A Patchwork Planet Read online

  The conductor came and went, and the row houses slipping by turned into factory buildings and then to matted woods and a sheet of gray water, but I was barely conscious of anything beyond Sophia’s packet. I saw how quietly her hands rested on the brown paper; she was not a fidgeter. Smooth, oval nails, pale pink, and plump white fingers like a woman’s in a religious painting. Her book was turned the wrong way for me to read the title, but I knew it was something worthwhile and educational. Oh, these people who prepare ahead! Who think to bring actual books, instead of dashing into a newsstand at the last minute for a Sports Illustrated or—worse yet—making do with a crossword puzzle that someone else has started!

  It bothered me more than I liked to admit that the passport man had avoided me.

  We were getting close to Wilmington, and the lady in the fur hat started collecting her things. After she left, I planned to change seats. I would wait for Sophia to shift over to the window, and then I’d sit down next to her. “Morning,” I would say. “Interesting packet you’ve got there.”

  “I see you’re carrying some kind of packet.”

  “Mind if I inquire what’s in that packet?”

  Or whatever. Something would come to me. But when the train stopped and the lady stood up, Sophia just turned her knees to one side to let her out. She stayed seated where she was, on the aisle, so I didn’t see any natural-seeming way to make my move.

  We left Wilmington behind. We traveled past miles of pipeline and smokestacks, some of them belching flames. I could tell now that it was rap music the kid beside me was listening to. He had the volume raised so high that I could hear it winding out of his earphones—that chanting and insisting sound like the voices you hear in your dreams.

  “Philll-adelphia!” the conductor called.

  Of course Sophia got ready too soon. We were barely in sight of the skyline—bluish buildings shining in the pale winter sunlight, Liberty Towers scalloping their way up and up and up—but she was already rising to wait in the aisle. The exit lay to the rear, and so she had to face me. I could see the pad of flesh that was developing under her chin. She leaned against her seat and teetered gently with the swaying of the car. Critics are unanimous! the back of her book said. The mailer was almost hidden between the book and her cushiony bosom.

  I put on my jacket, but I didn’t stand up yet. I waited till the train had come to a stop and she had passed me. Then I swung out into the aisle lickety-split, cutting in front of a fat guy with a briefcase. I followed Sophia so closely, I could smell the dusty smell of her coat. It was velvet, or something like velvet. Velvet always smells dusty, even when it’s fresh from the cleaners.

  There was the usual scuffle with that automatic door that likes to squash the passengers—Press the button, dummies!—and the usual milling and nudging in the vestibule, and then we stepped out into a rush of other people. It was obvious that Sophia knew where she was going. She didn’t so much as glance around her but walked fast, coming down hard on her heels. Her heels were the short, chunky kind, but they made her as tall as I was. I had noticed that while we were standing on the train. Now she was slightly taller, because we’d started up the stairs and she was a step above me.

  Even once we’d reached the waiting room, she didn’t look around. Thirtieth Street Station is so enormous and echoing and high-ceilinged—a jolt after cozy Baltimore—that most people pause to take stock a moment, but not Sophia. She just went clicking along, with me a few yards to the rear.

  At the Information island, only one person stood waiting. I spotted her from far across those acres of marble flooring: a girl in a denim jacket and jeans, with a billow of crinkly, electric red hair. It fanned straight out and stopped just above her shoulders. It was amazing hair. I was awestruck. Sophia, though, didn’t let on she had noticed her. She was walking more slowly now, downright sedately, placing her toes at a slight angle outward, the way women often do when they want to look composed and genteel. Actually, she was starting to get on my nerves. Didn’t that bun of hers just sum her up, I thought—the net that bound it in and the perfect, doughnut shape and the way it sat so low on her head, so matronly and drab! And Esther Brimm, meanwhile, stood burning like a candle on her stick-thin, blue-denim legs.

  When we reached the island I veered right, toward a display of schedules on the counter. I heard Sophia’s heels stop in front of Esther. “Esther Brimm?” she asked.

  “Ms. Maynard?”

  Husky, throaty voice, the kind I like.

