As they drive through lower Manhattan, Spencer is gratified to see there are more homeless people on the streets than there used to be. If his father is going to die he wants, vengefully, to see systems crumble.
‘How much?’ his father says.
‘How much what?’
The Lincoln Tunnel was always Spencer’s less-preferred. He loves the Holland Tunnel best, the sheer length of it, the railed platform along the side where policemen used to stand and slowly wave back to Spencer, helpless and besotted in the back seat. He felt ridiculous waving to policemen, even when he was eight or nine years old and taking trips with his father and stepmother, but he couldn’t help himself, there was an unavoidable exhilaration about it.
‘Your…judgement.’
His father knows he has said the wrong word and retreats into an abashed tunnel-darkened silence. Spencer’s policy on matters of this kind is to push him, so his father won’t settle into an accustomed lonely space behind walls of ununderstood language.
‘My, what?’
‘Judgement. I want to…’
In the darkness of the tunnel, his father, still expert in matters such as these, retrieves his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos, picks out from behind his Medicare and AARP cards the loose cheque that he keeps for emergencies.
‘Pay?’ ‘Right.’
‘There’s toll booths on the Turnpike, but I’ve got cash. They don’t take cheques.’
‘No. Your…’ His father makes a forlorn effort of concentration, shakes his head. ‘It’s pathetic,’ he says.
They are into New Jersey now, dipping up out of the tunnel into the glare of a less glamorous light. The road takes one regretful curve towards and then away from the Manhattan skyline and they are in the state where Spencer was born, forty-odd years ago, where he had learned to speak with an American accent at kindergarten and first grade, because otherwise he would stick out more than he already did, his sensitive ways, his take on the world, his incapacity for roughhousing with older, more athletic boys, and with an English accent at home, because his mother disapproved of all aspects of America.
Spencer’s notional best friend when he was six wanted to become a policeman, because policemen carry guns. A few months ago, trying to explain to his daughter who he was or at least who he had been and what he might have been in danger of becoming, he had told her about his early years in New Jersey and Mary had insisted on looking up the name of his notional best friend on Google. Raymond Auch still lived in Berkeley Heights. He had not become a policeman. He was a senior vice-president in his father’s real estate firm and had married well, into a blue-blood family from Philadelphia. Mary had found the wedding announcement on the New York Times site. Spencer always told people that if he had stayed in New Jersey he would probably have become a junkie or a lawyer or both.
His mother disapproved of chewing gum and television, instant coffee, big cars, what the country had allowed her husband to be, who he insisted on becoming. In the cold rigour of mealtimes, the three of them sat uncomfortably together, each not being able quite to comprehend how this was his or her world, where nothing, to any of them, ever seemed entirely familiar.
Spencer as a child—he made up for it subsequently—ate very slowly, to his father’s irritation and disapproval. His mother, in sympathetic complicity, would give smaller and smaller portions each time, which he would halve with his knife, and when he had laboured to consume the first half, he would halve the remainder again, and so on, in an infinite progression.
But this is not meant to be a memory drive.
‘No, go on. What are you trying to say?’ Spencer says.
‘It’s pathetic,’ his father repeats.
‘My judgement?’
‘Not judgement. Journey.’
His father settles back, looking first pleased with himself and then angry that selecting and finding the right word to express his thought should be such a source of pride.
‘Journey? You mean my plane ticket?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t have to do that. I’m not asking you for the money.’ ‘I know you’re not.’
Which is why, probably, he is prepared to give it. Spencer had learned, not long after leaving New Jersey, that any money he accepted from his father was a lever of power he was voluntarily submitting himself to. He had made it a policy after that never to ask for money from his father and seldom to accept it when it was offered.
‘It was six hundred dollars. Approximately.’ His father now looks for a pen.
‘Why don’t you wait until we stop somewhere. We’ll need to stop somewhere for lunch and gasoline.’ ‘I want a…a…’
‘Pen?’
His father spreads his arms out wide in his ignominy, touching the window with his right hand, the gear stick with his left.
Pylons surround their road. Spencer manages to drive one-handed and take a photograph of a line of them. Spencer finds pylons magnificent.
‘There’s one in the glove compartment,’ Spencer says, and he returns his phone to its perch above the dashboard and reaches over to wave towards the glove compartment.
Rather ingeniously, Spencer’s father uses the glove compartment door as a writing desk. He concentrates hard on forming the words, puffing out his cheeks as he carefully writes, before signing it with a flourish. He examines what he has made and hands the cheque over to Spencer, who has to struggle to take it while passing a truck that has lumbered on to the road from a strip of low-slung no-tell motels. (Air-Conditioning In Every Room! Free HBO! Daily And Weekly Rates. Mirrored Rooms Available!)
Spencer interprets his father’s assiduousness in trying to pay his son’s expenses as a way to expressing who might still be in charge, and also, maybe, if he offers to pay this then he won’t have to pay more.
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.
‘You’re welcome,’ his father says.
If he were to make this journey into a film, Spencer would resist the too-obvious irony of the self-professed Garden State being a jumble of pylons and factory chimneys and desperate stunted occasional trees trying to make their leafless lives between iron bridges and car parks. Instead he might chart the journey in its road signs, exits to Jersey City, the Holland Tunnel, Bayonne, Newark Airport, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Seaport, the Verazzano Bridge. Improbably and unpersuasively, a billboard, half hidden behind a gas tower, tries to inform them that they are in The Embroidery Capital Of The World! He doesn’t see any signs for Atlantic City, which worries him.
‘What was the scenery like when you were growing up?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The countryside. When you were a boy?’ ‘In Poland? It was beautiful.’
His father sometimes permits himself to become sentimental about his childhood. It is a tactic that Spencer allows himself on occasion, to question his father about his youth in Warsaw. While his father’s memory has grown unreliable about recent events, it is sure on the distant past. And sometimes he will talk about the taste of pickles in brine when he and his friend Benny broke into the cucumber factory at night, or the fresh buttered bagels you could buy on the innocently pre-War street—or not so innocent: his father could also tell stories about the gangs of Polish youths who roamed the streets, whose ideal recreation was to find Jews to beat up. His father, this wasting-away man, who was fastidious with his Italian suits and restaurant cutlery (even if every suit of clothes wore a reminder of the meal he had just eaten), who had made himself at home in law courts and yacht clubs, had taken to carrying a bicycle chain wherever