near the airport. I’d believed it might contain valuable clues to his whereabouts, but instead I was struck by its extreme brevity (four or five lines) and its speedy, careless, go-to-hell sprawl, like something he’d dashed off before running out to the grocery store.
In many respects it was a relief to have my father out of the picture. Certainly I didn’t miss him much, and my mother didn’t seem to miss him either, though it was sad when she had to let our housekeeper, Cinzia, go because we couldn’t afford to pay her (Cinzia had cried, and offered to stay and work for free; but my mother had found her a part time job in the building, working for a couple with a baby; once a week or so, she stopped in to visit my mother for a cup of coffee, still in the smock she wore over her clothes when she cleaned.) Without fanfare, the photo of a younger, suntanned dad atop a ski slope came down from the wall, and was replaced by one of my mother and me at the rink in Central Park. At night my mother sat up late with a calculator, going over bills. Even though the apartment was rent stabilized, getting by without my dad’s salary was a month-by-month adventure, since whatever new life he’d fashioned for himself elsewhere did not include sending money for child support. Basically we were content enough doing our own laundry down in the basement, going to matinees instead of full-price movies, eating day-old baked goods and cheap Chinese carry-out (noodles, egg foo yung) and counting out nickels and dimes for bus fare. But as I trudged home from the museum that day—cold, wet, with a tooth-crunching headache—it struck me that with my dad gone, no one in the world would be particularly worried about my mother or me; no one was sitting around wondering where we’d been all morning or why they hadn’t heard from us. Wherever he was, off in his New Life (tropics or prairie, tiny ski town or Major American City) he would certainly be riveted to the television; and it was easy to imagine that maybe he was even getting a little frantic and wound-up, as he sometimes did over big news stories that had absolutely nothing to do with him, hurricanes and bridge collapses in distant states. But would he be worried enough to call and check on us? Probably not—no more than he would be likely to call his old office to see what was happening, though certainly he would be thinking of his ex-colleagues in midtown and wondering how all the bean counters and pencil-pushers (as he referred to his co-workers) were faring at 101 Park. Were the secretaries getting scared, gathering their pictures off their desks and putting on their walking shoes and going home? Or was it turning into a subdued party of sorts on the fourteenth floor, people ordering in sandwiches and gathering around the television in the conference room?
Though the walk home took forever, I don’t remember much about it except a certain gray, cold, rain-shrouded mood on Madison Avenue—umbrellas bobbing, the crowds on the sidewalk flowing silently downtown, a sense of huddled anonymity like old black and white photos I’d seen of bank crashes and bread lines in the 1930s. My headache, and the rain, constricted the world to such a tight sick circle that I saw little more than the hunched backs of people ahead of me on the sidewalk. In fact, my head hurt so badly that I could hardly see where I was going at all; and a couple of times I was nearly hit by cars when I plowed into the crosswalk without paying attention to the light. Nobody appeared to know exactly what had happened, though I overheard “North Korea” blaring from the radio of a parked cab, and “Iran” and “al-Qaeda” muttered by a number of passersby. And a scrawny black man with dreadlocks—drenched to the bone—was pacing back and forth out in front of the Whitney museum, jabbing at the air with his fists and shouting to nobody in particular: “Buckle up, Manhattan! Osama bin Laden is rockin us again!”
Though I felt faint, and wanted to sit down, somehow I kept hobbling along with a hitch in my step like a partially broken toy. Cops gestured; cops whistled and beckoned. Water dripped off the end of my nose. Over and over, blinking the rain from my eyes, the