The Collector
As a salesman, Walter Head, who did not believe in luck, considered it something of an entitlement that he never had to travel much and therefore could count on getting home by the end of the day, but when he did have to travel he always made sure to bring something back, some little memento of his journey. He was a man who could weep beside a fire on a cold winter’s night and tell a deadpan joke that would steal your breath, yet these qualities he kept in a place somewhere deep inside, for those who knew him knew another man, an insulated man, of scarce interests, who read no books, rarely summoned the world beyond his little fenced-in yard, regarded ‘culture’ as the great sin of impending socialism, and enforced rigid expectations of his wife and children, whom he saw as figments of himself. His only source of fulfillment was work, albeit this absurd human contrivance of income and independence, which everyone must suffer, of course, in order to subsist, pay taxes, and put a roof over one’s head, and which he, having as he did, a nonworking wife and two kids, must suffer fourfold. And yet the fact that he had one of each kind of kid at least made the memento-hunting gratifying, and all the more so for its heterogeneousness, such that no excursion was ever a trial beginning with the first, to New York City, a destination that surfeited him like a king and presaged all the rewards he imagined were yet to come for his having protracted the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty coin banks and the authentic Subway tokens. In fact, he was so moved by these souvenirs that henceforth whenever he traveled he packed an extra bag: a carryon in which he could segregate his treasures from the abuse and incarceration given the cargo bags; and by his second leave, already an informed veteran, remembered also to bring along the record log he’d started for the collectibles.
The father was fortunate, indeed, doubly so, for as the boy had a good half-dozen years on the girl, Walter Head thought of him as a “surrogate father”; and also, the kids were inseparable. To Danon Head, his baby sister made an even swap for the beloved Raggedy Andy he had lost just before her arrival, and the girl even had red-coifed hair. Each parent had cooperated in naming her, yet the boy, also a mistake, Walter Head had named himself, after the yogurt company (but without the second n in case of trademark infringement), and with only mild resistance from Sherry Head had succeeded in rationalizing the name for its being derived from her father’s, Dane (while also being sufficiently different); though the truth was that ‘Danon’ stemmed from Walter Head’s perception of children as bacteria. Exactly six years older than Hillary to the week (both having been conceived upon the father’s return from business trips), the boy doted on his sister like a moth to flame; and, in turn, as soon as she was able, she trailed her brother like a second shadow. Throughout her infancy, Danon dressed and brushed her and took her to bed whenever he could, and, at least a few times, of early habit, would have tossed her in with the other colors had it not been for the mother’s rescue; and by toddlerhood li’l sis’ was mimicking big bro’s tics and calling him Dano and Dano was calling her Lärs and availing her of things he should not have. Especially when Walter Head was out of town Danon would become suddenly deliberate, shifting persona from child to adult, and until the father’s return would not tend to his sister with the usual charm and flippancy but with a concentrated directness enforced by the father’s absence and the pull of inquisition. Then the house would become a museum, majestic and luring and purposeful, a great gallery of the unordinary: its tables, shelves, counters, closets, vestibules, crawlspaces all archives suddenly availed for public gleaning, and Danon would play exhibition guide. Early on he had introduced Hillary to the basement boxes full of airplanes and imparted the story of how they had once stretched across the ceilings like Sunday kites, as well upon every table as accouterments to the ashtrays and lamps, until one day the dark red one with the three tissue-paper wings had soared between his fingers and slipped, and the father had removed every last one. And yet this had only posed a minor setback, there was still so much else to see! — the seashells and dried lichens, the pre-twentieth century pistols and canons, the designer candles and urban-park seeds like odd game pieces in their Plexiglas cages, the matchbooks, tokens and cocktail picks in their fancy goblets, all on shelf after shelf; the framed client contracts, domestic stamps, starving artists’ art, Major League Baseball caps and insects that made mosaics of the walls; the magazines and catalogs stacked in every corner; the perennials and bonsai trees; and the cacti, which, along with the insects, were the only things they would not touch. And then they had hardly made a dent in the basement where Walter Head had hewed his storage chambers — nor, for that matter, had Danon introduced Hillary to the guestroom closet upstairs with the Indian pipes from fifty-seven tribes (if he had counted correctly) all hung like ties, nor to the master bedroom drawers full of envelopes of baseball-ticket stubs and airplane seat-assignment vouchers and Republican Party pins arranged in topless strongboxes like index cards, nor to the vanity with its winding parade of elephants of leather and marble and fabric and soap, nor...
Throughout these excursions of espionage and clairvoyance, the mother would be kibitzing with her best friend Judy next door or away on errands. Sherry Head was a frumpy little thing and shaped like an eye: some evidence of shoulders propping her abnormally long face like a cork. (At nighttime, when she required the children to pray to the Lord, they would be wishing for the father’s genes: that is, the physical ones, and excluding the one responsible for the Head stomach, this indubitable water bag: his man pregnancy.) Sherry Head’s fulfillment, if it might be described as such, was walking and cooking; and before Danon came along she had also rescued stray cats from euthanasia and licked stamps for the Friends of the Library. But all this was just “stuff” after all, for her real work was motherhood.
At the start of each day she would pack the kids’ school lunches and make the husband’s breakfast, consisting of bacon and hash browns, eggs-over-easy with capers, black coffee and a double Bloody Mary, and when the house was hers again would handle the domestic chores — vacuuming — then gab with Judy and run some errands if she had to till noon when she would return for her Soap with the insatiable longing to be beautiful, and fall asleep, to awaken in three hours to the wail of bus brakes to fetch the kids whom she would quarantine to their rooms so that she could prepare for the husband’s return. She had produced children because it was what society expected: not to have reproduced would have been awfully irresponsible (why, she was not sure); for despite having graduated from college (with a degree in anthropology) she was of that last lingering generation of twentieth-century women predestined to do the full-time work of homemaker. And yet this job, like her husband’s, was not without its benefits, she realized: the chief being that with Walter Head nearly always home at dinnertime her own disciplinary role was, thankfully, secondary, such that when the children’s behavior breached normalcy all she had to do was the yelling part (and, of course, also make sure to update Walter Head’s list of their transgressions); he’d handle the rest: his actions varying from lectures and grounding to drives to the country, where he would make them get out at the side of the road and then start driving away — only to return and collect them when he heard their sobbing.
