Straight Man

“till death do us part,” she could now say with a clear conscience that she’d been good to her word. Shortly after the funeral I heard from her that she’d begun the task of going through his papers. She sounded almost excited, and I guess that would make a kind of sense. My father was probably more interestingand alive, more the man she knew, on the page than in life, and going through his notes must have represented some small recompense for all the actual conversations missed. She’d always claimed that she was my father’s ideal companion and that, in betraying her, he’d betrayed his own best self, and reading through all his drafts and research notes and letters to famous colleagues must have made her feel vindicated in this belief.
    A couple days after she’d begun the task, she called me, all excited, to say that she’d discovered two hundred pages of a novel in manuscript, dating back nearly twenty-five years. “Isn’t it amazing?” she wanted to know, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it would have been much more amazing if there
hadn’t
been two hundred pages of a novel. He was an English professor. What did she expect? Well, what she expected was that I’d want to read it as soon as she finished, and I know I hurt her feelings when I politely declined, explaining to her that I’d already read it, that it had already been thrust into my hands by my English department colleagues. “You’re comparing your father to the likes of William Quigley?” she wanted to know. She’d met Billy at some gathering earlier in the year. “Not at all,” I truthfully assured her. I’d have much preferred to read two hundred pages of Billy’s book.
    After the midway, my father and I had only one other interesting conversation, and that took place in my imagination the day I got out of the hospital and returned home with Lily and Angelo. After we finally convinced Finny that nobody blamed him for Occam’s death, and after I’d foolishly promised I’d read his dissertation when he finished it,
I gathered Occam up in the sheet and carried him around back of the house and down to the edge of the woods, where I dug the animal’s grave. It took me about an hour, and cost a pair of loafers and my favorite chinos. I was standing thigh deep in the hole when I looked up and saw William Henry Devereaux, Sr., leaning forward heavily on the railing of the back deck, watching me work. Lily and Angelo (who’d wanted to help) and my mother were there too, but they might just as well not have been. This little vignette had clearly been arranged for the benefit of the two William Henry Devereauxs
.
    We were some fifty yards apart, too far for him to see me clearly, and at that distance, to his aging eyes, I must have reminded my father verymuch of the man who buried my first dog forty years ago. In truth, as I have admitted, I’ve come to greatly resemble my father, and my soft professor’s hands were now as blistered as his had become so long ago. He could not have failed to note the parallel events or to misread their significance. I had tried to be unlike him, but look at me. “This is my son,” I heard my father think, in character as always, overestimating the importance of his own role in any proceeding, “in whom I am well pleased.”
    Well, it’s easy to send thoughts downhill. He had the advantage of being stationed above, on the deck, whereas I was below at the edge of the woods, hip deep in a hole, my eyes stinging with salt. So I had to work harder to order a thought and power it up the sloping lawn. “Oh, yeah?” I replied. “Well
, I
didn’t have to go borrow a shovel, old man.”
    But truly grateful people don’t make lists of things to be grateful for, any more than happy people make lists of things to be happy about. Happy people have enough to do just being happy.
    Growing old, as someone once remarked, is not for sissies, but age is not the issue so much as diminishment. This summer provided William Henry Devereaux, Jr., with two athletic milestones (I’m not counting the basketball game). Before leaving for Atlanta, Julie administered to her father a sound drubbing in tennis, an inevitable defeat I’d been postponing with smoke and mirrors for nearly a decade. One bright, warm Sunday afternoon, in a two set match that took just under an hour, Julie ran her fifty-year-old father back and forth from sideline to sideline, net to baseline, with a cruel efficiency that was