Crossroads

The first words that came to him were lacerating. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son? In hindsight, of all the abuses Clem had rained on him, this was the hardest to dismiss, because it seemed to refer to more than just Russ’s weakness for Frances. It was an explicit eruption of a disrespect that had been building in Clem for several years. Russ had attributed the disrespect to adolescence, but it came to him now, all at once, that his humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose had been painful not only to him. The humiliation must have been painful to his son as well. He’d been too preoccupied with his own pain to see it.

At the humiliating fellowship meeting, the Clem who’d stood up to defend him against Sally Perkins and Laura Dobrinsky was still the Clem he knew and loved. But Clem had become less and less recognizable since then. He’d grossly overstepped at Thanksgiving, styling himself as Becky’s defender, ordering Russ to let her make her own decision about her inheritance. And now he wanted to go to Vietnam. What had happened to the boy who’d marched against the war’s immorality? Even allowing for his absolutism, even granting the validity of his point about student deferments, it made little sense to join the army when the war was winding down and he wasn’t saving some other boy’s life, just derailing his own. As an act of principle, it didn’t add up. He was clearly doing it to hurt his father.

How terribly Russ must have embarrassed him. It was all very well to be privately deplorable, cowering in his office, nursing his grudge, creeping through the attic for fear of running into Ambrose. He could bear the private shame; he could square his own accounts with God. But to be so deplorable in his son’s eyes? He saw that if he only thought of Frances he would never sincerely forgive Ambrose, because the impulse was impure. It was hopelessly tangled up with his desire to (in Clem’s outrageous word) bone her. But if he performed the act of forgiveness as a gift to Clem? To make himself a father more worthy of respect?

Keeping his eyes half shut, to protect his fragile idea, he left his office and went up the hallway to the hateful door. With someone’s volition, his own or God’s, he knocked.

The response was immediate and sharp. “Yep.”

Russ pushed the door farther open. Ambrose, seated at his desk, looked over his shoulder. To judge from his expression, Russ might have been a blood-soaked apparition.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Um—sure,” Ambrose said. “Come in.”

Russ shut the door and sat down on the sofa where the young crowd received its counseling. Its springs were so shot that his knees ended up higher than his head. He shifted to the edge of a cushion, trying to gain height, but the sofa insisted on his being lower than Ambrose. And just like that, in no time at all, despite his loving intentions, he was engulfed in hatred. Engulfed in the misery of being made to feel smaller than a man half his age. There was a reason he’d shunned Ambrose for three years. It was only in the madness of Frances that he’d forgotten. She had no concept of the enormity of what she’d asked of him.

“I suppose,” he said stiffly, “I should begin with an apology.”

Ambrose was now glowering. “You can skip it.”

“No, I have to say it. It’s long overdue. I’ve been—childish—and I apologize for that. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I apologize.”

The words rang completely hollow. Not only did he not expect to be forgiven, he didn’t even want to be. He struggled to find a way around his hatred, but it had grown so large in three years, and thinking of Clem helped him not at all.

“So,” Ambrose said. “What can I do for you?”

Russ leaned back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. He wanted to be gone, but to run away now, it seemed to him, would be to admit that he would never have Frances, never regain Clem’s respect. He opened his mouth to see what he might say. “What do you make of all this?”

“All this what.”

“You, me, the situation. What do you make of it?”

Ambrose sighed. “I think it’s a misfortune. I won’t pretend I don’t blame you for it, but I understand that your pride was badly wounded. To the extent I made it worse, I regret it. I apologized to you at the time. I can apologize again if you’d like.”

“No. Skip it.”

“Then tell me what I can do for you.”

The tokens of love and adulation in Ambrose’s office had proliferated since Russ was last in it. Above the desk were poems and messages in female handwriting, on pages ripped from spiral notebooks. Hundreds of snapshots were thumbtacked on top of one another, teen faces peeking out from the lower strata. Silk-screened posters now entirely covered one wall, right up to the ceiling. Feathers and rocks and carved sticks and scraps of watercolor painting crowded two long shelves. The cup of Ambrose ranneth over.