Chapter 14

　　THAT JANUARY IT GOT so cold you could see chunks of ice the size of cars floating down the Hudson River. On those midwinter nights, the homeless shelters filled up quickly. Mom and Dad hated the shelters. Human cesspools, Dad called them, goddamn vermin pits. Mom and Dad preferred to sleep on the pews of the churches that opened their doors to the homeless, but on some nights every pew in every church was taken. On those nights Dad would end up in a shelter, while Mom would show up at Lori's, Tinkle in tow. At times like that, her cheerful facade would crack, and she'd start crying and confess to Lori that life in the streets could be hard, just really hard.

　　For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn't do any good, she said, and besides, dropping out would break Dad's heart. He was immensely proud that he had a daughter in college, and an Ivy League college at that. Every time he met someone new, he managed to work it into the first few minutes of conversation.

　　Mom and Dad, Brian pointed out, had options. They could move back to West Virginia or Phoenix. Mom could work. And she was not destitute. She had her collection of antique Indian jewelry, which she kept in a self-storage locker. There was the two-carat diamond ring that Brian and I had found under the rotten lumber back in Welch; she wore it even when sleeping on the street. She still owned property in Phoenix. And she had the land in Texas, the source of her oil-lease royalties.

　　Brian was right. Mom did have options. I met her at a coffee shop to discuss them. First off, I suggested that she might think of finding an arrangement like mine: a room in someone's nice apartment in exchange for taking care of children or the elderly.

　　"I've spent my life taking care of other people," Mom said. "Now it's time to take care of me.""But you're not taking care of you.""Do we have to have this conversation?" Mom asked. "I've seen some good movies lately. Can't we talk about the movies?"I suggested to Mom that she sell her Indian jewelry. She wouldn't consider it. She loved that jewelry. Besides, they were heirlooms and had sentimental value.

　　I mentioned the land in Texas.

　　"That land's been in the family for generations," Mom said, "and it's staying in the family. You never sell land like that."I asked about the property in Phoenix.

　　"I'm saving that for a rainy day.""Mom, it's pouring.""This is just a drizzle," she said. "Monsoons could be ahead!" She sipped her tea. "Things usually work out in the end.""What if they don't?""That just means you haven't come to the end yet."She looked across the table and smiled at me with the smile you give people when you know you have the answers to all their questions. And so we talked about movies.

　　MOM AND DAD SURVIVED the winter, but every time I saw them, they looked a little worse for wear: dirtier, more bruised, their hair more matted.

　　"Don't you fret a bit," Dad said. "Have you ever known your old man to get himself in a situation he couldn't handle?"I kept telling myself Dad was right, that they knew how to look after themselves and each other, but in the spring, Mom called me to say Dad had come down with tuberculosis.

　　Dad almost never got sick. He was always getting banged up and then recovering almost immediately, as if nothing could truly hurt him. A part of me still believed all those childhood stories he'd told us about how invincible he was. Dad had asked that no one visit him, but Mom said she thought he'd be pretty pleased if I dropped by the hospital.

　　I waited at the nurse's station while an orderly went to tell him he had a visitor. I thought Dad might be under an oxygen tent or lying in a bed coughing up blood into a white handkerchief, but after a minute, he came hurrying down the hall. He was paler and more gaunt than usual, but despite all his years of hard living, he had aged very little. He still had all his hair, and it was still coal black, and his dark eyes twinkled above the paper surgical mask he was wearing.

　　He wouldn't let me hug him. "Whoa, Nelly, stay back," he said. "You're sure a sight for sore eyes, honey, but I don't want you catching this sonofabitch of a bug."Dad escorted me back to the TB ward and introduced me to all of his friends. "Believe it or not, ol' Rex Walls did produce something worth bragging about, and here she is," he told them. Then he started coughing.

　　"Dad, are you going to be okay?" I asked.

　　"Ain't none of us getting out of this alive, honey," Dad said. It was an expression he used a lot, and now he seemed to find a special satisfaction in it.

　　Dad led me over to his cot. A neat pile of books was stacked next to it. He said his bout with TB had set him to pondering about mortality and the nature of the cosmos. He'd been stone-cold sober since entering the hospital, and reading a lot more about chaos theory, particularly about the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at Los Alamos who had made a study of the transition between order and turbulence. Dad said he was damned if Feigenbaum didn't make a persuasive case that turbulence was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed. "I'm not saying there's a bearded old geezer named Yahweh up in the clouds deciding which football team is going to win the Super Bowl," Dad said. "But if the physics梩he quantum physics梥uggests that God exists, I'm more than willing to entertain the notion."Dad showed me some of the calculations he'd been working on. He saw me looking at his trembling fingers and held them up. "Lack of liquor or fear of God梔on't know which is causing it," he said. "Maybe both.""Promise you'll stay here until you get better," I said. "I don't want you doing the skedaddle."Dad burst into laughter that ended in another fit of coughing.

　　DAD STAYED IN THE hospital for six weeks. By then he'd not only beaten back the TB, he'd been sober longer than any time since the Phoenix detox. He knew that if he went back to the streets, he'd start drinking again. One of the hospital administrators got him a job as a maintenance man at an upstate resort, room and board included. He tried to talk Mom into going with him, but she flatly refused. "Upstate's the sticks," she said.