Like her husband, Sherry Head knew she was lucky to have two children, one each to keep the other occupied; and only two. Yet because of their disparate genders, Walter Head suffered the constant frustration of having to treat them, at times, uniquely. He would look out the picture window and see them rolling in the dirt or climbing the great pin oak and really see himself all over again changing their diapers and having to navigate the one’s fountain and the other’s stream. He could not tolerate crying, whining and begging. He liked neither pink nor blue. He loathed baby clothes, baptism clothes and hand-me-downs. He abhorred the animal noises that interrupted his slumber on Saturday mornings and the church that interrupted it on Sundays. He could not look into the family room without chagrining that it was not a den. Toys repulsed him (it was he who had ‘lost’ Raggedy Andy), and toys with pieces would always soon become monolithic. And never would he be persecuted by gender activities: having to play video games with the boy, having to take the girl to the mall, having to do the “sports crap” or “Scouts thing”; and as they developed, the sight of little panties and peach fuzz frazzled him. By then, a seeming lifetime of cohabitation with Walter Head would have such an effect on Sherry Head that she’d be numb to him and used to taking his side in every argument against the children. Indeed, by then she would be him: a reflection — such that she herself would routinely prick the family fabric in ways that he once had exclusively, and for which she had despised him. By then she would ignore the children and grunt at them, as he: disparage them, doubt them, enforce the ‘two-day grudge’ at punishment and the ‘two-day absence’ on weekends..., and Sherry Head would also launch a secret society, Band of Mothers, in which she and the other PTA moms would share incriminating information about their kids’ rebellions and love activities (such that when the subject of proms came up she quashed it with the announcement that no kid of hers was going to spend a couple hundred bucks on someone he’d never see again). Oh thank God there are only two of them! thought Walter Head and Sherry Head. The idea of any more kids made them wheeze....
But one day, it was a Tuesday, in an aside to Walter Head, Sherry Head said, “Do you think it might benefit the children if we were a bit more involved?”
“What the hell’s that mean?” he said.
“In their lives,” she said, “you know, if we spent a bit more time with them.”
“They do that fine themselves,” he said.
“True,” she acknowledged.
“What is today?”
“Tuesday.”
“Good. Meatloaf.”
“Anyway, I’ve got this idea,” she said.
The next weekend, Sherry Head was feting the girl at the mall with lunch at the Italian restaurant and a pedicure at the salon while Walter Head was taking the boy to see an airplane cockpit. Sherry Head had devised a strategy: At least once a month, more often if it moved them, they would take the children out. It would be an ideal chance to learn some things about them. To enhance this discovery process they would separate the children, each parent taking one. Naturally on successive weekends they would swap, and so the pattern would continue. The kids loved the idea. Walter Head bought into it for how it steered him to his most beloved of airplanes: the corporate propjet. After the first outing, they never did another.
***
The more the children grew, the more Walter Head collected. Sherry Head herself was not a collector: Her mother had died before she was ten and she hardly knew her father, so she had not developed the mentality of keeping. In fact, none of the formalities of preservation had shaped her: the retention of ideas through observation, the retention of memories through attentiveness, the retention of people by practice of empathy and devotion. That she understood this about herself distinguished her from her husband, who did not. People, especially, ever since her beloved mother’s death, she viewed as ephemeral and expendable. Sherry Head knew that if her husband died she would simply remarry, and that when her children finally became adults the burden of relationship would shift to them — mothering having ended. Likewise, because friends are also transitory, Sherry Head had no close friendships. Even Judy Goodbody was not a close friend, she was a close neighbor; and when the time would come that she’d inevitably move away, her existence for Sherry Head would cease, even though relocation would have occurred no farther than the next subdivision.... Yet to Walter Head, keeping represented an engine: what made life move and tolerable. He had become a collector at the age of three when his mother had turned his baby album over to him (with its tin spoon, first photo, and hair lock), and as a young man had become suddenly earnest after she’d edited out his Boys Only Club memorabilia and pitched his baseball card collection and sweetheart letters. As soon as he had children of his own it followed that he would include them, too, in what by then had grown to a colossal library of the self. There, beyond hundreds of pages of his own history: photos, ribbons, clippings, certificates, citations, invitations, correspondence, souvenirs..., he began to compile theirs, such that as the years passed the original six volumes had spawned a seventh, then an eighth, ninth, and tenth, and before Danon and Hillary set out to make their own lives he would already have set aside a separate bookcase for the inevitable grandkids.
Meanwhile, Walter Head’s latest business trip, a semi-annual seminar of the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, in Orlando, Florida, proved a miracle of timing, for it coincided with Hillary’s sixth birthday. Twirling her Minnie Mouse keychain around two fingers like a propeller, the little girl skipped to her room with a smile as wide as the rodent’s and her fire-red pigtails shuffling like speed-skaters. But Danon responded to his Mickey keychain as if it were a handshake rescinded. Twelve then, he had passed the preceding year as if it had comprised the whole of his brief life: a bridge having quaked in the hurricane of dwindling youth, all his previous treasures having seemed to topple away like the storm-ravaged rafters. If he had felt so compelled he could, beyond this recognition, have further substantiated his awakening with but a glance into the blue strongbox in which he had kept his mementos from the beginning, for immediately he would have noticed its peculiar sparseness. Yet as surely as he had not even opened the box in a year, neither had he in that moment; and what should have been its twenty-first addition he left on the foyer table, just as he had the previous five or six. And once again, what would become of the thing mattered not.
The next trip convened in the Poconos in upstate Pennsylvania, a regional conference; and because it lasted through the weekend Walter Head made a daytrip to Gettysburg to fetch a couple of scale-model Union canons. February that year was a particularly trying month for Sherry Head, for Walter Head had three trips in succession: the second back to the Big Apple, where, between meetings on “How to Get Along with Superiors,” he mailed to the children the first of what would be a regular succession of postcards (which he bade them keep) and nabbed more tokens and two more coin banks (Yankee Stadium and the Brooklyn Bridge); the third trip being to Hilton Head, for the Annual Meeting, where he bagged two Nautiluses at the hotel shop. After that a half-year passed that he did not travel again, and he got antsy. One day his boss, the district sales manager, angled him: “Everything okay at home, Wally boy? You seem earnest.” “Oh, no, no, no not at all,” answered Walter Head, “the reason I asked is because I enjoy getting out — you know, how it’s ‘good for business.’” A curtain rose up his face, revealing the angst. “Oh come on, lad, confess!” said the boss. “Problems in the B-E-D-R-O-O-M, isn’t it, Wally boy?” He stood up. “But you will be okay.” He put an arm around the unfortunate lad. “I learned how to live without, you can, too!” “Huh—?” “Say, what’s up with that daughter of yours? Dating any bad boys these days?” inquired the boss. “She’s seven,” said Walter Head. “Well, ain’t it something how much sooner they start these days!” said the boss.
