Cliff Walker is seated in his office overlooking the Ohio River and tapping the desk with his empty pipe. He has just finished reading a letter from his daughter Sally, now seventeen. It is a good letter that describes in detail the daily routine of her freshman year at a small college in Virginia. She had picked the college because it was located in the area where Cliff was born and raised. She wrote now that if she knew more about his childhood environment she might better understand the man. She said she might even help him write a book about it. She’d do the research, even type the manuscript.
Cliff calls his daughter. “I don’t write,” he says.
“Mom says you do. She says you can write anything .”
“That’s funny. In the early days your mother said I could not make a living at writing.” At least, he thought, not the kind of living she wanted.
“She’s sorry. She says it’s not too late to make up for lost years.”
“They’re not really lost,” says Cliff. “I’ve usually made good money.”
“Mom says she knows how much it hurt to see lesser writers succeed.”
“They had the guts to succeed.”
“I think it took more courage to deny your talent in order to raise a family.”
“I failed at that too.”
“That’s in the past, Dad. Let’s talk about today.”
“Yeah, let’s talk about the fact that it’s 1970 and I’m forty-four.”
“No, let’s talk about the dream you had as a boy.”
“Who told you about--that was my mother’s dream. It was she who decided that one day I’d be a successful writer. That’s why she pinched her pennies to buy me all those damn books…which my father was never happy about.”
“Don’t disappoint her, Dad. Start writing. Please. You can do it.”
“It‘s too late. “
“Please, Dad. A man has to live his dream.”
“God, that sounds like a corny line I wrote one time.”
“It is. In a poem about a guy who runs away to paint.”
“Like Gauguin.”
“Yes, but you don’t have to go to Tahiti to write.”
Cliff laughs. “Not a bad idea though.”
“I also read a poem you wrote about the first time you met Mom.”
“Yeah, she was so young, bubbled when she laughed. Statuesque, and just a college freshman. A beautiful long-haired blond. Looked like a model. In fact, she looked a lot like you do now.”
“I wish.”
Cliff wants to reach through the phone and embrace his daughter, wants to make up for all the time he wasn’t around when she needed him.
“Are you there, Dad?”
“Yes, just surprised that your mother kept the poem.”
"She loves it."
"But she always ignored my writing."
“She framed the poem, Dad.”
Cliff doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Please think about writing again. For me--and for grandma.”
“Okay, Sally. I’ll think about it.”
“Thanks. I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, sweetheart.”
“Goodbye, Dad.”
“Goodbye, Sally.”
When Cliff hangs up the phone he sees that it is dark outside. He lights his pipe and for a long time watches a bouncing barge marking time on the river. At last, he empties the pipe into his hand, opens the window and blows away the ashes, sees spent particles of himself scatter through the universe.
There are indeterminate nights when he stands by the river, and in the breeze the river summons him, seems to speak an uneasy voice of discarded youth. Tonight, beneath the rustle of trees and the muffled music that crickets make, the voice is barely audible… a whispered sound.
He stretches on the cool grass beyond the river bank and studies the moon, a sliver carved in the night. He shuts his eyes, waits for tensions to disappear, but the persistent call animates his thoughts: his mind travels unhurriedly to a long ago house, his father’s house, and that tiny room.
The light of a small lamp slowly reveals the room: the stack of well worn books as prized as any friendship, the patchwork quilt on the corner cot, the old wooden table once a desk. He sees the yellow pad and the scratchings on the pad, as relevant now as hieroglyphics on a tomb--awkward trials of a lonely boy’s small imaginings.
One by one the boy’s labored words are challenging the language, redefining himself in a gentler world. Cliff frowns at the innocence. He shudders at twelve’s conviction that the world could be reordered on a yellow pad. He shifts his eyes from the pad and peers into the shadows where he sees the boy’s face, less complicated than remembered.
The boy retreats, not so much in fear as disdain. Or so it seems to Cliff, who reaches out to touch the boy, watches him walk deep into the shadows.
Cliff looks for words he never learned, words that might explain why black and white blend into gray, yes and no wind up in maybe, right and wrong a point of view: words that might explain why the currency that comforts often consumes adolescent aims. He looks for words to explain away the apathy--a bystander waiting at the curb for parades that never pass, a character in a Beckett play--words that might help the boy understand why he is his own adversary.
Cliff Walker says nothing.
There is movement in the shadows. The boy walks into the light, confronts the man he has become. Man and boy stare across the years. The boy’s lips seem to form the word Go.
Cliff presses his hands hard to his eyes, listens for crickets, for the rustling of trees. He hears only the whispered sound: Please go.
Cliff opens his eyes to darkness. Yet he continues to see the boy’s face until the face dissolves into the night: a black and silent grave.
Invisible tears attempt to wash away the empty years, obituaries of ends unrealized.
End