  “Your father asked me to bring you something____”

  I took a schedule from the rack and turned my face casually in their direction. Not till Esther said, “Right; my passport,” did Sophia slip the mailer from behind her book and hold it out.

  “Thanks a million,” Esther said, accepting it, and Sophia said, “My pleasure. Have a good trip.” Then she turned away and clicked toward the Twenty-ninth Street exit.

  Just like that, I forgot her. Now I was focused on Esther. Open it! I told her. Instead she picked up the army duffel lying at her feet and moved off toward the phones. I meandered after her, studying my schedule. I pretended I was hunting a train to Princeton.

  The phones were the unprivate kind just out in the middle of everything, standing cheek to jowl. When Esther lifted a receiver off its hook, I was right there beside her, lifting a receiver of my own. I was so near I could have touched her duffel bag with the toe of my sneaker. I heard every word she said. “Dad?” she said.

  I clamped my phone to my ear and held the schedule up between us so I could watch her. This close, she was less attractive. She had that fragile, sore-looking skin you often find on redheads. “Yes,” she was saying, “it’s here.” And then, “Sure! I guess so. I mean, it’s still stapled shut and all. Huh? Well, hang on.”

  She put her receiver down and started yanking at the mailer’s top flap. When the staples tore loose, rat-a-tat, she pulled the edges apart and peered inside—practically stuck her little freckled nose inside. Then she picked up the phone again. “Yup,” she said. “Good as new.”

  So I never got a chance to see for myself. It could have been anything: loose diamonds, crack cocaine … But somehow I didn’t think so. The phone call was what convinced me. She’d have had to be a criminal genius to fake that careless tone of voice, the easy offhandedness of a person who knows for a fact that she’s her parents’ pride and joy. “Well, listen,” she was saying. “Tell Mom I’ll call again from the airport, okay?” And she made a kissing sound and hung up. When she slung her duffel over her shoulder and started toward one of the gates, I didn’t even watch her go.

  The drill for visiting my daughter was, I’d arrive about ten a.m. and take her on an outing. Nothing fancy. Maybe a trip to the drug store, or walking her little dog in the park. Then we’d grab a bite someplace, and I’d return her and leave. This happened exactly once a month—the last Saturday of the month. Her mother’s idea. To hear her mother tell it, Husband No. 2 was Superdad; but I had to stay in the picture to give Opal a sense of whatchamacallit. Connection.

  But due to one thing and another—my car acting up, my alarm not going off—I was late as hell that day. It was close to noon, I figure, before I even left the station, and I didn’t want to spring for a cab after paying for a train ticket. Instead I more or less ran all the way to the apartment (they lived in one of those posh old buildings just off Rittenhouse Square), and by the time I pressed the buzzer, I was looking even scruffier than my usual self. I could tell as much from Natalie’s expression, the minute she opened the door. She let her eyes sort of drift up and down me, and, “Barnaby,” she said flatly. Opal’s little dog was dancing around my ankles—a dachshund, very quivery and high-strung.

  “Yo. Natalie,” I said. I started swatting at my clothes to settle them a bit. Natalie, of course, was Miss Good Grooming. She wore a slim gray skirt-and-sweater set, and her hair was all of a piece—smooth, shiny brown—dipping in and then out again before it touched her shoulders. Oh, s
he had been a beauty for as long as I had known her; except now that I recalled, there’d always been something too placid about her. I should have picked it up from her dimples, which made a little dent in each cheek whether or not she was smiling. They gave her a look of self-satisfaction. What I’d thought when we first met was, how could she not be self-satisfied? And her vague, dreamy slowness used to seem sexy. Now it just made me impatient. I said, “Is Opal ready to go?” and Natalie took a full minute, I swear, to consider every aspect of the question. Then: “Opal is in her room,” she said finally. “Crying her eyes out.”

  “Crying!”

  “She thought you’d stood her up.”

  “Well, I know I’m a little bit late—” I said.

  She lifted an arm and contemplated the tiny watch face on the inner surface of her wrist.

  “Things just seemed to conspire against me,” I said. “Can I see her?”

