PARTISAN REVIEW
361
On the days when Owen was left alone with his father, many
times
if
he weren't mistaken, he remembered the two of them play–
ing with
his
toys, rolling a croquet ball back and forth across the
wooden floor and shoving toy trucks toward one another to make
them crash; he remembered his father walking on his hands all the
way down the hall, all the way up the stairs, and then doing a hand–
spring at the top and landing on his feet; he remembered his father
dressing up like a bum and ringing their doorbell to ask for crackers;
and he remembered the time his father carried tables - end tables,
the kitchen table, the table from the library - into the parlor, set
them in a row, covered them with blankets and rugs, and made
a tunnel that ran from the door of the master bedroom, through the
parlor, to the door of the dining room. Sitting in the middle of the
tunnel, Owen's father began telling a ghost story. In the semidark–
ness, Owen could see just his father's teeth and the whites of his eyes,
and as his father got deeper into the story Owen noticed that the
whites of his eyes were growing more and more round. When
his
father came to the finish, there was a long silence, and then he
whispered to Owen, "Let's get the hell out of here," and Owen
could still feel the chill that followed at
his
back as the two of them
thundered on their hands and knees toward the end of the tunnel.
Also, when they were alone together, his father would sit beside
him on the couch, one of his arms around Owen to steady the book
that rested in Owen's lap. Owen had no memory of either of them
speaking at these times, although they must have, but he did recall
a feeling of complicity and involvement between them, communicated
to Owen by the agreeable sensation that traveled over
his
shoulders
every time his father turned a page. Sometime later, on a Sunday
morning when his parents were in bed and Owen was wandering
from room to room in the large, silent house with nothing to do, he
saw the Sunday paper drop through a slot in the front door. He
took it to the living room, sat on the couch, and started paging
through the comic section. His mother came out
of
the bedroom
and he pointed out a word and asked her what it meant. She sat
down beside him, and in a short while realized what he was doing.
"Gene," she called. "Eugene, come in here!" When Owen's father
appeared, in
his
bathrobe, she said, "He's reading the paper, for
goodness' sake! He can
read."
His father shrugged, and said, "I
should hope so. He's almost five." There was a look of blank un-
