Commonwealth(97)

“Caroline and I took her to the hospital. We were with Dad.”

“Well, that was nice of you.”

Franny shrugged. “I wasn’t going to leave her.”

“How is your dad?”

Franny shook her head, thinking of her father. How is old Bert? Fix would always say. “I’d tell you he wasn’t going to make it until New Year’s but I’m sure I’d be wrong.”

“Your father’s a tough guy.”

“My father’s a tough guy,” Franny said, thinking of the gun in his bedside table and how she had declined to help him when he asked. She’d done worse than that. She’d taken the gun to the police department in Santa Monica later, turned it in along with the bullets.

“I’m going to float a little more gin in there,” Bert said.

“A tiny bit,” Franny said, and handed back the glass. She wasn’t drunk and so she was sadly aware that all the gin was gone now.

“We’re not even up to half a jigger yet.” Bert made his way to the bar at the side of the room.

“Just be careful.”

“I remember seeing your father again after your christening party,” Bert said. “I saw him at the courthouse. I don’t know, maybe I saw him all the time and never knew it before, but that Monday he came up to me and shook my hand, said he was glad I’d come. ‘Glad you could come to Franny’s party,’ is what he said.” He handed Franny her drink.

“It was a long time ago, Bert.”

“Still,” Bert said. “It bothers me to think of him now, so sick. I never had anything against your father.”

“Do you hear from Albie?” she said, wanting to change the subject. It was a question she could have asked Albie but for some reason she never did. They didn’t talk about Bert. Even all those years ago when they’d lived together under this roof they didn’t talk about him.

“Not so much. Every now and then one of us gives it a try but we haven’t had a lot of success. Albie was very attached to his mother, you know. That’s the way it happens—girls to their fathers and boys to their mothers. I don’t think he ever got over my leaving his mother.” For Bert the past was always right there with him, and so he assumed that everyone else felt the same way.

“You should give him a call. It’s a tough time of year now, with Teresa gone.” Franny thought of her own father, of this time next year.

“I’ll call him on Christmas,” he said. “I’ll call from Jeanette’s.”

Franny wanted to tell him it was three hours earlier in California and that he could call his son tonight, could call him right now, but Bert wasn’t going to call Albie and there was no sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She pressed through the fizzy sweetness of the tonic and drained the glass down to the ice and the lime. “I wish I could stay,” Franny said, and part of her meant it. She would have liked to go upstairs to her room and lie down on her bed, though what were the chances that the bed was still there?

Bert nodded. “I know. I’m just glad you came by at all. I really appreciate that.”

“What time are you flying out?”

“Early,” he said. “That way I’ll beat the traffic.”

Franny got up and gave her stepfather a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Merry Christmas,” Bert said, and when he stepped back to look at her his eyes were damp. “Be careful now. If anything happened to you your mother would kill me.”

Franny smiled and gave him a kiss, thinking that Bert still saw the world in terms of what Beverly would and would not forgive him for. She stepped into her shoes beside the front door and let herself out into the snow. Inside the house Bert was turning off the lights, and she stood there on the front porch for a minute and watched the snow come to rest on the sleeves of her velvet dress. She was thinking about the night she couldn’t find Albie. Bert was in his study downstairs working and her mother was in the kitchen going over her French homework. It was long past dinner. It was snowing just like this and the house was perfectly quiet. Franny was wondering where Albie was. Usually by this time he had come into her room to do his homework or talk to her instead of doing his homework. She was lying across her bed reading The Return of the Native for AP English. It wasn’t that he came in every night, but if he wasn’t in her room then she could usually hear him, watching television, walking around. She kept listening until finally she put the book down and went to look for him. He wasn’t in his bedroom or the bathroom or the den or in the living room where he never went anyway. When she had looked everywhere in the house she could think of she went into the kitchen.

“Where’s Albie?” Franny asked her mother.

Her mother shook her head and made a little sound that stood in for the words no idea. Her mother never did learn to speak French.

“If you see him would you let me know?”

Her beautiful mother, maybe embarrassed now, looked up from her book for just a second and nodded. “Sure,” she said.

Franny didn’t think of knocking on the door to Bert’s study and asking him if he’d seen Albie, or checking to see if maybe Albie was in there with him. The thought never crossed her mind.