The Traveler's Companion

THE TRAVELER'S COMPANION

By David Foley

Copyright 2012 David Foley

Smashwords Edition

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For Jordan who read it and Michael and Karen

who gave me a place to write it.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 1

Snow sifts by my bedroom window. It’s made me dreamy, dropped me on the edge of my bed where I sit, tie looped about my hand, lost in the drift and eddy, the updraft and hover of the flakes.

Three loud thuds snap me out of it. They're followed by a shudder, a cough, an expiring hiss. I run to the window. My sister’s orange Volkswagen has come to a halt in the street below. She heaves the door shut—it’s fussy—and starts up the front steps.

Now I have to hurry. I sprint down the hall to the bathroom. Brush my hair. Tie my tie. Run back to the bedroom. Hunt down my blazer. Slip it on and trip down two flights of stairs. Judith is waiting in the front hall. A winter glow, passing through the fanlight, gleams in the melted snow in her hair.

She glances at her watch. It’s not a criticism. She just likes to keep track of the time. Still I say, I’m sorry.

She pushes a lock of hair off my forehead. You look different.

She looks the same. She’s wearing the same stiff practical braid she’s worn since college, though strands of grey now thread through the brown. Her earrings are carved ebony masks she picked up in Africa on a field research trip. They aren’t very Christmassy, but, if challenged, she’d probably be able to connect them to some tribal myth involving a virgin birth or the sacrifice of a god. Her lumpy purse and camel’s hair coat give her a matronly look, but the hem of a dashiki peeks out below, and if she’s not wearing her sandals and kneesocks, it’s only because the weather demands the ugly black boots she’s got on instead.

I pull my parka from the hall closet and shrug into it.

All set? she says.

But she doesn’t move. She’s waiting for something, and more or less on cue we hear a creak on the floorboards above us and a voice at the top of the stairs.

Is that Judith?

Yes. I’m taking Mark to church.

A little silence.

You wouldn’t like to come? she calls, though she knows he wouldn’t.

Oh, no thank you, he says.

We’ll see you at Alan’s then.

Alan’s? Yes, yes, he allows, as though the thought were only now occurring to him, I suppose you will.

* * *

Judith and I are the only ones who keep up the tradition of attending Christmas morning services. Except for the occasional funeral, my father no longer goes to church, and my brother married a Catholic; they take their girls to midnight mass. Judith is an atheist, but she combines, in the old Bostonian style, a fine disdain for convention with a reflexive respect for certain forms. By herself she might never go, but she believes our mother would have wanted me to go, and so we do.

In the vestibule of The First Congregational Church in Cambridge, we are stopped by a woman wearing a red jacket with a silver fox collar that exactly matches her hair. You’re all grown up, she says to me. How old is he now? she asks Judith, as if I’m still the six-year-old clinging to my sister’s hand the Christmas after our mother died.

Twenty-one, I tell her.

She shakes her head. Hard to believe. When did we lose Caroline?

1969, says Judith.

The woman smiles sorrowfully at me. You have her eyes, she says. But your father’s… She gestures vaguely at my face, as though reluctant to name what exactly of my father’s I have. How is Jonathan? she asks Judith.

Fine, says Judith, and leaves it at that.

Give him my love. I keep meaning to call and suggest lunch or something.

I’m sure he’d love that, says Judith, though she must know that the likelihood of my father going out to lunch with this woman, or indeed with anyone, is slight. I can imagine how delighted my father would be to hear from my mother’s old friend, how charmed he would be at the suggestion of lunch, and how regretfully, how vaguely he’d defer it to some hazy future chance.

We find a pew and settle in. A chorus of Hark the Herald Angels Sing rises around us, and I glance at Judith. She’s not singing—neither of us is—but there’s a little smile on her face. Perhaps she’s remembering childhood Christmases before I was born. Or perhaps she’s taking an anthropologist’s pleasure in the oddities of belief.

Clothed in flesh the godhead see, sings the congregation.

