The Complete Collection. William Wharton

really like; he’s dangerous and twice in the past few days he’s tried to hurt her. She says once he hit her with his cane and another time he bumped into her and almost knocked her down.

      Dad still doesn’t have total control of his body. There are certain almost spastic movements. I listen and try to reassure her; she must be mistaken. He’d never hurt her on purpose.

      He’s in with Delibro two hours again.

      On the way home in the car we talk. I ask Dad if he’s had any more dreams and he says he has; he still goes there nights and it isn’t like a dream at all.

      ‘John, I remember everything afterwards, better than I can remember yesterday. It isn’t only at night either.

      ‘I’ll be sitting there in the rocking chair, not thinking, just drifting, and I’ll go. Some big part of me leaves and is in Cape May. I don’t even know how long I’m gone. It happens all the time, whenever I relax, especially out there in the greenhouse.’

      He shifts his cane between his legs. He looks down, then at me. I give him a quick glance from my driving. I’m working up onto the freeway entrance at Lincoln Boulevard.

      ‘Something I told the doctor, John. It’s strange but this world here has come into that one.

      ‘I told Bess about us, there in my own world, and now she knows all about everything here. She believed me. Dr Delibro says it’s because I want her to believe but I’m not so sure. Bess wants to know everything about our life here. She only wonders where Hank and Lizbet are; she’s convinced I’m seeing into the future somehow. She wants me to describe how she looks as an old lady and she can’t believe you’re bald and have a beard. I didn’t tell her I have a beard, too.’

      Wow, I’m feeling transparent again! These days the physicists are saying the subatomic structure of any object, this car I’m driving, anything, can’t be fitted into a framework of space and time. Words like ‘substance’ or ‘matter’ have become devoid of meaning. This seat I’m sitting on is coming out of nothing, traveling through a non-medium in a multi-dimensional non-space. What we’ve been calling reality is up for grabs; time is a mind projection.

      It’s even possible the future has as much effect on what we call event, present, as the past. Causality is losing its effectiveness. My decaying bald-topped mind is spinning; maybe I’ll create a few new solar systems without knowing it.

      ‘What did the doctor say about this, Dad?’

      ‘He made me go through it about three different times and asked a peck of questions. He’s taken to writing these things down; I think he believes me, John.’

      He pauses again.

      ‘But I’m beginning to feel he suspects I might be crazy. He just could be right about that, too. Your mother’d sure be glad; she’s been saying it for years; she’s better than any psychiatrist; cheaper, too.’

      With this, he leans back and laughs in the most uncrazy way imaginable. I start laughing with him. I’m glad there are no cops patrolling this section of the Santa Monica Freeway. If they saw two older men with beards driving along laughing their heads off, they’d stop us for sure.

      ‘I told the whole family there about you, Mother and Joan; about my operation, and about me seeing a psychiatrist. They all laughed and Hank wanted to know what a psychiatrist is. To be honest, Johnny, they’re pestering the devil out of me. What on earth can I say to little Hank and Lizbet; I can’t tell them their daddy just made ’em up. That’s terrible. What do you think I ought to do?’

      God, what a question! If I start advising him on what to do in that world, it’ll grow more real, somehow make this one less true. I want to go home to my family, to Vron and Jacky. I’m realizing how in my own mind Paris, France, is less believable, less real than Dad’s crazy dreamworld. It seems so far away, so long ago. I can’t believe I do actually live in a houseboat on the Seine outside Paris; that I have an old water mill in central France; that I’m an artist. It sounds like one of the biggest pipe dreams anybody ever made up.

      ‘You’d better ask the doctor, Dad. I don’t know what to say. Did you tell them they’re all a dream and you have a real life here? Did you tell them that?’

      ‘Oh, no, Johnny, I couldn’t do that. I’m not so sure about things myself. I just told them how this part here is like a dream. I wasn’t lying, that’s the way it is. When I’m here, like now, that part’s a dream but when I’m there, this gets to be the dream and I have a hard time believing it.

      ‘I’ll be honest with you, John, it’s better there. If I had my choice, I’d make that part the real life for us.’

      At home we sit around the living room. There are some times when I’m sure Dad has left us. I’m itching to ask but I’m embarrassed. It’s like asking a woman if she’s having her period because she’s acting differently. There’s no real justification except simple curiosity and it’s an invasion.

      Mom’s tough to be with. Luckily, Billy’s gone back up on the forty acres. Mother, wandering around, the Lady Macbeth of Colby Lane, bugs Billy beyond endurance. I can’t blame him. Mom’s impossible when she’s scared; she’s striking out in all directions, trying to give some substance to things. Nobody’s safe near her.

      We’re sitting there in the living room and she starts off. Dad’s in his rocking chair, Mom’s on one of the dining chairs turned half around from the table and I’m sitting in an upholstered chair by the door. We’re all within a few feet of each other.

      She begins talking to me about how crazy Dad is. She’s pulling out all her memorized litany of Tremont variations from the norm through four generations. She’s tolling them off like a rosary, the five infamous mysteries; I listen and fume. Dad’s between pretending it isn’t happening, and listening. He’s like a very genteel woman who’s forced by circumstances to hear bar-room language.

      It goes on and on; nothing’s enough. I know she’s wanting me to argue and I don’t want to. But then I can’t help myself. You only kid yourself into thinking you’ve grown out of it, that you can respond as an adult logically, sensibly, to parents. I turn to Dad.

      ‘Dad, why do you let her talk like this? Why do you put up with it? It’s not good for either of you to have her spout all this rot. She’s the one who’s acting crazy.’

      Mother keeps talking over my first sentence, but then shuts up. If I’d talked to her directly she’d have kept on, only louder. Using a carom shot, talking to Dad, has her buffaloed.

      ‘We all know she does this because she’s scared, but backbiting at everybody doesn’t help. You’ve got to help her stop.’

      I turn toward Mom.

      ‘And, Mom, you should know better. You don’t really believe this nonsense; you’re only saying it to make yourself feel like a big shot and three-star martyr. Dad’s doing his best. We have an expert working with him. This doctor says Dad’s not crazy. In fact, he’s impressed with how Dad’s survived the past thirty or so years without going crazy.

      ‘If you’re so convinced Dad’s crazy, tell me in private and we’ll work things out. We can put Dad in a home, or you in a home, or something. But for God’s sake don’t sit there talking in front of him as if he’s a dog who doesn’t understand!’

      Dad’s turned white. He leans forward and lurches out of his platform rocker. Instinctively I stand with him. I’ve no idea what he’s going to do. Maybe take a punch at me or maybe Mom. It could be anything.

      He leaves his cane and shuffles toward us. Mother’s up, too; looking even more scared than I feel. Dad spreads his thin arms and we go toward him. He pulls us close to his breast and holds us tight. His whole body is shaking. Nobody says anything. It’s as if we’re in a two-hand-touch huddle, except we’re not leaning over, our faces are straight up, pushed next to each other at different heights.

      Dad kisses us