Keys to an Empty House by David Finkle

Author:David Finkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plum Bay Publishing, LLC
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

xiv.

A few days later, having thought more about Ethan’s housebound tendency, having thought more about Ethan’s sleeping difficulty (if only the one time, as far as he knows), Elihu gets an idea. He’ll suggest another venture for the two of them. He considers referring to it as an adventure but regards that as too cute. He holds off. He’ll suggest the outing but let Ethan decide what course it should take.

Raising the prospect, he asks what Ethan has not seen in New York City that he still wants to see. Ethan answers but in such a way that Elihu gets the feeling he’s the one being humored. “How about a ball game?” pops out of Elihu’s mouth. Where did that come from? Elihu knows: from the clutch of outings fathers are supposed to take with sons. For a second, Elihu is surprised he hadn’t suggested going fishing. Not that he ever did with Morris or ever thought about doing himself. Since it’s April, he wouldn’t have brought up skiing.

Ethan shakes his head with some show of thought and says, “I’m not that into baseball. I’ve wanted to see the 9/11 Memorial.” He stops, then talks on with a lingering look of uncertainty on his fleshy, stubbly face, “But I don’t know.”

It’s something to go on, Elihu thinks. Okay, if the 9/11 Memorial is what Ethan wants even hesitantly, Elihu—who has gone on no jaunts to update himself on New York City since he last lived here—decides fine, sure, let’s do that. It so happens that visiting the revised site of the Twin Towers catastrophe is just the sort of tourist-y outing he has always disdained. More than that, he has his private response to the invasion that has to do with cosmeticized memorials of any stripe. He thinks back on his horror at once taking the train from Munich to Dachau and observing what had been done there to turn a death camp into a green field with a bland, wooden “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the entrance and tidy buildings here and there.

But he’ll go to the memorial. Sometimes, he tells himself, a parent does what his child favors, even an adult child. He’ll go in that frame of mind, in a parent’s frame of mind.

On the next warm spring Thursday, when the trees are showing celadon buds and tulips and daffodils are boldly raising their heads, Elihu and Ethan walk the mile or so down Fifth Avenue, through Washington Square Park, through the Village, Soho, Tribeca, over to Church Street. The walk is decided on this way:

Elihu: “Do you want to take the subway? Or we could walk.”

Ethan with little affect: “We can walk.”

They are men of few words. In what has become predictable, the words exchanged between them remain few. The two of them have become the essence of terse. Elihu says, “Nice spring day, isn’t it?” and wonders if he’s blushing at the bromide. It’s years ago he made a hard-and-fast practice of avoiding bromides. He’s also wary of “hard-and-fast.

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