Understories. Tim Horvath

lingering charms, did I learn that she’d been skeptical of the book’s ever seeing the light of day. And, indeed, her doubt was justified—when my father eventually went into the hospital, the complications ensuing from a laryngectomy gouging his ability to take care of himself even more acutely than his ability to speak, I was given the charge of cleaning out his apartment. By this point, he was headed for assisted living if he made it out of the hospital. As I rummaged through his stuff, mostly books and papers, but also a remarkable collection of rocks, I came upon only bits and traces of anything like a work in progress. There were pages and pages of research notes, written out on legal pads and on the blank sides of manuscript pages, and copies of maps with incomprehensible annotations and arrows plunging and swooping about, but nothing that even approximated a coherent text. I tried to keep together anything that I thought might have belonged in The Atlas. It turned out that his apartment abounded with as much pornography as geography, and the former made more sense, at least, to one sifting through the detritus of a life lived largely alone. As I worked, I noted the relative heights of the two piles, rooting for The Atlas pile but knowing it would likely be a dead heat.

      At various points in what felt like an excavation, I would phone Aidan to discuss what to do with certain items that looked like they might have value—this sterling silver unpromisingly packed in a crushed cardboard carton, a broach that depicted a woman—our grandmother?—in solemn sepias. During these conversations, I felt as though Aidan was making a concerted effort to avoid sounding impatient, and I was made starkly aware of how different we were, how successfully he’d managed to extricate himself from the radius of our father’s magnetism. He was a stockbroker in New York, trading in oil futures, and, if his standard of living was any gauge, damned good at it. I was somewhat fascinated by what he did. Sometimes I’d come across a book about Wall Street while contemplating library purchases, and I’d seize the opportunity to consult with him.

      “Sure,” he’d say. “If someone in Michigan wants to read about the New York financial markets, that sounds as good as anything else.”

      Sometimes I was more direct. “What is it that you do all day?”

      He’d shrug aside the question. “It’s not really interesting. Then again, it’s not supposed to be. Only type interest that matters to my company is percent on the dollar.” He had an accent that I otherwise heard only on television and in movies.

      It was the same when it came to asking Aidan about being a parent. His answers were terse; there was the occasional extended anecdote, usually about something “cute,” like his daughter’s “One of Everything” collection, but other than that, minimal info. I liked being able to look things up—that’s just my way. As a source, Aidan seemed rich, substantive, and reputable but was frustratingly lacking in an index.

      Like Aidan, my mother had bolted when she saw daylight, I think. The way I’d construed it, after staying in the Midwest to marry him upon graduating from college, she must have undergone a sort of Copernican revolution at some point, realizing she wasn’t anywhere near the center of my father’s self-contained cosmos. Her own family came from outside Philadelphia, and they welcomed her back until she could relocate with the childhood sweetheart who was conveniently just the other side of a divorce himself. It might have been mere coincidence, just as it might have been coincidence that her geographical proximity to Aidan seemed to correspond to a greater emotional closeness, as was the case, I suppose, with my father and me. Then again, her closeness with Aidan may have stemmed from the fact that as a grandmother, as it turned out, she was a natural, a singer of strictly arias. Her disappointment that I wasn’t seeing anyone, or anyone worth really talking about for more than a few awkward moments, was ever palpable; my emphatic recommendations of the latest mysteries that she would love, no matter how right I was, fell ever short.

      At some point in the process of sorting through my father’s things, I realized that caves and cave-related items were demanding the formation of a third pile. Indeed, this would keep me on my toes—pictures of the interiors of caves bear a striking resemblance to certain close-up treatments of the human body. You see, my father wouldn’t go to the hereafter without leaving behind something cataloged in the Library of Congress—after all that, he was an author. GB603.P46, to be exact, or Dewey 551.4P. I haven’t memorized these systems, no, though they are our periodic tables. When I was getting my library science degree, there was a period in which if you handed me a book, I could have turned it over a couple of times, scanning its exterior only, and spit out a pretty reasonable guess as to where exactly it would be shelved. Nowadays, I’ve only retained those that stir specific passions.

      The book, Spelos: An Ode to Caves, had been available at the local store for a while, propped above the handwritten sign proudly proclaiming “Local Author Gus Pardo!!!!!!!” but the copy there never budged more than an inch or two. It got slightly dog-eared over the years, its pages turning creamy and mottled—when he self-published, my father did not know to use paper that would withstand time and other elements. The real moment it hit me with desolation was when I held it aloft, once, and noted a fresh smudge. That fingerprint looked, at a certain angle, like slime creeping its way out of the cave entrance that graced the cover. When I saw the smeared copy, I thought about buying it at the local store, but somehow it seemed like it would cause too much commotion in the small town where we lived—Sam, the guy who ran the bookstore, knew my dad well, and would surely ask him, “Hey, why’s your son buying your book, Gus?”

      But the copy of Spelos that was housed in our nation’s capital was another story. I remember visiting Washington, D.C. with the family, when Aidan was thirteen and I sixteen, and making our way to the glorious library amid the other palatial buildings, as they seemed to my decidedly midwestern sensibility. I remember spending much of the three days we were there bedazzled, in awe of dimensions, buildings that appeared to have been stretched out like the limousines we saw on the streets, and brightness that seemed to dance off every surface. My mother had to yell out my name a couple of times in intersections, and Aidan premiered the “jaywalking” jokes that immediately entered the permanent database of obnoxious family references.

      Our stop at the Library of Congress was surely one of the highlights of that trip. Our father kept announcing that there were “thousands of miles of books” there, adding, “That’s more than the distance that we traveled to get here.” I remember my mother shaking her head—she really wanted more face time with the seats of power: the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument; for her, the LC was a glorious architectural specimen, but, at the end of the day, just a library. My father’s insistence that it really was “the library of Congress” seemed to carry some appeal for her—she thought she might spot a congressperson. Once there, we got the needed special permission to go back into the stacks, as Aidan and I were technically too young. My dad even half-joked with the guard that they had better reserve a slot, “yea wide and yea high,” for the atlas he was eventually to finish; he actually, as I recall, apologized for making them wait.

      Finally, after various delays, we located the book. Unlike the much-handled version in the bookstore back home, this copy had had its cover stripped, and the black spine declaring the title in gold lettering seemed more hardened, as though it had gone off to join the military and been forced to toughen up, gather an austere dignity. And the very cataloging itself was revelatory for me. The transition between Dewey and LC is a conversion accomplished in seconds with a computer program nowadays, but I can still remember marveling at the unfamiliar codes on the books as we strode through, which seemed like intimations of an adult world I could barely glimpse, tantalizingly and dauntingly complicated.

      Of course, we had always had copies sitting around in the house—since it was self-published, he got more than the customary ten copies or whatever it is that an author receives. Oddly enough, while over the years I’d opened it many times, and read many pages, I’d never read the book straight through from start to finish. I knew it was about caves, of course, and that it was about more than caves, too. That in its 137 pages, my father had captured a passion for going into caves that had flourished in the years before I’d been born. That he’d mused on their natural history, their flora and fauna, their dankness and darkness, their labyrinthine souls. He’d touched on sleep cycles, prehistoric aesthetics, philosophy, oracles,