  After she’d thought that over awhile, she turned and floated off, which I took to mean yes.

  I made my own way to Opal’s bedroom, down a long hall lined with Oriental rugs. I waded through the dachshund and knocked on her door. “Opal?” I called. “You in there?”

  No answer. I turned the knob and poked my head in.

  You’d never guess this room belonged to a nine-year-old. The bedspread was appliquéd with ducklings, and the only posters were nursery-rhyme posters. By rights it should have been a baby’s room, or a toddler’s.

  The bed was where I looked first, because that’s where I figured she would be if she was crying. But she was in the white rocker by the window. And she wasn’t crying, either. She was glaring at me reproachfully from underneath her eyebrows.

  “Ope!” I said, all hearty.

  Opal’s chin stayed buried inside her collar.

  I knew I shouldn’t think this, but my daughter had never struck me as very appealing. She had all her life been a few pounds overweight, with a dish-shaped face and colorless hair and a soft, pink, half-open mouth, the upper lip short enough to expose her top front teeth. (I used to call her “Bunnikins” till Natalie asked me not to—and why would she have asked, if she herself hadn’t noticed Opal’s close resemblance to a rabbit?) It didn’t help that Natalie dressed her in the kind of clothes you see in Dick and Jane books—fussy and pastel, the smocked bodices bunching up on her chest and the puffed sleeves cutting into her arms. Me, I would have chosen something less constricting. But who was I to say? I hadn’t been much of a father.

  I did want the best for her, though. I would never intentionally hurt her. I walked over to where she was sitting and squatted down in front of her. “Opal-dopal,” I said. “Sweetheart.”

  “What.”

  “Call off your dog. He’s eating my wallet.”

  She started to smile but held it back. Her mother’s two dimples deepened in her cheeks. The dog really was nibbling at my wallet. George Farnsworth, his name was; heaven knows why. “George Farnsworth,” I said sternly, “if you’re short of cash, just ask straight out for a loan, okay?”

  Now I heard a definite chuckle. I took heart. “Hey, Ope, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “First I had car trouble, see—”

  “You always have car trouble.”

  “Then my alarm clock didn’t go off—”

  “It always doesn’t go off.”

  “Well. Not always,” I told her. “Then once I got to Penn Station, you’ll never guess what happened. It was like a secret-agent movie. Guy is walking up to people, pulling something out of his coat. ‘Ma’am,’ ”—I made my voice sound menacing and mysterious—“ ‘would you please take this package to Philadelphia for me?’”

  Opal didn’t speak, but I could tell she was listening. She watched me with her pinkish-gray eyes, the lashes slightly damp.

  “ ‘Take it to my daughter in Philly; all it is is her passport,’ he said, and I thought to myself, Ha! I just bet it’s her passport! So when this one woman said she would do it, I followed her at the other end of the trip.”

  “You followed her?”

  “I wanted to see what would happen. So I followed her to her rendezvous with the quote-unquote daughter, and then I hung around the phones while the daughter placed a call to—”

  “You hung around the phones?”

  I was beginning to flounder. (This story didn’t have what you’d call a snappy ending.) I said, “Yes, and then—um—”

  “You were only dawdling in the station all this time! It’s not enough you don’t look after your car right and you forget to set your alarm; then you dawdle in the station like you don’t care when you see me!”

  It was uncanny, how much she sounded like her mother. Her mother in the old days, that is—the miserable last days of our marriage. I said, “Now, hon. Now wait a sec, hon.”

  Which was also from those days, word for word. Some kind of reflex, I guess.

  “You promised you’d come at ten,” she said, “and instead you were just… goofing around with a bunch of secret agents! You totally lost track of where you were supposed to be!”

  “In the first place,” I said, “I take excellent care of my car, Opal. I treat it like a blood relative. It’s not my fault if my car is older than I am. And I did not forget to set my alarm. I don’t know why it didn’t go off; sometimes it just doesn’t, okay? I don’t know why. And I honestly thought you’d like hearing about those people I was so-called goofing around with. I thought, Man, I wish Opal could see this, and I followed them expressly so I could tell you about it later over a burger and french fries. Wouldn’t that be great? A burger and fries at Little Pete’s, Ope, while I tell you my big story.”

