Sunday evening, nine o’clock. Theo stands bent over his drawing board set up on the dining room table, the table glass-topped, an embroidered doily beneath, the board on a sloping stack of old Esquire magazines, a far from perfect arrangement — the magazines slither, the board drifts and tilts — the work before him a hotel in the mountains, golf and tennis, horseriding and restaurants, pools, spas, luxury suites, eighty miles from the city, a steep site overlooking a lake. For ten o’clock Monday morning, a scant and rapidly slipping thirteen hours from now, Theo has to provide plans, elevations, parking facilities, diagrammatic traffic flow, other details, a full-colour rendering of the whole scheme too, five sheets of work at least, an impossible amount, if he works right through the night it probably still won’t all get done, the project set two weeks ago but Theo only just started, Theo’s mother in hospital this minute being operated on for cancer, Theo labouring now on the basic floor plan, the very first sheet.
‘What’s the time?’ his father says.
Theo, drafting, halts midline.
‘Nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Just on.’
‘They said they’d phone.’
‘Dad,’ Theo says. ‘It’s only been an hour.’
Theo catches something in his voice and has to look quickly down. Theo’s father is in the front room, directly in front of him, through the open connecting double doors. The doors are sand-blasted glass, a stylised stag left and right leaping a rainbow and billowing white clouds. His father sits in an armchair angled to a far corner, so that Theo’s view of his father — a lumpy, puffy man — is of grey grizzled hair, the back of his head, the flushed stuffed roll of the back of his father’s neck, but a side slice of face too, an ear, a round cheek with its ash of bristles, the ponderous creases and folds of the lid of his father’s left eye. This is when Theo looks up. But even when he doesn’t, when he is bent over his drawing board, sketching, scribbling, calculating, drafting, working it out, getting it done, he can still see him, his sloping shoulder, his arm, his left hand lying on the armrest of his chair, an unmoving heaviness of flesh printed on the edge of his vision, impossible to dislodge.
‘You don’t think we should call them?’
The ink in his full pen quivers.
‘Dad,’ Theo says.
They ate early, were finished by six. Theo’s father made the meal. Then Theo set up his drawing board on the dining room table and his father sat in the armchair in the front room. This is where Theo’s father always sits, his armchair, his place. The armchair is placed to face the television set in the far left-hand corner of the room. Theo’s father loves television. He watches it every night. He switches it on the minute he comes home from the factory where he works, a loom-tuner in a woollen mill, something less than a mechanic, servicing the machines. He loves police things, detectives, gangsters, anything with action and fighting and shooting, but his real favourites are westerns. These he truly adores. ‘The cowboys,’ he calls them, tilting up his chin. He puffs. He beams. He fills the house with runaway stagecoaches, high-noon shootouts, the strident voices of steely men herding cattle, blasting lives. He thumps the armrests of his chair with his fists, urging them on. ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ he cries, his round face glowing, an exuberant sun. He is transported, in another world. Theo’s father was a pioneer in Palestine as a young man, laid the telegraph line from Haifa to Tel Aviv, worked in a quarry in Jerusalem, ‘A real life,’ as he endlessly tells Theo, ‘but what would you know?’ Twice this evening Theo’s father has pushed himself heavily up, lumbered across to the television, clicked it on. At once sirens, gunshots, roaring music filled the house. Theo’s father stood, bent at the set. Then both times, both times it was the same, he grunted, sighed, growled, muttered some sour word, clicked it suddenly off, lumbered back to his chair.
‘Ahhh,’ Theo’s father breathes.
‘What?’ says Theo, looking quickly up.
For the twentieth time the magazines slither, the drawing board crookedly slews.
They went to see her this afternoon, at visiting time, three o’clock. Theo’s aunts were there, uncles, family friends, others too, people Theo barely recognised, a crowd around the bed. Theo stood where he could. He saw his mother’s eyes encircled with black, her white face, her apologetic smile, as though this were all her fault, how sorry she was to be causing such a fuss. She spoke to this person, that. Voices babbled around the bed. Theo stood. Then someone pushed in front of him, pushed him aside, as though he were still a child, disregarding him completely, pushed him away.
Theo feels a hotness, a tightness flying to his eyes.
‘I’m making some coffee,’ he says. ‘Would you like anything?’
His father silently sits.
Theo hurries out of the room.
In the kitchen Theo puts a light under the kettle, quickly gets out the coffee, the milk. A cup and saucer. A spoon.
God, he thinks, looking at the sink.
