The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy Read Free Book Online Page B

the commercials are dressed. When I wake up with a migraine headache, instead of forcing aspirins down my throat, Aunt Verna rubs my temples until I fall back to sleep. The possibility of my mother returning sickens me in the same way that the brewing end of the summer holidays always does, and to postpone and even extinguish thepossibility, I am not above planting the odd false lead. When Aunt Verna asks,“Did Grace ever mention a place she had her heart set on going to?” I answer,“Australia.”
    “Australia?” my father says, dazed.
    “Also Japan,” I say.
    The investigation is uproarious. Aunt Verna flips over the mattresses and seat cushions. She empties out all the drawers, closets and cupboards, paws through the contents, then just tosses everything back in. At first I am horrified, and I refold sweaters, neatly arrange cans on shelves.
    “You take after your mother,” Aunt Verna observes, and it’s such a perplexing statement—I am
nothing
like my mother—that I let drop to the floor the opened box of white sugar I happen to be holding.
    So the house is a mess, and I don’t care, and my father doesn’t seem to notice. Specifically, Aunt Verna is looking for a diary, a note, a map, a letter, a private keepsake, a suspicious doctor’s prescription. We find none of these. But inside the white leather-bound Bible my mother was given as a child and claimed not to have opened in twenty years, we find her birth certificate. It’s a break, of sorts. Aunt Verna maintains that if you run off and don’t take your birth certificate, nine times out of ten you intend to create a new identity.
    And that, she says, is “easy as muck.” She tells us how you do it. You go to a city library and ask for the obituary pages from a newspaper published in the year you were born. You look for the death notice of a baby who is the same sex as you and who lived only a few hours or days. When you find such a baby, you record its name, parents’ names, the exactdate and place of birth. You take the information to a government office and pass it off as your own history. If anybody double checks, and usually nobody does, all they’ll discover is that there really was a baby born when and where you say. You get your birth certificate. You soak it in coffee and bask it in the sun to give it an aged appearance.
    “Grace wouldn’t know to do all that,” my father says, rasping his hand over his unshaven jaw.
    Like the house and Aunt Verna, my father is a mess. Hair spiking out, nobody ironing his shirts. Nevertheless, he goes to work every morning, cleans his plate at supper, wins at Scrabble. He’s more than coping, it seems to me. In the middle of the night when I wake from Aunt Verna’s snores and hear the floorboards creaking down the hall, I don’t picture him pacing in heartbroken torment (since I don’t yet know that he misses my mother’s laugh). He is a man who has flung himself around his study plenty of weekends simply out of frustration that one word in the cryptic crossword continues to elude him. He is pacing, yes, I picture that. He is punching his fist. Wanting answers.
    “She might know,” Aunt Verna says, regarding the fake birth certificate,“might not. All we can be sure of is that she had her secrets and kept them tucked under her hat. Anyways, her accessory might know plenty along those lines.”
    My father nods. “Small-time hoodlum.” Because he adopts this slangy tone only when talking about fancy Dan, I immediately grasp who “accessory” refers to. “Fraud artist,” he says, his eyes taking on a crazy gleam.
    “Crook,” I say. “Pickpocket.” To me, this is no longer the true story it is to my father. And yet I somehow know thatthe more lost my mother becomes, the more substantial Dan must be, and so I tend to nudge the biography along.
    As does Aunt Verna. “Never did an honest day’s work in his life!” she bellows.
    “Freeloader,” my father mutters.
    My father and I aren’t