“Listen,” said Walter Head, “the reason I asked about the next trip is because, well, I’m looking for a certain Indian artifact.”
“Indian artifact. —What’s that got to do with your travel itinerary?” said the boss.
“Oh nothing, really,” said Walter Head. “It’s for the kids. I bring stuff home for the kids.”
“Well aren’t you the good father, then!” said the boss. “My old lady should be talking to you. Then you could show me how to stop being a bum. —So what’s it you’re looking for, Wally boy, a couple of tomahawks?”
“Ceremony pipes,” said Walter Head.
“Ceremony pipes, you say—. But don’t you think kids want tomahawks?”
“Ceremony pipes,” repeated Walter Head.
“Oh, I don’t know, Wally boy. I still say kids want tomahawks.”
“You don’t know my kids,” said Walter Head.
“Not so fast, Wally boy. Met them that Saturday morning I caught your boy messing around in one of the supply closets.”
“He apologized for that,” said Walter Head.
“That he did, and not a problem,” said the boss.
“So, is there another trip on the horizon, then?” asked Walter Head.
“Maybe,” said the boss.
By then, he had immersed himself in a habit of presenting Walter Head itineraries only to change them at the last minute — such that, concerning the upcoming Agents’ Retreat, would “reschedule it from the Indian resort on Big Sioux River to a hotel in Rapid City” (there would be, of course, no need to reinform the other attendees). And all Walter Head would bring home then were stress headaches and excruciating visions of white maître d’s in red suits.
He returned Friday but was so forlorn that it seemed like Sunday, and passed up dinner (he abhorred fish anyway) to sulk in the family room. The wife, stooped in dusting his mermaid ashtrays, printed a kiss on his hip with as much affection as he tolerated (as if her lips had rather met his judging eye).
“You should put out your airplanes again, Walter,” she said, suddenly straightening.
“Eh?” he said.
“You should put out your airplanes again,” she said.
“Blueyfoo.”
“But they’re so beautiful, Walter,” she said.
“Blueyfoo!”
“Walter, you’re not being very nice—.”
“Leave,” he said.
She had just again stooped before him, where in his favorite chair his attention had been proffered to a twenty-four-inch model Sopwith Camel at the sun’s violet demise, when a hip-check put her on her rump and she rolled away. At the same time Danon and Hillary entered and turned on the TV, knowing that it was already tuned to the Big Game, so that in one motion they plopped and crossed their legs, beaming. Walter Head was eyeing them through the fuselage. “Off,” he said, as nonchalantly as anyone who has ever said anything so often that it has become a mantra. “But, but—” Up went the Warning Hand and the children squirmed like June bugs that had fallen upon their shells and could not right themselves, and the lord’s cold hand flicked them. And they found themselves at the end of the long hallway to hear, for the countless time, the echo of their loss: cheers rising with the volume, the giddy announcement that the home team had just taken the field. The father’s epithets of satisfaction...
“Lärs, come here,” Danon called to his sister, who had run to the great pin oak to pout.
“I dun wanna!” she cried.
“Listen, Lärs,” he said, “you can’t do anything about him. Nobody can do anything about him. He is how he is.”
“He’s a big stupidhead!”
“Get over here,” demanded the brother, “that is, unless you want to miss it.”
She turned then and slithered out of the receding shade, quick-stepping to join her brother in his kneeling at the hydrangea bushes. “What you doing?” she whispered. “Look,” he said, prone then and parting one of the bushes no wider than a finger. “See?” Having plopped on her own tummy, she peeked. “What?” “There, at the middle,” he said. “You butter not be teasing me!” “—Lärs, I’m serious, look!”
“Oh, I see, I see! What is it?” she said.
Danon smiled and gently tugged his sister closer. “It’s a jack-in-the-pulpit,” he said.
She giggled. “Oh that’s silly!”
“They call it that because of the striped stem there in the middle. See? The one that looks like a little man.”
Her nose scratched along the jumble of twigs as she maneuvered for a better look. “What’s a pulpit, Dano?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Look for the little man,” he said.
“Oh he’s strange!” she giggled.
“Yeah, just standing there. Stuck.”
“He’s pretty, though,” said Hillary. “—Why’s he in the dark?”
“Jack-in-the-pulpits need the dark,” said her brother. “Too much light, they die.”
Hillary nodded earnestly. “How’d that little man get in there?” she mused, realizing her nonsense, yet so taken aback by the stamen which in its tiny human form defied natural. “—Hey, what you doing stealing Papa’s plants!” she suddenly slapped Danon.
“I didn’t steal no plant!” he slapped her back.
“Whur’d you get this, then?”
“The woods! Where’d you think?”
“When were you in the woods?”
“When we were fetching acorns, Brainless! Monday last, after school!”
“I didn’t see you fetching this jack-in-the-puppet!”
“You were too busy collecting your nuts, that’s why! I planted it soon as we got back and you’d gone off to play with Sami Doll!”
“Oh goody!” she beamed, instantly appeased.
“Now listen, Lärs,” said Danon after a moment. “You’ve got to promise me you’ll never say a word about this.”
“I promise,” she said.
“Swear,” he said, offering his pinky finger. “That this is between you and me only.”
“I swear,” she said, in turn offering her own pinky, which she curled around his. “But why?”
“Just because,” he said. “Just because nobody else needs to know.”