　　So Dad went alone. He called me from time to time, and it sounded like he'd put together a life that worked for him. He had a one-room apartment over a garage, enjoyed doing the repairs and upkeep on the old lodge, loved being back within walking distance of untamed country, and was staying sober. Dad worked at the resort through the summer and into the fall. As it began to turn cold again, Mom called him and mentioned how much easier it was for two people to stay warm during the winter, and how much Tinkle the dog missed him. In November, after the first hard frost, I got a call from Brian, who said that Mom had succeeded in persuading Dad to quit his job and return to the city.

　　"Do you think he'll stay sober?" I asked.

　　"He's already back on the booze," Brian said.

　　A few weeks after Dad got back, I saw him at Lori's. He was sitting on the sofa with an arm around Mom and a pint bottle in his hand. He laughed. "This crazy-ass mother of yours, can't live with her, can't live without her. And damned if she doesn't feel the same about me."* * *All of us kids had our own lives by then. I was in college, Lori had become an illustrator at a comic-book company, Maureen lived with Lori and went to high school, and Brian, who had wanted to be a cop ever since he'd had to call a policeman to our house in Phoenix to break up a fight between Mom and Dad, had become a warehouse foreman and was serving on the auxiliary force until he was old enough to take the police department's entrance exam. Mom suggested we all celebrate Christmas at Lori's apartment. I bought Mom an antique silver cross, but finding a gift for Dad was harder; he always said he never needed anything. Since it looked like it was going to be another hard winter, and since Dad wore nothing but his bomber jacket in even the coldest weather, I decided to get him some warm clothes. At an army-surplus store, I bought flannel shirts, thermal underwear, thick wool socks, the kind of blue work pants that auto mechanics wear, and a new pair of steel-toed boots.

　　Lori decorated her apartment with colored lights and pine boughs and paper angels; Brian made eggnog; and to demonstrate that he was on his best behavior, Dad went to great lengths to make sure there was no alcohol in it before he accepted a glass. Mom passed around their presents, each wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher's twine. Lori got a cracked lamp that might have been a Tiffany; Maureen, an antique porcelain doll that had lost most of her hair; Brian, a nineteenth-century book of poetry, missing the cover and the first few pages. My present was an orange crewneck sweater, slightly stained but made, Mom pointed out, of genuine Shetland wool.

　　When I passed Dad my stack of carefully wrapped boxes, he protested that he needed and wanted nothing. "Go ahead," I said. "Open them."I watched as he carefully removed the wrapping. He lifted the lids and stared at the folded clothes. His face took on that wounded expression he got whenever the world called his bluff. "You must be mighty ashamed of your old man," he said.

　　"What do you mean?" I asked.

　　"You think I'm some sort of goddamn charity case."Dad stood up and put on his bomber jacket. He was avoiding all our eyes.

　　"Where are you going?" I asked.

　　Dad just turned up his collar and walked out of the apartment. I listened to the sound of his boots going down the stairs.

　　"What did I do?" I asked.

　　"Look at it from his perspective," Mom said. "You buy him all these nice new things, and all he has for you is junk from the street. He's the father. He's the one who's supposed to be taking care of you."The room was quiet for a while. "I guess you don't want your presents, either," I said to Mom.

　　"Oh, no," she said. "I love getting presents."BY THE FOLLOWING summer, Mom and Dad were heading into their third year on the streets. They'd figured out how to make it work for them, and I gradually came around to accepting the notion that whether I liked it or not, this was how it was going to be. "It's sort of the city's fault," Mom told me. "They make it too easy to be homeless. If it was really unbearable, we'd do something different."In August, Dad called to go over my course selection for the fall semester. He also wanted to discuss some of the books on the reading lists. Since he'd come to New York, he'd been borrowing my assigned books from the public library. He read every single one, he said, so he could answer any questions I might have. Mom said it was his way of getting a college education along with me.

　　When he asked me what courses I had signed up for, I said, "I'm thinking of dropping out.""The hell you are," Dad said.

　　I told him that while most of my tuition was covered by grants and loans and scholarships, the school expected me to contribute two thousand dollars a year. But over the summer, I had been able to save only a thousand dollars. I needed another thousand and had no way to come up with it.

　　"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" Dad asked.

　　Dad called a week later and told me to meet him at Lori's. When he arrived with Mom, he was carrying a large plastic garbage bag and had a small brown paper bag tucked under his arm. I assumed it was a bottle of booze, but then he opened the paper bag and turned it upside down. Hundreds of dollar bills梠nes, fives, tens, twenties, all wrinkled and worn梥pilled into my lap.

　　"There's nine hundred and fifty bucks," Dad said. He opened the plastic bag, and a fur coat tumbled out. "That there's mink. You should be able to pawn it for fifty, at least."I stared at the loot. "Where did you get all this?" I finally asked.

　　"New York City is full of poker players who wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ground.""Dad," I said. "you guys need this money more than I do.""It's yours," Dad said. "Since when is it wrong for a father to take care of his little girl?""But I can't." I looked at Mom.

　　She sat down next to me and patted my leg. "I've always believed in the value of a good education," she said.

　　So, when I enrolled for my final year at Barnard, I paid what I owed on my tuition with Dad's wadded, crumpled bills.