Free Granta 125: After the War by John Freeman Page B

Now that’s summertime to me. Mother! Are you listening to the sprinklers? It’s summertime!’
    ‘Kurt,’ I said. ‘It’s not registering.’
    ‘Mom! The sprinklers! Summertime!’
    Kurt had a brainstorm and it turned out very badly. I say this not knowing how it went down but I know it wasn’t good. He decided that since Mother was mistaking him for Wowser, he would just go ahead and
be
Wowser – ‘Wowser for a day’. He came home shattered. I really don’t know what happened unless it was Mother’s golden boy turning into some vanished adulterer, a role in some ways similar to the one he’d been playing around town and in his safe houses foryears. Finally, and without telling me anything, he calmed down. He said, ‘I think I have a headache. Do I? Do you think I have a headache?’ It was getting to him.
    When we were young I was always a little stand-offish. That is, I was a social coward. But not Kurt. By the time he was twelve he’d be sticking out his big paw and telling grown-ups, ‘Put ’er there.’ They liked it and it kind of made me sick. Now he revealed an uncertainty I hadn’t seen before; but it didn’t last. He was soon on the muscle again. Kurt: ‘I see literally –
literally
– not one thing wrong with my taking on the identity of Wowser in pursuit of truth.’
    Mother’s love of excellence was not something I always embraced. It certainly raised Kurt to the pedestal to which he had become accustomed, but it unfairly cast my father in a negative light. Truth be told, I was far more comfortable with Dad than with our exalted mother. What you saw was what you got. He was a sweet man, and a sweet old man later, who was not at war with time. He noticed many things about life, about dogs and cats and birds and weather, which were just so many impediments to Mother. Kurt was right: left to Dad we would have probably not gone very far, nor been nearly so discontented.
    I’m on the hot seat looking into the piercing eyes of my boss: ‘Earl, how long have you been with the bank?’
    ‘Twenty-two years.’
    ‘Like to see twenty-three? Not much coming over your desk except your pay cheque. Desks like yours are financial portals. You know that.’
    ‘My, what big teeth you have.’ I was fired that day.

    W here had I been all my life? I had grown up under so many shadows they were spread over me like the leaves of a book. Only Dad and I were equals, just looking at life without being at war with it. There was no earthly reason I should have been a banker beyond serving the shadows. By all that’s reasonable, I should have been at the post office like Dad, taking packages, affixing stamps.Reciting harmless rules, greeting people. I loved greeting people! In my occupation, you had to screw someone every day, even if it was your own family.
    I went to see Mother on my own on a beautiful day with a breeze coming up through the old cottonwoods along the river and cooling the side street where the rest home sat in front of its broad lawn and well-marked parking spaces. The American and Montana flags lifted and fell lazily. It was hard to go indoors. A few patients rested in wheelchairs on the lawn, the morning sun on their faces. I recognized old District Court Judge Russell Collins. He had no idea where he was but his still-full head of hair danced in the breeze, the only part of Judge Collins moving. The others, two women who seemed to have plenty to talk about, barely glanced at me.
    I sat with Mother in her room. It seemed stuffy and I got up to let in the air. A glance at the spruces crowding the side lawn made me want to run out into the sun as though these were my last days on earth. I was unable to discern if Mother knew I was in the room. She rested her teeth on her lower lip and each breath caused her cheeks to inflate. It was very hard to look at, which doesn’t say great things about me.
    I’d had enough of these visits to feel quite relaxed as I studied her and tried to remember