***
In November, Walter Head went to Providence for a continuing-education class. As this would be a one-day affair he flew with only the carryon, containing the study guide, a pencil and pad of paper, a flask of gin, a change of underwear, and the record log. Whenever he flew, Walter Head invariably slept, missing the complimentary nuts and cup of ice; but this trip he had the good fortune to sit with a military history buff that happened to have an extra catalog of Revolutionary War era flintlock pistols, whose order form Walter Head was still filling out as he disembarked. He had never been to such a hilly city and in the taxi felt as if he were on a mechanical bull, and as he paid the tab he marveled at his step, as if he had landed on rough ice, for the ocean sand, he learned, made a gritty film on every Rhode Island road. The class was scheduled from two o’clock to four o’clock. As soon as it ended he would be back in a taxi, so he wasted no time. At the hotel nearest the training facility he had his martini on the rocks (for the cocktail umbrella), then mailed the two postcards he bought from a concierge: one featuring a Yankee clipper off the Newport coast, the other four of New England’s innumerable lighthouses, depicted in quadrants. Which gave him an idea. He found the gift shop. “You got lighthouses?” The cashier pointed to a corner shelf where some thirty of various origins and styles stood like little sentries. He was so dizzy he bought an even dozen, and throughout class alternated between doodling and admiring the start of his newest collection. Afterward, as he leapt into the taxi, his overcoat beating him like a wind-flung cardinal’s cope, his first words to the driver were, “Where can I get a light?” The Portuguese shrugged, explaining he sorry he no smoke. “No, no, no, a plant light!” said Walter Head. “You no understand, I no—!” Walter Head thrust his head out the window. “You might try Wal-Mart,” said the passer-by. “Where?” said Walter Head, “where?” “Cranston, second exit.” Normally from where they were going, getting to Cranston meant a south-by-west diversion, but the taxi headed south and east first, through Warwick. Yet this deceit, revealing its ugly face in the excessive fare, did not even faze Walter Head, for he had found the light!...and all the way home he popped one ice cube and nut after another till his jaw buzzed from his giddiness. —At the homecoming presentation, at which each of the children received one lighthouse, leaving the father ten, they gaped at the collection for its particular beauty and salience, many of the towers featuring not just the prototypical cabin and searchlight, but also multiple stories and wings, like castles. “Are you starting a new collection, Papa?” asked Hillary dutifully. “Maybe,” said Walter Head. “And what are the rules with this one?” interrupted Danon. Walter Head appeared to ignore him. “Why don’t you just take our lighthouses now?” he said. “Huh?” said Hillary. Danon pushed her. “You’re being mean, Dano!” she said, falling on fanned legs like a new fawn. “Yeah, why don’t you take ‘em right now,” Danon jiggled his little love token, “right now, so you can put ‘em in the pantry with the moss and the ferns and that plant light — and the jack-in-the-pulpit!” “Stop it!” Hillary kicked him from the floor, her feet working like jackhammers, her own lighthouse still pressed to her belly. But the boy had already cast his, a stark white obelisk with a blood-red point, and stomped away. And Walter Head thoroughly rebuked him, of course, and proceeded to take the both of them for a drive to the country....
Christmas that year the Heads got their kids each a pair of ice skates, a battery-operated hand-warmer with accompanying gloves (which Danon had to admit was “nifty”), a hockey stick and mock-autograph puck, a toboggan (from Goodwill), and a coat to replace the holey one from last winter; and Walter Head stuffed their stockings to bloating with seashells and Subway tokens and matchbooks and mints and New Year pennies like cherries on top. The kids were then at the end of their seventh and thirteenth years, which to Walter Head represented a trial as brutal as Sisyphus’s and to Sherry Head the throes of motherhood only one-third finished. As she surveyed her little house that morning in which ribbon and tinsel and windowpane stickers made the scene a great big fruitcake and the sounds of fake logs crackled in the hearth and her husband’s frankincense-scented candles were supposed to wrap her in the nimbus of the newborn king, all she sensed were the chaos and discord of a ravaged landscape. Danon and Hillary had already skipped away to the part of the world as pure as the driven snow, to which they had gone to discover if their hand-warmers could make snow cones; but Sherry Head could tell that they weren’t content, for they had received their stockings as if they were loaded with coal, and had hardly made a squeak throughout the present-opening. Yet who could be jolly over gifts, every one of them tailored to the dreary season, and stockings pouring over with another’s interests? Once again she had begged, well, encouraged, Walter Head to imagine Christmas as a time of giving more than fiscal hardship, and had even gone so far as to suggest that Santa might consider skipping lunches out for a while so that he could deliver the talkie doll What’s-Its-Name that his daughter had had her eye on since March and the shoot-‘em-up video game What’s-It-Called that all of his son’s friends already had. A dizzying dread consumed her and she collapsed in a shiver beside the dried-out tree. Why are the Holidays always a harbinger of sadness and diminution? she thought. Why is this house always such a mess — why is life? “I can’t take it anymore!” she screamed.
Walter Head, in the kitchen, put down his gin and the newspaper, and in his squeaky voice called out to Sherry Head, what was her problem.
“I can’t take it!” she was rocking then to the rhythm of desperation, “I can’t take it, I can’t take it, I can’t ta—!”
“Can’t take what, can’t take what, can’t take what?” Walter Head poo-hoo-hooed back in his jeering voice, kneading fake tears.
“Ooooo!” Sherry Head wrinkled into a pepperoncini, wishing for the thousandth time that she could tell him what a brute he was! — wishing for the thousandth time that it was possible to turn his iron heart into a rose.
“I asked what can’t you take anymore?” Walter Head patronized again from his stool. He was re-creasing his newspaper at the kitchen island as she wobbled on the living-room floor as if convulsing, nearly disappearing in her big baggy bathrobe, a tiny visage of herself. “I can’t take it, I can’t take it,...!”
“Speak up, woman.”
“I can’t take this, Walter!” she howled. “This — this stuff!”
He had just then appeared, as on quivering knees her dizzy body twirled a ragged circle around the stepping-stone shelves, the speckled stands, the mosaic walls — all swarming with his awful essence.
“Walter,” she reached, as if for mercy, “look!” she said, begging all the hangings and showpieces for solidarity. “Can’t you see, Walter, can’t you see? Walter, this isn’t a house, it’s a warehouse! I’ve never asked for much, Walter, but if I’d wanted a warehouse I’d have married a trucker! Don’t you see? Don’t you see, Walter? And the kids, they don’t deserve this either! Walter, Judy Goodbody’s husband asked for a divorce over Thanksgiving! He couldn’t take the fifteen cats anymore! ‘Whose house is this?’ he asked.”
“Oh for the love of Christ would you get to the point just once!” barked Walter Head.
“Please, let me finish, Walter! And do you know what she said to him, Walter, do you know what she said? She said, ‘Those cats have as much right to this house as you!’”
“She’s mad,” said Walter Head.