* * *

My brother Alan has gotten just that much too pudgy to rise from his chair without due provocation, but he raises his glass convivially enough when we arrive at his place in Brookline. His wife Sylvia, all strained holiday nerves, kisses us tightly and takes our coats. Sylvia is from the south, from Baton Rouge to be exact (they met when he was at Tulane Law), and she’s never quite adjusted to the north or, for that matter, to us. Judith daunts her, my father terrifies her, and even I make her a little nervous. Her defense against us is to impose a southern woman’s sense of style and comfort on our dowdy family traditions. Her two girls are scrubbed and brushed and dressed in red Christmas frocks. The nuts and candies mound in bowls of pink Depression glass, and the drinks nestle in silver coasters. The dining table gleams ferociously under its display of Irish linen, Lenox china, silver and crystal.

My father has his patriarchal chair by the fireplace which, in lieu of a fire, is stuffed with poinsettias.

Ah, he says when he sees us, how was your worship?

Merry Christmas, says Judith and plants a dry kiss on his cheek.

Sylvia fetches me a beer—college students in Sylvia’s zoology always drink beer—and, with one last nervous glance about the room, dips into a chair.

Silence settles. Alan rattles the ice in his glass. My father clears his throat, though this is just an old man’s rasp. He’s not about to speak. Judith smiles at me across the room in that way she has of signaling that she and I, born seventeen years apart, stand together and a little aloof from our family’s oddities.

Mark, says Sylvia, when the silence threatens to become oppressive, how is Clara? Sylvia regards me as the most socially backward member of my family (no fault of his, she’s told Alan, seeing how he was raised), and last summer her eyes sparkled with relief when I introduced her to my girlfriend.

She’s fine. She’s, you know, with her family.

Will we see her?

Um... probably not. We’ll both be back at school in, like, a week.

She nods understandingly. You’re keeping it casual, she says.

Yeah, we’re pretty casual.

Judith rescues me. Mark is graduating this year.

Hard to believe, Alan mumbles, conventionally.

We should start making graduation plans, says Judith. I assume we all want to go out for the occasion. I’ve located quite a reasonable hotel near the college, but we should make our reservations now. I’ll get rooms for Daddy and me. If you’d like one for you and the girls, you should let me know as soon as possible.

Oh, says Sylvia, if you think we should... She trails off.

It’s entirely, says Judith, up to you.

The conversation goes on like this, though it hardly needs to. Judith has worked it all out in advance, and before long Sylvia is weakly agreeing that the graduation party should be held at their apartment and not my father’s house.

And then what? Alan asks. What’s the great life plan?

I hesitate. I’d like to go to Europe.

Judith’s eyebrows lift. I’ve surprised her.

Europe! says Sylvia. "How nice! To live?"

No—um—just to travel. Six months or so, you know. Kicking around.

You’ll need money, says Alan. It’s not an objection; we’ve only hit on a point that interests him.

I shouldn’t think money would be a problem, says Judith. He’ll get some graduation money from the relatives. And how much can it take? You won’t, I presume, be staying at the Sheraton. She turns to my father. How much money can we give Mark to go to Europe?

My father looks up at her. Oh, if he’ll need money... He lets it hang as if it were not worth discussing, though whether by this he means there is plenty of money or none is up to us to determine. The question, anyway, is largely formal. Judith knows more about his finances than he does. Don’t worry about it, she tells me. We’ll work it out.

A thought visibly strikes Sylvia.

Will you go alone? she asks.

Alone?

To Europe. Or will you take a friend?

I think I’ll go by myself.

Alone in the wide world, my father murmurs. How brave.

* * *

Judith’s own post-college trip was a year-long internship in Kenya, where she worked on a dig with the Leakeys. From there she was supposed to start grad work at Stanford, but my mother’s illness intervened, and she deferred enrollment and moved back home to care for my parents and me. My mother died in December, and Judith started making plans to be in California in the fall. It took her another month or so to realize that the care of a six-year-old was a challenge to which my father was unlikely to rise. So she stayed. She enrolled instead at Tufts and lived at home another year, moving into her own apartment only when she’d assured herself that my father and I could get by without her continued presence.

This required hiring a live-in housekeeper, and that required wading into my father’s finances. By the time she was done, she’d reorganized everything, budgeting, investing, safeguarding, so that when I was thirteen it was easy enough to send me off to boarding school. She gave me very good reasons for this: scholastic excellence, résumé building, development of an independent character, the company of boys my own age; but only the last rang true. She was worried about me growing up in that house with only an old and increasingly distant man for company.

