Straight Man

help.
    “They were talking about you earlier,” he says vaguely, no doubt referring to a morning news show. “Something to do with …” He shakes his head vigorously, as if the agitation will float what he’ssearching for to the surface of his liquid memory. When it does, he can hardly believe it. “Ducks?” he says. Did he dream this?
    I concede that the subject could very well have been ducks, which seems to satisfy him. At least he knows he’s not going crazy. “Would you object to some fresh air?” he wonders, peeking at the sunny day outside my mother’s front windows. “She keeps it so dark in here,” he says, looking around at my mother’s world.
    He locates a cowl-necked sweater, and we go out onto the porch. “Is this a safe neighborhood?” he wonders, peering up and down both sides of the wide street.
    “You’re in small-town Pennsylvania, Dad,” I remind him.
    He’s got ahold of the porch railing for support and is staring off down the street in the direction of the old amusement park. The top of the Ferris wheel is just visible among the trees. “What’s that?” he wants to know, standing up straight.
    “The old midway,” I tell him.
    “Let’s go,” he says, and he starts down the steps before I can object, his silver mane all astir in the breeze. I can’t tell if he means to walk over and have a look at things or if he means to go on the rides when he gets there. For a man who’s suffered a major collapse, he’s still got a hell of a purpose to his stride. My own would normally be longer, but it’s shortened by what I’m now doubly convinced, here in the presence of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., X ray or no X ray, is a stone the size of a pearl, blocking the entryway to my ureter. I have all I can do to keep up with him. I keep thinking he’s going to tire, but he doesn’t, and five minutes at our brisk pace brings us near the shore of the lake. Or rather to what was once a lake and is now a muddy, foul-smelling declivity. From here we can see all of what was once the midway: its Ferris wheel, the abandoned building that once housed the carousel, the weed-infested go-cart track. This is about as far as it makes sense to go, but my father has already started off around the lake.
    “It’s gated, Dad,” I call after him, wondering what in the world he has in mind. To look at him, you’d swear he intended to drive a bumper car. “It’s all locked up to keep the kids out.”
    But around the lake we go, stopping only when we come to the chain-link fence. My father goes right up to it, puts his slender fingersthrough the wire links, and pulls the fence toward him. It looks for all the world like he intends to climb. “This is a terrible thing,” he says, staring at the empty carousel building. “Something like this should never be abandoned. What possesses people?”
    “Before the amusement park this was all public gardens,” I tell him. “They were famous. People rode the trains in from New York and Philadelphia to see them.”
    He studies my face to see if this can be true, then looks back at the midway, perhaps converting the present scene to gardens. “Beautiful women strolling everywhere, I imagine. Dressed to the nines. Young men trying to make an impression. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Are there books on the subject?”
    “On all this?” I say, scanning the lake, the midway. “No idea.”
    “There should be,” he says, letting go of the fence. Then again, “Wonderful.”
    I can see that he’s suddenly tired now, and when I suggest we rest before heading back, he’s all too glad. There’s a bench nearby.
    “Your mother says you’re going through a midlife crisis,” he observes. “You don’t look at all well.”
    “I’m terrific, Dad,” I assure him. “Never better, in fact.”
    He gives no indication of having heard, much less digested or believed this. “
I
had a turning point of my own when I was your age,” he says. “It was a true crisis of the soul, as I now conceive it.”
    I’m not surprised when he launches into the story of his lost voice the year he went to Columbia. It’s sweet, I suppose, for him to concede that I’m going through some kind of crisis worthy of comment by him. Perhaps his intention in telling the story of his early humiliation at Columbia is to make me feel less alone in my own predicament. “Crises of soul,” he means to suggest, are not uncommon to men like William Henry Devereaux, Senior and Junior.