Chapter 25 2012
On a hot June morning, Al boards a flight to see his daughter.
In the three years of her degree, she never suggested he visit.
Always, Al had interpreted this as characteristically kind; in the years since Susan died, his fear of flying had developed physical symptoms. On an unfortunate family trip to Yellowstone, he’d retched so violently on the plane that they’d returned over three miserable days in an aging rental car.
It was easy to believe the shroud over Viola’s English life was a by-product of her thoughtfulness, her self-sufficiency.
Though the distance was at times painful, he could understand her desire to pursue something authentic.
Wasn’t their New England just a facsimile of this truer, older one?
Here she might find originals of all the towns that surrounded their own; primary sources and ideas that had bastardized into Americana.
But when she failed to come home for Christmas, he began to worry.
If this was the beginning of a disappearing act, she was carrying it out in a typically Viola-esque way. No drama, no grand pronouncements. Only quiet, competent intent. Perhaps she was not running toward something, but away from it. Perhaps the something was him.
Don’t catastrophize, Tillie said. Kids make decisions that have nothing to do with you.
But how could it not be about him? Given space to reflect on his shortcomings, Viola might find a thousand reasons to desert him.
He had failed to hold the family together.
All his efforts to shield them from the world had only resulted in its implosion.
And the wreckage revealed his repeated lies, his parental deficiencies.
By now she must have seen through all the falsehoods and fake presents, through his stuffed and insufficient Susan.
It would be nice to have someone else to blame.
But it was hard to see beyond the common factor; Al had been left behind too many times to blame anyone but himself.
His only defense is that he lacked the language, the sophistication, to talk about Susan in the way she deserved.
And for a long time, he was still angry.
Go see her, Tillie said. You’re not doomed to repeat things in life.
So, on their monthly video call, he said:
I’m coming for your graduation.
Really? Are you sure?
The gratitude in her voice cracked him open.
Another future appeared suddenly possible; Viola would come home and the world would be unified—his daughter sitting on the sofa reading and Tillie doing her sudoku and Sebastian crashing about in the kitchen.
He determined to do whatever it took to make it real.
“Dad!”
Here she is, waiting on the train platform under a close, uniform sky.
Is she taller? Thinner? Something about her face—more makeup.
It’s colder here and he feels underdressed in his short-sleeve polo.
She gathers him off the platform, asking about his journey, new intonations transforming her questions.
How did he find the flight? Did he manage?
He wonders whether she is losing herself or finding herself.
Insistently, she carries his suitcase, which rattles and bumps down cobbled streets.
His lodgings are separate from her lodgings.
How far he has come to stay so far away from her, at an inn across town from her college that she insists is the best. He walks more slowly than her natural pace, not because he is tired, but because he would rather the seconds didn’t pass so quickly.
“So, how does it feel?” he asks. “That it’s all ending?”
“Odd. It feels like it ended a while ago and we’re just lingering before something else begins,” she says, adding with a smile, “not necessarily in a bad way.”
She talks him through the schedule for tomorrow, the ceremony, a restaurant she has booked for lunch.
They pass a group of her peers, and fondly she promises to catch up with them later.
When they have gone, she tells him all of their names with great significance.
He forgets them almost instantly. He cannot help it—his mind ascribes no importance to them.
How fleeting were his own college friendships?
In years to come, these rounded, fleshy people with surnames and specific opinions and obscure tastes will become no more than archetypes in her mind, outlines of fortunes that may or may not arrive.
At a creaking backstreet pub, they order beer-battered fish. Al’s appetite is warping with his sense of time, hours and days collapsing into years. He eats ravenously.
“How is Sebastian?” Viola asks.
“Good. I think. It’s hard to say.” He smiles at her and she raises an eyebrow knowingly. “He’s been coming home a bit. It still feels like he’s avoiding me.”
“I see.”
“You know, I think when you come home, it will really help him.”
Viola’s forehead twists into a knot. She chews slowly. “So,” she says. “About that.”
She tells him she has been accepted into a master’s program in London. That she has found some funding and it would be a shame not to take the opportunity.
“You sound unsure about it.”
“No, it makes sense.”
“Did you look at other programs? You know, if you came to Harvard, we could get your tuition waived—”
“I’m also seeing someone.”
Someone behind him opens the door and a gust of cold air moves a napkin across the table.
A part of his brain is still reminding him to search for the London program when he’s back in his room tonight, to check the ranking and the reviews of the professors, the safety of the campus area.
And another part has stopped moving entirely, is fixated on the daughter who has become an unknowable woman.
“Is he a student?”
“No, he’s older.”
So this is the change he felt in her—love!
An image forms of this older man, some English boy in his twenties, gone to the city for work.
What would it take to steal her heart? He feels sick with the realization that Viola is as old as Susan was when they met.
How little they knew about the world then, how useless were all other choices when they had found each other.
“Is it serious?”
She laughs a little bit and says: “It’s not, you know, a terminal illness.”
Viola holds his gaze. There is her determination, a stubbornness entirely different from his own, unafraid of lighting out in the dark. The familiarity crushes him. But he battles the instinct to argue, to drive her away as he drove Susie away, underestimating her desires.
“Am I going to meet him?”
She shakes her head. “He’d like to, but it won’t work out. Next time.”
The mysterious older man. A person already moving into his life, settling into a sense of what is required of him. Al never wanted Viola to be determined by someone else’s dreams. But hadn’t he been six years older than Susie? Hadn’t he wanted to shape her?
“I hope he treats you well,” he says.
“Oh, he does,” she smiles. On her plate is most of her fish and a fistful of uneaten chips.
“You gonna finish that?”
“Can’t. Stuffed.”
The next day he watches her graduate, allowing the musical Latin to wash over him as a man confers magic upon her, transforms her from one thing into another.
She emerges afterward robed and beaming, and they take photographs together.
The sun is shining, and as they walk through town, young people are pushing boats down the river and laughing, and the world is good but not his.
“Could you see yourself living here?” she asks. Her eyes are bright and sparkling.
No sense in putting her out. He smiles benignly. “Maybe,” he says. “You certainly seem happy here.”
She beams. “I really am.”
He will give her the gift of her departure, even though he is breaking inside—it is his only hope. If he lets her go freely, then freely she may return.
The next day, he is gone.