“And that’s not even the point, Walter, that’s not even the point at all! She couldn’t care less, don’t you see? It wasn’t the throw-up, the pee,...it wasn’t the cats, really! Think about it, Walter, Judy and Duke Goodbody had been together seventeen years! No, Walter, it was her! He wanted her! But she couldn’t care less — she doesn’t get it! You get it, don’t you, Walter?”
“Oh hell, this is Peyton Place,” he threw up his arms.
“Tell me you understand, Walter, please tell me you understand! We want a home, Walter! It’s a home we want — a nice home!” She was crying now.
In the end they were as far removed from each other as they could be, in opposite corners, staring like nutcrackers, wooden; mouths ajar in consternation; the only sound in the house, aside from the pulsing in their ears, a record of Johnny Mathis Christmas carols that had just fallen atop The Messiah.
“You do get it, don’t you, Walter, don’t you?” said Sherry Head, hiccupping as she tried to collect herself with the help of an end table.
“I’ve worked hard for this ‘stuff,’” he said. “I’ve every right to this ‘stuff’!”
“Oh, I know, Walter, I know!”
“Listen, you’ve got to do something about these hot flashes, now!” he said.
“Walter, all I’m saying is, this is our home, our home, Walter. Oh, Walter—!”
The Warning Hand went up.
In one stout motion Walter Head reclaimed his stool at the kitchen counter, the weight of his barefoot slide across the clay floor having made a moan like a sick elephant until it had landed him squarely in front of his gin bottle, which with one hand he took up like a canteen as with the other he reopened the newspaper; the wife’s sniffles now like the far-off tweets of cardinals.
Outside, in the snow-kingdom stillness of the Christ’s birthday, Danon and Hillary had easily detected their parents’ fight and had tried, of its novelty, to listen in (yet without success). After melting much snow, they packed it into a snowman until the batteries gave out and the dead hand-warmers stuck to their hands. The girl tried to clap away the cold before finally flinging off the gloves and racing for shelter, and her brother, directly behind, did the same, except that he tossed the useless things into the hydrangea bushes.
Back inside, rippling holes in their new coats shimmered in candlelight and of their shivering they lobbied for hot cocoa; but the distraught mother refused, demanding that they put their presents away at once and go “cool down” in their rooms. As they passed, the father ignored them as usual, all but his hands and legs hidden behind the Funny Pages.
***
Because it is the fortune of women to mature many years earlier than men, the emotional effects of Walter Head’s self-directed behavior first manifested in Hillary, when she was a teen — her brother, all things considered, having passed his childhood in spared ignorance. Henceforward whenever Hillary’s moods baffled Walter Head, he would approach Danon to inquire what was wrong with her, and the young man, still amenable, would fashion a neat rationalization — his first being, “What do you expect? She’s a girl,” to which the father (missing the hormonal implication) responded, “Then why isn’t she also a pain to your mother?”, to which, without blinking, Danon added, “Geez, Pop, because Mom’s a girl, too!” And Walter Head, scratching his chin, furrowed after so many years on the bottle (though he attributed it to so many years on the road), shrugged; and subsequently, whenever the angry youth acted out, the father always managed to accede to satisfaction upon a combination of Danon’s insights and some definitive sign of his right and Hillary’s wrong, which he could pin to her immaturity or inexperience. And yet, it was this flaw — Walter Head’s indomitable aloofness — more than Hillary’s hatching womanhood, that gave life to her rebellion — which she waged largely by mimicry: rarely acknowledging him at coming and going; fixing her gaze at the TV whenever they were together in the family room; mocking him under her breath and just loud enough to be heard; and, of course, dusting her combs and brushes, her headbands and barrettes, her makeup kits, Teddy Bears, coats, purses, belts, shoes, phones, laptop,...all her things, and ever so caringly, with cotton swabs and lint-free cloths. And when she did confront him it was rarely to pout or beg for handouts, but to try to scold him to an awakening against his parental apathies: to rather beg him to “make the choice to change,” as she put it. But to such a gracious charge he would stiffen and growl and, having understood not in the least, say, “I am as I am” — “a hard-ass,” clarified the mother — and would walk away, proudly. And then Danon would pursue: “Pop, she doesn’t know you; she just wants to know you.” “What the hell’s that mean?” “Well, think of your plants and your certificates and your candles, and these shells here. What do they mean to you?” But Walter Head, having also no understanding of analogy, just stared blankly at the boy. And because Danon and Hillary seemed to him, by the most basic measure of differences, as veritable clones (they were both children, after all), neither did he understand why only the one would abuse him. And this is how it continued through college, which Hillary had chosen exclusively for its location far, far away....
Over the next four years Danon dabbled in jobs as a bricklayer and welder, yet on the eve of Hillary’s graduation had settled on contract ‘temp’ work for the time and energy it allowed him to pursue his calling as a writer. Meanwhile, Hillary had accepted a position at Duke Goodbody’s winery outside town, where she headed up his tasting staff and also helped in accounting. Peace between her and Walter Head had returned slowly, and not like a breeze but in gusts: tepid and sporadic, yet helped by the forgetfulness that time transcribes; and Danon was glad at last of their reunion, for family-gatherings (reservoirs of memory and longing) were to him, still, best attended wholly. In these years of their fledgling independence, both settled close to home and returned most Fridays or Saturdays for their mother’s cooking and this semblance of family, and now and then even stayed the night. On the first of these occasions, returning from a four-day trip to Long Island’s North Fork, Walter Head used a display of starfish he had harvested snorkeling in the Sound to make sense of the “Trying Years” with Hillary. The adolescent crustaceans, each no bigger than her hand, the summer sun having baked the life out of them, were already arranged on their designated shelf before Walter Head had changed out of his suit. As the girl proclaimed, “They’re pretty, Papa,” he looked her up and down earnestly, giving thanks, in his agnostic way, that she had taken a job becoming of the family name.
“Fascinating!” interrupted Danon. “And yet, isn’t this all just a bit like painting oneself into a corner?” he said gazing about the room as if he’d lost his mind.
“You have a problem?” said Walter Head.
“Oh, no, no, not me. I was just wondering about them,” said Danon, reaching out to the stifled walls. “They’re suffocating, don’t you think?”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“Shelves that high? You can’t be serious,” said Danon. “Who can see what’s on them?”
“You let me worry about my things, you worry about yours,” said Walter Head.
“I’m just trying to hel—”
“Oh you know so much!” barked the father, abruptly leaving to undress.
