Free Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard Page B

was Sheri’s position in my mother’s lap that put him off. He had changed his attitude and was looking at the two of them in a dreamy sort of way. Unless you kept him busy, he was always dreaming off.
    He was not really a conversationalist—what he liked was to tell stories. He fancied himself as an observer, a commentator, a satirist. He was always telling anecdotes. But he couldn’t seem to find an anecdote in his repertoire to tell to Sheri. He couldn’t
classify
her.
    He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him into it. He had left the French Quarter a popular man, but he got off the train in Pennsylvania Station, to find snow falling and no one there waiting for him. He lived in New York under protest, a protest he never admitted even to himself. He was ashamed to think that he had been pressured into leaving the city he loved.
    We had to leave because my grandfather, my father’s father, kept seizing our life savings. He was the best-known builder in the French Quarter and he would take a down payment on a job and spend it on horses or women. Then when he had to buy materials, he would seize our life savings. He had persuaded his four sons to give him power of attorney, but my father would have given him the money anyway. And of course he never paid it back.
    My father couldn’t get accustomed to New York City. Once, for example, he had a man on the job, sent to him by the carpenter’s union, who didn’t know how to hang a door. My father couldn’t understand how a man who didn’t know how to hang a door could hire himself out as a carpenter. But when he sent the man home, the union sent him back. Perhaps now, as he looked at her, he was wondering whether I could send Sheri home.
    He shifted on the love seat so that he was wedged into one corner. He looked uncomfortable now,strained. He was squinting and his head was pulled back in a peculiar way. It was an odd attitude and yet it was familiar, another image from our album. I could see this image clearly because my mind was abnormally alert. Sheri’s presence in the room electrified me and it took me only a minute to go back twenty years and identify that expression on my father’s face. It was his “walking on his hands” look.
    When we lived in New Orleans, my father would sometimes walk on his hands. A spirit would seize him and he would throw himself down as if he was diving, and then all of a sudden he would be standing on his hands. On a Saturday afternoon when people brought rocking chairs out in front of their houses and everyone was feeling sociable and relaxed, my father would go down on his hands and walk over to one of his friends on the block. Though they would laugh, nobody seemed to think this was strange. Men were more simply physical in those days, athletic in odd ways. Once, on a bet, my father walked all the way around the block on his hands.
    The first time I saw my father on his hands, when I was only two or three, I was terrified. It was as if he had turned the whole world upside down. I was afraid he was never going to get back on his feet again, that he had decided he liked it better down there on his hands, like a dog. He had a funny way of looking at us, too, from down there—not inverted, with his eyes at the bottom of his face, as I had expected at first, but peering up, his head thrown back until it seemed to rest on his shoulder blades. It was this looking up that frightened me so, because the veins in his neck stood out as if they’d burst.
    Standing on his hands put a lot of strain in his face.He strained and smiled at the same time, and I thought he was like a monstrous spider scuttling along the ground. Now, wedged into the corner of the couch, he was looking at Sheri this way, as if he was standing on his hands, his neck arched and his head rearing.
    Anatole loved to go to school, my mother was saying. According to her, I loved everything. Could it be true? Until I refused to wear it, she sent me to