
    Her voice falls tentatively, like she knows I’m here in the kitchen and is offering me the opportunity to pick up, to admit my own presence. “I thought that funny little man in the cowboy boots was going to have a stroke unloading those cartons. I figured he was a mover, but he said he was just a friend of Grandma’s. Anyway, he was too old to do all that work by himself.”
    The answering machine has heard enough. It cuts her off and dutifully goes through its series of clicks and whirs, finishing up just as the phone rings again.
    “Rude machine,” my daughter continues. “I’ll be back later, after the locksmith. Maybe we … well, I’ll talk to you