At dinner, of steak tartar, which the mother had prepared, not incidentally, because it was her “boys’” favorite, Walter Head looked down the table at the children and said, immediately after Grace, “Don’t forget, Hillary, you still owe me your diploma, and a Xerox of your tassel, too” (for her scrapbook); and she nodded, as her brother had six years earlier, not looking at him; and the father added, “And anything else you can think of”; and then looked directly at Danon and said, “So what’s up with this ‘writing’ crap?” And Danon, savoring another mouthful of the raw mangled sirloin with its gnashed-in egg yolk, capers and onions, having sensed this coming, of course, this latest interrogation about his “bumbling career,” thought it odd that the father had not initiated it sooner. “I asked you what’s up with—?” “Art. I like art,” said Danon, intentionally like a Dodo, fixed on his interrogator. “Oh, it’s art now, is it?” said the father. “Yes, writing is art, that’s right,” said Danon. “Well, whatever it is, it won’t do, boy!” Walter Head slapped the plastic tablecloth. “Such folly which serves no real purpose of any kind is well to be done in one’s free time, if one must! However, between the hours of nine and five — or, if you’ve a good work ethic like your sister —” “Papa, please don’t—” “Hush girl! Boy, I’d like to know what are your plans for gainful employment — and be straight with me!” “My plan,” answered Danon, without in the slightest readjusting himself, “is to tend to the business of writing.”
“That is not business!” the father pounded the table.
“Oh Walter, must we get into this right now?” said Sherry Head.
“You stay out of this! I will ask you one more time. What are your plans in business?”
From the moment they sat down, Danon had felt cornered like the candle extras the father kept in waiting as space-fillers; yet suddenly, of a marvelous feeling of self-exploitation, now freed himself with a lurch of his chair; and declaring, “I must now dismiss myself to my room without supper, for I am naughty,” skipped away like a schoolboy.
Hillary immediately made an effort to follow, but Sherry Head cut her off at the hallway. At the boy’s room, now a den, she pressed an ear to the closed door.
“It’s open, Mother.”
Danon was standing just beyond the door’s arc, stiff, arms folded, his back prominent as a roadblock.
“Please, Danon, this is not the time—”
“He’s a prick,” interrupted Danon, staring at shelves and tables and cabinets full of collections he had not yet seen. “Been a prick all my life.”
“Yes, I know your father can be difficult—
“Family,” said Danon, suddenly facing the mother, “family to him isn’t people, it’s protocol! ‘I am the parent: Of this are you to honor me, tend to me, be like me,—!’”
“Danon, please—!”
“‘Do this!’ ‘Do that!’ ‘Don’t do this!’ ‘—And every bit as I!’”
“Danon, stop—!”
“‘Give them a religious education.’ —When did he ever go to church? ‘Who needs sports? I didn’t!’ he said. ‘Bring home a good report card or there’ll be consequences!’ In college: ‘Why don’t you write to us more often?’ He didn’t write once! And our graduations. Ha! Do you think he was there for us? It was the memorabilia he was after!”
“Danon Head, stop it! Stop it this instant! All your father wants is the best for you!” cried Sherry Head, of her stupefied ignorance.
“Ha! Yes! ‘Thank you, father, thank you so much for wanting the best for me!’”
“And what is wrong!...what, pray-tell, is wrong with his wanting this?”
“How about wanting to be a father?”
“Now you listen to me, Danon,” said Sherry Head, “your father is a good—!” She stopped until the door was closed again, then: “Your father is a good father! And he doesn’t deserve this, Danon! He doesn’t deserve this at all!”
“Oh, Mother,” said Danon. “Leave.”
Sherry Head straightened up, stiffer than her son had been when she arrived. “You’re different, that’s the problem!” she said suddenly. “You’re selfish, Danon! Your needs come before everyone else’s; always have!” She knew she was lying: Danon was the humblest member of the family, even before Hillary. “We’ve done so much for you, Danon! You owe your father an apology! You owe me an apology!” She started to cry.
“Please, Mother,” Danon eyed the door.
“I will not leave until you—!
“Please.”
Hillary had already excused herself and gone into hiding at the great pin oak such that when the mother had returned to the family table only the father remained, silent as a happy idiot in his stoical certainty. She noticed a tangle of hair in her mangled sirloin and pricked it out before fetching seconds for the both of them. Then, in their common silence, they immediately forgot the latest little outburst and went on with dinner as if the room’s present tranquility had been as constant as the coming twilight....
Later, after all had turned in, Sherry Head asked Walter Head if he had not noticed lately a change in their son. “Obviously,” he said omnipotently, shaking the Business pages he’d brought with him to bed. “The kid’s a late-bloomer. The girl finally gets over herself, now it’s his turn.” “But why now, Walter?” asked Sherry Head. “He’s not a teenager anymore.” “Do you ever listen to me?” said Walter Head. “The kid’s a late-bloomer! Has always had a screw loose: sen-si-tive!” “But he’s such an innocent,” cooed Sherry Head. “Girly,” corrected Walter Head. “Stop that, he’s our son!” said Sherry Head. “—Do you think maybe he’s confused, Walter?” “What the hell’s that mean?” said Walter Head. “You know,” said Sherry Head, “depressed, or something?” Walter Head proceeded to inform the wife that Heads do not get depressed, and that they do not get confused either, and that if they did, they’d know how to “fix themselves”; and by then wagging his head, thoroughly bored, added finally: “Oh just let him be, he’ll get it soon enough — after the world’s tamed him!” And with this Walter Head flung open his paper like a cape. And Sherry Head turned off the lamp on her side and tried not to think anymore....
***
In households without extremes young children presume their parents to be without equal, superior to every other on earth, and at the least indulge the elders for the shelter, sustenance and security they provide. Such had Danon and Hillary tolerated the father. His silences, gruffness and the odd car trips to the country aside, Walter Head had been a passable patriarch, at worst a cretin easily ignored (for their proximate normalcy the children could thank the mother). Yet as insight as this is the especial gift of the mature mind, not until his experience as go-between to the father and Lärs had Danon — beneficiary then of both distance and time — been able to frame the father in the whole, of his true self: his nature finally as keen to the son as a harbor sunset, and as relevant as his own solitude. On the other hand, the father’s flaws no longer mattered to Hillary; she had settled into a complacent tolerance: able, partly of her earlier rebellion, partly of the genetic burden of her stoicism, to tolerate him finally as he was: at ease in the crystal realization that he would never change, cognizant that to hope or to prod him would be like efforting a snail to sprint. And so, whereas her sensitive brother still felt the crush of the old man, she, of her more circumspect personality, had easily dispensed his dark side by a lightened regard. “Hillary, why are you never on dates Friday and Saturday nights?” “Hillary, when are you going to marry?” “Hillary, when are you going to have kids?”... Why stew? It was big bro’ himself who had once said: “He is as he is.” She had nearly even ceased being baffled by his excessive collecting.