They had fried eggs and salami for dinner. Slices of cucumber. A cut-up tomato. Theo’s father is no cook, thick-fingered in the kitchen, clumsy, a splasher, a breaker, a spiller, and this meal was no exception, the egg yolks broken, the whites burnt, everything greasy with old oil. They sat in their usual places at the kitchen table, his father at the head, Theo to his right, the table to Theo strange, lopsided, out of balance, as it has been ever since his mother was taken to hospital, these past two weeks. Her empty chair was like a hole. Theo couldn’t look there. He ate with his eyes down. There was no conversation. The meal was quickly over. Then Theo stood up. ‘I’ll clean up,’ he said, but his father was too fast for him. ‘Leave it!’ he snapped, sweeping everything into the sink, the dishes, the frying pan, drumming cold water on top. Their eyes caught for an instant. Theo looked quickly away. ‘Ah, what’s the difference?’ his father growled. ‘So they’ll soak.’
Theo feels again that hotness, that slap to his eyes.
The kettle whistles.
Theo carries carefully his coffee into the dining room.
‘Are you sure you won’t have anything?’ he asks his father. ‘The kettle’s just boiled.’
His father says nothing. Theo sips his coffee, as quietly as he can.
Theo’s initial image of the hotel was a floating curve that fitted into the mountains, weightless and flowing, a wall of glass alive with light, reflecting the wide lake. He picks up a pencil. He looks at his work on the drawing board. For a moment he feels hopeless. Come on, he tells himself. It’s only a project. It’ll do.
‘Is it ten o’clock yet?’ his father says.
Theo looks up to see his father’s hand rising from the armrest. He is rubbing his face, the eyes first, squeezing, then down, the nose, the bristled cheeks — their rub like a roar in the silent house — his lips, his chin, then his hand falling away, lifeless, heavy, falling back onto the armrest of his chair.
‘I’ll phone them,’ Theo says. ‘Do you want me to phone them?’
His voice is too high. His father doesn’t reply.
Floor plan. Main services. Front elevation. Side. Theo unpins the sheet, pins down a fresh one. He straightens the magazines. He moves his T-square into place. He stretches for a moment, draws back his shoulder blades, rotates his head, eases his cramped back. He looks down. The new sheet seems to him already soiled, spoilt, an exhausted surface before he has even begun.
‘Eleven o’clock,’ his father says. ‘It must be eleven o’clock.’
Bent over the blank sheet, Theo thinks of the first design project he ever did, a kindergarten for blind children, a year and a half ago, his first project in his first college year. He remembers how he ran across to the library, spent the entire afternoon there, reading everything he could find. What blind children needed. How they felt. Surfaces. Sounds. Textures. Warmth. The ways they perceived the world. He scribbled notes, page after page. And then, hurrying home, in his room, on his table in the corner, his small desk, with papers and pages and wide-open books spread everywhere over his bed, and music playing — he always had music going when he worked, gorgeously clumpy Dave Brubeck on the record player thumping out the blues, the needle lifted every time it got to the end and put straight back on again — his brain ablaze with grass and pebbles and tanbark paths, and chimes too, and bells, and each child’s locker with a different shape in its door, a square, a circle, a five-pointed star, in two joyous hours Theo had danced out his design. But not before Theo’s father had appeared, home from the factory, looming in Theo’s door. ‘Ssh,’ Theo’s mother had said. ‘He’s working. For school.’ ‘Working?’ his father said, a quick look over Theo’s shoulder, bumping, dismissive, his usual mocking tone. ‘You call that working?’
Theo sees his face reflected in the glass, mirrored above the table’s dark wood. Beneath the glass the imprisoned doily patterns his forehead and cheeks.
‘Come here,’ his father says. ‘Sit here.’
It is midnight. The house is silent. The hospital hasn’t rung. Theo sits with his father, the room’s other armchair pulled across, side by side in the front room. Theo, like his father, looks straight ahead. His father sighs, an engine of breathing. And then Theo feels his father reaching across and taking his hand, where it lies on the armrest of his chair.
‘We mustn’t lose her,’ Theo’s father says. ‘We mustn’t lose her.’
Theo is embarrassed. There is something wrong. It is not his father’s voice. It is a forced voice, phony and unnatural, like his father’s foolish westerns. It is not true. Theo feels his father grip his fingers but he doesn’t squeeze back. He sits. He looks straight ahead. He wants this moment to be over. He has to get back to work. He wants his father to let go his hand.
Morris Lurie (1938 – 2014) was an Australian writer of comic novels, short stories, essays, plays, and children’s books.
