The Fool of New York City by Michael O'Brien

Author:Michael O'Brien [O'Brien, Michael D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novels
ISBN: 9781681497136
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

8

The end of the world as I knew it

In early November, two months after the catastrophe, Granddad Davies and I drove up to Vermont in his 1975 ruby-red Ford station wagon, a gas-guzzler in near-mint condition. He had been busy during the previous month, beginning legal work on my behalf, a bureaucratic complexity that he did not discuss with me. He had also closed up the house in Bedford-Stuyvesant and listed it with a real estate agent.

We stopped at my family home on the way north. I dropped in to see the Beamishes and cried in their arms, though I had fully intended not to. I asked them to say hi from me to their grandson Jeffer in North Carolina, and I jotted down on a piece of paper my new address in Maryland.

“He could visit me there,” I said.

Granddad and I walked together from room to room in the empty house, saying nothing, both of us afraid of our emotions, both of us focused on memories in our minds. He unlocked the garage, where the furniture was stored until it could be sold, nothing with highly personal meaning other than an armless “nursing rocker” that had belonged to his great-grandmother. This and a few cardboard boxes we loaded into the back of the station wagon.

There were dustings of snow on the hilltops of northern Massachusetts and southern Vermont, heavier falls as the route took us higher into the Appalachians, though the valley bottoms remained green. Wherever deciduous forests dominated the landscape, they were leafless gray washes with touches of the last purple oak and yellow beech. The sky was deep blue.

I did not know what to expect as we drove through Tadd’s Ford and along the fork to my grandparents’ place. I did not break into cheers at the first sight of the great sorrel horse. It was the first time I had ever come here without my parents. The smoke rising from the chimney of the old white house lifted my spirits, however, and the reunion with Ben and Dorothy was moving, if somewhat awkward. Grandma cried, and Grandpa grew teary, though silent and holding himself back. He initiated a hug, which I appreciated, though it seemed different from the hugs he had given me throughout my childhood. It was brief, tentative, lacking a smile or eye contact. He cast a contemptuous look at the huge station wagon, but made no comment.

My grandfathers had met only once or twice since my parents’ wedding. On some primitive level I knew that they were not comfortable with each other and strained to maintain the courtesies. They had made fundamentally different lives for their families, and while both had been military men in their younger years, this bond was fragile. Ben had suffered something hard and bad, which had never been explained to me, and I now recalled my father’s words about my mother’s father not recovering from a war he had played a part in. Granddad, by contrast, had retired from the U.

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