I don’t remember much about my father before my mother died, but her death seems to have snipped some last tenuous thread that connected him to us, and in the years that followed he seemed to drift farther and farther away. In time he came to regard all our claims on his notice with polite attention and just the faintest surprise, as if he couldn’t quite recall where he’d first made our acquaintance. But he withdrew on other fronts as well, and the withdrawal became complete when, in his mid-sixties, he retired from his law practice because of ill health. If he had friends he still saw it was only rarely, and only an old Bostonian sense of decorum kept him in touch with his remaining relations. It had its tender side, this withdrawal, as if the flesh beneath the shell were all nerves and delicate membranes. And it had its aggressive side, like a well-built wall of defense, chinks just large enough to admit an aimed crossbow.

It made coming home for holidays—and Judith insisted that I come—a little nerve-wracking. Judith was pretty good about finding things for me to do, and I was allowed to hang out freely at her Allston apartment (whose clutter seemed defiant, a declaration that here her orderly mind was allowed a holiday. She usually had to clear a mandible or two off the table before setting it.) But my father and I were still left alone a lot, occupying the same house but somehow not the same space. My presence seemed to dislocate patterns he’d grown used to. He always looked a bit startled if I walked into a room; he’d stand it a few minutes, then get up, hover, hesitate, and wander out. A housekeeper still left dinner for us, but he’d gotten into the habit of eating in his study and seemed uneasy sitting at the dining table with me, though no more uneasy, honestly, than I. We struggled and mostly failed to find things to talk about. On the housekeeper’s days off, I’d sometimes make dinner myself, but it was college cuisine, and he’d pick at it with a hurt befuddled look as if wondering where, under this alien fare, his usual food was buried.

I ate out a lot.

Indeed I spent as much time out of the house as I could, mostly by myself, since, having spent so much of the last years away from Boston, I had few local friends. It was a relief, then, when a couple of days after Christmas I ran into Lint at Quincy Market. Relief and surprise, since when last we'd spoken he was busing tables at a restaurant in the North End and now he was selling coffee beans. He had a new hair style, too, this one shaved close to the sides and back while strands of pale blond hair tumbled over his forehead. Other than that he was the same. Still the pouty blue-eyed prettiness and still that adolescent squeak when he cried Hey babe! He flopped over the counter and gave me an embarrassing kiss in the middle of the lunchtime shuffle.

Whatcha doin’? he said.

I caught him up as best I could with the crowd surging around and people asking him questions. (It’s just coffee, honey, he told one woman. I don’t pick it. I just sell it.)

Maybe we should get together later. You seem kind of busy.

What’re you doing New Year’s?

Nothing.

He scribbled an address on a cash register slip. Party. Wicked cool people. Be there.

I don’t know, Lint. I was thinking maybe—

Don’t be a wuss, Mark. Live a little.

I peered at the address. All right. Maybe. Maybe I’ll see you there.

* * *

I got home late that night. I’d managed to snag a school friend for dinner and a movie, and it was close to midnight when I arrived home, feeling hungry. I was standing in the light of the open refrigerator when I heard the scuff of a slipper behind me. My father had come into the kitchen.

I was clutching a Tupperware container of pasta, and I felt a guilty impulse to hide it, though there was no reason to.

Midnight snack? he said.

Do you want something?

He shook his head.

Now I was self-conscious and, not wanting to linger in the kitchen, I started eating out of the container.

You should heat it.

I’m fine.

You should sit.

I sat. He remained standing and I wondered why he’d come. He looked, as always, vaguely embarrassed by my presence. Finally he said, I opened a bottle of Saint Emilion tonight. Would you like some?

Sure. His eyebrows lifted slightly. Yes, please, I emended.

He set the bottle and two glasses on the table and sat down. As he poured the wine, he asked, What did you do today?

Just wandered around. Downtown. Bought some books. This seemed pretty threadbare so I added, I ran into Lint. Remember Lint? My old roommate?

It seemed unlikely that he would, but he nodded. Oh, yes. Lint. He was.... He searched for a word. Droll.