  It wasn’t working, though. Opal’s eyes only got pinker, and for once she had her mouth tightly shut.

  “Look at George Farnsworth! He wants to go,” I said.

  In fact, George Farnsworth had lost interest and was lying beside the rocker with his nose on his paws. But I said, “First we’ll take George for a walk in the Square, and then we’ll head over to—”

  “It sounds to me,” Natalie said, “as if Opal prefers to stay in.”

  She was standing in the doorway. Damn Oriental rugs had muffled her steps.

  “Am I right, Opal?” she asked. “Would you rather tell him goodbye?”

  “Goodbye?” I said. “I just got here! I just came all this way!”

  “It’s your decision, Opal.”

  Opal looked down at her lap. After a long pause, she murmured something.

  “We couldn’t hear you,” Natalie said.

  “Goodbye,” Opal told her lap.

  But I knew she didn’t mean it. All she wanted was a little coaxing. I said, “Hey now, Ope …”

  “Could I speak with you a minute?” Natalie asked me.

  I sighed and got to my feet. Opal stayed where she was, but I caught her hidden glimmer of a glance as I turned to follow Natalie down the hall. I knew I could have persuaded her if I’d been given more time.

  We didn’t stop in the living room. We went on through to the kitchen, at the other end of the apartment. I guess Natalie figured my jeans might soil her precious upholstery. I had never seen the kitchen before, and I spent a moment looking around (old-fashioned tilework, towering cabinets) before it sank in on me what Natalie was saying.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she was saying. “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t come anymore.”

  This should have been okay with me. It’s not as if I enjoyed these visits. But you know how it is when somebody all at once announces you can’t do something. I said, “What! Just because one Saturday I happen to run a little behind?”

  Her eyes seemed to be resting slightly to the left of my left shoulder. Her face was as untroubled as a statue’s.

  “I’m traveling from a whole other city, for God’s sake!” I told her. “A whole entirely other state! No way can you expect me to arrive here on the dot!”

  “It’s funny,” she said reflectively. “I used to believe it was very impor
tant for Opal to keep in touch with you. But now I wonder if it might be doing her more harm than good. All those Saturdays you’ve come late, or left early, or canceled altogether—”

  “It was only the once or twice or three times or so that I canceled,” I said.

  “And even when you do show up, I imagine it’s started to dawn on her how you live.”

  “How I live! I live just fine!”

  “A rented room,” she mused, “an unskilled job, a bunch of shiftless friends. No goals and no ambitions; still not finished college at the age of thirty.”

  “Twenty-nine,” I corrected her. (The one charge I could argue with.)

  “Thirty in three weeks,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  There was a sudden silence, like when the Muzak stops in a shopping mall and you haven’t even been hearing it but all at once you’re aware of its absence. And just then I noticed, on the windowsill behind her, our old china cookie jar. I hadn’t thought of that cookie jar in years! It was domed on top and painted with bars like a birdcage, and it looked so dowdy and homely, against the diamond-shaped panes. It made me lose my train of thought. The next thing I knew, Natalie was gliding out of the kitchen, and I had no choice but to follow her.

  Though, in the foyer, I did say, “Well.” And then, in the hall outside, I turned and said, “Well, we’ll see about this!”

  The door made almost no sound when she closed it.

  My train home was completely filled, and stone cold to boot. Some problem with the heating system. I sat next to a Spanish-type guy who must have started his New Year’s partying a tad bit early. His head kept nodding forward, and he was breathing fumes that were practically flammable. Across the aisle, this very young couple was trying to soothe a baby. The husband said, “Maybe he’s hungry,” and the wife said, “I just fed him.” The husband said, “Maybe he’s wet.” I don’t know why they made me so sad.

  After that, it seemed all around me I saw families. A toddler peeked over his seat back, and his mother gave him a hug and pulled him down again. A father and a little girl walked toward me from the club car, the little girl holding a paper cup extremely carefully in both hands. The foreigner and I were the only ones on our own, it seemed.