It was Christmas.
Right down to snow falling in thick flakes. No one was out, or so it seemed, but home with families, enjoying one day when everyone tries to feel loved, remembered. Christmas is for celebrating what you have.
The phone rang. I smacked the red copy of Catcher in the Rye in my palm, so happy to have read it, like I found a friend.
Mom was perusing a newsmagazine on her bed with her ankles propped and her big callused toe in the air, squinting in her glasses with a finger crossing her mouth like a "No talking" sign.
Ken was playing Monopoly by himself, so he'd be sure to win.
The phone rang again.
"Who could that be?" my mother asked.
Within a moment our eyes had converged in brief consultations. We knew.
"Ozzie," Mom said.
The phone kept ringing.
"You sure it's Dad?" I asked, "Maybe it's someone else... you never know."
"I'm sure," Mom said. "Who else would keep ringing like that?"
The phone sounded like a rat running the length of a xylophone with mallets tied to its feet, back and forth, over and over, with shrill malevalence. It was like an unexpected rapping at the door, intrusive, menacing, compelling response and risk. But less risk than ignoring it.
"Don't you think we should answer?" I said.
"Ignore it," my mother replied.
"How can we?" I asked.
Dad had left home five years before and no one was sorry. To the contrary, we were delighted Mom had his visitation rights revoked early that year, officially cutting him out of our lives. She took him to court when my brother complained that Dad had brought his girlfriend along on a few Sunday outings, and made him uncomfortable. Girlfriends were off-limits for these visits, according to their settlement. Since Mom had no boyfriends and did not date, believing such behavior unbefitting of a mother, she maintained that Dad must at least appear celibate.
Her severe standard came from her belief that divorce was a crime, entailing fault and punishment. She blamed my father for the failure of the marriage. He ruined her life. She sensed that a single woman with children in a couples society was a pariah, and that we children of a broken home were socially impaired. She feared we would be marked by teachers and administrators as misfits, on a downward spiral of delinquency, if we disclosed our situation.
"Tell people your private life and they rub your face in it," she warned. When we brought home public law forms that determined government support of schools, Mom cursed. She believed someone somewhere would now know about our fractured family and humiliate us.
I divided my energies between trying to make straight A's every term and constructing for classmates a fictitious, normal home life with an invisible father, always away on business, and a reclusive working mother. I thought that this concealment would keep them from thinking me needy or abject.
But here we were, the family together, for real. Mom, Ken and I in the room and Dad tied to us by a cord, at a safe distance. My brother, who had run when I answered, clung to Mom, shaking his head violently, "Hang up on him!"
Mom shrieked with laughter. I stared out at the snow that swirled with dismal density, removing our unit from a world we connected to by television, school and work. In the phone on the floor lay our fourth member, the cause of our misery and disgrace, adding his voice to our small chorus, claiming on this family holiday his place at the table, his voice pleading, "Hello? Hello? Let me talk to Ken."
I looked at the receiver and thought I was in it, dangling on the other end, huddled in a booth near a coffee shop men's room, crying out, as strangers milled by or someone hovered, jingling change, waiting to make a call. Did Dad know his voice was on the floor, his desparate try at contact futile but for me?
"Come on. Talk to him, Ken... He wants to talk to you..."
"Hang up," Mom grinned.
"Yeah, hang up," my brother echoed.
"We can't do that. Don't you care at all? He's human."
My mother laughed. "He's subhuman, an animal. Tell him to stop calling. Tell him to call his Filipino paramour."
"I can't tell him that," I replied.
"Why not? You, of all people! You know what he's like! You hate him."
The snow fell fiercely now. The blizzard wind whirred and beat the windows, flicking long oblique columns and writhing whips of white stuff. It was incredible to know someone was out in it. Alone. Yes, being out in that storm was the essence of being alone: annihilating and cold. It was the scene on a Christmas card of white-canopied pine forests, neatly framed and brought to passionate life; nature overwhelming art. But this pristine scene was a still-life, uninhabitable, meant for polished mantels above hearths before which people sat content and secure. To enjoy such cold exteriors implied a snug interior. Surely Dad, of all people, needed a warm interior now.
He had tried to raise a family for that comfort. But trying too hard, he put holidays on edge, wrecked them with his passionate clumsy need to make them compensate for what they never gave him before-- security. One Thanksgiving he angered my mother so much that she would not make a turkey. We ate hash instead. She knew how to get at him. By the next Thanksgiving he was gone.
"He sounds so lonely," I said.
"Since when do you care?" she asked, her eyes glittering with mockery to tell me I was stupid and weak, as if she were confusing him with me.
I swallowed. Why should I care about his call, or that he loved my brother? Who was he to me but a violent angry man without a family out in the snowy nowhere of a lonely Christmas?
Picking up the phone, I stared at the little mouth holes where his hope breathed.
"Look, Dad...He's not here..."
"Not there? I heard him. He must be there. Where is he? He's my boy. Jon, I have to speak to my boy..."
"He's not here, Dad."
"It's your mother. I know. She told you to say that. You always do what she says..."
"That's not true."