But Danon more than ever wanted a father then.
At first he thought this longing to be solely a consequence of his new adultness and separation. He was lonely, he felt even smaller in his little apartment box; and the sundry demands of modern life compressed him further. —But soon he realized he could attribute his wanting also to a greater understanding of the mystifying range of human possibilities: thus his belief that the father, a basically good man, would fix his shortcomings himself, without provocation.
To this end, Danon mingled with the father as never before. During his visits he would always ask the mother to mix him a gin and tonic, too, and then hover with the father at his usual pre-dinner spot at the kitchen island, where Danon would inquire about the old man’s day, and, if he’d recently been away, how the latest trip had fared. By then Walter Head no longer brought the kids souvenirs, though he had only ended the ritual as each had left home for college. Yet on those evenings when one or the both of them attended dinner, if he had been away that week he’d always have something to show them anyway: a bag of seashells, a replica gun, an old Dutch beer stein — something he’d brought back from the trip for himself. And still he reveled as much in the show as the shown — the kids ever feigning delight and awe — and allowed not the least diversion — no flinch nor word of interruption — until his heart was surfeited. Then, with the broad gesture of dispersal, he’d usher back the evening as it had begun, the collectible remaining, for as long as all were present, where he had placed it: at the center of the dinner table. On nights as this, when Danon was the only visitor, the conversations would quickly ebb, of course, toward the wayward sister; but Danon wouldn’t mind, absorbed as he was in this chance, like a gift, to know the father. —One night he began an impromptu discourse on the state of his New World — his disdain for its “hyper-capitalism,” its “poverty of ethics,” its “diminishing spaces,” “aimless, concrete ugliness...,” — even though he knew most of these ideas contravened the father’s, yet fully expecting that such boldness would aid their union. Yet instead the father slammed his glass, its frigid rocks flying like boulders at a highway demolition. “We don’t need your blasphemy around here!” he slurred. “But surely you abide at least some of these grievances!” said the son. “There’s the door,” interrupted the father, “if you keep insisting on badgering your mother and me with your politics!” Sherry Head intervened, of course, as she always did late in their dramas, but once again without success, and by then Danon had decided anyway to retire to his room. Yet before he left he offered to the inimical father that he might consider “some philosophy” in his life, as it was this to which Danon attributed his own solid constitution. But Walter Head’s ears were already turned off and his head propped up like a boor’s, locked in its eternal certainty of rightfulness. And even if he were still listening, he wouldn’t have understood.
As weeks passed and it became evident to Walter Head that Hillary was prospering in her proper career, as her stock rose Danon’s crashed for his remaining steadfast in aimlessness as a contract ‘temp’; and he subsequently stopped visiting the parents alone. And yet this strategy backfired, for during his next excursion, with Lärs, he posed a question in the mixed company that would have better been directed to the mother in private: about personal belongings. Six and a half years had passed since he’d moved out, and as it was that many of his things were still packed in boxes, he’d felt ever since a combination of guilt and suspicion over what may still be at home. This evening he inquired about his collection of National Geographic magazines which, between his fourteenth birthday and the start of college, had comprised the alcove of his bed’s headboard and night table, yet both of which, as he’d discovered while plopping down the next morning’s change-of-clothes, were now barren. “How many times have we said: ‘If it’s important enough to you, take responsibility for it yourself!’” barked Walter Head. “—Don’t look at me, Danon,” said Sherry Head, “I’m not your keeper.” Danon turned pleadingly to Lärs.
“What could I possibly want with them?” she said.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Are you absolutely sure they weren’t given to you by mistake?”
“They’ve been gone as long as you,” she said, “since Papa set up the den. Yes, I’m sure.”
“But I could have sworn they were still here the last time I—”
“Why don’t you just finish setting up your place, Danon?” said the mother. “Why don’t you just get your life together and then worry about some old magazines?”
Later, after everyone else had turned in, after the usual evening of TV and nightcaps, Danon descended into the world of the father’s boxes. It was ten o’clock. The outside noises were still vibrant — porch banter, dogs barking at the moon, the back-and-forth traffic of night owls,... — yet the house was silent as a catacomb. In his descent, he pampered the creaky ladder stairs as if testing water, the basement door having already whined some resistance. In the perfect darkness, his wide-open eyes had that swollen feeling from seeing nothing. At the last step, which he knew by its knot, he bent down to his ankles and groped for the flashlight beneath. His plan was to take a random inventory of the newer boxes: those which, as yet, were not faded and their contents unfamiliar; yet before the beam could lasso the storage-closet latch it stopped on the workbench, where it redoubled over a splotch of yellow protruding from a pile of candle-making instructions. Danon knew its source immediately and hastened to it — Since when has he been getting this? — his forehead spitting sweat — on his way tripping over the water-heater drain which clanged like a baritone cymbal: And yet only his nauseating heartbeat might have wakened them then! Like a snake from a log he pinched out the National Geographic magazine, its cover elephant sating at the high shoots of a Loquat tree. In the close light the cover shone like marble, in perfect condition, only the pages mildly worn: from many readings. And then he saw the date: March, 19—. The flashlight clunked to the clay floor and went out. Then a loud shrill ringing possessed his ears as if the whole basement had just been snatched up by storm, and in this hell his eyes squeezed shut. —And across their black screen, like ghosts drifting in search of their lost souls, he saw them: the jack-in-the-pulpit, in its alien pot, and the strongbox, whose contents, not so long ago, had seemed to fritter ever away like grit from a miner’s pan. —How else had he unwittingly bolstered the father’s collections?