Like many of my father’s pronouncements this was a little sibylline, a trap laid for the unwary interpreter. I wondered what, in my father’s vocabulary, were the subtextual connotations of droll.

And how is Lint? he asked.

He’s fine. The same. He’s working at a coffee store in Quincy Market.

Ah, then he’s found an occupation. And if this was meant to be a joke, he didn’t mark it with a smile.

We fell silent. Neither of us had turned on a light, and the light from the stove cast everything in a chilly chiaroscuro, turning the wine black, fading the plaid of my father’s bathrobe into shades of navy and grey, leaching the blue from his eyes. His gaze was focused on his wineglass and I watched his face, papery pale and tired. I wanted to say something, but panic tightened my throat. I should ask him about his day, but what did he do with his day, shut up in his study or his room? I remembered he’d gone out for a walk that morning, as he usually did, and that there was an antiquary shop he liked near Harvard Square. I thought I could ask him about that, though I wasn’t sure what to ask. Last summer we’d gone there together and he’d bought some kind of bird print by a nineteenth-century naturalist whose name I could almost remember. I had just about determined to ask if he’d been able to find any more of the series when his chair scraped back and he stood. He hovered a moment, swirling his wineglass.

Well, goodnight, he said and shuffled out, leaving me feeling that I’d failed a test.

I listened as his footsteps went up the stairs, then creaked down the hall to his room. When I was sure he was safely shut away, I took my own wineglass and went up to my room, a floor above his. I sat on the edge of my bed and remembered the Easter vacation when Lint had come to visit and we’d stayed in my room together.

* * *

On the last bitter cold night of 1984, clutching a six-pack of Heineken, I stand outside an apartment in Concord Square. The door is ajar, and my knock arcs it open another inch. Since no one seems to have heard me over the din of music and conversation, I step inside. Immediately I can see I’ve made a terrible mistake. Here I am in my cable-knit sweater and tweed jacket, and all before me, in the smoky blue-lit dimness, are people in pegleg black jeans, retro bowling shirts, inky dyed hair, and Duran Duran eyeliner. They sway and bob to Romeo Void or sprawl across the place’s ratty sofas locked in languid chat, while dozens of cigarettes swirl smoke up from numb fingers. Just as I’ve beaten down an impulse to turn on my heel and go, just as I’ve steeled myself to stay long enough at least to find Lint and say Happy New Year, someone calls my name.

Mark! Mark Dearborn!

Someone in a white sweater and blue-and-white Oxford waves his drink at me. I feel a moment’s relief at seeing somebody who looks as out of place as I do and then a moment’s dismay at recognizing Chet, a guy I know from college.

He nabs me.

"What are you doing here?" he says.

I was—uh—I was invited.

Really? Do you know Bobby and Stu?

Who?

Bobby and Stu. This is their place. You don’t know them?

No. No. A friend of mine invited me.

Who?

Lint. Lint Crowley.

"You know Lint?" This seems to impress him.

He was my roommate. At boarding school. Do you know him?

Not as well, he says archly, as I’d like.

I ignore this and scan the room for Lint.

So, Chet says, does Clara know you’re here?

Clara?

Your girlfriend.

I know who she is. I just didn’t get the connection. She’s in Pittsfield.

Uh-huh. He raises a significant eyebrow.

What?

Nothing. Just, ‘Uh-huh.’

I raise my six-pack interrogatively.

Kitchen, he says, and I make off.

In the glare of the kitchen, I shove the six-pack into the fridge, figuring it’s a fair trade for the scotch I slop into a plastic cup. I drop some ice in, take a gulp and a deep breath, and step back into the party.

Lint grabs my wrist.

Come on, he says. Let’s get out of here. Wait a minute.

He pops into the kitchen, pinches a bottle of vodka, then leads me down a spiral staircase into one of the bedrooms. He flops down among the coats on the bed, and I sit next to him.

God! he says, lighting a cigarette.

What’s the matter?

These people! They’re psychotic!

What do you mean?

"Bobby has been totally vicious to me all night long. Like I can help it if Stu has this insane fixation on me. Like I even want him to. Like having him stare at me from across the room with this demented gleam in his eye is my idea of fun."

I’m sorry.

Don’t worry about it, with which he seems to forget all about it himself. So whatcha been doin’, babe?