"It is. We even laughed about it. When you were two we left you in the apartment. Before we went out, your mother said, `Sit there and don't you move. Just stay where you are.' When we got back you were sitting where we left you and you said, `Mommy, I didn't move. Not one inch!'"
My throat was swelling. That's where the tears began. I glanced at Mom and Ken. They were grinning. Mom was braying, "Hang up already," slamming a phone in pantomime. What could I tell Dad that he had not heard? I wanted to make him feel less alone but there was nothing for him here. Even my brother, who had received gifts and good times from him and cried when his visitation rights were severed, mocked Dad's effort to get close, so loudly it seemed he never loved him. He must have heard Ken and felt betrayed. I could not lie that Ken was out in that snowstorm. Lies add to the cold. I put the receiver to my face. The line was silent.
"Hello?"
"Ken? Is that you, my boy? Is it you?" Dad blustered. His joy, so heavy with relief that he must have been waiting in a phone booth at a filling station or coffee shop, feeding a slot with nickles, hearing a silence as dead as a disconnect, gripped my throat and jerked tears from my eyes because it was so misplaced. Should I pretend I was my brother to give Dad a shot of the warmth he craved, the illusion that his life was not loveless, pointless, hopeless? The world hated him, with reason. He cursed and bullied it. But this only made him in my mind more worthy of consolation since he needed it more. Maybe if compassion had come his way early on he would not have become what he was. Whatever had twisted or stunted him took place so long ago that he did not recall it. Now I was witnessing a rerun of that defining and deforming moment: the people closest to him laughed, mocked and hung up when he hungered for a connection.
"Dad. Ken isn't here. He went out to -- I don't know.
But listen, Dad, how are you?"
"Jon. Ken is there. I know he is. Now put him on."
"He's not, Dad. Really."
"Stop playing games with me, Jon. You always did that. You always played games with me. Stop playing, Jon. Ken is my boy and I want to talk to him. I have that right."
"He isn't here."
"Not there, not there, not there," he muttered.
"Look, Dad, how are you? I heard you were sick..."
"Let me talk to your mother. She's there. Put her on. Jon. do you hear me? Put her on. You can't keep my boy from me."
"Dad, she doesn't -- she isn't here."
"Hang up!" my mother shouted.
"Jon. Ask her. I know she's there."
I put my hand over the receiver and asked Mom if she wanted to talk to Dad. She looked clownishly shocked, "Tell him to drop dead."
I grimaced. Did she have to be so cold? If only she heard his voice straining to talk to the only person he loved.
"Dad, she doesn't want to talk to you."
The line was silent. I wondered if he hung up. I felt empty. What difference did my effort make? I tried, but it didn't matter because nobody wanted me to succeed.
"You and your mother, " he said, "You've always been against me. But I don't give a shit, Jon, because I have my boy..."
"Dad, I'm not keeping him from you..."
"You did your share to keep him from me."
"Dad, it's not true."
"You did everything to destroy the family," he said.
"You did that, Dad," I gulped. No matter how I tried, I could not avoid saying things to hurt him. If I were him I would have hated myself, thinking of why I was in the cold, of what I did, of the family I destroyed with fights, shouting, hitting.
"Jon, let me speak to my boy. Jon -- I won't ask again."
"So, don't," I muttered. His voice quavered, he was crying in a phone booth, losing composure in the snow, feeling his nothingness, understanding that no one loved him, that every number was wrong. He deserved it, I thought, for hurling threats with his teary voice at the only one who would talk to him.
"You know, Dad, if you want to talk, I'll talk to you."
My mother dropped her magazine on her lap, "Hang up, already! What's your problem?"
I cupped the mouthpiece and looked away, chastened, yet pressed on with a sense of mission. What was my problem? Did I have one? No. Mom was acting like the woman he claimed she was. Nasty, vindictive.
"Jon, I don't want to talk to you," Dad repeated.
"Ken's not here. If what you want is to talk, you can talk to me. You can't see Ken, so what's the difference?"
"I have nothing to say to you, Jon."
"Why not? I know we didn't get along, but admit it, it was partly your fault."
"Jon, I want to talk to my boy."
"I'm your boy, too."
"Ken's my boy... Don't keep me from my boy. You can't keep me from my boy. Let me talk to him."
"He won't talk to you!" I yelled.
He hung up. I held the receiver in my hand like it was dead.
"Why did you humor him?" my mother taunted, "He's scum."
Mom said Dad's name as if he were Hitler. I was ashamed to be associated with it.
"Nobody else would..."
"You felt bad for him. Is that it?" she grinned, "You shouldn't bother."
"He was depressed."
"He should die. We'd all be better off," she replied and resumed reading.
I never talked to Dad again. Years later I started saying my father died. It did not feel like a lie. One afternoon, my brother was on a seek and eat mission in my mother's closet, looking for cookies where she kept a stash. He found adoption papers, instead. Ozzie wasn't my real father.
I was relieved not to be Ozzie's son, not to carry his fate in my blood or the guilt of a father's deeds. It clarified his attitude to me as his child. But one thing this news never explained was why, on a forsaken Christmas, when no one would talk to him, he would not talk to the one person who would listen.
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