He would confront him! —But what good could come of this? Only bad: a heightened strain on their relationship. The pilfered stuff had no actual value anyway, and the intrinsic had dissipated with youth. Yet how violated he felt! He imagined time ameliorating the pain, as it does memories of embarrassments and imperfections. But for such as this, time was too slow; and, he would soon also realize, irrelevant: For over the next several months he would see, in order, the elephant of the magazine cover (then clipped to the workbench pegboard), a carved teak elephant from the beloved Noah’s Ark of his childhood (then painted gray and displayed on the hearth), and the puzzle he and Lärs and their great aunt had assembled one Christmas morning: a still-life of starfish (then varnished and shadowboxed, hanging in the bathroom).
He stayed the night, clopping back up the steps like a wagon horse, the mother present at the door with a finger pressed to her tight lips, mutely begging him for protocol. But next morning the baked-leather stink of cheap bacon and black coffee, though its timeless familiarity had always before drawn him into the assembled clan, now diverted him like a toxin, and with his bag in hand he hardly entered the kitchen, hastening only a crinkled smile, before departing out the back door. Thereafter Danon could not return home without shivering at the sight of its motley décor, gagging on its acrid-sweet air, and ignoring Walter Head. Finally he stopped visiting altogether. For weeks afterward only Hillary heard from him, and this via sparse, sometimes nonsensical, text messages. Walter Head did not inquire. And Friday and Saturday evenings, Sherry Head naturally cooked for three.
One day, a Monday, his most recent ‘temp’ assignment having ended before the weekend, Danon called on the mother. Her Soap was already in progress, and she was glassy-eyed and drooling when he arrived.
“Mother.”
“Oh, helwo, Danon,” she yawned. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“The envelope-licking job ended.”
“Why aren’t you busy writing something, then—?”
“Mother, I’ve come to let you know that I’ve decided to estrange myself from Pop.”
Sherry Head’s eyes opened wide and her mouth became as big and round as a ladle.
“I’ve tried—. All my life he’s—. I just can’t—”
“That would be like a divorce, Danon,” said the mother. “Heads don’t divorce!”
“Please, listen.”
“—You’re speaking nonsense, Danon.”
“It’s not working, Mother. It’s not working anymore.”
“Your father loves you, Danon!” her voice suddenly raised an octave. “I love you. Hillary loves you. You’re part of this family!”
“I have no desire to estrange myself from you and Lärs, Mother,” said Danon.
“Your father does not deserve this!” said Sherry Head, suddenly rising then and reaching for her son.
“I’m sorry,” said Danon.
“He’s your father!” cried Sherry Head.
“And I’m his son,” said Danon, “yet no different than a piggybank, a seashell, a postcard, a goddamned pirate’s pistol,...!”
“Believe me, Danon, how I’ve tried to get your father to—!”
“Yes, for as long as you’ve known him!” said Danon. “He’s a narcissist, Mother! Do you understand? To him, I’m a token! To him, we’re all tokens!”
“Your father loves you, Danon!” she sobbed.
“I don’t believe he doesn’t, Mother. But Pop loves me only as a formality.”
“Oh stop it, Danon! Please stop it—!”
“I just wanted to tell you this, Mother. I’m sorry.”
Danon turned to leave. Sherry Head’s knees sagged, and she fell.
“I’m preparing your favorite, Saturday night,” she called after him. “Steak tartar. You come. You come, Danon Head! You hear me?”
***
Afterwards, once or twice a month at first, Sherry Head phoned her son and pleaded with him, sometimes to “stop being selfish,” other times to “simply agree to disagree,” and in every case to join her and his father for dinner “this coming Saturday [the day he was always home] — and not a day late, hee, hee.” Danon thanked her, of course, but always declined. On this day, Saturday, for years Walter Head had allotted an hour or longer, without exception, for a review of his finances, and with receipt of his last investment statement had decided to retire five years early to enjoy life and travel more, on his own terms. Sherry Head said she saw no problem with this as long as it truly suited him, and in the same breath said that Hillary had decided the time had come to move to Brooklyn to meet the nice older man she’d met over the Internet and begin their life together. “She’s got a screw loose,” said Walter Head, peeping over his reading glasses. “That’s what you said about Danon once,” said Sherry Head. “Who’s ‘Danon?’” “Oh, come now, Walter.” “I’ll be lucky the kid shows up for my funeral,” he huffed. Walter Head pecked his calculator harder and continued organizing. “Take a look at these stock certificates,” he said, waving a few from their neat pile in the strongbox. “Aren’t they something. Would look great framed. Right here over the desk.” “If you say so, Walter,” said Sherry Head. He kept out what he thought were the ten prettiest, and of a full range of hues, then asked the wife to turn on the TV. “Same old, same old,” she said. “You’re free to leave,” he said. “Thanksgiving is just two weeks away, Walter,” she said. “Good. Turkey time,” he said. “Hillary’s going to be home — with her new guy,” she said. “Is he clean?” he said.
“Stop that, Walter! —And Danon, of course, is invited, too. You do want Danon to join us, don’t you, Walter?”
“He can come if he wants.”
“Why don’t you call him, Walter.”
“What the hell’s that mean?” he barked.
“Tell him, yourself — you’d like it if he joined us for Thanksgiving, Walter.”
Sunday morning, at the still soulful hour when the sound of a passing car is like a gust and the first church bells are a cock’s crow away from clanging, the buzz tone of Danon’s cell phone wakened him.
“You coming over for Thanksgiving?”
Danon rubbed his eyes. “Pop?”
“You coming or not? Your mother needs to know for her dinner plans.”
“What do you think?” said Danon.
“What the hell’s that mean, ‘What do I think?’” said the father.
“What do you want?” said Danon.
“Listen,” said Walter Head, “I didn’t call to get an earful of your ‘philosophic’—”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Listen, it’s a holiday. You coming over or not?”
“What’s the holiday got to do—?”
“Oh why bother?” said Walter Head.
For a moment all that came between them was dead air.
Then, in a tone nearly inaudible:
“Listen, families get together. On holidays. That’s what they do. Your sister’s coming. That leaves you.”
Drywalls covered over, nearly to ceilings, as to be walls unto themselves; shelves, tables, cabinets, pedestals, invisible to their caretakers; crawlspaces tapped to saturation such that the name no longer resonates; closets, cubbies, chambers, all without access. House of stunning symmetry, crooked. Was it only youth this clutter had crushed, or also belief? Before his eyes Ignorance dangled, the odor of madness. —Oh what had he learned of flesh and blood, but this?
“You coming, then,” said Walter Head.
“Yes,” said Danon.
“Well, that’s everyone, then,” said Walter Head. “We’ll be a family.”
The End