Nothing much. What about you? The last time I saw you you were working in an Italian restaurant.

"What? Oh, that place. Oh my God! Did you ever see it? Like some nightmare out of Lady and the Tramp. They couldn’t fire me soon enough."

They fired you?

"Well, yeah. I mean, it was totally fucked up. I met this wicked cool guy, and he invited me up to Maine for the weekend. Spur of the moment. But I forgot to tell them at work, and they didn’t like that, so they fired me. Supposedly I was scheduled to work that Saturday."

He splashes some vodka into our cups. It tastes a little odd with the scotch, but I drink it anyway.

It worked out all right because I knew this guy who worked at Lord and Taylor’s and he was going out to California to be an actor. So I went in and batted my eyes and said how my mother always shops there and they gave me a job. It was all right, except you had to wait on all these hairy old bitches who expected you to kiss their ass just for buying a pair of size forty-two underwear. Oh, and you got a discount on clothes, but I mean would you really wear any of that stuff? I think I bought one scarf for my mother the whole time I was there. Anyway, one night my friend Karen and I got really drunk on Captain Morgan’s and apple juice—nothing I would recommend to my worst enemy, by the way—and she decided to dye my hair. Just the front. This wicked cool blue. But they didn’t take to it at old Lord and Master’s, and they wanted me to cut it off. Oh, and I have this snake earring they didn’t like either. So I figured screw this, and I quit. I was living with this guy at the time—well, I was sleeping on his sofa because I got kicked out of my apartment—long story—and he said they were always looking for people at Quincy Market around Christmas. So now I’m your Holiday Coffee Hostess! I’m over it, though. There’s this chi-chi little restaurant in Back Bay where I think I can get a job. The owner has the hots for me. Oh, I love this song!

He gets up from the bed and starts dancing. "I know what boys like, he sings along. So what about you? What are you up to?"

Just school.

But you’re almost done, right?

Uh-huh.

Well, what next?

"I’d like to go to Europe."

Really? He stops dancing. How are you going to work that?

I’ll get some money at graduation. And I have a job at school. And I think my father will give me something.

Lint ponders this. "I wonder if Daddy would give me money to go to Europe."

Ask him.

No, you can’t just ask him. You have to have an angle. Like I want to go to Denmark for testosterone injections.

I laugh. Lint’s father is ex-Army and before that ex-high school football. With touching naïveté, he’d thought sending Lint to an all-boys boarding school would toughen him up. I suppose it did in a way. He learned to run fast and slug back when cornered.

Lint is doing some calculations. I could get $500 from Grammy. She’d do it. She loves me. Mom would slip me something. If I get this new job, I could make a ton of money. How much would I need?

Depends how long you want to stay. Three thousand, if you’re careful, could go a long way, six months or more. If the exchange rates stay this good.

Are they really good now?

The pound’s about $1.20.

That’s good?

For us it is.

I bet I could get three thousand dollars together. If Daddy would come through.

Are you serious?

I don’t know. You want company, don’t you?

I guess.

Very gracious, I’m sure.

I just don’t believe you’re serious.

"I’m not yet. I need to work it out. Oh my God! We have to dance to this song! Come on!"

He drags me upstairs and we dance for a bit, then I lose him in the crowd. I wander about the party, flip through a copy of The Face, have an aimless conversation with a short raven-haired girl who kisses me violently at midnight, then remember that I meant to call Clara. But it’s late. I worry that I’ll wake her family, then I worry that she’s staying up waiting for me to call. Or maybe she’s out with friends. I decide to call her tomorrow.

I try to find Lint to say good-night, but he’s disappeared, and instead, as I squeeze my way towards the door, Chet grabs my arm.

Going? he shouts too loudly over the music.

Yeah, I gotta go... I mean, I...

Sure you don’t wanna stay a little longer? He’s still holding my arm.

No. Sorry. I mean, I—um—gotta go.

He stares a question at me, a blurry, drunken demand, as if my unwillingness to stay is a breach of some previous agreement. He drops my arm and shrugs.

Happy New Year, he says.

* * *

I didn’t hear from Lint until March. On a rainy raw night my roommate Howie got up, farted, and answered the phone. Howie had a thing about farting, or maybe