362
L. WOIWODE
concern on
his
face. But when Owen's mother rose and went toward
the kitchen, complaining about his frivolous attitude and inability
to show concern for anything, even
his
own son, he winked at Owen
and with a smile on
his
face went through a silent pantomime of
clapping
his
hands.
A couple of years after this, a great change came over Owen's
father, a change that manifested itself then - and now, too, and for
as far into the future as anyone wanted to see - in
his
signature in
the passport. The handwriting was flat and erratic, loosely formed,
almost indecipherable, and it displayed none of the vanity, quirki–
ness, care, or pretension that is present in most signatures, but looked,
rather, like a reminder someone had scribbled to himself on a note
pad. His father's lighthearted humor left him and he became silent
and morose. He began to lose weight, and gathers appeared in the
material of his trousers. Visitors and dinner guests showed up at the
house with less frequency (Owen's grandparents were dead, and both
of his parents were only children), and Owen's father, who was a
professor of history, stopped doing imitations of his students, stopped
reading aloud the absurd answers from their test papers, which even
Owen recognized as funny, and stopped working in his library,
where he was completing a textbook.
Owen could remember the way his father had walked before the
change, briskly, with long determined strides (this is perhaps why
Owen had retained an image of a tall man), his hands plunged into
his front pockets instead of swinging loose, as though their move–
ment could impede his tremendous momentum, because when he
walked it looked as if he were off balance and hurrying forward to
prevent a fall. But now he wandered aimlessly around the house,
much as Owen did on Sunday mornings, his thin, sensitive hands
hanging limp at his sides, looking naked, his eyes expressionless.
During this time, Owen remembered waking at strange hours
and blinking against the bright overhead light in
his
bedroom.
His
father would be seated
in
a chair beside the bed, playing his
guitar,
staring at Owen as he sang. He sang a number of songs each night,
but there were two he sang without fail; one of them told the story
of a man who is hanged from the gallows tree, which was adapted,
Owen later discovered, from a poem by Robert Bums, and the other
one was about bells, different bells in different cities. Owen could
